WE HAD OUR REASONS, Ricardo Ruiz

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Business as usual seems beyond me right now, and I’m daily amazed by the advertisements that make their way into my email-inbox—including from writers merrily chirping about new classes and life changing strategies for writing “your next best-seller!”

But here’s me. Dropping some of my 2024 goals, downsizing from the usual blog reviews, but still reading poetry and still wanting to share amazing poets with you, particularly the ones who are sustaining me just now.

We Had Our Reasons, a Washington State Book Award winner from 2022, is one of the books I keep picking up.

This community effort was created by poet and translator Ricardo Ruiz. On the cover, we find not only Ruiz’s name, but also: “and other hard-working Mexicans from Eastern Washington.” It was published by Pulley Press, an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing (Seattle, WA).

Each poem appears in the language of the writer (or collaborator), and in English translation. Thus, “Un saco de dormir y un semi,” by Centavo and Ricardo, on one page, and on the facing page:

A Sleeping Bag and a Semi

I came from Mexicali across the border.
There was work for me in Arizona.
I crawled into the gray sleeping bag,
hearing the zipper, feeling the tape
tighten around my legs and body.
I became a gray balloon floating into
the storage compartment
where the trucker kept the chains.
My mind, clouded by the smoke.
I meet the sky again
in Nogales.
I was born in California,
so I could have walked but I didn’t know.
I was bound up in not knowing.

—Centavo and Ricardo

The voices of the poems vary. Many are young, sounding a bit like any suburban kid dealing with divorcing parents, Game Boys, attempts to buy beer. Some, like Centavo, work alongside their parents in the fields. Many of the voices sound to me older, worn out with work and trying to keep families together. Ruiz’s own poems often address his service in the U. S. Military. The profiles of the collaborators are in prose, in the back of the book. We Had Our Reasons has a cumulative power that moved and educated me.

These are the people who will be threatened with deportation in the coming years.

After Ten Years They Came Back Again

My Social Security is good.
When I was detained
on the bus outside of Indio,
we filled out the paperwork.
So, I have been legal to work.

The call came in
while I was at lunch.
Don’t clock in.
Head straight to HR.

The officer told me
I had two choices
– walk out with them
– or be taken out in handcuffs

The shame shot into me
that I was wrong
as ICE paraded me out of my workplace.
I’d worked there seven years.

They took me to my house.
Let me change out of my scrubs
and we waited for my mom.

—Patty and Ricardo

You can learn more about the book at https://www.poetruiz.com/reasons.

To learn more about justice for migrant farm workers, visit this site: https://www.wslc.org/immigrant-toolkit/.

Victoria Doerper, WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED?

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WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED? POEMS OF NATURE, LOVE, AND AGING, Victoria Doerper. Penchant Press International, Bellingham, WA, 2019, 94 pages, paper, $15.95.

What If We All Bloomed? is a perfect title for this book of meditative poems. Here’s a poet who can celebrate marriage in one poem, and claim kinship with frogs in the next. Another riffs off Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” beginning, “Praise God for damaged things.” Yes, life is messy, Doerper proclaims here, then offers praise “For mismatched mates and misdirected mail, / For bulbs of scarlet tulips, rising in a golden bloom, / For spackled spark of beauty in tender broken things…” It made me want to grab my pen and write my own poem for what’s broken.

Last week I began reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, but stopped when I came to this line at the end of the Introduction, a quote from her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

Doerper’s poems encouraged me to return to Chodron, to muster at least some willingness to sit with all that is swirling inside me, to consider bringing it back with me “to the path” (Chodron, xiii).

Meanwhile, reading poems (and walking) are keeping me alive.

Hedgerows

I’m convinced that heaven
Lurks in old hedgerows,
Not like a predator, but
More like a mystery
Laced through thickets
Tangled with song.
In those byzantine temples
Of leafy, shaggy, profligate
Bud, flower, and berried
Commonplace delight,
Visited by visions of roses
Wafting the incense of attar
Into the sacred air,
Where angels shelter
The hungry, the trod-upon,
The sky-travelers seeking rest,
No questions asked,
No proof of worthiness,
No papers required
For an offer of ground
In an unsullied place
Filled with the potent
Possibility of grace.

—Victoria Doerper

That “possibility of grace” is, I think, what Chodron is talking about, too.

What If We All Bloomed? is dedicated to John Doerper, the poet’s husband, who also did the lovely drawings illustrating the cover and throughout the book.

The website for Penchant International didn’t work, but I found Doerper’s book for sale at Sidekick Press, and it is also available at Village Books ($1 shipping). Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times is widely available.

Thanks to Suzy Hazelwood at Pexels

Karen Rigby’s FABULOSA

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“Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other.”  — Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

I decided this morning to count my blog-reviews for 2024. Thirty-three thus far (fewer than I thought!). As this is week 41 of the year — or is it 42? — I’m 9 reviews behind. This is doable. For today, here’s a link to my most recent review at Escape Into Life (EIL). I have an additional review there that never got linked to the blog:  At the Edge of a Thousand Years, by Matt Hohner.

Some poets and some books stand out for me, but all of them have had their effect — to borrow from Jane Hirshfield again, each has had a part in mapping the terrain of my year of reading poetry.

So, with about 10 weeks left to the year, expect to see a flurry of reviews, or — barring actual reviews — shout-outs for poetry books. Maybe those read in August?? See, doable.

Click on the link below to see my review of Karen Rigby’s Fabulosa. And thank you for reading poetry!

Book Review: Fabulosa

Kevin Craft, TRAVERSE

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TRAVERSE, Kevin Craft. Lynx House Press, Spokane, WA, 2024, 130 pages, $25, lynxhousepress.com.

I’ve known Kevin Craft a long time. We were colleagues at Everett Community College, beginning in 1998, and our bond of poetry drew us into friendship. He was always the star, with awards and grants and travel—including to France each summer to teach. He had a knack for making opportunities for himself that I (frankly) drooled over. But we had other, more home-bound threads connecting us as well, including many of the threads found in these poems: parenting, adoption, navigating the intricacies and interstices of family. Who do we belong to? Who belongs to us? Sometimes this theme plays like a lament, as when he echoes Emily Dickinson with, “My life had stood me up one too many times” (“Only If You’re Feeling Better”). In others, it’s a messy celebration: “Into gravity a history of spontaneous alleles” (“Game Theory: A Primer”).

I love the way the poems in Traverse aren’t linear (not usually), but always complex and witty and woven. The first poem, “In Extremis,” launches with: “One man skis alone across Antarctica. / Another pulls morning glory // off a rotting backyard fence.” One world, multiplied. In another poem, a daughter rescues a ruby-crowned kinglet; in another poem, two daughters rescue a father. (I have to add, birds are woven throughout the book, too—snow geese, an Anna’s hummingbird, red-tail hawks, hermit thrush…). I had a sense, reading this book, of circles within circles where human varieties of existence and all of nature nest together in contiguous if uncomfortable relationship. Like they do. These lines, for instance, opening “A Few Pre-Existing Conditions”:

We drank too much.
Stayed up late watching late night turn to laughter
as the elephants disappeared.

Oh, yes. Or this:

Elevator Pitch

First the doors won’t close, then they won’t pry
open, between them the tall tale self-replacing.
We talk it through—a night train rattling high-rise windows—
beginning of the middle, middle of the end,
though sometimes whole chapters fall from the sky
like pieces of a space station. Once I wanted
to be an astronaut. The sky is a laboratory
into which we pour our excess lives.
Some appear in dreams like the family reunion,
the gull-circled landfill, that day I turned the blue car
into oncoming traffic. Our grandmothers went to town
in a horse-drawn buggy. A single cell becomes a city
is one way to muscle through this backstory
hanging over breakfast like a shroud.

—Kevin Craft

Kevin is the featured reader at Everett Poetry Night on Monday, October 7, 5-8 p.m. As I recall, the reading begins at 6:00, but you want to come early—to grab some dinner and find a seat, and to sign up for the open mike. I plan to attend. Go to https://duanekirbyjensen.wixsite.com/everett-poetry-night/features-poets-2024 to learn more

To learn more about Kevin, visit Lynx House Press, or this page: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kevin-craft. Or buy the book!