Rennie Ament, Mechanical Bull

 

HOW TO MAKE MILK

Coat the cow in calm.
Sing it a song

with blossoms. Where a girl
who smells like vinegar

sells violets. Pick
your version: make her die or find

Wild mind by the side of the road.
Give her a lover.

They touch each other
like a goat and toddler

at the petting zoo.
Toddler calls the great pony.

Goat could use a strawberry
to rub its head against.

It took a while to get to, but I’m finally working my way through Maine poet Rennie Ament’s full-length debut, Mechanical Bull (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2023), a collection of short, sharp lyrics of sly humour, observational oddness, language play and smooth clarity. For much of the collection, Ament’s poems offer a straightforward lyric of subtle turns, with echoes of what could be seen as correlations with those sly Canadian surrealists Alice Burdick or Jaime Forsythe. “Someone told me, take a left at the next light.” Ament writes, to open the poem ““PERFECPTION IS REAL AND THE TRUTH IS NOT”,” “Her name was Imelda Marcos. She  sat like a window / festooned in blue silk. Her son Bongbong still a baby boy / in the backseat. I swung / on as instructed.” Elsewhere, Ament’s language play is more overt, allowing collisions of sound and meaning as the spark of the poem emerges from and across those breaks. Listen, for example, to the poem “RENATA S AMENT,” a short poem on her own name that begins: “Me. / A name. / An enema / as atman. Tart / as a manatee’s teat.” Ament’s poems offer a delightful sense of play but one still very sly, almost covert, and provide effects slightly disorienting. “Remember me knee-deep.” the poem “HE THEN PLEDGED” begins, “Remember me kelp-bedecked. / Remember me wet, / legs pretzeled, sex-melted  /yet spleen-tempered. Best egg / esteem the verve, never / defer me.”

These poems really are delightful, thoughtful, and compact. The collection is structured in two sections--halved, one might say—of short poems that play with a variety of line-lengths and form, each offering their own variation on that central core of compact observation, but one slightly turned, twirled or twisted. “Mother and father were nude models.” she writes, to open the poem ““DISCLOSE THE SHADY LOCATION IN WHICH YOU LURK”,” “Neither of them ever hit me. Once // I bit my mother so she bopped me, / which is different. I had crossed the street // wrong.” What a lovely book. What a lovely debut.

 

Matt Rader, FINE: Poems

 

Last summer in Sunnybrae
we watched from across the lake
a kilometre of railcars
the colour of old memoires
slowly describe the shoreline westbound
below Mount Tappen
What are they hauling? I asked, knowing
we didn’t have an answer
The insides of mountains, trees, prairie
I imagined
It was difficult to watch
something being taken
but what
exactly (“Sweet Air”)

The latest from Kelowna, British Columbia writer Matt Rader is FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024), a book of fire, climate and crisis, including deforestation, mining and other increasingly-devastating resource-extractions. As his author biography inside the collection reads, Rader is the “award-winning author of six volumes of poetry, a collection of stories and a book of nonfiction,” the last title on that list being Visual Inspection (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Composed across twenty moments organized in four cluster-sections (as well as a further poem, hidden as post-script, just after the acknowledgments and author biography), the poems in FINE articulate “a vision of the present from a deep future, charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm.” There might be those who don’t recall that particular year, existing within the Covid-era, of the British Columbia fires, and this collection exists as an intriguing counterpoint to Delta, British Columbia poet Kim Trainor’s new long poem around the same geography and subject matter, A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), a book I’ve yet to fully delve into.

Across the poems of FINE, Rader offers long, meditative stretches, almost as a single, meditative length, through this year of catastrophe, offering a thoughtful, quiet and slow-moving sketchwork of point-form, writing of visiting his brother’s farm, watching the landscape hollowed out and the aftermath of a season of orange skies. As the poem “Working on My Brother’s Farm in Errington, BC” writes: “When we read / a silence / we change it. I can’t tell you / what it’s like / to be outside / language / inside language. The tall grass / at the edge / of the field makes shapes / in the breeze [.]” These are poems that exist from within a changing landscape, and one that sits nervously on a precipice of complete environmental, entirely man-made, collapse. Throughout, Rader offers lovely sequences of sharp moments, turns and observations across a poem-suite of sharp attention, deep concern and an abiding engagement with his landscape. Really, it is just as much the pacing of his short lines and line-breaks that make these poems as any other element, moving at exactly the correct speed as it makes its way down the page. As well, the ‘hidden track’ poem-as-postscript, “Lite Reading,” offers its own kind of conclusion to the collection, opening: “What does a good future look like? / I asked the plum tree / as I steadied myself / on the aluminum stepladder. In its bare branches / the tree held open a few choice pages / of daylight to read. That’s what it asks here, I said / but the plum knew that passage / from memory / being a natural, as it were, in the literature / of water and heat.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been published in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Iowa Review, Huizache, Círculo de Poesía, Periódico de Poesía, The Missouri Review, Epoch Magazine, The Nation, Poetry, The Progressive, Poets.org, The Southern Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer's Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I actually started with short fiction in high school and undergrad. My last semester of undergrad I took a poetry workshop with C. S. Giscombe. It was interesting but I was still very new to poetry. After I graduated with an English degree I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I started going to the public library where I discovered contemporary Poets of Color. Octavio Paz. Marcus Wicker. Joy Harjo. Francisco X. Alarcon. Alurista. Victoria Chang. That’s when I realized I could not only study poetry but write it as well.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I usually start with a title or a striking image. I often like to write about iconic Mexican and Mexican American imagery or symbols like boxing, piñatas, sombreros, mariachis, jaguars, famlia, etc. Also, in my prose poetry, I tend to create characters and write from persona and third person, like the Man in a Pink Floyd Shirt or the Man in a “Kafka for President” Shirt.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy doing readings in moderation. Sometimes they can be surprising and thrilling. Sometimes they can be disappointing and low turnout. Sometimes I have social anxiety. Sometimes I embrace it and go with the flow. Oftentimes, though, I spend more time on writing and reading and teaching than performing.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Don’t compare yourself to others.” I heard Eduardo C. Corral tweet that before and I think it is solid advice.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Right now a lot of my writing has been responding to prompts I create for my generative workshops.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Prompts. Reading. Music. Space. Time away from writing.

Not looking for it. When it finds me it will come.

Maybe I need time away from it?

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

From childhood? Chlorine from the pool in the apartments I grew up in. From adolescence: pan dulce from the panderia.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

MF DOOM, Chicano Batman, Ramon Ayala, The Get Up Kids (music), the beach (nature), Philosophy (academics), Picasso, Kahlo, Rivera, ASCO, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Basquiat, my friends who wrote graffiti for DFLK, JPAK…

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Teach full-time at an MFA Program, working with up and coming poets!

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Maybe boxing or guitarist, not for brutalist reasons, but I would’ve had to have started young.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Instructions for the Soon-to-be Beheaded by Shivani Mehta. The Williams Sisters movie a couple years ago brought me to tears; inspirational.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Teaching workshops online. Readings and interviews for Bad Mexican, Bad American. The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025); Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025).

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

new from above/ground press : Smith + Hall, eleftherion, Wren, Ebbitt, Deutch, Flemmer, Smith, carisse, Ballard, Burnham + The Peter F Yacht Club/VERSeFest Special,

; The Green Rose, in collaboration, Steven Ross Smith + Phil Hall $6 ; The Peter F Yacht Club #33/2024 VERSeFest Special, lovingly hand-crafted, folded, stapled, edited and carried around in bags of envelopes by rob mclennan $6 ; abject sutures, melissa eleftherion $5 ; From Desire Without Expectation, Jacob Wren $5 ; HYSTERICAL PREGNANCY, Katie Ebbitt $5 ; new york ironweed, Amanda Deutch $5 ; Alternate histories, Kyle Flemmer $5 ; Some Failed Eternity, Pete Smith $5 ; In The Margins. . . . . .of french translations found and remixed by russell carisse, russell carisse $5 ; BUSY SECRET, Micah Ballard $5 ; The Old Man: new stories, Clint Burnham $5 ;

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; see the previous batch of backlist from January-February 2024 here; and don't forget that Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] is still in the midst of a tenth anniversary sale!

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February-March 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each
and there's still time to subscribe for 2024! (easily backdated,

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by ryan fitzpatrick, Mckenzie Strath, Kacper Bartczak (trans. by Mark Tardi), John Levy, alex benedict, Helen Hajnoczky, Ryan Skrabalak, Hope Anderson, MAC Farrant, Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Sacha Archer, Dale Tracy, Saba Pakdel, Peter Myers, Terri Witek and David Phillips (among others, most likely); what else might 2024 bring?