Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here is a real smorgasbord of San Franciscan scenery, energy and art. Harvey Milk, Castro Street, the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Giants Stadium and Candlestick Park – Orlando Cepeda and Willie Mays! – all appear in these pages. It’s been almost fifty years since I was in San Francisco, but it all comes back vividly in these poems.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Henry David Thoreau : A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
I reveled in this book because, unlike others before it, it is not fragmented, incongruent, or just a compilation of interesting facts. But rather, it reads as though Thoreau lived much more recently and the author had interviewed in-person, first-hand witnesses to his life simply because it flows from birth to death without a sense of missing information or lapses in time. On any given page you may learn about the weather that day or how late Thoreau stayed up as if it were all recorded and timestamped on videotape for the author to view and re-view.
A review of Journey to Tatev by Lillian Avedian
Journey to Tatev is a love poem to the self and to the other, written along the trajectory of a single journey. These airy, deeply rhythmic poems encompass the multi-lingual voice of a migrant, coming-of-age, coming out, coming to terms with the past and future simultaneously. Words and notes dance across the page, engaging all of the senses in this vibrant and deeply moving collection.
A review of Chronicity by Michael J Leach
Leach manages the visual in particularly powerful ways in Chronicity. The concrete poems in the collection take on many forms, weaving and working through, around, between and besides their subject matter, playing with font, space, shape, and design to stretch out time, slow the reader, twist back on themselves, emphasise and create sound paths in the ear.
A review of Popular Longing by Natalie Shapero
At the center of the collection is the breathtaking tour de force entitled “Don’t Spend It All in One Place,” a series of fourteen fourteen-line poems (though not exactly “sonnets” in a metrical sense), whose themes of violence and art and time, coming “unstuck” in time, make one think of Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-hero in Slaughterhouse Five. There’s a similar dark humor at work in Shapero’s poems.
A review of Fireworks by Oliver Smuhar
The book is beautifully presented, with hand drawn illustrations, photographs, quotations, and facts about the different animals in the book and the events that inspired them, particularly the 2019/20 Australian bushfires, which were particularly devastating in Smuhar’s Blue Mountains hometown and which had some an intense impact on Australian flora and fauna (for example, some 60,000 koalas were negatively impacted by the fires). Smuhar’s goal with this book is not only to raise funds, but to entertain and educate.
A review of Closer to Fine by Jodi S. Rosenfeld
Dr. Rosenfeld’s novel is informative and interesting on the subjects of Judaism, Psychology, and same sex relationships. I was charmed by Rachel’s envisioning of God as a woman angel whose patchwork wings are made up of one’s glimpses of the divine. Another excellent idea is presented in the novel – that after a break-up, a woman should buy herself a ring to symbolize her commitment to herself as her own best friend.
A review of The Truth about Our American Births by Judith Skillman
Skillman employs many references to transportation – trains, mostly, but other kinds too. In the introductory poem we get our first train reference, when the grandmother is counting beats for her own personal waltz: “Always the counting beneath the whistles of trains/ running westward from the town of no money.” (from My Grandmother’s Waltz, p. 18). The train here is ghost-like. It brings a nagging fear of having to escape poverty.
A review of One Hundred Letters Home by Adam Aitken
Between the images, the recollections, the references, the correspondences and the longing, a new kind of story emerges – one that allows the the gaps in the narrative to remain unknown. Aitken doesn’t find the “key to a past the will grant…a thousand and one narratives” (“Stolen Valour”). Instead he finds questions that become Koans, a pathway to a greater truth.
A review of Woman Drinking Absinthe by Katherine E. Young
Throughout the collection, Young depicts the demimonde of women in the midst of affairs of the heart, neither fish nor fowl, but mostly foul; at least, fraught with emotional turmoil. This is captured so succinctly in “Postcards from the Floating World,” a series of four haiku that all begin similarly: “I cry out. His words”; “I cry out. His eyes”; “I cry out. His lips”; “I cry out. His hands / claw fierce, wild, deeper than pain / cradling my face.” The balance between pleasure and pain is a constant seesaw.