The Lightning Room with Bree Barton

 

–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

December author Bree Barton talks lust, secrets, spiders, and how she uses “fiction as a landfill for all the banal little happenings in my day.”

1. Your character is a ghostwriter, and so are you. How do experiences from your own life transmute when you write about them, and especially when you assign them to characters who might be entirely unlike you?

I hope this character is entirely unlike me, the poor schmuck. But of course the “you” in this story bears the marks of my own experience. I, too, ghostwrite books for a living. I, too, am driven mad by inconsistencies in hyphenation. I, too, have an intimate relationship with spiders (don’t ask). Sometimes writing a despicable character gives you more freedom in borrowing from your life; you can infuse him/her with your own troubling obsessions or rank desires. I’d much rather create an unlikable character than be unlikable myself. For me the real trick is to harness that transmutation and make it serve the story, rather than just using fiction as a landfill for all the banal little happenings in my day.

2. The line that turns the story does so much work: “Then you see the pound sign has grown legs.” The mechanical keyboard becoming animate, suggesting words taking on form and life of their own, words creating action. The narrative power of a spider as a symbol more than itself. Does that resonate? Continue reading

[REVIEW] Range of Motion, by Meagan Cass

Range

Magic Helicopter Press

56 pages, $8

 

Review by Caitlin Corrigan

 

In Range of Motion, Megan Cass performs the magic trick of presenting the inner lives of an entire family with novelistic depth in less than 60 pages.  Less sleight of hand and more clown car chauffer, Cass’s gift for manipulating structure and detail creates a dense, but very readable collection of linked stories.

We begin with a flash fiction after poet Craig Raine’s “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.” In Cass’s version, the Martian is writing from a suburban summer in upstate New York, observing human rituals in all of their fleshy, sweaty glory: “They make the pilgrimage once a year, in that season when the heat blurs the trees in their yards, when they plug up their light squares with grey boxes, when they shout their language across fields that could almost be our surface, redbrown and dry.” The repeated “they” here is broad, but in the following stories, we move much closer, hovering above the more intimate rituals of a family riding the tide of their years together. Alcoholism, affairs, the unreliability of memory—these dark spirits of the American suburban psyche are all present in Cass’ debut chapbook, but there is also warmth, playfulness, and an attention to sound on the line level that elevates these stories beyond what, in lesser hands, could be mere Cheever mimicry for millennials. Continue reading

[REVIEW] American Past Time, by Len Joy

American

Hark! New Era Publishing

335 pages, $5.99

 

Review by David S. Atkinson

 

Len Joy had his work cut out for him when I picked up American Past Time. The book centers on a 1950’s minor league baseball star who has to live with blowing his big shot. However, I’m not into baseball. Still, I could trust Len Joy’s writing chops since his work appears in places such as Annalemma, Hobart, 3AM Magazine, and The Foundling Review. Given that Joy is a competitive age-group triathlete, it also seemed he might have something interesting to say about the (to me) foreign world of athletics. I decided to give the book a shot. Continue reading

[REVIEW] The Ants By Sawako Nakayasu

ants

Les Figues Press

93 pages, $17 paperback

 

Review by Emily-Jo Hopson

 

Do some digging, and you will find that Sawako Nakayasu’s first publications included a translation of popular Japanese poet Hiromi Ito’s controversial postnatal piece, ‘Killing Kanoko’. The poem deals with infanticide, and in it, titular baby Kanoko is murdered in a number of ways: most notably, she is covered with biting ants.

Nakayasu’s ants are, for the most part, friendlier. They aid in divorce settlements, quest for greatness, wear shoes (ashamed), are the displaced victims of human interference.

Perhaps I’ve been reading the wrong books, but I’m refreshed to find that the weirdness of The Ants is not founded on horror, but in size-shifting, perspective shrinking and enlarging over the course of 70+ short, almost-vignette snatches of this insect/human world. Where there is horror to be found, it is handled with the same breezy touch as tourist-trap bickerings, as carrot cakes made ant-home. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Interrobang, by Jessica Piazza

Interrobang

Red Hen Press

69 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Laura Kochman

 

I hadn’t heard the term “interrobang” before encountering Jessica Piazza’s first collection, Interrobang.  Without knowing, it sounds aggressive, or accusatory. It’s a typographical character combining the exclamation point and the question mark, excitement and question, or excitement and disbelief. Two not-opposites made composite, an uncommon ligature. It’s fallen out of usage in favor of a separate exclamation point and question mark, maybe because we are prone these days to the simpler characters preprogrammed in our word processors and text-messaging apps, maybe because we are less inclined to examine the site of overlap. Tying two things together is complicated. Interrobang embarks on that kind of examination, looking more closely at pairings and opposites. All but three of the poems are named after either a phobia or a philia, though there isn’t much tonal difference between the two poem types. Most are sonnets or variations on the sonnet form. Fear and love aren’t so far-flung. Continue reading

Dead or Alive: In Mansfield, Missouri with Laura Ingalls Wilder

 

Exploring writerly lives through literary pilgrimage    

 

–By Robin McCarthy

hooverlibingalls

There’s no sense of discovering a long-forgotten treasure when visiting a Laura Ingalls Wilder literary landmark. In most instances, it would be difficult to miss the place where the cabin might have stood or find the well from which Caroline Ingalls might have fetched water. Rather, Wilder sites are widely publicized and celebrated. In Pepin Wisconsin, visitors gather each fall for “Laura Days,” a celebration of pioneer life near the “Little House in the Big Woods” where Wilder was born. DeSmet, South Dakota offers Wilder fans a tour of not one but two former Ingalls homes as well as other buildings featured in the story, as well as a pageant each July that re-enacts a different book from the Little House series. Just outside Independence, Kansas, a replica of the Ingalls’ log cabin, the home in which Little House on the Prairie is set, is a prominent feature of the area’s annual “Lamplight on the Prairie” and “Prairie Days” festivals. Lots of places stake their claim to Wilder fame because the truth is that the Ingalls family moved around a lot. While much of Wilder’s youth was spent in DeSmet, and her adult life was lived largely in Mansfield, Missouri (where the house is now a museum), there are twelve U.S. towns that boast their connection to Laura Ingalls Wilder as a tourist attraction. Continue reading

[REVIEW] The Half Life of Molly Pierce, by Katrina Leno

Molly Pierce

Harper Collins

240 pages, $17.99

 

Review by Darlena Cunha

 

“There are long stretches where I don’t remember anything.”

The resonation of this sentence must be nearly universal. Memory is a mechanism of fancy, and thoughts come and go, sometimes as snapshots, still pictures that float up for just a moment from the dark pools of the mind, and sometimes as living, breathing creatures overtaking all current thought from the will of the beholder. And isn’t each memory a memory of a memory? Each time the image springs upon us anew, the emotions we carried the last time we thought of it cling to the ever-heavying frame until we can no longer discern the bones of what happened in that one instant from the myriad of outside forces having sullied them.

And these are merely the things that happen to those of us lucky enough to have inherited a brain chemistry considered “normal.” Continue reading

Between the Bones

Fragments of language and story extracted from the body    

 

–by Temim Fruchter 

Almost A Love Note

 

I wanted it to be you. The first kiss. Mine. But I was afraid. I mean I had played the whole thing out in my mind over and over again from forever. You were a glint of satin. You made my thighs breathe. I willed you to look, like bending at the waist away from the gutter at the bowling alley. I pretended invisible wire, and like hope might hit hard and knock down like I wanted it to. I closed my eyes and imagined I was a proclamation. I wanted it to be you. But I wanted it where wanting was just a shimmer, the idea of wanting.

This is nothing new. Continue reading

[REVIEW] The Only Sounds We Make, by Lee Zacharias

sounds

Hub City Press

224 pages, $16.95

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Lee Zacharias’s most recent book, The Only Sounds We Make, is a collection of essays that discuss everything from where writers write, to the history of vultures, to the pleasures of photography, to destructive, document eating dogs. However common these threads may (or may not) be in our own lives, these essays interrupt our expectations instead of blandly repeating them. And they are wonderfully interruptive. Blending personal nostalgia, social or historical discussion, and intellectual statements, the twelve essays in this collection interweave all of these threads interestingly and adeptly.

The essays I enjoyed most were: “Geography For Writers,” a nuanced look at how surface plays in inspiration, and “Morning Light,” a paean to the creative delights of photography. Both fascinated me with their questions of place and location in relation to artistic endeavors. Continue reading

The Lightning Room with Tommy Pico

 

–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

Sing, O Internet, of the poems of Tommy “Teebs” Pico, who wrote “from IRL” and then talked about it on the blog.

1. “from IRL” seems to take as formal inspiration both epic poetry and internet diction. Can you talk about holding those two seemingly disparate influences together?

The idea first came to me after reading “Tape for the Turn of the Year” by A.R. Ammons, a book length poem written originally on one long piece of calculator printing tape. In it’s confines Ammons occasionally employed abbreviations that seemed a sort of proto-texting. I thought, what if I wrote a book length poem that could be sent as one long text message—a poem confined by the frame of the smart phone screen, but open to the shifting grammatical non-rules of texting, internet slang, typos, auto-corrects, etc. I guess holding Epic and Internet together, in my mind, had to do with wholly committing to them both and seeing where they led me.

2. I loved the idea of Muse as “finally giving me / what I want.” The traditional source of inspiration having her own power, deciding when and how much. What is your relationship to inspiration like? Continue reading