A Graphic Narrative curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M.V. David, edited by Leonard S. Marcus, reviewed by Tahneer Oksman MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK (Harry N. Abrams Press) In a collaborative comic strip…
Fiction by Pamela Erens, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner THE UNDERSTORY (Tin House Books, originally published by Ironweed Press in 2007) I began Pamela Erens’ The Understory to find the main character, Jack Ronan Gorse, peering inside his coffee cup to…
A Graphic Narrative by Diane Obomsawin, reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore ON LOVING WOMEN (Drawn & Quarterly) “On Loving Women”: it sounds like a treatise. But Diane Obomsawin does not deliver the usual tome with this intimately illustrated collection of…
Fiction by Dennis Must, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin THE WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE (Red Hen Press) and Fiction by Joan Chase, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA (NYRB Classics, new edition) GROWING UP, MID-CENTURY Childhood…
Poetry by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Anna Strong DEAR GRAVITY (Carnegie Mellon University Press) At the beginning of the fourth section of Gregory Djanikian’s Dear Gravity, in a poem titled “Beginnings,” the speaker, one of two “giddy / amnesiacs of…
Fiction by Melissa Malouf, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier MORE THAN YOU KNOW (Dalkey Archive Press) Melissa Malouf’s More Than You Know intrigued and perplexed me right from its disorienting start. I’d barely landed on the first page when I fell…
Anastasiya ShekhtmanTHE OLD MAN AND THE POOL Regardless of which creative field you look at, there is always talk about process. This postmodern world has rendered form and content inextricable in many ways, so when I look at work, it…
Patricia Colleen MurphyTHE BIRTH OF NO I remember everything but in an order I cannot control. It was suicide season. I was 14 and I couldn’t believe my mother’s thrift, like she had missed a few zeros. It was in…
Mary van OgtropTHE LAST ONE IN A bridge cuts a straight line across the sky, connecting one wooded area of Richmond, Virginia, to another. Imagine a bridge and you’ll see a parabola, the structure’s midsection arching high in the air…
HUNGRY
by Rachel Estrada Ryan
It has been seven days since we’ve run out of meat and vegetables in the freezer and most of the cans and boxes and jars in the pantry. My husband reminds me that we have not run out of money. He says this as he leans against our stainless steel refrigerator that matches the stainless steel stove and the stainless steel dishwasher and the stainless steel built-in microwave. Of course I know he’s right; I also know we probably never will. No, we will always have too much, and the people on the charity websites will never have enough, and frankly if I have to spend another afternoon hauling reluctant children and unforgiving paper-or-plastic bags I might just lose it once and for all. I’m not sure I can ever go to the supermarket again.
Laura Mecklenburger“VULNERARY” AND AN ART WITCH When I try to describe my artwork to others, I often say that I make ritual objects and installation art. But I didn’t set out to make installation art from the beginning, and I…
Nick KolakowskiTHE GREAT WAVE CARRIES YOU FORWARD Marie’s husband Zachary passed away in early March, followed two weeks later by the dog. Marie would never confess this to anyone, but she missed the dog a little more than Zack. At…
Zachary LundgrenBRANDED He was drunk and I’m sure it helped when I took the iron from the stove: a loud red, a cruel star. I held the iron like a relic of some religion we’ve all long forgot but is…
Royee Zvi AtadgyAN EVEN, PERFECT BURN Come here, he said. No, you can just watch me and then afterwards we’ll go to sleep and that’ll be the end of it, she said. You mean that we’ll go to sleep like…
Jason KapcalaBUNGALESE CONSTRICTOR No one told me that Carlos’s gallery exhibition was that night until after I’d wrangled the Burmese python from under the porch and I was drenched through with rain and covered with dead leaves and muck. Storm…
Olive MulletIN SEARCH OF DEATH Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me. —Emily Dickinson —So why are you working at Hospice? Death is my thing. I’ve read all the books on it, most of them…
Rick BaileyALL EARS A few weeks ago my father woke up almost totally deaf. He already had a significant deficit. For years he has worn hearing aids. One for each ear, they are a microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker all in…
Anthony WallaceBLACK RAINCOAT, BLUE STOCKINGS Nobody took Rhiannon there, and nobody took her home. She managed the whole thing by herself. When she woke up, it was dark outside. A light was on in the living room, and she could…
Shannon ViolaIN MY TIME I have a love-hate relationship with Hemingway. Sometimes when I’m writing, he’s over my shoulder. He seizes my hand and slashes the Latinate adjectives on my page while I wince and moan. He tugs at one…
Jane CarrollWINGS TO GO There’s a chicken place on Ridge Avenue called “Wings to Go.” I occasionally wait for a bus across the street, and that sign always seemed to me a little too poetic for a wing place. It…
Nicole CallihanIN THE MEWS Two feuding gardens are thought to be responsible for the most recent blooming. According to the rain, in late summer, a band of tiger lilies recruited a pack of peonies, and those peonies, comely as they…
Gabriel Ojeda SaguePLACES TO WALK OUT TO I read the note scribbled wildly on torn paper: “Language is not the signifier nor the signified. It is the significance.” The only constant is the height of buildings. I hate the way…
Robert WexelblattMARCH 5, 1953 The funeral was flowerless. Every early spring bloom had been expropriated by the KGB for their boss. Scarcely forty people dared show up. Charged with counter-revolutionary bourgeois tendencies, tormented and shunned by the Composers Union, his…
Melissa DuclosCONFESSIONS OF A FACEBOOK MOM I’m with Teddy and Elliot, sitting on the floor amidst a pile of Legos and a stack of books, and I find my eyes wandering up to the shelf. My fingers get a little…
Brennan CusackHOW TO MASTER SOCIAL MEDIA Take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror because it’s got a frame like a photograph and you need the practice. Move around and play with angles until you find the most…
J.C. ToddON THE ROMANCE OF PARKLAND for Erica Upstream, a shadow crosses the oxbow of a river whose flood plains are silted by paternal names of grant-holders. Their slaves tilled the alluvial bottom land, turning up flints and the bones…
Kathy Lou SchultzJACKSON LISTENS TO THE BIRDS for Jackson born 2/5/07 Memphis is a huff of spring grandiose pink blossoms about to pop a rainstorm lurking in the palpable air It’s you and me rounding the corners of Midtown lush…
Justin NicholesA SAD, LOGICAL CAPITULATION (after D. H. Lawrence) The day a welding rod shimmied down Zou’s collar and combusted his shirt into singed tendrils, the same day my stomach caught traction in the scoop of his lower back and…
B.A. VargheseALL GOOD THINGS The milk was white and it squirted out from under his hands. He pulled and pulled the cow’s udders one at a time to a rhythmic beat and I watched it fall down in spurts after…
Juniper GreenDEGENERATIVE DISEASES OF THE BRAIN When I walk into her room Mrs. Goldberg does not recognize me. Every morning I help her out of bed, clean her up, and dress her. Every morning we meet for the first time.…
Kim SuttellSHACKLED If it’s a fever you want, then I’m frenzied. What are you but an ice ax ear ache, an ice cleat hike down my throat, the churned Weddell Sea in my paunch. Hell, you’re the whole Antarctic. I…
Daniel W. ThompsonDAFFODILS The main reason I drove four hours to be here was to sign a document giving me access to mom and dad’s security deposit box. Mom called it personal housekeeping. She said, you never know, Miles. What…
Jamie LinFLESH AND BLOOD He’d done it again. Little puddles of sticky green glop all over the floor, specked with shards from the small glass bottle that’d held the apple purée. His fist clutched the plastic spoon as more pale…
George MoorePSYCHOGENIC FUGUE Every time I leave home I begin a new life. I am a boy again, sometimes a girl. My memories are so discrete that they talk to each other, gather in rooms, develop friendships without knowing. My…
Michael G. SmithBEYOND RIVER, BEYOND CANYON Once a year I backpack my ischemic-stroked brain and body into the Grand Canyon. To test. Observe. See what lost physical move I can do again. Metamorphosize. Twelfth trip: like the Earth, I have…
Shannon SweetnamMIRABEL RIVER GIRL, CHAMPION SPELLER I was twelve when my Daddy got a long iridescent motorcycle, his first to my unemphatic, unpathwayed, what-I-recall. I wandered the shop façade near the cow-bell laden door, while he strode around back to…
Lauren HallTWO POEMS The Miser “He was never a nice man,” she confessed, rolling her stockings slightly below her knees. “Nobody liked him much, not even me.” Through the screen door, I can see my great-grandfather swinging an axe at…
Thompson MayesPIGEON He was hot, too hot, walking on the sunny side of the hard stone streets through tourist stickiness of dripped gelato. He felt as wilted as the reddish-pink blooms that drooped out of the doorway, and he could…
Molly McGinnisBETTER I am salt and champagne. Salt and dirt and stars. Two-sided story, double-edged knife. Dinosaur bones and tambourines. I have walked into town by myself at dawn and seen my face reflected in the windows. I have danced…
Alina GrabowskiSCORCHER June had been eating a creamsicle on the front porch when she saw them. It was the third week of July and the entire house was sweating, drops of condensation sliding down bookshelves and chair legs. Her father…
Ray ScanlonARACHNICIDE An organ pipe mud dauber is building a nest in the ornamental tin-roofed wren house Cheryl hung by the door. I hear her stridulating at her masonry work, and see her carry a small ball of mud into…
Laurie BlaunerASSEMBLING AN ANATOMICAL LIFE To Annie I labeled all the dancers’ body parts and told them how to use them. I prepared resonant music, a prescription for feet that kaleidoscoped from room to room. I described what I wanted,…
Fiction by Jenny Offill, reviewed by Michelle Fost DEPT. OF SPECULATION (Alfred A. Knopf) Here’s an idea for a book party. Hold it in the Guggenheim. Set up an exhibit of all the pages of the book. Frame each page…
Fiction by Elizabeth Cohen, reviewed by Michelle Fost THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL (Other Press) Like so many of the characters in Elizabeth Cohen’s fifteen incisive stories in The Hypothetical Girl, Emily in the title story is truly suffering. Her affliction is…
Fiction by Peter Mountford, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin THE DISMAL SCIENCE (Tin House Press) It seems fitting that Peter Mountford’s novel, The Dismal Science, is being published just as certain global emergent markets—Brazil, Turkey, India, South Africa, and Indonesia, nicknamed…
A Graphic Narrative by Isabel Greenberg, reviewed by Stephanie Trott THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH (Little, Brown and Company) There is no sole way to tell the story of our planet. Whether one chooses to uphold a belief rooted in…
Fiction by Anthony Wallace, reviewed by Nathaniel PopkinTHE OLD PRIEST (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013 Drue Heinz Literature Prize) “Let’s leave Limit,” says Anna to her husband Phil, the narrator of Anthony Wallace’s story “Snow behind the door.” Limit is…
BLOOM IN REVERSE
by Teresa Leo
University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series), 104 pages
reviewed by Anna Strong
From the dedication page, Teresa Leo’s Bloom in Reverse props itself against the fence between the living and the dead. Dedicated to the living but in memory of Leo’s friend Sarah, the poems carry the dual burden of trauma and memory. How do we process, how do we articulate trauma? If we’re at all like Teresa Leo, we recognize that in art, in poetry, we remember the the Sarah Hannahs of the world and bring them into a collective consciousness. She is not forgotten.
Donald Hall wrote an astounding collection of poems chronicling his wife’s cancer and death, Without. Bloom in Reverse reads much like that collection—in each poem, we feel the keenness of the “without,” the strain of recollection, the reconstruction of the smallest moments of friendship and intimacy in the clearest language accessible to the speaker. Many of the poems are two-line stanzas, heavily enjambed and riddled with fragments, clauses that build and build on each other only to be let go in a kind of sigh—we feel the struggle to hold onto whatever memories come to mind, only to realize that that’s all they are. The ending of “She Said: It’s Not that Things Bring Us to Tears, but Rather, There Are Tears in Things” struck me as the most poignant of these conclusions:
Nonfiction by William Helmreich, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City (Princeton University Press) and Poetry edited by Reuven Snir, reviewed by Nathaniel PopkinBAGHDAD: THE CITY IN VERSE (Harvard University Press) Writers,…
Poetry by Alli Warren, reviewed by Vanessa MartiniHERE COME THE WARM JETS (City Lights) Diving into Alli Warren’s Here Come the Warm Jets is at once exhilarating and slightly overwhelming. Warren pulls no punches with this collection. The reader is…