Poetry. Aptly titled, the poems in this collection have the compact, unguarded, transgressive language of a relationship diary. Most explore erotic feelings and disclose both the tangles of desire and the scouring, complicated wounds that mark us. This balance of clean decision and difficult feeling is, finally, thrilling.

Black Diaries

Literature & Fiction

Hoffman, Jill

Poetry

Box Turtle Press

Poetry. Terry Phelan's second book, FIRES IN SONOMA tells the story of the dissolution of a marriage. In the famous words of William Carlos Williams, "Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time, divorce! divorce!" Phelan's voice is ablaze with her new knowledge, full of bitter truth and intimate revelations.

Fires in Sonoma

Phelan, Terry

Magazine. Fiction. Poetry. MUDFISH, a collection of art and poetry (and some fiction), takes its title from the storyteller's stool in Nigerian art. The poems each tell a story. They are resonant, and visceral, encapsulating our unique human experiences. There is a wide range to the subject matter and style, but the poems all have breath and life, a living voice. Additional Authors: Jennifer Belle, Marina Rubin, Lawrence Applebaum, Charles Simic, John Ashberry, Frank Stella, Michael Montlack, Stephanie Dickinson, Rob Cook, David Potter, Colette Inez, Nancy Hechinger.

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Rending the Garment is a narrative tapestry encompassing persona poems, prose poems, flash fiction, imagined meetings with historical figures, ancestral appearances, and ephemera. It is a series of linked poems exploring the life and times of one Jewish family. It is a narrative more of emotional truths than of facts. The facts are: Schneberg's parents were born and raised in Brooklyn, and after the death of her father, Portland became her mother's home. Her father suffered from agoraphobia, and her mother survived larynx cancer. Afterward, unable to talk, her mother "spoke" through writing in notebooks that were always with her.

Rending the Garment (Mudfish Individual Poet, 8)

Schneberg, Willa

Poetry. Jewish Studies. With the concentrated precision of poetry, VILNIUS DIARY has also the richness of a novel and the intimacy of a memoir. Memory, loss, and immigration are captured in poignant images. Each poem inhabits a dual time and space. Never simply a lament, Halberstadt weaves together the sacred and the wildly profane, lighting the great darkness with wit and laughter.  "Anna Halberstadt's VILNIUS DIARY kept me reading late into the night. With the concentrated precision of poetry, it has also the richness of a novel and the intimacy of memoir. One poem leads to the next with addictive power, moving from her childhood in Lithuania to her later life in New York by way of Moscow, Vienna, and Rome. Memory, loss, and immigration are captured in poignant images: the print of cat's paws in the dust of an attic in Vilnius, a knitted cap clutched in white-knuckled hands at the Moscow airport, buildings in Rome 'peeling and bruised like old hand-made shoes,' a grandfather's grave buried in beer cans in the vandalized Jewish cemetery of Kaunas, pigeons huddling on a New York street 'like small-time drug pushers.' There's an occasional lyrical burst of feeling for the natural world, as in 'the enormous palace of the evening sky.' Throughout, the poet returns again and again to Vilnius: 'provincial, sleepy, magical,' 'Atlantis of disappeared life,' its cobblestones stained with the blood of pogroms. The reader, like the writer, will fall under its spell, haunted by the terrible magic of the city. 'VILNIUS DIARY' is impossible to forget."—Elizabeth Dalton "'The need to forget gradually / turned into a need to remember,' Anna Halberstadt writes in this moving autobiographical collection of poems, which keeps returning to her Jewish childhood in Lithuania, her interim time in Russia, her first hardscrabble years in New York. VILNIUS DIARY is a fine book of days—scrupulously remembered, refreshingly truthful, deeply astonished."—Edward Hirsch "History's a glowing lamp held slightly aloft in Anna Halberstadt's hand. She guides us wisely, richly, and satirically across continents, tough choices and the gorgeous pithy details of otherwise overwhelming tragedies and truths. I love this book—across all of it and poem by poem because it's like a kind of careful shopping, she weighs and feels each thing and remembers to read her own heart too and the hearts of all the lost and known friends, the cousins and lovers and parents and strangers—waiting in rooms and getting on trains, acting, vanishing, all of it, all of them. This beautiful book lives most perfectly in the throbbing heart of our time."—Eileen Myles "This is a brilliant collection that immerses the reader from the first lines, sweeping us away... Anna Halberstadt's VILNIUS DIARY begins its poetic journey from behind the Iron Curtain only five years after the Holocaust. The poet's elegiac tone mourns and celebrates the Vilnius of her youth and like Sebald's Austerlitz images seem to flow effortlessly in an unending succession to evoke the drowned world of the past... In image after incantatory image the poet tells us of her immigration from Russia; in Rome 'persimmons like orange lanterns / hanging on naked branches;' the wrenching up of roots and replanting them in the unfamiliar soil of America, a nine-year-old-son and two aging parents in tow... Each poem inhabits a dual time and place... The genius of VILNIUS DIARY lies in its refusal to be circumscribed. Never simply a lament, Halberstadt weaves together the sacred and the wildly profane, lighting the great darkness with wit and laughter. This is the poet who calls God a bastard but recognizes divinity in a beehive, the poet who mourns a family tree cut off during the Shoah, yet wickedly observes changing women's fashions. Literate in three languages, she gives us VILNIUS DIARY in English. . . . The collection not unlike the immigrant's initiation into a Viennese s

Vilnius Diary (Mudfish Individual Poet, 9)

Halberstadt, Anna

History & Criticism

Poetry. A first book of immense originality. Narrative poems that draw the reader in to a personal connection with the poet. Dell Lemmon displays the breezy urbanity of the New York School, the autobiographical fearlessness of the Confessional poets, and a clear–eyed wisdom that is all her own. SINGLE WOMAN doesn't deny the rigors of life in middle age but does find pleasure and meaning in city life, in brushes with the famous, in friendships, in food, in art, in solitude. This is a book that questions everything–an illustrious but shadowed family history, the suicides of beloved artists, a crush on a younger man, political oppressions, inevitable aging and loss. With her unmistakable voice and her sure storytelling, Dell Lemmon is a singular poet.

Single Woman (Mudfish Individual Poet, 10)

Lemmon, Dell

Poetry. Decades in gestation, the riveting, poem-memoir THE GATES OF PEARL is woven together from a mother's Overeater's Anonymous journal written in the 1970s, mother-daughter telephone conversations, and the poet-daughter's exquisite verses... And here is the mother-daughter relationship with Pearly confessing her most private self to her grown child over the telephone. No attempt is made to prettify the mother's fragments and idiosyncratic stream-of-consciousness. Too much of Pearly's shimmering originality, her lyricism, and transgressive voice would be lost. Taboos of silence are broken. I leave the bed--I go towards an icy box--holding out its frozen breasts and erect Penis to me. The daughter responds in meticulous, impassioned verse that provides a counterpoint to the mother's flying-off-the-shelves imagery. Chiseled, Sappho-like in places, unscripted free-style in others, The Gates of Pearl is an impassioned lament of dark beauty. It is also a celebration. Listen to Pearly:&nbsp; My eyes were riveted on the huge banana trees... Lo and behold thru the dark purplish large leaves right before our eyes like a birthing came the stalk of bananas. I had seen Nature's unabashed sexual blaze of glory--an erection.

The Gates of Pearl (Mudfish Individual Poet, 11)

Self-Help

Relationships

Magazine. Poetry. Fiction. Often literary journals announce a theme ahead of time; MUDFISH announces its theme as the poems become one at publication--they create their own voice, in this issue celebrating youth from the vantage point of age, life from the embrace of death. In Yeats' words, "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom, / Young we loved each other and were ignorant." The poems reflect our lives today with all its attendant joy and grief. The art, like the poetry, is completely various, both traditional and new-fangled, and both art and poetry convey a sense of process: a sense of the writer or artist creating a living and breathing thing.

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Poetry. ARE YOU SOMEBODY I SHOULD KNOW? by Dell Lemmon is, according to Jason Koo, "one of the most important books of poetry you will ever read." John Yau writes, the poems "are about being alone and getting older and setting out each day. They are about memories, lost friendships, friends who died, and one thing leading to another." By virtue of the poet's honesty and clarity and the "lucid fever" of her observations, you will be inspired to live your life more deeply, to be more aware of every aspect of your life and to treasure every moment of living. Pared down and direct without ever tripping over themselves, the poems are strong rivers pulling you into their currents.

Are You Somebody I Should Know? (Mudfish Individual, 14)

Death & Grief

Magazine. Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Art. MUDFISH 22 is bursting with poems; prose and art; that are revelations; that grab you by the lapels; that defy forgetting. They are before and after visions and celebrations of our world today. Guest art editor John Yau has filled the pages with work from young New York-based artists that is immediate and sparkling. Contributors include John Yau; Donald Hall; Stephanie Dickinson; Dell Lemmon; Terry Phelan; Marina Rubin; James Trask; Dorothy Friedman; Alice Jurish; Mark Schimmoeller; Cornelia Hoogland; Jennifer Belle; and Charles Yuen.

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Contemporary

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