lots and lots of neat

recommended: taije silverman

What I'm struck by in this poem is the honest confrontation with helplessness. It seems a likely subject for a poem whose occasion is the mother's sickness, and the radiation therapy she is undergoing, and the months of diagnosis the family has been put through.

And maybe it's the speaker's confrontation and then acceptance that brings on her joy. I'm not completely sure. I sense it, but I think the true merit of this poem "On Joy," in the Spring 2009 issue of Ploughshares, is the vague, but powerful source of the speaker's emotion. It comes from some place outside her, outside her purview. "Past these fields are others no one sees, / and past them oak and poplar trees." For me, this unknown place hovering just past sight, and the speaker's knowledge that this place exists even if she can't see it, makes me believe this "unaccountable" joy that rises in her. At least this is what she calls it, despite every reason she has for not feeling joy. And when I read this poem, I want to call it joy too.

I find it touching that a poem can make this earnest consideration of a serious situation still full of wonder. Why joy? Thankfully joy.

Related Links:
Ploughshares (worldcat search for Ploughshares)
Houses Are Fields

recommended: linnea ogden

I can't quit with this Winter 2008/2009 issue of Ploughshares. The last poet I'm going to recommend from the issue is Linnea Ogden. Of course, I recommend Ogden not only on the basis of these poems. As an editor, I helped to get her poems published in Gulf Coast. And, now, a friend of mine has a chapbook of her poems available for sale (the link is below).

I can tell you what originally drew me to Ogden's work is her lyric splicing of legalese. "A Point Going Out to Sea" is different, in the sense that there could be an experience punctuated by a trailing ellipsis, that is then picked up momentarily with another sensation. I like how, for me, these converse with the legalese poems. That difference makes me all the more excited for Ogden as a poet.

Related Links:
Ploughshares (worldcat search for Ploughsares)
Projective Industries (where you'll find Linnea Ogden's chapbook Another Limit)

recommended: laurie lamon

I have to admit this poem had to win me out of a considerable skepticism. I have a knee jerk kind of reaction to poems that I suspect are going to be a whole series of "Pain" poems, or "Heart" poems, or "Beast" poems. Yeah, I get it, there are so many facets of this emotion or this concept, and you want to represent so many of them, and so you just keep on having to write poems about it. But inevitably (in very rare cases is this not the case, I think), it becomes the gimmick that generates new poems. Or, even if it's not a gimmick, the poet neglects to make this emotion matter in subsequent poems, the way it obviously mattered to him or her in the first few poems of the series.

And so I looked at the Lamon poem in the Winter 2008-2009 issue of Ploughshares. It is about pain--a short poem--and I saw "Pain" capitalized, and I got skeptical. But when I read the third line, which is a restatement of the title, I started to change my mind. Then Lamon adds this easy statement, "the sea without description," and I was won over. I believe the sea is without description. Most importantly, I believe Pain could be a sea without description. What I see in "Pain Thinks of Something Without Description" is a real understanding. And making a reader understand speechlessness through writing, well, I guess Ihab Hassan and his argument about postmodern poets aspiring to engage silence, would be very happy to recommend this Laure Lamon poem with me.

Related Links:
Ploughshares (worldcat search for Ploughsares)
Fork Without Hunger: Poems

recommended: ross gay

I could totally spoil thing for you, if I say too much. I have sat trying to figure out if I should mention exactly where this poem won me completely. And I decided I can't. The poem is too dear, too assured of its violence, too stately in its consideration of circumstances and occasion, to me at least. There are too many reasons for me to simply usher you to this poem, and let you get acquainted with this Ross Gay the way I did. Maybe you'll be standing in a bookstore, holding the Winter 2008/2009 issue of Ploughshares, like I was. And maybe you'll just be so grateful for the energy Jean Valentine edited into this issue. I would suggest you believe like I did, that it was for me. She was thinking all for me alone.

Related Links:
Ploughshares (worldcat search for Ploughshares)
Against Which

recommended: kaisa ullsvik miller

Dear Fence Books, Thank you. I am disgusted with you. The Winter 2008/2009 issue of Ploughshares has three poems by your poet, Ms. Miller: three brilliant, syntax burial poems. They are compulsion. They are voice saturated and smothering urgency.

Dear Fence Books, please be my friend. I want more. I want them more. I want you to sell these poems to me more often. Will you make Kaisa Ullsvik Miller a book? Fold her arms into her chest, tuck her legs in very snug. And then market this on your web site, so more people can have poems, the newest poems, the inside of saturation. I long for more poems to hear from her. And I insist it is your reponsibility to see that this happens. 

Recommended Links:
Ploughshares (worldcat search for Ploughshares)
Unspoiled Air