Photo and ‘Beast’ Cover Art by Cecelia Post
Don’t forget our launch party, with a reading by Justine Post, on January 24, 2014 — RSVP now or simply save the date, and we’ll see you there!
AND
There is plenty of Circe, and plenty of Caliban, too, in the poems of Frances Justine Post’s book BEAST. Carl Jung would have nodded in affirmation at the way in which myth and archetype pulse and flow under the surface of her poems—wolf, whale, cannibal, fire, doll. Her monologues cast the speaker’s self into these tableaux, and it’s hard to convey the detailed viscerality with which Post renders the human psyche—in all its needy, vengeful, rueful, generous and knowing configurations. ‘What have you been killing, my dear? / Let me wipe your chin.’ Post’s theme is hopeless love, but there is so much bravado, courage, insight, and self-knowledge in the poems that BEAST feels like a weird, wild, somewhat frightening party. Not to mention the sensuous, acrobatic flamboyance of Post’s remarkable writing, which carries this psychic carnival all proudly into Art.”
—Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me
Frances Justine Post
Frances Justine Post is the recipient of the “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize, the Inprint Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize, and the Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Western Humanities Review, and others. Originally from Sullivan’s Island, SC, she received her MFA from Columbia University and is currently earning her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where she is poetry editor for Gulf Coast Magazine.
.
.
With quiet astonishment, Halina Duraj explores the mysteries of love and madness, offering her readers the secret salvation of story. Between a father’s reinvention of himself, a mother’s perplexing fidelity, and a woman’s navigation of the complexities of betrayal, we discover the exquisite pleasures of a world restored and redeemed through Duraj’s luminous gaze, the loving attention and tender playfulness of an extravagantly passionate imagination.”
—Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River and In This Light
Halina Duraj’s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Harvard Review, Fiction, Witness, and other journals. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. In 2012, she was a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook, a women’s writing retreat on Whidbey Island, WA. She teaches at the University of San Diego, where she also directs the Lindsay J. Cropper Center for Creative Writing.
Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography
by Katie Fowley
Let’s all become nurses
And sleep in low places
A spa of red flowers
A block of old trees.
Away from your window
Across from your building
A building like yours
Lets off its new steam.
It’s better this weather
It’s better than silk.
The sky is a gray thing
The sky wants to hold you
The sky is away now.
It cannot white out.
Let’s all become nursemaids
And sleep in low places
Let’s all become jelly
In a spa of red hearts.
The heart is an urchin
The heart isn’t well now
The heart has a fever.
It wants to black out.
Let’s all become nurses
And sleep by the fire
The winter umbrellas
A host of red hair.
It’s a good thing this building.
This mantle of gleaming.
I’ll build you a building
If you live there with me.
Like snakes in the building
Like birds in the building
The men in the building
Are circling free.
The dusk is a low thing.
The dusk wants to hold you.
You cannot be held now.
You cannot walk out.
Come out of your building
Fluorescent in gloaming.
The windows are darkening.
The smell of green tea.
This green is depressing.
This green light is fetching
The light from the ether
The light from your knee.
Katie Fowley is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry and criticism have been published in No, Dear; 6×6; and Rain Taxi: Review of Books. She is a co-editor of Lightful Press, which publishes poetry, translation, and art. Her chapbook is forthcoming from DIEZ in spring, 2014.
Editor’s Note: Many thanks to Ugly Duckling Presse’s 6×6, in which “Lullaby” first appeared.
Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography
Mantic author Maureen Alsop and Joshua Gottlieb-Miller, winner of the 2012 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, paired up to create this piece of poetic splendor, “Cloud,” via A-Minor Magazine. Thanks, all!
Read “Cloud” at A-Minor Magazine.
Read more from Maureen Alsop or order Mantic.
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D., is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Mantic and Apparition Wren, and several chapbooks. Maureen is an associate poetry editor for the online journal Poemeleon and Inlandia: A Literary Journal. She presently leads a creative writing workshop for the Inlandia Institute/Poets & Writers, and the Rooster Moans. Collaborative poems with poet, Joshua Gottlieb-Miller have recently appeared on Verse Daily, Contrary, Inertia, and Switchback. http://www.maureenalsop.com
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is the winner of the 2012 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. He lives in Madison, WI, where he works as a writing center coordinator and grocer, and volunteers with the Writers in Prisons Project at Oakhill Correctional Institution.
Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography
M E D I A T I O N S O N P E R S P E C T I V E
by Matthew Zingg
Because the sky was wax paper the planes were
flies stuck in their holding patterns.
It was just one of those days.
You said: the city was wearing its clearest uniform.
I said: the brow of the park looked
scabrous and fresh
in its Sunday best, the air a shade
of yellow easiest to forget.
It was a game we played—to see how far the other
could take all this acreage.
A balloon lifts up a couple blocks away
and it means an explosion, a portent
or it means a slow eye. In other words
Matthew Zingg‘s work can be found in The Paris-American, The Awl, Blackbird, Cider Press Review, HTML Giant, The Madison Review, Birdfeast, The Rumpus, Everyday Genius, and Muzzle, among others. He lives in Baltimore where he hosts the Federal Dust Reading Series.
Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography
The Hello Goodbye
by Sarah Carson
Friend, they’re on their way to tell you that the poem you’ve been carrying is no longer your love poem. She’s said, “If another boy comes along, I’m going to kiss him,” and they’ve stamped it all official. There’s no time for an ode to the time you touched her hair in a store window, an elegy for the morning she found your necklace splayed softly in the dirt. She’s working on a little something about boxes and boxes and empty tractor trailers, about the widest river on your favorite continent and the shortest song you’ve ever heard. There are lines about several evenings where the phone is ringing and ringing and ringing in America. That poem, like most poems you loved, is useless. I’ve only come to tell you that I know how you are feeling, and it doesn’t matter. You need to take a long swig of something now. You need to get the hell out of here.
Sarah Carson was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, and now lives in Chicago with her dog, Amos. She is the author of three chapbooks, “Before Onstar” (Etched Press, 2010), “Twenty-Two” (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and “When You Leave” (H_NGM_N, 2012). Sometimes she blogs at sarahamycarson.wordpress.com.
Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography
From “Solitude Must Share My Solitude” by Pia Aliperti
A fixed fire
a quiet, collected aspect.
Now for the hitch in the storm.
Fix your hair
bathe your face,
white-walled life.
I would then be your mistress.
Pia Aliperti holds an MFA from The New School. Her poems and reviews have appeared recently in Rattle, The Best American Poetry blog, H_NGM_N, and Publishers Weekly.
Photo by Amanda Noyes
Playing Tennis Against a Wall
by Andrew James Weatherhead
The only way to win
is to rent a bulldozer
file a construction permit
learn how to operate
a bulldozer.
Don’t be a sore loser.
Trace the thought
back to the beginning.
The bus is late, again
but it’s here. It’s just you
and the driver.
His ringtone is that
Ennio Morricone song.
You know the one.
He has to use his hands.
He says, “Who is this?”
Then, “Oh, good morning.”
Andrew James Weatherhead holds a degree in Neuroscience from NYU, an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and is an Eagle Scout. His website is www.andrewweatherhead.org.
Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography
How To Keep Clean When The World Around You Is Going To Shit
by Travis Macdonald
Spoiler alert: there’s no secret meaning asleep beneath
every single love story. The human mouth contains
about 20 billion bacterium breeding
endlessly. Generations live and die in the grip
of your indigenous indigestion. Meanwhile we are still
killing the buffalo but with birth control
darts and BBQ sauce instead of bullets. Same dark hunger, different
villains in the seed vault stealing meals. It doesn’t take
Monsanto stock or an advanced degree to see we’re sinking in
iceberg sweat and high-speed propaganda bandwidths. You can get a PhD in pretty
much anything. Adieu
to you, dear country club bar mitzvah season. We miss
your microbe exchange rate slow dance doubling. With every chaperone slap
the effects of your affection hardened
into hidden tissues and hand-me-down zippers. Overstimulated
economic indicators of the apocalypse beware: This is the moment
where we begin to build our intimacy into a big brand name.
Travis Macdonald is a copywriter by day, editor by night and a poet in between. He is the author of two full-length collections (The O Mission Repo [vol. 1] and N7ostradamus) as well as several chapbooks. With his wife, JenMarie Macdonald, he publishes Fact-Simile Editions, a micropress dedicated to the creation of handmade contemporary poetic artifacts from recycled or reclaimed materials.
Last Thursday night, Augury board and friends kicked back over a few pints with the good people of Phoenix Park in New York.
Drink specials, a book sale (thank you all!), and hours of good conversation later, we were already speculating about turning this into a fine, lasting tradition.
Thanks to everyone (esp. David Joel Friedman, Viv for her Shriners fez and Phrenology bust, and Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography for the wonderful pics) for joining the party, lifting a beverage, and building your book collection. Won’t be long until we have two more to add to it ….
—Augury Books
