Jennifer Levin Reviews Denise Low's Shadow Light

Jennifer Levin reviews Denise Low's Shadow Light (Red Mountain Press, Editor's Choice Award) for Pasatiempo's "Subtext" section. This Santa Fe newspaper review begins with the poem "Sangre de Christo Novena," from the book:

Jennifer Levin

Saltillo tiles skein quick

            shivering filaments of rain.

Thin lizard bones and cholla needles

float down arroyos     August rosaries

Cloud banks unstack themselves behind

            a low-set moon.

Earth’s many gods stray among stars

            Lupus     Taurus     Ursus     Serpens

            Wolf     Bull     Bear     Snake.

Levin continues, "Low writes about the high desert with the intimacy of a local." Levin continues: "The poems in Shadow Light are heavily imagistic and sensory, focused on nature and the external world rather than Low’s interior life — though an “I” makes an appearance once in a while in order to anchor a short narrative in place. There is a sense of subtraction in the work, leaving reflection and interpretation in the hands of the reader. (August 10, 2018). For the full review, see "A Light at the End of the Shadow: Denise Low" 

Kevin Rabas Curates Ks. Poetry for PoetryBay

Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas, assisted by Michael Pelletier, has curated Kansas poems for the

online magazine PoetryBay, connected with Long Island Quarterly. The special section is "A Snapshot of Kansas Poetry." The introduction to the project, “The News, Not Just from Kansas But All the World,” by Pelletier, begins with a quotation from my similar print project of almost 40 years ago: 

      “’Biologists have a technique of plotting a given amount of land and recording every member of a species within it during a specific length of time,’ begins Denise Low’s preface to 30 Kansas Poets (1979). She continues, calling that collection of poems ‘more a record of what is occurring within the perimeters of the state … than an attempt to define or categorize ‘Kansas’ poetry.’ We follow Low here in offering a small sample — perhaps more akin to a snapshot than a record — of contemporary Kansas poetry.

     “As with Low’s collection, it was not possible to include the work of every member of the species writing in Kansas today, though Low herself, a former Poet Laureate of Kansas, is included. Two other former Poets Laureate, as well as the current Poet Laureate, are also represented.”

 The poets are: Brian Daldorph, Adam Jameson J.T. Knoll, Denise Low, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Al Ortolani, Jared Schmitz, Joe Toth, Wyatt Townley, M.R. Pelletier, and Kevin Rabas.  These include Rabas, 3 former Kansas poets laureate (Low, Mirriam-Goldberg, Townley), a librarian, students, teachers of creative writing, and an electric company employee.

Here is one of my own selections from “A Snapshot of Kansas Poetry.” It is from my forthcoming collection

Shadow Light, which has won the 2018 Red Mountain Press Editor’s Choice Award:

Too Many Green Leaves

Each tree shuffles a deck of cards

one suit each

     gingkoes for hearts

     maples for clubs.

My mother gambles for a last child.

One spring day I am born.

     Oak leaves are broken diamonds.

I turn ten yours old.

     I press scarlet leaves in wax paper

            flatten them with a hot iron.

I turn sixty.      

Each sawtooth

leaf edge

sharpens.

     Hackberries are spades.

CONGRATULATIONS! Red Mountain Press Announces Prize Winner Irena Praitis and Finalists Israel Wasserstein and Linda LeGrande Grover

Winner of the 2015 Red Mountain Press Prize was Irena Praitis. She wins $1000 and publication. Finalists, whose work may be considered for publication by the press, are Israel Wasserstein and Linda LeGrande Grover. Honorable mentions are James K. Zimmerman, and John Surowieki.

The 2015 Red Mountain Press Prize was judged by Denise Low, author of Jackalope and Mélange 

 Block, 2007-2009 Kansas Poet Laureate. She comments on the winning submission:

“In her extraordinary book The Last Stone in the Circle, Irena Praitis examines the nature of evil as a central paradox of human experience. The Holocaust is the poet’s occasion for an appraisal of social destruction. “The camp Römhild/ is not like Buchenwald./ It goes faster here…,” she writes in the opening, quoting a commandant. Beauty entwines with pain. “Chord” is an amazing poem, intermingling sounds of execution with opera. This serious, substantive topic is an essential addition to the genre of tragic literature.”  Based on eyewitness accounts, The Last Stone in the Circle chronicles experiences of prisoners in a WWII German work re-education camp. Delving into the murkiness of human experience in the face of suffering, the poems consider the complicated choices people make in impossibly difficult circumstances and explore the sheer resilience of survival. Irena Praitis has authored five books. She is a professor of literature and creative writing at California State University, Fullerton, and lives in Fullerton with her son, Ishaan.

 

The two outstanding finalists are Israel Wasserstein for When Creation Falls and Linda LeGrande Grover for To the Woman Who Just Bought That Set of Native American Spirituality Dream Interpretation Cards.

 Israel Wasserstein Beginning from a childhood in a Kansas trailer and expanding to face a possible apocalypse, When Creation Falls explores what it means to have everything one thought one knew fall away, and asks what can take that place. Israel Wasserstein was born and raised in Kansas, and holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico. His first book, This Ecstasy They Call Damnation, was a Kansas Notable Book.

 Linda LeGrande Grover To the Woman Who Just Bought That Set of Native American Spirituality Dream Interpretation Cards: This book weaves traditional Ojibwe teachings and beliefs into the collectively traumatic intergenerational experience of the Indian boarding school era. Themes of loss and survival, compromise and salvation, breakage and resilience, spiral throughout the stories of Ojibwe families and communities of the past century. Linda LeGarde Grover is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe and associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She has authored several prize-winning books.

Two more outstanding works have been awarded Honorable Mention. Terra Incognita by James K. Zimmerman of Pleasantville, New York and Man Made Out of Cornflakes by John Surowieki of Amston, Connecticut

 

Cheryl Olsen of WE WANTED TO BE WRITERS presents comments and excerpts from Denise Low's MELANGE BLOCK

Excerpt from MELANGE BLOCK by Denise Low on We Wanted To Be Writers Blog --Three poems are "Lost," "Parallax," "Sedimentation: Alligator Juniper." Thank you to WeWanted2BeWriters--and check out all the resources on their website for writers and lovers of writing. And I continue to be grateful for Red Mountain Press (please purchase from them directly if you can, no middleman deduction) and Susan Gardner and Devon Ross, RMP co-publishers.