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.

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

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

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet in those moments of a cold November day, we watched a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,

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