Saturday, June 4, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Review: Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein and Lisa Marie Basile's Diorama
Diorama by Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein and Lisa Marie Basile
Wisp Press, 2011,
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein and Lisa Marie Basile's collaborative chapbook Diorama presents two parallel threads of a lyrical progression — at times starkly haunting, at times lushly sensual — through scenes of intimacy and eroticism, loss and death, set against a backdrop shifting in locus between the deserts of the American Southwest and the valleys and rainforests of Central and South America, with occasional detours to the Old World of the Mediterranean.Morhardt-Goldstein's poems are informed by her background in classical music, including one presented as the first movement of a requiem mass, with parts in English and Latin.
Her poems move gracefully between dictions, painting moods with landscape and imagery.
One poem, "Piece for solo quena," begins:
We wear mustard-dust.
We sprouted saguaro antlers.
It sounded like the crackling of clay skeletons
running on the back of the sun.
The wind shot through holes in our bodies:
a violet diction of harmony.
The closing lines of her final poem exemplify an open-endedness that marks all of her work here: "the rolling of his cigarette/ the way a potter throws a teacup."
At first reading we see an image of effortless craftsmanship, and yet, two lines before, we had the image of "the foot that knocks over the fan at night," implying a drowsy carelessness; and reading the lines again through that lens, we can see a finished, painted, even well-loved teacup being carelessly shattered. It can be read either way, like much of the best work here.
Lisa Marie Basile writes with both startling immediacy and a taut reserve. Her image-rich poems retain an undercurrent of mystery beneath a disarming veneer of candor.
Her section brims with dazzling, at times devastating lines.
In "Letters," she writes:
When my mother spoke at the podium I felt
a wide angel fly from her head, crack against the rafters
and fall to the floor.
She covered the place in wing.
I imagined myself bending over her, preparing her like a
butterfly jaggedly descending toward a calm death.
Each poet carries her weight in this joint effort with technical skill and a voice refreshingly unabashed in its directness. This slim volume is a good introduction to two complementary yet distinctive new voices.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Sorry We Were Out...
We apologize for our lengthy hiatus from the blogosphere. Vacation, random personal crises, and just plain laziness may have interfered with our ability to post much over the last month and a half.
We would like to just blame the gap on our flurry of preparation for the Spring/Summer issue, which will launch by the first of next month, but that doesn't completely account for our lapse.
However, we might as well take the opportunity to mention that the Spring/Summer issue will launch by the first of next month! It's looking to be a good issue, and we look forward to wrapping up production on it soon. The issue will include the top three poetry contest winners and much more literary goodness.
And, finally (finally, indeed) look for a new review here in the blog next weekend.
We would like to just blame the gap on our flurry of preparation for the Spring/Summer issue, which will launch by the first of next month, but that doesn't completely account for our lapse.
However, we might as well take the opportunity to mention that the Spring/Summer issue will launch by the first of next month! It's looking to be a good issue, and we look forward to wrapping up production on it soon. The issue will include the top three poetry contest winners and much more literary goodness.
And, finally (finally, indeed) look for a new review here in the blog next weekend.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
2011 Poetry Contest Finalists
We're pleased to announce the 10 finalists for our 2011 Vivienne Haigh-Wood Prize for a single poem. The prize winner will receive $500 and the winning poem will appear in our Spring/Summer 2011 issue, out next month. The second and third place poems will also appear in a special section of the issue, and all non-winning finalists will be listed there as honorable mentions. Finalists will be notified of the status of their entries shortly before the issue appears. Congrats and good luck to all!
*Finalists are listed in alphabetical order by name.
Lou Amyx: Roses
Connie Boyle: An Inheritance
Pat Hurshell: Elegy (in 3 movements)
Pat Hurshell: Leda Tells It Again
Tomasz Mielcarek: I Was Waiting For You
Jenny Sanders: Mama's Little Heartbreaker
Lorraine Schein: The Hanged Woman
Lorraine Schein: The Lady in the Lake
N. A’Yara Stein: For the Rest of Our Lives, That Far Place Waits
Julie Stuckey: Watching the Door
*Finalists are listed in alphabetical order by name.
Lou Amyx: Roses
Connie Boyle: An Inheritance
Pat Hurshell: Elegy (in 3 movements)
Pat Hurshell: Leda Tells It Again
Tomasz Mielcarek: I Was Waiting For You
Jenny Sanders: Mama's Little Heartbreaker
Lorraine Schein: The Hanged Woman
Lorraine Schein: The Lady in the Lake
N. A’Yara Stein: For the Rest of Our Lives, That Far Place Waits
Julie Stuckey: Watching the Door
Monday, March 21, 2011
Review: Melissa Crandall's Weathercock
Weathercock by Melissa Crandall
Tortuga Loca, 2010,
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Melissa Crandall, whose short story collection Darling Wendy was reviewed for our debut issue, sent me a copy of her first non-series novel, Weathercock, a fantasy set in an alternative-reality medieval world where gender roles are directly inverse to traditional gender roles in the majority of known human societies. In other words, men's lot in life was rather bitter.
I admit I'm not very familiar with the fantasy genre, so I asked for some feedback from my partner on this, and it was interesting to get a male perspective on the story. He found the female characters easier to relate to than the male ones, simply because men in the world of this novel are so unlike the typical picture of a man in our society, while women in the novel's world do resemble men as we know them, exhibiting both what are perceived as positive as well as negative typically masculine traits. It seems the reversal in behavior stems from the respective genders' stations and the effects of those roles over generations, through a feedback loop of heredity and environment
For reasons unknown to the lead characters, men were born more rarely in this society, and they were often sterile. "It was just the way things were in Duine, the way things had always been."
The result of this scarcity is for men to be treated like commodities, essentially as breeding studs. Women set up "households," which are comprised of several wives, one of whom actually "owns" the husband and therefore wields most of the power, and others who exist lower in the hierarchy and have less say in household decisions.
Kinner, the lead male character, son of the "Firstwife" of a household, finds his future in jeopardy when it's discovered that he is apparently sterile and therefore cannot contribute to the household in the manner expected of him. The only alternative to execution for a sterile male is monkhood, and so Kinner's mother undertakes with him a long journey across the country to a monastery where he can live safely among other men in his predicament — although we later learn that Kinner's mother, Holan, who is a blacksmith, has misled the other wives about her son's sterility because she wanted a pretext to travel with him to this distant place of refuge as part of her quest in relation to a special sword she has forged in honor of a god, the Weathercock, whose worship is forbidden in a society that instead worships a triune goddess.
The inverted parallels to medieval European Christendom are obvious, but the questions this allegorical adventure tale raises are provocative and compelling.
Has our own society, even today, afforded equal worth to half its members even if they do not assume traditional procreative roles?
And, political measures like affirmative action aside, what would women today be achieving in non-female-dominated professions if they had not been treated as second-class citizens since time immemorial?
Kinner, raised to be docile and not trained in battle because he is a man, does not emerge as a hero in the war between the corrupt queen and her discontented subjects that provides much of the action in the novel. (Many of the subjects are miffed that the queen keeps stealing their husbands in pursuit of an heir.) In this way, the story is realistic, unlike anachronistic Hollywood films that cast every other ancient or medieval heroine as a Boudica, rather than portraying them within the context of their time, where courage did not necessarily manifest itself in dazzling swordplay.
And political feminism didn't win all of its early battles, either, but the closing of Crandall's tale allows for hope that change is in the air for men like Kinner, not from martial victories but from mutual understanding between the genders one person at a time, which is how all true and lasting peace and progress tends to be won.
I admire the author for tackling this territory and think she has written an original, idea-driven adventure story worth checking out.
The book is available directly from the author, as well as in ebook form here.
Melissa Crandall, whose short story collection Darling Wendy was reviewed for our debut issue, sent me a copy of her first non-series novel, Weathercock, a fantasy set in an alternative-reality medieval world where gender roles are directly inverse to traditional gender roles in the majority of known human societies. In other words, men's lot in life was rather bitter.
I admit I'm not very familiar with the fantasy genre, so I asked for some feedback from my partner on this, and it was interesting to get a male perspective on the story. He found the female characters easier to relate to than the male ones, simply because men in the world of this novel are so unlike the typical picture of a man in our society, while women in the novel's world do resemble men as we know them, exhibiting both what are perceived as positive as well as negative typically masculine traits. It seems the reversal in behavior stems from the respective genders' stations and the effects of those roles over generations, through a feedback loop of heredity and environment
For reasons unknown to the lead characters, men were born more rarely in this society, and they were often sterile. "It was just the way things were in Duine, the way things had always been."
The result of this scarcity is for men to be treated like commodities, essentially as breeding studs. Women set up "households," which are comprised of several wives, one of whom actually "owns" the husband and therefore wields most of the power, and others who exist lower in the hierarchy and have less say in household decisions.
Kinner, the lead male character, son of the "Firstwife" of a household, finds his future in jeopardy when it's discovered that he is apparently sterile and therefore cannot contribute to the household in the manner expected of him. The only alternative to execution for a sterile male is monkhood, and so Kinner's mother undertakes with him a long journey across the country to a monastery where he can live safely among other men in his predicament — although we later learn that Kinner's mother, Holan, who is a blacksmith, has misled the other wives about her son's sterility because she wanted a pretext to travel with him to this distant place of refuge as part of her quest in relation to a special sword she has forged in honor of a god, the Weathercock, whose worship is forbidden in a society that instead worships a triune goddess.
The inverted parallels to medieval European Christendom are obvious, but the questions this allegorical adventure tale raises are provocative and compelling.
Has our own society, even today, afforded equal worth to half its members even if they do not assume traditional procreative roles?
And, political measures like affirmative action aside, what would women today be achieving in non-female-dominated professions if they had not been treated as second-class citizens since time immemorial?
Kinner, raised to be docile and not trained in battle because he is a man, does not emerge as a hero in the war between the corrupt queen and her discontented subjects that provides much of the action in the novel. (Many of the subjects are miffed that the queen keeps stealing their husbands in pursuit of an heir.) In this way, the story is realistic, unlike anachronistic Hollywood films that cast every other ancient or medieval heroine as a Boudica, rather than portraying them within the context of their time, where courage did not necessarily manifest itself in dazzling swordplay.
And political feminism didn't win all of its early battles, either, but the closing of Crandall's tale allows for hope that change is in the air for men like Kinner, not from martial victories but from mutual understanding between the genders one person at a time, which is how all true and lasting peace and progress tends to be won.
I admire the author for tackling this territory and think she has written an original, idea-driven adventure story worth checking out.
The book is available directly from the author, as well as in ebook form here.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Editorial: Relic From The Mix-Tape Years
Sorting through a box full of cassette tapes that survived my handful of moves from over the last decade, I reread the story of my adolescence and early adulthood, spelled out on the handwritten covers of my mix tapes.
Ah, the mix tape, a short-lived, essentially obsolete art form. A few of my eighth and ninth-grade classmates had made them for each other, with photocopies of kittens or puppies as covers. As an introverted chick with few friends and less confidence in matters of influencing others' taste (but plenty of confidence in my own ability to know what I like) I made tapes for myself.
In high school the tapes, titled "Hits of 1980/90-whatever (I'm going to pass up the chance to show my precise age here)" and adorned with hastily ink-drawn musical notes, were songs I caught off the radio, recorded on the fly. I depended on my not particularly quick reflexes to catch the songs in their entirety, and so they appeared in no particular order.
Then in college I got a bit more sophisticated. I titled the series of tapes "Sonic Potpourri" and made them only from other tapes or (increasingly) CDs that either I or my brother owned. I could only make them when I was at home from school, where my treasured once-state-of-the-art stereo stood in my girlhood room. On the frequent occasions when I was home for a weekend, a new tape would be my major weekend project. I labored over the tapes with the attention I should have directed to my homework -- the attention and the passion. Maybe it wasn't coincidence that the only A I received my first freshman semester was in the history of jazz.
The tapes told the story of my life -- not from day one, but what was going on right at that time, in narrative form, although the narrative would probably have been comprehensible only to me. Much of it was centered around my relationship at the time, my first serious one, and my efforts to find my own voice in the world. Typical college stuff. Speaking more recently to friends, I realized that almost everyone made mix tapes in those days. My boyfriend at the time had made some for me, stuff he thought I might like, or hoped I might like, or thought I should like. I lacked the confidence to pass on my own finds to him.
Later on, my tapes began to tell the story of my burgeoning feminism -- since this was the '90s, a Second Wave, Riot Grrrl-influenced feminism -- my own untattooed, still-introverted but increasingly confident version of it.
I found one tape that captured this moment in time, a "special edition" called "27 Songs by Women." One of my signature ink-drawn notes is encircled by a Venus symbol. Reading the list of songs really took me back. Some remain staples of my playlists. Others I haven't heard since the '90s. Tori Amos, Veruca Salt, Shonen Knife, Hole, PJ Harvey, the Breeders, Belly, Throwing Muses, Heather Nova, Bjork, et cetera.
"Silent All These Years" leads off, and Indigo Girls' "Language or the Kiss" closes with a question, one never answered, but replaced with different questions.
Yes, I have my playlists now, but I can tweak them with a quick right-click of my mouse -- a bit too easy. In comparison, those tapes have staying power. Like the spiral notebooks I scribbled in as a kid, they're immune to hasty single-fingertip deletion. And every once in a while, I'll probably find myself combing through that dusty box of tapes and retrieving a gem.
I had faithfully kept journals in spiral-bound notebooks and later more attractive blank-paged hardcover books, up until my last year or two of college. I don't know why I stopped journaling. I continued to write poetry and dabble in fiction, but at some point I stopped allowing myself the luxury of written self-reflection. The mix tapes filled the void, and allowed me to tell my story (if only to myself) in music.
I never did go back to handwritten journal-keeping, but eventually (after a few resistant Luddite years) started up a live journal, which offered the slightly unnerving opportunity for me to share my personal thoughts with other human beings, albeit at a safe distance. Eventually, I replaced my highly personal blog with others more topical in nature. I suppose sites like Facebook filled the more personal niche, or maybe, once again, I stopped believing I have the time to journal. And I'm probably right, unfortunately. It's difficult enough to make the time for poetry and fiction. But occasionally, I jot down a quote or a few lines and file them away in a safe place.
And I have my playlists. The one entitled "Melusine" does, oddly enough, share a few tracks in common with my rediscovered feminist mix tape. All is not lost.
Ah, the mix tape, a short-lived, essentially obsolete art form. A few of my eighth and ninth-grade classmates had made them for each other, with photocopies of kittens or puppies as covers. As an introverted chick with few friends and less confidence in matters of influencing others' taste (but plenty of confidence in my own ability to know what I like) I made tapes for myself.
In high school the tapes, titled "Hits of 1980/90-whatever (I'm going to pass up the chance to show my precise age here)" and adorned with hastily ink-drawn musical notes, were songs I caught off the radio, recorded on the fly. I depended on my not particularly quick reflexes to catch the songs in their entirety, and so they appeared in no particular order.
Then in college I got a bit more sophisticated. I titled the series of tapes "Sonic Potpourri" and made them only from other tapes or (increasingly) CDs that either I or my brother owned. I could only make them when I was at home from school, where my treasured once-state-of-the-art stereo stood in my girlhood room. On the frequent occasions when I was home for a weekend, a new tape would be my major weekend project. I labored over the tapes with the attention I should have directed to my homework -- the attention and the passion. Maybe it wasn't coincidence that the only A I received my first freshman semester was in the history of jazz.
The tapes told the story of my life -- not from day one, but what was going on right at that time, in narrative form, although the narrative would probably have been comprehensible only to me. Much of it was centered around my relationship at the time, my first serious one, and my efforts to find my own voice in the world. Typical college stuff. Speaking more recently to friends, I realized that almost everyone made mix tapes in those days. My boyfriend at the time had made some for me, stuff he thought I might like, or hoped I might like, or thought I should like. I lacked the confidence to pass on my own finds to him.
Later on, my tapes began to tell the story of my burgeoning feminism -- since this was the '90s, a Second Wave, Riot Grrrl-influenced feminism -- my own untattooed, still-introverted but increasingly confident version of it.
I found one tape that captured this moment in time, a "special edition" called "27 Songs by Women." One of my signature ink-drawn notes is encircled by a Venus symbol. Reading the list of songs really took me back. Some remain staples of my playlists. Others I haven't heard since the '90s. Tori Amos, Veruca Salt, Shonen Knife, Hole, PJ Harvey, the Breeders, Belly, Throwing Muses, Heather Nova, Bjork, et cetera.
"Silent All These Years" leads off, and Indigo Girls' "Language or the Kiss" closes with a question, one never answered, but replaced with different questions.
Yes, I have my playlists now, but I can tweak them with a quick right-click of my mouse -- a bit too easy. In comparison, those tapes have staying power. Like the spiral notebooks I scribbled in as a kid, they're immune to hasty single-fingertip deletion. And every once in a while, I'll probably find myself combing through that dusty box of tapes and retrieving a gem.
I had faithfully kept journals in spiral-bound notebooks and later more attractive blank-paged hardcover books, up until my last year or two of college. I don't know why I stopped journaling. I continued to write poetry and dabble in fiction, but at some point I stopped allowing myself the luxury of written self-reflection. The mix tapes filled the void, and allowed me to tell my story (if only to myself) in music.
I never did go back to handwritten journal-keeping, but eventually (after a few resistant Luddite years) started up a live journal, which offered the slightly unnerving opportunity for me to share my personal thoughts with other human beings, albeit at a safe distance. Eventually, I replaced my highly personal blog with others more topical in nature. I suppose sites like Facebook filled the more personal niche, or maybe, once again, I stopped believing I have the time to journal. And I'm probably right, unfortunately. It's difficult enough to make the time for poetry and fiction. But occasionally, I jot down a quote or a few lines and file them away in a safe place.
And I have my playlists. The one entitled "Melusine" does, oddly enough, share a few tracks in common with my rediscovered feminist mix tape. All is not lost.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Melusine is a Hibernating Creature
Hello — just a note to say that Melusine is headed on vacation shortly.
Don't worry, we're not going anywhere warm. Winter will remain very much with us in our travels.
In any case, our nonfiction/review series will be on a two-week hiatus until we return.
Look for a new post the last weekend of this month, and have a lovely Valentine's Day!
P.S. Don't forget about the poetry contest — just two weeks left before the March 1 deadline: http://www.melusine21cent.com/mag/contest
Don't worry, we're not going anywhere warm. Winter will remain very much with us in our travels.
In any case, our nonfiction/review series will be on a two-week hiatus until we return.
Look for a new post the last weekend of this month, and have a lovely Valentine's Day!
P.S. Don't forget about the poetry contest — just two weeks left before the March 1 deadline: http://www.melusine21cent.com/mag/contest
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