I know I’ve writ­ten this else­where on this blog, but I have more to say about it, so I am going to write it again: CavanKerry Press, a small, inde­pen­dent pub­lisher based in New Jer­sey, pub­lished in May of this year my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men. (That link leads back to CavanKerry’s web­site; if you want to read more sam­ple poems or the text of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Fore­word or to find out more about me and my work, check out my own site.) Aside from the press’ obvi­ous and deep com­mit­ment to poetry, one of the great plea­sures I have had in work­ing with CavanKerry is the fact that they pro­duce visu­ally stun­ning books, and I am talk­ing here not only about my own book, the cover of which Peter Cusack painted specif­i­cally in response to my poem, but also about each of the six CavanKerry books I found recently in a used book­store in Man­hat­tan: Harold Levy’s A Day This Lit, Joan Seliger Sidney’s Body of Dimin­sh­ing Motion, Ken­neth Rosen’s The Ori­gins of Tragedy, Geor­gianna Orsini’s An Imper­fect Lover, Eloise Bruce’s Rat­tle and Andrea Carter Brown’s The Dishelveled Bed. (They can all be found on CavanKerry’s web­site here. I should also men­tion that Peter Cusack has a blog that’s worth check­ing out.)

I wish I could afford to buy the books from CavanKerry at full price, but I can’t. In fact, hav­ing paged through each of the books now a cou­ple of times, and assum­ing they are indica­tive of the qual­ity to be found in all of CavanKerry’s books, I wish I could afford to own the press’ entire output-to-date, but I can’t. Of course, I would not have sub­mit­ted my man­u­script to CavanKerry if I did not like the qual­ity of the work they pub­lish, and I remem­ber read­ing through more than a cou­ple of their books while I was doing the mar­ket­ing research I needed to do when I decided to give up on play­ing the book-contest-roulette that has increas­ingly become the pre­ferred way for poets in the United States to try to get their first books pub­lished. That kind of read­ing, how­ever, is very dif­fer­ent from sit­ting down with a book of poems and giv­ing the poems the time they need really to sink into you, giv­ing your­self the time it takes to let a poem’s lan­guage do its work. That’s what I’ve been doing with these six books over the past few days now that I own them, and, the more I read, the more I find myself hap­pily hum­bled to know that my work and these books are on the same list.

The rea­son I bought these six books in the first place is that, later this month, CavanKerry will be gath­er­ing all of its authors together, or at least all of us who can make it to New Jer­sey on that day, so that we can talk about the press, our own mar­ket­ing efforts and share some of our work with each other. When I read in the invi­ta­tion that we would be read­ing to each other, it sud­denly struck me that I did not know the work of any other CavanKerry author, that I remem­bered only a few of their names, and I felt guilty for this igno­rance. I wanted, when I met other CavanKerry authors, to be able to say some­thing mean­ing­ful to them about their work, and even though it is pos­si­ble that none of the six poets whose books I bought will be at the meet­ing, at least I will have made the effort. (I know there was no rea­son for me to feel guilty, and I cer­tainly am not imply­ing that any­one else in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion — CavanKerry author or not — should feel guilty; it’s just the way I am.) More to the point, now that I have these books, I can offer here, and in suc­ces­sive posts, at least a par­tial appre­ci­a­tion and cel­e­bra­tion of the work they con­tain, first because the books deserve to be appre­ci­ated and cel­e­brated and, sec­ond, because it gives me a chance to share how good I feel know­ing that my work is in their company.

So, for no rea­son other than it was the first one that came to hand when I started read­ing this morning, I want to start with Andrea Carter Brown’s The Disheveled Bed. This is from the Fore­word by Brooks Haxton:

Most mem­o­rably in this col­lec­tion, Brown records the dis­ap­point­ment and courage of a woman unable to bear the chil­dren she and her hus­band want. With­out hedges or illu­sions, the poems present the cru­cial details of clin­i­cal vis­its, mis­car­riage, mourn­ing, and the per­sis­tent dif­fi­culty of sus­tain­ing and recon­struct­ing one­self, one’s mar­riage, and the world.

I’ve only read so far to the end of the sec­ond sec­tion of the book, so I only a par­tial view of the process that Hax­ton writes about, but what I found myself most admir­ing as I read through the first sec­tion, which deals pri­mar­ily with the clin­i­cal details of infer­til­ity treat­ment, specif­i­cally the havoc that the drugs wreak on a woman’s body, was how Andrea Carter Brown finds lan­guage over and over again that uncov­ers in the nam­ing of an expe­ri­ence the beauty that inheres in the expe­ri­ence itself, no mat­ter how painful or sham­ing or frus­trat­ing or what­ever the expe­ri­ence might be. This is from “Ultrasound.”

They direct you to a dark­ened room. You climb

up on a paper-covered table, slide your butt
to its edge, spread your knees. The doctor

enters, slips a reg­u­lar Ram­ses over
the probe that vibrates with sound you can’t

quite hear, squeezes clear jelly from a tube
onto its quiv­er­ing tip.

In “IUI (a.k.a. The Dou­ble Rainbow)” — IUI stands for intrauter­ine insem­i­na­tion — Brown writes about the process of being insem­i­nated with her “husband’s/characteristic pink semen” while lying beneath a rain­bow mobile on which

                                              Red breeds

yel­low and blue, which them­selves pro­duce
orange and green, pur­ple and ultra­ma­rine,
rep­sec­tively, each repro­duc­ing in turn

except the last which, with­out issue is larger,
a coun­ter­weight to its fer­tile sibling.

Up till this point, the speaker’s con­scious­ness is wrapped around her­self and her body, as indi­cated by the third per­son ref­er­ence to her hus­band, but then the rain­bow spin­ning above her head sends her fin­gers to find

…the turquoise tad­pole strung between turtle

and frog on the fetish neck­lace I’ve worn
for luck which you car­ried home in a sock
to sur­prise me for my birthday.

That switch to the sec­ond per­son address of her hus­band is a beau­ti­ful moment in the poem, reflect­ing the speaker’s sud­den aware­ness that she is not alone in her predica­ment, that she is loved, and that even though “lying on the exam­i­na­tion table” makes it “hard to believe/life can be made,” there was a time when she and her hus­band saw their “first dou­ble rainbow…one/spectrum nes­tled within another as we do in bed/before sleep.”

It’s tempt­ing to go on quot­ing from these poems, the pre­ci­sion of their lan­guage and rhythms is so com­pelling, but I am going to stop there and say, sim­ply, that Andrea Carter Brown’s The Disheveled Bed deserves your atten­tion. I hope you will buy it and read it.