A Novel by Ruchama King Feuerman, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST (NYRBLit, e-book only) As I was crossing the street just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem one evening this summer,…
Poetry by Dave Newman, reviewed by William Boyle THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS (White Gorilla Press) Dave Newman’s The Slaughterhouse Poems is a book about work and failure and desperation, about the ways we escape and survive and the things we do when…
A Novel by Meg Wolitzer, reviewed by Chris Ludovici THE INTERESTINGS (Riverhead Hardcover) 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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Sarah Van NameTHE WASPS AND THE QUEEN In the back of the house Sherry and Miranda were playing in the plastic swimming pool. It was blue on the inside. The plastic made the water seem blue. Sherry stepped out of…
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…
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…
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…
Lindsay MillerA NICE PLACE TO VISIT My sister told me she was so hungry the night before that she had licked the inside of an empty sugar packet. “I found it in the couch cushion and tore it open and…
Olivia 子琁 TunWHAT THE STARS ARE SAYING When I hear about the death of a friend’s baby, it usually takes my heart two or three days to catch up to the news, to feel what a heart ought to feel,…
Anthony WallaceDO NOT USE QUOTATION MARKS TO INDICATE IRONY David Sarnovski taught only one creative writing course at Boston University, so he didn’t have an office. Sometimes he conferenced students in the Espresso Royale at BU Central, sometimes in a…
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…
William Winfield WrightIT’S NOT A CONTEST But if we wanted to, we could paint speeding cars, sneak into business class, eat oysters in months with a W, turn back clocks with just our fingers, and mend the wind-up toy versions…
Jennifer FaylorCONVERSATIONS OVERHEARD IN A BOWLING ALLEY WHEN THERE IS A CITY WIDE POWER OUTAGE My childhood sweetheart left me because I am an ancient jar of honey, forgotten about but still sweetening in a cool dark place, a thousand…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Dan MicklethwaiteTHE IMMACULATE SADNESS OF PETER J. BEECH He misses it immediately, the soft glass of that screen. The sinking, only slightly, of his finger against it. There is a pining at work within him for that formed plastic mass.…
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…
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…
Benjamin WoodardTHE LONG GREEN STRETCH, THE TALL TREES, THE CLOUDS SHAPED LIKE STARS I’m not supposed to get calls after nine, but when the phone rang, my old man didn’t stop me from answering. He’d already removed his leg for…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
John Michael MummeON (AND OFF) CONSISTENCY Objective Statement: For the last two years, I worked as a Staff Assistant for the Career Services office at Cedarville University. My job was to review résumés. A student comes in for a peer…
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…
Mercedes LawryTWO FLASH PIECES Puzzling The baby ate one of the puzzle pieces, a little bitty piece. He never choked or even coughed. The piece was cardboard and mostly blue sky with just a smidgen of white cloud. Its shape…
Poetry by B.C. Edwards, reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE (Black Lawrence Press) B.C. Edwards’s short story collection, The Aversive Clause, alternates between gentle poignancy and visceral revelation, often within the same story. To read his work is…
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.
Nonfiction by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Stephanie Trott HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR (Gotham Books) It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my…
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.
A Novel by Adelle Waldman, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P. (Henry Holt) Suburban Mid-Atlantic childhood. Check. Journalist. Check. Book reviewer. Check. Writing book review to keep from working on more substantial essay. Check. First novel…
Poetry by Stephen Kessler, reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke SCRATCH PEGASUS (Swan Scythe Press) 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…