Month: March 2015

[REVIEW] Trip Through Your Wires by Sarah Layden

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trip

Engine Books

264 pages, $14.95

 

Review by James Figy

 

Memory—how much we dwell on it, how much we can trust it—pervades Sarah Layden’s debut novel Trip Through Your Wires. The story follows Carey Halpern, an Indianapolis native who has never come to terms with her boyfriend Ben Williamson’s murder seven years ago in Mexico—and the role she likely played in it. Then authorities find Ben’s stolen passport. The discovery sends Carey into a maelstrom of memories about that year abroad.   It forces her to face the past and try to move forward.

The book is set half in Indianapolis in 2003, half in Mexico in 1995-96. In the present, Carey is unexpectedly let go from a temp office job, which was the bright spot in her life. It’s a worst-case scenario. Besides her parents, whom she lives with and owes money, Carey is alone. She cut herself off from everyone following a series of poor life choices after her return from Mexico. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Kathy Fish

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“For Tom,” by Kathy Fish

 

Fullscreen capture 3302015 80555 PMWhat I remember: eating dusty sandwiches in the car, my brother reading to me from “Chariots of the Gods,” the way my other brother had been so uncharacteristically silent on that trip, the motel beds that vibrated if you paid a quarter, the long walk to the municipal pool and the man wearing big black shoes who asked me to sit on his lap. I remember the tire swing on my aunt’s farm and the uncle who unfolded himself from a rusty Volkswagen in full, military regalia, who saluted us, and our father asking him where he got the costume. I remember green popsicles and a chicken getting its neck wrung and slippery, gray hotdogs on slices of bread and a cousin who climbed a tree and threatened to kill us all with a hammer. It was no small comfort to see there were people in the world poorer and crazier than us. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Shabnam Nadiya

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 “None for the Birds,” by Shabnam Nadiya

 

Fullscreen capture 3302015 22539 PMMothering didn’t come easy to us—not to my mother, not to me. Surely there are women who slip into that role with the ease of sword into sheath. Surely there are women for whom discarding their earlier selves was a battle early won. Not us though. Perhaps it is wrong of me to say that. Perhaps it is more accurate to say we discovered, in our own ways, that lullabies were just one kind of song.

To become a mother was expected; less so for me than for her. The leniency afforded by a later time was not much, but it did grant me a few more moments to breathe. Her vision of what her life should be was halted again and again by marriage, war, childbirth, migration. Obstruction (?b?str?kSH(?)n,äb?str?kSH(?)n/, noun) : a thing that impedes or prevents passage or progress. Sometimes you have to choose to let an obstruction merely ‘impede’ and not ‘prevent.’ Tenacity became my mother’s religion; she fed it to me straight and raw through the umbilical cord.

I broke my world apart, once, and put it back together. It’s not your world anymore, friends and family told me, You’re a mother now; it’s your daughter’s. I disagreed. If I didn’t learn how to hold on to my own world, how could I tell my daughter that the real question isn’t whether gravity can push you down or pull you up, it’s whether gravity can pull you apart? Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Amy Blakemore

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

In Amy Blakemore’s story “Exit Strategies,” a woman whose body is a paper bag begs outside a diner. Below, Blakemore names and claims desire, hunger, and the way trauma seeps past the edges of its occurrence and into our bodies, our lives.

 

1. You make such interesting use of juxtaposition: “Crispy bacon. She’s been on a diet since she was fourteen. It took me years to pop the question.” What do hunger, forbidden food, marriage, and fear have to do with one another?

This is a story, among others things, about suppressed appetites. I think it takes bravery to accept and fulfill our hungers. It requires us to accept that we are not always in control: that we are not always rational creatures. I wanted to write about two characters who, like most of us, had not accepted this—a girl who thought she could undo years of deprivation, a boy who thought he could help her without allowing his own desires to influence the texture of that “help.” Writing this story, at points, felt like a game of Whac-a-Mole: when a character pushed something down, a new and unexpected face appeared. Food became love, love became fear. When our desires are held down, for long enough, they start to shift and change—think of bones under pressure, and how they splinter. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Seth Fischer

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“Smurfs,” by Seth Fischer

 

Fullscreen capture 3252015 125806 PMSometime in 1983, a rogue photographer caught me covering my father with tiny plastic Smurfs. This transgression was so incredible to me when I made the photo album—by the looks of the tortured D’Nealian cursive, probably eight years later—that I wrote “I can’t believe dad let me” right below the photo.

It’s no surprise I couldn’t believe it. Dad is no fan of being the butt of shenanigans. Sure, he’ll put napkins on his head and call it a hat with the best of them, and when I was little, he was always down for a tickle war (as long as he won), but you should see the fight he puts up when my younger sister tries to boop his nose.

Really, though, what’s important is that this was not a good time in any of our lives: my parents were separating, my mom was mid-job search, my dad was up for tenure. I still hear the fights in that house sometimes, all these years later; because of the heating vents, I heard every word. Soon, I’d be bouncing back and forth between their houses, moving more than an Army brat, never feeling like I had a real home until, at the age of 15, I told my Dad I wouldn’t be moving anymore, the same year his parents died, his best friend committed suicide, and he had twins.

I broke his heart that year. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Erica Hoskins Mullenix

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“Commuter Marriage,” by Erica Hoskins Mullenix

 

Fullscreen capture 3252015 125250 PMI am not throwing back that far with this photo, but then again, my marriage didn’t last long enough to become a truly historical event fit for circa dates and carbon dating, so here we are with a picture of my husband and me from 2007. Always a long-distance relationship or a commuter marriage, ours was a pairing of sex and errands whenever we were in the same city. This photo was taken the day Q, my husband, helped me clean our pre-marriage apartment from top to bottom. We started with my disastrous closet filled with unpacked boxes from three of my previous moves, then hit the bedroom. Once we were able to see the floor, I broke down in tears, happy and bewildered that this boy could see me at my worst and still want to be with me. Two years later when he left me the first time, it turns out, according to the note he left behind without leaving behind much else of our stuff, my shit being all over the place was one of the things he “couldn’t take” so he wasn’t as much helping me out of my abyss that day as he was building a case against me, but that weekend, it was all love and fucking and the scent of Pine-Sol and clean Berber with us having sex in each room as we went along. We finished with this self-timed shot in the kitchen. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Fog Island Mountains by Michelle Bailat-Jones

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Fog

Tantor Media

225 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Julienne Isaacs

 

The gloomy cover design of Fog Island Mountains, Michelle Bailat-Jones’ first novel, immediately appealed to me, ripe for a spate of late-winter melancholia: streaking rain over a black-and-green mountainous settlement, the whole layered with heavy titular fog.

But true melancholia denotes passivity or depression, and on that level Fog Island Mountains’ cover design is deceptive. The novel, which won the 2013 Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction, is self-contained and energetic, as whimsical as it is sad, as playful as it is serious. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Andi Werblin

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“Happy Birthday to My Love in Barcelona,” by Andi Werblin

Fullscreen capture 3252015 124202 PMThe box contained new Converse sneakers (too large), a cassette tape with The Spinanes on one side & Liz Phair on the other, & a thrift-store dress that fit, which was surprising.

There was a letter too that said in its way come back & also don’t, because I’m sleeping with someone else & we broke into your storage locker so she could borrow your bike.

The dress said he is very guilty. The sneakers naturally said run.

The cassette tape was all, remember his cool taste in music. You guys are so connected.

The letter didn’t say he was fucking her from behind. I read that later when I broke into his inbox.

I wore the letter to the party. The dress came too with its drab color.

The wine gave me cheekbones & my new friends gave me more wine.

The bottle said the night is young. You belong here. Stay.

 

***

ANDREA WERBLIN is the author of one previous book of poems, Lullaby for One Fist (Wesleyan University Press). She works as a freelance Copy Director, and writes about neuroplasticity, amateur pastry-chef adventures, and stretch pants. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/WERSUN.html

Pictures of You: Pia Z. Ehrhardt

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“The Merry Miler,” by Pia Z. Ehrhardt

Fullscreen capture 3222015 93954 AM

When I was in Grade Ten, we moved suddenly from Alberta, Canada to Mississippi, driving the Merry Miler across wide, empty provinces, and traffic-filled states. There were six of us: my younger sister Nance and me, our parents, and two tiny new sisters.

My mother scouted out the next RV Park in a giant guidebook. She and my father listened to serious music on the radio. They were both musicians.

At night Nance and I sauntered around the grounds, thinking we were brand new. When we found boys our age we skipped the shyness because even if you never saw him again, hitting it off was better than standing there, tongue-tied and wishing. The next morning Nance and I would beg for a later departure, another sortie, but our father would start the engine and we’d ride off like cowboys on fresh horses.

Our mother kept things up in The Merry Miler like she did at home. There were petunias in a vase she’d super glued to the Formica table, fluffy towels in the water closet, Irish linen curtains on the windows. Continue reading →