Sealey Challenge Poetry Book Review #1

Today I’m going to review three books I’ve read this month. The original Sealey Challenge is to read one book per day during the month of August. That’s a pretty steep hill to climb, even for someone like me who doesn’t have a day job. I boldly chose a dozen books, and I’ve gotten through half of them in three weeks, although I’ve only sat in front of the computer and written reviews for half of those. There will be another batch of reviews coming soon.

Without further ado, here are three of the books I’ve read this month. If you find one you like, please click the link and grab a copy to support a poet and a small press. My hope is to expand the interest and consumption of books of poetry beyond the existing readership.

Green - Melissa Fite Johnson

Publisher: Riot in Your Throat

Green, by Melissa Fite Johnson - Riot in Your Throat Press

(on sale now)

The color green spreads an arcing, leafy canopy over this book of poems, each one becoming like the leaves on a tree, dancing in sunlight to create a cohesive whole. Green can be the naivete of a young girl learning the social norms of friendship and dating, or the color of envy as she watches others achieve their dreams, or even green at the gills from a nauseous thought of regret. Throughout the book, the poet peels away the green layers of the onion, each translucent skin a loss – loss of her father’s health, loss of her innocence in dating, loss of friends, loss of her father’s life. Each loss compounds upon the others, brings us to acceptance and resolution, understanding that Nature’s first green is gold, but nothing green can stay any longer than the gold.

From the poem “Visitation”

If I squint hard against the sun,
I can materialize a crooked door
cut into the sky. For an hour
or two, I depart this place
and enter the blue-tinged light
of an old television. Beside
my father on his couch
for Wheel of Fortune, we try
to guess the phrases first.
During commercials, I show him
photos of my husband, laugh
when he scrunches his face
in mock disapproval.
I touch his Adam’s apple –
new, plugging the hole cancer made –
and hear his gravelly voice
for the first time. Eventually,
I smooth my skirt, kiss his cheek,
slide open the screen door,
barefoot in the green.

Author Bio:

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book. She is also the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018).

Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Southern Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight Journal for high school students, and the co-founder of a new pop culture-centered journal, Forget Cool. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS.

Connect with her on Instagram or Bluesky, or email her at melissafitejohnson@gmail.com. (If you have a question about Forget Cool for her or co-founder Allison Renner, please email the magazine at forgetcoolsubmissions@gmail.com.)

O Lucky Day - Patricia Clark

Publisher: Madville Publishing

O Lucky Day a book by Patricia Clark - Bookshop.org US

O Lucky Reader

The poet serves up a sumptuous feast for the senses in this stunning work of poems that sweep in the scope of global events and global travel viewed through the intimate moments of human life. Through this series of poems, the macro is seen through the lens of the micro, bringing the vastness of nature down to the detail of a single seed pod while expanding the awareness of the abundance of beauty in this world. The world insists on joy even in the midst of loss, and the poet captures the evolving nature of a life lived with one foot steeped in memory while the other steps toward a hopeful future. Told through a series of snapshots such as the pandemic lockdown in Italy or a beloved pair of shoes purchased in Paris while on vacation with a friend, the splendid is distilled into potent moments of memory.

From Her Poem “Forest Bathing”

Each button undone,
	each tooth of a zipper
		gapped to let pants,
jacket fall open,
	each strap and hem
		of a top, blouse, shirt
says O skin, you have
	wanted this so much – to lie
		down, meadow grass
tickling, a see-through green, too early
	for mosquitos (you hope),
		to have nothing
between you and petal, tendril,
	bundle of last year’s
		milkweed packed, filament
upon filament in the pod, poised
	for release to scatter like bird-
		song, each thread carrying
a seed like a word on the wind
	though not a syllable uttered,
		this splash in
what isn’t liquid but spills out
	nevertheless – drift of grass blade,
		petals, blossom, leaf.

Author Bio:

Patricia Clark is the author of six books of poetry: Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars; The Canopy; Sunday Rising; She Walks Into the Sea; My Father on a Bicycle; and North of Wondering. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, Mississippi Review, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Pennsylvania Review, North American Review, Seattle Review, and Iowa Woman. She has also co-edited an anthology of contemporary women writers called Worlds in Our Words. She was Poet in Residence and professor in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University for thirty years.

She has also published three chapbooks of poetry: Deadlifts (2018), Wreath for the Red Admiral (2016) and Given the Trees (2009).

The Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2005-2007, Patricia Clark was invited with two other poets to open the Library of Congress’s noon reading series in Washington, D.C. in fall 2005.

Her website is: http://patriciafclark.com

Repeat As Needed - Dustin Brookshire

Publisher: Small Harbor Publishing

Repeat As Needed by Dustin Brookshire — Small Harbor Publishing

Loud and Proud and Thriving

In this lean and mean collection of fourteen poems of all muscle and no fat, the poet draws inspiration from the work of several well-known poets, crafting each poem in this collection as “after” or “inspired by” the original. This collection wrestles with such topics as growing up gay and Southern Baptist while infusing a throughline of joy, laughter, and defiance as the poet grows into his truest self. Sometimes chatty, sometimes catty, slinging a little shade from the sharpest blade, this is the perfect little book to enlighten and entertain.

From the poem “When I Was Straight”

(After Maureen Seaton’s “When I Was Straight”)

I stayed home
while my mother
drove to the grocery store.
Two hours alone to prance
in my mother’s high heels,
wear her dresses and nightgowns,
and a white t-shirt as a wig.
I’d probe her jewelry box,
slip on a ring or two,
a necklace, and the bracelet
she only wore for special occasions.
Sometimes I even applied
her lipstick with a smile.

Author Bio:

Dustin Brookshire (he/him) is the author of the chapbooks Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Love Most Of You Too and Never Picked First For Playtime were finalists in the Poetry Chapbook category of the American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Dustin is recipient of the 2024 Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship at Poetry by the Sea and a runner up in the 2024 Desert Rat Residency Poetry Contest. In 2021, he was a finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Award. Dustin has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize. In 2023, his work was featured in Georgia Poetry in the Parks.

Dustin’s poetry has been published in numerous journals, and he’s been anthologized in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012), The Queer South: LGBTQ Writes on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), Braving the Body (Harbor Anthologies, 2024), and the forthcoming Invisible Strings: 113 Poets respond to the songs of Taylor Swift (Ballantine Books).

More at dustinbrookshire.com.

Thank you for joining me in my latest review of poetry books and let me know below if you like what you read. If you pick up one of these books, please let us know in the comments how you liked it. As always, I encourage you to support independent artists and the small presses who publish our work.

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