Lovelace Scrambles Our Culture and Makes a Pleasing Dish

It's been raining in the desert. After softening us up with drizzle for days, the main event arrived last night: a storm front that rent trees, darkened houses and sent my cats freaking up and down the hallway all night, imploring me as their god to make it stop. Today the human population of the city, unused to not just rain but weather patterns of any kind, surveys with shocked faces the six inches of water in their backyards, the roof tiles on the ground, the tree sundered by lightning. Experiencing the storm was a brief, powerful experience (just ask my cats), but the effects will linger as we patch, drain, rebuild and try to find where the hell the lawn furniture got to.

Reading How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace leaves a similar feeling of wandering around your psyche afterwards looking at what has been changed, blown away, or revealed.

Pop culture in particular looks different after Lovelace has rained on it. In the title story, a recitation of egg preferences of famous people and notables, he uses bits of celebrity like Lego bricks, assembling a monument to our monuments. Like the bricks, each of these stories can stand on it’s own. The Howard Hughes and Cher entries hit like shot-gun blasts to your inner People magazine, and the Thelonious Monk entry that wraps the story at the end brings an honest query to what the currency of celebrity is among Americans.

Flash fiction uses white space on equal footing with the printed word. Implication can be a blunt instrument in the wrong hands, but Lovelace uses it like a rapier, all his cuts are deft and to the quick. The ending of “Meteorite,” a paragraph that is a single sentence, is a forward thrust that cauterizes as it cuts. “Wal-mart” is a short fable about a broken relationship that manages to indict American culture in two pages. Charlie Brown’s Diary: Excerpts contains single paragraphs that invokes vast bleak landscapes worthy of Beckett. I could go on, but a reviewer is on dangerous turf after reading Eggs. When you find out just how much Lovelace does with so little, you feel like a bad writer yourself if you go on too long. Let’s end with this thought: You could read the entirety of this book on the train on the way to work, but it will ride with you long after that.

How Some People Like Their Eggs
Sean Lovelace
Rose Metal Press

How Some People Like Their Eggs released!

Rose Metal Press (and HFR!) are pleased to announce the publication of the winning chapbook from their Third Annual Short Short Fiction Chapbook Contest.

Written by Sean Lovelace and selected by contest judge Sherrie Flick, HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is a collection of 10 flash fictions about things falling apart, wrung out wrong, raveling and unraveling, from missing woodchucks to train-struck ferrets, from Bonnie and Clyde to Charlie Brown (a notorious fatalist and depressive), from meteorites to bear attacks to gunplay in the bait shop. And so on to flash fiction worlds of talking crows, percolating trees, Che Guevara’s omelets, and Ingrid Bergman’s sex life. These stories are light and yet succulent like a Cornish hen, whatever that means. How does an amphibian know the moment it’s OK to unfold the lungs? Wait. These stories are small but so is a hydrogen atom. Open these pages, split them apart, and BOOM. There you go. Enjoy.

HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS features two-color letterpressed covers, printed on a Vandercook press at The Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA. The chapbook has been produced in a limited run of 300 copies, so be sure to get your copy soon! Today, even, right here. You can also add it to your Goodreads. And you can watch for announcements on the Rose Metal Press site about Sean reading around the Midwest!

The title story will appear in the next issue of HFR. To hear more from Sean, check out his Contributor Spotlight post here.

Review of I, NE: Iterations of the Junco

I, NE: Iterations of the Junco is a collaboration between John Chavez, Megan Gannon, Rachel May, and Joshua Ware. Illustrations by Meaghan Perry. Letterpress-printed on 18 file cards in a handmade paper slipcase. Edition of 100.
Review by Elizabyth Hiscox

Straight out of the gate this book from Small Fires Press is a captivating package. Printed on a series of unbound file cards peeking from the slipcase, the poems are punctuated by Meaghan Perry’s avian etchings that vaguely illustrate the content: tender juncos, gloried juncos, juncos in distress. The use of the recurring central image of these prints echoes the method of the text, although it should be noted the poems explore a variety of subjects. The individual poems, eleven in all, are assigned to the poets as a group: John Chavez, Megan Gannon, Rachel May, and Joshua Ware.

Granted, I am the target audience for a limited edition art book. Letterpress fonts can make me giddy and handmade paper (in this case, cotton with unbleached abaca & banana added) can enchant me. While the Kindle and similar next-gen technologies are cutting a wide literary path, there is an equal and opposite reaction in printmaking. Whether to deckle an edge is appropriate conversation again. But, don’t mistake it: I don’t like it all. You can’t judge a book by its paper.

Granted, I am also the target audience for the collaborative poem. I admire and defend its production and am especially inclined to the approach this text takes: allowing each poem to move past individual poet to become an un-assignable work that transcends a particular style or voice.

Granted, I, NE: Iterations of the Junco is my kind of book, but I was prepared for it to be otherwise. It could have been a gimmicky catalyst cast-off. It could have been a by-product of a concept. It could have been better suited to the vapid ranks of art object. It could have been other than it was.

The poem “Yet Limned in Watercolor” admits “Of course, the story, as with the junco’s stutter is contrived.” By extension: the poems. But contrivance is good in this case, as with the song of the bird. It is artfully devised. An implication that wild things play in structures too.

After the initial title card, and prior to the first poem, is an image of a songbird with an eruption of [light?] [sound?] lines skyward. Titled “Report” it carries the call and its response and suitably, subtly pulls us into a work of revelation mixed with repetition. There’s an earnest intelligence here, but there is also a sense that this is a bit of a romp with language. The sincere smile if not the sly wink in its pages. For example, the cards which open and close the collection are tabbed “hello” and “goodbye.” It’s as though you, the reader, have been allowed in on a space, a conversation. At times, a heated discussion. And this is, perhaps, the paramount appeal of these poems: that strange tug of shared process – the resonance becoming different each time a word is revisited – heard again and against the tenor of another.

Here’s a taster; these lines pulled from “The Word You Cannot Erase [Part One],” “Cotton-Glass & Parrot-Bells,” and “The Autonomy of Air,” respectively.

Come back to the junco call, stuttered white noise, drops of some- / thing from my body: coin, tooth, horizon. Even the airplane hears / the frog’s sigh, the radio white noise that swallows every sound,[…]

Kestrels hollow white noise as hovering ice limbs erase / the scrim of an early waver-light.[…]

[…] Another sentence descends & the junco alphabetizes the similes of its own syntax: kestrels, / moonlight, a newly leafed tree, and thistle-burrs. […]

There are moments of greater similarity than these in the book: moments where almost punctuation alone offers alteration. But to extract an emblematic set of lines would be to ignore that the poetry is un-extractable at the same moment that many of the phrasings and combinations produce immediate beauty [“We must’ve been invited into the aperture / of the morning just then,”].

In the end, to write a review of this book is to try to contextualize a project that already exists in a context that is at once fixed and fluid. The reader picks up on what is happening, gets the basic rules of the game and to a point that feels situated, and then finds the iterations informing themselves [in image, in space, in verse] and opening up again.

In the end, to write a review of this book is to try and contextualize my betters. “A Note on the Process” that accompanies the poems situates the project eloquently and as accurately as possible with poems driven by erasure and self-professed nonce form:

“Externally, these iterations may appear similar. Internally, these iterations produce difference: an irreducible and dynamic concept vibrating through temporal, spatial, and linguistic contexts. As such, each poem works to alter the conceptual freight of the entire series, or the ‘passing and repassing [of] decentered centers of the eternal return.’”

Yep. That sounds about right.

To see more pictures from the chapbook, go here. Or, go here to get yourself a copy. A series of Joshua Ware's poems appeared in HFR #44.

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.

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.

Review: The Garden of Improbable Birds by Roy Seeger

The Garden of Improbable Birds by Roy Seeger. Gribble Press, 2007. Review by Meghan Brinson.

If you enjoyed the tense domestic of “Heirlooms,” by Seeger in Hayden's Ferry Review #42, then you should check out this chapbook.

While the table of contents of Roy Seeger’s The Garden of Improbable Birds might read like a biology text, The Garden of Improbable Birds isn’t just another assortment of pretty yet unfulfilling nature poems. Flora and fauna form a landscape, often ironic, where the relationships that family members have with each other create larger legacies. Seeger’s chapbook, contrasting its pastoral, lyrical images with projections of pop icons, is a formally risky, emotionally successful collection.

Seeger tackles an ambitious experiment in form with the academic practice of footnotes. Any reader of Norton’s anthologies knows the dangers of his attempt: he risks splitting the reader’s attention between important emotional moments and trivia, or draining energy out of poems by breaking up the natural momentum of lines and stanzas. Yet Seeger’s footnotes, at their best, offer a kind of secondary text to the poems, literally creating miniature poems in the space between the lines. I suggest reading the poems without footnotes once, since these interjections do not add anything essential to the first reading. But on second reading of “Cavern,” for example, footnotes are enjoyable additions: the first offers a landscape vignette, the other a ghostly Greek chorus.

Seeger’s chapbook manages to do what many whole collections do not--he pursues a topic through a period of reflection and growth and takes it to a satisfying, convincing conclusion—in thirty three pages. The book’s focus on family issues, particularly the suburban mother and contrastingly rural father, and the hypothetically sheltered future children captures a particular moment in adult life when the speaker reflects back into childhood to project himself into the future he is considering of his own fatherhood.

It’s in these poems that the chapbook particularly shines, contemplating the father of the speaker’s necessary violence and (perhaps) unnecessary judgment in “The Wolfman’s Barber,” when the rare-beef-eating father trims his wolf-son’s hair:

“and I learned to avoid my father// When he searched each room in his crusade/ to civilize me. I learned not to answer//when he called.

Alternatively, the speaker considers what he would pass on to his own children in “Whenever I dance I imitate John Travolta,” an energetic lyric:

“This is nothing/ I’d ever teach my children, nothing/ they couldn’t learn themselves:// plant the toe and twist the leg;/ point to the sky, point to the ground;/ don’t look where you are pointing.

Here for ordering information on this chapbook. Since his publication in HFR, Seeger won the 2008 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. His book The Boy Whose Hands Were Birds, is available at this website.