Once Again, Different Now, and Moratorium by Jessica Morey-Collins

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THREE POEMS by Jessica Morey-Collins 
 Once Again A woman glances at her watch, one hand resting on the grip of a wheelchair, wherein is ensconced her mother. Both wear khaki sunhats and sea-foam green respiratory masks, coral shirts. Squawks and wing beats thunder among the buildings. The daughter shuttles her ward between the range-of-motion machines at the playground, settles her in front of a symmetrical set of yellow wheels. The mother lifts her arms to their handles. A toddler waddles up, her pink pants ballooned with newness and diaper. She squats, taps a foot on the platform of the hip-rotator, glances over her shoulder at her parents. The mother in the wheelchair swings her arms in two mild, mirrored smiles. A family squabbles over a soccer ball. Laughter rattles tiles and concrete. The daughter consults the time, peels her mother away from the park. A graying man bats a … chop! chop! read more!

R IS FOR RESTLESS by Christine Hamm

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R IS FOR RESTLESS by Christine Hamm Palm Beach, a fake emerald bracelet scratching your wrist. You crawl to the bed, the industrial carpet rubbing its cigarette stink all over you. You remember the man’s hands, the scars and words scrawled across them. A wilted yellow carnation on the nightstand. Your ruffled dress with pink and black diamonds sprawled across a chair. A ceiling full of tiny stabbed-in holes. The damp circle your body makes on the sheets dissipates. Eventually, you stop shivering.   Image credit: Jeremy Brooks on Flickr Christine Hamm has a PhD  in American Poetics and is a former poetry editor for Ping*Pong. She won the MiPoesias First Annual Chapbook Competition with her manuscript Children Having Trouble with Meat. Her poetry has been published in Orbis, Pebble Lake Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart … chop! chop! read more!

WHEN SANTA CAME TO CHERRY HILL, NEW JERSEY by DC Lambert

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WHEN SANTA CAME TO CHERRY HILL, NEW JERSEY by DC Lambert  You could hear the sirens blocks away, and if you didn’t know, you’d think it was a real emergency. Santa Claus had trouble keeping balance, so the fire truck took it very slowly as it crept around Cherry Hill’s subdivisions and rows of fifty-year-old colonials in need of new roofs, furnaces, windows; they could not be replaced, just now, in this economy. Perched on the truck, Santa waved and weaved past illuminated inflatable reindeer and whirling pink snowflakes projected onto garages, and families ran outside to catch a glimpse, shivering a bit in the brittle winter afternoon. This was probably the last year Local 2663 would sponsor Santa. It was time to cut the nonsense. It was time to trim the waste. People waved at each other, too, as befit the season of joy. “How yez doin’?” “Good, ‘n … chop! chop! read more!

THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL by Anthony Wallace

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THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL by Anthony Wallace He sets up the Christmas tree in the family room, untangles the lights and strings them around the tree in lazy loops from top to bottom, drapes a few strands of tinsel at the ends of prominent branches. He gets a good hot fire going in the fireplace. Later his wife will come home from work and they’ll have dinner and then put the star on top of the tree. The star is not really a star but an angel from his wife’s childhood. It’s large, about ten inches high, with sheer wings like an insect’s wings and overlarge blue eyes that the man considers overly sentimental. Perhaps it’s not an angel at all but a fairy, like Tinkerbell. Whatever it is, there is something annoyingly Disneyesque about it.   He opens the slider and goes out to see how the tree would look … chop! chop! read more!

IN THE ABSENCE OF CULINARY MENTORS by Kaori Fujimoto

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IN THE ABSENCE OF CULINARY MENTORS by Kaori Fujimoto  Mom When I was growing up in the suburbs of Tokyo, every evening at five my mother donned her white apron and set about preparing dinner. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling and over the sink illuminated the whole kitchen, which was dismally dark during the daytime, and they attracted little geckos that flattened themselves on the outside of the widows. I would hear a clack-clack of the kitchen knife on the wooden cutting board and then, in twenty or thirty minutes, my heart would sink as I detected the usual smells of fish or vegetables seasoned with soy sauce, sugar, and sake—conventional Japanese dishes I never found appetizing. She also made Western dishes, like a beef stew, potato gratin, and spaghetti Napolitana, because my father loved these rich foods and so did I; I felt exhilarated whenever the aroma of … chop! chop! read more!

IN THE MID-OUGHTIES by Sam Cha

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IN THE MID-OUGHTIES by Sam Cha IN THE MID-OUGHTIES, we thought we were men. We were all married for a year and a half or so. Our wives played cello or bass and read two books a year. We left our doctoral programs and played competitive video games. We spent most of our time looking at Wikipedia and watching anime. Sometimes we’d wander down Broadway at five thirty in the morning. Those were the days, I think, when we were still wondering sometimes about the informational content of the Brownian motion of the water molecules in the steam from the vent on the east corner of Twenty-Third Street―how many ones and zeros? Water there, water not. Writhing water writing Ulysses, are you searching for lost time? How many slices of pi? Three or one or four or one and five? How many monkeys have you written, typewriter Hamlets? Who will … chop! chop! read more!

LEMON TUESDAY by Jo Beckett-King

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LEMON TUESDAY by Jo Beckett-King It was Lemon Tuesday and so far it had not lived up to expectations. His gran had made pancakes, smaller and fatter than any his mum ever made, and while he was eating, his mum had come home and talked quietly on her mobile in the hall, before coming into the kitchen and speaking to his gran using words he didn’t understand. He fiddled with the metal ball chain around his neck and felt the four corners of the cross with the tips of his fingers, before thumbing the raised ridge of Christ’s body. He knew that if he asked what they were talking about she would say in her most serious tone that it was an adult conversation, so he continued to cut perfect isosceles triangles out of his pancakes and decided that when he was a grown-up he would remember what it was … chop! chop! read more!

BIRTHDAY POEM by Monica Wendel

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BIRTHDAY POEM by Monica Wendel There’s a secret 1950s housewife in me that loves amphetamines. Do you love it too? The zip zap? The blue boogers? Is that the right word? I found dark lipstick in my room and wore it when I met Kerouac’s ghost. He said I looked like a wound. Belly out, clammy skin. You would know, I thought. Let’s vote on it. Let’s settle this now. He put his arm out like a wing. Feathers came first, before the idea of flight. If I had been able to fall asleep I would have woken up. I woke up Chris and we looked at his painting. Stripes of seaweed. Jellyfish. My whole jaw hurt. In a painting nothing changes no matter how many times you look at it unless you reach up to the wall and turn it one way and step back all over again. Kerouac … chop! chop! read more!

Christmas 2009 by Catherine Mosier-Mills

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CHRISTMAS 2009 by Catherine Mosier-Mills The family was crowded around the small white gazebo in the middle of the yard. There was a map, too, pasted on the corkboard floating high on the gazebo’s walls, confining the chaotic compound in abstract squares and rectangles. Ruth didn’t touch the peanut brittle, the haphazard compensation present from her middle child, the feminist from Philadelphia, who’d brought her two kids. The conversation was a facsimile of previous email exchanges that she’d intercepted from her late husband’s computer, carrying the buzzwords of a telltale worrywart: college search, apnea, bullying. Whenever Ruth tried to make her way in and say the words she wanted so desperately for them to hear—state’s coming to get me. I don’t belong here, Russ is having an affair—they all looked away, like she was some kind of contagion that would spoil their perfectly planned afternoon. And then she stared at the … chop! chop! read more!

LOOK, HERE by Lisa Piazza

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LOOK, HERE by Lisa Piazza For this, I use my grandfather’s axe. Pull it carefully from behind the dead cat’s carrier in the garage, where it rests dusty and dull, subdued by seasons more or less come and gone. More because fifteen winters is a long time for a dormant blade—idle through fifteen springs and summers followed by fifteen hopeful falls glimmering with red-gold readiness. Less because it is only my bony fingers that inexpertly grip the heavy wooden handle ready to hack the camellias crowding the far corner of my backyard. Mine is a small job. I have hated these trees for years. Still—some warning would have been nice. A short note typed by my sensible grandmother, attached by thick garden twine to the long handled axe, stating: to clear is not to clean. Maybe then my breath would not have stuttered when two lops revealed a fibrous system pink … chop! chop! read more!

FRANCESCA by Mohammadreza Mirzaei

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FRANCESCA by Mohammadreza Mirzaei I was exhausted. It was an hour since we parked the car down the mountain and came up the slope. I had spent all my life in Tehran, but I had never been in Tochal, which was one of the city’s tourist attractions. And interestingly, this time, I was there with someone who was from elsewhere in the world. Her name was Francesca. She was an Italian girl, from somewhere near Naples, a student of Eastern studies in Naples. She had been to Iran several times, once as a tourist, and again as an intern at the Italian embassy. She was here now to take a course at the Dehkhoda institute to improve her Persian. Maybe it’s not right to say, “to improve”. She could say “hello” and “goodbye” in Persian and she might be able to learn “How are you?” and “Fine, thanks” this time. … chop! chop! read more!

HOW A HEART by Sean Lyon

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HOW A HEART by Sean Lyon Tricia the three-toed sloth started to slipper my hand into her undergrowth. “Wow,” I clickered, “I’m in love with this rainforest.” Then she maffled her tongue down some other toucan’s throat. How a heart emflampers under such circumstances! “O,” I lunkered, “The bananarama is cancelled, it’s over.” I clambered up the stairs, my beak petricuckolded, clorping like a gaunt gibbous moon against each step on my sweltering accent to smither canopy. Just then an ocelot corrustickered my eye, slimmering over her tree-house-porch card table and trucing me hence with her manicured claws. I wallifer-fluttered, with all the agility of a milk frog whose leg’s been snippered by a plurching boa, to this ocelot’s treetop abode. She enfolded me. How a heart carditisizes under such circumstances! “I’ve been at solitaire for too long, kid,” she volupurred, “Let’s get to know us better, what do you … chop! chop! read more!

EXILED FROM TRUTH: NINE ALLEGORIES BY Dmitry Borshch

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EXILED FROM TRUTH: NINE ALLEGORIES by Dmitry Borshch Interviewed by Anastasiya Shekhtman What made you decide on ink as a medium? Precision of the ink line. I love precise lines and was able to show that even in my first independent works. They were abstract, probably influenced by Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and Soviet Nonconformists, many of whom were abstractionists. I saw their work at various apartment exhibitions in Dnepropetrovsk and Moscow that I participated in. The compelling mood of the images, a certain wintry bleakness, is evocative of Soviet Russia. What role, if any, does your national background play in your work? Dnepropetrovsk was certainly bleak, Soviet Moscow even bleaker and wintrier. My background plays every role in these pictures. Although I call myself an American or Russian-American artist, they are neither Russian nor American. If one calls them Soviet Nonconformist pictures, I would accept the label. USSR is … chop! chop! read more!

Five Paintings by Tish Ingersoll

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FIVE PAINTINGS by Tish Ingersoll Interviewed by Anastasiya Shekhtman How do you begin a painting? I often start a painting using a level and making several horizontal lines, varying distances apart. Then, using black acrylic, I use gestural lines to overlap them. Finally, I add color. I often use memories of places I have walked or otherwise experienced. The painting and content emerges over a long period of not painting. The transformation of paint, a loose substance, into rigid lines and geometric shapes in your paintings is particularly intriguing. How does the form of your work play into the content? For twenty years, I worked as a lead artist for the Mural Arts Program. When creating a muraI, I use a grid to work up my concept for the wall, using a 1″ to 1′ ratio. About nine years ago, I decided to use a grid for my studio work. Rather than make … chop! chop! read more!

YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG by Kathryn Kulpa

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YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG
by Kathryn Kulpa

If God looked for Yvonne would he find her? If God looked down, past stars and satellites, through storm clouds thick and grey as dryer lint, would he see Yvonne in a stolen van, Yvonne in a darkened shopping plaza with Ma’s Diner and A-1 Hardware, Crafts Basket and Pets Plus?

Yvonne is down on options, down on her luck. Listening to the sighs and snores of her dog asleep in the back seat, the beat of rain on the roof. Her world the smell of wet dog. Her face in the mirror, hair wild, curling in the damp. Everything about her seems high-contrast, vampirish. Face white, except for that bruise her cover-up won’t cover. Tired eyes. White eyeliner is the trick for that, Teena had taught her. No white eyeliner in Yvonne’s make-up bag. No black, either. Almost out of tricks. She pats more cover-up on her eyelids, feels the oils in the makeup separate.

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BLOODSUCKERS by Zach Fishel

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BLOODSUCKERS by Zach Fishel Having sliced mosquitoes From the air all week, he sits with mail Neglected like the quiet granite Of New Hampshire. The enormity of moths is felt here. Thinking of the letters. That even in this loneliness there is body to be held. Remembering the time spent with another, like practicing how to use the right hand to undress secrets, nervous until the curves become the angry smiles of highway waitresses. We tear through each other so quickly the language of stillness has lost itself. A solitary motion of the wrist, a quick release, splatter on the neck from the biting.   Image credit: Anja Jonsson on Flickr Zach Fishel was born in Central Pennsylvania, but resides in the Berkshire Mountains working as an outdoor educator. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and has earned two Pushcart nominations. He is the author of two chapbooks, available … chop! chop! read more!

BLUE SANTA by R. Daniel Evans

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BLUE SANTA by R. Daniel Evans All the votive candles stood arranged in a circle before Blue Santa. First, Mirta lit the four red and four blue ones. Her favorite candle holders were made from yellow glass colored dark as old cheese. She placed two in front of the dolls with the sap-green insect heads, and two in front of the wooden Santa that she had painted blue the day after the collapse of the Towers. Mama came into the dimly lit room, luckily not noticing the mess of books and clothes on the floor. If only she would notice the dolls and say how pretty they were. “Mirta! What are you doing? Just like it’s a statue of the Blessed Virgin, you’re lighting candles in front of that Santa. I don’t know why you painted it that nasty blue—” Best not to talk about Blue Santa, which Mama had … chop! chop! read more!

PHENOMENON by Donna Vorreyer

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  PHENOMENON by Donna Vorreyer Homes awash in moonlight, in streetlight, the whole neighborhood hunched and hiding, watching the sky. All of the children are adrift, huddled in bushes, running under branches well past their usual bedtimes. It is a strange phenomenon, but one that goes unquestioned. In the morning, the grown-ups confess that they thought they saw a UFO, a strange streak that grew then slipped away too quickly for logic. For the next night, for the rest of the weekend, a vigil, lawn chairs clustered, poised to catch a second glimpse. The pleasures of these evenings were many—playing late in the dark yard, the low rumble of the men’s voices mooring us close enough for safety, even television allowed when it got late enough for pajamas and later still when their eyes would spot something moving—usually a plane—before they would laugh and finally retire, carrying us to bed. … chop! chop! read more!

TOURIST by Barbara Nishimoto

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  TOURIST by Barbara Nishimoto It was July, winter in La Serena, Chile, and Lily sat in a pretty little plaza, her feet resting on the battered train case that her mother had bought at Sears long ago.  Hard shell Samsonite.  Part of a set for the family trip to Hawai’i.  “Don’t pack it too full,” her mother had said.  “You’ll break the mirror.”  In all her travels with Adam she had never used the case; it seemed too old fashioned and clunky.  But she was glad she had it on this trip.  It provided a place to sit or put up her feet.  The rest of the luggage was arranged around her—the rolling duffle, the cargo bag, the camera backpack.  All within reach.  “In case someone tries to rip us off.”  Adam shook his head, smiled, “I’d like to see someone try to run with one of those bags.” … chop! chop! read more!

THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT by Lynn Levin

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  THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT by Lynn Levin  The day of his wife’s forty-fifth birthday party, Norbie Bernbaum let Jerry Rosen talk him into an afternoon at the Dirty Martini, a strip club on the edge of downtown where Hot Pantz, Double Dee, and The Bride seduced the clientele to one degree or another. Rosen had been there a couple of times, mostly during weekdays, and he made the place sound so irresistible—the women were just like showgirls—that Norbie was panting to go. “But what about Donna’s party?” Norbie groaned as Schpilkes, the family dog, came by and leaned against him. “Just tell her you’re going out to buy her a gift,” advised Rosen. “You’ll be back in time for brisket with the in-laws. I promise.” Norbie hadn’t bought Donna a birthday present, so this sounded like a plan.  He hurriedly splashed on a bit of cologne, brushed his teeth, and … chop! chop! read more!

VINYL by Brian Druckenmiller

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VINYL by Brian Druckenmiller  I was ready to die, so I jumped off the highest bridge in town, the river a dark frozen mass ready to accept my mangled mess of skin and insides. I detached from my descending body and watched it fall lifelessly while I drifted through the air with the winter breeze and the stars and those snowflakes that instantly melt when they land on you. I saw or imagined my mom’s house from the sky, about six miles from the bridge. Her house had been empty since I left nearly four years ago. Well, that’s not true. She lived there. I drove by occasionally but I don’t know why. Well, that’s not true either. I did know why. I wanted to make sure she still existed. Did she know I still existed? One time I drove by and she was unloading groceries or something from her … chop! chop! read more!

ROMEO & JULIETTE by Kevin Tosca

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  ROMEO & JULIETTE by Kevin Tosca  Romeo sent this text to Juliette: “Goodnight Julie.” She didn’t respond. It was their first night not sleeping together in two years. He didn’t know what she was thinking. The next morning, he had to return to the suburb where they lived to get the rest of his stuff. They agreed he would call before he left, and he did so beside the stairs leading down to the subway. The call went to Juliette’s voice mail. Romeo took two trains. When he got outside at the appallingly familiar bus depot, he tried to call again, and again the call went to voice mail. He became worried, decided he didn’t want to wait for the bus, so he started walking toward the home they had made together. On the bridge, about a mile from their apartment, he stopped and sent another text: “Here. Walking. … chop! chop! read more!

“Miniature” and “Poem Ending with Six Words from a Women’s Room Stall” by Teresa Leo

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TWO POEMS by Teresa Leo Miniature Sawtooth sky reins in its pomegranates and the carnival shuts down. We duck behind the House of Horrors for in-touch, downright, face-to-face clarity. The ground’s a popcorn mess, stepped over and on, near a chain link fence to keep out what inevitably wants in: a man with a cartoon axe, then a lady with a halo for a head, unflanked but expectant, a mouth that is not a door but a chant, and in the distance a radio broadcasts what’s red-blooded and American— no secret society, no wind, no whole or scene or parts, just what’s left after premature E, teenage illumination, not the E in evacuate or in escape, the carnage an unnamable E— for now it’s all straps and buckles and snaps, what’s bluesy and small-town true. Over our shoulders the Tilt-A-Whirl, quiet now, the Zipper stuck in midair, Lucky Cups, the … chop! chop! read more!

LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR by Ramsey Beyer reviewed by Stephanie Trott

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LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR by Ramsey Beyer Zest Books, 272 pages Reviewed by Stephanie Trott It’s a familiar notion, the sense of being a little fish in a big pond. This awareness may arrive at an early age for some, while running inexplicably late for others. But for eighteen-year-old Ramsey Beyer, a lover of lists, lakes, and bonfires, this epiphany arrives with a traditional right-of-passage: the start of college. Beyer, now ten years beyond this awakening, chronicles her transition from Midwest high school senior to city-savvy first year art student in her debut memoir, Little Fish: A Memoir of a Different Kind of Year. Like many pre-undergrads, she precariously balances on the teeter-totter of change and consistency that comes with college acceptances, graduation, and the unstoppable arrival of the first autumn away from home. Beyer demonstrates maturity and insight when constructing a list of … chop! chop! read more!

CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS by John Sibley Williams reviewed by Anna Strong

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CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS
by John Sibley Williams
FutureCycle Press

reviewed by Anna Strong

Controlled Hallucinations is a collection of questions, interiors, and barriers—stepping into the world of these poems means being alone with your thoughts and the images and associations your brain creates only in its quietest moments. The title of the collection already suggests that these poems will occupy a space far removed from the outside world, but John Sibley Williams invites readers into this space with an introduction to the collection in the form of an untitled poem (following the dedication, which is to “the coming extinctions”). The introductory poem is a series of infinitive clauses (“To be the effect. / To be a thoughtful pause / and restrained response. / To the the passion of raking nails.”) which collectively define what can be expected from the ensuing poems.

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THE GRAVEYARD by Marek Hłasko reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE GRAVEYARD by Marek Hłasko (1956) in the first English translation by Norbert Guterman (1959) release December 3, 2013 Melville House, 140 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin  The moment of truth in this book of deceit is treated in a most unusual way: it isn’t treated at all. Or more precisely: it isn’t even needed. The consequences for Franciszek Kowalski, the protagonist of Marek Hłasko’s unforgettable 1956 novel The Graveyard, indeed for all of humanity, are damning enough. Slender Citizen Kowalski had fought bravely in the underground in 1945; after receiving a nearly fatal chest wound, his faith in international socialism had willed him to live. Now, at 48, the sober Kowalski is a proud Communist Party member and a factory manager in a Polish city. One night, he runs into a comrade he hasn’t seen in years. The old fighters set off to a bar to reminisce, and despite … chop! chop! read more!

MY DIRTY DUMB EYES by Lisa Hanawalt reviewed by Margaret Galvan

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MY DIRTY DUMB EYES by Lisa Hanawalt Drawn and Quarterly, 120 pages Reviewed by Margaret Galvan My Dirty Dumb Eyes, released last May, may be comic artist Lisa Hanawalt’s debut text with a major publisher, but it highlights her preexisting popularity. Indeed, Hanawalt’s text shows its chops through its diverse array of humorous comic vignettes often originally commissioned for well-known print and internet periodicals—from New York Magazine to The Hairpin. A few months prior to its release, one of these comics, “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” first printed in the pages of Lucky Peach—a magazine co-created by Momofuku-founder, David Chang—was nominated for a James Beard, the preeminent award in the culinary world. In addition to “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” where Hanawalt creatively imagines bizarre skeletons in the closet out of the public personas of renown restauranteurs, she weighs in on the world of fashion and film in other comics. … chop! chop! read more!

A CONVERSATION WITH NATHANIEL POPKIN by Roberta Fallon

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A CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR NATHANIEL POPKIN by Roberta Fallon Nathaniel Popkin’s new novel LION AND LEOPARD is set in early nineteenth Century Philadelphia, and features historical figures such as Charles Willson Peale, Raphaelle Peale, and the German painter John Lewis Krimmel. A historical incident sets the plot in motion—a mysterious death at a mill pond— and the novel’s descriptions are so earthy you can almost smell the cowpaths. Yet Popkin says Lion and Leopard is not historical fiction but rather a contemporary piece that deals with universal themes of originality, duplicity, family, friendship, power struggles and unexpected twists of fate. Indeed, the dialogue-rich writing uses slang that you might overhear on the streets today. And the issues are familiar. I sat down with Nathaniel earlier this month to ask him about the book. [Editor’s note: You can preview a sample chapter of Lion and Leopard, “The Dig“, in Cleaver Issue No. 1.] How … chop! chop! read more!

PACHYDERME by Frederik Peeters reviewed by Brazos Price

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    PACHYDERME by Frederik Peeters translated from the French by Edward Gauvin Harry N. Abrams Press SelfMadeHero imprint, 88 pages Reviewed by Brazos Price  A cinematic opening: a woman’s heeled boot, a 1950’s traffic jam in bucolic Romandie, a downed elephant.   Carice Sorrel, a woman who “simply must get to the hospital,” to see her husband who has been in an accident, heads into the woods rather than wait for the elephant to be removed.  In Pachyderme, by Frederik Peeters, this transition from the road – through the woods – and into the hospital, quickly feels like a trip into the subconscious.  When Carice first sees the hospital, the reader sees her have something of an out of body experience. Ultimately, the image seems to suggest that she is replaying, reinterpreting, and reworking recent events while asleep or unconscious or insane or dead. She wanders through the hospital and her … chop! chop! read more!

GILGI, ONE OF US By Irmgard Keun reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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GILGI, ONE OF US By Irmgard Keun (1931) in the first English translation by Geoff Wilkes Melville House, 210 pages  Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin You push through the small, enclosed, almost claustrophobic rooms at the head of “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, like an exile from a provincial village, and there you are face to face with Léger’s masterwork The City. Now free of the repressive ties of the parochial, you’re not there yet. The City—the city—looms, an inscrutable machine. “At once spacious in its lateral spread and aggressively frontal, it offers the eye no reasonable focus and the body no comfortable place to stand,” says the show’s curator, Anna Vallye, in the deeply informed essay, “The Painter on the Boulevard,” in the exhibition catalog. “To approach is to hazard.” But Léger’s painting is no warning. Rather it’s a syncopation of the moment … chop! chop! read more!

SIDEWALK DANCING by Letitia Moffitt reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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SIDEWALK DANCING by Letitia Moffitt Atticus Books, 158 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin A sidewalk dance is the step or two that strangers on a sidewalk make together in an effort to get out of each other’s way. Sometimes, says Letitia Moffitt, they naturallly move in tandem, like dancers, until they collide. Sometimes they stay that way, perpetually in each other’s path, never moving past each other. This suspended state of existence—one imagines cells tumbling around a petri dish—infects Moffitt’s novel Sidewalk Dancing (Atticus Books), the story of Grace Chao, a Chinese immigrant to San Francisco, and George McGee, a peripatetic and dogmatic city planner, who intercepts Grace at the diner where she waits tables, and pulls her half knowing into a life of mutual abeyance. The couple moves to Hawaii, where George designs an impossible house, fails to convince his colleagues of the importance of the latest planning ideas, … chop! chop! read more!

BLINDING: THE LEFT WING by Mircea Cărtărescu reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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BLINDING: THE LEFT WING
by Mircea Cărtărescu, in the English translation by Sean Cotter,
Archipelago Books, 464 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

It starts in adolescence. The questions come to you while lying in bed (certainly now with a growing awareness of your sexuality), the walls of your room expanding into endless grainy darkness, as if the room itself could encompass the entire world: why am I here, why is there anything at all?

The questions may haunt you at age 13 or 15 or 17, but by adulthood they tend to feel banal. Unanswerable, impossible, if taken seriously debilitating, they are in a word blinding, and so you tend to avert your gaze. But suppose you can’t, suppose the inviolable white light only draws you closer, to madness possibly, to paint or write or drink or pray (to what God, tell me?) almost certainly. And so perhaps you scribble, the pages of your notebooks filling with furious script, like eons of sediment piling into sad mute mountains no one else will ever excavate or carve or climb.

Unless, perhaps, you are a writer of the caliber of Mircea Cărtărescu, the celebrated Romanian author of the 1996 book Blinding: The West Wing. Cărtărescu is a poet, essayist, and novelist of unsurpassing imaginative vision and startling bravery. He has won several Romanian literary prizes, but beyond Romania and France, where a few of his novels have been translated, and Holland, where he has taught, Cărtărescu, a child of the post-War communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, is rather unknown. His only other novel to be out in an English edition is the 1993 Nostalgia, published here in 2005 by New Directions.

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WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS by Margaret Kaufman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS by Margaret Kaufman PaulDryBooks, 201 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Critics never thought much of Ettore Scola’s 1987 film La Famiglia. Vincent Camby, writing in the New York Times, said that it has “the manner of a film that was conceived as an idea…The characters and events were thought up later.” But the idea, to capture time as it drifts through a single family in the space of a single apartment, is so powerfully melancholic that I’ll sit and ache through the film any time. Even despite the soft filter gauze of the mid-1980s. That same ache ventures forth from Margaret Kaufman’s debut novel Where Somebody Waits, out this month from Paul Dry Books. The tidy paperback, with its glancing, storyteller’s prose, covers about 60 years and four generations of the Davidson family, Jews in a small Arkansas town. While La Famiglia centers on the scholarly, even-handed … chop! chop! read more!

WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ By Jérémie Dres reviewed by Stephanie Trott

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WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ by Jérémie Dres SelfMadeHero, 199 pages Reviewed by Stephanie Trott Everyone has a story, a collection of historical inner workings and familial memories that makes us who we are. But not all desire or are able to physically retrace the steps of those who laid our ancestral foundation. In We Won’t See Auschwitz, author Jérémie Dres does precisely that: embarking on a pilgrimage to Poland in search of the “drop of cool water from a spring” that he likens to his Grandma Thérèse, Dres winds his way through the history of the country and retraces his grandmother’s steps while simultaneously forging his own. The reader is dropped immediately into the action, rendezvousing with Dres in Warsaw’s historic Old Town as he searches for his grandmother’s original home on an unseasonably warm June afternoon. Together we search with him through the clouded eyes of the past for … chop! chop! read more!

The Property by Rutu Modan reviewed by Amelia Moulis

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THE PROPERTY by Rutu Modan Drawn and Quarterly, 222 pages reviewed by Amelia Moulis A family secret.  A tragic love affair.  This could well be any book of the last millennia, and yet in Rutu Modan’s latest graphic novel, The Property, fresh life is given to these age-old tropes.  After receiving the 2008 Eisner for her first foray into adult graphic novels with Exit Wounds, Modan’s second novel further cements her talent in exploiting the subtleties of the medium. Where Exit Wounds is a fast-paced and chaotic adventure, The Property follows similar themes in a calmer setting as a grandmother and granddaughter travel from Tel Aviv to Warsaw ostensibly to reclaim a property they lost in World War II. From the outset, grandmother Regina is established as a quick-tempered, strong-minded and endlessly stubborn character in direct opposition to the temperament of her granddaughter, Mica, who is practical and level-headed. As their … chop! chop! read more!

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S by Jeanne Murray Walker Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S  by Jeanne Murray Walker Center Street, 384 pages Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier “I worry about Mother, mostly,” writes Jeanne Murray Walker in her memoir, The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s (Center Street), “but I also worry about myself, because I am beginning to get myself mixed up with her. What does it mean that, in company with her, I ‘live’ in the past so much?” This question shapes Walker’s story of caring for her mother Erna Kelley, who lost her memory and life to the disease. Seeking answers, Walker offers insight into how memory works and what remembering means. As she flies between Philadelphia and her mother’s home in Dallas, the author’s own 1950s childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, keeps flooding back. Her own life seems boxed up with her mother’s stories about driving her brothers and sisters to school in … chop! chop! read more!

HALF THE KINGDOM By Lore Segal reviewed by Michelle Fost

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HALF THE KINGDOM by Lore Segal Melville House, 176 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost Late in life, after health issues led my grandparents to move to a retirement community called Stonegates, my grandfather referred to their neighbors as his fellow inmates. I am still puzzling over Lore Segal’s new novel, Half the Kingdom, but I think she beautifully casts some theatrical lighting on the full inner lives and personal histories of the inmates. It’s as though Segal lifts a lid on what she might call, here, the Crazy Box of stories inside her aging characters. The lives of Joe Bernstine, Lucy Friedgold, Samson Gorewitz, Ida Farkasz, and a few others intersect in the emergency room and on the seventh floor of the Senior Center of the Cedars of Lebanon hospital. The open lid won’t reveal enough: part of the story here is that though Joe, Lucy, Samson, Ida, and their … chop! chop! read more!

THE FARAWAY NEARBY by Rebecca Solnit reviewed by Colleen Davis

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THE FARAWAY NEARBY by Rebecca Solnit Viking, 272 Pages Reviewed by Colleen Davis  Once a month my Saturday morning yoga class swaps our beloved Iyengar teacher for a visiting Power yoga trainer from Manhattan. Captain Kate is not her real name, but that’s what I call the woman who drives us through 85 minutes of fast, challenging postures which are not all that different from our normal fare. What Kate changes is the pace of our effort and the time we spend holding each pose. Under her direction, my country classmates and I move at the speed she expects from students in her 105-degree New York studio. Our local practice site has no amped up heating system, but a class with Kate still leaves us drenched. This is her rigorous lead up to the final moment when we gratefully follow Kate’s instruction to “lower our head and bow our mind … chop! chop! read more!

RELISH: MY LIFE IN THE KITCHEN By Lucy Knisley reviewed by Stephanie Trott

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RELISH: MY LIFE IN THE KITCHEN by Lucy Knisley First Second Books, 173 pages Reviewed by Stephanie Trott Never crowd the mushrooms. It’s a mantra recited time and time again in cookbooks, culinary shows, and even some Hollywood films. But without understanding what this actually means, as one’s interpretation will invariably differ from another’s, the only result is a disappointingly inconsistent sauté. In the absence of visual representation, one may interpret crowding as tight as a tin of sardines or as light as a bag of fluffy marshmallows. Enter Lucy Knisley and her graphic memoir Relish: My Life In the Kitchen, a bright collection of stories and memories centered on food, her family, and her upbringing. Following Knisley from the countertops of her childhood apartment in downtown Manhattan to early mornings at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her homemade meals and grocery lists guide the reader through … chop! chop! read more!

Two Cities, Two Outsiders, Two Novels reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE STORY OF A NEW NAME by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein Europa Editions, 471 pages ELI, ELY by Ezekiel Tyrus Hardhead Press, 283 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Two Cities, Two Outsiders, Two Novels My thirteen-year-old daughter Lena got a hold of my review copy of Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Story of a New Name and the pencil stuck inside it for jotting notes in the margins. “Your journey starts now! Ready….go!” she wrote at the beginning of chapter 59 (of 125). On page 251, and then every so often to the end of the book, she wrote, “Pit Stop,” and drew icons for a bed, a cup of coffee, and the bathroom. At the start of chapter 75, she sketched stick figures of people lined up, as if along the edge of a marathon route. “Yay! You can do it! Come on!” she wrote, in a speech balloon … chop! chop! read more!

ON GHOSTS by Elizabeth Robinson reviewed by Vanessa Martini

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ON GHOSTS by Elizabeth Robinson Solid Objects, 64 pages reviewed by Vanessa Martini Elizabeth Robinson’s On Ghosts is, in her own words, “an essay” that seeks to understand the idea of haunting. As many teachers—perhaps just many of my teachers—like to say, to “essay” means to try, and what Robinson tries to do is to create a haunting so slowly and carefully that at first a reader does not notice. The structure of the text is simple: many small sections compound upon one another in an attempt to understand “the phenomenon of ghosts and haunting.” What seems at first to be an Explanatory Note quickly proves itself rather similar to many sections that follow; we readers are suddenly sucked in, like hikers who swear the day was clear until fog rose all around. Though it’s hard to say whether this is Robinson’s fault or my own, the first few sections seem … chop! chop! read more!

IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST by Ruchama King Feuerman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST by Ruchama King Feuerman NYRBLit (e-book only), 203 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin As I was crossing the street just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem one evening this summer, I noticed a Palestinian boy, about 15 years old, flying a kite on the corner. It was about seven and the sun had disappeared already. The light was pink. The sky in the distance was a cloudless blue, but it seemed, at dusk, to have the texture of felt. An orthodox Jewish mother, wearing a headscarf and long skirt, came across to the traffic island, where the boy in capris and a t-shirt stood watching his kite fly over the honeycomb colored wall of the old city. The woman pushed a stroller, inside of which sat a nicely dressed boy of two. He was interested in the kite. The older … chop! chop! read more!

THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS by Dave Newman reviewed by William Boyle

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THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS by Dave Newman White Gorilla Press, 166 pages Reviewed by William Boyle Dave Newman’s The Slaughterhouse Poems is a book about work and failure and desperation, about the ways we escape and survive and the things we do when we’re lost in the vastness of youth and sore afraid of the vastness of age. The speaker of these poems—which are all set in Western Pennsylvania between 1986 and 1989—is looking back on his days as a high school fuck-up who has just taken a part-time job at a slaughterhouse. A wide cast of characters surrounds him: slaughterhouse employees (one who is famous for juggling cow balls and ultimately gets fired for fucking a three hundred pound pig), buddies, girls he’s after, dive bar regulars, a 91-year-old bowling alley owner, too-young strippers, old men who sit on their porches with cans of Schaefer beer, and drug dealers. The book has … chop! chop! read more!

THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer reviewed by Chris Ludovici

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THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer Riverhead Hardcover, 480 pages Reviewed by Chris Ludovici Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is a beast of a book. At four hundred eighty pages, and covering forty years of half a dozen lives, its ambition is both broad and admirable. It is compelling when it offers a sustained, ground-level view through one of her character’s eyes, which comprises the bulk of the book. But its ambitions also exceed Wolitzer’s strengths; the book suffers from odd pacing, random shifts in perspective, and haphazard leaps in time. When considered as a whole, the pieces don’t fit together in an organic, satisfying way. The Interestings has an ensemble cast, but its lead is Jules Jacobson, who in the summer of 1974 finds herself inducted into the cool kid inner circle at Spirit in the Woods, a New England summer camp for privileged children. Jules, a plain middle class girl … chop! chop! read more!

INDIVIDUAL, IDENTITY, AND THE PARENTHETICAL by Toisha Tucker

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INDIVIDUATION, IDENTITY, AND THE PARENTHETICAL by Toisha Tucker My conceptual works provide a foundation for introspection of the self and the other. They are distillations of ideas transformed into controlled environments or objects. Through text, sound, photographs, paintings, and immersive installation, I ruminate on literary modernism, magical realism, and the notion of benign indifference. Or I offer thought propositions to the viewer—some declarative, some open-ended—that are platforms for questioning or thinking more broadly about the social constructions we have come to accept as truths. Ultimately, my works are traces of thoughts and the interplay between the accepted realities and constructions of the spaces we inhabit and my own abstracted perceptions of them. Each work manifests my exploration of memory, time, and place while seeking to universalize the personal. Through my conceptual work, I continue to explore the landscape of my memory and my preoccupations with the malleability of language, history, literature, … chop! chop! read more!

PICASSO IN 10 LINES and SNOW by Jerrold Yam

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TWO POEMS by Jerrold Yam Picasso in 10 Lines Tell them the orange ocean. Make fear a nude woman. Two characters are more likely competitors than companions. Or the cautionary tale with shadows? Nothing is uglier than an angle struggling under the weight of mismatched colours. Lanterns are exaggerated faces. Be quick to judge but slow in remonstrance. See the fruit bowl stepping into a trompe l’oeil? Follow its lead. Stub your pencil out.   Snow Leave us. There is no generosity in unwelcome surprise. Already the neighbour’s yard clenches its earthen jaw in anticipation; kids sprint to windows upon waking. If you have to cheat in the middle of the night, vanish by morning. Tell me how kindness works in taming an undependable being.     Born in 1991, Jerrold Yam is a law undergraduate at University College London and the author of two poetry collections, Scattered Vertebrae (Math Papre Press, 2013) and Chasing … chop! chop! read more!

NEW WORLDS ARE OLD NEWS by Matthew Harrison

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NEW WORLDS ARE OLD NEWS by Matthew Harrison The pilgrim in Stop & Shop: broad hat, cloak. In the cantaloupes, the pilgrim. No fruit coaxes. Nothing ripe on sale looks new. When I shout “extra safe!” my wife cries for Saint Benedict, learner confirmer. Who will not lie nude? The sunburn in Stop & Shop: flip-flops, bikini. Seagulls flock each unsunburned spot. Cabinets of milk. The crotch is an animal knot. I bitch out the loud window AC unit while asleep, sleep-bitching evil dream starfish with teeth. They bite. Who knows the oceans of our blood? In Stop & Shop the kid calls a split kiwi a cooter. White Keds, Atlanta Braves cap backwards. The man-kid. But fruit is edible sex. Parked in the Stop & Shop lot post gym, I’m sopping sweat, I’m hard up, craving chicken. In a bind: a coop. Any cooked muscle is chicken. The pilgrim … chop! chop! read more!

STRING THEORIES by Jason Gordon

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STRING THEORIES by Jason Gordon 1. It’s still December still July a blue cloud walks a dog across the lake my hands fall off I glue them back on my head falls off I warm it in the oven I no longer exist I will exist again tomorrow I can’t remember my name can you remember my name? it’s cold in the microwave 2. Even dogs have feelings even fleas but fleas are not important the Stanley Cup is important energy drinks are important lighter fluid is important it makes fire for smoking pot and pot is important God is important he has feeling he has blue fleas in his beard this isn’t the 60s or it is he can’t tell time his bones dance on the sea 3. You steal my hubcaps I buy them back you eat a peach with a fork made of blood it’s an old … chop! chop! read more!

MY BITTER LOVE by John Oliver Hodges

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MY BITTER LOVE by John Oliver Hodges  Miko seduced our mom with a gruesome story about Jews. When he was a boy, he told her, he followed the American soldiers into Bergen-Belsen. He saw the dead bodies and the bodies that were not yet dead. This he shared with her during singles night at the Unitarian Church three years after the divorce. Miko said his purpose there was to profit off the rich Nazis who’d come to bad ends. Thing is, the bodies moved him to compassion. He just helped the Red Cross workers, that’s all he could do. Miko told our mom this after she told him her granddad was liquidated by Hitler. I got two brothers. We love our mom. We boys have turned out well, so it was good to see her happy. Miko was of high intellect, a sensitive man of the world. Name a country … chop! chop! read more!

NAVIGATION BY SPOONLIGHT by David Poplar

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NAVIGATION BY SPOONLIGHT by David Poplar Six hundred thousand children in the Horn of Africa are dying from ribcages bloated with hunger. They wait for helicopters filled with peanut butter. –from “To the father at the restaurant” by Julie Krystyna Cheng Helicopters of peanut butter stick To the marshmallow clouds. Like raisins In pristine white dough—the type of bone-ground Dough that will someday become fine china. No, you see, the sky is not the limit; The sky is just a small round bowl. We bounce around the edges, Never finding the corners. But in the serrated light of the spoon, I hear a voice. It sounds like someone old And very, very tall. I’m not sure If he is the one with the spoon, or if I am. He tells me I have high cholesterol. I don’t eat enough fiber, almost no fruit.   David Poplar is a graduate student at … chop! chop! read more!