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| BLOOD SOAKED DRESSES By: Gloria Mindock Ibbetson Street Press 25 School Street Somerville, MA 02143 Price: $13.50 / 62 Pages / 45 Poems IBSN: 978-4303-1034-1 Review By: Charles P. Ries In her third book of poetry, “Blood Soaked Dresses” Gloria Mindock raises horror to transcendent allegory. With language that has a lyrical soft quality to it, her new book of poetry becomes the perfect vehicle to express moments (sad, horrific, and glorious) that are set in El Salvador during its civil war from 1980 to 1992. When we see the massacre of innocents continuing in Kenya, Somalia, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan – the list becomes painfully endless. Her book becomes a timeless poetic prayer for peace. Her book of poetry is about the most painful of subjects. Through Mindock’s love of this culture, its people, words, and many flavors, she creates transcendent metaphor after transcendent metaphor. Here are a few cherry-picked from her poem, “Seeing Is Only a Flawed Secret”: “A long shadow filling my body”, “I have conversation with the abyss”; "My weary mind is just a symbol.” “The sky is gray today. / healing itself back to blue.” Jesus, rearrange your schedule. / Go, show me your lips. Make your kiss / a compass so I know where to go.” “I look out the window and feel / like a fool. / Everyone carries on with no ears. / Such motionless supervision – a crime!” Amazing - and these lines and phrases are taken from just one of her 45 poems. Mindock’s success with “Blood Soaked Dresses” is all the more remarkable given how very hard it is to write about horror. If a poet can enter into this world, speak to this blackness and create a wisp of hope, then the poet is by demonstration a great writer indeed. _______________________________ typewriter art By: Mark Sonnenfeld Marymark Press 45-08 Old Millstone Drive East Windsor, NJ 08520 Price: $4 / 16 Pages ISBN: 978-0-9798819-9-2 Review By: Charles P. Ries Mark Sonnenfeld is a unique creature in the small press. His world is one that lives at the intersection of poetry, word, and visual art. Many times his use of language has nothing to do with complete thought or meaning, but rather the splattering of words in a random cascade. We might call his work “experimental”, but for the fact that poetry, as one of writings shortest forms, lends itself to constant variation and experimentation. His new book, “typewriter art” is no different. Dedicated to small press pioneer and all around good-guy Joseph Verrilli, he takes words, or rather the ink-on-paper-image of words, and collides them with a phrase. On page 8 we find word the word “Mark” in 68 point type face and below it the phrase, “Magazines from the stack”. On page 5 we find the phrase “I woke to head pressure” in 14 point type laid onto a page that has a series of letters extracted from words in 68 point bold black type face. His work is so conceptual that it is even hard to clearly describe – it must be both seen and read. So what is one to make of this? Is it poetry or is it visual art? Certainly it is experimental, and in each art form there is a mad scientist who will push the medium’ s relevance toward the absurd, toward meaninglessness, through the trap door of context, and perhaps, toward yet new meanings. Will this become the rage? Will thousands of writers try to do what Sonnenfeld has done? I doubt it, but the highest form of flattery isn’t always imitation, sometimes it is our acknowledgement to artists like Sonnenfield that we have experienced their creation and encourage their continued exploration. The great literary unknown will be a richer friendlier planet because we have pioneers like Sonnenfeld orbiting the “word”. ___________________________________________ THE WIND TWIRLS EVERYTHING By: Francine Witte Muscle Head Press Chapbooks Boneworld Publishing 3700 County Road 24 Russell, New York 13684 Price: $5 / 40 Pages / 25 Stories Review By: Charles P. Ries Francine Witte’s book of flash fiction/prose poems gives us two wonderful things. The first is her nimble and effortless use of story, form, and technique. This collection of 25 short form vignettes shows us how quickly a skilled writer can create place, character, conflict, and move a story to a stratifying conclusion. Witte who is also a poet and a playwright applies these two forms into interesting, fast moving short stories. Her technique is effortless and invisible, but central to making these stories move forward. The second gift of “The Wind Twirls Everything” is her reflection on love, clueless good hearted men, place, and family. The men who populate her stories “try” to do the right thing, they are not without heart and soul, but still they do manage to stumble. Into this mix are the women who love, long for, or try to stay away from them. This collision of interests and abilities gives the stories in this collection their strong core. She is quick and nimble as she riffs around a variety of topics: a chair, a love, a city, a time, a man, a woman. There are many great stories in this collection: Jake Is A Forgotten Place, Someone Keeps Calling, My Husband’s Mistress, Joe and Sue Get In The Car, to name a few. The open paragraph of her story, “The Romance Of Sadness” gives us a taste of how well and how quickly Witte invites us into her world, “One day, she fell in love with the sadness. Unlike the man who had given it to her, the sadness would stay with her long into the night and never leave. If the sadness did leave, there would more sadness. And that was good.” And again her opening paragraph of “Someone Keeps Calling”: “A faraway voice. Like a voice underwater. He says hello. Nothing more. He hangs up. Calls back. His breath is angry, inviting, sexual. He’s distant, but intimate. Saying nothing. Saying everything.” What a treat to see Witte bob and weave structure, pacing, and story with such alacrity. How wonderful to read stories that run no more than 350 words in length contain so much heart, humor, yearning and meaning. ________________________________________________________ Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry — the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press & Publishing. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org). He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore (www.woodlandpattern.org) and a member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. But most of all he is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/ |
| 125 Dollars A Year By Doug Draime If I can’t make a living at my art, am I selling my soul by working at something I hate in order to eat, or feed my family, while I pursue my life and art? And does it matter if I make minimum wage, or become financially solvent from my despised labor? Who and where is the judge who judges such things? Was my writing better when I was going hungry, sleeping on park benches and stranger’s floors, stealing food from super markets, and walking the streets? I speak to you, you reading this, you hearing this, you of the privileged class! Yes, you elitist minority! You who can read ... reading books and magazines of literature, you who own computers ... while three-quarters of the people of the earth exist on a 125 dollars a year. We are the privileged, we are the elitists! We who can afford to write and read in the comfort of some individual corner. Even if you happen to be on the bum when you read this ... you have a dumpster, or garment box, or maybe a tree to lean against. At least you have that! You may say that everything is relative on the earth.. But there is nothing relative about starving and oppressed human beings You know or have known poverty? Well, I don’t think any of us can really claim to know poverty. Yet, let me know the sweat and blood of my labor, whatever it may be. Even, if I end up hating the machine which produces it, knowing full well it is the very same machine, which is responsible for the destitution and ignorance of people, who populate three-quarters of the earth. Black Sun for G.W.B. By Doug Draime The death bone worm knows your name can smell your rot before you are pronounced dead. It will all come to that and you know it. Your lies will not save you or shield you from the consuming black sun. It is centuries of lies which left you here. Make a friend of the worm a truer soul mate you will never know. Jimmy The Toad By Doug Draime They said I was babbling incoherently and swinging at anyone who got within 5 feet of me. No one in the bar at the time, could handle the situation. And Maxine ran next door to Ray’s Market and got my friend Jimmy the Toad. All I know is when I woke up in the hospital with a broken nose and 2 cracked ribs, Jimmy was leaning over me crying and apologizing for using a little too much force, offering me a bowl of orange sherbet The First Hooker (or Dead Eyes In Chicago) By Doug Draime I was 19 on an all night binge of coffee and Vick’s benzedrine inhalers, sitting in the coffee shop of the Greyhound bus station on Dearborn. I was watching the dead eyes of the waitress, arguing with the dead eyes of the cook. There were 2 limp wrist faggots cruising the stools for a hunk of meat, with their cold dead eyes A dead-eyed cop stood by the door to the street talking to a pretty blond hooker, and her eyes were alive and bright blue . My hop-head friend, Roger, from Evanston, rode the El in everyday on his parent’s money to score, and he always bought the coffee. Roger watched too, looking her up and down, with his own junk dead eyes; my eyes - deadest of all, getting an entrancing stare from her alive, bright blue eyes, while I rubbed myself to an erection under the counter . Long Gone,Motherfucker In A ‘55 Olds 45 Years Ago By Doug Draime Two tone blue A girl named Sue Smelly fingers all a-goo Blue balls too In my two tone blue |
Cop With The Burnt Face By Doug Draime 1. half of his face had the mark of a fire which burnt it a cherry red and half his mouth scared into a harelip 2 the cop with the swagger and billy club held tightly for maximum pain, moving toward me quickly with serious intent, it was clear, his eyes blank and trancelike... but focused on my handsome and unscathed face Walt Whitman Trashed By Doug Draime I read that after his death in 1892, Walt Whitman’s brain was kept in a jar at the university of Pennsylvania, where 200 other brains were also stored. But sometime in the early 1930’s a laboratory worker accidentally dropped Walt’s gray matter on the concrete floor, and it had to be thrown away. Of all those 200 brains it was the brain of the poet that had to be disposed of. Par for the course, eh, Walt? |