Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

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DRESSING IN THE DARK, Kathleen Flenniken, Lynx House Press, 2025.

A new book of poems by Kathleen Flenniken is always a cause for rejoicing.

The latest addition to the prestigious Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds, Dressing in the Dark is a paean to memory, loss, and survival. Flenniken has arranged thirty-nine poems into three sections, each section headed by a line from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” and it’s easy to understand this book as a wake-up call. Here is your life, the poet urges us, wake up, live it.

The book begins with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Alhough themes of childhood, motherhood, and marriage are interwoven, Flenniken does not shy away from diagnosis, surgery, and after, instead unfolding layers of meaning from what she no longer has.  “In My Hand,” begins:

When the breast is taken
what remains is not unfelt
but unfeeling. Unable to speak.

With the repeated n sounds (including the powerful un-, un-, un-), ending with the harsh sound of “speak,” this could be a three-line poem in itself. But Flenniken continues, packing in marriage, marital conflict, the marriage bed—lines that made me want to weep (“touch can be like conversation”)—and ends:

I can cup the silence in my hand
and feel its warmth
the way anyone touching me could.

The powerful evocation of feeling is everywhere present here. We can be haunted by our losses, or we can hold them.

Here is one poem for you—though I could have chosen any, a whole book of new favorites.

61

I remember myself as my own child

pinned at the chest to a list of wishes.
This isn’t the way I expected her to turn out.

I confused my inside and outside,
chose to be inscribed and circumscribed.

What would it mean to embrace myself?
my hands holding hands, packages, keys.

Balance required me to concentrate
on the doorknob, the groceries.

For much of my life I wanted to feel denied—
the principle of the grapefruit diet, of Odysseus

lashed to the mast while the sirens sang.
I trained on half-price racks of turtleneck sweaters.

We speak of ambition, the chef instead of the cook,
but Mother sat at a table

writing Christmas card after Christmas card
four days running every year.

Then she made the lebkuchen, shortbread,
and fruit cake. The true listener

doesn’t distinguish inside from outside.
She counts them the same. Bird song

and whatever you still could be.

—Kathleen Flenniken

You can find five more poems from Dressing in the Dark at New World Writing Quarterly.

Kathleen was Poet Laureate of Washington State from 2012-2014. Visit her website to learn more about her. Order  her books at bookshop.org or your local independent bookshop.

Michael Daley, GROUND WORK

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GROUND WORK: POEMS 2020-2025, Michael Daley, Ravenna Press 2025

It’s my pleasure today to share a poem from Michael Daley’s newest book, Ground Work. My full review appears in the current print edition of Rain Taxi, and you can learn more about Michael by visiting his page at Empty Bowl, or Poets & Writers.

I love this poem because I, of late, have been in danger of being buried in the bottom of box of tools. House projects began piling up in December—new gutters turned into a new roof, delayed and expanded by the discovery of rotted roof struts; new flooring because of the damaged carpets revealed a leak in the kitchen, a subfloor that had to be replaced, then the perhaps stupid choice to go for a whole new kitchen; and did I mention the doors, the windows?—suffice to say we are not yet at the end. (Though now when things come up I am learning to say, “That’s a 2027 problem.”)

Rereading Michael’s poems about work, and about failed work, gives me heart.

On the Gift of Yet Another Torn Cardboard Box of the Late Great Master Poet’s Letters

For Fred Manvellor

Maybe fifty years from now, some kid mechanic
desperate to locate a caulking gun or jigsaw blade
inside a greased box labeled “finest bourbons”—
under a cache of stripped screws, bent brads,
cigarette butts, garage soot, crumpled bloodied toilet tissue—
might uncover such a trove of my own unread sketches, unsent letters,
drafts of failed poems, and dreams—if I’m lucky.

—Michael Daley, Ground Work

In my on-line search for sites to share with you I found a bunch of Michael Daley interviews, poems, and recordings. Nina Burokas, in her Raven Chronicles review, calls the poems of Ground Work, “incantatory,” and adds a timely reminder (for me) that all work is prayer.

Michael Daley is truly a northwest treasure and I invite you to take a deeper look.

Sandra Yannone’s BOATS FOR WOMEN

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BOATS FOR WOMEN, Sandra Yannone, Salmon Poetry, 2019.

If you don’t know Sandra Yannone, I am here to tell you, you really should. In addition to being Poet Laureate of her hometown, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, consider this impressive list of activities from her website:

She is co-founder and host of Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry, an international, intersectional, intergenerational poetry group and reading series. In addition, Sandy hosts Last Tuesdays with Sandy & Thomas, a special monthly online reading event for Olympia Poetry Network subscribers, and co-hosts the West-East Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic & Beyondonline reading series. Previous hosting and co-hosting appearances include The Collectibles Lesbian Trading Card Reading Series with Headmistress Press, and as the featured poet and collaborator on the Little Oracles: Divinations podcast miniseries.

I met up with Sandy at my June reading for Olympia Poetry Network, and we exchanged books. Her Boats for Women witnesses the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic, rides along with Houdini’s wife, and dramatizes what it looks like to survive one’s own raucous and wild choices.

The title poem, a prose poem, marries marine history with personal history, capturing all the themes of the book—“Silence. Disaster. Desire. Hope. These cardinal directions…” Notice the anaphora (the repetition of a word at the beginning of clauses) of yes, yes, yes running all the way through the poem.

Boats for Women

Yes, the boat sank. Yes, it broke in two like a stereotypical
broken heart before it plummeted to depths no one could measure
until seventy years later technology caught up and looked its
ancestor in the face. Yes is the way the years oxidize the steel,
and yes wipes the name Titanic off the bow. Yes are the lifeboats,
the davits, the call for women and children first. Yes are the men
who cry from the decks. Sometimes when I kiss her, I am
leaving a yes on her lips to remind her that I will go down
with the ship. Sometimes when she whispers yes, she is staying
on board. But there is always room on the lifeboats for two
more women. Yes is the fact that if we were alive on that
night, we would have lived.

—Sandra Yannone

If you are writing a poem a day during National Poetry Month, Sandy’s “Some Talk About Rain” suggests a good prompt. (And, yes, it is raining today in the Pacific Northwest with a 100% chance of rain.) It begins: “We were in the soggy middle again and in between / she was talking about the rain, remembering / how it rained…” A few lines later: “how we would spill / wet against the bricks, sequined trails / / rushing ahead…” Are we talking about rain or about relationships or a hike, or all three? The imagery and chimed sounds (notice the plosive sounds: weT againsT the briCKs, seQuined) here, and throughout the collection suggest, definitely, the glad all of it.

To learn more about the poet, visit her website, https://www.sandrayannone.com, where you’ll also find links to her on-line events, and for purchase of her books.

Photo from PEXELS, by Mike van Schoonderwalt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/fishing-boats-on-water-5502827/

 

Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

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My Heart Is Not Asleep, Thomas A. Thomas, MoonPath Press 2024.

William Wordsworth famously described poetry as “strong emotion…recollected in tranquility,” and that is how I want to think about—or think with and through—this collection of poems by Thomas A. Thomas, a photographer and an extraordinary poet, now the Assistant Managing Editor at MoonPath Press.

Because My Heart leads us down the path of a partner’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease, through the painful decline, to loss, I both wanted to read this book, and I very much didn’t want to read it. Before my own husband was moved into a residential care home, I picked the book up multiple times, but couldn’t make myself continue. Around the first of this year, however, I told myself it was time, and I took it with me to a local café. Once I began, I read it all the way through. Five sections, 29 poems: I thought I could easily gin out a review. Tried. Couldn’t. A few weeks ago, having read it through again, I found my way in. Narrative arc of disease and death aside, My Heart Is Not Asleep is primarily a love story. So that’s the book I’m here to tell you about.

“Around Us,” the second poem in the collection, lights up the two main characters like gods in an ancient Greek drama. They may be on their way to a hard fall, but, reading this poem, I knew I wanted to be there to see it:

A beam of full moonlight falls through the skylight and
graces our pillows, our faces, lights up
dust motes, like stars turning silently above our bed.

Silver lights reflect “high knotty pine ceiling / and the knotty pine walls, each knot / you said, a galaxy.” The poem holds the arc of the whole book, ending with “eons exploded and long gone dark stars.”

As Alzheimer’s begins turning out the lights, the story grows darker, but the epic setting is still present. “In a Time,” about one-third of the way through, depicts a moment of seeming stasis, “times when I feel trapped in time,” August, Covid-time, memories of weddings, memories of “my beloved’s first illness, / harbinger of worse to come.” Yet it ends with this crescendo, not to be missed:

And it is still the month berries ripen along
humid vines, corn ears swell in steamy fields,
as fawns fatten out of their spots, gorging on
clover blossoms and dandelion blooms, as seal
pups bask between fishing lessons, as fingerlings

flash to avoid shadows, as kingfisher young
learn not to make shadows as they dive, it is
the month apples begin to blush at the thought
of falling, time of joy upon joy, joy upon sorrow,
time of sorrow, time of love upon love upon love.

The setting is another facet that makes these poems sparkle. Seal pups, fawns, apples that blush “at the thought / of falling.” Even eating chocolate or a strawberry, we know where we are, and it’s not city or suburb. When we encounter the first poem with those dread words, “care home,” Thomas even then peppers his love with exact and moving detail, as if to bring her home: “brine tears,” an owl calling “good night night,” “nights like burnt wicks,” the familiar exhaustion of stacking wood, “huckleberry like a ruby.”

The last poem, perhaps the shortest, sounds exactly the right note, casting the “little boat of her hospital bed,” into a much larger sea, that of the heart. We’re at the end of a journey and if there can be only one survivor, how lucky we are to have someone who bears such eloquent witness.

My Heart Is Not Asleep was a finalist for the 2025 Washington State Book Award in poetry. You can purchase a copy at MoonPath Press, from your local independent book store, or you can order directly from Thomas’s website: https://thomas-a-thomas.com/.