contemporary poetry

Gardens that Breathe: An Interview with Laura Donnelly

| Rebecca Valley

Gardens that breathe: an interview with laura donnelly

Written by Jillian Smith

In Midwest Gothic, her second collection of poetry, Laura Donnelly channels a speaker alternatively fascinated and fearful, youthful and wise, steadfast and skeptical. Through a rough yet rich expanse of memory and history, she seeks to both recover and reframe her past, a process as ominous as it is life-affirming. In doing so, Donnelly honors the resilience, creativity and legacy of her female ancestors, especially their ability to nourish a place into being, to maintain a home that not only withstands what is wild but welcomes it. As a revision to the ubiquitous patriarchal narratives the young speaker was exposed to, Donnelly posits women not just as the keepers and growers of an eternal garden, but also, subverting many Gothic tales, as the heroines of their own stories.Throughout the collection, we feel a complexity of emotions that is as unsettling as it is alluring, each poem a musical note that resounds into the vastness of history, building on previous notes, and both haunting and uplifting what’s to come.

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Review: DM Me, Mother Darling by Alexa Doran

| Rebecca Valley

DM Me, Mother Darling by Alexa Doran (Bauhan Publishing 2021)

Reviewed by Audrey Gidman

“We’ve all turned the knob down on God.”

Erotic, synesthetic, nebulous, rebellious, sensual, haunting: these words continuously ran through my mind as I tried to integrate the radically clever and wild movement of Alexa Doran’s debut collection, DM Me, Mother Darling.

How do I say it other than this: the work is amalgamous and full of pain—effervescent, shifting shape, shedding over and over like a snake whose skin has never fit. Doran amorphously circles and strikes at the tensions of motherhood, sex, grief, drugs, God, judgement, resilience, sickness, instincts, and grit as she tries, repeatedly, to convince us “to believe [that] love is / obscene” (25).

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“A Review in Questions:” Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman

| Rebecca Valley

A Review in Questions: Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman (Alice James Books, 2019)

Reviewed by Crystal Condakes

A note from the author on the form: One of the things I love about this collection of poems is the frequent questions it asks. At their core these poems say: It’s okay to have questions, to question. Reading these poems made me wonder, and the wondering became questions of my own.

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Drizzling in Tongues: On Translating Myself by Kiran Bhat

| Rebecca Valley

Drizzling in Tongues: On Translating Myself

By Kiran Bhat

In this piece, multilingual poet Kiran Bhat reflects on the act of self-translation, and how the act and ambitions of a translation project can shift based on language, emotion, and sound.

To be lost in language, or languages. I don’t want to say I was born with this problem. Language is not a space, language is a trap. We are born into one, we are formed into one, and we never choose which one it is. My blessing was that I was raised in an environment in which I thought, felt, and conditioned myself in the world’s lingua franca, English. For my family who remained in India, particularly the older generation, the language was Kannada. In order to connect deeper with my grandparents or uncles and aunties, I would have to speak in Kannada. And then, when I studied abroad in Spain, and learned that there were people who did not speak English, who had chortled and gossiped and slandered in a completely different tongue, I learned I had to speak in Spanish, too.

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Review of Shahr-e-Jaanaan: The City of the Beloved by Adeeba Shahid Talukder

| Rebecca Valley

Shahr-e-Jaanaan: The City of the Beloved by Adeeba Shahid Talukder (Tupelo Press 2020)

Reviewed by Leonora Simonovis

Winner of the Kundiman Prize Honoring Exceptional Work by Asian American Poets, this collection is a multilayered imaginary where the author converses with Urdu poetic tradition and poets such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mirza Ghalib, and Ibn-e-Insha, among others. Talukder is also a translator, which, as she explains in the preface, allows for transcreation “Based on the way the particular verses converse with the themes of my poems.” The interplay is not only between two languages, but also between two –or more– different ways of perception and experience.

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Review: Dancing in Sante Fe by Beate Sigriddaughter

| Rebecca Valley

Dancing in Santa Fe and Other Poems by Beate Sigriddaughter (Cervena Barva Press 2019)

Review by Carole Mertz

In Dancing in Santa Fe, Beate Sigriddaughter delivers a fine collection of fourteen poems, all written in free verse. An American poet of German heritage, she has won multiple poetry prizes, including the Cultural Weekly—Jack Grapes Prize in 2014, and multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her gracious promotion of women’s poetry (at her blog Writing in a Woman’s Voice) is also commendable.

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Review: OBIT by Victoria Chang

| Rebecca Valley

OBIT by Victoria Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Reviewed by Rebecca Valley

I wrote my first and only obituary in 2018, for my uncle. His name was Thom. He died quite suddenly, at 48, after decade-old cancer cells appeared again in his colon, took over his liver, swallowed him up.

Which is to say that I am no expert in the articulation of existence. And anyway, how do you go about writing a single document that might convey the precious, imperfect, complicated, wonderful nuances of an entire life? For Victoria Chang, the obituary is not just a death notice, but a mode. In her latest collection, OBIT, she asks: What continues to live when someone we love dies? What dies with them?

“I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to a scent” (18)

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Review: Sea, Land, Shadow by Kazuko Shiraishi

| Rebecca Valley

Sea, Land, Shadow by Kazuko Shiraishi, trans. by Yumiko Tsumara (New Directions Books, 2017)

Reviewed by Clara Guyton

Nicknamed “the Alan Ginsberg of Japan” by Kenneth Rexroth, Kazuko Shiraishi brings readers a sight-seeing drive through the mystical mountains of Japan in her collection Sea, Land, Shadow, complete with sharp turns and curves, moments of awe-inspiring depth and darkness, and instants of effervescent lightheartedness.

“on a mountain road in a traffic jam

I have poetry, so I’m fine…” (8)

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From Ecocide to Ecopoetics: Can Poetry Save Us From Ourselves? by Leonora Simonovis

| Rebecca Valley

From Ecocide to Ecopoetics: Can Poetry Save Us From Ourselves?

Written by Leonora Simonovis

In his essay “The Language of the Master,” Paul Kingsnorth argues that language is a form of ecocide because it creates a divide between us and our surrounding reality. The author  observes that language “is both our most effective tool and our most powerful weapon.” It can be –and has been– used to manipulate and control others, as well as to impose worldviews and ways of living. It was what colonizers in the Western hemisphere did, and many of the official languages spoken today are living proof of this fact. They have been legitimized and validated, while other languages –indigenous and creole languages, for example– are either in danger of becoming extinct or only spoken at home.

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