Review: Joshua Young and JK Anowe Chapbooks

On Joshua Young’s Weekends of Sound: A 764 Hero Mixtape and JK Anowe’s Sky Raining Fists

by Tyler Truman Julian

Rarely do poetry chapbooks get the attention and critical engagement that their full-length counterparts receive, though by their very short nature, chapbooks contain, perhaps, a more cohesive intensity and masterful control of subject and form. Much like the short story to the novel, chapbooks must have the same, if not more, emotional impact as a full-length poetry collection, all while remaining tightly self-contained. It’s for these reasons I’d argue we need more critical engagement with chapbooks and why I admire presses that deal solely in chapbooks or treat their publication as equally important as full-length collections.

This past year, contributors Joshua Young and JK Anowe both had chapbooks published by Madhouse Press, a micro press dedicated to publishing hand-sewn, limited edition chapbooks, released in pressruns of 100. Though limited edition, these two chapbooks are remarkably universal at their emotional core. Even though each tracks speakers on entirely different continents, desire runs through both, more specifically the desire for love. At their base, these chapbooks interrogate what it means to be loved and what it means to desire love.

In the wake of a failed marriage, Joshua Young’s speaker clarifies, “What I’m saying is, love is everywhere / & I want to feel it, / so why can’t it be in a poem?” then asks, “Tell me, what will real love raise over the trees?” (“Nobody Knows This is Everywhere”). Young’s speaker turns to sound, music, city life, and ultimately, memory to find answers to these questions. Throughout the collection, he wrestles with sentimentality and its place in identity, in art. He asks, “[W]hat the hell am I crying about?” and declares,

It’s easy to edit out the wreckage
digging through the calendar.
My friends knew
the corpse like crawl.
If history flickers truth,
our future isn’t anything to fret over.
Like, I know
what it’s like to fall in love—             (“Nobody Knows This is Everywhere”) 

There is pain in this search, and it requires sound, music, and poetry to be heard, fleshed out. In fact, I think this speaker would lie to me if he existed outside of the chapbook. He’d look me in the face and say, I’m fine. The speaker needs the page to work out the pain he feels, the heartache, and know it is okay to really feel and take off his rose-colored glasses. It takes the entirety of the chap for Joshua Young’s speaker to give us the image of a bridge, hope that there is a road that leads out of trauma and heartbreak into some sort of new future. Through his eyes, we see: “The bridge stretches across a dead river” (“The Can’t See”).

Half the world away, JK Anowe’s speaker leads us on similar searches. Deep into this speaker’s past we are asked to explore familial relationships and those that tie us to a particular piece of land. Anowe’s speaker explores the legacy of war, of institutional and personal violence, and how to reckon with it, how to ultimately forgive himself for the sins of his father, his country, and love himself. There is obvious pain here, and the speaker reels. He tells us,

            …you perhaps wonder if it is the

           ground that shivers    on impact
how the finger gropes to gratify

the wound    to remind the bodypart
it’s still here        which is to say before

biting down    you spit    on every
thing    to soften        the pain             (“Finding Middleground by Way of Digression”)

These are the words of a fractured speaker, struggling through a past impacting his present, who seeks to make himself whole, no longer compartmentalizing each part of himself. These words are also erotic, almost violent. It seems impossible to shake the violence. Even as the speaker attempts to find love with a woman, there is a caveat:

            …I love her

with these hands         despite dirt & gunpowder      shreds of
self-mutilated
skin underneath fingernails          from clawing 3 years of genocide
out my baffled bloodline                                                        (“Blue Boy Intimacy”)

The speaker chooses to love, but he is still “self-mutilated,” still not whole because of this generational violence. Like Young’s speaker, Anowe’s seems truer within the poem than in any situation we could extrapolate him into outside of the chapbook. As he seeks to redefine himself and love himself, he calls out other poets who do not wrestle with the questions he allows himself. Without the complexity, without attempting to pull all the fractured pieces into one, the work would only be an “obvious poem / excusing genocide” (“It’s Not Love as You Know It”). We don’t know if this speaker ever totally contextualizes his past, but, how could he? Instead, the chapbook’s short form pulls us into a place of empathy, if not understanding, and warns us that if we do not attempt to answer these questions of complicity in our own lives, we’ll only ever be cursed by “a constant fallback into sleep // into dreams / the circumference / of a sedative” (“An Unearthing in the Head”). For Anowe’s speaker, this awareness seems enough for him to choose to love himself, at least for the moment. Still, as he warns of the risk of “fallback,” we know the struggle for understanding, for reconciliation must continue on.

In case you missed it—here are Young’s & Anowe’s poems from The Shore:

Weekends of Sound
The Can’t See
An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward
A Road’s Guide to Kill

About Police Brutality and Our National Reaction

Dear Readers,

We have a role, albeit small, in whose voices get heard and we recognize and attend to that responsibility. And we are not interested in lip service. Sometimes words just aren’t enough.

We, as a team, have donated to the following organizations:

Black Lives Matter Global Network

Minnesota Freedom Fund

NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Reclaim the Block

We encourage you to do the same.

BLACK LIVES MATTER.

With Love & Solidarity,

The Shore Crew

In the Current with Ella Flores Post Two

In the Current

Post Two: Issue 2 Contributor Updates

Aaand we’re back! I am happy to present to you all the fruit of my internet labor. I have gathered here recent publications, honors, and achievements by our Issue 2 contributors. Of course, links to these writer’s works are included in this post. And yet, there are entire worlds in these journals. Do yourself the kindness of taking a stroll through the communities these writers inhabit. Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t spend an insufficient sentence giving gratitude to teachers, mentors, readers, editors, publishers, and writers, for their tired work these past months continuing to create, share, and nurture, such necessary art.

Jordan Durham won the Construction Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest Congratulations, Jordan!

Sneha Subramanian Kanta published her new chapbook! She also had work appear in Hobart, Trampset, Jaggery Lit and Waxwing. She was also featured in Plume Poetry’s 5 under 35. Congrats! And be sure to check out Parentheses.

Ben Seanor had a poem recently appear in Colorado Review.

Nicole Rollender won Palette Poetry’s Previously Published Prize. Fantastic job, Nicole! And of course, please check out the wonderful work on THRUSH Poetry Journal.

EG Cunningham had work appear in Voicemail Poems and in the inaugural issue of Lincoln Review. Congrats!

Max Heinegg had poems in Glass Poetry, Live Nude Poems, Thrush, Dovecote and The Indianapolis Review. Congrats, Max!

Shannon Austin’s work was recently in Kissing Dynamite Poetry and Rust + Moth.

Bob Sykora has a poem forthcoming in Foootnote: A Literary Journal of History.

Rachel Small had poems in Kissing Dynamite, Soft Cartel and Talking About Strawberries All The Time. Well done!

JK Anowe had work appear in Kissing Dynamite, Plume Poetry’s 5 under 35, and in Memento, an anthology published by Animal Heart Press. His chapbook was also released by Madhouse Press. He is also a chapbook editor at Praxis Magazine. Congrats!

Vismai Rao’s work appeared in Ghost City Press, Rust + Moth, Kissing Dynamite and Parentheses. Nice!!

Jonathan Louis Duckworth had work in Gulf Coast Online Exclusives, Sidereal Magazine, Metaphorosis Magazine and three poems in Heavy Feather Review. Good work!

Chloe N. Clark had work appear in Trampset, Atlas + Alice and had her collection of stories, Collective Gravities, published by Word West. Check out this interview relating to her book in Kanstellation and be sure to check out the journal she co-founded, Cotton Xenomorph. Amazing work, Chloe!

Nishat Ahmed had work appear in Into The Void, has a poetry book, Field Guide For End Days, through Finishing Line Press, AND another book, Brown Boy, forthcoming from Porkbelly Press. Wow!

Jack B. Bedell work in Fresh Air Poetry, Okay Donkey, ISACOUSTIC and won Hedgehog Press’ Stickleback competition! Attaway to be!

William James had a poem published in Booth!

Charlotte Covey had work taken by Arkana, The 2River View, Glass Poetry, Puerto Del Sol, Quiddity and Plume Poetry’s 5 under 35! Grats, Charlotte!

Satya Dash’s work appeared in Sangam,  Sundog Lit, Juke Joint, The Hunger, Glass Poetry, Pidgeonholes, The Mantle, Wildness and in Indianapolis Review. Great work, Satya!

Melinda Ruth is now a poetry reader for Arkana and did an amazing interview for Oxford American. Congrats!

Terin Weinberg had poems appear in Split Rock Review and Prime Number Magazine. Be sure to read and submit to Gulf Stream where she is poetry editor!

Alec Prevett was in Cherry Tree, Drunk Monkeys, Hobart, Longleaf Review, Sixth Finch, Puerto Del Sol, Up the Staircase Quarterly and is forthcoming in DIAGRAM and Denver Quarterly. Fantastic, Alec!

Alejandro Ruiz del Sol had work in Okay Donkey and is the poetry editor for Puerto Del Sol.

Nancy Mitchell’s work was featured in Cultural Weekly, The American Journal of Poetry, was interviewed by Broadkill Review and is the inaugural poet laureate of Salisbury, MD. Check out Plume Poetry where she is an associate editor of special features!

Molly Likovich had a stories taken by Automata Review and Not One of Us and is also the founder & editor of Elephant Ladder!

Tyler Truman Julian had work in Mineral Lit, Barren Magazine, South Dakota Review, Spiral Orb and is the managing editor for Puerto Del Sol. Check out his collaboration with Joshua Young, “Wyoming”, at Tupelo Quarterly and his book Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer) from Finishing Line Press!

Joshua Young had his work appear in Dead Alive and Maudlin House. His chapbook, Weekends of Sound: 764-Hero Mixtape, was recently published by Madhouse Press, and his novella, Little Galaxies is forthcoming at Los Galesburg. Congrats, Joshua!

A big thank you to all our contributors—Let’s see what awesome accomplishments we’ll get to share next!

All the best,

Ella

Review: Alexandra Teague’s Or What We’ll Call Desire

On Alexandra Teague’s Or What We’ll Call Desire

by Tyler Truman Julian

In his proto-feminist work, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy suggested that humanity was plagued by the “ache of modernism,” a pain rooted in the constant motion of the present age and the desire to quantify and qualify everything surrounding humanity. This ache reinforced gender and socioeconomical inequity, bolstered misplaced Victorian ideas of morality, promoted legalized cruelty, caused greater environmental degradation, and, for Hardy’s heroine, brought about tragedy and death. Alexandra Teague’s newest poetry collection, Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea Books, 2019), extrapolates this ache beyond the Modernist period, both forward and back, engaging with and challenging it in a refreshing and troubling way. Teague’s work appeals to ancient heroines and anti-heroines, seeking some sort of universal truth in their representation in art, scrutinizes the words of modern starlets in search of new wisdom, and develops a questioning speaker, whose everyday interactions with women and our present American society synthesizes the broad conversation of what it means to be a woman in America into an incisive examination of form, appearance, and the male gaze.

The meticulous research and careful word choice that is so typical of Teague’s previous work shines through in this collection and slowed my reading in a meaningful way. Or What We’ll Call Desire took me several days longer to read than I expected, not because of a lack of interest, but because the work asked me to slow and engage critically with its themes. I ended up spending as much time on Google and in conversation with other poets as I did reading Teague’s words. This was both a challenge and pleasure and showcased Teague’s particular poetic genius.

From page one, I was confronted with images of women, both real and fictional, that Teague seeks to recreate on the page and engage in dialogue about our country and its treatment of women. In “Self Portrait as Curious Lunatic’s Sketch of a Dancing Girl,” Teague’s speaker asks, “Who was I ever / but a girl climbing through the choices of being human?” From this question, Teague leads the way into a gilded, violent world of control, representation, and patriarchy that fails women. Teague’s speaker questions cubism, in its attempt to capture all sides at once, saying, “A woman posing for a portrait expects / her face, not a radio sputtering / disassembled circuits” (“In the Case of Mlle. Zina Brozia od the Paris Grand Opera Versus M. Jean Metzinger, Cubist”). She returns to her childhood, noting the violence and silence that surrounds growing young women: “without words what are we / but ourselves—inarticulate as the sky, as the fighter jets / to explain their sound” (“The Giant Artichoke”). She uses misrepresented mythology to demand that women “not believe Freud that your almost aliveness is what frightens: that you are yet are not” (“Baba Yaga Rides It’s a Small World”). And, slowly, she develops an image of various historic women that contradicts society’s (read: men’s) representation of them. Of these women, she spends the most time with Audrey Munson, a young model who posed for many of the famous statues still standing in New York City and whose story ends in tragedy much like Tess d’Urberville’s. Gradually, Teague’s speaker builds to the crux of this aching, this painful reality for America’s women, as it negatively impacts the whole world: nature, humanity, architecture, the very foundation on which our comfort is based. A lynchpin poem appears a little before the halfway mark in the collection, dragging this message to the forefront of the narrative of the collection. In “Suicide Notes (as M.C. Escher’s Impossible Constructions),” the speaker shows the historical progression of violence, its representation (often unseen by the male artist), and its ongoing impact for the speaker herself. Teague writes,

Someone told me [early] depression is a box and when I’m not
I see it as that cube I was so proud to learn to draw as a child
square overlaid on square and then those diagonals   [at first it seemed
like so much space]   My mother said Drawing boxes mean you feel
trapped   Drawing flowers means you feel lonely   [A doctor had electro-
shocked her in the 1960s   for feeling too strongly]

…

I can’t  I tried  and family history of     and my nephew
will not in the future survive
a room of a gun and himself   and will leave no note
except his body

…

[It was decades old already]
[my nephew has been dead a year] [my mother has been dead
more years thank I was old when she used to call
Rise and shine     like I was the sun
meaning     come down the stairs]

These boxes repeat throughout the collection. The women Teague channels and her speaker appeals to are often boxed, split into pieces. “How to Become Stained Glass,” one of Teague’s Munson poems, explores the male artist-creator’s relationship to his subject. Teague writes, “Be architecture. Be guileless // in pretending to be sky. If he says, so few girls possess / figures which are beautiful, separated into their details, / learn fragmentation.” Audrey Munson’s decision to appear as a man asks her is one of “the choices of being human” Teague asks us to evaluate. Presentation and form run through Teague’s work, begging us to interrogate our expectations of others, especially women, and the powerful need for self-determination, even in the current era that often seems so far from the past, 1891, for example.

In Or What We’ll Call Desire, Teague is asking us to allow ourselves to experience discomfort, to decentralize our gaze from the mainstream male-dominated representation of life and undergo a new way of looking at art and the individual art of each human. Thomas Hardy wrote during the transition from the Romantic and Naturalist Periods to Modernism. Of his ache, he writes, “[W]hat are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries.” This ache is never addressed by the characters of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and as a result, they fail to save Tess, making her to die a martyr. This ending is perhaps one of the great, unbearable tragedies in modern literature, but it seems fitting as Hardy critiques the society in which he lived. Writing of the ache that runs through Or What We’ll Call Desire, one that stretches from the ancient world to the Modernist period to our current time, Alexandra Teague’s speaker, in “The Meteorologist Receives More Letters Asking,” explains the pain that fills the poems of the collection: “Because there / is no choice but to imagine the unbearable to bear it.” The glittering art world covers up the violence surrounding the subject, asking her to smile, pose, live a certain way, and Teague pulls back the curtain for us to see and experience (however briefly) the unbearable, engage with it, research it, critique it, then go out into the world and try to be better humans. This is the challenge posited by Teague’s speaker in the final poem, “Selfie with Pomona: The Goddess of Abundance”: “Where’s the best light to look human?”

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

“Amazing Grace” (As American Rondeaux)

Because President Reagan Loved Jelly Beans

In the Current with Ella Flores Post One

In the Current

Inaugural Blog Post: What, When, and Who?

Welcome! In the Current will be a periodically updated thread shouting out recent publications, awards, books, or accomplishments by contributors that have appeared in The Shore. Roll out will first catch up to the current issue. Afterward, updates will be seasonal and around big events. A little about myself: my name is Ella Flores, poet and recent MFA graduate from Northern Michigan University. In the Current is meant to serve as a platform to share contributor achievements while also functioning as a sort of archive, providing links, journal names, events, programs, etc.. The work I do on this blog is primarily based on scouring and cross referencing online publications and bios. As this blog grows, I hope to provide, at some point in the future, an easy method for contributors to direct my way any news not readily available online. So, with that out the way, let’s see what strange and wonderful web we create.

Alexandra Teague had her work read on NPR’s Poetry Moment and her new book, Or What We’ll Call Desire, is out now at Persea Books (book review coming soon on The Shore). Congrats, Alexandra!

Chelsea Dingman had poems published in The Rumpus, Narrative Northeast and Kenyon Review. Her collection Through a Small Ghost won the Georgia Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Georgia Press (see our review here)! And read our Dingman interview here. Yes, yes, yes!

Check out Christine Spillson’s essay in Crazyhorse! She also had three pushcart nominations this year. Congrats!

Claire McQuerry had four poems in the museum of americana, was a finalist for Southeast Missouri State University Press’ Cowles Poetry Prize AND for the Journal’s Wheeler Prize. You rock, Claire!

Matthew Woodman had poems appear in Bone & Ink Press and was named poet laureate of Kern County, California. Congrats, Matthew!

Lisa Compo had poems accepted by Santa Clara Review and New Mexico Review. She was also a semi-finalist for the 2019 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Congrats, Lisa!

Rodd Whelpley had poems appear in Barren Magazine and The Wellington Street Review.

William Bortz had poems published in Ghost City Press and Back Patio Press.

Matty Layne Glasgow had poems appear in Cosmonauts Avenue and his poetry collection, deciduous qween, was selected by Richard Blanco as winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. It is available at Red Hen Press. Congrats, Matty! Read our Glasgow interview here.

Daniel Lassell had poems appear in Slice Magazine.

Giles Goodland had poems appear in Michigan Quarterly Review, Parks & Points & Poetry and won first prize in the Torbay Poetry Competition. Congrats!

Ryan Clark had two poems published in CONTRA VIENTO and appears in Posit and K’in.

Lauren Yarnall had two poems taken by Waxwing and was a Yemassee contest finalist. Nice!

Bruce McRae had poems published in Backchannels, Biscuit Root Drive and Black Bear Review.

Jill Mceldowney had work appear in Glass Poetry Press and Salt Hill Journal.

Brennan Sprague had poems appear in Jet Fuel Review, Glass Poetry Press and was a finalist for the 2019 Adroit Prize for Poetry. Congrats, Brennan!

Thank you to all our contributors, I am so excited for the great accomplishments we’ll get to share next!

All the best,
Ella

Review: Chelsea Dingman's Through a Small Ghost

On Chelsea Dingman’s Through a Small Ghost

by Tyler Truman Julian

It’s been said that the most traumatic experience of anyone’s life is one they can’t even remember: their birth. If we are to understand this as truth, then the question that remains is how this trauma impacts us for the rest of our life. The inverse of this, according to Chelsea Dingman in Through a Small Ghost, is that that a mother never forgets that “birth is sometimes about destruction: blood / & shit & sound. Or no sound. Just blood.” Dingman’s newest collection presents a speaker reflecting on her stillborn daughter’s death and the life she has built since. In this way, the speaker explores mortality and life, humanity’s propensity to accept that which may not make us better in order to feel some semblance of normalcy, and the complicated relationship between a man and woman who are left reeling after loss. There is an obvious heaviness to this work, but as I read, I marveled at the beauty of Dingman’s words and was pulled along by the clear narrative thread that wove each poem together.

I have been a fan of Dingman’s work for years and found her familiar appeal to image, masterful use of enjambment and the line break, and moving narrative arc in this new collection, but was struck by the use of space in this work to highlight the themes of absence and loss and the speaker’s confusion at them. The poems in Through a Small Ghost use the page, direct the reader to this absence, attempt to name it, then rename it in a way that I have not seen previously in Dingman’s work, showing the evolution of the writer and a shrewd reworking and understanding of her subject. In “A World within a World,” the speaker reckons with the way the world has sought to rename and stigmatize her and how that differs from her troubled self-definition. Dingman writes,

            You say mother means [         ]. Maybe it means

                        genius. A plaything for the dark

world. The pretty one.

…

Remember

                        when you were [

                                                            ].

This attempt at renaming runs through the collection, highlighting the speaker’s struggle to understand what it means to be a woman whose body seems to have betrayed her, whose body does not adhere to society’s expectations of the maternal. Dingman’s speaker reclaims this lack of definition in a poem directed to her male partner, someone who experiences the grief of a stillbirth but in a way distinct from the speaker. In “Let the Night Come, Monstrous, & Make Use of Us,” the speaker asks, “Am I the red-eye? The receptacle. / The body where others leave themselves. Gutted, // you leave me to the rain. / You pretend a body can’t be named— / the daughter we lost.” The conflict of father and mother in this loss revolves around this stigmatization, the desire by one to “move on,” the knowledge of the other that moving on is a simplistic understanding of the situation and an impossible reality. As the poem continues, the speaker declares, “I want to name the blood. The hurt / of her. The shadow-prayer of her. // I want to name the dark. / I want to name you bastard. // I want.” The speaker’s shadow-prayer pushes her to elevate her body, name it holy. This won’t be a moving on, but it does represent an acceptance and reclamation of self, and across the pages, Dingman asserts through the speaker, that in her “failed” body, the speaker is “almost / home…Almost / something holy.” This shift in thinking allows the speaker to live with her “small ghost” and appeal to a deeper spirituality, a naturalism that invokes fertility and loss all at once. In this nature, I find the human condition, according to Dingman. In “Revisions,” she writes,

we are the dead, the blue, the ghosts

of trees & rivers, the countries

where there is no one to damn

us & someone else tends the light

                                                & sometimes

there is only me, this light untended,

this world I don’t want to wake in.

In this collection, there is a communal invitation into the speaker’s grief, but as the excerpt from “Revisions” shows, Dingman’s poems also pull away, maintaining a confessional distance that roots the poem specifically in the speaker’s story and highlights her experience as a woman and mother. This authorial control of the collection highlights the disconnect between the speaker herself and her partner and appeals to an audience that may, at certain times, exclude some readers. This is not a flaw of the collection but rather an extension of the reading experience and poetic narrative deftly crafted by Dingman. Through a Small Ghost, as a result, is a stirring and humbling read. In “How Briefly the Body,” Dingman writes, “[T]he body is a story…[but] in the body, all things / have an end…every story I’ve known / carried off like tree pollen // in the white spring wind. But I enter, however / briefly. Asking nothing.” If I am to ask anything, it is that we all enter the story of Through a Small Ghost and ask ourselves what traumas we carry, maybe from birth, and what we can learn of empathy in the community made by words.

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

For a Thousand and One Nights

The Columbia River Taught Me How to Run

A Note from Home

Dear Readers & Writers & Editors,

In this disorienting new world, our tasks are more important than ever. As we move through this quickly evolving crisis, people will need new ways to understand the world around them and the worlds inside them. We will help create and translate our new reality. We will help remember who and what and how much was lost. We will author new hope and new pain. So please, think deeply, feel deeply, write and revise and revise and revise and submit and publish and curate with everything you have. We will write this new tomorrow together even while we are so very very far apart.

Love Always,

John

Welcome to Shore Things!

Hi Lovely Readers,

Welcome to our new blog space! Here you will find an exciting mix of contributor reviews & news along with other assorted stimulating odds and ends. We hope you enjoy it. Our first review will be posted shortly after the issue 5 launch. Our review editor Tyler Truman Julian will be reviewing contributor Chelsea Dingman’s killer new book, Through a Small Ghost. We hope everyone is doing well and that our new content will provide some joy in tough times. Thank you for being a part of The Shore family. We love you all and wish you well.

Very Best Wishes,

The Editors