For Today: Poems

by Carolyn Hembree, Ava Leavell Haymon (series_editor)

A revelatory collection of poems set in the Gulf South, Carolyn Hembree’s For Today chronicles the experience of a woman who becomes a mother shortly after her father’s death and struggles to raise her child amid private and public turmoil. Written in closed and nonce forms that give way to the field composition of the maximalist title poem, the work explores grief, rage, and love in a community vulnerable to Anthropocene climate disasters. Through relationships with her daughter, neighbors, friends, ancestors, other poets (living and dead), and the earth, the speaker is freed to accept and celebrate her own perishability.

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 2024

About the author

Carolyn Hembree's third poetry collection, For Today, was published by LSU Press. She has been awarded the Trio Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, an ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents, and grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my review of Hembree’s first book, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, I wrote that I didn’t know enough “to understand, much less review” it. Though some of the meaning in For You eludes me, and a reread would be in order (as with most poetry), I understand it much more than the other.

This is just as brilliant as her previous work, but my familiarity with its world helped with my connection and comprehension—from the early references of a Violent Femmes song (as she mourns her beloved father, who has died while she is pregnant) to her daily life in New Orleans as poet-mother.

With her child in school, she writes, gets interrupted, and fulfills mundane tasks, such as signing a permission slip for shooting-drills. On her way to pick up her “kiddo” from school, she describes the nuances of neighborhoods. She and child then go about the rest of their day pointing out, based on their letter of the day, all that “exists.”

[ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank u carolyn hembree for inventing daily walks

[Melissa Remark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to hear THE Carolyn Hembree read from the title poem, which is the ultimate way to consume these delights, but reading For Today one poem at a time is a close second to that experience. The flora, the fauna, the mechanical whirs, the sweet and caustic scents, and whimsical (sometimes tragic) fragments of memory all swirl into a visceral and lingering read. Do yourself a favor and enjoy this book on a sweaty porch with a cold glass of iced tea.

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title piece presents a phenomenology of being a poet, an immanent exploration of its eidos zoe, as the speaker on her morning walk probes the limits of her own interior through notes to self, draft haikus, translations of Rilke and Inge Christensen, speaking things that can't be written (and yet of course are written), and so on. It's something like Benjamin's flaneur wandering through Paris, but here it's post-Ida, post-pandemic New Orleans, by "all the raised houses" (29) from Katrina. She wonders "what do i know of anyone's inside lives?" (31). That knowledge is exposed as a "neighborhood still alive inside me" (59) as she strolls through the neighborhood.

The focus is often on parenting, both upward and downward from the speaker, seemingly about the speaker's own parents and own child--and yet "poetry is not memoir" (39, 59, 69); rather "poetry is a / scintilla of doubt" (39, 46, 72, 78), a deconstruction of "forgetting" (56-57, 58), if the text of the poem constitutes a remembrance, such as how professor Derrida suggests that writing is a prosthesis. As the speaker advises, "I remember" (61).

The text storms off the page but shines even more in a live reading. Hembree presents well and should be heard as well as read. This text also contains some lagniappe writings from years past.

[Mark Folse · Rating 5 out of 5]

The opening crown sonnet is so tightly wrought one more turn of the winding key and it would explode. They set a pattern--parent, daughter, parent daughter--that echoes all through this book.

The poems that follow between that and the title poem--a daughter born, a heart threatened, a funky groove-- are tonic to the opening poems outpouring of grief. Then August 29 2005 jumps out to disrupt your idyll. It is one of the finest things on the Federal Flood not written by me. (Braggart).

The title poem is an Odyssey of New Orleans for another sort of warrior always struggling to be home. No guidebook (including Williams and Hearn and Whitman) could better lure you to walk the streets of New Orleans, to stray away from the bright lights and beer into neighborhoods threatened and timeless. It is encyclopedic in its botany and geography, it's catalog of streets and sights and sounds. It says here I've read it, but I've clearly just begun with this book.

[J Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody writes or sounds like Carolyn Hembree. This book is a must read.

[Daniel Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

You must let the sonic resonance of Hembree’s language wash through you while you sit with her sharp, lively, sensorial poems deeply seasoned by life in the Gulf South. It’s okay—and perhaps preferable—to get lost in FOR TODAY’s phantasmagoria, mirroring the poems’ protagonist’s navigation of the liminal minefield between the death of a parent and nurturing the life a child. On ambition alone, FOR TODAY is a book I could never write, and thankfully, Hembree’s audacity has delivered to us readers a journey that challenges, delights, and awes.

[toby :D · Rating 3 out of 5]

not my cup of tea, lots of good lines i liked tho. i love new orleans

[Andy Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, complex, lyrical, riveting.

[John Berner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found a copy of this in a Little Free Library on Fern Street, it was signed and had a postcard inside which said the poems were about the neighborhood. Couldn't pass that up!

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louisiana poet Carolyn Hembree stuns with her poetry collection For Today with a cover image that calls to mind the New Orleans houses having been built on higher elevation to withstand floods, and this house surrounded by the events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (some of the poems address this).

Each word that the poet has chosen here is a precious commodity. Sometimes a single sentence reads like a masterpiece. It takes immense skill to convey so much emotion in so few words, and Hembree is a virtuoso of that.

Her poems are so distinctly capturing the energy of New Orleans and Louisiana and though they seem ordinary, the poems speak volumes.

The troubling family dynamics of many of the poems came through strongly as a theme. Another poem traces a line of heritage from all of New Orleans's Yellow Fever epidemics to the ongoing covid19 pandemic and Hembree captures the sorrow as well as loss so acutely.

I don't know if this review can do justice to how immensely good and evocative this collection is, so I will say it is one of those books that only comes along once in a generation and that readers need to reach up and pull this book down from the sky like a star, shield it in a glass case, and marvel at its beauty: to re-read it multiple times and on each occasion, find new meaning. Hembree is one of the most gifted poets of our time and deserves national awards.

[Brad Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I can fully express how much I love 'For Today,' the brilliant long poem by Carolyn Hembree. I can tell you it's a masterpiece. That's true. I can tell you it's not really like anything you've read before, that it is perfectly written, that it is profoundly moving (and joyful, and funny, and strange)--all true. But none of that really captures what I love about it: its thoroughgoing vulnerability, its extraordinarily brave and profound commitment to the full range of meanings in its title, its mysteries, the intimate and immersive experience it offers of self in place and time. It is that rare thing: a work of genius that springs from the writer's heart to fill up yours.

It's also a marvelously constructed book, with the poems in the first half preparing the reader for the title poem. They are also extraordinary, and your understanding of them may deepen once you've read the whole book--a pleasure I highly recommend.

[Brooke Champagne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carolyn Hembree is an extraordinary poet. Her work is propulsive, takes surprising turns and always lands with a satisfying grace. In For Today, she writes beautifully about motherhood and daughterhood, New Orleans, and life itself. A wonderful book.

[Dorinda Wegener · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Today is a long lyrical masterpiece. Hembree’s narrator walks the reader through neighborhoods, mothering, music, myth. With magnificent craftwork and sonics, the pages turn easy and you’re left spellbound, wanting more!

[Adele Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredible book of poetry--smart, sharp, tender... Hembree has the Gulf Coast chops! Holy smokes, I adore this book.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Today is immersed in the geography of the Gulf South, and the speaker’s home in New Orleans. It opens with the sonnet crown “Some Measures”: “Less of, less often, I see you still, free head / now gourd in wind, now bauble in crib light/ my baby” and is interwoven with the speaker’s “swain song fading,” her grief in losing her father. We follow a mercurial speaker, as she traverses dying, substance abuse, madness and pregnancy, to increasingly freer forms, ending with “For Today.” In Rossouw’s words, Hembree’s field composition opens on “any spring day” in a New Orleans neighborhood and progressively opens itself in a “political gesture of democratic welcome and as a formal move.” “[poetry is not memoir]”, Hembree writes, and we feel free to follow her as the bell strikes, in recurrent dreams, and ask, “What part do I play today?”
This is an introduction to an interview that first appeared in Tupelo Quarterly.