"The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us." – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 Photo by Kaycee Davis.
Ball, Ray, “Trinities.” Louisiana Literature, 2023. 86 pages. 0945083564 $14.95 978-0945083566
Holleman, Marybeth, “tender gravity.” Boreal Books, 2022. 88 pages. 1597099376 $17.95 978-1597099370
Warren, H, “Binded.” Boreal Books, 2023. 80 pages. 9781597099318 $17.95 978-1597099318
“Trinities” is by UAA history professor Ray Ball. I checked it out at the Consortium Library not knowing what it was about. I saw a bird’s nest on the cover and thought it looked interesting. I was surprised to get home and discover it was poetry by not only a local author but one of UAA’s own.
“Trinities” is written mostly in free verse and prose poetry, with some column poems that make way for interesting interpretations. When you read them out loud. It is divided into three sections where Ball has threaded a landscape of her family, persons from history and literature, and lovers and friends.
Where her greatest impact lies is in where she confronts how women have often stayed silent. She tells of what happened to her on the Metro de Madrid with a man who stepped over the line of decency, and in another work called “[breast]” she shares the experience of waiting to hear the next steps on a health concern.
She weaves in stories of religion and icons, art and medieval medicine women, showing her familiarity with the long history of Europe and the relationships between people, church and society.
Many of her works convey isolation. Ball tackles the story of Juana “the Mad” in “The Marquis of Denia Creates a Fictional World for Juana ‘the Mad.’” Juana I de Castilla — a princess by birth and queen by marriage — was used as a political pawn after the death of her husband and several family members claimed she was crazy when she was only grieving.
Ball writes, “In later centuries, they would call / this gaslighting. She is not so much / mad as a leader misled.”
By the force of poetry, Ball shares an entire chapter of the royal’s life in only a few lines, describing dimly lit tapestries around her, and ends it with, “She is lost among unicorns / Who wouldn’t feel melancholy / under the weight of such / loneliness?”
Marybeth Holleman published “tender gravity” in August 2022. Holleman has taught women’s studies and creative writing at UAA. Ecopoetry is her genre of writing, and it seems that nothing escapes her thoughts – everything from “Marbled Murrelets” to “thoughts on a black bear, charging” deserves a moment to be memorialized in verse.
The poem that stayed with me after reading her book was “At a Poetry Reading,” where Holleman describes going to a poetry reading where an old man, his eyes shining with “a kind of fire,” is reading poetry that he wrote thirty years ago. She contemplates her own future and asks, “When I am eighty years old, / will I be able to stand / with such power / arcing like lightning bolts/ around my body?”
Like Ball, her work pulls in stories from different times.
Holleman writes in “December 21, 2016” that she passed on “solstice skate party, on a holiday literary party, / and go alone to a geology lecture,” where she learned of the volcanic eruption in Katmai in 2012 and its destruction. While the country was rocking with an election, she settled into nature, which in the poem seemed to make things right with the world.
Holleman’s work revolves around an environment where the people may change but nature remains steady even when it is chaotic.
“Binded” is the kind of poetry book that I found hard to read. H Warren, a recipient of the Rasmussen award, received their Master of Fine Arts in creative writing poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
This material is heady. It hurts.
I propelled myself along by remembering that if it hurt to read it, it hurt more to live it. Warren, a poet and musician, is non-binary and writes about what it is like to live in a body that is transitioning. Like Ball and Holleman, Warren’s book is also mostly free verse.
They write about Alaska, the current governor, being a trans child, violence to them or members of their community, wounds that never heal, and body dysmorphia.
Warren’s poems say what prose tangles. Warren literally speaks of sewing their body together in “Seam” as they describe a Fairbanks mayor vetoing a nondiscrimination ordinance in 2019.
Words like “tear” and “ripping” are part of their canvas as they speak of their vulnerability.
From “Your Resistance to My Transition,” Warren writes in a plain-spoken style to someone they are trying to share about their transition, but the person doesn’t get it and Warren concludes with, “I cannot give you an image / When I do not have an image for myself / when you have given me an image of your own.”
What would take several paragraphs of prose is stated succinctly in 18 lines of poetry.
All three books share commonalities with each other in style, and each book has its own niche for readers that contribute to the tapestry of life.
They are worth your time and contemplation.
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