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thwack

thwack

  • Joined: December 27, 2012
  • Articles: 2319
  • Comments: 1

CUTMAN by Marc Labriola

Marc Labriola

Marc LabriolaCUTMAN If the needle swung from side to side, it would be a girl. If the needle swung in circles, a boy. Lailah’s three sisters lay her laughing in Ben’s arms as her mother dangled the needle above her…

SUNDAY IN VENICE by Julie Kearney

Julie Kearney

Julie KearneySUNDAY IN VENICE The alleyway was paved with humped dark stones like so many dead or hibernating turtles. On either side of these stones, walls leprous with peeling plaster inclined inwards towards a sliver of grey sky. The man…

MAGIC TRICK by Circus

Circus

CircusMAGIC TRICK He presses the deck of cards into her hands and says: Shuffle. As you shuffle, think about all the cards in the deck. Concentrate on a single card, but don’t choose one, just hand the deck back to…

MISS TORRES WOKE US EARLY by Beth Seetch

Beth Seetch

Beth SeetchMISS TORRES WOKE US EARLY Just before a) Death We sleep upside-down, toes at bed’s head, pajama seams chafing our buttons tender unless we remember to turn them inside-out and put cold spoons under our pillows. Walking slow in…

LAB CHILD THEOREM by Deborah Purdy

Deborah Purdy

Deborah PurdyLAB CHILD THEOREM Automatic habit like a rifle, pistol or pilot, the beach doll hermit told him to hold the bracelet, the bracelet told him to blame the rich hotel, the cloth heir, the rambling hot chili. He touched…

MAGDALENE’S DREAM by João Cerqueira

João Cerqueira

João CerqueiraMAGDALENE’S DREAM That night Magdalene dreamt about Jesus. She was wearing a green overall and gloves, her hair was protected by a plastic cap, and a mask covered her mouth. She was in a large laboratory, looking through the…

NOTICING WATER by Nancy Agati

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…

SPACE AND TIME by Amelia Fowler

Amelia Fowler

“Space and Time” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015 Amelia FowlerSPACE AND TIME 1. Since very early childhood, I have had a recurring dream of a white room so bright it is dimensionless, boundaries of…

LITTLE FEATHERS by Andrea Rothman

Andrea Rothman

Andrea RothmanLITTLE FEATHERS The bird lay shivering on the lawn, their faces reflected dark and alien in his button eye. The other eye, the one on the left side of his head, was shut, or possibly gone. A clot of…

MAKING EGGS by Carly Eathorne

Carly Eathorne

Carly EathorneMAKING EGGS A thousand ways to make an egg, and I’m attempting one: over-easy. But there past the blotches on my kitchen window gleams the hourglass on the belly of the black widow – she, too, is making eggs.…

THE TASTE OF OTHERS by Madeline Zehnder

Madeline Zehnder

Madeline ZehnderTHE TASTE OF OTHERS She walks gingerly toward the man chopping onions, who turns but does not shake her hand. Later she will learn this was politeness; right now she thinks he is rude. He criticizes the oil she…

BORDERLAND by Amber Officer-Narvasa

Amber Officer-NarvasaBORDERLAND The rainwater dripped lasciviously—as rainwater in New York will do—through the sidewalk gratings and down through the mottled, cracked, brown-stained ceilings of the Grand Street subway station. He was standing near the MetroCard machines, begging. Good writers, so…

BEAUTIFUL UGLY by Sue Granzella

Sue Granzella

Sue GranzellaBEAUTIFUL UGLY The temperature outside was 107, but it was hotter where I was that day in 1989, bouncing around with three friends in a dilapidated bus bound for Chihuahua, Mexico. Air-conditioning on this journey was simple: wrench the…

SMALL by Michael Head

Michael Head

Michael HeadSMALL He stood staring out the peephole and waiting for the girl who said she’d come. She was three days late and he didn’t have a television so he mostly stood staring out the peephole and counting the seconds.…

HOW A GHOST IS MADE by Sean Jackson

Sean Jackson

Sean JacksonHOW A GHOST IS MADE This is the part that gets to Shelly every time: running past the Horner’s fence with a big, bright smile on her face. It can’t be the sour pucker that she wants to display.…

CELEBRATED SUMMER by Charles Forsman reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Celebrated Summer
CELEBRATED SUMMER by Charles Forsman Fantagraphics Books, 67 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott For the first potion of one’s life, summer is a welcome three-month respite from the seemingly stressful remainder of the year. Like the buds of a flower, it is a period of joy in the face of few commitments and responsibilities. But somewhere, as those flowers begin to fade and adolescence sets in, we become forlornly reminiscent of those times as we’re caught in-between one concrete stage of life and another. Charles Forsman’s Celebrated Summer tells of one such swan song, recalling the alternating experiences of two teens as they trip both literally and figuratively in the midst of one teenage summer. Told through the perspective of Wolf, whose gentle nature is masked by his large frame and sprout-like mohawk, we join a transient trip from the suburbs to the shore. Wolf’s partner in crime, Mike, is a sassy-mouthed whisp of a teenage boy who initiates both trips, leading Wolf down the rabbit hole with two tabs of LSD and on an unnecessarily elongated drive. Mike is clearly the alpha-male in this friendship, though Wolf—who describes himself as “a pretty nervous guy on the inside”—does not seem to object. Rather, he willingly goes along with Mike’s dominant nature as a directionless passenger of his own fortune.

BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Nicholas Fox Weber reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Nicholas Fox Weber Dalkey Archive Press, 656 pages reviewed by Gabriel Chazan When looking at the paintings of Balthus, the viewer can’t help but react. Seeing paintings of young and often pre-pubescent girls and women in poses loaded with a strange sexuality, there is no possibility of cool remove. The viewer is made to consider actively their role in looking at the young women in these sometimes cruel, always compelling, provocative and often beautiful images. Balthus’s images have a strange, almost dreamlike hold, as they look back at us, impenetrable and confrontational. Balthus himself is somewhere in them yet distant. He wished his life to be separate from his work, something to be never included in exhibits or official publications, only “a misleading and harmful screen placed between the viewer and painter…paintings do not describe or reveal a painter.” He almost entirely obscured the true facts of his life, recreating himself as a count and rendering himself a challengingly elusive subject for biography. He placed the most responsibility on those looking at his work to react to whatever sexuality or darkness they might find in the work as their own perception.

BILATERAL ASYMMETRY by Don Riggs reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

BILATERAL ASYMMETRY by Don Riggs Texture Press, 120 pages reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat In his new collection, Bilateral Asymmetry, Don Riggs explores the balance—or the imbalance—between art and life, and the inevitable synergy between the two. His illustrations illuminate his poetic concepts, offering the reader a fuller texture through which to experience his work. In the manner of the old masters, Riggs offers provocation with deceptive simplicity. The first section, Gallery Opening, is an exercise in ekphrasis. Riggs entwines visual and literary art, reminding us how genres and mediums can and should inspire each other. Indeed, the opening poem, “Still Life,” creates a robust picture in the style of Vermeer, of the tortured artist struggling with the space between inspiration and craft. “Pagan Mystery in the Renaissance” further exposes the shifting boundaries between words and worlds, exploring Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses and how misinterpretation led to a masterpiece that inspires fantasy. Readers needn’t be familiar with the works in question in order to see them in Riggs’ imagery, and to understand the works’ impact on both the writer and the world, though the poems make you want to physically experience the artistic works.

BIRDS ON THE KISWAR TREE by Odi Gonzalez translated by Lynn Levin reviewed by J.G. McClure

BIRDS ON THE KISWAR TREE by Odi Gonzalez translated by Lynn Levin reviewed by J.G. McClure
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…

CONVERSATIONS by César Aira reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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.

CHANGE MACHINE by Bruce Covey reviewed by J.G. McClure

CHANGE MACHINE by Bruce Covey Noemi Press, 122 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure Think about the change machine outside your car wash: you put in a dollar, the machine spits out coins. Not a neat bundle, but a jangling tray-full. Now think of William Carlos Williams: “A poem is a machine made of words.”Now give William Carlos Williams superpowers and have him beat the hell out of the car wash while musing on Pokémon, Barthes, and metapoetics, and you’ve got a sense of Bruce Covey’s Change Machine. Covey knows the canon well, and treats it with a mix of comic distance and yearning. Take a poem like “29 Epiphanies.” The speaker has read the classics and gleaned a lot of meaning from them – just not quite the meanings the authors had in mind. From Coleridge, we get “Just leave the albatross the fuck alone.” From Blake, “A lamb is different than a tiger,” from Dante, “Beatrice is out of your league,” and from the Greek myths, “Styx is another name for shit’s creek.”

ON SNAPSHOTS by Jay Pastelak

Roy With Cigar

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…

FALL ON ME by Melissa Sarno

Melissa Sarno

Melissa SarnoFALL ON ME I’m on a crowded subway, clutching a heavy book that requires two hands not one, but where to place my fingers? On the warm metal pole, or balance, maybe lean, against a door or a railing where…

IS THIS IT by Sidney Thompson

Sidney Thompson

Sidney ThompsonIS THIS IT Jewell Jewell Young didn’t know what made her son happy anymore. There was a time she did, and for most of his life she did. It was why she was making this pecan pie for him,…

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