Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour

From the title, you can tell this might be a dark, hilarious book. And it is. It's really dark, so dark it sometimes swallows up the hilarity, and all the horror of world politics shines through. A paradox, that shining. Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, by Conor Bracken, is another of the wonderful Bull City Press books, this one from 2017, but, since it's about the polarizing figure of Henry Kissinger, seems to fit the general polarization of now. 

The cover art, Overflow, by Jenny Blazing (2017, acrylic, collage), looks like a city turning into a waterfall--so it brings to mind The Niagara River, by Kay Ryan, and its cover--but it might be a dam, its mechanisms overcome...which, yes, also describes the book--how loving the machinations of a world maker/breaker transforms things or sort of obscures and reveals what's really going on...

I was delighted to find the poems "jogging through August," like me, on p. 13, in "Henry Has Me Tell Him About My First Time," which is a pretty icky and not very delightful account of unwanted attentions, in a swamp. As you can imagine.

Another coincidence was the color blue again, in the amazing "Henry Pats His Heart for Emphasis," in the line, "I hold his x-rays to the moon's blue light." The poem keeps trying to figure out if Henry has a heart:

     If it mutters to itself at night upset
     by coups planned late, worrying that it left
     the serial numbers on the submachine guns.

You get the idea! And the dark hilarity! And the speaker is quite up front about his/her/their (?) complicity, as in "How American":

     Henry and I, we're as American
     as an overdose of opiates,

     our bodies red and white and blue
     and bloated. American as rural poverty
 
     and tort law, fingers lopped off by gears
     that move fast as the cruise missile in his living room

     we take turns straddling like a mustang,
     whispering hoarsely "ashes to ashes,

     lust to lust."

Dark, right? And I love the pun in "hoarsely." And it's amazing how the poems really are love poems, as in the last stanza of the poem "Henry Talks About the Hyenas," an unlikely title for such a lovely turn at the end, when, Henry having chosen the descriptor "velvety" for the night, this happens:

     The night a curtain
     we can roughen with one hand
     and smooth with the other.

Which also describes the manipulation of world politics, eh?

More (scary) blue in "Call Me Condor": "before dragging me from the air's blue throat." More marvelous (scary) imagery: "the sun still zipping the river / up in a yellow body bag." The continued mix of love and horror--in "How Mercy Works" (by blame and cruelty)--and in the wordplay of the title, "The Hands With Which Henry Puts The Casual Back in Casualty." But you know it's going to be this way from the very first poem, with its funny title, "The Tao of Henry," and that short poem's last two lines:

     Keep your boot on the throat of the season.
     With your good eye dare the horizon to shrug.

To Be Read in the Dark

I love how I finished reading this one in the dark! That is, at night! A glorious summer night, after an exciting in-and-out rainy day. We need more rain, but I am also happy for summer to last as long as it can and for fantasy/Camelot (only rains after sundown) to reign as long as it can. The book is To Be Read in the Dark, by Maxine Chernoff, a Chicago/San Francisco poet (Omnidawn, 2011).

I loved the immediate coincidence of blue, in the very first poem, "The Box," itself an accidental/prescient, pre-pandemic enclosure coincidence!

     blue as memory's
     alien air
     you
     blue as
     the world

The word "alien" is also an amazing coincidence re: yesterday's book, which uses the word "alien" in a number of ways!

I loved the phrase, and the personal/universal resonance of "memory's edge / is too demanding" in the poem, "There Will Be Consequences," the title of which also resonates with my upbringing. I loved the coincidence of "cardboard scenery" (theatre/unlikely) and "circumference" (Emily Dickinson, etc.)

I loved "How I Wrote Certain of My Books" for 1) its title and 2) the coincidence of mountain in "mountain's white page" (in part, in connection to Heidi, oddly!)

And I loved, and grieved, the last poem's aching, ever pertinent, perennial question, "What Did You Do in the War?" and how it devolves into "moments reduced / to cicada and vision," still going on in my own back yard in August....

Want Books?

The other day I tried to give away a bunch of wonderful poetry books and chapbooks at an open mic event, but, like me, after reading the Marie Kondo book, many people these days are avoiding more accumulation of books, no matter how much they love them! If you, however, as readers of a poetry/reading blog by a blogger who attempts the Sealey Challenge each August, if you would like a little box of books, a sampling of the kinds of things I read and respond to here, please send me an email (via the Contact-Info page of this blog, above) with your address and I'll send some along! You might create a little pile in readiness for next August, adding things you select on your own to the little grab-bag I'll send you. It might take me a while to send it off--busy here!--but I'll get to it eventually. If there's a particular book you want, that you've seen here this August or a past August, let me know, but I will probably save/set aside some of these books for sentimental reasons...and won't send them off till I do the sentimental weeding stage of the Kondo cleanout. Sigh... I love books.

Wild Fox of Yemen

Here in August, during the Sealey Challenge, I love the immersion in lives, languages, and cultures not my own. In this book, The Wild Fox of Yemen, by Threa Almontaser (Graywolf Press, 2021), I also loved tracking the wild fox, its brief appearances, its changing meanings...and, as keeps happening, tracking the coincidences--how the books or images in them keep connecting, or how my mind is doing that. I encountered the Tooth Fairy in the nonfiction book, The Tales Teeth Tell, but I was surprised to find her here, in the very first poem, "Hunting Girliness," "It is not tasteful / to fuck with the Tooth Fairy, baby teeth planted // in the oleanders." (And I just made the connection that she is "hunting" girliness, like a fox!)

Teeth again, and precise dental terminology, in "Recognized Language," "Now the words shed from my mouth like deciduous teeth." 

Here is the wild fox in "Heritage Emissary":

                                    At dinner,
     Baba tells a story of his childhood in Yemen.

     About catching a wild fox with his cousin---Arabic
     the medium through which his body can return home.

But imagine my surprise at the coincidence of sharks in the next poem: "In Yemen, I loved sharking / the tall mountains, twining my hair w/ hawk bones." And the coincidence of hair: "I refused to straighten." I loved learning, from "Etymology of Hair," that "The etymology of hair // is nest, from the Arabic..." I might have expected the connection of Arabic coffee in Wild Fox and Hard Damage, but I could never have guessed I'd be able to connect "Kalda the goat herder" in Almontaser's "Coffee Arabica as a Malestrom of Endless Aftershocks" with Peter the goat herder in Heidi, which I am accidentally re-reading prior to adding to the Little Free Library in front of my house. (And the grandmamma in the city sends coffee to the grandmother on the mountain!)

So many wonderful lines: "I plant our spangled plotlines in tin canisters, tempt a flower to rocket out, offering myself as witness." (From "Guide to Gardening Your Roots.") And "I imagine Allah as ever-shiting. As light / that keeps dazzling." (From "Operation Restoring Hope.") And the fox turns up again in "After Running Away from Another Marriage Proposal": "The fox stands heavy over my heart, watching the vast, empty valley, bronzed by the yellow moon."

I'll leave you with that, the yellow moon.

The Niagara River

Any time I read a poem or bunch of poems by Kay Ryan, I am blown away. This bunch, in The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005), tipped me over the edge in a barrel! The cover art, which I had been staring at for a couple years maybe, and thought was a photograph, is a painting by Frederic Edwin Church from 1857. Kay Ryan amazes me with her pithy truths and fabulous serious humor in short lines, short poems, each one hard and shiny as a crystal. The first/title poem is surreal and super real at once, part of the crystalline quality. Current events in my family wamily make me want to text "Carrying a Ladder" to my son. And suddenly, on p.4, I found the coincidence of sharks, in "Sharks' Teeth." And teeth.

The phrase "quid pro crow" in "Felix Crow" made me smile.

The subtle and persistent internal rhyme also made me smile. As did the way she sees a bird on a beach. In "Expectations," I am amazed at how an abstract and widely applicable title attaches to a specific dry creek bed waiting for rain. And how she turns the landscape voluptuously human in 10 short lines in "Green Hills."

Is "Rubbing Lamps" also an ars poetica? The poet describing

     something
     so odd and
     filled with promise
     for a minute
     that you spend
     your only wish
     wishing someone else
     could see it.

And I think I am her "Ideal Audience," a poet in the same room with her. "The Past" as a "frozen lake..breaking up" reminded me of the t-shirts for our family vacation: "The past is a bucket of ashes." (Carl Sandburg) And "Legerdemain" made me look up the word "legerdemain." There are poems that seem to be elegies and others that seem to be phiolsophy and poems that are dreams. A coincidence of Australopithicus. And a sad little lime of a poem at the end.

Sad as it is, August is a good month.