Samples from books my sister edited.

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5660434 10/31 Diane Kistner gave 5 stars to: The Porous Desert by David Chorlton
bookshelves: edited-designed
status: Read in August, 2008

As editor, I cannot ethically review this book, but I can share with you a few of the poems that have stuck with me.


WRITING IN THE DESERT

Once you have entered the desert
a lock behind you clicks. A new vocabulary
floods your tongue and leaves you struggling
to pronounce the words. After the first year
you learn that silence is the official language
here. The longer you stay
the shorter the book you came to write becomes
until the manuscript fits on the wings
of a moth. Each dusk, a lifetime's work
draws closer to the flame.


LIVING WITH DROUGHT

We know we are living with drought
when rain becomes so precious
we wear the drops on a chain
around our necks.

Touching the ground each morning
to feel for dew
reveals our insecurity.
We beg the passing clouds
to stop, invoke gods

known to be extinct
for a miracle, and polish
our faucets for luck.
Wildflower season finds us

counting roadside blooms
for reassurance. Vacationing
in ghost towns
we make friends with fate,
but too late. The owls

are already staring at us
accusingly, the lizards
have us in their sights,
and bats pour into the sky

without waiting for dark.
We try sleep
as a final refuge,

only to wake
after an hour, reaching
for the glass at our bedside
and seeing by the light
of the scorpion inside it.

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6671562 10/31 Diane Kistner gave 5 stars to: No Loneliness by Temple Cone
bookshelves: edited-designed
status: Read in July, 2009

As editor, I cannot ethically review this book, but I can share with you a few of the poems that have stuck with me.


HOSANNA

Nothing to hosanna, you will be buried
cold. Only the living go on living.

Worship the wind-hover while it's a-wing,
let scything talons fret the meadow grass.

If you bear likeness to the rough face
staring up from a lake, swallow grief, plunge

your hands through, grasp hematite
lining soft silt which like a father's eyes

beckons. Dredge. Repeat. A man thinking on
his dead friend will cast his dry flies

only in shallow pools. A boy, thinking the same,
casts his deep. The wind-soughed woods

and blue-hazed mountains are a bruised prism—
symbols of harm, symbols of healing.

Do not, for a blessing, cross barbed wire
into pastures where ponies graze.

No sugar can sweeten their wildness now.
The question of loneliness comes to this:

whether you go on watching swan-shapes bow
under dry pines to the encroaching dark

or start back down the untrafficked road.


WITNESS

I have seen an arrow pass through the heart
of a deer, and the deer, with a flinch,
continue nosing the moss
that blackened the roots of an oak.
But the deer knelt down, at last,
in damp leaves, cocked his head to hear,
then sagged, paling the earth
with his white throat, his loosening skin.

And I have seen a carpenter,
with his palm pierced in a jig-saw, put down
the half-carved block—the wood
sallow as flesh stripped bare—
and so as not to snap the blade, pull it
clean through the webbing of his hand,
his eyes raised the way the murdered look
to the sky, as vague as St. Sebastian's stare.

The dark pines in winter I have seen,
with branches full of snow, conceal
the kerosene drunks
gone to sleep in the shells
of abandoned cars, and I have seen
those men stumble in the woods at night:
their hearts answer one another
like ripples after a stone

with blood that wells from everlasting wounds.


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6715384 10/31 Diane Kistner gave 5 stars to: Beyond the Bones by Neil Carpathios
bookshelves: edited-designed
status: Read in August, 2009

As editor, I cannot ethically review this book, but I can share with you a few of the poems that have stuck with me.


INSTEAD OF WRITING A POEM ABOUT WRITING A POEM,
I STEP OUTSIDE AND SMELL THE AIR

Rain-choked worms like severed veins
twist on the sidewalk.
I picture their tiny rooms
underground flooded, their miniature
stoves, books, pots and pans
bobbing up and down,
their furniture like rafts floating.
I wonder when the rain stops
if they find their way back
to assess damages.
Do they weep at the loss?
Do they scavenge to find their sopping
items? Do they build a new home,
starting over from scratch?
Do they talk about the tragedy,
have film footage and interviews
like hurricane victims on TV?
Do they blame it on some god
who maybe was bored and ornery,
who needed a little excitement?
I watch them carefully to see if they wiggle
frantically to find their washed-out husbands,
wives, sons and daughters. As a boy
I'd run outside, scoop them up,
house them in a jar. I'd give them
plenty of dirt and grass to keep them safe
until I took them fishing where I'd pierce them
in the head or heart with a barbed hook and see them
bleed and ooze and writhe. Then I let them slowly die
underwater, pray some even bigger creature
would finish them off. I sniff and smell
their nakedness. Smell concrete, damp soil,
drops exploding all around me. I go back inside
and start to scribble words, label things,
wonder if my ears could hear
would their screams be translatable.


TEN TO ONE

A worm has ten hearts,
which means they are romantic,
or at least able to love

a lot. You see one
in a robin's beak or on
a sidewalk or in the crater

left by a rock.
You don't think
of them as lovers,

as something that longs
for another of its kind.
Maybe underground

where we never see them
they live secret lives,
tunneling and tunneling

in search of each other
with burning passion.
They can afford

to be struck by Cupid's
arrow without second-guessing
or doubt. Unlike us,

who have just one
that we try not to break
over and over.

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9207154 10/31 Diane Kistner gave 5 stars to: Stealing Hymnals from the Choir by Timothy Martin
bookshelves: edited-designed
status: Read in August, 2010

As editor and designer, I cannot ethically review this book, but I can share with you a few of the poems that have stuck with me.


SHIPWRECK SURVIVORS MARCH ALONG THE COASTLINE

Three days, twelve days, a lifetime.
To starboard, the sea that didn't bury us.
To port, a land that won't let us pierce it.
Sand beats our shoes with microscopic hammers
until the leather flies in strips. The sun
doesn't search hard enough for clouds to hide it.
We take turns carrying the child on our backs.

For food, cousins of plums that hang on bushes
like the crooked scarecrows of beetles.
Cook samples one and expires on the spot.
Meanwhile, crimson figs stand in trees
whose trunks grow an assortment of cutlery.
The birds that seem to have no song
eat these and stare.

For water, inland springs...only half a day's march.
One of us throws his face down into them,
does not rise. Perhaps he is trying to catch
a gudgeon with his teeth. Perhaps he will;
we leave him to his luck.

At night, we make fires to keep back
the animals that snarl or laugh from the brush,
or both. We throw on buttons, fallen teeth,
the ship's log, sextant, stewpot.
To atone for the lack of wood, the carpenter
throws himself on.

Day sixteen: a sail on the horizon.
We hoist the child to our shoulders, who
tries to do a dance. The sail immediately
8 Stealing Hymnals from the Choir
slips away, as if it's seen better.
That afternoon, mollusks are exposed
by the tide. When we lunge, they
burrow into the sand like the tongues
of repentant gossips. We strike at the beach,
whose enormous face cannot feel it.

We march. No crossroads, no reckoning, no end.
The child is dead, but we have forgotten
how not to carry him. The captain
walks into the water until he can float his hat.
The second mate dashes himself on the rocks.
Soon it's just the bosun and I. He climbs
invisible rigging to the sky,
reaches a hand for me to follow him.


STEALING HYMNALS FROM THE CHOIR

These are the famished in spirit.
They steal tomatoes from where the armless man
made his garden, sharpen their knives
on the gravestones of martyrs.

Be slow to invite them to your table.
They will scrape salt into their pockets,
hide the soup tureens in their laps,
use tweezers to serve your grandfather his salad.

They steal hymnals from the choir,
blood from blood banks. Last week at midnight,
one dug a sapling from the schoolyard,
where now the children vanish as they run.

These are the famished in spirit.
They sweep the world of its joy, using your broom
and mine. You will not know them by their fruits,
for they will have eaten them out of rancor and fear.

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15768072 10/31 Diane Kistner gave 5 stars to: Dead Wendy by Richard Carr
bookshelves: edited-designed
status: Read in July, 2012

As editor and designer, I cannot ethically review this book, but I can share with you a few of the poems to give you a tiny taste of the whole. Dead Wendy is written in three parts of 20 poems each. Written in the form of Berryman's Dream Songs, the book is elegiac and allegorical. Each part represents the perspective of one member of a love triangle; through their intertwining voices, the larger story is told.


From Part One: The Boy's Version

III

The lilacs bloomed that May in continuous rain.
Limping under his black umbrella, the old man
pried at us with his eyes.
Time and age pried at us—but could not divide us
as we strolled by the mere in the park,
our magnificent smiles turned inward.

You had a plan, inexplicable Wendy.
At the last moment you would fill up life with riches,
mahogany and gold, yes, but also wild shrubs and unstoppable rain,
and in blossoming fulfillment of the dream
we traveled to England, your strange ancestral homeland,
to face death—or cure it—with civility and tea.

The estate was grand. But the palace was odious.
The drugs were killers, the clinic a front
for a hospice infested with foregone conclusions.
We woke behind heavy curtains,
and as we drew them open, time rolled forward like thunder,
and we knew you had to die.


From Part Two: Dead Wendy Responds

I

I thought the underworld was a silent one
until your shouting shook the trees
and the black raindrops rolled off the black leaves,
splashed on the lawn of long night,
and seeping down through the dark soil
trickled across my flesh like acid.

So much trembling and commotion
I have not seen since life. There I was oak,
but you were fire and saw through to the molecules of me.
Even now I am afraid of your voice,
you sleepless monster, you storm whirling at my bedside.
The sickbed, the grave-bed—the terror never ends.

Yet there were safe moments, quiet minutes
folded cat-snug against your chest. That embrace,
recalled through all the minutes of the years intervening,
has remained to me, in my little bunk, a comfort.
Then you—storm-fire, lily fool—you kissed the dead.
And my lips opened for you.


From Part Three: The Old Man Steps Forward

IV

Wendy was never old
but always a terrible blue flower unfolding.
Patient as a fed cat, quiet as a book,
she waited for my visit. Always late,
I came to her sickbed and found her floating above it,
just a sliver of moon, crying sweetly to herself.

I looked away. And at that moment the boy returned.
The invader marched across the lawn,
trampled the twig and bark shrine of my grief,
broke the locks on the house,
blustered into Wendy's bedroom, and took her
for his own—lifting her, kissing her tears.

That hurt. I felt old. I looked in the mirror,
and the shaved head of death looked back, rotting
slightly. It sang a mad song! I backed away.
I would start over, in the forest, and grow again—
a seed in the mulch, a sapling, an oak of many limbs
—and build a ship to sail beneath the moon.