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Poems About New Mexico and the World

December 29, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

I went to the library and checked How We Became Human, Selected Poems by Joy Harjo to see what she had to say about New Mexico as place. Harjo is one of my favorite poets period, definitely my on the top of my list in the category/almost-genre of American Indian poets. In her first anthology I was looking for any 1970s references to New Mexico places. Harjo does come back to New Mexico quite a bit in her writing and she seems to view New Mexico as a spiritual, if not physical, home place when she references the Sandia Mountains, Albuquerque streets and the more southern Manzano Mountains.

But Harjo is really one of the most well-traveled and cosmopolitan modern poets we have. She moves through towns all across American and abroad and digs into the concrete of it all, so to speak. This fusion of urban and outpost gives her work uniqueness. Take for example her older poem "3 A.M." about being in an airport and trying to get back to Hopiland. There are also quite a few Indian themes in how she handles alcohol and the ideas of futility and fate. Like many Indian writers she's in a struggle of locating: locating her foundation of history, locating a sense of belonging, even locating asuvivor’s-guilt sense of existing, and locating forgiveness.

Harjo feels unique to me however in the sense of how she writes eye to eye with her reader. Much of American Indian poetic tone contains a spiritual distance inherent. Harjo is much more intimate. She’s not some voice-over spirit speaking from the stars. She’s on the street and across the table from her reader.

I always love to find moments of Harjo talking about the earth’s circling revolutions. This occurs again and again: “a whirring current in the grass,” “swirling earth,” “slow spin like the spiral of events.” The swirling is often coupled with descriptions of women in crisis, turmoil, madness, and lostness.

This is a great collection of poems. All her greatest hits are in here: “She Had Some Horses,” “I Give You Back,” “I Am a Dangerous Woman,” and “Perhaps the Word Begins.”

Poetry Received

As a holiday greeting, the Academy of American Poets sent me a holiday postcard with a Larry Levis quote from the poem “Winter Stars”

The newCopper Canyon Reader catalogue also came. I sensed a shift in poems this time, many more experimental poets although still with a spiritual cast. My favorite new book samples:

Erin Belieu – Slant Six ("humor and horror in contemporary American life—from the last saltine cracked in the sleeve, to the kitty-cat calendar in an office cubicle."); New York Times Review
Yosa Buson – Collection Haiku of Yosa Buson translated by W.S. Merwin and Takako Lento
Fady Joudah – Textu – a new form of 160 character long poems influenced by texting and Twitter

My autumn issue of Poetry London also came a few months ago. When I reflect back on this subscription I want to say I haven't enjoyed it. It's a bit dry and the magazine itself is unwieldy and downright ugly. But I have to admit some of their poets and reviews have stuck with me over the last few years. I still don’t like the layout, material or covers of this magazine, with such big photos you can see the pores on the chins of poets. It’s just distracting. Where's some tabloid airbrushing when you need it?

CK Williams has a great poem in this issue about climate change called “The Sun, The Saint, The Sot,” taking on an impossible topic and making it poetic. CD Wrights is included in the issue too. I always get those two confused. I liked her “Obscurity and Winter Sun” poem which is sort of about writing.

There are always a large amount of experimental, language-y poems in the magazine and whenever I read these pieces I think of the neurosis of the Internet age and how the world is full of too much information. I wonder if these poems are depictions of our minds spiraling out.

The issue provided me with a nice list of "new" poets to look up:

Heather Phillipson
Fiona Benson – Bright Travelers: A central sequence of dramatic monologues addressed to Van Gogh allows for a focused exploration of depression, violence, passion and creativity.
Kathryn Simmonds – The Visitations: I particularly want to read "Life Coach Variations."
Ciaran Berry – The Dead Zoo (available on eBook)
Bill Manhire – Selected Poems
Nancy Gaffield – Continental Drift – a book about landscapes and borders

A Book About the Dark Side of the 1970s

December 11, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

Over on my sister-site Cher Scholar, I've just published a recent interview with the author of a new novel, Sister Golden Hair, about a pre-teen girl named Jesse growing up in the early-to-mid 1970s. I talk to author Darcey Steinke, the daughter of a minister and a beauty queen, about how a celebrity-obsession with Cher works in the narrative and what Cher's "text" means vis-à-vis our struggles with ideals of beauty, role models and holiness. We also talk about the construction of her novel and depicting the trials of a teenager navigating issues of identity.

Interview with Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair

Things to Check Out (or not)

December 3, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

Last spring I listed The Anthology of Really Important Modern Poetry by Kathryn & Ross Petras on my list of books to check out in the celebrity poetry genre. I was hoping this book was an anthology of poems written by celebrities, poems collected which had never appeared in full-length collections.

It was billed as having "Timeless 'Poems' by Snooki, John Boehner, Kanye West and Other Well-Versed Celebrities." However, this book does not include any poetry written by celebrities. Instead, the authors have culled bad, embarrassing quotes from press interviews and twitter feeds and turned them into faux poems with snarky line breaks. The authors skewer not only celebrities, but political figures and they slay democrats and republicans alike.

On the one hand, I did enjoy the ridiculousness of the quotes and the author’s ruthless mockery of them. But on the other hand, I am nagged by the worry that making fun of ridiculous things celebrities say only encourages more celebrities (and all of us really) to make really idiotic comments in order to score some attention. After all, any spotlight is a good spotlight in modern America.

Highlighting the really ignorant comments of celebrities and politicians does not discourage the behavior, it simply lowers the bar.

I've recently come across this new poetry website: http://poetry.newgreyhair.com/ which promises "Punch in the Face Poetry."

I'm way behind on my trial subscription of Poets & Writers but the July/August 2014 issue (find it at your library) is all about finagling a literary agent (for you novelists) and the magazine continues to occasionally deconstruct and analyze good pitch letters.

There's also a good column inside on writing groups for military veterans and one on the life of teaching poetry in prisons. If you're like me you've probably already read quite a few of these testimonials but this one, by Wendy Bron-Baez, was particularly good.

And I want to give kudos to one in the mass of MFA advertisements inside the same issue. Pine Manor College uses images of the published books of its graduates to say all that needs to be said. Very impressive on many levels.

Ridiculous Reviews: T.S. Eliot

December 3, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

The Waste Land, 1922

“Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior.”

New Statesman

“…it is the finest horses which have the most tender mouths and some unsympathetic tug has sent Mr. Eliot’s gift awry. When he recovers control we shall expect his poetry to have gained in variety and strength from this ambitious experiment.”

Times Literary Supplement

from Rotten Reviews compiled by Bill Henderson

A Book About Womanhood; A Book Doing the Work of Zen

November 24, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

Face Painting in the Dark by Ann Cefola, Dos Madres Press, 2014

Full disclosure: Ann Cefola and I graduated from the same MFA class at Sarah Lawrence College. Looking back, I’m usually discouraged to find less and less of us are still working as writers.

W. H. Auden once made a prediction about successful writers: not one who has something burning to say, but one who is in love with with language. I find this to be a true measure of my MFA friends. Those who have continued to write are in love with words and sentences. Also, the successful writer is compelled to keep going, compelled to keep writing whenever they can. They don’t make excuses about having no time or inspiration. Their time is sacred to them and they defend it. Ann Cefola has kept going and she has been an inspiration to me. She’s kept working on her poems, on poetry newsletters and blogs. She’s published two chapbooks and now a first collection. Over the 14 years I’ve known her, she’s kept on keepin on and she’s encouraged me to keep on, too.

My reading of her work has evolved over the last 14 years. Her poems are tight and her juxtapositions are advanced. Reading her now I see the art of containment and the order of her constructed phrases. Her poems sometimes feel like incantations in their brevities. The juxtapositions between poems are particularly good in the new collection so that even the older chapbook poems feel new.

I am beginning to see her phrases like very particular paint strokes, cerebral leaps. I have always loved that her poems express a kind of thinking in process.

There are many new, explosive poems in this book…the poem about Picasso's “Demoiselles” being one example, a conversation with the subject of the painting, the women. Full with very smart allusions and juxtapositions, Ann and the divas work through history's responses to the painting. I've recently read about two types of feminism: that which deconstructs and that which reconfigures (or revamps) the situation of being a woman. I feel this poem does both, comparing the Demoiselles to WNBA players and ending with the incredible line, “I am just a girl writing.” This poem blew my head off.

I found many exciting transgressive strokes all through the book. There are poems about identity and making ourselves up, poems about New York City, office spaces, a really unique 9/11 poem, a veritable stroke of a "before."

From "Shrapnel"

"A live hand across two world wars
astounded and mourning between lines
your point sharp, your No. 1 pencil so delicate,
so willing to be erased."

From "Express," a poem about taking the train into the city:

"Heavenly bodies, arching above
warm coffee, cinnamon and yeast below.
Stretching doughy muscles and sweet cells,
we like small loaves expand, turn golden, rise."

This time around, I notice Ann's 3-4 word phrases that are very tight and feel like assemblages that build to a mood. Ann also knows and uses the power of punctuation.

From "Forceps"

"Soul braces, Here we go. No cheers:
Cold city street. People rushing to trains,
What will happen to me? – I don’t know, sweet pea?"

Ann also captures the spirit in the suburbs. Fro the poem "Price Club"

“I want transubstantiation, to be taking up in cornflakes.”

She artfully weaves a phrase through the poem "North by Northwest" and "Anthem" is a lovely meditation on the afterlife of an ant. Time after time, Ann puts herself in wildlife poems.

I highly recommend this first collection by Ann Cefola.

Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield, 2001

I found this book at my local library recently and thoroughly enjoyed her poems of noticing and mindfulness, which I realize is not for everyone. If you've ever engaged in any Buddhist practice, you might love these poems, too.

Hirshfield has a particular quietness like watching monks chop wood or chop carrots. They are full of small rituals, meditations on choice. She expresses a kind of spiritual movement and stasis.

In structure and tone, her poems remind me of other lyric poems of the 1990s. At one point her sister asks, “Does a poem enlarge the world, or only your idea of the world?”

My favorite poems here deal with existence and changes. Hirshfield's book contains an ant poem, too: “Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand”

"The ant’s work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.”

From "Red Berries"

"The woman of this morning’s mirror
was a stranger
to the woman of last night’s"

In "The Room" Hirshfield expresses a fear of new love with the act of preparing the house for a new guest to come and then the “shivering hopes” that “follow it in.”

From "Apple"

"One takes a bit, then the other.
They do this until it is gone."

This is the work of a spiritual practice. In "Rebus," she talks about the red clay of grief and asks "How can I enter the question the clay (grief) has asked?”

For me, some of the poems in the middle are vague. There are many contemplations of objects: buttons, pillows, carpet, an onion, a rock, clocks, ink. She is exploring thusness.

Dreams and identity are also recurring themes.

Article Watch: Tenses, Confessionals, Narcissisms, MFA-Alternatives

November 16, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

The November 2014 issue of The Atlantic has a good article called "Passive Resistance" written by Steven Pinker about how "the active voice isn't always the best choice.

American Poetry Review Sept/Oct 2014 has an article by Jason Schneiderman on the friendship between Agha Shahid Ali and James Merrill and talks about Merill's ouija board book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover." This poem is not included in his collected works, by the way. In the same issue there's an essay about the grotesque in poetry by Anna Journey. There's also a special suppplement of poems and commenorations on Stephen Berg, one by David Rivard and one by Edward Hirsch.

And finally the issue has a good overview of the most famous confessional poems and how their writers use pronouns and a retrospective of Pete Seeger.

Poets & Writers Sept/Oct 2014 Issue

This issue has interviews with both Edward Hirsch and Louise Glück. Hirsch says:

"I think to have poetry, you need to have all kinds of different poets. We need poets to write playful, funny poems, poets who write light verse; I don't think we should neglect that. But should that be the defining feature of your poetry? Is that how you want your poetry to be remembered? I guess that's up to people in the culture. But it's also true that we live in a very superficial culture. We live in a culture that's driven by entertainment, by celebrities, so there's plenty in the culture to distract us and lighten us up. People who turn to poetry, I don't think y're looking for something gloomy, but I do think they're looking for something deeper than the superficial exxperiences you get in the culture every day."

Also, three poets discuss keeping a journal. There's a great essay on narcissism and entitlement by Steve Almond and an article on the Savvy Self-Publisher and another one on MFA alternatives that talks about classes in urban areas outside of the college system:

The combination of innovative pedagogy, lower costs, and a focus on the craft of writing can make private writing workshops an attractive alternative to traditional MFA programs.

Just as happened with iTunes, Air B&B and Uber, the high cost and low-return (and greed of executives at the top) of bloated organizations will be driving customers to startup alternatives.

You can check your local library for older issues of these magazines.

Poems for Hard Times; Poems for New Mexicans; Poems for the Dead

November 16, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

I've been sitting on this book, The World of the Ten Thousand Things by Charles Wright, for about 17 years, moving the book from New York to Pennsylvania to California (3x in California alone) to New Mexico (3x there, too). Finally I buckled down to read it and, like many things you put off for so long, you realize you should have read this years ago. But would you have loved the book's ghostly vagueness 17 years ago. Definitely not. So you then realize you've carried this book around so long waiting for the "Wright time" — as it were — to read it.

I'm working on a novel about the ghosts of a dying western town so of course this book's poems about the dead attracted me. Years ago I may have found Wright's poems difficult and distant, too much well-readedness on his sleeve, the type of thing Helen Vendler and Hart Crane would like…and my friend Teresa who loved Hart Crane and Jorie Graham and recommended we go to the poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to see Graham and Wright read. This is where I bought the book long before I was ready for it.

Wright gets at that under-layer of nature poems, the almost gothic, elegiac layer of it…without coming across as completely Southern gothic. The books is also full of poems about artists (Cezanne a favorite), incidents of mysterious beauty. His thoughts flow about seemingly unedited. He experiments with variations: variations of self-portrait experiments, variations of journaling (one poem written over a calendar year). There is a lot of religion here: transfiguration, crosses, sin and plenty of nature's surreality and landscapes that undo us, abstractions of the seasons. In this way the book felt like a giant (and I mean giant) haiku.

The poems fly across the page in indents and with parentheticals. There is plenty of high-culture here too: music, painting, wine. He takes lots of car drives, invokes the act of licking a lot.

True, Wright often gets lumped with the language poets and he admits, "Language can do just so much" but there is plenty of aboutness in his poems, plenty of scene, plenty of voice. There's almost a sense of a man in early 50s midlife crisis here.

I've lost touch with Teresa 15 years ago…but I can still hear her reading excerpts of these poems to me.

From "Composition in Grey and Pink"

The souls of the day's dead fly up like birds, big sister,
The sky shutters and casts loose.
And faster than stars the body goes to the earth.

Head hangs like a mist from the trees.
Butterflies pump through the banked fires of later afternoon.
The rose continues its sure rise to the self.

From "A Journal of True Confessions"

The new line will be like the first line,
spacial and self-contained,
Firm to the touch
But intimate, carved, as though whispered into the ear.

Likewise I loved Adobe Odes by Pat Mora. I found out about Mora from a book on Southwestern literature and art. These odes are done in the spirit of Pablo Neruda (she even includes an ode to him) but they are fabulously about New Mexican subjects. My favorite ones were odes to adobe, guacamole, kitchens, chiles, chocolate, names, the cricket, tea, toes, bees, apples, church bells, and cottonwoods. I also liked some of the idea odes: desire, hope, courage.

Some of the odes wander a bit far from their target (ode to Santa Fe) but Mora knows what it takes to make a good ode, scrumptious and tactile language. I'm going to give this book away as a gift for my friends in New Mexico and my friends who love the state, but live elsewhere.

A few weeks ago I also read Mora's book Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints which is similar but about ode-like explorations of Catholic saints.

Good Poems for Hard Times." I got this book used and it was one of my bathtub poetry books. I need variety when I'm reading in the bathtub.

Having has so many hard times in New Mexico, I was expecting to like this anthology more than I did. I just don't think Garrison Keillor (the editor) and I have the same rubric for either hard times or good poems.

However, there were enough good poems in here for me to justify keeping this book on hand:

"There Comes the Strangest Moment" by Kate Light
The Carnation Milk poem
"Happiness" by Michael Van Walleghen
"The Rules of Evidence" by Lee Robinson
"Minnesota Thanksgiving" by John Berryman
"High Plains Farming" by William Notter
"In Bed with a Book" by Mona Van Duyn

and some poems that I feel would be very moving at a funeral:

"Dawn Revisited" by Rita Dove
"Crossing the Bar" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Everyman's Library of Pocket books puts out these little novelty poetry anthologies that I'm always wanting to buy: ghost poems, Irish poems, jazz poems, comic poems, Christmas poems. There's a ton. The only other one I have is Zen Poems which I did not love. Because I'm working on a novel with a murder in it, an anthology of poems about murder seemed necessary to read. And so I bought Killer Verse, poems of murder and mayhem. Loved it! Sections are divided between family murders, murder ballads, Vers Noir, the inner-workings of murders, psycho killers, victims and meditations on murder. You get both old and new here, from anonymous ballads to Robert Browning to Marie Howe.

For years I've loved the segment of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour where Sonny & Cher sang called "Stagger Lee" (famously done by The Grateful Dead) and in this book I came across the poem from which is was based: "Stackalee."

Galway Kinnel Dies, Poetry Brothel, Sandburg, Dylan Thomas and Lorca

November 3, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

Galway Kinnell has died. His obituaries:

– The Burlington Free Press

– The New York Times

– The Huffington Post

Last summer, for my family reunion in Bandon, Oregon, I took this poem, "On the Oregon Coast," to read during talent show night. I didn't end up reading it as the poem was too long, the crowd was too restless, and the text was slightly political. (Our reunion banned anything political.) I did however give the poem to my mother before the reuinion was over.

The first book of poetry I ever read was Powers of Congress by Alice Fulton but I didn't get that book so it doesn't count. I'm planning to re-read it since I recently enjoyed Palladium so much. In any case, I consider the first book of poetry I ever read to be the first one I ever fully understood. That book was Galway Kinnel's The Book of Nightmares.

In other news…

BBC America has a new movie about the last days of Dylan Thomas.

Archaeologists are now searching for Federico García Lorca lost grave.

Bordello-style poetry readings at the Poetry Brothel

I 've been reading the collected poems of Carl Sandburg (the book has 800 freaking pages!) looking for New Mexico poems for a project I'm doing. I found this poem in his book Slabs of the Sunburnt West, "Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry." It's a list of metaphors for what poetry is. I like some of them like “Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language" and "Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes."

Others are redundant and some make me scratch my head like "Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes" and "Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts."

I went to see a lecture last month give by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum called "Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line." The talk dealt with his connection to the Alfred Stiglitz circle, how he learned through the making and drawing of maps, about his friendships with Duchamp, Diego Rivera and Andre Breton. The talk defended caricature as abstraction.

Covarrubias did a series for Vanity Fair Magazine called Impossible Interviews. Here's one with Freud and Jean Harlow and another with Sally Rand and Martha Graham.

I just found new versions of Impossible Interviews by David Kamp with ones like Russel Brand and Vladamir Putin and Kim Jong-Un with Anthony Bourdain.

Interesting idea for a series of poems.

Movies with Poetry: The Life & Times of Allen Ginsberg

November 3, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

Last year I went through the Geencine library and marked for my que about 20 art and poetry documentaries. The Life & Times of Allen Ginsberg (1993) is pretty basic. No fancy editing or music. It's no Searching for Sugarman. But enjoyed it nonetheless and learned much about Allen Ginsberg, mostly from interview footage of Ginsberg made specifically for the documentary.

Luckily, I saw Allen Ginsberg read twice in New York City before he died in 1997. Both times he performed "Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don't Smoke)" which was a very funny poem as I recall it. But I have to tell you, I wouldn’t have gone to see Ginsberg read if my friend Julie hadn’t arranged it. Julie went to as many concerts, readings and events in New York City as she could and she often counteracted my shut-in-tendencies.

I don't know why I've never been much of a Ginsberg fan. Watching this video I surmised my hurdle must have been his buck teeth and fat lips, a pretty shallow reason indeed. I also think I assumed, as the king of all hippies, he was going to be untouchable and maybe somewhat spaced-out. The movie showed me he was neither out-of-it or full of himself.

The film chronicles his life with his own photos and in his own words with important interviews from his brother and step-mother. We also see footage of appearances at rallies and on TV shows like William Buckley's and later Dick Cavett's.

Watching William Buckley's obvious distaste for Ginsberg, it occurred to me we've traded someone like Buckley for Rush Limbaugh. At least Buckley didn't echew intellectualism. We were better off with Buckley.

Ginsberg talks at length about his mother’s mental illness and how it affected him, how this produced his sympathy for "people in trouble." He says he inherited a kind of "poetic paranoia." We also learn about his father, poet and teacher Louis Ginsberg, how close they were and how his father influenced his poetry. We see footage of a poetry reading they did together.

The film also covers interviews with the other Beat writers William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. Jack Keroac and Neal Cassidy are discussed. Ginsberg talks about what they all contributed to the group, how they would meet at Foster’s Cafeteria.

Throughout, Ginsberg seems concerned with the social aspects of being a poet and writer. We can see how this would evolve into social protest. In this film, he's called a cosmic social worker or cosmic public defender.

I kept noticing how Ginsberg would talk and rub his chin and beard with his fingers. I couldn't remember who this reminded me of. Then it came to me: actor Jeff Goldblum does this!

We hear clips of Ginsberg reading "Howl" then and now and there's a long segment and reading of "Kaddish."

There are also interview clips with Abbie Hoffman, Joan Baez (who called Ginsberg colorful but serious), Ken Kessey and Tim Leary. We learn when Ginsberg met Dylan and how he ended up in the movie Don’t Look Back.

The disastrous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago is addressed and Ginsberg describes how it turned to violence. He calls the event a liberal failure and says the blood resulting from the remaining years of the Vietnam War are on the hands of the right and the left (due to how this event resulted in the election of Richard Nixon).

We see Ginsberg doing Buddhist chanting and learn about his involvement with Naropa University and his study with Chögyam Trungpa and how Ginsberg started (with Anne Waldman) the Jack Keroac school of poetry where students study "spontaneous babbling."

Ginsberg also talks about his personal relationship with Peter Orlofsky and the lessons he had to learn about co-dependency. He talks about the death of his parents.

His Stepmother expresses amazement that Ginsberg can write about his life as it happens, as if he’s releasing his feelings "along the way." She says his father was very proud of him and that he was a good son.

Good Lessons in Publishing

October 27, 2014 / Big Bang Poetry

Last week I finished Archaeology by Linda Simone and I was reminded of some lessons in any kind of small or self-publishing.

It's good to note here that this book was produced under the banner of Flutter Press whose website insists they are not a vanity press but that they use Print-On-Demand technology, in their case, they print through Lulu. This puts them in between a small press and a self-publishing co-op. They choose authors to help through the process of POD and give them a logo to print under. In their mind, they see themselves as a small press

But whether you provide POD services or publish yourself, it's imperative that you appear professional…especially if you're using POD. The fact that the press feels the need to defend itself tells you there's a stigma out there about POD. You have to counter that with a perfect product.

There were some tell-tale signs of amateur POD with this book.

Their press logo was on the copyright page but nowhere on the back cover.
Emdash and endash appearances were inconsistent throughout. In the dedication, there's a plain hyphen where an endash should be used. In other quotations, you would find double dashes.
There was no printed spine. You must have a printed spine to look professional. You can spot self-published books a mile away with their lack of a spine. I had to pad my book a bit to get the page count over 100 in order to get a spine. When books are stacked vertically, you need to be able to be read their titles clearly on the spine. It's possible Lulu charges by the page and this might be the issue. CreateSpace doesn't deter you from adding pages.
This book cover is beautiful but blurry, especially the author's name and title, the most important parts, another self-published giveaway. Was it an issue of resizing a graphic? The graphic on the cover is clear.
Contents should start on an even page, not on the backside of the dedication page.
The first poem or chapter should start on an even page.
I found spacing issues between words in about 6 places throughout the book, not big enough spaces to look intentional, although there were what looked like the same number of intentional spacings.
Certain words should have been spelled out like the word inches for ".
I found a capital word in mid-sentences, an initial caps word in only one line of the poem.
The page numbers shouldn't appear copyright page and table-of-contents pages.
The book needs some blank pages for breathing room.
There are punctuation inconsistencies with clauses and inconsistencies in periods in the acknowledgement list.

If your publisher isn’t going to stringently proof your book, you need to pay for someone do it. Your reputation is the only one that counts.

All these rules of publishing should be learned even if you work with this kind of small, POD press such as this. Maybe in this case this author didn’t want to risk the self-publishing stigma, but the result is a book that looks self-published.

There’s a small press in Santa Fe that charges you to publish your work, in the line of about $3,000. Amazingly, they offer no services with that. Their editor told me himself, "Poets hate to be edited." Meanwhile their books are full of typos and grammatical errors. I know a prominent local academic who published with this press and received a bad cover and a book full of layout errors. It's embarrassing and it shouldn’t happen.

CreateSpace is free but if you truly need help navigating publication or you don’t like Amazon, there are other legitimate options. The Fine Print of Self-Publishing by Mark Levine evaluates all POD publishers, including Lulu.

Or read Self-Printed, The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing by Catherine Ryan Howard to learn about publishing yourself. You research to buy a car, research your POD publisher. Lulu tends to be expensive and their price-points are high. Thankfully the price point for this book is $7 for 33 actual pages of poetry which is actually okay.

You need to care about your price point, the quality, and the professional presentation of your book. And if you are running a POD press, make sure you know what you're doing.

Control your own book and you can control many problems. The good news for this book is that all these issues are fixable with POD. To learn more: http://www.bigbangpoetry.com/2012/07/self-publishing-poetry-first-things-first.html

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