TRAMPOLINE

BOOK REVIEWS

Vanessa Saunders, The Flat Woman (FC2/Univ. of Alabama Press 2024)

Vanessa Saunders has written a feminist dystopian novel that happens to be uproariously funny when it’s not being deadly serious. This description may seem incongruous, and to make matters more complicated, The Flat Woman, is also an experimental novel concerned with environmental disaster, which sounds both difficult and grim. 

However, the novel, in addition to being highly original and insightful is also highly enjoyable, and it is a tribute to Saunders’s imagination and deftness to pull off the world of The Flat Woman, a world which like all dystopias bears an uncomfortable resemblance to our own.

In The Flat Woman, the world is on the brink of a climate crisis.  Buildings collapse due to excessive heat and birds fall from the sky.  Instead of acting, the government places the blame for climate change exclusively on women.  When her mother is arrested for being an ecoterrorist, the protagonist, known only as “the girl” (later “the woman”), is forced to raise herself. 

Subsequently, the woman drops out of college to date “the man,” an environmental activist turned Elvis impersonator, who asks her to call him “The King.” After taking a cleaning job with the same megacorporation tasked with imprisoning her mother, the woman begins to question her complicity with a corrupt system, as well as her relationship with the man.

A short novel, The Flat Woman manages to say a lot in 160 pages, with insights into gender roles, politics, environmentalism, and corporate culture.  It is exciting reading a novel that is so concerned with ideas, and the questions raised by Saunders stayed with me long after the book had ended.  

This inventiveness extends to the style of the novel.  The world of The Flat Woman is so close to our own, but Saunders also plays with absurdity and magical realism, particularly when the woman assumes the appearance of things around her when she is in distress, such as by growing seagull feathers. 

On a related note, Saunders’s use of humor deserves particular praise. Too often “funny” novels are given short shrift.  However, Saunders could give a master class on how to effectively use humor to explore serious issues. The humor in The Flat Woman can be scathing but also laugh out loud funny.  Saunders perfectly balances poignancy with her humor, which is so rare and a real gift to the reader.

The Flat Woman is a novel that does many things very well. Ultimately, Saunders seems to be asking:  how does one be good (and happy) in the face of environmental disaster and political forces that seem beyond our control? What will our response be? It’s a haunting question and one that makes The Flat Woman ideal reading for our present moment.

Review by Justin Lacour

Sanjeev Sethi, Legato Without a Lisp (Classix, New Delhi,  2024)

Review by Deepa Agarwal

Sanjeev Sethi’s eighth volume of poetry, compiled to celebrate “the rugged tenure of his sixtieth season,” is indeed a legato without a lisp as words flow seamlessly, invoking Mnemosyne to deliver essential truths of human existence. The themes of these verses encompass nostalgia, reflections on life and living as well as the art of creative expression.

Sethi has been described as a “master wordsmith” and a cerebral poet. His meticulous attention to craft and his assiduity in selecting words and framing images makes an indelible impact on the reader, lofting his poetry to dizzy heights. These terse poems, none of them more than a page length, showcase the expertise of a highly talented and seasoned poet who can make a weighty statement in the space of a few compact sentences. 

In a recent interview, the poet stated, “I wrestle for nuance by wrenching words and woes. Some poems dip into emotional deposits; others document the demotic.” This revelation becomes evident as you turn the pages of the book. In “Ceremony,” the opening lines provide insight into the poet’s creative process and how poetic ambiguity is achieved:

When words reach 

in diglot:

With semblant meanings…

“Ties” resonated with me because it expresses the dichotomy of army life in the 1970s with sharp insights—outlining the brutal reality that lurks beneath the manicured exteriors of cantonments. 

Behind the orderliness lies 

the wantonness of war…

The mundane somersaults into tragedy when the calm of the “green oasis” is shattered for the nine-year-old by

…the stentorian voice 

of the wonky transistor announcing

neighbours as martyrs.

Sethi draws inspiration from memory, but poetry is the “zazen” that brings acceptance for loss. Thus in “Recognition” the poet poignantly recalls:

The taste of twin Genoise sponge

baked and partly burnt

for my fourth birthday bash…

…the agency of 

an ad patres mother,

not with us for forty years…

While he can ruminate philosophically on the pain of loss, Sethi can bring a smile to your face with equal ease. Growing pangs are captured with a wry wit in “Adolescence” which addresses the issue of sibling rivalry along with the uncomfortable acquisition of the knowledge which propels a child into maturity. 

Menarche left its mark

on your left leg.

Mother cushioned you in her arms…

…but my transuding earned

“Chin Up.”

Sethi’s poetry is remarkable in its use of language and his extensive vocabulary imbues his crisp verses with the ability to drive a point home with vigour. The personal becomes the universal as the poet ruminates on the fragility of human existence via the loss of a friend. In “Au Revoir for Vepa Rao” he says:

Mortality forwards its memo,

through a long-lost friend.  

Senectitude wrests my mentor…

This Samhain, there will be no celebration 

as wintertime opens its wounds…

Shelley famously remarked: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In this vein, Sethi’s poems explore contemporary concerns with acerbic directness. In “Plea for Peace” he succinctly remarks:

If we attend to peace and its attendant virtues as

casually as another nosh with our nightly sips:

Our kids will never be able to enjoy their aperitifs.

Sethi’s firm grasp over his craft is evident in the fact that he never draws his commentary out to dreary lengths. In his concise and sharp statements, the quotidian becomes illuminated with a dazzling vision.  Sanjeev Sethi’s cerebration and voice are so unique that they can be distinguished even without a byline. This is why I feel that this collection is a must read—one that should not be missed by any discerning reader.

Margaret R. Sáraco, Even the Dog was Quiet (Human Error Publishing 2023)

 Review by Benjamin Schmitt

“He chain-smoked Pall Malls/ and read Leaves of Grass when sad./ My father who loved telling stories,/ didn’t tell many of his war days.” 

            One cannot help how they are shaped by family. The family members I have known who passed down traditions and non-traditions played their part in making me the adult I am today. I doubt that I would have such an affinity for rock music from the 70’s if I hadn’t discovered my dad’s extensive record collection in first grade. Without the ghost stories passed down from my grandmother to my mother, I am not sure I would have discovered the joys of writing until I was much older. In Even the Dog was Quiet, Margaret Saraco explores how family (its blessings and its faults) has shaped her life and the world she still wants to build.

            Even the Dog was Quiet is broken up into eight sections. Each section begins with a finely drawn illustration that introduces you to the poems therein by touching on a certain topic or metaphor the poet will explore. This was an effective way to structure the book as the illustrations are simple yet mysterious, inviting a reader’s curiosity as they turn the page.

            These pages begin with the poet’s grandparents, undocumented immigrants who experience the carnage of a house fire, “everything lost—pictures, papers, links to their past/ consumed, turned to ash/ the fire department arrived too late.” Through these poems about her own immigrant ancestors, Saraco frankly discusses the issues that confront so many new arrivals to our country, even to this day. Later on, the poet recounts stories from her own childhood, including one about an early crush, “I watch him build a small bonfire on the sidewalk/ in front of my suburban home from the living room window,/ he is waiting for me with a Romeo devotion.” Obviously, this proves to be a bit excessive and her father effectively bans her from seeing the boy again. There are many poems like this in Even the Dog was Quiet that are both funny and endearing, like a familiar tale told by grandpa at the dinner table on Thanksgiving Day.

            This is a poetry collection that is largely focused on the past, especially life as it was lived in the 1960’s. Therefore, readers in their twenties or thirties may struggle to relate to some of the poems. That said, as a man in his forties who was born long after the 60’s ended, I did enjoy many of these poems as Saraco was usually able to touch on universal themes. For instance, a relationship in which “not quite boyfriend and girlfriend, I am his relief, a body to caress, explore, envelope while he downs vodka, whiskey, rye, numbs veteran pain.” I only know so much about the Vietnam War and the people who fought in it, but I think many of us can understand the destructive nature of alcohol as a balm for mental anguish. In a poem about her old family bank, Saraco laments the changes it has undergone, thus rendering it unrecognizable to her. In another, she writes, “I finger the grooves in my 80-year-old cedar kitchen table,” reveling in this connection to the past. The poet seems to be advocating for us to not abandon a past that she herself cannot let go of. It is a romantic notion that creates a compelling tension with our fast-paced, high-speed, internet-soaked world.

            But the most hopeful parts of the book occur when the poet is able to let go of that past to create a new family and home for herself. She finds family in her work as a teacher and in her community, writing “Maria surprises me in my classroom/ carrying a small box of flowers—yellow sprays, bright red/ carnations and waxy unspoiled leaves.” And she finds a home in unlikely areas where human development confronts nature, “a rusted old fence straddles the slow-moving water/ fallen trees drape the creek like a mass of tangled hair./ Beyond the crumbling rock wall and bent railing,/ a red fox sniffs along the creek’s edge, withdraws into the brush.” She then asks why she is drawn to such an untended place. Perhaps this is the place where the past meets the present to unlock the future. The place where family meets the individual to unleash the possible. Or to put it simply, home.

Jeffrey Bean, Everywhere, Everywhere, (Cloudbank Books 2024, Winner, Vern Rutsala Book Prize)

Review by Carla Sarett

One of the glories of English-language fiction is its remarkably varied depictions of children— and the joys and sorrows of childhood.  I, for one, will never tire of reading David Copperfield.  Jeffrey Bean’s latest collection,  Everywhere, Everywhere mines this rich mysterious turf as few contemporary poets do.  With apple trees, sticks and moss, where “it is always May,” these poems are unabashedly enchanting.  

Writing poetry from a child’s point of view is tricky; it is all-too easy to stray into Disneyland sentimentality. Jeffrey Bean’s poems are indeed sweet but they never indulge in cuteness.  Take these two stanzas from “The Girl’s Plan” (first published as “Ella’s Plan”)—its soft musical half-rhymes are balanced by the sharp, precise observation “but she’ll never/let you look right at her.”  We have all seen that little girl, darting away:

Out of a dream of flight she'll emerge,  vast as a yard of clover, and fall like a comforter  over the neighborhood. Then she'll shimmer

like a maple in the wind. You might catch a whiff of pine-sweet air—that’s her hair—but she’ll never let you look right at her. She’ll dart in your periphery,

The comforter (and the image of a child in bed) appears again for the boy, in “The Boy’s Nocturne” — a poem that luxuriates in nursery-rhyme imagery.  The wide-awake boy “gleams” like “a fork,” the night is a “tall dinner guest” with “green hair” and a “dark mouth.”  And then, the boy “melts/on the tongue of the moon” and becomes, wonderfully,  “a lozenge, wild and purple.”  

In his bedsheets the boy gleams,  rolled up inside his comforter  like a fork in a fancy restaurant. The night stands up, a tall  dinner guest, her green hair  billowing, teeth sparkling  in her dark mouth.

Every crawling creature on the block  points its shining eyes at the boy. He is  a bug-child, a once-flying thing, stuck  in an old web a spider forgot,  the stickiness not unpleasant. Slowly he melts  on the tongue of the moon,  a kid, a lozenge, wild and purple.

This restrained surrealism allows Bean to explore his real concern, which is imagination itself; the poems exist in a dream-like “everywhere,” and they can go “everywhere.”  The voice alternates between “the boy” and “the girl” — identity itself seems a floaty thing. We sense the boy and girl are the same child, seen from different angles and moments by the sympathetic narrator. 

But even within this gauzy framework, Bean is able to tackle real world conflicts. In “The Girl’s Painting,”  “there are wolves, each with her big brother’s/carved face” who know “how to shove a kid down in the mulch and so she gets up/funny with shame, stooped low for good.”  The “funny with shame” feels pitch-perfect for a young girl’s humiliation. In another poem, the boy hears of distant shootings that “bloom” in schools, and thinks, gratefully,  “of his own blue school, the safety in the smell/of socks, white paper, fried potatoes.”  The far-away shootings are now part of a collective fear.  In the more explicit and troubling “Truths”: “The truth is the boy’s babysitter turned on him/with a disgusted sneer/as soon as his parents went out the door./The truth is she pulled the boy’s hair,/smacked his mouth when he slouched.”

The encounter turns into a spanking, but the skeptical parents hire the babysitter again. And here, Bean’s delicate sensibility asserts itself.  Upon her return (with a “screwdriver” — now, the boy’s terror can’t be untangled from “the truth”), the babysitter finds the boy is “a puff of pollen/in a lily. The boy was the sizzle of bee wings.”  Imagination isn’t a luxury; it is part of every child’s survival kit.  The “truth is” that the child learned about cruelty.

In other poems, Bean reaches back into his Midwestern (apparently untroubled) childhood and adolescence.  In “Self-Portrait as a Driver,” the poet, a teen with his father, misses the point of a father’s advice:  “I didn’t know a body’s pain could change a person.”  In “My Friends,” his current conventional (apparently, happy) life and old friends seem “boring”   His pals used to “sleep/ in dry fields with lit cigarettes” and “eat magic mushrooms with their guitar teachers” and he envisions all of them spending “one night, at least, in a closed liquor store” and then driving to Kentucky for “pancakes.”  It’s a comic vision of American manhood as a kind of thwarted adolescence, and good-natured to boot— evoking the sly humor of another of my favorites, George Bilgere.  We like this poet for sticking with his old pals, dull as they may be. Happiness, after all, isn’t some rare exotic animal— it is everywhere.  

I confess that I missed the spider webs and kites in the “grown-up” poems.  Perhaps that’s because I savored the childhood poems so much, and I feel such pieces are all too rare. But that’s being greedy. As Jeffrey Bean reminds us in a lovely poem to his daughter, adult life is replete with its own “firelight”:  “In the future, there will be smoke, there will be/firelight on faces, there will be music/from stringed instruments, human voices.” And in each of us, there remains a deep well of the early magic and older ties, ever-fresh and alive as the poems in Everywhere, Everywhere.  

Andy Young, Museum of the Soon to Depart (Carnegie Mellon 2024)

In “Grief during Carnival Season,” the opening poem from Andy Young’s powerful second collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, the speaker declares while watching a brass band parade through the streets “I used to think I would die/of sadness but have learned there is no such luck . . . grief is a labor-like squeezing.” Indeed, grief is the primary theme of the collection, but the reader gets the sense that, for Young, grief is not just a matter of personal loss. Rather, the book’s concern is global, lamenting the loss of the poet’s mother alongside political unrest in the Middle East, and the locale of the poems switches from New Orleans to Cairo, from Ecuador to Barcelona. 

In “Recurrence,” an early poem in the collection regarding her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Young questions the role of poetry regarding tragedy, i.e., what good is poetry if it cannot stop tragedy or at least offer some comfort?  “Because I’m a poet I try to make/music of her diagnosis: scan/the adonic of glioblastoma.” However, there is “[n]o music in this diagnosis.”  The power of poetry seems to fail in the hopelessness of the mother’s condition. “To hell with games and similes . . . no comfort in this cureless verse/that as a poet I can’t help but make.”

However, the book also suggests poetry can serve a real purpose by shining a light on suffering around the world and by standing with those who suffer. A poem like “On Syrian Political Cartoonist Ali Farzat’s Self-Portrait, Drawn after His Hands Were Broken,” calls attention to a story that might otherwise be forgotten. Without a trace of didacticism, Young paints a story of resilience amid oppression, as the poem observes the cartoonist “his hands mummy-wrapped/broken fingers halved/by tape and gauze somehow/he unbent the middle finger,” and though “nothing will change anytime/soon,” the poem asks the reader to “praise the cartoons/of Ali Farzat/praise Ali Farzat’s/middle finger.”

This poetic impulse to preserve can be seen in “Old City Cemetery,” which Young describes as a “‘History Park’ and Wedding Venue” in Lynchburg, Virginia. Part of the tour includes a stop at “The Museum of Mourning,” where the speaker begs “Let me in to weep/for everything I’ve lost and broken,/for every aunt, every pet, for my grandfather killed/by the mines, for my nana’s lost mind and the cut-down/trees of my childhood.” The speaker asks to touch “the brooches made of hair/the ink of the catalogued dead.” Likewise, Young’s poems operate as a type of museum, cataloging what has been lost and naming the forgotten.  

In Museum of the Soon to Depart, Young examines both the limits and the possibilities of poetry. While poetry may seem inadequate in the face of suffering, poetry also has the power to open the eyes of the reader. In that way, Young’s poetry is political in the best possible sense. It mourns what might otherwise be forgotten, and so saves it. To mourn is to remember, whether it is our loved ones or the victims of oppression worldwide. Museum of the Soon to Depart is that rare book that is not only profoundly moving but challenges the reader to grow a bigger heart, a heart that can mourn.

Review by Justin Lacour

Joan Kwon Glass, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia Press, 2024, Winner of the Perugia Prize for Poetry)

by Carla Sarett

Psychologists have begun to understand intergenerational trauma— that scars of earlier generations are passed down.  In this respect, science is catching up to poets from Natasha Trethewey to Ocean Vuong. Joan Kwon Glass’s new collection,  Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, marks a powerful entry into this territory.  From Japan’s occupation of Korea to a sister’s suicide, the past marches, ferociously, through these poems; it  leaves us breathless.     

Twelve short “hungry ghost” poems anchor the book; these are are, Glass tells us, “loosely inspired by characteristics of the …thirty-six hungry ghosts in Korean Buddhism.”  The titles use Korean words, another link in the chain, although the poet admits her own daughter “can’t even swear in Korean.” Like their Buddhist counterparts, Glass’s ghosts are driven by insatiable appetites.  The poems speak with Plath-like intensity: 

“There is hunger that wants to be fed/and there is hunger that burns,”  (Page 18)

“I am fat/ and on fire, and my mother does nothing/to put out the flames.” (Page 61)

In “Spittle-Eating Hungry Ghost,” a Japanese soldier spits at her Korean grandmother:

And he moved on. From then on she would  see spit on the ground  and remember that she could endure  shame if it meant that when it passed, she was still standing  (Page 9)

In a critical sense, the shame is “still standing” with the grandmother and with her granddaughter — in part, because the larger world has buried it. It’s Glass’s job to dig it up. In “January,” she imagines an ideal world, in which “God is real” and the poet’s ancestors “remain unearthed.”  This poem offers an example of the author’s unforced imagery and softly compelling lines: 

Birthdays are still for celebrating, not imagining you  at the age you would have been. In winter,  it rains less and snows more. We walk unbound, across the January field. Our bootprints ruin what God has made,  as the world's icy seal cracks beneath our feet. In this version, God is real and you live  a long, uncomplicated life. Our ancestors remain unearthed.  (Page 27)

Many of the poems speak of normal suburban life (family meals, church, boyfriends, shopping)  where, time and again, ordinary things fall apart. The storytelling in these poems is remarkably sharp. Her father “as a joke”: tosses her mother into a swimming pool and her mother’s hands reach “for the same man who had thrown her in.”  As her father is about to abandon his family she writes:  “How the world can look so bright/before it catches fire” and after he leaves his old leather couch “holds the shape of him.” In “Hallmark Cards for the Rest of Us,” “bewildered” daughters imagine mothers as the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.  

And through all of this, there’s the poet’s hunger.  In “Even the Moon,” as a mother diets, she must  “devour the sweets she rejects.”  

I devour the sweets she rejects  with a wave of the hand  and an, Oh, I couldn't possibly!

Have you ever seen a bird pick through  a bowl of seeds, pecking and scattering them  with such fury

that there are more on the cage floor  than in her own belly?

Have you ever met a mother  who was not a cage? (Page 42)

The moment is briefly comical— we’ve all heard that “I couldn’t possibly.” But it turns immediately dark.  The poet has been squeezed into a narrow feminine container, she feels caged.  Her mother is only a part of a cage.  As a Korean-American girl, she can’t manage to fit in.  The name “Joan”  irks her, she longs to be a “Chelsea.”  She’s enthralled by Fonz on Happy Days who speaks  “in an accent I couldn’t name.”  Her American father’s Oreos count more than her mother’s kimchee.  (Somehow we know the hungry ghosts aren’t gorging on kimchee.) In a heart-pounding scene in “Christmas, 1983,” her drunken white grandfather calls her a “gook.”  

I crept in with my head down and stood in front of my grandfather until his eyes, red and half closed, turned toward me,

and in a sudden storm of liquor soured-breath, he muttered, Get outta here you fuckin' gook.

I could hear a rerun of Wheel of Fortune on the TV.  The wheel's spokes churned and spit.  The audience applause went on forever.  (Page 27)

Of course, that insult goes on “forever.”  Childhood’s stings and slurs later chase the author through the headlines: In the poem, “Gold,” she learns of Asians murdered in Atlanta, and she tries “to ignore the fact that the killer looks like my high school boyfriend.”  In another, the aged mother, now ensconced in a trailer park, enjoys living around “white folks” and:

appreciates that so many of their children did not go to Yale or Harvard, is awed by and basks in all of their shameless, American imperfections. (Page 42)

The poet has her own sad trailer stories, as if she’s trying to prove she can be shamelessly American. And the sense of shame, we feel, is linked to her grief (and fury) over her family’s suicides— a grief she cannot give up.   

My grief is a hammer and demands I find new ways to remain a nail.  (Page 34)

Grieving the dead, then, becomes a moral imperative.  Only the survivors, the tough nails, have the luxury of telling the painful stories. In  Daughter of Three Kingdoms Gone, Joan Kwon Glass has liberated her ghosts; and they are flying home, to all of us.

David Greenspan, Error (antiphony press, 2024)

In the Notes following his new chapbook, David Greenspan explains that the poems in Error use “language error” such as “intentional mistakes in diction, grammar, and syntax,” as a means “to consider traumatic memory,” particularly memories of abuse.  

This language error “mimics life with an auditory processing disorder, where . . . logic subordinates itself to aural pattern.”  In considering the play of language and memory, Greenspan also remixes other texts, such as the French philosopher Guy Debord, but with language error to create new texts.  

However, Greenspan’s work is not merely inventive; the poems also have an enormous heart. Error is somehow both experimental and highly moving, making it a unique work that rewards rereading.     

The speaker’s parents, particularly the speaker’s father, looms large in Error.  However, it is the great silences in these poems that tend to be so heartbreaking.  Greenspan does not confess so much as associate around the pain.   

Rhetorical like a father. If body, then worm. If bullied, then warm. Piss leak, past and shake with hands. Fingers grim, nail through other lumber. If bile, than wane. Watery rat tail between dredge and gloat. The body, then bodies, ratted and watery. If body, then rivered, reverbed, lumbered. No bloat oar worm. You ourselves leak father.

What is so striking here is what is not said and yet, the fear and sadness is palpable.  Greenspan’s memories are built on the associations of language, i.e., “worm” leads into “warm,” “body” flows into “bullied.”  But part of the woundedness here is that the speaker can barely express what has happened to him; at best, the speaker stutters out bits and pieces of the story.

However, as the book progresses, the stuttered bits begin to give a fuller picture of the speaker’s situation.  For example, the reader begins to see more of the father’s character, as well as feeling the terror experienced by the speaker:

Cowered under playground equipment. That I do. Cowered under play. Ground. Yes coward and play. Performance of cow and gourd. Celebration underground. Cowered American. Masculine as nothing under play. I do. I do not need to say father was American man. But did.

Here, the father is presented as having traditional masculinity, while the speaker is “Cowered,” and “Masculine as nothing.”  Later, the speaker struggles to even let himself feel sadness over his childhood, speaking volumes of how the speaker has been broken by this experience: “Father yelled. So what? Every father yellows . . . why should you care? Why should I?” 

As a relief from this trauma, the speaker often turns to small animals as his friends, with “Worms and rats/my closest.”  In one poem, the speaker carries worms around in his pocket.  However, these friendships never last long, and animal death figures prominently in the book, as seen vividly when the speaker befriends a mouse:

on nose, the mouse returns and the cat, the cat named at vermin times vermillion things, half swallows, her sharp little mouth confused. You pull mouse tail to help, handkerchief magic, succeed in none.

Despite the language error utilized, a narrative emerges over the course of the book. Greenspan paints a gray landscape of nineties Michigan and a childhood of loneliness and pain and terror. Indeed the “error” underscores the pain experienced by the speaker as he struggles to understand and express what happened to him. It is impressive what Greenspan does with language, but to have poems this adventurous and so moving at the same time is the real achievement. Error is a tragic, brave book that poignantly examines a shattered childhood with the poems groping to put the pieces back together.

Review by Justin Lacour

Susan L. Leary, Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press 2024, Winner of the Louise Bogan Award)

by Carla Sarett

It’s fair to say that grief has joined the list of pathologies, for which we prescribe cures. We’re supposed to “move through” grief like a virus. But grief’s a sluggish, unruly thing; and in her new poetry collection, Dressing the Bear, Susan L. Leary navigates the spiritual maze she has traveled after her brother’s death.  It’s a heart-wrenching book. 

Leary’s brother died in 2020, and she apparently started this elegiac series after his funeral; the hurt in these poems feels fresh.  And alongside elegy’s familiar motifs — flowers, birds, water and other images of nature—Leary imposes a darker layer.  Her brother hasn’t died from so-called “natural” causes, he has overdosed in prison. So there’s a double-sorrow— for a life ended, for a man who was “lonely and broken.” (Page 35)  

We get to know the funny, sweet brother in Leary’s poems; he’s not merely a vehicle for the poet’s feelings.  In the title poem (and my personal favorite), “Dressing the Bear” the brother creates a bear for his childhood sweetheart, and then Leary fast-forwards into a “Florida landfill” where the bear “probably” is, and from there, to the funeral service: 

He gives the bear perfumed bones & shiny gold laces & breathes so as not to snap them. He considers what the girl wants & I consider his face as he forgets he has one, as if in loving the girl & loving her limb by clothed limb, for once, my brother can love himself. Probably, that bear is in a Florida landfill, barefoot & decapitated, its floral button-down shirt torn & full of crawfish stains. But the girl arrives at my brother’s service in a blue & pink striped dress, a burst skeleton of human sky—& I remember the air as we exited the mall that day, the reddest bomb of a fist before us. Then my brother, with insight delicate enough not to wreck the evening: It’s harder to catch  the sunrise, he says. You have to really want it. (Page 26)

At their best, Leary’s poems offer these heartbreaking leaps.  She moves, as grief does, from the empty present (of mourning) back to the living past. as she hears her brother “with insight delicate/ enough not to wreck the evening”  speak about a sunrise,  Or take the poem, “Heat.”  The brother is allowed to shower in prison once a day —so hot it “turns his skin red in a blitz” — as the poet remembers her first word was “hot”:  

wobbling around the kitchen, my mouth as wide as the fingers that stretched outward toward the stove.  How lucky I was  (Page 50)

The poet was “lucky” not to get singed but also to escape the understanding of danger.  Her beloved  brother has not been equally lucky.  And now, God has saddled her with a different kind of suffering.

In a recent interview with Mandira Pattnaik, Leary says she uses God as “a stand-in” for the idea that while “each of us will die, everything will have been worth it.”  I think this feeling is the essence of elegy. Leary makes her case, even as she admits that  “your life will be worth the sadness of one or two people “  In  “Influencing the Angels,” she writes:  “Soon you start believing. Soon it occurs to you, only God cannot tell you what you want to hear.”  So while friends console us with platitudes— “only” God is incapable of banality.  

Leary wrestles with faith because as one title suggests, “We’ll take the riddle so long as it remains unanswered.” In  “Floating Gospel,” the water into which she casts her brother's ashes is not “heroic” but “to believe in the water is an extraordinary act of faith.”  (Page 74)   The water (or the metaphor) can’t act alone— it’s our belief in the purification that heals us. The sister can “return” her brother to himself.  She can make him “clean.”  

Ultimately, the poet is too “busy being alive” “absorbing the blow of a new season” to keep on longing for what is gone. There will be new loves and new loss. But her brother warns her, in “The Birds, They Too Are Clean”

Yet you’ll never leave me, he says, it never ends. The birds are washing their feathers with water from our eyes. (Page 79)

In Dressing the Bear,  Susan L. Leary gives life to her brother in a way that only poetry can. We will not forget him.

Sanjeev Sethi, Wrappings in Bespoke (Hedgehog Poetry Press 2022)

It’s hard not to enjoy the poems in Wrappings in Bespoke.  Sanjeev Sethi constructs poems brimming with unusual word choices, word play, and complex, sometimes convoluted, sentences.  However, the reader never gets the sense the play is just an end to itself.  In Sethi’s poems, the unusual causes the reader to look at the usual with fresh eyes.    

In an early poem in the book, “Biog,” Sethi begins with an imposing Ashberian statement “Intertextuality of our ideas meet/on a spotless page to indite a/collaborative effort of strange/rhythms and sudden refrains.”  Who is this speaker? The language, although academic in tone, is also friendly and strangely inviting. There is an “our,” which leads to a “we,” which, in the context of the poem, seems less like a general “we” than the speaker calling out to someone for the intimacy of a shared creative act.  But in the middle of his discussion of writing, Sethi drops “In an/ecosystem of unequal genii, we/are happy to exist.” There’s something magic in creating, where the result is less important than the process.  As Sethi notes “To be is to/bloom.”

In “Rigmarole,” Sethi pelts the reader with odd, seldom used words: “punctilios,” “bovarism,” “panopticon,” “mortise.” What’s the point of these dictionary words? I think part of it is that, for a poetry built primarily on language rather than narrative, strange words take the reader to new, unfamiliar places.  Also, for Sethi, the strangeness ultimately makes the reader look at the usual in a different light.  By the end of this poem, for example, Sethi hits us with a hard truth, “Pain isn’t proprietary; join the party,” that forces the reader to reexamine the word play that’s come before.

In “Avoirdupois,” Sethi surprises with unexpected word choices: 

My mind drafted in mirror-writing to help you decode me. While sculling through choppiness we adopted mismatched cant. This took time to condense.

So the reader gets “mirror-writing,” a method of writing backwards sometimes found in children, alongside “sculling,” a way to row a boat. Following that we get a “cant” or language that becomes condensed. What world is this poem taking place in? Or, are we jumping between worlds? All this in a poem whose title refers to a system of weights. Again, the unusual forces the reader to confront the usual, such as by asking, how does language become condensed? How would writing backwards help someone understand me better?

Ultimately, arriving at a definite meaning seems less important than the sense of wonder these poems invite.  These are poems keenly aware of the possibilities of language and Sethi plays with those possibilities, and creates his own, unique wordscape.

Review by Justin Lacour

Darren C. Demaree, in defense of the goat that continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff (April Gloaming 2024)

In his book-length sequence of poems, in defense of the goat that continues to wander towards the certain doom of the cliff, Darren C. Demaree crafts short, philosophical, enigmatic poems that take on history, spirituality, science, and art, as well as “the meaning of human existence.”

The poet expresses doubt as to humans’ ability to plan for the future as they often sow the seeds of their own destruction:  “tell me once more why/the remaining wilderness is being asked/to grow a fungus that can save us/that can mean human existence can be/carried beneath a tree while we harvest/all the trees.”  Indeed, the poet mordantly observes “i can’t tell you why we placed the hook/inside our mouths called ourselves planners.”

At the same time, nature comes off as a powerful oppositional force to humans.  The poet announces, “the order is insect arachnid ant bee wasp spider/the order is a mafia let them do what they want/with the fish with the horse’s head with us.”  By contrast, humans struggle:  “our open mouths our red squares that always threaten evolution that never evolve.”

In the realm of art, the poet observes the arts have been divided between those who believe “the goat” is beautiful and brave, but doomed to die, and those who believe the goat will fly if

we describe the landscape in a way that explodes the frame that makes note of death but never gives in that edge is real what else

What is the poet saying here about the role of art?  Is he saying art is divided between realists and idealists?  Is Demaree saying great art defies death?  The power of the poem is that it refuses a precise meaning and forces the reader to wonder about the role of creativity.

Demaree also questions our ability to interpret art and the larger world around us.  The poet seems to suggest our inability to interpret correctly leads to principles that fail to truly speak to the human situation, including such essential questions as what does life mean?

the rule follows the fear the fear follows the misinterpretation the misinterpretation follows the meaning of human existence the meaning of human existence is a false flag operation

I thoroughly enjoyed the humor and insight of this book.  Demaree is able to reflect on big issues with both humor and insight.  In particular, he captures the absurdity of human efforts, while at the same time, the power of art and creativity.

Review by Justin Lacour

Jessica Jacobs, unalone (Four Way Books 2024)

By Jessie van Eerden

To read the poems in Jessica Jacobs’ unalone is to come alongside another human who is listening deeply, listening to her own experience as a queer Jewish woman in contemporary America and listening to the ancient stories of the Torah. Those familiar with Jacobs’ first two collections will recognize the combination of her inwardly- and outwardly-attuned attention, in her memoir-in-verse, Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), which unfolds a love story, and in her biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), which is steeped in O’Keeffe’s letters and art. In unalone, the “Poems in Conversation with the Book of Genesis” offer tender interpretations of some of the most familiar Judeo-Christian stories; they defamiliarize the texts so that we might hear “a sound [we] know so well/ [we’ve] never heard it.” 

It’s a book of access and invitation, offering context for the poems in a generous notes section and preceding each poem with a contextual epigraph from the Bible. Structured in twelve sections which correlate with the twelve sections of Genesis, the book might resonate most deeply with the biblically-immersed reader, but it also appeals to any reader curious about the various ways myths continue to unfold and manifest throughout time. The opening poem directly acknowledges the barriers and fences we often associate with religious tradition, those which can divide and exclude, but also offers invitation to communion, the possibility of entering conversations with the text that are not so calcified: “Let every fence in my mind have a gate./ With an easy latch and well-oiled hinges.” Jacobs suggests that poems themselves can perform an ingesting work (“Let us honor what we love/ by taking it in”), can grow intimate with the precepts of tradition and discover something new.

Jacobs is a student of the midrashic rabbinical tradition; the poems here not only converse with the biblical text but also with scholars of midrash: Lawrence Kushner, Alicia Ostriker, Avivah Zornberg (the book closes with a section on sources and teachers). Many poems in the collection perform modern midrash, exploring the shadows and crevices of familiar biblical narratives, examining the left-out and unsaid—the textured anxiety of the unnamed wife of Noah; the possibility that, after Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac, “[w]hen they passed// in the tent, Isaac rubbed a remembered ache/ in his shoulder and never again held// his father’s eye.” Jacobs feels for the nuances unapparent in the skeletal text of the epic stories of Abraham, Sarah, Noah, Hagar, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Leah, Rachel. Such midrashic work must ask: what new thing is brought, what new leaf lifted to reveal what is beneath the text? What might this moment have felt like, in the flesh? 

We know, for instance, from the story of Hagar, Sarai’s handmaid forced to bear Abram’s child when Sarai was barren, that Hagar flees Sarai’s mistreatment and jealousy, but in the poem “How the Angel Found Her,” we come upon Hagar in the wild as the angel might have. Hagar holds “the bones/ of a long-dead ram: one horn at the base/ of a juniper, the other in a boulder’s/ cool shadow.” Here, her child, Ishmael, is in the womb and is held in parenthetical stanzas in the poem; he “quickens” as, in this scene, Hagar sniffs the bones but smells no death: “leaning in, though, Hagar/ smelled her own sweat, life/ insisting.” The poem’s moment is sparse, only a whisper, a tableaux, really, before the angel will instruct her to return to Abram. We readers sit with Hagar in the pocket of her discovery of life’s insistence in a deadly world.

Midrashic interpretation offers not only scenic texture and gap-filling to these ancient narratives written as sketches, but also the opportunity to draw our lived experience alongside the text, “to make the reader aware, in the current that runs between his/her lived situation and the text, of the ways in which we are ‘at key instants, strangers to ourselves, errant at the gates of our own psyche’” (Avivah Zornberg, The Beginnings of Desire, xv-xvi, quoting George Steiner’s Real Presences). Such electric currents show how yearning spans time and history; in the shadow of great stories (Jacob’s ladder, Noah’s flood, Isaac and the ram) we find our ordinary lives. Thus, in these poems, we find a speaker childless at midlife, queer and newly married, her mother’s memory fading, her father’s body aging, her own body so like his. The poems include bodies “already up on blocks, listing/ and unsightly in the yard,” and bodies running. This from “Learning to Run Barefoot in a Dry Riverbed at Dawn,” a poem conversing with Abraham rising early to pray, the origin of the Jewish morning prayer service “shacharit”: “And if you fail// to avoid a rock—sharp jut against your sole—/ just go to hands and a knee. Before standing, notice// how the new light ribbons east; how eddies/ in the sand say this was all once water// and will be again.” Be grateful for the “falter,” the poem urges, for the way it teaches what full-bodied kind of prayer is possible.

These poems incorporate beautiful nuggets of memory, too, as they parallel contemporary and ancient experience. In “Prayer should be a tunnel,” the lesson from the adult speaker’s Hebrew teacher brings back a childhood memory of the “Terror of Tunnel” at SeaWorld, all the sharks swimming eerily overhead. The poem interrogates how this aquarium tunnel is analogous to prayer’s tunnel which takes us toward the divine. The poem ends with a question: what words might I pray that would “let me wander unafraid/ into the open mouth and emerge/ unscathed and changed?” The question renders the poem a meditation on both coming of age and coming into spiritual practice, later in life.

In “Sleepwalkers in the Garden,” an expelled Adam and Eve now understand loss for the first time, understand the nature of the paradise they had, and experience this new thing called longing. The second half of this poem introduces the speaker’s grandmother in her last living days, the granddaughter looking into the face of the dying loved one and now understanding, like Adam and Eve, “Paradise/ is every moment we’ve ever left, all the small/ unnoticed gardens we can never again enter.” The poem invites the reader to experience the nuances of loss in the Eden myth and to experience with ever-present mythic resonance the way loss reframes the Edenic moments we overlook.

The biblical characters here are always themselves and always us. Here is Abraham eulogizing Sarah: 

What is long love

if not a reliquary for the selves the other

sheds, a reflecting pool shining back

your shared past, their wishes long-forgotten

flashing bright from the bottom? Even

as we mourn, love gives us back to ourselves.

Jacobs draws up personal and timeless communal experience, but also the anxieties and difficulties of our particular 2024 moment: a culture deeply divided, a climate in crisis. In “Why There Is No Hebrew Word for Obey,” the uneasiness in the speaker’s reading of Abraham’s unquestioning faith, of his awful willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, transfers to her horror in the face of the absolute conviction of the antisemitic shooter who opened fire in October 2018 in the Pittsburgh synagogue. There is danger in allegiance to our convictions and there is room to question them. “What if we turn/ from certainty and arm ourselves// instead with questions?/ Obey, obey, obey is everywhere// in translation. The real word is/ שְׁמַע shema: listen.” 

The poems about Noah’s ark find chilling resonance between our climate crisis and the Deluge narrative. They question, within this story that ends in a rainbow promise, the decision to save the few and let the many perish; they discern, in the flood story, elements of our current “climate apartheid” in which the poor disproportionately suffer. And into the narrative-husk of Joseph and the famine, Jacobs inscribes the reality of present-day climate refugees, rendering the ancient story in the form of a present-day report, complete with vision statement, operating costs, conclusions “(Then & Now & Too Many Times Between)”: “Desperation gives nations legs.” Joseph’s is a story meant to admonish us to welcome the stranger, to know ourselves once as strangers seeking welcome, to remember that the stories of refugees are old stories, “[a]nd they repeat.” As poems in touch with the repetitive patterns in human history, they are acts against humankind’s forgetfulness.

In listening to narrative arcs that map onto human history, Jacobs also listens deeply to language itself, to its nuances and possibilities, to its creative energies. Many poems turn to etymology, peer into familiar phrases often misunderstood, or taken for granted. In “Mazel Tov,” Jacobs examines this “Jewish go-to// for Congratulations!” by pulling us out under the stars with the speaker and her dog and imagining Abraham there with us, receiving—along with the instruction to strike out from his homeland—the promise that his descendants will be numerous as the stars: “ובֹט tov means ‘good’/ and לָזַּמ mazel, ‘constellation’ or ‘destiny,’// and sometimes, like Abraham, you must/ leave the place that grew you to grow// toward better stars.”

Jacobs listens for the reverberations of translations that resist the dulling of tradition and habit and attunes herself, too, to that elusive divine voice that speaks the world into being. The title “And God speaks” is a frequent refrain (there are nine poems with this title), often with the title serving as first line of the poem so the poem’s body becomes the very declaration of the divine: “And God speaks/ words that enter the world/ as things”; “And God speaks/ a covenant”; “And God speaks/ a confluence/ of sustenance// and grace”; “And God speaks, in a sound beyond/ sounding.” We hear the varied ways the divine, creative voice may be heard and the varied kinds of truth that divine speech may enact. And we hear human speech—these poems—sounding out strongly in response. Speaking and listening. Deep conversation. 

These dialogic poems delve into stories which are millennia older than we are but which—this book implicitly argues—need us to complete them, to continue to unfold and discover them. Which suggests we need them as well, to know and make sense of this world and our experience. In “How to Pray,” Jacobs writes, “The way to God/ is not around the world but through it. So dig/ your heels into your heels; flex your fists, your/ jaw. Then release to become for an instant all/ ear: listen out, listen up to branch/ sawing branch like a giant violin; listen in—there’s your blood’s/ steady loop-the-loop.” These instructions also apply to how to read these poems: become all ear as you listen.

Maggie Rue Hess, The Bones That Map Us (Belle Point Press 2024)

by Renee Emerson

The Bones That Map Us is a chapbook of poems exploring heredity, loss, and love. The poet grapples with the loss of her parents, the disintegration of her marriage, and the blossoming of a new relationship.

Many of these poems ask, What do we inherit? In “Looking for an Ear,” the poet’s sister is looking at the ears of all the people in the family to see if her newborn has the same “curve of the cartilage / and the length of the lobe / and the hint of heredity.”

Likewise, the poet looks carefully at all the ears to be had in her immediate family—her mother, with her illness and multiple ex-husbands; her father, with his alcoholism and disappearance from her life. What will she inherit? What will she carry forward, whether she wills it or not?

Even as the poet declares her status as an “orphan” now, in the poem “At the adult beginner Spanish online night class,” she seems to wonder in this collection if she will end up like her parents. The sequence of poems, “We know the ending but not the beginning,” poses the unspoken question in the title—we don’t know how our parents started off, so how can we know if we are making the same mistakes, living the same lives?

Her poem “Scared / Sacred” explains her family’s drama most plainly—“My mother had four husbands / and died in the middle / of her last divorce.” This poem helps orient the reader in the story, and directly addresses the fears of going into a new relationship: “Hon, these are the only / blueprints I have: / you leave, one way or the other.” Will she inherit divorce or death? Either way, she moves forward with “I wed my fear.”

Hess does not shy away from experimenting with form in this chapbook, varying lineation in free verse, experimenting with formal poems (the ghazal), and, frequently, erasure. Erasure poems take a lot to win me over, and I prefer her original poems to the erasures of the original poems. However, I can see the logical and clever connection of subject matter in those poems—the mother is leaving out parts of the story and the poems themselves become erasures. In that way, the poet takes command of the story herself.

My favorite moment of form experimentation was the dictionary definition type poem, “An Alcoholic’s Daughter Edits the Dictionary,” which redefines “Haunted,” ending with the “the origin of the word: a laugh in an empty room.” The poem emphasizes her losses and loneliness, her trauma and orphanhood.

“Of Course All Dogs Go to Heaven” was the poem I kept thinking about after closing the book — a short, simple poem with a little sad humor. With so much of the past and her origin remaining forever shrouded in uncertainty after the death of her mother, the lines “I have believed / so many wrong things already” are particularly poignant.

My only real critique is there are times in this little chapbook that I think the poems would do better with more room to breathe, as in a full-length collection, where there is more space to sift out all the relationships (“Divorce Spoons” includes the poet’s lover’s ex-lover’s ex-husband’s spoons, for example).

I look forward to reading more poetry by Hess in the future, and seeing what questions they raise next.

Carolyn Hembree, For Today (LSU Press, 2024)

I’ve been a fan of Carolyn Hembree’s poetry since reading her first book, Skinny, back in 2012, a book I greatly admired for its language and voice, as well as its Southern gothic vibe.  I just finished her latest collection, For Today. I was blown away by the poems, and the dark, tender, heartbreaking places they took me. There are many fantastic poems in the book, but this review will focus on the two longer works from For Today.  

For Today begins with “Some Measures,” a crown of sonnets, which contrast the loss of the poet’s father with the birth of the poet’s daughter. Hembree’s sonnets are impressive for their power to interweave these two narratives, while drawing out the complexities of two pivotal family relationships. The sequence begins at the father’s funeral, where the poet is pregnant with her daughter:

Just a womb-field where sound waves echoed, I kept spotting. But today, oh day, my rootling roots, this paper kirtle leaks, the heavy earth falls. 

However, the sonnets are not content to simply reflect on the ubiquity of life and death. Hembree complicates matters by introducing the poet’s mother who is troubled and “so strung out.” The mother takes on a haunting quality as the poet learns to be a mother to her own child. The poem seems to ask how do you learn to be a mother when your relationship with your own mother is fraught? How do you parent when you survived childhood by making a “religion out of anger”? 

Additionally, the sonnets show the poet as a child developing her interest in poetry from her father, a translator, but even this has dark overtones. The poet remembers “Walking me/home the day the president was shot, you tied/my shoe, and I rhymed sidewalk gum with collapsed lung . . . Now, I am your gun poem. I won’t be put down.” 

“Some Measures” is a vivid, moving, complex poem that set out the key themes of the book, but Hembree’s scope only grows as For Today progresses. 

The majority of the book consists of the title poem, a breathtaking long poem that has the poet walking through New Orleans taking in everything she sees and everyone she meets. The poem is an attempt to catalog the whole of the poet’s life, from family to work to friends, but it is also a powerful meditation on how we handle individual and common trauma. In her walk, the poet considers family history, her identity as a daughter and a mother, as well as a friend’s illness, but also the existential threats of climate change–manifested concretely in Hurricane Katrina–school shootings, and the pandemic. 

It is hard to do “For Today” justice in a short review, though it may be enough to point to a few of the poem’s many powerful threads. First, the poem returns to the poet’s father and his influence on the poet’s own poetry. The poet remembers her father sharing one of his translations with her, going line-by-line: “Did he know I would, one day, need poetry and doubt?/Or did he teach me to need them?/Or is poetry a/scintilla of doubt.” In this portion of the poem, Hembree observes “poetry is not memoir.” This may sound strange in an apparently autobiographical poem, but this seems to fit with Hembree’s association of poetry and doubt. For Hembree, poetry is not simply recordation, but it is a space for questioning.

Similarly, “For Today” also returns to the theme of motherhood, but here the concern is more global and the danger more imminent. The poet reflects on signing a consent form for a lockdown drill at her daughter’s school, as well as pondering the Amish school shooting of 2006, before asking for her daughter “What has she gotten used to?” Hembree voices the fear and desperation of every parent in face of rampant school violence:

Where will we hide our children in this swamp? Where will our children hide? Where will our children hide from us?

“For Today” is a long poem that rewards repeated readings.  Hembree’s scope is so ambitious and all-embracing, and the resulting poem is a remarkable performance. Indeed, the whole collection radiates an impressive heart that makes room for family, neighbors, an entire city, while at the same time dazzling the reader with the feats of language we’ve come to expect from Hembree’s work. For Today is truly a unique and exceptional collection of poems.

Review by Justin Lacour

Kathryn Gray, Hollywood or Home (Seren Books 2023)

by Carla Sarett

In a piece published in the December Los Angeles Review of Books, Eileen G’Sell writes of the “poetry of embarrassment” — poems about “minor” feelings (e.g., bad sex, annoyances) that turn “mighty” on the page.  Those words came to me as I read Kathryn Gray’s new poetry collection, Hollywood or Home.  It’s smart, sophisticated, elegant:  a dry martini of a book.  Kathryn Gray makes the minor mighty. 

Many of the poems in Hollywood or Home deal with blockbusters like Top Gun— movies that earn billions but don’t win awards. In her notes, Gray drily observes “In lesser hands, Top Gun may well have become high art.”  

So that’s her game: to write serious poems about unserious art.  In poem after poem, Gray pulls it off, and stylishly.  She can take a cheesy line, “I am the world’s last barman poet” and make it a title (this apparently from the movie Cocktail— a film I have managed to skip.)  In  “Meet Cute,”  the poet tackles the exhausted tropes of the New York romance film:

It will be New York.  And we may infer that the girl  is late for some as yet inscrutable but crucial prior engagement which will never occur.  Overcoats and umbrellas move the crowd. She has no umbrella. 

It’s a sparkling romp through formula, without a hint of cliche. Gray glides from one fresh line to the next. The girl may be a “fragrant stenographer.”  The girl lives with her “loud mother.”  And of course, the girl (never a woman) has no umbrella— had I ever noticed that?  

That ironic distance is key to this collection.  The author is English (she is one of the editors of the journal, Bad Lilies.)  Gray doesn’t live or work in New York or L.A.  She’s never “lunched at Spago” but she knows what Spago is.  Which is another way of saying, she knows there is a business called Hollywood— a business that manufactures feelings. (Confession:  I worked in concept testing for movies and TV.)  

If Wallace Stevens can find thirteen ways to look at a blackbird, Kathryn Gray finds “Six Ways of Looking at John Cazale.” In the first, she writes:

John’s eyes— a tender inquisition. You are not, in fact, looking at him.

That phrase, “a tender inquisition” hits home for anyone who’s looked at the actor.  Let Stevens keep his bird, Gray has Cazale.  Her choice of this actor is telling. Cazale was a fine character actor who died early (some may recall him from The Godfather).  He was never a star or close to a star.   I suspect more than a few readers will be puzzled by the name and the references (her sixth stanza, one word:  “Wyoming”— bonus points if you know why.)  The tone is secretive, and that’s her point.  It’s like a family gathering where everyone knows the old fights;  but even if you’re a stranger and new to the code, you still recognize every hurt.  Tender inquisition: we’ve seen those eyes. 

In my favorite poem in the book, “Love,” Gray references the films of Douglas Sirk in one deftly rhymed couplet after another.  She starts:

Take me to the country club in my red dress. Make me locally infamous.

Fix me a Martini— Dry— I am getting weepy. I almost want to die.

O take me, please, to the clinic in Zurich. I'm not being ironic—

I cannot see to see! You—you have blinded me!

I am a fan of Douglas Sirk  (don’t get me started on Sirk’s use of color), so, in this case,  I savored Gray’s references, starting with, sigh, the red dress.  But anyone can plunge into this poem’s overwrought atmosphere and irresistible kitsch —I almost want to die.  And oh, the irony of I’m not being ironic.  

There are other “minor” sorrows in this collection.  In “Lovely Young Man”, Gray laments that young men are not flirting with her, and she has reached that certain age “when your dentist is the lovely young man now.”  She’s thinking about sex, yes, a lot and no, the lovely young man isn’t or at least not with her.  She asks, “Is there any pleasure in sorrow quite like it?”  Well, I don’t know but I suspect Dorothy Parker might  (and there is a Dorothy Parker poem in this collection.)  I think Parker might well appreciate the line in “Fresh Hell:”

I want to be a star.  I’d die for my art.  But I worry that no one would care.

Such a grand comic emotion.  Such fantastic vanity. Perhaps I will take a look at Cocktail after all.  

Ken Meisel, The Light Most Glad of All (Kelsay Books 2023)

Ken Meisel’s recent collection of poems, The Light Most Glad of All, is a deep and uplifting meditation on the nature of love. The poems explore the complex interplay of love’s erotic and spiritual elements in way that feels both profoundly wise and profoundly joyful.

The book begins appropriately enough with a wedding in “Preface, Forward & Prologue on the Gazer Within.”  Building on a line from Rilke, the poem introduces a mysterious messenger who enters the ceremony and makes the guests gaze at one another “like they were in the original Eden, but not as sinners,” before moving on to the couple, whispering “that love is the awakening of the Eternal/Gazer within.” 

At the outset of the book, the poet points to the spiritual dimension of love which has implications beyond the lovers. Love is not simply a feeling but an exchange of something higher that has been given to the lovers.  It enables them to love the other as the other truly is.  As the poem concludes, “& only gazing love reveals,/& only through a light most glad of all, will we ever see.”

In “A Stage Play Exposition on Love & Marriage,” the speaker marries an otherworldly orb turned woman “during the hottest part of summer.”  The lovers try to truly know each other, “to love not just one part/of someone but, instead to love the whole,” which requires one to walk through “ghost-white” almond blossoms, to gather them all,

 . . . .  & then construct the other, over & over. & not so that they are whole but, instead, so that the one putting the white blossoms together, can finally see the full orb, the beauty first seen, just as it truly was.

The poet seems to suggest love is a continual process of discovering and understanding the person we love to be able to truly see them, to see the person we first fell in love with.

Love as an act of discovery is also explored with “In the Almond Groves, Highway 5, San Joaquin Valley.”  There, the “angel of the orchards” whispers to the speaker as he is driving past almond groves.  “To Love, the angel said to me, is to begin to speak/with the babble-tongue of the magpie, which is naked, alive.” The yellow-tailed magpie flies into the almond groves, dropping beautiful white blossoms. The angel says the speaker is the magpie and his wife is the fragrant blossoms “and vice versa: …it’s both. You are both unbodied & yet, solid/Together you must change shapes in order to find one another.”

In “Quick Postcard (the Angel of the Ravel District, Barcelona),” a different angel addresses the speaker as he wanders through the revelry of nighttime Barcelona. This time, however, the angel focuses on love as a gift, both as a gift given to human beings, as well as a gift lovers give to each other.

“& to be constantly present to one another is the gift of stepping into true revolt, for the consent to breach the distance – & I mean the distance where beauty and reality are identical, & that’s love, without any fear,”

By the end of the poem, the speaker realizes “Love & Beauty are a testimony of Spirit that grace granted/into the incarnated vision of this world,/& to give it away – so that it nourishes others/into delight.”  Here, love has not only an erotic, but a sacred quality as well. It is a process of discovering another person, of finding their deepest and truest self, and is therefore holy.  As the speaker concludes “To hold the beloved/&/to touch the beautiful in us that can never change.”

Meisel’s collection is unique not just for addressing both the spiritual and erotic dimensions of love, but for arguing the dimensions are inseparable. These are vivid poems that capture the excitement and swirl of being in love, but these are also numinous poems populated by angels and ghostly almond blossoms.  Meisel continually finds something sacred in relationships, a giving away of the best part of ourselves that has been given to us.  Meisel’s lovers are “exchanging our light/from/that light most glad of all/like it always/in us/is.”

Review by Justin Lacour

Luke Wortley, Shared Blood, (Gnashing Teeth 2023)

Review by Carla Sarett

Several years ago, I happened to read a trio of prose poems in Pithead Chapel— the first was called “Father in War Time.”  Its originality and bravery immediately hit me. In fact, I saved a copy to read to others. Now, its author, Luke Wortley, has written his debut full-length poetry collection, Shared Blood. It’s a heartbreaker of a book. 

The poems in Shared Blood shift between a man’s experiences as a new father, and his uglier past with his own father.  It’s a wild roller-coaster, and it works. In part, this is due to Wortley’s pitch-perfect voice. His prose poems balance surreal imagery with grit; they are poems with characters as well as dreamscape. It’s a real father, it’s a real son, the stakes for the future are real.  

For example, Wortley writes as a rather typical nervous dad in a tender poem called “Near Miss.”  Like many new dads, he imagines that he might drop his new baby, and in this poem, he nearly does.

Before I can catch him, the house falls away and I’m on a shoreline watching him plunge from a the slippery, cool sky. He falls back into my arms.

Before we’ve caught our breath, the author’s next poem swoops down to the grim turf of his relationship with his own father, in “Four Wheeler”: 

Dad’s want coiled in bone, ready to spring out of a ribbed throat.  Bleated desire ripping the air.  Come for me and take me.  

The poems in Shared Blood tackle an age-old question. Are the sins of a flawed parent inevitably handed down ? Are sons doomed to repeat their father’s mistakes?  Luke Wortley reflects on this in several poems— most directly in the philosophical poem, “Fencepost” 

What I have here is something that I can’t divorce from the I, from the we, from the father and son, the son who has become the father. 

It is not an easy question, and these poems don’t offer facile answers. The son, we learn in “The Son Holds” has an autopilot feature that lets him endure the Father. A life of holding on, and then cleaning up after the leaking gas can of a father.  (What a perfect image.)   The poet hasn’t emerged from his childhood unscarred. This father is everywhere; even when the two are not speaking, he pops up in scary voicemails speaking foreign tongues or, equally scary, pointless texts about sports. The poet’s own path is littered with bourbon and self-hatred and heads sinking into toilets. There is blood on the ground, it’s still wet after trauma.

But that’s not all there is. With his son, the poet gives off sparks of humor and fun. The two go on a hike in the poem “Monster”; a monster swallows pairs of fathers and sons until they populate the bottom of the monster’s stomach.  It’s a wonderful metaphor, and in a playful turn, father and son decide: yes, this is our life now, and we better make the most of it.  The poem, “Mercy”  starts with a father’s safe, which gradually reveals all sorts of wild and sad things, but ultimately leads to a son’s “toy truck” and inside the toy, forgiveness.

In Luke Wortley’s Shared Blood, even after wartime, some men do become human. Not perfect, but willing to try.  It’s the most we can ask of anyone.

Dayna Patterson, O Lady, Speak Again, (Signature Books, 2023)

Review by Isaac James Richards

If Shakespeare was both poet and playwright, so too is Dayna Patterson—and more! In her most recent collection of poems, O Lady, Speak Again, Patterson is both cast and crew, the ideal dramaturg for this very show in which she is also, vulnerably, the main character. 

True to form, Patterson’s book unfolds in five acts. Her “Dramatis Personae”—also the title of her first poem—includes a host of Shakespeare’s female characters, from Miranda, Cordelia, and Ophelia, to Juliet, Lady Macbeth, the Three Witches, and more. The very title of her collection comes from the mouth of Emilia in Othello Act V, Scene II, who bemoans Desdemona’s death. Her book is full of such quotations and intertextual allusions, but a full third of her poems, such as “Self-Portrait as Miranda after Shipwreck,” are also title-proclaimed self-portraits that “divide Self into selves, braid [Patterson’s] stories into theirs.” 

Throughout, Patterson is unabashedly unafraid to subvert Shakespeare’s world of patriarchy with a feminist twist. “In this version,” as Patterson puts it: 

Romeo doesn’t drink the apothecary’s poison,  and Juliet awakens in his arms. They ride horseback to Mantua and have seven kids,  hyphenate their surnames: Montague-Capulet. 

… 

In this version, Lear doesn’t banish his third girl, and Cordelia cares for him in second childhood, spooning mashed turnip to his lips when teeth fail. Cradles his head as he slips into void. 

Such is Patterson’s power to “amend, upend, augment, reinvent, retell, unveil, expound, expatiate, chide, [and] upbraid” the playwright’s timeless classics. 

While Shakespeare fans and ardent feminists are Patterson’s primary audiences, one need be neither to enjoy these poems. Part of her brilliance is in proliferating a multiplicity of meaning. Act II focuses on Hermione and Perdita from A Winter’s Tale, but at stake is mother-daughter, daughter-father, and other familial relationships that figure prominently throughout the poems, along with themes of fraught love, true fidelity, and childbearing. What will on first read be a wave of cosmic color and ecstatic emotion quickly recedes to reveal sparkling allusions—seashells and sand dollars of insight that only become visible after the ebb and flow of rereading. 

Much of this layering becomes possible through Patterson’s mastery of form. In “O is the Sound of Tragedy,” Patterson gathers the many memorable o-sounds and quotes from Shakespeare into a single circle of text—delightfully accomplishing the elusive concrete poem. In “Self-Portrait as Miranda, A Green Girl,” a column of green hues allows for duplicitous line breaks: 

Jungle I gather grass from the lawn, Juniper gob my cheeks, chew and chew

Chartreuse and chew, hoping for grape, Lime watermelon. A neighborhood girl, Ariel

Kelly tells me if I chew long enough, it will turn Sweetgrass into gum.…

Thus, Patterson’s experimentation and exploitation of form functions as stage directions to both wider and deeper readings—and what could be a more resonant metaphor for restrictive parents than a child craving candy? 

Patterson’s is also a colorful collection; “Self-Portrait as Perdita in 33 Washes of Purple,” “Self-Portrait as Ophelia in 33 Hues of Blewe,” and “Self-Portrait as Lady Macbeth in 30 Shades of Red” spout forth a symphony of synonyms that give tone to color, music to the stage. 

Finally, Patterson takes up the language, imagery, and issues of her childhood Mormon faith in poems like: “Self-Portrait as Cordelia, Mormon Polygamous Wife,” “Self-Portrait of Isabella as Mormon Middle Child,” and “Self-Portrait of Jessica as Mormon Meeting House, Repurposed.” While Patterson claims that “I peeled away old faith like / sunburn skin,” the abundance of Mormon content and themes throughout the book suggests less of a firm “break / from my father’s faith” and more of a continued haunting—a performative disavowal that simultaneously illuminates just how impossible it can be to truly evade our upbringings. 

All told, Patterson has woven both a tight braid and a loose one, a mingling of past and present that is as classic as it is contemporary. Her poems are both “ripe and sour, flesh and rock, impossible not to savor.” And perhaps nothing captures Patterson’s ability to collapse heaven and earth, the secular and the sacred, as well as the final lines from her own final poem: 

… Let incense climb

our limbs and sash our waists and curl

through our hair in smoky tendrils, unfurling to the stars.

Carla Sarett, My Family Was Like a Russian Novel (Plan B Press, 2023)

Near the end of her haunting new chapbook of poems, My Family Was Like a Russian Novel, Carla Sarett (appropriately enough) quotes Dostoyevsky: “It’s a great mystery of life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.”  This is a fitting epigraph for the collection as Sarett’s poems explore the dynamics of grief and loss, but still manage to find some semblance of peace and even beauty.

Like Russian novels, the poems are often concerned with family and tragedy, but the collection is wide-ranging, with the poet drawing on a myriad of sources, including the titular novels, but also old Hollywood and music (both classical and pop).  In fact, one of the most outstanding poems of the book, “Rainy Days,” is about Karen Carpenter.  The shape of this poem shows both Sarett’s skill and empathy as a poet.  It begins with the speaker hearing a woman (somewhere) singing “sad as Karen Carpenter,” which reminds the speaker of a movie she saw once where Karen Carpenter was played by a Barbie doll:  “People laughed like suffer-/ing was one big insider joke, like a woman starving herself to death was/hysterically funny.”  

For the speaker, however, Carpenter’s voice captures the everyday sadness we are all subject to, the sadness of “wear-/ing a bathrobe and padded slippers all day and reading yellowing letters.”  This brings the speaker back to the woman singing at the beginning of the poem, considering the singer’s sadness at a “nowhere hour” that makes the speaker realize “I can hear everyone drowning.”

In Sarett’s poems, joy is often felt only in the context of a distant, but palpable hurt.  “The Nest'' takes place during the speaker’s childhood, as she attends a drive-in with her family for a World War II movie.  In the movie, there are “smoky battles in a foreign land,/an island perhaps, but not Long Island.” By contrast to the violence on screen, the drive-in is idyllic.  The speaker and her brother, dressed in matching superhero pajamas, become “sugar-sleepy” from movie candy, while their young parents kiss “beautiful as movie stars.”  

The speaker concludes “this must be heaven—the four of us/in our shining white station wagon,/with all the other cars and families.”  However, dark clouds hang over the speaker’s happiness, as she concludes, ominously, that “The war was far away.”  This ending is so rich, as it refers back to the drive-in feature, but also, potentially, the war in Vietnam, or even more poignantly, a conflict in the family dispelling these more peaceful times.

Indeed, some of the most heartbreaking poems of the book involve this sort of family conflict, particularly revolving around the speaker’s brother, his drug use, and his death.  “I slapped my brother’s face in Times Square,” the speaker remembers in “Beautiful Meeting.”  “I’d caught vermin-like tracks on his arm./He did not wince,/I’m sorry, sis, it’s what I do.”  The meeting lasts only a moment before the speaker rushes away from her brother to go “downtown for a guy/who quoted Lacan—passion, I named it.”  The poem moves forward to another meeting, a meeting where the speaker and her brother are not even in the same room, a meeting where her brother is slowly vanishing:  “Maybe my mother held the receiver/when he called from the hospital—/the words cloudy and slow, still, his./I’m dying here.”  By the end of the poem, her brother is gone, and the reader can feel the unspoken regret. “People tell me:  I delivered the eulogy,/beautiful, they say I never cried.”

From Sarett’s poems, the reader begins to understand how grief is a constant companion, popping up in the most benign circumstances, impossible to shake.  In “Funeral Cake,” even a pack of drunken Santas at Christmastime remind the speaker of her lost brother, making her yearn for “something called cheer” rather than “[o]ld scars, familiar as chill.”  The poem contains one of the most arresting images of the book, as the speaker remembers “after my brother’s funeral/on my father’s birthday—-/a cousin brought him a white cake/with burning white candles/and my stunned father blew them out . . ./as if it were a party.”

However, poems like the titular poem seem to offer some hope for the grieving, that the lost remain with us somehow, if only in the kingdom of memory.  In “My Family Was Like a Russian Novel, Everyone Says,” the family faces misfortunes familiar to readers of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky:  extreme weather, bad rations, poverty, and illness.  Most poignantly, “Mother took to her closet after a doctor shouted she’d murdered Brother . . ./a lie but not entirely untrue.”  Despite this string of bad luck and transgressions, while on her deathbed, Mother is granted a vision of her dead son “I knew you’d come my darling, she sighed, how long can anyone stay away?”  Our ghosts haunt us, but also have the capacity to comfort.

What makes Sarett’s collection so powerful is its accurate picture of grief.  Loss never seems to totally go away, but infiltrates the present in surprising and painful ways, ready to hurt us again.  However, these poems are never anything but vivid, and ring with their own color and music.  The beauty of these poems is itself a rejoinder to the loss and hurt they chronicle.   The final poem of the book captures this spirit.  A little girl sits on her father’s shoulders, watching a drawbridge rise, as if by magic.  There are boats, clear water, birds, sailors, and the girl’s wonder at it all.  Sarett’s complex and moving poems point the reader to a beauty that is still possible, even after loss, a beauty that “is not a place for dying.”  

Review by Justin Lacour

The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants by Renee Emerson (Belle Point Press, 2023)

Reviewed by Megan McDermott

The title of Renee Emerson’s chapbook, The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants, reveals something from the start about the way Emerson approaches the weighty subject of grief.

This collection grapples with the death of a child, a subject matter that is so heavy one could reasonably anticipate an arduous and taxing reading experience. If the collection did have a heavy, oppressive air, that could very well be a worthwhile offering to readers, but heavy and oppressive are not how I’d describe this chapbook. Instead, Emerson chooses to look at death through the lens of what’s “commonplace” and “everyday” – through “Clearance Plants” that go unpurchased, for instance, or a “Live Plant Mistaken for a Succulent.”

Overall, Emerson gives a relatively understated experience of grief. Again, her title is informative. “Misfortunes,” as a word, seems to indicate a companionship with smaller griefs than the death of a child. Despite the chapbook’s understated quality, the poems don’t come across as repressed or cold. Instead, its subtlety suggests something about its purpose. I don’t think these poems mean to fully immerse us in the experience of a parent’s grief, which is perhaps too holy and sorrowful a thing to enter. They don’t discombobulate, or overwhelm, or devastate. Instead, they seem to gently guide readers into connections between a profound and tragic loss, such as loss of a child, and the overall human condition, which is peppered with loss (both major and minor) and inevitably subject to death.

For example, the poem “Gift Plant” shows the speaker reflecting on a plant given to her that she’s been neglecting. “I….set it on the front step and hope / the sun and rain will do the resurrection / work I never could get to take root,” the poem says. There’s a weariness and helplessness in these lines, but also a possibility of grace. Perhaps something beyond the speaker (in this case, the sun) might be able to transform the situation.

Like many poems in the chapbook, this poem has a duality to it. It can be read with an understanding that it speaks to the loss of a child, but it can also be read in a way that connects with a range of circumstances that might overwhelm a reader.

“Maple with Plastic Walmart Bag” characterizes a bag wrapped around twigs as waving “a weak / surrender or hello / like a leaf gone wrong.” In the midst of the tree being distorted by our litter, the poem arrives at this wish: “May you dream / of catching better things….” And again, this wistfulness for something better might be read in the context of the weight of death, or it might simply meet us whenever something intrudes upon, or distorts, our natural, peaceful state. 

Some of the poems do approach loss and grief more directly, such as one of my favorite poems in the chapbook, “Family Therapy.” It makes plain the parallels between plants and the loss of a child through its opening lines: “I sing the girls little songs / while every plant in the house dies.” The siblings are surrounded by the reality of one sibling’s death and simultaneously surrounded by death in the form of failing houseplants. This gives us a key to seeing how plants and grief are connected through the rest of the chapbook. 

The poem explains how the speaker makes use of plant language to convey medical realities: “I have to explain / how the body stops working, how a lung / can be like a plastic bag caught in a tree branch, billowing.”  The rest of the poem articulates a struggle with language, especially in relation to young children. Therapists advise parents of dead children to “avoid metaphor” and yet other parents in the poem persist in language that might be seen as obscuring the situation, like one who “calls her son a star.” The speaker herself ultimately retreats back into metaphor and a natural image at the poem’s end: “I take / pictures of the snow, and what the snow covers.”

Another poem “Do You Still Pray?” confronts the spiritual questions that accompany grief in a more direct fashion than some of the others. The poem calls God “the God who would not / save my daughter” and then concludes that “no one /can help you.”  This poem is striking in context because it operates in a different mode than the other poems. The heartache here feels very much on the surface while, in some other pieces, the heartache seems to pulse underneath the words.

Overall, the approach of the chapbook makes me think about how, as a minister, I often give people a poem or piece of art to respond to in order to open up conversation on spiritual topics. I believe it can sometimes put people more at ease, in terms of sharing what they think, when they can share in response to something external (rather than simply being asked to narrate their spiritual life or theological point of view). Similarly, Emerson’s poems seem empowered by having something to respond to beyond the primary subject of death. “Everyday” plants become a lens, or an angle, from which to view her subject and which, I’d hypothesize, draw something different from the poet than what otherwise might be said.

By choosing plants as that lens, perhaps Emerson is saying something about human fate being interwoven with the fate of all nature and creation. As much as we would like things to be otherwise, does this indicate that human life is not special (and neither is the speaker’s particular human life) – that ultimately loss, even the most unfair and unjust, is not ever unique, but is something that happens everyday, to everyday people (and everyday plants)?  If our eyes are open to it, we very likely can look around and see the ubiquity of loss. Through The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants, Renee Emerson does not sear our eyes or obscure our vision by the intensity of loss, but rather, she invites us into opening our eyes so we might be able to gaze on loss with her.

Vapor by Sara Eliza Johnson, Milkweed Editions, 2022

In her powerful second collection of poems, Vapor, Sara Eliza Johnson uses the natural world as a prism for addressing human pain and the desire for love.  The poems in Vapor are incredibly rich and vivid, as emotions run through a landscape populated by black holes, photons, molecules, endoskeletons, and exoplanets.  As much as the book revels in the immensity and minutiae of the cosmos, however, the natural world is a place of real darkness, a place of scars and tumors, where “we’re never safe/but maybe it means we’re never alone.” 

Throughout Vapor, pain trickles in “like an extraterrestrial spring.”  In “Ceremony,” the speaker tends a scar “so old I renamed it/many times, as if a child of my own.”  Ultimately though, the speaker realizes the pain is an inseparable part of being human:

When the pain comes, I remind myself this is what I wanted  in the end: to remember how to be human  again, to feel with my whole body, not despite the pain  but because of it.

Similarly, in “Home,” the speaker characterizes pain as an essential aspect of living: “I’m afraid to stop bleeding/because it means sleeping forever.”  At the same time though, there is a deep desire for the pain to produce something transcendent.  The speaker points to trees that bleed red sap, fish that bleed milk, glaciers that bleed iron oxide, and longs for the pain to birth something as wondrous: “Everything bleeds./Still, nothing so beautiful lives inside me,/nothing like the tenderness of horses,/their trembling eyelids and tangled manes.”

In many of the poems, the speaker is searching explicitly for love:  “I am ready to be loved by any thing . . . I would cut my soul out to make room/for another soul.”  In Vapor, love is born or at least clarified through pain, but also requires moving beyond the pain into intimacy with another.  The speaker in “Mutant” finds a black jellyfish and observes “everything needs love, even this creature/which opens, despite its pain, to show me/its insides.”  By the end of the poem, the speaker confesses “I am an irradiated thing that needs someone/to hold it closed,” however:

no one can hold a thing  like that long enough to love it unless maybe they, too, have been ruined,  cast out or kept hidden,  named abomination  after someone tried to bury their power and failed.

In this way, love is the ultimate fulfillment of pain, but pain is a necessary component, fostering and deepening love.

Vapor is a dark book with event horizons and radioactive pollen, among other threats, looming over the poems.  But to say the poems are “dark” does not truly capture the richness of Johnson’s imagination.  The images in these poems are nothing short of breathtaking.  The reader gets planets of eyeless and earless birds, skulls filled with crystal colonies, and a speaker who exclaims “I am meat blossoming/in the mouth of the earth.”  Even when the earth dies, the speaker can still picture someone “walking the fields, your bare feet/pressing each flower out.”

Johnson’s poems are concerned with life and death, but also have a sense of wonder and a heart at work even in its darkest moments. The power of Vapor comes from its constant hope for love and intimacy while acknowledging the reality of suffering. In Vapor, “a heart can beat/outside a body,” but “so can a wound.”

Review by Justin Lacour