Hey, Guess What!

You probably guessed right, much appreciated readers, if you guessed that our Fall/Winter issue, Volume 3.2, is now available, just in time for your holiday reading pleasure.

If you haven't already, you can check it out right here.

And have a happy one!

New Issue Delayed, But Coming Soon

Our "Fall"/Winter issue will be appearing while it is still technically fall (astronomically if not meteorologically) but it will be a little delayed from when I was originally hoping for it to appear, by the first week of this month.

Aside from the server migration issue with the hosting service setting me back a full day's work or so, a shocking loss this week has made it difficult to focus on the work I had planned to do, and frankly, I've gotten pretty much nothing done in the last five days.

But as long as this annoying cold I'm fighting doesn't turn out to be the flu, with a little work this weekend and over the next week, hopefully the issue will launch by the end of next weekend, December the 11th.  It's going to be a pretty good issue, content-wise, I think, so I'm looking forward to being able to finally get it out there.

Review: Ann Cefola's St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped

St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped, by Ann Cefola
Kattywompus Press , 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

In her new chapbook, St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped, Ann Cefola begins by exploring the transformational potential inherent in the ordinary moments of a woman's life:  having girlfriends over on a summer evening, kissing her husband goodbye in the morning, enduring a long commute to a downtown job, shopping, getting a makeover, reading a daily horoscope, celebrating an anniversary.

As the collection progresses, the subject matter grows weightier, in poems that deal with loss, grief, and the capacity of human belief systems to address the more elusive mysteries of human existence. 

In "Girl's Night Out," the child-free hostess of a garden soiree for friends glad to be relieved for a night from the responsibilities of motherhood imagines her uterus "untraveled as a new triple-digit Interstate,/ a wide boulevard Hausmann might have built,/ tree-lined and unpopulated, a passage I walk every day,/ sometimes fast, blindly; other times singing,/ My avenue, my very own.

In "The Boys of Iona Prep," who spy on the narrator and her husband's goodbye kiss from a coffee shop window, a daily ritual is charged with new erotic significance:  "Mid-kiss I catch his eye — unblinking —/ and I am no longer being but body, marriage no longer a distant vow".

In "Dance in the City," the darker voices of the narrator's family history won't be silent even amidst the most joyous moment of her life:  

At our wedding, the dead, close as my lace stroking the red

church aisle, chanted:  Lovrien's breakdown over grandfather's

affair.  Great uncle's depression-era suicide.

My father soon dead from drink.

All my life, I read their lives like so many required

tragedies, the twists to come or avoid.  We were like

that painting by Renoir, me creamy fragile in your arms,

you all black poise.  Music and color blotted out their voices

and we danced.  Anniversary after anniversary.  I tell

the dead to return to their tombs, but they won't,

they want our breath, they call it inspired.

"Teint Pur Mat," a poem about the seemingly frothy topic of a woman's lifelong romance with cosmetics application, hints at something deeper in the epigraph, a French proverb which is translated, "It's hard to be pretty."

In that vein the poem closes, "To swim toward grace, she knew what must be applied."

The title poem takes its name from a news headline, "Hospital changes name to Westchester Medical Center, White Plains Pavilion" and finds the formerly eponymous saint forced to roam the grounds, looking for new employment.  "Now she understands the dilemma of the dying:/ how they don't want to turn their backs on/ the sun-edged bloom, how one human spring/ can ruin paradise."

"Kerning" offers a pause for comic relief from the more somber tone of the collection's later poems with a defense of the punctuation-followed-by-two-spaces convention, comparing the white space they create within a page of text to "Twin beds made up perfectly./ Binocular lenses that form one image.  Miles/ of thought after reading a billboard.  The weekend./ Systolic and diastolic pumps.  Good fences/ that make good neighbors.  A swim lane's/ quivering blue lines.  Deus/ ex machina", exclaiming in the next stanza, "Save/ the double spaces!"  (For the record, this reviewer agrees.)

"February" speaks movingly of death in winter:  "If you must escape,/ the angel of late winter counsels/ my comatose father, do it now/ before the strength of green reappears.// Do it now before light floods day,/ before hope pierces maroon tree buds./ Before you see the unboxable blue sky/ and believe in beginning again."

"After" lyrically examines the moment at which the enormity of grief begins to give way to a certain curious haunting by what remains of the deceased:

Behind the opaque glass.  Not memory, not

bone — but unspoken balloons in a cartoon,

what would have been said, certain times.

We were quick to get rid of the clothes,

and she has not appeared in dream.

But the jellyfish that follows —

squooshes underfoot, takes in 

salt water and sunlight.

That harms no one.  That floats.

The luminescent edges of its circular spine.

Finally, "Velocity" depicts the moments immediately before death, when it still seems avoidable, describing the Kennedys in the seconds before the assassination:  "His square head, jacket bunched at the neck, her wide delight/ as she turns to the camera.  Joy fills their bodies like/ an anesthesia that will fail them./ There is a prayer that says// Shield the joyful."

Despite Cefola's ability to look squarely in the face of human vulnerability and the chasm of grief, the poems in "St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped" tend to wind up accentuating the positive, crystallizing the moments of joy, wonder and clarity to be found in even the most tragic or banal circumstances, but in a truthful way and in clear, graceful language, without resorting to the convenience of window-dressing.

Review: Jessica Cuello's Curie

Curie by Jessica Cuello
Kattywompus Press, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Jessica Cuello's debut chapbook, Curie, is a biographic poem cycle devoted to the Polish-French chemist, physicist and twice-honored Nobel laureate who became one of the most famous women of the 20^th century.

Cuello's lyrically spare yet sensual narrative style is well-suited to the subject matter of a serious yet passionate woman who spurned frivolity and adornment and pursued her work with absolute rigor but who also loved deeply and was fearless in her intellectual curiosity.

Curie, as shown in these poems, was driven by enthusiasm for her life's work in chemistry and physics as well as by her devotion to her husband and lab partner, Pierre Curie.

Other pivotal events and catalysts in her life included the devastating early loss of her mother and sister, who died within a year of one another; her romantic disappointment when the son of a couple for whom she worked as a governess obeyed his parents' wishes to reject her because of her poverty; her lifelong loyalty to her father and her native homeland, Poland, for which she named one of the elements she discovered, Polonium; and an affair she had with a married colleague after the death of her husband which made her a figure of notoriety in the French press for several years despite her international acclaim.

Cuello treats all of these topics with an agile grace restrained by understatement.

In “Schoolgirl,” we read how the young Maria Skłodowska “stands for the Russian inspector” and recites the names of the czars while her Polish-language books lie hidden in her desk: “All my life there was a motion/ outside me, and under the desk,/ the saved page. I performed/ at will. My little arms grew.”

The poem ends, “Then it crystallized –/ our shelves were full of specimens,/ burning outward in the dark./ They could not be contained.

In the final part of “Casimir,” a poem about her early suitor's rejection, Cuello's narration dispassionately relays the young scientist's mindset as she embarks on her studies:

In Paris I arrived

without a girl's desire.

I used my memory

for facts. With a porous

mind I woke,

tin roof slanted

over me. Alone

I made my myth

with a cup

of tea and radishes.

In a poem about the miscarriage that ended Curie's second pregnancy, “Fifth Month,” Cuello writes:

The child had been living.

I knew her like the form

in a sideways glance,

like three words

in a whisper before sleep

not ordered for sense,

the way we know everything

somewhere: the salts we will find

at the bottom of the ore,

my husband awake

in the kitchen, stiff with pain

when my eyes open.

The next poem, “Pierre,” which evokes Curie's despondency after the loss of her partner and husband, begins by recalling the tenderness of earlier times:

Slow, careful

as words, you climbed

the steps our wedding night.

Fingers cradled the railing as I would cradle

your head – no one else

feels. Has ever felt.

I wish I had no daughters,

no work. No garish daffodils

in a cup of water.

I was an eye climbing the stairs.

My eye saw out of my chest,

my head heavy

with emptiness.

“Rented Room,” a poem about the affair with Paul Langevin, Marie's colleague, ends, “Yesterday, I asked myself/ as though you were a compound/ why his body?/ My first answer: to merge.// But my second: to annihilate/ the self. I hate/ that you must plan your life.”

The cycle's final poem, “Last Day: July 4, 1934,” describes the hospital bed where Curie was nursed by her younger daughter, whom she had loved but never fully understood because of their dissimilar personalities:

Her fingers turn the sheets

and the static coat

my body walked in everywhere

loosens. Our bodies hum

together in a way

they didn't in our lived lives.

The metal bed glints

like Gallium warmed in hands.

The poems in Curie often begin by holding their treasure at a distance from the unfocused eye, but as the reader is drawn closer, she catches first a glint and then a growing sense of an underlying radiance. I wish more poets wrote like Jessica Cuello does here.

Guest Review: Carol Smallwood's Compartments

Compartments:  Poems on Nature, Femininity and Other Realms by Carol Smallwood

Anaphora Literary Press, 2011

Reviewed by Aline Soules 

In our modern world and complex lives, we live in "compartments"–home, school, town, nature – the kind of compartments and realms Carol Smallwood explores, giving us what we know and questioning what we don't. "The Morning Warbler" may be seen "if one walks the bogs," she writes, "but does it sing in the morning?" What do we really know? Smallwood raises questions even as she leads us into a consideration of our own world with a direct, matter-of-fact approach. "Why Do Women Ask First about their children / when meeting other / women?" or "After a / hysterectomy did they package your remains in a / paper sack like the gizzard, heart, liver, neck, / inside a roasting chicken? 

Everything is delightfully jumbled, but beautifully detailed. "The Sewing Box," just like Smallwood's compartments, is filled with its own sub-compartments – thread bag, needle assortment, tray, and others-each, in turn, filled with its own details, whether a "myriad of spools," "potholder loops," or "a ring of white crocheted pineapples." She ties these objects together in the poem and also from poem to poem. For example, she sews the ring of pineapples on a "new J. C. Penney's case"; later, in the "Town" section, she gives us a poem called "J. C. Penney litany" with its "Flannel, Poplin, Wool, Cotton, Chambray, Chamois, Corduroy, Micro-suede" shirts and its "Amber, Indigo, Basil, Blue Abyss, Oatmeal, Olive, Espresso, Mushroom" colors, all in the "men's section" with "not a man in sight." 

The joy of these compartments is that they are all linked: the women's objects from "The Sewing Box" and the array in the men's section of the "J.C. Penney Litany"; the ants and spiders from the "Nature" section and the "Black Holes" from the "Science" section; and the questions that range through the book from "What'd happened to the Chinese damask / robe Nicolet had worn greeting the Winnebago's at Green Bay?" to all the answers the poet would "like to know"--"why snow's white" or "Why we know more of / the surface of the / Moon than ourselves."

Everything builds on her prologue-how we live between "the highest mountain / and the deepest ocean" and how we are all these compartments rolled into one. In this collection, the reader can experience a journey through our shared world, a journey beautifully guided by this skilled and generous poet.

Aline Soules, California State University, East Bay faculty member, has appeared in journals such as Kenyon Review, The Houston Literary Review.

Susan Knox: Baby, Baby

The maternity ward. Alliance City Hospital. Alliance, Ohio. July 3, 1941. A new mother, twenty-five years old, stares out the window.

Is she remembering her lascivious grandfather, the rape, the termination ten years earlier. Is she picturing a small, windowless room, a man in a white coat, the mass of tissue he dangled in front of her face like a warning. Does she believe the sins of the father are visited upon the son and she will pay a penance for her grandfather’s perfidy. Is she worried because the nurse hasn’t brought the infant to her. Was it a difficult labor, a long labor. Was she sedated before the baby was born, a mask clamped over her face. Is she afraid her newborn is not normal, that she will be punished with a blemished child. Will she undo my pink receiving blanket and will she untie the ribbon holding the white plisse kimono and will she remove the safety pins closing the cloth diaper and will she bare my body and find a flaw, a deformity. Will she call for the doctor, show him the stigma, ask him what it means. Will the doctor reassure her, it’s only a missing toenail, nothing to worry about, or, not knowing her deep concern, will he laugh at her silliness.

Questions for my mother that I never asked. 

Susan Knox's book, Financial Basics:  A Money Management Guide for Students, was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2004.  Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in CALYX, Monkey Puzzle, Pisgah Review, and Sunday Ink.

Diane Hoover Bechtler: Do It Yourself Project

It was not the kind of job tackled without help. But we did it ourselves, alone.

We had to. We were the single mothers of sons. Chloe was a widow. Her husband died in a car accident when the child was a baby. When our son was three, my husband left to chase other women.

Chloe received Social Security checks for her son. I collected sporadic child-support. Neither was enough to support us. So it was up to us to both work and raise those small men.

We forged our careers and raised our sons when two dope-smoking draft-dodging former hippies occupied the White House.

We knocked our heads against the glass ceiling as we climbed and left scratches as markers for our sisters to come. We pushed forward in sickness and in health. No one else was going to pay our rent or help us teach our small men to ride bicycles, to sail, play baseball, or later to shave and drive.  When we had to work extra hours or travel, we placed our sons with caretakers often of questionable abilities, so we could do our jobs and make money to feed our growing children. As in the beginning of time, a single cell split and made two. We were mother and father, caregiver, and provider. Chloe was in sales. I provided customer support, both of us in the graphic arts industry.

We brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan and did not think that commercial was funny. We were tired. In the summers, Chloe sent her son to spend time with her parents. I sent mine to basketball camp, archery school, tennis camp and whatever else I thought could shape him into a good man.

Together, Chloe and I bought tropical wool navy blue suits chosen with the Women's Dress for Success recommendations. Briefcases flapping against our Jane Fonda-firmed hips, we wore our serious suits and muted lipstick  to appointments with our clients. At home, we assembled model cars and studied the scales of train sets.

After late business meetings and only a Powerbar dinner, we attended PTA,wearing those ridiculous ties – like fake silk scarves for women with little anchors and turtles dotted across them. We drank our scotch neat. We smoked an occasional cigar. We already smoked cigarettes. We placed our MasterCards by our plates to signal wait staff that we were paying. Occasionally, we abused our privileges from our places of business by treating ourselves to dinners placed on our meager expense accounts. We took lunch at 3:00 so we could go to school conferences with our sons’ teachers.

Chloe grew her hair to her waist.  My hair was cut in an easy chin length bob quickly and cheaply trimmed at SuperCuts once a month. These were economical hairstyles.

For business, Chloe twisted her hair or clipped it in a barrette.  But on weekends she'd let that hair flow and fly.  It was like wheat.  Mine was black as sin. She was a color like lemon. I was not a color. She had the golden hair. I had the midnight black hair. She looked great standing in a cornfield and I looked great over candlelight. Night and day.

She painted and I sculpted in the bit of free time we had. We never expected our painting and sculpting to put food on the table.

Rather than be second-rate struggling fine artists we applauded the works of others by attending gallery openings. So after a week of doing double duty, Chloe and I drove to the arts district and strutted. I have a photo of us standing on a red carpet after an art gathering.

She and I did not walk.  We swished and bounced. "Thriller" blared in the background and we danced, planting one foot and stomping around it with the other foot. We let go the tensions of the week.


Many boyfriends came and went. Few stayed very long.  We were incredibly picky about who got close to our sons, our best creations.  Some men saw our sons as possibly being their sons. They missed the window of creating a family so looked to us as potential providers.

I eventually married again only to choose another womanizer.


Chloe broke my heart more than any man could have. After vowing to grow old together and sit side by side in rocking chairs staring at ocean waves, until death did us part, Chloe renounced her vow and moved away without me.


Years have passed. I see Chloe occasionally. She comes to my town. Or I go to hers. So in a way we have grown old together, but my rocking chair is here and hers is hundreds of miles away. Our sons have not seen each other in a decade.

Our careers ended. We passed our business torches. We have reverted to one person rather than two.

Our children have grown into men-good men. We did a fine job of raising them alone, of doing it ourselves. Raising our little boys into tall men made us grow taller and stronger.

We still do most things ourselves. The pace has slowed. We have the time.

I miss weekends with my best friend kicking back and having fun. I miss the little boys who now bring home women who may join our lives and provide grandchildren. One and one will equal three. Chloe's hair is very short now and streaked with gray. Mine is too black for a woman my age.

I miss our journey.


Diane Hoover Bechtler lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Michael Gross, who is a poet with a day job, and with their cat, Call Me IshMeow.