Poetry

Two New Books by Adoptees for Spring 2021

| Michele Sharpe

The world, and especially the U.S., needs more #adopteevoices.

The U.S. adoption industry operates now and historically as a money machine rife with corruption, misogyny, oppression, racism, and exploitation. All of these institutional characteristics work to silence adoptees. So when a book by an adoptee gets released, I celebrate!

Cover of Cleave

Cleave is a poetry collection of magnitude and fascination. I started reading it one evening after dinner and stayed up late with it, still reading. As one critic notes, “With breathtaking lyric beauty and formidable formal range, Nobile details the intimate effects of the international adoption industrial complex on children and parents caught up in a system’s unrelenting hunger. This is a book of remarkable compassion and real horror. Its stories will be news to many and all too familiar to others.”

I’m a domestic adoptee, and Tiana Nobile identifies as a Korean American adoptee, so there are important distinctions in our two experiences of adoption, but her stories are “all too familiar” to me.” Most, perhaps all, people who are adopted by strangers experience feelings of loss, alienation, of not fitting in.

Adoption doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The adoptee experience of loss and alienation can be exacerbated in transnational and transracial adoptions in a country like the U.S., where racism and anti-immigrant hate poison communities, families, and individuals. Tiana Nobile’s poems place a personal experience of adoption in that wider community and in a historical continuum. This is a critical book for critical times.

It’s also an aesthetically rich book, full of sensory delight in language and provocative use of many traditional elements of poetry like internal rhyme, organic form, alliteration, and startling imagery.

The poems in Cleave make expert use of a wide variety of intriguing formats. For example, in “Where Are You Really From?” Nobile employs a prose poem format that’s a list of place names in the U.S. that create a mystery narrative — one that illuminates the the empty past of people separated from family, culture, language, and history. A series of poems titled “Abstract” begin with white space, illustrating the absence of knowledge. The famous “monkey love” science experiments that separated newborn monkeys from their mothers is a recurring source of images.

Many of the poems mine science (or pseudo-science) for information on the mother-infant bond and details about fetal and infant development, a technique shared by the writer of the second book discussed here. Nobile’s poem, “Lost First Languages Leave Permanent Mark on The Brain, New Study Reveals,” uses this headline format to to introduce a meditation on what is lost:

How do I translate

the sound of my mother’s

moaning? It’s a soft wail

I hang on the wall

of my windpipe

Published on April 6, 2021, Cleave can be purchased directly from the publisher or wherever books are sold.

* * * * * * * *

Cover of The Guild of the Infant Savior

Megan Culhane Galbraith‘s genre-bending book, The Guild of the Infant Savior also kept me reading late into the night. I finished this 300 page collection of essays and visual art in two sittings. Galbraith’s artwork consists mainly of compositions of dollhouses and dolls from the 1960’s, the era in which she was born and then adopted. The visuals work in conversation with the text, but also with the history of women and motherhood.

The text often relies on poetic devices like juxtaposition and repetition to create meaning without overt explanation. But there are also plenty of insightful and direct observations about the adopted state, like these:

“As an adopted child, I’d felt like a thing to be played with instead of a person with her own identity.”

“Many pro-life groups use the term proadoption, but I am not their poster child.”

“I continually try on identities and feel like an actor in my own personal theater productions of The Good Child or Don’t Ever Leave Me Again or See, I Am Worthy of [insert here: Love, Kindness, Joy, Pleasure].”

Like Tiana Nobile, Galbraith explores historical and scientific beliefs about maternal separation. Her installations of period doll houses and dolls (photographed for inclusion in the book) re-create a “mothercraft” degree program at Cornell University in the 1960’s that used infants from orphanages as “practice babies” for students. Like the creators of the “monkey love” experiments, the architects of the Domecon program demonstrated a callous disregard for the emotional states of their subjects, in this case human babies who were put under the care of a rotating series of undergraduates. These babies were seen as in need of middle class remediation, and were later adopted anonymously. Galbraith herself was not a “Domecon baby,” but she spent her first five months in foster care wearing a mechanical brace to correct a medical condition before being adopted anonymously. The parallels are apparent.

The Guild of the Infant Savior publishes May 21, 2021. Pre-order the book here

Many thanks to the publisher, Mad Creek Books, for providing an advance review copy.

New poem up at Sweet Lit

| Michele Sharpe
A herd of nine deer beside a house in my neighborhood

I start every day (after coffee) by walking my dogs in a woodsy park near my house. The park is wedged between two well-traveled roads, and the noise of traffic can overwhelm the quieter sounds of small birds. Still, it’s a refuge for wildlife in the area, and I often see deer on my walks.

A poet friend who was also a pig farmer used to call deer “rats with hooves.” He was at war with them over certain crops he grew to supplement the pig income.

Deer have acclimated quite well to living in proximity to humans, well enough to be deemed a nuisance or worse by farmers, gardeners, and motorists. And, the deer have acclimated well enough to see us humans as harmless, or even as food dispensers. A mistake on both sides of the relationship, in my view.

This poem, originally published in Sweet Lit, was prompted by one of my morning walks. Click the play icon for an audio version.

Ones & ZeROES

The doe’s belly ripples, then a placental hoof or knee
pokes her skin from inside out. She watches me watch her,

 
browsing for a hand held out with treats, whatever’s tender
or nearby. Re-programmed for curiosity toward humans,

 
she’s unremembered fear. A new machine can write a terabyte
of data every day on five hundred trillion molecules

 
of DNA. That memory will last ten thousand years.
Soon, the deer may see my dog, who never catches them,

 
as one more harmless thing. Is that the sort of bit she passes
down to offspring? Her new fawn rests, wet and dazed, between

 
deep shade and sun. Such tender prey. Let the dogs run.

New Poem: “More Rains in Store for Florida”

| Michele Sharpe
Cover of 2020 PASSAGER journal: “Meditation on Figs” by Hal Boyd. Image description: a cardinal surrounded by multi-colored leaves.

For the past 10+ years, I’ve sent work to Passager, a journal for art and writing by people over 50. They always have a beautiful cover!

I’m a slow writer. The poem I have in the current issue began as a response to the 2016 Pulse Nightclub murders in Florida. Then the summer rains began, and it seemed the storms would never end.

I submitted the poem at the beginning of 2020. Little did I know how Florida and her people would continue to suffer.

Here’s the poem:

More Rains in Store for Florida

Thunderstorms train west to east

across our fucked-up spit of land

and drag the gorgeous Gulf of Mexico

behind them through our seaside towns

and mangrove swamps as if The Gulf’s

a girl who oughta meet the warming,

rich Atlantic. As if the storms can

end our blood-soaked story with

a wedding. It’s not a romcom. Rains

like these have never washed away

the lynching trees, the prison cells,

the children bleeding in their schools,

the nightclub’s bullet holes. But maybe they

can level us. Flat as the face

of a lake, as the skim of water on a just-

rinsed plate. A flood, a dove, an even start.

Marriage Fragments

| Michele Sharpe

Two purple plums hanging from a tree limb.                                Image by andreas N from Pixabay

My brain, like everyone’s, has its ruts. One of the mostly deeply ingrained of these is iambic pentameter: da-DUM da-DUM da- DUM da-DUM da-DUM.  Free verse (poetry without meter or a given form) doesn’t come very naturally to me.

Habits aren’t bad, but experimenting with new patterns is, IMHO, good for the brain. To break out of my habitual poetry patterns, I sometimes mimic other poems to start one of these experiments.

When I read the very fine “Portrait of Reality in Fragments” by George Alexander, I was entranced with the pattern he used and also with the conversation in his poem between the self and a younger version of the self.  I was eager to try writing a fragment poem with bits of memory juxtaposed, and the result is “Marriage Fragments.”

Originally published by the remarkable journal The Sunlight Press. The editors publish poetry, fiction, essays, and visual art. If you’re an artist or writer looking for a place to publish your work, I recommend them.

The Sunlight Press

Marriage Fragments

I wanted to love him
like my fifteen-year-old self:
lips unsplit, nose unbroken,
face without a mark
on it, my tongue tasting
of plums.

*

Seneca thought luck happened
when preparation met opportunity.
I’d like to think it was the plums’ sweetness
that prepared me
to taste the bitterness,
the differences.

*

In this marriage, my mother’s skin was,
assuredly, my own:
craving, drenched with knowing
touch and never enough touch
and never enough.

*

Rivers froze where I grew up,
and spring shattered them.
He liked to say
he un-bitched me.
Maybe so, or maybe fish
leapt from the river as sleet.

*

His father took him fishing
on Ozark rivers under
yellow honeysuckle. I wouldn’t
recognize those rivers, only
his hands, circling
a canoe paddle and his sex.

*

He asked me to marry him
the first time we had sex,
asked so easily, as if it was
his habit. I waited
him out. My river, his spring,
my differences.

***

 

Writing About Our Dead

| Michele Sharpe

Fireplace-hand with shell fragments
An open palm holding tiny shells and shards

It’s an honor to hold the ashes of our dead.

Some of my brother James’ ashes are in a box on the top of a bookcase in my house. The ashes of a full-grown human being are heavy, enough to fill a half-gallon jug.

His daughters and I released some of his ashes on the beach at Tybee Island two months after his death, on a cold day when the wind was sweeping up sand. His ashes mingled with the sand and the salt wind.

We have vague plans for the ashes in the box, maybe to take them to the mountains he loved and scatter some there. I’ve already scattered some in my garden. James, like me, had an affinity for the plant world.

This poem was originally published in Atticus Review , along with the image above.

Atticus Review
Fireplace

Bananas love ashes in summer.
Time to spread some in the yard.
The fireplace grate is empty.                                                                                          

It’s easy to put things off. Even fire.
No one was diligent like my brother,
who sifted broken shells for hours

looking for shark’s teeth. Once, he held
his hand out with a shattered sand dollar
to show me little bones inside.

His other hand flew up and fluttered—
he said the bones were white doves, the peace
that passes understanding. He believed

in omens and Jesus and that one thing
could also be another. Time to feed
plants? At the first thunderclap.

The grate is empty, the urn is full.
His ashes scatter under the banana trees.
Rain dissolves fine particles, but not
the shards that passed on through.

Writing About Worry

| Michele Sharpe

worried

I’m not prone to anxiety. Maybe it was all that LSD I took in middle school. I’ve heard it’s helpful for similar issues.

But I do worry about the young people in my family.  I love them so much, and so many of them face obstacles that seem insurmountable.

Here are two poems about those worries that were originally published in the Winter/Spring 2020 edition of Wordpeace. 

For audio versions of the two poems, click below.

Michele Sharpe

Michelle Sharpe poem for WP word-page-0

 

Michelle sharpe poem 2 for WP

 

Writing About Shame

| Michele Sharpe

grey and brown fox on open field near herd of deer
Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

I’ve denied shame exists, but that’s wrong. And one thing that makes me feel deeply ashamed is being wrong. Just imagine how I felt when at 21, I found out I was adopted! I’d been wrong about quite a few things.

Here’s a poem that touches on the experience of shame, published in February, 2020 by the wonderfully daily poetry journal SWWIM.  It’s an honor to be included in their river of poems.

For Sure

Honoring Laura Hershey — #CripLit Goddess

| Michele Sharpe

Image result for laura hershey
Image description: Book cover featuring photo of Laura Hershey, a white woman with O2 line and wheelchair, at her desk.

The publication of a new book by an author you love is a wonderful thing, perhaps especially when that author is no longer in this world  Last month, a posthumous collection of Laura Hershey’s poetry and prose was published by The Unsung Masters Series, a project of Pleiades Press, Gulf Coast Journal, and Copper Nickel Journal.

Hershey passed away after a sudden illness in November of 2010; this came as a shock to her many friends and followers, including me. I’d met Laura when she organized a WOM-PO event at the 2010 AWP conference in Denver. About 30 women attended the lunch, exchanging news about recent books and publications.

I’d become familiar with Laura’s work through the WOM-PO listserv, and deeply admired her incisive intellect and her writing on personal and political facets of living as a disabled woman, and I was anxious to speak with her about her work. At the time, I was working on a chapbook of poems about my experience with hepatitis C and stigma. After some conversation, we embarked on an exchange of poems via email for mutual feedback.

Laura and her long-time partner Robin Stephens had recently adopted a teenage girl, and many of her poems in our brief exchange centered on her new daughter. As an adoptee raised in a fucked-up home, I had a bad taste in my mouth about adoption in general. Laura’s poems were a palate cleanser for me. I had no idea that an adoptive parent could focus, as she and Robin did, on learning all they could about who their daughter was, understanding her daughter as an individual, and acting for the benefit of their child.

The Unsung Masters Series project is an important one, but Laura Hershey was hardly unsung in the many communities she touched with her poetry, prose, and activism. For a sampling of her international influence, check out her website, which continues to live on after her death.

She put her considerable energies to work for both the theory and practice of LGBTQ and disability rights. In addition to her prolific writing, she worked with ADAPT, Not Dead Yet, and other disability rights activist groups. Among other issues, she advocated for universal design — a world that is ready-made for all of us — because, as she asked, “what could be more universal than having a body?”

One of Laura’s poems, “You Get Proud by Practicing,” was set to music and also became a rallying cry for many people with disabilities. It’s included in this important book. Here’s an excerpt:

 

You Get Proud by Practicing
by Laura Hershey

If you are not proud
For who you are, for what you say, for how you look;
If every time you stop
To think of yourself, you do not see yourself glowing
With golden light; do not, therefore, give up on yourself.
You can get proud.

You do not need
A better body, a purer spirit, or a Ph.D.
To be proud.
You do not need
A lot of money, a handsome boyfriend, or a nice car.
You do not need
To be able to walk, or see, or hear,
Or use big, complicated words,
Or do any of those things that you just can’t do
To be proud. A caseworker
Cannot make you proud,
Or a doctor.
You only need more practice.
You get proud by practicing.

Fresh Confessions

| Michele Sharpe

Perhaps especially because I’m a native-born #FloridaWoman, it’s a delight to have my review of Leah Claire Kaminski’s chapbook, Penninsular Scar, in this month’s Tupelo Quarterly Review. 

peninsula_1024x1024The title of the review, “Fresh Confessions,” refers to an observation about how the nature of confessional poetry has expanded in the twenty-first century, as exhibited in Penninsular Scar.

Like Sexton and Plath, Kaminski employs a set of private symbols that may accumulate meaning over time for the reader who follows her work. “Cypress,” for example, appears in many of the poems as a strong, durable building material that nevertheless falls to the same destruction as the rest of Florida. Unlike the confessional poets of the 20th century, however, Kaminski proceeds with a distinctively contemporary aesthetic. The confessions contained in the poems, even those contained in conversations with “my therapist,” avoid a coherent narrative by questioning a sense of self at the center of consciousness and employing syntactical disruption.

Read the full review here.