Review: Debarshi Mitra

On Osmosis by Debarshi Mitra

by Tyler Truman Julian

Osmosis by Debarshi Mitra came out in 2020, at the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, making it hard to separate the collection from the slow and grief-filled days of the deep pandemic. It’s hard to believe it’s only been three years since the world paused in response to COVID-19. While the publishing world didn’t pause—books continued to come out—the attention around these books, the marketing, the promotion, even the reading of these new books definitely slowed. For this reason, it makes sense to revisit these works and give them their due—even three years on. As a result, Osmosis deserves attention as a document of that period, but also a profoundly relatable look at grief and human relationship.

            Osmosis is a slim, tightly written collection, choosing to focus on description and detail (often with haiku-like brevity) to explore its themes of grief and relationship. To some this may appear too simple, but it’s Mitra’s subtle attention to detail that adds depth to his themes. For example, “On Arrival” presents a speaker returning home, and in this home, “The air is stiff” and “the floors have / shoe stains on them.” The word choice is intentional; the use of stiff rather than still or musty implies not only that the house is empty (and has been for a while), but that there is something uncomfortable about the homecoming. Further, shoe stains imply a history, ghosts even. While the caesura and linework feels less important to the poem’s structure and meaning (and less important through the collection as a whole), the brevity of the lines adds intentionality to the images and message of the poem:

            My books and other things
            are exactly where
            I last saw them
where they always were,
only my mind

is elsewhere.                                                                                           (“On Arrival”)

While the speaker is physically in this old familiar space, their thoughts are elsewhere, and they feel separate from the connections made in the space. The poem makes this clear, and this idea colors the rest of the collection. This is particularly interesting looking back at this collection knowing it came out at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowing the isolation and loss of the pandemic, this collection reads differently, has a prescience to it that is remarkable.

The intentionality of image and message in this collection give the reader something concrete and universal to cling to in poems that could feel immensely personal. How many of us felt “all alone” during the early days of the pandemic? How many of us have been “All alone” “led astray / by a thought / barefoot / walking / on a winter night” in our daily life? These five lines highlight the relatability of the speaker’s lack of relationship to others and even to the place they have found themselves in, even if the reader is left with room to insert their own emotions.

The juxtaposition of personal detail and the universality of the moment being described continues throughout the collection. In “Family Sundays,” the speaker places the reader in the center of a family event:

            Anecdotes of
            grandparents
            and dead aunts. 

            On the centre table
            a decapitated wax turtle. 

            I look both ways
            to cross a one way street.

This personal moment, tied inextricably to the loss and lack of connection the speaker feels, is universal in its simplicity, even if the chosen details are specific. The reader is able to connect with the speaker and imagine their own family events (“anecdotes of grandparents / and dead aunts”). And the speaker’s inability to feel secure in their relationships, looking “both ways to cross a one way street,” is something most readers can relate to, especially post-COVID. In “Loss,” Mitra’s speaker is more forthright, embracing a more narrative form:

            It was always this way,
            was always a metaphor
            built on fragments and
            a physical space stretched
            by light streaming in
            from one side of this endless
            corridor.

It is more than the corridor that stretches endlessly; it’s also the speaker’s grief and the lost connection they once felt with a beloved relation. The speaker continues from that corridor,

            It is here that
            I preserve the image
of you bending
to pluck tulsi leaves
from a yellowing tulsi plant,
and suddenly remember that
for all these years now
after your passing,
I have forgotten even
to part curtains.                                                                                               (“Loss”)

This moment is personal, but relatable, and the shift to narrative poetry is intentional. The reader has already added their own personal details to the spare poems in this collection, building a connection with the speaker and the places they describe. Now, the speaker can specify the grief they feel and the reader will be invested. The reader may have to read between the lines, fill in the ample white space around the images painted by the speaker, but in doing so, they will find “the pale, / imperceptible shadow / of death itself” (“Between the Lines”). Even if the speaker feels adrift through the collection, the poems effortlessly link the reader and the speaker, cultivating some sense of solace amid the loss riddled throughout the collection. It is the writing itself that creates this relationship because the only thing “between two eternities / of darkness” (death and grief) is “the vapour trail / of language” (“Osmosis”).

            COVID-19 has created a universal experience of loss, and looking back on the art produced through the pandemic, we can find community and language for our grief and missed connections. Poetry of loss (regardless of if it is written in response to COVID) is powerful because it gives language to emotions we often can’t readily articulate. In Osmosis, Debarshi Mitra not only gives language to loss, he leaves room for the reader to join their loss to the loss explored in the collection’s poems. Personal tragedy becomes universal in Mitra’s poetry, and the timing of this book’s release makes this exploration of grief and lost relationships even more meaningful.

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

Morphogenesis
Abscissa
the flick of a lighter
Parallax

Masthead Updates!

Dear Lovely Readers,

We are excited to announce some updates to our masthead. After the departure of our wonderful co-founding editor Emma DePanise, we have made a number of staffing changes. We want to welcome our new co-editor, our former blog editor, Sarah Brockhaus, who will begin her duties as part of our three-headed poetry team for issue nineteen. Taking over as blog editor, will be Siobhan Jean-Charles, our previous social media manager. Moving into Siobhan’s former role will be new edition to the staff, Lisa Compo. We are very excited for the future of The Shore. We wish you a lovely summer.

Sincerely,

Sarah, Caroline and John

Important Announcement

Dear Lovely Readers,

It is with incredible gratitude and deep sadness we announce that Co-Founding Editor, Emma DePanise, is stepping away as a Poetry Editor. Over the past 5 years, Emma's commitment, vision, keen editorial eye and overall ingenuity has helped shape The Shore and its success. It is hard to imagine The Shore without her. As we move forward into our next phase, please keep in mind that Emma will always be part of the foundation of this journal and a part of The Shore family. Please join us in thanking Emma and wishing her the very best in her future endeavors. She truly is one of the best ever.

Sincerely,

Caroline and John

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Ten

Dear Reader, 

Issue Ten of The Shore was published in the Summer of 2021 and it embraces every aspect of this season. This issue is a brilliant collection of art and poetry that challenges perceptions and creates perspectives through which the world can be seen anew. The poems in this issue play with the position of the reader, bringing us underground, on a poet road trip, into the labyrinth of a wasp nest, jump roping and into the miniscule as a means of approaching the maximal. You cannot enter this issue and leave unchanged, these poems will break you from birdcages and challenge you to grow dandelions on your lips.

Over the last two years, the contributors of issue ten have continued to create art that explores and pushes boundaries. Here is what they have been up to:

Lindsay Lusby has recently published poems in Copper Nickel,  Puerto Del Sol, Epiphany and the micro anthology Haunted.

Jenn Koiter published her debut collection, So Much of Everything, which won the 2021 DC Poets Project.

Sarah Brockhaus has recently published poems in Sugar House Review, Tupelo Quarterly and North American Review. She is now your humble blog editor for The Shore.

Grace Li recently published a poem in Tupelo Quarterly.

Karen Rigby has a poetry book forthcoming in 2024 titled Fabulosa. She has also recently published poems in Quarterly West, Revolute and Ex/Post.

Brittany Atkinson received her MFA from Western Washington University in 2022. 

Erin Wilson published her second poetry collection Blue in 2022. She has also recently published poems in Body, Jet Fuel Review, Verse Daily and On the Sea Wall.

John Sibley Williams’ latest book of poems, Skyscrape, won the 2022 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. He has also recently published poems in Portland Review, Colorado Review and Break Water Review.

Paul Ilechko has recently published poems in Impspired, The Night Heron Barks and North of Oxford.

Audrey Gidman has recently published poems in The Night Heron Barks, Luna Luna Magazine and The Inflectionist Review.

Stella Lei recently published a poem in Narrative Magazine which placed second in their High School Contest. She also recently published poems in Four Way Review and perhappened mag.

Todd Osborne’s debut poetry collection, Gatherer, is forthcoming in 2024 from Belle Point Press. He has also recently published a poem in Scrawl Place.

Bobby Parrott recently published poems in Across the Margin, Oddball Magazine and Modern Literature.

William Littlejohn-Oram has recently published poems in Muzzle Magazine, Eco Theo Collective and Amethyst Review.

David Ford recently published a poem in Speckled Trout Review.

Matthew Valades has recently published poems in Redivider and The Indianapolis Review.

Melody Wilson has recently published poems in Cleaver, Silver Birch Press, Two Hawks Quarterly and Sugar House Review.

Jared Beloff published his debut poetry collection, Who Will Cradle Your Head, in February 2023. He also recently published poems in The Night Heron Barks, River Mouth Review and IceFloe Press.

Russell Thorburn recently published a poem in Streetlight Magazine.

Toti O’Brien’s latest book, Pages of a Broken Diary, was published in 2022. She has also recently published poems in Harbor Review, A-Minor Magazine and Whimsical Poet.

Trey Adams was recently published in Gone Lawn.

Dare Williams has recently published poems in Frontier Poetry, West Trade Review, Had, The Journal and San Pedro River Review.

Rebecca Patrascu has recently published poems in Deep Overstock, Smartish Pace, Glint Literary Journal and Heron Tree.

McLeod Logue has poems forthcoming in The Sonora Review, Gulf Stream and The Southern Poetry Anthology. She has recently published creative nonfiction in Pithead Chapel and fiction in 34 Orchard. 

Jeremy Rock has recently published poems in The Broadkill Review, Flyway Journal, Beaver Magazine and Sugar House Review.

Jen Karetnick’s latest poetry collection, Inheritance with a High Error Rate, is forthcoming in 2024 and won the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. She has also recently published poems in A-Minor Magazine, About Place and The Broadkill Review.

Jordan Deveraux recently published poetry in Tilted House Review. 

Ifeoluwa Ayandele has recently published poems in Another Chicago Magazine, The Concrete Desert Review and Emerge Literary Journal.

Mandira Pattnaik published a poetry chapbook, Anatomy of a Storm-Weathered Quaint Townspeople, in 2022. She also recently published a flash fiction collection, Girls Who Don’t Cry, in January 2023, and her novella, Where We Set Our Easel, was published in May 2023. 

Jeffrey H MacLachlan has recently published poems in The Woodward Review and Red Ogre Review.

Matthew Burnside has recently published in No Contact Magazine, Berlin Lit and Cheat River Review.

Lawrence Di Stefano has recently published poems in Bear Review, Southern Humanities Review and Sepia Journal.

Majda Gama’s forthcoming chapbook, The Call of Paradise, won the 2022 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. She has recently published poems in The Adroit Journal, The Night Heron Barks and The Offing.

Congratulations on all your accomplishments! Your contributions to literature are incredibly valuable and it is a privilege to see what each of you have been up to in the two years since the publication of issue ten.

Sincerely, 

Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Lucy Zhang

On Hollowed by Lucy Zhang

by Tyler Truman Julian

Lucy Zhang’s debut fiction chapbook, Hollowed, probes the depths of the human experience, zeroing in on the theme of agency. Zhang’s compelling characters, poetic imagery and body horror build a cohesive and disturbing collection of short shorts and flash fiction. Hollowed’s strange but accessible fiction is definitely for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Han Kang.

            In “Soft-Shelled Turtle,” a woman reflects on a childhood of eating turtle soup while fairies play mahjong in her kitchen. The fairies want to eat turtle soup and demand it of the woman, who appears more prepared to offer them her firstborn child. But what the fairies know and the reader learns across the story’s two short pages is that this child is purely theoretical, something that may or may not happen one day. The woman’s memories of childhood help paint the picture the fairies see clearly: This woman is not living up to the imposed expectations of her race and gender. In this way, this fairy story, like most fairy tales, has a moral. The fairies still take from the woman, like they do in most fairy tales, and something is sacrificed. Relationships with family are severed by her lack of a marriage and children; a turtle is cooked and eaten.

Through “Soft-Shelled Turtle,” the reader is plunged into the strange, often tragic, sometimes humorous world of Hollowed. In Zhang’s tightly-crafted world (so often mirroring our own, even if the mirror is sometimes a funhouse mirror), women can be disobedient and punished, but independent as in “Soft-Shelled Turtle.” They can be loved (but only when they teach others to love them): “Be soft, like you’re coaxing a sparrow off a bridge rail” (“How to make me orgasm”). They can be broken, as in “The Stone Girl,” a story that solidifies the poetic nature of the chapbook. Not only does Zhang rely on the metaphor of rock to describe the girls of “The Stone Girl,” but each vignette seems closer to a prose poem than a literary sketch. Each word of the story has a purpose, creating meaningful poetic imagery. The stone girl, made of “something else” (the others in the story are made of basalt and travertine), can think and feel, and she is carved into a statue reminiscent of Venus de Milo. And what does she think? “She thinks she has never looked so symmetrical, so delicate, and she wonders if this is what having skin is like. Or maybe this newfound fragility is because she stays awake the entire night. She waits for dawn, for its rays to heat her face” (“The Stone Girl”). When her sculptor awakes, he realizes her face has cracked, whether a flaw in the stone or a product of his carving is never discussed, but “I can work with this, he thinks as he picks up his chisel and attempts to pivot his artistic muse…but when he strikes the mallet onto the end of the chisel, a chunk of her face cracks off, falls to the ground, crumbles to unevenly sized chunks and dust” (“The Stone Girl”).

So much of this collection circles around questions of agency. And, here, in “The Stone Girl,” an extended metaphor for a controlling relationship between a man and a woman, there is no agency, and the statue remains standing, half of her face gone, “staring at him, as though to ask what he’d do next.” The stories in Hollowed continue exploring agency through its interesting women and language, but also by diving deeper into body horror. In “Thigh Gap” a grandmother hands a young woman a knife to “carve out your thighs.” Even after the woman cuts away her flesh, creating a large thigh gap, she realizes she is still the same woman, thigh gap or not. The theme of agency and the conflict between the lack of agency and asserting one’s agency continue even if the horror is more subdued in the chapbook’s story most rooted in realism: “Cracked.” “Cracked” explores pregnancy and the narrator’s preoccupation with death. When she trips and falls, dropping a large watermelon, narrator realizes the watermelon, having been plucked from the vine some time ago, was already dead when she dropped it. She says, “It couldn’t have died twice when it rolled down the stairs and revealed its insides to the world” (“Cracked”). The watermelon becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s pregnancy and the pregnancy is a type of death, a loss of agency. “Code Baby” and “Hatchling” further explore pregnancy and loss, both the mother’s loss and what the loss of a baby can mean. Horror comes both in the body and connections between motherhood and monstrosity. “Code Baby” shows how numbers and code cannot capture the complicated emotions and reality of pregnancy and loss, while “Hatchling” shows the fear attached to pregnancy and childbirth. Both stories lean heavily into metaphor and intentional, figurative language, daring to cultivate poetic moments amid their prose.

The collection closes with “Room Tour” in which a time traveler visits a woman in the present who will one day be his lover. The narrator says, “My lover from the future says I am dead in his time” (“Room Tour”). The narrator refuses to ask her future lover the tough but expected questions (How do I die?); instead, she asks whether or not they are happy together and about love. Rather than answering, he tells her to make her own choices, stay healthy, and live the way she wants to live. When she says she can do that and he acts incredulous, the narrator responds, “I mean, how else am I supposed to live?” (“Room Tour”). This question lingers into the chapbook’s final paragraph in which the narrator muses on why someone would worry about someone else’s future when they should be worried about their own, leaving the reader with the question of how else am I supposed to live? This is the question Zhang seems to want to leave her readers with, and after spending time with nine stories rooted so deeply in the theme of agency, what else is the reader supposed to take away? Without self-determination, without a sense of agency, the reader will be hollowed, much like Zhang’s characters.

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

Only We Were Left

Lacto-Fermentation

Maillard Reaction

Announcing Our Earth Day 2023 Special Collection

Dear Shore Readers,

We are proud to announce our first ever special collection, the 2023 Earth Day Special Collection. It was inspired by a collaborative reading occurring 22-Apr-23 in Easton, Maryland jointly hosted by Shore Lit, The Talbot Free Library and The Shore. We looked for poems that were eco-inspired and whose authors had a connection to the area. Our special collection features original art by the Eastern Shore's own, Ellery Beck. We hope you enjoy it and that it inspires you to think about your environment and the systems that govern and inhabit it.

Happy Earth Day,

Caroline, Emma and John

Review: Dani Putney

On Dela Torre by Dani Putney

by Tyler Truman Julian

Dani Putney’s newest chapbook, Dela Torre, defies the limitations of its length. Embracing the sensitivities of a postcolonial lens and confessional and narrative forms, the poems of this chapbook cross oceans and time to shape a global and familial history that is at once arresting and compelling. The poem’s elevated sense of detail causes both reflective pause and a breathless race toward the end, as the reader grapples with the legacy of empire and craves closure and wholeness in the speaker’s fractured existence.

            When engaging with postcolonial texts, it’s necessary to reflect on the body, and throughout Dela Torre, Putney’s speaker wrestles with identity. Their attention to detail consistently points back to their body and how their familial history impacts it. In “Los pioneros,” the speaker asks, “La atmósfera está infectada, / ¿la ves? El pasado / no nos dice nada—” Do we see the infected air? And with this question, the speaker seems to say, The past can’t tell us anything. It just infects. What does this mean for the postcolonial body? What does this mean for the speaker? What does this mean for the reader? These questions drive the reader forward and deeper into the chapbook. In “Kimchi,” the speaker synthesizes the “nervous conditions” of the colonized body (transferred through the generations) into a clear, descriptive narrative for anyone willing to attempt to understand:

            Nothing gives me more hope
            than spicy cabbage—
            …
            my Filipina mother didn’t eat
            ramen growing up, or like
            kimchi, but my picture of Asia
            was painted in America—
            …
            I’m my most Filipinx version
            of myself with white friends
            in a Japanese-style ramen shop—
            Filipinx, not Filipino,
            not because of my non-binary
            identity but because x marks me
            as Anglo, barely yellow—

            and the truth—I don’t become
anything by eating kimchi,
no metamorphosis,
my face still a question—

In postcolonial studies, the body is a text, a space in which conflicting discourses can be explored and imperial power can be rejected or reinforced. And this is the work that happens in “Kimchi” and the poems throughout Dela Torre. Putney’s speaker navigates identity, subjectivity, and ultimately, American-ness shrewdly, with clear cut usage of contemporary cultural references, language, ideas to assert individualism and a nuanced poetic style. They tell us, “I’m not the first to say life is / a perception of reality. Our bodies / exist because we make them” (“Pauli Excursion”). Just by existing and asserting their identity Putney’s speaker is creating a new reality and responding to history. “I was born,” the speaker explains in “Dela Torre,” “with Ma’s blaze along my tongue, // her plea to never forget our past: / colonization in two languages.”

            Dela Torre’s attention to detail offers a ready corrective to the abstract ideas it is so tempting to apply to conversations about race, colonialism, and American empire. Putney’s speaker places these conversations into a living context, fraught with familial and historical tension. Dela Torre is a powerful chapbook and its wealth extends well beyond its short length, to where it enters, intersects and complicates the narratives so firmly rooted in America’s sense of self that they have become sacrosanct.

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

Sidewind into the Universe

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Nine

Dear Reader, 

Issue 9 of The Shore is filled up with skeletons and not-babies, with names for the un-nameable. In this issue, poems profess love for a squeaking grocery cart and pay careful attention to the soft shape of a snail inching, smiles play in reverse and powerlines buzz like something alive. Here is what our wonderful contributors have been up to in the past two years:

Dana Blatte published her first chapbook, Lone, in 2022. She also published poems in Roanoke Review, The Adroit Journal and Polyphony Lit. 

Jessica Poli has a forthcoming poetry collection, Red Ocher, which was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She also has recently published poems in North American Review, South Carolina Review and New Ohio Review.

Matthew Tuckner recently published a poem in Yalobusha Review, which won the 2022 Yellowwood Poetry Contest. He has also published poems recently in The Cortland Review, Four Way Review, Dialogist and Pleiades. 

CD Eskilson has recently published poems in Pidgeonholes, The Florida Review, Booth, Ninth Letter and Beloit Poetry Journal. They were a 2022 Best of the Net finalist. 

Dakota Reed has recently published a poem in Nelle. 

Kelsey Carmody Wort has recently published poems in Southeast Review, Ghost City Press, Rejection Letters and South Carolina Review.

Martha Silano has recently published poems in Bracken, The Inflectionist Review, Diagram and The Shore. She also published a poem in Colorado Review which was featured in Verse Daily.

SK Grout has recently published poems in Moria, LEON Literary Review and Moist Poetry Journal.

Hilary King has recently published poems in One Art, Ms. Magazine, Rogue Agent and Maudlin House.

Babo Kamel published her second poetry collection What the Days Wanted in 2022. She also recently published poems in Thimble and Third Wednesday.

Noa Saunders recently published poems in The Mantle and Ghost City Press.

Jeremy Michael Reed recently published poems in Still: The Journal and Moist Poetry Journal.

Lucy Zhang published two chapbooks in 2022, Hollowed and Absorption. She has also recently published short stories in Craft and The Spectacle, and nonfiction in Salt Hill.

C Samuel Rees recently published poems in Action Books.

Becki Hawkes published her first chapbook, The Naming of Wings, in 2022. She also published a poem in The Broken Spine.

Kevin Grauke has recently published poems in Ninth Letter and May Day Magazine, and flash fiction in Atticus Review, Thimble Literary Magazine and Jet Fuel Review.

Jenny Wong has a debut microchap, Mouthed, forthcoming in 2023 from Kissing Dynamite Press. She has also recently published poems in Hennepin Review and Porridge. 

Steven Pfau recently published essays in Astra Magazine, Diagram, The Offing, Guernica and Passages North.

Ashley Steineger published her microchapbook. Ebb/Flow, in 2021. She also published a poem in Palette Poetry.

Danielle Pieratti published a poetry collection, Approximate Body, in 2023. She also translated Maria Borio’s Transparencies from Italian to English in 2022. 

Eric Steineger has recently published poems in The Ekphrastic Review and The Night Heron Barks. 

Farnaz Fatemi published a full-length poetry collection, Sister Tongue  زبان خواهر, in 2022, which won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. She also published poems in Olney Magazine, Nowruz Journal, Pedestal Magazine, Jung Journal and Catamaran Literary Reader.

Scarlett Peterson has recently published poems in Barely South Review, Drunk Monkeys and Josephine Quarterly. Her first collection, The Pink I Must Have Worn, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in Fall 2023. 

Sarah Elkins has poems forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, SWIMM and Painted Bride Quarterly. She has also recently published poems in Porter House Review, Quarterly West and Rappahannock Review. 

Katie Holtmeyer has recently published poems in Superfroot, Stanchion and Jupiter Review. 

Robert Fanning’s fifth poetry collection, Cage, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. He has recently published poems in 3Cents Magazine, Diode, Good River Review and Humana Obscura.

Jean Theron published two poems in The Minnesota Review, which both received pushcart prize nominations. She has also recently published poems in The Tiny and Cathexis. 

Heidi Seaborn recently published poems in The Bellingham Review, Fjords Review, Missouri Review and Radar Poetry.

Caroline Riley received her MFA in poetry from West Virginia University in Spring of 2022.

Sarah Stickney recently had a poem published in Carolina Quarterly featured on Poetry Daily, and poems published in Guest House.

David Keplinger’s 8th poetry collection, Everlastingness, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2023. 

Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan has recently published poems in Bracken, MudRoom, Strange Horizons and No Contact. 

Tara A Elliott had poems published in Ninth Letter and Poetry Super Highway.

Lauren Mallett has recently published poems in Cola Literary Review, Night Heron Barks and The Seventh Wave. 

Richard Prins has recently published a poem in Redivider. He also received a Pen/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations from Swahili. 

Sam Sobel graduated with his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University, New Brunswick and is an editor for Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine.

Joshua Young has been working on graphic design, you can find his recent work on Instagram @jyoungdesigns.

Congratulations on all your well-deserved achievements! 

Sincerely, 

Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Mary Morris

On Late Self-Portraits by Mary Morris

by Tyler Truman Julian

Mary Morris’ Late Self-Portraits is an artist’s incisive look at her life as she navigates chronic illness, a type of self-portrait itself. Morris’ speaker is adept at navigating intimate and vulnerable moments of illness, high art and history, resulting in the cultivation of a poetry collection that interrogates death, change and art itself. Approaching these large topics with nuance is a challenge for any poet, but approaching it through the lens of a mother with epilepsy, Morris makes unfamiliar moments universal and compelling. In Late Self-Portraits, the reader is led from poem to poem by the maternal hand of the speaker and is always granted a solid footing in the collection’s arc.

            Morris’ speaker sets the stakes of Late Self-Portraits early in the collection. She introduces the reader to Salem “witches,” Joan of Arc, Marie Laveau, Marie Curie and other misunderstood women in history to ultimately form a connection between these women and those with epilepsy. “Sometimes we slip out of our bodies,” the speaker explains of those who experience seizures, but this slippage also causes snow to fall “through late night poems” (“Sometimes We Slip Out of Our Bodies”). The speaker continues, emphasizing how epilepsy serves as a gateway to artistic production and how doctors easily explain this away:

            Neurons misfire
            Muscles stiffen 

            Years disappear          morph
            through synesthesia

(“Sometimes We Slip Out of Our Bodies”)

What doctors see as tragedy and medical emergency, while not romanticized by Morris’ speaker, is in fact the connection point to the mythic women of history that pop in and out of these poems and art itself. This connection begets art and brings solace: “the body is an empire filled with past lives” (“Portrait of Orpheus, Frida Kahlo, Love & Death”). Where else can we turn when faced with pain but to art and story? It’s from these connection points that beautiful things (joy, consolation and art) come. Once the speaker and reader reckon with this reality, they can face death as fully realized individuals:

            When death makes its move
            close enough to dance
            breathing down my neck
I want to tango
fall into its arms
in love with the music
swing low
trust its compass
let go
my breath.

(“Last Tango in Red”)

This acceptance of death and connection to those who have gone before (whether in true history or folklore) only deepens the collection’s narrative arc. The frequent reliance on ekphrasis and narrative further reinforces the themes of the collection, building a community of artists, musicians and storytellers that offer consolation and “tell us / how to draw death close, paint ravens in” (“Rembrandt, Late Self-Portrait”).

            The emphasis of dying well that these poems embody is matched by their expectation that the poetic I and, in turn, the reader also live well. For every poem about meeting death with trust, there is a poem about living in a creative state, as a parent, as an artist. This, the speaker tells us, is the only way to live well: Remember your death but remember to live. The speaker leaves us with this reminder, the work of poem craft turning a reflexive you into a command, “you / are hungry, and you eat” (“Act of Faith”).

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

Portrait of Spain, Cubism

Review: Lorrie Ness

On Anatomy of a Wound by Lorrie Ness

by Tyler Truman Julian

Lorrie Ness’ chapbook, Anatomy of a Wound, is an intimate dissection of grief and close, personal examination of growing up. The chapbook’s narrative poems explore illness, suicide and the fallout surrounding a loved one’s death, moving effectively from imagist-esque moments of body horror to the lyric occasion to show the beauty and tragedy of the loneliness that comes with losing a parent. A story as singular and personal as this is made universal across the pages of Anatomy of a Wound by inviting the reader into the place of grief and the familiar memory of growing up through vivid imagery, powerful storytelling, and the condensed cohesion of the chapbook form.

The chapbook opens with “Unzipped,” a no-nonsense poem describing the speaker’s mother’s autopsy. The speaker describes how the mother’s body was observed after death and allows this poem to ground and direct the rest of the chapbook: “Time of death, 11:11. Manner, / suicide.” The concise and intentional framing of the mother’s death colors the remaining 21 poems of the chapbook, helping the reader understand the personal tragedy. This allows Ness’ speaker to present several personal, lyrical poems presenting her family history before returning to her mother’s death. For example, the speaker explores her relationship to her mother in relationship to a recent relocation and another girl in the area. She shares,

We were new to Florida, living with dad’s parents
in a mobile home edging an unpaved road. 

There was no AC, just aluminum roofing
sealing in the summer heat. 

Sweat from four adults and one child
marinated inside the walls.

Most evenings I came outside with mom
airing my legs in cutoffs as Mikki streaked by. 

Lap after lap. Orbiting
like she was caught by the gravity of this place. 

Nightfall was our renewable resource,
its shadows filling in the gaps of her ripped clothes, 

transforming her briefly
before the sunrise tore her up once more. 

She’d wait for her folks’ light to go out,
then lean her bike against the chain link, tiptoe in. 

Every evening it was the three of us
keeping vigil under the moon.

(“The Move”)

The childhood poems throughout the chapbook tell a story of closeness between mother and daughter, grown through solidarity and isolation. This relationship builds as the poet-speaker ages and the mother gets sick and ultimately dies by suicide. The speaker explains,

The facts are simple.

She came into my room that February morning,
flipped the lights and smiled,
backed out the door. 

I had been using an alarm
since she got sick two years before. 

Every day after,
I’d been waking her with an injection
before catching the bus to school. 

This was the only morning
she said she wanted to do it herself.
I was a teenager, happy to be off the hook. 

The facts are simple.

This was the last time I saw her alive.
I was in US history as she pulled the trigger.

(“Goodbye”)

The reliance on one another ends in this moment, and the speaker is now alone, forced to confront grief and trauma on her own. What follows are poems about the poet’s discovery of her mother’s body and the emotional impact of that. It is in the act of writing though that the poet is able to find solace and understand that in her mother’s death “[s]he was seeking comfort” (“Autopsy Report: Between the Lines”). Before coming to a close, the chapbook challenges the reader to make this connection, to bear the poet’s burden of grief in solidarity. Exploring the often-toxic dynamic of a writing workshop, the speaker tells the story of how a writing group’s

comments were constructive, supportive,
until they got to mine. This is totally implausible!
How could a woman get ahold of a gun?
You’re asking too much here. 

Too much of what?
The only reason you bring up suicide
is to get sympathy. You’re burdening the reader.
The poem explored the stigma of suicide—
the multiple reasons why loved ones
stay silent.

(“The Sin of Telling (Not Showing)”)

The personal is universal in this specific instance and throughout the chapbook as a whole because Ness makes sure we understand her story and recognize ourselves in it. Are we going to be those workshoppers or someone else entirely?

Grief and coming of age are common subjects in our current poetic moment, but Anatomy of a Wound by Lorri Ness adds a forthright look at suicide and the search for solace to these conversations in an intentional and significant way. This chapbook should be added to anyone’s reading list on grief, for in it the reader will not only experience grief, but come away with the challenge to walk side-by-side with those who are processing loss.

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

Body Cartography

She Spoke with Urgency

Visual Distortions

Review: Kyle Vaughn

On The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places by Kyle Vaughn

by Tyler Truman Julian

The American Mid-South has produced its share of poets, but their work is perhaps underappreciated on a regional scale. Given the ecological and social concerns that plague our present moment—ever more complicated at the ecotone—ignoring the role of place in literature seems misguided. Cue Belle Point Press, “a new regional small press founded in 2021,” with a mission “to celebrate the literary culture and community of the American Mid-South: all its paradoxes and contradictions, all the ways it gets us home.” Their focus on the regional in its paradox and contradiction is timely and important—politically, ecologically, and socially. This specific attention to place, arguably, needs to be at the forefront of literary analysis and even our own writing for us to make sense of the present age. In fact, Leonard Lutwack in The Role of Place in Literature argues, “An increased sensitivity to place seems to be required, a sensitivity inspired by aesthetic as well as ecological values, imaginative as well as functional needs. In so far as the representation of place in literature has an important influence on how people regard individual places and the whole world as a place, it may be concluded that literature must now be seen in terms of the contemporary concern for survival.” Lutwack’s groundbreaking study on place and literature appeared in print clear back in 1984, but it seems all the more significant now. From Arkansas, Kyle Vaughn writes of his Mid-South home in The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places, but easily moves beyond its borders in the elegiac chapbook to explore environment, memory, and ultimately, transcendence. This chapbook not only explores the individual and the individual spaces and places that individual can occupy, but interrogates what Lutwack calls “the contemporary concern for survival.”

            Kyle Vaughn’s poems take his reader to mountain tops and grassy plateaus, exploring philosophical questions of loss and metaphysics. Vaughn’s speaker asks, “And in any hard season, who / are you, are you one who will find / enough to live on in this world?” (“Blackland Prairie”). This question, central to the chapbook as a whole, connects the disparate threads of Vaughn’s poetry. Not only is the poem rooted in a specific place (Blackland Prairie, a large native tallgrass grassland in central Texas that has been 99.9% lost to other use), but it conflates the individual (a reflexive you, i.e. the speaker) with the vulnerable place. This is significant. Vaughn’s speaker is in nature. He is a part of nature. Vaughn comes by this honestly, developing setting and a personal story in tandem throughout the chapbook. Initially, the speaker is lost, bereft even, mourning a beloved. In “Lonely Traveler,” Vaughn writes,

            Anywhere I’ve roamed was never far enough 
to find myself. Cathedral, citadel, temple in which

no animal may be harmed. Old mountain lodge, petrified
forest, cold dunes. Always I set out to make it

all the way around, get to some unlonely heaven on
the other side of things. Only found the solitary

trails…And always my silence
is an apology, a penance for carrying my worry to

so many places.

The searching never ends for Vaughn’s speaker. The mourning never ends. For our speaker, “ghosts // bloom from any absence” (“The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places”). Yet, as the poems progress, as he moves through time, the speaker’s understanding of grief and spirituality shift. He gains a clearer understanding of who he is across the poems and describes how his wandering search has been a result of his grief for his lost love, not a pursuit of some intangible transcendence: “Up western summit to go further out / from grieving…I went up but didn’t rise” (“November, Sol Duc Falls Trail”). Vaughn’s speaker is rooted to the earth, he doesn’t rise; therefore, he is only human, only one part of the greater-than-human world. This realization seems to reinforce the challenge of literature to interrogate why we engage with place—why attention to place and our position in nature is not only a concern for survival but a way of coming home. Lutwack’s work explores the metaphorical relationship of place in literature and how place and character and even reader share a dynamic relationship. The Alpinist Shearches Lonely Places embodies this dynamism. Vaughn’s speaker travels across the country, literally up and down mountains, to understand his grief and return home with a sense of peace. In “Leaving My Desires at the Sol Duc River,” the speaker transitions into this peace, explaining,

            I carried your image to an old growth forest.
you will never love me. My life’s meaning
is to be present for the first snow. To be

subsumed by winter, wardened by
evergreen. To set out as landscape
my heart through which timber fell.

As showcased here, the metaphysical and spiritual moments in Vaughn’s work are tempered by a deeply human voice and a speaker unafraid of vulnerability. As a result, the poems in The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places are not only accessible, but they create a compelling grief narrative that satisfies Lutwack’s goals of writing about place, personalizing the drama of humanity’s place in nature.

            Kyle Vaughn’s The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places is a chapbook, for all its breadth, that centers around the personal desire to find your center. For Vaughn’s speaker that center is in and through grief and nature. Much can be learned in these pages about the feelings, ideas and places wrapped up in the word home.

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

Memory of September

Inscape with Aviary

Vocabulary

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Eight

Dear Reader,

Issue 8 of The Shore takes on pasts, unflinchingly facing grief, movement and the ephemerality of the current moment. It is filled with rivers and rose gardens, crayons and hermit crabs, chickens and fields. These poets give language to the fleeting, providing a voice for what would otherwise pass by unspoken.

Here is what the contributors of issue 8 have been up to over the last two years:

Doug Ramspeck published his ninth poetry collection, Book of Years, in 2021. His poems have recently been published in Thrush and The Southern Review.

A Prevett received the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passages North in 2021, and has recently published poems in Frontier Poetry, Western Humanities Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Penn Review, Sixth Finch, Booth and Dear.

Donald Platt published his eighth book of poetry, Swansdown, in 2022. 

Jane Zwart has recently published poems in Plume,  Juxtaprose, Pidgeonholes, Bear Review, Salamander, and Issue 13 of The Shore.

Iheoma Uzomba won the Lagos/London Poetry Competition. She has recently published poems in Rattle and Arts Lounge.

Aiden Baker has recently published in Jet Fuel Review and Drunk Monkeys.

Jennifer Loyd has recently published poems in The Rumpus, Shenandoah and Poet Lore. She also edited a special feature for West Branch.

Jane Satterfield has recently published poems in Interim, Burrow Press Review, The Common and Literary Matters. 

Emry Trantham has recently published in Split Rock Review. 

Dylan Ecker has recently published poems in The Arkansas International, Twin Pies Literary, New Ohio Review and The Penn Review. 

Trivarna Hariharan has recently published poems in The Temz Review, Counterclock and Atticus Review.

Karah Kemmerly has recently published poems in Hooligan, Mason Jar Press, Crab Creek Review, Whale Road Review and Dear.

Su Cho published her first poetry collection, The Symmetry of Fish, a 2021 National Poetry Series winner.

Laura Minor recently published a poem in The Normal School.

Hannah Bridges published a poem in The Atlanta Review.

Eileen Winn recently published in Small Orange and received a 2021 AWP Intro Award honorable mention. 

Ann Pedone published The Italian Professor’s Wife in 2022, and her book The Medea Notebooks is forthcoming in 2023. She has also recently published poems in Inksounds, The American Journal of Poetry and Narrative.

Kelly R Samuels published a book of poems titled All the Time in the World and has recently published poems in The Normal School, Bear Review and Sweet. 

Nicole Stockburger has recently published poems in Had, Beloit Poetry Journal and The West Review.

Michael Battisto has recently published poems in Fly Paper Lit, Wrong Publishing, Eunoia Review, Wales Haiku Journal, Poet Lore and Counterclock. 

Simon Perchik published his 30th collection of poetry, The Family of Man, in 2021. He recently published poems in Plume and The Bombay Review. Simon passed away in June 2022 at 98 years old, may he rest in peace. 

Steven D Schroeder published a book of poems titled Wikipedia Apocalyptica in 2022. 

Jed Myers third full-length poetry collection, Learning to Hold, is a winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award and is forthcoming in 2024. He has recently published poems in Rust & Moth, Terrain and Rattle.

Michael Garrigan has recently published in River Teeth, Orange Blossom Review, and Orion.

Veronica Kornberg has recently published poems in On the Seawall, West Trestle Review, Rhino, and Lake Affect.

Kate Sweeney published the chapbook The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us in 2022, and has recently published poems in Jet Fuel Review and Northwest Review.

Adam Houle recently published poems in Sequestrum and Guest House.

Ellery Beck has recently published art in Phoebe, Interim, Santa Clara Review and So to Speak. They have recently published poems in Runestone, Rappahannock Review, Thin Air and The Pinch.

Congratulations on all your brilliant accomplishments!

Sincerely,
Sarah Brockhaus

Pushcart Nominees 2022!

Congratulations to our 2022 Pushcart nominees!

Ellery Beck “In Winter, We Tried to Write”
Jill Crammond “How to Bury a Bird”
Derek N Otsuji “Hunting for Octopus at Night”
Jess Smith “Retreat”
Nano Taggart “On Selecting the Contents of Care Package Number Three”
Any Wang “Summer fire”

Thank you so much to all our contributors for making this such a difficult decision. Please join us in celebrating the nominees.

With love and admiration,
The Shore Crew

Review: Carolyn Oliver

On Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble by Carolyn Oliver

by Tyler Truman Julian

Carolyn Oliver’s Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is a skillfully crafted debut, powerfully rendered with the talent of a poet sure of her craft and steady in her ambition. The collection moves easily through time and subject; the speaker engages, one moment, with her son, discussing koala bears, the next, tracks Eve and various saints as they interact with different artists and the speaker herself. Oliver does this effectively, maintaining a sure command of both the collection’s narrative, arc, and poetic structures. Across narrative, prose, lyric, and occasional aubade, epithalamion, and structurally experimental genres, Oliver builds a cohesive, interesting, and moving collection that in less capable hands would feel disjointed.

Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is ambitious, yet finds ground in the real world. The saints, the art, the academic moments throughout the collection are all rooted in human moments that connect to themes of nostalgia, childrearing and family relationships, and liberation. Oliver begins the collection with a poem about her son and a larger question of ecological, social, and personal survival. The poem, “My Son Asks if I Would Rather Live in a House Infested by Bees or a House Infested by Koalas,” is predicated on a realistic, childish question, climbs to a crescendo that connect the three themes above, introducing them to the reader. She writes,

            So, my son’s question. Survival means
koalas on the stairs, lamps turned boughs,
menthol in the mouth. Means marked territories

and the slow click of claws in the dark, days
safe in a house full of sleep. But sometimes—
it feels right to tell you this—sometimes

  inside the storm I want to touch the tremble
of a colony warming its queen. I want
walls seeping honey. I want a willing tongue.

So much rests on the you of the poem’s eighteenth line. There’s the personal address to the son and the address to the reader. Here, we begin to learn the collection’s crucial conflict between the speaker’s desire for liberation and the need to care for others, a conflict that returns often throughout the collection. It’s a complicated conflict, and Oliver offers many entry points to help the reader come to understand. Eve reflects on the freedom of her fall, St. Ursula encourages Emily Dickinson toward individualism, John Donne takes comfort from Leonard Cohen as the world ends, and in “Ohio, the late 90s” the speaker observes a classmate, wise beyond her years, and explains how complicated it is to look at another with admiration. Of the classmate, the speaker tells us,

Behind the girl, a dark hedge, a melon-curve of sky ripe for summer.
This is twenty years ago.

She has her own baby girl now, real sick, and the insurance company
won’t approve her medicine.

(“Skin”)

This example emphasizes the-care-of-others-versus-care-of-self-conflict because the speaker is mesmerized by the knowledge this eighth grade girl has and craves her freedom and maturity in the early lines of the poem, but by these last four lines, Oliver’s speaker emphasizes how time has leveled the playing field and the freedom the preteen had twenty years ago has now been absorbed by caring for another. Clearly, this is not a black and white conflict, but memory and family relationships can rarely be delineated into black and white. There’s something lost when either choice is made, to love another or to love yourself. Nowhere in the collection is this more poignant and pointed than in “Listening to Ralph Vaughn Williams on a Tuesday Night,” an elegy to a lover:

            Tonight I close a book, note
the oval smudge on its edge. You held
your books this way, index finger braced
against the spine’s opposite—the sternum?
Your fingerprint in pencil means
you were writing the day you turned these pages
though the margins are First Communion white,
a record of that pristine attention
you offered other poets,
you gave it again and again
as if rehearsing a longer silence.

Opening the book once more I find
the inscription I missed, and then
your spiky initials inside the back cover.
Your letters look always like they want a life
off the page, the y in my name diving
twice as deep as the word,
and how is it you will never write
the poem that’s waiting
about gasping letters getting the bends?

Appearing approximately halfway through the collection, this poem only adds to the overall cohesion of it, emphasizing the problem of losing oneself in memory and the opportunity to recreate oneself after loss. The final pages of the collection capitalize on this desire. Oliver’s speaker revisits images and ideas from earlier to create a sense of resolution and completion for the reader. In “Midlife,” the speaker looks forward, declaring,

            And on this soft morning
nine years from now,
the days behind gone hollow,
the days ahead milling,
buzzing in their thousands,
waiting for you and
watching the bees drunk
on the stranger’s gift,
I could answer: yes.
This is the time, the place
to end, and start once more.
Let me be born again,
here with the laboring bees
in the last throes of their valiance.

Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is a masterful work. It pulls together disparate themes, characters, genres, and structures to build a debut that feels like the work of a poet who has honed her craft and written many books over many years. Oliver’s debut reminds us that complex poetics can be accessible. This collection should find its way onto reader’s shelves regardless of their level of formal poetic knowledge. Carolyn Oliver is a poet I will watch out for years to come.

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

Horses in the Mist

Saint Agnes Meets a Hawk on the River’s Edge

Best of the Net Nominations 2022

Congratulations to our Best of the Net Nominees for 2022! Your poems continue to stun and inspire us.

Lisa Compo "Postscript"

Fatima Jafar "Silence"

Flourish Joshua "Akeldama"

Stephen Lackaye "The Poet at Seventeen"

Marlo Starr "Ghost & Gun"

Aron Wander "Often, we forget"

Thank you to all of our contributors and readers for being part of The Shore fam.

With Our Deepest Admiration,

The Shore Crew

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Seven

Dear Reader, 

Issue 7 of The Shore is brimming with the strange and aching: a rosebush stomach, neighborhood bobcat, the moon growing a sweaty upper lip, a termite in an apple. These poets get up close and specific in their work, never letting you dare to look away.

Here is what the contributors of issue 7 have been up to in the past 2 years:

Melissa Crowe was the 2021 winner of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She had a poem featured in Poetry Daily and poems published in New England Review, Four Way Review, Poetry Northwest, The Bear Review and Sugar House Review.

Lisa Ampleman had poems published in The Rumpus, Sweet and Ecotone.

Susan Rich published a collection of new and selected poems titled Gallery of Postcards and Maps.

Taylor Byas won 1st place in Frontier Poetry’s 2020 Award for New Poets and the Beloit Poetry Journal 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Award. She has also released two chapbooks, Bloodwarm (2021) and Shutter (2022). Her debut full length collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is forthcoming in 2023 from Soft Skull Press. 

Joely Byron Fitch published an essay in Blue Earth Review. 

Emma Aylor published poems in Diagram, The Yale Review, Terrain.org, Roanoke Review and AGNI. 

Jill Mceldowney published poems in Barren Magazine and Muzzle Magazine.

Samuel Adeyemi won the 2021 Nigerian Students Poetry Prize. He published poems in Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, Brittle Paper, Afro Literary Magazine, Indigo Literary Journal, Kissing Dynamite and more.

Taylor Fedorchak published poems in Counterclock and Gigantic Sequins.

Susan Moon published poems in Lammergeier, Porridge and Honey Literary.

Owen McLeod published poems in Copper Nickel and The Southern Review. 

Olúwádáre Pópóọla published poems in Palette Poetry and Frontier Poetry.

Isaac George Lauritsen published poems in Muzzle, Hobart, Sidereal and Jabberwock Review. He also published fiction in The Maine Review. 

Duncan Mwangi published in Shift.

Adam Day published poems in No Contact, Overheard and Interim. 

Natalie Young led a workshop and read at the Utah Poetry Festival in April 2022. 

Dan Wiencek published his first poetry collection, Routes Between Raindrops. 

Andy Keys published poems in Twyckenham Notes.

Vincent Poturica published poems in Telephone and his fiction was selected for the Best Small Fiction Anthology 2021. 

Katherine Fallon published a chapbook titled Demoted Planet in 2021. She also published a poem in The Los Angeles Review and fiction in AGNI.

Sarah Lilius published a full-length poetry collection titled Dirty Words. She also published poems in Two Hawks Quarterly, Fatal Flaw, Coal Hill Review, Kissing Dynamite and more.

Troy Varvel published poetry in River Styx.

Katherine Eulensen had a poem from Bear Review featured by RevisitLit on twitter.

Mayowa Oyewale published poems in Blue Marble Review, The Cardiff Review, Sand and Gutter.

James Grinwis published poems in Painted Bride Quarterly.

Barbara Daniels published poems in Apple Valley Review, Atticus Review, The Dodge and The American Journal of Poetry. 

David Spicer published poems in Delta Poetry Review. 

Christen Noel Kauffman published a collection of lyric essays titled Notes to a Mother God in 2021. She has poems published or forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Rhino, South Florida, Prism Review and Sugar House Review, among many others.

Jeffrey Hermann published poems in Blood Tree, One Art, Feral, Rejection Letters and Lost Balloon.

Jude Marr published poems in Leavings, Moria, Icefloe Press and Boats Against the Current. 

Emily Lake Hansen received the 2022 Longleaf Poetry Fellowship. She also published poems in Up The Staircase Quarterly, Limp Wrist, Poetry Online, So To Speak, One Art, Glass and more.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi has published widely, most recently in Sugared Water, Trampset and Gone Lawn. She has poems forthcoming in Pidgeonholes, The Cortland Review, Salt Hill Journal, Rhino, Moon City Review and Counterclock. She also published a poetry chapbook titled Cartography of Trauma and a micro chapbook titled Cinophile.

Gary Fox has a new poem forthcoming in The Shore.

Jack B. Bedell published collections of poetry titled Color All Maps New (2021) and Against the Wood’s Dark Trunks (2022). He also published poems in Iamb.

Joe Lugara was the cover artist for Pithead Chapel Magazine (2021) and The MacGuffin (winter 2021).

Congratulations on your numerous well-earned achievements, we look forward to seeing what you achieve next!

Sincerely, 

Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Rachel Marie Patterson

On Tall Grass with Violence by Rachel Marie Patterson

by Tyler Truman Julian

From the outset, Tall Grass with Violence by Rachel Marie Patterson is rooted in the erotic, as Audre Lorde sees it. Lorde once wrote, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” For Lorde, the erotic isn’t only about sex and sexuality, it’s a “deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” The erotic is about desire, reclamation and freedom. Knowing oneself is the beginning of freedom and Tall Grass with Violence’s deeply human, often personal poems, exploring change and growth, revenge and resilience, create a truly powerful work of art.

The poems of Tall Grass with Violence are sensual, image-driven, building on one another so that the four sections of the collection tell a story of self-discovery and shifting power dynamics. The speaker sets the stage for this growth early in the collection, announcing in the second poem, “If nothing changes, / nothing ends” (“Metairie II”). And what ends? The first section of the collection presents a series of poems examining the theme of isolation: “I have tried to have a joyful heart, / to be made perfect” (“Metairie III”). The tone of this section signals to the reader that this pursuit of joy is ongoing, and we wonder if this isolation will, in fact, end. The speaker even desires the aloneness, to an extent, confiding in the tenth poem of the Metairie series, “You can always be alone / here with the salt grass, the rigs and their / perfect lights.” This speaker is experiencing the depth of her feelings. Even if the lonely feelings are unrealized and their import is uncertain, the speaker finds connection to the Louisiana landscape and it is in this connection to a fragile and shifting environment that she takes her first steps deeper into the erotic, self-realization and ultimately, power.

The second section of the collection pulls back from the imagist-influenced poetry of the first to wax narrative. Between memories, Patterson uses the lyric occasion to help the speaker sort through the emotions of the first section and give the reader a foothold in her world. Where the speaker seems lost and pensive in the first section, she uses the second section to explore the idea of freedom and what it takes to achieve it. In “The Seahorse Motel,” a coming-of-age poem, the speaker muses on rebellion and giving into feelings that spur on action:
My cousin taught me how to drink
in a half-priced room at the Seahorse Motel
with a handle of 151 and a liter of coke.
…
It was just the first drop, but
that night I understood the clean thrill
of forgetting, the numb thrill of waking
sleep. We stumbled to the street to smoke
our Newports, my spectral body teetering
against the salted air. I loved him for what
we shared, our mothers as nervous as purse-dogs,
our fathers severe and reticent. We stayed
awake all night, and when I finally blanked out,
I dreamt that there was no reason for all
our meanness—just that half-kicked bottle.
There is physical and emotional danger in the rebellion in this poem, but this rebellion also leads to a deeper understanding of self. Perhaps the attention to this risk is what Lorde means when she writes, “We have been taught to suspect this resource [the erotic], vilified, abused and devalued within western society.” In fact, it is after this poem remembering the Seahorse Motel that the collection turns again, often conflating human emotion with the actions of animals and shifts into the third section that relies heavily on allusions to myth and folklore. Patterson’s poems move from the realm of memory to the realm of fantasy to investigate liberation and how it is, to borrow from Lorde, vilified, abused and devalued. She uses the myth of Melusine, a mermaid-like serpent woman, the legend of seal-women, the classic story of sirens, and a general mysticism to highlight how feminine power is linked to the monstrous. And in this mythmaking, the speaker becomes aware of the power she holds, revealing,
I am not anything you ought to want,
                        or anyone—still, I’m the electric fence
                                    you keep touching.                                                         (“I Am the Match”)
And
            If I am bright,
if I am burning,

who’s to say I’m not
the sun? All your body
will be a pocket

for my impulses. So comb
your pockets; find the charm
you think will moor me.

I’ll bloom for you, then
I’ll pucker to a lime, but you’ll
go on admiring

my shoulders, my painted wings.                                                                            (“Siren”)
These are the words of a speaker grown into herself, someone who has come to understand the erotic.             The last section of Tall Grass with Violence presents a mature speaker, blending the image-driven poetry from the collection’s early pages and the narratives of its middle sections to create a sense of self-actualization for the speaker and resolution for the reader. The poems frequently show the speaker, who is no longer alone but has found a lover, claiming her own space. In “High Acres Drive,” the speaker reflects on the process of moving into a new house, replacing her home’s previous tenants:
The last woman who lived here
bought bricks and a kitchen, planted
a garden, then became a widow.
We spend our first spring mowing
dead nettles along the rusted gate.
I line three amber bottles above
the sink where you won’t forget—
aspirin for your blood, iron for your gut,
and the daily capsule that slows
your heart. We should fix the steel
windows, caulk the tile, have a baby.
First, scrape the old name off the mailbox.
This claiming of space suggests the alteration in Patterson’s speaker, one who has recognized the power in feeling. In the poem immediately following “High Acres Drive,” this shift is further illuminated when the speaker reveals, “For a long time, I was afraid that only good people / were able to be happy” (“The Worst Thing”). The speaker is happy but seems to recognize that the depression and loneliness present in the preceding poems were equally as important emotions as joy is now. It is in recognizing emotion and the power of expression that the speaker finds wholeness. In a quasi-ars poetica, the speaker posits, “To write a poem, you have to be afraid” (“Lake House”). Poetry, specifically the poems of Tall Grass with Violence, confronts fear, often gently but in order to cultivate power. “Giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity,” Lorde writes, “is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.” This reclamation of fear is at the heart of Tall Grass with Violence and adds meaningfully to conversations of power and change.
In Tall Grass with Violence, Rachel Marie Patterson creates an erotic exploration of change and a powerful story of self-discovery. The erotic “is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing,” writes Lorde, and it is in this question that Patterson’s speaker rests, offering narrative, image-rich poems, rooted in revelatory lyric moments of growth and motivation. “Only now,” Lorde summarizes, “I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange.” It is in the creative nature of the erotic that individuals make change, and in this way, Patterson both challenges and shines light on the weary drama of everyday life. Tall Grass with Violence recognizes the political in the personal and Patterson motivates each of us to be brave enough to feel deeply with her.

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

Market

Review: David Greenspan

On One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan

by Tyler Truman Julian

            With a title like One Person Holds So Much Silence, it’s easy to default to a state of questioning with David Greenspan’s new chapbook. Some questions that arise from this short collection are What is the speaker withholding? and What is he inviting the reader into? Greenspan is not without answers, however. The chapbook’s answers to these questions rest in familial and generational trauma and pain, addiction and sickness, and not to mention, hope. But when it comes to silence, potentially the most nuanced and compelling aspect of Greenspan’s work, it is contained into the white and blank spaces of the collection. These moments of caesura force the reader into a poem’s overt and material silences, asking them to sit and reflect and to feel a necessary discomfort.

One Person Holds So Much Silence is a challenging read, parked at the intersection of many roads. It tugs between humanism and naturalism, narrative and erasure, and active participation and passive acceptance to cultivate a bold communal vision of poetry. The collection pulls the reader to that busy intersection with the speaker and asks, What silences do we hold? And can we hold them together?

            In Greenspan’s collection, the figure of the body acts as a conduit for spiritual experience. I do not mean to suggest a kind of divinity at work, but rather a pure and transcendent significance of experience. In the long Q&A style poem, “Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the speaker espouses his life’s philosophy: “There is no blood without blood.” In the biological sense, there is no life without blood; abstractly, there is no living without a little bloodshed. Nonetheless, there rests a deep desire for living in these poems, but also flirtatious descriptions of death and decay. Both descriptions of life and death seem tied to this idea that there is no living without bloodshed. both connect to the reality of bodily experience making us human. The speaker further explores this idea of experience as life-giving, saying, “What do we think when we hear sensual. A feeling of hands along other hands, water along filament. How much more can we syllogism. All ash is tactile. Lungs are ash” (“We the Dead Balk”). This prose poem uses the page, breaking at paragraphs, jumping to the next page, asking you to sit with the images of body parts and flashes of earth. The reading itself becomes a physical act as the reader is propelled to the next page, repeatedly, to finish the poem. Several pages later, “We the Dead Balk” continues, exploring experience and humanity, but taking them further and inviting the reader to make their own conclusion: “Our body has not found a destination & will be declared stateless unless claimed before [          ]” What makes us human? What connects us to the body that is our planet? What happens when we die and individual physical pain subsides, but others remain behind? We fill in the blank.

            The connection of spirit to body to earth is concrete in these pages in a complicated way that the reader is forced to come back to again and again. If they can’t fill in the blank in “We the Dead Balk,” they get more opportunities later. For example, the speaker becomes more explicit in “A Poem to Pass the Time.” He asks,

                                                what use is a landscape
            without hair    a landscape meatless
            pitied
…
                                    I guess my entire body
wants to scream          say please
say one person holds so much
silence

This poem provides another glimpse into a childhood connected to nature and Vicodin and anxiety and ends the chapbook. The words jump across the page in alternating short and long lines, with an abundance of white space. The reader has ample room to feel the silence, ask and answer the speaker’s questions, and participate in the poem itself. Rounding out a dynamic, communal collection, the poem is cathartic for speaker and reader, clarifying nuanced moments of the chapbook and inviting further reflection

            David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence is a haunting work, where the ghosts are not only the speaker’s but also our own as readers. Readers of this work participate in Greenspan’s project as much as the speaker himself and we may not come out unscathed, but we certainly come out better for having done so. We are asked to leap from word to word, page to page, and poem to poem, hoping to avoid the frequent white space for fear of the possibilities that might lay within it. But of course, we will fail, as intended.

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

Language for the needy thing in your lungs

Portrait of the ocean as a young artist

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Six

Dear Reader,

Issue Six of The Shore came out in the summer of 2020. In a moment of isolation, the poems and art in this issue find ways to reach beyond—exploring the ordinary with newfound patience & precision, reflecting on self & memory and redefining human connection.

In the last two years, the poets and artists of this issue have continued reaching out and impacting the world. Here is what they have been up to:

Catherine Pierce published her newest book, Danger Days with Saturnalia Books in October of 2020. She became poet laureate of Mississippi in April of 2021. She won her second Pushcart Prize in 2021.

Kim Harvey published micro chapbooks with Kissing Dynamite Press and Ghost City Press.

Beth Gylys published a collection of poetry titled Spot in the Dark in 2021 which received the Ohio State University Journal Award. She also had poems featured in The Best American Poetry and Verse Daily.

Joshua Garcia is a 2021-2022 Stadler Fellow and received his MFA in poetry from College of Charleston in 2021. He was interview by The Massachusetts Review. He has published poems in Yes Poetry and The Georgia Review, among many others. He has received Best New Poet 2022 nominations for poems published in The Massachusetts Review and Arts & Letters.

Sara Moore Wagner published her second book Tumbling After in March of 2022. She received the 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and was a finalist for the 2022 National Poetry Series. She has published extensively, most recently in Permafrost, Jabberwock Review, Atticus Review and Little Patuxent Review. She has poems forthcoming in Meridian, Limp Wrist and The Pinch, among others.

Kristi Maxwell published poems in The Gravity of The Thing, Another Chicago Magazine, La Vague Journal, and Storm Cellar.

Dillon Thomas Jones published his first poetry book with word west press.

Matthew Bruce had a poem published in Coal Hill Review.

Lorrie Ness has published widely, most recently in journals such as Rogue Agent, Empty House Press and Rappahannock Review. She has poems forthcoming in many journals, including River Heron Review, Eunoia Review, and Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art.

C.C. Russell published poems at No Contact.

Travis Truax published poems in Baltimore Review and Cumberland River Review.

Stanley Princewill McDaniels published poems in Icefloe Press, Libretto and Jalada.

Njoku Nonso published poems in Lumiere Review, Bodega and Nigerian News Direct.

Erin Rodoni published a poetry book titled And If the Woods Carry You which won the 2020 Michael Waters Poetry Prize.

Phillip Sterling had a poem featured by the Poetry Society of Michigan. He also had a poem published in Cider Press Review.

William Doreski published multiple book reviews in Harvard Review and published poems in The Westchester Review and New World Writing. He also published his most recent book of poetry in 2021, titled Mist in Their Eyes.

Emma Alexandrov is the editor for Windows Facing Windows Review.

Jay Kophy published poems in Four Way Review, Lolwe, The Indianapolis Review, and Rogue Agent Journal.

Ajay Kumar had poems published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Alipore Post and Isacoustic.

David Greenspan published a book of poetry titled One Person Holds So Much Silence in March of 2022. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is now a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. He also had poems published in Superstition Review, Diagram and more.

Carolyn Supinka has published widely in journals such as The Indianapolis Review, Radar Poetry and Sixth Finch. She also has poems forthcoming in The West Review and Birdcoat Quarterly.

Carlo Rey Lacsamana has published creative nonfiction at Citron Review, an essay at Rigorous Magazine and fiction at Amsterdam Quarterly.

Maya Lowy has published poems in Black Coffee Review and Quaint Magazine.

John Sibley Williams published a book of poetry titled The Drowning House which won the Elixir Press Poetry Award. He has published widely, recently in Breakwater Review, Solstice and Waxwing.

Amanda Pendley published poems in Kalopsia and Fools Magazine.

Dorsía Smith Silva published poems in Pidgeonholes, Superstition Review, The Hopper, Porter House Review and ANMLY.

Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau was interview by Literature Voices. His manuscript, The Morning The Birds Died, was a finalist in the 2021 Sillerman Prize. He has published poems at Have Has Had, Frontier Poetry and Lolwe.

Brooke Sahni published a book of poems titled Before I Had the Word in 2021. She has also published poems in Frontier Poetry, Interim, Zocalo, and Nimrod.

Caroline Shea received her MFA from New York University. She has published poems in Glass and Narrative Magazine.

Luke Johnson has had poems published by Louisiana Literature, Frontier Poetry, Cortland Review and Vox Populi. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press and The Vassar Miller Award.

Liza Katz Duncan received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her book, Given will be published in 2023 and won the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award. She has had poems published in The National Poetry Review, AGNI, About Place and more. She has poems forthcoming in Poet Lore, Poem-A-Day and Broadsided Press.

Connie Wasem Scott published a chapbook titled Predictable as Fire in 2021. Her full-length poetry collection, The Open Hand of Sky, will be published in August of 2022. She has recently published poems in American Poetry Journal, Pontoon Poetry, Streetlight and Wildroof Journal.

Brenda Edgar recently published a poem in Rust + Moth. She also has poems forthcoming in The Blue Mountain Review, The Main Street Rag and Crosswinds.

Michael Lauchlan has recently published poems in Cumberland River Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal and The Briar Cliff Review.

Natalie Shapero published her third poetry collection in 2021, titled Popular Longing.

Katie Delaney was an artist in the 2021 ICA Flat File Program.

Cleo Jones recently published her art in Beaver Magazine.

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

Sincerely,
Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Kathleen Winter

On Cat’s Tongue by Kathleen Winter

by Tyler Truman Julian

Memory is the thread that connects the poems in Kathleen Winter’s probing new chapbook, Cat’s Tongue. Memory runs through poems exploring aging, childhood and inheritance, asking what it is we keep from our ancestors and what we leave for others in our wake. This is sensitive poetry, aware of past, present and future, and both the speaker’s and our collective impact on all three.

It is not easy work to break down our impact on time and the people around us, but Winter’s poetry is more than equipped for the challenge. Unafraid to climb into abstraction, Winter pulls the poetry back to earth and humanizes this short collection through the confessional moment, often embracing humor and the uncanny. She writes,

This is temporary       a misunderstanding
between myself and me.

How I came to be caught in my own net,
the red blur of an old girl.

Half-submerged body—craft to carry just one animal.

I pull myself up

by the boot-strap of my braid.

Memory! I send the last dog to greet you

with his one wild eye.

(“Beside Myself”)

This short poem opens the chapbook and captures so much of what the collection is. As if to put a period on this first poem, Winter’s speaker tells us in the next poem, “I’m not thinking of/how time was, but of what the instance felt like,” and of course, this second poem is about a childhood memory of holding a snake and the breakdown of expectation, and of course, this second poem is called “Some days I want certainty, some days, revelation.” Winter’s poems are relatable, even when they wax abstract or personal. The poetics carry them and we can easily see ourselves sitting “on the floor, waiting/for the snake to make the rounds,” wondering what it feels like, only to be surprised at the unexpected, forced to grow up. This could be our childhood memory or a parent’s, told to us at the dinner table. Regardless, we inherit a lesson, just as the speaker does. We learn about expectation and adulthood.

This is it, the crux of the chapbook: What can we learn from memory and its inheritance? And Winter lays this out throughout the collection, building finally to “Call It Like You See It,” an almost response to “Some days I want certainty, some days, revelation.” Her speaker, reflecting on a cold, dreary day, declares,

            The Labrador inside his faux fur rug
is Sultan of Dog
and wouldn’t say no to a pastry.
Why rise from bed
when the owl yet sings in the mesquite
and no one has made coffee.
Tomorrow without fail
brings rain, more cold.
The Sultan and his retinue
have each grown up and almost
old. Who knows what song
the owl pronounces now
in oval tones—the fable’s knell,
or an avian solicitation?

Who knows what tomorrow might bring beside the cold? But we can call it as we see it and learn from it as we go. Cat’s Tongue is Kathleen Winter and her speaker’s opportunity to call it as they see it and sits as a challenge to us to evaluate our memories and how they impact our lives and those around us.

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

Finally the Girls

Phone Interview with Medusa