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Pictures of You: Victoria Barrett

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“First Apartment, Spring 1996,” by Victoria Barrett

 

Fullscreen capture 352015 85722 AMIn the fall of 1995 I was twenty-one years old, living with my mother in an apartment in my hometown. I had flunked out of college that spring and slunk home with my head hanging, vacillating between deep, deep shame and panic. I was a Smart Kid. My smartness had, growing up, been the only thing about me that mattered. What I wanted once I was on my own at school was to be loved, smart or no: loved by family, loved by a boy, loved by friends. Failing that, I would have liked to be admired. Failing that, well, I didn’t know what I wanted. That summer and fall I worked a day job dispatching truck drivers and waited tables at night, convinced I was the kind of loser who had already done at age twenty-one every worthwhile thing she’d ever do. I wanted to go back to school—I was determined that I would—but more immediately, I needed to live somewhere else. The fights were getting nastier and more severe. My mother had been hitting me, throwing at me whatever came to hand, telling me she wished I hadn’t been born since I was twelve. By this time there was nothing left but the fighting. Continue reading →

Let’s Not Fuck Each Other Up: An Invitation from Arisa White

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Dear Reader, If you’re a bastard, send me a letter. If your father was absent from your life, please do write. If you haven’t talked to your father in years and don’t know if you will– because he’s a bastard—an epistle of any style is welcome. Use words or visuals, no limit. I’m collecting letters from individuals who have been affected by the absence of their fathers for dear Gerald, an epistolary project I have been working on for the past two years.

We all seem to suffer fatherlessness, be it a particular father loss, through degrees of unavailability, estrangement, abandonment or death, and since we all are offspring of capitalist patriarchal societies, I find this to be interesting. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Diorama of a People, Burning by Bradley Harrison

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Burning

Ricochet Editions

33 pages, $15.00

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Several years ago, when I first read Ronald Johnson’s radi os, an erasure text with Milton’s Paradise Lost as source material, I was fascinated by the construct of erasure in the meaning of language. Though the intended product was inconsistent in its desire towards an aesthetic reading experience, it asked questions about interpretation and intention which were interesting in their own right. Put in a different way, a need for structure to display a level of content seemed the point of the erasure. These types of texts often contain intentions in making meaning as one of its forms of making meaning.

In this vein, Bradley Harrison’s short collection Diorama of a People, Burning is neatly exposing these intentions. The chapbook is a wave-like series of text erasures. (This wave-like structure might be intentional, as many references to the catastrophic flooding in Iowa a few years ago occur intentionally and often.) The erasures center around six prose poems. Each prose poem has a series of three corresponding increasingly erased versions that follows it.  In all but the last series, they are in order of least to most erased, which gives us a sense of everything falling away as we read. Continue reading →

Behind The Fictive Veil: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz

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–Interview by Brian Kornell

 

Wendy C. Ortiz’s story “Interiors” appeared in April 2012 issue of PANK. She is the author of Excavation, a recently released memoir from Future Tense Books, about family, secrets, sex, and coming to terms with her queer identity. It is a book that spoke to me in a way that very few books have before. Ortiz writes with emotional frankness about difficult subjects, while maintaining the lyric beauty of the world around her. I had the opportunity to talk to her about the book and the process of writing it.

 

Brian Kornell: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about stories that demand to be told or ones, especially when it’s memoir, that a writer cannot ignore despite their best efforts to do so. Was this book like that for you? Did you have any hesitation in writing it? If you did, how did you work past that to write it?

Wendy C. Ortiz: This book spent some time being ignored (I always imagined it sitting in a corner, sulking) but when I look back at this time, I recognize now that it was steeping. My hesitations have always been about how I might be perceived once the story was out. I got some practice when “Mix Tape” was published by The Nervous Breakdown last year and in the first 24 hours of it being on the web I went through physical reactions that were all about the hesitation. Then the physical reactions passed and I was fortunate to get good feedback on the piece and knew I was heading in the right direction. That was a good way of working past any recent hesitation I might have had. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Broom Broom, by Brecken Hancock & The Spell of Coming (or Going) by Mary Lou Buschi

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broom

Coach House Press

72 pages, $17.95

spell

Patasola Press

48 pages,  $10.80

 

Review by Adam Sol

 

Grief is one of our first reasons for inventing poetry: the urge to inscribe a loss that cannot be recovered. Gilgamesh’s Enkidu, Homer’s Achilles, Jeremiah’s Jerusalem, Shelley’s Keats, Ginsberg’s mother, Olds’ father, Mary Jo Bang’s son – all have been memorably recorded and mourned in verse.

But your loss is not necessarily my loss.  The hard part about writing from grief is that most of a poet’s readers will not know or care about the poet’s mother or brother or son or city the way the poet does.  And so, if the poet is to draw successfully on our emotions, something of that loss must be transferred, rather than merely reported, to us.

Two recent debut collections of poetry attempt to convey, through emotional perception or linguistic flair, a sense of the mind struggling to cope with devastating loss. The Spell of Coming (or Going) revolves around the tragic death of the poet’s brother.  Although the specifics are not described in any detail, Buschi at her best can evoke the complex emotional landscapes that make families unique and fascinating as they confront suffering.  In “Clocks,” a grieving father spends his time “bent over his box of stopped watches.”  “When the Wreck Has Been” describes the strange, sad horror of dispersing the ashes of a loved one:  “It’s your body I toss from my hand, / wipe on my trousers, you who I chased // down streets as a child, always just beyond my reach.”  These moments evoke the tragedy that haunts and compels The Spell of Coming (or Going).  Continue reading →

Between the Bones

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Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

 ~by Temim Fruchter 

Nine Other Prayers

 

 

Please let this never stop.

 

Because it’s not like breathing or walking I had to learn to pray. Because I am made of thighs and wine and restless ancestors I didn’t have to learn too much. We were girls modest at school and we swayed, we shuckled, not because they told us to, not because of choreography – though there was choreography – but because the bodies centuries behind our bodies made urgency of singing. This has made it harder for generations since to stand still.

 

Please stay.

 

I can’t stand still now. Born a swish of soft denim skirt, blunt rebound plastic orange chair to the backs of waking legs, yawning big for more air than the day school ceiling would allow. The swing of prayer comes easy and I am not graceful. I think desert wanderers, loop dancers, sea crossers, escape artists. I think irreverent scientists, ecstatic rabbis, clumsy angels, elderly acrobats. I hear the cotton morning voices of girls, some loud, some whisper, some cough and some sigh. One is deep and one is thin like a weedy pond. I hear and I think they hear me back. Continue reading →

Literary Flaneurs: Michelle Bailat-Jones

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A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

***

 

Fullscreen capture 882014 90551 AM

 by Michelle Bailat-Jones

 

 

1. At the top of the toes, above the slender metatarsals and those little phalanges, sit three small wedge-shaped bones—the cuneiform bones—that help to create the arch of the foot.

2. Within the larger Kirishima Mountain Range, there is a smaller ridge dotted with several peaks that runs across the center of the island from Mt. Karakuni to Mt. Takachiho. The tops of these peaks rise above the forest with terrains like moonscapes—covered in scrubby plants, pebbles, and dust. Craters dot the ridge line, some dry, others filled with sparkling blue water.

3. In the 15th century, a Venetian traveler named Giosafat Barbaro visits Persia and sends back reports of a strange and indecipherable writing found on clay tablets and on the walls of ancient city sites. Continue reading →

Dead or Alive: Eleanor Brainerd in Iowa City, IA

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 Exploring writerly lives through literary pilgrimage

 

–By Robin McCarthy

 

 

BrainerdFamily(1)

Iowa City is hot in late June. It is, perhaps, not the ideal time of year to wander aimlessly through five sprawling city blocks of cemetery searching for a headstone whose existence is only confirmed by a passing mention on Wikipedia. But by the time I was searching for Eleanor Brainerd in Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery, we were well into a cold and gray summer where I live and I was ready for the heat, ready for the thickness of the air, ready for long hot days building toward evening the thunderstorms swept in off the plains.

Before arriving in Iowa, I had never heard of Eleanor Brainerd. But Iowa City is such a mecca for writers, a place where so many literary heroes have nurtured their careers, that it felt important to discover someone new, someone overlooked, someone whose novels were not placed with covers facing outward at Prairie Lights, someone whose prose was not carved into benches or concrete sidewalk. And so I set my sights on Brainerd, who was born in Iowa City in 1868 and wrote ten novels before her death in 1942. Brainerd is a true child of Iowa City; she was born and spent her childhood at Plum Grove, a large brick Georgian home once owned by the first governor of Iowa Territory. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Nick Narbutas

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Nick Narbutas talks about using syntax to cope with myth and history in his poem “Tiresias Abandons His Pretense,” from the July issue.

 

Interview by Diana Clarke

 

1. I was so excited, in “Tiresias Abandons His Pretense” to encounter, well, Tiresias. It’s hard to address old mythologies in new ways, and fantastic when someone—like you—does it well. What drew you to the old blind prophet of Thebes in the first place?

Thank you so much! What initially interested me about Tiresias was the trade-off he was forced to make—Hera taking his sight, and Zeus making it up to him by giving him foresight. The ability to see what lies beyond and the inability to see what’s right in front of you. With that in mind, I started using Tiresias as a kind of lens in order to write about events with more historical weight than I felt I as a person/poet had any right to be the speaker for. But the only time it ended up happening that way was a four-part prose poem called “Tiresias Watches TV” about watching 9/11 on the news as a child. Every other poem seemed to glance off the historical and into something vaguely cultural, if not just personal. Then the issue arose that I had to deal with allof the Tiresias myth, and I couldn’t figure out how to answer the question: how do I, in my narrow experience as a male, take on the mask of a figure who knew the experiences of being male and female? Then: do I really have the right to try? The project got more and more convoluted as the poems drifted further away from my original idea and I wound up trying to work through issues of my own privilege rather than issues of, say, the rise of the Golden Dawn party, as I had initially intended. This poem is me admitting that I am not up to the task of speaking through the mask I’ve chosen, I don’t have foresight, I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, the project failed. It did fail. I’ve kept most of the poems that came out of it, but the larger project has been canned. Continue reading →