Honold: Men as Trees Walking

Men as Trees Walking

Kevin Honold

America’s cities embody some of the central paradoxes involved with modern American life and with human existence: poverty in the midst of plenty; a type of loneliness that is intensified by a crowd; dirty brick smokestacks and disused factories that are nonetheless seen as beautiful. Many of these poems inhabit this paradox, especially where people are involved. “The only madness is loneliness,” wrote the Irish poet John Montague. He was echoing Matthew Arnold’s sentiment on the same matter: “The only sanity lies in those brief, ironic moments of tenderness shared between two people.” Men as Trees Walking dives into this particular strain of madness that afflicts people in cities: exploring it, teasing out the paradoxes, and probing its secrets. Yet, there is a certain beauty in a cityscape, even an abandoned and dilapidated one. Because the underlying element of life is paradox, these poems search for, and find, the beauty—something redemptive, something reassuringly human—in empty lots, in burning gasfields, on crosstown buses, and on desert battlefields.

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Wayson: American Husband

American Husband

Kary Wayson

Life is a mystery, a puzzle, “a house of inscrutable signals,” leaving us “often stranded in the middle of a feeling.” With exquisite manipulation of language, the poems in this collection seek to unravel the mystery and solve the puzzle by parsing everyday experiences—observing life while lying about on the couch, on the floor, in bed and out—and everyday relationships—between the self and the mother, the self and the father, the self and the lover, the self and the self, and the self and god. English, “the telephone and the telephone book and the table with one vase and the cut rose,” is the means through which Wayson, drawing not only on her own wisdom but also on that of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Shajahana, Mother Goose, Federico Garcia Lorca, Edward Gorey, and others, enacts intersections between self and meaning. At each intersection, love’s loneliness forms and dissolves, expands and contracts, and then passes much like weather, or the mysterious changeable relationship between silence and words. Wayson may feel that she lives “with a desk where nothing gets done,” but with every poem she finds “some nook or cranny to plumb, some crook or nanny dumb enough to tell them what,” and another puzzle piece falls in place.

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Shadeland

Andrew Grace

Shadeland is not only the name of the Illinois farm on which poet Andrew Grace was raised, it is also that elusive space where language attempts to recover all that has been lost. Deeply concerned with the state of today’s rural spaces, Grace’s poems describe a landscape and a lifestyle that are both eroding. Stylistically rangy, yet united by an ardent eye for intricate imagery, Shadeland features allusions and influences as classical as Homer, Virgil, and Hopkins while still exhibiting a poetic sensibility that is thoroughly contemporary. Employing a blend of baroque and innovative language, these 21st-century pastorals and anti-pastorals both celebrate and elegize the buckshot-peppered silos and unstill corn fields that are quietly vanishing from the countryside.

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Svenvold: Empire Burlesque

Empire Burlesque

Mark Svenvold

Empire Burlesque begins with a romp through the Journals of Lewis and Clark and ends with cameo appearances by Ambrose Bierce, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound (in drag), Andy Warhol, and even King Kong. Mark Svenvold was inspired to this approach, which he describes as that of a “clown lost in the Library of Babel,” by the letters of Jules Laforgue, who believed clowns had achieved true wisdom. With this collection the author shares Ezra Poundian–inflected poems that are funny, that are as serious as they come, and that realign the personal with the historical.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org