Charles Goodrich reviews Mike O'Connor's OLD GROWTH: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

In the photo on the cover of Old Growth: New and Selected Poems by Mike O’Connor, the poet stands beside the trunk of a massive Douglas fir tree in a Whitmanesque pose of ease and delight. Hiking boots, long pants and shirt, a wide-brim hat, a white-barked, hand-carved walking stick: he’s ready for a day in the woods. On his left wrist, a surprising combo: a woven Buddhist bracelet and a big wrist watch. And the man’s face: open, aglow, so plainly at home here. Is he smiling for the camera, or at the friend taking his photograph, or could that radiant delight be his default emotional state?

The testimony of the poems suggests that O’Connor lived a charmed life, an outdoor and outward-facing life. His poems are exoteric; plain-spoken illuminations of significant moments along his path

Thomas Hubbard reviews Priscilla Long's Dancing with the Muse in Old Age

How old are you? Do you know somebody just half your age? Do you trust your own knowledge, your experience, yourjudgment, more than you trust that younger person’s? For your sake, let's hope so. Priscilla Long's new book, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age, delivers a litany of examples, anecdotes and statistics giving us good reason to view all ages through this same principle.

Despite most positions of ultimate responsibility in business and government being occupied by older adults, ageism pervades most of our culture. Note how many of us twist our language every which way to avoid calling ourselves orour associates old. In the introduction to her book, Long notes “Some [of us] insist that the word elderly and elders isrespectful, whereas the word old is not. Others make up terms, such as olders…”

Finally, in business the truth comes on the bottom line. If “NEW” on the packaging of soap, breakfast cereal or patent medicine is expected to increase sales, it becomes obvious that a large segment of the population holds a negative view of old. Priscilla Long is working to change that.

Mary Morgan reviews Marian Birch's The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason, Marian Birch’s fascinating new novel, is set in rural Connecticut during the early 1950’s. The Brynn family lives in a rambling farmhouse dating back centuries. Edith Brynn, age 8, is the oldest child of atheist, intellectual parents. Her father Arthur, a passionate communist, teaches at a local college. He lives in fear of being fired or arrested for his political affiliations and beliefs. Her mother Kitt, also a college instructor, is the daughter of once aristocratic Russian immigrants who live in Manhattan.

Mary Morgan is a happily retired teacher who lives in the Olympic foothills near the Dungeness River on traditional lands of the S’Klallam people. Her poems, essays and book reviews have occasionally appeared in Rainshadow Journal, Lived Experience, the Madrona Project, the Port Townsend Leader and Voice of the Wild Olympics.

book reviewsPhoebe BoscheOctober 21, 2022Raven Chronicles Pressraven chronicles, Mary Morgan, fiction, marian birchComment

Rob Jacques reviews A.E. Hines's ANY DUMB ANIMAL

Any Dumb Animal is about being different and learning to cope with that difference in spite of everything and everyone, about seeking out ways to touch and be touched . . . which is all any of us really need to keep living, keep creating, keep the faith with our fellow humans. Hines, too, aches for that touching in his life and, most rewardingly for us, in these poems.

Author Bio: A. E. Hines grew up in rural North Carolina and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He has been published widely in poetry anthologies and literary journals.

book reviewsPhoebe BoscheOctober 15, 2022Raven Chronicles Pressraven chronicles, rob jacques, ae hines, gay poetryComment

Kathleen Alcalá reviews Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe's RED PAINT

Sasha taq(w)šablu LaPointe is not Suquamish, but she is a descendant of two local tribes, the Nooksack and Upper Skagit tribes. To my delight, I discovered in the book that Sasha is the great-granddaughter of Vi taq(w)šablu Hilbert, a renowned storyteller who in large part helped recover the Lushootseed language of the coastal tribes before her passing in 2008. I interviewed Hilbert for an early issue of The Raven Chronicles, around 1991, and am continually struck by the importance of the role she played in language and cultural recovery. This is especially clear to me as I work with others of my tribe, the Ópata Nation, to recover and re-birth a language that has been all but obliterated by other languages and interests.

book reviewsPhoebe BoscheSeptember 21, 2022Raven Chronicles Pressraven chronicles, kathleen alcalá, Red Paint, Squamish, Sasha LaPointeComment

Mary Morgan reviews Michael Daley's Telémachus

Michael Daley’s Telémachus is a timeless dream of a book that takes place in a town where boat builders, artists and writers, waitresses, tavern dwellers and ordinary neighbors mix in unpredictable ways.

Mary Morgan is a happily retired teacher who lives in the Olympic foothills near the Dungeness River on traditional lands of the S’Klallam people. Her poems, essays and book reviews have occasionally appeared in Rainshadow Journal, Lived Experience, the Madrona Project, the Port Townsend Leader and Voice of the Wild Olympics.

book reviewsPhoebe BoscheSeptember 12, 2022Raven Chronicles Pressraven chronicles, Michael Daley, Mary Morgan, fictionComment

Steve Potter reviews Maged Zaher's On Confused Love and Other Damages

Like an experienced stand-up comic, Maged Zaher knows to pause and let the audience laugh before he moves on to the next set-up and punchline. Like a good performance poet or storyteller, he knows to pause to let the audience experience the grief described vicariously before plunging on. Zaher's book is full of funny moments but also deeply sad ones. They often occur simultaneously. That is the nexus where so much magic happens in art. The Beatles' song "HELP!" came to mind while I read the book the second time. I remembered the day in childhood when I first paid attention to the lyrics, after hearing the song many times without focusing on them. I remembered the disjointed feeling when I realized how depressing the song was. How could such a sad song also sound so fun and upbeat at the same time? Zaher's book has some of that same quality – smiling through the tears, accepting the dark beauty of melancholy.

Sibyl James reviews Benjamin Schmitt's THE SAINTS OF CAPITALISM

Benjamin Schmitt’s latest poetry collection is really two quite different books: a witty political/social satire of 21st century United States wrapped around a lush center of lyric poems filled with understanding and affection for the places and people inhabiting that country. Despite the humor, this is a real dystopia wending its way toward totalitarianism. Schmitt doesn’t name names but there’s a man “who audaciously believes / we’re not racist enough to vote against him,” and another who strode down a “golden escalator,” promising “a world that only he could bring back.”

Kathleen Alcalá reviews Stephanie Barbé Hammer's PRETEND PLUMBER: AN ADVENTURE

This book is part exegesis, part coming of age, and part farce. It is full of self-absorbed people, institutions that reflect the same, well-meaning Jews, and even a little Kabbalistic magic.It also casts a light on the “things down below”—be they our personal plumbing, a secretly SM retirement home with senior ciizens dressed in black leather, angelic drug dealers, or unresolved family dynamics.

Because of Sarassine’s unrelentingly honest voice, this is probably best described as a YA book. Sarassine has a condition I’ve never heard of called dyspraxia, which makes it hard for her to learn certain things, and physically awkward. Those of us who survived adolescence might vaguely recall Sam’s experience of a first kiss, her willingness to forgive her parents for their non-parenting, and her openness to the many and varied characters that people Los Angeles today.

Steve Potter reviews Steven Creson's BIG DAY, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

Steve Creson's collection of thoughtful, introspective poems, Big Day, is arranged into five sections presented in reverse chronological order from 2020 back to 1988. The book ends with an afterword by Creson's long-time friend, the poet and multimedia artist, Jim Jones. Jones writes that:

Creson's lifelong project is to imagine how his past determines the quality of the unfolding present. As Kierkegaard remarked in his journal, 'Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.' The attentive reader, then, will not be surprised to find so many references to dates, days, and even specific hours and minutes. The poet tries to pinpoint experiences that have some bearing on what he is living as he writes each poem. The result is a kind of bilocation, a feeling conveyed to the reader of being in two places at the same time.

Laura Lee Bennett reviews Carolyne Wright's Masquerade: A Memoir in Poetry

Carolyne Wright is a force of nature in these parts. Celebrated poet, essayist, “scholar gypsy,” teacher, editor, translator, and reader, she has traversed continents, cultures, and political landscapes. With Masquerade: A Memoir in Poetry, we have a gift of the poet at the peak of her powers looking back on her youth, incorporating the carnival culture of Mardi Gras and the jazz scene of New Orleans with her observations of local characters—the roller-skating, wedding veil-wearing Ruthie the Duck Lady, for example, “tough as a folded bird” in “Endecasyllabics: About the Women (Ruthie)”—as well as visits to her home state and the placid white culture there. She shares the story of a lost love with all the attendant sighs and confessions and pheromones.

Michael Daley reviews Gary Thompson's Broken by Water, Salish Sea Years

The more I read Broken by Water the more I find myself stopping after one or two poems, putting down the book and saying, sometimes out loud—wow, these are really great poems! (I know, I know—I can hear you saying along with my old teachers: “What the hell kind of a way is that to start a review? Tone it down already.”) Still—one after another these poems carve out a masterpiece of praise. Each one slides neatly inside its columnar sheath—the form is at one and the same time action and observation which delivers real experience as each swing of a line brings its own tension, ships us out onto the wave pattern of the Salish Sea. The best “praise of place” poems give poets a chance to step out of the poem or to be a minor character. Yet the praises here deliver a poet’s range between joy in the paradise of the sea and terror in unexpectedly striking land.

Book Reviews