First Words

By Emily Vogel

ISBN 978-1630450168

June 2015

NYQ Books

Review by Brian Fanelli

Though the northeastern winters serve as a background for several of the poems in Emily Vogel’s collection First Words, there‘s a tenderness and intimacy beneath the book’s howling winds and snowfall, a celebration of love between the narrative’s speaker, her husband, and their firstborn daughter. First Words, however, is not simply a collection of love poems or meditations on motherhood. There are larger themes at stake, including language, the metaphysical, and a country increasingly prone to violence and hyper-consumerism.

Frequently, there‘s interesting juxtapositions of images at work. In the poem “First Snow,” for instance, the winter setting is referred to as “a strange euthanasia of gray.” Certainly, the image evokes the loss of life winter causes, but it’s contrasted with the love between the speaker and her partner, who is referred to as “the essence of song/in a warm room.” The husband is something constant and reliable, a foundation, and as the poem says, they will always return to each other.

In another poem, “White Christmas,” the speaker drives home and throws herself into her husband’s arms. Again, the husband—and the sleeping infant in the next room—serve as something stable. All but the closing stanzas contains Christmas images, but the carolers have faces that “reflect dimensions of apprehensions,” and the speaker imagines that that they are pondering “guns/bank accounts, the magic of a blinking digit.” These images cause tension and reflect the capitalistic aspects of the holiday, but by the end of the poem, family is the anchor, something pure and true.

Other poems address larger cultural issues and undertones of violence. “Sequestering,” for instance, references zombies, claims of God as a hoax, and fears of getting shot in the supermarket. It‘s as though these references are threats to the safe domestic space, where the newborn daughter “gasps delightedly,” the husband laughs at old movies, and the snow, too, acts as a protective barrier.

In “Events,” Vogel again employs some apocalyptic imagery to address society’s larger ills. One section of the prose poems reads, “The war proliferated like neighborhoods/like families, like vacations in exotic places. A fire burnt/down the city.” The poem is one of the most biting, in that it also tackles indifference and hyper-consumerism with the concluding lines, “And then everyone involved got into their/warm cars and drove around, with no particular destination/in mind and thought a lot about what happened for a while.”

The end of the book circles back to family, with a poem dedicated to the author’s daughter. “Dear Clare” is a mix of memories of the daughter’s infant years and mediations on her future, and it includes the line, “I wonder if one day you will know/that poetry can often be as basic as a bank receipt.” On the one hand, Vogel has a knack for writing about the ordinary, about images of snowfall and her daughter laughing at images on TV. On the other hand, this collection constantly pushes deeper. Despite the violence that may exist in the world, Vogel illustrates how relationships and love stand as a stark contrast to those ills.

Seaglass Picnic, by Frances Driscoll

Pleasure Boat Studio, November 2015

Reviewed by Cheryl R. Hopson

The late black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde told us decades ago that silence would not protect us. But what happens when we speak those silences – personal, cultural, generational, familial? If Frances Driscoll’s poetry collection Seaglass Picnic is any indication, poetry is what happens.

Driscoll subtitles her collection with a splash of Post Traumatic Stress, suggesting something of the book’s themes–rape, PTSD, suicide, addiction, love, and renewal. And indeed, Seaglass Picnic has the beauty, vibrancy and whimsy of sea glass, as well as the unpredictability and destabilizing force of rape and PTSD. Driscoll opens the collection with a tribute poem to a lost love, Andy—one of five individuals to whom the collection is dedicated. The poet writes,

Roma historian Sarah Carmona says in Romani

when you want to tell someone you love him

you might say,

I eat your heart

Love,

I have eaten your heart,

And,

you,

my beloved,

have eaten mine.

Thus begins the reader’s journey. The poet tells us that, try as we might, there are things that happen to us that can never be forgotten or erased – terrible, torturous, violent things like rape or a beloved’s suicide.

It’s not a rape thing.

I have always loved amnesia.

In the poem He takes off his shirt, the speaker jettisons the imposed/customary silence of rape victims and PTSD sufferers:

I’m a rape victim and

I’m having a small. Little. Well kind of bad

re-occurrence

of post traumatic stress and …

…

There is no reason to be so afraid

when a man says on the telephone

I am taking off my shirt.

But

I’m as I said having this

little post traumatic stress thing going on

Though I was drawn to Seaglass Picnic, I found myself resisting reading the collection. I know firsthand the havoc and destruction rape and its fallout can bring. I am the sister of a survivor of rape, and I understand by way of my sister—and now, by way of the speakers of Driscoll’s poems—the tenacity and strength it takes to survive what ultimately amounts to the destruction of a person, body and soul. I found myself time and again returning to pieces such as to go properly into the past, a poem in which the poet writes,

Have yourself a little post

traumatic stress episode.

One that comes with flashbacks.

Lots of flashbacks.

And to poems like What Is/What If, part of a series that references the television show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In What Is/What If, Driscoll revises Law & Order’s subtitle, removing the “Special” and replacing it with “Torture.” Victims are not “special,” as the poet tells us. Rather, they’ve been made fragile and left broken by the experience of rape–as well as by their rapist’s inability or refusal to recognize their humanity, and call them by their names.

Too, in a collection that takes on so many serious, gut-wrenching topics, there is levity – and there were moments when I laughed out loud. Consider the poem The Object #2, in which the poet writes of “a very bright pink very large” penis that “once…followed alongside the car/flying with me / all the way home from school.”

I talk with Donald about it.

This is normal he says.

Jung had visions.

I don’t tell Donald,

do you really think anyone thinks

Jung was normal.

Though at times dark, despairing, and damn painful, Seaglass Picnic showcases the power of poetry to revive, relive, relieve, and break—once and for all—the silences that imprison us and prevent healing. I end my review of Seaglass Picnic as the poet began her collection: Frances Driscoll, poet, teacher, and beloved aunt to Ocean, I eat your heart.

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Cheryl R. Hopson, PhD, is an assistant professor of African American Literature at Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Georgia. She has published essays on Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, as well as on U.S. black feminist sisterhood. Her chapbook Black Notes was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.

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Nkosi Nkululeko, poet and musician, hailing from Harlem, NY, has performed his written works in venues such as Apollo Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Oxford University and others. He has performed for National Writers Union, Lincoln Center and Urban Word NYC. He was on the 2014 Urban Word NYC Slam Team for BNV(Brave New Voices) and the 2015 Urbana-NYC Slam Team for NPS(National Poetry Slam). Nkosi is a 2015 nominee for the American Voices Award, a Callaloo Fellow and has been published in Junior Scholars’ Schomburg Review and forthcoming in No Token, The New Sound and is anthologized in great weather for MEDIA’s, “Before Passing,” their 2015 Anthology.