I have made it through the Sealey Challenge, through 32 total books and out the other side of August (34 if you count Ravenna Press’s Triple as 3 chapbooks). I posted a photograph on Instagram of each cover with the day’s number, with the exception of this book. (For day 13, I posted another cover a second time.)

Let us admit that I got a bit lost at times. What book did I read yesterday? What book am I reading today? But, as these things go, each day brought stand-out poems, and — by the end — certain books loomed. Not necessarily that they were better or worse than others, but their impact on me, at the particular time (and mood) I found myself in, created a greater impact.

A literature professor once said to me, and to her class of graduate students. “I know it’s a lot of reading, but when the wave recedes I hope you’ll be able to tell what flecks of foam have stuck to you and left the greatest impression.” That’s how it feels this morning.

So.

Carol Frost’s Honeycomb (TriQuarterly Books, 2010) was one of those impactful books. The poems in this, her ninth collection, address her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, a journey I’ve also undergone. It’s hard not to quote the description on the cover, because it’s true: she writes “with unflinching sincerity and courage.”

Her mother’s memory loss is only one theme. The other, woven throughout every poem, is the decline in the bee population. Flying insects of all kinds are growing endangered, and the loss of our native pollinators is a disaster that really can’t be countenanced or compensated.

As is the loss of one’s mother. The poems are a perfect marriage of spirit and humanity and nature.

In these 34 poems (33 in a row, and then an “afterword”), a mother drinks ‘from the poppy-cup / and drowses in her world of dream” (“(For the ones”). A daughter listens “from her shell of silence…” and the last notes are “a song or wound,” or both. In “(Tyrannus tyrannous)”:

bee after bee disappear[s]

into incandescence::

Only the metaphysic flower

feels the approach: and emptying.

(I’m sorry not to be better informed about what’s going on with the double-spaced lines, parentheses, and double colons — I seem to remember encountering double colons before, but I don’t want to research it just now. I will say that, whatever those marks mean, Frost gets away with them. I was willing to grant these poems every grace.)

Consider this short poem about halfway through the book:

To live without memory is to have each hour

as a pane of air for canvas and the view from a window

to paint: amber-honey cold mornings:

humbled by evening: variation and variation

of ambiguous figments — ziggurat beehive

auroras — flicker and go out. All history

may as well be in these brushstrokes:

the hand has not rested nor the paint dried.

— Carol Frost

The book, in short, is itself incandescent, and it is one I will be reading again, and again.

To learn more about the poet, you might start here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carol-frost.

THE ARBORISTS, Molly Tenenbaum. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2023, 98 pages, $16.99, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

Eleven days down on the Sealey Challenge, twenty days to go. My brain is bursting, and though I’m making notes for future blogposts, there’s a tendency for everything to begin blurring together. Then (honestly, almost every day), something stands out.

In Molly Tenenbaum’s The Arborists, for me, it’s sound. As she is also, besides a poet, a gifted musician, a teacher of the art of banjo, of course it is. Not always euphony, often cacophony, baskets of sizzling s’s, explosions of repetition—in “Banjo, Banjo on the Wall,” this stanza:

I have seen a cat’s ass banjo, Pleiades banjo,
banjo overgrown with vines.
Never no more lighthouse banjo, never
no more poppy, paintbrush,
coastal wildflower banjo.

You could study this book for how to make your poems jangle and twang (and sing). I’m pretty sure that Tenenbaum is one of those people who, when she walks into a room, you never know what will happen. And when she picks up a banjo? Well!

Well, She Died with Them Under Her Own Bed,

died with a thousand single-stroke circles
in a newsprint stack, died with ten pages
of not-quite ducks, their backs a press
with the fat of the brush, their bellies
bare eggshell paper. Died with two red-wattled
black and white chickens, their foreground,
gray chickenwire hints, a few yellow grasses—
a masterpiece mashed under stacks
of calligraphy grids, story of when she wailed
she never would get it, her teacher
cheerily, Don’t worry, do a hundred tonight,
bring me the best one tomorrow.
Which page was tomorrow’s? She died with the great
Western mountains on scrolls in the dark
in cardboard tubes, her foam bed
on a plywood plank above bleeding
magenta beets and fiercely gold-veined chard.
We will all die and pass our beds on, next person
lie dreaming on a flat in a frame
above our packets, starting up midnights
to label trees or animals in black marker
on the brown paper, returning
to slide between thin cottons and under
thick wools back to sleep.

—Molly Tenenbaum

To read more (and find banjo classes!) go to https://mollytenenbaum.com. To see a video of Tennenbaum reading with fellow MoonPath author Ronda Piszk Broatch, visit this page: http://moonpathpress.com/MollyTenenbaum.htm.