Best Books Read in 2019

Again, because of time constraints, I've limited the year-end review to specific parameters. Concentrating here on poetry and fiction, I've also excised rereads and books ranked 1-4 on a scale of 5, where 5 (all books here)is exceptional, 4 is very good, 3 is fair-to-middling, 2 is subpar, and 1 is irredeemable. Just including books from rank 4 (very good) would have ballooned the reviews to a number too big to take on.



1) Bernardo Atxaga, Nevada Days (tr. M.J. Costa), 2013. Categorized as a novel, Nevada Days is presented more accurately as a journalistic memoir with surrealistic interludes. Atxaga, with wife and two young daughters, and on a writer exchange in 2007-08 from home Basque country to the University of Reno, sets down an amazing array of adventures, Spanish reminiscences, phone conversations to and from his mother, Nevada histories, and geological explorations, all of them lively and strangely moving, while also maintaining a subdued, even accepting, tone in the face of (often) violent foreboding or remnant evidence. The lynchpin to the book is the rape and eventual murder of 19 year-old Brianna Denison in January 2008, the abduction situated catawampus from the Atxaga digs in Reno, but other highlights (if I can put it like that) include attending the optimistic auditorium carnivals (with frenetic retinue) of presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and (later) Hilary Clinton, the funeral (in deep woods) of an overseas Basque-American army soldier, the historical recounting of a heavyweight boxing match in 1931 between Paulino “the Basque Woodchopper” Uzcudun and Max Baer, poisonous spiders and snakes, encounters with state prison road crews, and a particularly frightening loss of bearings during Atxaga's drive through desert with his family. Costa's translation, as with many of her projects, brings colour, vividness, immediacy, and transparent thought to the fore without undue linguistic awkwardness. I've thought often of this book throughout the half-year since I read it, and themes, if you will, are many and interlocking: awe and non-judgement in the face of overwhelming cultural shock; asserting oneself into whatever experience is undertaken, but not as star or solipsistic focus; elemental bleakness, without the opposing sins of sentimentality and tragic hopelessness; loose ends that can never be satisfactorily tied together; and a relentless low-key tenacity in observation and diurnal confrontation.

2) Leslie Thomas, Dangerous Davies The Last Detective, 1976. I usually read about one crime novel a year, foregoing more because of the genre's limited engagement with character complexity, attention to writerly panache, and off-beat or meticulous description. My own take on plot is that it should only be the focus for the lowering of coffins, but I'm not your typical genre reader. Lately, though, I've been delighted with a new (to me) discovery: comic crime. I should have been more intuitive long ago, what with many comic movie adaptations of crime novels. Thomas' Dangerous Davies series of four begins with this book under review, and it nails so many elements, and with an astonishing ability, of what I look for in a 'literary' novel: individual vision; quirky, finely delineated, believable characters; moral complexity; descriptive prowess; emotional versatility; authoritative (and appropriate) information; lexical surprise (and general stylistic brilliance); and, yes, though it's not always needed, especially in those 'literary' works, an interesting and surprising plot. Davies is the 'last' detective because he takes on moribund (actually, buried) criminal cases that have gone 'unsolved' for decades. Somewhat of a physically maladroit Clouseau, Davies nevertheless proceeds with an underappreciated doggedness and guile, eventually (with the sometimes-help of his Babe-in-Arms bar room philosopher friend Mod) putting 2,418 and 654,774 together to solve the case. Steeped in Brit vernacular, and punctuated with the wit of black comic dialogue and situational physical highjinks (though with a touch more wistfulness than bite), the novel packs more 'meaning' into its wild yarn than a warehouse-filled remaindered stock of ponderous literary fare.

3) Patricia Beer, The Estuary, 1971. This slim poetry collection is a (pardon the pun) high-water mark for Beer, balanced skilfully between classical structures and interpersonal history. Marriage, severe illness, local history, house interiors – whatever the level of emotional charge, Beer creates a proportional art that avoids outsized declaration or obscure dullness. Rereading rewards one with layered ‘facts’, but also fresh perspectives without easy accusations, or even a sense that taking sides ultimately matters. Her imagery recalls Patrick Anderson’s approach of mating common nature word choices – rain, sun, shadow, grass – with unusual adjectival juxtapositions which act as both compliment and contrast. Classical allusions are expertly inserted into contemporary stories, sometimes dramatically, sometimes humourously.

4) John Updike, Rabbit is Rich, 1981. The best novel of Updike’s tetralogy – more mature than Rabbit, Run, much more believable and less politically simple-minded than Rabbit Redux, and less cynical and fatalistic than the final Rabbit at Rest – received generally high acclaim when it came out, though now, like so much else earlier than ancient 2000, it’s been downgraded in certain academic quarters because of its perceived sexism and middle-class complacency. The last charge is hilarious when considering the ambiguously considered wife-swapping, the long and final (and brilliant) encounter with protagonist Angstrom’s first-ever fuck, and the many family decisions Angstrom makes in regards to the car dealership. The first charge misunderstands, in a sadly common recurrence, the difference between the author’s views and that of any of his character’s, and, even were he to be ‘guilty’, has little if anything to do with the aesthetic force of the work. And that the often “too much sex” charge is even given credence is itself puzzling. There’s too little sex in most novels, or, if a major factor, it’s often written as a craven or jejune or obfuscatory sandbagging exercise. Updike depicts sex, in many encounters, as joy, disappointment, lust, boredom, disgust, tenderness, and mortal reminder. You won’t get that kind of all-encompassing wisdom from sexual experience when it’s relegated to a ‘cleaned up’ academic room visited every hundredth page. Aside from sex, Updike’s other great themes are money and natural efflorescence and decay. For someone personally sheltered from many of life’s economic difficulties, his knowledge of money’s complexities – from many characters up and down the class ladder – is deep and on-the-ground convincing. Many reviewers and critics have lauded – rightly so – Updike’s facility and expertise with language. But they stop there. What makes it so? A large vocabulary is often cited as the, or a, chief reason. But Updike’s not so very different, in that regard, from many other excellent writers. He can write long, elegant, sinuously gorgeous sentences, but what really stands out is his stylistic virtuosity. Dialogue, descriptive passages, and philosophical musings are seamlessly interwoven without losing any narrative or meditative thrust. Nature metaphors are exceptional, often, as in classical or jazz music, with repetitive thematic material turned over like jewel light from different angles, or, to keep with the musical analogy, in tonal variations.

5) Shen Congwen, Border Town, (tr. J. Kinkley), 1932. This classic Chinese novel was banned during the Cultural Revolution. It’s unbelievable because Congwen’s focus is on the socialists’ supposed dream: manual labourers unencumbered by, and unconcerned with, intellectual concerns and counter-measures. A traditional story of two brothers competing for marriage to the daughter of a poor widower who operates a riverboat all day, the novel lacks even the undertones of political allegory or critique, instead steeping itself in the surrounding natural elements, those acting as metaphorical emotional forces in (mostly) the naïve and yearning young woman. A terrifically crafted and subdued tragic tone is maintained throughout, and if the ending lacks surprise, the climax matches the fatalistic cues and forebodings at every turn in the story.

6) Daniel Cowper, Grotesque Tenderness, 2019. (Reviewed for an upcoming issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters.)

7) Marjana Gaponenko, Who Was Martha?, (tr. A. Spencer), 2012. Another novel in a long line of exceptional European depictions of the guilt- and depression-ridden residues left behind after two, three, four generations of WWII experiences (Erpenbeck, Tokarczuk, Sebald). Unlike the other novelists mentioned, Gaponenko’s tone here is light (with pensive, even profoundly tragic, underpinnings), humorous, witty, farcical. It’s quite an achievement to make that complex tone register against the arthritic psychological backdrop of an old man having a determined adventure outside his formally steadfast mundane existence before cancer shoots its final tendrils into him.

8) Nicholas Bradley, Rain Shadow, 2018. (Reviewed in subTerrain issue #83.)

The Utopian Literary World of Michele A. Berdy

In her August 14th article in The Moscow Times entitled “If I Were Queen of Translation Reviews”, Michele A. Berdy prides herself on her tone, a “rant”. It’s actually closer to a myopic, supercilious, ungenerous clusterfuck (ironically) against the very translators and (especially) original authors she professes to champion. But it’s especially ungenerous towards the potential readers of those works.

After an off-topic, current hard-times ground state that’s supposed to lend justification for the “rant” – I suppose, in hopes that sheer outraged tone is to override any points that may be challenged – Berdy begins with rule #1 of “Those Banned From Reviewing” with “Someone who doesn’t know the language of the original. Duh, right?” Actually, duh, wrong. Her only reasoning is that “I mean, would you ask me to review a translation of book (sic) of Chinese poetry if I didn’t know Chinese?” The answer: it depends. I want the reviewer, above all, to be a passionate and knowledgeable reader of poetry, and to write well. Knowing the source language is certainly a help, but often not a prerequisite, and highly dependent on the review’s context. Who is it written for? What publication is it in? What are the writer’s particular reviewing parameters, either self-imposed or determined in advance by the editors/publisher? Is the review a retrospective on a work or works, or, especially, on the author? (In the latter case, even a glancing knowledge of the original material isn’t needed.) And why stop there? By extension, her draconian measures should encompass transfers of jargon, argot, idiom, and dialect. Imagine the audacity of a transatlantic English speaking reviewer presuming to opine on the untranslated Irish brogue of Paul Durcan!

Further, if reviewers (and publishers) acceded to Berdy’s dicta, readers wouldn’t even know of many original works in their conversant language of the received translation, let alone come across opinions, story outlines, broad judgments, and on and on. Scholarly work, including tonal faithfulness and nuanced assessments of word choice? Sure, but most reviews don’t have that as a mandate, and a good thing it is. How many reviewers, often working for free or for a pittance, even if they are fluent in the original, are going to spend hours tracking down the context and probability of use for a now archaic phrase that has a muddied philological history? And how many of that reduced number are (e.g.) fluent in both Burmese and English, know the back catalogue of the original author (another of many of the Queen’s requirements), and are intimately familiar with the political and cultural milieu in which, say, the particular novel takes place? Would you give double-digits-to-one odds that the number is close to zero? I would.

Berdy royally waves away anyone who would presume to review translations without knowing the source language, but how about the many translators who actually go German-to-English with no more extensive vocabulary than ja and nein? This happens frequently, and in poetry, not ‘just’ non-fiction tomes, with lauded results.

There are many other ‘prerequisites’, in the article, from Her Highness, but from what I’ve outlined here, the procedure is already unworkable and needlessly restrictive.

Patrick Warner's Octopus

Pick up a copy of most any poetry collection these days, flip to the back, and you’ll note the weighty thematic encapsulated in a bumpf so precise (yet paradoxically vague) you’d think you were about to dig into an epic novel were it not for the thin spine. There are several reasons for this: it makes for a more coherent outline in order to gain grant money from our government overlords; it presents as serious content, most often allied with current hot button topics and with others in the poetry community (in which the ‘transgressive’ poet always seems to join the winning team); and it’s easier to get away with individual poems that are mediocre since each is meant to be taken as a small piece in a narrative whose sum is (supposedly) much greater than its constituents.

Patrick Warner is a throwback in that he writes poems meant to be enjoyed and assessed within the parameters of each offering, attuned to the desires of present-day consumers of songs, who enjoy and assess them as singles, not oases in DVD deserts. Octopus, from 2016, is his fifth collection, and though themes and obsessions can be observed, volume to volume (as they inevitably will in any poet, good or bad), his focus is much more on intricate rhythms, sound patterns, dynamics, narrative surprise, vocal idiosyncrasy, apt and piquant diction, subtle irony, moral dilemmas, and a rare humour that combines the black with the compassionate.

Warner enjoys going for walks and looking at the earth, foregrounding his observations, rather than using them, as is usual in ‘nature’ poets, as metaphorical standbys for the spiritual malaise of the speaker (or author, let’s not be coy). In that, he’s aligned with Bly, Kinnell, and, closer to home, Peter Norman. But, unlike the aforementioned poets, Warner isn’t averse to including disparate comparisons within a poem. Take “Cold July” (dedicated to the late Elise Partridge), the first stanza of part one of which is recorded below:

I have seen it a beaver-dammed
lukewarm dribble, but this summer the brook’s a river,
deep and cold, running steeped tea
and a skim of froth around lichened rocks,
roaring like an air-conditioner.

The next poem, “Downpour”, is even better on the same front: out of a cistern, “oblong doilies;/crocheted antimacassars; gobs of/cuckoo spit; and here where two stones/make a whirlpool, a round lace pastie/ringed by seven clear bubbles – a rotary phone’s finger holes.”

Fun in contemporary poetry has been attempted through sheer will of personality, whether made up or natural. Blame Purdy, sure. But his followers are ultimately culpable. Flat or mild jokes – OK for stand-up comics, dire for repeated poetry readings – dominate the mode. Warner is having none of that. In “Guerilla”, the fun is one-hundred percent language driven : “Adios to my pueblo, my adobe abode, my white-washed hacienda of the mind”. It continues, through eight sestets, in the gathered and regrafted tropes of a scion of a Spanish conquistador, his revolution one of spiritual, not military or political, movement.

Painstaking observation, care in expression, emotional heft and complexity. Those attributes don’t have a chance next to the various popular social positions most are shouldering within to get positive ink and communal support. That is, until time, the ultimate judge, immune to hype, has its say.

Dan MacIsaac's Cries From the Ark

It’s been estimated by some environmental scientists that, each day, about a hundred species of bird, beast, or insect vanishes from this globe of water, dirt, and asphalt. Of course, we don’t know the exact amount since most endangered species aren’t headline news like the Malayan tiger or ivory-billed woodpecker. Rather, most species are microscopic, tucked away (e.g.) in Amazonian jungles, unknown to us, and are indispensable for the survival of many other creatures since they start the feeding chain. Scientists have been urgently trying to find and classify those species before they’re gone, so that at least we know what we’ve missed, as this will at least shed light on the interconnectedness of ecosystems in those areas. It speaks to the dire predicament we’ve found ourselves in when a concession of extinction is made even before finding those species.

Dan MacIsaac’s inaugural poetry collection, Cries From the Ark, celebrates and elegizes the eponymous critters, and, with that as a base, speculates on past life forms, and how they came to extinction, whether through human or natural challenge. The book is divided into six sections: animals; Biblical personnae; birds; anthropological digs and myths; insects; and anthropology updated.

MacIsaac’s concentration on many members of Noah’s roll call is a welcome reprieve from the environmental grandstanding or abstraction that hampers a particular subset of advocacy verse. Some of the animals the author depicts are in a peculiar bind: their numbers and habitat aren’t at the tipping point (yet), so they haven’t gained sensationalistic press, but neither are they home and clear from current and various stewardship malpractices. The British Columbia Kermode bear is one such animal. Here’s MacIsaac’s “Spirit Bear”, in full (sub-heading: Ursus americanus kermodei):

At the river’s black mouth,
the white bear waits
for the swimmer.

He crashes into shallows,
seizing the quick fish,

glisten of silver
along cinder lips.

A cedar twig
cracks.

He lunges
for the far shore
murky with hemlock.

He vanishes –
froth spattered
on dark rock.


This is near perfect in its execution and vibrancy of images, and captures the grace, patience, strength, and ferocity of the bear with close observation, neither overstating the event nor interposing distracting, subjective layers. One such poem is worth a thousand hand-wringing self-regarding prosy salvos.

Elswwhere, the author accomplishes a wider perspective than the recording of events. In “Dandelions”, “my child, grown older,//will blow parachutes/of spun seed/over alien country.” A humble – even clichéd – ritual becomes sexual necessity, and the poem ends with, “love seems most/like the lion’s tooth.”

Consistently on display is an ear attuned to both appropriate rhythm and sound patterns. MacIsaac’s go-to notes are paired assonants, which emphasize importance of theme, and they often link to similar sounds in later stanzas. Internal rhymes also figure, and have a similar effect: “From a deep cirque of thorns,/the tribesmen goad the herd”.

Humour is sparse, but natural. The opening of “Red Pileated Woodpecker” is illustrative: “Headbanger,/mohawked,//with a buzz-saw/guffaw,//flaps over/the mosh pit”. But humour gives ground to the author’s sober insistence that what we call ‘nature’, or ‘the environment’, is not some cute concept to be proselytized in sentimental urgency, but a dynamic force, frightening in its potency, and often, like the “Bison: Wallowing”, “sweating out ticks/from its soiled hide/into the suety ooze.”

Dani Couture's Listen Before Transmit

Dani Couture’s latest volume of poetry, Listen Before Transmit, obsesses and moves over time shifts between present and future, by way of spatial relations. The present is personal, the future is abstracted. Both are dire. It could be labeled pre-apocalyptic lit. Teasing out those shifts could have been a fascinating exercise, yielding many insights, but the speculations would have to have been grounded in a convincing present reality. This is a problem throughout the collection. Too often that present isn’t a developed panoply of imminent environmental disasters, but a focus on the doomed individuals: death by accident (“It was/a black spot on their left shin after having/mown the lawn. During an eclipse,//they looked at the sun without their/daughter’s pinhole camera.”, from “Black Sea Nettle”), vague suggestions of mass capture and, perhaps, deportation (“The helicopter nears. Tonight, even the air is filled with bodies.”, from “Another Earth”), female subjugation and overcoming (“Jet propulsion will eventually erupt/and cause a break between her legs, at which point she will take off.”, from “Pioneer 14”).

Another problem is tonal choice. The most effective registers for apocalyptic speculation, near or long term, are solemn and scarily plausible or angry and accusatory. The voice, here, is distanced, cool, at times even ironic. Cool then becomes cold, and the inevitable fall-out leads to pretentious lines like, “The electric lever of passive care plasma fuels/or sometimes doesn’t” (from “A Casual Defence”), or “T minus the time it takes you to forget/your intention” (from “Minus Time”), or “An issue with constant values/and constant invalidation of facts.” (from “Flyby”).

Mary Dalton’s blurb recognizes the “uncertainty, estrangement and disconnection”, but also comments on “a countermusic in the book that strengthens the hold these poems gain over the reader”. I didn’t hear it. Similar to the failure of Dennis Lee’s Yesno, the author might listen, but fails to transmit any joy in the present world that should serve as the bedrock for the rage or grief that would necessarily follow from ‘the end of the world as we know it’. The collection’s closer, “Transit of Mercury”, ends with, “So when I say I miss you,//it’s not to you, but through to the palm trees/on the throw pillow that are not actual palms.//But I enjoy the idea of their shade/when the sun hits them right.” The only enjoyment is in “the idea”, which perhaps accounts for the joyless and dull phrase, “when the sun hits them right”.

In Listen Before Transmit, Couture has bitten off far more than she can chew. It’s more convincing as a personal fear of death than as a speculative take on different apocalyptic scenarios.

Jeramy Dodds' Drakkar Noir

Who doesn’t enjoy entering a funhouse of mirrors at a county fair or city exhibition? You pay your five-spot (or get discount tickets), glance at yourself in the convex madness for a few minutes, and exit back into the brilliant sun or tragic snow.

Now imagine yourself as you open the pages to Jeramy Dodds’ latest poetry collection, Drakkar Noir. You chuckle a few times during the madcap shifts and distorted riffs, but you can’t exit, not if you want the whole experience. So you read the rest of the book, and the relentless one-note antics turn from humourous to annoying to numbing.

You’re led to believe the intention is to “bravely chas[e] after the new gods of our post-electric reality” which will reveal “the truth about what the hell is happening to us” (from Robert Montgomery), yet as soon as the carnival packs up, the contorted images disappear, and are remembered, if remembered at all, as adolescent jackanapes after a bender on chloroform.

Dodds isn’t the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to yoke comic absurdity with the whole nine yards of the contemporary information freeway. And he offers the add-ons of wordplay: homonyms, double entendres, rhyme replacements mid-phrase, arcane pairings. But a funhouse doesn’t refer to what’s outside of it, to “what the hell is happening to us”, it refers only to itself, and is giddy with what it sees, precisely because it ain’t real. Or of any import. Here’re a few examples:

“After a brief period of mourning, it was afternoon./This mirror is selfie-proof”.

“My daughter starts dating a dwarf./They attend a Bergman retrospective;/she gets home after midnight, every night./My child is nine” ... “He was wearing one of my shirts, taken in:/ ‘Time Traveller Caught with Miner,’ ” ... “ ‘Will you be heading to the beheading?’ ”

And so on.

Stay for the first few punch lines. Then cut your losses and get out.

Aaron Giovannone's The Nonnets

The cult of personality was outsized during Canadian poetry’s centennial heyday. Pick your favourites or denounce them – and there were many – but you couldn’t go three volumes down a bookstore shelf without encountering a front cover mug shot of an author setting his face (and they were mostly men) to the appropriate takeaway – tough, bemused, bewildered, laughing, or grim. Al Purdy gets blamed, unfairly, for starting the angle. (Most of his covers were faceless.) You could also point the finger at Frank “I do this, I do that” O’Hara. But they didn’t get the ball rolling. After gathering snow, that ball finally froze, motionless, at the edge of a sewer drain during the 90s when personality meant transparently autobiographical jokey or tender anecdotal blathering. Enter the brilliant new millennium. Personality, if present in any recognizable manner, was sublimated, or at least at the service of craft and narrative force. But the cult of personality never went away. New practitioners were clever enough to mask their foregrounded selves with greater layers of irony and wit, disjunction and ambiguity. Tone was fluid, which, in practice, meant provisional, confused (and confusing), overriding. We now have a spate of current CanPo titles that tweak 90s jokey or tender into jokey and tender. Aaron Giovannone’s The Nonnets is among those collections.

The Nonnets refers to Giavannone’s own form, nine-line poems which split evenly into three stanzas. Any other formal constraint, though, is an add-on, if present at all. For example, the author employs rhyme, end or internal, at times. As for organic development, that’s either not on the menu, or is subverted. Since an example is impossible without full quotation, and because the poems’ brevity allow it, here’s one entry, in full (all poems lack titles):

WHEN GREENPEACE CANVASSERS stop me
I say, I’m late for a meeting.
This is the meeting.

Just to be here’s amazing.
I’d like to thank the many people
who believed in me.

That was your first mistake.
A silver maple with twinkling leaves.
Just kidding. There’s no tree.

This poem’s fairly typical in procedure. Introduce one scene, sever that completely in the second stanza, then refer obliquely, even obscurely, to the first stanza in the wrap-up. The language is banal, the sentences or sentence fragments are short and often declarative, the poem references itself implicitly (and in other poems, explicitly, with the “Dear Reader” address), the tone is floating. The effect on the reader is of being in the audience where a magician keeps hinting that multiple and endless rabbits will, eventually, be pulled from hats. Unfortunately, in all but several poems, there are an awful lot of hats and very few rabbits.

When Giovannone drops the casually practiced and ineffectual comic shtick, his efforts can stick. He’s much better when at his most directly vulnerable. Here’s a terrific nonnet, fifth from the final poem:

ZOOMING SEMIS ROCK my car
on the highway’s shoulder.
Hazards flash in the gallery of pine.

Is anyone here afraid of bears
or of that blue pickup
parked at the edge of the woods?

Because we’re alive, we’re growing
a moustache, at least its wispy beginnings.
Dead, we will be too.

Stevie Howell's I left nothing inside on purpose

I left nothing inside on purpose, the title of Stevie Howell’s 2018 collection of poems, is taken from a note in the window of a Mercedes, in a ridiculously optimistic request for preservation of property. Howell’s header uses that naive note ironically, realizing we – I use that collective pronoun seriously – can’t shut out disaster, whether we’ve money and good health, or, in the speaker’s case, little of the former and even less of the latter. The title also refers to the fearless revelations of the speaker, impatient with the poses and tertiary peccadilloes that comprise so much of the tea-cosy-and-grey-sky school of poetry.

Voice is a particular challenge in this volume. The tone, I feel, left plenty of room for various inflections, tempi, and dynamics, yet I didn’t feel this an arbitrary exercise. The poems have to be read aloud – all of them – and I found myself stopping and starting frequently because of the constant indentations, caesurae, ellipses, one-and-two line stanzas, short phrases, and sporadic period disappearance. The effect is halting, but not tentative, and certainly not flat. Though sentences are paratactic, they don’t fill the page with numbing, unresolved repetition, the latter a cheap ball-peen in the postmodern toolkit. Actually, the ‘flat’ tone emphasizes the terse and not infrequent tragic maxims that follow the earlier strategy. And those harsh conclusions are earned by the (now) heightened earlier content. This is difficult, even impossible, to relay accurately here because of the typographical misrepresentation which would result. And unlike the often arbitrary indents and erratic spacings other poets use in an attempt to impart complexity, Howell’s efforts in layout are instructive. So I’ll just pick a few quotes from various poems that can be rendered here with fairly close representation, realizing that, in this volume more than most others, excision doesn’t do justice to her work.

“A dream of diaphaneity by the calcified. Life requires 3 people to make a//tragedy. & for the tragedy to be performed. A 3rd person can’t come between a couple unless//you let him, & he wants to.”

“That I can close my eyes & make you//mine on loan is a miracle////God help me –
”

“a retired train station, too. A maze of different platforms makes you panic – you might miss your ride into oblivion.”

The bravery on display doesn’t just result from exposing the extremes of mental and emotional states – (“I refuse to describe the tangible world in signs anymore. Since Google killed/the lyric, all we have inside//(states, not traits)”) – but on laying out spare relational settings (objects in a room; mundane images) and somehow managing to link the humble beginnings to interesting, even profound, observations, and all this through transitions that, initially, seem maximally disjointed.

Here I note that her editor was Ken Babstock. I don’t normally comment on a book’s editor, publisher, or designer, preferring to let the poems speak without the support system, not that that system is unimportant – far from it – but that those details can easily veer into the ‘business’ of poetry, important for sure, but also dangerous in that false conclusions, or at least banal ones, can be drawn from the links. In I left nothing inside on purpose, though, Babstock’s influence shows. His latest book, On Malice, now four years in the rear view mirror, uses flatness and disjunction to mirror emotional reactions to history as impersonal insult. Howell has learned well, and has added her own deft touches, dependent on no one.

Catherine Owen's Dear Ghost,

Catherine Owen’s previous poetry collections have stuck pretty closely to an all-encompassing thematic: life in the fast lane of a metal band; grief over, and elegies to, a dead lover (twice); studies of other artists (Egon Schiele and Robinson Jeffers). In her latest collection, Dear Ghost,, the focus is on herself (though there’s also an extended section on others), including artistic excitement during childhood and work experiences in the present. Unlike many other poets who rework the same source material until every mundane detail, post-wringer, is rank and dry, Owen has had a varied and interesting life that can withstand (with caveats) the frequent dead-ends and narcissistic concentration that overwhelms lesser efforts in the autobiographical mode.

This is Owen’s best volume. Always bold and engaging, she shows a deeper vulnerability here that works lyrically to hold the emotion while also, paradoxically, setting it free. The excellent “Against Billy Collins’ Refusal to Read Poems called ‘My Grandfather’s Binoculars’ ” ends, after a curious exploration giving the lie to Collins’ typically facile and jokey remonstrance, with, “the small ships drift by and I want to mark their names,/to enter their fierce ceremony of water for awhile.”

The same problems apparent in her earlier work also surface in Dear Ghost, , though their evidence is more scant. Questionable (or outright wrong) word choices intrude. Thoroughbred horses aren’t “shot” when they break down, which softens much of the sting and (otherwise) complex rage of “Just the Way Things Are (He Said)”. And, with “The Window Washer”, I have a hard time with the verb wherein a wind “bashes him into his bucket”. These are faults of overwriting, or, more particularly, raising the stakes for a falsely heightened dramatic effect.

Owen publishes too much (volumes, and poems within volumes), but her best poems, and there are many here (“When I Love Film the Most”, “Residual Lingerie”, “The Dildo Craftsman”, “Swallows’ Nests of Isla de Janitzio, Michoacan”, “The Combination”), dominate the more negligible efforts with their intense lyricism and sharp observational capture.

Jeff Latosik's Dreampad

Pick up most any poetry journal or magazine from the past 50 years and you’ll meet at least two, possibly 50, poems of mild observation, event or anecdote – the crushed roadside raccoon, the carrot steaming in the pot, grandfather’s rheumy eyes. One reaches the end of the poem with unbearable ennui, and hastens to the next page, fingers crossed for a more enlightening guide.

Quite a few of Jeff Latosik’s poems start out on (not metrically) similar feet. Moving through a house, playing guitar, sliding a hand inside his parka, checking a bump on his knee. These are openings to poems from his 2018 collection Dreampad, but Latosik has an interesting and inquisitive mind which is able to branch off in many directions from such humble sources. Time and space are the author’s primary considerations. Nothing ever ‘begins’ in the usual generative sense, anyway, and Latosik’s observations are fascinating to follow as they link to concurrent and disparate thought patterns, time loops, and speculative outcomes based on shifts in spatial possibility. This may begin to sound like sci-fi tomfoolery, but only to the unimaginative, obtuse, or stubbornly prosaic. There is much to latch onto here, and, far from the emotional plastic landfill of an Adam Dickinson, Latosik’s ruminations often run parallel with wise sadness, cautious acceptance, and transitive joy.

The anecdote’s usual goal, in a standard poem, is a set-up for the reassuring – or, at least, hopeful – epiphany, boring and solemn as an Oral Roberts telethon. The religiose comparison is also apt in that the reader is asked to join the writer, through an emotional sales job, in hazy communal faith. Latosik undercuts all that malarkey. “To know that no one and nothing is coming” begins “Oath of an Unaffiliated Boy Scout”. How’s that for immediate black irony? But progression is still possible, through reversal: “To know it will take many years but might not”, “To know there’s no bedrock but still agree”, and “To live, for as long as you can, in the difficulty”. There’s a church I could get used to attending! But what’s a church without good music?

Latosik’s wayward thought processes wouldn’t seem to be suitable for formal designs, but, moreso that in his first two volumes, Dreampad is notable for internal rhyme, close-shouldered assonantal comparisons, and chiming unrhymed gerunds. As well, he relaxes into a more personal mode, which helps to relieve abstract congestion that tended to mar some of the poems from his first two collections. Here, to illustrate, are just a few passages, but there are many standout poems throughout: “[y]ou’re met,/ as ever, by the range of choices your qualm half fits,/a cache of wants crushed on a touchpad of options/that feel as though they’ve been free-floating//and present forever.” (“Troubleshoot”); “But what I am now can’t/be made real to whoever was once lying there.” (“Silverado”); “It wasn’t a place, but you could go there.” (“The Internet”); “spike the microphones in the grass/so no one sings; and spin again the giant carousel/I must step off to just see anything.” (“The Bright Note”).