Reviews – East Jasmine Review

10 Nov

Review: Hearts Forged in Resistance

Chella Courington meditates on profound personal moments and on arresting news tragedies in her latest chapbook, Hearts Forged in Resistance (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her evocative work illuminates themes of womanhood, violence, hope, sorrow, and, of course, resistance.

The poem, “Resilience,” which discusses cancer, resonated strongly with me, as I lost my father last year to cancer and a cousin has been battling it for years. The lines “I feel it//how it might again pull at my nipple//and slip through my ribs” provide me with insight on what it must feel like to not only live through cancer, but to survive it. The poem’s gutting depiction helped me reflect on the profound emotional and physical challenges that come with confronting this disease.

Her poem, “Strength,” about Ukraine, contains the title of the collection as the last line. In this poem, Courington writes about buying sunflowers. In the act of arranging them in a vase, she is reminded of Ukraine, a country closely associated with sunflowers. The normally bright flowers change to represent a nation embroiled in a harrowing and ongoing conflict. Her simple handling of them becomes a weighty rumination on surviving through our tumultuous times.

I fully recommend this short collection of poems. Courington navigates the intricacies of the personal experience of the zeitgeist, intertwining themes of perseverance and the indomitable nature of resistance. Her language evokes a visceral response to life’s struggles and the never-ending doom-cycle of the news. Her words are a testament to the power of poetry in conveying profound understanding and powerful resistance to violence.

Hearts Forged In Resistance is available from Finishing Line Press now: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/hearts-forged-in-resistance-by-chella-courington/

26 Sep

Review: The Moon, My Lover, My Mother, & The Dog

Randomly inspired and yet meticulously woven, The Moon, My Lover, My Mother, & The Dog, written by Daniel McGinn, is so fervently raw, it serves as a glimpse inside the process of a poet coming to fruition. “I don’t know what to write about I tell her…” McGinn states upon the opening of his second collection of poetry. “Just follow the light she says/the light is free to go wherever it wants she says/as she goes to the candle she keeps on the table/and lights its brittle wick.”

At once honest and masterfully written, McGinn effortlessly leads readers down a rabbit hole of poetic snap-shots and slice-of-life reveries that range from the complexities of childhood to the inevitability of death within the span of pages. In the poem “Mother Laughing,” McGinn effectively resurrects his mother in a stream-of-consciousness piece that juxtaposes the memory of her making strawberry ice cream to the vast feeling of emptiness the poet experiences as he mirrors her same behaviors, albeit, without her. “Roll it with the scoop your mother owned, it’s been in the kitchen drawer for at least 40 years. It belongs in your hand. Some things never change.” By reconstructing a memory with language, as well as highlighting the subliminal effects this memory has on the author, McGinn delicately forges a new line between past and present, grief and remembrance, and solidifies the idea that just because someone is gone, it does not mean they are forgotten.

Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of The Moon, My Lover, My Mother, & The Dog, is its sequencing structure, which is determined by content, and not traditional linear timelines. In the “The Passenger,” McGinn discusses a conversation he had with his father while driving a Grand Prix. “Every time you win two hands in a row, double your bet. Play your cards right, I do and that’s how I got this fine automobile…” In the subsequent poem, “The Mountain,” the author contrasts this moment with a darker one he experiences in his own truck, as an adult. “I cussed and smudged-up the inside of my window in hard circles like I’d smudged-up my life and I felt older than this beat-up tuck, which was all I could afford.” By breaking the fourth wall of the page, and allowing readers to have a more intimate view of a poet’s inner monologue, these concepts, loosely woven into recurring images, allows the collection to move as fast as the timing of life. Blink, and it’s over, the reader left to flurry the pages, reaching for whatever he or she might have missed from in-between the lines.

30 Jul

Review of Drop and Dazzle by Peggy Dobreer

Review by Julianne Carew

Drop and Dazzle

At once transient and yet powerfully grounding, Peggy Dobreer’s poetry collection, Drop and Dazzle, leads readers through an assemblage of life’s most defining moments, including birth, death, and every human emotion that can be found in between. By contrasting the intimacies of everyday life with the vastness of the universe, Dobreer successfully encapsulates the intensity of the corporeal experience, while at the same time making it clear that “we are stardust, hardly a thought, a fleeting note on its way to a verse or song.”

From the collection’s first poem, “Climbing the Moment of Birth,” Dobreer emphasizes an internal relationship with the outside world, and the impact this has on an individual. She states, “On a war-tired base, under desert skies, the only thing I remember of my birth is the smell of death.” By sensually connecting the first moments of existence with the reality of its imminent conclusion, Dobreer stresses the immediacy of life, the fragility of all that it has to offer, and sets the stage for the work that follows.

Sprinkled throughout Drop and Dazzle is the subject of continuity, and how the creation of something inevitably marks the beginning of its end. In “Genesis,” Dobreer writes, “Like, force, it has no opposition/until something moves against it.” In poetically highlighting the natural observer effect that humanity unconsciously adheres to, Dobreer emphasizes the simple fact that life has meaning because we provide it. Life, storytelling, the very idea of artistic expression, it is all a way of reacting to a force in which we have no control over. Dobreer follows up with this concept in a later poem, “Ashes to Ashes,” which concludes with the phrase, “You can finally forget the world, return unto the earth.”

In conjunction with thought-provoking, philosophical concepts, there are many sobering moments throughout the collection that speak for the immense struggles of the human experience. In “The Hands of Glory,” Dobreer brings attention to the obscured focus of public opinion when she describes a public execution. After a man is put to death and his handkerchief is stolen, “the execution crowd disbursed, they mourned the loss of the miracle, maybe more so than the life of the man on the rope.” On a more personal note, she later continues, “I checked. My breath was there/becoming deeper, more pronounced, the way breath will in the presence/of a body without one gasp left.”

In short, Drop and Dazzle lives up to its title. At once dazzling and thought-provoking, Dobreer’s ethereal literary voice leaves readers breathless, feeling at once empowered, and humbled within the star-studded universe she creates within the constructs of a page.

04 Jun

Poetry Book Review: “Babbage’s Dream” by Neil Aitken

Babbage’s Dream Book Review
by Julianne Carew, Fiction Editor
The East Jasmine Review

Full of quotations, Bible verses, definitions, and intimate portrayals of the man who can arguably be hailed the founder of the digital age, Babbage’s Dream, written by Neil Aitken, is no ordinary collection of poetry. It is a poetic testament to the interdisciplinary studies of mathematics and humanity, religion and technology, and one man’s revolutionary passion in quantifying a seemingly intangible universe.

In today’s digitized world of instantaneous communication and innumerable social media platforms, it is easy to get lost in the vast coding of data that we have come to know as cyberspace. But before there was Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, there was Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first mechanical computer. It is through the influence of Babbage’s life and work that Aitken draws his poetic inspiration.

Before the collection’s opening poem, “Begin,” Neil Aitken introduces readers to a quote by William Carlos Williams that summarizes his take on the work that follows. “A poem is a large, (or small) machine made out of words.” Beginning with this opening statement, Aitken is already emphasizing a close relationship between artistic expression and technological advances. He is making it clear that throughout his collection of poetry, each word is, in itself, a piece of a greater whole, a small, yet essential part of a literary machine that works to make sense of man’s relationship with that which he has created.

In his poem, “Binary,” Aitken juxtaposes computer code, a combination of zeros and ones, with language, in a successful attempt to display how seemingly random, inconsequential patterns create the blueprint for the computerized world. “0000,” becomes, “Absence stretched to extremity, nothingness in all quarters.” “0001,” becomes, “at the far reaches of a void, a glimmer.” By personifying data code with descriptive human emotions, Aitken bridges the gap between man and machine, art and technological discovery, and gives precedence to the system on whose back the modern world operates.

In addition to drawing parallels between a wide range of topics, Neil Aitken uses a variety of literary techniques to further solidify his idea that art and science, religion and culture, are each mechanisms through which man creates meaning out of the chaos of the universe. In his poem, “Void,” Aitken utilizes an alteration on the cut-up technique, first introduced by the early 1960’s writer, William S. Burroughs.

“Of those machines //the mind of gears, the heart, a spring

by which we produce power//ever-winding, a chorus of marionettes…”

By using two different columns that can be read both independently, and as two pieces of a whole, Aitken reiterates the crucial emotional and physical space technology has overtaken in our modern world.

Due to its broad subject matter and harmonious artistic rhythm, Babbage’s Dream can easily be devoured in one sitting. Much like the spark of genius that propelled the centuries’ subsequent scientific breakthroughs, Aitken’s poems are each a blazing testament to the elasticity of the human mind, the seamlessness through which various fields of study attribute within themselves, and an invaluable reminder that all people, thoughts, and ideas are each a crucial piece, solidifying a never-ending whole.

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09 Jun

Book Review: Clifton Snider’s “The Beatle Bump”

Book: The Beatle Bump by Clifton Snider

Genre: Poetry

Reviewer: K. Andrew Turner

The Beatle Bump, by Clifton Snider (Los Nietos Press), is a work of adoration, contemplation, and emulation. Written mostly after the murder of John Lennon, Snider explores the playful lyrical style of the Beatles in his own songs. He digs into the roots of the Beatles, how they started and who influenced them. But above all, this is an ode from a fan to the musicians themselves.

Through exploration, Snider brings up letters that would not be out of place in the here and now. Love letters to Ringo and George, by fans that want nothing more than recognition and that ardor returned. Perhaps looking into our pop culture boy bands of the last few years: One Direction, N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, Boyz II Men, etc will yield similar letters. All these bands have their loyal followers, their fans that scream and shout and oftentimes lay bare their feelings freely, and some say excessively. Perhaps the only thing that has changed is our attitude for those women (in particular) that simply throw themselves at these stars. Snider never judges these Beatlemaniacs, as his poetry feels right on the edge of the precipice. He understands why we fawn over such innocent-seeming men and why they pull us in with magnetism.

Each poem reflects hours of listening to music, absorbing, jamming along, and feeling in those deep moments spent late at night wondering just how someone so far away, so distant could “get” you. In some of the song forms, he playful enters the arena of lyrics riffing on some of the nonsense but provocative stylistic choices.

And Snider reflects on the darkness that follows each Beatle around, from drugs to loss, and death. He explores, throughout the book, how he was affected by each Beatle, by the band as a whole, and by the world-wide impact the band had. In the later poems, when he explores Liverpool, with each snap of the camera and each line of the poem, the reader comes to understand, full-circle, the brilliance and the nostalgic pangs of a young man desperate to connect to something that so powerfully impacted him.

This work is phenomenal in and of itself, and any fan of the Beatles, or music history in general, should pick up a copy. Those who have been transfixed by music or any fan of a band will understand the deeper meanings here as well.

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K. Andrew Turner
@KAndrewTurner
Publisher, East Jasmine Review

writes literary and speculative fiction, poetry, and dabbles in nonfiction as well. Growing up in the foothills of San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California has influenced his writing style and outlook on life. So far, his writing has appeared in Chiron Review, Carnival Magazine, Creepy Gnome, Lummox, A Few Lines Magazine, and publications by Bank-Heavy Press. K. Andrew Turner is a creative mentor and freelance editor, teaches creative writing, and is the publisher and founder of East Jasmine Review. www.kandrewturner.com