BLACK LAVENDER MILK, BY ANGEL DOMINGUEZ
Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015
136 pp.

Review by Anna Avery

This is not a book of poetry. This is not a novel. Black Lavender Milk, by Angel Dominguez is a linguistic portal interlacing time, crashing and stumbling through airports, spilling notebooks all over the floor, retrieving ancestors, while offering rose pedals with coffee.

The prose poems drain into dzonots, underground water caves, located in the Yucatan Peninsula. These intricate limestone tunnel caves were used for Mayan human sacrifice rituals:

But I’ve been trying to form a dzonot from ribbons of night and the atoms of dreams. I’ve been attempting to communicate something else, outside of our world. Dzonots are portals to Xibalba, the Yucatec Mayan underworld. Here, the bodies from which my blood originates would toss offerings, or offer themselves in hopes of invoking a livable future. Sometimes, a body would emerge from the waters with a message from below. Dzonot is the indigenous spelling of the Spanish word: Cenote. These portals are holes in the limestone foundations of the peninsula; they are all interconnected with water – their rhizome leads to the coast; touches Tulum.

The book takes its form in prose poems, fragments, and photographs of white clouds shot from airplanes. Reading this book felt like floating through a black-lit bardo. The poetry, more visual than rhythmic, plays by its own rules, crafting cosmic and ritualistic apparitions. I’m transported through time, in a delightful flexibility, gliding from present to past, to a future beyond my body, in poetic gestures similar to Alice Notley’s creations of somatic presence after death. The author reveals the dzonot of literary time. I catch glimpses of when the author stops writing the book; because of the revealing of intimate information, I trust the poet. I am more than ready to buckle the seat belt, turn off all of my electronic devices, and fly.

Dominguez’s poetry plays with language and time in a very serious way. The writer, lucid in the linguistic dream, leads me through the water scene-by-scene. I flow into airports, meet Xix, part stranger, part mentor, part watch keeper, and see the grandfather sent off to the priesthood due to his family’s poverty. By the poet’s guiding hand, I dance my way back to the Cinnabar, to the terminal, and into miniature dzonots, punctuated within the word:

Waiting in slow light, pressurized by our oxygen-dim faces recycle(d) sleep, or are they empty seats?

Having the option to choose which tense to read brought the concept of the dzonot closer to my body. These moments happen throughout the book.There is something empowering of having the flexibility to chose between the past and the present tense.

The book is so aware of its failure that it almost feels like a sacrifice within itself. The interpersonal dzonots of being a writer and a person in real-time capitalism collapse into vulnerability. There is something touching about this-to know that other writers become tired from producing work, and at the same time, I wonder what it would look like if the book smashed Beckett’s concept of failure into tiny shards (at times, it does). Failure is a concept from one’s mind. Who defines failure, the reader or the writer? What happens to the text once it is read by the other? Does the book ‘fail’ when it is read or does it open up new possibilities? What I want more from the book is a redefinition of success, success of a book that creates a new future. Maybe it succeeds in how it fails. Much of the book links to the somatic poetic tradition. At times the sentence structures resonate to Bhanu Kapil. This resonance drew me to the work, and at the same time, some of the sentences drown in that resonance and the second person voice. I was most drawn to the sections that addressed me directly without second person, through the bending of time and zeroing in on specific memories from the body.

Black Lavender Milk emits shadows from the light of its movement:

Dzonots of light blossom in the distance; the bruise becomes a portal, a site of rich nutrients from which a body of night might feed feral dreams.

I recommend reading this book in bed on the night of the super moon covered in lavender and rose oil. Light a candle and swim in this book. The water is warm.

EXPLOSION ROCKS SPRINGFIELD, BY RODRIGO TOSCANO
Fence Books, 2016
80 pp.

Reviewed by Dan Keating

A little over a year ago, I first encountered a group of poems by Rodrigo Toscano through PEN. Those five poems, taken from Toscano’s Explosion Rocks Springfield, instantly drew me in – first with the notion, expressed in the introductory notes by the editor, that every poem in the book is entitled “The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care,” and second with these haunting two lines:

I remember the breeze right before…
Burs of—was it willow—slant-falling.

I knew I wanted to read the book. I’ve never wanted to read a book of poetry more. I’ve now completed Rodrigo Toscano’s Explosion Rocks Springfield and somehow it turned out to be even more than I’d thought it was going to be, going in. Explosion Rocks Springfield is a dissection of the language we use to relate ourselves – to others, to places, to experiences, ultimately to our own thoughts and feelings, and especially to dissonance – the dissonance of noise (expressed through recurring onomatopoeia and the constantly-interjected “HEIGH HO!”), the dissonance of disaster (“Vapor gray whitening shingle powder rain. / A dumpster lid sheered off a gravestone’s angel face.”), the dissonance of industrial life (several poems are given over entirely to the labels on gas fixtures and/or the safety procedures for using them) the dissonance of sex and caring and the notion of really knowing a thing.

To dissect our words and the way we use them to relate, Toscano uses a series of questions, where the language in which we question is as much on trial as the subject matter itself – for instance, in his first poem on page 1, Toscano asks, “What is “drywall,” exactly? … What is “care,” exactly?” On page 2, these questions – still unanswered – are transformed: “What is “care,” approximately? … How dry is drywall?” Toscano is uninterested in giving us the means to simply or succinctly understand the issue at hand; instead his goal is to make us question our questions, to keep diving deeper. The discourse on drywall, for instance, continues on page 5 (“Is drywall interested?”) whereas the style of questioning the the question about care transforms to encompass other subjects (for instance, on page 8: “What is “stability,” exactly?”).

It is through these connotational similarities that Toscano creates a language within a language – an English that is recognizable but which is also his own. Or perhaps the English of Toscano belongs to all of us – all of us who create the connotational understanding that links his various onomatopoeia (the word “doink” recurs throughout the book) with the sort of imminent criticism he employs against his own inquisitiveness.

What, ultimately, may we glean from “doink,” from “frabba jabba,” from “perdepistatiplode,” from “The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care”? All recur. Toscano has no interest in making the answer to this question easy – as well it shouldn’t be. Toscano does occasionally take a break from expositional philosophical discourses and onomatopoeic interjections to provide more concrete perspectives – like the juxtaposition of the gas workers on pages 61-62, the strippers on pages 63-64, and the cupcake shop workers on pages 65-66, all of whom use the same language to describe their feelings and their jobs; and of course those direct descriptions of the aftermath of the explosion.

Explosion Rocks Springfield is a small book that travels a long way – along the capitalist supply chain that created the physical ingredients of the disaster; along the lives of the people involved; and along the language we use to describe it. It’ll travel a long way through your mind, too; and you’ll be better off for it.

NOT A SELF HELP BOOK: THE MISADVENTURES OF MARTY WU,
BY YI SHUN LAI
Shade Mountain Press, 2016
218 pp.

Review by Rosa De Anda

Yi Shun Lai’s Not A Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu, 2016, parallels René Margritte’s painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). Margritte’s perfectly rendered image of a pipe represents a real pipe, but it does not cause cancer, the same way that Marty Wu’s deeply disturbing story does not make our life more painful, but most importantly mirrors reality for millions of women. We commend Margritte for his flawless pipe painting the same way we can appreciate Yi Shun Lai for her amazingly disturbing story embellished by wit and humor.

The book is a four-month journey with a series of flashbacks spanning Marty’s 28 years of verbal and sometimes physical abuse. The dialogue is seamlessly woven throughout the narrative. At eight years old, in front of her cousins, Marty Wu’s mother throws a plate of eggs at her and commands her to eat them off the floor, like the dog that she is. And, she does. Marty further states “if I had righted the ship at age eight, life now wouldn’t be so hard. (Maybe I’d be able to add scramble eggs back into my culinary repertoire.)” Marty’s relationship to her hypercritical mother is at the heart of this story. Our protagonist’s career, her love interests, and all other relationships orbit around her mother’s unthinkable acts of tyranny.

Marty Wu, an emigrant straddling two cultures, feels scrutinized by an old, non-existent world, and driven to meet expectations in a society she does not fully understand. Her aunt tries to explain to Marty, “We Taiwanese don’t see it that way. Help, I mean. We see it as interfering…your mother has a good life. It is a life of leisure. It is the life all women of her class get. It is as it should be.” (161) Marty does not agree with her aunt’s over simplistic view of her mother’s bazar behavior. She comes to understand her mother as “broken,” living with a different kind of normal. Foreign in both worlds, she dives searching for answers in her collection of self-help books that cannot address her specific problems. She must decide for herself what is a healthy self-image balanced in confidence, courage and self-respect, and what overarching advice to accept which applies to her circumstances and what she must figure out on her own while staying connected in two worlds — her Taiwanese and American cultures.

Americans clearly seek help, and Marty Wu is a devotee. Addicted like millions of Americans to self-help books, which have helped to define our universal challenges and promote ways to face our personal problems, Marty religiously references from her favorite self-help book, The Language of Paying Attention to YOU, which like so many self-help books suggests the importance of documenting one’s trauma to help release the power it holds over us. Marty Wu does just that. Only better. Inspired, she takes copious notes everyday. Vulnerable, exposed and open, we, the readers, are the beneficiaries of her courage; we get to read her diary.

Armed with the advice from her self-help books, Marty Wu learns to break from her family’s insanity, upper class entrapments, and old-world cultural domination. She breaks the family secret code of silence found in every family, and begins a new healing phase, evolving towards the personal freedom she desperately craves.

Equally painful as it is hilarious, there is a little Marty Wu in all of us. This book presents a different ending to the same old mother daughter narrative. Worth the read, it really can help.

FIRE SIGN, BY KATHERINE OSBORNE
Electric Cereal, 2015
90 pp.

Reviewed by Logan Ellis

Katherine Osborne’s debut Fire Sign is a confessional mouthpiece. A mouthpiece through which voice is morphed, rearranged, turned surreal. I say confessional because her work carries the tone and direction of a constant confessional, though the reveal, the long-awaited answer, is never, completely, confessed. We’re given death, car crashes, murder, horses, lakes, deer, while Osborne circles it all, wings outstretched. She achieves this partially by pulling apart syntax and grammar line by line, imbibing a run-on the way one thought swims over to another.

Something was my way
all along I can’t stop replaying
what you said
like a slow killing you set to music
I can’t

explain when was the last time you put
a domino piece in your mouth.

The grammar rearranges itself mid-poem, trails off to a dead end, then circles back around into itself. The new, invented language propels us forward, reaching out to take the hand of conceptual surrealism.

I was born inside a
dead girl. We mourn
through the door

holding the last four Lynx

to beyond us

with whatever secret they mouth
to each other and only one earth shows up
for trial.

Osborne uses these constant leaps to move around grief in such a strange way, in such a real way. The grief is heavy in how she addresses mysterious pronouns scattered throughout—he, she, you—with guilty anecdotes, accusations, and questions. More precisely, her writing style moves with such obsessive, sporadic tendencies that at the beginning of a poem a question has been asked and, by the time you’ve reached the end, it has been asked again, the answer erased beneath it. She’s chosen one thing and questioned everything about it until the question no longer pertained to that thing.

I erase mouths with my own mouth.
Handfuls of ice. It won’t hurt.

The light breaking over the water.
Sister out on the edge. Are you my
sister. I give a little push.

And did you dream. Did you remember
something. You were out in the dark

field. As you were

breaking. Did she let you say that.

Hold me still. An undercurrent.
god leans in. Interprets my mouth
as a map. As a door you could run

through.

Her book is a beast of snippets, some pages containing only small tercets while others hold lines and lines of free verse, sometimes even prose poetry, extending a single poem across several pages. The consistent shifts in form carry on her gradual commentary on the consequences of keeping your voice to yourself, of holding too closely the analysis of guilt, happening. Even the cover art, both bright and dark, appears to be constantly revolving, ascending, mimicking the poems, circling from joy to introspection to grief, memories filling each seat. Pulling itself upwards into the sky with the motion of its own being.

SPLIT THE CROW, BY SARAH SOUSA
Parlor Press, 2015
84 pp.

Reviewed by Sabrina Barreto

I’m swallowing a story
that ends with blood-stained snow.
I know how this looks.
It appears to be true.

So begins Sarah Sousa’s second volume of poetry, Split the Crow. The opening poem, “Her Moods Caused Owls,” serves as an immediate sine qua non of the book: history, and the individual human stories at its core, is not an issue of fallacy and truth. History is a matter of accountability, and stories are accumulated moments that pivot into cornerstones.

Just as history braids the threads of human lives, so Sousa gathers multiple voices into a chorus that rages and laments. Her chorus is a mingling of Native Americans and European colonizers, speaking initially from the Contact Period in 1600s New England, then traversing Midwest in the early 1900s. The brutality and subjugation that are mentioned as abstracts in American history textbooks return to their breathing, bleeding bodies in Sousa’s hands.

All are culpable, and it is Sousa’s unflinching stance toward her personae that gives her lyric-narratives power. In Part I, which features several accounts of archaeological observation, she excavates the burial grounds and personal effects of children, denoting how objects like the “left forepaw of a bear” (8) and a medicine pouch “Small as a tablespoon” (18) carry their emotional heft: “Sometimes love is expressed with a stone / heavier than what lies beneath it” (8).

Among interred bodies, foreign voices soon rise. The recurrent “Remove” poems, written from the perspective of captive Mary Rowlandson, provide visceral insight into the terrors experienced by settlers’ families seized and marched in raids: “Nine days on my knees. I leave / jelly-red bowls in the snow when I stand” (13). In her trademark forte, Sousa’s images subvert tenderness with violence: “I watched the goodwife, heavy with child, / stop and have a game of ring-a-roses / played with hatchets on her skull” (20).

But the most horrifying voices belong to the men who condemn: Puritan missionaries. Roger Williams’ hypocrisy appears first, succeeded by John Eliot’s pseudo-Algonquin Bible and his suggestive translation that “cleave is both / cut and cling to” (26), then cemented with a Christianized native’s confession “Satan makes me homesick… Reverend, I believe Satan is easier / with me” (29).

In comparison, the most captivating voices belong to liminal women: the native midwife complicit in infanticide, the native mother who bears a colonizer’s “mottled” stillborn (25), and, in Part II, a slave adopted by the Cherokee as “a gift given”(45) juxtaposed with a slave impregnated by a native and rejected by his tribe.

If Part I of Split the Crow was the Civil War, then Part II would be the Reconstruction. While the first half delves into decimation, the second half deals in “Survival and Other Skills” (56). No longer driven towards death, Native Americans live in death’s presence: the asphyxiation of their way of life. In response, tribal elders gather the living and ghosts alike, while they are caricatured against the “clever cowboy” in the “Indian Exhibit” (53) and their children are “Renamed at Boarding School” (54), where “Speaking Kiowa could get a boy thrown / across the room, collar bone snapped” (55).

Yet, in a longing for past rituals, there is more space for warmth in Part II: a “Courtship scene drawn on an envelope” (39), a lacemaker’s hodgepodge scrapbook of remedies and censuses, and daughters who still “cut hair, make light biscuits” (56) like their grandmothers. Sousa explores how memory is processed and contained not only in the body, but moreover through tradition – traditions that she draws upon from her female forbears in poetry.

In particular, there are four poets that inform Sousa’s work. There is Dickinson, with her crystalline diction, and Bishop, with her quiet details and narrative sequencing, but there is especially Plath and Glück. Sousa shares Glück’s sharpened sensitivity and intense adaptation of persona, and creates incantations reminiscent of the “Vesper” / “Matin” poems in Iris. Like Plath, Sousa streamlines fury, harnesses “quick and liquid” (26) sounds, and accentuates the energy of death, with a strong sense of fracture.

Split the Crow is a book that wrenches and haunts, “dark / and sweet as a raven’s wing” (19). In excavating the remains of a past life and culture’s lifeblood, Sousa’s reaffirms indigenous force, if not authority: “Sad because extinct but still / possessing mythical teeth, legs, claws” (6). History doesn’t slumber – it is couched in shadow, waiting to emerge from dust.

Herbert Crowley (1873-1937) was a British born artist, sculptor, musician, and cartoonist. In his younger years he studied to be an opera singer in Paris, but upon his first engagements performing in front of an audience in Canada (his brother Clement was an engineer for the Grand Trunk Railroad) he found he suffered from stage fright. During his time in Toronto in the late 1890s he was close to artist Elizabeth Mcgillivray Knowles, and a frequent visitor to her studio which was a haven for musicians as well as artists.


Having failed as an opera singer, his brother Clement connected him with a job as a foreman on a banana plantation in Costa Rica – Clement was designing the railway for the United Fruit Company, which essentially controlled the country and was known for its brutal labor practices. Herbert fled this job soon after, and ended up in New York. Here he began living with fellow British (though Jamaican-born) sculptor John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke. Herbert would soon be living with John and his wife-to-be Mary Mowbray-Clarke at their studio/commune “The Brocken” in Rockland County, NY. Here he met one of Mary’s art students (Mary and John both taught at the Finch School, an Upper East End art school), a young heiress named Alice Lewisohn. In December 1912, this constellation of people began to conceptualize the “Armory Show” – Alice was one of the first financial backers, and John was a principle organizer. Herbert remained in the shadows, being an introverted type, but two of his works were included in the show. Alice and her sister Irene went on to create one of the first “off broadway” theaters, The Neighborhood Playhouse. Mary and her business partner Madge Jenison founded the immensely influential subversive bookstore “The Sunwise Turn” in 1916.


Herbert served in WWI, in the British Camouflage Division, joining in 1917 upon the entrance of the US into the war. After the war he traveled the world extensively with Alice, whom he married in 1924, and they met many intellectual and artistic luminaries. Referred to psychologist C.G. Jung by her theater colleague Robert Edmond Jones, Alice and Herbert became part of Jung’s Psychological Club and inner circle in the late 20s/early 1930s. 



In 1935 they were divorced, and Herbert remarried Wilhelmina ‘Mina’ Seilaz, co-owner of a high-end perfumery which Alice and Herbert had frequented. Near the end of his life, Herbert had a breakdown (as he was wont to do on occasion) and attempted to destroy his work. He told those around him that he wished for any of his work which was found to be destroyed. He died suddenly and unexpectedly in Ascona, Switzerland on December 11th 1937.

The Temple of Silence: Forgotten Worlds of Herbert Crowley is forthcoming from Beehive Books.

Translated from the Burmese by Kenneth Wong

No matter what,
The blue pigeon still has wings;
His imagination
Is on the ferry bound for San Francisco.

When he taps on someone
And asks, Is this the bus to New Dagon?
Bystanders can’t help but see
His missteps—
The stumbles of a midday drunk.

Oh, how my mouth is dry!
He drinks 10 Kyat’s worth of ice water¹
From the waterseller banging on an iron bucket,
And watches the passing clouds from the window.
Aww, I screwed up!
This is actually the bridge across the Nga Moe Yeik Creek.

I’ve arrived! I’ve arrived!
Mr. Carl Dennis,
Come and greet me!
I’ve finally put my foot down.

ေဇာ္ထိန္

ဘာပဲေျပာေျပာ ခုိျပာေလးမွာ ေတာင္ပံရွိတယ္။
သူ႔အေတြးဟာ
ဆန္ဖရန္စစၥကုိသြားတဲ့ သေဘၤာေပၚမွာေပါ့

ဒါ၊ ဒဂုံၿမိဳ႕သစ္ကုိသြားတဲ့ ဘတ္စ္ကားလားလုိ႔
တစ္ေယာက္က လက္တုိ႔ၿပီးေမးေတာ့
ေန႔လည္ခင္းႀကီး မူးေနတဲ့ လူလုိ
သူ႔ေျခလွမ္းေတြမွားေနတာ
ေဘးလူေတြျမင္သြားေပါ့။

အာေခါင္ေတြ ေျခာက္လုိက္တာ။

သံပုံးကုိ ေကာ္ခြက္နဲ႔ေခါက္ၿပီး ေအာ္ေရာင္းတဲ့
ေရခဲေရ တစ္ဆယ္ဖုိးေသာက္ၿပီး
ျပတင္းေပါက္ကျမင္ရတဲ့ တိမ္ေတြကုိ ၾကည့္ေနမိတယ္။

ေဩာ္…ငါမွားသြားၿပီ
ဒါ ငမုိးရိပ္ေခ်ာင္းကုိျဖတ္တဲ့ တံတာႀကီးပဲ။

ေရာက္ပါၿပီ၊ေရာက္ပါၿပီ
မစၥတာ ကားဒင္းနစ္ ေရ
ႀကိဳစမ္းပါေတာ့
က်ဳပ္ေျခေထာက္ ေျမေပၚခ်လုိက္ပါၿပီ။