Andrew Hemmert, No Longer at This Address, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025,

ISBN: 978-0-8229-6753-8, 88pp, $20.00.

Titles like “The Powerplants of Jupiter” and “To Live on Mars” suggest Andrew Hemmert’s planetary concerns in his new collection, No Longer at This Address, but the planet that most concerns him is the third one from the sun. As he writes in the latter poem, that though “I think I could live on Mars,”

                             who am I kidding,

          how could I ever abandon a world like this?

But oh, this world. Against the background of devastating hurricanes in Florida and out-of-control wildfires in Colorado (in “Eating Honey from a Canopic Jar” he writes: “I so often dream of tornados”), Hemmert considers the causes and effects. He muses in “Protestant Ephemera”:

          All the grasses with my favorite names

          are invasive, all the state birds

          are leaving their appointed offices

          for more fitting climates, and rats,

          as always, are ubiquitous as night.

Five of the thirty-two poems in No Longer at This Address are called “To the Instrument at Arecibo.” The Arecibo Observatory is located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The observatory’s main “instrument,” the Arecibo Telescope, was a thousand-foot spherical reflector. Completed in 1963, it was the world’s largest single-aperture telescope for 53 years. In 2020, two of the receiver’s support cables broke and the National Science Foundation announced that it would decommission the telescope. The telescope collapsed on December 1, 2020, and in 2022, the NSF announced the telescope would not be rebuilt. The poems are implicit elegies.

In the first, he tells of hearing about the telescope breakdown on the radio.
 

When you collapsed, I heard

a researcher on the radio refer to you

as an instrument. What are your feelings

on music? Me, I think I would be a singer

if I had the talent.

It certainly does seem an odd choice of terms, the way a policeman orders people out of their “vehicles,” and the thoughts it triggers in Hemmert are also amusing. Indeed, many of his poems begin with these idle speculations. “A Dream of Gold, Eternity, and Clownfish” starts “I was thinking of the gold in the cargo hold / of a sunken and undiscovered Spanish galleon” before going on to wonder about cryogenics and bringing the dead back to life. “Wilderness and the American Mind” similarly begins, “I was thinking of a heavy hammer compelling / something molten and malleable into shape” before meditating on survival, volcanic ash covering half the country, Colorado wildfires, forests “crumbling into smoke,” the utter and complete darkness in Mammoth Cave.

But back to the Arecibo instrument. In the next of these he speculates that Hurricane Maria, the devastating 2017 storm, may have hastened its collapse. That poem ends, “ I flew / into San Juan a year after that storm

blew through, and the airport still wore the damage—

ceilings torn open, windows missing,

some terminals closed off and powerless.

We name hurricanes and they begin to feel

like individual offenders, like living things.

Earlier in the poem Hemmert tells us he’d been “reading an article about complacency,” suggesting how we take climate change for granted at our own peril, how easily we can convince ourselves, like the dog in the burning room meme, “Everything is fine,” and put off addressing the issue until it’s too late.

Yet in another poem “To the Instrument at Arecibo” he notes that “so much of the initial interest in space travel was driven by competition with communists,” itself a wry observation about scientific inquiry. But in a later poem to the instrument, he assures us, “Instrument, I haven’t given up on the earth.”

In the final “To the Instrument at Arecibo,” while remembering witnessing a shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral, the poet muses, “Mostly I think the idea of Americans

dropping their differences and coming together in celebration

of such flight is a transparent dream, an oppressive myth.

But I almost believed it, watching that rocket go up and not explode
 

into meteors, go up and stay. I am not trying to be sentimental

but damn if it didn’t stop me from worrying for a moment,

damn if it didn’t fill me with something resembling hope.

Yes, it may be ephemeral, even a tad maudlin, but it’s nevertheless part of the equation. “Western Love Song Refusing the Apocalypse” starts out on a similarly optimistic thought:

          For me, it’s hard to believe the world could ever end

          when you’re sitting under a tree full of wild cherries

          eating a seafood bouillabaisse while honeybees

          buzz past your ears like allied biplanes on their way

          to save you.

Later in the poem he opines, “I just believe the apocalypse is / an anthropocentric concept.” He takes some comfort in the idea that the human race may be eliminated, but the universe will go on.

Still, in “North American Bison” he laments the passing of species, including “flowers that once roamed // the mountains and prairies,” specimens of which are now “displayed like a miniature ghost town circus” at the Buffalo Bill Museum. In “If I Had a Time Capsule” he writes:

          If I had a time capsule I’d put into it

          nothing, no guarantee

          anyone will be around to dig it up.

          Still, I choose the future over the past. 

In “The Senator” he writes about a three-thousand-year-old bald cypress a woman burned down “so she could see more clearly / the crystal meth she was trying to smoke.” Oy.

While much of this sounds bleak and pessimistic, in the eponymous poem that ends the collection, Andrew Hemmert assures us that “it’s not so bad here / in the country of the rest of my life,” and that may be the best any of us can hope for.

Charles Rammelkamp

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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books. His latest collection is The Trapeze Of Your Flesh (BlazeVOX Books).

hubbies ed. Jagari Mukherjee,

Hawakal Publishers, August 2025, 214 pp.

What can be learned about the marriage chambers from a poetry anthology? In hubbies published by Hawakal Publishers 54 fantastic female poets speak of husbands. These poems are intimate, direct, sometimes critical and dreamy, but always authentic. As the editor Jagari Mukherjee states in her introduction, hubbies is a “celebration of love, desire, and the myriad ways in which relationships unfold.” Mukherjee states, “Poetry, at its essence, is an exploration of human emotions, relationships, and the unchartered territories of the heart.” This critical definition provides the aesthetic for the anthology as a whole.

Some poems are richer in emotion and language than others, and there are a few surprises throughout. As an example, Rochelle Potkar’s “Henry Mendonsa” is an expose of darker underbellies in male psychology. A married man dies and his greediest secrets are uncovered. The poem reads like an obituary as if to take a moral stance on Henry’s foul psyche. The editor’s own poems reflect on loss and its malcontents. In “He Says to Lalita” she writes, “Tonight, I lie alone at the same spot. Missing you is permanence.” The stars “laughed at my loneliness” deepening her somber tone.

Most of the poems are joyful, hopeful and resonate with our deepest wishes for love and privacy. Ajanta Paul writes, “Some relationships get / stronger with time,” suggesting that many marriages succeed at bringing friendship to the connubial chamber. Menka Shivdasani’s “The Fire Within” uses allegory to cast a light on how people shape each others’ lives through love. She writes, “We are all made of unbaked clay, / hardened in pits of fire” and “Stay, stay, my love, / do not turn to mud. / The Great Potter is building / a new vessel for us / in eternity.” This dialogue reveals a sacred mystery to the reader about how relationships shape our destinies.

In poems such as Camellia Paul’s “Bijou Problemette” love is like an outcast: “My love in tatters hangs from one side. // A truant, you could have mowed my havocked heart.” In this poem, the loved one leaves a whispering hole in the soul’s energy. Paul’s following poem “Trapped” tells more as it becomes apparent these poems are about loss through death. Every love story might not end ideally. She writes, “…a trail of sand leaving my palm / and retreating to the sea.” The natural imagery borrows from classical poetic device to remind readers love is always present even when the loved one recedes.

Boby Borah’s “As I Love You” presents love as a conjoining emotion, “How can I join / My broken heart on / Your love persistently!” This conundrum initiates many relationships. Broken hearts mend anew through fresh relationships, and sometimes those relationships endure. “I have been waiting / Since an unknown past / For you only” Borah writes to her soulmate.

Many of these poems celebrate love’s artistic and mythological dimensions. “Finding You in the Classroom” by Namrata Pathak reflects on love’s miscreant tendencies: “the light to enter the alleys of an outcast’s heart” and “How many circles have we made / in search of a perfect triangle?” Love is presented in multifarious ways, not just as sentimental emotion. Sunanda Bhadra Bhattacharyya’s “My Scientist Husband” is a quirky tribute to how scientific ideas infiltrate her household love secretly.

However, these poems are not just love poems. They speak of duty, love’s trials and tribulations, how relationships unfold, yearnings even within marriages for other loves, and the stubbornness men often show their female partners, as well as their affections and humor. hubbies does not mince words or present idealizations of partners. It is a serious, bold reflection on how women view men, what they love and expect, how love delights as well as disappoints, and what darkness shrouds the light we know as love.  

Dustin Pickering

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Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote Journal, and several other publications. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and books including Salt and Sorrow. He placed in the top 100 for the erbacce prize in 2021 and 2023, and was a finalist in Adelaide Literary Journal’s first short fiction contest. He was longlisted for the Rahim Karim World Prize in 2022 and given the honor of Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace that same year. He hosts the popular interview series World Inkers Network on YouTube and co-founded World Inkers Printing and Publishing.