Young Bright Things

Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine: A Review by Iris Cushing

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Are Ben Mirov’s poems haunted? Perhaps not so much as they are preoccupied—inhabited by something that was there before anyone arrived, including, perhaps, the poet himself. Ghost Machine guides us through the narrator’s material occupations: food, friends, money, sex. The conspicuous absence of what corresponds to these occupations—nourishment, comfort, love—hums and glows under the poems’ surface. Here we meet a narrator who reveals this absence while keeping its mystery intact.

Mirov has a great knack for writing sentences that recreate the cadence and rhythm of everyday life. Owing much to the newly-minted poetic economy of email and text messages, each largely-unpunctuated sentence is only long enough to fulfill its purpose. Modified versions of the same sentence are repeated in a manner that calls out to Lyn Hejinian’s poetic autobiography My Life. While Hejinian’s repetitions are systematic, Mirov’s crop up unexpectedly, appearing on either side of the divide between conscious and subconscious thought. “My bed is an ear that cannot record,” for instance, is transformed fifty pages later into “her face is an ear that cannot record.” Thrilling moments occur when the narrator alters his language before our very eyes: “I change love poem to move pole.” These repetitions and transformations progress as effortlessly, and disturbingly, as recurring dreams (or nightmares).

In reading this collection, I couldn’t help but think of the fact that spirits refers to both ghosts and alcoholic beverages. It’s not a coincidence. The altered logic of inebriation is examined here with an objective clarity that is at once horrifying and hilarious. Sentences like “I’d like to kill a forty” and “I’m smashed after three drinks” point to the way our language treats alcohol as a living, willful entity. In Mirov’s world, everything is fair game for this kind of treatment: one may just as easily “go down on the breeze” or “eat a man made of dreams.” Booze is one of many spirits that underlie the superficial simplicity of these poems, influencing the poems’ inhabitants in ways beyond their control.

The deadpan extremity of Mirov’s tone allows for some very funny moments. Anyone who appreciates Twin Peaks will enjoy the seamless transitions from serious to ridiculous, as in “Ghost (1:42 a.m.):

The spirit world shifts behind me. There’s coffee on my shirt, not blood. I can’t absorb information on a bench in Dolores. I had a dream we were in a hotel. Your blonde friend was faceless. She offered me salsa.

As in Mirov’s other collection, I is to Vorticism, mundane subject matter is treated with a correspondingly plain voice; between the two, the unexpected emerges in the form of some unarticulated hilarity or doom just under the surface of everything. “I erase what I compress, “ Mirov says. Here, the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary is compressed so much that it disappears. Mirov finds ghosts haunting our shared language, just as he finds them haunting his private life. I arrived at the end of this book as if having just woken up on the BART train, with no memory of where I was before, and upon entering the somnambulant fog of San Francisco in search of a burrito, found instead the phantom afterglow of Ghost Machine.

—

Iris Cushing lives in Brooklyn and is an editor for Argos Books.

Gather Round, Gather Close

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xTx takes on Into the Wild at Titular. It will be the best read you have all week. She also has a beautiful, heartbreaking story, Standoff,  in Word Riot. She is joined in the September issue of Word Riot by Gary Moshimer, PH Madore,  and others. Tobias Carroll also reviews Aaron Burch’s How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew.

Enjoy a story from Ben Loory at Moon Milk Review where he is joined by Corey Mesler.

Not only is there a swank redesign of their magazine this month, The Collagist features an essay from David LeGeault. poetry from Nick Ripatrazone, and much more.

I turn the tables on J. Bradley in an interview at HTMLGIANT where we talk about, among other things, his fantastic chapbook, The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot.

If you’re looking for a great poetry collection, consider buying Gabriel Welsch’s An Eye Fluent in Gray, available for order from Seven Kitchen Press.

The last unpublished story from Matthew Salesses’ Our Island of Epidemics is now up Kitty Snacks.

Enjoy a tiny story from James Tadd Adcox at Nanoism.

Daniel Nester has a new blog for the Albany Times Union. Check it out.

Ben White’s story story “Cryo” is in  Folded Word’s third issue of Heron.

The Ancient City continues to be unearthed during Amber Sparks’s tenure at Necessary Fiction. Read more about the city from Lily Hoang, Speaking of Amber, she brings news of 1575 at For Every Year.

Enjoy four new poems from Melissa Broder at Small Doggies where she is joined by Matthew Simmons.

At (This is) Disingenuous Twaddle, find poetry from Ray Succre.

Nicolle Elizabeth writes on music for The Rumpus.

Wigleaf brings a story from Gabe Durham as well as stories from Arlene Ang and Beth Thomas.

The reliably excellent DOGZPLOT brings three fictions from Mary Hamilton and stories from Michelle Reale and Kyle Minor.

Lauren Becker is interviewed by Barry Graham at Third Face and she namechecks one of our favorite songs””Ani DiFranco’s Swan Dive.

The Missed Connections series, fomented from the mind of Brian Oliu, is complete. Read it here. Just look for the ones with 22 at the end of the title.

Literary Los Angeles: The Four-Season Climate, Comforting Boundaries, and Literary Lies

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It’s surprising, considering that fall is my favorite season, how unhappy it makes me.   Autumn surrounds me with all my favorite things—pumpkin pie, woolen garments, cranberry sauce, turning leaves—but it also drives me to check and recheck the weather report, hoping that somehow, miraculously, this year the temperature will dip below 80F sometime before December.

As a child growing up in Los Angeles, the lack of a four-season climate was a torment to me and I felt it most keenly in autumn.   It might sound silly now, but this longing as a child was very real and very sad.   It would not be an exaggeration to say it was one of the things that bothered me most in my obviously very fortunate childhood.   Every autumn there would begin again the onslaught of seasonal propaganda, and I would sit home and absorb picture books and fairy tales, and later, works of literature, from Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Oliver Twist.   All of which feature snow.

As a child I read constantly and compulsively, until the world between the pages was the only one that mattered, and everything that happened outside of a book — my home, my school, my friends — was but a pale approximation of the real thing.     Snow, too, was the real thing, real frozen water that fell from the sky, not the fake plastic powder and tinsel icicles that decorated the malls in Los Angeles.   Fall and winter in Los Angeles always felt like faking it: my family would still visit a Halloween pumpkin patch, roast a Thanksgiving turkey, and pick out a Christmas tree, but no matter how much I enjoyed these things, I was haunted by the idea that it was in some sense playing pretend, pretending we lived in a place that required hearty winter roasts when we could just as easily have gone to a beach barbecue on Christmas Day instead.

Reading taught me what was normal and what was real, and L.A. wasn’t either.   (Among other things, this is an amusing example of western centrism.   Even as a child I was aware that other countries did not have snow at Christmas, did not even have Christmas, but the unreality of those places was even greater than that of Los Angeles.)   By living in a place without golden leaves or falling snow, I felt I was missing out on something fundamental to the human experience, and my life was the poorer because of it.   I felt cheated.

There may not have been any snow in Los Angeles, but outside, snow was everywhere. It was on Christmas cards, in “Charlie Brown” television specials, and on sale in the Southern California outlets of national retail chain stores whose west coast locations still stocked shelves of hats and mittens.   Every year I bought those mittens hopefully in case my lot might change.   (I still buy them now, though with the dubious justification that they are for traveling.)   Snow was in carols and coloring books and in plastic snow globes whose intimate bounded delicacy perfectly captured all the reasons I wanted winter.

I associated a cold winter with a warm hearth, with flannel sheets and fireplaces, and the coziness of being inside protected against the wind and snow.   Winter was about the reassurance of boundaries and the safety of a solid, brick-built home that was not so porous as L.A.’s light-soaked indoor/outdoor spaces.   Until I was eighteen I had never even seen snow but I associated it with respectability and a sort of grueling adulthood: shoveling walks, icing driveways.   Snow was responsible, solid, and mundane in the beguiling way of a Garrison Keillor monologue.

A real winter defined not just boundaries of space but also of time.   The changing of the seasons sets clear end posts on your years and days, not like in L.A., where the future winds out ahead of you as one long, bright, palm-tree-lined road. Seasons and their attendant rituals impose order on the undifferentiated mass of time.   The reoccurring yearly chores of putting up storm windows or cleaning out rain gutters remind you of all the rain gutters and storm windows past, the orderly progression of life.   In my childhood in Los Angeles it felt like there weren’t very many chores or rules or rituals, just broad expanses of time and space that spread out in all directions.

Now I’m older.   I know cold.   I lived for four years in Chicago and since then I’ve spent cold, snowy winters in Shanghai and in Paris; I’ve hiked through Scottish November damp, walked to work for two years in San Francisco’s endless dismal chill; I’ve even visited Russia in the winter.   I know snow is not easy or pleasant or fun. I know that for every snowball fight or sleigh ride or cup of hot chocolate by the fireside there are a dozen days of dragging your stiff, salt-encrusted trouser cuffs through a semifreddo concoction of cheerless mud.

Now I’m an adult who lives in Los Angeles and creates fictions both personally and professionally.   I’ve passed through undergraduate theory courses and post-graduate irony, and I know more than I did about authenticity, normalcy, and artificiality.   And yet I still ruthlessly enforce seasonal rituals.   Every September, I bring out the autumnal tablecloths and serving dishes, pack up the barbecue, and serve soup instead of salad.   Out go the white clothes and in come the black.   At Christmas it’s hot chocolate and roast turkey, no matter what the outside temperature might say.   Picking an arbitrary date in September after which I no longer wear sandals only reinforces the boundlessness of time and space, but I’m learning to be okay with living fictionally.

Fall into the September Issue

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It’s hard to believe that two years ago this month we started publishing content online to complement our annual print issue. That first issue shared the words of only three writers–Daphne Gottlieb, Bruce Cohen, and Gabriel Welsch. We’ve grown quite a bit since. This month’s issue is a special double issue because our October issue is a special issue guest-edited by Tim Jones-Yelvington. You’ll find an interesting mix in the September issue, with poems from Megan Falley that will keep you on the edge of your seat; a fantastic story, in the truest sense of the word, by Lisa Aldin about girls who cause earthquakes; a story told in notes on a story by Travis Hessman who always wows us with how he plays with form; a gladiator vampire space opera by Jesse Bradley that is also a little heartbreaking and will make you laugh or  ry or both and much much more. The full line up includes work from Jenny Bitner, DeWitt Brinson, Patrick Allen Carberry, P. Scott Cunningham, Phil Estes, Greg Gerke, Tania Hershman, Kristina Knappett, Tara Laskowski, Sunshine LeMontree, Derrick Medina, Robin Lee Mozer, Michelle Nichols, Jen Percy, Jeffry Pethybridge, Andrea Scarpino, Isabelle Serafin, Valerie Suffron, Brendan Todt and Michelle Valois. Go, read, spread the word, and tell us what you think about this awesome assemblage of talent.

the unfirm line – Mike Young

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“What I do know is the trick of all things wonderful. It’s that you can’t thank them.”
Mike Young, We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough

I wish I could thank for all things wonderful. I wish I could write them. The joy of watching a child laugh and play. The simple beauty of a woman’s smile.

The trip of a line, riding on music, which always brings tears. A heart exploding from your chest, like this song …

Our Nominations for Best of the Net 2010

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It’s always difficult to choose from the wonderful work we publish in our magazine when it comes time to nominate writers for recognition. As my co-editor said to me this morning, “We should just nominate the whole thing,” and he’s right because we fall in love with everything we publish. That said, we cannot nominate everyone so here are our nominees for the Best of the Net. Our nominees are some of the stories and poems we would grab if the magazine were on fire. Good luck, writers!

Fiction
Anne Leigh Parrish for Snow Angels
Shanna Germain for Big Red

Poetry
xTx for Do You Have a Place For Me
Rachel Andelman for Harquebus
J. Bradley for How Esmerelda Estrus Got Her Revenge
Carrie Murphy for The Strongest Men in Town
Ori Fienberg for Revolution

Two Calls for Submissions

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A Midsummer Night’s Press announces a call for submissions for two anthologies celebrating queer Jewish poetry:

FLAMBOYANT:
A CELEBRATION OF JEWISH GAY POETRY
edited by Lawrence Schimel

and

MILK AND HONEY:
A CELEBRATION OF JEWISH LESBIAN POETRY
edited by Julie R. Enszer

to be published in Spring 2011.

We are looking for poems that celebrate and question, meditate and intimate, argue and reconcile contemporary queer Jewish identity. What is queer Jewish experience in the twenty-first century? What poetry expresses queer Jewishness today?

Whether you write about interfaith queer parenting, cruising in shul, how it feels to sign a ketubah in a country that won’t recognize our same-sex marriages, fetishizing a sheggitz or being fetishized, we want to read about it and share it with others who want to read it as well.

What are our sacred texts for today? If they don’t yet exist, write them. What are our queer Jewish blessings, curses and prayers.

While there is a rich tradition of queer Jewish writers who have made an indelible mark on our literature over the years, from Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich to Allen Ginsburg and Edward Field, we are looking for work that reflects queer Jewish identity in the new (secular) millennium. As such, we are open either to unpublished work, or work that was published since 2000 (this would include work originally published in a magazine or anthology before 2000, which was later collected in a book published after 2000).

We welcome voices from across the spectrum of Jewish identity, from observant to merely cultural, and their intersections with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities and experiences.

We are open to all styles of poetry, from formal to free verse.

We welcome queer Jewish voices from outside the US, and are willing to consider translations into English. (It is the translator’s responsibility to secure permission to reprint the poem in English.)

Both anthologies are open to previously published work, but it is the poet’s responsibility to secure permission to reprint the poem.

We welcome work from Jewish trans poets, so long as the content of the work is relevant to either gay or lesbian experience.

There is no limit to the number of poems which may be submitted, so long as the Jewish and queer content are both relevant.

Submission instructions:

1) Title file with the initials of the anthology and author’s last name: F-Surname.doc or MH-Surname.doc
2) Include your name, your mailing address, your email address, and a bio WITHIN the .doc file with your essay, as submissions will be separated from emails to be read.
3) Submit your work by email, as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format, to queerjewishpoetry@gmail.com

Deadline: November 30, 2010.

Payment will be three copies of the anthology per contributor.

About the editors:

Lawrence Schimel is the author or anthologist of over 100 books, including FOUND TRIBE: JEWISH COMING OUT STORIES, KOSHER MEAT, BEST GAY POETRY 2008, FIRST PERSON QUEER, PoMoSEXUALS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GENDER AND SEXUALITY, TWO BOYS IN LOVE, THE FUTURE IS QUEER, etc.

Julie R. Enszer is the author of the poetry collection HANDMADE LOVE (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2010) and the chapbook SISTERHOOD (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in numerous Jewish, feminist and queer publications, including BRIDGES, JEWISH WOMEN’S LITERARY ANNUAL, SINISTER WISDOM, CALYX, WOMEN’S REVIEW OF BOOKS, FEMINIST STUDIES, WASHINGTON BLADE, LAMBDA BOOK REPORT, etc. She is also the founder of the Lesbian Poetry Archive.

About the publisher:
A Midsummer Night’s Press is an independent poetry publisher, publishing primarily in two imprints: 1) Fabula Rasa, dedicated to work inspired by myth and fairy tale, which has published FORTUNE’S LOVER: A BOOK OF TAROT POEMS by Rachel Pollack and FAIRY TALES FOR WRITERS by Lawrence Schimel, and 2) Body Language, devoted to queer poetry, which has published THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED IN OUR OTHER LIFE by Achy Obejas; BANALITIES by Brane Mozetic, translated by Elizabeti Zargi; HANDMADE LOVE by Julie R. Enszer; and MUTE by Raymond Luczak. http://www.amidsummernightspress.com

Literary Los Angeles: Superclogger

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I’m a little late to post this (I’ve been meaning to blog about it since June, how time flies!) but I couldn’t let Literary Los Angeles go without mentioning “Superclogger,” artist Joel Kyack’s mobile puppet show.

Kyack and his fellow puppeteers lie in the back of a white Mazda pick-up truck and perform puppet shows during rush hour on some of L.A.’s most congested freeways.   A sign tells motorists to tune to an FM station on their car radio that will broadcast the play’s soundtrack within 200 feet.   Their audience is whoever happens to be behind them on the 5, the 10, the 101, or the 405.   The plays deal with issues familiar to those stuck in traffic, like control, confinement, frustration, and anger.

“Superclogger” is sponsored by the non-profit LAXART and will be coming to the Hammer Museum after it finishes its tour of the Los Angeles freeway system on September 25.

You can read more about Joel Kyack and “Superclogger” on NPR, the L.A. Times, and elsewhere.

Sadly I haven’t run into the “Superclogger” truck in traffic yet, but I have seen the shows on YouTube.

As long as Los Angeles is dealing with the many downsides of car culture, I’m heartened to see artists finding creative ways to make the best of a bad situation.

Mud Luscious Press Blind Faith Subscription Drive

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Mud Luscious Press is having a limited-time ‘Blind Faith’ subscription drive: If you will trust us on the authors & titles of our forthcoming 2011 catalog without seeing any covers or blurbs, then you can get every book in the 2011 MLP season for $35 & free shipping. Titles include:

GRIM TALES : Norman Lock
THE HIEROGLYPHICS : Michael Stewart
I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR : Mathias Svalina
[ C. ] an mlp stamp stories anthology

plus handmade chapbook volumes from Jessica Newman, Stephen Gropp-Hess, Neila Mezynski,
Kristina Marie Darling, John H. Henry, Andrew Borgstrom, Ani Smith, & others

This offer will only last until we confirm our covers & blurbs (mid Oct. at the latest) so get on it asap:

SUBSCRIBE NOW

We’re Gonna Lasso You Some Words To Read

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Let’s kick this week off with a fine story from Shannon Peil at vis a tergo. Are you guys reading vis a tergo? It’s an interesting little magazine we would love to see more people reading. Shannon is the editor of amphibi.us which features a poem from Donal Mahoney. The circle of life.

PANK is being hosted by Artifice Magazine for a reading on October 1, at 7 pm, Book Cellar, Chicago, and something shocking is going to happen–both M. Bartley Seigel and I are reading.

Bull: Fiction for Thinking Men needs some staff to help with submissions, social networking, etc.. Details here. Think about lending them a hand. Working for a magazine is an invaluable experience and Bull is a really fine magazine.  Speaking of fine work, have you read the stories currently up there by Jensen Beach and Mel Bosworth?

In fancy, fancy time, Kathleen Rooney has an  article in Air Tran magazine and she name checks Tim Jones-Yelvington, the guest editor of our October issue.

Birkensnake 3 includes  Kate Wyer, AD Jameson,  Andrew Borgstrom, and others.

Acapella Zoo 5 includes writing from Jason Jordan, Kristine Ong Muslim, Tania Hershman, Toshiya Kamei, Mike Meginnis and others.

Over at We Who Are About to Die, Ani Smith gives us a nice  little review.

Ethel Rohan is the  featured writer in Emprise Review 16. She is also interviewed  here. Then Ethel turns the table and interviews Kirsty (Logan, of course) at Dark Sky.

Staccato Fiction  includes a story from Nick Ripatrazone this week. Nick also has work in  Abjective.

Deer, by CL Bledsoe is up this week at Staccato Fiction.

There are  words from JA Tyler in Radioactive Moat

In the September issue of Hobart, you will find a  great story from Nick Kocz.

Micah Dean Hicks tells us  How This Works in Tryst Magazine.

Solo Flight, by Sheldon Lee Compton is  featured at Metazen.

Route 9 is a new magazine out of UMass and the debut issue includes  Jensen Beach,  Gabe Durham,  Christy Crutchfield, and more.

I love Canteen and the  latest issue has an essay from Lincoln Michel.

Congratulations to Sarah Hilary who has made the  short list in the Sean O’Faolain Prize.

I hope you’re reading the great stuff Amber Sparks is throwing up at Necessary Fiction this month. You can find installments from  Anne Valente, Sal Pane, Joe Kapitan and others.

There’s a new issue of Sink Review with poetry from Elisa Gabbert and others.

In the September 2010 issue of Knee Jerk, writing from  James Tadd Adcox,  Simon Smith and a conversation with  Shane Jones.

Clutter, by David LaBounty is featured at The Criterion.

At Everyday Fiction, Powerball by Eric McKinley.

The second August issue of Foundling Review includes a poem from Kirsty Logan.

This week’s Annalemma features Eternal Love by Mark Budman.