Special Features

Review of The Vicious Red Relic, Love by Anna Joy Springer
May 6, 2014 | review

Anna Joy Springer. The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir. Seattle, WA: Jaded Ibis Press, 2011. 202 pp. $18.00, paper.

Anna Joy Springer’s fantastical memoir, The Vicious Red Relic, Love, is a thickly layered exploration of love, lust, loss, and grief—and of the differing selves called into play as imperfect humans navigate desire. The beginning of the book lays out its improbable task: The primary narrator, Nina, is to create a guidebook for a creature she has fashioned to go back in time, to be with her first female lover, [Gil], as the lover commits suicide. The creature, named Winky in imaginary real time and Blinky in imaginary past time, must negotiate a series of enchanted forests, each offering different enticements, pleasures, and dangers. Associated with each forest is a document or set of documents through which Winky and the reader may piece together not only the lovers’ story but also its parallels in (a reimagined) ancient Sumerian literature, most notably the loss of a partner in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the netherworld sequence in Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld. (Though “Nina” may be seen as a derivative of “Inanna” and “[Gil]” as an abridgment of “Gilgamesh,” character correlations are fluid throughout the book.)

For all its lavish use of fable, The Vicious Red Relic also functions as a snapshot of 1990s San Francisco—specifically, of the world of a third-wave-feminist college student who is also a sex worker, punk-rock musician, and fledgling lesbian. Nina’s efforts to juggle these identities become ever more complicated as she enters into a love-and-sex relationship with [Gil], an archetypal Bad Girl—damaged, addicted, brilliant. Dazzled by [Gil’s] past as cult/abuse survivor, street thief, and prostitute, and by revelatory sex (“I felt like a muscular black-winged horse had flown out from between my thighs, then burst open like a star”), she attempts to fulfill her partner’s violent fantasies, learning in the process “that in my heart I could be anyone, even the ‘father,’ and that I owned nothing, nothing of me, not a damn thing.”

The Relic unfolds as a seeming miscellany of narrative shorts (some clearly fictional, others disturbingly realistic) punctuated by journal entries, class notes, poems, doodles, drawings, collages, and other “artifacts” that may or may not be historically authentic as memoir. The work is, in Barthes’s famed terminology, a writable text, one that flaunts its artifice and dares the reader to assemble its meanings, irreducibly plural. As such, it doesn’t lend itself to summary review. A conclusive understanding of [Gil], for example, is thwarted by (among other things) the character’s dissociative identity disorder, an irreducible plurality in itself. How much of her reported lethal past is “real,” and does it matter that we (and Nina and Winky and quite likely Anna Joy Springer) will never know?

And the author’s disregard for the “sanctity” of classic master works—Nina’s first reading of Gilgamesh is titled “How to Read the Ancient or Hackneyed”—reminds us that even what is carved in stone may prove to be writable, that foundational texts can be shown to have feet of clay. The extant official version of this work, dating from between 1300 and 1000 BCE, was selectively constructed from multiple stories, many of which survive on tablets and fragments of various origins. The earlier stories do not form a coherent narrative, and significant lacunae in both these and the sanctioned redaction invite significant editorial intervention. Springer’s radical rewrite is thus a revision of a revision of a revision for which there is no urtext. The official version of Gilgamesh is a forcibly unified myth in the service of ancient Mesopotamian kings—why shouldn’t a twenty-first-century queer feminist writer adapt/expand/transform it for her own aesthetic and political purposes? Why shouldn’t Inanna, who functions in Gilgamesh primarily as a narrative device (the petty, punishing bitch-goddess), be restored as epic hero, as the only deity who braves the realm of death and yet returns to the heavens?

The audacity of The Vicious Red Relic, Love is less a matter of intricate design and daring appropriation than of Anna Joy Springer’s willingness to acknowledge the book as memoir. The work is a study in pain, abjection, fear, betrayal, and devastating tragedy—familiar themes in feminist confessional writing—but the protagonist and her lover are at times cruel, indifferent, hateful, bored, funny, manipulative, and/or self-destructive, both within and without the theater of their BDSM. While Nina and [Gil] are clearly not documentation but representation, fictive enactors of “womanhood” through manifold (and sometimes startling) gender identities, their basis in real-world lovers makes for a kind of intimacy that not all readers will welcome. In this book of shattered boundaries, the line between public and private may be the most challenging to forego.

As must be clear from the above commentary, in many ways The Relic is a classically postmodern text, forsaking the idealizations of literary realism and moving between registers with disconcerting ease. If, as Lyotard has suggested, the postmodern aesthetic calls for presenting the unpresentable, this fable of impossible love and terrible death very nearly achieves that unattainable goal. But if a hallmark of postmodern literature is cool and ironic detachment, the play of surfaces without concern for depth, The Vicious Red Relic, Love defies categorization. Numerous reviewers have attested to its pathos, and Springer herself has described the work as intentionally emotive:
     A writer has to theatricalize, to teach a reader how to read this particular      book, to bring a reader into a psychic state, to work on the reader’s nervous      system, to pace the experience, to guide the reader but not overguide, to give      moments of crescendo, moments of rest.
Her aim is not merely to produce a tragic spectacle but to engage the mournful imagination—as prelude to critical reflection.

Through Springer’s commemorative art, we face the certain and irrevocable loss that shadows all human life. We are reminded that bereavement triggers more than individual sorrow, that the anticipation and experience of loss are intersubjective, socially shared. In this difficult book, sharing functions as an occasion not for sentimentality (Winky and Blinky notwithstanding) but for raising difficult questions. What do we think and feel in relation to death, and why? Do memorials heal us? Have they typically provided an artificial closure, a way of avoiding the presence of absence? In the performance of mourning, how do we speak of (and for) the lost person, the lost body? To what extent is human subjectivity a precipitate of lost attachments, physical and emotional? Despite multiple personae, do we share with the ancients a core experience of connection and sorrow? The Relic prompts us to consider how cultures have taught us to express—and to suppress—our love, our sexuality, our grief.

Interview with Karin Gottshall, Winner of The Wheeler Prize
March 25, 2014 | blog interview news

Karin Gottshall lives in Vermont and teaches at Middlebury College. Her first book, Crocus, won the Poets Out Loud prize and was published by Fordham University Press in 2007. She is also the author of three chapbooks—Flood Letters (Argos Books), Almanac for the Sleepless (Dancing Girl Press), and Swans (Argos Books). Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.

Shelley Wong: Congratulations on winning! We are thrilled and very excited to bring this book into the world. What was the writing process like for this book and how did it compare with writing your first book, Crocus? How did the three-part structure come together?

Karin Gottshall: Thank you! I am so grateful for and humbled by this prize. The Wheeler Prize book is one I’m interested in every year, and I’m so proud that The River Won’t Hold You will be in this series. Kathy Fagan is a poet whose work and contributions I love and admire so much, so to have my manuscript selected by her means the world to me.

I hadn’t actually thought much about the way the experience of writing this book compared with that of Crocus. This may be a dull answer, but actually I think it was much the same. I work slowly, very slowly, and both books took many years to put together and both went through many drafts and many poems were overhauled and cut and replaced before I felt like the books had arrived at something like their final forms.

The three-part structure, which I used in Crocus too, came about without my having planned it. When I looked at the poems all together, and saw the ways different pieces seemed to talk to each other and build from each other, they just seemed to keep falling into three constellations. I tried working against that, since I didn’t want to feel like I was just arranging them that way out of habit, but no other formal solution I came up with seemed satisfying. I like the number three, or at least it seems to be a number that I often find my life organizing itself around in different ways. In terms of poetry I tend to use tercets quite frequently, and a reviewer noticed that a lot of poems in Crocus (unconsciously) favor the anapest. So there must be something about the formal qualities of three that feels natural to me in the way I create rhythm and structure.

SW:I admire these poems for their evocative images of a woman’s life from youth to maturity. How did you enter into this speaker’s (or speakers?) consciousness over a lifespan? What were your concerns?

KG: Honestly I don’t think I had any sense of entering another consciousness. Not that these speakers are all “me,” exactly, or that all of the experiences in the book are mine, but I guess, as I wrote these poems, I was more aware of going deeper into myself and my own questions than of trying to inhabit the consciousness of a persona.

I’ve had the experience of doing that, too—my chapbook, Flood Letters (Argos Books, 2011), is a narrative sequence spoken in the voice of a character who is definitely not me, though we certainly share a lot of the same preoccupations. In writing that way, one of my main concerns was making her world coherent to the reader without gunking it up with too much explanation. Conversely, a big concern for me in writing the kind of poems in The River Won’t Hold You is allowing enough of the solid world in to give the reader something for their brain to do as well as some sensual pleasure or frisson in the imagery—not relying too much on the too-easy shorthand of emotional language alone.

SW: The shifting spaces and landscapes are vividly rendered with precision and emotional color. How did the world (or worlds) come into being for this collection?

They came into being through the process of rendering down the raw material of decades of daydreams. I don’t mean to sound glib, by that—I really think my poems and their worlds emerge out of my fundamental affinity toward that pursuit and ineptitude for pretty much any other. I hope that doesn’t sound frivolous—I think reverie is necessary to human happiness, and certainly, in my experience, to art. And yet for some reason it feels like we’re supposed to be apologetic about it.

Jenna Kilic: I’m interested in how you arrived at the book title.  Often times, a book will have an eponymous poem.  Your book nearly has that in the poem with the running title, “After all, the river.”  When I read “The River Child,” I feel like it could nearly be titled “The River Won’t Hold You” or come before a poem with that title.  Can you explain how you arrived at the book’s title and how it works with and/or against the poems in the book?

KG: The manuscript went through several titles in different versions, and I liked all of them in different ways, but none of them felt exactly right. I think the title fell into place for me at just about the same moment that the manuscript as a whole did. I hope the feels concrete but also appropriately ambiguous—there are multiple possible meanings, and I think all of them are present in some way in the book.

JK: I’m interested in the rhyme schemes you use, particularly the internal and slant rhymes, and how, because they’re so well-managed and well-placed, they sneak up on you.  It seems that poets either love rhyme or hate it.  I love good rhymes and yours are certainly that.  Can you tell us what draws you to rhyme and how you see it working in your poems?

KG: Thank you! I don’t usually consider my poems as having rhyme schemes unless I’m working with a received form, but perhaps they kind of do, in that I think I use patterns of sound in a similar way. I think of rhyme and sound effects like that as a kind of spelunking rope that I use to find my way through the poem. In striking a strong sound I think I often imagine that I’m also casting that sound out ahead of myself into the poem, and part of the poem’s work is then finding its way back—or catching up—to that repeated sound. So I guess that creates a kind of constraint, even in free verse poems, that works a little like the constraint of end-rhymes in verse, and I find that useful. Those schemes may not always stay intact in later versions of the poem, but they sometimes help me find my way through initial drafts, and often they become important structurally.

JK: I have a sense of other poets who might have influenced your poems, but would you mind explaining whose work you feel most influenced or inspired by or if you had a particular mentor who was a great influence on these poems?

KG: This is so hard to answer, because so many poets come immediately to mind but it always feels somehow presumptuous to me to claim them as influences. And influence always seems so wide-ranging to me—including novels and music and paintings and accidents of fate as well as poetry—so that just talking about poets seems to give a distorted picture. I can say that there are some poets that for a long time I have returned to over and over again for solace and pleasure, and they include Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Ruefle, Robert Hass, Larry Levis, and Jack Gilbert. I know I am leaving out important names I will regret.

All of my wonderful mentors at Sarah Lawrence and Vermont College have been huge influences on my writing, and my own brilliant students at Interlochen and Middlebury have inspired me daily with their wild imaginations, their courage, and the urgency and importance of what they have to say through their writing.

SW & JK: Is there anything else you would like to add? Thanks so much for your time!

KG: No, nothing to add! Thank you for the lovely, thoughtful questions—it has been a pleasure.

 

 

Review of You Are Not Dead by Wendy Xu
March 5, 2014 | review

Wendy Xu. You Are Not Dead. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013. 67 pp. $15.95, paper.

You, the reader. You, the loved one. You, the speaker’s best friend. You, a football. You, a river. You, the moon. You are and are not the “you” in Wendy Xu’s You Are Not Dead. I know this because when reading this rhetorically complex but unbelievably casual collection of poems, I embodied the position of the subject just as easily as I did that of the speaker. Take, for instance, the final line of “Like Whatever Makes You Not A Statue”: “Everyone is laughing but only / you should know why.” In this poem, the “you” has been addressed in terms of a close relationship (whether romantic or platonic) near the poem’s beginning and suspended towards the poem’s center. The final use of the second person occurs after a discussion of the speaker’s own dreams: “about a ferris wheel rolling away…on a gigantic tour / of North America…My mouth is a peach pit of everything / I’ve ever said.” Due largely to its placement following such internally-dependent details, the final “you” jolts us out of the intimate address and into a register in which the speaker could be considered to be talking to herself. Such a shift muddies the identity of the “you” in, I think, a rather satisfying way.

These highly lyrical poems are organized mostly in blocks—that is, stanzaic breaks are a rarity here. This is due, partially, to the emphasis Xu places on the line break, but it is also reflective of each poem’s meditation as its own individual and individualized experience. Each box of text contains its own little world in which neither you nor the speaker is dead. And each of these text boxes is replete with elements of the natural world: iron, trees, sails, light, birds, the moon, sand, horses, wolves, rivers, teeth. Underlying this obsession with environment is a pervasive anxiety about the apocalypse and its terms. The speaker of “You Are Not Who They Wanted You to Be” asserts, “when the actual untelevised apocalypse / comes I don’t want / to be ready, a capsized tugboat blinking in the harbor / is how you’ll know I stayed.” The speaker’s indefatigability is evident here—despite the very real fear of the world as we know it ending, the speaker is determined to remain in it, to remain in these text boxes, in the natural world, surrounded by its material things.

Reading these poems, I was spellbound by shared moments of suspension—the ordinary events that hold within them the same love, or pain, as a dramatic one. “I drink my coffee and wait / for what is next,” Xu writes in “What It Means to Stay Here,” and we are almost there with the speaker, waiting on the next grace- fully simple line, waiting for our own “you” to walk through the door and tell us plainly about their day. Throughout You Are Not Dead, we anticipate the next thing that is not this thing, while simultaneously reveling in the moment at hand. “Hold on, I promise / it’s happening,” the poet swears in “Requirements for Seeing a Valley,” and we hold out for the poem’s end, for the world to un-pause, for the following poem to affirm, “Here you are. Here / you have always been.”

Xu’s navigation of moments of suspension is not the only way our expectations are manipulated in this collection; rhetorical play is at the heart of her work. The rhetoric of You Are Not Dead is often one of disavowal—of what’s important being talked around, not about. Such rhetoric invites the reader to explore what’s not being said through the explicit statement of its lack. These poems almost say, “Here are ten ways to say what isn’t happening,” and this inductive approach results in an unexpected emotional depth. The collection opens, for instance, with “Several Altitudes of Not Talking,” a contradiction in itself, since the poem is colloquial, conversational—even friendly. “Several Altitudes” is, like all of the poems in You Are Not Dead, heavily enjambed; the first two lines read, “You are part of other people but not / like them,” exposing a certain distance from yet fascination and identification with the world around the speaker. These poems, truly, are part of the world but not / like it. Here, the ordinary is filled with the poet’s own awe and charm: “A very important car / with sirens rumbled by and sounded / exactly right.” What a totally obvious yet profound claim—that a car sounds, “exactly right,” exactly like itself. How deft of Xu to draw our attention to the inevitable aptness of the world.

Xu’s poems deftly navigate the space between the often-obscured personal and the dominant external. The concrete world is in the spotlight while the personal and confessional take place off stage—far away enough that we can see hints of it, but not so close that we comprehend the details we’re presented with in a narrative sense. “In June Like We Said But I Fell Out of Love” indicates, for instance, in its title, a past between the speaker and a lover, but the poem, even in its opening, goes about avoiding the subject, diverting us to a seemingly-alternate anecdote: “Once I went to a costume party for the end / of the world where I was a meteor and my friend / a blue jay.” The speaker and this friend drink tequila and talk about happiness on a rooftop while their costumes come apart. By the time we reach the poem’s final line (“So we stayed up there in the dark for a while / thinking about what to think”), we have entered and exited a moment that appears to be narratively separate from that of the title—the character in question in the body of the poem is a friend, presumably not a lover. And are we in June? Has the speaker fallen out of love, or is this scene one of a romance’s conception?

Xu plays further with our expectations in “Dear Future Where Everything is Hypothetical Except for Joy,” in which she toys with causality by utilizing anaphoral “if” statements that, for the most part, resist resolution through a flirtation with the “then.” Occasionally “then” appears, but mostly it is implied, or even skirted away from, as is the case in the lines, “If later the streetlights shatter me / into pure amazement.” Also at work in this poem is a sense of detachment as the speaker looks in on herself at a party scene. Someone has fallen in love. Someone is holding a glass up to the light. And in this poem I, like the speaker, want to preserve some element of the world’s unpredictability—I am with her when she declares, “if it is supposed to be a surprise don’t / ever tell me.”

Ending the collection is an eleven-poem series in which each piece is entitled, “We Are Both Sure to Die,” the second poem of which ends on a particularly telling passage:

     …We are not dead.
     We still adventure in a completely
     original way. Just coconut or
     wearing stripes for dinner.
     Good weather or hello.
     I have been waiting forever
     to meet you with all these books.
     The sky no longer angry.
     How does it feel now
     with your head still stuck
     inside the amazing sun?

Fascinatingly, this passage contains the material things of Xu’s and our world—coconut, stripes for dinner, good weather, books, the sky, “the amazing sun”—while simultaneously addressing the speaker and reader’s own absorption in these concrete elements in the final lines. Suddenly we are not visiting these poems so much as we are “stuck inside the amazing sun” of them—we don’t get to choose whether or not we live here, whether or not we are going to die. In this sense, Xu’s collection is entirely inevitable. And this inevitability made me leave these poems really needing to return to them—needing to go outside and look at trees and the moon, and appreciate the world, and then laugh at it for being so simple, and hug people, and say hello, and drink my coffee in solitude, all at once.

Review of Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic by Eva Heisler
March 5, 2014 | review

Eva Heisler. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic. Tucson, AZ: Kore Press, 2012. 114 pp. $15.95, paper.

Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic houses poems written by Heisler during a nine-year stay in Iceland after having received a Fulbright grant in 1997. Within the collection, prose poems slowly expand and condense, as Heisler attempts to apply structure to her experience yet fails innumerable times in a struggle to understand the trills of the Icelandic language, the faces and attitudes of its inhabitants, and her own self so displaced she is nearly disembodied. Compact lines of prose give way to lines more dispersed and scattered across the page, forms flickering over the harsh, mysterious, and sublime landscape of Iceland, embodied in the flat faces of its inhabitants, particularly in the poet’s lover Steinunn. I found myself startled by breaks in prose and increased abstractions, then brought back to level ground when prose returns in the final poem. There is a movement from the physicality of Iceland to hazy mindscapes of ghosts and lost women like Persephone and Eurydice. The poet speaks to “Persephone in the Winter Palace” in couplets whose simple and predictable line breaks reflect the straightforwardness of the story that is also her own:

     You fell in love with your husband
     because he knew a lost language;

     because his incantations and promises
     resembled your dreams of God.

     But you have been in this winter palace
     for eleven winters,

     and you have acquired neither the language
     nor a shape.

     You are inside the palace
     but outside the door.

Such a love is paralleled in the speaker’s love for Steinunn, whose palace—Iceland—is also the place where the speaker resides but does not fully reside. Just as the poet fails to fully understand and keep Steinunn, she fails to ever fully integrate herself into Iceland’s landscape, halted by mistranslations or, at other times, an inability to even begin to translate.

There is a sense that Steinunn is one with the foreign landscape in “Map and Hand,” and the poet’s attempts at understanding or mapping the two result in confusion: the land is “an emptiness that I cannot read—like you. You map the / emptiness because I cannot tell the difference between / my feelings for the view and my feelings for you.”

The foreigner’s inability to separate the person from the place further emphasizes how travel disorients the traveler, allowing even once familiar things to take on new meanings. Heisler examines flea market finds like aromatherapy “Fizz Balls” in “Something to Finish”: “Encountering these in the States, I would have folded / into myself. But in Iceland, the kitsch doesn’t claim me. / I finger the gaudy beads; they don’t take the shape of coffins—I am here and some place else.” This strange sense of being present but absent, here but not-here, becomes a consistent and ironically grounding element in the collection. Heisler’s relationship with this displacement is ambivalent but perhaps ultimately soothing; Heisler, at the end of the four-sectioned collection’s first section, sighs, “At last, elsewhere.”

While Heisler technically has the ability to translate Icelandic to English, this ability cannot transcend cultural differences, just as a word cannot perfectly embody the actual thing or experience. Her lover can only speak and write so much English, and she as the poet fails to evoke foreignness through the necessary use of recognizable words: “I know that you write not what you want but what you can. / I have the words; you, the place.” There’s despair, and loneliness, in the inability to translate, yet once the thing has been translated, there is perhaps a deeper despair at having simplified something ineffable: “Today you look at me and the look is like a bruise / on wallpaper. I am exhausted by the looking. I blame you, / the stranger, for no longer being strange.”

Steinunn marks an ambivalence Heisler has for Iceland: while she wants to find ways to connect and really understand the place and its people, she also yearns to maintain a distance in order to admire it. Once again, this calls to mind our human relationship with poetry: we long to translate our feelings, but sometimes in decoding such feelings, we can ruin them. At the same time, Heisler enjoys a sort of limbo with Steinunn in that Steinunn embodies Iceland but also speaks English. When Steinunn is fully Icelandic in “Accent,” the bridge to Heisler falls: “Speaking Icelandic, Steinunn no longer charms: wooly / syllables exclude me; our private architecture disappears / and in its place stands a stall roofed with shields.”

Heisler’s strained relationship with Steinunn extends to her relationship with all Icelanders, a mix of attractive strangeness but troublesome distance and aloofness. Early on, Iceland’s people are idealized pastoralists in their boot-wearing and harvest feasts but also gruff critics of the materialist North American lifestyle riddled with wasted leftovers and aluminum foil. The color red there is not of Coca-Cola, but of red cabbage. In response to such coldness and difference, Heisler expresses a constant need for sweetness and sugar cubes throughout the collection, amidst the spit balls, rotten shark, and singed sheep heads of Iceland and the crumpled receipts, endless to-do lists, and tangled extension cords of the U.S. This continues to encapsulate a greater trope of yearning for human connection despite issues of translation. There are moments, though, when the poet triumphs simultaneously within and despite such list-heavy poems of objects riddled with strained meanings, as in “Imagining the Last on the First”:

     … This isn’t about letting you
     know me. It is about persuading you that where it is not
     blue, it is gold. I do not speak of crumpled receipts and
     the tangle of extension cords. “You’re awake!” you
     remarked in the autumn, as if this were sleight of hand.
     This isn’t about letting you know me. This is about keeping you
     from sleep.

There is gold, and beauty, to be found in between objects and in moments shared with others. Whereas Steinunn seems to lose her mystery and allure, Iceland remains different from the United States, but also the same in that it is not the physical objects that matter, but the human impressions left on them. In “What I Remember,” Heisler further emphasizes what she finds to be most important:

     What I remember is neither the words nor the light in
     the kitchen but the press of a hand against my forehead.
     What I remember is not the color of eyes but what it felt
     like to be seen. What I remember is not the overstuffed
     luggage but the door, and you leaning against it. What I
     remember is not computing sums in the margins of my
     notebook, but three words and a grove of birch that I
     mistook for a herd of ghost horses. What I remember is
     not the new wardrobe but a fling of red and white.

Interview with Poetry Editors Shelley Wong and Jenna Kilic
February 23, 2014 | blog interview news

In preparation for the staff’s imminent departure to Seattle for AWP, Associate Poetry Editor David Winter sat down with Poetry Editors Shelley Wong and Jenna Kilic. Shelley and Jenna are both third-year students in The Ohio State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and they have both published widely in literary journals. They discuss their editorial philosophies, their own writing, and Mariah Carey below.

David Winter: Thank you both so much for doing this interview. Where do you see The Journal heading in the next year? What do you hope to accomplish as Poetry Editors?

Jenna Kilic: I think we’re going to continue with something that [former Poetry Editor] Michael Marberry emphasized with us last year and that’s publishing established poets who we love alongside new, young poets whose work thrills us.

I want every issue of The Journal to strive toward publishing the most eclectic work possible and not just in terms of form. I’m talking about different voices; different cultural ideas and concepts; poems that risk being fierce, emotional, disturbing, etc. Unsafe poems. I want to publish poems that trouble me throughout the day and when I go to sleep, poems that make me want to write. On the whole, I want the poems in any particular issue to be in some sort of conversation and/or argument with one another and to establish that through eclecticism.

Shelley Wong: It’s a ridiculous honor to be a poetry editor for The Journal and have the opportunity to read the work of so many fine poets. I’m excited to work with Jenna and the entire Journal staff in the upcoming year.

Now, onto the questions! I concur with Jenna that diversity is important. I’m interested in the different ways a poem can create and craft meaning and I too am looking for poems that surprise me, that talk about unexpected subjects or talk about familiar subjects unexpectedly. Poetry is an auditory form as well as a visual one and how a poem uses music or white space in relation to its content fascinates me.

In addition to aesthetic diversity, I also champion gender equality and diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and education. Poetry is about many voices, histories, interpretations, and representations.

The Journal has a wonderful tradition of publishing established and emerging writers, and we look forward to continuing that legacy and spotlighting some terrific poets through our print and web issues and online presence. During Michael’s tenure, he included several translations in each issue, and that is something Jenna and I are happy to continue. It’s a great honor to receive so many terrific submissions from poets around the world and expand our knowledge of poets who may be little known in the United States.

DW: I am so excited to be on staff here, too, and especially to work with the two of you. You make editing sound like a pretty great gig, but it’s also a rather eclectic pursuit, to borrow Jenna’s terminology. Is editing a lit mag something you’ve wanted to do for years? How did you get interested in this work?

JK: I became interested in the possibility of editing a literary magazine while applying to MFA programs. I wasn’t even aware that was a possibility for me until I was applying, and I wasn’t even sending my work out then. OSU having a well-established literary magazine was one of the reasons I decided to come here. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the publishing world, and working on a literary magazine seemed like a great way to do that.

SW: Being an editor is such fun! It’s much easier than writing. I was a poetry editor for my undergraduate literary journal Ibid at UC Berkeley and was very keen on getting involved with the graduate literary journal while pursuing my MFA. Writing can be a lonely art and literary journals are a terrific way to build community. As an editor, it’s such a thrill to find good work and support emerging writers. It’s also a surreally awesome experience to correspond with poets who you’ve admired for many years. As a student, I’ve come across so many new favorite poets through The Journal (a handful of names: Traci Brimhall, Marcus Wicker, Sally Wen Mao, Christina Veladota). Former poetry editors and poets extraordinaire Tory Adkisson and Michael Marberry both did an exceptional job of bringing in established writers alongside newer writers and I want to continue their legacy of helping great poets find their readers. Editing is really about building a home for poems and making love matches between readers and poets and poets with other poets. I hope we can make that happen.

DW: What are a few of your favorite literary magazines, and why? Where are you sending your own poems?

JK: Whenever I read Birmingham Poetry Review or 32 Poems, I feel the urge to write. When I get that feeling, then I know a magazine is one of my favorites. I also like the Boston Review, which recently published our own reviews editor, Raena Shirali, in the “Discovery” poetry contest. Those editors are interested in publishing serious poems and serious articles. I find their magazine incredibly engaging. Ninth Letter is like a shiny new toy I can’t wait to rip open. Other journals: Arcadia, Salamander, Kenyon Review, Kartika Review, Damazine, The Portland Review, Pleiades, Poetry, The Dark Horse, Measure, The Sewanee Review, and Subtropics, among several others. I’ve sent my poems to all of these places. You win some; you lose some.

SW: As to journal favorites and my own poetry submissions, I’m a fan of Indiana Review, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Shampoo, Sycamore Review, and jubilat. These journals publish great work that often lingers in my mind. I love finding poems that cause me to rethink what I know about poetry or teach me how to see beauty or an image differently. The Internet is providing a platform for so many new poetic voices that it’s hard to keep up! It’s a great time for poetry.

…

Continue Reading
An Interview with Daniel Hornsby
January 28, 2014 | blog interview news

Daniel Hornsby is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Unstuck. He is working on a novel. His story “The Gargantuans” appeared in the Fall issue (37.4) of The Journal. He spoke to Fiction Editor Brett Beach about giants, myths, and how he used metaphor to talk about the unintentional pain parents inflict on their children.

Brett Beach: Why giants? (Or, to put it another way, what was the original seed of this story?)

Daniel Hornsby: I was at a party with a friend. It was one of those boring parties where the host tries to get everyone to dress up, and so the guests are kind of stuck there in their fancy clothes. Anyway, my friend and I got to talking about her mother, who, like many mothers (not including mine!), had left her scarred and resentful. At one point, I began thinking about how our parents hurt us without even trying, mostly as a result of their size—both physically and metaphorically. I thought it was funny how, when you’re a child, your parents are gigantic compared to you. They’re giants; they hurt you without even trying. And so a few days later I started working on the story.

BB: Where did you struggle in writing the story? How did you get around those issues?

DH: There’s no short supply of stories with couples struggling to have a baby. And there’s probably an equal number of stories in which children adopt some orphaned animal (baby bird, kitten, etc.), which, despite their best efforts at parenting, inevitably dies. On some level, these are two new sorts of myth types. Part of me wanted to combine these two stories, using the giants’ scale as a way to make these old, tragic archetypes fresh and funny. I don’t know if I was able to do this, but that was what I was going for.

BB: What made you go back to the story again and again?

DH: I keep coming back to pieces that set their own rules and vocabularies for themselves. Here, a giant narrator let me play with scale and make funny (at least to me), contradictory statements about size: little houses, small moons, etc. Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel sets a comic tradition for play with giants, and I took some comfort in that.

BB: How does “The Gargantuans” hold up against your other work? Is it similar in theme, setting, view of the world?

DH: Just before I wrote “The Gargantuans,” I’d just finished a story about some children who ride around in a giant, mechanical unicorn, kind of like the Trojan horse. Gigantism and childhood seem to go together—I think there’s a reason fairytales are full of enormous monsters, because childhood is, too. And for much of childhood, there’s really no distinction between reality and fantasy: the fantastic is real, and the real is fantastic.

BB: What is the most important piece of fiction you’ve ever read? (Or: who should our readers go seek out right this second, without even closing the internet down or turning off the stove?)

DH: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is a book that continues to haunt me years after reading it. There’s a kind of subterranean realm that Bolaño’s work operates exclusively within—a brutal twilight zone or dark maze that covers the whole shrinking world. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and Steven Millhauser’s We Others are also both pretty infectious. Davis’ style—her precise sentences and range—and Millhauser’s whimsical ideas and premises have been enough to keep me inspired for a long time.

Review of Woman Without Umbrella by Victoria Redel
October 15, 2013 | review

Victoria Redel. Woman Without Umbrella. New York, NY: Four Way Books, 2012. 84 pp. $15.95, paper.

Victoria Redel’s third book of poetry, Woman Without Umbrella, is an exploration in witness and meditation. So perhaps it is fair to begin with a brief biographical note: Redel is a second generation American of Belgian, Romanian, Egyptian and Russian descent; a younger sister to two other women (one of whom the book is dedicated to); a mother of two boys; and a writer who is as accomplished in prose as she is in poetry.

In some ways, for many years, unlike its European and international counterparts, American modern and post-modern poetry has not shown sustained interest in interpersonal relationships. Redel’s personal history connects her to the older landscape of Europe while her own American life (more European than Puritan) has honed her experiences. Her poetic enterprise of content born in language (along with the likes of Edward Hirsch and Joseph Brodsky) has not abandoned that meditation of risk, balance, and observation. It is a kind of conservatism. Woman Without Umbrella is easy to read. No pyrotechnics. Redel is imaginative and lively—but is no hipster shaking the tree of effects or trendy subject matter. The poems are elegantly cosmopolitan; no references that any well-traveled, reasonably well-read person will not readily know. The poems are civil—liberal and brutal—in their tether between daily life and poetic meditation. What is at stake is always in the interpersonal. If one is looking for the hard edge of irony, pre-processed fear or hate tainted with malice, or the unrefined or savage imagination, a reader should look elsewhere.

The book opens with a pairing of poems that consider the clumsy opening of a relationship between a young man and a young woman and then the quiet closing of a relationship between a mature husband and wife. The poems are the fore and aft of the adventure of a life with another. Redel’s aesthetic revolves around affection: the notion that living beings like lying/living next to other living things. It is a simplicity that can lead to a neurotic silence…or, with skill, a poetic voice of revelry:

     At the end of the marriage they lay down on their big, exhausted bed.
     It was crowded with all the men and women they had ever loved.

     Of course their fathers and mothers were there and a boy in uniform
     she’d kissed on a stairwell. His first wife spooned her first husband.

     Ridiculous Affair held hands with Stupendous Infatuation.
     There was a racket of dreaming and, though both were tired

     from the difficult end and in need of sleep, neither could sleep,
     so they began telling each other the long, good story of their love.

                                                                                      (“The End”)

There is an appearance of Circe, a lesson in how to say “I love you” in Greek, an appearance of the Wolf (erotic counterpart of Little Red Riding Hood), and then…a woman without an umbrella. Umbrellas involve the mechanics of protection and, as such, fall in the category with mirrors, garlic, the hand of Miriam or Fatima, and condom use:

     A month after turning forty-five, every last egg in her body
     is a Rockette doing the can-can. Use me use me use me, they cry.
     I’ll be the easy child, the I-won’t-wake-you-up-in-the-night child.

     Now every city block boasts the popular miracle—

     Keep away, she says to civilized men who stop at crosswalks.
     Do you see this glittered fertility, this fishnet stocking hunger?

                                                                               (“Suddenly”)

Hunger propels the young forward. Redel also weighs in for those in mid-life; no less hungry, but perhaps less prone to careless risk and more attuned to the bases of sustenance and happiness. The word courage takes its origin from “cor”—Latin for “heart”:

     Wherever you are, driving
     whichever back road

     of suburban middle-age,
     whatever courage

     brings you through
     to whomever you love,

     there it is again,
     the old frontier.

                (“First”)

Redel is subtle, adept, and clear. Fragile things may be damaged, broken, or worn beyond repair: the soft bodies of adolescent sons with an eye for sports, mechanisms that turn up at the Customer Service Counter claims department, the cardiologist’s report of a father, the beeping monitor of a friend, the subjects of stories. Ants become “killers.” Shores restrain. Anxious romantic desire is measured by a famous poet in a chain of cigarettes. Beauty shops become the place of assignations. In one poem, someone gently touches the hair of a beloved; in another, someone recalls a mother drawing the famous line, “Over my dead body.”

The poem “Woman Without Umbrella” itself concludes:

     The dark came on with orange in the clouds.
     Swallows feeding over the lake.

     No one had anything left to say.

     If she hadn’t said it before, or enough, she was sorry.

The poem “Auspicious Subway” later in the collection concludes: “Just you wait, Sweetheart. Just wait till you hear what in the world’s going on out there.” Redel’s collection shows us much of what is—revealing both the wearying elements and the fantasies, illusions, and beliefs we assemble to protect our vulnerable selves from those elements, even—and perhaps especially—in such close proximity to one another. Like with her title character, however, Redel sees that sometimes we’re left to the weather with no protection at all.

Review of Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa; translated by Stephen Snyder
October 15, 2013 | review

Yoko Ogawa; translated by Stephen Snyder. Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. New York, NY: Picador, 2013. 162 pp. $14.00, paper.

The stories in Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales are not horror stories, as the front cover and the title of this collection might suggest. Instead, these eleven linked tales are “dark” because they are primarily concerned with those things that are traditionally kept out of the light: grief, tragedy, the desire to harm others, death, mental illness, alienation, obsession, failure, loss. Ogawa drags these disturbing subjects into the light, prying into her characters’ most private fears and desires. Her narratives are engrossing, twisting into unpredictable and peculiar shapes, and her prose is swift, unadorned, and powerful.

“It was a beautiful Sunday,” the first story begins. “The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight…Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on a drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings…You could gaze at this perfect picture all day…and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing.”

From here, Ogawa makes a habit of uncovering the undercurrent of strangeness and imperfection that runs beneath seemingly unremarkable and familiar scenes. She draws attention to the missing details, illuminating the hidden sadness, anger, and violence that lurk in the corners of daily life. A mother continues to buy her deceased son strawberry shortcakes for his birthday years after the child suffocated to death in an abandoned refrigerator. Two elderly women build a museum that displays used implements of torture. A woman whose husband is having an affair accidentally stumbles upon the dying moments of a pet Bengal tiger, and takes comfort in stroking the tiger’s fur during its last breath.

I was most impressed with the story “Old Mrs. J,” a tale about a writer who observes the unsettling behavior of her landlady, Mrs. J, whose husband recently went missing. Soon, Mrs. J’s garden begins to produce carrots that are shaped uncannily like human hands. The story skillfully walks the line between the supernatural and the simply strange. The mournful tale is set against the backdrop of a garden of rustling kiwi trees, which rivals any Gothic castle in the category of best creepy locale: “The kiwis…grew so thick that on moonlit nights when the wind was blowing, the whole hillside would tremble as though covered with a swarm of dark green bats.” The story is masterfully paced—eerie and unnerving in all the right places—and old Mrs. J is a villain to delight in.

Another standout was “Sewing for the Heart,” a story in which a bag maker is tasked with crafting a custom bag for the heart of a nightclub singer. The singer’s heart is exposed, having grown on the outside of her chest. The narrative is captivating, and the descriptions of the heart are beautiful and surprising: “It looked like a spider, or a work of modern art. Or a fetus that had just started to grow.” Of all the narrators in the collection, the voice of this obsessive bag maker struck me as the most memorable and interesting. “When you live alone as I have for many years,” the bag maker reports, “daily life only becomes simpler and simpler.” But before the reader can feel too sorry for this isolated man, he assures the reader that his passion for his work is quite a different thing. “You may be thinking that a bag is just a thing in which to put other things,” he explains. “And you’re right, of course. But that’s what makes them so extraordinary. A bag has no intentions or desires of its own, it embraces every object that we ask it to hold…To me a bag is patience; a bag is profound discretion.” The bag maker becomes obsessed with the singer’s heart and with the bag he is constructing for it. The narrative parades on towards an inevitable, yet still striking, conclusion.

The stories in the collection are linked to one another, but in puzzling and tangential ways. The broken-hearted beautician in “Welcome to the Museum of Torture” finds the dead hamster that belonged to the bag maker in “Sewing for the Heart.” A teenager coping with her mother’s illness in “Fruit Juice” discovers an abandoned post office full of kiwis, which was stockpiled by the sinister landlady from “Old Mrs. J.” This same teenage girl plays a bit part in the first story in the collection, as an adult, crying in the kitchen of a bakery. Tracking the elaborate web of intersecting points is extremely satisfying, but the overlapping details do not provide the impression of unification. Instead, there is a randomness to the way the characters’ stories bump up against one another, which only highlights how untethered and unknowable the characters are.

The people that inhabit the world of this collection are outsiders. They are lonely and alienated, and for the most part they keep their emotions and desires hidden. But in each story the characters experience a few heart-wrenching moments of connection and honesty. A novelist who finds it too difficult to fit into the role of wife and mother says goodbye to her stepson for the last time: “You’ve been a good boy…I wish that I was so good.” When the curator of the Museum of Torture is asked if he ever has the urge to try out any of the instruments, he finally, grudgingly, admits, “I don’t exhibit an object unless I have the desire to use it.”

Although it is tempting to draw comparisons to the work of such diverse writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Haruki Murakami, Shirley Jackson, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Ogawa’s prose is wholly unique. The tales found in Revenge are perhaps most accurately compared to the kind of eerie dreams that take our familiar world and knock it just slightly off-kilter. This absorbing and inventive collection certainly has the same effect as an off-putting dream: it will leave you mesmerized, unsure, and shaken.

Review of A Concordance of Leaves by Philip Metres
October 15, 2013 | review

Philip Metres. A Concordance of Leaves . Richmond, VA: Diode Editions, 2013. 34 pp. $10.00, paper.

Consisting of one long poem “written on the occasion of [his] sister’s wedding in Palestine,” Philip Metres’ chapbook is set in 2003 and follows the author from his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, across the border into Palestine for the wedding, and back into Israel for his departure from Ben Gurion. These events are represented as important in themselves, and also as a cross section of daily life in Palestine. The quotidian nature of this cross section serves, in turn, to anchor Metres’ lyricism, which displays a wonderful lack of anxiety about being lyrical, neither apologizing nor overcompensating. The opposition of the everydayness of the plot with the ceremony of Metres’ language mirrors the metaphorical opposition of the book’s premise: a wedding, a coming together, in Israel/Palestine. A Concordance of Leaves’ balance of plot, style, and premise captures how politics can infect every aspect of daily life with banal indignities, yet at the same time disregard many moments of unexalted happiness.

A few lines in, Metres writes:

                                                …the unseen

                (

     & inaccessible sea caresses our strange faces—
     blind & we wait for our lines to be read

                (

     & this is the cemetery, where the father
     of his father’s father’s father’s father’s

                (

     father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s
     buried…

This is the poem’s primary stylistic mode: uncapitalized couplets separated by a parentheses—open for the poem’s first half and closed for its second. As the poem progresses, Metres alleviates the potential monotony of the couplets by using slashes to effectively indicate a line break in the middle of a line. But while the above passage is stylistically typical of the volume, the straightforwardness of its political message—invoking Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip (and thus access to the sea), and directly contradicting the Zionist slogan, “A land without people for a people without a land”—is not. The delivery of a political message, and particularly a well-known one, is rarely poetically successful, but in this passage, it is. That success is due, first and foremost, to the rarity of explicit politics in the poem, but also to the lyrical manner in which Metres conveys them. The consecutive repetition of “father’s” imparts a familial connection to place, a sense of home, that the phrase “There were people living on the land before it became Israel” cannot.

After landing at Ben Gurion, the author gets into the taxi of a man named Rami, a “sunglassed cabbie born in al-Quds, dead ringer / for Travolta circa Saturday Night Fever.” Unable to get to Palestine, “[swimming] in traffic for hours,” the author eventually ends up pissing on the side of the road, “half in ecstasy / ( / half in terror a sniper’s bullet would chauffeur me / from this place—pants undone, penis in hand.” Metres delivers political observation with devastating understatement—having to piss on the side of the road won’t make the evening news, but is just a commonplace of living on the wrong side of segregation.

The author eventually arrives at the wedding, and his depiction of its beauty indicts the region’s politics by implication:

     scarved sisters are radiant with wide
     mouths & waves & teeth & singing

                )

     & though there is the great unhappiness
     framed in silent unsmiling faces

                )

     hammered on insides of houses
     watching over all preparations

                )

     night is lifting the women
     are drumming the tabla their voices inviting

                )

     a heart to break itself & open
     a space another could nest inside

The wedding is the antithesis of Israeli-Palestinian political relations, beginning “because there is a word for love in this tongue / that entwines two people as one.” The opposition of the wedding and regional politics is moving, despite its obviousness, because it goes wholly uncommented upon. Metres’ silence brings the political tension into being.

A Concordance of Leaves vividly portrays a few everyday consequences of Israeli-Palestinian political relations, but isn’t ultimately about politics. Its subject is the wedding of the author’s sister in Palestine, a singular event. The poem’s occasional nature limits its scope, so that small truths take the place of political generalizations. Its journalistic quality assumes that we should try to know what’s going on, as fully as we can, before thinking about what we would like to have happen in the future. And part of what was going on in Palestine in 2003 was his sister’s wedding, as evoked by Metres in the following passage. Note the use of slashes to alter the couplets’ rhythm:

     you my sister you my brother
     outside the walls / in the wind

                )

     if Aristophanes was right
     & we walk the world

                )

     in search of, a split-
     infinitive of to love, if two

                )

     outside the walls / in the wind
     should find in each other more

                )

     than mirror, then we should sing
     outside the walls / in the wind

                )

     you my sister you my brother
     that tree & stone may answer

In this passage and others, A Concordance of Leaves reminds us, through demonstration and description, that humans all over the world—including Palestine—exist in many aspects beyond the exclusively political. Politics, by its nature, relies on generalizations—it is, at heart, a process of the few speaking for the many. But life, on an individual level, is—by its nature—more specific than general, experienced as detail rather than politics. While the journalistic quality of Metres’ poem strongly registers the vast impact of politics on individuals’ lives, it just as strongly registers the countless non-political factors, such as conceptions of love and ritual, that also influence individuals’ experiences. William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” In its illumination, in all senses of the word, of the details beyond politics’ grasp, Philip Metres’ A Concordance of Leaves uniquely honors Williams’ conception of poetry’s purpose.