What I'm Reading: Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. I: Bazzell, Call, McGrath

57º ~ a murky, heavy-sky day of gathering thunderstorms, late November in the mid-south, most trees have lost their leaves, but the sweet gum holds on, tenacious


The Floodgate Poetry Series features three chapbooks by three poets in a single volume, and the debut volume is just out from Upper Rubber Boot Books. This collection features chapbooks by Jenna Bazzell, Martin Anthony Call, and Campbell McGrath, and the series is edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, of poemoftheweek.org fame.

My connection to Volume I is that I blurbed Call's contribution: The Fermi Sea: Book I of Hologhost. Today, I read both Bazzell's and McGrath's chapbooks as well. I'm struck by the distinct differences in each collection, and yet how the volume somehow holds together as a piece in itself. Overarching themes of history (both personal and political) woven through with glimpses of the future run through the collection.

First up is Jenna Bazzell's Homeland. A devastating elegy for a troubled mother figure, the poems are frantic prayers spoken in a haunted, southern landscape. While I was impressed with the entire set of poems, "Nightgown" stuck with me, and I think I'll be returning to it in the days to come. Here is the opening.

Tonight, call back the ghosts you refused--listen to their steps

from the ceiling to the floor--palms flat to the window, a pair
of stumbling bare feet. Nights like this you're spun
                                                       in your mother's skin: fingers
thin as forsythia limbs, slender neck bent over a coffee table.


After these poems of grief, grounded in a lush landscape, we move on to Martin Anthony Call's The Fermi Sea. These poems move us into a dystopian future where the promise of technology has changed the world, but not always for the better.

Here's my blurb:

Martin Anthony Call’s character sketches in The Fermi Sea call to mind a dystopian Spoon River Anthology set somewhere mid-twenty-first century on the West Coast. Filled with nanotechnology, all-digital media, walled cities, holograms, and air cabs, these poems project a gritty disillusionment about the power of both humans and machines. (Think more Blade Runner than Star Trek.) With deft poetic strokes, Call introduces the reader to a host of characters whose trials have only just begun.

Here is a bit of "Wheeler," one of the opening poems.

Simon drops off the sofa at the sound

                     of his buzzer blaring

and the Vid-Mon popping on full volume.

4 AM wake up call could only be

                      Wheeler, leery and

lizard-eyed, woefully paranoid

Wheeler, who might be a city administrator

                     if not for the rabbit-

         hole of prescription pharmaceuticals.

   

Finally, Campbell McGrath shifts us back in time with Picasso/Mao, a series of persona poems covering much of the 20th century from the point of view of these two influential men. While much has been written about both Picasso and Mao, here we have a re-imagining through a heightened, personal lens as McGrath attempts to remain true to the facts of history while broadening our empathy for these cultural giants.

Here is the opening of "Mao: On Patience (1931)":

Sick with malaria, I withdraw from the clamor

of disputatious cadres

to live in a bamboo pavilion with He Zizhen,

my revolutionary companion,

who has surrendered our newborn daughter

to be raised by peasants. A model comrade, she would not

saddle the Party with an infant's needs.

All together Volume I of the Floodgate Poetry Series does not disappoint. It offers all of the advantages of the chapbook with the added spark of three voices placed side by side, so that the poems of one poet linger and influence the reading of the next.