Within the next year, the majority of my closest friends and I will turn “the big 4-0,” – a milestone, sure, but one not as earthshaking as it seemed when my parents and their peers ventured over the hill. Of course, some of the stereotypical debates remain: whether to cut our hair above our shoulders, stop ordering kid’s meals to save money. For the most part, though, we see aging as a privilege.
One privilege that comes with aging in the literary world is bearing witness to friends’ growing bibliographies. Lately, I’ve been fortunate to celebrate pals’ book birthdays nearly every month. In this feature, I want to shout out three new poetry collections I’m particularly rooting for – not just for their skillful verse, but for the stellar humans who penned them.
Grief Slut
by Evelyn Berry
Sundress Publications
January 2024
If you google the term “literary citizen,” photos of Evelyn Berry should flood the image results. I don’t know anyone who works harder to promote literary life than she does, which is one reason I was thrilled when she announced her first full-length collection of poems, Grief Slut – a volume that is daring, playful, and also a study in restraint.
Berry’s first poem is “praise song in lieu of obituary,” one of several poems in which she shows “care and compassion” for her dead name: “bless my body, prelude to a corpse, / prologue to whatever comes next. bless / the boy born here. bless my body for / holding my body long enough to / imagine a future. derek, silly, sweet / derek.” In “queer ecology,” the target audience changes, as does Berry’s tone:
don’t be surprised: i’m a redneck wussy
moonshinesloppy with a limp wrist
town crier sobbing on the street corner
they’ll get used to the lipstick
same like the scupadine’s fleshsweet pulp
i’m here
sure as roadkill
The sonic-sounding wordplay as a vehicle for hold-no-punches endings is a hallmark of this collection and can be seen in a number of Berry’s poems. I’ll share one more favorite here – from “county fair”: “i lick each star. / hold them in my cheeks / like luminescent jawbreakers.”
Dirt Songs
by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Eastover Press
February 2024
Kari Gunter-Seymour and I met in 2017 when on assignment for Rebecca Gayle Howell’s poetry class at the Appalachian Writers Workshop. We were looking for treasures in the Hindman, Kentucky, dirt. Now, she is Poet Laureate of Ohio and she’s just published her fifth collection of poems: Dirt Songs – not about our scavenging, but about her adolescence and young adulthood in Ohio. Dedicated “to all the invisible girls,” the poems in Dirt Songs are honest, heartbreaking, and hopeful portraits of the past.
In “Sometimes I Picture You Walking Too Far Ahead,” Gunter-Seymour sets this scene: “We wore Carhartt bibs, Red Wing boots, / denim ball caps turned backwards, / smoked Marlboros, ganja when we could get it [. . . ] sang Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time.” The carefree narrative builds for four and a half stanzas before foreshadowing the drowning of a close friend. Gunter-Seymour laments, “All I know is this loneliness of body, / curse the way my legs still carry me forward.”
In “Photo 1985,” “Oshkosh bibs and tiny / red tennis shoes” prompt memories of “pole beans and Roma tomatoes in raised beds,” “zip-locked zucchini loaves rested in the deep freeze,” longing for “the smell / of lilac from the heirloom bush were you would hide,” “Those last afternoons we walked the tracks hand in hand, / making up songs, going nowhere.”
The Intimacy of Spoons
by Jim Minick
Madville Publishing
March 2024
Question: Who wakes up one day and thinks, “Spoons really don’t get the attention they deserve”? Answer: Jim Minick, my former colleague at Augusta University. The underappreciated piece of cutlery is the focus of his third poetry collection, The Intimacy of Spoons. Through Minick’s eyes, we are called to consider the literal and metaphorical meanings of the verb and noun forms of spoon – sometimes by not mentioning the spoon at all. In “To Spoon,” he asks, “Can you bang forks and get a song?” and “Can you play knives without getting hurt?” Of course not; “To spoon is not to knife – / that’s what we do too often / to bodies and silence” […] “To spoon is to slip into sleep / and the same soft, slow breath.”
Songs appear throughout this collection, too, and it wouldn’t be a Jim Minick book without mention of birds. A lifelong birder, Minick’s “Why Birds?” is a love poem, for the avifauna and for his wife, Sarah, to whom Spoons is dedicated:
How they make me remember—
the sound of the gone ivory-billed
I learned from listening to LPs
with my grandfather;
[…]
or the pileated that flew across
a country road at eye-level,
and we not yet married
and you yanking the wheel
back across the yellow line
as we crested a hill.
You knew then I was mad
with love for you and for birds
and you still said yes […]
It is my hope that you will say “yes” to one or more of these recommendations. This summer, break from the typical beach read and toss one of these volumes in your straw tote or add them to your TBR as you stock up for this year’s Sealey Challenge, in August. You won’t be disappointed.
Southern Review of Books 