Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts features cutting edge poetry by T.R. Hummer, Rebecca Seiferle, Jude Nutter, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Doug Anderson, Daniel Nathan Terry, Karen Carissimo, Patricia Clark, Kathryn Winograd, Ann Fisher-Wirth as well as short stories by Pam Houston, Alfred Corn, Christiane Buuck, Carlos Gomez and Jamie Carr.

Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts

Literature & Fiction

Seiferle, Rebecca

Dougherty, Sean Thomas

Hummer, Tr

Poetry

Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts

Bitters is an extended quarrel with God, driven by the desire to recover what is banished to the marginal and apocryphal. In her third collection Seiferle claims whatever originates in the earth as an emissary of the divine, whether it is a starving boy in a supermarket or the maggots thriving in the skin of a cat.
Seraphim
Even houseflies must have their angels. Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch, it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them, can they blame me? Like all good messengers, they're just testing whether we are still alive. By such means, the priest taught me, "God creates. All the living and the dead, just a nursery for his hatching." So when I found a trinity of maggots in the abdominal wall of a living kitten, though I had to pinch them out, I could not blame them—Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses of a homesick God, caught in the furnace of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.
Against the background and harsh light of the desert Southwest or withing the darkness of European history and religion, Seiferle has created a new kind of beauty: tragic, wise, open to every possibility. And just as the liquor of the title are colorful, earthy draughts of distilled spirits with an ancient medicinal history, so too are they a fitting metaphor for these darkly humorous and curative poems.
Rebecca Seiferle's The Music We Dance To was nominated for the Pulitzer prize and poems from the volume are included in The Best American Poetry 2000. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Memorial, the Writers' Exchange, and the Writers' Union Poetry Prize. Her translation of Cesar Vallejo's Trilce won the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. She lives in Farmington, NM.

Bitters

Copper Canyon Press

“With a bitter and withering irony and an eye for shocking beauty . . . Seiferle cuts straight to the emotionally honest kernel within family, spirit and myth.”—Publishers Weekly
Poet Rebecca Seiferle once said that “one should always read a poem as if it was a matter of life and death.” Seiferle’s fourth book of poems, Wild Tongue, suggests a similar belief about writing poems.
The tongue is both voice and body, and Wild Tongue rages against these global bits, bridles, and palliatives that attempt to calm and control. Combining shocking beauty and compelling directness, Seiferle counterbalances divorce and domestic violence with newfound love and cathartic wit. Her poems, like cave drawings, are inspired by urgency and concern, working into the cracks and contours of truth and wound. “The human voice on the edge of extinction,” she writes, “and on that edge, everything wild, unspoken, vital and living, begins to speak out.”
 From “The Too Long Married Woman”:
 So, it came to this, she could barely bear to be touched, though she was glad for that moment in the kitchen, tense with containers, scrapings of delicacies adhering, floating in the sink, and the other woman who turned and walked toward her, holding out her arms, extended from her shoulders, those most human wings, to gather her up . . .
 Rebecca Seiferle is the editor of the online journal Drunken Boat and has published six volumes of poetry and translation. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Wild Tongue (Lannan Literary Selections)

This is the prize-winning poet's first collection. The poems in this collection are various in style, from the highly experimental to shape poems to prose poems to sequences, and in subject matter, from the personal subjects of family, to various landscapes, predominantly that of New Mexico, and to historical and philosophical themes. The volume contains two collections: THE RIPPED-OUT SEAM and VOLTE, and etchings from the great Spanish painter Goya. Poems from this collection won the Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America: the Bogin Award is given to a group of four or five poems that reflect "the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary, uses language in an original way, and takes a stand against oppression in any of its forms." Poems from the volume also won the Writers' Exchange Award, and the volume itself was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Poems in the volume previously appeared in American Poetry Review, The American Writer, Blue Mesa Review, Calyx, Carolina Quarterly, Croton Review, Cutbank, Indiana Review, Negative Capability, PSA News, Poem, South Coast Poetry Journal, The Taos Review, Triquarterly, The Denny Poems and have been anthologized in NEW MEXICO POETRY RENAISSANCE, (Red Crane 1994) and SALUDOS: POEMAS DE NUEVO MEXICO (Pennywhistle Press 1995).

The Ripped-Out Seam

Sheep Meadow Pr

New Mexican, with a place in American poetry fused to Latin American tradition, Rebecca Seiferle is a poet of enormous range. In her second collection, she writes of family life and human tragedy, of ancient myth and Native American sources. This is a poetry of compassion and intensity--fierce and unflinching in its level of inquiry.

The Music We Dance to: Poems