by: Christine Hamm
MIPOeseias Print Publications © 2007 Paper, 28 pages, $7.99
www.mipoesias.com
One of Three Reviews by Mary Morris
A master of metaphor, unsentimental in troubling circumstance, Christine Hamm takes charge in this book with a risky subject: children’s eating disorders. She works deftly, with precision, skill and sensuality. Think of the mouth, texture of food, the sound of eating, weight.
Hansel and Gretel appear, as do parents and the witch.. Enter a modern day Grimm’s fairy tale in this timely book of our culture obsessed with body image and our most innocent victims, children. A dichotomy, audibly executed by the author. A subject vastly overlooked by the literary world.
What is eaten, what is eating? Who is fed, how much, and why? What is horrifically beautiful about this book is the duality of its psychological/physical bounty.
Begin at the Mouth
Not at the feet
those pretty pale turtles
or the belly
opalescent and soft
as a banana slug
not the hands
quick worker ants
or the hair
baring its throat
to the scissors each spring
shining like a doe
but the mouth,
mobile, scarred, full of sharp
clicking
a crab with long red tongs
who pulls from my esophagus
dark beens stinging marks in the air
these words.
OCHO #9
From MIPOesias Magazine, Paper $7.98
www.lulu.com/mipo
Second of Three Reviews by Mary Morris
From MIPOesias Magazine, welcome OCHO#9 with an illustration of John Lennon painted as prophet on the cover (number 9, number 9).
Lots of stars here, like Nin Andrews, Nick Carbo, Grace Cavalieri, Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, and rising luminaries. Listen to the rolling Leigh Stein’s prose poem, ”Walpurgisnacht.” ”Last night you lit your hand on fire in the field/…..already moved on to lighting the grass on fire,/and the azaleas, and the time portal machine you built.”
Nin Andrews pulls magic from her hat with “Love Poem.” ”This poem is like a paperweight full of snow.” You can only imagine. Pick up the read and find out for yourself.
Grace Cavalieri astonishes us with the moving and unusual, cultural phenomenon poems of “Anna Nicole: A Fiction.” ”She’d think everything revolved around her,/ The way poets feel the world,/ But she didn’t know the name for poetry.”
Read these poems and you will be murmuring them in your sleep.
OCHO Magazine is published eight times a year by Didi Menendez, a MIPO~Print Publication for MIPOesias Magazine, www.mipoesias.com .
Best of Café’ Café’, Summer 2007
MIPesias Print Publication, ©2007,
Didi Menendez, Publisher, 47 pages, paper, $6.99
www.mipoesias.com
Third of Three Reviews by Mary Morris
Producing some stunning literary editions, MiPOesias Magazine is the creation of Didi Menendez, publisher, as well as poet and visual artist.
MiPOeseas Magazine has been offering poetry online since November 2000. The magazine publishes well known writers’ first publications. The editor-in-chief is Amy King.
Best of Cafe’ Café is a hot, eclectic collection of work, unafraid to take risks. Hallelujiah!
Showcasing new work of such notables as Evie Shockley, as in the poem, “let the water come.” ”summer oozes along the nile like/juana, shakirah, and sue move through customs/with someone else’s drugs cached deep/inside their bowels…” Or the work of Laurel K. dodge in “Bad Daughter.” “How easy it would’ve been to slit/the wrists open like the bellies of fish/and clean that suicide wish and finally…” “The grass is so long (it grows longer/and longer just like longing.”
These are experimental as well as straight forward, direct poems. It’s nice to see the two together. Poetry is a big lake.
Mary Morris is the winner of the 2007 Rita Dove Award. She lives in Washington, D.C. She has published poetry in the Indiana Review, Quarterly West, Nimrod, and Blue Mesa Review among others
