Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse by Shawn Pavey, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse
Shawn Pavey
154 pages
Spartan Press
May 30 2019
ISBN-10:1950380343
ISBN-13:978-1950380343
$15
reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Shawn Pavey's book Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse has been on my radar for some time. I travel in or closely observe the outskirts of a lot of different poetry scenes, and one of them is the midwestern ethos of Spartan Press and Stubborn Mule, among some others I am unfamiliar with yet. The poets strike me, in general. as fellow-travelers in the best sense of the word, with varied points of view united under an umbrella of beat poet, confessional poet, Tom Waits or Bukowski-oriented. Some of that can go a long way, if you know what I mean. I am pleased to report that among those fellow-travelers Shawn Pavey is someone well worth paying more attention to.

In his introduction, Mike James rightly--after reading it , how could you not?-- mentions the first quietly strong poem of this long but never meandering collection. "Autobiography" tells us more about the speaker in a few lines than we get in most poems. We know he leads "a quiet life in my place every day," "middle-aged and soft around the middle in the middle of America. where he is "fair to middlin." Note here the narrator as someone who first of all is a poet, a listener to all the things we say to one another in our own complex autobiographies, where the path of admitting everything, bad and good, brings out vulnerability, a necessity for a poet especially.

Speaking of necessities, In the title poem "Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse" Pavey's tips include stocking up on Texas Pete Hot Sauce plus cabbage and carrots for cole slaw, "because you can't descend/ into full-blown goddamned savagery just yet." This very funny poem finishes strong:

Stock up on ten-penny nails
and hundred-dollar bourbon:

nails to fix the shit you know will break
and bourbon to fix the shit you can't.

Get used to drinking hundred-dollar bourbon.

I don't know about you, but when the shit goes down I'm headed for Pavey's fallout shelter. He'll have the good stuff. I'll trade him a couple three banty roosters for a bottle of Maker's Mark. It's the apocalypse after all. I'll go cheap.

I should mention before closing, too, that there are good lines on nearly every page. When mentioning the aftereffects of a lunar eclipse, we get lines that "[fill] a hole in the sky as big as life/as big as all this", or later on in another poem where "seeds of/ prairie grasses crack secret in the loam, yearn for/wildfires of blanketing shoots." You might quibble with breaking the line on 'of' there but the overall impact is solid.

Along with good lines, the poems fairly burst with insight. Some of them are the tried and trusted of poets everywhere, but some snap with ferocity as in "Hollow Point" where the poet repeats "all the hollow points/ hollowing bleeding bodies/these hallowed bodies of the dead." Some linger in the mind, as the aftereffects of a young boy soft-shoeing on a nearly finished sand mandala burst bright for a moment and then fade. All in all, really fine lines in good, often great poems.

This is poetry that wears its influences boldly, without shame, and will reward a patient reader who can dig an earthy poem next to a sentimental poem, meteor showers next to burst mandalas, side by side with prairie wisdoms, all of them parts of a solid collection I'll return to again and again. 4.0 stars.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Two Bottle Caps and a Gas Station Receipt

I reach down into my pocket

thinking twisted blow up dolls

back into balloon animals.

Feeling around for my wallet

that is a no show. 

Just two bottle caps and a gas

station receipt.

I toss the receipt

and finger around the bottle caps

like those Chinese stress balls

that professional assholes swear by.

The heavy melanoma sun over my face.

A rock in my shoe that makes me

walk with a limp I don’t have.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Live Nude Poems, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

Doug Holder

We Hold Hands

At dusk

we hold hands.

We hold hands,

with  fading

tarnished rings.

As if some

unexpected storm

could suddenly

separate us forever.

We listen to the muted horn

the hint of some heroin-tainted voice

we clink our cocktails

the house cat

another appendage between us.

And the light grows dimmer

as it always does.

Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, MA. He has recently collaborated with playwright Lawrence Kessenich on a new play based on a short story he wrote "The Patient." It is going to be published by the Presa Press, and  has had a staged reading at the Playwright's Platform in the Boston area. Holder's poem " Oh Don't She Said, It's Cold" adapted into a song by singer/songwriter Jennifer Matthews, will be preformed by the dance company "text moves" in the fall at various venues in the area. Holder is the arts editor of The Somerville Times, and teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, and Endicott College in Beverly, MA. He holds an MLA in literature from Harvard University. (Photo is a painting by Bridget S. Galway.)

Gawaine Caldwater Ross

Tool Shed

Hard rain rakes the roof of my shed.

It’s autumn, and the wind tosses the blanket

That serves as my door.

I wrap my quilt around me

And stare at the books on the wall.

There’s no electricity, and after dark

I can’t read by candlelight.

I haven’t a stove or a fridge;

I live on oatmeal, cabbage, and scraps of cheese.

I drink rain water, or tea,

If I can get a fire going outdoors.

Today when the storm  rolled in

I stripped and begged to be struck by lightning,

But Zeus was not obliging.

Yesterday in a state of helpless rage

I hammered a boulder into gravel;

It didn’t help my mood.

Two weeks ago I hiked to the coop

And posted a notice that said:

Help! I can’t find a job!

I have no cash, savings, bonds,

Gems, certificates, stocks,

Monies due, property, or anything else.

There’s been no response.

I’ve been homeless before -

This is nearly as bad.

I came here to be with Darla at her invitation,

The cabin is small, so we

Screwed outside in the summer sun,

Green leaves fell from buttocks.

But after only a month she declared

I bored her, and would have to go

Live in the tool shed instead.

I built the house she’s staying in,

But I don’t own it.

She brings back a new guy every week

Including an Italian fascist,

And she is Jewish!

She stated, “Commitment sounds like a jail term.”

Am I really that boring?

My friends say she’s sadistic,

But I love her so much,

I can’t let go of hope.

My Rockland friends want me

To go on the road and sing with them,

But I’d have to leave Darla,

And the band doesn’t pay.

Yo would give me pot to sell,

But I no longer believe in breaking the law.

I watch the rain flood the yard,

According to the news

There’ll be a frost tonight.

I put on extra clothing,

So much, it makes me stiff.

I stare at the ceiling,

Counting the cracks in the old whitewash.

Gawaine Caldwater Ross was born to a military family in Boston.  His family was troubled with alcoholism and schizophrenia. Gawaine spent 10 months in a mental hospital as a teenager and then lived on the streets. Homeless 5 times, and married 3 times, he eventually became a nurse. He has had poems published in various online journals and in a few small publications. He currently lives on a very pretty street in the Back Bay with a cheery little dog named Yayo.

Virginia Chase Sutton

Perfection

We are all beautiful at seventeen,

our flawless skins attached to willing

bones and sinews. Some of us are

waiting for our chance, for someone

to say, let’s make out like a couple

of teenagers, or the stranger with

a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine

he will share though you are underage.

Or the joint passing around the room,

making you happily relaxed in the

front-closing lace bra you are willing

to shed for the unknown, the chance

at real love, not what you left behind

at home, your father missing you,

smoking cigarette after cigarette.

You do not know yet how lovely you are

with soft brown hair and blue eyes

flecked with squiggles. And though

your body is not like the striking grace

of cheerleaders back home, it stuns

with dazzling breasts and big areoles

that men will kiss and love. You will

learn of this loveliness even as you scorn

those who are not worthy. Later, your friends

will grow into their flesh as you grow

away, already ahead, open and waiting,

discovering a taste for a certain sort of man.

He is the one who will hurt you

with his attention/inattention, leaving

you alone some weekends when you

want his body and crazy kisses. What

he suggests you do over and over, though

you have performed for your father

for years. It is all new, this perfection,

a body that happily does as you bid,

no thought or chance of illness, destruction

or loss. Love your gorgeousness.

It will not come again---this purity of spirit,

this holiness, this beam and shine

beacons from your eyes, your eyes.

Virginia Chase Sutton's second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, winner of the Morse Poetry Prize, has been reissued as a free ebook by Doubleback Books. Embellishments is her first book and Of a Transient Nature is her third. Down River is her chapbook. Seven times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, QU, Mom Egg Review, The Laurel Review, and The Comstock Review, among many other literary publications, journals, and anthologies. Sutton's poems have won a poetry scholarship to Bread Loaf, the National Poet Hunt, the Allen Ginsberg Award, and the Paumanock Visiting Writer's Award and Reading Series. She has received fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Writers at Work. Awards include three times from Poets & Writers, Arizona Humanities Council, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and many others. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Howie Good

Science Can’t Help Us

A monk in a monastery in the remote Northeast Kingdom sits in the lotus position for nine straight hours, which is how long it takes to count all the ways there are to kill a person. Every day about 200,000 people die. The ancient oak that once served as the hanging tree has started muttering to itself, saying things like “Here’s my hat. Go away.” That could be why the seasons now seem to come and go in no particular order. Meanwhile, gunmen from around the world have organized a banquet of vultures. It’s only gravity that keeps us there.

Howie Good is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry. His latest poetry collections are I Am Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submission Press, both published in 2018.

Michael McInnis

Michael McInnis lives in Boston and served in the Navy chasing white whales and Soviet submarines. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in Chiron Review, Cream City Review, Naugatuck Review, Oxford Magazine, Unlikely Stories and Yellow Chair Review to name a few. His third book, Secret Histories, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press.