Winter kept us warm . . .
—T. S. Eliot
I’m writing this on National Beer Day in the United States, where we’re also celebrating National Poetry Month. So it’s a good time to catch up with the fifth Whitman tribute from Bell’s Brewery, Song of the Open Road. In these quarantine times when we’ve got time on our hands, a slow-sipping Winter...
Paper-Thin Skin by Aigherim Tazhi, translated by J. Kates. Zephyr Press, 2019
For a debut poetry collection, Aigerim Tazhi’s Paper-Thin Skin is a work of stunning originality. Part of what makes this work so compelling is the way that it grapples with the mystery involved in the creative process, namely the act of turning “everyday life into a miracle,” which requires a kind of searching and tuning-in to all frequencies until one finds a clear signal. The poetic imagination, which alights at making connections between seemingly dissimilar things, is the focus of the book, revealed through the speaker’s interest in mitigating internal worlds with external realities....
(Documentary Poster, Courtesy of the Archive of the American Dance Festival)
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Most great American train songs are really about people. But Walt Whitman’s “To a Locomotive in Winter” and Emily Dickinson’s “I like to see it lap the miles” are machinist at heart. They don’t depict engineers, stokers, and passengers. They don’t take you home, and they won’t bring your baby back. Dickinson’s mechanical animal, a frolicsome iron horse, rounds mountains and crosses valleys before finally coming to a stop. But Whitman’s train keeps on coming, making a constant locomotion: throbbing, gyrating, shuttling, protruding, careering, rumbling...
Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman (Alice James Books, 2019)
There’s something apt about the fact that Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium arrived in the world in 2019. That’s because this year is the 25th anniversary of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s landmark book, Prozac Nation, while Kay Redfield Jamison and Annie G. Rogers, psychologists who both blurb Erlichman’s collection, published their books documenting personal experiences of mental illness a year later in 1995. Now, a quarter of a century on, Erlichman’s odes bring a new kind of wonder to our conversations about mental illness, a tenderness not just towards the self, but...
Front Cover by Naudline Pierre
Hold On, Hold Tight, 2019. OIL ON CAVAS.
