The Alps by Bandon Shimoda. Flim Forum Press, 2008.

Review by Bonnie Jean Michalski

While Brandon Shimoda’s The Alps is arrestingly free from restraints, its subject matter is in balance with the texture of its language. This is a work about the human psyche encountering the frightening majesty of the natural world.

The book is loosely divided into sections whose titles could be lines of poems themselves. Among them: "HOW will I ever find the scenery," "AS FOR MAN, his days are as grass," and "A HUNDRED YEARS since your shy feet." The third section, "the Headmaidens and Bridesmen," is, for me, the most difficult, despite Shimoda's note at the end crediting several people including poets Susanne Dyckman and Kate Greenstreet, saying "All words within are from and for them."

Rich in botanical language, the poems in The Alps maintain a certain androgynous sympathy. The first of two poems entitled ESTRUS is rich with pathos:

Can anybody hear
Among the white marsh hearts is
Anybody alive is

Anybody alive
Down there rides horses and
Elephants into the grave

To say that Shimoda's diction is impressive is an understatement. But it's more than that. Amid the lyric, single words pop out that adroitly straddle the crux of multiple situations, voices, and times. For example, consider the word "bouquet" in this excerpt from "AS A FLOWER OF THE FIELD":

to replace, I thought, a feeling





but for a ring of light
pushing a pond across the fields

the sky caught
up
           strapped to my feet
made way for the tree-line

girdled the wood
to tease a bouquet from thick wood
make a toast

This is one of many poems that straddles the personal-historical with the collective-historical. Like the four photographs printed in the book, we don't always know whether we are looking at a photo from Shimoda's family scrapbook or at a piece of public art. This book lingers on many points of conflict. Probably the most familiar in poetry are the conflict between mind and language, and the conflict between the macrocosm and the individual. Though they are familiar, we don't tire of them, especially when the work exploring those conflicts is as daring as The Alps.

How Many of You are You by Philip Jenks, Dusie Press, 2006.

"What on a Map Exactly?" A Review by Annie Guthrie

Reading again through How Many of You are You, Phillip Jenks’ e-book published in a limited edition from Dusie Press, (and now only available as a PDF) I’m struck by the question the title poses, and the work it does, right off the bat. It seems to ask the question of itself (how many multiples does a printout make) and the doubled subject reflects its audience’s numbers as potential. It’s also an important question as a legend for the work, because by beginning in complication Jenks outlines the complexity of the project, which is no less than consciousness mouthing off its territory. The poet visits his hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia, and “captures” it in a series of photographs and poems. The collection has been called ekphrastic, but I see the work as evidence of call and response reversed, as spastic, gutteral utterances reflecting conflict and paradox… that is to say, mysteriously the photographs respond and the poems call, giving the work a dynamic, vital quality. Since he is the photographer, he can make the photos say something about the poems, and this odd effect lends that living breath to the work. Jenks accomplishes a cosmology, he makes the political experiential for the reader, and so we don’t have to wade through some poet’s take on what was taken from a place or what remains, instead we can take the trip with. Consider this line from the poem "Philosophy." Sacred and scared trains and tracks compact or/ Complicate, it is place that does not change. The poet pairing "sacred and scared" calls the distance language can make into attention, and the photo showing the ended sentence of old train tracks buried in the dirt says even more, by comparison. In a review of Jenks’ first book On the Cave You Live In, Joel Bettridge pointed out that the poems reveal "the possible impotence of personal dissent." This collection too, rides that train and grinds it to a halt, revving up again by the tension a wit has when in witness to himself. I look forward to where it’s all going.

A Toast in the House of Friends by Akilah Oliver. Coffee House Press, 2009.

Review by Wendy Burk

Written from grief, working in grief, A Toast in the House of Friends makes the unimaginable imaginable. Oliver succeeds mightily here by not describing grief and rage, but by uttering them in vivid ways that cry to be read aloud, and that harness spoken language’s capacity to rawly astonish. Thus Oliver gives us extended chants like “an arriving guard of angels, thusly coming to greet,” which begins with one stark line on the page, “i am gasping at hosts,” and in which the beloved soul’s transition from the body is heralded with a litany of more gasped words:

I also love Oliver’s wry wordplay, often hinting at the limits of grammar and technology, as in “pop&mockery,” where the speaker asks, “do you call that deceiver god except after ‘c’” and where the word become becomes “be@com.” What’s really being hinted at here are our own limits. You’ll also see this in the standout first poem, “In Aporia,” where Oliver deftly sums up the pain of dreaming a future that cannot be (that is, after a child’s death) by calling it “The book I would want to right.”

Reading A Toast in the House of Friends, you will feel the emotional surge of being led to inhabit a situation that no one could ever wish to inhabit—and yet, through the poet’s words, breath, and white space, to transcend toward what is described in a poem to Matthew Shepherd as “your beautiful/ true form.” Oliver works truly, in a generous act of poetry that must be all the more gripping when performed in her own voice.