Featured Art AGAINST HATE
Thomas Hubbard (June 15, 1938-May 30, 2023), a retired writing instructor and spoken word performer, authored Nail and other hardworking poems, Year of the Dragon Press, 1994; Junkyard Dogz (also available on audio CD); and Injunz, a chapbook. He designed and published Children Remember Their Fathers (an anthology), and books by seven other authors. His book reviews have appeared in Square Lake, Raven Chronicles, New Pages and The Cartier Street Review. Publication credits include poems in Yellow Medicine Review, spring 2010, I Was Indian, editor Susan Deer Cloud (Foothills Publishing, 2010), and Florida Review; and short stories in Red Ink andYellow Medicine Review.
Featured Book Reviews
There are moments in this volume, dominated by sickness of time and virus, when Weaver transcends the “easy way of death” to land in profound instants of insight. Those moments grace this collection, not with the expected lamentations of loss and death, but a greater depth—perhaps, even, grace beyond death.
Here the verse is clean, sharp and pure as the poet uses ordinary language to say extraordinary things. There is much Imagism in Weaver’s poetry—Imagism : “saying what you mean in the fewest and clearest words.”
While Weaver never fully abandons the purely experiential—and this volume is built on the personal—she leads us past the lyric of lamentations and into the epic of our own battles as humans to survive.
Season Unleashed is a collection of new poems by award-winning novelist and poet Anna Odessa Linzer. Published by Empty Bowl Press, with a cover photo by the author, the book is beautifully rendered. To describe these poems as a celebration of place, of the Pacific Northwest, is true, but inadequate. It is an extended love letter to the places Linzer has called home, to her people, and, through her poetry, to us. In her preface, Linzer reflects: “These poems and prose passages are a kaleidoscope of seasons that I have danced through. That have danced through me. That I carry with me.” This collection is a Master Class in attention, in appreciation; it is an invitation to experience what it feels like to listen and tune oneself to nature. To a life unleashed.
I slipped into the poems as one enters the water—toes first, evaluating, and then proceeding—a contemplative wading or an exuberant plunge. However I arrived, the experience was the same: immersive. Her poems are imbued with the colors, characters, scents and sounds so recognizable to those of us who live in this area: birds, plants and trees are known and named, affectionately, like family. Her description of the Hoh is strong enough to make me question my memories—to compel my return to notice what I missed amidst the deluge. But I do recall the moments of awe, as she relates in “The Hoh”: “At the openings / to the river’s song, sun flashes off the water, splashes through / branches, lighting scales of bark, lady fern, deer fern, sword / fern, salal, and vine maple. . . . I feel the / tender tendrils of spruce roots stir against my heart.”
It was with this awareness that I celebrate Milkweed Edition’s Seedbank Series, and, in this review, Mikeas Sánchez’s How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems. The thirty-eight poems in this collection are drawn from the author’s six prior publications, dating from 2006-2019. The author both wrote and translated the poems in those bilingual—Zoque and Spanish—publication. How to Be a Good Savage is trilingual, making the poems accessible to English readers for the first time.
Sánchez is a member of the Mokaya people, Indigenous to the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Her native language, Zoque, is a branch of the Mixe-Zoquean languages of Southern Mexico. Translators Wendy Call and Shook note that Sánchez now writes primarily in Zoque; specifically, the regional Copainalá variant of Zoque, an endangered language. The author states that “[being] an Indigenous writer in Mexico is an act of protest, an act of cultural and linguistic resistance.” Indeed, Sánchez’s activism—as a poet, as a radio producer, as a translator and developer of elementary school curricula—has been a significant contributor to the survival of her native language and the associated culture.
African-American/Black History Month is a designated time to remember people and events in the history of the African diaspora. Last year Raven Chronicles Press published POEM OF STONE & BONE, The Iconography of James W. Washington Jr. in Fourteen Stanzas and Thirty-One Days, by Carletta Carrington Wilson. This book honors the art-filled legacy and life of Mississippi-born and Seattle-based Artist, James W. Washington Jr (1909-2000). Below is a chapter from the book.