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A GREATER MUSIC, a novel by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith and reviewed by Justin Goodman

Bae Suah’s newest English-translated work, A Greater Music, describes the Austrian composer Franz Schubert as “a short, fat, shy myopic.” As brutal as this description is of a man who unhappily died before his 32nd year, it seems altogether different in tone when used to describe Bae’s novel itself. Filled with observatory indifference and an almost disembodied airiness, the novel comes across particularly as commentary, and as particularly rebellious. But what’s striking about A Greater Music is that it treats the work of Schubert above the man, treats the novel above the social, giving grandeur to otherwise short, fat, shy myopics. They are breathing things that were trapped in frames ill-suited for their sublimity--short in length, fat with substance, shy about their revelations, and myopic in their attentions, they are beings greater than their comportment can present. Something so heavy has rarely looked so light.

ASK JUNE: The Shell-Shocked Citizen and the Expectant (would-be) Spouse

Ask June Cleaver

After my initial shock wore off I found that I was very, very happy at the thought of being a mother. But Jeremy’s attitude is freaking me out. The absolutely first thing he said when I told him was: “I don’t want you to think that this means I’ll marry you.” This response devastated me for a lot of reasons. It seems ominous that this was the very first thing he thought of, not the joys or even the burdens of parenthood, much less my or our child’s welfare. I was also insulted by the tone of what he said, as if I were the supplicant for some wondrous gift he was withholding from me, not half of an equal partnership between equally committed people.

FACT CHECK, a poem by Laura Yan, featured on Life As Activism

yes, let's
argue over semantics while
decapitated bodies and babies litter
hospital floors in aleppo and
not-my-president unites with Russia in
a fight with common enemy number 1
terrorism and extremism and
hoses spray ice and gas and bullets
against water protectors protestors while sophia’s
arm is exposed cartilage and elders ache from
head wounds let’s argue over safety

HUMAN ACTS, a novel by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith, reviewed by William Morris

First published in South Korea in 2014, Han Kang’s new novel Human Acts is now available for the first time in the United States. American readers first encountered Kang in 2016, with the translation of her 2007 novel The Vegetarian. This strange, dark, poetic novel, about a woman who decides to stop eating meat after having a horrific nightmare, was met with great acclaim. Translated by Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian went on to win the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. While Human Acts is a rich, powerful novel in its own right, and should be read independently of The Vegetarian, it is often interesting to situate a novel against the writer’s other work.

INCANTATION ON THE EVE OF 2017, a poem by Monica Rico, featured on Life As Activism

I turn bread into tortillas.
I leave dried guajillo chiles in my wake.
My hair is wild cilantro.
My footprints are poinsettias.
My tongue is an eagle whose wings will shout.
The fringe of my rebozo is made of infinite braids.
I dare you to touch.
I am a field.
My hands are dirt, my fingernails roots.
Diego Rivera has painted them.
My bones are made of corn and chiles.
My stomach is arroz con frijoles.
My lungs are comino y canela.
My blood is lemon and salt.

F M K, a poem by Sybil Kollappallil, featured on Life As Activism

Two months ago they played FUCK MARRY KILL
He picked me as Fuck and the other brown girl to Marry
Kill was a white girl who changed her name a lot
Anna then Ann then Anne then Anna again
Marry Girl told me, I wasn't there
He would have been my Kill, so you know
Then when the president was elected he yipped his pitchy yip
Marry Girl shrugged and told me, don't forget
That they think of things when they see us
And especially when they see us together and recall
There is more than one here

THE DAY AMERICA DIED, AGAIN… by Joel L. Daniels Featured on Life As Activism

shhh…

this is not an essay. no, this is not that. not a poem. not a bomb. not hydrogen. this is not blackface. not a pledge to a new allegiance. there will be no cotton picking. there are signs - a cross stump stuck in a lawn, a flag burning. there may be a march, some spring uprising to coincide with fall palettes and patterns, of bodies being flung to concretes, red pastels overshadowing the grainy elements of white hoods floating in the background.

ASK JUNE: The Cherry-Picking Chore Guy and The Dog-Kicker’s Lament

Ask June Cleaver

My husband likes to tell people that he pulls his weight at home and does his share of the family chores and daily housework. The problem is that he always seems to do the jobs I actually like to do, and leaves the less pleasant, usually harder, jobs for me. I will come downstairs after a shower and he will say: “Honey, I just wrote little personal messages on the Christmas cards—now if you can only address them… and make sure the addresses are up-to-date. You might want to do some cross-referencing. Oh, and get stamps.” Or he will announce that he has emptied the dishwasher—which leaves me to sort and scrape and prewash all the dirty dishes and load them, and then do the pots. After these announcements he will pause so I can thank him. It makes me crazy....

THE LOVERS’ PHRASEBOOK, poems by Jordi Alonso, reviewed by Claire Oleson

Jordi Alonso’s collection The Lovers' Phrasebook shelves itself precisely in the lexical gap between languages, working with absence to depict presence and utilizing singular words to display relationships. These poems are able to gesture at miscommunication and a lack of sufficient vocabulary while also creating space for new conversation. The Lovers' Phrasebook excels in its bravery and conceptual construction, working to translate without obscuring or whiting-out the original word in favor of an English counterpart. It’s a book that hails the multiplicity of loves and languages, largely favoring an experiential approach to definition rather than a literal one. The Lovers' Phrasebook is an invitation to re-imagine how we move between languages and what the space in between words and their translations means and can be used for. By placing love in the space between fluency and confusion, Alonso has turned what could have been a dictionary into a romance.

Ask June: The Squirreling-Away Spouse and the Prolix Writer

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June,
...I am troubled and, although I haven’t yet spoken to her about it, a bit angry that, without consulting me, my wife decided to put all her art-therapy earnings in a separate bank account. The account where my salary gets deposited is a joint account, and has been since before we were married. So is our small savings account, all of which is either money from my earnings or sale proceeds from a house I used to own before we moved in together. She is the beneficiary on my 401(k) and insurance. I just don’t see why the money I earn is our money, and the money she earns is her money. What do you think?

A BRIEF GLOSSARY OF IRELAND for the American Tourist Trying to Cram Thousands of Years of History into a Ten Day Tour by Sarah Ann Winn

Carvings: Everywhere there were stones, vines, and leaves twined together, along with knots and crosses, where animals often played in the hewn greenery, or people’s faces peered up at the top of columns. In some places, they’d been knocked away, in others they were restored from drawings, and in still others, most amazingly, the originals retained their details. A monkey sat at the foot of a monk. Saint Catherine held her book with the cover cross intact. At Maynooth University, the College Chapel featured fantastical creatures and plants in rare wood and marble, which never repeat after that first appearance. Between the gold leaf, the hand painted ceiling, the chorister which seats four hundred and fifty people, the pipe organ with three thousand pipes and bells and spinning stars, and an ornate marble alter piece surrounded by five small chapels, equally extravagant, the effect is exactly what each craftsman and designer over the two hundred years of construction intended — provoking marvel and wonder.

TWO POEMS by Leonard Gontarek featured on Life As Activism

Walt Whitman With Light On A Lake

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
The land and the sea, the animals fishes and birds, the sky of heaven and
the orbs, the forests mountains and rivers, are not small themes … but
folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which
always attach to dumb real objects … they expect the poet to indicate the
path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty
well enough … probably as well as the poet. You shall ratchet up the moon.

WHIPSTITCHES, poems by Randi Ward reviewed by Hannah Wendlandt

Whipstitches is, at its core, an examination of all the many aspects of a rural home, especially a rural childhood home. The pastoral is tinged with loss and decay because the world is, it is colored by the lives drawing strength from it just as is the earth, and so this small somewhere becomes a whole and complete universe. Randi Ward’s poems are neat and well-edited impressionistic snapshots that interact in a novel way to create depth despite their length. Ward is triumphant in her presentation of a rural childhood; you know this girl. You’ve seen her at a diner or a gas station. Come hear what she has to say.

Ask June: The Eternally Barking Border Collie and the Sneaky Saucier

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June,
Last week we went to a dinner party for ten, hosted by our friends Barry and his husband James. Barry, who always makes the main course, is a good cook, but his meals are usually on the bland side. This time the linguini sauce was wonderful—if anything, it was a little challenging, a little edgy. Although I did notice that James was silent and looked a bit discomfited, everyone else at the table praised the meal and Barry, the cook, seemed delighted. I remarked on the uncharacteristically flavorful sauce to Frank, my husband, during the drive home. He laughed and said that while Barry was off serving drinks, he (Frank) had seen a container of salt, along with jars of some other spices, standing near the simmering saucepot and had doctored the sauce with liberal additions of salt and two or three of the spices. I was appalled, but Frank—along with the couple we were driving home—said that there was no harm done, and indeed some good, since we had gotten a funny story and a tastier meal out of it.Who was right? And what, if anything, should I or anybody else do about this?

Only More So, poems by Millicent Borges Accardi, reviewed by paulA neves

Only More So is a read for troubled times. War, climate change, cancer—it’s all here in forty-six poems of mid-life contemplation that simultaneously remind us that forgetting the past condemns us to repeat it and that celebrating the remembering is a necessary act of resistance and transcendence. Appropriately, the former sentiment originates not from Churchill, the statesman who appropriated it in wartime, but George Santayana, the poet who believed “only the dead have seen the end of war.”

WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER by Shira Walinsky

Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love and home of the famous LOVE statue by Robert Indiana, is taking love to new places. If you happen to be in Philly, chances are you’ll catch sight of the 47 Bus. You can’t miss its bright blocks of color or its bold, emphatic message: WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER. This “mural on wheels” is the brainchild of Shira Walinsky, mural artist, and filmmaker Laura Deutch. It runs daily from South Philadelphia’s Whitman Plaza, on through Center City, and all the way up to 5th and Godfrey in North Philadelphia, connecting several multilingual, multiethnic neighborhoods and commercial corridors. Riding the bus through this cross-sectional slice of the city you’ll inevitably hear a cross-cultural variety of languages spoken, while being wrapped in a welcoming collage that represents the patchwork of diverse people whose lives intersect every day. The back of the bus reads “We Are All Migrating Together”—words from the mouth of one of its drivers—and along the way you’ll see murals by and about refugee groups who have recently settled in Philadelphia—the Karen and Chin of Burma, the Bhutanese, the Nepalese.

AFFIRMATION by Ben Nardolilli

Any interested parties herein? I sought to execute a release, they ended up executing me.
The conscious pain and suffering, while extreme, lasted approximately 30 years. Yes,
I sought to execute a release. Just the good air and the silent situation. All necessary releases.
I left New York behind, the only decent discovery zone for games and diversity.

STILL LIFE IN A SHIVERING TOWN by Matthew Gellman

Get cozy. You pull me
under starlit covers, coax
the past from my throat.
The blue-veined suburbs.
Winters gathered like sticks.
My father, when he was there.
Face-first mornings pressed
to the blacktop, the boyish
crackle of skin on ice. And
in the window, a comet
falling, clearing a path
through the trees.

SEVEN PIECES by Karen Donovan

Candelabrum
Lighting for your soul in purgatory, for deep nights at the end of the dock, for gravetenders on vacation, for the silencing of aspersions. Discounts for camping without a lantern, for al fresco dinners at the café of nevermind, for attending the flatbed truck parade, for packing a canyon with parabolas. Call for a second lighting tomorrow, for delivery of your complimentary rope ladder, for the flame annuity option, for your name on this grain of pollen. Twelve tapers included.

NO REPEAT CUSTOMERS by Josh Wagner

Josh WagnerNO REPEAT CUSTOMERS Early one Sunday morning Dean and I stumble past the First Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit, the only church in town old enough to have God’s own handprint cemented in the walkway. We’ve been up…

CONDITIONAL [FALL 2009] by Nicholas Fuenzalida

if he hadn’t planned to go hunting with his father

if his father had kept the rifle locked away

if that day had been overcast, a variation in our state of sun

if I hadn’t been in a distant country

if lightning rods didn’t have to watch the storm clouds come

if the air took shape as a barrier, and not a field for the bullet to seed

if someone was in the house when he came home

THE MAESTRO by Amin Matalqa

William, who was a cockroach, had a deep love for the music of Beethoven. Born and raised behind the walls of the Cincinnati Concert Hall, he grew up nurturing a passion for the romantics, much like his forefathers, with an affinity for the operas of Wagner and Puccini. To say that music ran in his blood, while biologically inaccurate, would be an understatement. It traces back to his great grandfather, Wilhelm the first, who was an immigrant from Germany, famous for boasting to the uncultured Cincinnati roaches about life behind the walls of the Berlin Opera House (legend had it that he once sat on Herbert Von Karajan’s shoe while the maestro conducted Brahms’ Requiem); and his grandfather, who was taking a stroll to contemplate the thematic development of his first symphony when he was stepped on by none other than Leonard Bernstein. When he was still alive, William’s father longed for the day the family would return to the motherland and hear the acoustics of the famous venues there, but he died while scouting the route to the airport (he was captured and swallowed by a drunk man over a $20 bet).

WELCOME HOME by Michael Fischer

For 23 years you’re free. Then you go to prison.

You arrive in an orange jail jumpsuit, thin and see-through as a dryer sheet. You sit in a cage until a correctional officer calls you out. State your full name. Any aliases? How tall are you? Yeah you wish, how tall are you really? How much you weigh? Hair color? Eyes? Any scars? Any tattoos? Where? Of what? What size shoe you wear? Pants? Shirt? Get back in the cage.

WHAT HE SAW and WHEN THE MOON WAS NEW by Karl Plank

What Phi Dees saw that morning may have disturbed him. At least he has not forgotten and has noted the way the memory prowls unfettered in his mind. What happened would seem to be a simple matter; indeed, natural. A neighborhood cat down low in the grass, inching toward the feeder, leaping through the air to bite a finch off its perch. No skirmish or even sound of a ruffle. There and then not. And the cat turning to look back in his direction.

But what he saw was this: a view of himself, looking up from his reading, observing too quietly the silent scene. Even waiting for its denouement, not unlike when he once watched someone fall slowly down a flight of stairs.

A TOAST and BEGGING FOR OUR LIVES by Marc Harshman

A red-stemmed vase of lightning lifts the sky toward heaven’s permanent farrago of space and time: heavy, religious, worth thinking about, we agree. God might rest easier tonight blessed by our toast, a toast raised above the fold, the mad superciliousness of the headlines, the narcosis of the many. Lincoln, you would’ve reminded me, lives on in the few. We do well, I might have replied, to thank the weather for this breeze, and that bottleneck guitar climbing those angelic blues might be the ultimate apotheosis, yet another reason to go on living as if this day might last forever. Lilacs and a shot of bourbon, neat.

PUSHING THINGS by Matthew Mogavero

I threw my sandwich wrapper out in a trash can. On
the side of the trash can was the word LIMITLESS.

I threw out my sandwich wrapper,
I threw out my clothes and toiletries from my
suitcase,
I threw out my suitcase, I took my clothes off and
pressed them through the rim of that trash can.

DON’T TOUCH by Elisabeth Lloyd Burkhalter

Magnolia to aloe, silver-sheened river, and shallow.
We are minor in the composition but figure prominently.
Often now I think of the past as a large country
of crumpled maps, fragments
arranged under my feet. Hasn’t it always been
a question of which trees, which injuries
to include, where to place them? To be human is to hoard.
We keep the hours to curate them:
Imagine a place, now mute its colors.

THE UNBORN by Kika Dorsey

They are cutting down all the trees for Christmas.
Pine and spruce lay bundled on warehouse floors,
and I drink cognac in the corners of silent rooms,
red oriental rugs bursting with flowers and leaves,
warm feet wrapped in wool,
my body a river where the man capsized,
my body that I gave away,
all of it.

JINJU IN THE DUST by Robert Hinderliter

This morning, out my window, a strange amber film over the sky. The usually crowded streets now mostly empty, only a few people hurrying down the sidewalk, heads bent in medical masks. In the distance, the temple on the hill just a faint shimmer.

Something on the wind.

THE GRAVITY OF JOY by Charles Green

Recently, I ruined someone’s moment of mundane joy. The hallways of my campus building were bare—students were taking exams, or locked away in the library and various study nooks they’d marked as their territory, or sprawled on the campus greens. The end of the semester was nigh; my step had a lilt.

FRACTIOUS by Geraldine Woods

Fractious was the Word of the Day, peeled off the doorstop-sized calendar block and stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnetized map of the London Underground, a relic of LBB. LBB -- Life Before Benny -- was Anna and Keith’s term for a time when their living room wasn’t littered with plastic toys and bits of food. Only eighteen months ago Anna had posted a photo of their freezer, filled with tubes of breast milk, on Instagram. “Our life now,” she’d written. “LBB is in a galaxy far far away.” They’d laughed, but Anna had thumped the next bottle on the shelf with a little more force than necessary.

WAKING UP IN AN MGM MUSICAL by Roy Bentley

I don’t know whether I’m awake or sleeping,
but I know the past is the prison we break into,
a penitentiary of what was before it was nothing.
I’m watching Donald O’Connor wall-walk sets.
The backlot-lumber complains. One minute,
there’s the choreography of a canary-colored
couch defying gravity—the first dance number

PHASE THREE OF BAZ LUHRMANN’S RED CURTAIN TRILOGY by Kelly R. Samuels

We may have found ourselves situated in Phase Three of Baz Luhrmann’s Red Curtain

Trilogy – that kind of progression. From happy ending to two lovers dying for love to one woman dying, coughing up what appears to be blood but is actually a mix of red food coloring, corn syrup and water. It doesn’t make us happy, this.

We wonder how old Luhrmann is, if age is a factor in outlook. How can it not be?

SCAPEGOATS by April Vázquez

Here's the way the rain works: it comes down every day for a whole third of the year. June, July, August, September, there isn't a single day without rain. Sometimes it's just a loud, violent storm that swoops in, does its bit, and moves on, but as often as not it lingers. Like a cat you're trying to shoo out the door: it yawns, it scratches, it stretches out its claws, it licks itself. In other words, it takes its time.

A LAND MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN HERE by Casey Whitworth

Two miles from the Greyhound station, Burt hiked through the pinewoods to the edge of Lena’s backyard. The trailer windows were dark. Her Chevy wasn’t in the driveway. They hadn’t talked during the last nine months of his stint in Starke, and what-ifs had been fermenting like toilet hooch in Burt’s head. But what he saw now in the morning light—Virginia creeper on the siding, bull briars in the yard—was a way to work toward absolution.

BEAT BOY by Michael Corrao

I sat on the sidewalk; smoked cigarettes. I never put less than two in my mouth because I figure the time combined is worth more than the time separate. You can’t tax two things like you tax one thing. The sidewalk was black and gray with powder brown cracks. The ground was opening up and I thought it would swallow me up, but I didn’t want the world to think I was scared of it so I just sat still and took drags as they came to me.

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