A recurring theme in Iana Boukova’s collection Notes of the Phantom Woman is emptiness: for the emptiness that is a space, a container reserving space for something else, perhaps just waiting to be noticed, to have the same regard as spaces filled. “There are schools of architecture / that focus on the virtues of emptiness,” she writes in “Building.” Throughout the collection, Boukova includes direct references to Zen Buddhism, and the sense of embracing emptiness feels very Zen.

Boukova dances between binaries throughout most of the poems, refusing to settle on one definition as opposed to another while teasing the reader into new perspectives, much the way a Zen koan might. For instance, in the collection’s title poem she writes, “Dirt on something black is white. / Every housewife knows this.” Even the matter-of-fact short, end-stopped lines declare how obvious this statement is, though I chuckled out loud when I read it for its commonsense nature.

Boukova begins the collection with “In Nature,” a poem eminently quotable and impossible to convey its full character:

.…the most persistent question
concerns nature’s boundaries.
Because where nature ends,
another nature begins….
What am I to do with the fears surrounding me?

She drops that question at the end of ponderings that appear simple in their directness. It is the reader’s first clear indication that the poem is not just about nature, as we might assume (trees and rocks and rural spaces). And yet the poem dances between nature as philosophical concept and nature as in “we take walks in nature.” Nature is a mysterious otherness, “the nearby darkness.” The emptiness so clearly not empty.

Yet humor also traces throughout all the poems, a wry humor and particularly a kind of irreverent touch with regard to angels: “the Angel of History / flies with his backside exposed,” she writes, and “as if subterranean angels were blowing trumpets / in the ovaries of the earth….” All of this twists the traditional idea of winged angelic beings, at once referencing their physical, earthy bodily function and suggesting something divine about cosmic reproduction. Wow.

Boukova’s commentary on human society wades a similar tideline tiptoe between dry appreciation of humanity and soggy realism of our human shortcomings, as in “Dog”:

From a religious viewpoint our so-called fall
was probably denial of immobility.
That is to say,
it’s not because we ate the apple,
it’s because we didn’t become trees.

For this tiny bit of independence in space,
for a stroll down to the sea, you might say,
we got stuck with the whole education system….”

A lyrical tone carries through each of these poems, a tribute to the stated collaboration between both translators and Boukova herself. She wrote the poems in this collection in both Greek and Bulgarian, releasing separate editions in each language. This translation blended both previous versions into this new collection, a feat that surpasses mere translation. Unlike what William Learned said about translated poetry being like boiled strawberries, Boukova, Kane, and Petrova have created an “incandescent strawberr[y]” (from Boukova’s “Don’t Panic. It’s a Thought Experiment”).

Unlike movies in which the trailers clearly contain all the good scenes, I have held back on quoting from many of the poems in this collection. Boukova is a master at one-liners, almost like punchlines, yet manages to keep them relevant. She inserts them in the middle of a poem, then keeps going without losing the moment or narrative of the poem, as in “Tractatus”: “I think it is high time / that I clarify my position regarding pigeons.” And, in “Umwelt,” “Rhythm is the dialect of the masses. / Trotsky to the DJs.”

In an age where books can be mass produced and designed by anyone with a keyboard, publishers with a commitment to craft, to letterpress printing, to limited runs made with care and skill are to be treasured. Ugly Duckling Presse puts out books in a variety of formats, each made with attention to layout, construction, and materials. Their books are a joy to hold in your hand, a charm only bested by the joy in reading them. The craftsmanship is well suited to the high quality of Boukova’s work, which is worth revisiting again and again.

-—John Reinhart

Irene Mitchell’s latest book of poetry, An Overdose of Meditation, is perhaps her most accessible and personal. Her ninth collection explores changes in the world and in herself, using her own clear direct voice, eschewing ambiguous metaphors, unwieldy grammatical constructions, or flimsy personas.

Mitchell ponders the meaning and value of life’s moments and memories, and implicitly invites readers to use her poems as a springboard for their own personal explorations. In “Strife Over Trifles,” she sets the stage with an image of the landscape she will venture into at the beginning of our journey:

Clamshell gray, beak yellow.
Hard to tell this gull from that
for the shoreline is foreign in fog,
an indistinct scene of orts and fragments.

There she uncovers no great truths, but rather “a teasing glitter, a vague priority…which insinuates something else.” Similar perhaps to life, the collection is about the journey and the desire for illumination, rather than the epiphany itself. Mitchell’s heuristics uphold a unique formulation that serves to guide her investigations.

It is difficult to pull “representative” lines from this collection, for the apparent simplicity and directness of the language belie the depth of each poem, the meaning of which only becomes clear after the reader reaches the last line. However, these excerpts from “Ascending,” while not meant to stand alone, demonstrate Mitchell’s style. Here she examines not only prayer but, more important, the idea of prayer and our relation to it, and with the skill and insight of a Thomas Merton:

When prayers stack up,
their original premise not quite ready
for the voyage home,
the idea of prayer
remains latent in the mind’s sphere.

In the final stanza the poet, perhaps, realizes the futility of grasping the whole, and with that comes the idea that the pattern of fragmentation brings its own comfort.

The moon went west toward the Rockies,
its light on the crags.
Had I followed it, I would have cried
for its parting from the east
and prayed for its return to calmer waters,
prayed
in a sing-song language
of casava, papaya and bits of sugar cane
which restoreth the whole.

For Mitchell, this pattern provides freedom from worry, a flat plane to visit to prolong prayer without lamentation.

In “Something Else, Please?” we see that individual moments contain the seeds for much more:

Every day is graduation day
proving that there is always something else.
At Key West, for example,
the sun goes down like a parachute.
A little renegade is running toward
his mother’s camera
in a white cotton Easter suit,
angelic to the eye. We expect him
to graduate by and by.

The stanza is crafted with the imagist eye of a William Carlos Williams and wrapped up with the offhanded wink of a Howard Nemerov.

But all in Mitchell’s collection is not introspection. The book is peppered with humor, as in “And Stands in For a Torrent of Ampersands,” in which a torrent of ands replaces what could have been a torrent of ampersands. William Blake would approve.

Given today’s publishing environment, I need to add that Mitchell’s An Overdose of Meditation is a physically beautiful book, printed on sturdy paper, rather than the seemingly ubiquitous print-on-demand offerings marred with the stamp of when and where they were “printed.” Dos Madres cares enough to invest in an actual press run. Find the book and, as Mitchell advises in her invocation to the reader, “lean back at your leisure / in a modern chair” to enjoy these poems in a quality format, for this is not a collection to hurry through.

—Alex Balogh