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Voice: Poems
Poetry. African American Studies. "Sassy and funky, serious and sly, the poems in Allison Joseph's VOICE travel through a rich and varied landscape. From childhood griefs to adult desires, the classroom to the bar, these poems cut and cajole, tackling the most serious and the most sultry with a graceful eloquence. Like a soloist who rises above the rest of the choir, the voice in these poems peals with clarity and beauty, leading us from a place of familiarity smack dab into the sublime"--Stacey Lynn Brown.
- GenresPoetry
29 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 2009
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About the author
Allison Joseph
64 books26 followersAllison Joseph (born 1967) is an American poet, editor and professor. She is author of six poetry collections, most recently, My Father's Kites: Poems (Steel Toe Books, 2010).
Born in London to parents of Jamaican heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A., and from Indiana University with an M.F.A. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and is Director of the Young Writers Workshop at SIUC, which she founded in 1999: a four-day summer program for high school students. Many of SIUC's creative writing faculty and graduate students are involved with the workshop, and the student participants come from several states. In 1995, she was one of the founding editors of Crab Orchard Review as the magazine's poetry editor and has also worked as editor-in-chief since August 2001. She lives in Carbondale, Illinois.
(from Wikipedia)
Born in London to parents of Jamaican heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A., and from Indiana University with an M.F.A. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and is Director of the Young Writers Workshop at SIUC, which she founded in 1999: a four-day summer program for high school students. Many of SIUC's creative writing faculty and graduate students are involved with the workshop, and the student participants come from several states. In 1995, she was one of the founding editors of Crab Orchard Review as the magazine's poetry editor and has also worked as editor-in-chief since August 2001. She lives in Carbondale, Illinois.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 22, 2013
Pygmalion 9 ENGL 453
Voice Review 1-14-13
When you first look at the cover of Voice: Poems by Allison Joseph, your eyes are captivated by the velvet-black background and engaged by the wood? plastic? wax? sculpture that is one of the focal points. Certain elements, however, take away from the beauty found in the cover. First—and most superficial—is the author photo on the back cover, which looks like one taken by a thirteen-year-old by herself in her bathroom. Somehow Joseph ends up looking like a preteen wanting attention from boys, or…anyone.
Once you actually get into the poems you come across those poems that do not have as much punch as you desire…the ones which lack a sort of nuance (see “Fear of a Performance Poet,” “Knitting,” and “Something About Hotel Rooms”). Once a complexity-loving brain gets past these aspects of Voice, however, what of substance can be found between the covers?
The content of Voice fits in with arguments both national and ones found in universities. First of all, this is a collection of feminist poems, and so fits into a national discourse that was vamped up in the seventies. The first poem that has feminist overtones is “Full Meal Deal.” Here Joseph makes a pun out of the popular song “Milkshake” by pretending to take the sexually-loaded word at face-value. This increases the ludicrousness of comparing a woman’s body to a Milkshake and forces the reader to look at the type of words used for women and sexuality. Perhaps, in America, we too easily let women be compared to sweets or treats to be delighted in and in this way objectify them.
Joseph picks up this thread again in the poem “Don’t.” Here, Joseph shows that women in America are often compared to sweets, saying “Don’t be fingering my sugar / unless you want to taste my salt.” She argues that women are more than just pleasantries, that they are real humans. They too experience the complete range of emotions—from dismal sorrow to manic joy.
Here, however, you find a contradiction with Joseph. She writes two poems that point out that women are more than just superficial confectionaries, yet she takes a picture of herself in which she looks like a woman that, characteristically, is sad and unhappy due to her internalization of society’s objectification of women. She looks like those women on facebook who are always putting up glam-photos of themselves dolled up to their eyes in glitter and at the same time are posting self-deprecating statuses such as, “Oh my God! My hour at the gym yesterday did nothing!” or “I’m so stupid for just eating 25 cookies in a row!” I wonder why she couldn’t have had her Marley-loving husband take her photo. He seems like a nice guy.
This collection also fits in with arguments that university students and staff espouse across the country: that current rules of tenure enable professors to develop apathy and self-righteousness. Joseph has obviously encountered a few of these unfortunate souls that are trapped in oppressive belief-patterns. We see her frustration in her pantoum “Professor Inscrutable” when she writes, “He thinks you’ll learn a lifetime’s worth of text / in seminars that meet just once a week.” The professor she writes of seems to believe that students are capable of doing an impossible amount of work—an easy mistake to make as self-righteousness clouds judgment.
The form of Joseph’s poems captures the imagination of the contemporary poetry community. Most of her poems do not follow traditional forms of poetry, and so she falls right into the rebelliousness poetic line of sticking it to the establishment. Although Joseph largely departs from tradition, her poems are aesthetically-pleasing to the eye on the page. Many poems, including, “Fear of a Performance Poet,” “Voice,” and “Emergency Librarian” have stanzas of three or four lines each and do not follow traditional form. Thanks to the handy tool of the contemporary poet—enjambment—she is able to turn the lines in these poems so they don’t rhyme or necessarily end in sentences but still fall into soothing visuospatial patterns. This allows Joseph to be freed from constraints of end rhymes and end punctuation and to present a polished-looking piece to her audience.
Although Voice can be read as a feminist text, it departs from other texts in this realm in that it is only subtly feministic. Of twenty-five, only three poems are overtly “don’t touch my body without asking—yes, let’s stop this habit of 250,000 years, guys.” There is even one poem—“Tourist Attraction”—in which Joseph seems to be freely inviting a man in to revel in her physical beauties, hardly the cocky piece to be put in a text that would set down a firm line. All this, however, is refreshing: feminism can simply be a theme-thread throughout a collection of poetry, not the point of every poem. Perhaps subtlety would win more readers over to the cause of equality between the sexes than shoving the arguments down the readers’ throats. What is that story again? The one when the wind tries real hard to get a guy to take off his coat but it fails, but then the sunshine comes out and the guy takes his coat off just like *SNAP* that, and then he decides to go get a cup-cake with tons of frosting on it and then goes dancing in that one club? Yeah. Joseph’s poems kind of make me reminisce on that one.
It is Joseph’s arguments, then, that redeem this collection of poems with the contradictory author’s photo. I do not recommend this a read if you are looking for chunks of mysticism that will take you into Rumi’s office. If you want, however, a brash and defiant commentary on America’s treatment of women and unhappy professors in universities, pick Voice up, flip through the pages in front of your face so you can get that fresh-chapbook smell, and fold into your favorite couch.
Voice Review 1-14-13
When you first look at the cover of Voice: Poems by Allison Joseph, your eyes are captivated by the velvet-black background and engaged by the wood? plastic? wax? sculpture that is one of the focal points. Certain elements, however, take away from the beauty found in the cover. First—and most superficial—is the author photo on the back cover, which looks like one taken by a thirteen-year-old by herself in her bathroom. Somehow Joseph ends up looking like a preteen wanting attention from boys, or…anyone.
Once you actually get into the poems you come across those poems that do not have as much punch as you desire…the ones which lack a sort of nuance (see “Fear of a Performance Poet,” “Knitting,” and “Something About Hotel Rooms”). Once a complexity-loving brain gets past these aspects of Voice, however, what of substance can be found between the covers?
The content of Voice fits in with arguments both national and ones found in universities. First of all, this is a collection of feminist poems, and so fits into a national discourse that was vamped up in the seventies. The first poem that has feminist overtones is “Full Meal Deal.” Here Joseph makes a pun out of the popular song “Milkshake” by pretending to take the sexually-loaded word at face-value. This increases the ludicrousness of comparing a woman’s body to a Milkshake and forces the reader to look at the type of words used for women and sexuality. Perhaps, in America, we too easily let women be compared to sweets or treats to be delighted in and in this way objectify them.
Joseph picks up this thread again in the poem “Don’t.” Here, Joseph shows that women in America are often compared to sweets, saying “Don’t be fingering my sugar / unless you want to taste my salt.” She argues that women are more than just pleasantries, that they are real humans. They too experience the complete range of emotions—from dismal sorrow to manic joy.
Here, however, you find a contradiction with Joseph. She writes two poems that point out that women are more than just superficial confectionaries, yet she takes a picture of herself in which she looks like a woman that, characteristically, is sad and unhappy due to her internalization of society’s objectification of women. She looks like those women on facebook who are always putting up glam-photos of themselves dolled up to their eyes in glitter and at the same time are posting self-deprecating statuses such as, “Oh my God! My hour at the gym yesterday did nothing!” or “I’m so stupid for just eating 25 cookies in a row!” I wonder why she couldn’t have had her Marley-loving husband take her photo. He seems like a nice guy.
This collection also fits in with arguments that university students and staff espouse across the country: that current rules of tenure enable professors to develop apathy and self-righteousness. Joseph has obviously encountered a few of these unfortunate souls that are trapped in oppressive belief-patterns. We see her frustration in her pantoum “Professor Inscrutable” when she writes, “He thinks you’ll learn a lifetime’s worth of text / in seminars that meet just once a week.” The professor she writes of seems to believe that students are capable of doing an impossible amount of work—an easy mistake to make as self-righteousness clouds judgment.
The form of Joseph’s poems captures the imagination of the contemporary poetry community. Most of her poems do not follow traditional forms of poetry, and so she falls right into the rebelliousness poetic line of sticking it to the establishment. Although Joseph largely departs from tradition, her poems are aesthetically-pleasing to the eye on the page. Many poems, including, “Fear of a Performance Poet,” “Voice,” and “Emergency Librarian” have stanzas of three or four lines each and do not follow traditional form. Thanks to the handy tool of the contemporary poet—enjambment—she is able to turn the lines in these poems so they don’t rhyme or necessarily end in sentences but still fall into soothing visuospatial patterns. This allows Joseph to be freed from constraints of end rhymes and end punctuation and to present a polished-looking piece to her audience.
Although Voice can be read as a feminist text, it departs from other texts in this realm in that it is only subtly feministic. Of twenty-five, only three poems are overtly “don’t touch my body without asking—yes, let’s stop this habit of 250,000 years, guys.” There is even one poem—“Tourist Attraction”—in which Joseph seems to be freely inviting a man in to revel in her physical beauties, hardly the cocky piece to be put in a text that would set down a firm line. All this, however, is refreshing: feminism can simply be a theme-thread throughout a collection of poetry, not the point of every poem. Perhaps subtlety would win more readers over to the cause of equality between the sexes than shoving the arguments down the readers’ throats. What is that story again? The one when the wind tries real hard to get a guy to take off his coat but it fails, but then the sunshine comes out and the guy takes his coat off just like *SNAP* that, and then he decides to go get a cup-cake with tons of frosting on it and then goes dancing in that one club? Yeah. Joseph’s poems kind of make me reminisce on that one.
It is Joseph’s arguments, then, that redeem this collection of poems with the contradictory author’s photo. I do not recommend this a read if you are looking for chunks of mysticism that will take you into Rumi’s office. If you want, however, a brash and defiant commentary on America’s treatment of women and unhappy professors in universities, pick Voice up, flip through the pages in front of your face so you can get that fresh-chapbook smell, and fold into your favorite couch.
January 15, 2013
In her chapbook, Voice, Allison Joseph writes, “I love / the motion of words through air, / sound waves punctuated by breath.” The truth of this statement is evident throughout the twenty-five poems that make up this collection. Whether Joseph is writing about poetry, women, academics, or domestic activities, her poems reflect a careful consideration about how they sound read aloud.
An example of Joseph’s language at its best is in the poem, “Something About Hotel Rooms.” In this poem, the narrator explains how hotel rooms facilitates her writing, how “something about // a room for rent and me alone makes words / elusive at other times, other ours, come // tumbling forth, inky on scraps of hotel / stationary, backs of take-out menus” (6). This rhythmic language is also used effectively in “Fear of a Performance Poet” and “Voice”: “Ice / under your fingertips, rage under // your eyelids, she drizzles salt in the cuts / she has scored in the flesh of each / and every one of your backs” and “consider its registers, / its hues, its tonal acrobatics, / love of syncopation and lullabies” (3, 4). These poems combine imaginative language with a straightforward, conversational tone. In addition, Joseph crafts her sentences with very calculated pauses that make the poems ebb and flow at various paces, compelling the reader to speak the lines aloud. It is clear that Joseph considers how her poems sound spoken into the air as well as how they read on the page.
Despite the vividness of Joseph’s language in numerous poems, there are many poems in which the tone becomes too conversational; conversational to the point that the poetry becomes lackluster, and gives the elusion that the poems could have been transcribed straight and unedited from a person’s conversation. This occurs in both “Pedestrian’s Blues” and “Professor Apathy.” In “Pedestrian’s Blues,” there is a painful simplicity and lack of creative language: “Please don’t run me over with your big red car; / slow down and give a woman walking room. / My feet may be tired, but I’ve traveled this far” (10). Of course, simplicity can be effective within poetry, but in this poem, the simple, conversational diction and syntax is not successful. Rather than being compelling, it comes across as dull and dry. “Professor Apathy” is conversational to the point of seeming like a paragraph—a very rough, unedited paragraph—that was simply enjambed. It reads more as a rant that wasn’t fully refined into a poem: Because / I don’t care now that I’ve got tenure. Not / that I did before, but I don’t need to pretend // anymore” (22). Many of Joseph’s poems display very careful craft, but the reader is distracted from them by poems like the ones described above that lack innovative language and refinement.
Voice is full of compelling linguistic moments, and Joseph clearly displays a talent for observation and imagery. But that this talent occurs in moments is just the problem—occasionally the reader is exposed to flashes of vivid language and compelling description, but these flashes have a difficult time converging to create a strong, powerful collection of poems.
An example of Joseph’s language at its best is in the poem, “Something About Hotel Rooms.” In this poem, the narrator explains how hotel rooms facilitates her writing, how “something about // a room for rent and me alone makes words / elusive at other times, other ours, come // tumbling forth, inky on scraps of hotel / stationary, backs of take-out menus” (6). This rhythmic language is also used effectively in “Fear of a Performance Poet” and “Voice”: “Ice / under your fingertips, rage under // your eyelids, she drizzles salt in the cuts / she has scored in the flesh of each / and every one of your backs” and “consider its registers, / its hues, its tonal acrobatics, / love of syncopation and lullabies” (3, 4). These poems combine imaginative language with a straightforward, conversational tone. In addition, Joseph crafts her sentences with very calculated pauses that make the poems ebb and flow at various paces, compelling the reader to speak the lines aloud. It is clear that Joseph considers how her poems sound spoken into the air as well as how they read on the page.
Despite the vividness of Joseph’s language in numerous poems, there are many poems in which the tone becomes too conversational; conversational to the point that the poetry becomes lackluster, and gives the elusion that the poems could have been transcribed straight and unedited from a person’s conversation. This occurs in both “Pedestrian’s Blues” and “Professor Apathy.” In “Pedestrian’s Blues,” there is a painful simplicity and lack of creative language: “Please don’t run me over with your big red car; / slow down and give a woman walking room. / My feet may be tired, but I’ve traveled this far” (10). Of course, simplicity can be effective within poetry, but in this poem, the simple, conversational diction and syntax is not successful. Rather than being compelling, it comes across as dull and dry. “Professor Apathy” is conversational to the point of seeming like a paragraph—a very rough, unedited paragraph—that was simply enjambed. It reads more as a rant that wasn’t fully refined into a poem: Because / I don’t care now that I’ve got tenure. Not / that I did before, but I don’t need to pretend // anymore” (22). Many of Joseph’s poems display very careful craft, but the reader is distracted from them by poems like the ones described above that lack innovative language and refinement.
Voice is full of compelling linguistic moments, and Joseph clearly displays a talent for observation and imagery. But that this talent occurs in moments is just the problem—occasionally the reader is exposed to flashes of vivid language and compelling description, but these flashes have a difficult time converging to create a strong, powerful collection of poems.
May 7, 2011
A very short collection of poems from Joseph. Good variety of topics, very easy to read. Will probably read more.
June 3, 2011
A fine chapbook of Allison Joseph -- although not my favorite collection, I liked the fun (but with serious overtones) poked at popular culture and images.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews