Author: Sheila Squillante

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

–by Temim Fruchter

What Kept Us Awake

“The use of fingernails for the purposes of divination is a longstanding Jewish practice – one uses the light of the Havdalah candle (used for a ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath) to gaze into one’s own nails. Young girls do so in hopes of seeing the man they will marry, but earlier authorities held that all kinds of omens, for good or for ill, could be detected in the reflection. Conversely, there is a belief that cutting one’s nails can adversely affect memory unless a specific order of trimming is followed: starting with the left hand, begin with finger four (ring) and end with one (thumb), and avoiding doing any two in sequence; right hand two to five. Fingers can be used in magical formula, and, most dangerously, in witchcraft. The careful disposal of trimmings is therefore imperative.”

– Geoffrey W. Dennis, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism

*

Nobody could quite disagree that, when you thought about it, fingernails were upsetting. Strange little interruptions, dirtcatchers, fossils, afterthoughts. But we were the only ones we knew who were actually afraid. We trimmed our nails in corners and over careful containers. Our fingernails, we’d heard, could cause harm. Could curse unborn babies. Could annoy the dead. We whispered prayers in threes, mostly that we hadn’t done anything incorrectly, that we hadn’t dropped any on the floor.

What kept us awake at night: death, eternity, our fingernails. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist, by Kirun Kapur

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Indira

Elixer Press

104 pages, $17

 

Review by Meg Eden

 

 

Kirun Kapur has a love-hate relationship with history. Her debut poetry collection, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist, is an embodiment of history—not just her own, but the archetypes that build history itself. Kapur is situated within both eastern and western culture, and carries such a rich family history that it’s almost as if she’s compelled to be involved in conversation with history, whether she likes it or not. In her poem “Under the Bed” she says, “I didn’t need monsters, I had history. Didn’t want history, I wanted crime—“ But despite “not wanting history,” Kapur uses it fully as a successful medium for her poems.

While many of us write about our family histories and narratives, Kapur reminds us what makes a successful retelling of history. Kapur begins the collection with a quote by Willa Cather from O Pioneers, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before…” This quote perfectly sets the landscape and ideology behind these poems, which do not rely solely on their own uniqueness but affiliate themselves with a history of human stories. What’s so great about what Kapur does is that she doesn’t isolate her family poems, but marries them alongside biblical and Hindu narratives, using these archetypes to place her family narratives in a larger context and history. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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[PANK] Interviews Editor Diana Clarke is a facilitator of the unexpected. She is a brilliant asker. Her approach both to writing and to conversations with other writers is vivid and curious, articulate and pointed. The fiery result of this approach comes across not only in her interviews, but also in her other work – including her film reviews, her writing about urban space and culture and her work translating Yiddish women poets. The stories she tells – and the ones she draws out of her subjects so deftly – are deeply dimensional.

Below, Clarke talks Lolita, lightning, pleats, vulnerability and Yiddish.

 

–Interview by Temim Fruchter

 

1. Many of us are scattered across the country and only know one another, and our writers, from the internet. Where do you blog from?

Mostly I blog from coffee shops. I find I can do the work much better–much truer, with more presence and intention–away from my home. My favorite cafe in Northampton, Massachusetts, where I’m living these days, has huge windows and great people-watching. I love sitting in the ambient communal energy, able to be still because of all the motion around me.

2. Okay, maybe this is a cheating question, but here goes: What is your dream question, the question you’d want any interviewer worth their salt to ask YOU? Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Families Among Us, by Blake Kimzey

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families

Black Lawrence Press

40 pages, $8.95

 

 

Review by Thomas Michael Duncan

 

In the first episode of his podcast, The Monthly, Mike Meginnis observes that the chapbook, as a form, appears to be something “people enjoy publishing much more than they enjoy reading.” This struck me as a smart, if generalized, reflection on the medium. Like new literary magazines, a spattering of chapbook publishers appears to sprout from nowhere every few days. This is likely an outcome of the current economic and cultural climate, where it is too expensive for upstart presses to print full-length books when more and more readers gravitate towards digital editions or free online content. The chapbook offers a cost-effective way to put something physical in a reader’s hands, but the ease of production also lends the form to hurried publication and incohesive collections.

Yet when a publisher puts real time and consideration into a chapbook, when a writer tells vibrant stories that bleed into the margins, and when a sharp design meets fitting, fascinating artwork, the result is too great to ignore. In other words, the result is Families Among Us, winner of the 2013 Black Lawrence Press Chapbook Competition. Continue reading →

#AWP15: On Firsts

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–by Chelsea Kindred

 

First AWP.

First plane ride where passengers are reading The Paris Review instead of US Weekly.

First snow rain in April, first city split in two and stretched across the Mississippi. The same river that crawls across the country, curving in and out of the words of writers past, present and future.

First panel, first page of notes, first inky smudge from tip of pinky to bottom of wrist on my left hand. That tell tale sign that I’ve been writing. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Where Alligators Sleep by Sheldon Lee Compton

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 alligators

 

Foxhead Books

160 pages, $18.00

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

“What is so interesting at your feet? It’s only your destiny,” writes Sheldon Lee Compton in his story, “Ouroboros,” which opens his new collection of flash fiction, Where Alligators Sleep. The question of destiny is perhaps the most over-arching theme in these 66 short shorts. In the title story, Compton crisscrosses time, depicting an elderly couple in 2008 who survive by remembering their first dance together in 1951. He writes, “There is sadness all around, spread out like mud through a hog pen.” In other words, destiny isn’t kind to any of us.

This tragic view of human suffering is depicted most uniquely in the story, “Assignment,” where physical and learning disabilities in students are likened to assignments drawn blindly from a bag. We all get one whether we want it or not. Continue reading →

Book We Can’t Quit: North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell

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North

451 pages, $12.00

Penguin Classics

 

Review by Julienne Isaacs

 

Elizabeth Gaskell is a relatively unsung Victorian novelist, at least compared with Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot. Like her contemporaries, Gaskell uses the marriage plot as a vehicle for female self-actualization and empowerment. But in my opinion, she surpasses them all.

Eliot has a superior knowledge of politics and a shrewd sense of community life, Austen has an ungodly talent for drawing-room drama, and the Brontës infuse gothic panoramas with intense sexual energy. These elements are present in Gaskell’s work, too, but she adds a generous social ethic and a talent for complex human drama. In North and South, Gaskell makes social concerns the core of a love story that is wonderfully readable more than 150 years after its publication. This is a novel I can’t quit, and can’t even skim. Continue reading →

#AWP15: Listen Up

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–by Shannon Reed

mini apple 2

In the weeks leading up to my first AWP conference, I heard a great deal of advice. Although much of it turned out to be helpful, the words “strategize” and “survive” were so often included, I began to think of my trip to Minneapolis as a minor campaign in a small, bloodless war. Get in. Get free bookmarks. If the battlefield is clear, maybe snag a free tote bag. Avoid the panels. And then, get out. As it turned out, I enjoyed the conference a great deal more than I expected – the free tote bags guy at the London Review of Books was really nice! – but I also came away more concerned about the inclusivity of the world that AWP gathers together.

Much has been written about the representation (or lack thereof) of writers of color and LGBTQ writers at AWP, and, from my limited perspective, the concern seems justified. Here, though, I want to point to another area I worry about, one that I am better equipped to speak to: the way the conference actually unfolds, which leads to a prioritizing of one kind of communication and learning over all others. Continue reading →

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

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A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

 

DILDON’T

 

http://metro.co.uk/2015/04/26/remember-your-loved-one-by-putting-their-ashes-in-a-dildo-5168393/

 

Your lover can fuck you beyond the grave.
I’m just going to put this here:
a widow has needs. If you crave
your lover’s dick, from beyond the grave
his ash is yours, forever your slave
encapsulated in plastic gear.
I can fuck myself beyond his grave –
I’m just going to put this here.

 

***

hauthorpicHeidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

[REVIEW] The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, by William Todd Seabrook

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Lewis

Rose Metal Press

Winner of the Eighth Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest

56 pages, $12

 

Review by Caitlin Corrigan

 

In a recent radio interview with Minnesota State University (MNSU), William Todd Seabrook described his latest, prize-winning chapbook, The Imagination of Lewis Carroll as both “magical realist biography” and a kind of “fan fiction of a historical person.” Seabrook, a PANK contributor, is also the author of two other prizewinning chapbooks of biography (on Joan of Arc and J. Robert Oppenheimer, respectively). His work toys with our ideas of cultural mythmaking, while also creating space for Seabrook to bring his own sense of playfulness to lives whose details have already been committed to our cultural memory, for better or worse.

In these two dozen flash vignettes, Seabrook mixes fact and fabulism to bring Lewis Carroll to life using spare, imaginative prose. Writes Michael Martone, judge for the Eight Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest, “Carroll, the logician and mathematician, saw language as an analog calculating machine. Seabrook recalibrates here, bringing to the language a digital elegance, the repeating replication, the algorithmic grace of aughts and ones.” The stories here are tight little delights, but Seabrook doesn’t shy away from probing some of the darker nuances of Carroll’s life. Continue reading →