BookReview: Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024.Peter J. Harris, Ed. Altadena, Ca: Golden Foothills Press, 2024. ISBN 978-1-7372481-2-5.
Michael Sedano
One of the nation's foremost poetry communities populates the northwesternmost corner of California's San Gabriel Valley, Altadena 91001. A pair of Co-Poets Laureate serve two-year terms organizing readings, workshops, events, culminating in a published anthology. This year's book, the thirteenth in the series, features 121 poets with 177 thoughts, covering nearly 300 pages of Golden Foothill Press'
Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024 (link).
Editor Peter J. Harris welcomed hundreds of submissions in the process of selecting works in section I of the three-section collection.
In a remarkable publication schedule necessitated by the term of service of Altadena Poets Laureate, Harris and Golden Foothills Press publisher, Thelma T. Reyna, had only seven months from open call to printed copies and produced a magnum opus of contemporary U.S. poetry.
The anthology has three divisions. Part One publishes poets from the open call. Part two shares poems from an
ekphrastic project of the Laureates in 2023 (link). Part three collects work from a cross-generational workshop, and comes with an introduction by Co-Poet Laureate Carla R. Sameth.
Harris knows most of the poets in the collection but he relates an editorial anomia regarding poet names, selecting poems that move him personally. In his preface, Harris says he selects poems "that call to me." He chooses poems "that stop time in their own ways". The anthology collects numerous Poets Laureate, and awardees of American Book Award and Pushcart Prize, as well as numerous debut authors.
Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024 represents a nationwide set of voices with southern California artists in the majority. The anthology's roster of poets reflects the region's diversity with work across ethnic, age, and gender lines. There's an extensive fourth section, not of poems but biographies of poets. After reading a particularly provocative thought, readers will find perspective by reading a poet's one-paragraph file.
Harris' "Foreword: Community Without Conformity," and Robin D.G. Kelley,'s "Introduction" will give readers keen insight into the process of selecting, and the critic's understanding of how the poems go together and fall into recognizable ways of looking at a world. Carla Rachel Sameth's "Places We Call Home: Cross-generational Ode to the Land Workshops", frames selections.
Poetry itself will deal in universals, a reader expects to read poems about love, sex, reverence, anguish, heartbreak, politics, anger, separation, death. Anthologies collect these from the submissions that reached the Editor, que no? Submission aside, readers expect unique takes on familiar themes and for the Editor to collect stuff that makes sense, together as a collection, stuff that makes sense individually.
In this, Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024 exceed all expectations, offering readers a definitive portrait of contemporary poetry right now. It's like a Norton Anthology of contemporary United States poetry in 2023 and 2024 as seen from Altadena, California where Poets Laureate have been doing this for almost twenty years, and publishing for thirteen.
Robin D.G. Kelley's "Introduction" views the collection as a stream of consciousness where memory flows through to link poems into themes reflecting the poet's sense of purpose and aesthetic. Dig into the collection and see for yourselves.
Poets appear in alphabetical order, which adds to a reader's enjoyment discovering one's own organization of style and theme. Consider the richness exemplified in the first ten titles by seven poets: "May You Rest in My Love", "Shared Magic"; "Super Duper Toxic Masculinity"; "Saltwater Woman"; "Oh Palestine", "The Many Faces of La Llorona"; "Tin Man"; "Streamlight", "Letter to My First String Quartet, Live and Up Close"; "Star Catcher."
Kelley's suggestion that memory links these work strikes me as right on. Many poets possess memories built over years. More than mere memory, their poems reflect maturity and long years' experience living those universalities. Mature poets--old people, not-young poets--write poems with strong understanding of completion, finality, absence. Dying and death offer no mystery. Here, poems express resignation instead of regret, acceptance instead of anguish.
Two dementia and dying poems especially move me for their ethos and implicit strength, "The Essence of Us. Thirteen Profiles from Memory Care," by Linda Kraai, and Beatriz De Necochea's "Endless Angst". Each voice accepts what is, and finds balance in desolate landscapes.
The quartet poem delighted my own memory. People who dig chamber music probably share the childlike delight the poet breathes into the words.
Readers will enjoy what I call the "vocabulary poems," for example, "An Experiment in Poetic Physics" evokes "Baroclinic vorticity / (swirly plasma)", also, "WIMPS / (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles)". Turn to the biographies to learn the poet is an astrophysicist in her published poem debut. Elline Lipkin sends me to Webster's for "haint blue".
In a cornucopia of poetic delight such as
Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024, it's fruitless to catalog all the themes and attempt some forced-selection list of the best poems in the book. According to Peter J. Harris, here are the best poems of 2023-2024, and I, for one, take his word for it. I was privileged to read a draft and contributed a blurb to the back cover, so I was fortunate to spend many hours inside these pages.
Critical thinkers like people who read poetry, or would like to, will want to make up their own mind. Independent booksellers will order your copy from the book's distributor. Wise buyers will order publisher-direct, whose pre-order discount has just expired. Lástima.
Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024, at just $19.00 publisher-direct, is poetry's best bargain.
http://www.goldenfoothillspress.com 
Editor Peter J. Harris welcomed hundreds of submissions in the process of selecting works in section I of the three-section collection. 
2 comments:
Thank you for this insightful review, for capturing this anthology's spirit and illuminating the tremendous job that Editor and Poet Laureate Peter J. Harris has done. Peter's poetic artistry and vision have given the poetry community writ large an enduring gift. Our thanks to La Bloga for elucidating the wondrous impact of this gift.
Michael, thank you for this great post and thank you Thelma for all the work you put into this anthology I look forward to reading.
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