Features

[REVIEW] Aria Aber’s HARD DAMAGE

Posted on by

University of Nebraska Press, 2019

—

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

In an increasingly global society, there are many whose upbringing is centered around two or more cultures, which at times can be in harmony with each other, and at others in conflict. In Aria Aber’s debut collection, Hard Damage, a strong sense of identity lies at the center of each of the worlds explored, with every poem seeking to interrogate the historical and the personal, to flesh out what it means to have a past that impacts the present, and vice versa.

Winner of the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Hard Damage examines various aspects of the immigrant experience and the manner in which one navigates the complexities of a new life. In the proem “Reading Rilke in Berlin,” the speaker reflects on learning English and her father’s journey to a new country:

Into English I splintered the way my father clutched

his valise at the airport, defeated and un-American.

It took me twelve strange springs to know: nothing

occurs out of a sudden. How do I let it go?

Little has been purloined from me and the ghosts

of childhood still sibilate, by which I mean

nobody has touched me on my innermost parts.

Despite the sense of loss the speaker’s father feels, and that the speaker herself feels by splintering into a language her parents don’t fully know, there is no coming back, and they both must commit themselves to a land and people that are as intrigued as they are indifferent to new inhabitants. When we arrive at the end of the poem, the speaker’s mother responds, rather confidently, with a “fine, ou hare you?” after being asked where she is from, and the speaker, aware of the callous attitude of the immigration officer she encounters, says she wants nothing more than to “[rip] out his tongue/… and [wait]/ for it to bloom new [in her] blood,” thereby fully possessing what at the beginning of the poem wasn’t quite hers.

Although the speaker interrogates the nuances of her identities (Afghan, German, American), there is no denying that she accepts every part of who she is, regardless if part of her upbringing isn’t fully attached to one geographical location. She is not quickly or easily defined, and for others, this concept can be lost on an adherence to stereotypical expectations of what someone should be. One of the most memorable poems in this collection is “The Ownership of Naming Things,” which details what others see the speaker as rather than what she is:

What once was feathered like a voice, a seduction

of finches, now is vigorous, bids me into the sun.

I am not less enough. Once, a man unbuttoned

my spine into the purple noise of night, swore

You’re not like them, look at how light your skin

is.

Her skin may be light, but it doesn’t mean she loses her Afghan identity because of it, and it doesn’t dictate that she should shun what is essential to her being. As she says, quite directly, “I am not / delicate. Look at me. I am not trying to disappear.”

The process of not forgetting takes up the entirety of the third section of the book with the poem “Rilke and I.” The eight sections are titled in both German and English, and they highlight not only the attention to language but the manner in which certain words and phrases shape identities and worldviews. This can be as minuscule as the word “I,” which in the first section captures its implications:

Ich, the German first-person singular pronoun, is not capitalized.

Is my German selfhood humbler, does it fold into itself? Why is the

English I so prominent, so searing on the page?

It could look like an | and therefore like a wall more than a door—

altogether very different from the little ich, which is the scaffolding

of a roof, a cathedral, something to contain the collective.

Putting a microscope to things that might not seem important is at the core of the speaker’s attempt to understand her history better, and to form a new way of looking at what is too often overlooked. Although contemplative and philosophical, Aber’s ability to switch into the narrative provides the perfect balance to insights into the speaker’s past, as shown in “Und/And”:

As children, it’s the only word we use to comprehend continuity. “And

then what?” we ask.

And then we had to leave Afghanistan.

“And then? And then? And then?”

You and I. You, who made me. And = the umbilical cord.

And Mother and Father, at last. Yes, he was there—a distant firefly in

a field; like the traveler that he was, which as the meaning of his last

name, he was always gone, trying to become an American.

Again, a single word is sufficient enough to meditate on what exactly “continuity” entails, and how moments from our life are connected in more ways than we originally thought.

The past here is personal, but it doesn’t entirely exist outside of history. “Operation Cyclone,” titled after the code name of the CIA’s program to arm and finance the mujahideen during the 1980s, interweaves various stories with the reality and consequences of such an operation:

a brother a favorite among his eight siblings

a brother believed to be gone

a brother’s name crossed through, filed away under “collateral”

a cheek held to the soles of the occupation

a country surveilled and censored as X

a cyclone as metaphor

a family collapsing at the grave, the grave empty, the stone etched

with cursive Died: unknown; died believing in good, beloved son,

brother, and uncle

a family cowered at the dinner table thinking of their brother

a family scouring through death lists, searching among the names of

the tortured, the detained and executed for a trace of their brother

a family waiting for news

a father beginning a joke with There’s no Walmart in Afghanistan

a fridge full of light

a funeral willowed and willing

a funeral with sisters wailing like blue jays, flagellating themselves and

each other

a funeral without a body so sober the orchids are flushing

I include this entire stanza because it’s important to read the totality of Aber’s attention to events that most Americans more than likely know nothing about. For the speaker, it’s a truth they must live with constantly, recognizing that she doesn’t want your sympathy, but instead she “want[s] your attention.” Even if that can be bothersome (think of all the people who shed light on unjust issues in order to promote their own brand or because they are merely hopping on a social bandwagon), it’s something that is nevertheless necessary in order excavate every aspect of the truth, regardless of how tragic that truth may be.

Recently, there has been some debate about “Best of” literary lists, whether they are too narrow in their scope or simply biased toward works that have been bestowed with awards, failing to consider the abundance of books that deserves a wider audience. Regardless of where you land in this debate, it’s hard to imagine, as 2019 nears its end, that Hard Damage won’t be on every one of those lists. It’s an incredible achievement that doesn’t sugarcoat the subjects it tackles, and if there is a book that so thoroughly explores the human condition this year, it is undoubtedly Aber’s, one that will move you as much as it will stir serious discussion with others and, most importantly, with yourself.

—

ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press 2019), In Bloom (SFASU Press 2020), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press 2020). His poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, an Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI, and a regular reviews contributor for [PANK] and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

[NEW NONFICTION] Crying and Paintings

Posted on by

BY ALICIA BYRNE KEANE

—

I.

I remember once going to an Edvard Munch exhibition and seeing an entire room filled with studies of the Weeping Woman. I don’t really know art things so the painting didn’t really seem all that remarkable to me compared to his weirder ones. It’s a nude, standing up in a bedroom, her head bowed. But the longer I looked at it the more I started finding it sinister. The way the same picture has been obsessively repeated. I started to notice how in certain versions the room is claustrophobically distorted to make it look as if her head is almost pushing against the ceiling like she’s standing up in a tent. How in some the palette is unpleasantly oversaturated, her cheeks too red, the shadows in the corners of the room too dark. Something invasive about the angle like the artist is sitting too close to the subject. I never found out the context of the painting, whether it was meant to seem that way. (Weird if not, and weird if so.) There’s something panic-inducing about it.

 

II.

Crying four years ago, surrounded by large abstract paintings. I’m in a top-floor office in a leafy suburb, the very kind of ornate redbrick neighborhood that causes people to employ the cliché leafy suburb, in the office of an academic I have just met. She conducts studies on things like hats in literature.

There is lots of art on the walls, floor to ceiling. It’s not very good art, but it’s large and copious. Particularly vivid, in this memory, is a view of the painting opposite me. It’s sort of pinky beige. It looks the way baby wipes look when I’ve used them to take off my makeup.

‘Beckett was a real guy,’ she is saying. ‘He had sex, he played tennis.’

He played sex, he had tennis.

I manage to say ‘I hate it here’, in a voice that sounds like it’s being squeezed out through a straw.

 

III.

I don’t know my housemates very well, but around the Repeal referendum, one of them bought a little framed painting that sits on our mantelpiece. I can’t see who the artist is because their signature is done down the bottom in pencil and I can’t read it hardly, but it looks like the first name is Anna or Ann. It is titled #togetherforyes and it shows a crowd of people from afar, stick figures with outstretched arms, holding different banners that all give the names of different collectives and organizations. It’s incredibly detailed when you look at it closely and reminds me almost of Quentin Blake drawings, it seems gentle. I need to ask them who made it.

I Google #togetherforyes painting, #togetherforyes ann painting.

Everyone’s away and the house has an uncanny quality. I have been cleaning for hours. It reminds me of grey Sunday dread when I was a kid.

I have put a chair out in our garden and I can see it from the window. The garden is a blaze of sun and if you saw just this scene in isolation you would think you were somewhere nice. I duck into the corner of the kitchen closest to the door, for some reason, because this feels like the least windowy area of the house, and somehow safer than anywhere else for displays of emotion. I don’t know who I think would be watching me. I begin to cry.

I am not sure why I am crying, here in the part of the kitchen that no one can see, where the dustpan and brush hang, trailing bits of grey fluff.

This time last year I walked to a part of the city I didn’t usually go to and read Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin and found the way she was in bed with a broken ankle for most of the story sadder maybe then I was meant to. It made the whole book seem transitory and unfinished like just a really odd part of someone’s life. I read it in a park during a drought, when most of Dublin looked grey and yellow.

—

ALICIA BYRNE KEANE is a Ph.D. student from Dublin, Ireland. She has a first class honors degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University. She is currently working on an Irish Research Council-funded Ph.D. study of ‘vagueness’ and translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami. She has performed poetry at events such as Electric Picnic, Lingo Festival, and Body & Soul, and has assisted on the editing team for the New Welsh Review. She has more recently turned to writing prose pieces.

November’s Future Friday – Divya Mehrish

Posted on by

We wanted the holiday bustle to settle before sharing this wonderful story by Divya Mehrish for our November Future Friday! It’s our first prose piece of the series!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Divya Mehrish is a high school senior from New York. Her work has been commended by the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and the Scholastic Writing Awards, which named her a recipient of National Gold and Silver Medals. Her work has been published in the Ricochet Review, the Tulane Review, Body Without Organs, and Amtrak’s magazine The National.

Snapshot

We keep leather-bound photo albums on the bookshelves. Dust slithers over the front covers, reminding us to read our memories like encyclopedias, to search for the definitions of who we could have been. My mother has stacked them onto the shelf at the back of the living room, behind the piano no one plays anymore. On some Sunday mornings, as her espresso whistles on the stove, she sits at the dining table, her baby blue bathrobe draped over her narrow shoulders. She leafs through the books, her eyes wide. It’s my first birthday again. The pale pink cotton of the little embroidered dress wafts over my body, the body my mother had forged with her own hands, her own thighs, her own breasts. As I sip on my orange juice and try to balance redox reactions on the tablecloth, I watch her out of the corner of my eye. Her eyelids are fluttering, her face changing. One moment, her lips part to reveal her small jaw of beautiful, straight teeth. The next moment, she is gnawing at her lips, little vermillion carnations bursting in the thin line separating each half of her smile. Briny drops the size of the dew clinging to the petals on the terrace flow down the concaves of her cheeks. My mother never could hold back tears.

She leans over to me, holding the book in her arms like a sleeping infant. “Divya, look—this was your first birthday.” My gaze flutters over to the image. My hair is thick, dark, soft—raven feathers humming at my shoulders. It seems that I had my mother’s hair, once. Little gold bangles suffocate my fat little wrists. I am holding onto the pole in the playground for balance. I must not have been able to walk properly yet. My first two little teeth are showing, peeking out behind my moist, plushy upper lip.

I don’t look at my mother. I refuse to engage. I swallow the growing lump in my throat. I don’t remember that girl, but I miss her. I bite the inside of my cheek until I can taste metal stinging my teeth, rotting my gums. My mother’s fingers are stroking the waxy paper the same way she caresses our goldendoodle’s flaxen curls. “Weren’t you so sweet? Look how happy you were.”

“Leave me alone.” I turn back to my chemistry homework. But no matter how hard I try to focus my eyes, I can’t make out the oxidation number I am staring so hard at. As I squint, a drop of warm liquid slides out of the safety of my bottom eyelid, leaking onto the piece of paper. The crystal of fluid makes contact with a portion of the instructions on the top of the page. The water pools into the ink, clinging to the fibers. I think about the polarity of water, and for a moment, I hate knowing the chemistry behind my tears. I imagine what might have happened if I had not known the instructions yet or started the worksheet. Could I have gone to Mr. Nick and told him “my eyes consumed my homework”? I wonder what he would have said.

I can’t concentrate anymore. I’m beginning to confuse single and double replacement reactions again. My mother has gone on to look at the album for my seventh birthday. She appears to have her favorites. I rest my chin in the curve of my elbow and think about how much I loathe my mother’s use of the past tense. I don’t have the stomach for nostalgia, for the “weres” and “would have beens” of this world. I can’t reminisce about my childhood without feeling my intestines clench and gurgle inside me like a ticklish fetus. At the moment, I don’t feel like being pregnant with sentimentality.

My mother is stacking up the albums as she finishes with them. She’s moving more quickly now, her fingers accustomed to the routine of pinch, flip, turn, slam, stack. She’s on my tenth birthday now. That was the year I had a tea party at the Plaza Hotel. We binged on petit fours and saccharine pink tea that smelled like my body the time I poured my mother’s rose-scented perfume all over my arms like body oil. For the party, I wore a lovely blue-and-white sailor dress with what I used to call a “poofy” skirt. I wonder what happened to that dress. I notice that there is only one pile of books now, stacked high, and that it is slanting over precariously like the Leaning Tower of Pisa to the left of my mother’s elbow. She is finished. Her eyes lost in the leather, my mother traces the covers, her fingers circling over the hills and valleys of what may once have been animal skin, but now shields my childhood. For a moment, I wonder why my mother isn’t looking at the photographs from my more recent birthdays. I feel the space in my mouth begin to increase in size behind my closed lips, pressed tightly together in the shape of the “m” sound. But just as I am about to interrupt her meditative silence, I slam my jaw closed. I already know why. After my tenth birthday, I began to grow touchy around photographs. I became increasingly conscious of the way my cheeks swelled in pictures that would last forever, the way the dark circles under my eyes sunk into my pale skin like black holes. I stopped letting my mother capture the progression of my smile, either with palms shielding my face from the grenade of the flash, or simply letting my eyes frost over with a hard, angry expression. Sometimes, my mother still managed to capture some images when I wasn’t paying attention, but only with her grainy phone camera. An actual camera would have been much too obvious. After the party, I would demand that she hand over her phone so that I could systematically check the Photos app. I knew where to look—she had grown too intelligent and too practiced to simply leave the photographs in the normal Photos section: she had begun deleting them. These images would remain “hidden” in the Deleted Photos section until my swiping fingers, bent on annihilation, would encounter the bolded red letters warning me that if I chose to delete the already deleted images, I would never again be able to retrieve them. Yes, I told the device. I understand. I would breathe a sigh of relief as I expunged the few moments that my mother had been able to secretly capture—blurry images of my face, neck bent back, as I sipped on a glass of water, or as I turned my back to continue a conversation. None of these snapshots were worthy of preservation. On my most recent birthday, as I handed back my mother’s newly-cleansed phone, smiling strangely with a mix of relief and irritation, she refused to look at me. Her waiting fingers grasped the sides of the slippery case and slid the device into her purse without a pause. She zipped the bag closed and trudged forward into the wet April afternoon. We walked for a few minutes in silence, our steps in sync. As I rubbed my bare arms, the chilliness seeping into my bones, I clenched my jaw. I was peeved at her reaction, but not at all at the fact that she had taken those photographs, despite my many warnings. I had almost learned to enjoy the tradition—to let my mother engage in her foolery, and then punish her for it. But at the same time, I felt almost felt guilty. What other fourteen-year-old would force their parent to hand over their phone so that the child could survey and delete information off of the device? I began to wring my hands, taking a deep breath as I prepared the introduction to my apology—

“You will regret this.” Her crude comment cut sharply through my beautiful, flowery train of thought.

“What do you mean?” I had stopped walking, taken aback by her brusquerie. I folded my arms against my chest, ready to defend myself against any bullet she shot against me.

“One day, you are going to wonder where all these memories are. Don’t come blaming me then. All I’ve ever tried to do is to help you preserve them, to lock them into books that one day you might have flipped through, letting your childhood flow back in.” Her voice was beginning to tremble. “I was a child once, too. I only wish that my mother had taken this effort to hold down those few moments of happiness, before they flew away, and pinned them down to paper. You don’t know how it feels to reminisce and then wonder if your mind is playing tricks on you. You don’t know how it feels to live each day the way the breeze zips through your hair—with you one moment, gone the next. All I’ve been doing is trying to help you save yourself.” Her voice was thick and wet, but also hard, like frozen ice. It seemed that we both already knew this secret—anger is the best kind of tissue. She didn’t wait for me as she continued to march up the Avenue, the brown paper bag holding the leftover cake slamming against her thigh. I let her keep walking, imagining the lilac frosting clinging to the sides of the plastic. Standing off to the corner of the sidewalk, I folded my arms against my chest and hid my chin in the concave formed by my elbows. As my throat began to close, I let myself travel back to my first birthday. I was an infant again, blissfully ignorant of flashing cameras, of the rolls of fat cascading down my pudgy legs. I wondered, momentarily, how I had such clear memories of my toddler self, playing out like a film in my mind. Tucked behind my irises was a leather-bound album, with a series of photographs so similar but for slight differences—a movement, a change in background. My mind had learned to splice the images together, creating its own album out of the memories someone else had found worthy enough to capture.

 

 

With a Cheek to the Fire: A Conversation with Alexus Erin on her new chapbook, ST. JOHN’S WORT

Posted on by

(Animal Heart Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY KATE HOYLE

__

Poet Alexus Erin talks about her debut collection, about the poet as specter, about ritual, politic, and writing to a “capital G God”

Kate Hoyle: There’s so much that this collection is doing, let’s get right into it. St. John’s Wort feels interested in the space between word and feeling, as introduced in the collection’s first poem “June 9th, 2015”. Have you felt these poems as vehicles to bring language closer to truth/experience?

Alexus Erin: I think not just in the first poem, but in all of my work, I’m interested in how my explication of the feeling, my explanation of the feeling, how close it is to the word as it would be read by my reader. I am very interested in semiotics and etymology. In these layers of meaning. So yes, the distance between the word and the feeling, I try to draw a mirror to that space, knowing that a word will never sum it up, but I‘m gonna get as close as I can. In one of my poems, not in this collection, I note how the word blessing comes originally from “to make bleed”. Which is that poem… ah it’s called “Great Black Hope”.

KH: That title. Would you talk about how these poems speak from within and also sort of push up against the expectations of identity?

AE: I’m really interested in all of my work the sort of narratives that we normally subscribe to, particularly as someone who has identities at marginalized intersections, that poem is very much about what it means for the individual when considering the perception of the audience. I draw from WEB Dubois’s idea of double consciousness, the idea of knowing how you’re perceived, by an Other, by an audience, as a Black person. In “Great Black Hope” I bring this concept to my own experience in the world of academia. I attended a largely white, K through 12 private school and there was a black admissions counselor who would call me and my brother “Great Black Hope”. I must have been only eleven, so my brother was eight. To hear that, to be expected to perform to that, it’s a lot. I think Muhammed Ali was called that, I’ve heard it in reference to Obama, but one person can not be the singular hope for a people. That poem is about aspiration and expectations and how a person is not a narrative, a person has one.

KH: There is a holiness present in the world of these poems – They seem to be in relationship with the divine, both in direct conversation with a “capital G” God and also in the intimate sort of rituals they embody, Could you say something about that?

AE: A lot of my poems are kind of like prayers and petitions–when we think of praying, we might think about praises, and about asking a capital-G God for something, but many of my poems say to God “hey, look at what I’m experiencing” and that sounds almost inflated, but because I am a woman of faith and I feel I have a direct relationship with God, it’s almost like saying, “look Dad, this is what I am experiencing, can you see what I’m seeing and feel what I’m feeling?”And there’s a duality in who I’m calling Dad. In some poems, I’m talking about my biological father, and I talk to a heavenly father in others. I think they reference one another. And because God in these poems is linked to the more sobering ideas of death, violence, invasion, and illness, the holiness of the poems themselves does its best to counteract that darkness and acknowledge the inherent holiness in all living things.

KH: I think it does that successfully, there’s a balance, a magic inside the grief. And I wonder about the role of the natural world in these poems, and how it relates to the intimate, and the political? I was reading the collection in Golden Gate Park and as I arrived at the end of this poem, a red tailed hawk landed on the grass just ten feet from me. I’ve never seen a hawk land on the earth before, it felt a certain kind of blessing.

AE: I’m fascinated by that – I tend to ascribe meaning to all things, but I’d really love to know what that means. I don’t think that I am naturally a ‘nature person.’ I spend a lot of time in cities, but the fact that there are other things living that are witness–that serves as another character and another voice – there are times when I am in conversation with nature because, like God, nature is the other thing that sees everything.

KH: Hmm, yes. I love this quote, from your piece in The Poetry Question, that says “As a young, Black, woman poet, the political is paramount and ultimately inextricable to informing my experience; […] Poetry facilitates a platform to express larger political concerns- be they of the mass failures of global powers and self-sick demagogues, to the politics of the body and identity”. This collection holds a vital tension, an intimacy between the historical, the political and the personal. I’m thinking of Coretta Scott in “Black Girl Prayerbook”, of the speaker’s father in “St. John’s Wort”.

AE: I’m always interested in domestic space because of its intimacy and because of the gendering location it has for women, that it can be a space of liberation and has certainly been a space of subjugation. When it comes to “Black Girl Prayerbook” and Coretta Scott specifically, I wanted to imbue an image in the poem of the contrast between the joy of time with her family at the dinner table, against the tragic and turbulent outside. I was writing that poem not too long after Ferguson. I was living in Switzerland, going to class and spending time with friends and at the same time thinking about the plight of my people back home. These things always happen at the same time, and we’ll always experience them at the same time. There’s also the scene in that poem of our music teacher who had been there and marched. She taught us the black national anthem (at this largely white school K-12) and she got so emotional. I never forgot the image of her, that she was re-living the bloodbath of the civil rights movement, that we weren’t there for. This poem and the collection are interested in that dynamic, being aware of, versus not being aware of, acting in the context of the event and acting outside of the context of the event.

KH: You mentioned that most of these poems are coming from a first-person speaker and I wanted to ask, particularly in “Black Girl Prayerbook”, who is speaking, and to whom?

AE: A lot of these poems I wrote in 2014-2015, so immediately I want to say that it’s me writing a letter to God, telling him what I see, how I can go to class and have an argument about morality versus ethics and then go on the internet and watch Missouri burn. Saying to God, look at these two lives I have to lead. Now, interestingly enough, that the poems are being published, and when I read them, it feels like me talking to that me from back then, who was talking to God. I have a spectral relationship with the work, almost phantasmic as if I’m talking to things that don’t exist anymore but that definitely existed, and that in the reading of them I return into that portal somehow. The poems are almost like a reminder—like writing little clues to myself, the way it presents it is that I am talking to God or to my dad or to nature, but it feels like writing myself a secret note, in a code that only I would know how to decode – that’s at least what it’s like when I’m writing.

KH: I love that, I feel that too, that my poems are often something like a “Note to Self, for Survival”. Thinking of survival, this collection does not deal in insignificances. You really address and are able to hold some of the bigger elements of this human beingness. The book brought me into and through a journey of grief and loss, as well as one of wonder, of witnessing. And I really feel these poems wielding the power to resurrect. Do you want to share about the titular poem and how it holds the whole?

AE: St John’s Wort touches on a couple of critical points. That poem oscillates around a difficult time when I was witnessing a lot of difficult things, one of them being my father having an aneurysm. The idea of losing a parent, of losing what he meant to me, the idea of not having a future with my father, somehow the idea held maybe more darkness. The idea that there would be no hope, had a particular sinister quality to me. That poem lives where I feel like I’ve pressed my cheek against the glass of that sort of loss, where being that close almost feels like the loss already happened.

KH: Are there any poems or writers that you remember offering a touchstone, helping you through that time?

AE: I’m a huge Michael Dickman fan. His work has a lot to do with scenes surrounding violence and the suburban, the creeping dark that can accompany the quotidian, as well as flashes of light, flashes of miracle, the supernatural. I’ve actually met him several times, I‘ve told him about this book. His work is amazing, it’s gotten me through so much.

KH: Such a gift and I think a particular power of poetry, to bring us through some of the narrow places. I feel your work doing that. Ok, do you want to talk about form? The poems in this collection take a range of shapes and structures…

AE: Yes. I mostly follow my intuition, but I am a huge fan of the miracle of enjambment, and all the types of meaning aligned space can bring. In my work a lot of the time I am very attentive to and giving a lot of intention to where the lines break. And I’m always a huge champion of space on the page, and space when you’re reading. I think as a person I can forget to breathe, so when looking at my poetry, having that space there reminds me where the breath is supposed to be, where the living is.

KH: Mm, yes. Yes. How are you spending your time now? You’re working on your Ph.D. in Medical Sociology in Manchester—that seems like a lot. Are you taking a breath, a pause from writing, are you writing new poems?

AE: I let the poems make the decision, which is a real choice. So a lot of the time they absolutely just happen anyway. I might intend to do some science, and the poem just says no. When I, God willing, travel to Australia to interview aboriginal women about their experience of birth, I am going to add poetry as a method. So as part of my research, these women will have the opportunity to write poetry about the lived experiences of their pregnancy and about the experience of their care. I think poetic inquiry can be a wonderful method and that it’s terribly underused. I might be the only medical sociologist who thinks so. Some colleagues have said, “well what can a poem tell you?” My response is, literally what couldn’t it tell you.

KH: Exactly. That’s incredible. Yes, the entire worlds contained in a poem. As we close, is there anything else that you want to say?

AE: I guess I’d like to say that a lot of these poems worked very well as a coping mechanism amidst very painful and difficult things happening. So some of these lines are really truly artifacts of older harms. That alone has such value to me. There was a me who was in there. I couldn’t put my pain on pause—I picked up a pen, I came up with something, and I decided to keep it and trust it. To me more than anything that’s the value of a lot of these poems, that they’re still standing there in the heat of the fire. I don’t know how much advice I can give to other poets, but if your work is still close to that heat, I think you’re reader will be able to feel it.

__

ALEXUS ERIN is an American poet, performer, and Ph.D. candidate living in the UK. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, The Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity, American Society of Young Poets, God Is in the TV, LEVELER, Red Flag Poetry, Silk + Smoke and a host of others. She is the author of Two Birds, All Moon (Gap Riot Press) and Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence (Cervena Barva Press). She was the 2018 Poet Fellow of the Leopardi Writers Conference and a performer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2018). Her screenplay, American Lotus Project, won the screenwriting award at Temple University’s Diamond Film Festival (2015). When Alexus isn’t writing, dancing, singing, comedy-ing or researching maternal/child health, find her growing plants in your walls as the co-founder of Wallflower Hydroponics, and trying to catch up on sleep.

KATE HOYLE was raised in Moraga, California. Her work has been published in Scoundrel Time, The Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, and Typishly. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

[NEW NONFICTION] Intro to all my Unwritten Novels

Posted on by

Image by Catherine Green

BY LORI GREEN

—

Recently I’ve been hearing this sentence: A baby, loose among the banquet, crawls towards the raspberries. I know it’s grammatically off, but replacing ‘among’ with the antiseptic ‘at’ leaves the picture juiceless. So does keeping ‘among’ but turning ‘banquet’ into a word for its people, such as the archaic ‘banqueters,’ of which the baby is one.

I don’t go to banquets, certainly not ones with guests self-possessed enough to bring a baby and set it free to find its own memories. I can’t think of anything more glamorous, except for a story I read in a fashion magazine when I was a teenager: It’s the late 1950s and a couture-clad woman strolls through Venice with a man she just met. They’ve spent hours along the canals tilting their chins toward the moonlight when she realizes she has to pee.

If she asks to interrupt their wandering, she’ll betray herself as a human being with a body rather than the universal antidote. Even if she does admit this fatal flaw and make it to a restroom, her dress is such that she’d need the help of a good friend and a pair of scissors to get the job done. She cannot will the situation away and her wits are failing by the minute. It’s pressing. In the end, she is saved by her nose, which remembers that Venice already smells like sewage. With a fit of sparkling laughter, she hides the sound of urine sliding down her legs under a gown she will never wear again. For me, its cloth has always been a satin in ominous mauve.

Not being fifteen any longer, I understand the scenario’s corrupt. But still, whenever I remember her ingenuity I’m reminded to get off my ass and actually make something of myself. I’ve told this story to friends and family but I can never translate its effect. No one sees the charm, the danger and innocence. I try to emphasize the lines of her dress and the intensity of her gaze, the city’s postcard perfection and its stench, the Woman Victorious.

When they tell me it’s simply disgusting, I know I have failed again. I wonder if it would play out better on film. The baby, loose among the banquet, crawls towards the raspberries. I will not kill this darling.

 

—

LORI GREEN studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

[REVIEW] The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures by Alejandra Pizarnik, Trans. Cecilia Rossi

Posted on by

 

(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019)

—

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

 

SOMETHING

night as you go

lend me your hand

work of a teeming angel

days commit suicide

why do they?

night as you go

good night

Alejandra Pizarnik

 

Ugly Duckling Press sponsors a Lost Literature Series that “publishes neglected, never-before-translated, or scarcely available works of poetry and prose.” Painter and writer, Alejandra Pizarnik (1936 -1972), is among the avant-garde writers highlighted—a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants to Argentina who died from an overdose of Seconal while on furlough from a mental institution. Most of the online and textual sources that I consulted label her death, “suicide.” It is well-documented that Pizarnik endured challenges growing up, particularly problems affecting her physical appearance (acne, weight gain) and social presence (stuttering). However, she coped sufficiently during some periods as a young adult, living and studying in Paris for four years and traveling widely on Guggenheim and Fulbright awards. I first became familiar with Pizarnic when conducting research on Marosa di Giorgio, another South American poet resurrected in Ugly Duckling Press’ recovery project. Marjorie Agosín’s edited volume* provided useful “portraits of Latin American women writers,” documenting that, of the sixteen included in the book, six died tragically—among these, four poets who died by suicide.

The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventure comprises two poetry collections, published 1956 and 1958, respectively, of mostly short pieces revealing Pizarnik’s self-absorption and dark mien, presented in styles that are difficult to classify, though she is generally placed among the literary Surrealists (unconscious motivation, dream analysis), with a current of Romanticism (inner world, feelings, emotions). Like her noteworthy visual art, however, Pizarnik’s poetry demonstrates an affinity to Expressionism’s emphasis upon emotion, exaggeration, anti-realism, and psychological reality. It was also an important movement in the fine arts in Argentina during the 1960s, according to Edward Lucie-Smith (Thames & Hudson, 2004). It is not clear to me why Pizarnik switched from literary studies to painting and then to writing; however, an online source suggested that she considered one of her teachers—“pre-Surrealist” Giorgio de Chirico— to be a poor artist, and therefore possibly a source of disillusionment for the young student.

Argentina has the highest per capita number of psychoanalysts in the world, and one online report is titled, “Almost everyone in Buenos Aires is in therapy.” In addition, Argentina has high rates of depression and suicide. Pizarnik wrote in this psychosocial milieu, combined with a political context characterized by authoritarianism and military dictatorship. Although Pizarnik was a lesbian (or more probably bisexual) the scholar David William Foster pointed out that, “Her poems reveal only scant same-sex markers,” a characteristic that Foster attributed to the need to remain conventional under repressive regimes. On the other hand, a 2015 article by journalist and editor Emily Cooke demonstrates that, in letters to her analyst, León Ostrov, to whom The Last Innocence is dedicated, Pizarnik spoke openly, even flirtatiously, about her sexual attractions and fantasies (especially in Letter #10 dated 12/27/1960) and that she was consciously aware that she (and, he?) had entered the Freudian stage of “transference,” where unconscious sexual motivations transfer from patient to therapist and vice versa.

Indeed, the letters discussed by Cooke suggest to me that Pizarnik’s correspondence to Ostrov may have been manipulative, though, to what end? The letters leave the impression of a playful girl, and Enrique Vila-Matas, writing in Lit Hub in 2016, states, “The dark force of her Immaturity produces an irresistible attraction,” different from today’s “academic lyric poetry.” Pizarnik had a history of rebelling against the academic establishment, a characteristic that she shared with the Expressionists. But The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures, collections written before her residence in Paris (1960-1964), has more affinities to Surrealism as compositions representing the poet’s unconscious psychological states of being and deep motivational drives (e.g., epigraph poem).

Vila-Matas refers to Pizarnik’s story as “an unstoppable myth,” and much has been written about the themes of childhood, not-belonging, woman-as-hostage, and silence in her oeuvre. In 2006, scholar Susana Chávez-Silverman referred to the poet’s “complex textual self” expressed in “a variety of…voices”—dolls, little girls, “automata,” animals, the wind, etc. Pizarnik’s writing has often been compared to that of Silvina Ocampo, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath—Ocampo because of the tendency to “decouple emotion and action”: “…a dead bird / is flying toward despair / in the midst of music / when witches and flowers / cut the hand of the mist. / A dead bird called blue.” (49); the other two poets because of an emphasis upon death, dying, and interiority: “…there is something that tears the skin, / a blind fury / running through my veins.” (21).

In a 2019 Bookforum article, Cooke discussed Plath’s letters to her (female) therapist, showing the poet to be supplicatory, demanding, desperate for attention and aid, and, in the words of poet Vijay Seshardri, “psychologically sensitive.” While Pizarnik’s letters to Ostrov are clearly attention-seeking and, possibly, unconscious cris de coeur, she performs her writing with vigor and feigned or exaggerated self-confidence rather than Plath-like neurasthenia. Nonetheless, some psychologists speak of the “Sylvia Plath effect”—the purported association between creativity and mental illness. Indeed, following an American Psychological Association article, Aristotle wrote “that eminent philosophers, politicians, poets, and artists all have tendencies toward ‘melancholia.’” It is a simple point to observe that Pizarnik’s persona is consistent with the Plath effect; however, unless I am mistaken, the validity of the hypothesis is controversial among psychologists and feminists—open to interpretation, gendered, and lacking hard evidence.

In a recent New Yorker interview between editor Kevin Young and Seshadri, Plath was discussed in terms of several traits, some applying readily to Pizarnik. For example, in contrast to the classicism of Elizabeth Bishop, Seshadri pointed out that Plath’s writing is “absolutely individuated—it’s very hard to see Plath as an exemplar of anything but her own situation and condition.” One might consider this characteristic to be an artistic limitation; however, both Plath and Pizarnik have proven to have lasting popularity, particularly among women and the young, raising issues of “gendered and sexualized” self/ other contrasts as well as spectors of “power and powerlessness,” topics discussed in numerous scholarly and critical papers available online. Seshadri goes on to point out that both Bishop and Plath wrote poetry that communicates “wildness” and animality, also features of Pizarnik’s writing as noted above.

To speak of self/other raises questions about “alterity,” a topic fundamental to the Lacanian psychoanalytical traditions in Argentina. For Lacan, the Other is the subject—symbolically and metaphorically, and the role of the Other is to mediate its relation to the unique, “individuated” subject in a dialectical manner. Thus, Pizarnik’s “you” may be understood to be herself: “this dismal obsession with living / this distant madness of living / it’s dragging you down alejandra don’t deny it” (17), suggesting a circular, internal, “individuated” relationship of the poet to the environment that is, presumably, unconscious– “I must go / but on you go, traveller!”(25). Perhaps this characterization of Plath and Pizarnik relies too heavily upon a conceptual framework implying narcissism; however, more than one scholar has interpreted Pizarnik’s self-absorption in this manner (see, for example, Stephen Gregory, 1997, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 74). To speak of self/other or subject/object incorporates another of Lacan’s essential ideas—“mirroring.” the process of objectifying the Ego, typifying “an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image”: “alejandra alejandra / beneath I am me / alejandra” (29). Pizarnik entered psychoanalysis at a relatively young age, demonstrating a precocious grasp of its canon in letters to Ostrov; thus, authentic and accurate critical scrutiny of her oeuvre must include evaluations of Lacanian psychoanalysis on her state of mind, behavior, socio-economic-political contexts, values, attitudes, opinions, and writing.

Vijay Seshadri noted that Plath’s poems are “not just held together by form.” Similarly, Pizarnik’s compositions rely not only upon innovative uses of lineation, punctuation, and other grammatical conventions, but also upon complex semantic, imagistic, and musical features transmitting powerful emotional content open to multiple interpretations, including possibilities for identification—no doubt major determinants of Pizarnik’s appeal and endurance, particularly for women and young adults. Cecilia Rossi’s sensitive translations will widen Pizarnik’s readership and contribute to the increasingly common recovery projects of female writers and visual artists forgotten, lost, passed over, overpowered, or dismissed. Too many of these women lived or died tragically; the least we can do is to honor their work.

 

*Borinsky Alicia. Alejandra Pizarnik: the self and its impossible landscapes. pp 291-302 in Marjorie Agosín, Ed. A dream of light & shadow: portraits of Latin American women writers. (1995) University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

 

—

Clara B. Jones is a knowledge worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is the author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal (Gauss PDF, 2019). Clara also conducts research on experimental literature and art & technology.

[NEW NONFICTION] The Dead Psychologist

Posted on by

BY AMANDA OLIVER

__

I’m using a dead psychologist’s pen in a dead psychologist’s house full of dead psychologist’s books and yes, it smells like an old man.

Or dead air, or cooked food aromas that have hung out in the rafters too long, or just a closed-up house at high elevation. It could be comforting, could be warm and familiar, if I knew him. But he is a stranger. But he is dead. But the house is free and his children are so generous to let me use it for two weeks. The floors are real wood and real rock and lush carpet. The bed has memory foam and the couch has a plaid pattern and there are glass roosters, of all sizes, everywhere (everywhere, everywhere). The bedroom has a bay window. The living room has a fireplace and massive television with surround sound. There are games in a closet, there are plush towels in a hope chest, there are family photos on the fridge, there are menorahs.

The ink of the dead man’s pen isn’t working. I’m carving lines into the pages of books I’m reading with it anyway. Hoping that leaves enough of an imprint that I can find it later when I need it.

His children have left this house like a shrine to him. In his den, among books like TREATMENT OF THE OBSESSIVE PERSONALITY and THE OBSESSIVE PERSONALITY and THE EGO AND ITS DEFENSES, is his checkbook. The last check he wrote was to the IRS for $1,079 on 3/20, year unmarked. The check before that was to AT&T for $43.65 on 3/17, year unmarked.

Can you invade a dead person’s privacy?

 

I am in the middle of writing a book. One that requires full sentences and a better version of myself that I do possess, but I possess it like a ghost, which is to say it feels like haunting, like lingering around too long in a place I maybe don’t belong, using words I’m not quite sure of.

Most houses are dead people’s houses, I guess.

This house does not feel haunted, but, somehow, my writing does.

My own psychologist’s name is Suzanne and she has worked with me for eight years. Says things like, “You deserve this” and “Do you think you could ever forgive your brother? Do you think you could ever forgive yourself?” and of course I do and of course I could, but will I?

I’m carving lines with the dead psychologist’s dead pen under words like “he craves a family, a neat nest of human bowls” and I wish that I could unwant anyone. I wish I knew how to satisfy a craving for a person who isn’t here anymore. Isn’t dead, but is still, incredibly, a ghost.

There are mugs full of pens, mugs that say things like ZABAR’S, a gourmet emporium in New York City with A Mezzanine that Has Everything For the Kitchen and Home and they remind me that the dead psychologist had a full and well-traveled life in addition to what seemed to be a successful therapy practice.

I don’t want to discover that none of the pens work, that all of the pens are dead, so I don’t try another one from the mugs.

On page 62 of the book I’m reading, the pen miraculously starts working again and I draw a blue arrow at the words: “The houseplants will appear to have chosen sides. Some will thrust stems at you like angry limbs. They will seem to caw like crows. Others will simply sag.” I have killed more houseplants than I can count on both of my hands. When I moved from D.C. to Southern California I tried to mail six plants in a package to myself. When they arrived, they were, inevitably, dead.

I am constantly doing this. Trying to make things live longer than they want to with me.

What would the dead psychologist say?

Which book would he read after meeting with me?

How much would he charge me for the favor of telling me what’s wrong?

Do we think the dead psychologist had a favorite patient?

I am always trying to be someone’s favorite. The dentist, the barista, the classmate, the coworker. I want everyone to like me. Tucked away in this house at 5,678 feet above sea level there is no one to make like me.

Two trucks pulled over outside of the house windows earlier and I heard a man and a woman yelling from their windows.

“Why can’t we just get lunch some time?”

“I have a husband.”

“What about everything I did for you?”

“I have a husband.”

I do not have a husband. I do not have a boyfriend or a suitor or a crush or an affair or a desire to let anyone touch me. I do not have the feelings of a significant other to worry about. I have freedom that some people would kill for and I’m not sure how much I want it.

If these walls could talk would they tell me I should let someone in for once? Can therapy occur through osmosis, like, if I sit in the psychologist’s office chair? Can therapy occur through death? If I touch and eat and sleep and write in one of the last places it was life?

On my fourth and fifth nights here my electric toothbrush turns on in the middle of night and wakes me up. I press the button to turn it off and it stays off for the rest of the night. This is not the thing I wanted to haunt me, or, I am totally unclear on what this message means and who it comes from. Is it the dead psychologist? Is he worried about my teeth?

Nightmares about losing your teeth are supposedly about feelings of powerlessness and loss of control. I have them all the time, but I haven’t had them here.

Have I gained back some power?

Is the dead psychologist trying to tell me to keep going?

I would like some answers, dead psychologist.

Do you have them?

Can I keep them?

 

__

AMANDA OLIVER is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Times, Vox, and more. She is currently at work on a book about being a librarian. She is @aelaineo across social media.

NOT DEAD YET: An interview with Hadley Moore

Posted on by

(Autumn House Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY CAROL SMALLWOOD

__

Not Dead Yet, winner of the 2018 Fiction Prize at Autumn House Press, studies the uncertainties of loss, turning a gaze toward the often-silenced voices of the infirm, elderly, and adolescent. Rich in humor and honesty, Hadley Moore’s debut collection of short stories presents a contemporary set of narratives from a lush cast of characters. We find the protagonists of her stories tenderly revealing their pain after the loss of loved ones and coping with the voids left by the passing of youth, happiness, and fulfillment. ~Autumn House Press

Carol Smallwood: Not Dead Yet has contemporary characters dealing squarely with universal problems. Which of the characters did you find the easiest to write about? How long did it take to complete the collection?

Hadley Moore: I say this all the time, but it is true: the process is so mysterious. For me, it isn’t so much that certain characters are easier or harder to write as that whole stories are. I can look at the table of contents of this book and remember what it was like to draft and revise each story—which I wrote relatively quickly; which went through multiple revisions, sometimes in fits and starts over years; which I thought I might never finish—but I can’t tell you why. The process is likely determined by a combination of how well-formed the idea was to begin with, whether I received useful feedback from a reader on an early draft, how much uninterrupted time I had to work on it, and many other factors related to all the as-yet-unknown ways our brains operate. I just have to accept that when I start a new project there isn’t any way to know how it will go.

This book took about ten years to complete, during which time I also focused on other work. Each story felt like a discreet project, and it didn’t occur to me until I had most of them drafted that I might be heading toward a full collection.

CS: Do you write poetry or nonfiction? When did you begin to write character-centered fiction?

HM: I admire poetry but I don’t write it; everything that comes out of me is a sentence. And if I have an urge to write nonfiction, it’s usually about fiction books or fiction writing, but I haven’t published an essay in years. All of this is to say fiction is my literary home.

In my early twenties, I started dabbling in essays, then I got an MS in journalism, and it was a few years after that that I finally decided to try fiction. I was twenty-nine when I started my master of fine arts (MFA) program.

CS: You shared in an interview with Midwestern Gothic: “There’s an austerity to the Midwest that doesn’t lend itself to self-promotion.” Can you say more about that?

HM: This was in response to a question about why there isn’t so much acknowledgment of a regional school of writing of the Midwest as there is of, say, the West or the South. I don’t have a comprehensive answer, but I do think it has something to do with the unassuming nature of (at least parts of) the Midwest. That’s a stereotype and a sweeping generalization, but there are certainly aspects of truth to it.

CS: How do you manage to include humor, even absurdity, in difficult situations?

HM: It’s just the way my brain works! Not everything I write is funny, but much of it has an element of gallows humor. It’s something that presents itself early in drafting, as part of the tone and a character’s situation or worldview. I like to say my life’s motto is “Laugh or slit your wrists,” which I realize can come off as both overly dark and also flippant, but life is hard. You have to laugh at it.

CS: Do you find male characters more challenging to delineate?

HM: No. I don’t think we’re so different, really, in what motivates us and what we obsess over and what the stakes are in our lives.

CS: In what magazines has your work appeared?

HM: Many literary journals: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, the Indiana Review, and others. Many of these are housed in and receive support from universities. I keep an updated list on my website.

CS: What is your literary training, background?

HM: I earned my MFA from the wonderful Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where my teachers were Maud Casey, CJ Hribal, Erin McGraw, Michael Parker, and Steven Schwartz. They were all excellent. I was very lucky.

I also participated in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program with the writer Christine Sneed, who has been so generous and encouraging.

CS: What are you working on now and what advice can you share with those wanting to be published?

HM: I’d like to find a home for a novel manuscript I’ve revised several times, and my current project is shaping up to be thematically linked stories about the assassinations of the 1960s.

Persistence is the key. Writing has to be work you would do no matter what. Publishing ambition is great, but artistic ambition must precede it.

CS: Where can readers learn more about your work?

HM: My website is www.hadleymoore.net, and I very recently got on Twitter @HadleyMoore10.

 

HADLEY MOORE’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Witness, Amazon’s Day One, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the revived december, the Indiana Review, Anomaly, Quarter After Eight, Confrontation, The Drum, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She is an alumna of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives near Kalamazoo, Michigan.

 

__

CAROL SMALLWOOD is a literary reader, judge, and interviewer. Her most recent book is Patterns: Moments in Time (Word Poetry, 2019)

[NEW FICTION] Saint Lorna

Posted on by

BY BRIAN ALESSANDRO

—

AT FIRST, SHE HESITATED TO CLICK ON THE LINK. As a rule, Lorna deleted emails from unknown senders, though few ever made it past her spam filter. She felt safe opening this one. The subject line read “Dr. Truman-Hall, I am NOT a Robot! Please read me! EOM.”

Lorna clicked the embedded URL, a YouTube destination, and watched herself give a lecture from two days ago. She recalled that it was the day she’d slipped up and gone on a rant in her Gendering Culture class. She had discussed the myth of rape, about how there were parts of the violation that could be construed as desirable (“I mean, who doesn’t like a show of strength?” she’d said), the complicity of females in their own degradation, the “problem” with gay and effeminate men, and the sovereignty of heterosexual masculinity. She had held these views for years and written about them in numerous articles and books, but pushback had historically been confined to civil discourse between academics, lively and respectful debates in university auditoriums. Her new book, The Wanton Feminine, forthcoming in a few months from Dowling House, her most high-profile publisher, would set the record straight.

The clip had only been posted a day ago, but already yielded four hundred and twenty thousand views and eighty-seven thousand comments, almost all of which excoriated Lorna. Some even demanded a live-streamed suicide.

“Though I consider myself a progressive, my gripe with the left is that they absent things like common sense, basic biology, and ancient history.” Lorna watched herself address the students in the five-minute clip. “Girls need to smarten up and start acknowledging human nature—and especially male nature—as something concrete, not theoretical or elastic. Not something that will bend to the whims of political correctness. The brain has a tendency to mistake pursuit for desire, but that’s not entirely what I’m talking about here. I do believe that we’re built this way on an evolutionary level to perpetuate the species, though. It follows that those alpha men who effectuate change and keep the world spinning forward are also inclined to conquer sexually. Without beta permission, without omega timidity. They are biologically pushed to spread their seed. To propagate. Shaming those men into believing that there’s something wrong with that impulse will surely extinguish their flames. The constructive fires that build cities and cure diseases and produce great art. Women are neurologically wired to accept the conquest because they know on some unconscious level that they’re welcoming in an alpha seed and thereby helping civilization advance. And for the last time, please stop writing about the fluidity of gender in your papers. Gender is not fluid. It’s as fixed as a tumor or a clogged artery.”

NOW Lorna looked around her austere office and wondered if she’d been playing the clip too loud, if anyone in the hall could have heard it. She lowered the volume and put on closed captioning for the duration of the video as she searched her memory for which students might have had his or her phone out during class. As there were over eighty students in attendance, the clandestine recorder was as much a mystery as the anonymous sender of the email.

 

LORNA WEATHERED THE STARES AND SNEERS with admirable indifference as she walked across campus. The muffled comments and audible hisses were more impactful—how she loathed this neologism or more precisely the back-formation of the word into an adjective— blows to withstand. CUNY Merkin’s faculty and students were nothing if not up on their viral video sensations. And all the chatter that would follow. Multiple Twitter storms and FaceBook fusillades erupted. She had happened upon them after closing the YouTube video and researching the national witch hunt playing out online. It all left her dazzled. She almost chimed in but decided she’d better not.

Even the barista at her favorite café across the street was awkward when handing her the receipt. She’d been an affable young woman, a graduate student who was fond of Lorna’s work and conversation, if not tips. Her nametag read “Sam,” but Lorna always thought she looked more like a Sue. The young woman flashed a half-smile and busily moved on to the next customer waiting in line, eyeballing Lorna with unease, if not impoliteness. Were so many people really that plugged into YouTube? It’s not as if the clip had been broadcast on any of the major networks or 24-hour news channels. Not yet, anyway.

A group of protestors, politically-active doctoral candidates that Lorna had recognized from past colloquia, had gathered at Merkin’s main entrance and held placards that read “No Room for Hate Speech!” and “Beware Traitors Infiltrating from Within!” and “Stop the Sexists!” and “#MeToo is NOT a Passing Fad!” and “Toxic Masculinity is a Cloak That Even Women Can Don!” They shouted their slogans with theatrical brio.

Lorna sipped her hot black coffee and hadn’t realized that the demonstrations had been organized in her honor, even though they’d co-opted one of her phrases—donning the masculine cloak. It became clear that she was the butt of the joke—that’s what this whole farce was, after all, a joke— when one of the protestors saw her and began hissing. The others followed suit. Lorna turned away, red face and wide-eyed, and brushed past them, spilling some of her coffee on her pants and scuffing the side of her shoe on the base of a nearby concrete planter.

 

CONSTANCE DE LA ROSA, the chair of the cultural studies department, entered Lorna’s office with authority. Closing in on sixty-five, Constance was breathless, if not flush, by having made the urgent visit. As if she had run up the stairs from her office three floors below.

Lorna, obfuscating any signs of annoyance, looked at her. “Constance?”

“Are you kidding me with all this?” Constance spoke in a smooth, unnecessarily breathy purr. The kind of feminine, neither sexy nor expedient, that always got on Lorna’s nerves.

“What?” said Lorna, slouching.

Constance, her silver-black hair coming slowly undone from its bun, paced with a menacing majesty. “That video, Lorna—let’s get right to it, you know the one I mean—the one that’s been all over social media all morning. It’s going to cause some trouble. It is causing trouble!”

Lorna stood, began watering her numerous succulents, and nodded, absorbing Constance’s admonishment. “I didn’t’ know I was being recorded, Constance.”

“That’s beside the point. The things you were saying shouldn’t have been said in the first place! The department doesn’t need that kind of attention. Not in this climate.”

“The department doesn’t? Or the university doesn’t?”

Constance’s cheeks bunched when she winced. “What difference does it make? The department is the university!”

Lorna continued moving around her office with the pitcher. The plants were thirsty. “Oh, an honest and direct answer. I like that!”

Constance hurried after her. “We don’t support your views, Lorna. Not on this one.”

Lorna stopped again. “What’s the problem, exactly, Constance? What’s so threatening about—”

“You can’t be serious asking me that? What you’ve said about women and rape and gay people … it’s just downright bullying, Lorna. And frankly bigotry.”

Lorna’s top lip curled into a livid smirk. “The hypocrisy is stomach-turning.”

“There’s no hypocrisy!”

“Constance …”

“And we won’t even get into how you believe women secretly desire being oppressed within patriarchal systems. From that ludicrous article you had published last month! The Atlantic used to have standards—”

“I never said they desire being oppressed. I said they long to be named, designated: ‘Whore.’ ‘Mother.’ ‘Loose.’ ‘Frigid.’ Women are like all other people. They require leadership.”

“And that appalling thing you wrote about a woman’s worth measured by how much they’re willing to –”

“Look, these kids spend upwards of seventy-five thousand dollars a year on a liberal education, to think freely, to expand their scope, and yet you’re prepared to deny their educators the right to think liberally, to speak freely! It’s the exact definition of hypocrisy, Dr. De La Rosa!”

Constance gathered herself, took in a deep, hearty breath worthy of a master vinyasa yogi, and spoke softly, slowly with eyelids firmly half-mast. “And Slate Review just published an essay denouncing you. They criticized Merkin for keeping you on staff. They say we’re complicit. Aiding and abetting a criminal.”

Lorna scoffed.

“And it’s had almost two hundred thousand hits already, Lorna. It was just released this afternoon.”

Lorna sobered up. Retrieved her stoic mask. “Clearly, my words have been taken out of context and distorted. The Wanton Feminine will be out in a few months. I’ll be touring with the book and I’ll be able to clear up all the confusion.”

Constance shook her head, her eyes heavier than before. “We’re working on having the video taken down, but as far as the article … it doesn’t help and now in light of what you said in class … We can’t have it. Write a retraction.”

“I won’t do that.”

“Then you’re alone. The department and the president will send editorials of their own to The Times distancing ourselves from your views. And from you, Lorna.”

Lorna pondered the threat with a demonstrative gusto. She shrugged. “I’m tenured. And need to grade papers.”

Constance left. Lorna watched the YouTube video three more times, counting the increasing number of hits with each viewing.

 

LORNA’S EIGHTY-FOUR PUPILS LISTENED with a rapt attentiveness. Their tacit enthusiasm would electrify Merkin’s largest lecture hall. Or so she had relished believing. She got off on the energy that her seminars had elicited in undergraduates, apparently. Prided herself on telling the kind of truth missing from contemporary academia: that of the ugly, offensive variety. She owned her ugliness. Cuddled her offensiveness. Cultural studies as a subject was still relatively new and students were eager to learn as much critical theory as possible if for no other reason than to show off their creative connections between disciplines and earth-shattering insights at cocktail parties.

She should have made an attempt to move on and away from the YouTube clip, but the cold war brewing between her pupils, ghoulishly bathed in the blue-white glow of laptop screens, and herself was a battle from which she’d not shrink. Though the circumstances couldn’t be more awkward, Lorna would make the video the centerpiece of today’s Gendering Culture class. And it being a lecture, there’d be fewer opportunities for talkback or scrutiny.

“Good afternoon. You have by now all seen this YouTube clip of my lecture last week, which has been circulating on social media, I’m sure? You were all at that session.” Lorna paused with a delightful smile and gay eyes. “And one of you even recorded it.”

Some students shifted in their seats, others leered, ready for an apology or a confession or a gloriously well-executed excuse

“What I said wasn’t new. I’ve been writing about it for the past twenty years. You’ve all had time to read my book, The Civilized Masculine: Unnecessary Crisis in The Age of Traumatized Selfhood and should know my positions by now. None of this was done for shock value. Or to hurt anymore.”

A male student, black, preppy, bespectacled, and likely a senior based on his age, raised his hand but began speaking before Lorna had a chance to call on him. “You really think that women ask for rape?”

Lorna sighed and hunched a bit, approximated well the mien of an embattled woman. “I see my comments were taken out of context. Tragically, you all weren’t able to detect the nuance and subtext of my delivery. If only you had been keeping up with the reading, you’d have been able to better understand what I meant.”

Lorna caught them, the faces, the expressions made by newly educated kids who liked to prove street credibility by schooling others, usually older and in modes of power, like parents or employers or teachers. They rolled eyes and shrugged shoulders and curled lips into mocking smirks.

Actually, she could never be sure if their sneers were for her or her intended targets.

“So, then, a summary.” Lorna reviewed her book, thumbed through the dog-eared pages, then put it down. “Listen, I’m less interested in dwelling on the role of women in all of this. The so-called victims or ‘receptacles.’ They’ll get their hearing in my new book, The Wanton Feminine, coming in a few months. No, no. We’d be better served understanding the so-called perpetrators, the ‘violators.’ Men. When scrutinizing the behavior patterns and reactions exhibited by males in today’s society one is wise to consider the archetypal roots found in male icons of centuries and millennia past. Ramses II. Alexander the Great. Caesar Augustus. Henry VIII. Napoleon. King Herod. King Solomon. Hitler. Though their pride ultimately led them to ruin, it also fueled a quest for greatness, and here we are after all this time still discussing their indubitable glories.”

Some of the students, those who weren’t busy muttering foul sentiments under their breath, nodded and jotted notes or punched keys. They annotated copies of her article. They wrote immediate responses, rebuttals. They logged their triggers.

“Envy between even heterosexual males spawns a strange desire. The second-fiddle beta or lowest-rung omega endeavors not to just steal the alpha’s place, but to supplant the alpha himself! To be him. Or defeat him. This odd craving generates a disruption in the beta’s or omega’s ego. The disrupted ego occasions bizarre role plays, toxic theater, and dangerous charades. The said role plays, theater, and charades foster varying humiliations. Their humiliations cause carnage. The tools of their combat and disaster are now voyeuristic, judgmental bystanders, ever-recording cellphone cameras, and an omniscient internet. Before, it was a coliseum. The envy cuts deep. A need to assert and prove one’s self arises. Women, caught in between, become collateral damage. Remarkable this masculine toxicity.”

Some of the young students sniggered but admitted uneasy truths, anyway. Others shifted again with a detectable agitation. The note-taking and keyboard clacking persisted. Lorna paused for a dramatic beat, seductively, sweetly eyeballing the front row, all of whom looked up at her with a dense air of uneasiness. She diffused with a gentle disposition. Maternal, soothing.

“Men, not broadly mankind, but straight men specifically, are prone to self-immolation. They are ruled by the command to conquer and create. When they find themselves unable to do either they choose destruction and death over surrender and submission. And there always remains one obstacle too insurmountable to fathom for the great heroes of history, be it India for the Macedonian emperor or Waterloo for the French dwarf. All supreme men are hungry dogs seeking domination. And, yes, I realize that Alexander was bi.”

Lorna felt the ions shift in the lecture hall, the eagerness to share thoughts and push back against theories that didn’t sit well was in the dense, uneasy air. And yet she was capable of making the suspense linger. She would push the lesson and her students’ nerves further. The tension was necessary as it provoked concentration and remembrance; she was a professor who demanded absolute concentration and complete remembrance.

These lectures were her art and she would somehow reclaim that goddamn, motherfucking YouTube video.

“It takes literal balls to build a culture. The bold push from the testes produces civilization and advancement. My blend of feminism permits the worship of men who have made the world their own and those few women who have … donned the masculine cloak … and done so for themselves: Cleopatra, Elizabeth I and even her ruthless half-sister Mary, Victoria, Thatcher, Clinton. Essentialism has its limits as a philosophy. As a science, it is an experiment intended for ceaseless empirical research.”

Whereas it had been the more delicate men who were most vocal in their braying at her pronouncements up until this point, the women in the room had now suddenly found themselves jeering their teacher’s pseudo-defense. Lorna enjoyed this the most. To trouble young girls, to upend their new, ill-informed feminism, to chip away at the patina of their self-congratulatory activism and performative outrage. But still, she worked toward disarming with a loving glow.

Several female students were now shaking their heads and had crossed their arms, silently and in solidarity refusing to take notes, protesting any more propaganda from this self-loathing woman. Lorna’s calculations were not off; by her estimates two-thirds of the whole class will have joined them by the time her session was up.

“Several volumes of this epic could be filled with the data amassed on the transformations undergone by the alpha and his beta. And their omega. Their change is seemingly ineluctable. It must be a demoralizing revelation indeed when these men find out that they are unable to control their own personalities, and that they had seized control of them like angry poltergeists, intent on either breaking them or recreating them.”

Lorna could tell at this point that several of her scrawnier, meek pupils were searching the auditorium for the jocks, the models, the physically superior specimens. The inadequacies screamed. The jocks, the models themselves basked in the silent adulation. The bitter atoms between the alphas and betas and omegas caused the female students to tingle in all the appropriate places. Lorna tingled, too.

“Finding comparisons between the ‘tournaments’ held by the competing men and idolatry and the ancient gods requires no leap of faith. Even as the beta and omega succumb wholeheartedly to nihilism and even anarchy in their self-loathing-fueled destruction. He who shirked the dictates of logic and abided by the commands of delusion. Fastidiously, and with fetishistic relish, the beta and the omega work toward the solution to his problem: debilitating self-doubt in the shadow of their alpha.”

The small, quiet, bookish boys—the first to have been audible in their disagreement— had begun to rock back and forth in their seats, their knuckles white, their cheeks flush. Lorna imagined that the jocks, the models were by now fluffing their feathers, their tumescence likely apparent had she looked closer. She couldn’t be sure who’d recorded her, but she could manage the temperature in the room. And when tactical, quiet her judges with congeniality.

“The lazy analysis suggests that men are inherently sadistic and women masochistic. This is one of life’s great fallacies. Men, not women, are the true masochists as their failure is inevitable and the suffering their conceit is destined to afford them will reveal itself as the humiliation for which they implicitly thirst. For more on this see my previous examination of self-importance, Theater of Violent Happiness published in 2010 by Lakehouse Ltd.”

The females in the classroom scribbled with personal grudges. Lorna wondered what criticisms they were inventorying, what caricatures of her they were drawing, what phallic symbols they were sketching. She made eye contact with one student, an East Asian girl whose expression ambiguously bordered on scorn, or maybe rapt attentiveness. Lorna averted her eyes, set them on her notes.

 

“Please understand this. The beta and the omega do not pine for success or power in the conventional Western sense. He seeks no fame or grandeur for their own sake. Rather, he is after a deeper-dwelling fish. He plumbs depths, leagues-beneath the surface. He fights murderously for self-acceptance. His introspection is so focused and pointed that one would feel a sense of shame when in proximity, first for themselves for not digging as ardently, and then for him, for the beta and the omega, for doing so. A man of his time and at a certain age ought to turn his attention to others, elsewhere, outward. He should come to the cold realization that he and his contentment or sense of achievement or worth no longer matter. The alpha is so satisfied with who he has manifested into that self-reflection is to him a vain, pointless exercise.”

Lorna thought about her husband Risk and son Theo, and their designations. How would she rank them? Among the alphas? Certainly not. Though Risk would like to think of himself as worthy of the station. He was no omega. Beta, then. And what about Theo? Her son was firmly planted amid the omegas. The lowest. Her theories had originated as a reaction to her marriage. They were developed as a reaction to her son. Risk engendered an intolerance with faux, forced manliness, while Theo implanted an impatience with a complete disavowal of natural states.

A young female student—Hispanic, short, overweight, and starter stylish in pink and black plaid—raised her hand with a fiery ardor, waving a paperback novel in the air; she sighed irritably. “But wait!”

Lorna’s eyes rounded. She paused, clasped her hands, and stood with a cocked head and warm smile like an unthreatening grandma. “Yes, my dear?”

“What about what Herman Hesse wrote in Narcissus and Goldmund? We’re reading it now in our German literature class,” said the girl, thumbing through the book to a dog-eared page. “Here. ‘We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.’ Why does there have to always be a pissing contest?”

“Well, Hesse meant well as a permissive fiction writer, but that’s really all it is. Fiction. Also, his blend of pseudo-spirituality is to blame for this awful wave of nonsensical New Age pop psychology. He was a fraud and a weakling, I’m afraid. A narcissistic coward.”

The ardent student looked down and closed her copy of Hesse’s novel. This business of analyzing student psychology in the moment of intellectual delivery was a tricky affair. It had never thrown Lorna before, but these days, what with the video burning down her reputation, the steel had run from her nerves, and she was becoming distracted and driven off course. She redirected her eyes once again and fixed on a crack in the wall, found comfort in its inevitability.

Lesser critical theorists—typical critical theorists—relied solely on the narrow and limited tradition of the cultural Marxists. It’s all magical thinking, not honest, comprehensive life. Lorna couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy.

A thin-boned boy swaddled in oversized sweaters and pants, clashing patterns, and uncombed hair, twitchy and bothered, raised his hand and began to sweat. Lorna nodded in his direction.

When the thin boy spoke, it was with shallow breaths: “But, I think these are false equivalencies: gay men, beta and omega. Straight men, alpha. Feminine behavior: beta and omega. Masculinity: alpha. I just … I think they’re … false!”

Lorna landed her grandmotherly posturing with a kindly smile. “Oh, but I don’t think so, young man. I just believe that gay men, effeminate men ought to resign themselves to their beta and omega statuses. They have their place in the culture, but it’s just not behind the wheel of the big ship, is all. And straight men must embrace and even protect their masculinity because it is the primary engine that drives civilization. It’s nothing to feel ashamed about. Don’t buy into this ridiculous new narrative that they’re selling you! Look, the Left produces victimhood, plain and simple! They require an oppressor and an oppressed in order for their industry to thrive. You, my sweet child, are not a victim.”

The boy had reminded Lorna of her son. It’s why she wasn’t moved by his trembles, pouting, and deep breathing.

Risk had been his most self-absorbed. Most childish in his pursuits. Playing at boyhood aspirations. And Theo was getting smaller by the day, shrinking into himself, into a cowed and embarrassing boy. They had failed her. She had failed them. Everyone broke contract.

“Family is a sort of a business, a corporation, in which matters of facilities and operations must be attended to. It is a concept that a leader must internalize to keep the institution running through supervision and execution of daily functions, accountability, and principles of growth and improvement. If the omega or beta is the manager of his company, the head of his household, he is remiss in his responsibilities and derelict of duty. And the employees, that is, the wife and child, duly suffer. A culture of criminal neglect and routine embarrassment is one that will not persist.”

Students grumbled to one another, the hall reverberating impatient hisses, as the session was almost over, and lunch was to be had. Lorna needed a strong finisher. She always ended her classes with a punch, something for the kiddies to mull over until the next session. Three hands were raised. She ignored them. Two students had already left early, probably to use the bathroom or smoke a cigarette. No matter, she had plenty of others to populate her captive audience.

“What barbaric grief—the episodes unfurled by the child, the child of the beta or omega, his own depraved public outreach, echoing that of his father. The inherited tendencies toward exhibitionism and self-defeat rear ugly heads. On parity with the tragic Greeks or saddest Shakespeare. And the wife—her own petty, spiteful journey away from kin and into sin. Astonishing, truly, how the dissolution of a perfectly normal and well-adjusted family is begotten by such infinitesimal insults and small, needy flashes of unwise pride. Consider Emerson and Thoreau. The transcendental way. Consider their grave admonishments. Not to stray too far from nature, God, the humble soul. Modest needs. They warned of disingenuousness, of flinging yourself too far from earth. The disconnected face unhappy ends. They fail at grace. Nature scolds them for their hubris. It’s a note worth taking.”

The students at this point had become lost in the maze Dr. Hall-Truman had built around them. Finding themselves in the middle of the labyrinth, the students turned and stared blankly at one another, waiting for a roadmap out, but Lorna had already packed up for the day. The lecture had ended, and she would leave no compass.

 

ODDLY, LORNA’S HUSBAND RISK TRUMAN had also melted down on a public stage. In a series of performances purposefully recorded for the whole world to consume. Because he was affluent, he could afford the endeavors. An investment banker at a leading hedge fund, Risk spent his way through it, first by funding a charter school network in the South Bronx and Harlem, then by hiring himself as a history teacher (to live out the fantasy of a common man and role model of wayward, impressionable, minority youth) and now he had begun to orchestrate team-building exercises that served as a cover for competitions between himself and the school’s younger, fitter, more attractive science teacher, Dominick Bonaventura. Risk shared his own YouTube channel with Lorna, so far consisting of only several videos, but each boasting thousands of views. She’d already told him about her own Internet stardom, but he dismissed it as a passing fad.

“The way these things work, darling, it’ll blow over before you know it, and it’s not like my channel where I made something, you know? This is just some punk student who’s too delicate a snowflake to handle the education you’re trying to give them. Plus, make this work for you! It’s. great PR! You have a new book coming out soon, right? You can’t pay for this kind of exposure! Use the hype!

Risk competed and strategized so impulsively it had become as natural as breathing.

“Who shot all of these?” asked Lorna, watching her husband first indoor rock climb in Washington Heights, then run an outdoor obstacle course in Upstate New York, then engage in a Muay Thai kickboxing session in Bushwick. In each video, Risk was both predatory and bested. His prey and eventual victor, the young Mr. Bonaventura, Risk’s junior by twenty years.

Risk positioned the laptop on a coffee table in the middle of the living room of their too-large Upper West Side apartment. “Darnell, he’s great with the camera, isn’t he?”

Had he not realized how petty and pathetic he was coming across in these clips? “I don’t understand, Risk? What are these for?”

“Just for fun, Lorna. God. Not everything has to be some symbol for something else.”

Lorna imagined these clips conflagrating, her husband becoming the poster boy for middle-aged men trying too hard to prove their manliness and failing. The insecurity was the stuff of legend, and Lorna would be sure to file it away for another essay. She sometimes wondered how closely her husband paid attention to her work if he knew she’d been all the while writing about him and men like him. Resenting that level of clumsy, ineffectual machismo.

He said, chillingly to Lorna: “Have you given any more thought to Spain?”

Risk’s next escapade, after acting the part of a teacher and businessman, was to pay his way into the bullfighting circles of Madrid and become a matador. It was an outrageous aspiration, but one he would pursue, anyway. He’d already contacted the most famous bullfighter in the country, Javier Alegria, who maintained a cordial relationship with him through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Perhaps now that he was being routinely defeated by his charismatic young colleague/ employee, and inexplicably—masochistically—sharing it with the consumptive world, Risk was ready to move on. If things got worse in her own virtual life, Lorna would have to move on, too.

Their son, Theo, “Thee Thee” to friends and in online video games, was a different animal, entirely. She knew he’d caught wind of her writings about feminine, queer men. Her son, being both feminine and queer, had stopped talking to her for months at a time whenever she’d publish a book or article or give a lecture on the subject. He’d felt like her lab rat, the thing she didn’t want but needed for the professional profile. Wife, mother, scholar. As a straight woman, it softened her. Made her accessible. All jobs now required a relatable narrative and a likable protagonist. Lorna could be likable. At least on paper.

“Since you’re YouTube famous now, mom, I guess it’s high time I share my channel with you!”

Had everyone in her family been a social media superstar?

Theo’s soft manner and voice, his pasty complexion, his lanky frame. All of it rankled Lorna, but she’d tried to be pleasant. Conceal her distaste for his manifestation. A child knows, though. Theo possessed an uncanny knack for picking up on his mother’s suppressed loathing

His video collection consisted of strangers taking nasty spills, dropping boxes, fumbling groceries, crashing bicycles, tumbling down staircases.

“What is this? Are they friends of yours? I don’t get it, Theo.”

“They’re just people, like, making asses of themselves. It’s all about public humiliation.”

“Well, why?”

She was asking him, her son, with his not completely masculine nickname. Thee thee

Theo looked at his mother as though she were simple. “Because … it’s funny.”

“Is it, though?”

Lorna looked at her son’s laptop and watched one of the videos. A twentysomething white yuppie in an expensive suit getting socked in the mouth while smoking a Cuban cigar in front of Trump Tower on 5th Avenue. The attacker was a homeless man, probably sixty or sixty-five-years old, and shorter than the victim. The assailant had to leap to connect with the gangly investment banker’s lofty jaw, knocking the cigar across the street and the target on his ass.

Lorna had wondered if Theo had paid these people to make fools of themselves or if he’d secretly orchestrated the accidents. An oil slick. A nail. A screw. Hidden twine. A drummed-up altercation. To what extent of sabotage was her son capable?

“Well, all these people seem to think so.” Theo pointed to the views and likes and comments. The numbers still fell short of her own. This was a competition that she had no interest in winning. “I mean, we can’t all be like you, Mom. Instant, overnight celebrity!”

Theo trundled back into his bedroom, a place of comic books, drawing pads, homoerotic cartoon characters sodomizing each other, nests of wires and gadgets and old cell phones and laptops, walls of rapidly outdated video game systems, classic comic books, superhero and horror Funko Pop figurines, caringly-framed posters of the drag queens Adore Delano, Sharon Needles, and Bianca Del Rio, vintage board games, and all the stuffed toys he’d held onto from his childhood. He was the spawn of a nationally vilified cultural studies professor and stunted investment banker living out boyhood fantasies, after all. Lorna should appreciate that much, he always thought; he might be a sissy but at least he was interesting.

AMID the Twitter storm and FaceBook fusillade that she’d periodically check in on, without commenting, and against her better judgement, Lorna, in bed on her iPhone, found two posts sticking to her, one from a college student in Chicago, a male, who wrote about her sermon: “The weak violently protect the powerful. For the poor, the rich, or in Dr. Hall-Truman’s case, for women—men, because there’s an aspiration to become such.” Another, a female high school student in Tucson, called her out in a post: “Social media raised me, not my parents. And it’s because of adults like you, I’m grateful for that!!!”

 

THE WALL CLOSEST TO LORNA’S DESK was plastered with images of men. Prime men. Primal men. Merciless leaders. Libidinal warriors. Even Russell Crowe in Gladiator and the strapping Spartans with the airbrushed abs in 300. The subjects weren’t erotic in nature however the emphasis was on physique and physicality. In fact, her entire outsized office was full of paintings, drawings, and photographs of powerful bodies in glorious, gorgeous postures. She reviewed a stack of synthesized alpha biographies. Her connections between ancient rulers and contemporary athletes prompted many in academia to compare her to Camille Paglia, someone she had known for a short while when she taught for a year at the University of Pennsylvania as a visiting professor soon after earning her doctorate.

Lorna’s notes on Sargon of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, Ghengis Khan, and Ramses II were as voluminous as her dossiers on Michael Jordan, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Roger Federer. Lorna was working toward building bridges between the men of their respective eras and the adoration and emulation they elicited in their followers. She considered modern male megastars to be on a parity with the supreme commanders of history.

Her peers in the department had once supported her views, knowing that it would help her forge a distinction in the field; cultural studies was messy and turbulent and those few whose hypotheses could deliver the zeitgeist in palpable sound bites tended to reap a good deal of attention, appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher. Judith Butler and Jordan Peterson had been recent “co-stars”.

It had been a week since the video leaked on YouTube. The faculty had since rescinded their initial encouragement.

“This bit goes too far, I think, dear.”

Geraldine was a mainstay at Merkin who was closing in on seventy and had earned her Ph.D. in the 1970s, a time when such grand accomplishments felt rarified and radical, especially for women. Her mentor was the eminent and still clandestine Julia Kristeva. Dr. Herzer’s writings on “the abject” mystified her graduate students and sickened her critics who thought that she was too fixated on notions of good and bad breasts, authoritarian and inconsistent parenting and the instability it engenders in the needy, avoidant children they raise.

Lorna stopped watering her succulents and turned to Geraldine. “Which?”

“Here,” said Geraldine, poking the text with the tip of her red pen. “You state all-too-assuredly that even the most accomplished women ought to revere men as the chief builders and managers. That all women need to support their constructions and influence.”

Lorna’s eyes sharpened. “How’s it too far, Geraldine?”

“Oh, Lorna, come on now, I know you value your provocations and polemics, but this is a bit much, no? Especially after the YouTube business. You know, our students complain to me. To us.”

Lorna continued watering the succulents. One, robust and virile in purple, took the water aggressively. She thought she heard it suck in the moisture. Everything thirsted.

“I mean, it’s one thing to criticize men for their compulsion to fight and quibble over penis size, but it’s quite another to suggest that women should worship at the altar of their narcissistic bravado.”

“Okay, Geraldine. I get it. This has nothing to do with the article. Nothing about my work has changed. This is about the video.”

Geraldine’s eyes narrowed. “The video, yes, and the murmur across campus of students who feel unsafe here because of what you’ve said. You’ve no idea the number who want to file a class-action lawsuit.”

Though her office was always the coldest in the wing, Lorna managed to chill Geraldine with her gaze more thoroughly than did the temperature. The artic atmosphere warmed considerably when the remainder of the cultural studies staff walked in ready for their monthly department meeting.

The men entered laughing. Thomas Chen was a short, sinewy Beijing exponent. Matthew Bowman, a ginger from Rhode Island whose years of sprinting left him with disproportionately large legs and an easy strut.

Myriam Farshadi, a twentysomething Persian from Tehran, who had modeled her way through graduate school in Los Angeles and had only recently relocated to New York for Merkin’s appointment, sheepishly filed in after them. She was hoping to make tenure within the next three years.

“Weird tension here today,” said Bowman, only twenty-eight and quicker with his tongue than with his brain. He’d done time at Harvard and then at Magdalene College in Cambridge, where debating was easy, fearless, and as natural as trained rowing on the Charles.

Geraldine bunched up her face in a mischievous smirk.

Lorna ignored the comment and instead reviewed her notes, the agenda for the meeting.

The staff assumed their jocularly fearsome circular seating formation. Oh, these people.

Dr. Chen said: “Your last paper, the one just published in Junk & Noise, was oddly confident in its assertions about homoerotic imperialism and role play, Dr. Truman-Hall.”

“Why was the confidence odd, Dr. Chen?”

Dr. Chen crossed his legs and spoke with a raised chin. “Well, there’s not been a sufficient amount of data collected, yet. It’s still just theoretical.”

Lorna sighed. “But that’s what we are. Theoreticians. Our work is rooted in observation and analysis. It’s also largely guesswork. Creative guesswork.”

Dr. Chen’s dismissive smile, marked by bushy inverted eyebrows and dimples, caused Lorna to reflexively sneer. “Dr. Truman-Hall … Lorna … Our students keep interrupting class to discuss the YouTube video … it’s been over a week and it’s not going away.”

Dr. Farshadi sighed and, a little bored, thumbed through her students’ research essays, which she had been grading before the meeting diverted her. These gatherings were always sullen and tense, not unlike a funerary repast, she thought. And it being the first since the social media bombshell, it was better to have work on hand for the sake of healthy distraction

Lorna took a breath before speaking. “It is the white elephant in the room today, isn’t it? I get it, I do. But, really, what do any of you want me to do about it? I was just doing my job. I have no interest in being that kind of a teacher, who watches her Ps and Qs, censors herself, pleases the students and their parents and the community and the stakeholders. If I wanted to become that kind of teacher, I wouldn’t have earned my fucking doctorate and I would have resigned myself to teaching high school or kindergarten! Do you have any idea how many emails and letters I’ve been receiving? People calling me a cunt and a bitch and a self-loathing woman, a gender traitor! A sexist and a misogynist? Do you?!”

Lorna was taken aback by how angry she’d become. It had crept up on her the more she talked, the more she thought about how useless and compromising the entire affair had been.

“And look!” she ventured on.

Lorna grabbed her laptop off her desk, smashed away nervously at the keys, and then spun the computer around for her staff to see the video playing on Vimeo:

Two suited women, both with close-cropped hair and chalky white skin, spoke chirpily about Lorna, the footage of the infamous video on mute in the background. It was MSNBC and the talking heads were self-satisfied in their tone and regal in their miens.

“She should be censured,” said one woman. “Merkin has a moral and ethical responsibility to patrol and discipline their own.”

“I think she’s a dangerous dinosaur who’s undermining the Democratic party,” said the other. “And in the end, she’ll just end up empowering the Republicans. This is exactly what they want.”

Lorna stopped the clip, put her laptop on the desk, and combed her hair back behind her ears. Her wide, handsome face, often with little makeup and dark eyes with thin lips, wasn’t completely feminine with her hair set back.

Geraldine fixed her stare on a Victorian weathervane and Colonial scale of justice, both patina laden, resting on a mantle close to Lorna’s desk. Her office was stately that way, thought Geraldine. Quintessential in its Ivy League trappings.

“This is what we’ve been saying, Lorna,” said Geraldine. “It’s becoming a bigger story and it’s not fair for us to have to bear the brunt as a department.”

“It’s not nice, the things I say, and I know that, but nice isn’t something I aspire to be. Right is. I am only interested in being right, Geraldine.”

Geraldine made a cartoonish, goofy face. A face that laughed at others, a face to be laughed at. “And do you really think you are with all of this?”

Lorna’s eyes widened in faux cheer. “Bowman, your ancestors were from England, right?”

Dr. Bowman’s grin caused him to redden. His powder blue eyes even sparkled. “English, through and through.”

Lorna nodded, played with her earring. “Chen, your family are Cantonese, though they moved to Beijing when you were in first grade, no?”

“Yes, that’s right. Though we went to Hong Kong probably once a month to visit family.”

That time her father caught her masturbating to a boxing match when she was fourteen. Mother had dismissed it as healthy. He was supposed to have been the more progressive of the two, but it was she who better understood the ways of a young woman’s impulses. What excited. What satisfied. She spared Lorna a discussion. Lorna would graduate to horror films and BDSM videos she’d find on gay websites by college. Popular, respectable teen girl and women’s magazines would never explore these impulses. They were proclivities that no one wanted to touch, consider, or watch.

Lorna stopped fidgeting with her earring and said to Bowman, as though they were faculty gathering friends: “They left, though, because they had trouble with England’s ethnic influence, right?”

Dr. Chen cleared his throat and mumbled when he spoke. “Even after the handover in ‘97, it still lingers. Like a stain.”

Bowman’s eyes narrowed as he chewed his cheek.

“Like a stain,” repeated Lorna. “What kind of a stain?”

Dr. Chen’s compact body with aged muscle seemed to grow bigger as his childlike face took on a hardened countenance. He chuckled and pretended to annotate an article.

Dr. Chen, into his chest: “They arrived in 1841. It was a long time, their stay. They had occupied for a long time, Lorna.”

Lorna tapped her pen softly against her bare left leg, slung over her right. “You’re aware of the emasculation campaign that some British soldiers decided to spearhead clandestinely, aren’t you?”

Dr. Bowman sat up, jaw clenched.

Dr. Chen frowned. “I’m not familiar, no.”

“Apparently, the young English soldiers of a small village outside of Hong Kong, I believe not far from Kowloon Bay, had decided that to make the Cantonese men easier to manage they’d have to break them first of their pride and pesky tendency toward self-defense.”

Dr. Bowman’s sat up awkwardly as his stomach tightened. On his knees, Dr. Chen’s fists balled.

“These young English soldiers would systematically pick out the strongest and most dominant men in the pack, the troublemakers, the agitators. Mostly fishermen or dock workers. Real brutes. And they would ritualistically rape them in front of the whole community. Shaming them. Feminizing them. Many committed suicide. Many others ran away. The British had their reign. As you said, Dr. Chen, it had lasted for one hundred and fifty-six years.”

Dr. Chen snarled and when he spoke it was with a big, wet lump in his throat. “Fucking Limey bastards.”

“Whoa there!” exclaimed Dr. Bowman who stood up on a nervy impulse, dropping his folder and notes to the floor.

Dr. Farshadi gasped and instinctively covered her breasts and closed her long tawny legs.

Red obscured Dr. Chen’s vision and he shook. “Piggish white people. I could go on!”

Dr. Bowman snapped out the epithet, and the word could not be unsaid. He knew he erred when he saw the faces of Dr. Farshadi and Geraldine, both of whom were wearing expressions of repulsion. But Dr. Bowman had only reacted and lost his sense of station, of place, of propriety.

Dr. Chen also snapped, but his explosion was not verbal. It was physical and before he realized what he was doing he had already leaped to his feet, thrown a knee in Dr. Bowman’s ribs, causing his pillar-like legs to crumble, another into his face, and was currently on top of him striking with a crazed repetition the boyish redhead’s swollen mouth, making it bleed.

Lorna’s desk had been knocked over, two of her plants were left smashed, and at least one chair-leg was cracked. But she didn’t care about any of that. In fact, she could barely contain her glow, the grin too bright to shade, and it shone on Dr. Chen, who was panting and revealed the faint outline of an erection when he stood. It shone too on Dr. Farshadi, who had a hand pressed against her right breast and another against her mons veneris.

Geraldine was breathless and flush, her hands out of view.

Nothing like this had ever happened, though Lorna had always hoped and meant it to. But it kept on happening, and delightedly Lorna wondered how’d she work it into her next book without condemning anyone at all. She thought of Plato’s reverence for the Olympians.

Dr. Bowman groaned and coughed up a tooth and some of his lunch as Dr. Chen adjusted his tumescence and the female professors endeavored to steady their breathing. Lorna’s inconvenient insights settled on the room’s queasy inhabitants with an uneasy weight. Though it hadn’t solved any problems, she was satisfied with the support of her thesis it had offered.

Then it was over, for now. It would prefigure future events, Lorna was certain.

 

THE NEXT FEW DAYS would bring about more Internet-triggered seismic spasms. It manifested next at home. Risk policed the bar and drank too much. Lorna was on the couch and replayed the events of the barbarism in her office. She’d thought about it often since the melee.

“So, it seems that the board has a problem with my behavior,” said Risk, lumbering over a series of wine traps, gripping a bottle of beer.

Lorna was on her second highball. “No kidding?”

“They took issue with how I conducted myself during the team-building challenges and, you know, that I videotaped it, put it online. Fucking shit. They think it reflects badly on me and as an extension on the network. Whatever. Small, mediocre …”

How he conducted himself: pulling Dominick’s ankle as he climbed the tall, plastic rock wall, causing him to dislocate a knee. Tackling him into poison ivy near West Point after he was clearly going to reach the finish line first. Kicking him in the balls during what had been a friendly Muay Thai sparing session. And then electing to upload all of these juvenile, violent shenanigans onto an internationally-accessible website.

“And the Remington Associates, they’re, uh, not happy either. So …”

“So, they’ve both let you go, then? Fired you?”

“Yeah, but not without a healthy severance … and then there’s our savings, right? I mean, we’re fine. Just fine. And this means that maybe we can seriously move forward with Spain.”

Move forward with Spain. As though it were wedding plans or a military campaign. Lorna hadn’t said too much more after his blasé pronouncements.

Why had she ever thought their lives were anything but contingency?  Once Spain had seemed like a romantic fling held at bay while they found themselves. They’d never used the phrase found themselves.  But that’s what they were doing because both of them were now completely lost. The city was already forgetting them.

She retreated into her home office, smaller than the one at Merkin by half, and checked her emails. The home office featured no plants, no posters of any Adonis or warrior. Just stacks of papers and shelves lined with books.

So many emails from former students and colleagues who wished to express their disfavor or support, scolding and sympathy.

Though at fifty-one she wasn’t all that old, Lorna was dazzled by how quickly the world had changed and how far behind it had left her. The new guard deemed her a relic of a primitive age. Not long ago her theories would be fodder for dinnertime discussion, stimulating classroom debate, and gentlemanly cross-examination in chambers of critical analysis. Now she was just labeled a cretin and a monster.

Multiple requests from legacy media, top brands wishing for interviews and profiles. Lorna would consider, but ultimately ignore the opportunities. She had no need to clear her name or clarify anything she’d said. The email from the publisher of The Wanton Feminine wouldn’t arrive for another week. It would remind her of the morality clause in her contract and cancel the publication of her book, citing “too-tempestuous social headwinds”. They’d allude to the Twitter storms, the FaceBook fusillades, and the coverage on the 24-hour news networks, excerpting the comments and posts, likes and emojis.

 

BUT she was surprised by how grateful she felt for the momentary attention, negative though it mostly was. So what if the suicide requests and insults had started to chip away at her? She was relevant, again. Perhaps it was time to leave. Start over. Find a place in the world where they didn’t martyr speakers of unpopular truths.

And then an official letter from Sherlyn Lopez, Merkin’s director of human resources. Lorna urgently opened the email. She stared at the screen, rereading the words until her eyes strained, until they made sense. It took many minutes before they did.

Dr. Hall-Truman,

We regret to inform you that your term of employment at City University of New York Merkin has come to an immediate end. Due to your violation of our employee code of conduct Section 4.b) we have no choice but to end your employment with us.

You have until the end of November 2019 to clean out your office and vacate the premises. If you do not comply, your belongings will be packed up for you and you will be escorted off the premises by our security team.

Your courses for the remainder of the Autumn 2019 semester have been canceled and all students have received full refunds.

We thank you for your service to City University of New York Merkin and we wish it didn’t have to end this way.

She could hear realtors picking up the phone and calling to ask if it was true, and how soon would their place be available for staging and showing.

 

 

—

Brian Alessandro holds an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University and has taught the subject at the high school and college levels for over ten years.  His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice and the Independent Book Publisher Association Best New Voice Award. In 2011, he wrote and directed the feature film, Afghan Hound, and has adapted Edmund White’s 1982-classic “A Boy’s Own Story” into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions. Brian currently writes literary criticism for Newsday.

Writing CROSS COUNTRY: A Conversation with Justin Evans and Jeff Newberry

Posted on by

(WordTech Editions, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY MATTHEW THORBURN

__

There’s an interesting tradition of poets writing collaborative books—books in which two writers have a creative conversation, writing poems back and forth to one another or sometimes writing each poem together. This kind of dialogue on the page seems especially well suited to poets. Braided Creek by Ted Kooser and Jim comes to mind, as does Ghost/Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher, as well as Little Novels and the other collections that Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have written together.

I’ve been interested in how this works—how two poets decide to set out on such a journey together, and how they make their way along that road. So when the opportunity came up to talk to Justin Evans and Jeff Newberry about their new collaborative book, Cross Country (WordTech Editions, 2019), I couldn’t resist. Cross Country is a collection of epistolary poems that Justin and Jeff wrote back and forth to each other during 2016 and early 2017. These letter-poems are wide-ranging, encompassing thoughts about the nature of art, religion, family, and politics. I caught up with them over email—from New Jersey to Georgia to Utah and back—during the busy back-to-school season to get the backstory on Cross Country.

 

Matthew Thorburn: So—let’s begin at the beginning: How did you decide to write a book together? How did this project get started?

Justin Evans: The idea to write a book together began with me. Several of the writers I admire, and two specific mentors of mine, David Lee and William Kloefkorn, had collaborated on several books of poems, so I always had it in my mind that collaboration on a book of poems was a viable creative option.

When the itch hit me some five years ago to write a book with someone else, it became increasingly clear the only person I would want to collaborate with was Jeff. I mean that. I admire so many poets, but when I thought about who I wanted to write with, Jeff was the one. My feelings paid off because almost every critical decision and direction the book required was a result of Jeff’s abilities and intuition.

 

MT: How would you describe Cross Country to prospective readers? What do you want them to know about it?

Jeff Newberry: It’s a dialogue about life, fatherhood, and faith, a conversation between two men who are trying to better understand their pasts and the turbulent world they inhabit. From a craft perspective, it’s a book about the intertwining of poetic voices.

JE: I would describe it as a real conversation between two people who are somewhere in the middle of their lives, still trying to figure out what it means to be parents, teachers, poets, and people who are aware of the madness which surrounds them. I would want readers to know that everything in the book is sincere, and not jump to the conclusion that the poems are merely confessional. The admissions we make in our poems are starting points, not the results of exploration.

 

MT: The poems in Cross Country cover a lot of ground—from family life to what it means to be a parent, to memories of childhood and life lessons learned, through to the state of the nation. They also feel very personal—and very candid—about some difficult experiences for each of you. How did you decide what you would write about? Was anything off-limits?

JE: This may sound like a put-on, but the decision to write personally and candidly was a very organic process. I had several ideas for the direction of the book which were wisely rejected, and somehow our focus began to rest on the ideas of faith and hope. I think it was Jeff’s poem about his daughter which really opened things up. He exposed something vital in that poem bigger than itself, which was what good poetry is supposed to do.

From there we started sharing stark reflections of our experiences. He would write a poem and I would write a response. I would write about something that happened and Jeff would write his response. With national events, there was a sense from both of us that something needed to be said.

JN: I know that a lot of poets in our world snoot at and dismiss the idea that poetry can be a kind of therapy. For me, it is. I don’t mean this in a fatuous way. To understand the world, I have to write about it. As such, the ground covered in the book pretty much tracks with what was obsessing me between 2015 and 2016, when the majority of the poems were written.

I find it difficult to write about my daughter. I want to write about her because I want to understand her. The poem “Four Attempts at a Letter about My Daughter” came together from my various attempts at trying to write about her. What that poem showed me—what that poem taught me—was that there is a line between the Madi of this world, the daughter I see every day, and the Madi of my imagination.

 

MT: This book is a dialogue—a sequence of poems that feels like a conversation or letters you wrote to each other. Did you decide from the outset to shape the poems and the book this way? What drew you to this form?

JE: As I said before, every major decision about form and theme was a result of Jeff. I just wanted to write poems with someone else. I thought it would be cool to emphasize the role that place has in American letters, and write poems about places we were familiar with and write about places we had been assigned to write about by the other person. I thought this kind of noodling around might lead to some interesting work. Jeff, knowing we both shared a love for Richard Hugo, suggested we write letters to each other. That went through one or two iterations before we settled on what is in the book.

JN: Justin says that the letters were my idea. I am convinced that they were his. Either way, the epistolary form had never really attracted me. I was familiar with Richard Hugo’s 13 Letters and 31 Dreams, of course, and I’d read some letter poems here and there. However, the form never interested me—until I began writing them. Having a willing, open audience who was not only going to listen but also respond made the form perfect for the kind of personal issues we explored in the letters.

 

MT: How did you navigate the pull to have each poem respond to the one that came before, versus striking out in some new direction?

JE: First, let me say that Jeff’s ordering of the poems—he reversed the order in which some of the poems were written—truly made a huge difference. As for new directions, that is also an organic creation. What I mean by that is we never directed each other by saying, “Your next poem should be about….” I think we wrote poems for two reasons. We were having a sincere conversation through our poems, and we wanted to know how each other would respond to what we thought of something. I also think we kept one foot in the real world, never completely giving in or allowing ourselves to become untethered from the real world. Everyday life is not a novel, and it can’t be plotted.

 

MT: Would you talk a bit about your experience publishing and promoting the book? How did you go about securing a publisher? What has the reception been like from readers?

JE: We divided up the workload. I would be in charge of individual submissions for poems, and Jeff would try to find a publisher. I do not normally submit to contests, but I supported Jeff in whatever fashion he saw his task. I think it also shaped where our poems were seen outside of the manuscript. Jeff found a published very fast, which was both a pleasant surprise and a daunting revelation for me.

Readers I know personally have enjoyed the book. I thought I was going to get a lot more support from family, as has been my experience. While my family still supports this endeavor, so many more readers have expressed their enjoyment. I had a teacher ask if she could read some of my poems in her class, which blew me away.

JN: Unfortunately, the book has not found a wide readership. We’ve had a few people show interest. The poetry market is crowded, and if you’re not in the MFA world, like Justin and I aren’t, it can be hard to find someone who will teach or review your book. I’ve sent out review copies to several magazines. We also promoted it on Facebook and Twitter.

 

MT: What would you say to other poets considering collaborating on a book? Any good advice—or words of warning?

JE: It is an enlightening experience, to say the least. I would say to go into the process with very few immutable expectations. Most of my ideas about what I wanted to happen had to change into something else. It was all for the better, but if you are set on something happening and your allegiances are in the wrong place, your ego will take a beating. You simply have to keep an open mind, and you need to have patience.

JN: My only advice is this: Find someone you trust. That’s a very important aspect.

 

MT: What are you working on now? What’s next for each of you? And do you think you might collaborate on another book project at some point?

JE: After reading Battle Dress by Karen Skolfield and Mothers Over Nangahar by Pamela Hart, I am revisiting my military/wartime experiences in a series of short poems.

I think it might be very interesting to collaborate with Jeff again. I am torn between thinking that if we did, it would need to be completely different in order to make it interesting, or trying the impossible by writing letters again. I do know that I need some time to recover and see myself as a poet in the singular for a while before I could even consider collaboration.

JN: I’m working on a book of experimental mini-memoirs. I’ve also got another book of poetry in progress. As far as collaboration? Perhaps. Right now, however, my own projects are keeping me busy.

 

 

JUSTIN EVANS was born and raised in Utah. After serving in the U.S. Army, he attended Utah schools and has been teaching in rural Nevada for the past 21 years, where he lives with his multi-media artist wife, Becky, and their three sons. He is the author of four chapbooks, including Four Way Stop, Gathering Up the Scattered Leaves, and Working in the Birdhouse, and four previous books of poems, including Town for the Trees, Hobble Creek Almanac, and Sailing This Nameless Ship.

 

JEFF NEWBERRY is an essayist, fiction writer, and poet. His previous books include the novel A Stairway to the Sea and the poetry collection Brackish. Recently, his writing has appeared in Brevity: Concise Nonfiction, Sweet, and The American Journal of Poetry. He is on the core faculty in the Writing and Communication Program at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two children.

 

__

MATTHEW THORBURN‘s most recent book is The Grace of Distance, published by Louisiana University Press in 2019. He’s also the author of six previous collections of poems, including the book-length poem Dear Almost, which received the Lascaux Prize, and the chapbook A Green River in Spring. He works in corporate communications in New York City and lives in small-town New Jersey with his wife and son.