Sugar's 2012 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Sugar House Review's excited to announce our 2012 Pushchart Prize nominations:

• Rob Carney’s “A Lesson Every Shipwreck Learns Too Late”
• Steven Cramer’s from Clangings, [Mother said you count your friends on one hand…]
• Amy Eisner’s “Wasting Water”
• Kate Greenstreet’s “719”
• Jay Hopler’s “That Necessary Evil”
• Carl Phillips’s “Your Body Down in Gold”

It's never easy to pick just six out of so many amazing poems. So, a special thanks to all of our 2012 contributors--obviously, without you, there is no Sugar.

Burnt Sugar Reading

We're really excited to be doing our first joint reading--it's especially exciting to be doing it with burntdistrict, who is normally too far away. burntdistrict recently celebrated the launch of
its inaugural issue at AWP in Chicago. Based in Omaha, it takes its name from the city’s 19th century red light district.

Tuesday, June 5
7:30 p.m.
Eccles Community Art Center

Contributors from both magazines will read:

Shanan Ballam
Liz Kay
Christopher Leibow
Joel Long
Susan Nyikos
Natalie Young


Wine, cheese, and sugar reception to follow the reading.

Sugary Year

It's been a full year for Sugar so far. AWP was insane and great; we met a lot of contributors and subscribers, which is always nice. We sold out of our the Fall/Winter 2011 issue (at least what we brought with us), which is also nice.

In the past month we launched our 6th issue, Spring/Summer 2012, and while it took longer than planned to get it ready, it was worth the extra time. Contributor and subscriber copies finally shipped this week. We're proud of this issue, so if you're not a subscriber, you should find out how to get your hands on one.

Also this last month, we found out Patricia Smith's poem "Laugh Your Troubles Away," from our Fall/Winter 2011 issue, won a Pushcart prize and will be featured in the 2013 anthology, due out in the fall. We felt lucky just to get Patricia Smith's poems in our pages, and feel much more than lucky to have our second Pushcart winner. (The issues with Pushcart-winning poems are available for purchase on our website: #1 Fall/Winter 2009, #5 Fall/Winter 2011.)

To sum this up, we are overwhelmed by the good things Sugar's been able to be a part of in the first part of 2012 (and the two years previous). Our next issue will mark three years (!). For the four of us who founded the magazine (Natalie, Nathaniel, Jerry and John), it seems pretty crazy. This endeavor is a lot more work than we anticipated, but it's also has much bigger rewards than we expected. Thanks for supporting us. We couldn't do it without you--subscribers, contributors, volunteers, submitters, event attenders, candy eaters, etc.

We have yet to figure out how to be good blog keepers, but we're hoping someday soon, we'll get it better at it. Thanks for being patient.

Join Sugar for Issue 6 Launch Party

Help us launch our 6th issue--Spring/Summer 2012. Come for an amazing reading featuring current and past contributors:

Curtis Jensen
Nate Liederbach
dawn lonsinger
Laura Stott
Wendy Blankenship

More info on our Events page (see tab at top of page).

Negro League Baseball by Harmony Holiday 
(FENCE Books, 2011) 


reviewed by Steve Langan 

Harmony Holiday’s Negro League Baseball, winner of the 2010 Fence Books Motherwell Prize, is a difficult book, and it is, in many places, impenetrable. But after a more full immersion, these cryptic poems, most of which are in amped-up prose, deliver the reader with immeasureable energy into the future of medium. Set in landscape, rather than portrait orientation, to better hold long lines/stanzas/paragraphs, many poems are punctuated by varying taps on the space bar, which is one of the ways this poet holds the beat. It’s a book almost as idiosyncratic as Spring and All. The cover of this collection depicts a riotous orgy of music appreciation. Holiday’s expansiveness brings to mind C.K. Williams, but compared to her display of fullness and spontaneity, he’s counting iambs on his fingers and toes. 

Music, heard through unexpected and thrilling word and phrase choices, is apparent throughout this bold debut. From Holiday’s far from run-of-the-mill bio, however, we are made aware that she’s a dancer and an instructor of dance, which may be the best way to frame how she should be read. In her poems, we 
are made to feel the presence of the sinuous dancer, the lithe one who can move with ease—muscles and muscle groups that middle-aged men like me never were able to access—and with fluidity that approaches the level of danger. Now that she made this leap and that spin, how is she going to come, in one piece, down to earth? Over and over, Harmony Holiday’s poems defy gravity. 

Told slant, Holiday has a story to tell, one that involves and serves the memory of her dad and mom. Dad, we learn in the poems and more directly in the bio, was “Northern Soul singer and songwriter Jimmy Holiday.” Mom, 30 years younger than he, was a writing student at the University of Iowa when they met. A trim early poem, “The Soonest People,” channeling her, ends: 

         My father was Jimmy, dad
         was weeping so frankly it came like gazing had 

Yes, we see that Holiday can do Dickinson, just one of many samples and references spliced onto these poems that are shot through so brazenly with multiple influences that, paradoxically, they find a sound—or layers of sound—like no one else’s. Another poem that appears early in the first section, “Assembly,” arrives—after playing around a bit with the metaphor of the “battery” and then, through free association, to the “body” via the “house” and then the “self” (this is how Holiday’s poems move; People get ready)—at mom. Part of the first stanza emits a valuable clue about how Holiday, from here forward, should be read: 

         recklessness became a dance and a dance became every battery lined up like ready 

For a more full taste of Holiday’s hyper-charged mind in motion, I include the last stanza of “Assembly,” which achieves a full report of Mom, with so much love and tenderness and heartbreak, and includes a Dickinsonian victory salute: 

         Every battery lined up in a station as the police check for accidents, no my mother
         hasn’t slipped when she had fallen that maximum down there is constant effort, we
         feel it as agency one commits to behaving in a certain way and ceases to motor,
         matter, my mother, with her casual sense of a language of the household scaffolded
         by words for average moments by words for disaster, for happier, bywords, I can’t
         think of any now but maybe purified by the effort hiding its failure watch her slump
         into the one rubber chair until she amuses with the automatic of her own sacrifice or
         fact or Edith Piaf or As you Like it, the right clothes, the right desperation looks
         indignant and I am dizzy backwards each time I laugh about while I cry for her,
         demiurgic as our mild sorrow it runs, bang! into ecstasy. 

By dismissing the rote writing workshop dictate to trim the poem down, Holiday is able to access her particular genius. She openly explores and speculates—she says this, says that, how about this?—in messy unrelenting metaphoric free-form. I get the sense she periodically pauses to make what becomes an unexpected and ultimately wise editorial decision: to leave it all in. She lands not only with unexpected gentleness on her marks, but more often than not with complicated and resounding pathos. She seems to convey, “So how do you like that, arbiters of what has become, in too many circles, the denaturing creative writing roundtable?” 

Throughout the third section (of five), Holiday clearly hits her stride. In “An Assassination from Appropriation Forms,” Jimmy returns: 

         that Jimmy finishes wearing his hat down that babbling lane [...] 
         And, near the end of the poem, he arrives in yet another form,
         And then Jimmy steps in the from of him, lend me your teeth, lemme your teeth [...]

It is at this point that even the most jaded reader will want to step in and attempt to save the young woman who demonstrates her vulnerability through the stress she places on language, which keeps fracturing or flaring everywhere she looks, for her protean father, for herself. 

However, in “Alltime,” also in section three and presented here in its entirety, Holiday seems to be telling us that, despite the worry her poems may cause, as 
long as love and validation are options, she’s okay: 

         And every time I fall in love, what television, another obituary, I am three, trying to tell psychology about /
         psychology: look at me, see me, watch me. 

Because of this poet’s youth and audacity—or because Holiday’s is an original voice, which can obscure or upend readers’ judgment—others may argue that these poems are headlong, excessive, and “private” beyond what’s tolerable. Examining some poems or sections, they probably have a point. But I would happily counter this argument by saying the high virtuosity Holiday represents depends on excess. Though they could not differ more tonally and formally, I see the Derek Walcott of Omeros—and the epic poets to whom Walcott regularly pays homage—as ancestor to Harmony Holiday. She is mission- driven to lay claim, however fleeting the objects and subjects of her vision become—dissolving sometimes just as they are presented—to her own distinct contemporary epic of hurt transferred through music and motion into beauty. 

Her project, in the end, is one of humanity’s oldest: the reinvigoration and reenactment of history through lyric poetry. By detailing the quest for her family and personal history in a fully imagined stream of crosscurrents, Holiday delivers to us the opportunity to begin to lay claim to our own complicated pasts. The difference between Holiday and many other contemporary poets is that Holiday is brave enough to transfer this information to her readers in an interactive form that upsets all they thought they knew about how poems look, feel, sound, and function. Holiday is energized by the spirit and need of discovery. It seems she can’t help but take ongoing formal, syntactical, and linguistic risks and leaps. Through Harmony Holiday’s daring first collection, we begin to feel what freedom really is; she makes us hardly afraid to reimagine and redefine 21st Century American poetry.

Still: of the Earth as the Ark Which Does Not Move by Matthew Cooperman

(Counterpath Press, 2011) 

reviewed by Jerry Carlin

In his new collection, Still: of the Earth as the Ark Which Does Not Move, Matthew Cooperman gives readers poems of contemporary chaos filtered through a human brain and attendant nervous system. The work provokes multiple blood pressure spikes and drops within individual poems, though we ultimately come to sympathize with this scrupulous, self-observant list-maker and erudite poet. These 28 poems pencil out a fluid, incessant anxiety. In the Still: series the poet indexes his cache of persons, places, and things, setting his foundation to build list-like poems—Christ and Celine Dion, NASA and Gaza, arugula and hangovers—all the while future-tripping to The Three Horsemen of The Rapture. Cooperman holds close to his charged, disparate bits of information. Ordered on a page, they’re like digits on a spreadsheet in a bookkeeper’s ledger. Categories of interrelated subjects, pertaining to the poem’s title, are placed down the right side of a page. Anxiety “triggers” related to those subject headings are inventoried across the page, separated from their parent heading on the right by a colon:

                                                      Still: Winter
         and the lanterns coming on: the oil price rising ($135 crude), the old furnace
         functioning (2/3rds capacity), the body count rising (38%, 1/20/01–3/20/11)
         Snowman: made of salt, or the salt made of man, a pillar standing in Whatzitstan
         a soluble symbol, a salient salve, desert, deserted, dersertification […]

Like Frank O’Hara in his “I do this, I do that” poems, Cooperman gives readers a glimpse at how a brain filters the world. O’Hara was freer in dispatch, showing how he felt; Cooperman, not so much. He’s a straight guy poet writing about feelings. He hides them behind a wall of vocabulary, realizes what he’s done, and after being scolded for it, once again, the poet caves and shows tenderness or terror. He’s the guy who busts your chops before jetting home to take his twin boys to kiddie yoga; openly butch, closeted sweet.

Reading the collection start to finish in one sitting requires no uncertain stamina. The weft and warp of Cooperman’s bulging spreadsheets will unravel the unsuspecting reader, who will live the poem’s escalation from baseline worry to despair to stratospheric paranoia. However, the depth of Cooperman’s poems becomes apparent in subsequent readings. I am not erudite. I am curious. Faced with the obscure, I stayed close to my Webster’s, with Wiki and Google fired up. Accessible but not facile, the poet’s bank of cyber-ephemera and skillful nods to total annihilation come to life with terrific rhyme schemes and manic sparkle, while tonal shifts go Pushmi-Pullyu over the map of pyscho-social issues:
         you are first
         and on a
         list complexly these
         are hours and
         days oh daze
         to singularize and
         bind disparities please
         please baby please
         make larger space.

Throughout, the reader is reminded how painful it is to be scared. All. The. Time. Yet, throughout the struggle, readers are asked to consider accepting life on life’s terms, as in the final stanza of “Still: Enlightenment,” “Problem: driving pictorial expressions of breath down a page about letting go.” Not inclined to acceptance, I prefer the stanzas with humming disquiet, like those in Still: Thirst, “Equation: coffee = the Enlightenment, Michelob Ultra Peach = the Decline.” The Still: poems alternate with brief, single stanza poems. Whitman, Crane, and what feels like Ashbery, color the verse. In this mix of poems, readers experience Dubstep pacing, measured, lullaby lines, and soft stumbles at frayed line breaks. These poems are like punctuation, a transition, or a rest from the dire lists, like this poem that sets up the reader for a new section:

         everyone in invocation
         chalking a line
         around a thing
         hedge glittering
         belt
         to bolster home
         the local altar
         our little time
         pearling quite quietly
         the child within

The pattern is sucker-punched as we move into “Still: Shooting.” The poem beginsat a brisk pace, the humor in the first stanza devolving into severe turbulence in the second. The stunning simplicity and the chilling rhyme scheme of the secondstanza kills, literally in, “Location: grassy knoll, Indonesian atoll, Dakota Hotel,Arizona mall.” The shooting continues with a “roll call:” of schools and colleges,“‘Presidential Fatalities:’” and a well-timed injection of humor, “Announcer: ‘Yes,after a tough day sometimes a shooting game is all you need.’”

These aren’t static lists of whack-a-doodle thinking. Everyone’s anxious, hence The End Times people, the Global Warming People, The 9-11 Conspiracy People. The poems are morning-time gnawing in your gut before hopping out ofbed. We’re all afraid of some force taking us out, and Cooperman has catalogued a glorious pandemonium of grown-up considerations to feed off.

Visuals, typographic and otherwise, accompany Cooperman’s poems. Pages of white typeface floating on a black ground are interspersed throughout. Letters, dropped from words on the black pages, disrupt quotes from Harriet Tubman and Kathopanisada, The Serenity Prayer and Corinthians. Crumbling platitudes are no longer reliable. Sprinkled throughout are iconic fonts and logos of name brands; Coca Cola, Ralston Purina, Trojan Condoms, Playboy, and Nikon imply the root of all evil once removed. Cooperman’s visual aids suggest society is totally doomed.

At 116 packed pages, the freshness occasionally disappears; a rhyme scheme doesn’t hit the mark, a stanza doesn’t scan. It takes a DeMilleian effort to sustain this level of energy. Cooperman succeeds despite minor blips in the final cut. He takes risks with mechanics and reputation. Simply put, he has the nerve to let his readers peek and poke at what goes on in his vivid imagination. Near the conclusion of the work, however, the poet really goes all out with a direct poetic declaration in “Still: Here,” “Author: and in the end, I’m still here, I am always in the book, a somewhere I
am […].”

“A somewhere I am” nails it. The poet’s self-exposure made this reader squirm. As someone who obsesses about the inevitable or the unimaginable, Cooperman’s poems do come around to something I easily forget—hope eternal. If he can hang onto that, I suppose I can too, and hope for a world that eschews Michelob Ultra Peach for the refinement of coffee.

The Hurricane Lamp by Sundin Richards 
(Otis Nebula, 2011)


reviewed by Andrew Haley 

In his first book of poetry, The Hurricane Lamp, Sundin Richards gives us lean, jagged poems that seem at first glance mostly erudite bravado but deepen with repeated reading until they span into multitudes. Under inspection, the language reveals simultaneities hung over the precipice of adept enjambment, and syllabic economy developed from scrutinizing the American masters of the short-lined poem. Individually, these poems nurture a fondness for the actual delivered via Richards’ predilection for the sordid: “the little / town fumes / in a cradle.” But try as he might, the effect is more H.D. than Bukowski. In “The Last of the First of the Last,” the misanthropic hangover opens into the lyrical:

         I’m deeply sick
         of you

         And want to be
         left alone

         […]

         You spin
         and your

         Hair spins
         with you

         Fire your flies
         all you want

         It won’t change
         things

The modulation from bitterness to elegiac to self-censuring is standard throughout. The forlorn, even self-pitying tone, leads to wider laments (and not a few minor jeremiads) often with such sincerity that a handful of Richard’s syllables, divided among couplets or tercets, evoke the more sinuous lines of the Pisan Cantos. Few poets use the couplet so concretely. For a punk rock acolyte of Williams and Olson, Richards’ couplets have a materiality, a sculptural intentionality. It is no small thing to fashion short-lined poems which are hewn but not hatchetted. Perhaps because he writes his poems on old manual typewriters, Richards’ poems seem machined. There is purpose to their shape. They maximize conduction. The line of their music does not flag. In an age when free verse wears the pope’s ring, it is surprising how little attention is paid to the materials. Whereas Richards’ basic unit of expression is the syllable, it feels like many poets today use the blog post, or that staple of creative writing workshops, the so-called free write. Lines end with a keystroke, without cause. As a result, much free verse today reads like a paragraph broken at random on a smart phone’s screen. Richards puts such thought into the tooling of his lines, into their parsing, shaping, and selection that they exceed the sum of their parts:

         The
         elegant

         Algebra of
         rocking wires

         Makes its
         own reveille

         For me
         and I’m sure

         I might blos
         som into breaks

As a collection, The Hurricane Lamp pays a subtle, but indebted, homage to The Maximus Poems. Richards’ Gloucester is Helper, Utah, a derelict coal mining town in the mountains southeast of Salt Lake City, accessible by the nation’s most dangerous highway, US-6. It is a scenic, nineteenth century hamlet abandoned to its ruin by the indifferent economic gods, a place whose present was hijacked by its future before it escaped its past. Richards’ grandfather lived in Helper and, as a boy, Richards visited by train from his native Colorado. It is from memories of these trips, and later visits, that Richards’ Helper, as imagined and remembered, is formed and populated. A blue-collar, tough-guy persona speaks from the last bar under the mountain but, as with Olson among his watermen, the intelligence, sensitivity, and education of the poet continually slip from beneath the mask. While “Firedamp is feared/up and down the line/and are those your teeth/or dice over there?” “chords are/no match/ for a starved/Solyma” and “singing saws/are thaumatropes.”

Alecto. Solyma. Thaumatropes. As tough as he tries to be, Richards swaggers though his honkytonks and hangovers quoting Milton, and not the usual soliloquies. Alecto, brother of Nemesis—one of the avengers, the Erinyes, born from the mess of Uranus’ castration—punishes moral crimes committed against the people. Richards has brought him to Helper. He is a man with no name. No town has better need of an avenger. This shuffling of rhetorical masks evokes Pound’s Cantos, which Richards knows well. The persona, as well as Helper’s role as an Olsonian topos commit less to a process of realism, than to a Poundian invocation of a lost arcadia; in this case, a plain-talking arcady replete with hookers, miners, and librarians isolated in the high mountains from transformative social and economic changes that destroyed Helper in the second half of the 20th century. Topos in The Hurricane Lamp is less important for what it is than for what it is for. Richards’ mountain-Gloucester is an instantiation of arcadia meant to evoke all arcadies. These are not histories, but odes.

In later poems, Richards’ poor, sordid habitations are visited by Enkidu and Metatron—Sumerian and Hebrew demigods. As in the Cantos, this kind of name-dropping blows out the walls of the realist project and sites the poet, and the reader, in a great vortex of culture and context. Just as Helper is meta-Helper, more variable than referent, so obscure, anachronistic characters and objects help universalize the scope of Richards’ poems and predicament. He too becomes a collage. The hardboiled tough guy, the miner, the drunk, the plain-talker, the Hellenist, the slighted wunderkind, the birdwatcher are all masks worn variously, with varying success, sometimes all within the same poem. Despite the chaos and complexity, Richards never lets up on his extreme focus. The poems are tight, clean, tooled. They are inheritors of the ethos of the Imagists. Take for instance that previously quoted line:

         Singing saws
         are thaumatropes

A thaumatrope is a Victorian toy which consists of a disc with two different images, one on each side. The disk is connected to a string. When both ends of the string are pulled in opposite directions, the disk spins, end over end, creating the illusion that both images are blended into one. A long-time student of Donald Revell, Richards has learned to abhor simile. Here the long, two-handed saws, themselves an anachronism, bend and twist, their blades flipping from one side to another, creating the illusion that both sides are one. The singing saws are thaumatropes. They are not like them.

In “An Explanation,” dawn comes early for the poète maudit and his female companion:

         Mis
         taking

         Chemicals
         for grief

         Loose the
         dogs all over

         For all
         I care

         Many dawns
         goddamn it

         Sprinkle your
         sun somewhere

         Else for
         once

         I’ll give you
         the coordinates

         Promethium
         for oracle

         Numphe
         arms reach

As I’m not much of a scientist, I assumed Promethium was a neologism and, on first reading, I imagined “Promethium/for oracle” as a way of saying something nifty about fire. Promethium is an element on the periodic table. Highly radioactive, it was once widely used in luminous paint. The poet, lying in the half-dark, hearing dogs bark, is looking at his watch. As in “singing saws / are thaumatropes” here promethium really is an oracle. The beauty, complexity, and meaning of these three words are not conveyed through metaphor but through the things themselves, and the suggestion of wider meanings, of the gift of fire, of first dawns, and all dawns, occurs not in a pocket reality created by inventive word play but in our own minds as our educations and collective culturing respond to the exactitude of the poet’s choice. The same goes for “Numphe / arms reach.” Numphe, pronounced “noom-fay,” is an obscure Greek word, infrequently used in classical culture. It appears briefly in the New Testament and is adapted from the verb “nupto,” which means “to veil as a bride.” By extension, numphe refers to a young woman or bride. In this case, it is the girl stirring beside him in the twilit space between worlds, still a bride for a moment longer before she wakes up a wife. We have traded punk rock for Morgenlied. In the half-dark, woken by distant dogs, her veil-white arms and the light of a watch dial. It is the honeymoon when night has been forgiven and the day’s choices remain unmade. Even the brutest have their aubades.