Pushcart Nominations 2024!

Dear Lovely Readers,

We are honored and excited to announce this year’s Pushcart Prize nominees! These poems just blow us away. Thank you to all of our contributors, submitters and readers for helping The Shore publish such exciting poetry and making these decisions so difficult!

Emma Bolden “Nights in White Satin”
Isabella Piedad Escamilla “You Don’t Have to Believe Any of This”
John Gallaher “I’m Not Afraid of Pop Music”
Dylan Harbison “July”
Melissa Holm Shoemake “Meditation over a Lagunitas Beer with iPhone”
Kate Welsh “In June, Pigeons”

With Deepest Admiration,
Sarah, Caroline & John

Review: Emma Aylor

On Close Red Water by Emma Aylor

by Tyler Truman Julian

Those looking for the perfect autumn read need look no further than Close Red Water by Emma Aylor. The prize-winning collection deftly blends folk and ancestral wisdom with feminist spirituality, resulting in poems that engage with landscape, family legacy, and femininity in profound ways. As Close Red Water approaches its second birthday, the collection, with its benevolent ghosts and subtle witchcraft, deserves another look during Spooky Season. Close Red Water attempts to make sense of the haunting that is familial legacy and parse out what it means to become an individual surrounded by family ghosts. Some say that naming a ghost can take away its ability to haunt and Aylor’s collection successfully names ghosts in order to take away their power.
           “The place I know holds an ancient pang,” begins Close Red Water (“Hay Moon”). The lyrical pulse of the collection’s opening poem establishes a strong voice and image-driven poetry that reinforces the familial and landscape-based ties of this “ancient pang.” “Hay Moon” finishes on these two ideas to lead into the rest of the collection:

            It feels like leaving again the land I left already. Remember back
            at the farm, after picking up hay? My father asked me recently.
            How the air was so soft you could wrap it around you.
            What’s past arches at the roof of my mouth like salt. In an ocean
            I remember, the brown water, cold, unrolls cleanly, paper over me.

What does it mean for the past to be eaten up, but to also sit uneasily on one’s tongue like salt? To be held in “brown water,” but “cleanly”? There are paradoxes in Close Red Water that shed light on the muddiness of the past’s impact on the present. The past both hurts and holds in comfort, like being haunted by a familiar face. This reality is explored in “False Spring,” a poem that plays with space on the page, taking the shape of a river or a timeline, fluid but structured. Aylor writes:

            One day I’ll wake with ice on my tongue
                        and cold spread to the ceiling and it will settle
                        in narrow planks, each length lit to
            innermind blue. Blue of my grandmother’s eyes,
                        chicory through vapor, one not passed full
                        to my father, whose blue is rinsed by white.
            I have only ever been haunted
                        by people I didn’t know alive: flashes
                        at a room’s edges and twist of crashed
            ribbon in early morning. I take on ghosts
                        not yet ghost, old panes overlaid, future
                        visitants. My grandmother passed on the first
            day of spring—a hundred and half.
                        I left my office to stand by the river;
                        water ran brown and rained-into
            under the bridge. Her body lay south a good
                        few hundred miles. Trees stood slipped
                        leafless; crocuses started to push up.
            My grandmother would never haunt a person.
                        She would not want to be a bother.
                        I almost see her in the mirror
            passed down to my parents’ room, corroded
                        by rot, unsilvering for two centuries:
                        to look is to see her cheekbone and chin
            picked from mine and a face specked in glass
                        decay. The plane was made and brimmed
                        in walnut, a still pool painted dark behind—
            We intend a mirror to preserve the original light.

The collection explores what is passed down from generation to generation, with emphasis on the matriarchal line. “My brother can’t witch; he doesn’t have the eyes,” Aylor’s speaker reports in “Self-Portrait as Water Witcher. He doesn’t have “the eyes,” neither does the father referenced above in “False Spring,” the same father who asks if the speaker remembers how the hay could wrap a body up in “Hay Moon.”
The buildup of these images, such as blue eyes that carry mystical significance and are presented through a feminist lens, gives the speaker in Aylor’s work power and the ability to self-actualize outside the family unit. This power is made clear in the lyrical, imagist poem “Conservatory”:
 
           Holy bones of the greenhouse slim and steeple;
            holy few panes brushed by blue. Holy strung river
            run under monstera and pitcher plants that open 

            their grace mouths. Holy mother who asks
           her daughter, so this beautiful thing is carnivorous?
            Holy my mother’s naming, her love for botany:

            even here her hands spindle in the ferns—
           wrinkled palms that braid drifts of my heart lines
            through. Holy air eighty degrees and humid

            in the fern house. Holy my déjà vu as water sings indoors
            and rock seems a place to lay myself down.
            Holy my tongue, slowing, enclosed. 

            Holy for I have been and believed, my three names
            urns for family dead; holy the ants that wobble
            over my sclerae, ghostlets that stop now and then to eat; 

            holy to be planted green in smooth water and shiver
            a body’s way to its given bed. I have been
            here before. Have not been here before.

Aylor’s speaker emphasizes her power: “Holy my tongue.” To speak and write are acts of power. Claiming that power and naming it holy reflects the feminist spiritualism of this collection, especially as it connects to nature and mysticism. When one develops as an individual outside the family, they are better positioned to re-enter the family in a healthy way and overcome past trauma. By exploring this dynamic through an image-driven feminist lens, Aylor brings her speaker full circle, asking,

            How do I ask my family
            to haunt me here?           

            None of the altars
            I make living alone will reach

            the three thousand miles
           to their graves. In fairness,

            it is a long way to walk,
            and do I really believe?

            …

            How can I rightly feel deserted
            as the one who left a place behind? (“Haunts”)

There’s excitement and joy in the agency experienced by the speaker as she claims her identity, but there’s also a sense of loss. “I wish you’d lay, I wish you’d lay me down / fluffed or washed, spindled or carded,” she laments in “Our Lady of the Blue Ridge.” “This is not coming easy— / there are parts of you leaving—I’m misplacing accents / with the loss of home-tongue.” It’s hard work to assert one’s place in a family, to name ghosts, to say good-bye. Close Red Water acknowledges this reality.
            In “Body Language,” Aylor’s speaker confides, “I only see what I can see, but I’ve made my work / to lead you down to that water with me.” A lot of work has been done to understand the water and the people in her family who lived, worked, and died along its riverbanks. A feminist examination of landscape and family, presented through lyrical, image-driven poetry makes Close Red Water an exciting and thought-provoking read. Its engagement with the supernatural adds nuance and depth to these themes, especially as the nights grow longer. Reading Close Red Water won’t leave you looking over your shoulder for things that go bump in the night; rather, you’ll be inspired to look back to your past at what ghosts need named and released in your own life.

In case you missed it—here are Aylor’s poems from The Shore:

Distance
Stonefruit Season
Daydream

Review: Abbie Kiefer

On Certain Shelters by Abbie Kiefer

by Tyler Truman Julian

Abbie Kiefer’s forthcoming collection Certain Shelter is a moving exploration of abundance. In the world of Certain Shelter, a near facsimile of small-town Maine, abundance manifests as harvest and nostalgia, cancer and grief. Many threads weave this concept of abundance with overabundance, and Kiefer dives into it fully by assigning her speaker the difficult task of poet-recorder as she reports on the state of life in a rural, blue-collar town in flux. The town’s shift from plenty to decay mirrors the speaker’s mother who succumbs to an overabundance of cancerous cells. In well-crafted poems, ranging in form and mode from prose poems to couplets to abstract, Kiefer blends craft, story, and history to build a beautiful and moving collection.
            In “A Brief History of Tarceva,” Kiefer’s speaker explores the dichotomy of abundance that spreads throughout the collection:
            Tarceva (erlotinib) was developed to treat metastatic non-small
            cell lung cancer in patients with an active EGFR mutation who
            have never smoked. Only about a third of patients have this
            mutation. My mom’s oncologist finds it, tells her What luck.
            In a trial, patients using Tarceva had a median survival rate
            of 8.7 months. Tarceva can cause rash, lack of appetite. More
            strangely, it also makes my mom’s eyelashes grow long and
            dense. The nurse says she’s jealous as she trims them with suture
            scissors. You’re like a Kardashian. My mom doesn’t have time
            for reality television; she doesn’t know the Kardashians. Her
            lashes, when she blinks, look so heavy to lift.

This personal, emotional core of the collection is informed by the love and disappointment experienced by the speaker in the poems reflecting on her small hometown in Maine. There’s perseverance in this community, informed by shared values and memory, but these make the loss of community and decay of the town even more painful. The speaker knows, doggedly, there’s little to do but “To make. To make do or do without. To trust your own two / hands, maybe too much” (“A Brief History of Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic”). There’s nostalgia here, but also realism, hope but also distrust. She continues, “To hear a person / say work and swear he said worth. To do. To do. To abide in spareness and rarely be spared.” A person or a whole community could have done everything right, for example, never smoking as in “A Brief History of Tarceva” or embracing the American Dream as in “A Brief History of Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic”, and still will “rarely be spared.” This reality cultivates a grief that permeates Certain Shelter, grief for a mother lost to cancer and grief for a town lost to the outsourcing of labor to more affordable overseas markets.
           Both “A Brief History of Tarceva” and “A Brief History of Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic” are prose poems and show Kiefer’s attention to form. Kiefer frequently utilizes the prose form to report, to share facts, to clarify and commentate and she turns to other forms to complicate and explore the community she paints so vividly through prose. In “Resolutions,” Kiefer’s speaker reflects on parenting without the guidance of a mother and how life’s abundance can feel overwhelming:
            Stop calculating: If I were the one to die,
            could you afford a good sitter? Someone
            who would find adventures—
            streams and boulders, trees for climbing.
            Who would urge our boys with all the ease
            I lacked: Go. Yes, go. What’s the worst
            That can happen?

Kiefer’s line work is on display here. Enjambment always works in her favor, and each individual like functions both independently and with what comes before and after, resulting in rich and textured poems. This complex line work is extended into an experimental space in poems like “Self-Portrait as the Safe Deposit Vault in the Vacant First Trust.” As in “Resolutions,” “Self-Portrait as the Safe Deposit Vault in the Vacant First Trust” works on many levels. Metacommentary is employed to align the speaker with the town, causing her loss to become the town’s loss and vice-versa, and structurally, the poem works like a stereoscope, with two images, built on either side of the page, creating one larger image:
           I only wanted to

            carry out the good work.
Be a two-ton slab 

            shut fast against trouble.
There’s hubris in being 

built to withstand.
I promised to hold 

Everything. Now I’ve lost

even memory: 

the particular weight of a
pocket watch or passport— 

accumulations of a life 

gone.

A straight read of this poem gives you the complete picture, but each margin works independently as well, which adds layer upon layer, weight upon weight, to a poem that explores the pressure of time and memory that weighs on an individual feeling unanchored amid immense loss.
            So what can be done with this weighted grief at the intersection of abundance and overabundance and the waste that it results in? Nodding to lyrical and confessional poetry, Keifer’s emphasis on an ever-present first-person speaker points to the responsibility of the poet as recorder. At the beginning of the collection’s second section, Kiefer invokes the legacy of Maine poet E.A. Robinson who wrote of a fictionalized version of his hometown, where “Its residents falter against change. Against their own failings… / the people endure or they don’t. You can / empathize or not. E.A. isn’t kind. He isn’t unkind, either” (“A Brief History of E.A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine”). Kiefer’s speaker and her hometown mirror E.A. Robinson and his hometown. Reality is blurry, but truth is explored as a result of a poet taking on the subject of home. Utilizing quatrains, Kiefer expounds on grief and poetry through “I’m So Very Tired”:
            of writing all these sad, sad poems. As if my life
            is only a meditation on its own end. I mean,
            I do think often of mortality. But also I’m among
            such generous pleasures. Five kinds of tea… 

            it should feel like wild indulgence, like overabundance,
            except he loves in a way that says This is your due.
            I have hurt and I have sisters who carry the same
            hurt and we share the carrying of it. We share jokes 
          
  too, like when one of us shakes a fist skyward
            and huffs Carol!, exasperated at our mom
            for dying and leaving us to figure out all this
  hard stuff for ourselves, like what should we do

  about these defiant kids and were we defiant too?
  Did we turn out okay? Oh Carol. We miss you.
  Can I say that here, reader? In this poem about being
  less melancholy? Because it is solace to say it plainly. 

  I had a mother and I miss her and I have joy
  and a garden. The turkeys amble around it.
  I’ve learned to care for plants, to know them
  by leaf and bloom.

The poet’s way of parsing out grief from nostalgia and determining what to do with those emotions is through writing. In a rural space slowly wasting away or a family missing its central figures, the poet must fill the empty space with words to make sense of it all.
            The power of Certain Shelter lies in its clarity: Kiefer’s clear-eyed speaker, fearless engagement with lyrical and confessional poetry, and sharp use of form. The threads Kiefer weaves of small-town life, rural decline, family illness, and parenting ultimately knit together a story that’s beautiful and well-defined, even as the emotions she explores are nebulous and personal. Certain Shelters is a must read for anyone who has known loss, but it’s so much more than a grief memoir or an elegy. It’s a glimpse into daily American life in a changing, wider world and a call to action for writers everywhere to write their own true story.

In case you missed it—here is Abbie Kiefer’s poem from The Shore:

Growing Season with Losses

In the Current with Siobhan Jean-Charles Issue 15

Dear Reader,

Issue 15 is filled with a little blasphemy, an eclipse that stops traffic and butchered names. Dear reader, it is also my favorite issue of The Shore. Stare at these poems too long and they may hurt your eyes with their illuminating language and insights.

Here is what the issue 15 contributors have been up to since:

Michael Emmanuel was nominated for Best of the Net, had work anthologized in 20.35 Africa and was featured in Plume Poetry’s 5 Under 35.

Jill Crammond published her first chapbook, Handbook for Unwell Mothers.

Ali Wood published a poem in Frontier Poetry.

Amy Wang had work recognized by the New York Times, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop and The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She has published poems in The Adroit Journal, Waxwing, Kissing Dynamite and others.

Lynne Ellis published poems in The Missouri Review, North American Review, Sugar House Review and more.

Doug Ramspeck was the third place winner of Narrative Magazine’s 2024 Winter Story Contest. He published poetry in The Sun Magazine, Rattle, Rhino Poetry and more.

Robert Carr published poems in Chestnut Review, The Offing, Third Wednesday Magazine and others.

Nano Taggart published a poem in Pilgrimage Magazine.

Mary Ford Neal had work featured in One Art: a journal of poetry, Couplet Poetry, After Poetry and others.

Jessica Baldanzi published a poem in Exposition Review.

Anne Cheilek is an MFA candidate at San Jose University and published poems in Rhino Poetry, Cider Press Review, Reed Magazine and more.

Jeanna Paden recently published a debut poetry collection with Finishing Line Press titled Premonition.

Elizabeth Joy Levinson published poems in Beaver Magazine, West Trestle Review, Gyroscope and more.

Juliana Gray published a poem in Poetry Northwest.

Madelyn Musick had poems in Bodega Magazine and Somerville Arts Council.

Ryler Dustin published a poetry collection with University of Pittsburg Press titled Trailer Park Psalms which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. He published poems in The Missouri Review, The Slowdown Podcast with Major Jackson, Green Linden Press and other journals.

Michelle Park published a poem in Agapanthus Collective.

McKenzie Teter published poems in Litmosphere and Volney Road Review.

Lawrence Di Stefano published poems in Tupelo Quarterly, Waxwing, Sugar House Review and more.

Alicia Byrne Keane published work in Acumen Journal, Irish Independent, The Galway Review and other journals.

Erin Little graduated with an MFA from Louisiana State University. She published a debut poetry chapbook, Personal Injury, which won the 2023 Chestnut Review Chapbook Prize.

Abigail Chang published poems in Redivider, diode poetry journal, The Los Angeles Review and other journals.

Ion Corcos published poems in The Hyacinth Review and The Woodward Review.

Alec Hershman published a poetry collection with Midwest Writing Center titled, For a Second, In the Dark.

Alison Hurwitz published work in Anti-Heroin Chic and was anthologized in Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus and Global Poemic.

Rachel Walker published poetry in Lunch Ticket, trampset and JMWW.

Jared Beloff published poetry in The Baltimore Review, Kissing Dynamite, Crab Creek Review and more.

Sarah Wallis published poetry in Dust Magazine, The Winged Moon, Full Mood Mag and others.

Brooke Harries published poems in Cleaver Magazine.

Adam Day published poems in The Los Angeles Review, No Contact Mag, The Broadkill Review and other journals.

Maria Hiers published work in Two Hawks Quarterly.

Bobby Parrott published poems in Across the Margins, Bruiser Magazine, oddball magazine and others.

Hannah Schoettmer had work in Brooklyn Poets and Rust & Moth.

Lora Robinson published a poem in Pine Hills Review.

Jesse Fleming published a poem in Backstory Journal.

Taylor Cornelius published a poem in The Penn Review.

Jennifer Metsker published work in Dialogist, The Inflectionist Review, Epiphany and other journals.

Gary Fox read at The Shore’s 2023 Earth Day Eco-Poetry reading.

Annalee Roustio published a poem in Rhino Poetry.

Kaelyn Wright’s photography can be found at kaelynwright.com

Congratulations on your achievements! We cannot wait to see what you do next.

Best,

Siobhan Jean-Charles

Best of the Net Nominees 2024

Dear Wonderful Readers,

We are overjoyed to announce our 2024 Best of the Net Nominees!

Madeline Allen “Click Bug”
Marisa Lainson “Old Scabs”
Sarah Mills “The world is ending & I’m crying in the Taco Bell parking lot”
Susan Muth “Daughter Bugle”
Lexi Pelle “The Nuns Came by Bus”
Tara Westmor “Lesser Muse”

These poems just keep coming back to us. We hope you will reread them now to celebrate and rediscover their magic. Thanks so much to all our contributors for wowing us every issue and BIG GRATS to our nominees!

With deep admiration,

The Shore Crew

Review: Ben Groner III

On Dust Storms May Exist by Ben Groner III

by Tyler Truman Julian

Dust Storms May Exist, Ben Groner III’s full-length debut, is a tour de force in the deeply American road trip narrative. The poems of Dust Storms May Exist traverse the American (and South American) landscape and the rise and fall of the human soul. Groner’s poems explore memory, health, and identity, always circling around the theme that life is full of small miracles. These seemingly ordinary moments are where memories are forged, life is lived despite challenges, and identity is shaped. Groner’s descriptive and narrative style beautifully captures the essence of daily life, presenting it as nothing short of miraculous.
            The collection opens with “The Window,” and Groner’s speaker longs for experience, gazing out on the world from a rented room:

            There is a sense my entire life is out
            there, verging and pulsing, waiting.
            Maybe existence in any meaningful
            sense requires both embodiment
            and action.

This desire for action begets motion. The poem continues,

            I set my pen aside, close my journal,
            turn out the light, the hills blazing and
            shimmering in silence. I wonder how
            long I have been holding my breath.

Groner effectively introduces the reader to the collection’s philosophy of life, while his descriptive and narrative style keeps the work accessible. There’s a remarkable depth here that continues throughout the collection in each seemingly mundane moment.
In “Feed & Seed,” the speaker establishes the road trip narrative that drives the collection forward and highlights the growing significance of each ordinary moment. A stop along the road results in a visit to a small-town church turned dance hall one Saturday night, and it becomes a reflection on home and meaning making. “Perhaps not one of us can go home / again, but who would want to?” the speaker asks, then continues,
           
            places don’t seem to have meaning
            until people bestow it. At times,

            we may need to pray; at others, we
            need to dance. What are our bodies 

            supposed to do with space, with
            themselves? We whirled the night

            away until the band closed out their
            set with Hank’s classic gospel hymn.

            Standing by the front pew, the whole
            room singing, I’ll fly away oh glory,

            we let our shoulders lean and touch,
            my eyes pressed shut, my lungs belting

            out the tune with all their might,
            feeling as if some unsayable place

            within me had already taken flight.

Here and elsewhere, these everyday moments take on a spiritual dimension, and Groner is unafraid to explore these heights while his speaker waxes philosophical. In “To Which We Are Going,” a reflection on John 6:16-21, the speaker retells the story of Peter and Jesus walking on water and the apostles’ boat miraculously arriving at the seashore seconds later. He then clarifies,

            And that’s where it ends. Talk about
            a cliffhanger. The walking on water bit
            gets all the attention while the teleportation
            is hardly mentioned, as if the existence
            of one miracle precludes the need for another.
            But my days are filled with phenomena
            I flounder to explain, pairs of realities
            I’ve never imagined nor deserved,
            one story always leaning into the next. 

            How the achiote carnitas tacos
            from La Mulita Express #2 food truck
            last week were generously garnished
            with both cilantro and lime; how in a month
            both a low-hanging, smoldering bead of sun
            and a nascent crescent will share the sky’s vast
            dome; how in two years the turbulent passions
            of Verdi’s Il trovatore will surge from both
            the unseen orchestra pit and the opera
            singers strutting upon the stage.

These little things are placed on the same plane as the two miracles in the Gospel of John. This focus on the mundane is subversive. Religious experience is unnecessary for one to be filled with wonder and awe. “But I’m not asking for revelation,” the speaker further explains.

            I don’t need to be taken anywhere,
            don’t wish the scroll of my days
            unfurled and dissected. I welcome
            the breeze rolling off the ridge
            into sky the color of spring.
            I turn to face the pine-lined trail
            to which I am going and set off
            on two resolved legs, forging ahead
            with the first, and then the other.

Groner’s approachable poetry, combined with his frequent philosophical flights, emphasizes the speaker’s personal growth and evolving sense of self. By the end of the collection, this identity exhibits a sense of fluidity, achieved through the freedom of actively engaging in life rather than merely observing from the sidelines. This sense of freedom and fluidity leads to deeper introspection:

            so what should I make of this moment?
            or this one? 

           what state are we in anyway? 

            what state are we in the midst
         of being?                                                                                             (“State of Being”)

Notably, Groner’s style has changed in “State of Being.” The poem still contains narrative and descriptive moments, but it culminates in these probing broken couplets that lack capitalization and standard grammar, emphasizing the speaker’s grappling with mystery and miracle. Expectedly, these rules return in the collection’s last poem, “Precarious Cairns,” to punctuate the importance of the lessons presented throughout the collection. In a type of coda, Groner’s speaker gives the reader a parting reminder that little miracles make up a life and one must go out and do something to experience them. In “Precarious Cairns,” he explains,

            First it was about the sights I was seeing, then
            who I was seeing them with. The land itself,
            then the sensation of soaring above it. 

            First it was about music, history, geography,
            regional cuisine and lore, then simply
            an adventure shared with a girl, a friend. 

            So much has been given and received:
            conversations, months, bodies—
            the precarious cairns of memory.           
…          
            A few tendrils of knowledge, of truth,
            have yet to be pressed into a page, a song.
            It has taken me so long to be inside my own life.

Verging on ars poetica, “Precarious Cairns” reinforces Groner’s philosophy that life is made up of little moments that one gives meaning to and looks back on.
           Dust Storms May Exist is a powerful debut. Throughout the collection, Ben Groner III embraces profundity while balancing it with accessible and engaging narrative poetry, making the exploration both thought-provoking and enjoyable. The pages are infused with a refreshing sense of hopefulness that stands out in contemporary poetry. The reader is invited into the journey of one man’s life and challenged to go out and live their own through “embodiment / and action.” Dust Storms May Exist reminds us to stop holding our breath.

In case you missed it—here are Ben Groner III’s poems from The Shore:

If My Physical Ailments Took a Road Trip

C Boarding Group

Review: Christopher Blackman

On Three-Day Weekend by Christopher Blackman

by Tyler Truman Julian

In a Whitmanesque style, Christopher Blackman’s Three-Day Weekend catalogues vivid East Coast cityscapes and populates them with nostalgia, loneliness, and the beauty of little joys. In this way, he explores hope and human connection with humor and attention to detail that makes his poetry particularly strong.

            From its opening poem, Three-Day Weekend asserts itself as a collection of highly contemporary and universally relatable poetry. The age-old question, who am I, moves between the lines as the speaker establishes himself, and the reader is expected to wrestle with it alongside the speaker. The speaker invites us into his urban Americana, reporting through Blackman’s signature descriptive poetics,

            We stood in a crowd beneath strings of lights,
            each of us moved by possibility, joined
            in vague conspiracy, giving the night
            the feeling that cranes could carry a camera above us,
            were it all a film, to denote our scale, to denote the rush
            of being in the right place at the right time—

(“Feast of St. Michael and All Angels”)

This euphoria is swiftly tempered by Blackman’s speaker and the urban setting—reminiscent of Whitman’s crowded Manhattan—when he announces later in the same poem: “All the best things happen in parking lots—” Yet, this is the first hint of the small joys that Blackman and his speaker are pointing the reader to. It also represents Blackman’s shrewd use of the volta in his poetry, moments in which his poems turn and grow in both meaning and strength. These moments coupled with thoughtful enjambment in his less structured poems show Blackman’s skill as a poet. Three-Day Weekend is never dry; it perpetually draws the reader toward some deeper revelation.

Blackman’s emphasis on little joys and their role in self-making builds across the collection. His speaker embraces the ebb and flow of urban life, craving connection and freedom to be himself. The imagery of parking lots, introduced earlier in the collection, is fully elaborated as the speaker reveals,

           But we still have green
           in its many forms—
           on lawns and boulevards,
           under the noontime sun.
           How I love lunch in the summer—
           how good it feels to be allowed,
           by law, to experience opulence:
           sitting back in your car
           in the Burger King parking lot,
           food laid on your dashboard

(“Lunch in Summer”)

The urban landscape isn’t stifling for Blackman’s speaker. Rather he uses its busyness, its sheer volume of noise and people, as a crutch—a reality of which he is painfully self-aware. “I’m sensitive to the unique loneliness / of the state fairground forty-nine weeks of the year,” he laments in “Two Tickets to Paradise,” adding,
            and the mall Santa in June,
            and anything, really, that is an eyesore
            out of its single context, returning me always
            to the question “Is it better to be versatile
            or to specialize?” Now I have everything
            I want and still there is more to want—

These moments of painful self-reflection that Blackman presents are not only relatable and poignant, but also often laced with humor. In “Stooges,” the speaker delves deeper into this juxtaposition more deeply:
            The saying goes “if you don’t laugh
            you’ll cry” and though I do a good bit
            of both I learned quickly
            a person wears a joke the way
            a man training dogs wears a bite suit—
            both as armor and as a tool to train animals
            the best ways to draw blood. My sister says
            I look like John Hinkley Jr.,
            Reagan’s almost-assassin, and so I laugh.

This humor poses a challenge to the reader by prompting them to reflect on humor’s role as escapism and connection-building, and often these profound moments take on a more structured form. Blackman showcases this in “Terminal,” employing tercets to give the reader a pattern to help absorb the poem’s significance:
            I take inventory of my sins. My life
            has been a sequence of desperate acts
            in the service of being wanted. I lie awake 

            and draft unimpeachable defenses
            for my personality, knowing that one day
            I will have to answer for myself.

Three-Day Weekend repeatedly invites readers to empathize with Blackman’s speaker throughout and, ultimately, grasp the poignant loneliness that echoes through its pages, reminiscent of Whitman’s call for a new “hand ever day!”

            Three-Day Weekend captures the subtle and authentic moments of a real life and should appeal to all readers, urban, rural, old, and young. Blackman’s attempt to draw readers into the narrative with descriptive and humorous situations turned profound effectively crafts deep connection throughout the collection. While the speaker is left yearning for his own personal connections and exists in much the same mental space at the end of the collection as at the beginning, the reader recognizes their own life—or at least a life wrestling with universal questions of acceptance and identity—in this collection. Three-Day Weekend is a collection for the nostalgic and the introspective, a testament to the human experience in all of its searching for—and making of—meaning. It is a collection for us all.

In case you missed it—here is Christopher Blackman’s poem from The Shore:

Meditation at Colonial Williamsburg

In the Current with Siobhan Jean-Charles Issue 14

Dear Reader,

Issue 14 is filled with surprise and danger. One of the first poems describes a counterfeit prophet. Another tells the story of a young boy stabbed in the heart by a fish, and later he is outpaced by the swiftness and intelligence of an octopus. Throughout the issue, a child stirs potions from rainwater and rose petals. Hunters are led into darkness, and magic is practiced safely when the adults are unaware.

Flourish Joshua was long listed for the 2022 Frontier OPEN Prize. He had recent poems in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, No Contact Mag, Isele Magazine and others.

Aron Wander was nominated for the Best of the Net.

James Kelly Quigley published poems in Dialogist and The Banyan Review.

KJ Li published a poem in Overheard Lit.

Meghan Sterling recently received three Pushcart nominations and published poems in Rappahannock Review, Ghost City Press, Subnivean Journal and others.

Alyx Chandler was nominated for Best of the Net. She recently had work in The Penn Review, Texas Review Press, Moon City Review and others.

Derek N Otsuji recently published poems in swamp pink, Cider Press Review, Rappahannock Review and others.

Robert Fanning recently published poems in diode poetry journal, 3Cents Magazine and Good River Review.

Siobhan Jean-Charles recently published poems in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Tusculum Review and Furrow Literary Magazine. She was once your social media manager and is now your blog editor.

Ariel Machell published poems in Barely South Review, The Inflectionist Review and Up The Staircase Quarterly.

V Batyko published work in New Orleans Review, Fugue Journal and Zone3.

Marcy Rae Henry was featured in the 2023 Best New Poets Anthology and published a chapbook titled We Are Primary Colors with Doublecross Press. She published poems in RHINO, Moon City Review and ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, along with several other pieces of visual art, fiction and nonfiction.

Hannah Rifell published a poem in Blue Marble Review.

Anne Taylor has designed and hosted movement based poetry workshops.

Lily Beaumont was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published poems in Sweet Tree Review, Halfway Down the Stairs and Willows Wept Review.

Jennifer Martelli was the 2022 winner of Riddled With Arrows Literary Journal’s Ars Poetica Prize. Recent work appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Atticus Review, Jet Fuel Review and others.

Lisa Trudeau published poems in The Inflectionist Review.

Kimberly Kralowec published poems in North American Review, American Literary Review, Parentheses Journal and others.

Laura Vitcova published a poem in The Orchards Poetry Journal.

John MacNeill Miller had work in Peatsmoke Journal and The Hopper.

Aaron Magloire published poems in diode poetry journal, Boston Review, Barnstorm Journal and others.

Abdulkareem Abdulkareem published poems in Waxwing, Southern Humanities Review, West Trade Review and elsewhere.

Molly Tenenbaum published a poem in Disquieting Muses Quarterly.

Joseph Housley published poems in Nashville Review and the Niagara Falls Project.

Kayla Rutledge has work published or forthcoming in Coffee People Zine, Citron Review and EDDA Journal.

Samuel Burt was the 2022 winner of the AWP’s Intro Journals Project. He published poems in Colorado Review, Portland Review, Beaver Magazine and elsewhere.

Chris Kingsley published poetry in Pine Trees.

James Owens published poetry in Still: The Journal.

Alexandre Ferrere published a poem in The Banyan Review.

Urvashi Bahuguna has poems published or forthcoming in Copper Nickel, The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast and elsewhere.

Amanda Roth was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She had poems in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Portland Review, Thimble Literary Magazine and others.

Jory Mickelson published a microchapbook, titled Plunder with Ghost City Press (2023). They had poems in Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, Josephine Quarterly Review and others.

Miceala Morano published poems in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Pidgeonholes Magazine, Healthline Zine and more.

Seth Leeper published poems in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Denver Quarterly and others. 

Michael Lauchlan published poems in Valparaiso Poetry Review, ONE ART: a journal of poetry and The Westchester Review.

Summer Smith published a poem in Third Wednesday.

Mary Lou Buschi published a book titled Blue Physics with Lily Poetry Review Press (2024). She published poems in Ploughshares, Sweet Lit, The Banyan Review and others.

Jack B Bedell had poems in Verse Daily, Broadkill Review, Beaver Magazine and others.

Adam Gianforcaro published a book titled Every Living Day with Thirty West Publishing House (2023). He published poems in The Offing, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Couplet Poetry and more.

Robert Beveridge published poems in JMWW, Antarctica Journal, WordCityLit and others.

You can find more of Roger McChargue’s photography on Instagram @r_mcrg.

Congratulations on all your accomplishments! We can’t wait to see what you do next.

Best,

Siobhan Jean-Charles

Review: Sara Moore Wagner

On Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner

by Tyler Truman Julian

Sara Moore Wagner’s prizewinning collection Lady Wing Shot is an epic relaying of historic sharpshooter Annie Oakley’s life and an engaging interrogation of the larger myth of the American West. It belongs on the same shelf as the work of Alexandra Teague and Gabrielle Calvocoressi, masterful contemporary poets who engage with historic and academic myths to parse out American identity in our present moment. Lady Wing Shot boldly confronts the mythos of the American West through telling Oakley’s story—from her humble origins in the Ohio woods to her rise to international stardom. Wagner delves into the complexities of what is gained and lost when traditional gender roles are challenged, bringing Oakley's narrative into a modern context. This expands the critique of the romanticized notion of the West, moving it from the historical backdrop of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to the reader's own contemporary American experience.

            Lady Wing Shot challenges the narrative expectations of poetry about the American West by centering a woman. This destabilization of the western narrative allows for a critical engagement with the myths of the West, giving Moore Wagner the poetic room to play with Oakley’s story across the collection. Two revealing poems clarify the feminist themes of the collection but are also persona poems, taking on Oakley’s voice. In “Annie Oakley on Marie Currie,” Oakley, as the speaker, dreams of a different world, saying,

            Imagine a school where every girl has a book
            and a gun, where the world gets undone like this—
            We don’t know how to make a home worthy
            of a man, because every single man is unworthy,
            our own husbands, quiet worshippers of the ends
            of our fingers.

Historically, Oakley did teach girls to shoot after her retirement from the Wild West Show. Poetically, this can be turned into a larger message of liberation. The challenge of the persona poem lies in the risk of appropriation, but through obvious research and poetic liberty Moore Wagner creates Oakley the character. Moore Wagner’s Oakley is mythic because of her historic and cultural status and already outside of myth because of the collection’s revisionist tilt, and writing in the persona mode works to draw attention to the challenges faced by women who resist traditional gender expectations in order to make a better life for themselves. Similarly, in “Childish, Envious, and Devious: Annie Oakley to Freud,” Oakley examines Sigmund Freud’s worldview and how it contributed to the amplification of societal flaws:

            How did you love your mother? How often
            did you see her undress in the late evening, not just take off
            her clothes, but leave off her body, her gender a tight
            ribbon on the finger—did she unwrap that? Because I am poor,
            because my father left nothing but a gun, which is not indicative
            of any longing in me—is not a phallic-shaped yearning for a father,
            is a gun—how much did you love your mother? That perfect glass
            of water pouring her own dreams into you, which you would
            interpret for her.

            These two poems cement the narrative in the worldview of the mid- to late-1800s, pointing to the conflict inherit in Annie Oakley’s lifestyle. Both poems highlight broader themes of societal misogyny and the enduring limitations faced by women, transcending historical context to resonate with a modern audience who inevitably interprets them through their own understanding of these issues.

Annie Oakley’s life as related by Moore Wagner is a performance, and Oakley’s skill with a firearm is commercialized. This gives her freedom, but this freedom has its limits within a society where women are limited by gender expectations. “Here’s what I do,” Oakley explains in “Truest in Heart and Aim,”

I put my eye to the rifle sight
or I look in the mirror, over my shoulder,
the glint of the sun, how it separates,
I use my eyes, both eyes, I use both eyes:
one on the target and one aimed high, higher.
Fire and it always hits. I don’t know why,
or I do know. I’ve kept open both eyes
and closed those other lower senses, I’m clothed
from the tips of my toes to the top of my head.
Every inch of me covered in the Texas heat
so that only I touch me, not even a breeze.
Simple and modest, undistracting: modest
as a girl can be with both eyes open, firing
at a glass ball, blown out blue as God.
I am a God girl, they say and I say, because
I’m clothed simply, dull as a horse, majestic
in that natural draping which exposes nothing
but these two round jewels I keep open wide.

Spectators eagerly pay to see the “Little Sure Shot” defy expectations by outshooting any man, yet they simultaneously expect her to conform to gender norms. “Truest in Heart and Aim” concludes with the reflection that women are expected to maintain a façade of happiness while being reduced to mere objects, where the speaker notes, “Ritual / oneness: smile wide and be nothing / but these eyes.” This suggests that, to navigate a male-dominated industry and society, women must conform to narrow expectations, minimizing themselves to non-threatening and utilitarian roles. This performative nature of femininity is reinforced in poems like “What Annie Oakley’s Mama Taught Her.” Here, blending Annie Oakley’s experience with that of a modern American woman, the mother-speaker imparts such advice as:

            You will grow up to be beautiful
            or you won’t. Cold can of pop
            pressed against you daddy’s
            forehead. You’ll be
            an Adirondack chair, on sale
            in the front of the store—and more:
            useful and luxurious, you’ll strip
            that old wallpaper, repaint
            every room the blue
            of your eyes.
            You’ll clink into the coin jar
            with the rest of us, golden
            and stacked acorns, buried
under a woodshed, scrap
of paper to ignite the bonfire
we sit around.

Even if you are as gifted and special as Annie Oakley, the mother-speaker seems to say, your lot has already been cast because of gender, but this poem also suggests there is hope for change and even freedom within these limitations. The poem continues,
  
          lovely or not, depending
            on how you’re looking.
            It’s open to broad definition
            like any abstract term.
            Be you abstract lines we’ll call
            swan, portrait of a swan
            or an American bald eagle.
            I am saying whatever you are,
            rise.

            By presenting Annie Oakley’s life story as an integral part of the larger story of the American West, Moore Wagner’s collection reaches epic heights that transcend time and space. She successfully positions this epic in line with modern feminist questions and contemporary American sensibilities through the frequent confessional moment throughout the collection. In “Domesticated,” the contemporary speaker connects her modern maternity and home life to the Western myth:

            We hike through the disappearance of the first homesteads,
            sanded and waxed boards, little chimneys hand-laid
            from foundations, now archways in the forest we walk
            with our children. Here was a farm someone built.
            Here, three sticks in the shape of a shelter.
            I lose our only set of keys near the creek.
            We separate to retrace our steps.
            I take our daughter, who is looking for whole
acorns. She finds only split husks. Something else
has been here, has collected things to survive.
What will we do in the hills with no service
on either of our phones, no people for miles.
There is a creek. There are remnants
carved out from the landscape, crafted
and flattened. A long time ago a girl, dew soaked
in the frosted morning, chased a white-tailed deer.
Shot it. What would I be without
our little house to tend and wipe, without
the glass Pyrex mixing cups I measure into.
I can create buttermilk with just a little vinegar,
know which chemicals take stains off the center
island. I know just where the spoons go. God
help me. I walk the length of the water, tell
our daughter this is what we’ll do: rest
in those old ruins. We’re lucky someone else
came before us. We can sleep in a shelter, pull
the forest around us. I don’t know how
to make a fire. You don’t know how to make
a fire. Listen: there’s water and somehow, life
comes from that and look, right by the rocks: our
keys. These things we inherit as we do all things.
We will get to sleep in our own bed, I on the
right side, far away from the door, where I feel
safe, shielded, separated from that world
and that other girl, braids undone, gun
in hand, unlatching and firing and holding
the rifle up above her head. I mean to say
I have become wed to something else in this house.
I mean to say I don’t know what I am.

Moore Wagner doesn’t shy away from the complicated history of American expansion. She recognizes the privilege it creates for certain segments of American society, while also expanding the idea that the myths it created limited all segments of society. “Domesticated” is one of many poems throughout the collection that ties this limiting power of myth and expectation to a contemporary speaker. While a reader may initially engage with Lady Wing Shot out of historical interest and fascination with Annie Oakley’s story, these moments elevate the narrative to wider application.

            Lady Wing Shot is a complex and engaging retelling of the American myth. The focus on Annie Oakley's journey as one of America's earliest superstars, juxtaposed with the mundane realities of modern American women, challenges the myths we often uphold unquestioningly. Far from didactic, the poetry of Lady Wing Shot tells relatable stories of sacrifice and power. This collection will appeal both to readers who crave poetry the rises to academic levels and those who seek a more emotional experience. Sara Moore Wagner has crafted a truly powerful work that contributes to the ongoing narrative of the American experience.

In case you missed it—here is Sara Moore Wagner’s poem from The Shore:

On Letting Go

Review: Susan Rich

On Blue Atlas by Susan Rich

by Tyler Truman Julian

Susan Rich’s newest collection, Blue Atlas, is a complicated work that artfully blends the personal and the political, avoiding didacticism to create a timely narrative that explores the themes of choice and liberation. Where many poets wax romantic or end up preaching, Rich has instead crafted a speaker who leaves room for reader interpretation and who also asserts herself. Rich adeptly transitions between experimental and structured forms, highlighting the speaker’s evolving and solidifying self-conception. When Rich’s speaker declares, “I’ve always desired a different life than the one I am living,” the reader is compelled to believe her. Yet, this same woman can also assert she is “the proud ‘I’ that does not apologize, / the ‘I’ that no one holds by the throat” (“From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”; “Single, Taken, Not Interested”). Accepting these two contrasting ideas simultaneously is challenging, but Rich makes it feasible. This is the power of Blue Atlas and the genius of the work.

            Blue Atlas invites dialogue and asks readers to confront the reality of choice or lack of choice from the initial poems on. Rich’s speaker fearlessly addresses taboo topics, notably naming abortion, and uses universal reverences, particularly through nature imagery, to connect with personal experiences. This approach guides the speaker through trauma toward self-realization, and the reader journeys alongside her. We see this operate effectively on the micro-level throughout the collection, but a prime example comes early in the collection through “Post-Abortion Questionnaire Powered by Survey Monkey,” one of the more experimental poems of the collection. The speaker responds to questions about her experience with abortion, using the language of nature, especially in cultivation (flowers, gardening, etc.), and her personal experience to engage with a subject often shied away from:

1.     Do you feel reluctant to talk about the subject of abortion?

In the center of the ceiling a marigold weeps

or perhaps it’s an old chandelier.

Look. Inside there is an otherworldly glow,

shards illuminated in violet-pink

and layers of peeling gold leaf.

Such minds at night unfold.

2.     Do you feel guilt or sorrow when discussing your own abortion?

The cabbage is a blue rose,

an alchemical strip show. They scream

when dragged from the earth,

only to find themselves plunged into boiling water.

The narrative unscrolls from cells

of what-ifs and hourglass hopes.

The poem is disorienting at times, specific and familiar at others. While the speaker appears unafraid to discuss abortion and, in fact, seems to have reached a point in her development of self to need to discuss it (“Does anyone escape her own story,” she asks later in “Post-Abortion Questionnaire”), the narrative is troubled by what could have been. This ambiguity causes the reader pause. This human appeal, marred by confusion, may be confusing for the reader. Yet, by crafting the narrative this way, Rich invites the reader into the story. By breaking down the stigma sometimes attached to abortion, she invites speculation and, hopefully, empathy on the part of the reader.  

It is only later in the collection that the reader fully grasps the context: the abortion mentioned in the poems was coerced by family. Rich presents a complicated notion of freedom—one that suggests freedom and choice become much more complicated if one is not in a position to fully exercise their free will or lacks support. In this way, Rich’s speaker wrestles with the past constantly and is left to wonder what choice means. In “The Abortion Question,” she explains,

            The abortion question is: did you want it?
          the abortion question is did you have a choice?

            The abortion happened in Manhattan—

            the Big Apple shaken and stirred along Madison Avenue—
          just two days after being kicked out of his 5th floor Paris walk-up.

            The abortion question watches you through sideview mirrors—

            the self-satisfied gaze like that of an undertaker,
            as if it holds the answer 

            to the future of your body.
           …
            Abortion is no joke to this body which ate
            enough for two: chips and kosher pickle sandwiches 

           well into the second trimester. 

           The abortion question places its miniature sticks
            into the cervix,

           small bundles of twigs made from seaweed. 

            See you tomorrow! The abortion question waves.
            And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
~
This is not an anti-abortion poem.
           No one will be killed with a 22-caliber rifle

            as in the two women’s health clinics in my hometown.

            No one pushing fetus prom outside the central post office.
           But the abortion question really loves to attract attention.

            It lives in a clock tower, chimes strongest at three months.
           …
           The question hangs about me like a pest
            tugging at my knees. Begs. 

            It will not go away.

            Offers another drink—
            a Manhattan, shaken and stirred—

The details about the abortion, along with the developing understanding of freedom that comes out in this poem is part of a larger, slower reveal of key details spread throughout the collection that clarifies the larger narrative of the collection and slowly ends the reader’s speculation, but never their empathy. These details help craft a clearer picture of the speaker for the reader.

As in “Post-Abortion Questionnaire Powered by Survey Monkey,” Rich turns to an experimental form in “Outline for Freshman Composition” to emphasize the speaker’s lack of self-understanding and control over her story. This is a pattern that continues throughout the collection, and in “Outline for Freshman Composition,” the speaker uses the medium of a first-year college-level English paper to explore her experience with abortion further, writing:

            Question at issue:                    Did you agree to an abortion to appease a sister? 

            Question at issue:                    What did you fear? 

            Question at issue:                    Are a bomb and an abortion detonated the same?

            Possible thesis statement:      Maybe not a sensible idea to allow someone else to
determine the future.

While the form initially seems to help organize the speaker’s thoughts and helps bring about a possible “thesis” statement about choice and the future, the form quickly becomes overwhelmed by the magnitude of the topic and emotion, ending in quasi-catharsis: a refuting argument and conclusions that deepen the reader’s understanding of the speaker and help the speaker develop a concept of self. She concludes:

            Refuting Argument:               Wanted out. Wanted    none of it. None
                                                           of this  ever     happened.
           …
           [                       ]                       If I didn’t make the choice but it was the right choice.
                                                            If I made the choice but it was the wrong choice.
                                                            If I could go back and find my own way. 

           Unintended Consequences: The rest of my life.
 
                                                          I will never visit Paris
                                                           or acquiesce again. 

                                                           For four decades, no words came between us.

            Possible Conclusion:            Yes. No. Yes. No.
                                                           The abortion wars come, but do not go.

            Possible Conclusion:            Mybodymmybodybodymyboymybodymy
                                                           bodymybomb—

Rich employs more traditional structures between these experimental occasions to highlight those post-cathartic breakthroughs. The speaker’s internal conflict translates to the structure used to present it throughout the collection, another shrewd move by Rich to help engage the reader in an emotionally and politically fraught conversation. As the speaker matures and gains insight into her past and herself, Rich often employs couplets and conventional poetic forms to mirror form and content. In “Burn Barrel,” the speaker clarifies why she is telling her story, and the poem has a tone and humor that many of the poems that appear earlier in the collection do not have. She explains,

            You think I write about you to remember…
            I think of you this way— 

            Rotting at the end of the season.
            The trouble that’s gone and the burn 

            barrel of delight that went with it.
            I write of you to stake a claim

            not to make sense of a man who
            worshipped only his own words— 

            who never tried to read the bright leavings
            nuanced and telling in mine.

These more structured, traditional poems become more prevalent as the collection progresses, aiding the reader in immersing themselves naturally in the speaker’s story and experiencing her nuanced journey toward self-realization.

            Blue Atlas is both compelling and challenging, nuanced and boundary-breaking. Susan Rich fearlessly plunges her readers into discussions that many writers avoid, guiding them through with a speaker as engaging as the various poetic forms she uses. Rich is a bold poet, whose work resonates in our present moment. Readers across the political spectrum should be unafraid to read and engage with Blue Atlas, but regardless of where you sit politically, be prepared to be challenged as abstract concepts become concrete and political issues become deeply personal.

In case you missed it—here is Rich’s poem from The Shore:

The K Word

In the Current with Siobhan Jean-Charles Issue Thirteen

Dear Reader, 

The contributors of Issue 13 were nominated for Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the Net, had their work featured in anthologies and won contests. When searching the recent activities of our past contributors, it’s always thrilling to see writers and artists accelerate their literary careers by publishing a book or continuing to have their work featured in magazines. Sometimes, we discover that a talented poet who had a poem or two taken by The Shore a few years ago hasn't seemed to publish since. We lose great poets all the time—often, when their work is not available for an audience. A few times, an online search for a writer has turned up an obituary. Featured in Issue 13, Kevin McIlvoy passed away September 30, 2022. He published six novels during his prolific career that included years as the editor-in-chief of the acclaimed literary magazine Puerto del Sol. We are saddened by his loss, may he rest in peace. He has had multiple works published posthumously, including a book of fiction called Is it So? Additionally, with the permission of his wife Christine Hale, he had a short story published in West Branch. We are reminded of the importance of community, of loved ones who believe in us and our writing and who will push on our legacies. 

Lisa Compo has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She recently had poems in Colorado Review, Muzzle Magazine, Permafrost and elsewhere. She recently became the social media manager here at The Shore!

Stephen Lackaye had poems published by Radar Poetry and One Art.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman published a book of poems, Exploding Head with Persea Books in 2024. She had poems taken by Bennington Review, Radar Poetry and The Indianapolis Review among others.

Jen Gayda Gupta had poems taken by Rattle Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, One Art and elsewhere. She was recently an intern for Sundress Publications.

Jess Smith won Hayden Ferry Review’s inaugural poetry contest. She recently had poems in Sixth Finch, Verse Daily, Sweet Literary Magazine and elsewhere.

Jane Zwart published poems in Muzzle Magazine, Superstition Review, The Indianapolis Review and elsewhere.

Simon Montgomery is an MFA candidate at Georgia State University.

Lee Potts was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He had poems in UCity Review, verum literary press, Riggwelter and elsewhere.

Calgary Martin published a poem in Booth.

Daniel Ruiz published poems in Tupelo Quarterly and New Letters.  

Shannon Ryan graduated with her Bachelor’s degree from Salisbury University.

Wendy BooydeGraaff was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was also nominated for the Best Microfiction Anthology. Her work appeared in Blue Earth Review, Barely South Review, The Broadkill Review and elsewhere.

Lori Lamothe published a fourth poetry collection with Kelsay Books, titled Tulip Fever. She published work in The Chamber Magazine, Mason Jar Press and SugarSugarSalt Magazine.

Adam J Gellings published a debut poetry collection, Little Palace, with Stephen F. Austin State University Press. He also had poems in The Academy of American Poets and Salamander.

Mikko Harvey published a poem in Four Way Review.

Sy Brand published a micro-chapbook, on having needs, with Trickhouse Press. They published poems in Ghost City Review, Parentheses Journal, WriteNowLit and others.

Sam Rye had a poem in Propel Magazine.

DS Maolalai had poems taken by Arboreal Magazine, North of Oxford and Porridge Magazine.

Carolyn Oliver was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She published poems in Copper Nickel, Phoebe, Superstition Review and many others.

Victoria Mbabazi published work in Queer Little Nightmares Anthology, No Contact Mag, Violet Indigo Blue Etc and more.

Samuel Prince published work in Red Door Magazine, Acumen, Apricot Press and others. 

Christien Gholson had poems published in Permafrost, The Tiger Moth Review, Wilderness House Review and others.

Michael Battisto had poems published in Poet Lore, Eunoia Review, NOON and elsewhere.

Sara Fitzpatrick published a poem in Feral: a Journal of Poetry and Art.

Ja’net Danielo has poems published or forthcoming in the Maine Review, Cider Press Review, SWIMM and others. 

Stephanie Kaylor has a debut poetry collection titled Ask A Sex Worker! forthcoming from CLASH books. They published poems in Michigan Quarterly Review, Four Way Review, Split Lip Magazine and others. 

Afton Montgomery has poetry published or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Passages North and Prairie Schooner. 

Jenny Della Santa published a poem in Bracken Magazine. 

José Angel Araguz released a poetry collection, Ruin and Want, with Sundress Publications.

Sihle Ntuli published poems in Frontier Poetry, Moria and Adda Stories.

Jeanine Walker published a debut poetry collection, The Two of Them Might Outlast Me, from Groundhog Poetry Press. She has poems in Bennington Review and The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.

Julia Hands’ chapbook was a semi-finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition.

Matthew Herskovitz published a poem in Strange Horizons.

Katherine Huang is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She won Phoebe's 2022 Greg Gummer Poetry Prize.

Malorie Varnell graduated from Georgia State University.

Meredith Arena was a poetry resident at Bethany Arts Community in Ossoning, NY.

Laurie Sewall published a poem in The National Poetry Review.

Ariel Clark-Semyck published a poem in trampset.

Kevin McIlvoy passed away in September 2022. His posthumous essay was published in West Branch, and recent poems appear in Cincinnati Review, The Common Terrain and others. His posthumous book, Is It So? was released in 2023 with WTAW Press.

Rachel Marie Patterson published work in Sixth Finch, The National Poetry Review and Cumberland River Review. She released her debut collection, Tall Grass with Violence with FutureCycle Press.

Nadine Rodriguez was nominated for the Best of the Net for their hybrid visual-text series, Sainthood.

Congratulations on your achievements! We cannot wait to see what you do next.

Warmly,

Siobhan Jean-Charles

Review: Rhienna Renée Guedry

On Root Rot by Rhienna Renée Guedry

by Tyler Truman Julian

Rhienna Renée Guedry’s debut chapbook, Root Rot, holds no punches. Embracing the condensed nature of the chapbook medium, Guedry skillfully explores themes of family and heartbreak, embraces a strong sense of place, and effectively navigates various poetic forms. Guedry traverses great distance in these poems—moving physically from Louisiana to Oregon and artistically from narrative to experimental forms to highlight different emotional moments in the chapbook’s throughline: the speaker’s pursuit of a lost “you.” As a result, Root Rot is a master class in the chapbook.

            The opening prose poem, “Mt. Tabor,” sets the tone of the chapbook, referencing the volcanic peak in Oregon, and evokes its Old Testament namesake as Guedry’s speaker spends the poem seeking an unnamed “you.” “You were a combustible thing,” the speaker declares as she ascends the mountain, connecting both the mountain and the unnamed, lost subject in this moment. “I came in pursuit of fire. Induction to extinction—” This use of nature to describe the state of human affairs continues throughout the chapbook and helps the reader understand the personal emotions and memories explored in each poem. The effective movement between descriptions of nature and reflection on the speaker’s relationship to the invoked subject in “Mt. Tabor” allows the reader to later fill this void with various characters who appear in the chapbook: an absent mother, an aging friend, another friend who has already passed on, and even the speaker’s beloved. Immediately following the speaker’s claim that she came to the volcano to experience its power, she explains, “that described you, too…You lived for the heat, the ejecta; I am trying to, in your name.” For such a slender volume, the stakes are high from the project’s opening poem on.

            The narrative takes the reader to the Louisiana swamp, employing experimental structures to depict the speaker’s childhood and the changing landscape:

            like swamps, storms will come and go
            everything this humid defies static categories: weather,
                        permaculture,
                          land as uncertain as floodwaters inside a house where
            water ain’t supposed to be, a wild solstice thing
            you know better than to sink your ankles in
            when you’ve had too many whiskeys
            the swamp is a shapeshifter from sci-fi:
            they are the shoreline not the tide,
            they are putting roots down,
            they are licking oyster beds
            because it’s that season
                                    kneel down on what is land
            today but tomorrow may be water (“The Swamp Is a Third-Gender Thing”)

The nature of the swamp, reflected in the changing structure of the poem itself, mirrors what becomes the upbringing of our speaker where she

            moved on, and then on again
            five times in five years to another swamp,
            another state—though never home to me,
            just another wet place—another damp suburb
            where I learned to spell rhododendron
            and chrysanthemum not because I knew
            their blooms, but because we moved
            onto streets named after them, streets
            where flowers used to grow (“The Name of Streets”)

            Outrunning floods and hurricanes put strain on the speaker’s family, and mildew begins to grow between their relationships, just as it does in their home. “You can’t forget the smell,” the speaker reports in “Mildew,” another experimental poem, highlighting this initial fragmenting in the family. She continues,

            it’s a texture, the raised level on a Styrofoam cup
                        condensation       white pepper       it changes
                        with your fingerprints,
            it reminds us that there is water under us all

The use of the narrative mode to relay information and the experimental mode to emphasize moments of increased emotion or complicated ideas that the reader needs to pay attention to, along with the continued use of nature to highlight the speaker’s relationship to those around her, builds narrative tension from poem to poem. This ultimately creates a more cohesive and fuller picture of the speaker and Guedry’s themes.

            Ultimately, the rotting landscape and the outward gaze of the poems turn inward. Using the language of nature in “Entanglement,” Guedry’s speaker describes “the rot of me”:

            My doctor called them cobwebs
            She watched
            as a surgeon wrestled loose
            the parts of me he was tasked
            to remove from the adhesions
            none of us expected to be there;
            detritus, seaweed tangles, my pelvis
            a shipwreck whose rusted bulkheads
            gave way to spoils and deep sea gardens

Now, the reader understands even more clearly how all these pieces fit together. Humanity is a part of nature, not an entity capable of controlling it. The family is a microcosm of nature, and children can’t control what happens in the family unit. The human body is an even smaller microcosm of nature, and it is equally as unpredictable. In “Disaster Planning,” the speaker tells the reader she moved, finally, to Oregon “because I was tired of the floods and hurricanes and I didn’t pick California because they have their own problems.” However, what follows this throwaway explanation is the more significant, more poignant engagement of Guedry’s speaker with the chapbook’s themes. Exploring fear and safety, she says, “Some demons you can plan for better than others, so we stick to natural-disaster planning.” Human relationships and human health are less predictable, less manageable than natural disasters.

            Nevertheless, Guedry’s speaker comes full circle, returning to the ideas that appeared in the chapbook’s first poem. She chooses to draw power from destruction. In “Compartments,” she explores this dynamic, saying,

            You know what they say
            about other people’s trash
            When they rummaged me
            and found delights 

           A grapefruit appendix
            little stones like boba
            copper 

            I get the appeal; I’m part scavenger
            searching for gems with skillful fingers
            —rot never troubled me

This light sarcasm grows into a guarded freedom that she explains in “Departures,” the chapbook’s last poem, as

            I think I’d like to do some leaving, too
            Except I am locksmith and proprietrix, my metal
            To stay put. Bolted seams of worn lock
            And warped key, this mess of loving
            Shadows in lieu of farewells 

            —the lesson I am teaching
            myself before the next time:
            when to lock up, when to hand
            over the tangle, and when
            to swallow the keys

The chapbook returns to the beginning here. The speaker is attempting to establish her own boundaries and decide who to live for, even amid the unpredictability of life.

            Across 35 short pages, Guedry shows her strength as a poet and storyteller by crafting a chapbook that showcases the beauty and power of the medium. Root Rot’s condensed yet expansive nature captures the human condition, juxtaposing it with the natural world, making it a compelling read for both newcomers to the medium and seasoned enthusiasts alike.

In case you missed it—here is Guedry’s poem from The Shore:

This Corrosion Beats On

Review: Melissa Crowe

On Lo by Melissa Crowe

by Tyler Truman Julian

As we enter the new year with its accompanying books, now is a good time to reflect on the past year, revisit our "To Be Read" lists, consider why certain books made the list, and prioritize them before moving on to the next trend. It can feel tempting to rush onto the newest books, especially at this point in history when we have more access to the written word than ever before. Maybe in the new year, we should strive to read those books that truly excite us, rather than what’s hot off the press.

For me, this meant returning to Melissa Crowe’s Iowa Poetry Prize winning collection Lo, which was released in May 2023. When The Shore published Crowe’s poem, “America You’re Breaking” in Issue 7, I knew I needed to read the collection it lived in. The collection itself is expansive, even larger than “America You’re Breaking,” with its exploration of the political division of the United States. Lo spans a lifetime, starting in childhood, exploring themes of ruralness, violence, community, and differentiation, before pulling up in the speaker’s mid-life, marking that period of one’s life with both hope and realistic ennui. 

The poetry of rural spaces is typically marked by an attention to nature, individualism, family, labor, politics, decay, and accessibility. These markers are most noticeable early in the collection as Crowe’s speaker explores her childhood and offers important background for the rest of the collection. In the collection’s opening poem, “The Self Says, I Am,” the speaker wants the reader to know several things about her before proceeding: 

Say I’m clover and Queen Anne’s 
lace, devil’s paintbrush and lupine. 
I’m a yard of junked cars, each 
with its corona of broken glass 

and never-mowed grass. Dirt trail 
to cattail. My heart this sudden 
pond, this skipped stone. Say 
I’m a girl in a sundress, perpetual 

beginner in a cloud of bees 
and blackflies and my heart a foraged 
apple, still green. 

As Crowe’s speaker looks back on childhood, she wants the reader to know there is hope and resilience there, a hallmark of rural life. This “girl in a sundress,” the “perpetual beginner” adapts and overcomes over and over throughout life and contains multitudes. 

When the collection progresses and turns thematically to violence, the speaker also reflects on early love interests and queerness, juxtaposing the beautiful and painful to paint a similar picture of resilience. Several subsequent poems explore unrequited love and allusions to sexual violence and then Crowe’s speaker breaks down many of the life lessons she’s received by the time of her late-teens: 

...I was sixteen when I learned my grandfather 
could no longer tell me from my mother or that year from 1975-- 
Sandy he kept saying that bitch sat on the shed roof waving 
a whiskey bottle and laughing while they buried my mother & 
by bitch he meant my Gram from whom I’d learned men are hooks 
I shouldn’t let into me & it’s okay to sleep alone without  
drawers on under my nightdress. At seventeen I learned no house 
is emptier than one you've begged to be left in while your father 
takes your mother south again to have the cancer out hopefully 
but definitely her uterus & whatever else they find eaten by the 
stuff that made her bleed so much on the bed the mattress couldn't  
be saved. Even with the dog in the yard I didn’t feel as brave as 
I thought I would & though I could see my grandfather’s house 
from the porch of my own I didn’t go there where I'd be called 
by the wrong name. Instead I called you & you came as you always  
did & as you still do--with a carton of Five Alive & a fistful 
of daisies & you said Melissa, Melissa & I let you in. I let in 
whatever that might bring & you touched me in ways that made me  
forget—want to forget—every single other thing I'd ever learned.                 (“Lessons”) 

In “Lessons” we see the impulse for differentiation. The speaker begins to separate from the family and become her own person to break the pattern of trauma. The speaker finds love, makes her own family, and confronts past trauma in her personal development outside of the family unit and the dysfunctional rural space. When the man who sexual assaulted her as a child is caught, for reasons unknown to the reader, she feels both relief and pain:  

Thank god I thought, burning, 
Somebody will ask me. Nobody asked me. 

Thank god I thought, burning, knowing  
for the first time maybe what he’d done to 

me, that what he’d done to me was 
wrong enough to go to jail for, if you told. 

Nobody asked me. I understood they knew 
Already. I understood they didn’t want to know 

...  

but to stay free don't we have to call a hole 
a hole, a goddamn shed a shed?                                       (“When She Speaks of the Fire”) 

There’s a sharp maturity in this long poem that directs the rest of the collection and shifts the reader into the adulthood poems of the collection. The speaker must also recognize the limitations of family life and establish boundaries to continue to grow.

In “The Parting,” the speaker turns her gaze outward onto a husband, showing how her life has changed in adulthood. She has found, maintained, and cultivated love, and as a result, she is able to focus on the pain of others and support them, rather than her own, establishing further this sense of growth. The speaker relates, 

Husband, I didn’t know the beautiful 
broad-winged shape riding the air above us 
as we lay in the hammock under the loblolly  

pines was a buzzard until you told me. 
Namer of whatever dark thing hovers, 
you too deserve the truth, so when the police 

find your father in a slick of blood 
and offer no other explanation but natural causes, 
I say he drank himself to death  

This poem highlights the push-pull relationship of a couple who are comfortable with each other and who rely on each other to help make sense of the world. This relationship seems a far cry from the girl who was surrounded by family but was alone in the pain, violence, and self-discovery of her childhood. 

Lo concludes by underscoring continual personal growth and highlighting the speaker's enduring love for family amidst a poignant past in “General Absolution.” The poem employs the shared communal symbol of 9/11 to delve into themes of forgiveness. With shrewd realism and accessible engagement with the subject, Crowe’s speaker explains that general absolution is a type of blanket forgiveness for sins in an emergency, then asks, 

Will you know what I mean if I say 
we should have designated all the water  
holy? I’m trying to forgive you. And if you’re 
wondering who you are, you’re everyone. 

The forgiveness in “General Absolution” is imperfect. Yet, it is notable in its attempt and extension to everyone: the speaker’s mother, the man who assaulted her, the hijackers on 9/11, her husband, and even us, the readers, who have voyeuristically peered into this world unable to do anything about what we have seen. This human, imperfect resilience is the power of Lo by Melissa Crowe. The collection spans a lifetime, childhood to mid-life, leaving room for future growth and narrative discovery, but each moment in time is deftly and poignantly handled. There’s anger, fear, and sadness in these pages, but there’s also humor and beauty. In Lo, Crowe has created a deeply human work of art. 

In case you missed it—here are Crowe’s poem from The Shore:

America you’re breaking
I cry each time we say goodbye because I know I’m always sending you to war

In the Current with Siobhan Jean-Charles Issue Twelve

Dear Reader,

Issue 12 of The Shore was released in Winter 2021 and it’s filled with parts. A gun that shapes a pair of hands, a cold mouth, teeth in a drawer, spindly knees, feet on a staircase. These poems create a whole that’s longing for warmth in winter, they will pull you in and refuse to let go.

Shannon K Winston has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Sweet Lit, Cider Press Review, Parentheses Journal and elsewhere.

Marlo Starr published poems in BOAAT, Ghost City Press and Napkin Poetry Review. 

Lynne Ellis won the ​​2021 Perkoff Prize. They recently had work in Barzakh, Moving Parts Press and Pontoon Poetry.

Kyle Vaughn recently published his book Calamity Gospel, and had work recently published in The Journal, The Museum of Americana and Juke Joint.

Eunice Lee received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her work recently appeared in Honey Literary.

Lauren K Carlson had poems appear in Terrain.org and The Inflectionist Review.

Fatima Jafar published a chapbook with Bottlecap Press titled, Being There. Her recent work appeared in The Aleph Review, Eunoia Review and Wasafiri Magazine.

Taiwo Hassan was nominated for Best of the Net, and published a chapbook with River Glass Books titled, Birds Don’t Fly for Pleasure. His poetry appeared in ANMLY, The Lumiere Review, Olney Magazine and elsewhere.

Stefanie Kirby was nominated for Best of the Net and published poems in The Offing, Portland Review, Passages North and elsewhere.

Charles Hensler published work in West Trade Review, Rust & Moth, ONE ART and elsewhere.

Simon Perchik was widely published in journals such as The New Yorker, The Poetry Foundation, North American Review and many more. He passed away in 2022, may he rest in peace.

Stephen Ruffus was a semifinalist for the 2022 Morgenthau Prize. He published poems in Third Wednesday, JMWW and Stone Poetry Quarterly. 

Kathryn Knight Sonntag had work appear in Colorado Review, Four Way Review, Wayfare Magazine and elsewhere.

Amy Williams published poems in Rust & Moth and ONE ART.

Meghan Kemp-Gee had work appear in ANMLY, Frontier, JMWW and elsewhere.

Matthew Murrey published poems in Bear Review, Redheaded Stepchild Magazine and The Dodge.

David Dodd Lee published poems in Verse Daily, The National Poetry Review, Rattle and more.

Lorrie Ness had work appear in Rappahannock Review, The Inflectionist Review, Eunoia Review and elsewhere.

Julia Schorr graduated with her Bachelor’s from Salisbury University and published work in The Allegheny Review.

Jake Bailey published poems in Allium, Guesthouse Lit and The Carolina Quarterly.

Katie Kemple published poems in Rattle, Rust & Moth, Valparaiso Review and more.

CC Russell published work in No Contact Mag.

Adam Deutsch published work in East Jasmine Review, Jarfly Magazine and Broken Lens Journal.

Nick Visconti has work in Palette Poetry, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly and elsewhere. 

Andrea Krause has poetry in Third Wednesday, Eunoia Review, The Inflectionist Review and elsewhere.

Sam Moe earned her PhD from Illinois State University. She won Invisible City’s Blurred Genre Contest in 2022, and published her second chapbook, Grief Birds. She also published work in Beaver Magazine, The Museum of Americana and The Hyacinth Review.

Patrick Wright published poems in Sweet Lit, Rough Diamond Poetry, Leon Literary Review and elsewhere.

Brittney Corrigan published a poetry collection, Solastalgia with Jackleg Press. She published poems in North American Review, Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly and more.

Alex C Eisenberg published poems in I Sing the Salmon Home Anthology and River Heron Review.

Liane Tyrrel published work in The Offing, Roanoke Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.

Lindsay Stewart published her debut chapbook, House(hold) with Eggtooth Editions. She has recently published work in The Pinch, Nashville Review, Red Wheelbarrow and more.

Natalie Marino was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work appeared in Eastern Iowa Review, Sweet Lit, Rust & Moth and elsewhere.

Mary Morris released the poetry collection Late Self Portraits with Wheelbarrow Books. She published work in North American Review and Blue Mountain Review.

Rhienna Renée Guedry released a collection with Cooper Dillon Books titled Root Rot and published work in Maudlin House.

James Miller published work in Identity Theory.

Terry Ann Wright published work in The Hyacinth Review.

Roy White published work in On the Seawall.

William James released If I Forget Thee Lowcountry.

Mary Rose Manspeaker had work in Brooklyn Poets and Poetry Northwest.

Kelly Grace Thomas was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry. She published poems in Tupelo Quarterly, ONE ART and diode poetry.

Daniel Biegelson published poems in Superstition Review, The Journal and The Glacier Journal. 

Michael Quattrone published work in Poet Lore, Harpur Palate and EcoTheo Review.

Abu Bakr Sadiq won the 2023 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for his collection, Leaked Footages. He is the winner of the 2022 IGNYTE award for Best Speculative Poetry.  He published poems in Palette Poetry, Poetry Online and Boston Review.

Shannon Ryan received her Bachelor’s from Salisbury University. You can find more of their work on their website.

Congratulations on your achievements! We cannot wait to see what you do next.

All my best,

Siobhan Jean-Charles

Pushcart Nominations 2023!

Dear Lovely Readers,

We are honored and excited to announce this year’s Pushcart Prize nominees! A few are from our forthcoming Winter issue (out December 21st), so this is an exclusive sneak peek. Thank you to all of our contributors, submitters and readers for helping The Shore publish such exciting poetry!

Sarah Barber “How to Tolerate the Ambiguous”
J P Dancing Bear “The Boss”
Samantha DeFlitch “November Eclipse”
Jenny Munro-Hunt “The Drying Green (Glasgow Green, 1732-1977)”
M M Porter “On Shaking Hands”
Melody Wilson “Resting Bitch Face”

With Deepest Admiration,
Sarah, Caroline & John

Review: Chelsea Dingman

On I, Divided by Chelsea Dingman

by Tyler Truman Julian

I, Divided, Chelsea Dingman’s ambitious new collection, is a masterful interrogation of pain, cycles of violence and desire. The collection makes use of those powerful standards that make Dingman’s work so engaging—mindful enjambment, attention to the natural world, and lyrical and confessional moments that ring true for most readers—yet the work also showcases Dingman’s continued growth as a poet and the creative leaps she makes to keep her poetry fresh and nuanced. The poems of I, Divided have all the hallmarks of what makes Chelsea Dingman a top-tier poet, but seem more structurally daring than her previous work. Playing with space, form, and even length, Dingman’s poems hone in on the marital drama that unfolds when a partner becomes ill and investigate the impact that past familial trauma can have on one’s present. The result is a spotlight on the lonely personal struggle of a woman in the face of personal illness. This collection is heavy, even dark at times, yet there is the glimmer of hope in Dingman’s motif of motherhood. The poet’s command of language adds depth to the images she paints. All of this framing creates a wonderfully moving collection, showcasing Dingman’s strength as a poet, but also creating work that if one can’t personally connect with thematically, they can definitely commiserate with and feel empathy toward.
            I, Divided opens with a speaker whose marriage has soured. Her world is a hurricane-season Florida, and a storm is always on the horizon:
            Sweat gathers between my breasts
                        & thighs. Every morning, I wake
            to heartache—

            the lilies cry from dry beds. You say: no life is without loneliness.
 
            At a courthouse, the justice of the peace witnesses us
           vow to turn off the lights
            & put down the toilet seat. 

            You say you love me.

            You haven’t yet handed me your heartache. Saw-
                      toothed. Looming.
 
            You aren’t yet another version
            of the lilies, lost to the ellipses between rains.           (“How to Live in Holy Matrimony”)

The metaphors here are significant. The rains are not only the literal threat of inclement weather, but the husband’s unpredictable moods. There is threat here, but there is also devotion. The speaker hangs onto the husband’s words, oracular and strange, seeking meaning and prediction in them. She continues,
            Consider the conditional if. What aches to be other than itself? 

            You used to call the rain
                                               degenerative. Like any long sickness. 

            In some iterations, we don’t know each other.
           The rivers are lonely.
            A life is all that’s holy.                                               (“How to Live in Holy Matrimony”)

Quickly, the reader uncovers the husband’s life as a professional hockey player has caused traumatic brain injury, resulting in dementia-like symptoms that impact his mood and memory. These moments of decreased function, the rainy days in the couple’s married life, cause loneliness, are degenerative to the point the speaker is left wanting safety, intimacy, and what once was. There’s no surety any of these desires will be satisfied:
            The children cry when he stays up all night 

            and tears apart the house. They are afraid 

           for my life. I rise and rise, the winds
            high. I pull the birds’ slight bodies into me,

           cruelty the only country they’ve known.
            I fear the rot the rainy season will leave.

            In the retention ponds, a pattern is the wake

            left by protected species that cannot flee. Past lives
            hurricane in my head. No surface is safe 

            from weather. I’m careful. I take all valuables
            down from the shelves. The kids’ pictures 

            hide in the cloud on my phone, along

           with whatever devastation that downloads
           while we sleep.                                                                                                   (“Fractals”)

The unpredictability is the hard part. When charting the progress of a storm, one never truly knows when and how hard it will make landfall, and yet there is even a desire for that crash of thunder and rain: “Let the rain come soon and be done with us” (“Memorial Day”). This fatalism is balanced by moments of hope and beauty that remind the reader that all is not lost. Motherhood and nature connect frequently to let the reader know that even if this speaker must run, she and her children will survive. In “A Small Life,” she declares,
“And love is a kind of survival—
            the river rushing past
            that teaches the fields how
            to pray. The small flowers
            that erupt in spring.

Life always returns after a storm.

            The second section of I, Divided clarifies this truth by moving the speaker out of the present rainy season back to a wintry, Canadian childhood. And while “There are few // words for loneliness / like a child’s,” in these reflective poems, the speaker explores the death of parents, alcoholism, and violence in detail (“While Reading Plato during a Lockdown”). What has the speaker taken away from the past that informs the present reality at home? In “I Remember, I Remember,” she reports,
           I remember everything.

           I remember living. I remember dying.

           I remember dying to live.

There is a persistence in these poems that speaks to survival. That survival prepared the speaker for motherhood, and these poems give the reader a glimpse at what it means to be a mother: Explain disease, my young son says, how someone lives with pain. 

I never got to tell my father: I miss you.
He’d already been gone for months when he died. 

To live, I need to make meaning of the dark
          again tonight. 

What I mean is: I want to love the world
           as though it’s something I’ll survive.                                          (“After a Suicide”)

Self-preservation is complicated when you must take care of others, which is the reality of motherhood, and Dingman’s poetry navigates that complicated gulf between the desire for self-determination and domestic responsibility with ease. However, her work does not minimize the complexity. This is perhaps the genius of these poems. They feel emotionally real at their core, even as the desires outlined by the speaker compete with one another, a quality that especially rings true in the collection’s third section.
            The third section of Dingman’s collection explores a personal medical diagnosis. Suddenly, the speaker is forced to deal with the repercussions of individual pain, rather than the fallout of someone else’s. This is further complicated by the political, female body. The poems of this section cover fertility issues, cancer and the loneliness of suffering. In this way, the speaker engages with more personal poetic mode, where questions become increasingly prominent and agency climbs to the top of the speaker’s list of desires. In a life spent resisting, surviving, what does it mean to give in? She asks, “did I ever tell anyone                 I’m not comfortable being touched // or did I let the world enter without using a door / in order to prove what I’m willing to surrender?” (“When the Wind Culls Its Name”). But she also admits, “I have to tell you: / nothing saved me from believing in the future” (“Occupation”). When you spend so much time caring for others, a husband, parents and siblings, children, what happens when suddenly you must care for yourself? Surrender can seem like weakness. Hope can feel weak. This is complicated but real philosophy, laid out by Dingman through her speaker, and the reader can’t help but feel its gravity. As if putting a period on it, the speaker reports on a dream she had about religion and power, saying,
           
I dreamt I was a god last night, but I couldn’t save anyone
            from their suffering. 

What good is power? 

The roses are dying on their stems. 

I am lonely. (There is no meaning in this.)                                                     (“Imperium”)

What good is power in the face of the chaos of the world? Dingman reminds us that we don’t get to choose our parents, that our partner could get sick, that we could get diagnosed with a terminal illness. Yet, she also reminds us that we persist, for ourselves and for others, because we have no other choice. In the collection’s final poem, “Economic Theory,” Dingman’s speaker makes this clear:
                                                                                    Always,
a man had all the power when I was young,
            & didn’t have any money for food. There 

isn’t a day in this life that I haven’t gone
            hungry. But quiet in my kids’ mouths
means I’ll work twice as hard to feed them
            full. The garden, under snow. Forever, breath
is an argument against failure. With Botox
            & heady songs. Other rituals, like leaving
a conflict region, a woman invests in
            by beginning. I’m tempted to say I begin.

 In case you missed it—here are Dingman’s poem from The Shore:

The Columbia River Taught Me How to Run
For a Thousand and One Nights
Letter From the Dead to the Living
Nachträglichkeit
Tenderness

Review: Jill Mceldowney

On Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney

by Tyler Truman Julian

From the opening line of Jill Mceldowney’s full-length debut, Otherlight grips the reader with an emotional and ontological intensity that leaves them gasping for air. While difficult to read for its subject matter, especially in one sitting, the collection is best read as a whole. Reeling through the grief and survivor’s guilt of a boyfriend’s death by overdose, the speaker takes the reader through the deep-water of depression and the heady, torturous heights of attempting to make sense of untimely loss. Taken in its entirety, the collection becomes a devastating love story and reflection on mortality and, across the poems, the reader experiences every emotion of the speaker, eventually understanding (as much as they can without actually living it) that opening line: “I know it scares you when I say I’m not afraid to die” (“The Lake Will Wait”).
Otherlight poses questions about life and death that rarely, if ever, get answered. But how does one make sense of unexpected loss? This question is one both the reader and speaker of the collection must wrestle with throughout Otherlight, and while that could seem to be a logical goal for Otherlight’s speaker, she doesn’t want to make sense of the loss. Instead, she points the reader to the carnal and emotional reaction one has when confronted with questions of the hereafter and the reality of grief:

            when will you stop believing me when I say I’m getting better
            about taking my meds,
                    when I say I stopped thinking of jumping a long time ago?

           I disappoint you. When I talk about the comforting gloom
                      of a birdless sky, that lake
           of quiet, I hear my own shadow

           call it want. Call it impossible—
                        to heal, to understand,

           to shake a ghost bird back to life in its cage, impossible to build
          cages under every bridge I’ll ever cross—you can’t

                        make someone want to be alive no matter how hard you shake them.

(“The Lake Will Wait”)

The speaker not only creates questions for the reader but is bombarded herself with external questions in her lover’s absence. Her own: When will you believe me? Why did he die this way? Where is he now? Will we meet again? And those of others, specifically, therapists, who appear throughout the collection. Attempting to answer these questions may seem a type of healing to those unacquainted with grief, but to do so would separate the lover from the speaker in her mind. When she is able to mull over questions of God and disaster, he appears. If she gets closure, he’ll disappear. In the first of a series of poems that mirror the conversations between a therapist and the speaker, when the therapist asks why the speaker has made the appointment, the speaker fleshes out this dynamic, responding,

            As if I could explain that easily

            when there are places on this earth that grow so wild
            even our maker was not sure where to begin.

            And how could I hope
          to begin knowing

                        what it will cost me to say what I really mean?
                       When you see me in so much pain I am unable to speak

            will you call me ice?
           Will you rip my life wide open?                                             (“Psychotherapy: Prologue”)

The speaker may not fear dying, but she fears losing the grounding that grief brings, as irrational as that may seem to those unaffected by loss. However, revealing too much or probing too deeply into this trauma will cause the speaker to lose control of what she does have control of, her grief. The questions—implied, rhetorical, and sincere—in Otherlight root the reader in the speaker’s story and give important context to her emotional state and the specific loss she has experienced. “Everyone has their own overdose story to draw from,” the speaker declares in “Psychopharmacology: Half Life,” and the questions she asks, and the images used to illustrate them, offer the reader a foothold to connect with the specific grief of the speaker.
Through the collection, Mceldowney crafts a powerful narrative. Each of the poems propel the reader forward and deeper into the speaker’s story, linking what came before and what is yet to come. In this way, Mceldowney deftly helps her reader see connections not only between the work and their life, but between individual moments in the work itself. As the therapy series continues, the speaker maintains her exploration of loss and the fear that it has inserted into her life. If she moves on, looks to the future, there is now only uncertainty. In “Psychopharmacology: Levels,” the speaker furthers this idea,

                                    The worst part of loss is that you live
          after it and my life

                        has been annihilated by this loss.

           I miss him and I have been
           missing him and
           I am allowed to be afraid that I will never be the same.

The speaker makes sure the reader understands everything that was lost in her lover’s death. She saw a future, albeit gilded, with him:

           It was clean.
           It was impossible, angels
                       lit by polar auroras. I’ll never get over it.
           He kissed my hair to wake me, my face
           against his shoulder.
           I felt the heel of a child in the small of my back.

            I’m allowed to be angry.                    
Look at what’s been lost.                                             (“Psychotherapy: Epilogue”)

The speaker’s loss is cemented here in some ways because the relationship has now moved beyond young, although passionate, love to something larger. Moreover, presenting this moment at the end of the collection, at the end of the therapy series, gives the reader a significant and well-earned payoff. Mceldowney’s narrative skill is on display here and throughout the collection.
Otherlight gives the reader ample opportunity to both commiserate at a distance and experience (almost) first-hand the speaker’s grief. The framing is almost cinematic as Mceldowney zooms in and out on her subject. This is a masterful approach to the challenging subject matter of the collection. As the speaker continues to explore the question of moving on from loss, it becomes clear that she cannot. Instead, she walks the reader through what it feels like to try to move on in a modern, structurally complex spin on the confessional poem:

                                                Every new man tastes like your name.

            I would do anything
                                                to keep him—anything—
            is not enough to keep him                   alive. I listen
                        to the horse beats of his heart rush him further.
            Loss
                        like your’s—again, can I take it?                                            (“History of Sleep”)

The speaker’s fear of unexpected loss is reasonable. The guilt that compounds that fear though is tragic. Mceldowney illuminates this reality with ease as her speaker oscillates between both guilt and fear believably. “Overall, how would you describe your mood?” the therapist asks in “Psychotherapy: Epilogue.” The speaker takes this opportunity to finally say it plainly, “I feel guilty / that I am alive // when he is not. I am guilty // all of the awful things that I have done to stay alive.” This form of magical thinking is going to be familiar to anyone who has experienced grief, but also adds a sad literary irony to the text because the reader knows there’s nothing the speaker could have done to prevent her boyfriend’s death.  
            Otherlight is both otherworldly and fixed squarely in the human experience. The tragic-beautiful story Mceldowney crafts across the poems of this collection is an expert display of the poet’s attention to audience and technique. She skillfully makes sure the poems remain in conversation with one another and build off one another as the reader moves through the collection. This keeps the reader necessarily grounded while Mceldowney probes deeply into the emotions of loss. The work’s questions about life after loss, posed by a troubled, relatable speaker, brush against the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell as she sits with grief, and ultimately, Mceldowney is brave enough to write out what many readers who have experienced loss would like to say to God, others, and ultimately, themselves. Otherlight is essential reading for both those who are and aren’t afraid to die.

 In case you missed it—here are Mceldowney’s poem from The Shore:

 The Believing Brain
Dream Tree
Sleep on the Floor
Birds Of

In the Current with Siobhan Jean-Charles Issue Eleven

Dear Reader,

Issue Eleven of The Shore was released in Autumn 2021. Traditionally, autumns with their falling leaves symbolize endings, and this issue is full of them– the end of a playlist, the end of relationships, the ending of the planet, the end of memory. But autumn, associated with the harvest, also represents life and new birth. One poem is written from the perspective of one of the millions of ants who were trapped in a Soviet bunker and devoured their own before Polish scientists helped them move to a new nest. These poems explore endings as much as they push for beginnings, juxtaposing to create meaning in a way that the best poetry does.

Since their publication in The Shore two years ago, contributors have been nominated for awards and won prizes, pursued their degrees, released books and continued pushing their work into the world. Here’s what they’ve been up to:

Paige Sullivan was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize and recently published poems in The Journal, Southeast Review and The Florida Review.

Julia Watson was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize and a runner up in Identity Theory's Best 22-Word Poems of 2022. She recently had work published in Reckon Review.

Chris Cocca had poems published in Dodging Rain.

Dhwanee Goyal published poems in Plum Recruit, Honey Literary, Barrelhouse Mag and others. They were recently nominated for the Best of the Net anthology, the Orison Anthology and ​Best New Poets.

Paige Welsh is a dual English MA and MFA candidate at Chapman University. She had a poem published in Pidgeonholes.

Caroline Plasket had work published in Gulf Coast. She recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published by Pleiades.

Katie McMorris recently published poems in The Rupture, The Pinch, Passages North and elsewhere.

Vismai Rao was nominated for Best of the Net and the Orison Anthology. She recently published poems in Jet Fuel Review, iamba and ucity.

Debarshi Mitra had poetry featured in Mad Swirl.

Tatiana Clark recently published poems in Thrush, Dream/Nightmare Anthology, Lumiere Review and elsewhere.

Abi Pollokoff has published poetry in Palette Poetry, Cream City Review and Radar Poetry, among others.

Sophia Liu recently published poems in Muzzle Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rattle, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere.

Mia Bell published a poem in Beltway Poetry.

Loisa Fenichell recently published poems in Poetry Northwest, New Delta Review and Bear Review, among others.

Barbara Daniels recently published poems in Cider Press Review, As It Ought to Be Magazine and Open: Journal of Arts and Letters.

Julia McDaniel was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, RHINO’s 30 Below and the Founder’s Contest for Narrative Magazine. She recently published work in The Pinch, Beloit Poetry Journal and Poet Lore, among others.

Jennie E Owen is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University. She won second place in the Briefly Write Poetry Prize. She recently published poems in Neon Literary Magazine, Atrium Poetry and Ink, Sweat, and Tears.

Melissa Strilecki is a reader for Variant Literature. She recently published poems in Hyacinth Review, Volume Poetry and Gordon Square Review. 

Corinna Schulenburg has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has recently published poems in Poet Lore, Canned Magazine and miniskirt magazine, among others. 

Odukoya Adeniyi has published work in Palette Poetry.

David Donna recently published poetry in The Rupture Magazine, Rust + Moth and Constellations, among others. 

Robin Gow published work in Poet Lore, POETRY Magazine, Miniskirt Magazine and The Baltimore Review, among others. 

Ben Bartu was a Fishtrap Fellowship finalist. He published work in Poetry Online, The Hunger Journal and Elsewhere Magazine.

Linds Sanders published work in Scapegoat Review and Fever Dream.

Bill Neumire recently published work in Ghost City Review and On The Seawall.

Aaron Sandberg was selected for the Dwarf Stars anthology and was nominated for Best of the Net. Recent work appeared in No Contact Mag, Armstrong Literary and Mockingheart Review, among others.

Leah Claire Kaminski was a semifinalist in the Boston Review Literary Contest. Recent work appeared in The Florida Review, The Rumpus and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others.

Justin Lacour published poetry in B O D Y Literature, Atlas and Alice, Concision Poetry and others.

AD Harper published work in Cordite Poetry Review, bath magg, The Interpreter’s House and Dream Pop, among others.

Ellie Altman published her debut chapbook, Within Walking Distance and recent work appeared in The Keeping Room.

Ben Kline was a finalist for Best of the Net, and had poetry selected for the anthology of Ohio Appalachian poets. His recent work appeared in POETRY Magazine, Southeast Review, Ghost City Review and Pangyrus, among others.

Catherine Rockwood released a chapbook, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, and she has a second chapbook forthcoming, titled And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death. They recently published poems in Thrush and Ariadne Magazine.

Rachel Small had recent work in Kissing Dynamite, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ample Remains and elsewhere.

Nancy Lynée Woo received the 2022 Artists at Work fellowship. She released a book titled I’d Rather Be Lightning, and her poems have been published in New Delta Review, About Place Journal, Invisible City, Nixes Mater Review and elsewhere.

Cady Favazzo had recent work published in Cimarron Review, Nimrod, and Five South Anthology.

Congratulations on your achievements! We cannot wait to see what you do next.

All my best,

Siobhan Jean-Charles

Review: Suzanne Frischkorn

On Fixed Star by Suzanne Frischkorn

by Tyler Truman Julian

In her third collection, Fixed Star, Suzanne Frischkorn delves into the process of mythmaking that shapes identity, while exploring the multifaceted aspects of being first generation Cuban-American. The collection intricately examines the complexities of politics, locations, and family dynamics in defining this distinctive identity. Frischkorn’s poems do not hesitate to delve into these complications, relying heavily on the imagery of place and embrace the sonnet form to give the collection its backbone. Fixed Star is beautiful and singular, telling a story often politicized and manipulated with nuance and personality. As Frischkorn’s speaker works through her personal family history, the reader also reckons with Cuban-US relations, the power of language to build bridges or create islands and the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves.
           Fixed Star is filled with locations, both domestic and foreign, and all contain deep meaning for the speaker and the content of the collection. Within a postcolonial context, these locales can represent dispossession and identity struggle, and Suzanne Frischkorn’s speaker knows there is something about the soil that makes a person. Just as different soils render different flavored grapes in winemaking,

          It is the dark,

dusty ground that gives

to tobacco its aroma and flavor.                                                                   (“My Body Translated”)

This reality is complicated for the children of immigrants, who become American citizens as a result of jus soli, the right of the soil, when they are born in the United States but their family is from somewhere else. These children often live in a state of limbo— neither here (the United States) nor there (the parents’ home country)—and the speaker of these poems lives in this liminal space, trying to articulate where home is:

          If you speak quickly I will understand if I don’t
try to understand my first language. You must

          understand it was stolen—
          legend, song, all of it
                                                            a fading stain by firing squad.                        (“Papaya”)

The impact of the Cuban Revolution and the diaspora that ensued is pressing in these poems and has resulted in a loss of culture and familial understanding. “My parents only used Spanish to curse,” the speaker explains about this loss.

                       The scent of Cohibas,
          a recipe for black bean soup

          and how to roll the r in naranja.
          That’s all the Cuban my father gave me.                                             (“How Do You Say Orange?”)

She adds,

What it means to be Cuban

hyphenated?                I don’t know—

My father’s from Cuba. I’m American.

He wanted me to learn one language really well. (“What It Means to be Cuban, Hyphenated”)

Frischkorn’s attention to detail is sharp and clear in the titling of these poems. The revolution has instigated the move to the United States, but the speaker declares that her body is also a revolution:

Its propaganda tucked
inside a push-up bra.                                              (“My Body as a Revolution”)

The move out of Cuba itself may be radical, but growing up and making her own story in the face of erasure is the true revolution. This exploration of self is interrupted by a sequence of sonnets exploring the father-daughter relationship in which the speaker continues “with my father’s story, / making up details as I go along” (“IX”). In these poems, the speaker can imagine her father’s experience in Cuba and participate in the revolution. She continues in the next sonnet,

          Making up details as I go along
          I held my hands up to the generals.
          I walked around investigating:
          the endless star, an empty net, the fish

          trapped inside the wind.
          The first night was wonderful—
          adrift amid the remnants.
          In the empty house I hear the sea. 

          The boats were manned by brothers,
          uncles, cousins, blood ties, a bond
love can twist. All the years by the sea
taught her every definition of blue.

  There was a lot of lechery and disorder.
And I am queen on that island.                                                                                         (“X”)

This imaginative play and the formal poetic treatment of the subject through the sonnet form allow the daughter to build a relationship with the father and Cuba, creating the proverbial Beloved out of both, and allowing self-actualization and meaning making. The speaker knows that this is, nevertheless, incomplete; it is “how we lose ourselves to myth, to legend, and how you find me, with regrets only” (“Spanish”). It’s in traveling to Spain and seeing herself as an individual person that she finds Cuba: “I came to the source, seeking the shape // of my eye, my nose—I passed as a native, and at last / found a way home. I discovered Cuba in Retiro Parque” (“Granada”). Through a second sequence of sonnets taking the speaker to tourist locations in Spain, the speaker develops an internal, personal Cuba that defies political and social boundaries. The Beloved this time may actually be herself.
          Fixed Star tells a powerful story of myth, family, and self. As a result, Suzanne Frischkorn’s poetry retells and adds to Cuba’s story of American exile, while also remaining deeply personal. Fixed Star becomes truer in its search for truth than most mainstream commentary about US-Cuban relations. As we continue the necessary work to understand both our own histories and the histories of our neighbors more deeply, we should not forget to also turn to poetry. Poetry is political because it is personal and it tells human stories, adding depth and truth to stories that become one-sided when they hit the mainstream. Fixed Star by Suzanne Frischkorn is a just such poetry. It should be read, internalized, and ultimately, enjoyed.

In case you missed it—here is Frischkorn’s poem from The Shore:

Victors of Tiny, Silent, Invasive Insect

Best of the Net Nominations 2023!

Dear Amazing Readers,

It is with great pleasure we take a break from the crazy heat to share some really good news, our 2023 Best of the Net nominations! There are links to each so you can enjoy the poems. Grats to our nominees—it was tough to narrow down our selections this year. Thank you so much to our lovely contributors for making that job hard—it rocks to have such high quality work. Here are the noms:

Laura Apol “Regret”
Sara Femenella “Infidel”
Pamilerlin Jacob “Dark Fruit”
Erin Little “I’ll never forgive you for loving me most beautifully at the Super 8 in Lake Charles, LA”
William Littlejohn-Oram “Neon Moon with Cicadas”
Haley Winans “While I Watch Flesh Erode off a Raccoon Skull in a Pickle Jar”

Thanks again for your loyal readership. We never take it for granted.

With deep admiration,
Sarah, Caroline and John