Chokko (better known as “Sir Chonkus of the Chonkmeisters” or “Chonky”) Waterfield finds himself enjoying a recent issue of Mid-American Review. When he isn’t reading, he is a ruthless tug-of-war player and always down for a walk through the cemetery.
(Photo courtesy of Lila Waterfield)
For my first summer read, I decided to pick up Leila Chatti’s new chapbook Figment (Bull City Press, 2022). At 35 pages it goes by quickly, yet its emotional depth and experimentation make every reread a rewarding experience. The chapbook’s black cover and barely visible, embossed title set up the work’s mystery and coyness early on. Composed of half formally restless lyrics and half terse, associative abecedarian poems, Figment indulges in the mysterious and uses language to confront difficult emotions.
While the poems are withholding about their specific subject, the theme of thwarted motherhood becomes gradually clear in poems like from the root *dheigh-: where the speaker writes: “fictile I formed / you I didn’t know before / I did it what I was / capable of.” As the book progresses, the exploration of language becomes a way to confront this trauma. In the abecedarian poems, this formal constraint takes the poems on a journey of association the speaker uses to gain understanding and acceptance. The rewards of this endeavor, for the reader and speaker alike, are reflections on grief and loss that could only be gleaned through experimentation with this form. For example, the speaker writes: “faint / face less / fabrication / false falter / fault,” ending with “failure familiar.” This phonetic practice illuminates for the reader just how nuanced and bewildering the experience of grief can be and how language may be used to organize its mess.
––Christopher McCormick, Mid-American Review
Thursday, March 23rd, at 7:30 PM, Sara Moore Wagner will be reading a series of her poems for the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University.
Sara Moore Wagner is the author of multiple collections including Swan Wife, awarded with the 2021 Cider Press Review Editor’s prize, and Hillbilly Madonna, published by Driftwood Press in 2022. Wagner has also authored two chapbooks: Tumbling After released in March of 2022 and Hooked Through published by Five Oaks Press in 2017. Her work has appeared in several publications such as Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Western Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Cincinnati Review. Wagner has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times as well as Best of the Net and Best New Poets awards.
Wagner’s poems explore relationships between mother and child, father and son, and other family ties in Appalachia. Several poems address the opiate crisis that heavily ravaged Appalachia and the entire country. Poems such as “Girlhood Landscape” explore the impermanence of beauty through a young girl waning optimism, stating: “because I want to remember blooming. // Because I think I could just bloom.” These poems also depict moments of trauma associated with miscarriages. Her work incorporates fairy tales and folklore, with several poems devoted to sharpshooter Annie Oakley, myths of Tantalus and Thetis, and Biblical figures in works like “Self Portrait as Judas.”
In her work entitled “Invasive Species,” published by the Normal School in December 2020, Wagner talks about a nest created in a dated wreath. The relationship of mother/daughter and mother bird/hatchlings seems to blur. Both mothers are “separated […] by a door” from their young. The poem closes with:
We’re all just waiting to crack open
or be emptied out, to be forced
from our homes or windows,
to destroy what we love
because we need it,
because we think
we’re safe.
There is a sense here of the complicated necessity of letting our loved ones live their own lives, continuing to love them from a distance. This necessary and natural trajectory of love and how it operates exists in these final lines. Perhaps the complexities of love lead to hurt when love is needed most. The shared habitat of the nest on the house’s door creates all these avenues of focus.
Poem excerpts appear courtesy of Normal School and Saramoorewagner.com. Biographical info also from saramoorewagner.com.
–Michael J Morris, MAR
James O’Bannon’s poems “Naming” and “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It” were published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI. In the spring of 2023, James agreed to answer a few questions by associate editor Christopher McCormick on his poetic work.
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Your poem “Naming,” (after a poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen) which appeared in Volume XLI of Mid-American Review, utilizes non-sequiturs and surrealistic elements, as in the unforgettable line “If there is a child who is dead there is a bird alive somewhere,” yet a firm wisdom seems to underpin the entire poem. Can you tell our readers a little bit about what you sought to achieve with this piece?
“Naming” is written after the poem “Grief Logic” by Diana Khoi Nguyen. In her brilliant poem, she utilizes hypothetical syllogisms to explore grief as well as other ideas. For “Naming”, I wanted to maintain the sense of logical leaping employed in Nguyen’s poem, while using the image of a bird to symbolize a child in sort of a spiritual sense.
I found myself thinking about the language used in the death or incarceration of Black children and how that differs from the language used with white children. Considering that dehumanization, I wanted a poem where Black children could exist/stay alive in perpetuity, hence the “If the child stays alive” line’s repetition. Lastly, in all of my work where a god figure is mentioned, I think of it as a means to wrestle with an aspect of faith and hopefulness in a world that consistently contradicts those beliefs and antagonizes them.
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In your poem “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It,” you write “I’d like to live / in a world where there is a god / who calls my name.” What role does religion and spirituality play in your writing?
In being raised in a Black, religious household, participation in church and other aspects of Christianity were expected. I went to Sunday School, Bible study, participated in sermons, etc. As a child, you are never really allowed to interrogate your inherited belief system. As I got older, I found myself questioning many of ideas I was taught. Christianity felt too idealistic to me, and it excluded too many people I loved.
In my writing, I see god as a figure used to interrogate those difficult questions.Much of my poetry deals in the questioning of how one could believe in not only a god-figure, but a god that is unquestioningly good, when so much of our world fails us in so many ways.
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Your poem “and now the doctor asks if depression is a family,” published in Waxwing issue XVIII, speaks on subjects such as race and self-love. Can you talk about how those subjects have been an influence on your journey as a writer?
I wouldn’t really call my relationship to these ideas an influence. Race is definitely embodied in my writing because as a Black person in America, it is tied to every part of your being. You wake up Black, you breathe Black, you sleep Black. In this particular poem, I chose for the relationship between mental health and Blackness to be overt because of the ways it is stigmatized. There are so many negatives poured onto the waywe view the mental struggles of Black folks; even medically. So, I would say my goal in marrying these concepts would be to allow people to see the struggle I’ve dealt with (and still deal with) in its most open and bare form, hopefully, as a means for people to embrace the humanity in that struggle.
On Thursday, February 16th, Dustin Pearson will read his poetry as part of the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. The reading will take place at 7:30 at Prout Chapel at BGSU.
Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, Millennial Roost, and A Family Is a House. Dustin also has work which appears in The Nation, The Boiler, Blackbird, Bennington Review, Poetry Daily, The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, among other publications. Dustin is an Assistant Professor teaching creative writing at the University of Toledo.
Pearson’s work explores themes of love, loss, abuse, trauma, and hope. His work is both raw and honest, and while woeful at times, still carries grace and hope in its folds. Pearson views his writing as a way to artfully call on his lived experiences and observations, zooming in on them in the process. In an interview with Florida State University’s English Department, Pearson iterates, “I like to think of the writing as holding a magnifying glass to different aspects of that experience. The aesthetic presentation of the resulting writing is determined by how much I prioritize my internalized perception of what I’ve experienced or a more assimilated or recognizable one, which I think people most often call reality.” Indeed, there is a malleability to truth, experience, and the expression of them; in his poem “Souls Side by Side” Pearson writes to that end:
“He creeps
around us
pining
like he hadn’t died
when he first left.
Father, why
are you dying?
We killed you.
You should be dead.”
(from theboilerjournal dot com)
With the pain in Pearson’s writing, however, love and tenderness comes hand-in-hand. In “A Difference,” a brother’s broken arm is bandaged. In “Fossil Fuel,” hope is within reach: “The loss is overwhelming, but ahead of you, there are tracks. You want to fall but think not again, and you think: no matter the man the tracks belong to, you must find him.”
—Mays Kuhail, MAR
(Poem excerpts courtesy of The Boiler and The Account Magazine, biographical information from dustinkpearson dot com)