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
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.
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.
“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.”
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.