Rich Ferguson's 8th & Agony

  I’m adding my thoughts rather late to the mix, but I feel compelled to do so after reading through Rich Ferguson’s first collection, 8th & Agony (© 2013 Punk Hostage Press). I’m also compelled to disagree with one of his admirers who proclaimed Ferguson “the last of the great poets.” Instead, I choose to view Ferguson as one of the founders of a new generation of 21st Century poets who’ve fused the best of written word with the classical tradition of oral poetry, or in this case, spoken word/slam poetry, and, in doing so, ensures the survival of both.

    Ferguson has spent many years performing in showcases. films, and tv shows. His stories have been burned into the minds of thousands of poetry lovers worldwide. If you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Ferguson perform, then you’re in a woefully uninformed minority. Fortunately, now there’s 8th and Agony, a collection of the best of Ferguson’s poems that leap off the page and into the mind of the reader with the same lyrical ferocity of his aural performances. It takes the twin gifts of a bard and a writer to be able to deftly straddle the words of written and spoken word. 8th & Agony has achieved that level of mastery.

8th & Agony also offers a positive message, poetically and mythically speaking, which is often absent from contemporary poetry. Underscored in all of Ferguson’s poems is an aching tone of wistful hope, even through the lens of grief, as in the poem “Excommunication,” which chronicles the final stages of death and resurrection from a long-term relationship, which could have at one time been romantic and addictive:

A corrosion of loss clotted in his still-unformed wings,

while somewhere in his ghostly remains of memory

lingered a woman’s kiss -

sweet as gardenia.

He could remember that much,

remember that much of his life. He knew

there’d be things like this

he’d always remember. He knew he could

never die of forgetting.

    Ferguson is, as many of his admirers have put it, a “poetic messiah.”I gladly agree with this assessment, as the majority of Ferguson’s poems pay tribute to the bruised beauty of humanity, (“Transition Into Turbulence,” “Certain Things About Certain Women I’ve Known”, “On Becoming an Urban Legend”). Ferguson is a comedic street-corner prophet preaching a new version of the afterlife through the streets of Los Angeles in what I regard to be the best poem in his collection, “The Los Angeles Book of the Dead,”

O’ Son and Daughter of Noble Birth,

if you’ve done wrong

you can’t go trading up karma like baseball cards,

thinking you’ll end up with that prized

Tommy Lasorda 1988 Dodgers World Series Winner.

So if you’ve lied, cheated, looted,

committed a drive-by shooting,

screwed your best friend’s girlfriend/boyfriend,

left your cell phone on during a yoga class or movie,

now is the time your conscience is collecting

those sins and numbering them

on the bones of a South L.A. body count.

Yet if you should find yourself

in a La Brea tar pit hell

filled with dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers,

space aliens, and earthquakes -

don’t worry.

Know that it’s merely being created

by the special effects experts at Universal Studios

to ensure your journey

is the most exciting ride possible.

It’s National Poetry Month, and the masses (including myself) will unashamedly push all kinds of reading recommendations into the ether. If you had one book to choose, I’d recommend Ferguson’s 8th & Agony as an experience to immerse oneself into, and as a journey to take alongside one of the best poets to exist in any time or place on this planet.

(8th & Agony, Rich Ferguson, © 2013 Punk Hostage Press, ISBN 978-0-9851293-6-1, 136 pages, $15.95)

poetic content/cover artwork © 2014 Rich Ferguson and Punk Hostage Press

article content © 2014 marie lecrivain

David Herrle's Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy

     David Herrle's Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy (© 2014 Time Being Books), is a hefty poetic treatise that explores – in Herrle's scarily well-informed opinion - the varied and contradictory reasons this world reveres and destroys all that's bright and beautiful, as well as the impact of macrocosmic events (history) on a microcosmic happenstance (the human soul).

     To prove this premise, Herrle devotes the first third of the book by paying tribute to well-recognized icons of beauty (Katy Perry, Rita Hayworth, Eva Braun, et al). Here, Herrle champions the girl on the pedestal whose unwilling/unwitting elevation to heights of glory both exalts and condemns her. Herrle compares and contrasts the ever-increasing modern day need for destroying that which you love to The Terror in 18^th century France, Hitler's Holocaust, and the invention of the atomic bomb. This sets the reader up for a one-two punch. The meat (no pun intended) of Sharon Tate involves Herrle's troubling look into the depths of three historical lovlies who, through no fault of their own, met with a grisly and tragic end: Sharon Tate (at the hands of the Manson Family); Marie Antoinette (under the blade of the guillotine), and Mary Jane Kelly (the last, youngest, and most attractive of the Ripper victims). Herrle doesn't spare the reader any time to feel remorse. To balance the equation, he also invokes the maddened minds of Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson and his followers (Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, etc), and various personages from the (pre/post) French Revolution (Jean-Paul Marat, Marquis de Sade, Napoleon Bonaparte). Beauty v Beastliness, Peace v War, Life v Death, Creation v Destruction; all of these themes are dissected under the blade of Herrle's excellently written poetic prose. In the end, why do we even bother?

     I believe, and I may be going on a limb here, we (in this case, Herrle) bother because to do so leaves us with nothing left to live for. Even in an existential world, there is a need for beauty, light, and a purpose beyond oneself. Everyone needs to be a hero (Joseph Campbell was correct). Theology, philosophy, art, music, poetry, none of these things matter if one cannot, even for one brief moment, transcend the visceral “anus mundi” to advance beyond the immediacy of their shitty existence. Herrle proclaims, “I'm... the Scarlet Pimpernel.”

     Herrle also dares himself and the reader to take their deeply ingrained ideas of beauty for a walk through the darkest depths of hell. Every artist must do this; question WHAT they believe in, put that belief through the ringer, abuse/rape/destroy it to see if that belief can/will survive. How would one's viewpoint change, say, if you it came to you, as it did to me, that I was born one day before the Tate-LaBiana Murders? How uncomfortable would it make you feel to know, as you were drawing your first breaths, that a couple hundred miles away there was a psychotic band of fringe hippies planning the murder and evisceration of Sharon Tate's baby, an innocent who should have been born into this world without harm the way I was? How ugly and intrusive the world becomes to me when these thoughts present themselves. How enraged I become when I read Herrle's imagined account of Tate's last moments, and those of her baby's life in the poem “The Baby Lived Twenty Minutes After Sharon's Last Breath”: “You begged those soul-midgets/to take you to their lair and kill/you after you birthed your son./The gleeful stabs that replied/seemed to make one girl cum.” If this doesn't lay you low, as it did me, if it doesn't make you question the cruelty of the world and challenge your premise of sweetness and light, I don't know what will.

     All is not lost. In the end, (sorry, no spoilers), Herrle is able to give the reader a glimmer of hope, like a wet towel on a bad burn. Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy is Herrle's stunning account of initiation into the deepest layers of self-doubt and the hard-won attainment of inner wisdom. Treat Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy as you would a copy of Liber AL vel Legis, The Torah, The Koran, or The Art of War. It's not a book for the meek, but it is a book that will make the reader stronger for the reading.

Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy, David Herrle, copyright 2014 Time Being Books, ISBN 978-1568092225, $15.95, 198 pages.

(poetic content © 2014 david herrle)

(article content © 2014 marie lecrivain)

Yvonne M. Estrada's My Name on Top of Yours

    Yyonne M.Estrada's My Name on Top ofYours: A Crown of Sonnets With Photographs (copyright 2013 Silverton Books) is a compact powerful distillation of poetry and photographs that pays homage to the most pernicious and rebellious of incidental artists; the tagger/graffitiartist. As Estrada explains, “a crown of sonnets is a sequence of interlinked sonnets in which the last line of one becomes the first line, sometimes with variations, of the next.” Estrada fuses both the classical form of the sonnet (Elizabethan) with the modern eye of photojournalism, and while there are minor poetic liberties (frequent slant rhyme) taken by the poet, overall, the book successfully conveys its message: taggers are practicing/will practice their art whenever/wherever time and circumstance allow.

     My Name covers not just the bravado of taggers in the poems “A long name on a freeway overpass,” and “A fresh coat of night ends another day,” but also how they affect their environment, as in the poems “Shoot them in the back with yellow paint balls,” and “She was fed up, that neighborhood was hers,” which explores the other side of the issue, that of the frustration from home and property owners whose walls become the defacto tagger's canvas. The environment Estrada deftly describes in her poems is one of mounting deprivation, territorial disputes, and the driving need to claim a piece of the world for oneself, often at the expense of another. What is an artist to do? Where/when/how is an artist supposed to express him/herself in a world that constantly attempts to annihilate individuality, freedom of expression, and, on a more personal scale, a human being's existence as Estrada so eloquently asks in the poem “Oh he's too high to shout, or hide, or run”:

Oh he's too high to shout, or hide, or run.

He's pinned under the ghetto-bird's spotlight,

then unfreezes, drops the bag and it's on;

he bolts past squad-cars, escapes into night.

Torn pocket and blue under fingernails

help him tell the story all the next day.

Homies in dead cars go over details,

migrate inside to play World of Warcraft.

Any motivation goes up in smoke.

Their boredom rolls downhill, getting bigger.

They feel it close in, they know it's no joke;

they're not at work, they're not in jail either.

They're just taggers, each one has what he has -

his name on a freeway overpass.

     My Name on Top of Yours is a cautionary tale of what can happen to art, and to freedom in a society that's overwhelmed to the point of entropy. The next time you see a splash of graffiti, consider viewing it as not an intrusion on the landscape, but as a manifesto for art and life on the most personal level.

My Name on Top of Yours, Yvonne M. Estrada, copyright 2013 Silverton Books, ISBN 978-0-9629528-7-6, $7.59, 36 pages.

(poem and cover art © 2014 yvonne m. estrada)
(article content © 2014 marie lecrivain)

Don Kingfisher Campbell's An Alternate Sky

     Don Kingfisher Campbell, poet, educator, and editor of the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly is not an artist who can be pigeon-holed into one specific literary category. He proves this truth with his newest chapbook, An Alternate Sky (copyright 2013 Don Kingfisher Campbell).

     If you know Campbell (and I do), then you can’t help but like him. He’s an amiable guy from Pasadena who works hard to make sure that he - and all the poets he nurtures - are fairly represented, respected, and have a turn at the mic - and he carries this principle into his poetry.

     An Alternate Sky contains 36 poems written in a similar style (narrative, short stanzas), but each one has a distinctive voice. There’s Campbell the romantic (“Fuck to the Future”, “Seven Courses”), the teacher/facilitator (“Workshop”, “Prose Poem Inspired by Perfection”, “Summer School Senryu”), the social critic-commentator (“Not So Still Lives”, “Big Bangs”, “CNN Universe”), and my favorite (and where I believe he shines best), Campbell the dreamer-philosopher (“Did I Planet”, “Issa Frequency”, “Curiosity”). Campbell is a poet who respects his work and audience in equal measure. Each poem visually and lyrically unfolds in the mind of the reader like a series of well-crafted films, as in the poem, “Curiosity,” a revelation of what gifts Campbell has gleaned from viewing the Mars Rover Curiosity’s pictures from the Red Planet:

Why can’t I walk

on this pebbly dirt?

Why can’t I traipse

up rocky brown slopes?

Why can’t I climb,

ridge by ridge, plateau?

Just because it is too far

to reach without a ship,

just because there’s not

enough money for a mission,

just because I will be dead

before an expedition leaves.

At least, I can enjoy the robot

photographs from the rover,

and without hesitation believe

I am seeing familiar earth,

minus plants, animals…

now sporting human-made debris.

Campbell the poet has much to teach us about the nature of fair-play, with ourselves and in relation to how we as wordsmiths interact with our poetry. With An Alternate Sky, it’s a lesson many writer-poets can learn and refer back to in the future.

Note: For those of who weren’t fortunate enough to take advantage of Poetry Super Highway’s "9th Annual Great E-book Free For All", you can still purchase Campbell’s newest collection, An Alternate Sky, as a gift for the poetry lover this holiday season, or better yet, as a gift to oneself.

An Alternate Sky, copyright 2013 Don Kingfisher Campbell, 36 pages, $10 (includes shipping and handling. Details at http://dkc1031.blogspot.com/2013/11/book.html )

© 2013 marie lecrivain

Zarina Zabrisky's We, Monsters

We, Monsters (© 2013 Numina Press), the debut novel of emerging writer Zarina Zabrisky is the literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollack painting: a multi-layered, amazing, and seductive mess. Before I begin, let me say that Zabrisky has done something I have yet to do -  write a novel. However, as a fellow storyteller and a reader who likes to follow the evolutionary arc of a writer’s work, I appreciate what Zabrisky has achieved.

We, Monsters is the story of Rose, a Russian emigre who lives the American dream: successful husband, beautiful children, and house in the ‘burbs. Rose nurses aspirations to be a writer, which her husband doesn’t understand and the rest of the people in her life patently ignore. She has a rich fantasy life born out of her Russian literary heritage, her need to escape the banalities of her current existence, and the traumas of her childhood. She applies for a position as a dominatrix in a dungeon to research material for her book. Predictably, the further Rose delves into the world of BDSM, the more difficult it becomes for her to keep the parts of her life - as well as her past and present - from clashing together.

Running through each chapter of We, Monsters is a series of footnotes that explain Rose’s psychological pathology. The reader may find this intrusive. Indeed, it takes a measure of concentration not to get distracted from Zabrisky’s prose. In the heart of the story, Rose meets “Motherfucker Mike,” the most creepy (and litmus test) of the dungeon clients. MM is indirectly introduced via Rose’s study of a book called Deviants, an in-depth treatise on BDSM behavior. Rose’s first encounter with MM turns We, Monsters on its head. From this point the story instantly becomes coherent and cohesive even as Rose’s internal and external worlds fall apart.

What I like best about We, Monsters are not just the disjointed narratives that finally meld together, but the characters Zabrisky creates out of thin air. Each person in We, Monsters -  Rose’s husband Luke; her children, Nick, Olga and Roxanne; her fellow mistresses Mommy, Zoe, Greta, and Susanna; even the Latina gas station attendant and the quirky clients come to life through the lens of Rose’s fractured consciousness. With a few well-chosen words and a humorous tone, Zabrisky paints a full-blown, thoroughly believable portrait:

The session was held in the Dungeon. The spy turned out to be a fragile, red-faced man in his seventies. He had the radiant blue eyes of an iconic saint and an infectious laugh. He offered us a bribe of Moet champagne and two glasses.

“It’s a bribe,” he chuckled.

I hesitated, but Susanna gulped hers down, so I followed her example and soon felt all bubbly and light-headed. As we tumbled between the ob-gyn table and the golden shower tray, Susanna transformed.

Her angelic face twisted, she scowled; her pupils widened, making her olive-green eyes almost black. Her upper lip twitched and raised and for the first time I noticed her sharp, uneven teeth, like those of a small rodent, a squirrel maybe. Her gentleness was gone; she’d turned into a wicked bloodsucking witch, and once again reminded me of Potemkin, Potemkin the Huntress, a dying mouse hanging between her bloodstained teeth.

“We are mean! Nasty! Baaad!”

Her voice was bubbling, like the champagne we were drinking. I felt adrenaline rushing through my veins and my heart pulsing.

“I will torrrturrre you in a KGB way! You will forrrget your own name!”

I caught a glimpse of my burning face in the mirror next to Susanna’s; all we’d need in order to fly was two brooms. Susanna cursed and spit and grunted. We were shouting, hitting, kicking, fighting, hurting, and it felt breathtakingly sweet. We drank more champagne, and pushed the old man around on the floor. He was laughing like a baby and shoving dollars into our thongs… - (from the chapter “A Spy Fantasy/We, Monsters)

As with IRON, Zabrisky is unapologetic, as well as forthright. With We, Monsters, Zabrisky takes a great risk in alienating the reader with diametrically opposed points of view, but her gamble pays off handsomely with a novel that won’t soon be forgotten, and in some cases, may leave the reader questioning his/her own reality. I wish more writers would take this risk, as it would, in my opinion, bring literature back to where it needs to be, in the realm of Art.

(Note: We, Monsters will be released in December 2013. Check Zabrisky’s website for where/when to purchase, and author dates)

(We, Monsters, ©  2013 Zarina Zabrisky, ISBN 978-0-9842600-4-1, A Vox Nova Book, published by Numina Press, 300 pages, price TBA)

© 2013 marie lecrivain

Alex S. Johnson's The Matador of Mirrors

Today, there’s almost no one who can write as well, and at the same time, prolifically as author Alex S. Johnson (The Doom Hippies, Black Tongues of the Illuminati). Daily, anyone can log onto Facebook and find two or three new posts of Johnson's scarily brilliant poetry or prose. If a reader desires to become more acquainted with Johnson's work, then his newest chapbook, The Matador of Mirrors (©  2013 Lucid Play Publishing), is a great place to start.

Matador delivers some of the best of Johnson's writing in a series of shorts (poetry and flash fiction), that will leave the reader, who may think she's prepared, dead flat on her proverbial back from the onslaught of Johnson's genius. Johnson lives in Bizarro World (he's listed as a top writer of bizarro fiction on Wikipedia), and he comes by his writing gift naturally (he's the son of Steven Johnson, noted artist and “Accidental Futurist). If one is to read bizarro fiction and poetry, especially Johnson's, then, one must come into the process with two things: an appreciation for the absurd, and an openness to the gorgeous variations of Johnson's vision. Matador opens with a short prose poem, “Body Art,” a paean to what could be described as a bizarro goddess – beautiful, shocking, humorous, and primal:

Her body was a journey. She became an exploration of golden temples, smiling pagodas, oracular energy. She sipped at the narratives that snaked up from the chinks in the stone. They cooled her throat, only she wanted more: diamonds that became wine, gems of all sizes, shapes and colors that spoke the language of hone. Singing draughts of perfume cleansed the air. A stock of recyclable babies clad in graveskin. The world riddled with tiny marble wounds that spat out forests where the tips of every branch yielded clockwork dynasties.

Matador, like its title promises, leads the reader on a rapid turn-on-the-dime dance through the doors of Johnson's perception: “Imaginary Criminals,” briefly drops the reader into a world of creepy surrealist film noir; “Today She is French,” explores a day in the life of a young woman whose imagination and casual donning of pop culture personas is her only escape from a dystopian home life; and “Matador of Mirrors,” beautiful and peripherally continues a journey through the constantly shifting dreamscape introduced in “Body Art.”

My only regret about Matador is that, at the end, I want more; more absurdity, weird beauty, and more time to immerse myself in Johnson's universe. The Matador of Mirrors is going on my permanent shelf, to be brought out again when I need a creative kick in the pants, and, more importantly, when I desire to read a truly great piece of literature.

The Matador of Mirrors, Alex S. Johnson, ©  2013 Lucid Play Publishing, (http://lucidplaypublishing.weebly.com/the-matador-of-mirrors.html), 30 pages, $8.00 + shipping when ordered through the publisher website.

"Body Art" content © 2013 Alex S. Johnson
Review content © 2013 marie lecrivain

Larry Colker's Amnesia and Wings

O misbegotten fool

in pool of inklings

things cannot be clear... - “Lyric”/Amnesia and Wings

Above is a gorgeous snippet of poetry from Larry Colker’s debut collection, Amnesia and Wings (© 2013 Tebot Bach Press). Most first collections are heavily laden with verse. To be honest, this handicap can turn off a reader to a poet’s future work. The opposite is true with Colker’s collection: 32 poems bound into one slim volume - which, in point of fact, turns out to be the perfect amount of poetry.

Colker, a careful bard, writes with the artful restraint of a man who's lived most of his life walking a fine line between the mundane and waking worlds. Like an alchemist, Colker has distilled his life experiences (mostly about love, and up to this point), into a series of beautifully written poems that are a genuine pleasure for the reader in which to immerse herself. Colker’s not afraid of linguistic gymnastics; quite a few of his poems could be put down to workshop exercises, but a touch of self-deprecating humor saves the day, as in the piece “Lunch Poem”:

Today I’m eating Brazilian,

three kinds of meat on a

skewer.

Big knife!

The woman I nearly started an affair with

was - is -

Brazilian.

Big knife!

She tasted like this fried banana,

sugary, fragrant, yielding,

slick.

Big knife!

I tried to give my marriage another chance;

kissed artistic, sexy, portugues-inflected Amalia

good-bye.

Big knife!

While the theme of love dominates Amnesia and Wings, Colker also explores other avenues; family (“Projector”), mythical archetypes (“Eros in the Heartland,” “Legend”), and the growing sense of one’s own morality (“China,” “Crossing Over (Exhibit #204)”). Though Colker is careful, he's not sparing of himself or his subjects. Each poem is bracketed by the conviction of a man who has no qualms in sharing and accepting the variegated, truthful totality of a fascinating and well-lived life. Few contemporary poets are capable of making that commitment to themselves or to their work.

Amnesia and Wings deserves a place on every poet’s bookshelf.

Amnesia and Wings,  © 2013 Larry Colker, Tebot Bach Press, ISBN 978-1-893670-6-31, 45 pages, $16.

Article content © 2013 marie lecrivain

poetic content © 2013 Larry Colker