Heather Sweeney : Gentlewoman, by Megan Kaminski

Gentlewoman, Megan Kaminski
Noemi Press, 2020

 

 

 

In an exploited and precarious world, how can move through, reclaim, and honor what is left of nature? Of ourselves? Megan Kaminski’s new poetry collection, Gentlewomen, evokes the experiences of gathering, of caring and of re-envisioning/re-visiting the world we have (un)made.  The words that constellate and collide on these pages are resonate and timely:

          “We are all alone together” (43).

THE WALK
I was thinking about the sisters on my walk today, the great allegorical trinity: Natura, Providentia, and Fortuna.  I was winding my way through a hilly neighborhood of concrete and mountains, palm trees and hazy sunlight.  The streets became narrative strands. I was thinking about what sisterhood means and about what our relationships contain and maintain for each of us. I was also thinking about our mother earth who continues to hold and nourish those who regard her with indifference and even those who seek to destroy her for their own gain. I was thinking about stability and sustainability, about how everything contains and emits its own energy.  About how everything is personal.  About how we, much like the sisters, are now separately enduring:

This shouldn’t be so difficult--your side
          of the ocean no colder than mine and
          coasts are often rocky and lined with stinking
          fish and seaweed.  I read your letter again
                                                                        (37)

THE TAROT
Later, I was compelled to draw a tarot card for Megan, for her gorgeous book and for the gentlewomen everywhere. The Emperor appeared which implies, as I understand it, confrontation with authority, rigidity and the patriarchy.  Not surprisingly, this card reflects the struggle of the sisters, and of the collective, as they/we grapple with loss, isolation, and anger. Kaminski reminds us that the earth is “Too easily depleted and used” (23). The sisters are gentle with the earth, but are not afraid to express rage and resistance to the systems that continue to destroy us all.  Natura proclaims: “When I rise up strong at times furious,/I thunder might and with havoc,/sweep over glasslands over sheets...I fuck factories spewing moke, tumble cities, light oil wells on frozen tundra…”(15).  The sisters are (re)designing something together as in ritual, as in creativity, to feel alive.  There is also a sense of simultaneity occurring: “...”I and my sisters,/ever present always listening” (68).

 

THE DREAM
In the dream I was looking for the sisters “Amongst/irrigation tubes and GPS planters” (29).  Amongst ruin and rupture, I sifted through space and looked for the lost girls, the motherless and the ghosts.  Amidst catastrophe I scoured for a circle of sisters in the interdimensional gathering.  I looked for traces of them “over miles of ocean” and in a “tree budding pink sending shadow/across lawn”(45). I searched for them on the “highway unfurling towards northern plains/unspooled unbroken bereft of pulse” (51). I foraged in “The porous body of we and I and they and so” (42)

In Gentlewomen, Kaminski suggests a collective landscape and how we, the earth and all her inhabitants, are an extension of each other.  This book is a catalyst for community, engulfing the reader with intensity, grace, rage and humor all at once. The sisters want to tell you about survival and about healing.  They want to illuminate our possibilities.

 

 

 

 

 

Heather Sweeney lives in San Diego where she walks her dog, looks at mountains and tries to breathe deeply.  You can find her at https://www.heathercsweeney.com

Heather Sweeney : To Limn/Lying In, by J’Lyn Chapman

To Limn/Lying In, J’Lyn Chapman

[Pank Books], 2020

In To Limn/Lying In, a prismatic collection of lyrical, personal essays, J’Lyn Chapman reflexively examines ephemerality and the emergency that exists within, and without, each of us. Here, light is the fulcrum; light is the event.  The light expands, breaks, breathes and transforms, as do the bodies and lives that inhabit these incandescent pages.  This pivotal and incantatory question arrives and re-emerges throughout the work in different incarnations:  “Could light be responsible for the writing of light and, therefore, also its transformation?” (10).

These contemplative and poetic essays read as a series of meditations that draw their inspiration from the photographs of Uta Barth that explore the sunlight as it streams into her home; here, Chapman expounds: “Uta Barth says that the photographs she took of light in her home were “detached from narrative, detached from history, detached from identity.” I wanted this: the sun cast upon a white wall in an empty room” (19).

As a whole, the work gathers a spectrum of fragments from the notebooks of Francis Ponge which were drafted during the German occupation of France, Charlotte Bronte’s strange and obscure novel, a failed family winter solstice adventure, an art installation that translates Beethoven into Morse code, and the borrowed language of poets, philosophers and saints. Ekphrastically, the lexicons and energies of these sources web and cohere with the author’s contemplations of life, and life-giving experiences.

TLLI begins with a poetic essay, “Firmament: Postpartum Fugue.”  Wherein “One morning, birds and light are inextricable. The blue firmament is full/of grey clouds with luminous, metallic underbellies” (7). These sections accrue as their own firmament, and reach back in time wherein we witness the childhood memory of headlights and branch shadows inside a “vaporous dream.” 

I found myself pausing between sections to recollect myself the way one might while viewing an assemblage of striking paintings in a museum. For example, I long considered and sat with this question: “Which prayers go unanswered, and what does the dark hide from flame?” (25).

Within these pages, the reader also spends time with the author and her family in domestic space where we witness “the television’s red blister” and “the oven’s blue glow.” This is where the private space of home meets the metaphysical, in a sense, the universal experience of isolation that often comes with pregnancy and new motherhood.

In what will soon be a germinal essay entitled, “Consenting to the Emergency/the Emergent as Consensuality,” Chapman captures a rare, raw and honest examination of the body as it is enveloped by the transformation of pregnancy:  “In this sixth month of my pregnancy, I began to feel dread that at once seemed to descend on me and rise from within, which is to say I was immersed in it.  Papules flared on my torso in clusters of three.  The gross math of Une and its swelling heat.  I was disgusted, so I was disgusting…” (42).

Chapman merges with and is simultaneously submerged by the light, writing and motherhood as both a life-giving and all-consuming entities. She unveils what we are hungry for and what sustains us: “The mother is made for the child’s mouth, but the child’s mouth is made for the world” (21).

The intimate essay “Day and Night, Night and Day,” contemplates the disorientation of time and its ephemeral mutations: “The baby has made the divisions of night and day incomprehensible.  Some days, I can keep time straight.  I know when it is morning.  I feel I have slept through something like the night and I have woken into something like the day” (35).

In “Dark Grove, Shining,” we begin with pervading duality: “I have spent so long thinking of light, and I have done this thinking in the solitude of midnight or in the sadness of early morning.  In the absence of light, I think about it.  So darkness resides within the limning.” (23).  This particular essay calls attention to shadows, what separates us from others and what separates us from reflections of ourselves.  “In the glass of the backdoor, my daughter identifies our shadows.  I tell her, no, these are our reflections...In the image, she does not recognize herself” (25). This points to the timeless question of what separates the “I” from the “other.”

This luminous collection highlights small moments in time that can often be overlooked.  It provides careful attention to the moment because the moment is all we have: It is how light can transform our personal space and how it is perceived by it in an expansive, revelatory way: “And this is metaphor: I begin to think of god as light and if not light then/the small white moths that float above the grass.  Because they are beautiful, because they barely exist at all” (21).

Heather Sweeney, she/her, lives in San Diego where she writes, teaches and does visual art.  Her chapbooks include Just Let Me Have This (Selcouth Station Press) and Same Bitch, Different Era: The Real Housewives Poems (above/ground press).  Her collections, Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and Call Me California (Finishing Line Press) are forthcoming.

Heather Sweeney : New Sutras, by Suzanne Stein

New Sutras, Suzanne Stein

Dogpark Collective, 2019

I inhaled New Sutras in one sublime sitting.  This sparkling new poetry book by Suzanne Stein examines, among many other facets of daily existence, what a line of poetry can do.  What it can contain and how it sustains itself. It explores its possibilities. The line, as Suzanne Stein suggests, arrives “meaningfully uncomfortable frequently”.

Here, within this long poem, the line always delivers.  The line is prismatic.  The line is a sutra, a thread. It is a yoga posture; it is a fragment lifted from sacred text. The line is a memorable and funny tweet. It connects an amalgamation of thought and experience. It is the horizon. It is a door, a dream, a factory, a bubble bath, a reality show, a cocktail. It is the line that joins the writer and the reader: “do you see what I mean?”.

New Sutras traces an 8 year span of time (2008-2016) during which Stein was living in San Francisco and working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  The time she carved out for writing resulted in sharp moments that reflect a universal experience of economic crisis, entropy, exhaustion, anxiety, and social media overload: “If feel 80% more agony today”. The book is assembled in inverted time.  The junctures and pivots are subtle.  There is a sense one is looking through a telescope and a microscope simultaneously.

I allowed myself the pleasure of being carried by New Sutras, from line to line and page to page, to encounter moments that meld and gel, but also hold their own as individual proclamations, questions, illustrations, instructions, histories, pithy witticisms, and humorous observations, as in this acute remark: “This horoscope is so last year”.

Stein examines, with great agility,  the complexities of thought, what thoughts are filtered through and how those thoughts become a line: “Every day I unbury -- I dig up. I find relics of myself/in sympathy” Is this the act of writing?  Of living?  Of being online? Of excavating the self through yoga and meditation?  In these pages, our palimpsestic selves are illuminated.

 This book calls attention to writing and to its own poetics:  “doesn’t this look like an images?” “doesn’t this look like a zeroes?” Collaging lines from varying sources such as James Baldwin, Twitter, Virginia Woolf, and yogic mantras, lines assemble, transform and transcend.  The line holds up.  The line holds up the reader. The line is both refraction and contraction. The line is both “distraction and desire”. The line is elastic. Consider the momentum of these compact and entrancing lines:

time’s a soft science

blade at the beach

diligent rose

indictable mint

New Sutras is a candid, refreshing take on what it means to be human in this eerily dystopian, frenetic, and multi-faceted landscape: “I am awkward in my salivating soul”. This book leaves one to question what a life is, what a line means; and asks Stein, “It is real?”

Heather Sweeney, she/her, lives in San Diego where she writes, teaches and does visual art.  Her chapbooks include Just Let Me Have This (Selcouth Station Press) and Same Bitch, Different Era: The Real Housewives Poems (above/ground press).  Her collections, Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and Call Me California (Finishing Line Press) are forthcoming.