Flash Fiction in Flapperhouse

The lovely Flapperhouse published my flash story, The Playground, in their Fall 2015 issue, and you can now read it online, here. So excited for this pub, as it marks my return to fiction, my primary game.

Poems in Menacing Hedge

Thrilled that Menacing Hedge published an excerpt from my chapbook, The Birth Creatures, in its Fall 2015 issue. Check it out, alongside some other great work, here.

2015 Book Roundup

New year, aka, time to throw a book list wrap-up at you.

Fiction highlights were Amelia Gray's new one, Gutshot, which I'm fairly sure I can credit with kicking my ass back into fiction-writing gear, and beginning Karl Ove Knausgaard's opus, My Struggle, which I think most people either love or hate for its painstaking attention to mundane detail. I don't know what it says about me, but I love it and can't wait for the U.S release of all its volumes. Poetry is, as usual, all over the map, but a standout for me was discovering the badass that is Cate Marvin. Similarly, with chapbooks, Amorak Huey's The Insomniac Circus slayed me with its cleverness. I often have a hard time finding nonfiction that blows me away. Jan Bondeson's Buried Alive was great for its subject matter and intrigued me enough to want to read more on the longstanding fear of being buried alive. Five Days at Memorial also drew me in - a good work of journalism that isn't totally without bias, but that doesn't overtly try to lead the reader to one conclusion or another.

Seeing as I did not meet any 2015 reading goals, I'll merely set out to have a literary and fulfilling 2016. :D

Fiction

Three Hundred Million – Blake Butler

The Poorhouse Fair – John Updike

Umbrella – Will Self

The Strange Library – Haruki Murakami

My Struggle: Book 1 – Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle: Book 2 – Karl Ove Knausgaard

Gutshot – Amelia Gray

Against the Country – Ben Metcalf

Binary Star – Sarah Gerard

Can’t and Won’t – Lydia Davis

The Cure for Suicide – Jesse Ball

The Heart Goes Last – Margaret Atwood

Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel

Slade House – David Mitchell

New American Stories – Ben Marcus

In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods – Matt Bell

Poetry

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing – Paul Muldoon

Strike/Slip – Don McKay

The Glacier’s Wake – Katy Didden

Twigs and Knucklebones – Sarah Lindsay

Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower – Sarah Lindsay

Strike Sparks: Selected Poems – Sharon Olds

The Keys to the Jail – Keetje Kuipers

Gurlesque – Lara Glenum

Not For Mothers Only – Rebecca Wolff

[insert] boy – Danez Smith

Heliopause – Heather Christle

Deep Lane – Mark Doty

Count the Waves – Sandra Beasley

The Bone Folders – T.A. Noonan

Confluence – Sandra Marchetti

Stationed Near the Gateway – Margaret Bashaar

The Lunatic – Charles Simic

Apocryphal – Lisa Marie Basile

Oracle – Cate Marvin

New Exercises – Franck Andre Jamme

The Last Two Seconds – Mary Jo Bang

World’s Tallest Disaster – Cate Marvin

Given – Arielle Greenberg

Satellite – Matthew Rohrer

Fragment of the Head of a Queen – Cate Marvin

Mr. West – Sarah Blake

The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems – Olena Kalytiak Davis

Erratic Facts – Kay Ryan

Non-Fiction

Deep Down Dark – Hector Tobar

Buried Alive – Jan Bondeson

Gods, Graves, and Scholars – C.W. Ceram

Yes Please – Amy Poehler

About Town: TNY and the World It Made: Ben Yagoda

Zine – Pagan Kennedy

Missoula – John Krakauer

The Bone Woman – Clea Koff

The Seven Good Years – Etgar Keret

Word Nerd – John D. Williams

The Invisible Sex – J.M. Adovasio

The Other Serious – Christy Wampole

Five Days at Memorial – Sheri Fink

Chapbooks

The Hows and Whys of My Failures – Dan Nowak

The Insomniac Circus – Amorak Huey

Mutant Neuron Codex Swarm – Juliet Cook and Robert Cole

Incident Reports – Caitlin Thomson

Blinded By Clouds – Risa Denenberg

war/lock – Lisa Marie Basille

wingless, scorched, and beautiful – Allie Marini Batts

Strangest Sea – Ariana den Bleyker

The Sheep Stealer – Jenn Blair

Orphans Burning Orphans – Gene Kwak

My Mother’s Child – Pamela Taylor

Traveling – M. Mack

Review: Orphans Burning Orphans by Gene Kwak

Orphans Burning Orphans by Gene Kwak
Greying Ghost Press, 2015
19 pages

I haven't done the Greying Ghost subscription for a few years, but they've always been one of my favorite small presses, so I was excited to get one this year. First up is Gene Kwak's Orphans Burning Orphans, a chap of six short stories. Staple-bound with black end-papers and a yellow cardstock cover that's stamped with black and red lightning/gun/fire imagery, the prose inside is quick and sharp to match.

The characters in Kwak's stories often come across as people trying to do good in the less-than-perfect situations they're put in. In "Neon God From The Top Turnbuckle" contemplates his own existence and whether he could continue the thread of himself through reproduction. "Red Skin, White Skin, Blue Skin," is a darkly funny story of a man attempting to go along with a lover's fetishes. Both of these pieces feature men struggling to find their place with women who don't always want what they want, making what they think are good decisions that ultimately mislead.

"The Death of Superman" and "Bad Done To His Good Hand" explore friendship and abuse through adolescent perspectives. The innocence lost in each - the severing of an inseparable childhood bond, the revenge taken by a child against an abusive family member - invokes a despair and hopelessness that isn't easy to clear away, no matter what the ending of "Bad Done To His Good Hand" suggests.

The story that feels like the black sheep of Orphans is "Warnings," though it's probably the most powerful piece in the collection. Propelling the story is a tragedy that befalls a man's child at a playground (one that I happen to have a somewhat irrational fear of, which may explain why I was most drawn to this piece), and while it's short and ends quietly, the ramifications of what's happened are huge.

Kwak's direct but poetic prose keeps all his stories on their tight tracks. Where other sparse prose is tired and distancing, the writing in Orphans is engaging, not wasting any sentence on trendiness or wit for the sake of it. Describing an encounter with a lover, the reader is asked to, "...imagine you only knew normal air and someone introduced you to a fog machine." It's satisfying to read fiction in which each line of prose is delicious and necessary, and each piece in Orphans Burning Orphans lives up to that.

Buy Orphans Burning Orphans here.

Poem In Fruita Pulp

The new issue of Fruita Pulp is out, and I have a new poem in it called "Feast on Top of A Smudged Glass Ceiling" that you can read here. There are some other fantastic poets in here too, so definitely check out the whole issue.

Big thanks to Kyle Harvey, Sonya Vatomsky, and the rest of the staff. I'm honored they included my work.

Poetry Review At The Rumpus

I wrote a review of F. Douglas Brown's latest collection, Zero to Three that you can read here. Some reflections on fatherhood and family, with some rhythm and pop culture thrown in.

Review: The Sheep Stealer by Jenn Blair

The Sheep Stealer by Jenn Blair
Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015
32 pages

Hyacinth Girl Press has become one of the few presses whose chapbooks I eagerly await, both for the badassery of their work and the stunning handmade style of their books. Kicking off their 2015 lineup is Jenn Blair's The Sheep Stealer, a poetic trek through rural America. Like all HGP titles, great care was taken in the aesthetic artistry of the book, featuring very simple cover art by Marian Scales, and my copy had flowery end-papers and lime green ribbon binding.

The twenty-three poems in The Sheep Stealer dance to the slow wilt and bloom of small-town, rural America, immersing themselves in a host of characters, meals, and ways of life. Blair's elaborate but pointed imagery carries the narratives, whether it's the prevalence of lamb's blood on everything in "Before the Flood" or a woman browsing brochures in a convenience store who, "inadvertently skins the knees of her / plump eyes on the word massacre," in the poem "Cherokee Summer" (oh, the power of a line that can make you stop, re-read, and then imagine it in your head).

Though the stories are diverse, they all speak to a movement within the stillness of place. This movement often comes in the form of travel, mostly on family vacations, and it also shows up in life cycles - birth, adolescence, and death. In "Vignette," two young girls go exploring and wind up dead; a boy confesses and is punished. "Gettysburg, 1992" is a fairly common snapshot of a family stopping in an antique store, the young girl bored and longing for the TV in the hotel room and fashion magazines. So much of these narratives is typical, but told with a breathtaking language and haunted nostalgia, and you find yourself looking between the lines for more from these characters.

My favorite poem in the collection is "Vessel," an inventory of mementos a mother keeps from her child's birth. It speaks of how she preserves, putting "small knit booties in / mason jars," and a baby footprint of "Five faint / pearls of toe and one gorgeous / black heel." We are shown a more literal imprint of life here, while the rest of the book recounts passages of time and life subtly, though the poem ends with the same "moving on" theme.

"Epilogue" closes the collection, moving primarily through the aging of nature, reminding us that, "once the beginning began / there was no way to turn it / back into itself." The act of looking back always takes place while life is moving relentlessly forward, no matter our desire to return to a certain newness from the past. The Sheep Stealer is an immensely satisfying and enjoyable chapbook to read. Rich in its language and setting, Jenn Blair's poems speak eloquently on adolescence, travel, loss, and the rural ways of life through an engaging cast of characters.

Buy The Sheep Stealer here.