Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Tostevin, Tucker, Czaga, Christie, Kronovet, Abel and Poe.

Anticipating the release next week of the seventh issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the sixth issue: Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel and Deborah Poe.

Interviews with contributors to the first six issues, as well, remain online: Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming seventh issue features new writing by: Stan Rogal, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi and Suzanne Zelazo. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first six issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. We are minutes away from anything.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Pirie, Clark, Carr, Holbrook, Dyckman + Wagner

Anticipating the release next week of the third issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the second issue: Pearl Pirie, David Peter Clark, Julie Carr, Susan Holbrook, Susanne Dyckman and Catherine Wagner.

Interviews with contributors to the first issue, as well, remain online: Gil McElroy, Camille Martin, Pattie McCarthy and Eric Baus.

The third issue features new writing by Gil McElroy, j/j hastain, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, Susan Briante and D.G. Jones. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of both the first and the second issue are still available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. Isn't that grand?

Donkey photo kindly provided by Deborah Poe.

Handsome journal, volume 5, no 1

THE WORLD IS BEAUTIFUL BUT YOU ARE

NOT IN IT

Let me refer to myself in glorious ways:

colors seem brighter, the sky is a shocking blue.

I carry my stomach in this bowl

and earth is planted in my blood.

From your last letter, I gather hills.

I’m trying to keep my tenderness in check.

Trying to see what kind of grill the neighbors have

is everything I couldn’t do before.

Now brown eggs shift heavy in my palms, this bowl.

Words make their way up my thigh.

I swear very nice boy and I refer to myself.

No. The hills are holding you and I refer to myself.

Let’s be honest: I need a real man, I say out loud.

Every weakness I have settles into a tree trunk,

stays all winter. I don’t know if I mean it.

Winter has lasted five years already.

This morning I press into the edges of my stomach.

My mother makes coffee in California.

Ladies will say we are expert with machines

but they will be two bottles under sangria.

I said you could make music out of this.

Ingesting artificial palm trees, exploding.

Your letters are getting shorter. I am getting close

enough to the sun to touch the tip of its cigar.

We carry what is shocking and heavy in blood.

Music seems brighter: the sky the sky. (Morgan Parker)

After a short wait, I finally received my contributor copy of the fifth annual HANDSOME journal, produced by Black Ocean. Launched recently at AWP in Boston, this issue contains one hundred and twenty pages of strong writing, most by writers I haven’t previously heard of. I’m slowly and still working my way through learning the names and writing of contemporary American poets, but there are still only two that haunt the pages of this new issue, being Deborah Poe [author of a recent chapbook through above/ground press] and Brian Henry. A graceful journal of new poetry, HANDSOME is edited by Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Allison Titus, and published by Janaka Stucky. Another of a series of journals who publish work sans author biography, I’m left with the work itself, immediately struck by the work of Morgan Parker, Kristina Marie Darling and Sarah Goldstein. There is something of Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay (Slope Editions, 2002) to Kristina Marie Darling’s poem, in that the footnote quickly overtakes the body of the poem. Sarah Goldstein’s pieces in this issue are a small handful of “untitled” prose-poems, wrapping a rather straightforward lyric story with just a hint of something more, something surreal, akin to Miranda July or Lydia Davis. She says just enough in each piece, but there is so much more beneath the surface; suggested, but still hidden.

UNTITLED (PROPERTY)

The woman in the house down the road, whose phone bill you accidentally received and ripped open, fills her doorway, out of which wafts the dark smell of potpourri. You’ve seen her in the branches of the furious thickets between your houses calling her dog, thrashing like a shark in a net. You talk about the neighborhood squirrels: the big one with deep cuts on its shoulder, and the other one that made it through the winter without any fur. Large white cat in the window, large yellow dog pushing and whining behind her. “Oh, you’re so bad, you’re so bad,” she says to him. The dog always runs to you when he sees you, snapping the leash out of her hand, shoving his desperate head into your belly.

Some other pieces that struck include Jenny Drai’s poem “DER ABFLUG,” as well as Audrey Walls’ striking poem “Aquaphobia,” which ends with the lines: “You could drown in two inches // of water, my mother once warned. All you need / is someone to hold you under.” Kerri Webster has four poems in the new issue, each with the title “DIADEM,” and I wonder if these are a stand-alone quartet, or, like Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011), part of something much larger? I would like to see more.

DIADEM

Jupiter is fucking with me. What I know

of cruelty: a world is made

we did not ask for. In the dark, boys

set the dog on fire, let it loose

in the field. What

do you believe? Chanting what

as you go to sleep? I

see: same trees. Same locust

blossoms. I walk and walk. Smoke

from the burning scrapwood

shuts my eyes.

Deborah Poe, the last will be stone, too

endless rebirth

nails and teeth

organs flesh and bone

dusk reverie rabbit then deer

hard substance of body, the earth

sweat bile and blood

tears fat and mucus

jellyfish

fluids, water

body mechanisms fire

physical warmth, aging

fireflies at night

the scattering sparks

breathing

in the belly

the crepuscular crow

energy, movement

pink light on black pavement

when the body’s fire dissolves into wind

thin paper’s fragility

skin cools

mouth nostrils and ears

the rhythm circles, repeats

from the feet upward to the heart

the dissolution of elements

beyond the physical body’s slow ring

In her third trade poetry collection, the last will be stone, too (Ithica, NY: Stockport Flats, 2013), Hudson Valley poet Deborah Poe composes a study of death in four sections: people, place, animal and ghost. Originally produced as four chapbooks as part of the dusie kollektiv #5, part of the strength of this collection is in how the multiple voices come through the text, from one piece of fading text across bold, from a series of italicized choruses and a poem in binary, or in more subtle ways, wrapped underneath and across straighter lines. Through composing lines in italics, it is as though Poe has composed a poem within the poem, commenting on the main line of the piece and responding to it. Even the preface, the poem “death mix” (called “tract” in the table of contents), is entirely chorus, written nearly as a kind of foreshadowing, writing:

stone, wherever you look, stone

in the passages, passages

let the grey animal in

O one, o none o no one, o you

As Poe writes to open her lengthy “notes” at the end of the collection, “The title of this collection is based on a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope (Athneum Publishers 1970): Once, resting by the pile of rocks, [Osip] said, ‘My first book was Stone, and my last will be stone, too’ (399, emphasis mine).” In a second collection composed as a “last book,” Poe uses erasure, lyric, ekphrasis, lists and the prose-poem in a collage of forms, each reaching toward some kind of unknowing, writing the conflict between comprehension and the impossibility of what might come, and the foreshadowing of death, the great equalizer. Throughout the collection, she weaves references to how the ancient Egyptians saw death to more than a couple of quotes from Nadezhda Mandelstam and other cultural counterpoints, each exploring death towards an accumulation of lyric on the subject, presented as a book-length essay-poem. As anyone knows, any book about death can’t help but be also a book about life, as one can’t exist without the tension of the other. In the hands of Deborah Poe, the last will be stone, too is a poem tightrope-taut.

le passage

No one asked if Magritte’s bowler-hatted homme was autobiographical. This is not a dream; it’s a vision. Past the sign, the significance. Winter sky. She doesn’t face you because she steadies an end. Cloth wrapped around her lower half, she hunches. The way forward is precarious. A body worn thin. She confronts dead sky. Flat panels—space between ground. Broken earth ocean. You come to nude body. Beauty is convenient. A set jaw line signals a smile. She’s gone spine. Shadows on twisted stairs rise behind. She has said all she has to say. All there is to do now is scream.

new from above/ground press: new titles by mclennan, eckhoff, Poe + Cochrane

Notes, on the subject of marriage;

rob mclennan

$2

See link here for more information

their biography

kevin mcpherson eckhoff

$4

See link here for more information

Keep

Deborah Poe

$4

See link here for more information

Cat.

Mark Cochrane

$3

See link here for more information

published in Ottawa by above/ground press

September/October/November 2012

a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

20th anniversary above/ground press subscriptions now available for 2013!

See previous batches of above/ground press items listed here or keep scrolling down here. Check www.abovegroundpress.blogspot.com for regular updates, and sidebar links for chapbooks, “poem” broadsides (includinga new sub-series curated by Phil Hall!), author interviews and recent reviews of various titles, and a couple upcoming readings through The Factory Reading Series, which turns twenty years old in January! Review copies of any/all titles available (as supplies last).