Nonfiction by Eileen Cronin, reviewed by Colleen DavisMERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience (W.W. Norton) When I read a memoir, I feel like I’m climbing into the kitchen of someone I’ve never met to see if their recipes for life trump…
Poetry by Jerrold Yam, reviewed by Kenna O’RourkeSCATTERED VERTEBRAE (Math Paper Press) Jerrold Yam’s second poetry collection was titled with care: like the image of scattered vertebrae, these poems are at once beautiful, dark, and disturbing. Yam weaves family life,…
CARDBOARD PIANO
by Rina Terry
Texture Press, 102 pages
reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat
We tend to equate the word “prison” with concrete, metal and despair, ostensibly as means of change or as a tool of rehabilitation. In her new collection, Cardboard Piano, Rina Terry reveals multi-layered evidence of the transformative power of art versus stone. Anyone who is familiar with Stephen King’s prison stories, The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption (or at least with the movie adaptations thereof) expects to question the prison system and to explore the humanity of both the inmates and the guards. Terry’s words push the reader to consider the realities of an in-person search for and confrontation of that humanity, in all its potential glory and obloquy.
The opening salvo, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Inmates” offers a kaleidoscope through which we can feel the entire collection. Terry challenges our accepted notion of rehabilitative space as cyclical: “There is only one/direction. Single file/through metal detector.” Parole notwithstanding, the suggestion is that for most who enter, there is no hope, and what’s more, the system-keepers believe that as well. After all, “an inmate/is and inmate/is an inmate.” The guards do not see what Terry sees, the one man who holds on to his sense of self enough to iron his uniform, or the baptism trough as cleansing agent.
Poetry by Nicole Callihan, reviewed by Anna Strong SUPERLOOP (Sock Monkey Press) The startling beauty of Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop lies in the balance the poems strike between the specificity and universality of childhood memory. The strongest poems take us deep…
Ivy HughesLAVERNE AND SHIRLEY I held the handset of the house phone to my ear, the dull tone providing a soundtrack for what was sure to be the most humiliating conversation of my life. From the sitting room, the three-foot…
Cullen Bailey BurnsFLORIDA The pelican was a kite or vice versa in the way I was a wave in the body my mind made of ego and thread. How do we glue the ideas into order? In the gulf, warm…
Shane Joaquin JimenezICELANDIC KISSES The man in the fur coat paused in the electric blue of the porch light. He sniffed the air, as if trying to read some presence in the atmosphere and the ice particles. A blinding wind…
Peter LaBergeTESTIMONY AFTER THE VARICOCELECTOMY My mother changes the bedpan, the evidence of life. Stomach, definition of withhold, overripe plum I did not purchase. I would never crave this heaviness, the way she folds over my body with braided fingers.…
Emma GreenbergTHE FERRY “So your mom told you about the new houses?” “Yup.” I lunged too aggressively for the volume control and my seatbelt tensed and slapped me back into my seat. The second verse of “Livin’ On A Prayer”…
Pattie McCarthyfrom x y a && a couple of breaks of sunshine over the next couple hours, what little sun shine there is left. a view that outranks me : two baseball fields, two bridges, the dome (golden) of a…
Jared Yates SextonYOU ARE BUT A PILGRIM VENTURING TO A STRANGE AND HONEST LAND On the cab ride in the driver turned and said, Did you know Hope and Despair are sister and brother and you their distant cousin? We…
Marie Nunaleeblockage no. 8 a bumblebee, Kamikaze pilot in disguise, balancing ancillary, damp sidewalk-situated, papier mache pinions flashing faintly. six coarse-haired legs flicker for the troubleshoot-detection of external demise; antennae circuits flip on, flip off, blow fuses red and bright.…
Ann de ForestPEACE, from The Names of Roses Peace Rose: Just before Germany invaded France, a French horticulturist sent cuttings of his newest rose to friends in Italy, Turkey, Germany, and the U.S. to protect it. It is said that it was…
Henry MarchandA HUNGER ARTIST The medium is biological, human cells crafted in a sterile environment to simulate body parts: an ear, a finger, a foot. Clyde Averill has become renowned for his work, the first bio-artist to achieve such astonishing,…
Kristen SharpTELESCOPES In a dress with sequins the color of champagne, her legs like bone, she crouched on the beach and dug her hand under the packed wet sand. The New Year had been mostly Manhattans and whiskey-gingers and drunk…
Lori LamotheLEXICON I’ve forgotten the language of cities, of travel. I insert the room key upside down, stumble over a couch in the lobby, ride the wrong subway line, walk South instead of North. New York hems me in, surrounds…
Anne Dyer StuartTHIS TOWN IS YOUR TOWN TOO The next morning at Paige’s, too many mamas were there. I didn’t know why they’d stayed. It made me feel like Mama was anti-social, which she was. But more than that, it…
Jesse MinkertTWO POEMS Mesopotamian Ruins Eras apply dust victorious harden over masonry. Accomplishments in architecture and death; lives of sleep and food and shit removal. Dust sweeps off the table water in a flask, a bag of emmer. Thirsty soil…
Donna FestaPORTRAITS OF AGE Interviewed by Anastasiya Shekhtman Where does your fascination with faces come from? When I was a young girl, I went with my mother on a regular basis to visit her sisters. She was the youngest of nine…
Jessica Morey-CollinsTHREE POEMS Once Again A woman glances at her watch, one hand resting on the grip of a wheelchair, wherein is ensconced her mother. Both wear khaki sunhats and sea-foam green respiratory masks, coral shirts. Squawks and wing beats…
Christine HammR IS FOR RESTLESS Palm Beach, a fake emerald bracelet scratching your wrist. You crawl to the bed, the industrial carpet rubbing its cigarette stink all over you. You remember the man’s hands, the scars and words scrawled across…
DC LambertWHEN SANTA CAME TO CHERRY HILL, NEW JERSEY You could hear the sirens blocks away, and if you didn’t know, you’d think it was a real emergency. Santa Claus had trouble keeping balance, so the fire truck took it…
Anthony WallaceTHE CHRISTMAS ANGEL He sets up the Christmas tree in the family room, untangles the lights and strings them around the tree in lazy loops from top to bottom, drapes a few strands of tinsel at the ends of…
Kaori FujimotoIN THE ABSENCE OF CULINARY MENTORS Mom When I was growing up in the suburbs of Tokyo, every evening at five my mother donned her white apron and set about preparing dinner. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling and…
Sam ChaIN THE MID-OUGHTIES IN THE MID-OUGHTIES, we thought we were men. We were all married for a year and a half or so. Our wives played cello or bass and read two books a year. We left our doctoral…
Jo Beckett-KingLEMON TUESDAY It was Lemon Tuesday and so far it had not lived up to expectations. His gran had made pancakes, smaller and fatter than any his mum ever made, and while he was eating, his mum had come…
Monica WendelBIRTHDAY POEM There’s a secret 1950s housewife in me that loves amphetamines. Do you love it too? The zip zap? The blue boogers? Is that the right word? I found dark lipstick in my room and wore it when…
Catherine Mosier-MillsCHRISTMAS 2009 The family was crowded around the small white gazebo in the middle of the yard. There was a map, too, pasted on the corkboard floating high on the gazebo’s walls, confining the chaotic compound in abstract squares…
Lisa PiazzaLOOK, HERE For this, I use my grandfather’s axe. Pull it carefully from behind the dead cat’s carrier in the garage, where it rests dusty and dull, subdued by seasons more or less come and gone. More because fifteen…
Mohammadreza MirzaeiFRANCESCA I was exhausted. It was an hour since we parked the car down the mountain and came up the slope. I had spent all my life in Tehran, but I had never been in Tochal, which was one…
Sean LyonHOW A HEART Tricia the three-toed sloth started to slipper my hand into her undergrowth. “Wow,” I clickered, “I’m in love with this rainforest.” Then she maffled her tongue down some other toucan’s throat. How a heart emflampers under…
Dmitry BorshchEXILED FROM TRUTH: NINE ALLEGORIES Interviewed by Anastasiya Shekhtman What made you decide on ink as a medium? Precision of the ink line. I love precise lines and was able to show that even in my first independent works.…
Tish IngersollFIVE PAINTINGS Interviewed by Anastasiya Shekhtman How do you begin a painting? I often start a painting using a level and making several horizontal lines, varying distances apart. Then, using black acrylic, I use gestural lines to overlap them. Finally,…
YVONNE IN THE EYE OF DOG
by Kathryn Kulpa
If God looked for Yvonne would he find her? If God looked down, past stars and satellites, through storm clouds thick and grey as dryer lint, would he see Yvonne in a stolen van, Yvonne in a darkened shopping plaza with Ma’s Diner and A-1 Hardware, Crafts Basket and Pets Plus?
Yvonne is down on options, down on her luck. Listening to the sighs and snores of her dog asleep in the back seat, the beat of rain on the roof. Her world the smell of wet dog. Her face in the mirror, hair wild, curling in the damp. Everything about her seems high-contrast, vampirish. Face white, except for that bruise her cover-up won’t cover. Tired eyes. White eyeliner is the trick for that, Teena had taught her. No white eyeliner in Yvonne’s make-up bag. No black, either. Almost out of tricks. She pats more cover-up on her eyelids, feels the oils in the makeup separate.
Zach FishelBLOODSUCKERS Having sliced mosquitoes From the air all week, he sits with mail Neglected like the quiet granite Of New Hampshire. The enormity of moths is felt here. Thinking of the letters. That even in this loneliness there is…
R. Daniel EvansBLUE SANTA All the votive candles stood arranged in a circle before Blue Santa. First, Mirta lit the four red and four blue ones. Her favorite candle holders were made from yellow glass colored dark as old cheese.…
Donna VorreyerPHENOMENON Homes awash in moonlight, in streetlight, the whole neighborhood hunched and hiding, watching the sky. All of the children are adrift, huddled in bushes, running under branches well past their usual bedtimes. It is a strange phenomenon, but…
Barbara NishimotoTOURIST It was July, winter in La Serena, Chile, and Lily sat in a pretty little plaza, her feet resting on the battered train case that her mother had bought at Sears long ago. Hard shell Samsonite. Part of…
Lynn LevinTHE BIRTHDAY PRESENT The day of his wife’s forty-fifth birthday party, Norbie Bernbaum let Jerry Rosen talk him into an afternoon at the Dirty Martini, a strip club on the edge of downtown where Hot Pantz, Double Dee, and…
Brian DruckenmillerVINYL I was ready to die, so I jumped off the highest bridge in town, the river a dark frozen mass ready to accept my mangled mess of skin and insides. I detached from my descending body and watched…
Kevin ToscaROMEO & JULIETTE Romeo sent this text to Juliette: “Goodnight Julie.” She didn’t respond. It was their first night not sleeping together in two years. He didn’t know what she was thinking. The next morning, he had to return…
Teresa LeoTWO POEMS Miniature Sawtooth sky reins in its pomegranates and the carnival shuts down. We duck behind the House of Horrors for in-touch, downright, face-to-face clarity. The ground’s a popcorn mess, stepped over and on, near a chain link…
A Graphic Novel by Ramsey Beyer, reviewed by Stephanie Trott LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR (Zest Books) It’s a familiar notion, the sense of being a little fish in a big pond. This awareness may…
CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS
by John Sibley Williams
FutureCycle Press
reviewed by Anna Strong
Controlled Hallucinations is a collection of questions, interiors, and barriers—stepping into the world of these poems means being alone with your thoughts and the images and associations your brain creates only in its quietest moments. The title of the collection already suggests that these poems will occupy a space far removed from the outside world, but John Sibley Williams invites readers into this space with an introduction to the collection in the form of an untitled poem (following the dedication, which is to “the coming extinctions”). The introductory poem is a series of infinitive clauses (“To be the effect. / To be a thoughtful pause / and restrained response. / To the the passion of raking nails.”) which collectively define what can be expected from the ensuing poems.
A Novel by Marek Hłasko, translated by Norbert Guterman, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin THE GRAVEYARD (Melville House) The moment of truth in this book of deceit is treated in a most unusual way: it isn’t treated at all. Or more…
A Graphic Novel by Lisa Hanawalt, reviewed by Margaret Galvan MY DIRTY DUMB EYES (Drawn and Quarterly) My Dirty Dumb Eyes, released last May, may be comic artist Lisa Hanawalt’s debut text with a major publisher, but it highlights her…
A CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR NATHANIEL POPKIN by Roberta Fallon Nathaniel Popkin’s new novel LION AND LEOPARD is set in early nineteenth Century Philadelphia, and features historical figures such as Charles Willson Peale, Raphaelle Peale, and the German painter John Lewis Krimmel. A…
A Graphic Narrative by Frederik Peeters, translated by Edward Gauvin, reviewed by Brazos Price PACHYDERME (Harry N. Abrams Press, SelfMadeHero imprint) A cinematic opening: a woman’s heeled boot, a 1950’s traffic jam in bucolic Romandie, a downed elephant. Carice Sorrel, a…
A Novel by Irmgard Keun, translated by Geoff Wilkes, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin GILGI, ONE OF US (Melville House) You push through the small, enclosed, almost claustrophobic rooms at the head of “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” at the…
A Novel by Letitia Moffitt, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin SIDEWALK DANCING (Atticus Books) A sidewalk dance is the step or two that strangers on a sidewalk make together in an effort to get out of each other’s way. Sometimes, says…