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

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

Featured Writers: Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia

Distinguished alumni Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia will read their poetry as features of Bowling Green State University’s Winter Wheat Festival of 2022 from November 10th– 12th. 

Remi Recchia

Remi Recchia writes with an unflinchingly graceful and poignant voice that resounds in every line of his poetry. Poems like, “Waking Up from Top Surgery in a Sparse Airbnb Living Room”describe a singular experience with breathtaking emotion: “The hardwood floor/reflects my new watch, large/face swallowing wrist:/a reminder that I am a man.” In other poems, Recchia conveys beautiful intimacy in carefully crafted words, like his poem “Fire Eater, Premolar, Bones,”: “Sometimes when we kiss, I feel your teeth/clink against mine: the quietest champagne/toast. We are not embarrassed anymore when this happens.” His book, Quicksand/Stargazing, a must-read, questions what it means to be a human/animal. 

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021). His chapbook, Sober, is forthcoming with Red Bird Chapbooks. He lives in Stillwater with his wife.

(biographical information courtesy of https://winningwriters.com/people/remi-recchia)

Roseanna Alice Recchia

Roseanna Alice Recchia’s work rings with voice and power. She has a mastery of image that pervades in every line. In “Bones I Get From My Mother,” Recchia describes: “I know my tongue/is a rounded wasp’s nest/with an egg’s gold finish./Everything inside is humming.” Delicate imagery overlaps with powerful messages, while messages can also be found in every well-crafted line. In another poem, “On Being Fat-Shamed While Out with Your Conventionally Attractive Boyfriend,” Recchia delivers a powerful voice by using a simple situation of ordering food at a restaurant. She writes: “This is just one way of practicing grace,/my mother says—people mostly/mean well and are doing their best/and don’t realize how they sound./I try to play that game too.” Recchia work resounds with a vast array of readers. Check out her poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, and her chapbook, Imitating Light.

Roseanna Alice Boswell is a queer poet and educator from Upstate New York. She earned her MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University and is currently working toward her Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Her debut poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, was released with Haverthorn Press in 2021 and she was the winner of Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2021 Chapbook Competition for her manuscript Imitating Light. Roseanna’s research interests include feminist theory, fat studies, and how these two fields speak to femininity and domesticity. She currently lives, writes, and teaches in Stillwater, OK, with her husband and their two cats, Bean and Blossom.

(biographical information courtesy of https://roseannaaliceboswe.wixsite.com/poet/home)

– Caitlyn Mlodzik, MAR

Why We Chose It – ‘Book of Dolls 3’ and ‘Book of Dolls 8’ by Bruce Bond

“Book of Dolls 3” and “Book of Dolls 8” by Bruce Bond were selected last autumn and published in Mid-American Review Volume XLI in 2022.

Something in MAR that we gravitate toward is the peculiar and uncanny. Work that tugs at our emotions on a deep human level and won’t let go. In poetry we look for things that as editors and readers we can’t get out of our head. Lines that we keep returning to long after putting the packet away. We love a poem that knows who it is and what it wants. The doll poems by Bond do a wonderful job at using repetition to bring a sense of movement and unsettling-ness to the piece, but also comfort. For our editorial staff, it was a deep and whole-hearted yes.

-Megan Borocki 

“I take them to my therapy session, / the one I have online. To my surprise, / my therapist is broken, arm here, foot / there, lonely head weeping on a chair.” – From “Book of Dolls 3”

I really admire how Bond makes the strange familiar in these two poems. In “Book of Dolls 3,” he characterizes the dolls as a kind of burden, though is closely connected with them, and it feels almost delightful that the speaker gives the therapist a doll. There’s a strange innocence there, I think. In “Book of Dolls 8,” there is this sense of inevitability with this growing doll: “Soon it will become a horror.” which Bond follows up with, “Go on, hold it,” gesturing again to connection. There is a closeness in these burdens, and a strangeness that feels emotionally accessible.

-Michael Beard

“Imagine a real-time feed of the beach / so tedious with heavy objects it cannot / be imagined. Only suffered, held.” – From “Book of Dolls 8”

In comments shared among readers, Bond’s use of surreal doll imagery—to untether otherwise banal human experiences from the familiar, before bringing them right back to earth—was met with high praise. I felt a keen pace and music in these poems too, speeding unrelentingly to weighty finishes. Dolls are the perfect catalyst for Bond’s exploration of pain: these almost-human objects can be broken, made up, filled with whatever we wish, and exist utterly at the mercy of our imaginations. Bond’s “Book of Dolls” poems ask that we imagine ourselves, too, with such customizability, able to rearrange, detach, and repair our broken parts, or fill ourselves with sand that we might live with a weight which feels truer to a life beyond our often ungraspable suffering.

-Samuel Burt