Books by poets from San Jose / delight and take our breath away
One of our favorite reading spots—SJ’s Municipal Rose Garden (from C. McGraw)—is mostly dead this month. But, like heaps of phoenix ashes or drooping sunsets, even its bare bushes remind us: life goes on. (And beauty’s always just around the corner.)
Join us, below, as we waft through reviews from Amazon/Goodreads (plus Opp Now’s resident English majors!) on three highly-rated anthologies from local poets.
Kat Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems:
Amazon review from Patricia Rockwood: As an aspiring poet, I grab on to the "greats" to show me the ropes, as it were, to lead by example. I can find no better example than Kay Ryan in this book of poems, which earned her one of the highest honors in letters possible: the Pulitzer. I was entranced from the first poem. Kay Ryan's poems are mostly short and easy to read, but when you study them, you learn there are many more layers under the surface.
Amazon review from Sara M. Robinson: The Best of It: New and Collected Poems of Kay Ryan is a must on any poet lover's bookstand. I am reading it slowly as I want to savor every word. I close my eyes after each and pretend I have just finished an exotic chocolate bar.
This incredible writer has been Poet Laureate of the United States for a reason. No, for many many reasons. The brevity and clarity of her poems become miniature masterpieces of thought and narrative. … And the skill.
Note from Opp Now’s editors: To begin to capture Kat Ryan’s poems, we’d use three words: “such is life.” In tersely clipped lines, Ryan observes nature (a bird’s legs, lions lapping up water, ephemeral clouds) to point out the beauties and hardships, the victories and losses of human life. All the while challenging the notion that we singly act upon our world—instead reinforcing how the world teaches, changes, and even “hunger[s]” for us. How our words are wild things; they inevitably “stray as in a dream” despite our intentions. But, alas. C'est la vie.
Sally Ashton's The Behaviour of Clocks:
Amazon review from Tresha Haefner: Gorgeous moments flitting before your mind ... In The Behavior of Clocks the poet must "testify to what (she) saw" which is the world, passing before her, momentary and shimmering as she sees it from the windows of trains, planes, and the momentary awareness afforded by her own mortal eyes. It is a world alive, and yet on the brink of eclipse.
Amazon review from Sage Curtis: Sally Ashton's Behavior of Clocks tumbles the reader into a world that is both concrete but also completely in flux. The chaotic and whimsicalness of travel comes out in the very first poem, where the surreal world of train travel (the setting of a-many-a murder mysteries) meets the poetic muses. It sets the tone for the whole book, where we follow the traveler on airplanes, through airports, to Italy, and Portugal, and even through time.
Note from Opp Now’s editors: Are we passengers as time propels us forward—or is “time” simply what everything else does as we move through the world? In this collection, Sally Ashton invokes trips on airplanes and trains, moments of stillness and of unending motion, to explore the curious “simultaneity of the past, present, and future.” One of our favorite parts describes the Sun—a time machine in itself, whose light takes eight minutes to reach us—and how “its words [are] a glossary of tomorrows it will not be turned back from.”
Janice Lobo Sapiago's like a solid to a shadow:
Goodreads review from Taylor Napolsky: A soulful meditation on uncovering the past, learning about one's self and legacy. This work feels comprehensive: rooted in history, but also the "now"; and futuristic in the way Sapigao unabashedly incorporates the digital age into the work.
Goodreads review from pey: beautiful memoir and poetry about grief and the absence in analogous to the lost of language; in finding her father, she finds her voice
Note from Opp Now’s editors: Janice Lobo Sapiago's father died when she was six years old. Decades later, she contemplates family, identity, and grief by piecing together excerpts from her father’s “love letter” tapes; family trees and photos; and raw, weighty, even devastating verse. But as any good tragedy evokes catharsis, like a solid to a shadow ultimately leaves readers with hope. That life can have meaning after loss. That loved ones can be both far away and deeply intertwined in who we are. And that pain—no matter how excruciating—doesn’t have to shut out joy, or connection, or beauty.
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