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I Call, You Respond

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A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender. Intro to project here.

 

Call and Response: “Ballad”

Sonia Sanchez is one of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement and is the author of 16 books. She’s the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award. The lyric poem “Ballad” is from Sanchez’s book, Homegirls & Handgrenades.

 

Ballad
(after the spanish)

forgive me if i laugh
you are so sure of love
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Exiles, by Matthew Kirkpatrick

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Kirkpatrick

Ricochet Press

57 pages, $10.00

 

Review by Matt Pincus

 

In late February Matthew Kirkpatrick wrote an article in The Believer about a McDonalds constructed to seem like it’s floating at a shopping plaza in Berwyn, IL. He discusses how an architecturally significant building is antithetical to the corporate notion of a “less is more” philosophy, where the space is a container so one associates with and attaches it to the brand name. Corporate stores are homogenous because they make the consumer familiar and comfortable with their products.

Kirkpatrick’s style, in his novel, The Exiles, on the surface, consists of simple sentences that act as similar containers. The language is generic, abstract in a sense, such as when discussing the protagonist James: “The boy says they have not seen Dad in years.” The girl across the street from James “sits at the dinner table inside the dark dining room, eating her salad, and watches her father on the weight bench in the living room.” The text breaks through the small container of sentence with adjectives, little vignettes of Gothic context. One wonders first of all how James does not recognize his Dad, who is possibly trapped, locked in the basement. Another instance is the parents across the street who run on treadmills during the day and lock their daughter in the house during the night, and the way she accepts and fears their negligence as well as their omnipresent parental authority, which she expresses through her habit of running in circles out in the backyard. Continue reading →

Tommy Pico’s Tattoos: A Tour

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Tommy’s first publication was in PANK ‘s Queer Two , October 2011. Entitled “Sucking Famous Dick on the Rooftop of the Omni Hotel in Downtown Austin during SXSW 2011,”  it started life as a three-minute sex story. His first chapbook, Absentmindr, is available on iTunes for $0.00 (that’s right, it’s FREE) and you should download it right now, even before you finish reading this interview.

 

Interview by Julie Hart

 

On Tommy’s left hand: Kumeyaay, his tribe near San Diego. This is his most recent tattoo, he got it with his brother on his most recent trip home.

tattoo 1

Left forearm, a lightning symbol used in Kumeyaay basket design. It scabbed over and he picked at it like he didn’t know you weren’t supposed to, since it was his first, so now it has patchy areas. His brother has the same design on his calf. “Everyone always says tattoos don’t hurt, or you get used to it. Not true. When I’m getting a tattoo, the first pain and the last pain are exactly the same, the same absolutely quantifiable physical pain. Normally I have five hundred ideas crowding my mind at once, jamming the doorway, all trying to get out. When I’m under the needle, only one thought at a time can get through. It hurts, but it’s worth it. The focus is worth it.” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan

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Make

 

CB editions
216 pages, £8.99

Reviewed by Christopher Allen

 

May-Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break is all about sex—or is it? What is sex but the search for the right connection? Sometimes people get it right; more often they—we—cross lines and break rules. We break things.

Tan’s treatment of intimacy in this collection of graciously detailed short stories embraces a variety of sexual experience: from sexual abuse to attempted sexual healing, from sadomasochism to a teenager’s first flushes of jealousy. Tan doesn’t limit herself to one gender perspective or one sexual orientation. Things to Make and Break is omnisexual, and it’s mind-blowingly good. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Farm For Mutes by Dimitri Anastasopoulos

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Farm

Mammoth Books

203 Pages, 15.95

 

Review by Morris Collins

 

Dimitri Anastasopoulos’s pyrotechnic new novel, Farm For Mutes, explores the collapsing relationship between Luther Bouquie—a film restoration expert—and his wife, Sybil–a germaphobe suffering from a mysterious disease.  Luther works to restore an early recording device whose purpose was to capture, but not replay, sound, while Sybil waits in cloistered withdrawal reliving the choices that led her to her sickbed (though Anastasopoulos remains wary of narrative causality). Meanwhile, an extraterrestrial observer—serving as chorus in all senses of the word—watches, hunts, and abducts via a frequency-altering scream the inhabitants of the Bouquie’s Buffalo, NY neighborhood.

So, this is what “happens” in Farm For Mutes. Or, anyway, this is the novel’s situation, but unlike conventional novels, it is a situation that does not produce narrative consequences. It is all epilogue: Anastasopoulos welcomes us to the moment just after his characters’ last possible choice, an aftermath unfolding at the end of their marriage. The “events” we witness are the consequence, perhaps, of previous actions–some of which we experience in flashbacks, unreliable memories, and travel logs—but the novel’s present tense remains pure reckoning.  Or, maybe more accurately—pure echo. Continue reading →

The Call

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On Coping with the Pressure of a Professional Literary Scene

~by Amanda Silberling

 ***

Did you get the call? A Facebook group sends messages from Illinois, to Connecticut, to California, all asking the same question: Did you get the call? In my Florida bedroom, my friend Andre and I work on an English project. Andre asks me what I think the theme of Madame Bovary is. Did you get the call? I stare at my phone, knowing that just one ring tone holds the validation I have been working towards for months—years, even. Did you get the call? A girl in Pennsylvania gets the call. Facebook tilts on its axis. The messages come quicker. Did you get the call? A boy in Massachusetts gets the call. Did you get the call? A girl in New York gets the call. Did you get the call? I have four texts, seven Facebook messages (Did you get the call?), three Snapchats, and zero missed calls. Did you get the call? Andre goes downstairs to tell my parents that he’s worried about me. Did you get the call?

I keep my phone on the loudest volume for a week. I never get the call. I check my mailbox every day when I get home for a month. Finally, a rejection letter. Did you get the call?

Andre and I don’t finish our Madame Bovary project that night in November. I apologize to him the next day (with one eye on my phone, just in case it rings). In class, my English teacher discusses the protagonist’s self-destructive desire for constant validation and superficial success. We decide that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is a novel about a woman poisoned by her lofty expectations, slowly growing more and more disappointed with her life. She is her own worst enemy. Continue reading →

Virtual Blog Tour: What Happened Here, by Bonnie ZoBell

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Zobell

Follow Along With Bonnie’s Virtual Book Tour Using the Link on the Banner!

What Happened Here delivers a wildly different cast of characters living on the same block in North Park, San Diego, site of the PSA Flight 182 crash in 1978. The crash is history, but its legacy seeps in the stories of the neighborhood’s inhabitants, bringing grief, anxiety, and rebellion to the surface and eventually assists in burning clean the lives of those who live in the shadow of disaster. Amidst the pathos of contemporary life, humor flits through these stories like the macaws that have taken to the trees of North Park. The birds ensure that there’s never a dull moment in the neighborhood, and their outrageous colors and noisome squawks serve as constant reminds of regrowth. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

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Welcome, once again, to Blog People, a venture here at the Lightning Room which gives you the pertinent deets on our fellow denizens of The Blog. In this installment, DeWitt Brinson presents the progression of the physical into a single syllable, as Scott Pinkmountain asks you to go with him and you must not ask where. Check out his Column Work: Surviving The Arts

1. What is the importance of art? Both the word and the concept?

Just to scrape the edge of this infinite question, I’ve been thinking a lot about how art has the potential to be one of the very few non-capital-driven endeavors in our otherwise Capitalist-circumscribed existences. For that purpose alone, it’s a life line. At this point in our culture, to be engaged in any public endeavor that is not for the purpose of making or spending money is essentially a radical political action. If you view family life, daily functional creativity (cooking, childcare, walking, sewing, etc..) and intimacy and play among friends and loved ones as private endeavors, spiritual practice as a kind of in between, and art as a public practice, art is pretty much it aside from direct political activism for standing up to genocidal, oligarchic Capitalism as it’s being perpetrated today.

As for the word, I don’t know it has any importance per say, but I’m glad it’s a simple, single syllable, grunt-like word akin to food, sleep, sex, birth, death. It helps strengthen the case for it being an imperative life function.

2. What’s your guilty pleasure?

If I could talk about it in public I wouldn’t actually be feeling much guilt about it, so there’s no honest answer to this question aside from declining to answer. But in terms of pop culture, I eat all kinds of shit and usually hate myself for it while/after it’s happening – superhero movies being my Achilles Heel, as I grew up reading and loving all things Marvel. I don’t feel guilt about that stuff though, just self-loathing and embarrassment. I draw the line at reality tv though. I have to preserve some self-respect. Continue reading →