Mighty Stranger by Daniel Pujol
Pujol’s debut chapbook Mighty Stranger experiments with the divergent imagination of eternality. The psychopomp has chosen Hermetic limbo over paradise, out of its element and able to manipulate the forces around it in a world that has already seen that trick done on its giant iPhone, the deity waxes existential, curious as to whether it’s all a bad dream or the world is solely bad at dreaming. Pujol’s anti-apocalyptic poems strive to answer impossible questions, to delineate impossible narratives, all while still being true to what it means to be alive and human in the 21st century.
Gutterboy Rides Again by C.T. McGaha
McGaha’s strength lies in his vulnerable honesty, balancing self-deprecation with self-awareness in a way that makes the reader feel comfortable laughing at all the wrong times. Straightforward and sincere, goofy and grinning, Gutterboy Rides Again feels like a bleary-eyed, burnt-coffee conversation with your best friend on the porch of your rented townhouse, but one where he pulls out some of his closet’s skeletons in confidence. Whether stuck on the ledge of the crumbling parking garage and navigating the mental barrage of pop culture afterimages and gnawing personal doubts, McGaha’s poetry asks us a question profound in its simplicity: do you love?
Nashville Notebook by David Bersell
Alternating between flash essays and journal entries, Bersell explores the loneliness and ecstasy of a young writer in his prose, simultaneously toeing the rocks at the bottom and pulling hard towards the surface. Honest, sharp, and intimate, Nashville Notebook is stains of regret and signs of redemption delivered at close range with full eye-contact. Look back.
ROYGBIV by Nathan Wade Carter
Personal, poignant, and revelatory, ROYGBIV blends the corporeal and ethereal to draw you into darkness and guide you out again. These poems are prisms. Let your mind be the light.
Chirp by Greg Zorko
As humorous as they are heartbreaking, Zorko's poems toe the line between playful and formal in a way that can mystify before placing themselves right in front of your nose. These poems are an awkward square dance in socks on a freshly waxed VFW floor, a sleepy Midwestern interstate made magic by a party of horses, a lump rising in the throat of a baby bird.
The People's Elbow by Rax King
Thirty stomach scraping recitatives on rape and wrestling, The People's Elbow is what it is to try to process trauma in the twenty-first century. It is slamming the head into the mat repeatedly only to realize the match is rigged for the heel. It is the comfort and confusion of fantasy as a coping mechanism. It is the ways we heal and ways we don't.
A Brief Way to Identify a Body by Devon Balwit
Inspired by lines of Sylvia Plath, Balwit's poems interweave current events within the multifaceted experiences of a teacher, poet, parent, and flotsam in the techno-global maelstrom. Balwit's work is equal parts somatic and cerebral, wrapping itself around your heart even as it writhes around your neck.
Misrule by Adam Tedesco
When our landscape is all empty plastics, data-thievery, trashed bodies of oil barons, candy bars and Suboxone, the idea of living itself becomes revolutionary, if not Magickal. Misrule could be a response to Joyelle McSweeney's The Necropastoral, an embodiment of the philosophical cautions of Jean Baudrillard, or a final, desperate death-posture against the oppositional currents of American capitalism. Tedesco's poems are slippery and strong, maneuvering our nightmarish infrastructure with satire and fatalism. Misrule is honest about the impossibility of survival, cutting open space for criticism and humor in the face of certain death.
The Thought of Preservation by Keegan Cook Finberg
What is the language of displacement? Where does it begin? Is it a language of forgetting? Is its action intentional? Keegan Cook Finberg’s The Thought of Preservation uses the source language of neighborhood classifieds to uncover and disclose the sinister gentrification of one of Nashville, TN’s most historic neighborhoods. A kind of erasure to implicate erasure, Finberg opens the voice of white mobility to its ugliest intention, unmasking what is often written off as either simply innocuous or ignorant. The Thought of Preservation is inherently tragedy, its subject cannot be redeemed, the battle was lost. It does, however, provide a text of experience, of warning, of incipient siege.
American Girl Doll by Naomi Washer
In apostrophe reminiscent of Ginsberg's "America," Naomi Washer's American Girl Doll addresses the conditions, frustrations, and expectations of our monolithic and problematic country through a lens that seems both extrinsic and intrinsic, the self being called into the same rhetorical criticism as the setting that conditioned it.
Wave Function by Coco M. Keehl
That our bodies (and everything they touch) are malleable collections of particles, that time and our perception of it are fictions, that location is only fixed by semiotics are ever-compounding propositions of sciences both hard and soft. In Coco M. Keehl’s Wave Function, these very propositions are broken open across the page, subjectivity is magnified to its molecule, spacetime is breached by the poem’s ability to trespass modes of containment. When the speaker asks “How do you know what altered state you’re in?” they are also giving permission to enter the poems themselves. The reader is invoked, like an incantation, to the spectral, discorporate field of Keehl’s language where every object, sense, and action are codified and decodified, where meaning is both metastatic and implosive, where every word hinges on the inevitability of its own collapse. Wave Function, like the universe, is a terminal text, expanding and exhaling unto its own finality.
Traces by Robert Balun
"Each day I am the first of many weird encounters," begins Robert Balun's Traces, a sentiment as syllogistic as it is spooky. What follows is a lateral navigation through modes both syntactical and elemental. Where is meaning imprinted in the universe? Can the signifier every truly conjure the signified? Can it be reversed? Can it obliterate? Is living transitive or intransitive? Balun's words do not answer these questions but further extrapolate them, opening his language like an almanac. Traces propels the reader through its pages as though the reader, too, were nothing more than the sum of its symbols, malleable to both worlds, mineral and lexical, leaving us all pensively pondering "will I remember I am the water when I drink from it."
dogteeth. by Levi Cain
Levi Cain's dogteeth. is a meditative awakening from the deeply integrated maxims of Catholic upbringing into a radical corpus of queerness, race, and gender identity. Cain's poems are a rectification of past harms and future lives made stable by the poet's own process of trauma. Cain's language is a pendulum of celebration and lamentation, and swinging between the two, a blade, to sever the past, to carve new meanings. dogteeth. is a Mass for the oppressed, the marginalized, the forgotten, the broken, the subjugated; it is a room where Cain sloughs the skin of their old name and looks brightly upon their truth.
A Little History of the Panorama by Matthew Cooperman / Simonetta Moro
Part poetry, part sketchbook, part archival document, Matthew Cooperman and Simonetta Moro's A Little History of the Panorama is a cohesive excavation of perspective. With the artist (Moro) providing breadth and the poet (Cooperman) providing depth, the collaborative nature of the book deconstructs and recontextualizes the subject so that the work itself becomes panoramic. A Little History of the Panorama through its multifarious approach manages to alternately glimpse and gape both the academic history and the natural phenomena of ocular mechanics. The book, like the human eye, opens and closes, widens and thins, glosses and grasps, selects and stupefies; it is a functional poetics that obfuscates the past in order to clarify the present, just as memory is not the sum of all we have seen, but the fractured catalogue of what we committed.
Reality In Bloom by Annette Covrigaru
Reality In Bloom is a tense and scrupulous navigation of tradition, ancestry, land, religion, and gender. The poems work to extrapolate a splendid radium of identity by sifting through the detritus of memory, both inherent and inherited. From Israel/Palestine to New York, between pasts lived and unlived, Covrigaru leads the reader through the sometimes nebulous, sometimes traumatic, ruins, gardens, catacombs of their own excavation. Yes, the solid state of the self is called into question, but so are the selves of lineage, the atavistic selves, culminating in a dialectic of divergence and acceptance, as if there exists in everyone an ineffable substance of belonging, an inscrutable link to which we are most powerless and most ourselves. Covrigaru's poetry is deft in its delineation of these irreconcilable truths.
Chinatown Romeo by MICHAEL CHANG
“I know not of power/nor of influence” Michael Chang writes in Chinatown Romeo, and yet, one begins to doubt this assertion as the book reads on, the influences make their subtle appearances, and the power over each line becomes resolute. Chang’s lexicon feels masterful as they navigate the sordid experiences of oppression while admonishing the bigoted world with metropolitan poise. Chang’s poems are here to dig their elbow into the complacency of collective memory, to interrupt the problematic discourse, to reclaim their own narrative(s), and to use some violent archetypes as punching bags along the way. “You can lie in poems,” Chang later states, which clarifies as much as it complicates what Chinatown Romeo reveals to us: perhaps, in a moment of urgency, the quickest way to the truth is through a lie.
31 Days / The Self by Samantha Wall and Amie Zimmerman
Amie Zimmerman tells us in her poem, The Self, which is accompanied by and faced with the metamorphic, gradient illustrations of Samantha Wall's 31 Days to create a collaborative excoriation of an identity of society's worst behaviors. In an effort to get at the root of true evil (i.e. violence, fascism, exploitation, colonization, etc.) both artist and poet peel away at the human inability to interact with society without (un)conscious integration. Zimmerman, whose poem meanders through both waking and dream states, assesses our current political turmoil, our fragile ecology, our sociopaths and demagogues who lead our country further into darkness, while also accounting for her own culpability. "Look at me/demanding anything," she states in a paradoxical gesture of power and abnegation. Opposite of Zimmerman's poem is Wall's series of fists created daily during the month of January 2017. In Wall's drawings, the self is also subject to forces beyond its control, accounting for an irresolute, perishing subjectivity while also maintaining a gesture of power, solidarity, and integrity. 31 Days/The Self reminds us that the way forward is not through attrition, not through the simplification of dualism, but through a radical recodification of our own identity that takes into account what we have yet to unpack, that our harms are not singular, solipsistic blips in the atmosphere, that our harms are systemic, that they are the harms of the many.
Magic Box by Peach Kander
In Swann’s Way, Proust is famously stricken with sudden, voluminous memory with one bite of a madeleine. In Peach Kander’s Magic Box, the object device is the book itself wherein the reader is immediately dizzied by the question of where to begin and what is real. “The summer I was crowned / Miss Rockaway Beach,” Kander opens their first poem, “everyone / was wearing those velour / tracksuits, which are so hard / to shake sand out of.” It becomes immediately clear that Magic Box will require a necessary suspension of disbelief, a patience for disorderliness, and a willingness to go comfortably astray in one’s own path to discernment. Kander’s poems are not unlike recalling memory itself. They deftly recapture the often labyrinthine and nebulous attempts to isolate a hazy image and to draw forth its apposite emotional validity. It is a book of negative capability, which concedes by its very form that the map to elucidation is difficult to read, but that the efforts themselves come with their own rewards. One is quick to remember, while adjusting Kander’s Magic Box from section to section, that memory lives in the body, and that we often have to readjust or displace ourselves in order to see deeper into the past or to move around the fictions we’ve created.
BALEEN by Cea and Vicente Sampaio
In BALEEN, a Poem in Twelve Days, Greek-American poet, Cea, and Portuguese artist, Vincent Sampaio, reflect on queer yearning, illness, and place as a locus of escape, not unlike Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. However, unlike Mann's novella, tragedy is not so certain. Illness doesn't mean death. Yearning doesn't mean loss. Cea's yearning is amorphous and undulant like the water they find respite in. There seems to be no component of the poem that is not also of the sea as they move, reflectively, in and out of one another. "I crush my poem to seashells," Day Five goes, "ocean it out examine the water's wares / & I will get this wrong all rust & ruins / bobbing up from the foam". Art from Sampaio responds to these crushing moments—a broken ionic column, a slippery body melding with water, a clam with teeth tonguing a pearl, one feels as uncannily in a distant memory as much as a ruin. In Cea's world, what is fragmentary is also whole, like synecdoche made literal, the parts not representative of something complete but complete in and of themselves, as if what we fail to recapture in memory makes it any less of one. What's the difference anyway between a memory and a ruin?
Love Me with the Fierce Horse of Your Heart by Gabrielle Grace Hogan
“I gave up on breath / a long time ago, / with all its melodrama,” Hogan proclaims early in a poem about a queer awakening from the 1999 film, But I’m a Cheerleader. And yet, breath and melodrama sing through the poems in Hogan’s Love Me with the Fierce Horse of Your Heart, as if this failed abnegation were a kind of music. Hogan’s poems are poems of doubt, longing, and tenderness all subsumed by a Sapphic undertow where both the pleasure and pain of queerness become inscrutable. “I can’t bear you a child,” Hogan writes, “Not from this flesh to yours / but I’ve never wanted another of me less—though, I suppose /// I could stand a world with multiples of you.” The way Hogan refuses to fill the space of her poems so that her beloveds may inundate them makes one question the tragedy of magnanimity and the readiness for sacrifice so abundant in narratives of queer survival. Although well-acquainted with the sadness of yearning, Hogan’s poems are, above all, a clarion of love in its heaviest and most resilient beauty, teaming with all of her most precious artifacts: from Natasha Lyonne’s gravelly voice to Rococo paintings to Jodie Foster’s used underwear. The inscrutable passion of Hogan’s poems will leave the reader wondering, “Are we headed to a wedding or an orgy?” The answer, as always, is in the poems.
I Wake with Eyes the Sound of Nectarines by Annie Grizzle
Language we know is somatic and yet this fact often eludes us. In Annie Grizzle’s I Awake with Eyes the Sound of Nectarines, we are bluntly confronted by the compulsion and confusion of a word’s becoming, first as body, then as breath, and ultimately as sound. It is this vibrational process that Grizzle, in kinship with the poetics of Charles Olson and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, explores most evocatively. “Am I not vibration?” Grizzle asks the reader, “standing before you, humming my mush,” and we, too, feel compelled to examine our own mushiness like a primordial call and response. Listen, it’s 2023. The fads of Deconstruction are tacky compared to the neural networks of mycelium or the incandescent songs of sperm whales. Meaning is a byproduct, but sound is an essence. Grizzle’s work invigorates us toward the essential and sloughs the hermeneutic nastiness that eventually becomes ideology. Read this book the same way you would a lemon, or a river, or a cicada obscured by an elm. “The HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE,” Olson asserts in his essay “Projective Verse.” We suggest trying it both ways.
This Fire by Justin Lacour
Like Ted Berrigan before him, Justin Lacour's collection, This Fire, interrogates the capacity of the sonnet. In these brief poems, we encounter the quotidian, the banal, the mysterious, the magnificent, and the dizzying surrealism of living all of life at once. Time is a construct stuffed into small envelopes of experience, predilection builds a diegetic soundtrack, and love is so large and looming it's catastrophic. Lacour's poems are painfully American if by that estimation we mean a restless paradox; the fire is also smoldered, the water is arid, the memory both ebullient and catatonic. "It is so American, fire," Larry Levis once wrote. "So like us. / Its desolation. And its brief, eventual triumph," which is not the epigraph to Lacour's collection, but certainly could have been.
Zero by Tyler Little
Zero, an integer that expresses an absence, a being there that signifies the inverse, space inhabited to indicate nonspace. In Tyler Little’s debut chapbook, zero is not so much a paradox of operations as it is a historical process, from nothing, a brief flicker, and return to nothing. For Little, this order is inherently atavistic but that lineage requires investigation. “I, has been / found / from the form / without / origin” she writes, invoking the poetics inherent in questions of heritage. Old photographs and documents form a constellation across Little’s jagged and paratactic lines and effectively blur the temporal, confusing the ontological origin of the self. This is complicated by the act of writing itself which induces a split. Little’s poetry does not seek to find harmony in this rupture, but to uncover more between the cleavage. Take for instance:
my excrement opens and excavates me,
sloughs its way off
of my crack, the body’s fissure, cut in two,
my twin, who lies inside
me, looking in, one of shadow, masa confusa
Medusa, who follows
her son in her nightmare gait
Tyler Little’s Zero is as stunning a debut as they come and makes abundance out of a tightly woven matrix.
The Technicolor Sycamore 10,000 Afternoon Family Earth Band Revue by Ryan Skrabalak
To attempt to write about Skrabalak’s poetry is to be already doing the wrong thing. So instead here are a few completely hypothetical poetic movements that his work might speak to: The Floozy Parataxists, The Gnostic Hobgoblin Popular Front, The Lachrymal Leninist Ketamine Experiment, Carnival Barkers for Public Sex Depots. Any of these movements might house the same concerns as Skrabalak’s The Technicolor Sycamore 10,000 Afternoon Family Earth Band Revue which interrogates the syntagmatic structures of language as the manufacture of a larger cultural hegemony. If order encloses us, then disorder delimits our ability to be adequately expressed and thus legible. I mean, just look:
bent I, my contrition over bathroom sink
solicited greased up darkroom milkshake
now do I poems in quick silence of mind
moon river wider than a mile I, lovesick
or otherwise codependent boy who will
solo scene in this, the national economy
Skrabalak’s subject is both delivering and receiving action but never becomes object. His poiesis never gets stuck in the fussy clutter of conjunction or preposition (as so many poets do), as if through some clean elision, and continues like an arrow shot through a particle accelerator. These poems will likely shift some subatomic part of you, probably, to the left.