Cholla Needles Open Poetry Reading
Click here to purchase Cholla Needles 60 on-line ($5)
From Alturas:
My apologies for condoning the hawkfor not holding its predating natureagainst it. We all hunt, justin different ways.The hawk does it beautifullyas large birds do, sunlitand in plain sight.
. . . I seem to have been wedto the hawk time ago, in prehistoric erasour tie as indissolubleas a sacrament. Let mecelebrate the rite of the hawk,hawk and I, hawk and eye, the long gazethe telescopic vision.
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Toti O'Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish last name. Born in Rome, living in Los Angeles, she is an artist, musician, poet, and dancer.
Click here to read a review of In Her Terms by John Brantingham
Click here to read a review of In Her Terms by Michael Escoubas
Click here to order In Her Terms ($5)
This volume includes the full edition of Simon Perchik's very first book, The Bomber Moon, which was self-published in 1950, and is long out of print. Poems between 1943 & 1979 published in many literary magazines have also been collected, and appear in book form for the first time. These include The Lambert Castle Poems from 1943-49, two hundred and fifteen poems called "The "A" Poems, a set of five prose poems, and a rare long narrative poem entitled Misha's Funeral.
excerpt from A215:
I always walk in afternoons
when heat beats hard for me
and bangs the sides of grass
against the heat and me.
But then in the cool evening of my mind
I grip the moon's long hair
and braid the dreams I've held
with tears from everywhere.
Click here to read a review of Dreams I've Held by John Riley
Click here to purchase Dreams I've Held online, 400 pages ($15)
This historical journal of a journey through the Mojave in 1920 is a treasure for all lovers of this desert region. Edna and her friend Charlotte visited the desert at a time when one could travel far distances before seeing another human. Their expectation was to experience the strenuous life of the outdoors being touted by Theodore Roosevelt, and to explore by choice "the wild and lonely place" of the Mojave Desert. Edna's voluptuous prose lets us know that this goal was reached with a deep and lasting joy. Reading her words today demonstrates the desert still has a magical draw 100 years later.
Edna Brush Perkins began working for suffrage with the Ohio Woman's Suffrage Party. After the defeat of the suffragists' 1912 Ohio referendum campaign, Perkins became chairman of the ward organization of the Ohio Woman's Suffrage Party. Perkins was influential in efforts to help women gain the right to vote for the municipal elections in 1914, and presidential elections in 1917, though the latter decision was ultimately overturned. During 1916-1918, Perkins served as the Chairman of the Women's Suffrage Party of greater Cleveland.
Her work in the suffrage movement included organized door-to-door campaigns, petitioning Ohio legislatures, and debating against anti-suffragists. Nationally, Perkins participated in a suffrage parade in Boston and led a suffrage parade in Cleveland in 1914. In 1915, she gave speeches in Massachusetts, Mississippi, and represented Ohio at the National American Woman Suffrage convention in Washington, D.C. She wrote a pamphlet entitled "What It Is", which was distributed by volunteers who worked to gather signatures to support the suffrage movement. Perkins also co-founded the Women's City Club in Cleveland in 1916 and used this platform to focus on the birth control campaign.
When the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote, Perkins travelled through the Sahara and the Mojave deserts with fellow woman suffragist Charlotte Hannahs Jordan. She later wrote two books, The White Heart of Mojave (1922) and The Red Carpet of the Sahara (1925) about her experiences. Perkins exhibited her artwork at the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1927 to 1930.
Things I Learned from Falling by Claire Nelson
(Published 2020 by Aster; 272 pages)
Reviewed for Cholla Needles by Greg Gilbert
The book begins with her fall, a remarkably common-place misstep that anyone who hikes will relate to, something that could have happened to me dozens of time. To that extent, her story is a cautionary tale that plumbs the depths of one’s will to survive and what the well lived life might entail. After the fall, the reader’s proximity to Nelson’s pain and struggles is intimate and vivid. The author has strayed from the established path, has fallen 25 feet and landed among boulders, her pelvis shattered. She can only move her arms, there is no phone signal, she is hidden from view, and while she bakes during the day, she freezes at night. Her heroic struggle of survival is physical and psychological, a tale of twin shattering’s.
While her physical demise is a dominant and dark presence, the book’s title says that she’s endured and “learned” as a result. The threats of exposure, shock, thirst, foraging predators, and her having to resort to measuring out and drinking her urine describes a brilliant determination to live, and a universal desire for a fulfilling life. That she survives is not the crux of the story, but, rather, how she does so and her determination to be worthy of the opportunity.
A last happy note involves references to our hi-desert friends and neighbors, among them our own Space Cowboy Books proprietor, Jean-Paul L. Garnier. Again, this is a well told story that I am happy to recommend.
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Many
of Allen’s poems are inspired by her upbringing in Texas, such as “Practical
life skills,” which details the memory of a fishing trip with her father. The descriptions
feel nostalgic—“ We
pull up to the dock with three picnic chairs as crickets chirp”— but there’s
something darker simmering beneath the surface. Take the final stanza:
In dark matter
water and wonder what it would be like to live away from
A cliff then You
catch a blowfish and bang its head up against the concrete
On top of the dock
we watch it die You didn’t have to kill it
You throw it in an
empty cooler we continue hooking I share all your names.
“You didn’t have to kill it” has a satisfying sting, and that feeling is echoed throughout the collection. Each poem is dressed in layers of nostalgia, darkness, and resilience. This is especially apparent in the poems with religious overtones, such as “Sermon notes” and the five “Our Father’s house,” poems. In each of these, she criticizes the expectations Christianity thrusts onto its followers. “Most calvaries have dead people” highlights this theme of unwilling martyrdom, where Allen writes:
like Our Father
when he gives me
his issues
places them in my
spine lets me,
sew skin into skin
without thread
and tells me to
walk
to a city where i
am given something more
than a man
whose obligation
is to no one, not even
the Blood
As with the rest of her work, “Most calvaries have dead people” covers a lot of ground. Allen isn’t just questioning organized religion, she’s calling out the forced martyrdom of women, daughters, and BIPOC members of society, and she drives this point home with the poem’s final line, something between a question and an accusation: “how could you let me spill all over town”.
The Collection Plate is a glimpse into the future of poetry where, unbound by restrictions of form, the poet’s message is free to flourish, just as Allen’s has. She knows how to make every word work for her, and each line of each poem could stand on its own; fresh, raw, and ready to leave a scar.
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Kate H. Koch writes poetry, flash fiction, and screenplays. Her work has appeared in Cholla Needles, Bombfire, Club Plum & other journals. Follow her at http://krista.place/
