Literature & Fiction

Freligh, Sarah

Poetry

Small Harbor Publishing

bright news of gladiolas

Westhale, July

Written in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing and steeped in the memory of Anita Hill’s testimony thirty years ago, What Happened Was: explores the cumulative effect of what women have been told is not that bad. The title series of What Happened Was: includes ten poems; each uses seven repetitions of “what happened was” to tell its story. The chapbook begins with the poet’s mother, who was told by the law school dean that she could not attend classes while pregnant. Other poems elucidate the poet’s own experiences of mismatched assumptions and sexual harassment in college and in the workplace, in the context of history and in the present moment. What Happened Was: speaks up and speaks back, “still teeming with syllables left to spill.”\nFrom the Back Cover\npraise for What Happened Was:\nWhat Happened Was:is the work of a poet at the height of her powers. Its architecture has a delightful variety; we have both taut, imagistic poems that, say, consider the meaning of the word "meantime" or the middling middle finger, and we also have the "What Happened Was:" series that centers female disenfranchisement with sly surprise. This is a fabulous collection, confident and compelling. ~ Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs\nIn Anna Leahy's telling of "What Happened," we are made aware of the conflicts between possibilities and chance; the yin and yang of the terrorizing, of the sublime; the "thousand splendors across . . . shadowed stretches"; that "opposites attract . . . in a flash." You'll be aware that you've been holding your breath until there are no more pages to turn. ~ Lynne Thompson, author of Fretwork\nIn Anna Leahy's poignant chapbook, you see the speaker unspool the connective threads of messages and meanings into lyrical diadems. Each intricate facet illuminates a potential possibility, and yet the full knowledge that once the light shines through, piercing the edges of what is woven, the gaps are reflected, shimmering on the walls as a testament to the difficulty of this knowledge. But even further, Leahy speaks to the dangers of these misunderstandings. The poems in What Happened Was: reveal the finely hewn corners, sharpened to cutting. It is there where the poems contemplate power, silence, and the need to speak on history. ~ Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth

What Happened Was:

Leahy, Anna

Dustin Brookshire, a finalist for the 2021 Scotti Merrill Award, is the founder/editor of Limp Wrist and curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series, a Zoom based poetry reading series. He is the author of the chapbooks Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Dustin’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been published in Assaracus, Whiskey Island, Mollyhouse, The West Review, Oddball, Gulf Stream Magazine, Redheaded Stepchild, SubtleTea, Ocho, Oranges & Sardines, Ouroboros, Qarrtsiluni, Blue Fifth Review, and other publications. He has been anthologized in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012) and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writes on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Visit him online at dustinbrookshire.com.

Love Most Of You Too

Brookshire, Dustin

Review From the Back CoverIn Glint, Carole Symer traces the rhythm of a long love story with flashes of sights, smells, and hints of inside jokes--the way intimacy truly unfolds. By sharing it, she has given us a gift of pure pleasure. —Monica Banks, ArtistA glint is a small flash of light; to slip, slide, or gleam; to shine with particular attention. The poems in Carole Symer's debut chapbook, Glint, are radiant, hot blooded, self-assured, and infused with potent energy. She begins with a fragment of Sappho and ends with a standing wave. Along the way there is marriage, international adoption, food, flowers, and "the scent of human soft". You may laugh out loud as you read this work. You will recognize honest truths. —Holly Wren Spaulding, author of Familiars Carole Symer's chapbook, Glint, is human and full of movement. Birdsong delivers sudden richness to moments of heartbreak, made complex with family, children, and the fleshy, full-grown perspective of the narrator. There are no half-felt emotions here, only deep wells of what it means to be alive and in relationship with others. Symer will cook you miso soup and make you think of love. —Amber Edmondson, Poet, Book Artist, and owner of Wild Pages, Traverse CityCarole Symer's poems wrap frames, intimate junctures and truths in which one catches the "glint" of radiant life filled with love, moments of motion, heat, and energy. Between family, children, and life's abundance of complexity, Symer can cook or write something spicy and hot, and bring you a sweet smile. —Ariel Sun, Designer, ArtistHow such a voice could be made possible in a series of experimental, minimalist lyrics that borrow their fragmentary edges from none other than Sappho is the great accomplishment of Glint. Here is I, of the 25 Roman-numeraled sections that comprise the chapbook: wouldn't it be just like our baby to come on a Sunday in August traffic you mimicking Nurse Ratched and me relieved it wasn't my sister's cooking that poisoned the evening swooning under yellow hospital light for one more lick of ice and you Tesoro oddly content with cold hospital ziti...From the get-go, these compelling splashes of life are offset by the large, scientific questions of the 21st century. An address to the infant in the very next poem casts "a mother's antibodies" as "the language of water," suggesting that Symer, a practicing psychologist, keeps one foot planted in the sciences, the other in the humanities. This is a stance that humanizes science and sciences humanness. —from Harbor Review's Senior Reviews editor, Cameron Morse, author of Bad Astrocytes About the AuthorCarole Symer is a practicing psychologist who works with adolescents and young adults, from whom she learns the exquisite effort it takes to language a life. Symer also teaches at New York University and has authored nearly a thousand neuropsychological evaluations to help neurodiverse learners fulfill their civil and human rights and discover more pleasure in daily life.Symer's essays, articles, and poems have appeared in Across the Margin, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Dunes Review, Michigan Chronicle, Sky Island Journal, The Passed Note, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. She is the 2020 recipient of the Anne-Marie Oomen & Katey Schultz Interlochen College of Creative Arts (ICCA) Creative Writing Scholarship. She is the author of the chapbook, Glint (Small Harbor Publishing, 2021). Product Description Radiant, hot blooded, self-assured, and infused with potent energy.In her debut chapbook, Glint, Carole Symer strikes a tone brimming with human warmth, humor, and glimpses of what's real inside the high stakes of a long love story--and oh it's so intensely real! Accentuated by an experimental, minimalist form, she weaves birdsong with sarcasm and pop culture into a sense of how intimacy truly unfolds. There's fla

Glint

Symer, Carole

From the Back Cover\nLike a deck of playing cards, shuffled, fanned, dealt and swept away with a flourish, Arden Levine's Ladies' Abecedary delights and dazzles. In this alphabetic parade, portraits of women's lives flash past our eyes. Designated by only a letter and the "glittering shrapnel" and "high-heeled balancing acts" of Levine's descriptions, we can't be certain who or where or when these women live. Yet each life, each poem, feels vivid and energetic, bristling in forms that range from pantoums to prose poems. So we lean in closer to the mystery, keen to catch a fuller glimpse of each sharp life and not to miss the "twisting silver" sleight-of-hand taking place on the page. —Kirun Kapur, author of Women in the Waiting Room, finalist for the National Poetry Series\nThe poems in Ladies' Abecedary are self-aware "like warring starlings" and serve as a prayer to the imagination and craft. The female voices in these poems, ranging from cooks to scientists, push against stereotypes by exposing women's "voices between walls." They acknowledge the pursuit of safety, what women say to each other in secret, and how words help build identity. These women are more than just ladies. While Levine commits to the abecedary form, she is never a slave to it. Each poem has a volta, unexpected turns, deadpan humor, and windchimes. This collection belongs on your shelf. —Cynthia Manick, author of Blue Hallelujiahs and founder/curator of Soul Sister Revue\nArden Levine's extraordinary collection grapples with the questions of how women's stories are documented. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf writes, "Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?" Ladies Abecedary is an audacious, feminist response to Woolf's question. Levine's readers measure the heat and violence done to the speakers of these stunning poems. While it is tempting to decipher which historical, popular culture, and literary figures feature in these captivating poems, the power of these poems accrues over the collection and exemplifies the diverse and complex nature of women's interior and external lives. In the beginning of the collection, Levine writes, "B, little she, was told she could be whoever she wished/in the school pageant. So she chose God." Near the end of the chapbook, Levine writes, "They've all forgotten her name." Levine makes sure that even if we don't know the names of each speaker, we know their stories. The collection exemplifies the importance of the project to reclaim voice, agency, and equality for women, in all their varied experiences, through history and in our current moment. —Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift\nAn abecedary, or alphabet book, teaches letters, the primary pieces of language and of story-making. In Ladies’ Abecedary, each letter is a woman, each woman is a poem, and each poem is a narrative of female identity. These micro-biographies-in-verse present a series of anonymous characters (historical and mythological, contemporary and composite, unique and universal) in a collection that reveals "the diverse and complex nature of women’s interior and external lives.” Letter by letter, Ladies’ Abecedary “exemplifies the importance of the project to reclaim voice, agency, and equality for women,” and raises a remark about how a woman’s story is told.

Ladies' Abecedary

Levine, Arden

Kristin LaFollette is a writer, artist, and photographer from Indiana. She is the author of the chapbook Body Parts, winner of the 2017 GFT Press Chapbook Contest. She serves as the Art Editor at Mud Season Review and her poetry has appeared in Thin Air Magazine, Cimarron Review, Spectrum Literary Journal, Poetry South, and Common Ground Review, among others. She received an M.A. in creative writing from Indiana University South Bend and a Ph.D. in writing studies from Bowling Green State University. She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

Hematology

LaFollette, Kristin

Literary

Duets

Rhone Fancher, Alexis

Atkins, Cynthia

“bow your head/in prayer to a new Holy Trinity:/Father, Gun, Holy Ghost/place your ear to the floor,/listen for whatever echo/death leaves behind.” In her exquisite chapbook, How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy, Joan Kwon Glass becomes an alchemist, transforming unfathomable tragedy into a narrative of mourning, teaching us in the process that there are endless layers to discover even in the heartbreak of a life cut short. Wild with stunned grief, Kwon Glass weaves this tender narrative of bewildering loss with treasures, like the ones her children uncover in the backyard of her centuries-old New England house, “animal bones, smoking pipe, porcelain china, some pieces etched with the surprised or broken faces of Chinese women, their robes adorned with blue and white flowers.” Like the ancient earth around her home, like the tragedy of her nephew’s suicide at age 11, there are secrets and sorrows beneath every surface, dangers lurking behind every door. Aching with desperate regret, Kwon Glass’s wishes to go back in time to keep watch over her nephew so that, “eventually, I would see what needs to be fixed.” These poems deserve our time and care, to read again and again, to uncover their secrets and treasures, to protect ourselves from complacency, to come awake with gratitude for all we still have.\n—Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds

How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy

Kwon Glass, Joan

Shareen K. Murayama is a Japanese American, Okinawan American poet and educator. She’s a 2021 Best Microfiction winner and a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal. Her art is published or forthcoming in Pilgrimage Press, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, The Margins, Puerto Del Sol, Juked, MORIA, and elsewhere. Her first collection of poems, HOUSEBREAK, will be published by Bad Betty Press in 2022. You can find her on IG & Twitter @ambusypoeming.

Hey Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group?

Murayama, Shareen K.

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