not a single significant detail evokes the Buckeye State. His “corn” and “gravel roads” of “Ohio” could be in any number of rural states. Rather, Bledsoe delivers images rooted in the generic nostalgic soil of his youth, for example in “Kilgore Trout in Oklahoma”: “there were donuts in those days.” We accompany the poet on a selfindulgent journey to his teenage times in Anywhere, USA, when “I fell asleep waiting for you to return (“Oklahoma”) and when he was “looking for tomorrow’s sweet / smile (“Ohio”). Yes, he gets off a good line occasionally. I’m still delighted by the “boarded-over windows of our mothers’ eyes” in “Tulsa.” But too often the poems are plagued by insipid lines, such as “and the young are so young” (“Not Even the French Laugh at Me”). Or this one from “Oklahoma”: “Foxes mate outside.” Where else would fox sex occur? And this is Bledsoe’s second digital chap from Right Hand Pointing?! (Executed, I must point out, in black ink against a pumpkin-orange background. Ouch.) Maybe it’s a guy thing and Tulsa is meant for guys who, like Bledsoe, are yearning for their Holden Caulfield days by reading poems like “The Rye,” and who also “never wanted to be the man farting ” (“Not Even the French Laugh at Me”). That’s the same poem in which Bledsoe proclaims, “Masturbation dulls.” His sure does.
“S T I R R I N G
DE C IM AL S
into
t h e F O L D E R”
Michael Cadnum’s 6 poems in The Woman Who Discovered Math from Red Booth Review are of a higher caliber with many beautifully crafted lines and arresting images. “Hearing the Shot” opens: “Wasp on the spoon at your / elbow, great yellow lemons in the tree.” I’m hooked. And this from “The Strongman Eats a Car”: “And here are the tailings / from the mine of blood.” And from “Fridge Death”: the image of “duct tape weathered to silver scabs.” My trouble here? I’m mostly unsure of what the poems mean. Yes, I understand that a boy died in “one of the lost Amanas” in “Fridge Death,” and a waitress met her untimely death in “Hearing the Shot” and it was “three months before hikers / found her.” But mostly I don’t get them, just as I don’t get so many of the language poets’ works. But that’s okay because my body feels Cadnum’s poems: menacing, violent, tragic, and redolent with decay. My body is familiar with his post-modern world, painted with such an acute slant we can’t pin them down, but sense this is our world, too. And we, too, live with “cities in our lungs” and “piss-bythe-ton / in the groundwater” (“The Woman Who Discovered Math”). Cadnum’s time is our troubled time, one of “the red silence” (“Fridge Death”), one when “already / the birds have vanished” (“The Strongman Eats a Car”). I am strangely moved (and not at all chagrined by the several lame line breaks). This digital chapbook is a good thing. And Red Booth Review’s editor, W.T. Pfefferle, has done a good service by presenting Cadnum’s short collection for all of us to ponder. For free.
“…Y E L L O W / B L O S S O M S
u p:
FLO A TI NG
G A Z E B O S.”
That’s the masterful eye of Ken Pobo at work in “River and Leaves” from his award-winning digital and print chapbook, Ice and Gaywings, which won first place in the 2011 qaartsiluni poetry
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