February News

FORTHCOMING TITLE

I am delighted to share that my latest poetry collection, Ain’t These Sorrows Sweet?, will be released by Roadside Press later this year. The collection is divided into two sections, Sorrows and Sweetness. The poems are very personal and intimate, yet firmly grounded in the real world. They cover such topics as Latine culture, family, feminism, home, memory, health, food, and cats. Overall, this book is a celebration of life in both grief and joy. Many thanks to editor Michele McDannold for giving my work a home.

 
 
PUBLICATION

My prose-poem, “A Food Court in Hell,” appeared in the latest issue of Ghost City Review. Thank you to editor and all-around excellent human, John Compton.
 

August News

Hello, friends! It’s hard to believe summer’s already coming to an end! I hope your summer was as restful or adventurous as you needed it to be and you’re ready for autumn. After two years in Florida where they don’t have autumn, I can’t wait for bright leaves, sweaters, and hot cocoa.

Here is my writerly news for August:

The first and biggest is that I have been nominated by TWO magazines for the Best of the Net! “The Water Station” was nominated by Editor Allison Blevins at The Harbor Review,

and “Without” was nominated by Editor Katie Manning and the rest of the team at Whale Road Review.

It’s an incredible honor just to be nominated. My deepest thanks to these editors for believing in my work, and congratulations to my fellow nominees!

On a bittersweet note, the anniversary edition of Voice of Eve magazine came out this month—unfortunately, it will be the last edition. My poem “Hirsute Woman,” was nominated by readers and selected by a panel of judges to be included in their farewell. My heartfelt thanks to the editors for being so wonderfully supportive of women writers. Read it at Issuu here.

On the usual publication front, I am pleased to be a part of the inaugural issue of Black Coffee Review, which includes my poem, "Nameless." Many thanks to editor Dave Taylor for launching this beautiful new literary site.

Strange Fruit: Poems on the Death Penalty is now available on Amazon as a paperback. An ebook is forthcoming. This new anthology includes my poems, "The Heart Goes Last" and "In Event of Moon Disaster." This is a subject I care deeply about. I encourage anyone interested in justice to give it a read. Thank you to editor Sarah Zale for compiling this timely collection.

My poem, “Empire of the Fireflies,” appeared on Silver Pinion. My thanks to editor D.C. Wojciech for sharing my work.

“Chasing Grace” appeared in the latest issue of Panoply. Thank you to editors Andrea, Jeff and Ryn.

Some new reviews have come in on my poetry books. A new 5-star review on Requiem for a Robot Dog on Amazon called it “intelligent and thought-provoking.”

A 5-star review on West Side Girl & Other Poems on Goodreads said, “The whole book is a studio of canvases showing all the sides of life.”

Thank you to these kind readers for taking the time to leave feedback.

And finally, I am thrilled to share that I will be reading my poetry in Chicago next month! I have been invited to the Woman Made Gallery's Consumerism and the Stuff of Consumption event on September 22 at 2 p.m. If you’re in the Chicago area, I hope you stop by!

Thank you for reading! Hope you have a great Labor Day weekend!

Poetry Review: The Mercy of Traffic by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

The Mercy of Traffic is a masterful poetic memoir. These poems are steeped in a sense of place-- Carlisle was born in Florida and now lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. The collection is threaded with a series of poems she refers to as “Ozark Sonnets” and a single “Arkansas Sonnet.” But these poems are also about transience in America. This makes the title apropos as so many of the poems are about driving around, especially along Southern highways: in addition to Carlisle’s current and former abodes, she writes of Texas and Tennessee. A few references pop up to California and New York. But Carlisle is unequivocally a product of the South. As someone who lived for two years on the Gulf Coast, and the rest of my time in Missouri, which shares the Ozarks with Arkansas, these poems really spoke to me.

In the Southern poems, Carlisle confronts the stereotypes of rural America: poverty, corn pone, kudzu, cotton fields. There are covered dishes, trailers, cheap furniture, broken things, broken people. But there is also the rural beauty, mountains and birds, coyotes and deer, sultry summers and polka-dot fabric, comfort food and cleansing rains. These poems establish a sense of community, for good or ill. At funerals, people bring covered dishes to express sympathy and solidarity. People join the military in an attempt to escape their hardscrabble childhoods. But in Carlisle’s poetry, none of these things feel like stereotypes. The poems are affectionate but clear-eyed. She is fully aware of the places’ flaws, but loves them anyway. “On an Island” is an anti-pastoral, about the beauty of horses, hemmed in by barbed wire, plagued with flies and horseshit. “Against Moving to the Mountains” is a stunner, a celebration of the Ozarks’ beauty, as well as an indictment against its worst tendencies: “Just keep going,” Carlisle warns.

“Sly” was the word that kept coming to mind as I read these poems. Carlisle eviscerates so gently! This is fitting, as the title of the book comes from a line in “The Argument,” a poem about a fox who survives on cunning, but cunning only takes you so far when there are cars to dodge. In “What I Missed,” Carlisle gives a sublime description of grackles: “shining as spoiled meat.” Perfection. So many lines like this, that balance on the knife’s edge between terrible and beautiful, terrible because they’re so cruelly accurate and beautiful for the same. Somehow, in that poetic alchemy, the words and imagery seem to flow so effortlessly, so economically. (Only one poem exceeds a page.)

These are poems about homecoming. I’ve always felt that home isn’t a place, but a concept, like enlightenment. It’s something that must be achieved. It’s a state of being, not necessarily a physical place. Sometimes, it’s a person. Carlisle writes of the places that have imprinted themselves upon her. I imagine she carries them with her, the white Florida sand, the Ozark granite, the West Coast sage. They become components of the self. I like how the places jumble together in this book. They are all America, but such different Americas. Home is also the thing we turn and return to, even if it’s only in our minds. The mind is a homing pigeon, retreating to the familiar. So too, does memory jumble. It’s something we return to. The book flits back and forth between childhood and adulthood.

Carlisle is honest about the dubious nature of memory. What we don’t remember, we invent. Like all good memoirs, this collection has the elements we crave to read about: bad relationships, death, hard luck, which, again ties into Southern life, where poverty and limited job options are the reality. “The Real Night” addresses childhood with images of skeletons and bones, as if to underscore the idea that life’s most enduring lessons are hard and stark. In “Juke,” Carlisle depicts a woman who is down on her luck, which feels so different from men being down on their luck—perhaps because desperate women so often turn to prostitution, or accept a domestic abuse situation if it means a roof over their head. Likewise, “Say Yes” hints at abuse with its haunting final line, “In our bedroom I learned to say yes as if I meant it.” The poem “Once Upon a Time” is framed by objects, ending on blood and milk, quintessentially feminine symbols.

Sexuality from a woman’s perspective is another big theme in these poems. Carlisle speaks of the blame and shame women experience. In “Things Burn,” she says, “Because my hair was a red cape/the street filled with bulls.” In “Greed. Lust. Envy.” she offers a meditation on sin and absolution. She describes trying to look up her step-dad’s towel after he emerges from the shower. There are poems about bras and first kisses, modern takes on fairy tales such as “The Princess and the Frog” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Physiological terms pop up, like in the poem “Systole,” which skillfully employs the term to suggest the flex of muscles.

I can scarcely pick a favorite among these poems. As I go back over my reading notes, I keep finding titles with a star next to them, which means I loved them. I basically loved all of them, from start to finish. Usually, if a collection has a single poem that knocks my socks off, I’m happy. To find a collection where every poem feels like it’s speaking directly to you is a rare pleasure, one that I truly hope others get to experience for themselves.  

The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books) is available for purchase on Amazon.  

Poetry Review: Letters to Joan by Allison Blevins

I didn’t know who Joan Mitchell was. I am an art enthusiast. I live in a cool art city. I live within walking distance of two museums and an art institute. I’ve taken my share of art history classes.  

Never heard of her.  

So, first and foremost, I want to thank Allison Blevins for introducing me to Mitchell’s work through her lovely chapbook, Letters to Joan. I blame the usual patriarchal bullshit for failing to give Mitchell the attention she deserves, despite being a contemporary of Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning, and, from what I’ve seen of her, I like her better than those dudes. Mitchell passed away in 1992, after a long, distinguished career. She spent most of her life in Paris, but she was originally a Midwesterner, like Blevins. Mitchell’s work is frequently described as violent, physical, athletic—her brushstrokes, the moods she was trying to evoke; a gallery owner remarked, “She approached painting almost like a competitive sport.”  

I found all this out after the fact, so I actually read Letters to Joan twice, once without having viewed the art, then again after I had. I wasn’t able to view all of the paintings online, but enough to give me an idea of Mitchell’s style, to see what Blevins had seen. Without the art, I was still able to appreciate Blevins’ poems. But the poems were infinitely richer when paired with the visuals.  

In Letters to Joan, Blevins offers more than mere ekphrasis. She carries on a tradition of female interiority: quiet, meditative, dreamlike, deep. She offers poems that are keenly attuned to the body, which is fitting—not only for women, who I think inhabit our bodies in a way that men do not. But also because a book of poems inspired by Joan Mitchell should focus on physicality—for her ferocity, and because Mitchell fought so tenaciously against a series of debilitating illnesses: oral cancer, resulting in a dead jawbone; osteoarthritis; hip dysplasia; and then, ultimately, lung cancer. Women are more likely to suffer from chronic pain, from a variety of physical and mental health issues that don’t seem to affect men as much. Women are socialized to believe our bodies are all that matter, we who are charged with protecting our bodies from violation, and for having bodies that are capable of housing new life. Blevins offers poems that are sometimes self-recriminating, exploring themes about ambivalent motherhood and disappointment in our own mothers. Sometimes she attacks the sacred cow that is motherhood, referencing Susan Smith and such women who do the unthinkable.  

The book opens with mothers and children in, “Watching Dust Glow in the Window Light,” which describes the poet’s complicated feelings towards her daughter, and towards her own mother who left. She juxtaposes, “I want to keep you safe,” with “On days I wish you’d never been born.” Its images suggest helplessness: floating, shaken, caught, “caged-bird lips.” The idea of being caught in a snow globe that’s been shaken is a womblike image, a round ball of fluid, something small and self-sustaining, yet delicate and precious. The next poem, “Moored,” a word that implies being tethered, feels like a progression. It describes mothers worn “transparent as nightgowns,” the toll being a mother exacts on a person, bodily, mentally, spiritually. “The Color of Tearing” explores separation and separation anxiety, the distance between bodies in all relationships, and the inevitable demise that awaits, both in the relationship itself and for us, individually, as mortal beings.  

“How to Explain Fertility When a Friend Asks Casually” digs into bad mothers, “all the women and children dead/a history of female drowning.” Drowning does feel like something iconic in the deaths of women (Ophelia, Virginia Woolf). Drowning has also been a preferred method of infanticide, especially with unwanted girls. Water subsumes mother and child alike (again, a replica of the womb). At the same time, there is deep sympathy for the people involved in these situations. The title implies undertaking fertility treatments, which, for women who have trouble conceiving, can be a taxing endeavor in every possible sense. Imagine going through all of that only to find you don’t like motherhood very much, or that you aren’t very good at it. Drowning can feel like a way of erasing your mistake, of coming clean.  

In a series of body poems, Blevins focuses on the female form, though not in the way a male artist would, asking, “What is this burden of estrogen?” Blevins describes hair falling out, excessive perspiration. This reads to me like a meditation on age, dealing with mood swings and night sweats, and the anxiety that accompanies these seismic hormonal shifts. “Say my body, drooping and defiant,/ is a thing I can possibly control,” Blevins says, when, obviously, we all knows it’s the opposite. Yet, Blevins celebrates the body in “The Actual Size of the Rifts in the Human Heart May Vary Depending Upon Age and Use,” with erotic descriptions of explosions, “when a tongue figure eights/in your mouth” and “your bones draining into the basin of another woman.”  

My favorite image comes “From My Box of Tangled Memories,” of a girl, “with sirens for hair/and flashing blue and orange where her mouth/should be.” In a book rich with sensory imagery, I found that very evocative, the meshing of the mythological sirens with a beacon of warning.  

Water is a recurring motif—the feminine/womb imagery, as I mentioned, but water is also a powerful natural symbol on its own. I hear the quiet of the Midwest in the waters, in images of ponds, both wet and dry (even in its absence, water leaves an indelible mark). I hear the hills and plains. Blevins also weaves in combines, semis on back highways, stones, chicken, and deer. Even wood paneling and a rifle make appearances, which you will find in almost any mid-century home in the dozen states that make up the Heartland.  

Another recurring motif is color, which makes sense for poems that were inspired by visual art. “Promises Attached to this World” is a simply beautiful poem inspired by Mitchell’s No Birds, which, in turn, was inspired by van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows. Mitchell believed that this was van Gogh’s suicide note. This poem is the most overtly ekphrastic, referring directly to “the blue in the corner,” the suggestion of blackbirds in flight on the canvas. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that this is one of Mitchell’s less abstract pieces.  

Now that I’ve viewed Mitchell’s art, I can see why it would move a woman poet to such an outpouring of expression. I am impressed that Blevins would undertake such a project—transliterating abstract visual art into words is ambitious, to say the least. I’m pleased to say that she rises magnificently to the challenge.

Purchase Letters to Joan on Amazon. 

Also, be sure to check out The Harbor Review, an art and literary journal of which Allison Blevins is the publisher/editor-in-chief. They are currently open to submissions. 

August News

Hey, folks! Here are the places you can check out my latest work:

"Large-Breasted Woman" and "Day of the Dead" appear in the Flint Hills Review.

"Rootstock" and "Cicada" appear in the BLOOM edition of Brenda Magazine. You can also read "The Tattoo Artist" on their website here.

O4S update: I finalized the manuscript for Book V this morning and have started formatting. Cover art is in the works. Check out an excerpt here.

Thank you for reading! I'm always thrilled to hear from you, so don't hesitate to leave comments, feedback or reviews.

Push Mountain Road: poems of nature, faith and domesticity

Description

Pat Durmon’s third book, Push Mountain Road, is a tribute to the Ozark Mountains, the relationship between ourselves and all that surrounds us, and a life lived fully.

Review

Push Mountain Road by Pat Durmon is actually three books in one, Push Mountain Road, Lights and Shadows in a Nursing Home, and Blind Curves, released from 2007-2015, so you’re getting quite a bang for your buck in terms of quantity. I’m pleased to report, you’re getting top-notch quality as well.

Push Mountain Road is, quite simply, a joy to read. Durmon focuses on nature, domesticity and faith. She handles all three deftly, but she is at her best when she is observing the beauty of the world around her. (She lives in Arkansas, which, if you’ve ever been there, you know is home to stunning mountains, hills and forestland.) I adore good nature poems, capable of taking something small and commonplace and transforming it into something miraculous, revelatory, and universal. We have all been enchanted by wildflowers, birds, a clear sky, and these poems assign them the specificity of place. There are poems about the home, about country-living. There is a lot of truth to be found here in ruminations on the day-to-day: marriage, arguments, divorce, aging, a mother in a care facility, funerals, illness, hairdressers. But virtually all of the poems are couched in nature imagery-- an argument pushes up mountains. The falling rain is an epiphany. Newly beautified salon clients walk out, tall as walnut trees.

Durmon’s work is imminently straightforward, accessible, yet artful. Her pieces are wise, powerful and meditative, but there’s a playfulness at work here, too, that I really enjoyed. She peppers in words and phrases like flimflam and tra-la-la. She plays with rhymes and alliteration, which, in the hands of a less capable poet can just come off as silly. Here, I think they reflect the poet’s genuine and profound love for life.

These poems are also Christian, but if you are not, don’t let that put you off. I am not a Christian myself, but I respect the faith of others. Yet I wouldn’t categorize these as Christian poems, per se-- there are allusions to scripture, but again, it mostly expresses itself in Durmon’s love of the world. These are poems for everyone, they just happen to come from a place of awe, gratitude and humility that is uniquely Christian, like this passage from “What a Good Life”:

When the sun travels its higher path,

I read a psalm. King David’s words

and the smell of beans humble me.

Suddenly, I am fed.

In all of her themes, Durmon achieves the not inconsiderable feat of being positive without being sentimental, or cheesy. These poems are solid, nourishing works, juicy and savory as venison steak. They are deeply honest, quietly funny, yet there is a sharpness here-- an eye for truths thrumming away beneath the surface of things, an inner ferocity. A husband’s scowl can rock his wife, but she gives as good as she gets, asking in a later poem, “Which ditch do you want to die in?”

The poems are mature, distinctly female. There has been a lot of discussion lately by feminist writers about how writing that deals with “women’s subjects” has been traditionally dismissed as less important. I would point to Durmon’s poetry as a reason why they matter so much. In “Upholstery Shop,” she quotes the upholsterer, who says, “Welcome to my tiny place where/important work happens.” If this doesn’t sum up literature that deals with domesticity, I don’t know what does. And just because they deal with subjects like cooking and laundry doesn’t mean they don’t have teeth. She finds beauty even in a dead skunk, in the potential of manure. She captures the fury of storms and arguments, floods and funerals. “Hanging” is a gut punch. She is a Christian with the soul of a hedgewitch, capturing the beauty of gardens, kitchens, and the earth at large.

One of my favorites was, “How to Build a Mean Mincemeat Pie,” in which the narrator consults a very famous red-and-white cookbook that my mother and I both use, and consults with her mother-in-law on ingredients. I am thrilled to share this experience with other women. “Deep Delight” is another favorite-- a quiet little poem about a single magnolia blossom.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Durmon tells me she has a new collection in the works and I can’t wait to read it.

Purchase Push Mountain Road on Amazon.

About the Author

Pat Durmon is the author of Blind Curves (2007), Lights and Shadows in a Nursing Home (2013), and Push Mountain Road (2015). Poems have been published by Rattle, Main Street Rag, Poetry East, Cyclamens and Blades, Between the Lines, Lucidity and other journals. She is the recipient of the Sybil Nash Abrams Award (2007) and the Merit Award (2013), given by Poets Roundtable of Arkansas. Pat Durmon is retired from mental health counseling and currently facilitates two groups.  She writes a weekly blog and invites people to follow her uplifting blog by signing up at patdurmon.com. Durmon is a native Arkansan and lives in the Ozarks with her husband. She sees herself as lighter and more joyful after writing a poem.