Imagine Sisyphus Happy by R. G. Evans
Kelsay Books (October, 2020), ISBN: 978-1-95232-660-8, 90 pages

Reviewed by Kevin Carey

To Imagine Sisyphus Happy, the king of Corinth pushing a bolder to the top of a hill only to have it repeatedly tumble down (for eternity) feels right in this current climate. We’re all stuck repeating the daily chores of this new existence day after day, feeling often as if we’re merely surviving, hoping for that magical moment when we grunt one last time and set the rock on top for good. The fact that RG Evans has brought us this collection (his third) and asks us to imagine ourselves “[shrugging our] flesh into the stone” seems so appropriate and timely.

The poems in this collection are not all about pain and suffering, though there’s some of that, “Every pain, every scar, every weakness / is a scream that we are still here” (Enemies of Time 65). There’s plenty more to consider beyond the bent justice of Greek Mythology. There’s grief, God, sadness, childhood, living the life of a flawed human being (aren’t we all?). There’s an unflinching examination going on here,  and a sort of anthem to the Sweet Old Life we have to endure.

                                    Blue poem says come on and
have a drink. It knows twelve bars
where you can sink good and deep
down in the blue. It says
the sky ain’t cryin’ baby. (Yellow Poem, Blue Poem, Red Poem 77)

You know you’re reading an RG Evans poem, when you feel the beat of the line, when the careful crafting rings in your ear like a good country song (he is a great musician and songwriter by the way). But I recognize an Evans poem most when I feel that little tug in my heart, perhaps a reminder of something I wanted to forget, or a memory I can’t shake, or that thing I just can’t dream away. “Inside my dream / I can hide nowhere. The barbed wire edges / of sleep herd me into empty rooms…” (Perchance to Dream 66).

The type of reflection that Evans shares with us is often buried in his own clever word play, in the form of opinions, or when evoking empathy, or sometimes when he is having fun with the language, like in the poem Apology to Time (71) which reveals a punning, turn of phrase side to the poet, which I personally know well. 
…we who end up doing you because
we’ve already done something worse,
we who rest when you are out
and expire when you are up
apologize for killing you when young
and later for trying to turn back your hands
when all you wanted to do was fly.   

Evans’ words ring like guitar chords in some blue neon saloon, bouncing off the walls or guiding us around in a slow dance. The energies of these poems are eclectic that way, some asking us to kick up our heels, others crooning us into a memory with details that keep jabbing and setting us up for the knockout punch.

                                    The cut dry hay of August,
its scent a little like decay,
deranges time and I am a child
at the carnival by the train tracks.
Straw spread over paths of mud.
Bamboo canes. Hawaiian leis.
Chinese finger traps. A carousel
in the rain. Boo-boo, my mother calls,
don’t wander off too far;
but when I turn there’s only open fields,
the tractor and two men are gone, bales
the size of caskets on their sides (Momentary 28)

And then there’s God. Evans devotes quite a bit of time to the subject of God or Gods, with poems such as “The Pagan World,” where he shows us that polytheism is alive and well, “Apollo Blazes, Artemis glows / Zeus…chuckles / and the “overworked…Hades wrings his hands (52).” In “God of Ghosts,” he reminds us how religion straddles a rickety fence, “times are tough / on both sides of the veil (53)”  In “Christ on the Cross,” Evans recalls the different versions of Christ, one “thin as a rail and beyond all suffering” and a newer version, “still on the cross / but risen, guru’s robes and Beatles beard (57)”. And the final couplet of the praise poem “Prayer,” makes the case for mystery and worship going hand in hand.

Praise the emptiness within that calls us forth to praise
It may be all we have, and may be, praise be, enough (59).

Evans has written a wonderful and candid collection. Tucked into these tightly crafted poems is a lot of straight shooting about life, love, memory, religion, mercy, regret and hope. With his keen eye for detail and his skilled lyrical voice, Evans has created a challenging and rich book of poems, worthy of much praise.  

Wordsworth would tell us to “fill the paper with the breathings of your heart.” Evans has done just that. These poems are personal, allowing us to see and feel the poet’s dreams, to question alongside him the grander notions of living and rejoicing in the simple moments that make us human, and inevitably to keep pushing even when the rock feels too big and the hill feels too steep.

The harvester will raise it up, and the soy
may feel the silvery weight of the Hunter’s moon
upon its leaves, stems, and beans. 
Or perhaps it never felt at all,
just moved when the wind moved it,
bent like the burdened in the rain,
while we pretended that it could dream,
that we could dream, that dreams
were what made us both alive.  (The Soy’s Long Dream 85)
*******

Kevin Carey is the author of three books of poetry from CavanKerry Press, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, Jesus Was a Homeboy, and the recently released Set in Stone. Murder in the Marsh from Darkstroke Books, is his first crime novel. Kevincareywriter.com"

R.G. Evans’s books include the poetry collections Overtipping the Ferryman, The Holy Both, and Imagine Sisyphus Happy. His CD of original songs, Sweet Old Life, is available on most streaming services. Evans recently retired after thirty-four years of teaching high school English. Website: www.rgevanswriter.com.

Bone Chalk by Jim Reese
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2020, ISBN: 978 162 288 2038, 168 pages

Reviewed by Keith Lesmeister

“How many souls make up the inexhaustible winds? How many of them taught with their bones’ chalk? What are the givens?” This passage from Requiem for a Teacher by Don Welch serves as epigraph on which Jim Reese’s essay collection Bone Chalk is built. There’s an even-handedness about this collection, a sense of unflappability donned by the author that creates a kind of trust between reader/author, a sense that this person is a Teacher, capital T, but that doesn’t mean that each of these essays is the same. In fact, in content and tone, these essays span a rich cast of characters and situations: learning of the locals at the neighborhood tap; exploring the seedier areas of Omaha; meeting inmates through the author’s work in prisons; and then there’s the author himself, Reese, who shows his depth of thought and reflection and, like a good teacher, is always pressing us to think deeper about those people who we think we know, especially those living on the fringes of society, or perhaps even more pointedly, those who are or have been incarcerated.

            The essay referenced immediately above is titled “Never Talk to Strangers—12 Years in Prisons and What Criminals Teach Me.” The essay, perhaps the most ambitious and most personal of the collection, starts with an account of brutal crimes that took place in the author’s hometown of Omaha in the eighties. After introducing those heinous crimes—which I won’t discuss here in this review—Reese immediately pivots away from them and to himself, asking the question that ultimately guides the rest of the essay which is this: “Is there a killer inside me?” This question of course is acknowledging what we all know to be true, but perhaps keep repressed, which is this: how do I keep the good-natured part of myself flourishing while acknowledging, though suppressing, the darker sides of myself? The Smashing Pumpkins, put it more directly in their song Disarm: “The killer in me is the killer in you.” And this exploration of what we are made of—what’s inside of us—propels the essay.

            Further along, same essay, Reese discusses his own family, his teaching in prisons, and he begins to build on other questions and realizations. “What I began to discover,” Reese writes, “was that addiction, in all of its gross immaturity, will make people go to extreme measures.” And later, while talking to an inmate in the prison yard, the inmate says, “You know, I’m no killer or sicko. My whole stint that got me here only lasted five months. Meth will eat you up. Fifteen years I’ll be down for an addiction I couldn’t shake.”

And this is the heart of Bone Chalk, as it intimately frames Reese’s world as a teacher, certainly, but also as a constant lifelong learner himself, better understanding those with whom he interacts regularly, and the lessons he’s learning come from inmates, as we’ve just seen, but also a range of unsuspecting characters.

One such couple Reese learns from, and pays tribute to, are his noble and humble in-laws, who lead quiet, productive lives. You’ll never meet a person who reveres his in-laws the way Reece does, as the third essay of the book is titled “The Mother-in-law Archives” and shows us the virtues of his wife’s mother, a woman who was “born during the Great Depression” and “makes pie crusts from lard” and has “unidentifiable things in her deep freeze.” This is a woman who has anything you need: from a “blow torch” and “nunchucks,” to “bell bottoms” and a “bowling ball.” She is a person who, born out of the Great Depression, wants to keep everyone in the family well fed. The father-in-law is on equal terms with the mother-in-law, and an equally impressive essay was written about him, a meditative deep-thinking soul who has a keen eye and a shy sense of humor.

 The wonderful thing about this collection is that its focus is not solely on Reese, which is the way of most personal essayist, but rather Reese reaches outward to honor those people with whom he has shared time and knowledge. But not all of the essays are meditative and serious. Some are bombastic and humorous, and do look inward, and show Reese’s range of writing ability, such as the essay “My Life as Willy the Wildcat.” It’s about a time when Reese took on the role of his college’s mascot and learned the ups and downs of taking on a new persona. The essay is a kind of sexual exploration, which makes perfect sense given that most eighteen-year-olds are trying to find comfort in their own sexuality, and this is amplified by the fact that he’s taken on a new identity. On one hand, he says, “simulating an animal brings out sexualized behaviors in others, in me, and I didn’t care.” Later on, Reese admits to being humiliated in those woozy after-bar hours when he went home with a “lady friend” and “immediately after [his] paper-mâché head came off, her hysterical laughter and sighs ensued.” Reese now has the luxury of age and hindsight through which to tell this self-deprecating essay, and Reese is skilled at intermixing the humor with poignancy.

This is evidenced further by three chapters that are like found poems in a way, showcasing the various bumper stickers Reese has paid witness to on cars traveling through South Dakota, where he now lives, stickers about guns: “My peace sign is a cross hair” or “Gun CONTROL Means Using Both Hands”; politics: “Charlton Heston is MY PRESIDENT”; food issues: “Save a Cow, Eat a Vegetarian”; and sex: “I like my women like my deer: HORNY” or “Boobies make me smile” or “If You Are Going to Ride My Ass At Least Pull My Hair”.

            What Reese is doing throughout, even with the bumper stickers, is providing an unflinching and oftentimes humorous—though some might say terrifying—view of the flyover states, and why not? This is who we are, in some ways, and Reese is showing—teaching—us what that means. No explanations needed. Like a good teacher, he’s letting us figure things out on our own.

Even in the first essay of the collection, “How to Become a Regular,” is a kind lesson—a direct address to someone new to a small town, and it offers an intimate view into a single evening at the local tap. We meet an assortment of characters, which is ultimately how Reese frames the instructions—by how we relate to one another, which often means never refusing another beer, “I guess I have time for one more.” This, so you can watch Edsel “plop another peanut into his rum and Coke…and offer… wisdom about women.” 

These essays are character studies of Midwesterners who have something to teach all of us, if only in their own subtle way, but that’s exactly the point. One of the other teachable moments here is the simple idea of paying attention and embracing those people in our community who, even if they aren’t aware of it, are leaving indelible marks on us—using their own bones’ chalk to show us all the ways possible to live, to work, and to relate to one another.

Keith Lesmeister is the author of the story collection We Could've Been Happy Here. He currently serves as co-director of the Luther College Writers Festival and teaches at Northeast Iowa Community College. 

Jim Reese is Associate Professor of English at Mount Marty University. He is the National Endowment for the Arts Writer-in-Residence at Federal Prison Camp Yankton. His book of nonfiction, Bone Chalk, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in December of 2019. A fourth collection of poetry, Dancing Room Only—new and selected, is forthcoming by New York Quarterly Books in 2021.

The Things I Didn’t Know to Wish For by Linda Hillringhouse
NYQ Books, 2020, ISBN: 978-1-63045-069-4, Pages: 90

Reviewed by Joe Weil

Linda Hillringhouse’s new book begins with a highly unusual memory poem, “New Dress.” It’s unusual for several reasons, but the first unusual aspect of it is the structure. “New Dress” begins in future tense and with a bit of verbal trickery:
“I’m going to tell you something even I don’t know”   
Then after this somewhat baffling gambit (that the voice of the poem is going to tell what she doesn’t know), the poem is transformed from a long line (more than 14 syllables per line) into a full out prose poem form. This second section of the poem in prose form is in the present tense, dealing with the same figure and it is all one breathless sentence:

She stands arms outstretched like a supplicant or little model & they are walking
through the door & her father picks her up but unbelievably her mother walks by,
smiling, in the full beauty of her days, at the neighbor & past the dress like no other
& the thing that was known & not known became flesh & I’m finally telling you that
right there in Lenore’s living room time stopped and the future turned to dust.

The very end is in past tense, and so we’ve been taken from a long lined poem to a prose poem, from future to present and then past tense, and in the meantime, we’ve been treated to a voice who, by the unusual process of the poem, does, indeed, tell something even the poet does not initially know.
Hillringhouse’s first poem is in the midst of discovery as it unfolds, and it is a brilliant experiment in making the poem’s structure aid and abet its meaning within the process to the utmost degree.  We are not sure if the future turns to dust because the mother looks past the daughter at the neighbor (this one action might be the tip of an iceberg against which the speaker of the poem crashes, but the full freedom of a poet is present here and, as I read the poem, it’s unusual lineation and tense shifts all made sense. Memory, and the experience of hurt, destabilizes past, present, and future. This opening poem beautifully proves the wobbly and unstable nature of memory and trauma.
The poet is honest about several of her trips into memory and knowing (in a belated way). In the poem “The Sixties,” Hillringhouse admits to not being “present” in the sixties (a decade where everyone insists they were fully present and swears they were at Woodstock or Selma or Haight Ashbury). The poet shows a good and wry sense of humor:
“I was at Goddard College / majoring in hedonism”                                                                                                          
This poem moves deftly between issues of class and race with a light but ever increasingly truthful touch. The poet remembers the first black girl she knew “who got political and stopped talking to {her}.”  She remembers the first rich girl she knew (a girl from Scarsdale who drove a Porsche) throwing her lunch tray down at the feet of the college president in protest and the poet thinking this was suicidal (showing her class fear of pissing off authority in a wonderful half a line). The poem proceeds with the first gay person she knew, the first blind person, and then the first person she knew to die in Vietnam—the boyfriend of a friend. Very abruptly we are in the present, or, rather, the recent past, and the speaker of the poem is at the Vietnam War memorial, searching for his name. This “time jostling” is part of the power of the book, the sudden shifts that open up any number of meanings and perspectives, one on which Hillringhouse ends this particular poem:
“it’s weird the way / insight finally arrives, but way too late / to do anyone any good.”
What The Things I Didn’t Know to Wish For seems to be implying in many of its poems is the value of hindsight is not so much to do good as to create a vibrant sense of remorse and rueful wisdom out of which memory can create art (even though it can’t undo).
The poem Blue that appears almost dead center in the book is, unlike most of the poems in the book, fairly sparse and airy, with the lines being double-spaced (as if each line were a stanza). The poet writes:
“we live in a straight line unless something, / a planetary life, gets in the way.”
It is the straight line with which the poet contends and which the poems act as bodies that cause the line to curve, to move freely out of that straightness. This is a confessional, poems in which the poet is unafraid to admit regret and fault and even ruined chances, but a beautiful act of confessing that, in many respects, restores and repairs via the poetry what the life would mar.  Reading the book, I considered a theory in physics, where, at the micro level of the universe, the future can change the past. I think this strange science exists in these splendid poems. The final poem in the book, “Nieves Penitentes,” shows the brilliance of the poet in terms of getting all she can from a phrase: “nieves penitentes” is a description of pennant or pinnacle shaped snow that forms at very high altitudes, and under frigid conditions. The phrase literally translates as “penitent shaped snows.” Hillringhouse, like Dickinson, is having her complete way with the play of her lexicon. The book, in many respects, plays with the concept of a penitent, someone finally awakening to their sins (almost always sins of omission, of inertia) but at a time when there is not much to be done about them.  Still, regret can be turned to art. The poem is one of hard won and contingent hope -- a beautiful “maybe.”  The poet writes:
The snow is falling 
as if it’s forgotten to stop.
Maybe the mind
that keeps mountains
upright and oceans
in their bed
is setting up some new venture
What this new venture is the poet can only conjecture, but penitence precedes absolution. The Thing I Didn’t Know to Wish For is extremely honest in its provisional discoveries, and beautiful in its verbal magic. This book is a journey not so much of regret as of recognition and a little hope, perhaps smaller than a neutrino, that the future, can, indeed, change the past. I know the good poems here go a long way in redeeming that lost past and unknowing which they explore.

Born and raised in Elizabeth New Jersey, Joe E Weil is a former tool grinder and union shop steward who became an associate professor at Binghamton University. His poetry, stories, notable quotes and reviews have been appeared in many journals and anthologies including Boston review, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, and he has read his poetry at universities and colleges across country. Weil makes his home in Binghamton, NY with the poet Emily Vogel and their two children.

Linda Hillringhouse was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and a second-place winner of Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Lips; New Ohio Review; Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her new book is The Things I Didn’t Know to Wish For (NYQ Books).