Books
Houses Fly Away
By Leigh Ann Couch
(Zone 3 Press, 59 pp., $12)
City of Regret
By Andrew Kozma
(Zone 3 Press, 73 pp., $14)
Both poets will read from their books at 8 p.m. Nov. 1 in Austin Peay’s Gentry Auditorium. Competition judge Richard Jackson will introduce the poets and read from his own work.
Because big-name publishers generally publish poetry only from big-name poets—Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award winners, Poets Laureate—the job of publishing less and not-at-all big-name poets falls to smaller, nonprofit presses often associated with universities. They focus on the quality of the poetry itself rather than its marketability, and they have managed to keep poetry flourishing despite a mostly indifferent culture.
Such is the case at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, where the school’s Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts sponsors the internationally known literary journal Zone 3, which recently launched a first-book contest and hired a big-name poet, Richard Jackson, to judge it. The winners—Houses Fly Away, by Leigh Ann Couch, and City of Regret, by Andrew Kozma—are phenomenal collections.
Couch has worked as a maid, waitress, schoolteacher and obituary writer, and is now the managing editor of The Sewanee Review. She has been writing for 15 years. “At the most,” she writes in an email, “I publish about four poems a year in magazines that maybe a half-percent of Americans even know about.”
Houses Fly Away collects the best of that work and forms it into a treatise against the separation of body and soul, past and present. As Couch explains, “I try to create a world in these poems where nothing ends, where all parts of a life—childhood, romances, my dream of being a backup singer—go on and on. Loss, grief, regret, all that bad stuff, dismantles and then defines us, making us more of ourselves over time.” Thus the final line of “What the Dead Say” reads, “What you have now forever you will have.”
Couch says that while she “grew up believing the body, this span of life we’re given, is just a cage for the spirit, and death sets the spirit free to go to heaven,” she no longer thinks that way. “In these poems,” she says, “I’m trying to show that the body and the soul can’t be separated so easily in life or in death.”
Which doesn’t mean, however, that the soul is content, even when the body is sated. Toward the end of the book’s first poem, “Beast,” the speaker, who is warm, fed and rested, remarks:
To taste the shape of that—enough—
to mouth its escape and take one more breath
as it struggles, wings against the teeth.
Whether futile or not, the poem says, the soul will strive for more than the body can offer.
Couch admits that her philosophy is not yet fully formed. “I’m still working it out,” she says, “through imagery, music and a kind of logic, and I hope to map a country of the afterlife that I can believe in.” In “To Be Fire,” a poem that might be Couch’s manifesto against the separation of self and world, the poet writes, “I wrote water to be water.” She ends, “I write field to be a field.”
No Regrets Andrew Kozma
Andrew Kozma, like Couch, has been writing for many years. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and recently earned his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where he is the nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast. He’s also a staff writer for RevolutionSF, an online science fiction magazine.
Also like Couch, Kozma shies away from traditional dichotomies. City of Regret, in fact, is largely the story of a speaker’s attempt to connect with his dead father, while at the same time beginning a new romantic relationship. As Kozma explains in an interview, “The main theme involves communication, with both the living and the dead. Once a person is dead, there’s no more real communication, even though it may be the death that brings up all the questions you suddenly want answered. With the living, open communication is hard to achieve because people are, generally, so self-protective.”
In Kozma’s book, the speaker is on both a physical and metaphysical odyssey through his “city of regret.” The first poem, “Dis,” begins,
My father said I would not find him here,
but I’ve 2 coins for passage, 3 boiled ox bones, 1 cup blood.
Hell is a room the size of the world… .
But while the speaker’s journey maps the stages of regret, the poet deliberately avoids closure. As Kozma explains, “Instead of a path with a definite end, I see the book as more of a circle: the end doesn’t bring acceptance, which might be the normal psychological model, but a temporary deferral of feeling.”
Like Couch, Kozma is unafraid of the fantastical, though he is careful to distinguish between the surreal—where logic does not exist—and a made-up world where the logic of that world must cohere. “I am tied,” he says, “to some visualizable reality, something that can be imagined as existing, even if impossible.” Thus, for example, these lines from “Not a Love Letter”:
Lyrical Lady Leigh Ann Couch
Now, the stilled air
prepares my body for passage into the horizon:
from the moon descends a scratched pillar,
its surface liquid with climbing bodies.
If Couch and Kozma are any indication, poetry’s in no danger of disappearing, even in a culture defined by American Idol and Dancing With the Stars. And, refreshingly, despite the seriousness of their themes, neither poet takes him- or herself too seriously. As Kozma writes in “Not a Love Letter”: “I cannot make myself a saint. I can make myself / a sandwich.”
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