Many people fashion themselves poets. They stay quiet when everyone else talks. They find drama in their Budweisers, call the sky cobalt, and sometimes kind of smell (or is that just me?). Less than many people who fashion themselves poets are truly decent working poets — you know, the kind whose work you actually want to read. And fewer people still look like poets and write like poets and are respected by poets and have their poems praised in poetry magazines.

Case in point: Ben Mazer.

Recently Mazer (January 2008 / Dark Sky Books) was praised in Jacket Magazine.

Here’s a snippet from the review, written by Christopher Bock:

The poems in January 2008 sputter like severed electrical wires firing and trying to find a place to reconnect their currency. Handling these poems is like handling live electricity. As in Poems, the poet is composing a symphony of objects for the ear and mind. Yet these poems feel more desperate, more exhausted, more alive, and less apparently wedded to the English lyric tradition.

It seems extremely difficult to talk about a book that contains 135 poems, the bulk of which are without titles, which enact such a broad range of verse as:

Ice kindled trees to life in passive fog.
The shadows settle on the wires log
too absent early. Then he heard eavesdrop
the marching others hush and the wind stop.

and:

Snaggly waggly went to fair,
saw the natty raccoon there.
When the raccoon went to play,
Snaggly waggly ran away.

These two isolated examples speak to the range of the poems contained within January 2008. There are moments of grace in which the self confronts the self in the shadow of nature and the echo of the sublime.

Read the entire review at Jacket Magazine.

And if you want to get your hands on some of Ben’s poetry, visit Dark Sky Books now and we’ll ship you a copy of his stellar collection.

Free hands touch the wall, laughter
deep where the waters land and pool,
the wall holding you up and away.

Where do the angels go when you give
in? Do they gather in the wet spots
and mildew the bones? Do they conspire?

Take a deep breath and hold it, pushing,
shoulder against the wall. You get no help
here, a bit more laughter, but no water.

If you sleep, you’re gone, off to Indiana
where marketers swarm at the base of mirror-
covered buildings, telling lousy secrets.

The angels turn to larva underneath the skin,
eating their way up the arm to your heart.

_____________________________________

Rob Spiegel is a journalist who lives in New Mexico and writes poems and fiction.

We dance among the ruins and sunbake in the rain. We drive straight through the barn door and sleep with whiskey in the hay. We write stories at night and read stories at day and then leap up like a piece of lightning and settle on the tops of buildings and say to the world: You Must Read This Fiction.

Yeah.

– I wanted Anjali to go home. I couldn’t think of a better place for a Canadian than Canada, but she was very comfortable here. She stayed in a small room down the road from my grandmother’s house and spent her time sending postcards to the folks back home. She wrote about how this was a real-deal Indian town that didn’t have many cows but there were lots of black pigs and goats that never stopped farting.  Water only came out of the taps twice a day and you couldn’t drink it because it was filled with malevolent strains of cholera, typhoid, malaria and small pox. She wrote about how she saw dead rats in the daytime, how people peed at the side of the road, how the electricity came and went as it pleased. Once a month her sister wired her fifty dollars, but Anjali wanted to expand her horizons and you couldn’t do that on fifty dollars. This is why she wanted to sell her appendix. One afternoon she came to my grandmother’s house and started tugging at the front door. — Kuzhali Manickavel in Agni

– In the fields, we didn’t sneak our trash into other people’s bins. We dug a big hole and dumped everything into that. Sometimes we would sprinkle dirt atop it and hum a little song, maybe to bless it, maybe to distract ourselves, maybe just to hear our voices humming little songs. Other times we heaved the stuff in and told the children ominous tales about bad children. Don’t get too close to the bees near the trash, we told them. We’ll know if you do. — Jen Gann in Gigantic

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