Poetic Book Tours: Among The Lost by Seth Steinzor

Among The Lost by Seth Steinzor 

Back Cover:

Among the Lost, set in the modern American rust belt, is a meditation drawn from Dante’s Purgatorio. To Dante, Purgatory was the mountain where souls not damned went after death to cleanse themselves of sin in preparation for entering Paradise. What, Steinzor asks, are we preparing ourselves for, having lost the fear of hell and the hope of heaven, in the course of our daily urban existence? And whatever that is, how do we go about preparing for it?

My Review:

Hindu Religion is about attaining Nirvana, where the cycle of rebirth is broken. One strives to attain that highest status where ones soul merges with that of God. The soul stuck in mid way is in fact, how we are. We do not even realize it and that is what is terrifying. When we follow the right path then Nirvana is not as difficult as it seems.

I won't say that this book of poetry was a revelation for me. I liked the narration. The way he describes the mundane everyday life and is very near to the cycle of birth and death, being in a hospital. I always found that it is only place which levels us. We are forced to contemplate our own mortality. It is how we deal with it, is the question as well as the answer.

Lost love need not be saddening. It gives us the confidence and capability to love. However, we are lost in the maze of life and think, why me, why me....

I found the poems rhapsodic, melodious and very touching. The beauty of words cannot but touch the soul, that very soul, which wants to attain the highest state. 

Essential Readings & Study Guide: Poems about Social Justice, Women’s Rights, and the Environment by K.V. Dominic

Synopsis

“K. V. Dominic Essential Readings” gathers for the first time the three most important works of poetry from this shining new light of contemporary Indian verse in English: “Winged Reason,” “Write Son, Write” and “Multicultural Symphony.” A fourth collection of 22 previously unpublished poems round out a complete look at the first 12 years of Dominic’s prolific and profound verse. Each poem includes unique Study Guide questions suitable for South Asian studies curricula.

Written in free verse, each of his poems makes the reader contemplate on intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, political, and social issues of the present world. Themes range from multiculturalism, environmental issues, social mafia, caste-ism, exploitation of women and children, poverty, and corruption to purely introspective matters. From the observation of neighborhood life to international events, and everyday forgotten tragedies of India, nothing escapes the grasp of Dominic’s keen sense of the fragility of life and morality in the modern world.

My review:

This poetry book is one of those which stays with you long after you finish reading the poems. The poems deal with the real issues of our present society and have been written in very beautiful language. The poems deal with real emotions too, arising out of those issues.

Women's issues, cultural values, globalization, its impact, all these have been dwelt with strongly and hit us hard. We are aware of what is going around us yet we turn a blind eye. The poems in this book brings us back to those and we are forced to confront.

I recommend this poetry book to all those who the world to change for the better...

Sharing here one of the poems....

Pleasures and Pains

Pleasures and pains;

two sides of a coin.

We toss it early morning;

majority gets the pains side.

Pleasures come like sprinkle,

while pains fall like deluge

and continue like monsoon.

Happiness is a mist

while sorrows shower like snow.

Poetic Book Tours: Field Guide To The End Of The World by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Book Description:

Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the 2015 Moon City Poetry Award, delivers a whimsical look at our culture’s obsession with apocalypse as well as a thoughtful reflection on our resources in the face of disasters both large and small, personal and public. Pop-culture characters—from Martha Stewart and Wile E. Coyote to zombie strippers and teen vampires—deliver humorous but insightful commentary on survival and resilience through poems that span imagined scenarios that are not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. The characters face their apocalypses in numerous ways, from strapping on rollerblades and swearing to taking notes as barns burn on the horizon. At the end of the world, the most valuable resource is human connection—someone holding our hands, reminding us “we are miraculous.”

Title: Field Guide To The End Of The World 
Author: Jeannine Hall Gailey
ISBN:  978-0913785768
Publisher: Moon City Press/2016

One things sticks out when you read Gailey's poetry. That she has deep knowledge about science. She touches War in all its forms, Disappearance of Bees, and Natural Disasters. Pondering about all these should stop us on our tracks and it does. 

Field Guide To The End Of The World is dark. Yet the humour makes the dark bearable. The way she makes us think is like keep changing channels for our favourite programmes. We want to watch it all at the same time. Same with her poems. We want to savour the poems all at the same time.

In the poem In Case, it starts with matter of voice but gets fanciful when we reach the middle. 

We were taught in grade school different lessons of survival:
In case of nuclear attack, hide under your desk.
In case of chemical attack, buy duct tape.
Buy a rape whistle.Learn a martial art

I read old fairy tales, wolves lurking behind trees
and parents ready to kill children.Magic mirrors,
dragons, spells that charm and protect.
Burn this herb to banish ghosts.

Sometimes I imagine afterlife, puffs of pink
clouds and unicorns, or gold harps, or glass cities
with streets made of Emerald. The whole earth
spinning like a child's marble below, pitiful.

We are told to vaccinate, o educate, to warn.
Traffic tickets, parking signs: bureaucratic safety nets.
Our governments promise safety in exchange for....
I will light a candle, listen to the solar-charged radio for a sign.
```````````````````````````````````

Introduction to the Body in Fairy Tales

The body is a place of violence. Wolf teeth, amputated hands.
Cover yourself with a cloak of leaves, a coat of a thousand furs,
a paper dress. The dark forest has a code. The witch
sometimes dispenses advice, sometimes eats you for dinner,
sometimes turns your brother to stone.

You will become a canary in a castle, but you’ll learn plenty
of songs. Little girl, watch out for old women and young men.
If you don’t stay in your tower you’re bound for trouble.
This too is code. Your body is the tower you long to escape,

and all the rotted fruit your babies. The bones in the forest
your memories. The little birds bring you berries.
The pebbles on the trail glow ghostly white.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I have the following poetry books by Gailey and loved those 

The Robot Scientist's Daughter by Jeannine Hall Gailey and
Becoming the Villainess by Jeannine Hall Gailey

But Field Guide To The End Of The World is one of her best till date. It has been divided into sections and each one reaches out. As I understand Rocket Science only too well, these poems touched the scientist in me....

The poems makes an impact, changes us in subtle ways, and make us wish to reach out and touch the words. Need I say more? May be yes...may be no....I must mention here I am no fan anything apocalyptic or of zombies or vampires. Despite that I couldn't put down this book of poetry.

In short, I am going to read more of Gailey's poetry....

Wish I had the print copy of this.....

Poetic Book Tours: Ergon by George HS Singer

Book Description:

George Singer's ERGON is precise, delicate and fierce in its engagement with the world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ergon: The core function or purpose of something or someone. Virtue arises when the ergon is realized fully. 

Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics, 1.7, 12)

Title: Ergon
Author: George HS Singer

• ISBN-13: 978-1625491923

• Publisher: WordTech Communications LLC/2016
• Pages: 86

George HS Singer has made the simple things in life poetic. The use of imagery is awesome. The poems deal with everything in life as well as nature. The poems are deep and very insightful. They make us think about life in ways we have not imagined. I feel that every poetry lover should read his poems. Such a slim volume but with so much depth which touches the core. Heartfelt and at times overwhelming....

One of the best poems:

Our Quotidian

I love you differently 


now than when you were hot 

and I sizzled—

I sweep the floor, scrape away 


squashed berries, pry 


tops off medicine bottles you no longer can
and you drive

across town to find just the right


apples, open the bills first, brew kimchee,
worry for the both of us.

I listen for your stuttering laugh
downstairs and feel the silence
that concentration makes

when you ply your needlework,


racing to finish the Christmas stockings
as if the cosmos required it.

Children phone with stories about


their children. We need only change


the beds in their old rooms twice a year.

You call 911 and you’re there


with me when the anesthesia
wears off—worry webbing around

your eyes. Too, you call me cheap


and I spit lazy. We walk past each other
in the hallways.

Until we jump back from


the loneliness as, when on a hike,


a diamond back shook its rattle at us.

You vacuum, I mop.


I know your smell and you, my snore.
In line at the market, you lean into me,

Grazing my shoulder with the warm loaf
of your breast, I tap your thigh—still here,
together in the quotidian.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Don't we all wish for everlasting and sustaining love like that?

Poetic Book Tours: Paradise Drive by Rebecca Foust

Foust has won the 2015 American Literary Review Creative Writing Award for Fiction judged by Garth Greenwell and the 2015 James Heart Poetry Prize judged by Jane Hirshfield. 

MEET PILGRIM

on-the-wane, children grown and gone.

Who, voice-trained from birth in desire,

wakes one morning wanting—nothing—

in 
Foust has won the 2015 American Literary Review Creative Writing Award for Fiction judged by Garth Greenwell and the 2015 James Heart Poetry Prize judged by Jane Hirshfield. the way of things. Wanting some not-thing

not quite not-seen. Her dreams

—Macy’s-parade-balloon-sized dreams—

now lie, a tangle of downed silk and line.

Waist-deep in bright ruin, she labors to sing,

wondering if wanting is, after all, all

there is. Somewhere far away old ice recedes;

somewhere new wars combust. Here, rain is rare

and Pilgrim sings her scales to the dust.

House of no children, guest room of no guest;

no god or guide, a broken song. Her quest.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Title: Paradise Drive
Author: Rebecca Foust
ISBN: 9781941209165
Publisher: Press 53/2015
Pages: 114

I have a deep seated love for Sonnets. I have written a lot. Reading Rebecca Foust was a pleasure. Her sonnets deal with the 21st Century issues. Very contemporary and hits the gut. The Pilgrim's journey has just begun. The quest, the questions, the path and how to define oneself in this modern era....

Contemplating the sonnets, one can hear the music, understand the irony, the humour, the perception.

She covers terrorism, autism, divorce, birth, war, drugs.....I never could think of Sonnets in the modern context. There I was sitting, reading the sonnets, and thinking about that eternal search of truth the poet has tried to find for herself and for us, the reader. There is darkness, yet there is light. In many ways, I could identify myself with The Pilgrim.....

Filled with vivid imagery, descriptions, sensuality, deep thoughts, the language is simply beautiful. The references are very meaningful and give us great insights into each of the sonnets.

I recommend this book to those who love sonnets, poetry and also those who try to experiment in their reading...

Wet Silence by Sweta Srivastava Vikram

I am a woman
who can be left in a desert,
and I'll come back smelling of jasmine. 

Title: Wet Silence
Author: Sweta Srivastava Vikram
ISBN: 9781615992560
Publisher: Modern History Press/2015
Pages: 72

A poetry collection that hits hard. Gut wrenching emotions pour forth. How do I review it? Being an Indian, I have heard, seen, felt enough. So close that the mind shuts down. 

Widowhood is a curse even now in many parts of India. She is made to shun all worldly pleasures. She can't attend any auspicious functions. Can't wear colours, can't have certain foods. I have heard it all and more. In my paternal grandma, who was widowed at 18, with a two year old son and carrying another in her womb. And then she lost her second child at 28 years of age. She brought up my dad single-handed, with virtually no support from her so-called family. 

When I was old enough, I could even feel her longings, her deep sadness. Yet I also saw the strength. 

When my dad passed away 13 years ago, I saw my mom reach out for white sarees, and shun certain foods. My brothers and I did not allow it. How could we? 

Sweta Vikram has made the women reach out to us. Somehow it saddened me. Her poetry reaches out. Yet I had mixed feelings. Maybe because it was too close to home. 

Posted for Poetic Book Tours:

 https://poeticbooktours.wordpress.com/2015/06/02/wet-silence-by-sweta-srivastava-vikram-blog-tour-aug-21-sept-18/

Sweta's Video:

https://youtu.be/QqbUenw4h58

Reconnaissance by Anne Higgins

Title: Reconnaissance

Author: Anne Higgins

ISBN:978-0692300046

Publisher: Texture Press/2014

Pages: 104

Poetry is very close to my heart. I read it and write it all the time. Reconnaissance by Anne Higgins is divided into six parts.

Binoculars

Like the Eye of the Insects

Knowing Again

Debriefing Magritte

Interrogations

Safe House

Her poems deal with birds, insects, gardens, human diseases, and life's journey, ending in death. Beauty of her poem lies in the poignancy and sadness. One can relate to her poem because she speaks of the quirks of life, the dead end, and inevitable death. When she writes about aging, illness and people, we nod our head at that as if she is talking about us.

The section, Interrogations was not easy to understand. It encompasses life yet it is somehow surreal, happening at another unknown plane. I had to read that section twice to understand it. I am glad I did. 

Her poetry looks at everyday things in a new light, another dimension. That appealed to me. 

One poem which struck a chord is Perdita. It spoke to me. Sharing it here to know why:

PERDITA

If I had a daughter, I would name her Perdita.
Of course, the time when I could have a daughter is long
gone.
But that name, the lost one, calls to me tonight.
Like Anita, and Rita, and Jacquita, Lolita, Florita, it is Latin and
lovely
but it’s lost, too.
So my lost eggs, long ago shriveled up,
and lost nest, more recently, fried by radiation.
Perdita, your name wouldn’t go well with my last name,
or the names of any of the men I would have married,
but you are the lost one,
the invisible one,
the one I never would have had the patience
to toilet train, to least train like a puppy,
to train like a stubborn adolescent.
Never meant to be be a mother,
today, more than old enough to be a grandmother,
I think of long lost tempests,
and you.

I recommend this book of poems for all poetry lovers..

Posted it for Poetic Book Tours

The Robot Scientist's Daughter by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Cesium Burns Blue

Copper burns green. Sodium yellow,
strontium red. Watch the flaming lights
that blaze across your skies, America—
there are burning satellites
even now being swallowed by your horizon,
the detritus of space programs long defunct,
the hollowed masterpieces of dead scientists.
Someone is lying on a grassy hill,
counting shooting stars,
wondering what happens
when they hit the ground.

In my back yard in Oak Ridge,
they lit cesium
to measure the glow.
Hold it in your hand:
foxfire, wormwood, glow worm.
Cesium lights the rain,
is absorbed in the skin,
unstable, unstable,
dancing away, ticking away
in bones, fingernails, brain.
Sick burns through, burns blue.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Title: The Robot Scientist's Daughter
Author: Jeannine Hall Gailey
ISBN: 9781936419425
Publisher: Mayapple Press/2015
Pages: 82

When I was asked by Serena Agusto-Cox to review this poetry book for Poetic Book Tours, I did not think twice. I had read and reviewed Becoming the Villainess way back in 2009. I liked what Jeannine Hall Gailey had penned in that.

Coming back to The Robot Scientist's Daughter, I liked the title. When I read the introduction by the poet, I was hooked to the poems. I could relate to the scientific stuff mentioned in the poems. My dad used to talk Physics to us during meal times. He explained the complicated scientific stuff in a very simplified manner. Theoretical physics still is part of my life.

I have done my Masters in Inorganic Chemistry. When Gailey writes about various Elements and their properties and mentions Geiger–Müller counter, I know exactly what she is speaking about.

These poems speak to me, reach out to me. When we say Nuclear, everyone thinks Nuclear bombs, Nuclear wars. No one thinks of the nuclear debris, which is more devastating then the bombs and wars. Why? Because it kills slowly, and spreads over generations.

Gailey has personalized the poems and that connects to the heart. I paused at times, reflecting on the words, was saddened too, now and then. Rural childhood is mixed with straight laced scientists, consequences of our mindless nuclear experimentation. To what effect? Destruction in one way or the other. 

Each of the poems that talks of The Robot Scientist's Daughter, in one way or the other, fills us with poignancy, helplessness and stoic acceptance. I find poetry books hard to review but this one was easy for me despite being on a difficult topic of science, which most don't relate to.

Posting this for Poetic Book Tours

Muscle Cars by Stephen G Eoannou

Griff stood in the bedroom doorway and watched his wife count the money a third time. Val’s hands trembled as she piled the fifty dollar bills on the bed in stacks of ten. When she was finished, there were ten neat stacks on the bedspread.
Val looked up at Griff. “Five thousand ,” she said.
Griff nodded. He had counted it twice before she got home.
“Tell me again how you found it.”
“There’s not much to tell,” Griff said, leaning against the doorjamb, his hands stuffed in his pockets. “My shift ended and I found it when I was cleaning the back of the cab.”
“So it belongs to your last fare.”
Griff shrugged. “The envelope was under the backseat, like it had been dropped and accidently kicked when the person was getting out. I don’t know who it belongs to."
“You must have an idea. A suspicion.”

~~Auld Lang Syne, Muscle Cars...

Title: Muscle Cars
Author: Stephen G Eoannou
ISBN: 9781939650221
Publisher: Santa Fe Writers Project/2015
Pages: 250

Short story collections are hard to review. The same goes for this collection too. I loved the stories but do not quite know how to explain those. One thing I discovered reading the stories is that, most have endings which are open-ended. It is for the reader to decide how he or she wants to explain it.

The stories depict the male point of view and cars are important part of the stories. The stories are about males and for males. Yet I loved the book. The title story sets the mood. The narrator goes to his neighbour's place to complain about noise and all but ends up bonding with the young boy and his friend by revealing about his brother.

The narrators of each story end up knowing something other than what they expected. Sometimes the consequences are not so good. Many a times, things are not what we think or expect. Life will always throw a curve when we least expect it.

I loved the build up of each of the stories, be it tragic or otherwise. If you want to read something that exercises your mind, makes you think, I recommend this book. The author knows his job and knows how to play into the readers mind.

Posting this is for Poetic Book Tours

Guest Post – Stephen G. Eoannou, Muscle Cars

 
 Poetic Book Tours will be doing the blog tour for Muscle Cars by Stephen G. Eoannou in April.

 Also check Santa Fe Writers Project

Guest Post – Stephen G. Eoannou, Muscle Cars

I’m often asked where I got my ideas for the stories collected in Muscle Cars.  There’s no 
single answer to that question. “Stealing Ted Williams’ Head” was inspired by a photograph hanging in a locker room; “Slip Kid” was based on a real murder case that rocked the Buffalo Greek community in the late seventies; and “Swimming Naked” came about because, well, we swam naked in gym class like in the story.  “The Wolf Boy of Forest Lawn”, which originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post’s Great American Fiction anthology, was inspired by a deer and my insurance agent.

Forest Lawn Cemetery, all 267 acres of it, is located in the heart of Buffalo, New York. It’s a beautiful cemetery of rolling green hills, old-growth trees, and the resting place of 
presidents, tribal chiefs, war heroes, and that super freak Rick James. A few years ago, a deer was spotted living in the cemetery. This fascinated me. How did a deer end up in an urban cemetery? Where did it come from? How did it get there? I wasn’t the only one intrigued by this deer. There were stories on the evening news, complete with video, about the Forest Lawn deer. 

Photographs of it appeared in the newspaper. Friends posted about seeing the animal on social media. Everyone, it seemed, had seen the deer or had some deer story to tell except me. Hell, the damn deer even had its own Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Deer-in-Forest-Lawn/312800387511?ref=br_tf).  I live about two blocks from the cemetery and drive by it four times a day and never saw an antler. I started driving through the cemetery four times a day looking for it and I still didn’t see even a hoof print. I dragged my kids there every chance I could, rode my bike through the endless rows of graves on weekends and still nothing. The deer became a mythical creature for me, so I decided to write about it.

As I stared at my blank computer screen at five in the morning, my writing time, and 
after a series of false starts, I realized there was no story there, that writing about a deer in a cemetery is boring, that no one would care. As the sun started to rise (and as that deer, I’m sure, started to stir just blocks away) I decided that a story about a boy living in a cemetery is much more interesting than one about a stupid deer living there, especially one I couldn’t see. But what boy? And how did he get there? 

Sitting on my desk is a calendar, one of those tent-style spiral types that my insurance 
company sends every year. Each month has a bucolic picture from New England associated with it: colorful Connecticut foliage for October, a Massachusetts snow-covered barn in January. And there, at the bottom, in large, blue font is my insurance agent’s name: Sanford G. Wolffe.  I decided right then that the only thing more interesting than a story about a boy living in a cemetery is a story about a wolf boy living there: The Wolf Boy of Forest Lawn.This is the only story in the collection and, in fact, the only time in my career that I came up with the title before I came up with the story itself.  It took a while to work out who the boy was and how he ended up in the cemetery, but since then I’ve seen the real Forest Lawn deer twice and the story that it inspired has become one of my favorites in Muscle Cars.


Synopsis: The stories in MUSCLE CARS explore the unique and sometimes flawed relationships between men, their families, and their friends. Featuring a diverse cast of inarticulate misfits, including a compulsive body builder obsessed by the death of his brother; a former boxer forced to sell his prized 1946 New York Yankees autographed baseball; and two boyhood friends who plan to steal Ted Williams’ scientifically frozen head, this is a stand-out debut from Pushcart-nominated Eoannou and a powerful journey through the humor, darkness, and neuroses of the modern American Everyman.

Those who enjoy the fiction of Larry Brown and Tom Perrotta will enjoy this book as well as anyone who enjoys coming-of-age stories and stories that explore the complex world of men and their relationships.

​

​About the Author:

Stephen G. Eoannou holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and an MA from Miami University. His
work has been nominated for two Pushcart Awards, awarded an Honor Certificate from The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and was honored with the Best Short Screenplay Award at the 36th Starz Denver Film Festival. He lives and writes in his hometown of Buffalo, New York, the setting and inspiration for much of his work.