MICRO REVIEWS | VOL. 3

how memory feels

by Annie Kim

The Sum of Its Parts

by Sally Ashton

How Memory Feels

how memory feels

On Julie Hanson’s The Audible and The Evident & John Sibley Williams’ Skin Memory

“I want to say that poets revive memory (and survive it) by constructing on the page how memory feels. And how it disrupts consciousness, like a single raindrop splashing the surface of an otherwise still pond, sending ripples both downward and outward.”

Read MORE.

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the sum
of its parts

the sum of its parts

On Meg Eden’s Drowning in The Floating World & Lesle Lewis’ Rainy Days on the Farm

“. . . where Meg Eden focuses on water in extremis—tidal wave, flood, drowning, destruction—in Lesle Lewis’ collection a rainy day suggests a tone, the commonplace, at worst an oppressive backdrop.”

Read MORE.

MICRO REVIEWS | VOL. 2

COLLECTOR, SELF:

Martha Silano, Callista Buchen, Chelsea Wagenaar

by Annie Kim

Visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna last year, I got quickly overwhelmed by the delights of its kunstkammer —a “cabinet” or room of curiosities. Clocks, fans, goldsmithed vessels in every size and shape. Even a table-top ship that propelled itself to music while tiny sailors danced on deck. Here, objects that didn’t belong to the same time or geography could be assembled, named and coded, preserved from the forces of destruction.

Writers curate life, too, of course. The modern poetry “collection,” more than any other literary genre, operates on the buffet principle: we can all eat a bit of everything. Poets collect—their experiences, their worlds—in boxes as tiny and splendid as Joseph Cornell’s, as large and strange as the nocturnal desert. And the self that glimmers through collections can be candid or implied, clearly framed for autobiographical consumption or artfully obscured. When I pick up a new book of poetry, I am always interested in the self that’s being constructed. The emerging portrait of the poet laboring to make sense, to create meaning, reconnects me to my own desires to make.

The three poets whose books I’ll be discussing are each master collectors and self-inventors.

Martha Silano collects nothing short of the universe itself, both the wonders and physics thereof, in Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Callista Buchen’s Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Chelsea Wagenaar’s The Spinning Place (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019) boldly investigate the self that grows and splinters through motherhood, as well as the body that’s radically redefined in the process. In their elegance, in their dedication to craft, these three women poets offer us glimpses of the collected, many-layered self.

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one

Martha Silano, Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019)

Among our three collections, Martha Silano’s Gravity Assist fits most squarely within the kunst- and wunderkammer tradition. Each of the book’s sections (“Periapsis,” “Orbit Insertion” and “Escape Velocity”) navigates the shifting distances between speaker and world, the inexhaustible layers of the visible and invisible. And, like those generously packed curiosity cabinets of the past, Silano’s poems overflow with natural and manmade artifacts, all gorgeously described. Take this passage from “Beneath twelve feet of ashy topsoil”:

. . . here they are: the blue-glass

pitcher, snake bracelet, bowl in the shape of a shell.
Here’s the bronze speculum, tools for extracting,

for pulling back the skin, the bloodletting suction cup. 
Here, the scales for weighing, by the libra, by the unicae,

eel and octopus, almonds and broad beans, peaches
and dates; here the ruddy amphorae, two-handled

 vessels housing garum, fruit sauce, oil;  . . .

The hawk-like eye and insatiable appetite for the world, on display here, are just a few of Silano’s gifts. They come, as well, with an encyclopedic vocabulary for naming. Dozens of the scientific, medical and geographic references in Silano’s poems sent me straight to Google. What exactly is a “benthic tubeworm,” anyway? And where are those “Kunlun Shan Mountains”? In some ways, of course, the answers don’t matter, as these precisely named things serve, in part, to ornament the poem’s surface. Though, like a wunderkammer bristling with taxidermied bodies of obscure creatures, they offer the reader sharp new bits of knowledge.

Sparks fly when Silano’s hunger for naming intersects with human foibles. In “Ode to Autocorrect,” for instance, O’Hare Airport transforms to “o hate.” Hate leads us quickly down the slippery path, where the innocent text, “I get home,” turns into “I get guns.” The litany that follows is equal parts delicious and disturbing:

                           . . .  My feet, iamb
of a son of a birch, of a brick chatting

with the devil, with God, with a listener
not listening. Because he’d gone bonnets,
his garden bounty a faded wine, his wife’s

linguine longing for a golden ear,
so I took her to the botanical gardens
in my getaway car, to a fruit on a vine,

but the limes went lemur, the night to nonfat,
the clear to catastrophic.

Given all this richness, what kind of self is implied by these poems?

“Despite Nagging Malfunctions,” a pseudo-ars poetica, offers one clue:

           . . . I fell in love 
with Fornax, Latin for furnace, divine impersonation
of oven, Roman Goddess of baking bread, constellation
from which we gander at galaxy UDFj-39546284,
most distant object in the universe. 

In this charmingly imagined origin story, both a love of seeing and a love of distance define the speaker. Likewise, “The World” rhapsodizes all things untouchable and untamable: the world’s “toothsome fissures” and “calderas,” its convoluted formulas and “spiral notebook of incomprehensibles.” But the poem closes on the image of “the blue beyond the pelvic bone’s socket: frosty, flanged, fecund.” Here, Silano reminds us that what seems intimately near remains, ultimately, distant. Infinite.

And don’t we all long for the infinite?

“I am the miraculous,” begins the penultimate poem in the book. The speaker is both the omnipresent “traffic running smoothly down Oak” and the hidden “hyaloid canal/that gave you sight,” a self that’s fleeting, like “lightning’s formation,” but also strangely persistent:

      All of me summed up

in one small artifact: a pair of fornicating froghoppers
entombed in sap.
 

This is Martha Silano at her best: naming, summing, recklessly inventing. “I bore thousands,” she pronounces happily at the end of this poem, “each one named Incredulous.”

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two

Callista Buchen, Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019)

“Woman: be permeable, be ocean, be habitat.” 

So begins Callista Buchen’s “Regeneration,” one of the first poems in her book-length exploration of the self splitting into mother. “Our most ambitious work,” observes Buchen: “mother as birthplace, where woman becomes location.” (“Metaphysics”) 

If Silano’s collection finds its visual counterpart in the wunderkammer, Buchen’s comes nearest to collage—tissue against tissue, feather between steel wires, ink bleeding through it all. In fluid prose poems that build over time into an engrossing narrative arc, Look Look Look takes us inside the richly alert consciousness of a woman stepping out of her private self into the borderless landscape of the mother.

Not surprisingly, then, this self collects throughout the book like water in its many forms. “I am light rain, hard rain, thunder, hail,” muses the speaker in “Milk Drunk.”

Buchen underscores this scattered sense of consciousness by employing multiple points of view throughout the book, shifting seamlessly from the third-person in one poem to an “I” or “you” in the next. These layered voices give Buchen’s meditations both spaciousness and variety. Here’s an example of the third-person speaker ruminating on life after childbirth in the delightfully quirky “Quick Change”:

She keeps her body around the house. There is body in the coat
closet in the hall by the front door, body under the bed in plastic
bins, a pile in the garage by the recycling bin. The spares, she 
calls them. She misplaces her body like she loses her keys.

And here’s the “you” meditating on obsessive maternal compulsions in “Swaddle,” quoted below in full:

At home, the baby might as well be in a museum, under glass, his
perfect fingernails, how he smells of melon and flour, wrapped
and wrapped in muslin until he is preserved. This is your job
now. Look, you could be saying to visitors, at what has been saved! See
his open mouth, how he uses all this room to breathe. You are the alarm, the
resin, the final word on keeping him alive. You document,
record, and wrap him again like the artifact you imagine him to
be. You do everything right and lie when you don’t. Look, you say.
Look.

As these two passages illustrate, Buchen approaches the disorienting, exhausting states of motherhood with quicksilver humor and irony—hallmarks of a style that make this collection deeply pleasurable to read, even addictive.

But Buchen can also be mercilessly raw, heartbreakingly direct. Take this passage from “Loss,” for instance, where the speaker recalls the experience of miscarriage:

We do the research. We hear the quiet, see the heart slow, vanish.
For a while, we are made of words, of embryo, of viable, of wait.
I am grief. I am double and half. I carry the dead body, which is
better than no body. I can be a coffin. That easy.

While these three previous poems lean toward narrative, Buchen is also a master of the prose poem as miniature essay. Of metaphor and argument. The real as it blurs into the surreal. 

In “The Virtues of Cement,” for example, Buchen riffs on the idea of mother as water. Wouldn’t it be better, the speaker ponders, to be cement? Construction motifs—trucks, hard hats, hazard cones—appear throughout the book, but here it’s cement itself that appeals: solid, elemental, thoughtless. Consider the first half of this poem:

All the water, the constant wetness, overwhelms you. You see
now that cement is the way to go. You like the way after you are
gone, you won’t have to watch the destruction, how someone else
will jackhammer your sidewalk, your basement, your backyard
slab with its initials and dates. A leftover pile of unnatural rocks.
You know better.

As this passage shows, Buchen’s sentences move at the pace of speech: the kind of intimate speech we hear in our own heads, connecting thought to thought almost without hinges. Every word, whether it’s the imagined “jackhammer” drilling the sidewalk or the “leftover pile of unnatural rocks,” feels exactly placed. And when Buchen later bemoans the shapelessness, the seeping of water—metaphors for the borderless maternal self—we hardly notice how we’ve gotten there.

We merge with the speaker as she ruminates: “You aren’t even after permanence. . . . You build your wall and wait, eyes wet with smoke.”

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three

Chelsea Wagenaar, The Spinning Place (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019)

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, Convent of San Marco (1440-45)

Mary looks a little pensive in all the early Annunciations, including my favorites by Fra Angelico. Awestruck, yes. But in the cautious tilt of her body, the firm seal of her lips (resolute? resigned?), she’s always struck me as not quite sure whether she wants to hear what the angel is about to say. Maybe the birthday song she’d sing at that moment would be, as Chelsea Wagenaar deftly observes in the The Spinning Place, “both elegy and ode, a tune that rises / from a dark depth no one else can know.” Praise, yes, but “struck from the flint of sorrow.” 

Wagenaar’s collection brims with both elegies and odes, all elegantly crafted. Elegy for a sister’s lost twin son. A miscarried child. A young woman struggling to reshape her life after trauma. Odes to the unborn baby, the small child learning her words, the husband tweezing a splinter from his wife’s heel. Here are poems that tenderly extend to all the loved ones in the poet’s orbit—including horses, foxes, frogs, and birds out the window—giving each an account, holding each to the collector’s light. 

If Buchen’s book spotlights the soul’s trials in the wake of an avalanche, Wagenaar’s embraces the sweet enclosure of all that snow. Take this poem, “Annunciation (While Pregnant, I Develop Aviophobia),” in which Wagenaar describes the sudden onset of acute mental and physical fear:

. . . my body glyphed with secret & threatening to tell, 

I slipped from consciousness into the stewardess’s 
firm grip on my elbow, the oxygen mask 

she cupped over my face, her waterwords calling
Is there a doctor on board? I fell & fell 

from that sky, unearthly, impossibly winged, to find you 
in the airport, my oracle’s lips lusterless. 

In Wagenaar’s hands, the bizarre out-of-body experience of aviophobia is metabolized into a spiritual journey, a path to knowing. This passage also demonstrates Wagenaar’s gift for quick, inventive metaphor—body “glyphed,” the flight attendant’s “waterwords”—and for creating lush, stately music at the level of the line. Elsewhere, she envisions the mother’s body as a “solstice,” the baby as a “small motor churn[ing],” who blows “raspberries with her lips” and forms “glass pearls.” Erasers in a deserted college classroom do the “great unwriting:” they “cancel Gettysburg, erode the ribs / of the human skeleton;” they “unstack the kindling/of the music staff . . . unconjugate cantar.” 

Though Wagenaar’s collection often strikes a major key, much in the poet’s world can’t be reconciled. That’s when the music gets even more interesting. Whether it’s the cloud that hangs in the air after a marital spat, as in “Apology,” or it’s the speaker’s mother leaving poignant notes on the staircase for a husband who abandoned her, in “Hope,” some splinters can’t be plucked from the skin. 

“Hands,” a beautifully conceived long poem, contains all the notes on the human scale. Structured as a sequence of short fragments, the poem alternates between the speaker’s meditations on sorrow and language, and her unsuccessful attempts to help her sister write about a recent trauma. Here’s one section:

I sent her the notebook
because her therapist
and the district attorney
and the guidance counselor
and our mother—everyone tells her to write. 
But she cannot write about that. 

What I mean to say is
hand it to the page, shift the weight of it 
little by little until you don’t carry it all. 

But what I say is
Imagine yourself as a flower. What kind of flower would you be? and
Make up a knock-knock joke and
Imagine the contents of your closet as a city. Who is the mayor? and
What do you think is the opposite of “ father”? Think hard. You can’t say mother. 

We come close to the heart of the book here: that airless space where the poet—as sister, mother—knocks up against her desire to collect, contain, and, ultimately, transform. “Make a list of things that are blue,” Wagenaar’s speaker urges her sister. The list that she then imagines represents an act of pure empathy, pure delight in the face of sorrow: “the sky / Kool-Aid / eyeliner / the veins in my wrist / the lines of this paper.” It’s the primal poetic urge that drives us to catalog both our joys and our pains, using the vocabulary of the visible world.

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Callista Buchen is the author of Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet(Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of DIAGRAM's essay contest and the C.D. Wright Conference's Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award. She teaches at Franklin College, where she directs the creative writing program and the visiting writers' reading series.

Martha Silano is the author of four previous poetry collections: Reckless Lovely, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, Blue Positive, and What the Truth Tastes Like. She is also co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. She teaches at Bellevue College. 

Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of The Spinning Place (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019), winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and Mercy Spurs the Bone, selected by Philip Levine as the 2013 winner of the Philip Levine Prize. She holds a BA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, and many others. She teaches at Valparaiso University in Indiana, where she lives with her husband, Mark Wagenaar, and their two children. 

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MICRO REVIEWS | VOL. I

Disappearing Acts: Three Takes

Cecilia Woloch, David Ebenbach, Anatoly Molotkov

by Annie Kim

I had just started writing poems in the mornings before leaving for my job as a lawyer, feeling a bit trapped by my dull but comfortable suburban lifestyle, when I came across a CD titled, intriguingly, Diary of One Who Disappeared. Pathos! Though I was hardly the Moravian farmer running off with a gypsy girl depicted in this 22-song cycle by composer Leoš Janáček, the idea of ditching civilization and its rules of conduct thrilled me. Then, as now, disappearance had its seductions.

As it turned out, the farmer-poet whose romantic lyrics Janáček read in the local paper and set to music proved to be a fake. It was, in fact, a well-established writer—Ozef Kalda—who’d penned this sequence. Who disappeared, if at all, only in his head, in the rush of writing. 

But disappearance—its seductiveness, its grim promise of resolution by dissolution—winds through the new collections of three otherwise quite different poets: Cecilia Woloch, David Ebenbach, and Anatoly Molotkov. Vanishing mammoths in Ebenbach. The ontology of snow in Molotkov. Exile, personal and political, in Woloch. Disappearance as the darkly present, obsessively imagined, unseen half of being human.

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one

Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (New Edition) (Two Sylvias Press, 2018), by Cecilia Woloch

“My grandmother/who never was/my grandmother,” Woloch observes about her elusive forebearer, a Carpathian who came to America after being sold to a man as a teenaged bride. “Who was called Tsiganka,/Gypsy, as in: she/who vanishes.”

At the center of Woloch’s book-length poem, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (New Edition), stands the legacy of this grandmother: a fiery survivor of rocky marriages, children’s deaths, harsh immigrant life in early twentieth-century America. The desire to know not only what happened to her, but why her siblings and children—including the poet’s own father—spoke so furtively about their Gypsy blood, sparks the search that Woloch chronicles in this book.

Early on, Woloch dramatizes the family mysteries she pondered as a child in passages marked by vivid imagery and snatches of dialogue:

I called them teta
(Teta Sue, Aunt
Teta Annie)
for the clicking 
of their tongues
against their teeth,
the way they danced
the polka—flying,
spinning, cackling—
how they hissed,
whispered to me
(Eat, honey, eat)—

 . . . .

 I called them teta
for his sake
and for the secrets
that they kept—
where they’d come from
what was hidden
in their apron pockets, what
could not be claimed—
their laughter rising up 
like crows, black-
winged, their hands
waving me back—Don’t 
ask, don’t ask— . . .

In slim, quickly paced verse sections like these, interspersed with prose meditations, Woloch the poet takes us on the journey that Woloch the adult granddaughter began in order to understand her Roma heritage and the roots of her own unrootedness. One of the great pleasures of this book is Woloch’s gift for revealing both the physical and metaphysical elements of this journey. So the “sticky cakes” she buys with her American dollars for a ring of Gypsy girls in “brilliant skirts” who press against her, and the wild hope she feels when she meets an ancient woman in Wislock Wielki who remembers her grandmother’s family, her hair “a shock of silver-white beneath/a scarf of emerald green.” On the streets of modern Paris, Woloch’s acute awareness of otherness when a little boy calls her “witch” as she walks by, her “dark hair flying, wild, unkempt.”

Disappearance on a larger, cultural scale also plays a recurring role in this book.

From the start, Woloch expertly weaves back and forth between her personal narrative and a telescoped history of the Roma people who were displaced, exiled, and exterminated over the centuries. Though the book alternates mainly between lyrical, autobiographical verse sections and stark, historical timelines that telegraph information about Romani expulsions and deaths, Woloch also gives us glimpses of her travels through longer prose meditations. Newly arrived in Lodv, for instance, she imagines how town life continued despite the rounding up of Jews and Gypsies during the Holocaust:

We didn’t know where they’d gone, said their neighbors, 
waking one too-quiet morning to find their neighbors
gone—the Jews who had run the village shops; the 
Gypsies who had made music for generations here. Then
not a note, not a scrap of song. Though of course they
knew. The sky full of smoke. Soon enough, the fields
would be char and ash.

As this passage—and the author’s notes in this expanded, new edition of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem—reflect, the journey is never done. We return again and again to the sources of unrootedness within us.

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two

Some Unimaginable Animal (Orison Books, 2019), by David Ebenbach

“No great accomplishment, disappearing,” quips David Ebenbach, musing about a Neanderthal man whose bones were accidentally preserved at his death only to be, one day, displayed to twenty-first century sightseers. “In the Museum of Natural History,” like many other poems in Some Unimaginable Animal, revels in the physical, albeit temporary, particulars of presence behind which absence dimly beckons.

 If Woloch’s poetic persona is a restless wanderer, Ebenbach’s is a raconteur who loves to riff on food and holidays, preferably food with holidays, animals both living and extinct, and those all too intractable but disappearing animals, humans. Behind all the delectable specimens that pile up in the poems—“big bowls of pasta,” “mini-pies and cider doughnuts,” “sticky buns”—we get an occasional glimpse of the spiritual cravings that drive this consumption:

                         Eventually it’s nine-
thirty, and the bread has cooled and the soup is
perfectly milled and the sauces have all thickened,
and it’s time. That’s when a sadness comes over
the kitchen, which you almost don’t catch, you’re
so hungry: the cooks are done. They’re done
and the cooking was the pleasure part, so now
their pleasure is just some food. Now it’s just
the tedious rotating of jaws, the steady dis-
assembly of what matters . . . 

(“From Scratch”)

That disappearing act we stage each time we eat a meal is one rhythm in the book.

Another is an almost little-kid wonder at the origins of the universe. How big was the “first insect[’]s” jaw? Did the “first mammal” have only enough time “to make two babies/before something ate it, or a wave/swept it away”? Standing, again, before bones in a museum in “Whale, Extinct,” Ebenbach ponders the cycles of death and life:      

  And what after that?
The sea recedes again, inevitably, the drying sand strewn
with new bone—and all of us, or what remains, left to
some unimaginable animal and its tools of excavation.

In quiet moments like this one, Ebenbach puts us in touch with the Big Questions without fanfare or elegy. Or here, in the tender poem, “Driftwood,” where a father explains to his young son:

this was once a branch,
somehow it got into the sea,
he doesn’t know how—oh,
the things fathers should
know—but the water skinned
the wood, opened seams in it,
left it here for the sun
to whiten through its daily examinations.
The father holds the awkward
fragment. He doesn’t get into
how we started out like this. . .

Ebenbach is in his element when he gives full force to his narrative imagination. Nowhere is this more the case than in the delightfully strange and meticulously crafted prose poem, “After the Battle.” In it, a mysterious group of people labor to untie a mountainous knot, only to discover that there were “countless thousands of knots at the heart of this one mountainous knot.” In a closing scene that feels particularly resonant in our current political moment, Ebenbach offers this grim but clear-eyed vision:

Their enemies, too, 
found themselves caught between a desire for vengeance and a 
desire to disentangle. Because war never fails utterly, blood was shed. 
It soaked into the ropes and, as it dried, tightened them, first around
hands, then around arms and bodies. By this time, all were quite
unable to move. Nonetheless, the fighting found a way to continue,
and the knot continued to tighten.

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three

Synonyms for Silence (Acre Books, 2019), by Anatoly Molotkov

How can a poet use silences to say “something small, smaller/than one can hear”?

Anatoly Molotkov’s Synonyms for Silence seems to answer: By imagining very hard being something else, a thing whose nature is to disappear. “I’m a mandala built/to be/erased,/a snowflake, a former crystal,” begins the slender poem, “Opened.” “I envy air,” asserts “Obituary.” “I respect concrete,” echoes “To the Firm World.”

Indeed, Molotkov divides his book into three sections named after elements—“Carbon,” “Iron,” “Oxygen”—which also happen to be chapter names in Primo Levi’s collection of short stories, The Periodic Table. Mirrors within a mirror. Despite these literary signposts, though, it’s no easy task to figure out how Molotkov’s divisions (or their epigraphs from Levi) illuminate the poems they contain. But their conceptual difficulties—like others in the book—seem intentional. Why should meaning, itself, avoid the slippery embrace of disappearance?

Erosion, corrosion: these are the actions of Molotkov’s melting snowflakes, of rust on metal, coolly and elegantly described in poem after poem. In “A Love Letter to Chemistry,” for instance—one of the book’s many affirmations of the innocent, fierce and, ultimately, amoral, elements in nature—Molotkov opens:

I believe in rust, its malignant vitality, its firm
love for every surface that will love it back. I admire

the way snowflakes

remember last melting. Trees care little for warmth if
it’s not a fire. I wish I could be that confident. I wish

I grew on a hill. I would

give anything to be pure water or
pure ash . . . 

As one statement unfolds sinuously into the next, we take pleasure from the music, from being able to almost make out their arguments. Molotkov explained the reasoning behind such a poetics in a 2016 interview with the Cincinnati Review: 

A poem should not be completely understood by either the reader or the writer—instead, it should open an interpretive space in which multiple possibilities coexist. “Obituary” begins a series of poems that attempt to project a distinct, confident voice via the use of statements that do not easily lend themselves to causative relationships yet accrue as symptoms of the speaker’s views and, more generally, of the human condition.

Causation as mirage, words as symptoms. And when the symptoms are as lovely as they generally are throughout this book, should we care about the course of their disease?

Certainly, Molotkov’s poetic personas seem at home with extinction. “We wait in line to become obsolete,/to trade places with shadows,” starts the last poem in the book, “Love Letter to Everyone.” There, as in “Unhistory,” Molotkov’s speaker displays his characteristic acceptance: “Where does blame belong, where/does guilt lead us? When salt enters, the ocean accepts our final promise.” What remains is “[m]y body extinguished, its dark skin.

Disappearance has its seductions. 

But what are we to make when we come across a poem like “Confronting the Body,” in which Molotkov writes in the first-person about a detained “unlawful combatant’s” experience of torture?  One of several poems in the section called “Iron,” it describes with more realism than the others real violence against a particular person that can’t be considered just allegorical or metaphorical. Though it, too, resolves into acceptance:

In this torture tool,
Palestinian Chair,
my hands chained
to an iron
ring in the floor,
my leg 
muscles ache then hurt then
break.

Yes, it’s true: some futures are
shorter than the rest.

 Some

 silences last longer than others.

Maybe it’s asking too much of a book called Synonyms for Silence to want a carefully expounded ethical stance on violence. It wouldn’t shock me if the poet behind Janáček’s Diary of One Who Disappeared, for that matter, was at least as much in love with the idea of disappearance as he was with any living girl. Poetry thrives in the seam about to come undone. As in the desire Molotkov voices in the last lines of “Obituary,” in the section called “Oxygen”:

   In the end,
I will be smoke over your city. I envy

the spaces between things.

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Cecilia Woloch’s honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, CEC/ArtsLink International and the Center for International Theatre Development; her work has also received a Pushcart Prize and been included in the Best American Poetry Series. She has published six collections of poems and a novel, as well as essays and reviews. Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, her second collection, originally appeared in 2002 from Cahuenga Press, was published in French translation as Tzigane, le poème, Gitan, by Scribe-l'Harmattan in 2014, and was issued in an expanded and updated English edition by Two Sylvias Press in 2018. The final poem in the new edition is featured in a commemorative exhibit by Daniel Libeskind at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The text of Tsigan has also been the basis for multi-lingual, multi-media performances across the U.S. and Europe. Born in Pennsylvania, raised in rural Kentucky, and currently based in Los Angeles, Cecilia has traveled the world as a teacher and writer. 

In addition to his new poetry collection Some Unimaginable Animal, David Ebenbach is the author of six other books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, winners of such awards as the Juniper Prize and the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, among others. He lives with his family in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing and literature at Georgetown University. You can find out more at davidebenbach.com.

Born in Russia, A. Molotkov moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. His previous poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things and Application of Shadows. Molotkov has received various fiction and poetry awards and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com.