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thwack

  • Joined: December 27, 2012
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MY FATHER’S ARMS by Betsy Campbell Stone

MY FATHER'S ARMS
by Betsy Campbell Stone

At home, we covered up. Mine was a house full of brothers.

A closed bathroom door meant it was occupied. Occasionally I’d find the upstairs bathroom door ajar and push in, only to catch my father shaving. He always shaved nude. The long mirror over the two sinks was shrouded in steam except for the watery oval he cleared in front of his face. His bicep — round as Popeye’s — flexed as he swept the razor downward to reveal a stripe of skin. Like a drop of water that knows to leap off a griddle, I pulled the door shut.

Such squeamishness had disappeared by my father’s last year.

One afternoon, I heard a heavy thump while he was showering and ran into the bathroom. I opened the glass door to see him struggling like a beetle on its back.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“No, but I can’t get up.”

He’d fallen before, but on the thick carpet of his bedroom. I learned then that he didn’t have enough strength in his stomach muscles to roll over, much less to sit up. Fortunately, his leather belt made a good handle; I hauled up on it while he strained to get to his hands and knees. Then I coached him to reach forward and lean on a low chair before pivoting his bottom around to the seat. Those Popeye biceps were his salvation.

AMERICAN GRAMOPHONE by Carey McHugh reviewed by Clare Paniccia

Carey McHugh

AMERICAN GRAMOPHONE
by Carey McHugh
Augury Books, 72 pages

reviewed by Clare Paniccia

In approaching Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone, one might first consider this question: What is the song of America, or American culture? It’s easy to jump to the obvious conclusions—the United States has strongly defined itself through its velocity, whether in industry, technology, or commercial growth, and its music has become largely representative of these themes, with contemporary pop artists representing the almost-electric shine of the digital age, rock bands highlighting the working-class, and country groups crooning over the “loss” of an easy-going, slow-paced lifestyle.

Beneath these surface associations, however, McHugh challenges our initial question with a more stripped-down idea—what if America’s song isn’t something you can quickly flip to on a radio? What if America’s song is something that deviates completely from the mainstream—something pared to its most visceral form: an instrumental, organic, and natural tone? Think of the vibrating note of a fiddle, the deep strum of a guitar, and bare, haunting vocals. The sounds of folk and Americana that seem to eek out of valleys, creeks, and forgotten forests—quietly shivering their way into the undercurrent of the American everyday. These are the notes that wind from McHugh’s own gramophone, characterizing this dark collection with a taste of folklore and caution that asks the reader to step out of his or her American associations and return to the frontier’s beginning—the land at its most original, and its most severe.

CONSEQUENCES: Four Books in Translation, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

CONSEQUENCES: Four Books in Translation
reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

WAR, SO MUCH WAR
by Mercè Rodoreda, translation by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennant
Open Letter, 185 pages

TRISTANO DIES
by Antonio Tabucchi, translation by Elizabeth Harris
Archipelago, 192 pages

THE THINGS WE DON’T DO
by Andrés Neuman, translation by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
Open Letter, 190 pages

A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION
by José Eduardo Agualusa
Archipelago, 246 pages

Once in a while a writer speaks to me as if we are in a kind of private ecstatic embrace. That is the kind of reader I am: thirsty for intimacy, for communion. In dialogue, I answer back as best I can.

I spent much of last year with Traveler of the Century (FSG, 2012), Andrés Neuman’s lost and found allegory of the nineteenth century, bildungsroman of modernity, eyes tearing with fraternity. Here was the brother (older and wiser) of Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press), a novel I had published the year before.

Now Neuman has nudged me into a new conversation, about constructing narrative, in a series of conceptual stories and experimental situations collected in The Things We Don’t Do, in the English translation by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. Neuman whispers as he writes about writing, the place of the writer in the reader’s field of vision, and holds out a hand as he wanders through the borderland of experience, writerly self-awareness, and invention. “We have become such hybrid authors that any day now we’ll make a purist revolution” (a counter-revolution probably more accurately), he writes, one of a series of “dodecalogues” of interpretation and observation that follow the stories in the new collection.

As Neuman plays with form, Caistor and Garcia, his English translators, demonstrate extraordinary range and interpretive capacity, and they must: translation as a theme runs through his work—the heroes of Traveler of the Century fall in love translating poetry. Neuman’s stories in fact speak in various tongues at once. In “Piotr Czerny’s Last Poem,” a secret poet loses his entire oeuvre in a fire. The fire—both destructive force and fuel of imagination—saves him amateur embarrassment and provides an “electric shock” of inspiration. In “Embrace,” with a scent of Poe, Neuman observes the consequences of guilt after a mugging that leaves one friend injured and the other unharmed.

MASKS AND ICONS by R. Daniel Evans reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Masks and Icons

MASKS AND ICONS
by R. Daniel Evans
Blurb, 82 pages

reviewed by Shinelle Espaillat

In his fourth poetry collection, Masks and Icons, R. Daniel Evans examines the complexity of love and desire, and exposes the ways in which these emotions both intersect with and deviate from each other. Evans brings a microscope to the multiple small evidences of love in the world, using the lens of art to view the beauty and pain of interpersonal connection, inviting readers to look through the mask of the self and perceive the extraordinary.

Section I, “From The Land of Walt Whitman,” focuses on the intimacy and inner-life of a speaker’s relationships with individuals, beginning with a one-sided conversation with Whitman himself. The narrator sits on a beach, fairly melting with desire over a distant beauty to whom he never speaks, but whom he imagines as Whitman’s muse. He wonders how, with such an object of desire near him, Whitman “ever got any poems written,” noting, in this metaphysical moment, that desire is an obstacle to his own work. Sexual desire, then, is all-consuming, and the speaker suggests that poets instead mine the world at large for the rich possibilities of interaction, with the vibrancy of the natural world, with the music of the oppressed, and then to write poetry that speaks America.

CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG reviewed by Justin Goodman

CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG
edited by Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz
Coffee House Press, 160 pages

Cat-is-art

Anonymous' Internet Rule 38: “one cat leads to another.” This rule is played out, true to form, within the universe it governs. I think of Douglas Davis’s classic “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence,” which (half Mobius Strip) perpetually leads, and (half Internet) begins with “cat purring softly”; or, in the same vein, the more contemporary “Drei Klavierstücke op. 11” by Cory Arcangel, composed of cat-on-piano videos molded into Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music.

The Internet seems to have returned us to what Schoenberg’s contemporary, the painter Gustav Klimt, asked with his bijou palette and bourgeois nudes: when does something exit coincidence and enter art? As with Klimt's regal-looking prostitutes, we might ask, where is the line between artistic intention and the more accidental capturing of internal feeling? Now, amidst a flurry of cat media, editors Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz have gathered the work of 14 authors to discern meaning in the paw swipes virtuosity. The work is gathered in the collaborative Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong.

STUMBLING OUT THE STABLE by Sean Pravica reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Stumbling out of the Stable

STUMBLING OUT THE STABLE
by Sean Pravica
Pelekinesis Press, 436 pages

reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

In his short stories, Sean Pravica often prefers the magical real and the weird over realism. In his debut novel Stumbling Out the Stable, however, Pravica steps up to a more classic literary endeavor: to find (and not shy away from) meaning in the everyday. For Pravica’s characters in Stumbling, this “meaning” is found between the gods of order and chaos—not simply in their conflicts, but in the strange beauty of their creative harmony.

The novel crackles with the nervous energy of this crossroads between order and chaos, between the dream of freedom and the fear of aimlessness, between the desire for something new and the temptation to remain safe in practical routine. It is at this crossroads that Pravica introduces us to his leading men, the debt-riddled college student-philosopher-photographer Seamus and Seamus’ best friend, Jamie. “What if taking neither path was the best decision?” wonders Seamus,

“The more as well as the less traveled were both born from the same split decision. What if movement was nipped in the bud? Was that not It, content already, seams tied shut, wounds healed, stasis realized?”

The fog was clearing. Seamus knew it.

A young man who aspires to become a photojournalist hitchhiker after graduation (though he already bums rides everywhere he goes), Seamus is still adjusting to the possibilities now opening before him, a world of sense and senselessness, normalcy and absurdity. Pravica gives us this world in still life:

FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

Fat City

FAT CITY
by Leonard Gardner
introduction by Denis Johnson
New York Review Books, 191 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

We steal. Writers do. A good writer is a magpie, searching other people's sentences for something that glimmers. A good writer reads with a jeweler's loupe. Close reading, and the willingness to borrow shamelessly from other people's works, is what differentiates the casual writer from the serious writer. Very serious writers find other writers' reading lists, and read them. And then those writers' lists, their influences. And so on back. Read up the chain. Understanding what a writer reads, and how they read it, can give deep insight into the craft of storytelling. But getting inside means finding the book that matters most; the one that changed everything. Fat City by Leonard Gardner is one of these. It's cited as a major influence by writers like Denis Johnson and Joan Didion. Ever heard of it? Me neither.

Like its main characters—two perpetually out-of-luck boxers—Fat City is the best book you've never read. It resists hype in a way that's refreshing. In an age that lives for the reboot—J.K. Rowling's return to YA fiction, Harper Lee's lost manuscript, yet another volume of the Game of Thrones series—this slim, unpretentious novel comes from an era when fiction did not have to be flashy to be read and respected. The trim sentences create neat sketches of Stockton, California and the fly-by-nights who clutter its gyms, weekly hotels, lunchrooms, and dark bars.

Gardner's restraint is reminiscent of John Steinbeck, whose novels Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat dignified the shallow, unhappy lives of the vagrants of Monterey, California. Published in 1969, Fat City makes no allusion to its period in history. There's no mention of the massive social changes taking in America in the late 1960s. There's no talk of brotherhood and equality, either. Gardner's characters become equals when they enter the boxing ring; otherwise, they go aimlessly from tomato field to short-order station, passing time until they can get in shape for their next fight.

KIDS IN THE WIND by Brad Wethern reviewed by Rachael Tague

KIDS IN THE WIND
by Brad Wethern
Red Hen Press, 146 pages

reviewed by Rachael Tague

Randy Ray McKenzie received the nickname General Custer because Junior Malstrom always thought Randy was galloping Strawberry, the one-eyed horse, into disaster. And perhaps, on the day General Custer agreed to race the old horse against a junkyard Ford on a rarely used, viciously windy airstrip in the California seaport town of Fairhaven, he was indeed galloping into disaster – or at least over the edge of a sand dune.

The General moved to Fairhaven in the middle of second grade, which “is like playing 52 Pickup with all your people and things. When you try to collect them and put them back together, you can’t, because they are somebody else’s people now and somebody else’s things.” Fairhaven was different from the General’s grammar school back in Oregon where little John and Marnie “could kiss just like Hollywood stars at the end of a movie,” and Hugh Taylor did not get in trouble for yanking the new Egyptian student off his swing by the ankle. The Fairhaven school had nutrition and physical education instead of morning and afternoon recess, the first through third graders were all in the same classroom, and Lance, a boy from the “Jova Witness Church,” always left the room during the Pledge of Allegiance. According to author Brad Wethern, “The world of Fairhaven on the north spit of Humboldt Bay in the 1950’s is familiar to very few,” but by late elementary, the General was well acquainted with the peculiar town and its inhabitants.

A BLIND GUIDE TO STINKVILLE by Beth Vrabel reviewed by Mandy King

A BLIND GUIDE TO STINKVILLE
by Beth Vrabel
Sky Pony Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 288 pages

reviewed by Mandy King

A Blind Guide to Stinkville is a story told through the fuzzy eyes of 11-year-old Alice, whose albinism and near blindness give her the unique perspective to uncover hidden stories of the people in her new town. The genius of Vrabel’s approach is that the reader meets the other characters through nuances of feelings and impressions rather than stark physical descriptions. The book is not a page-turner plot-wise and there are no major catastrophes; instead the novel peers beneath the superficial to reveal important lessons about what it means to be a member of small town community.

Despite the fact that Alice has to use a magnifying glass to read a book a few inches from her face, she is the only person in the story who truly sees what is going on around her. Initially, Alice thinks her new hometown of Sinkville, aka “Stinkville,” is a horrible place dominated by the terrible smell emanating from the local paper-mill. It’s nothing like where she grew up in Seattle. It smells foul and everything is different.

THE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN by Micol Ostow and David Ostow reviewed by Rachael Tague

THE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN
by Micol Ostow
illustrated by David Ostow
Soho Teen, 326 pages

reviewed by Rachael Tague

I don’t like to be scared. I can’t stand that chill-in-the-air, breath-on-my-neck, sweat-in-my-palm terror that comes with horror stories. The last time I tried to read a scary book, I was twelve, and I flipped to the epilogue before I was halfway through to relieve the tension. That’s the only time I’ve ever read the end of a book without reading everything in between. But if I had the option to stop in the middle of The Devil and Winnie Flynn, I would have given up during the séance in the criminal ward of an abandoned insane asylum. As it was, I had to shut the book, take a breath, and reorient myself to reality before I could continue with this creepy tale.

Brother-Sister duo Micol and David Ostow (So Punk Rock (and Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother)) team up for the second time to write and illustrate The Devil and Winnie Flynn, packing the pages with ghostly spirits, exorcisms, demons, psychics, and all manner of haunted locations, its characters seeking communion with the dead and the damned. Cleverly twisting the paranormal with mystery and pop culture, the Ostows invite their readers into Winnie Flynn’s haunted adventures.

When her mother commits suicide, Winnie Flynn meets her long-lost Aunt Maggie, “the creator, director, and producer of the Fantastic, Fearsome USTM series." Her life becomes “a family-tragedy-turned-last-minute internship in television—in reality television!—smack-dab dead center in America’s armpit.” Winnie relocates from Portland, Oregon to a shady motel in her late mother’s home state of New Jersey. From their headquarters in Asbury Park, the cast and crew are within driving distance of spirit-filled destinations like Overlook Insane Asylum, Ghost Boy Bridge, the Pine Barrens, and the Devils portal. Their goal: to hunt down the famed New Jersey Devil, a creature Winnie believes is a myth.

CALIGULAN by Ernest Hilbert reviewed by J.G. McClure

CALIGULAN
by Ernest Hilbert
Measure Press, 96 pages

reviewed by J.G. McClure

From his debut Sixty Sonnets to All of You On The Good Earth, Ernest Hilbert has made a name for himself as a dedicated formalist. His latest, Caligulan, is no exception: you’ll find no free verse here.

Hilbert is at his best when the content of the poems plays against the formal constraints. Take “Barnegat Light,” for instance:

The gull pulls bags from trash and drags them clear.
He’s big as a cat, a blur of snow and soot.
He pokes until debris spills down the pier.
He’s clumsy, and somehow he’s lost a foot.
Chewed off? A winter fishing line? Wedged in boards?
The stump’s a small sharp spear that stings the bird
If ground is touched. He soars to foggy scree,
Alights but flaps to halfway hang in air, spurred
By pain to perform endless pirouettes.

The tightly elegant form contrasts perfectly with the unsettling pain and violence of the scene described; one senses the formal control is the only thing between us and the chaotic world the bird inhabits. It’s hard not to read this as an ars poetica: the bird has lost a foot (ha!) and is now “spurred / by pain to perform endless pirouettes,” like the formal pirouettes of the sonnet. There’s the slight misstep of “if ground is touched”—a moment of awkward syntax in which the form seems to control the poet instead of the reverse—but in context, it’s forgivable: the image of the bird makes us understand why rigid form is of the utmost importance to this speaker. The poem’s ending brings the point home:

TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz reviewed by Rory McCluckie

TALK
by Linda Rosenkrantz
NYRB, 215 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

Whatever else it might be, Talk is the bearer of a remarkably terse and comprehensive title. Has there ever been a work that so accurately summarizes its contents in so short a space? In four letters, Linda Rosenkrantz encapsulated the interior of her 1968 literary experiment immaculately; this is a book of talk. All 215 pages are repositories of speech, unadorned by scenic description or third-person agency. What's more, they're pages of genuine talk, not a word of it imagined or fabricated. Over the summer of 1965, Rosenkrantz decided to capture the conversation of friends on tape, a process that eventually lead to her picking out three personalities, and presenting their interactions in the form of a “novel in dialogue.” Stephen Koch's introduction fleshes out the context: “I had the tape recorder running all summer,” Rosenkrantz recalls,

even dragging the bulky monster to the beach. At first there were about twenty-five different characters and fifteen hundred pages of single-spaced transcript, which I took close to two years honing down to the three characters and two hundred fifty pages.

Quite the project, in other words. A little later in this same introduction, however, there's another phrase that ultimately proves more striking. As Koch introduces the conceptual basis of the book, he posits that the guiding vision behind the work was one of exploring how daily existence might function when presented as an act of creation, thus acting as a literary experiment the results of which were hard to foresee. The framework, he offers, within which Talk should be viewed is crystallized into the following question: “Why not see if life really imitates art?”

INK AND ASHES by Valynne E. Maetani reviewed by Leticia Urieta

INK AND ASHES
by Valynne E. Maetani
Tu Books, 380 pages

reviewed by Leticia Urieta

Valynne E. Maetani’s debut novel, Ink and Ashes, begins with the narrator Claire’s eerie statement: “I stared at my pink walls, wishing away the smell of death. I imagined the wispy smoke snaking its way through the narrow spaces around my closed door, the tendrils prying at tucked away memories.” This observation cements her voice as protagonist, a mixture of sensitivity, uncertainty, and fierceness. As the smell of incense wafts up to her room – part of a ritual to honor her father since his passing ten years ago – she struggles to reconcile memories of her father with what she later discovers about him. And it’s this powerful voice that leads us through a heart-pounding narrative journey, exploring the nebulous nature of memory and trauma.

At seventeen, Claire deals with the typical issues of a teenage girl: homework, relationships with boys, and overprotective parents. Still, her life is colored by the loss of her father. Looking back through his old journal, Claire discovers a mysterious letter from her father addressed to her stepdad George, whom she believed her father had never met before. Suddenly, the stable life she thought she knew is thrown into doubt. Claire must reconcile the memories and ideas of her father with a new and haunting legacy.

From the moment of her discovery, Claire embarks on a mission to learn more about her father’s past, his suspicious cause of death, and whether he was the upstanding man she believed him to be. Meanwhile, her locker is broken into at school and Claire’s anxiety rises as she notices a black SUV following her around. On top of these worries, Claire is forced to come to terms with her feelings for her best friend Forrest. He is always on hand to comfort and defend her, keeping Claire from retreating into herself when her thoughts get jumbled or anxiety takes over.

PUNK ELEGIES by Allan MacDonell and DADDY Madison Young reviewed by Johnny Payne

PUNK ELEGIES
by Allan MacDonell
Rare Bird Books, 306 pages

DADDY
Madison Young
Rare Bird Books, 323 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

“Let my heart tell you what prompted me to do wrong for no purpose, and why it was only mischief that made me do it.” Thus spoke Saint Augustine of Hippo, and with those words, invented the confessional memoir and spawned the talk show in which the recounting of misdeeds leads—it is hoped—to self-reflection, repentance and salvation. When you put the peccadillos in print, it is difficult to escape this literary paradigm, for, as with Augustine’s sins (and our own), the more you struggle, the more surely redemption will drag you toward a hopeful destiny, like the mighty Mississippi at flood tide, and you borne aloft on your own self-damning words.

Two such memoirs have just been issued from Rare Bird Books. The first, Punk Elegies, is the sometimes desultory, occasionally comical, and moderately self-aware account of Allan MacDonell’s drugged and drunken misbehavior as a skilled yet dubious reporter of punk music for Slash magazine in Los Angeles, present at what is dubbed the birth of stateside punk, via a band called The Screamers. He has given himself his toughest assignment ever in this memoir, because it’s all been done before: promiscuous sex, alcoholic stupors, watching friends overdose into comas. After sixteen centuries, the genre has grown a little tired. And what do you do when you weren’t really that close to the main action, nor played a prominent role? What if you were a journalistic hanger on, and not even of the sweetly naïve Almost Famous variety? What if you were an annoying lout?

Slyly, MacDonell turns these facts to his advantage. He neither preens nor tries to win us over too insistently. He accepts his insignificant place among the night crawlers, and acknowledges that his quintessential brush with fame is when a teenage Joan Jett, wearing a wife beater, shoulders him in the midst of an alcohol-fueled, bickering fight with three “heavyset girls who wear a lot of makeup.” Dispassionate as the Living Jesus, Joan takes a knife from Allan’s hand and dispenses this wisdom: “You’d be a pretty cool guy if you didn’t drink so much.”

WAVELAND: One Woman’s Story of Freedom Summer by Simone Zelitch reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

WAVELAND: One Woman's Story of Freedom Summer
by Simone Zelitch
The Head & The Hand Press
221 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

Any discussion of race is going to include a good story. Identity is organic; it's not semiotic, raised like softened noodles from a theoretical alphabet soup. Race is about how we relate to ourselves, to others, and how our stories mix together. Is it an educated, white woman's privilege to say that? Maybe. I can't see outside of myself, though I can admit my limitations. I wouldn't presume to take on another person's story, as that dishonors their experience.

This dilemma—the quandary of the white liberal who genuinely wants to work for racial equality—is the piercing thread that runs through Simone Zelitch's fourth novel, Waveland. Set in 1964 and the decade that follows, Waveland brings the Freedom Summer to life. Young people from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worked to register African-American voters in Mississippi. They set up Freedom Schools in church basements and back rooms and offered classes in civics and basic skills. They were beaten, arrested, and disappeared. The mixed group, SNCC, was real—not imagined—and when Zelitch starts blurring the lines of history with fiction, things get a little crazy.

Waveland uses the past to challenge the future in ways that are both thrilling and uncomfortable to read. An idealistic, prickly Northern student, Beth Fine, leaves her university in a powder-blue Corvair to give her energy to the Freedom School movement that's cropping up in Melody, Mississippi. Her attraction isn't just the group's radical call for integration. Ron Beauchamp, one of the movement's leaders, hooks her in with a kiss. Does this sound like soft-soap?

It's not. Racism is not dead, and in the early 1960s it was alive and murderous. “Your brother or sister could be dead tomorrow,” Ron says to himself, “shot through the neck or burned in the basement of a church.” Interracial relationships were an invitation to violence; people who mixed were under threat, always, from “good” white people who wanted to regulate the status quo.

KILLING AUNTIE by Andrzej Bursa reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

KILLING AUNTIE
by Andrzej Bursa
translated by Wiesiek Powaga
New Vessel Press, 107 pages

reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

Andrzej Bursa was born in Krakow on March 21, 1932, seven years before the German invasion of Poland. He died of congenital heart failure at age twenty-five on November 15, 1957, just after Poland began to overthrow its totalitarian system of Communist rule. Bursa lived in a time that shifted dramatically from extreme suppression to extreme expression, misinformation and propaganda to jazz and poetry. His literary career began on the heels of the post-war period of Polish literature noted for an emphasis on “Socialist Realism,” but was cut short at the emergence of an era of national sovereignty that prompted an explosion of avant-garde art, performance, literature, and music.

Bursa’s only novel, Killing Auntie, was not published during his lifetime. The novel takes place over the course of a week, during which a young man named Jurek whacks his aunt in the head with a hammer and then attempts to rid himself of her corpse, a more difficult task than he imagines. While it doesn’t ever do anything, or say anything, everything Jurek does is in reaction to the corpse. This is the black humor of the story, which could also be a foil to the atmosphere of 1950s Poland, a time that fluctuated from the enforcement of Soviet sponsored police terror, censorship, and economic strife to the reversal (or decrease) of such policies.

Even without knowing the novel’s political context, Killing Auntie may be understood and appreciated for its stark and unapologetic approach to the (frankly) absurd trajectory of adulthood. Jurek, orphaned, disaffected, and now living on his own, longs for real purpose: “Today for the first time I realized I had no purpose. I went out without a reason. These purposeless, lonely walks were murderous. I knew that.” Jurek’s story is not dark for the sake of darkness (although killing your aunt in cold blood is pretty dark), but to subvert the idea that we all grow up to make families, buy groceries, and pay bills because these are aspirations for a lifetime of happiness. Jurek does not kill his aunt because he hates her. He kills her to have a purpose.

DIORAMA by Rocío Cerón reviewed by Johnny Payne

DIORAMA
by Rocío Cerón
Phoneme Press, 145 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

Cerón’s creation can best be described thus: she summons words. Like iron filings to a magnet, they come into an order that feels inevitable.

Pulsar body, delicate hibiscus flowers or mangrove
Palm: residual beauty of misery/

In this penchant for naming, her exquisite and casual catalogues could pass as still life. But her poetry, technical yet drenched in sensation, scientific yet opulent in the manner of natural history, is propulsive, as she pushes herself, and us, to the far limit of the mind’s ken. In “Sonata Mandala to the Penumbra Bird,” echo seems to precede sound:

Hyperboreal smell: wild mist of civet musk.

Body’s simple landscape, dermal aura, death.

Scent of tea and points of star.

Affect falls dense, and what might feel like lacunae or mere white space in the work of another poet, figures as sensation. Feeling crowds and suffuses each gap. It is not so much a matter of a reader making logical leaps (though they can be made) as it is of following the quick pulses that run through the lines. Politics figure as oblique, yet Cerón is quite capable of brief, cutting critiques of the history and politics of America:

FAR COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ABROAD AND OTHER PLACES, essays by Timothy Kenny reviewed by Beth Johnston

FAR COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ABROAD AND OTHER PLACES, essays
by Timothy Kenny
Bottom Dog Press, 144 pages

reviewed by Beth Johnston

In the preface to Timothy Kenny’s new essay collection, Far Country: Stories from Abroad and Other Places, Kenny links his stories to the new journalism of the 1960s, the work of “Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion.” Yet although Kenny positions himself as Didion, personal and revealing, he more often echoes New Yorker journalist John McPhee. His essays hold back, shield the author’s character, and confess little. The best of them capitalize on Kenny’s strengths: carefully observed detail, compelling stories, and flair for sentence. But only a few of them require Kenny to risk baring himself and his responses to distant places.

Kenny is a former USA Today journalist and a journalism professor who has worked abroad since 1989. He’s seen a lot: Belfast during the Troubles, Berlin right before the wall fell, Sarajevo during the siege, and Kabul as Afghanistan is rebuilt. He’s interviewed Vaclav Havel in Prague and fought off feral dogs in Kosovo. His character feels like the movie version of a Western journalist abroadhe’s Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously or Stephen Dillane in Welcome to Sarajevo. Kenny himself might resist the comparison, since, he notes, he “was neither a war correspondent nor a traditional foreign-based journalist . . . [but] a reporter fortunate enough to travel overseas frequently.” Still, Kenny is true to journalistic type: he’s jaded enough not to be shocked by what he sees, pragmatic enough to resist heroism, and reluctant to indulge in unbridled idealism.

SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems by John Wieners reviewed by J.G. McClure

SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems
by John Wieners
Wave Books, 216 pages

reviewed by J.G. McClure

I’ll admit upfront that, prior to receiving Supplication, Selected Poems of John Wieners, I knew very little about Wieners or his work. Biographically, I knew he was a Beat Poet and member of the San Francisco Renaissance. The only poem I knew was the titular poem of this selected, “Supplication”:

O poetry, visit this house often,
imbue my life with success,
leave me not alone,
give me a wife and home.

Take this curse off
of early death and drugs,
make me a friend among peers,
lend me love, and timeliness.

Return me to the men who teach
and above all, cure the
hurts of wanting the impossible
through this suspended vacuum.

This is Wieners at his best. The first stanza shows his trademark gifts: a willingness to use an elevated rhetoric that risks—and resists—sentimentality, and a powerful longing for what cannot be. How is poetry to provide success, companionship, marriage, a home? Wieners knows as well as the rest of us that it doesn’t work that way.

In the second stanza, we see Wieners wrestling with another of the primary concerns in his work – “early death and drugs.” Remember that we’re in the ’50s and ’60s, the peak of a glamorous bohemian drug culture. Sometimes Wieners indulges himself in fantasies of this life – but he’s at his best in moments like this, when he explores the painful realities of the drugs that he uses and that have killed his friends. And again, we see that longing: poetry won’t give him love or timeliness—at best, it will “lend” them.

HEDERA HELIX by Claire Rudy Foster

HEDERA HELIX
by Claire Rudy Foster

That morning there was an email from Paul. Gemma clicked on it without thinking. Her coffee mug steamed at her elbow, too hot to drink. She forced her eyes to focus on the tiny electronic letters. Legal issues, he wrote. Looks like it's back to jail, do not pass go. I'll try to be out by summer break so we can meet again in the usual place. She had to read it twice, slowly. Then she slammed the laptop shut , as though extinguishing a flame.

Pouring her coffee into the travel thermos, she took care to rest the lips of the cups together. That way, even her shivering hands couldn't spill—no messes, her kitchen spotless, not a beer can in sight, the garbage can empty and lined with a fresh plastic bag. A place where no roach dared to tread.

Don't nobody know my troubles with God, she sang along with Moby on the radio. Traffic was light going into the city, but she tailgated the red Civic in front of her anyway. The maples and pines that shouldered together on both sides of the highway were close and dark, the ivy obscuring their trunks so they seemed like a dense wall of green. As Gemma's Volvo rounded the final bend, and she saw the tunnel that opened to the city, the sky began to lighten in the west. A handful of leaves floated over the road for a moment, showing their yellow bellies.

“You won't need those,” Allie told Gemma in the locker room. “She's doped.”

CANNED HAPPINESS by Sharon Kurtzman

CANNED HAPPINESS
by Sharon Kurtzman

Pancakes smiled at me. A mouth fashioned from whipped cream, edges melting into a golden face like a worn starlet’s lipstick. JT’s handiwork, the line cook known for his deep-U grins.

I delivered the plate to a girl in pigtails. Pancake International was a favored breakfast spot for families whose kids played weekend hockey at the Garner Iceplex.

A rapid-fire order from table five and my pencil skidded across the pad, but that whipped cream smile stuck. I blamed Mama.

“Make your own happy, Lorelai.” Mama’s phone edict last week was meant to drown out complaints about customers, anemic paychecks, and hours that didn’t qualify for health insurance.

“Easy for you to say.”

“Not easy for me at all.”

“Sorry, Mama.”

“Quit your moaning. I raised you to be stronger than that.”

Headed to the kitchen, chestnut hair escaped mismatched barrettes. My whole life was mismatched: plates, socks, sheets, where I’d started and how I’d ended up.

GOD: USER REVIEWS by Diane Arieff

GOD: USER REVIEWS
by Diane Arieff

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THE CURRENT WAS WEAK by Michael Kern

THE CURRENT WAS WEAK
by Michael Kern

I found my sister smashing china in the woods
because the color reminded her of bone.
We took turns throwing rocks at the shards of white
strewn on the creek-bank across from us,
prizing each chip, each crack in the façade.
We hadn’t understood what the words meant:
dialysis, foot ulceration, neuropathy.
I only knew what I could hold in my hand —
a broken tea cup with its handle missing,
a nub that reminded me of the amputated foot
you showed me the week before I saw you last,
before I got a grip and skipped this broken
fragment across the creek’s surface, watching
each new ring spread before crashing
against the tree roots on the far side.
Before each blow I checked over my shoulder,
scanning the leafless trees for movement.
No one could see us. The current was weak,
carving out a small canyon shoulder deep,
depositing large banks of silt and river rock at each bend.
It felt as if there was no end,
as if each toss called to you across the surface.
The china, glistening white and scattered,
appeared ordered on the far bank.
When the stars looked down that night
they reminded me of what we all are —
fissures of white cast across a cosmic mud.

MAIL-ORDER BRIDE by Sara Baker

MAIL-ORDER BRIDE
by Sara Baker

Three women are swimming in a pool. It is a large pool surrounded by trees. Sunlight filters through feathery pecan leaves; twigs and bugs from the night’s rain litter the pool. The women with their kickboards push through them, heedless. To one side, teenagers explode from the water, spiking a ball over a volleyball net with raucous shouts. On the other side, shrieking children toss balls and hit each other with sherbet-colored Styrofoam noodles. In the middle of the chaos are the lap lanes, where the women find refuge from their children, where they can talk in peace.

The youngest one, Amy, in her twenties, is recovering from a break-up. “Tell me there are good men; I don’t want to be bitter,” she says to the other two, one in her late-thirties, the other in her late forties, both long married.

“Oh, sure there are,” says the middle woman, Rosa, “although my husband says most men are pigs.” The word comes out “peegs.” Rosa is Brazilian, and although she has lived in America for twenty years, her English still rises and falls with unexpected pitches. Kristin, the oldest, says nothing.

“Great, I’m fucked,” says Amy. They approach the wall, turn lazily, push off and kick, their feet leaving three small white trails of frothy bubbles.Sar

THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA by Paula Rivera

THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA
Works on Paper and Beyond
by Paula Rivera

I started drawing when I was a baby. My first subject was an elephant, done in orange Crayola marker. My parents have the drawing to this day. I've always had a strong feeling for drawing animals. Like many children, I believed I understood animals. I'm still fascinated with animals (although I'm no longer quite as obsessed with horses as I used to be, like many young girls.)

I went to Philadelphia's High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), a magnet school for art students. I was convinced that an arts school environment would be best for me, even through I felt strongly that you cannot teach a person how to create art. The artistic environment was good for me in many ways, but the Western philosophy of teaching art messed with my head and feelings.

When I graduated from CAPA I was accepted to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to study drawing and painting. But after three years, I was completely sick of it. So I left, planning to work for a year and save enough Zmoney to move to California to study animation. But even after that year of working, my California dream was too expensive—I didn't want to go into debt for student loans. Before I knew it I was auditioning for acceptance at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas to study animation. I was going from my adopted home city, Philadelphia, to my birthplace, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

My original goal in character animation was to create figures that make anatomical sense; the difference between drawing "life" and "cartoons" (that is, I want to draw bodies "made of bones" as opposed to bodies "made of rubber"). You can see what I mean by this if you look at work by the Studio Ghibli, or compare Disney approach to animation versus Looney Tunes or Cartoon Network.

KEEPING TIME by Angelique Stevens

KEEPING TIME
by Angelique Stevens

Walking through the doors of the V.A. hospital where my stepfather is a patient, the air settles, resigned like the sun’s afternoon descent. Dust flecks float in and out of golden afternoon rays. In the stillness, I can almost follow one from foyer through corridor, up and down lifeless hallways until it finally settles on a rusted radiator. I walk cautiously like I might break the building’s trance. The building, its dirt collecting in forgotten baseboard crevices is lined with plaster walls, their cracks covered with layers of paint. An old wooden bench sits in the foyer where people remove boots and unbutton coats.

Along the right wall are two bulletin boards. One posts the day’s schedule “10:00—group meeting, 12:00—lunch: corn, meatloaf, and onion soup, 2:30—movie: Harrison Ford in Patriot Games” The other overflows with old pictures of current residents. One photo, cracked and worn, shows a young man newly pressed and proudly uniformed with an elbow on the nose of an old fighter plane. In another a young man, no older than 17, stands next to his parents. His mother lingers in the back, indifferent. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam—they all stand, young and strong, next to the armaments of their era.

In the silence, I tip-toe unconsciously. The nurse’s station in the next corridor is empty. The other workers have all gone home to their families for the weekend. Unused rooms are darkened and office doors are closed. Further down the corridor, a man slumps in a wheelchair blocking it where the sun’s rays are the brightest. He wears gray pants with dark stains that reveal his secrets. A slipper covers one foot, a cast the other. He doesn’t move to greet me; he only stares in expectation at the slit of light on the floor.

THE EMPATHY MACHINE: A Visual Narrative on the Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith by Kelly McQuain

THE EMPATHY MACHINE: A Visual Narrative on the Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith by Kelly McQuain

"How did you spend your summer?" is the theme my schoolteachers used to ask us to write on when September came and we shuffled into our wooden desks with new lunchboxes and freshly sharpened No. 2 pencils.

As summer 2015 winds to a close, I'm reflecting on the what's preoccupied me for so much of it: the purpose I find in art-making, and the specters of poets like Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, whose recent projects have cast a pall over the field of poetics this year due to their clumsy handling of identity politics at a time when the country is still smarting from recent wounds and suffering new traumas on what feels like a daily basis.

Goldsmith, the MoMA Poet Laureate, is a champion of what he calls "uncreative writing": He's printed out the Internet. He's transcribed news reports of famous disasters and retyped an entire issue of The New York Times. He's read for Obama and been a guest of Stephen Colbert. Last March Goldsmith ran into trouble after performing a poem called "The Body of Michael Brown" at a conference. Goldsmith read a somewhat edited version of the autopsy report for Brown, the African American teenager who died in Ferguson, Missouri after being shot multiple times by a police officer the previous August.

Goldsmith's "poem" ends not where the coroner's report actually ends, but with the coroner's description of Brown's genitals and the observation "unremarkable." The Twitter-verse erupted in howls of protest. Goldsmith pulled his poem from the Internet and won't talk about it, even when other poets have pressed to interview him.

What's worse? That Goldsmith never accounted for context, or that he simply chose not to? As a white male making a big fat salary at an elite institution, he should have been aware how his position of privilege would open him to charges of exploitation. Where was Goldsmith's empathy for Michael Brown's family?*

THE DEATH OF A BABY by Kirsten Aguilar

THE DEATH OF A BABY
by Kirsten Aguilar

The day we went to see the baby it rained. One of those rains that dumps and then is done, leaves you soaked but not shivering. The family lived on the same road as Celia and worked a plot of land that now, in the spring, burst up in stocks of corn. The father of the baby sat on the porch and waved us in despite our dripping clothes and mud-caked shoes. I cannot remember now where we were coming from or whether we’d planned the visit, but I do know that it was evening and Celia had her camera and inside the little house, two boys sat on stools eating rice and fish with their fingers. The baby was small and warm and she slept while I held her. The TV was on. The boys ate. Celia took pictures.

A few days later, I was in a taxi alone, just me and the driver. It was hot and my thighs sweat and stuck to the seat. We drove through the city and I watched out my window when Celia called and told me that the baby, Liza, had died.

“Elle a toujours dormi,” Celia said—she was always sleeping. She told me that the baby had died around noon and by two o’clock, she was buried in the ground, la terre near the house. The mother had three other children, all boys, and this was the second girl she’d lost.

The French verb for dying is mourir. A word that falls back into my throat when I try to get it out. Too many vowels, not enough consonants. It reminds me of more and of mourn, of something that isn’t quite finished, something that begs for a crisp ending, the percussion of a T.

CAESAR IS DEAD, LONG LIVE CAESAR by Ross Losapio

CAESAR IS DEAD, LONG LIVE CAESAR
by Ross Losapio

There is no new air in this world.
Can you understand? No
new air. Atmosphere is
a crowded elevator and even
if someone is carrying a ficus
to freshen up the tenth-floor office,
you’re still taking in everyone’s
quietly released breath. Each
deep inhalation contains a molecule
or two gasped by Caesar
on his last day. Tonight
Caesar is sucking the time-release
coating off a fistful of oxycontin,
depositing them on the coffee table

NOM DE VOYAGE by Travis Kiger

It was less about ego surfing than curiosity is what my fingers self-consciously whispered into the keys spelling my name in the box. If you did this, you would find, even before finished, that Travis is a former city councilman of Fullerton County, CA. Click one of those links your search produces and you would read critical blogs with critical comments written about him. You would read the headline, “12 Year Old Takes Fullerton's Travis Kiger to School on Bullying.” You would learn that he is a progressive politician by finding a video posted of his rant purporting DUI checkpoints as unconstitutional and are a union scam. Scroll down—he plays soccer for Lee University. Scroll down—he coaches debate. But mostly, thanks to busy bee search engine optimizers, you would see that he is a former city councilman. Each Travis Kiger with a different face. Each with a different occupation.

ETERNAL CALM by Samuel Hovda

ETERNAL CALM
by Samuel Hovda

A mother descends on a meteor.
Her kids on a keychain
attached to her pants.

When she lands,
the whole forest goes up
in delphinium flames.

The mother walks
to a dust-grey town
where the single stoplight blinks after nine.

OVER AND UNDER by Caroline Swicegood

OVER AND UNDER
by Caroline Swicegood

“Where are you from?”

The question, which comes from a smiling white-shirted waiter with a red towel over his arm, is friendly and typical, nothing but small talk with a tourist, the way it generally starts. Sabine begins flipping through her mental rolodex of possible answers: with slightly olive skin, warm brown hair, and green eyes, with three languages perfected (and two of them Western, no less), with a French name, she can pass for almost anything.

She used to tell the truth more than she does now. In Istanbul, she either got slant-eyed suspicion or solidarity, depending on who she was talking to; she found herself over-tipping to prove that she isn’t like the other Syrians wandering the streets, covered and curve-palmed. In Athens, she was kicked out of a cab after speaking Arabic on the phone with her mother. In Dubai, no one gave a shit, because everyone knows they are being paid half as much to work twice as hard—the master’s degree hanging in her brother’s office there feels almost mocking. In Alexandria, in a country that has known its share of problems, it inspired a spirited coffee shop discussion about the nuances between refugee and immigrant and expatriate. In the Venice airport, her first time this far west since the war started and her home country gained notoriety, the customs agent flipped through her passport, looked repeatedly at her Schengen visa, escorted her to a room to wait three hours, be questioned for two, and wait four more.

MY PERSONA by Cynthia Atkins

MY PERSONA
by Cynthia Atkins

I carried my persona
in a brown paper bag. It held
shreds of lint and one hair
that the comb forgot—My persona
has a pecking order. Its first name
rhymes with self—Always the last in line.
My persona is filled with
yearning. It shipped off on a garbage
of barge, and landed with a din in
the Witness Protection Program.
My persona hid under a shamrock
in DUMBO---My mural penned
by a black gloved hand. It lay chalk flat
on a red brick building,
mixed with saliva, turpentine,
and cheap wine. My persona is not

REV. DR. KING by henry 7. reneau, jr.

REV. DR. KING
henry 7. reneau, jr.

bury me standing,
with the music of my name
ringing out
into air as hope,

as gut-bucket blues,
saw blade that shears a nail
to scatter of phoenix sparks,
legend,
blooming as one strong pulse
within the windstorm
of indifference & history.

remember me as conviction,
a moral parallel,
to live each day
as if i were someone else’s mile
in broken shoes.

VOLTAGE by Kylie Lee Baker

VOLTAGE
by Kylie Lee Baker

Ivy turned the living room lamp off and back on again for the eleventh time when Hal finally looked up from his book.

"Should I read somewhere else, darling?" he said.

The worst part was that he meant it. Ivy knew Hal would gladly get up and read in the bathtub again so that she could toy with the lights until the bulbs burned out. What was left of Ivy's fingernails gnawed into the doorframe, her other hand limp across the lamp chain. She turned it off again because she couldn't look at Hal's face in moments when she loved him.

Ivy hurried to the bathroom and turned on the hot water, scrubbing lavender soap into the creases in her palms and under her chewed fingernails. The familiar restlessness sent electric currents prickling through her bones and charged her fingertips with static energy. She felt an absence, a missing brick in the wall, a cavernous negative deeper and darker than simple nothingness.

She threw open the medicine cabinet lined with nail polish that she never used and pushed back one bottle sitting half a millimeter out of formation.

SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT THIS STREET by Zoe Stoller

SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT THIS STREET
by Zoe Stoller

Adam, and how he thought I was 24 and how
Erika didn’t know I wouldn’t forget. I drew red on

my fingernails and it stained my shirt and I dream
of falafel and my back turns to sweat. Backstage,
and I remember dancing, and Molly kissed Peter

too but I slept in his bed. My electricity’s off and
the pencils are permanent. My tea tastes thick and

it hurts to swallow. He grabbed me in the city
and my virginity on the phone. Next I am who I
wouldn’t ever really be, and maybe I would sing

NATURE POEM by Eliza Callard

NATURE POEM
by Eliza Callard

Worrisomely fat dog--a silken nut brown ale color--
belly swaying near the bouldered trail, with his wolfish

mates. A family under the budding trees, the girl twisting
a butterfly net in her hands. “What are you trying to catch?”

“Anything.” Pitbulls Hazel--with the wet grin--and Pele--licking
and nibbling so vigorously he awakens the years-old bone bruise

where a stranger punched my jaw on a crowded street. Instant
friends with t-shirt-wearing Phillies fans, commiseration alone our

FLU, 1917 by Elizabeth Frankie Rollins

FLU, 1917
by Elizabeth Rollins

The germ slips into the spaces, the interstices, trembles in the fingerprints, in the suspended spittle of a cough. It gathers and collects itself. It becomes something, again. There in the lungs and hollows of the human body, it grows and blooms. Greedy and bountiful, it burgeons and spreads and insinuates. Hungry, vigorous, it climbs into the lungs, it fills the life with itself, makes life forget what came before. Agnes walks down the street, the germ humming in those around her. A woman passes, turns her head toward Agnes, opens her mouth and coughs, her gloved hand rising to cover her mouth a moment later.

The sound of coughing. The delicate cough. The throaty cough. Phlegmy cough. Muffled cough, wet cough, graveled cough, also the sound of moaning and whispers and the frequent cries of pain. The sighing of the living and the sighing of the almost dead. Footsteps. Weeping. Hacking. Foam.

The patients stare at the ceiling. They lay on their sides, elbows holding up their heads. They sit up. Sometimes they sit together. But often, unless they are in the throes of serious dying, they are motionless, hands under covers, half in another land, preparing to leave entirely.

BOYS WITH FACES LIKE MIRRORS by Joe Baumann

BOYS WITH FACES LIKE MIRRORS
by Joe Baumann

The bus crash devastated everyone.

That morning, Jane Philban looked out the kitchen window and tsked at the thunder heads perched above the trees. Her son bounced on the balls of his feet behind her, telling her it didn’t matter because the field trip was to the bowling alley, and the bowling alley had a roof.

Mrs. Pederson’s son pleaded from his bed to be allowed to go even though he had a temperature of one-oh-one. He didn’t feel sick, he said, slapping at his high forehead and kicking his feet like he was pedaling a bike. I feel fine, and you know I really like the smell of bowling shoes.

Anthony Skiles dressed himself, picking out a t-shirt and the new jeans he’d gotten for his birthday because the field trip meant no one had to put on the blazers or the purple-and-green striped ties they wore every other day. He was glad for the field trip because his dress shirt was wrinkled and the teachers would frown at him. Anthony waited for the bus while his mother cried in her bedroom because her husband had told her the night before that he wanted a divorce. No one had told Anthony this, but he’d heard a lot of yelling, the slamming of a door, and his mother’s sobs. He’d reheated his own dinner.

GET BEHIND ME SATAN by Mica Evans

GET BEHIND ME SATAN
by Mica Evans

She remembers his daft voice ringing like a death knell: Beer,
it’s beer you blubbering broad - you’re supposed to drink it fast.
She’s feeling fat but not hungry. She’s full of beer but not ugly,
and she knows. She’s looking killer in that cotton blend catsuit
he bought her the last time she couldn’t stop crying. Whenever
she cries, he causes then cures it, and she forgives him
like bare feet in a crowd. When his caustic tongue takes it
a lick too far, he flowers, fixes, flatters her like fluorescent
lights in a sunny park. She remembers his pink lips spitting:
She’s got a nice ass and an afro, she doesn’t know about Foucault,
so don’t ask her, just bring a round of shots. She rarely talks.
She thinks, Can someone get this broad a crock of soup and a lager?
All hail the pale ale gods who got her here another night.
Despite the seven white men drooling at her from their stools,
she taps her toes, takes a glub, and anxious-glances at the door.
She’s down down dumb drunk drunk and won’t eat until
he waltzes in with that keyring jingle, three bloodhounds at his feet.

TOUCHED FROM THE SKY by Shannon Viola

TOUCHED FROM THE SKY
by Shannon Viola

Whenever I read Tacitus in the Latin, I want to crawl underneath my bed with twelve cupcakes and curse myself to Dis and back. He’s a sassy Roman author. One time, Tacitus used an ablative absolute to lead into a result clause. You might not know what either an ablative absolute or a result clause is, and I wouldn’t expect you to, but trust me. Connecting those two grammatical constructions in Latin is mental. But Tacitus did it anyway.

If you haven’t already guessed, I am a Classics major.

If you don’t know what a Classics major is, that’s okay too. My roommate, Erica, has known my major since we moved in. One day in October, however, I was lounging on my bed, translating some Tacitus, when I peered up to Erica and said:

“You know, I just really love Latin. Translating just makes me happy.”

So Erica, with a face as sincere as a mother’s and in a tone as dulcet as vernal dew, said, “Well, Shannon, if you love Latin so much, you should major in it. Really. Just do what you love.”

I squinted my eyes and stifled a guffaw. “Erica—that’s what a Classics major is.”

“Oh,” she laughed, “I never knew what a Classics major was, so I just pretended to know whenever you mentioned it.”

LESSONS IN PROBABILITY THEORY by Tony Gorry

LESSONS IN PROBABILITY THEORY
by Tony Gorry

It's a late summer afternoon in 1945. On the side of Tongue Mountain in the Adirondacks, a male deer is leading two females along a switchback. They're on their way to a special meadow to enjoy its late summer bounty in peace, undisturbed by occasional hikers passing along the trail.

They're halfway across the last switchback when the sharp crack of a rifle splits the air. The buck stops abruptly and stands rigidly in the soft light. The does freeze as well. For some moments, only his ears and nostrils move. Then he shakes himself, sending a ripple under his coat from his neck to his haunches. He snorts, and turns from the trail onto a narrow rocky track that is largely hidden by bushes. The inner side of the path clings to the mountain, but the outer edge drops off sharply to a valley below. With no hesitation, the buck and his companions clatter out along the ridge. As they round a bend, the buck again stops. Standing still, he surveys the shimmering vista the lake laid out below him. The females behind him fidget slightly, awaiting his direction. Some twenty seconds later, he snorts once more, gives another rippling shiver, and starts up again. The three deer round the bend and soon will be gone.

As the second doe makes the turn, one of her back hooves dislodges a small rock, spinning it over the edge of the trail and sending it caroming down the hill. The falling rock flickers when it exposes a polished side to the fading summer light. Silently, it drops until it glances off the side of a large boulder embedded in the hillside. With a click, the encounter sends the rock spinning sharply off course. It bounces twice, once left, once right, into a patch of mossy stones. Then, continuing its journey, it strikes the edge of a large tree root, seems to poise for a moment, and finally nestles into a depression among some mottled leaves.

Below the deer, between the mountain and the lake, lies the Knob, a loose cluster of cottages and a few permanent homes on an abutment into Lake George. During harsh winters, only a few hardy souls live in the Knob. In summer, however, the cottages are filled with families drawn by the swimming, boating, hiking, and the sheer beauty of the lake. During the war years, it's mostly mothers who bring their children. They want a few days break from work and escape from some of their loneliness and fear for their husbands overseas.

AN APOLOGY by Simon Mermelstein

AN APOLOGY
by Simon Mermelstein

The mouth is where toxicity leaves the brain. Spit
out the ugly until pure thoughts remain. Split
my sharp tongue from soft palate, my kind heart from all that blood.

Where do bad thoughts come from? Cruel instincts,
those regretful daggers that slice inside and out.
Bottle them and they shatter glass. Chew them over
and they swallow my stomach

but to exhale this teargas is a prayer for dissipation.
Maybe it will sink into the soil, poison the carrots but leave my friends be.
I’m so sorry I’m Sarin.
People wear masks and I think I know why.

THE ANGELS OF PONT-SAINT-ESPRIT by Patricia Flaherty Pagan

ANGELS OF PONT-SAINT-ESPRIT
by Patricia Flaherty Pagan

In her mercy, mother ties me to a chair in the attic with rough, wheat-colored rope. Fishermen tell mother that Monsieur Armunier writhes in his straightjacket yelling about serpents upon him. Nurses and nuns rush to his aid. But mother does not trust me, “ma belle jeune fille,” to the doctors at the asylum, so we guard my secret at home.

The attic roof leaks. Raindrops kiss my cheeks.

Silvery lights flash and my stomach convulses. Delicate bells of lily of the valley wrap me in their sweet aroma. I am grateful. As flames crackle in the river, seraphim rise on blue-tipped wings. Their celestial voices join in a libretto of glory. I also sing. Then I ride the crescendo of sound to them. They enfold me in their wings of sky and we soar and dip above the spreading fire.

Quiet, child, my mother says.

MY PROMOTION by Gerri Brightwell

MY PROMOTION
by Gerri Brightwell

The night we celebrated my shell wouldn’t open. I worked the blade between its lips but it rattled across my plate while the others were already swallowing in ecstasy. Soon they were offering suggestions. I gripped the shell in my napkin, pinning it against the table and viciously twisting the blade. Finally it gave with a wet suck and a cheer broke out as I lifted it to my lips. Inside lay a naked creature smaller than my thumb, limbs folded tight, eyes shut in fear. One heartbeat, then I tipped it into my mouth and applause shattered the air.

NATURAL SELECTION by Alec Hershman

NATURAL SELECTION
by Alec Hershman

The trees wave desperately to the storm-procession
like a pope-cloud has inspired them to send wind.
The size of the fury dwarfs us. And we not-
so-desperately have feet for scampering
and industry. This is how we've been lost
—as creatures—unwound on scented tracks.
The horses among us turn circles
around the spot where lightning starts.
Is this the replica? Puppets are ingesting
other puppets and the whole cast, it seems,
is strung on one string that runs gut to throat.
We are thimbles, once nested and now harassed
by a breeze. We are humans
and so are mutants for how we hear
a word in thunder, see the flash, and think
the string has raised us from our meal.

RUSSIA IS NOT LIKE US by Barbara Haas

RUSSIA IS NOT LIKE US
by Barbara Haas

An inch or two of new snow has fallen since morning, flocking the graves at Novodevichy in feathery white. Black marble obelisks and basalt monoliths create a vertical as well as horizontal tombscape, a way to organize death into the narrow alleys and lanes of a space-cramped necropolis.

Shostakovich, Chekhov, Yeltsin, Kruschev—they lie here. Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Gogol, Tretyakov—tons of granite guard their rest.

Moscow is never more silent than under a mantle of soft mounded snow and winter never more Russian than on a somber day whose gray sky is wooly with constantly sifting flakes.

An occasional bouquet of faded flowers brings a splash of color to this cemetery. Even the grave of a mathematician from the 19th Century is graced with a spray of scarlet gladioli, proof of memory’s persistence. Roses lie crushed at the feet of alabaster statues, their petals made pale by the lacework of snow, forgotten bouquets in a forgotten season left to commemorate the lives of legends.

The statues themselves are arresting. Human figures seem to stride out of polished rock slabs but stop just short of stepping free, something in the granite leashing them to eternity. The opera singers, ballerinas and artists stare across the black and white austerity, honored guests at a quite exclusive cocktail party, VIP’s on the A-list forever. Sculpted larger than life, the carvings illustrate the way death has forced upon those who rest here super-human proportions. Their stone faces reveal the dignity of luminaries who know strangers will gaze upon them for centuries.

THE DROP SHOT by Shola Olowu-Asante

THE DROP SHOT
by Shola Olowu-Asante

The thing to remember was that nothing had really changed. That was what her father was telling her. Yes, he and mum were no longer together but that was only a small detail in the grand scheme of things. More important was that he loved her, mum loved her and Imee loved her too.

Stella nodded but her gaze drifted out the window, to where the sunlight draped over the Angsana trees. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying with the many cries flying up from the condo swimming pool now that it was after-school peak hour. Hard because she was looking forward to seeing her friends, maybe even going out to Ion Mall like they used to on Friday afternoons when she still lived here, in Singapore. Hard because her father had been staring at her ever since she got off the plane, making her feel that despite what he said, nothing would ever be the same again.

‘Stella are you listening?’

Stella wrapped her arms around the new Babolat racquet he’d just given her. A tennis prodigy, that’s what her parents and coaches had called her from the minute she first picked up racquet. She had played every day since but after the divorce and the move back to London with her mother, she had lost her touch. Everything that had once been easy became a struggle. She couldn’t hit her favored drop shot, because it needed finesse, soft hands, while hers felt about as sensitive as meat cleavers. And when, during a match against a girl she should have beaten with her eyes closed, Stella watched as ball after ball dived to the bottom of the net or else sailed over the baseline, the emotions that had been simmering away boiled over. She smashed her racket on the court, screaming over and over, ‘I’m done with this stupid game. I’m done.’ She’d had enough of all the rules, the hours of practice, the fitness training. It was the scaffold around which the rest of her life had been built and she wanted to tear it down. Her mother had been patient at first, but when after a month, and then another Stella refused to play, she panicked. ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ Stella overheard her saying on the phone. ‘She’s your bloody daughter too.’

ART AND HEALING by Donna Levinstone

ART AND HEALING
Pastel Landscapes
by Donna Levinstone

Art enhances the healing process. My work is meditative and has been used in hospital settings and other situations where healing is called for. My mother and a few of my friends, in the last stage of their lives, have used my work as a source of calm and focus during their bed-ridden illnesses. As a cancer survivor, I, too have found that artwork provides calm in my life. My pastel landscapes have often been referred to as “landscapes of the soul”.

The use of wide skies in my work promotes a sense of well-being. I have memories, as a young child, of riding in our convertible and gazing up at the sky for hours. According to Jack Borden, founder of For Spacious Skies, people who have sky awareness in their lives often have an added sense of optimism. They look at their lives, like the skies, with an endless sense of possibilities.

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