Books

The First Night We Thought the World Would End
Poems by George Yatchisin

There is much to appreciate about George Yatchisin’s poems, but what I admire most is the free ranging nature of this collection, the expansiveness with which the poet engages the ordinary. With lyric intensity, Yatchisin investigates the world—whether he’s writing about film, music, memory, or science; the personal or the observed. Because “poetry was everywhere and random,” he reminds us that “…if you look./Look closer.”  It’s this looking closer and his ability to bring to life the details in clear and often beautiful language that urges us to keep reading these poems.

—Gerry LaFemina, author of The Story of Ash

 

“There’s the idea the heart is a museum” and George Yatchisin’s poems reveal the intention of a collector who adds “each day a wing to the museum.” Yatchisin invites us to pause, to consider the things that snag inside us. His poems move like essays; they gather the ribbons, work out the knots. He writes of “arugula, bosc, butternut, saffron,/sundrieds, shitakes—an alphabet of exotics”; of popular culture: baseball, Batman, fifties films, and The Clash; of Ovid, Blake, and Thomas Aquinas; and even the most ordinary subjects: a cement truck, a decoy duck, roadkill, muskrats, and dead fish: “If I could excise my heart like boning a perch/with one steel clean thrust, I would lay it down/among those hungry eyes.” His poetry has sharp knife skills, carving to the essential. Aligned to a James Wright aesthetic, Yatchisin’s poems reflect how “language clear as water still lets us see ourselves.” Each poem is a bead strung like a sequence of days, “handing over a string/of now and now and now,” each line the ticking of a clock, each poem a notch, a pulse. A boy crouched inside a museum-heart asks, “Please, there is a permission I seek,/a keeping I need, a past I pray for/and tenderly, daily, poorly teach myself to mend.” There’s a gathering feeling to this book; meditative and lyrical, his poems contemplate a range of wonders from the minutiae to the grand, man-made or natural, solitary or shared, because “poetry [is] everywhere and random.” And of that pulsing, a color-splash that merges and blurs, Yatchisin urges us to consider “How much of/our lives are an abstract painting, where even beauty/seems too much to answer for, all we can ask.”

—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, author of Matria

Feast Days
Poems by George Yatchisin

Of course George Yatchisin’s poems are mouthwatering — here is a poet who cares deeply about meals, libations and all of the human rituals that are marked and enhanced by them. But, Feast Days is the work of a master poet, not a chef or a vintner. Ginger root, onions, IPAs, truffles, “brisket and bourbon” — all of these constitute the content of these exquisite poems, but at the heart of this feast are dazzling images, sonic depth that comes when one is in the presence of a first-rate singer and percussionist, and the beautifully-choreographed rhythms of someone who really knows how to dance with words and lines. George Yatchisin knows how to plate a poem, and is wise enough to relish every moment in the process of doing so. This is memorable, distinguished work.

—Rick Benjamin, Former State Poet Laureate of Rhode Island

 

 

 

 


Big Enough for Words: Poems & vintage photographs from California’s Central Coast
Online anthology edited by David Starkey, George Yatchisin, and Chryss Yost

Excerpt from the anthology’s introduction, written by George Yatchisin:

On Poets and Photos
Let’s face it, the thing we like best about archives is that we can feel someone has done the remembering for us. We’re all happy that old stuff exists, and even happier we don’t have to curate, care for, or store it.
Big Enough for Words challenges the notion that archives are only for attics or libraries. Writers from Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties dove deep, sifting, considering, looking. For as Susan Sontag wrote in 1977 in her brilliant On Photography monograph, “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” She forgot to add poetry.
As writers we bring all our present-day baggage to the process, of course, so be prepared for plenty of questioning of what a Santa Barbara means, and how mean it had to be to get that way. But, as ever with the California coast, there’s all that beauty, and poets can’t refuse to testify to that. And we live here, now, ourselves, so we have to be complicit.
For Sontag also wrote, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” And similarly, these poems hope to lovingly, responsibly, hold time tight, knowing, knowing, all must go.

Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art
Edited by Nancy Gifford, Chryss Yost, and George Yatchisin
Ganna Walska Lotusland, a botanical nirvana in Santa Barbara, California, has been managed organically for nearly 20 years, making it a sanctuary for over 85 species of wild birds. Besides being the garden’s allies in pollination and pest conrtrol, these wild birds bring music, color, charm, and spectacle to the garden. Lotusland’s wild birds serve as the muse for the contemporary art exhibit FLOCK: Birds on the Brink, curated by Nancy Gifford.
—Gwen L. Stauffer, former Executive Director, Lotusland
 
The Shoreline Voices Project, published by Gunpowder Press, showcases the poetic voices of the Central California Coast, including Santa Barbara and surrounding communities. Collections are created in partnership with local institutions. Rare Feathers collects poems by more than three dozen Santa Barbara area poets on the subject of birds and art, inspired by FLOCK.