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The Naming, Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto

The Naming is a reconciliation: with the personal, the familial, the ancestral, the spiritual, the terrestrial, the institutional, and the political. It is a world that is being created over and over again because of and through the past, one in which the speaker finds himself in time and place but also outside time and place with the help of his father’s fathers.

I feel deep history and deep love in this work. It’s the kind of collection that makes me think, I’ve been doing it all wrong, and by that I mean living—in the here and now, without calling my ancestors in close, my mother and my mother’s mothers. The Naming points at history to find out where it hurts the most, but it also points at us to show us how we can begin to heal.

Images: 1. The collection on a stand with a pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. Interior pages from the collection alongside the pomegranate.

By Dirt, by Blood, by Oil

I could have called my family by its dirt. I could have called it by its blood. But it’s oil I settled on, the oil that extracted something from us as a family and as Oklahomans even as we came for it this way and that.

How oil turned to paper money then burned. How it burned us in the process.

I could have called my family by its horses. I could have called us by our broken land, our busted hope, our anger, our crimes, our laughter, our deaths, our abuses, our bruises, our fires—I mean real ones we set, places we took a match to when they stopped being to our liking. That includes our own bodies.

But it was always oil, my family, even before it knew it was oil.

Image: My great-grandfather and my grandfather on my mother’s side along with their horses. Either Altus or Headrick, Oklahoma, date unknown, probably 1920s.

Scattering Light

My manuscript Crude was shortlisted for the Lightscatter Press Book Award, judged this year by Heid E. Erdrich.

I’m from Oklahoma. Crude is set largely in that state. The work deals with issues related to trauma, healing, and the formation (and destruction) of identity through places and what happens in them. The word crude functions in several ways in the manuscript. It captures what is raw and coarse and also speaks to the oil industry, which informed so many people’s lives in Oklahoma through the 1980s, including my family’s.

Things like the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the oil boom (and subsequent bust) may seem like forever ago and like they have nothing to do with your story. But Crude is where we were and where still are, all of us. We are all hurting in one way or another in this crude country and this crude world. We are all healing in this crude world, too. Or trying to.

We’ve survived, my kin and me, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unsurvivable. Surviving the impossible is possible. That’s my story. It’s that I’m still here and so are you.

Lightscatter Press is a micropress here in Utah whose publisher, Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore, and board of directors all live, write, and work in the state. It’s one of those dream presses for me because of the people involved and what the press embodies. I’ve said before that I don’t aspire to be on the biggest press. I want to be on a press that cultivates a sense of community and connection, a sense of people and place.

I’m touched by this. It’s good to know my work matters in some way to some people. After all, I’m not writing about what I’ve experienced for fun. It’s not an exercise. It’s a decision to enter into a way of being and to remain there for as long as it takes, which I hope is as long as I live.

The winner of the award is Sagirah Shahid, whose book SPIRIT: An African American Muslim Lyric, will be published in Spring 2027.

Image: My mother’s grandparents, father, aunts, cousin (who was passed off as an aunt if the rumor is true), and dog in front of one of their early homes in Oklahoma. This family photo and many more are woven into the fabric of Crude.

‘Becos,’ by Bill Knott

I had this collection years ago before I left poetry and sold, donated, or gave away most of my poetry books. I just got this beautiful copy from Chaparral Books in Portland, Oregon. A friend read a poem from the collection to me last week. I realized I no longer owned the book and needed a copy.

Images: 1. Becos propped up on a book stand with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. Interior pages from the book. 3. The book propped up against the horse sculpture to show its spine. 4. The collection lying flat on a desk with the dried pomegranate, horse sculpture, and hourglass.

‘The Devil’s Castle,’ by Susanne Paola Antonetta

Antonetta is a poet and writer whose work deals with psychiatry, madness, and science. The Devil’s Castle looks at German and American eugenics, including the T4 program in Nazi Germany that was the blueprint for concentration camps, within the larger framework of psychiatry — and from her perspective as someone with lived experience with bipolar and psychosis.

This is a hard book to read but one we can’t ignore, certainly not now, not when things are happening here that parallel things that happened in our own country’s history and in Germany shortly after the Nazis took power.

The next time you or someone you know decides to move into a sanist or ablieist stance in order to, ironically, show your support for other groups of marginalized and oppressed people,* think again. Please think again. Think about this history, this present, and the future we’re headed toward if we keep moving from one form of discrimination to another rather than examining and addressing all our biases.

Where we discriminate against one, we discriminate against all.

* One example I’ve seen is folks who support, or want to be seen as supporting, trans rights and who use sanist language to do so, that is, characterizing anyone who doesn’t support trans rights as mentally ill. That’s not going to cut it. That’s doing more harm. That’s a sign you’re performing what you’re saying, not feeling it or living it.

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Images: 1. The Devil’s Castle standing perpendicular to my desk with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. A page from the book. 3. A page from the book in which Antonetta discusses here first manic episode. 4. A photo of the book lying flat on my desk with the dried pomegranate, the horse sculpture, and the hourglass.

‘I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014,’ by Bill Knott

Images: 1. I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014 standing perpendicular to my desk with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. The author image on the back cover of the collection. 3. A page from the collection.

‘It Just Looks Like a Window: Essays on Television,’ by Nadia Arioli

Sometimes, you think wanting to be the cylindrical carrier in a pneumatic tube system—maybe like the ones at Security National Bank or Anthony’s in your hometown—makes you strange and unrelatable. But then one day, you’re reading an essay whose author says what they desire, above all else, is to be a pneumatic tube. And you think, wow. And you think, yeah. And you think, suddenly, this is a world I may actually belong in.

The author of that essay is Nadia Arioli. The collection it appears in is It Just Looks Like a Window: Essays on Television, from Kristy Bowen’s Dancing Girl Press. It’s really good, really really good.

It would be good even without the pneumatic tube, but it’s even better with it because now you know someone has thought about being a pneumatic tube the way you’ve thought about being a cylindrical carrier in such a tube, and you feel a little less stupidly alone and also grateful to spend time in these essays which, to borrow a word from Arioli, are “liminous” (not to be confused with luminous): each piece a pass-through place, each paragraph a doorway full of light.

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Images: 1. The front cover of It Just Looks Like a Window: Essays on Television. 2. Interior pages from the chapbook. 3. The chapbook with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 4. The dried pomegranate.

‘Exploding Head,’ by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

These poems have a feel for me, a texture. Take the opening lines of “MRA Machine”:

Strapped inside this bright rocket, you are a spirit ready to be launched toward the light.

Do you feel that? In the pacing, in the sound? There’s fear, but there’s also something soothing about the language because of its music.

In Exploding Head, Hoffman’s prose poems feel like the warp of the subject matter coming together with the weft of the language she uses—language that, in her words, both opens up and clamps down hard. Reading the work is, for me, like running my hand across the face of newly woven fabric, nubbins and knots and all. I’m talking about poems that drape, that shoosh or scritch, that become something sensual, that conceal and reveal. I’m talking about a poet who can make a poem into a garment woven from different types of yarn that readers can step into and then back out again, both ourselves and not ourselves—the you in the poem an internal conversation in second person but also us if we allow ourselves that moment of extension into and beyond, which I willingly and gladly do. What is poetry if not a way to experience the world through a consciousness and creative expression that is not our own?

These poems sley the reed, thread the heddles, and follow the fell line as they take shape on the page as blocks of memory, experience, imagination, and disquiet.

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Images: 1. The front cover of Exploding Head, by Cynthia Marie Hoffman. 2. Two interior pages from the collection. 3. Another image of the front cover of the collection, along with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass.

Carolyn Kizer

Let’s just call her what she was: a siren, a soothsayer, a mythmaker, a chorus, a riot. I met her. She took a sliver of me. I am but a sliver of her. You will never remove that sliver.

Image: A photo of Carolyn Kizer that ran in Poetry Northwest.

Cunt Norton, Dodie Bellamy

Why am I scarfing down a whole thing of chocolate hummus all at once? Because I’m reading Cunt Norton, by Dodie Bellamy. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by Ariane Reines:

This book will make your mouth water.

It will make you want to live, whatever that means. It might even make you want to write.

If bliss could become a book, I mean if a book could become bliss, then this is that book.

I mean that this book is the greatest fuck poem in the English language, and it isn’t even a poem.

Shakespeare is commended to his or their proper androgyny in this book. In this book, Ginsberg is better and gayer than Ginsberg. This book is so happy, it is so beyond gay.

Gender is nothing compared to this book.

If you hear me screaming yes yes yes with my volume maxed out, trust me: I’m just reading this book.

(Personally, I think it is a poem.)

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Images: 1. The front cover of Cunt Norton. 2. An interior page from the collection. 3. The back cover of the collection.