Jack Remick reviews "Slow Now With Clear Skies" by Julene Tripp Weaver

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.

Nina Burokas Reviews "SEASON UNLEASHED" by ANNA ODESSA LINZER

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.”

book reviewsPhoebe BoscheApril 17, 2024Raven Chronicles Pressraven chronicles, Nina BurokasComment

Nina Burokas Reviews "How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems" by Mikeas Sánchez

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.

Nina Burokas Reviews "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century" by Kim Fu

In Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Kim Fu imagines worlds that are both familiar and fantastic, characters that are flawed, as all human beings are (monsters no exception) and examines the way we respond to life’s stresses. Days after finishing a story, the images still reverberate: Liddy standing, “her legs forming an inverted V…. The wings spread to a majestic span”; Miki veiling her intent in an oversized patterned scarf and exaggerated gestures; the surrealism of the Sandman; the mysterious smile on Connie’s face, “gone and back from somewhere I could never truly know, all her secrets her own, fascinating again”; and the experience of a classic French boule. These stories play out at the edges of our consciousness: not quite real and yet universal, relevant in proportion to one’s experience and imagination.

book reviewsPhoebe BoscheMarch 18, 2024Raven Chronicles Pressraven chronicles, book reviews, Nina Burokas, kim fu, tin houseComment

Nina Burokas Reviews "Leaning Toward Light" Edited by Tess Taylor

“We live in a divided society. We live inside climate change, ecosystem loss, mass extinction, and racial violence, in a global community gripped by famine, hunger, and war. The heaviest days are excruciating. Yet sometimes, in the face of huge pain, the things of the earth . . . can help reroute any of us toward awe and fascination. They can reconnect us—if just for a moment—with the life-giving energy we need to go on.”

The above excerpt from editor/poet Tess Taylor’s introductory essay, “Gardening in Public,” captures what it means to garden in these times. Reading this anthology is an immersion in a source of positive energy that is accessible to all of us, whether we tend a single plant or manage a production garden. Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them collects the experiences of ninety poets, testifying for gardening and its potential for renewal. As Mariana Goycoechea’s mother says in “Palm Sunday:” “La luna renews itself / & so can you.” In the depths of the pandemic, Taylor observed that as she tended the garden, it tended back. And being outside, in pickup conversations with neighbors, she saw “how gardens help us nourish both the soil and one another.”

Nina Burokas Reviews "Northwest Know-How: Beaches" by Rena Priest

One of Seattle-based publisher Sasquatch Books “educational, entertaining and highly giftable” Northwest Know-How series, Northwest Know-How: Beaches is a “sleeper” (aka “sneaker”) wave. On the surface, it’s a packable, concise reference, with evocative illustrations by Jake Stoumbus. In it, Priest highlights thirty-four of the most notable beach destinations in Oregon and Washington, including the Wreck of the Peter Iredale and Heceta Head Lighthouse. Listings are arranged by region—coastal sites from Semiahmoo in northwest Washington to Sunset Bay State Park on the Oregon Coast, and from the San Juan Islands to Seattle. The Olympic Peninsula and Washington Coast are also covered. A section in the back of the book notes activities by area; for example, the best camping, best kite flying, best lighthouses, best paddling, best sandcastle beaches, and best whale watching. A Safety and Guidelines section provides general planning hints and a reminder of safety and stewardship protocols.

Natalie Pascale Boisseau Reviews Where the Language Lives, Vi Hilbert and the Gift of Lushootseed

With her book, Where the Language Lives, Vi Hilbert and the Gift of Lushootseed, published in 2022, author Janet Yoder explores the world of Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert—an Upper Skagit Indian Tribal Elder in Washington state. We discover her life, her humor, her traditional wisdom as a guide to navigate an everchanging reality, and her life purpose which was to uplift the human spirit.

With a broad stroke of her brush and intimate storytelling, Janet Yoder writes about Vi Hilbert’s contribution to safeguarding and preserving the Lushootseed language; how the language of the people of the Salish Coast is connected with culture, a deep sense of belonging to the land, and to spiritual life. Through Vi’s life story Yoder documents how the stories are kept alive and connected to Spirit, which pervades the human experience, the animal realm, and nature and places.

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