ON THE LONG BLUE NIGHT poems, Eliot Cardinaux Dos Madres Press, 2023 ~ In some nearby deepness, language has forgotten how to understand the conversations between thunder and mirror. That nearby deepness could be singlehandedly so many that it might as well be predestined to be what belongs to poet Eliot Cardinaux in the precisely given away On The Long Blue Night. I question what nearby means and have to pick the echo that replies. But oh the echo that doesn't. If, of late, discovery is in a constant state of rehabilitation, Cardinaux gives us a verse embedded in what it recovers. Gives us a natural melancholy that separates moon and footprint might time pick different days to touch the earth. Gives us shrugged vulgarities of stonestruck awe might language learn eventually how madness cuts us short. This is a work and a voice afflicted with a great noticing, a hidden showmanship, a doomed unpredictability. A joy this tactile is frightening and freeing. I wrote the following note to myself in the reading, and then misread it, and then combined both, which are here: Your poem is in the room writing about the room I'm in. Many things are impossible. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
GAZE BACK – poems, Marylyn Tan
Gaze Back poems, Marylyn Tan University of Georgia Press, 2018 In Gaze Back, poet Marylyn Tan is a vandal of ache and etch whose verse erases plainness, whose voice knows to radio itself, whose vision evicts and eventually encodes. Ah the automated shrug of a shoulder, ah this constant state of notification. Tan’s is a prayerful anger of dismantling and differentiating, one that reimagines the student of injury into a wounded anti-weakness that tenderizes evasion might the promise of invisible scrutiny trick the microscope into seeing. Somewhere between documentary and dream, the body has its fun with pain and its cake with god. The whole work is a safe word sounding its de-worship of password. In the reading, I wanted to be resurrected, but was found alive. Wanted to look back, but the future of Gaze Back mattered. Matters. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
The New Quarantine – Johannes Göransson / Sara Tuss Efrik – Inside The Castle, 2023
The New Quarantine Johannes Göransson / Sara Tuss Efrik Inside The Castle, 2023 ~ So I'm just going to start in the middle, or the end. I have kids who can't laugh. They press button after button. I draw a smiley face on one of the buttons. I'm an uneducated vandal, you should know that. I don't know what happened. I got drunk before I got drunk. A week ago I started The New Quarantine by Johannes Göransson and Sara Tuss Efrik. It is an overwhelm. For some reason, the first thing I wrote in response to it was "A movie about three paper cuts." The thing is, I didn't follow that up, so I don't know what I meant by it, or what it was supposed to trigger in me. Anyway, THE BOOK, it seemed all heart and guts and inside joke and even more inside absolute immaculate un-fingerprinted leapfrogged footfalled sorrow. And I thought I was okay. But then, I got to the end of it tonight and all of those things are true, but also, everything is vividly falsified and now I am grieving a beginning. Look, explanation is a nostalgia. I try to make myself pristine. I was sick for six months this year and am better now but it fucked up my teeth. And people still want to read what I write. Hell is wrong with them. I am so not pretty but kind of able to film stuff in fake poems in between capitalisms. My youngest son doesn't make me think of death, but he should. He is not well and his not wellness isn't appropriate. I am all over the place and I am nowhere. I did not expect a week ago that The New Quarantine would childhood me back to now. I am a very basic lover of obsessions such as orphan and widow and mirror. Well, fuck. I am just going to say right now that I know for a fact that you're not going to stay with me this whole time because I am about to go so much more south SO RIGHT NOW if you love me or believe me or think my brain is worth the salt I turn it to, go buy The New Quarantine and while you're there or away, check out Haute Surveillance by Johannes Göransson and Toxicon and Arachne by Joyelle McSweeney and basically anything else written by them as one or all, etc. I am a prophet with zero thoughts. This book was written before my memory kicked in. It builds collapse. All my words toward it will move away. I think it's right that things disappear. Right as rain that falls on one whose language lets me have mine. I don't believe I can scratch this off, even if I do. It's a lottery ticket that hell gave to apocalypse. It's a trap. Thirst escapes me. I cut up magazines about self-harm. I am trying to respond to these rejected sober closures of dead attractions. Arrogant, but belonging is an exile I abandon forward. In the reading, it is strange that I heard things advertised that no buying would solve. What dares violate the secret americana. Who. There is so much blood in the work that I can't tell whose blood is the silent alarm. I might have died for the laughing of the resurrected. Caught sex from a diseased script description of the exterior. In the reading also I felt like I was impressing god more with each spider I removed from my picturing of spiders. I unpeople. My suicide has no entry point, only penetration. Don't die, omg. This work is a love story, and I am glad I waited. It made me read it too quickly. I don't feel like I reached the end. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
Overland – Natalie Eilbert – Copper Canyon, 2023
OVERLAND Natalie Eilbert Copper Canyon Press, 2023 ~ The wrongdoing, the math of it, so often abstract. Or hermetic. I sleep in a dark room where I pretend to sleep and my only light is my seasick joy. It is not right for me to misunderstand. Don’t worry, I only know this now in this undated now that comes before and after reading Natalie Eilbert’s considerate, final, and genetic Overland. If I fail, here, to say what comes during any writing of and, please keep at the very least that I almost didn’t make it through the book as I was taken into a particular sadness in thinking on those who will never read it. I guess it is no small thing to feel as a reader that one is in a good soft eye coming upon an egg that will hatch on sight. Overland is a decentering work, a work of shortlisted patience that checks our fictions and does not fake its wrongdoings to relieve relief. Soaked in the desolate allowances of solace that isolate permission, its verse is blessedly always a vowel away from reliving rescue, and it keeps the skull beneath the light bulb long enough to interrogate every ask. It hurts. Its devastating callbacks pinpoint flaw and fail. Earthly boredom, bodily boredom, the boredom of long beings who belong. Eilbert is serious about play and also about play. As in, we can’t use a name that has a name. As in, invention has no mother. I hope you will see these poems, and in the seeing I hope something is placed in the immediately created left hand of a hallucinating birdlike bird. As in, be carried. Its vision is a song to, and to, the loss of our dual invisibility. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
Dyscalculia – Camonghne Felix – One World, 2023
Dyscalculia Camonghne Felix One World, 2023 ~ A blunt delicacy of slow care and tender economy, Dyscalculia, as doubly imagined by author and deeply reliable narrator Camonghne Felix, tells its story with its story. With break-up broken like the last romantic bone left as a soundbite trailing the howl that echo takes for snapping, it ensouls diagnosis with prognosis and makes of availability a border where on any given side a fringe context awards vision to those whose sight is an inheritance. Which is to say: It does the work. Felix uses verse as a suddenness with which to yield conversion from reversion while swearing on exhumations in a language that is both jarring and meditative. The performance itself designs a changeable, and elsewhere, audience that allows the reader to breathe above brackets and parentheticals as the marginalia of void and abyss. A warning, a trespass, a field, a comet- this is outside stuff that attends the inner. There is no reclaiming, here, of an old self, but rather a reclaiming of how one understands reinvention. To speak at its speaker, may we all ‘start to love what we know’, perhaps in stories such as this where the reading leaves those looking in the before-glow of its aftermath. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ Dyscalculia is HERE reflection by Barton Smock on the previous work of Camonghne Felix is here and here
Vexations – poems – Annelyse Gelman
Vexations , poems, Annelyse Gelman , The University of Chicago Press, 2023 / annelysegelman.com
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Whatever it is you’ve been trying to say, or hear, can probably be found in the interior stoppages and outbound etymologies of Annelyse Gelman’s spiritually forwarded Vexations in which the current devours the recent but goes on to imagine that it’s eaten a de-aged now and so becomes terrified of the present. Born invented, it ended so many times I ran out of weeping. Rooted in the everyday that has to relive with itself, it’s a hard book to finish once. I found things because things were everywhere and I found things because they disappeared twice. With its snapshots of acceptance, vacated visions, and exiting accumulations, the verse makes of the moment an inquiry that speech isn’t normally asked to speak for. A password, here, seems to know our password and Gelman creates access from a de-awed strangeness and discovers elsewhere as the anchor of locale. It looks like the world. It looks like my misunderstanding of the world. Illusions offer safe passage to holograms. Mirages aid in the evacuation of hallucinations. I look sometimes at my children as data sets of worry. I can’t say how briefly I long for each. Vexations gives measure, and leaves one with a closeness glowing for the losses of its following.
~ reflection by Barton Smock
~ book is HERE
Take 1 – poems – Eliot Cardinaux
Take 1 poems, Eliot Cardinaux Bodily Press, 2023 bodilypress.bandcamp.com ~ In my wanting to appear forever specifically to no two people, I go back and forth, or went, here beside, in hereafter, of the writing of Eliot Cardinaux, as it is, or will be, in the chapbook Take 1. First take. Or perhaps: First, take. Oh title, oh instruction. This white space of abundance. This absent plenty. If it's true that the same poem comes to all over and over, then Cardinaux writes to each of how to be, differently, again. In the reading, I wrote a note-to-self to maybe unselve: I long to be in the moment and also I pine to misremember, though I am suddenly wrong to have ever kept them apart. As such, I am still being struck by these thrice thundered poems, by how they hold, and give away, the optimistic loneliness of the unexpected. As in the joke where god tells crow 'Crow, this is your last, warning.", the poem looks, and can only look, where it's already. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book, etc, is here
No Farther Than the End of the Street – poems – Benjamin Niespodziany
No Farther Than the End of the Street neighborhood poems by Benjamin Niespodziany Okay Donkey Press, 2022 ~ How just recently undiscovered the poems feel in Benjamin Niespodziany's No Farther Than the End of the Street, and how secretly they demand distraction. I've been ill of late, and in this lateness have come to believe that revelation does not come, after all, to those who wait. So I waited, and held, then read, this inescapably freed book. I am weak and want to say things simply. I strain to recall whole silences. I write that love is made of two people telling each other that they have a room at the hotel when neither of them do. Niespodziany takes the nameless and the familiar at face value and lets one mask disguise another. I am weak, I strain, there is joy here. In this verse, a neighborly, twinning joy...and a sadness brought to earth both by the alien mediocrity of grief and by those few doubled things that go through absurd shortages to single out loneliness. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
Summer – Johannes Göransson
Summer Johannes Göransson Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022 ~ I think it might be too early for me to be putting words toward Johannes Göransson's Summer as I've only just finished its fourth and final section called The World and the fire as a whole is still trying to figure out which parts it still needs to set. But, I also worry some season will end, and I'll be in it and have to lie about how I moved forward. Göransson writes the under out from under. Beauty, death, the after. The after-art of living as something uncreated. If a ceiling fan falls on a trapdoor...ah, I have no then. I paint my kidnapper to look like my kidnapper, lose blue like a hand, let children make me sad, think maybe invention has always known where it's imagined itself from, and am poor but less poor for work like Summer and the care it takes of the false elsewhere. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
a child walks in the dark – poems – Darren C. Demaree
a child walks in the dark / poems, Darren C. Demaree / Small Harbor, 2021
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Holy with intention, Darren C. Demaree’s a child walks in the dark is a non-performative piece of displayed belief and an unbroken speaking of the telling world. Poems here are remnant doings, and each month is a faith. Demaree tells a son, tells a daughter, tells them both, and in the saying, another thing is built inside the thing built to fall. Memory has to start somewhere, myth is a myth, and the children are long. The verse here is gentle, protected by wonder and worry and wager, but it is not safe. In one breath, there is blueprint, and in that same breath, there is something unsold from the museum of cold weather that must be described correctly in order to be seen by both the young and by the architect of their forgetting.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book info is HERE
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