Review: Daniel Biegelson

On Of Being Neighbors by Daniel Biegelson

by Tyler Truman Julian

Daniel Biegelson’s Of Being Neighbors is a complex inquiry into what makes us human and what makes us artists. From dense prose poems to winding narratives, Biegelson adeptly moves a speaker around and through all sides of the varied realities of childrearing and writing in our postmodern moment. This collection, reminiscent of Grace Paley in its deeply human, often wry and humorous explorations, leaps to strange and disquieting heights in search of answers to unsettling questions that plague the contemporary poet: What role does poetry have in a world so troubled? Are my troubles as large as those of the world’s? Circling these answers takes time, takes a frequency of word and image that Biegelson handles well, utilizing imagery, repetition, and metaphor to beautiful effect, forcing his reader to slow and reflect and question in their own experience: What makes living worthwhile?

            From the outset, Biegelson’s speaker’s foot is on the gas, his hand is heavy on the pen. The repeated and revised poem “Neighbors” opens the collection, pulls us in, and never lets us go:

Do you believe in eternity. Infinity. Affinity. For once. Can we pray without ropes around
the prayer. Exchange branches for wires. Extinguish the clouds. We are the murmuration
turning over the earth with our predatory eyes. We are the field turned over and under.
We want to preserve our singularity. We can no longer look at each other.

(“Neighbors (I)”)

The small tragedy of neighbors failing to look at each other is compared and equated to questions of eternity. The microcosms of a cul-de-sac, a family, and a writer with their pen mirror the drama of the larger world and require special attention. With the skillful blending of his own words with those of others, Biegelson’s work addresses both extremes as equal, though such a stance is complicated:

                                                We don’t really speak anymore
of what it means to be human. As if we were dying.
We speak of clothes and their cast. Of cars and rigs
mangling people. Of grievance and violence. Shuttering
or drifting toward a mass extinction. Can we convince
ourselves that we are real.

(“The New Light”)

Again, what is poetry’s role in responding to our present moment seems to be the question at the heart of these complex lines. Can art reveal our humanity in the face of dehumanization and isolation on the global level? Slowly, the poems in Of Being Neighbors build into a clear yes. “Even you are responsible,” Biegelson’s speaker warns us, “to more than you. / What is light. What is rain. Now a metaphor” (“Notes on the Winter Holidays”). Life and art blend in almost Gertrude Stein fashion here to emphasize this yes. Biegelson challenges us to see the world and respond:

We are witnesses to our own evolution…We are the genderless sea heaving upon the
breathless shore. The tired. The poor. The masses. ‘Yearning to breathe.’ But what we
need is (not) also. What we need is. Is. No adherents. And oxygen.

(“Neighbors (I-X) Revisited”)

The mosaic that is crafted by Biegelson’s blending of his words with the words of global as well as distinctly American poets, artists, pop culture icons, and philosophers is sprawling, a complicated image of the present moment, of what it means to be good neighbors. How can artists add their piece to this puzzle? The speaker says it best in “Henny Penny Blues,” “We cannot / be quiet even in our most intimate whisper.” This is deeply human writing elevated by appeals to a muse that the author can’t seem to shake, even if he wanted to. Writing is vocational, and poetry is vital. The personal is truly political. Evocatively four-square, Of Being Neighbors raises questions of responsibility and impotence that cloud both the parental role and task of the writer in the modern age. “We’ve been thrown back onto the shards / of questions we thought we had answered,” the speaker further posits in “Henny Penny Blues.” In the face of questions, Biegelson writes, Biegelson raises his children to be good neighbors. Bearing witness is art, and art is something greater than survival; in fact, it is how we find our “footing in depthlessness” (“Only the Borrowed Light”).

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

(ק) :: To See What You Cannot See

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Five

Dear Reader,

Issue 5 of The Shore came out in the Spring of 2020, on the brink of the global pandemic. It is difficult to believe two years have passed since, and yet it feels like a world entirely separate from us today.

The work in issue 5 lives on the cusp of change, it challenges and explores the bounds of memory, plays with opposition and dances through problems of identity and image.

In the face of the pandemic, the contributors of issue five have continued to boldly make art and share it with the world:

Julia Bouwsma is the poet Laureate of Maine, the guest editor for The Ilanot Review, and recently published in The American Poetry Journal.  

Charlie M Brown has poems forthcoming in Cincinnati Review.

Nicholas Samaras published poems in Ruminate and Image.

Sarah Marquez published a poem in Mud Season Review and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Library Science at San Jose State University.

Nicholas Holt received his BFA in creative writing from Florida State University.

Rachel Small published the poetry collection, Where Do We Go from Here?  with Whispering Wick Chapbook Press in 2021.

Noah Stetzer published poems in Waxwing, The Cortland Review, Hobart, Green Mountains Review, Under A Warm Green Linden, Scoundrel Time and The Night Heron Barks.

Kathryn de Lancellotti was interviewed by Shoutout SoCal and published poems in Night Heron Barks and Beaver Magazine. In June 2020 she published her chapbook Impossible Thirst with Moontide Press.

Molly Tenenbaum published a poem in Moria.

Jide Badmus published poems in Neuro Logical and African Writer.

Satya Dash published poems in Superstition Review, Wildcourt, Atlas and Alice, Sangam House and Cincinnati Review.

Wheeler Light published a poem at Broadsided Press.

JK Anowe had work featured in Bakwa 10: Family Politricks.

Jennifer Saunders published poems in Whale Road Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, Heron Tree, and Twyckenham Notes.

David Dodd Lee published in Rattle, Packingtown Review and Thrush Poetry Journal.

Maxine Patroni received an honorable mention in Broad River Review’s 2021 contest.

Stephanie Seabrook published poems in Birdcoat Quarterly and Kissing Dynamite.

Tara Ballard published in Diode, Glass: A Journal of Poetry and The Normal School and is currently a PhD candidate in English at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Ned Balbo received a 2022 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council and was a 2021 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He was also interviewed by Hocopolitso.  

Joanna White was a 2021 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Panelist on the topic of Cross Art Collaboration.

Pat Hanahoe-Dosch published poems in Thimble, Rust & Moth and Red Fez.

Barbara Westwood Diehl is the founding and current managing editor of The Baltimore Review, and recently published a poem in Matter Press.

KG Newman published poems in Gasher Journal, Reed Magazine, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Harpy Hybrid Review, Sledgehammer Lit, Rough Diamond Poetry, Hash Journal, The Crank and Miniskirt Magazine.

Bryan D Price published poems in New World Writing, Josephine Quarterly, Hole in the Head Review, Barzakh, Watershed Review and The Broadkill Review.

Kathryn Merwin has had poems published in American Literary Review and Puerto Del Sol.

Jenny Irish published her third poetry collection, Toothbox. She also has poems forthcoming in Grist and Constellations.

Nicholas Molbert had a poem accepted by G U E S T and poems published in Flyway Journal and TIMBER.

Alicia Hoffman published the poetry collection ANIMAL with FutureCycle Press in May of 2021. Alicia has a poem forthcoming in Rock Paper Poem, and published poems in Marrow Magazine, SWWIM, The Night Heron Barks, Feral, South Florida Poetry Journal and Thimble Literary Magazine.

TW Selvey had art published in Waxing and Waning.

Theresa Senato Edwards published in Naugatuck River Review. Theresa was also a poetry mentor for the 2020 and 2021 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective and is currently a senior poetry editor for Harbor Review.

Clay Matthews is the current poetry editor at The Tusculum Review and published a poem in Appalachian Review.

Anna Sandy-Elrod has recently published poems in Limp Wrist Magazine, Angel City Review and Florida Review. She has poems forthcoming in Exhume and Stained: An Anthology of Menstruation.

Clifford Brooks is co-hosting a podcast called This Business of Music and Poetry.

Stephen Furlong is the current staff reviewer for the journal Five:2:one.

Melissa Marsh continues to create across multiple genres, her work can be found on her website.

To the contributors of issue 5: congratulations on your incredible achievements and thank you for sharing your talents with us.

Issue 5 closes with the words of Stephen Furlong, which seem as appropriate today as they were two years ago, “I used to believe
the one true teacher was grief                        
revealing itself as a butterfly
such beauty     from chaos     
for as long as I could remember         your light has shined through
the corners of the home I’m building—”

Sincerely,

Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Erin Rodoni

On And If the Woods Carry You by Erin Rodoni

by Tyler Truman Julian

Erin Rodoni’s And If the Woods Carry You is a commanding interrogation of motherhood and the many complicated relationships that come with it: mother to child, mother to nature, and mother to self. Though often tender, these poems, unlike many similarly themed poems, roar from the page, asserting agency, demanding attention and asking hard questions of both motherhood and the reader. In a lynchpin poem of the collection, Rodoni’s speaker announces, “I want the poem to hold everything the way my body holds / the whole and holy me” (“Time Capsule: The Poem”). And hold everything these poems seem to do. There’s a depth to these poems; they face the pain of birth and the difficulty of explaining death to a child; they confront climate change and the myths we tell ourselves to hide from painful truths; they play in apocrypha and rule, forest and carpet; and they craft a complicated, relatable speaker, unafraid to admit, “childhood is mythed / and monstered” and wonder where that leaves the mother (“Lullaby with Fireflies and Rising Seas”).

            Where is the mother in all the monstrous myth of childrearing? Rodoni’s speaker-mother declares,

            In ever fairy tale, the mother dies

            and is replaced by someone wicked. It’s true,
            I want to keep you safe, but I want

            to keep you mine. I never meant to fly
            you like a kite. I never meant to stay

            behind. But the mother is a cottage
            the daughter flutters from, the mother

            more cage than bird, and the parting clean
            as licked sword. The future, a castle that can’t be

            childproofed. And the fairy tale, still
            open on my lap, is not a map.

(“Lullaby with Fireflies and Rising Seas”)

Where is the mother? The mother is lost. In the tight linework of Rodoni’s poetry, her speaker tracks motherhood’s frightening lack of a map and, furthermore, dives into a mother’s need to find her place in the world and in her personal journey in order to better accept her inability to childproof the future. In this way, the collection works—satisfyingly—full circle, following both poems that explore childhood trauma and adults reckoning with it, ultimately coming back to mother and daughter. In the penultimate poem, “Caesura,” the speaker-mother returns to themes of truth and mythmaking:

I remember hearing about them, the babies               my grandma never had,
and though I’d never held such a seed                       in my body, I felt the want
of them. Five children with ghostspaces                    between. She believed
unbaptized souls went to Limbo,                   which to me meant low,
so I saw them spread like mica          in the soil beneath her roses,
and in the gauze of grasshoppers                   that rose with every step
through summer grass.

…

After our cat died my oldest kept asking        Where is she? I know she’s dead
but where is she? First, I spun a heavenplace,           then I changed my mind,
stood her barefoot in the garden and said                   Here, look down.
The dirt is full of root and bone.                     Oh, my darlings, we are so small.
Lie down, back to summer grass. Feel                                   how we are always falling
into that starspread black expanse.                 And feel too
the way the earth holds us,                 and we are held.

The truth that interrupts the mythmaking emphasizes the speaker’s growth of understanding, a clear arc in the collection. Her maternalism is not wrong because it is different from her grandmother’s, nor is it wrong because it is different from that in a fairy tale. The last poem emphasizes the complicatedness of motherhood, the desire for a fairy tale ending, but the speaker knows better, and Rodoni creates an ideal end—one that doesn’t deceive, one that maintains hope, but one, too, that is rooted in reality. In “While Hunting Mummies at the Museum,” the speaker-mother confides,

            And because I might be vague
            about the Tooth Fairy
            and Santa, but swore I’d never lie
            I have to say Yes 

            when she wonders, inevitable,
            if she will die. The next
sarcophagus is empty, so I myth
it with a mummy, bandage-
wrapped and risen, then make
the promise, that is, at best,
only half mine to keep:
But baby, not for a long, long time.

            “Love is laced always // with a stunning sadness” Rodoni’s speaker-mother tells us (“While Hunting Mummies at the Museum”). How true that is, especially for a mother. There is nothing trite or cliché about these poems. Every poem contains a surprise and takes you one more step on the speaker’s maternal journey, and also a life journey—nuanced in its challenges yet relatable in its anxieties. This makes And If the Woods Carry You a bracing wind in the forest of motherhood poems, chilling when you’re caught unprepared, your red cloak left at home, refreshing when you’re fatigued from a long day of chopping wood. This is a collection not to be missed.

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

Time Capsule: Days of Ash from Elsewhere

Review: Kimberly Grey

On Systems for the Future of Feeling by Kimberly Grey

by Tyler Truman Julian 

Recently, a friend in the middle of studying for her Creative Writing Doctorate’s comprehensive exams sent me a picture of sentence diagrams, a linear breakdown of a sentence with offshoots that label each part of speech in the sentence. They look a little like a tree blown over in a storm. The longer the sentence, the more complicated they get. The tree trunk (the subject-verb base) may fork with conjunctions, and the number of branches only increases, expanding as the sentence is broken down into prepositions, adjectives, objects of prepositions, and adverbs. I’d seen sentence diagrams before and even filled some in (in Spanish classes though, not English), but looking at them in relation to my friend’s doctoral program, they seemed heavy and interesting. Words carry a lot of weight, so much so, these diagrams seem to say, that sentences can collapse under it into their various pieces. Interestingly, it’s somewhere around this idea and the study of semantics that Systems for the Future of Feeling by Kimberly Grey takes off and finds its genius.

            The poems of Systems for the Future of Feeling seek new ways to make meaning of age-old questions in a postmodern world. Grey approaches love, lost love, and catastrophe in this collection, working through various imaginative and philosophical diagrams all her own, looking for the right words to give voice to emotion that is much older than the perceived apathy of our present moment. The first section of the collection, aptly titled, “Rhetoric,” is a long poem that builds to the question: “can we be happy still?” This question, in isolation, is tired, over-asked, but from the first line on, Grey’s speaker offers new questions and images to lead the reader to it, with new meaning:

            If language formed a center.

            If the center were true and tugging.

            If the tugging kinged us and we were fully assembled.

            If we were translated into compasses and the wind spun us around.

            If the ground imagined us raveled.

The poem continues on the next page, after sufficient white space to sit with these images. Grey’s speaker builds,

            If we string milkweed around our shoulders and walked north.

            If we found a little house and labeled it covet.

            If it were contemptible to be personal and diamondly lit.

After several pages:

            If we are unkinged.

            If we suffer for language and a little house.

            If truth is contemptible and wonder is a symposium of god.

            If we build god with a compass and bath.

            If the neighbors watch and wonder.

After a page break:

            If language equals failure and failure is the end.

            If we disassemble the center.

            If we wander back to where we arrived.

After one last page break:

            If the ground is a gallery of horse tails.

            If we bury our failures in the ground.

            If we wait for them to bloom.

            If a horse comes and pisses on them.

             can we be happy still?

This long poem sprawls across pages, a complex breakdown of semantics, and comes full circle in a winding, probing way, asking questions of the language used in the poem, asking with each rhetorical situation, can we be happy still? Knowing the postmodern, postindustrial reader is not interested in the romantic, Grey’s speaker builds and builds before dropping the question. This is effective. This adds meaning. And this poem sets the stage for the rest of the collection, allowing the poetry to climb to romantic heights, while the rhetorical and semantical play keep it grounded and frequently academic.

By way of moving forward, the speaker admonishes and invites in the poem immediately following “Rhetoric.” Grey writes, “For too long / now I’ve been spoiled by what I don’t know…it’s never enough, to be astonished” (“System of Knowing”). Why can’t we be astonished—by beauty, love, romance? Grey’s speaker seems to be asking. And the inability seems to lie in the inability to find modern words to capture the emotion created by these themes. The speaker looks back to find the language, interviewing various Bigs of linguistic history: Gertrude Stein, Sina Queyras, Anne Carson, Jack Gilbert, and Ludwig Wittgenstien, at the same time, she recognizes that “Time deserves to be studied, as I study you and me and how we are linked. See we’ve become almost like holy things, while the reverse is also true and every time I see you, while I’m looking…I’m thinking of a long river, something with no end” (“Simultaneously”). The speaker learns, as the readers learn, that time always moves forward, and we with it; therefore, language always changes and capturing the large emotions of life is always going to be a challenge, just as it has been from the dawn of time. Still, the speaker tells us, “It’s valuable to know language / will not make us beautiful;” it’s our working through the big emotions that makes humanity beautiful (“System with Some Truth”).

Once the speaker draws this conclusion, she looks for ways to better articulate the impact, both for the speaker and the larger world. She explains,

We need a form to form us, we need a form to teach
us the facts. How, actually, it is form that un-renders us
now: my back against your back.

…

Is love really a mountain

that just stops? When I say, why aren’t you weeping
I mean, weep with me. We need an affectionate form,
we need a home various

with love. This is experimental. Everything is sad
but I cannot describe the sad. I can only describe
the outside of sadness

            (“Love in the Time of Formlessness (or Form in the Time of Lovelessness)”)

This poem points to the need for poetry, even as language fails, in an almost ars poetica kind of way. Humanity craves forms to categorize and define their feelings, but nothing quite captures them. Grey’s speaker knows this. After all, language will not make us beautiful—but art and poetry can move us and describe experience, making the personal universal and vice versa.

            Why does this matter, especially if language equals failure and failure is the end? Grey has an answer. Her speaker bookends the collection in another long poem, this time titled “Reason,” and stretches various responses from page to page. Ultimately, language matters, poetry matters, this collection matters because there is so much pleasure and pain in life, and we need to describe it, we need to see the romance of the present moment to emphasize its existence, even at the risk of failure. Why does this matter?

Because in German world is Welt.

…

Because the law says everything is in conflict.

…

Because objects were empty and infinity, robust.

…

Because we couldn’t leave.

Because we whispered Welt, Welt.

Because arranging the future is violence.

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

Intellectualization (An Excerpt from A Mother is an Intellectual Thing)

In Support of the Purdue MFA and Sycamore Review

At Purdue University, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts has withdrawn funding completely for all graduate student admissions to the Department of English for the next academic year. This moratorium on graduate student admissions, as well as the Dean’s plans to severely reduce admissions in following years, threatens the existence of the MFA program in creative writing and Purdue’s student-run literary journal, Sycamore Review.

What Purdue’s administration doesn’t seem to understand is the immense value of MFA students, not only on-campus (as instructors, editors, mentors, tutors) but off-campus, nationally and internationally, as poets and fiction writers who contribute to their fields in ways made possible by the mentorship of the MFA.

When my fellow editors John A. Nieves and Caroline Chavatel and I released our first issue of The Shore in March of 2019, I had applied to several MFA programs (and had not yet received an acceptance.) A few waitlists and offers later, I was on the phone with Professor Donald Platt, creative writing faculty at Purdue. It was several talks over the phone with Don, now my MFA thesis advisor, it was his persistence and attention and lengthy descriptions of the Celery Bog near campus, that made me feel like Purdue could be home without ever having traveled to the Midwest.

Purdue is home to creative writing faculty who are incomparable in their fields.

Professor Kaveh Akbar describes the MFA program as his “education,” stating, “I’ve been faculty here for nearly a half-decade, and each student who has passed through my classroom has expanded for me the aesthetic and moral possibilities of our field.”

Purdue is home to my program-mates whose creative work, intellect and compassion continue to astound me.

Just these past couple months in the program, I listened to Paul Riker read one of his short stories, forthcoming in Salt Hill, while creative writing students and faculty raised money for our local foodbank; I read a poem written by Aiya Sakr published in Palette Poetry that I had first read and admired in workshop; I attended Zoom readings that featured Purdue MFA alumni who have gone on to publish award-winning books; I deliberated with my poetry co-editors at Sycamore Review to accept the highest caliber of work from emerging voices.

The actions of the Dean not only threaten the existence of an incredibly successful program but the existence of a vibrant and diverse community.

Kaveh describes this community as such: “The sincere rigor, curiosity, and collective spirt upon which this program has been built are rare in the literary world. It’s an oasis, a miracle. It should be celebrated, cherished, exalted. Our program is the exact antithesis of the malignant machinations of bureaucrats whose confusion at the sight of real beauty and community provokes them to threaten it.”

The Purdue MFA community extends beyond our program and into the lives of the undergraduate students that MFA candidates teach every semester.

Creative writing courses teach students how to question and pay close attention to the world around them. The Dean is misguided to believe English and creative writing instruction aren’t essential to students at large. Attention to the intricacies and possibilities of written language is useful to us all.

Creative writing graduate and undergraduate students understand what Purdue’s administration fails to: the exciting possibilities that occur when both the arts and sciences are respected and allowed to flourish.

A recent poem I wrote, forthcoming in Salt Hill, was inspired by reading a Purdue email about an engineering professor who invented an ultra-white paint that can cool surfaces below air temperature, leading to my meditation on what it means to live in the current climate crisis.

Undergraduate student Isabella Escamilla, who has poems published or forthcoming in esteemed national journals like Passages North, Adroit Journal, PANK Magazine and others, studies crop and soil management AND poetry at Purdue.

The College of Liberal Arts is doing a severe disservice to its students by defunding English graduate programs and Sycamore Review. A decision, that if allowed, Purdue will pay for with a lessening of innovative thought, communication skills, community and conscientiousness on campus.

As a fellow literary journal, The Shore stands with Sycamore Review and the Purdue MFA. We hope you will too. Please send an email to the administration. Retweet. Sign and share the program’s petition. Talk to your friends and colleagues. We won’t get another chance to be loud enough.

With love,
-Emma with the support of the Shore Crew

As direct evidence of the program’s excellence, please enjoy the incredible work of Purdue Creative Writing faculty and students past and present published in The Shore:

Donald Platt
XV. Album of Figure Studies
XVI. Male Model Resting
XVIII. Figure and Pool

Emily Rosko
First Lesson
Shard & Smoke

Jennifer Loyd
Rachel Carson: Juvenalia
Rachel Carson: Genealogy
Rachel Carson Leaves Springdale, PA for The Sea
Some Mothers Are As Lighthouse to Ship
The Shore Interview #16: Jennifer Loyd

JK Anowe
An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward
A Road’s Guide to Kill

Katie McMorris
Allowing Your House Ghosts to Steal Your Loafers
cannibal ant from special object 3003

Kelsey Carmody Wort
Our Three-Quarters Phase
I Watch My Girlfriend Put Poetry Under Her Microscope
O
Gemini Drunkenly Scrolling through Her Twitter Feed in the Bar Bathroom
The Shore Interview #17: Kelsey Carmody Wort

Lauren Mallett
Porfa

Review: Kelly R. Samuels

On All the Time in the World by Kelly R. Samuels

by Tyler Truman Julian 

Kelly R. Samuels’ All the Time in the World is a collection that explores cause and effect. For every here, in Samuels’ poems, there is a there. Everything global has a personal connection. Each effect has a cause. It is in these clearly defined connections that Kelly R. Samuels reveals, in striking poems that elevate the mundane to a mythic level, that humanity does not, in fact, have all the time in the world when it comes to responding to climate change.

The poems of All the Time in the World track a speaker who knows she is inextricably connected to the changes happening around her in real time. This speaker is a type of at-home sleuth, uncovering these connections, moving beyond conspiracy to point out how all the threads tacked to her wall converge. In “Geographical Changes,” the speaker highlights the sprawl of it all, putting the pieces together, and declares,

            Fragments make more sense, both visible and not.

                        What has been found—fragments of yet another—

maybe meaning we are more than, that if we delve
            we may learn something.

Is there another wall, where I could draw the timeline, see
what I need to see?

I’ll take down some of the art that matters
to me—that painting
there, or that one.
                                    Though I’m growing weary
of understanding, of holding this knowledge in my head.

Samuels’ speaker carries a lot of weight on her shoulders, and the poet carefully unloads it piece by piece. The poems are jagged and fragmented, like the drowning islands and cracking ice shelves they describe, but they come together to create a compelling whole, a narrative tied together by the timeline of the speaker, the individual in our fraught ecological moment.

Samuels clearly sees how the individual is impacted by the global. She writes,

            Flotsam and what sinks.

                                                Bits
            and pieces.      Dregs.
            The dregs of this brew,
            this day,
            these hours.
                                                            Toss the cap

            there.
                        Throw the bottle elsewhere.   

…

            All the lines are now plastic, hauled up
            and photographed. Catalogued
            as evidence of what is borne on currents,
            carried and bobbing—                                                caught
            in the throat. 

            As girls, we slid the plastic
tabs on our ring fingers and said, Darling,
how lovely.

                                                                                    (“Plastic Debris, Borne”)

Environmental degradation is personal in these poems. The speaker is perpetrator as well as victim. She is each one of us. That is the heavy “knowledge” she carries and works out frantically on the walls of her home. “Or so it seems to me,” she reports, in “Here’s Now, Alteration.” And still, life goes on. It’s a troubling existence, but one Samuels knows humanity must reckon with, even if it feels “as if there is no use / in knocking at the closed door, asking for reassurance” (“Here’s Now, Alteration”).

In All the Time in the World, Kelly R. Samuels has written a prescient and timely poetry, elegiac, odic, and lyrical. Samuels’ poems capture the human condition and describe the world around us, changing and confusing as it is. This is an important collection for now. It’ll be an important collection later. It’s a collection for here and for there. Everyone should read All the Time in the World.

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

Wool as Gatherer, or Seven Years

Talking of a Kind

Pushcart Nominations 2021!!

We are proud to announce our 2021 Pushcart Nominations!

Chris Cocca “The Effects of Ground-Level Ozone on the Ecology of Pennsylvania Highways”

Jessica Poli “To My Second Lover”

Paige Sullivan “Crystal Palace”

Kyle Vaughn “Memory of September” FORTHCOMING 12/21 in ISSUE 12!

Julia Watson “The Playlist Reaches At the Bottom of Everything”

Shannon K. Winston “Mustard Seed” FORTHCOMING 12/21 in ISSUE 12!

Congratulations and thank you all for sending us this vital work that makes our little journal go!

With Our Deepest Admiration,

The Shore Crew

In the Current with Renae Tucker Issue Four

Dear reader,

In the winter of 2019, The Shore released its fourth issue.

This issue was composed of old and not-yet-haunted grounds. Of ghost stories and doors opening onto other doors. Of shadows and all the things we could not know.

Contributors filled issue 4 with the best kind of poems--the tangled and gnarled, the ones that refuse to save face.

Here’s what these amazing writers have been up to since then:

Jen Schalliol Huang had poems published in Compressed Journal of Creative Arts, Flock, McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, Shenandoah and Sou’wester.

Elizabeth Bradfield Had poems in The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic and Quarterly West.

Precious Okpechi had a poem taken by Pallette Poetry.

Bob Hicok had a poem published in The New Yorker.

Emily Rosko Had poems published in Tupelo Quarterly.

Simon Perchik had a poem taken by Guernica.

Andres Rojas published his book of poems, Third Winter in Our Second Country--congratulations, Andres! He also had poems taken by Ice Floe Press, Diode, First Things, The Banyan Review and Psaltery and Lyre.

Martha Silano published widely in magazines like SWWIM, On the Seawall, Eco Theo Collective, Atticus Review, Vox Populi, Rappahannock Review, TAB, Bracken, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Cincinnati Review/Verse Daily, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Westchester Review, The Fourth River, The West Review, Plume and West Trestle Review.

Kathryn V. Jacopi published in The Awakenings Review, Whimsical Poet and Sky Island Journal.

Sarah Uheida has been widely published in magazines like Eunoia Review, fresh.ink., Plume, the South African, Sonder Midwest, Stone Thursday, Everyday Fiction, Wend, Flock and Atlanta Review. She was also the recipient of the 2020 Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets-- congrats, Sarah!

Taylor Schaefer had an essay taken by Runestone, poems published in Hawai’i Pacific Review, Santa Clara Review and The Pinch. She was also a semi-finalist for the Spring 2021 Black River Chapbook Competition--Congrats, Taylor! She is now the Interview Editor for The Shore!

Michael Hettich published a book of poetry, The Mica Mine--congratulations, Michael!

Kathleen Hellen has published widely in West Trestle Review, Okay Donkey, Bracken, Josephine Quarterly, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Book of Matches, Not Very Quiet and Superstition Review.

Bridget Tevnan had a poem taken by The Bushfire Literature & Arts Journal.

Jeremy Rock has had work published in Ninth Letter, Waccamaw, Cider Press Review, Sugar House Review, Beaver Magazine and Bear Review.

Derek Annis was interviewed in Art Chowder.

Catherine Weiss has had poems published in perhappened, counterclock, Flypaper Lit, Hobart After Dark, Birdcoat Quarterly, Fugue, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Okay Donkey and Freezeray.

Ronda Piszk Broatch had poems taken by Whale Road Review, The Missouri Review, Indolent Books,  Juxtaprose and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

Mariah Bosch had poems published in Superstition Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy Magazine, ctrl+v journal and Hobart. She also won CSU Fresno’s 2020 Ernesto Trejo Memorial Prize--congrats, Mariah!

Joanna Gordon had a poem published in Nimrod International Journal.

Carolyn Oliver published widely in both poetry and prose. Her work can be found in Plume, Dialogist, River Mouth Review, Ninth Letter Online, Shenandoah, Phoebe, Porter House Review, The Hopper and Letters among others.

Bill Burtis published a book of poetry titled Liminal--congrats, Bill!

James Owens published a book titled Family Portrait with Scythe: Poems--congratulations, James!

Suzanne Frischkorn had poems taken by Terrain, SWWIM, Pine Hills Review, [PANK], The Night Heron Barks, Ms. Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Juked, House Mountain Review, Ecotone and Diode.

James Miller had poems taken by Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Bone Parade, Sweet Tree Review, Soft Blow and Phoebe. He also won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020--congrats, James!

Carly Madison Taylor had poems published in Ghost City Press, Crepe & Penn Literary Magazine, Boston Accent Lit, Ghost City Review, Stone of Madness, perhappened, 3 Moon Magazine and Delicate Friend Lit.

Mehves Lelic is a photography MFA student at Bard College. You can see more of her art on her website.

We’re so excited to see what these amazing artists do next! Stay tuned for when we catch up with contributors of Issue 5.

Happy writing,
Renae

Review: Jack B. Bedell

On Jack B. Bedell’s Color All Maps New

by Tyler Truman Julian 

Color All Maps New, Jack B. Bedell’s sixteenth poetry collection (an impressive feat in and of itself), is the remarkable work of an artist sure of his craft. Bedell’s poems sit easily in the intersections of place and memory, narrative and description, humanity and ecology, moving just as easily between personal, regional, and universal lenses. With an incisive and reflective voice, reminiscent of Mary Oliver, Bedell has developed a collection that captures his home state, Louisiana, in its present moment, shining a hopeful (and always believable) light on the landscape, even as it shifts before his eyes.

            Hurricane Ida made landfall at the areas described in Color All Maps New in late August 2021. Revisiting these poems post-Ida brings new meaning to many of the lines throughout the collection, emphasizing those tied to climate change, environmental degradation, and importantly, sustainability. In a poem in which Bedell’s speaker describes the draining of a lake for oil extraction, the onlookers seem surprised to find that a rainstorm would bring the water back:

            Silt bottom dried slowly,
stared at the sky like a blank face, 

until one night after a rain
the water came back.

Pine trees swayed in the breeze
coming off Lake Peigneur. Shore birds
swam in patterns between stumps.

  First morning light brought
the gift of fog settling
above the tusks of mastodons,

reminders this place will be,
whether or not we are.

(“Jefferson Island, 1980”)

This collection, like Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, is a tracker of the social impact of environmental change. As Bedell points to this change, the impact, he also points to how change, in general, is inevitable, and how it causes movement and growth. Even as waves cause erosion, “will color all maps new,” as Bedell writes, the “[s]ilence in their loss / rises from the water as psalm” (“Nuage,” “Exhumation”). There is destruction here, but there is also renewal. Honesty tempers the hope in these poems and makes it palatable.

            The inevitability of change extends beyond environment in Color All Maps New, and it is in this pattern of change that Bedell looks at themes of family and community. In “Gulf, Waves,” Bedell’s speaker describes his daughter writing names in the beach sand. He explains,

            She wants to spell out the names
            of all the people she loves,

            but the closer the water gets,
            the more she knows

            she’ll have to edit her list
            on the fly, leave some names

            behind in the air to beat the tide,
            its hunger boundless, and time.

In this collection, Bedell is a mature writer, sharing reflections on life and death and time. Time does not stop, an idea reinforced throughout these poems and mirrored by the ever-cresting waves that bring both disaster and joy. This duality is something that many people in harsh landscapes love and struggle with in the places they call home. It is Bedell’s experience and clear-eyed wisdom that can walk us effortlessly to poems like “Communal,” which tells us that “togetherness, time, and a little help / will fill our bowls to overflowing,” and make us believe.

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

Serpents and Insects, 1647

Cardinal

Best of the Net Nominations for 2021!

Congratulations to our amazing Best of the Net Nominees for 2021. Thank you to all our contributors for making these choices so difficult to make!

Dana Blatte “Premonition with Extras”

Sarah Brockhaus “Perennial”

Jenn Koiter “Reading Tour”

Lindsay Lusby “Machine as Well-Oiled Girl”

Susan Rich “The K Word—”

Matthew Tuckner “Elegy with Balls of Neptune Grass”

We are so grateful to all our readers for making these poems part of their lives.

Your Biggest Fans,

The Shore Crew

Review: Heidi Seaborn

On An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn

by Tyler Truman Julian

Heidi Seaborn’s An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a fever dream of deeply sensual and human detail. The collection is at once poetic and historic: a probing exploration into and extrapolation onto the life of Monroe. By juxtaposing persona and confessional poems, ekphrastic and lyric moments, Seaborn creates a complete and beautiful collection that moves well beyond mere biography or simple ode. This is a complex look at a woman who we all think we know, placed beside the life of a speaker, who, in many ways, could be any of us, alone in the night.

Personally, I am fascinated and troubled by persona poems. At their best, they give voice to historical and fictional characters and (through research and care) add layers to their stories. At their worst, they might feel like a rip-off or even an appropriation. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe takes on an immense challenge in channeling the voice of Norma Jeane Baker, but the complicated dance of poet, persona, Seaborn, Monroe is choreographed beautifully. The bantering voices, the word play, the use of historically accurate detail all work in Seaborn’s collection to give voice to a woman that so many people (often men) have spoken for throughout the years and to also shape a narrative that helps a speaker, the Insomniac, find her own peace.

            At the beginning of the collection, Marilyn is presented through the speaker’s sleepless gaze and in ekphrasis. “She arrives,” the Insomniac, unable to sleep, announces, and describes her as “a gardenia in a cellophane box” (“Marilyn”). The following poem makes clear this nocturnal visit, if new, is not unusual; the speaker is not simply a fan. There’s an otherworldly connection between the women. The Insomniac sees Marilyn everywhere:

            On the wall of the cowboy bar in Wyoming
a photo of Marilyn in a potato sack. Naked

            legs like a chorus girl. IDAHO spanning
            her breasts, POTATOES cinching her waist,

            100 LBS. NET marking her pubis, marking her
            as a bag of produce, to be slit open, dumped

            into a bin, priced and purchased. To be
            someone’s mash, soup fries rolled in tin

            & baked until she steams when sliced
            with a knife from end to end, butter seeping.

(“I see her everywhere—”)

In this way, Seaborn highlights how hungry eyes look at women, especially women like Marilyn Monroe, remembered (often solely) for the roles they play. From here, Seaborn offers the first poem in Marilyn’s voice. This shift, immediately following “I see her everywhere—” and the introduction of the Insomniac, creates a believable arc, in which Marilyn has an opportunity to respond to what has already been presented:

            It used to bother me
            when people I didn’t know touched
            me       they haven’t
            loved me         no not really

…   

I turn & smile blow a kiss
            that is really nothing
            a transaction of air

(“What I Give of Myself”) 

Because Marilyn’s character is developed alongside (and even after) the speaker in these poems, the persona also reaches back to Seaborn’s speaker. Marilyn becomes not only a historically accurate representation of herself, but she also becomes what the Insomniac needs in order to make sense of the chaotic world around her and her relationship to a partner who sleeps through this quasi-dark night of the soul. Thus, Marilyn, as presented in the collection, is a more true-to-life rendition of herself than we often see in popular culture. Likewise, she is a looking glass in which the Insomniac can compare her life and seek meaning, even if at times the mirror is the warped glass of a funhouse. In “Snapping a Selfie,” for example, it’s hard to tell who exactly is speaking, Marilyn or the Insomniac, when Seaborn writes, “All that glimmers is what / keeps me up at night. But last night was a blur. / Isn’t it always that way when you wake up and look / in the mirror at who you were yesterday? / Some days, it’s best to stay in bed way past / when the robins have gone.” In this poem, it does not matter who is speaking, instead the focus is on the connection between the two lives, setting the stage for the type of reflection that comes from looking at the life of another and pulling back a façade, created by years in the public eye.

            Beyond the moments where the voices blur together, Marilyn’s voice is distinct, historically accurate, and she speaks back to the Insomniac. In perhaps the most poignant moment of the collection, the Insomniac and Marilyn go back and forth, line for line, as Marilyn recounts her death. The warning of the collection comes out in these lines: “there is so much grief / in glamour” (“take that bow then slag off”). Marilyn, regardless of whether the image presented is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, becomes what the speaker needs. For the speaker (and perhaps the poet herself), coming to know Marilyn (perhaps more aptly Norma Jeane) beyond what is presented on camera has given her permission to be herself, to accept herself. From the penultimate “bow,” the speaker finally is able to sleep. She tells us,

I slept in, slept through the night.

I slept without Ambien’s dark
fist pressing my pillow. Slept all night.

…

In the stacked white boxes
up the hill, the honeybees doze.

(“Then I Slept”) 

The speaker has found the peace Marilyn was unable to during her life. Marilyn is able to play a good fairy, guardian angel role for the speaker, and the conceit of the insomnia, the dreamy set-up of the collection, coupled with Seaborn’s obvious research elevates these poems to a place of emotional and historical merit for the reader.

            Marilyn Monroe is real on these pages, far more real than Bert Stern’s eroticized account of her “Last Sitting.” The Insomniac is real and relatable. This is a collection to learn from, to teach from. Like “the heavy perfume / of daphne drift[ing] through an open window” this collection lingers, Marilyn Monroe lingers, our fascination with celebrity lingers, and Heidi Seaborn has created a work of art that is alive and different, something large enough for the characters in it.

In case you missed it—here is Seaborn’s poems from The Shore:

For my first marriage,

After Life, the Carnival Begins

Review: Daniel Lassell

On Daniel Lassell’s Spit

by Tyler Truman Julian

Rural America is a complicated space, and it is further complicated by the changes it is actively undergoing, demographically, socially, economically, and even physically. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people flocked from more densely populated areas to rural ones. This runs in contrast to the well-documented flight of young people, “brain drain,” and scarcity of resources in rural spaces. In this unsettled time, Daniel Lassell’s award-winning collection, Spit, was released by Wheelbarrow Books (2021). Spit is a fascinating look at the rural, its beauties and its challenges. The collection explores the push-pull reality so often experienced by young people growing up in farming and ranching settings. Lassell pushes back against the pastoral, resisting trope and expectation (what are your expectations in a collection ostensibly about llamas?), resisting the outsider’s rose-colored inward view. Lassell pulls the reader into his world and makes them live the heartache of death, the joy of a new birth, the fear and desire of moving away, and the anxiety of selling the family farm. This is reality. This is no privileged pastoral view of some ancient Greek watching another tending his flock. This is a meaningful collection that captures an important American reality.

            “When you live on a farm, every animal receives a name,” Lassell writes in the first poem of the collection, “The Llama Named James and John Sons of Thunder.” This poem unravels as tragicomedy, exploring in poetic detail the castration of a male llama. Even with a name, the llama must undergo the everyday husbandry of farm life. These are no pets. From this poem on, Lassell delves into what it means to be an agriculturist with a serious and often questioning eye. Reflecting on the clearing of a field, the displacement of the wild, he asks,

            What becomes wind

                        when the dead
                        live in it?

            What becomes a farm

                        when by blade,

            an emptiness
                        is called clean,

                                    godly?

(“Laws of Motion”)

Again, this is no pastoral. This is a true-to-life investigation of the rural. Lassell’s poems extend a kindness to animals and labor, a cynicism of humanity, and a well-placed sadness for wild spaces that reinforces the speaker’s mental conflict: here or there, rural or city, mom or dad, family or individual. Early on in the collection, the speaker announces, “There’s a crowd in me that wants out, wants goddamn air” (“Tasting Moonshine”). Still, there’s an intoxication to the rural, it draws people in. In “Spit,” Lassell’s speaker tells us,

Even in this farmland,
the calling of it, farmland
notes an imposed purpose.

My family builds comfort
around loneliness,
says of this farm,

Peaceful is enough.

     \\

Christ, some believe,
shared from his lips
a holiness,

that he asked from soil
a muddy lump,
spat, then pressed
that blessing
into another’s eyes.
All the body.

Real life isn’t always beautiful. We are meant to remember the llamas, the castration. The poetic can be brutal. Coyotes prowl the pages of Spit, stirring up the llama herd, threatening Lassell’s speaker’s family, and as the family slowly breaks down, the young moving away, the parents divorcing, the speaker laments,

            I’m trying to find grace
            in the sternness of a parking meter,
            in the crumbling sidewalk squares.

            Endings can be
what the lesser gods call good,
but I’m okay if a farm’s ending

waits a little while.

(“Leaving the Farm”)

Post-move, the speaker reels: “Homesickness can howl / a kind of guilt, as I am guilty / to think a place my own. / Every land begets and receives a trauma” (“The Way Home”). Boiled down to red and blue states, a smattering of statistics, and often inaccurate stereotypes, popular depictions of America’s countryside often forget the individual navigating the micro-level familial drama and macro-level societal changes that inform everyday life across the country. Reaching the climax of the collection, Lassell’s speaker slowly comes to terms with his move from the farm and the repercussions of it. In “End of the Llamas,” he announces,

            and now          I am no longer farmer

            unnamed                  

                                                unnamed

…           

            maybe my body is now the farm
            a housing        where now I

            carry them
                        carry them

            …

            I become         at this edge
            a pain              a healing

Healing marks the end of this collection. Lassell’s speaker looks on as several vultures pick over the remains of his family’s farm and prays, “Let mercy be what guides us” (“Final Visit”). It seems an appropriate prayer in the present moment. Mercy and deep soul searching.

Recently, The Modern West Podcast, a product of Wyoming Public Radio, wrapped up their newest season, which was focused on ghost towns. Quickly, the host, Melodie Edwards, redirected toward “ghostowning,” or the act of becoming a ghost town. She asked what makes small rural towns die, what keeps them alive? In Part 11 of “Ghost Town(ing),” Melodie interviewed, Brian R. Alexander, journalist and author of Glass House, who said, “One thing that upsets me is when I hear or read what I call the smart pants set who want to pigeonhole small towns and rural places as being this monolithic, white throwback retrograde place without having actually spent any time in them.” While it is true that these spaces do boast a surprising diversity, a historical diversity, these spaces are also challenging places to live for marginalized individuals and young people seeking opportunity, whether the community is ghostowning or not. This is why Spit is an important poetry collection. Daniel Lassell pulls back the curtain on the rural to showcase not only the true rural, the lived experience of the rural, but to also share a deeply human story, one that is vulnerable and enjoyable to read regardless of where one calls home.

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

Attic

Review: Michael Garrigan

On Robbing the Pillars by Michael Garrigan

by Tyler Truman Julian

In Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Jane Smiley argues that poetry is poetry because of its form and structure—that a poem requires memorization to retain its title off the page. Fiction on the other hand does not require memorization to retain its impact because of its sweep and depth. Rather than remembering words, cadence, and rhythm—Smiley asserts—the reader of fiction remembers the way something made her feel, the scene, the moment in which something was read. In general, I tend to agree with Smiley on just about everything, with the fervent devotion of an ancient zealot to the poet-god Apollo. Yet, in Robbing the Pillars by Michael Garrigan, I found myself transported, pulled along beautifully from image to image in the way a master storyteller leads you from lesson to lesson. This storyteller sits on a porch in a dying coal town in Pennsylvania, somewhere between Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the Susquehanna River, and his poetry is so deeply tied to place and memory that often the nuance of the poetic device is overwhelmed by the emotion and image of the moment, leaving the door open to powerful connection between reader and speaker, reader and poet, reader and the Susquehanna area of Pennsylvania.

Garrigan’s poems are driven by their speaker in a way that grates against Smiley’s definition but settles easily into the reader’s mind and heart. This storyteller is a fisherman, telling much more than fish stories. His connection to the space around him explores universal questions of life and death and the hereafter. Watching the coal companies come and go, witnessing the decay of a community, wading through a river older than the continent on which it flows, he declares:

It is the after that bother me, the desire to be remembered.

But that is the wrong word. Not remembered, but useful.

The best things in this life are still useful in this death—

leaves, roadkill, salmon, antler, orange peels.

Plant me in the moss. Lay me in the sun. Float me in the river.

An afterlife of decomposition into the universal consciousness of soil and water.

Cleave the grain of each day with the certainty of a useful death.

(“Life-Cage”)

There is something large here, larger than any one person, any one community, and Garrigan reaches for it with each cast of his speaker’s flyrod. In “Native, Wild, Invasive,” the speaker explores his troubled relationship to his home, a community impacted by economic forces out of its control and environmental changes larger than its small corner of the world. He recognizes the interconnectedness of all things, the religiosity of this connectedness, saying, “When continents broke and shifted natives / survived spread on wings, safe in eddies and cracks of granite. / Genes stretched over thousands of years, unfathomable generations.” There is a hope here: Survival is real. There is a question here: What does it take to survive? Garrigan’s speaker does not pretend to have the answers. He does not even seem to know exactly where he fits in the present moment where mountain living, development, and deindustrialization all meet around his home, the Susquehanna. The only constant is a mindful attention to the present moment that is nearly spiritual, self-preserving.

            “We
                        spill
                                    out,”

he tells us, “so our roots don’t rot / in this saturated soil” (“Two Weeks of Rain”). Garrigan writes toward something that often disappears when people tackle subjects of climate change, environmental degradation, and familial decay. Garrigan’s speaker thinks in geological time, to recognize all the things that make the present moment what it is: “The sex of rivers and concrete / comes from the love making of thick / forests and springs” (“Gluten Free Lap Dances”). This stretching of time, interrupted by the poetic moment, runs contrary to many expectations of poetry, but cuts to the heart of the human condition in the way only poetry can.

Michael Garrigan’s Robbing the Pillars bears witness to a changing world. In a 2017 interview with New York Public Radio, another author of fiction I deeply admire, Claire Vaye Watkins, announced, “I don’t know if storytelling is the thing that’s gonna get us out of this awful current moment we’re in, in the long-long moment, the long current moment we’re into, like geologically, but it’s what I have to offer.” The poetic storytelling of Robbing the Pillars humanizes change and challenges us to reflect on the impact climate change, economic policy, and what and how we choose to remember have on our lives and our communities.

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

The River, a Mouth

Review: Kelli Russell Agodon

On Kelli Russell Agodon’s Dialogues with Rising Tides

by Tyler Truman Julian

Kelli Russell Agodon’s forthcoming poetry collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), is connective tissue in a world that feels not just disjointed, but surgically separated. Agodon’s contemporary and down-to-earth poetry pulls a narrative from grief and melancholy that has personal repercussions for the reader and global impact for the community they re-enter upon closing the collection. Dialogues with Rising Tides is profoundly personal in the best possible way. The speaker in these lyrical, confessional poems is not only a mirror but a companion, guiding the reader to and through various revelatory experiences, that all seem to say, Don’t forget to put your mask on first and It’s okay to want something different.

“In the darkness it’s impossible / to see the darkness,” announces Agodon’s speaker. “How long must you know someone / until they see your scars?” she asks (“Wound Is A Form of Wind”). Deeply conversational, these poems broach taboo and create dialogue. Relatable, the speaker casually leads to profound depth. “As a child I believed suicide only happened / to the Hemingways” becomes the entry point into a harrowing yet candid poem exploring familial mental illness and its legacy (“To Have and Have Not”). In “I Don’t Own Anxiety, but I Borrow It Regularly,” Agodon pulls the personal into the universal or metaphysical and back without melodrama, rooting the poem and anxiety in relatable realty; she writes,

This is why some of us wake up
in the middle of the night looking for a saint—
and maybe your saint is a streetlight
or maybe the sea or maybe
it’s the moment you walk out the door
and exist in the darkness,
announce to the heavens that you’re still alive.

Each poem stands effectively on its own—poignantly sharing, bringing ideas and individuals smoothly together—but the collection builds quietly line upon line and image upon image into a complicated but necessary conversation on mental health, beauty, and strength. “I dream of the song where the pharmacist / doesn’t judge me for not being able to make it through / the day without some sort of pill,” from “Braided Between the Broken,” is tangibly connected to a series of lines seven pages later that make up part of “Everyone Is Acting as If We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home”:
                 Once I remember my dad saying,
           You are worth more than you think, as I always sold myself
      at a discount, and I wish I didn’t, I wish I didn’t
            say how much I hurt on social media
            but sometimes I just want to believe I’m not alone
            like how we’re all doing cartwheels on life’s grass
until someone lands in a sinkhole, until one of us
decides it’s late and the streetlights
are telling us it’s time to return back home.
And this moment feels inextricably tied to “Hold Still,” in which the speaker declares, “I’ve never been / interested in mishandling any life but my own.” This collection is stitched together line by line in beautiful and disquieting ways.

In Dialogues with Rising Tides, Kelli Russell Agodon has crafted poetry that is restorative and necessary, but like all successful surgery, there will be scars, there will be needed rest and recovery after you sit with this collection. These poems are significant and personal, and you will be moved by them. They could change your world. These poems ask us to listen to our bodies, listen to our souls, and take care of both, so that, like Agodon’s speaker in “We Could Go On Indefinitely Being Swept Off Our Feet,” we can “trust the thirst we feel is trying to tell us something.”

Dialogues with Rising Tides was published by Copper Canyon Press on April 21, 2021.

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

When You Are a Ghost, I’ll Also Love Your Shadow

Torn (Old Fabric)

In the Current with Tayor Schaefer Issue Three

Hello dear readers, and welcome!

In our third issue, which went live in September of 2019, our contributors wrote about Pulitzer Prize winners, Medusa, melting into the desert, and apocalypse— but they also wrote about baths, babies on airplanes, buses, kitchens, the deer in their backyards— they wrote about the everyday mundanities (and insanities) of our lives.

We loved this issue, as we love all of our issues, and if you enjoyed it too, you can check out what our contributors have been doing since being published with us!

Sarah Barber had poems published in Southern Poetry Review and Copper Nickel.

Lilia Dobos had poems taken by The Quaker and Red Flag Poetry. She was also accepted to the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and will be starting her PhD in the fall! Congrats Lilia!

Jeffrey Bean was published in The Laurel Review.

Benjamin Cutler was published widely, in such places as River Heron Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Orange Blossom Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, Appalachian Review and others! In addition to these publications, Benjamin’s poetry also placed first for the North Carolina Poetry Society Mary Ruffin Poole American Heritage Award, as well as placing in the Caldwell Arts 2020 Regional Poetry Contest, with one poem in third place and one poem winning an honorable mention. His chapbook was also a finalist for Beloit’s Chad Walsh Chapbook Series contest for 2021.

Kimberly Grey published a new book of poetry titled Systems for the Future Feeling, with Persea in 2020. Congrats Kimberly!

Brett Harrington had poems published in 2 Hawks Quarterly and Ligeia Magazine.

Kimberly Dawn Stuart had three poems published in Anthropocene.

Justin Runge had poems published in Sons and Daughters, Poet Lore, Sweet Tree Review, Sweet Lit, and Cobalt Review.

Will Cordeiro had poems published in AGNI, Cider Press, and Thrush.

Kelli Russell Agodon had poems published in The Night Heron Barks. She also has a new poetry collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press this year! Congrats Kelli! Feel free to check out what she’s working on over at her press Two Sylvias Press.

Romana Iorga had poems published in Poet Lore, Folio, Lunch Ticket, Quiddity, Thin Air Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Poemeleon, Moria and Cordite Poetry Review.

Jeff Hardin has a new poetry collection, Generosity for a Later Generation, forthcoming in 2021 from Seven Kitchens Press. Congrats Jeff!

Karen Rigby had poems published in Grain, Banshee, Jet Fuel Review, The Journal, Revolute, and The /tƐmz/ Review.

Barbara Daniels had poems published in The American Journal of Poetry, Isacoustic, Queen Mob’s Teachouse, Belle Ombre, Panoply, Spank the Carp, and Clementine Unbound. She also has a new book, Talk to the Lioness, that just came out from Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

Adam D. Weeks had poetry nominated for the 2020 Best of Net Award and the 2020 Pushcart Prize. He also had poems published in Poet Lore, Puerto Del Sol, Ninth Letter, Slipstream Press, Broadkill Review and Runestone.

Seth Jani was published in Black Fox Literary Magazine.

Lauren Camp published a new poetry collection, Took House, with Tupelo Press (2020). Congrats Lauren!

Stephen Scott Whitaker had poems published in Body Literature and The Blue Nib.

Dani Putney had poetry published in The Racket, Alien, Figure 1, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Sons and Daughters, The Fourth River, Dovecote Magazine, Thin Air Magazine, Glass: A Journal of Poetry and Rappahannock Review. They were also interviewed by Rappahannock Review for the same issue. In addition to all these publications, Dani also has a new poetry collection, Salamat sa Intersectionality, forthcoming from Okay Donkey Press. Congrats Dani!

Prem Sylvester had work nominated for the Orison Anthology, and several of his poems were published in The Night Heron Barks and The Selkie.

Lee Patterson had poems published in Anthropocene and Heavy Feather Review.

Kathleen Winter was interviewed by Serena Agusto Cox for 32 Poems. Her poetry was published in a recent issue of Copper Nickel, and placed third for the 2020 Palette Poetry Prize. Kathleen also has a new poetry collection, Transformer, out now from Word Works Press.

Haley Winans is now a first year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Memphis, where she serves as a poetry reader for The Pinch Journal. Go Haley! You can check out their new issues here. While being busy reading, she has also found time to submit and recently had a poem published in Red Cedar Review.

Alice B. Fogel had poems published in The Inflectionist Review, as well as an interview for the same issue. She also won the 2019 Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review for her poem “Saturn.” Congrats Alice!

Josh Bettinger had poetry published in Poached Hare.

As always, our contributors have been doing amazing work and making amazing art. Check back in with us when we review the accomplishments of our contributors from Issue 4!

See you soon,

Taylor

Review: Owen McLeod

On Owen McLeod’s Dream Kitchen

by Tyler Truman Julian

Dream Kitchen by Owen McLeod is a surreal look into the middle of America and into the middle of the human heart. In many ways, I am at a loss for how to approach these moving, challenging, contemplative, and hilarious poems beyond individual adjectives. This is intentional. McLeod’s Dream Kitchen embodies what may be called a modern middle-American surrealism. This book claws into the heart of America, our consumerism, our self-interest, our troubled relationship to the self, and pulls it out, still beating. In this strange heart, torn between the past and a present, Plato lives comfortably next to John Berryman, and they are both sitting in La-Z-Boy recliners eating Cheetos. This image isn’t an exact reproduction, but it isn’t far off from what McLeod paints throughout the collection as it wrestles with what middle America, with its Facebook moms and carpool lanes, swing state politics and suburbs, has come to represent.

Complicated and often humorous settings surround McLeod’s speaker as he walks through the world philosophizing, setting the stage for meaningful self-appraisal. In “Someone Just Searched for You,” McLeod’s speaker highlights the perverse voyeurism of our love affair with social media (which represents so much of our jealous, nostalgic, and confused current reality) and warps it until the only person left in scene is the speaker seeking notice. The individual crying out from this crowded, strip mall “wilderness” becomes a profound critique of our present moment. He writes,

Whatever they found, it wasn’t me. Strange,
since I’m not hiding anywhere. I’m right here
at Supercuts, across the street from Applebee’s
watching a toddler fumble with the house
he fished from the second-hand toys stashed
in a laundry basket near the door.

The speaker seems to not only seek notice, but relish in the reality that the aforementioned technology cannot capture him, that he has some sort of knowledge others lack. Social media only catches so much of a person, and McLeod is interested in parsing out the real from the mask, the disreality presented to the world and forced on individuals by it. He continues,

Still can’t find me? I’m inside the house,
seated at a miniature piano. I stumble
over a sonata, then stop and stare dumbly
at the keys. I remember a box of old letters
in the attic, too poignant to read, too precious
to burn. I remember cave paintings, amulets
of bone, dead leaves eddying on the back porch,
my failure to capture the thisness of things.
I open the piano lid and crawl inside.
If they search long enough, they’ll find me.

(“Someone Just Searched for You”)

This is a troubled speaker. He wants to be found, recognized, but he doesn’t yet seem to know his true self. He has failed to capture the thisness of his own life and hides behind humor and image, inviting the reader to seek out who he is alongside him.

This search takes the reader on a journey that wants so badly to mirror that of the characters in Plato’s parables, the heroes of The Bible, and the speaker of Aristotle’s treatises. However, McLeod’s speaker exists somewhere around Ohio in the 21st century. The distractions of our modern world interrupts and challenges the speaker’s search for what it means to be human. It is for this reason the surreal erupts across the pages of the collection. Humanity is strange, and the speaker seems to wonder if it is stranger than ever before, given the state of the world around him. But it is in this rupture, this strangeness, that McLeod reveals his deepest ideas about humanity. Through his speaker’s search, it becomes clear that humanity is as flawed as ever, but no worse that it’s always been. Amid the chaos, the search is what matters in “the grander scheme whose end we hope is love,” and he tells us that if we cannot comprehend the world (just as our past philosophical giants could not in their own lifetimes), then the goal must be “at least to sing / in tune with the becoming that has always been” (“Carousel (a mirrorform)”). This failure to comprehend is not new, McLeod tells us, and in this common understanding of humanity, McLeod’s speaker finds himself. Perhaps this understanding will change and shift with time, but maybe that is the point. Even as the world spirals out of control and nothing seems to matter, McLeod leaves us with an important command: “know below the nothing, the thing that counts” (“The Same Bare Place (a mirrorform)”). What counts is the innate humanness of the search, the mundane moments of stability in an individuals complicated life. These things can’t be captured in a Tweet or Facebook post, but they build into something of real consequence at the end of the day.

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

Corona Sutra

Entomology

Review: Sneha Subramanian Kanta

On Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s Ghost Tracks

by Tyler Truman Julian

Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s chapbook, Ghost Tracks, is a rich collection of poems set in the ecotone, a strange hybrid space both concrete and metaphysical. In these tightly crafted poems, Kanta engages both the sacred and profane in a swirling image-driven narrative that requires a reimagining of both natural landscapes and human-made spaces. Ultimately, these spaces blur in the speaker’s understanding of self and humanity: “The light that creates us assimilates into the bodies of ghosts” (“Everywhere, Ghosts—”). We are ghosts. We are the descendants of ghosts. Ghosts are all around us, and they aren’t just human. They reverberate across our minds and the landscape.

This is a new spiritual awareness, a new doxology, where all things are living, even as ghosts, and all things are holy, unnamable. Time and place overlaps with the time and place of the past in Kanta’s worldview. Existing simultaneously beside scenes of the past leaves little room for misunderstanding one’s impact on a particular place, and this seems to be the crux of Kanta’s poetry in Ghost Tracks. Her speaker explores this sense of cosmic time fully, saying,

move the pastoral into a soft
muscle where ghosts eschew

            the body & reformulate it
                        as a prehistoric sea of aquamarine.

            ghosts breathe through coral reefs
                        each polyps a cluster of prayers

            built from larvae & migration.
                        ghosts reside in this silence

            warming spaces with undercurrents
                        under the abyss of water skin.                                                                    

            (“ghosts with elegies of muscle”)

The images in Kanta’s poems flash quickly across the page, often reshaping from line to line. This is not meant to mislead, but to bring all things—human, animal, and mineral—together across time. It is exactly this harmony that Kanta’s speaker wants us to recognize and cultivate. Amid the natural imagery and oracular musings, the speaker asserts that “every fragment becomes / a joint rhythm from a harmonium,” and in recognizing this, she extends an invitation:

            let us move      into an orison of breaths         a continuum
of unfolding                fragments turning whole. 

(“Transmigration”, “We rise like wildflowers against the dimming light”)

We would be remiss if we fail to recognize our role in the shaping of the landscape, our fraternity with the greater than human world. Ghost Tracks is a short but powerful reminder of this reality.

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

Syntaxes of Conversion

Displaced

Review: Jenny Irish

On Jenny Irish’s I Am Faithful

by Tyler Truman Julian

Writing anytime is challenging. Writing in a pandemic is its own animal. Anyone who has been able to write and publish in 2020 has earned my admiration, and many of The Shore’s contributors have released new work, sent books to the printer, and completed fantastic virtual readings over the last few months. I speak for the whole Shore crew when I say, I hope this brief introduction serves as my sincere applause to the artists and creators of all stripes who have made time for their work amid this year’s uncertainty and strangeness, and for those of us struggling to write right now, we see you too. The words will come, and we are waiting for them.

Jenny Irish is one of the many contributors that could be listed above. Her short story collection, I Am Faithful, came out this spring from Black Lawrence Press, the home of her 2017 poetry collection Common Ancestor, and because of the pandemic has not receive the attention it so rightly deserves. I Am Faithful is a powerful, timely collection that interrogates the intersections of gender and poverty. Irish’s heroes and antiheroes are women living paycheck to paycheck, women navigating relationships, women thriving in creative, unorthodox ways. This collection seems primed for 2020. Many of these stories wrestle with the pressing questions of this election, but like all good art, they rarely give us black and white answers, a yes or a no. In this way, Irish effectively creates a believable world with relatable and moving characters. In this collection, she has captured the essential worker, the neighbor, the survivor that society has forgotten to check in on. Irish has offered a glimpse into this complicated reality, without pandering to any sort of story that invites an outside savior in, that takes agency from her main characters.

These slice of life narratives are fresh and nuanced, challenging and tightly written. I thought I’d blow through them in a type of breathless awe, but instead, Irish’s stories asked me to slow, to sit with her characters, and be present in the struggle, witness to it. This collection burns with the cool light of great independent film, the tight feminist view of a Kelly Reichardt film, the seedy, character driven arc of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, the cinematic imagery and humor of something like Michael Lehmann’s Heathers. I Am Faithful is as beautiful as it is real, and the descriptions used to set up its scenes show Irish’s ability to draw up worlds truer than our own. In the story, “Glass,” for example, Irish describes the neighborhood where her narrator lives, revealing more about the character than the surroundings, while skillfully painting an immersive picture for the reader to collapse into. She writes,

There’s one home completely surrounded by a hedge of pink bleeding hearts. They’ve forgotten they’re only flowers. There comes a point though, where under the weight of a thousand of heart shaped petals the stalks fold over and flowers spill onto the sidewalk. The wind blows them through the streets. It’s like magic, something so pink behaving itself so badly. (I Am Faithful, 77)

There’s something tragic in this description, something invigorating. The narrator of “Glass” is somewhere between girlhood and adulthood, reflecting on the strange freedom of children in a do-it-yourself glassworks shop, even as she struggles with depression and the loss of a friend by suicide. As she gazes at the building, she wishes it would burst into flames, but of course, this does not happen. Her wishes, her desires tied inextricably to her friend’s death and her life on the poverty line, never come to fruition. The narrator tells us, “Expectations should be met like walls. Sometimes you can go up and over, and sometimes you can bust right through, but the rest of the time, which is most of the time, you hit them full-force, head-on” (I Am Faithful, 80). This is Irish’s narrator in “Glass,” but it is also the main character of each of these stories: dogged and alone, but fiercely so. Each character is new, each story is nuanced, but so much rests on these walls, the desire to bust through them.

Jenny Irish’s short stories in I Am Faithful pick up where Common Ancestor left up, and, though fiction, they are no less confessional, no less lyrical, no less intricately woven into a narrative web. These stories occur at the intersection of poetry and prose, beauty and horror, tragedy and comedy. These stories defy categorization as they interrogate family, violence, love, and growth; they offer no easy answers. In painting real life, life at the margins, these stories find their power.

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

In Texas There Are Tours of Things That Aren't There Anymore

Review: Luke Johnson

On Luke Johnson’s :boys

by Tyler Truman Julian

Luke Johnson’s chapbook, :boys (Blue Horse Press, 2019), is part elegy, part critique of boyhood. With ease, Johnson creates familiar images, snapshots caught in the flash of a Kodak disposable camera. In these images we get a complex definition of childhood, at once romantic and violent. The first poem, the title poem, sets the stakes. Johnson writes,

In a barn
choked by rusty tools
and ragweed

we stood
in riotous circle

watching
fetal mice fill
their fresh lungs with air

when Smitty
behind a tribal smile

pulled a blade from his back pocket…

(“:boys”)

The image continues, presenting a boy who “unsnapped / the [mouse’s] sternum / like a bloody brassiere,” and clues us into what “: boys” is defining. This is no “boys will be boys” justification, but rather a direct critique of it, a critical look at American boyhood and interrogation of the ancient adage, “The sins of the father…” This question runs deep through the chapbook. Johnson’s speaker “rummage[s] / through ruins / of charred bark” and offers another memory: a breakfast with his (presumably) hungover father and uncles. The speaker’s father invites him into his world:

He says: Come sit son,
here, by me, my beautiful boy,

moving a wrinkled
stack of Playboys
and a few bottles of Beam.

I rise to my feet
like white trash royalty,
demand they serve me my meal.

(“WTR”)

It would be easy to read a poem like this and wonder at the poet’s intent, if we’re supposed to read the speaker as reveling in these violent, masculine interactions, but Johnson and his speaker continually break expectations with each new photograph he drops in front of us. Johnson’s speaker says, Yes, I want my father’s approval. I want to belong to this gang of boys that kill baby mice, then turns around and offers a glimpse into his own fatherhood and the anxiety that comes with knowing what type of world his son will grow in. In “Finch,” Johnson’s speaker explores in his son’s life the same type of boyhood violence he saw in his childhood, but through the lens of an observing adult, one differentiated from his father and actively attempting to create different patterns of behavior. Returning to the motif of ash, Johnson’s speaker presents a roaring fire (the same that swirled amid his uncles and father just transplanted), and he stands outside its flames. It can be assumed that this fire was kindled in the small violences enacted by the father when he was a boy, fueled by the same interactions as those of the speaker and his friends in the barn, but now the speaker is outside it, looking for ways to protect his son from it. The speaker reports,

 …I’d wait
by the window, watching, wait
until sunrise. Listen for sounds

of my son’s feet
racing across the cloven field, forbid
him to pass through the gate.

(“Finch”)

This is the crux of the chapbook. Johnson’s speaker has emerged from the crucible of boyhood with mature goals, desiring to end the cycle of violence created by his father and the fathers of his friends. Luke Johnson’s poems achieve what the best of Stephen King’s reflections on boyhood and friendship and their strangeness offer us. He presents the violent and mundane American rural with the strength of Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. Johnson gives us images, fragments of familiar memory, and makes us look hard before we paste them into our photo albums and move on. :boys offers nostalgia and critique, forcing itself into our current American moment, asking for mindful reflection.

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

To My Son Who Asks about Baptism

Review: Chloe N. Clark

On Chloe N. Clark’s Your Strange Fortune

by Tyler Truman Julian

America loves a good scary story. We teach “The Lottery” in schools, knowing Shirley Jackson is calling us to question authority. We read Octavia E. Butler’s “Speech Sounds” as a way to draw attention to the voiceless, the power of communication when the world seems devolved into chaos. We turn to Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel when a global pandemic strikes, Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins when temperatures rise, and The Between by Tananarive Due when we are called to reckon with racial injustice in our country. The Gothic is a means through which we can look critically at our present moment by juxtaposing it with the dark and frightening. For example, Shirley Jackson wrote a less regional Gothic that used the supernatural and the strange to draw attention to unbalanced power dynamics in marriage, ill-constructed gender roles, and, as in “The Lottery,” the powers that maintained them in the post-war United States. More broadly, speculative writing, of which the Gothic, modernly, is a part, asks us to look forward, to speculate on what the strangeness within our lives can and should create. Regardless of nomenclature, we turn to “scary” stories for guidance when we have questions about ourselves and where we live. From there, they spur us into action.

But, what of poetry? Poetry, by nature, is more immediate. It seems to address these questions head on, finding, especially in our present digital age, a platform that elevates individual poems into politically galvanizing acts, shortly after being written. On the flip side, readers frequently lift poetry into an untouchable place, inaccessible and elitist. Given these extremes, the need for the Gothic (or any genre) in poetry could seem unnecessary. Yet, if writing a “good scary poem” is so unnecessary, then why did James Merrill use a Ouija Board to write the poems that most openly explored his homosexuality and won a Pulitzer as Divine Comedies in 1977? Why did writers in the 1800s turn to classical myths to elevate the mundane into a more critical space of engagement? Why have we seen an ever-growing use of the speculative in poetry? The novels and stories mentioned above seek to take one person’s (the author) personal response to a problem or societal ill and make it relevant to a larger audience through universal feelings of fear, discomfort, and, at times, humor. Poetry’s goal of universality and connection is the same, and Chloe N. Clark’s collection, Your Strange Fortune (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019), achieves these goals and puts them in stark contrast with the failure of communication that impacts the speaker’s personal relationships and our society as a whole. And Clark does it with Jackson’s flare for the quietly uncomfortable, Butler’s penchant for science gone wrong, and a contemporary re-appraisal of old myths in the vein of St. John Mandel, Watkins, and Due. The poems of Your Strange Fortune weave a complicated ghost story to track a speaker’s personal development through the apocalypse. Yes, the poems tell us, there is an apocalypse, but Clark cleverly, movingly uses the apocalypse (and surviving it) to highlight how the tragedies of childhood impact our self-worth as adults and how reconciling this trauma with who we are in the present moment allows us to break the cycle of pain and create something better. This is at the heart of Gothic and speculative narratives: There is a brighter future if we are brave enough to face the darkness in front of us.

            For the reader to see a better future for the speaker, as well as society in general, Clark’s speaker asks us to engage with a higher consciousness, to see ghosts and ancient heroes in our everyday life and memories. She asks us to reflect on the places we call home and how they shape us. The first poem in the collection introduces us to the speaker’s hometown, where “There was a woman / kept hands / lined up in jars / along her walls” (“Automatism; or What to Visit in My Town”). These hands are recognizably those of members of the community, and they are for sale, though no one buys. What question is Clark’s speaker positing other than, Do you see this cruelty? Are you a part of it? Thus, Clark forces immediate, global reflection, inviting us into the macabre world she has crafted. The speaker then offers her own reflection of who she was as a child and who she is as an adult looking back on a childhood filled with loss. In “Mirrors are Practically Useless to Me,” she begs for escape, for a way to assert her independence from a fraught homelife and an unsympathetic town, a complicated question to be sure. She takes on the persona of an escape artist and appeals to the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel to say,

we all wait with breath held, with eyes unblinking, and we

disappear slowly, tying the ropes around our wrists, dipping

backwards into the water, pretending we know the answer to the

riddle, the answer is smoke and   

(“Mirrors are Practically Useless to Me”)

Clark’s speaker does not offer an answer directly, choosing to end on an incomplete thought. But, given the title of the poem, the preceding invitation to reflection, Clark is asking us to contemplate our failure to react to violence and trauma and how this failure impacts the present moment, personally, in the lives around us, and in society as a whole. The speaker is already haunted by past loss, has already done this type of reflection, so she waits for us to fill in the blank. What fire preceded this smoke? Three poems later, she makes this crystal clear: “Apocalypse was just / the fact of life” (“I Believed Not in God but in Gods as a Child”). In this way, mirrors are of no use to her, even as she holds one up for us.

            How do we move forward now? Clark’s speaker seems to ask us. Now that we know apocalypse is not some great thing, but instead, everyday sadness, how do we change our trajectory? She practically begs us to supply an answer, even as she offers one, a critical one. In “The Escape Artist Ponders Mortality,” she tells us,

My hands are tied

            you say

my body is captured

            and there is nothing

                        I can do to escape

You are always saying lies

            built upon facts

there are so many chains

            you wear and that wear you

Underwater, even, you are a half-truth

(“The Escape Artist Ponders Mortality”)

The next several poems show us how the speaker has come to a place where she can call us, the visitors to her hometown, out for our negligence, our inability to communicate honestly with one another. She shows us the loss of a kid-sister, the loss of love, and as a result, a life filled with ghosts.

        So, where does she want honesty? Clark’s speaker wants honesty about grief and emotion, about the sadness that has shaped our lives. Until we are able to be honest about our pasts, we will never make meaningful connections. She tells us, we will only “send echoing / hellos down long abandoned / tunnels where the only answers / …will come from ghosts” (“Hum”). These poems are the speaker’s attempt at connection, at honesty. They are the attempt at escape.

We are witnesses to this escape, and as a result, we are expected to be better, to create a truer, more-connected future. She tells us,

            …push

            forward, promise to keep

moving, seeking, dreaming,

imagine that there is something

left that we have to give

            (“Please”)

The Gothic expects criticism. The speculative expects change. Poetry expects connection. Chloe N. Clark expects all three. She challenges us to interrogate our lives and the moment in which we live  to create a future in which “the past / could be reborn” and we could whisper “to the not / yet born grow / grow / once upon a time you would / grow” (“Fairy Tales & Other Species of Life”).

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

The Time I Saw the Earth from NASA's Mission Control