Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
In my Wordgathering review of Raymond Luczak’s Compassion, Michigan: The Ironwood Stories, I noted that Luczak is “one of the most prolific writers and editors of his generation.” This description remains accurate. At the time of this review’s writing, Luczak has many more books in-the-works, and others of his numerous recent and forthcoming publications will be reviewed in our future issues (including in the Summer 2025 issue).
Chlorophyll: Poems about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula again brings readers into Luczak’s sphere of passion, vision, and care, with regard to a region he knows and loves dearly. The ecology, landscape, and concerns that undergird and define Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are emphasized throughout these poems. When Luczak and I discussed the book during an email exchange, shortly before the volume’s publication, he noted how Chlorophyll “celebrates” the region’s natural world.
A resident of Minnesota, Luczak grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He knows well the spirits, copper, apple trees, moths, lake cliffs, lilacs, and pines here. The attention taken and sense of scale present in each of the poems are simultaneously wide-ranging and specific. There are eagles, agates, and lichen among the references to socioeconomic complexity, wood carving, and property titles.
While the majority of the poems in the book’s four distinct sections are offered in a “typical” versed fare, in “The First Musk,” readers are invited into several pages of columnar words, which form a sequence of thick trunks in a steady while potentially shifting language. The splits across five of the poem’s six grounded pages are doubled, so that one can read across the spatial bifurcation and “white space” between the columns, or from top to bottom, within each of the separated columns. (It seems, although one may not be being “asked” to read across, the opportunity surely presents itself, says this reader…)
On the left, for example, “Two rows lined crooked / daggers until they turned into swords of corn,” appear adjacent to and slightly below the lines to the column on the right, which read, “The dirt across the street / where mottles of birches / and tall grasses swayed / revealed a rust color, / a nod to the old days.” These lines can thereby become, “Two rows lined crooked / and tall grasses swayed / daggers until they turned / revealed a rust color, / into swords of corn. / a nod to the old days” (51). These “old days” refer to “when miners from Croatia, / Finland, Ireland, / Germany, and Poland / slid down into / the gaping shafts, / gods in full mastery.” Luczak goes on to address “the iron ore / that would be soon / hauled away by train.” (51) In these and other ways, the poem creates a temporal portal that is historical while mystical without solely invoking a complicated nostalgia.
Such imagery happens with different yet overlapping purpose in Lunafly, a far-reaching love story aching toward geology and paleontology with a finessed interlocutory abandon. Readers are greeted by admixtures of Biblical icons, Greek deities, and atemporal all-too-human visitations. In what I find to be a gorgeous homage to Whitman, “A Pagan’s Prayer” takes an aspirational trope and turns it alchemical. The nine lines are riveting and personal while open-ended and big-skied, as in: “May the sun freeze my veins of revenge” and “May the glass of youthful water mirror death” (66). “Needle” is a verb, but not for pestering; the trees are the needlers, encouraging the poet and reader “to look down.” “Carcass” is a verb, too, as happens in, “May the slices of autumn carcass nourishment.” The roads rise to meet us—without enjambment, in these instances.
I admire so many of the lines and scenes that unfold in Lunafly. “Eve in the Freak Show,” for example, concludes with “The might of woman is still a reckoning to come” (5). (Oh, Raymond, how you pun.) A decided Crip story, Eve is performing at a side-show in Coney Island, and she ain’t playing nice. “Naomi” shares her heartbreak candidly, and while Job is not named, this poem makes clear that Naomi, who gets far less attention than Job, deserves no less compassion (or attention) than he does. Themes of power, access, and queer feminist commitments arise more than a few times.
“David” and “Goliath” are literally side-by-side and thus facing each other when holding open Lunafly. “Goliath” takes place at the cross-hairs of a problematized queer desire that in this case comes dangerously close to violence. It is (isn’t it?) an unnamed David in this poem who has a “marbled chest swirling / with hair sprawled like strawberry vines / after a thick summer rain” (22). “David,” in his own poem, notes how he was both sculpted by Michelangelo (in homage, as he knows), and, seeking to be interrogative, why he undermines several received narratives of power. For this David, a named Goliath is “the brute” who “dripped with sweat.” This sweat is indexed rather differently in the poem featuring “Goliath,” while seemingly abjecting David—though in a critical way.
Lunafly’s many splendored characters and players, along with the readers, might “swim / against undercurrents / in the ocean of / mushrooms / collapsing, rebuilding, / as we arise toward / the moon / until we kiss the stars.” (“Mycologia,” 70) Hells yes, please.
These mystical while pragmatic messages appear, too, in Far from Atlantis, contrasting the Upper Peninsula with Atlantis while combining these landscapes into something entirely different from either locus. Through poetry, Luczak shares stories of his experiences enduring childhood isolation, audism, and ableism, utilizing the mythographic to summon, reflect upon, and newly render the real. Clergy, Buck Rogers, Wonder Woman, mermaids, and numerous Greek deities are present. If I had not already encountered Lunafly, I wonder what might have happened if I read it after Far from Atlantis, rather than beforehand.
When I guest edited the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue of Nine Mile Magazine, featuring Neurodivergent, Disabled, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetry, I was struck to the core by Luczak’s “The Deaf Boy from Atlantis,” which we published in that Nine Mile issue, along with “Numbers,” both of which appear in Far from Atlantis. In “Poetry is Everyone’s Art,” my editorial introduction to the double issue, I quoted the following lines from “The Deaf Boy from Atlantis”:
I was all legs and bones when you appeared
covered with kelp on TV. A storm had appeared,flinging you from the bottom of the sea
onto the shore. A father and son appearedand called for help. You found it difficult to breathe
there in the hospital. Yet Dr. Elizabeth Merrill appearedto figure out what needed to be done. You were
brought back to the ocean, where you finally appearedto revive with your webbed feet and hands…
(27, in Nine Mile Magazine, Vol. 7, Nos. 1 & 2)1
As dedicated / noted by Luczak, this poem is “after Patrick Duffy playing the Man from Atlantis (1977-1978).” In my editorial introduction to the Nine Mile double issue, shortly before quoting Luczak’s poem, I indicate that the double issue is “replete with writing about myriad embodiments and consciousnesses…[that] feel, to me, like a joyous secular blessing” (27). After having quoted Luczak’s “The Deaf Boy from Atlantis,” I note, “One doesn’t have to be Deaf and gay, or have watched Man from Atlantis on TV in the late 1970s (although I did), to find these lines evocative” (28).
As always, I look forward to reading much more from the wonderful and prolific Raymond Luczak.
Note:
- In Far from Atlantis, the line quoted above reads: “revived with your webbed feet and hands” (28).
Reference:
Wiener, D. R. (2019). Poetry is everyone’s art. Introductory essay to Special Double Issue of Nine Mile Magazine (Vol. 7, Nos. 1 & 2, on Neurodivergent, Disabled, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics). Guest Editor: Diane R. Wiener. Lead Editors: Bob Herz, Stephen Kuusisto, Andrea Scarpino. 22-30.
Title: Chlorophyll: Poems about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
Author: Raymond Luczak
Publisher: Modern History Press
Year: 2022
Title: Lunafly
Author: Raymond Luczak
Publisher: Gnashing Teeth Publishing
Year: 2022
Title: Far From Atlantis
Author: Raymond Luczak
Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
Year: 2023
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, For The Birds Arts & Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.