Brian Fanelli

Joe Weil—A Night in Duluth NYQ Books, 2016 Page Length: 104 Pages Retail: $15 After recently re-reading Raymond P. Hammond’s Poetic Amusement, a book that isn’t afraid to criticize the current state of academia, contemporary American poetry, and the pressure to publish or perish, I can’t help but find similarities between Hammond’s work and Weil’s latest collection of poems, A Night in Duluth, at least in terms of argument. The key similarity between the books is their willingness to take on the contemporary American poetry scene, namely all of the hobnobbing that goes on and the rapid speed at which some poems are churned out in order to fill a CV or earn tenure. Yet, the final pages of Weil’s book remind us of the power that poetry can still have, especially when it elevates the everyday image as something of beauty. Hammond and Weil’s books are completely different forms. [...]

Jason Allen—A Meditation on Fire Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2016 Page Length: 71 Retail: $14 Poems of Survival: A Review of Jason Allen’s A Meditation on Fire Jason Allen’s debut full-length collection of poems, A Meditation on Fire, reminds me of what remains in a boxing ring after the final round. The poems spin tales of mental and physical bruises, blood, scars, and shadowboxing. Yet, even in the most confessional, sobering work, poems that speak to addiction and sobriety, the book is not without its humor and salvation. Several of the poems are so visceral that we feel what the speaker feels as we thumb through the collection. The opening poem, “Blues Before Sunrise,” for instance, loosely plays with the blues form, namely the repetition, not the rhyme scheme and meter, to give us insight into the speaker’s troubled mind, as he listens to Muddy Waters. I’ve got nothing [...]

Maria Mazziotti Gillan— What Blooms in Winter NYQ Books, 2016 Page Length: 116 Retail: $15 The last several months have been trying as an American citizen. Donald Trump’s candidacy has used xenophobic rhetoric to demonize minority groups and immigrants. In these times, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work, which often focuses on her Italian-American family heritage and celebrating the immigrant experience, is especially relevant. Her newest collection, What Blooms in Winter, draws on the deeply personal to vocalize her story and also give praise to the melting pot aspect that has always been a foundation of American culture. Gillan’s latest collection continues to draw on the narrative form, and most of the poems use personal memory to address broader issues, including the immigrant experience, climate change, and global terrorism. The early part of the collection moves through grade school, before shifting to her teenage/twenty-something years, during the 1960s and 1970s. [...]

Dinner Table Refuge by Benjamin Schmitt Punks Write Poems, 2015 Paperback, 118 pages, $14 ISBN: 978-0986170737 Clocking in at over 100 pages, Benjamin Schmitt’s Dinner Table Refuge tackles a number of issue— death, politics, homelessness, love, punk rock nostalgia, and even zombies and robot takeovers. The collection is not only wide in scope, but wide in its array of forms. Collage poems mix with straight-forwarded narratives, but the work resonates the most when the poems are clear, when they recall the idealistic punk rockers of the poet’s youth, or offer meditations on love in the book’s final section. There is a thread of memory, images of slam dances and sweaty punk clubs that reoccur in the book. The poem “1997,” for instance, transitions between the past and present well. Set against the backdrop of punk rock youth, the poem drives deeper, hitting notes of love and heartache. In 1997 the [...]

Stay with Me Awhile By Loren Kleinman ISNB: 978-1941058350 April 2016 Winter Goose Publishing Reviewed by Brian Fanelli Loren Kleinman’s last collection of poems, Breakable Things, had a lot of references to Charles Bukowski, even in terms of subject matter, specifically the poet’s willingness to not shy away from raw subject matter, such as drinking or sex. There are still some echoes of Bukowski in Stay with Me AWhile, but Kleinman’s new book draws more resemblance to Anne Sexton for the way that it addresses matters of the body and notions of beauty. The book is also more expansive in form, containing a number of prose poems and work that is more surreal than it is narrative. At the heart of the collection, however, is a theme that has been most pronounced in Kleinman’s work, the need for love and affection in an increasingly isolated and fragmented world. Kleinman’s growth [...]

Because I Did Not Die By Nicole Santalucia ISBN: 978-1599540948 October 2015 Bordighera Press Reviewed by Brian Fanelli The Cannoli Machine at the Brooklyn Detention Center, the opening poem in Nicole Santalucia’s Because I Did Not Die, sets the themes—family, Italian American heritage, and addiction—that are a thread throughout the book. Santalucia’s latest work is bold in its subject matter, and shows a willingness to go into the cave and tackle past demons. The poems are unflinching in their handling of the personal, something fewer and fewer contemporary poets are doing in the decades following the height of the confessional movement that saw the ascension of Plath, Sexton, and Lowell. Several of Santalucia’s poems deal with parents realizing that their children are addicts. The opening poem, for instance, finds the speaker’s dad in the Brooklyn Detention Center, trying to come to terms with the fact that his son is jailed. [...]

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 [...]

Hughes’s ideas about jazz and blues were echoed by other black intellectuals only a few years after “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” was published. In Duke Ellington’s 1931 essay “The Duke Steps Out,” he says that jazz is more than the American idiom, but rather an essential part of black history, the result of transplantation to American soil and the evolution of the slave song, thus jazz has a history much deeper than mere dance music. “It expresses our personality, and, right down in us, our souls react to its elemental but eternal rhythm,” Ellington states (qtd. in Halliday 147). Like Hughes, Ellington makes a fine defense of jazz as an essential part of black culture, a music form that stems from slave plantation songs, a music that does not lead to laziness, nervousness, or hysteria, but rather a music that was necessary to survive in a white-dominated [...]

This is essay is divided into three parts. Part two will post on Wednesday, and part three on Friday. While many critics have noted the influence of blues and jazz on Langston Hughes’s poetry, little has been written about Hughes from a sound studies standpoint. His sonic landscapes not only chronicle Harlem from the 1920s to 1950s, but also challenge the sonic color-line, specifically ideas from the Enlightenment Period about sound and logic, ideas that still persisted in the first half of the 20th Century, evident through early criticism of ragtime and jazz. In defending black music forms and using specific sounds in his work, including blues, jazz, and laughter, sounds of interwar and post-war Harlem, Hughes challenges 19th Century notions that only white speech is clear and reasoned and sounds unable to be pinned down, particularly sounds of the racialized Other, are purely emotional and non-logical; Hughes’s sonic landscapes [...]

Swallowed Whole Recently, on vacation, I saw a blue heron catch and eat a fish. In its middle, the fish was a good deal larger than the heron’s slender neck. Looking out subway windows, sparks fly, light up graffiti tags in this dark, rat-infested tunnel I am hurtling through. Ideas leap to mind: violence, poverty, being born with very little real opportunity. I’ve been taught these ideas. The heron brought the fish on land, pecked into it repeatedly until it was good and dead, then somehow managed to swallow it whole. Can I have an original idea? It all feels collaborative, this living of life. My original ideas are the smallest of perceptions. I’ve been taught, too, the importance of graffiti as urban art, street culture expressed. I’ve rounded many corners, blown back by a mural with teeth. In a class I took, one theory-loving student asked a particularly earnest [...]

On This Side In the dream father was finished with me. He was dressed for work or moving on. Whichever it was he would soon be gone– his silence a warning, in his gaze regret: whatever it was he had wished for me hadn’t happened yet and by now probably never would. The window framed his measured stride and I understood, when he did not turn to wave, he had given all he could on this side of the glass and the grave. _________________________________________________________ Jeff Rath is the author of three collections of poetry: The Waiting Room at the End of the World (2007), In the Shooting Gallery of the Heart (2009) and Film Noir (2011), all published by Iris G. Press. His works have been published in a number of journals including Everyday Genius and Fledgling Rag. He is the 2007 R.E. Foundation Award winner and a Pushcart Prize [...]

Watching the Pelican Die On TV, I watch the pelican with its mouth wide open, its wings and body coated with oil. Is it screaming? I do not hear the sound and since this is a photograph, I don’t know if it was caught in that mouth-stretched howl when it died or if it’s howling in recognition that it cannot survive the thick coat of oil that bears it down. The ladies who take care of you when I’m gone tell me you are having trouble. “His hands,” they say, “his hands.” When I come home, I see that your hands have turned black at the tips and I see that the ends of your fingers have been eaten away. I watch the dead bird in the Gulf floating on top of the water, its legs stiff and straight in the air, its body drained of all motion, all light. [...]

Bliss April loves a challenge, choosing to split the slab of winter-hardened earth with the silk tongue of a crocus. She casts the stiffened brooks as her fandango dancers. At first they crack and groan, call her the cruelest of taskmasters but April persists, persuades: the streams ripple, sequined and agile. For April even forgotten roadsides can ruffle out in a froth of forsythia, waving brash wands of membranous stars that glitter like eternity, then float to the ground, a wasted galaxy melting into the land while this uterine muscle of a month bears down, rousting the fetuses each from their dark havens, thrusting them naked and mewling into the hungry light. The least of April’s exploits is lulling us: we are so eager to ignore the hollow echo of the daffodils’ blare and the lithe red tulips’ throats of snow. Bliss is included in Appetite for the Divine (2006) [...]