Guevara, Cher. “Valley Blues”, Writing Knights Press, 2018.

An Epic Poem

Amos Lassen

One of the things I love best about reviewing is watching writers mature both in content and in style. A young poet named Walter Beck approached me in 2012 and asked if I would be interested in reviewing his work and of course I agreed as I always do with new writer. Between 2012 and 2015, I wrote thirteen posts about young Beck and then quiet. I just assumed that the well was dry and besides I had so much to do, I didn’t really think about it. Then one day, I noticed a familiar face on Facebook and I realized that Walter Beck had become Cher Guevara.

“A cold voice,

what are you doing here, Beck?

My spirit replies,

I’m hearing the beautiful music

From the dry hills

And my name is Cher”.

I must say that I was not really surprised by the physical transformation. I had always thought of Beck as someone quite radical and I felt that there would always be surprises. His poetry was always radical but I must admit that I had not thought about the poet (I am trying to be careful with pronouns) and gender but that was my problem and not Beck’s.

“Valley Blues” is an ambitious undertaking just as changing from Walter Beck to Cher Guevara is ambitious and they both succeed. I love that Cher, the person, stands up for what is right and I certainly saw that in Beck’s early poems which now seem to me to be more angry that what I read in “Valley Blues”. Do not misunderstand me, there is anger but it more like being discontent than really boiling.

I understand that Cher wrote “Valley Blues” while in the western desert and I cannot think of a better place to find one’s stream of consciousness. I remember when I was a young (and good-looking) graduate student having gone to spend some time in Arizona for a Proust weekend. With great people and a little help from some substance, I appreciated Proust more than I had before or since. I have often wondered if when becoming someone else. One has to destroy the former being. If I understand Cher correctly, the new being came about as a result of destruction and self-discovery. Cher uses images that hit close to home:

“Dressing in fishnets and make up

in the July moonlight…

An old friend calls

tells me home is burning

The land of my rebirth

Is collapsing in chaos.”

This is the saga of the search for a road out of an exile that has lasted nearly a decade. Cher Guevara is from Avon, Indiana , not place where I imagine there are many gender queer people living so I can’t help but see him as a marked person and I can only imagine what life must be like for the poet. Nonetheless, Cher has made a name as a poet of the Indiana underground. Believe it or not this is his tenth book and in my opinion, the most mature of them.

There is a great deal that I can say about what the poetry brings us but I do not want to ruin the reading experience for anyone else. This is not just a read but a full and total experience. Cher mentions that they have become selfish over the years and would like some credit for the many changes that have come about. This, for me, was the only place I saw indulgence. What I do see more than anything else is a cry for acceptance. While we may not all be the same, there is humanity that unites us and we want to revel in that freely and liberated.

“Forget ‘em”.

Don’t let the bastards

Get you down.”

The poetry comes with wonderful pictures of Cher. He see him on his voyage and we are with him when “he keeps his blues songs alive”. Don’t miss this chance to meet a dynamic voice about the way we live.

sax, sam. “bury it”, Wesleyan Press, 2018.

Looking At Death and Desire

Amos Lassen

sam sax’s “bury it” opens with poems written responding to several highly publicized young gay suicides in the summer of 2010. sax gives us visceral meditations on death, rites of passage, the Diaspora translation, personhood and desire. We, with the poet look at the choices and the mistakes we make and we question them. These are poems of discovery and just in case we have forgotten, sax reminds us that the heterosexual world has ruled over us, dismissed us and tried to erase us totally. Many have been driven to take our own lives and sax will not let us forget those who did. In the poems, we read the silent desires of those who were unable to vocalize them because of shame and fear. We question the society that has allowed this to happen and we say Kaddish for them remembering that it is a prayer that does not mourn but rather praises where no praise is due. Personally, I find Kaddish the most difficult prayer to recite for someone I have loved and I have done so many, many times. It is the finality of those words that maker death so real.

I love that sax also resurrects those beautiful men we have lost as he writes about death and desire. Regardless of cause of death (disease, cancer, suicide, AIDS), they return to us through remembering them and their lives, their eroticism and their humanity. They were part of us but are gone and gone with them are their worlds. We did not have to know them; they existed and they were part of us just as we were part of them.

Drawing on his queer and Jewish identities, sax morns the physical and what it might have been. He challenges gender with “i never wanted to grow up to be anything horrible as a man […] i prayed for a different kind of puberty […]”: “it’s not that we’re all born” “genderless, though we are.” Art is a commentary on society and these poems offer an alternative to what have becomes traditional perspectives on gender and suggest that identity itself is not fixed.

The poems look at mourning from many different perspectives and from many different aspects, “maybe i can’t see you now without also seeing you dead.” Mourning can also come before death like when an illness is discovered. We are all impermanent and we all will die. We must accept this while at the same time keeping a loved one alive in our mind.

Rejecting the notion of death as permanent just as he rejects fixed gender reminds us just how nuanced death is and what it means to bury not just the body but everything else as well.

Tortorella, Nico. “all of it is you.: poetry”, Crown Archetype, 2018

Exploring “All of It”

Amos Lassen

In all fairness, I must admit that until I heard about this book, I had no idea who Nico Tortorella but after reading the poem that he wrote about his penis, I knew he has to be an OK guy. However, I am not sure that a career as a “penis poet” will give him a comfortable style of living.

This is Tortorella’s debut poetry collection and in it we hear his voice that is filled with curiosity, awe and love. Nico is an actor, an advocate and a podcaster who lives with no boundaries. He takes us on a sensuous journey into who we are and how we deal with the world around us. He lets us know that the connections that we make in life are important to the understanding of who we are. His poems are provocative and filled with emotion and they hit us hard. While this is a debut collection, I cannot believe that Tortorella is a debut poet. Every word, every verse is important and he knows what he is doing here and his poems are both raw and real.

In his poetry, Tortorella looks at his own identity, gender, addiction and sex. Yes, he writes about his penis but he also writes about menstruation. It seems that to him, nothing is out-of-bounds. His interest in human sexuality is well felt here.

Bidart, Frank. “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

WINNER OF THE 2018 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY AND THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

Amos Lassen

The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices, Frank Bidart has the ability to turn the body into language and dares to go into the dark places of the human psyche. This new Pulitzer Prize winning volume, “Half-Light” contains a all of Bidart’s previous books, and a new collection, “Thirst”. On “Thirst”, Bidart examines his life before he moves on to do something new. It is here that he sees himself as one who is still searching for who he is and on of the “queers of the universe.” Throughout the entire collection, Bidart is a visionary with revelations and both unguarded and intimate. He is an unresolved conflict that is constantly renewed who is eternally restless.

Here is a collection of fifty years of poetry that gives voice to what goes on inside of both real and imagined people. It some senses it is autobiographical.

Bidart has the ability to transform a poem into “a vocalized (albeit anguished) performance of consciousness and moral interrogation, an occasion for metaphysical speculation that is oracular and sublime.” Then there are Bidart’s thoughts on

homophobia, doubt, and a parent’s confusing love can shape a gay child. Bidart gives us an invocation of love even where that love no longer exists and thoughts on friendship and mortality.

Bidart is intense and this comes out of need, desire and his own art as a poet. He shows us what it means to be human.

Wade, Julie Marie. “Same-Sexy Marriage”, AMidsummer Night’s Press, 2018.

Fragile “Straightness”

Amos Lassen

Have you ever thought of marriage at the same time as thinking of taboos? I bet none of us have with the exception, perhaps of Julie Marie Wade who has not only thought about but has written a poem cycle about “same sexy marriage”.

“Speculation turns to circumstance and back again” as we read about unspoken truths, final understandings and/or misunderstandings with exes. We see that finality just does not really exist or like my mother used to say, “When God closes the door, a window is opened.” exes. For Wade’s characters, finality is in flux.

I wish someone had been around to record my facial expressions as I read these poems. There are tricks and surprises all along the way. Wade sees the world clearly and shares her perspective with us. She also shares her mother who lives in her own world but every so often visits the world of her daughter… to stir things up a bit.

“she is quick to explain…”

“My mother would like the idea of Maine,

like Main Street and mainstream American values…”

“She will have packed a dinner for them—“

We have hear a world that lacks compassion and that assumes the worst of any situation.

As Wade looks at the world, she remarks that to live in it is “how it feels to be living in a typo”. She brings us the vulnerability of what she calls straight America and American values along with her mother’s absolute and determined unwillingness to accept her daughter’s lesbian relationship by making up a story for herself and everyone else.

If I married him, Reader–this surgeon/this Jeffrey Hamilton–I must have loved him./And my mother says, to anyone who will listen,/that I married him.

Her mother selects not only the husband, but also his occupation, and where they live and if they will have children.

Granted this is totally audacious and for more than shocking. There are no scared cows here and Boston gets its fair share as does the concept of Boston marriage. “Even if we were too women older and otherwise occupied…”. I had no idea what to expect before I sat down to read this collection but I soon realized that the poems carried me away and I was both entertained and inspired. The inspiration comes from the fact that the poet does not hold back and says things as they are. I realized that I was reading something different by this strangest event. As I sat down to write this review and would finish a paragraph, it would delete itself letter by letter as I sat and watched. Twice my review disappeared before my very eyes and I have no idea how or why that happened.

I do not usually pick favorites but I do have to quote a few lines from (and this is the third time I am typing this) “Mary Cheney You Know What They Say About Women Like Us”:

“That we’re dykes because we have daddy issues”.

“That we’re bitter because nobody asked us to the Prom”.

“This whole homosexuality business started in the 1960s. Your mother and I got married, then watched the world around us fall to the fornicators and the bigamist and the sodomites”.

In less than 70 pages, I found so much to like here and cannot find the words to show how much. Get a copy and enjoy. And yes, this review did disappear twice.

Van de Vendel, Edward. “The Sexy Storm”, translated by David Colmer, A Midsummer’s Night Press, 2018.

Adolescent Love

Amos Lassen

I bet we can all remember that adolescent crush that occupied our minds endlessly and in fact, we still think about it. Let’s face it teen love is very special with its “thrills and chills” and its tender passion. After all, what do adolescents know of love? Edward Van de Vendel looks at that very same emotion in his collection of poems about young love and each and every entry is a treat. The poems run the gamut of emotions from the joys and pleasure of meeting for the first time to he pain and sorrow of love ending. Age has no influence on the enjoyment of these poems simply because we have all been there. One does not have to be young to enjoy reading about youth just as one does not have to be gay to write a gay love story (Andre Aciman has surely proven that).

I love that Van de Vendel writes with such detail yet his poems remain informal. In “Hallelujah, I was knocked out by “love’s trunk grows strong with annual rings and sends new shoots up in the spring”. There is nothing new here except for the way it is said and the way it is placed in the context of the poem. Not only are we taken back in time, we are made aware that we are reading the past with all of its youthful allusions to sex and feeling, “I feel your goosebumps too”. The poems capture those special moments that we do not let go of and makes sure that we feel them again.

“I’m standing here

With kisses tipped,

So:

If you’re still keen,

I’ll slide in between.”

We certainly sense Van de Vendel’s confidence in what he says and his writing is both sensual and dark ;

“How can I not be more aware

that this body in the bed

makes sleep deeper and more beautiful

makes dreams more childlike?

I was reminded of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” that he referred to as a memory play. These are memory poems that take us back while at the same time keeping us here.

It’s in the past and none of it is now and every day I think:

Will I see you again? I look up. It might not happen

Soon, but the world is open at the top.

Sometimes we all just need to get away and I found “The Sexy Storm” to be a great retreat. With only 40 pages, a poem a day is fine and then it is easy enough to start all over again. The poems never go stale.