The Sound of Sugar....Erica Dawson

Everybody Down

Around this time of year, someone will fall

Over Great Falls. It could be me if I

Left Tampa’s flatness for Virginia’s drawl.

Altiloquent, high-flying cardinals’ cry

Whit chew. The Civil War has its own app,

e-iPhone forts; but, love rides war roughshod

Over Virginia for lovers and sap

Sugar maples. I could get right with God

Here, and descend from blue preoccupations

Catching humidity latching on white

Oak trees, and tangle with indoctrinations:

Survival of the fittest; fright or flight;

Heat rising. Metamorphic slab for miles

Above the water table, stipule spines

Float somewhere for a stagnant spot. Rock stiles

Tease ticks to Climb back up. The ripples’ brine

Is really schist’s sharp grains. How do you like

Me now, God? Accident of fractured bone,

One with nature, the solstice, and a hike.

I bloom in spring. In spring, I die as stone.

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....Charlie Malone

Illusive, Weeded

white chicken feathers scatter across the lawn

red specks glisten wet grass thick with

dandelions.

                  the door to the coop is ajar.

beyond this    flight    thick rows of pine

dead limbs scratch and snap

                                               heart slows

deeper in the woods     skittish deer bed down

within the rectangle of a toppled sugarhouse

bucket rust.

                        pick up a brick and the wet

rotting leaf smell it holds down rises

the cold mass fills small hands.

an earthworm writhes in the vacancy

reddish centipedes scatter

a potato bug rolls in the palm.

About the Poet:

Charlie Malone recently returned to the Midwest to occupy a house in the woods outside a small town home to a not-exactly-small university, Ferris State. Malone studied literature and writing at Kent State and Colorado State and liked it just fine. He is grateful to all his students, teachers, colleagues, his wife, and the the kind editors who see something worthwhile in his work. Charlie's writings can be found in or are forthcoming with The Dunes Review, Phoebe, The Laurel Review, as well as the anthology A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park. 

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.

Large White House Speaking by Mark Irwin
(New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013) 
 
reviewed by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky


Mark Irwin’s poems juxtapose the preservation of memory with a poetics of the inaccessible. He asks, “Tell me...how we hear music / in silence, or a dead person’s voice / in our minds (that child’s swing / blown back and forth).” These lines perform a kind of mining through memory that takes us to an edge where sound and language are ultimately inaccessible and are conjured up only through an associative image. The remembered voice is conveyed through an image of absence hermetically sealed in parentheses that can never be completely opened. It is around this point that poems revolve in the collection Large White House Speaking.

The recurring theme of preserving the past is introduced in the first poem, “On Sundays, Sometimes.” Irwin uses language to plumb a line toward memory:

     I’ll start in the afternoon and follow the words of a new sentence
     ...I’ll open a photo album and descend
     into its cellar where people are walking toward me, out from
     the white chancel of each corner

In these lines, time is transformed into place and place represents a time preserved. “Memory is love’s quarry,” a phrase from the poem “Creation,” describes this fusion. In “April,” the fusion exists through a link between a father’s football helmet and a bronze Corinthian helmet. The former is found in an attic and is described as “scratched and dusty in the dormer’s blast of sun.” This family artifact is decaying from the elements. But a memory has preserved another image associated with the father—a brassy pole and shiny firetruck from the speaker’s childhood. A brightness exists in memory that becomes dull in the present. That brightness returns when one literally touches the past: “In London once / I touched a bronze Corinthian helmet whose pitted crown / was dented from blows.” This helmet corresponds with the football helmet, yet its existence conveys a certain defiance of time that the other helmet does not have.

Irwin’s poems explore both a desire for the past be tangible and the unnerving discovery that sometimes only abstract words can be a source of preservation. “April” expresses one of the few moments when the desire to feel the sensations of the past is fulfilled. The poem “Elegy” takes the opposite view. There is again an attempt to revive the past in the lines, “I am polishing the lens of a telescope to make / the distant more bright.” However, here the past is represented by a daughter and a marriage each lost in some way. There is no preserved artifact in the attic nor in a museum to represent what is gone, what cannot be retrieved: “—A glove, a ball, a house collapsed. A carcass of vowels wept.” In “Elegy” the speaker seeks objects and hears them from decaying letters that become a strange metaphor of absence. The house with its inhabitants is no longer intact. These interior letters that provide shape to words are simply sounds. It is the sealed, parenthetical phrase turned inside out with the loosened letters falling into a void.

The poetics of the inaccessible is aided by telescopes and telescopic poems, as in “Augenblick” which begins by looking into the eye of a dead robin then shifts to a glimpse of the setting sun into which the speaker sees “closer far.” In that instance, the speaker sees a moment from his past: “I remember Katherine now… / Some things you can never hold.” The poem “Ghost” addresses this relationship with the past head-on:

     Sometimes your name’s
     a dress like an iron/ bell the years
     swing shadows from/longer than home.
     Can you hear/that word peal? I’m going
     there now,
     carrying the windows/from inside
     all the vowels

The question plaintively expresses desire for sound to be tangible. The speaker wants to touch sound itself, and an attempt is made through the remarkable last line “I’m going there now”—as if sound is a place. These vowels and their sounds are now the opening to that place, to the bell’s peal.

The drive toward an interior space is contrasted by other poems that move almost cinematically through an exterior pastoral world. Images of trees, leaves, sunlight, insects, and the presence of other animals exist in these poems to clarify time into a tangible present. Yet the poems are both entranced by and skeptical of the natural world. The recurring seasons and their seeming beauty testify simultaneously of continuity and inevitable death. The poem “Red Feather” elucidates the former idea: “The owl / blinks its glass eyes / in a tree. Sometimes I think the red feather’s / the word is.” Likewise, in “Moment” the juxtaposition of singular images gives a nod to the pastoral hope of cheating time through recurring common events:  “Years. It was cold. You wore / red mittens…/ Summer. The late light / upon us. Blue coppers, just hatched….” Yet it ends with a sense of oblivion: “... then you are sent to a country of nameless people / where there is no time.”

There are two poems in which a brutal death coincides with images of the natural world that convey continuity. “Pastoral” defies the connotation of that word by referring to the rape and murder of a young girl whose body is found beneath an elm, “A balloon, red, was tied, bobbing from a limb / above her.” The childish image of the balloon in the tree and the reference to growing grass create a haunting contrast to the girl’s life cut short. In a poem about Matthew Shepherd, “Shoes,” Irwin places the image of people leaving “their offices and homes in that quaint / mountain town” next to the image of Shepherd: “He was tied, naked to a fence, then beaten.” Here it is the continuity of the sky that creates a brief, if inadequate, refuge.

In poems such as “In Winter,” Irwin plays more gently with notion that time and death stalk the pastoral. The former poem describes the lives of two widows. One husband is memorialized through the simple gesture of tracing a map, the other as his widow hangs bedsheets in which he died out to dry. The speaker acts as conduit between these women and their dead husbands. When he helps the one widow hang the sheets, their hands accidentally touch and for that moment, he breaks the loss that time awards through death.

Large White House Speaking is divided into four sections and while there are poems focused on memories, they never settle into nostalgia. Instead, there is a restlessness that indicates it is not enough to restore the memory and the people within it. Instead, these poems explore how language unlocks memory to fulfill a desire for the sensuality of those lost moments. It is that desire that compels so many of the poems and creates the deft metamorphoses the reader encounters in seeking lost sensations. Often, after several transformed images, the only result is untranslatable sound. This happens in “The Mirror in my Parents’ Room” in which the mirror has trapped within its silver, the Milky Way’s “phosphorescent, streaming light” which hums “infant sounds.” “Ars Poetica” conveys an unsatisfied hunger for the sensations of words,

     So many words I put
     together, pushing them along their way, packing them
     with light, loss, smells, tastes
     silence, seasons, and the lost
     seasons of an hour

The speaker responds to this hunger with a desire to “unwrap the cellophane from what we mean.”

The complexity of these poems is a pleasure as is the thematic insistence that pushes toward an elemental space. To focus on sound as being the doorway to that space creates unusual relationships between the words and their context. The sense is that if Irwin could shake these words from their context he would detect the heart that beats inside the letters. When he comes close to doing this, there is almost a euphoria at the discovery, as in the final lines of “Survey”:

     And there are those, who, almost
     after a lifetime, only listen.What
     ushers us through the years? Yellow leaves
     swirl past a stop sign. It is
     a ringing you/can feel.

The Sound of Sugar....Steve Langan

THE MIDWEST

I remember this old guy at the bar

where I worked gestured toward a girl

seated with friends at a round table

and said, You really need to learn to pause,

study the small of a woman’s back,

the parallel lines subtly curving upward—

are her shoulders little shouts or whispers?—

and her neck, slightly untuned, does it plead?—

to know how best to begin to pursue her.

But I was mainly interested in scoring then,

in showing you how many bottles I could

hold aloft in the dim light, and getting

and staying loaded for days at a time.

It’s rude to talk too much about yourself.

That’s what we learn here in the Midwest.

Days are numbered, we ask you to contribute

to the bottom line, to catch one another

in your sullen reproaches, crashing swoons,

make it look easy these next squalid hours.

Some little nitpickers claim we’re improving.

But we can’t all be angels of mercy or pain,

hunting and gathering, failing and building,

saving nothing for later, sleeping it all off.

About the Poet:

Steve Langan was born in Milwaukee and raised in Omaha. He earned degrees from the University of Nebraska and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Langan is the author of Freezing (2001), Notes on Exile and Other Poems (2005), Meet Me at the Happy Bar (2009), and What It Looks Like, How It Flies (2013).

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....Natalia Treviño

Tortilla Skins

In the hot light of your kitchen, ‘Uelita, you showed me how to

press the thick dough against your popping, aluminum table. Your

hands the size of the tortillas to come, willing the mass to open

as soft disk. My hands too small to maneuver, to stretch over it,

to pull the dry powder in. I was fifteen and knew you were happy.

Years after ‘Buelito had died, you a new kind of woman. Certain eyes.

Laughing, traveling, playing cards. Able to wake and say no, to skip

the heat of the day to cook the midday meal. Bake a cake instead, at

night. Crochet and smoke at the same time. Speak up around men.

Accept a small glass of beer. The dough as cool as your hands, your

red fingernails disappearing into the ball. Would you remarry? I

ask. You are quick to answer. Yes, it is ugly to live alone. Your fingers

have memorized this motion, this touch. All I can think is how the

wives in Mexico flail in sick waters, in tired, wakeful oceans, choppy

white crests salting their faces, silenced and gasping by the slap of

spray. Romantic novella endings kneaded into the eyes and ears of

daughters, spiteful neighborhood chisme, the sealing orders from

men, sons, brothers, husbands. The lines on your face, Uelita, deep

like the folds of the dough in your hands. The portraits in your

living room, bridal framed faces, faint as shells at the end of flat

beach, stripped of color by the brine of dry sunlight, waiting for

the tide to soak them, turn them, or swallow them. Bone exposed at the

back of the neck, you bend to your yes. And we press our tortilla

skins to the heat, their faces down, to cook them.

About the Poet:

Born in Mexico City, Natalia grew up in Texas where her mother taught her Spanish and Bert and Ernie gave her lessons in English. Natalia has won several awards for her poetry and fiction including the 2004 Alfredo Moral de Cisneros Award, the 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2012 Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. Currently, Natalia is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Vista College where she works with students of all levels.

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 Even Years of Marriage by Ash Bowen
(Dream Horse Press, 2014) 

reviewed by William Neumire

Ash Bowen’s debut collection, The Even Years of Marriage (winner of the 2012 Orphic Book Prize), charts the dissolution of relationships just as it charts the disillusionment of the speakers in these finely wrought, tightly woven poems. 

Every sound is intimately intended for another, the harmony almost at odds with the disconnected characters who weakly try to solder relationships, as in “Mexico’s Waters Are Only for Newlyweds,” from which the title comes:

    An affair every even year of marriage and this is another
    makeshift reconciliation—mojitos and a week of beach

    we’ve charged to our credit card: penance
    of the easiest order […]

                                          
                                 [ . . . ] Twenty years of marriage—
my lust’s no longer monstrous, your sarong has little left

to hide.

These sonnets, villanelles, and nonce forms are dense thickets of iambic sound, like pomegranate seeds of rhythm that convey anxiety for the loose, unruly lives described. The structures and strictures of these poems are arbitrary rules to anchor the unsettled worlds of their characters—characters who can’t depend on marriage or parents or siblings to steady them.

The book proceeds in three sections: the first details the unraveling of the speaker’s marriage; the second and third branch out and back to the speaker’s parents’ unsteady marriage and stories of the sister’s sexual misadventures and other menacing episodes. All of it is built through metaphors of space, physics, and 50s sci-fi movies, as if those were all systems of arbitrary rules, too, and could keep the chaos from overwhelming reality.

Bowen wields an array of tricks to create pauses, lacunae in which one can ponder, reconsider, recalculate. He employs white space particularly well to this effect, a fitting technique in a book so fraught with issues of separation and divorce:

                                                            stars collapsed

through the atmosphere

They threw their light between us

as I made a wish for you

to love me and you did

not.

A sense of nostalgia pervades these poems, a struggle to believe in a world where things still work, where the wedding day smiles and expectations last. Bowen draws from metaphors of old, often sci-fi, movies in this regard; movies that can be rerun ad infinitum to continue to show the way things should have been/were in some more fictional, romanticized past. Meanwhile, space gives the poet a metaphor through which to convey the cold distance that inhabits so many of these poems of failed marriage and failed attempts to have children that result in disillusioned reevaluations of other relationships. While the space metaphors provide fertile ground for illuminating topics of distance and ache, they also register a note of larger universality:

The night you went away

                                    the interstate glowed red beneath the flaring

                                                fins of your father’s Cadillac.

Now this collect call

                                    from outer space & what you’ve called to say

                                                is clear at last: Among stars

lovers come and go easy as you please. It’s the gravity

of earth that makes letting go so hard.

The idiom “to be expecting” doesn’t appear in this book, but a motif of unrealized expectations does, and often it is overtly in the form of trying to have children, the mechanized drudgery of working to get pregnant:

                                                                        You, from whom

all paternity proceeds, it’s on nights like these

I try to hide, creep farther across the beams

whenever she calls for me.  God,

how I fear the grisly machinery inside of her—

blood in the spokes, miswelded DNA, another

month of trying.

There’s a more sinister, even monstrous, quality to the poems in the second section, poems that portray the females in the narrator’s life as whorish, abused, hurt:

                                                Once my sister

did pirouettes through the city park

saying, I’m a leaf blown by a twister.

Four years later, she boarded a train

with a man who turned her head

six times against the edge of a knife.

Ultimately, this section positions the speaker as an inheritor cursed with an inability to escape the failed relationships of his family’s past, as well as the inherent separateness of his species. In a way, the speaker becomes his jealous father. These poems are creepy yet engaging: morbid, menacing, corset-like. These are characters in jeopardy surrounded by a society that loves the gory details of their sordid stories. And it would be easy to write these poems as judgments, but that’s not what happens; Bowen is skilled at switching points of view, and adapts well to new characters, creating pathos, wisdom, and universality, even when adapting the first person. These often come across as poems of invasion, as in these lines from ‘Stork:’

Tonight I am looking for you

to reclaim your fine down, to break

the windows of sleeping men

hoarding your plumes in their pillows.

Your ghost is circling the city. I am

looking for you like an expectant falconer,

my arm raised against the sky.

  

Admittedly, the poems sometimes are too honed in on one conceit without enough discursion, diversion or surprise for a reader of contemporary poetry that has so exploded with the cult of surprise. But there’s something nostalgic and comforting in the very way Bowen’s rhythms carry the reader back, soothe the reader with songs even as they recount such haunting stories.

In the end, this is a fine debut, one that welds sound and story into a moment that examines anxieties about our ability and inability, to be together, to damage each other, to keep going while constantly looking back. It’s a smooth read that offers pleasure on the level of each poem as well as pleasure on the level of following characters through dark, narrative tunnels. It deserves reading and listening as it connects to its readers in an abstract salve against its own anxieties.

The Sound of Sugar....Vidhu Aggarwal

umbilical with titles from Vidhu Aggarwal on Vimeo.

Humpadori Umbilical Cord Friend

Euphoria:

I arrive, singly—

prizing

the belly to unfuzz

the static orchestra,

to expand the warm feelings, play jump rope!

A neon pulse—a dimple—wanders

in

and out on you—

Lickety split. Spit and lick

the seal.

Close your eyes. And all the shine will migrate there:

lubing the tube, where the oxygen bells and surges,

ripening incidence, wings,

and miscellaneous

appendages.

Worlds-a-rama lotus out

of your skin and hinges. Soft

Camelots

peep and spore. A door opens.

You’re adored.

You’re another Venus

Hottentot, Venus with fur. It’s almost a dream:

You can always be more than you are—

Since you’re more than you want to be.

I’m your live feed

of nerves dangling, attached and rhyming, going to seed.

If you pluck the grub-end, I might bleed

horizons,

a free-form history, but never free.

About the Poet:

Vidhu Aggarwal grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and Sugar Land Texas, and currently lives and teaches in central Florida. Her poetry and video are a mash-up of cultural forms such as Bollywood, Star Trek, video games, internet porn, anime, minstrel shows, and tourist attractions. Her poems can be found in Sugar House Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Juked, Nimrod, PANK, desi-lit, and interlope among others. Readings and videos are available at the website
www.vidhu-aggarwal.squarespace.com. She is the found editor of SPECS, a journal of arts and culture with issues on Toys, The Perverse, and Homuncular Flexibility – www.specsjournal.org.

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.