Category: booknotes

ceremony and conduits

On By l noelle mclaughlinIn booknotes, publicationsLeave a comment

Sometimes you read a request for submissions and just know you have found kindred spirits. Such was the case when I received the call for Volume 12, Number 1, The Braided Gift.

The ritual of ceremony has been on my mind since a recent conversation with a friend – a yoga teacher and musician returning from a journey to the Badlands. She encountered garnet in the mountains there, that stone that can resemble the seeds of a pomegranate. What is our fascination with stones? To me, it feels like they hold so much time inside. They are doorways into another dimension.

The Plumwood Mountain Journal is an Australian and International Journal of Poetry and Ecopoetics. Their most recent submission call was written by the issue’s esteemed guest editors: Shari Lynell, author of Foxstruck and Other Collisions and The Semiotics of Arrival, and Lucy Van, a poet listed for the Stella Prize and Mary Gilmore award. They quote Kimmerer: “You start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember,’” (5).

May we all remember.

Soundings

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Soundings East is a beautiful and brave publication run by Salem State University Press.  My piece “Psalm Ambulista” was accepted to be printed in the Spring 2025 issue (Soundings East Volume 47), but I had to pull out because I had just signed over first serial rights elsewhere.  If you are looking for a good old fashioned literary magazine – full of varied, prescient and insightful voices – with just the right weight to hold in your hand, I highly recommend this imprint.

It starts off with Richard Hoffman’s heartbreaking essay, beginning with his personal memories of Mosab Abu Toha singing with him, and his confrontations with the narratives of warlords.  It continues with Stephanie Saywell’s confrontations with self.  It leaves us with Malak Mohammad Al-Hessi’s haunting photo of The Great Omari Mosque in Gaza. 

I used to sell zines of mine in the local bookstores with staples in them and my journal scribbles photocopied in black and white at the library.  Maybe to a fault, I tend to equate a certain polish with insincerity.  This book looks good on a shelf, but its real beauty lies with the words inside.

Oxford defines sounding as the action or process of measuring the depth of the sea or other body of water. A fitting title for a fine publication.



 

every unknown wanderer

On By l noelle mclaughlinIn booknotes, publications2 Comments

This past week the poet and novelist Ben Lerner spoke with the students of SUNY New Paltz about his work.  Lerner is the poetry editor for Harpers, and the previous poetry editor for Critical Quarterly.  He is also currently a professor at Brooklyn College, and has taught at The University of Pittsburgh and California College of the Arts.  His latest book is The Lights (2023). 

Lerner discussed, in his terms, “the dramas of repurposing language and recontextualizing language.” (1)  I was first introduced to Lerner through his poetry book Angle of Yaw, published in 2006 by Copper Canyon Press.  The “angle of yaw” is the angle between the direction of travel and the direction of wind, specifically the rotation around the vertical axis (picture shaking your head no).  

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transmission and reflection

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The Holocenter, or Center for Holographic Arts, is located in midtown Kingston.  I have seen featured artists here from Japan, France, the UK, Canada, Germany, the US and South Korea.  Holography deals with the recording of the transmission and reflection of light.  A hologram is basically a light sculpture.  I must say the art really doesn’t translate in pictures at all…you need to be present to see it.

I took a workshop here a year ago with the executive director Linda Law.  My classmates and I first learned about the history of this medium, from Law who was a part of the scene in New York since before I was born.  Then we each created our own 3 dimensional art piece using different materials.  Later Linda took us individually into the dark room to shoot our pieces.  Everyone outside of the classroom had to be very quiet and still, so as not to throw off the recording process.  No talking or going to the bathroom, or preferably moving at all.  I sat still in my chair, silent, conscious of the vibrations a chair leg could make if tilted to one side.  

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your hands were comets crossing

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The North American Review has a great translation up of Macario Matus’ “Binnizá.” This world of ocelot grandparents and fish brothers is vivid and green, welcoming in the depths of New York’s midwinter grays. I had no idea there were so many different Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico.

In flamenco dance, the hand movements are referred to as floreo. These are what I pictured in reading the line “your hands were comets crossing.” The Spanish word “floreo” comes from the Latin word for flower, and – in fencing and music – means a flourish.

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the pines

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An exerpt from a story of mine from 2022:

When I walked there it was always in a circle, for it was laid out that way, like a ritual.  The pines would get pushed around by the wind like the little lights atop ten thousand candles, and that is where I would bring my questions, I would bring my questions to the field and she would answer me, sometimes immediately, in lively conversation, sometimes slowly and over a season or so.

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some songs

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My latest writing contains inspiration from Silvia Federici’s contemporary work and Wace’s Roman de Rou, because in the twelfth century struggles against desperate gestures of control from the nobility and other old and corrupt institutions was also a thing. Doesn’t nature’s abundance and preserverance seem to mock these constructed narratives of our reliance on these crumbling institutions? As their systemic evil is further exposed, I find myself wondering is there more than just carelessness behind their direct assault on the natural world and her powers? Is this the one ally they know we need?

Working in a museum for years, I learned that the point of reciting, revising and revisiting history is to not lose the lessons our ancestors already learned the hard way. It is a concern for the present that keeps these old tomes and debates green.