thwack

thwack

BALLAD by Patrick Dacey

Patrick DaceyBALLAD OK she’s gone let’s get setup amp cord guitar now this is romantic this is a gift D C G yep way out of tune needs a good tuning can’t remember how to tune just listen listen it…

ONE OF THOSE WORLDS by Steve Klepetar

Steve KlepetarONE OF THOSE WORLDS Returning from the kitchen one night, you stumble into one of those worlds where dogs breathe fog and foxes roam through orchards near where your mother grew up, a circular tower house where you looked…

CRITTER CONTROL by Rebecca Entel

Rebecca EntelCRITTER CONTROL I hadn’t given much thought to the snake that connected my toilet to the bathroom wall until one July when it split its plastic cap and flooded most of my house. Among other damages, the water buckled…

THE ELEPHANT by Erika Price

Erika PriceTHE ELEPHANT He got the news in the usual way: via Twitter. At 5:00 am when he’d already given up the prospect of sleeping (the thrum of his across-the-hall neighbor’s Skrillex ebbing into the rattle of the broken refrigerator),…

THE INSIDES by Brooke Schifano

Brooke SchifanoTHE INSIDES In the train, you listen to a story about a shaman, feet braced against the wall in the part where you stand on the circle cut into the floor. If this were a human arm you’d be…

KENTUCKY SNAKES by Shaun Turner

Shaun Turner

Shaun TurnerKENTUCKY SNAKES Me and Dorsey worked with Gross Lumber down in the woods behind Viola Creek and we’d cut our share of trees. In the woods, not even Lloyd Gross cared how many beers we drank. All the loggers—usually…

FUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST by Myra Lotto

Myra LottoFUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST On the last Saturday morning of April, my husband and I put our two young children in the car for the hour-long drive to New Canaan, Connecticut. We were on our way to attend the…

GROWING UP by Devin Kelly

Devin KellyGROWING UP She is naked save for pink socks, and her pale young behind squeaks as she slides, or inches, down the balustrade. The sound echoes off the wooden floorboards and she imagines a tiny creature screaming in short…

ON THE Q By Tricia Park

Tricia Park Author Photo

Tricia ParkON THE Q Someone is singing “Rocket Man” on the opposite side of the NQR stop at Prince Street. “I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife; It’s lonely out in space; On such a timeless flight.”…

BIRDS / NERVES by Max Bartlett

Max BartlettBIRDS / NERVES There’s this bird.  It’s nighttime, and there’s this bird.  And he’s flying, and who knows how long he’s been flying, because that’s not what’s important.  The thing is there’s this house.  Everything outside the house is…

FLYING by Grace Jordan

Grace JordanFLYING I was wearing my turquoise suede moccasins. I was afraid they would get wet because I knew it would start raining at any given moment. There was an ominous raincloud making its way down the block. I decided…

HUNGER by Amy Burns

Amy BurnsHUNGER I was sitting at my friend Bebe’s kitchen table. She was standing at the counter using a black and yellow handled screwdriver as an ice pick. I was telling her about it while she chopped. You should have…

THE ACOLYTES, LIAR, and BOX by Mercedes Lawry

Mercedes LawryTHE ACOLYTES, LIAR, AND BOX The Acolytes Somebody drowned the acolytes. They were not wee fellows so it must have been someone with plenty of muscle. Now an emptiness hovers like a bad smog burning throats and lungs. The…

COUCH by Jenny Wales Steele

Jenny Wales Steele

Jenny Wales SteeleCOUCH [?] It was an okay day. I don’t understand zoos, the appeal. The kids thrill to it, sure, but kids are dumb. My nephew flounced around, did his giddy slash sissy thing. He was wearing his jester’s…

TOUGH by Geoff Peck

Geoff Peck

Geoff PeckTOUGH You picture it: fourteenth floor of Walker dormitory. A former wrestler dangles from a window. The one they call Bisonhead has him by one ankle and another ex-teammate, a freshman, by the other. It’s late April in Oklahoma,…

A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by Liana Finck reviewed by Ana Schwartz

A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by Liana Finck Ecco Press, 128 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz There’s a new sort of fiction circulating, stories of young people, by young people, for young people. This isn’t YA lit. These stories range across genres, even mediums, but they all describe the ambivalence of maturing in post-post-modernity. These narratives share a sense of lostness and reflective self-estrangement. The authors are smart and the narratives are smartly-dressed. They usually take place in New York. Think Frances Ha or Tai Pei or Girls. And if, as one well-respected author of such fictions has recently described them, they at times seem “cold, lazy, [and] artificial,” they also exhibit “extreme honesty and thoroughness of […] self scrutiny.” Liana Finck’s new graphic novel, A Bintel Brief features one such young me-person; but, although the story mines her development as an artist, it does so by digging into the past. With the distance afforded by history, and supported by the graphic novel’s relatively diffuse gaze, Finck offers a warmer, and more engaged account of a remarkably persistent theme: how one comes to feel that they belong to a community.

ZOONOSIS by Kelly Boyker reviewed by Carlo Matos

Poetry by Kelly Boyker, reviewed by Carlo Matos ZOONOSIS (Hyacinth Girl Press) Kelly Boyker’s chapbook, Zoonosis, is loaded from cover-to-cover with fantastical creatures, folktale monsters, and twentieth-century “freaks” drawn from the pages of Robert Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.” The…

APOLLO by Geoffrey Gatza reviewed by Carlo Matos

APOLLO by Geoffrey Gatza BlazeVOX
, 168 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Geoffrey Gatza’s Apollo is an all-out assault on the reader, like facing an opponent who senses you’re about to wilt and so presses the action. Every time we think we know what he’s doing, another surprise comes our way. And this is how good conceptual poetry should be—not just the simple execution of a clever conceit but a text that threatens at every turn to burst from the inside out and take the reader with it but never does. Taking the shape of a souvenir program for a one-night performance of Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name, the book contains a myriad of Dada-like exercises: poems generated by a John Cage-like method of assigning words to each square on a chess board and to each piece and then playing out the game between Marcel Duchamp and then US chess champion, Frank Marshall, at the Chess Olympiad in Hamburg in 1930 (accompanied by pictures of each position and a cat), an Arthurian legend based on the Lady of Shallot, a three-act play where Duchamp somehow manages to play himself as Rrose Sélavey (his female alter-ego), and a business letter to the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, who kicked the author out one day for the mysterious offence of carrying an umbrella—a moment so Duchampian it is the perfect coda to this ready-made text. In “Fifteen Hundred Hours,” Rrose Sélavey says, “The consciousness that bound these obscurities. . . together/ was overgrowth.” It is a perfect metaphor for the entire collection, for this paean to Gatza’s modernist heroes who perform his ballet: Duchamp, Sélavey, Max Ernst, Gertrude Abercrombie, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Dizzy Gillespie.

THE LAST ONE IN by Mary van Ogtrop

Mary van Ogtrop

Mary van OgtropTHE LAST ONE IN A bridge cuts a straight line across the sky, connecting one wooded area of Richmond, Virginia, to another. Imagine a bridge and you’ll see a parabola, the structure’s midsection arching high in the air…

HUNGRY by Rachel Estrada Ryan

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.

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