Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(Chicago: Moria Books, http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html , 2015), ISBN: 9780991212132 This month marks 10 years since I wrote my first book review. In that time, I have had the opportunity to review multiple books by the same author (in several cases, different books from a continuous series, but not always). Of the 110 reviews that I have done, there are half a dozen reviews of books that Eileen Tabios has either written or edited. This has been an easy decision to make, because no two are the same. Tabios is not only a talented wordsmith, and visual artist of language—she truly is an innovator. She invented a style of poetry called the Hay(na)ku, which numerous authors have adopted. She writes poems that pull in visual and literary art, music and dance, and that employ an impressive array of styles. She can go from dense prose poems that fill page after page with compact images and historical/literary references to very brief forms. Some months ago, I reviewed Tabios’s ...

(Press of the 3rd Mind, Chicago, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-9800257-3-9) On the last page of this brand new First Edition, there is an opportunity for readers to write in for free samples of collections by such well-known independent poets as Bradley Lastname, Eric Johnt, Robert Pomerhn, and Patrick Porter. In the past nine years I have reviewed several of the works listed. I recommend them all and any other titles you can acquire from this Chicago-based small press, because quality and relevancy are guaranteed. With this in mind, I was honored to have received an advance copy of Carli’s book and it didn’t disappoint. Being a college teacher of film, literature, and humanities as well as a reviewer of film and art and collaborative performance artist, Carli is a poet that unapologetically tells it like he sees it, dissecting from his own multi-faceted and hyper-personal perspective such topics as literary academia, Death, the personalities of the Chicago poetry scene, reality vs. illusion in nu...

(il piccolo editions by Fisher King Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-1-926715-05-6) It has been a couple of years, since my review of Ed Baker’s Restoration Poems, that I have felt so moved by the prayer that a poem can be and the soul-bearing, soul-reaching prayerbook that is the rare collection such as this. Lowinsky’s history is complicated and rich. Many of her family members were lost to the concentration camps of World War II Europe. She is the granddaughter of painter Emma Hoffman, whose watercolor of her Berkeley home graces Adagio and Lamentation’s cover. She has endured (more than?) her share of hurt and grief and pain. And yet these larger circumstances—the mix of tragedy and triumph through the healing that is Art well made and selflessly shared—matter less in the scope of the selections than the Little Things—moments and minor memories; love and its loss; affairs and adjustments. There is, of course, because of her grandmother’s craft, the taking of inspiration from visual art, but ...

(the Press of the 3rd Mind, Chicago, Illinois, 2011) I was first introduced to Bradley Lastname through his role as publisher of the early books of Patrick Porter and Robert Pomerhn through Press of the 3rd Mind, books they each sent me for review. This was early in the new millennium, when I was doing a lot of poetry writing, mail art, and corresponding with fertile-field poets like Ric Carfagna, Mark Sonnefeld, Joseph Verilli, and Vernon Frazer. I first experienced Bradley’s writing when I was asked to review the first volume of Letterhead (Highest Hurdle Press, 2007), which was in part a tribute to Harvey Goldner, a mentor of Pomerhn’s. Lastname and his co-editors also produced a second volume of Letterhead, in which some of my own work appeared. Before starting Press of the 3rd Mind in 1985, Lastname published 25 issues of the acclaimed BILE Dadazine dating from 1978 to 1984. In addition to publishing over ten books of poetry and prose, he is a painter, sculptor, and collagist and ...

(Forthcoming from Marick Press, 2010, http://www.marickpress.com, Price: $14.95, ISBN 13: 978-1-934851-12-8) In the past 12 months I have had the opportunity to review several collections written by poets who are producing works stemming from their condition of being a Westerner in the East or vice versa. The time for such catalogued experiences is certainly ripe—with the United States and Asia having no choice but to come to terms with one another economically and otherwise, and the growing realization (from a small but potent population) that the future of our world must exist in a place that honors Uniqueness without fortifying Boundaries, such dichotomy-breaking insights are keys to the doors of New Possibility. Who better to keep those keys than the modern poet? From Sze-Lorrain’s bio we learn the following: She was born in Singapore and “grew up in a hybrid of cultures.” She attended school in Britain, the United States, and France. She has performed worldwide as a zheng concerti...

(2009, Baltimore: Publish America, www.publishamerica.com) by Joey Madia The subtitle of Michaela Sefler’s most recent collection (she is the author of almost a dozen books of poems) is “Metaphysical Poetry,” a genre which has long held interest for me. The poems read as though they were channeled by the author in a somewhat altered state—certainly a place of openness and peace—derived either through meditation or deep breathing, allowing the words to flow like a calm, tranquil river. There are no politically or socially jarring works here. Everything is Prayer. They have titles such as “Yellow Jasper,” “The Magician,” and “Equinox.” The poems are all set center-spaced, marking a landscape wherein the author takes us on numerous journeys as we follow several nameless questers on their paths of enlightenment. Referred to only as “he” and “she” or “him” and “her,” these individuals operate on the level of the warrior seeking sartori, bushido, or the knighthood. The tales of the Grail Qu...

(Beneath the Underground, 2005, $45.00) Improvisations is a scary big book. At 700 pages it is far afield from your typically slim volume of poetry. Frazer uses the length and breadth of this master-work to cover an immense amount of typographical and etymological ground, and he has the freedom to repeat a variety of themes for emphasis and effect. At times the passages are so slightly, subtly revised as to be almost unnoticed. But the structure here is akin to Pollock’s drip paintings or the works of East Coast wordsmith Marc Sonnenfeld—Frazer “denies the accident” and one gets the sense that moving one word, one symbol, one line would collapse the entire structure. It took me nine and a half months to read Improvisations, taking it in as I did in manageable, well-considered doses, like the potent intoxicant that it is. Not since I read Bob Dylan’s Tarantula many years ago have I felt so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of words. I hold the distinction of being the first person to buy ...

Review of Highest Hurdle Press’s Letterhead Vol. 2 (Edited by Bradley Lastname, Christopher Robin, Brian McMahon, Robert Pomerhn, and Eric Johnt, Highest Hurdle Press, 2008) {Disclaimer: Two of my poems appear in this collection. They are not mentioned in this review.} In 2008 I had the distinct pleasure of reviewing Letterhead Volume #1. At the time I thought it quite the impressive undertaking, bringing together so many different types of poets from so many areas of the United States. Readers of that review (and that volume) will be pleased to know that Vol. 2 builds upon both the scope and quality of its predecessor, retaining all of its best qualities while striking new ground in content and form and offering what co-editor Bradley Lastname recently explained to me is a “…darker selection of work, because the times we live in are darker.” Amen. Embroiled as we are in a time of ongoing wars and global economic and environmental crises (the key subjects explored), the role of the poe...

“Building Words in Time”: A Review of Ed Baker/Cid Corman’s “Restoration Letters (1972–1978)” (tel-let, Charleston, IL, 2003) and Ed Baker’s “Restoration Poems (1972-2007)" (Country Valley Press, 2008, countryvalley@mac.com) In the age of e-mail, at a time when the Post Office is deep in the red and thinking of scaling back delivery to five days a week, it was a welcome pleasure to receive “Restoration Letters” as a companion to “Restoration Poems” from poet and artist Ed Baker. Ed’s minimalist, stream-of-consciousness poetry had caught my attention several months before, as did his goddess drawings, and I was eager to read the collection of poems he had written while restoring the John Penn house outside Hanover, PA during the years 1972–1975. “Restoration Letters” represents five and a half years of correspondence between Baker and the poet, editor, and translator Cid Corman, who was living at the time in Kyoto running a struggling coffee shop with his wife Shizumi, a former tel...

Chatelaine (chain)—A set of short chains on a belt worn by women and men for carrying keys, thimble and/or sewing kit, etc. (from Wikipedia) “Kapwa”—a Filipino cultural concept of interconnectedness whereby other people are not “others” but part of what one is. (from the opening page; emphasis in original) How does one get to truly know the artist? Especially when the one doing the searching is the artist her- or himself? Dostoyevsky and Freud put forth the notion that it is impossible for an autobiography to reveal the Truth because of our penchant for self-delusion and both positive and negative exaggeration. Aldous Huxley seemed to agree, saying: “there is never a one-to-one correspondence between an author’s work and his character.” If poetry, like all writing, is a form of autobiography, then the path to the Truth is lined with thorns and nails and broken glass, at the end of which are myriad locks. The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys is a collection of reviews of many of Eileen Tabios’ b...

Eileen Tabios is proof that one need not be locked into either a right- or left-brained set of experiences over the course of one’s life. With an MBA from NYU and an undergraduate degree in political science, she had a successful career in finance before shifting her attention to poetry. Her list of publications and awards is impressive (including the Philippines’ Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for Poetry). She is an editor as well as a writer, and since 2001 has been integrating mixed-media and performance aspects into her work. She is also the founder of Meritage Press. Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is a subtle cinematography of words. It is a meditative and gentle read, drawing on the deeply experiential and ultra-personal, framed by a referential triumvirate—poetry, painting, and place. This book of what might be termed “prose poems” is composed of three sections: My Greece, Returning the Borrowed Tongue, and Triptych for Anne Truitt. The collection opens with four...

The Underside of Flight is a stark, poetic chronicle of one artist’s journey into the darkness brought on by losing his job after 10 years and facing the uncertainties that poured forth from such a deep, piercing wound. It is a collection of 120+ pieces categorized as Poems, the writer’s own Quotes (e.g., “Life is a granting of living; when is the last time you lived?”), and Mind-Blasts (e.g., “Some of my favorite madmen were scholars of their craft”). The collection opens with a page full of dedications to family and friends—a signal that although the word-shaman has gone into the wilderness, alone, to seek the darkest of caves and deepest of rivers, he has not forsaken his vital connection to his Tribe. These works are some of the most raw, honest, and at times brutal that I have read in quite some time. The artist wrote with his mental blood as he bled and was not so presumptuous or cowardly to feel the need to go back and cover his tracks, soften his truths, or make any apologies i...

The Details: published July 2006 by Dalkey Archive Press (www.dalkeyarchive.com), $13.95 paperback, 247 pages, ISBN: 1-56478-383-9 The Book: A collection of 150 poems (1991-1998) organized into 10 thematic sections, varying by style and subject, with translation by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. It is a grand tour of Paris, the City of Light. The Poet: Jacques Roubaud has four novels and two books of poetry available in English translation. He is a member of the innovative literary group Oulipo, whose work with form, constraint and memory this collection clearly exemplifies. The Context: An exploration of the conditions and changes of the beloved city that has inspired so many of the world’s great artists—poets like Rimbaud, Francois Villon, and Baudelaire; painters like Tolouse-Latrec and the Montmartre personalities in dance and music and other entertainments that he immortalized; composers like Michel Legrand; playwrights and theorists such as the four Jeans—Anouilh, Genet, Sartre, ...

Picking up Nervous Halo, a collection of poems published by Academic and Arts Press in 2001, I didn't know what to expect. The title, coupled with the mysterious cover illustration ("believed to be" by Gilles Brenta) led me to think perhaps the poems were a religious exploration, in the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. If there is a little bit of God in everyone and the Devil truly is in the details, then the cover art and title (which appears as a recurring line in one of the poems) are perfect. In 25 poems, titled as 26 "Streets" (more on that later), the poet takes the reader on a tour of a city as seem thru his and other eyes. One peopled with what at first might seem the pitiful and downtrodden of society, as might be the case when portrayed thru the pen of a less gifted writer. Porter, however, rises above writing about the lower-class city-dweller for no other reason than to say, "Here they are. Don't they make a provocative subject fo...