REACH OUT!
and
REACH OUT!
and
|
|
|
For Today's Discerning Readers |
For Small, University, POD and Self-Publish Presses |
|
|
poetry Shy, Shoshauna What the Postcard Didn't Say Zelda Wilde Publishing, 104 pages, ISBN:0-9741728-3-9.
$12 + $2 shipping = $14
REVIEW:
|
What the Postcard Didn’t Say, is a book of accessible, unsentimental, character-driven poetry, enjoyable as much for what’s unstated as what is. Whether told in 1st or 3rd person, almost all of these poems incorporate fictional narrators, or persona—sometimes more than one to a poem—with a story to tell, secrets to hide, their own point-of-view. Memorable characters include a maid whose employer tempts her to steal in “Sting”; a grown man who lives with his mother and writes anonymous love letters to her bridge friends in “Back Route to Baraboo”; the child of a couple who had to get married in “Keepsake”; the checker held-up by an ex-boyfriend in “The Sound of Spite’s Name”; a mother desperately focused on her own clothing in “Bringing My Son to the Police Station to be Fingerprinted.” If some pieces are based on facts or on experiences of the poet, Shy’s personal relation to that “reality” is refreshingly inconsequential to the poem. Instead of dwelling on her own biography, she explores the undercurrents of situations you might read about in the morning paper, or have heard, as a child, your parents discuss when they thought you weren’t listening, including infidelity, abandonment, sexual predators, messy divorces, abuse, social change, revenge, estranged families, suicide, murder, poverty—in short, the messy facts of life. Suggestive titles develop her stories quickly: “Emergency Surgery 3rd Grade, “The Pill Arrives in Wilmette,” “Why You Got Your Wallet Back,” “When Ann Landers Asks, 70% Say They Regret Having Kids,” or “Dancing with His Ex at His Wedding.” Shy likewise has an eye for the visually vivid, significant detail: a mysterious pearl; a candy-cane print bathrobe; an ant on a court-room bench, or, in “For Better and for Worse”: Divided into four sections that extend her title’s travel metaphor—“Accommodations,” “Luggage,” “Detours,” and “Souvenirs”—each part turns around the other meanings of these words: accommodations refers to marriage and its difficulties, for example, and luggage to secrets, while most of the last part’s souvenirs are memorable for some unpleasant reason. Each section begins with a numbered “What the Postcard Didn’t Say” that draws our attention to omission as a narrative choice and to the postcard form itself: a form we all use, as well as a form through which we put on other identities, moving among locations and vacations, altering our words, even our selves, depending on the receiver. Although these strong but fragile poems focus on the sometimes unpleasant, sometimes tragic lives of breakable people, they are, nevertheless, often comic, occasionally surreal, and always considerate of their characters’ humanity. After you’ve read the book once, read it again, slowly; examine a few figures at a time, run your fingers along their edges and hollows, feel for the missing chip, appreciate their contours and contortions. --Wendy Vardaman |
|
Lehman
has invented a form he calls the justified poem, a reference to the fixed
line lengths and justified appearance of these pieces. It is a form that
seems made for (in fact, was made for) his particular way of viewing the
world, of both seeing the ordinary surface of things and looking beneath
the quotidian to the bone of things. These pieces are both clever and
addictive. Reading them is like eating plate after plate of dim sum—you
keep eating and eating because they're so good, and pretty soon you're
deliciously, magically full. A
poem is a way to tell the truth—not necessarily the literal truth, not
this happened and that happened, he said and she said, but the kind of
deeper emotional truth that relies on metaphor, archetype and image. And
Lehman is a consummate truth teller, pointing us over and over toward the
skeleton under the skin of things. The justified poem form aids this
process. After all, what could be more ordinary than prose, or a prose
poem? The word itself is from the Latin prosa, meaning straightforward.
The art is in the tension between the deceptive simplicity of these pieces
and the complex worldview revealed within them. These
poems feel quintessentially Midwestern to me, an East Coaster born and
raised; the world they portray seems created on a human scale—not the
vast wide-open spaces of the West or the crammed interior passages of the
East. They take place in a landscape that is comfortable but not
comforting, a place big enough to contain us and all our concerns and
feelings, yet not so big as to be overwhelming. They are clearly
narrative; something happens in each. A couple recollects a defining
moment in their relationship, a man eats a bowl of mushroom-barley soup, a
woman rides by on a bicycle. Their power comes from their ability to make
the reader reconsider the quotidian, touch for a moment the feeling of
wonder and mystery that runs under everyday life like an underground
river.
The
title poem, "Shorts," embodies Lehman's often playful form. Its
seven lines, each between 9 and 11 characters long, take the physical
shape of a space between pickets in a fence, which is also part of the
startling image the poem conjures. "Rest Stop," another of my
favorites, ends with an image of spring leaves caressing the light—a
reversal of the usual metaphor, of light falling against leaves. Lehman is
the master of the telling last image or line, the kind that socks into
place like a baseball hitting the sweet spot in a glove. The
little hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I read "How I
Learned to Drown," with its killer lines "…After the rescue he
vowed he'd never / again go farther out than where he could touch / the
bottom. I’d rather drown than live by that philosophy..." I wanted
to leap out of my desk chair and shout "Hallelujah!"
But then, so many
of these poems gave me that feeling: "Eating Truth," which noses
at the relationship between art and life, and "Power of Prayer,"
which made me laugh out loud, and the sly humor of "If Poets Did
Useful Things." Well, some of them do useful things, as it turns out.
Like write books that make you see the world differently. Like this one. ―Harriet Brown
|
poetry Lehman, John
Zelda Wilde Publishing, 96 pages, ISBN:0-9741728-2-0 $12 + $2 shipping = $14
REVIEW:
|
|
biography
Lehman, John America's Greatest Unknown Poet: Lorine Niedecker Reminiscences, Photographs, Letters and Her Most Memorable Poems Zelda Wilde Publishing, 104 pages ISBN 0974172804.
Price $12 + $2 shipping = $14
NO REVIEW
|
This work loosely correlates Lorine Niedecker’s letters, photographs and reminiscences of people who knew her with her most memorable poems. This gives readers a deeper understanding of her work as well as a better appreciation of that relationship between writing and reading and the lives we live and the places where we live them. Niedecker’s life and work provide a unique touchstone by which we can answer questions such as: “What can we achieve through writing?” “How are we affected by where we live?” “Who inspires us?” and “Why is a piece of writing great?” Lorine Niedecker was the shy daughter of a Wisconsin carp fisherman who lived much of her life beside a flooding river in a barren cottage without electricity or running water andwrote fierce poetry which today stands alongside the work of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams. "Lorine Niedecker was a little-known poet whose real greatness may be that her struggles reflect our own. America’s Greatest Unknown Poet should be in every public library, high school and on every writer’s bookshelf."—Talia Schorr, Free Verse "By combining the voices of those who knew Niedecker during her lifetime with her most memorable poems, excerpts from her letters and his own close reading of her poetry, Lehman succeeds miraculously in resurrecting the heart and soul of an unjustly neglected literary artist."—Bob Wake, The Cambridge Book Review
|
|
TO HAVE YOUR BOOK LISTED AND REVIEWED Click Here:
|
