A hint of things to come

Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving

Ah, but then you know it’s time for them to go

But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving

I do not count the time

 

For who knows where the time goes?

Who knows where the time goes?

—A.E.M. Denny

 

Where it Goes features a photograph by Eleanor Bennett

This is the leading epigraph to Where it Goes by Martina Reisz Newberry’s new book of poems from Deerbrook Editions.

Albino Carillo said this about Where it Goes, “Startling and surreal, intoxicated with love and lust in its images and her characters, the book achieves a rare form of history from the inside . . .”

We think Where it Goes is an exceptional book and we want people to discover Martina because we think she is a wonderful writer. Discovery is the big word we see around the blogs, the big issue for indie writers and indie presses. So please read  these poems. Here is a preview of about one-third of the book. Tell someone about this writer. Please buy the book and help support our writers as well as the press. Maybe you can make a tax-deductible donation.

A fine poem from Where it Goes.

 

Mid-February Late At Night

 

Intimidated by the glass,
I reach to touch a near-full moon
suspended on a near-black string.
It strays across tonight as I
have wandered across blank paper,
decorum over and done with.
The strange bones of my hands find their
own way (hasn’t always been so).
Outdoors, the moon lights up the dirt,
hides behind clouds that start to spill
rain. The environment reeks of
failure and I, unmoved by its
intent, start to despise the rain.
I have stood in this place a long
time waiting for shame to produce
the wild, tender thoughts I’ve called up
in the past. Where is the book I’ve
not written? Where is the house and
the barn I saw when I slept then
wrote about when I woke? Where are
the lumbering animals that
will find their way back home and the
farm wife in her wrinkled jeans and
patterned apron? Maybe they’ve been
cast upward into God’s shadows.
I reach to touch a sky that has
filled my life with false promises.
The old olive tree looks so cold.
Soon it will be Spring: warm, blameless.

 

 

As always, deserving authors good books can be found at deerbrookeditions.com and thanks for visiting.

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New Poetry

The latest book by Martina Reisz Newberry is Where it Goes.

Albino Carillo said this about Where it Goes:

As a poet Newberry crafts lines of hot, personal intensities.

“In her new poems, Martina Reisz Newberry conjures the mytho-poetic, the natural, conjures the contact zone of the body in nature, fully aware of itself and of nature’s powers. Her poems are sometimes harsh and honest about the self in relation to others, and the lived life: human, to be sure, meditative in the face of death and ruin.”

Albino Carrillo, Author of In The City of Smoking Mirrors, is Associate Professor of English, University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio.

Here is another favorite poem from Where it Goes.

Mustard

When Bukowski was alive,
poems still seemed possible.
Bukowski was one poet
who thought it was lame
to write about butterflies
and rainbows,
unicorns
and fairies.
He wrote the real thing;
about how the horses were running
and which ones were winning
or about rain on a pavement
that will never come clean
because it’s Los Angeles
and those streets
don’t recognize clean.
Poems had hopes for continuing
when Bukowski wrote them.
Poems had grease on the paper
and cold coffee in the chipped mug
and eggs over easy.
Poems smelled like bacon
and burned toast,
could be found hiding
in the white shorts of
a seventeen-year-old hooker
down at Santa Monica
and El Centro,
or in the tuck-and-roll upholstery
of a ’55 Chevy.
Poems boggled the mind in those days.
Poems were like
the best hot dogs
you ever ate
on Dodger Day
at the stadium.
Lots of mustard
so it gets on your shirt
and nobody in the bleachers
talking about li ter a tchooor.
Not a word.
Mustard
Just watching the game 61
and downing Dodger Dogs.

When Bukowski was alive,
there was a chance for poems.
They hung out in the donut shops
and the not-so-trendy bars
and they were boiling up in the car radiators
and cozying up together
in heat-tossed beds
on a mattress
that had seen better days.
When Bukowksi was alive,
poems were wicked and nasty
and if there were any little birdies
in those poems,
it was because there was bird poop
on the windowsill.
It used to be that poems led,
lives followed;
seems like now they trailed off somewhere
leaving no breadcrumbs
so we could find them.
There ought to be answers
in this poem before it finishes.
Still, when Bukowski was alive,
and it came to showing him the door,
his only answer, clear and clean,
was, “Get your foot outta my ass.
I’ll leave when I’m ready.”

Blooms

Where it Goes features a photograph by Eleanor Bennett

 

One of my favorite poems in Where it Goes by Martina Reisz Newberry is Blooms. This has to be an all-American poem but it could be an every-town poem, which is better. It is the kind of poem that breathes with so much time and life it may be one of those Albino Carillo was talking about in his endorsement. I know the day I brought home the proof, and the day I bring home the proof copy of a book from the printer is a special day because I remember it is one of my moments, a what-it’s-all-about moment, and I read this poem, and I did cry.

 

 

 

 

Blooms

 

My father helped Mister Hudson move his old fridge out to the garage
and move the new one into the kitchen. Daddy worked at Kaiser Steel
in Fontana shoveling slag and minding the Open Hearth. Mr. Hudson
worked at Upland Savings and Loan. He wore a suit and a nasty face and
he hated the neighborhood kids. But Daddy helped him anyway and
turned down the five dollars he was offered, told old Hudson “Naah, we’re
neighbors after all” and thanked him anyway. Second Avenue was old and
shaded with big pepper trees. They shook at the slightest breeze, grew
malformed fungi at the base of their trunks.

 

The gritty winds came down
from Mt. Baldy. The sand
smelled like copper, gleamed
like copper

 

On Saturday, when Daddy’s friends came to visit with their permed
floozies in tow:  Andy Kushner with “Penny” and Bob Trow with
“Brenda.”  They all got loose on beers and shots of Old Crow and Daddy
told about moving Hudson’s fridge. Andy Kushner, pinched his girl’s cheek
with a thumb and a forefinger knobbed as tree twigs, kissed the red spot
and said, “It won’t make the old bastard any friendlier, Jack.”  “Why sure it
will,” Daddy said, “he can’t get any damned UNfriendlier” and everybody
laughed like crazy. The room filled with cigarette smoke and the flexing
of calloused hands and the smell of Evening in Paris perfume. Brenda’s
stockings, brand new from Sears Roebuck, got a run in them and she cried
a little. Everyone went out onto the front porch and looked up.

 

The sky glowed like the night
was on fire and maybe it was
and the sounds and colors
of the mill split the sky

 

This all happened a good 20 years before the mill closed and the skies
above Fontana and Rialto and Etiwanda went blue and maybe even clean.
Before I went off to college, we drove, my father and I, to the closed-up
mill and the deserted shells of the machine shops and the blast furnaces
and the empty soaking pits where only the ghosts of ingots lay cooling. We
went right up to where he used to work—the locks on the gates weren’t
locked.

 

It all looked cold and unfriendly like old Mr. Hudson’s face. It was such
dirty work, such hard work I said, but my father said, “Naah. I was grateful
because it gave us a living.”  On the way home, we passed Dominic’s Bar,
closed as well. All the men had drunk there and stayed too late there and
left their lunch pails there and left their smelted dreams there at one time
or another.

 

Walking out of the mill,
the men grinned, faces so dirty
their teeth looked whitewashed
fierce in the gloaming

 

Walking into Dominic’s
Beer tasting of hops and grime
Hard-boiled eggs, sausage
out of jars, into steel fists

 

I wish we could go here again, I said. I wish I was still 9 years old and
Momma and I could meet you at Dominic’s after work and I would have
a hard-boiled egg and a sip of your beer and a Shirley Temple for myself. I
wish Dominic’s never closed.
My father said, “Me too,” and flexed his fingers. Dominic’s sign was falling
off the building,
My father tried to fix it. I saw Andy Kushner trying to help him. They
couldn’t get it fastened back up.

 

A week later, I was on my way to San Jose State College, wanted to be a
librarian and a writer. My father hugged me hard, told me, “You’re the
daughter of a working man, a steel worker. Be proud of that.”  I wasn’t
proud right then, but I got proud some 25 years later when an elitist bitch
told me I couldn’t write worth a tinker’s damn because I didn’t have a
degree. I got proud then and told her about my father and told her she
ought to be slapped, but not to worry because I wasn’t into slapping and I
left her class and didn’t go back.

 

In my dreams, my father
glides over hot rolled blooms
and billets. His shovel makes
sparks that bounce off his grin

 

The alarm sounds and the door
goes up to show the molten river
red as blood and hot enough
to rival hell

 

My father guides that river
right out into the sky where
the stars drink of it
and continue to shine

Seven & seven

After reading an article/review by Steve Coll of “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Brad Stone, I found my less than usual tendency toward discouragement gaining. But I’m tired, and feeling behind in the overwhelming number of chores associated with marketing and publishing. Needless to say, you will learn more about Mr. Bezos and amazon’s duplicity just from the article.

Perhaps what lead me to discouragement most are the invisible flags that hang over politics, corporate and partisan leverage, the essence of corporate behavioral marketing practices, now e-commercialized, and the usurpation of our culture, what may be best expressed in this sentence, “ . . . small businesses like bookstores and corner grocers watched their political influence fade . . . “ and “. . .the United States, which lacks a politics favoring small- and medium-sized publishers, booksellers, or independent filmmakers.“ This last statement refers to a comparison between the U.S. and Europe in a philosophy “that a thriving culture depends on small diverse enterprise.” Coll also says, “the real problem of ‘the Age of Amazon,’ . . . concerns the future of reading and writing.”

After that, how do you pick up and attempt to forge a plan to help people discover authors and their books, because it is about discovery. Some entrepreneurs are working on sites to help small presses and indie authors with this.

 

Now I am going to cast off my mantle of gloom and toot my Hohner.

Where it Goes features a photograph by Eleanor Bennett

Entering stage right, a new book; Where it Goes, poems by Martina Reisz Newberry, author of Learning by Rote, also form Deerbrook Editions.

I am going to post the review / blurbs for this book and give you a link to Martina’s blog where more reviews can be found.

 

Review by Albino Carillo

This book rocked me, threw me off the chair in the little forest where I dwell. These poems made me cry, cheer, laugh, made chills run down my spine.

In her new poems, Where it Goes, Martina Reisz Newberry conjures the mythopoetic, the natural, conjures the contact zone of the body in nature, fully aware of itself and of nature’s powers. Her poems are sometimes harsh and honest about the self in relation to others, and the lived life: human, to be sure, meditative in the face of death and ruin.

Startling and surreal, intoxicated with love and lust in its images and her characters, the book achieves a rare form of history from the inside: real old desperate “hipsters,” suburbanites, the poet as a visionary and voiced persona narrating the adversity of living in the 21st century. There is a gentle but convincing gathering of the past that has created the sharp present in this book. So, when she looks back, it is with passion and fury and wisdom. There are political poems here which dare to dissect the darkness in which we all walk, a darkness we’ve been acquainted with for a long time.

Here and there, her poems are neat, sharp, beams of light, sunlight and soul-light. There is a hint of the Ginsberg, the Levertov and the Bukowski in the metaphysics she’s dealing with. She reaches amazing levels of passion, her words are even and precise and put together organically, creating startling and beautiful vistas of life—and by this I don’t mean she hews to the golden mean—she makes poems organically, she speaks her visions and meditations in the projective, in the space between bodies, in the space between the city, nature, and herself.

As a poet Reisz Newberry crafts lines of hot, personal intensities:

“Hold me hard and close
while I fight for our passion
and fight our way out of slavery.”

“God pisses ice. I know he’s there—someone’s there—
doing some insider trading or
checking out the Fall collection
from Abercrombie and Fitch.”     Prima Serata

 

Beyond the realm of confession, and into the heart of the desert, her poems tell us

“The wind
is so strong sometimes, it pulls
needles from the cacti and
sends them straight through our hearts. “   Redhead—Three About Sadie And Me

 

This is exactly what her book accomplishes in great, dazzling poems of emotional, mythic and poetic intensity. Dear reader, in this book you will find so many poems worth reading over and over again, as I did. Truly the work of a master poet.

       —Albino Carrillo    Author of In The City of Smoking Mirrors,  Associate Professor of English, University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

 

 

 

I’m just plain bowled over by Martina Newberry’s poetry collection Where It Goes. These are poems I’ll read over and over again, for the pure strength of their language and the surprises, light and dark, that they unroll.

—Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else On Earth, Dreams of Sleep, Rich In Love

 

 

 

With intense human vulnerability and wondrous irony, Newberry’s matter-of-fact,descriptive storytelling renders the poignant moments of life in an earnest tone thatis both sensuous and nostalgic. Where it Goes, altogether luminous and universal,relates us to one another, bringing us closer to a rich understanding of our worldand ourselves.

 

       —Anne Tammel – author of fiction and poetry

Founder, Tammel Productions, leads Poets and Dreamers series of creative writing workshops

 

 

The work in Martina Newberry’s poetry collection Where It Goes is breathtaking in its variety and originality and in how well it reminds us that our memories can be as wonderful and dangerous as the reality staring us right in the face. Newberry presents poetry rich with reflections from past events in her life, and then blurs the lines of the reality of those memories. [Her poems] introduce us to a writer able to live in the world, but then make visits to the fringes, in order to review everything properly. What those vacations to the world’s end of her specific world give us is dazzling again and again.

—Gabriel Ricard, writer, actor, producer, editor, staff writer for Drunk Monkeys Magazine