86º ~ hot, hot, hot, humidity that makes you want to wring your skin out, all for the next 7 – 10 days, summer holding on tight

When life gets this busy, something’s always got to give, and for me that’s been blogging. I’m hoping, hoping to make blogging a once-a-week activity this semester, and since I’ve got so much poetry news to convey, I think that will happen. That means the posts may be longer, as I sum up the goings on of the week.  I hope you’ll hang in there and read all the way through.

Updates on The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths
First and foremost, my work with Richard Krawiec at Jacar Press continues on at highly caffeinated speeds. Like most small, independent publishers, Richard is doing amazing things for poetry and poets. If you haven’t checked out the list of books he’s published, I hope you’ll do so now, and consider supporting a great press by ordering something. The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths will have an official release date of early 2014!

We are already planning a reading tour in North Carolina for February 2014, which means getting to see Al Maginess and meet his family as well as visiting Michelle and Bob Holschuh Simmons and, hopefully, meeting their boys.  (Surprise!)

Many of you have already gone through the publishing process with a book or a chapbook, but for those who haven’t, the things I learned the first go-round have been invaluable this time. If you’ve got a manuscript out at a contest or under consideration in any way, you will be well-prepared if you have the following on hand:

~ a brief paragraph description of the book (sounds easy, can be super hard)
~ a current bio and headshot
~ a list of journals where you’d like review copies to be sent
~ an email list of folks who might be interested in news about the book
~ an address list for PR postcards
~ the names of fellow writers who might provide blurbs
~ an email list of all the journals in which poems in the collection appeared
~ contact information for your local paper, arts organization, employer, etc. for when the press release is ready

Updates on The Fall for the Book Conference Appearance
In the rush of the new semester, I’m also planning a trip out to Fairfax, VA, and George Mason University for the 2013 Fall for the Book Conference. While this is a week-long celebration, I’ll only be able to be there for the Gazing Grain Press Reading and Reception on the afternoon of Sunday, September 22.  Meg Day, the winner of the chapbook contest, and I will be reading. For those in the area, this will be at the Sherwood Center from 4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.  It’s FREE! And, hey, we’ll be followed by Dave Barry at 6:30, so yeah, wow!

As part of being runner-up for the Gazing Grain 2013 feminist chapbook contest is that two of my cautionary tale poems will be published as a “mini-chapbook.” These will be available at the reading and will ship with any orders for Meg Day’s winning chapbook.

I’m super excited about this event for so many reasons!

Updates on the New Semester
Things at Pulaski Tech are off and running. I’m so lucky this semester to be teaching Creative Writing I and Creative Writing II on campus, as well as my usual Composition I online. In between teaching and prepping, I’m also curating the Big Rock Reading Series again, as well as serving as managing editor of our journal of academic writing, Milestones.  Whew!

I’ve also begun teaching my first-ever graduate level class.  I’m teaching Contemporary American Poetry for the new low-residency MFA at the University of Arkansas Monticello. This has been a super blast! The class is a combination of graduate students and upper-level undergrads, which adds an exciting twist to all the prepping, but I have to say I’ve been incredibly impressed with everything about the program, the faculty, the students, UAM, everything.  So, so thankful for this opportunity!

PS: If you know anyone searching for a low-residency MFA, the deadline for applications for students wanting to start in January is 15 October!

Updates on Heron Tree
Chris Campolo and Rebecca Resinski, the creators and owners of Heron Tree Press, have been hard at work getting the print volume ready for purchase. Soon, I’ll post information about how to get your hands on the collected poems for volume 1.

We continue to post one new poem a week on the website, and we are eager to begin reading new submissions starting September 1.  Please send us your best work for consideration (but please wait until Sept. 1, so we don’t have to reject anything out of hand for not following the guidelines). Also, if you sent last year, take a moment to look at the guidelines again, as things have changed a bit.

Updates on the Central Arkansas Broadside Project
I’m thrilled to announce that I have the first broadside, featuring a poem by Hope Coulter, nearly ready to go. The file is finalized, and I’m just working on getting copies printed this week.  I’ll be launching the project the first week of September with the help of the contributors and their students.  We plan to plaster Little Rock, North Little Rock, and Conway with poetry.  Wahoooooooo!

For someone who spent much of the summer wondering where she fit in the poetry world and so much time NOT writing poems, things have certainly gotten a lot clearer and a lot busier!

Surprise!
Finally, for those who did read all the way through, I’m going to give away one copy of Blood Almanac in celebration of all the good things happening these days.  If you’ve already got a copy, consider playing along and if you win, pass the copy along to someone else.  To play, just leave me a comment. On Sunday, 1 September, I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winner! If you don’t have a blogger account, please provide a way to get in contact should you win.

66º ~ 9 a.m. in August and 66º, some kind of weird joke going on here, right?  don’t panic, the heat shall return on Monday, just in time for school to start

This post is super easy because my response to Carolyn Guinzio’s Spoke & Dark (Red Hen, 2012) is now up at Atticus Review. Carolyn is a good friend and an amazing poet and photographer. She also edits the writing side of Yew: A Journal of Innovating Writing and Images by Women.  


Click on over to the Atticus Review site and read all about Spoke & Dark. Then go buy yourself a copy!

72º a bit cloudy but not overbearingly so, beautiful breezes and open windows

*warning: exclamation points used with abandon beyond this point

Dear Friends, it has finally happened. The good news email arrived yesterday morning from Richard Krawiec at Jacar Press, just as I was about to enter one of those amazing professional development meetings that clutter the week before classes begin. The poet Stuart Dischell (oh my gosh, Stuart Dischell!) chose The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths as the winner of the 2013 Jacar Press Full Length Poetry Book Contest!

Yes, this is the press that I mentioned here. I had learned in June that the manuscript was a finalist and had set about waiting out the news of the results. In a strange twist of coincidence, I had just announced to C. and to my mom last week that I was resigned to the news being negative, sure as I was that someone else must have won. The coincidence part is that just before I heard the good news from Rick Campbell at Anhinga about Blood Almanac, I’d said the same thing. Hmmmm, patience not my strong suit? I think not. Also, this “preparing for the worst” mentality is very much a Midwestern trait.

Aside from that, I can tell that this adventure with Jacar is going to happen quickly. I’m set to proof the text, and Richard and I have already started having those conversations about cover design, press releases, review copies, readings, and etc. that go into making and launching a book. I’m so glad I’ve already had the experience once, so I know what I’m talking about. I’m also thrilled by the speed given that this manuscript has been the bridesmaid for so long that the quicker I can get her down the aisle as the bride, the happier I will be!

In addition, yesterday was incredibly different from finding out about Blood Almanac because my poetry world has grown considerably thanks to this blog and Facebook. When I found out about BA, it was 8:30 p.m. on a school night, and C. was already “resting his eyes” in front of the History Channel. He woke long enough to absorb the news, and then I called my mom, who was also headed for bed. Then, I wrote a group email to a handful of close friends and failed to sleep at all that night b/c there wasn’t anyone who wanted to stay up all night and celebrate with me. (In C.’s defense, having to face a full day of high school teaching the next day, he needed to sleep.)

Yesterday, the news came mid-morning and Richard had announced it on Facebook before I could blink twice, and re-read his congratulatory email for the tenth time to be sure it was real. C. was then able to interrupt a PD meeting of his own to announce the news to his colleagues and administration (blush from afar), and my mom was ecstatic, especially later in the day when we had a chance to really talk it all over. Many of you were on FB and helped celebrate with me. All thanks. It really does make the moment sweeter. Special, extra thanks to all of you reading this blog and on FB who have shepherded me through these rough last few months of book despair! I am so lucky to be a part of this big, wide world or poetry!

It turns out Jacar Press is perfect for me; after all, it defines itself as a “community-active literary press” and part of the profits of the book will go to a non-profit, and I get to help pick the group.  Wow!  The press funds writing workshops in underserved communities and does all kinds of other fantastic things to promote literacy and poetry. (Can I get a Wahoooooooooooooooooooo, sister?) I am eager beyond words to begin, and so I shall.

While I do not wish the long wait and many years of submitting on anyone, I’m here to tell you that persistence almost always wins. When you get that positive feedback time and time again, but just miss the goal, keep going!

76º ~ with a dew point under 70, all is passing fair outside for now, forecast calls for mid-90s for the next seven days, a stormy Sun/Mon on the outlook

Today started off with all kinds of over-stimulation on Facebook as posts about some recent good news exploded, but first, some good news not about me but about a poetry friend.

Amanda Auchter’s new book The Wishing Tomb (Perugia Press) won the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry!  Now that is a mighty wahooooooooooooooo!  This book is on my to-read pile, so expect a blog response soon.

Last night, I found out that a panel on which I am a participant was accepted for AWP 2014 in Seattle. Wahooooooooo!  All thanks to John Bell for bringing together “Here We Gather: History and Advice on Setting Up a Writers Conference, Festival, or Colloquium at a Two-Year College.” I’m looking forward to sharing information about the Big Rock Reading Series at PTC and to learning how to make it even better from my fellow panel members!  (Hat Tip to Tawnysha Greene who tagged me on FB to tell me that she saw my name in the program before I even read the email from John!)

Earlier in the week, poet and blogger Diane Lockward emailed me to give me a heads up about a poem of mine appearing on Verse Daily today.  All thanks, Diane!  Apparently, Verse Daily sends out an email on Monday with the list for the upcoming week.  I’m now signed up for that email!  In any case, stop by Verse Daily today and check out “Small-Time Rapture,” a sickly speaker poem that appeared in the lovely & magnificent Barn Owl Review 6.

Finally, I’m thrilled to announce the creation of the Central Arkansas Broadside Project.  I followed through with my intent and have enlisted a handful of local poets and writers to contribute.  Each will send me a poem that I will format into a broadside.  Along with the poems, I will publish the writers’ traditional bios, but I will also publish a list of recommended poets on each broadside.  I imagine someone stopping for a couple of minutes at a coffee shop, gallery, library/bookstore, even a hair salon, and reading a poem.  Perhaps, the reader may like the poem, and perhaps, like many non-poets out there, the reader will want to read more poetry but not know where to start.  The author’s bio is one place to start, but the list of recommendations just sweetens the pot. The timeline looks like the first broadside will go up in October, and I’ve got a fine baseball-reference poem from Hope Coulter as the lead-off batter.  Soon, I’ll have a web presence for the project and will keep you all posted.

79º ~ the sound of cicadas drilling the air comes through the open windows, all bright sun and sweet breeze, a few more days of this before the heat returns to lock us in

As my constant readers know, I haven’t been writing poems this summer, having hit one of those fallow times that I’m learning to live with as I age. In the meantime, I haven’t abandoned poetry all together. I am, in fact, continuing on with all my other non-writing work as a poet. Here’s a brief list, numbered for my own organization, but in no particular order:

1. I’m prepping to teach my first-ever graduate level class. This fall, I’ll be on the faculty for the University of Arkansas at Monticello’s new low-residency MFA. I’m teaching Contemporary American Poetry, and I’m psyched! So far, I’ve built my syllabus and written my first lecture. It’s an online course, so writing a lecture means more than making notes. It means trying to translate the energy of a spoken lecture onto the page. I do this by abandoning MLA conventions and using indents, bold font, white space, and asterisks liberally. (Having taught online at PTC for five years has been a big help!)

My first lecture is “a brief history of Western poetry” and starts with Aristotle’s Poetics, travels through the centuries hitting the high points, coming to land on the Romantics for quite a while, before pausing on Dickinson and Whitman, and then ending up in the 1970s when all hell breaks loose and American poetry finally begins to resemble America. The class reading begins with a brief look at some of the key poems of the 1960s and 1970s and then sinks deeply into the 80s through today.

My next project for the class is to lay out the beginnings of the readings. We are using A. Poulin, Jr. and Michael Water’s anthology Contemporary American Poetry, and it is a bear trying to narrow down what we can do in one semester. *Have you ever tried to define “contemporary”in terms of poetry? It’s one slippery sucker of a fish.

2. I’ve been keeping up with reading books of poetry and commenting on them here. Just search “What I’m Reading” and you’ll get a list of posts. However, I’ve also just been asked to write a review for an online journal, so the post I wanted to put up over the weekend has been waylaid, as it will appear as a formal review later. I’ll let you all know when and where.

3. I spend quite a bit of time each day keeping up with the blogs and Facebook. Yes, some of this means losing a bit of time to cat memes and outrageous political moves that make my blood boil, but for the most part, I’ve been reading about what others are doing, leaving comments of support and congratulations, and checking in on the ever-overly-reported death of poetry. The latest reports are that poets no longer put any feeling in their poems and are all about showing how smart they are with linguistic tricks. (Insert dramatic sigh here.)

4. In relation to my posts about the current state of poetry publishing, I’ve been brainstorming ways to get poetry into my community. I have two ideas that seem viable so far. A) I will contact both of the local papers (one daily and one weekly) and see about doing a column. There are many iterations of what this column could be, and I’m open to whatever might happen, although there’s a strong chance those contacts may not go anywhere. B) I am contacting some local poets to ask for poems I can publish as broadsides to hang up in coffee shops, libraries, bookstores, galleries, etc. around town.

5. In two days, I’ll start the August Poetry Postcard Project. Well, truth be told, I already wrote my first poem on the back of one of my collage postcards and mailed it because one of first seven names is someone who lives in Singapore. This is the 7th year for the project, in which poets sign up with names and addresses to write a postcard-sized poem a day in August and mail them off to the next 31 names on the list. A giant poetry chain letter, and you’ve got one day to sign up if you’re interested!

6. I participated in a manuscript exchange with a fiction writer! This was awesome, as I got to read a great novel and exercise some different brain matter, and I got some helpful comments back on the angry sister poems that I wrote this past spring.

And now, I have to get on with the keeping on. The poems will follow when they must.

77º ~ cloud cover & cool breezes ahead of the rain we’ve been promised

I think it is safe to announce this here, since it’s already on Gazing Grain Press’ blog.  A chapbook version of manuscript #2, The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, is the runner-up for Gazing Grain’s 2013 feminist chapbook contest.  Cathy Park Hong selected my work, mostly my Midwest fairy tales combined with my handful of saints, as runner-up to Meg Day’s, We Can’t Read This.  I’m thrilled!

As the runner-up, the chapbook won’t be published, but I’ve been invited to read alongside Meg Day on Sunday, 22 September 2013, in Fairfax, VA, during Fall for the Book!  Wahoo.  I think at least one of the poems will also be produced as a “miniature” through Gazing Grain Press and I’ll have an interview on their website.

Many, huge thanks to Cathy Park Hong and all the folks at Gazing Grain.  I confess, the name of the press caught me first (in The Writer’s Chronicle or on CRWROPPS), and then their feminist focus held my attention.  I can’t wait to meet everyone in September!

As many of you know, in May, I decided to chop up manuscript #2 into three chapbooks.  I sent the fairy tales & saints to GGP because it seemed such a perfect fit and it had a June deadline.  I have held off sending out the chaps anywhere else, because sometime in June, I learned that mss. #2 has one more chance at success, having made it to the final round at a publishing company I’m not allowed to name (so please don’t ask in the comments or by email).  If mss. #2 finds a home there I will be delirious b/c it is a press that does all of the things I’ve been hoping for / asking for in my posts about the state of poetry publishing today, and I adore their mission.  If mss. #2 doesn’t find a home there, then I’m ready to overwhelm the chapbook publishers of the world with these three new versions.

Thanks to you all, as well, for reading along and offering up such great support along the way.

76º ~ ah, breathable air, a delight after the storms, clear skies, every living thing covered in green, green, green, on the flipside (because there is always a flipside), it’s been a good year for all the creepy, crawly, flying things as well

Yesterday, I read Nicky Beer’s The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon 2010) and I’ve been processing its waves of emotions ever since. This is another book that I meant to buy the year it came out; however, by the time I got to the CMUP table at AWP 2010, they were sold out. Three years later and I finally accomplished my mission, buying a copy on the first morning of the bookfair in Boston.

The Diminishing House is an elegy for the speaker’s father combined with poems that explore the human body via a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, according to the notes in the back. Interspersed are poems of awe and wonder at the natural world, especially insects, birds, snakes, and things oceanic. In my list of notes scribbled on the back of the last page I have noted this:

fossils / extinctions / artifacts / genetics / inheritance / language

These are the tropes that Beer uses to navigate a loss as massive as that of a father. The book is divided into five, untitled sections, and the opening poem of the third section, “Cardinal Virtue,” poised at the midpoint, offers up a clear view of Beer’s ideas on death.  As the speaker watches a cardinal swoop down and land, she states:

Bird, your life would terrify me.
Bones full of air, belly full of hunger,
the underbrush dense with murders.
Death is a twist, a pinfeather lost,
a stumble over a slow pebble.

Later, the speaker imagines the bird’s death at the claws of her cats and vividly describes the physical results of that attack.  Then, she addresses the bird:

remember that we dreamed our radiant dead
would become more like you,
…
Incomprehensible thing, drenched in the color
of something we call joy, 
… 

I’ll save the last few lines for any reader to savor first hand. This poem is one linked to elegy and the natural world. Alongside these poems, and others set more specifically during the death of the father, are the poems of human anatomy. Here are some titles to give you an idea.

“Note on the Xiphoid Process”
“Variations on the Philtrum”
“Lobe of the Auricle”
“Cubital Fossa”
“Patellae Apocrypha”

While these poems weren’t necessarily at the top of my list for dog-earing and underlining, they play an important role in the book, offering respite from the elegies and the weight of death.

I’ll end with a bit from what might be my favorite poem in the book, “Erosion,” although it is a close tie with “Floating Rib.” In both of these poems, Beer’s expert use of sound shines. “Erosion” is a long poem for this collection, at three and a half pages, and its lines vary from Whitmanesque to Dickinsonian.  Here are two examples.

From the first section:

A fossilized car’s wreck with a tree spares the beach from total anonymity.
How the gastank must have bloomed into the night like a rakish handkerchief.

Wow.  All those a’s and hard k sounds offset by the sweetness of the s’s in “fossilized” and the low o’s in “bloomed.”  Then, in the second section, the speaker describes a windchime made of shells, shells

… born of beauty and warp,
bastards of moon and rock,
spit up as loose change,

Again, I’m stunned by the soundplay here, especially the consonance and assonance, my two favorite poetic elements. It wasn’t hard to find examples of this attention to sound throughout the book, and I could have listed so many more, but I don’t want to spoil the joy for other readers.

While The Diminishing House might appear to be a slim, trim volume of poetry on the outside, I’ve found the poems to be dense and lingering, in all the best ways.

89º ~ feels like 99º (heat index), the rain finally fell for a bit last night, but nothing like the 2-3″ they got to the north and west of us, this morning all the rain hovers just to our east, we are beginning to feel cursed (at this point, rain = lessening of the heat index, for which we all rejoice…yes, it’s a WET heat and SCUBA gear would come in handy for breathing when out of doors)

So after the big discussion about poetry publishing today here and here on the Kangaroo, I had a great comment from a writer new to me, C.A. LaRue.  C.A. pointed me to a post on the Ploughshares blog written by Tasha Golden, “Why Poetry Can’t Find its Public.”

I highly recommend clicking and reading it before you continue on here.  Golden addresses, head-on, an issue I hear all the time: only poets read poetry, therefore poetry is dead or elitist or boxed in or limited in some way or etc.  I love that Golden bashes the myth that poetry is harmed by popularity (remember all the articles you’ve ever read about that dirty word, “accessibility”).  Time and time again in my life as a poet, I have met non-poets who read poetry or are interested in it and want to talk about it.

Thanks again to C.A., I just read Golden’s follow-up post, “Why Poetry Can’t Find its Public, Part Two,” and this post is the most exciting for me.  Here, Golden gives real-world examples of ways we can broaden the poetry audience.  Check out this list of DIY activities.  I know I plan to use some!

Of course, not every person who encounters a poem in the wild (aka in a public space like a coffee shop or a topic-specific, non-literary blog or art gallery or even the library for goodness sakes) is going to become a reader of poetry, but I guarantee you that there is very little chance of growing our audience if we do nothing beyond what we are already doing.  (This connects back to the idea that poets must subsidize publishers with reading fees, because they don’t sell enough books to cover their expenses, which seems to me to be saying the audience is too small, no?)

So, let’s all go out there and put some poetry in the world, in any way we can figure.  If you send me a picture or link of what you do, I’ll be happy to post it, along with links to you and your work.  In that way, the world of poetry will keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keepsswimming, swimming, swimming (a la Dory from Finding Nemo) and eventually, good things must happen.

76º ~ “rain-cooled” but so far no rain, it surrounds us even as it refuses to fall on this particular patch of dirt, I search the radar and fume…5 minutes lapse and aha!  it rains!…ack, it stalls out…and stops…the wicked witch of the weather, she toys with me … and now, the sun returns to steam us all

This morning, I spent some time with Bernadette Geyer‘s The Scabbard of Her Throat (The Word Works, 2013). Bernadette and I first met, briefly, at AWP several years ago, and had a chance to cement a friendship over a pre-reading dinner at this year’s conference, where The Scabbard of Her Throat debuted.

This book is filled with delicate poems that seem, on the surface, full of fragility.  It is only as they accrue that the strength emerges.  Here are poems of girl, woman, wife, mother, and widow, poems that confront fairy tale myths and expose the pain and the joy of living.  Divided into four sections, each section begins with a sonnet “Thumbelina’s Mother Speaks,” and each sonnet is addressed to someone different from the tale: Thumbelina herself, the Witch, the Toad’s Mother, and Hans Christian Anderson.  In these re-tellings and new explorations, Bernadette sets the stage for the rest of the poems in each section, poems of nature’s threat (a wasp kills a cicada, a gust of wind nearly capsizes a boat, clouds descend and obscure, etc.) and poems of love (intimate love, familial love, and love of self).

As I set out to crack the book open, I paused to absorb the title of the book again.  Scabbard: a sheath for a sword.  And this, as in “her throat.”  I found myself transfixed by the implications of this connection, of all the dangerous things a woman might consume, of how this implied language trapped, scarred, or sliced, of how we are impressed by the sword swallower’s skill and magic, and how women are often like this, but in the every day mundane.  In fact, the title of the book comes from the poem “The Sword Swallower Finds a New Calling,” which begins:

She swallows stones, now —
throat like a creek bed.
Started with pebbles. Palmed
several to warm them
before she plucked one …

It is not much of a leap to think of all the metaphorical stones, those heavy life lessons, we are all forced to swallow, and unlike the sword, not so easily removed.  While there are these poems from the world of Thumbelina and from the world of magic (a la the sword swallower), the vast majority of the poems arrive directly from the every day world and what it offers us (good, bad, and in between).  One such example comes from the poem “Echo,” about an echocardiogram.  Here is the opening:

It’s like she said Here, have some pain,
and when I adjusted to that she said Here


have some more, ratcheting up
the transducer’s pressure against my chest

to find not just my heart, but each valve —

In these poems of the every day, Bernadette approaches life with the keen observant eye I look for, I hope for, whenever I read poetry.  She lets nothing slide and confronts this mad, chaotic world head on, eyes and heart at the ready.

85º (heat index = 92º) ~ the heat dome touched on Arkansas but didn’t really deviate us from our normal heat and humidity, our sympathies to our northern kin who aren’t prepared for such assaults, heat and humidity pretty much sums up the foreseeable future here in the mid-south

Putting my money where my mouth is, this month I bought two books of poetry, one of which is Brent Goodman’s Far From Sudden (Black Lawrence Press 2012).  I wrote about Brent’s debut collection, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, also from Black Lawrence, here.  While Brent and I haven’t spent much, if any, time together in the “real world,” I feel as if we are connected, loosely via Facebook and blogging and such, and more deeply via the poems.  So, I was stunned to learn that Brent suffered a heart attack in 2009, just as I was beginning to know his poems and therefore outside the time of our poetry friendship.  While others may have come to Far From Sudden having already processed the near miss the poetry world suffered, I came to it without that knowledge; this clearly influenced the way I read the book.

Far From Sudden begins with quiet, meditative poems moving between the natural landscape and the more urban world, focused on mortality, but in a general way.  For example, in “Madison, New Year’s 1999,” the speaker describes:

Freezing rain. Shivering past
the tagged bus stop, walking home,
my knees two broken dinner plates,
stomach a tumble of stones, tonight
each house memorizes the inner shape
of its heart.  Every tree understands
the blood’s difficult passage from this world
to the next. Trees are the slowest rivers.

The poem goes on to describe the rest of the speaker’s walk home and his attempt to wrap his mind around the fragility of the body, of life.  This is indicative of the poems in the first section of the book, and the first few poems in the second section, until we hit “The Ground Left Me.”  This poem opens with:

The morning I had a heart attack,
gurneyed pale and shirtless O2 mask

past my coworkers.

Suddenly, the speaker and the poet merge, and here, I had my first jolt.  Often, I am one of the loudest champions for reading contemporary poetry without assuming that the speaker is the poet.  I do this in part because too often I’ve had readers confuse the speakers in my poems with me, with my reality. Brent’s poems, here, are clearly threaded through with the reality of his “sudden” heart attack in 2009, and the title of the collection helps point us to this, if subtly.

I read on through the book, breath catching at descriptions of medical procedures and a body slowly healing, at explorations into how a person confronts mortality with dignity and grace, or at least with honesty.  A great example of this is “What to Do With My Body,” a catalog poem of directions, such as:

Slingshot my eyes back into the sun.
Unpuzzle this heart from my ribs.
Tuck my left scapula into an owl’s nest.
Fashion my feet to furrow a field.

If you read my work, you know that the fourth line here is one I’ve underlined with emphasis, the sounds! the image! Then, the end of this poem contains a zinger that I savored over and over, and so do not want to give away.

The poems in Far From Sudden tend to be short, but they build to a greater contemplation of the human body as a fragile vessel.  With the speaker as our guide, we cannot help but contemplate what it is we are doing with this “one wild and precious life” (as Mary Oliver says).  I am relieved that Brent remains among us, doing the work.