Category: Reviews

Book Review: Moudi Sbeity’s Alhamdulillah Anyway: Poems

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
Alhamdulillah Anway
by Moudi Sbeity

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Sbeity’s debut collection recollects his origin and juxtaposes it with his reality.  This begins with not only his poetic imagery, but also the cover which is a photograph of his grandmother under a loquat tree.  The setting of many of these poems is either his village in southern Lebanon, or that liminal space that poetry can create.  As of 2016, he and his family have not yet returned “home.”  Despite this exile and estrangement, he wakes, “daily in love with and gratitude for [this world’s] immense beauty” (Epigraph).

Sbeity’s first poem in the collection, “How It Might Have Happened” (12) considers the start of our existence:

Perhaps the world did not start
with a big bang
but with a quiver.

He imagines a world that is more gentle and fragile rather than volatile.

Not with a loud echo
but with a stutter.

The poet wonders about the world and our own utterances.  Do we merely repeat and reverberate, or could we show kindness to those who have difficulty in self-expression?  These are the questions of “possibility” that dare us to continue, to become, and to simply be.

In “Give Us This Day” Sbeity invokes the “Lord’s Prayer” although the faith system he grew up in evolved in vastly different offerings.  Rather his belief stems in his reality, of who shows up and when.  His objects of belief are the tangible things that create his every day such as warm fresh out of the baker’s oven bread.  Family gathered around a table. Hands that hold, fingers that bind, and tongues that gorge upon the ceremony that is a shared meal (14).

“What Remains” recalls the things he and his family have left behind.  Olive groves.  Blossoms that shrink in frost.  Harvests lost.  This is a livelihood destroyed, not only there in Lebanon, but here in Sbeity’s chosen home.

Everything will go awry…
we too / narrowly weather a changing climate,
… recovering from any promise of hope.

But in this loss there is a stripping down of the essentials that provide a certain kind of freedom.

A freedom of self, that finally is “in love with what remains” (20).

“A Life’s Worth” is one of Sbeity’s poems of resistance.  It cries out for justice.  It witnesses what is being done in Palestine.  In his verse he speaks of news reports. A child lifted out of a bombed building.  The lifeless body is a sacrifice to what “they” said was necessary, to what had to be done in name of “their” justice (35).  Can a child’s dead body ever be justified is the question that resounds in the reader’s internal thoughts.

Center: Moudi Sbeity at Ogden Utah’s 2026 Literary Death Match

The poet wonders, “What will you say twenty years from now when / they ask you about Palestine?”  Will there be answers?  Would one say, “never again”?  Meanwhile we all – the poet, the reader, and the questioning audience – should self-interrogate.  Do we have the capacity to, “look up from your own guilty palms to see the whole world burning”? Do we have the situational awareness to understand our own complicity in our silence and apathy and inaction?   How many stolen lives does it take or broken hearts to justify what a single life is worth? (36).

“Water Remembers where it has been” (57) considers humanity’s connection to water, earth, and our place in the natural world.  It remarks on human activity and how our daily lives affect the ground upon which we walk:

what the first humans
touched now streams in rivulets down mountain
cheeks, now courses through your bloodstream

We all are interconnected.  These songs, “echoed from long ago” now etch, “memories of ancestral sorrow” in our throats.  Our relationship with ~ water as life ~ is a river’s plea that seeps into ground, a fresh new hope.  Hopefully it becomes a conversation that is acted upon rather than a, “chorus waving to each other from [an] invisible ledge” (57).

As Sbeity nears the end of his collection, “Remembrance” lays out his own ceremonial mantra:

Of the many reasons
to live, this
is what sustains me –

knowing that the spirit
never tires
of its own
daily waking (72).

Perhaps this is the poet’s own mindful labyrinth, to remind themselves to keep one foot in front of the other.  And, with each step life will not mire in fatigue but will keep on going.

The final poem within the collection is also its title, “Alhamadulillah Anyway” (74).  The poet questions, “And what now?” but cannot supply their own answers.

I cannot speak for you, whoever you imagine yourself / to be.

Instead they realize, “Ahead is a path built not of promise.”  The future is unknowable, only that the fact is, “The world is remade again” and again and again.

For Sbeity, the truth reveals in what saved him: Poetry, Awe, and Sunrise (74).

By stating this sacred trinity he lifts his praise, Alhamdulillah anyway.

Moudi Sbeity is published in a variety of journals.  He lives in Colorado and writes his way into the world.

Interview: Moudi Sbeity

Alhamdulillah Anyway

BY MOUDI SBEITY

Available Through Fernwood Press

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: A Year of New Mexico Poetry

~ South Broadway Press ~ 1 Comment

Book Review:
A Year of New Mexico Poetry

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

A Year of New Mexico Poetry (2026) is a perennial collection that digs deep roots and steeps with long memory (ix).  It embodies poetic reflections upon the land, the community, and the people-scapes of la tierra encantada.

In “Tomorrow” Ursula Shepherd addresses time, not just within its lifetime of seasons, but as if it were a person:

I will stand with you
I will be whole
or I will be part
of you
I will…
carry it…

And from that burden born “will turn the world around” (2).

This idea speaks of our longevity, what legacy we lay, in other words – querencia.

The love, want, and desires of our heritage – rooted in land and familia – are expressed in Michelle Otero’s “Sacred Texts” (6).

Frontier menu, mother’s
hard lines, crane
tracks in bosque sand.

These are quintessential nuevomexicano things: green chile breakfast burritos, an elder’s cuentos, and the Sandhill Cranes’ migrations along the Río Grande.

Learning from those who came before us is Wayne Lee’s lesson in “Abuelo” (13).  Like leaves that descend from treetop, his grandfather “the end of the family line” knew one day he’d fall.  Similar to “his abuelo’s abuelo”  eventually:

He’ll give his body to the soil from which he sprang
and let his spirit rise like mist from dawn-lit frost,

like the pale green shoot that will lift its head next spring
from the roots of what some thought was dead (13).

Each season, each life-cycle, each generation brings new life but retains a bit of the past.

A past sung on Coyote’s song is elusive in Levi Romero’s “Fool’s Moon” (54).

Romero wonders:

Should I walk out to meet you?
The horizon moving further away with my every step

What I reach for, I am told
Can be felt but never held

You peek out over the shoulder of the mountain
What is it you are whispering in its ear?

These secrets that mother nature keeps, “[sing] along to the song inside me.” Only time will reveal, “that the brightest estrella / will forever be out of reach” (54).

Nature’s colorful beauty is a tempestuous lover in Arther Sze’s “White Sands” (81).  And like the many hues of this stunning National Park, so are her shifting moods.  White sands, yellow yok of sun, claret cactus blooms – illustrate the expanse that their westerly gaze drinks in.  He compares this later to a coastal horizon:

                          Wave after wave,

                          I see how our lives have unfolded

Open to an infinity that:
                          lifts against an
                          ocean of sky” (81).

Belief in the power of Mother Nature is one of the few things that New Mexicans are known to hold true.  Hakim Bellamy’s “Milagros” attests to these beliefs and a refusal to renounce that,

there is no such thing
as Magical Realism.

[Where] sometimes blessings
get sideways here.
…
and tongues
tie themselves
to crosses
and cottonwoods (110).

Along these banks, River may seem dormant but she seeps through her bed where she’s never a liar.

One such tradition that is honored throughout New Mexico is subsistent level farming, the use of acequias, and the fact that Agua es Vida.  Enrique R. Lamadrid’s “Faces in Rocks” acknowledges:

The river at their feet is a messenger who sings
…
Drink from this stream
and you are destine to return to its waters.
Querencia is a place of returning
the center space of desire, the wellspring
of belonging…
The place of birth and re-birth (113).

A community’s connection to the land is intrinsic to understanding not only where they are from, what is their origin, but also who they will become.

Home is a repeated thread in many of the poems gathered in A Year of New Mexico Poetry.  Denise Chávez’s “Artery of Land” bleeds into the body that is land. It shelters the heart-space.  Here the-body-that-is-land thirsts.  The desert’s “pore-red valleys” bead sweat, and recall “the vision line” seen through “that New Mexico heat,” only to continue wandering the “sun-paths”:  Home (165).

Lauren Camp’s “Look as Far as You Can” (170) details this home she has claimed for more than twenty-six years.  Under this sun:

I spend days walking
the familiar reel of this land.

She shares the landscape with her new kin: columbines, doves, rabbits, cholla, and prickly pear.

Her verse shouts out in glee:

Everywhere, small forces. A clandestine vision.

Editors Amaris Feland Ketcham and Zach Hively had a specific vision, bringing together 366 poems in A Year of New Mexico Poetry. Each poem whether poignant or playful, historical or contemporary exclaims:

Yes, to this dusk.
Yes, to this dimming day.
Yes, to our night.
Querencia mía, is this tierra encantada (156).

Interview: Levi Romero

A Year of New Mexico Poetry

AN ANTHOLOGY

Available Through Casa Urraca Press

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Shelli Rottschafer’s Sorrel Summer Sky

~ South Broadway Press ~ 2 Comments

BOOK REVIEW:
Sorrel Summer Sky
BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

A BOOK REVIEW BY ISABEL GREY

Shelli Rottschafer’s debut chapbook, Sorrel Summer Sky, is a collection of seventeen Earth-Poems and eight photographs releasing on January 22, 2027, with Finishing Line Press. The contents serve as call to action and catalog of extraordinary noticing. A question raised in “Blue-Robed Magi” (15) distills one of the main accomplishments of this chapbook: What do we truly see/ even when it is right before our eyes? Rottschafer’s poems perambulate various physical locations in Colorado or New Mexico while simultaneously transporting readers to the inner landscapes of human memory and non-human collective interiority.

The speakers and places of Sorrel Summer Sky share a reciprocal relationship. Subject matter runs parallel with Rottschafer’s structural layout of text and accompanying photographs done by her partner, photographer Daniel J. Combs. The book begins with a striking black and white image titled “Cresent Moon Rock Slide Trail,” capturing the celestial body framed by rocky terrain. “The News of the Day” follows, a haunting, sparsely worded poem about a newspaper dispenser found littering the hiking trail depicted in the previous photograph. An ambiguous chorus of “we” end the opening piece with a challenging reminder:

                                     We
                                     are still
                                                       here.

Second, “At Day Break” composes an aubade with Sapphic stanzas, yet speaker implores  us to consider more than just dawn or the future. There is a bittersweetness to the coming of a  new day, to the passage of seasons.

“I wait for the loveliness” comes next, a retrospective ars poetica where the speaker equates a loveliness, or a cluster of ladybugs, to her writing process; gather[ing]/ and flutter[ing] my pages wide (8). Rottschafer’s diction is imbued with masterful linguistic surprise. Natural occurrences are subverted; shooting stars become “Shooting at the Stars.” Colors and nouns become verbs while abstract concepts become subjects:

Ever greens to chartreuse. Closely Tell the Sun, (19)

Whose pages wing a woken mind. I wait for the loveliness (8)

This use of color is in conversation with Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Lorca’s essay “Play and Theory of the Duende” explored the concept of deep image through the likeness of a folklore spirit. Deep images have historically comprised of gatherings of colors, animals, and other natural “ingredients” used to invoke this mysterious, visceral power of struggle, emotion, and spontaneous creation rising from an artist. Poems like Rottschafer’s “All these words influence her spell” (23), work in similar vein of contemporary poets who use image as  ingredient for incantatory effects.

Later in her end notes, Rottschafer acknowledges the resilience of Indigenous  communities, specifically how their protection of land stems from honoring diversity and recognizing both biological and human spectrums of existence. These sentiments are imbued  upon each page, adding Sorrel Summer Sky to the list of works in conversation with the poetics  of spells. Rottscafer’s poems remind us that Duende is still present in natural landscapes as Earth responds to the Anthropocene— as we still inflict injustices on the planet— as colonialism  continues to echo across time and space.

Furthermore, spell poetics influences current feminist poets, and Rottschafer’s use of the pronoun “she” serves as another ingredient. Whether the speaker addresses herself in third person, someone separate, or a she more representative of Mother Nature is ambiguous. In that ambiguity, poet and reader realize the interconnectedness between these she’s. The speakers throughout are often feminine individuals who are awestruck by nature’s beauty, while at other times grief-stricken by its desecration. A suspicious tone emerges in the book’s fourth poem, “Fata Morgana” (9), where an optical illusion on Lake Superior’s horizon serves as vehicle to discuss what the speaker calls adulthood’s “kinder lies.”

Author Shelli Rottschafer

Dynamics across different ages, communities, and species are depicted in poems like golden shovel “Equal Parts: Hydrogen to My Oxygen” (11) or “Sorrel Roan” (13). Respectively,  characters like the speaker’s Grandmother and a young foal represent interconnection, our shared  need to not be forgotten. These poems ask about the possibility of our redemption. The poet  leaves this for the reader to decide.

Aside from the subjects’ shared reciprocity, Rottschafer’s and Combs’ collaborative  efforts make for an effective exchange across poetics and photography. The sharp quality of  Combs’ black and white photos accentuates the captured landscapes and their vastness. As poems grow increasingly interior toward the end of the book, in a sense, so do the photographs, scoping  down from wide shots to close ups. From “Latitudes and Longitudes: an Outtake Poem”:

This awakening,

urges said swaddled child

below a pocked moon darkness.

Backlighted. (22)

The final three of eight photos portray various flora, from the meandering cracks on a tree’s trunk to a blossom framed by the arms of a Prickly Pear Cactus. Text and visual are in conversation with each other. “Ode to Submission,” speaks to the efforts and distractions that go on behind the scenes while the poet works to bleed gold onto the page (26). Following is a close- up of a Prickly Poppy, a blossom bigger than that of the previous flower, but still framed by less, sharp points. Experiencing the photos and poems in tandem, the reader finds a clear progression at work. A poet makes progress on recording her verse. A flower takes up more space.

The chapbook’s preantepenultimate poem, “If We Are Lucky: A Firefly Sestina,” poses the delightfully surprising question: “Kin we go to?” (25). A chorus of glowing insects shares its knowledge; we can answer all our sentences that seem to begin with a question mark if we can trust that all of us are lucky to do so. “What Emerges in Bloom” (28) begins with the multiplicitous line: Story is not complete by early May. Is the speaker addressing the other-than human marrow of arid elevation as it taunts a rainbow of Yarrow’s creation or the knowledge instilled in a human subject, that spectrum [of] knowing nothing rhymes? Whether in the desert or on an illusory horizon, we are reminded that humans and other-than-humans share a collective story, our story.

Sorrel Summer Sky ends on the poem titled “First Color.” We have come a long way since hearing the news of the day— having climbed Rottschafer’s ashen boughs and descended El Nogal Trail alongside a canine companion, our knees trembling with relief. We’ve visualized the poems’ colors and landscapes and gazed upon monochromatic photos. Do you remember the first color you saw? From Rottschafer’s first line? Or ever?

The sun sets. Stars speckle the night sky as a comet flies past. What will we leave behind? Will it be, as Rottschafer concludes, brighter or longer?

Sorrel Summer Sky

BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER
Pre-Order from Finishing Line Press

Isabel Grey (she/her) is a poet, fiction writer, collage artist, and educator. She received MFAs in Genre Fiction and Poetry from Western Colorado University. Isabel is an editor at Terrain.org and Morrow Point. She was awarded the WordCrafter Press Best Fiction Award, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and supported by McCormack Writing Center. Grey’s work can be found at new words {press}, South Broadway Press, and elsewhere.

Book Review + Interview: Alexander Shalom Joseph’s Buffalo Elegies

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
BUFFALO ELEGIES
BY ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH

A BOOK REVIEW BY CRISOSTO APACHE

America is in between these pages where spaces are carved memories, a reminder, a deliberate echo of forgotten [____]. A deliberate annihilation toward a calculated expansion.

Buffalo Elegies, by Alexander Shalom Joseph, writes brutality and erasure, a song, a circle in the eminence of absence and the rise of stacked bison skulls from a black-and-white photograph in a stockyard. Away from myth becoming myth, Buffalo Elegies illustrates a less-heard herd between bracketed silences, giving pause to a nearly exterminated species.

“and now the grass which grows in the median is litter-strewn and brown

swaying in the diesel wind of passing trucks” (7)

Joseph reminds society of the forgotten haunted shapes of light and darkness, moving beneath the living shadow of what was the quieting arrival of dust settling over history, revealing the devastation of sixty million lives, sixty million poems “systematically slaughtered” memorialized in the spaces of each letter of this collection.

Buffalo Elegies Author, Alexander Shalom Joseph

INTERVIEW: AUTHOR ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH

SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS INTERVIEWS SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS CONTRIBUTOR ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH, THE AUTHOR OF BUFFALO ELEGIES

SBP: WHAT WAS THE IMPETUS FOR BUFFALO ELEGIES?

ASJ: Growing up and living most of my life in Colorado, I have long heard about the buffalo, but there were huge gaps between what I was taught and what actually happened. While reading a book about the Native Peoples of the american west, I came across a line that said there were once 60 million buffalo. I couldn’t believe this number. As I did more research I found that this wild herd was reduced to just a mere twenty three. I had such grief over this massacre and how it shaped the west that I had to write about it, to elegize them, to grieve, to tell the truth of how the west came to be.

SBP: WHAT IS THE STATUS OF THE BUFFALO IN TURTLE ISLAND / NORTH AMERICA TODAY?

ASJ: I believe at one time they were endangered, they are no longer considered so. There are about four hundred thousand of them across north america, but most of those are kept in private herds as livestock and have been interbred with cattle at some point. The herd of the true descendents is only around a thousand and is in Yellowstone. It is a shame what we have done and continued to do to the buffalo.

SBP: DID ANYTHING UNEXPECTED COME UP AS YOU WERE WRITING BUFFALO ELEGIES?

I think that the sheer impact of the loss of the buffalo is what really hit me as I worked on the book. The dry west as we know it is a product of their slaughter. Their hooves are shaped like spades and they tilled thousands of miles. They were caretakers of this land and their murder affects not only the people who once lived off and worshipped them, but continues in the land itself.

SBP: CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION THAT THE PROCEEDS FROM THE CHAPBOOK WILL GO TO?

ASJ: The Buffalo Field Campaign’s mission is to stop the harassment and slaughter of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo herds, protect the natural habitat of wild free-roaming buffalo and other native wildlife, and work with all people—especially Indigenous Nations—to honor and protect the sacredness of the wild buffalo. I have long been a fan of their work and they have a lot of support in the mountain community where I am from. It is an honor to donate $1 from the sale of each book to them. I will also be going up and doing a reading at their site, and can’t wait to read to the buffalo themselves.

SBP: IS BUFFALO ELEGIES IN CONVERSATION WITH YOUR OTHER WORK? HOW SO?

ASJ: These days a lot of my work is in response to climate change, seeking meaning, connection to nature and spirit in a culture which rejects those things and finding a way forward and into beauty despite it all. I think Buffalo Elegies is a continuation of these themes in a new way. I think this book echoes and builds on my novellas the clearing and the last of the light,  as well as my poetry collection broken light in a burning wood, in regards to asking the questions of how we reckon with the atrocities of our past, the terror and wonder of our  present and the possibilities of our future. 

SBP: WHAT DO YOU HOPE READERS WILL FIND IN THIS COLLECTION?

ASJ: A few months back I was at a poetry reading and read a poem from this collection. Later a woman came up and said nature poetry has never landed for her but that after hearing my poems she went out for a cigarette and sobbed. This is what I hope will happen when people read this book. I hope you sob because you should. 60 million buffalo were killed so that we could have fucking water world and ikea.

SBP: WAS THERE NOTABLE RESEARCH THAT WENT INTO THIS COLLECTION? WHAT DID THAT LOOK LIKE?

ASJ: I think as a poet our research most mostly comes from one’s own spirit, from the whispered murmurs of greater things which poets are uniquely tuned to transcribe. For this book much of my research was walking the land and feeling into the silence, the emptiness, the loss.  This research comes from a knowing beyond statistics, beyond data. It’s the poet’s report on history. This was my process, plus googling a lot about the buffalo.

SBP: WHAT DID YOU LEARN AND/OR EXPERIENCE FROM GRIEF IN PUTTING THIS COLLECTION TOGETHER?

ASJ:  I believe that we need to first grieve all that has been done to the world if we are ever to heal it and ourselves. I hope in some small way this book can help people to grieve the buffalo and all that was lost when they were massacred, so that maybe one day we can start to heal. Through writing this book I felt a tiny bit into the grief that is required of us. We have a lot of weeping and ritual to do and I hope this book can be part of it.

three poems from Buffalo Elegies // Alexander Shalom Joseph

BUFFALO ELEGIES

BY ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH

AVAILABLE THROUGH MIDDLE CREEK PUBLISHING

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:

Crisosto Apache is the 11th Poet Laureate for Colorado (2026–2027), a recipient of the Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Fellowship, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a board member for The Offing Magazine. Originally from Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache reservation. Crisosto is Mescalero, Chiricahua (Chair-a-cow-ah), and Diné (De-neh), with maternal and paternal clanships in the Salt Clan and Towering House Clan.

Apache holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and serves as an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design.

Crisosto’s publications Ghostword—which won the Publishing Triangle’s 2023 Betty Berzon Emerging Writers Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Authors League Award in poetry—and is(ness), both published by Gnashing Teeth Publishing. For the past twenty years, they have advocated for the Two-spirit and Indigiqueer communities through local and national grassroots non-profit organizations.

Book Review: Otherwhere: Carolyn Forché’s New and Selected Poems 1976-2026

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
OTHERWHERE
BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Carolyn Forché is a prolific author most known for her poetry but also her 2020 memoir What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, which was nominated in 2019 for the National Book Award.

After graduating from the University of Michigan, and after the death-by-suicide of her first husband, a Vietnam Vet, Forché moved to California.  There as an emerging poet, she was approached by El Salvadoran exile activists who encouraged her to journey with them to act as an international observer and war correspondent journalist to document the atrocities of the US backed El Salvadoran military in their Civil War turned genocide.  

This time abroad was pivotal for her career, it inspired her trove of poetry-as-witness and advocacy to speak out for the marginalized.  Since then her poetry has turned to face many themes, all of which is now captured in her latest collection, Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems 1976-2026.

In an interview with The New York Times, Forché was asked:

If there is a single poem that had to be in this collection, for you, which was it?

She emphatically replied:

“The Colonel,” written from El Salvador just before the long war against the dictatorship,” which was first published in her collection, The Country Between Us (1981) and was also included in her memoir,  What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance.

This prose-poem tells of her encounter with an El Salvadoran high standing Colonel.  It demonstrates how much she put herself at risk for her writing, for telling her truthiest truth.  The Colonel is an expert in manipulation, interrogation, and Panopticon fear.  “There is no other way to say this,” Forché confesses to her reader, as she remembers how her life was on the line as the Colonel spilled a sack containing the tortured-dead’s ears, now dried and misshapen like peach halves (58).  His tactics did not work on her.  She is phased, yes.  She is intimidated, but not into silence.  And his snide comment, “Something for your poetry, no?” – is a fact.  She has dared his cat and mouse game.  She continues to set the chess board with each new poem she crafts.

Over the years Forché’s ghosts visit her and reappear in her dream-poems.  “Blue Hour” published in the collection Blue Hour (2003), recalls that liminal hour as night approaches and, “The moon slips from its cerement” (148). She reflects on her son’s birth, his childhood in Paris as juxtaposed to her own in America just after World War II.  Death and wars have marked her own life and she has come to learn, “You see, one can live without having survived” (151).

She wonders aloud in her poetry:

How is it possible that I am living here, as if a childhood dream had found
An empty theater in which to mount a small production of its hopes? (151).

Trauma and goodbyes have shaped her:

One does not forget stones versus tanks.  When our very existence broadcast
an appeal.  Shall not say adieu when a country ceases to be (152).

In her resilience she comes to terms with her internal strife:

No longer could she live alone.  As if dead, looking into a mirror with
no face (153).

She must instead live through l’heure bleue – so that she is the one to tell it.

In “Museum of Stones” published in the collection In the Lateness of the World (2020), Forché collects stones like talismans that symbolize memory, places, and peoples from her past. 

It is a mind-museum where she archives their significance.

These are your stones, assembled…
collected from roadside…
battlefield… basilica [and]
loosened by tanks in the streets…
carried from one silence to another (207).

All earth a quarry, all life a labor…
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place… sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human
               dawn (208).

And in this way her poems become stones that when gathered seem like eulogies to honor those moments so that they aren’t relegated to the past but continue to live in those who remember.

Author Carolyn Forché

“Morning on the Island” mourns the loss of habitat, and laments the affects that climate change has upon the land and those that live upon it.  “The lights across the water,” wake her and the rest of the city.  She rises to stroll the shoreline.  “Not far from here lie the bones of conifers / washed from the sea and piled by wind” (227). These trees have succumb to, “a strange beetle” and are skeletal in comparison to what they once were.  In the past, the beetles’ destruction, “was kept still by the cold / of a winter that no longer comes” (227).  Warmer temperatures allow for its invasiveness, a surge that frightens off what once were indicator species.  Still there are hold outs like the, “owl living in the firs behind us…. They say he is the only owl remaining” (227).  Yet in his solitude, “asking who of no other owl” he still seeks community and longs to communicate with that which is gone.

The final poem in this collection that gathers from her oeuvre, “What Comes” is the poet’s acceptance of all that may come.  She has lived an extremely full life.  She has written profusely.  She has witnessed many things, and now it is time to rest.

Breath to breath…
You have yourself within you
Yourself, you have her, and there is nothing
That cannot be seen
Open then to the coming of what comes (238).

Carolyn Forché is a poet with many accolades, a Pulitzer finalist, the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, and a Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University.  She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.  Together through his lens and her pen they have given voice and provided images that lend to truths that need telling.

OTHERWHERE

BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ

AVAILABLE THROUGH SIMON & SCHUSTER

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Places on the Way: A Poetry Road Trip

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
PLACES ON THE WAY: A POETRY ROAD TRIP
JUNE ROAD ANTHOLOGY SERIES V. 1

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Road trips are symbolic of transforming journeys into memory, and asphalt into freedom. When put on the page, they recall not only sights, sounds, smells, and tastes but also a glimpse into one’s lived experience and personal history. This collection does just that, through gathering verse that weaves a cross-section of roadside Americana.

We begin at dusk in Hannah Lee Jones’s “Vocabulary (Solstice).”  

The moon not yet risen
over your bone-white table,
set for a feast with friends who aren’t here (1).

Lee Jones leans into past memory, time spent with a beer in hand and stories told around campfires.  Yet she chooses movement upon, “a ribbon of asphalt.” This road leads her and her wayfaring friends to afar places, scattered like the flock of birds they are.

Veronica Tucker’s “Frost Line” plays with the contrast of those who are of-place, and those “people from away.”  Newcomers, “learn it the hard way… like a memory surfacing where it shouldn’t.”  Still, “We build knowing things will shift.”  This is life after all in which, “the damage happens slowly… 

where you cannot see 
but must plan for
all the same (19).

For even when we are grounded in place, we still are traveling through life.

Another thread that strings throughout this collection is the idea of which place one calls home.  Carly Sachs’s “Another City,” conjures that very questioning.

You’ve pictured yourself living
every place you’ve ever been…

How do we feel at home in one place?  How do we survive our origins?  The fact is each place we land has similarities despite their differences.

Every place has a Main Street,
a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
Does this mean everywhere
and nowhere is home? (25).

Sachs’s wonderment echoes Thomas Wolfe’s old adage, “You Can’t Go Home Again” because our wanderlust moves us into new and evolving versions of ourselves, we never remain the same.

Learning detachment from the self, things, and memory is a constant lesson.  Jen Sepso’s “Rough Road” (132-136) speaks of this in which, 

We said goodbye 
to all the unremarkable
versions of ourselves….
At first it felt like winning- (132)

Then came the days-
the same road,
the same sky,
the same words,
the same songs….
The horizon kept unspooling – (133)

We kept on –
this scorched road (134)

until the end, a settling of ash and sand.  This is the reveal: what happens when the journey stops?  Who are we then and are we comfortable with that version of ourselves?

The “Byway” of revelation is how Erica Reid grapples to understand her inner-person. She searches for a tune, a melodic voice that explains, “I am trying to buy my way home.” Each home-place she travels is elusive: 

I know when I’ve stayed
too long – a town is like a song,  better
the first few times, when you can still
sneak your own story in.  Time to begin
again…. 
To drive to the next song I hear (149).

The final poem included in Places On the Way is Joan Peck Arnold’s “On the Edge of the Road” (219).  Arnold invokes her matriarchs who teach:

Life is hard, my dear,
so dance.
The poet loops, sways, and stomps.
When rougher stones bloody my feet,
I move to the edge of the road,
but still I dance 
knowing she is in community with, “sisters and daughters and daughters of theirs” (219).

These poet-travelers on the road less traveled, write a two-stepped dance on the way which is their demonstration of creativity and survival.

Places On the Way: A Poetry Road Trip is edited by Sara June Arnold.  It is forthcoming in November 2026 through June Road Press. Each poem marks its place across the expanse of the United States, from Maine to California.  Each also tests our idea of freedom, origin, the lands we call home, and the comfort we hope to find.

PLACES ON THE WAY: A POETRY ROAD TRIP

JUNE ROAD ANTHOLOGY SERIES V. 1

AVAILABLE THROUGH JUNE ROAD PRESS

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: A Little Daylight Left by Sarah Kay

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
A LITTLE DAYLIGHT LEFT
BY SARAH KAY

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Sarah Kay’s second collection A Little Daylight Left, written a decade after her debut No Matter the Wreckage (2015) tempts us with that liminal dimension between dusk and, “the moment when the streetlights come on.”

Told in three sections her verse dances, “with everyone [she’ll] love” – herself, her father, her brother, and her grandchildren yet to come.  This is where she plays between remembrance, loneliness, and the world she creates through her poetry.

Kay’s poetry is world building.  In “Ode to the Two Girls in the Outfield of the Tee Ball Game” (7-8), the narrative voice and her friend are more than teammates.  They have abandoned the game at hand.  Instead:

fingers interlaced or braiding blades of grass,
there is no left or right here. Just field.
Just butterflies & bees (7).

Unlike the uniformity of the greens, and the crowd, they are like dandelions – golden.  For the girls, “the sky is laughing” until their shared-space shatters.

Soon
someone will call our names
someone will summon us back to earth
… remind us of the rules (8)

And it is from this memory-space she declares, “I want to be able to see where we once were” – innocent and upon the cusp of knowing.

“Raccoon” (9-10) also enlightens her reader of another innocence-lost point in time.

& for a moment, I am a sorceress.
For a moment everything is possible…
& the ‘cats’ disappear
& the trash is double-bagged…
& the aunties are trying to explain the difference
between a pet & a wild animal…

& later,
when I am old enough to know the animals you can keep
from the ones you cannot,
when I am old enough to know
a cat from raccoon,
a sorceress from a lonely girl, 
magic from survival (10).

These are the revealing moments, our ‘aha’ moments between curiosity, knowing, and societal imposed self-censure.

“Ars Poetica”  (13-14) claims Sarah Kay’s place on the page as a means of recovery from trauma, she and her family have survived 9/11.  They were evacuated from their downtown NYC apartment upon that fateful day.  However now that they are home, it is time for thirteen-year-old Kay to begin her bat mitzvah preparation – her emergence as a young Jewish woman.  But rather than being guided by her Rabbi into this unknown, it is Kay who becomes the sounding board to her faith-leader.

she slides me
the first fountain pen
I have ever held
& tells me it is mine
… she asks how I plan to relate
… to everything that has happened

as though proximity might make it mine
instead she says
You know only Rabbis are allowed
to handle certain bodies
I went down because they said
they needed help … identifying but
there were barely any
bodies
the dust the ash  (13).

It takes Kay over twenty years to write about her rabbi’s confession because in her own early writing she only knew, “how to write love letters & send them into space” (14).  

Author Sarah Kay

So, it is from this safe space she admits that now, as an adult, she “can’t tell you want any of the [Hebrew] words mean.” Yet she knows that as she recites them with her father standing next to her, that those words conjure his father, who now is no longer.  And it will conjure her father, “when he isn’t singing next to me any longer”.  It is from, “this search of mercy” that she poetically finds the space where she learns to set these struggles down upon the page.

Part II leads Kay’s reader into adulthood, sexuality, and an understanding of how relationships can make us question who we once were, what we have become, and in what shape we will be in the future.  “Beginning is a Season” (31) stops the reader within the moment before a pendulum swings.

I want to stand in the doorway in between
I understand &
I am understood…
knowing that to be undone by someone
supposes a past in which you were once done or at least doing
as opposed to being unloved which supposes
nothing at all (31).

Heartbreaks, numbness, and recovery introduce her reader to an emotional pain that, we as humans, can all relate.

“Allow Me Just This One” (52-53) tries to move beyond post-love.

sometimes a fragment still floats back…
from a long day of the world
treating me exactly the way I fear I deserve
& I am too tired to fight myself, 
my heart unclenches enough to remember (52).

Kay confides, “I learned to write – looking for light, / running an eager hand across a moment for as long as it allows.”

She looks at this memory, as if in a rearview mirror, “sifting through the ruins of our time together / for what trace of beauty still shines through” (53).  Despite the hollowness she feels, she knows she still is alive because of the pain she can express through her poetry.

Part III leans toward prose poetry and sets a stage that gives flesh to Kay’s multiracial background.  “TSUBU” considers her maternal Japanese side of her family (67-69).

(Because their parents were their parents)
my mother & her siblings learned to eat
rice with chopsticks…

Tsubu, the Japanese word for a sole, lingering grain of rice, “is one of the only words [Sarah knows]” (67).  It is this one, that clings to your side of your mouth, the side of your face.  It makes others’ laugh.  It makes you have humility.

(because [her] mother is [her] mother), and upon her hospice bed, she tells Sarah a story.  Monks only need three grains of rice to survive their journey.  The first is nourishment and survival.  The second is for abundance and gratitude.  The third is for sharing (68).  

But then, near her end, Sarah’s mom explains, a fourth grain – a tsubu – is necessary.  “The tsubu is necessary so we have humor at ourselves so we know we have no control but it is ok we know nothing it is what gives us curiosity & wonder & serendipity.”  

(because her daughter is her daughter) Sarah knows her mom loves her, and continues to have her own humor despite her physical pain.  Her mom teasingly calls her, “Sarah dippity” and reminds her to trust universe (69).

The final poem of Sarah Kay’s collection is, “Miles from Any Shoreline” (87-88).  Along this shoreline of loneliness, the sole grain left clinging, she is greeted by other-than-human relatives.  For example, a starfish left alone on the asphalt, most likely discarded by a seafaring fowl; and three hawks who glide and land upon her windowsill.  Two take off and one stays behind to eye her through the pane of glass.  These moments of inter-species contact dare her, “to pick up when the universe calls” (88), because there still is, A Little Daylight Left (2025).

Sarah Kay is a writer, slam poet-performer, and educator. She lives in New York City.  She is of Japanese and Jewish American heritage. This cultural legacy empowers her poetry, her classroom, and the community she creates through her language.  

One of her next public performances of her poetry will be at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan through their Contemporary Writers Series on September 17, 2026. 

A LITTLE DAYLIGHT LEFT

BY SARAH KAY

AVAILABLE THROUGH PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com

Book Review: Come Back to the Dollar General, Harry Dean, Harry Dean! by Jason Ryberg

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
COME BACK TO THE DOLLAR GENERAL, HARRY DEAN, HARRY DEAN!
BY JASON RYBERG

A BOOK REVIEW BY SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS EDITOR CHRIS BULLOCK

In the middle of nowhere, the payphone suddenly rings. Who is on the other end of the line? With no information, it could be a scam call, it could be someone in trouble, it could be a butt dial, it could be a finger dial. If all the world is a stage, if we are living in an opera, it could be God, the director, calling with a change to the scene, or to remind us of our lines. It could be the outside world, pushing in on our carefully curated reality.

Faced with limitless choices, we shut down and rot away alone. Flooded with information, we yearn not to think, jealous of animals and children. With personal histories only an internet search away, there is always a reason not to trust and open up. I have specified that I would only like to interact with those who share my interests, politics and personality type, and in doing so, I shield myself from chance and serendipity, and live a thoroughly Zizekian simulation. For excitement, I arrange a travel itinerary to a developing country, and make sure to take a retouched picture of my legs on a clean beach. I don’t even have memories of my trip, because I was watching artificial videos the whole time. I only have a picture I took of my sandy legs, only because that is what you are expected to do.

However, life outside the small screen is infinite and chaotic. It can be boring, but boredom is the soil wherein the creative seed takes root. Ryberg’s world is the world, without customized searches or corporate algorithms. Moments which occur then vanish, leaving only words on a page. Time which cannot be replayed over and over again in your hand, but rather this is a movie which is trying to shake you awake, but you dig your headphones further into your skull. The payphone is ringing, the director, or God, is on the other end. Do you pick up the phone, or just let it ring?

Genre writing, or “fan fiction” and streaming series, may seem like art, but the characters are set and predictable, and fans will judge it on how well it sticks to formula. Poetry, on the other hand, confronts us with mystery and uncertainty. The first few poems start innocently enough, until we find ourselves addicted to ambiguity, and the curated environment fades in interest, compared to the cloud of unknowing.

Ryberg’s poetry is where we encounter spirits disguised as strangers, parking lots which set the scene for the third coming of Christ since the second coming was not promoted enough and turned out to be a dud. Like a blues musician, all you own can fit in a matchbox, so you can pack light and hit the highway at a moment’s notice, take a seat on a bench and the locals wonder if you are famous. Ryberg’s poetry is a demonstration of Whitmanian particle physics, wherein we exchange atoms with every human, even the ones we cannot control. Ryberg’s world is the Confucius scholar in rags, treating every person he meets as a teacher with something memorable to impart. The Taoist master who is both drunk and wise, the mystic who sees divinity in everyone.

Author Jason Ryberg

Ryberg creates poetry which perfectly mirrors life as I have discovered it to be. Each line like each moment can be a surprise, and no moment is boring if you are open to inspiration. Even disappointment becomes impetus to write, instead of asking to see the manager. If the manager is God, or some omnipotent alien power, do you really want to escalate the ticket? What if you are the problem?

Someone is calling you back into the Dollar General, but your mind is distracted by a one minute video of artificial people, played on repeat. The payphone is ringing at the edge of the parking lot, but you are afraid to pick it up, not seeing the number or name of the caller. Ryberg’s poetry is about being open to the moment in all of its uncertainty and mystery, a reality which cannot be documented or livestreamed, but remembered and written down later.

Just like atoms, we exchange memories with poets, subverting corporate algorithms, private equity neighborhoods, and sanctimonious marketing strategies.

We pick up the phone and have a conversation with the writer of the opera. I ask you, who was on the other end? All you can do is shake your head, shrug, and write a poem before we hit the road.

COME BACK TO THE DOLLAR GENERAL, HARRY DEAN, HARRY DEAN!

BY JASON RYBERG

AVAILABLE THROUGH SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS

Chris Bullock, otherwise known as Tall City, has self published a few volumes of his work, and has been presenting his poetry at open mics and showcases for quite some time now, even reading for audiences with a rudimentary grasp of English. He has written and been published by South Broadway Press, has displayed art and curated exhibitions at The Lab on Santa Fe, has toured the country a few times with The Nicotine Fits, has sung his poetry inspired lyrics along his autoharp at venues and open mics, has spun original beats for freestyle rappers in Colorado and New Mexico, has studied in China on scholarship from community college, among other activities, and has recently decided to get a little more serious and diligent about something.

Book Review: Creekwater Mansions by Ian Hall

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
CREEKWATER MANSIONS
BY IAN HALL

A BOOK REVIEW BY HUGH BLANTON

Ian Hall’s debut collection of poetry, Creekwater Mansions, has a striking originality that betrays no pastiche to any of the Kentucky masters that came before him. He’s fulfilling a tradition rather than furthering it. The poems here are not organized so much as tumbled forth—we get the Civil War, his distaste for city life, a walk through an automobile junkyard—and the reader cannot predict, despite Hall’s preoccupations, what the next subject will be. He’s the polar opposite of poets of silence like Keats and Celan, his poems are filled with profusions such as a house disemboweled of its copper wire or Colonel James Garfield (the future President) defeating the Confederates in Eastern Kentucky in 1862. Hall plunges into image with meticulous abandon:

     Jumper cables like macabre spaghetti,

                  pistons, schismed manifolds: a Gettysburg

     of tinker & shrapnel to paw through. But this junkage,

                  this totaled zip code, does not trouble

     the squirrels, who are like clockwork

                  laying next season’s supper away in the dark

     escrow of tree holes, a clobbered sedan.

His eye turns toward each new observation with whimsy and excitement; he’s an unrhyming Frost with each poem as complete as a Wendell Berry novel.

Creekwater Mansions is a debut collection, but Hall has established himself as a poet of place, even while he takes us on infrequent sojourns out. Cultural depictions of Appalachia often only show the pitiably downtrodden and they miss the humor that Hall finds. His virtuosity is in the precision in which he states their cases, even when the case he’s making isn’t complimentary: “That place is rotten/ with southpaws & anemics.” He’s referring to Letcher County where a candidate he liked lost an election. He goes on: “I won’t beat a dead horse & bring up how tectonically// stupid they are.” But he still takes pride in where he’s from:

     Our national flower: an auger bit.

     Our anthem? The occasional

     clangs from a rip-roaring game

     of horseshoes. & even though it violates

     the Establishment Clause, blacking out

     off Goldschlager & praying you barf

     up a truck payment is our bonded

     religion.

Hall’s obviously not entranced by his own designs, he would not make a good classical lyricist. He ingeniously indulges his free verse and in fact the only thing approaching the formal in this collection is a single quasi-sonnet that we wouldn’t even know was a sonnet except that “Sonnet” is in the title. Hall doesn’t fall for the trap of trying to impose form on unruly subjects.

There’s much tribute and elegy to coal miners in Creekwater Mansions. In “The Coalblacked Jacobins” a group of miners are preparing to strike and one of the miners addresses the mine owner: “I don’t aim to keep pickaxing/ years off my life so some Philadelphian’s daughter can get college/ learnt & trot around in jodhpurs. I want my due.” Hall writes of the children in Harlan County schools who gave up saying the Pledge of Allegiance back during the bloody coal mine strikes of the 1930s and instead sang the Pete Seeger song “Who’s Side Are You On?” (written by Florence Reece, a union leader’s wife). The miners themselves sang songs of protest during drunken nights of the strikes, “their baritones/ gruff with silicosis.”

Author Ian Hall

Hall gives us his version of Aesop’s “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” in a scathing indictment of city life: “& best of all, you never had to deal with the sidewalks/ full of malnourished loons, each blubbering help me, my per-frontal/ cortex is on the fritz.” He also takes a shot at urban Gen Z’s propensity for depression and psychotherapy, saying country doctors “would only prescribe/ push-ups, aggressive doses/ of contact sport.” Hall describes city folk during his brief stay with them:

     At soft dark the alarms cluck

     hen-skittish & everyone has their own boutique

     neuroses. Shit, most people here are in mad love

     with their own prattle. They misknow

     the lowliest smudge on a spectacle lens

     for profundity—the sun going

     tweed behind clouds at twilight.

The “in mad” inversion and the “misknow” serve to raise the temperature of his blow torch’s flame.

While fellow Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren’s poems are vast, stately mansions in which you slowly visit room after elegantly furnished room, Hall’s are bare-wood, corrugated tin roof shacks, with occasional clapboard cottages thrown in. Warren rarely allowed himself to be entertaining, he was far too intent on being poetic and ranted on about the Civil War as though it had never ended. Hall is a poet of wit and cranky passions, he rarely reaches for abstractions. His few attempts at lyricism come off more like pot banging music: “Bugs suicide in citronella./ This is gnarly terroir, but all are battened// blithe to mattresses.” Hall speaks relentlessly in his own voice, or, since he’s a newer poet, what the reader is encouraged to construe as the voice of poet in rural informality. Such a voice is gratifying when it doesn’t take itself seriously.

There’s a subtle subversive element in Hall’s violations of decorum—here he takes a shot at the snobs over in Western Kentucky: “we hayseeds/ from too far east of the bluegrass being a hazard/ to property lines & public safety.” With most of his poems taking place in Eastern Kentucky, you can still make of his poetry a travelogue and Hall the overworked guide getting on to the next Civil War battlefield park, on to the next salvage yard, and on to the next county fair. “West Kentucky—shit—out there it’s so flat// you can watch your dog run away for a week.” Hall moves gracefully between levity and tragedy, a lot of his poems are elegiac for grandfathers, fathers, his own childhood. Rural poets have a tendency to pass themselves off as sages and backwoods naturalists who have learned the nutritional content of every berry and root, but there’s a complete lack of pretension in Hall. And while it’s always been fashionable to be a poet in exile, Hall firmly claims his Kentucky home. As a newer poet he’s disconcertingly shrewd and avoids the grandiloquent windbaggery of many of the southern gentlemen poets who came before him. And The younger Hall already knows something that the older Robert Penn Warren never learned: when to shut up.

Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Creekwater Mansions is his debut collection of poetry.

CREEKWATER MANSIONS

BY IAN HALL

AVAILABLE THROUGH EASTOVER PRESS

Hugh Blanton’s latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.

Book Review: Spirit in the Dark by Gary Copeland Lilley

~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
SPIRIT IN THE DARK
BY GARY COPELAND LILLEY

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Poet Gary Copeland Lilley has written several collections including Raven on Moaner’s Bench (Four Way Books, 2025), The Hog Killing (Blue Horse Press, 2018), The Bushman’s Medicine Show (Lost Horse Press, 2017) ,  Alpha Zulu (Ausable Press, 2008), Black Poem (Hollyridge Press, 2005), The Reprehensibles  (Fractal Edge Press, 2004), and The Subsequent Blues (Four Way Books, 2004). 

Spirit in the Dark: Poems is his forthcoming chapbook that weaves his blues guitar rhythms, his North Carolina rearing, and his Pacific Northwest home.  Gary has had a storied life, once serving in the US Navy Submarine Force he now battles memories with his pen. As a poet, his language is melody which he hopes resonates through his readers’ ears, and transforms into body swaying, and feet tapping. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington with his partner and fellow poet, Tess Gallagher.  He is the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference and teaches as Poetry Faculty through Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing.

Spirit in the Dark (2026) haunts it’s reader through a common arch, poems titled <<Spirit in the Dark #1-5>> which are in conversation with each other and dispersed throughout the collection.

“Spirit in the Dark #1” introduces Lilley’s reader to the lies told by the “mercy-spirit,” but the inescapable truth is that we all come to die (2).  The only promise given by the “dark song” is that we all struggle to decipher what our walks in life will reveal.  We all wish we had the ability to foretell, to sing and say the necessary things in the exact moment they would lend clarity.  But, often those words only come in afterthought.

In “The Daze We Rolled Our Own Cigarettes” (3) Lilley speaks of the moments in life where there are glimpses of contented perfection.  The vulnerability of a dog exposing her belly for scratches, the first cup of black coffee, and a good song rendered from a 12-string guitar.  These are the things that ground us, these are the things that call us back from “the cross of two roads,” the one chosen, the one discarded.

“Spirit in the Dark #2” (7) narrates another tongue-tied moment when the poet recalls, “What I wish I’d said to everybody” but instead who’s words are elusive, just like the slipping away of a “low horizon.”  What the poet knows is, “that marriage & / blood are stronger than death” where this eternal connection still lives on in “all of us / revolutionaries dead or alive, all us sinners, saints, siblings.”  These ties bleed through Lilley’s creative community and transform into eulogized verse.  

“Wolf Moon” is a stream-of-consciousness poem detailing a night-ride road trip (8).  Sitting shot-gun is the devil, poking the poet with “argument-weary” thoughts in these “small hours of morning.”  The darkness pulls the earth taunt as he drives toward, “the Great Dismal.”  What saves him from this inner-dark-spiral is the gospel that blares from his radio and the “half-moon” light that catches his attention.  Are these the “God-touched” moments we wait for in order to continue on that sweet desolate road?  Or are we all due to end in the great swamp of our self-doubting minds?

Author Gary Copeland Lilley

“Spirit in the Dark #3” is a eulogy to Mama Daisy. This matriarch is remembered at every family gathering whether reunion, holiday, or wake – “there is an absence” without her presence.  Memory “captures & re-captures” it is not the “remainders, the living” but rather the “missing part” that provides the “clear-eyed, sharper view” knowing we can do this life alone or together, but together is better (15). 

Throughout this third section of Lilley’s collection he remembers particular folks in his life.  His past selves reappear in ars poetica poems that peel back the layers of what he has learned (17).  His brother-man, Daniel Anderson, who paratrooped into various unacknowledged wars in “anywhere-South-America” only to survive and not tell what had happened (18).  And, “the old-man-janitor” who “doesn’t have any luck left” understands that sometimes, “what life offers you [is that] there’s nothing left but to swallow the spit” (19).  These characters that re-visit Lilley through his poetry demonstrate the breadth of experiences and the spirits that has met.

“Spirit in the Dark #4” is the hope that exposes herself in jazz, gospel, and poetry.  These revelations of clarity bend the poet, knee to sacred ground, in prayer with the understanding that, “in all [these] things [he is] saved.”  Music and words are redemptive, and for these things, “in the end” he understands who he really is (26).

“Spirit in the Dark #5” recalls the underlayers of life for those who live upon the fine line of have-vs-have-not.  We all have choices, some are fine, some are bad, some are worse.  Lilley wonders upon the page as he observes “Mike,” who’s polemic choices have driven destructive decisions: Is it better to hustle so that a mother doesn’t have to sell her body for her children’s next meal? Is it better to bring a gun to a machete fight?  Is it better to stand and take the swings, or run from the threats?  Is it better to play nice or accept what comes your way, “when you ask for it” (29).

Gary Copeland Lilley’s final poem in the collection is “Miles, in a poem: Ars Poetica” (31).  Lilley is a Miles Davis as opposed to a John Coltrane admirer.  Like Miles he believes, “that notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you” do play.  Those silent pauses, the liminality, “resonates into that void.”  Davis as to horn-note, Lilley as to word-poem; “the greater amount of open space… [the] more deliberate.” 

Spirit in the Dark conjures the wisdom of his matriarchal family, the secrets of Carolina swamps, the knowledge learned over a lifetime.  His verse-melodies hum these stories from strumming guitar, wheel-worn roads, and scratches of pen.

SPIRIT IN THE DARK

BY GARY COPELAND LILLEY

AVAILABLE THROUGH FINISHING LINE PRESS

Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).

Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue. 

Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com