Tag: news

Hush by Nikki Ummel

Review by Cid Galicia

Belle Point Press
Publication: October 2022
28 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9858965-2-7

In the chapbook Hush, Nikki Ummel guides readers through the neighborhoods, bars, and backyards of New Orleans–while simultaneously the streets, alleyways, and rooms of her own life as a partner, mother, sister, and queer woman. Readers travel the lived realities of medical recovery and support for her sister, hurricanes, and the ever-stretching diversity of today’s family dynamics. There is joy, but that joy is not a shield of denial to hide behind from real-world experience. Through these poems, she offers us truths of living with struggle and love in the heart of The Big Easy.

Many writers use their first pages to coax the reader’s attention and adoration–offers of pleasures, happiness, or wealth of life that can be lived vicariously. Truth is never avoided in New Orleans, and truth is never avoided in Nikki’s writing. Her opening poem, My Sister’s Double Mastectomy, adheres to this. The reader follows Nikki’s observations of her sister’s recovery as she struggles to identify with her new body that looks and feels now so distant and strange.

                      She is relearning comfort…
                      This is not her body, or wasn’t,

                      but now is…

                     She pulls his four year old body
                     to her recessed chest but us unable to staunch his giggles.

To the many readers who have experienced the same personally, or have  had friends/siblings that have, in which they also had to painfully observe–Nikki’s poems offer a sanctuary of empathy.

At the same time, Nikki is also a laughter igniter. One of my favorite poems is Eleven. In this poem, Nikki writes through the narrative lens of a young adolescent girl nearing one of the physical thresholds of womanhood, her first period and also through a mother with concern for this coming too soon for her daughter. What I love about this poem is the simultaneous dialogue of prayers to the Virgin Mother.  Spoken as a reflection of the two, one of high anxiety and the other of youthful female ferocity!

               Hail Mary / full of grace / am I blessed
               amongst women too? / And my fruit / 
               Buds / Holy Mother / but it’s too soon.

               Hail Mary / full of grace / bless me
              Mother of mothers / make me a woman too.

The narrative poetic craft of setting, characters, symbols, and humor are so strongly etched within this poem. We are pulled into the duality of the two characters so deeply, we cannot help but leave this poem with hope and a bit of laughter.  

Throughout this book Nikki artfully covers the full canvas of poetic expression as she guides the reader through her words and stories down the pages and into the hearts, hopes, worries, and fears of each poem.

Nikki Ummel is an active advocate of poetry in her New Orleans community. She is a writer, editor, educator, and laughter-igniter to those who find themselves in her creative wake. Assistant Editor for Bayou Magazine, UNO & Xavier University Instructor, and most recently co-founder of the reading series lmnl lit. Nikki has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and twice awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Andrea Saunders Gereighty Poetry Award. She is the 2022 winner of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize. Nikki has been published, or will soon be, in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, The Georgia Review, and more. Her second chapbook Bayou Sonata, NOLA DNA, is forthcoming Spring 2023.

Hush is available now from Belle Point Press.

Voice to Voice in the Dark by Tim Hunt

Review By Cat Dixon

Broadstone Books
Publication: August 2022
Paperback, 112 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-13-4

The spirit of the Beats pulses throughout this new collection from the poet Tim Hunt. The Beats, as we all know, were focused on genuine lived experiences and often protested against traditional modern life while celebrating art, music, and freedom. Tim Hunt has painted vivid scenes of the everyday with his imagery coupled with the hunger for travel, adventure, and hope. The poet calls out to the voices of the past—excellent poetry collection title—and gives the reader a glimpse into our current American life and its landscapes, both natural and manmade, with reminders of the near-distant past.

The collection opens with an invitation to the reader to go on a walk. The first section, “Poetry for Bread,” introduces Kansas on the verge of harvest. Hunt offers us nourishment for our journey in the form of imagery, prosody, and metaphor. He explores risk as well. In the poem “Here in the New West: American Canyon, ‘Gateway to the Napa Wine Country’ (August 2016),” he describes a game room and writes, “Here, each card matters. Win. Lose. Here, / they do not think about which can to open for dinner/ or what to pretend they want to watch on the TV…” The scene of the cardplayers absorbed with their cards mimics how each of us loses ourselves in something—be it film or literature or even a card game. As we latch onto distractions and devotions, Hunt reminds us that there is more to life than winning or losing, consuming and hoarding. Each day, each interaction matters.

In the poem “Between the Highway and Train Tracks (Vallejo, CA, August 2016),” Hunt brings us to a liquor store. He writes, “Here…. The upturned hand/ receiving the brown-bagged pint—/ the breadless communion/ of temporary salvation:/ blood of my blood: morning, / noon and night:/ forever and again. / Amen.” This quick detour has turned into a prayer, a lamentation. There is no sustenance in those bottles and pints; instead, the poet points us to what we can do, and what we should do. In the next poem “A Tomb for Melvin, Who Has None,” we’re reminded of the brevity and randomness of our lives. This line stays with me, “So, I offer this as if it could matter, as you once mattered..” What else can we give to our deceased loved ones and friends but our words, our memorials to those who once journeyed along the road with us? I thoroughly enjoyed Hunt’s take on Ginsberg’s famous poem “A Supermarket in California.” The poem, titled “A Truck Stop in Kansas,” is part portrait of the Midwest, part call to transcend the everyday.  

As we move through the second section, we stop in Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The imagery here, focused on light, ends with this important ponderance about childhood ignorance/bliss:

         And as the setting sun winks the streetlights on
         and you wait for the Grand Parade to begin,
         you do not think to wonder whether your parents believe
         or pretend, because here, in this Magic Kingdom, you
         do not have to worry about that. 
         Yet. 

Despite the happy setting, something is looming in the distance. Throughout the poems the reader catches glimpses of some kind of concern. There’s the “dark of the moon,” “fallen fruit,” the missed turn on the road, and “the lake’s spring-thinned ice.” All remembrances of the past are coupled with the pain of humanity’s selfishness and the hope for a better future. 

The third section, titled “In That Time When Time is Not Measured,” begins with childhood, younger days of innocence. My favorite piece here is “The Story,” which opens with, “This is the story you were told/ when you were too young to understand the story/ but could tell from the telling that you were meant to remember/ and carry it forward…” Later Hunt writes, “Even why a war?” This—paired with the “brown shirts and military caps” from the previous section and the poem “The Boy is Taken to the Soldier’s Grave,” which begins this new section, and the long poem “The Circle”—captures how our American history is marred by war, how our society is built on struggle, and how if we consider the whole picture of our past, we, too, may question how it has come to this. But Hunt doesn’t criticize the soldiers who served and are serving our country; instead, he recognizes their painful sacrifices and honors them. Hunt writes about how soldiers became great fighters in the poem “The Circle.”  He writes: 

         Because we learned to Hate—
         the t snapped like breaking a dried stick, 
         and this not a sign or memory but the thing,

         a never forgotten: brighter than pain,
         grief—a truth. The truth. The hate.
         And leaning back, arms closed, silent again. 

Hunts ends the collection with imagery that is carried throughout the poems: light, travel, and a boat returning to shore once again. These poems invite the reader to journey with the poet as he strolls a gas station with Allen Ginsberg, travels from Kansas to California, hops on a railcar, stops at a soldier’s grave, and ponders America’s past along with its vast landscape and its promise of a better tomorrow.

This book is available now in the Broadstone Books Catalog.