What I've Learned from Dorothea Lasky

I think Lasky’s success as a widely published writer comes with her ability to write about current trends in an endearing voice.  With topics of her poems ranging from zombies to love and to Sylvia Plath, Lasky’s poems are intriguing because of the postmodernist space they acquire.  They matter to today’s reader:  teacher, student, and every day observer.  The reason I buy her books is because she is very popular among my friends and she writes similarly to other poets I follow.  Her poems are longer than many poems I have been reading lately and I think that is a different and interesting endeavor to read.  Her ability to writer “in the now” is hugely important because that is what I strive to write about.  I think her success in chapbook, magazine, and journal publishing comes from her ability to hone in onto the contemporary popular culture while still writing beautiful and interesting poetry.  Perhaps that is what everyone is wanting to read right now.  

Part of Review of "A Broken Escalator Still Isn't The Stairs"

Out of the 29 poems, 7 of them involve missing.  These poems are crucial to the collection as a whole but also fit cohesively together when separated out from the chapbook.  These poems begin, “to say on is missing…” (3, 8, 13, 18, 22, 26, 29).  By combining the idea of missing with a person (or the speaker) there is a created tone of absence.  This theme carries throughout the collection as a whole.  There is a missing woman.  There is not seeing.  There are missing cities.  There is the misplaced.  These themes make these short poems resound with a voice full of confusion and discontent.  The broken and lost theme of these poems brings the reader desire to solve a kind of mystery of the given discontent.  However, is comfort found?  Is the puzzle solved?  This could be possible by the briefest poems in the collection that involve nature.  These petite poems sit in a place of calm realism.  Combine all of these pieces and the reader finds comfort in not knowing.  These themes do not create a bad collection.  They create a thought provoking solidity in the unknown and feel for the absurdist world (and poetry world).  Finally, these missing poems create, in themselves, an absence that the reader can see blankness, simple abolition of these poems or the subject of these poems.  All of these possibilities lend themselves to the fine-tuned ambiguity by Carlise.  

What I've Learned from Nick Sturm

First, be involved in what you do and produce.  By doing this people will know your name with your writing, chapbooks, and presses.  Second, stay real.  Writing takes honesty and that is clearly displayed in the poems in all three of these collections.  What I write outside of the classroom is sometimes similar to Sturm’s voice.  the grappling tension, the incongruent thoughts, the theories off the world are all themes that span past Sturm specifically and to many contemporary poets like Heather Christle, Leigh Stein, and S.E. Smith.  These chapbooks perhaps don’t have a larger narrative arc so perhaps they are time based.  Perhaps they were written during a certain time and then placed in the chapbook thusly.  A career this successful while going through your MFA and PhD is impressive and noteworthy.  To have a hand in so many productions and pieces of the poetry world makes me firstly jealous and second something worth watching in the years to come.  Sturm’s career could make it even bigger than it is currently and I hope, as a fan of his, to watch that flourish. 

Part of Review of "Of a Bed Frame"

In Dan Nowak's chapbook Of a Bed Frame, there are many love poems- love poems for another person, for drinking, and for Nebraska.  They’re funny poems and sad poems.  There are intense and serious poems and happy, uplifting poems.  These love poems sit in a calm and protected place where the speaker's voice is just that- observant and caring.  At times the love poems get overwhelmingly sentimental as well as a few cliché lines are found throughout the collection.  Regardless of these pieces, the collection as a whole is lovable, something to drink in, and something to move with through time.  

part of review for "Prairie Suite: A Celebration"

            Moving from small insects to birds to stars, Hansen’s view on nature is clearly portrayed.  Whether describing the food of owls or the snake sunning itself, there is a sense of adoration for all parts of the Midwest prairie involved.  Between describing the prairie and animals Hansen also questions more prophetically; stating “Is the beauty of this broken world, then, to grapple with,/ to understand” (25).  These over-arching themes of purpose or reason make the collection cohesive.  Another aspect of the collection is the point of view described in a few singular poems.  In “Grasshopper” the reader is given it’s point of view, it’s voice, the voice of the grasshopper itself.  By doing this Hansen not only describes the scene of a life as a grasshopper but its thoughts and emotions.  “My affectionate song echoing in the wind” (15).  Portraying nature through the lens of a bug rather than a human is an interesting tough even though it happens sparingly. 

            Some places in the collection Hansen veers away from describing single animals and bugs and describes the earth, walking on the ground, the summer, fall, and evolution.  These more general poems are scattered throughout the collection but, they act as landmarks to a bigger whole- the prairie.  All of these ideas of the earth, change, and seasons are part of the larger whole focus of the collection. 

            The speaker’s observations of the natural world of the prairie surround the reader in these poems.  Along with the art paired with every poem, the reader can feel, see, and hear the isects, wind, and animals.  By writing as if completely surrounded by this landscape, Hansen has created a collection of poems separate from the world of city scape most of us live in.  These observations, made throughout the collection, are made through patience for both writer and reader.  

Part of review for "the lake has no saint"

The varied form that the poems take is intriguing.  The poet has changed how a reader looks at a poem.  The definition of poetry is skewed in this collection due to the lack of fundamental sentence structure in every poem.  For example, in “when after you have exhausted the possibilities”, there is one sentence for the entire poem with the period being at the very end.  This is striking.  Obviously, there are fragments included that change how the poem is read aloud or seen on the page.  Without separate sentences or pauses the poem is read with more force, perhaps faster.  Many of the poems act this way.  The form influences how the poem is read and where the focus is for the subject at hand.  “Not” is repeated many times, created a friction for the speaker of the poem.  “i will not paint the new house blue” is repeated numerous times creating force and emphasis there. 

            The lack of capitalization also lends itself to the defacing fundamentals of writing.  Why not capitalize?  This is included in every poem.  Even states are not justly capitalized.  This could be done to make all words equal, not more important than another and the focus is put on the poem itself.  (This then, could be said of gender, the topic at hand; all people are equal.)  Or, simply, it could be the stylistic choice of the writer.  

Part of the book review for "Between Frames"

            This collection of poems does not stand out against any other divorce-subject-repairing-what’s-broken-to-begin-again cliché of the middle aged woman’s journal entry poetry.  Recurring themes like divorce, making cornbread, and going to the movies are all ordinary and uninteresting topics.  Granted, Barker does make cornmeal muffins sound very intriguing.  Like in the poem, “De Nada” the reader sees both “yellowing in the park” and “yellowed waves”.  I get bored reading two different adjectives only to describe nature.  Barker’s voice is not distinct enough to put herself aside from other nature poets.