Toronto ON/Tallahassee FL/Bennington VT: I was amused to see an exchange a few months back on social media that directly led to American poet Sandra Simonds’ debut Canadian chapbook, Combustible Mood (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), an assemblage of eighteen short, sharp lyrics. The author of eight full-length poetry collections and a handful of chapbooks—including steal it back (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Atopia (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019) [see my review of such here]—the poems gathered in Combustible Mood give a sense of a far-wider canvas, which speak to not only her experience, but the possibility of these pieces being part of a larger, full-length manuscript. Her narratives provide the curious ability to extend and return, extend further and return, utilizing a core through which the language and purpose of each poem moves out from, and beyond. As the poem “I Took My Place” ends: “I want to collapse in you or find some shared / furrow that translates roughly into a train // of thought and take it so far past the cedars / that we could recognize our own ghosts.”
Book of Hours
November, my God,
November: a paranoia
of kernels and tombs, a
panorama watered-
down, the rouge returning
to a slapped
cheek then draining away
once again as if
nothing happened. That’s
the body, isn’t it?
Ready to refill, ready to
harvest, ready to paint
the walls of its own
catacombs vertigo-blue.
Boston MA/Paris: I’m finally getting into the recent trio of chapbooks by Sputnik & Fizzle, including Biswamit Dwibedy’s latest, FILM OF DUST (2023). The author of five full-length collections published in the United States and India, I’ve only seen a small handful of Dwibedy’s work prior to this, such as the chapbook EIRIK’S OCEAN (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2016) [see my review of such here] and full-length Hubble Gardener (New York NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) [see my review of such here]. There is such an intriguing way that Dwibedy extends his lyric from one poem to the next, as though each cluster of poems as a kind of extended line of thinking across distances. Dwibedy utilizes film as his subject for this two-sectioned cluster of poems, but in a way that allows for other threads, other conversations, to float in and around as well. “We were one / with everything that worked in rhythm / hence the stones that dance,” he writes, as part of the poem “14th April, 1911,” their faces half-gone, centuries later / still striking a pose.” The poems weave through histories domestic and familial, and the patternings of the intimate against the universal. As the small collection opens:
The Hindi film industry
is a family business. I write
about the movies because
my mother loved the
adaptation of a book into a film.
She studied it, for an
exam, an education she gave herself
years into her marriage.
Or her other favorite films she let us watch. Or so
many films in which an
actress plays a double role,
Without the face changing, so it was the same
woman who gave birth to
her. Repeatedly.
One plus one
equals a million. They say a
child can hear what the
mother sings or listens to even
from inside the womb.
This love for songs
starts when within.
In fact,
babies react to music with an
invisible smile.
How else do you teach something? You hum a
tune into his ears and it
becomes a new time.
Anything sung
is always in the present tense.
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