We each have our own way into the lands beyond death, but it strikes me, reading these poems, that sometimes we can share our paths, or discover a footing from observing the path of another. Maria Dylan Himmelman’s poems occupy a borderland, standing at the edge of the quotidian and looking out over other realms—a homely and sometimes comforting surrealism floats her words into forms capable of being witnessed. Throughout, the music of Dylan Himmelman’s language enriches the view.
Sundry Abductions by Maria Dylan Himmelman. Hanging Loose Press, 2023. 76 pages. $18
I long for a house in the Biglands or wherever it is
that the best burning craters are found
I want every windowsill filled with wishbones
I wish to believe that what I already have
is enough (18)
Does that sound like fun? Given the fact that we all die and that death surrounds us while we like to deny its ubiquity, finding fun in this context is a prophetic and highly artistic skill. Sundry Abductions takes the reader on a journey that begins somewhat tentatively to explore that borderland where surrealism is the only true way to express dimensions shifting and shifting again. By the later poems in the book, the poet’s footing at that slippery edge has become profoundly sure. A certainty arises in the presence of all the questions.
But, well, what do I mean by fun? The mood here is more like a long, unfolding tragic disaster, but told with all its jewels flashing, its hot scarves revealing and concealing by turns. Fun for this reader, at any rate, to follow the turns of the dance: “The goats make a racket while the wind / blows the dirt back in your eyes” (45). The section titled A Careless Cosmic Mistake offers vignettes of a family who live a dramatic and tragic life wherein
...the landscape outside my skull is a wilted field pocked with small clucking birds in search of tiny kernels of corn, none of them the least bit concerned with the sky or its falling (44)
And then in the final section, On This Lost Planet, the poet makes known her concern and apparent intention not to let darkness take her down: “….The hound starts to dig. The brass / raise their horns. I cross // to the other side of the street” from “The Unspeakable Illness Speaks” (54). And, in “Like the Stars”: “Lord, let them dig, let them dig // and then with my rust / let them paint the barns red” (56). Dylan Himmelman gives us a taste of humor too: “I can’t help but think it has something to do with / that ridiculous hat” (57).
Sundry Abductions is a journey, through stages of awakening, perhaps, or passages of wry darkness—taking heart somehow from the artful view of the endlessly tragic events we’re all witness to, if not mired in ourselves. “The dying star is always left on the floor / to smolder like yesterday’s headline” (15).
that when this is over we merit continued joy a glass of hot tea, a spoonful of muskmelon jam and all of our departed beloveds, together on a plush carpet in God’s finest tent (59)
Be it so.
Kyla Houbolt has work in Sublunary Review, Barren, Janus, Juke Joint, Moist, Neologism, Ghost City Review, Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere. Her most recent chapbook, But Then I Thought, is now available from above/ground press.
LIKE NOW by J-T Kelly. Subpress/CCCP, 2023. 32 pages. $10.
Here are poems that invite you in with details of a life, and omit just enough of the narrative to drop you into a space of reflection. The implied stories in J-T Kelly’s new chapbook LIKE NOW are intriguing enough that the doors left open are impossible to avoid. We walk through them to ask: are we talking about betrayal? Lost love? Redemption? Perhaps all three.
I can’t afford to bring any love with me on the bus. Just look at me like that again and you’ll see. We line up as if. We sit quietly as if.
(from “This Life is Eating Me Alive”)
Pithy, pungent, and direct, J-T Kelly’s poems deliver a view into the profound as it is found in the quotidian, even the banal. House painters are compared to Caravaggio, in “Art History,” a poem mostly about the art of house painting and the mystery of drunkenness—as well as the appropriate saints.
In Kelly’s chapbook, vignettes about college life are interspersed with love poems and stories of a marriage, of griefs, travels, formative experiences, and strong opinions—all crafted with a deft touch and alive on the page, and told with humor – “I have turned the machine that babbles / to face the machine that archives everything” (“Keeping House”) – and a ferocious understated severity – “…Seventeen / seconds–that’s how much time / a driver should get between a sign / and the thing signified. Ideally. / Often it is less” (“Crossing”).
Mid-collection, two gorgeous sonnets face each other. The first, “Christmas Village,” evokes the scalding pain of a holy day turned plastic with consumer displays to the point of sickness and identification of one’s own well-being with the ability to purchase… what? Implied is the question: who would want what’s on offer in that world? On the facing page, “Squall,” by contrast, reveals a potently tender exchange that bears a loving kindness so abundant it spills over into anguish – the sonnet’s lines conveyed in homely detail, death an unavoided presence. I’d go so far as to say the pairing of these two poems is the heart of the collection. We are visiting that contrast between the falsehoods forced on us by the world and the felt realities of the human soul, the fleshly heart. Fear and its overcoming, generosity and withholding, lasting love and lasting anger all make their voices known.
Another of Kelly’s sonnets, “Strata,” demonstrates direct and uncompromised metaphysics, showing the large and small layers of a fallen world. (Amusingly, this poem faces the previously mentioned “Art History”.)
A sweet delight in Like Now is the generous sprinkling of very short poems. Of these tiny gems the shortest two are only nine words each; the longest is 22. I count eight of these, leaving out two or three that are maybe ten words longer. These micro bites cover much ground, and include at least three love poems (it’s a vague boundary; there are a couple more that might be considered love poems.) Here’s one of those micro love poems, “Love Song From a Marriage”:
I hope you know I love you even though. And I hope you love me even though too.
This is a great example of how leaving out the details can make a poem more powerful by orders of magnitude. Implied here is the thought, “even though… whatever! Anything!” which carries a greater weight than any list of marital grievances. The slight awkwardness in the final line break is sweet, like a bashful person digging a toe into the ground (“gosh”) but, you know, saying the thing anyway.
I think, though, that my favorite micro is the opening poem of the collection, “Unsolicited”:
I don’t like to give advice, but if I have to tell you something, it’s this: Don’t tell me what to do.
I’m not going to go into the poem behind the book’s title. I’ll leave that to you to discover and have opinions about, which I hope you will.
Kyla Houbolt has work in Sublunary Review, Barren, Janus, Juke Joint, Moist, Neologism, Ghost City Review, Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere. Her most recent chapbook, But Then I Thought, is now available from Above / Ground Press.
One of the themes in V.C. Myers’ work is the connectedness of human experience: what happens in Appalachia ripples outward to connect with the experiences of people all over the world. In this new collection, Ophelia, Myers adds temporal and narrative connections between past and present, myth and lived experience, by interspersing erasure poems created out of text from Hamlet (all titled “Ophelia”) with non-erasure poems that take on the experience of sexual predation. Throughout this collection, a horrifying chorus forms: Cassandra, Medusa, Philomela, Ophelia, Lavinia, and others. Every character and speaker adds a me too to the refrain. It doesn’t matter whether these characters are fictional, mythical, or real; their stories reflect a world in which women are punished for the actions of men, and then silenced through often violent means. Before I go any further, I’d like to reiterate my first point, which is that the poems are still widely resonant despite their sharply focused lens. They speak for all manner of beings who can’t speak for themselves: the poor, the disenfranchised, the colonized, the hunted, the marginalized, or the Earth itself.
As in Myers’ previous collection, Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), the poems mix dead seriousness with a dark sense of humor, and by doing so, slice deep. “Labor of Love” puts this trait on full display:
These lines shift from a simple rethinking of a worn-out myth, and then come in with a punchline that seems funny until you realize it’s what many of the perpetrators in this collection of poems would say—She got herself into that mess—as Apollo might have said of Cassandra when she promised herself to him, then reneged. In fact, in many of these stories, mythical and not, a man’s actions bring blame and punishment upon the woman. Women are figuratively turned into rocks, unable to speak or testify. This collection tells their stories.
The erasures in Ophelia’s voice take words spoken by others and appropriate them, erasing Shakespeare and all the characters but Ophelia. Since I follow Myers on social media, I recall some of the compositional journey of this book, and the decision to integrate the Ophelia poems with the other poems. And I am reminded of something Louise Glück said of two of my very different poems during a workshop: They came from the same mind. That seems apt here. I was surprised by how seamlessly many of the erasure poems flowed into and out of the non-erasure poems.
Writers often say that they can’t write about a traumatic event right away–that their voices were taken away by the act of violence, and must be regained. Ophelia is considered to have gone mad when it’s perhaps more accurate to say that no coherent words can convey her experience. If we imagine being in that position, we can also imagine the resonance of lines in another text, when they are about a character who has suffered some of the same slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Erasure poems convey how their author reads and identifies with a text. Erasure is what flares out at us when we’re reading. Erasure is a way to have a voice because no speaking is involved. The silences tell the story.
The first non-Ophelia poem, “Papier-mâché,” sounds, in voice and content, as though it could have been spoken by Ophelia. It begins, “I befriended the red paper wasps / flying around my garden. I sang / as they circled me” (17). By the poem’s end, the book’s central trauma emerges:
The nest
cocooned my throat so I couldn’t
breathe, sealed my mouth so I couldn’t
scream, covered my eyes so I couldn’t
see what too much trust made of me.
This is Myers wielding sound and line break with devastating accuracy, the couldn’ts yanking on the reader’s throat to force them to feel what the speaker feels. couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t.
I appreciate Myers’ tendency to alternate between heady linguistic acrobatics and blunt, plain-spoken confessionalism. The pattern reminds us that this poet, capable of elevated language, also has waded through some dirt in life. Yet these moments, too, contain the incantatory, as in these lines from “greenhouse, glasshouse, it’s all the same & broken,” a poem about the ways past trauma manifests as present-day issues in the body:
Ophelia’s poetic mode is a departure from the modes of the last collection, Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot, though both collections deal in the autobiographical and confessional. There is more formal reach and attention to line break in Ophelia, a development perhaps brought on by working with erasure, which has so much to do with how words appear on the page.
Despite its inherent limitations, Myers manages to wrest erasure into the incantatory rhythms of the non-Ophelia poems, while also retaining the atmosphere of the original text. The Ophelia poem on p. 24 begins:
and a moment later: “enter ghost,” which, in this collection, serves as a metaphor for the appearance of traumatic memory. Enter ghost.
But then the poem builds to:
The last four lines can be read left to right, then down (your fate this body called) or downward first (your fate called this body), giving two different but accurate meanings. Erasure convention is to preserve the words where they were on the page in the original text, but with a text like Hamlet there is no standardized page layout, or even a definitive text, so Myers’ layout doesn’t need to adhere to any “original.” Instead, it can be flexible to accommodate different readings.
Myers’ erasures also emphasize the repetitions that are buried when the full text of the play is present, as in the Ophelia poem on p. 48:
These poems, Ophelias and not, capture the experience of women, how their voices are unheard, and how their lives are fraught with constant and daily dangers that the women themselves do not invite.
In Greek drama, the chorus comments on the action with a unified voice, rather than as individual voices. Myers has created a collection of poems that is both a chorus, speaking in unison, but also individual voices telling their stories. The function is the same as in a theatrical production: the chorus warns, makes sense of, reacts. It also serves as a reflection of the world—in this case a world of many, many women who have been objectified, used as pawns, or subjugated to male desire. Relationships with men are portrayed as dangerous in their unpredictability, the way they can turn to madness, as Hamlet does in the play.
In Ophelia, Myers has reworked the idea of the chorus, giving each voice its moment, using repetition and incantation to force the world to hear—or, finally, to listen.
J.D. Ho holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin. J.D.’s work has appeared in the Georgia Review,Missouri Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere.
Moist Poetry Journal 