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Rialto Beach from https://wa100.dnr.wa.gov/olympic-peninsula/rialto-beach

NPM #4: Curve

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CURVE, Kate Reavey. Empty Bowl Press, Chimacum, Washington, 2022, 93 pages, $16, www.emptybowl.org.

The curve here is the touch of a hand to a child’s head, the shape of a maple leaf, the sole of a foot against a floor, and it is curve as in the trajectory of a life. A woman remembering her mother’s body as she anticipates the birth of her own child. A woman with small children. A woman whose grown son sleeps upstairs. A brother, surfing a wave. A blue and white bowl. Weaving throughout, the loss of the mother and grandmother. Weaving through all the other poems, the poignant grief and sweetness of making jam on a stove top, as one’s mother once, conjuring memories that curl (and curve) in the room along with the aroma, “the taste of blackberries, the reticence of grace” (“Grief”).

In “Honeycomb,” the surprise of these lines:

Beyond buzz, beyond the onomatopoeia
of desire,
the strum of air
on each iridescent wing—

Many of the poems are long, but, perhaps because insomnia has been haunting my nights of late, I want to share this shorter one. Watch for the curve, and know that this beach near Reavey’s peninsula home will recur later in the book:

After Insomnia

I walk among jellyfish.
Their nimble veins still
and glisten in curves of sand.

This is the time in between tides,
unsettled, and I lean close, squint
into pools of jelly and light—

the glare on the surface of their clear bodies,
drying by and by. Salt winds

tickle and I wake the surest
sign of sleep—a circle of spittle and breath
collecting on my pillow, muses of just-waking

trembling in my limbs.

—Kate Reavey

One of the small pleasures of doing these blog posts comes when I research the poet. If these final links seem tacked on, I hope you’ll click through them and take a look for yourself.

Empty Bowl: https://www.emptybowl.org/

And find a review at Mom Egg Review here: https://merliterary.com/2023/08/23/curve-by-kate-reavey/

Kate is a mover and shaker at bringing poets to Port Angeles / Peninsula College. I just followed her on Instagram, too: https://www.instagram.com/katereavey/

Ann Spiers, RAIN VIOLENT

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RAIN VIOLENT, Ann Spiers (poet), Bolinas Frank (artist & calligrapher). Empty Bowl, 14172 Madrona Drive, Anacortes WA 98223, 2021, 78 pages, $16, paper, www.emptybowl.org.

“In Rain Violent, Ann Spiers unfurls the ravages of climate change,” so Deborah Bacharach begins her Compulsive Reader review of this arresting book. Along the way, Spiers unfurls her own life: a child’s knees, dead bees, Dakota, chickens, China.

In his Raven Chronicle review / interview / potpourri of and about this book, Jim Bodeen describes the 61 short poems in Rain Violent as “compulsive” and interpretive of not only weather but of our lives. “We’re in this weather together, reader.” He talks with both Spiers and Bolinas Frank, whose hand-painted weather symbols illustrate and accentuate each title (please skip over there and take a look at all he has to say).

Do take note of the cover designed by Tonya Namura.

My own weather today (Rain Continuous: three black dots arranged in a loose triangle):

Rain Continuous

I wear rain gear always.
Some of us go naked, cycling
through the market. Everyone wears
shower caps, crinkling over coiled hair.

—Ann Spiers

The poems are 4-lines each, not much room to play in, you would think—though every line bears Spiers’ signature sound-play, “Electronic hearts skitter. / Data, like confused fighter jets, scramble” (“Wind Out of the North”); “Snake skins, shunting in the wind like riffs / from a broken guitar” (“Thunder Heard”).

The prose introducing and following the poems also drew me in. I love Spier’s biographical note, a Vashon Island, Washington, poet I have reviewed before, but should know better. And we get this from the bio note on artist and calligrapher Bolinas Frank, suggesting the depth and range of the symbols, not to mention the themes packed into this slim book:

Bolinas sees the painting surface as a skin, and his creation emerges on the intelligent edge where art and life interface. Through his painting’s stacked messages, he asks what is underneath things, what is on the hidden side, what secrets lie underneath, and what information asserts itself….His work speaks about migration, domesticity, atrophy, exposing underlying flaws and defects that are carried, delivered, and exposed. (p. 77)

Rain Violent is a fast read, only 244 lines of poetry, after all. But the format and the content work together to slow you down. I found myself pondering each page. Despite the one-poem per page, and the artful titles and international weather symbols as rendered (beautifully, starkly) by Frank, there’s also a sense of the book as one long poem. When I finished I went back and read it again.

I often feel an urge to leave you with something gorgeous. Instead, this:

Clouds Dissolving

Faucets dry. Streams silent. Pools
fill with brush. I spit on my finger tips
to wash black oil from my child’s knees.
From the air drop dead birds.

—Ann Spiers

You can read more about both Spiers and Frank by following these links to their websites:

http://bofrank.com/

http://annspiers.com

Raven Chronicles Review

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When I was given a copy of Tele Aadsen’s What Water Holds (Empty Bowl Press, 2023), I knew I wanted to review it. I’m so so grateful to Phoebe Bosché at Raven Chronicles for making room in their on-line forum for it. To read the review, click on this link: https://www.ravenchronicles.org/book-reviews/bethany-reid-what-water-holds.

You can learn more about the author at https://www.teleaadsen.com/.

Tito Titus, I Can Still Smile Like Errol Flynn

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I CAN STILL SMILE LIKE ERROL FLYNN, Tito Titus. Empty Bowl Press, Chimacum, Washington, 2015, 100 pages, $15 paper, www.emptybowl.org.

I had heard about Tito Titus, had maybe bumped elbows with him at Litfuse in Tieton some years past; sometime, somewhere, someone had given me his book of poems. On Saturday at the launch of I Sing the Salmon Home, he said hello and introduced himself. Today, I rummaged through my bookshelves, found his book, and read it all the way through, even the end notes (which are sort of a poem, themselves).

These words, from Titus’s website, capture the experience:

In I can still smile like Errol Flynn Tito Titus interrogates life, aging, and death with a delicate blow torch. These poems adore the beauty of youth and memory, fluently articulate the melancholy and nostalgia delivered by loss; and, with irreverence and awe, dicker with Death. It’s wry, wistful, fierce, searing, erotic, humorous, regretful, brave, and lonely.

“A delicate blowtorch.” Exactly. The poems are also, at least part of time, quite charming.

Someone’s darling daughter

approached me today
with a bag of weed
at a good price,
even for Hilo,
and I said yes
because the plumeria
tattoo peeking above
her low slung sarong
told me pleasure
lasts only a while.

—Tito Titus

In these poems the body gets all the attention it craves. Nose hairs, penises, “the old bastard’s feet,” bellies. And so much music that you begin to picture the writer with a guitar in his hands.

As Joannie Stangeland remarks in her cover blurb, the book also “reaches further back to childhood, facing the past’s violence and the silence after, its bruises and scars.” In the last section, we’re introduced to a cast of characters just as they’re leaving life’s stage. You’d think it would be too heartbreaking to read, but Titus uses a conversational tone that drew me in.

Here’s a poem, so you can make up your own mind. I love the long title.

The evening of the day after things changed like they’d never changed before

He wanted to sit on the front porch
watching no one pass on the empty street,
but it was cold, wet, and windy,
so he sat in the darkened room
watching the telephone. It rang once
earlier in the day. A wrong number.
He thought to engage the caller
in conversation but let it pass. Perhaps
someone else would call. Or maybe not.
Or probably not. Or not at all.
The radio played songs he didn’t know
by performers he didn’t know.
The newspaper still lay by the front door.
He cleaned the refrigerator. It contained so little.
He forgot to turn on the furnace,
put his hands in his pockets and shivered.
At last he reached for the bookshelf.
Sometimes he felt a little bit Leonard Cohen,
but he felt like Bukowski tonight.

—Tito Titus

The spareness, bawdiness, and understated (often macabre) humor that runs through this book reminded me a lot of the school of Charles Bukowski. If you, too, would like to know more about Tito Titus, visit his website, particularly the scrapbook page: https://www.poetfire.com/scrapbook.