I digress.  I wanted to send poems out to 10 journals per month this year, and this past month, I barely made that goal.  Do I not know enough journals?  Am I not simultaneously submitting enough?  Am I not writing enough poems to send out?  I’m not sure, but I promised myself that I would be more aggressive this year with submissions, so I need to work on this number.

Other number news?  Three acceptances and one rejection.  And many, many journals that still have my poems.  Plus, I did end up reading 10 poetry collections this past month (full length collections and chapbooks).  Like I mentioned before, it’s going to be a great year in poetry!

A final note for the month: for those who preordered my new chapbook, publishing schedule is on time, so Wearing Heels should be in your mailbox very soon!

Smith’s The Naming of Strays is divided into sections according to different definitions of the word “stray” .  What follows in each individual section are poems that loosely embrace those definitions.   For instance, in the last section, the definition is the following: “stray: an animal that has strayed or wandered away from its flock, home, or owner.”   With this meaning in mind, one might expect that a stray, perhaps an alley cat, may at least make an appearance, but instead, Smith chooses to adapt the idea of a “stray” to human narrators who seemingly have strayed from past lives, past homes and past loves.  For example, in “Closet Space” the narrator stares at her clothes, deciding that her closet is “plagiarized from other lives.”  In another poem, “On Learning to Be Okay” a speaker muses that she does not think “about spring/or how it feels/to be loved” but instead, chooses to find some solace in making “a thick pea soup” and listening “to the radiator/as it bangs/its way to life.”

Some readers of Smith’s book may consider her poems a bit quirky — and certainly, with poems like “Winter” she is approaching old subjects with a fresh voice. In this particular poem, she personifies the season of winter as “a pony-tailed redhead/displeased with the undoing of her work.”  Winter, in this work, is hard and gritty:  “She lights a cigarette, taps the ashes on the floor.”  Even when she speaks, she is all sass, saying, “Spring is my bitch.  She’ll come/but only when I tell her to.”

 But what I admire most about Smith is the way that she equates a physical place with abstract emotions.  She travels from the Midwest, to eastern New York, to Mississippi — one may think that this book is a collection of journeys, and indeed it’s easy to see the wandering of both emotion and physical meanderings.   For instance, in “On Being Erroneously Called a New Yorker Again” the speaker struggles with the meaning of the relationship between physical place and personal identity.  In another poem, “Index of the Midwest” the speaker muses about the idea of escape when she says “If only there had been an escape hatch/in August’s shorn field.  One that falls/forever into this flat/and desperate black.”   And in still another poem, “Driving Next to Two Men I’ve Slept With” the narrator muses about personal pasts and tension in a single road trip.

I’ve been reading a lot of “first books” the past few months, so it’s great that I finally got to read a “second” book — and of course, with Erin Elizabeth Smith’s work, I will look forward to the third, and fourth, and fifth….

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the founder and managing editor of Sundress Publications.   More information can be found about Gold Wake Press here.

Still, I’m looking forward to finding the semester’s routine again.  Somehow, this week, I managed to revise three poems and write a brand new poem! I’m trying to keep a target goal of submitting to at least ten journals a month, and so far, I have only submitted to five, so I know I have a lot of work to do before the end of January.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about a recent blog post by poet Amanda Auchter.  In her post, Amanda talks about the motto of her MFA program which asked its students to “Read 100 Books. Write One.”  I think the program wants its students to read 100 books in the course of their studies — which would be a bit difficult.  When I was in grad school, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t read 100 books per year or even in the two years I was in the program. 

However, now I easily read 100 books per year.  In fact, last year, I read over 200 books.  How many of these books are poetry books, you may ask?  I looked at my list (I keep track of titles) and it appears that I read 90 poetry books (including chapbooks and anthologies) last year — about 40 of them were published in 2011.  I would love to set a new goal for myself and read 100 poetry books in 2012 — but that would be difficult, especially since in January (so far) I have only read four! Still, even though I said that I don’t want to make too many resolutions this year, I would like to have the overall goal to write at least one poetry book review per month and post this review here. 

Look for January’s review in the next week or so!