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Then it was over: that which you fear, being/ a soul and unable/ to speak; these lines by Louise Glück might serve to suggest the power of Shanan Ballam's luminous first poems after the stroke-language as the soul's release, healing energy driving these poems of damage and recovery. Her observant gaze turns always outward to nature: its unfolding, its flowering, the way things turn toward light-nature's transformations assuring her own: I am a monarch/butterfly who will emerge/ with wet wings jeweled/with dew...
-Eleanor Wilner author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2017
Among the last things one might expect from a person who has suffered a massive stroke, even from a gifted young poet like Shanan Ballam, would be a distinguished chapbook of poems. first poems after the stroke doesn't ask for our sympathy: it spurs a sympathetic vibration that kindles intense empathy. Ballam creates strands of richly evocative imagery from the natural world around her, beautiful in themselves but also handholds on her fierce climb out of paralysis, pain, and the cobwebs of aphasia. This chapbook is a work of heroism as well as breathtaking poetry.
-William Trowbridge, author of Call Me Fool
These poems spiral, following the ancient seats of knowledge from the belly to the brain and to the heart. They are beautiful poems of pain, courage and healing that are witness to the human capacity at its best to rise above suffering and explode into hope and joy. I loved reading these poems, and on reflection realize I haven't used that verb regarding a new book of poetry in quite a long while...I will stand on that as my final reaction.
-David Lee, First Poet Laureate of Utah and author of Mine Tailings and Rusty Barbed Wire: Selected Poems
Seeing-In A Small-Town takes us on a journey through small-town America. The poetry chapbook is a collection of vignettes, each based on a different person or group of people that our visiting explorer encounters during their travels. Each vignette is a story the explorer imagines based on the person's appearance, behavior, and interactions with others. Through these stories, the reader is given a glimpse into the lives of small-town Americans and the daily routines that make up their lives. The book explores judgment, assumptions, and the importance of seeing beyond the surface. The poems remind us that every person has a story and that we should be slow to judge and quick to listen. We never know what burdens someone carries or what joys they celebrate. Everyone is more than just their appearance; we should take the time to get to know them before forming opinions.
When Tom Dukes calls himself an old southern queen / with poodle, the love child of Liberace / and Flannery O'Connor, he's both funny and right, though there's much more to him than that. His has been a life triangulated by family in South Carolina, friends from his college days in Texas, and those mature years of settling into Ohio. He has the southerner's knack for storytelling, often about Mama and Daddy and his permissive Aunt Ruby who used to say, Sometimes God goes out for a smoke. He also has what all poets crave: a gift for indelible beginnings and endings that hit the sweet spot, as in his poem Red Onions that starts They put the day on its feet and ends with I need this Old Testament fruit, / The peculiar charity of its taste. We come from his poems fully satisfied by their grace and wry humor and a poignancy that has gone on too long for tears: I live in the kingdom / Of the haunted and the grateful, / Keeping my ghosts in line.
-Elton Glaser
Tom Dukes, southern queen with poodle, the love child of Liberace and Flannery O'Connor, takes us on a beautiful pilgrimage of faith, family, life. His travels show us Southern places of the heart, the borderland of El Paso, and his adopted Ohio landscapes. I read each poem and want immediately to reread it. I already love Tom's writing, and the vividness of his language. This is a top-shelf collection that I'll turn to again and again.
-Paul Stroble, Webster University
You don't have to be born and raised Baptist in the deep south with Mama crying over sins she didn't commit and Daddy full of the Old Testament to put your faith in these exuberant, inspired, love-soaked poems. Tom Dukes not only considers the lily but also Carolina hydrangeas with heads big as planets, sewing-circle widows making crochet out of chaos, Tibetan prayer flags flapping between Ohio barns like God's laundry, and the saving graces of insulin, Daddy's Army latex lessons, holy infidelities, and outlaw marriage. In a voice full of empathy and wit, even elegies become odes to being alive in a world of ruptures, raptures, and unexpected charity. These gospels will make both saints and sinners say Amen!
-Lynn Powell, Season of the Second Thought
Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers focuses on the author's mother and the glamorous soprano who came between his parents when he was eight years old. They both fell in love with her, but Carolyn Long and his mother, whose nickname was Bobby, ended up together, sharing a life and what they secretly considered a marriage, having exchanged vows on a moonlit night in the summer of 1958. This memoir celebrates the do-it-yourself union between two women: a housewife who became a bank teller and a professional singer who became a voice teacher. It endured until one partner's death in 1991-memorialized by the cemetery plot they share, with their names engraved on opposite sides of the tombstone, just like the names of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Their life together was turbulent, partly because of their volatile personalities (and it took volatility to make such a leap of faith into forbidden love in the Fifties), partly because of prejudice against same-sex relationships, so they had to call themselves cousins in order to rent an apartment or a house together. Although the author grew up with the two women and considered Carolyn more of a parent than his father, he didn't discover the true nature of their tumultuous relationship until both women had died and left clues for him to find in their diaries and notes.
The American Gun is a poem in ten parts delving into the modern phenomenon of mass shootings in the United States. It's a narrative account of a young teacher in NYC wrestling with the reality of American gun culture. From the classroom to the subway platform, The American Gun is a meditation on tragedy and what it means to live in a country where domestic terrorism is a constant threat. Femiani's poetry illuminates what the media cannot: the residuals of monumental loss, months and years after the fact, in the face of an unyielding democracy unable to protect the lives of its citizenry and its children.
Still Life with Rope and River explores racism through a chorus of voices surrounding Emmett Till's murder. Through research in combination with emotional truth, Williams Shen uses persona poems to dive deep into the psyche of both common and lesser known people and objects regarding Till's lynching. Williams Shen also weaves in their own narrative and family history of how Blackness is dissected and dismissed, illustrating how the past is a ghost to the present.
Tumblehome is structured like a musical fugue, moving in three sections from the west coast of Ireland to London, then to Galway, and back to a small town in Minnesota as it interweaves and deepens themes of home, time and loss. The poems contemplate vast human history and the small space of our lives in distinct voices and episodes, with closely-observed objects-coins, stones, birds, water-reappearing and echoing to create a harmonic poetic travelogue.
Birthing Butterflies aligns the metamorphosis of butterflies, a symbol of transformation and resurrection, with nineteenth-century Black enslaved mothers. Like a cocoon, their wombs nurtured and birthed memories that sustained Black life. Just as butterflies take flight from the confines of their self-built shells, these poems explore how Black enslaved mothers inhabited Black love, joy, agony, freedom, and rebirth. They soared above the systemic structures of slavery set on diminishing their human dignity and dismantling their communal regard.
Birthing Butterflies acknowledges the suffering Black enslaved mothers experienced when their difficult labors left them unable to control their bladder and bowel movements - a condition called obstetric fistula. These women endured countless surgeries without the aid of anesthesia when the nineteenth-century surgeon, J. Marion Sims, operated on their tender bodies.
Birthing Butterflies recognizes the collective trauma shadowing the histories of Black enslaved mothers. Still, this collection of poems decenters Sims' presence by asking, what role did enslaved community members play in caring for Black women burdened with the infirmity of obstetric fistula? Who nursed these women as distress overcame their bodies and spirits? What hopes did they have for their children?
Birthing Butterflies offers a humane appreciation of the vital spirit and robust legacy of Black enslaved women. Imbued with beauty and the paradoxical fullness of human complexity, their trauma stories are as restorative as they are harrowing, healing, and liberating. Set amidst a violent socio-economic and predatory slave system, this collection of poems begins with Black love. Black enslaved people upheld each other's priceless and treasured dignity. They affirmed what James Baldwin would later come to assert, that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else's profit.[1] Black (un)enslaved mothers embodied the vulnerability, fight, and emotional transparency of the blues. They invoked the agency of the spirituals that dwells in the depths of African diasporic cosmologies. Their speech and wisdoms relished the linguistic ingenuity of Black English and reveled in the dialectal flair of creole. Their nursery rhymes and lullabies were relatives to the dissonant timbres of Jazz and the exultations of lament. As memory keepers, their testimonies sang griot chronicles. In Birthing Butterflies, Black enslaved women become a sacred harbor as they abide in processes of luscious becoming for themselves and generations to come.
[1] Baldwin, James. An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis. The New York Review of Books, 19 Nov. 1970, www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/01/07/an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis/.
In The Thaw of Day chronicles the aftermath-what it's like to leave a marriage torn apart by rage and substance abuse. In the midst of divorce, the poet was also by her mother's side as she lay dying. After burying her mother, she relocated as a newly single woman to Mexico. Alone for the first time in more than half her life, she rented out her home to pay the bills and learned new skills fast to stay afloat: preparing for hurricanes, managing invading bats, exterminating snakes, and evading a growing population of witch moths. The speaker in these poems comes to terms with trauma experienced over a lifetime, taking readers on a journey of recovery while finding deep meaning and joy in the smallest things: ...the ocean, sky, dirt and air, and space // between my cells... as she grapples with big questions including impermanence and why we are here, how the wind off the Seine /crawls under your scarf. The black / and white photo from the museum, / an image of Basquiat between us / tells me Basquiat is dead, / and in this photo, all of us are memory. The collection is bursting with the natural world, filled with whales and wild mushrooms, taking the reader from Paris and Mexico to Los Angeles, Atlanta and the moon! The book looks at grief following the loss of the poet's long marriage, the death of her mother, and her father to suicide, while always finding something to be thankful for, even if it's, the way a leaf / still shudders after the wind.
After the cancer diagnosis, the veterinarian said, I think we can beat this. What came next was five years of medications, surgery after surgery, Cushings Disease, two more cancers, and the slow decline of a beloved pit bull. Dying Dog Poems explores the impacts of canine cancer, managing hospice care, and the decision of when to choose compassion and let go.
And Then She Persisted, is the story of overcoming generational trauma, abuse, and neglect. It is the story of standing up against racism. It's a story of advocacy, passion, allyship, and surrendering to stepping into one's purpose.
This book started as many blog journals, schooling, training, therapy, light night talks with my friends, channeling into my spirituality, and a plethora of other methods to work through compartmentalizing through the childhood trauma I endured, and finding myself on my journey to being antiracist.
Although I did not know at the time, childhood trauma, and systemic racism that our county is built upon, really conditioned me to be a person that I had learn to persist against.
Throughout the memoir, I walk through my childhood and all of the trauma, abuse, and neglect that I endured from my birth until moving out of my home. It covers the importance of relationships in my life. It covers finding myself as a biracial woman, who was raised in a white home with no access to my black family, struggling with my identity and finding a springboard of support to really put my all into my journey of identity development and Antiracism education.
It is a woven story of my memoir and self-help of ways to start and continue on one's anti-racist journey, with some information about advocating in between.
And then she persisted.
Metal House of Cards explores the interconnections between place, relationships, and the environment. These collaborative poems weave together two voices to tell a single story about queer love. In the wake of a lost relationship, the speaker recounts memories, weighing the costs and possibilities of seeing and being seen. This chapbook was written during a midwestern power outage, and its poems speak to the electric nature of collaboration and surprise.
