In his second, full-length collection, poems of innocence and experience take readers from the schoolyard to the trout stream, from birth to death. Bruce Dethlefsen’s familiar, folksy voice acquires new depth and darkness. As Max Garland notes, “there’s clarity that’s not to be confused with naiveté or simplicity.” Dethlefsen chooses to speak in a plain voice that makes room for the lyrical in these poems, using a common vocabulary and an understated tone of voice. While his previous collections have hinted at darker tints to life, this book allows the darkness its due, paying attention to death, to loss, to grief, and to anger. The people in this book, including the poet/speaker, are conflicted and multi-dimensional: failing, trying again, and, in the meantime, loving as best they can. W.E. Butts praises the balance of the “elliptical, conversational, playful, and serious,” in Dethlefsen’s poems. The shifts in voice, using song, pun, and rhyme by turn, bring the reader closer to the heart of the book and then playfully, skittishly, evade and deflect the attention. It is by what he leaves out, as much as what he says, that Dethlefsen expresses the inexpressible. The terms which spring to mind on reading Bruce Dethlefsen’s poems, tenderness, kindness, gentleness, aren’t words we’re used to hearing in relation to contemporary poetry. These poems have a wide scope and a lot of give. They’re tough enough to admit how fragile they—and we—are. And they whisper whatever you are feeling, whatever you are going through, you are not alone. You are not alone. Together, these poems lead us to, in Garland’s words, “a redemptive vision of the world around us.” Visit brucedethlefsen.org for more information about the poet. Visit cowfeatherpress.org for supporting materials, including discussion questions for book groups, an interview with the poet, and audio from Unexpected Shiny Things.

Unexpected Shiny Things

Literature & Fiction

Dethlefsen, Bruce

Poetry

Cowfeather Press

In this bi-lingual collection of poems, Luz de Todos los Tiempos / Light of All Times, Mexican poet Moisés Villavicencio Barras explores the idea of crossing from a multitude of perspectives, and comes again and again from his various journeys, back to the central figures of his parents. This is a book of love and homage, as well as a tender but honest exploration of what it means to grow into adulthood and reconcile oneself with the past. Writing of his family and childhood in Mexico and also of his own children growing up in the Midwest, Villavicencio Barras has a strong sense of himself as survivor: “I am the one who still walks the prairies / inventing my self / speaking the language of things” he writes in “Ancestros”/ “Ancestors.” Having lived now in Wisconsin for over ten years, Villavicencio Barras moves between languages and cultures, between the natural world and the city, between dreams, memories and the day’s sharper delineations. As poet Roberta Hill puts it, “his self-reflective vision of living at once in the North and South awakens us to what is near, just outside the window, and to what is far, the jaguar in the ravine.” Distance brings desire; as Wisconsin’s Fourth Poet Laureate, Bruce Dethlefsen, acknowledges, these poems give us “a dark, familiar theater of heartfelt longing.” And yet, the poet responds by finding gifts in the mundane, “like that small rainbow of car oil on the sidewalk.” Sample poem, in Spanish and English: LAVAPLATOS Yo miraba las manos de mi madre ir de a un lado a otro de los platos. El limón se comía la grasa y la ceniza el cochambre. El agua sucia era para los jazminez y los geranios. Pensé muchas veces en sus raíces retorciéndose como los intestinos de los gatos atropellados en la noche de mi barrio. Sordo escuché las quejas de mi madre hacia los posillos de estrecha boca y los vasos de plástico. La vi sangrar lágrimas en monosílabos. Mi padre me dijo mientras se afeitaba: Los platos, los desperdicios y rosarios son asuntos de mujeres. Uno hace las cosas duras que le tocan al hombre: Encontrar los yacimientos de peces, masticar tabaco y tirar las redes. Hoy yo también me quejo de la redondez estúpida de los platos de tantos vasos y de tantas tazas. DISHWASHER I used to watch my mother's hands going round and round on dinner plates. Lemon ate grease and ashes grime, filthy water fed jasmines and geraniums. I often thought about their roots twisting like the intestines of cats killed at night in my barrio. Deaf, I listened to my mother complain about our glasses with narrow mouths and our plastic mugs. I saw her bleed tears in monosyllables. My father said to me while he shaved: Dishes, leftovers, and rosaries are women's business. We men do the hard work: Fishing, hunting and chewing tobacco. Now I complain about the roundness of dishes, so many cups, so many glasses.

Luz de Todos los Tiempos / Light of All Times

Villavicencio Barras, Moisés

In Sister Satellite Cathryn Cofell writes with power and a hard-earned, wide-ranging scope. As poet Oliver de la Paz writes, “the language of Cofell’s debut collection shimmers in amplitudes of love.” Love, yes, but hers is an engaged love that won’t let us go easily. Her poems provide an answer to the politics and pressures of our times, as Cofell wrests the microphone for herself, turns up the volume and the heat and writes about women’s lives and bodies in lines which are funny, bold, defiant, angry and celebratory. Married love and unvoiced lust, pregnancy, miscarriage, adoption, abortion and aging all figure into the mix. And Cofell writes her version of the truth bravely. “The only hard part about the abortion / was getting the car to start,” she tells us in the poem “Her Religion.” She also writes movingly about families (“When I do arrive it will be coffee all day hot in the pot / spoiled milk in the fridge / twin beds bunk beds bags on the floor” from “Getting Home”) and about just how fragile our time is on this planet. In Cofell’s vision, even a brain tumor can bless us with new vision and tenderness: “I will stay. Here. / I will lay by my lay. / From the behind of my heart.” As Kelly Cherry says, “Every woman should read this book. So should every man.” Sample poem: Appeal for Eclipse Enough about the damn moon. Bulimic bitch, four fits of clothes, all that cellulite and she still prances, still tries to light up the sky when he wants only to be dark, to be Johnny Cash and strum the train ride right out of her. Enough from the poets, the artists, the astronomers. Quit coveting her behind his back. She needs to learn the ways of a docile woman, to be viewed askew from inside a cardboard box, her trashy peep show ass puppeted from the earth, strung up behind the sun curtained by this ring of fire.

Sister Satellite

COFELL, Cathryn

Here’s a literary block party filled with both echoes and locations, as more than 100 poets share poems that refer to specific Madison places. Long-time residents live next door to writers who passed through for only a while. Local streets intersect with myth, history, personal narrative and ecology. More than geography, more than chronology, what emerges is something akin to the shifting psyche of a city. Poem by poem, a new map evolves, folds back upon its own stories, and rewrites itself over and over through its sounds and its silences, taking into account a variety of perspectives, a multitude of voices. In the end these poets ask us, How many Madisons are there? This anthology project was conducted by Madison, Wisconsin’s poets laureate, Cowfeather Press, and Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf. Madison has had a poet laureate since 1977, when Paul Soglin named John Tuschen to the volunteer post, now overseen by the Madison Arts Commission. Co-editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman work together as the current poets laureate (2012-15).Their mission is to integrate poetry into the fabric of civic life, ritual, and the everyday, and toward that end: place poetry before the public in surprising places/spaces; create conversation about poetry; connect poets and groups of poets to each other and to other artists; build bridges between people using poetry. Visit cityofmadison.com/mac/poet.cfm for more information, as well as how to donate to the John Tuschen Poet Laureate Memorial Fund, established by Andrea Musher, the city's second poet laureate. Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf (PoetryJumpsOfftheShelf.com) is a program launched in 2004 by poet and co-editor Shoshauna Shy in Madison, with the mission of bringing poetry out of the libraries, bookstores and classrooms into the general public arena. Calls for submissions are conducted largely via cyberspace. PJOS published ten of these poems on decals that were affixed to Madison B-Cycles in April, 2013, for the riding season. Other projects have included poetry on specific themes published on java jackets, bookmarks, palm-sized books for glove compartments, postcards, and inside jawbreaker capsules. Partnerships for distribution included a wide variety of companies, businesses, and organizations all across the country. Cowfeather Press, founded by Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman in 2011, is a two-woman volunteer operation committed to developing a place for poetry in civic discourse, serving others through poetry, and expanding and connecting communities of poets and readers. At Cowfeather Press, we believe poetry matters, and we reach towards an aesthetic that represents the diversity of the upper Midwest. We encourage conversations on the page, the stage, and in public spaces which embrace, challenge, and explore both our differences and our common humanity. Supporting materials for book groups & community reads are at cowfeatherpress.org.

Echolocations: Poets Map Madison

Press, Cowfeather

Twenty-five years ago Oscar Mireles published the anthology, I Didn’t Know There Were Latinos in Wisconsin: 20 Hispanic Poets. This third volume in the series includes the work of more than thirty authors of poetry, essay, memoir, and fiction and demonstrates once again the breadth and depth of Wisconsin’s Latino/a population. Not strangers, not new arrivals, these authors represent an important part of the region’s cultural and social fabric. Writing sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, and sometimes in a dynamic mixture of both languages, Mireles’ anthology helps to extend many narratives: not only of what it means to be Latino/a in the Midwest, but also what it means to be Midwestern.

I Didn't Know There Were Latinos in Wisconsin: Three Decades of Hispanic Writing

Mireles, Oscar

United States

For five years, Wendy Vardaman and Sarah Busse co-edited the hybrid poetry magazine Verse Wisconsin working on laptops out of local coffee shops and libraries. Over 13 print and 15 online issues, they published the work and words of writers from around the corner and around the globe. Including poetry, essays, book reviews, interviews, verse drama, spoken word, visual poetry, and other poetic forms in print, image, audio, and video, they sought to build the audience for poetry and the community of poets, while working to define and re-define what community might mean. Over the years, the mission of Verse Wisconsin underwent significant shifts, as editorial emphasis moved from a simple publication model toward creating conversations, activisms, and transformational circles, seeking to invite diverse voices into these conversations, to define and to redefine what a poetics of the Midwest might be, and to point the way towards what such a Midwest poetics might become. This volume represents another iteration of an ongoing conversation, as the voices of Verse Wisconsin's editors weave in and out with those of other poets, once again reframing the questions by selecting work from over the years and placing pieces in new context.

Local Ground(s)--Midwest Poetics: Selected Prose Verse Wisconsin 2009-2014

History & Criticism

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