August,
already. All I can do is remind you: check out
periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, the new issue of which starts posting today!
And you
remember that above/ground press is holding a 29th anniversary big
ridiculous sale this summer, yes? And I'm still selling copies of this new poetry book of mine! So many exciting things!
San Francisco CA: Following her
full-length debut, Isako Isako (Alice James Books, 2018), and winner of
the 2022 BOOM Chapbook Contest is Bay Area poet Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s charming
and utterly striking Notes from the Birth Year (bateau press, 2022), a suite
of lyrics that write out elements of new motherhood, and connecting deeper to a
lineage; the threads that begin to open fully and further across both
genealogical directions. “With this telling,” she writes as part of “On Mind
and Memory,” “I am weaving her an origin story—one in which, I realize, / I am
incidental. This is about her, not me.” Hers is a lyric simultaneously casual
and crafted, set as sketched notes on the possibilities of newness and
connectivity around having a small child. These poems are remarkable for their
intimacy and their scale, written across and through distances great and small,
long lines of calm, hesitation and memory, reaching out into a new way of
seeing what was already there. “Strange,” she writes, as part of “On Gestation
and Becoming,” “how what is closest most eludes us.” She composes poems that
engage with the emergence through their own possibilities, seeking to connect
poetic form and structure with an openness that having a growing child allows. As
the poem “On Form” begins:
I became a mother and I began
to write like a Japanese woman.
Which is to say: I began
to write like myself—from the imaginary whence my mother’s mother and her
mother and her mother before her came.
Things That Are Distant
Though Near: Festivals celebrated near the Palace. The zigzag path leading up
to the temple of Kurama.
When I became a mother,
my lines began to grow less mannered, less sculpted—and this wild, itinerant
prose did not adhere to shapeliness.
Instead it spilled from
birth into death and questions of beauty and my opinions about this and that,
arranging itself as it wished.
An unruly, yet artful
text.
Kentville NS: From Regina-born and Brooklyn-based Canadian poet Cassidy McFadzean, the author of the full-length collections Hacker Packer (McClelland and Stewart, 2015) and Drolleries (McClelland
& Stewart, 2019), comes the chapbook Third States of Being (Gaspereau
Press, 2022), a title composed as “a crown of sonnets written for my mother, Catherine
Mae McFadzean (née Warriner), who was born May 29, 1957, and died September 24,
2020.” Admittedly, I had to look up the specific term, as the Poetry Foundation website offers: “The sonnet redoublé, also known as a crown of
sonnets, is composed of 15 sonnets that are linked by the repetition of the
final line of one sonnet as the initial line of the next, and the final line of
that sonnet as the initial line of the previous; the last sonnet consists of
all the repeated lines of the previous 14 sonnets, in the same order in which
they appeared.” As her poem begins: “The way loss ricochets through memory /
altering every moment that preceded / Those left behind forever changed by it /
with renewed engagements tending / ever loyally to the earth and its labours /
like caretakers in the palace gardens [.]”
There
is a curious language to her elegy, one that seeks a particular crafted phrase,
accumulating line upon self-contained line until the lines begin to narratively
collage into a larger shape. She writes her elegy slant against the loss of her
mother, attempting to articulate points through the loss and the very notion of
scattered, shuffled memory through shuffled language. Each step is both the
same and not the same, all of which ends up in that particular spot.
IX
Galloping off and never
turning back
Was your death swift and
unexpected
because a long and drawn-out
illness
would have destroyed me,
unable to rise
to the occasion? In the
night I berate myself
with circular thinking:
if we’re only given
what we can handle is it
my fault for being
too weak to bear your suffering?
I search through pages of
histopathology
to find the arteries of
your heart calcified
A pink marbling on the tissue
slides
tiny cells became lilac
buds in a river
floating downstream,
almost beautiful
with knowledge the
invisible will betray
