The Animals Beyond Us by Michael Hettich
(New Rivers Press, Paperback, 59 pp., $13.95)

Reviewed by Stephanie Woolley-Larrea

           “When I look out the window and see myself out there/ When my breaths and heartbeats have reached the magic number/ they are always counting toward.  Burn the underbrush away." (From “The Votive Candle.”) Many of the poems in this collection, Michael Hettitch’s seventh, work to “burn the underbrush way.” These fifty free-verse poems align humanity with the natural world and the titular animals around and beyond us as the speaker encounters, and enjoys, middle age. The poems are accessible, engaging, and solemn. Some of the themes which emerge throughout the four-part collection are the death of the speaker’s father and grandfather and a peaceful, empty-nest marriage.

          The Animals Beyond Us is an excellent example of how a poet can use one lens, in this case animals, to explore a variety of aspects of life. Clearly this angle gives the poet a focus for examination which provides both perspective and comfort.  Birds, bees, snails, lizards, toads, and fish all figure prominently.  He explains his interest in “Habitat:” “Blue and yellow-striped creature, how did you grow so beautiful?/ This is not an idle question, but an attempt to understand / fingernails and teeth, our downy hair and eyebrows/ by understanding nothing, really.  Certain things we know/ are beautiful beyond themselves, simply to be real.”

 The language is vivid and the tone sometimes self-effacing, as in the poem “The Bullfrogs,” set in the Florida Everglades. “We marveled at the fact that so few people / came out here to swim: The water smelled like flowers. / For that whole first year we had no idea / those croaks we found so charming were actually / challenges from bull alligators establishing their territory.”

There is no narrative arc in the collection; however, many of the poems inform one another, so there is reward in rereading. For example, the tender marriage which exists in the second section, in “Even Sleeping:” “The truest love is every day, / we understand that now, even sleeping,” is mirrored near the end of the book is “A Kind of Pleasure:” “The hibernating animals are staring to wake. / Your body is more like a gesture than a thing. / More like a song than a gesture.”

This book is a love letter to the speaker’s family and his wife, as well as to his place in the natural world.  He has cleared the underbrush away, and makes this realization in “After the Rains:” “You are the only person in your body / for a moment. What’s a moment? Where eternity resides.”

Stephanie Woolley-Larrea is the mother of triplets, a writer of prose and poetry, and a teacher of English living in Miami, FL. Her work has been published in Connotations, Sentence, Mipoesias, Gulf Stream Magazine, Florida English, Coe Review, and 400 Words.  More information about her publications can be found at http://the-green-shirt.blogspot.com/

Like Happiness by Michael Hettich
(Anhinga Press, Paperback, 63 pp., $17)
Reviewed by Kacee Belcher

           From the first couple of pages, I thought Michael Hettich’s Like Happiness would be a nice, “happy” collection of poems. As I got into the book, I found myself surprised at how Hettich creates a darker world. The book’s mainly free verse and prose poems seem to chase an idea of happiness that constantly retreats and stays just out of reach, as the title would suggest..

            “The Frogs” takes the reader into a natural landscape of what might have been. The poem begins, “He loved frogs, so he spent his afternoons/wading in the tall grass or standing in the leafy water/where the stream turned.” But what at first appears to be a pleasant, boyhood remembrance of frog hunting changes:

    …Then he walked up to the house
    through the tall grass, through the dark,
    Still singing in his own language. Don’t think of him now,
    drinking in a city bar, talking to strangers
    who ignore him. Don’t think of him walking out into
    the empty street, slightly drunk.  He’ll be fine.
    Think instead of that walk through the dark wet grass,
    the sound of a child’s body moving through the grass;
    think instead of those frogs falling silent . . .

            Here Hettich’s use of the imperative magnifies the ominousness. By directing the reader to ignore the boy’s current state, Hettich instead make it impossible to ignore. And the memory itself picks up a sinister cast, with “those frogs falling silent."

            As with “wading in the tall grass” and “standing in the leafy water,” Hettich finds images of uncertainty in liminal spaces. Where is the actual line between night and day? The water and the shore? Dreams and realities? These borders are often blurred in poems such as “Awake Before Dawn,” “The Boat,” “The Mind,” and “The Peach Tree.” Moving across edges has an effect all its own which left me unsettled, not quite knowing where to plant my feet or if the ground would even hold if I tried.

            The poems are full of apparitions and disappearances.  “Happiness” begins, “In the Navy, he said, he’d seen young men disappear,/ just vanish who knows where? He claimed his own mother—/ grandma—kept featherless wings folded/against her back.”  “The Betrayal” starts, “When you open your closet and find the friend/you betrayed once, long ago/standing there wearing clothes that don’t fit him—your suit coat and best pants.” Cumulatively, Hettich builds a world where presence is uncertain, absence always hovering.

            In “Not Grieving,” the speaker demands some explanation. He summons the ghosts. “Tell me who you are when you’ve forgotten everything./Tell me who stripped those old junk cars, and what/they did with the parts; tell me what they built/and how fast they drive it, the kind of roar it makes.” But there is no response. Instead, Hettich creates a tension that could not have been achieved if he tried to pinpoint answers for his readers.

            Usually, I am a reader of the concrete and find it hard to appreciate or even be comfortable with not knowing. Hettich’s fifth collection, Like Happiness, chases what is neither here nor there, but leaves me willing to hang out in the haunted space in between.

Kacee Belcher's work appears or is forthcoming in Two Hawks Quarterly, BORDERLANDS: Texas Poetry Review, and Voices De La Luna. She lives in Miami.

Hope, As The World Is A Scorpion Fish by Liz Robbins
(The Backwater Press, Paperback, 84 pp., $16.00)
Reviewed by Nick Vagnoni

           The speakers of Liz Robbins's poems all share a fascination with the outside world.  More specifically, many of the poems in this Flagler College professor's first collection, Hope, As The World Is a Scorpion Fish, want to probe the connection between the mind of the speaker and the life that swirls around them.  Taken as a whole, Hope . . . is a meditation on the careful observer and the sense that he or she tries to make out of the world.  These poems seek connection—between past and present, between self and other, between human beings and nature.  Almost always, however, there is a pause, a moment of hesitation, that keeps the speaker from connecting completely.

            Sometimes there are literal boundaries, such as in "Women Picking Potatoes Outside Amsterdam," where the speaker takes in the world from a train compartment, as visions of women harvesting pass quickly through the window.  The speaker's companion says, "You need to interact with people, which you don't do out of fear/ of rejection."  He gets up, opens the door of their compartment, and the activity of the rest of the train comes rushing in:

    ...the air-conditioned air of the dining car, the hum of the people

    speaking Dutch and English in low voices, pool into the space

    he's left.  The clink of silverware.  I look around, meet briefly

    the eyes of a woman dressed in a suit, alone and reading,

    picking at her plate of steak and peas, its mountain

    of potatoes, and she reminds me of home.

            In "Studio," the poem that follows "Women Picking Potatoes . . . " the speaker is again semi-secluded, this time in their apartment, where signs of life such as cigarette smoke and music drift through both the floors and ceilings.  In the poem's final lines, we again find the speaker at the window, trying to make meaning of the outside world:  "Stars shine beyond the windows, two/ or three in bright clusters, and the occasional one, alone."

            Even when there aren't floorboards or glass, there is still a pause or hesitation when reaching out to embrace the world. In "Apology with Sunset Motif," for example, "the sky changes nonchalantly,/ stripping its clothes/ as though I'd been married to it for years," after which the speaker immediately asks, "Am I wrong to see the world as finding/ ways to reflect/ its inhabitants, to hold them captive here?"

            Such reflections on the powers and ownership afforded to the observer come through again in "Love of Mine," a sonnet written after Edna St. Vincent Millay, in which the speaker confesses:

          For your desire's really mine on loan,

          as in your eyes I see myself grow wet,

          thus ready to lure mself into the sack

        (your want of me's the aphrodisiac).

Here, even in the most intimate of situations, there is still an observational awareness that pervades, that keeps the speaker from becoming completely engaged in the moment.

            This observation grip loosens slightly as the collection progresses, however.  Robbins begins to experiment with other subjects—her father, or Odysseus, for example—and other points of view.  Many of the poems in Hope . . . 's fifth and final section are written in the second person.  The final poem, "Running the Race," comes closest to achieving the unity that the speaker of the earlier poems sought.  The subject of the poem, having just run a marathon, now sits in celebratory repose, and is told by the speaker:

          Your mind has left

          its tight prison during this,

          the big endorphin swim . . . 

          so you wil sit, and sip,

          and win

          not from whatever your place in the race,

          but because you opened the floodgates

          to let it all in.

            At last, Robbins allows one of her characters to let the world in.  It seems a fitting end to this collection of poems that are so often intrigued with the world, yet still wary of fully giving themselves over to it.

Nick Vagnoni recently received his MFA in poetry from Florida International University in Miami, where he currently teaches creative writing. His poems and reviews have appeared in Alimentum, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Florida English, Backwards & Ugly, The Secret of Salt, and Solares Hill.

Derelict Tributaries by Lawrence Hetrick
(Anhinga Press, Paperback, 116 pp., $17.00)

Reviewed by Guillermo Cancio-Bello

            The low drawl of the landscape itself rises from these lived poems. In Lawrence Hetrick’s Derelict Tributaries, each word is born out of the dark back-water of the poet’s memories. Hetrick was raised in Gainesville, Florida. His father was a professor of entomology and his mother was a botanical researcher. It seems fitting and inescapable that these poems are grounded in the Florida landscape from which Hetrick himself has rooted and sprung. Each poem grows in strength because every line and image grows out of that land. His emotions, his memories, and his insights  summon a deepened sense of loss and grief, while giving the reader, at the proper moment, a glimmer of a future hope shining on one small ripple in time’s riverbend. In the first poem in the book, "Arrowhead Field," Hetrick maps out the course the book will take.

    Here they lie, beneath mirage,
    Sinking farther out of sight,
    No wind, no moon, no cloud is here.

    Where can I be except this place
    whispering to me in every grain?

           Although Hetrick takes a certain delight in the “half-remembered innocence” of being a child, or of being “young marrieds,” his focus is on the sadness that gives clarity and light to those moments, and to the moments of happiness that become striking to us in the present:

    In pinewoods, over beds...

    Bay-gall laurels glare
    With fire and disaster, war
    And grim dependencies...

    No other despair
    Is like this, our fear
    Without hope, obscene
    Laurels multiplying

          This idea of hopelessness, of being unable to escape one’s fear, is present throughout the book. It is the terrible curse that each poem attempts to break. But with this despair, Hetrick gives us a light, albeit a match burning down to one’s fingertips.  In his title poem he says, “Grief obliterates grief.” For Hetrick, it is the grief of being that opens one up in a new way, giving perspective to the landscape of one’s life.

    Bring more books! you say, oranges,
    Loud rain on the roof, silk pillows...

    For everything
    Is private now, as it is in books,

    As it never was, nor will be after
    Our rain bursts every flower open

          Hetrick’s inner-world is tied to the landscape in which he lives. This has given him a perspective which says, although we may say we have private griefs and joys, there is really only ‘grief’ and ‘joy.’ A book rests privately beneath its cover until it is read. Hetrick understands that “your naked pain is art”, that we are meant to be seen and to see, we are meant for relationships, which is another theme in his poems. But because of this, it is “our rain,” our grief and tears that “burst every flower open,” that gives us perspective on our own lives and the lives of those around us, leading us to those moments of joy. Yet the struggle is constant and will never be finished.

    But you turn toward me this last time
    in your music room looking out...

    your last objection not yet spoken.

Guillermo Cancio-Bello was born in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate student in the Creative Writing Program at FIU.

Tropicalia by Emma Trelles

(University of Notre Dame Press, Paperback, 72 pp., $15.00)

Reviewed by Danielle Sellers

            With the publication of Tropicalia a new voice leaps onto the scene, one rejoicing in the often unsung qualities of Florida. In her first collection, winner of the 2010 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Emma Trelles seeks to make sense of the South Florida world she was born into, a world often gritty and hard to love, with its drugs and traffic and racism, but also one of exotic beauty. Unlike many who write about Florida, Trelles doesn’t rely on cheap exotic thrills to hook her readers. The poems in this collection are raw in their honesty and in what they are willing to divulge.

            Readers of Tropicalia are offered an insider’s look into Miami life. For Trelles, her hometown is more than just tropical food and art deco buildings. The collection begins with a kind of death in the third poem, “From the Shorecrest, Miami Beach”: 

        Mine was a death by Cuban-good-girl rules:
        Always wear lipstick
        Worship the father
        Keep the true tongue still.

            It’s clear Trelles’s speaker struggles between the rules placed on her by culture, tradition, and family and the desire to find her own identity. The poems early in the book wrestle with political and religious ideas which arise from the geographical and cultural history of the state and its tumultuous relationship with Cuba. But the landscape is so powerful it takes over the mind of the speaker, and thereby much of the book, and happily so.

            In “Florida Poem,” rain brings “thumb snails and beetles” to “blot the window screens / with pearl and drone. Gardenias swell, / breathing is aquatic…” In drought, “the heat becomes a devil / girl with oven-red lips…” This is a poet intimately familiar with the land, but also with desire. Often Trelles’s speaker will muse on paths not taken, such as in the prose poem “What Would Have Happened If I Had Married You”:
At night I listen for your snore, wait for your octopus stretch across the bed. I slip across the patio, past key lime, mango, sapodilla, and mamey. White-soled and ravenous, I climb branches, swallow skins, save the seeds for later, knowing even the shriveled ones can bear life.

            Even when the speaker is muddling through the dark, there’s always a sense of hope present in the poems, which is both unusual and refreshing.

            With this first collection, Trelles was interested in re-creating her hometown on the page, but because of South Florida’s unusual atmosphere, the reader is almost given a parallel universe, a place which exists between action and the mind. The first stanza of “Autorretrato Quintina” explains much:

  A mind needs a place to set its teeth, and grace
  arrives in fixing the toilet, in water
  smoothing the pre-dawn fears of possible
  cysts, faulty seatbelts, the radio loop
  of reasons I’m needed and belong nowhere.

            To read this book, one is expected to have a foot on the ground while the other stretches into the expanse of dreams, as the poems are always two-sided. They are the stuff of real life mixed with the otherworldly. Emma Trelles’s world is one readers leave only reluctantly, happy to return again and again.

Danielle Sellers is originally from Key West, FL. Her poems have appeared in River Styx, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, The Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, and her first book is Bone Key Elegies, published by Main Street Rag. She’s editor of The Country Dog Review and teaches at the University of Mississippi.

MoonFlower by Gianna Russo
(Kitsune, Paperback, 108 pp., $12.00)

Reviewed by Guillermo Cancio-Bello

           All things blossom out of the dark, and Gianna Russo’s MoonFlower chronicles the growth of a consciousness rising out of that dark into the light. Even the early poems, born out of despair at divorce and the death of her mother, are written with tenderness and with a voice of one who has her poetic feelers out, absorbed in the sensuousness of the material and emotional world. In her first poem, “Angel of Drought,” Russo sets the tone and mood for the rest of her collection.

    The cattails have gone brown and brittle,
    the lily-pads under some dark spell,
    are reduced to the size of dimes.
    . . . Every day its draining touch
    draws closer to my door.

          Russo gives us these images of flora dying not just from the course of life but because the force that drives life has been stolen. The reader can feel her associating her own loss with this natural calamity. Then, in those last two lines, “Every day its draining touch/draws closer to my door,” she brings the reader to a sense of encroaching darkness and despair, almost like a slow approaching wave of depression. Yet, even here, the sense of attention to physical detail and the pleasure taken in these images can be felt.

           In  “Emergency Room,” the reader is given a first hint of a divorce, with its complexities of anger and lingering affection. Early in the poem, during an argument with her husband, the speaker cut her hand, and then these lines arrive at the end:

    You held my good hand
    held water for the pills

    stayed with me through the stitches and didn’t
    look me in the eye.

          We get the sense that these two people have, if not deep, at least familiar affection for each other. Not only is he holding her hand, but water for her pills. Then with the lines “stayed with me through the stitches and didn’t/look into my eye,” the reader gains a better understanding of the distance between them. That inability to look her in the eye, to confront the personal, reveals the depth of the schism.

          In poems such as “Manic-Depression Approaching Spring,” Russo reveals the joy she takes in the structure and form of poems and how that architecture can comment on and enhance the content.

    Off the edge
    of winter, the icicle
    hangs tenuous
          You can see Russo's playfulness,  breaking on the word ‘edge’ and ‘icicle.’ But those line-breaks also leave the reader on edge wondering where the poem is going, and that enhances the manic-depressive theme.

In the title poem, “Moonflower,” Russo gives the reader a sense of life rising out of this dark mood and world she has created. “In the yard anguish has taken root” is the first line. She establishes her footing; this anguish is what is within (and around?) her. In the lines “I pace the rooms, closing doors/on what used to be,” we are cued-in to anxiety that arises in her attempts to deal with the past and to overcome it. And “The blanched lip of the fruit bowl/kisses nothing but motes of dust.” This strong image shows where her despair has left her, with the feeling that her affection is not returned, that her affection disappears into emptiness. But in closing the poem Russo leaves us with hope.

    The moon flowers turn their porcelain faces up
    and open themselves to the dark.

Throughout this collection, Russo displays a wonderful control of language, syntax and the use of line, revealing her musicality in poems such as “A Thing about Rhumba.” However, it is in her final poem “The Fixed and Startled Way” where she finally claims the intensity and light of her own poetic voice and being, leaving the reader delighted.

    But I myself rise and shake out
    the waist-length hair of my soul,
    and it sets all the bells ringing.

Guillermo Cancio-Bello was born in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate student in the Creative Writing Program at FIU.

Bone Key Elegies by Danielle Sellers

(Main Street Rag, Paperback, 60 pp., $14.00)

Reviewed by Guillermo Cancio-Bello

           Unremorseful in her attempt to capture the despair that binds itself around every longing, Danielle Sellers tunes in to the low tones that throb and keep the beat of life when life seem like it is too much and too dark for us. Her language is stark, each word chosen to slice into the heart of the matter and into the heart of matter, as if things, both present and past, carried within them some possible meaning, if not a path to the resolution of lingering grief.

          Seller’s book, Bone Key Elegies, is grounded in the nature and life-style of the Florida Keys. It is clear that the speaker is intimately familiar with the setting’s natural world. And the poems written away from her home, are full of longing for the sensual world that her poetic voice and self has grown from. Her voice has grittiness and lushness, both also descriptive of the character of the Keys.

           Sellers begins with the poem “Winter Elegy.” It is a poem that takes joy in the vivid memories of childhood. One can feel the cool wind, smell the cinnamon candles, see the “sugar apples ripening on the tree” and the “blossoms of cacti in the corner of the yard.” Then in the ending lines she brings in images that set up the lamentation for a way of being which we hear for the remainder of the book.

          .....That overture
          of sighs and low moans and my father’s constant snore
          lulled me back to sleep, and I never imagined
          this was not the way it would always be.

          By setting the realization of lost innocence against the image of the tender awareness of her father and the safety he represented, that movement into uncertainty is even stronger.

The next few poems offer reminiscences of her father and investigations into his character. They are full of affection and praise, as well as anger at his sickness and infidelity. The speaker and her father spent time together fishing, and that image of her father as a fisherman becomes a way for her to explore him in his complexity, where he is known and revealed as a hero and where he is unknown, like something from the sea itself. In “Fishing at Night” we are given a sense of his mysteriousness and weakness. “Legs slick with mud, shimmering with scales./His figure diminished under the anemic moon.” Because he is slick and shimmering there is a sense of him being something other than her father, and since his figure is diminished there is a feeling that he is fading, that there is something of him she does not and cannot know. Then in “Daddy at the Stove” he is a complete hero. “From the sofa’s peak I see my daddy barefoot at the stove,/silver hair uncombed and salty, his tongs a scepter."

           The loss of the author’s sister is revealed in “Road Trip West” in a car accident that not only took the sister’s life, but ripped the security from beneath the speaker’s feet, and the rest of the book shows her feeling around trying to find her footing, sometimes sinking like one walking in the roiled silt shallows.

Just as the book began in winter, it comes full circle in the final poem “December Evening, Key West."

Here the speaker is watching a school of mullet in the canal as they swarm and shimmer, just as the reader has watched the speaker test the directions of life, and both of them are beautiful in their tirelessness.

I thought of the mullet swimming in the canal,
           and wondered how they never tired
           of turning their bellies to the sun.
           How close I am to jumping in.

Guillermo Cancio-Bello was born in Miami, Florida.  He is a graduate student in the Creative Writing Program at FIU.

Bud Break at Mango House by Jen Karetnick
(The Portlandia Group, Paperback, 31 pp., $8.00)
Reviewed by Nick Vagnoni

           Bud Break at Mango House, the title of Jen Karetnick's most recent chapbook, refers to the yearly blooming of the mango trees.  "Bud break signals the start of a new season," says the chapbook's preface. It's a fitting title for a collection that deals with the cycles of the natural world in South Florida. The poems speak with authority about the seasonal changes here, and the repetition Karetnick employs in forms such as sestinas and villanelles serves to transfer that authority to the reader.

            After the first stanza of the sestina "Bud Break," we know that the end word of each line will return again and again throughout the poem.

    As still as wine, the pool robed in blueness

    Soon the dun robins will mistake plate glass

    for passage, though the intervals will be

    unpredictale, while on the live oak trees

    the blue jays polish themselves like chefs' knives.

    Then the bees will leave their hidden hives.

            Karetnick writes with the knowing voice of someone who has experienced these seasons many times, and the sestina's repetitions grant the reader a similar knowlege and expectation.  We are unsure how, exactly, these six words will reappear throughout the poem, but, just as the author again awaits and welcomes the new mango season, we now wait for their familiar yet always slightly different return:

    Later, this summer, we will pour into this glass

    juice pummeled from mangos, poke straws like                knives

    deep into the syrupy pulp, flash paring knives

    over the seals of rum bottles that be-

    wilder sweaty hands when curved around glass

    that itself has been left in the sun, hives

    of condensation running down blueness,

    label sticky as if with the sap of trees.

            Though many of the poems share this calm, observational tone, Karetnick also uses more direct address while still using form to reinforce meaning.  "Venetian Way," for example, begins:

    Let's keep things simple.

    There's little story to tell.

    The early-morning night

    beats the street with shadows

    and it's a pleasure to add

    my weight. Shoes slapping

    the arcs that lead me

    away from the man

    sleeping patiently with pillows,

    I run from island to island,

            The tiny couplets continue through the poem, mimicking the tiny, opulent islands of Miami's Venetian Causeway, and the frequently-enjambed lines serve as bridges that carry the reader from one stanza to the next.

            These short couplets appear again in "Conga Duet: A Lesson," this time mirroring the poem's male and female conga players.  Along with frequent end rhymes, Karetnick makes ample use of internal rhyme, folding a slant rhyme into the middle of a line or across a pair of couplets, to approximate a kind of syncopation, with some stanzas hooked to the next by the embedded rhyme:

    He hooks his ankle around

    his drum the way he would

    rest his foot on the rungs

    of a chair . . .

    At the back of El Yunque

    bookstore on the west side

    of the city, Annie

    arrives like a bride,

    still veiled with the snow

    slanting outside, silent

            In many of these poems, the line between the Florida landscape and those who inhabit it is often blurred.  In "One Form of Therapy," we find a beach, "with a comb-over/of palm fronds." And in "Scene and Herd," Karetnick contemplates the effects a storm has on both the people and the place, ". . . watching/transformers spark and sand rise/and the streets flood like shared happiness/around my ankles . . ."

            The collection closes with the sonnet "First Mango of the Season," which revisits many of the events and images from "Bud Break,"—blue jays, chefs' knives, and, of course, the coming of a new crop of mangoes. The poem begins:

          The first mango of the season is in

          miniature, precise down to its blush

          but smaller than a peach, skin and flesh

          hinged to a pit the heft of an almond

            Again, Karetnick treats the new mango with familiarity, but also with wonder and excitement. Working in the tradition of poets like Pablo Neruda or Kay Ryan, she takes ordinary things—fruit, the weather, the places we call home—and with a careful eye teases out their complexities and shows them to us as the captivating things they are.

Nick Vagnoni recently received his MFA in poetry from Florida International University, where he currently teaches creative writing. His poems and reviews have appeared in Alimentum, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Florida English, Backwards & Ugly, The Secret of Salt, and Solares Hill.