NOBODY PLAYED THE GUITAR IN THE CORNER OF THE LIVING ROOM by Christopher David Rosales

NOBODY PLAYED THE GUITAR IN THE CORNER OF THE LIVING ROOM
by Christopher David Rosales

Not the husband heating the milk for the baby in the crib. Not the baby in the crib. And not the wife coming in the door from work. The cat didn’t play it. The dog couldn’t play it. The parrot on its perch cawed “I won’t play the guitar”. The French diplomat didn’t play it. Instead he smoked an e-cigarette beside the fireplace listening to the Spanish ambassador remark, “Nunca tocaré la guitarra”. The stunt man in white rode his motorbike off the balcony before he got his chance to play it. The prostitute and her fiancé leaving out the back window never even asked to play it. The serial killer chose instead to swipe his bloody knife across a painting in the hall, his calling card. Meanwhile the cat-burglar returned to the drawers the jewels he felt guilty about stealing, nestled them among panties. No, neither the maid, the butler, nor the flower arranger played the guitar, and not even the gardener blowing leaves off the walk. And yet if you touched the guitar in the corner of the living room, you would have felt it hum.

WHEN THINGS WEAR AWAY OTHER THINGS by Michael Melgaard

WHEN THINGS WEAR AWAY OTHER THINGS
by Michael Melgaard

Moira played with the ocean, chasing the waves as they pulled back into themselves. Her pink rain boots splashing through the water were the only colour on the wet, rocky shore. She turned to her dad and laughed while a wave came in behind her. It covered her feet and was over the top of her boots before she noticed. She watched the water pulling away and then at her dad. She started to cry.

David walked over and picked her up. He told her it was okay and just water, then turned her away from the ocean and asked, “Do you see how they built a wall there?” He held her on his hip in the crook of one arm and pulled her boots off with the free hand. She was trying to tell him about her feet being wet between exaggerated sobs. He said, “Over there. Look. Do you know why they would build a wall on the beach?”

She didn’t say anything, but did look where he was pointing her. David went on, “A long time ago, before they built the wall, there was a graveyard here, where we’re walking.” He dumped the water out of one boot, then the other. “Back then where we’re standing was underground.” He moved her onto his other hip and tugged off her socks. “But the waves eroded the ground away.”

She asked, “What’s ‘eroded’?”

He turned back to the water. “See how every time a wave comes up it pulls some rocks back with it? That’s eroding. It’s when things wear away other things. Eventually, the waves will wear through the wall and wash away the city.”

Moira looked at the wall and then the ocean and then at her dad. She asked, “Really?”

“Yup.” He said, “Hold these,” and handed her the boots. He rang out her socks as best he could. “Eroding takes a long time, though. Hundreds of years. But anyways, back before the wall was built the waves were eroding the ground, wearing away the graveyard’s dirt, and you know what’s under the dirt in a graveyard?”

“Coffins?”

BLUE: SMOKE: COTTON: TEETH: CAT: JELLY: BLOW by Anne Panning

BLUE: SMOKE: COTTON: TEETH: CAT: JELLY: BLOW
by Anne Panning

I rarely wear blue, but today there's a striped dress the color of rain in my closet. It's a pullover. I can hardly stand how good it feels against my bare knees, walking.

When I lived in The Philippines, I became a party smoker. The cigarettes were menthol, loosely packed. The brand was called Hope. I quit.

My sister works at a fireworks factory. She has to wear all cotton clothing, right down to the underwear. When I ask her what she does all day, she says, "the usual."

One of my teeth, one of my front teeth, is porcelain. A clay animation artist made it. The dentist said to me, "Be careful. It's like china. It can break."

I got a dog instead of a cat because I know a cat could eat me. My dog is part poodle and not very smart. When the groomer ties holiday ribbons around her neck and sends her home smelling like oatmeal, our whole family applauds.

Last night I dreamed my dead father was lying in bed, drunk, his hands covered in bright red raspberry jelly.

Every night I sleep with two fans blowing madly through my bedroom: a box and an oscillating. The air is chilled and hard and loud. When I turn them off in the morning, it's a terrible silence.

GRANNY AND THE BONEHEAD SQUAD by Maria Pinto

GRANNY AND THE BONEHEAD SQUAD
by Maria Pinto

My grandboy, Ricky, actually comes over nowadays, ever since that stupid show. He’s been here every day this week, drinking all the juice in my fridge straight from the carton. He’s so proud of me, or at least as proud as a pre-teen can be of his grandmother. I mean I wasn’t on the show, but Alexia the reborn was. Ricky couldn’t be bothered with old Mema before, but then Mema got herself tangled up with the Music Television. I’ll take it, I suppose. Beggars and choosers and that.

After he accepted my hugs and kisses with minimal protest, I let him have the run of the house while I holed up in my studio, adding dimples to Ruthie’s knees. I can hear him in the kitchen now. He’s chugging my cran-apple like a diabetic, cussing and fussing with Roland Nielson’s kid. Yes, the same Roland Nielson’s kid who shaved Marylou Crain’s mini-poodle and wrote a filthy word that rhymes with “Bundt” on the poor thing’s side in permanent marker, two summers gone. The same kid who has done worse besides—his worst, as we know it, involving firecrackers and the deaths of a whole heap of lizards this past Fourth of July. I remember a smell like chicken over that particular field as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played nearby. Made me hungry even as it made me sick. The boy won’t stop till he’s tried as an adult, I swear.

Ricky’s mother has already tried and failed to keep Ricky away from The Devil, Jr., so I know there’s no use in my making an attempt.

Best I can do is keep an eye, right? My eyes and ears may have seen and heard the events of umpteen Sundays, but they still work as good as they did when I was a seedling. The ears in particular perk up when they hear, from the kitchen:

“Holy shit, that thing’s creepy! Like, that’s the most insane thing I’ve ever seen.”

BOUNTY HUNTING by Karen Levy

BOUNTY HUNTING
by Karen Levy

They pulled up behind the others who’d just arrived and were piling out of their car, laughing.

That was a long drive.

Together, they walked toward the house. They all laughed except for her; she was very angry at her brother-in-law.

There was a fishing boat out front. A sign led them away from the front door, to a backyard office, where a sunburnt man waved them in.

Joe, he said.

Nice tan, Joe, someone said and the others laughed.

From fishin’, he said. He was a big man but he said it light and breezy.

She thought he looked like a cop. She’d heard that her brother-in-law had been caught by undercover cops.

Everyone laughed.

They barely fit into the office; there were eight of them, all related through blood or marriage.

A PRESENCE IN WOOD Wood Sculpture by Miriam Carpenter

A PRESENCE IN WOOD Wood Sculpture by Miriam Carpenter Throughout my life I have sought the companionship of trees and have developed an ever deepening reverence for them. Trees are intelligent, resilient, majestic and adaptable. When a tree has reached the end of its life, the shadow of what once was presents another gift in the form of a satiny, warm, sensual material. Each piece of wood has its own story—reflections of moments specific to place and time within the inherent architecture of a species. Each tree has its own experience and characteristics uniquely formed by its geographical location, the effects of the seasons, wind, rain and what grew beside it. The history of each year is physically recorded in each ring slowly reacting to external and internal stresses after it has died and been cut into lumber. Reading the story in the grain is just as exciting to me as transforming it into an artifact. The more time I spend with each piece of wood, the deeper my understanding grows of its unique characteristics. With respect for its capacity and understanding of its potential, I can be more thoughtful in how I bring the piece to completion. Everything that I create is an experiment. Whether the approach is multi-axis split turning, bending or carving by hand, it is always an exploration of unique material potential. My current passion is fueled by an evolving series of delicately carved wooden feathers. Species with the most porous earlywood, tight growth rings and strong medullary rays provide the type of structure I have found to be most resilient. The dense medullary rays project radially through the rings, offering an ability to shape incredibly think undulating forms that expose the delicate pores. The tight rings expose a dramatic visual texture and a challenge to create sweeping lines through varying densities. There are specific qualities in certain species that will allow me to create something that is fragile yet resilient. My process is of making, of staying present in the moment, of focus and flexibility and is a lesson in non-attachment. As I work, I allow myself to pour out love with such intensity that what I create might become embodied with a life that is viscerally connected to me. I do not believe that hand-made artifacts are simply objects or things; I believe they are imbued with heart and soul. Our energy passes through us and into what we are making. Bliss, anxieties, these things are reflected in what we produce. We exchange matter. When we create a baby, far along in its gestation, its DNA floods the mother’s body. When a baby is born, some of its DNA remains in the mother’s body forever. There is a constant exchange in whatever we create, and being mindful and deliberate about how we do what we do is of utmost importance to how we share our gifts and our lives with everyone and everything around us.

EMU ON THE LOOSE by Thaddeus Rutkowski

EMU ON THE LOOSE
by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Not much was happening at the artists’ retreat (people were hiding in their studios; maybe they were working; maybe they were drinking) until the emu arrived. We didn’t know where it came from; no one came with it. Wherever it had been, it hadn’t been missed. It was a tall bird, between five and six feet from toe to head, and it was in no hurry. It ambled past the barn complex and stood on the dirt road. Those who saw it from their studios left their writing (or their drinking) and came out for a closer look. The bird wasn’t afraid. It stood and stared at whoever approached. It didn’t need to use its legs to kick—no one came close enough to threaten it.

Someone had the idea of corralling it in a pasture. There was a way to herd the bird; you flapped your arms and blocked its path. It had to walk away from you. The emu was led through a gate into a fenced field. It didn’t try to escape. It stood there in the tall grass and stared. Its eyes were intense in its triangular head. If it wanted to, it could jump the fence, or tear the wire mesh apart with its claws.

Someone brought it food and set the dish on the ground near the gate, but the bird wasn’t interested. What did emus eat? Probably something more natural, something more alive than what was in the dish. Something that wriggled or flew.

We left the creature in the pasture and gathered for our own dinner.

PROPHET by Odelia Fried

PROPHET
[prof-et]

Definition:

It’s bloody knuckles and skinned knees, it’s heaven’s fever slicing through the black with open jaws. It’s finding a swarm of locusts dead on your back porch, stuck to the screen door and crushed into the wood slats. It’s curling into bed, into not-sleep, because in sleep comes the Dreams, and with the Dreams comes the People, and with the People comes the End. It’s red-rimmed eyes and violently fluttering fingers. It’s painting the rocks with your blood, Hashem hu ha’Elokim, Hashem hu ha’Elokim, Hashem hu ha’Elokim.
When you were a child, you dreamed of meeting angel, all soft white halo and fluttering wings. The angels God sends to you in your dreams are nothing like this. They do not emanate a gentle glow and they do not have kindly blue eyes. They are knife-like wings and sharp directions, they lightning-strike fear into your heart, prophecy into your veins.
You are named God’s vessel. God’s words are impaled in your ribs like a sword. His holiness rattles your bones.

COCKCROW by Tyler Kline

COCKCROW
by Tyler Kline

Moment: a father inks the scythe
above his daughter’s breast, a tail
of bonfire licking a skein of braid.
Moment: tractors rake light from crows
and a goat blinks to count a storm.
Moment knives are slid into boots
like lures crossing a tiger-eye lake,
moment hands covered in bees
are pulled into light shaking honey.
Moment: scapes are tied to a gourd,
moment the gourd is hollowed
until thirsty like a drum. Moment
the boy asks which is his mother,
the banjo or storm. Moment the boy
eclipses whatever tower he can find.
Moment: nothing has its name except
straw-paper sun, moment the boy
looks to the sky and begs for another.

POT OF GOLD by Tina Barr

POT OF GOLD
by Tina Barr

Stings stitching under the skin, bristles,
like thoughts that roil, like brambles’
thorns that catch at my pants, scrape
bar pins of blood on my forearms.
Lindy says not to touch the nettles;
when they hit hot water, they’ll lose
their sting, but not before, so I shake
them into the boiling. When I go
to taste them though, two small yellow
worms curl in the spoon’s harbor.
Lindy and Ed didn’t tell us they didn’t
have clear title, hadn’t paid their taxes,
so the land we bought is delinquent,
up for grabs. Late, the trees thrash.
I want to set fire to their trailer, want to
bait their place with honey, so bears will
tear their cars open like sardine tins.
I line up people like toy soldiers, whose
carelessness is never personal, the way
poison ivy grows, twines, glossy, reefs
the woods. Foxglove multiplies, its high
combs flowering into apartments for bees,
but in a tea, a poison to serve to Lindy.
Brown recluse scare me the most;
the bites go necrotic. Late in the day
a double rainbow melts its colors away.

THE SCORPION by Erika Dane Kielsgard

THE SCORPION
by Erika Dane Kielsgard

We tear her limbs to divide our fear.
Her mangled segments reflect
hell mouths in mortal eyes.
She does not inspire the sacred.
Adorned with a swarm of insects,
her myth is a mask for history.
Her claws do not grasp
haphazard or hapless.
Do not let her slip
through your fingers
while your iris clings
to the muse invoked:
a stagnant self-portrait
in a shallow pool,
a shower of pearls
she likens to foam.
The scorpion is an ocean,
the context of a wave.
She sheds her skin seven times
before devouring the dawn,
carrying within her abdomen
small heavens, the eternal call.

THE LOVE NOTE by Svetlana Beggs

THE LOVE NOTE
by Svetlana Beggs

In 1988, when our city was still called Leningrad and kids wore red (always wrinkled) Young Pioneer’s scarves, my friend Natasha developed a crush on Yura, the tallest boy in 6th grade. She blushed whenever he walked near her, causing us to start feeding Natasha’s backpack tiny love notes bearing Yura’s forged cursive. I was the designated forger, Lida was the writer, and Polina the spy, but we jokingly called her “the assassin.” In two months we published seven short notes and made five crank calls to Natasha’s flat releasing Lida’s “deeply meaningful silence.” Around this time Natasha began to apply her sister’s eyeliner in the school’s bathroom and we told her honestly that her new look was “amazingly alluring,” even though Yura’s friends now called her “The Vampire.” She would walk into the classroom holding the backpack over her breasts, the boys would say, “Hide from the Vampire!” and Yura would chuckle because he wanted to continue being friends with these boys.

One day, Elena Nikolaevna, our fear-and-trembling inducing algebra teacher we all called “The Guillotine,” pried a draft of our love note from Lida’s fist and mercilessly unfolded the crumpled piece of paper. Everyone grew quiet from the effort of suppressing curiosity while showing overt dislike of The Guillotine. And then she started reading the note (omitting Yura’s name, thank God), her voice rich with enjoyment because she was delivering the pleasure a lot of students craved while simultaneously showing everyone her whip. The Guillotine had a way of making things sour and unappetizing, saying, for example, “comradeship” instead of “friendship,” or “it is in your interest,” when she clearly had her own interest in mind. In her voice, our note no longer felt like a clumsy first draft—it sounded sinister, as if written by a creepy stalker: “…When you walk home tonight, turn around five times and you might see me…”

from THE BEAUTY OF ADMISSION by Joe Nicholas

from THE BEAUTY OF ADMISSION
by Joe Nicholas

It's seven in the morning & the shower is asking me questions

Did mermaids ever mistake us for wood cows?

For breakfast I ate a banana & blueberry

yoghurt/I'm never sure if I should drop

the "h"/Why

does it hurt

so much?

Notes on POEM FOR MY BROTHER by Eric E. Hyett

Notes on POEM FOR MY BROTHER
by Eric E. Hyett

I have to be careful—
what I mean is
it’s the absence of him that matters,

though the light’s the same.
I wear green a lot these days
like I’m a tree in bloom.

I attract insects and leaves.
Even my socks are stitched with leaves.
If I were a tree,

I could renounce memory
and survive for centuries
on sunlight and water.

EVERYONE MEANS SO WELL by Lisa Piazza

EVERYONE MEANS SO WELL
by Lisa Piazza

By fourth period
we can barely breathe. Each stir of the stifled air whispers glitter into sound. The struggle at the board is all mine: a virtue of verbs, the urgency of action. Who can tell the compound from the complex? Every phrase dependent on the next.

Sophia whines from the second seat: keep it simple. One subject, one verb. It’s a plea. I pull a name from the book on their desks: Scout discovers. Jem grows. Keep going: Boo scares, Dill hides until Robert’s screech from the seat in the back corner un-silences the cycle. Today he’s a cheetah, all energy and thrust. Some days he is nothing but quiet. Across the room, Zaid knows better than to laugh but he does it anyway, then Regina, who hates her teeth, dares to smile and Leann pulls out her phone and Parker puts on his sunglasses and Devin the Quarterback sticks his fist out for a bump: Knuck it up, Ms P.

YESTERDAY and TODAY by Addison Oliver

"Today"

Today I put a bottle’s worth of anti-depressants in my mouth, thinking I might swallow them. I let them sit there for several seconds, cold on my tongue, and then I spit them into my palm. I did it again—put them in, let them sit, spit them out—and then a third time. They stuck together from saliva. I was afraid; I was gearing myself up; even this, I couldn’t accomplish. I imagined swallowing them, quite suddenly—do it!—the little slide over my tongue and the momentary bulge in my throat. But each time I imagined swallowing them, I became more afraid and dismally hoped I would fail.

I was alone in a room I didn’t like. A small, crowded room in which the bed filled up the interior. I sat on the edge of that bed. There was a mirror in front of me, and I saw my reflection: fragile, pitiful, my hair in tangles but my eyes made up in crimson and black. My best feature I’ve been told—my eyes, the speckled gold green of the irises. My reflection was tarnished by a dark, blotted mirror, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t there to look at myself.

THE AFFAIR by Lyn Lifshin

THE AFFAIR
by Lyn Lifshin

The Margaritas were blue with paper roses.
Later I thought how they were the only salt of those nights.
His e mail letters like skin,
very taut. What he didn’t say drugged me.
Language was wild, intense.
I could feel him, his screen name a tongue.
Verbs taut, what he didn’t say a drug.
It was a dangerous tango.
I wanted his body glued to mine.
Distance kept the electricity vivid.
It was a dangerous tango.
How could I know his mother leaped into Niagara Falls.
I fell for his words, what he left out.
How could I know he was ice.
How could I know his mother leaped into the falls.
Even in the heat, he was icy.
His name was Snow. Our last night
we drove thru fog until 3.
He told me things he said he’d never told anyone.
My thigh burned where it touched him.
On our last night we drove thru Austin
mist talking. I was burning.
He photographed me, exhausted, at 3 AM. Everything he
told me was a scar. My hair curled in a way
I hated. After that night I wasn’t sure
I would be pretty again.
Everything he told me was a
scar. Under the ice the anger in him was lava.
I wanted him, always longing for men
with something missing.
The Margaritas were the only salt I’d taste.
The anger in him was lava under the ice.
I wanted more, my longing a scar.
When he didn’t write, I printed his old e mail.
When I no longer looked for it
his e mail was there, like a mugger.
The Margaritas were strong with black paper roses

STUDY by Andrew Taw

STUDY
by Andrew Taw

Almost by accident, they found that the average frequency of a particular synapse firing in all dolphins directly correlated with the average frequency of all starlight. In countless dolphins, they implanted electrodes that gradually accelerated and slowed the frequency at regular intervals.

Within roughly 17 minutes, all things began to shift periodically up and down the visible color spectrum. Sometimes the trees took on the sky. Sometimes, women thought themselves beautiful. The blind were still blind. The elders and the synesthetic became nocturnal. Under the effervescent moon and rain, tragedy seemed unfitting, which leadened the weight of loss.

After nine years, all of Alpha Centauri shifted from color to color, each of its three stars, a different moment from each other and our own. Then Barnard’s. Then Wolf 359. Then Sirius. when transience was all the young knew. By then, the dolphins had long since beached themselves, throwing themselves at the feet of their tormentors and found, to the scientists’ delight, they could not die.

ODE TO THE QUIET ROOM by Niyathi Chakrapani

ODE TO THE QUIET ROOM
by Niyathi Chakrapani

There is a room
inside a paradox—the
silence, the calm of
grieving water, of lamenting purples in the sunset,
the flecks they see, admire,
but don’t love enough
to remember.
And yet the silence is there, waiting,
surviving,
dancing alone with
a [temporary] smile.

But—the paradox.
The marooned silence in which I fill my bones
with water, sustaining—yet barely—
for there is an element forgotten in
that moment; the silence, like water,
runs alone, unfriended, falling into seas
with vigor that shakes the nerves as
it breaks apart into molecules, writhing, trying
to come together, and yet, they are

HAMLET THERAPY by Maud Burnett McInerney

HAMLET THERAPY
by Maud Burnett McInerney

The last time I had seen a live production of Hamlet, I was a teenager, and I fell in love with the Melancholy Dane. He was beautiful and blonde and had one of those resonant voices, trained by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I learned all of Ophelia's lines—this seems disturbing to me now, but then I played her over and over again in the privacy of my bedroom.

Nearly forty years later, I saw Hamlet again on the very same stage at the Canada's Stratford Festival. This time, I saw a different play entirely. I was no longer in love with Hamlet, I was Hamlet. Watching the play from the dark shadow of my own depression, I recognized myself on stage. I could taste the flavor of Hamlet's every mood because his moods were mine.

Just to be clear, the precipitating cause of my depression was not that my uncle killed my father and married my mother. It was more mundane and yet horribly painful: my husband of over 20 years left me for a much younger woman, with whom, I eventually learned, he had been involved for some time. Not tragic, just sad and disappointing and commonplace, and yet, because betrayal is betrayal, I felt what Hamlet felt.

The second Stratford production was both stylized and extremely naturalistic, especially when it came to how the actors spoke. No one declaimed, no one used British-y accents, the words were clearly and rapidly delivered in ordinary Canadian tones. The characters spoke as you and I do but using Shakespeare's words, and thus those words gained an intimacy they all too often lack in stagier performances.

LESSONS by Michelle Ross

LESSONS
by Michelle Ross

In the shed, the girl’s mother presents a hammer for the girl to examine. “A hammer is a lever, a simple machine. All simple machines reduce the push or pull force needed to move a load by increasing the distance over which that force must be applied,” she says.

The girl slides a finger around the cold metal knob and along the thick claws. She recalls the purple hammer birds in Alice in Wonderland, how their heads seemed backwards. The claw end of a hammer more closely resembles a beak, after all; but in the movie, the knobs are the birds’ beaks, the claws like feathered hair moussed back. Of course, in the movie, the birds wedge nails into wood rather than pry them out as her mother does now.

“See how I lift the handle all the way up like this to remove the nail? I’m willing to work for a longer period of time so that I may apply less effort over the short-term. In the end, conservation of energy always prevails: input equals output. But most people don’t appreciate how wildly different that input can be made to look and feel.”

As is the case with most of her mother’s lessons, the girl understands that this one is at least partly about the girl’s father. Since he left them, he has remarried; fathered two boys, brothers the girl has never met; and published a book of cookie recipes, three of which the girl’s mother claims he stole from her.

NEWS DELIVERY by Smriti Verma

NEWS DELIVERY
by Smriti Verma

Once, my brother set himself on fire, on a cold December morning.

We were sitting on the front porch with a glass of sherry, a skull,

arms, winds. Said: ‘my hands, the fingernails, the hair.’

And then, a pause. That was also the winter my mother, sixty now,

came home from Delhi, limping straighter than usual. I gave her

the news, you gave her a cup of tea. And in the corner, my brother’s hands-

burnt, yet working. Moving in space. His hair, faulty ends,

sticking out like remnant ashes we forgot to throw away.

My eyes slowly dissolving, and your hand- grounded to bone.

And my mouth, opening and closing, sewed with a fabric of glass.

My body lost to me like the last vanishing oranges of sunset.

A MAN LIES DREAMING, a novel by Lavie Tidhar reviewed by Kylie Lee Baker

A MAN LIES DREAMING
by Lavie Tidhar
Melville House, 294 pages

reviewed by Kylie Lee Baker

When a novel opens the gates of Auschwitz, we expect to be moved by a tale we've heard a hundred times before; we expect to see Eli Wiesel searching for his father's emaciated body in the snow; we wait for Oskar Schindler to brush snow from his car and then realize that it is not snow but the ashes of burned bodies; above all, we anticipate a tale that unites us in our hatred of Nazi Germany and makes us weep for the injustices inflicted on the Jewish people. A Man Lies Dreaming is none of these things, and never brings us down the path we expect.

This is Lavie Tidhar's third novel, published in Europe in 2014 and now released in America, winner of the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, A Guardian Best Science Fiction Book of the Year, a Scotland Herald Best Crime Novel of the Year and a British Fantasy Award nominee. A Man Lies Dreaming follows Wolf, a private detective who flees from a concentration camp in Communist Germany and works in 1930s London among Nazis and fascists. He is hired to find a wealthy Jewish woman's missing sister and investigate the murders of various prostitutes. As the murders keep occurring outside his office and all signs point towards Wolf, he confronts the possibility that someone is trying to frame him. Meanwhile, a seemingly unrelated man named Shomer lies dreaming in a concentration camp.

Louder Than Everything You Love, poems by Nicole Rollender, reviewed by Camille E. Davis

Nicole Rollender
ELJ Publications, 120 pages

reviewed by Camille E. Davis

In her debut book of poetry, Louder Than Everything You Love, Nicole Rollender introduces herself as a voice that is polyphonic, startling, and necessary for the modern audience. When a contemporary woman is bombarded with messages that she cannot control her body, Rollender reaches through time to remind women of their own fierce strength. Rollender does this by considering prominent Biblical women, Rollender’s female ancestors, and her own daughter. She achieves this by deeply inquiring into her own faith, heritage, and even her mortality.

The true elegance of Louder is in the way it slowly opens, as if Rollender’s neo-confessional speaker were quietly opening up her chest cavity, so that the reader could see her very bones moving. Rollender realizes this feeling through a masterful sense of pacing, an ambiguous temporality, and a lyricism that is gorgeous, haunting, and moldering. I say this because the poems in Louder frequently place the reader in very pastoral landscape, where things may bleed and die in a wooded bush, but where the reader cannot fully track if it is taking place in the past, present, or future. This affect culminates in a mysterious mist-like atmosphere pervading the entire collection.

A SCHOOL FOR FOOLS, a novel by Sasha Sokolov reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

A School for Fools does not immediately strike a modern reader as new or groundbreaking; its central premise is that the narrator, a male youth attending a school for the insane, is unreliable, territory well-tread by canonized authors and Intro-to-Fiction students alike. Perhaps the original novel by Sasha Sokolov preceded (or at least coincided with the origin of) the pervasive cliché of the asylum story, having first been published in 1976, but a reader of this new translation by Alexander Boguslawski can hardly be blamed for her skepticism after glancing at the book’s back-cover blurb. As the asylum motif becomes apparent in the text (the speaker and his alter ego discuss appointments with Dr. Zause, interrupt each other, etc.), trepidation is unavoidable.

BURN BABY BURN, a young adult novel by Meg Medina reviewed by Rachael Tague

BURN BABY BURN
by Meg Medina
Candlewick Press, 305 pages

reviewed by Rachael Tague

New York City is one of my favorite places to visit. I adore Broadway, Times Square, and ice skating at Rockefeller Plaza. But thirty-some years ago, the Big Apple was not the magical tourist attraction it is today, especially if you had “the wrong skin color or a last name like López.” Disco, dancing, free love, and women’s rights typically define 1970’s America, but, for Nora López, New York City in 1977 means arson, looting, serial murders, a struggling mother, and an increasingly dangerous brother. In Burn Baby Burn, acclaimed children’s and young adult author Meg Medina presents a strong female protagonist in one of New York City’s most tumultuous years.

Nora should be able to look forward to college, boys, and an all-night dance party with her best friend Kathleen to celebrate their eighteenth birthdays. She should be care-free, dancing to Parliament, Heatwave, the Ramones, Donna Summer, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. Instead, she’s worried about police brutality, scorching summer temperatures, and navigating the dangerous suburbs of NYC as an attractive young Latina in a sea of sickos and psychos like Sergio, the drug dealer in the basement who harasses her and corrupts her younger brother.

GOOD ON PAPER, a novel by Rachel Cantor reviewed by Lillian Brown

From Rachel Cantor, the lauded author of the 2014 novel A Highly Unlikely Scenario, comes a novel of New Life, a journey of personal resurrection, Good on Paper. Much of the novel is a meditation on fidelity, in relationships and in translations, and it brings to the page some of the most interesting personalities and family dynamics so far this year in literature.

The characters and their relationships make this story of literary delight: Shira, the protagonist, a translator and single mother; Ahmad, her gay best friend and co-parent; Andi, her young and sharp daughter; Romei, the illustrious, Nobel prizing-winning poet, both on the phone and the page; Benny, the owner of the neighborhood bookstore People of the Book, publisher of the local literary magazine Gilgul, part-time love interest of Shira, and the very person to connect Shira and Romei. Good on Paper serves as a reminder of the power of connections, between both people and words.

A PhD dropout and SuperTemps veteran, Shira spends much of her time contemplating the impending Y2K (the novel is set in the late nineties) and the nature of love in its various forms, when she receives a mysterious telegram. The note is from the famous poet Romei, who requests that Shira translate his most recent work. She’s shocked, and even believes it's a joke at first, courtesy of Benny, but quickly realizes the good fortune of the situation, and accepts the offer.

THE ETERNAUT, a graphic narrative by Héctor Germán Oesterheld reviewed by Natalie Pendergast

Deadly, beautiful “flakes” falling gently, the bodies they touch folding neatly to the ground. The light thrower, a powerful weapon that spotlights your death, as though stage fright wasn’t real enough. Sinister devices “plugged in” to the necks of robot men, long before The Matrix was even a twinkle in the Wachowski Brothers’ eye. All of these: combining to form layers of artful threats to your well-being, like different sections of an orchestra imbricated and inter-punctuated to form a unified song. This is the world we enter upon reading the Eternaut’s, also known as Juan Salvo’s, recounted story. More: hallucinogenic, mind-controlling biological warfare, the telecommunication gadgets that dreams are made of, fifth column military pursuits by alien “hands,” enraged “gurbos” and an enemy automaton disguised as an attractive woman. A faraway extraterrestrial empire has designs on colonizing not only as many planets as possible, but also on pillaging the galaxy’s resources by picking pockets of time throughout eternity. Navigating this same eternity is the Eternaut. A displaced person in space, he borrows somewhere to sit from other slots in time, so as not to allow for his own vanishing. Set in “today”—or late 1950s Buenos Aires—The Eternaut, both man and story, arrives like a hologram in the office chair facing writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld. Together with Oesterheld, we are just one stop among many on his sempiternal journey.

BLOOD HYPHEN, poems by Kenny Williams, reviewed by J.G. McClure

Frost said that, like an ice cube on a hot stove, a poem must ride on its own melting. It’s an apt description of the poems in Kenny Williams’ Blood Hyphen, winner of the 2015 FIELD Poetry Prize. Take the book’s opening poem, “About the Author,” which begins:

The genius of Diogenes:
all his books are lost.
But really that’s the genius
of the books and not the man.
If I can speak for the man,
his diet of worms and onions
makes me feel like a pig
when I go to the store
and it’s midnight
and the store is closing.

Riding on its own melting, the poem proceeds by continuously undermining itself. The genius of Diogenes isn’t really the genius of Diogenes but rather the genius of his books—all of which are lost. So to be ingenious, a piece of writing should not exist—a darkly funny argument that undermines the very act of writing the poem in the first place. The speaker then proposes to “speak for the man” Diogenes—but does no such thing, instead talking about his own experience in the grocery store.

ALMOST EVERYTHING VERY FAST, a novel by Christopher Kloeble, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Like the best coming-of-age stories, Christopher Kloeble’s Almost Everything Very Fast addresses universal concerns by asking personal questions. Nineteen-year-old Albert, raised in an orphanage, wants to know why he was given up by his anonymous mother and the father he knows: Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes, a grown man with a childlike mind. Albert has gotten nowhere by following the “Hansel and Gretel crumbs” he’s found in Fred’s attic: a photo of Fred with a red-haired woman, a few auburn hairs plucked from a comb. When Fred’s terminal illness imposes an urgent deadline, Albert visits him in Königsdorf one last time—but his “infinite questions” lead to still more questions: What is love? In what ways do family ties bind us? Is nurturing natural? Do parents cause their children more harm than good?

In Segendorf, Fred’s ancestral village, to love is to discard. For nearly 400 years, residents have been compelled to hurl their Most Beloved Possessions off the rocky bluff of the highest hill at the annual Sacrificial Festival. During one such celebration in 1912, incestuous (and murderous) twins Jasfe and Josfer Habom conceive a son, Julius, whose birth brings shame but also relief: the baby is not a “Klöble”—the local term for the “clumsy, stupid fellows” who “test a parent’s love.” Unknotted from their lineage—their mother died in childbirth and Josfer kills their disapproving father—they are scorned by hypocritical neighbors in a village where inbreeding is a cultural norm.

Their second child, Anni, orphans herself and her brother by burning down the family’s home with their beloved parents inside. Julius takes off with Wickenhäuser, the town mortician, who offers the boy as a companion to his war-widowed mother Else (Julius’s “first love”), to pay for freedom from filial responsibility. Back home, Anni wastes away until she marries Arkadiusz Driajes and gives birth to the Klöble-esque Fred, rekindling her brother’s covetous love. Meanwhile, Julius impregnates a woman he doesn’t love—the devoted Mina, who gives birth to Ludwig, who will one day marry Klondi, who loves the idea of motherhood but can’t stand the scent of her actual daughter, Marina.

SEEKING CHILDHOOD by Nathaniel Popkin

SEEKING CHILDHOOD
by Nathaniel Popkin

In early 1951, when the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis was almost eleven, he came home from playing soccer with friends and, following a vague urge, took his brother’s shotgun to the yard. He shot into the air, scattered the birds aloft from the sapodilla tree, and dropped the shotgun to the ground. The gun fired and struck Aridjis in the stomach. He barely survived. The accident, writes Chloe Aridjis, his daughter, “cleaved in two” his life and sealed off his early childhood “like a locked garden.” In the aftermath of the accident, Homero Aridjis began reading and writing in earnest, the crucible of an astonishingly prolific career, but without access to memories of his own boyhood.

Twenty years after the gun accident, with his wife, Betty Ferber, pregnant with Chloe, the couple’s first child, Aridjis began to have “astonishingly vivid dreams” of his childhood. These dreams unlocked the garden of memory. He eventually recounted them in a slender memoir of childhood, El poeta niño, published in 1991. Now, Chloe Aridjis, the author of the novel Book of Clouds, has produced an English translation, The Child Poet, brought out by Archipelago Books this month.

I am particularly hungry for this book because my own childhood is locked away, and my writing suffers for it. It isn’t clear why—there is nothing so acute as a gun accident in my history.

My mother, like Aridjis nearing 76, is the keeper of the garden. She calls me with “sad news.” Stephen, a friend from when I was six, has died. “You remember playing with him, don’t you?” she says. I shrug, not because I’m callous, but because I can only conjure a vague image of a yard, a dark kitchen. Nothing about the boy. Another time she says she’s run into my third grade teacher, Mrs. So-and-So. “She was the one who got you interested in books.” Oh?

ENIGMAS, poems by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, reviewed by Justin Goodman

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz remains Mexico’s greatest mystery. Born in 1651 out of wedlock and between social classes, intensely devoted to knowledge—having had discussions with Isaac Newton—and to Catholicism, she died forty-four years later despised by the male authorities of the church, but canonized as part of the literary godhead of the Spanish Golden Age. The haziness of these seeming contradictions evoked in the glorious 20th century Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, a sensation of the enigmatic which he captured in “Wind, Water, Stone”: “Each is another and no other.” It’s appropriate, then, to see Enigmas publication; it is a work whose title is a reflection on both de la Cruz’s existence and poetry, and also on the amorphous gulf between language and meaning that translators of poetry attempt to concretize.

At least that’s what Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal seems to get at in her manifesto-ish “Translator’s Not-(Subtractive Letter).” Much as she describes her aesthetic decisions, “through Neo-Baroque deletion of first person yet a postmodern acceptance of my identity,” the note evokes the characteristically astringent intellect of poststructural feminism. Also in Villarreal’s note, she insists her “polar associations to sound and form” embodies Gloria Anzaldúa.” I could go deeper down the spiral, citing Villarreal’s interest in “all of Sor Juana’s enigma translations…hyperlinked to each other” and her obligation “to pick a unifying aesthetic that would point to naked sound.” All I’ll say, however, is that Engimas is szygy: the rare coincidence of planetary alignment.

IN OTHER WORDS, essays by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed by Michelle Fost

In Other Words, a departure for Jhumpa Lahiri as she turns for the first time to memoir, took shape as weekly writing assignments—in Italian—that were published over six months in the Italian magazine Internazionale. Regular deadlines and the constraint of writing in a language she was still learning re-energized Lahiri. These very personal pieces are framed and contained self-portraits. They are fascinating, focused, and at times repetitive, and give the sense of a complex literary artist with a passion for language.

Part of Lahiri’s accomplishment in In Other Words is her recovery of a way of working that is unspoiled by the expectations of a demanding readership. I thought of a story told to me by an early childhood educator about a child who loved to paint. An adult, looking at the child’s work asked, “Is that a flower?” Is that the sun? What a beautiful yellow.” For weeks, the child, now self-conscious, did not return to paint. Lahiri’s project is a return to a literary garden, a place where she is free to play with language and expression in a way that is full of joy, discovery, and personal satisfaction. Lahiri generously invites the reader to share this pleasurable experience.

THE LAST WEYNFELDT, a novel by Martin Suter, reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

THE LAST WEYNFELDT
by Martin Suter
translated by Steph Morris
New Vessel Press, 302 pages

reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Martin Suter’s The Last Weynfeldt is an impressive work of intrigue and beauty. It sparks at the intersection of two very different people, Adrian Weynfeldt, mid-fifties, internationally renowned art expert, and Lorena, a shoplifting, small-time model who rips Adrian from his carefully crafted still life.

Adrian earns his living by putting a “fair” price on beauty, authenticity, and originality. Lorena, often an anonymous commodity as a model, is also a thief, a woman who never pays society’s agreed upon price. And it’s through these differences—along with a whole host of other artists, liars, grifters, and moochers—that Suter brings out the novel’s central conflict between authenticity and forgery, the mass-produced and the one-of-a-kind.

Of Lorena, Suter asks what does it do to a person to be dismissed as little more than copy or commodity:

In the streetcar to the exhibition center [Lorena] took a free newspaper from the dispenser and sat down cautiously on one of the hard seats.

Her picture was on the cover. Wrapped around the Ducelli in a provocative pose, with a seductive look for the camera. The caption read: “Superbike with ultra-transparent chassis and high-torque motor: the new Ducelli 7312.”

She read the article carefully; she wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the main text either. Not even as an accessory, not even as something which stopped you from getting a good look at the bike. It was as if she didn’t exist.

But just as Lorena longs to exist, to matter to someone, to matter to herself, Adrian is only too happy to remain locked up in the tradition-built cages of routine and old money.

ABDUCTING A GENERAL, a memoir by Patrick Leigh Fermor, reviewed by Rory McCluckie

ABDUCTING A GENERAL
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
NYRB, 206 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

In 1933, aged only 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor began walking from Rotterdam to Constantinople. Clad in an old greatcoat and a pair of hobnail boots, he had left his native England on the deck of a Dutch steamer and set off on foot with a few letters of introduction, some notebooks, and a copy of Horace's Odes in his rucksack, It was an extraordinary thing to undertake but we've long known that Leigh Fermor was an extraordinary man; a skilled linguist, a vivid, ebullient writer, and a lover of literature, people, and the world in all its variable wonder—of life, essentially—he has become celebrated for enjoying an existence so improbably charmed that his travel books often read like stirring, romantic fictions.

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Leigh Fermor—then living in Romania—returned home and was accepted as a candidate for a commission in the Irish Guards, a posting he quickly came to regard as dull. It was with some relief, then, when the Intelligence Corps took note of his lingustic capabilities and offered him courses in military intelligence and interrogation before dispatching him, in 1940, to the Mediterannean as a member of the British Military Mission.

At this point, Greece had been invaded by Italy and it was the Mission's primary responsibility to help the occupied country in any way they could. In April 1941, this difficult task was rendered almost impossible when a German blitzkrieg tore through the Balkans, forcing most of Britain's troops from the European mainland. Some, Leigh Fermor among them, managed to flee to Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, and were soon treated to a fresh barrage by the Nazis who, sensing an advantage, sought to capitalize. While the islanders' resistance was noble, the outcome was inevitable; luckily for the author, the Royal Navy evacuated him to Egypt before the Axis powers could impart a less merciful fate, and it was in Cairo that Leigh Fermor proposed a plan to return to Crete in order to kidnap a German general.

HERE COME THE DOGS, a novel by Omar Musa, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

HERE COME THE DOGS
by Omar Musa
The New Press, 330 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

You had to be there. Right? That's how these things work—the magic of moments strung together, a shared lexicon, the bond of shared origins. Omar Musa's brilliant first novel Here Come The Dogs unpicks the rough, multifaceted hip-hop culture of small-town Australia. Immediate and compelling, this one deserves a place on the shelf next to Trainspotting or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Both a snapshot of a specific time and place, and an examination of the broadness of humanity, Here Come The Dogs is filled with stinging insights, delivered in freestyle and lyric prose.

In hip-hop, context is everything. Those who know, know. Inside that world—word battles and swag weed—a man can be a prince if he spits good rhyme. Outside, it's a different story. The guy dominating the mic last night is waiting to wash your car windows this morning. Who is underneath the shiny props and thick black tattoos?

Solomon, Jimmy, and Aleks—one Samoan, one Macedonian, and one unknown—waste time being cool in small ways. They're half-assing it, diverting their hustle to greater things in the way that artists do. One has a part-time dishwashing gig, one plays the middle man for the local drug traders. Around them, the world is shrinking into a shape that doesn't have space for three men like them. “Every fire dies, every story, every star, every town. Every nation? Childhoods are macadamed beneath asphalt and paint rolls, but just for other childhoods to exist. This, the nature of change, of modernity.” The friends struggle at the fringes to keep their fire alive.

It's a shit life, and they know it, but at the same time, what's the alternative? Their words make them powerful—turn them into a secret tribe. You had to be there, the rhymes assert. Who's the outsider? Who doesn't get it, now?

A GIRL ON THE SHORE, a graphic narrative by Inio Asano, reviewed by Helen Chazan

A GIRL ON THE SHORE
by Inio Asano
Vertical Comics, 406 pages

reviewed by Nathan Chazan

In a 2013 interview, Inio Asano cites learning the phrase “chunibyo” as an inspiration for A Girl on the Shore. A Japanese meme, “chunibyo” translates roughly to “Eighth Grader Syndrome,” and describes an early adolescent’s tendency to aspire to and imitate the adult behaviors that she is too young to understand. The comic, a direct and emotionally intense story about two early adolescents who enter a sexual relationship, functions as a parable of “chunibyo,” exploring this youthful desire to seem more mature as well as its consequences. In contrast to this motif, A Girl on the Shore is a deceptively mature accomplishment, employing the techniques of commercial manga to the greatest level of sophistication to convey the searing anxieties of adolescence.

This is a graphic novel about two teenagers, Koume and Keisuke, who decide to start having sex when they are very young. Both are haunted by recent trauma: Koume by her rape at the hands of a popular kid named Misaki, and Keisuke by the absence of his deceased older brother. The two youths enter this relationship believing it will be strictly sexual, an escape from normal life without emotional baggage. However, no relationship can really be casual at such a young age, and they soon must deal with the feelings brought out by their connection. It’s a relationship that is never romantic until its very end, a relationship Asano describes as “a love story in reverse.”

THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE, a graphic narrative by Riad Sattouf, reviewed by Jesse Allen

THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE
by Riad Sattouf
Metropolitan Books, 160 pages

reviewed by Jesse Allen

As a memoir of childhood, color plays a prominent role in Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. Different locations and environments take on a range of hues, beginning with the blunt red-black-and-green cover. On it, Gaddafi’s handsome and commanding image on a billboard salutes Riad’s parents as they walk past while he, uncolored, rides his father’s shoulders. He looks to the salute as if it were another adult doting on him, a golden haired child. Over the course of the memoir, scenes that take place in France are colored in blue, while those in Libya and Syria are colored in yellow and red respectively.

Reds and greens also offset memories when contrast is needed to elicit a moment of childhood awareness: the red of Riad's father Abdel’s radio announcing the political news that directs Abdel and his family’s life, green signaling a televised broadcast of Gaddafi’s state speech in Libya as well as the angry words of a Libyan waiting in line for state rationed bananas, which, too, are colored green, and red for Syrian army berets and broadcasts of Hafez al-Assad’s state propaganda. These seemingly minor details are key signifiers to what is remembered in sentiment even as they recount a larger reality and history.

While chronicling his “childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984,” Sattouf builds his story around his father Abdel’s journey as an academic and a family man. Abdel’s pride in his Syrian roots and in the Arab world in general is emblematic “of Syrians of his generation,” yet his ideals are often challenged by the realities of the Arab world. In Libya, Riad recalls the socialist vision of Gaddafi and how “housing for all citizens” meant that any apartment was free to commandeer if no one was home or locked inside. Abdel finds this out the hard way when his family is forced to look for a new flat immediately after another has settled into their space.

OUT OF DARKNESS by Ashley Hope Pérez reviewed by Leticia Urieta

OUT OF DARKNESS
by Ashley Hope Pérez
Carolrhoda LAB, 402 pages

reviewed by Leticia Urieta

Out of Darkness is broken into parts: before the disaster and after. This compelling novel is rooted in history, and the book begins with the aftermath of the 1937 New London school explosion in East Texas and a town reeling from disaster. Volunteers move debris, collect the severed limbs of school children, and build caskets for the dead. The narrative voice embodies the horror, the grief, and the growing need for someone to blame. This is how the story begins, with a sense of impending doom, and this feeling of dread pervades the rest of the novel, the “before”, leading up to the “after.”

The story encompasses a school year, oscillating between the third person points of view of a family hoping to make a new start. Naomi Vargas moves to New London from San Antonio with her twin brother and Sister, Beto and Cari, to live with their father, her stepfather, Henry Smith. From the beginning, the rules are clear; no Spanish at school or around town; watch where you go; attend church revivals and socialize with the locals. New London is an oil town, a white town, and Naomi is immediately aware of how she doesn’t fit. Henry changes her siblings’ names to Robbie and Carrie Smith and expects her to keep his house, get to know the church wives, and learn how to cook proper southern food and biscuits, not tortillas. Each short vignette is set in one perspective at a time. And the hopes and fears of this new life are revealed.

Naomi fears living with Henry, the stepfather who has sexually abused her as a child, and being responsible for her twin siblings now that her mother, Estella, is gone. She hears Henry’s promises, the born again song and dance that he performs, but is constantly triggered by his presence. Henry is filled with self-righteousness, that this is God’s plan for his redemption from a life of drinking and sin. Beto, the sensitive, quiet twin, loves the new encyclopedias he gets to read at the new white school, and the childhood wonders of a new place, and new possibilities.

LOSE 7 by Michael DeForge reviewed by Helen Chazan

LOSE 7
by Michael DeForge
Koyama Press, 52 pages

reviewed by Nathan Chazan

The most recent installment of Michael Deforge’s one-man anthology series Lose features three new stories from the artist: two shorter pieces surrounding a longer work, which form a sort of triptych. Unlike earlier issues, Lose 7 lacks a subtitle alluding to a loose theme connecting the stories within (“The Fashion Issue” and “The Clubs Issue”). But if I were to choose a title for this seventh issue I might go with “The Growing Up Issue”, or perhaps “The Dysphoria Issue”. The three stories reflect how identities are constructed and the feelings of detachment and anxiety that accompany such journeys of self-definition.

The first story, untitled in this volume but previously published on Deforge's Patreon page as “Adults”, depicts a children’s game in which a boy instructs a girl on how to pretend to be his mother. The two run through town proclaiming their false identities, fraught with the fear and excitement of fooling the outside world. The parody turns into a nightmare as the “mother’s” literally swelled head assumes and reverses the previously established power dynamic, becoming a brute force of the parental aggression the kids had been imitating.

With his friend, the boy creates a new version of his mother to boss around and power that he could not experience in his real family. In the hands of a child, this adult power—the very bossiness he hoped to escape—becomes terrifying. Deforge illustrates his work with garish primary colors and rough lines drawn over his minimal, schematic forms, suggesting that an actual child has traced over his artwork: every form intact, and yet ever-so-slightly off. The images in “Adults” are so loud they seem to scream. They evoke the bodily monstrosities of Deforge’s early work while keeping those eruptions contained—but just barely.

The longest and most thematically complex of the triptych, “Movie Star”, is the story of Kim, a young woman who discovers a schlocky sci-fi film featuring an actor who looks almost identical to her deadbeat dad, Louis. Her father denies the resemblance at first, but when the actor, a former professional wrestler named Gregory Tan, enters their lives, the two men become fast friends. Louis idolizes Gregory, who is revealed to be his long-lost older brother. After several strange episodes it becomes clear that the two have formed a new “whole” identity in which one man is inseparable from the other, like an actor and a stunt double in a film.

POENA DAMNI TRILOGY by Dimitris Lyacos reviewed by Justin Goodman

POENA DAMNI TRILOGY
Z213: EXIT, 95 pages
WITH THE PEOPLE FROM THE BRIDGE, 61 pages
THE FIRST DEATH, 35 pages
by Dimitris Lyacos
translated by Shorsha Sullivan
Shoestring Press

reviewed by Justin Goodman

“What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?”

In France, in 1960, this question pressed itself upon the Romanian-born Emil Cioran. Histoire et Utopie was published, likely to the same acclaim (and rejection of acclaim) that marked all Cioran's career after 1950. Six years later and southeasterly, Dimitris Lyacos would be born in Athens. Despite the distance, Lyacos' recently translated Poena Damni trilogy revels inside Cioran's head.

The composite units: Z213:EXIT, With the People From The Bridge, and The First Death, are ridden with the lack of euphony that belongs to the invisible canon of defeat to which Cioran belongs. Understanding is a place, for those of this school of thought, towards which knowledge only exacerbates the distance.

The translator of the triology, Shorsha Sullivan, who is also a Classics professor at Leeds College, distinguishes Lyacos from the Greek poets that “slide easily into the mainstream of European Modernism” and those localized poets whom “lose [their] savour in translation.” “Lyacos' case differs,” Sullivan continues, because “he speaks to us as fellow human beings from an almost non-local viewpoint, using western tradition but not committing himself to any side.”

It does make one wonder what can be said of the Ancient Greek traditions Lyacos borrows heavily from: the Chorus in the trilogy’s second installment, With the People From the Bridge, comes to mind; the odyssey of Z213:EXIT; the brutal abstractions of Greek sculpture in The First Death; and how this contingency is taken into account when writing “a version that could possibly make sense in the context of our own tradition.” But Sullivan lets this doubt suffice as an answer: “Could this version have been produced originally in English?” Recognizing the fact fails to answer it, let alone, comfort us; only discomfort translates, bringing Poena Damni to a truly real fluid-filled birth.

BREATH TO BREATH by Craig Lew reviewed by Heather Leah Huddleston

BREATH TO BREATH
by Craig Lew
Little Pickle Press, 432 pages

reviewed by Heather Leah Huddleston

Seventeen-year-old William has been dealt a bad hand in life. Raised for as long as he can remember by his grandparents, Gramps dies and G’ma can’t take care of him, so William is shipped from Kansas to California to live with his estranged father. He has no real memories of his mother, except the fictionalized ones he makes up for his friends. And there’s this: he has a history of violence; he nearly killed someone in Kansas.

The novel unfolds like both a mystery and a coming-of-age story as he tries to come to an understanding of who he really is. Though violence seems to follow him, we learn that the violence has a reason; he saves a girl from being raped; he saves a boy from being beaten by bullies; he saves himself after being finger raped by the captain of the football team. Within the gray area surrounding all the violence lies the question: is there ever a time when violence is okay? Or at least understandable?

William’s sleep is haunted by nightmares of whales being hacked to death by faceless people and his waking moments are haunted by the vision of a four-year-old boy, Patches, who both reveals himself to William and hides from him just as quickly. On their initial meeting, the boy tells William that he is being sexually abused and, each time William catches a glimpse of the boy’s red shirt or hears his familiar giggle, he chases him in order to help him. The more William asks questions about him around the neighborhood, however, the less the boy seems to exist. And then there’s the mysterious blue-eyed dog that guides him, not only to Patches, but, to other people who need his help.

A HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME by David Gates reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

A HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME
by David Gates
Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages

reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is a short story collection that offers a rare pleasure: the possibility of reading it cover to cover, leaping from one story to the next.

Some readers, including this one, may want to protest the gallery of rogue characters David Gates presents in this new collection perhaps enough to wonder who Gates hangs out with. I’m reminded of the scene from the film Ocean’s 11 when Julie Roberts’ character says to George Clooney, who plays Danny Ocean, “Your problem is you’ve met too many people like you.” Some of these characters’ habits and inclinations, reflections and bitter asides, are just this side of depraved (or perhaps for some people, the other side of depraved). Indeed, the people in Gates’ stories can wear a bit, with their biting sarcasm and world-weariness.

Yet there is no denying the sure hand behind these stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Gates knows his characters so well that the descriptions and stories feel chiseled like sculpture. In the case of Lily, the protagonist of the story “A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens,” one is tempted to think Gates has compiled a fictitious Netflix account for her. Clearly he’s had the fortune or misfortune of knowing exactly the kind of families who send their children to Brearley, Dalton, and other New York City private schools. The kind of families who know people called Portia and who can be found “doing coke…in the bathroom at Portia’s wedding.” Lily lives in Brooklyn Heights, and casually mentions at one point sharing “a taxi back to Brooklyn with Portia’s married boyfriend” and then sharing some illicit affection, which sets off a torrent of emails from the boyfriend.

DOG MEMORIES by Doug Ramspeck

DOG MEMORIES
by Doug Ramspeck

It must be the stillness of a morning sky, the repose of grass in a field beyond a fence, or maybe the kitchen floor where my father is forever dying of a heart attack when I am five, fat doves singing outside the windows of our rental house in rural Ohio. It seems possible to remember the half-life of light on a leaf outside my childhood bedroom window in dead summer, to construct an impression from the mud of the river or the black clothes of the mourners, to dream an open maw of earth. My memories of my father are as imprecise as footprints filling with snow, though I do recall, a few months later, a bulldog coming toward me—after we were evicted from the rental home—on the porch of my grandfather’s house, the creature lunging then hovering above me. In my vision the beast snares me with his great teeth pressed against my neck, though years later my mother claims the dog was simply exuberant with friendliness and knocked me down. But if I close my eyes, I feel the animal heat of breath against my skin, the sharpness of teeth. Or maybe, it sometimes seems, memories transform to living organisms, evolving or devolving, breathing and letting go, asserting whatever volition they can. I am eleven when my mother’s live-in boyfriend begins locking our German shepherd in the basement, which is a sign, we know, that he plans to beat one of us, or maybe both. The basement, as I remember it, is small and low-slung, with bare cement and a naked light bulb, cobwebs having their conversations with the hot or cold air breathing through the vents. I remember blood oozing from my mother’s nose, the swollen baptism of an eye, the dustiness of memory growing more opaque yet powerful with decades, as though the past becomes a dust devil swirling its magic in August, rising from the dry earth to make itself into a living being. We are homeless, then, residing in my mother’s car, the cold winter air a judgment. Once my mother is given a frozen turkey at a food pantry, and we bring it back to the Ford, uncertain how to cook it. I remember how heavy the turkey feels when I hold it in my lap, and I recall—digging deep into memory—building a fire from sticks and discarded newspapers and whatever dry wood we can find at the roadside. And then a skinny man with a white beard and a voice like a rabid dog is stopping his motorcycle by the bar ditch and stealing the turkey from us before we have even found a way to place it above the flames. Blood trails its offering down my mother’s forearm after the man lunges at her with a box cutter. And now, rising in my vision, is the man racing off on his motorcycle with our turkey clutched like a sleeping infant in one arm.

ANGEL OF THE MERIDIAN by Samuel Hovda

ANGEL OF THE MERIDIAN
by Samuel Hovda

Step out of the cave of my mouth.

Wear your golden earrings
like snakes eating.
Put on your

purple eye shadow.
The daggers

have mostly withdrawn,
green of the vipers fallen off.
A few stray villages at night
with stones,
palm-sized and ready,

but you’re the robin
in the morning

unaware of the innards
of their dark bedrooms.

TRIP by Rheea Mukherjee

TRIP
by Rheea Mukherjee

The door that led into the house my parents owned in Denver needed an extra nudge for it to open. Once prodded, a bell attached to the knob jingled before you could set foot on the white tiles. This jingle, the thrust of the door, was a short prelude to the potent smell of mutton being fried in canola oil. The smell of curried meat, intense and intrusive, compared to the odorless winter air outside. Clumps of snow would fall from the sides my boots onto the floor as we took off layers of sweaters and coats.

For me there would be vegetarian dishes. My father always made sure of that. He wearing shorts that reached his knees, his elbow poking against the thickness of masala vapors, stirring his curry, a universe of flavors condensed into an offering of love. The TV in the living room was massive, reminiscent of the American suburban nineties. CNN or some other news channel would be blaring, and the house not yet warmed enough for a Colorado winter, would temper the spattering of oil.

This is how I remember of my father. Not because there wasn’t more. Not because I don’t remember other things. Like him driving his car, his head attached to a cell phone, bantering to clients in Hindi or English about real estate: houses, liquor stores, another closing. Not because I don’t remember vividly him telling us ghost stories when I was eight, coddled by pillows, in the backseat of our car being driven somewhere in Georgia, one of the many family road trips that entailed pit stops at gas stations and the endless tar of an American interstate highway. Not because I don’t remember him telling me that it was not possible I had gotten three C’s in Social Studies, Math and Science in 4th grade, I had studied too hard. Because I do remember him marching up to my favorite teacher, Mrs. Berks, who looked up my tests frantically and then realized that it was true. I had gotten straight A’s that year and she had made a mistake, a miracle I still can’t fathom. Only he knew.

EPISTLE TO THE COPS ON A WINTRY NIGHT by Cal Freeman

EPISTLE TO THE COPS ON A WINTRY NIGHT
by Cal Freeman

Dear historical ambling
in that souped-up Ford, dear steel
gaze hidden behind tinted glass,
keeping these hours, everything
is a question of before
or after dawn. Your briefs spell out
blank descriptions of men
whose retreating shadows have been glimpsed
at the scenes of nearly-executed crimes;
not sour breath, red-eyed, and wandering,
but black male on foot, possibly armed,
suspicious. Before dawn,
those hours between bar
and liquor store, when the nerves pull taut
and the birds start with their racket,
crepuscular hours no do-gooder is awake to bless
when the dreams of the civic mind
grow skittish with wild imaginings.

FUCKED & THE INNOCENT by Marc Harshman

TWO FLASH STORIES BY MARC HARSHMAN

I. Fucked

He is deaf from the whining scream of the chainsaw, and is sweating under a thinning, November sun. There must have been some way to avoid this hellhole in the Middle East. When he had seen the pictures on the screen last night, something had knotted in his belly. But here, at least, this morning, the work felt good, the bright, interior heart of the tree exposed like this. Fuck politics. There were wormholes. Some people liked them in their furniture. Antique. He was fifty-nine years old. And lately it felt old. Antique. Christ, what he wouldn’t give for a beer and a chance to get laid by that girl at Tommy’s. She was a bright thing. He’d vote the bastards out of office if any other bastards would do any better. The white house down below had rung the cops once about his chain-sawing on Sunday. Fuck the neighbors and their Sunday. Fuck the neighbors and their lament about the old elm. Fuck everyone. What was it his son had said in that poem. “Fuck was a strong word, an Anglo Saxon word, a good word that gets the job done.” He was sharp, that boy of his, despite his politics. Funny how the kid could be so sharp and dumb all at once. How anyone could believe in those sissy liberal assholes, but worse, he began to think, how could anyone believe anything at all? Maybe all he needed was to introduce his son to Sheila down there at Tommy’s. Maybe that was all anyone ever really needed. It was worth a try. One more cut and he’d have the hour in and enough firewood for a month. It felt good. But, Jesus, those little kids. That was what bugged him. Little kids, parts of their bodies just strewn across the ground like windblown trash. And our boys did this? Something was fucked—big time.

II. The Innocent

The iron gate opens into a field of snowmen lively with sticks and carrots and their button-eyes of coal. No one asks who put them there, so eager are we to mingle, to get acquainted. A crow older than the far mountains calls to us in his misery. It was not his choice to stay behind here where color holds for him no advantage. The sun has been told to stay away by this army of cold warriors whose stolidity brooks no compromise. It obeys according to the terms of a treaty made when the old was new and far away. We walk further into this stage set for a December pageant of badly dressed and skinny children, orphans and waifs from Basra and Tirkut, Tamil Nadu, Aceh, Kobane, Bethlehem, children whose lives are to be cut short—of this we are reminded in this white garden beyond the black gate. Perhaps it is the cold. Adam lived in other forests besides Eden. Somewhere beyond the Tigris it is snowing even now. And on a beach somewhere in Turkey that little boy—

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