Slaves to Do These Things by Amy King. BlazeVOX, 2009.
Review by Wendy Burk

While the imperious imperialism of the title speaks of inequality, distance, and irony, King’s latest book, her third from BlazeVOX, actually draws and holds the reader close. You’ll feel understood by this book as it speaks of birth, divinity, and the sociocultural moment that may have you weary. I like King’s invocation of American angst in poems such as “Stimulus Package” and “Everything Happens At Once”; the former ends with the lines “we ignore the dress of death/ when they mirage America back,” while the latter begins with “the government wants their money,/ retirement shrinks its future,/ I am stuck at the bottom of alert/ that is only a test/ of what?” She grabs and inverts the crummy corniness that keeps people up at night.

It’s a strength of Slaves to Do These Things that such unadorned phrasing coexists well with its opposite: arresting noun phrases, carefully concatenated. Thus, “Everything Happens At Once” invokes not only government, retirement, phones, and doors, but also “fortune’s dial tone,” “the fields of water crocus/ set adrift with handmade paddles,” and “houses in swollen grass.” Elsewhere, you’ll find “chalk blown sky of rabbit tails,” “a calico sky in an earlobe’s kerchief,” and a deft definition: “Moustache: a salt & pepper mole rat”—has it been said better? I wish I could see with my eyes half of the things that King describes.


Hush Sessions by Kristi Maxwell. Saturnalia Books, 2009.
Review by Kristina Erny

A mysterious accumulation, Hush Sessions is an exploration and meditation. It is a circling of image and thought, pieces of narrative (he & she), which begins with superstition, but comes to represent an even more ominous and heartbreaking sorrow. Kristi Maxwell whispers in hushed tones all manner of connectivity and relationship between. He & she. Husband & wife. Offspring & womb. In contrast to her first book of poetry, Realm Sixty-Four, which followed a research-based chess arc and theme (conceptual), Hush Sessions is also conceptual, but less linear and more transitive, fleeting. She uses fractured lines, math jargon, Q & A, dialogue and strong, insistent voice to build a book that hints and frets over larger themes: loss, struggle, love, trust, familial heartbreak. All these insecurities. One gets the sense that the poems themselves are hinting at something that Maxwell herself won’t admit to, trying to beat out a deeper theme, a warning perhaps, or maybe just an empathetic voice pulsing under it all. She writes, “And so a number. To be numbered among/ other numbers, then called. Culled.” and later “… my fingers aren't libraries where feel can be archived.” Beautifully stitched together, this book truly does sing quietly: “An asterisk between us: / the symbol used to mark a structure believed to have existed, but un-recorded, or recorded incorrectly.” Oh, “how you shiver like teeth or a wire/ made electric by the exit of birds./ To be the cold that holds you/ like teeth - / by roots or ruse.”

New in the Collection
by Several Authors

Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Božičević. Tarpaulin Sky, 2009.
Review by Bonnie Jean Michalski

Emoticons and screennames, curse words, "yawn, blah, blah, schma...", ozone, yellow cab... this book includes it all. Božičević's is not a poetry enamored of the archaic. Following in O'Hara's footsteps, it challanges us to place the stuff of daily life under the adjective "poetic."

The cover features a gorgeously arresting painting by under-appreciated surrealist painter Remedios Varo. Varo's paintings almost always depict vehicles, apparatus, or contraptions that, although mystical, are very thoroughly engineered. This painting, Ícono, is no expection and depicts a traveling apparatis that harneses the momentum of wind, its one-wheeled construction balanced by the gravity of multiple moons. Despite its title and cover image suggesting a journey, Stars of the Night Commute is firmly located inside one consciousness, and that consciousness is rooted, as evidenced by the excerpts above, in the present day. Its fast pace and ever-shifting images would be dizzying were it not playing on the familiar and were it not coming from a single, "believable" self. This book kept me riveted, and though I'm usually the type of reader who wants to experience work free of the personality of the author, Stars of the Night Commute makes me want to sit down at a café and have a chat with Ana Božičević.


On the Kitchen Table From Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed by Olena Kalytiak Davis. Hollyridge Press, 2009.
Review by Kristina Erny

Olena Kalytiak Davis is a woman who is truly in love with words. This chapbook is a wonderful word romp. It is a mix of longer and shorter work. Her longer poems tend to accumulate, building on each preceding line to culminate into a rumination on love, or the self in love, or another self (in the self) in love (with the self). Everything is includable; everything is fair game. She is aware of herself as the poet, using the word “i” as a third-person pronoun, a commentary on the role of the lyric “i” or the self in the greater poem-scape.

As in her former work, Davis continues to be concerned with the more formal elements of poetry: she rhymes, she works with rhythm & meter, she writes sonnets. She writes sonnets about sex! Sexy sonnets! In a perfect Italian sonnet titled “Francesca Can Too Stop Thinking about Sex, Reflect Upon Her Position in Poetry, Write a Real Sonnet,” the apologetic speaker addresses the reader as a wayward pilgrim: “pilgrim, I did not mean to be so loose/ of tongue, so bold in all I loosely told/ in my smut so smug, so overly sold./ I did not mean, pilgrim, to traduce.” She ends, calling the reader now “poet,” “thank you, poet, for keeping me alive.”

There seems to be a sort of immediacy and passion in all of the poems in this chapbook. Playful and smart, funny and poignant, Davis includes the reader in her journey towards understanding the role of her art, her self, and her pursuit of all things, including love (& sex).