Laura Mecklenburger“VULNERARY” AND AN ART WITCH When I try to describe my artwork to others, I often say that I make ritual objects and installation art. But I didn’t set out to make installation art from the beginning, and I…
Nick KolakowskiTHE GREAT WAVE CARRIES YOU FORWARD Marie’s husband Zachary passed away in early March, followed two weeks later by the dog. Marie would never confess this to anyone, but she missed the dog a little more than Zack. At…
Zachary LundgrenBRANDED He was drunk and I’m sure it helped when I took the iron from the stove: a loud red, a cruel star. I held the iron like a relic of some religion we’ve all long forgot but is…
Royee Zvi AtadgyAN EVEN, PERFECT BURN Come here, he said. No, you can just watch me and then afterwards we’ll go to sleep and that’ll be the end of it, she said. You mean that we’ll go to sleep like…
Jason KapcalaBUNGALESE CONSTRICTOR No one told me that Carlos’s gallery exhibition was that night until after I’d wrangled the Burmese python from under the porch and I was drenched through with rain and covered with dead leaves and muck. Storm…
Olive MulletIN SEARCH OF DEATH Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me. —Emily Dickinson —So why are you working at Hospice? Death is my thing. I’ve read all the books on it, most of them…
Rick BaileyALL EARS A few weeks ago my father woke up almost totally deaf. He already had a significant deficit. For years he has worn hearing aids. One for each ear, they are a microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker all in…
Anthony WallaceBLACK RAINCOAT, BLUE STOCKINGS Nobody took Rhiannon there, and nobody took her home. She managed the whole thing by herself. When she woke up, it was dark outside. A light was on in the living room, and she could…
Shannon ViolaIN MY TIME I have a love-hate relationship with Hemingway. Sometimes when I’m writing, he’s over my shoulder. He seizes my hand and slashes the Latinate adjectives on my page while I wince and moan. He tugs at one…
Jane CarrollWINGS TO GO There’s a chicken place on Ridge Avenue called “Wings to Go.” I occasionally wait for a bus across the street, and that sign always seemed to me a little too poetic for a wing place. It…
Nicole CallihanIN THE MEWS Two feuding gardens are thought to be responsible for the most recent blooming. According to the rain, in late summer, a band of tiger lilies recruited a pack of peonies, and those peonies, comely as they…
Gabriel Ojeda SaguePLACES TO WALK OUT TO I read the note scribbled wildly on torn paper: “Language is not the signifier nor the signified. It is the significance.” The only constant is the height of buildings. I hate the way…
Robert WexelblattMARCH 5, 1953 The funeral was flowerless. Every early spring bloom had been expropriated by the KGB for their boss. Scarcely forty people dared show up. Charged with counter-revolutionary bourgeois tendencies, tormented and shunned by the Composers Union, his…
Melissa DuclosCONFESSIONS OF A FACEBOOK MOM I’m with Teddy and Elliot, sitting on the floor amidst a pile of Legos and a stack of books, and I find my eyes wandering up to the shelf. My fingers get a little…
Brennan CusackHOW TO MASTER SOCIAL MEDIA Take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror because it’s got a frame like a photograph and you need the practice. Move around and play with angles until you find the most…
J.C. ToddON THE ROMANCE OF PARKLAND for Erica Upstream, a shadow crosses the oxbow of a river whose flood plains are silted by paternal names of grant-holders. Their slaves tilled the alluvial bottom land, turning up flints and the bones…
Kathy Lou SchultzJACKSON LISTENS TO THE BIRDS for Jackson born 2/5/07 Memphis is a huff of spring grandiose pink blossoms about to pop a rainstorm lurking in the palpable air It’s you and me rounding the corners of Midtown lush…
Justin NicholesA SAD, LOGICAL CAPITULATION (after D. H. Lawrence) The day a welding rod shimmied down Zou’s collar and combusted his shirt into singed tendrils, the same day my stomach caught traction in the scoop of his lower back and…
B.A. VargheseALL GOOD THINGS The milk was white and it squirted out from under his hands. He pulled and pulled the cow’s udders one at a time to a rhythmic beat and I watched it fall down in spurts after…
Juniper GreenDEGENERATIVE DISEASES OF THE BRAIN When I walk into her room Mrs. Goldberg does not recognize me. Every morning I help her out of bed, clean her up, and dress her. Every morning we meet for the first time.…
Kim SuttellSHACKLED If it’s a fever you want, then I’m frenzied. What are you but an ice ax ear ache, an ice cleat hike down my throat, the churned Weddell Sea in my paunch. Hell, you’re the whole Antarctic. I…
Daniel W. ThompsonDAFFODILS The main reason I drove four hours to be here was to sign a document giving me access to mom and dad’s security deposit box. Mom called it personal housekeeping. She said, you never know, Miles. What…
Jamie LinFLESH AND BLOOD He’d done it again. Little puddles of sticky green glop all over the floor, specked with shards from the small glass bottle that’d held the apple purée. His fist clutched the plastic spoon as more pale…
George MoorePSYCHOGENIC FUGUE Every time I leave home I begin a new life. I am a boy again, sometimes a girl. My memories are so discrete that they talk to each other, gather in rooms, develop friendships without knowing. My…
Michael G. SmithBEYOND RIVER, BEYOND CANYON Once a year I backpack my ischemic-stroked brain and body into the Grand Canyon. To test. Observe. See what lost physical move I can do again. Metamorphosize. Twelfth trip: like the Earth, I have…
Shannon SweetnamMIRABEL RIVER GIRL, CHAMPION SPELLER I was twelve when my Daddy got a long iridescent motorcycle, his first to my unemphatic, unpathwayed, what-I-recall. I wandered the shop façade near the cow-bell laden door, while he strode around back to…
Lauren HallTWO POEMS The Miser “He was never a nice man,” she confessed, rolling her stockings slightly below her knees. “Nobody liked him much, not even me.” Through the screen door, I can see my great-grandfather swinging an axe at…
Thompson MayesPIGEON He was hot, too hot, walking on the sunny side of the hard stone streets through tourist stickiness of dripped gelato. He felt as wilted as the reddish-pink blooms that drooped out of the doorway, and he could…
Molly McGinnisBETTER I am salt and champagne. Salt and dirt and stars. Two-sided story, double-edged knife. Dinosaur bones and tambourines. I have walked into town by myself at dawn and seen my face reflected in the windows. I have danced…
Alina GrabowskiSCORCHER June had been eating a creamsicle on the front porch when she saw them. It was the third week of July and the entire house was sweating, drops of condensation sliding down bookshelves and chair legs. Her father…
Ray ScanlonARACHNICIDE An organ pipe mud dauber is building a nest in the ornamental tin-roofed wren house Cheryl hung by the door. I hear her stridulating at her masonry work, and see her carry a small ball of mud into…
Laurie BlaunerASSEMBLING AN ANATOMICAL LIFE To Annie I labeled all the dancers’ body parts and told them how to use them. I prepared resonant music, a prescription for feet that kaleidoscoped from room to room. I described what I wanted,…
Fiction by Jenny Offill, reviewed by Michelle Fost DEPT. OF SPECULATION (Alfred A. Knopf) Here’s an idea for a book party. Hold it in the Guggenheim. Set up an exhibit of all the pages of the book. Frame each page…
Fiction by Elizabeth Cohen, reviewed by Michelle Fost THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL (Other Press) Like so many of the characters in Elizabeth Cohen’s fifteen incisive stories in The Hypothetical Girl, Emily in the title story is truly suffering. Her affliction is…
Fiction by Peter Mountford, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin THE DISMAL SCIENCE (Tin House Press) It seems fitting that Peter Mountford’s novel, The Dismal Science, is being published just as certain global emergent markets—Brazil, Turkey, India, South Africa, and Indonesia, nicknamed…
A Graphic Narrative by Isabel Greenberg, reviewed by Stephanie Trott THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH (Little, Brown and Company) There is no sole way to tell the story of our planet. Whether one chooses to uphold a belief rooted in…
Fiction by Anthony Wallace, reviewed by Nathaniel PopkinTHE OLD PRIEST (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013 Drue Heinz Literature Prize) “Let’s leave Limit,” says Anna to her husband Phil, the narrator of Anthony Wallace’s story “Snow behind the door.” Limit is…
BLOOM IN REVERSE
by Teresa Leo
University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series), 104 pages
reviewed by Anna Strong
From the dedication page, Teresa Leo’s Bloom in Reverse props itself against the fence between the living and the dead. Dedicated to the living but in memory of Leo’s friend Sarah, the poems carry the dual burden of trauma and memory. How do we process, how do we articulate trauma? If we’re at all like Teresa Leo, we recognize that in art, in poetry, we remember the the Sarah Hannahs of the world and bring them into a collective consciousness. She is not forgotten.
Donald Hall wrote an astounding collection of poems chronicling his wife’s cancer and death, Without. Bloom in Reverse reads much like that collection—in each poem, we feel the keenness of the “without,” the strain of recollection, the reconstruction of the smallest moments of friendship and intimacy in the clearest language accessible to the speaker. Many of the poems are two-line stanzas, heavily enjambed and riddled with fragments, clauses that build and build on each other only to be let go in a kind of sigh—we feel the struggle to hold onto whatever memories come to mind, only to realize that that’s all they are. The ending of “She Said: It’s Not that Things Bring Us to Tears, but Rather, There Are Tears in Things” struck me as the most poignant of these conclusions:
Nonfiction by William Helmreich, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City (Princeton University Press) and Poetry edited by Reuven Snir, reviewed by Nathaniel PopkinBAGHDAD: THE CITY IN VERSE (Harvard University Press) Writers,…
Poetry by Alli Warren, reviewed by Vanessa MartiniHERE COME THE WARM JETS (City Lights) Diving into Alli Warren’s Here Come the Warm Jets is at once exhilarating and slightly overwhelming. Warren pulls no punches with this collection. The reader is…
Nonfiction by Eileen Cronin, reviewed by Colleen DavisMERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience (W.W. Norton) When I read a memoir, I feel like I’m climbing into the kitchen of someone I’ve never met to see if their recipes for life trump…
Poetry by Jerrold Yam, reviewed by Kenna O’RourkeSCATTERED VERTEBRAE (Math Paper Press) Jerrold Yam’s second poetry collection was titled with care: like the image of scattered vertebrae, these poems are at once beautiful, dark, and disturbing. Yam weaves family life,…
CARDBOARD PIANO
by Rina Terry
Texture Press, 102 pages
reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat
We tend to equate the word “prison” with concrete, metal and despair, ostensibly as means of change or as a tool of rehabilitation. In her new collection, Cardboard Piano, Rina Terry reveals multi-layered evidence of the transformative power of art versus stone. Anyone who is familiar with Stephen King’s prison stories, The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption (or at least with the movie adaptations thereof) expects to question the prison system and to explore the humanity of both the inmates and the guards. Terry’s words push the reader to consider the realities of an in-person search for and confrontation of that humanity, in all its potential glory and obloquy.
The opening salvo, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Inmates” offers a kaleidoscope through which we can feel the entire collection. Terry challenges our accepted notion of rehabilitative space as cyclical: “There is only one/direction. Single file/through metal detector.” Parole notwithstanding, the suggestion is that for most who enter, there is no hope, and what’s more, the system-keepers believe that as well. After all, “an inmate/is and inmate/is an inmate.” The guards do not see what Terry sees, the one man who holds on to his sense of self enough to iron his uniform, or the baptism trough as cleansing agent.
Poetry by Nicole Callihan, reviewed by Anna Strong SUPERLOOP (Sock Monkey Press) The startling beauty of Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop lies in the balance the poems strike between the specificity and universality of childhood memory. The strongest poems take us deep…
Ivy HughesLAVERNE AND SHIRLEY I held the handset of the house phone to my ear, the dull tone providing a soundtrack for what was sure to be the most humiliating conversation of my life. From the sitting room, the three-foot…
Cullen Bailey BurnsFLORIDA The pelican was a kite or vice versa in the way I was a wave in the body my mind made of ego and thread. How do we glue the ideas into order? In the gulf, warm…
Shane Joaquin JimenezICELANDIC KISSES The man in the fur coat paused in the electric blue of the porch light. He sniffed the air, as if trying to read some presence in the atmosphere and the ice particles. A blinding wind…
Peter LaBergeTESTIMONY AFTER THE VARICOCELECTOMY My mother changes the bedpan, the evidence of life. Stomach, definition of withhold, overripe plum I did not purchase. I would never crave this heaviness, the way she folds over my body with braided fingers.…
Emma GreenbergTHE FERRY “So your mom told you about the new houses?” “Yup.” I lunged too aggressively for the volume control and my seatbelt tensed and slapped me back into my seat. The second verse of “Livin’ On A Prayer”…
Pattie McCarthyfrom x y a && a couple of breaks of sunshine over the next couple hours, what little sun shine there is left. a view that outranks me : two baseball fields, two bridges, the dome (golden) of a…