Pretty Marrow by Shanan Ballam
(Negative Capability Press, 2013) 


reviewed by Shari Zollinger

    Letters, like bone, have pretty
    marrow. Intimate, gritty

    as a pearl […]

So goes the title poem from Shanan Ballam’s second book of poetry, Pretty Marrow, winner of the Utah Arts Council’s Original Writing Contest. In this collection, Ballam offers the inmost and essential parts of herself through exquisite syntax and sparkling, clear lines that explore such gritty themes as alcoholism, domestic violence, suicide, depression, and family dynamics.

Ballam structures the book via five sections including “Back into Syntax” and “Pretty Marrow,” yet each section might have also donned such titles as “mother,” “sister,” “father,” “brother,” and “lover.” In the first section, Ballam invites us to come to the hospital window behind which her mother is dying of alcoholism.

               I tip-toed to the hospital, peeked
    in my mother’s window. My one wet eye
               spied the tidy bed where my mother lay.

    A porcelain doll. My sisters sat near her,
               their lips and cheeks painted pink.
    Purple chrysanthemums, yellow daisies in vases,

               the pastel green light of a monitor
    made me remember sugar eggs for Easter,
               a little peephole to view a lovely scene […]

Ballam’s words glimmer, rendering priceless even the most painful poems. She propels the reader back into syntax, each sentence embedded with semi precious stones available to mine, to collect, to keep hidden under the bed or to pull out, to shine.

Shanan Ballam’s doppelganger/alter ego, Red Riding Hood, enters at the end of the first section and features strongly in the second. Her first book-length work was a chapbook called Red Riding Hood Papers. Ballam uses the familiar fairy tale as archetypal sidekick to elevate her own familial story from the personal to the mythic. Ballam’s fresh approach to the Red Riding Hood story weaves seamlessly through her poems, as we are granted unexpected perspectives from inanimate objects like Red’s basket, or Grandmother’s bed. Through this section we meet a sister who married, for all intents and purposes, the wolf:

    Wolf, ulfe, lupine, lupus:
    the slippery animal of time.

    Wolf will always be waiting the girl always
    watching, maybe inside, maybe outside, in the sky.

Ballam explores the nature of instinct and how to protect her sister from the real threat of domestic violence. She does not shy away from complex emotion and asks the reader to see, even empathize with dark things. She takes responsibility for every word on every page, anchoring the reader in precise, god-honest writing.

In her poem “Once More to the Lake,” Ballam speaks to the family experiment, its successes and failures. She highlights her relationship with her father.

    Weren’t we a family?
    Weren’t we?
    And wasn’t our father charming
    that day on the lake,
    his blue hat flying off in the wind?
    And wasn’t he marvelous,
    his enormous authority as he leaned
    from the truck window, Marlboro dangling
    from his mouth […]

Section four charts the bittersweet budding of the body, sexuality, and new relationships. Lovers emerge but are nameless. They share qualities of the wolf—still so animal. The body is both refuge and refuse.

    You, who just to feel your falling, fell,
    unlocked your eyes to splendid shame.
    You who crave delicious hell

    fell to feel the spark in every cell,
    shock of knowing shimmers your brain.
 
In Ballam’s final section, “Pretty Marrow,” we have fallen in love with Ballam’s loves. It is clear she loves her sisters, as well as the precision of words, the catharsis of poetry. In Ballam’s story, it is her sisters who save her and transform her poetry into a love story
  
    […] and my sisters bend, we all curve
    in to the sweet breath of one another’s hair
    as we sit in these, then other sticky chairs […]

    Then you sing, sisters your soft songs […]

Ballam finishes this collection on a highway, in a storm in “White-Out, Wyoming.” Having already guided us deftly through sharp metaphors and dark terrain, she asks us to take one more journey, linking us to the “little blue car” just ahead.

    […] and I was Alice tumbling down
    the reeling, deep throat
    of the rabbit hole. The heater blasted
    my face. My bladder ached.
    I was incredibly small
    but gripped the wheel, nudged
    the pedal till faint lights glittered.

But this poem is different. We enter that rabbit hole with her, because she’s taught us time and time again that we will emerge from each poem holding a glint of hope extracted from even the smallest of things—a smile from a boy, “his red hair wild in the snow.”


Reviewer’s Note:
During the period of time it took to write this review, Ballam’s younger brother Dylan tragically died. This review is dedicated to Dylan, who, Ballam believes, is the subject of her poem, “Paper Boat.”

    […]Why did I not save you,
    lay you in the sun, why did I
    not lift you, moss-limp and lovely, press

    your river blurred words to my face.
    You are my love note to the world,
    my paper boat. I wish you

    could let go and swirl away
    to a place unblemished, where light
    could pour its honey onto your face.

A Penance by CJ Evans
(New Issues, 2012) 


reviewed by Erin L. Miller

In CJ Evans’ latest collection of poems, images speak for themselves, allowing their peculiarity or violence to stand on their own. Despite what the title suggests, A Penance doesn’t seem a collection meant to atone but rather one that pulls certain things to the surface. In each poem, Evans creates a new world set in carefully selected and connected images. He strikes an uneasy timbre, placing stories of prison inmates next to personal confessions of desire next to a speaker vexed with the cruelties of the world. He writes through both a personal and global scope, touching on broad yet poignant themes. The collection is frank but lyrical and it is this balance that makes the blunt declarations so surprising.

Small, curious turns of phrases show up unexpectedly in the middle of poems, as in “the porpoise of a woman near orgasm” or “dangerous as owl pellets.” Other parts halt the reader in their certain and somber temper: “We have certainly failed so far,” “I dread your affection,” and “How can I know my children won’t be monsters?”

It is this consistent and lingering sense of doom that reminds the reader of the speaker’s acute familiarity with dark places (in himself and his environment): “It’s late / and I’ve misplaced,” “Trouble is nesting in my lungs,” and “Here’s the pallid / infection, the much-quiet dying.”

The speaker seems tethered between doubt and a wish to redress. Living in the company of paradox, Evans speaks of the “much-loud living” against everyday failings. He pairs subdued natural scenes with the wires of industry, animals with people, tragedy with intimacy. And despite the subtle brutality of some of the poems, others embody a lovely tonality that serves as soft interruptions, as in lines like “The nights pass like gypsum and butter” or “Let’s find a nesting box and pull / the smell of figs from beneath the bed.”

Mindful to sound, Evans strings together images and commands in a captivating stride. In “Instructions for Silk,” he begins with a thread of soft “b” sounds, “Never again the black box, the bind, / the flightless bird. Becalm in paper scent / of scotch.” only to quickly advance to an even longer series of biting “s” sounds “Silt, spend your fume […] Arrive / slim-boned, wisped, lusting after lust […] Never again, singe or wasp.” It’s this quiet unraveling that lends to the textured quality of his work.

In “The Work of Giants,” Evans writes about the wolfish, sometimes paltry quality of lust when compared to the world’s cruel giants: “The world is furious and I’m so tired / of being furious with it […] all / I want is your skin against my skin.” However, desire takes on multiple meanings in the book. It represents the distractions of lust but also a means toward growth and a lens to interact with the world.

In a book that hinges on honest examinations, Evans not only writes about conflicts of the world but also conflicts of the self reacting to the world. He explores self-evolution, learning through failure, and the inevitable not-knowing, as in “This Time in Wartime”:

    […] I don’t

    know the name of this new
    thing. This thing I’ve let settle

    down throughout me,
    which spreads itself enormously

    like unfurling skeins
    of creosote and becomes

    me. Far off, the artillery
    flashes, and I miss the boys

    I’ve been […]

The poem “Metamorphoses” serves as a multi-tiered study of the inevitability and universality of change in its use of the first person plural while moving back and forth from natural elements to the human condition. He also writes about moving beyond and reconciling the cruelties of the world while avoiding a maudlin voice of redemption. Many of the poems in the book have a fictional, dreamy air to them, as if existing just beyond, in another realm. The power of poetic whimsy is certainly not lost on Evans. He takes a step away from the first person, choosing instead to focus on observation. He lets the speakers’ reactions to their environments reveal their true character. They’re speakers who are simultaneously tired and sanguine of the world’s machinery. Despite the dark themes surrounding the text, they don’t give in to helplessness. For example, in “I Know the Pinecones,” the speaker discusses the pinecone’s sharp defenses as merely products of the world’s design, blameless subjects of the Earth’s “cruel devices.”

The collective self in the book ultimately becomes the self that, as Wallace Stevens writes, “touches all edges… that fills the four corners of night.” There’s no denying that A Penance is an expansive collection, which can appear, at times, scattered. Yet, what the book loses slightly in cohesion, it gains in powerful single lines and concise language. Every piece feels precise. If Jean-Luc Godard is right in saying that language is the house man lives in, then CJ Evans has built a striking piece of architecture.

Jesus Age

When someone says, I’m hopping on the train,
I see that person bouncing toward the train,
And bouncing like a crack-addled rabbit.

When I stand on the platform, James Brown yells,
Let’s count it off, let’s take it to the bridge.
And Gladys’s Pips woo woo their way to Georgia.

When I consider jump, I think of all
The people over 33 who say
There’s no year better than this one.

Jesus was supposed to save me at seventeen.
When he said no man knows the day or hour,
He said nothing of adolescent girls.


About the Poet:

Erica Dawson’s first collection of poems, Big-Eyed Afraid (Waywiser 2007), won the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her new collection, The Small Blades Hurt, is forthcoming from Measure Press. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology, Harvard Review, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the undergraduate, and the low-residency MFA, program at University of Tampa.

About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it. 

The Sound of Sugar....Erica Dawson

Jesus Age

When someone says, I’m hopping on the train,
I see that person bouncing toward the train,
And bouncing like a crack-addled rabbit.

When I stand on the platform, James Brown yells,
Let’s count it off, let’s take it to the bridge.
And Gladys’s Pips woo woo their way to Georgia.

When I consider jump, I think of all
The people over 33 who say
There’s no year better than this one.

Jesus was supposed to save me at seventeen.
When he said no man knows the day or hour,
He said nothing of adolescent girls.


About the Poet:

Erica Dawson’s first collection of poems, Big-Eyed Afraid (Waywiser 2007), won the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her new collection, The Small Blades Hurt, is forthcoming from Measure Press. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology, Harvard Review, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the undergraduate, and the low-residency MFA, program at University of Tampa.

About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.  

The Sound of Sugar....Scott Poole

A Beautiful Flower

Don’t call her vagina a beautiful flower.
Please don’t.
If her vagina were a beautiful flower
then she would have bees in her pants
all the time
and it would be impossible to hold her
close enough
to be intoxicated
by the gossamer tendrils of her perfume.
One cannot be swept away by subtle
drops of dew welling at the corners
of her eyes when you reveal
your most vulnerable,
baby-chick-softness
sentiments
if your dearest love
is hopping around
like a River Dancer on crack,
waving her hands madly
in front of her crotch.
Then, all you’ve got is
is a screaming freak-out
ripping her pants off in public
and that would not be a flower,
my friend,
that would be porn.



“A Beautiful Flower” from The Sliding Glass Door © Scott Poole 2011 by permission of
Colonus Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.



About the Poet:

Scott Poole is the author of two books of poetry, The Cheap Seats and Hiding from Salesmen. Poole is also the resident poet of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s weekly show, “Live Wire!” and the founding director of both Wordstock, Portland’s Annual Festival of the Book and Get Lit!, Spokane’s Annual Book Festival. Currently, he is a software developer who lives in the town he grew up in, Vancouver, Washington with his wife and two children.



About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it. 

The Sound of Sugar....Lucy Biederman

ALL OUR HITS ARE ACCIDENTS

The dead are dead—
we can do whatever we want.
At no station on earth do they stand
and wait. Have we crammed this barren land
to spite them? They might not recognize what they’d return to haunt,
they’ve missed so much.
Someone said they liked the color red
so we painted the station, the trains, the casually panicking bus.










About the Poet:

Lucy Biederman is a doctoral student at the University of Louisiana and the author of a chapbook, The Other World (dancing girl press, 2012). Poems of hers are forthcoming or have appeared recently in ILK, Shampoo, Many Mountains Moving, Gargoyle, Ping Pong, Word Riot, and The Tusculum Review.


About the Sound of Sugar:

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it. 

Two Important Utah Poets Present Their Work

Poets Rob Carney and Michael McLane will present from their works at Cedar City's Main St. Books (25 N. Main St.) at 7pm on Monday, November 4, 2013. A reception and book signing will immediately follow at nearby Artisans Art Gallery (94 W. Center St.).

Refreshments will be available.

This event is free and made possible by sponsors Main St. Books, Artisans Art Gallery, and Sugar House Review.

Rob Carney is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Story Problems (Somondoco Press) and Home Appraisals (Plan B Press). His poem "Seven Pages from The Book of Sharks" just won first prize in Terrain.org's poetry contest; the latest issue is available on line now. He teaches at UVU and lives in Salt Lake City.

Michael McLane earned an MFA in Creative Writing and is finishing an MS in Environmental Humanities. He is the review editor for Sugar House Review and a co-editor of the new journal saltfront. His work has been published in numerous journals including Interim, Laurel Review, Colorado Review, Sidebrow, and Denver Quarterly. He is the Literary Program Officer for the Utah Humanities Council.

Please take advantage of this unique opportunity to hear two exceptional Utah poets present their work.