University of Arizona Poetry Center

I Read You Green, Mother
by Will Inman. Howling Dog Press, 2008.

Joining recent work by a beloved Tucson poet with selections from earlier work spanning several decades, Will Inman's I Read You Green, Mother is a book that can teach. Two characteristics make this so: first, a deep tenderness towards the poet's fellow creatures; and second, an unusual syntax that compels by nouning verbs and adjectiving nouns. Often, the two work in tandem, as in lines from "Mulling a Dark Hero," "i never knew this man but he ancestors me yet," or from "scan," about the flight of a Red-Tailed Hawk, "i do not witness plummet,/ but my heart/ dives, knowing with." Inman probes his own attitudes about human nature—particularly the side that endures injustice, pain, and death—and clears space for acceptance. The book’s final poem, “Those I Have Known Living” traces an elegant movement from “all i can say now in answer to this pain/ is that there are others, still living” to “didn’t i always know the fierce hold of your/ hand on my heart keeps creating the beat?”

All-Night Tango Lingo
by Barbara Hamby. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

"With twenty-six soldiers I conquered the world." So said Johannes Gutenberg, and so enacts Barbara Hamby in her technically flawless exploration of the alphabet of raucous joy. Hamby’s abecedarian sonnets (in which 26 poems, each beginning with a different letter, run through the alphabet at each line’s beginning and end) and double-helix abecedarians (a term she invented for poems that weave together two alphabets, proceeding forward and backward at beginning and end of lines) stun whether form or content is under the microscope. The sonnets, plus a generous helping of odes inspired by Horace and Pindar, teem with personae, protagonists, and drop-ins ranging from Titus and Titania (randy lovers, in Hamby’s version) to Bijou the Dog and Harold Pinter. And for all you Donne fans, there’s even a sonnet called “Xerox My Heart, Three-Headed Dog,” which declaims, “…and send a facsimile copy,/ zip code 60606, to Mr. Doesn’t-Give-a-Fig-bout-a-/ Bloody-Thing.” Horace, Pindar, Donne, Shakespeare, Hamby—let’s run with it.

New in the Collection

from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [HACHA] by Craig Santos Perez. Tinfish Press, 2008.

The tenet “the personal is political” has informed poetry since the early 1970s. Recent years have seen the rise of a new credo, “place is political.” And, as Craig Santos Perez shows in from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [HACHA], the presence or absence of certain places in poetry is definitely political. In his preface, Santos Perez delineates the near-total invisibility of his native land, Guahan or Guam, in American literature. Looking for Guam in poetry, he finds a single line by Robert Duncan (in “Uprising: Passages 25”) referencing U.S. military aircraft “roaring out from Guam” en route to war in Vietnam. Then, Santos Perez proceeds to rectify the omission in beautifully spaced poems that present place whole: language, people, and story as much as physical terrain. We walk through Spanish and Chamorro words whose meanings morph after conquest; maps, split lines, and empty text boxes that visualize dispossession; and family stories (the personal is still political) that make palpable a sense of being used and overtaken. The poems are masterful, but they are deliberately uncompleted: each title, like the book’s title, begins with “from”—another reminder of the excerpted condition of Santos Perez’s homeland and self.

Delivered by Sarah Gambito. Persea Books, 2009.

Delivered is the perfect title for a book of poems whose primary unit is the declarative sentence. With most, though not all, of Gambito’s lines terminating in a full stop, the poems do give a sense of missives delivered, perhaps telegraphically. If the poems are letters, they’re tough ones. The book’s first lines are “So what if I don’t love you./ My problems don’t even happen to me.” Isolated, bright images pop from the background; red is a recurring tone and biting is a recurrent habit: “I opened a melon last night and immigrants spilled out of it... They bit me for my attention” (“For My Attention”). Gambito depicts Filipina American identity and immigrant identity as spheres of both certainty and uncertainty: “Whodunit, who’s whistling?// It’s my ‘race’ I say./ And I’m so exhausted” (“Immigration”). Like the preceding lines, Delivered is up for anything, maybe weary of battle, but eminently ready for it.