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Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi

by Guest Contributor on October 28, 2024

The premise alone of “Quarantine Highway,” (Flowersong Press, Oct. 2022) the latest collection of poetry by Millicent Borges Accardi, is well worth the price of admission ‒ which is only about $16 right now on the Flowersong Press website.

The 68-poem collection, written during the early and mid-months of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, records and examines the shared sense of fear, isolation and uncertainty that many of us nonessential workers, forced to socially distance, would experience for up to a year or more of working from home, home schooling or just sheltering in place.

The book itself emerged from a 30-by-30 writing challenge put to past and present CantoMundistas, AKA fellows of CantoMundo, a national poetry organization since 2009 who, according to its website, “cultivates a community of Latinx poets through workshops, symposia, public readings, and publications.” Accardi’s work here, intentional artifacts, were prompted by readings and themes influenced and initiated by this tightknit literary community who met regularly on Zoom to challenge, collaborate, inspire each other, and to help confront and navigate their forced isolation together with their shared love of poetry and reading, and the healing and safety of their strong connections (personally, professionally, and digitally). What a magnificent experiment and premise for a book of poetry!

One of my favorite poems in the book is “Bread,” which not only sets the stage for the dreaded “new normal” of our world plus social distancing, but it also highlights the vivid imagery, repetition, and surprising wordplay that feature in the best of Accardi’s work throughout the book.

In “Bread,” the speaker opens by telling us what we already “know, knew / know, known…”; that it was all just a big gamble, just a bet we all made “hoping for a last breaking of luck / before the world ran out.” Do you remember making that same bet before braving empty-shelved grocery stores, armed with only “sanitizer and hope,” trying to stock up on anything and everything (even toilet paper) our families might possibly need before “…life was forbidden and / everyone was an enemy”? Because I sure do.

This poem also brings up other important themes explored throughout the book: rampant misinformation from the media, new levels of political upheaval, and the growing divide (both physically and politically) between us and them.

“We were television-glued / as news rolled by and the rooms / misled us into doing the nonsense / we knew we shouldn’t:/ over-drinking, board games, /chanting curses at each other.”

Accardi’s use of first-person plural here, and in many of the subsequent poems in this collection, is a bold choice that clearly demonstrates, to me, the poet’s intention, despite its subject matter, to push past this hate in the time of the ‘rona to a much healthier and more productive place of hope, healing, self-reflection and the reckoning we all so sorely needed.

^{Listen to “Bread” read by the author}

In “Bread,” a familiar cadence or rhythm also recalled for me the opening bit to T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” – and, considering the subject matter, it makes a lot of sense now. Accardi’s word choice and placement of “breaking…” “betting…” “binding…” and “bleeding” echoes the “breeding…” “mixing…” “stirring…” and “feeding…” from Eliot’s seminal Modernist work. And this was just one of many poems in the book that had me Googling other poets and books for hours and hours as I willingly dove down into literary rabbit holes of inspired reading and learning.

I talked to Accardi about “Bread,” and how much I liked it and all the allusions to other poets and their work. I shared with her that, for me, poetry has always been a kind of cosmic conversation between poets over time and space – and that this mystical feeling came over me quite a bit while I was reading her book and all the amazing writers her work references. I asked about her own objectives or goals when it came to writing her poetry.

“I write to try to make sense of the world,” she said, “to piece things
together in my own mind. I write to learn and to research. I write to
keep me sane.”

She told me, whether she was ranting or mumbling, celebrating or complaining, her writing is about vocalizing change and starting a conversation that could, ultimately, effect change.

I should point out that not all the poems in “Quarantine Highway” are specifically about COVID-19, like “Bread.” In fact, most of the poems, as part of the 30-by-30 writing challenge, are direct responses, written under the specter of the global pandemic, to specific poetry prompts: words, phrases or titles of poems, books, and songs.

In the second half of the book, the poet also takes on one of COVID-19’s favorite targets: immigrants and immigration. A proud Portuguese American, Accardi examines her own heritage in much of her writing, and “Quarantine Highway” is no different, especially themes concerning the loss, discovery, claiming, and reclaiming of identity.

In “With Cascading, Iron Straight Hair,” we get all three of the book’s interesting elements in one playful yet poignant poem about a young immigrant teen’s cultural assimilation. “Slathering on lye from an orange jar…” to straighten out her “Portuguese Frizz waves…” in “a divorce of emotions between what /” she sees in the locker and who she sees far away “in the pages of Seventeen magazine…” which the poet calls “a catalogue of friends…” she “could never connect with…”

Composed after a line from “Heirlooms” by Luivette Resto, a Puerto Rican poet and CantoMundo fellow, this piece offers a hopeful “ever-present relief” from what seems a painful personal moment, a “charm of sweet conflict…” as true as true can be.

In “Unlearning America’s Languages” (on a theme by, “Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps” by Sheryl Luna), another seemingly young voice tells us how her own generation “…form-fitted into a dress of forgetting / language culture, food, Fit in Fit in Fit in / disappear into America…” We learn that their “Parents came to California to rise above / blending inside a fairytale Knott’s Berry Farm…” Finally, the poem ends with devastating (yet still hopeful) image that left me shook and shaken like one of our infamous LA tremors:

            “…Tell the counselors you will ride the bus
                and stave off the earthquakes, embracing a future
                that does not resemble any past you heard whispered
                and fought about at night after bedtime, where
                we lie in bed and draw words in the air, spelling
                out where we came from.

This book easily could’ve taken a much darker turn were it not for that bit of hope in this and other insightful poems in the collection. Accardi made sure to remind us throughout the book that, while hope may be free, real change has a very high and very real cost – it’s the pain, struggle, the fight, the fear, the anxiety, the potential and actual loss of identity, of self, of life, of limb, and of who we are and where we might and might not Fit in Fit in Fit in the world. Most importantly, we see that change, while often imperceptibly slow in the real world, can possibly accelerate through self-reflection, creativity, community, compassion, generosity, art, music, and – dammit, yes – the wise words of poetry!

I asked Accardi who influenced her writing and this hopeful view of her art. I was not surprised when her short list was made up of mostly educators and librarians, her parents and her amazing fellow fellows at CantoMundo. But there was one name on the list that really got my attention: Mrs. Virtue, her first-grade teacher.

Mrs. Virtue wasn’t just any teacher; she was that teacher for Accardi, the one who really left her mark. “Her dad was a poet,” Accardi said, “and she read us poems in class which I am sure were not part of the curriculum.” It turns out Mrs. Virtue’s dad wasn’t just any old poet. Her dad was Claude McKay, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

I couldn’t help but recall a poem about Mrs. Virtue in “Quarantine Highway” called “The Truth would be from a Line” (inspired by Gastão Cruz) that I now knew I’d misread, and which I suddenly realized, I’d clearly misinterpreted as well.

Mrs. Virtue wasn’t a poetic personification of virtue or even some positive educator in general; she was an actual and important person from the poet’s real life. The poem discusses “…an old phrase, / like a poem dealing with / trees I memorized, along with everyone / else in Mrs. Virtue’s first grade [class] / at Luther Burbank…” This line, which would “…require / more sense than this crazy crisis / we are going through presently…” was the truth – the whole truth:

            “For truth would have
              to be untouchable,
              like a hand we used to know,
              to hold –
              as if it were our own –
              the left reaching
              for the right, fumbling along thru
              this magnificent universe we kind of
              know, or at least pretended it to be so.”

This was interesting to me because, while I was reading “Quarantine Highway” for this review, my 8-year-old daughter, struck by the colorful cover art by Ralph Almeida, asked me what the book I was reading was about. I told her it was a poetry book written during the pandemic, which captured her attention. The pandemic is easily the biggest historical event of her young life so far. So, we talked about that difficult time for a little while when she suddenly asked me a question I didn’t know how to answer. Is poetry fiction or non-fiction?

I brought this up to Accardi, and she agreed that it might be an impossible question to answer properly, especially to my 8-year-old daughter. She then recalled how surprised she was one day when she went looking for poetry books at the Alamitos Library in Long Beach, her home-away-from-home as a child and discovered that the poetry books were stored in the non-fiction section. “Poetry was deep in the trenches between biographies and chemistry,” she said. “It made no sense to me.”

In the end, neither of us was sure which was which. And while Accardi gave me an answer for me to share with my daughter, I think I should end this review by sharing that answer here as well. Not only because I like her answer, but because I think it accurately represents what “Quarantine Highway,” the latest poetry collection by Millicent Borges Accardi is really about.

“My final answer is both,” she said. “With poetry, we write about
the truth that is sometimes too painful to speak or mention unless
it is couched in fairy tales, made-up characters, and lessons learned
by strangers, so as not to harm the innocent and to make the
truth easier to take.”

Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi is available now from Flowersong Press.

Frank Mundo is a poet from Los Angeles. His latest chapbooks are Touched by an Anglo (Kattywompus Press) and Eleven Sundry Flowers (Antrim House).

Book Review

The Aves by Ryane Nicole Granados

by Guest Contributor on October 24, 2024

The Aves, Ryane Nicole Granados’ debut YA novella is a coming of age story of a Black girl in a South Central neighborhood in Los Angeles in the 70’s. The Aves pays tribute to Black women sisterhood while dropping wisdom in gorgeous language. What I most cherish from Granados’ delicate prose stands out in tight curls decorated with barrettes.

This opening passage sets the reminiscent tone and the pre-teen female voice that carries throughout.

“… I wore my hair in three pigtails. Mercy parted two in the back and left one on the top of my head, which she brushed to either the left or the right side. She snapped plastic barrettes on the end of each braid and coordinated the colors to match my outfit for the day.”

The main character Zora Neale Rebecca Hunter sits at a salon to have her hair straightened with hot iron rods, which brings memories of the coming of age ritual in the life of Black girls. The description of this event laced with the girl’s reactions and emotions take up the first four pages, indicating that having her hair done at a salon for the first time became part of her identity.

Hair plays an important role in this brief and powerful tale of sisterhood. Hair not only marks their entrance into womanhood. Additionally, it serves as an instrument to express the Black woman identity.

“Sauda’s only daughter, Imani, is two years older than me and she once claimed she was a direct descendant from royalty because she had true African blood in her. She said … my hair was too fine and slippery to come from pure Black ancestry. … It was settled we were both African Princesses. We pricked our fingers and mixed royal bloodlines to make our nobility official.”

In The Aves, Black women’ hair comes in all textures to display their femininity.

“If I owned her windstorm of hair, … I would run my hand from scalp to hair’s end and roll each strand around my index finger to get the attention of the cute older boys. . . I would never, no matter what my sisters did, or mother did, or brothers expected, of father demanded, wrap it away from the eyes of the world.”

Although there are some male characters in the story, they do not move the plot. They are the dark shadow on Imani’s life, or a fictionalized memory of Zora’s father, or a young husband, Tomi marrying the girl who grew out of the foster care, or Zora’s brother, James, who only has a few lines of dialogue instigating conflict between mother and sisters, or a homeless man writing a thank you note. The only male character with some significant participation is the neighborhood thief who acts as some sort of Black Santa Claus. He is funny and caricatured.

In contrast, women are the protagonists of the action, the ones that twist the plot, who make things happen. The readers never see the shadow of the man holding Imani captive, but we certainly see Mercy’s action that liberates the 15 year old from her dark life. We see Luisa, the girl fighting the boy in the middle of the neighborhood with all the toxic passion learned from her dysfunctional parents.

The reader can also see a working class, African American neighborhood in South Central LA, not far from the LAX airport, where airplanes are so close their noise interrupt an afternoon game. These are one or two parent households. At least one character has outgrown the foster care system. They have their dysfunctionalities that serve as neighborhood evening entertainment. They celebrate their joy and small accomplishments. Homelessness has already made its appearance in this 70’s setting, but even the most innocent and fragile character does not feel threatened by a poor man living on the streets. The thief plays Santa, but the single mother with high moral standards can’t accept those gifts. Granados has treated this neighborhood with the same love and sense of nostalgia that she treated her best female characters; thus, she reinforces the power of community in creating a strong African American identity.

Although Granados never deviates from showing us The Aves through the eyes of a pre-teen girl, it is through the master use of dialogue that the author drops adult wisdom.

“Regret is a wasted emotion, Zora. Envision a life that when you grow old you will one day want to remember, and then spend the time in between making that life come true.”

With its textured hair and bold female characters, Ryane Nicole Granados laces a sweet and brief story of sisterhood. The Aves touched my heart with a reminiscent tone bringing up the shared memories of rites of passage for Black girls. The young reader will be delighted to find a character that looks like her and feels like her. I am sure Middle Grade readers, especially Black girls, will cherish The Aves as much as their souvenir barrettes.

The Aves by Ryane Nicole Granados is available now through Leapfrog Press

Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual author and an avid reader. Her debut book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017) explores the intersection between immigration and mental health. Her poetry collection, Uprising / Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press, 2021) raises awareness of the humanitarian crisis in her homeland. Her book reviews have been published in the New York Journal of Books, in Citron Review and The Compulsive Reader, LibroMobile, and Cultural Daily to name a few. She lives in Los Angeles, where she works and hikes.

Sonic Sound Fest at Teragram Ballroom

by Guest Contributor on October 4, 2024

On September 6th 2024 Sonic Sound Entertainment took over the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles for their first ever half day festival. The group brought out some of the best bands they work with (as well as some special guests) spanning the genres of emo, shoegaze, dreampop, and other adjacent genres to put on a night that was one for the books. Check out this photo reel and linked songs below to get a taste of some of the hottest up and coming bands in LA right now.

^{The Divines – Photo by Michael Arroyo}

^{Home View – Photo by Israel Hernandez}

^{Israel’s Arcade – Photo by Michael Arroyo}

israel hernandez is a photographer and student at CSULB. Besides music he is interested in art, books, cool jackets and the color red. he is local to Montebello but is often in long beach as well.

Michael Arroyo is a concert photographer, who recently began using a camera last year after enduring hardships. Seeking an outlet, finding that photography was that for him. Finding his way doing live photography for concerts due to the authentic nature of concerts.

Live Photos Music Music Review

Julie – My Anti-Aircraft Friend Release Show

by Guest Contributor on September 30, 2024

A plain white house in East Hollywood would normally not draw the attention of a passerby, but with a narrow and crowded driveway full of haphazardly parked cars and a long line of chattering young adults, it is now bound to pique curiosity. Lively conversations and cigarette smoke wafted into the air as the setting sun cast a subtle golden hour glow. The distorted cacophony of sound checks blared from within the house as fans waited right outside the door. They were here to have a chance to witness Blimp – a frenetic and at times explosive four-piece act – open for the loud and sonically unbound trio out of Orange County, Julie who would be celebrating the release of their debut album my anti-aircraft friend.

As nighttime arrived by 7:30, people were now given entry into the unassuming house. Inside was a light wooden floor, posters of Linkin Park and The Fader hanging on cream colored walls, and an array of bright lights illuminating the space where the bands would perform. A drum kit with a kick drum that seems to have been scrawled with dark colored crayons was set up in front of a rack of electric guitars while tall and dark Sunn cabinet speakers stood menacingly in both corners. Photographers and videographers made their way to the very front as the house rapidly filled to capacity. Soon enough, Blimp took to the stage and played songs from their album Egg. A gritty energy replete with frantic drumming, furious strumming, a three string Ibanez bass, and harsh screaming coupled with a wonderfully chaotic dynamic set the tone for the audience, which they took very well. Blimp’s assault would have been enough for a final headlining act, but this certainly was not the end of the night’s performances.

Julie quietly set up their instruments as the house cheered upon their arrival. After a quick microphone check, guitarist Keyan Pourzand played one chord and everyone instantly knew what was coming. A dramatic shift in energy could be felt as fans braced themselves for the song that would bellow out of the monstrous Sunn cabinets. Alexandria Elizabeth slowly played the song’s distinctive bassline to create even more tension as the crowd anxiously moved in excitement. The guitar suddenly let out a sustained cry, waiting to be led into what was coming. Dillon Lee then hit the kick and snare drum, and with that, Julie unleashed their first single “flutter.” The crowd jumped and became a joyously writhing mass, freed from the inhibitions of daily life by the sounds of heavy distortion and thick low end. Despite the growing heat and humidity, the band would keep the momentum going as they played new songs from their album without letting up, finishing their set with an encore: an unreleased song titled “twee.” Julie’s performance is a confident step forward into their future as they continue to push their creative boundaries – and the durability of their amplifiers.

Jeremy Ruiz is an independent photographer based in the San Fernando Valley specializing in portraiture and live music photography. He spent three years training as a student photojournalist and photo editor for the Valley Star, the independent student newspaper of Los Angeles Valley College, and has gone on to win multiple awards from the Journalism Association of Community Colleges. In his spare time, he likes to brew coffee and practice bass. IG @itzalku_sfv

Live Photos Music

Sour Sun Fest Patio

by Guest Contributor on August 6, 2024

On July 20th, 2024 it was a Saturday summer day. It was another hot summer night when we hit ninety-degree weather. However, Pound Booking had something in store for us to do this Saturday. They were having a festival at the Echoplex, a music venue in Echo Park Los Angeles, California. Showcasing eleven bands in total and the headliner band was Slow Hollows. They had a two-stage system to make everything run smoothly where the main stage was inside the venue and the side stage was their outside patio. This patio is where I stayed most of my time since I appreciate a more intimate stage where I can be face-to-face with the band as they play their set. I just feel more connected with the band and feed off their energy as they play their set. These are the bands that played on the patio stage.

Dunk Pacino

An L.A.-based punk band fueled by donuts and rage!

Whoremones

Can’t tell from the smiles but this band makes angry music!

Trash Day

This is an indie/punk band from Santa Cruz, CA delivering unadulterated musical garbage in the best way possible!

Love letter

This band carried a lot of emotion in their set. Couldn’t help but scream along with them.

FLOATS

These tract suit-wearing Texas boys love to give a great show! I am always astonished at how they travel so much from Texas to LA just to play one night and then go home the next day! They gave one incredible performance leaving us wanting more.

Book Review

The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger

by Guest Contributor on August 2, 2024

Elusive Love, Loss, and Healing in the Electrifying Story of Psychiatric Treatment

As a writer who suffers from a mental disorder, I was immediately drawn to The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger, by David Rocklin, which tells us about the fictionalized life of a Jewish-German psychiatrist born under electrifying circumstances on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

A fascinating reading, The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger speaks about a man’s obsession with his own near-death experience, which led him to design the early versions of the Electroencephalogram (EEG). The novel also links EEG to the birth of the motion picture industry at the turn of the century.

Few historical novels can keep the weight of the facts as the backdrop of the story. David Rocklin masterfully develops an intriguing plot that takes place between the Great War and the rise of the Nazi Germany, while presenting the history of psychiatric treatment in an imaginative love story without overwhelming the reader with historical facts. Instead, the historic events depicted in the story function as catalyst for plot development.

The novel grabs the reader with suspense from the opening line,

“The first time Fleischl Berger almost died…”

With the word “almost” David Rocklin sets a tone of anticipation and commits the reader to the entire story, which delves into each stage of this man’s life his historical backdrop.

Fleischl Berger is raised by a grief ridden father and mentored by the men in his community: a rabbi, a merchant, and a psychiatrist all of whom influenced the young man’s devotion to service. Gifted with the power of attentive listening and empathy, Fleischl discovers that he can help others recover from their emotional wounds, if not actually heal them. In his mentor’s words,

“…in the end all men of psychiatry do is tend their wounds. We can’t heal anything.”

Eventually young Fleischl Berger falls in love with the merchant’s daughter, but as circumstances will have it, their love is interrupted by Fleischl’s decision to find his father, who is lost at sea. Shortly after, Fleischl nearly dies in an accident during a military exercise.

Fleischl Berger becomes obsessed with the experience in the aftermath of the explosion that almost killed him. Inspired by the creative spirit of his childhood friend and lover, he designs a machine to capture brain activity to explain what happened to him. Thus he creates a scientific instrument that will eventually revolutionize neurological research.

He carries out these extraordinary experiments as movie productions–and his justification to try to observe the human mind more closely.

“To the addled mind,” he said as the audience watched him closely, “illusions are real. They are the world left to them. To us, such people are lost in a world of their own. We try talking to them, but we can’t get through. We try showing them things they ought to know. Their wives, husbands, children, homes, even their own reflections. It’s as if they see something we can’t. Or else they see nothing at all. Our sounds and visions are no longer theirs. How can we reach them?

“I have a way. We give their minds something else. A piece of them that they’ve lost, only at undeniable levels to pry the window of their mind open. I’ve seen it happen – “

“… But this work will help those we think we’ve lost to injury, infirmity, to psychosis. I believe it with all my heart. And I’m here with your kind permission to show you. The louder and brighter the sounds and visions, the wider the window.”

As Fleischl explains his controversial and dramatic experiments with altruistic arguments, he paves the way to unprecedented progress in neuroscience.

Meanwhile, hidden in Berlin’s theatrical scene of the early 1900s, the elusive lover observes Fleischl growing as a scientist and entering the most influential circles of Berlin’s society. As he finds financial support for his experiments, Fleischl gets entangled in social intrigue and power struggles foreign to his personal search, but that will be crucial in his survival.

First the reader must understand that for Fleischl survival means more than beating death. Fleischl’s actions are driven by a sense of loss: the mother who died at his birth, the father who disappeared at sea, the lover who left after he broke her heart,

“I miss home,” he said, because he wasn’t sure what he felt and had nothing else to say that might explain the hole where surely something ought to be.”

The novel carries this nostalgic tone, a longing for what does not exist anymore.

The setting helps create the nostalgic tone. This is particularly true at the beginning where the laconic landscape of a village on the shores of the Baltic Sea sets the tone with which the young Fleischl will grow. The sea appears first on view, dangerous, dark. It is followed by a row of small, rudimentary buildings, functional for a basic life where the merchants do business near the house where he grows. On top of a hill, sits the asylum that will inspire Fleischl’s vocation for healing. However, the setting also serves as a plot catalyst. Later in the story, the rough sea scenes set the tone for dramatic turns and plot twists. And when Fleischl moves to Berlin, the busy urban landscape of the turn of the century accelerates the action as the social scene moves between small theater venues, ball rooms, mansions, and academic lecture halls.

In The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger, David Rocklin gifts us with simple phrases filled with wisdom, like aphorisms,

“You will fail and fail, and with luck one day succeed. Go fail, Fleischl Berger.”

With these phrases, Rocklin offers the reader an opportunity for reflection, enriching the reading experience.

Fleischl Berger’s journey is the story of an extraordinary man, the history of the ECG, and historical fiction of a crucial moment in German history. But ultimately, what held me turning pages is David Rocklin’s ability to weave in the historical facts in fictional narrative using a love story as a thread. In his own words,

“Do you want to know a secret I learned, Ava? All stories are woven with love. Maybe when all the stories come to have their silences broken, when they come to be heard, they come to those who love them. Who listens just for them.”

Perhaps what I love more about The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger is the way this historical novel drew me to learn more about the man, and what is not in the story: the scientific research behind contemporary psychiatric treatment, and the creation of the instrument widely used today in the diagnosis of neurological conditions. By far, The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger is one of the best stories I have read in 2024.

The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger by David Rocklin is available now through Thane & Prose

Live Photos Music

Mexican Slum Rats and En-Vitro at the Glass House 6-22-24

by Guest Contributor on July 3, 2024

^{Mexican Slum Rats – Photo by Oscar Celis}

Oscar Celis is a photographer and founder of First Class Studios based out of SoCal . Growing up in Southern California, he was always part of the music scene his sister use to be a music photographer he often went with her to local shows and concerts of his favorite bands.

Oscar used to think about how great it would have been to have those big shows documented better. That’s what drives him now to capture this era so future fans can appreciate it like he does. He leans towards music photography because, honestly, he’s terrible at making music himself, but he loves being part of the scene.

Album Review Music

Asco by Wazoo

by Guest Contributor on June 24, 2024

Put yourself through a staggered cycle of existential dread with Wazoo’s latest, “ASCO”

The music scene is saturated with countless entities, so much so that regardless of narrowing it down to Los Angeles, discovering a distinct band presents its difficulties through an ocean of musicians. Luckily, In the past two years, Wazoo has slowly emerged within the LA DIY underground scene. The four piece has blatantly displayed their individuality through their chaotic onstage energy and noisy hardcore and shoegaze driven instrumentals. Now, with their first full length album (10 tracks), ASCO, released June 7th this year through Fusion LA, Wazoo has exhibited their potential as an upcoming local band. Packed with noise, melodic bass, and harsh vocals, ASCO takes you through the motions of existential dread as perceived by the band. The soft and ambient composition in the opening track, Bugland 01, may misguide new listeners. That is until the second track, Android, crashes in. Starting off with an ear-ringing guitar riff, then slamming into a heavier sound emphasized by blast-beats, we are swarmed by lyrics, “I feel it, I feel it in my head. I don’t want it in my head.” The scorching vocals that follow those statements can hardly be understood, adding to the chaotic and explosive outro which fades into pedal noise. Likewise, Flesh Eater (track 3) and Garbage (Track 6), include hardcore fingerprints primarily established by the drums and/or vocals. Even so, each track sets forth their distinction from traditional hardcore music through their lead guitarist’s experimental pedal usage, creating unique noise compositions evocative of bands like Sonic Youth. To illustrate, at minute 1:32 in Flesh Eater, following the first chorus, a disorderly electric pedal effect escalates and dissolves into a drum break around minute 1:51. This area of the song places a spotlight on their drummer as they slowly roll the track to build toward a faster time signature for the outro. The distinct raw and jungle-esque sound of the drummer’s snare is also accentuated as the other instruments dial down. Throughout the album, Wazoo illustrates their ability to organically blend disorder and allure. This aspect of the band is what makes them particularly inspiring during live performances as their energy and emotion floods into the crowd. Whether it be in small increments like Garbage’s dissonant introduction prior to eruption, or in ASCO’s third track, Comet Buster. Comet Buster highlights Wazoo’s duality, arranging a song packed with nostalgic feeling, making it a personal favorite throughout the album. The bass line in Comet Buster is quite notable, holding a beautiful melody reminiscent of songs E and TZC from their first release, Eat That! (EP, 2023), unveiling the growth the group is capable of. Encapsulating ASCO into words and even narrowing the piece down to a genre is tough as listeners are taken through a sporadic yet beautiful trip. Full of experimental noise, emotional bass/guitar, haunting vocals and animalistic drumming, the album is an auditory experience in itself that demands to be absorbed.

Kate De La Torre: Born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles, is a 21-year-old community oriented and first-generation Chicana artist. Having focused on visual arts and journalism prior to graduating high school in 2021, De La Torre found herself embarking on an unexpected journey after throwing her first DIY house show on June 18, 2022, under DIY Collective, Rosie’s Pad!. The collective formed with a goal to grow a warm and welcoming community within the local music and art scene for young adults within Los Angeles county. Additionally, she is in the LA based band, Sugarhead. De La Torre also holds bilingual art classes for her elementary school community in Downtown Los Angeles.

katerinosteeth (at) gmail.com

Bella Villa is an up and coming photographer in the LA scene. Her signature photography is personal, scintillating, and infused with surrealism that showcases her experimental style. From vibrant editorials to live music shots, each photo is filled with vibe and intimacy. Look out for her work.

Book Review

Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma by Sonia Gutiérrez

by Guest Contributor on June 11, 2024

Review by Frank Mundo:

When I received “Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma,” the latest poetry collection by bilingual writer and poet Sonia Gutiérrez from El Martillo Press (April 2024), I was surprised by its unusual heft. 180 pages is quite a lot these days for a poetry collection by a single artist. Turns out, however, the high page count is a direct result of the book’s unique presentation – at least, it’s a format I’d never seen before. Not only bilingual, some of the poems are also described as “interlingual” in the book’s introduction by Mexican writer Susana Bautista Cruz. Interlingual is the relationship between two languages, which, in this case, refers to the natural, multicultural (and inevitable?) mashup of English and Spanish by Latinos and Chicano Americans into, essentially, a “new” language known as Spanglish.

Divided into three sections, the book presents 14, 12, and 14 bilingual poems, respectively, each one printed side-by-side, first in English and then in Spanish. A smaller selection of Spanglish versions of the poems, translated in this collection by bilingual poet and musician Francisco J. Bustos, are shared after that. Offering these poems in all three languages this way is interesting to me and, I would argue, an empowering poetic exercise and experience for fluent readers and speakers of any of these languages. In the third section, there’s also a single bilingual short story called, “Teresa and the Birds Inside,” which is Gutiérrez’ take on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” except her version takes place at a DMV in San Diego with a broken A/C and which is possibly haunted by what seems to be a flock of horrible screeching birds. Finally, several illustrations and other bonus features help fill out the book’s 180 pages, including the bilingual versions of the introduction, acknowledgments, and a helpful discussion guide for book clubs and educators.

My favorite piece in the book is “The Giver of Poems,” a beautiful and vivid homage to the prolific Chicano poet and educator Francisco X. Alarcón, who, with insight and compassion, explored in his writing important themes in Latino and gay identity, mythology, the Nahuatl language, Mesoamerican history, and American culture. In “The Giver of Poems,” there’s a sense of peace and clarity, but also a playful tone that seems apropos. The speaker of the poem is experiencing an inspiring and lucid or “woken” dream, where the unnamed Giver of Poems, perhaps Alarcón himself, awakens “on white / sheets of paper” in a sky full of “luminous letters.” Using his hands, he “kneads words / forming clouds / made of poems.” Don’t sleep on the wordplay here with knead and need. This joyful little literary moment pays off later when The Giver takes a break, of all things, “and goes up the stairs / of a giant / uppercase A” until “laughing and smiling,” he “goes down its slide” with his arms “wide open.” I can’t help but smile picturing Alarcón, who Gutiérrez calls her Chicano role model and Literary Saint, on a break from making clouds into poems with his bare hands, only to slide down the slope of an upper-case letter A with his arms in the air.

Listen to Sonia Gutiérrez reading the “Poema Giver” para–Francisco X. Alarcón, the Spanglish version of “The Giver of Poems.”

I asked Gutiérrez about her homage to Alarcón and how he became such a major influence in her work and her life. “His poetry is medicina,” she told me. His work “allows us to look at the Mexican American (the Chicano) experience through a historical context.” Like so many of us do, Gutierrez got her poetry legs in an Intro to Poetry course in school, unearthing poetry gems from that giant Norton poetry anthology. These excavated poets would serve as her “professors and teachers” at that time, helping her recognize what poetry is, what it looks like, and what it could do and be. She told me that’s why she teaches Alarcón’s work sometimes in her own college classrooms, so her students can discover and experience his work, too. She also said she liked how Alarcón told fellow poets often that he didn’t write poems, “he wrote tattoos,” which was the title of his first poetry collection. She admired the way he composed poetry against convention without capitalizing words and using periods, and the meaning he shared behind this creative choice ‒ that the period, he said, would come at the end.

In “Bones Speak,” another nod to Alarcón and his multicolumn poem, Gutiérrez offers a “tattoo” of her own. According to the book’s Notes section, Alarcón says the columns of poems are “like copal smoke signals.” And since “Bones Speak” is also one of the works selected for Spanglish translation by Bustos, we get to experience the full power of this triple-column collaborative composition, with all three versions, side-by-side on one page, one in each column – and wow! It’s a stunning example of poetic expression.

But this collection is more than an homage to Alarcón or to bilingual or even interlingual poetry. Timely stories, histories, narratives, dreams, and testimonies explore subjects in themes of human, environmental, social, and cultural dignity. Before reading the book, I asked Gutiérrez about her writing and what readers might expect. “Ever since I was a child,” she told me, “my way of seeing the world has always been through a lens of social justice.” So, years later, when Gutiérrez discovered poetry and started writing her own poems, it made sense that she would write about the issues that, as a poet, needed to be addressed.

“I’m a poet concerned about humanity,” she said. “I’m a poet concerned

with the environment. A poet that would like for people to have dialogical communication about pressing issues. Anything that needs to be addressed

we should have the ability to discuss.”

In “Testimony of a Tree,” we get just that, a firsthand account of what it’s like to be the trees along Highway 805 in San Diego, who “had wished their lives / on the superhighway / would always be green.” Interestingly, the first three of the four stanzas of this scathing environmental poem are offered in first-person plural: “but nobody asked us / why one day we turned pale, / our bark fell and arms / went bare.” The final stanza, however, switches to first-person singular – a foreman, perhaps? A delegated representative? Maybe the star witness, who knows? Either way, in the final stanza of this testimony, we get our grass absolutely handed to us: “What I do know is we never / dreamed of living next to / burning black asphalt / breathing in the sulfuric waste / of humanity away from the birds / and bees…”

In “Neither Rooster, Nor Bird, Nor Human,” we learn what things are by what they are not – starting and ending with the rooster, the bird, and the human. A very short piece, it’s even shorter on forgiveness – and the last stanza will stay with me for a long time. Looking now in the book, I see that I circled this stanza because I knew I’d need to come back to it later: “A human is not a human; / he is an inhumane animal, / killing the Earth / with his utter will.”

In “An American Landscape,” we visit that “chilly February night / under a star-spangled sky…” where Trayvon Martin “…stayed warm / fastened like a monk…” or what some called a thug, in his hoodie.

“The Indictment of Index Fingers and Thumbs,” is an indictment of our justice system in America. It opens with the poet, standing before “Judge Justice…” who is examining the six index fingers and six thumbs that facilitated the shooting deaths of Charles Smith, John Crawford III, Micheal Brown, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, and India Kager. “Who pulled the trigger?” the Judge asks, and the fingers and thumbs, “Dumbfounded and with white knees…” “…pointed at the firearms…”

In “Bakr Red Petals on a Beach,” Gutiérrez addresses the four children from the Bakr family, ages 9-12, who were killed by a missile from the Israeli naval force on the fishing beach west of Gaza City: “With bull’s-eye precision / on an open shore / Flower Killers came to Gaza…”

“The Colors of Death” personifies Fukushima and grills her about the nuclear accident that poisoned the ocean and displaced at least 164,000 people: “Ask Fukushima / if she drank clean water / this morning.”

Finally, in “Eulogy for Súper Pancho from the Land of Maiz,” one of the longest poems in the collection, the poet responds to Donald Trump’s painful and unfair statements about Mexicans during his presidential announcement speech in 2016. Súper Pancho, our brave hero, with his “corn-tortilla cape” and shovel, “his super weapon,” is paired against Mr. Liberty Mouth, who’s “snarling mouth” spews “torture words.” There’s a nice black-and-white illustration of Súper Pancho whose “tamale arms / and legs don’t hide / from the scorching sun / to sell diamond-faced / watches nor does he build / golden hotel skyscrapers, / reaching for the Green / Dollar God.”

There are so many standout and outstanding poems in this collection that it’s difficult to choose which ones to highlight and which ones to neglect. I had a similar reaction or experience a couple years ago when I read “Dreaming with Mariposas,” Gutiérrez’ debut novel from Flowersong Press. Made up of vignettes (mostly 1-3 pages), we follow the coming-of-age of two sisters, butterflies in a family of dreamers in So-Cal during the late 70s and 80s. For most of the book, I honestly thought I was reading her memoir because the details were so rich and real and accurate.

I asked Gutiérrez if she had a goal or objective when writing poetry. “When my poem is in front of someone and they’re reading it,” she said, “my goal is that they’re moved, that they’re looking at the world through a lens or a perspective they had never contemplated before.”

She also said there was a quote in the letters of Emily Dickinson that really summed up her objective when it comes to writing poetry:

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me,
I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken
off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any
other way?”

In English, Spanish, or even Spanglish, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma is available now from El Martillo Press.

Frank Mundo is a poet from Los Angeles. His latest chapbooks are Touched by an Anglo (Kattywompus Press) and Eleven Sundry Flowers (Antrim House).

Music Poetry

Violet isn’t Blue by Timothy Nolan

by Guest Contributor on June 5, 2024

You told me it was your favorite Billie Holiday song. I was already hooked but silently swooned. Mine’s been You’ve Changed since the waitress I worked with at the Waldorf Astoria told me it was hers. She was a chanteuse who sang it at clubs I’d never heard of. WNEW’s Make-Believe Ballroom broadcast from the lobby by Peacock Alley once a month as she served tea and I bussed lilac teapots and cups to music from the 30s and 40s. She’d always ask them to play it but they were more of a Glenn Miller and Sinatra affair. One day they let her sing it after the show and I understood. Maybe I could feel a You’ve Changed moment coming for me. But then you came along with the Lady in Satin CD, Billie’s bare shoulder and pulled back hair in quarter-view before a smokey plum seamless. You hit track 6 and handed me the headphones. And all I wanted was your April in that December, the day you brought me Violets for Your Furs.

Timothy Nolan (he/him/his) is a writer and visual artist living in Palm Springs, California with his husband and their rescue dog, Scout. He has exhibited extensively for three decades and his work is in the collections of the DeYoung Museum of Art in San Francisco, and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. He’s been a fellow at Yaddo, Ucross, and Djerassi. His poems appear in The Hudson Review, Fourteen Hills, Puerto del Sol, and Roanoke Review, among others.

Music Music Review

Cold Gawd, Day Aches, Drauve, and Salt+ at Midnight Hour

by Guest Contributor on May 31, 2024

The warm, overhead glow of tungsten string lights illuminates the black walls and white tile floor of a small backstage space. Flanked to the left by a wall with large holes and crumbs of plaster, a black wooden platform that is just shy of a foot tall serves as the stage. Colorful guitars and basses stand propped up in front of large amplifier cabinets and a gray Mapex drum set provided by the venue. This nondescript space serves as the secondary stage for a popular record store in the city of San Fernando called the Midnight Hour, and for one Friday night, it turned into one of the best places to experience some of the most exciting new shoegaze bands that the scene has to offer. With a lineup consisting of the bands Drauve, Day Aches, Salt+ and Cold Gawd, the set provided a powerful dynamic of extremely loud, distorted riffs and hazy, atmospheric melodies that the genre is best known for. There was something for every type of shoegaze fan: Drauve interspersing laidback and hopeful sounds with bursts of energy, Day Aches creating dense layers of reverberating sounds with the ferocity of grunge, Salt+ crafting an incredibly noisy and somewhat mysterious atmosphere using the awesome loudness of Sunn amplifiers, and Cold Gawd closing off with intimate, sparkling melodies serving as the backdrop for introspective lyrics that is reminiscent of Cocteau Twins’ best moments. The Midnight Hour typically hosts hardcore and heavy metal acts to partake in its unique DIY ethos, but with the growing presence and success of shoegaze, it may as well consider this excellent show as a contribution to the genre’s growth within the San Fernando Valley and beyond.

Book Review

I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom

by Guest Contributor on May 1, 2024

I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom by Kim Dower

Review by Brian Sonia-Wallace

There are few things more classically Freudian than autobiographical poems about a poet’s relationship with their mother, and this new collection by prolific former West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Kim Dower takes up the challenge deftly: will she become her mother? Is she already her? What continues after death? (Mail, memories, junk). What is broken by death? (Rituals, memories — junk).

The poems in I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom are casual and conversational in tone, laugh-out-loud funny or tearjerking at their best. A mix of new pieces and motherhood poems from Dower’s former collections, they paint a portrait of urban motherhood rarely seen in verse, a Southern California freeway pastoral blended with a 5th Avenue childhood in New York. Writes Dower:

…My mother

didn’t know about soil or earth worms.

City mothers, we know about bus routes, restaurants,

Broadway, the people on the eighth floor.

Mine taught me to accessorize…”

Tellingly, this poem is entitled, “Different Mothers,” and the whole collection is nuanced by a consistent self-awareness of other possibilities, the “might have beens,” from Dower’s reflections on an imagined daughter to her fear of following in her mother’s footsteps in suffering from dementia. Dower’s mother, a socialite in her day, succumbs to memory loss and helplessness, and many of these poems grapple with the slipperiness of memory, both in childhood and old age.

In her poem “Letter to My Son,” Dower imagines herself in her mother’s shoes, and writes instructively to her son: “Tell me everything’s okay / and I will believe you. Tell me there’s a bird on a branch outside my window, even if there is no window, and I will imagine he’s singing to me.” Dower’s poems inhabit a world self-conscious of its own aging and eventual, inevitable collapse, with the thin narrative of what’s passed down in a family holding the discordant pieces together. Through the examination of motherhood from both ends, as a daughter and as a mother, Dower raises questions about the legacy of learned values and behavior, asking the question: what happens when, with time and distance, the memories we inherit decay?

The physical world comes into play as a doorway into memory. The materiality of sweaters, jewelry, chairs, and the dress of the collection’s title act as an artifact of human presence (“we bought this together” or “these were your things”) and agency (“you liked this, you chose this”). Part of what is stripped away, alongside memory, with dementia is the ability to make choices, and in an odd and very American way, the ability of Dower’s mother to make conscious choices as a consumer become a stand-in for her wellness. The poetry of illness and of kitsch are intertwined here, as the mass-produced material world interacts with and enacts ensouled human existence. In “The Salvation Army Won’t Take the Futon,” what happens to our stuff as we make the move into nursing care echoes what happens to us. In the “I Lost My Mother at Bloomingdales,” we see shopping as a bond:

…what if she vanishes into a refurbished brownstone

stairwell her dress on backwards label showing lost forever after

her last outing shopping with me it’s what we did what we loved until

—the poem finishes, achingly, here, with no punctuation, no resolution. Just the terror of losing your mind.

The title of the collection becomes a reassurance, in this context. “I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom” a reminder of who the “I” is, who the “you” is, what day we’re on, and the relationship between the speaker and subject (“Mom”), with the dress serving as an anchor to what was once important in that relationship, even if it has long since stopped mattering. The title poem drips with longing, and the speaker, who we get the sense resented the high society New York life her mother so prized, now mother-less and in Los Angeles, finds herself with “a closet filled / with dresses I need to show you.”

These themes of motherhood, framed in an urban pastoral and humanistic materialism, run through these poems, with their attendant anxiety which might also be interpreted as a longing or nostalgia. This is a collection of imagined nature and of the unreliability of memory, pretzels at baseball games and “boiled secrets.” A strong gender commentary pervades the work as well, a through line from women’s’ roles in the 1950’s balanced with writing and bringing up kids, to a visceral set of poems which inhabit and explore Dower’s C-section and her son’s birth as an older woman. Dower returns to earlier themes and motifs from her work as well, in particular the moon, which even here is fragmented, diminished, hanging on too long.

The theme of anxiety around memory extends to Dower’s son, who, as he grows up, becomes someone alienated from her memories of him. Even if memory doesn’t fail us, she seems to say, the world will come to fail our memories of it. But it works the other way too — in “After the Rain,” she says, “although the dead / are gone, the way we think of them / can change.” These everyday poems, with titles like “Scrambling Eggs” and “While Washing the Dinner Dishes,” are a testament to how that change occurs, unobtrusively, in everyday life, as our brains make sense of loss through the continual process of living.

Southern California is a major player in this collection, situating the poems in geographic and mental space, from a poem entitled “The Things I Do In My Car” to one about earthquakes, “Minor Tremors,” where the shifting, uncertain landscape of California mirrors the mental landscape of a child coping with the loss of a parent. Perhaps my favorite in the collection is the laugh-out-loud funny piece “Bottled Water,” which contains such lines as ‘If I drink smartwater / will I raise my IQ but be less authentic?”

Dower is on form in this collection — both smart and authentic, with enough snark and humor to keep things from getting too, well, dour. Don’t let the serious themes fool you, there’s plenty of irrelevance at play here, too. Dower ends the poem “My Mother Bakes Sugar Cookies” with the lines:

The people in charge of Heaven

sound so thoughtful, I tell her.

Well, they’re angels,

she says,

but not like you’d imagine.

Sure, they wear white,

have wings,

smile sweetly

but they all talk way too much

and their asses

are huge.

Dower is a master of tonal shifts and irony, and uses dialogue to great effect. In the next poem, “Why We Dream,” her mother tells her, “I’m not dead…/ I’m going to the Opera!” It’s the mark of a great poet that, in speaking about the dead, Dower gives us such a vivid sense of life.

I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is available now through Red Hen Press

Brian Sonia-Wallace is the author of The Poetry of Strangers (Harper Collins), winner of the 2020-23 West Hollywood City Poet Laureateship, and a national 2021 Laureate Fellow for the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Poets.org, Rattle, and more. He teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and Get Lit – Words Ignite. More at briansoniawallace.com and @rentpoet.

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