ALINA PLESKOVA AND KIMBERLY ANN SOUTHWICK WANT YOU TO DIY IT THIS POETRY MONTH A Conversation with Alina Pleskova and Kimberly Ann Southwick Edited by Hannah Felt Garner Alina: Kimberly Ann Southwick and I have traveled in the same extended poetry circles for about a decade–she as founder and editor of the long-running journal Gigantic Sequins, me as co-founder/co-editor of bedfellows, which has published a few of her poems! Both of us are Philly-connected (me, a current resident; she, a former one). We've done various readings together over the years, too. One, as I recall, was in a dive bar basement, where performers read in a corner, sandwiched between an ATM and a trash bin. Ah, the lives of poets! That's what I wanted to talk with Kimberly about: the life of a poet. Specifically, a poet with a first book out. Kimberly’s first full-length collection, Orchid Alpha, was released by Trembling Pillow Press in April 2023. I expected to love it, and I did. What I observe and deeply appreciate in Kimberly's work is a masterful balance of the lyrical and the demotic. You never forget that you're reading a deftly-crafted poem, but it also feels like a real ... Read the full review

T.S. BenderMIGUEL'S SANCHO It was some point early in August, a Thursday or Friday, some point at the end of the week that Miguel didn’t show up to work. And that morning, as the sun streamed into the garage of the grounds shop and mowers rumbled in place, the guys said that Miguel would be in.  “He don’t miss work,” Victor said, and someone else said to check the kitchen, that maybe he was in there with Mary, and Victor smirked and said it was too early for that. But later, long after starting at six, long after finishing the first jobs and then the second ones, Victor came by the golden willow beside the fourteenth green that me, Fin, and Gilberto had gathered under after push mowing around trees and benches and wherever else the rough mower couldn’t get to. Victor slipped through the dangling branches that swayed just above the ground, adjusting his pants as he told us that he’d heard from Miguel, in Alabama somewhere after driving all night, on his way to Michoacán. It was Miguel’s sancho, Victor said. The guy living in his house, spending time with his kids, and, of course, fucking his wife ... Read the full review

Julian ShendelmanSUSPENSION POINTS “I suppose you could DM,” Marine said, staring into her clipboard.  “Direct message?”  “Dungeon monitor. You essentially walk around making sure people aren’t openly bleeding on the carpet. It’s a violation of our lease. Here.” She handed me a laminated double-sided list of rules. The first three—no fire, breath play, or unconfined fluids—seemed straightforward enough. But I couldn’t wrap my head around interrupting a scene in progress.  “Are you sure there isn’t, like, a clean-up shift I could take?”   The goth shrugged. “We’re booked up. It’s DM or full price.”  Forty dollars was a lot of sesame tofu.   Marine rose to her feet, towering in buckle-encrusted platform boots. The wings of her black eyeliner extended into her temples, bisecting her face. Her teeth were small and crooked, brown behind purple lipstick. She handed off door duties to another volunteer, a nasally man in a snug, black neoprene button-up and matching sailor’s cap. Fleeting, uncomfortable recognition. I eyed the exit, debated running.   This was the biggest hazard of working reception at the queer clinic for a decade straight: bumping into patients everywhere and anywhere. For years, I’d exclusively socialized in private homes with my ex and her ... Read the full review

Sofi GuvenPROXIMITY When I get home, I start to make bread. I open my window curtains wide and prepare the ingredients. Buckwheat flour, salt, sugar, and yeast stored in jars, scooped out with a ring of measuring cups. The windowsill is too narrow for my sleek new bread-maker, but I keep it there anyway. I touch the curtains of the sliding glass door as I pass, impatient.  I wait for it to grow darker. I turn on lights. Just yards away, she responds, raising the blinds to her own kitchen, shiny granite counters visible to me down to the mottled grains. I see her pour expensive wine into a glass. She lifts a record, tilting the Wagner aria slightly in my direction. She took a bit to build up to operas, but plays them almost always now, all grandeur and pretense.   When Michael lived here, the curtains would close before dark.   “We’re private people,” he’d say, “and it’s worse that we know the neighbors, people are more nosy when you know them.”   Not that you could see them very well then; a busy street with wide bike lanes separated the parallel apartments.   Not that we knew Silvia and Hassan ... Read the full review

Rachel Toliver ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R7, ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R8, ON WHAT USED TO In those days, what I call my girlhood, there was always a man and he was always at the end of the train. It mattered less who the man was. It was the train and the going that gave him a name, a measure, a distance between. Here in Philly, in Germantown: the sunset on slate, the beech trees losing track of themselves. The streets that, when I was a girl, would make me a grownup. Then I grew up but I didn’t realize I was growing up because growing up took so long, all the years of boredom interspersed with years of hurt. I lived for a while in Ohio. No trains there, where I was in Ohio, and this read in me like heartbreak. Like a hitch across the wrong track. I used to think of being as I am, boots absolute and heel-heavy, black coat encapsulating my heart—tremendous, pulpy, stirring thing—this heart borne down Broad Street, right down Philly's center, as I’d written, young—city salts surfacing—or some such way of fixing my grown-up face—in a thousand books, ... Read the full review

L M Feldman YOU WILL HAVE ARRIVED: A Semi-Natural History 1. The Valley Green Inn A WEDDING You arrive alone to celebrate someone’s love and hope and future (your faith in such things long gone, a dry river). You’ve donned your best shoes (so no one will know) and the suit that fit a former You. The Inn is festooned in white and pale green, the flowers arrayed in bowls of water. Wedding guests (tamed by ties and heels) are milling on the long dirt road (what was it called before Forbidden Drive?) in outfits that (more or less) fit. You smile, greet, hug, laugh, escape (at last) to join the geese. ... Dirt. Trees. Wind. Creek. Facing out: the sky. Facing in: incandescent bulbs, strung up like stars (like chaos caged). Later, you’ll carouse. Make up words to songs you don’t know. Sing yourself hoarse to songs you do. Later still, you’ll make your way home. Fall asleep alone in the hollow of your bed. Snuffling sleepsounds no one will hear. (If a tree falls in a forest...) But right now? You breathe. And laugh. And stride your old suit inside to toast the glowing newlyweds. 2. The View ... Read the full review

Krys Malcolm Belc COLLIDING WORLDS Johnny Brenda's Where Frankford Avenue meets Girard Avenue—heart of demolition, of crumble and shiny plastic—you can see Philadelphia’s most surprising sunset, melting purple bleeding into orange-red, punctuated by Fishtown’s rowhomes and churches. Forget that this is a site of colliding worlds: battles over demolition and rebuilding, crumbling buildings, plastic construction, streets blocked by concrete trucks and delivery vans, articles in national magazines about how we’re just arriving, here on Frankford Avenue, the oldest road in Pennsylvania. We came thousands of sunsets ago to see a singer neither knew perform upstairs at the place on the corner. Off the El, along Girard Avenue where four lanes of traffic flew by. Up sticky steps we went hand in hand. Leaning against the bar, me with my Kenzinger, you with your Sprite, shoulders rubbing those of the people who became our neighbors, you laughed when I asked to move here, to leave behind the life we knew across the city. I put my beer on the bartop and turned towards the music. You were seventeen weeks pregnant with our first baby, and we were in the place I wanted to be. Cake Life Bake Shop Over the next ... Read the full review

Beth Kephart SQUEEZE It’s your size. You fit within the squeeze, take the narrow on like it belongs to you, like Camac is your personal arcade of gendered sketch clubs and daytime twinkle and the red balloon of a hibiscus bush too wide for the walk. A poodle’s piss. Nobody out ahead of noon, ahead of you, and where Camac breaks, it breaks south and you break, too, down Manning, past Sartain, toward the narrow hush of Quince, where the only way to be civil as a stranger is to amble the proper center of the street and keep your wings tucked in, which is to say, Do not be a tree, rushing your reach across the bottled glass, sudsing your touch against the locks, the windchimes, the birds that avoid the barbs, the mouse running parallel to Jessup. Do not be a tree. The purest angle on it all is to count the doors by their colors (lime, apple, cherry, saffron) and to forgive the bike lashed to the No Parking sign and to deliberate on love according to the merits of the window boxes and the degree to which their stems and blooms and greens rise up like ... Read the full review

Yolanda Wisher germantown avenue speaks & coulter school to school the dark writes itself a poem of youngblood façades playin in the face of founding fatherhoods cobblestones chucklin low—got ghost jokes stagin colonial comedies & catcall sitcoms yoga & ubuntu with nicole in the old piano showroom in the pine place of louisa may’s little women where masons lodged lowdown in gothic revival a bookstore like a diner in a hopper painting but Black—square for markets & martyrs school to school—the light rights itself & schoolhouse it all started with a dream brotherhood tech services—curious little minds waitin for a sign—a lightning bolt of Beauty secret banquet hall of treasures above the imperfect gallery it all started with rumbas in the cane with a car croonin whitney—i have nothing nothing nothing a sneaker shop kickin monica—don’t take it personal local calls 25 cents sign waitin for the return of its booth boo gtown dollar plus la rose live jazz school to school the dark writes itself into crescendo & chelten deluxenaildesignpawnshopbeefchickenlamb checkcashincrabhousestopprofilinmuslimsafricanhair raisin the dead 7 days a week rip murraysnowbossfurniture rip soundofgermantownnowbrothahalal we accept bodyoilsfoodstampsebtwisecracksinthearmor school to school barbers barberin thedarkwritesitselfinto corners dine-in or takeout—you are loved bluebrothaonaskateboard chickenjointwithlonglines ... Read the full review

Alyssa Songsiridej FOUR DESTINATIONS AWAY AND NEARBY 4814 Trinity St My tenancy in this house—a longstanding punk house in permanent dereliction—took place from 2011-2013, but this is just a sliver in the house’s long history, a drop in all of the total personal experience held by its walls. The story of the house existed as myth and oral rumor, passing through a series of different names: The House of Less Cock, the Unholy Trinity, and then, when I lived there, only Trinity. Human life ebbing and flowing and leaving waves of random detritus: a bronze Buddha, a stripper pole, the expired rubber pads from an endless number of bikes. A show house, a collective group house, and a sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional experiment in group living. 49th and Chester From this corner, you have several options. There’s lingering: you can go into Jennifer’s Grocery, full of marked up dry goods and Fabuloso and an original Ms. PacMan machine. And then there’s leaving: by the number 13 trolley, west to Yeadon and Mt. Moriah, cemetery or east to Center City, or by the Regional Rail line to the suburbs in the west. The #13, whose humming electric cars are even older than ... Read the full review

A Writing Tip from Leonard KressHEADLINE POETRY Estimated reading time: 4 minutes I was driving to work a few weeks ago, listening closely to a news report about the survivalist Eric Frein, who had just murdered a Pennsylvania State Trooper and managed to evade capture by hiding out in the dense forests of the Pocono Mountains. Although hundreds of people were engaged in a desperate and dramatic search for the killer, he had thus far evaded capture. I listened closely to the report. I grew up in Philadelphia and the Poconos almost rivaled the Jersey shore for vacation fun—summer camp, ski trips, hiking, camping, and later, gambling casinos. When I was older, I became more and more fascinated by the old mining towns and patches, the abandoned anthracite coal breakers, the eternally burning mine and town of Centralia, the gold-domed churches of immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia. As tragic as the killing was, it still sounded like something out of the 19th century—as though a character—Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov—had moved to the region, taken up with a magistrate or mine-owners wife. Here among his fellow Slavs, he could continue his profligate ways, until he broke. And went crazy. I was ... Read the full review

Zachariah Claypole White OCD SONNET #3 Sonnet  enough of poetry—i want only honesty between us how once for cbt i had to call my mother a bitch it’s almost funny now—her delight i mean when finally i did—or the video from undergrad psych- ology: the man kissing a gas pump handle and please believe me it was the most beautiful kiss anxiety is not a poetic word the “i” too self-assured the “t” all steeple and bell but how tender a field it makes of our lips that last year my grandmother mistook every perennial for an epitaph and no priest or ornithologist could prove her wrong did you know every flower is its own tragedy that coleus has leaves like hurricane clouds demands water three times a week what is a garden if not obsession and kindness. Zachariah Claypole White was born and raised in North Carolina and lives in Philadelphia. He holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications, including Pedestal Magazine, Weird Horror, and The Hong Kong Review. His awards include Flying South's 2021 Best in Category for poetry and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize. Read more ... Read the full review

Micah Muldowney CONFESSIONS  It is a full moon tonight, but she has yet to clear the colinas of Salina Cruz. She might not crest at all; they are high and stark, almost walls, and the valley is very thin, almost a ravine except there is no river. In daylight, the colinas hang thin in the air like sheets on a line, almost weightless. The wind might catch them. But now that it is night, there is a weight to them, and their shadows welter in the streets. Making my way through the dark, I think—and not for the first time—that Salina Cruz is a strange and unlovely town, pushed well beyond her natural limits by the appetency of her nation. I have been told that before Cortés, she was just a handful of palm huts in the thin strip of valley opening into the gulf. The region was generally considered inhospitable to human life due to the Tehuano winds that scour the coast through the wind gap of the isthmus, coloring the waters with algae blooms almost a hundred miles out to sea—winds so fierce I knew a man who died of them on the way to La Ventosa. He ... Read the full review

Susan Barr-Toman OLD WOMAN BEARING FRUIT My senior year of college, I was set to graduate a semester early. Instead, I took a full-time position at the university and enrolled part-time, hoping it would make things easier. I’d been working my way through college, sometimes cutting classes to meet tuition payments. Always closely eyeing that grindstone with its precarious balance. Spinning. I felt older than my classmates, more grown-up, and it was not a lot of fun. On one of my first days, before the other students had returned to campus, my boss, an older woman named Rosalie, invited me to take a break from the office and walk outside the campus gates over to Belmont, the Little Italy of the Bronx. On our way back, she spotted a man selling produce out of a white truck on the corner and asked if I minded if she stopped to pick up a few things. She pulled fruit out of one of the buckets, and I said, “What’s that?” She turned and held out her hand, presenting me with a soft, smooth, reddish fruit the likes of which I’d never seen. “Try it,” Rosalie laughed, amused that I’d come this far ... Read the full review

Alex Behm MAIN LINE His voice is scratchy with sleep and a virus. I ask how he’s feeling. What’s wrong, my father interrupts through the phone. I’m just thinking, I say. Again. My father is in another state, trying to sleep, whereas I am in a dorm room with high ceilings and all of the lightbulbs blaring, even the desk lamp. I like to let the light in; my family lives in a river valley where I have never seen the sun set beyond those mountains that press us inward, nearer to the heart of what land is left. My father walks down a flight of carpeted stairs, and they crack under his weight. He doesn't want to wake up my mother, my sister, my brother. I hear him flick the light switches in his office. It is full of filing cabinets and antique toys that he has collected, whiteboards with dates and numbers and things, he tells me, I am not to be concerned with. Photos of our family. There is a picture of my sister and me Scotch-taped to exposed drywall taken after a recital, standing with our grandmother. She wears a pink seersucker shirt with buttons and ... Read the full review

A Writing tip from Leonard KressPoetry as Meditation Estimated reading time: 3 minutes For several years I have been working on a series of sestinas that embody certain important aspects of Buddhist mindfulness meditation. Each sestina—and I have written nearly 100 so far—is a timed and focused meditation, contingent upon time, place, and physical, mental and emotional states. Duration, for example, translates to space—the 36 lines in each individual poem is the amount of time it takes to wander through those lines, just as a meditator might practice sitting or walking meditation for a specific time period. The lines of the poem, as they proceed, play out and represent the active workings of a restless mind (what Buddhists sometimes refer to as “monkey-mind”). These mental wanderings, however, must, at the end of the line, return to the poem’s focus—the repeated end word which is part of the sestina’s form. This refocusing is the poem’s version of returning concentration to the breath. And, as in meditation, the poem invariably struggles free and proceeds in its own distracted and digressive way—until the next repeated end-word. Thus, the process repeats throughout the six stanzas. The varying end-words inherent in the sestina form keep ... Read the full review

Leonard KressCOLLOQUY OF YOUNG MOTHERS ON VENANGO STREET By one a.m. they hoard the crossroad stoops, spotlit by squealing cars and vans, each beam gilding an icon nimbus in mounting loops of hair. They gaze impassive at the stream of boyfriend-fathers whose beery grind, embodied, now wails—ham hock babies hammocked in strollers collapsible as ancient empires. Each deed of love begets its own insatiable railers against: to pass around, coo at, and compare. Initiates, impenetrable now, these girls who chat like their own mothers, children who could not care less we stalk through corner-hanging danger for that transfiguring kiss all of them distractedly plant on the velveteen globe of each infant. Leonard Kress has published poetry, translations, non-fiction, and fiction in the Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and others. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley, Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems, and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He has received multiple grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Kress currently lives in Blackwood, NJ, and teaches at ... Read the full review

Samantha NeugebauerVILLAINS Back then it was impossible to do anything with my mother sleeping. In the evenings, we watched Prancer and ate turkey clubs; in the mornings, we drank coffee, then Bloody Marys. It was when I worked in the afternoons that she liked to sleep, so I schemed to thwart her efforts (although I did celebrate her condition in the abstract). I’d give her small tasks; send her out for a forever stamp, or to Dunkin' Donuts, or to pick up her prescriptions, things like that. My bank account had become anorexic, so we kept our overhead low. It was a transitional time for both of us. My mother, sixty, had recently gone on disability after an injury at her job. I, thirty, had moved back after working abroad for ten years, although no one was interested, so I tried not to think about it. In general, my mother was more maudlin than me, while I was more calculated. What my mother saw as human nature, I saw as flaws in a design. I couldn’t help it, I’d gone to college. She was a size twelve and I, a sixteen, although we could wear each other’s clothes—sizes, like everything, ... Read the full review

RIGHT THIS WAY by Miriam N. Kotzin Spuyten Duyvil, 339 pages reviewed by Lynn Levin They say it can be done, but it is hard, very hard, for most betrayed wives to regain trust and forge ahead in a marriage with a husband who has cheated. This may hold true even if the man has ended the affair, even if he feels remorse, even if he is not a repeat offender, even if he tries to repair the marital bond. Warranted or not, suspicion, like a persistent shadow, may stalk a woman’s thoughts. She may not be able to rid herself of the notion that somewhere out there the enticing forbidden fruit still dangles or ripens anew. The concept of transgression without redemption goes all the way back to the myth of Adam and Eve. Miriam N. Kotzin, in this wise and heart-wrenching new novel, reimagines the foundational Genesis text and adapts it to our times. The author situates the action in early twenty-first-century Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a comfortable middle-class town in which people have steady jobs, play tennis, eat healthy, go for manicures, have social lives with friends, care very much about their homes, and where, sorry to ... Read the full review

Wisest is she who knows she knows nothing: a Conversation with Alison Lubar, author of Philosophers Know Nothing About Love Thirty West Publishing House, 2022 by Michael McCarthy Read Alison's poem "Grand Slam" in Issue 39 of Cleaver. I first met Alison Lubar at Fergie’s Pub in Center City Philadelphia. Kind of. The Moonstone Art Center runs poetry open mics every Wednesday there. One night I took to the stage to read a poem I had written in an online workshop. When I stepped down, Alison came up to say they recognized my poem. Only then did I recognize them as the leader of the very same workshop for which I’d written it. A digital interaction became a real-world one, though I suppose COVID-19 collapsed the border between digital and real-world realms a while ago. Anyway, we met. I went to Fergie’s every week and often heard Alison read there. Their debut poetry collection, Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, draws upon their encyclopedic knowledge of Western philosophy and retells select myths in bracing, piercing, harrowing verse. This makes it sound rather heady, but it’s also a delight for the senses, a playground for the intellect, and a cleansing of the ... Read the full review

I LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OF MY CHARACTERS HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: A Conversation with Chaitali Sen, author of A NEW RACE OF MEN FROM HEAVEN Sarabande Books, January 2023 by Gemini Wahhaj Chaitali Sen’s short-story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven (Sarabande Books, January 2023) won the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her novel A Pathless Sky was published by Europa Editions in 2015 and her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, American Short Fiction Online, New Ohio Review, and Colorado Review. The daughter of Indian parents, Sen grew up in the US and now lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an important part of the literary community. In the fall of 2022, we participated on a panel about Bengali women writers at the Conference on South Asia and I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of her manuscript. In “Uma,” a young woman emigrates from her native Calcutta to the US, where she is ultimately reduced to a guest in her brother’s atomized suburban home on Long Island. In the opening pages in Calcutta, though, Uma is surrounded by an abundance of human relationships and hilarity: she ... Read the full review

TETHER AND FLOAT: THOUGHTS ON TWO NEW ESSAY COLLECTIONS by Beth Kephart SOUVENIRS FROM PARADISE Erin Langner Zone 3 Press HALFWAY FROM HOME Sarah Fawn Montgomery Split/Lip Press What would happen if, when we thought about essays (the power they might wield, the indignities they suffer), we thought about tether and float? The ways in which the essay knits itself into its own grounding facts, on the one hand. The ways in which it transcends them, on the other. Essays erupt from the lives that we live. Our hopes, which surge and thin. Our grief, which stills and screams. Our joy, which can’t be fixed. Our desire, which we understand until it makes no sense to us, until we don’t make sense to us, until we write the essay to find out, or read the essay hoping to find both the shimmer of the world and the maybe of ourselves. The math of an essay is not plot times words, not questions equals answers, not A plus B sums out at C. The math of an essay is disclosure and search, supposition and erasure, reassertion and pause. What happened is the essay’s tether. Why it mattered, or what it means, ... Read the full review

Beth KephartHOW ARE YOU? An Antonym Story If there were a Very Special Prize for the world’s most inadequate respondent to the How are you? question, I would be blue ribboned. How are you? Well… How are you? Just a— How are you? No, really. You first. I am so notoriously arrantly perfectly foul at performing this simple civic duty that I become invisible to myself whenever I am asked. Uh, I stutter, and in the absence of my response, the talk salts up without me, which is to say that I can walk four hills, two cul de sacs, five point two miles, and 12,433 steps, a phone pressed to my ear, without making any sound except for the huff and the puff demanded by my exertions, and the yes, and oh my god, and so happy for you required of a listener. Sometimes, when I’m at the proximate end of my travels and my face is berry red and my hair is whipped into its high humidity frenzy, the gold finch pecking on the crust of the cone flower that I am just then passing will hear me blunder with a short-changed tale, a wedged assertion, a strike of personal news. But even the finch hops away ... Read the full review

Alison LubarGRAND SLAM Tacoma WA, 1939 Jack takes a baseball bat to the river. August spawning season. ................The dry rocktops steam like the belly of a monster cut open. ................Unlaces right boot, then left, pulls them off without sitting and sets ................each woolen sock safely inside. There is no one out sunning today. Salmon bounce and skip upstream, suddenly buoyant and silver. ................Across the frothing surface, Jack wades in halfway amidst the frenzy. ................He winds up, tight as a fist, smacks one out of midair toward the bank— ................it lands next to his shoes. Not all hits are lucky. Not everyone is lucky. Jack knows he’s firstborn— blessed. Extra pressure to provide as the sole ................sober near-adult. A quarry of four; he will share with his sister. He escapes ................hunger and a beating that night. No one is ever full. When he’s bunted ................across the room, it’s so his little brother isn’t. We can only break the cycles ................we know we’re a part of. He feels nothing for the fish struck out of the air ................like a perfect pitch. Stoic hit. They never see it coming. Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are ... Read the full review

Madeleine GavalerZOLOFT NANNY Red drips down Dasha’s chin as I watch her through the playground bars. I hold my phone a distance from my cheek, giving my voice air to wade through before making its way to some faraway woman at a desk who doesn’t know why none of the meds work on me. “Zoloft made me want to kill myself, so actually I would not like to keep taking it.” I press the sound of her between my shoulder and face, the way suburban moms do when they’re busy cleaning but still have to talk to their friend Nancy—women can hold so many things. I crawl under the slide to the child and lick my thumb, smudging cherry slushie around her massive cheeks. Another nanny, older, wordlessly hands me wipes from her more well-equipped but lower-tech stroller. “Thank you,” I mouth. My psychiatrist continues to proselytize into my ear about the many months it takes each antidepressant, mood stabilizer, and antipsychotic to work properly. Christine is the doctor in charge of keeping me alive. She is not doing an impressive job. I set my phone down and close my eyes. Ice hits my lips. Dasha’s grinning face is inches ... Read the full review

Matt ThomasPOP SONG These eggs that I wash every morning before tucking them into the carton remind me of washing my daughter no less carefully, with an eye to the future knowing her cost and improbability. Like stroking a pocket rabbit's foot, thumb stopping on the sharp bone beneath the fur: the luckiest things are the least likely. Roll an egg in your palm: it’s a spirit level finding true. Once, stumped around a friend's deathbed, a nurse suggested some music to pass to I think of that phrase, humming to the radio above the hens squawking, winners to date, praising. Matt Thomas is a smallholder farmer and occasional community college teacher. His work has appeared recently in Triggerfish Critical Review, Killing the Buddha, and the Hampden-Sydney Review. He lives with his partner and their daughter in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #38 ... Read the full review

WAR AND PEACE 2.0 A Nonfiction Visual Narrative by Emily Steinberg ... Read the full review

Sadie Shorr-ParksTWO POEMS Winter on Earth In my bruise blue Subaru with the drooling sunroof rattling down skyline drive. Winter on earth can mean leafless branching, iced asphalt. Headache sunlight ahead: a migraine to match the moment. Winter can be a dice game in West Virginia towns. Boil that water, baby, the good things have already happened. Modern Ledas We pulled up in gold Jettas and ate up all the other girls. I brought the sky with me: a black-on-black bandana. A swan mingled among us graceless in baseball cap. I said, be careful of the transformed: men untethered from themselves. Already the lawn had sprouted crinkled plastic cups, red flowers. He left with a freshman. He ran red on the drive home. Sadie Shorr-Parks teaches writing at Shepherd University, where she is the Director for the Society for Creative Writing. She is the author of HONEY MONTH (Main Street Rag). Her writing has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Aquifer: The Florida Review, Blueline, Cimarron Review, The Hong Kong Review, Lines+Stars, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sierra Nevada Review, Southwest Review, Utne Reader, and Witness, among others. Her book reviews can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Southern Literary Review. She edited Becoming International: Musings on ... Read the full review

Gemini WahhajURGENT When Polly’s father died, she received an outpouring of love from his friends. She was grieving by not taking any calls—no tears, no ceremony, just silence, and a total loss of appetite—but these were international calls, coming from Bangladesh, in the middle of the night, from strange-looking numbers. Her father had died in Bangladesh. Her mother had died a year before that. Polly was an only child, unmarried, living by herself in faraway Houston, where she knew few Bengalis, certainly not anyone from her parents’ past. She had left home two decades ago for a master’s degree in the US and never returned. “Come back and settle your property,” Bashir Uncle advised Polly over the crackling phone line one night. Another night, she woke up to fierce ringing and Rahim Uncle’s words, “We are all meeting to discuss how to help you.” Yet another of her father’s friends, Musa Uncle, cried to her for several minutes, then asked in a clogged, emotional voice, “Tell me, child, what can I do for you? Polly called them Uncle, but she was not related to them by blood and she did not know them well, knew them only by name or ... Read the full review

A Conversation with Ann de Forest, editor of the Anthology WAYS OF WALKING, New Door Press, 258 pages, Interview by Amy Beth Sisson I met writer Ann de Forest many years ago, but during the pandemic we formed a new connection around poetry. We became critique partners and attended Claire Oleson’s Poetic Anatomies class. Ann is an accomplished writer in multiple genres who often focuses on the resonance of place. When she mentioned she was editing an anthology of essays about walking, I knew it was something that I, as a walker, reader, and writer, wanted to get my hands on. After reading the advance reader copy, I was impressed not only by the excellent essays but by the thoughtful structure of the collection. I was delighted to have this conversation with Ann about the project. (The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) —ABS, April 2021 Amy Beth: Tell me how you came to edit this compelling collection of essays about walking. Ann: In 2016, I was involved in Swim Pony’s Cross Pollination artists residency with Adrienne Mackey, JJ Tiziou, and Sam Wend. Together we decided our collaborative project would be to walk around the perimeter of Philadelphia ... Read the full review

beginner to advanced nonfiction writers | Synchronous  POSTPONED UNTIL FALL 2022 ... Read the full review

DREADFUL SORRY: Essays on an American Nostalgia by Jennifer Niesslein Belt Publishing, 162 pages Reviewed by Beth Kephart I have been reading Jennifer Niesslein’s new collection of essays—Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia—on a suddenly warm February afternoon. Outside on the deck I sit, the white stones of a fire pit glowing by my feet, the neighborhood kids riding their remarkably loud vehicles up and down and up and down the nearest driveway. Somewhere in Russia, Vladimir Putin is addressing his people with a long list of grievances. He is stamping his figurative foot, wishing for a yester-year, a yester-century, even. And because Putin wants what so long ago was, there are nearly 200,000 troops massed on the Ukrainian border. Putin’s nostalgia is maniacal. A pretext for death, destruction, war. Putin’s nostalgia is a bullying. It’s what he wants, and how he wants it, and the fact that he wants it now. What is this thing, nostalgia? What does the word rightly mean? What is it good for, and what good might it do? Those are the questions that set into motion the true stories at the heart of this thoughtful and thought-provoking collection. To Niesslein, who previously authored ... Read the full review

SINGING LESSONS FOR THE STYLISH CANARY by Laura Stanfill Lanternfish Press, 352 pages An appreciation by Beth Kephart On Sale: April 19, 2022 Picture a serinette: Music in a box. Notes arranged as pins. Crank it, and here it comes: the auditory sensation of someone whistling, maybe, or the chirp of cheerful birds. Now place that serinette into a quiet, magical village—an imaginary French town called Mireville, where women work lace and men craft these intricate music boxes and the sun shines ever so persistently, thanks to an incident some time ago, when a baby stopped crying and the clouds—well, they parted. A boy named Henri lives in the town of Mireville. His father, Georges, is the master serinette maker; serinettes are the family affair. Georges is also the long-ago baby who stopped crying, otherwise known as The Sun-Bringer. He is, additionally, not the very best father in the world, nor the very best husband, and he has a secret he likes to believe he’s good at keeping—a son on the opposite side of the world. A son named Robert who is growing up in a house that is part aviary, where singing canaries are most graciously accommodated by a ... Read the full review

Christine MullerADULT SWIMS Someone must have peed in the pool. From the vigor of the lifeguards’ arms waving us out, I figured that someone must have peed a lot. I tried to keep my head above water as I made my way to the end of the lane, thinking about all of the sweat, saliva, and mucus that’s already a part of the liquid-based exercise experience. At any given time, someone is spitting into the gutter, and at all times, lap swimmers exert themselves enough to be soaking wet on dry land. Swimming is funny that way; it can look clean, even though it’s probably the workout that most fully immerses you in other people’s excretions. I tried to look at it philosophically: Nietzsche says whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And The Joker says whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stranger. I wondered which way this might go for me as I pulled myself forward. I noticed that my earnest but so-slow-am-I-actually-going-backward breaststroke wasn’t getting me out of the water fast enough, so I decided to walk instead. This was the instructional pool, after all. At 85 degrees and never more than 4.5 feet deep, it invited amateurs ... Read the full review

Kelley WhiteI AM LOSING MY HANDS. The right hand middle finger middle joint swollen. I can almost see it. And hurt. Three times I try to open a bottle and hurt. Struggle. Will I need to ask for help? And who? There is the caretaker and I do so little. Last night the bulk the sheer bulk of him in bed. I move and it is a truck. A seismic dinosaur. The bedclothes shifting. Bedclothes. How many he saved. And all the tolls. He took tools he saved from his raggedly van. Sad. How sad. We did sleep in it and once I shivered shivered shivered big me. On skyline drive where there were deer and I saw them in the misty morning. And that boy hitchhiking with his dog. I don’t remember their names, the boy or the dog. Might have been Australian. He drew us both. Not what I think I look like. Yet my braids are gone now. So many shears. Years. It would not harm be me now to grow them back. How could it? This is this is a draft. Automatic s writing with a malfunctioning finger. Will it improve if I go faster? If ... Read the full review

Bree SmithSHELTER First, the wound has to clot. In the hemostasis phase, blood vessels constrict to stop blood flow. Platelets fuse together to form a seal. Coagulation binds the wound on a molecular level. If a wound doesn’t clot, it bleeds out. After thirteen years as the director of a women’s shelter, I know: the ones who don’t clot are the no-chance girls. These are the girls with loose teeth and rib bones poking through their tank tops. These are the ones who don’t make it past their stepfathers. The ones who are always found a few minutes too late. Krysta’s wounds were raw. At 15, her mother started pushing her to get pregnant. Babies mean child support checks. 24-year-old Krysta had two elementary school-aged children and a baby by her last landlord. When I did my nightly checks at the shelter, she stuck two spoons in a gallon of ice cream and advised me to invest in sexier pajamas. During the day, we sat at my desk planning imaginary weddings on TheKnot.com. I helped get her son into a special school for children with behavioral needs. We had conversations about why it’s not okay for her 6-year-old daughter to ... Read the full review

Grace KennedyMAKING A CAKE Today is my father’s birthday and I am making a chocolate Guinness cake. I am making this cake by hand because I do not have a stand mixer and do not want to spend two-hundred and seventy-nine dollars on a twenty-pound gadget I will only use once a year. I am making a cake even though I do not really like cake and do not have a stand mixer because my dad is turning seventy which I know is not so old but feels very old when I watch his hands shake as he pours his beer into a tall glass. Three years ago on his sixty-seventh birthday when we found out why his hands were shaking I got so drunk off wine and port that I do not remember if there was any cake at all. I am making a cake but I have gotten distracted by a video of a baby eating vanilla ice cream and now there is flour all over my phone but I do not wipe it off and I wonder when or if I will have babies and when or if my father will get to hold them. Yesterday he ... Read the full review

Cassie BurkhardtTHE TRUTH When I was in eighth grade, I had a terrible eating disorder and was hospitalized for most of it. When that didn’t work, I was admitted to a treatment center in Utah called The Center for Change, three thousand miles from home and everything I’d ever known. Eventually, I got out, but I still looked like a scarecrow with braces. My parents, bless them, decided to give me a fresh start, sent me to a private school, an artsy, alternative one where I could hopefully be myself, whoever that was. Ms. Johnson was my English teacher, and she introduced me to poetry, to form and meter, a structure for my feelings. She encouraged us to keep a journal, a marbled composition notebook—you know the one—and write in it every day. “Fold any page you don’t want me to read,” she said. At first, the book was all folds, an accordion of secrets. I asked for another book. At about the same time, I was gifted a CD of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair read aloud to the soundtrack from the movie Il Postino, and I think the combination of those two things that year ... Read the full review

Cassie BurkhardtSPONTANEOUS BUNGEE JUMP IN SWITZERLAND Twenty-six years old. Pink cutoffs. Barefoot. Day trip to Lugano with friends when we see a sign with an arrow: James Bond Golden Eye Cliff Jump. No one else wants to do it, but I do, so we hop in the VW Golf, make our way up to the tiptop. My husband can’t even look out the window. Rocks, some jagged, others smooth as elephant backs, peek from glacial water, turquoise but stop-your-heart cold. Twenty minutes later, I’m poised, arms to a T, toes on the very edge, ready to dive headfirst off a pirate’s plank on the lip of a dam so thin it’s like a giant grin in free-floating space above the world and 720 feet of sheer vertical concrete down. Someone counts. One. Two. Three. I let out a primal scream and dive off the face of it. It’s horrible. My heart is in my tonsils. I’m eating wind. Cheeks liquid, I’m dying. Nothing to save me from glacial rock death but a bungee on my ankle, when one millisecond later an incredible lightness rinses over me because I am not dying, I am flying. Slow and fast at the same ... Read the full review

WANTED: TWO WRITERS MUSE ON THE ART OF SAYING NO by Beth Kephart and Stephanie Weaver They want you. They want you for free. Because you are wise, they say. Because you know things. Because they want their people to know your person, to learn from you, with pleasure. They will, of course, be keeping all the cash, but you should focus on the pleasure. Just an hour of your time, they say. Then (a few days later): Two? You say yes because you are conditioned for yes, because isn’t this what you, playing the writer, do—yield what you know and who you hope to be? You wish to be part of the conversation. You wish to be helpful, hopeful, a strike of winter sun or a jar of daisies, a puff of buoyancy. Amenable, in other words. At the very least, not nasty. Yes, you say, and then (a few days later), they say: Three? You should stop right there, when they say three. When have I paid my dues, had enough exposure? Am I—aren’t I—sufficiently exposed? Isn’t my light, my bouquet, the breath of words trailing from my fingertips onto the page enough to get paid for my ... Read the full review

Danny Cooperflats hot sand and grainy glass yours is packed like clay me i grab some seashells and scrape to the bone doe deer’s ribs on hard cement honey fur still clean and pristine same wet pink thread of mine in coiled cervine braid rigid skull, a cratered moon flakes like chocolate croissant under silver steak knife gray matter oozes out grimy fingers prod the grooves looking for the right shape a celtic knot or bunny-eared loops force the image clear mold and wet blur my grassy eyes can’t glare i send your vision in the mail watch me bend in the grid bug bites on my legs lunulas swelling their bed overgrown green marrow or a neck i think you’ll bite grind me into ash amaranth slivers of meat sieve through the desert skin in the wind Danny Cooper is a recent graduate from the University of Pennsylvania where he majored in English and Earth Science. He’s originally from South Jersey and is now living in Brooklyn, New York. He spent the past summer working at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities developing climate storytelling workshops. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #35 ... Read the full review

Emily SteinbergMen O Pause For over a thousand years, menopause has been treated as an illness, something to be feared and fixed. Emily Steinberg’s Men O Pause visualizes the grim history of the treatment and attitudes towards menopausal women throughout history, from the Salem Witch Trials to 19th-century institutionalization for hysteria, to menopause medicalization in the early 20th century. The story ends with her own positive experience of empowerment and self-actualization. In 2021, not only do we no longer need to be ‘fixed,' but we are quite happy to be living outside the realm of women’s historical natural function. —Caroline Harris, from M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have, Flint Books, UK "Men O Pause" was previously published in M-Boldened: Menopause Conversations We All Need to Have, Ed. Caroline Harris, Flint Books, UK 2020 Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative. Her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her ... Read the full review

Sara DavisTWO STUDENTS WALK INTO A BAR I can't believe you haven't heard this story. I feel like we tell it all the time! Maybe not in class, no, but grad school isn't all lectures and bad coffee. We do have fun sometimes. Anyway, Lee and I used to come here all the time in our first year, because on Thursdays they had pierogies for fifty cents apiece and we'd have money left over for nasty beer, except I think this happened on her birthday so maybe it was nasty rum instead. I'm sorry, I don't know if I should try to tell this story without Lee, I'm not going to remember it right. Well, anyway, we were sitting up at the bar over there having some kind of intense conversation. I think it was when we were planning on co-teaching a class about rape culture—I told you, we know how to have fun. So we were just talking with our heads together when out of nowhere this guy thumps down right next to her and says "Hey, you, have either of you read any Russian literature?" I know! Not even an excuse me! He wasn't from our program. I ... Read the full review

For writers of all levels, synchronous ... Read the full review

For writers of all levels | Synchronous with asynchronous writing assignments ... Read the full review

THE FUNNY IN MEMOIR: Alison Bechdel, Dinty W. Moore, and Trey Popp A Craft Essay by Beth Kephart A few years ago, a friend who had first come to know me through my books and was slowly coming to know me through myself—our emails, our occasional actual conversations, our letters, our back-and-forth gifts—sent a note my way that included (I’m paraphrasing here; none of my friends speak as strangely as I write) this question: How is it that I’ve known you for all these years and I’m only now learning that you are funny? Why have you hidden your funny? I wondered then, I wonder now, what frees me to precipitate the giggle. And why I so rarely feel so free. And why funny isn’t in most of the books I write, why I tend, on the page, toward the not-hilarious me. Writing funny, especially in memoir, is a surprisingly recherché talent. Every spring semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach memoir, the ratio of funny submissions to not-funny submissions is, on average, one: everything else. This semester our funny was the work of Jonathan, who had me choking on my chortles at 4 a.m., as I read ... Read the full review

Sara DavisEVER GIVEN Because the spring tide comes in on its own time, because the earth goes on turning and the moon goes on circling around us and the ocean eddies unevenly but inevitably between them, because the seawater rises even in the desert latitudes of the world where scorching winds blow dust in the eyes of sailors, the tide came in on the seventh day after the Ever Given lodged slantwise in the throat of the Red Sea like a crust of dry bread. It was because the seawater welled in the deep trench men cut between continents, because the seawater poured into the furrows men scratched into the muddy banks where her bow sank into the sand, because the seawater flowed under and around her steel hull, that this colossal obstruction, this beached vessel vast enough to be seen from space, this ship of shipments simply buoyed up and floated away, as light as the plastic dross she ferries across the world to waiting hands. And so you too can wait, ever grounded and ever grateful, as long as it takes for the tide to lift you out of the mud and clay when all your clawing at ... Read the full review

Lizzy LemieuxLOAVES My daughter tells me her dream while I pack her lunchbox. What a terrifying nightmare! I say and kiss the top of her head. She narrows her eyes. Mom, she says, It was not a nightmare. It was a dream. She smiles, showing off two lost teeth. I do not correct her. Even though it is polite, when you dream up terrible things, to pretend that they are unwanted. But she is still learning, still puzzling over the sound an 'o' makes. When is it a short exhale? When is it a sharp howl? I add a sticky note to her lunch and make myself proud. Motherhood is contained in small gestures. Later, I get the call. My daughter has decided today the 'o' makes the howling sound. When I arrive at her school, the teacher says, Your daughter is crying because she cannot read the sticky note in her lunchbox. She pronounces love like loaves of bread. I bristle. She is very fragile, I say. I collect my daughter from the timeout corner. As we are leaving, the teacher grabs my arm and says, I'm worried about her dream. I say, It was just a nightmare. No, ... Read the full review

Christine MullerANTONY AND CLEOPATRA They sat the way they wished they could always sit: together, with wine at their fingertips, a cooling breeze in the air, and the fading day’s light sparkling like magic across the terrace’s gold fixtures. Cleopatra told a story. “He was so funny, you know. Well, of course you know, you knew him. This one time, he told me, he said to me, he said, ‘Hey, Clea: workin’ hard or hardly workin’?’ Oh, so funny. Too funny.” “That’s—kind of funny, I guess.” Antony took another sip from his cup. “And so wise. This other time he said to me, ‘Clea, do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ So true, you know? So wise.” “Mm.” “What’s that?” “Oh. Nothing. I didn’t say anything.” “Are you OK? You seem, I don’t know...bored.” “I’m not bored. It’s just—” “What?” “I just don’t know what you ever saw in him.” “What I saw in him?” Antony was undeterred. “Yeah, I mean—he wasn’t much to look at. Like, literally. Just by proportions. Next to other people he looked like he was drawn to scale. Small guy, is all I’m saying.” “He was Julius fucking Caesar, ... Read the full review

Emily SteinbergTHE RECKONING The Reckoning is a 22-page full-color visual narrative, that illustrates our planet’s stark environmental crisis on a visceral gut level in words and images. It explores how our sustained misuse of natural resources is intertwined and connected, on micro and macro levels, impacting everything from climate change to how the Covid 19 Virus was transmitted from animals to humans. It imagines how we can do better. The Reckoning, supported by a grant from The Studio for Sustainability and Social Action, Penn State University, was created in response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Responsible Consumption and Production. —Emily Steinberg Emily Steinberg is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and visual narrative and her work has been shown across the United States and Europe. Most recently, her first cartoon and Daily Shouts story were published by The New Yorker. Since 2013, her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine. In 2019 she became Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver and now curates submissions. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Steinberg teaches visual narrative at Penn State University, Abington College, and Drexel College of Medicine, where she is Artist-in-Residence. She ... Read the full review

Dylan CookPLENTY OF FISH Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ocean, already strong and getting stronger as the light shifted from orange to white. On a good day, no one bothered him on this beach. He could expect to see one or two old retirees fishing too, but they usually kept their distance and never said anything to him besides the obligatory “How’re the fish today?” to which he’d respond with either “Not a nibble” or “Got a few keepers.” Beyond that, they all had a tacit agreement to keep the peace by keeping to themselves. Matt baited his line with some baby squids he’d picked up on his drive to the shore. He had a good feeling about today. High tide was just about to peak, so the fish would be caught up in the swell and dragged in towards the coast. That was the theory, anyway. Matt believed in it when it was working and blamed his luck when it ... Read the full review

THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD Krys Malcolm Belc Counterpoint Press 304 pages Reviewed by Beth Kephart Krys Malcolm Belc—nonbinary, transmasculine, and talented—begins his memoir with an Irish dance—“all jumping and pounding, the tight black laces against my calves, the bang of hard shoes on the floor.” He is young and the music permeates, and now, he writes, “I try to remember what it was like then, when I was four and five and six, if I was unhappy. I am supposed to remember being unhappy, but mostly what I remember is what it’s like to stand there knowing the dance is about to start.” Supposed to remember. Supposed to be. Supposed to become. But suppose does not fit the life Belc will live. Competitive, just like his father. Prone to moments of rage. Enrolled in an all-girls’ Catholic school, dressed in the costumery of girlhood. A girlfriend who becomes a boyfriend who becomes a partner, a parent, a “natural mother of the child,” according to legal documents, and then, at last, following the birth of his child and testosterone treatments, a human being who, with his beard, shaved head, and Cross-Fit body, is assessed by ... Read the full review

Kate PetersonAT A CAFÉ IN VICTORIA, BC TWO GREY-HAIRED MEN TALK ABOUT LOVE She’s in the garden all the time and I’ve got my bridge, and the next thing you know you’re living different lives. One asks the other, If she finds another guy do you think you’d still be friends? I wonder if this is generational or national, men talking this way out in public, over a cup of coffee. My ex was absorbed in his book and didn’t notice, which may also be generational or national. After a while he eyed me taking notes and guessed I was writing about him. He looked up to say he just realized he is more American than he wants to be. Wind lifted in my chest, waves of loneliness and love I’ll never understand. The way it rises and falls. The men started up a game of Mahjong and my coffee was gone so I got restless, which is obviously generational and national. Finally, we moved to the water. Kate Peterson’s chapbook Grist won the Floating Bridge Prize and was published by Floating Bridge Press in 2016. Her poetry, prose, and interviews have been published in Sugar House Review, Glassworks, The ... Read the full review

Valerie LovelandI AM THAT GROUP OF PICTURES OF SPIDERWEBS MADE BY SPIDERS ON DIFFERENT DRUGS Scientists call everything an experiment, .........................even when ......iit is actually a meme even when ................................it is actually a spiderweb beauty contest Scientists don’t realize even when they talk about drugs, ....................................................they are still nerds. ......Who hasn’t been........ an accident, an experiment, a copy of an experiment, .................another copy of an experiment? Everyone always tells me I am........................ so .................................right: I am proof there is a part of us all that can be normal. But I forgot to tell you spider moms die before the babies are born so ............nobody teaches spiders how to make their webs. I forgot to tell you a spider doesn’t bother to go back and fix their mistakes. ..........................................A fact becomes a fun fact when everyone attempts to tell it to everyone else ..........................................but everyone already knows it. ............One time, a person tried to tell this group of photos ............................................................about this group of photos. I usually display ..............................high contrast black background with white webs but when I am angry I switch ....................................................................................to beige background with black webs. My psychiatrist told me I need to find a new doctor ................................................because he is ... Read the full review

Ann de ForestAMMONITES mountains once were ocean  evidence coils beneath our feet  prehistoric curlicues  not yet nautilus  not yet snail  not yet calcified turban washed up on the beach ...........................void of any tender .....................................creature barely old enough to remember  tasmanian devil’s cyclone wake  cartoon cat’s stiff armed stumbles  vertiginous eyes hypnotize  pulsing black & white  watch dangles ...........................sways  eyelids ....................................fall .............................................................................where does time begin? crack the case  find the spring  sister crouched beneath a crib  a finger flick sends silver spiral shimmying up spinning down  mesmerized by tiny revolutions mesmerized by bounce and drop ...........................by boing ................................and hum .................................................................................danger up ahead rattler on the trail  vortex in the toilet bowl  fingers furled to pack a punch  lobster thrashing in a pot  fallen leaf and flame-licked letter  go in green  come out red  tail ...........................rolled up between ....................................your legs tentacles sweep across the map  tempest whirls  turns one blind eye  twists wind and water  flattening palms pounding the panhandle  whitening the gulf  your thumbs ...........................too cold to leave ...........................       any imprint .................................................................................curl up & die old woman tends her labyrinth  plants boxwood seedlings ankle high  a lifetime pulling weeds curves her spine ...........................downward ..................................eyes drop fiddlehead unfurls to fern  ... Read the full review

A GHOST IN THE THROAT by Doireann Ní Ghríofa Biblioasis [North American edition forthcoming in June] reviewed by Beth Kephart “This is a female text,” Doireann Ní Ghríofa asserts as her story begins. A rouse. A prayer. A persuasion. A female text because Ní Ghríofa suffuses her days with the domestic arts of hoovering, dusting, folding, mothering, and bends her prose toward those ticking rhythms when she carves out a moment and writes. A female text because Ní Ghríofa carries the lament of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman of the late eighteenth century, in her bones as she works—a poem called Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, a poem of howling grief erupted from the murder of the poet’s husband. A female text because the words have risen up in Ní Ghríofa and stayed: This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours. Ní Ghríofa wants us to know the story of the widow, whose poem still keens across the centuries but whose biography ... Read the full review

A MEMOIR CONVERSATION with David Marchino and Beth Kephart A former student (now a writer and a teacher) finds himself in his once-teacher’s memoir. A conversation ensues about mirrors, facsimiles, and blankness ... Read the full review

For experienced nonfiction writers | Hybrid  ... Read the full review

Louise BarrySLOW STARTER 1. I stand at the kitchen table, poking at a lump of raw bread dough. “I don’t understand why it’s not rising,” I say. My roommate wants to be helpful. “Sometimes it’s the temperature of the room,” she says. “It likes a dark, warm environment. Maybe put it in a cupboard for a while.” Working with yeast is a negotiation; the yeast is in negotiation with the temperature and humidity in your home, and with the other ingredients you mix with it. My recipe tells me to combine the ingredients—salt, yeast, flour, water—and leave them alone for a minimum of twelve hours, preferably eighteen. Actually, the phrase used is “let dough rest,” as if the dough is feeling tired. I’m tired too, but I have a restless need to act in response to crisis. It’s difficult to come to terms with the idea that some things should be left alone. I spend a lot of time in my room. I also like a warm, dark environment. I feel sick at the thought of the need that must exist outside my door, invisible to me for now, but terribly real. I think about all the people who don’t ... Read the full review

Dylan CookTHE GREENER MY GRASS Maureen could clearly remember the day in December the two young professors moved in across the street and how much more she respected them back then. It was a shame that Mrs. Graham had passed, really, but Maureen liked the idea of two yuppies coming into that stuffy, gray house, sprucing it up a little bit, and bringing some fresh energy to the neighborhood. And professors, no less! With any luck, they’d be the first step in turning Manasquan into a kind of cultural center along the Jersey Shore where intellectuals and artists lived and worked, anything that would warrant it being bolded on maps. Each box they pulled from their U-Haul held that dream. When she first met the professors, they had been so warm and kind, so cute behind their nearly matching pairs of glasses, that Maureen, for the first time in her life, considered greeting her new neighbors with a pie. She decided that a pie would be too kitschy, but she held the idea of her neighbors’ potential close to her heart like a locket. For good reason, too, because in a matter of weeks the couple had painted over Mrs ... Read the full review

Mike NeesFLARE As she clocks in, Jillian looks up from the computer to find a wrinkled envelope dangling in her face. Her chest tightens. “Thank god you’re here,” Sonya says, waiting for her to take it. “Everyone’s calling out.” Jillian grabs the letter, slips it in her apron pocket. “Not me,” she says, out of breath. She and her dad are nowhere near the estimate the mold people gave them, and the latest bloom inflames her airways. “What are my tables?” While Sonya checks the floor plan, Jillian answers the phone ringing at the counter. The man on the other end starts placing an order for pick-up, but his kids can’t make up their minds. You want Denny’s before the apocalypse or not? he shouts. She hears rumblings about getting Chili’s instead. As the debate drags on, Sonya glares at her. “Can I help you?” Jillian asks the man, as forceful as she can muster. “Sir, can I help you?” Sonya takes the phone and hangs up on him. “Some people can’t be helped.” Jillian’s first table is a young couple with a daughter. “I’m incredibly strict with myself,” the man says, ordering his coffee. “I don’t drink milk, I ... Read the full review

Amy Beth SissonDISSECTION After school my teacher helped me pull the pink downy breast feathers to clear the skin and make an incision She put the scalpel into my hand smaller than the body pinned to the black wax tray I cut to reveal porous bones, tiny intestines, spongy lungs. This would never happen now A teacher today would lose her job Though plenty of robins are still found dead on sidewalks Night before last I didn’t hear the screech owl whose cry had kept me awake all week When I awoke you came to mind out in the smoke-choked west Where birds are falling from the skies of the migratory flyways I texted but you still haven't replied But today in the early hours I again lay listening for the descending whine and long trill Amy Beth Sisson is sheltering in a small town outside of Philly. Her day job is in software development. She tells programmers what business people want and tells business people why they can't quite have it. She completed UPenn's online Modern Poetry course, ModPo, this summer.  Her fiction has appeared in Enchanted Conversation and Sweet Tree Review. Her non-fiction for children has appeared in Highlight's High Five and Fun for ... Read the full review

Evan AndersSPEAKING OF SUNFLOWERS the world is bare bones an orphan after rage relinquishes her arrow. magnolias ago, sunflowers stormed my mouth every night an attempt to take ownership of the sun every tide stumbling into decimation a collied exists as a reminder we were born a flicker of elegance. autumn evolved with our refusal to compromise, a sea turned to snow, the sea’s last poem another battle with the sheets every destroyer has a price to pay for petals strewn upon the floor. who am i to question this state of decay? stripped bare the world is stone soured on the promise of gold speaking of sunflowers each petal a faceless instinct a glimpse at where the dust gathers i’ve glorified my share of silk. where once i was a storm i am afraid where once i cherished chaos, chaos became my craft. where do i go to scream? no longer whispers in a vase i swear to god silence is a virtue. we chew love for sugar not sustainability lost in a lullaby, i repeat myself how shall i go to war with this flesh? if i am empty, what are you? to become the tide, one must ... Read the full review

Music by Richard Casimir, "Antumbra" (poem) by Herman BeaversTHE ESPERANZA PROJECT In classical music, a fermata is a pause of unspecified length printed above a note or rest. It is represented by an eyebrow above a dot, nicknamed a "birdseye" or "cyclops eye." How long that pause should last is left to the discretion of the performer or the conductor. In March 2020, the music world paused, subito—suddenly—leaving concert halls dark for the foreseeable future, and an entire industry stunned and unemployed. For how long, we can only guess. And yet, by comparison, this Great Silence seems trivial: a global pandemic is killing millions. The rest struggle against police brutality, racial injustice, the rise of fascism, the precarious state of democracy. In late June, as our American cities broke open in protests over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I received a WhatsApp message from my longtime friend, Richard Casimir, a Haitian-born violinist and composer now living in Pamplona, Spain. He'd written a string orchestra piece on the improbable (it seemed to me, in this dark time) theme of hope. Now he was enlisting performers from all over the world to record their individual parts while quarantined at ... Read the full review

Nicole GreaveEIDOLON She said there are some things you will always be, like Italian, some skills interchangeable:  folding underwear and trussing a chicken, some days for darkness.  I remind her of her dead daughter.  Her true character! Everything is a lie and everything a truth. We always know it. Like how we are loved and unwanted. As a girl I drank water out of shoes. It made sense, all of it. Nicole Greaves teaches at The Crefeld School in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an M.Ed. in special education. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary reviews and was awarded prizes by The Academy of American Poets and the Leeway Foundation of Philadelphia. She is a recent 2020 finalist for the Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest and was a 2015 finalist for the Coniston Prize of Radar Poetry, who also nominated her for The Best of the Net. She is a former poet laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and resides minutes outside of Philadelphia with her family Cover photo from Pixabay Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #31 ... Read the full review

William SulitDUMP TRUMP: Illustrated T-Shirts Many artists have the ability to verbalize their thoughts with great clarity and eloquence—sadly, I’m not one of those. This must be a great source of frustration for my wife Beth, who is an extremely accomplished writer and well versed in the art of verbal communication. But she does not complain; she smiles and lets me babble aimlessly until I get distracted by a squirrel or something. Oh well. As I used to say to my mother when she was yelling at me for something I did (or didn’t do): That’s just the way God made me.In any case, I should stop rambling and get to the point which is to write a few words about this image. I decided to make a series of drawings that chronicle the pure and unadulterated stupidity perpetrated by the current occupant of the White House. I really didn’t want to spend too much time staring at reference photos of Trump so I picked a character that visually had similar characteristics: bottom-heavy, awkward, graceless, has difficulty drinking water with one hand, etc. And so I landed on a duck, even though I am fully aware that even the dumbest ... Read the full review

THE SHARPEST TOOLS IN THE DRAWER: Honing Critical Distance in First-Person Narratives A Masterclass by Cleaver Nonfiction Editor Lise Funderburg Four Sundays, 12:00pm - 3:00 pm:  Oct 11, Oct 18, Oct 25, Nov 1, 2020 $175 Early Bird / $200 regular Class limit: 10 Questions: [email protected] SOLD OUT Writing from personal experience is always a double-edged sword in Creative Nonfiction: on the one side, we have almost limitless access to material. On the other, familiarity often breeds blind spots, cheating the work of dimension, resonance, and narrative drive. Through close readings of exemplary work, craft essays, writing exercises, discussion, and peer review, we will build strategies and practices that elevate your personal essays and memoir projects. Expect to become a stronger writer, a better reader, and an enthusiastic reviser. Lise Funderburg’s latest book is Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents, a collection of all-new work by twenty-five writers, which Publishers Weekly deemed a “sparkling anthology” in its starred review. Previous books include the memoir, Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home, and the recently reissued collection of oral histories, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity. Her work has been published in the New York Times, TIME, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The ... Read the full review

WRITING THE PERSONA POEM "When I Use I" A Poetry Workshop taught by Herman Beavers Asynchronous with optional Zoom sessions 5 Weeks October 16-November 13 $275 Class Limit: 15 Questions: [email protected] The persona poem is a staple of Western poetry. Whether it’s Andrew Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress” or W.B. Yeats’ s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” or Ai’s cycle of poems written in the voice of J. Edgar Hoover, the persona poem offers the poet an opportunity to step out of her own skin and embody another personality, whose character traits may be a radical departure from her own but who gives the poet a mouthpiece through which to express feelings and ideas. The main ingredient of the persona poem is empathy, which offers poets the means for entering into the concerns and predicaments of another person. In this five-week workshop, we will devote time each week to reading and discussing persona poems, trying to hone in on what makes the voice in the poem sound like authentic speech, how the poem’s use of syntax, rhythm, and pacing combine to create the sense that the persona exists in time and space, and finally the concerns the poet is ... Read the full review

IN THE WOODS Mid-June. It's cool. It's quiet. the sun-dappled path is rugged and craggy and I've been walking it one or another for 55 years. Gus pulls me along, his pantaloons jauntily swaying in the breeze, stopping at each watering hold with expectant, happy eyes. In here, I don't have to think about 115,000 dead. In here, I don't have to think about a 27-year old shot in the back in a Wendy's parking lot or a 46-year old dying with a knee on his neck after 9 minutes ... Read the full review

My wife fingered the remaining chocolate syrup from her bowl to her mouth and announced she was going to bed. I’ll admit The Tonight Show monologue that night wasn’t going to change her mind. It was all obvious punchlines about the president’s Asia trip, with some cheap shots at the end for the congressman with the Honduran mistress maid, and the reality TV star with the unflattering DUI mugshot. I feared this was becoming the norm. I followed my wife upstairs, hoping we might discuss this unsettling trend, or get in something cursory between the two of us, but she fell asleep in a way that suggested a medical condition ... Read the full review

The banana bread would not bake. Maddy had followed the recipe to a T, only substituting canola oil for half the butter, honey for half the sugar, skim for whole milk, and nutmeg for cinnamon. Putting on long oven mitts and pulling the door open, she checked the loaf again. Three hundred and fifty degree heat swept into the kitchen, already filled with late summer swelter. Not wanting to take the time to lift the single bread pan onto the top of the stove, she pulled out the rack, took off one mitt and stuck a toothpick into the loaf. Raising it straight up, it was plain to the naked eye—her reading glasses were sitting idle on the kitchen table—that raw batter clung to the sliver of wood for dear life. If it had been at all cooperative it would let the toothpick withdraw, leaving no trace on the twig, as if untouched by the experience ... Read the full review

There are three women installed in the living room when I arrive. Smartly dressed, young moms most likely, with highlighted loosely curled hair, gleaming toenails, and tailored pantsuits. All have open laptops and cell phones—new information and guidelines saturate the air. I arrive with a friend because this is where our weekly writing group meets, at Hope’s house—because she’s wheelchair-bound, and can’t easily secure a ride to our usual meeting places. The women are from the hospice—nurse, social worker, and gerontologist. It occurs to me that the more they deal with the dying, the farther away they get from death. They bring a pleasing scent to the room, perfume and doughnuts and pastries, which overpower the disinfectant used to clean up after Hope’s father’s renal stent failed in the middle of the night and urine soaked into the carpet ... Read the full review

During the day and a half that I ravenously read Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel, The Royal Abduls, I asked myself these questions. I leaned into the lives of Koya’s magnificently drawn characters, into the nest of troubles they inadvertently twigged together, into the love they did not know how to express. Or forgot to express. Or ran out of time to express ... Read the full review

Emily SteinbergRING THE BELLS: A Visual Narrative Emily Steinberg is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been shown across the United States and Europe. She has been named the first Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia, where she works with medical students to translate their medical school experiences into words and images. Her visual narratives have been regularly published in Cleaver Magazine where she has recently taken on the role of Visual Narrative Editor. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic "Blogging Towards Oblivion," was included in The Moment (HarperCollins). She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State University. Steinberg earned her MFA. and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To submit graphic narratives for consideration in Cleaver, contact Emily at [email protected]. Visit her Cleaver Magazine bio page here. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #29 ... Read the full review

Adrienne lay on the floor of her apartment, thinking that her life had become what she wanted it to be, when her phone began to ring. Sophia sat next to her, cross-legged, with a glass of wine, flipping flashcards and nodding when Adrienne said the right answer. Grassy late-April air drifted through the open window and the sound of crickets came to a swell outside. Neither Adrienne nor Sophia reached for the phone, letting the sound of fluttering bells continue ... Read the full review

The fiery fist above slowly loses its hold / and the musky lungs of autumn grow dry. At last, fall staggers and drops upon the rattling grass / breaking the arched back of summer ... Read the full review

The children make a ball the size of a cantaloupe out of looseleaf paper and book tape. They throw it across the classroom, not listening to my adult cries of “Stop it!” All I want is quiet. These children don’t know how to behave. They are boisterous and loud, and I wonder what their parents would do if they were left alone with them for five minutes. I don’t even want to be here with these children. I am substituting, a thing I do when I am only left with ramen and frozen corn in my larder. Substituting is the emergency brake of my life, the ripcord on the parachute. It keeps me from crashing harder, falling farther than I otherwise would ... Read the full review

There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside the pages of a Carson McCullers book, toward Everglades gators and gun shows, through the annals of art, across parts of Greece and Rome—a tour of landscape and psyche that is seamless, self-assured, quietly inventive. Hinnefeld doesn’t break her own spells. She doesn’t remind you that she’s writing ... Read the full review

In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder ... Read the full review

IN SOME ALIEN PRAIRIE the birds don’t circle the ways they do here     collected in one large cloud      a blanket of ‘of’          there’s no following in backwards time   no picking back up or undoing     the glass hardens almost immediate   the soft bubble at the tip smoothed to hard nub    the sound of liquid in yr straw          a suck bitten ... Read the full review

I thought a lot about this family as I read Julie Justicz’s novel Degrees of Difficulty. Here the child at the center of the heartbreak is third-born Ben, born with damage to his twenty-first chromosome, an “omission in the blueprint” that has resulted in “the recessed jaw that would lead to feeding issues, the missing kidney due to frequent injections, hospitalizations, IV medications. And later, the seizures: Body-wracking grand mals that daily medications could not control.” ... Read the full review

When Faith Sullivan began writing what has become known as her Harvester books—novels like The Cape Ann and The Empress of One and Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse—she invited readers to join her in a fictional Minnesota landscape, then gave them many reasons to return. Sullivan’s Harvester is a palpable place. Its people are relatable and real. They carry burdens and they engage in kindness. Their bones bend with the hills ... Read the full review

Twenty-one-year-old Matthew clicks his tongue in time to each step he takes. Tramping on carpet, he still makes the cupboards rattle as he descends the staircase into the living room. Knowing the clicking signifies contentment, his mother turns over in her bed and allows herself fifteen more minutes of sleep ... Read the full review

The white car that lives in the white of the eye comes out of the sun behind the line of parked cars, the potted plant on the corner ... Read the full review

Maite and her daughter Pala arrived home only minutes ago, and already Pala’s settled in. She’s plopped in front of the TV, watching an inane show on the cartoon channel, all done telling Maite how she ate a cupcake at snack, that Lucy wasn’t playing nicely during recess. Maite hasn’t yet had a chance to change her shoes or chug a glass of water. Her feet ache like hell. ◊◊ Natalie Gerich Brabson is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, and holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from Vassar College. Her fiction has been published in New World Writing and Eunoia Review. In 2017, she received the Go On Girl Book Club Unpublished Writer Award. She lives in Philadelphia, and is at work on her first novel ... Read the full review

I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover? ... Read the full review

“[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint. (A long sentence, a beginning.) ... Read the full review

“I was born a knot like my mother and her mother before her,” Sarah Rose Etter’s debut novel begins, drawing readers into Cassie’s life story, The Book of X. “Picture three women with their torsos twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center.” ... Read the full review

Cheryl HarperPASSAGES: An Installation in Progress I am one of those artists who thinks my work has to say something. I have nothing against paintings that bring together a disparate room décor or just make one feel good, but that’s not what I want to do. If you happen to like my work for any of those reasons, that’s fine, but if you are intrigued and compelled to think about bigger issues, that is my goal. Since 2006 I’ve been making small statues of politicians, particularly of women in the national spotlight, in addition to works that address issues like anti-Semitism, terrorism, and gun violence. But in the last few years, I’ve been thinking about how I came to where I am now, a Jewish woman who lost extended family in the Holocaust and who married a direct descendant of a Southern plantation family that owned other people. I am a descendant of the oppressed who married into a family who oppressed. I used to think of this in terms of predator/prey imagery but I’ve become more immersed in the complex history of both families, especially through the lens of today's rising intolerance. We now live at a time to ... Read the full review

Hot, back in the corner of the coat closet you find it, right where you knew it would be. Pull it out with both hands, it’s a lot heavier than you expected. Dad said never to touch it, but who knows when he’s coming back this time and what else are you supposed to do on a day like this? Show it to your sister, how it gleams in the light let in through the screen door. Stand it up, it comes up to her chin. “Dad’s giant wrench. Can I hold it?” Laugh at her. “It’s bigger than you are.” “So are you, but I could still toss you.” ... Read the full review

Tory Lord O’NeillTWELVE There he was, as always, on the eve of her birthday. She never expected him. Never dreamt of him, but there he was. As always, he was standing on the corner waiting for something—her perhaps—but she didn’t see him until she tripped, snagged her heel, rolled her ankle and fell slightly into him. “Whoa! You okay!” What’s the rush, buttercup? Cuidado, señorita. Each time, his hands felt slightly different. Firm like a contractor. Gentle like a surgeon. Scarred from a fire. But with that first touch, all of their lives came flooding back to her. She remembered how he smelled of cinnamon on that morning in South Bend and how his nose crinkled when he laughed. She remembered the feeling of his fingers running through her wet hair on the shores of San Juan and the feeling of her knees buckling when the military police came to her door in the summer of ’42 to give her notification. In this life, however, he was a piano player. After nearly rolling into an oncoming bus, he’d steadied her and offered to take her for a drink at a bar up the street. She stared into his eyes and ... Read the full review

Numbing    forgiveness-salve slathered on eyes     damned eyes, to sit across from this              man praised for handling his bossy woman   so well− my she-ro,           my sister.           I see Tammy Wynette. We’re slamming wine.         We’re   laughing. I’m globbing it on thick. Blurring memory:    his hands robotic extensions groping me awake     shudder his stupid face     his stupid easy chair− When I woke to it that night, all I said was, You need to go to bed. I may have rubbed forgiveness on too soon ... Read the full review

MID CENTURY HIPSTER by Emily Steinberg Panel 1: It's been quite a year. Last June I went under the knife. And got a new hip. 6.5 years ago dancing like a 20-something freak at my niece's wedding, my left hip snapped. Panel 2: Yeah, I know, brilliant move. This led to bursitis, joint trauma, bone-on-bone, and physical therapy. Then guided steroid injections, to limping badly. Every step excruciating, and, finally, walking with a cane. Panel 3: Doc said I would know when I was ready for hip replacement surgery. What? But I'm only 48.... March 2018, age 53, I knew. Complete physical breakdown. Panel 4: Couldn't walk. Became immobile. Blew up round as a full balloon. Panel 5: The night before surgery was a stunningly beautiful June evening. The last night with my old, crumbly, irregular, jagged hip joint. I was scared. Panel 6: I saw this commercial: If you had hip surgery between 2009 and 2016 and it went BAD, call this number! Very reassuring. And I took a shower with weird special orange antibacterial soap... Remember! Don't get it in your eyes or genitals. Panel 7: I needed to pack a bag. Looked at the moon. Can't sleep. Heart racing ... Read the full review

Daisy has this boy that none of us like. She says they aren’t boyfriend girlfriend but he sure acts like it’s more than a hookup when he texts her things like, where are you? and i miss you much right now baby. Daisy tells me she likes the way he takes control. Like on their first date, he put his hand on her chest and she pushed it away cause she’s “not that kind of girl,” but then after a few more minutes he tried again and she let him. “I wouldn’t like that,” I tell Daisy ... Read the full review

Within the first few pages of The Real Sky by Valerie Fox and Jacklynn Niemiec we meet a theatrical tour guide in a haunted town, a man named Andrew who might turn into someone else at the end of the day, and a mother, covered in plaster, who walks into a field and never returns. Valerie Fox’s hybrid writing in The Real Sky is unexpected and surreal ... Read the full review

A Conversation with Elizabeth Mosier Author of EXCAVATING MEMORY: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HOME from New Rivers Press, 96 Pages Interview by Nathaniel Popkin Elizabeth Mosier logged one thousand volunteer hours processing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory to write EXCAVATING MEMORY: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HOME, which uses archaeology as a framework to explore personal material, including her mother’s memory loss, the layering of shared experience in creating family or community narratives, and the role that artifacts play in historical memory. The essay titled "Believers", a 2015 Best American Essays Notable pick, first appeared in Cleaver. Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier has twice been named a discipline winner/fellowship finalist by the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, and has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her nonfiction has been selected as notable in Best American Essays, and appears most recently in Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She writes the "Intersections" column on alumnae lives for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin. More information at www.ElizabethMosier.com. Nathaniel Popkin: You write, early in the collection, in regard to your work processing objects from an archeological dig near ... Read the full review

Rae PagliaruloME AND MRS. BEE When Mrs. Bee leaves her house, she uses a metal cane to get down the steps, the kind they sell at Rite Aid next to the plastic bed pans and ace bandages. It taps against the concrete at perfect metallic intervals, tink, tink, tink, as she lowers herself down. I hear it even when she isn’t home, when I lock things up for the night, when I nap with the windows open. It’s a small block I live on, houses jammed together in squat, red brick rows. You don’t miss much on a street like this. ◊ Years ago, on the other side of the city, I shared a second floor apartment with my boyfriend. His amusing irritation, once directed at the world, shifted at some point to contempt, aimed squarely at me. Life with him was a full-time job—I managed his moods, changes in weather, what kind of day he had at work; all factors that would dictate whether I was berated, belittled, or simply ignored. I felt more like I was living inside him than in the apartment itself. I started to carve out tiny places where I felt safe. In the bathroom, ... Read the full review

Born with multiple spinal malformations. Missing ribs on the left side—only flesh to guard the collapsed lung. One right lung won’t keep a baby breathing. Slice her throat, insert a trach and attach her to a ventilator. Construct a chest wall with the Vertical Expandable Prosthetic Titanium Rib. Insides on the outside. Red balloon, dark blue tether. Breathe ... Read the full review

Tall A woman grows taller and taller till she looms above her friends, brushes her head on door frames, grows out of her sensible clothes. Like a photograph, heightened, ... Read the full review

Emily SteinbergA NATIONAL EMERGENCY: A Visual Narrative Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, she has been named Humanities Scholar in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine where she will teach medical students how to draw their own stories in words and images. Her visual narratives No Collusion! (2018), Paused (2018), Berlin Story: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, and her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com. Visit her bio page here. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #25 ... Read the full review

Stephan Salisbury has been a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer for more than three decades. Britt & Jimmy Strike Out, his first novel, is a dystopian, satirical quest story about branding, live streaming, social media, and commercialization of lived experience. Britt and her friend Jimmy set out into a blighted urban landscape to find answers when Britt’s online brand starts to fail, friends start disappearing, and mysterious men show up at her home to intimidate and threaten her for not getting in line with the President’s brand. Ken Kalfus describes it as the “first great novel of the Trump Era.” Stephan Salisbury is also the author of a non-fiction book Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland about the anti-Arab hysteria after 9/11 and its devastating effect on people’s lives ... Read the full review

Melissa Duclos’ debut novel Besotted is a lyrical, urgent love story about two young American women, Sasha and Liz, who run away to China to try to find themselves. Sasha has fled all the trappings of her privileged life, including her father who disapproves of her sexuality. Liz, the object of Sasha’s desire, has packed up and left her predictable existence and Amherst-educated boyfriend, having grown tired of being an afterthought of his otherwise-enchanted life ... Read the full review

Heather HolmesTERMS AND CONDITIONS one month I am in philadelphia reading the Andrew Durbin book that describes this club The Spectrum, and the next month I am at The Spectrum watching women flog one another in an affectless way. that’s sort of how it is in new york, I guess, I say to someone later, ha ha, to read something is to conjure it. this is no safeguard against emptiness I wonder at length whether writing always has to stake out a new and special way of seeing. I just wanted to talk about how bored they looked even as the leather began to break skin . I plant the hyssop. I wait it out. I think about how far we are into this century and still I know three women named Geraldine, which G. #2 described to me as a man’s name suffixed diminutively. all three are gay and one of them would like to fuck me. it doesn’t work that way, . even the best smartest scholar most critical of SM’s whiteness still refers to spanking as producing “a reddening” ................“Silvia Federici?” yes! ................“squeeze of lime?” Yes! ................“Forget This Network?” yes, Yes! this isn’t abundance. Maybe I missed ... Read the full review

DRAWING A BLANK A Visual Narrative by Emily Steinberg Pipe bombs to 14 in the mail. 11 Slaughtered at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Kroger grocery, 2 dead. Domestic terrorism. Hounds of hell unleashed But Beto might win over Cruz! But...Kavanaugh and Javanka are still in the White House. Civil War 2.0? Election on Tuesday. I can't look. Holding my breath. So we had a Blue Ripple. 100 women elected to congress! Next day, insane post-election presser. Acosta banned, press pass pulled. Sessions forced to resign. Whitaker in? Who the hell is Whitaker? WTF? Creeping authoritarianism. Then, Thousand Oaks shooting. Then, California burns. And then, Florida recount. Again? Seriously? Then, more house wins! Blue advance? Then, in France, no-show at cemetery due to rain? Veterans Day, no Arlington visit. And Saudis get a pass? Have you no decency, sir? The state of the union is fragile ... Read the full review

The ridiculous dissatisfaction with good fortune begins in shade, when every bit of luck pops up like a harlequin jammed in a jack-in-the-box, and the hue of the lip is wrong wrong wrong— ignoring for the moment the creepy leer of clowns, or the gut twist borne of a springed lurch, or the clatter of the trap click and clack when it opens— and though the arms of the clown spill forth ... Read the full review

Instead of getting on the highway, Jake starts to drive deep into the woods, past the Savage Funeral Home and out 147, past Iona’s Country Bar. I can tell by now that this so-called spontaneous road-trip has been meticulously planned. I think, Iona’s in there, so is Lucky, so is Fran. I give a quick squeeze to my red rubber stress-ball. Jake’s got his box-cutter handy, for just in case we get into an accident and need it to free ourselves from our seatbelts ... Read the full review

The dissection, in simple terms, is a search. Imagine searching your house for a pair of socks. Now, imagine searching your specimen—for our purposes, the body—and this time, the body is your house, and its secret is a pair of socks, misplaced somewhere in the body for you to unearth ... Read the full review

He’s a grotesque in primary colors, as much David Cronenberg as Clark Kent. The cartoons and the movies and the coloring books—they usually forget that. The idea of Spider-Man is, at its core, revolting. When it is time to suit up, Superman bears his classically handsome mug. Batman, Captain America, and Green Lantern, at the very least, leave their chiseled jaws exposed. With Spider-Man, everything hides beneath his spandex. Should you be saved by him—hung up in his gangly, yet muscular arms as he swings you off to safety—you’d look into the face of your hero, and there’d be no reassuring grin or playful wink, but, instead, two pupil-less eyelets, teardrop-shaped and alien, staring hugely as if frozen in shock. It would take all you could muster not to scream ... Read the full review

Blake LondonSEAN’S ROOM Steam from the shower moves in columns to the ceiling. I’m holding Sean’s hand, and his eyes close with the bathroom door—we twine and twist into sheets of flesh. Sean said the comedown is the hardest, but I’m still electric, can hear a crooning in the static of my fingers on his spine. It’s a slow dance with small movements, and the glow in my bloodstream says sway, so we make the steam vibrate in the small space. My fingers smooth water from the divots of his waist. The lazy warmth of him runs down my legs, floods the pale stucco floor. His curves, his hardness, his breath on my neck all feel ancient and half-remembered, and here I am, touching him for the first time again. We let the water run down the drain, dry off with a shared towel, and crawl under the duvet. I wake first, watch the shuttered light play on his shoulders. The street outside is three floors down and a busy that bustles during rush hour. Sean was lucky with his room assignment—a queen size bed (instead of the standard twin), and nearly twice as much floor space as his flatmates ... Read the full review

He was standing outside the double doors of the restaurant, sweating underneath his blazer. He was exactly on time. He saw a girl walking towards him, a close approximation of the one whose picture he had on his phone. He waved to her. She didn’t wave back. “Amelia?” She waved back. Amelia. She was wearing a puff-sleeved pink fur coat, cropped at the waist. He could tell by the sheen of it—his ex-wife had been fond of mink—that it was faux. She trotted up to him and kissed his cheeks in quick succession without having to tiptoe ... Read the full review

Part of the pleasure in following an author, as I have followed Claire Fuller from her first novel to her latest, Bitter Orange, is coming to recognize her voice, even without a title page. Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons introduced me to Fuller’s eerie, ironically rendered English countryside of dark forests and haunted seaside villages, and to her characters held captive by lies. From novel to novel I’ve admired how she uses intelligent but naïve narrators to withhold information from the reader, sustaining unnerving suspense while signaling dissonance beneath the well-mannered surface. At this point, I’ll eagerly read anything she writes. And Bitter Orange is her best book yet ... Read the full review

The paradox in writing a postmodern memoir is that the author must somehow convince readers she’s telling the truth—typically by admitting to subjectivity and fallible memory, and by interrogating her version of events. But that’s not the strategy Vanya Erickson employs in her post-WWII coming-of-age story, Boot Language. With vivid detail and some implausibly long passages of remembered dialogue, she presents herself as the sole reliable narrator of her life in California, where she was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father and a mother who failed to protect her (but did “soften Dad’s blows” with inherited money) ... Read the full review

Last night David Bowie sent a motorbike rocket, the first of its kind, into space, with a man having anal sex with a woman. It has long been every female’s dream for a gay man to have sex with them ... Read the full review

When we meet you will tell me you’re tired of the same old thing. You will look me up and down and see what you like. I will nod and tell you I know, baby. I will show you all the ways that I’m different. I like football and beer and steak ... Read the full review

This isn’t one of those stories where the twenty-two year old work-study assistant gets kissed on the cheek by the Chair of one of the country’s most prestigious English departments while she’s arranging cookies for the Visiting Writers Reading, writers whose names you’d surely recognize, like the author of the graphic novel about her coming out and the author who writes about horses, and the trim little poet who upstaged her husband last December at a reading for The Environment ... Read the full review

Holly LiTHE REVOLUTION IS NOT DEAD: I'M WEARING IT It was a dingy street stall, somewhere in the back alleys of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The uninterested teenage boy manning the booth flipped through a magazine while I rummaged through bins of t-shirts wrapped in clear plastic. Some were printed with Chinese words; most had faces I didn’t recognize. “An old Chinese Communist hero,” my dad would explain as I pointed indiscriminately at one and looked to him. “Another old hero,” he chuckled, as I held up yet another generic grinning face, this one with rosy cheeks and a red star cap. For seven yuan (a dollar), I could afford to buy them all, but I took my time. I made piles of favorites, weighed options carefully on a rubric of juvenile aesthetic taste and shock value, then narrowed them down. Eventually, I settled on the Glorious One: a white t-shirt featuring a smiling crowd of men and women, thrusting Mao’s bible in the air against a rising red sun. Poorly translated English reads underneath: “Careful Study Marxism and study society.” “This is the one!” I exclaimed, as my dad paid the vendor, amused. I was seven years old and ... Read the full review

My earliest memory of Po-Po is her cooking: the thick aroma of beef and bok choy wafting through our old kitchen, and the sight of her tightly permed semi-afro through the steam gathering over the stovetop. After dinner, she would humor me as I tried to teach her English. I never had much success, but I remember her nodding and smiling along as I read my favorite picture books to her ... Read the full review

I'm waiting for you in Paris. Waiting in the Champ de Mars, the park next to the Eiffel Tower. Standing on a patch of grass, wearing a tuxedo, and holding flowers. One among many men who wait, but they’re not like me. They stay for varying amounts of time—some holding signs, some sitting under trees—but eventually they leave. Not me. I’m here for you, Jess, waiting patiently, if not excitedly. And when you get here, we’ll embrace, and we’ll climb up the Eiffel Tower, and we’ll be together again, in love ... Read the full review

The summer after my senior year of high school, I worked in a donut shop selling macchiatos and breakfast pastries to young office workers in downtown Portland, Maine. I decided to get a job because my best friend Emma wanted a job and we were drunk off the prospect of making money and never having to go back to high school. We promised that the rest of our lives were going to be spent with only each other so we better start saving money so we could eventually live in Paris or New York or somewhere else far away from where we grew up ... Read the full review

Emily SteinbergNO COLLUSION!: A Visual Narrative Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently, images from her visual narrative Broken Eggs were featured in an exhibit titled Sick! Kranksein Im Comic: Reclaiming Illness Through Comics at the Berlin Museum of Medical History @ the Charité, Berlin, Germany. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine, her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins 2012) and her visual narratives Paused (2018), Berlin Stories: Time, Memory, Place (2017), A Mid Summer Soirée (2015), Broken Eggs (2014), and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver Magazine. She currently teaches painting, drawing, graphic novel, and the History of Comics at Penn State Abington. She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and lives just outside Philadelphia. Visit her bio page here. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #23 ... Read the full review

Nathaniel Popkin, Cleaver Magazine’s fiction reviews editor, published a new novel this year, Everything Is Borrowed (New Door Books). It draws deeply from his love of Philadelphia history and his passion for research, but is also a compelling story about one person’s obsessions and regrets. In addition to the new novel, he’s the editor of a new anthology, Who Will Speak for America, author of the novel Lion and Leopard, and two books of non-fiction, Song of the City and The Possible City. We recently asked Popkin to talk to us about Everything is Borrowed ... Read the full review

If Disney’s Pinocchio is an affable, pliable ingénue who was reconfigured, according to the lore, to look more like a boy than a puppet, Collodi’s is an anti-hero—a wooden thing with barely any ears who mostly can’t see beyond his own nose, no matter its current proportion. He is persistent, insistent, impossible, exasperating, willfully obtuse, a regular screw-up. You don’t have to stretch to note the parallels that dominate our news cycle. Donald J. Trump was prefigured more than 130 years ago. He was augured by a satirist who was most supremely skilled in imagining poor, and poorly curbed, behavior ... Read the full review

Gloria YuenFROM HERE TO THERE Barrier on, the device declares. “When you initiate the force field,” the Head Agent instructs, “you lock yourself in an impenetrable membrane. It will keep danger out. But it will also keep you in.” Barrier off, the device declares. I engage Search: Force field, noun. Popular Articles. The invention of the force field (neochrome). The invention of the force field (electromagnetic). History of force field usage in Post-Contemporary warfare. [New in TECH] ‘Defense Fields’ for Civilian Homes in Final Stages of Development. The Head Agent claps her hands. I exit Search. “Field practice with the neochrome next week. Dismissed.” We salute in unison. “What happens if you walk through a force field?” M-2 asks at my left. I turn to examine him. Raised eyebrows, slightly open mouth. Inquisitive. He is one of the preliminary cadets to join the M garrison and is much older than I. He was modeled after a lab specialist who died in one of the first base attacks. “Did you not use Search?” I ask. M-2 blinks. “I will use Search. Engage Search. Search. Searching. ‘What happens if you walk through a force field?’” “All right, M-2, you’re coming with me,” ... Read the full review

moves in gravelly time, so that the words I say here have been said before, and my car is covered with the dirt and dust of little cabins where people live on the sun, ... Read the full review

In 1944, at the age of five, I invented the magnifying glass. The end of a Coke bottle, when held up to the sun, could make anything burn and vanish. First, bits of paper—cellophane from my dad’s Chesterfield packs, and my bubble gum wraps—then live things like slugs, worms, the hind end of ants. Once I torched a whole village, many casualties, dead ants smelling like burnt tires. I needed to hurt something that couldn’t hurt me back ... Read the full review

A week after the classes ended, the community service started. Seven of us stood in a small lot outside of a small zoo. It was the kind of place single dads with child support payments take their kids because it’s close and cheap ... Read the full review

Emily SteinbergPAUSED with an introduction by Susan Squier My own menopause was a surgical one. It surprised me over the course of several months, with excruciating pain, then finally a diagnosis of ovarian torsion, then a hysterectomy/ovariectomy. It announced itself so dramatically that I felt entitled to give it the proper respect. To pause. To rethink everything (which is what I did, which is another story.) But reading Emily Steinberg’s remarkable comic Paused, what grabs me is her remarkable recognition: her gripping ability to see the Dark Horse Menopause approaching (“unbidden and unwelcome”) amidst the dailyness of a young woman’s life, to envision Menopause announcing herself in her calamitous lability, her flow of symptoms (waking, drenched, freezing, stuck, and then raging heat surges/broiling/sweating), and finally her mythic multiplicity. ...she’s a banshee; she’s La Belle Dame sans Merci in her fully cloaked and unwelcome glory; she’s a desiccated Madame Frankenstein (in academic jacket) lurching towards us and yearning for the lube that love requires... Steinberg’s wonderful, witty comic reintroduces us to our manifold ways of unknown knowing (sorry, Rumsfeld) about what menopause is, culturally and personally: she’s a banshee; she’s La Belle Dame sans Merci in her fully cloaked and unwelcome ... Read the full review

Karen Donovan’s Aardvark to Axolotl and John Shea’s Tales from Webster engage with this paradox via the dictionary, that great alphabetizer of language. The dictionary is the reference-book-of-all-reference-books. It is writing broken down to its most basic components, as a color wheel separates out the most basic tools of the painter. It also makes for dry reading. As far as plots go, it’s lackluster ... Read the full review

Divided into four sections, Deborah Burnham’s poetry collection Tart Honey seems cut into citrus slices— edible, organic, and aware of some lost and bodily whole it re-composes in the formation of its parts. The poems feature modern relationships with too much absence, a dissolving picture of Apollo 13 soon taken over by a persona attempting to collect her body into experiencing her partner, and paintings with colors that spill into cells, among other simultaneously harmonizing and divisive images ... Read the full review

In rural upstate New York, kids start driving young. Fourteen and fifteen-year-olds are driving tractors between fields before they start high school. A few years later, their trucks are flying into parking lots with friends piled in their truck beds, searing black streaks of tire rubber onto the asphalt ... Read the full review

Jake pulled up in a red Toyota truck. It looked brand new. He rolled down the window and grinned. His teeth looked like they had been bleached, and his dark hair was a little longer at the top, short on the sides. I walked to the passenger door, climbed inside. He set his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, his smile still huge, but I laughed and shrugged so his hand fell away. I adjusted the seat, sitting as far back as Jake and rolled down the window. The only way to keep things normal was to pretend like nothing had changed, and he caught on, ripping down the dirt road so fast we didn’t have time to think about anything but the speed ... Read the full review

Ros Schwartz has been a literary translator for 36 years and has been an active participant in the evolution of the profession. She has translated over 70 books from French to English by writers as diverse as Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun and French crime writer Dominique Manotti, as well as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. She has presided as vice-chair of the Translators Association, as chair of the European Council of Literary Translators Association and as chair of English PEN’s Writers in Translation program. Most recently Schwartz translated Translation as Transhumance, which was reviewed by Cleaver. In this interview, Ros Schwartz discusses the process of translating a book about translation, including her work with Gansel, her theory of translation, and translation as activism ... Read the full review

For Mireille Gansel, the work of translation is an all-consuming task. Before embarking on a project, Gansel first immerses herself in the world of the poet she is translating. She studies the historical context of their writing as well as the personal context. Wherever possible, she engages with their physical environment: she visits their home, observes their writing space. And, ideally, she listens to the poet read their work aloud. Attempting to translate a single German word, “sensible,” in a poem by Reiner Kunze, Gansel travels from West to East Germany to “[listen] to the poet read, alert to his intonations and facial expressions. In the tiny blue kitchen, I was conscious of his precarious everyday life.” She imagines the letters from friends in exile that he’ll never receive, and the mingling of his two languages, a German abstracted by Nazism and a Czech repressed by war, both of which survive in the poetry of his contemporaries, in songs from his childhood. Here, in this intersection of past and present, Gansel finds the word for “sensible”: fragile ... Read the full review

He doesn't notice the desert. The smell of the dead rising, birds or fish, saltwater feeding on air or salt air on the water, the sand turning black as it wraps his ankles like a skeleton hand. He doesn't know why the horseshoe crab shells ... Read the full review

It’s moonlit and muggy out as Peety Alfaro walks to work. Under the yellow streetlights, he pauses to wipe the condensation off his glasses. Once done, he affixes his large and thick lenses back onto his face and takes a deep breath. Exhaling, he tugs rapidly at his white tee to cool off. Then he nods hard and continues walking, shoulders back and head up ... Read the full review

In the ground, the real never of a boy How a couple recovers I do not know Whose heart Agony of mother, father Maria unimaginable Two weeks from his due ... Read the full review

Emily Steinberg, with an introduction by Tahneer OksmanBERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place Like fresh snow covering over a messy urban landscape, there's a kind of concealing but also unifying quality to the fourteen central images of Emily Steinberg's "Berlin Story." Following a four-panel introduction, in which our narrator introduces herself as having grown up an anxious, fearful depressive, lost in the grip of, among other things, the "images of death, murder and gratuitous Nazi sadism" shown to her in Hebrew school, we are presented with still portrayals of an uninhabited, idyllic setting. Each drawing, contained in an unframed rectangle, presents its viewers with a narrowed angle, or point of view, proximate to or regarding the famous Wannsee Villa, a mansion located in the suburbs of Berlin. The drawings are in black and white, cramped with details composed from demarcated lines, some of them even slightly wobbly marks. From four cherubs adorning the villa's rooftops to two tree trunks gracefully tilting somewhere in the vicinity of the house grounds, we glimpse this locale as either a deliberately or unintentionally naive visitor might; this is a structure embodying decadence and wealth, good taste and fine craftsmanship. Here is a sculpture to admire, ... Read the full review

Adonis was a painting. Or rather, he was a boy, but his limbs and lips looked as though they were made of artistry and creamy filaments of paint. It is no wonder, then, that Venus loved him. She kept him pillowed in her lap, far from the wars and deaths of heroes, and whispered him stories, her warm breath travelling across his lips. On days she was forced to leave him, Adonis made love to the forest instead, exploring it slowly, deliberately. On one of these days of absences and longing, a wild boar came across Adonis and gutted the canvas of his torso from stomach to collarbone. When Venus returned and found his broken body, she discovered the shape of heartbreak. Distraught, she made the spray of his blood bubble into hard teardrop seeds. And so, nourished by the blood of the most beautiful man to have ever been loved, the pomegranate blossomed into existence ... Read the full review

I discovered a near-limitless capacity for patience on my parents’ back porch, hiding out, eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and reading Richie Rich comics. I was skipping school, biding my time until the end of the afternoon when I could pretend to come home. That first morning, I had slunk down behind an old green aluminum chair and sat in an upright fetal position, knees to chest, arms swaddling legs. I counted the boards on the floor, twenty-five. The rails along the side, forty-eight, and 360 holes in between the crisscross side rail, 250 yellow leaves on the porch, 423 reds, five points in this yellow leaf, eight in that red leaf. I counted my fingers and my toes and every letter in the alphabet, and then, when that was done, I made up a new game. I spelled out every letter:, A, AY, B, BEE, C, SEA. I spelled my name: Ay, En, Gee, El, Eye, Cue, You, Eee. I spelled out whole sentences. “Angie is skipping school today.” “School sucks.” It wasn’t long before I was bored ... Read the full review

Holiday party season is once again upon us—a time of dough-forward cookie trays and ornamental cabbages, of feigned interest and conversational quicksand. This year, why not ride the crest of incivility that has taken our nation by storm? Say what you mean. Say whatever you feel like, then get the hell out of Dodge. Examples follow ... Read the full review

THE MINORS by Chris Ludovici Unsolicited Press, 376 pages reviewed by Ryan K. Strader Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in professional sports. A fastball travels at 90 miles per hour, moving from the pitcher’s mitt to the catcher’s glove in approximately .44 seconds. If the batter blinks, he’ll miss. For the last few feet that the ball travels, it is essentially invisible to the hitter. He has to have made his decision by then, whether to swing, how he’ll swing. I did not know anything about baseball when I picked up Chris Ludovici’s The Minors. Nick Rogers, one of the protagonists, reflects on the difficulty of hitting a baseball, and I ended up spending too much time engrossed in an ESPN Sport Science episode checking Nick’s information. It turns out that, football fanatic though I am, the fastball is a formidable opponent: 90 mph is a frightening, lethal speed, and statistically speaking, it is almost impossible to hit. However, when we meet Nick in The Minors, baseball is part of Nick’s past, thanks to a shoulder injury. Back home and living with an aunt, the 28-year-old Nick tries to forge ahead by working as a contractor ... Read the full review

The superhero is a staple of pop culture, but poets can use elements of superhero identity to craft poems and explore their own mythology. Lynn Levin offers a writing prompt designed to allow poets to reach beyond the real in search of other truths ... Read the full review

There must be more of them than you suspect, here in the Midwest—maybe every tenth, every fifteenth woman you pass. Those who used to ride clinging to some guy’s leathery back, bruised and battered and passed from one biker to the next, and then re-applying makeup in the fender’s reflection. Like the one who dropped by my office last week, her second skin peeled back to reveal her trinity: Harley, Triumph, BMW. Her name was Lorca, after Garcia Lorca, I hoped, imagining one of his dark Gypsy ballads recited at her conception ... Read the full review

Island of Point Nemo is a fast-moving adventure story featuring murderers, romance, and preternatural turns. But dig further into those turns, and the novel is ultimately a eulogy to books, both as physical objects and as containers for fiction. Written by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès and newly translated from French by Hannah Chute, Island of Point Nemo features suspenseful plotlines that intertwine in such a way as to make the reader question the natures of fiction, reality, and history ... Read the full review

Haunted by her father’s absence and riveted by her single mother’s cautionary tales, Cleaver contributor Andrea Jarrell longed for the “stuff of ordinary families,” even as she was drawn to the drama of her parents’ larger-than-life relationship. In her forthcoming memoir, I’m the One Who Got Away (She Writes Press, September, 2017), Jarrell revisits family stories starring wolves in cowboy clothing and lambs led astray by charming savior-saboteurs, to recount how she escaped a narrative she'd learned by heart ... Read the full review

“The narrator of this book is a Caribbean woman. You may have noticed that the writer of this book is not,” Rebecca Entel notes in a preface to Fingerprints of Previous Owners, her novel set at a resort built on the nettle-choked ruins of a former slave plantation. Alluding to her research and credentials as a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, Entel does more than attempt to deflect criticism for cultural appropriation. She declares her investment in this story, as well as her intention to free her characters from a colonial narrative frame ... Read the full review

Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting is an intimate romance among hundreds. This book of fictional fragments, each in the first person, features character after character—most of indeterminate gender, age, and history—falling in and out of love. The self-contained pieces range from one sentence meditations to several hundred word flash fictions. The shortest of these could be writing prompts, while others read as prose poems. Reading Trysting can, in fact, be like reading a book of poetry, and it benefits from slow, thoughtful study. You could linger over any one piece, reread it and taste the rhythm, the carefully chosen words ... Read the full review

The day a little gloomy, sky not exactly low but grackles higher than they ought to be, their oily, boat-wake tails dragging worn-out clouds. And that finch song, isn’t it garbled, ... Read the full review

He took about a week to consider. I imagine he woke up Monday, warily shaved his cheeks and chin in his bathroom, then stared at his hair in the mirror. Tuesday, the same. Wednesday, with frustration. By Friday, disgust ... Read the full review

My bag disappeared with my passport, my keys a little vial containing a sliver of bone. I was stalked by an ordinary man ... Read the full review

This November blew down to the just-reaped fields a hectic of leaves. More golden leaves than fevered leaves but the fevered claimed the land in the way that we call fair ... Read the full review

“A book becomes a living thing only when it interacts with a reader,” says writer Gil Coleman, the rogue central character of Claire Fuller’s Swimming Lessons. When he tells a bookshop assistant that “first editions don’t matter,” he seems to argue that access is more important than ownership, that a book’s content is more valuable than the object enclosing the text. But the impulse behind the sentiment is hardly democratic; his words cast light on his unequal marriage to Ingrid, a student he impregnates, derailing her education. Infamous for a single work (the lurid and presumably autobiographical A Man of Pleasure), Gil is oddly less interested in an author’s words than in “the handwritten marginalia and doodles that marked up the pages,” and “the forgotten ephemera used as bookmarks.” By the end of his life, his wife is gone and his library is full of “bits of paper with which he could piece together other people’s lives, other people who had read the same books he held and who had marked their place.” It’s also full of clues to solve a mystery at the center of this skillfully structured and satisfying novel: Where did Ingrid go, and why? ... Read the full review

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

you know that photo stuck into the side of a frame in the den you know, the photo of Katie & Jamie on the stairs well, we found it halfway down the block, black-edged but whole. must have blown out with the force of the explosion like a balloon out of a kid’s hand & maybe two weeks later you find a mound of popped rubber and string with a boot print on top ... Read the full review

Winter beforelight. Lamp by lamp the house of night shuts. Dawn enlarges; a father turns off the lights, loves each room for lives it holds ... Read the full review

Everywhere I went in Sudan, people offered me things. I was the foreigner in their country and they could tell the minute they saw me that I was different with my lighter skin and my long hair and my rounded body. They understood that it was me who needed their help. They knew that my system wasn’t used to the extreme temperatures, that I had not sufficiently acclimated to bacteria-ridden water, that my skin was too soft for hard work, my eyes too sensitive to the dust ... Read the full review

OUTHOUSE BLUES Three Poems by Herman Beavers Featured on Life As Activism Outhouse Blues #1 Accounts coming due, enunciated in The mumble of feet. Coathangers, The electric eye of catechesis. Populism blushes in a frenzy Of bared teeth, biceps swelling With the ripple of Confederate flags. Manacled in a pageant of Disconsolate shotguns, the echo of Self-confident dice, the public figures. Amputation kin to the succulence of Crow. ◊ ... Read the full review

On Saturday, for the second week in a row, I attended a protest march against the election of Donald J. Trump as President. These marches here in Philadelphia, as they have been around the nation, are meant to bring people together to assert their anger, their betrayal, and their worry over the direction of the nation under Mr. Trump. To press for action. They provide an instant sense of camaraderie and communal feeling, and, yelling righteously into the cavern of towers, or the granite of monuments, or, in our case, the sturdy brick of Independence Hall, a heartfelt outlet for protest. The marches allow a person edging toward hopelessness to feel alive again, if only for an instant, and to sense oneself melding into the body politic. After despondent days, they come as a relief ... Read the full review

Is there anything more disappointing than waking up in your mid-30s and wondering what the hell happened? Suddenly, you have a family, children, a mortgage, and a job that, despite your best efforts, is starting to define you. Your sensible car is in perfect order. You have a retirement account. Where’s the punk you used to be? What happened to all those bad decisions you made in your 20s? ... Read the full review

Canek Sánchez Guevara’s 33 Revolutions is a prayer of a novel with a single liturgical refrain and a retort (of a kind) to the giddiness emitting from the American-Cuban travelsphere. Not since Reinaldo Arenas has a Cuban literary voice arrived on American shores with such beaten madness, and sense of personal desperation. Sánchez Guevara, who died last year at age 40, was the eldest grandson of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His mother, Hilda Guevara Gaesa, was Che’s oldest child; Hilda’s mother (also Hilda) introduced Che to the Castro brothers in the mid-1950s. (It’s worth remembering that the American literary public became enamored of Arenas after his death, too.) ... Read the full review

For many years, my husband, William Sulit, and I have collaborated on projects for corporate America—annual reports, commemorative books, employee magazines. When corporate America changed—when the cultures shifted, the ideals, the relationships—we began to explore a new idea, a company we could create and manage as our own, a company through which we could define the quality of the product and the nature of the conversation. We have called that company Juncture Workshops. Through it we offer memoir retreats, a monthly newsletter, and video essays that showcase the work of memoir masters and offer ideas and prompts. As with most things, of course, it all sounds easier than it has been. Here we provide a behind-the-scenes look at our memoir-steeped lives, post video production ... Read the full review

The short flash pieces that comprise Sharon White’s Boiling Lake read like dispatches from a dreamscape—or perhaps a nightmarescape. Surreal, dark, and unmoored from time, these journal entries are well-crafted machines that merge fairytale, myth, and history into concise forms spanning no more than a page and a half. While some of these stories build narrative bridges—recurring characters include a girl nominated for sainthood and New World explorers reporting back to higher-ups—many exist as discrete moments, indulging in provocative imagery without the expectation of elaboration. There is skill in this work that allows one to dwell in the temporary, to savor the fleeting ... Read the full review

“The linoleum swells with stories. As he plays, darkness rises from the floor and slowly claims the room.” With these unsettling, intriguing first lines, we enter the mind and story of Stub, a six-year-old who observes the broken, embittered adults in his world. Growing up, he’s learning, requires giving up not only childish things but childish wonder, too. Abandoned by his mother, neglected by his father, briefly cared for by Jenny (a sweet but “crazy, sort of” young woman just sprung from the local “madhouse”), the boy becomes a refugee on the college campus where his father works as a plumber. By nineteen, he’s left home for good and is raising himself there, eating food purloined from faculty houses and wearing “preppy discards” he finds in the student dorms. He spends his days roaming the library stacks and reading the works of the reclusive anthropologist Verner Vanderloon, a Werner Wolf-ish character who writes that mankind is divided into people “who know how to play, are full of mirth and fellow feeling, and the ones who are killjoys and combustible.” Play is a powerful form of magic, Vanderloon says, warning that its suppression leads to catastrophe ... Read the full review

When she first came to Epping after dropping out of art school in Boston, Davi loved the way everything in the farmhouse was old and falling apart, swollen in August, when she arrived, and then splintering all through the winter. Beth gave Davi one of her dead husband’s orange hunting hats to sleep in and Beth slept in a camo skullcap. The kitchen was so cold November through March, Beth wore cotton gloves in the morning when she sat at the Formica table drinking instant coffee. For the first few months after she moved in, Davi sketched the kitchen almost every day, usually more than once. The light was so nice in there. Beth liked the sketches and stuck them to the fridge with magnets from the dentist. Davi was over it now, mostly, and the sketches were a little moldy from the moist air seeping out of the freezer ... Read the full review

It is, it is, it is – it’s you, cool as the night, scraping toothy wing on wing. Yeah, man. Your it is is far from my it was, in this town I never knew I’d know. Yo, first violinist of Washington Square, slave picnic site, burial ground a shout from Independence Hall. It is, it is – it is fall, it is here, it is you and I and your ... Read the full review

The man across the desk was handsome in the way that young men could be without actually being attractive. That was one of the things Melissa had started to appreciate when she passed fifty; she could recognize the beauty of younger men without desiring them. So yes, the man was handsome. But tired-looking; he needed to shave. He leaned forward across the desk and smiled weakly at her ... Read the full review

When I sat down to read Beth Kephart’s newest novel, This Is the Story of You, its title and cover art caught my attention—personal, serene, then chaotic. I read the first line of chapter one—Blue, for example—and fell in love with the writing. A quarter of the way through the book, I adored each character, and connected with Mira, the narrator and protagonist. Kephart’s mesmerizing writing, wonderful characters, and themes of strength and endurance thrilled me from beginning to end ... Read the full review

Don’t Think, Burgin’s newest collection of short stories (and his nineteenth book), is one of his very best. The author’s straightforward and suspense-driven storytelling voice is as compelling as ever, the stories somewhat spooky and darkly comic. They give you the willies and keep you coming back for more. But Burgin, in this latest collection, demonstrates a new empathy for his characters. This notable evolution gives the characters softer landings and a fuller resonance in the reader’s imagination ... Read the full review

THE EMPATHY MACHINE, Part Two Text Version by Kelly McQuain 1. Tweet No Evil In an effort to get my head around what I consider the purpose of art-making, I attended three writing conferences during summer 2015. The first was at U.C. Berkeley and was supposed to commemorate the influential 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference fifty years prior, inspired by a student Free Speech Movement earlier that year. But poet Vanessa Place’s inclusion on the bill caused the commemoration to implode. Place, whose current project uses Twitter to disseminate instances of the “n-word” from Gone With the Wind, has been the subject of controversy before.[1] Place’s name on the Berkeley schedule caused many invitees to drop out in protest. The organizers canceled the conference and replaced it at the last minute with Crosstalk, Color, Composition: A Berkeley Poetry Conference. I made it from Philadelphia in time to attend the last day. There was a lot of talk about colonization theory, and at the end of the day people sat in circles discussing race and their feelings in ways that were careful not to offend. I learned that the organizers kept notice about “conference 2.0” largely on the down-low out of fear ... Read the full review

THE EMPATHY MACHINE, Part Two Text Version written and illustrated by Kelly McQuain 1. Tweet No Evil Tweet-No-EvilIn an effort to get my head around what I consider the purpose of art-making, I attended three writing conferences during summer 2015. The first was at U.C. Berkeley and was supposed to commemorate the influential 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference fifty years prior, inspired by a student Free Speech Movement earlier that year. But poet Vanessa Place’s inclusion on the bill caused the commemoration to implode. Place, whose current project uses Twitter to disseminate instances of the “n-word” from Gone With the Wind, has been the subject of controversy before.[1] Place’s name on the Berkeley schedule caused many invitees to drop out in protest. The organizers canceled the conference and replaced it at the last minute with Crosstalk, Color, Composition: A Berkeley Poetry Conference. I made it from Philadelphia in time to attend the last day. There was a lot of talk about colonization theory, and at the end of the day people sat in circles discussing race and their feelings in ways that were careful not to offend. I learned that the organizers kept notice about “conference 2.0” largely on the down-low ... Read the full review

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 ... Read the full review

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 ... Read the full review

KENNETT SQUARE by Erin Jones We had forgotten the dank mushroom farms, the deer carcasses peppered across route 1 for a full mile. This one’s fur is patching the highway like fresh moss, its rib cage steams in the median. This is different than the hardboiled bodies of armadillos. Those yolks made us queasy, but this one is intimate. In the distance we can hear the birds stir for carrion. In the distance we can hear the other meat, its fearful hoof clicks, the blood still beating ... Read the full review

WHY DRAW TREES? by Laurel Hooker Before I went to art school, before I decided to become a painter, before my work and classes carried me far away into the world of fine art, all I really wanted to do was draw. I drew the way a lot of teenagers do–carefully, self-consciously, and often. I drew unaware of the complicated realm of critical analysis, ego, sophisticated processes, and expensive materials that would soon emerge in the form of my higher education. When I was a student at the Tyler School of Art, drawing nice pictures was the farthest thing from my mind. In that four-year whirlwind of studio classes, I roved quite far from simple drawing. I took glassblowing, ceramics, on-loom weaving, and clay-figure modeling. As a painting major, I took drawing classes, but they were secondary to my painting classes. After graduation, I went home to my parents’ house in east Tennessee. where I listened to the drone of the cicadas in the evenings and slept until noon. For the first time in four years, my life slowed to a walking pace. I made a couple of paintings; I carried a small watercolor kit with me as a way ... Read the full review

SHADOWS by Eliza Callard The “y” on my forehead from the radiator. The early cooking accident with the knife. The shadow from the spark on my hand when I was six. It turned white and melted my skin. The odd dent on my thigh from the time I tried to impress a girl and fell off a fence. The teen wounds I made myself-- tiny white scissors scars; the popped zits, faded to a soft brown. And the big marks--the surgeries-- my belly a long road, and the port pushing the skin of my left chest like a short stack of quarters hidden beneath, like I may need them for the jukebox ... Read the full review

POKEWEED by Lynn Levin In my deathwish days when I was young I reaped the bitter from the field and ate the poison pokeweed raw. What did I know of boiling and washing of throwing the bad soup out? In my deathwish days, I never had enough of wretchedness. A bird in the pokeberries I drank the toxic wine and warbled my bitter thoughts. Oh, I had lived a life of deferment: of little I never had enough. Then early one morning, sick of it all I caught the wild perfume of the honeysuckle. I heard the chorus of its delicate tongues. I drew the stamens through the butter and moon. I sucked the clear sweet drops. I left my house. Dawn came up ... Read the full review

Pinto los Flores Para Que No Mueren For Frida Kahlo Revolution coincides with your birthday. You open fire, unbound. Born of discontent, la casa azul leaves you no hope but you find yourself longing for its pain. Frozen disfigured limbs still look for love, and he wants to give it. You search desperately for passion, but none could be found among wilted flowers. Splintered metal, your broken body lies in a field of wildflowers. Blood pools freely; finally a part of you no longer bound by the confines of your skin. Screams echo around you and you smile, hearing only passion. In thirty-five parts, they try to stitch together your dying hope, empty promises hang like bloody limbs on the canvas, no more love left in your paintbrushes. No more pain. You drink dreams in shot glasses, thrown back quick, pills for your pain. Immobilized like you: broken stems and tired petals. You are fascinated by flowers; kaleidoscope of colors and temporary love. Your bed becomes your confidant, that most intimate lover to whom you are bound. Consolation comes in the strangest of forms. Drips of hope storm your bloodstream with liquid passion ... Read the full review

THE DISABLED by Aimee LaBrie It is just past Thanksgiving, and they’ve already begun playing Christmas carols at the theme restaurant where Eleanor waits tables. The music streams from the speakers on the ceiling, like a curse from God, until her head feels stuffed with jingle bells and sleigh bells and holiday bells. She is so bloated with pre-Christmas spirit that she feels sick, as if she’s eaten an entire plate of Santa shaped cookies with an inch of frosting on the top. And yet somehow, the show must go on! She has been living on her own in the Windy City for just under three months, lives in a shitty garden apartment with a leaky ceiling, and auditioned for zero plays. She can’t seem to find the time, what with all the old AMC movie watching she must do and the waitressing and homeless people to dodge and all. Table two would like more ketchup in a white salad dressing cup, please. Table three would like several free refills of Diet Coke, some with a lemon and some with limes. Table five would like a new husband and in the meantime, will take her unhappiness out on Eleanor by ... Read the full review

MASKS AND ICONS by R. Daniel Evans Blurb, 82 pages reviewed by Shinelle Espaillat In his fourth poetry collection, Masks and Icons, R. Daniel Evans examines the complexity of love and desire, and exposes the ways in which these emotions both intersect with and deviate from each other. Evans brings a microscope to the multiple small evidences of love in the world, using the lens of art to view the beauty and pain of interpersonal connection, inviting readers to look through the mask of the self and perceive the extraordinary. Section I, “From The Land of Walt Whitman,” focuses on the intimacy and inner-life of a speaker’s relationships with individuals, beginning with a one-sided conversation with Whitman himself. The narrator sits on a beach, fairly melting with desire over a distant beauty to whom he never speaks, but whom he imagines as Whitman’s muse. He wonders how, with such an object of desire near him, Whitman “ever got any poems written,” noting, in this metaphysical moment, that desire is an obstacle to his own work. Sexual desire, then, is all-consuming, and the speaker suggests that poets instead mine the world at large for the rich possibilities of interaction, with the ... Read the full review

THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA Works on Paper and Beyond by Paula Rivera I started drawing when I was a baby. My first subject was an elephant, done in orange Crayola marker. My parents have the drawing to this day. I've always had a strong feeling for drawing animals. Like many children, I believed I understood animals. I'm still fascinated with animals (although I'm no longer quite as obsessed with horses as I used to be, like many young girls.) I went to Philadelphia's High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), a magnet school for art students. I was convinced that an arts school environment would be best for me, even through I felt strongly that you cannot teach a person how to create art. The artistic environment was good for me in many ways, but the Western philosophy of teaching art messed with my head and feelings. When I graduated from CAPA I was accepted to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to study drawing and painting. But after three years, I was completely sick of it. So I left, planning to work for a year and save enough Zmoney to move to ... Read the full review

KEEPING TIME by Angelique Stevens Walking through the doors of the V.A. hospital where my stepfather is a patient, the air settles, resigned like the sun’s afternoon descent. Dust flecks float in and out of golden afternoon rays. In the stillness, I can almost follow one from foyer through corridor, up and down lifeless hallways until it finally settles on a rusted radiator. I walk cautiously like I might break the building’s trance. The building, its dirt collecting in forgotten baseboard crevices is lined with plaster walls, their cracks covered with layers of paint. An old wooden bench sits in the foyer where people remove boots and unbutton coats. Along the right wall are two bulletin boards. One posts the day’s schedule “10:00—group meeting, 12:00—lunch: corn, meatloaf, and onion soup, 2:30—movie: Harrison Ford in Patriot Games” The other overflows with old pictures of current residents. One photo, cracked and worn, shows a young man newly pressed and proudly uniformed with an elbow on the nose of an old fighter plane. In another a young man, no older than 17, stands next to his parents. His mother lingers in the back, indifferent. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam—they all ... Read the full review

"How did you spend your summer?" is the theme my schoolteachers used to ask us to write on when September came and we shuffled into our wooden desks with new lunchboxes and freshly sharpened No. 2 pencils. As summer 2015 winds to a close, I'm reflecting on the what's preoccupied me for so much of it: the purpose I find in art-making, and the specters of poets like Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, whose recent projects have cast a pall over the field of poetics this year due to their clumsy handling of identity politics at a time when the country is still smarting from recent wounds and suffering new traumas on what feels like a daily basis. Goldsmith, the MoMA Poet Laureate, is a champion of what he calls "uncreative writing": He's printed out the Internet. He's transcribed news reports of famous disasters and retyped an entire issue of The New York Times. He's read for Obama and been a guest of Stephen Colbert. Last March Goldsmith ran into trouble after performing a poem called "The Body of Michael Brown" at a conference. Goldsmith read a somewhat edited version of the autopsy report for Brown, the African American teenager ... Read the full review

SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT THIS STREET by Zoe Stoller Adam, and how he thought I was 24 and how Erika didn’t know I wouldn’t forget. I drew red on my fingernails and it stained my shirt and I dream of falafel and my back turns to sweat. Backstage, and I remember dancing, and Molly kissed Peter too but I slept in his bed. My electricity’s off and the pencils are permanent. My tea tastes thick and it hurts to swallow. He grabbed me in the city and my virginity on the phone. Next I am who I wouldn’t ever really be, and maybe I would sing ... Read the full review

NATURE POEM by Eliza Callard Worrisomely fat dog--a silken nut brown ale color-- belly swaying near the bouldered trail, with his wolfish mates. A family under the budding trees, the girl twisting a butterfly net in her hands. “What are you trying to catch?” “Anything.” Pitbulls Hazel--with the wet grin--and Pele--licking and nibbling so vigorously he awakens the years-old bone bruise where a stranger punched my jaw on a crowded street. Instant friends with t-shirt-wearing Phillies fans, commiseration alone our ... Read the full review

ART AND HEALING Pastel Landscapes by Donna Levinstone Art enhances the healing process. My work is meditative and has been used in hospital settings and other situations where healing is called for. My mother and a few of my friends, in the last stage of their lives, have used my work as a source of calm and focus during their bed-ridden illnesses. As a cancer survivor, I, too have found that artwork provides calm in my life. My pastel landscapes have often been referred to as “landscapes of the soul”. The use of wide skies in my work promotes a sense of well-being. I have memories, as a young child, of riding in our convertible and gazing up at the sky for hours. According to Jack Borden, founder of For Spacious Skies, people who have sky awareness in their lives often have an added sense of optimism. They look at their lives, like the skies, with an endless sense of possibilities ... Read the full review

BEAUTY by Gregory Djanikian In the eye of the beholder, we say, disregarding what the beautiful might spring from, an oil slick’s satiny iridescence, the ravishing splash of orange in the smog-ridden sky. Yesterday, someone pointed to the loosestrife overtaking our garden, praised the lovely delicate petals, the long magisterial stalks. Sometimes the beautiful is a fire that takes the whole of a tree in its arms, sometimes a wild and engorged river cutting deeply into the land. The beautiful floats beyond us immune to our beholding ... Read the full review

THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL, novelas by Bohumil Hrabal translated by James Naughton NYRB Classics, 299 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Late summer might be the best season to read Bohumil Hrabal, for time reveals itself in the ripe air and everything bleeds with life. Hrabal, the Czech novelist of delirious syncopation, who died in 1997 falling from a fifth floor hospital window while trying to feed the birds, returns to childhood in these two novelas about the manager of a small-town brewery, his older brother, savage wife, and young son. Hrabal’s stepfather was the manager of a brewery; Maryška, the wife of Francin, the fictional brewery manager, narrates the first novela, Cutting It Short. Their son is the narrator of The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. When Cutting It Short, which Hrabal published in 1976, opens, Maryška, is lighting the lamps, waiting for Francin to come in from the brewery. “I dread the day,” she says, “the mains will be brought to the brewery and all the brewery lamps, all the airy lamps in the stables, the lamps with the round mirrors, all those portly lamps with round wicks one day will cease to be lit, ... Read the full review

CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley Southern Illinois University Press, 310 pages reviewed by Lynn Levin We live in an era of border crossings. In marriage, family, race, gender, and geographical boundaries, our world is more than ever about blending, bridging, transforming, and migrating. Frontiers are shifting in literature, too: the move is on toward hybrid and blurred genres—prose poems, flash fiction, videos, and other experiments in expression. Into this climate of mixing and crossing, comes Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley (SIU Press, 2015). The book details the many ways in which creative writing instructors are crossing boundaries: for example, using compositional strategies in the creative writing classroom. The twelve essays in this book are rich in theory, research, practical ideas, and in-the-trenches know-how. The contributors are academics who are also poets and writers. They all specialize in teaching creative writing, composition, and/or literary studies. Many of the essays captivate with inspired ideas. A few, aiming for the scholarly, rely a little too much on academic jargon and buzzwords. All in all, I found a raft of useful crossover and new-generation ... Read the full review

TOMBO by W.S. Di Piero McSweeney’s, 63 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne Giacomo Leopardi speaks of two essential kinds of imagination: strong and promiscuous. The first is “weighty, impassioned, melancholic, with deep emotion and passion, all fraught with life hugely suffered.” The second is “playful, light, fleet, inconstant in love, high spirited.” The W.S. Di Piero of The Dog Star, the one I first encountered as a reader, is of the strong variety, as in his depiction of a somber Whitman attending injured soldiers and offering introspection on a Civil War battlefield in “Walt, the Wounded.” A small fire still burns in the nursery. Rice and molasses simmer on the stove. Children will have to learn to ask for less, less from the elephant dawn that chilled across the heights where Lee held his ground. Or there is the dark homage “To My Old City”: “diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked / on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers / from the black newsstand.” In it, memory figures as corrosive. Surely all poets offer changes in mood, even within a single book, but underlying shifts in temperament happen over time, if at all. And with the appearance of Tombo, I ... Read the full review

COUP DE FOUDRE A Novella and Stories by Ken Kalfus Bloomsbury Press, 277 pages reviewed by Carolyn Daffron Ken Kalfus is an audacious stylist, whose stories and novels often invoke the likes of Borges, Calvino, Golgol, and Saramago. His choice of subject matter can be equally fearless: cosmology, 9-11, and the grand sweep of Russian history, to name only a few. Coup de Foudre, the novella which forms the centerpiece of his most recent collection of short fiction, is a coruscating example of this gutsiness and high literary ambition. Not that I enjoyed reading it, at least not the first time. Coup de Foudre tells the story of David Léon Landau, a character not-at-all-loosely based on French financier and former presidential hopeful Dominque Strauss-Kahn (known in France and now everywhere as “DSK”) who was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in his New York hotel in 2011. Although criminal charges were dropped, the case led to a civil settlement, various other scandalous accusations and revelations, and the ruin of DSK’s career. The novella is a first person account of the hotel assault and the events immediately surrounding it, written in the form of a letter to Mariama, the housekeeper-victim—a letter ... Read the full review

NOW IN ELSEWHERE A Now for MENAM by Orkan Telhan The Middle East. North Africa. The Mediterranean. Asia Minor and the Levant. These refer to inexact geographies. It is hard to tell where each begins and ends. As names, they may take on different meanings when they refer to people, languages, belief systems, and politics, all of which constantly negotiate their identities with respect to one another. As places, they may bring together a series of disjointed lands unified as an imaginary cultural construct, yet whose presence lives everywhere, whose lands have produced many diasporas around the globe. Today, someone from Little Syria, New York, uses the same recipe for hummus that a grandmother uses in Syria. And it tastes different; taste belongs neither here nor there, and changes every moment. It is often an oriental gaze that renders these uneasy, tenuous connections. This is a gaze that comes both from the desire to belong to a place and the fear of its possibility. Thus the Middle East, North Africa, or the Mediterranean always exist as mediated elsewheres where only others can belong. Or where we belong as others. Making sense of all of this today is an art. Is ... Read the full review

WHAT I WAS THINKING OF DURING THE FUNERAL SERVICE, DOUGLAS, ARIZONA by Gregory Djanikian for Wendy Glenn Of course, death, how it wore its outsize black hat to slice the day. The mysterious abyss of the body failing again, falling into another body. Not so much of resurrection though it was spoken of, the oxen kneeling in the straw, the stone rolled away. The first death that had no likeness. The earth that hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood. After which the history of departures required a history of common prayer ... Read the full review

PILLS by Eliza Callard Every day, I consume many colors--white and blue, pink, translucent as a pale winter sun. Some I could crush to a powder, some I could puncture and watch thick red ooze smear my hands. Fat in the middle, round like a flat earth, capsules you could shake like maracas. I have ingested the weight equivalent of an adult male gorilla or an anoa, from Indonesia (similar to the water buffalo). I have swallowed one for every resident of Copenhagen or the South American country of Suriname ... Read the full review

STEALING THE BOOK by Leonard Kress What happened to my signed first edition of Auden? Stolen, I suspect, though I lack any evidence. An abomination--even medieval monks formulated byzantine book-thievery curses: For such a sin, let book worms and mites ingurgitate broth brewed fresh from his hell-incinerated ashes. But I am not full of vengeance and I wish no pain on fellow bibliophiles, only that their hands do quake and tremble, so that words squirm beyond discernment when they read, that they become their own antonyms, that sentences invert to palindromes, so star becomes rats, straw becomes warts, and so that my book in their hands is transformed into an altogether different book ... Read the full review

ESTHER FRIEDMAN by Michelle Taransky There is always someone Whose job it should be To advise you, even if you don’t want to know: No girl dreams of being proposed to With a ring from the Shoah Look to your mother She cares so much it hurts If you don’t want to have to describe To your lover how You want to be loved ... Read the full review

Emily Steinberg, Introduction by Tahneer OksmanA MID SUMMER SOIRÉE: A Visual Narrative First sort through Emily Steinberg’s A Mid Summer Soirée in quick succession. Then go back and read it slowly. This appealingly energetic set of captioned images is a storyboard of sorts. Each slide displays a beguiling creature or character, and sometimes a pair, pictured just above a crisply worded sentence encased in a neat, if bourgeois, font. We are presented with a simple trajectory: the individuals, spotlighted in medias res, are about to attend, or are attending, a party. These experiences do not clearly build on each other: “He’d been out of circulation a while.” “They argued just before arriving.” “She rooted through her closet and was dismayed.” Trying to fill in the narrative gaps is part of the pleasure of the journey, as is, on the contrary, moving past those gaps in favor of experiencing the piece’s seductive rhythm. The artworks—some fashioned in delicate colors, some in black-and-white—are offset by clean white backgrounds. Many of the images are clearly collages, intricately inked cut-ups of crossword puzzles, newspaper articles, and cartoons. “I’m interested in the idea of chance, and what happens when you don’t control the situation,” Steinberg explained ... Read the full review

ARLES by Autumn McClintock It’s a good beard. Stop yanking it like a strapless dress. See what I did there? Fit the last puzzle piece and voilá, Starry Night! You aren’t half as weird as you’d like. In the morning, you’ll drive me home, sit in the coffee shop, wonder what made you do it ... Read the full review

THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST by Daniel Torday St. Martin’s Press, 291 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost In Daniel Torday’s debut novel The Last Flight of Poxl West, two first-person tales wrap around each other. This intertwining is in itself fascinating, especially given that one of the strands is an account of a man who repeatedly pulls away from those he feels closest to, seemingly unable to sustain intimate connections. Torday begins the novel in the voice of Eli Goldstein, a Boston-area teenager who bears witness to the literary rise and fall of his adopted uncle, Poxl West. Eli finds his Uncle Poxl’s success as a writer absolutely thrilling. These two have a special relationship—they greatly enjoy each other’s company, going together to cultural events such as operas and symphonies—and, best of all, afterwards going out to Cabot’s for ice-cream, conversation, and the sharing of early drafts of Uncle Poxl’s writing in progress. Eli is Poxl’s first and probably most adoring audience for his book, Skylock: The Memoir of a Jewish RAF Bomber. Eli takes a lot of pleasure in following the book’s reception. After the memoir is reviewed in The New York Times, Eli imagines Poxl’s response to ... Read the full review

RUNAWAY GOAT CART by Thomas Devaney Hanging Loose Press, 80 pages reviewed by Anna Strong Early in Runaway Goat Cart, the latest from Thomas Devaney, readers get a found poem of language that has come from a diary found in a darkroom at Moore Women’s College of Art, dated 1972. The writer of the diary is unidentified, though she records the speech of a few of her friends. One of these, Susan, from the haze of cigarette smoke and darkroom chemicals, offers two startlingly clear statements about photography and art that also serve as a guide to reading Devaney’s text. The first, dated November 9: Susan says it’s forbidden for our pictures to echo the objects they depict; nothing looks like that, she said, but it’s allowed, it’s allowed for the world to look the way it does. Fine words those. The second, dated less than a month later, reads: Prints are not reproductions. Susan said this is a mistaken idea. What you’re looking at is a photograph: how something looks there. Taken together, Susan’s sage advice about how to look at a photograph (or take a photograph) tells readers much about how to read Devaney’s poems. So many of ... Read the full review

TROMPE L’OEIL by Nancy Reisman Tin House Books, 352 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Does a good life play out like a well made film? Nancy Reisman has published two excellent books—a prize-winning collection of stories, House Fires (it won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction in 1999) and a novel, The First Desire. Now her second novel, just published by Tin House, Trompe L’Oeil, comes along and almost tricks the eye to thinking it is about a real family, or perhaps about what we can learn from a carefully curated assemblage of painters (descriptive response to their work is incorporated into the novel) including Edouard Vuillard, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and Georges de la Tour. Still, there is something more exciting at play in Trompe L’Oeil than the saga of the Murphy family or the discussion of visual art within the novel. This is a novel that finds beauty and resolution by testing how real life and literary art are like filmmaking. Reisman can sound like Virginia Woolf, but her experimentation also places her in the company of contemporary film directors like Terence Malick and Richard Linklater. If she has written a love letter to cinema, it’s not a ... Read the full review

ENDING UP by Kingsley Amis NYRB Classics, 136 pages reviewed by Jon Busch Originally published in 1974, Kingsley Amis’ short novel Ending Up is about five old-timers approaching death in England. It is a startlingly funny work, considering the grim subject. I was initially apprehensive about this book, wary that my limited knowledge of English culture would hinder my ability to understand an English work of social satire, but happily this was not the case nor should it be a worry for any reader. Amis’ concerns in the book, while presented through British characters, are predominantly human in scope. The bulk of the novel, with the exception of a few doctors’ visits, takes place at Tuppeny-Happenny Cottage, where the novel’s five protagonists share residence. The cottage, with its off-the-beaten-path culture, is a petri dish of incubating irritation resulting from the character’s declining physical power and loss of mental faculties. While the plot is inherently tragic, Amis’ dry descriptions, annoying characters, and ridiculous ending argue for the book’s classification as comedy. Satirist Craig Brown, in the introduction, describes the book as irritation raised to the level of art. More succinct words have never been uttered. If there is an aim to ... Read the full review

DISPLACEMENT by Lucy Knisley Fantagraphics, 168 pages reviewed by Travis DuBose Lucy Knisley’s Displacement follows her previous graphic travelogues focused on carefree adventures in Europe with a diary about aging and constriction. In the winter of 2012 Knisley accompanied her elderly grandparents on a cruise through the Caribbean, a vacation that, given her grandparents’ condition—her grandmother was suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and her grandfather was mentally sharp but physically frail—was, by her own admission, ill-advised and possibly dangerous. As she recounts the difficulties of caring for her grandparents, Knisley ruminates on the role they’ve played in the life of her family. In particular, she quotes from and illustrates selections from her grandfather’s memoirs of the second world war ... Read the full review

THE SEA by Blai Bonet translated by and Maruxa Relano and Martha Tennent Dalkey Archive Press, 178 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Manuel Tur, sixteen years old and confined to tubercular sanatorium, stares out his window at the forested plane. He fixes his gaze on the holm oaks and the olive trees. This is Majorca, the Catalan island, 1942. “To the west,” he says, at the opening of Blai Bonet’s 1958 novel The Sea (El Mar), in the new English version published by Dalkey Archive Press, “the sky is hazy, blue, tender, like an open switchblade above the sea.” Bonet’s metaphoric language bristles with despair and danger. Tur, says another patient, Andreu Ramallo, “speaks as though bleeding to death.” The dying Justo Pastor has the “glassy, dirty gaze that animals have in the afternoon.” A razor blade in Tur’s hand (for the worst of reasons) has the look of a “train ticket that some invisible conductor has punched.” The sea itself is the novel’s heavy, so vast and inviolate it’s invisible. Tur, the novel’s protagonist, mentions it at the opening (threatened by the switchblade sky) and then at the end, when the reader comes to understand its power. Nowhere and ... Read the full review

GUYS LIKE ME by Dominique Fabre translated by Howard Curtis New Vessel Press, 144 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Dominique Fabre has written a dozen novels, including the 2005 The Waitress Was New, which Archipelago Books brought out in English translation in 2008. New Vessel Press publisher Ross Ufberg attended a reading at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and decided to publish an English edition of Fabre’s next novel, Guys Like Me, in the translation by Howard Curtis. Both novels are narrated by middle-aged protagonists, once married, now single and lonely. “Sometimes you’re so alone you think you’re talking aloud even when you haven’t said a word,” says the unnamed narrator of Guys Like Me, who works in an unnamed office and lives in an apartment in Levallois. Once a week or so he talks to his son Benjamin, who’s finishing university studies, and every so often he meets up with his lifelong friend Marco to talk about Marco’s troubled son Antoine, who has been in and out of jail and rehab. Sometimes they reminisce and the landscape of the Hauts-de-Seine, which holds all their memories, talks back. He trolls Internet dating sites, “a kind of ocean” of loneliness. On ... Read the full review

AnonCHILDREN DANCE ON GRAVES[1] collected by Sir Peter Cotton edited by Sophia Lee In time, he would come to bear great hatred toward the juniper[2] tree. He would hate the soft sheen of its[3] needles and its slender twisting limbs. He would hate the roundness of its berries, so plump and tender. But most of all, he would hate its scent. The young hunter spent his boyhood years swinging from the boughs of a myrrh tree, in whose oil his nursemaids cleaned his hair[4]. He was an active child, perpetually turning cartwheels around his caregivers and chasing small game in the park[5] around his manor. He would catch rabbits with fur so sleek and fowl with feathers so fine that he didn’t mind at all the quiver of their throats beneath his hands—how fearfully they gazed at him with wide, innocent, and watering eyes; how their hair-lined lips or beaks shuddered for breath, or perhaps whimpered, each emitting long, low croons that would be shrieks were it not for the boy’s hands around their throats, and their limbs thrashing, thrashing, thrashing in pain, struggling to bound away, but all in vain, as their muscles tired, and their bodies whole—head, neck, ... Read the full review

THE DUCK LADY by Jeremy Freedman In my dreams I see the duck lady, her profile’s sharp tang, quack-quacking on Chestnut Street. Pterodactyls are tame compared to the rampaging avians flying past her head, pecking at her, causing her wracking sternutations. Remember not to write me duck lady, you don't owe me anything. In my complacency, I betrayed you, betrayed your otherness. I did not believe in the modern polyphonic style of your extruded aria on Chestnut Street. You owe all to yourself and the Blessed Mother and your home, husband and family. Your needs are important to you; they converge in the area in front of you, in the two feet of sidewalk in front of your two feet ... Read the full review

Tara Stella, Introduction by Raymond RorkeHIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: Instagram Photography A century ago, in 1916, American photographer Paul Strand would attach a false lens on the side of his camera so that he could photograph candid portraits of unsuspecting subjects. Later, in the 1930s, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson painted his small Leica with dull black paint so that he could unobtrusively capture “the decisive moment.” Before the decade was out, Walker Evans was hiding his camera under his coat, the lens peeking through a buttonhole, to photograph riders on the New York City Subway just as they were. Today, in this time-honored tradition of street photography, New York photographer Tara Stella takes Instagrams. Her subjects, too, are candid moments, but her camera is a cellphone, hidden in plain sight. And while Evans didn’t publish his collection of subway photos until 1966, Tara’s photos are shared instantly online with a worldwide public. Tara is one of over 300 million active users of Instagram, the popular mobile app that enables cellphone users to grab an image and share it on social media. Since its debut in 2010, over 30 billion photos have been generated by users, ranging from the National Geographic ... Read the full review

HUSH, PUPPIES by Catherine Nichols The vet returned my call as I was rolling the last wineglass in bubble wrap. In counterpoint to my curt hello, he sounded upbeat, even jovial. He explained that when Mags had been spayed last month, the operation had sent her hormones haywire. “That’s why she’s behaving like she’s pregnant,” he summed up. “It’s a textbook case.” The “textbook case” was curled beside the stove in a cardboard box she had commandeered during my week of packing. She’d stuffed it with laundry from the overflowing hamper. Each time I approach, she whined. “It’s all in your head,” I told her, shoving the phone into my pocket. “Snap out of it.” Her eyebrows twitched. Then she sighed, wriggling deeper into the mound of dirty tees, her silky muzzle resting on her paws. Alex returned with the U-Haul around one. After much hemming and hawing on both sides, I was making the move to his place. I updated him on Mags’ condition. In the several hours since the vet’s call, she had whelped. At her swollen teats were Alex’s favorite Nikes that she’d dragged from under the bed ... Read the full review

FINDING BABEL A Video Documentary by David Novack and Andrei Malaev-Babel (Odessa Films) Introduction by David Novack and Dylan Hansen-Fliedner Isaac Babel is considered one of the most significant literary figures of the early Soviet Union. A writer, translator, and journalist, he began publishing shortly after the revolution of 1917 with the help of his mentor Maxim Gorky. The older author advised the young writer to go and see the world, incorporating what he saw into his fiction. Babel signed up with the Red Army in the Soviet-Polish Civil War as a war correspondent and began keeping what would become his 1920 Diary. Only 26 years old, Isaac Babel developed a unique literary practice rooted in the act of witnessing. As a documentarian, Babel captured reality, filtering and distilling it into memorable impressions in his diary. These observations and reports would later be transformed into a collection of short stories, Red Cavalry, which blend fact and fiction into powerful narratives. Red Cavalry thrust Babel upon the international stage. In these stories, Babel wrote under the alter-ego Kyril Lyutov who, like Babel, hides the fact that he is Jewish from his fellow Cossacks, widely known for their anti-Semitism. The intertwining of ... Read the full review

ABC FOR THE CHILD WHO LIVED TWENTY-SIX DAYS by Deborah Burnham Air your only appetite, your first food. Your bones fit, peg in cup. Creases on your arms. Down, derry derry derry down your mother sang. Except for the first cry, you were silent. Fist-sized head. Fists the size of cherries. Don’t go. Don’t go. The single prayer. Half your life, you were too small to hold. You never said I ... Read the full review

GEOLOGY by Patrick Ball How fast are we moving do you think. She’d been lying back with her eyes closed and with her sunglasses off and above her head on the ice, nothing between her and the cold bright rays but as I spoke she reached to the glasses and crunched forward at the waist. Her legs pivoted upward a little in reaction then back down and she pushed the sunglasses onto her face. Not far to her left the ice was clinging to rock and in places it was cracked and fissured with slow pressures but to the right the side of the valley wasn’t visible beyond the hump of the glacier and down further at the valley floor, sunk in green and surrounded by trees and heat the house did its fairytale thing. Stacking upward turreted from the land. She brought her knees toward her and hooked across them and peered down the slope. I don’t know. A half metre a day maybe. When I touched the ice my fingertips came back dry. It was pitted and uneven and it had had specks of dirt and grit ground into it by footsteps or deeper down by the building ... Read the full review

ZUMBA FEVER by Nadia Laher Saturday at Zumba there was a new song, one with a thumping electronic beat. Marie hated when there were new songs. She still had difficulty learning the routines they did every week, mastering such simple moves as simultaneously throwing her right arm in the air and kicking her left foot up. The instructor, Sierra, bopped around at the front of the room, clapping her hands together. “It’s a new song, ladies! Time to jive!” Marie could feel sweat sticking to her back underneath the big white t-shirt and loose black capris she wore. She’d found them on sale at Marshall’s, next to the racks of bright athletic clothing and spandex. Lenny had bought her a gym membership, insisting she stay active. She’d protested, but he used his trump card, said, “I want my kids to know their grandma for a long time, Ma” and she gave in. Now she watched the young girls dancing in their sleek running shorts and wished it were possible for her to feel less unappealing. She imagined them whispering about her, the fossil in the back row wearing all the clothing. Three rows of girls in front of her, and ... Read the full review

JUST READ by Rebecca Lambright When the power goes out, empty the refrigerator and put the perishables in a cooler full of ice. Assume that the bills weren’t paid and don’t ask questions. Light candles and do not speak. Time your showers, keep them short, ignore that they’re cold. When there isn’t enough food for everyone some nights, drink water to silence the hunger. Do your homework, go to bed. Take the foreclosure letters from the mail, put them in Dad’s briefcase, pretend you didn’t see them. When Mom is sad, hide the books. When Mom looks tired, hide the books. When Mom gets angry, hide the books, every time. You hide them because you know that she’ll look for them. Because you know that there is no money, Dad got them anyways. For you, he says. And once everything is calm again, read. I grew up with these as my principal rules. I followed every one except for the rule about words. I wasn’t supposed to have them, read them, want them, or write them. Mom said words took you away from school, took you away from work, too you away from what you were supposed to be doing ... Read the full review

OBSIDIAN BLUES # 36 by Herman Beavers on the slaveship used to be, a polemic blast of wind, the mere hint of an ache & somewhere a child sadder than me, long gone brother suffers through yet another mention of this light around me, a bright tumbling; character, the falsest of alarms— electricity shirring, doubt scoffing this pyrophoric embrace ... Read the full review

THE HURRICANE by Gemini Wahhaj THE HURRICANE by Gemini Wahhaj At the time of the hurricane, they were both still working. A few days before the hurricane hit, Lila was getting on a plane to New York for an oil and gas conference. At the time of the hurricane, they were both still working. A few days before the hurricane hit, Lila was getting on a plane to New York for an oil and gas conference. They called it Hurricane Ike on the radio, and people laughed when they heard the warning, since it followed warnings about so many other hurricanes that season that had failed to materialize. But this time it was real. Lila saw Ike approach Houston on TV in her hotel room in New York. She tried to call Kamal but phone lines were down. Ike finally made landfall at night. Lila watched, minute by minute, as the giant, swirling cloud simulation of a category 4 tropical cyclone hit the speck that was supposed to be Houston. News of a train accident interrupted the hurricane coverage periodically, but mostly, during the days of the conference, all TV cameras stayed focused on Ike and Houston. Heading home, on ... Read the full review

ATLANTICA by Ernest Hilbert At a touch, the pane of ice jigsaws, cracks To diamond scatter, hard cold clouds Clustered against a mountain chain. One large shard holds its shape, tracks Its slow starfish way down the windshield, crowds Out ever smaller nicks of ice. The rain Will soon steal its contours, but for a while It is my continent, rhododendron, Moth wing, milk spill, embryo, no Atlantis Or Antarctica, but a sunken isle I’ve named Atlantica, frozen cauldron Filled with cold storms, a far home, locked atlas, Fighting to recall a word and reclaim Myself from a place that has taken my name ... Read the full review

THE CROWS by Kathryn Hellerstein We hear them before dawn in our dreams And step through droppings On the sidewalk in the morning. Seeing no birds besides the usual sparrows, We wonder, at first, if geese were Driven up from the river by the night's rain. At dusk, I walk with my daughter. Through the deepening light, black arrowheads By the hundreds swarm over the treetops, Glide, and settle indifferently, caw, grow silent, Caw, in a circle of branches. I spin around with my face to the sky ... Read the full review

TONY by Elizabeth Alexander We were running through the Shepherd’s Woods down by Yalloway Creek and across from the schoolyard. We were running because Tony had said he wanted to and I had said that that sounded fine, and so we ran. When we reached the Gap, that’s the wide space between one side of the Woods and the other where the ground falls away and you can see the Creek squeeze through rocks at the bottom, I jumped over. Tony stopped and wouldn’t do it, so I said “C’mon Ton—! Don’t be a chicken!” And he hated when I called him that, and I suppose that’s what did it. And I suppose that’s why his mum won’t meet my eye when I look at her across the pew ... Read the full review

THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD by Justin Hocking Graywolf Press, 266 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz “Grand Programmes of Providence” Boys can be so mysterious, so closed off with their feelings. Surely they must feel things. But what are they feeling? And what are they thinking about those feelings? Why don’t they talk about those feelings? What do they expect women to do, simply divine those feelings like a barometer at sea—blind to the gathering clouds, deaf to the sound of the gulls and the waves, unable to smell the saltiness of the air? What is the deep wonderworld of a boy’s mind? What do boys want? Let’s get this out of the way: According to Justin Hocking, it’s not not sex. In his recent memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, Hocking shows that boys also want emotional gratification that often, coincidentally, happens with sexual encounters. And he wants it pretty badly. He might even want it as badly as Ahab wants revenge on the white whale. Hocking’s desire—his addiction—certainly leads him to some strange and dicey situations, and, like Ahab’s quest, often has harmful effects on the people surrounding him. Hocking makes many analogies to characters and ... Read the full review

OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS by Claire Fuller Tin House Books, 388 pages reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier Claire Fuller’s mesmerizing novel begins with a black-and-white photograph from 1976: the once-upon-a-time that her narrator, 17-year-old Peggy Hillcoat, is trying nine years later to recall. The picture opens a window into a living room in Highgate, London, where a group of so-called “Retreaters,” among them Peggy’s father James, meet to discuss their defense against environmental and economic catastrophe. In the photo, eight-year-old Peggy’s image is blurred; she’s being led from the room by her disapproving mother Ute, while James clenches his fists and Oliver Hannington, his sinister-seeming friend, smiles “as though he wanted posterity to know he wasn’t really interested in the group’s plans for self-sufficiency and stockpiling.” But memory is partly projection; for Peggy, the photo is like a magic mirror, reflecting what she knows unconsciously but can’t yet claim. Her sudden, strange behavior after looking at it—using scissors to cut around her father’s face, then slicing off her bra and tucking his image beneath her breast—is the reader’s first clue that the “bloody Armageddon” she’s trying to recover is an entirely different disaster from the kind these survivalists predict ... Read the full review

PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE by Atticus Lish Tyrant, 417 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher If civilization ended tomorrow and had to be reconstructed based on Preparation for the Next Life, our descendants could get reasonably far with Atticus Lish's instruction manual. They could learn, for instance, how correctional officers respond to an incident in the yard. Or how to eat a hot dog: The guy whose house it was’s woman brought out a tray of hotdogs and set it on the coffee table, which was behind them. The plumber turned around and said thank you, hon. There's relish, she said. She sat down on the couch, which was behind the coffee table, and spooned relish on a hotdog and bit into it with her hand cupped under it and chewed. In Preparation for the Next Life, Lish fixates on certain details. Notice how insistent he is on the geography of the living room, seemingly at the expense of almost everything else besides the hot dog. No one says much in this well-appointed room and not much happens—here or anywhere. The nearest metaphor for the novel may be a heavily upholstered room in which no one talks, really, about anything ... Read the full review

TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST by Deirdre Madden Europa Editions, 161 pages reviewed by Annika Neklason I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to meet my family for the first time. What it would be like to look at them as strangers, to know nothing more about them than what I could see in their faces and their clothing and the way they moved to introduce themselves. It seems like an impossible task, separating the people from the years I’ve spent growing up with them and the years I’ll spend growing old with them. Maybe more than anything else, family is a matter of shared time. Of photo albums full of baby pictures and accumulated Christmas and birthday presents and long, fidgety car trips to half-remembered vacation spots. Family is this weight of shared history, both experienced and inherited, and of shared futures that are always looming over every exchange of goodnights, or goodbyes ... Read the full review

WE’LL GO TO CONEY ISLAND by Barbara Scheiber Sowilo Press, 246 pages reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner With all the recent speculation about octogenarians releasing novels, it’s exhilarating, and reassuring, to read Barbara Scheiber’s sweeping first novel, published last year when the author was 92. We’ll Go to Coney Island, which was 30 years in the writing, tells a semi-autobiographical story about one family across generations, with a mother’s secret as the thread that connects everyone. The story is a set of relationships, conflicts, and memories as time passes. Scheiber was formerly a radio producer for NBC, and in 1975, she was involved in drafting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. The book’s cover is a Walker Evans photograph of the backs of a man and woman at Coney Island. Evans took the photograph, which captures the scene Scheiber describes on the page one, in 1928. The Metropolitan Museum of Art featured it as a signature poster for a retrospective of the photographer’s work in 2000. There is double-meaning to the photograph’s use as the cover illustration for We’ll Go to Coney Island: the man in the image is Scheiber’s father, Harry A. Gair, and the woman is Harriet, his ... Read the full review

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan Daum Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher Authenticity is Her Bag So here's the problem with coma stories: not everyone gets a coma story. Life-threatening medical emergencies chased closely by miraculous recoveries are, for most of us, in short supply. People who do find themselves with a coma story shouldn't be surprised when friends, relatives, and neighbors want a piece of it. They want your Ninety Minutes in Heaven, absent the ignominious retraction. They want to know how your near-death experience has changed you, brought you closer to God. They want your spiritual lesson, and they will be insistent. Meghan Daum’s coma story caps off what you might call a tough year. First her grandmother died, then her mother. Then she began to feel woozy with grief or flu, except that it turned out to be flea-transmitted typhus that knocked her prone on a hospital bed, hovering for days in a medically induced coma. Her total recovery is so unanticipated that her neurologist is prompted to call it miraculous. (Not the word you want to hear from the man with his tools inside your skull, Daum observes.) ... Read the full review

LEARNING CYRILLIC by David Albahari translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać Dalkey Archive, 189 pages reviewed by Jon Busch Printed on the cover of renowned Serbian author David Albahari’s most recent short fiction collection, Learning Cyrillic (his seventh book to be translated into English), is an excerpt from a review, “A Kafka for our times…” As I read the twenty plus stories in the collection, this short passage stuck with me. I was taken aback and distracted by how little resemblance to Kafka I found. Unlike Kafka, who never breaks role and keeps the fourth wall strong, Albahari entertains a great allowance of postmodern play—with frequent narrative breaks and ruminations on meaning and text. With the exception of, “The Basilica in Lyon,” about two-thirds into the collection, there is slight trace of Kafka. And even in this piece, the resemblance is superficial and lies solely in the use of a labyrinth setting ... Read the full review

THE SCAPEGOAT by Sophia Nikolaidou translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich Melville House Publishing, 237 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin In Greece, the perennial crisis of confidence in political institutions has worsened since the economic crash of 2008, leaving young people particularly disenfranchised and disillusioned (“New Party Capitalizes on Greeks’ Loss of Faith in Their Leaders,” says the Times on January 21st). The writer Sophia Nikolaidou confronts the disillusionment in The Scapegoat, a neatly kaleidoscopic stirring of a novel, her first to be translated into English. Nikolaidou, in Karen Emmerich’s swift translation, connects the present anxiety to the1948 murder of the American journalist George Polk (the namesake of the prestigious Polk Awards), who had been investigating Greece’s corrupt right-wing government during the nation’s Civil War. Fearing the loss of U.S. aid, the Greek government pinned the murder on Grigoris Staktopoulos, a journalist and one-time communist. Evidence was thin to non-existent and, as in the Nisman case in Argentina, hardly anyone felt they would ever learn the truth ... Read the full review

RED JUICE: POEMS 1998–2008 by Hoa Nguyen Wave Books, 245 pages reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke Hoa Nguyen is a poetic tease: her retrospective Red Juice is a decade’s-worth of poetry that tantalizes with glimpses of self-awareness and familiarity just as soon as the lines lose you in non sequitur and obscurity. The poet flutters between intense clarity and seeming nonsense (albeit eloquent nonsense), forcing the reader to dwell over her deceptively short poems, grappling with gut-reactions to the way the work appears on the page. Reading the book becomes an accomplishment, a brain teaser; steeping the simple language in one’s thoughts to draw out the meaning seems as much a part of Nguyen’s poetry as the words themselves. For all of its length, Red Juice is rewarding—its complexities reveal themselves in intricate patterns of meta-referentiality, historical weight, even humor. One has to wonder if Nguyen presaged the collection, time-stamped in its very title, as she wrote these poems seven-to-seventeen years ago: they drip with a sense of history, whether the recent past or the Neolithic. With titles like “Dream 5.22.97,” the reader can’t help but picture the Nguyen of the ’90s knowing that cataloging her poetic chronology would be useful ... Read the full review

A QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH, 1586-1987 by Kathryn Hellerstein Stanford University Press, 496 pages reviewed by Alyssa Quint Poetry by female Yiddish writers has become the tree that falls in the empty forest of Jewish literature. As a discrete body of work it resonated only faintly with the same Yiddish critics and scholars who gushed over male Yiddish authors. English translations have become an important repository of the dying vernacular of East European Jews but, again, not so much for its female poets. Women's Yiddish poetry finally gets its scholarly due from Kathryn Hellerstein, long-time champion of the female Yiddish poetic voice, in her comprehensive and accessible account, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987. Hellerstein organizes her book around the concept of a literary tradition as invoked by the likes of T.S. Eliot in his monumental essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." To Eliot's eloquent if male-dominated and Eurocentic discussion of what "compels a man to write," (my italics), Hellerstein counters with a chain of women who work off the energy of the East European Jewish female experience with its idiosyncrasies of language, religion, gender, and culture ... Read the full review

APPROACHING BORDERS by Nathaniel Popkin Two men, one aged 61, the other 65, each born in late January, each a father in grief. The first is the Israeli writer David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed in the brief 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon. The other is the American poet Edward Hirsch, whose son Gabriel died of a drug overdose in 2011. On a bookshelf these men and their books may stand together, G then H, Grossman then Hirsch, David then Edward. They are joined too by the instinct to drill into unfathomable sorrow. In 2008, Grossman produced a startling work of preemptive mourning, a novel published in Jessica Cohen’s English translation in 2010 as To The End of the Land and last summer the ecstatic lamentation Falling Out of Time (also translated by Cohen), both brought out in U.S. by Knopf. Hirsch reviewed Falling Out of Time in the New York Times Book Review shortly before Knopf published his piercing seventy-eight page elegy, Gabriel ... Read the full review

THE USE OF MAN by Aleksandar Tišma Trans. by Bernard Johnson New York Review of Books, 368 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher One of the major themes in The Use of Man is the use of women by men. Most of Tišma’s men are womanizers, none more confirmed than the central character Sredoje. As a boy, he dreams of lording over "sweet-smelling" slave girls as a pirate brigand; as an adult, he uses his policeman status to coerce frightened women into sleeping with him. The other main character, Vera, attempts to save herself as war approaches by separating from her family, escaping with a local official to Budapest. She attracts him by tanning in the sun, relying only on “her own healthy, supple body, in which she had full confidence.” In the long, dismal postwar economy, she will eventually prostitute herself in exchange for gifts and favors. For preoccupations like these, the author has been accused, on occasion, of “eroticizing the Holocaust.” ... Read the full review

10:04 by Ben Lerner Faber and Faber, 245 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz 10:04 is Lerner’s impressive follow-up to 2011’s Leaving the Atocha Station. It aspires to make more meaningful connections between art and life; philosophy and experience. Atocha sets a high bar. That novel’s protagonist, Adam Gordon, wandered through Madrid in 2004, lonely as an El Greco cloud, thinking about Lukacs while staring at Bosch; in the meantime, cultivating a precious skepticism toward any “real experience of art.” 10:04 updates Atocha—tries to push conceptually further its concern for the melding of art and life, and the critical possibilities of the novel genre; while bringing them objectively closer, making them more reachable ... Read the full review

WORKING STIFFS By George Dila One Wet Shoe Publishing, 42 pages reviewed by Jon Busch George Dila’s recently published short story chapbook Working Stiffs is a satirical romp through perverse worlds where power and profit constitute The Good. In such worlds, morality is thereby consigned a priori, as any action that serves power and profit. The stories contained in Working Stiffs are brutally honest, albeit zany, depictions of a universe existing under this moral teleology ... Read the full review

Several years ago I came across a story about a nor’easter that hit a small coastal town. The morning after the storm, residents of the town reported having seen something they had never experienced before or since—fleeting visions, every one. Strange sightings out at sea, like clouds of smoke rising from the horizon, orbs of light and unrecognizable objects floating on the water. Yet, as soon as they appeared, they were gone ... Read the full review

FIGURES OF SPEECH by John Shea Philadelphia Dear Joe, It was great seeing you again last weekend. I don’t think Sharon and I have had so much fun in a month of Sundays. Sorry for the cliché. Which reminds me: I’d be delighted to write the rhetoric booklet you spoke about. It would be fun to trot out all those dusty figures of speech, half of which I can’t even name. Is there still a market for that sort of thing, with all these students who just ramble on or pour out their undiluted, unfiltered feelings onto the page? Rhetoric is a bad word to them, isn’t it? Well, if the offer’s still good, I’ll send up some pages soon. A few extra bucks would help tide us over. Sharon is feeling a bit glum about my tenure situation, and who knows what will happen if I have to start over somewhere else ... Read the full review

THE HERD by Annika Neklason The cows are clustered together at the crown of the hill. From where Priya stands on the shoulder of the highway they look like shadow puppets, dark, shifting silhouettes backlit by the harvest moon. They seem small enough, insubstantial enough, at this distance to be knocked over by a strong wind, or even swept away entirely. Beside her, Amo cups his hands around his mouth and moos at them. The low vibrato of the sound makes Priya shiver, but the cows are too far away; they can’t hear him. They don’t lift their heads ... Read the full review

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW by David Hallock Sanders Excerpt from BUSARA ROAD, a novel in progress “King Solomon was a very wise man. This we all know. How do we know this? Because the Bible tells us so! Right here in ….” Pastor Hesborne Kabaka made a small production out of opening his Bible and reading from it. “…right here in ’The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon.’ There you go – clear as can be!” Someone in the congregation exhaled a soft laugh. The pastor shut his Bible ... Read the full review

WHISPERS by John Middlebrook Wrapped up in the rustle around us, I missed the texture and hue in your whispers. You were delicate and soft as silk, but I was sired from cottons and thistles ... Read the full review

VARIATIONS ON SECOND CHILDREN by Amanda Silberling On Labor The youngest daughters come stitched into birth like the elastic waists of their mothers’ jeans, sewing needles improvising under the skin. In theaters we are sequels, second acts, thrift stores selling shades of pink our mothers are told they need ... Read the full review

THE SLOW ACTS by Sanaë Lemoine 1. In the autumn when the summer heat has burned to the ground, my father drives me to Elsa’s home before school. Her house is old and tall with peeling white paint. It reminds me of my mother’s flaking skin. Plump-armed vines crawl the walls and the windows fight for territory, small gaping mouths into Elsa’s house. Elsa hasn’t dressed yet and I help her with the buttons while her mother trots around naked. She is pale other than red elbows and knees from the cold weather. Their plumbing is rusty. I don’t know if the heat works. Their house is by the seaside and holds humidity year round. Its floorboards ripple from dampness and patches of black mold grow like soot in the bathroom ... Read the full review

BERGAMOT by Alina Grabowski “I wish my sweat smelled as good as yours,” Nellie told her grandmother when she was little. She still remembered asking, sitting on her grandmother’s lap on the porch, carving a frozen Hoodsie cup with a wooden spoon. Her grandmother laughed. “That’s not sweat,” she said. “It’s perfume. Bergamot.” “What’s bergamot?” She liked the way the word was unfamiliar in her mouth, a new twisting of the tongue. She whispered it when she said it—it seemed like the kind of word that held secrets. “A bit like an orange, a bit like a lemon. We don’t have them in the U.S., really.” Nellie hadn’t realized there were things that didn’t exist here. Everything, it seemed, was contained in the world that stretched from her house to her grandparents’ ... Read the full review

INSIDE REX by Mimi Oritsky Oil on Linen I was born in a small town sixty miles northwest of Philadelphia, Pa. called Reading. It was an industrial city on the Schuylkill River, full of brown-brick factories and heavy gambling with lots of strip joints. It usually appeared dark with silvery smoke in the air. Fine art and culture were not nearly as popular as building automobiles, shooting squirrels, and drinking Olde Reading Beer. However, the town was surrounded by mountains and farmlands, and this landscape was filled with corn fields, milk cows, and small herds of sheep. It all appeared to me so much lighter and more colorful ... Read the full review

Sharon WhitePANIC I was on top of a mountain, a small mountain in the Lake District, and my grandmother was alone at the inn. I was lost in fog. I was lost in the swirling fog and my grandmother was alone at the inn. She wasn’t as old as my mother is now. She used to call me Cherie. We were traveling together to all the famous places in the British Isles. I wanted to go to Scotland and the Lake District and Oxford. When we got to Oxford we had sherry in an American’s flat, a woman who knew lots of diplomats. I thought I was heartbroken. My mother sent a suitcase of clothes, flowered silk dresses and shiny shoes with high heels. I loved a man in Norway who smelled like fish and milk. I was drugged on Valium and had a hard time driving the shift car. Little did I know a boy from Germany had sent me a bottle of sweet wine and it was sitting, would sit, in Norway at my lover’s house for thirteen years. When we opened the cold bottle, it was sour. I’d never had a lover—was that what started the panic ... Read the full review

IF NOTHING CHANGES by Angelique Stevens I was twelve and sitting in the back of the Number 5 city bus with a bag of cheap Christmas presents when I saw my dad stagger up the steps. I was about to call to him but stopped myself. He had fumbled with his change too long to be sober. I slunk in my seat and tried to make myself invisible. He lurched his way to the front, talking and spitting as he moved. I watched him from behind my propped-up arm and wished it were any other night but Christmas Eve ... Read the full review

APOLOGY TO LOS ANGELES by Julia Bloch I’m sorry because winter. I’m sorry because “Lost Angeles.” I’m sorry because the hand is the most versatile of instruments and Even zero is a position ... Read the full review

BRIEF EULOGIES AT ROADSIDE SHRINES by Mark Lyons Wild River Books, 216 pages reviewed by Jon Busch “...they just stick him in the ground with no stone, no nothin’. That ain’t right I say to myself.” This short passage from “He Sure Do Want to Fly”, one of the many superb pieces in Mark Lyons’ most recent short story collection, Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines, summarizes the intent of the work precisely. With the assurance and ease of a well-worn traveler, Mr. Lyons escorts the reader on a voyage through the lonely corners of North America, erecting descanos—roadside memorials—along the way. Each story, in its own manner, is an offering to the Gods of forgotten souls, or as the eponymous hero of the story, “Arnold’s Roadside Café” eloquently states, “The Great God of Roadkill.” The collection pulses with a tragic calmness akin to the writings of Carver or Cheever. Beneath every scene and absurd occurrence lurks a temperate sadness. While the explored themes of isolation, loneliness and death are heavy, the electric tone of the prose persistently enthralls. Here is Lyons’ energy and command of voice revealed by Blue-J, the protagonist of “He Sure Do Want to Fly,” describing a ... Read the full review

ORPHANS by Hadrien Laroche translated by Jan Steyn and Caite Dolan-Leach Dalkey Archive Press, 130 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher Orphans starts with an advisory warning from the translators. Orphan, they explain, has a slightly different meaning in French: orphelin describes not only a child who has lost her parents, but a child who has lost only one parent. The explanation is necessary, but also somewhat inadequate. Looking back along our linguistic family tree, orphan shrinks and dilates to cover so much more. In Latin an orbus is “bereft”; in Old English ierfa, an “heir,” with close ties to “suffering” and “trouble”; in Old Church Slavonic, a rabu (think robot) is a “slave” or “servant.” When we work our way back to Proto-Indo-European, orbho means “bereft of father,” but also “deprived of free status.” Orphan begins to sound simultaneously like someone who has lost his parents and someone who is inescapably tied to them ... Read the full review

ON THE ABOLITION OF ALL POLITICAL PARTIES by Simone Weil, translated by Simon Leys New York Reviews of Books, 71 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz When Albert Camus heard that he had won the Nobel Prize in 1957, he ran and hid. Averse to the frenzy of the press, he sought refuge in the home of a friend. He landed at the apartment of the family of Simone Weil in Paris’s 6th Arrondissement. Another friend, Czeslaw Milosz, in an essay on Weil, recalls that home fondly. He notes the humble, ink-stain-covered kitchen table, and he recalls the generous hospitality of Mme. Weil, mother of the young philosopher. He all but represents the quality of morning light illuminating the desk at which the young Weil would do her thinking. He never directly states that by 1957, Weil had been dead for almost fifteen years ... Read the full review

Bolaño: A BIOGRAPHY IN CONVERSATIONS by Mónica Maristain Melville House, 288 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz “Companionable Fictions” The first section of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 describes a small but ardent group of academic literary critics who dedicate their lives to the work of an obscure German author, Benno von Archimboldi. Almost five hundred pages later, in the last section, “The Part About Archimboldi” Bolaño finally introduces the author. In between stretch many strange adventures, but most are not directly related to the work of the author. But neither, really, was the first part, “The Part About the Critics.” Instead, Bolaño narrates the friendships and rivalries of four dedicated readers. If not for the table of contents, the fictitious novelist would appear to be merely the occasion to build a story out of these otherwise unremarkable lives. Actually, for the characters, Archimboldi, who keeps evading their grasp, really does turn out to be an excuse for them all to sustain richer and more companionable lives ... Read the full review

MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: A MEMOIR by Brian Turner W.W. Norton & Company, 240 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher Just a few years into the Iraq invasion, I remember a certain amount of critical hand-wringing over the absence of War Literature, or the absence of an audience willing to receive it. We had the relentless daily body counts, the Iraqi countryside reduced to numbers and the names of cities. We had news. What we were waiting for was a sense of perspective: writers who could walk into the news cycle and persuasively inhabit the numbers. Preferably we wanted soldier-poets, in the Wilfred Owen tradition, who could combine the insiders’ perspective and personalization with a capacity for irony. In a decade characterized by the deterioration of public institutions and increased privatization, we wanted, oddly enough, more privatization.  Ten years later, we have a crop of fine veteran-writers and a receptive market, from Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds, Phil Klay’s stories in Redeployment, and Brian Turner’s poetry collection Here, Bullet. Turner, who has been praised as the poet of the Iraq/Afghanistan Generation soldier-writers, has now released his much-anticipated memoir of seven years spent fighting in the Army. Even in ... Read the full review

CONQUISTADOR OF THE USELESS by Joshua Isard Cinco Puntos Press, 249 pages reviewed by Jon Busch Joshua Isard’s Conquistador of the Useless is a novel of vertices, exploring the terrain of transitions, where cultural ethos and personal identity evolve in phase. It is this vague middle ground, the no-man’s-land between good ol’ days and dreary futures, where our protagonist Nathan Wavelsky traverses in apathetic strides. The use of this structure manifests in an insightful and poignant exploration of meaning and meaninglessness in contemporary life. What does it mean to live outside the narrative arc? The novel opens with Nathan and his wife Lisa moving out of the city of Philadelphia and into the suburbs. The move marks a return to the land of his childhood and the end of his rebellious twenties. But Nathan isn’t home in either world. He is neither young nor old, urban nor suburban. The era of his young adulthood has concluded and the shifting cultural tide presents him with the uncomfortable truth that all of his once grandiose, youthful angst has accomplished nothing—the experiences which once felt unique and infused with importance were, in fact, no more than the standard benchmarks of growth that all ... Read the full review

AUGUSTUS by John Williams NYRB Books, 305 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz “Notable Romans” Those who studied Latin in high school or college might recognize the feeling with which Georg Lukacs introduces his Theory of the Novel. Although the book was published a century ago, it still holds valuable insight into the pleasures of reading. In the introductory sentences he describes those happy ages when the world and self were each visible with sharp distinction. Discrete they were, but also intimately familiar to each other. Lukacs’ framework is present in the first lists of Latin vocabulary; these collections of words alert contemporary readers to a world in which a word meant itself and at the same time more than itself. For example, ferro—iron—could denote the reliable metal; it could metonymically represent a sword made out of iron; and it could metaphorically represent any object of potentially harmful strength. These vocabulary lists imply a world in which such figures were useful, a world in which they could and would be deployed with practiced subtlety, perhaps in response to iron-willed violence ... Read the full review

JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT by Antal Szerb translated by Len Rix New York Review Books, 296 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin I don’t mind observing that as a child I reveled in erotic games, secret afternoons and evenings of play at sex and death. The child’s world stretches infinitely and yet is all encompassing. The ceaseless hours end—usually forcibly, by parents—inevitably leaving a taste of unfulfilled desire. Oh, to be so fully awake, so charged again. Those earliest encounters with desire—yet unnamed, unformed—set on us, mark us, until, at some point the feelings fade. Not desire itself, but the skin’s memory of it fresh, smothered by age and responsibilities. But for some of us, perhaps because the experience is so acute, the process of forming relationships to others cements in those early rooms. Then adulthood presses, like a train conductor telling you, in a foreign language you don’t understand, that you’re sitting in the wrong class. You shrug, he keeps demanding, and the seconds freeze in confusion until at last someone pushes you along. It is in this state that we find Mihály, the 30-something protagonist of Antal Szerb’s scintillating 1937 novel Journey By Moonlight, published this week—in the English translation by ... Read the full review

THING MUSIC by Anthony McCann Wave Books, 113 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami Anthony McCann’s newest collection, Thing Music, is not unlike a player piano, only instead of standards it plays John Cage or even Merzbow. That is to say, that while the reader recognizes McCann’s Thing Music to be poetry as one recognizes Cage’s compositions to be music, the common associations with either art—melody and harmony, form and line—are rearranged, actively dissonant, and yet nonetheless beautiful. Unlike familiar emotional confirmations found in melodrama or more confessional lyric poetry, Thing Music’s reward is one of discovery: of new pleasures found in innovative poetic forms, and of newfound emotional connections made with the imagery and diction belonging to those forms. That is not to say Thing Music overtly plays with common poetic restraints; rather, the collection challenges the idea of form through its overall free-form stylistic execution, only leaving recurring motifs of formal structures, words, and images throughout the collection as trail blazes to unify the poems and enhance the reader’s comprehension of the collection as a whole text. But what is a “text”? It seems McCann explores the text’s limits as an object, that is, as a set of signs ... Read the full review

I CALLED HIM NECKTIE by Milena Michiko Flašar translated by Sheila Dickie New Vessel Press reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin A novel can fly across time and space or it can burrow, it can seek out, hide from itself, emerge somewhere else, on some other plane: a surprise. Certainly, other novels set in Tokyo, as is I Called Him Necktie, sprawl across the endless city as words scratch across the page. But this one, by the 34-year-old Milena Michiko Flašar, the Viennese novelist whose mother is Japanese, is a kind of airless tunnel—the closer you are to the exit the further you’ve actually gone, lost as if in meditation, digging. Flašar’s protagonist is Taguchi Hiro, 20 years old and a hikikomori—an outcast who shuts himself in. Buried in silence, Hiro hasn’t left his room in two years. “My room was like a cave,” he says, a few days after venturing away, into public for the first time. I had grown up here. I had essentially lost my innocence here. I mean, growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really you are losing yourself. I mourned the child I had once been, whom I heard in rare moments pummeling ... Read the full review

THE SEARCH FOR HEINRICH SCHLÖGEL by Martha Baillie Tin House Books, 352 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher "ERRATICA" Think fast! ____’s fourth novel navigates the tension between fact and fiction, readership and voyeurism, the impersonality of the archive, and the personal voice of the archivist. If you guessed W.G. Sebald, you’re not far off. He was known for writing in luminous ellipses around historical catastrophe, particularly the Holocaust, with an intellectual restlessness mirrored by his travels. But the author in question is Martha Baillie, and the book not Rings of Saturn but The Search for Heinrich Schlögel. Baillie likes to lay her influences plain; she has named Sebald as one of the patron gods of “elegance and lucidity” guiding her previous novels. In The Shape I Gave You, a novel studded thickly with “archival” photographs, she obsessed over authenticity and travel. Her Incident Report was narrated entirely through (admittedly unorthodox) workplace documentation. Sebald’s Rings and Baillie’s Search even begin with similar whodathunkit reference-book citations, Sebald’s describing the eponymous rings of Saturn and Baillie’s digging up an obscure usage for erratic: a rock “transported from its place of origin, esp. by glacial action.” Here our erratic is Heinrich Schlögel—a restless walker ... Read the full review

OUR LADY OF THE NILE by Scholastique Mukasonga Archipelago Books, 244 pages translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin This is how Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile ends, in 1979: You remember what they used to tell us in catechism: God roams the world, all day long, but every evening He returns home to Rwanda. Well, while God was traveling, Death took his place, and when He returned, She slammed the door in his face. Death established her reign over Rwanda. She has a plan: she’s determined to see it through to the end. She does, in fact. In 1994, ethnic hatred erupted into political terror and Hutu militants wiped out some 800,000 Tutsi people along their Hutu allies. This is the part of the history of Rwanda, a tiny East African nation squeezed between Burundi and Uganda, between colonialism and corruption, that we remember. For most of us the genocide was unfathomable and worse, a distant horror, another strange interruption of the Clinton years. Here, in this slender, deceptively fast-paced novel, Mukasonga, who fled Rwanda before genocide, explores everything leading up to it: ethnic rivalry, resentment, hatred, the quota system that limited Tutsi ... Read the full review

Emily Steinberg: Introduction by Tahneer OksmanBROKEN EGGS: A Visual Narrative To read Emily Steinberg’s autobiographical visual narrative, Broken Eggs, a set of sixty-seven images accompanied by sprawling text and recounting her struggles with infertility, is to witness a series of concurrent, sometimes even conflicting, emotional transformations. From the first, our narrator appears engaging, intimate, and raw. She sits on the ground, her hands wrapped around her knees and her brow furrowed, delivering a back-story for the whirlwind series of events that follows. [Image #1]  She spent her twenties as an artist [Image #3] and her thirties unsuccessfully looking for love, while other life events—depression, anxiety, her mother’s dementia— got in the way as well. [Image #4]  This is how she finds herself “on the cusp of forty,” [Image #5] just married, trying to have a baby, and suddenly encountering the possibility that what seemed like such an inevitable life course might no longer be a possibility. Steinberg’s narrator figures prominently throughout almost all of the pages, but particular visual details often shift. In one image, depicting herself undergoing interuterine insemination, her midriff and thighs widen, as though her body is stretching itself to accommodate this  new surreality. [Image #23]  In another image, she draws ... Read the full review

Luke StrombergWHEN I SLEEP, I DREAM OF TSUNAMIS I’m walking down Main Street when a blue and strangely beautiful tidal wave rises in the distance, reaching high over roof tops. It’s the sound of wind, of water gathering force that I hear first, and I cannot move, awed by this watery hand that seems to come from nowhere as its shadow falls over an afternoon scene: a meter-maid writing a ticket; two teenagers smoking cigarettes in front of a convenience store; somebody sweeping; my dead uncle walking his dog. They all seem to notice at once, look up, break into a panic. Cars shriek to a halt, try to turn around. The hand comes down on top of them. Water crashes over buildings, crushing them to pieces. A torrent rushes toward me, taking everything with it: cars, telephone poles, debris, what used to be people— I run, my legs heavy with the thought of what’s behind me, the roar like an army, a herd of beasts, and I’m swept up by it all, carried away, ditched someplace I’ve never been, lying in a puddle on a deserted street. Old bicycles, women’s clothing, church pews, shattered bits of wood scattered all ... Read the full review

Alli KatzCATS “If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.” —Mark Twain Mark Twain never met my cat. Five seconds with Albany, watching him throw his body against our kitchen cabinets early in the morning (and again in the afternoon, and at bedtime) for six ounces of “classic beef” or a scoop of prescription urinary health dry food, or watching him raise his leg to lick his crotch and then forget what he’s doing, or him leaping on a tiny table that would never support his girth to try to press his face into a cactus, is easily enough to dispel the idea that a cat has any kind of dignity at all. And it’s not just Albany. You can watch my friend’s cat Walker slide across a wood floor to play fetch with tiny foam balls, or my mom’s cats Egon and Janine spoon, pressing their back paws awkwardly into each other’s face. My childhood cats, Strip-ed Tiger and Super, would attack our toes under our blankets as we tried to sleep. Even my dad’s dearly departed Jessica Rabbit the ... Read the full review

Merilyn JacksonOYSTERS I am licking the insides of the oyster shells embedded in salt on a plate black as your angry eyes like your love, cooling rapidly as lava. Forgive me. It reminds me of how much I want to lick your hair. A dance and book critic, Merilyn Jackson regularly writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Broad Street Review, national and international dance magazines on the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European literature, culture and politics. The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts awarded her food-driven novel-in-progress, Solitary Host, a $5,000 Literature Fellowship and a chapter of the novel, "A Sow of Violence,” appeared in the Massachusetts Review. In 2012 she attended Colgate's Summer Program with Peter Balakian and Sarah Lawrence Poetry Seminar with Tom Lux. Her poetry has been published in Exquisite Corpse, Poiesis Review 6 and Poetry Nook. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #7 ... Read the full review

Nancy AgatiNOTICING WATER: Public Art As you travel along the river—any river, stream, creek or body of water—what do you notice? Do you see the changing currents, the light that bounces and travels from wave to wave? Do you feel the rush of water at a rock’s edge? Can you hear water lapping at the shore? Do you sense the flow that ceases to part as it travels? I believe that there are times when one becomes acutely aware of the act of perceiving. There are moments when a heightened sense of awareness highlights things that might otherwise go unnoticed. Trying to accurately describe this sensation, this shift in perception, is difficult. There is a certain silence in the experience, it overcomes you and narrows your focus. Like a camera the eye zooms in, crops, and brings into view specific visual aspects of life. Objects in nature can take on a presence and that presence for a short period of time heightens all the senses. I wonder if this happens to everyone, or if it is a gift or curse for the artist? When I begin to experience this shift in perception (and the moments are fleeting), I want to ... Read the full review

Stephen PerloffTHE TIMES, THEY WERE A-CHANGIN' - West Philly Days: A Photo Essay When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania as a freshman in 1966, men were required to wear jackets and neckties to dinner—and most of us wore jackets and ties to football games. The men’s dorms in The Quad were several blocks from the women’s dorms at Hill House, and you couldn’t have a woman in your room past 10 p.m., and maybe a little later on the weekend. But there were confounding juxtapositions and experiences. Who was that strange guy with the huge head of curly hair and the button that said “Frodo Lives”? What did that mean? (Most people now don’t know that The Lord of the Rings trilogy started to become a popular phenomenon in the U. S. in the mid-1960s.) And then there was the war in Vietnam. Back home it was hardly a topic of conversation—and, even if it were, who wouldn’t want us to fight the evil Communists? They might as well have been alien invaders as depicted in many sci-fi movies at the time. Who knew that Ho Chi Minh had once been staunchly pro-American and that the U. S ... Read the full review

Thomas DevaneyPHOTOBOOTH Black-and-white film is instant toner for Americans and their famous tans, our fantasy faces, free of talent and a free shot. What summer looks like when the sound is on: bronzed, burnt, black, and red. Just look at us crushing our crush: our closest friends are as close as we get. There’s no need to point out anyone: Fresh. Lusty. Full-sized. Bad. All clamor, no fear our every move is enterprise. The second hand swimsuit. That hoodie. A soda face and a T-shirt slogan that can’t be read— and then nothing. We, free, and again out of the last frame, all of us together. One strip left behind; and by now the sea shook loose, and who knows how many stories have been concocted. These pictures aren’t private photos that our mother mailed to our father. She went to the drugstore to take those. We were not even born. But just look at her looking, hair off face, just look at the way she looks. Thomas Devaney is the author of Calamity Jane (Furniture Press Books, 2014) and The Picture That Remains (The Print Center, 2014). Recently he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He teaches ... Read the full review

MY STRUGGLE: BOOK THREE: BOYHOOD by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated by Dan Bartlett Steerforth Press, 432 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow If all one reads is Proust, it might be easy to forget that some young boys—a lot of young boys—are really fascinated with the body and its messy, abject creations: excrement, urine, semen, saliva. What a relief to see that Karl Ove Knausgaard is, at least in this respect, less Proustian than the great hubbub would have it. You have probably have heard of his six-volume memoir-novel, My Struggle. Most famously, Zadie Smith, in a tweet, called it her “crack.” The third volume, Boyhood, translated by Dan Bartlett and published in London earlier this year, has, thanks to Steerforth Press, finally arrived here in the states. This installment takes readers back to the childhood of the narrator-protagonist, roughly from when he is eight to twelve years old. The plot, such as there is one, is picaresque: young Karl Ove’s adventures with his friends. It describes his early intuitions of history, and his discovery that his parents were real people. There’s an early scene that very quickly establishes Knausgaard’s seemingly effortless ... Read the full review

BIRDS ON THE KISWAR TREE by Odi Gonzalez, trans. Lynn Levin 2Leaf Press, 140 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure It’s the Last Supper. The apostles pray earnestly as Christ radiates a heavenly light, bread-loaf in hand. It’s a scene we know well, with a key difference: dead-center of the canvas, surrounded by corn and chilies, a roasted guinea pig splays its feet in the air. This is a prime example of the Cusco School of painting, an artistic movement that developed during Peru’s colonial period and that forms the subject of Birds on the Kiswar Tree. As translator Lynn Levin explains in her notes: Painting flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Peru when Spain sent highly-accomplished painters, some of them painter-priests, to the Andes in order to evangelize the people through art and art instruction. The Church, however, put severe restrictions on the native artists: they were permitted to paint only religious subjects. The artists responded by producing work that was pious, syncretistic, and subversive. In hidden nooks in churches, Quechua artists painted angels with harquebuses; they furnished the Garden of Eden with Andean birds, trees, and flowers… ... Read the full review

TITULADA by Elena Minor Noemi Press, 75 pages reviewed by Anna Strong From its first pages, Elena Minor’s TITULADA announces its commitment to experimentation and resistance to easy characterization in a single poetic or linguistic category. English is invaded by Spanish, typical grammar and punctuation are dispossessed by mathematical symbols, poetry itself is invaded by prose and even drama. Readers enter these poems with trepidation, uncertain of where the floor will fall out from underneath them, but that not knowing, the discomfort with which we read these poems is a crucial part of the immense pleasure of reading them. Minor’s dedication is “For all those upon whose shoulders I stand” and these poems certainly owe much, visually and typographically speaking, to e.e. cummings. But where cummings mainly broke up words and messed with punctuation for visual effect, Minor’s additions, subtractions, and radical indentations suggest what is linguistically possible with even infinitesimal changes. In “Low and Slow to Taste,” the first prose poem in the collection, Minor uses brackets to suggest alternate readings and other possibilities: These elements are essences such as have no mor[t]ality. They [they] neither have color nor tenor nor faith so they [they] can’t conceive of the ... Read the full review

SELECTED POEMS by Mark Ford Coffee House Press, 146 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami Mark Ford’s Selected Poems is one loquacious houseguest. Appearing unexpectedly at your door one soaked evening, the speaker of these poems immediately pulls at the thread of your surprise as you prepare them some tea. Despite being visibly traveled the speaker is quite chipper, and as the details of their arrival unfold your home crowds with characters from British literature, mythic Roman gods, but also heirlooms—such is the cultural capital of this collection: both of the world and of the self. While this chronological sampling of Ford’s previous three collections spans twenty-two years, along with new poems, the writing is consistently and uniquely Ford throughout. That is not a remark on growth, but rather Ford’s authority: here is a poet who confidently knows his craft. While there is a twinge of John Ashbery in Ford’s writing—one Ford would not deny, as he is an Ashbery scholar himself—Ford nods to his influence but distinguishes himself in his own right. And this distinction: Ford’s uncanny blend of encyclopedic knowledge and a commitment to the mundane—or rather, a surreal spin on the mundane. Take this passage from “Affirmative Action,” ... Read the full review

CONVERSATIONS by César Aira translated by Katherine Silver New Directions, 88 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz The Little Estancias Domestic Tourism What’s the name for the genre of writing about a house? House tourism exists, but what about house-writing? It would be a good word to have on hand when reading Argentina: The Great Estancias, because whatever that genre is, this book is the exemplar. An estancia is a large estate originating in colonial settlement of Latin America and supported by agricultural industry, usually livestock. Despite regional variation across Latin America (and the use of different names, like hacienda), they generally consist of a large central house and several smaller edifices across acres upon thousands of acres of land. True to the title, the nation of Argentina is the primary subject of this book. Its history and culture are beautifully recorded in the photographs by Tomás de Elia and Cristina Cassinelli de Corral, alongside the descriptive text by César Aira ... Read the full review

VELVET RODEO by Kelly McQuain Bloom Books, 42 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami Between a single dawn and dusk, I shadowed a speaker through adolescence and into adulthood, from young summers in West Virginia to liquored confessions in Mexico. Kelly McQuain’s Velvet Rodeo is a rare chapbook that spans such lengths—though, that is one of poetry’s potentials: every verse paragraph a vignette. And yet while McQuain’s poems are distinctively narrative, they are rife with imagery; from nature to anatomy, McQuain’s imagery evokes experience, from discovering one’s body to discovering parental fallibility. It is fitting then that Velvet Rodeo’s opening poem, “Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers,” begins spiraling outward, from pastoral aesthetics to something more existential: Your brother and sister run to catch the horizon. You wade slowly through the lashing, alive with combustion, eager for bursting. This hill, once a forest, has long been cut low, untilled, rock-strewn, stubbled with stubborn flowers. Soapwort, Queen Anne’s lace, whorled loosestrife seeded scattershot The evocative action at the beginning of this passage, “run to catch the horizon,” casts a human experience on the plainly stated imagery following; in this sense, McQuain quite literally illustrates one of the poet’s roles in this world: ... Read the full review

IMAGO by Lindsay Lusby dancing girl press & studio (chapbook) reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke In many ways, Lindsay Lusby’s chapbook reiterates the themes of every poet—loss, recovery, the perplexity of navigating the adult world. But Imago, in the concisest of ways, defies a typically cliché approach to these matters through weird and compelling symbolism; on the surface level, the collection is about a girl and her pet eggplant. The reader enters Lusby’s work knowing, and taking as a given, that “The girl and her eggplant / would not be parted” (1), with only a brief epigraph on etymology and psychoanalysis to alert them of the deeps ahead, not to mention the strange realization that they, too, would not be parted from this anthropomorphized vegetable. In the interstices of this work (created in large part by the poet’s choice to number certain poems as “1 ½,” “3 ¾,” etc.), it becomes apparent that the eggplant is a stand-in for the girl’s lost mother, who “did not leave a note / or a casserole” (2 ½), but did leave the wise eggplant. Though the girl’s eyes “stray in the produce section / to summer squash, zucchini” (2), we come to understand that ... Read the full review

AGOSTINO by Alberto Moravia translated by Michael F. Moore NYRB Classics, 128 pages MR. BOARDWALK by Louis Greenstein New Door Books, 316 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin MUSEUMS OF INNOCENCE In September 1980, military officers took over the Turkish government. Soldiers arrested 500,000 people, executed some of them, and installed martial law. Ultimately, the coup ended years of political and economic instability, but most remarkably it led to Turkey’s integration into the global economy, and eventually its status as an emergent power. Gone were days of economic and cultural isolation—a shared national innocence that novelist Orhan Pamuk has so daringly and insistently memorialized in the novel Museum of Innocence (2008)—and before that in My Name is Red (2003) and the memoir Istanbul (2005). In these books he has rebuilt and recreated a deeply provincial, yet colorful and highly idiosyncratic world that otherwise was trapped in his head. This same instinct seems to motivate the author Louis Greenstein, a playwright, whose first novel, Mr. Boardwalk, was published last month by New Door Books. Greenstein’s museum of innocence is Atlantic City in the decade before 1978, when the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel was converted into Resorts International, the city’s first casino. Greenstein conjures this ... Read the full review

SPHERES OF DISTURBANCE by Amy Schutzer Arktoi Books, Red Hen Press, 280 pages reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier When my mother-in-law was dying of ovarian cancer, I had no patience for fiction. That summer, I sat by her bedside, reading while she slept—Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, sent to me by a friend who worked for the National Hospice Foundation. Though I’d always sought out stories to figure out how to live, in the face of her death, I urgently needed reality-based guidance. This spring, I carried Amy Schutzer’s Spheres of Disturbance with me as I spent long days in the hospital, and later hospice, with my father. That a literary novel could help me sort through the painful experience of losing him says much about Schutzer’s skill—and more about her wisdom. Compassion informs every line of her story about Helen, whose breast cancer returns metastasized, and about the circle of people who are moved by her impending death. Schutzer circumvents the expected (and dreaded) arc of a terminal illness story by shifting among nine different points of view. She advances in time through a single day and in depth through a web of interdependent ... Read the full review

Jay PastelakON SNAPSHOTS “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” —Susan Sontag On Easter Sundays, when we were kids, after mass and before we changed from our Easter clothes, our mother would parade my sisters and me out to the yard and pose us before the forsythia for a photo. Sorry—for a picture. We knew those things that came from a camera were photographs but we called them pictures because, well, that’s what they were: pictures of us. Later, I’d come to call them snapshots, these little segments of our life, but at the time they were just pictures. They were important to us, but they weren’t photographs. Photographs depicted bigger, important events: the school photographer made photographs because he had those lights and the camera wasn’t hanging around his neck; it wasn’t even in his hand but mounted on what I came to understand was a tripod. That was serious. That was photography. At home, we took pictures. Everyone takes pictures. My mother-in-law had boxes of pictures from years before, ... Read the full review

Grant ClauserTHE MAGICIAN CONSIDERS HIS AUDIENCE The first is always family, living room arranged around the coffee table and a Mickey Mouse Magic kit hidden behind the La-Z-Boy. Handkerchiefs produce silk flowers. Three balanced balls become two, become one, then melt into the darkness of a palm, a pocket. Later counting the eyes in a night club, a firehall, the late-night train ride home— he learns to study the difference between paying attention and real scrutiny— the ones who want to see through the darkness are the enemy. The others, for whom the darkness is the comfort of sleep, something you trust to hold you through silence and doubt— those are like his interchangeable pigeons all cooing the same infuriating note.  Grant Clauser is the author of the books Necessary Myths and The Trouble with Rivers. Poems have appeared in The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Cortland Review, American Poetry Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and others. In 2010 he was Montgomery County Poet Laureate. By day he writes about electronics and daydreams about fly fishing. He runs workshops at Musehouse and other writing conferences and runs the blog www.unIambic.com. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #6 ... Read the full review

Leonard GontarekVEHICLES 1 It is a large, pink cloud, spreading and growing larger, soft, and saturating everything this morning. The town, the smoke ejected curled from houses, some of the lights still on, the sycamore limbs, the bowl-shaped park once used for skating, now used for soccer, the day-gray sky this morning, this morning after the darkest night in 500 years. The lit rose of stone paths and outside cats, this morning, the swirl of fire vehicles, the still and shining, dark river. 2 Be a dictator of the landscape. There is less guessing, less anxiety. Leonard Gontarek is the author of five books of poems, including, Déjà vu Diner and He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Field, Poet Lore, Exquisite Corpse, Pool, Volt, Fence, Verse, and The Best American Poetry. He has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and has received two Pennsylvania Arts Council Poetry Fellowships. He was the 2011 Philadelphia Literary Death Match Champion. He has edited six anthologies of children’s poetry and is contributing editor for The American Poetry Review. In 2014 he created the first Philly Poetry Day. His website is www.leafscape.org/LeonardGontarek. Image Credit: ... Read the full review

Teresa LeoPoetry Editor's Preface, Cleaver Magazine, Issue No. 6 Cinematic. That’s the word that comes to mind reading the poetry selections from this issue of Cleaver Magazine—poems with many sweeping and carefully chosen images woven into the terrain of the verse to convey both the glorious and the traumatic. The image is to these poems as perhaps architecture is to film for Finnish architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa, who explores this relationship in his book The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. He describes “cinematic architecture” as that which “evokes and sustains specific mental states . . . terror, anguish, suspense, boredom, alienation, melancholy, happiness or ecstasy, depending on the essence of the particular cinematic narrative and the director’s intention.” Pallasmaa is interested in how “space and architectural imagery are the amplifiers of specific emotions,” how cinematic architecture allows the viewer to insert him/herself into the world of the film. He acknowledges that other art forms can have the same impact with place-making. “A great writer turns his/her reader into an architect, who keeps erecting rooms, buildings and entire cities in his/her imagination as the story progresses.” Ideally the experience continues beyond the boundaries of the art, and the ... Read the full review

Erin PerazaTHE THING ABOUT A BOAT-IN-A-BOTTLE IS NOBODY STEERS Two figures sit on the bamboo gangplank jutting off a model pirate ship. A man and a woman. They aren’t quite to-scale, and slightly over-sized as they are, they can’t explore the cabin space below or stand lookout in the crow’s nest. So they dangle their legs over blue-green silicone that feigns at ocean waves beneath them. Their relationship is more fragile now, contained in glass, than it’s ever been before. She’s a wide-eyed citizen of the world—packs a light suitcase, counts passport stamps—and he’s just grateful to have found a way to get out of town without ever having to leave it. Time feels different inside a bottle, on a ship, at sea. There’s no telling how long they’ve been inside. “Balmy,” Faye had said when she first arrived. She emerged through the bottleneck, jumping with two feet onto the hardened-putty ocean. Lance sealed the entrance quickly behind her—he’d grown accustomed to the quiet—gripping the cork like the wheel of a car as he guided it back into place. He walked Faye across the sea to his pride and joy, his masts and sails. “It’s modeled after a real English ... Read the full review

Ilana EllisPORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP: Oil on Canvas These past few years, my work has been fueled by two passions that tugged me between them. The first is that I want to be a painter of great skill. And the greatest skill takes years of continuous training and practice, which I still need. The second is that I want to paint life. I want my works to be so real they almost breathe, and so fluid they seem caught in motion. So when I focus on the ongoing problem of increasing my skill, I often have technical realizations that allow me to see the world as if I have never seen it before. After a few days of being stunned by the overwhelming beauty of everything, I am desperate to capture what I see in paint. Which leads me right back where I started, because inevitably there is something wonderful about the physical world that I don’t yet have the skill to reproduce. This cycle is what led me to produce my most recent body of work. In these past few months, I painted a series of three portraits: a self-portrait accompanied by portraits of two of my close friends. These paintings are very ... Read the full review

Joshua IsardPLATITUDES The only platitude anyone should ever offer is I love you. It is the only phrase that they know is true, that you know is true. You'll be fine, you'll be great, everything will work out—those phrases aren't meant to make you feel better, only to forget the problem until you're at a safe distance from the speaker. The only person who told me the truth was my boss. My boss who puts an away message on his email every night when he leaves the office and once looked at my phone and asked what I do with that glowing rectangle gizmo. He shook my hand, congratulated me, asked if it was planned—and then he said that anyone who doesn't tell me how hard this is going to be is just slinging bullshit. He said that the happiness getting happier, that's all true, but the other end, the sadness becoming utter misery, that's true too. Don't forget it, he said. I told all this to my dad, who'd originally told me I'd be fine, and he said that yeah, that's true, but you'll be fine. Joshua Isard is an author and teacher living in the Philadelphia area. His ... Read the full review

"Believers" was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015 Elizabeth MosierBELIEVERS The sauceboat showed up in a bag of filthy artifacts dug up at the National Constitution Center site. To my untrained eye, it was just another dirty dish for a volunteer technician like me to wash, label, and catalogue. But judging from the buzz in the archaeology lab the day the ceramics collector visited, this piece was important, even precious. The archaeologists believed they’d unearthed a Colonial-era treasure: an intact example of Bonnin and Morris soft-paste porcelain made by the American China Manufactory in the Southwark section of Philadelphia. Corroded and discolored, the sauceboat didn’t resemble the company’s 19 known surviving pieces (sauceboats, tiny baskets, pickle dishes, and stands) exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Tests to determine its chemical structure were inconclusive and the underglaze blue-painted decoration was gone, but the sauceboat was the right shape and bore the right factory mark. If authentic, it was historically significant: a souvenir from the campaign to sell locally-produced ceramics to colonists, which lasted until Josiah Wedgewood flooded the market with cheap imported English porcelain in the testy years leading up to the Revolutionary War. But history ... Read the full review

Susan CharkesTWO POEMS To Catch The Ocean In Your Bucket You Have To Point Your Bucket Toward The Shore remember the time you forgot that bird’s name? the one that sings all night if you’re not listening. you wake to snow on the lawn: that’s how you know you missed your calling. seagulls can drink sea water yet dragonflies choke on dragons. words are not the answer, but they hold it for safekeeping. mist fogging your glasses obscures the haze. ◊ Hollows 1. you would peel an orange in a single long strip, making a beginning and an end. 2. to addle a goose egg: coat with corn oil, smothering the embryo. place it back in the nest: she won’t know the difference. 3. blind fish nibble at numbered ping-pong balls cast into the underground river whose mouth has never been found. Susan Charkes lives in southeastern Pennsylvania where she is a freelance writer/editor and consultant. Her recent poetry has been published or is forthcoming in, among others, APIARY, Gargoyle, Prick of the Spindle, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She is also the author of three nonfiction books. Image credit: "Bucket" by  zizzybaloobah on Flickr Read more ... Read the full review

Charlotte BoulaySCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED that there are whirlpools in the wakes of stars. Birds run on at the mouth in different languages and the horses are lonely: we must keep mothering the empty plains. Detroit’s salt mines are becoming saltier every year, and unrelated studies show that street sweepers are seventy-five percent more effective when they whirr the curbs in threes. We’re born speaking a cinematic grammar— we spend a third of our lives dreaming in actions and cuts. There are cities underneath all the cities and streets that can only be seen from space. The bats are dying! Caves full of sleeping creatures are slowly stifling in the dark. Data is breaking out of computers and staggering down the streets on shaky legs. Oil is offering an apology. An eddy off the coast grows larger each day but can’t swallow our latitude of trash. We’re lost. We’re a piece of real technology. We’re escaping nothing, and all we want is to come to the place where the answer to every question is yes. To get there we’ll ask a stranger the way— there will be three riddles, then we must decode the aurora borealis. O scientists, bring your white ... Read the full review

INSEL by Mina Loy Melville House, 176 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin You, dear reader, consummate seeker of literature in all forms, of voices in all languages, of song and fragment, of tome and flash, of ancient and modern: writers, books, are slipping through your fingers. It isn’t your fault. There’s too much to read. Every other minute, they say, a new genre is born. You can’t, certainly, keep up. The idea of it is absurd. Worse yet, there are other things to do besides reading. After all, it’s nice out, cherry blossoms are swirling in the wind, a vortex of pink feathers alighting the street corner. Maybe the best thing to do is simplify, streamline the library. Return to the classics after all these years. Read all of Dickens. Run through the American pantheon. Default to Shakespeare, or Edgar Allan Poe. No? No, of course not. Don’t be silly. There’s no reason to limit oneself. You have to keep trying. Sisyphus lives. His stack of books is growing. His tablet is pregnant with titles. But where will you start, Sisyphus, how will you choose? The first sentence, of course. The first sentence is telling. It’s the hook, the draw, ... Read the full review

ELSA by Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil,  187 pages reviewed by Lynn Levin As I began reading this short novel by Tsipi Keller, I found myself enjoying what I thought was going to be a leisurely experience with chick lit. Nothing too demanding, nothing to worrisome. Elsa, at the start, is as much about the jealousies of girl friendships as it is about the protagonist’s desire for some overdue sex and true romance. About a third of the way into the book, however, the narrative becomes increasingly disturbing as Keller skillfully pitches the fascinating but dislikable protagonist, thirty-nine-year-old Elsa, into a gradually darkening labyrinth of seduction and danger. I so wanted to reach into the story and shake Elsa. “Get out of there while you can!” In the meantime Gary, Elsa’s wealthy middle-aged date, whispers in her ear in a velvet voice, “You’re a fool...So trusting.” Elsa is the third in Tsipi Keller’s trilogy of psychological novels. The first two were Jackpot and Retelling, which trace the fortunes of women. Elsa calls to mind some of Richard Burgin’s noir fiction. Both writers explore the world of nefarious, but initially engaging, operators who insinuate themselves into the lives of lonely strangers aiming to ... Read the full review

FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE by Charlotte Boulay Ecco Press, 64 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami You are in a field, a forest, or on a shore; you may have never been here before, but it brings forth some immense longing. Until last summer I had never been to the prairie, but it is strange how I miss it now—I miss its monolithic emptiness, and how it made me feel like a tiny monolith myself. We miss something or someone because we feel we belong there or with them. The speakers of Charlotte Boulay’s debut poetry collection, Foxes on the Trampoline, feel their selves or their emotions belong in or to other, natural beings. Boulay articulates this longing through natural imagery—though not as descriptions, as per the nature poem’s tradition, but as part and parcel of the human experience, juxtaposed to want, love, and loss. Take “Senza,” (Italian for “without”) from Part One of the collection: Jane says her grandfather cage-raised foxes. She remembers While these lines depict a man possessing animals as objects, the second line of “Senza” embodies Boulay’s unique employment of nature imagery: no longer as object but subject; joined with Jane on the same line, the “cage-raised ... Read the full review

THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL by Luis Chitarroni translated by Darren Koolman  Dalkey Archive Press, 256 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz Because we were late in arriving, because we were late in departing, because we didn’t care that we’d be late, and, above all, because those from whom we waited turned out to be ourselves, which is to say, the others, the ones we called, ‘the slow ones.’ – The No Variations Readers can only hope to be included in that community, that “we,” for the community described so affectionately here makes this one of the most memorable passages from The No Variations, Luis Chitarroni’s dense and often disorienting new non-novel. The passage appears early in the text, while expectations of narrative continuity still hold purchase. Lateness, in fact, extends hope for a plot, and with its charisma buys patience against the frustrations of plots subsequent absence. Instead of plot, the novel offers personality. The expansiveness and potential inclusivity of this passage pleasurably inscribes the writer himself; yet the same sort of expansiveness can slide easily into solipsism, an overindulgent memoirish quality. The No Variations balances between anecdote and comprehensive narrative. The tension between the two appears as ... Read the full review

THE WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE by Dennis Must Red Hen Press, 232 pages DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA by Joan Chase NYRB Classics (new edition), 215 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin GROWING UP, MID-CENTURY Childhood is a kind of endlessly swelling pregnancy; the womb stretches and through the amniotic fluid of rooms and voices, odors and faces, the adult world becomes slowly traceable yet still distant, incomprehensible. Once in a while it ruptures and the child is forced to “grow up fast.” Otherwise, it’s the child who must give birth to her adult self.  But perhaps I’m oversimplifying: for every child, eventually, will have to negotiate the various thresholds to the adult world and will do so not in a linear progression, but rather in some sort of prolonged iterative process of seeking and receiving, receiving and seeking, a rain shower that comes and goes, once in a while revealing sun. And society has erected its own regiment of boundaries, some known, some unexpected; almost all of these require some kind of an appointment with sex or death. Such are the haunting conditions in which we emerge as full grown members of our species that we come to ... Read the full review

DEAR GRAVITY by Gregory Djanikian Carnegie Mellon University Press, 104 pages  reviewed by Anna Strong 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 the present” under the ‘disapproving glance of history’ gestures outwards: Here’s a new window to turn to, here’s a cloth to clean the mists (“Beginnings”) Though the poem comes at the beginning of the penultimate section, it is in many ways a suggestion for how to read the entire collection: as one enormous room of infinite windows to turn to, an insistence on presence in each individual poem, and an acknowledgement that history, however disapproving, is unavoidable, in both poetry and in memory. So many of those windows look out on landscapes and cityscapes, from Alexandria to Arizona to Philadelphia. Language preserves the memory and the feeling of those landscapes against one another and allows them to exist in the same poetic space. In “First Winter in America,” Djanikian’s speaker, experiencing the first snow and ice of winter, is suddenly afraid to forget the desert, and the language of the desert: White eyelashes, white mittens, I thought I could ... Read the full review

MORE THAN YOU KNOW by Melissa Malouf Dalkey Archive Press, 240 pages Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier 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 down a rabbit role with narrator Alice Clark, chasing characters I hadn’t yet met: Hannah Jensen and her husband Bradley, always called Mr. Jensen; Barbara Delaney from Las Vegas; the “three dead young men,” Eric Langland, Richard Stone and Darrell Farnsworth, grad students in English and American Literature at UC Riverside. Unmoored (by early retirement) from teaching at a California community college, Alice doesn’t decide so much as she is compelled to travel cross country to Vermont to confront the Jensens and her role in her friends’ deaths. Through Las Vegas, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Peoria to the Jensens’ home in Chittenden, Vermont, Alice pursues a psychological mystery for which the only way forward is back. Her “mad undertaking” is a puzzle she puts together in real time with the reader, a year after her road trip—and decades after her loss. “Untimely deaths is a phrase one could use to make a tidy story of it,” she says. “If one ... Read the full review

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 is always the same question that comes to mind: how does the form inform the content? Are there traces of the process in the work the artist presents? Much of the writing that I love does not humor such inquisition. Even lines related through a colloquial voice are likely to have been subjected to meticulous editing, were crafted in the grand scheme of the piece. Without access to the revision process of admired work, I often find my own attempts to write plagued—paralyzed, even—by self doubt. This project began very much like every other attempt, which is to say, by an overwhelming of imagery and inspiration from the world, and the unsuccessful attempt to wrestle it into the screen. In order to contain some of the ideas and connections speeding through my mind (which came and went at a much quicker pace than the “official” writing), I began to collect these shorthand notes in a document. In the first submission ... Read the full review

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 ... Read the full review

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 certainly didn’t expect, when I decided to make art my career, that it was going to explicitly include magic and ritual. I still blush when I tell people I am an initiated witch. I am faintly surprised at myself that I have made such an intimate part of my life so public. But the path I took to reach this work has felt inevitable and rewarding. As my favorite author, Neil Gaiman, told the graduating class at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia, “The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside . . . [is] the moment you may be starting to get it right.” I didn’t plan this either, but after spending two years building a portfolio on my own in Philadelphia, I spent four years in graduate school for fine art, in three different ceramics ... Read the full review

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 it never happened. It never did, she said. In the glow of the single desklamp, yellow glow, onionskin, he watched her shed her black cardigan like a snake in the darkness, revealing first the shadowy bones of her shoulder blades—very thin and on the verge of falling out of her back like two ice shelves. Then it was the middle of the back, almost all spine and the shadows played on her disks as if they were small mountain ridges in a diorama. There were two moles he had never seen before and a scar, pink-shaded, about three inches long that lay diagonally across the bottom of her left blade. He had waited forever for this. Well, not entirely forever, he thought, because by forever something else would have occupied his mind. As she revealed her arms to him, he saw where the elbows attached the two pieces of each of her arms and, as bad as it was to ... Read the full review

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 makes me think of my mother. Not because of anything having to do with chicken or food, but because I often wished I could give her wings. I wanted to see her fly away from the stuffy room in the nursing home where she lived for seven years until her death at 92—fly through the plastic window blinds and away from the hospital bed and the carpeted hallway that inexorably became her whole world. She needed to take flight, but her heart was like a tap root—long and strong, growing straight down into the earth. Her body hung on to be fed and bathed and laid down again, long after her mind had left the room. On my mantelpiece is an old photograph of my mom sitting outside an office building in New York City, where she lived and worked when she was in her twenties. She’s wearing a tailored suit and a fox-tail stole around her shoulders, and she’s ... Read the full review

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 you find things like that and I’ve just now realized it’s the smoke that’s making that taste of oranges in my mouth. A yellow cat bolts through a black street. I am drunk and swinging through concrete paths, my legs twisting and stumbling, pivoting and sliding. Billboards sneak into my field of vision. “For tough cleaning, toughen up with Husky brand paper towels.” “No more pests with Nomopest bug spray.” “Feel the fragrance. Be the woman. Rise. Rise, by Vaudlin.” The night is long and I hate the names of streets. “Washington St. Mulligan St. Perricone St. Franklin St. Jefferson St. East St. Hawke St. Levi St. 15019 Levi St. 15021 Levi St. 15023 Levi St. 15025 Levi St.” My house is simple, affordable, and gray. I remember to smell the coriander that I’m growing on my porch. My welcome mat is damp and tattered. “Robertson Home” Two weeks before he left, he wrote a poem about my breasts. What ... Read the full review

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 twitchy. I find a reason to stand up. “Hold on, honey. Mommy just needs to check something.” I slide my finger across my touchscreen, unlocking the phone. The familiar blue banner appears, and I  swipe my finger upward, my eyes scanning the Newsfeed. Pictures of other people’s kids, other people’s dinners, other people’s yards covered with snow. Justin Bieber got arrested; Derek Jeter is retiring; there’s an interesting article on parenting in The Atlantic; a good op-ed on writing in the Times. The kids play happily together—they’ve just entered this magic phase of chasing each other giggling in circles with rarely any fighting—while I stand leaning against the kitchen counter, my eyes glancing up and around every few seconds. “Mommy, what are you looking at?” Teddy asks me. “Nothing,” I sigh, clicking the phone back to sleep. “I’m all done.” I have a problem with my phone. More specifically, I have a problem with the Facebook app on my phone ... Read the full review

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 of Lenape. So much loss in the torrents of plunder and order thought to be gain. No wonder the broad plateau that sweeps in folds to the river has gone fallow— such sorrow breaks plow shaft and blade. Better to carpet over the turmoils that clear cut one people’s woodlands to plant another’s prison farm, another’s estate. Better to leave it a meadow of clovers and broadleaves obscuring the blood-rusted soil. To proclaim it parkland, to name it Fairmount as if the elevation were destined to display your picnic aspic, as if the rhizome undernet were meant to cushion your lavender cakes. J. C. Todd is the author of What Space This Body (Wind Publications, 2008). Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Big Bridge, Wild River Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Leeway Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Baltic Center ... Read the full review

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 flattering position. Now practice snapping into picture position. Repeat until it’s automatic. Practice makes perfect. Smile perfectly. The next day you sign up for a photo class with Abby. Pick up your rented cameras and practice your photo smile as Abby points the lens towards you. Click. You look pretty, she says. Make it your profile picture. You’re on the right track. As the professor drones on about camera settings, begin laying groundwork for network popularity by scrolling through your newsfeed and liking pictures and statuses accordingly. Watch as your name appears across the newsfeed as you click, think of footsteps in the sand, think of I came, I saw, I liked, think of a like for a like. Someone has liked your comments. It’s Tara, a girl from your IR recitation last semester. You click her name and scroll through her recent pictures. She looks fun outside of class. You’ve almost made it through a year of photos when ... Read the full review

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 if something happens to your father and me? Somebody’s got to care for our affairs, and we all know your sister—. Well, you know what I’m saying, she said. When we got to the bank, they couldn’t find the form we needed. The person who prepared it was on her way, but it would be thirty minutes. Mom suggested we go pick daffodils behind the old elementary school while we waited. I said we should forget the bank and flowers and go home and eat lunch. I told her I wanted to get an early start back to Richmond. But Mom said it was too important I sign the form. The school was right up the street and wouldn’t take long. Then she started in on how tall these daffodils were. They come right up to your knees, she said. Best daffodils in town and only a short walk away. Fine, I said. Let’s pick daffodils. The sun warmed our ... Read the full review

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 a scrawny pine, ducking invisible branches as he works. No one can tell him to stand up straight, he's not tall enough to hit his head. No one call tell him we don't need any firewood, it's July. The air up here is heavier than the whole mountain, blackberries on the bush shriveled and abandoned by the birds. He gathers what's left. "Don't you eat any," he warns, teeth stained purple with juice. "There isn't enough." When the lake dries up, he makes a list of possible suspects: me in my bathing suit; pipe tobacco sneaking into the well again; the fat water bug squashed beneath his fishing boot. ◊  Possum Sometimes, the crumpled form on the side of the road turns out to be a cardboard box or an abandoned tire. Sometimes, it doesn't. The animal lying there might have been someone's dinner. Someone's mother. It might have been someone's pet. Try not to think about this as you ... Read the full review

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 was having his annual boys’ weekend with some college buddies, and her mother was at an artist’s retreat in Vermont, working on her new series of collages. June was left to babysit Lily, whose tyrannical seven-year old behavior she’d only expected the heat to magnify. Instead she had become drowsily acquiescent, content to sit in the shade of the porch as long as she had a constant supply of chocolate milk and coloring books. June laid on her belly on the shadowed porch, coloring mermaids and dripping creamsicle syrup onto the page. “No mermaid has brown hair,” Lily said, leaning over with turquoise stub in hand. “It has to be realistic.” If Lily hadn’t intervened she probably wouldn’t have seen anything. She wouldn’t have looked up from Coral Casey and her sea critter pals. She wouldn’t have glanced at the maroon Lawson Shrub Service truck speeding down the road. She wouldn’t have bit her lip at the sight of Tim ... Read the full review

THE DISMAL SCIENCE by Peter Mountford Tin House Press, 275 Pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin 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 by investors the “Fragile Five”—are failing. As the book opens, in 2005, at a World Bank conference in Washington, DC, Vincenzo D’Orsi, a Milan-born, 24 year veteran Bank economist, is leading a panel discussion on the state of global markets. The subtext of his introductory talk, in the woozy gestalt of Bank and IMF bureaucrats: Politics had matured, capitalism was working. Stability had taken hold and the emerging markets were now actually emerging. “It’s almost on autopilot,” says Vincenzo. Vincenzo is speaking of himself, too. Professionally, he’s peaked, after a long climb through the bank’s politicized bureaucracy; fundamentally allergic to simplistic, ideologically fraught rhetoric, he’s grown bored of spouting the corporate line. He knows he could give the same speech next year and the year after that, endlessly collecting a bloated paycheck and playing speed chess with his best friend Walter, a Washington Post reporter, on the weekends. But like those emerging markets today, Vincenzo is about to send ... Read the full review

THE OLD PRIEST by Anthony Wallace University of Pittsburgh Press 2013 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, 170 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin "Let’s leave Limit," says Anna to her husband Phil, the narrator of Anthony Wallace’s story "Snow behind the door." Limit is a fictional New Jersey town near Atlantic City and a metaphor for the physical and emotional borders that confine Phil and the other protagonists in this searing, surprising collection. Phil and Anna want to escape—their neighborhood is in decline, the neighbor’s dog won’t stop barking—but at what cost? To what end? What’s keeping them? What’s begging them past the border? Phil and Anna could leave. She suggests they open a restaurant in an old industrial town in upstate New York that’s "just begging for this kind of thing." But Phil’s grandmother Rose is dying; they can’t leave her, not yet, anyway. He needs her too—as he listens to her own stories that wend the line between escape and acceptance. Ruth’s stories—and the stories, places, and myths that hover over other characters in this collection—exert a kind of invisible, perhaps even imagined, influence over their lives. We imprison ourselves, Wallace seems to say, in memory and habit. In "The ... Read the full review

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 ... Read the full review

THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich Princeton University Press, 449 pages BAGHDAD: THE CITY IN VERSE edited by Reuven Snir Harvard University Press, 339 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin  Writers, this one included, have long struggled to capture in words the dynamic and multi-layered ways that cities change. Cities themselves are powerful change agents in the wider world, but they are defined and redefined constantly by the evolving tastes and desires of their residents (who themselves are always changing), technology, culture and religion, structural political and economic shifts, and the feedback loop of history and history-telling, characterized through myth, poetry, and mass media. Here’s how I try to make sense of it in Song of the City (Four Walls Eight Windows/Basic Books): Think of the city as a collection of swarming cells that change, adapt, grow, shrink, and grow simultaneously. Imagine hundreds or thousands or millions of cells, each living and dying not in parallel or even in sequence, but overlapping from one generation to the next. The whole place moves in several directions at once. Unless calamity hits, no city dies in a single instant. Despite what you read in the ... Read the full review

MERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience by Eileen Cronin W.W. Norton, 336 pages  reviewed by Colleen Davis 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 mine. It’s amusing—and sometimes shocking—to discover the great variety of messes humans can create with similar ingredients. Lives get twisted and re-shaped by crazy family members, creative impulses, and random events. But some people get a truly strange variable thrown into their stew. Eileen Cronin, for example, was born without legs. You might think that if you’ve spent your earthly time in prime physical condition, her story will not connect with yours. But that’s not how Cronin’s memoir, Mermaid, comes across. Sure the young Eileen is at a great disadvantage in her early years. She must “squiddle” from one place to another instead of walk. But once she’s old enough to get prosthetic legs, her challenges start to resemble those of typical teenagers. In fact, it seems that the most complex feature of Cronin’s life is not her lack of legs. She has a much tougher time navigating the shifting emotional currents set off by members of her ... Read the full review

SCATTERED VERTEBRAE by Jerrold Yam Math Paper Press, 2013 reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke 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, social expectation, religion, and tragedy together so ornately that at times one does not realize what they’re reading. This technique generally makes for compelling and delicate poetic image, but at times the disorientation feels less deliberate—Yam’s is a poetics that requires rereading, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It is a poetics of “pleated identity” (31), turning away from singular intent or simple subject matter, and its difficulty reflects the personal sense of unease that Yam confronts throughout: unlike some collections, here one can safely equate the speaker with Yam himself. Yam’s verse is elaborate, complex by nature, for the poet dives into his own conflicted psyche in a ritual of Freudian digging. He dredges up childhood memory as well as painful scenes of the present day, from his disappointed mother’s mixed acknowledgement of him, to his stricken grandmother with curled body and “feet knotted / in wreaths and bouquets” (89). The book is writhing with sexuality, ... Read the full review

SUPERLOOP  by Nicole Callihan Sock Monkey Press, 72 pages Reviewed by Anna Strong 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 into a place of colorful, youthful imagination, full of the unexpected juxtapositions that only retrospection can bring. The poems retrieve those crystal-clear moments in childhood when we make our first brushes with what it means to be a grown-up—a death in the family, divorce, a new word, and ultimately, the realization that our parents are no more perfect than we are. Callihan constantly crushes and compresses those moments of innocence and experience together, as in the the title poem, where she writes “This is the way / the Tilt-a-Whirl ends / not with a smile / but with a nice ass whisper.” Every poem in the collection is richly textured and intensely visual. The colors of our childhood homes, playgrounds, and titular (“SuperLoop” is the name of a favorite carnival ride) theme parks seem brighter than ever when seen through the lens of Callihan’s poems, an effect that comes from her ability to access childhood, whether in content or ... Read the full review

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. Meanwhile, I dream about a god shaped like a subway station. From the surface, she blames a dose of codeine. She is careful in her faith-giving tread, knowing morning is installed and foreign as a catheter. I wonder if there is a word to describe when your mother empties the evidence of you down the toilet, flushes. Peter LaBerge is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent work appears in such publications as The Louisville Review, DIAGRAM, The Newport Review, BOXCAR Poetry Review, and Hanging Loose. In the past, he has been named a two-time Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold Medalist for Poetry and a Foyle Young Poet of the Year, among others. He grew up in Connecticut, and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Adroit Journal. Image credit: MIT-Libraries on Flickr Author photo by William Sulit Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #4 ... Read the full review

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” blasted from the speakers. He reached for the dial and turned it down slowly, eyes still on the road. “What did she tell you?” I shrugged and clenched my teeth. “Not much.” “They’re only a few minutes away from each other, we’ll all be close by.” “Cool.” I had been playing 80s music in the car since I got to boarding school the year before—before that, actually, after I had visited for a night in ninth grade and all of the girls on Hall II played it from their laptops as they got dressed for a dance or geared up for a field hockey game. By now I knew all the lyrics too, but Bon Jovi’s hopeful words and electronic guitar solos suddenly sounded idealistic and whiny. It made me angry. I skipped to the next song, the next, the next—they were all annoying. I switched to the radio. “I think you’ll like the new house. You’ll have to share ... Read the full review

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 church I can't identify. a ludicrous little halo.              a noun formal or technical.           moxibustion vertex     frank     footling complete. (she turns) she turns (she turned) her own version.           like ploughing a field       like a furrow       like verse or     versus (preposition)       against or toward     furrow like a harrow (what a harrow is for) verso (on the turned) like the turn in a sonnet. sleep with arms around my children, as if— -- II. 1 - 3. Kenneth Goldsmith, The Weather. 6 - 7. Mina Loy, "Parturition." 14. Julie Carr, 100 Notes on Violence. ◊ both nuns & mothers worship images. under a spire at the piano. thistles, birds' nests to the left of the church. boys build a ringfort & say carry me. I ordered in the Starbucks demotic ... Read the full review

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 sent to the U.S. on the last plane available before the invasion. Because the cultivators couldn't communicate during the war, each country gave the rose a different name. In France it was called 'Madame A. Meilland' in honor of the breeder's mother, in Italy 'Gioia,' in Germany 'Gloria Dei,' and in the U.S. 'Peace.' "Can't I have peace at my own table?" Our mother's war cry. The very mention of peace sets our teeth on edge, steels us, her adult children, into contention. My father glares at us, grits his teeth and shakes his head in frustration. "Listen to your mother." But it's always too late. Raised voices escalate to accusations to shouts to crashing plates to slammed doors to hysterical crying to uneasy sleep. The morning brings resentment disguised as remorse. Then five months or even a year later we get together again and let past grievances erupt at the dinner table. It seems that peace has become impossible. Our history, ... Read the full review

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 children. The three youngest sisters—my mother Betty, Cassie, and Tucker—were the core of the group, but others would join in on different occasions. You never knew who was going to be at the kitchen table when you arrived. These visits were either at my Aunt Tucker’s house (Sylvia was her birth name, but, due to her resemblance to the actress Sophie Tucker, she is still called Tucker at 90 years old), or my Aunt Helen’s house, the oldest sibling, in South Jersey. Aunt Tucker always had a homemade cake, and most always a pot of pasta sauce slowly simmered on the stove all day, filling the house with an incredible aroma. Aunt Helen had a homemade pie to serve with the tea, and a cat curled up on her large, soft chest. When I wasn’t shamelessly throwing myself at Alvin or Sam, the dogs, I listened to the conversations about my aunts' lives and studied their faces. The personality of ... Read the full review

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 very slowly as it crept around Cherry Hill’s subdivisions and rows of fifty-year-old colonials in need of new roofs, furnaces, windows; they could not be replaced, just now, in this economy. Perched on the truck, Santa waved and weaved past illuminated inflatable reindeer and whirling pink snowflakes projected onto garages, and families ran outside to catch a glimpse, shivering a bit in the brittle winter afternoon. This was probably the last year Local 2663 would sponsor Santa. It was time to cut the nonsense. It was time to trim the waste. People waved at each other, too, as befit the season of joy. “How yez doin’?” “Good, ‘n you?” They had to put Michele’s Pop-Pop in a nursing home. It was an hour away. God bless him, he cried; he cried, but what could they do? He kept falling, he’d break his hip one of these days, it was a disaster waiting to happen. The kids didn’t know yet. Well, ... Read the full review

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 and rectangles. Ruth didn’t touch the peanut brittle, the haphazard compensation present from her middle child, the feminist from Philadelphia, who’d brought her two kids. The conversation was a facsimile of previous email exchanges that she’d intercepted from her late husband’s computer, carrying the buzzwords of a telltale worrywart: college search, apnea, bullying. Whenever Ruth tried to make her way in and say the words she wanted so desperately for them to hear—state’s coming to get me. I don’t belong here, Russ is having an affair—they all looked away, like she was some kind of contagion that would spoil their perfectly planned afternoon. And then she stared at the tin box with its pastel Victorian design, remembering the gray barn. She wanted to open it, everyone could tell. Her fingers trembled and then returned to her sides, where they dangled limply over the top of her sweater. Pea green, just like old Mama had worn, before Papa took out the ... Read the full review

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 of the city's tourist attractions. And interestingly, this time, I was there with someone who was from elsewhere in the world. Her name was Francesca. She was an Italian girl, from somewhere near Naples, a student of Eastern studies in Naples. She had been to Iran several times, once as a tourist, and again as an intern at the Italian embassy. She was here now to take a course at the Dehkhoda institute to improve her Persian. Maybe it's not right to say, "to improve”. She could say "hello" and "goodbye" in Persian and she might be able to learn "How are you?" and "Fine, thanks" this time. She had been in Tehran for a few days when she called me, and said: can we go to: “Tochal?” And I answered: “Tochal?” A few days after that conversation, we were in Tochal, on the side of a mountain. We went and sat at an outdoor cafe. The waiter brought a ... Read the full review

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. They were abstract, probably influenced by Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and Soviet Nonconformists, many of whom were abstractionists. I saw their work at various apartment exhibitions in Dnepropetrovsk and Moscow that I participated in. The compelling mood of the images, a certain wintry bleakness, is evocative of Soviet Russia. What role, if any, does your national background play in your work? Dnepropetrovsk was certainly bleak, Soviet Moscow even bleaker and wintrier. My background plays every role in these pictures. Although I call myself an American or Russian-American artist, they are neither Russian nor American. If one calls them Soviet Nonconformist pictures, I would accept the label. USSR is no more but my art still lives there, “nonconforming” to the state's cultural dictates and proscriptions. Some of your work is quite political. All artmaking is political. “Koch—Mayor of the City of New York” and “Doctor Kissinger,” also called “In seine Hand die Macht gegeben,” are explicitly so. They belong to a series ... Read the full review

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, I add color. I often use memories of places I have walked or otherwise experienced. The painting and content emerges over a long period of not painting. The transformation of paint, a loose substance, into rigid lines and geometric shapes in your paintings is particularly intriguing. How does the form of your work play into the content? For twenty years, I worked as a lead artist for the Mural Arts Program. When creating a muraI, I use a grid to work up my concept for the wall, using a 1" to 1' ratio. About nine years ago, I decided to use a grid for my studio work. Rather than make me more rigid, it served as a freeing experience. I began reading about the history of grids and discovered that ancient Polynesian fishermen used a grid construction of sticks to navigate the waters; I liked the idea of this moveable grid. As I often depict layers of water, this was so ... Read the full review

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. She placed two in front of the dolls with the sap-green insect heads, and two in front of the wooden Santa that she had painted blue the day after the collapse of the Towers. Mama came into the dimly lit room, luckily not noticing the mess of books and clothes on the floor. If only she would notice the dolls and say how pretty they were. “Mirta! What are you doing? Just like it’s a statue of the Blessed Virgin, you’re lighting candles in front of that Santa. I don’t know why you painted it that nasty blue—” Best not to talk about Blue Santa, which Mama had never liked, even when she bought him in that town in Mexico. “Elena, what lovely stockings you’re wearing today. What color are they?” Mama liked to be called by her first name. Mama smiled and looked down at her legs. “I think the woman in the store called them lilac.” Mirta pushed ... Read the full review

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 The Bride seduced the clientele to one degree or another. Rosen had been there a couple of times, mostly during weekdays, and he made the place sound so irresistible—the women were just like showgirls—that Norbie was panting to go. “But what about Donna’s party?” Norbie groaned as Schpilkes, the family dog, came by and leaned against him. “Just tell her you’re going out to buy her a gift,” advised Rosen. “You’ll be back in time for brisket with the in-laws. I promise.” Norbie hadn’t bought Donna a birthday present, so this sounded like a plan.  He hurriedly splashed on a bit of cologne, brushed his teeth, and scooped his keys off the top of the bureau, which was slightly dusty and decked with family photos. He nearly tripped on a toy police car that his son, Eddie, had left in the upstairs hall. Latin rap pulsed from his teenage daughter Annette’s room. Through the slightly open door, Norbie saw her ... Read the full review

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 fence to keep out what inevitably wants in: a man with a cartoon axe, then a lady with a halo for a head, unflanked but expectant, a mouth that is not a door but a chant, and in the distance a radio broadcasts what’s red-blooded and American— no secret society, no wind, no whole or scene or parts, just what’s left after premature E, teenage illumination, not the E in evacuate or in escape, the carnage an unnamable E— for now it’s all straps and buckles and snaps, what’s bluesy and small-town true. Over our shoulders the Tilt-A-Whirl, quiet now, the Zipper stuck in midair, Lucky Cups, the Shooting Gallery, Skee-Ball and Clown Splash, a row of open mouths in mid-vowel, all evacuated, and of course the Flying Elephants that go nowhere really, the whole world standing by, the exact vanishing point obscure, progressively smaller: what little we knew. ◊ Poem Ending with Six Words from a Women’s Room Stall ... Read the full review

LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR by Ramsey Beyer Zest Books, 272 pages Reviewed by Stephanie Trott It’s a familiar notion, the sense of being a little fish in a big pond. This awareness may arrive at an early age for some, while running inexplicably late for others. But for eighteen-year-old Ramsey Beyer, a lover of lists, lakes, and bonfires, this epiphany arrives with a traditional right-of-passage: the start of college. Beyer, now ten years beyond this awakening, chronicles her transition from Midwest high school senior to city-savvy first year art student in her debut memoir, Little Fish: A Memoir of a Different Kind of Year. Like many pre-undergrads, she precariously balances on the teeter-totter of change and consistency that comes with college acceptances, graduation, and the unstoppable arrival of the first autumn away from home. Beyer demonstrates maturity and insight when constructing a list of what her home environment lacks and what the prospect of life in a more populated setting might bring, highlighting both the positive and negative possibilities. After one final evening together with her “oldest and best friends,” the author even wonders while on the edge of slumber whether a part of ... Read the full review

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 ... Read the full review

THE GRAVEYARD by Marek Hłasko (1956) in the first English translation by Norbert Guterman (1959) release December 3, 2013 Melville House, 140 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin  The moment of truth in this book of deceit is treated in a most unusual way: it isn’t treated at all. Or more precisely: it isn’t even needed. The consequences for Franciszek Kowalski, the protagonist of Marek Hłasko’s unforgettable 1956 novel The Graveyard, indeed for all of humanity, are damning enough. Slender Citizen Kowalski had fought bravely in the underground in 1945; after receiving a nearly fatal chest wound, his faith in international socialism had willed him to live. Now, at 48, the sober Kowalski is a proud Communist Party member and a factory manager in a Polish city. One night, he runs into a comrade he hasn’t seen in years. The old fighters set off to a bar to reminisce, and despite himself Kowalski gets drunk. On his way home early the next morning, Kowlalski inadvertently insults two young police officers, and without explanation they have him locked up for the night. The earnest Kowalski can’t understand what’s happening. “Under arrest?” he asks. “What for?” “Don’t you know?” “No,” Franciszek said resolutely ... Read the full review

SIDEWALK DANCING by Letitia Moffitt Atticus Books, 158 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin A sidewalk dance is the step or two that strangers on a sidewalk make together in an effort to get out of each other’s way. Sometimes, says Letitia Moffitt, they naturallly move in tandem, like dancers, until they collide. Sometimes they stay that way, perpetually in each other’s path, never moving past each other. This suspended state of existence—one imagines cells tumbling around a petri dish—infects Moffitt’s novel Sidewalk Dancing (Atticus Books), the story of Grace Chao, a Chinese immigrant to San Francisco, and George McGee, a peripatetic and dogmatic city planner, who intercepts Grace at the diner where she waits tables, and pulls her half knowing into a life of mutual abeyance. The couple moves to Hawaii, where George designs an impossible house, fails to convince his colleagues of the importance of the latest planning ideas, and loses in a bid for city council of the town of Windward Oahu. They have a child, Miranda, who narrates some of the chapters of the book. The three McGees each struggle with identity. George has run from his unassuming Pennsylvania origins; over and over again he seeks the ... Read the full review

BLINDING: THE LEFT WING by Mircea Cărtărescu, in the English translation by Sean Cotter, Archipelago Books, 464 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin It starts in adolescence. The questions come to you while lying in bed (certainly now with a growing awareness of your sexuality), the walls of your room expanding into endless grainy darkness, as if the room itself could encompass the entire world: why am I here, why is there anything at all? The questions may haunt you at age 13 or 15 or 17, but by adulthood they tend to feel banal. Unanswerable, impossible, if taken seriously debilitating, they are in a word blinding, and so you tend to avert your gaze. But suppose you can’t, suppose the inviolable white light only draws you closer, to madness possibly, to paint or write or drink or pray (to what God, tell me?) almost certainly. And so perhaps you scribble, the pages of your notebooks filling with furious script, like eons of sediment piling into sad mute mountains no one else will ever excavate or carve or climb. Unless, perhaps, you are a writer of the caliber of Mircea Cărtărescu, the celebrated Romanian author of the 1996 book Blinding: The ... Read the full review

WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS by Margaret Kaufman PaulDryBooks, 201 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Critics never thought much of Ettore Scola’s 1987 film La Famiglia. Vincent Camby, writing in the New York Times, said that it has “the manner of a film that was conceived as an idea…The characters and events were thought up later.” But the idea, to capture time as it drifts through a single family in the space of a single apartment, is so powerfully melancholic that I’ll sit and ache through the film any time. Even despite the soft filter gauze of the mid-1980s. That same ache ventures forth from Margaret Kaufman’s debut novel Where Somebody Waits, out this month from Paul Dry Books. The tidy paperback, with its glancing, storyteller’s prose, covers about 60 years and four generations of the Davidson family, Jews in a small Arkansas town. While La Famiglia centers on the scholarly, even-handed Carlo—it opens with the infant Carlo in his grandfather’s arms on the day of his Christening and ends at a party for his eightieth birthday—Where Somebody Waits places its focus on Ruby, a fiery beauty from a poor downriver hamlet who seizes the opportunity to marry the gentle shopkeeper Bubba ... Read the full review

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S  by Jeanne Murray Walker Center Street, 384 pages Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier “I worry about Mother, mostly,” writes Jeanne Murray Walker in her memoir, The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s (Center Street), “but I also worry about myself, because I am beginning to get myself mixed up with her. What does it mean that, in company with her, I ‘live’ in the past so much?” This question shapes Walker’s story of caring for her mother Erna Kelley, who lost her memory and life to the disease. Seeking answers, Walker offers insight into how memory works and what remembering means. As she flies between Philadelphia and her mother’s home in Dallas, the author’s own 1950s childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, keeps flooding back. Her own life seems boxed up with her mother’s stories about driving her brothers and sisters to school in a Model A, teaching in a one-room school house, staffing the night shift alone as a hospital ER nurse—cargo that was once pulled by the “powerful locomotive” of her mother’s memory. As Erna becomes increasingly disoriented to time, place, and person, it’s as if her daughter has been uncoupled and ... Read the full review

HALF THE KINGDOM by Lore Segal Melville House, 176 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost Late in life, after health issues led my grandparents to move to a retirement community called Stonegates, my grandfather referred to their neighbors as his fellow inmates. I am still puzzling over Lore Segal’s new novel, Half the Kingdom, but I think she beautifully casts some theatrical lighting on the full inner lives and personal histories of the inmates. It’s as though Segal lifts a lid on what she might call, here, the Crazy Box of stories inside her aging characters. The lives of Joe Bernstine, Lucy Friedgold, Samson Gorewitz, Ida Farkasz, and a few others intersect in the emergency room and on the seventh floor of the Senior Center of the Cedars of Lebanon hospital. The open lid won’t reveal enough: part of the story here is that though Joe, Lucy, Samson, Ida, and their peers clearly hold a wealth of stories inside them, it is painfully difficult for them to deliver their stories to the outside world.  What they wish to communicate too often is trapped and locked up inside them. In the case of Lucy, she is completely distracted by the fact that ... Read the full review

THE FARAWAY NEARBY by Rebecca Solnit Viking, 272 Pages Reviewed by Colleen Davis  Once a month my Saturday morning yoga class swaps our beloved Iyengar teacher for a visiting Power yoga trainer from Manhattan. Captain Kate is not her real name, but that’s what I call the woman who drives us through 85 minutes of fast, challenging postures which are not all that different from our normal fare. What Kate changes is the pace of our effort and the time we spend holding each pose. Under her direction, my country classmates and I move at the speed she expects from students in her 105-degree New York studio. Our local practice site has no amped up heating system, but a class with Kate still leaves us drenched. This is her rigorous lead up to the final moment when we gratefully follow Kate’s instruction to “lower our head and bow our mind to the power of the heart.” After all the physical exertion we’ve just endured, this commandment becomes easier to follow and sweet to feel. Rebecca Solnit is a writer who also understands a thing or two about the power of rigor. Her writing displays a masterful command of language, imagery, ... Read the full review

THE STORY OF A NEW NAME by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein Europa Editions, 471 pages ELI, ELY by Ezekiel Tyrus Hardhead Press, 283 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Two Cities, Two Outsiders, Two Novels My thirteen-year-old daughter Lena got a hold of my review copy of Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Story of a New Name and the pencil stuck inside it for jotting notes in the margins. “Your journey starts now! Ready….go!” she wrote at the beginning of chapter 59 (of 125). On page 251, and then every so often to the end of the book, she wrote, “Pit Stop,” and drew icons for a bed, a cup of coffee, and the bathroom. At the start of chapter 75, she sketched stick figures of people lined up, as if along the edge of a marathon route. “Yay! You can do it! Come on!” she wrote, in a speech balloon above their heads. I didn’t need this sort of encouragement to get through the book, a striking, deeply felt, and fully imagined psychological portrait of two young women raised in a poor, particularly parochial Naples neighborhood in the early 1960s. But Lena was on to something. The book is powered ... Read the full review

IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST by Ruchama King Feuerman NYRBLit (e-book only), 203 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin As I was crossing the street just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem one evening this summer, I noticed a Palestinian boy, about 15 years old, flying a kite on the corner. It was about seven and the sun had disappeared already. The light was pink. The sky in the distance was a cloudless blue, but it seemed, at dusk, to have the texture of felt. An orthodox Jewish mother, wearing a headscarf and long skirt, came across to the traffic island, where the boy in capris and a t-shirt stood watching his kite fly over the honeycomb colored wall of the old city. The woman pushed a stroller, inside of which sat a nicely dressed boy of two. He was interested in the kite. The older boy immediately noticed the little boy’s gaze; he gestured to him and the mother let him out of the stroller. She smiled with delight as the Palestinian boy held out the kite handle and the two boys held on together, the older one keeping a casual eye on the kite, ... Read the full review

THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer Riverhead Hardcover, 480 pages Reviewed by Chris Ludovici Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is a beast of a book. At four hundred eighty pages, and covering forty years of half a dozen lives, its ambition is both broad and admirable. It is compelling when it offers a sustained, ground-level view through one of her character’s eyes, which comprises the bulk of the book. But its ambitions also exceed Wolitzer’s strengths; the book suffers from odd pacing, random shifts in perspective, and haphazard leaps in time. When considered as a whole, the pieces don’t fit together in an organic, satisfying way. The Interestings has an ensemble cast, but its lead is Jules Jacobson, who in the summer of 1974 finds herself inducted into the cool kid inner circle at Spirit in the Woods, a New England summer camp for privileged children. Jules, a plain middle class girl from Long Island who just lost her father to cancer, is attending the camp on scholarship and is immediately smitten with her new artistic friends and their upper-class Manhattan lives. There is the beautiful, open-hearted Ash; her moody, enigmatic brother Goodman; sensitive musician Jonah; emotional dancer Cathy; and the brilliant ... Read the full review

Toisha TuckerINDIVIDUATION, IDENTITY, AND THE PARENTHETICAL My conceptual works provide a foundation for introspection of the self and the other. They are distillations of ideas transformed into controlled environments or objects. Through text, sound, photographs, paintings, and immersive installation, I ruminate on literary modernism, magical realism, and the notion of benign indifference. Or I offer thought propositions to the viewer—some declarative, some open-ended—that are platforms for questioning or thinking more broadly about the social constructions we have come to accept as truths. Ultimately, my works are traces of thoughts and the interplay between the accepted realities and constructions of the spaces we inhabit and my own abstracted perceptions of them. Each work manifests my exploration of memory, time, and place while seeking to universalize the personal. Through my conceptual work, I continue to explore the landscape of my memory and my preoccupations with the malleability of language, history, literature, and epistemology. ash Ash is a body of work that explores the pseudo-myth of my birth: I was born on May 18, 1980, the exact day that Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State. Ash from the eruption settled across much of the Northwest and in one isolated pocket across Oklahoma, falling ... Read the full review

Matthew HarrisonNEW WORLDS ARE OLD NEWS The pilgrim in Stop & Shop: broad hat, cloak. In the cantaloupes, the pilgrim. No fruit coaxes. Nothing ripe on sale looks new. When I shout "extra safe!" my wife cries for Saint Benedict, learner confirmer. Who will not lie nude? The sunburn in Stop & Shop: flip-flops, bikini. Seagulls flock each unsunburned spot. Cabinets of milk. The crotch is an animal knot. I bitch out the loud window AC unit while asleep, sleep-bitching evil dream starfish with teeth. They bite. Who knows the oceans of our blood? In Stop & Shop the kid calls a split kiwi a cooter. White Keds, Atlanta Braves cap backwards. The man-kid. But fruit is edible sex. Parked in the Stop & Shop lot post gym, I'm sopping sweat, I'm hard up, craving chicken. In a bind: a coop. Any cooked muscle is chicken. The pilgrim forgoes all cantaloupe. Stop & Shop is a bad rock to Plymouth. The pilgrim doubts bargain fruit. A good pilgrim will self-check out. In my hands I have two hands. Our hands. Hot palms planted in the pulp of us. Juice pilgrimage. Fuck Stop & Shop. The best fruit is never bought ... Read the full review

David PoplarNAVIGATION BY SPOONLIGHT Six hundred thousand children in the Horn of Africa are dying from ribcages bloated with hunger. They wait for helicopters filled with peanut butter. –from “To the father at the restaurant” by Julie Krystyna Cheng Helicopters of peanut butter stick To the marshmallow clouds. Like raisins In pristine white dough—the type of bone-ground Dough that will someday become fine china. No, you see, the sky is not the limit; The sky is just a small round bowl. We bounce around the edges, Never finding the corners. But in the serrated light of the spoon, I hear a voice. It sounds like someone old And very, very tall. I’m not sure If he is the one with the spoon, or if I am. He tells me I have high cholesterol. I don’t eat enough fiber, almost no fruit. David Poplar is a graduate student at the Brandeis University, where he studies Philosophy. He has published work in Boston Literary Magazine, Apiary Online, and PennAppetit, as well as more avant garde publications, such as the Dickinson Law Review and the New Jersey Law Journal. Image credit: Julie Jablonski on Flickr Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #3 ... Read the full review

Hannah WhiteADVENTURES IN GYM CLASS Put your feet in my old sneakers for a minute. They’re nine years old and smell like a pubescent locker room, so hold your nose and just do it. Now, let me take you back to my middle-school gym class. Every day in “physical education,” as the euphemism goes, you are allotted five minutes to do the following: change into your uniform, lock up your stuff, tie up your hair, and sit down criss-cross applesauce in your assigned seat on the gym floor. This is all easier said than done. First, see, you have to remember to shove your gym uniform and your Asics into the bottom of your backpack that morning. (Your backpack is purple, and monogrammed, and you’ve had it since the fourth grade. It’s embarrassing.) Then you have to remember your combination lock and—crucially—your combination. Then you have to navigate the crowds into the gossipy girls locker room, the haven of wiry track stars and sinewy-thighed volleyball players, and undertake the harrowing task of getting naked in public. Strategically, you face the lockers, hunch your shoulders, and start removing your layers. White cardigan, American Eagle polo shirt, tank top, ribbon belt, stretchy ... Read the full review

DC LambertCANDYLAND Every day, as I drive down Main Street and then turn in to the high school where I’m a long-term substitute teacher ($65/day), I pass rows and rows of $2 million houses. It’s a fairy tale I can see but can’t join. The houses are sort of like Candy Mountain and Gumdrop Hill. A few years ago, in fact, Money Magazine voted the town a Best Town To Live In, a watershed achievement that was trumpeted in a banner across its Main Street and plastered on its idyllic, quaint storefront windows: the Starbucks (needless to say), the adorable toy store, The Happy Hippo, the obligatory "Oriental rug" shop with $10,000 area rugs “on sale” in the front display, the upscale consignment shop, Jamaican Me Crazy, where a used shirt costs more than three brand new outfits at Target. Did you know the town’s schools are “top notch,” according to Money Magazine? In my top notch classes, the kids talk endlessly of 1) The size of their houses (“I went to Bryce’s yesterday—Oh my God! Have you seen his house?”) and 2) The vacations they’ve been on. Europe, cruises, Disney, and any number of fortress-like five-star resorts in Mexico, ... Read the full review

Paul SiegellTWO POEMS *WE’VE COME FOR YOUR BLOOD TEST RESULTS* On the bridge, the birdgirl waits with a weight in her ribcage. Symbolically, a sailor and his sweetheart. A sparrow pecking at a cigarette. A sparrow pecking at salt for snow. Next to the pizza place, she keys up a door with a horseshoe over it, then goes to sleep with hair clips in—Like the firepower rainwater has on Fort Torch Falls, the level rises in a surge—Exhausted, she whispers into her pillow: “Bring me things with wings.” *WE’VE COME FOR YOUR YUENGLING YAMMERING* Frank O’Hara has a few nosey people coming over: “It’s a party!” he announces, then into the parking garage he disappears like the Boston Bruins blowing a three-games-to-none lead in the Stanley Cup playoffs to the Philadelphia Flyers. To my knowledge, Frank Zappa isn’t being played in any of the elevators in O’Hara’s build- ing, but, well, most likely still lingering up there are my 11th floor farts—Child caregivers beware: goes a man painting famous faces onto a hotdog cart, tryna get them to blend into the murals of Dirty Frank’s Bar. And of his Franz Kafka kasha recipe? An approxima- tion. It’s missing something: Aretha ... Read the full review

Desiree WilkinsLEAP YEAR BABY 1976:   I spend my days on the couch with grandma while mom’s at work at the diner. Grandma eats chocolate bon-bons and watches soap operas. We play outside and she smokes a cigarette while I commence my plan to rid the world of bees. It’s quite simple: all I have to do is uproot every flower in the ground and the bees will not survive. There are many flowers and I have been unsuccessful in recruiting other revolutionaries. 1980:   Mom is gone to California, leaving me with Grandma. She sends a postcard with no return address. There is a picture of the Hollywood sign. Grandma yells at her a lot over the phone. Mom hangs up. Grandma says mom flipped her lid. I put the postcard on the fridge. I want to visit but Grandma says there’s nothing out there for us. I have to repeat second grade. That doesn’t seem fair. 1984:   Grandma quits smoking after she finds me with a cigarette. It isn’t lit, but she takes it from me and crushes it into the ground. Mom calls needing money. I talk to her for a moment but I don’t have any money so ... Read the full review

Ashlee Paxton-TurnerLINEY’S SENSE OF IT It was the not-so-early morning, coming on about nine o’clock, in the early spring or end of winter, whichever one prefers, and Dr. Naismith’s game the Saturday prior had just made the town feel alive and made its boys feel like they could be men going somewhere, elsewhere. Dismissing the papers on the desk, it was decided that today Sherwood Anderson was more important. There is no sense in trying to explain just what that means, but it is something one can’t help feeling, something one might try to explain nevertheless. That Saturday, like all of the other Saturdays of the season, had brought the town out of its kitchens, living rooms, and Main Street offices. Of course, that Saturday’s game required a drive to a dusty gymnasium in a slightly bigger town. The hour’s drive to watch the boys play Dr. Naismith’s game had been spent differently by the different citizens of the town. Some had clambered aboard a bus, freed by the absence of seatbelts. Others had chosen to ride privately in their own vehicles, enjoying the ride, the accompanying conversations, and radio stations. In the gymnasium, crowds filled the bleachers and the ... Read the full review

Nicole GreavesTWO POEMS Sack of Scarabs The museum's glass box was hidden from light in between the hopeful columns, the scarabs swarming in a pool of cloth. Somehow they made the presence of my mother's body more familiar, in the way her shadow made it more foreign. It takes a distraction to move us further from ourselves, at the same time, closer; it's the sickness of the mirror, how it moves from reflection to the well to reflection again. My mother and I held hands as we walked, lest one of us be lost to the museum—and part of us is still there —the thin wrap of my wrist against hers like plagiarism, the rooms cool around us like wet paint. When she said my name it rose like a balloon in a circus tent. Those scarabs pressing against glass like my children's faces to animal stunts, like my own against my mother's waist, its yeasty scent. The scarabs' color, the imitation that longs for its sea. A line dividing them, an aquiline nose. It was getting late, the day descended like the hood of a jump-rope over my eight-year-old body. I knew we would be the last ones left ... Read the full review

Morgan GilbreathTHE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET My artwork is a product of the ground beneath my feet. I do not own a car, so my experience of a place is created entirely through biking, walking, and the occasional use of public transportation. Because of this, I have a very intimate relationship with sidewalks, as well as the buildings and streets with which they are connected. I am endlessly curious about the things that people discard onto the streets, a no-man’s-land of both public and private space in which no one is held accountable, allowing for a strange sort of freedom. This concrete space between roads and homes has proven to be one of the greatest influences in my work. In the morning I go to buy milk from the bodega across the street, where the shopkeeper’s knowledge of English is limited to “hello” and “thank you.” I like them there. People loiter in the doorway of the tiny corner store, socializing with the shopkeepers who talk to them from behind scratched bulletproof glass complete with transparent compartments with every sickly sweet candy wrapper meticulously organized into its own secure drawer. In this wonderful community gathering space, however, people are constantly ... Read the full review

HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart Gotham Books, 254 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class. Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details ... Read the full review

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P. by Adelle Waldman Henry Holt, 242 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Suburban Mid-Atlantic childhood. Check. Journalist. Check. Book reviewer. Check. Writing book review to keep from working on more substantial essay. Check. First novel coming out. Check. Writes on urbanism. Check. Closest friend Peter. Check. Name Nathaniel P. Check. That Nathaniel P? Like the fictional protagonist of Adelle Waldman’s debut novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., I’m happiest reading and writing; I’m ambitious enough (though the doppelganger has a large advance for his novel, something I’ve not yet received); and I can’t see myself doing anything else. The arrival of the book has made for good jokes, of course. My friend Cristina wrote me the other day to say she had received the book (she ordered it and read it as soon as I told her about it). “I have your love affairs with me,” she wrote with a wink and smile. But the Nathaniel in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. isn’t really anything like me. I don’t go by Nate, for one—ever since my little league coach called me “Nate the Rusty Gate” (I couldn’t hit)—and my Peter would never admonish ... Read the full review

SCRATCH PEGASUS by Stephen Kessler Swan Scythe Press, 88 pages reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke Stephen Kessler’s agenda in the poetry of Scratch Pegasus would seem to be that of the artist in his poem “Hopper”: in an era where inscrutable conceptualism has become somewhat of a standard, Kessler is confident that his “representation / so square compared to his successors’ transgressions / looks now purely formal and coolly classical … in rooms full of murmuring tourists / relieved to see what they recognize”. It’s lamentable, then, that Kessler’s altruistic aspirations towards a communitarian poetics, a poetics of reachable clarity, are troubled by an unintentional (or so one hopes) exclusion of the modern reader. True, the poet occasionally hits the mark with poignant imagery (“the barking park / where the city’s dogs / sniff each other’s butts / and tangled strips of toilet paper / fly like flags from lampposts”, “Gold light streams / through cold beer”, etc., obviousness that is not condescending but pleasantly relatable), but such imagery drowns in problematic particularities. Kessler makes clear that he is in his later years, a state of being meant to inform his poetry, but he is heavy-handed in dating himself. While certain details, ... Read the full review

RECALCULATING by Charles Bernstein University of Chicago Press, 208 pages Reviewed by Mary Weston  Bringing to mind the now all-too familiar GPS phrase, Charles Bernstein’s latest collection of poetry, Recalculating, depicts a poet pulled in a number of different directions and impulses. As readers, we too at times feel this pull toward the many evocations and articulations present in Recalculating. Yet in many ways, direction—or lack thereof—becomes the thematic anchor which ultimately binds Bernstein’s latest work. Poems in this collection move deftly and swiftly from heady articulations of Bernstein’s poetics, to oftentimes humorous experiments in language and syntax, to poignant translations of works from Catullus to Baudelaire. Yet throughout the collection, the theme of “recalculation” takes on a more sobering nature, as interspersed between Bernstein’s didacticism and humor, grief and loss also begin to take shape in the work, each time creating a quiet swerve and evolution in the work’s “direction.” It’s this versatility and variety throughout the collection which makes Recalculating such a compelling read, as quiet sorrow becomes inextricably linked with both the playful and the cerebral, and which nuances the work as a whole. In many ways, parts of Recalculating seem written for the well-read and well-versed ... Read the full review

THE MEHLIS REPORT by Rabee Jaber translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid New Directions Paperbacks, 202 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin At night, I dream the city; I dream Baldwin’s—and Capote’s—alluring New York at mid-century; I dream Pamuk’s melancholic Istanbul of the same period; I dream Antunes’s desperate 1990s Lisbon and Nasr’s suffocating Tunis and Bolaño’s heretical 1970s Mexico City; I dream Zadie Smith’s London and Mercé Rodoreda’s Barcelona; I dream my own Philadelphia, which sometimes isn’t Philadelphia at all (it may be Brooklyn or Montreal). Now, I dream Rabee Jaber’s early 21st century Beirut; I dream the enduring disquiet, I dream the hidden springs, I dream the memories (of terraces filled with mulberry trees, of abandoned villas), the loss, the fear, the cranes that rattle the sky. “How many cities are hidden in the belly of this one city?” writes Jaber, At rare times, you see all these cities together. At night, when you push the window open, outward, and hear the wooden shutters bang against the wall, and then retreat into darkness, your heart jumps. The Mehlis Report, in English translation by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is Jaber’s first to be offered to the American reader. At 42 years old, he’s ... Read the full review

DAVID LYNCH SWERVES: UNCERTAINTY THROUGH LOST HIGHWAY TO INLAND EMPIRE by Martha P. Nochimson University of Texas Press, 295 pages reviewed by Chris Ludovici In David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty Through Lost Highway to Inland Empire, Martha P. Nochimson presents a radical interpretation of David Lynch’s last four movies. She rejects the popular critical interpretations of his work, in favor of her own theory: a complicated mix of eastern philosophy and quantum physics. It’s fascinating, challenging, frustrating, and only intermittently persuasive. Her ideas are compelling, especially when she’s addressing Lynch’s philosophy. As a devoted believer in Hinduism and tantric meditation, Lynch creates movies with strong spiritual components. They are intense stories, and his characters are often emotionally troubled. Nochimson clearly and thoughtfully explains Lynch’s repeating themes of the dangers of life lived in the service of greed and ambition, and his commitment to spiritual peace over material satisfaction. But it’s her more radical, scientific ideas that are troublesome. Quantum physics isn’t exactly simple, and frankly, I don’t have enough knowledge on that subject to understand anything beyond her most superficial points. But here’s the part that’s tricky: the book is unclear as to whether or not Lynch does, either. When Nochimson uses ... Read the full review

THE HARE by César Aira New Directions Paperbacks, 218 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin The writer César Aira has a charming trait (at least in the English language translations of his books published by New Directions): at the end of his novels, he inscribes the date he completed the work, at least so we are supposed to believe. For both The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, published in Katherine Silver’s English translation by New Directions last year, and The Hare, which New Directions brings out tomorrow translated by Nick Caistor, were apparently finished the same day, September 6, 1996. Could this really be? Aira, the author of some 70 works of fiction and essay, is after all one of the most prolific writers in the world. It is conceivable he completed the two books on the same day. Or has Aira, a master of meta-fiction, found yet another way to invite the reader to contemplate the nature of reality, the possibility of storytelling, and the absurdities of perception? “Between one story and another,” he writes in The Hare, “even one that was really told and another that remained virtual, hidden and unborn in an indolent fantasy, there was not a ... Read the full review

RUST BELT RISING ALMANAC, Vol. 1 Various Authors The Head & The Hand Press, 168 pages  reviewed by Ariel Diliberto Rust Belt Rising Almanac presents a pastiche of short stories, poems, photographs and artwork. Collectively they form a fairly complete image of the post-industrial cities that comprise the toponymous “belt” (in the case of this publication, namely Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh). Collectively being the operative word. For individually, some of the stories are flashes in the (rusting) pan. However, together these ethereal dispatches evoke the negative space inside an abandoned factory building, and upon reaching page 168, readers can step back and see it for what it is. So what is it? The triumph of Rust Belt is its ability to dispel the false narrative about America’s trajectory from industrial to post-industrial, in which the peak of our society was the peak of the industrial era, and it’s been downhill ever since. Put another way, the idea that when factories were pumping in the hearts of these cities, it was the “good old days,” and now that they’ve shut down or relocated, despair ensues. Rust Belt demonstrates that a) the “good old days” weren’t always all that good, as Kim ... Read the full review

NO APOCALYPSE by Monica Wendel Georgetown Review Press, 70 pages reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke Monica Wendel makes every pretense of proving the veracity of her title, No Apocalypse, in her debut collection: as if responding to the question “What are some topics of poetry?” the poet has organized her work in orderly divisions—Politics, Dreams, Animals and Cities, Money and Ghosts—lending an everything-under-control sensibility to the book on the surface level. Indeed, her treatment of what many would consider signs of apocalyptic societal devolution – Wikileaks, the Trayvon Martin case, etc – is surprisingly deadpan, as if, in declarative ending lines, Wendel is grimly calming a gloom-and-doom hysteric. As such, when trauma does make an entry, it is all the more traumatic for its surprise, as in the poem “September, Red Hook”; at first glance the poem is whimsical, a charming exchange between two children as they float a piece of stale bread downriver (“a raft for a mouse who’s getting tired of swimming”), and by the time the reader realizes that the poem is set in the aftermath of 9/11 (“‘Or maybe,’ I said, ‘it’s a landing raft for someone in the ashes who jumped’”), it is the final stanza ... Read the full review

THE SENSUALIST by Daniel Torday Nouvella Books, 177 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost I've been thinking a lot about how I am at once very connected to and disconnected from Germany, and I’ve been exploring this feeling in a novel I’m working on. My grandparents were German Jewish refugees, sailing from Hamburg, Germany, to Ellis Island in 1934. We talked very little, my grandparents and their grandchildren, about their lives in Germany before they left. If their lives were an apartment building, it was as though we always entered on the third floor, and were welcome to walk around anywhere from the third floor and up but never below. We didn’t notice anything unusual. Obviously, there are good reasons for not talking about what was left behind by German Jews who escaped the holocaust. But there is also tremendous loss in disowning all of it. Sam Gerson, the narrator of Daniel Torday’s novella The Sensualist, has a similar relationship to his grandfather and his past. His grandfather rarely talks about his background as a Jewish Hungarian refugee, and Sam has not been especially curious. But Torday gets across the surprising strength and importance of the experience of the past generation—as ... Read the full review

THE OFFICE OF MERCY by Ariel Djanikian Viking, 304 pages Reviewed by John Carroll I had the good fortune of reading Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood,and the Prison of Belief immediately before picking up Ariel Djanikian’s debut novel, The Office of Mercy. While Wright’s nonfiction account of a minor religious movement is, on the surface, seemingly far removed from Djanikian’s novel about a futuristic American settlement, the two books share much more in common than anyone could initially believe. In particular, Scientologists and the America-Five residents in The Office of Mercy are equally concerned with the ethics of their individual movements. But both groups have arrived at ethical standings far removed from what a contemporary American majority would define as acceptable. While Wright narrates numerous confessionals about physical and emotional abuse in the Church of Scientology, Djanikian introduces readers to the “sweeps” of America-Five: these carefully planned strikes eliminate Tribespeople who live “Outside” – that is, beyond the enclosed settlement of America-Five or similarly numbered settlements established after a globe-altering event known simply as “the Storm.” We learn about America-Five and the titular Office of Mercy through inhabitant and office employee Natasha Wiley. Natasha is an Epsilon, a name ... Read the full review

WOMEN'S POETRY: POEMS AND ADVICE by Daisy Fried University of Pittsburgh Press, 88 pages Reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat Daisy Fried’s new collection, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, illuminates issues that are both specifically feminine (i.e. mother-daughter paradigms) and gender neutral (being American in a foreign land). Divided into four numbered sections, the poems explore the layers of complicated relationships and expose the emotions therein. Fried shows us how beauty forces us to notice it, even when we’d rather not. Through several reflexive lines that connect to other poems within the text, she speaks to the multi-layered nature of art. The Advice Column Section gives Fried latitude to launch a sweet and snarky rant against those who place themselves outside and against the world of women and words. How absolutely accurate, and satisfactory, to hear that the only difference between a male poetess (she “applies the term poetess to men and women, good poetesses and bad”) and a female poetess is that a male poetess is free to overtly comment on another male poetess’ body, whereas no matter how far we’ve come, body image issues can remain a no-fly zone for female poetesses. Her advice to Mr. Martyr (“try champagne, oysters, ... Read the full review

THE END by Anders Nilsen Fantagraphics Books, 80 pages Reviewed by Henry Steinberg The Humming Bird. The Condor. The Giant. The Hands. I hold your head in my hands and your heart in my heart and I look at you and I am floating above the bed alone and there's nothing I can do at all because you're gone. These are the Nazca Lines. Located in the southern desert of Peru, these ancient geoglyphs dot the landscape, their purpose unknown, their mystery immense. Carved into the earth by the Nazca Peoples, the exact date of their creation is impossible to pin down, but researchers believe they were made between 400-650 BCE. When standing on top of the lines, within them, it is impossible to discern the shapes of the designs, though they are figurative and quite complex. One needs the great distance and height of the surrounding foothills to see and understand their intricacy. In 2005, Anders Nilsen’s fiancé Cheryl Weaver died after a long battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That’s when Nilsen began writing and drawing in his journals – laying down in lines the solid grief that would become The End. His drawings are not of the Nazca Lines, ... Read the full review

THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner Scribner, 400 pages Reviewed by Chris Ludovici Early in Rachel Kushner’s occasionally frustrating but fascinating book The Flamethrowers, the protagonist sleeps with a man she’s only just met. She naively believes that her encounter with the attractive, nameless stranger is going to lead to something more meaningful, and she is more than a little disappointed to find him gone when she wakes the next morning.  He leaves a mark on her, though, both by taking her virginity and also by giving her the only name we will know her by, Reno, after the city she was born and raised in. It’s a fitting name for the heroine of this novel, which is, principally, about starting over, on both an individual as well as national level. All the characters in The Flamethrowers are interested in reinvention; they ache to transcend their compromised human past into a more perfect, harmonious present and future. Fresh out of college with a degree in film, Reno arrives in New York, ready to live. She’s a born gear head, she loves motorcycles and speed, and she’d like to do something with her camera, but all she’s got is some grainy film ... Read the full review

THE TRANSLATOR by Nina Schuyler Pegasus Books, 352 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin I noticed, earlier this week, that my friend Cristina Vezzaro had been posting on Facebook in Dutch. This shouldn’t have surprised me. Still, I wondered, “Have you added a new language?” “I took Nederlands while in Geneva 20 years ago. I am just trying to refresh what I knew and learn it better,” she replied. Vezzaro, after all, is a literary translator, who translates novels from the original German and French to Italian; but Cristina was born multi-lingual, in a part of Italy near Germany and Switzerland, and she acquires languages as some do shoes or kitchen appliances. I’ve witnessed her almost immediate acquisition of American English, slang and all. Hanne Schubert, the protagonist of Nina Schuyler’s quietly perceptive new novel The Translator, is one such character, an expert translator of several languages with a special expertise in Japanese. Like Vezzaro, she is primordially multi-lingual. Schubert, whose childhood and education took her all over the world and who eventually settled with Japanese husband, an ambitious chemist, in San Francisco, is at home almost everywhere—and yet nowhere. Now a widow, the intensely (and rather moralistically) disciplined Schubert is ... Read the full review

HE LOOKED BEYOND MY FAULTS AND SAW MY NEEDS by Leonard Gontarek Hanging Loose Press, 88 pages reviewed by Brandon Lafving Reading John Ashbery’s early works in college, I remember begging the poetry to make a goddamn point. My yearnings for intellectual coherence went unanswered, regardless of how much attention, how many thoughts I piled up on the poems. No matter how hard I tried, my efforts were resisted. I have often wondered since: what would happen if Ashbery were crackable? I even made a number of attempts, myself. Leonard Gontarek’s fifth book, He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs, finally answers my question. A casual reader might see in this collection - the pole-vaulting mindset, the penchant for painterly imagery, or the ability of certain, magical phrases to hold an entire universe of subjective meaning – and presume in this postmodern sepulcher of ours that there are no intellectual underpinnings. For instance, one of the first poems of the book, "Imago Mundi", shows off some of the gifts of super-abstraction: There was the wolf that ate his leg, then his other one. Then ate all of him. You would think sorrow would disappear too. But apparently that is ... Read the full review

CARNIVAL by Rawi Hage Norton, 304 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Fly, the narrator of Rawi Hage’s fabulist novel Carnival, released in the US on June 17, is a literature-obsessed taxi driver—and child of circus performers—who imagines himself a super-hero, avenging wrongs perpetrated on the vulnerable and the poor. Books—particularly the subversive kind—are his sword. One night, he picks up an arguing couple. The woman, Mary, is crying. Her husband berates her for her introverted, bookish ways. He wants some action. “I am tired of this, do you understand?” he says. Fly flies into a rage, forces the husband out of the car, leaves him by the side of the road, and brings “sweet Mary” back to his book-stuffed apartment. “And she laughed and walked among the garden of books,” he says, “and then we took off our fig leaves and made love in the corner, where verses from heaven touched our bare, cracked asses that hopped and bounced like invading horses in the holy lands.” ... Read the full review

Ken Kalfus, reviewed by Chris LudoviciEQUILATERAL (Bloomsbury USA, 224 pages) At its core, Ken Kalfus’s Equilateral is about communication: communication between an empire and its subjects; between visionaries and those who finance that vision; between the people who plan a task and those who realize it. And— most essentially to plot while least essentially to the narrative— Equilateral is about communication between the planets Earth and Mars. In a little over two hundred pages, Kalfus manages to tell a rich, fascinating story about our need to connect with something outside of ourselves, and our inherent limitations that keep us from doing just that. The discovery of canals on the surface of Mars has led the nineteenth century scientific community to conclude that there is indeed intelligent life on our closest celestial neighbor, setting in motion a mad scramble to be the first culture to make contact with it. In Egypt, British astronomer Sanford Thayer is nearing completion of his Equilateral, a gigantic equilateral triangle, each side five feet deep and more than three hundred miles long, dug in the dessert that, once completed, will be filled with pitch and set on fire, creating a “space flare” so large it will be ... Read the full review

Beth Kephart, illustrated by William Sulit, reviewed by Michelle FostDR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT (New City Community Press, 190 pages) When I lived in Philadelphia, I sensed its history underfoot. One pleasure of Beth Kephart’s lively new historical Philadelphia novel is the strong fit of the writer’s project and the story she tells. In Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, Kephart looks at material from the past that we might consider lost to us and demonstrates how traces of that past stay with us through research and writing. In her story of William Quinn in 1870’s Philadelphia, too, much has been lost. As fourteen-year-old William goes in search of what has been taken from his family and as he thinks about what he is missing (including a murdered brother and a father in prison), we see that a great deal of what is loved can be recovered. William internalizes his brother Francis’s voice and can imagine what Francis would say to him at an important moment. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent shines as a novel about grief itself, suggesting that in thinking about what we miss, we keep what’s missing alive. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent opens with a haunting image. In a story William ... Read the full review

Kathryn HellersteinMY WRITER'S BLOCK It depends how you define writer’s block, whether or not I am experiencing it at this very moment. At sunset yesterday, as I swam my laps, I thought through this essay and decided exactly how I would start, develop, and finish it in one sitting this morning. But now it is afternoon, and the wholeness of what I’d conceived is spotty and tattered. It’s raining outside, with a rumble of thunder. I’m sure that the pool is closed. Yesterday, tracing the line at the bottom of the pool, my body inscribing it with the rhythm of strokes, kicks, and breaths, I thought that I would start out by telling that it’s been almost a year since my mother died, and that in that year, I have not written a single poem. I have had plenty to write about—the shock of her illness, the busy, sad, loving full-heartedness of accompanying her through her last weeks and days with my siblings, my grief at her last breath, the casket-choosing, the obituary, the funeral, the shiva, the move to Cambridge for the year with my husband, the trips to China and Russia, the returns home to work on emptying ... Read the full review

Mark LyonsTHE PLACE OF THE RED-FOOTED ROOSTER IN THE HIERARCHY OF SENTIENT BEINGS A story from the Eleventh Year of Emperor Bunsei (1829), based on a true event I am not famous, but my rooster is immortal. I am the poor son of a poor farmer, and my station in life is to take the cows to pasture, feed the chickens and collect their eggs. On Saturdays I tie a string around the feet of my young roosters, hang them upside-down on a pole draped over my shoulders and walk the half hour from my village of Yotsuya to the market in Edo. “Guaranteed cockerels! None older than ten weeks!” I sing, as I run my fingers through their feathers. I don’t shout like the other vendors of fowl in the market. There is so much competition that I have had to learn to distinguish myself. Thus, I sing of cockerels in the melody of "Uenimo Haru,"-- "Plum Blossoms in Spring"-- my favorite song, loved throughout this part of Japan. Short soft combs, bright red, no barnyard nicks Fresh cockerels! The brightness in their eyes Says I have led a happy life Pecking corn in the barnyard of my master ... Read the full review

Nathaniel Popkin"THE DIG" From LION AND LEOPARD (The Head and the Hand Press, October 2013) Charles Willson Peale, Belfield, November 24, 1818 I woke at half past four, drank two glasses of water, and with the wind in my eyes, walked past the sleeping elk’s pen and into the barn.  There, I milked the two cows, remarking to myself on the double economy of doing one’s chores oneself.  It is apparent that many a gentlemen farmer, if that is how I am to be labeled, pays good money for his own idleness and sloth.  It is like purchasing one’s hastened demise.  The body in motion stays in motion, says Mr. Newton, the body at rest stays at rest.  I don’t need to be convinced of the better alternative. I set down the bucket of milk, took a spade and a basket, and so I trudged, suppressing worry of danger, through the fetid late autumn field, which felt thick and even overgrown (and not winter raw or empty), into this splendid darkness.  Breathing deeply as I walked, I passed through the grazing field, our small vineyard, and ducked under the bare branches of the pawpaw and into the little apple orchard.  ... Read the full review

Chris LudoviciDAISY Rebecca Saunders was mean. She was the meanest girl in the fourth grade, the meanest girl in school, maybe the meanest girl ever. It wasn’t that Daisy wanted to think that way about Rebecca Saunders, or anyone else for that matter. Daisy liked to like people, her mom always said to try to see the best in everyone, and Daisy did her best to do just that. But some people… some people there was just no best to see, no matter how hard she tried. The truth was, Rebecca Saunders was a bad word. She was a word Daisy wasn’t allowed to say but that Aunt Casey said all the time. It rhymed with witch. Aunt Casey used it to describe Rebecca Saunders even though it made Daisy’s dad mad when she did. “Did that stupid little (bad-word-that-rhymes-with-witch) start anything today?” she would ask Daisy when she got home from school. Most days Daisy would shake her head no, Rebecca Saunders had left her alone, and it was usually true. Mostly. She didn’t bother telling her aunt about the little things Rebecca did, how if Daisy accidentally made eye contact with her, Rebecca’s face would go into this ... Read the full review

Nissa LeeTWO POEMS BEFORE GOING OUT after a painting by Fuco Ueda I. About one in every 10,000 doe-eyed girls grow horns. These rare creatures enjoy drawing lines in the dirt and leaping over them for play. When thirsty, they pause to taste wild berries— delight in their shades of purple, delight in their skins' momentary resistance. In other girls, the horns hide just beneath the scalp. II. Until this girl sheds the woolly uniform and socks down to her cool skin nothing seems right. She itches. Her black hairs spark. III. Antlers clatter on the ground. A friend dangles her feet over the bed, deliberating which pairs make them look best. Pulse flickers at the possibility of fingertips pressed to her temples, to those bones, heavy ornaments pulled from mother's wardrobe just for play. IV. They do not know the implications of their jewelry— the conquest, the kill. The shearing of self to simply fit in. V. The girls lie down with their heads at the tombstone of her twin bed, stroke the blunt tips of ivory. Their ribs gasp shallow, their feet forget cold. VI. You think you have grabbed this creature by the horns, wrestled her to ... Read the full review

Jamie-Lee JosselynDISPATCH FROM THE CAT SHOW Pulling into the parking lot of The Riveredge, a banquet hall in Reading, Pennsylvania, a wave of glee rushed over me. I scanned the rows of SUVs and minivans for the now-familiar “I ♥ my Persian” bumper stickers and “Show Cats on Board” placards suctioned to rear windows. And, of course, there were many variations on those popular stick figure family decals: Stick-Dad with a baseball cap, a Stick-Mom with one long curly-cue for hair and a coffee mug in hand, and no fewer than three Stick-Kitties. Sometimes a Stick-Kid or two. Sometimes just Stick-Lady (Stick-Cat-Lady?) with any number of Stick-Cats. The license plates covered the Mid-Atlantic region, as well as Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and Ontario. We made our way into the lobby, and I presented two cans of Fancy Feast to the woman at the registration table. “Oh, donations!” she said as she placed our cans in a crate heaped with tins of Friskies and Royal Canin. “So, you each get a dollar off admission.” I handed her a ten dollar bill and, when asked, told her we were already on the mailing list. We’d gotten the post card announcement a few weeks ... Read the full review

Daniel TordayAIR CONDITIONER I recently had a difficult argument with my Aunt Lucille about turning up an air conditioner. My wife and I were staying with my aunt in Baltimore for a weekend where, after all, air conditioning was necessary in the summer. Lucille asked if I wanted her to turn up my air conditioner before bed. I said no, I didn’t like it too cold. So? she said. So, I said, I didn’t want it turned up. She stated rather forcefully that turning up an air conditioner meant making the room warmer, not cooler. “Turn up the air conditioner,” she said, as if using italics would solve the thing. I speculated it meant the opposite—to turn up the air conditioner’s powers was to make the room cooler. Not turn up the thermostat. Turn the machine up. My aunt was indignant. What kind of feckless legerdemain was this? What kind of crap did they teach in college when I went—Gender studies? African handclapping? What kind of bullshit semantics was I getting into? After all, with my collared shirt and those two-hundred dollar jeans I was wearing, who did I think I was? Who really the fuck did I think I ... Read the full review

Anna Strongfrom APOSTROPHES "Hockey" This poem will be mostly about force. With one finger on my knee my science teacher tells me I can skate better than half the guys on varsity and I should really try out for the team. In class I’m called on (caught doodling) and asked which muscle group is most responsible for the slapshot and all I want to know is what happens when you give a poet a stick of gum, twenty cents, and point to the cigarette burn on your wrist? "Mouth" In my yellow room, I slipped a spare button into my cheek and held it there all through dinner. Between bits of carrot there was also button, peas and rice were also button, ice cream and spoon became button despite the cold that should have frozen all else away. I was discovered when I let it click against my incoming molars. She said there would be drastic measures. I learned drastic means winter and all the things people will do to touch clouds with a fork. "Nausicaa" At the podium the poet says that she’s always talking to the Victorians. She even invites them to dinner when she needs an idea ... Read the full review

Leah KoontzBIPRODUCT: Drag, Societal Identity, and Gender Equality BiProduct is a project I embarked on which considers drag queens, art, female expectations, and the media. This series features four of my works which address gender roles, equality, and social construction. BiProduct features sculpture and performance, created from nylon, spandex, foam, digital media, and plastic. Drag Queens possess many progressive qualities. However, I feel that certain aspects of Drag should require more careful consideration. Over the past two decades, drag has transformed tremendously. What exactly is drag in 2013? A drag queen is a man, usually homosexual, creating a female illusion through clothing and performance. This illusion ends when the costume comes off. There are many genres and subgenres of drag. Not every drag queen agrees or identifies with all of the categories and genres that have been named. Some queens do not approve of various terms that are currently used in certain gay communities. Sometimes these categories can divide the drag community, which some feel is unproductive. Certain genres of drag queens aim to be “fishy,” meaning as close to a biological woman’s aesthetics as possible. Other genres are more “androgynous.” This genre relies on gender bending, the act of ... Read the full review

Anya LichtensteinBEATING PLOUGHSHARES INTO iPODS As a Conserva-dox Jew by upbringing and agnostic by nature, I don’t know whether I believe in the afterlife. Sometimes I’m certain that we are all just worm food. Other days I can feel my grandparents looking down on me from heaven while I’m opening a grad school acceptance letter or trying on dresses at Bloomingdales (my maternal grandmother believed above all in the god of retail). In my hunt for a compelling afterlife scenario, I found that several cultures have done a thorough job figuring out where to send their dead and how. The ancient Norse believed the soul could wind up in a number of places: Helgafjell, the "holy mountain," where the dead go on with their lives pretty much as usual; Hel, which is not as dreary or painful as its fiery Christian homophone; and Valhalla, which is essentially a Gold’s Gym, a predominantly male realm where fallen warriors pump iron in preparation for the last great battle, Ragnarök. Much like the Egyptians and their pyramids, the Norse sent the dead off on a 1,400 ºC funeral pyre with practical instruments. The packing list often included weapons and the dead person’s slaves, ... Read the full review

Luke StrombergMEMORIAL DAY When you were a boy, did you dream that street And wonder where it was? Did you dream Of death in an exotic locale? Iraq— its bicycles and minarets. Its men And their sweat-shined, mustached faces On the television. Women in the hijab, Weeping in debris. Did your temples throb In its dry desert heat? A roadside bomb, Assembled there—in that ancient, wasted place— Scheduled you and others for oblivion, Claimed you, even at home in Conshohocken. We’ve never met and never will, But this afternoon, I sit at a picnic table Under a tree with my brother and nephew And think of you. The street parked up On both sides for a soccer game. Cheers rise harmlessly above the music. Strangers here are less strange. Nothing here is quite mysterious— Even the shadow pattern of the branches On the walkway. This is the life I know. And, for you, I wonder: would I die for even this? Luke Stromberg has also published work in Rotary Dial, Victorian Violet Journal, Tower Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Lucid Rhythms, Philadelphia Stories, Think Journal, Mid-America Poetry Review, and on Ernest Hilbert’s blog E-Verse Radio. His work has also been featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer on multiple occasions. He lives in Upper Darby, ... Read the full review

John CarrollJOURNALISM No one in my family talks about Uncle Terry, or why there never was a funeral. We did have a wake. We gathered at his house. The priests came in turtlenecks and polo shirts. My mother hovered by the basement door, ushering me away when I pleaded for just a minute at the pool table. My cousins suffered a similar fate. We soon gossiped to one another, only to find we’d been told the same story: Uncle Terry was working in the basement and accidentally stuck his finger into an electrical socket, a Saturday morning cartoon turned fatality. This lie, which we later individually pieced together, was pre-meditated, passed around in the hours and days after his death. It was a family contract: if they couldn’t know why, we wouldn’t know how. The coffin we never saw was stuffed with the facts of his life. I’ve still yet nothing further to report. John Carroll  has published fiction in Philly Fiction 2 (Don Ron Books),Versal, Interrobang!? and The Battered Suitcase. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from American University in Washington, DC. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he was born and raised. He is a former ... Read the full review

Emily SteinbergTHE MODERNIST CABIN I began creating graphic novels or illustrated stories in 2005. I realized that I not only wanted to make visual imagery, as I do in my paintings, but I wanted to tell stories as well. I found that the combination of words and images created a visceral way of storytelling. Most of my material is autobiographical. Stories that have happened to me along the way that have shaped my being. The Modernist Cabin is a story about my family set against the pristine lines of a modernist cabin on Cape Cod. The architecture and the story serve as companions to each other. They are independent of each other but dependent nonetheless. --Emily Steinberg, June 2013 Photography by Paul Rider Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist who earned her MFA and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has shown at 55 Mercer Gallery and The Westbeth Gallery in New York, and has exhibited at several Philadelphia area venues, including Mangel Gallery, The Borowsky Gallery, The Woodmere Museum of Art and the Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown, PA. Most recently, she exhibited in the solo series at the Abington Art Center and at The Crane ... Read the full review

Rosebud Ben-Oni, reviewed by Kenna O'RourkeSOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 80 pages) It is not difficult to lose patience with the poems of Rosebud Ben-Oni’s Solecism: studded with cultural and personal reference, streets names, and regionalisms – not to mention the grammatical experimentation implicit in a book of poetry – Ben-Oni’s work disorients. The reader clings to disparate stanzas, following ambiguously symbolic sparrows, in a fruitless attempt to add everything up, but the author evades a single style. Ben-Oni traverses her mixed Jewish-Hispanic heritage in sudden turns; just as the reader grows accustomed to colonias and sal si puedes they find themselves in Israel (with side trips back to the States), the parts of the poet divided into cavalier sections. A fragmented poem about Ramadan lives alongside unexpectedly sentimental lines like “and so they fly away / breaking my heart on this cold, cold day” or a sugary ode to the poet’s niece. And Ben-Oni’s eerily suspended language occasionally lapses into indulgent alliteration and even rhyme, troubling an easy conceptual reading and testing the reader’s fortitude: attempting to process more than three such poems in a row generally leads to a sort of inattentive auto-pilot. Were it not for Ben-Oni’s introductory ... Read the full review

Tom Gauld, reviewed by Rebecca DubowYOU’RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK (Drawn & Quarterly, 180 pages) Tom Gauld’s latest graphic novel, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, is a hundred and eighty pages of cartoons about classic literature in the digital age. Many of these graphics have already appeared in The Guardian, but reading each of them back to back is especially satisfying. Experienced this way, his cartoons argue for a seamless intersection of literary fiction and popular culture. A graphic novel is the ideal medium to accomplish this marriage because it has historically been associated with popular culture. In the past ten years or so, however, great works like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have demonstrated the considerable potential of the graphic novel as a literary work. Gauld's graphics are cartoonish and simple, indicating at first that the work would be equally cartoonish and simple, but his irreverent understanding of classic literature is immediately apparent. Although each page contains a different cartoon, the same figures appear repeatedly—Dickens, Shakespeare, and dinosaurs, to name a few. Gauld takes modern storytelling devices and then puts those devices in conversation with classic literature. Dickens becomes a “Dickensmobile”-driving superhero, the ... Read the full review

BOX SCORE by Kevin Varrone Digital Earthenware, available from iTunes Reviewed by Anna Strong Kevin Varrone’s Box Score: An Autobiography spans across form — from autobiography to history to visual art to the baseball rulebook to the prose poem — content, and reading experience. Presented as a highly interactive free iPad and (by early June 2013) iPhone app, Varrone’s text, which he calls an autobiography, does almost everything in its power to thwart that somewhat restrictive classification. “Box Score” is made of a series of prose poems, each of which invokes Philadelphia history, baseball history (e.g. the first night game ever played between the Phillies and the Reds) Philadelphia baseball, a speaker’s personal recollections (“police your area my dad would say as he smoothed dirt around the first base bag w/ his foot after a bad hop ate me up”), baseball terminology (page 78 is simply a line of a batter’s statistics: g: 1 ab: 0 r: 0 h: 0 2b: 0 3b: 0 hr: 0 avg: .000), found language (Harry Kalas’ famous “outta here” long ball call appears on page 73), and lyrical, evocative images that seem disembodied from — and beautifully juxtapose — the rest of the language ... Read the full review

Lynn Levin, reviewed by Michelle RealeMISS PLASTIQUE (Ragged Sky Press, 68 pages) I should have know from the cover of Lynn Levin’s book that I would be able to connect with the poems inside on a very visceral level: that blond doll, with the thick cat eye eyeliner, all blonde and coiffed, with head tipped---yeah, I get it. When I played with my Barbie dolls, they broke rules, they were well-dressed rebels, and they smiled in your face, but plotted their escape behind your back. Lynn Levin writes of a generation here—my generation, her generation, our generation, but her themes are universal, though some of the particulars, some details give a throb to the heart because, well, recognition in any form is a powerful thing. She slips in details you think you may have forgotten about your young life long past, but realize they’ve only been coiled tight inside, waiting to be recalled. Levin writes with a ferocious tenacity, all arterial memory, lust, found power, and raw regret like you imagine a Miss Plastique would be if she were real. The illusion of the “gentle” days of Leave it to Beaver, lettermen, Wally and Eddie Haskell are in the collective ... Read the full review

Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin, reviewed by Shinelle L. EspaillatPOEMS FOR THE WRITING: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 154 pages) PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS In the poetry workshop, we encourage writers to explore their individual potentials, to experiment, and to eschew valuations of “good” in exchange for measures of success as achieving authorial vision.  The instructor must speak to a wide spectrum of skill.  Valerie Fox’s and Lynn Levin’s new book, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, supplies a toolbox for doing just that.  The range of prompts makes the creation of art a more accessible act to a wider audience.  Ultimately, this works as a text for how to teach poetry. The book intermixes the prompts with respect to levels of difficulty and formal elements of the resulting poems.  The first prompt, the paraclausithyron, may appeal to an old world sense of “The Poet,” but introductory workshop students might find both the name and the task somewhat daunting, and are less likely to want to write like Horace, at first.  Indeed, Fox and Levin actually suggest starting workshops with what they call the “get-to-know-you cinquain.” This serves the dual purpose of getting students writing, right away, and introducing formalism to ... Read the full review

Kristen MartinBETWEEN THE FRAMES My parents never owned their own video camera—in the 1990s, it was the sort of luxury item (like a snow blower) that could be borrowed from a relative or neighbor when needed. With my Uncle Joe’s bulky camcorder hoisted on his shoulder, my dad would record birthdays, vacations, and Christmases. The camera was a heavy machine, much too big for John and me to ever play with; it was obsolete even by 1990, when handheld camcorders became the tool of choice for doting parents. Nevertheless, my dad ignored his bad back on those special occasions and accumulated hours of footage of us running through the sprinklers in our backyard and ripping wrapping paper off presents. The impulse to document stopped around 1997—by that time, I was 8 years old and John was 11. Maybe we weren’t cute enough to immortalize on moving film anymore. More likely, life just got too busy—who could remember to borrow a camera in the endless cycle of dance recitals, baseball games, First Holy Communions, and trips to the beach? About the time that my dad stopped recording our major life events, I started watching our home videos. Back then, when I ... Read the full review

William Sulit & Beth KephartCHICKEN DANCE, DIGITAL 3-D DESIGN A conversation between a writer wife and her artist husband, in a quest to understand Important Subject: A chicken BK: You spend hours in your garage studio (among the ghosts of a skinny car, in the shadow of night visitors, within walls yellowed by old fuels) fiddling with electronic pencils and twinned screens, and you come up with ... a chicken? Why a chicken? How did your chicken begin? WS: It began with a sphere about the size of a golf ball. I'm sure electrons are involved but what is really being manipulated are vertices. This chicken was really a way to test 3D printing technology (color and all). No lofty idea—just that as someone who works with 3D "art," I wasn't going to leave that stone unturned. BK: And I thought I had married into lofty. Didn’t you promise me lofty? Okay, then. You began to pull and poke at this thing, began to manipulate these vertices. The computer can’t resist you. There isn’t any tactile feel to this material, no smell, nothing that gets your hands dirty. Do you still consider this art? Because, at the very least, I ... Read the full review

Kevin VarroneBIRTHPLACE OF A NATION Joe saw your number at Silk City while going crazy in the men’s room. Joe saw your number on the sin wall and understood the irritating itch on his bearish toes to be his own cross, his own three alarm fire. Joe TIVO-ed Casablanca and became immune to commas. Joe’s been paralyzed by the syntax of youth, by his sumo for frankfurters. Joe is a concave bibliographer, a nor’easter cult diva who uses tabula rasa as an ultimatum and asks “Where you at?” Joe loves women. Joe loves a woman the way two broken machines love each other in a landfill. Kevin Varrone’s most recent publication is Eephus (Little Red Leaves Textile Series, 2012). His current project, box score: an autobiography, is forthcoming as a set of literary baseball cards from Little Red Leaves Textile Series (2013) and as an iPhone/iPad app (2013). His previous publications include Passyunk Lost (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), id est (Instance Press, 2007), and the chapbooks g-point Almanac: 6.21-9.21 (ixnay press, 2000) and the philadelphia improvements (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). He lives outside Philadelphia. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #1 ... Read the full review

John TimpaneIN A DRY MONTH Time says have to, time says go to a green place, a space, a peace beyond the outskirts of earshot and streetlight mind of barnacle-bearded whale rears, geysers shattered water, sounds a mile past the din of fish silence where warmth has never been. Infinitesimal in that crush, that loneliness, those lightless ancient canyons, whale hums a half-hour, utter tone that travels shelf to shelf, reef to isle to continent and every whale, oceans apart, judders a little. Beyond the suburbs, where Orion glistens, all sings and oceans of night reverberate: what is in me, what is heavy, holds its breath, dive when the deep calls. John Timpane is the Media Editor/Writer of the Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has appeared in Sequoia, Vocabula Review, Apiary Mixtape, ONandOnScreen, Painted Bride Quarterly, Per Contra, Wild River Review, and elsewhere. Books include (with Nancy H. Packer) Writing Worth Reading (NY: St. Martin, 1994);It Could Be Verse (Berkeley: Ten Speed, 1995); (with Maureen Watts and the Poetry Center of San Francisco State University) Poetry for Dummies (NY: Hungry Minds, 2000); and (with Roland Reisley) Usonia, N.Y.: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); and a poetry book, Burning Bush(Ontario, Canada: Judith Fitzgerald/ Cranberry ... Read the full review

Deborah BurnhamALBINO We slung harsh words like stones: we spat at the white-haired boy and called him freak. We couldn’t see his long hair glowing like an opal in the dark waves of children flowing through the schoolyard. Someone should have led him to a safer place, a shady forest where it’s damp even in July. His forked white body might have rooted there, like the colorless and waxy plants that feed from trees and the rich litter of the forest floor. Perhaps he would have grown tall, sending hooded blooms into the dappled light. His opaque and fragile stalks would glow, would grow back, summer after summer, refusing to take root anywhere that’s bright and hard and noisy.  Deborah Burnham has lived in the Powelton area of Philadelphia forever. She walks to work in the English department at Penn where she teaches creative writing and literature, and advises students.  She writes long repetitive sequences of poems, then slices and dices. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's Issue #1 ... Read the full review

Kelly McQuainJAM At dusk, they come haunting to slake their hunger: doe and fawn threading autumn brush. Down hillside, through hollow, they search for fallen apples—rotten spoils of the abandoned orchard Mom’s lived by since Dad passed on. The deer move like wood smoke through charcoal shadow; I’m penciled in against trees, watching roadside, unsure why a lover once told me he liked me more than raspberry jam and that—while he loved raspberry jam—he didn’t love me. The truth? I didn’t love him either and liked him less at such clumsy carelessness. So I held my tongue about his small cock and left with what grace I could muster. Words are awkward sticky things that sway from sugar to sour once loosened from tongue. Do I forgive him because we were young? Desire reversed doesn’t chase need away. In June, among roadside rock, new blackberries will muster. Wild strawberries too, budded brambles inviting tongue. Mom will wash Ball jars before the briar’s best get eaten by deer teaching next year’s young. She’ll mail me preserves, knowing—there’s nothing I like more than blackberry jam. But right now, evening drowns in grays and browns. Shadows swallow me alongside apple, poplar and pine ... Read the full review

I stayed up 'til 1:00 AM a few weeks ago, and where was the party? At my desk, with everything but the keyboard covered in postage stamps. Polish stamps, Poczta Polska, all issued between 1928 and 1969. Musty old stamps honoring tanks and trade union congresses, marking six-year plans and newspaper tricentennials and the 1000-year anniversary of the country itself. Clumps of stamps memorializing uprisings in Silesia, the recovery of territories, and planes, lots of planes, carrying mail or flying over cities. New steelworks, new electric plants, well-muscled and barefoot coal miners, studious children, Curie and Kopernik and korfball, Chopin and Paderewski, Stalin and Hitler, zoo animals and butterflies. Not one stamp memorialized or honored or even acknowledged Catholicism ... Read the full review

Angel HoganTINY MAGICS Sometimes it is an outrage. When Mila considers the chances and possibilities in this world, the fine lines and gaping canyons between what is good or not, the distances between blessed and cursed, she is outraged enough to spit! "I have had a hard life, no doubt," she mutters inwardly on her way to catch water from the well. "I've had a life that makes others wonder how I have managed, still, to have an open heart and love. I am flawed and far from perfect but I BELIEVE!" Mila believed in goodness and love and light, even after the days of Noe and all the hurtful ways and words. She believed she was blessed and graced with rare and tiny magics. "A fact," she whispers into the darkness, "a fact is that flowers make me happy. A true and honest joy in this world so full of those anxious to grind any bit of beauty straight to dust. This happiness is a miracle." "Who needs millions? Let me lay down on a blanket in the grass, let the sun shine, let the dog come in and snuggle me, let me hold a child or a grandmother's velvet hand ... Read the full review

Ann de ForestCLOSING THE CURTAINS 1. Daughter A little girl sits alone in her room at night, reading. The lights are on. The curtains are open. She feels safe inside her room, inside her book. She knows what lies outside in the dark. She doesn't even have to look. Just below her window, a hedgerow of purple-berried bushes. If she eats the berries, she will get sick and probably die, says her mother. The bluejays eat them though. Sometimes the little girl watches them, so greedy they drop most of their harvest on the ground. The sidewalk is stained with splatters of red juice. Beyond the bushes and the sidewalk is the street. Across the street, a street lamp glows. When she looks up from her reading, she does not see the bushes, the spattered sidewalk, the street, the lamp, the neighbors' houses. She sees herself, her body bright and transparent over the night's silhouettes. It is time for bed. She undresses in front of the window and stops to stare at her naked reflection. Her body stares back with its own face: two dark nipples for eyes, a belly button nose, the smiling V of her crotch, a mouth. The walls of her room blur behind her in the glass, floating but still secure. She has no sense of danger. She does not believe there might be eyes out there feeding on her ... Read the full review

Max McKennaGARY'S SISTER The same way we didn’t know, way back when, that mom and dad couldn’t stand their “friends, ” so we didn’t know that Gary’s sister wasn’t interested in either of us, which starts to explain why she kept mixing up our names last Saturday night in the busted stretch limo that cut through the grey-blue soup of Pacific Avenue, with the winding path of a rocket about to be decommissioned, after she pulled us into the back of it where she was already singing along with the radio and pounding the ceiling that snowed bits of dried-out upholstery on our heads and where her skirt kept flying up—though, yes, you were right, there were three other guys in that limo with us; it wasn’t in the cards; and weighing it all out now, we did do the right thing to leave and drive the forty-five minutes from Atlantic City back to mom and dad’s though it was late and I’d been drinking, because in the end I don’t think it would be healthy for us anymore to have a girl come between us, and this way you got to sleep in your bed and I in mine, ... Read the full review

Rachel R. TaubeWORM DIRT She found me digging up worms in my backyard. Just plopped down beside me and started wriggling herself when I found one in the freshly turned soil. Later, her mother was angry about the worm dirt on her dress, but she came back the next day. “My name is Mara,” she said this time. What a pretty name on her lips, she smiled just a little on the “ar” and I saw her dimples. Her lips were pink like a worm. “This one’s name is Cara-Beth,” she said, pointing. She named each worm we found: Mariel, Nathaniel, Courtney. She wouldn’t touch them, but demanded I house each in a plastic cup, which we then placed in the shade. Digging them up, they dry up. When one died, she would say, “Poor Cara-Beth” and hand me the emptied cup, ready for the next worm. If you cut off the head of a worm, it doesn’t hurt it, my teacher explained. Each end just keeps squirming away. When I told Mara, she squealed with delight. She said we had to try it. She dared me and double-dog-dared me, and still I held my twig over the wriggling body, ... Read the full review

Martha CooneyCORMAC I was kicking my football along the road in our estate, timing my kicks to each time the curbstones changed color. They were painted in the Ireland flag’s green, white, and gold, just to let anybody foolish enough to get lost in North Belfast know they were in a Catholic estate. I turned into the alley and kicked the ball ahead, prepared to chase after it past imaginary defenders, but stopped short. Standing in front of the rubbish bin halfway down the alley was Cormac Devaney, from my year at school. He was holding a teddy bear, not even looking my way. He laid the bear on the edge of the bin and held it down with his elbow while he lit a match. Then he picked up the teddy, pressing the light against its fat stomach and dropping the ball of flame into the bin. I walked toward him. “What are you doing?” “What do you think I’m doing?” he said. Smoke started to billow up, thick and black. “Is that yours?” I asked. He laughed. “You think I play with teddies? I found it in my neighbor’s garden.” “You’re burning some wee kid’s bear?” “Aye. They ... Read the full review

Elizabeth MosierEVERYTHING MUST GO “Here’s what you do,” a friend said to my husband, eyeing the dreck on our front porch, residuals from a previous sale: the single chair, incomplete set of plates, fancy dolls our daughters never played with, battered sleigh they had outgrown. “You go to the bank. You get $200.00 cash. You pay someone a hundred bucks to haul this shit away. You give your wife the other $100.00 and tell her it was a huge success. Nobody wants stuff you don’t want.” How I wish my husband had done it, though I’d insisted on the sale. When we’d moved to the suburbs twenty years before, we’d paid for a vacation by selling “antiques” we’d spent years collecting in Germantown. These things filled our imagined future, but didn’t fit in our new house. Nor did the wedding crystal I’d been carrying from the basement when I accidentally let go. I’d heard that delicate world—ring holders and sherry glasses—shatter, and put the box out at the curb without even looking inside. We’ve emptied four houses now—my childhood home and my husband’s, our first apartment and my in-laws’ last—and are weary of clutter’s delusions: that there will be another ... Read the full review

Beth KephartSCRABBLE I said it would be nice (look how simple I made it:  nice) not to be marooned in the blue-black of night with my thoughts, I said the corrugated squares of the downstairs quilt accuse me, I said the sofa pillows are gape-jawed, I said there are fine red hairs in the Pier 1 rug that will dislodge and drown in my lungs, I said I can’t breathe, I said, Please. It wasn’t hard. But you were asleep by then, west to my east, uncorrupted by the plain and the soft of my imagination, the occasional and wire whipped and cruel:  you couldn’t be touched; you wouldn’t stir; you. I broke and I climbed out and I climbed through and I climbed down into the blue black red threads and sat until a fat clack cracked the hollow between the walls and I knew that it was the long-nailed scrabble of a squirrel or the procrastination of the fox or the wolf that is my thoughts. That was the first night after. Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of fourteen books, most recently Small Damages, named to many best-of-year lists.  Three new books are set to be released, including Handling the ... Read the full review

Katherine FallonGIN A JUNIPER SLICK Gin a juniper slick, drain-bound, spilled by the wrist that meant it this time. The glass-floor desert, the sugared rim, glister in cloud-gauze sunlight. To win, to be as cold and lasting as the snow. Sometimes me, sometimes winter. Katherine Fallon lives and writes in Philadelphia. She received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence and her work has recently appeared in Sink Review and Snake Nation Review. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's All Flash 0.5 Preview Issue ... Read the full review

Lynn LevinTHE ASK SANDWICH The TSA lady at Newark Airport had a nice touch, and Josie enjoyed the pat down. The blue gloves slid under her arms, along her sides, down one leg, then the other. They searched, discerned. They pleased with just the right amount of pressure. Josie thanked the TSA lady, who nodded back with very professional brown eyes. In bed last night in Robert’s apartment, it was their sixth time together, Josie had attempted the “ask sandwich,” something she’d read about in a woman’s magazine. First she told him how nice his cologne smelled and trailed her fingers playfully down his arm. That was the first slice of bread. Then she said she’d really love it if he rubbed her back. That was the sandwich filling. She would have praised him and reciprocated generously, which would have been the other slice of bread. Instead he said, “You’re really bossy, aren’t you?” Sheesh. She’d only done what the magazine had instructed. Josie curled away from Robert, then on his hard mattress, she recovered a little backbone. “I don’t consider that so bossy.” “Well, I do.” The atmosphere in the room wadded up like paper. Pulling her carry-on bag, ... Read the full review

Anna StrongDEAR COUCH Dear Couch, I want to zip myself in a pocket and watch baseball. You say sit down and stop moving the furniture around. A square of light hits my palm from the gap in the curtain teeth and I want it to fill my creases with more than skin. Despite spiders, my name is safe in your mouth. Grain by grain you’re putting salt on your tongue. The game ends, there are questions, outside it’s all purple and traffic. When you’re asleep on my knees and it’s just me and the crushed end of chips and the street below wide awake, I remember my first god was my mother, my second, the light switch. Anna Strong is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and is forthcoming in Peregrine. Currently she is working on her senior honors thesis, a collection of prose poems tentatively titled Apostrophes. Anna also helps teach Penn's Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. Read more from Cleaver Magazine's All Flash 0.5 Preview Issue ... Read the full review

Rachel PastanBONES Once, they’d read aloud to each other all the time: letters, menus, fliers posted on telephone poles along the streets. Missing dog, black, one white ear, answers to Shayna. For sale, stereo cabinet, some damage. Telugu lessons, $10/hour. Telugu, they’d said, maybe we should learn Telugu? Now, the sun streams in through the windows onto the stained tablecloth, onto the chipped cups and the tarnished spoons and the damp sugar in the saucer they use for sugar, and they no longer speak to each other even in English. She doesn’t even read him the headlines.  ñShe won’t—can’t—read him the words banged out on her personal teletype machine, the banner that runs along the inside of her brain. Baby baby baby baby baby it says.  But there won’t be a baby, and even her desire has been burned almost away, bleached down like the corpse of an animal in the desert, to the bare white bones of the single word. “Busy day?” she asks, seeing him look at his watch. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t be late.” His voice, its scalded hostility, accuses her of caring.  But he is mistaken; she doesn’t care. Be late, she thinks. Belate, ... Read the full review