The Lightning Room with Christine Gosnay

 

–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

Christine Gosnay’s poem “The Pleasures of the Gut” appeared in [PANK] back in January, we sent her questions about it in June, and she answered them in October. Fortunately, good poems don’t get old, just wiser—or, in reading them, we do.

 

1. Early in “The Pleasures of the Gut,” the speaker is fixated with hunger, but by the closing section she throws untouched food into the trash, while her bowl of oatmeal “leaves four bends of a circle on my two legs/proof of the butter, and the grain, outside my body.” Can you speak to the long cycle you depict here, food moving through the body and also outside it, the speaker’s body participating in some bigger turn of consumption and digestion?

I think about food constantly. Hunger trains the mind and the body; food rewards. Real hungers, hungers you remember, individually, as physical and emotional experiences, shape consciousness and behavior as much as anything from love to abandonment to art. A market thrills me, any place to see piles of food lain out piece by piece, food waiting to be touched and seen; I love to watch people and animals eating, to see a person choosing a meal, to watch plates being cleared of bones, gristle, greens, crusts. Because consumption is a choice and digestion is automatic, there seems a lot to say about what happens to the mind after the body has eaten. Guilt, confusion, sometimes disgust, and sometimes pleasure, if everything was done right. I find it difficult to look at the world after I have eaten and impossible to look away from it when I have not. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Doll Palace by Sara Lippman

Doll Palace

 

 

Dock Street Press

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

 

Every story in Sara Lippmann’s debut collection, Doll Palace, is a finely crafted, stark distillation of a different kind of loss, loneliness, or alienation. A motley of bleak quests for happiness in a world of irony, desolation, and shabbiness, the collection features the seedy-carney side of beach towns, broken relationships, families reckoning with their babies’ complicated and heartbreaking illnesses, a father-daughter knife throwing team, and more.

With such weighty and often off-beat topics, it’s no surprise that the tone of the collection swerves toward the melancholic at times. The story that left me with the most cheer was “Houseboy,” narrated by an immigrant working for a ridiculously wealthy man. The “rock-n-roll hootchie koo summer” he yearns to experience in the U.S. contrasts with the bitterness of what he’s left behind, leaving the character to conclude in his broken English, “The whole world is cry.” Still, the character’s humor and sweetness left me with humble hopes of better things for him. Continue reading

“facts are artifacts”: a roundtable discussion with poets from Women Write Resistance

 

October is Violence against Women Awareness month. This October we bring together four poets whose writing appears in the anthology Women Writing Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), along with the book’s editor, to discuss navigating truth and fact, the historical record, and the influence of the outside world on poetry. Women Write Resistance views poetry as a transformative art. By deploying techniques to challenge narratives about violence against women and making alternatives to that violence visible, poetry of resistance distinguishes itself by a persuasive rhetoric that asks readers to act. Leslie Adrienne Miller, Jennifer Perrine, Sara Henning, Sarah A. Chavez, and Laura Madeline Wiseman explore poetry of resistance in this roundtable discussion. These poets were featured at this year’s Omaha Lit Fest.

 

How do you navigate fact when writing about the present and the past in your poetry and prose?

 

Leslie Adrienne Miller: Very few things qualify as fact for me. Those that do are generally concrete things. Once you add language, however, nothing qualifies as a stable fact because every word choice brings different tonal shadings. That said, I work on the magpie model; I look for the shiny bits and make a new nest of them. I’m attracted to things that appear to be fact, things that somebody (sometimes myself) once believed were facts, and the tension between those facts and the instability time has subjected them to.

Sara Henning: It would be silly not to argue that facts are artifacts of hegemony and historiography, though some things seem fairly unalterable—for instance, the riots at Kent State, or the shooting of Michael Brown. In my writing, logos is both a foundational principle and a site of exploration. I tend to allow things to bevel amongst a series of perceived moments that try to sustain their own truths. Continue reading

[REVIEW] EarthBound, by Ken Baumann

earthbound

Boss Fight Books
191 pages, $14.95

 

Reviewed by Kelsie Hahn

 

Ken Baumann’s EarthBound is the first release from Boss Fight Books, a press founded by Gabe Durham and Baumann to publish books that celebrate classic video games.

EarthBound the game is a quirky, funny, and often satirical role-playing game from Japan set in the U.S. In it, the hero Ness and his friend battle spiteful crows, hot cups of coffee, ramblin’ evil mushrooms, skate punks, and other assorted villains tainted by the evil influence of Giygas. The game was a massive launch in America in 1995 with lousy sales. But those wise enough, or lucky enough, to have purchased the game at its launch have loved and championed it. It is by turns funny and moving, irreverent and wise. Continue reading

[REVIEW] The Messenger by Stephanie Pippin

messenger

University of Iowa Press
70 pgs, $18

 

Review by Molly Sutton Kiefer

 

 

Stephanie Pippin can turn a swoon-worthy phrase.  Admittedly, I could spend the whole of my word count copying down the syntactical constructions Pippin created, but I will rein myself in with a few to share:  “this sky of promiscuous wings,” “Their jeweled eyes lamp the ash,” “The red fruit, with its buds / Like a string of little time bombs,” “the green / throat of an elm,” “winter’s / blood clock counting / mice,” “The waves in their gray / Ruches remind me / Of tormented pigeons,” “stargazer / lilies wilt like angels / overthrown, a bed of throats / collapsing,” “sogged with August, / morels swelling like lungs.”  These images are the sorts I collect, as if an ornithologist in the field, tucking samples into my notebook for the specimen tray at the museum.

Poems with wings:  fifteen.  Eggs:   eight.  Feathers:  five.  The last poem contains all three.  Other words I could have counted:  blood, death, bones.

Know too, that “his feathers / are holy things” and in a poem such as “Hatch,” “It is hard to give birth / to yourself.”  Continue reading

[REVIEW] Last Word by Jonathan Blum

last word

Rescue Press

86 pages, $14

 

Review by Jonathan Russell Clark

 

There are so many wonderful things about Jonathan Blum’s Last Word. Blum’s narrative takes us into an upper-class Jewish private school called Traubman V. Goldfarb. The narrator is Dr. Kip Langer, a facial reconstruction surgeon, whose son (from a previous marriage) and daughters attend the school. When someone hacks into the school’s network and adds strange and offensive comments to all the report cards, Dr. Langer, his family, and the entire school are thrown into upheaval.

This is a world Blum knows intimately, as evidenced by details sprinkled throughout, like the “zither-shaped concrete bench whose seat spells Shalom Yeladim in a mosaic of brilliant-colored stone flecks,” or the “three-part blue-framed proverb” on the wall of a conference room, “If I Am Not For Myself, Who Am I For? If I Am Only For Myself, Who Will Be For Me? If Not Now, When?” I know Blum has seen these things. Continue reading

Let’s Not Fuck Each Other Up: An Invitation from Arisa White

 

Dear Reader, If you’re a bastard, send me a letter. If your father was absent from your life, please do write. If you haven’t talked to your father in years and don’t know if you will– because he’s a bastard—an epistle of any style is welcome. Use words or visuals, no limit. I’m collecting letters from individuals who have been affected by the absence of their fathers for dear Gerald, an epistolary project I have been working on for the past two years.

We all seem to suffer fatherlessness, be it a particular father loss, through degrees of unavailability, estrangement, abandonment or death, and since we all are offspring of capitalist patriarchal societies, I find this to be interesting. Continue reading

[REVIEW] I Am Currently Working on a Novel, by Rolli

novel

Tightrope Books

200 pages, $21.95

 

Rolli understands the public opinion of flash fiction as a lesser literary genre. For evidence, look no further than the cover of his latest collection, I Am Currently Working on a Novel. Drawn by the author himself, who is also an accomplished illustrator and cartoonist, the cover shows a tombstone beneath a starry night with the book’s title engraved as an epitaph. It’s a joke that will hit home with any practitioner of an underappreciated art form and the first of many nods to the writers among his audience.

Rolli’s eccentric, whimsical stories exhibit a style and a brand of comedy all his own. “Candy Island,” begins like this: “In case you’ve ever wondered, all us missing kids aged two to six wind up on Candy Island.  Candy Island sounds great. But it isn’t. It’s a big, scary island. There are lizards bigger than me. We lost three kids last week.” Continue reading

Dead or Alive: With H.D. in Bethlehem, PA

Exploring writerly lives through literary pilgrimage    

–By Robin McCarthy  

DSCF1659 (360x640)

 

I visit Bethlehem, Pennsylvania about twice a year to spend time with my boyfriend’s family.  A few years ago, during one of these visits, I discovered a sign rising out of the sidewalk outside the public library announcing that the poet H.D. had been born in Bethlehem and was buried nearby.

My senior year of high school, my English teacher placed a copy of H.D.’s poem, “Helen”, in front every student in the class. The poem is neither long nor particularly dense. I remember reading the first stanza, “All Greece hates/ the still eyes in the white face,/ the lustre as of olives/where she stands,/ and the white hands” and being eager to dig into the poem. I was just learning to assign significance to literature and the process of decoding felt like a perfect challenge. In part, I was fascinated by the gender ambiguity of the artist’s name, those two staunch and commanding letters—H.D.— at the top of the page. I was preparing to write a humanities paper on women whose literary careers hinged on the obfuscation of their gender. I had just been introduced to George Eliot and recently learned Louisa May Alcott published as A.M. Barnard for years before Little Women was published under her own name. The initials seemed a way of entry into the male-dominated world of publishing. Continue reading