September 17, 2018
Welcome to Issue #18 of
Sticks & Stones,
Erica Goss's bi-monthly newsletter
dedicated to poetry, reading and literature.
IN THIS ISSUE:
- REVIEW: Starshine Road by L. I. Henley
- THE READING LIFE: Reading Saves Lives
- WHAT I'M READING/RECENTLY READ: The Spirit of Intimacy, Turtle Diary, Fire in the Belly: the Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
- RANDOM POEM FROM THE BOOKSHELF: “Of Cascadia” by Sam Hamill
- QUOTES: Robert P. Baird, from NY Times Book Review
- VIDEO: "Stone Poems," my latest video poem based on 5 poems by Joan Dobbie
- BOOK REVIEW SUBMISSIONS OPEN OCTOBER 1!
- SUBSCRIBER RECOMMENDATIONS/NEWS
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Hello, and welcome to the eighteenth issue of Sticks & Stones! My mission with this newsletter is to help spread the word about poetry and art. That's it, plain and simple. I hope you enjoy the newsletter, and if you do, please share it with your friends.
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In L. I. Henley’s poetry collection Starshine Road, the author explores the Mojave Desert, a place of tough survivors, trash heaps, and unexpected beauty.
REVIEW #19: Starshine Road by L. I. Henley
Perugia Press, 2017
In The Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin’s classic book about the Mojave Desert, she writes, “Not the law, but the land sets the limit.” The poems in L. I. Henley’s collection, Starshine Road, celebrate the desert’s conflicted personality, a place empty yet full, untamed yet mystical, and dangerous yet familiar.
Henley sets the tone with the line “conception made the sound of a shotgun,” from the book’s first poem, “Little Child.” In subsequent poems, we learn that the poet’s father was “a cop / a white man” who “mistook me for a crook” one night and “put his hand around my throat.” This same father teaches his daughter, at age four, to shoot:
Coffee cans perched on a fence in the desert
wingless rusted birds
The one in the middle
that one is a killer
Life in the Mojave Desert blurs the line between safety and danger. In “Starshine Road,” the title poem, the speaker is a teenage girl learning the difference: “sixteen alone in the desert / thirty minutes from town,” walking to the bus stop “past that windowless shack where at 5 a.m. // the meth-heads had finally drifted off on Ambien.” She worries about the men who drive past her, finding out later that instead of wanting to attack her, “some of them were actually worried” about her.
A love story surfaces in three poems about a junk pile visible from the speaker’s home. In “Junk Pile as Seen from My Kitchen Table,” the pile’s distance renders it a mysterious presence, standing between the speaker and “the highway where cars are going to Vegas Salt Lake Taos.” The poem ends with a plea: “promise me you are something close to content / …so we can keep on this way.” In “Junk Pile as Seen from Inside the Junk Pile,” the speaker lists what she sees, now close-up: “a gutted cabin,” “lunch meat,” “a clock face,” and ends again with a statement about love:
There is nothing here
that I want
so then how do I
explain my love?
In “More About the Junk Pile,” we learn who is responsible for its existence: “an artist” who “buried her trash,” which includes “pull-tabs from the 90s.” In the poem’s ending lines, the trash rising up from the ground spurs an emotional response with “I come back / when I throw myself at you.”
“Shoe Tree (a poem in twelve parts)” describes the effect, both absurd and poignant, that man-made objects often have when contrasted with “a cinder cone / a lava field.” Like many human desert dwellers, this completely ordinary thing “creates itself” within an environment that now includes “a dry wash” and “a row of empty cabins” with “broken windows.” The poem first reimagines the shoe tree as an actual tree – either deciduous, evergreen or coniferous, or as unwanted lumber – and then compares its purpose to those of real trees: “But you, with all of your gaping, flapping shoes / what can you offer besides stories?”
Henley explores poverty, privilege and compassion fatigue in “A Dollar (for a funeral),” a long poem about the speaker’s repeated encounters with a woman who appears, at various times, to be an immigrant, pregnant, asleep, dead, having just given birth, and a liar. “A dollar to make her go away,” Henley writes, and “I said I was sorry.” At the end of the poem, the woman is revealed as a fraud: “Just two weeks ago / the woman got a promotion.” The poem ends in the queasy moral place these encounters so often create.
Starshine Road shows us that the Mojave Desert is a place deeply deserving of poetry, a land imbued with the stark contrasts that inspire strong emotion. L. I. Henley has written a book that reveals the true nature of this implacable place, too often ignored and undervalued, as a mysterious and fascinating land.
L. I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert village of Joshua Tree, California. She is the author of two chapbooks, Desert with a Cabin Viewand The Finding (both with Orange Monkey Publishing). Her first full-length collection, These Friends These Rooms,was published by Big Yes Press in 2016. She is the recipient of The Academy of American Poets University Award, The Duckabush Prize in Poetry, The Orange Monkey Poetry Prize, and The Pangaea Prize through The Poet’s Billow. She lives with her husband in the high desert of California, and edits the online journal Apercuswith her husband, Jonathan Maule.
Starshine Road is available from Perugia Press and Amazon.
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