Book Review: missed connections with tall girls by Gwen Aube

April 6, 2026April 9, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
missed connections with tall girls
BY GWEN AUBE

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

It’s the poet’s right, according to the Russian Futurists, to use “arbitrary and derivative words”. For Myakovsky, in fact, it was a “social command”, a requirement to translate colloquial speech onto the page following increases in literacy after the Revolution. Similarly, as trans presses do away with the market-oriented eyes of cis editors, beautiful phrases lurch out of Omegle chat rooms in knee-high socks and cat ears. We are blessed with language that is not only geared towards trans audiences, but would hopefully piss off, confuse, and be unintelligible to most cis ones.

Gwen Aube’s missed connections with tall girls is a book that spoils us with such language. A collection of vignettes of “oddball trannies”, it is filled to the brim with bawdy colloquialisms, manifestos, and general debauchery of every kind. It has “girldick”, HSTS vs AGP kandi, traps, “kkkanada”, and blood pacts. It is the sounds of dolls awkwardly crowding into bars, Montreal train yards, and half-bird girls smuggling away hamburgers. It is a book that is warm, and loud, and will make you cackle so heinously your roommate asks what you are choking on.

The poetry is funny, and carries so much character, that it is hard to realize how earnest it is. Aube brings the poetic voice of a self-identified “flop-house bitch”, yearning after eponymous “missed connections” of a cast of stragglers, vagabonds, and cast-off trans women. The politics of the poetry throughout are a working-class evangelical trannyism, with shade reserved for those that would scorn solidarity for the sake of upward mobility i.e., girls on their snobby stealth or true transexual bullshit.

The first section holds stories of rebuffs and missed connections underscored by class or social anxiety, but transitions to a second interspersed with a chorus of all-caps stanzas laying out the voice of “AN OLD GENDER CRITICAL FRIEND”. Aube’s double ventriloquism satirizes the far-right conspiracy theorist while simultaneously proclaiming the warmth of T4T collectivism:

COME YE NEEDY AND BROKEN
GIRLS—BRAID TOGETHER YE
WEARY BODIES— BATHE IN

THE GIGGLING COVENANT—

Aube explores the part Western transsexuality plays in the imperial project. When a group that relies on solidarity for its survival finds state legitimization, what purpose could it serve? The poet reflects on the infamous but mythological “Lockheed girl”, on the CIA-backed PEN International giving Aube a literary award, and on the fact that western queer claiming of the Greek Galli opens Mount Ida for Canadian mining interests. Among this horror, the poet longs for pre-legitimization, to be declared a “freak unfit for labor” outside the tools of the Western project. Yet, the voice proselytizes this is the place we stand once again, amid an apocalyptic “HETEROGENOUS REJECTION” which leaves “PURSES CUT, OUR TEMPLES DESTROYED, OUR CHILDREN SLAUGHTERED”. But this is rarely a poetry collection settling into despair, and it is here, in this post-Revelations world, that bourgeois trans life rediscovers its fetishized “underground”, reapproaching the place where “LOVE WINS” is more than a bumper sticker.

However, Aube’s poetic voice is too compassionate to assert that a direct confrontation with fascism will be a net positive if it creates class love among trans women. The third section is, among other things, a guide on mogging the welfare office. In the different presentations Aube’s narrator has in the chapter, wearing a fur coat to the welfare office, getting stared at for the holes in her shoes by “the state itself”, or living off arts grants “before I even had a book out”, we see the poet leveraging what is meant to be a static class/caste system. Combined with For Herma, the longer ekphrastic poem making up the last section of the book, it becomes clear that, for the poet, love already overwhelmingly exists in trans life when it is separated from capitalist values. The poet works to reckon with “tranny wiping poopy ass—tranny attending the PTA meeting—tranny pushing the stroller” but is easily able to resolve to “find some boy in an alley and groom him to be my daughter”. For Herma makes connections to family in all its forms, it is the poet’s reckoning with growing into an elder through queer or conventional motherhood. A deep love orbits the vignettes and portraits of the book, for all the girls that she fails to connect with, for Nevada, casey, syb, and for the traps and dolls that populate the book’s pages. It becomes clear that uncoupled from institutional validation, bourgeois aspiration, and the nuclear family love is still intertwined with survival. However, it is a love that is subject to state indifference, if not violence, and generally deserves the downfall of the West to prosper.

It is an important book for anyone interested in what trans poetics can do. If the goal is to repudiate fishy girls that run away with boys, or the ones that tell you to fuck off in doctor’s offices, if it’s to support the spirit of grooming as a beautiful plot to increase the warmth of the trans project, then it succeeds. It’s a book I felt too bougie, too Statesian, and a little too young to fully get. Aube’s hilarious writing is a layered satire, using joy and irony to explore transness and class at multiple levels. If it stumbles anywhere, it’s that the written poetry can’t match the energy of Aube’s readings, existing between page and voice to demand gathering. It is a book inline with Bambara’s irresistible revolution, proselytizing love in the corners where the state can’t or won’t reach, a collection that dreams pretty, audacious, blasphemous dreams. Dreams that are summed up best in some of the final lines of the book:

“let no woman be without sister…

let rains bless the women

which have made themselves women

for the kingdom of heaven’s sake”

MISSED CONNECTIONS WITH TALL GIRLS

BY GWEN AUBE

AVAILABLE THROUGH LITTLE PUSS PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Queens, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Trans Mag.

Book Review: SOFAR by Elizabeth Bradfield

March 23, 2026March 24, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
SOFAR BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Sofar is Bradfield’s fifth collection of poetry and it demonstrates how her craft has come so far. In it she intertwines her love of nature, her understanding of ecology, and how the waves off Alaskan shorelines as well as her Cape Cod home have shaped her. The sea floor, its swells and dimples, peaks and trenches are, “proof/ that what’s hidden can still be sensed” (3).

She comments on her life, how her emotions list like a boat, swaying from one side to the other. Tipping, “At/ the edge of what felt right. And now, / here we are” – she learns to float, to lean into herself and her being, to selvage after a storm (5). To pick up the pieces that have been discarded like flotsam.

Bradfield notices seasonal changes and “the change” of her body. Both are unexpected (6). She compares this strangeness with the surging emotions of her adolescent self as compared to the retreat that she now is experiencing upon reaching five decades. Her poems give testimony to her coming out and her understanding as a queer woman in a misogynistic world. Each tide are transformative and, “as capable / of damage as any / ungiving thing” (6).

In “Marlinspike” she observes herself and the many lives she has had, as boat hand, as naturalist, as poet – “despite the fact [that she] was a girl” (27). Bradfield is compelled to go forward to keep moving, to follow her bait line so she, “can drift at last / from what holds us tight, what / binds us to such boring normalcy” (27). And clearly in stating this her life’s path is everything BUT a complacent normal.

Rather she embraces her voyageur-self. “Vagus means wandering. My days vaguer / and vaguer. Was it yesterday or last year…. Where did time go?” (46). Bradfield recognizes she is buoyed, lifted up and jettisoned. An estrogen-related propulsion, a uteral roam within a world she wishes to explore.

Her sights are added by, “Ded Reckoning” (48).

To know where you are and when

you’ll get where you’re going,

to deduce via reckoning, look to landmarks…

The known….

Which hold unknowns.

And through these renderings Bradfield has come to, “know / roughly where [she is]” (48) proving that life lessons are a constant moving equation.

In “Held/Treasured/Secret” Bradfield carries fragility within her. She knows life is fragile like a paper nautilus. She cups it in her hand, fingers curl shell-like. By doing this, she understands that what she holds dear is a responsibility. Picking it up, carrying it this far, requires a vigilance. Yet decerning when it must be set down is the ultimate lesson of letting go.Elizabeth Bradfield furthers these lessons as an educator. She teaches at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and is the Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Gunnison. Her work is heavily lauded. Interpretive Work won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry. Approaching Ice was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry was a winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award. She also is the Editor-in-Chief of Broadsided in which Ekphrastic Poetry is in conversation with artwork.

SOFAR

BY ELIZABETH BRADFIELD

AVAILABLE THROUGH PERSEA

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: What the River May Bring by Erin Robertson

February 15, 2026February 19, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA BY ERIN ROBERTSON

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Robertson gathers her words to advocate for the land and the confluence of both the Koyukuk and Yukon Rivers. During her time in the Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge she was embedded with biologists, collaborating with her craft through the Artist-In-Residence program “Voices of the Wilderness”.

Her poetry draws us in, witnesses to her experiences upon this land, and helps us envision her impressions of interior Alaska. It all begins, “when the float plane’s buzz fades” as she first settles into her sub-arctic residency. She meets the, “devoted swans, tender loons, [and] dancing cranes.” She follows moose tracks and moss lined trails. These relationships with the other-than-human creatures she encounters bring her company.

Glaciers, and clouds, and wild country greet her. Upon arrival in the Alaska Interior she leaves behind “creature comforts” and chooses a new freedom; trading suburbia, her partner and children, for a growing winter white and jagged mountains. It’s a new opening, a new era of possibility for her. “Wilderness Eve” seems to recollect a childlike wonder, a new version of awaiting gifts below a Christmas Tree:

waiting to see

what this wilderness holds

sleepless and sleepy

dreaming the space

and the silence (21).

Her time in Alaska and her observations while there is an unveiling where she comes to realize:

I knew I hit the lottery

but hadn’t quite known

how many riches there’d be (25).

Robertson marvels at nature’s natural wonders. For her, the Yukon River inspires just like Georgia O’Keefe’s infamous cloud-scapes or French Impressionists’ swirling lines. The river:

It bends and dapples and distorts…

Adding and subtracting shades (27).

Still, “You never know what / the river may bring… Everything comes down the river / if you watch long enough” (29). And yet, like the old adage, one can never step in the same river twice, its purge and rejuvenation brings new waters that can both cleanse and drown.

In her poetic meanderings, Robertson also takes on the persona of “Other Animals” like otter, caribou, peregrines, and Swainson’s Thrush. She watches their lives, their passage onto new territory, and their passing into the beyond. It’s a moment, a flicker, a stillness juxtaposed to the more rapid pace of her life back “home” in Colorado.

Fire, too is a constant, not only in the Alaskan Interior but throughout the Mountain West like Robertson’s home upon the Front Range. She notes:

after the fire

naked birches are

black and white tapers

all blown out (56).

Even after a “Severe Burn” she comments on the stark beauty:

The burn dazzles

despite a blackened past (57).

Seemingly, it is a reality that we all have to come to accept because out of destruction, the ashes can reinvent a newness, a regrowth, another possibility.

Robertson’s experience as an Artist-In-Residence is a testament to her “Vocation” (105). She embraces where this has taken her:

so many options open

when you go where you’re called

when you do what you love

when you toss every last bitter pill aside…

the earth is humming

with so many ways to play

what will you try next? (105).

This is the challenge that she sets before us. In her closing poem, “Accounting for Awe” she sets us straight, like one hiking boot in front of the other and asks:

What is the sum of these days of devotion?

An accounting of the endless ways to direct awe.

Anywhere you look there’s a one-inch bit of wonder…

To not let it all burn yet (107).

Here is our reason, in our act of love for nature, we will find compassion for ourselves.

Boulder County Poet Erin Robertson carries this love for nature and compassion forward. She is the founder of BoCo Wild Writers where she teaches outdoor nature writing classes. Her work can be found at http://www.erinrobertson.org

WHAT THE RIVER MAY BRING: IMPRESSIONS OF INTERIOR ALASKA

BY ERIN ROBERTSON

AVAILABLE THROUGH RAW EARTH INK

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

Book Review: Brooklyn ave. Hymnal by Andy Riley

January 29, 2026January 30, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
BROOKLYN AVE. HYMNAL BY ANDY RILEY

A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON

One of my main impressions of Andy has always been that he prints chapbooks like other poets print rejection slips. The first time I met him, at Wolverine Publick House in Fort Collins, he was carrying a bundle of self-printed books for the reading. Later, when he invited me over for homemade absinthe, he had more from the past year for me, from the “early years”. While I have long delighted in his exciting cacophonic phrasing and interesting imagery, what I have most admired from him was the nonstop DIY ethic which kept him writing and printing instead of waiting for approval.

Thus, it is with great pleasure I am reviewing Andy Riley’s debut 87-page serial poem Brooklyn ave. Hymnal. A book about moving to Seattle that is so rife with character observations and daily ennui, chronic pain and stunted sex drives, that truly it will leave you searching for an answer to the question, why would you move to Seattle?

Maybe it’s so Riley could “get out to see Red Pine” from Seattle or live on the street of the “high school where sir mix a lot went”, perhaps it’s so he could live a ten-minute walk from “three old growth trees”. Or maybe Riley moved to Seattle for the same reason anyone moves anywhere, to see something new and make sense of it, to turn around and produce a work of art grounded deeply in a place and time that hadn’t grown dull from repetition. What we receive is a poem facing down the alienation and loneliness of being literally ungrounded. We receive addresses to the dead and separated, to long distance friends, and the ever-aloof state of Colorado.

We are introduced to a poet navigating public space and the struggle for connection between strangers. I delighted in the man in camo pants trying to train surf, the howler under the tunnel on the light rail, and the couple who waves back at the narrator from under the bridge. The poem builds us a world of characters vying for attention, a series of exhibitionists mirroring the short, showy writing of the poetry itself.

Having read shorter renditions of Riley’s writing, the sometimes-eclectic chapbooks he described as his “EPs”, I was excited to see how his style would take to a book-length poem. The use of short sequences allows for concentrated bursts of energy sympathetic to his style, while the relationality allows for an opening up into moments of satori. One of my favorite sections in the poem is election day which both contains the rapid fire “bodily steam footfalls mirage/ like climbing a ladder” and the wide-open couplet “hate of the unknown is traditional/what of this hate of the known”. The book also shares my love of nouns you can grind your teeth on. Brooklyn ave. uses to full effect the regional “noggins”, the scientific yet punk “oxytocin boot black”, and a whole quatrain about “priapism”. More space allows Riley more exploration in word choice and sound, and it’s lovely to see him opt for a yummy and timely dialect.

The building blocks of short poems translate into a feeling of discovery throughout each that Riley deftly sustains through the book.

Riley’s adjective phrasing, which delights in novel syntax while also bending the grammar of sentences, help him create metaphors from bite sized lines of language. Lines like “no flower columbine”, “smack gridlock/migraine-iacal car-ships” or even the simple “ATM smoke shop” recreate adjectives from modifiers into carriers of essential natures for each of the nouns. The building blocks of short poems translate into a feeling of discovery throughout each that Riley deftly sustains through the book.

The only places of the book that confused me were moments of rhyme where the poet slips into a register more reminiscent of Shelly and Dickinson than Weiners or Spicer. Compared to the breakneck speed at which the poetry generally moves the section “the dawn nay dies/it flies.” or “ah/T-shaped wisteria” felt lethargic. However, the register never seems to be employed without irony or self-awareness and there are plenty of moments where rhyme or abstraction is seasoned to taste in the poem. There are also brilliant sections subverting form such as the telegram-like “when I speak” section. Overall, the spots that stick out and interrupt the flow of the poem are done with subtlety and creativity that brings the larger project in balance with itself.

We may never know why one moves to Seattle. However, we do know what one does with the experience. Riley gives us an istoria making sense of public space and loneliness in a large explorative sequence. Brooklyn ave. Hymnal is an assertive ennui filled poem making sense of the daily mess that we each navigate to produce art. The creativity and power of his style is on full force here while his craft remains a love letter to poets like John Weiners and Frank O’Hara that have long informed his work. It’s a delight to have such a strong showing from such a young western poet.

BROOKLYN AVE. HYMNAL

BY ANDY RILEY

AVAILABLE THROUGH PILOT PRESS

Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Mountain Bluebird Magazine.

Book Review: In the Soup by John Calderazzo

November 14, 2025February 15, 2026 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW:
IN THE SOUP BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Calderazzo is an accomplished Nature Writer and emeritus professor within the English Department at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. In The Soup is his latest poetry collection. Expressed in three sections Calderazzo relays how he feels, in the soup, in the thick of life-after-retirement on the “Big Day,” as he is “Gathering Voltage,” and one “Windy Day at the Dump.”

Calderazzo begins with his titular poem, “In the Soup” – a psychedelic homage to his inner-man found at the bottom of a can of turkey noodle soup. Calderazzo ponders the ingredients. What makes a man, what makes the contents of life, what inspires our mindfulness? The ensuing pages hope to reveal these answers.

PART I: BIG DAY

“Second Coming” wonders about our connection to fading stars and skies laden with floating feathers that cascade like snowfall (13). Calderazzo takes up his lament for extinct and endangered species. The Passenger pigeon, “that once blocked the sun” now, “bearing down on oblivion” (13). Will their eradication be the future for howling wolves and roaring grizzlies? The same goes for unshackled rivers, and sludge gray oceans. What will their fate be as climate change deepens? Some may deny these cause-and-consequence actions but, “even the wind-bitten crew of / the farthest-out whale boat… began to comprehend / what we had done” (14).

In “The Secret Life of Mountains: Front Range of the Rockies,” Calderazzo explicates his home-place in a meditation of tercets:

Deep in,
a lupine meadow
scored with trails

softens, mists over,
dousing spot-fires
of glacier lilies (33).

It is Spring. The Front Range is emerging into new life. The:

Pasque flowers
close their petals
like eyelids folding (33)

into meditation,
relieved from
the trespass (34)

This is Calderazzo’s means of telling his reader to “Go lite” and “Think Like a Mountain” as Aldo Leopold implores. Yet to also take on John Muir’s challenge, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” but do so with care in order to preserve their beauty, and to protect them from “boot scrape” and drone’s “beauty-lust” (34).

PART II: GATHERING VOLTAGE

“Way Stones” told in three numbered stanzas stories acts of subtle environmental activism. Beginning with his friend who knocks over cairns – the way stones marking paths on trails. His friend, who shakes his head in disgust and kicks the keystones which topple in disarray, demonstrating that he prefers, like Robert Frost, to take the road less travelled by. However, Calderazzo actually doesn’t mind them. The stone pyres, “suggest a tall dance / with gravity” marking where, “The trail / goes this way… [and] Death is that way” (43). Calderazzo notes that in other lands, cairns value prayer, offer blessing, and lead the way, “A last ride / through the stars,” which is entirely a different matter.

PART III: WINDY DAY AT THE DUMP

“Windy Day at the Dump” is a necro-pastoral poem which details environmental decline’s connection to humanity by listing the things discarded within a landfill. The poem documents Calderazzo’s personal letting-go of things and moments in his life that now decay within the dump’s depths. Medical records of a last parent to die, the draft of a youthful novel too embarrassing to recycle, love letters, a broken wall clock, a fizzling floor lamp. These objects mark his passing of time and are his mile markers of maturation. They are the cairns that lead the way to his end flight (68-69).

Calderazzo’s closing poem of his collection, “Passing through” is his quest through Wingo, Kentucky in search of his final resting place. However, “The casket shop has moved” and so he decides to, “pass on a casket, thank you.” Instead he chooses for his final destination to be a “high flower valley” surrounded by “peaks of snowlit fire.” He prefers for his ashes to “zephyr off while friends & family / lift their arms & sing” (87). And in this way those who would remember him, mimic his chosen poetic lineage as they burst into a Whitman-like mighty yawp.

Calderazzo’s collection, In The Soup (2025) by Middle Creek Publishing & Audio nods to his literary community and those who came before him. Through this gathering, he enters their company, and encourages others to tell their stories, communicate to the public about the importance of wilderness preservation, and find those ancient cairns while trekking among high mountains around the world.

IN THE SOUP

BY JOHN CALDERAZZO

AVAILABLE NOW!

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

Book Review | Another Death Bed by Jasmine Maldonado Dillavou

June 2, 2023May 28, 2023 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Another Death Bed by Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou
A review by Chris Bullock

“a moment of pause with things that matter”
Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou

Another Death Bed (but this one is more comfortable, and the sheets just came out of the dryer)

During my time “studying” in China, I learned to see art not as much a hustle and grind, but rather as way of being. While taking an introductory Mandarin class, most classmates said they were pursuing business and politics, which only elicited a nod from the teacher, a middle-aged guy from Shanghai. When I said I enjoyed art, he gave a pause and a grin, then said an artist is blessed because an artist is never bored. From others there I got the same impression, a few said they wanted to be friends with an artist because an artist thinks differently than most, offering refreshing if unpredictable conversation. I had a local Chinese musician buddy who offered me drugs, guns, and often spoke his mind. When I said I was studying education, he interrupted me to say “Chris, you are not teacher. You a fucking artist.”

Artists, poets, and other rabble often share with us the process of discovering themselves and the world, and Another Death Bed by Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou, or Jasmine, offers that insight of a sitting in her brain as life unfolds. She rummages through the closet for an old stackable chair and offers us a seat in her mind, and she points out things which are as new to her as to you. You might expect to read a few pieces and set the book down, but time has suddenly passed and you have finished the book and wondering if there is something you missed. These are notes in the head of a creative, and as she puts it “a moment of pause with things that matter.”

I had first made her acquaintance upon returning from China to Colorado Springs, and attending a monthly discussion salon put on by Non Book Club Book Club. I had lived in the Springs and never found it repressive or backwards, rather I had come upon the same inspiration that has made it attractive to artists since the Broadmoor School. It was a bohemian life, piecing together rent how I could, playing concerts, going on tour, attending poetry readings, wandering art galleries and alley ways. In contrast to Denver, where quite a few were on hustle and grind mode and unwilling to open up for fear you might plagiarize and profit, in the Springs I found a tight knit and relaxed misfit milieu wherein just seeing differently made you different. Similar to my time in China. Fucking artists.

A few things had changed since my time away, however. All these creative students and faculty from UCCS were not only putting on events, but also inviting you out to see it. Living downtown, meeting up just to chat about what we are up to. Trying out unusual ideas, without even a business plan or a merchandise table. It is true what Denver diehards might say, the Springs could be boring, but it also encouraged you to do something to fill the boredom, even if as in her case, “riding a Lime Scooter the wrong way down Bijou Street with a big black hat on.”

This collection is the writer discovering her mind as it emerges, and sharing it with you. An invitation to sit in her head on an extra chair pulled from the storage closet, a place which is rough around the edges and unaccustomed to guests, but will make do if you show up. A peek into Tejon Street bars, rubbing elbows with the most normal people imaginable, as an artist with other oddballs making things happen in warehouses, restaurants, bookstores, parking lots, on the street, wherever there is an emptiness screaming to be borrowed and occupied temporarily. Art for art’s sake, after which the observer can’t point out any details but just feels like something invisible has changed.

One moment it is “the girl whose thighs don’t touch leaves the bathroom in front of me at the punk show” and the next is finding graffiti in the bar that says “I want to be dead with my dad”. One moment it is living your Boricua being and all the cultural weight and expectations, the next you are really just an artist and you are your “own greatest fear,” writing down your mind as you uncover it. Even after the tour is done, I am still in the chair on a dusty studio floor, and one of the legs of the chair is off-balance. But instead of complaining about it, I just rock a little, for art’s sake.

To grab a seat of your own, you can pick up the book in Colorado Springs at True North Art Gallery, Garfield Gallery, or Westside Stories. Or you can contact her on IG @jasminrunswithscissors or Jasminedillavou.com and if you are feeling extra boring, try Amazon.

About the Reviewer

Tall City (Chris Bullock) was born and got bigger on Long Island, New York. He did a few things then moved to Colorado Springs after trying to study in Paris. He did a few things there too, then moved to Denver, where he went back to school for foreign language. A couple of years on scholarship in China, and he is back in Denver.

Book Review | without water by Lawrence Mack

May 22, 2023May 22, 2023 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Hugging the hurt: without water by Lawrence Mack
A review by Chris Bullock

“bravery is hugging the hurt you know will come”
Lawrence Mack

Several lines stood out to me while reading without water by Lawrence Mack, but this seemed to encapsulate not only the poetry but the whole approach to writing and living. Lawrence’s poetry is not only hugging the hurt, but anticipating the hurt, welcoming the hurt, and dancing with the hurt, finally making the hurt feel at home as a guest or part of the family, with some tea set out on the table. It is a book of poetry both deeply personal on an emotional level, but also as approachable and light as two strangers making small talk in the bar.

I had known Lawrence mostly through dance, as a frequent guest to several events around town, as someone who may study dance but still also enjoys dance. I had no idea he was a poet, but some of the best poets out there have developed lives which in turn inform their writing, like a written mirror held to life, and without water is not only a mirror, but a moving mirror, as if the surface of the bay, on which we float, until we wash ashore at the end.

These poems have a very casual air, recommended for any aficionado of Frank o’Hara and the New York School. Frank narrated his day with minor inconveniences and pleasures until learning that Billie Holiday had died, writing about the small everyday things in a way that underlines both their simplicity and importance. Tributes to friendships and relationships as important elements of life, with the brevity and wit of social interactions, wherein we let slip a penetrating insight between remarks about the weather.

Small talk hints at bigger things, or small talk avoids bigger things, but why do we need to address bigger things? Agnostics believe that the mind of man could not possibly comprehend the mind of God, so why try? Live how you are, who you are, when you are, with others or alone. It is what it is. We construct an independent image in the mirror, but we are also our past, with or without a family environment. The made could not possibly comprehend the maker, so don’t worry about it.

Probably the one that stuck in my mind after reading was “at least there are snacks”, picking up as a casket is lowered, and ending with the little things hinting at the big things “Pops says don’t forget the sandwiches in the trunk / Mom curses—she wouldn’t have bought so many / if she’d known so few / would show up”

This book really is a dance in stepping from pain to redemption to dry wit to exhaustion to joy within a single page, but also with the sense it was no big deal, just a dance, so lighten up if you can. Part of the environment is a newfound sobriety and understanding that sobriety can be the ultimate high, and taking please in noticing everything with a clear mind, and making the conscious choice to welcome the hurt that underlies any addiction. The hurt re emerges, the hurt approaches you, the hurt seems frightening, but it is also part of you, it is you. Once you accept it, you hug the hurt, dance with it, even welcome it into your life. And after any big welcome, there is small talk, topic to topic, and without water is a book of small talk which not only welcomes you and makes you comfortable, but also honors the struggle we may have endured to reach such nonchalant comfort.

How do you get a copy of a book if the poet is always out dancing awake and asleep? I would try an email to lawrencewritespoems@gmail.com and he will get to it when the music stops.

About the Reviewer

mouth trap by rebbecca brown – a review by seth berg

December 27, 2018December 27, 2018 ~ South Broadway Press ~ 1 Comment

mouth trap

October sings to me like a sexy yodeler, alternating abruptly between chest-voice and falsetto, simultaneously eerie and enchanting, vocal vibrations shaking foliage free. It is fitting then, that Rebbecca Brown’s brilliant prose collection Mouth Trap, Arc Pair Press, 2018, landed with a boisterous thud through my otherwise uneventful mail slot. This is a fascinating, musical, often melancholic collection from an alternate dimension. Brown has crafted dreamy, sometimes nightmarish, micro-worlds that challenge the confines of three dimensions. From the onset, she delivers an intentional, intelligently snarky heft which challenges the reader to engage in immediate self-examination:

Object (pg. 1):

There is nothing to stand and declare loneliness when the wind scratches against saplings—initial here, initial there, toward anything, something seems.

Brown crafts precise catastrophes designed to enlighten and frequently induce hallucination. In doing so, she left this reader feeling sculptured, but not at all fearful:

Not Exactly Clear or There (pg. 3):

She listened to someone singing in a rain soaked sky at the bottom of an ocean. Someone offered fleeting moments and a sack of teeth that clattered and clashed against a touch that smelted numb.

Body parts—sometimes human, sometimes animal, always precise—abound in various contexts resulting in multi-tiered transmogrifications affecting speaker and reader alike. The aforementioned self-examination becomes blurred as reader and speaker are both bodies of aged stardust contorted by the frailty of shared emotion, the uncertainty of voice:

The Circuitry (pg. 23):

There I am—one star, the sickle constellation. It is part and parcel. It is meted out. This is how I tell time etches bodies bright to sallow.

The shadows wrap themselves around my legs and make themselves available in ways lovers never can be. I’ve forgotten the way someone else smells frictive and pleasured. I’ve forgotten who is speaking.

I am reminded of Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s vignette from Waking Life during which he states “Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember, because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting.” As Mouth Trap progressed, I found myself vivaciously embracing the psychotic activity that Brown has embedded throughout this exploration, not needing to remind myself to remember to remember as Brown forced me to confront the past on multiple occasions:

This Began (pg. 35):

You, my blue bird, my bumble bee, my lightning, my white hot streak of pleading, lead me like fission, like fragments of yesterdays colliding through the sight of park swings shifting legs into the sunshine. You, my sentence, my likening, my one word into the next, full of sense and senseless. I’ve forgotten where I’ve lost you. In a pocket, in a figment of the past where the verbs all lie, buried with worms and writhing.

While Mouth Trap resounds with weird zest, Brown maintains room for sweetness and heart, fully considering the need to appreciate and honor those who labor to create:

To the Artist (pg. 36):

I’ve never written to anyone dead before, and since the weather’s in my bones, now I have time to tell you, I respect your work, not to say I’d want the same, all those crossing of lines, dabbling and doodles, the constant trail of cocker spaniels yellowing behind, and since these are inconsistencies, dumb dumb mysteries with no witch to cackle at, throw stones, thank you please. I suppose your hair is fizzling into sticks through triangular stars toward the valleys, where you weren’t, but maybe are, and that’s what I wonder, wish upon, so that I might say somehow, I admire how you hung on the walls like a dead mouth trap.

While I openly admit that I have a soft spot for literary strangeness, I am also objective enough to ignore my aesthetic preferences as I seek literary rarities and complete collections that resonate with intelligence and masterful dedication. Mouth Trap is indeed a rarity in it’s ability to simultaneously convey dynamic human spirit while inducing hallucinations; is stands brazenly atop a peak like a minstrel thought extinct. Brown has invigorated my love of prose poetry and I will psychotically and consciously remember this book until I have danced myself into exhaustion:

The Dancers in the Book are Getting Tired (pg. 60):

Lithe bodies of filament and flesh tirelessly stretch their legs and recline in the dutiful taut of muscle. In the story, they motion toward endings fictitious, firm in coming and going. She says and he says: a body straining to skin and ashes this is where we are and will be. The clock marking page turn and photograph a drying artifact crafts a paper syntax. They extend and bend the pages all the while weary not aware of the worm the moth and cocoon’s wrap.

SBGS December

You can find more about Rebbecca Brown on Goodreads.

Seth Berg is a hatchet-wielding forest-dweller who digs tasty hallucinatory literature. A hot-sauce-addicted pyromaniac with an MFA from Bowling Green State University, Berg fantasizes about flight without mechanisms, alien glyph systems, and snowshoeing through your nocturnal dreamscapes. He is a professor, poet, artifact-maker, and amateur astrophysicist whose mathematically coded collections of poetry will haunt, invigorate, provoke, and inspire you.

Berg’s first book, Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory won the Dark Sky Books 2009 book contest. His second book, Aviary, co-authored with Bradford K. Wolfenden II, won the 2015 Artistically Declined Twin Antlers Contest, and was released by Civil Coping Mechanisms in January of 2017. Other poems and short fiction can be found in Connecticut Review, 13th Warrior Review, Spittoon Literary Review, BlazeVOX, Heavy Feather Literary Review, The Montucky Review, Masque & Spectacle, and Lake Effect, among others. Recently, poems were anthologized in GTCPR Volume III and Daddy Cool. He lives in Minnesota with his two supernatural children, Oak and Sage, and his magical better half, Kori. He loves your face.

You can find more about Seth Berg at mutedlines.com and on Goodreads.

YEE-HAW, Cletus!!!

Photo: @bantersnaps