The title “Sistas Stay Strong” by Eric Reese feels somewhat misleading when written by a male poet, but it does explain the content of the book of poems. The use of the word "Sistas" is slang for sisters and conveys the African sense of sister meaning family women and women friends. It starts by using consonance and addressing black women. The book provides homage to what black women have endured while using the reinforcement of command to continue with encouragement. Courage is needed as many of the poems show.

Most of the poems read as if the author had read the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters at some time in the past, because they bare the same resemblance to gravestone inscriptions, that tell a brief moment about an individual or providing witness to some event. The poems are all short, tight, discussions that often start with an address to a person and then ends with a sharp note of wisdom at the end. The hooks are in the tight start, the cliffhangers beat a drum, meaning they often have a real impact on the reader.

​Topics vary throughout including the #Metoo movement, prostitution, rape, slavery, media, hair, skin, babies, equality. So as you can see, the poems offer why encouragement is needed. Examples from Sistas Stay Strong:
​
OF COURSE!
 
Was accused of murder
when she was just
avoiding rape.
 
and an example of encouragement:
 
SISTA GO GET IT
 
She didn’t know anything
other than being in the kitchen
but wasn’t intimidated
when she discovered that
she had the same power
to generate money in it
like her white counterparts

​Most of the poems brought back memories for me, the latter of working in a restaurant which has the equality of being where the unskilled first start out. The former "Sista Go Get It", reminded me of the terrible trial I had sat on during jury duty, where a woman was accused of killing her significant other with a kitchen knife. I hadn’t qualified for the jury because I had had previous experience of assault in my history. Later, after the trial finished and I was still on jury duty, I learned from a jury member the murder trial victim had previously killed other partners in self-defense, a psychologist explaining why this often happened. In the murder trial, the woman was black, my coworker’s daughter was white. Regardless of the race issue, the issue of violence, especially toward women is apparent throughout the book.
​
The situation of violence that I was aware of that disqualified me for the jury happened to a daughter of a coworker had stopped to help a man who stopped on the roadside in front of her. When the man came to my friend's daughter's window which she rolled down partially, he punched her in the face. Luckily, the daughter had pepper spray in her car and was able to get away. The police found he had pictures of her in his apartment, he’d followed her for some time.

So my long-winded set of examples is leading to a point, namely that poems don’t exist on their own. They feed from the world we live in, and feed back through the words to the community members, providing tales we can relate to and providing the music of verse to reinforce that things need to be different and can be different.

If you suffer from abuse in your relationship, please read "The Truth About Abusers" an article at Psychology Today.
 
Poems also connect to each other, forming a pattern and texture almost like cloth, that paints a picture that each instance can apply to more than one individual to create the sense that not just one person was wounded, we were all wounded.
 
My view of this collection of poems is that Eric Reese went beyond the Spoon River Collection that captured individuals in a graveyard, to capture the society of living and dead in our society. It connects and reconnects throughout, while being easy to read and understand.
 
In conclusion, this is one of the collections Eric Reese has written and has an opening dedication written by former President Obama. Eric Reese writes from his home in Philadelphia. It will be interesting to see what moves him to write in the future.

Kim Addonizio’s poetry in “Tell Me” reads more like prose than poetry. This is not a fault or a benefit, it serves more to establish her voice, for me. Many of the pieces seem stream of consciousness—she doesn’t seem to edit out the unpleasant from her thoughts, such as a poem titled “Garbage”, a very unique look at humanity and what we value and do not that has a political edge to it rather than ecological. She in fact seems to specialize in the nitty gritty of everyday life, those details stood out as different from say, a nature poem and they add the richness of experience and reality to the content.

Even though her poem’s format seems to imply line breaks, I feel they are superficial, not always breaking to make a point or to lend emphasis, same way for the indents, sometimes they start a sentence, sometimes they end a sentence, other times words trail off not so you’d ponder the words more, but so that maybe it fits neatly on the page.

When I mentioned this to my classmates, they disagreed, and I admit that there are many places where her use is specific and important, however, that was my initial impression.

The formats are pretty much the same throughout the collection and serve as a visual tie for the poems, without even looking at content or thought or anything else. I think this format was chosen to help prepare a prose piece into a more poetic form, allowing space into a dense passage that would keep a reader from delving into the material (many people I’ve run into say dense blocks of text are skimmed or feel unapproachable and this format works to avoid that problem).

Again, I had argument about the idea that her poems were primarily prose. I guess, that is why the exercise of looking at other poet’s work is important since it helps to identify how impressions change with different people.

I felt the collection was about her broken relationship with her husband and with addiction and what comes after it. Many of the poems feel isolated and lonely or full of pain, such as “Collapsing Poem”. The follow on poem “The Divorcee and Gin” seems to indicate there is a tie here between the two. 

My emulations tended to be from less personal issue areas. I didn’t relate personally to some of her topics although I could understand them and empathsize, I can’t say I’ve ever sat looking into my glass of whatever in a bar as in “Glass” yet it finds more content than I would imagine and I have to say, the concluding line was a situation I ran into a time or two. My curiosity is sparked by the unusual topic. I found her poem “Spider” amusing and sweet, the relationship with her daughter seems wonderful.

The title poem “Tell Me” is wonderfully revealing and inviting (like a desire to step away from loneliness and reach out), and seems like a turning point in the collection. Rather than being mid center, it sits toward the end. 

Many of the poems connect to bars and drinking and the problems they cause. The many poems on this topic change from relationships, to what happens, to a father’s problem with drinking, to social engagements, to addiction, to winding down after a class. They pop up throughout the collection so one is aware of it and you feel sad, but it doesn’t overwhelm the collection.

Why did I feel empathy for her poems, what happened in the poem to cause this feeling?

The emotion I felt via her imagery primarily, but I think the empathy came from the collective sense running through the pieces. It sort of says that even if we have emotion at some point, there's a greater humanity to a person than just the moment they cry, sort of like, its the sum of her experiences and willingness to dig into the world around her which feels gutsy given the pain she feels and her willingness to see people inside of people where many don't look such as the poor, the drunk, the woman on her doorstep, and how that same return look isn't guaranteed by others. So, "Tell Me", is just that demand, do you see more? given to her audience as a challenge to give back to her what she's given them.

In comparing Kim Addonizio’s work to Robert Hass’, I felt Robert Hass' work went beyond prose, to more complex contrasting imagery and thoughts. His works had emotion, but held at check, while the ideas came from many directions as if they added up to a bigger understanding. Kim Addonizio's is quite different, she's dealing in moments often, and what is at the surface at that time, very carefully examined. Not all of them are prosaic, some like Tell Me and What Women Want, are quite refined down to the nub, while others have the sharp details of capturing everything in a moment.  But many, seem to fall from one idea to the next.  I think I use it because much of her work seems to come in complete sentences.

More on Robert Hass' writing in another post.

The above photo is of one of the Scarlet Macaws at the Central Florida Zoo and Botanical Gardens.

Alison Luterman’s collection of poems “Desire Zoo” connect associatively and sequentially at times and share many of her passions. Alison Luterman also writes prose but that hasn’t prevented her from writing narrative poems; many in this collection tend to be narrative. The stories tend to be daily occurrences where some event, image, or person caught her attention and wrapped it around a question she had.

Three prose poem pieces, “Love Shack”, “Dust”, and “What About God” are structured like prose but are tighter in presentation. They focus on the universal or ideal behind the day to day. 

In “Love Shack”, the poet conveys her connection with her lover as the connection from lover to mother to child with the implication that is passes on through the generations. 

In “Dust”, she is told a story by a student in her class and it impacts her so much that she can’t help but see death even in life around us. My summary is rather simplistic compared to the poem, but the metaphor of dust to dust carries through the piece. 

In “What About God”, a rabbi comes to visit and they share their perceptions of God and find they all fit in a manner or not. These poems don’t use line breaks or stanza breaks or end rhyme to provide the poetic sense to the poem. Instead, she uses the ideal sense of moments or words to raise the poem into greater meanings that extend beyond her personal experience.

Other poems are also narrative, but use poetic devices such as form or line breaks or italicized words to emphasize or order. 

In these poems, there is usually an immediate moment, such as noticing herself in relation to other persons, like in the poem “Arrow” where she “refuses to believe Carla’s dying” and who she places in a given moment, “the punching of a button on her wheelchair”, to deal with the eventual death of a loved one. The title and the use of the arrow are consistent with the mythic tale of Eros shooting love into someone. The conflict is stated in terms of circumstance, how will she deal with the loss and the resolution comes about out of love.

In looking at the collection, you see instances of death of a loved one showing up (death is dealt with several poems), as is the love of a child through a series of poems at the zoo, for example, as well as the love she shares with her husband(s) in varying forms. These provide additional cohesiveness to the collection.

In the case of non-narrative poems, that moment of conflict-resolution is missing and is replaced by a element of emotional growth such as occurs in the case of “Cashmere” where the poet relates to the material and "Amber” where she connects to the wearing of her mother’s earrings. What is conveyed is more a changing depth of emotion without an attempt to resolve it; the appreciation is what is mattered or the feeling at the moment. Another non-narrative poem is “Citizen’s of a Broken City” and what she is conveying is the changing of detail, in this case different people and how they all feel connected even in their disconnect.

What ties the pieces to each other is a fairly honest, uniform voice that shares her emotion as but doesn’t attempt to badger, sell, compete etc. that would imply a different tone of voice. Details are shared about body, love, people and their reactions with enough sensitivity that the reader believes that she says it occurred; there’s no sense that she is adding drama for the sake of making the story better. 

In reading her poems, our task in my poetry class as part of my multi-genre option in the Creative Nonfiction program at Ashland University was to discuss narrative poems. I wasn't sure what the definition of narrative poem was but used what I knew from my coursework in fiction. On Wikipedia, which offers excellent examples of more classic narrative poems, one element is plot. The University of North Carolina at Pembroke runs the All American: Glossary of Literary Terms also has an entry for narrative poetry, but they use the more modern or post-modern definition of a story must have occurred and it explains the more common forms of narrative poetry such as ballad.

To learn more about narrative poetry, try the lesson and examples at the Education-Portal.

Mark Roper was one of the mentors at the Carlow MFA Program Residency at Trinity College this summer. He read two of his poems, including the poem “This” from A Gather of Shadows at the welcome dinner, both about dogs and both quite different. He also introduced many of the guest speakers and had a student doing her thesis reading. I tended to hang out with several of the ladies in the poetry group.

In A Gather of Shadow, Mark Roper offers images of “a moment” when the poet, aware, finds a special quality in the world. Many of these poems are in half tone or shades of gray, the colors seen at dusk when the eye changes from the sharp color of day into a netherworld.  Several of the poems speak about the experience of the poet, when they stop and turn to writing poetry instead of continuing about their everyday experience.

In asking myself what I liked about this collection, I found myself examining specific poems and saying, what did Mark Roper do in this poem.

The most inviting poem for me, “Advent”, frames the experience of doing i.e. “Open the door” with qualities that are hard to define. He moves from concrete into idealistic terms “Darkness, Stillness, Silence” that readers connect with images. By capitalizing each, it’s as if he lived in the time of leprechauns or totemic Gods and he were calling special friends among them into an experience. The repetition of this phrase returns the reader back again and again to where they once experienced those three qualities. The repetition also works because of the rhythmic balance of each item in contrast to the other stanzas and visually because of their italics. The result is readers place themselves in the same position that the poet was in at the time of finding the poem.

In the poem “Falling” the experience of the poet and the experience of a swallow are superimposed, one a top the other and back again. The use of start, stop, up, fall, captures the flight pattern of the swallow. The insertion of these verbs at specific places, shapes the same experience even though every sentence is about the same length, again mirroring the flight of swallows, too and from a wire or nest. The initial comparison is from a person awakening to the swallow. Then the poem follows the swallow but then it returns back to the person as they are about to fall asleep, catching that same start to dream or fly, then stop awake, that occurs when someone is napping when they shouldn’t. Because of that, the imagery turns back to the swallow because they seldom sleep, it seems and because their survival depends on getting food and so perhaps they shouldn’t rest. In essence, this poem works really well by combining specific details about the natural world from two different perspectives and playing them off each other as a reflection as well as connection to the other.

Overall, the poems in this collection are very polished—you never stumble reading them, you never find any weasel words, they are simple and clear to understand. They all connect strongly with nature including places like the saltmarsh, lough, St. Patrick’s cabbage, oystercatchers, thrush, swallows and plovers with life along the river, at sea, by waterfalls.

Poems about the Beginning or End

I wasn't quite sure what I thought that this would mean i.e. about the Beginning or End, but it generated lots of finds in the form of death or the universal chaos or the farmland or the night falling without the moon. I have more to say, this is just to share some of the source material.

In the process I found some other sites where you can read poems and write poems and maybe make friends and share thoughts:

Hello Poetry -- simple blog, just register, and go.

Online Literature Forums  -- great place to learn from some basic courses, write poems, meet people, and discuss artists

VoicesNet -- another place to write poems and meet people