Tag: Review

SwEP Mid-Month Review: the heart is a muscle

On By awhitetrashpoetIn Mid Month Review, News

Review by Lizzie Waltner

Kat Heatherington’s poetry collection, the heart is a muscle, brings to light ideas of love that address all aspects of life in a powerful manner and has a deep connection to nature throughout. Her use of, or lack thereof, of capital letters throughout her collection gives the pieces a softness. There are no sharp edges in this collection, which makes it very comforting. These pieces are bright and playful but not downplay the serious issues that wring our hearts.

In her first section, a house by the river, Heatherington’s poem ‘planting poem’ we not only get a taste of spring, but also the touch of the past and endings. For example,

i need to plant more food this year, and less flowers,
but that thin pale green leaf lifts my heart,
and i pray for rain enough to give them all blossoms.
the cat’s grave, her small lilac,
is undisturbed and thriving.

In this small section we see her powerful use of the past contrasting with the present. It not only reflects on the past, the previous dirt being flower filled and a resting space for her cat, but also what it can become which is more sustainable and hearty for the soul, growing more food and the ability of there still being beauty in her memories of her cat that can be represented by the thriving lilac.

This idea of needing more food, could also be applied to more than just nutritional value, and how sometimes all we can do is hope to get through the next months. We all need a little rain sometimes.

The central section is aptly named, stunning transitional moments, as it is not only done stunningly, but addresses some of the toughest realities everyone learns as an adult. In ‘breathing room’ Heatherington tackles the idea of distance and leaving, and the complexity we all feel when walking away from something we love.

now we both have room to breath
and are using it to cry with.
now I can see your stormcloud eyes
filled with pain, and watching me walk away
and not feel all the wind in my sails
fly towards the storm in your heart.

The piece ends with ‘we are both standing’ and I think that hits home hard, because despite sometimes leaving being a difficult idea to grapple with it can have a positive ending, such as being able to stand on ones own.

The last section of this collection, the flammable heart, is admittedly my favorite. This entire section made my heart ache, but in the best way possible. My favorite piece in this section is, maybe. It’s simplicity about wishful thinking with the simple phrase ‘or maybe not’ got me every single time it’s used throughout this piece. This repetitive technique in this poem is repetition at its highest.

and you will visit now and then,
or maybe you won’t,
and i’ll love you anyway,
and send you postcards and text messages
about the rain and the corn and the sweet desert stars,

The way the poems presents this idea of unconditional love, despite being aware of things not working out makes it that much more heart-breaking. At the end of the day, there is always wishful thinking for love and always a realization, that maybe it won’t work out.

Overall, this collection really gets under your skin and claws itself in, sometimes making you feel warm and fuzzy, other times letting those emotions sting throughout. It makes you feel alongside the narrator and presents itself in a relatable manner and uses wonderful metaphors and similes to give visual representation to emotions. Kat Heatherington does a fantastic job in this collection, and anyone with a heart will adore it.

 

Click the image to order the heart is a muscle from Bookworks ABQ.


the heart is a muscle
by kat heatherington

Kat Heatherington is a queer ecofeminist poet, sometime artist, pagan, and organic gardener. She lives south of Albuquerque New Mexico, in Sunflower River intentional community with a varying number of other humans and cats. Kat’s work primarily addresses the interstices of human relationships and the natural world. She has one previous book, The Bones of This Land, published in 2017 by Swimming with Elephants Publications and available at Bookworks and Harvest Moon Books in Albuquerque, as well as on amazon.com. She can be found online at https://patreon.com/yarrowkat and on instagram at @sometimesaparticle. You can contact the author at yarrow@sunflowerriver.org.

SwEP Mid-Month Review

On By awhitetrashpoetIn Mid Month Review, News, Reviews

Into the Sunset

A Review of Courtney A. Butler’s Wild Horses
By Beau Williams

Like the name suggests, Wild Horses is the struggle of an unbridled soul ready to escape from the reins. Courtney A. Butler dissects the intricacies of a fierce heart under stress and scatters them through this collection in twenty-two poems.

This collection is a frustrated soul screaming from behind a crumbling barrier. In the book’s introductory poem, “Words, Like Meat,” the first line reads:

“I scrape words
like meat
from the inside of my ribs
They have hung there
clinging desperately to what
oxygen they could”

This line summarizes why this book exists. Butler portrays a person that has had this “meat”, these weighing parts of her that needed to be released, and Wild Horses is that release. Butler tackles the delicate topics of loss of a loved one, being the “other” girl, carrying secrets, searching for love, and (like true wild horses) learning to break free. This collection has the longing and reflection of Plath, the fierceness of Ke$ha, the nature influences of Wordsworth, with a hint of zany like Lewis Carroll.

This book has hidden its structure quite well. There are no full-stops, though there are commas, hyphens, italics, and capitalized letters to subliminally guide the reader’s eye through the pages. The lack of full-stops gives the book a sense of uncertainty that Butler carries with grace; a slight unease that really sets the tone ahead of time and prepares the reader for the topics soon to follow. There are no sections, no interludes, and no quotes, Butler just gets straight to it and gives you exactly what you came there for.

As previously mentioned, the introductory poem seems to be Butler giving herself permission to write the rest of the work; “Words, like Meat” is Butler strapping the bomb to the dam, once the switch is flipped, whatever has been pushing itself against the walls will finally be released, and it was.

After that, the book really dives into relationships between the subject and the people closest to them. The second poem: “DNR,” lays out the concept of the book. It is about a person who is trying to come to terms with a situation in a relationship that neither of the participants have any control over. This is a recurring theme throughout the book. In “DNR,” the topic is death. In later poems the topics are love, lust, miscommunication, and distance.

It can be argued that one of the most intimate, relatable, and touching poems in the collection is “The Importance of Being Broken (Or Sitting in a Bathtub with Your Clothes On and the Lights Off).” Here, Butler describes the deafening moment of collapse; the moment where all the stress and all the worry has finally become too much.

“because all the shit has been hitting all the fans”

This poem gets into the mind of a person who has reached a breaking point and literally crumples into a ball, fully clothed, in their bathtub with the lights off; contemplating turning the water on, the light on, removing their clothes, finding strength but ultimately doing none of these. The content of this poem is relatable to nearly everyone. Everyone has hit rock bottom. Everyone has given up hope. Everyone has crawled into an unlikely place in an awkward fashion in search of any sort of comfort. Butler doesn’t sugarcoat anything about this mental state.

“Maybe you were pushed off that cliff
Maybe it was your fault
or maybe you got caught in the landslide
The reality is
everything you were was on that cliff
and now everything you are is
broken in a bathtub?”

Though raw and heavy, Butler ends the poem on a strong note; describing how, at the end of this, you will start to mold your new shape together like a carved bar of soap — highlighting the brand new you that will finally be able to stand up and turn on the light.

Butler also has a fun, cutesy side which is apparent in her poem “The Long Slow Huzzah! (or Tea Time Going Over a Cliff).” This one has a very surreal feel, like Salvador Dali meets Alice in Wonderland. In this poem, the author describes falling in love as a metaphor for having a tea party… while tumbling off a cliff.

“Pale yellow tablecloth rippling in the breeze
taking all the fine china with it (…)
Well then, I’ve gone and fallen in love with you ”

This might be the most animated piece in the collection. Short and sweet, “The Long Huzzah!” is quaint and joyful, with underlying tones of terror. There is no mention of fear, no imminent crash to end the plummet, just weightlessness. The mention of a cliff face insinuates it is connected to a ground and with no mention of the ground throughout the poem or plans to get out of this situation, one can only assume the postscript is bloody and riddled with shattered porcelain.

Wild Horses is a solid collection that would find home on the bookshelves of the strong-of-heart. “Closer to One” is one of the last poems in the book and sums up the target audience very well. Here, the subject considers themself as two people: the untamed animal in a cage, and the caregiver.

“Yes! I say, finally
Yes to your thirst
Yes a thousand times
to the nectar you crave (…)
You are right to thirst
and I will answer you”

This book is for any static heart who has ever felt tied down or unheard. This book is for the wild of spirit; for anyone who has needed to scream and doesn’t have the haven. Wild Horses lets you know that you are never alone in these places, and that others have been where you’ve been and (like you) survived to ride free.

Click here to help support Independent Bookstores during this time of social isolation by purchasing Wild Horses from Bookworks Albuquerque. 

 

Review by Beau Williams:

Beau Williams is a fairly optimistic poet based out of Portland Maine. He co-runs a weekly poetry class at Sweetser Academy and facilitates workshops at high schools and colleges around the New England area. His work has been published in numerous poetry websites and journals.

Beau has performed internationally and nationally both as a solo artist and with the performance poetry collectives Uncomfortable Laughter and GUYSLIKEYOU. He was the Grand Slam Champion at Port Veritas in 2014 and was the Artist in Residence at Burren College in Ballyvaughan, Ireland in January of 2017. Beau’s book, Rumham, is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

September: traces of letting go /Review by Nicholas Kovach

On By awhitetrashpoetIn Reviews

SeptemberIn the book September by Katrina K Guarascio accompanied by the photographs of Gina Marselle, the author expresses a longing to letting go.

Guarascio is definitely capable of expressing her own process of “letting go” as she shows in three sections of the book. Her poems range from anger to nostalgia. Guarascio seems to have loved the memories that the specific baggage has given her; but she obviously is angered at what this has brought her.

In section I we see poems like “Impermanence” that expresses how she will always remember the memories of whatever she is trying to let go. She explains that, “Like a sunburn, I know you will absorb into me and fade into memory” because she enjoyed what was their but now views it as simple nostalgia.

In section II we see her demeanor change from a place of nostalgia to hate and relief that she is letting go. In the poem “Badge” we see that whatever she is letting go of is inconsiderate of her feelings being like a “scar dug into my [her] flesh… which you ignore every time you brush past.” “Badge” expresses her pain that this thing gave her and the loathing she now has for it.

SeptemberIn section III we see Guarascio’s attitude relax. In the poem “Warrior” we see now that she is joyous in newfound freedom and how “a sense of posture and responsibility is near impossible to slouch.”. She can finally let go and not care about the pain her baggage has given her. Overall, I thought that Guarascio is outstanding at expressing her feelings through poems.

Normally with poems I feel like I am reading another language. However, Guarascio is able to express her feelings through three stages of letting go. September is truly an excellent read with photography that is relevant to the poetry.

Featured SwEP author: Jennifer E. Hudgens

On By Maxine L PesekeIn Daily Share, Featured Writers, Publications, Reviews1 Comment

Swimming With Elephants Publications would like to reintroduce you to Jennifer E. Hudgens, author of Girls Who Fell in Love with War. Jennifer was born and raised in Oklahoma City. She has always danced to the beat of her own drummer, just ask her mom. Using poetry as a means of expression and survival, Jennifer lives poetry. She watches the sky the way most people watch television. Jennifer is terrified of clowns, horses, and animatronic toys. That damned Snuggle bear is secretly trying to steal souls.

Girls Who Fell in Love with War is Jennifer’s first full collection of poems. She has plans to release a couple poetry chapbooks and her first novel in 2016. Jennifer promises the novel is quite murdery. She is also working to bring more diversity and light to the amazingly talented poets in the Oklahoma Poetry Community.

Jennifer is currently pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in English and Creative Writing at the University of Central Oklahoma with plans to teach high school students after graduation. She teaches creative writing classes for the Oklahoma City Arts Council and is a pretty rad substitute teacher.

Jen genuinely hopes you like her poems. If you don’t, that’s okay too.

Recently, she released a collection, Paloma, with Blood Pudding Press. So it goes…

You were the only one who believed me when I said what he did hurt

You were the only one who knew I was burying myself in too much fat and flux

Paloma kickstarts with 1996, a punk rock war-cry of nostalgia and a final lingering note of sadness. This, like many others in the collection, is a poem that resounds with everything oh-so-90s; but make no mistake, this is meant in the best possible way. A mixed tape soundtrack that plays like growing up, it sets the tone to whom this collection is dedicated– as much funeral dirge as it is love song for a sister and friend. The final line of the first poem rings melancholic: “Who’s gonna take care of us strays now?”

It is this echoing theme of finality, of trying to grasp the concept of loss, that carries on through the entire collection, questions of mortality and suffering scattered like the ashes of the departed, asking the question specifically in Lauren Kate is Dead: “Where the hell is this better place people are always talking about” and present in lines like:

How is it life if we aren’t suffering
Pain keeps us still {here} latched to gravity

With each poem thereafter comes a chapter of both closure and reawakening old memories; Paloma is remarkably bittersweet in the tug-of-war of saying goodbye to somebody who can no longer hear you, and Hudgens’ voice is so clear and combative against adhering to traditional standards. If nothing else, it is clear that Hudgens proves to be anything but a traditional poet; she rocks the reader’s thoughts, with gruesome details suggesting unkempt murder, encouraging one to further unravel the mayhem behind a sudden loss. Nonetheless, this proves to be a beautiful read, a true work of dedication and memory even with scattered wishes to be unseen, like that found in Bizarre Love Triangle:

You always saw me
Now
I’m trying not to be seen

And isn’t that so like loss, and how we process it? Loud as bombs, but in the quiet, in solitude, trying to process in peace, even if the death was anything but peaceful. But with this thought, I wonder at the intention of the book title: Paloma– a name that means peace, it is perhaps, with this offering, the dearly departed (because judging by Hudgens’ words, Lauren Kate was, indeed, so very dear) may be at peace, too.

Overall, as with all of our SwEP family, I can only offer heartfelt recommendations to reach out and read more of Jennifer Hudgens’ work. You can purchase her full-length title, Girls Who Fell in Love with War, published with Swimming with Elephants, on Amazon, and keep an eye on her wordpress for more news directly from the author.

Elegy for a Star Girl Review by Amanda Cartigiano

On By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Reviews

A Review of Elegy for a Star Girl

by Amanda Cartigiano

Each poem in Elegy for a Star Girl is categorized into three elements of existence: The Other World, The Here and Now, and Transcendence, and each poem is a combination of life experiences, Science Fiction, and space. These poems illustrate great depth within the soul, body, and mind, and the illuminating language and imagery express the universe as a metaphor. Life is questioned and answers are hard to find. Life is a journey that must be experienced from above. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

Pick up your copy at Amazon or Barnes and Noble today.

A Review: You Must be This Tall to Ride

On By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Reviews1 Comment

You Must be This Tall to Ride

by SaraEve Fermin

A Review by Kevin Barger

The first time I remember seeing the words that make up the title of SaraEve Fermin’s book, You Must be This Tall to Ride, I was probably around eight years old. My parents had taken me and a couple of my friends to the state fair and I stood in a line with tickets in my hand for what felt like hours to be able to ride this massive pirate ship that rocked back and forth like it was being tossed around by waves at sea. It was basically just a giant boat shaped swing, but it would speed up and go higher and higher until it eventually would flip upside down and go around in a circle a couple of times before slowing back down and stopping. I remember pretending to be a pirate and saying “Arr!” a bunch of times while standing next to my slightly older and slightly taller friend. I remember getting up to the gate, standing beneath an outstretched wooden hooked pirate hand, and being an inch or two too short to ride. I remember my friend barely reaching it and the excitement in his eyes as he was let in the gate–and I remember the crushing disappointment I felt as I stood outside the fence watching him rock back and forth scared and laughing and turning slightly green.

You Must be This Tall to Ride reflects that sort of crushing disappointment of having to stand outside while watching the world go on around you. Here, though, having to stand apart is due to physical and mental illnesses requiring medications and surgeries. Split into two parts, it’s the poetry of the caged–the shaking of the bars. If you are not prepared it will wound you in the most beautiful of ways. Fermin does her due diligence, though, and prepares us for the journey ahead with the first several poems. She lets us know that, no matter how bad things seem, light can be found in the darkest of places. She lets us know that, even though we will be caged with her, there is beauty and love and laughter here. In the first poem, “After you think you are going to die and instead live…” she paints a picture of her lover who

…will preempt your every stubborn refusal
with a reason to live.
He will hang your wind chimes,
install a new showerhead so you are safe after surgery,
pay the stylist to fix your hair after you’ve cut it off to spite your face.

In the second poem “This is How I Own You” Fermin seems to define what the rest of the book is about stating:

Call this coming clean. Call it my start over,
my claiming. These scars. This drawer of
medication bottles, watch me fantasy them
into hope. Into holding on.

This is a fight song, and one of my personal favorite poems throughout the collection. Fermin reminds us to embrace what wounds us and celebrate our own survival. It’s a call to heal through bleeding. It’s a reminder that no matter what we have our breath. That we are all a “maker of star magic.”

The first half of the book also deals a lot with family. These are some of the darkest poems in the book, highlighting highly complex strained relationships between a mother and daughter and siblings. These are the poems that will wound you if you are not prepared. Here we see glimpses of the interplay of addiction and abuse and illness. We are told of the pain of having an absent father. We are told of the guilt felt for not being able to cure an addicted mother. In “For My Sister, The Youngest, Earnest Apologies” Fermin apologizes for these interplays even though she is just as much a victim of circumstance as her sister:

Sorry about the cops and EMTs that huffed and puffed outside the door like a bad fairy tale, sorry you knew the smell of hospitals well before you knew the smell of a classroom.

But, again, through these dark poems are moments of love and laughter. In “We Get Ice Cream, 2013” we see a family that, if only for 30 minutes, can ignore their demons just long enough to laugh. In “Sia Explains How My Mother Loved Me Like Singing” we see what motherhood should be with lines like:

Tough girl, pulled the thorn from
all your bad days, uncovered a better
version and a waterfall hook.

If the first half of the book deals with the external, of being caged and examining the people outside and the effect they have, the second half deals with the internal. These are more cerebral, focusing on the “I” instead of the “you.” In “But What You Could Be” the speaker asks what would happen if she got rid of everything she sees as a flaw. In “When I Tell Him ‘I Think of Dying Every Day’” we’re faced with the reality of fighting depression:

What I mean is,
I swallow these pills because
I love myself too much to let go,
I love the dark and sharp and red
because I enrage myself enough but
don’t know how to let go.

Music plays a big part in this collection with song lyrics peppered throughout along with quotes from tv shows like [H]ouse, m.d. and Doctor Who and authors like Stephen King. No one plays more of a role than enigmatic singer Sia, though, whose music is the subject of three poems. “Sia Teaches Me How to Fight My Way Through a Panic Attack and Get to the Bus on Time” is a semi-found poem brilliant in how it perfectly mimics the stuttering kind of speech one might experience during a panic attack:

quick step/ stop paying attention to everyone else/ I don’t care if you don’t look pretty/ us what you got left/ teeth/ giggling eyes/ a wig/ your entire range

The second half, while dealing a lot with mental illness, are also where poems of healing are found. Fermin showcases the moments when we have realized that life is never going to be perfect, but we strive to make it as good as it can be anyway. “How To Be Something Other Than” highlights this process by focusing on the little things only to learn to surrender:

…To cry with the door
open, to cry with abandon. How to learn
to love a plum again, to taste it sweet
and still warm from the tree. To surround
yourself in something other than damage
and yourself.

This is the message of You Must Be This Tall To Ride. That we will all continue to grow. That eventually we will be tall enough. That even if we don’t conquer our pasts or various demons completely, we have the capacity to live with them in ways where we can at least contain the daily damage they do by turning to face them–by surrendering to the fact that they are there.