Book Review: The Bees Have Been Canceled poems by Maya Catherine Popa

Key West Poet Laureate Kirby Congdon (Photo by Richard Watherwax)

by Kirby Congdon…….

Our dependency on such a trivial concern as the spread of pollen has, with our industrial and technological forces, become one more anxiety in civilized society. Maya Catherine Popa’s collection of poems opens with the title prose-poem, “The Bees Have Been Canceled.” The ambiguity of the factual business jargon and the poet’s own language is clever and full of concern at the same time. The narrator comments in a discursive tone that recollects what the activity of bees used to be like as the reader winces at the probability of their extinction. The last line of this prose-poem ends a list of probabiities to beware of:

“The lull as each integer walked its body over a blossom, then flew away with its instructions.” That last word encompasses the reality that was there over eons of time.

This poet’s stance in its examination of truth and probability is extraordinary.

Her talent advances the history of contemporary poetry.

Tucson, AZ, New Michigan Press, 2017
paperback, 37p. $9.00
New Michigan Press
Department of English
P.O. Box 210067
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 – 0067
http://newmihiganpress.com
Orders and queries to nmp@the diagram.com
ISBN 978-1-934832-59-2 First Printing

 

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