Four Chapbooks
Reviewer: Janelle Adsit


Casey Quinn
Prepare to Crash and Other Poems
Big Table Publishing
ISBN Number: 978-0-9842473-1-8

          Introductory poems teach one how to read collections, and Casey Quinn’s “Prepare to Crash,” his book’s eponymous opening poem, readies one for a flight. In this poem, a father prepares his young son for the life ahead by making him feel the motions of takeoff. Then the fuel runs out, and the father instructs, “pray then/ my son/ your landing gear/ protects you.” Quinn’s chapbook is as plainspoken and quotidian as the father’s lesson. Yet it soars.

          A writer who accepts his own timbre and makes the most of it, Quinn offers here a well-composed song. Prepare to Crash stays in the same key through all 38 pages. One becomes quickly acquainted with Quinn’s sound. It is characterized by short lines and short words. Quinn’s lower case letters match the book’s subdued reverberations. The cymbal crashes of this book come when Quinn reveals his thick sense of humor.

today
i looked in a mirror
and knew why birds
bounced off my window
and died

          Quinn’s voice feels personal, causal, and familiar. He uses common speech to achieve the extraordinary. As such, Quinn’s poems are usable. They’re the type of poems one might transpose onto a small piece of notepaper to send as a missive. Renewing the clichéd, the poet can find the words to say that there are no words:

i’ve got nothing
up my sleeve

no tricks
to play

no ace in the hole

no more clichés
left to say
after this…

i’m sorry.

          This book seems born from a collective sense of the world. Quinn reiterates some ideas that are well-circulated. Many, for instance, have wondered how this age of technology will be addressed by historians of the future. What Quinn can bring to this discussion is a series of one- to three-word lines that thrust the situation into view. Quinn is comfortable with the hackneyed—he employs it for effect.

          Using everyday language, Quinn notices common things—a faded photo, the garbage brought to the house’s front, a forgotten name, mosquitoes. He contemplates these things. He looks closer. After five years of walking by the garden next door, a bright orange flower appears to him for the first time. The unexpected moment straightforwardly described is poem enough.

          The book is unfussy and minimal. But it’s not undemanding. The book has layers that don’t immediately meet the eye. There’s the occasional obvious pun, but Quinn is employing other techniques more delicately. The book is worth multiple reads. With each page turn, take this book as a comfort, as Quinn intends:

i put my words
on this raft
and set them afloat

though they
may never
reach your shore

the wind
takes the sail

and there
is comfort now
in a warm breeze.

Sandy Green
Pacing the Moon
Flutter Press

          With Pacing the Moon, Sandy Green shows herself to be a student of experience, of her domestic surroundings, of her relationships. Each of the fifteen poems collected in this chapbook seems to operate as an earnest exploration. But nowhere is Green’s study more evident than in “The Blue Side of Winter” series. This set of three poems provides three versions of an encounter with a sparrow. It’s an exercise in line-by-line revision, which investigates the poet’s ability to change with just a word how something is known and/or experienced.

          Trained as a classical ballet dancer, Green channels her knowledge of dance into poems such as “Why He Wants to Be the Poet from Les Sylphides in Your Life” and “Pointe.” The latter title showcases Green’s cleverness, focusing on the speaker’s stalker, who waits for her outside the studio, and her ballet shoe. Fittingly, it ends with the pun, “I’ll open my bag,/ and curse myself—/it was broken in/ just right.” This is an almost playful description of being a victim of a crime. The unsentimental take on life’s miseries is Green’s signature and can also be seen in “What Happens to Busy People,” where the loss of a lover is expressed plainly:

While I had other things to do:
The folded scarf relaxed its creases
In the drawer,
The puff of soap
From the dispenser
Formed a soft, skeletal reef
on the counter,

…

and I didn’t notice
that my best friend had moved out of town
and my husband went along for the ride.

          Such an occurrence could be brought to the page with a drawn-out and possibly melodramatic wail. But Green’s style is one of straightforward restraint and understatement.

          The poem “What Happens to Busy People” is representative of Green’s manner in another way, too: She attends to the common object—the scarf, the soap dispenser, the pile of magazines, the knocked over glass, the Springerle rolling pin. Green recognizes the significance of these things. She draws out their potential messages. “Of course it had to be/ the iron she took when she left/ for good,” Green writes. “[T]aking the iron screamed of permanence,/ steaming and hissing,” she then adds.

          This book is also remarkable in that it frequently shifts directions and incorporates many different moods and tones without losing a distinct cohesion. One page is serious. The next resounds with humor. The opening poem is playfully titled “false start” (a title which self-mockingly excuses Green’s beginning in a clichéd way—with waking). Among Green’s characters is a titration whiz—an odd claim to fame. And there’s the sign on her front door:

The words read:
I Do Not Want to Talk to You—
underneath
there a picture of a sweet kitten
with round eyes

Then, other lines are eerie and suggestive:

She scans the choppy line
where waves meet sky,
and turns
as birds of no distinction
blink their wings and
drift like eyelashes
on a paper face.

          What makes the book cohere is its central themes. Green is concerned with relationships, and she concentrates on their quiet moments—a shared car ride, tea poured over breakfast.

          The book ends with “Yesterday is Tomorrow.” On this last page and the others before it, Green invites readers to relive and remember. Her book is ultimately a welcome invitation.



Jan Steckel
Mixing Tracks
Gertrude Press

          Winner of the 2008 Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook Contest, Mixing Tracks is a 22-page marvel. The book features a single, well-developed story that is ripe with irony. Cameron Gray is the only member of his band to have survived a plane crash. With the voice of his late partner loud in his mind, Cameron meets another survivor in an uninhabited land of summer-swollen streams. In that setting and in his memory, he’s faced with questions of belonging, alliance, and escape.

          The book opens with a scene that induces—rather than merely describes—the protagonist’s disorientation as he emerges from a plane crash. Steckel achieves this sense of confusion tactfully, without annoying her readers.

          Steckel has a knack for skirting the literary no-no. She employs the plane-crash-on-a-deserted-island premise without being predictable. Somehow, Steckel gets away with lines that could be trite, but become ingenious. “He has a hole in his heart” is such a line. Rather than stalely expressing longing, the line becomes one that lovers flirt with, bond over, and delight in.

          With this book, Steckel has taken on many thematic and sonic challenges, and her prose often evokes the sense of a doina, a wailing solo song:

It speeded itself up and ran away. I had a counterpoint going now, a breach of decorum, but irresistible. It was too beautiful to let go, so I dropped the pick in the sand and gave in, going with all my fingers left and right at the speed of coach and six horses.

Michael lifted the harmonica to his mouth again. He started the same tune as I at exactly a quarter of the tempo, and damn it, it worked. Steady but with quavers, he played like a tightrope artist walking slowly over the net of my finger-picking. Suddenly the sound tumbled off the rope and down the scale, only to be caught and borne skyward again as if by some wide-winged bird.

          As is clear from this passage, Steckel makes ample use of symbolism. The descriptions of music become a means of communicating the resonances between the book’s characters.

          In the world of Mixing Tracks, music is sacred. It outlasts the human characters. In the baggage compartment of the crashed plane “[n]o tomb guardian was there, no dust of kinds or cold sarcophagi, only the luggage and the instrument cases. Packed with such care, the instruments had fared better than the passengers.”

          This is life-grabbing work from an author with a breadth of experience. Steckel has served as a Peace Corps volunteer. She is a Harvard- and Yale-trained former pediatrician and a bisexual activist. She has delivered a book that is at once satisfying and tantalizing. Following this second major release, here’s hoping there’s much more to come from Steckel.



Frank Montesonti
A Civic Pageant
Black Lawrence Press
ISBN Number: 978-1-934703-74-8

          To read the titles of Frank Montesonti’s A Civic Pageant is to consider a mode of awareness. Montesonti searches out “Heaven’s Undershirt.” He performs the “One Last Waltz on an Ave Maria.” He mocks and renews the genres that compose our existence with “Gratuitous Voice-Over at the End of a Film Reflecting on the Tribulations of the Plot and Coming Finally to an Epiphany.”

          This collection is a planet coincident with our own. As Montesonti orbits the Earth—sometimes from a plane, always from an elevated mind—he changes the light readers dwell in. A Civic Pageant has its own gravity. It pulls the detritus of our world in, spinning a varied assortment together. Prayer can take place over a jar of Miracle Whip. The baseball bat, the Devil, and rhubarb pie all exhibit a kind of patriotism. The book is well-stocked. In spellbinding lines, Montesonti can discuss “every 1930s French Novel” as well as dark matter theory. Ask the poet what the weight of the world is, and find not an answer but rather a rendering.

          Montesonti is introspective, attending to his own means of perception. And then he reminds us that he is not only cerebral; he is also fully embodied, residing in nights, in blackouts, and at kitchen tables:

garlic bread, a glass of milk,
and a bowl of tuna salad,
lie untouched on the kitchen table.
I try to piece together
last night like a shattered black
vase: slow, and with attention to the eventual
healing.

          Like this morning scene, A Civic Pageant is an excavation. Montesonti gets to the skeleton where “there is just a crude black outline,/ empty as a child’s résumé.” Montesonti illuminates what’s missing from a scene, recognizes the snow as legless, notes that “there should be a word/ for shadows of raindrops/ on a hotel window.” His is a multi-pointed geometry of attention.

          One might assume from the thoroughness of Montesonti’s vision that the genre has become him. He is accruing much-deserved credits, having published in A-list journals such as Alaska Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, and Poet Lore. And, notably, this collection won the Spring 2007 Black River Chapbook Competition. Currently, Montesonti teaches creative writing in the MFA program at National University. In “Piranha,” a poem which remakes the ars poetica, Montesonti writes of his classes.

When I’m asked what a poem should be like,
I simply state the fact that a full-sized cow can walk into a river
and a school of piranha can devour it in two minutes.

…

Frank, do all our poems have to be about piranhas?
A student asks—the piranha.
No, no, not if you don’t want them to be about piranhas,
I tell her, of course
I really don’t see the point
of not writing about piranhas:

that moment when the water starts to break and pop
before the frenzy.

          Montesonti’s craft summons readers from habitual negligence. “[T]he world never runs out,” Montesonti writes. Let him convince you.