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A Review of Chuck Harp's WORKING TITLE by Logan Rodgers

11/1/2020

 
PictureAvailable November 10, 2020
Working Title by Chuck Harp presents a confluence of the integrity and denigration of human spirit in the digital-industrial modernity we reside. Under a less nuanced poet this material would come across as didactic, but what Harp does so well is turn the reading into a rhythmic flow that feels like you are looking through the eyes of a camera on a track which is spinning to focus on different people as it rolls. 

The layman, the unknown artist with their own rich history and voice, is celebrated from the start with “The Cheap Seats”, a title reverberant with the influence of Neil Gaiman’s “The View from the Cheap Seats”. It is here that we find the handshake of the reader and the author, unapologetic and outward with influence for this reader I immediately found a home in Harp’s work because of this. Yet, despite the similar titles, the poem racks us fast into the ironic world we reside in which billions of people with hardly any money pay full price to see a film like Avengers Endgame while Disney makes off with even more fuel monetarily and in the minds and hearts of the poor masses cheering on as Captain America proves he is worthy to wield the Hammer of a Norse God. The frustration and anger at this irony is palpable, but not anywhere close to off putting, if commiseration is the focus of many of the early poems in the book then vulnerable humility is the undercurrent that takes mainstage after the initial venting has passed.

“The Hunt” takes us into the uncomfortable space of recognizing how fragile the support of monetary future is in a world where jobs are unreliable long term, or even worse, time and energy consuming for the artist. “Skills” the anxious negotiation between the self we perceive vs. the self we present to be hirable or publishable, and not only the mental strain that puts on a person, but the dilemma of living as an autonomous artist when you may have to change your work for it to be shared, and to possibly have a future continuing to share it. 
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The poems continue their journey through the dregs of the working class and the time and life they lose in their survivalist state. The push and pull between the responsibility to strike and the pressure that puts on one’s ability to live, the corporate assholes who need cheap labor’s practices, and how the idea of money plays with one’s self-worth are also on the spit. Where the journey soars though is not in the misery of these experiences, but in the beautiful spaces that are found and the suffering endured to survive being able to return to it. The poem “Overtime” takes this into account and breathes so much living air into what we as readers have not only endured in the process of going on Harp’s journey, but what many of us have gone through in living in America. Even something as small as staying up an extra half hour when already exhausted just to kiss your partner goodnight is deep balm for all that is churned and torn. Especially if you are an artist of any medium who is reinforced with the need to constantly compare their accomplishments to the quality of their character in society. This utilitarianism is actively critiqued multiple times over by way of the emotional accounts present.

The accumulative poem aptly titled “Working Title” is button on the journey. It is heart breaking, heart affirming, exhausting, and something that should be stood by in solidarity. Chuck Harp knows not only his poetic voice, but how to allow confluence between each poem. The synthesis makes the read digestible, while also being incredibly complex. I hope to see more work and poems from him in the future, and for more publishers to give him the attention and time he is due.

Praise for THE GOLD TOOTH IN THE CROOKED SMILE OF GOD by Douglas Cole

6/30/2020

 
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The poems in this generous collection mirror the chosen title. One after another they engage our not-so-secret foibles, desires, rants & ravages. & they leap around, which keeps us slightly off-balance but engaged & curious, what will the poet come up with next?

Not one (thankfully) to follow a theme per se, Cole would rather dance with time, with community, with characters & predicaments that attract & some that repel. There is also a touch of nostalgia, as in the longish poem L A Days that speaks of his younger years in Los Angeles & ends with a dream of a man going into a theater to watch the movie of his life, saying,

“I remember that,
or, that never happened,
or . . . oh, man, I wish I could do that again.”

In delivering us into his world, Coles does not disappoint. His poem Father and Son speaks of being a kid & boxing a bigger kid while his father & the kid’s father got drunk & urged him on - marrying duty to determination.

His poem Mad Alice is another intriguing look at family in all its complexities. Time of the Greats – so appropriate today with that anything-but-great sitting in our White House – tells of heroes & the sadness that follows their loss, not only for the writer but for the generation that had lost them – names like Bessie Smith & Miles Davis & Hemingway & the list goes on – we do miss our ‘heroes & I suspect each era will have theirs to savor & to lose.

In the long poem “Bryan”, Cole paints an intense & intimate portrait of someone who has touched him deeply – through all the upheavals, torment & pain, Cole ends the poem in an uplifting commemorative posture:

“There’s a star for you
There’s a shooting star
You lovers and sad sailors

Rolling on decks and unreal seas
All around
That’s my fiery blaze
Flashing out up there
So make a wish!”

In essence, there is much that has captivated me in reading The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God, especially Douglas Cole’s mastery of the poetic line, his sparse use of adjectives & his uncanny ability to surprise with a quirky turn of phrase, mastery of enjambment & quick shifts in tempo. This is a book to be relished – Don’t miss the opportunity.​

-- Roger Aplon

Douglas Cole’s latest collection of poems titled The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God is a challenge from beginning to end, where the outcome varies, as it does in all good poetry, according to what the reader brings to it or fashions from it while reading. Cole is unusually adept at leaving enough unsaid to require the reader to enter what Gaston Bachelard calls a reverie of will, in this case interpreted as “I will puzzle this out.”
​

Accustomed to exploring in my own poetry the body of God as it appears to us through incarnation in nature and in human creativity, I approached Cole’s work with great interest. His book is a rare opportunity to consider human life lived in cities, among “those sad, ugly, wretched, addicted/ poisonous and scabrous souls/ crawling through their days/ or sitting on a city bus beside that clean,/ grinning, happy-dull, complacent/ everything-goes-right for me/ citizen of the universe ….” The clearest “big picture” of what the book is about occurs in “Time of the Greats”:
 
… the time of the greats of America is gone
Mohamed Ali Hemingway Miles Davis
Billie Holiday the great generals
great ambition great dreams and great vision
ability to say I am the greatest and believe it
gone and in its place unquiet squabbling
and bickering people in constant irritation
standing in lines overcrowded oversaturated
watching the world die wishing it weren't
 
The poet asks, “What can I offer?” in the face of constant apocalypse? He answers with these poems, and I can add that what he offers is the gift of attention and densely framed detail, given without judgment, with empathy, and in beauty.

The poems provide interesting glimpses into the lives of ordinary people who commute on public transportation and pour out of buses into offices for their work week and gladly leave work for evenings and weekends to roam the streets for comfort zones where they dream of the bland better life of those with more money to spend. Here, “Bars exhale their patrons, the street/ trebles like a song, and inside every house/ when one light goes off, another comes on.”

But what does Douglas Cole mean by imaging God as a face, sometimes revealing in a crooked smile the hidden presence of a gold tooth with its associations of decay and repair? Is it there to warm your lonely heart? There to amuse? There to make you wish for gold? Literal gold as in gold toilets? No, that would be dreamed only by the “smug and rich and unconscious/ walking over your body to the club/ uninterested in your dreams or journeys.” How about metaphorical gold, as in meaning and purpose and beauty?

One clue to Cole's intention is in the epigraph, lines taken from singer Jim White's Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a film starring, among others, novelist Harry Crews, where the search for God is a road trip in a classic car through the rural South, in search of beauty and meaning imaged as “the gold tooth in God's crooked smile.” Cole adapts this fascinating image to hover over the present condition in largely secular urban areas in the West: bland Sundays full of loneliness, drifting, or driving to a library full of “old books that whisper/ stories of another age and near/ death experiences no one will ever read/ yet remain the way all things remain/ in the vast vault memory of God ….”

He describes this world as “Pragmatic. American stoicism,/ a grim fortitude of disappointment/ and distrust …,” a place where religion, for many people, has no longer a vital sense of immediate reality but rather is a vague or distorted expression of what was once Almighty God, looming up there like a cloudy face, possibly grinning at the goings-on among his earthly creatures and perhaps, just perhaps, although out of sight but not completely out of mind, there may be a glint of gold lurking inside that grin … a tooth of hope … for beauty, for value and meaning that used to lure people to church, to make life feel worthwhile.

Cole focuses on the harshness that dwells among people who have been “gut-punched” by life, harshness expressed in “Thoughts of a Hanged Man” as cold, hate, hunger, fear, pain, nightmares, shame, regrets, bad choices, and waiting in line. “In Those Days” speaks of “people coupling and fragmenting/ in a particle accelerator of lives—/ and when the fires came, we scattered like cockroaches,/ found other rooms in which to sleep,/ to play and drink and seek oblivion.”

Here, there is little opportunity to enter Bachelard’s balancing reverie of repose, except in occasional significant lonely moments created by smoke, drink, drifting, where fantasy life takes over in daydreams of, for instance, “a Mai Tai under a palm tree.” Such dreams sometimes get translated into a cruder form. In “My Friend's Garage,” the speaker's friend, to create space away from his wife who is having sex regularly with another man (as he is having sex with another woman), fixed up his garage “like a tiki bar,/ with palm tree posters and coconut ashtrays/ and bamboo grass along the workbench,” declaring, “A man's got to have a place he can fart.”

What is beauty, you may ask, in such a world? The word is mentioned mysteriously in “Black Fish” where, after describing the hill people who come to town “in their finery/ and smoke-soaked coats/ drinking, laughing ...” he quietly transitions to “while beauty appears/ and crosses the street/ to the Salvation Army/ in Morton on Saturday night.” More explicit answers can be found in a poem called “Beauty,” arranged in a gripping sequence of images that begin with “Beauty is the burned husk of an old house/ with a crime scene strip around it/ I pass each night on my way to you.” My favorite appearance of the word occurs in “The Voyagers” where, in the face of rampant dereliction, the poet looks on as “beauty pulls a curtain back/ or shows up in worn shoes next to the bed” (an image I associate with Van Gogh’s art).

In Cole's “Invisible Land” the speaker sits in a bar waiting and thinking, with a “need fire going in the heart/ while we ride the big winds/ through the deep black sea/ because I’m waiting for beauty/ to come through the door/ with that inextinguishable spark.”

This book bears reading again and again to discover as I did that Douglas Cole is not writing merely about losers and winners out there where real life is envisioned as garbage, where fantasy life is bland and bereft of meaning—he is writing about us in our own bleakness, reading and wondering, “what's next?”


Near the center of the book is a long poem “LA Days,” chock full of images from a man's late life reminiscing that ends with “and so I've come back to tell you/ about this dream I had/ about a man who goes into a theater/ to watch the movie of his life/ and all the way through he keeps saying,/ I remember that,/ or, that never happened,/ or…oh, man, I wish I could do that again.”


As I read, I began to hear in my own mind the echo of Willy Loman's wife Linda in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, crying out against her husband's apparent worthlessness: “I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.” This collection of poems is Cole's way of paying attention, more like Harry Crews than Arthur Miller, but with quiet empathy and the added intensity of poetry.


At the end of this journey through the poems, I sit with the speaker in “The Consolation of Philosophy” and listen to his magnificent speech and say, “I got it!” (meaning my own variations of “it”) and understand and feel the blessing he leaves, there on the page, for me.

 ​
--Barbara Knott

Zbigniew Herbert once said, “It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.” And yet the barometer is an essential tool for translating the pressure of the atmosphere to help us forecast what weather is headed our way. In The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God, Douglas Cole has provided readers with a precise collection of atmospheric readings for the weather systems of human relationships and struggles. The poems in the collection blow and rumble, rage and grow still. After finishing the collection I felt tousled and sunburnt and invigorated.

The lives Cole translates into verse in this collection feel genuine and known, and they are treated with a respect that never falls too easily into kindness. The voices that appear in the collection muddle through and suffer and find small moments of joy. The combination of clear realism and a sense of the mythic is surprising in many of the poems. There is an elevation of mundane experience that calls to mind Gary Snyder or Jim Harrison.

Cole has a great talent from dropping bluntly worded lines that snap the reader back to attention mid-poem and reshape the experience of reading.

“until a cop appears with his flashlight / shining our eyes, / saying get on out of here--”

That subtle addition of “on” in the officer’s words gives the reader a sense of who the man is behind the badge. This sort of clear observation of little details charges many of Cole’s poems with a realism that invites the reader in.

The unexpected internal and end rhymes that appear in many poems create rhythms and pattens that invite multiple readings. Cole’s lines work together like cloud formations, echoing and refroming one another through their interactions. In the sonnet “Outcast,” Cole’s attention to rhyme and meter is particularly strong. In the lines “or an insistent moonlit blade of crow / shadow paralyzing every nerve / eyes transfixed by a cockroach floor”, Cole uses conventions of the form to generate momentum without drawing unnecessary attention to the form itself. Throughout the collection, form and structure serve to lift up the poems with similar unobtrusive skill.

Working together, the poems in The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God create a full picture of a weather system of the downtrodden that reads as both portrait and elegy. These poems are not out to change the world, but to record with precision the movements and moods of people finding their way between sunlight and storm.

--
Matt Daly

There is much beauty to behold in Douglas Cole’s compulsively readable poetry collection The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God. As a whole, these poems leave the reader with the feeling of movement in depictions of gritty landscapes and the people whose dreams and failures inhabit them. These places are filled with memorable characters who the poet presents to the reader without judgment, and often with an open-eyed wonder. The reader winds up feeling like a witness and a friend.

In a poem entitled “Beauty”, beauty is described in varying levels of splendor and unexpected metaphor. It is “the burned husk of an old house/ with a crime scene strip around it/ I pass each night on my way to you.” In “Invisible Land” the speaker is at the only bar unaffected by the city’s power outage and describes the storm’s effects: “The last/ leaves were ripped to shreds./ This would about do it—/ all that gold and red would get/ washed right down the street—/back to gray and black for a while./ I wasn’t completely without responsibilities.” The juxtaposition of the landscape with the speaker’s state of mind is one more beautiful effect of Cole’s poetic skill.

Some poems deliver brutality with narrative simplicity as in the marvelously brave and vulnerable “Father and Son” where the speaker is forced to box the son of his father’s friend. Description here is factual, the emotions of the speaker come out in lines taut with anger: “I fought the big dumb kid,/ while dad’s friend hit a bottle with a knife/ to start and stop the rounds/...The big kid hit hard. I didn’t let on./ I could see my drunk father was proud/ that I was sticking it out”. The reader, at once horrified and filled with compassion, is there for this speaker.

Often the poems rely on line breaks in lieu of punctuation to create their perpetual energy. I found myself eager to move from poem to poem to find out what would happen to the next character. What scene —be it a bar, a market, a cafe, or a friend’s garage—would roll out towards me and include me in its tragic beauty? One such poem is striking in its inclusion of the reader. Called “The Cycle”, it describes the relentlessness of everyday existence: “we are sucked up/ through elevators/ ...we are worms/ eating the world/ the bed throws us/ into the room/ the room throws us/ into the yard/ the yard into the street…” By the end of the poem we are all “bidding farewell/ climbing for light.”

As we arrive at the last poem in the book, “The Consolation of Philosophy”, we are provided with a sort of benediction, soothing us despite our woes. Using the second person “you” voice, it consoles us with a summing up of an imperfect life so far, but ending with the prayerful: “bless you on your journey,/ bless you in your optimism,/ bless you, and god’s speed—” It’s a voice that could be talking to themselves, a family member, you, or me, and it’s a voice that will stay with me a long time, inspired by its beauty.

--
By Jessica Purdy


Douglas Cole is a poet that America needs right now. The country is having a loud argument with itself; so loud, you almost forget that the majority of Americans aren’t shouting at anyone, they’re just trying to get by. Cole writes poetry for this America - for the man who sits down in a reading room out of the rain who “knows someone’s coming / to try and kick him out, / so he lowers his head / and sets up for a siege”, people “watching the world die wishing it weren’t”, and the hanged man who consoles himself with the thought that “I’ll never regret again / I’ll never choose badly again / I’ll never wait in line again”.

I’m inclined to agree with the poet that “the only way to make it through all / this is music”, and the silent music of Cole’s words will stick with you. Lines like “Out the door the storm blows / the wicked and the lawn chairs” and “He’s never more alive / than when he’s stuck in traffic” dig a finger in your ribs to wake you up and remind you that if you close your ears, and open your eyes, you too can see The Gold Tooth in The Crooked Smile of God.

--JEA Wallace

Anne Leigh Parrish's Book Hits the Road with Intuitive Reviews

2/18/2017

 
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Anne Leigh Parrish's collection By the Wayside released just a week ago and the reviews are really swell. We wanted to share one of our favorites with you, written by Chrissi Sepe on Amazon:

Anne Leigh Parrish's stories hit an emotional nerve which ensures you will remember them. One of my favorite stories in her newest collection, "By The Wayside," is "Where Love Lies." It is about a woman named Dana who moves to a quiet, yet gossipy, island town to escape her former life. Her self-esteem is wrecked, and she wants to start over and rebuild her confidence and heal herself through her love of painting. However, as she befriends an older man and finds herself attracted to another man closer to her age, she realizes that this beautiful island town is everything but serene, and danger lurks because, as she says: "Hating was far easier than loving, and came more naturally."

Yet Dana survives, as Parrish's female protagonists seem to do. No matter how difficult situations get for these strong women, they persist and often turn out wiser and more confident and capable than they were when we first met them in their stories. Not only do we as readers discover shocking truths about them, but the characters themselves are often surprised at the capabilities they hold inside and of what they are able to achieve if they just have the courage to speak up or to make changes in their lives.

In "How She Was Found," lead character, Fiona, begins the story described as a "mouse." She is compliant and insecure, and these traits are not likely to serve her well when she sets out as the only female on an archaeological dig with her professor and three male fellow graduate students. When she finds the bone of a human hand, she believes her professor will finally take her seriously, as she feels he never listens to her.


Where to Buy Anne's Book

In Print:
  • Unsolicited Press
  • Amazon
  • BN.com


E-Book:
  • Amazon
  • Smashwords

On Ohan Hominis's "Scattered Alegories" —Michael Ketigian

12/27/2016

 
 Hominis does a helluva a job creating vibrant paintings in your brain with nothing but static text, helping explore the vast worlds of love and humanity.

Note: To be fully transparent, Ohan is like a brother to me. I see no point in writing an intentionally nebulous review that aims to obfuscate that fact, and I'll actually be leveraging our collaborative friendship to illuminate the power of this collection.
​
What is poetry? What is love? What does it mean to write the first, and feel the second?


While we may never fully grasp these concepts fully, I have full confidence that a conscious read of Ohan Hominis' Scattered Allegories will do exactly what the title suggests: shatter the shackles holding you in that metaphorical cave, allowing you to see at least some sliver of formerly distorted light. This poetry is real and raw, yet crafted with careful intention that brings you through the initial experience and subsequent analysis of a human being capable of sensing and communicating an impressively broad spectrum of thought and emotion.

This poetry will make you raise your eyebrows. It'll make you smile, smirk, and laugh. It may make you cry — though perhaps not for reasons you might expect. Some of it will likely turn you on, since certain scenes are reminiscent of depictions on Grecian urns. To quote an unassuming bystander following the performance of one of these poems: "That was sexy."

Above all else, though: this poetry will make you feel.

If the aim of prose is to communicate concrete ideas while also keeping the ethos engaged, poetry takes the opposite approach, assailing the senses to provide the reader or listener with something concrete — but something that only they could provide to themselves. So while Hominis speaks of his own experiences in exquisite detail, they draw parallels to your own experiences, and allow you to walk away with newly discovered pieces of yourself.

As a writer whose aims for poetry are more concrete and didactic, I'm seriously inspired by this collection. While it can be enjoyed by all, it's a reminder to writers in particular that there is no proper way to communicate a message — that the seemingly simple though actually quite difficult task of being true to your own feelings is all you must do to reach other minds. Hominis reminds us that this is in fact the only way to communicate anything concrete.

If you're a fan of poetry, there's no question that you'll enjoy this work. It's refreshingly unique and authentic, and represents a legion of artists who recognize that the purpose of creation is to create what is real to the creator. This is, after all, the only way that it can be real to anyone else.

If you're not into poetry, then simply forget the word poetry and pick up this collection of verbalized memories and sentiments as a means of opening your own perspective to whatever you've been missing. 

There is an immense beauty in every walk of life, and works like these — due to their careful exploration of important ideas, while maintaining accessibility — are pivotal in helping us appreciate it.

"Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face" Review by Jeff Merrick

9/22/2016

 
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In the opening and title story of his riveting collection, Timothy O’Leary returns fire, blasting the S.O.B. Cheney with true facts spun out by a fictional victim in a most entertaining way.  As with all of the stories, O’Leary’s exuberant, fast-paced style bobs us down rivers of his savvy takes on the cultures, fun, fears, and realities of our time.

“One Star” gets into the heads and hearts of a struggling immigrant restaurant family and struggling, married, U.S. born customers disappointed by a declined Groupon.  A drunken Yelp-like review exposes a cleavage too often exploited by politicians and leading to consequences both sides regret.

A has-been sitcom actor was content with his life of booze and pussy as a travelling stand-up comic until he is blind-sided by an up-and-coming talent using the technology and tools of today in “Hecklers.”  

A widower who avoided cell phones and blames them for the death of his wife takes another look at his departed wife and the phone’s benefits when the neighbor boy shows him a video of her at her best in “The Tower.”  

Each story in this collection is a gem of thought, language and craft.  Some are funny, some are darkly funny (e.g., “Adolph’s [Hitler] Return”), and others are dramatic.  All are superbly entertaining.  Together, they process and contextualize the world around us from the perspective of someone who has been paying attention for the past four decades.  

Personally, I finish about one in every nine books I begin.  I finished this one in no time. My biggest criticism is that I wish there were even more than eighteen stories. 

Tim O'Leary's book "Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face" is available for preorder and releases on 2/16/2017.

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