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Beyond Repair by J.C. Todd

Beyond Repair
by J.C. Todd
Review by Courtney Bambrick

Beyond Repair presents a solemn, resigned perspective of war and its inevitable, irrevocable toll on civilians, combatants, and their communities. The collection opens with “In Whom the Dying Does Not End,” in which a parent recalls the development of her child’s body inside of her. This intense awareness of the work of creating a body – the prolonged and exact process of gestation – follows through the book as a counter-perspective to the awareness of the body’s vulnerability to violence and how witnessing such violence can affect the brain. The speaker in “In Whom…” contextualizes her daughter’s gestation within her own awareness of an insurgency in Hama, Syria. Throughout this collection, that balance between human creation and destruction reinforces the shared humanity of us and them in any conflict, across any border, but maintains that geography, history, power, and imperialism have made some bodies more vulnerable than others.

As it establishes expectations about pregnancy and motherhood, “In Whom the Dying Does Not End” offers a lens to see the effects of war on parents, children, and the bond between parents and children. Other poems such as “Cover Shot” (13) and “Night Ride, ar Raqqah” (17), pick up the theme of caring for children or carrying a pregnancy through tragedy. These poems seem to attempt to balance threat and promise. By referring to the space inhabited by her daughter as the “province of my body” (4), this foundational idea of pregnancy and development becomes complicated with the idea of nations and political powers within them. The speaker of “In Whom…” is “consumed by what I feed,” reflecting the parasitic nature of imperialism. The poem’s depiction of violence in Hama is countered by the daughter’s development: “a riot of cells / firing between [hips]” (3). Different “provinces” support or suppress different revolutions. The poem “Flashback to the Morning After” makes this parasitism even more explicit in depicting the flies in the wounds of a child: “…his decay / is the incubator / and holy food for clusters / of eggs” (44). Such a “contagion” is “alien / and intimate / as a just-conceived child.”

“My Parents’ Altruism” also repeats themes of “In Whom the Dying Does Not End” such as gestation and development of life set against a backdrop of war. The poem suggests an animal urge toward growth and survival and future. The repeated emphasis on the scientific and medical language serves to de-personalize the images and allows the poems to speak to universal human experiences. Todd writes, “Eight months before birth, / all the eggs I will bear into life / appear in me as seed” (51): not only is there birth emerging out of war, “the seedbed” where the speaker has “taken root,” but the potential for the next generations.

The landscape is another vulnerable body threatened by human violence. The former fecundity and abundance of “Peshawar  Lahore  Kashmir  Shalimar” are mourned in the poem, “The Silk Road and the Scythe.” Here, an orchard, provides an image of historical opulence and plenty “epic and sugary before it fell” by the work of “that ascetic—the scythe” (9); such destruction of orchards and farmland leads to the starvation of human bodies. Similarly, in the section “Earth” from the sequence “The Damages of Morning,” the planet itself says of its unruly inhabitants, “They cavort and die. I persist, / My motion not a quest for power / Or longevity” (75). The host can withstand cycles of destruction and regeneration to a degree we squabbling leeches, fleas, and flies cannot.

The title Beyond Repair comes from the military slang term FUBAR, an acronym meaning “fucked up beyond all repair.” Here, “FUBAR’d” is a sonnet sequence near the middle of the collection about an Air Force doctor who is coping with immense and relentless loss: of patients, community, resources, and of elements of herself. The sequence brilliantly uses the sonnet form to contain ideas and emotions that are too gruesome or too dangerous to share unfettered. The connections among the linking first and last lines of the sequence stitch together like sutures, holding together this doctor’s world, but just barely: “…In dreams, their skin gapes open / to wound her pain that has no analgesic” (31) shifts into “Too wound up and there’s no analgesic / strong enough to bring her down but uproar” (32). I think of the splint, tourniquet or the hasty stitches closing a wound enough to protect the patient for just a little longer. The subject of these poems considers how changed she is, how unrecognizable to those with whom she shares a life: “Best prepare him to live with her half-gone, / fucked up by damage beyond her control” (34).

Partway through the book, Todd’s geography becomes more familiar to American readers: in “Imagining Peace, August: 1945,” we see the speaker’s father and uncles “laze in Adirondack chairs” while drinking beer and singing “Mairzy Doats.” The poem presents a family’s exhalation after the end of war, and the ways that confrontations persist in peace: “We’re picking fights. Clam up / or else, the first idle threat of peacetime” (54). Poems in this section relate to the poet’s childhood and growing up and how life is shaped by WWII, Korea, Vietnam. Even in American backyards, insulated against so much of the terror experienced elsewhere, we feel reverberations. For many U.S. citizens living today, there are few periods of time untouched by American militarism; very few of us know no veterans or refugees of these and other wars. In “Reading the Dark in the Dark” (58) and “Reading with Students about Death Camps” (69), Todd illustrates the ways these stories of war are shared through writing and reading as well as through more personal and immediate connections.

War, militarism, and imperialism affect all of us – the relative immediacy of that danger may vary whether we are living in a region under siege, working in such a region, or growing up with someone who has witnessed such horror. Todd’s emphasis on the body allows us to consider all bodies regardless of political or ethnic identity. Removed from borders and beliefs, the physical body that demanded the sacrifice of parents’ strength, time, and safety is a body familiar to most of us. The human connection shared among parents and children across languages, regions, and cultures is matched by our shared vulnerability to violence. Todd knows that it is often easy to look away, but Beyond Repair presents layers upon layers of damage – a reader will almost certainly recognize a familiar reflection in at least one of these stories. Maybe the title is more a question than a declaration. How much suffering and how much cruelty will push us “beyond all repair/recognition/reason/redemption” (Notes 91).

J.C. Todd is the author of Beyond Repair, a special selection for the 2019 Able Muse Press Book Award. Other books of poetry are The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press 2018), a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award finalist, What Space This Body (Wind 2008), the chapbooks Nightshade and Entering Pisces (Pine Press 1995, 1985), and collaborative artist books from Lucia Press, On Foot/By Hand and FUBAR, both in the collection of the Library and Research Center of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Honors include the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize and finalist designations for the Robert H. Winner (2015) and the Lucille Medwick (2006) awards of the Poetry Society of America. She has received fellowships from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and awards from the Leeway Foundation and the Latvian Cultural Capital Fund, and has been a fellow of the Bemis Center, Hambidge Center, Ragdale, Ucross, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts international artist exchange program, as well as a scholar at the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators and a resident poet at the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College. Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mezzo Cammin, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals, and have been anthologized nationally and internationally, most recently in Welcome to the Resistance (Stockton University Press), Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Press), and A Constellation of Kisses (Terrapin Books).Her poetry has been translated into Lithuanian, Italian, and Albanian. She has edited two online anthologies for the former journal, The Drunken Boat: Contemporary Lithuanian Poetry in Translation (Winter 2002)and, with coeditor Margita Galaitis, “To Be The Roots:” Contemporary Latvian Poetry in Translation (Winter 2005). She has lectured on lineages in American women’s poetry at Vilnius University in Lithuania, the University of Latvia in Riga, and, through the American Consulate in Berlin, at the American Studies Departments of Goethe University in Frankfurt and the Universities of Bayreuth, Stuttgart, and Würzberg. Currently she is writing a group of poems responding to the work and life of the German Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, which has been supported in part by a residency with the Department of English Language and Literatures at Humboldt University, Berlin. For her work in Artists in the Schools programs, Todd has received a Governor’s Award for Arts Education and a Distinguished Teaching Artist Award from the state of New Jersey and a fellowship from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Council. She is affiliated with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program and Festival, where she has been a featured reader and workshop facilitator. She has taught on the faculties of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College and the Rosemont MFA Program and holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Courtney Bambrick is poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories. Her poems are in or forthcoming in Inkwell, Invisible City, New York Quarterly, Beyond Words, The Fanzine, Philadelphia Poets, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mad Poets Review, Certain Circuits. She teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia.

The Prodigal Daughter by Maria Ereni Dampman

     

Maria Ereni Dampman lost count of how many newspapers, magazines, websites and blogs she has written for over the years.A graduate of West Chester University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Communication Studies and Journalism, she’s also an award-winning speechwriter and orator with examples of her winning works featured in collegiate textbooks for the past two decades. One of Maria’s greatest passions is social justice and equality for all. She’s a staunch crusader of a woman’s right to autonomy over her own body, a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, the LGBTQIA+ community, and a vocal proponent of nationwide election reform.

Review of Maria Ereni Dampman, The Prodigal Daughter

by Stephen Brown

Opening on the aftermath of an explosive terrorist attack, the second installment of Maria Ereni Dampman’s Daughters of the New American Revolution, The Prodigal Daughter, is a story of highly privileged family drama and political intrigue set on a dystopian stage. Dampman’s main character, Emma Bellamy, might at first be mistaken for a “quaking, terrified, grief-stricken girl” but she soon transforms into the pregnant action hero I never knew I needed, while squaring off with the pussy-grabbing “Purity Police,” an aptly named paramilitary force controlled by, you guessed it, her own father. The secretly-multi-ethnic de facto leader of the white supremacist government that has replaced our own, Edward Bellamy, is as contemptible as any comic-book supervillain. If Emma has her way, she’ll be the one to put a bullet between his eyes. Succeeding isn’t without its own complications, of course. The only person more powerful than Edward is the government’s near-comatose Supreme Archon to whom Emma is engaged against her will. Emma can count on one hand the people who know that she’s already married and that the father of her baby is miles away. If the Supreme Archon regains his ability to do anything other than make occasional furious eye contact, that number may grow!

Emma’s actual husband is casted as a hunky healer and all-around

damsel-in-distress. “Lithe,” “athletic,” and not so unlike “those ancient Greek statues of young warriors,.” Declan seems to have such a tough time keeping his clothes on and nobody’s complaining. We get it, tying your scrubs can be tricky! Unwilling to risk the last remaining East Coast oil refinery to civil unrest, the Supreme Archon commissioned a wall erected around the adjacent city. The inhabitants were presented with the option of surrendering or starving within. They chose neither. Declan embarks on a harrowing recovery period under the authority of Brother Love, the hulking leader of the Broad Street Bullies and the devout practitioner of a patient, forgiving, and now-outlawed form of Christianity. That isn’t to say Declan is welcomed with open arms. As far as the BSB is concerned, if you don’t have the accent, they don’t trust ya!

Dampman’s characters spend a significant amount of time separated and relatively clueless about one another’s activity, a storytelling choice that is more validating than fatiguing. Viewing the novel as a broad commentary on current events, this feels like an homage to our years spent in various forms of social isolation. Much like our own world during the quarantine era, Dampman’s is ruled by the cumulative, individual efforts of her characters.

While Dampman takes care in navigating post-traumatic stress from the nuanced perspectives of former military combatants and the male survivors of sexual assault, her most tragic portrayals are those of the queer and interracial partnerships that find themselves invalidated under the rules of this new regime. Perhaps the most heartbreaking of these is the story of Dr. John Andrews and his wife, Marta, both of whom suffer unimaginable losses yet somehow persevere through the sheer might of their adoration for one another. Their commitment to each other and their community is a triumph that brought a tear to my eye.

For Dampman’s queer characters specifically, the need for secrecy is sometimes so severe that even those closest to Emma share romantic histories she knows nothing about. I tend to read storylines of this nature with a heightened level of scrutiny and to

her credit, Dampman doesn’t disappoint. Her queer characters feel complex and thought out. Their personal motivations define them well beyond their sexual identities or their proximity to her straight characters. Without knowing how Dampman personally identifies, it’s possible she accomplishes something I rarely see from straight writers — that being, the joy of her queer characters is as represented in their storylines as their oppression. The Prodigal Daughter counterbalances the abject suffering of life under fascism with dark humor, friendship, and… a whole lot of Philadelphians doing exactly what Philadelphians would do.

Stephen Brown is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and LGBT+ activist. A graduate student at Rosemont College, Stephen holds a BA in English Literature and Gender Studies from Temple University. His work has appeared in the Women’s, Queer, Trans, and NB Anthology from Querencia Press, Wicked Gay Ways arts journal, and others.

Apartment Poems by Cord Moreski

   

Cord Moreski is a poet from the Jersey Shore. Moreski is the author of Apartment Poems(Between Shadows Press, 2022), Confined Spaces (Two Key Customs, 2022), The News Around Town (Maverick Duck Press, 2020), Shaking Hands with Time (Indigent Press,
2018) and was featured in the PBS show Driving Jersey for the NJ Poetry Renaissance. He is currently the host of the New Jersey poetry series Coffee & Words in Asbury Park, and the virtual poetry series The Couch Poets Collective. When he is not writing, Cord waits tables
for a living and teaches middle school children that poetry is awesome. You can follow Cord here: www.cordmoreski.com.

Review of Cord Moreski, Apartment Poems

by Jada Cox

From the title alone, I instantly connected with this collection. Having lived in an apartment all my life, New Jersey native poet Cord Moreski’s newest chapbook “Apartment Poems” takes issues, culture, and diversity of apartment living to make poems that read more like small stories/snippets of Moreski’s community than actual poems. The voice of each one of his neighbors echoes different themes and feelings about apartment living and the sub-culture that surrounds it.

The first poem, “Welcome,” introduces the poet’s voice as a wildflower living in a world of differences in a small apartment complex. Each line reads with a flow that pulls you into this small, diverse complex. As a reader, if you close your eyes, you can see the place Moreski builds with each line using descriptive smells of weed, dusty doormats, and barking dogs. He pulls you down the hallways with him as he describes the neighbors and the landscape he calls home. The contrast between the loud environment and the graciousness of the last line, “just
watch your step,” brought me back to my days as an administrator of an apartment building. It always felt like the world was at your feet culturally as people of all walks of life lived all around you, so many people that you may never see, but you can hear and smell what they leave behind.

Moreski continues the soft tones of remorse in “ANGEL.” Each line has a velvety softness that amplifies the depressing thought of someone overdosing. You feel sorry for Angel, but hopefully he’s on the other side. As a reader, you feel reminiscent of a familiar death, as he connects you with these characters right from the beginning of the collection. For me, this poem brought a vision to what could have happened to the spirit of my uncle, who has recently passed; who had a drug problem. “Angel” ends with hopes of redemption for troubled souls.

In “Casual Friday”, the lines contrast the a flamboyant neighbor who hides in a gray suit. Gray being a color of bland, static, and nothingness. The writer pushes the reader to think about how what they wear could tell a lot about how they feel about themselves. Similarly to how you decorate your apartment, the poems leading this one center around being who you are, even if the world may not accept it. This particular poem pushes its reader to question if the outside matches the inside.

These poems are more than just a collection of poems but a love letter to the people that Moreski leaves around. They are memories of what used to be, homages to the person hiding in normalness, and a tribute to complex community culture and the people inside it. Moreski uses a light and relatable narrative that allows the reader to connect easily with each poem. He goes past stereotypes and clichés and pays tribute to the people who live there and the culture they bring.

Jada Cox is a spoken word poet, event planner, and filmmaker, born and raised in Union, NJ. In 2022, she founded Blk Hippe Productions, a full-service creative entertainment company that supports POC talent, stories, and ideas.This idea came about while she was attending graduate school, where she earned an MA in screenwriting from Wilkes University. In the summer of 2022, she released her first short film called “Part/time.” Currently, Cox is working on an MFA in Directing and Production while launching her podcast “Damn’s She’s Strong,” a podcast focused on health, fitness, cannabis, and spirituality.

Creole Conjure by Christina Rosso

                 

Christina Rosso-Schneider (she/they) lives and writes outside of Philadelphia with her two rescue pups and bearded husband. Together, they run an independent bookstore and event space called A Novel Idea on Passyunk. In 2016, Christina received an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Arcadia University. She is the author of CREOLE CONJURE (Maudlin House) and SHE IS A BEAST (APEP Publications). Their fiction and nonfiction work centers around gender, sexuality, fairy tales, and the occult, and has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. She is represented by Eric Smith at P.S. Literary Agency. When Christina isn’t writing or working at the bookstore, they lead various writing and occult-based workshops.

Review of Christina Rosso, Creole Conjure

By Linda Romanowski

Horror fiction is not a realm I visit often. My recent exposure and appreciation for the short story genre led me to read beyond my comfort zone and find a most compelling story collection written by Christina Rosso. I was partly drawn to Rosso’s book because in 1977, I
visited New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Aside from the raucous activities, there was time to tour the area. I never gave a passing thought to swamp-witch sorcery in a place noted for its refinement and charm. I unconsciously braced myself as the tourism aspect of the city
disappeared and the fog of the mysterious dominated my thoughts while reading this collection of stories. The curiosity of the spells and occurrences described dove my physical memory of New Orleans underground. I felt the shift in location. The word “Creole” in the title sets in my mind an immediate image of unfamiliar territory, a culture floating around me and apart from me, yet rooted in the fiber of the surroundings. Rosso’s dedication, “For New Orleans. This is a love letter to you” questions what that means.

This is a reading where revenge and vengeance is in the eye of the beholder, the villain, the scorned, whether real or imagined. It did not cross my mind until days after my reading of Creole Conjure, that women control the narrative in every one of the nine selections. They are the protagonists. They are not infantilized but strong and determined, They become demi-gods as their stories are unveiled. In my reading experience of mythology, women are often punished by the whims of the gods, with loss of physical beauty a common outcome of some act or situation. In this collection, it is not the prevailing issue. Theirs is a persistent, at times disguised manic control of lure and punishment.

There are moments when wincing before reading the next paragraph became nearly routine. But with the squeamishness, there are moments of tenderness, encased in wondrous imagery and prose. Most central to Rosso’s presentations are the backstories, enough to explain
but not excuse the characters’ motivations. They keep our near repulsion in check. Disclosed in bits and pieces, they provide a texture to the tapestry of the unfolding tales, perhaps quelling judgment. They provide layers and challenge the reader’s thinking. Rosso’s is not a gratuitous spate of random exploits. What you read might bring a reaction of horror or upset, but her presentation draws your mind back to the page. The motifs of beauty and ugliness are not so dramatic here; it’s more a delineation of the victims, all males.

The concept of The Seven Deadly Sins came to mind as they manifested in the men-turned-victim and are the draw to the perpetrators. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth highlight and destroy, perhaps causing the reader to respond, “Take that!” As the
reader is drawn through every telling, they become captive to the action (p.1) …riding the carousel at the carnival,…always with a new attraction waiting for you. Meanwhile, prose as beautiful as it is alarming jumps from the pages when you least expect it.

These stories are separate puzzles that attest to the spiritual, to realms nefarious to those who scoff at the presence of the invisible. Rosso makes us pause and ask who the monsters truly are. You might find yourself asking this question. Each tale is worth reading again. Try one read from the tourist’s point of view. And save the last line of the book for its deserved proper place in your reading.

Linda M. Romanowski graduated from Rosemont College with an MFA in Creative Writing in 2021. Her thesis, her hybrid Italian memoir, Final Touchstones, is pending publication with Sunbury Press. Her non-fiction and poetry publications include The City Key, the Marion Lanza Institute Facebook page and website, Moonstone Arts, Ovunque Siamo, and Vine Leaves Press.

Beyond Repair by J.C. Todd

   

J.C. Todd, Beyond Repair [Able Muse, 2021] – Review by Courtney Bambrick

J.C. Todd’s Beyond Repair presents a solemn, resigned perspective of war and its inevitable, irrevocable toll on civilians, combatants, and their communities. The collection opens with “In Whom the Dying Does Not End,” in which a parent recalls the development of her child’s body inside of her. This intense awareness of the work of creating a body – the prolonged and exact process of gestation – follows through the book as a counter-perspective to the awareness of the body’s vulnerability to violence and how witnessing such violence can affect the brain. The poet in “In Whom…” contextualizes her daughter’s gestation within her own awareness of an insurgency in Hama, Syria. Throughout this collection, that balance between human creation and destruction reinforces the shared humanity of us and them in any conflict, across any border, but maintains that geography, history, power, and imperialism have made some bodies more vulnerable than others.

As it establishes expectations about pregnancy and motherhood, “In Whom the Dying Does Not End” offers a lens to see the effects of war on parents, children, and the bond between parents and children. Other poems such as “Cover Shot” (13) and “Night Ride, ar Raqqah” (17), pick up the theme of caring for children or carrying a pregnancy through tragedy. These poems seem to attempt to balance threat and promise. By referring to the space inhabited by her daughter as the “province of my body” (4), this foundational idea of pregnancy and development becomes complicated with the idea of nations and political powers within them. The speaker of “In Whom…” is “consumed by what I feed,” reflecting the parasitic nature of imperialism. The poem’s depiction of violence in Hama is countered by the daughter’s development: “a riot of cells / firing between [hips]” (3). Different “provinces” support or suppress different revolutions. The poem “Flashback to the Morning After” makes this parasitism even more explicit in depicting the flies in the wounds of a child: “…his decay / is the incubator / and holy food for clusters / of eggs” (44). Such a “contagion” is “alien / and intimate / as a just-conceived child.”

“My Parents’ Altruism” also repeats themes of “In Whom the Dying Does Not End” such as gestation and development of life set against a backdrop of war. The poem suggests an animal urge toward growth and survival and future. The repeated emphasis on the scientific and medical language serves to de-personalize the images and allows the poems to speak to universal human experiences. Todd writes, “Eight months before birth, / all the eggs I will bear into life / appear in me as seed” (51): not only is there birth emerging out of war, “the seedbed” where the speaker has “taken root,” but the potential for the next generations.

The landscape is another vulnerable body threatened by human violence. The former fecundity and abundance of “Peshawar  Lahore  Kashmir  Shalimar” are mourned in the poem, “The Silk Road and the Scythe.” Here, an orchard, provides an image of historical opulence and plenty “epic and sugary before it fell” by the work of “that ascetic—the scythe” (9); such destruction of orchards and farmland leads to the starvation of human bodies. Similarly, in the section “Earth” from the sequence “The Damages of Morning,” the planet itself says of its unruly inhabitants, “They cavort and die. I persist, / My motion not a quest for power / Or longevity” (75). The host can withstand cycles of destruction and regeneration to a degree we squabbling leeches, fleas, and flies cannot.

The title Beyond Repair comes from the military slang term FUBAR, an acronym meaning “fucked up beyond all repair.” Here, “FUBAR’d” is a sonnet sequence near the middle of the collection about an Air Force doctor who is coping with immense and relentless loss: of patients, community, resources, and of elements of herself. The sequence brilliantly uses the sonnet form to contain ideas and emotions that are too gruesome or too dangerous to share unfettered. The connections among the linking first and last lines of the sequence stitch together like sutures, holding together this doctor’s world, but just barely: “…In dreams, their skin gapes open / to wound her pain that has no analgesic” (31) shifts into “Too wound up and there’s no analgesic / strong enough to bring her down but uproar” (32). I think of the splint, tourniquet or the hasty stitches closing a wound enough to protect the patient for just a little longer. The subject of these poems considers how changed she is, how unrecognizable to those with whom she shares a life: “Best prepare him to live with her half-gone, / fucked up by damage beyond her control” (34).

Partway through the book, Todd’s geography becomes more familiar to American readers: in “Imagining Peace, August: 1945,” we see the speaker’s father and uncles “laze in Adirondack chairs” while drinking beer and singing “Mairzy Doats.” The poem presents a family’s exhalation after the end of war, and the ways that confrontations persist in peace: “We’re picking fights. Clam up / or else, the first idle threat of peacetime” (54). Poems in this section relate to the poet’s childhood and growing up and how life is shaped by WWII, Korea, Vietnam. Even in American backyards, insulated against so much of the terror experienced elsewhere, we feel reverberations. For many U.S. citizens living today, there are few periods of time untouched by American militarism; very few of us know no veterans or refugees of these and other wars. In “Reading the Dark in the Dark” (58) and “Reading with Students about Death Camps” (69), Todd illustrates the ways these stories of war are shared through writing and reading as well as through more personal and immediate connections.

War, militarism, and imperialism affect all of us – the relative immediacy of that danger may vary whether we are living in a region under siege, working in such a region, or growing up with someone who has witnessed such horror. Todd’s emphasis on the body allows us to consider all bodies regardless of political or ethnic identity. Removed from borders and beliefs, the physical body that demanded the sacrifice of parents’ strength, time, and safety is a body familiar to most of us. The human connection shared among parents and children across languages, regions, and cultures is matched by our shared vulnerability to violence. Todd knows that it is often easy to look away, but Beyond Repair presents layers upon layers of damage – a reader will almost certainly recognize a familiar reflection in at least one of these stories. Maybe the title is more a question than a declaration. How much suffering and how much cruelty will push us “beyond all repair/recognition/reason/redemption” (Notes 91).

 

These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things by Shannon Frost Greenstein

     

Shannon Frost Greenstein is the author of “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things,” a full-length collection of poetry from Really Serious Literature, and “Pray for Us Sinners,” a short story collection by Alien Buddha Press.Shannon’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in McSweeneys Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, Philadelphia Stories, X-Ray Lit Mag, Reckon Review, Arkana Mag, New Mexico Review, Epoch Press, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Cabinet of Heed, Door Is a Jar, STORGY Lit Mag, Lunate Fiction, Ellipsis Zine, Scary Mommy, Crab Fat Magazine, Bone & Ink Lit Zine, Ghost City Review, trampset, Crepe and Penn, Spelk Fiction, Rhythm & Bones Lit Mag, Blunt Moms, the Philadelphia City Paper, WHYY, The Manifest-Station, Royal Rose Magazine, and elsewhere.She harbors an unhealthy interest in Hamilton, Nietzsche, Mount Everest, ballet, and the Summer Olympics. Shannon aims to write The Next Great American Novel while simultaneously acquiring more cats.

 

Review of Shannon Frost Greenstein, These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things

by Sarah Van Clef

When I read the collection of poems “These are a Few of My Least Favorite Things” by Shannon Frost-Greenstein, the first word that came to mind was balance. How does one balance the wickedness of the world, the unfortunate changes and shifts we see in our cultural society, mental illness, drug addictions and illnesses, and  the beauties of the world and culture like friendship, companionship, and family? In this collection of poems, Frost-Greenstein walks on the tightrope of such balances. She provides readers with a dialectical lens of the analysis of what suffering and life and celebration and horror actually mean to her. She culminates in the love of her world around her amidst the destruction that is going on in and outside of her mind.

From the beginning of the collection, in her poem “Down To The Filter”, Frost-Greenstein owns the fact that she “backslid today”(Pg. 8) amidst her many roles of being a mother, a writer, and a basic functioning member of society. Like so many of us do when trying to tackle any kind of demons we may be facing, “Down To The Filter” provides such agency that we are all allowed to “smoke that bitch down to the filter” (pg.9) when we need to, that as human beings, we are allowed to slide back into old habits and routines that sometimes aren’t the healthiest for us mentally. By the end of this poem, Frost-Greenstein boils it down to one thing: She is human, and humans are not always perfect, and neither are the demons that lurk in this collection.

In this collection, Frost-Greenstein not only tackles hard subjects like drug addiction and family trauma, she also widens the dialectical lens and looks at her city of Philadelphia, and the violence and destruction that was once her home. With an apocalyptic tone, Frost-Greenstein describes the violent segregation in her society  in her powerful poems “The White Pieces Go First”, and “Billy Nair’s On The Moon”. For the speaker in these poems, she must ask herself a larger question: What does home mean amongst the chaos? For Frost-Greenstein, she finds the answer in her children, her trauma, and her voice.

These poems are a call to warning, a loud, scream and cry for help. Not only does Frost-Greenstein understand that these poems need to be written for the mothers, fathers, friends, and neighbors that have felt similar loss and grieving, but also the future generations of leaders and artists that can change the narrative in how we look at mental illness, drug addiction, and familial trauma. Poems don’t always have to be pretty, and in this collection they weren’t in the slightest, but as much as it was difficult to read contextually, it surmounted in its beauty between the lines. Powerful in their own right, “These Are A Few Of My Least Favorite Things” is a collection that needs to be read, screamed, and chanted to anyone who will listen because this is how change actually comes to fruition.

Sarah Van Clef  is a poet and memoirist from South Amboy, New Jersey. Her lyrical essays and poems have been featured in Local Gems NJ Bards Literary Anthology, The Monmouth Review, and others. She currently is the Reviews Editor for Philadelphia Stories, An Adjunct Professor at Monmouth University, and the Co-founder of 2nd Renaissance Arts; an online creative cohort for writers to network and celebrate writing through educational and enrichment programming. Sarah holds an MA in English Writing Studies from Monmouth University and is currently working towards her MFA in Creative Writing. When Sarah is not teaching or writing, you can mostly find her on the beaches of the Jersey Shore or singing in her band, The Cellar Dwellers.