Poetry Review: The Pact by Jennifer Militello

The Pact by Jennifer Militello. North Adams, Massachusetts: Tupelo Press, 021. 80 pages. $19.95, print. 

The Pact by Jennifer Militello is a fantastic collection of poems tackling provocative themes: complex relationships, places of vulnerability, love, and danger. The cliché of never judging a book by its cover does not apply here—a Venus flytrap on a black backdrop furthers this essence of hunger or longing in this collection but also the way relationships tend to fall into assumed roles: one might become a fly, the other becomes a carnivorous plant or a carnivore. 

The first section delves into sibling relationships and the symbiotic love required for them to operate optimally. There’s an honesty to these poems that does not quibble over issues of blame but focuses on the complexity of the relationships using extended metaphors through the Medusa myth or Frankenstein’s Monster. The poems explore the relationships in ways that indicate a sense of progress even if situated in what might appear to be a relationship in need of repair.

The second segment is devoted to love poems and sexuality. Here, Militello uses clever linguistic plays: “w (he) e” and “com-pair” in “Erotomania.” This playful reconstruction of language is fitting in what appears to be a seductive exchange of power dynamics which dives into the full scope of a relationship cycle. Subjects explored include “Odaxelagnia,” the act of biting during sex leading to sexual arousal; this seductive poem is one of a kind—honest and maybe dangerous in a good way. The poem “The Punishment of One is the Love Song of Another,” demonstrates this grappling between love and loss most clearly and is indicative of a vulnerability that is exceptionally beautiful.

The third segment is rather robust. The poem “Tough Love in A Vulgar Tongue” with its lipogramatic and alliterative functions brings about a playfulness but also a tough love for the poetic craft. Numerous poems in this segment reflect on the writer’s relationship with her mother. The poem that gave this collection its namesake, addresses the mother: “Mother, your grand chandelier/of lies has so many eyes it sees the spider or a fly in every/direction; it decides, goes for miles.” (52). 

This collection has teeth. It was written by a carnivore but also an herbivore, unafraid of expressing vulnerability, and the alternation between personas takes the reader on a wildly seductive ride that’s exciting and provocative. There is a mastery of language happening in this work that gives the thematic elements a boost of steroids, and the poems almost read themselves.

—Michael Morris, MAR

Poetry Review: Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko

Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko. Flowstone Press. 2021. 33 Pages. Paperback. 

Chopping Wood in the Moonlight is Ken Letko’s tribute to nature and simple living. In these tightly crafted poems, the author utilizes his years of traveling and collected wisdom to celebrate a life lived authentically. In the title poem, Letko invokes the ancient Chinese poet Li Po as he contemplates whether he likes chopping wood at day or by moonlight. In the end, the speaker decides to let the owl show him “how / to glide through trees,” or, in other words, to follow their natural inclination, whatever that might be on any occasion.

In “Enjoying Illusions,” the speaker muses on a smudge left by a finger on their back door window. Each angle from which the speaker views the smudge reveals a different resemblance to a rabbit or a zombie walking their backyard. It is this playful meditation which makes the book so charming, as when, at the end of the poem, the speaker admonishes the reader to play their own games with perception, asking “how many windows / have you washed today?”  

The true strength of this collection, however, lies in its quiet, imagistic nature poetry. The poet’s home in the “redwoods of Del Norte” certainly helped inspire some of the collections most immersive meditations on nature and what it means to inhabit it. In one of the opening poems, “Bright Angel,” the speaker shares the revelation that every living thing is connected by using a symmetrical conceit wherein “ferns become deer” and later “deer become ferns.” In Chopping Wood in the Moonlight, Ken Letko invites readers to spire to insight by following him on his mystical journey through nature. 

—Christopher McCormick, MAR. 

Poetry Review: The Track the Whales Make by Marjorie Saiser

The Track the Whales Make: New and Selected Poems by Marjorie Saiser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 181 pages. $19.95, print.

The Track the Whales Make begins with a section of new work and then features poems from Saiser’s seven previous books, starting with the most recent and then moving backwards in time. Like Saiser’s poems themselves, the book’s construction creates a sense of what is fleeting. As the reader steps back further into Saiser’s work, the world and its ordinary things and relationships continues to transform in beautiful reverse.

The new poem “Sometimes I Remember to Watch” explores not the sunset, but the pink sky it creates opposite itself. Saiser captures the feeling of an ever-shifting world, which shifts whether or not we pay attention: “It’s brief, no matter whether / I raise my glass or turn my back. / The glow is, and then is gone….” Saiser draws the reader’s attention to the pink sky, not to the “audacious” sunset or anything more obviously breathtaking, because there is something beautiful and unmatched in that fleeting quiet. Throughout her poems, Saiser takes the ordinary and the ignored and finds the innate beauty in them, found largely in the fact that they, too, are fleeting.

Saiser’s poems are ultimately about love. Whether that be love for nature, parents, children, or even love gone awry, the heart of Saiser’s work is love, which courses through not only the depicted relationships but also the ordinary, fleeting things that she so deftly captures. In “I Didn’t Know I Loved,” Saiser discovers love in unexpected, everyday things, such as the speaker’s mother’s “big hands / slicing iceberg lettuce / with a thick-bladed knife” or “the head of the nail, / the blow of the hammer, / blueprints become the shell of the house.” There is a sense of gentle and welcomed surprise at the realization of love for these small things. Again, Saiser creates a sense of something fleeting, as the love is only now realized and has gone unnoticed for so long. This poem blends the love of family and home with the love of nature, creating a patchwork of an everyday world with love woven into the little things, only to be noticed now, when the choice is made to look.

—Mary Simmons, MAR

Poetry Review: Unholy Heart by Grace Bauer

Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems by Grace Bauer. The Backwaters Press: An Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. 2021. 169 pages. $19.95. Paperback.

New and selected poetry collections can sometimes be cumbersome when approaching any poet to experience their work. I always find that’s because we must figure out where to begin. With Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems by Grace Bauer, it’s best to start at the beginning and move actively to the end. This collection surveys the body of Bauer’s work from early poems to new poems.

“Eve Recollecting the Garden” opens this volume of poetry as a meditation on the creation story. During my reading of Bauer’s collection, I kept returning to this Edenic exploration of Eve’s stolen voice, “Dolphin, Starling, Antelope / were syllables you stole / from me…” (3). Presumably speaking to Adam, Eve accuses him of literally stealing her words. Bauer gives Eve the voice many creation stories never seem to do and allows her space in which Eve’s truth is finally spoken. Thematically, Bauer’s opening poem resonates as true today as it had when it was first published.

In “Update on Emily,” the closing poem in this collection, Bauer’s voice becomes much softer and contemplative. Bauer slows down and works through the puzzling she presents to us. The poem opens with what could be taken as a harsh statement of inevitability, “Because Death stops for everyone / and is rarely ever kind, / she writes her letters to the world–– ” (166). The poem moves quickly into a rumination on the necessity of what it means to live a life. For the speaker, it’s the act of writing letters. However, the poem asks whether the letters will be important to Emily, or for the world. Bauer eventually comes to the conclusion-less realization that we end up the same either way because the letters exist at all.

Through the inverted mirror between the urgency of creation in the opening poem “Eve Recollecting the Garden” and the quiet contemplation of death in the final poem “Update on Emily,” Bauer bookends us in waiting. Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems is a collection of believing that spans a career recording Bauer as a needed voice in poetry.

—Tyler Michael Jacobs, MAR

Fiction Review: Hoaxes and Other Stories

Hoaxes and Other Stories by Brian Dinuzzo. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. 161 pages. $17.95, paperback.

​Right away, this book pulled me in. The titular Hoax, the leading story of the collection by Dinuzzo, is about a budding actor who keeps dying, found the victim of a number of terrible accidents, though each one reported to the news is fake—a hoax. The rest of the stories in the collection do a similarly excellent job of grabbing me immediately, drawing me into the folds with fascinating scenarios and interesting characters. If you’re like me—a chronic lover of weird stories—this collection is for you. Dinuzzo expertly crafts these strange situations and makes each one a treat to read.

​These strange stories are, of course, held up on the backs of Dinuzzo’s wonderful characters. Grandpa Charlie of The Undeniable Proof of the Bigfoot comes to mind as one expertly rendered example: an explosive storyteller and grizzled hunter of the cryptid of legend, unwilling to let go of his first encounter with his mark, obsessed with unearthing the secret magics of his unexplained world, even as it cuts him off from his community. This wonderful pairing of situation and character are what make Hoaxes and Other Stories such a wonderful read for the individual who seeks strangeness with a heartwarming humanity at its center.

—Sydney Anderson, MAR