Super Blood Wolf Moon, by Gary V. Powell, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Super Blood Wolf Moon

Gary V. Powell

Kallisto Gaia Press 2020

41 pages

$12.95

Powell's chapbook is an impressive undertaking, Beginning with the evocative title, Super Blood Wolf Moon, the collection takes us through rocky pitfalls of life with wit and poignance. "On Learning of the Death of an Old Girlfriend on Facebook Before Finishing Your First Cup of Coffee" uses repetition to make its point, in a a chant or wail of sadness in which the narrator bemoans the loss of an old love while performing the odd tasks of a life, walking the dogs and remembering that annual flowers are just that: they always come back, but that she won't. Age and accident rule us all, and it's never easy to take.

Another poem which uses repetition to its great advantage is a poem titled "Crowder Peas." The first and last stanzas are identical: "Remembered picking crowder peas/for the first time in years." Yet in the middle, contrary to the first poem, the narrator catalogues the natural elements that remind him of a girl and her father, the doilies his grandmother crocheted, and the bark of a dog on his father's farm. It's a lovely, if sentimental, perhaps because it deliberately and bravely risks sentimentality, poem.

"Super Blood Wolf Moon" is the most representative poem here in its descriptions and mood, so I'll discuss it at length. from the first third of the poem

. . .You've seen this first, full winter moon before,

hanging like a lantern over Indiana corn fields,

floating like a Mardi Gras mask over Lake

Pontchartrain, rising like a New Year's'

ball over Lake Michigan, and riding

like a horseman over Iowa prairie.

I admire the way the poet gives us four different views of the moon, not any of which you would normally take to look like the other, so it's a fine piece of writing that brings together disparate looks at the same thing. And later on, "You've seen a lot because you're retired, now,/ like the winter copperheads burrowed beneath/these stones, and you have plenty of time,/. . . . The narrator has plenty of time of course, but these snakes probably don't, and this the fragility of life retired or otherwise offers itself up for our consideration. The remainder of the poem describes the meaning behind super blood wolf moon, and I find myself interested in it only as a way for the retired narrator to give us his thoughts on what it means. The technical definition, eh, not so much.

Poetry collections like Powell's serve to show how much there is to discover about American poetry. In all its hives and cells and uni programs and community centers, there are beating hearts of poetry each so different from the other it beggars belief. Kallisto Gaia Press may be one such locus. I do know one thing, of all of them Gary V. Powell deserves much more recognition than he currently has, and the poetry world at large, in all of its multifariousness, could use his wisdom.

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

Corey Mesler

I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

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