This month’s featured poem is the first in Reaching Guantánamo, a series of nine poems that are imagined letters to Salim Hamdan from his wife written by Solmaz Sharif, an Iranian-American poet.

Sharif wrote these poems in 2008 after reading an article about Hamdan in The New York Times. All nine are linked from Paperbag’s table of contents for their summer 2010 issue.

These poems navigate the incendiary human territories of war, torture, and erasure. By erasing words to mimic government redaction of documents, Sharif’s poems evoke the loss, separation, and anguish inflicted by censoring a person's communication, and by the collateral individual and cultural erasures that can result.

However, Sharif’s practice of erasure differs from that of her peers who blackout or erase words from real source documents to isolate words they wish to remain as a poem. Through this process, they exert a power similar to that wielded by governments when they redact sources. 

Reaching Guantánamo resists this pattern by erasing imagined words instead. Since she is not striking words from real letters, Sharif was not privy to any details Hamdan was actually denied; she saw no words now hidden from the reader. Through the process of imagining these letters, she birthed each absence, each denial of intimacy and ancestry, each anxiety-provoking deletion. 

Consider the denials and deletions in this poem's opening lines. 

These poems provoke discussion about topics we often evade, like the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.” According to the NYT article, Hamdan was a former driver for Osama bin Laden charged with helping bin Laden avoid capture.  His lawyers sought to delay his prosecution due to mental instability they said was caused by Hamdan being kept in solitary confinement at least 22 hours per day for over six years.  Hamdan was convicted in late 2008, released in 2009, and his conviction was overturned in 2012.

Sharif wrote an essay about her perspective on the poetics of erasure for Evening Will Come.  A Stegner Fellow, she is currently "working on a poetic rewrite of the U.S.Department of Defense Dictionary." 

Her poem "Family of Scatterable Mines" was published in The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles (Michigan State UP, 2012). Others, such as "Look," "Mess Hall," and "Drone ," are available online. Paired with the latter poem by Sharif, "The Cup Runneth Over" by Shailja Patel, whose collection Migritude was reviewed here in January, provides a similar perspective on drones. 

In a Kenyon Review interview, Sharif said it surprises her that "in addition to empathy, my writing requires a callousness. Maybe this is the nature of the material I immerse myself in—mostly testimony of warfare and imprisonment. Maybe this is the nature of the craft—that putting language, putting music first requires a kind of violence."

It appears that the summer 2010 issue was Paperbag’s only publication, so it's uncertain how long the site will remain available. 

When I finished reading William Notter’s Holding Everything Down (Southern Illinois UP, 2009), I longed to connect with the working people and landscapes of my growing-up years: uncles in bib overalls leaning against trucks, Aunt Eileen’s strawberry-rhubarb pie cooling on the counter, the chainsaw scent of morning in the woods with Dad. And despite the unlikely inclusion of meat on my plate these days, my stomach growled for sausage, biscuits, and gravy.

In this hardscrabble, heartfelt collection, Notter captures a deep connection to the land, as well as the connection between Midwestern people who live with nature’s unpredictability.   

“Morning News in the Big Horn Mountains” starts with the news that makes the papers - celebrity impropriety, global warming, and war - then shifts to local news of a different sort, revealing the speaker’s keen observance of nature’s wildness even as he tries to influence it.

In Wyoming, just below timberline,
meteors and lightning storms
keep us entertained at night. Last week,
a squirrel wrecked the mountain bluebirds' nest.
I swatted handfuls of moths in the cabin
and set them on a stump each day,
but the birds would not come back to feed.

As the poem moves toward the closing lines, this intertwining of human and natural world continues, sparking reflection about the cyclic, ephemeral quality of both.

Flakes of obsidian and red flint
knapped from arrowheads hundreds of years ago
appear in the trails each day,
and the big fish fossil in the limestone cliff
dissolves a little more with every rain.

In “The Ranch Woman's Secret,” it is the rancher’s actions the woman undoes. As he obsesses over coyotes that she knows haven't killed their cattle in years, she muses... "He'll start to wonder / where he put his seven-millimeter shells / and how his traps get sprung while he's in town / or hauling a load of hay to from Nebraska." 

While coyotes limit the geography where readers could imagine the ranch woman listening for the coyotes' wailing, the kids the speaker addresses in “Directions in the Nebraska Sandhills”  could represent kids in any rural place with dwindling options for making ends meet.

Ahead of them are shotguns, pheasant,
deer from groves along the Platte.
Then clumsiness with girls, the monotony
of tractors, raking hay.  They will hate Lakeside.
They will buy a pickup or souped-up car,
rumble off to Rapid City, Denver, anywhere

After this passage, Notter hones the poem's sense of place as the speaker praises the wide, stubborn beauty of the plains, a landscape he predicts will follow the kids to that anywhere.

In mountains they will wish for sunset
the way it looks past Alliance, nothing
but orange sky over all their families work for,
ponds like sheets of Depression glass,
trill of a fencepost meadowlark,
Angus in silhouette, more space
than anyone can stand until he leaves.

Other poems available online include “High Plains Farming,” “Jubilate,” and “Demolition Derby.” Some poems startled me, like the short series whose speaker is "the dead guy" who picks up dead animals from farms. Others unsettled me, like "The Trailer House on Bethel Road" in which a couple encounters tracings of the last family who lived there, evidence that makes them wonder "if rage could live on in a house."

Read Holding Everything Down for the memories it may stir and for the barren, gritty, and ruggedly beautiful places it takes you. Read it for the vivid, textured quality of Notter's precise diction and imagery. Share his poems with students, friends, or cousins who may find themselves in its dusty, grease-stained lines.