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thwack

  • Joined: December 27, 2012
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ALPHA ∞ OMEGA by Laurin DeChae

ALPHA ∞ OMEGA
by Laurin DeChae

Unveil, prophet. Write me the end first where you find comfort
And tell me when the time is near to suck sweet from the vine.

Feel that atmospheric friction, surge of pressure, curl of toes to shriek
Just above our heads the rise and fall of history, of man deepening ravines.

How the body changes form when it pleases, how it
Shifts shape for both right and wrong reasons. Water to wine.

Whiff of honeysuckle memory gently rests its head on your shoulder,
Think of bread, of mouth dry, of want as tendrils touch cheek to vine.

Let knowing lull you to sleep with fantastic imaginings of the end,
All gold and glitter, razzle dazzle and stars, glitz at the end of the divine.

BIRDSHOT by Michal Leibowitz

BIRDSHOT
by Michal Leibowitz

After we’ve shot the swallows from the sky
I tell you of the coast you’ve forgotten,
memories turned legend, migrating inwards.
I am the gluttony learned by leeching
the ocean, all swallow bones and
winter. Wait with me as I sift through
this island, the almost-glass, the spirits
they promised. Let me pick these splinters –
murmur gentle things – let me make you
stay. Here are the swallows and here
are their feathers and here are the phantoms
waiting, wasting:
Let us take you to the grotto
where the walls glint inwards,
and the birds drop downwards,
lose their faces in the swell.

MY BOYFRIEND’S ESTRANGED GRANDFATHER by Rachael Tague

MY BOYFRIEND’S ESTRANGED GRANDFATHER
by Rachael Tague
He was an alcoholic, a wealthy engineer, and a butterfly collector. He traveled all over the world, especially in South America, specializing in Southern California and Neotropical specimens, amassing a collection allegedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time of his death in late 2007.

His house in California must have been nothing but walls and racks of display cases – wings ranging from the size of a buttercup blossom to an oak leaf. Splotched, banded, eyed, lined, swiped, swirled. Splayed and mounted, framed, flocking Emperors, Brushfoots, Daggerwings, longwings, snouts, and Swallowtails, sleek, fuzzy, feathered—frozen.

It happened on a bridge—or rather, off a bridge—in the Kosnipata Valley of Atalaya, Peru. He ventured away from the Association for Tropical Lepidoptera early on the morning of November 4. As there were no witnesses, they can only assume that he spotted a rare butterfly – perhaps the one he traveled to Peru to find – misjudged its distance from the bridge railing, and flung his net too hard.

Accounts of the height of the fall range from thirty to five thousand feet, frozen in flight for an instant, barely long enough to snatch a breath of the air rushing around him before he met the dry river bed. His association initiated a search when he didn’t show up for dinner and discovered his body in the ravine, net in hand, and the butterfly trapped, flapping in the fibers.

WANING by Caitlin McGill

WANING
by Caitlin McGill

Saria rocked in her chair on the porch, wondering how the trees kept still on such fierce nights. The house had grown so quiet since her mother’s boyfriend left—since she told her mother what he’d done—that it seemed like all she ever heard was her mother’s wine glass clinking against the sink.

Her mother had kicked him out right away, but Saria sensed her mother hadn’t believed her. “I don’t understand,” her mother had said. And later, once he was gone, when she was drunk: “Who started it anyway?”

Saria stared out at the trees and wondered what it would be like to never speak again, to wave only when the breeze brushed her limbs, to keep the sparrows and robins and blue jays warm as they scampered through her, to open her mouth only when the wind grew so strong that her whole body trembled and his voice was there beside her again: Don’t tell.

BEAUTY by Gregory Djanikian

Gregory-Djanikian

BEAUTY
by Gregory Djanikian

In the eye of the beholder, we say, disregarding
what the beautiful might spring from,
an oil slick’s satiny iridescence, the ravishing
splash of orange in the smog-ridden sky.

Yesterday, someone pointed to the loosestrife
overtaking our garden, praised the lovely
delicate petals, the long magisterial stalks.

Sometimes the beautiful is a fire
that takes the whole of a tree in its arms,
sometimes a wild and engorged river
cutting deeply into the land.

The beautiful floats beyond us
immune to our beholding.

THE AIRPORT AND THE MUSEUM by Laura Tanenbaum

THE AIRPORT AND THE MUSEUM
by Laura Tanenbaum

I decided to ask for the manual scan, so I was listening to this woman telling me to spread my legs, where she was going to put her hands and I laughed because it seemed like porn. Not really like porn, of course, just like the way I imagined porn would be when I was a prim pre-internet teenager who’d never seen porn, right down to the crap lighting I somehow knew was something you were supposed to know about porn. The word banal came to mind. Though in the airport the lighting really was crap. Thankfully, there weren’t any mirrors, not to guard against vanity like in the house of mourning but to preserve some shred of self-respect, some hope we weren’t the faces we were.

Behind me men came out of the luxury lounge. More porn; more banality. They twitched under their rings and slick hair making their way to the first class line. Last year a company spent ten million dollars on an innovation that found an extra centimeter of room for first-class legs. They had a team of engineers and they all cheered, threw a big office party in honor of the centimeter. I read this in an airport in the special travel issue of the New Yorker. It was right before an article about migrants dying at sea and the European coast guards turning them away. A sentence came into my mind: “I tremble for my world when I remember God is just.” I thought someone righteous had said this but I looked it up later and it turned out to be Jefferson. First I thought, how strange a slaveholder said it. Then I thought, of course a slaveholder said this, they would know.

MEDIEVAL PHOTOGRAPHER by Sarah J. Sloat

MEDIEVAL PHOTOGRAPHER
by Sarah J. Sloat

In a past life I imagine
I was a medieval photographer
toiling to capture

the wrist of a prince
perspiring in miniver sleeves.

With anachronous baggage I recorded the horse
collar and caravan,
wheels crossing a field of bodies

to cast gradations of shade,
stippled and matte,
on the dust and beclouded countenance.

THE YELLOW FACEMASK by Tasha Coryell

THE YELLOW FACEMASK
by Tasha Coryell

She hadn’t been planning to rob the bank. Her face was cold.

Or maybe she had been planning to rob the bank and her face was cold. Sometimes bank robbers feel a chill in their cheeks just like any ordinary person.

The facemask was yellow. She couldn’t remember buying it or recall why she had chosen that color. There were a lot of yellow things in her closet: cardigans and dresses, a nightgown that bordered on an ugly green. She supposed at one time she must’ve enjoyed the color. Said things like, “Yellow is cheerful.”

On that day however, yellow did not make her feel cheerful and instead made her feel like the top part of a banana, the knob that is peeled down to reveal the gushy insides.

It was one of those winter days that was so cold that the car door was frozen shut and Elise, with her small body and yellow knob head was unable to open the door and had to return inside to get her husband who was still wearing his pajamas pants to come outside and open it for her.

“You’re starting to turn into the chair, all brown and leather,” she said to him.

“The chair leads a good life,” he replied and looked up at her. “You look like a bank robber in that thing.”

He had to put on his Goretex jacket and boots just to go outside.

“Sure is cold out there,” he said. “Are you sure you want to go out now?”

THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL by Bohumil Hrabal reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL, novelas
by Bohumil Hrabal
translated by James Naughton
NYRB Classics, 299 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Late summer might be the best season to read Bohumil Hrabal, for time reveals itself in the ripe air and everything bleeds with life. Hrabal, the Czech novelist of delirious syncopation, who died in 1997 falling from a fifth floor hospital window while trying to feed the birds, returns to childhood in these two novelas about the manager of a small-town brewery, his older brother, savage wife, and young son. Hrabal’s stepfather was the manager of a brewery; Maryška, the wife of Francin, the fictional brewery manager, narrates the first novela, Cutting It Short. Their son is the narrator of The Little Town Where Time Stood Still.

When Cutting It Short, which Hrabal published in 1976, opens, Maryška, is lighting the lamps, waiting for Francin to come in from the brewery. “I dread the day,” she says, “the mains will be brought to the brewery and all the brewery lamps, all the airy lamps in the stables, the lamps with the round mirrors, all those portly lamps with round wicks one day will cease to be lit, no one will prize their light, for all this ceremonial will be replaced by the light-switch resembling the water tap which replaced the wonderful pumps.” Maryška’s no sap to nostalgia (indeed, quite the opposite, a woman of voluminous hunger for free-flowing life, she loves to climb the brewery’s chimney and speed around town on her bike); she’s merely setting us up for a string of electric events that will forever disrupt life in the town where time stood still. Hrabal’s full-throated prose, brought to delirious and delicious English life by the late translator James McNaughton, has the capacity to go low and high all at once, to convey meaning glossed with viscera.

LONG WALK TO VALHALLA by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox reviewed by Brazos Price

LONG WALK TO VALHALLA
by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox
Archaia, 96 pages

reviewed by Brazos Price

In Long Walk to Valhalla, a graphic novel by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox, we follow a young man named Rory as he winds his way back through memories of his childhood in rural Arkansas. Rory and Joe are brothers, but so much more. Rory is Joe’s protector. Joe has difficulty speaking and is prone to strange trances in which he sees visions of "Pretty Things," surreal-looking creatures that are not exactly monsters but certainly not part of the normal landscape of Arkansas. Because of Joe's peculiar malady, he is vulnerable to worlds both real and (perhaps) imagined. This is a story of growing up and the sadness that accumulates along the way.

The story begins when Rory’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. He has only three contacts, all three of whom we meet during the course of the narrative, and no money to make a call. Then Sylvia appears from within a corn field near where Joe is stranded. She claims to be a Valkyrie out of Norse mythology, sent to take Rory off to Valhalla, the land where heroes go after they die in battle.

This is a framed story that works on several levels as it moves back and forth between Rory's present and his childhood. There is the story Rory tells himself and the story he tells Sylvia about his life. Rory and Joe’s abusive and alcoholic dad, Dwayne, looms large in the frame, the one constant that must be overcome. We get a sense of Dwayne's character in one of the early flashback scenes, when he sends Rory and Joe out to a convenience store to buy some ephedrine so he can cook meth. When the boys return, he spends hours haranguing Joe over some perceived slight. This short scene also defines the setting of the small rural town where Rory and Joe grow up; the store clerk is not at all surprised that Dwayne is sending his sons to do his "errands," and when she comments that Joe "don't talk much," Rory simply says "Yes, ma'am," and takes Joe's hand as they leave, showing the protectiveness he feels for his brother. We then see the parking lot from Joe's point of view: alive with hordes of bizarre creatures, from a dog-faced airplane to a giant sushi monster. Rory doesn't share these visions, but he accepts that Joe sees them and doesn't label him as crazy because of it.

THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

THE WAKE
by Paul Kingsnorth
Graywolf Press, 365 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

As I write this, the white half of the world is up in arms about a lion, killed on the other side of the globe. Black protestors in Ferguson stand in lines, chanting the names of the dead. Videos are released of police officers assaulting, maiming, and shooting unarmed black citizens. The temperature soars to 165 degrees in Iran. This summer has been too hot, a climate sweating for change. It is the oldest story: the new idea comes, and grinds the good old world into dust. And another idea on top of that, invaders with new languages and new philosophies.

Not all new ideas are good; genocide is one of them. We're still seeing the systemic elimination of natives from their own land, in the United States and elsewhere. Sacred tribal lands are sold to copper mining companies. Lakes where gods once rose to give prophecy, poisoned by industrial waste. The crushing disappointment of our modern losses is brought to life in The Wake, which takes place in England in 1066 A.D. Awakened to the impending disaster of the Norman Invasion, Buccmaster of Holland begins to have visions of the Old Gods, which call him to fight back against the invaders and restore England to her former glory. Wake means “watcher,” and like the Buccmaster, the reader is compelled to watch the persecution of native English people by the army of Guillaume le Batard.

THE TREE WITH NO NAME by Drago Jançar reviewed by Justin Goodman

THE TREE WITH NO NAME
by Drago Jançar
translated by Michael Biggins
Dalkey Archive, 274 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

Contention over millennials’ degree of entitlement hasn’t been limited to the United States. As we learn from Slovenian writer Drago Jançar, in fact, the generation gap has an equally special significance in the former Soviet Bloc, where, according to translator Erica Johnson Debeljak, writing on the Dalkey Archive Press website, the “new generation…takes independence and freedom, the Slovenian language, and shopping malls to be their birthright.” Communism is outdated. That’s why The Tree With No Name is so timely. The issue is not simply post-birth pangs (Slovenia was established in 1991 with the USSR’s collapse). Rather Jançar asks, what is there for the old generation in a new world?

To Janez Lipnik, the archvist protagonist who’s preternaturally incapable of letting go of the past and which he belongs to, it’s all that’s left. “Wherever there is no past,” he thinks, “the world is fundamentally unreal.” The overarching dread of becoming a living artifact overcomes Lipnik after his wife, Marijana, points out a women’s bicycle that is pulled from “the poor river whose bad luck it was to run through the center of the city.” This has happened after Lipnik has started work on the diary of “The Great Lover,” as he dubs him, who “slept his way” through World War II; after he remembers his grade school teacher, Zala, had a bike just like it; after he discovers a secret about his wife’s past, which destroys their marriage. “After,” in the sense of Klee’s Angelus Novus: In the words of Walter Benjamin, “He is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.” The novel opens with chapters Eighty-six to Ninety-nine, going down to One (when the bike is found) and back up to Eighty-five, reduplicating the unhinged obsessions of the archivist to retrieve a lost world, the past, as it moves rapidly away.

Four Novels from Unnamed Press reviewed by Johnny Payne

THE PAPER MAN
by Gallagher Lawson
Unnamed Press, 267 pages

REMEMBER THE SCORPION
by Isaac Goldemberg
translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler
Unnamed Press, 133 pages

THE FINE ART OF FUCKING UP
by Cate Dicharry
Unnamed Press, 230 pages

ESCAPE FROM BAGHDAD
by Saad Z. Hossain
Unnamed Press, 304 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

The wryly-named Unnamed Press out of Los Angeles is living the self-appointed paradox of making a name for itself. Any independent press walks the line between sufficient eclecticism to draw in a swath of curious readers, and a strong enough identity to stand out from the pack. Unnamed Press has achieved this goal with a set of spanking new novel releases: Escape from Baghdad, Remember the Scorpion, The Paper Man, and The Fine Art of Fucking Up (possible best title of the year).

A decided taste rules the selections:

There is snappy dialogue. “He’s a sullen little shit, but his work’s pretty good;” “All of Lima smells like a woman in heat.” “I dream only in American.”

There is narrative pith. The first, brief paragraph of The Fine Art of Fucking Up reads:

I am sitting behind my desk watching the downpour when I catch the scent of bacon. Dunbar is in the building again, despite the restraining order.

CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley reviewed by Lynn Levin

CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley reviewed by Lynn Levin

CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley
Southern Illinois University Press, 310 pages

reviewed by Lynn Levin

We live in an era of border crossings. In marriage, family, race, gender, and geographical boundaries, our world is more than ever about blending, bridging, transforming, and migrating. Frontiers are shifting in literature, too: the move is on toward hybrid and blurred genres—prose poems, flash fiction, videos, and other experiments in expression. Into this climate of mixing and crossing, comes Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley (SIU Press, 2015). The book details the many ways in which creative writing instructors are crossing boundaries: for example, using compositional strategies in the creative writing classroom. The twelve essays in this book are rich in theory, research, practical ideas, and in-the-trenches know-how. The contributors are academics who are also poets and writers. They all specialize in teaching creative writing, composition, and/or literary studies. Many of the essays captivate with inspired ideas. A few, aiming for the scholarly, rely a little too much on academic jargon and buzzwords. All in all, I found a raft of useful crossover and new-generation ideas for teaching creative writing and, as a by-product, some new ideas for teaching composition as well.

ARE YOU SEEING ME? by Darren Groth reviewed by Allison Renner

ARE YOU SEEING ME?
by Darren Groth
Orca Book Publishers, 278 pages

reviewed by Allison Renner

Books are often seen as a respite from everyday life and road trip books can be an even greater escape. They let you travel without having to go through airport security or get stuck in a strange city's traffic. Darren Groth’s Are You Seeing Me? takes readers from an Australian airport to several stops in Canada and the United States, journeying alongside nineteen-year-old Justine and her twin brother, Perry.

The trip is a big undertaking, but it’s meant to be a send-off, a farewell to the lives the twins have always known. Justine and Perry’s father died a year ago and, since then, Justine has been Perry’s caregiver. Before his death, their father secured Perry, who has autism, a spot at an independent living facility. Justine is conflicted: Perry says he wants to move away; her boyfriend wants to move in; and she can finally live a life without caring for a brother with disabilities. But she doesn’t really mind taking care of Perry, and worries that he’ll forget about her as he establishes his own independent life. She knows how to prevent his behaviors (sometimes!), how to calm him down, and how to explain his condition to others with a rehearsed speech. She promised their father that she’d take care of Perry, but is she doing that by letting him go off on his own?

WHY I WRITE Or, It’s The End of the World as We Know It and I Feel (Sorta) Fine by J.G. McClure

J.G. McClure Author Photo

WHY I WRITE
Or, It’s The End of the World as We Know It and I Feel (Sorta) Fine
by J.G. McClure

I remember as a kid going to a science museum somewhere in Missouri. They had an exhibit—basically a rickety computer with MS Paint hooked up to a radio transmitter. The idea was this: you’d draw a picture, the transmitter would transmit it upward, and voila, your masterpiece would travel out among the stars, waiting for distant life-forms to receive it. Whether this actually happened or whether it’s merely a cocktail of youthful misunderstanding and nostalgia is beside the point. I remember it, and I remember the conviction that aliens would discover my rudimentary stick figure family and feel a pang of pathos for life on our little rock.

This was a great deal of pressure. If the drawing was bad, what would that say about our society? The aliens who found my little sketch—the lines rough, the colors off—might decide not to visit us after all. Or worse, they might rain fiery death down on us all for my grave sins against representational art. (My sketches were not good. If that turns out to be what dooms our world, I apologize.)

A recent piece in Esquire, entitled “When the End of Civilization Is Your Day Job, or, Ballad of the Sad Climatologists,” explores the “pre-traumatic stress” experienced by climate researchers: the prevailing sense of apocalypse among the folks who know apocalypse best. The story describes “the gradual shift from hope of prevention to plans for adaptation” to an Earth so unrecognizable that we shouldn’t even call it Earth anymore. (One writer proposes “Eaarth”). Even the “optimists” of the story speak of glacial melt, rising sea levels, and the obliteration of coastal cities worldwide as a foregone conclusion. As one researcher puts it, “We’re fucked.” Some of the less-hopeful scientists have moved into the woods (as far inland as possible) and set up off-grid cabins to wait out the end of days.

A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

A HOUSE MADE OF STARS
by Tawnysha Greene
Burlesque Press, 189 pages, 2015.

reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

In the very first scene of A House Made of Stars, Tawnysha Greene’s debut novel, the ten-year-old narrator and her sister are awakened by their mother, who spirits them to a darkened bathroom where all three sit in the bathtub, towels piled over them, while the house shakes with thuds so loud even the narrator’s deaf sister can feel their vibrations. Their mother tells them it’s a game. She tells them they’re practicing for earthquakes. But even at ten, the narrator knows it’s not nature’s rage they need to fear. It’s their father’s.

Greene’s voice in this novel is pitch perfect, an eerie and convincing combination of innocence and prescience. The hard-of-hearing narrator is homeschooled and isolated; her mother believes public schools will not teach “Godly things.” Yet her understanding of their family dynamic and her father’s mental illness are intuitive and profound. Without adult labels or filters, we see his depression, his paranoia, his moments of happy, expansive mania that can change in an instant to brutal outbursts, and the scars he carries from his own violent childhood. We see her mother’s hapless attempts to keep the family safe and fed continually thwarted by her father’s whims. After the family loses their home and moves in with relatives, the children go hungry while Daddy spends his money on lottery tickets. Mama already knows not to question his choices. The girls learn it, too, in a particularly brutal fashion.

While the scenes of violence against children are harrowing and at times hard to read, A House Made of Stars also has moments of beauty and hope. There is a timeless, quiet feeling to the story, especially when the two girls are alone with their mother, that makes it feel almost as if it is taking place in a long-ago world. Despite her inability or unwillingness to protect the children, we sense Mama’s love for them. It is her mother’s stories of the stars and the myths behind them that help sustain the narrator, as well as the letters she writes to her cousin, describing what is happening with her family. Later, when the family are on the road, the narrator leaves these notes hidden along the way, both memoir and cries for help.

HAW by Sean Jackson reviewed by Michelle Fost

HAW
by Sean Jackson
Harvard Square Editions, 181 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

Sean Jackson’s first novel, Haw, recently out from Harvard Square Editions, is an ecological nightmare narrative, the story of a world starved for clean water. When I first came across Jackson’s writing in his short story “How a Ghost Is Made” (in Issue 7 of Cleaver) I was impressed by Jackson’s snappy, lean prose style. In “How a Ghost Is Made,” Jackson portrays a woman who is in the process of pulling away from the husband who is cheating on her. We first encounter Shelly while she is out for a run. As Jackson describes: “She leans into the next turn, bursting up Spindale Street like they taught her at Oberlin: run till you can’t think straight, then back off one gear.” The anger in the story moves similarly—high throttle, then backing off just enough. Shelly runs in a lush setting and her anger as she moves towards her emotional leave taking gives the story a satisfying, raw, unbridled energy. Shelly’s external world—her surroundings on her run—appears full, but her internal world feels stripped down, impoverished, giving some power to her reaching out in memory (however feebly) toward her mother.

The world of Jackson’s Haw is starkly different from that of “How a Ghost Is Made.” In Haw we won’t encounter any sprinklers nourishing lawns or anything even close to what Shelly experiences when “she pops in her earbuds and descends along the bridge into a canopy-covered swath of nature so green it makes her sick.” Instead, in Haw Jackson gives us a remarkably desolate world of the future.

HOW TO BE ANOTHER by Susan Lewis reviewed by Carlo Matos

HOW TO BE ANOTHER
by Susan Lewis
Červená Barva Press, 81 pages

reviewed by Carlo Matos

In How to be Another, Susan Lewis explores the full range of the prose poem form. These poems read like short speculative essays in the tradition of Montaigne, which is to say they have a metaphysical or epistemological bent to them. “Most knowing goes unlicensed,” says the speaker archly in “Introduction to Appreciation.” We are not dealing in this book with the esoteric details of autobiography or memoir but with the broader experiences of humanity as a species. How to be Another isn’t concerned with the kind of surface empathy or watered-down existential day-seizing of self-help books (as the title might suggest) but is instead a work of anthropology—though, clearly, these perspectives must intersect to some extent. For example, the speaker of “Introduction to Narcissism (III)” says, the “point is, self-awareness confers little evolutionary advantage. We are not wired for objectivity.” However, later in the same poem, the speaker acknowledges that the “pain” caused by self-awareness “is relentless, staying with you longer than any friend or flattering memory.” The shift to the second-person pronoun is telling for although the “you” is largely rhetorical in nature, it is still much more personal than the third-person perspective of the rest of the poem. Evolution itself is not the problem; it’s the fact that our species has evolved, or so the poem seems to suggest, to a point of diminishing returns.

TOUCHÉ by Rod Smith reviewed by Brandon Lafving

TOUCHÉ
by Rod Smith
Wave Books, 112 pages

reviewed by Brandon Lafving

Poetry these days is unglamorous, but at least it’s fun. At most, it’s fun. Rod Smith’s Touché plays, but you would have to call it mischievous because it hits you with über grit, and not one punch is held back.

“Everything I have written is trash. I have not / even the strength to love. Let it go.” The blunt emotion of these lines is the impulse of “Buoyancy”—the cathartic moment of a tormented artist who is filled with self-hatred and guilt over his inability to love a woman more than his work, and his work at all.

The pathos is so real to me—the hapless raising-onto-pedestal of a woman—the inevitable transition to thoughts of writing: “I have to write past this obsession / with you, Nora, with an invalid / admiration in the learning. You’ve / got the idea. I’m a calf. & the victory / of the light. // Does it go on? The poem I mean.” I am pretty sure I felt this way last week. Touché, indeed.

DOCTORS by Dash Shaw reviewed by Brian Burmeister

DOCTORS
by Dash Shaw
Fantagraphics Books, 96 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

What is it that awaits us after death? In his graphic novel, Doctors, artist/writer Dash Shaw creates a world in which each afterlife is unique, generated from one’s own memories with assistance from a newly-invented medical device, the Charon.

Throughout Doctors, Shaw showcases skillful storytelling. The world he creates is inventive and fascinating. From the beginning, he successfully pulls in the reader with the story’s sense of mystery. One quickly wonders what is real as the initial central character of Miss Bell struggles to make sense of a series of confusing events in her life.

As the story surrounding Miss Bell unfolds, we learn that doctors have created (through the Charon) a way to prolong life after death, allowing one’s consciousness to live on temporarily in a joyous modern-day Elysium. Within the afterlife, doctors are able to communicate with the deceased and, when successful, are able to compel the person to return to the land of the living, at least for a limited time.

A HISTORY OF MONEY by Alan Pauls reviewed by Rory McCluckie

A HISTORY OF MONEY
by Alan Pauls
translated by Ellie Robins
Melville House, 197 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

There has never been a time when the subject of money wasn't fertile ground for a work of literature; whatever view you take on its role in our lives, it's central to them. From the economic policies of governments to the spare change tossed into a busker's guitar case, it's difficult to imagine what life without it might look like. Not a bad subject, then, for a work that is set to catapult its author onto the international stage. Alan Pauls is an Argentinian novelist, essayist, and critic who has been writing fiction for years while holding various academic and editorial posts in Argentina and the United States. Indeed, he seems to be so active and prolific in his various roles that it's perhaps surprising that Pauls' 2007 novel, The Past, has, until now, been his only work to have received an English language translation. With A History of Money, he should have assured that such negligence comes to an end. This is a skillfully realized work, as accomplished in its execution as it is acute in its criticism.

YOU DON’T SAY by Nate Powell reviewed by Stephanie Trott

YOU DON’T SAY
by Nate Powell
Top Shelf Productions, 176 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Given ten years, an artist can undergo a series of personal evolutions that may come to mark them as a master. Among these seasoned individuals sits Nate Powell, a graphic novelist who has been writing and self-publishing since the age of fourteen. His most recent collection, You Don’t Say, presents seventeen short stories written over the course of a decade that celebrate the range of realizations that contribute to our inevitable maturation.

Targeting a young adult audience, these narratives are relatable to all who are in or beyond those infamous teenage years. From nights spent idling in barren parking lots to the realization that we will not forever willingly stay up past 3 A.M., Powell captures the a-ha! moments that come to define us as adults in the face of calendar rotations. Each installment features a brief text-based introduction that both describes the inspiration for the following piece and explains the comic in relation to the artist. Powell also includes suggestions as to how certain pieces should be read, asking the reader to consume several in one go or to allow features to work as singular entities. He shows the reader respect, and we in turn follow him down a psychological rabbit hole into a shaded world of self-doubt, superiority complexes, and good but misplaced intentions. Among these well-laid plans is the narrative “Cakewalk,” a non-fiction account in which a young white girl dresses in blackface as Aunt Jemima for Halloween. Forced by a teacher to remove the meticulously applied charcoal, we learn that the girl deeply wishes to embody the person she imagines the iconic matriarch to be: “I imagined that everybody liked Aunt Jemima. And that they stared at her face like I did when I ate pancakes in the morning.”

SUPERIOR PACKETS by Susie Timmons reviewed by Clare Paniccia

SUPERIOR PACKETS
by Susie Timmons
Wave Books, 181 pages

reviewed by Clare Paniccia

So often we find a characterization and romanticization of New York City within literature and film—the city forming a metaphor for struggle and loss and surrounding a scene with an obvious reminder that time (or taxis) waits for no one. If we close our eyes and imagine “New York,” we might see towering skyscrapers, new-age coffee shops serving only one type of organic bean, streets marred with the remnants of garbage and posters… This is the city that we know—the one that pulses continuously in our veins and invites a feeling of hunger or thirst, in that we cannot be satiated unless we are wholly involved in the movement, in “it.”

I find it important to imagine my own relationship to the city before interpreting Susie Timmons’ three-volume collection of poetry, Superior Packets, which takes on its own characterization of a late twentieth-century New York. Any place, the city or otherwise, can mold to the individual experience—within spaces and locales we encounter our own subjective realities that form the basis for our relationship to that particular environment. Out of these subjective events, these memories, we create our own understanding, our own identities that take on pieces of these locales as fragments of our individuality.

THE ARGONAUTS by Maggie Nelson reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

THE ARGONAUTS
by Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press, 160 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Sometimes an idea reverberates and echoes for a long time, like a song. This was my experience reading Maggie Nelson’s revelatory new memoir, The Argonauts, which starts with an idea Nelson found reading Wittgenstein: “the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed…”, and “its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.” Nelson wrote the book while she was with her partner, the non-binary trans artist Harry Dodge, and pregnant with their first child. At one level,The Argonauts recounts her experiences with Dodge, whose gender identity consciously resists the traps of language, and with parenthood. In attempting a reconciliation of the two perspectives, Nelson finds a freedom through language.

More than simply telling a ‘story’, Nelson considers here the act of trying to bring experience into language and ideas, particularly those which seem to oppose this very act. She incorporates an array of ideas from theorists ranging from Judith Butler to Wittgenstein in order to consider the inexpressibles of gender, sexuality, joy, and the seeming contradiction of queer parenthood and marriage—an experience increasingly brought into the mainstream of social structures and away from radicalism.

In the brief interval between my first reading of The Argonauts and the writing of this review, the Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. This is, in many ways, an important and very positive development for queer rights, yet it is also far from an ending. In the book, Nelson pointedly notes, “if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us.”

TOMBO by W.S. Di Piero reviewed by Johnny Payne

TOMBO
by W.S. Di Piero
McSweeney’s, 63 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

Giacomo Leopardi speaks of two essential kinds of imagination: strong and promiscuous. The first is “weighty, impassioned, melancholic, with deep emotion and passion, all fraught with life hugely suffered.” The second is “playful, light, fleet, inconstant in love, high spirited.”

The W.S. Di Piero of The Dog Star, the one I first encountered as a reader, is of the strong variety, as in his depiction of a somber Whitman attending injured soldiers and offering introspection on a Civil War battlefield in “Walt, the Wounded.”

A small fire still burns in the nursery.
Rice and molasses simmer on the stove.
Children will have to learn to ask for less,

less from the elephant dawn that chilled
across the heights where Lee held his ground.

Or there is the dark homage “To My Old City”: “diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked / on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers / from the black newsstand.” In it, memory figures as corrosive.

Surely all poets offer changes in mood, even within a single book, but underlying shifts in temperament happen over time, if at all. And with the appearance of Tombo, I may observe, without being accused of vicious gossip, that Di Piero The Strong has turned promiscuous.

BETWEEN GRAMMARS by Danielle Vogel reviewed by Amanda Hickok

BETWEEN GRAMMARS
by Danielle Vogel
Noemi Press, 78 pages

reviewed by Amanda Hickok

It’s so often that a book of poetry can be thought of as a static object, a collection of disembodied words that are supposed to transcend the body and voice of their author on the page. And it’s so often that poets are bodiless, as poetry—no matter how much it is about bodies—must be divorced from its corporeal source and recipient; that a poet writes for an anonymous reader who in turn reads nobody behind their words. However, and perhaps ironically, poetry’s meaning comes at least in part from its resonance within these bodies, in its ability to stir in them a visceral reaction. Danielle Vogel knows this, addresses this with a forceful intimacy between poet, reader, and page that is both beautiful and challenging in a breaking-the-fourth-wall kind of way, in the vulnerability it necessitates that we are so often sheltered from.

Between Grammars, a book-length poem, begins with an equation of text and body—epigraphs that include “we melt into each other with phrases… We make an unsubstantial territory,” from Woolf, and “Language is a skin,” from Barthes, and then a prologue in five volumes: body, letter, page, book, body. It’s significant that we start with VOLUME: BODY and circle back to it, volume itself as the attempt to unfold the hidden dimensions of these relationships, and the cyclical trajectory as the making and renewal of meaning in the body. The next section begins WATERSHED, and I can almost hear the tearing of the thin membrane between body and text as seamless contiguity floods the boundaries.

COUP DE FOUDRE by Ken Kalfus reviewed by Carolyn Daffron

COUP DE FOUDRE
A Novella and Stories
by Ken Kalfus
Bloomsbury Press, 277 pages

reviewed by Carolyn Daffron

Ken Kalfus is an audacious stylist, whose stories and novels often invoke the likes of Borges, Calvino, Golgol, and Saramago. His choice of subject matter can be equally fearless: cosmology, 9-11, and the grand sweep of Russian history, to name only a few. Coup de Foudre, the novella which forms the centerpiece of his most recent collection of short fiction, is a coruscating example of this gutsiness and high literary ambition.

Not that I enjoyed reading it, at least not the first time. Coup de Foudre tells the story of David Léon Landau, a character not-at-all-loosely based on French financier and former presidential hopeful Dominque Strauss-Kahn (known in France and now everywhere as “DSK”) who was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in his New York hotel in 2011. Although criminal charges were dropped, the case led to a civil settlement, various other scandalous accusations and revelations, and the ruin of DSK’s career.

The novella is a first person account of the hotel assault and the events immediately surrounding it, written in the form of a letter to Mariama, the housekeeper-victim—a letter which Landau can never send to her or anyone without violating a civil gag order and subjecting himself to criminal prosecution. Landau’s story, which parallels DSK’s in almost every known particular, is a repellent one, and its narrator is about as monstrous and unappetizing—to say nothing of unreliable—as they come. Even while purportedly seeking “moral benefit” from “fully and exactingly” acknowledging his errors, the chief of which is that he forcefully fellated Mariama, he cannot help reminding her that his name “signified financial brilliance in the service of the public” and that a water treatment plant he financed in her home country may once have given her clean liquid to “sip thirstily and with pleasure…You may even have reflected at the time on the liquid’s animating power and plenitude…Some may have spilled from the sides of your mouth.” It is hard not to shudder at this.

THE TRAVELS OF DANIEL ASCHER by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat reviewed by Melissa M. Firman

THE TRAVELS OF DANIEL ASCHER
by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat
translated by Adriana Hunter
Other Press, 189 pages

reviewed by Melissa M. Firman

How well do we really know the people we love? What happens when the family stories and personal histories we’ve grown up believing turn out to be fiction—or, at best, a version of the truth?

These are the questions explored in The Travels of Daniel Ascher, the debut novel of Déborah Lévy-Bertherat. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, this is a quick, fast-paced read where much happens in this story-within-a-story novel.

Hélène, a 20 year old archaeologist living in Paris, is a typical university student; she’s exploring her new city, falling in love with Guillaume, and occasionally babysitting a young neighbor boy. Among the few people she knows in Paris is her great-uncle, Daniel Roche, a famous author. His books, written under the pseudonym H.R. Sanders, are bestselling literary travel adventures with dashes of fantasy and mystery. (Think Harry Potter.)

THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

THE BOOK OF LANEY
by Myfanwy Collins
Lacewing Books, 200 pages

reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

When terrible acts of violence occur—as they do all too often in America—our thoughts naturally turn to the victims and their families. But what about the families of those who commit violent crimes? What if someone you grew up with was a school shooter, a terrorist, a mass murderer?

That’s the reality fifteen-year-old Laney is living. Her brother West and his friend Mark, two high school outcasts, boarded a school bus armed with machetes, knives, guns, and homemade bombs. Six people died; twelve were wounded. Mark blew himself up, but West made his way home to kill his mother, and he would have killed Laney, too, if police hadn’t stopped him. Left with the wreckage her brother left behind, Laney feels completely alone, unwanted, even hated. Her father died when she was young, and her mother’s boyfriend is only interested in leaving the state as soon as possible. Strangers phone the house with death threats. This is her only identity now: the killer’s sister.

THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS by Ryo Yamaguchi reviewed by Johnny Payne

THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS
Ryo Yamaguchi
Noemi Press, 97 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

This chaste book could be titled The Story of O. Ryo Yamaguchi rhapsodizes, if more quietly, in the mood of Keats when he exclaims “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”:

O machine, O accord, I no longer ask the things I need
not ask . . .

the slow atmosphere of story has refused too long

to seat my rhythms, and I
have refused to elaborate myself through its lines.

His drama of sensate consciousness is based on the refusal (ergo the title) to follow the suit of narrative poetry, in favor of the mind’s free play. Yet one may legitimately ask, as we sometimes do of historical novels, whether the writer courts anachronism or rather renews the proposition. In the case of Yamaguchi, the answer is complex.

Many times I found myself wondering whether this one-vowel incantatory tendency was a tic or sprang organically from what I am tempted to call “new lyric.” “O youth, o conflagration, O end of summer parking lots”; “O office of elaborate letters, O remark”; “O here is the work”; “O John the Baptist”; “O hybridized floral shift.” All this is contained in a single poem, and there are many like it. Bemused, I could say at least that the tone is not ironic, as in Laurie Anderson’s suburbia-mocking “O Superman/O Mom and Dad.”

ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND by Box Brown reviewed by Brian Burmeister

ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND
by Box Brown
First Second Books, 240 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

For a generation of professional wrestling fans, Andre Roussimoff was a giant, both as a man (he stood seven-feet, four-inches tall and weighed 500 pounds) and as an icon (he was one of the most successful and beloved wrestlers of all time).

In telling Andre’s story, author/illustrator Box Brown did his homework. A life-long fan of professional wrestling, Brown draws upon interviews with those who personally knew Andre as well archival footage in an effort to show a complete and accurate portrayal of Andre’s life in and out of the ring. Throughout Andre the Giant’s pages we see Andre as a young boy growing up in the French countryside, Andre as an up-and-comer in the professional wrestling circuit, and finally Andre the globe-trekking celebrity. Along the way, Brown gives life to dozens of anecdotes about the wrestler, moments ranging from playful to painful but always compelling and curious.

For those less familiar with professional wrestling, Brown takes pains to make the material accessible. Throughout the course of the narrative, he includes a preface in which he imparts to the reader a useful description of wrestling as business, explains all necessary terminology in text and within a glossary in the back of the book, and walks the reader through the context and culture of professional wrestling fandom during the 1970s and 80s.

Brown’s visual style is simple and fun, much like professional wrestling itself. While a more superhero-y sort of approach might have been equally fitting, Brown draws each moment in a very comic way, giving a light-hearted feel to the entirety of the work. Andre’s size lends itself well to this cartoonish format, allowing Brown to exaggerate Andre’s hugeness even further for effect, a move which lets Brown take the Giant’s legacy and spin it into the stuff of legend.

BLACK RIVER by Josh Simmons reviewed by Stephanie Trott

BLACK RIVER
by Josh Simmons
Fantagraphics Books, 110 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Despite society’s wonderment over advances of the human race, we are nonetheless fascinated by hypotheses of how the world may one day cease to exist. And while prophecies of rapture have yet to prove veritable, there exist countless fictional renderings of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The medium of graphic narrative has long played host to such tales, from the teenage plague that dominates Charles Burns’s iconic Black Hole to the psychedelic stylings of anarchist rebel Tank Girl. In this spirit comes Josh Simmons’s Black River, which follows a gang of five women and one man as they traverse a dormant planet void of laws and warmth.

Led by the experienced Seka over the course of more than a decade, the group searches in hopes of locating the fabled city of Gattenberg—“walled in and completely self-sufficient, protected by sharp-shooters all around the city.” They are survivalists to the Nth degree, employing stockpiled supplies unused by those now deceased; their camaraderie is strong (as they quite literally sleep together in an attempt to stay warm through the night) and extends both to preserving life and taking it when necessary. The reader does not receive much exposition regarding life before the present day, save for a wavering account of how every possible proposition of world’s end contributed to humanity’s current state of being.

THE ART OF ASKING by Amanda Palmer reviewed by Justin Goodman

THE ART OF ASKING
by Amanda Palmer
Grand Central Publishing, 333 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

"Art is the Artist"
I first heard of Amanda Palmer while driving a flashy, cherry red Mustang convertible blasting “Girl Anachronism” from a speaker system clearly not made to handle any song at full volume, let alone one already deafening at standard volume for an ipod-earbud combo. It didn’t help that it was my car, and that my first girlfriend and I were the ones in it. By 2009 a year had passed since Palmer’s band, the Dresden Dolls, broke up, and three years before she would give the TED talk that would inspire the memoir The Art of Asking. My relationship and my car had both broken down by that point and as I, that bachelor now in a minivan, would likely have said about Palmer’s memoir-essay, there is one thing the three have in common: they deeply affected my life, and then repeated themselves enough that I wanted them to be done with.

Memoirs often annoy me, in part, because they take Whitman’s advice too literarily: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” And that’s not to ignore that such songs lend themselves to marketing nicely. That is the function, generally, of celebrity memoirs. But Amanda Palmer, musician-blogger turned memoirist, was already given this treatment, wrongly, when her more than successful and record-setting Kickstarter became journalist gossip about, as she summarizes, “what a terrible person I was, on top of being an untrained, unprofessional, shitty musician.” This book doesn’t feel like it intends to sell itself. It even comes across as if it has no idea who the audience is, as when she explains crowdsourcing, “for the uninitiated.” (What Palmer fan purchased this book “uninitiated?”) Like any good memoir, be it Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, or anything by David Sedaris, it uses its jointed memory to propel it towards insight. How the joints connect, though, is what makes a memoir work. So, while Sedaris uses a series of essays, and Woolf the titular moments of being, Palmer’s book seems nebulous in that it has no organizing function. The text switches between her budding romance with Neil Gaiman (now her husband), to her record label experiences, with essentially random stories intermixed, as new experiences accrue over time.

WHALE WATCHING by Lisa J. Sharon

WHALE WATCHING
by Lisa J. Sharon

Katherine’s father wanted to get out of the city. “We can hike and star gaze,” he said. “I want to show Katherine the whales.” So, early in the morning they packed the car and locked up their townhouse. Katherine climbed into the back seat, and her mother tucked her stuffed dog into the seatbelt with her. As they started down the driveway, her father stopped the car, “Where’s that photo album? The one with Phillip?”

“In the attic with your parents’ things. You’re not going back for it?”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

He returned with a large brown photo album. Katherine’s mother moved to the driver’s seat, “I’ll take the first shift,” and her father settled in the passenger seat with the album on his lap.

They headed north over roads that thinned from six lanes to four. “Goodbye, Massachusetts. Hello, New Hampshire,” they said together. Katherine’s parents talked about the cabin. Would there be cleaning supplies or should they stop in Portland and buy a mop and Lysol? Katherine’s mother sang to Simon and Garfunkel. Her father flipped through the pages of the photo album. He reminisced about Phillip their seed-spitting contests and the time they knocked down the bees’ nest in the wood shed. He turned to Katherine to tell her about the time, when Phillip was seven and Katherine’s father five, Phillip got the ladder from the shed and the two of them climbed the red maple tree along the path to Jackson Ridge so they could peer into the nest of the barred owl. “He had no fear,” Katherine’s father said, wiping his hand across his eyes. Between stories he’d fall silent. Katherine gazed into the passing woods of jack pines and aspen and saw Phillip riding between the trees like a cowboy on the back of a whale.

NOW IN ELSEWHERE, A Now for MENAM by Orkan Telhan

NOW IN ELSEWHERE
A Now for MENAM
by Orkan Telhan

The Middle East. North Africa. The Mediterranean. Asia Minor and the Levant. These refer to inexact geographies. It is hard to tell where each begins and ends. As names, they may take on different meanings when they refer to people, languages, belief systems, and politics, all of which constantly negotiate their identities with respect to one another. As places, they may bring together a series of disjointed lands unified as an imaginary cultural construct, yet whose presence lives everywhere, whose lands have produced many diasporas around the globe. Today, someone from Little Syria, New York, uses the same recipe for hummus that a grandmother uses in Syria. And it tastes different; taste belongs neither here nor there, and changes every moment.

It is often an oriental gaze that renders these uneasy, tenuous connections. This is a gaze that comes both from the desire to belong to a place and the fear of its possibility. Thus the Middle East, North Africa, or the Mediterranean always exist as mediated elsewheres where only others can belong. Or where we belong as others.

Making sense of all of this today is an art. Is opinion really in the eyes of the beholder? What is there to look at when our interpretation will always be skewed by what is selectively mediated for us? Where or whom do we belong if opinions are already others’?

“A Now for MENAM” is an artwork that responds to these questions. It reflects on our habits of looking and making meaning out of what is thrown at us by media. It proposes a different kind of interface—perhaps a less complacent window or mirror—that tries to present the other in its fluidity; with enough room for fact and fiction.

CREAM FLAVORED & CHERRY SCENTED by Chelsea M. Harris

CREAM FLAVORED & CHERRY SCENTED
by Chelsea M. Harris

She told you she was driving to the bridal store to shop for dresses with the girls she used to babysit before you were born since she knew she’d never see you all wrapped up in a marshmallow mess surrounded by floor-length mirrors, asking questions like How does my ass look? and Do you think he’ll love it? your cheeks glowing in rose-colored blooms, eyes done up in sugar-coated sparkle, pupils wide, sipping down those strawberry cosmos, fifteen dollars a whack because you’re at fancy place with silk curtains and shimmer walls dripping in white, dripping in the things you ask your daddy for because that’s a man’s job and why’s he even living if not to pay for you to marry one under a string of Jell-O lights, your twinkle toes strapped into nine-inch heels, a thread of crusted diamonds kissing your chest, and whose to say you even love this guy with the charcoal mustache, with the beady smile, telling you one night when your twisting underneath him that he’s done a whole lot of fucking, a whole lot of banging pounding knocking nailing

GIRL ON THE MOON by Andy Bailey

GIRL ON THE MOON
by Andy Bailey

College kid this time. Loud, heard him soon as they got out of the car, warbling like someone too comfortable with his own voice. Badly fucked up or bad at faking: had to be a college kid. Blue-collar guys handle their booze and don’t have to be loud to prove a point, and professional types bug out when they see our shithole. She even brought a black guy back once, the only one who introduced himself, cooked us eggs before he left.

Must’ve gone to the dives near the college, had her pick of beer-soaked frat boys blue-balled from staring at tight Mormon asses all day. Knew it was going to be one of those nights, fucking knew it, but I’d stopped taking Tylenol PM the month before, giving my liver a well-earned retirement, and had to spend each night wrestling my thoughts and gripping the mattress so I wouldn’t get up and do something stupid. Should’ve put more shit up in the room to distract me, lava lamp or aquarium or those squirmy little sea monkeys. Shit, probably should’ve moved rooms in the first place—hate and hurt seeped into the walls—moved rooms, moved houses, moved cities. But time gives a fuckall about your plans.

JUDGING DISTANCE by Hannah Allen

JUDGING DISTANCE
by Hannah Allen

A word is flung into the dark from the sidewalk behind me, but I don’t recognize the voice it belongs to. What did he say? Tighten my scarf around my neck, hold my umbrella a little lower, scan the approaching expanse of parking lot for other students leaving campus. Night classes let out an hour ago, parking spaces vacant.

“Slut!” The word, clear and hard, snaps against my ears. I sidestep a sheet of ice. Fingers involuntarily fumble in my coat pocket. Is he talking to me? I meant to sew up the hole in my jacket, the one that sucks change, lighter, and keys deep into the lining. Too late now. My fingers can’t make sense of the mess. Slow down to feel out my keys. Mom’s voice in my head: You should already have them out, dear.

“SLUT! HEY SLUT!” The voice, closer. Coming from the right but from how far back, I’m not sure. Never been good at depth perception. It’s near enough that I forget about finding my keys. Why did I leave work early? Only had ten minutes left. Head down, I march towards my old Buick at the far end of the empty lot. Rain, lashing below the umbrella, blinds me. Already a slack bun gathered at the nape of my neck, my hair works free. Sharp, wet edges slap at my face. Tears gather at the corner of my left eye. I think of my boyfriend. Wish Drew would’ve answered my fucking call. Pull my phone from my slacks and try again. Voicemail.

ALINA by Svetlana Beggs

ALINA
by Svetlana Beggs

When I was young and living in San Francisco’s Sunset District with a roommate, I had a job selling underwear at Neiman Marcus. If I were to speak of this job with more reverence I would say that I sold “intimate apparel.” But “underwear” is more honest and also closer to “undercover,” because that’s what I was, an incognito undergraduate philosophy major, covered up by a lot of expensive underwear. I had to be a good salesperson to an occasional businessman who came in to grope La Perla panties (at $130 apiece). These men would ask, in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, “Where is the nearest restroom?” And I would say, “Straight and then left, next to the children’s department.”

One late night I was working alone and had to close the register. I was putting bras back on their hangers. When I looked up, I saw a very attractive woman who dared to examine underwear a few minutes before the store had to close.

She was a rare beauty, likely in her mid-40s, her body alert, her movements self-aware, like an actress or dancer. She was wearing simple dark slacks and a tan-colored, v-neck sweater and had the polished look of wealth that signals unattainable dignity. Her jet-black hair was long and wavy, her lips full and her dark eyes calm. Her make-up was heavy, but tasteful. A wholesome beauty—it was as if she were created from a single cloth, showing no seams. She looked a bit like the Italian actress Monica Bellucci, who had had recently appeared in the movie The Matrix. To meet Monica on my night shift amidst underwear seemed itself akin to a trip into some kind of Matrix.

WHAT I WAS THINKING OF DURING THE FUNERAL SERVICE, DOUGLAS, ARIZONA by Gregory Djanikian

Gregory-Djanikian

WHAT I WAS THINKING OF DURING THE FUNERAL SERVICE,
DOUGLAS, ARIZONA
by Gregory Djanikian
for Wendy Glenn

Of course, death, how it wore
its outsize black hat to slice the day.

The mysterious abyss
of the body failing again,
falling into another body.

Not so much of resurrection
though it was spoken of, the oxen kneeling
in the straw, the stone rolled away.

The first death that had no likeness.
The earth that hath opened her mouth
to receive thy brother’s blood.
After which the history of departures
required a history of common prayer.

PILLS by Eliza Callard

PILLS
by Eliza Callard

Every day, I consume many colors--white and blue, pink,
translucent as a pale winter sun. Some I could crush
to a powder, some I could puncture and watch thick
red ooze smear my hands. Fat in the middle, round
like a flat earth, capsules you could shake like maracas.

I have ingested the weight equivalent of an adult male gorilla
or an anoa, from Indonesia (similar to the water buffalo).

I have swallowed one for every resident of
Copenhagen or the South American country of Suriname.

STAYING ON TRACK by Ori Fienberg

STAYING ON TRACK
by Ori Fienberg

Like his father, whenever he voiced a new idea a steam-engine-run train emerged from his mouth. It was possible to spot the idea coming, as his throat would glow and the area around him rumbled slightly. Specialists assured him there was no cause for alarm; it was a mysterious nuisance, but hereditary, and besides, the trains were quite small.

School discussion posed some difficulty as well. Fortunately, it was a well-documented condition, and so accommodation could be made; each room was equipped with a circular track, and he was given extra time to articulate particularly in-depth ideas, which could lead to additional cars, or a tiny, overly-energetic conductor, repeatedly pulling the train's whistle. Some ideas were like that.

It could get overwhelming: all those ideas: all those trains to maintain, or to find bearing down on him in the night. The trains kept irregular schedules, returning the next day, or much larger, years later. His father insisted that one day the trains would take him someplace, though he was vague on the exact details of the location.

COMPOST AND BAD POETRY by Diane Payne

COMPOST AND BAD POETRY
by Diane Payne

1.
The dogs and I walk to the neighborhood park and there are four cars in the parking lot; usually there are none. My first thought: Damn it, they’ve all killed themselves.

That’s what happens when there’s been a week filled with suicide.

Years ago, I remember walking to this park with my teenaged daughter. We noticed a car that appeared to be empty, yet moving. Curious, we peered through the window. The dogs started barking. The dogs were smarter than us. Embarrassed because they were classmates, my daughter took off running.

It had been too long for me, and yet never happened for she. Screw the words. This is one of those times when the universal bark of a dog says it all.

Today I take a long look at the parked cars. Not one car has a hose hooked to the window. No blood marks on the windshield. I don’t know why they are just sitting alone in their cars, not outside enjoying the park.

At least they are alive.

After finishing our walk through the neighborhood on the other side of the park, I notice the cars are still there. I check out the cars one more time, relieved to not see any dead bodies. Oddly enough, they all seem to be alone. No shaking cars. No hoses. No blood. Just four people sitting in their cars.

ROOTS by Helen Park

ROOTS
by Helen Park

You never realize how impoverished the soil is, how exhaustive the journey, for vineyard grapevines—how much they are forced to withstand to simply sustain themselves. Bob, our vineyard tour guide, explained in a hushed, deferential tone how large pieces of shale and rock are intentionally buried right underneath the roots of the grapevine so that they have no choice but to strain and stretch to painful lengths in order to reach the meager sources of water deep underground. The soil itself is as nutritionless as gravel.

“This is what must occur so that the grapes remain small and tight. If they were to be fed in abundance, watered with the generosity given to other crops, they would swell and dilute in flavor, intensity and depth.” Bob wagged his finger, “If you want to make great wine, the grapes must suffer.” He presented these facts with the utmost respect.

My brother and I had traveled to Northern California for a weeklong holiday and stayed for a few nights in the Mission District of San Francisco before driving up to Napa Valley. We were able to stay over a close family friend’s house while in the city. Our friend’s mom was an on-call nurse who was about to start a 12-hour shift at midnight that very evening, and although we arrived around 10 o’clock with very little notice, an enormous Vietnamese feast of jasmine rice, stir fried pork, steamed bok choy and tofu awaited us.

STEALING THE BOOK by Leonard Kress

STEALING THE BOOK
by Leonard Kress

What happened to my signed first edition of Auden?
Stolen, I suspect, though I lack any evidence.
An abomination--even medieval monks
formulated byzantine book-thievery curses:
For such a sin, let book worms and mites ingurgitate
broth brewed fresh from his hell-incinerated ashes.
But I am not full of vengeance and I wish no pain
on fellow bibliophiles, only that their hands do
quake and tremble, so that words squirm beyond discernment
when they read, that they become their own antonyms, that
sentences invert to palindromes, so star becomes
rats, straw becomes warts, and so that my book in their hands
is transformed into an altogether different book.

ESTHER FRIEDMAN by Michelle Taransky

ESTHER FRIEDMAN
by Michelle Taransky

There is always someone
Whose job it should be
To advise you, even if you don’t want to know:

No girl dreams of being proposed to
With a ring from the Shoah

Look to your mother
She cares so much it hurts

If you don’t want to have to describe
To your lover how
You want to be loved

PICK by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

PICK
by Mitchell Grabois

1.
You want me to hit you with a stick, but all I’ve got is a guitar pick. (Lou Reed)

2.
The gorilla, conscience of the world, sits and broods and ignores the humans pressed against the glass.

3.
The old is dying, the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms.(Gramsci)

4.
A splintered pick. Is it wood or some unfathomable synthetic? That’s the same question I ask about life. Are we God’s joke? Can I play guitar after my gall bladder surgery?

5.
The gorilla stuffs hay in his mouth. A little while later he lights himself on fire, using a pile of hay as accelerant. Where did he get a match? What cruelly sympathetic zookeeper conspired with him, or at least aided and abetted him?

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US by Samantha Memi

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN US
by Samantha Memi

The real estate agent pulled at the hem of her skirt. In the shop she had thought it too short but her lack of inhibition after a couple of lunchtime drinks swayed her decision.

—I like your skirt, said the girl wanting a one-bedroomed flat.

—Oh, thank you, said the agent. —I got it at Reddy Teddy. You don't think it's too short?

—No, not at all.

—You need to be careful in this job. You don't want to seem too available.

—I'm sure you don't.

—The flat isn't far. Beaumont Avenue. Do you know it?

—No, I don't.

—It’s very nice, Edwardian. Quiet. It leads onto Baron’s Court Road, close to West Ken tube.

The two women left the agency and walked down Fulham Broadway. The agent, Marilyn, had recently divorced after fourteen years of childless marriage. She didn't want another relationship. Her client, Jane, had just returned from Spain where she had been teaching English, and she was looking for a place of her own as she was staying with plastic friends at the moment and her life was overcrowded.

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