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Rajiv Mohabir on

THE TAXIDERMIST’S CUT (Four Way Books, 2016)

The Taxidermist’s Cut is my first full-length collection of poems. The oldest poems in the volume I wrote in 2009 before I went to VONA in San Francisco—and took its present incarnation after Kundiman in 2013, so a lot of the songs that I will include will also be a triptych for that particular time of my life to the present. My book concerns the natural world, immigration from the Caribbean, Indian (South Asian) heritage, racism, and queerness. The speaker comes into an awareness of his environment as well as own proclivities. Carved into his body are the rivers whose banks he bathes in, those rivers where he fucks a man for the first time.

But the thing is, the speaker hates himself. The speaker is a cutter who instead of enacting violence on others, enacts it on his own self.

“Lion’s Mane” by Iron and Wine

This first song sets the tone: we are in rural Central Florida—the band is from Florida too. My mother makes sweet tea, mimicking the iced tea that we have in school, except my mother doesn’t put too much sugar in; in this way it’s very much a lo-fi drink that I grow up with and cherish. This song drips with nostalgia. My back porch that overlooked the retention pond where a small gator lived. The blackening sky and their bursting rainstorms.

In adulthood, about the time I wrote most of the poems in the first section of the book, I was listening to this album when I got into a fight with an ex-partner when he physically attacked me for the first time. I thought: I am a big guy, it’s okay. Really it’s never okay for someone to harm you physically. I wish I could go back and tell the speaker what I know now.

“The Devil Had a Hold of Me” by Gillian Welch

This song goes along with the title/long poem “The Taxidermist’s Cut.” For the longest time I really did believe that the devil had a hold on me until I realized the only real devil was a construction of shadows and secrets that I kept. Instead of opening the door and letting the stories scatter like moths I kept them inside and tormented myself. And like the “butcher’s boy” in this song, I “trembled in my hand and voice.”

“Leviticus: Faggot,” by Me’Shell Ndegéocello

Because my mother would pray, “Save him from this life.”

“Kaise Bani” performed by Babla and Kanchan

This song is the last section of The Taxidermist’s Cut is THE song that I learned to take from my home space, that space of familial connection and parties. If you didn’t realize as yet, I’m not a Western person, wholly. It took me a long time to want to identify with being Indo-Caribbean, often obscuring the fact that my immigration story is so folded and complex. Plus internalized racism. Plus white supremacy.

This is a chutney song, a mix of Guyanese Creole and Guyanese Hindi lyrics. I learned to incorporate it into the rest of my queer life; I can play it on a guitar; I have danced to this song in queer spaces. It’s a song that responds to trauma of forced migration and alleviates tension with joyful celebration. The singer says “I beatin’ my drum when I singin’ me song/ the only thing missing is my bottle of rum.” It thematically corresponds to the poems “Ganga,” “Corentyne,” “Thames,” “Econlockhatchee,” and “Hudson.” These are all rivers that my family is “from” and this song is very much part of my experience as an Indo-queer Guyanese.

“Teri Mehfil Mein Kismat Azmakar Ham Bhi Dekhenge” by Shamshad Begum and Lata Mangeshkar

I lay in bed with the man that I write the poem “[Last Night] in Jackson Heights [This Morning] With Him, Not You” after my queer-brown-flight from Central Florida to New York. We lay in my Little India, Queens studio apartment naked. On my computer he pulls up this Bollywood song from 1960s film Mughal-e-Azam and tells me the story of how Salim, son Akbar the Great, was in love with Anarkali, a dancer in his father’s court. Their love was forbidden by the Emperor, which made it all the more sexy. In this song, the more appropriate of partners for the prince battles Anarkali with fierce rhymes, but it’s Anarkali whose shairyi really cuts through to the bone.

This man who lay next to me was several years younger, Punjabi, and not out to his family. This poem is about him and also about some other older white man that I was chasing at the same time. I quote my translations of this song in this poem and make reference to the movie and how momentous this moment between Sef and I felt.

“Dove and Pigeon” by Lord Nelson

When I was a child we took yearly road trips from Chuluota, Florida to Scarborough, Toronto to visit my grandmother. My father would sing this old calypso when he was in a good mood, always wanting to extol the genius of the dove who outwits the pigeon. This is one of my fondest memories of my father who I would betray by writing poems about our hurts.

This song is about failures, as is this penultimate section of my book.

“Heartbeats” by The Knife

The last song of this poetry book playlist needs to involve birds, knives, razors, and dancing. The video shows an animated bird flying, children skateboarding down the road, and 3-D geometric shapes flying off into the sky. We are in New York City, finally at a safe distance from the abuses felt during adolescence in Central Florida. It was not all bad, in fact it was truly a pharmakon—a poison and an antidote. The scrubland forest is what saved me: its animals, its rivers, its quiet. This section shares its heartbeat with that forest where the beautiful emerges.

Author page

#rajiv mohabir #the taxidermist's cut #four way books #2016 #poetry #book #playlist #AWP intro journal award #kundiman #kundiman prize #immigration #caribbean #south asian #indian #racism #queerness #vona

Rajiv Mohabir’s THE TAXIDERMIST’S CUT soundtrack

#rajiv mohabir #the taxidermist's cut #soundtrack #poetry #book #iron and wine #Gillian Welch #me'shell ndegéocello #babla and kanchan #shamsad begam #lord nelson #the knife #2016

Craig Santos Perez on

FROM UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [GUMA’]

(Omnidawn Publishing, 2014)

This soundtrack is for my third book of poems, which received the American Book Award. The songs echo many of the themes of the book, including decolonization, migration, demilitarization, cultural revitalization, and food sovereignty in relation to my experience as native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam).

"Inifresi" by Jack Lujan

This song puts to music and voice the Chamorro pledge of allegiance, "Inifresi," a poem by Bernadita Camacho Dungca. The poem is a pledge to protect and defend our culture and environment.

"Back to Guahan" by Erica Nalani Benton.

This song, by Chamorro singer, songwriter, and activist Erica Nalani Benton speaks to the longing for home and importance of returning.

"Decolonize" by Matthew Sablan

This powerful song speaks to the urgency of decolonization for the Chamorro people.

"Down for the Movement" featuring Willa, Meta, and daʻkota

This song responds directly to the proposed military buildup on Guam, featuring a few of the island's most talented rappers, as well as many activists who appear in the video.

"All Life is Sacred" by daʻkota alcantara camacho

This song speaks to the sacredness of land, life, and culture for indigenous peoples.

"Guava Jelly" by Bob Marley

I have several food poems that echo the sentiment in this song.

"Guava Jelly" by the Kaʻau Crater Boys

A Hawaiian band version of the Marley song. Guava jelly goes good with Spam jelly, if you know what I mean.

Author page

#craig santos perez #from unincorporated territory [guma']#omidawn #2014 #american book award #poetry #book #guam #chamorro #guahan #activism #playlist

MaryAnn Franta Moenck on

BEES IN THE ATTIC (Finishing Line Press, 2016)

After the death of an old and dear friend in 2013, I found myself writing about the connection we shared. Our friendship began at a poetry reading in the 1980s while we waited in line to file in and find seats. Imagine! Waiting in line for poetry. So writing poems was the natural way to grieve a friendship that had spanned even a twenty-year absence when we lost touch. Alongside grief, the poems contained sweet remembrances of playful humor, serious conversations, and the mutual constancy of uncomplicated friendship.

I saw that the poems at hand were calling to earlier works through shared themes around structures, homes, wood grain, walls, doors, hinges, and all manner of things made from trees. Some of those poems leaned toward one another, and arranged themselves into this collection, Bees in the Attic.

“In My Life” by Jake Shimabukuro

Welcome. An overture doesn’t have to be grand and loud. One of my all-time favorite melodies is from the Lennon and McCartney song, In My Life. Here it is rendered as a sweet meander on ukulele by Jake Shimabukuro. “There are places I remember …” called up wordlessly on strings, touches me with the gentleness I hope these poems convey. It reminds me that memories are always accessible if we choose to listen for them. “Some are gone, and some remain,” the song says, but really they all remain in memory.

“Ain’t Misbehavin’” by Andy Razaf (Score by Thomas "Fats" Waller and Harry Brooks)

Ain’t Misbehavin’ relates especially to my poem, “Night Bird.” The song has its roots in blues, that distinctly American genre that my late friend, Philip, so enjoyed. It keeps an easy, strolling pace, much like a walk beneath the trees after dark. The poem commemorates Philip’s early leanings toward what would become a rich musical life he would pursue during the years we were out of touch, playing blues harmonica and guitar. The lyric, “Ain’t misbehavin’ — savin’ all my love for you,” indicates the kind of friendship we had. Neither of us was looking for romance at the time, and our friendship was a gift not to be messed with. We both found love later on, and were each happily with a partner years later when we reconnected. Not misbehavin’ can lead to good outcomes.

“Mouth of the Tobique” by My Sweet Patootie

Full disclosure, these folks are friends of mine. This little jig playfully reverberates inside the wooden walls of the poem “Listening, A Guest in the Old Log House” and celebrates the humorous impulse behind stowing “The Poem Under the Floorboards.” I love the energy My Sweet Patootie brings to their take on this traditional tune.

“Mercy Now” by Joe Crookston

This song carries sadness and prayer like an undertone to the book with its simple lyric: “My brother — He could use a little mercy now.” And the lines of the song repeat, “My father … My church and my country … We all could use a little mercy now. We may not deserve it, but we need it, anyhow.”

There are several other losses in my book that go unnamed. I’ll say here that “A Dying Man Wants Poems” is about my own brother, who has been gone just over a year. Joe Crookston is one of my favorite songwriters, and his ability to distill a lyric to the essence of what is needed, while apparent in all of his songs, is especially strong in this one. Whether we prepare and accept and live fully to the end, or are kept artificially alive by machines, a plea for mercy sometimes seems the only prayer that makes sense.

“The Last Thing on my Mind” by Misty River

Also relating to the same poem, ‘A Dying Man Wants Poems,’ I have to include the Tom Paxton song, The Last Thing on my Mind. I especially like the way the group Misty River sings it. “I could have loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind. You know that was the last thing on my mind.” When someone is gone, there is no longer a way to love them better. The mistakes, the inadequacies and regrets can pile up and weigh on us. And yet, it’s true; unkindness was the last thing on my mind. I thought he might want poems. He maybe wanted something else, or nothing. The song is an apology and an absolution.

“The Hard Way” by Mary Chapin Carpenter

Now for something completely different, let’s give a listen to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s The Hard Way: “We've got two lives, one we're given and the other one we make / And the world won't stop, and actions speak louder … Everything we got we got the hard way.” Maybe I’m a little skewed, but this is a love song, hardcore. Just as in my poem, “Lilacs for the Blacksmith’s Wife” this song says that there’s hard work in making a good relationship. Don’t tell me a happy marriage comes from good luck. You get what you give, and this song is about what we give to love and to successful living. There. And I love the beat, too.

“Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Flight of the Bumblebee is a famously frenetic and dithering piece of music best expressed on a violin. It’s that dithering that calls out to ‘Unseasonable Spring Heat” and the title poem, “Bees in the Attic.” The process of grieving can cause confusion with its fits-and-starts progress toward feeling oneself again. Days are good and bad, up and down, and sometimes we feel frantic, until finally, with time and care, our lives are restored to order.

“Ghost in this House” by Alison Krauss

Alison Krauss sings the Hugh Prestwood song with a soft poignancy that touches the heart. Although the widow depicted in the poem “Bees in the Attic” is a made-up character, I can feel her inhabiting her house just like that ghost. The song offers that sketch of the emptiness that inhabits one’s home, be it the actual structure or a mental state, after a loss.

“I’ll Fly Away” by Gillian Welch (Composed by Albert E. Brumley)

This hymn is upbeat, full of life, flight, and joy. When we come through grief and can finally laugh again, and dance and — yes, breathe — this is how it feels. It’s the songbird in our pocket, the honeyed cornbread, a hummingbird, a lilac bouquet, the treasured friend remembered. I love the exuberance of this catchy little down-home hymn about death.

“Josefin’s Waltz” by Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas

Closing the book is “Christmas at the Farm, and Missing You.” It’s a quiet poem, sure and secure in the way forward. We keep one another, even beyond death. I’ve fallen in love with this tune, written by Swedish musician Roger Tallroth, commonly called Josefin’s Waltz, written originally as Josefin’s Dopvals, or Josefin’s Baptism Waltz. Many traditional fiddlers have played it, but for me, the ultimate interpretation is by Alasdair Fraser and cellist Natalie Haas. The tune flows like a river slowed by winter, quiet, but moving still. And the book closes. Thank you for listening.

Author page

#maryann franta moenck #bees in the attic #Finishing Line Press #2016 #poetry #book #playlist

MaryAnn Franta Moenck’s BEES IN THE ATTIC Soundtrack

#soundtrack #maryann franta moenck #bees in the attic #jake shimabukuro #andy razaf #my sweet patootie #joe crookston #misty river #mary chapin carpenter #nikolai rimsky-korsakov #alison krauss #gillian welch #alasdair fraser #natalie haas

Cynthia Arrieu-King on

UNLIKELY CONDITIONS (1913 Press, 2016)

From 2006-2014, I wrote collaborative poems with the late Hillary Gravendyk, a poet I met at the Vermont Studio Center. We became fast friends and immediately began to collaborate on poems. Partly we did so because we liked games and playing around with language, partly because it was a way to maintain our friendship over a huge distance: she lived in California and I lived on the East Coast in NJ or Philadelphia. We carried out our writing through googledocs and often discussed songs. She passed away in May of 2014 after a long illness.

Hillary and I thought about this book of poems as being about rejecting what you don't want. How, as we get to a certain point in life, we want deliberately to choose what we do want to spend our time on. Let the rest go. For her that meant making pies, spending time with friends, and writing poems in the face of a terrible prognosis. For me, I was trying to field the ways you can weigh out your dreams and decide if they are worth the realities that come with them. I also know we put a lot of water imagery, moon imagery, and forests in these poems. A lot about obsession and confirming to each other that we were present and had our whole hearts in the writing and in our friendship.

“Sara” by Fleetwood Mac

How you deal with an aftermath, how you stay in touch. I'm sure that's not what the song is about, but that's what I hear. There's some dude mentioned in this song, but I like that the phrase "you're the poet in my heart" and "call me" is in the lyrics. That seems right. We did call each other a lot.

“Thursday Afternoon” by Brian Eno

I think this is a good accompaniment to the poems. Nature, clouds, water, forest, not too brash. Also, we were good at things like writing on Thursday afternoons.

“Ben's My Friend” by Sun Kil Moon

A great song about getting older and kinda being fed up with things. I feel like getting crab cakes and buying a fancy lamp are fairly Hillary things to do. I know she liked this album and I love its off-handed anxiety and precision.

“Meaningful Moment” by Stars of the Lid

Once went to a planetarium with Hillary, Ben and Megan, Hillary's sister. We saw the rings of Saturn through a telescope. The echo on the piano chords feels right on and watchful. There's something about instrumentals that captures the writing process more than a song might, and she and I definitely spent hours on the computer, her on one coast and me on the other.

“Daniel in the Lion's Den” by Walter Martin

Loved talking about art with Hillary: paintings and so on. This song is about going to the museum LACMA in L.A. There's a poem about paintings and the shapes of diamonds within water, "waking up in the thin blue dress." You can't tell if the woman is falling back into the water or coming up for air.

“Orinoco Flow” by Enya

I listened to Watermark (the album) once at my friend's house right before I got to L.A. to visit Hillary. It made me cry. But when I got to Hillary's I told her and she laughed saying she used to listen to it in the fifth grade and cry and write poems that may have been reinterpretations of the lyrics. Thinking of such a deliberate ten year old her made us laugh so hard. You have to be okay with emotion before you can "recollect it in tranquility".

“The Sun” by Alice Coltrane

I'm going to say the album this song comes from A Monastic Trio, goes with our extra long poem called "Unraveling Regret.” It's about obsessiveness, danger, mental danger, a thread you follow whether you want to or not and it keeps you up all night.

You can keep up to date with my work and with Hillary’s here. You can find our book here. Some broadsides by Port Press’ Michael McGarvey are available here.

#cynthia arrieu-king #hillary gravendyk #unlikely conditions #1913 press #2016 #poetry #book #playlist #collaboration

Cynthia Arrieu-King’s (and Hillary Gravendyk’s) UNLIKELY CONDITIONS Soundtrack.

#soundtrack #unlikely conditions #cynthia arrieu-king #hillary gravendyk #fleetwood mac #brian eno #sun kil moon #stars of the lid #walter martin #enya #alice coltrane

Michael Kiesow Moore on

WHAT TO PRAY FOR (Nodin Press, 2015)

What to Pray For is my first collection of poetry. As such it spans many years of creative work. Many of the poems pay witness to loss, to bullying, to social injustice. Yet I hope it is more than a record of the ways the “world is a broken heart.” With an arc of three sections, I explore the question “What to pray for?” with answers that come from art, nature, the creative process, and conversations with angels. As Morgan Grayce Willow said so eloquently in the book’s foreword, “If we choose to embrace sorrow, surround it with compassionate arms—or wings—we can all have a share in transforming the world’s broken heart.”

It was a fun project to develop a playlist for this book because anyone who knows me knows how much music rules my life. If any music was not mentioned directly in a poem, it always stood just behind the surface of the words. And now, that music can reveal itself.

“Starman” by David Bowie

Throughout What to Pray For, I trace my history of being bullied and pay witness to others who were bullied, and the many teens who committed suicide in recent years. I was bullied and beaten up from elementary through high school. In college, the word “Faggot” was painted on my dorm door. The college incident happened in the 80s and there were no LGBT supports then, even when someone threatened me with a knife to “kill the faggot.” A refuge for me during these years was the music of David Bowie. I lost myself in the aural soundscapes he created with Diamond Dogs and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His sexually ambiguous persona gave me hope that perhaps there could be a place in the world for someone like me. Choosing a single track to go with these poems—and “The Visitor” in particular—was not easy because I have fond memories of my brother and I seeing Bowie perform live during his Let’s Dance tour, and I came to love other albums such as Low. And one of his last songs, “Lazarus,” is one of the great testaments to being true to one’s art without compromise. In my poem “The Visitor,” my adult self visits my boy self to help him survive his childhood. In like manner I offer “Starman” to the terrified boy I once was who often prayed that a UFO would save him by beaming him up and taking him to the stars.

“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” by the Flaming Lips

I have always loved the art of the surreal. When I was a boy I had posters of Magritte’s art on my bedroom walls. Whenever I go to New York City, I visit Salvadore Dali’s surreal masterpiece “The Persistence of Memory” and Joseph Cornell’s beautiful box-framed worlds. My poem “The Cyclone Surreal” was inspired by words of the greatest surreal artist of all, Remedios Varo. It is thanks to Deborah Keenan I came to know and love her amazing art. While reading a biography of Varo, I came across a line from one of her short stories: “I don’t want more monoliths.” That inspired my poem which tells a story of what happens to a boy and his mom when the “Cyclone Surreal” touches down. Although there are no evil robots in my poem, I am certain that the Flaming Lips’ pink robots are down the street from where the poem takes place.

“Gabriel’s Oboe” by Ennio Morricone

Living with loss is a large theme in What to Pray For, especially with the poems that make up “In The Garden of My Dead.” During the worst years of the AIDS crisis I lost almost everyone I knew. Shortly after college, I leapt into caring for the first people who had AIDS even before that word was coined. Hearing stories of patients in hospital rooms where nurses left their dinners in the hall or abandoned patients to lie in their own filth spurred me to action. These were tough years. Here I was in my 20s and I was going to a funeral every week. Sometimes the funerals came so fast and furious, I had to choose which one to attend. In addition to working as an AIDS buddy, I helped organize the 1987 Gay and Lesbian March on Washington that had at its front people with AIDS walking for their lives (and my mom walked with me that day, too). I moved to Minnesota to help care for my best friend—Keith Gann—when he was diagnosed with AIDS, and I helped put on the showing of the AIDS quilt “Names Project” in the Metrodome. One day during the display of the thousands of multi-colored quilt pieces, each one remembering a man or woman lost to AIDS, I asked that my CD from the movie soundtrack The Mission be played, filling the Metrodome with this music. I now associate “Gabriel’s Oboe” to the image of Names Project volunteers dressed in white who unfurled each AIDS quilt with solemn ceremony, the names of every person read aloud, each and every life held up as sacred and not to be forgotten. “They entered my life through the gate of love; / they have returned to love.”

“Imagine” by John Lennon

The idea of Peace is central to my being. No matter what happens to me or in the world, I will not give up on it. I have taken this idea to the streets and to writing classes where I teach “Writing Peace into Your Life.” Some years ago I founded the Loft’s Peace and Social Justice Writers group, which put on Art of Peace festivals and other activities. Just recently this group helped Open Book become recognized as an International Peace Site. In my poem “The Vessel,” I set out to say everything I believe about peace with as few words as I could gather. A line that may sometimes get lost is one of the most important for me: Peace “is most/ assuredly/ not passive.” I believe peace to be a living, vibrating force in life, holding us always whether we see it or not. It may be a quiet force, but it is greater than war. If there is a single song that I would say is “my song” it is “Imagine” by John Lennon. “You may say I am a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” May it always be so, and may the world live as one.

“Let Union Be” by Bellowhead (English folksong)

My brother recently said to me that What to Pray For is a sad book. No question it holds stories of violence and loss. But from the first poem “Shaman’s Door” to the last I also speak of the ways I found a way to say Yes to life, and how life says Yes to me. One of the things that has brought great joy to my life is Morris dancing. I dance with the Ramsey’s Braggarts Morris Men, and I describe one of our dances at the start of “The ‘Betty’ Morris Dancer:” “White handkerchiefs fly like spritely doves,/ bells strapped to their ankles jangle the cadence / of first spring—leaping manly arabesques.” The folksong “Let Union Be in All Our Hearts” is not a Morris dance tune, but you will hear us sing it often, especially on May Day when we gather before sunrise on a knoll along the Mississippi River and “dance the sun up.” The chorus of this song sums up the spirit of our dancing: “Let union be in all our hearts, Let all our hearts be joined as one. We'll end the day as we begun, We'll end it all in pleasure.”

“Regina Coeli” by Nicolas Gombert

I can never get enough of the choral music from the early 1500s. I listen to it all the time, especially when writing. My poem “Sound’s Jar Crack’d” lists many of these Renaissance composers, including Tallis, Gombert, and Ockeghem. Interestingly, many of them, such as Nicolas Gombert, hail from Flanders. What was in that water? The joy of this music is how these composers were discovering that the unison line of Gregorian chant was not all there was: “how surprised they must have been/ when sound’s jar crack’d / spilling infinite hues.” My poem ends up also being about AIDS and surviving loss and what the arms of angels are for. You can listen to any choral music from the 1500s to go with this poem. I select this piece by Gombert because whenever I hear it, I rest in beauty.

“Casta Diva” by Maria Callas (From Norma, composed by Bellini)

In a letter to his brother, Vincent van Gogh said, “I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” Nature, art, and poetry have been my solace all my life. I was lucky in that my family took to camping when I was young and we traveled across the country to hike in places that ranged from the mountains in Maine to the Badlands of the West and in the Tetons. A special place in my heart will always be the Appalachian Mountains, which was a second home to me growing up. Many poems in What to Pray For pay homage to nature such as “Sabbath” where we find that “Holiness wants nothing.” Both nature and poetry come together in “Portents on a Midwinter’s Eve” when I write that maybe what poets are for is to “put mystery back into the moon.” I have long been a lover of opera, and I don’t think any song better expresses the sanctity and mystery of the moon than “Casta Diva,” especially sung by Maria Callas. In the Bellini opera, Callas’ character, Norma, is a Druid priestess, and with this aria—asking the goddess to “Scatter peace across the earth”—Callas truly puts the mystery back in the moon.

“Parvardigar” by Pete Townshend

Prayer comes up a lot in What to Pray For. A mother prays for a son who commits suicide. Prayers go unanswered. Prayers are offered to angels to bear the weight of grief. The making of art is a kind of prayer. The book concludes with the poem “What to Pray For,” a conversation with an angel who answers the question, “What prayers should we make?” The angel concludes by commanding, “Ask for our help to remove your fears so that fearlessly you stoke the love you carry inside and reveal yourself as a pillar of light only you can attain. Pray that you learn how to blind angels with your light.” Pete Townsend’s “Parvardigar” is a prayer that celebrates the Creator using names from many religions. The first time I heard it, I was overwhelmed. It felt like the music was really all about Love. That God, however named, is Love. That each of our lives is a love song, sacred and infinitely lovely.

Author page

#michael kiesow moore #what to pray for #nodin press #2015 #poetry #book #playlist

Michael Kiesow Moore’s WHAT TO PRAY FOR Soundtrack

#soundtrack #michael kiesow moore #what to pray for #poetry #book #david bowie #the flaming lips #ennio morricone #john lennon #maria callas #pete townshend

Kenji C. Liu on

MAP OF AN ONION (Inlandia Institute, 2016)

Map of an Onion is an altar to my family, and a poetry collection about ephemeral spaces that have real physical and psychic effects on individuals. Most evident in the book are national, postcolonial, and corporeal spaces, their intersections, and our migrations between them. The intertwined histories of Taiwan, Japan, and the United States are present throughout, not to mention references to new wave, disco, and science fiction. Map of an Onion is also a visual and physical object. The size, design, and layout from cover to cover is very important to the experience of this collection.

“I Melt With You” by Modern English

In my collection, the poem “Peach Boy in Kyoto” is a kind of homage to this song, which represents a good portion of my teen years. One summer we visited my grandmother in Japan, and I listened to Modern English’s album After the Snow in my Walkman over and over while hanging out in the small, enclosed yard. Of course, this hit song is the album’s jewel, and as a teen it swept me away with its vision of stopping the world for love, and with (what seemed to me to be) its sci-fi reference to saving the human race.

“Waiting for the Night to Fall” by Depeche Mode

Another classic from my teenage years. I still regret missing out on the Violator tour. In a way, Violator was one of my gateway drugs into electronic dance music. But before that, this song and its video gave me the space to favor nighttime over daytime—in a sad, black hair over the eyes kind of way. Its transition between A minor and D sharp provide a kind of rush that verges on resolution, but of course it doesn’t, because it’s Depeche Mode. Lead singer David Gahan’s baritone was one of the only pop music voices I could really sing along with, since most male pop singers are tenors.

“Televised Green Smoke” by Carl Craig

Detroit techno brilliantly translates a certain post-industrial, working-class, urban African American history and aesthetic that many people in the US are unaware of. It often spills into Afrofuturism. As one of the genre’s original second-generation innovators, there is a stark urban beauty in Carl Craig’s music that emphasizes the machine—the movements of robots and cars and transit, and also asphalt, metal, concrete. “Televised Green Smoke” stands out as a personal classic. Its alien sweeps and stabs, circular acid and strings, and deep bass foundation has always moved me. A perfect combination of stillness and journey, like a moment of reflection in the middle of a busy city.

“Fear of the South” by Tin Hat Trio

If I had to pick my favorite song of all time, this would be in the running. Tin Hat Trio (now Tin Hat)’s work is eclectic, moody, and intelligent, making use of unusual keys and time signatures drawn from many influences, including European folk. In addition, the musicians are absolutely at the top of their game. The pentatonic and diatonic solos over 5/4 time in “Fear of the South” are beautiful and masterful. As a classically-trained violinist, I have a lot of appreciation for Tin Trio’s musicianship.

“Sigh by the Sea” by Bitter Party

I first heard Bitter Party at Tuesday Night Project in Little Tokyo (Los Angeles). They call their style “ghost pop,” and it’s a very appropriate description. Drawing on WWII and post-war era music from Asia, their music is haunting and melancholy. When looking for music to accompany the video for my poem “Search History,” Bitter Party’s “Sigh by the Sea” immediately stood out. Luckily, they were into it! Please buy their LP Ghost Pop.

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Kenji Liu’s MAP OF AN ONION Soundtrack

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Laura Madeline Wiseman on

DRINK (BlazeVOX Books, 2015)

I wrote the poems in Drink over a five-year period. The book started with a reflection on myths and stories of water—lost planes, drift bottles, mermaids. I’d written the first drafts of the mermaid section during one semester with my poetry students. The poems about messages in bottles I wrote during a summer writer’s residency. The poems on loss and disaster were inspired by a collaborative project between artists and writers in which I participated. But the dark heart of the book was poems that I wrote after I finished my doctoral dissertation. These are poems about violence, poverty, alcoholism and drug abuse, and attempted suicide. Drink is a tribute to girls and women who survive and live as adults who’ve seen it all and yet still, find beauty in a calm stretch of water.

“Hotel California” by the Eagles

I remember first hearing the song “Hotel California” while in my dad’s truck. He had installed an eight-track, after several burglaries and thefts of his truck’s stereo. As a kid, he traveled frequently for jobs beyond our home. He liked playing mixed-tapes of music. Due to the thefts, he resorted to a battery powered boom box and a motley assortment of eight-tracks for music. “Hotel California” is a haunting song about being trapped in a place of alcohol and drugs and of women, where occupants can “check out anytime [they] like, but…can never leave.” Drink is about being trapped, about being unable to leave, about women who are abusive and the men drawn to them. But Drink is also about thrift, about installing eight-tracks and bringing along duct-tape repaired boom boxes because such devices are not ones people thieve, about how sometimes we make things ugly so no one will steal the sweetnesses we intend to keep.

“Drunk Daddy,” by Cherry Poppin Daddies

This song is about an economically disadvantaged family where the father is abusive and beats the children when drunk. The mother of the family is absent and others think “she’s a whore.” Though upbeat and swing, it still portrays the real life experiences of children trying to survive in a home where substance abuse, physical abuse, and emotional abuse are as plentiful as water from the tap.

In Drink I wanted to explore the ways in which an abusive parent might destroy a daughter’s belongings as a form of punishment and how such acts are also a breaking down of the child’s sense of self. Elaine Scarry explores issues of trauma and abuse in The Body in Pain and argues that pain unmakes language. Torture is used to deconstruct the person by pain to a place before language. The room itself becomes a thing that tortures. Spatially, objections and places can become manifestations of trauma and those who have experienced trauma can become triggered when returning to a place or by an object connected to the original trauma. For a child to be abused by a parent and the parent to localize that abuse on the objects the girl-child kept such as a diary, I wanted poems in Drink to explore the unmaking of a girl’s body via the pain of spatial destruction.

I edited the anthology Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, an anthology that collects over one hundred American poets who resist gender violence by poems. In the media, domestic violence is often framed by the question, “Why doesn’t she just leave?” I’ve often been puzzled by this refocusing, the movement away from the enactors of violence to the victimized, a refocusing that perpetuates victim-blaming. In my poem “Substances,” for example, I wanted to explore one way to understand a causation of such abuse. Substance abuse by a parent doesn’t cause them to abuse a child, but it may change what motivates them to care.

Songs like “Drunk Daddy” remind us to be aware of violence in the home, how it effects women, but more importantly how that violence—whether witnessed or experienced—traumatizes and has lasting effects on our cultural and lives of the children who live through it.

“California” by Rachael Sage

“California” is a love song that focuses on a woman learning to accept the parts of herself that are counter to traditional gender roles and expectations for women. It’s also about regret and loss, losing someone who is “leaving me for California,” one who wouldn’t accept the woman that she wanted to be. When I was a girl, the film The Little Mermaid filled the theaters, appeared as toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals, and instigated a product line of sleeping bags, stuffed animals, coloring books, and games. I had Prince Eric. Ursula was a suction cupped plastic plaything I brought with me into the bathtub. I belted the words to the Disney film score, despite the flaws of imagining a girl giving up her voice to get a man to love her. Later, as an adult, I found other music to sing, music that is about loving yourself and finding others that love you for who you are and what you have to say.

“Deep Water” by Jewel

This is a song about survival and finding yourself in a deep place of sadness or pain. The song reminds us, “It’s nothing without love,” and “We must demand more not from each other, But more from ourselves.” One weekend after I started college, my mother, aunt, and sisters took a long-weekend vacation to a bed and breakfast in Northern Iowa. We stayed on the attic floor of a large remodeled Victorian home, one with multiple bedrooms, baths with claw-footed tubs, and vintage clothing in the closet of the kid’s room, inviting my sisters and I to play dress-up. That weekend we watched movies, drank hot chocolate, and ate decadently—cookies, take-out, junk food. We went there because my mother wanted to get away from her long over-time shifts at the post office, my aunt needed a weekend to shake off a sequence of affairs that had ended badly. My sisters were in middle school and high school and I was home working the same job I’d worked all through school as a teen, at a nursing home feeding the elderly. I’m not sure if my mother played this song once or over and over, but it seems to be the song I couple with that summer’s long weekend, days where all of us were trying to swim our way out of where we were to where we wanted to be.

“Soak Up the Sun” by Sheryl Crow

I adore Sheryl Crow, but missed when this album was released. I’ve never seen her live. “Soak up the Sun” is upbeat and poppy. Listening to it makes me want to tap a foot, play the thumb-drums on the steering wheel on a warm summer afternoon, and hum along with the words, “It’s not having what you want. It’s wanting what you got,” and “I’ve got no one to blame.” I think Drink is about releasing the blame one might hold against abusive parents, unkind men, narrative about being female that keep one sunk in a shallow pool of being, and letting go to dive deeply into your life.

“You & Me & the Bottle Makes 3 Tonight” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

The fourth section of Drink focuses on the love story of a couple who find drift bottles on a vacation trip to the ocean. Other than the years of my childhood when I lived in California, I’ve lived most of my life in Midwest cities, far, far away from the ocean. The Midwest is a place I love—prairie land, towering skies, interstates, flat and long, and open. I visited Virginia Beach a few years ago, remembering suddenly the beaches I’d visited as a girl and began writing about drift bottles, though I’ve never actually found a drift bottle in water. I didn’t need to. I grew up with a father obsessed by bottles, by the art of antique bottle collecting. I grew up with bottles everywhere—whisky jugs and fruit crocks on the carpet surrounded the TV, whiskey bottles stood stacked in white buckets in the garage, broken doll parts filled the tablecloth over the kitchen table. Some of the poems in Drink focus on that type of relationship, one in which bottles become an integral part of every aspect of the way two make three.

“Falling Slowly” by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

I love the way this song unfolds and builds in the chorus, how the solo becomes a duet. They sing, “Take this sinking boat and point it home. We’ve still got time, Raise your hopeful voice--you have a voice. You’ve made a choice--you’ve made it now.” As much as Drink is about family violence and alcohol, it’s also about stepping from those waters, that sinking boat and choosing love. There’s something heroic about moving from pain to love, trauma to healing, abuse to care. It’s not an easy path and the compass one might follow doesn’t point true north, but it is about finding your voice and learning to tell stories about your life that are true to you.

“Weird Fishes” by Radiohead

I remember listening to Radiohead as a girl, but I didn’t see them live until I studied abroad in Wales at Swansea University. One weekend, several other American students and I took a train from Swansea to Glasgow to see Radiohead perform in a massive open air arena. The song “Weird Fishes” invokes the mystery of water and love, the water and land I visited in the UK, and the reflective qualities of water. Just recently, I sat on the edge of a reservoir in Nebraska during a trip out west and felt calmed by the rippling surface, the invitation to pause and think. I like the Radiohead lines, “In the deepest ocean. The bottom of the sea. Your eyes. They turn me. Why should I stay here? Why should I stay?”

Part of what draws me to myths and stories about mermaids is the ways in which they’ve been imagined, as beautiful women both drawn to the human world in equal measure that humans are drawn towards theirs. Radiohead’s music suggests this dreamy, water-like region of echoes and reverberations, of being in one place and longing for another, even though what that other place is, is entirely unknown. Perhaps that is part of the appeal of mermaid myths, the possibility that there is some other place where the rules that govern are different.

“Grey” by Ani DiFranco

This April, one of the journals I follow sponsored a 30/30 day challenge with daily prompts of poems. One day was to write a poem about one color. Ani DiFranco’s poem “Grey” is a song on one color. She sings, “the sky is grey, the sand is grey, and the ocean is grey. I feel right at home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way.” When I followed the poem prompt, I didn’t write about grey, but whatever prompted Ani to write this song feels like a relationship that has become sunk in a kind of depression few can easily escape without support and yet, I think all of us have experienced that kind of greyness in our lives, a time when we are thirsty for more than what we have. The power of art is the power to transform. Each of us has access to that power. It is the ocean we swim in. Our choice is always to learn to swim, to slake our thirst from within, and to learn to drink in the beauty we have been given—a gorgeous monochrome grey day, an hour on the lip of reservoir leaping with fish, a trip to the ocean bright and glittering with summer light.

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Laura Madeline Wiseman’s DRINK soundtrack

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(Photo by Shawna Hudson)

Jia Oak Baker on

CRASH LANDING IN THE PLAZA OF AN UNKNOWN CITY

(Dancing Girl Press, 2015)

I am not the beneficiary of a musical inheritance. My parents immigrated to the United States in the early 1970’s, almost two decades after the Korean War, and relocated to Los Angeles, California, where they sought out the proverbial American Dream. More importantly, they sought out a place where they thought a war would never happen. My parents were preoccupied with the exigencies of their new lives, trying to survive in a country where they didn’t know the language or culture. They were not the kind of people who spent their evenings after work playing old records and singing along to the music.

The poems in Crash Landing in the Plaza of an Unknown City are mostly autobiographical, reaching into memory and trying to make sense of what it is for me to be an immigrant, bi-cultural, non-white. The songs on the playlist are ones I remember from my childhood—before MTV, MP3’s, cable TV, and the Internet. We lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment in Koreatown, and most of the music I heard was while riding in our wood-paneled Chevy Caprice or from a small alarm clock radio. These are some of the songs that remind me of that “crash landing,” of growing up in L.A. as a Korean-American.

“Hello, It’s Me” by Todd Rundgren

I’d forgotten all about the song until I watched the The Virgin Suicides, Sophia Coppola’s 1999 movie based on the Jeffrey Eugenides novel of the same title. The story takes place in suburban Detroit during the 1970’s. In the scene, the Lisbon daughters have been sequestered in their home for some time, and the neighborhood boys, who tell the story from a first person plural point of view, attempt to contact them by playing records through the telephone. This is the first song the boys play for the sisters. Rundgren sings, “Hello, it’s me / I’ve thought about us for a long, long time.” I recognized the piano chords immediately and kind of froze, hit with a weird, distant wistfulness. It’s a heart-rending moment in the film, but I felt the same way about the song two decades earlier.

“Killing Me Softly with His Song” by Roberta Flack

“He sang as if he knew me / in all my dark despair / and then he looked right through me / as if I wasn’t there.” It’s a great song that’s been covered by numerous artists including Lauryn Hill, Tori Amos, Perry Como, Al B. Sure!, and The Jackson 5. But Flack’s cover is the first version I ever heard. It would come on the radio, and I would sing along as I lay in the back of our station wagon. I had no idea what the words meant, but I knew I felt sad singing them.

“Mercy, Mercy, Me” and “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye

I remember the day I found out Marvin Gaye died. I heard it on the radio. I would start high school that fall, and my friends and I were listening mostly to Prince and Madonna. But I had listened to Marvin all my life and could still hear him on FM 102.3, though the station’s signal sometimes faded in and out. I remember not talking about it with anyone, especially my parents who would not have understood how I felt. There are several clips of a 1980 concert from the Montreux Jazz Festival on YouTube. He’s wearing a red blazer embroidered with sequins and he’s singing live. In one of the clips, the 9:54 one, he’s riffing in between and through both of these songs. It’s fantastic.

“This Guy’s in Love With You” by Herb Alpert

In 1978 my parents traded our Chevy station wagon for a Lincoln Continental Mark V. The car was marketed as a luxury coupé—I’m not sure why. It was a two-door, but it was longer than two modern-day coupés put together, and it wasn’t particularly luxurious. It did come with a cassette tape from the factory that congratulated you on the purchase of your vehicle. It contained seven or eight songs that we listened to over and over again and this one was my favorite. I’ll still hear it from time to time as I’m flipping through radio stations and every time I do, I remember sitting unbuckled between my brother and sister in that backseat. The song, with its trumpet solo, seems vintage 70’s to me, as does the car.

“It’s Too Late” and “So Far Away” by Carole King

There’s something maternal and pure about King’s voice. In 1975 King sang “One Was Johnny” for an animated version of Maurice Sendak’s counting book. That may be the first time I heard her voice. I’m often struck with a significant dose of melancholia whenever I hear King, and certain parts of the songs, like the outro in “So Far Away,” will transport me straight back to the 70’s. These were the days of analog photography, and all of our family photographs from this time period were taken with a cheap Kodak Instamatic. The photos are square with rounded corners and have faded to just their orange and pinkish tones. In most of the photos, I’m dressed in polyester—bell bottom pants and a white peasant blouse with my hair in plastic barrettes. I never look comfortable.

Jia Oak Baker’s

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CRASH LANDING IN THE PLAZA OF AN UNKNOWN CITY soundtrack

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Lee Ann Roripaugh on

DANDARIANS (Milkweed Editions, 2014)

Dandarians was written largely between 2008-2011. The title poem of Dandarians, “The Planet of Dandar,” is the first in a series of five lyric flash memoir pieces that explore what I like to think of as “word betrayals”—words (mis)transmitted to me from my first-generation Japanese mother that took on their own powerful signification and became richly connotative and symbolically fertile or even, at times, dangerously toxic. Dandarians (dan-dare-ee-uns) was how my mother pronounced the word dandelions, and for me, the word sounded like a science fiction alien, hailing from a radioactive yellow planet, struggling in the diaspora of otherness.

I feel as if in many respects the book is about vulnerability, alienated others, and the possibilities/impossibilities of language—both the ways in which we are inscribed by and contained, or even caged, within language, as well as the lovely ways in which we so desperately yearn to connect and (mis)communicate with one another through language.

“Your Ghost” by Kristin Hersh

Language, too, can mark us as vulnerable and other: either through naming, categorizing, and thereby symbolically “mastering”/controlling our difference, or through making us feel raw, and mollusk-without-a-shell-ish when we disclose our desires and needs; when we “talk back” and say no; or when we name the traumas that we are haunted by. When Kristin Hersh sings:

“It’s the blaze across my nightgown / It’s the phone’s ring / I think last night / you were driving circles around me”

in her voice of pure raw honey, it’s the swirled boa of fog that parabolas the empty small-town street, the chilled glass spin of marbles on hardwood floors that keep the speaker of Dandarians awake and obsessively in dialogue with her anxious ghosts at night.

“Subterranean Homesick Alien” by Radiohead

I grew up as other in small-town Wyoming, in a home treacherously land-mined with emotional violence and silenced secrets—a landscape I feel can be captured by the dreamy melancholy of Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien”:

“Up above / Aliens hover / Making home movies / For the folks back home / Of all these weird creatures / Who lock up their spirits / Drill holes in themselves / And live for their secrets.”

“Earthcrosser” by Veruca Salt

At age 9, I was molested by an 18-year-old boy who lived across the street from me and continued to live across the street from me until I left home for college. My parents blamed me, shaming me for what happened, saying that I should have been able to identify that his gun wasn’t a “real” gun, and later on saying that I shouldn’t ever tell anyone what had happened to me. And even though I outwardly continued to dutifully perform in the all the ways upon which my parents’ love felt conditional (winning piano competitions, excelling in academics) after that, no place felt emotionally safe for me, and I felt further marked, silenced, anxious, and isolated. Maybe the soundtrack for that self, in that time, would have been Veruca Salt’s “Earthcrosser”:

“Sleep little flea, / little boy me. A freak. / Am I clean, flea/ I feel like men, / (flea, little flea, little boy) / I feel like boys, think I’m peeling. / And the ringing in my ears / from playing too loud / I hear the ocean / I hear the crowd.”

“Red Planet (Live)” by Eric Dolphy

I dreamed constantly of escape, maybe back to my home planet of Dandar, or perhaps to the fractured, envelope-pushing, weird spaces of Eric Dolphy’s “Red Planet.”

“Black Hole Hunter” by Rasputina

Or maybe of escaping to somewhere darker—spiderwebbed with a lacy self-destructive edge, more of a voyage to the inner radioactive core of repressed self, as in Rasputina’s “Black Hole Hunter”:

“The remnant of a collapsed and molten core / A curious breed of galaxy never seen before / No longer able to support its mass / It’s unleashed ten thousand-trillion watts of noxious gas.”

“Riding on the Rocket” by Shonen Knife

Or perhaps even escaping by hitching a ride onto the mod retro kawaii punk spaceship of Shonen Knife’s “Riding on the Rocket” from Let’s Knife:

“Riding on the rocket, I wanna go to Pluto / Space foods are marshmallow, asparagus and ice cream / Blue eyed cat said, ‘Let me go with you’ / Let’s go let’s go let’s go with me”

“Crane Wife” by The Decemberists

Summer 2008, and I’m driving to Wyoming to visit my parents in the home where I grew up. It will be the first time I’ve gone home in over seven years. As I descend through the foothills, silver-bellied rainclouds move sleekly and rapidly across the mountain range, occasionally broken through by spears of sunlight. I’m listening to The Decemberists, and something about Colin Meloy’s open pure voice, or maybe it’s that I read somewhere that he’s originally from Montana, suits the enormous scale of sky, clouds, and mountains. I love the song “Crane Wife,” because it’s based on a traditional Japanese folk tale, an animal bride myth, that I remember from my childhood, in which a hunter rescues an injured crane, who then appears on his doorstep in the form of a woman. They are very poor, and so at night, she shape-shifts back into a crane and makes beautiful blankets out of the feathers from her breast that he can sell for money. When he discovers her secret, that she is really the crane that he rescued, she disappears. Perhaps this is a story about vulnerability, false selves, and secrets. I also associate it with my mother: the bags of Tsuru-Mai rice she buys, the fact that as I child, when I saw the crane logo on her Japan Airlines ticket, I thought that she traveled to America on the back of a crane. The visit is devastatingly disastrous and I haven’t been back since:

“There’s a bend in the wind and it rakes at my heart / There is blood in the thread and it rakes at my heart”

“Artichoke,” by Cibo Matto

Shortly after I return from this trip, my sweetheart, Bruce, who I’ve just met, sends me Cibo Matto’s Pom Pom as a gift, after I confess to him that the artichoke is my totem produce. Thistled and prickly on the outside, but with a soft, creamy heart. I am trying to learn to be vulnerable in my life. I am trying to learn to be vulnerable in this book. Plucked petals, plucked feathers scattering the floor: “Are you gonna keep on peeling me?”

“Iron Man” by The Bad Plus

I’m drawn to the hybridities and fluidities of Iron Man: the way in which he’s cyborg, how he’s both human and alien because of the way he can independently rocketship himself into outer space, that he’s a mollusk with a removable shell, not to mention his broken, glowing, vulnerable-making arc reactor of a heart. I’m drawn, too, to the hybridities and fluidities of jazz trio The Bad Plus’s cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Iron Man.” Opening with some random out-of-tune piano noodling that evolves into flight of the bumblebee-esque passage work, the original tune is then introduced, tongue in cheekishly, with all of its kitschy, lugubrious grandeur—pianist Ethan Iverson’s intricate keyboard filigree becoming increasingly elaborate, like a thousand fleet-winged bees attempting to launch an iron rocket. Toward the end of the song, the key brilliantly, and improbably shifts from minor to major, and through the playful and virtuosic keyboard work, darkness is transformed into the sublime. I love that! Maybe I was attempting to aspire to a little bit of that myself in Dandarians.

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Lee Ann Roripaugh’s DANDARIANS soundtrack

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