Marginalia, Highlight Reel, and Cabin Fever
Marginalia I’m walking on a beach, the tide is low and no one is talking, splintery crabs hiding in kelp beds, an arrangement of mergansers shuffled on the water, their loopy hoods puffed up like forgetfulness— absence mapping its piece of mind. Give it fifty years....
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
A Review of Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens by Corey Van Landingham
Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavensby Corey Van LandinghamTupelo Press 2022. There’s an unexpected character in Corey Van Landingham’s poetry...
Prose is what we add to myth: Sam Taylor’s Book of Fools
The music at the center of Sam Taylor’s Book of Fools is a soulful dance between myth and memory. In this work, Taylor’s Orpheus, one of several interacting characters, accompanies the reader through the gaps in the underworld and the speaker’s inner world, tinged with loss and longing but sustained by the central feature of the work: the lyric.
GMR Interview- Diana Whitney
GMR: This anthology is a gift to young women everywhere. It strikes me a poetic version of what "Our Bodies Ourselves" was to me growing up in the...
A Manifesto and Unapologetic Permission for Girls to Be…In Verse
You Don’t Have to Be EverythingDiana Whitney, ed.Workman Publishing, 2021. An edgy manifesto for non-binary, trans, or cis-gendered girls in the form of a poetry anthology that cheers all kinds of girls to live without apology will hit the stands with a second reprint...
beyond hardware
i peruse paint samples to learn what shade names you. a blend of calumet cream1 and ivory2 and atyour cheek blush rose, but i didn’t need a color chart for that. at six months, you have lost theshimmer that teens buy cheap or steal in their first transgressions, but...
Mud and Honey
Beyond the six windows of our little world is a sea that rises with wind and temper. Nothing is even anymore, the horizon an old lunatic, bashing its head against a tilted sky. White caps form on the backs of swells, the Aleutian volcanoes sleeping behind spitting rain and haze. It’s early season in Bristol Bay, where I work as a deckhand on a commercial fishing vessel for the summer, catching sockeye salmon on the eastern edge of the Bering Sea.
eight years
not nearly enough to cleanse the stench, funk / grime and crime within the walls of an estate corrupt / not enough to baptize a new beginning or / dissolve evil embedded in historical detail
On Thin Ice
KATHRIN SCHMIDT
Multi-award-winning contemporary poet and novelist Kathrin Schmidt was born in the former German Democratic Republic, her voice feminist, political, and distinctly of the east. Her themes range through unemployment, loneliness, suicide and disaffection, which she sees as characterising the experience of East Germans during and since Reunification. Schmidt’s novel ‘You’re not dying’ (2009) won the German Book Prize and will at last appear in English in 2021 translated by Christine Les.
SUE VICKERMAN
The UK’s Brexit vote triggered writer Sue Vickerman to throw a rope across to Europe by turning to literary translation. Being northern English, Vickerman empathizes with East German peer-writer Kathrin Schmidt who similarly hails from a region where people feel ‘left behind’ and where right-wing populism is on the rise. Sue has translated TWENTY POEMS BY KATHRIN SCHMIDT, Arc Publications, 2020. She edits for Naked Eye Publishing (UK). suevickerman.eu
Death and Hope from ‘The Heart of Darkness’
J. Chester Johnson’s book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation, brings fresh air and a fresh methodology to the ‘difficult discussions’ circulating today in America about race, racism, and racial reconciliation.
Florida Grown
My thumbnail presses / into tangerine top, / oily mist spray arcs
A Review of RUIN by Cara Hoffman
I met Cara Hoffman in 1999 when we were featured at downtown reading series in Ithaca, New York. I had already read the manuscript of her novel, Running, which wouldn’t be published until 2017, and she had read my first novel, Specimen Tank. She was in her twenties and I was thirty-eight. Mutual friends had been telling me I needed to meet her for months. I was skeptical that her first book could be as good as they said it was, but within a few pages I was stunned by the precise prose and her savage sense of humor.