The Sound of Sugar....Gary Dop

Have You Heard The One About

the madwoman who gave birth without screaming

till she held her child? She wailed:

He’s going to die. He’s going to die. And he did

eighty-four years later in a fishing village where he retired

with his wife and their latest Shih Tzu, Dreamy.

I know there’s no satisfying punch line, no

little joke about mom’s prediction, and nothing

to barb with the sanity of a mother’s pain—

nothing, that is, till you examine

your satisfied sigh when you heard that the baby

lived. Distracted, you pranced past the little truth—

every joke’s companion—the madwoman

was right: The boy died. The crazy mother

mourned the death to come, the death

of the old man in the infant, the death we forget

in favor of what we call sanity, that flimsy gift

of some other madwoman who birthed

the rest of us and the jokes we bear.

About the Poet:

Gary Dop teaches writing at Randolph College on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His essays have aired on All Things Considered, and his poems have appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, Agni, Rattle, New Letters, among others. His first collection of poems, Father, Child, Water, was just released from Red Hen Press.

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....Shangrila Willy

HUNGER

came down from the hills
stealing in through a slight break
in the fence, a thoughtless day’s work
of forgetting. He slinks round the back way
looking for scraps I’ve left. Rough-furred
and bony under hand, I’d lost sight of him
in summer’s bustling seeds and furrows.
Now, as the days thin,
pared sliver by sliver at twilight’s
widening rim, I think of his warm burr
curled at my spine. I begin leaving him bowls
of empty and scraped plates of watching.
Soon, he is my sleek companion again,

his footsteps dogging mine.

About the Poet:

Shangrila Willy is a collector of words, shoes, fables, and other em­broidered things. She lives in Baltimore with her lugubrious Great Dane and her husband who mucks about in brains. She has most recently been pub­lished in Pear Noir!, Rattle, and Gargoyle; and has work forthcoming in Mea­sure, Magma, and cream city 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. 

The Sound of Sugar....Juan J. Morales

Boy Scouts vs. Zombies

In my elementary school

gymnasium, Scout Master tells us

to do our civic duty

with sticks we sharpened

and pockets knives we aren’t supposed

to know how to use yet.

There are no merit badges for this.

We are never prepared

for parents and teachers possessed

with the undead gait

that rips through school to eat children

and anyone in between.

If I survive, I will join

the future leaders of a hellish country,

rebuilt by the orphans who sob

for forgiveness to their hungry-for-flesh

families we execute

against our will.

I don’t want to wear

this uniform anymore. I don’t want

to think about being

loyal to my den or being

a good citizen by putting down

our bit up Scout Master.

I will not think about my absent mother

or my reanimated father

attacking towards me. I will

pretend I get a pin or patch for this. I will

act like it’s not him anymore

and other lies to keep myself alive.

About the Poet:

Juan J. Morales’ collection of poems, Friday and the Year That Followed, won the 2005 Rhea and Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition and was pub­lished in 2006 by Bedbug Press. His poetry has also appeared in Acentos Re­view, Many Mountains Moving, PALABRA, Poet Lore, Washington Square, Zone 3, and other journals.

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 Entanglement of Class and Care: A Conversation Between Sara Henning and Laura Medline Wiseman

Laura Madeline Wiseman: Both you and I have recently had books released from Lavender Ink that focus on the body, love, and relationships that turn violent. My book Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), addresses a contemporary recasting of the Bluebeard myth, focusing on the romantic encounters of three sisters who marry the man who will murder them. Rather than centering on Bluebeard’s bloody travails, my retelling meditates on love and its exhibitions. Your debut collection, A Sweeter Water (2013), is really an examination of elegy, as it traces a father’s suicide and its devastating complications on a speaker aching to find her voice among loss. Through the book’s development, loss becomes its own lyric predicated by the chimerical dahlia—one part talisman, one part anchor, and one part taboo. Thinking about our books together, I’m curious about the brutality of loss. For example, the loss of a parent is brutal in all its many guises because it’s also the loss of support, including financial. This is especially so for women and mothers. How do poets negotiate issues of class and privilege in their work?

Sara Henning: Oh yes, the loss of a loved one is ruthless. Yet, I agree that loss has far reaching socioeconomic repercussions, especially for women left to suffer with children in the quagmire of patriarchal hegemony. Loss is a rhizomatic conception, an issue important to contemporary poetry because it is as much a psychological issue as it is a class issue.

As a white woman, I will never argue against the fact that I come from a privileged subject position. I have never been watched closely at Walgreens by a female clerk who feared me, due to the color of my skin or my gender. I have never had a well-to-do couple cross the street out of fear that I might stab or hustle them. If anything, the clerk is always friendly and the woman in the couple often smiles or makes pleasantries. To these women, I am simply a sister, a member of their tribe. But I am also the product of an impoverished background, which is an intimidating psychosocial space to incorporate when standing at the staircase of academia’s often lush and exclusionary ivory towers. Without my father, my mother couldn’t make it on her own, and in turn, she was forced to solicit the support of her parents, and as a package deal, an environment of multigenerational abuse. As a motivated child, I often “passed” as part of my general cohort, middle and upper middle class families with a two-parent income, though I felt like a paradox: a member of the underprivileged privileged who belonged in neither world.

LMW: You say this so beautifully. It reminds me of Audre Lorde’s words: “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Poetry collections like A Sweeter Water are not luxury, they are vital, because if I might quote Lorde again, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

SH: If we are not taking Lorde’s advice, as women, we are failing the institution of poetry and each other. Perhaps by saying this, I can be criticized as essentializing the role of the female poet or confining poetry to an act of agenda. Let me clarify: in a space where we have supposedly transcended race, gender, and sexuality as functional sociocultural definitions, I simply hope that literature that addresses reclamation, resistance, and witness will continue to garner respect. As I was writing A Sweeter Water, I addressed the loss of a father through notions of physical and emotional absence, but I also felt the need to examine next door prostitutes, physically abusive lovers, wild girls who fall by the wayside—our contemporary culture’s very real broken birds.

Since we are thinking about ways that gender and privilege inform art, would you talk about your work with the Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, which directly confronts gender violence?

LMW: My new book Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience grew out of my work with WWR. By the time I started researching what would become WWR—a task that took seven years to complete—I already had intimate experience working with survivors and resistors of gender violence. As an undergrad at Iowa State University, I first volunteered in a women’s crisis shelter and participated in events like Take Back the Night. I continued this volunteer work as I completed an MA in women’s studies and a PhD in English. Because I had a small part in the vital force that seeks to help women resist gender violence and because I was now in a privileged place—a doctoral student with an assistantship and fellowships—I wanted to see what else I might be able to do. That what else was the anthology. Since its release we’ve been able to raise money for organizations that support women, donate copies of the anthology to their libraries, and participate in events such as Week Without Violence, One Billion Rising, and Women’s History Month. There have also been readings at AWP, Split this Rock: Poetry of Provocation and Witness, Omaha Lit Fest, and the Indiana Writers’ Consortium. It’s a privilege and honor to do this work. It is my hope that such events resist gender violence by raising awareness and initiating action.

SH: I am amazed by how your focus on resistance surpasses the page. Literary work that engenders transformation (personal and/or cultural) does so much more than simply being an exercise in mastering metaphor, and this is the timeless literature that demands re-reading. Our mother of resistance, Muriel Rukeyser, would be so proud of you.

LMW: Thank you for that. I’ve always admired Muriel Rukeyser’s work. In the critical introduction to WWR, I quote her words: “If there was no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.” She’s right. We hunger for poetry, for what work poetry can do.

In ASW there is this unexpected violence, a disregard for self and place, another kind of class violence. In “Psalm” there are “soda cans floating down river” and a “father shot-gunning beer,” and this is contrasted with a girl trying to save a chicken being hollowed out by maggots in “Three Themes on Rescue.” Can you talk about how care and class are intertwined in offering full portraits of survival and love?

SH: Love and survival are fraught subjects in ASW. In the work, the self is often forsaken for the more immediate goal of subsistence. One could argue that taking the burden upon oneself to alleviate the struggle of others is a way that the collection’s characters often demonstrate love. Your mention of “Psalm,” the fact that soda cans are as conspicuous a part of the natural landscape, as say, oak roots, reveals how far the speaker has internalized an ecological disregard that informs her emotional experience. In this particular poem, a father driven by addiction and self-indifference is similarly normalized, a sentiment that resurrects itself in different incarnations throughout the work.

As you noted, the collection contains poems that, I think, validate an attempt to surpass these attitudes and enact salvation. In “Three Themes on Rescue,” the speaker attempts to rescue an already dead hen in order to preserve her body’s integrity. When she finds the animal already debilitated by maggots, she recognizes that the animal’s steadfast spirit bests any violence inflicted upon her, and that notions of survival and endurance are not necessarily interdependent.

So to answer your question of how care and class are entangled in the book, I would argue that the speaker’s experience is as paradoxical as the hen’s. Through the book, an attempt to champion integrity while normalizing disregard makes for poems that modulate between these extremes, often to subversive ends.

Do you think that violence against women still confounds and surpasses class hierarchy in our contemporary moment? Fatal Effects seems to confront these issues, so could you focus your discussion here?

LMW: Fatal Effects is a campy, contemporary retelling of the Bluebeard myth that charts the love of three sisters who each marry the same man upon the demise of the sister who preceded her. Bluebeard is usually framed as a story of blood and gore, but this retelling focuses on the love each of his unfortunate wives felt. As a kid, I was drawn to fairy tales and myth in literature, even though the life presented there was not a life I knew. I’ve never lived in a castle (okay, full disclosure: when I studied abroad as an undergrad at Swansea University, one of the dorms I lived in was a castle, but I’m not sure the co-ed residence halls count as full-castle life). I’ve never kissed a former lover of my siblings—that would be weird. I’ve never experienced the kind of wealth an estate like Bluebeard owned, though I’ve watched each season of Downton Abby. I’ve never married a murderer.

Fatal Effects is not my life, but you are correct to point out that the violence the book outlines is a violence experienced by women across class. My poem “Inquisitive Faces” explores the ways a woman can be trapped in such a marriage permeated by domestic violence, and despite the privileges class may make available to some, the most dangerous time for any woman is when she leaves her husband. About one third of women murdered are murdered by their intimate partners. The poem “Widower’s Insomnia” seeks to capture what has been called the rising action in the cycle of violence, the time between the honeymoon phase and the violent outburst, when the threat of violence lingers, when the thrum of it vibrates even as he sleeps.

Though I’ve written more on gender violence, I am invested in issues of class and the ways in which such depictions are represented in literature and popular culture. In 2012, the Guerilla Girls performed at the local art museum on campus in the city where I live. I was particularly provoked by their skit on what things have changed since the second wave of the feminist movement and what things have not. For example, they demonstrated how despite forty years of feminist work, still today: “Women make less than men.”

Much as I don’t know what it’s like to live in a world of castles and multiple murdered wives of which the current wife is seemingly unaware, I can imagine a world of equitable pay. I can imagine a world where women are not the victims of violence. Part of why I wrote Fatal Effects is that I sought to imagine that world. In my book, violence is the threat that is the unsaid and the undescribed. It lingers. It is not front and center, blood and gore. I wanted to know the life these women lived, not their demise.

 I think one of our jobs as poets is to bring texts into our classroom that challenge assumptions about privilege, gender, and oppression. I’ve taught Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, Joy Castro’s The Truth Book, Anne Sexton’s Transformations, as well as books by Dorothy Allison, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Marjane Satrapi, texts that have provided rich opportunities for discussions. I’m wondering if you can talk about important texts in your own teaching and why those texts have helped you be a better writer.

SH: Of course. But first, I just want to say, I’ve had a wonderful time discussing these issues with you, Madeline. Your work speaks for itself, and I have enjoyed, and grown from, the candor and rigor that informs your stunning answers.

I’d like to focus my response on texts for a graduate class that I cannot wait to teach: Contemporary Women’s Trauma Literature. In the course, I’m envisioning teaching works such as Edwidge Dandicat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory; Nancy Venable Raine’s After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back; Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth; Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina; the list goes on—works that directly confront loss, violence, and suffering as it enters and antagonizes a woman’s body, and what is left in those traumatic wakes. One cannot be an effective writer without being an effective reader, and the converse application is true—these things necessarily inform each other. The cycle of reading, writing, and teaching should beautifully intermingle. My goal is to honor these texts by writing passionately in their wake and teaching others to grow from their words.

LMW: It sounds like a wonderful class. Your students will be lucky to have such a smart, talented teacher among them. By the way, I know that you are working on a manuscript that involves the themes we have discussed today, and that a chapbook manuscript from the effort has been circulating. Can you talk about it?

SH: Of course, and thank you so much for your kind words. In 2011, I lost my grandfather to implications related to Korsakoff’s Dementia, a condition onset by chronic alcohol abuse. Because he was as close to a father as I had growing up, his loss got me thinking about how drinking affected my familial relationships at microscopic and macroscopic levels. My grandfather was an accomplished professor, but a heartless man. He would often put my grandmother on bare-bones grocery allowances so he could buy top-shelf gin. When inebriated, he would go into rages that would take a physical toll on his daughters. Yet his behavior, and its intergenerational manifestations, are systemic of the larger negotiation placed on families plagued by shame, addiction and the secrets that inform them. Like many with his condition, he had a secret that none of us learned until his death that I am exploring in my current collection. Many of the women in our family, myself included, spent years drawn to addicted men who would be cruel to us, and many of my aunts and cousins never escaped this tendency. My manuscript concerns memory and addiction as embodied processes, and explores the aftermath of their liaison. I also know you have a chapbook of prose poems forthcoming. Would you talk about it?

LMW: Sure! While I was a fellow at a residency program in Taos, I started a new series on death personified and gendered female. My interests in violence against women (done by men) are evident in what we’ve discussed here. I’m also interested in the ways women are violent. While visiting museums in New Mexico, I discovered art and history exhibits from the nineteenth century on la muerta. For years, I’ve been fascinated with stories of female death such as Demeter and Persephone from Greek mythology, and Inanna from Sumerian mythology. A concurrent interest has been the culture and traditions of the Southwest. I studied Spanish in school and I lived in Arizona during graduate work. Suddenly, all these interests coalesced, sparking the new series and forthcoming chapbook Threnody. The lady of death walked into my poetry, a series about finding and inviting those that needed to climb into her cart.

Little Oblivion by Susan Allspaw
(Elixir Press, 2013)

reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

Antarctica, the expanse of ice, the blues and whites, the temperatures with their sustained lows, the wilderness and wild that is there—seals, petrels, terns—and the humans who wrap themselves in layers of down to work and study in an unforgiving environment, a place of surprising life and obvious death: this is what Susan Allspaw’s first book of poetry, Little Oblivion, would have us consider.

Allspaw tells us, in her poem, “Burial,” that “the ice is trying / to tell me a secret it’s been keeping // for years.” That’s a clue to these poems, free verse poems that exhibit moments of narrative, though the real story is Allspaw’s examination of ice as “other,” of place as mystery, of landscape as the story-teller and mirror for what haunts and intrigues her. For Allspaw, this ice and landscape is father, mirror, and companion. We’re not just reading a poetry of place, of ecology, but a navigation of map and meaning, a reflection of “our nakedness as wonderful as icebergs.”

That nakedness is how we get to the overarching feeling—longing, for both meaning and connectedness—that dominates these poems. A poem early in the book, “Heading into Dion Island, Antarctica,” starts us on our journey to the ice—though to enter this challenging landscape, we must also recognize what we’re leaving—on a mission to count penguins and eggs.

    Twenty centimeters of ice below the bow,
    seven knots, and the barometer falls on us like bad news.
Yes, the good news is behind us. Yet, this adventure is a letter to her father, a man no longer with her. “Writing the dead is not easy,” she says, cleverly writing both to and about “the dead” in this case. “Pity dead fathers / can’t see us trawling for science, wanting to write home,” and we’re in Allspaw’s landscape, the place of craft and examination where she tells us about so many delicate things at once, recounting the science, her concrete mission, but linking to longing, to the human grasp of what’s already gone and can’t be regained, no matter how intelligent the writer or scientist.

    […] Dad, the sun rises in the north here, and the Southern Cross
    is pointing with us, south, where we will census

    what hasn’t been born yet. I can’t reach him through the salt water.
    Sea smoke, my father. Brash churned with tide.

We experience the place, the past, an address to a father, but then the first-person brings us back to reality, to the more abrupt present. The voice of the letter, this story-teller attempting to send mail, faces the constraints, the reality, of this unforgiving place, of life. The tide and ice and water become both her father and the barricade that prevents her from reaching him. Allspaw has guided us to this lonely and poignant ambiguity.

Allspaw, who serves as support for the US Antarctic Program, is in the grip of that paradox. In the poem, “Weightlessness in a Red Parka,” she writes: “I walked on water / for hours. I lay in a seal’s old cradle, ready to curl up / for my own hibernation.” There is an almost religious attachment conveyed; we’re close to transcendence, something out of body, closer to animal than human. In other poems, this attachment is conveyed using remembrance and comparison, frequent tools in these poems used to bring in other worlds. In “The Body of Ice Remembered,” a male diver, one of a young crew who’s “excited about everything they see—smoking Erebus, / distant splashes of seals making holes, even the slush / forming on top of the dive hole,” also remembers his girl in Colorado.

    His body will sink in the water
    because when he isn’t in it, he is loving that girl
    in Colorado, swimming through her,
    all her parts.

Colorado is an alien word here, a collection of syllables that stand out as foreign because we’re so far from the vocabulary and vision of that kind of landscape. The western girl may as well be on the moon, and the divers and scientists feel this, too, according to Allspaw,
  
                […] if only that girl
    in Colorado could grow like a glacier, if only
    she could move with the freedom of icebergs.
    If only he could stay down, below the surface,
    his breath forming a body on its underside, then hands
    wouldn’t matter, then deep water would be enough.

So we are again merging with the landscape, wishing what was distant could merge with the rich experience of the ice, the deep water, an experience that can make the “other” world seem superfluous.    

The lessons of Antarctica continue through this volume, reflected facets of human learning from what is essentially a desert landscape. “Even ice over ice creates heat,” she teaches us. This heat and longing is what Allspaw shows us about her Antarctic life. It’s how a vast plain of snow and ice can become her father, her obsession, her life. In this book we are down-clad and trekking, we are naked and groping. We are deep in the sticky dryness of this vast southern-most continent. This long meditation gives us a gorgeous understanding of compulsion: “When we leave, / it clings, the damn child, / the obsessor, the stalker. / The ice never learned to let go.”

The Royal Nonesuch by Steven Schroeder
(Spark Wheel Press, 2013)  

reviewed by William Neumire

If a pun, a limerick, and a sonnet got together to drink and impugn America for its dehumanizing free market economy and idiosyncratic stupidities, and things got a little sloppy, and they had a one-night stand, this would be their child. Steven Schroeder’s second book of poetry, The Royal Nonesuch, is silly-thick with sound like a braid of tongue twisters and mad gabs.

A nonesuch is a person or thing without an equal, but in Schroeder’s collection, it alludes to the scam run by the duke and the king in Huckleberry Finn in which the audience, expecting a drama, gets instead…nothing. Bitter over the philistine sensibilities of the townsfolk, the con artists scam two different audiences like this, and before the third can pummel them with rotten food, the pair make a run for it. How does this translate into Schroeder’s poems? In “Better Consider My National Resources,” the reader gets a microcosm of the whole collection’s bent attitude, as the speaker riffs on “The National Anthem,” “This Land is My Land,” and other chants of Americana: “Oh say can you see my cheese fries…I only regret that I have but one life to give for my third job at / 7-Eleven.” It’s a joke bitter with debt, the failed promise of the American dream, and most of all, a joke bitter about loneliness amidst plenty.

The book moves forward in four thirteen-poem sections, each poem a little 13-line sonnet (a scam in itself) with sporadic stanza breaks; it is reminiscent of Ben Lerner’s Lichtenberg Figures in form. The poems are accusations documenting the collapsing expectations of this myopic, conned speaker:
 
                       In that last dusty library book,
    the vocation least likely to become obsolete

    remains bookmaker.

There’s an underlying and absurd desire manufactured by an even more absurd, amoral free market economics at work in poems such as “Imbecile, Donkey, Flax-Head, Dope, Glump, Ninny and Fool,” whose speaker begs, “please oh please / may they name this disease after me.” In half-rhymes, iambs, and homophones, the book regularly details money’s Marxist role in devaluing people and engendering loneliness:

    Cash makes you fun. A check can stop
    without your help and when it wants
    Credit cards only hurt themselves…

                                               To save
    your country pay until you’re spent.

Schroeder also plays this game of homophones throughout the collection, as in “Where the Bank Fails”: “Lenders weigh debtors down with pounds / Of Krugerrands and launder their hands / Tender in the green-eyed current, see?” Note the sly slipping of currency into current, see and legal tender into “tender in the green-eyed current.” It’s smart and funny and acrimonious all in one grand blur.

With titles clipped from pop culture (such as “I do not think it means what you think it means,” lifted from The Princess Bride, itself a grand mock), this is an indictment of whatever vestige of “the American dream” remains, as the reader can see in a jaded take on Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:  “America, your song was too big to fail / Your song cost more than itself.” The poems slip like this from funny into somber, like a tough guy deflecting pain with humor, and then finally cracking.

Chained to each other and cleverly phrased in this language as tongue-in-cheek game, Schroeder’s poems constantly set up and break from expectations: “After a break // on whatever levels of the word, we can make up / reasons to repeat these moves we make, Love.” Here, in “Each One Goes Alone,” we get that comforting, euphemistic cliché, “make love,” broken by that direct address comma in such a way that both meanings come through, though—as is usual in this book—the conventional meaning is tainted and fraught with contempt, or at least strong critique. But cynicism gives way to internal collapse soon enough in most of these poems, as in “Code Name Is The Only One,” where Schroeder writes “your password is passive-aggressive… // Why can’t you guess this picture I encrypted / in invisible ink? It’s obvious it’s loneliness.” And loneliness here gets the last echoic silence after the laugh.

On Poetry’s podcast a while back, Don Share declared, “language makes lying possible.” These poems, as much as they accuse and complain, are odes to that language of lies, and to the greatest lie: that all of this belittling madness is not ephemeral,

    When we closed your eyes for good, you looked
    like you were checking the lids for pinpricks.

    When we closed ours, we could deny everything.

It’s always there, that hollow sense at the end of the joke, that hangover after the party:

                      Add in bed after any of my statements (in bed).
                               We’re Pete and Repeat sitting in a boat.

    If I complement you, will you compliment me?
               When I’m with you, don’t whisper implications.
                        When I’m incognito, tell everyone I’m cute.
                                   When I’m gone, say I was beautiful.
 
A reveler in oxymorons and ironies, Schroeder rolls through The Royal Nonesuch with his cheeky, stinging mojo on full-tilt: “This bunker-buster bomb is user friendly, idiot proof and child safe for the entire family to enjoy, eight to 88 / This gun wants to tuck your kids into bed / This one would fuck anybody.” He’s a gamer and a scam artist to the very end, where he offers his “Transgressions” index, a sort of categorizing of the sins his poems illustrate, everything from “bad advice” to “substance abuse.” And though this collection can feel, at intervals, like it strikes the same note too many times, it’s fast-paced, double entendre, witty jabs and word games make it too much fun to put down. It’s a good laugh (itself difficult to pull off so intelligently in contemporary poetry) that also gradually builds a poignant sense of pathos for its conned and broken speaker.

History of Grey by Katie Kingston
(Main Street Rag Publishing Co, 2014)

reviewed by Diana Anhalt

Katie Kingston’s latest collection, History of Grey, explores lives that lie in-between—in that area beyond judgment, which is neither black nor white. In addition to the grey in the title, colors vibrate in these poems. They are exhilarating and full of life. Fusing history and legend, they cover a region encompassing Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Traveling from past to present and back again, they imply that the past informs the present; the present the past. Time flows like the river, El Rio de Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio (The River of Souls Lost in Purgatory), introduced in the book’s opening and its voyage speaks of struggles and perseverance.
  
The first of the book’s three sections introduce two figures, Umaña and Bonilla, roughly translated from Spanish as Human and Beautiful. Part history, part legend, the two are reputed to have set out in search of Quivira, a utopia noted for its great wealth. They meet their fate on the banks of the Colorado river, El Rio de Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio. According to legend, when Bonilla and Umaña die, their souls end up in that grey area, located midway between heaven and hell. In the poem “Flood,”

    Bonilla laughs. His mouth fills with water,
    a traveler of mirrors toward sea
    with a voice like bees in the crabapple.
    The opaque world of indigo rapids splashes
    his rugged lips. He cares about sound,
    how the river evolves its own name,
    Purgatorio, Purgatoire, Picketwire.

More recent history—the 19th and 20th centuries—is depicted in the second section of the book with a series of highly lyrical poems, many in the first person from the points of view of women. Often they portray their lives on the frontier, their struggles and yearnings. The personas speak for themselves and are never idealized, never self-pitying. They inhabit that middle ground marked by uncertainty—a grey area undefined by right and wrong, a place not unlike purgatory, where suffering is the norm. This is their history. Like most women of the time, they exist on the margins of society, and here Kingston captures their voices, the reality of their day-to-day lives. Catherine German, a girl held captive by the Cheyenne in Kansas in the second half of the 19th century, wonders whether she has been stolen and sold again. A laundress at Fort Kearney, Wyoming, writes in a journal of her night visitors and the pleasures she takes in her simple life. Among the most compelling is a Colorado miner’s wife who studies her daughter’s hands “as she lifts chunks into wheelbarrows”; a woman whose own mother told her “it would be this way / child after child, the sky without pelicans”; a woman who finds solace in her own voice, “whispers the color blue / just before snow releases down feathers, / eclipses the sun.”

Because of their honesty and simple, straightforward tone, “Unwritten Letters from Josefa Carson to Kit” are particularly moving. In this poem, Josefa’s words are punctuated throughout with the refrain, “I remember your fingers,” evoking their intimacy. She writes:

    I am waiting for you, dear husband,
    to return with your company of Ute,
    your tobacco pouch sweetened with candy,
    pockets teeming with buffalo nickels,
    to return with your feet blistered,
    your hair sullen, your skin tinged to rosa.

Characteristic of Kingston’s writing is her ability to individualize her subjects and avoid stereotypes in order to capture their sense of reality. This is evident in a poem like “Stampede,” where the speaker remains anonymous:

    In my wilderness warriors
    rise up like hornets, women like spiders.
    Flutes serenade wheatgrass. Water
    lifts its voice. I see blue windows,
    yellow willows, red clouds. I see
    turquoise, drums, corn dances.
    In my wilderness I hear pick axes,
    chisels. I hear horses.

To a great extent,  her ability to use  vivid, evocative language makes her work so memorable. In “Relocation of Old Sopris Cemetery” she writes:

    […]When I leave,
    names trail me like children, sun
    spilling down their backs
    into their shoes. Sunshine
    flicks celadon through poplars,
    bleaches tombstones, turns
    white pickets to grey. Erases.

Although grey may figure in Kingston’s title and much of her work here deals with life’s grey areas, color—though sometimes muted (white, black, rust)— appears throughout. Her work is insistently visual and often references works of art. They appear in such poems as “Bonilla’s Portrait,”  “Bonilla as Artist,” “History of Grey” and  “River Canvas,” where she writes:

    I have been thinking about your painting all weekend,
    the breast dissected into angles, the coffin floating
    like a barge through the faces of the living, a woman’s neck
    in layers of white. And what is that color, the one
    that resembles a vein of rust in candlelight?

This last example from the third section of the book is one of thirteen poems that take place in the present. Here Kingston alludes to her work as a teacher, drawing from her students, her youth, and to scenes from everyday life.

In an attempt, perhaps, to illustrate the flow of time, how history repeats itself, she terminates where she began, in the past. In her final poem, Bonilla gives Umaña directions:

    If you want to get to the heart, study the underbelly
    of clouds just after daylight, learn their vaporous language
    before it dissipates. The bone sky knows marrow,
    knows sorrow.
  
While Kingston possesses the skill to create gorgeous imagery and give life to voices that are singular, what sets her apart from other merely competent poets is her ability to summon complexity of meaning. She transforms the “in-between,” the gray, into more than just a place or situation. In her words, these become a frame of mind. To that she adds language of depth and dimension. Long-legged and bold, these poems travel through centuries. They cross many lives and bring her full circle, starting the collection and ending it with a river called Purgatorio.