Author: Roxane Gay

A Passing of the Editorial Torch

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Greetings, fine PANK readers! I bring you nightmares news!

Some of you already know me as reviews editor here at PANK, a job I’ve been doing since fall of 2012.

*waves at my awesome reviewers*

To the rest of you, hi there! It’s been positively blissful to bring smart words about so many excellent books to the blog for you this year, and now I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted the editorial torch from the formidable and fabulous Abby Koski (who has new adventures of her own ahead!), and will be stepping into the role of associate editor in charge of All Things Blog at PANK!

As I get settled in, we will be putting the blog on hiatus for July and August. A summer vacation, if you will. We all deserve it, don’t we?

Yes.

So, while you wait for our Cicada Overlords to crawl out of their subterranean strongholds (Maybe they already have? We’re still waiting for them here in central PA) and land officiously on your watermelon-jicama salad, why not pour yourself a gin & tonic (or, better still, a Red Eye with candied cicada garnish–yum!), bring the laptop to the porch, and peruse our wonderful archives of reviews, interviews, columns and other tasty blog content.

Set your Google Calendar Alarm for September 1 (or, you know, thereabouts), when we’ll be back with all the old, awesome PANK stuff and maybe some new, even awesomer PANK stuff, too.

I’m excited! It’s exciting! Thanks for having me and see you in September!

~Sheila

 

Sheila Squillante is the author of three chapbooks of poetry and one artists book collaboration with the experimental photographer, Paul Bilger. Her full-length collection will be published by Tiny Hardcore Press in 2014. Her poems and essays have appeared in places like Brevity, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Phoebe, TYPO, No Tell Motel, Thrush Poetry Journal, Superstition Review and elsewhere. She joins the faculty of Chatham University in Pittsburgh this summer as the associate director of their low-res MFA program.  Follow along at www.sheilasquillante.com.

 

 

Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine (A Review by J. Capó Crucet)

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Barrelhouse 

181 pgs/$15.00

Bring the Noise is the very first release of the ambitious (and highly promising) Barrelhouse Books, the D.C.-based magazine’s venture into indie publishing. I was drawn to the anthology in the hopes it would explain my unhealthy obsession with Jersey Shore (my working theory centers on the gravitational pull of JWoww’s chest). What I found instead, via the book’s strongest essays, was a sense of camaraderie: for better or worse, pop culture reflects where we are as a society now, and in hating or loving it—in examining what we hate or love about it—we figure out who we really are.

Comprised mostly of essays that previously appeared in Barrelhouse (five of the 18 are previously unpublished), the anthology is a potluck of voices and themes. It stretches the definition of pop culture to mean almost anything that could end up on TV or heard on the radio: from pro-wrestling, The Hills, the Chicago Cubs, and that creepy Wizard of Oz sequel (which I’d blocked from my memory almost entirely until this essay brought it back in vivid, nightmare-friendly detail), to Bob Dylan, payphones, and Pearl Jam. The range of these essays, however, is a reminder that pop culture isn’t always ubiquitous on a national scale, and so the tall order for a pop culture anthology—if it’s going to feel like the book it promises to be rather than, say, an issue of a journal—is that it be as robust and inclusive as possible. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Lisa Nikolidakis

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Learn about danger and Bullshit from Lisa Nikolidakis (Read her How to Date a Stalker in the Jan. edition).

1) If you met a stranger who confided in you that an ex was terrorizing them by stalking, what is a question you would ask them?

I’ve had this happen. Tending bar, people tell you all the things. First: Are you in danger? If yes, get thee to the police ASAP. If not, have you made your intentions to be left alone plain as can be? Second: Do you have a therapist?

2) Was it the Safe Horizons pamphlet that inspired this list form or did you find the pamphlet while researching?

The stalker pamphlet as a part of this came from a suggestion by the friend who originally gave it to me–many drafts into this. I had the title first, and I think it inspired the list form.  Continue reading →

System of Hideouts by Heather McNaugher (A Review by Anne Champion)

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 System of Hideouts

 Main Street Rag Publishing

55 pages/$14.00

 

In Heather McNaugher’s debut collection of poems, System of Hideouts, readers are treated to intellectual gusto, personal gutsiness, and aching tenderness.  The collection covers a broad range of experience—childhood, familial, and sexual—in interrogating the construction of self identity, producing a collection of moving poems emboldened by emotional verve.

McNaugher’s most stunning poetic trait materializes through her unabashed honesty.  These poems pilfer the experiences that many people keep silent about: from first lovers to first menstrual cycles to familial homophobia, McNaugher weaves her way through the secrets hidden deep within us, plucking them from our bodies for close self exploration.  In “Max,” the speaker reflects on her first friend, who she unashamedly reveals had “the first family I’d hate.”  She recalls suffocating goldfish and placing bets about cartoons, which Max always won.  The speaker makes meaning out of this young memory:

“From this I developed my first self-defeating theory
of luck—boys have it; I don’t.  It occurs to me only now
that a glossy T.V. Guide arrived each week at your door.
At my door was a woman on drugs.”
 Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Gregg Murray

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Crawl into the tub with Gregg Murray (poem in Jan. issue) toast each other with a glass of cool lemonade and wait for a bucket of arrogant bunnies to be tossed in with you.

1) Your poem makes me feel like restocking shelves under a droning, florescent light in a grocery store the morning after a one-night stand. Why do I feel that way?

I feel the same way when I read it back to myself. Thankless, meaningless work has never been therapeutic for me. Menial work, being under the boot, taking orders from an imbecile. It hurts me to see interested and capable and talented and spirited people shining the shoes of some arrogant bully with a horse on his shirt.

2) If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book of poetry, what book would it be and how would you use it to survive/escape?

I had to wedge a copy of Pride and Prejudice under an a.c. unit one time because it needed something there. At first I felt bad, but I know I like that book a lot and besides I meant no harm or disrespect. I’m so practical, though, with books I love. I’d take a big ole anthology or something for the island. But I love reading journals with experimental work in them.  Continue reading →

Beneath the Liquid Skin, By Berit Ellingsen (A Review By Simon Jacobs)

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firthFORTH Books

108 pgs./$10.95

Towards the end of this collection’s first story, Berit Ellingsen writes, “We need to be something else again.” We begin in uncertainty at the point of dissolve, as things change, and it is this unease, this perpetual state of transition that drives Ellingsen’s brilliant, undulating and mysterious first short story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin.

The book begins with the aforementioned “Sliding,” the inevitable drift into winter, and ends in a duet, “The White,” which chronicles the journey of “you,” a logistics assistant who treks from a research base into the vast, shifting whiteness of the Antarctic landscape, and finds wholeness and home, the universality of everything in the ice and snow. This is followed by “Anthropocene,” describing, in fierce, poetic language, a frigid apocalypse on our age, dragging everything into the center, when “you” and “I” are torn apart in fire and ice, only to begin again:

This is where it ends: in a concrete hall between reticent, snow-burdened mountains, under a mute sky the color of forgetfulness, snow falling like soot, and the air so frigid that every metal object tears the skin from your fingers. The lashing nettle-wind shrieks and tries every door and hollow window frame, like a burglar at night, clinking across the floor’s lake of glass shards. The red-rusted ley lines with rows of disc-shaped insulators curve into the sky and sing of legacies misspent and lost, of eternal life squandered. Continue reading →

Work: Surviving the Arts–What If I Don’t Want The Future?

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~by Scott Pinkmountain

The Rumpus Interview with Miracle Jones (May 6, 2013) is a thought-provoking read. Miracle Jones is an enthusiastic and articulate proponent of new ideas and developments in publishing and the lit world, and he is very much putting the practices he advocates into action. His distaste and distrust for the New York publishing establishment is matched by his entrepreneurial spirit and his sheer positivity and optimism for new forms. And he’s an interesting writer, so the stories he self-publishes (in USB drives or online) are worth checking out. While I was inspired by much of what he said in The Rumpus interview – the future of books will be as communal locations, not as commodities, the publishing world should be globally distributed, not centrally located in NY and London, releasing a book on a USB drive allows you to include video, sound, images, multiple versions of a story, etc… – I was also left with a lot of questions. The biggest among them being simply, “What if I still like books?” And not just as a reader, but as a writer. What if I don’t feel a digitally self-published release carries commensurate significance to the effort I’ve given my work?

I put this question to a friend of mine, Heather Abel, a writer living in North Hampton. Heather is working on her first novel and would ideally like to see it published through traditional channels as a bound hard copy.

“I would definitely weep if it were not made into a tangible, held-in-hands, paper book,” Abel said. “Right now it exists in a document on my computer, and I know, on some level, that’s all any book is – the collection and arrangement of data, easily erased Continue reading →

In The Bag

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Tote. Clutch. Sling a strap
Across my body.

Fill the void with  slick
Apotheosis.

It’s a supple shame
A fine-grained havoc

I’m unable to contain
When I think

I’ve got a handle

On this skin addiction

I lose my grip

I get carried away.

 

Mia Sara is an actress and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in PANK, Cultural Weekly, The Kit Kat Review,Forge, The Dirty Napkin, St. Ann’s Review, and others. For more please visit: http://wheretofindmiasara.tumblr.com/

Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand ( A Review by Helen McClory)

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Small Beer Press

286 pgs/$16.00

There’s a sense of wholeness to Errantry: Strange Stories which makes it appear, at first, easy to discuss. The subheading is ‘Strange Stories’ and strange they are. Ten stories make up this collection, ten distinct but obviously blood-related kin. Each populated by wonderstruck onlookers or sinister, eccentric figures. Each set in places – Woodlands, coast, mountains, cityscapes – that are uncertain grounds, warped by mysterious forces, but rich in realistic detail. There is a sense of accrual in each story. But what is being accrued is a sense of long lasting dis-ease. An enthrallment that is hard to shake or find out the edges of.

It’s no wonder that one of the stories in the collection won the Shirley Jackson Award. Like Jackson’s work, there is a claustrophobic creepiness to almost every story, despite the wonders. Hand’s stories here are more expansive, yet have that undercurrent of a formless force closing in, be it weather, or birds gathering in a falling evening sky. For the scope of this review, I’d like to focus mostly on the award-winning story above, my favourite of the ten, ‘Near Zennor’. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room With Brianna Stout

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Brianna P. Stout (poem in Jan. Issue)  cautions us against chasing planes and falling into dreams. Listen to her stand on the plain earth as it moves.

1) Reading your poem makes me want a hug. Why do I feel that way?

Well, some people just like to be touched, DeWitt.  Please don’t try to hug Jacob, though – he wouldn’t like that.

2) Both flight and freedom have historically been used to represent freedom. What is their connection?

I think it boils down to a desire to feel like we have control over a situation.  No one wants to feel pinned down, like we can’t do what we want or need to do.  When we see someone fly above us, we, envious, want to join in their locomotion.  It’s kind of like those chickens owned by that Causby dude (from the United States v. Causby case).  A plane flew over the Causby farm, and the chickens were like, “Whoa! We want to do that!”  The only problem was that the chickens were in their chicken house and couldn’t really fly, so Causby claimed that the trespassing planes caused his chickens to slam themselves to death against the chicken house walls in pursuit of the plane.  All right, so this question has taken a depressing turn (I’m starting to understand your first question more now), so I’ll have another go at it.  Maybe it’s more like my cat.  Whenever he feels uncomfortable with a situation, when he feels uneasy or slightly out of control, he doesn’t go hide under the bed, he finds the highest spot possible and perches there.  By being up high, he feels like he can handle things, like his abilities are, ahem, heightened.  His own little slice of freedom.  O.K., I know that a cat answer may seem typical, but don’t you prefer it to the depressing chicken analogy? Continue reading →