Blog Posts - West Trestle Review

Maria James-Thiaw :: Jules Jacob

9/7/2020

They can’t feel the heart of our people
beating on 116th or
understand the holy words
of El Shabbazz

that live in the God-coiled ropes
that crown my head,
and they don’t know my soul

From “Beyond the Brownstones”
by Maria James-Thiaw

I met Maria in 2015 while we were attending the Virginia Center for the Creative Art’s Poetry Workshop in France. Maria had begun interviewing older women for her remarkable American Griot Project, a historical account of first-hand experiences during the era of Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement. Since 2015, Maria has taken the interviews and stories “…of learning about race and privilege and experiencing second class citizenship and love across color lines…” and translated them into a choreopoem brought to the stage in the theatrical production, Reclaiming My Time: An American Griot Project.

Maria James-Thiaw is an award-winning poet, performer, playwright, and educator. She’s the author of “Talking White” and her poetry and reviews appear in journals such as New Letters, Cutthroat, and Black Magnolias.
~Jules Jacob

Maria James-Thiaw

Ellery Akers :: Julia B. Levine

7/18/2020

Book cover: painting of path through the woods with mountain in the background

I call shinbones of water skinnying down into sluice boxes.
Brackish water, sulfur-smelling water, sludge.
Rain in rain barrels,
clear water spilling over dams
and clear water that has never been dammed.

I confront the brink
even though I’m part of the brink.

from "We Have the Power to Pull Back from the Brink"

Ellery Akers is the author of three poetry books, most recently, Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance. She’s won thirteen national writing awards, including an IPPY Award and the Poetry International Prize. Her poetry has been featured on National Public Radio and in Poetry and The New York Times Magazine.

I was introduced to Ellery over email by our mutual friend, the poet Ruth Schwartz. At our first meeting, Ellery and I took a walk around a small pond. I quickly realized that Ellery was an extraordinary ecologist, who knew so much about the flora and fauna of West Marin, as well as a woman brimming with love for good poetry. Not only would she recite lines from Hopkins or Dickinson by heart to me as we walked and talked, but she and I would engage in delightful conversations about newer work from modern poets that we’d just read.

We have been friends for several years now, and workshop together regularly in a wonderful group that Ellery invited me to join. But I love Ellery for more than all of this. Ellery is also one of the most dedicated environmentalists I know, and through her incredible new book, Swerve, has inspired me to feel less hopeless and more willing to take action to save our planet. I feel such admiration, respect, and deep gratitude to Ellery; consider reading her work, as you will too!
~Julia B. Levine, July 2020

Arriel Vinson :: S. Erin Batiste

7/1/2020

Woman sits cross-legged on a couch

Arriel Vinson

Arriel Vinson is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who describes her writing as: "about being young, black, and in search of freedom." Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2019, and a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in Kweli Journal, Catapult, BOOTH, Cosmonauts Avenue, Waxwing, and Electric Literature–just to name a few.

I had the good fortune and delight to read alongside her at feminist community bookstore and cafe, Cafe Con Libros' Renegade Reading Series in Brooklyn, New York, last year. I was immediately swept away by her powerful delivery and language. Her recent poem, "Minnesota," which is after Morgan Parker with a line from a Najma Sharif tweet, operates as a kind of time capsule of how I've been left feeling as a Black woman in America these past few weeks.

Opening lines:

The world is burning again. I haven’t stomached a full meal in days. Justice is an
imaginary word. The police kneel on necks and white people say “but.” I am required to
work when Black people are dying. I send emails as Black people set shit on fire. I can’t
grieve something that never stops.

The speaker here is honest, she is fearless, and she does not shy away from her own emotions or overwhelm or even indulgence, which may come off as surprising to some. Vinson's tone and masterful craft manages to do what countless news stories, emails, phone conversations, and group chats have failed–to take an unforgettable snapshot of one woman from a generation at the precipice of a world ending, and another possible, more hopeful one emerging from its ashes. "Hear we shall overcome. Hear burn, baby, burn."

S. Erin Batiste, Fairlies feature, July, 2020

Taylor Graham :: Irene Lipshin

7/11/2016

Angle brackets. Binomials of exotic
species. Boldface colons: how he spends
his days, and then files it all away.

from "Lexicographer's Daughter"

Taylor Graham, Poet Laureate of El Dorado County, is multilingual —her first language, poetry. I met Taylor in 2003, when we were both part of a small group of poets who started Red Fox Underground, a Poetry Workshop, in the Sierra Nevada Foothills, that has been meeting ever since. Prolific and highly published, she inspires me to write about life. She’s a storyteller, choosing topics closest to her heart, family history, her dogs and search and rescue experiences, and the training that she continues to lead. Her poems are layered with meaning, often surprising the reader with a universal truth or recognition of the freedom or constraints in life, our interaction with nature and animals, human and wild.

-- Irene Lipshin, poet of the week

Sarah Lagomarsino :: Connie Gutowsky

6/26/2016

The way my father participated in our birth,
his getting to know us, was by touch.
Each of his newborns were bathed
With olive oil, solely by him . . . .

   From "Italian Homecoming" by Sarah Lagomarsino

Sarah's poems have appeared in Late Peaches, The Rendezvous, a publication of Air Force Nurses, Yoga Stanza, The Sacramento Walking Sticks Newsletter, and Tule Review.  Three of Sarah's poems were selected and performed in The River City Anthology, a production by The Sacramento Actors Workshop and the Sacramento Poetry Society.

   -- Connie Gutowsky

Idris Anderson :: Beverly Burch

5/22/2016

Donatello got it wrong, stooped her penitent,
whipped to shame, shunned. Worm-eaten wood.
In rags. A sore on her lip.
I wrote my love
a postcard with a photo of the Magdalene.
I was in love with the heart of the wood, the woman within.
I saw but did not say the truth of it. Here it is.

--from "A Correction"

I love how Idris’s work combines high culture and a low country — i.e., coastal South Carolina — sensibility. She writes from a wide-ranging mind and keen intuition, poems that are personal, political, ekphrastic and earthy. In the writing group we share she always has an attuned ear for other poets’ work as well.

-- Beverly Burch, poet of the week

Charlotte Muse :: Priscilla Lee

5/16/2016

... She is singing a time
when music was the music of the tongue,
of gourd rattle, whistle, and drum,
of birdsong, water, and the world.

from "Ascencion Dying" by Charlotte Muse

I was introduced to the poet, Charlotte Muse, in the early 2000s, and I have had the privilege of having her as a mentor for almost two decades now. Her book A Story Also Grows is one of my favorite books of poetry. No one knows better how to delve deeply into the soul to call up stories of great beauty and wisdom and to unfold them into the cosmos than Charlotte. They are extraordinary evocations of the miraculous.

-- Priscilla Lee, poet of the week

Via InMenlo

Priscilla Lee :: Cathryn Shea

4/10/2016

Maybe they are the spawn
of the serpent who prowled and tempted Eve,
cast into the saltwater.

from "Beneath the Surface" by Priscilla Lee

I first met Priscilla Lee when I started working at Oracle and we were both technical writers in database engineering. Her book Wishbone is one of my favorites.
One of the things I love about Priscilla's poetry is how rooted in California it is. I love her dark sense of humor.

-- Cathryn Shea

3.29.16: Melen Lunn :: Wendy Williams

3/29/2016

A goddess
floats in mandala dream
hair of sunflowers
doves resting in her hands . . . .

--from The Art

Melen Lunn is a Sacramento poet who writes short, power-packed poems rich with imagery and emotion. She was a member of The Writer's Circle group of women poets at the Sacramento Poetry Center.

-- Wendy Williams, poet of the week

Cheryl Dumesnil :: Gail Entrekin

2/22/2016

Cheryl’s work is immediate, full of the small details of life that make it rich, and artfully-crafted while giving the impression of off-the-cuff spontaneity. I published a section of her first manuscript in an anthology called Yuba Flows that we were putting out at Hip Pocket Press in 2007, and in 2009 the manuscript as a whole, In Praise of Falling, won the Agnes Starrett Lynch poetry prize and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series. I was delighted for her, and so pleased that others saw in her poems the same shiny spirit that I enjoy so much.

We became Christmas-card-and-email friends, showing up at each other’s readings when our books came out, and we have followed each other’s lives and careers ever since. Her luminous poems continue to please and surprise me (and so many others). They are warm and funny and alive with intelligence, and I feel she represents some of the very best of her generations’ work.

-- Gail Entrekin, poet of the week