Mad Poet of the Year - Bill Van Buskirk

August 25, 2025 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Bill Van Buskirk serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2025.

NUDE BEACH

I sing the body electric.
Walt Whitman

I had just buried a wife and wasn’t good at parties
but Chris and Fiona said I just had to get out.
I was terrified—the thought of all those bodies—
hot, swarming, close—would I have an erection
in front of all those people? Would I die
of embarrassment?

At first it was a blur of body parts and blemishes—
a bombardment coming at me all at once—
too much for any metaphor—what to call them—
boobs, teats, pendulous sagging dugs?
Scars, moles, zits, wounds, scabs?
Cocks angling between skinny legs
or nesting in the shadows of enormous flopping bellies?
I was ashamed to look. I felt cruel, said nothing.

I’d never seen such a crowd—so naked, public, so stripped
of commercial allure. I knew no language
as physical as they were—nothing but body
and the beating that it takes—each a map
of suffering and innocence.

But they didn’t care what I was thinking.
They were on the move, out in the open, unadorned
except by yellow-toothed smiles and those eyes—
lustrous sheen of something hidden, blazing in the meat—
and gradually I saw myself in them—brooding hominids
scuffling on our gritty crust of beach and what washed up—
shell, kelp, jellied snacks for gulls—everything gone,
but not quite yet.

And when at last I stripped, I was not alone
but undefended, and suffused with day—
blue unfiltered breeze against my skin,
deep, deep almost all the way to what’s beyond us—
amazed that all that vastness could look
right through me and like what it saw,
right through how I’d tensed against it—

and like a tide I slipped away from the hard island
I’d been starving on, began to taste myself again—
sea, sweat, tears, salt.

I had just buried a wife and wasn’t good at parties/ but Chris and Fiona said I just had to get out: It was the summer of 1991. My wife had died at age 35 a few months previously; and I had decided to spend the summer on the west coast, visiting her friends and family. By mid-August I had worked my way up the coast to Vancouver to visit Chris and Fiona, two old university friends. Like many of the folks I had visited, they were unsure how to act in the presence of my grief. So, they decided to invite me to one of their favorite haunts—a nude beach. Chris, in a moment of awkward bonhomie, said “there’s nothing wrong with you that a nude beach won’t cure.” He was right in a way, but I didn’t find that out until later.

I was terrified—the thought of all those bodies—/hot, swarming, close—would I have an erection/in front of all those people? Would I die/of embarrassment?: I was not enthusiastic about the trip. As an “east coast” person, raised on Irish Catholicism, I had imagined nude beaches as places haunted by self-indulgent sinners. But I had no good reason to refuse, since I was a guest and they were so eager to please. So I went along. Fiona assured me that the beach was “clothing optional” but that wasn’t much comfort.

At first it was a blur of body parts and blemishes—/a bombardment coming at me all at once—/too much for any metaphor—what to call them—/boobs, teats, pendulous sagging dugs? /Scars, moles, zits, wounds, scabs?/Cocks angling between skinny legs/or nesting in the shadows of enormous flopping bellies: My first impression of the scene was a blizzard of body parts. There were about 200 nude people on the beach—too many to avoid. So, I was paralyzed by a conflict between wanting to look away and being unable to. Everywhere I looked there was another nude body. As I was crafting the poem, I wanted to capture this profusion in a catalogue of body parts suggestive, not of erotic allure, but of the body’s aging and suffering.

I was ashamed to look/ felt cruel/ said nothing: Ashamed to look at what I couldn’t ignore, I resented everyone I saw. I was reduced to speechlessness. But after a while, as I sat there, watching and looking away, I settled down and something started to change. Anger and discomfort began to morph into something else—amazement.

I’d never seen such a crowd—so naked, public, so stripped/of commercial allure. I knew no language / as physical as they were –nothing but body/ and the beating that it takes—each a map/ of suffering and innocence: As the crowd confronted me with the fullness of its vulnerable nudity, my image of the body began to change. I began to see it, not as a locus of allure or disgust, but as a harbinger of the brutal truths that all life faces. At this point, empathy comes into the picture. I saw that such flagrant, unglamorous nakedness reveals the body’s truth and its fate. These nude, beat-up bodies reminded me of Gael’s death a few months before. Their unglamorous deformity tugged at my sympathy.

But they didn’t care what I was thinking: But then I realized something else about the crowd. No one else seemed to be thinking heavy thoughts like mine. Here, the poem takes yet another turn. For all my morose ruminations, I notice that these people are not suffering in the here and now! Everyone is laughing and having a good time! As I notice this, I begin to ease into their good humor. I settle into the details of their joy.

They were on the move, out in the open, unadorned/ except by yellow-toothed smiles and those eyes/ (that) lustrous sheen of something hidden, blazing in the meat: I notice, also, that they are not completely unadorned. Teeth and eyes are their adornment. Teeth are yellow, not pearly white, which adds a bit of color and gravity. And that other adornment, eyes, seemed to blaze with a keen enjoyment of the moment. And yet all the light that I could see was mere sheen for a deeper “blazing in the meat” I could not name. Call it glee, bliss, joy, manifesting in the body’s unadorned molten vitality—in a defiance of its vulnerabilities. I got caught up in it despite myself. This joy- in- the- face- of- death drew me in. I found there a liveliness I’d been searching for in my own personal grief. It was as if I’d started to re-join the human race.

and gradually I saw myself in them—brooding hominid(s)/ scuffling on our gritty crust of beach and what washed up—/shell, kelp, jellied snacks for gulls—everything gone,/ but not quite yet: the fragility of the crowd mirrored my own. The empathy was complete. I became a part of them—even fully clothed. This sympatico extended to the non-human world, to the remnants of life scattered on every beach, remnants which highlighted the fact that I was alive. There was only one thing left to do.

And when at last I stripped, I was not alone/ but undefended, and suffused with day: At last I joined them in an act that was very different from my experience at the beginning of the poem. I was neither embarrassed nor aroused, but united with something much greater than myself—Eros joined by Cosmos? I was surprised to find myself nestled in a great gentleness indistinguishable from all that was happening in that sunny day. Nature, the elements, weather (and gods?) were gentle with me. Fellow-feeling connected me to the revelers, to the remnants of dead creatures on the beach, and to an intuition of a divine being suffused in it all (blue unfiltered breeze against my skin). Unfiltered by clothes, the gentle breeze took on a vibrancy, a color—of sea and sky, a blue that is both vast and deep.

deep, deep almost all the way to what’s beyond us—amazed that all that vastness could look right through me and like what it saw,/ right through how I’d tensed against it: And so our naked humanness connects us to life, death, human, animal, and cosmos in a vast intimacy that evokes an intuition of a deity. So on that trip to the beach, I found a beginning and an end of grief in a savoring of humanity in all its naked vastness and dimension. And finally…

like a tide I slipped away from the hard island/ I’d been starving on, began to taste myself again—/ sea, sweat, tears, salt.

Bill Van Buskirk’s poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Mad Poets’ Review and many others. His chapbook, Everything that’s Fragile is Important, received honorable mention in the Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook contest sponsored by the Comstock Review (2007). His book, This Wild Joy that Thrills Outside the Law, won the Joie de vivre contest sponsored by the Mad Poets’ Review. (2010). His latest book is The Poet’s Pocket Guide to Steady Employment (2023).

Review of Human Rights: Elegies for Victims of State-Sponsored Violence

July 23, 2025 Brooke Palma

Human Rights: Elegies for Victims of State-Sponsored Violence

Moonstone Press

$20.00

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

The collection, Human Rights: Elegies for Victims of State-Sponsored Violence, skillfully curated by editor, Helen Zeidman, is not easy reading, but rather essential reading. It is strident; it pulls no punches. True to Moonstone ethos, this collection calls from poets from all backgrounds, experiences, and geographic locations to respond to the open-ended prompt: Human Rights Day 2024. From the website, “Seventy-five years ago, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that declares ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’” As my wont when reviewing other anthologies, I will refrain from reviewing anyone I know personally from the poetry community. Please note this collection thoughtfully examines state-sponsored violence and its devastating impact. I thought it was important to review, but I want to make sure people reading this review are aware of its content.

Although many of these poems refer to US government-sponsored violence, some of these poems focus on human rights violations in other parts of the world, including the succinct, powerful poem, titled “Felani Khutan was left on a fence by the India-Bangladesh Border Police for 5 hours before her body was taken down and returned to her family” by Sonia Aggaral. The stark poem begins

                        Her legs wrapped in blue pants, splayed
                        across barbed wire and raw
                        wood for hours with her head hanging
                        below her,

The words are direct, simple perhaps but graphic. This poem gives the reader a lucid glimpse into the horror of the violence enacted against Felani. She “looks back” to where the “wildflowers grow.” The wildflowers are “picked…by children/and brought to parents, who hide/ the newspaper.” The poem ends hauntingly with “this girl, bride to be…waiting to be released/ from metal and caught, shot/ left to grow stiff with the night.”

This volume contains several poems examining the horrifying situation of police violence against Black people in the United States. These poems demand our attention. Two poems that I want to highlight nclude “Trix” by Sam Hendrian and “#autismawareness” by Aurora McKee. “Trix” uses a strong narrative and a rhyme scheme to illustrate the unjustness of policing of Black men in particular. The man

Got through the self-checkout
with relative ease;
threw the receipt right out,
was too stressed to track fees.

He is stopped by two policemen who assumed he did not pay.

                        Demanded he show proof;
                        that he hadn’t stolen anything;
                        he hoped it was a spoof
                        of a pre-60s sort of thing.

The situation escalates and sadly deteriorates into violence: “put a bullet through his face.” Hendrian ends the poem

                        The Trix fell out of the bag
                        alongside a junior hair comb
                        while his family’s eyes started to sag;
                        how late would he be coming home?

“#autism awareness” was written in remembrance of the police shooting of Charles Kinsey, a behavioral therapist who was assisting a patient:

                        There’s a rainbow police van on the streets of miami
                        bright colors like the free candy strangers offer, tempting
                        mouthwatering, adorned with puzzle pieces, offering
                        neatness, order, a solution, #autism awareness…”

McKee counters, “did you think we’d forgotten?/ the Black social worker shot besides his autistic patient.” The poem continues in tightly wound stanzas about to unwind and explode with righteous anger: “gunfire the only stim allowed around/ here…precious autistic bodies,/ precious disabled bodies, precious Black bodies.” This poem encapsulates the rage many Americans experience and the duplicity often inherent in law enforcement who are there to protect the peace.

The last poem I will explore examines the situation for LGBTQ people in the United States. “Firestarters” by Ace Howlen is a whirlwind of LGBT political history from

                        There were Ariston, Baker Street, and Turkish Baths:
                        those private/public bathhouses at the century’s turn,
                        where men could be men (or women) until the Scare,
                        a legal campaign claiming all gays were insane.

The internal rhyme continues with the lines “Deemed deviants and perverts, both politician and police/ incite/inspire suppression, crushing without question. I think for this collection I would like to have the final word. I do want to recommend this collection. It is stirring and necessary in these times. I hope Human Rights: Elegies for Victims of State-Sponsored Violence inspires us all of us you can to fight on, and like so many poems in this collection, “Firestarter” ends in a helpful and necessary defiance:

                        So when we outline their bodies in chalk
                        we dance a fury, chanting their names
                        before igniting the flames, light them so
                        bright neither police nor priest can escape
                        our thoughts and prayers.

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

Mad Poet of the Year - Bill Van Buskirk

July 16, 2025 Brooke Palma

SURF MUSIC

To be alive!
Not the carcass but the spark
I know this is crudely put but
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?
Gregory Orr

Crackling bonfires burn for us up and down the beach.
These strange blazing tongues flex and stretch up toward
an infinite indifference that kills them at the height
of their telling. What are they trying to say?

Out there, words turn foreign and fantastic:
black holes, anti-matter, a universe running
away from itself. When is a light year? Where?
Words break like dried sticks against this immensity,
and we can’t think our way to space
where spark snaps into darkness.

Down here our fire’s burned out almost. We stare
at how the coals contain their flames—
liquid, flickering, shifting, shadowed—
embers holding fast to what consumes them.

In a breath from out of midnight, this fierce union
of death and beauty flares to lick the faces
of the future—sons and daughters of my hosts—
doe-eyed, dumb as oxen around their parents
but dry kindling for starlight.

Like an old grandpa I wrap myself in sweats and blankets,
grow still and fantastic, begin my little wearing away
into a hollow self—empty, happy, echoing all that’s lost
and unremembered as constellations careen overhead
and eternal codes, older than dreaming, explode out
to the edge of here where imagination gutters into night.

These sons and daughters—soon they’ll slip away
from us into the muscular current of their own stories;
even now they wander into moonlit surf
where old gods mutter just out of earshot
and lifetimes burst into myth—
molten, drifting, faster than time.Is this what living is?

Tinderbox bodies, starlight’s transit, conflagrations
fed with whatever comes to hand?
Is this what dying is?

And to know all this in a lucky moment!
Time, space, mythos rippling just beyond will…

It is so still out here!

It is so still out here!

It was summer of 1991. My wife, Gael Mathews, had just died of cancer at age 35. As a way of staying close to her, I spent that summer on the west coast where she grew up and went to college. In being with her family and friends, I could, in a way that is hard to explain, stay in touch with her. This intimacy was especially strong one night in the middle of July, when a group of about twenty friends and family went to Avila beach near San Luis Obispo. The poem tries to capture the essence of that evening when it seemed that earth, air, fire, water, the living and the dead were together in one choir, singing. The epigraph is by Gregory Orr, an arch-celebrant of beauty-at-the-edge-of-life-and-death. What music is he talking about? It’s not clear, can’t quite be heard. It’s as if the poet hears it but we can’t. He invites us into it anyway. He invites us to dance.

Crackling bonfires burn for us up and down the beach: The first thing that occurs to me when I remember that night is the line of bonfires along the beach. The image isn’t just visual, but aural too. I imagined a chorus of sea, stars, and wind echoing a hymn to our ancestral dead—that vast world that Gael had passed into. So, how to bring that line of bonfires into the poem? What was their music? Is there a word that might capture their contribution to the oratorio? I experimented with a number of verbs before I hit on “crackling”—the kind of music given out by burning wood—a roaring that a bonfire might make if one were quiet enough to hear it.

These strange blazing tongues flex and stretch up toward /an infinite indifference that kills them at the height/of their telling: What are they trying to say?: I imagined the bonfires as part of an ardent choir, willing its song to reach—what? Where? Heaven? Not exactly. Not on this night. The deity these flames sing to is a universe indifferent to their song. Indifference and incredible vastness merge into an alien presence (mysterious and dangerous at once). It’s as if they sing to millennia of ancestral lineage reaching back to a time before speech. But how can we join the choir? Sing to all this vastness? We have to try, even if our language is totally inadequate. I think the bonfire-tongues mirror our own longing to belong in this universe, to find our song in it, to be ennobled by it.

Out there, words turn foreign and fantastic: /black holes, anti-matter, a universe running/away from itself. When is a light year? Where? /Words break like dried sticks against this immensity,/and we can’t think our way to space /where spark snaps into darkness: the poem starts with the sheer difficulty of the project. To name this space in the terms of our daily speech, to find a connection to it in words, is clearly impossible. Try as we might, the universe defies our attempts to name it, to address it. The very words we use are suffused with paradox. It’s as if the grand display does violence to the very language we would use to speak of it. Time and space themselves are confounded, and we are left with images that defy our imaginations. This universe, so vast, we so small—how can we find a place in it?

Down here our fire’s burned out almost. We stare/at how the coals contain their flames: This is where the earth befriends us. The bonfires, extinguishing themselves, mirror both our personal fates and the astral fires which will burn out over eons (Google says that our sun will “burn out” in about five billion years). In staring at the coals as they soften and lose their boundaries, we see something of ourselves—we too are bodies holding form and flame. Just as our dead have lost their bodily form, so also the suns will burn out. I tried to reflect this in the line—liquid, flickering, shifting, shadowed—words that merge at the level of rhyme and assonance. Thus, the great irony: life shapes us and consumes us. Yet we hold fast for something called “dear life.” Can we find a tentative form in what we love?

In a breath from out of midnight, this fierce union/of death and beauty flares to lick the faces/ of the future—sons and daughters of my hosts—/doe-eyed, dumb as oxen around their parents/ but dry kindling for starlight. At this point the poem moves away from the cosmic to embrace our heirs. Several of the people in our little group—Gael’s relatives and friends—have adolescent children who are present in the scene. Through them, our fragile humanity is brought into the poem’s frame. The flames, that illuminate and obliterate at once, flare to lick their faces. These sons and daughters, who are already beginning to leave us, will inherit the same spark, the same fire that births our tenuous kinship with the mysterious heat of stars.

Like an old grandpa I wrap myself in sweats and blankets, /grow still and fantastic, begin my wearing away/ into a hollow self—empty, happy, echoing all that’s lost/and unremembered as constellations careen overhead/ and eternal codes older than dreaming explode out/to the edge of here, where imagination gutters into night: At this point I put myself in the picture. At age 45, I was probably the oldest person in the group, certainly a lot older than the sons and daughters. I was happy to be there: old, empty and still, to let all the vastness of the evening, and its poem, come to me. I am blessed by it. I recognize the infinitesimal speck I am becoming, a transfiguration that’s beyond my understanding. Yet I am conscious of the energy it engenders. I am alive, in the cosmic spark of all that is “lost and unremembered.” These “eternal codes,” are intimate with me—so far beyond anything I can imagine yet so present in the fading here-and-now. I breathe and pulse in them. I am alive. The constellations “careen.” They are wild and uncontained, incalculable and uncontrolled. Yet they are also intimate—the stuff of dream and image. Their careenings and explodings are happening in us—here and now where imagination gutters (like a flame being quenched?) into night.

These sons and daughters—soon they’ll slip away /from us into the muscular current of their own stories;/even now they wander into moonlit surf/where old gods murmur just out of earshot/and lifetimes explode into myth—molten, drifting faster than time: The sons and daughters return to the poem, but only to complete their separation from us. They are claimed by the same “muscular currents” that long ago claimed us. They are coming into their own stories, dramas in which we’ll play small parts, that will “explode into myths.”

Is this what living is? /Tinderbox bodies, starlight’s transit,/ conflagrations fed with whatever comes to hand?/Is this what dying is? The poem is now rounding into its conclusion. It is a hymn to the mystery and vastness of a universe in which the poet is an intimate participant—ignorant yet aware, infinitesimal yet glowing with starlight. He would join, if only in imagination, the stars in their transit across the night sky; he would feed those fires with whatever fuels he can find on this earth—physical, psychological, astrological, cultural. It is the essence of this participation that it leaves him with two questions: Is this what living is? Is this what dying is?

And to know all this in a lucky moment! /Time, space, mythos rippling just beyond will…/It is so still out here! /It is so still out here!: To know all this, which is in so many ways beyond knowing, is indeed a lucky moment! To sense a universe on the move beyond our wisdom and our will, and to be alive in it! The last line repeats itself, and in this repetition, it intensifies the vast urgency of the poem. This, the poem’s last echo, creates a great void from which the its voice echoes.

Review of Coronation Chicken by Maria Masington

July 2, 2025 Brooke Palma

Coronation Chicken

Maria Masington

$13.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Guest Review by Brooke Palma

Maria Masington’s Coronation Chicken has a humorous title and contains spots of laughter throughout its 52 pages. But don’t let the sense of levity interspersed in its pages fool you; these are serious poems with serious intentions. The poems in Coronation Chicken are odes to women who are frequently told they’re too much: “five-foot-nothing goddesses” with “big mouths painted Cherries in the Snow” who hold “quick tempers, five-and-dime wisdom.” The women in Masington’s poems face life’s difficulties head-on and often with a wry smile.

The sense of narrative in these poems is profound. In telling her stories, Masington’s narrator confesses that she has “always been too loud, a desperate voice, from a long line of noise.” She takes us on journeys through the difficult experiences women face every day in marriage, motherhood, and caregiving. It celebrates the bonds of womanhood, especially friendship, which is clearly vital to the narrator in many of these poems. In “Consigliere,” Masington writes:

Through cancer, financial crises, abusive partners,
career changes, pain-in-the-ass kids, depression,
social injustices, taking parents off life-support,
CEOs and homemakers alike, we change bandages,
bail water out of basements, do background checks
on sons-in-laws.

The women in Coronation Chicken are family, friends, and frenemies (in one poem, at least).

In addition to the profound sense of narrative what is most striking in these poems is the sublime imagery Masington relies upon to tell her stories, especially imagery of the natural world. She brings us “sharp and unrelenting shards of clam, oyster, and eggshells”, “a violet sky”, and in describing the wild horses of Chincoteague Island, “pregnant mares, bachelor bands, female-led harems of caramel, chocolate, and cream.” These are only a few of the beautiful and sometimes haunting images throughout the book.

The book also leans in on ekphrasis in a stirring manner, drawing emotional connections to various types of art. The poems reference classical sculpture, other written works, and renowned writers like Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. Through these references, Masington sparks interesting conversations with the past and the lessons art teaches us.

While the poems this collection offers are nothing short of delicious, I can’t say the same for the dish the collection takes its name from. Coronation Chicken is “basically chicken salad. No pomp, no circumstance, just meat, apricots, mayonnaise, served cold” – essentially, a letdown. This image of Coronation Chicken as a disappointment (in a poem about postpartum depression, no less) continues throughout the book, but Masington’s narrator shows us that despite life’s disappointments, it’s up to us to “unspool from our separate bobbins and, for a split-second, weave together a lifeline.” You should give it a taste for yourself.

Brooke Palma (she/her) grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Many of her poems focus on the connections between culture and identity and finding beauty in the everyday. Her work has been published in The Mad Poets’ Review, Moonstone Arts, Toho Journal, and E-Verse Radio (online). Her chapbook, Conversations Unfinished, was published by The Moonstone Press in August 2019. She serves as Vice President/Treasurer for the Mad Poets Society.

Mad Poet of the Year - Bill Van Buskirk

June 23, 2025 Brooke Palma

SPELL FOR ENCHANTING AN AUDIENCE
In the rustle of our gathering
I see myself in you, feel

the hard throb buried in my neck,
listen for yours. This syncopated silence,

rising from our bodies like a scent,
thickens in the ear as the house lights dim.

Tonight, we meet as shadows, seek
to find ourselves in something grand,

feel our way to a common promontory,
a shared abyss—closer than breathing,

fading like echo. Your gaze
fixes me, blinds me, makes me real—

here, we find our stake in darkness,
lose ourselves in all we chant about:

stars that burn through time whether or not we name them,

song-wrought faun let slipped in the mystery of our common air,

the body’s ceaseless cry for the myth of its death.

For these we tear our careful minds
to shreds, dissolve into an evening,

ripple, vibrate as our thousand-year-old
language rises up—

incarnate, muscular, dangling
back into the black hatchery of myth…

tentacle, root, tail,
curl, grope, grasp
old woman in the woods begins to chant—
new moon, old moon, blood on fire!

The space between us opens up—rushing wind…

This poem is not about a spell. This poem is a spell (or tries to be). It relies on poetry’s capacity to mesmerize, hypnotize, transport—to draw poet and listeners into a magical world of talk that lies outside their day-jobs. Its ambition is to evoke a shared trance that alters the senses and scrambles the mind.

In the rustle of our gathering: The poem starts out with the audience arriving in the theatre and the poet on stage. Immediately, a kind of sense-play kicks into gear. The poet hears their rustle, and he sees himself in it. For him this is not just any audience. It is a kind of mirror or echo chamber in which he sees himself, hears and feels his heartthrob, and listens for the heartthrob of the audience. He aspires to a most intimate connection—to join these new arrivals in the music of the beating heart.

This syncopated silence rises from our bodies like a scent/ thickens in the ear as the house lights dim. This is the poem’s first impossibility, the first of many to follow. The poet, in fact, cannot see the collective heartbeat of the audience. He certainly cannot hear it. Neither can he smell it. It does not actually touch his ear. But through its diction—the throb in the neck, the syncopation of silence, and its thickening in the ear—the poem transforms physical senses into imaginary presences. If the magic is working, if the presences it evokes are immanent enough, the poem will draw the audience into a trancelike (hallucinatory?) moment that opens it into a heightened sense of life. Thus, the mere moment becomes more than itself. It becomes a spell that joins reader and poet in a way that is imagined, felt, embodied, real—and (perhaps) impossible.

So, the poem takes aim at something big. As the reader continues on, perhaps a doubt arises. Perhaps this poem is a strange duck that makes no sense beyond its quacking. But to doubt is better than to reject. It will be a test of the poem’s strength if it can pull the reader more deeply into itself, into a mind state lost to a culture that rushes past the dreams and possibilities inherent in its poems.

Tonight we meet as shadows: The poem’s next job is to define the audience as a community, to instigate a meeting that’s beyond a mere gathering of bodies. It is a gathering of seekers who have come to the reading to find new versions of themselves, souls maybe, or shadows. And in this meeting, there is a common purpose—we seek to find ourselves in something grand. But this meeting, this transit into shadow, is not without risk. Participants are feeling their way to a common promontory, a cliff that overlooks an abyss. Audience and poet share this risk—of falling over the edge of who they think they are. Yet this too is part of their intimacy. It is closer than breathing. It fades like echo. It is embodied yet out of reach.

Your gaze fixes me, blinds me, makes me real: Here the poet testifies to the poem’s power. It takes hold of him. Its trance changes him as well as the audience. He takes shape in their gaze. It fixes him, blinds him. It is only in their gaze that he can be real, that he can be the poet he longs to be. Together then, audience and poet find their stake in darkness—lose themselves in a common 3-fold chant: stars that burn through time, song-wrought faun, body’s ceaseless cry.

For these we tear our careful minds to shreds: Poet and audience cherish this chant. It provides a reason to tear their careful minds to shreds. Together, they dissolve into an evening. This dilution is part of a joint performance. Poet and audience are claimed by the mystery embedded in a thousand-year-old-language that is incarnate, muscular, dangling back into the black hatchery of myth. In the end there is no poet, no audience—they have de-evolved into animal gesture and chant (tentacle, root, tail / curl, grope, grasp).

So who is speaking? Somewhere there is an old woman (a witch?). There is always a question when it comes to witches—good witch? Bad witch? The poem does not explain. Yet its passion carries us into new territory where risk and mystery hover in the space between its lines. And in the end, it comes back to the present moment with a thud. There is, once again, only poet and audience, and the space between them—rushing wind. The spell is cast. The performance begins.

Review of Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno

June 11, 2025 Brooke Palma

Book of Mutter

Kate Zambreno

$14.93

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

We all house ghosts that wave at us when we least expect them. We all harbor grief that wears us down when we are least prepared to get up and move forward. We all co-exist with inner voices that gnaw at us when we are least ready to talk. We all do. But we don’t all find ways to write to and through the games those ghosts, grief, and gnawing can play.

Kate Zambreno has, and in Book of Mutter, Zambreno documents both process and pain alongside memory and the mundane. Zambreno’s mother is the text’s centerpiece, one of both expulsion and resurrection, exorcism and revisionism, and decades in the making. The work and its collection of fragments and memories penned as a sort of meditation is a masterpiece.

Zambreno has not only produced a method for making sense of the haunting longevity of grief but has also produced a work of uncategorizable possibility. Writing across and within genres– non-fiction, memoir, creative non-fiction, poetry, and prose, Zambreno defies classification and defines the power of writing as a tool to process and promote growth.

Written for a mother who persists at the intersection of memory, remembering, and a thirst for another tomorrow, Zambreno writes life into the page of Book of Mutter: “Over the decade I’ve attempted to sculpt this book. It’s not malleable enough.”

The work is of memory and moments. Of mothers and hung laundry. Of dirty laundry and unfamiliar habitats. Of homes and questions that haunt. The work traverses the uncanny ability of a mind to recreate, reimagine, and reconstruct history. Zambreno is honest about the flexibility and potential for fabrication when rummaging in memories or historical records. Zambreno is just as honest about the known pain of loss and the truth that grief haunts. The pieces shape, and are shaped of, the spiraling thoughts, journeys, and searches that so often accompany loss in layers of longing and asymmetrical ways of being. The pieces are as unique as the grieving process is personal and as unifying as grief is universal.

Threaded through the work is the story of Zambreno’s mother— her life, illness and ultimate passing. Other threads include that of Henry Darger and Louise Bourgeois. The threads offer a cohesive narrative and a reminder of the universality of questions of identity, grief, and memory especially when grounded in loving and longing. Zambreno writes with the confidence of a skilled memoirist, the lyricism of a potent poet, and the piercing intelligence and breadth of a well-read scholar. References fill the pages– from Lady Bird’s journal to Anne Carson’s essay on “The Gender of Sound” and from Virginia Woolf’s embrace of shadows to Mary Todd Lincoln’s bed during her stay in a sanatorium.

Combined with Zambreno’s generous wonderings, observations, and meditations, the work is just as likely to inspire research into the past, both personal and historical, as it is to make space for a fresh approach on the future – “Don’t look back or else you will be consumed”.

This book is for anyone who has looked back and been consumed. This book is also for anyone who comes from somewhere and from someone. Zambreno writes “towards” her mother and for everyone who has, had, or is (multiple tenses duly noted) a mother:“my mother my sworn enemy my first love”.

Just as grief gnaws long after a person’s passing, so too do the memories and the material in its many forms. Zambreno also penned Appendix Project– a companion text of lectures, talks, and essays which offer yet more to explore. No matter to what histories and to where the collection “meditations on grief cut up into fragments” takes you, dear reader, whether your childhood home, the cancelled Sweet Sixteen party of your own mother, or a mantle of collected women, the journey, with Zambreno’s powerful prose as your guide, will be well worth the time spent.

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.

Mad Poet of the Year - Bill Van Buskirk

May 26, 2025 Brooke Palma

LULLABY
Before our ears filled up with wax,
before we began to shadowbox
for the right to exist
in one another’s minds,
there was a song

that we could almost hear
that lingered in the closet,
with your hanging suits.
Last night, after twenty years,
it drifted out at me
like an old ghost riding
a whiff of camphor.

It was the hymn a young father hums,
surprised at the first of many deaths
endured for his sons.
You did not know the words,
just chose a tie,
slipped the knot against your throat

and crooned,

“It’s early boys,
go back to sleep.”

And we did.

For most of my life, my relationship to my father was characterized by admiration on the one hand (he was a champion athlete, running marathons into his sixties), and resentment on the other (He was often harsh and judgmental.) I’ve lately appreciated that I grew up in a world quite different than his. His childhood was blighted by the influenza epidemic (his mother died when he was four years old), the Great Depression, and a world war. Mine was a world where safety could be taken for granted, a sheltered world that he had largely built (but for which I never gave him credit). The gulf between us was almost unbridgeable—an exercise in “shadowboxing for the right to exist in one another’s minds.” Unfortunately, he died before we could talk about any of this.

Once I started writing poems, however, a different version of who he was began to show up. It was as if a great tenderness that he kept hidden emerged in the writing process. Or maybe it was that I did not want to carry a burden of resentment into old age. In any case, our “relationship” began to change as the poems emerged.

“Lullaby” is an account of one of my earliest memories. It emerged about twenty years after his death during a time when my siblings and I were helping my mother move out of the house where we grew up. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that house was about to become a place of memory and dream, whose roots went back to a time of innocence before the shadowboxing began.

I was cleaning out his closet which was just outside our bedroom. It was still redolent of mothballs (camphor) which triggered an image of a time when my brother and I were still quite little and he was our hero, as yet untouched by the corporate world that he was about to enter.

Review of Long Island Sad Poems

May 19, 2025 Brooke Palma

Long Island Sad Poems

Serotonin Press

$12.95

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

The fact that industrious poet and literary citizen, Jane-Rebecca Cannarella, has a new poetry collection out titled Long Island Sad Poems is great news for fans of her poetry. And, to be quite frank, everyone should be fans of her poetry. It is surreal yet relatable, heartbreakingly sad while at the same time defiantly funny. In other words, her poems are an open rather than a closed door. This title is a non-classifiable, emotional, culinary fantasia that I will endeavor to do justice to in my words below.

Many of these poems in this book either take place during or reflect back on the narrator’s seemingly endless Long Island summers where she begins to learn about life—the agonies and the ecstasies, if you will allow me to quote one of my favorite novels. The first poem, “Boulder” discusses those formative moments of isolation that children often experience, and how that solitude can help to create a creativity as formidable as Cannarella’s:

The building of a boulder half covered
at high tide, I remembered how the cool
kids would climb them, and I see

                        the scrambling of their bodies
                       as they reach the top to seat themselves:
                        tangled hair kings in my memory.

You can feel the longing to become part of the cool kids, but also a longing to be separate from them. In this poem, you start to become one with the beach as the narrator becomes one with the boulder. Cannarella ends this exquisite poem with the lines: “I saw myself not just watching the Sound/while standing on the brick backs of red rocks/but becoming the boulder.”

Loss is a throughline in this collection, suggested by the title. This loss concerns not just actual people who have died, but also a loss of innocence and the child’s love of the self. In “The Jelly Inside Doughnuts,” Cannarella touches upon on these losses:

                        This Easter, my dad got doughnuts
                        and told me Pop’s favorite was jelly—
                        gone forever ago.
                        Time stretches backwards
                        with a gemstone, the ingredient of travel—
                        an archaeologist’s discovery
                        of my favorite person,
                        somewhere resting in a field I’ve never been.

It takes a poet of Cannarella’s sensitivity to use food, literally as a time machine, to take you back to those dearly departed loved ones. Memories of her Pop and her former childhood self occur as the poem ends with “My cheeks are a child’s again,/covered with jam.” As I grow further into middle age, I learn few things connect you with more people, past or present, than food.

As indicated in the previous paragraph, food is as important to this collection as it is important to human connection. How often do we bond with each other over favorite foods, recipes, and restaurants? One poem where food serves as the invitation to the reader is “In the Absence of Sugar, We Used Syrup.” For so many of us when we are starting out in our twenties our diets are often limited by our funds. In this poem, the narrator and her roommate, Cassie,

                        lived in the red-wine-stained
                        apartment, alongside a jug of Carlo Rossi,
                        a VCR, cans of Campbell’s soup,
                        and a white fridge filled with old food
                        from the previous tenant.

Cassie and the narrator “grabbed what we could from/sad jobs” since “Necessity makes choices for you.” The “dusty groceries” were indeed “treasures found before cabinet cleanouts.” I think there are very few people who could not relate to this poem and its celebration of the bittersweet serendipity that can be found even with sad jobs or low funds. Like any great poet, Cannarella telescopes out from one such treasure “a bottle of Vermont maple syrup,/was our substitute for sweetness” to

Loss comes with adulthood—a lack
of sugar, security, my grandfather,
I looked at my hands, and at Cassie’s,
warmed by secondhand mugs,
and even within the absence, I saw God.

There are several moments, several verses, where you get an approximate of God, or at least otherworldly versifying, in Cannarella’s Long Island Sad Poems. Of course, many of the poems are sad, but in that conversely uplifting way. Cannarella shares the narrator’s sadness to forge connection with people, to make them feel they are not alone. In an era where poetry can often feel mysterious or indecipherable or overly solipsistic, I find it refreshing to read Jane-Rebecca Cannarella’s poems as an invitation to life experience, a hand holding as you rediscover your own joys and losses, your own friendships and solitudes. Perhaps, Cannarella shares the most warm and welcoming invitation of all, a shared feast of words.

Review of Gratitude List (Jarrett Moseley) and The Heretic’s Bestiary (L. Danzis)

April 16, 2025 Brooke Palma

Gratitude List (Jarrett Moseley) & The Heretic’s Bestiary (L. Danzis)

Bull City Press

You can purchase a copies here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

There’s a saying, when you give someone an inch, they’ll take a mile (with origins in a proverb found in John Heywood's 1546 collection, “Give him an inch and he'll take an ell,” – the use of mile dates to approximately 1900). While I’m not typically a fan of clichés (especially when writing about writing), when it comes to the Bull City Press INCH series, I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment– to read one INCH is to wish to read another.

Recently, I took more than an inch (in the context of reading poetry, I hope all readers can forgive me) and had the good fortune to read two Bull City Press INCH publications. After reading (and rereading both, because they’re that good), I couldn’t decide which to review. Hoping readers may enjoy the collections just as much as I did, I share both in this review.

The first, Jarrett Moseley’s Gratitude List (INCH #58), is a tender and deeply personal work that explores the human connections that make for a world worth knowing– a world worthy of recovery and reconciliation. Of healing and helping. Of community and care for one another. The collection portrays the day-to-day experiences of recovery from addiction and, while sharing so generously of the poems’ subjects, helps us all grow closer to personal truths and to those, sometimes ourselves, sometimes others, who know us best.

Gratitude List is a celebration of the power and bonds of friendship, of everyday moments– from phone calls with Luis (“The Last Drop”) to “long kisses on the nose” and a “loud happy quiet” (“My Life In Robes”), and of healing. It’s a journey as much as a pause in the everyday. Across themes of grief, recovery, and loss, there are powerful and painfully poignant threads of hope and resiliency. Friendship is celebrated, and acceptance and tenderness take on starring roles. The interconnected prose pieces track stories of recovery and a rebirth, of sorts, all while centering the lives of a group of friends. Poems take on some of life’s most challenging moments – relapse, loss, meet-ups calendarized by funeral dates and while the themes are heavy–

“I tell Luis the smallest unit of being is heartache” –

(“After I’m Picked Up From The Hospital”)

“I don’t know how to tell her–
whenever I write her into a poem,
people think she’s dying.
They have it reversed.” – (“A Possible Exit”)

the collection is tenderness at its finest. The collection was appropriately published in Spring (2024) as, despite the seriousness of the topics, it’s an ultimately hopeful work that centers and celebrates community, connection, rebirth, renewal, and “rehumanization” (Rehumanization Litany, 3). Moseley writes with a fierce honesty and a tremendous capacity to capture the human condition and the power of connection. Grounded in friendship and fortitude, the collection will linger in the reader’s thoughts long after the INCH’s final page is reached.

The second INCH (I took it and I’m glad I did), The Heretic’s Bestiary by L. Danzis, is a collection of seven personal essays that take readers on a journey of many miles all within the span of seventeen pages. INCH #61 (Fall 2024) is as mighty as it is meditative. From “two-lane Virginia road[s]” (Heavenly Bodies, 5) to church parking lots to Crystal Coast marshes (Heeding the Call, 14), from Easter to Christmas, and then again, the collection turns years into moments. It’s a celebration of “rebirth and redemption” (A New Life, 16) and the infinite and often unexpected joys of evolving (17) as much as a journey of discovery and a meditation on found meaning, whether by accident (a bumble bee unexpectedly in the path of an oncoming step) or by intent (a conversation, long procrastinated, on naming).

“Filled with birdsong” , “the waning crescent of sun, the winking eye of the divine”, and Signs of Spring, the essays braid nature and nurture, today and yesterday, known names and unknown nuances, labels and longing, what we know and what we imagine, through gorgeous imagery and poignant prose. The collection offers the gift of meditation, reimagination, and lessons grounded in gorgeous language laced at the intersection of imagery, nature, and nurture.

“Let those who want to understand your call take the time to learn it”

(“Heeding The Call”)

INCH #61 maintains a sense of awe when looking at the world– from the shedding skin of snakes and seasons, to lilies and introverted bumblebees, all while grappling with the many ways in which a natural propensity for awe can be shadowed by the realities of the sometimes intentional, sometimes arbitrary nature of naming, arbitrary norms, and what it means to be seen.

“On Accepting the Offered Hand”, essay V in the collection, is an appropriate phrasing for the work as a whole - I hope readers will accept the offering that is The Heretic’s Bestiary and journey with the author through questions that explore the intersection of nature, nurture, and the natural curiosity of life - as it evolves and unfolds.

With the calendar calling for new beginnings, there’s no better time to start a fresh book, and these INCH collections are perfect pairings. Engaging with patterns, roots, and new beginnings, both deliver far more than their weight and dimensions, all with an eye towards growth, reimagination, and rebirth. Put them in your pocket and add an inch (or mile) to your step.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Alma Cole Pesiri

April 14, 2025 Brooke Palma

Ghosts of Poems
by Alma Cole Pesiri

Stanzas enjoy lying there
often for years
dusty and dog-eared
fragments of memories
that elude me

These aged poems jump out and choke me
moving easily through
walls of time

with eerie sighs
causing shivers to my soul

No matter that I ignore them
they speak crooked words
spout strange ideas
nearly-dead thoughts
I no longer recognize

Some of these specters can be resurrected
burnished to shining clarity
while others will stay on their yellowed paper
stuffed into drawers
forever forgotten

What called you to poetry as an art form and what keeps you coming back to it?
Extreme shyness kept so much of me inside. Actually started writing things I didn’t have the nerve to tell someone. Then thoughts began to rhyme and some poems became 3- dimensional. Writing “Vine of Lies” about a person who was a mean liar, I decided to paste a string ‘vine’ with little leaves on it. Later came notes on a balance scale with love on the ‘heavy’ side. Poetry lets me be anyone I want to!

Your poems often use South Jersey as a backdrop. What do you find special about South Jersey?
South Jersey gal - grew up on a street that literally had the Delaware River as our front yard. We lived in the safety of children roaming all over the neighborhood, gathering driftwood for evening fires on the beach. We swam, climbed trees, picked apples and peaches across the street – walked in groups to the roller skating rink and amusement park. The simpler times often become my poems.

What is your process like? How do you get from all possible blank page to finished piece?
The title Words Can Say Anything has been rattling around in my brain as long as I can remember. I enjoy making words dance on the paper. Have over 900 poems (not all for public consumption.) Being published in numerous chapbooks, newspapers and magazines was exciting, but every poet dreams of their own book.

What is your process like? How do you get from all possible blank page to finished piece?
Writing usually starts with pen and paper, and gets to the computer if it wants to. Every tree has a personality! Sometimes a word, an animal, a house will demand to show up on paper. I’ve been extremely lucky to attend writing workshops with incredible leaders who share noted poets and suggest prompts. We write what touches us from that; some pieces might grow, and some never get past the birthing stage.

The poems in Words Can Say Anything view their subjects from many lenses and mirror images. What is your strategy for pushing past binaries and coming to a place of truth?
The poems I decided on for Words Can Say Anything went through a process of very, very difficult decision making. I could publish a book of tree poems, one of childhood, one of broken hearts, and one of fairy tales. A poem often starts out in a certain vein, and squiggles itself into something I hadn’t seen originally. Another situation that surprises me is when I work from a painting or picture, and two entirely different stories emerge, then merge into one. Hopefully the finished product shows some of my quirky, irrelevant ideas; that’s what I was aiming for.

Where can readers buy your book? Keep up with your writing?
Words Can Say Anything is available from Amazon for $15.00 + shipping. Also, have copies for sale at $14.95 + 5¢ for my autograph in my signature purple ink. You can find me on You Tube (Alma Cole Pesiri); some videos from the days at Brenner’s Brew and some from appearances at Pennsville Historical Society.

For Alma Cole Pesiri, poetry has always been a passion – structured, unstructured, rhyming or free verse – it demands to be written. In addition to the printed word, she also creates collage-type visual poems. She had participated in readings and shows in a multitude of venues in South Jersey, as well as Camden, Philadelphia and Arizona. She was a member of “Sightlines 2005” poetry as art/art as poetry – a collaboration of shared works between artists and writers. She also participated in a like program called “See Me – Get My Story” at the Riverfront Renaissance Center in Millville, NJ. She has taught poetry and creative writing (learned at The School of Hard Knocks and numerous workshops with noted poets) to both teens and adults. This is one of her fondest accomplishments. Publications include: Frogpond, Patterson Literary Review, Singles Scene, Haddon House Press – Pick Me Up, Stockton College - A Tour of Poetry Anthology, and many others.

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

March 24, 2025 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.

Skunk
Petunia visits us zigzagging across our common backyard.
She is a waddling old lady, her snout digging for grubs
like a cane testing for solid ground.

It’s two in the afternoon and I marvel at her through my binoculars,
why are you here out in the bright sunlight of day?

I think maybe she’s pregnant
that her shuffling body is carrying her litter down low
like a folded-up apron filled with gathered fruit.

When it’s time for me to go food shopping
I see her in the patch of green near the driveway.
Which of us will give up our ground first?

I am ready to wave my white flag
but it is she who flattens herself into the tall grass.
Is she dead? Or trying to make herself and her scent invisible?

I can relate to playing possum
in this fake it until you make it world
now hidden behind the disguise of masks.

I shimmy past her to start my engine, turn the car around.
In the rear view mirror I furtively see
that she is back on her feet again, nose held up to the sky

Spring dousing her with all its perfumed air.

This poem was inspired not only by the actual skunk boldly sauntering in our backyard, but by Naomi Shihab Nye’s brilliant poem “Valentine for Ernest Mann.” When I first discovered this poem over thirty years ago, I was struck by the lines “poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.”

These lines have become my mantra, and have informed not only this poem, but all of my writing. I strive to pay attention to the ordinary moments in life and find a way to show who or what is happening and then turn them into stories of wondering, where readers might find something relatable to their own lives.

In this poem, I was attempting to establish a relationship between Petunia the skunk and myself, to normalize this odd occurrence, and to find ways to connect while keeping our boundaries intact. A poet often uses all of the senses to capture that moment and in this one, smell plays an important role. How do we see a better side when our first whiff is of something we decide is offensive?

The poem tries to imagine what Petunia might be going through in her predicament of being in a human’s territory during the day when it is most unsafe. I hope that it encourages us to move past our fear and pre-conceived ideas and view the situation more honestly and not always the way we might want it to be. I give her kudos for stepping outside of her comfort zone.

Speaking of comfort zones, serving as Mad Poet of the Year has helped me to grow and hone my creative voice. This will be my last blog on this website. It has been a real honor to share images, poems, and commentary with all of you.

I wish you wonder in all your creative adventures and in life, and invite you to see things in a different light. What better animal to use as a stand-in for all the ways in which we might resist change, or avoid areas of discomfort. Afraid of being sprayed? Absolutely. But from a distance, we might be able to appreciate the skunk in all of us.

I leave you with Naomi’s words,

“So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.

And let me know. “

Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.

She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.

In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Review of Serotonin: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose on Mental Illness, Suicide, and Neurodivergence (edited by Sean Lynch)

March 19, 2025 Brooke Palma

Serotonin: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose on Mental Illness, Suicide, and Neurodivergence

Serotonin Press

$11.99

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Serotonin is an online poetry and prose journal founded by Sean Lynch in 2020. Over the course of five years, Serotonin has published poetry and prose focusing on mental illness, suicide, and neurodivergence from countries all over the world, including Australia, Canada, France, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Uganda, the UK, and the US. The anthology itself is divided into ten sections: Depression, Anxiety, ADHD, Autism, OCD, Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, Self-Harm, Eating Disorders, and Trauma. I will discuss four poems from the book from the Depression, Anxiety, Autism, and Self-Harm sections. Please note that due to the nature of this astoundingly vital collection superbly collated by Sean Lynch there will be difficult topics discussed.

Full disclosure, I am included in this anthology, but, of course, I will not review my own poem. I would not even know where to begin. I do think the subject matter and the work of these brave poets does deserve a review in Mad Poets Society.

I also fortunately know several of the brave and talented poets in this anthology. For my review, I decided to review poets I did not know well or at all, in a spirit of fairness.

In the first and largest section, Depression, a poem that stood out to me for its succinct, vivid detail is “My Shrink’s Waiting Room” by Gary Bloom. It starts with the wry observation: “Everyone’s head stays down/studying the rudely stained carpet/(the Prozac tremors knocking the coffee from our cups).” In just three lines, Bloom’s voice is sensitive yet defiant, humorous yet sad.

In a society where men do not discuss their mental health enough, I welcome Bloom’s directness: “afraid to look up and be assessed/who exit their paneled (padded?) offices/and glad hand new arrivals like Walmart greeters.” Bloom paints the scene so skillfully with surprising diction that you are there with the speaker. His wit serving as the magazine to distract you from the wait. He ends the poem with the stunning lines: “while I make my way to the vacant chair/where I sit uncomfortably/in someone else’s warmth.”

I had to read “night reading mode” by Cynthia Arrieu-King in the Anxiety section multiple times to fully understand and appreciate its rich imagery. It describes an activity so many of us engage in reading, perhaps doomscrolling, our cell phone before bed, rejecting all the self-help articles we may read before bed saying this is not good for our circadian rhythms. But I digress. Arrieu-King opens this exquisite poem with

she gestures toward a pink cloud inside digital forest
wallpaper and says:

this is my cloud. it contains all my data
uncle moon sees the white screen in my glasses
and he kicks on night reading mode—

I am impressed by this sleepy time, almost bedtime story like, syrupy rhythm of these lines. Perhaps, anxiety itself is winding down before bed, suspended, but may well return. The brilliant closing lines address this reality: “the ball dropped to the street doesn’t bounce/a dead path, footsteps stopped mid-stairs, an immovable/string on a guitar.” This is a poem I will return to multiple times.

“Revelation” by Matthew Feinstein is a powerful prose/prose-poem piece in the Autism section. It begins with the haunting, fatalistic sentence: “My memories of you are now reduced to a single night spent curled up on a recliner while you read me the bible before bed.” Due to the strictures of religion, the narrator worries “Part of me thought you worried I would rot in hell. Not because I do drugs or have sex, but because I was different.” Being different exposes the narrator to increasingly violent taunts from his classmates, but still he writes “What I would give to hug another one of God’s children & feel another body against my own.”

He does find a connection with the girl next door. Even that morphs into sin and temptation. Feinstein continues, “I am still looking for acceptance.” The narrator runs into the bullies who seem to lurk behind every sentence in this work. The last encounter causes the narrator to reckon with his faith, confessing to his dead mother: “And I’m sorry, Momma, but I can no longer believe in God. How could I? Four of his children were about to slit my throat.” This piece floored me. Feinstein possesses a rich command of rhetorical strategy, used here to devastating effect.

The final poem I will discuss comes from the Self-Harm section. In “Guillotine Blues,” Avra Margariti uses the beheadings of both Catherine Howard (fifth wife of Henry VIII) and King Charles I as historical metaphors to explore the narrator’s desire for self-harm. Howard’s death reminds the narrator of

how I would practice my own death throughout my
childhood: stand on the edges of tall buildings, see how many
pills I could fit like marshmallows in my mouth, call it an
accident when I cut my fingers on sharp objects.

In the second stanza, the narrator “learns that King Charles I wore two heavy,/layered shirts during his public beheading. He didn’t want to shiver.” This fact leads to the powerful lines:

I looked
down at my arms, the long shirtsleeves hiding all unhealthy
practices-turned-habits. I rolled up my sleeves and let the
cool air nip at my skin, let myself shiver.

Margariti expertly employes historical details in two stylistically balanced stanzas. This poem, and the three other poems I reviewed, would be standouts in any and all anthologies.

Serotonin is an anthology that will break your heart, perhaps, but it will also remind you that you are not alone. It covers difficult subject matter, but all the poets write with such precision and passion about important subjects, often ignored by the population-at-large, that I cannot recommend this anthology highly enough. I could have chosen any of these strong poems to represent this collection. Necessary work is being done by the journal, Serotonin. Work that I hope this review has done justice to and work that I hope is exposed to people who may have been previously unaware of it.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Marcia LeBeau

February 24, 2025 Brooke Palma

When Ice Cream Was Funny
by Marcia LeBeau

I stopped thinking for a week in October 2015.
It was unexpected and not dangerous
like you might imagine. I didn’t get run over
by a car, I just didn’t think about how

I crossed the street and I was fine. I had lunch
with a friend that week who recognized something
was different. You seem happy she commented.
So very happy, she sighed. And I was, my mind

was blank. I smiled a lot. Many things were funny

that hadn’t been funny before. Humans,
running around doing things, were funny. My kids,
screaming for ice cream, were funny. The sun

on my face was exquisite because I actually felt
the sun on my face. And I listened, boy, did I listen.
People didn’t know what to make of my listening.
And then the emptiness was over, as quickly as it started.

I knew the surest way not to get it back, was to try
to get it back. So I didn’t try. I think about not thinking
occasionally, along with the billions of thoughts
that have been back for years. I say—Brain, I know

you’re not ready yet, but when you are, I’d really like to try
that non-thinking thing again. It won’t make you obsolete,
I promise. You’d just be happy, so very happy.

Recently, your debut poetry collection, A Curious Hunger, came out. Tell us a little bit about the book. What was your process for bringing it into the world?
The book was a long time in coming—almost two decades. It’s a completely different book than when I started because I was a different person back then, with different concerns and obsessions like being single in New York City. Obsessions like motherhood, marriage and temptation were what I was writing about when the book got taken for publication. I had submitted many variations of my manuscript over the years to first book contests. When I shifted to open reading periods, I found that it was getting more attention. And then two years ago, Larry Moore at Broadstone Books decided it was right for them. I’m eternally grateful for his belief in the book because I knew it was done at that point and wanted it to be out in the world. I was ready to move onto other work. I’m so incredibly happy that Broadstone allowed my husband, Lee (who is a designer among other things) to design the beautiful cover. Having worked in advertising, I know that sometimes the book is judged by its cover.

Speaking of process, how do you get from all possible blank page to a finished piece? Do you have any particular writing habits?
I still love taking workshops with poets I admire, especially ones who are good teachers with great prompts. That’s always very inspiring to me. I sometimes take part in Bull City Press’s accountability writing group, the GRIND, which requires you to write a poem a day for a month. I can usually get two or three poems from those months. Or if I’m going through something tough in life, I use poetry as a way to look at my problem from different angles. To get outside myself and look at it more objectively. Sometimes I get “a keeper” out of that mess. But if I really want to write intentionally, I get out the poetry books which inspire me, take a breath, and realize the world doesn’t need me right now. This gives me the space to read. That always sparks a line or two.

In your new collection, among other themes, there are a number of poems centered around caregiving. Who do you care for? How do you balance caregiving with your creative work?
Though I am able to find moments when the world doesn’t need me, in all honesty, these moments are rare. I have two teenage sons. While they are much more independent than they used to be, I like them to know I’m there for them. Also, my parents and my sister with Down Syndrome are suddenly aging more rapidly. I’m not sure I do a great job of balancing, but I do have a lock on my home office door. Sometimes there are more important things than writing a poem. And of course, it’s all material, much to my family’s chagrin.

Your poems are energetic and many have a humorous undertone which help move the characters in your poems through a world that can be hostile particularly towards women. What is your strategy for curating voice in your poems?
I don’t have a strategy per say. It’s the voice that comes out in the moment which I write the poem. Almost an inner voice that speaks through me. If it doesn’t feel authentic then I trash it because I know it won’t speak to the reader. It’s later that I do the work on the craft, but the voice rarely changes.

You are the founder of The Write Space. Tell us a little about this place and space. As a writer, why is community important to you?
The Write Space is a co-working space for creative writers in Orange, NJ that I founded in January 2020. Not the best time for opening a business. But it survived the pandemic. I wanted to create a space for writers where they could write with other writers in a distraction-free environment. I created a space that I wanted for myself and then crossed my fingers that other writers would be drawn to it, too. And so far, they have been. We have award-winning and bestselling authors writing next to people who are just starting their creative writing journeys. We all have the same intent, to get our writing done. As you know, community is vital for writers because it can be so isolating. It can be easy to say, “Why am I doing this?” when the process is slow, or we don’t see the results we had hoped for. The Write Space tries to remedy this isolation with class and readings, a monthly submission day, and writers’ happy hours quarterly. Writers can rent the space or teach a class. It’s a vibrant community in an arts district and I’m really proud of it.

Where can readers keep up with your work? Buy your book?
I’m still promoting A Curious Hunger now until the end of April when it will be the one-year anniversary of its publication. My reading schedule, recent publications, and link to buy the book is on my website: www.marcialebeau.com.

Marcia LeBeau is a multidisciplinary artist. Her debut poetry collection, A Curious Hunger, was published in April 2024 and soon became one of Broadstone Books top-selling titles. Her poems, essays and reviews have been published in O, The Oprah Magazine; New Ohio Review; Rattle; Painted Bride Quarterly; Moon City Review, and elsewhere. She was a third-place winner of the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Award and received an honorable mention for the Rattle Poetry Prize. Her work has also received several Pushcart Prize nominations. She has an MFA in poetry from VCFA and is the founder of The Write Space, a co-working and event space for creative writers in The Valley Arts District of Orange, New Jersey. She lives with her husband and two sons in South Orange, New Jersey. (marcialebeau.com/thewritespacenj.com)

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

February 17, 2025 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.

Shoveling

Mom is on the roof again.

Her broom cuts through
soft layers of new snow
sweeping the white wetness
close to its edge.

Bristles push powder
up into the blue sky
so it seems like it’s snowing
all over again, flakes come together,
fall apart, disappear
in different directions.

She is tending her own garden,
raking life's patterns
into the impermanence
of Now.

This is the time
for clearing things away,
for simplifying life.

Sort through the debris,
the heavy weight
of what no longer matters,
and find joy
in the emptying
of the day.

One of my fondest childhood memories is of my mother crawling out of my bedroom window to step onto the roof of our row house in Northeast Philly. At first, I was afraid for her, fearing that her strong bull-headed “ness” might lead to a slip and a fall and then where we would we all be without her? But I reasoned that panic away because she only ventured onto our individual porch roof and not the long-tarred canopy that covered our thirty homes.

In any season, her first task would always be to sweep the dirt away like any good Italian immigrant who wiped their front steps with bleach. But in winter, she scooped the clean white fluffs of snow, froze them into a ball and then hours later, added some flavored syrup to make homemade snow cones for us. What an ordinary miracle of delight.

This poem is a tribute to her and her fearlessness, her unique way of handling a problem, her determination to get a job done. It’s also a reminder for myself about impermanence, how things change, how they get swept away, and where I might find joy amidst any kind of debris or burden that crosses my path.

As we move through this new winter of our lives - where we might feel frozen and without a sense of hope - perhaps there are moments of joy left to discover in the melting away, the preparing for Spring, and the deep emptying of what no longer matters.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Review of Shiny Girl by Marianne Gingher

February 5, 2025 Brooke Palma

Shiny Girl

Bull City Press

$9.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

A quick-witted, delightful read, Shiny Girl (Inch #60), published as part of Bull City Press’s Inch series, is full of whimsy and vivid imagery. It’s as surreal as it is surprising and as introspective as it is imaginative. From a bride who chomps and consumes her groom (“ate him, hat and all”) to feral cats with opinions on the “legacy of domestication”, the pages are chock full of unexpected encounters and revelations. Creativity is in full bloom in this fun and thought-provoking take on life’s many forms. Beneath its inviting and inventive prose, the collection takes on serious topics of infinite and infinitely complex relationships with a degree of levity that paves a hopeful path forward despite the rocky terrain.

Gorgeous images, including a Carolina wren that “butters the hot afternoon with song”, “spiders as big as Frisbees in the bathtub” and “a larky sky” that “shimmers as clear as blue jelly” are as instructive for the writer as they are prompts for personal reflection for readers of all interests and backgrounds.

In “Fugacity”, students practice the art of observation and seeing things that usually don’t receive attention. Shiny Girl works in similar ways. Through tiny stories exploring big themes—holiday trips, memories of vacations as kidnappings, innocence “bobbing along in the wide blue sea”, raised hands and “Early Marriage”, unplanned pregnancies “when Bill ought to have been writing, he’d distracted himself and banged out a human being instead of a poem” , separations, reunifications, and depression (“Do trees ever get depressed?”[42], Gingher’s love of language and life is contagious. She writes with levity and whimsy that is uniquely hers and Shiny Girl’s alone. Even as she explores difficult topics, Gingher weaves hope into spaces otherwise susceptible to despair.

From “Dear Fred”

You used to say I was your gift from God. Well,
your gift died, but then come a miracle, it growed
wings

“Beautiful Weather”

Going out for a little walk I tell you. Just need some
air. Back soon.

What if this day becomes the most beautiful sum-
mer day that’s ever happened? What if it’s the day of
last chances?

The collection is a powerful reminder to remain observant, so as not to miss life’s sun and the sunlight, the kind that “spangles the wingtips of birds, insects, the prick points of leaves” and flames “here and there rather hopelessly like fool’s gold”, that pulses throughout the work’s pages.

With boys who pull dreams out of caps, spiders caught in their own web, and cats that enjoy mathematics, this 63-page work will surely inspire a reader’s full complement of senses. The stories are delightfully re-readable, akin to the nine-lives of the cats that lurk within the collection’s pages. They delight– again and again. Pick and choose pieces to pair. You won’t be disappointed.

Review of Make Space by J.A. Lagana

January 22, 2025 Brooke Palma

Make Space

Finishing Line Press

$20.99

You can purchase your copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

J. A. Lagana’s poetry collection, Make Space, asks the haunting question can grief speak. And if it can speak, what would it say? What would its voice sound like? The voice Lagana imagines having is at turns lyrical: “Gather up wayward strands/of hair and thread and seaglass. Clear the dust/from every photograph. Add river stones.” and practical: “You can’t afford/to spend all your time with me.” In this masterful work, Lagana explores the contours of grief reminiscent of an ever-changing coastline. Grief ebbs and flows; grief lays bear the people or things taken away as well as those that are left behind.

After allowing grief to speak, which is a recurring motif in Make Space, Lagana’s first poem, “Letter to Stephen Regarding That Night in April” is a rich, detailed poem about the loss of a brother entwined with family lore:

I thought you were asleep, although the only time anyone
ever slept on the landing was that night Charlie came home
drunk from an office party, too many sheets to the wind,
you said. So, it wasn’t odd to see you there, on the landing,
stretched out a sheet up to your neck.

In prose poem couplets, Lagana explores her childhood in the house where her family member died with the powerful lines:

My wish, mumbled and sincere, would be for something silly,
like make Jamie Rogers fall in love with me.
Only on the landing that night the world turned serious.
I wished only for you to stay.

Lagana ends this beautiful elegy with the lines: “That house is long gone. Some days, /I am still kneeling on the landing, pleading with you.” To paraphrase Faulker, “Grief and family homes are never dead. They’re not even past.”

Make Space is divided into three sections, and the second section contains perhaps my favorite poem in the book, “She Favored the Scent of Fabergè’s Aphrodisia.” I admit this poem spoke to me so much since I inherited my grandfather’s cologne just as the speaker in this poem inherits her mother’s favorite perfume. This poem also elegantly incorporates caesuras and fully realizes the space on the page.

The poem begins:

Still and semi-filled
with that mossy-colored
unforgettable scent. I kept three,
each capped
in speckled gold…

There is a synesthesia to this poem that excites and soothes, a reached can see the scent and feel the perfume. And a half-filled perfume, or cologne, bottle is a perfect way to remember someone and to see their scent:

Time, if what they say
is true, you’ll dilute our losses—
diminish our longing
for what’s wafted away.

Before grief has the final word, and maybe it always does, Lagana ends the book with “Even Though I Will Eventually Tire.” The speaker admits she will eventually tire “of putting one step in front of the other/and heading out.” She “can’t get enough of the grey sky” or “how beautiful it is to walk/the same path day after day.” One palliative, I couldn’t bring myself to write cure, for grief is to find the joy and peace in everyday surroundings. A dying friend related to another friend of mine is what they discovered in the process of dying was gratitude. Lagana knows that this is also a lesson for the living, and in Make Space and in her shimmering and lovely poem, Lagana expresses sincere gratitude for the beauty in the world. Some of the beauty is found in language.

Since grief has the final word or poem in this book, I will let it have the final word here. But before, I finish this review, I want to commemorate the soothing, incantatory power of this debut collection. Grief:

Gather every version
of your faded family.
Wrap their memories.
A favored cloth will do…
I won’t always interfere…
Make space.

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

January 13, 2025 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.

Take A Stand

Last season’s dried hydrangea puff
came out of hiding from the snow-covered flower bed

tumbleweeded down Betsy Lane

past the ice mound blocking our mailboxes and driveways
landing right next to Harry, the neighbor’s new foster dog
who had decided to pick that moment
to lie down in the middle of the street and take a stand.

What could we all do but put down our shovels
laugh at this simple snapshot
a young dog and an old flower side-by-side
both waiting for Spring to melt Winter away.

This poem is quite simple and speaks to the wonder and comedy of a moment. It came to me several years ago, it may have been before the pandemic.

I was outside shoveling the snow, like so many of our neighbors, and I saw this dried hydrangea puff sputtering and tumbling down our lawn. At first I was confused, questioning its presence out here in the dead of winter under all this snow. Then I was amazed at its stamina which was much more than my own on that day. My neighbor was trying to walk his foster dog Harry down the snowy street but Harry wasn’t having it and decided to lay down in the middle of the icy road.

Within minutes, the puff ended its rolling journey at Harry’s side. I took a mental snapshot of the odd pair, this young pup and this dried up hydrangea flower, and wrote a poem about it that same day.

The print “Ghost Dog” was one that I had already completed several years before. When I looked at it again, I saw both the fluffiness of the hydrangea and the shadow of a dog both emerging at once.

Life brings us beautiful and odd reminders to pause and to notice the connections around us, no matter how ordinary, obvious or blessedly unexpected.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Mad Poet of the Year - Lisa DeVuono

December 23, 2024 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.

Full Moon

Decorating the garden
with lights
small but bold

I wish to avoid the inevitable
darkness that will be upon us
as we head to the shortest days of the year

This year when we had to choose
between loneliness and well-being
sitting solo in chairs made for the company of others

What is the process of hope?
to emerge from all the fearful hiding
tattered but intact

Darkness is a wakeup call
that when we work together
we have no reasons to fail

Still when I am done stringing
the luminescent globes
that will turn on at dusk, and fade by dawn

I make sure I whisper to the moon
“Please, do not think my lamp lighting
is an invitation to stop shining.”

Heading into wintertime, it’s always a mixed blessing. I’m not a big fan of cold dreary winter days and long for the warmth of summer but it does offer me the chance to hibernate and hope that slowing down might bring peace. While the camaraderie of the holidays serves as an opportunity to gather, it can also point out the loneliness of those who may not have family or friends.

I wrote this poem during the first year of the pandemic when we were still in the place of uncertainty about the virus, unclear about the treatment, and in grief about lost moments and loved ones.

I was stringing up some lights in the garden so that we could see them from our window, to cheer us on. It was a full moon that night and I imagined that I was negotiating with it. “Hey Moon…I’m trying to lighten my life and make things look hopeful even when I don’t feel hopeful so I may need your help to carry on” or something equally vulnerable.

For me, this is ultimately a poem about connection and reliance on others. It’s about the communities that we lost, and the ones that we were trying to hold onto.

I hope the lights in your life continue to shine and be a beacon for you when the darkness bears down and can be too much to handle.

Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.

Review of Expecting Hands by John Sozanski

December 23, 2024 Brooke Palma

Expecting Hands

Moonstone Press

$19.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by guest blogger, Anthony Palma

When I first picked up John Sozanski’s debut collection Expecting Hands, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Sozanski has had a wide range of experiences: he has traveled; he has been involved in painting and visual art; he is well-read and articulate, and I was excited to see how all of these things came together in a poetry collection. What I found in these pages were carefully crafted poems that tell fascinating tales big and small. They exist in a world where poetry is the language, currency, and creed.

From page one, the thing that stood out to me was the meticulous craft with which these poems were composed. The line breaks are crisp and appropriate, drawing us through the worlds of the poems, holding our hands gently as a guide, not a pedant. A careful editing and revision process has ensured that there is never a word that feels out of place or unnecessary. Poems like “two for one” and “ricochets” perfectly embody the tight free verse that Sozanski employs.

In regards to Sozanski’s background, I was pleasantly pleased to see that a number of the poems in this collection reference his connections to other types of art. “Weeds” is for the author Frank McCourt, and there are references to Rumi, Shakespeare, Jerry Garcia, and more. The part of the book where this is most evident, though, is the section entitled “My Friends” that includes a series of ekphrastic poems dealing with El Greco, Pablo Picasso, and the conceptual work 50 Days at Ilium by Cy Twombly that takes up an entire room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These are true works of ekphrasis, emphasizing the conversation between author and painter, painting and poem. How are we to respond to art? How does it impact us? John Sozanski might just have that answer.

However, all of this is not, in this reviewer’s opinion, the strongest part of this collection. That distinction goes to the sense of reality in these poems. Through all of the artistic and philosophical musings, not once do these poems come across as pretentious or self-important. Poems like “stille nacht” and “even birthdays” call out the violence and moral cost of hatred, while “the indifferent wave” muses on the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the ignored warning signs of the current conflict. All of this comes together in “on the road to Harlem,” a poem that tells the story of traveling to Harlem for art through a montage of social inequity, conversations, and culture told with a matter-of-fact style that would make Frank O’Hara proud. This poem perfectly captures what seems to be the main project of this collection – elevating the mundane and filing down the extraordinary onto an even plane of insight accessibility, and meaning.

In reading this book, it is clear what John Sozanski loves. After all, this book is a love story. It is written out of love of art, of words, and of expression. It tells a love story about places, faces, and even pets. Most importantly, it is a love letter to humanity, to us, in all of our joy, tragedy, and despair. And just like a love letter it offers us the hope of a better day tomorrow.

Anthony Palma’s work attempts to bridge the gap between poetry and other forms while addressing issues of social justice, identity, and existence. His work has appeared in publications such as Rue Scribe, Oddball Magazine, and the Show Us Your Papers Anthology. His debut collection of poetry, flashes of light from the deep (Parnilis Media), and Horror, a chapbook, are available on Amazon.

Review of May Day by Jackie Kay

December 18, 2024 Brooke Palma

May Day

Pan Macmillan

$19.15

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

In May Day, Jackie Kay, a much-loved poet, novelist, and short story writer, once again delivers a collection that will surely move both readers new to the author and long-time fans of her work.

The former Makar (national poet) of Scotland, Kay offers readers a poignant series of elegies, ones capable of transporting readers across time while inspiring engagement and activism for the present. Recounting a life of activism, from Kay’s childhood in Glasgow (A Life in Protest– “1974: when Madame Allende comes to Glasgow, after Pinochet’s coup and Allende’s murder,” 3) and protest marches (“1984: marching with Pride through London! Lesbians and gay men dressed to impress. Me with my double-headed axe, yes,” 4) to a global pandemic (Still, Mother’s Day 2020– “So still, so still, still, still” 55) to Black Lives Matter protests, Kay seamlessly weaves personal memoir with associated political upheaval, period events, and the human condition in its many forms.

As Kay guides readers through lived experiences and associated recollections, the relationship of daughter-to-mother and mother-to-daughter is a constant presence. Kay’s mother features prominently throughout the entirety of the collection (with a sequence of three Mother’s Day poems a powerful testament to the thunder of silence whether or not living, while living or dead.

The influence of a mother, Kay’s mother, is explored repeatedly in poems such as Mother’s Day, 2021 (56)--

You are still my mother. I am still your daughter.
Though there is nothing now between me and the sky,
I will still be saying hello and you say goodbye.

and more, including “Blue Boat Mother”, “My Mum is a Robin”,

and “Three Little Birds”--

That day in the ambulance, heading for the mortuary
with my newly dead mum on the trolley beside me,
so herself still it didn’t seem possible
that she could be dead at all,
the first responder’s ringtone went off.
…
I would have thought she’d have chosen
‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, by Edith Plaf
or Nat King Cole’s ‘Almost Like Being in Love’,
the song she took to singing every day

of her last few years. What a day this has been.

Kay’s gorgeous text pulses with a palpable life story interwoven with layers of longing and love for layers of living. Kay writes in ways that make the past a part of the present and a powerful tribute to poetry as a tool for both documentary and autobiography.

Kay repeatedly, consistently, and expertly teaches how to write poetry that is as powerful as it is poignant and as therapeutic as it is thought-provoking. May Day is a work of quiet strength and compelling story. The poems repeatedly and powerfully weave active reflection with activism inspired by a love for nation, family, intentionality, and solidarity while fighting for social change.

Of natural beauty, Kay’s words– line by line, stanza by stanza, poem by poem, string a love letter to family and a map of familial history. The work not only showcases the potential for poetry to document with a historical lens but also to move readers to ponder and revisit lesser-known pockets of history. Within those pockets rest a goldmine of endless story- story Kay captures so well in May Day.

The autobiographical collection chronicles Kay’s life, as written in the aftermath of the passing of her adoptive parents, Helen and John Kay. Subjects include both mother and father as well as unexpected yet likely familiar names such as Paul Robeson, Picasso, Harry Belafonte, Louise Gluck, Joan Baez, and more. The pieces infuse and sustain new life in figures both of family and familiar names.

From page to page, poem to poem, Kay moves seamlessly through time and era, offering readers a gorgeous blend of vivid imagery and memorable story while mourning and celebrating lives gone. The poet turns distress into dances with beauty, and distance into daring queries of life’s most important meanings.

From “Daughters, Neighbours (for Elaine)”

And then came sorrow,

your mammy’s hearse pushed uphill in the snow.
My mum following ten days later.
The snow still thick in our street.

…

walking grief’s long corridor
to the open window, the open door,
knowing we could not have given more.

We could not have given more.

“Oh my oh my oh my”

Further than the sky now, you and I,
as far apart as the moon and the earth

and yet not. Not at all. Not apart.

You, you, you who orbit my heart.

May Day is warmth wrapped in a humanist perspective and a poet’s prowess. The collection is a deeply delightful, deep read from an ever-more-delightful poet. If I may, I encourage anyone looking for their next collection to find space for this phenomenal work– one that will prompt a wealth of emotion and reflection in and off your reading queue. It’s a sure tonic to any day’s call for fresh words and a collection of protest songs that channel grief into forward movement.