August 2012
Lynne Thompson's Beg No Pardon won the Perugia Press First Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Thompson was recently commissioned to write a poem to celebrate the installation of Alison Saar's statue of Harriet Tubman at her alma mater, Scripps College, and she has received residences from the SLS Summer Literary Seminars and the Vermont Studio Center. Recent work has appeared in Sou'Wester, Solo Novo, Ploughshares and the 2010 anthology New Poets of the American West. The December 2012 issue of the journal Spillway will be her first as Review & Essay Editor of that publication.
FEAR OF THE BIT
First came a thought of pronouns, under-
pants, tin. Next, she noticed her parents
feared evolution and abstract paintings.
They taught her to fear one-liners, drywall,
and the entire state of Georgia. She taught
herself to fear receptacles, sportscasters,
corkscrews, and the number nine. While
others admit to a fear of interbreeding
and nomads, a clan of wild gypsies fears
Big Ben. Some Christians own up to a fear
A MUST READ for all artists, art worldians, literary folks and comic fans, now online: One of the greatest essays of all time on comics, fine art, classism, and elitism by the super litereray critic and theorist, the late Leslie Fiedle. His "The Middle Against Both Ends" : >http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1955aug-00016?View=PDF
I had the great joy of corresponding with Fiedler close to the end of his life via email --- he himself said he was on his "probable deathbed" in the hospital. He wrote up till the end. a giant of a thinker, reader, theorist and man.
Ryan Walsh grew up in West Virginia and is author of The Sinks (winner of the 2010 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest). His poems have appeared in Ecotone, FIELD, Green Mountains Review, Narrative, among others, and he serves on the editorial board of Q Ave Press, makers of handmade poetry chapbooks. He has degrees from Warren Wilson College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught for several years at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. A scholarship recipient from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and finalist for a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship in 2011, he currently works at the Vermont Studio Center and lives in Johnson, VT.
SAM'S GAP, TN/NC
You must be born again.
First clouds, then rain,
then evaporation's cool hand
lifting. The horizon we see
is the horizon. Tracings
of hawk. Eyeful
of mountain like
the body of the beloved
in repose. You cannot
go home again.
Matthew Guenette is the author of two books. His most recent poetry collection is American Busboy (University of Akron Press, 2011), a book inspired by his years busing tables at a vast warehouse of a seafood restaurant where the food was mostly fried and always served on disposable dinnerware. His first book, Sudden Anthem (Dream Horse Press, 2008), won the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He has been awarded residencies for the Hessen-Wisconsin Literary Fellowship and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Barn Owl Review, DIAGRAM, Indiana Review, and numerous others. He lives and works Madison, Wisconsin.
—PROLOGUE—
for Josh Bell
When we failed to steal lobsters
from a rival's tank
they made us eat
fistfuls of tartar sauce.
Busing tables
is a form of worship—
The managers would be screaming—
BUSING TABLES
IS A FORM OF WORSHIP!
until we became abstract compositions,
shocked into prepping
the Golden-Brown Traps
