Poetry Month with Way Too Much to Do and Mini-reviews of some terrific poetry books

Yes, I’m finishing up a final proposal for my mystery job opportunity, going in to measure the new townhouse for window treatments and signing lots more paperwork for the bank, trying to finish up classes on anime and haibun, and balance my National poetry MFA class at the same time. Totally sane and normal, right? (I think I might be living on adrenaline.)

On top of that, I’ve actually been writing a poem a day, and reading a poetry book a day for fun as well. I thought I’d do a few mini-reviews because you too should find out about these terrific books!

Amy Newman’s Dear Editor
I’m loving this book as the construct is terrific – a series of letters to publishers asking them to publish her fictional poetry book, “X=Pawn Capture,” which, meta-liciously, she describes so fully in the book that we get a wonderful sense of her family history, her mental connections between chess and martyrs, and her inner insecurities as a writer. I laughed out loud a couple of times, and since my father was a huge chess maniac and taught me some of the main moves of chess as a little girl and had me play against a robot – true story – I very much identified with Amy’s meta-story about her grandfather teaching her chess playing techniques while remaining emotionally unavailable, as her grandmother cooked and told her gruesome stories of Catholic saints and the “old country.” Anyway, it’s a terrific book, funny without being overly light or flippant, and something that any poet who has sent out book manuscript after book manuscript will identify with, including the quasi-religious language of submission to publishers and the writer’s always plaintive queries.

Another book in which “the poet” appears as a meta-character – in this case, she’s called “the sliver poet” – is Carmen Gimenez Smith’s Goodbye, Flicker, which uses the structure of fractured fairy tales to illustrate a variety of broken girl archetypes, a sense of being “the other,” the dangers around every corner in mirrors, long hair, frogs. Her work has a lot in common with Rene Lynch’s series, “The Secret Life of the Forest” from which I borrowed a painting for the cover art of “She Returns to the Floating World.” In particular, Gimenez has an owl-girl that keeps reminding me of this painting “The Secret Life of the Forest (visitor)” that you can see here. This book has a lot in common, too, with my upcoming third book, Unexplained Fevers, but Gimenez has more of an exploratory use of language than I do, I think (dare I say – a more experimental take on language?) and I like the way she plays with her different character’s internal landscapes, which are slippery and shift around from poem to poem. Anyway, a definite must-read for fans of fairy-tale themed poetry, and I might add that if you like Mary Biddinger’s work, you’ll probably like Gimenez’ – their poetry has a lot in common! Did I mention Carmen is also the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, and publisher of Noemi Press – like Mary, a super-hard-working multi-tasking poet!

Speaking of multi-tasking editor/poets, I’ve also enjoyed in my April reading series Tom Holmes’ (editor of Redactions) book, Poems for an Empty Church. You may know that I have a soft spot for archetypal explorations, and Tom’s poems here search for the metaphysical and mystical in the everyday, the everyday in the mystical, and he mentions the laws of thermodynamics AND Port Townsend, so basically, everything I love.

I wanted to put up sample poems from all three books but you’ll just have to go read them yourselves to find out more – you won’t be disappointed! Happy Poetry Month!