thwack

thwack

PICASSO IN 10 LINES and SNOW by Jerrold Yam

Jerrold YamTWO POEMS Picasso in 10 Lines Tell them the orange ocean. Make fear a nude woman. Two characters are more likely competitors than companions. Or the cautionary tale with shadows? Nothing is uglier than an angle struggling under the…

STRING THEORIES by Jason Gordon

Jason GordonSTRING THEORIES 1. It’s still December still July a blue cloud walks a dog across the lake my hands fall off I glue them back on my head falls off I warm it in the oven I no longer…

MY BITTER LOVE by John Oliver Hodges

John Oliver Hodges

John Oliver HodgesMY BITTER LOVE Miko seduced our mom with a gruesome story about Jews. When he was a boy, he told her, he followed the American soldiers into Bergen-Belsen. He saw the dead bodies and the bodies that were…

CATHEDRAL by Kieran Duddy

Kieran DuddyCATHEDRAL Ling turns up for class every other week and falls asleep halfway through the lesson. I watch her from the other side of the room as her head drops. Her round cheeks redden and her hair falls over…

HONEY by Carlo Matos

Carlo MatosHONEY You could tell they weren’t from around here by the way they spread their honey, with a finger instead of a spoon—all thin, pilling at the rug of bread. It was like the day she finally admitted she…

LEAVES OF GRASS APP UPDATE by Jim O’Loughlin

Jim O’LoughlinLEAVES OF GRASS APP UPDATE Click to view the update in higher resolution. Jim O’Loughlin teaches in the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the coordinator of the Final Thursday Reading Series and…

ON THE MIRACLE MILE by Andrea Jarrell

Andrea JarrellON THE MIRACLE MILE It was lunchtime on the Miracle Mile—a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles that’s not quite downtown and not quite the West Side. My mother, who always hated the hot, walked beside me in…

THE BIOLOGICAL NEED TO ADAPT by Lily Brent

Lily BrentTHE BIOLOGICAL NEED TO ADAPT If I miss one thing it’s the butterfly mobile I bought in Mexico, now hanging on a nail and gathering dust. One of the painted cardboard butterflies has already been crushed and smoothed out…

HIDE-AND-SEEK by Alex Schmidt

Alex SchmidtHIDE-AND-SEEK He hides under hot lamps and sandpaper eyes. Lay your wrist on the sidewalk. I can draw chalk in your veins, father. Whatever we are turns the corner, frozen despite his friction, friction despite my icy eyes thanks…

THE RUNNER by Jane Sussman

Jane SussmanTHE RUNNER She has begun to go to the gym twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening. She will run fast, moving up the speed every five minutes, until it is going at nine and…

THIS by Chavisa Woods

Chavisa WoodsTHIS Last night you wrote me a letter a smile big as a swollen peach gushing on your face while your mother intently told you everything about the people she hates Last week you phone fucked me on my…

SOMEWHERE, A HONEYBEE by Andrew Browers

Andrew BrowersSOMEWHERE, A HONEYBEE I kind of really love bees. While most kids were taught, through hilarious example by terrified adults, the various dance-like moves that help one evade these fuzzy little stingers, I learned to watch them buzz on…

ALL THIS by Stephanie Papa

Stephanie PapaALL THIS I am on my knees. Fur collects In the room with the damp dog bed Peco the black cat Figure eights around me Ants crawl in the wooden kitchen below The smell of pesto and pine I…

AMERICA by Michael Nagel

Michael NagelAMERICA The world was churning itself clean. The poisons in the rivers were becoming poisons in the seas. The poisons in the seas were basically harmless, diluted. Rain was moving in cycles, making laps between the ground and the…

QUITTER TAKES ALL by Maggie Light

Maggie LightQUITTER TAKES ALL A review? In the Times? Impossible. It’s an Off-Off-Broadway. Two offs. And Beth is only sixteen. Yet Cedric Plum’s judgment, the judgment, is seven paragraphs and in her sunburned hands. But why now? Weeks after her…

GHOST STORY by Lydia Pudzianowski

Lydia PudzianowskiGHOST STORY “Were you looking for ghosts?” The police officer inspected the three of us—twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three years old. There was no way we could tell him the truth. Earlier that afternoon we’d passed my hardcover copy of…

AMERICAN ARCADIA by Filip Noterdaeme

Filip NoterdaemeAMERICAN ARCADIA Spicing up realist landscapes with fantastic nudes and infiltrating austere family tableaux with whimsical eroticism, American Arcadia is a mixed distillation of artful irreverence and subtle mischief. Here is the story of its making. In 2005, my partner Daniel…

REMNANTS by Julia Hogan

Julia HoganREMNANTS The day my father’s friend, Wade, tried to build us a screened-in porch on the front of our house was the day my mother decided to move out. Wade made his living by selling muscadine grapes and handmade…

PESANTE CON MOTO/ALLEGRO BARBARO by S. I. Adams

S. I. AdamsPESANTE CON MOTO/ALLEGRO BARBARO Street signs reflect neon blinks on and off and on and back from the turn signal click-resting-pause between inhales drawn shallow between chapped lips and flaky nostrils. “East” – off – “East” – off…

BOBBY FEAR by Bonnie Altucher

Bonnie AltucherBOBBY FEAR When Bridget was sixteen, she met a sardonically mumbling School of Visual Arts dropout named Robert Fein while they were both browsing for cheap shoes on Eighth Street. Robert was too bug-eyed and slight to be handsome,…

QUINTESSENCE by Lauren Guza Brown

Lauren Guza BrownQUINTESSENCE In the desert, the day after Thanksgiving, a physicist friend told me I would find what we were seeing, sandstone walls mottled and cragged like giant seahorse forests, in a Hamlet soliloquy. Quintessence, he said, that’s what…

CALLING DR LAURA By Nicole J Georges reviewed by Amelia Moulis

CALLING DR LAURA By Nicole J Georges Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 260 pages reviewed by Amelia Moulis Nicole J Georges’ Calling Dr Laura, is an acerbic and intelligent addition to the graphic memoirs of 2013. It catalogues Georges’ troubled upbringing and her subsequent quest for love and stability in her relationships, and indeed her life at large. Georges enters this story through her first girlfriend, who takes Georges to a psychic, inadvertently uncovering a deep family secret: the psychic insists that Georges’ father – whom she was told died of colon cancer when she was a baby – is in fact alive. Although this is the ‘hook’ of the story, it is important to emphasize that this is actually not the driving force behind the storyline. It takes many years for Georges to share this information with anyone, let alone confront her mom about it. In the meantime, Georges meanders between cross-sections of her mom’s abusive relationships, the string of ‘father figures’ shaping her upbringing, Georges’ own inability to process stress and emotion, her struggle to establish a family, and the faulty dynamics of her lesbian relationships. But underneath this is the constant tension of when, or if, Georges can confront her mother about her sexuality and the circumstances of her father’s absence from her life.

CARTOON COLLEGE by Josh Melrod and Tara Wray reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

CARTOON COLLEGE (video documentary) by Josh Melrod and Tara Wray L. B. Thunderpony Home Entertainment, 76 minutes reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore Within moments of its bare opening, I already liked Cartoon College. When I reached chapter three of the documentary—which dubbed comics “better than sandwiches”—I knew that I loved it. Josh Melrod and Tara Wray keep the first shot simple: the camera shows a man’s back as he rummages through old drawings. We are not coddled by music meant to make us feel happy-go-lucky or sentimental. This meditative simplicity populates the entire film, allowing viewers what feels like a filmic rarity: the ability to listen to a human voice with only that voice for guidance.

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