On a Saturday, I had a sleepover to which a friend brought a Ouija board. The new girl said she felt sick to her stomach and called her father to pick her up. By second period Monday morning, the intercom insisted I leave Geometry and report to the office where, in more or less terms, the principal enjoined me to give up those sinful practices that opened up my soul to Satan!

Why was I even there?

My grandparents, the footers of bills wary of Tennessee public education, sent me to the cheapest private school in town for middle and high schools. A year earlier, another student and I had been called to the office because they knew we both attended, with our parents, St. Peter’s Episcopal that featured, on its lawn, an inverted cross, Peter’s cross. The fundamentalist school, however, identified the cross as perhaps Satanic.

I cried in the meeting, and the next. They let me off with a prayer and a warning.

A year or so later, when I began dating, I started keeping a fake journal. The idea was, I would write about overcoming temptations, sexual etcetera; the innocent day-to-day, however, was recorded as is, but I’d Trojan Horse Bible verses in lieu of confiding the blemishes. If I was ever accused of anything again–including sex, which had gotten several other students suspended for whole semesters–I would show them the journal: Look! I overcame temptation. I’ve been keeping this all along.

Who would lie in a journal?

I don’t know where I got the idea, but I’d been inundated with the notion of “evidence” for years; my father, then, was a forensics cop, head of the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) unit of our local force. In writing this account of half-truths, however, the “evidence” in some way confused my motives. I wasn’t sure, deep down, if I believed in God and, yet, as I continued to have sex with my boyfriend and steal from my mother’s liquor cart, I began to experience intense bouts of guilt, like dizzy spells, that saw me awake whole nights, paranoid about what I told once-confidants, and, perhaps even more so, compelled to continue the behavior.

I wasn’t exactly a rebel, and no one will remember me as a wild child. All of my minor mutiny took place in extreme secrecy. I was never accused of anything ever again. I was never called to the office, never asked to explain myself. I made okay grades especially in music and, unsurprisingly, English where I had two truly wonderful teachers in the 11th-grade Advanced and 12th-grade AP, including one who slipped me a book deemed inappropriate by the school, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?–still a favorite of mine–and another who led a quarter-long creative writing class where, for the first time, I felt some freedom of expression without fear of expulsion. Some would say I am, in some respects, unscathed by the lockdown, no-sex-no-dancing-no-nothing, hellfire-and-brimstone dystopian education.

That said, my motives for writing remain eerily similar to my first endeavor. I write in order to protect myself; it’s just the “what from” that’s changed. I no longer need to cloak my actions and desires (thanks, public universities!) or hide the fact that I’m happily agnostic with, if I may say, a fondness for the Episcopal church, at least the one in which I was raised. (Bingo night with a full bar! A priest who has a degree in literature from the University of the South! The denomination’s acceptance of gay clergymen! Their warmth and non-judgment.)

Now, writing protects me from misdirection, boredom, and anxiety. I may explore those worst parts of my imagination, perhaps after Anthony Burgess’s idea that the writer’s “innate cowardice . . . makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself,” as well as establish ideals of my own. Writing catches me in my missteps, accuses me, forgives me, betrays me, and defends me. It is outlet, inlet, spell, and caster. It listens to me, and knows before I tell.
 
 
 
 
 
EMILIA PHILLIPS is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013) and two chapbooks including Bestiary of Gall (Sundress Publications, 2013). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, The Paris-American, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the 2012 Poetry Prize from The Journal, selected by G.C. Waldrep; 2nd Place in Narrative’s 2012 30 Below Contest; and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, U.S. Poets in Mexico, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Commonwealth University where she received her MFA in poetry in 2012. She serves as the prose editor for 32 Poems and has been appointed as the 2013–2014 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

***

 
Today Cecile and I did yoga, then jogged as pilgrims in a 10K. We drank wine, the conversations moving to how she couldn’t believe I didn’t have a sex toy. She gave me one she and her husband didn’t like much–when I left and started walking, my boyfriend called and asked what I decided–I’m supposed to be on my way to visit him in Montana, which is something I keep doing even though he’s only been here once. I walked one way, then another without thinking, telling him he lives in a town I can’t imagine going back to.
 
I walked from street to street, getting into a conversation he didn’t like much.
 

***

 
After running from the chained guys, I walk further, down another street I can’t seem to place. I see houses with junk in the yard.
 
I walk by two parked cars filled with guys with crew cuts. I go straight. I know it’s dumb, but I hold on to my sex toy.
 
I say to one of them, Excuse me? Can you help me?
 
A man looks me up and down. His friends laugh. He lifts his chin and points and tells me, That way.
 
I say thanks, and though my legs feel weak, I keep myself ahead.
 
I think I hear a bang and I sprint like a race.
 
 
 
 
 
KIM CHINQUEE is the author of the collections Oh Baby and Pretty. Most recently, her work has been featured, along with Daryl Scroggins and Holly Tavel, in Ravenna Press’s Triple No. 3. She edits New World Writing, and lives in Buffalo, New York.

SUBMIT HERE

SUBMISSION FEE: None!

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 10, 2013

Trinity University Press: San Antonio Texas. 2013. 672 pages.

Reading a recent review by Ange Mlinko’s for The Nation, I was made aware of the fact that the term anthology at root refers to a collection of flowers. Nowhere does this etymology seem more embodied than in the The Ecopoetry Anthology (Eds. Fisher-Wirth and Gray-Street). Spanning over 400 pages of contemporary ecopoetry and including a historical section of over 100 pages of canonical American poetic antecedents to ecopoetry, this is an impressive collection of blooms.

In the contemporary section there is a vast breadth of work. On one page Kwame Dawes writes in “Genocide Again”

If a man were to wake in Sun City,

he would smell the truth of prophecy.

Those close by will die of machete blow,

those far away will die of plague,

and those who are spared

will know the famine of orphaned days–

and on the next, Alison Hawthorne Deming in “Specimens Collected at the Clear Cut”:

1. Wild currant twig flowering with cluster of rosy microgoblets.

2.Wild iris, its three landing platforms, purple bleeding to white then yellow in the honey hollows, purple veins showing the direction to the sweet spot

The scope the editors have taken in selecting work reflects the central tension surrounding ecopoetry: exactly what can be said to constitute an ecopoem? In this vein, it is perhaps not the poetry pressed into the pages, but the editors’ introductions, and the long essay by Robert Hass included, which contributes the most to our understanding of ecopoetry. In their introduction Fisher-Wirth and Gray-Street define ecopoetry as

poetry that is some way shaped by and responds specifically to that [environmental] crisis . . . . addresses contemporary problems and issues in ways that are ecocentric and that respect the integrity of the other-than-human world . . . [,] challenges the belief that we are meant to have dominion over nature and is skeptical of a hyperrationality that would separate mind from body and people from earth. (xxvii)

This definition is a broad starting point; they then outline a taxonomy of ecopoetics:

1.     Nature poetry: which “considers nature as subject matter and inspiration” (xxviii)
2.     Environmental poetry: “propelled by and directly engaged with active and politicized environmentalism” (xxix)
3.     Ecological poetry: which is elusive and “engages with questions of form most directly, not only poetic form but also a form historically taken for granted-that of the singular, coherent self” (xxix)

Articulating these differences among particular ecopoetics is in keeping with an ecological view of poetry, one which seeks to view a poem holistically in terms of wider contexts–much like trying to place a particular flower species into a broader ecosystem.  Embracing the broadest possible definition of ecopoetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology challenges us as readers to link previously divisive perspectives of ecopoetry (the experimental/ecological vs. the natural/representative) together and to be rewarded with the links we find. For example on page 219 we encounter the ecological in Julia Connor’s poem “Canto for the Birds”:

& you cannot talk about poetry

              without talking about

                                               the land)

YOU  CANNOT  TALK  POETRY

WITHOUT TALKING LAND

                                                     in the chapel

                                                     where we meet to

                                                                            open

                                                     our imperfect

                                                     hearts

                     7 mourning doves

        perched like

                                  the shadows

                                                  of ideas

                     whose movement between

       worlds

                     we are

                                 the animate

                powers of

Then on page 331 we see a direct echo of this idea that nature embodies a poetry that cannot quite be linguistically articulated in H.L. Hix’s sonnet “The Last Crows Whose Cries Are Audible Here,” a poem decidedly closer to nature poetry:

They are the questions one knows not to ask,

The answers one does not know how to take.

They console bare limbs for lost leaves. Their flights

Are lines in verse translations of the snow

Into a tongue, inscrutable by light,

That no diurnal mind will ever know.

These surprising connections can be traced not just through the contemporary poetry section, but also back to the historical section. One of the joys of The Ecopoetry Anthology is how it repositions canonical work we would not normally associate with ecopoetry (for example Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane and Ezra Pound) as antecedents. The historicism of American ecopoetry is thoroughly enunciated in Robert Hass’s almost 30-page essay “American Ecopoetry: An Introduction,“ which in very clear terms seeks to examine the conditions and contexts which make American ecopoetry possible. Beginning with 1609 and Galileo and the year the first colonial Americans arrived, Hass traces the history of America alongside the history of science and the history of poetry. Interdisciplinarity is emphasized in ecopoetry, and Hass shows us what this might look like. It’s a reframing of the canon of American poetry in terms of scientific innovation and environmental change. One of the major benefits of this historical section is that it allows us to reinterpret these poets from within the framework of ecocriticism; as Hass notes, The Wasteland reads very differently when examined for its foliage content.

One downside is that the historical section highlights potential flaws in the contemporary section. Against the refined body of canonical work, the breadth of the contemporary section in certain lights appears flabby. The historical focus of the introduction and the chronological arrangement of the historical section by birth order of the poet, also jars with the arbitrary alphabetical arrangement in the contemporary section. It would be interesting to see what trends would appear if the contemporary were also arranged in a chronology. I also questioned the limitation of the anthology to solely American poets, for ecopoetry seems to oppose the human imposition of national boundaries and asks us to consider global environmental issues.

But these are small quibbles in light of the important and necessary work this anthology is doing in deepening our questioning of how poetry can interact with the changing world. As Fisher-Wirth says in her introduction, each of these poems has “the power to move the world–to break through our dulled disregard, our carelessness, our despair, reawakening our sense of the vitality and beauty of nature. With that awareness, let us pledge to take actions that will preserve it” (X).
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CAITLIN MALING has published poetry, non-fiction and criticism throughout Australia and the United States. Poetry is forthcoming in Westerly (Aus) and non-fiction in ThreePenny (USA). Her first collection of poetry, Conversations I’ve Never Had, is forthcoming with Fremantle Press (Aus) in 2015.

      I intended to give her the box with the bow
      on top but I left it at the airport.

      They say the most dangerous place to put
      your hand, germ-wise, is the seat-back pouch.

      I could stare at the manual all week
      and not know how to assemble the swing-set.

      So fidgety was how Mrs. Burnside,
      my third-grade teacher, described us.

      But look at me now. No fear of dying.
      Take that, Mrs. B. None at all.
 
 
 
 
STEVE LANGAN is the author of Meet Me at the Happy Bar, Notes on Exile and Other Poems, and Freezing. He lives in Omaha and on Cliff Island, Maine.

 
 
and that’s how she got herself pregnant. We weren’t trying to conceive, and in fact, to ensure we’d stay childless, we took every precaution: I stayed on top, no kissing, no prayer before or after, and I made sure I lasted less than a minute; personally, I’d done everything right. That’s why I’m furious with Grace. And I know: If only I’d taken this negative energy into the bedroom, we wouldn’t be in this mess. No matter how badly my wife screwed up.
 
The pastor at our church insisted we keep the baby. In fact, he volunteered to counsel us to ensure nothing unGodly came to pass. Before Grace and I even talked about it, Reverend Pasquale and his wife Joannie were sitting in our living room, eating Grace’s duck liver pâté, playing Taboo, and instructing us on how to child-proof our apartment. The plugs would need caps, the corners were too pointy, and my stacks of CDS would have to go. Grace was excited to have people over, our first guests in eight years, especially the good preacher and his wife. What was weird, not keeping the baby hadn’t crossed my mind, not until Reverend Pasquale stopped us on the way out of service last week. Grace was none too happy when I pointed this out, Reverend Pasquale flummoxed by the notion he’d planted such vileness in my head, his face turning the color of the pâté. Joannie said, “You could put a changing table right where that TV is. You need to be able to change in every room.”
 
When I was a kid, my dad gave me the Talk when while we waited in line for a roller coaster. He explained the plumbing first, noting the different chambers, going into detail about pipes, wrenches, and reservoirs. When I was able to repeat every part of both my own self and my future wife’s, he switched tracks and demonstrated attitudes, techniques, even pillow talk, the difference between a child-rearing disposition and the other kind. By the time we reached the front of the line—me now a man and several smaller kids in line damaged for life—I knew three things: 1) If I ever had kids, both parties would have to consent; 2) No matter what happened, I was in charge; and 3) Why would I ever want to have marital relations when there were awesome things like baseball, bicycles, and roller coasters in the world?
 
After doing some research, then calling my dad, I was certain my Grace had planned this pregnancy. I thought back to that fatal afternoon, ran things over and over again, and there was no way the combination I remember could have worked, angry, fast, and missionary as effective as outright sterility. It had to be her, her cunning. At the outset of the last trimester, I accused Grace with this theory and she denied it. She swore her conception was the Lord’s work, a blessing He’d intended all along, at that moment. She then asked me if I loved our unborn baby, if I was grateful to the Lord for this gift. I told her I was grateful, and all of sudden, she turned the tables. She asked if I was the one who’d planned this, if I’d propagated without permission. Dear Lord, the doubt crept up inside me right then. Maybe I’d angled myself incorrectly. Maybe I’d thought about babies during climax. Worst of all, there could have been love in my heart. Within seconds, she was locked in her bedroom, sobbing and calling her sister, and I was questioning my own self: Did I plan that baby? Had I done everything in my power? I became so confused, I could no longer tell what transpired that day. Who initiated the coitus, she or I? Did I have my maroon pajamas on? Was she was afraid? And of course the most important step of all: Which testicle had the sperm come from, the left or the right?
 
 
                                                                                                                             –for Todd A.
 
 
 
MICHAEL CZYZNIEJEWSKI is the author of two collections of stories, Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions (Curbside Splendor, 2012) and Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books, 2009), and in 2010 received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an assistant professor at Missouri State University, where he serves as Editor of Moon City Review.

Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts. 2012. 273 pp.

If it sounds like I’m giving the story away, rest assured that I’m not, for this is not a story of confessions so much as it is a story of the fallout that follows them. How does one explain to two young sons that their grandparents are suddenly divorced? How does one explain to them why the divorce took place? When one son learns, via the publication of one of the essays from this book in The Sun, that his grandfather attempted suicide, how does one explain that his grandfather once wanted to kill himself? These are questions that Gregory Martin has to face, in addition to his own about the events, and he chronicles his attempts to reconcile these issues along with his relationship with his father throughout these pages.

In one essay, “Hypotheticals,” Martin writes, “I didn’t want a different father. I wanted to find a way to love my father the way I had always loved him. But that was no longer possible. I would have to find new ways to love him.” This would prove difficult, however, especially after his father broke into his mother’s house to reclaim his things. It would even prove difficult after his father, post-divorce, had developed healthy relationships with men–no longer in hiding, but nonetheless representing a fundamentally different father than the one Martin thought he knew. Still, in the end, Martin and his father are able at least to heal a few wounds and to grow together, with Martin going so far even as to rekindle some of affection between his father and his sons when his father comes to visit.

The organization of the book is unusual and even haphazard. It’s only chronological in the loosest sense, being that it opens with his father’s attempted suicide and closes with their relationship on the mend. Emails sent between Martin and his father pepper the pages, as do photographs of his family, the treehouse that he builds for his sons, movie stars and poets to whom he looks for solace and reminiscence. (Martin looks in particular to Walt Whitman, whose open sexual explorations provide a sort of model for how such experiences might be approached in writing.)

To some, the organizing principle might seem like little more than a set of disparate emotions and ideas moving all around a central theme, but perhaps that’s as it should be. This is a book that works like the mind itself in a state of trauma, attacking its focal point from all angles, then circling around to try again. In the course of this dance, Stories for Boys becomes a tale of anger and sadness, confusion and wonder, and then, only in the end, once all the possibilities have been exhausted, into one of familial reconciliation against all odds.
 
 
 
 
 
WILL DONNELLY is a graduate of both the University of Houston and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction, non-fiction, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, Pebble Lake Review, PANK Magazine, Five Chapters, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.