Month: March 2015

[REVIEW] Pattern Exhaustion, by Nate Pritts

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pattern
Smoking Glue Gun
46 pages, $8

 

Review by Jen Lambert

 

What’s the word for when you’ve been doing something your whole life, like, let’s say walking, and suddenly you become so very aware of how you do it, maybe you put more weight on your left foot or you land on the balls of your feet just so, and now that you know this, you can never, ever walk the same way again? Now, the way you move is altered, and you can feel it with every step you take. What is the word for what this walking has become? This book is full of this word.

Pattern Exhaustion, by Nate Pritts, is everything I fear, the collapse of what I know and expect and the period after, the fumbling, the tripping through, until the new becomes the known. Maybe it’s everything we all fear: a brokenness, an unraveling of the familiar. Pattern Exhaustion is a manifesto on how to learn to be human when you are already human, or maybe it’s a lesson on the recovery of being too human, a nervous breakdown of the mind and the heart, the softening of everything we know until we don’t even recognize our own bodies, until we are empty, until we ask “how do I love when there is no one there?” Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Paul Myette

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“The Willows,” by  Paul Myette

 

Fullscreen capture 3222015 93128 AMHis parents bought him a popcorn ball to show him that everything was fine, to keep him from asking if everything was fine. It worked. For a while it worked. They smiled and said of course, of course as they handed it to him. He knew better. He saw the frustration in his father’s face, the hurt in his mother’s, but they only bought him treats on the days when they were good. The popcorn ball, brown with caramel, dotted with peanuts, allowed him to accept their fiction.

He struggled with it. He sat on a bench and tried to eat. The circumference was too much for his mouth, but he bit at it over and again, struggling to gain purchase with his bottom teeth. He thought if he could pull even one kernel free from the rest then he could take it from there. The process coated his chin with a layer of caramel. Every third bite or so he’d stop and lick this, pushing his tongue as far down past his lip as he could. His hands grew sticky beyond cleaning. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Ashley Inguanta

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“DEDICATION: TO THE REGISTRAR,” by Ashley Inguanta

Fullscreen capture 3222015 92402 AMYears ago, I wrote a poem before boarding an airplane. A dream of mine: When I was a young girl, I held my grandfather’s hand, and we ran. I was a monster, growing. He had the greenest eyes. I remember ghosts. I remember how–after the poem, after the dream—I turned to gold when I kissed my lover, when I kissed her hair. I remember when I thought all of this made sense once, when I drove past palm trees and all things wild. It was in my DNA to love hard.

The dream of my grandfather: There is another man who has never showed up in any of my dreams, but he is also my blood. He had a scar between his eyes. Tell me—when you saw him, when you marked down his features, when you scanned his face—did you see a young girl forming from his DNA, from those lines, from his dark complexion, from the scar between his eyes? I want to know, how did he speak to you? He filled out his draft card, World War II. His body belonged to America. Did he know this? Tell me. Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

–by Temim Fruchter

Unwinged

 

I was proud of my muscular shoulders, molded by swimming and tennis, and I used to stand facing the bathtub, holding up a hand mirror so I could stare at the reflection of my back in the bathroom mirror. At school, though, I felt like a football player, hulking, musclebound … In my mind’s eye I was a leering giant, gesticulating and capering around the little people, making them laugh, just one jot off a Frankenstein monster.

– Shelley Jackson, My Body, A Wunderkammer

 

Many small birds, particularly finches, have bouncy, roller-coaster trajectories caused by fluttering their wings and then actually folding them shut for a split second.

– www.allaboutbirds.org

 

*

He has meaty shoulders. Quarterback shoulders. Big tough words for arches, first impressions, upended roots. His shoulders dwarf his neck. His shoulders are like hills in both the softest and least soft senses of the word. His shoulders make me want to trust him because, any time I’ve tried to visualize trust, it always looked most like a shoulder. More malleable than any kind of rock, to be sure, but not by very much. His shoulders rounded out when he loved you. They squared like pillars when he walked away. His shoulders were always just close enough to the sky, but not too close. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Cynthia Hawkins

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“Disembodied,” by Cynthia Hawkins

Fullscreen capture 3192015 63125 AMThis is me, age seven, pretending to be a disembodied head.  I imagined the camera couldn’t see the rest of me behind the sofa.  I’d taken pains to arrange the pillow just so.  If I’d known the gag was ruined, I wouldn’t be smiling.

Sometimes I was a disembodied head on an armrest.  Sometimes I was a sideways disembodied head appearing to float up and down a doorframe while the rest of me was upright behind the wall.  Sometimes I was a disembodied head at a jaunty angle appearing to float from side to side atop the high back of mom’s upholstered chair while the rest of me was shuffling in a crouch on the shag rug puckered around the chair’s ball-and-claw feet.  Sometimes I’d slip my arms inside my sweater and let the loose sleeves flap as I asked every family member, “Hey! Where’d my arms go!”   Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Remnants of Passion by Sarah Einstein

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remnants

Shebooks

40 pages, $2.99

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

I thought I was going to love Sarah Einstein’s collection of four essays, Remnants of Passion, as soon as I read the first sentence: “Mommy Buddha is grousing again, hitching up his skirts and planting his big, black Chuck Taylors into the rutted mud of the road.”

I knew I was going to love it a few pages later when I laughed out loud, because I really love good writing that startles me enough to make me laugh. Having read the collection a few times now, it’s hard to remember exactly which sentence was the first one that made me laugh out loud, but it might have been the one in which our narrator/protagonist describes overhearing an ex-boyfriend (specifically, the one she describes as Terry-who-was-my-boyfriend-before-that-awful-business-with-the-cops-and-the-weed) describing a Thanksgiving at his parents house, and “his father grousing at the words we’re using on the Scrabble board, words he doesn’t know, words like textual and orality, which he says don’t sound like good Christian words to him …” The sentence goes on, though I’m not going to include it all here, because I’m supposed to be the one writing this review, and Einstein has a gift for writing long sentences woven of many strands of meaning and experience that carry a reader into the very sensations and sensuality of the world she is describing in these essays. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Michelle Bailat-Jones

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 “we counted the birds off instead,” by Michelle Bailat-Jones

Fullscreen capture 3162015 84731 PMDeviled eggs, our mothers told us, that is what the men would want on a day like today. We woke at dawn, for there were cousins coming and neighbors and children. Our dresses grew limp from all the boiling. Some of us took the time to change before the cars started rolling up the back field—tires crunching, horns squawking—some of us ran outside anyway, grateful for the cool air on our faces.

Over at the creek, tree branches tssked their fingers at us in the eleven o’clock wind. You said there would be ants, swatting already at your skirt, smoothing and pulling at the darts, and I wished I’d chosen a floral print, too.

The men carried their bottles and blankets and footballs and jackets. Their hair was combed, their shirts open at the collar. They were forgetting the children already, shouting only half-hearted rules and reminders. Watching them dash and tumble in the grass and the weeds, then vanish at the wood in a line of bright heads. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Allison LaSorda

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

Allison LaSorda’s poem “Playdate,” from the March issue, gets intimate with the iamb and an unnamed partner. It’s pretty hot.

1. “Playdate” is so dense and chewy, it feels like it must have taken ages to get just right, yet in its compactness the poem feels naturally a whole. How did you go about tweaking the thing into place? How long did it take?

I started with the first line, “you’ve got me where you want me,” which initially felt kind of flat and familiar, and wanted to pull it apart for meaning. The poem grew more in the direction of a creepy nursery rhyme as each line came out. I left about a month before doing any edits, just letting it sink in and feel comfortable for me, but really, the poem is very close to what I initially wrote down. I wanted to work quickly and go more by sound and playfulness rather than overthinking, which I usually tend towards. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Ellen Parker

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“See Here,” by Ellen Parker

Fullscreen capture 3162015 82811 PMThis little boy is my dad. Someone gave me this photo of him shortly after he died. I’d never seen it before then. After someone dies, after the person is no longer available to be looked at, how come people relinquish all these pictures they’ve been stockpiling?

Maybe the mindset is: Now that this person is gone, you might want some clues as to who he was.

In fact, yes. I’ve been looking for clues. I’ve been looking all my life.

Notice his hands. They don’t look like little-kid hands. When he was 74 years old and in the hospital, dying—actually, dead; a machine was doing his breathing, but we were still hoping—I watched his hands rest against the sheets. They didn’t look like old-guy hands. They were the same hands you see in the photo. A little chubbier, though. Fleshier. A little younger. Continue reading →

Wrought & Found

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Original poems and found images

–by Mia Sara

horse
Not Your Rodeo

It’s a hard trick to pull off,
dropping the reins on a rider-less horse.
No rope, no saddle, no “Thank you, m’am.”
It’s a long walk home to an empty stable.

The halter. The harness. The wasted feed.
Spit the dust from your mouth
and insert the bit, the one you love.
Freedom is for beginners, Continue reading →