Connotary

This was a lovely book to read outdoors on a lovely day, Connotary, by Ae Hee Lee (Bull City Press, 2021), with a lovely cover, Green Flash, by Stephanie Law. I don't know what "connotary" means, but maybe there's an idea of connotations. Each poem title has a doubleness built into it, and each poem evokes place, or memory, or connection. In the first, "Hyu::In-Between," I learned about real jujubes, not the candy jujubes I remember from my own childhood: "It's a quiet

     and passionate affair--to dwell
          in the meanwhile, with a waiting so bright

     red like the beads of jujube fruits
          our grandmother used to dry

     out in the yard, so they would amass all
          the sweetness of the world in their little bodies.

That right there shows you how the poems will somehow do the same! I appreciate the cooking, the eating. In "Kimchi::In Trujillo": 

     My mother's measuring tool: her intuition, her philosophy
     that a fixation with perfection deters one from pouring jeong
     into the food. Jeong, she teaches me, is love
     that comes with time...

I loved, in "El Milagro::Edges," the eating of a pineapple down to its core, or not, depending on your culture, and how its juicy sweetness relates back to this:

     Once I read each heart knows
     its own bitterness,

     and no one else
     can share its joy.

And ends up here:

     She eats until her hands empty,
     while I don't. It's hard
     and not so sweet.

I learned so much from this book, and I hope you will, too. And that you will love the surprise of the perfect ending. That also pours its jeong into the world.

Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White

I woke up to dense dog, the world gently white outside the window, and picked up this snowy white book, Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White, by Jill Osier (Bull City Press, 2013), cover painting by Marina Mariya. The first poem suggests it (the poem itself, perhaps the book) won't be telling the whole story, not yet, but that it "is not about loss," a momentary comfort, but maybe it is, or about waiting, or about readiness.

I wasn't ready to spot coincidences on this Blue Monday in the blog, but I found "a dead-blue tulip" in the poem "Last Dream of Flowers."

The poems are quiet and gripping, like a cold and snowy day at the edge of the woods, silence fallen. The title poem begins:

     Even while we talked, snow must have been falling. Now it's a scar:
     I've mostly failed in the rooms

     of honesty and forthrightness.

Then there's the story of a child sledding.

I find myself reading and re-reading these snow-packed or gently drifting poems. I see little flickers of red and flame and skies and fields of snow. In "Flame,":

                                   Your heart, red wax,

     slipped soft from its nail. I shaped it back, and the two of us lay waiting
     in a cabin's draft.

What if you could live in a box, a camera obscura?

     A small, simple box with a tiny hole
     for light to come through,

     make everything clearer?

Or a snow globe? In the middle of the book, in the middle of the poem "Obscura," the scene becomes object suddenly:

     Shaking the scene now, snow falls,
     smoke rising up to meet it.

I am not ready for winter. I am not ready for snow. It is only August. Ah, but those first yellow sweet gum leaves already litter the yard.

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.