Month: February 2021
Review of ‘Faint’ by Lucy Dixcart
Lucy Dixcart’s impressive debut pamphlet, Faint, covers a range of issues such as motherhood, student life, identity and unrequited love. However what intrigued me most was the originality and the force with which she conveyed her insights into gender power relationships
In the fine poem, Ballroom Dancing for Introverts, these relationships between men and women are aptly symbolised through a ballroom dance. The man leads, he is given control: ‘he steers’ her. Her role is to do as she is told: ‘As commanded, I recline my head in rapture’. There is nothing innate or natural about these roles: they are roles they have been ‘cast’, yet the role for the woman is a distinctly inferior one. She is merely ‘dressing’ and ornament, whilst the male’s role is conveyed through the beautifully apt and inventive image, ‘a wrangler of women’, which conjures up associations of male vitality and control. Significantly…
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Three Poems in Society of Classical Poetry
Three of my poems were published on the Society of Classical Poets site here. “The Inca Kings,” “The Swimming Lesson,” and “Elegy for Mary” (my sister), were all published last month, but unfortunately I was in a difficult state of mind, thus am late to publish this. Do check them out!
Rachel Eliza Griffiths: A Striking Personal Language
Rachel Eliza Griffith’s poetry has this satisfyingly startling quality at every turn, both highly communicative yet nothing is ever predictable. Her use of language hits on a very personal level and yet we can all feel it, nothing is opaque, her words convey their meaning in devastating clarity. Her most recent book, Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton, 2020), is a hybrid of her own photography with her poetry. An award-winning author of several books, this recent book deals with the death of her mother in 2013.
In an interview with Four-Way Books, her relationship with photography and how that helped her express and come to terms with her grief, and how she ultimately decided this book had to combine both photography and poetry, reminded me of my own turn towards photography in dealing with my own grief. As she put it in the interview, prior to her mother’s death…
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Poem in Nightingale and Sparrow
My poem, “The Blizzard of ’96” is in the recently published Blizzard issue of Nightingale and Sparrow. Perfect timing! 😀 My thanks to EIC Juliette Sebock. Here’s a link to my poem, but please do read the rest of the issue, which is available online and in print.
Three Poems and three Micro-poems by Soodabeh Saeidnia Published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal — Poemedicine
The Mansion She Inherited she lives in a mobile mansion inherited from Hopis in New Mexico built with sugar cane and cinnamon decorated with yellow flyers hanging all over the wall in the dining room blue stairs are one-way only toward Sirius green, two-lane highway toward Orion the curtain, knitted from butterflies’ dream in cocoon […]
Three Poems and three Micro-poems by Soodabeh Saeidnia Published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal — Poemedicine
New book alert: Taking Pictures in the Dark by David L O’Nan
Poetry inspired by Ginsberg: Clearly! by David L O’Nan (2005)
Kaleidoscopic rainbow men
scurrying through dumpsters
In search of their souls.
They carry the hands of fate
with matching bleeding fate
They succumb to territorialism,
they breathe in tantric manoeuvring
They slit the soldier’s wrist in the green air,
The war air
Bombshells, gun shells
filling up their stomachs with nuclear slime.
Digesting liquified bones
Dreaming in presidential monotone
Picking the hands off the clock
with many shades of plasma and blood
on their claws
Ripping the tock away,
making love to the ticking
Relishing and marinating
in each other’s sexual juices
Lighting a cloud on fire,
then inhaling the ashes
To take in the ultimate high
High as a cloud they exclaim!
As they continue
pulling their amulets and chains
out from under God’s lockbox.
Sepia coloured tombs
being spit at by these loose streetwalkers
These, living in monarchy
dressing in megalomania clothing
They peel whispers out of strangers,
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4 Black History Poems by R.D. Johnson : Malcolm & Martin, Angels, Dr. King’s Dream & February 1st
Malcolm & Martin
Built like Malcolm, that’s the X in me
Think we just in the middle, the thought perplexes me
Built like Martin Luther, no wonder my name mean king
And continue one day at a time
Walking in his dream
Angels
Angels watch over me
And don’t let the devil get up under me
A lot of evil planning they six feet so they can put me under see
Six feet has become the socially acceptable distance
I have people farther away taken from me in an instance
Thinking about the circumstances got me withdrawing my defenses
See the pain through my lenses
Lather all my feelings, watch it repeat as it rinses
I got angels over me
Waiting to give my wings
I still gotta do a few more things
Reach a few more dreams
Right now things don’t look like what it seems
Feel like we’re…
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2 New Poems by Elizabeth Castillo : New Start & Black Dolls for Christmas
New Start
In all my languages, I have found there is no word for you. Although most vowels are the same, no matter where they sit on your tongue,
and life goes on, I’ve noticed, and tries to drag one along with it. But my bags are not packed. This time I do not travel light, or alone.
You’re mistaken if you think I’ve folded all this up neatly behind me.
You’re an idiot if you think I don’t know your twitter feed by heart.
I want to be like that crab that builds itself from bits of detritus- that decorates its shell with rubble from the sea floor. To feel and not feel, and breathe while underwater, to be a hundred people, a hundred creatures, and not be anyone at all.
Who said that healing from mishap and mischief is linear? Who gets to decide the shape of my bruises…
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The Wombwell Rainbow 