If you have a book you’d like considered for a review in Light—one that includes a large helping of comic verse and was published within the previous 12 months, or will be published in the next eight—please send a copy to:
Barbara Loots
4741 Central St.
Ste. 601
Kansas City, MO 64112
(Pre-print-run electronic copies may be sent to lightpoetryreviews@gmail.com)
Light on Their Feet
Reviews of books by A.M. Juster, Julie Kane, Marjorie Maddox, Kevin McCaffrey, Alfred Nicol, and Chris O’Carroll
by Barbara Loots
Quantum Creed, by Chris O’Carroll. Human Error Publishing, 2024.
Here’s a titillating romp through life as we know it, delivered by a light poetry master. To be honest, I was not in a frame of mind to be amused by the first poem, “Check-up,” which begins, “The doctor dons a rubber glove….” It’s followed by a handful of poems that include such phrases as “KY in dollops” and “cute little needle.” Ick! On the other hand (that glove again??) I haven’t often encountered versified medical dread from the male point of view. Thus, with dark humor, O’Carroll establishes the empathy at the heart of the whole collection.
History and current events feature in seven loose categories of poems embracing a remarkable variety of subjects and verse forms. Some readers (perhaps fewer and fewer) will remember the controversy referenced in “Astronaut Orbit”:
Neil took the final step or leap
That all of us must someday take.
Conspiracists, however, keep
Insisting Armstrong’s death was fake.
Almost everyone will discern the times a-changin’ in “Life is Better With Cannibals”:
What? No, it’s not! the back-seat kids exclaim.
Reading a billboard from the family car,
They’ve misconstrued an unfamiliar word.
It’s life with cannabis the ad extols.
They bank their new vocabulary coin,
And interest may accrue in years to come,
For literacy is a gateway drug.
As to literacy—and literature—O’Carroll skillfully sends up the Greats. From “Emily Dickinson’s Covid Counsel,” here’s a snippet:
The Sanctity of Solitude
Is Nature’s best—Advice.
When Fellowship turns fatal, then
Let Self—alone suffice.
O’Carroll brings new wit to an old classic with “On the Set with Basho’s Frog”:
“Old pond scene. Action!”
“Jump in? That’s it? I don’t speak?”
“We just need the splash.”
In “Bard’s Xmas Cards” he produces clever riffs on poets from Ogden Nash to Philip Larkin. Would you care to guess this one?
Cut the fruitcake! Pour the gin!
Men may be unreliable,
But ’tis the season for some sin!
The urge is undeniable.
Or this?
We do not choose a silent night
We are not just good friends.
When we set our Yule log alight,
We burn it at both ends.
Answers below*
In the spirit of Xmas-in-May, you’ll find out who’s naughty and nice.
X-Rated X-Stitch
It is not our policy to sell products with the “F” word.
—Michaels corporate HQ, quoted in the New York Times,
explaining the craft store chain’s decision to trash all its
copies of the book Feminist Cross-Stitch.
The patterns in this book play dirty tricks,
E.g., spell Patriarchy is for Dicks,
Feminist as Fuck, and Fuck Politeness,
Wounding our manhood and our moral rightness,
Needling us with naughty-word cross-stitches.
Feminists can be such crafty bitches.
In “McTrumpeter’s Tool (with a tip of the hat to Dr. Seuss)”, a certain problematic (priapic?) politician takes a hit with words like Whang-Dangle-Doo and Zingle-McSwingle. Let the rest of the inventive invective be yours to discover.
In a range of styles, you’ll find many more jibes and jokes about critics, cultures, and poetry itself. Underneath it all, there’s a winsome reverence for life and love. So I hope I leave you wanting more with “After Fifty Years”:
We’re folding laundry when we find
Your panties in a sleeve of mine,
Which puts us merrily in mind
Of diverse ways to intertwine.
These days, though we’re less acrobatic
Love still feels tumbled and dramatic.
*Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay
After the Carnival, by Alfred Nicol. Wiseblood Books, 2025
As your humble reviewer, I keep asking the same question: What is “light poetry”? Is it a form? A tone? An attitude? A good laugh? A knowing chuckle? Well, all of the above, I’m sure. My definition is expanded—and illuminated—by Alfred Nicol’s After the Carnival.
For one thing, he writes natural sentences, deftly outfitted in meter and rhyme. He makes poems short and long, warmhearted and wry, clever and classic that dazzle me with pleasure in the craft.
In “Poemmakers,” Nicol discloses his own opinion of what he does: “This isn’t really rocket science, is it,/only a hobby a certain type enjoys./We don’t invite the epic muse to visit./Heroic figures make a lot of noise.”
It may not be rocket science, but Nicol makes it seem a bit like magic. I marvel. How does he do it?
He writes zingers, like “Epigram for Two Voices”:
Might poets cozy up to autocrats?
Who knows? Fish slime is comfort food for cats.
It’s hard to think a Caesar would prefer
that kind of pet.
A toothless cat can purr.
He tells a good story in “A Notable Catch in a Tourist Town,” where
…the ponderous fish is caught.
Hoisted above the gathered crowd that presses,
its shadow falls on billowing sundresses
with children under sail,
and gulls screech overhead.
Not everyone’s convinced the fish is dead.
He aims at politics in “An Indelicate Proposal”:
So let us press the elders into service.
They will be recognized and celebrated,
no longer penned inside, emasculated,
clucking like old hens, ruffled and nervous,
ready for the freezer or the fryer.
What difference if the end is ice or fire?
Nicol’s literary allusions throughout the book embrace more than our old friend Frost. On a single page of poems about birds, would you expect to encounter Zelig, Forrest Gump, Emily, and Euclid? Nicol pulls off the mash-ups in one convincing poem after another.
In “Talking All Night,” he brings us a poignant tribute as simple as a nursery rhyme, sustained over three pages:
I asked my friend, the poet,
how she was getting by.
“Work and tears,”
came her reply.
“And listening,” she added,
“in silence, to be sure.
I listen closer
now than before.
It is a lot like reading,
a thing I love to do…
What book felt like
first love to you?”
It’s easy to forget when you’re absorbed in an “irreverent portrait” that Nicol is a magician of meter and rhyme. It’s like the background music in a movie. You feel the effect while barely aware of the fact.
Cheers to Father McLaughlin, master of
the convoluted anecdote, who’s known
to interrupt himself mid-sermon to
explore an etymology—the Bugs
Bunny of liturgists, whose faith alone
brings order to his spirit’s messy room,
where he can hang his hat on God is love.
The poem encompasses five twelve-line stanzas. Every iambic line has a rhyme. Somewhere. You can listen for it, but the anticipation won’t stop you cold from one line to the next.
Nicol consistently matches form with subject. “Ballad of the Terrible Silence” builds peppy quatrains into a colloquial narrative unfolding towards… well, you’ll have to read it for yourself.
Is this “light poetry”? Whatever you call it, the whole book feels like some kind of love.
Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems, by Julie Kane. Louisiana State University Press, 2025.
If you’re not already acquainted with Julie Kane, start here! Kane was the featured poet in Light’s Spring 2015 issue. There you’ll also find an appreciation of her work by A.E. Stallings, which includes a mini-review of her light-verse collection Paper Bullets (White Violet Press, 2014). In Naked Ladies, you’ll encounter the full range of Kane’s style and sassiness.
As one critic observed, the tell-all redhead might be today’s Edna St. Vincent Millay. I know the power of red hair (I had it once) to command a certain kind of attention, as in “Men Who Love Redheads”: You can pick one out in a crowd/by the way he jerks his head/when an Irish setter passes,/ drawn to that shade of red…”
And then—whaddaya know—along with the red hair there’s a captivating wit. Kane writes with earned wisdom about meeting and parting, forgetting and remembering. See “Used Book” and “Kissing the Bartender” and “Maraschino Cherries”… as “precious as Burmese rubies.”
Red seems to be a recurring theme. What about the driving metaphor in “Ruby Red OpelGT”? “Your car is new./It has AC./The engine’s under warranty/and yet your heart’s/unmoved as stone./You dream of one/you used to own/which (like a pet)/acquired a name—Ruby, her color/red as flame,/the hue your Mom/warned not to wear/because it clashed/with your flaming hair.” Let’s see: Red hair. Sporty red car. What else do we have in common?
How about an abiding devotion to poetic forms? Villanelles, pantoums, sonnets, ghazals. Quatrains woven with subtle rhymes. Even a rap on the hapless Alan doll of Barbie Land. Kane makes the mastery of form seem effortless.
Accomplished as a poet and lauded as an educator, Kane was the 2011-2013 Louisiana Poet Laureate. For her “contributions to the state’s literary and intellectual life,” she has been honored by the Louisiana Center for the Book in 2025 with the 26th Louisiana Writer Award.
These selections from her five books, plus a generous helping of new and uncollected poems, disclose a life rich in adventures and misadventures. Kane turns them all into a feast of language.
Girlatee, by A. M. Juster, illustrations by Grant Silverstein. Paul Dry Books, 2025.
What or who is Girlatee? How can I tempt you to find out without a spoiler? This is a picture book about a gentle aquatic animal threatened by human carelessness and saved by human kindness. The story unfolds in conversational verse, just enough. Detailed pencil drawings by Grant Silverstein illustrate the drama and emotion.
I’m no expert in children’s books, let alone today’s children. But the child in me—and the latent grandma—loves this gem of a book. So much to look at. So much to care about. In a size that’s easy for small hands to hold. I think you’ll enjoy sharing it with the littles in your life.
The Review mailbox for Light could easily be swamped by children’s books. Everybody thinks they can write one. (Also, they have a friend who can draw the pictures!) Such efforts rarely get an editorial glance in today’s juvenile publishing and merchandise marketing.
Every week, taking part in a school volunteer program, I read books in a classroom with a second-grader. In the cardboard box of books we choose from, I find more POW! CRASH! sound effects than actual sentences, more word balloons than clever word play. I wish more books for kids had the artistic and social merit of Girlatee.
How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled?: Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks, by Marjorie Maddox. Kelsay Books, 2024.
Original and playful, these poems by Marjorie Maddox may or may not help you remember those old “rules” of spelling and grammar. Better you should read them just as romps with words, which is the thing light poetry does for fun. The titles are often your clue to the point, if you need one:
The Principal is Your Pal
Supposedly, but with what principles, boasting so
prince-like from his authoritarian office
of spelling rights and wrongs? The final word
on retention, suspension, expulsion,
he compulsively claims to edit, credit, and correct
for our grammatical good, this Lord of Letters
deceptively citing friendship
as sentence-rule addendum.
I/Me
I hoards all correctness, misremembered rules
from past classes. Shy of conversation, she stays
clear of chit-chat, casual interludes. Instead,
she insists on her deserved inclusion
in multi-error sentences (direct object or no)
and indignantly sends Me scurrying,
comma between his knees. There is no citing
a higher court; no Chicago Style could overturn
her conceited convictions. She, only, has claim
to the brains of beginning brainstormers,
to the doings of final drafts,
to the laws of student editors
systematically deleting Me.
Ah, yes. How often have I winced when Me failed to show up in his correct place? And don’t get me started on Its/It’s. Maddox notes a “pet apostrophe/yapping incessantly.” We know how annoying it can be.
Clever clip-art illustrations assembled by Karen Elias visualize the lessons in, for example, “There is a Double Ass in Assassin” where you’ll find a Push-Me-Pull-You. That’s a literary allusion as rare as “a burro bundled with another.” The mind of Maddox teems with her associations as a reader, a teacher, and, of course, an editor.
I Could Have Been More Wrong, by Kevin McCaffrey. Four Winds Press, 2024.
Over the transom, this book arrives with its irresistible title. On the cover, eyeballs tossed by a juggler suggest what’s inside: a quirky point of view, playful language, and puzzlement.
For instance, what to make of this? “Bid the fellows to be mellow down in the hollow—/the Othellos with their jellos, do you follow/me? Hello…” Is it simply fun with words, or would spending some time with it bring a fresh connection with an intriguing human?
On the adjacent page, the poem “Mind” invites me to keep going, to look a bit deeper into the source of these odd verses: “There is a mind behind your mind—/calm, cold, and dark as the vast sea—/and floating there’s a fishy eye/that blinks at your complexities.” There’s definitely a mind behind these verses. It may resemble a rat’s nest: the accumulation of ideas is startling.
Although absurdities abound, the poet does inhabit the real world. For example:
My Friend Zuckerberg
He knows what I had for breakfast
and what I had for lunch,
he knows my favorite movie star—
…
How does he know? How does he know?
Have I been overheard?
No, I shared everything myself
with my friend Zuckerberg.
Haven’t we all?
In poems like “Attention All Shoppers” and “The Last to Go” and “No One We Know” the poet muses on the vagaries of daily life and corporate employment. Here’s the start of one such poem:
Counting for Nothing
I’ve come from the land of Nothing Matters
here to the city of Nothing Works
where I hope to climb the broken ladder
to join a company of inept clerks
who count until they can’t remember
what number it was they counted last,
counting on each finger, on each member,
until the future becomes the past.
These snippets hardly capture the odd logic of each poem. Readers must be willing to suspend their own notions of continuity and common speech. In fact, it might be easy to dismiss these verses as nonsensical or clumsy—except that they’re so calculated, provocative, and, most of all, original.
Back to the Grind
It’s hard to make a telepathic baby,
I know because we’ve tried at least three times.
It’s more than just an idiosyncratic hobby.
We’ve worked on it so much we’ve grown weary.
Our skin has turned a morbid shade of lime.
It’s hard to make a telepathic baby. …
Where’s he going with this? You’ll have to decide for yourself.
Also Received
Dogged: A Verse Novel, by Martin Elser and Joan Axelrod-Contrada.2024.
Dear Dante, by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Paraclete Press, 2024