Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Dystopia Borne Alive in No Land in Sight

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Reviewed by Jason Tandon

No Land in Sight
by Charles Simic
Knopf, 96pp., $23.95
HR

Charles Simic is not just one of the most celebrated and honored poets of the last fifty years; now in his eighties, he remains one of the most prolific, having released four books since 2015. Fans of Simic’s poetry who have especially enjoyed his newer work, such as Come Closer and Listen (2019) and Scribbled in the Dark (2017), will find many of the hallmarks of his recent style in his latest collection, No Land in Sight. The poems are brief, often ten lines or fewer, and they are primarily set in a city (presumably New York City, where Simic has spent much of his time when not in New Hampshire). His persona is a solitary figure who suffers from insomnia and roams the streets at all hours or lies in bed listening to the wind, a portentous sound in Simic’s work. He routinely shows empathy for the homeless, disdain for political leaders, and bemusement at the masses who blindly follow them. [Read more…]

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

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Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023)
by Rachel Reid Wilkie

Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in spontaneously on the spot. Below is her 7-part response, with each video speaking to one painting as Wilkie circles through the cavernous, faintly-lit room: [Read more…]

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

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Smoking the Bible
Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla

Smoking the Bible
by Chris Abani
Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99
HR

Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along with references to West African rituals, reveals the devotion of a sibling who has become his brother’s keeper as he succumbs to cancer. Displacement, violence at home, civil unrest, and neocolonial forms of subjugation are all running themes in this accomplished, elegiac collection. [Read more…]

Songs For Our Higher Selves

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A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln
by Eve Wood
Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99

Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who represents the very heart of our onetime democracy and the towering soul of this once-revered nation: Abraham Lincoln. A Cadence for Redemption is a work of narrative brilliance, the arc and architecture of which is seemingly upheld by the merest of lyrical tentpoles – that, in all their brevity, of the poems themselves. Yet the ideas across the collection, and the emotive carry in each one of these songs of love, songs of longing and loss, are as equally affecting as they are disquieting; they are as well, in their grand sum, entirely profound.

If you’re seeking to recalibrate your own internal compass on what it means to be a ‘good person’ or, conversely, are in search of sound template for our next generation of elected leaders, A Cadence for Redemption is a singular point of onset, for its terrains are of the highest bearings, its lyricism of heartsome beauty, its imagination of distinct wonder. It is, in other words, an altogether fine book of poetry for this fraught moment of our now.  – C von Hassett

Below are three excerpts from A Cadence for Redemption, courtesy of  Eve Wood.

[Read more…]

“Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell: A Reflection

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by James McWilliams

Robert Lowell
Life Studies / From the Union Dead
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176pp

In 1958, The Partisan Review published Robert Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour.” This was a notable moment in American literary history. The poem was closely linked to Lowell’s friendship with Elizabeth Bishop. Reading and re-reading Bishop’s work allowed Lowell to escape, as he put it, “the shell of my old manner.” It is to her that he dedicates this poem. 

“Skunk Hour” is worthy of close study because it captures Robert Lowell in the midst of creative transformation. He alters himself from a formal to a confessional poet in the middle of the poem. It happens “right before our eyes,” as one critic aptly put it.

What follows is my own stanza-by-stanza attempt to make sense of it. I’ve always loved this poem for the way it hits my ear, and the shifting imagery. But I’ve never really slowed down and tried to figure out why. This is what I’m doing here. My comments are italicized    —jm———

[Read more…]

New Poems from John Biscello

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Excerpted from Moonglow on Mercy Street
forthcoming on CSF Publishing

Birthing Pains

To see, everywhere,
brave little lights going up,
flares of hope and justice,
holding hands
to tip the scales
in a bond of solidarity,
a fire-chastened purge
and desire for change’s
holy golden grail,
the quest,
a blessed rhyme
and legacy,
with each and every
one of our hearts
breaking open
to scale the ribs of light
and become radical midwives
to a collective rebirth.

[Read more…]

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

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Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor

Brown: Poems
by Kevin Young
Knopf, 176pp., $19.29
Harvard Review

In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” shadowed recollections of boyhood, and culminating with “Field Recordings,” somber reflections on the recurring traumas of African American social history. In its progression toward a more experienced vision, this brilliant and moving collection is structured as a coming-of-age chronicle. Young’s poetry on social issues tempers a tragic sense of outrage with a blues-based ethos which, as Young points out in a recent review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, is “embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston … [and] sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as ‘an act of resistance.’” In these poems, the expression of “hard-earned joy” in the face of unspeakable injustice is an ennobling challenge. [Read more…]

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

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Reviewed by Flora Field

Dispatch
by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Persea, 80pp., $12.69
Columbia Journal

In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the intersection of so many systems of violence? How does that violence surround and move through the body? What does one do to try and move away from it, while not moving away from their communities? [Read more…]

Banishment

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for Sharon Doubiago

She urinates on the graves
of her precursors—
it’s her thing (one of many),
to “unite my living waters
with theirs.” The list
includes Camus,
Karl Marx, George Eliot,
over a hundred in all.
She once called me a fascist. [Read more…]

The Slave Trade

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by Iman Mersal 
translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell
.
            I went down the narrow passage, wide enough for one slave at a time, to the harbor.
            An Englishman inspects the line of those leaving the fort—maybe he has unloaded his cargo of missionaries and guns and now waits for a ship to carry him over the ocean to the cane fields. A handsome man, in fact. Why is he smiling at me?
            Piles of gold beneath the palms, piles of salt under the sun.
            When will a sailor come unfasten the iron ball from my feet? I want to make sure the pencil and Moleskin notebook are still in my backpack, since I plan to turn whatever happens to me into heart-wrenching prose.

[Read more…]

Where to Begin?

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by Jacques J. Rancourt

First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,

which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker

than the dark night sky.

Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,

is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses [Read more…]

Penal Cistern Lightning Throne Lightning Rebounded

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by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Back into the body all the lightning goes
back into the body. Up through the crown
of the skull and round again like the Whip-It
at the fairgrounds. Pushing the boundaries
of the light body. Overloading the light
body. Silly bowl shaking above the bowl
of the skull, which is a bowl holding court over
bowl the brain. Bowl into bowl into bowl.
All the curves pressing together. Too much
light in the light body. Body of cattle after long [Read more…]

Pain Scale

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by Catherine Barnett

Floating above the gynecologist’s hands,
Dolor looks down at me
with her many expressions.

Someone sketched the eyes, the mouths,
someone pinned them up,
arranged the faces

so they softly say, like this? like this?
The doctor says to choose one,
but I’m no fool, I close my eyes [Read more…]

I Listen

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by John Biscello
From his forthcoming collection of poems, Arclight, publishing this February by Indie Blu(e) Publishing
.......................................
Dawn. The sea breeze,
salt-fringed, rolls in through
the opened glass doors,
its damp fingers sifting
and touching upon
the cravings,
rent and folds
of our shared bare skin,
It’s like home, you say,
and this makes me dig my nails
in deeper, [Read more...]