8th & Agony
Rich Ferguson
ISBN 978-0-9851293-6-1
Punk Hostage Press
135 pages

Reviewed by Kelli Allen

In the introduction to Rich Ferguson’s debut poetry collection, 8^th & Agony, Bob Holman writes that “the words come at you like it’s just a conversation among folks, but then it’s like he’s talking thunder.” Yes, thunder, but also the smoothness of a barely recognizable wind, and the sensual wet of steady rain, and the oppressive need of dry dessert heat to occupy every space, every particle of the air. Ferguson’s poems are like that—they are organic, alive, part of an atmosphere we all live within, but seldom take the time to discuss and dissect. His words are for us and –of- us, becoming at once a celebration of the breathing body and also a communion with the words we give to each other—this gift of language from one group of folks to another, from the poet to waiting listener.

It is difficult not to image a shade of Whitman in this collection, which is broken into three sections: Origins & Sin, Journey & Suffering, and Destiny & Enlightenment. Ferguson invokes the desire to be seen as physical presence, to share his personal experience of his relationship to the objects in the shaky, temporal world and then offer explanation and explication for why his own impressions are vital, important. His voice does not allow us to look away from the damaged buildings lining a street, or the damaged women and men swimming through one stage of living into another. There is much of The Hero’s Journey sketched-out in these sections. We can imagine Jung’s bright mandala circling its elephants, horses, bows, princes, maidens, arrows, and gold as we read through these poems.  Ferguson begins his own quest with “Where I Come From.” In this poem he offers us this notion of beginning, of birth, both ugly and visceral, and reverent with quirky abstractions:

I come from Are you sure we should be doing this?

From the Grim Reaper’s belly button lint,
………babbling Scrabble pieces, and an abracadabra thesis.
I come from the vibration of bells;
………bells singing down into
………the places deep inside us,
places deep inside us that say…

Every moment is a breath / Every breath is a word /
Every word is love / Every love is now /
Every now is everything…
 
I come from hummingbird beer burps,
………..from evening’s first song in a cricket church.

The physical body is present in all of the poems in this electric collection. We are given moments of the body’s first pleasures, its anguish, its unpleasant realities, and its closeness to mortality. Ferguson wants us to remember that we are skeletal, and that our own journeys give us flesh. He tells us this while always remembering where the structure begins, as in “Bones:” “Sometimes I feel like I’m filled with bones—/Bird bones/Lullaby bones/bones sung heartbroken and moaning through some/Hangover Radio bones/Dust bones/Shadow bones/Alone bones.” There is Ginsberg in this poem, and some very early Ferlinghetti, and we are treated to Ferguson’s interpretation of the Beat vibe, the roll and swish of the hip as we bounce from short line to short line.

There are stories in these poems, too. Narratives of boy-meets-girl-explodes-in-lust-pain-joy populate the collection. Titles sing their own brief tales such as “Grow Wings or Cease to Be,” “Because of Camp,” and “world without dogs.” Ferguson is above all a storyteller, or rather, a story singer. He uses language to continue our oldest traditions of gifting the tale, sharing the fabric of verse through sound. These poems beg to be said aloud, and more than once.

“we voice sing,” a nod to Philip Levine, functions in style as song lyrics formed into a poem with the backslash signifying breaks in tone, meter, bridges. I think of Etheridge Knight and his sexy swaying jazz poems, which used this same style to make the reader sing the lines, feel the breaths between verses. This oddity in form comes toward the end of the collection and serves as something of a prayer and a call-and-answer for community and togetherness.

There are two prose pieces (“A Dedication” “On Becoming an Urban Legend”) in the collection, coming toward the book’s end, and their language is a departure from the tone Ferguson tapped into throughout the first two sections. In these long blocks, he decides to tell it like is, give it to the reader straight, with language open and engaged:

This one goes out to those whose spines are lightning rods. No wonder the blazing, brilliant light follows you wherever you go. This one goes out to Generation Elation, Generation Elevation, Generation Regeneration. This one goes out to those who can scrape the old, crippling stories from their bones. Make themselves Tabula Rasa. Blank slate. Brand new day. Anything & everything is possible. This one goes out to all the dogwalkers, streetwalkers, freedom riders & freedom marchers. This one goes out to those who are far from homogeneous. (“A Dedication”)

Here, the dedication is to the Reader, the one being given the package containing the lesson, the one with the swift pat to the shoulder, the smile from poet to reader, the author’s heart open, pulsing, pushing his message into the ear. In “On Becoming an Urban Legend,” we are shown a map of sorts, in one long rant with comma after comma, sending the reader down the hole of destructive self pity and illusionary redemption, and sadness that we all know too well. He begins with a single, sharp sentence: “Becoming an urban legend is simple.” The prose is anything but simple. Here, as in no other place in the collection, the reader is given a hard mix of the urban, hot, greasy, -now- of the jumbled, voyeuristic coma we frequently try to claw our way past. This is a sexy block of prose, though a real departure from the high-hopefulness of the collections other poems.

I want to say that Rich Ferguson is a mystic poet living in a city where mystiscm is rarely allowed. I want to say that he gives us something of ourselves when he admits, “Yeah, you and me/ we’re tired of crash-and-burning down/ our bird-bone shrines/ to fleeting time.” I want to say to Rich, Thank you for asking me to be brave, to find the beauty in a broken bottleneck, a wandering feather, in my own regret. I want to say, Thank you for asking me to sing with you, however briefly, and letting me return to your poems, your assertions that we are in this together.

Rich Ferguson has shared the stage with Patti Smith, Wanda Coleman, Bob Holman, Ozomotli, and other esteemed poets and musicians. He has performed at the NYC Fringe Festival, the Bowery Poetry Club, and is a featured performer in the film What About Me? He has been published in the LA TIMES, Opium, and has been widely anthologized. Ferguson is a Pushcart-nominated poet, and a contributor and poetry editor to The Nervous Breakdown. His poetry collection 8^th & Agony is out on Punk Hostage Press.

Lines of Flight

by Catherine Chandler
Able Muse Press 2011
ISBN:  978-0-9865338-3-9
Pages: 98

Reviewed by: Richard Wakefield

Whatever else our brains do – or our hearts, if you prefer a more figurative view – they seem as ineluctably dedicated to reading meaning into the world as our lungs are evolved to separate oxygen from air. It’s as natural as breathing, this process of seeing things in the fourth dimension of significance. Call it the confluence of the outer and inner worlds.

Catherine Chandler is one of the skilled and discerning few who help us navigate the resulting stream. In place of the fragments of meaning glimpsed by most of us most of the time, Chandler gives us a coherent view of the course along which we speed. The view sometimes enlarges us, makes us more at home in the world, and at others forces us to look a little more soberly at the vast and frightening void toward which we are hurled.

In “66” she contemplates a coincidence of toponymy: “Along Route 66, connected by / a six-mile stretch of road, two towns align; / one bears his family name, the other mine.” A charming bit of chance, it seems, a bit of geography that reflects an emotional connection, the kind of thing we might notice and recall as an anecdote. But Chandler traces its meaning far beyond the trivial. “The decommissioned highway’s gone to hell,” she continues, and the fading connection between the two towns becomes a metaphor for the complex ambivalence of human relationships. The road connects; the road separates. We find that we and those we love inhabit “universes spinning parallel.” That may not be the meaning we wanted, but it’s more true to experience than the facile sentimentality we might have preferred.

Someone noted once that poetry gives us tools for living. A poem like “66” does exactly that, nudging us out of complacency and into an awareness that will better serve us. The poem acknowledges the separateness that we work so hard to ignore, and yet, paradoxically, it makes us a little less alone by assuring us that we are not alone in our loneliness.

What better occasion for sentimentality than Mother’s Day? And what can be more oppressive than the narrow, mass-produced emotions that holidays can impose on us? In “Mother’s Day” Chandler opens a woman’s heart to reveal wounds that the woman herself cannot express; in fact, as she weeps, the tyranny of expectations makes others blind to the real meaning of her tears. There must be no more profound loneliness than that. We understand the woman better than those closest to her, and perhaps we understand ourselves and our own loved ones a little better for it.

“Supernova” begins by asking why we should “dull” the beauty of nature with “a lapse to metaphor / or scientific fact, or myth.” A telling word, that “lapse.” Our need to analyze, to probe beneath the surface of beauty, can feel like a fall from grace (perhaps it was that very need that drove Eve to eat the forbidden fruit which, after all, was from the tree of knowledge). At the conclusion of three stanzas that seem to celebrate the “burnished afternoon” in preference to what she will later call “logic, reason, purpose, cause,” the poet asks, “Why resort to words / when hush will do?” The answer comes in the second half of the poem, where we learn that the speaker has come to scatter a loved-one’s ashes: “…I find / it’s easier to release you, as I must, / less harrowing by far, / knowing that all human dust / was once a star.” How do we live through loss? The Book of Common Prayer, with its “dust to dust,” assures us that our senses get it wrong when we see mortal remains as mere elemental dust; science, teaching us that all elements had their origins in the fires of supernovas, assures us that there is nothing “mere” about dust. Either way, our consolation – dare we say our salvation? — comes in our ability to see more than motes.

A big part of a writer’s inner life is, of course, literature. It is no surprise to find that the meaning Chandler finds in the world is informed in part by her wide reading, just as there’s no doubt that her own poetry will become part of many readers’ inner lives. The epigraph to “Journey” comes from Robert Frost’s “Hyla Brook,” a poem about how memory conditions our view of what we care deeply about: “We love the things we love for what they are.” What they are, inevitably, is a palimpsest, one impression written over another and over yet another – the sum of our experience of them..

“New Hampshire Interval” pays explicit homage to Frost. At the farm to which Frost returned after his desperate (and successful) quest for recognition in England, Chandler sees the tangible objects, “his Morris chair,” “the woodstove,” “the frosted trees” he tapped for maple sugar (delightful trope, that “frosted), and she sees them all transformed by her knowledge of Frost’s life and work, hears him “speaking to God about the world’s despair.” Just as Frost himself wrote meaning into the landscape, Chandler writes another page of her own, and for us.

“Vermont Passage” also transforms a landscape, describing the profuse flowers of summer that linger in memory after summer gives way to cold: “I breathe in honeyed memories of clover, / and winter, for a while at least, is over.” We live in two worlds, or many worlds: the literal “bitter night” of winter, along with our memory of what was, which is also our expectation of what will be. Chandler gives texture to the flat world. If there’s any truth to the cliché that poetry reminds us to stop and smell the roses, Chandler’s poetry reminds us that we can also revel in the smells and sights that linger in our recollection. It is the remembered roses we smell most poignantly.

“Lines of Flight” ranges far and deeply. The poems display a craft that is all the more impressive for the way it never distracts us from the scene but, rather, adds a dimension of music and, yes, memorable texture.

Catherine Chandler, an American poet born in New York City and raised in Pennsylvania, completed her graduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, where she has lectured in the Department of Languages and Translation for many years. She is the winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems, interviews, essays and English translations from French and Spanish have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia.

Meeting Bone Man

By Joseph Ross

Main Street Rag Publishing 2012

ISBN: 978-1-59948-355-9

Pages: 90

Reviewed by: Cort Bledsoe

Joseph Ross has been a staple of the DC literary community for some time as a teacher, activist, and an amazing poet. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Joseph read several times, and he’s always a profound experience. I’ve had the opportunity to read with him more than once, and frankly, I’ve been nervous about it because I respect his work so much. Joseph Ross is a very rare kind of poet, compared to most (including myself). He rarely writes poems exploring his own experiences; his attentions are turned outwards on social issues, on ignored segments of the population, on the abused and mistreated. But Ross doesn’t lecture or seek to rub the audience’s noses in perceived wrongs; he’s simply exposing things that need to be exposed. He writes poems that matter. With more and more of the audience turning away from the self-absorption of current poetry trends, Joseph Ross is a breath of fresh air.

Ross’ debut collection is one I’ve been waiting for a long time. His writing is beautiful and brave. He opens each section of the book with portrait of the ‘Bone Man’ character, an anthropomorphic incarnation of death: “In the end,/ we all lie down in pieces,/in dry and tilting disarray” he concludes. Ross moves to the Darfur poems, a series of portraits of people and objects in Darfur, each imbued with meaning. “Darfur 1: The Boy” describes wrapping a boy’s corpse:

My hands move as slowly
as they have ever moved.

I carefully wrap
the stiff, brown body

of this child,
in a bright orange and blue cloth.

A boy, seven years old,
very old, for here.

Elbows, like crickets’ legs
teeth, luminous white.

The canvas walls of the tent
gasp for air

as the colored cloth
covers his face.

Ross’s imagery is stunning, not just for the power of the subject, but his description: the ‘elbows, like crickets’ legs’, the teeth, ‘luminous white’. Ross is silent in the presence of the body; he doesn’t rant or rail or try to make the reader feel one way or the other. It’s an impressive display of restraint, and further evidence of his talent. Anyone can write a sad poem about a dead child, but Joseph Ross has written a beautiful one.

Another series in the book is the Cool Disco Dan poems. Cool Disco Dan is a graffiti artist in the DC area. Ross uses this topic to not only shed light on an interesting subculture, but with Cool Disco Dan’s subject matter – frequently on social issues – Ross does double duty and further exposes the injustices faced in the African American inner-city culture. “Because spray paint smells/like anger, his name growls/from walls along the train track,” Ross begins.

Ross excels in finding beauty and significance in overlooked places, whether it be graffiti that many would consider vandalism, or in “The Universal Artificial Limb Company” which might be considered a grotesque subject with certainly a tacky building, but which also produces hope and opportunity in tangible form.

In the second section, “Bone Man Loves Parties,” Ross deals with more personal issues: memories of his mother. In “Grieving,” a beautiful contemplation on loss, Ross begins:

Thinking of her
is kind

of a search, a voyage
of looking

for signs and moments,
shadows and gasps

of her.

In these brief lines, Ross captures loss beautifully. His word choice is perfect. I especially like “gasps//of her”; aren’t memories of someone we’ve lost gasp-enducing?

The third section is “Bone Man Goes to the Beach.” In these poems, Ross deals with groups marginalized and victimized by American culture: African American and homosexual victims of violence and oppression. In “Bone Man is Not My Friend,” Ross deals with his father’s illness, among other things.

But don’t think that these are depression poems beating us over the head with that ever-present guilt-inducer “We need to do more!” As Ross says in “When the Dead Stand Up to Sing”:

Their song is not
of blood and breath.

It cannot just stop
like those things.

Their song is of victory.
Their song is of overcoming,

It is not the music of ashes,
clinging to us all.

It is the music of light
breaking through every crack

in every stone.

And Ross does his damnedest to share that light with us.

Joseph Ross is the finest poet I’ve read who wasn’t long dead with several college buildings named after him. There are a lot of people out there publishing writing they’re calling poems, and I might be one of them, but Joseph Ross is a Poet. Let’s hope his work gets the recognition it deserves. Suffice to say, I can’t wait for his next collection.

Joseph Ross is part of the vibrant literary community in the Washington, D.C. area. His poems appear in many anthologies including Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality, Come Together: Imagine Peace, Full Moon on K Street, and Poetic Voices 1 and 2. His work also appears in a variety of journals including Poet Lore, Tidal Basin Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Drumvoices Revue, and Sojourners. He has read at the Library of Congress and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. An early member of D.C. Poets Against the War, he co-edited Cut Loose The Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib. He founded and directed the Writing Center at Archbishop Carroll High School and now teaches in the English Department at Gonzaga College High School. He writes regularly at JosephRoss.net. 

Otherwise, Soft White Ash 
by Kelli Allen
John Gosslee Books, Sept. 2012
ISBN: 0983365547
Pages: 144

Reviewed by: Melanie Moro-Huber

“Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives?”

–Mary Oliver

There is something of Oliver’s “dark acorn of the heart” being broken open in Kelli Allen’s Pulitzer prize nominated debut collection Otherwise, Soft White Ash -poems and other creatures- An intensely intimate view of familial relationships, Allen grabs the reader and throws them right into those “long black branches.”  The poems in this book contain the visceral terrain of memories seeped with traumatic moments sometimes told through the perspective of child dealing with a suicidal mother. Her poems are richly intertextual; they engage the intellect without mucking it all up with sentiment or pushing us too far into the sensational. Using Jungian landscapes in the tradition of imagists like H.D. and with a pioneering approach similar to Millay and Plath (note the occasional nod to Dickinson) there are veins here, literal and metaphorical, bleeding through each page, and yet not in the grotesque voyeuristic style of an ego-driven author content to wallow in suffering. No, there is no inept stuttering of an ultra-confessional “I…I…I, me…me…me” hemorrhaging here; rather the author’s revelations are more of a Rorschach inkblot, evidence of how poetry with insight and clarity will expose the mythologies we are caught in.  The courageous honesty in the author’s approach is surprisingly uplifting and is very relevant to our cynical doom and gloom culture. It makes me believe, even momentarily, maybe poetry’s main purpose is (or should be) a reconciliatory one, overcoming loss through the ability to express that loss: in other words, there is a healing aspect in Allen’s language.

I am not a big fan of narrative style poetry, a technique Allen employs, but many of the lines in Allen’s poems unexpectedly turn in on themselves as she often pays homage to past masters, for instance:

There is an old poem in which Rumi says:
I don’t like it here, I want to go back.
Yet, there is only going up
when the twigs of our soft nests
have become brittle again
in what we know to be heat and sun,
but hope is a round shade of some beloved
eye watching as we climb, climb hard
and askew toward where our dried grass bowl
allowed us careful haven to be born.

As Allen incorporates words from other poems these words become life-lines, if you will, that the narrator seems to hold to and build from as she adopts them into her lexicon; this is one of the ways she delicately elevates each poem from a one-dimensional narrative into a multi-layered, multi-generational expression of art.  I love when a poet honors the tradition, and our poetic history, treating past poets like they are a part of her family instead of just a bunch of old dead dudes from a bunch of old musty textbooks.

Allen’s introduction is a long poetic prose piece called Orphan Near the Cave. Here, we step away from the allegory of Plato’s cave and past the shadows on the wall right into a Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale.  Through-out the prose sections in the book the narrator references the story The Wild Swans as a parallel to the narrator’s trials within her own family; a traditional fairy tale to correspond with the fairy tale of the traditional family.

The opening paragraph begins:

“If the egg splits, its sides falling open just enough for the fuzz-capped head of the child to emerge, then the story might be allowed to end.  When the egg is found crushed, wet pieces tucked quickly into the open mouth of the tree, then we have little choice but to begin again.  Often, after peeking through loose fingers held as wings over our eyes, we look for fragments, hoping they remain piled, split and sharded, not growing, as magnets, back together.”

The egg becomes emblematic of many facets of birth–one hints at the poet’s awareness of the “birthing” aspect in the poetic process.  As a mother of five Allen has practical physical knowledge of these connections that subtly informs her writing. Several of Allen’s poems reveal the interior workings of the poem so we are often allowed to see not just the delivery but all the ugliness of labor. Although I’ve read and often heard meta-poetry is overly self-conscious and caught up too much in the nuts and bolts of the craft, here I appreciate it as an expression of belief, or maybe even a summoning of like to like, valuing the creative depth and intelligence of each reader. Allen’s meta-poetry makes the self-aware poem seem like a litany. For example, just look at the luminosity here in the poem “Amputated Landscape, Getting Closer to There”

In the line, if a claim is to be made
about the origin of loss,
it can be asserted by plotting
the trilobites on the ocean’s floor
against the orchid heads floating
in their bowl on my desk.

There’s an evolution occurring from one poem to the next. Back to the egg for a moment though, from the opening paragraph the reader can surmise the evolution that occurs after birth happens through destruction; the breaking open of the hard outer shell will reveal the emptiness that follows.  But not just emptiness, it is important to note the reference to wings. “Often after peeking through loose fingers held as wings over our eyes, we look for fragments.” Wings, again, relate back to the story of The Wild Swans.  In this tale there is, of course, the standard wicked step-mother. She jealously turns her step-sons into swans.  The tale is different than the usual wicked step-mother fairy tales because there is no prince; the hero is the little sister who takes on an enormously difficult, seemingly impossible task in order to free her brothers of their cursed wings and give them back human form.  She must painfully weave shirts by hand for each brother from thorny thistle plants. Each shirt she creates leaves her hands bleeding. In a like manner the narrator uses poetry to defeat another mythical mother curse, shame.  Indeed, the poems here are weaved with the sharpest of words.

Let’s move on and talk about the book’s format for a minute. After the introduction, the book is divided into four sections.   The beginning and ending of Allen’s book are long prose pieces.  One could argue that the prose pieces could and should have been condensed into poems, or omitted, as this is a poetry book after all, but the flowing nature of the prose allows for an expansion of the narrative voice that assumes an enlarged Jungian landscape and in this collection it anchors the poems into the concrete archetypal female birthing images: wings, eggs, feathers, and nests.  The four sections of the book are as follows:

1. Otherwise, Soft White Ash
2. Making the Mouth
3. Notes for Elijah
4. Final Wing

Section one, Otherwise, Soft White Ash deals with a type of “curse,” the fear and shame of a daughter who momentarily wishes her mother would just succeed in one of her many suicide attempts so that she would no longer have to suffer with the threat of it hanging over her head. In the poem:  “Unsprung, On the Weak Quiver” the narrator explains how words are helping her overcome this curse.

I read The Lover the same year
my mother was institutionalized
for the second time.  Marguerite Dumas
was able to state what I had long assumed
I believe that always, or almost always,
in all childhoods and in all the lives
that follow them, the mother represents
madness. Our mothers always remain
the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.
Her lines haunt and succor me
and serve to bridge the disconnection.

Here we see how lines from a poem can “haunt” and yet at the same time “succor,” as when a line tries to “trace the origin of loss” it becomes a “bridge” to the “disconnection” which occurs in dysfunctional relationships.  Lines are not just words on a page, Allen suggests, but a pathway to overcoming the emptiness of separation.

In section two, Making the Mouth, the longest section of the book, Allen brings back the fairy tale symbolism, the egg and the wing reappear and in her poem “The Twelfth Swan” she writes of the one brother stuck between worlds, part human, part bird.  The little sister was able to break the curse for the rest of the brothers but something went wrong and she wasn’t able to complete the task for the Twelfth.   Again this connects the reader back to the familial relationships in the first section, an attempt to heal something that cannot be fully healed, words can only do so much, after all, and it points us towards the third section, which is about the author’s son.

The other poem in the Making the Mouth section that draws from the Grimm’s fairy tale also suggests that while curses might be broken in fairy tales, in the real world broken relationships aren’t that easily mended.  From “Four Legs, Two Voices” the narrator assumes the voice of the little sister:

I am a weak companion
whose twelve raving princes
would rather collect feathers
from red throated birds
than share this cracked beach with you.

Still, we ignore everything
Aside from a promise, even
though each other sounds faintly
extinct, post nebular, like whispering
amen behind missing fingers.

Consider the use of italics here: “even though/ each other sounds faintly/ extinct” as it seems to emphasize the mother/daughter relationship and yet at the same time is able to encompass all relationships.  The poem also shows the evolution of self-awareness,

… God,

how horrible I have become
that I want to hurt you, collect
full fisted clusters of sand
to rocket hard in your mouth
and eyes.  Too many times
I have sat on your roof,
swallowing dense dread enough

to taste, enough to burn
rightdoing and wrongdoing
out of potential conversation.

There is a shifting point of view in this poem as the narrator addresses “you,” which is directed towards the archetypal step/mother female figure that Allen conjures in previous poems.  We return our focus to the intimate mother/daughter relationship in the concluding stanza: “Because there is only me/ and only you after all/ and we engage in jumping/but never tragically, / and no closer to reprieve.” The “me” and “you” at times in this collection seem to become one person, a mirror image of self: the mother reflecting/becoming the daughter, wanting to “hurt you” is the daughter reflecting/becoming the mother, and in hurting “you” is the poem suggesting the wish backfires leaving the narrator “no closer to reprieve?”

In section three, Notes for Elijah, the author writes about her own son, bringing in another aspect of familial relationships.  It is particularly difficult (I know from experience, being a mother of five myself) to write about your children in such an intimate way and yet still maintain a sense of autonomy.  As such, for the benefit of the reader, I requested the author’s permission to allow us insight into this relationship and help the reader put the poems in this section in context.  Elijah, like the fairy tale half-bird, half- human brother left in between worlds, is challenged in life because he is not like other children. In her own words, Allen explains:

“[Elijah] has Asperger’s and a significant social anxiety disorder. He is also Bi-Polar, which is rare in a child his age. The combination of these three issues makes parenting him extremely challenging. He is also asthmatic and has a rare fever disorder which means he becomes ill very quickly with high fevers and the cause is unknown (despite thousands of dollars in genetic testing to determine where the fevers may be coming from). The poems deal with his anxieties (and mine) and how vastly different he sees the world compared to his siblings and parents. “Milligrams” refers, in part, to my long hesitance with allowing Elijah to be medicated, and finally understanding, after so many of his rages wherein he hurt himself and me that without medical help, he could not function safely in our world. “One More Stick” refers to the monthly blood tests he must get and the long ritual we go through before and after to prepare. There is much hope in the poems in this section, especially with the more myth driven pieces, and I hope that comes across.”