Rachael
Ikins and “A Handbook for Alchemists”
Rachael Ikins is an award-winning poet, artist and photographer from New York who has authored and illustrated books in many genres.
She has multiple nominations for the CNY Book Award and Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and won the 2018 Independent Book Award for her full-length poetry collection, “Just Two Girls (Clare Songbirds Publishing)”
She is also the author of “A Woman With Three Elbows (Raw Earth Ink 2022)” “For Kate a Love Story in Four Parts” and “Eating The Sun” both from Clare Songbirds Publishing.
She started writing poetry at age 14 under the guidance of a gifted English teacher. Now she has the honor of being a judge in a poetry competition in memory of that teacher!
A graduate of Syracuse University with a degree in Child and Family Studies Ikins worked as a sign language interpreter for deaf students ages K-12 and also as a veterinary technician before devoting herself full time to writing.
She founded and moderated the feature/open mic event bimonthly Monday Night Poetry at a sushi Blues 2008-2011.
She received an honorarium from Finishing Line Press for a week long workshop in Lismore Castle, Lismore, Ireland 2014. While there she worked with Patricia Smith, Jane Smiley, Ethel Rohan and others. In June 2014 she juried into Marge Piercy’s Poetry Intensive workshop, Cape Cod.
She has published 2 chapbooks with Foothills Publishing, 3 chapbooks with Finishing Line Press, a young adult fantasy with Log Cabin Books, and then four books —a full length, a chapbook, a children’s book and a memoir Eating the Sun that is mixed genre, so far with Clare Songbirds Publishing House as well as being lead editor for an anthology The Brave, and now one full length collection with Cyberwit.
This summer 2024 Clare Songbirds is releasing Rachael’s second young reader book. The first is titled “A Piglet for David” which came out during Covid. The sequel is titled The Magic Blankie.”
Her work appears in journals such as the Muddy River Poetry Review, Owl Light, Literary Turning Points, The Mason Street Review, Broadkill Review, Fly on the Wall Press UK, Synkroniciti, the Red Wheelbarrow, S/tick, Dragon Poet Review, Indigo Blue online UK, Cider Press Review, Syracuse Poster Project, The Healing Muse, The Pen Woman Magazine, Avocet, Moonstone Press, anthologies from IndieBlue Press, The Brave (Clare Songbirds Publishing House), Spontaneity Review, Ireland, and many others.
Her visual art and photography have won prizes and have hung in galleries from CNY to Washington DC and appeared on local television stations and on many journal covers. She is a former member of NLAPW and currently of Just Poets. She works as associate/contributing editor at Clare Songbirds Publishing House.
Rachael also spends significant time mentoring emerging poets and helping them achieve published works.
She has appeared on the New York Parrot Literary Review YouTube and in other interviews.
Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson
Rachael Ikins and I met on Facebook before I even read a word of her poetry and instantly we connected. We have the same poetry book publisher and we both love cats and chocolates.
After reading her poetry, I am in awe of Rachael Ikins imagination and individualism. She is a word wizard in a whirlwind and her imagery is fresh and exquisite. Her voice has incredible range whether she is writing about fairy tales, nature or her personal life. She is raw, gritty and isn’t afraid to go where others do not dare.
I was hooked when I read these poems:
When You Know You’re Old Enough to Die
The voice of the wind, ocean
combing trees’ dark fingers.
Vibrates my skin. Flights of geese
lift off scrim, Star Lake.
Old pillows shaped like burnt marshmallows leak dreams,
cast-off hairs of chrysalis-you,
humming night after night, scents of
sour sleeps, lips loosened, drooled
tree-rings of story.
This is the place you carry the poems, this soft bitter pregnancy hidden among
hole-y teeshirts and spilled piles of socks.
Old pillows turn inside out. Venus watches. Frost. Poetry crunches in the molars of winter. December licks where ice thins, the danger zone. Memories of 2001, your last Christmas in the first house, before everything collapsed.
Wrap around wings’ autumnal musk
and must. Now fly, hands wintering cuticles like stems, splinters clutch at air, make no mistake, God takes the one
you can’t live without
every single time.
In Another Life
You dye your hair, lift your breasts planted in that wife-beater shirt, the organ that was no real organ. You pressed a button, it would karaoke by itself while you complained about the guitar you couldn’t play, the one you no longer have that you made your ex-husband buy when you were pretending to be a cowgirl.
I slept on the living room floor beneath the maple where the hawk waited for food.
A hen turkey brought her chicks, so close to suburbia, strip-malls and a six lane highway.
The cat and dogs curled into my curves, touch-points of warmth in this cold house. With overhead light fixture like a large bronze-nippled breast, the house was a Picasso woman, breasts askew, one collected in an aluminum colander.
Not Picasso, Goya, where gas infiltrated the nightmare we breathed, lit to bloom by your cigarette lighter, all the stormed doors slamming.
I went back once after I had packed the animals, rescued by my mother, dark autumn sky. My family tasted your bitter.
The panic of walking into a space where I had lived as if I was/was not real, the caricature of you swarmed me on the couch under the picture of a cat on a bed in a beach house. I was in love with the idea of love, filled with grief for the juice of him, how he’d treasured me, unable to untangle the complicated yarn-snarl of how that trailed off.
Why do you dye your hair? I say, it’s not like everyone doesn’t know it’s fake.
The last time I saw you, you had let it grow out white.
A purple suitcase sprouted wings, blundered through the basement air, trying to escape.
How hard those implanted, beautiful breasts: at once, inviting then repelling fingers and lips.
When we stayed with your daughter in San Francisco, when I won that Poetry prize, coming home from dinner at an Ethiopian place where we tore off shared pieces of bread, a homeless man, erased by a tarp, rose up in front of our feet. Imagine sleeping on exhaust-stinking concrete, on gum and cigarette butts, where anyone could invade. Imagine building a boundary with the mind alone.
I tried so hard. I worked lifting each brick until sweat stippled my face, but I couldn’t do it, any more than the child could escape the cage. That moment, no angel is coming, when my hands touched the cool, smooth door knob, and I braced my eyes for all the light I had forgotten was out there. Inhaled petrichor, cut my skin on the shatter of moon, cloud bellies’ thunder, that was freedom. I followed the dogs out into it, clutching a wadded wrapper of a Hershey bar in my pocket.
In “A Handbook for Alchemists,” I was swept up in a rich fantasy world meshed with the harshness of reality that I couldn’t put the book down until I’d read it from cover to cover. Her work is a cross between Milne, Poe and the brothers Grimm with her own unique style.
Here’s some of my favorite poems from that book:
The Bird Watcher
The sharp-shin poses for my camera high as a kite, escorted by triple crow, the sycamore. I zoom in, image blurs. Crow says, “Time to go. Off with you!” Hawk skips across the road, forgetting for a moment or not translating me in my large feet and flap of hands so unlike wings. A child spreads arms, pirouettes around and around the leaf pile. Small infinitesimal mushrooms tiptoe through leaf mast digesting grief, a thousand fragrant griefs. Maple leaves print their perfect paws, memories into tarry pavement. When did this happen? A possum disemboweled itself on a truck fender, a red fox dangles flat off the bridge, some car reminded him he doesn’t have wings either. I hear foxes singing to each other in lust down the path marked by centennial sugar maples one with neither leaf nor branch, just a sculpted memory shagged in bark and woodpecker excavations. Of these an owl makes a home, eyes slanted half-mast, is it with wisdom? Some think owls wise. Christopher Robin thought so although his owl couldn’t spell. Trudging back uphill, occasional basso profundo twang from a bullfrog in the pond that hawk skims air over my hair like a memory of my mother and her binoculars and the summer on the ridge with Peterson’s Guide, my father while we watched red tails feed their young and a pack of foxes with kits. I combed my doll’s hair with her tiny brush, rubbed my lips against the softness, her fragrance. Forgotten, sold or given away, decades later I find her at a flea market. Though mine was blonde and this a redhead, that softness, fragrance packs me in a trunk, loads it onto a ship that snouts out into the river. The 10:00 p.m. train wails for the life of the sparrow that sharp-shinned hunter grabbed. I forget, a mouse’s tail or bird’s feet I saw dangling from talons. Clouds rumple themselves into a sullen gray wall in the west. Pregnant with snow, wind whispers at the sex of it. Early dark this day Robert Bly died, will find a bird sleeping, its belly full, me on my back hovered over by a fleet of colored discs, pass around and through me like xrays. Like magic. Fire licks the darkness, crooning fingers suck you closer, promise warmth until you smell singed hair. Reminds you there is a spell going on here and my mother believed in the wicked witch. Her Thanksgiving Birthday already pancreatic cancer tinged her skin yellow yet still I brought a live Frazier fir for her table. That red wheelchair, candy apple red, her blue eyes still looking out of a child’s face when I zipped the blue jacket I can’t seem to throw away. A month later mustard and eggplant predominated. Skin split having outgrown its usefulness, no longer able to contain the rivers and pulsations of life. I cradled her, cold collection of hurting bones against my breasts, that argument because I never would wear a bra, now my warmth enfolds her. I call her name when I see the owls in the nostril-stinging midnight sky and she opens her eyes, some reflex maybe for she was already journeyed far, and then I took my ratcheting heart to bed. Unsure of sleep, startled awake, a gun shot, knock, dogs’ explosion, my ratcheting heart. only an hour past and she sprouted wings, disappeared in the spruce boughs with those owls.
I Can’t Put Her Down so I Just Keep Carrying Her
You are here between two walls of berry canes.
Faces weep from your eyes. Loved ones’ ashes
coat your shoes.
Some sorrows are a gift.
Still she rides your bones into the crowd
of poetry, her words wiggling.
\You should set her down.
But she sticks, attaches to lips, ears, your heart.
You bow beneath Uncle Yannis’ weight, scrabble
for pieces of broken statue tipped over by the ouzo.
Your toes know it’s there.
Her ears wings above leaf rafts. Gold runs through
your fingers. Her hair was water all along. Statue limbs
weep from your eyes. Piriformis stretch. Ankle
on knee, kneecap clasped in hands while her calves
drape your collarbones.
Arms grip a father’s head, gleeful.
He drinks in secret.
Child taller than anyone else.
A giant. Vodka bottles upended
in the closet wall. He drinks secrets.
The statue on horseback wearing tooled boots
into a child’s sticky heart. You bang your good knee.
Broken granite. Lichen civilizations,
hidden as bottles too high for stained fingers.
Big as golf balls.
A club connects. Secrets crack open: a golf ball
under mower
blades. Yes. Losses are
sorrow-filled gifts trailing.
Ashy footprints ground into stolen land.
Nourishment for your lips, ears,
for your ticking heart.
On the Edge
5:45 a.m. moon, Jupiter and Venus.
Air breathing on spruce. Boughs, a rabbit dashes
across blacktop, Morse code. One early robin startles
from sleep. We pass. Crow family blasts over maples
shouting sunrise, their voices, “Dogs! Dogs!”
You wonder if your camera has captured an alien
boomeranging into the Turquoise. On the green,
a light crawls, dark monster behind it
grazes shaved grass. Tips toward its reflection, the moon,
Venus, Jupiter swallowed. Enormous blue gill,
slow-moving shadow boomerangs from Star Lake deeps.
You rub air. Sweaty fists, heart pounding
“Dog! Dog!” Shout, “Sun! Rise!”
Night mare gallops on,
bleeding turquoise.
Buy the book at:
Rachaelikins@gmail.com
https://www.cyberwit.net/publications/2265
She has multiple nominations for the CNY Book Award and Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and won the 2018 Independent Book Award for her full-length poetry collection, “Just Two Girls (Clare Songbirds Publishing)”
She is also the author of “A Woman With Three Elbows (Raw Earth Ink 2022)” “For Kate a Love Story in Four Parts” and “Eating The Sun” both from Clare Songbirds Publishing.
She started writing poetry at age 14 under the guidance of a gifted English teacher. Now she has the honor of being a judge in a poetry competition in memory of that teacher!
A graduate of Syracuse University with a degree in Child and Family Studies Ikins worked as a sign language interpreter for deaf students ages K-12 and also as a veterinary technician before devoting herself full time to writing.
She founded and moderated the feature/open mic event bimonthly Monday Night Poetry at a sushi Blues 2008-2011.
She received an honorarium from Finishing Line Press for a week long workshop in Lismore Castle, Lismore, Ireland 2014. While there she worked with Patricia Smith, Jane Smiley, Ethel Rohan and others. In June 2014 she juried into Marge Piercy’s Poetry Intensive workshop, Cape Cod.
She has published 2 chapbooks with Foothills Publishing, 3 chapbooks with Finishing Line Press, a young adult fantasy with Log Cabin Books, and then four books —a full length, a chapbook, a children’s book and a memoir Eating the Sun that is mixed genre, so far with Clare Songbirds Publishing House as well as being lead editor for an anthology The Brave, and now one full length collection with Cyberwit.
This summer 2024 Clare Songbirds is releasing Rachael’s second young reader book. The first is titled “A Piglet for David” which came out during Covid. The sequel is titled The Magic Blankie.”
Her work appears in journals such as the Muddy River Poetry Review, Owl Light, Literary Turning Points, The Mason Street Review, Broadkill Review, Fly on the Wall Press UK, Synkroniciti, the Red Wheelbarrow, S/tick, Dragon Poet Review, Indigo Blue online UK, Cider Press Review, Syracuse Poster Project, The Healing Muse, The Pen Woman Magazine, Avocet, Moonstone Press, anthologies from IndieBlue Press, The Brave (Clare Songbirds Publishing House), Spontaneity Review, Ireland, and many others.
Her visual art and photography have won prizes and have hung in galleries from CNY to Washington DC and appeared on local television stations and on many journal covers. She is a former member of NLAPW and currently of Just Poets. She works as associate/contributing editor at Clare Songbirds Publishing House.
Rachael also spends significant time mentoring emerging poets and helping them achieve published works.
She has appeared on the New York Parrot Literary Review YouTube and in other interviews.
Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson
Rachael Ikins and I met on Facebook before I even read a word of her poetry and instantly we connected. We have the same poetry book publisher and we both love cats and chocolates.
After reading her poetry, I am in awe of Rachael Ikins imagination and individualism. She is a word wizard in a whirlwind and her imagery is fresh and exquisite. Her voice has incredible range whether she is writing about fairy tales, nature or her personal life. She is raw, gritty and isn’t afraid to go where others do not dare.
I was hooked when I read these poems:
When You Know You’re Old Enough to Die
The voice of the wind, ocean
combing trees’ dark fingers.
Vibrates my skin. Flights of geese
lift off scrim, Star Lake.
Old pillows shaped like burnt marshmallows leak dreams,
cast-off hairs of chrysalis-you,
humming night after night, scents of
sour sleeps, lips loosened, drooled
tree-rings of story.
This is the place you carry the poems, this soft bitter pregnancy hidden among
hole-y teeshirts and spilled piles of socks.
Old pillows turn inside out. Venus watches. Frost. Poetry crunches in the molars of winter. December licks where ice thins, the danger zone. Memories of 2001, your last Christmas in the first house, before everything collapsed.
Wrap around wings’ autumnal musk
and must. Now fly, hands wintering cuticles like stems, splinters clutch at air, make no mistake, God takes the one
you can’t live without
every single time.
In Another Life
You dye your hair, lift your breasts planted in that wife-beater shirt, the organ that was no real organ. You pressed a button, it would karaoke by itself while you complained about the guitar you couldn’t play, the one you no longer have that you made your ex-husband buy when you were pretending to be a cowgirl.
I slept on the living room floor beneath the maple where the hawk waited for food.
A hen turkey brought her chicks, so close to suburbia, strip-malls and a six lane highway.
The cat and dogs curled into my curves, touch-points of warmth in this cold house. With overhead light fixture like a large bronze-nippled breast, the house was a Picasso woman, breasts askew, one collected in an aluminum colander.
Not Picasso, Goya, where gas infiltrated the nightmare we breathed, lit to bloom by your cigarette lighter, all the stormed doors slamming.
I went back once after I had packed the animals, rescued by my mother, dark autumn sky. My family tasted your bitter.
The panic of walking into a space where I had lived as if I was/was not real, the caricature of you swarmed me on the couch under the picture of a cat on a bed in a beach house. I was in love with the idea of love, filled with grief for the juice of him, how he’d treasured me, unable to untangle the complicated yarn-snarl of how that trailed off.
Why do you dye your hair? I say, it’s not like everyone doesn’t know it’s fake.
The last time I saw you, you had let it grow out white.
A purple suitcase sprouted wings, blundered through the basement air, trying to escape.
How hard those implanted, beautiful breasts: at once, inviting then repelling fingers and lips.
When we stayed with your daughter in San Francisco, when I won that Poetry prize, coming home from dinner at an Ethiopian place where we tore off shared pieces of bread, a homeless man, erased by a tarp, rose up in front of our feet. Imagine sleeping on exhaust-stinking concrete, on gum and cigarette butts, where anyone could invade. Imagine building a boundary with the mind alone.
I tried so hard. I worked lifting each brick until sweat stippled my face, but I couldn’t do it, any more than the child could escape the cage. That moment, no angel is coming, when my hands touched the cool, smooth door knob, and I braced my eyes for all the light I had forgotten was out there. Inhaled petrichor, cut my skin on the shatter of moon, cloud bellies’ thunder, that was freedom. I followed the dogs out into it, clutching a wadded wrapper of a Hershey bar in my pocket.
In “A Handbook for Alchemists,” I was swept up in a rich fantasy world meshed with the harshness of reality that I couldn’t put the book down until I’d read it from cover to cover. Her work is a cross between Milne, Poe and the brothers Grimm with her own unique style.
Here’s some of my favorite poems from that book:
The Bird Watcher
The sharp-shin poses for my camera high as a kite, escorted by triple crow, the sycamore. I zoom in, image blurs. Crow says, “Time to go. Off with you!” Hawk skips across the road, forgetting for a moment or not translating me in my large feet and flap of hands so unlike wings. A child spreads arms, pirouettes around and around the leaf pile. Small infinitesimal mushrooms tiptoe through leaf mast digesting grief, a thousand fragrant griefs. Maple leaves print their perfect paws, memories into tarry pavement. When did this happen? A possum disemboweled itself on a truck fender, a red fox dangles flat off the bridge, some car reminded him he doesn’t have wings either. I hear foxes singing to each other in lust down the path marked by centennial sugar maples one with neither leaf nor branch, just a sculpted memory shagged in bark and woodpecker excavations. Of these an owl makes a home, eyes slanted half-mast, is it with wisdom? Some think owls wise. Christopher Robin thought so although his owl couldn’t spell. Trudging back uphill, occasional basso profundo twang from a bullfrog in the pond that hawk skims air over my hair like a memory of my mother and her binoculars and the summer on the ridge with Peterson’s Guide, my father while we watched red tails feed their young and a pack of foxes with kits. I combed my doll’s hair with her tiny brush, rubbed my lips against the softness, her fragrance. Forgotten, sold or given away, decades later I find her at a flea market. Though mine was blonde and this a redhead, that softness, fragrance packs me in a trunk, loads it onto a ship that snouts out into the river. The 10:00 p.m. train wails for the life of the sparrow that sharp-shinned hunter grabbed. I forget, a mouse’s tail or bird’s feet I saw dangling from talons. Clouds rumple themselves into a sullen gray wall in the west. Pregnant with snow, wind whispers at the sex of it. Early dark this day Robert Bly died, will find a bird sleeping, its belly full, me on my back hovered over by a fleet of colored discs, pass around and through me like xrays. Like magic. Fire licks the darkness, crooning fingers suck you closer, promise warmth until you smell singed hair. Reminds you there is a spell going on here and my mother believed in the wicked witch. Her Thanksgiving Birthday already pancreatic cancer tinged her skin yellow yet still I brought a live Frazier fir for her table. That red wheelchair, candy apple red, her blue eyes still looking out of a child’s face when I zipped the blue jacket I can’t seem to throw away. A month later mustard and eggplant predominated. Skin split having outgrown its usefulness, no longer able to contain the rivers and pulsations of life. I cradled her, cold collection of hurting bones against my breasts, that argument because I never would wear a bra, now my warmth enfolds her. I call her name when I see the owls in the nostril-stinging midnight sky and she opens her eyes, some reflex maybe for she was already journeyed far, and then I took my ratcheting heart to bed. Unsure of sleep, startled awake, a gun shot, knock, dogs’ explosion, my ratcheting heart. only an hour past and she sprouted wings, disappeared in the spruce boughs with those owls.
I Can’t Put Her Down so I Just Keep Carrying Her
You are here between two walls of berry canes.
Faces weep from your eyes. Loved ones’ ashes
coat your shoes.
Some sorrows are a gift.
Still she rides your bones into the crowd
of poetry, her words wiggling.
\You should set her down.
But she sticks, attaches to lips, ears, your heart.
You bow beneath Uncle Yannis’ weight, scrabble
for pieces of broken statue tipped over by the ouzo.
Your toes know it’s there.
Her ears wings above leaf rafts. Gold runs through
your fingers. Her hair was water all along. Statue limbs
weep from your eyes. Piriformis stretch. Ankle
on knee, kneecap clasped in hands while her calves
drape your collarbones.
Arms grip a father’s head, gleeful.
He drinks in secret.
Child taller than anyone else.
A giant. Vodka bottles upended
in the closet wall. He drinks secrets.
The statue on horseback wearing tooled boots
into a child’s sticky heart. You bang your good knee.
Broken granite. Lichen civilizations,
hidden as bottles too high for stained fingers.
Big as golf balls.
A club connects. Secrets crack open: a golf ball
under mower
blades. Yes. Losses are
sorrow-filled gifts trailing.
Ashy footprints ground into stolen land.
Nourishment for your lips, ears,
for your ticking heart.
On the Edge
5:45 a.m. moon, Jupiter and Venus.
Air breathing on spruce. Boughs, a rabbit dashes
across blacktop, Morse code. One early robin startles
from sleep. We pass. Crow family blasts over maples
shouting sunrise, their voices, “Dogs! Dogs!”
You wonder if your camera has captured an alien
boomeranging into the Turquoise. On the green,
a light crawls, dark monster behind it
grazes shaved grass. Tips toward its reflection, the moon,
Venus, Jupiter swallowed. Enormous blue gill,
slow-moving shadow boomerangs from Star Lake deeps.
You rub air. Sweaty fists, heart pounding
“Dog! Dog!” Shout, “Sun! Rise!”
Night mare gallops on,
bleeding turquoise.
Buy the book at:
Rachaelikins@gmail.com
https://www.cyberwit.net/publications/2265
Striking work Rachael. Wonderful contrasts. Tumbling intensity.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite line is a stopper: "Gray dawn and you are gone."