Book review: Body, In Good Light by Erin Rodoni

In keeping with April's theme as National Poetry Month, I'm happy to review a lovely book of poetry by a former colleague of mine at Literary Mama, Erin Rodoni.

Erin was the assistant editor in poetry at LM until she had the double good fortune of giving birth to her second child and seeing her first poetry collection in print. Busy woman! Working with her for about a year, I appreciated her careful eye and wide range of poetic appreciation.

Both of these skills are on display in Body, In Good Light. Erin's poetry demonstrates deftness with a variety of styles while offering a clear, consistent voice. Body, in Good Light explores the tension between body and spirit, light and shadow in sensual, clear-eyed poems.

As the book's title suggests, the visceral aspects of the body undergird the poems ("sometimes meat, we dream"), particularly as the body loves, ages, battles disease, and gives birth to and nurtures new life. At the same time, poems revel in qualities of light, especially when imbuing the physical with an internal, spiritual glow, like "tomorrow's sun in her hair."

Erin's startling descriptions, such as "pureed carrots like lamb's blood on the door," made me imagine her as an impressionistic painter who can evoke external as well as internal landscapes by combining visuals, scent, texture, and sound. Check out these lines from "The Woman Who Is Your Mother":

I still love the unapologetic suck of a struck match
and the horse that joyfully bucks its rider no matter
how much shugar it lips from a palm. I know the woman
who is your mother will never forgive herself
for all the ways she has to break you
before the world can.

In the book's third section, motherhood sharpens questions of identity, physicality, and wonder as "the woman / who is your mother still marvels that roaming minerals / in her blood settled to form your bones." I also loved the lines: "Now that I'm never alone, / I suddenly am so // lonesome." Yeah, it's like that. At the same time:

the perfume of another sphere still rises from your body
while you sleep, sweet as the Technicolor sugar at the bottom

of a box of Trix.

Rich imagery, nuanced wordplay, and shifting layers of meaning reward multiple readings of this elegant collection.

Review: Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson

I was lucky enough to snag a copy of the gorgeous, brand-new Poetryfor Kids: Emily Dickinson from Quarto Publishing. If you love poetry and art--or heck, just appreciate thoughtful contemplation of the seasons--check out this book.

Divided into seasons, 35 of Dickinson’s nature poems edited by Dickinson expert Susan Snively dance among beautiful ink-and-watercolor illustrations by Christine Davenier. Classics such as “Hope is the thing with feathers” and “There’s a certain slant of light,” as well as lesser-known poems, are celebrated with bright, lively flowers, insects, birds, and children dancing, reading, cloud-gazing, and running in tall grass (while a snake slithers in the foreground); my only complaint would be the lack of people of color in the paintings with human characters. 

Definitions of challenging words, such as “troubadour” or “pensive,” appear in unobtrusive, italicized text near the bottom of each page (thank goodness poems are not marred with asterisks). 

At the end of the book, two pages titled “What Emily Was Thinking” offer short summaries of each poem, providing not only context (“A cricket’s song helps the sun finish its daily work”) but also simple explanations about how the poem’s craft affects our understanding (“The poem’s gentle rhymes…create a hymn of farewell”). 

This lovely book, a wonderful gift for budding poets, is also appealing for teachers to encourage students’ careful observation and inspiration to write—and paint—our world.

Review: Brown Girl Dreaming

How did I not know that Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming was a book in verse?!

Highly awarded, this memoir (in verse!) describes the author's childhood in the 1960's and '70s in Iowa, South Carolina, and Brooklyn. Woodson paints portraits of places and people with spare-yet-lush poetic language. Each poem could stand alone, some moreso than others. Together, they offer a prismatic collection of memories crafted into a gorgeous merging of form and subject.

Beginning with the day she is born, Woodson introduces a marvelous voice: an adult Jacqueline who knows things the infant Jacqueline couldn't know. Yet later poems are imbued with a childlike quality that allows the reader to hear the young Jacqueline's adoration of her grandfather, confusion at moving from her beloved South Carolina, and wonder at her ability to tell, and later write, the stories that pour out of her.

Born in Iowa to a mother who misses her family in South Carolina and a father who can trace his family's heritage to a son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Woodson sets her narrative firmly in a historical continuum. The second poem describes Martin Luther King, Jr., planning his march in Birmingham, John F. Kennedy as president, and Malcolm X "standing on a soapbox / talking about revolution."

Without going into much grown-up detail--the narrative stays close to what the child Jacqueline knows and experiences--Jacqueline's mother leaves her father and takes the three children to South Carolina to live with their grandparents. In a big house in a small town, their grandfather--who the children soon call Daddy--is a supervisor at a printing press who loves to garden and their grandmother teaches part time and takes on "daywork" cleaning white people's houses.

The Civil Rights movement is a constant. In "south carolina at war," young Jacqueline describes "teenagers...sitting / where brown people still aren't allowed to sit / and getting carried out, their bodies limp, / their faces calm." In another poem, their mother participates in "the training," where demonstrators learn nonviolent techniques:

How to sit at counters and be cursed at
without cursing back, have food and drinks poured
over them without standing up and hurting someone.
Even the teenagers
get trained to sit tall, not cry, swallow back fear.

Little Jacqueline absorbs the quiet determination and bravery of her family and community as she learns to write her name and have her hair pressed in her grandmother's kitchen. Woodson balances a child's preoccupations with the grown-up world's slow progress, creating a textured narrative that works on multiple levels.

When Jacqueline's mother leaves for New York, where an aunt and other family lives, the children ache for her return while reveling in their grandparents' love. Returning from her second trip with a new baby brother in tow, the mother and four children move to New York, eventually settling in Brooklyn near an aunt, an uncle, and friends from South Carolina. Still, the children feel torn between worlds: North and South, urban and rural, parent and grandparents.

Bit by bit, Jacqueline finds her talent despite feeling overshadowed by her brilliant older sister and brother and "the new baby." Although sad events take place, Woodson handles them with tenderness and gentle honesty, never getting too deeply into the world that the adults must be experiencing yet remaining clear-eyed. This child-focus makes for a YA-appropriate portrayal of a girl coming of age surrounded by a loving family in a time of tremendous change.

A portrait of the artist as a young girl, inspirational for all ages.

Welcome back, brain

After a long, hot summer of Camp Mom (two kids + one 40 pound puppy over three months of sweltering heat and almost-daily thunderstorms), I am so grateful for September. Kids are back in school (even my 2.5 year old!), weather is beginning to cool off, and I finally have time and energy to tackle some of the projects buzzing around in my sun-soaked brain. And none of them involve fingerpaints or glitter. Yet.

I'm working on a review for Women's Review of Books of an interesting book by a native New Orleanian, Hearing Sappho in New Orleans by Ruth Salvaggio. The premise is that the author, while mucking out her flooded home after Katrina, found a copy of Sappho's poems, and she begins thinking about how Sappho has been dug out of the muck for 2,000 years--just won't stay buried. She argues that New Orleans is much the same way; its culture goes back too far and too deep to be completely lost. It's a scholarly quest for the origins of New Orleans lyric poetry, and a very interesting ride.

The difficult parts, for me, are reliving some of the immediate aftermath of Katrina, remembering details of that time. And of course, reading and writing about lost homes and lives immediately after Hurricane Isaac did the same thing for so many families around Louisiana--it feels like the trouble never really stops. Yet that's Salvaggio's point, over 300 years, times of trouble and sorrow, there are threads that connect the past to present, and how comforting that is, to know that someone has done this before and wrote something down for someone else to find. Now it's my turn.

Review of Nicole Cooley's Milk Dress

A review I wrote, Between Wonder and Fear, has just been published on Literary Mama.

Nicole Cooley's Milk Dress is a gorgeous book of poetry about the complicated feelings that arise upon becoming a mother. Add to that living through 9/11 as a New York City resident and watching her hometown, New Orleans, drown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and you have a fascinating look at a person struggling with issues of identity, vulnerability, resiliance.

Please check it out!

Recent publications

How exciting! A review I wrote of three excellent books of poetry has been published on Literary Mama. Here's a sample:

In Mary Crockett Hill's poem "The Fat Cat," one line in particular stands out: "Someone should write a manual for avoiding random horrors." Although that manual may not exist, three recent collections of poetry--Mary Crockett Hill's a theory of everything, Amy Lemmon's Saint Nobody, and Rebecca Foust's Dark Card--address how mothers reconcile a world filled with beauty and pain, attachment and loss, especially when motherhood doesn't turn out the way we imagined it would be.

Also, the story of my first son's birth is going to be published in an anthology of birth stories sometime in the next couple of months. The editors have created a blog, with photos and clips (mine is down toward the bottom, if you scroll!). Can't wait to see the finished product.

All this activity reminds me that I'm more than just a milk machine/sandbox playmate...and one of these days I'll be back to creating some new works (or finally putting together the half-finished ones sitting in my "In progress" folders). Till then, I'm watching the two little guys grow bigger day by day...