Alison Stine Reviewed by Nick Ripatrazone

The new issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, released this month, includes a review by Nick Ripatrazone of Alison Stine’s second collection of poetry, Wait.

ALISON STINE: WAIT


We know that charged whispers can be louder than screams, and the same goes for poetry. Wait, Alison Stine’s second collection of poems, is not a muted book; rather, a carefully calculated arrangement from a poet well aware of the need for the pacing of pitch. Several of the 38 poems in this book span two pages, and Stine’s talent for architecture is clear: her attention to threading sentences across lines feels more careful than deliberate. The result is authentic narrative poems, and a wholly singular, hauntingly pastoral vision.

The title poem is written in the collective voice, and is a useful introduction to the book: Wait feels like a text composed of different perspectives, and yet they all reside within a similar tone. There is a clear dialogue between the sexes, a place where “men / called but could not find us.” Stine’s play with “wait” is rich. A curious verb, it at once represents the current action of anticipation yet requires the future condition of expectation. What is the point of waiting if one is not found?

Wait chronicles the year leading to a woman’s marriage, though that through-line is fleshed with the eccentric characters and narratives of the setting....


I invite visitors to examine the entire review of Alison Stine’s book, as well as to read the rest of Valparaiso Poetry Review’s Fall/Winter 2011-2012 issue, the journal’s 25th issue.

Photo Friday: “The End of Baseball Season”

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Poem of the Week: “Trick” by Stephen Lackaye

The VPR Poem of the Week is Stephen Lackaye’s “Trick,” which appears in the Fall/Winter 2011-2012 issue (Volume XIII, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review—the 25th issue of the journal—that was released last week.

Stephen Lackaye’s manuscript, Claims, has been a finalist or semi-finalist for awards including the Elixir Press Open Competition, Brittingham/Pollak Prizes, and the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Normal School, Los Angeles Review, Cave Wall, Pinch, Poet Lore, Sow’s Ear, Dos Passos Review, and other literary journals. He holds an MSc from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA from Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches in The Writing Seminars.

Tuesday of each week One Poet’s Notes highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers visit it.

Martha Silano Reviewed by Barbara Crooker

The new issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, released last week, includes a review by Barbara Crooker of a recent poetry volume, The Little Offices of the Immaculate Conception, written by Martha Silano.



OUT OF THIS WORLD: MARTHA SILANO’S THE LITTLE OFFICES OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION


Martha Silano’s third full-length collection, The Little Offices of the Immaculate Conception, contains poems that are simply out of this world. That’s not hyperbole; almost two-thirds of the poems in this book deal with some aspect of the extraterrestrial. But these aren’t poems with their head in the stars; rather, they’re firmly grounded in crumbs, crickets, and the stuff of daily life with two small children, a blend of what Campbell McGrath calls the “quotidian and celestial.” These poems veer from the galactic (“I Live on Milk Street,” ie, the Milky Way) to the down and dirty (slugs attacking pole beans). Silano shuffles poems about the cosmos and the existence of God with poems about the everyday (“This Parenting Thing”), and she does this with panache, humor and wit. Reading Martha Silano is like ripping open a bag of pop rocks; words explode in the mouth with juice, jive, and fizz. Some of the ways she makes this happen are via diction and word choice, syntax, strategy, rhythm, and humor. But always, she keeps in mind her larger themes: the strange and the alien, the earthly and the terrestrial, family and parenting.

Silano often uses titles to announce these themes, beginning with the other-worldly: “They know all about us on Andromeda,” “Crickets, God, Phan Ku, Pickles, Synergy, a Wayside Church, Anaxagoras, Anaximander, More Crickets, the Cosmos,” “What I Will Tell the Aliens,” “My Place in the Universe,” and the aforementioned “I Live on Milk Street.” She might set up a poem like this, anchoring an image in one spot, then letting the poem open outward, finally ending up someplace else, reversing expectations: “Because I knew you’d understand this—you, me our sibling // earthlings, our sibling citizens of this swirly world, / which only grows bluer the farther away from it we get.” (“Because I Knew”) “Sibling/earthlings” echoes nicely, while the image of Earth as a “swirly world,” again with an ear to sound, follows the motion of the poem as it telescopes outward. Having the earth grow bluer as seen from space moves the emphasis from the earthbound to the ether, giving the poem an interesting shift in perspective that purposefully keeps the reader slightly off-kilter.

The poems in this book slip back and forth from the cosmological to the liturgical. Barbara Hamby says that “Martha Silano is jitterbugging with the gods,” and that is an apt summation. Her engagement with the ineffable is not via orthodoxy, but rather, the wonderfully irreverent. . . .



I invite visitors to examine the entire review of Martha Silano’s book, as well as to read the rest of Valparaiso Poetry Review’s Fall/Winter 2011-2012 issue, the journal’s 25th issue.

Photo Friday: “Late Bloomers”

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Ned Balbo Reviewed by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

The new issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, released earlier this week, includes Ned Balbo as the featured poet, and it contains a review by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell of his recent poetry volume, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems.

NED BALBO: THE TRIALS OF EDGAR POE AND OTHER POEMS


Ned Balbo’s new book, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, is a brave foray into the sometimes terrifying world of childhood. The collection, which won the Donald Justice Prize in 2010, consists of 25 well-wrought formal poems, each one substantial and some (such as, “Hart Island,” a powerful blank-verse narrative at the heart of the book) qualifying as tour-de-force in terms of their deeply imaginative engagement of the subject and the deftness of the poet’s craft. In fact, this combination of grave content and lively formal wit characterizes the book as a whole, creating for the fortunate reader a world that is simultaneously haunting and high-spirited, woeful and playful.

Childhood is common ground every one of us shares—our center of origin, a landscape of intense, relentless, and rapid change wherein our hopes and fears, loves and antipathies, talents and weaknesses have their genesis and generation. Within its precincts, for better or for worse, we become who we are. This shared terrain, and our seemingly inexhaustible interest in exploring it, is one reason for the enormous appeal of Balbo’s work, past and present. Readers familiar with his previous work, particularly his first book, Galileo’s Banquet (1998), will recognize this as territory the poet knows well and has probed with characteristic sensitivity and nuance. (It is worth noting that Balbo’s first book won the Towson University Prize for Literature and his second, Lives of the Sleepers, won the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry in 2005, thus establishing The Trials of Edgar Poe as the third in a trifecta of prize-winning collections.) In his new book, Balbo approaches his theme from a fresh perspective—or, rather, a series of fresh perspectives—as he narrates the circumstances of his own difficult childhood intermingling them with the stories of others who have endured loss, insecurity, and disillusionment at a young age.

Most prominent among the book’s afflicted children is Edgar Poe, a figure Balbo identifies with as a fellow-poet whose artistic disposition is related to the sense of abandonment he experienced as a child. In addition, the poet is drawn to a host of motherless, fatherless, and otherwise vulnerable creatures, including the actual, the historical, the fictional, and the mythic. From Frankenstein’s “son” to Batman’s orphaned apprentice, Robin; from James Whale’s hunted “Invisible Man” to Jules Verne’s hapless young Harry; from Fanny Allan (Poe’s foster mother and caretaker, herself an orphan) to Don O- (Balbo’s fatherless birth father)—and embracing even “the nameless dead” children buried by the thousands at Hart Island, New York City’s potter’s field—Balbo’s book gathers together a company of rejected, forgotten, and misbegotten souls whose identities and lives have been (de)formed and (mis)shaped by childhood circumstance. In the course of the book, childhood becomes a land of unlikeness that is also eerily familiar; thus, it should not surprise us when we find ourselves in these pages. . .

I invite visitors to examine the entire review of The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, as well as to read the rest of Valparaiso Poetry Review’s Fall/Winter 2011-2012 issue, the journal’s 25th issue.

Poem of the Week: “October Snow” by Doug Rampseck

The VPR Poem of the Week is Doug Ramspeck’s “October Snow,” which appears in the Fall/Winter 2011-2012 issue (Volume XIII, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review—the 25th issue of the journal—that has just been released.

Doug Ramspeck's poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, was awarded the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and was published in 2008 by BkMk. His poems have appeared in West Branch, Rattle, Confrontation Magazine, Connecticut Review, Nimrod, Hunger Mountain, and Hayden's Ferry Review. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima.

Tuesday of each week One Poet’s Notes highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers visit it.

Publication Announcement: 25th Issue of VPR

I am pleased to announce publication of the 25th issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. The Fall/Winter 2011-2012 issue (Volume XIII, Number 1) of VPR includes Ned Balbo as the featured poet. Readers will find in the contents a trio of new poems by Balbo, as well as a review of his latest book, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems.

In addition to Balbo, 35 other poets are represented in this new release of VPR. The issue also includes reviews of recent books by David Orr, Martha Silano, Alison Stine, and Larry D. Thomas. Gregg Hertzlieb contributes commentary on the cover artwork by Jim Dine.

VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW

Volume XIII, Number 1
Fall/Winter 2011-20112

Contents:

Featured Poet: Ned Balbo

Additional Poets: David B. Axelrod, Lisa Barnett, Michael Bazzett, Philip Belcher, Deborah Bogen, Karina Borowicz, Sarah Busse, Jared Carter, Joanne M. Clarkson, Carol V. Davis, Susan Donnelly, William Ford, Rebecca Foust, Ron Houchin, Bethany Schultz Hurst, Marci Rae Johnson, Greg Keeler, Stephen Lackaye, Sandy Longhorn, Sheryl Luna, Mary Makofske, John A. Nieves, Edward Nudelman, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, William Page, Rita Signorelli-Pappas, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Allan Peterson, Doug Ramspeck, Liz Robbins, Brian Simoneau, Joannie Stangeland, Jeanine Stevens, Robin Tung, Shari Wagner

Reviews: Ned Balbo Reviewed by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell; Martha Silano Reviewed by Barbara Crooker; Alison Stine Reviewed by Nick Ripatrazone; Larry D. Thomas Reviewed by Jeffrey Alfier; David Orr Reviewed by Edward Byrne

Cover Art Commentary: Gregg Hertzlieb on Jim Dine’s Rancho Woodcut Art

Recently Received and Recommended Books

I continue to be grateful for all the ongoing support Valparaiso Poetry Review has received from contributors and readers. I invite visitors to examine the Fall/Winter 2011-2012 issue, and I urge everyone to revisit the numerous entertaining, engaging, and enlightening works published in the previous twenty-four issues of VPR that continue to be available through the archives sections of the journal.

—Edward Byrne, Editor

Photo Friday: “Entering Autumn”

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Susan Elbe’s “Constellations”

I was pleased to learn Monday that Susan Elbe’s poem, “Constellations,” from the Spring/Summer 2011 issue (Volume XII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review has been chosen as Verse Daily’s Web Weekly feature this week. I am also delighted to note that a number of poets from previous issues of VPR have had their works acknowledged as past selections by Verse Daily, including David Baker, Annette Basalyga, J.P. Dancing Bear, Sheila Black, R.G. Evans, Paul Hostovsky, Robin Kemp, Muriel Nelson, Allen Peterson, and Margot Schilpp. I congratulate each of these poets, and I am grateful whenever such recognition arises for the high quality of poems evident in every issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Poem of the Week: “Aphasia” by Jennifer MacPherson

The VPR Poem of the Week is Jennifer MacPherson’s “Aphasia,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue (Volume IX, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jennifer MacPherson is a founding editor of Comstock Review, and she currently serves as Senior Editor. Her work has been published widely in such journals as Calyx, Connecticut Review, Louisiana Literature, The MacGuffin, Poet Lore, Poetry International, Sulphur River Literary Review, and South Carolina Review. She is the author Stuck in Time (2002) and Greatest Hits (2001), both from Pudding House Press. Her other collections include A Nickel Tour of the Soul (FootHills Press, 2004), and In the Mixed Gender of the Sea (Spire Press, 2004) which won the Spire Press Poetry Book Award. Her latest book is Rosary of Bones (Cherry Grove Collections, 2007). A school psychologist for over twenty-five years, MacPherson lives in Syracuse, NY.

Tuesday of each week One Poet’s Notes highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it.

Photo Friday: “Storm Front”

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“New Construction” from Autism: A Poem

As I have mentioned previously, I have created a separate blog site as an open experiment of poetry composition, perhaps a glimpse at an emerging manuscript as it matures. The contents represent portions of an ongoing personal project with a particularly narrow focus intended to eventually develop toward a book-length poem tentatively and simply titled Autism.

The poem will grow as sections are added. The individual pieces are designed so that they may be viewed as independent items; however, I have consciously carried themes, images, and language through the extended sequence with the hope that connectivity and continuity will be preserved among numerous sections of the long poem.

I have now posted a new section, “New Construction.”

Readers are asked to regard Autism as a work in progress, a partial draft rather than a finished product (even if some selected segments previously may have appeared in print), and I request everyone realize various revisions—edits, emendations, or expansion—may be made to the posts at any time in the future.

In addition, I would like to remind readers that a portion of this poetry series in progress was released in March as Dark Refuge, an audio chapbook by Whale Sound. The dozen poems in that chapbook represent a narrative designed as a poetic sequence, part of this overall project of poetry I have been composing about particular observations or impressions concerning the characteristics and consequences associated with autism through a poetic chronicling of personal experiences with Alex.

Dark Refuge is available for readers to experience in differing formats: as online audio, online text, free downloadable mp3, pdf, e-book, print edition, and cd. Therefore, I also urge readers to visit the main page for Dark Refuge.

Poem of the Week: “Blue Crow and Shadow” by Judith Montgomery

The VPR Poem of the Week is Judith Montgomery’s “Blue Crow and Shadow,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2010-2011 issue (Volume XII, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Judith Montgomery's poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, Northwest Review, and Southern Review, among other journals. Her poetry has also been published in several anthologies, including Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease. Montgomery's poetry collections include a full-length book, Red Jess (2006), as well as two chapbooks, Passion (2000) and Pulse & Constellation (2007).

Tuesday of each week One Poet’s Notes highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it.

VPR “Best of the Net” 2011 Nominations

Sundress Publications is again accepting nominations of poems published in online journals (between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011) for its annual “Best of the Net” anthology. As I have observed in the past, the editors of Sundress deserve praise for continuing to draw greater recognition to the presence of quality writing in online publications.

In previous posts to One Poet’s Notes, I have expressed my high regard for every poem among those listed in the table of contents for each issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in VPR, many of whom I have come to know well and have admired over the years. Determining the “best” poetry may be as hard to clearly define as the image of the poet in the accompanying painting by Miro. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge and accept occasions that allow some of VPR’s deserving poets an opportunity to reach a larger audience through special recognition or possible inclusion in an anthology.

Therefore, I have decided once more to adhere to the process I followed when making past nominations, which includes noting the numerous comments (concerning poems appearing in VPR’s pair of recent issues) that I have received in correspondence from readers or submitting poets throughout the past twelve months. In this manner, I obtained a sense of readers’ response to the poetry in the two issues of Volume XII (Fall/Winter 20010-20011 and Spring/Summer 2011), which are eligible for the upcoming 2011 edition of the Sundress “Best of the Net” anthology.

Aided by those observations from VPR’s readers, I offer the editors of Sundress six poems for consideration selected from the two issues in Volume XII of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and I am pleased to announce the following nominations:

T. Alan Broughton: “Acceleration”
Barbara Crooker: “Oriental Poppies”
Kate Fox: “No More”
Travis Mossotti: “My Brother's House”
Alison Pelegrin: “Bestiary of the Bayou State”
A.E. Stallings: “The Eldest Sister of Psyche”

I offer my congratulations to the nominated poets. At the same time I express my appreciation to all the contributors whose works have appeared in VPR this past year, as well as in previous years. I also hope this post encourages readers to continue communicating their feedback on writings in the journal, commentary I always enjoy receiving. Indeed, I am grateful for all the ongoing support Valparaiso Poetry Review has received from contributors and readers.