What We’re Reading: by associate editor Tyler Michael Jacobs

I’m currently sitting with Kwame Dawes’ collection Nebraska (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). I just love Dawes’ poem “Chadron” from this collection and looking at the poem as an interrogation of the myth of the frontier and the speaker’s place as “a strange statue in the wind” (25) of Chadron, NE. I find this collection to be a search of place discussed through the seasons of Nebraska and through history. As a native Nebraskan, I find the poems in this collection honestly cohesive while also being a formally restless exploration of a place I have known for the thirty years of my life. While I keep returning to this collection, it returns me to a home I’ve known most of my life. The speakers of Dawes’ poems try to walk carefully over icy driveways due to the winter freeze in the opening poem “How I became an Apostle” (3); they realize how you learn to ignore the sounds of yourself in the quiet vastness Nebraska surrounds one with in “Loneliness” (14). In “Prairie” Dawes reminds us of the enormous space between the towns of Nebraska, assuring us it all “stretches over / the open fields, mutates, pulses, breathes, / finds its own music” (61).

I’ve also been revisiting Mary Oliver’s work. In particular, House of Light (Beacon Press, 1990). In my undergraduate career, I stumbled upon a reading of “The Summer Day” by Oliver herself and the grasshopper she describes “…eating sugar out of [her] hand” (60), which always takes me back to my childhood sitting in the grass outside of my grandparent’s house under the birch tree in their front lawn while grasshoppers would fling themselves into my palms. This poem found its way to me again as I drove back to Ohio from Nebraska nearing the end of winter break. I was listening to On Being with Krista Tippett, revisiting the interview with Mary Oliver, when Tippett played an audio file of her daughter reciting Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” I found myself back in that innocence in the lawn as a young boy, much like I did in my undergrad, and when I returned home, I picked up Oliver’s book and found myself lost again in her poems, wanting “…to stroll through the fields” (60) rather than hiding from the cold of winter under a blanket in my Ohio apartment. I have this poem taped to my office door so I’m reminded of summer in these frigid months.

After moving to Ohio, I’ve kept a copy of Ted Kooser’s Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) sitting on my office desk which I’ve returned to over and over throughout the fall semester and continue to do so. I find Kooser’s observations in Splitting an Order to be both incredibly familiar and quite deep in what lies behind the actions of the personae, as in the titular poem, which describes an elder couple, as the title suggests, splitting an order, “…and then to see him lift half / onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring, / and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife” (9). It’s a very vulnerable act of compassion and love and I find myself returning to this poem when, at times, life may feel bleak and void of these acts, as a reminder that such small moments of kindness and love do exist. Poems such as “Two Men on an Errand” (5) take me back to my childhood spent in the waiting room of mechanic shops while my father talked the mechanic’s ear off as I spun on those stools wrapped in duct tape only found in mechanic and autobody shops, and the scent of grease and metal where men in denim bibs and suspenders would chat over coffee in Styrofoam cups. Maybe there’s an air of nostalgia with Kooser, but I’m wary of reducing Kooser to pure nostalgia as the sole reason I’ve read and keep reading this collection of poems. I think, too, of poems like “Garrison, Nebraska” and how Kooser speaks of his town in winter with “its gardens of broken washing machines, / its empty rabbit hutches nailed to sheds, / cold and alone on the sea of the prairie” (47) speaking on the beauty, the normality of cluttered lawns, and Nebraska’s harsh seasons. Or how he explores the domestic intimacy of a lost life in “Mouse in a Trap,” in which Kooser eulogizes what we deem as a pest and how it comes to rest on “…the ship / of the rest of its life” (48). I keep returning to this book for the way Kooser captures a life, or a moment of a life, and the impact these seemingly fleeting happenings that surround us can have, which only poetry can put words to.

—Tyler Michael Jacobs, MAR

Featured Writer: Laura Walter

Laura Maylene Walter will read her work as part of the Prout Reading Series hosted by Bowling Green State University in Prout Chapel, January 26th, at 7:30pm.

Laura Maylene Walter is an author, editor, and BGSU alum currently based in Cleveland Ohio. She has been published in Poets & Writers, The Sun, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review, Slate, Ninth Letter, The Masters Review, and many more journals and publications. Her awards and recognitions are as numerous as her publication locales: a finalist in the Ohioana Book Awards, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, achieving fiction book of the month from UK Booksellers Association, etc. To add to her numerous accomplishments, the sheer volume of her pieces makes it impossible to include them all here. Most notably, she is the author of the short story collection “Living Arrangements” and has just debuted her first novel, Body of Stars published by Dutton. 

Walter’s early work explored dark themes, largely based on the death of her mother when she was twenty, “Even so, I often find myself returning to that period of my life, particularly when I write nonfiction. I think it’s because, as difficult as that time was for me, the darkness made it rich” (Kenyonreview). Her most recent piece Body of Stars is a speculative feminist piece that explores the future as it relates to bodies, “an exploration of fate and female agency in a world similar to our own” (Ohiocenterforthebook). The premise of this up-and-coming piece focuses on the placement of women’s moles being able to predict future events. What Book Riot calls “a story of devastation, rebuilding, grief, and hope,” Walker’s Body of Stars is a debut of terrific promise.

—Kennedy Lomont, MAR

Review: Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó’Tuama

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poem to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó’Tuama. W.W. Norton & Company. 384 pages. $22.99, hardcover.

On Being Studio’s podcast Poetry Unbound, hosted by Pádraig Ó’Tuama and first broadcast early in 2020, sets a high bar for all poetry media. It is gently-voiced, ceaselessly generous in its readings, and effortlessly vulnerable. Ó’Tuama’s essays on the poems he chose are a gift, and one which leads listeners to find themselves in poetry. In each episode, Ó’Tuama presents a poem then speaks both personally and critically to its merits and its stake in the world. Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World follows the podcast’s same formula. Whether written or spoken, Ó’Tuama’s essays on this anthology’s 50 poems—from poets like Kaveh Akbar, Ada Limón, and Tracy K. Smith—comes across with a prayer-like sense of devotion to the medium. This is a gracious anthology, a true labor of love, and a testament to poetry’s reach that celebrates each word of every poem. 

I first came to Poetry Unbound during the COVID lockdown of early 2020. By that point in my life, I had lost interest in opening myself up to what poetry could teach me. Poetry Unbound became an invitation to remember how poetry can be at once meaningful, devastating, and beautiful. I feel that my creative writing life since coming to Poetry Unbound is indebted to this series, and I still often turn to this book, and the podcast to which it owes its title, any time I feel a need for inspiration or grace. There is a wonderfully intimate feel to this anthology, as Ó’Tuama’s essays in both book and podcast form are, first and foremost, points of personal connection. At the same time, they invite readers and listeners into a world of utmost faith in what poets have to offer us. Some of my favorite poems and essays from this anthology are on James Wright’s “A Blessing,” Margaret Atwood’s “All Bread,” and Dilruba Ahmed’s “Phase One.” Any time your passion for writing or faith in poetry wanes, turn to this book. Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World offers a terrific balm to any hurt, and undoubtedly keeps its title’s promise. 

—Samuel Burt, MAR