Welcome to the first issue of Alternating Current Press’ annual Poiesis Review that contains fiction and creative nonfiction right alongside the poetry you’ve always loved. We’ve expanded the journal to contain prose, and now this beast of a journal sits pretty at 200 pages of writing by some of the best writers in the independent press today. There are lots of literary journals out there, so why take a chance on this one? Because, after 20 years in the small press, Poiesis Review is one of the only literary journals in existence that features a blend of today’s up-and-coming promising rookies alongside the staples and legends of the last few decades in the literary underground. You can buy in confidence knowing that nowhere else will you find such a smattering of the writers’ spectrum or such a truly accurate cross-section of all walks of the literary world—what five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Wisconsin Regional Writers Association Award winner, Charles P. Ries, called “young blood running with old blood.” We are proud to be one of the holdout bastions representing the full and true independent press. The Featured Writers in this issue are Norman Mailer Award finalist, Nathan Graziano; Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, two-time NEA Fellowship recipient, and Pushcart Prize nominee, Sean Brendan-Brown; and multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and three-time PEN grant recipient, Doug Draime. Their work is showcased beside 37 other artists and over 100 pieces of writing, including two of Alternating Current’s six 2013 Pushcart Prize nominations, the two grand-prize winners and four honorable-mention winners of our 2013 Luminaire Award for Best Poetry and Best Prose, and stunning cover and back cover art by the tremendously talented Terry Fan. This journal is hands-down one of the finest collections to which we have ever had the pleasure of affixing our name. If you’ve been wanting to give Alternating Current a try but didn’t know where to start, then this is the place. Other writers featured in this issue are: Leah Angstman, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Harry Calhoun, Paula Cary, Alan Catlin, CEE, Christina Elaine Collins, K. M. Dersley, Aleathia Drehmer, Michael Estabrook, Jason Fisk, Lawrence Gladeview, George Held, Kevin M. Hibshman, Justin Hyde, Merilyn Jackson, Angie Turner Jeffreys, Patrick Kindig, Angela Consolo Mankiewicz, Hosho McCreesh, Frankie Metro, Shauna Osborn, David S. Pointer, D. A. Pratt, Misti Rainwater-Lites, Charles P. Ries, Christopher Robbins, Robert James Russell, Janette Schafer, Robert Schuler, Neil Serven, Denis Sheehan, Jane Stuart, William Taylor, Jr., Travis Turner, Paula Anne Yup. Thank you for taking a chance on Alternating Current. Find out more at alternatingcurrentarts.com.

Poiesis Review #6

Literature & Fiction

Current, Alternating

Catlin, Alan

Draime, Doug

Berriozábal, Luis Cuauhtémoc

Brendan-Brown, Sean

Calhoun, Harry

Collins, Christina Elaine

Gladeview, Lawrence

Literary

Alternating Current

Twelve stories, fraught with an unapologetic voice of firsthand experience, that pry the lock off of the addiction, fanaticism, violence, and fear of characters whose lives are mired in the darkness of isolation and the horror and the hilarity of the mundane. This is the Deep South: the dark territory of brine, pine, gravel, and red clay, where pavement still fears to tread. Contains interior illustrations by Ryan Murray and Patrick Traylor. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “Schuler Benson writes like the spawn of Chuck Palahniuk and Barry Hannah. While approaching his subjects with empathy, humor, and a keen eye for detail, he creates a world of snake-charming preachers, meth heads, and spurned lovers. This collection will make you laugh, make you anxious, and keep you turning the pages. Read this damn book.” —Kody Ford, The Idle Class Magazine ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “A Breece D’J Pancake of the plains, Benson writes with a hell of a knack for dialect. His characters are dirty, flawed, and all-too familiar. There are no heroes here. Yet in these stories, Benson manages to lift his people to another plane; someplace where they might achieve a little redemption.” —Eric Shonkwiler, author of Above All Men ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “Schuler Benson has a playwright’s ear for dialogue, a poet’s eye for scene, and a comic’s sense for when the sane is actually crazy, the crazy actually sane. The Poor Man’s Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide announces Benson’s place in the tradition of Wells Tower, Barry Hannah, and Mark Twain: here comes another great documentarian of the agonized and hilarious souls who inhabit Rural America.” —Brian Ted Jones, Electric Literature ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Find out more about Alternating Current Press at http://www.press.alternatingcurrentarts.com.

The Poor Man's Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide: Stories

Benson, Schuler

Short Stories & Anthologies

Alternating Current’s annual literary journal dedicated to historical and contemporary views on history contains poetry, maps and historical photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by various authors, both contemporary and historical, about various topics of history. Within these covers fantastically drawn by artist Terry Fan, you’ll meet the Romanovs, Serbian poet Vojislav Ilic, Dr. Zhivago, Stephen Crane, Geronimo, Lord Strathcona, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You’ll learn of the misprint in Herman Melville’s obituary, the constellations in the Southern Planisphere mapped out by Nicolas de La Caille, what might have been exchanged between William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, how Laura Cereta thrived on insomnia, and who’s buried in the cemeteries at Pere-Lachaise and Montparnasse. Our first Featured Writer, A. Jay. Adler —— an interviewee for a junior fellowship at Harvard Society of Fellows, Vermont Studio Center grant recipient, and Maui Writers Conference Screenwriting Competition prize winner —— will take you through Jewish life on the Lower East Side, Van Gogh’s mental asylum, Route 66, and the bordello rooms of Old-West Tombstone. Our second Featured Writer, Jesseca Cornelson —— a Catskill Center’s Platte Clove Preserve and a Sundress Academy for the Arts’ Firefly Farms resident artist —— will take you through the Tablet of Daughters, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville’s journals of the South, and a history of her home state of Alabama’s unfortunate past with racial lynchings. Their work is showcased next to three of our Pushcart Prize nominees and the first, second, and third places, and nine notable-mention finalists, for our 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical. From the Wild West to the Holocaust to Lincoln’s exhumation to the folk music of the sixties to the lost city of Atlantis, you’ll discover entire past worlds between these covers and meet a cast of characters colorful enough to color every page.

Footnote #1: A Literary Journal of History

Serea, Claudia

Angstman, Leah

Penick, Robert L.

Adler, A. Jay

Cornelson, Jesseca

Bassen, L. S.

Kojadinovic, Miodrag

History

As Faulkner's voice portrayed the South and Breece D'J Pancake's represented Appalachia, Eric Shonkwiler captures the Midwest, with this collection of novellas and short stories that peels back the edges of rural existence to expose the heart of it. Through parental neglect, rebellious sons and daughters, drug-addled war veterans, backwoods zombies, injured firemen, car thieves, witch doctors, and Navajo ghosts, Shonkwiler brings you a disregarded world you can no longer ignore—one thriving with the mundane, the bruised, the unheard. Here is the voice of the rest of us, spoken only the way firsthand experience, rooted deep in overworked soil, can say it. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Winner of the Luminaire Award for Best Prose ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Shonkwiler's stories capture the rural experience rarely heard—the quiet, dangerous voices of the desperate, struggling for honor among thieves. A stark and timely slice of Americana gothic that both razes and rebuilds." —Paula Bomer, author of Nine Months and Inside Madeleine ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Shonkwiler has an eye for detail and a lot of heart that he places in each and every sentence to make his words leap from the page and stay with you long after they’ve been read." —Frank Bill, author of Donnybrook and Crimes in Southern Indiana ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "God bless the hardscrabble elegance of Eric Shonkwiler's prose. These stories turn strangers into familiar faces. Battered souls and stoic hearts. Revenge, redemption, mercy. It's all here for the asking, like an emotional fire sale. Comparisons don't come easy with Shonkwiler's work. Few others measure up." —Anthony Breznican, author of Brutal Youth ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "An engaging read." —Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Eric Shonkwiler is the new voice of the American Heartland. The stories in Moon Up, Past Full touch the scorched heart of the Midwest, and there is something deeply American in the telling, a directness that honors the cowhands and combat vets, single mothers and fatherless daughters, who grit their teeth and lean into those old hard winds." —Taylor Brown, author of In the Season of Blood &amp; Gold and Fallen Land ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Find out more about Alternating Current Press at http://alternatingcurrentarts.com.

Moon Up, Past Full: Novellas & Stories

Shonkwiler, Eric

Dark, strange, lyrical, and full of frustrated desire and whimsy, Carmen Lau's debut collection of stories paints a vivid picture of femininity in the clutches of fantasy, reflecting the brutality of growing up a girl and challenging readers to rethink fairy tales as they've always known them. Within, you'll find a tender heart, a painful core, and a paradoxically disastrous and beautiful coming-of-age of every and any girl, told through fairy tales that mirror real life and are at once contemporary and timeless. Joining the ranks of Angela Carter, Kate Bernheimer, and Allyse Near, Lau weaves tales of a girl who is too fantastical to be real and too real to be fantasy. ~~~~~~~~~~ Winner of the Electric Book Award ~~~~~~~~~ Each story is fully illustrated by Christina Collins. ~~~~~~~~~~ "A beautifully vicious first collection of retrofitted fairy tales, with whip-smart swerves, darkly funny moments, and razor-sharp language. Like Angela Carter meets Let the Right One In with a dash of Lady Vengeance tossed in for good measure. —Brian Evenson, author of Windeye and ALA-RUSA Award-winner Last Days ~~~~~~~~~~ "You think you know these stories of wolves and witches, wicked parents and wicked children, devils and vampire boyfriends. No, you do not. Here is storytelling that is deft and dangerous. Tales that seem to hold back over a great roiling. Then they don't. They get you." —Lucy Corin, author of One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament ~~~~~~~~~~ "Haunting and beautiful, Carmen Lau's collection reads like a fever-dream of all your familiar childhood tales. These stories are at once contemporary and timeless, intertwining modernity and the world of the ever-after with deliriously powerful prose. Readers may need a trail of breadcrumbs or a ball of twine to find their way back to reality—The Girl Wakes is mesmerizing." —Eric Shonkwiler, author of Above All Men and Moon Up, Past Full ~~~~~~~~~~ "The 'girl' in Carmen Lau's fictions is a kind of shifter, moving in and out of cracked fairy tales, would-be knock-knock jokes, and scenes that run on the weird but persistent logic of certain dreams. Lau's debut is rich, surprising, assured. Let's take a moment to recognize the emergence of a remarkable new writer." —Scott Garson, author of Is That You, John Wayne? ~~~~~~~~~~ "A warning as you set out on the enchanted path Carmen Lau has created: These sharp, surprising stories beckon like the wolf's unhinged jaw; they will delight you, devour you, transform you." —Elise Winn, Iowa Review Fiction Award and Fairy Tale Review Prose Award Winner ~~~~~~~~~~ Find out more about Alternating Current Press at http://alternatingcurrentarts.com.

The Girl Wakes: Stories

Lau, Carmen

A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror-show, David Leo Rice’s novel combines the mundaneness of modern life—motels, strip malls, temp jobs—with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether any of us can ever truly escape this world—or our own. ~~~~~ Winner of the Electric Book Award ~~~~~ Each chapter is fully illustrated by Christina Collins. ~~~~~ "David Lynch meets Neil Gaiman meets Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. Just as Dodge City is a place the narrator can never leave, Rice’s book sucks you in and doesn’t let you walk out of it intact, either." —Nick Antosca, author of The Girlfriend Game, Midnight Picnic, &amp; Fires ~~~~~ "With a draftsman’s hand and a psychonaut’s eye, Rice has mapped the alien precinct in which we already live. I’ve never encountered a book so strange yet so familiar. Writers such as William Burroughs and Samuel Delany may have helped prepare the ground, but this high-speed, controlled drift across it is all Rice’s own." —Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan &amp; A Compendium of Domestic Incidents ~~~~~ "A vivid, precisely described nightmare filled with jokes for people who think nothing is funny anymore. Rice imagines American pop culture as a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, and he gives us a carnival barker’s tour through a disturbing landscape of lost souls, vain ambitions, and distorted identities, ultimately finding a path to redemption through the spiritual wreckage." —Mark Beauregard, author of The Whale: A Love Story ~~~~~ "Rice cares deeply about his characters and this comes out in every vignette. He doesn’t follow the nihilistic postmodern structure by declaring that life is meaningless or hopeless. What we find is the presence of hope in all things, no matter how run-down they might appear on the surface." —Joe Halstead, author of West Virginia ~~~~~ "Dodge City is a walk on the dark side of the contemporary imagination that reworks the post-realist storytellings of Donald Barthelme or Henri Michaux into a voice that is unique. A picaresque novel for the age of the Darknet and Tor." —Simon Pummell, director of Bodysong &amp; Identicals ~~~~~ "In his mind-boggling debut novel, Rice conjures a series of seemingly unassuming vignettes that read like a revelatory prose poem written by the Zodiac Killer. A celebration of what it means to know that you know that you can never know everything." —Mike Kleine, author of Kanley Stubrick ~~~~~ "Don’t enter into Rice’s terrifying and hilarious fictional multiverse looking for causality, continuity, or logic, as we know them. A Room in Dodge City will plunge you into a nightmarish warren-maze where somewhere, amid the numberless trapdoors, inner chambers and branching halls on branching halls, a literary orgy is going down among the imaginative intellects of Blake Butler, Kathryn Davis, Haruki Murakami, Livia Llewellyn, and Robert Coover, refereed by Cronenberg and Lynch." —Adrian Van Young, author of Shadows in Summerland &amp; The Man Who Noticed Everything ~~~~~ "A Room in Dodge City warps the serial format to its own uncanny ends. Briskly paced with elegantly streamlined prose, the book follows its own impeccably strange and addictive dream logic." —Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora &amp; Novi Sad ~~~~~ "Unsettling and unsettled, reading A Room in Dodge City is like reading Jakob von Gunten’s dream journal the day after he’d stayed up late to watch High Plains Drifter and Videodrome." —Gabriel Blackwell, author of Madeleine E. ~~~~~ Find out more about Alternating Current Press at alternatingcurrentarts.com.

A Room in Dodge City

Rice, David Leo

Against a backdrop of loss and exhaustion, in the searching tradition of Walden, Bluets, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the speaker of Solstice to Solstice to Solstice chronicles the in-breaking of day in a quest to see and to be seared by seeing, to know what can be known, to find truth sturdy as clapboards and joy robust enough to get her through each coming day. Allison Boyd Justus’ collection of freeform and prose poetry captures every sunrise during the 2009-10 solar year—from solstice to solstice and back to solstice—and each cyclical dawn brings something new and fresh, bursting with color, internal compasses, and astronomical guides. Through it all, beauty, introspection, hope, and felicity remind us to embrace every day in its new light. ~~~~~~~~~~ “Justus reminds us that observation is one of the most important parts of being alive: just noting change and presence. She forces attention to the small things, and even though the sky is the star, the speaker takes on a supporting role. By the end, it seems that both the sun and the speaker have learned something in their year: they’re back where they started, but also further along. There’s something about witnessing dawn, each day—knowing, this is new, and untouched.” —Micah Ling, author of Three Islands, Sweetgrass, Settlement, and Flashes of Life ~~~~~~~~~~ “In Solstice to Solstice to Solstice, Allison Boyd Justus gives us 366 mornings of sunrises during a single solar year, 366 blank slates, 366 chances to perceive and create something new. These eye-opening poems are like mornings themselves, full of startling pleasures: ‘light brilliant as fact,’ ‘the mountain a shudder,’ ‘a murmuration of starlings rattl[ing] like a tambourine.’ Justus shows us, poem after poem, that each day is a page where anything might be written.” —Maggie Smith, author of The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and The List of Dangers ~~~~~~~~~~~ “In Solstice to Solstice to Solstice, Allison Boyd Justus chronicles one year’s worth of sunrises, from one December 21st to the next, a document that is as much prayerlike supplication as it is physical phenomenon. Each morning takes shape, almost insecure about its inevitable happening: our counter-course reading from left to right orients us as Justus’ writing dispels the dark.” —Anthony Michael Morena, author of The Voyager Record: A Transmission ~~~~~~~~~~ Find out more at tinyurl.com/solsticetosolstice

Solstice to Solstice to Solstice

Justus, Allison Boyd

Poetry

Eats of Eden is a trip into the memory, into the stomach, and into the heart of every woman. These essays of tasty bites, writing, coming-of-age, family, sex, self-esteem—and above all, overcoming personal odds to live your best life—are complete with mouth-watering recipes and memories that will change your relationship with food forever. From self-identity to love affairs with the sinking of the Titanic to cheese snobbery to reconciling the unanswered questions of a lost friendship, the home-loving socialite at the heart of this memoir dishes and dines on fashion, feminism, fabulousness, and food. The foodoir follows a year of attempting to write a novel, and the daily life, occasional revelations and passions that feed, distract, complicate, and enrich that process—in the author’s case, constant detours into the kitchen. It’s a book about writing, eating, and surviving in the modern west, from literary hustling at the Doug Fir Lounge, to waiting for life-altering emails around a stew-cooking campfire at Crater Lake.

Eats of Eden

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Blankenbiller, Tabitha

Cooking Education & Reference

Equal parts prose-poems, flash stories, riddles, and mythological prologues to the lives of spent Americans—struggling, murderous, born again, drug-addled, sexual, hopeful, despairing, soaring—this collection stands on the edge of genre definition and questions what it means to be at the cusp of living. Punchlines, plays on words, dad puns, and yo’ mama jokes straddle the saddle with deep metaphorical lessons on society today, making companions of dark humor and serious wit. A seance of poetics and politics, this collection of glimpses into the disheveled and desperate, the cerebral and celebrated, the gangly and glorious, conjures what it is to be American in a society as stupid as it is terrifying. Illustrated by Jacob Heustis.

Second Acts in American Lives

Ridge, Ryan

Bosworth, Mel

The second issue of Alternating Current Press’ annual literary publication dedicated to past and contemporary views on history contains poetry, maps, photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by various authors about various historical topics. Within these pages, you will find contemporary outlooks on history right alongside little-known historical works that feel as fresh and as vibrant (and as scary) as if they were written today. Here, the old meets the new, and you’ll discover fascinating history from a personal, non-scholarly literary approach. In this issue, you’ll meet Jack the Ripper, Fanny Hooe, Jesse James, Geronimo, Lewis &amp; Clark, Nikolai Vavilov, and the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You’ll learn of the catastrophic Hartley Colliery mining disaster, the woman who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel, the lost language of the Clatsop, harvesting sugar beets during World War II, how Commonwealth Indians were treated during World War I, and the costs of artistic patronage. You’ll discover what Dorothy was like during the Great Depression and how Lucile Fitch gave birth to an atomic bomb. Writers speak about deafness, queerness, and birth control in the face of Margaret Sanger’s and Alexander Graham Bell’s abhorrent eugenics rants, alongside the effects of the Oklahoma City bombing, erasure poems of Jules Verne, and the sacrifices of historical witchcraft. The Featured Writer, Holly M. Wendt, mines 18th-century New England newspapers for responses to clippings about lost items, weeks at sea, feminism, and transporting lions. Her work is showcased next to the winners and finalists for the 2016 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.

Footnote #2: A Literary Journal of History

Anderson, Cynthia

Gillespie, Tyler

Luczak, Raymond

Buchinger, Mary

Davies, John Paul

Wendt, Holly M.

Brown, Garrett J.

Bane Jr., Charles

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