Friday, May 29, 2026: Ann Tweedy's "By the river"

 By the river,

hanging my camera on the plank

of an Adirondack chair. Wading in the cold

flow–shallow, bed of smooth rocks,

slippery and hard on the soles of my feet.

Turning out of the water to a sheltered pool–tiny fish

swimming there. Almost like tadpoles but so small.

A centimeter to an inch.

Squatting by clumps of grass that formed

the pool’s barrier and staring in. Getting up, a sense of someone

watching me from behind--at the river shore. I turn and

a surprised woodchuck, large and beaver-like but with a thin tail, stares back.

It kept its eyes locked with mine as it moved

haltingly upland. Meanwhile I inched toward my camera,

keeping myself in our eye-lock.

As I got close, my toe stubbed hard on the wood chair,

the small one next to the pinky. I felt the stab but mostly was glad

to be within reach of the camera--grabbed it and proceeded

to snap. The woodchuck’s serious and cautious gaze

caught in my aperture, face with its mix of brown and black.

The rounded oval back. Alert squirrel stance.

When it was over, the woodchuck up in the grass and trees,

beyond my sight path, I noticed that my toe was blooming purple,

felt the pain it took to walk. Picture-replay revealed my camera

had been accidentally set to “effects”–photos

a mash of painting and cartoon, contrasts in color

overdone, too much black at the muzzle, the intelligence of the eyes

lost. Scathed by eagerness but left

with fascination. Those moments

looking into its eyes, the lens

our mediator, rivet my days.

 © Ann Tweedy

Ann Tweedy’s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet (Headmistress Press), earned a Bisexual Book Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks: Beleaguered Oases (2 nd ed. Seven Kitchens), White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts), and A Registry of Survival (Last Word Press). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and five Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She recently left the University of South Dakota School of Law for a position at University of Mississippi School of Law. Read more at

www.anntweedy.com.

Ann Tweedy's "Beleaguered Oasis"

   

Full disclosure: the book I’m about to review was gifted to me, and is dedicated to our mutual dearly departed friend, Theresa Antonia, may she rest in peace.

    In the past 18 months, I’ve discovered, and with great pleasure, published the work of poet and human rights advocate Ann Tweedy, who, in my opinion, needs to be read by every poet and lover of poetry in the world right now. While I’m more familiar with her recent work, it was a joy to dive into her chapbook Beleaguered Oasis (© 2020), reissued by Seven Kitchen Press, as part of their ReBound Series.

    Beleaguered Oasis contains fifteen gorgeous poems, divided into three sections; The Body, Many Oases, and Immersed. Within these sections are several poems that tie together the larger theme of the work; a poet going through a journey of self-discovery, with time spent observing, or connecting to nature, or with people, until they are is ready to take up the journey again. Each poem is highly detailed, both in narrative and tone, and at the same time, accessable. 

    The lyrical and compact quality of the poems in Beleaguered Oasis are what make it an unforgettable gem. Tweedy’s greatest skill, as a poet, shines through every piece, especially in the poem “Lit Rooms”:

It’s night and the small tan moth

presses wings to pane,

enchanted by my light. Above her

the spider who’s spun

along the frame waits.

Did the spider, spinning, dream

of moth-juice, knowing light 

would draw one? And who

besides a moth can decipher

the call of incandescence-

whether the promise of nectar

or a moonbeam’s guidance?

Some posit she hovers

in a daze to let her eyes

reorient to darkness. But those

who gaze from lit rooms

watch light pull her and discern

the outlines of a why no smaller or bigger

than the why of any desire that pulses-

unknowing, unknowable-through us.

© 2020 Ann Tweedy

   Beleaguered Oasis gives the reader the opportunity to experience, and enjoy Tweedy, as a poet, on a different level. There are poets who will reissue, or republish, the same set of poems in a work they consider seminal, and more likely, sentimental, for a time they hit the mark. There are poets who will refuse to reissue/republish earlier work, as a way to exert control, and to satisfy their ego. Tweedy is neither one of these, and Beleaguered Oasis is a testament to the poet she started out as, and who she will ultimately become. 

Beleaguered Oasis, © 2020 Ann Tweedy, Seven Kitchens Press (https://sevenkitchenspress.com), 21 pages, ISBN 978-1-949333-64-0, $9.00

© 2020 marie c lecrivain

Walter Ruhlmann's "Crossing Puddles"

I’ve yet (and probably never will), write a book about my hometown; not the place of my birth, but where I spent my formative years, or those places which have had the greatest influence on me. Very few poets can do without opening the floodgates to melancholia, anger, and disappointment. These feelings are as much a part of ourselves as the earth we occupy, and we, as human beings, prefer to stay in control. Walter Ruhlmann’s newest collection Crossing Puddles (© 2015 Robocup Press), is a wonderful and highly pleasurable example of a poet who’s not afraid to explore this complicated transformation through a poetic medium.

Ruhlmann, an English teacher and publisher of mgv2, gives the reader an intense, parabolic travelogue with Crossing Puddles that begins in Normandy, then moves to Bresse (a region of eastern France that butts up against the Alps), and then into the asymmetrically precise and vast landscape of Ruhlmann’s consciousness. There’s loving (and not so loving), reminiscences in the first section titled “Normandy”, where Ruhlmann adroitly leads the reader through the labyrinth of his childhood and family memories. Nature darkly and deliciously haunts the early years of Ruhlmann’s incarnation on this earth, as in the poem “Another Bleak House”:

The orchard behind the house was even gloomier. Apple trees, pear trees,

quince trees, plum trees, thick grass and rhubarb, dahlias, daffodils,

gladiola, irises, and lilies. Peonies and chrysanthemums.

The fog often filled the garden, anti-Eden, anti-chamber of a past mixed

with industry, agriculture and trade. Trade mostly. Dirty money, stolen

goods, black market income, an inherited greed.

In the second section “Bresse,” Ruhlmann takes the reader through a series of defining crystallized moments, both quotidian (“Meat”), and sexual (“Jerking in the Bus”). This kind of subject matter is always in danger of becoming pedantic, and is anything but in the skillful hands of Ruhlmann’s poetry. Again, nature plays a predominant role in Ruhlmann’s work, and here, we glimpse a more robust and intriguing portrait of Ruhlmann the man, who, while reminiscing over an unforgettable and disturbing experience, finds his peace and pleasure in honest hard work, as in the poem, “The Crusty Dark”:

In the shed showing its inside

unscrupulously,

shamelessly,

I can see two saws -

a spotting that brings new thoughts:

soon these dry twigs and arms and boughs

will be cut off, dismantled, dismembered.

More wood to burn the fire next winter.

More blood will flood and whirl in my heart.

Winter has already started in Maore,

the island where I left my pride, my joy, and pieces of my mental health.

I hate to say this but bats are mad.

Other flying mammals - flying foxes - flowed high above,

wider, fluffy, somehow less disturbing than these fat dragonflies

who circle, twirl, swirl and whirl

chasing mosquitos, flies and gnats.

My late cat used to catch them from the balcony where I used to live.

I love to say this:

I love my worker’s hands

they dig soil and scratch and tear and plough.

Dark fingernails, large red scratches, abrasive palms.

The soreness cannot erase the pleasure throughout the day.

The last section, “Remote Places of the Mind,” reveals the open-ended resolution of where Ruhlmann’s traveled, along with the reader, into this present moment. Questions that were never answered regarding family (“Late Epiphanies”), love (“The Blue Tit’), and the identity (“Genesis Revisited,”), come to the fore in a disturbing and wonderful sequence of abstract poems. Who has Ruhlmann become? Or, more accurately, who is he becoming, as in the poem “I Wish It Would Snow for Christmas (Another Acrostic Poem from a Deranged Soul)”:

Sometimes life is so bitching you wonder why existence matters so much.

No trees, no garlands, no stupid baubles hung anywhere.

Other lands, dreamed and fancied, could give shelter to that deranged soul

of mine.

Why haven’t they sent me tickets to take that ghost train to hell?

Fallacy, false images, fake and fancy dressing for the forlorn.

Omens crash on that wrecked brain of mine,

restless, neurosis and neurasthenia, neuralgia won’t leave me in peace, just

bits and pieces that

clatter and eventually shatter.

Hummus will remain after the fall.

rotten skin,

inane limbs,

stained soil,

torn flesh,

meaningless,

awkward,

sick and sulfuric ashes blown away by the wind from the snowy eastern

border.

As an artist of any stripe, it remains a constant duty to one’s vocation to keep questioning, researching, and refining one’s identity. Ruhlmann’s Crossing Puddles pays homage to this courageous and ongoing process.

Crossing Puddles, Walter Ruhlmann, © 2015 Robocup Press, 73 pages, ISBN 978-1-32-098137-8, $11.99

poetry content © 2015 Walter Ruhlmann

article content © 2015 marie lecrivain