River Styx Looking for Managing Editor

Position: Managing Editor ˆ Part Time

River Styx, one of the nation's premier independent literary magazines, invites applications for the part-time position of Managing Editor. The areas of primary responsibility include general editorial, event coordination, volunteer management, grant writing, and data base management. Candidates must have a minimum of a BA, with experience in literary publishing and computer literacy in both MAC and PC environments. Attention to detail, creativity, self-initiative and a passion for literature are critical to success in this position. Experience with nonprofit management is highly desirable. Please send application letter, resume, and writing samples by July 6 to: Richard Newman, Editor, River Styx, 3547 Olive St., Suite 107, St. Louis, MO 63103 or email to richard.newman(at)riverstyx.org (replace (at) with @).

Announcing Good Housekeeping's Short Story Contest

Enter your story for a chance to win $3,000 and be published in the May 2010 issue

How it works: Enter at goodhousekeeping.com/shortstory by submitting a short story no longer than 3,500 words, on a theme that focuses on the lives of women today. Submission must be original, not previously published or a finalist for any other prize or award. Please include your full name, address, daytime phone number, and e-mail address. Guest Judge is Jodi Picoult,
author of My Sister’s Keeper, Nineteen Minutes, Handle with Care, and other best-sellers.

Eligibility: Contest is open to anyone, age 21 or older, who is a legal resident of the United States or District of Columbia.

Deadlines: Manuscripts will be accepted beginning June 5, 2009. All entries must be received by September 15, 2009. Only one entry per person allowed. Submitted material cannot be returned or acknowledged. Winners will be notified in December 2009. Decisions of the judging panel are final.

Prizes: One grand-prize winner will receive $3,000 and possible publication of the winning story in the May 2010 issue. Two runners-up will each receive $750 and may have their stories published on goodhousekeeping.com. For official contest rules, go here.

News Around the Net

In commemoration of both MJ and Farrah Fawcett, check out the lists of books by and about them.

"Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less" sold to Penguin.

Now you can get lost in the Dan Brown's world too. The publishers of his forthcoming Lost Symbol are littering the internet with puzzles to solve before the book is released in Sept.

Chris Anderson has apologized in advance for having copied Wikipedia passages directly in his book Free: the Future of a Radical Price without attribution.

"Inappropriate" stories by King and Sedaris are removed from a New Hampshire school reading list. Chicago, however, has decided to keep the disputed Alexie novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian on its summer reading list.

Nedim Gursel has been acquitted by the Turkish court of inciting religious hatred in his novel The Daughters of Allah.

Winning the International Impac Dublin Literary Award is the best thing that could've happened to budding novelist Michael Thomas.

The influences of Haruki Murakami's own 1984.

Here's a list of the top ten novels about the menage a trois. How's that for racy?

Website of the Week - Freerice.com

The site FreeRice.com will test and train you in vocabulary, and donate rice to the needy at the same time. By getting questions right, money is donated to the United Nations World Food Program by sponsors of the site. The more right answers you have, the more rice is donated.

While the altruism is a good thing, the reason I come back to the site again and again is that it is intuitive, just like the SAT and the GRE tests are now. As you answer vocabulary questions, FreeRice adjusts to your ability by tracking answers, eventually zeroing in on your word strength and assigning it a number. I scoffed at it initially but as I kept coming back to the site, the same number always came up (though I won’t tell you what it is). This lets you know your progress as your score steadily increases over time.

FreeRice has also added math and Art History (!) multiple choice quizzes to its offerings, but I am still loving the vocab. If you can’t afford to drop four grand on a Kaplan or Princeton prep for the GRE, drop in on FreeRice.

Unusual Calls for Submissions

Miami University Novella Contest
As commercial publishers are driven more and more by marketplace concerns, novellas, by nature of their length, often fall between the cracks of short story collections and novels and wind up being published—if at all—not as individual volumes but as part of a collection of stories. Because the form is such a pleasure for readers and writers alike—short enough to be read at a single sustained sitting, but long enough to allow the writer greater freedom in character and plot development than does the short story—we are happy to present a rare venue for publishing individual novellas as stand-alone volumes. Winner receives $1000 and book publication. Submission details here.

Call for Submissions for Issue 3: Chickenpinata, a journal of poetry
Inspired by a recent trip across the Mississippi River, the editors of Chickenpinata are accepting poems for the "Bridges" theme until Friday, June 26. We want to see poems that take both literal and metaphorical approaches to bridges--what do they mean? What is crossed over? Where are you once you've crossed? Etc. Writers may interpret this theme broadly. Please indicate the theme in your subject heading: e.g. "Submission--Your Name--Bridges." More here.

Fairy Tale Lust: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women
Editor: Kristina Wright; Publisher: Cleis Press; Publication Date: Spring 2010; Submission Deadline: August 15; Payment: $50 per story, upon publication; E-mail: fairytalelust at gmail dot com (replace (at) with @). Once upon a time, an editor sent out a call far and wide in search of deliciously naughty adult fairy tales… In this collection of erotic fairy tales for women, I am seeking reinvented classic tales as well as new fables that blend fantasy and desire. Writers are encouraged to explore the vast realm of fairy tales and reinterpret those that are familiar or lesser known, but are also invited to craft original stories playing on classic archetypes. Diversity and creativity are key! Submission Guidelines: Unpublished stories only, no simultaneous submissions. Stories should be 1,500-4,000 words, double-spaced, 12 point font, in Microsoft Word document format only. Do not put extra spaces between paragraphs. Include full contact information (real name/pseudonym, mailing address and phone number) and a brief bio with your submission.Send your submission as a .doc attachment to fairytalelust at gmail dot com (replace (at) with @) with Submission: Story Title in the subject line. Please direct any questions to the same address.

Art from Art Anthology
Deadline 7/31/09. This collection of short fiction by literary writers aims to feature stories that are connected directly to—or inspired by—a work of art. It could be a song, a painting, a museum, an architectural monument, a blueprint, a piece of writing—a play, novel, poem, letter, etc. The art in question needs to be a major component of the story—a character—within the fabric of the story. Perhaps the idea will be inspired by an event from life or maybe it will be something completely fabricated. All genres welcome. ART from ART will bring new and established voices and ideas to a fine collection of fiction. I aim to have the art featured on a page either at the beginning or the end of each story—a visual correlative that will enhance the experience. Submit your story and a brief bio via email to Stephen Soucy at (replace (at) with @). Please follow standard submission guidelines (Microsoft Word Document with 12-point font). More here.

BIRTH PARENT ANTHOLOGY and MISCARRIAGE ANTHOLOGY
Catalyst Book Press is seeking literary essays telling personal stories of adoption, open adoption, birth parent connections, the adoption triad, and unification with children after closed adoption for an anthology for and about birth parents. Authors of accepted essays will receive $50 for their stories and one copy of the publication. Submissions can be sent by August 15, 2009 to co-editors Ann and Amanda Angel, 15255 Turnberry Dr., Brookfield, WI 53005. For more information, please email Ann at (replace (at) with @).
If you wish your manuscript returned, please include an SASE.

Catalyst Book Press is also seeking literary essays telling personal stories of miscarriage, in particular emotional and spiritual ramifications of miscarriage or the transformations that occurred in people’s lives as a result of undergoing or observing a miscarriage. We are looking for essays that reflect a diversity of experiences and outcomes. Authors of accepted essays will receive $50 for their stories and one copy of the publication. Submissions can be sent by August 15, 2009 to editor Jay Gibson at (replace (at) with @) or care of Catalyst Book Press, 709 Masson Ave. Apt. A, San Bruno CA 94066. If you wish your manuscript returned, please include an SASE. More on both here.

Old Anthologies don't die, they just team up with PEN

The new PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories is out. This volume's new association with the PEN American Center comes at a good time for the award, which has undergone a creative struggle with format in recent years. William Abraham, who edited the collection for three decades until 1996, governed with a distinctive editorial voice and an apparent preference for bleakness that could leave a reader of the volume depressed for days. After he retired, the series became lost in a literary wilderness for a while, with different editors and experimentations with the format. Though it could be argued that it was time for a change, the confusion that reigned afterward was no kind of improvement: One of the editors, Larry Dark, included a story in the 2000 volume by his wife, Alice Elliot Dark and nonsensical statements like this were issued on the publisher’s FAQ page as the series tried to stop its slow skid:

"Why was there no O. Henry Prize Stories 2004?

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 was published in January rather than the traditional date of October. There was always a difference between the year in which the stories were published in a magazine and the year in which The O. Henry Prize Stories was published, but it may appear that we skipped considering stories from 2004. In fact, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006 will be based on stories originally written in English and published in Canada and the United States in 2004."

Now that PEN, the literature and author advocate group, has joined with the collection in much the same way it partners with PEN/Hemingway and PEN/Faulkner perhaps the collection will enjoy some stability. The caveat being the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation are not for profit entities and Anchor Books is a division of Random House owned by huge corporate media conglomerate Bertelsmann.

That and the oddity that the author “jurors” do not actually choose the stories for any given edition will insure that if the series has some stability in format, it will remain idiosyncratic. The jurors choose their favorites from series editor Linda Furman’s selection of twenty stories and introduce that story with an essay. That seems to be a waste in editorial talent of a group of great writers that have “juried” thus far, but I’m glad the series is continuing on, whatever the format. And there are a few stories that strike me as distinctly Abraham-like in their selection. If she is truly trying to pick stories that William might pick, then let’s hope she takes the lesson of his continuity as well.

Contributor Spotlight: Sarah Pape

What Comes After the Lightning

I have always described the moment the first line of a poem comes as being hit by lightning. Larry Levis mused that “it seems to me that any poetry, any realized “making,” comes almost directly from some kind of actual center, some location of energy” (69). Where does a poem come from? What is the culminating force that brings language from the ether and onto the page? To test the truth of my description of invention, I began reading narratives of those that had survived the experience of being “struck.”

Most lightning survivors describe a heinous amount of physical pain, in some cases, being burned from the inside out, or becoming a conductor for the electrons, as one woman had it enter her ear and exit through her big toe. Most folks who are struck are doing fairly mundane activities—unloading groceries, talking on the phone, or strolling through an open space. Afterward, many are left with debilitating health problems like loss of hearing, chronic pain, and physical scarring. But more intriguingly, a few are left with a “gift”—or a power that was not accessible to them before the incident. One person described that she now has a deep intuition about storms, and has a sensation when clouds pass over her that the electricity has been amplified and she can feel the potential lightning inside them.

Some days I know a poem is coming. Like those mornings when you know for certain upon waking up that you are going to cry that day. You don’t yet know the shape of what will trigger your weeping, but it is there, crouched low.

Jane Hirshfield writes that “[p]oems do not make appointments with their subjects—they stalk them, keeping their distance, looking slightly off to one side. And when at last the leap comes, it is most often also from the side, the rear, and overhead perch; from some word-blind woven of brush or shadow or fire” (107-8). Most of my poems come like uninvited houseguests, flushed and ready to talk into the night, while I am just getting ready to leave for some dental work. I will be back in an hour, I insist. But they grow impatient and are never there when I return.

And then sometimes, my poems slap me, in a good way. Let’s say I am in my chaos brain, numbers and lists and names ticking across my inner windshield as I am driving too fast to the airport to get to the meeting that I am not prepared for. This is the last place one would think to find creative spark. But then I let my eyes wander to the flooded rice fields that quilt the highway, and as if queued, hundreds of geese lift simultaneously. The sky is the pink of a baby’s ear, and I am shocked into a first line. “A cursive of geese…” begins the poem, and I pull the car over obligingly.

Last week, we had a real lightning storm. It began at around 10:30 in the evening with a few low grumbles that could’ve been mistaken for some muffler-less truck. I had a fever of 102 degrees. The thunder claps and lightning flashes started coming with no pauses between. My husband, who, simply put, has less fear than the average person, opened all the doors and windows, running in and out, flushed, exclaiming that this was the most amazing thing he’d ever witnessed. Glancing quickly at our daughter, he revised, most amazing natural phenomena he’d ever witnessed.

They sat in our garden together on a weathered bench, prehistoric zucchini fronds all around their legs, leaned against one another, watching the sky fracture and illuminate. From inside, I felt like the storm was within my body; each crash starting as a low tumble far off, gaining speed and sound until it seemed to split and explode just inside my ribcage. It was surreal. And it was terrifying.

Gregory Orr questions, “We are creatures whose volatile inner lives are both mysterious to us and beyond our control. How to respond to the strangeness and unpredictability of our own emotional being?” (4) As I lay there, pinned to the bed by sickness, my singular thought was my fear of my only child and dearest love being bludgeoned with electricity. I had been reading the lightning victims’ survival narratives, and knew that statistically, there was only a 20% chance that they would survive to tell about the agony of their toenails falling off. In my feverish state, I could not join them, and be stunned into the afterlife along with them. I had to lie in my bed and listen, let the paparazzi of flashes pass over my tightly shut eyes, sweating and shivering.

The next day, I shakily emerged from the sick bed and went out into our garden. It seemed to have taken on a more verdant hue. The plants looked enthusiastic—revivified. Our neighbor, an unofficial farmer, told me through the chain link fence that lightning helps the nitrogen in the air dissolve into the water, supercharging the plant’s roots with a natural fertilizer.

Life is very difficult sometimes. On occasion, we are heartbroken, bankrupted, maimed and sickened by the experiences and losses that pervade us. This is the lightning, I think now—the unexpected bolt of devastation that comes when you are not asking, not expecting such a thing. We are left with all sorts of evidence to show that we’ve come through the loss. Lightning survivors are sometimes left with a scar that shows the electron pattern that was burned into their skin. The scars look precisely like fern patterns. They are quite beautiful.

Poetry is what comes after. The lines and phrases and metaphors come emboldened with the excitement of a resurrection. We suddenly realize we are alive to tell about it, and the alchemy of language is the magic at hand. A deeply felt recognition comes with this art. Tell me the places you’ve come from. Help me see.

A poet friend calls me at random times, leaving long messages when I don’t answer. I hear him inhale the smoke from his cigarette, and he’ll ask, as if I am there to answer him, “Can I read you this poem?” I hear the shuffle of his pages, and he begins. Wherever I am when I finally get the message, I hear his voice, and I sit down and listen. I’ve begun recording the lines that come to me at random times into my cell phone. I tell myself the story of the poem and then stumble through the words that accompany it, hoping that when I return to it, the energy will still be present.

Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York, New York: HarperPerennial, 1997.
Levis, Larry. The Gazer Within. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.
Orr, Gregory. Poetry As Survival. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002.

*****************************

Sarah Pape teaches and writes in the Northern California community of Chico, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She has been published in The Southeast Review, Watershed, and was recently included in the anthology, Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses, published by Yarroway Mountain Press. A series of her poems appears in HFR #44.

Happy Father's Day!

A poem, for you and your fathers, by Arra Lynn Ross from issue #41.

Planting Potatoes with My Father

That April I came back from Prague, alone,
my heart torn. We dug trenches in the rain
then reached inside our small, brown-paper sacks
and pulled out cut-up chunks, each with an eye.
We must’ve planted at least a hundred: red
and white, some purple too.
Did he tell me,
or I tell him how potato shoots grew?
If placed inside a covered maze, all dark
but for one small pin-prick at the other side
the growing eye will nose past dead end trails
to touch that tiny hope, that sweet spot, sun.

Go Get Nice Wonderful

The journal Flatmancrooked has launched a really fun regular contest on its website called Nice Wonderful. When you visit their website, near the bottom you'll see this month's untitled book cover. Your job is to title it, then write a back cover blurb. It's free to enter, and the best entry each month earns its inventor a copy of their new anthology. Winning entries, says the website, will typically be funny, lighthearted, and insightful. This month's cover asks you to imagine George Orwell with some grilled meat. What fun!

News Around the Net

If you were wondering about the progress of Salinger's suit against his copycat, here it is! And here's the defense.

Teen book to burn in Wisconsin for dealing with a gay boy's coming of age.

Sometimes it pays to build on someone else's success.

Although they originally tried to buck the system, they will now be part of it in a big way. The Beats are going to Hollywood!

Kindles can be autographed too!

Is "Web 2.0" really the millionth word?

Science-fictional cities.

The first "Anonthology" challenges readers to match the story to the author.

The creator of the Little Grey Rabbit might not be as sweet as her creation.

The Crime Writers' Association's shortlist for the Dagger Awards has been released.

A Perrenial Springs Anew

Time to check out Harper Perennial, apparently. I found the preceding ad in the back of my new issue of A Public Space. Never one to turn down abject pleading, I investigated and found the Olive Reader, HP’s blog packed with news not just about books but also unicorn tatoos, fake Criterion Collection DVD covers - more hip than a fixed-gear bicycle.

But if that weren’t crazy enough, HP is doing something even more insane. It’s promoting short stories. A real live, major publishing house (owned by Rupert Murdoch, for God’s sakes) is giving away one free story a week at fiftytwostories.com. This week they are on number 24, ‘Alyosha the Pot’ by Tolstoy. At the bottom of the page you can see the contemporary and classic author collections HP is publishing now. I like the tease because it plays to the short stories' strengths. It gives the casual web-browser something short but complete to read but then hits you with promotions for the collections that possibly contain more treasures within.

One of the best parts of the Olivereader blog are the short story public service announcements. The first one I’m not so crazy about but this one





And this one



are a scream. What's the deal, HarperCollins? Are you trying to break my big-publishing cynicism? Well, it just might work.

Review of Short Houses with Wide Porches by Christopher Watkins

Review of Short Houses with Wide Porches by Christopher Watkins, Shady Lane Press, 2008.

By Meghan Brinson

I was surprised to see the short list of journal acknowledgments at the beginning of this book of poetry. After having read the previously unpublished work in Short Houses with Wide Porches, I’m a little sad that Christopher Watkins didn’t give Hayden’s Ferry Review the opportunity to read more of his poems for issue 42; there are a number that I liked even better than “The University of Iowa Sunset Village Quonset Hut Haiku Blues,” which we accepted for that issue. This lack of previous publication gives the reader who gets their hands on this book a real bargain, though, a collection of long poems, haiku, and short subtropical vignettes by this emerging poet that none of their poetry-reading friends will have seen in a magazine.

Watkins comes to poetry from the world of music, writing and performing as Preacher Boy. He also participated in a Kerouac Project residency, and these two factors intersect to make this particular book of poetry. This isn’t a book of song lyrics parading as poems, but music and musicians are one major obsession of this poet, and their lives are the basis for several long poems in the collection. Florida also makes a big impression on Watkins, serving as a landscape for the majority of the poems and also, I suspect, informing a fascination with the elderly that drives the collection’s major preoccupation, time.

Watkins has a number of forms appearing in Short Houses with Wide Porches, long poems comprised of numbered segments which describe linked vignettes of blues musicians or art pieces, blues haikus, which are a haiku form which repeats whole lines from one stanza to the next, and sometimes even whole stanzas, as well as open forms and more traditional haiku groupings. The music of the poems features assonance and consonance heavily, but the steady strings of long vowels, approximates and sibilants means that these repetitious sounds aren’t heavy-handed. There seems to be two movements weaving through Watkins’ poetry: a poetics of stasis and a poetics of movement. The long poems “Elephant Graveyards,” and “Thoughts On A Minor Collection of French and American Barbizon and Impressionist Works at The Orlando Museum of Art Written During the Final 20 Minutes Before Closing,” both illustrate the conflicting impulses of the poet. While many of the poems in the collection suggest that time is short, the work of the poems seems to either fix moments like flies in amber or to chronicle a tempo of life that is leisurely and meditative, full of humidity and seascapes. In “Elephant Graveyards,” the poet uses dashes to separate short episodes, all of which rush conspicuously to the grave. In “Thoughts,” the poet creates a stanza for each of the named works, each a completely static object. Yet the weight of time, appearing in the title as the museum closing, creates an increasing urgency in the lines, a crescendo of directness.

Urgency is certainly part of the poems “Squall” and “Watching Seals,” both of which feature frailty and impending death. “Squall” describes a heron dying in the miserable heat before a Florida summer storm breaks and the speakers’ guilt over his helplessness to do anything other than observe it:

“In the street, a severed tendril lies sodden,
Boneless in that way of water suicides,
And I see again the dirty heron
That was gasping by the freeway
[…]
Feel my heart ache hard to touch
Something too slight
For the loose sieve of my life.”

In “Watching Seals,” an elderly accordion player on a family trip to the ocean plays the final note of the lament that is one of the leitmotifs of Short Houses with Wide Porches:

“This is what will be
his last time at the ocean.
[…]
All have a turn, him last.
He doesn’t say to anyone,
The time’s run out,
I can’t see anything.”

What does the poet do in the face of this forgone conclusion? He sees as accurately and as much as possible. The counterpoint to these poems where time is running out is the haiku lyrics such as “Florida Storm Haiku,” or “Lake Adaire Haiku,” where moments are fixed in form with precision and humor. In “Florida Storm Haiku,” the speaker describes a lizard as an anxious jackhammer in the same poem where he notices more traditional haiku objects like dew, grass and shadows. The joy of these haiku lie in their Zen-like embeddedness in the moment and their descriptions, detailed with unlikely metaphors: “Lizard doing push-/ups on the side of an oak/ pooching out his throat,” and “Morning birdsong; bright/ hues and brittle pitches of/ a toy xylophone.” In “Lake Adaire Haiku,” the speaker realizes:

“A dog acquires in
one crisp sniff more than my whole
life’s cache of knowledge.

Across the lake, I
see brake lights flash on and off.
I miss the fireflies.”

This world too is haunted with loss: loss of what has been observed, and loss of the observations that will never be made. But the joy of being in the moment, the relish with which the language of these poems captures and caresses the seen world is a reminder that though there may never be enough time to experience every detail of the ever-changing world, there is, however, enough time to enjoy it. Get a copy here.

Abe's Penny: Get to Know It

Abe's Penny, a micro-magazine from sisters Anna and Tess Knoebel, knows how much you love to get mail. Once a week, one part of a four-part story arrives in my mailbox: a postcard with an intriguing photo and a bit of text on the back. After four cards, I've got a full story or poem, and four cool images to tack up around my desk. It's a fun idea, though I'm not so good at being in the middle of things. I like to collect all four (as I've done with various Burger King glasses) and then re-read all at once. Though some installments stand up pretty well on their own. One card written by Eric Ledgin (photograph by Peter Bernard Killeen) read: "Snipers aren't a fact of life on Long Island. I only know one person who's been shot by one. It was at fairly long range, and with an air rifle - but it's still getting shot in the face. It counts as an experience." Receiving my postcard counts as an experience, too. I seem more worldly now. Even my mailman sees it.

University Presses' Debt to Linebackers

More bad news for publishing. This article from the Associated Press describes how some university presses are being pushed toward extinction. Louisiana State University Press, original publisher of A Confederacy of Dunces, doesn't make enough money to function on its own. Said LSU Chancellor Michael Martin: "We allocated $500,000 of university money to the press in the last fiscal year. They spent $1.4 million." Publishing Pulitzer-Prize-winning poetry apparently doesn't pay the bills.

Ted Genoways, outspoken editor for The Virginia Quarterly Review had this to say in response to several university presses putting budgets and employees on the chopping block: "Do you want to be known as some place that supports the history and culture of your region or some place that has fantastic outside linebackers?"

Martin responded that athletics subsidize some academic programs. "In some respects," Martin said, "the press has been saved by the outside linebackers — up to this point."

Contributor Spotlight: F. Daniel Rzicznek

Now Comes the Hard Part

When first invited to contribute to this blog, it took me a month or two to hit upon my topic: the town of Oberlin, Ohio, and more specifically, my brief but rich history with it. About one hundred and fifty words into the endeavor, I hit a wall. I simply had nothing more than a paragraph to say about the subject, and even that didn’t seem of worth to any reader other than me. Sad, considering the fitting epigraph I’d unearthed from W.S. Merwin: “Home is a place that does not exist, about which your opinions are irrelevant.” Those words of course rang even truer after abandoning that piece, tentatively titled “Home along the Way.”

A month later, I convinced my father to stop at a house out in the country with a sign—BIG BOOK SALE—scrawled in sloppy red letters at the end of the drive. There I found a twelve volume set of the Audubon Nature Encyclopedia, replete with all kinds of articles, drawings, diagrams, statistics, etc.—for free. They were giving it away: an illustrated study of the diets of various hawks; an anatomical diagram of a cricket; an in-depth history of chestnut blight; a gorgeous pen and ink rendering of birds navigating by starlight, the Earth below them crowned with the first sharp rays of morning. Surely this was the answer: write about the serendipity that is bound to occur when one is a dedicated book snoop. This particular idea didn’t even make it to the drafting stage. No provisional title, no tantalizing epigraph.

It took another month, but my real topic presented itself: why can’t a poet, with one book published, a second book in the wings, and two manuscripts on their way to being ready for submission, sit down and write prose? More pressingly, why can’t an instructor of English composition with four years of experience in the classroom and hundreds and hundreds of student essays under his belt write some halfway meaningful prose about a subject of his own choosing? After being approached this year to write two essays, one on service learning and creative writing, another on bird dogs (and agreeing to write both), I realized I’d better figure something out. Fast. As a poet who religiously composes by hand in seventy page, college ruled notebooks, I realized my problem: the space for my work has always been more or less defined by the factors of writing with a pen and using the bottom of the page (with the exception of roughly a dozen longer poems I’ve written) as the self-imposed limitations of my art. I’ve always favored compression, vividness, and celerity, due perhaps to my short attention span as both reader and writer. I’ve also always pushed myself to “get it right” on the first try. This naturally has never happened, but good things have happened because of it: words and rhythms that would’ve otherwise gone unwritten came my way because of this particular self-applied pressure. Trying to approach a 4,000 word essay in this fashion, however, is not in my abilities. Every attempt has led to one frustrating bout of silence after another.

The final factor in my development of favoring poetry to prose is that I never allowed my prose to mature alongside my poetry. My years as a graduate student in the MFA program at Bowling Green State University had me going along at a good chop as a prose writer: papers, book reviews, an annotated bibliography, a statement of purpose for my creative thesis, and even a few short stories when I opted to temporarily hop genres during a summer workshop. Degree in hand, I ceased to write prose longer than a few hundred words and turned my attention fully to poetry. The truth is that I’ve never liked my prose writing, especially when compared to my poems. I’ve always taken what has come easier. I am naturally drawn to breaking the line, to testing my own awareness of metaphor and image, to going straight at the unsayable and haloing it with what I hope is beauty, and almost always within the space of thirty blue lines and a Zebra F-402 in my hand. For five years this process defined me as a writer, and while I feel it may continue to serve me well as a poet, it has led to a serious blockage as a writer of prose. I’ve set up my materials and routines to enable me to hand draw schematics for small vegetable gardens and backyard sheds. Now I find myself trying to use the same means to design an entire city block. Just this minute, after finishing the above sentence, I’ve been struck with the sensation of having nothing to say. The wall appears once more in the lessening distance. The appeal of opening a new way to write and communicate is too strong to draw back from. It may very well be that it’s time to get over myself. My comfort zone may be a place that does or does not exist. Certainly my opinion about it is irrelevant. The present pressures remain and the wall is very close now, its brick handholds cool and sturdy beneath my fingers as I begin to climb.

F. Daniel Rzicznek’s poetry collections include Divination Machine (Parlor Press, forthcoming in late 2009), Neck of the World (Utah State University Press, 2007) and Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press, 2006). He is also co-editor with Gary L. McDowell of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice, forthcoming from Rose Metal Press in 2010. Rzicznek teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His poems "Untitled" and "Antidote" appeared in HFR #43. See his author profile on GoodReads here.

News Around the Net

Bunch of Grapes Bookstore has been reborn!

Gov. Schwartzenegger wants to replace schools' textbooks with e-readers.

Looks like V.C. Andrews isn't the only hand writing from the grave. Two new Agatha Christie stories featuring Det. Poirot are about to be published.

9-year-old star of Slumdog Millionaire, Rubina Ali, has written her autobiography.

Indian poet and memoirist of women's sex lives, Kamala Das, has died at age 75.

Taking the "smell of books" to a whole new level.

Fiction and the recession.

This year has seen a lot of firsts, so here's one more. The first man, Farahad Zama, has won Melissa Nathan award for comedy in romance against a solid competition of all female writers. He wrote it on the train to work.

Amazon wants another bookfest in Seattle.

Simon & Schuster are embracing the Scribd.

Good News for Recent Contributors!

Josie Sigler is the winner of the 2010 Motherwell Prize. Josie will receive $1,000, and her book, Living Must Bury, will be published in the spring of 2010 by Fence Books. Josie's poem, "The Grief of Animals Whose Grief is Misunderstood" appeared in HFR #41.

Molly Brodak has just received the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her collection, A Little Middle of the Night, will be released in the spring of 2010. Molly's poems, "Young Ox" and "Roman Girls," appeared in HFR #42.

Congratulations to Josie and Molly! Check out one of Molly's poems:

Young Ox

I saw the soft mathematics of his guts:
not fierce, not terribly
darker or larger. But old—

stirred up from the ghost ocean
over Kansas, and edging in
as imperceptibly

as the spur of his longing—still, my body
barely a color on the hem of his vision.


I haunt myself with a voice I made for him.
the danger started with your burning blue dress,
crook of elbow—

I’m holding open for your stony eyes,
the horn too near, weird muzzle. All love
is a secret. Ever ordinary as bare life.


The quickest way out of a man’s heart is with my hands.
If he could, he’d say put them back

put it back on

Website of the Week: Maud Newton

Maud Newton subtitles her eponymous blog “Occasional Literary Links, Amusements, Politics, and Rants,” which pretty much covers her topics. But the frequency is anything but occasional. Since starting her blog in 2002 (the dawn of blogging so many years ago), Maud has posted practically every day on something of note in the literary world.

These posts are incisive, intelligent, and link heavy, and are the keys to her keeping the lit-head crowd happy. Maud Newton is my refutation to anyone who thinks that blogs don’t count as literary or that all bloggers simply want to tell you what they had for dinner last night. One of my favorite parts of her page is the “Remainders” section, which is a running commentary/AP wire of the literary world. It’s a good way of taking the pulse of American publishing.

She also has proved that she can get the story herself. I first found her blog when I was reading online about the controversy around the Paris Review and writer Yiyun Li. The Review maintained that Li was an unpublished writer whose work was pulled from the slush pile. There seemed to be some doubt about Li’s greenness, having been published in the Gettysburg Review prior to the Paris Review. You can read the interview here as Maud and Brigid Hughes discuss the process of how the slush is handled at her magazine.

She seemed literally to come from nowhere. She studied with Harry Crews at the University of Florida, but then decided to go to law school. After practicing for a couple of years in Florida moved to New York and got work as an editor in a law firm. So while she was interested in what was happening in the literary scene in NYC, she was not directly part of it.

There might be some uncertainty on that issue now. Her posts used to begin: “I read recently in the Times…” or “I’m going to have to get this book I’ve been hearing about…” but now are more likely to be “While I was serving on this panel with (insert literary luminary name here) or “In my appreciation on NPR..." These show how different her perspective is now that she is more successful and famous as an arbiter of literary taste. One of the biggest differences that has emerged in the last few years is that she has begun publishing her own work. So in effect, she has turned 180 degrees and become a complete insider in the NYC writer scene. But she still is an intelligent critic and reporter of the happenings in the world of words. If she can keep her perspective, she is well worth the read.

Not To Be Forgotten

I used to be really hard headed about poetry; I would only read poems that "made sense," ones that I could "understand." And so, I would only read certain poets, particularly narrative poets. I was the kinda guy who thought all the cool poets were Whitmans and all the crazy poets were Dickinsons. John Berryman was simply a mind f---. My perspective was that poetry should write about the mysterious, not be mysterious. I'll admit it now just to keep you reading, I was very wrong. I came to see my mistake by falling in love with work of the Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914).

Trakl's story is heart-wrenching. Trakl began to write poems at the age of 13. He dropped out of high school at the age of 18 and began working for a pharmacist. Three years later he moved to Vienna to study pharmacy, where he fell in with a group of artists who helped him publish some of his poetry. Eventually his work captured the attention of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who anonymously gave him a stipend to work on his poetry. After the outbreak of WWI, he became a medical official. Trakl would go through bouts of depression and caring for 90+ critically wounded eventually sent him over the edge. He was hospitalized and put under strict observation. Wittgenstein, learning of Trakl's condition, went to see him, but was too late. Three days before he arrived, Trakl committed suicide by overdosing on cocaine.

Here is my story of how I discovered Trakl, and thus a more open perspective of what a poem can be and do. This past semester the teacher/sage, Norman Dubie, noticing that I was limiting my growth as a writer and reader with my nothing-short-of-anal poetic tastes, recommended that I read Trakl's work. It's important to do what the Dubie says. So I found myself at the library, swept into the turbulence of Trakl's language. Through elegant lyricism, his poems combine the ephemeral and concrete to create fresh metaphors. In his imagery, he is famous for the use of primary colors to depict a diverse array of scenes. And throughout all of his poems I have read, there are deep meditations upon silence and stillness- the in-between spaces of life that startle us with a need for meaning.

Here is a the first stanza from one of his more widely anthologized poems, "De Profundis," which illustrates his simple, yet haunting imagery.

There is a stubble field on which a black rain falls.
There is a tree which, brown, stands lonely here.
There is a hissing wind which haunts deserted huts---
How sad this evening.
(Read the rest here.)

Georg Trakl is a poet whose work deserves to be read today. He reminds us that one of the essential aims of poetry is to show the emotive power that words can have without the need of a linear cognitive coherence. In recent years, Robert Hass and Norman Dubie have written poems in his memory. To read his poems, check out this 20 poem collection that James Wright and Robert Bly put together.

Unusual Calls for Submissions

AN INTERNATIONAL CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
A multi-cultural, multi-national, and multi-community anthology of literary criticism, critical essays, poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, creative writings, and visual art on HIV and AIDS. Edited by Kelly Norman Ellis and M L Hunter. A project of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University. Published by Third World Press. Scheduled to be released World AIDS Day 2009. Deadline for submissions: Friday, August 14, 2009. There have been great strides implemented in the research, treatment, care, and social awareness (both nationally and internationally) of HIV and AIDS. However, the critical dialogue needed to eradicate this disease seems to have dissipated. This anthology seeks to push this life-threatening issue into the consciousness of not only America, but also the world. The current climate in America, under the Obama administration, is hope and change. So what does that mean for a disease that is tied to human sexuality, morality, and the need to feel love and acceptance? The editors are seeking creative writing in the genres of poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, memoir writing and journaling as well as visual art that explore the intersection of the human condition with HIV and AIDS. The editors are also seeking artwork in the mediums of photography, fine and graphic arts. We are particularly interested in a vast array of literary criticism that provides social commentary and theoretical and pedagogical models that assist in understanding HIV and AIDS past and present. We also are interested in interviews with survivors and non-survivors of HIV and AIDS. Submissions should be sent by email attachment to hivaidsanthology(at)gmail.com (replace (at) with @).

Past Loves Writing Contest
To foster awareness of PAST LOVES DAY, SEPTEMBER 17, Spruce Mountain Press is sponsoring its 3rd annual Past Loves Day Story Contest. Both the Contest and the Day offer an opportunity to acknowledge a truth that lingers in your heart. ENTRY REQUIREMENTS: No entry fee. Nearly everyone has memories of a former sweetheart. Write your true story of an earlier love, in no more than 700 words. Tell us about someone whose memory brings a smile or a tear, or both. What did she or he mean to you? In particular, how did that person's presence in your life change you, and what do you still carry with you? Your story may be heart-warming or humorous. Just tell it as if you were talking to a good friend. More info here. Entries must be sent by midnight, August 16, 2009.

EXPRESS YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT SHARKS AND RAYS IN OUR SHARK SUMMER POETRY CONTEST AND YOU MIGHT HAVE YOUR POEM POSTED AND PUBLISHED!
Shark Poetry Contest: Aquarium of the Pacific. The winner will have his or her poem posted on the Aquarium's website and published in the Aquarium's exclusive magazine Pacific Currents, along with passes to the Aquarium and a behind the scenes tour for four people. Entries will be accepted online or via mail through July 31, 2009. Poems must be no longer than 200 words. You must be 16 years old to enter. Only one entry per person. All entries must be received by July 30, 2009. Upload your here. Or mail to: Shark Poetry Contest/Aquarium of the Pacific/
320 Golden Shore, Suite 150/Long Beach, CA 90808. Please make sure to include all your contact information (name, email, phone, mailing address) in the actual document as well.

Dogs and the Women Who Love Them Writing Contest
Angel Animals Network contest seeks true stories of remarkable women and dog companions who give service in extraordinary ways and fulfill their life's purpose. Each entrant will b e considered for publication in Dogs and the Women Who Love Them, to be published by New World Library in Fall 2010. No entry fee. Deadline: September 30, 2009 postmark. More info here.

News Around the Net

The best books, a la Google Squared.

And without further ado, the prestigious Orange Prize goes to Marilynne Robinson, for Home.

Derek Walcott has left Oxford for Alberta. In a related story, an anonymous "high-profile" poet puts his/her feelings about the Oxford Poetry mess into verse.

Marc Kelly Smitth, one of slam poetry's first, is worried about the artform.

Giving books in the digital age.

Facebook: coming to an e-book near you!

New York's "crowd-funded" and written book.

J.D. Salinger is suing the writer and publisher of the upcoming (and unauthorized) sequel to The Catcher in the Rye. Fanfic writers beware.

It's Google vs. Amazon. Visit your local bookie today and place your bets for the coming "standards war"!

Although the big houses were tightening their belts, the Indies got more of the spotlight at this years BEA.

Six therapists work together in what might be one of the most fertile creative writing groups.

Fantasy master and one of the creators of the "door-stopper novel," David Eddings has died at age 77.

Worried about the future of traditional publishing? Drop Dave Eggers a line. No, really, he wants you to write to him. And he'll write back, too!

Recommended summer reads from famous authors after BEA.

Use your cell phone to get published.

Changes at Granta

Recent changes at Granta are garnering some attention. Editor Alex Clark stepped down last week after only eight months in the position. Taking her place is John Freeman, a freelance book critic who has been with Granta as its American editor since December. The New York Observer has this very interesting profile of Freeman, positioning him as perhaps the "salve" to the "chapped" publishing industry. "The publishing industry needs a hero," notes the Observer's Leon Neyfakh, and though perhaps Freeman isn't the likeliest candidate, Neyfakh argues that "in his various roles—editor, prolific book critic, ardent reader, former president of the National Book Critics Circle—he provides a kind of cold comfort to the industry, a steady and measured voice arguing that maybe not everything has to change, that simply loving to read and loving books could be enough to keep book publishing as it exists going a little bit longer."

Said Freeman, “I couldn’t do this job or the National Book Critics Circle job or the job of the critic if I didn’t believe fundamentally that there’s a fighting chance for keeping the experience of reading at the center of human life.”

A Poet in Mongolia

Last year, HFR contributor Ming Holden lived in Mongolia as a Luce Scholar, working on PEN Center formation, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees refugee status for an exiled Chinese writer, and literary translations for the Mongolian Writers Union. The Asia Foundation sent her back to continue that work for a short time this summer. Here, she takes us inside her trip. You can learn more about her work on her blog.

On Sunday, Altangerel, the top lawyer at Mongolia's Ministry of Justice and also the woman whose translated book of short stories I am editing for The Asia Foundation, stood in the 8am sunshine outside my Stalin-era apartment block in Ulaanbaatar. I walked toward her with by bag over my shoulder, squinting in the Gobi bright. Ulaanbaatar is not a city that opens early, especially on a Sunday (witness: the only Buddhists I know who drink). Alta looked up from texting. Alta manages to do everything quietly, even things that would be silent in the first place.

A man in a camouflage uniform got out of the jeep beside her, and I realized that we were not only going with them, but that I would be riding for the next 13 hours in the middle seat in the back, between one of Alta's co-workers at the ministry (I think) and Alta, who, like me, is not at her best in the morning. "Who is driving us?" I asked. "Border Patrol Officers," she said without anything beyond her normal, calm amount of inflection. I was glad; this meant I didn't need to worry about the border pass foreigners usually need to travel that close to Russia and/or China--Choibalsan is quite close to both, in the dusty, windswept, flatlanded far-east of Mongolia.

"What are you going out to Choibalsan for, anyway?" I asked.
"Work." she said shortly.
Oh. Right. She had said, when she mentioned I might come with her for a work trip, not to tell people I was there to do work on her book. It followed I shouldn't be asking about the nature of the work done by those around me, those to whom I was not to tell the whole truth.

Outside of Ulaanbaatar where people on road trips stop for chips and gas, we pulled into a parking lot next to a glistening SUV. Police officers climbed out of it. The Mongolians, lawyers, Border Patrol Officers, and Police Officers greeted one another, stood in the green and the wind for a few minutes, then got back in the cars.
Five hours later we were in the aimag center of Khentii. Pollen blew. We went into the central police office, and Alta pointed up, smiling. On the TV in the top corner was Alta herself, giving an interview. The resident Police Chief led us to the only restaurant/pub establishment I could see in the town, and we ate the requisite gureeltai shul, mutton and noodle soup. Alta and her cohorts actually left the rest of the vodka in their glasses after the welcome toast, something that in the ten months I lived here last year I'd never seen before--but then again, I worked at the Mongolian Writers Union last year.

The guard driving was the only person I knew not to either stop at the ovoos (Buddhist places of worship on certain hilltops consisting of piled stones, sometimes birch branches, blue khadags, or prayer flags, and plenty of milk, vodka, and candy offerings), and get out, circling it three times and tossing a pebble each time, or at the very least, honking three times as we drove past. He was also the first I knew to follow the speed limit.
"Who starts the ovoos?" I asked Alta.
"The herders consult with lamas, with monks, and they say the place with the best energy."
She mentioned energy one more time when describing the province of Uriangkhai: "Mongolians who live there use no technology. We say, Mongolians say, they are special with a gentle nature. All the monks who lived and worked there- the place has a special energy, a special feel." She looked out the window. "This place feels to me like the heart of Eurasia," she said. "All this clean land with no mountains, feels like the mother place." When we went away across the fields to pee where the men couldn't see us she said on the walk back that she felt excited to have the time "to relax, to dream, see the nature, listen to music" (on her iPod Nano).

People were working on a bridge when we drove up to it, so Border Patrol driver guy did a seventeen-point turn and we went to the next bridge over. Two teenage boys in their deels on horseback at the other side, and between us, flooding the bridge, were a hundred sheep. Big sheep, brown sheep, baby sheep, horned sheep. They groaned and jostled in a river or fur. One of the Border Patrol guys got out to stand between our jeep and the side of the bridge, helping to herd. The other one, the heretofore unsmiling driving one, rolled the window down and "Ch! Ch! Ch!"'d the sheep along. Camels, who by their tattered appearance were ownerless, wandered solo across the steppe, fresh wind, then the Kherlen River with twenty horses mid-submerged.

Here in Choibalsan we stay in a hotel with no hot water or showers. The police officers woke me up today by entering the room I shared with Alta and her co-workers and asking loudly if we'd go eat. They take me to the market, they call to ask if I need anything. Alta and the others are gone on their James Bond Mission somewhere near China. The pollen stream by in tufts like piano notes, carried swiftly along the breeze. The faces of the elderly, sun-browned and leathery, look as though the word "weathered" was created for them. Dust coats it all, the buildings match the desert floor upon which they stand, and the sky, patched with rapidly scudding clouds, is, of course, endless.

Today I permit the present to enter. I'm not to know the facts that ferried me here, so I won't try to; instead I will bear witness to this uncanny place, this hole in the world, as a poet and not a journalist. I'll ponder that "text" has become a verb. I'll watch the adolescent boys push each other in the children's park porch-swing and pray to this dusty place for that playfulness and obliviousness to remain in them. It's the interaction between the world and my heart, unfettered by analysis: deep grooves of soaking, pollen and light.

Website of the Week - Poets.org's Writerly Landmarks

Picture it: you and a couple of your literary friends make a road trip happen this summer, a literary trek across the USA. You go to the homes of your favorite poets, see the preserved original letters of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Lowell, and Allen Ginsberg. You talk about how surreal the experience is, say to each other: "Whoa! they actually lived here, man!" If you are in New York, go to the Beat poet's favorite hangout, The White Horse Tavern. Get a few drinks in you, then go to New Jersey and find the graves of Ginsberg, Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. Become emotional. Shed a few tears over their gravestones, read a few of their poems, and then write an Ode or Elegy which includes tears falling onto their graves. This exemplifies how you believe your words can still reach them just as their words reach you.

America has a plethora of amazing poetic landmarks, and poets.org has an accessible map of these landmarks all across the U.S. You can find out about poetry festivals, living poets, poetry-friendly bookstores, and lots more in each of the places you visit. You might also be surprised to learn about landmarks that are in your home state. So go check it out!

Infinite Jestation

How long should it take to read David Foster Wallace's 1,000-page masterwork? 92 days, according to Infinite Summer, the new website/reading project bringing all of us "endurance bibliophiles" together this summer to stop the procrastination. You have until June 21 to pick up or dust off your copy of Infinite Jest, so the reading camaraderie and discussion can begin. The schedule asks that you read only 75 pages per week, then head over to Twitter, Facebook, or the website discussion forums to speak your mind through September 22nd. In these remaining weeks before the marathon begins, the website asks only that you "finish or abandon all books, hobbies, and/or relationships." Now you have a reason.

Review of Inventory from a One-hour Room by Elizabyth A. Hiscox

Review of Inventory from a One-hour Room by Elizabyth A. Hiscox, Finishing Line Press 2009.
By Sarah Vap

I love this debut collection by Elizabyth Hiscox.

To begin, the language of the poems is alive and pushed-- it is incantatory, as if calling spells. It is pushed for the love of sound and for the sincerity and gorgeous peculiarities Hiscox’s writing voice and writing purpose. The language is in turn warm, clever, scathing, sharp, accurate, generously rich and exuberant, angry, and, ultimately…. her poems reach the space of a pure and simultaneous sorrow and joy.

This collection could also have been titled “screamchild in the sun.”

This book is yellow and gold. Yellow and gold abound, literally and in tone. “There is a listening in the sun” she writes in “Early Artichokes.” There are egg yolks, whiskey, paint that is “yellow under the palette knife,” “orange-round grins,” pumpkins, and sun-ups. There are lemonades, sunhats, photographs that are “time-touched yellow,” mornings, stars, torches and daffodils. Yellow is everywhere! From the goldish orange artwork on the cover of the book, “Abstract Orange I, Berlin 2007” by Oliver Godow, to the whitegold hair of Hiscox in her author photo on the back page-- there is yellow. From the poignancy and clarity of the scenes she evokes, to the faded-newspaper-yellow and “sad brown sun” of a time she has lost-- there is yellow in these poems.

And when there is no yellow, there is blood.

There is the heart-wrenching illness and dying of her mother, which we learn about in the first poem.

When the joy flips to sorrow, then there is the red. The lesions, the pumping heart, the irises “planted deep,” the sickness that “thickens blood to blood,” morticians and lab coats and lipstick for “lips of the gone” that is “Desert Rose, yes, her/ favorite.”

And in these poems, when there is no red, there is night.

There are “nightmares pulling/ toward an open ocean,” and “in the night: the approach of glaciers,’ veined with blues like gold, sky, death/ far into themselves.” There is Halloween night, just before, we know, the Day of the Dead.

And when there is no yellow, no red, and no night-- then there are remnants of pieces of art. A grandmother’s miniature animals, dusted every day. The paint being mixed. Egyptian carvings of mothers. And, in “The River’s Mouth”, there is

Ptah, in his feathered costume
of a cast out delta religion,
awash in a protestant nation’s
exhibition hall.

The museum can’t know what passionately alive and powerful treasure it holds when:

… ’Implements to mouth’ a placard sedately
relates a calling out of spells to restore.

The spells Ptah uttered that have the power to restore-- those, Hiscox lets us know, are the alive and the living. The museum that houses the “feathered costume”-- that is what is dead and uncomprehending. It is these two ends of an expressive spectrum that Hiscox identifies, and easily chooses, for herself, the living option of casting spells with her words.

In “Shot, Front-row Happy”, Hiscox describes a photograph in the newspaper in which she, in the front row, is smiling while the Jaws of Life demonstration takes place. “The photographer caught me the moment/ they cut a car in half, no gold spilling.” It is this exact moment that pervades the poems of this collection-- a childhood’s joyfulness, and its simultaneous catastrophe.

It is not a museum poem, nor an artifact, that Hiscox is writing. Hiscox’s poems of grieving and joy in this collection-- these are her spells to restore. These are poems of a mother, filled with motherliness and nativities, and ending with her mother’s final dream, “pulling toward an open ocean”.

Yet after the yellow, the red, the night, and the fragments of art struggling to resolve… what are we left with? We are left, purely, with what is identical of sorrow and of joy…. we are left with pain.

Ends Hiscox: “Start embroidering your pain on the back of my neck.”

Poems by Elizabyth A. Hiscox and Sarah Vap appear in HFR issue #44. Here to order a copy of Inventory From a One-hour Room.