Rose McLarney Receives George Garrett Award

Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) has been named winner of the 2013 George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry. She is the author of the book of poetry, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books.

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She will receive the Garrett Award during the Celebration of Southern Literature, produced by the Southern Lit Alliance.  The event will take place April 18 to 20 in the Tivoli Theatre in downtown Chattanooga.

“We are pleased to present Rose McLarney with the 2013 George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry,” said Allen Wier, FSW Chancellor. “Giving awards to and recognizing distinction in literary writing is central to the Fellowship’s purpose.” Founded in 1987, the Fellowship of Southern Writers recognizes and encourages excellence in Southern literature.

DOMESTIC

from The Always Broken Plates of Mountains

The sows are in heat, squealing and pink.
The wild boar comes from the forest
to batter at their pen.

I go out and smash the ice
on the trough. The water
breaks free. This takes
a pick ax. Wielding it, I feel wild.

But the only strength in this story
is the fences’. Not even boars are wild –
imported for hunting a hundred years ago,
crossing the sea in a rich man’s crate.

When I hang up the pick ax
it freezes to the nail, clinging as I do,
making my living elsewhere and

returning to farms after sunset,
the barns symbols
just discernable in the dark.

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Hum for the Bolt

“Hum for the Bolt,” a poem by Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) appears online at Poetry.

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It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so
of the next closest thing to water to the touch,
or it could just as easily be a shaft of  woodcrumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm.
But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure
of this town, it is the flash that arrives

and leaves at nearly the same moment.  …[Keep Reading]…

Jamaal is the author of Hum (2013, Alice James Books).

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The Half-Life of Home

The Half-Life of Home, a novel by Dale Neal (fiction, ’89) is available this month from Casperian Books.  Read an excerpt from the first chapter at CasperianBooks.com.
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Standing your ground is hard when you can’t trust what’s underfoot.

Sorting what’s true and what’s only wished is even harder in a place like Beaverdam, where stories sprout faster than grass on a new grave.

Beaverdam’s children heard tell of the Witch Woman who lived in a ruined  cabin, who would cuss you or worse if you dared knock on her door. They were warned of the Snakebit Girl, how the rattler’s fangs struck her pudgy hand reaching into the nest for the hen’s eggs. Rather than tell a soul of her plight, she swelled with poisoned pride, and for her silence she was buried in the sloping graveyard. They knew of the Failed Farmer who lost all in the last depression of  the nineteenth century. He sold off his plow horse, but still found necessity for the useless halter: his body was found hanging from a rafter in his empty barn.

But the oldest story was of a curse that lay on the land itself. The first whites who crossed the gap encountered no Indians, but the occasional arrowhead could be unearthed in the black fields by the creek, once dammed by the creatures who lent the cove its name. Besides those napped flints, those first hunters had left behind a legend…

this one cover
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Eighth Stage of Love

“Eighth Stage of Love,” a poem by Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) appears in the current issue of the Boston Review.

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Tell me I am not the only one
            who saw the hawk in the tree.  Who saw

the bird’s swift descent.  Once you said
            you wanted to be my adventure.  Tell me

now.  Here, where shade is scarce.  Where
            the sidewalk is burning and dogs

walk with purpose.  Remember when you found me
            by the lake and we heard the rain?

How close it came but never reached us?  Tell me
            it reached us. […]

Read the entire poem in the spring 2013 issue of the Boston Review.  Laura is the author of Inkblot and Altar (2006, Pecan Grove Press).

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The Boss Who Fired Me During the Recession

“The Boss Who Fired Me During the Recession,” a poem by Bethany Pray (poetry, ’88) appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Ploughshares.

Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise
but when she walks in her custom-size narrow boots
she minces, or half-dances like a pony,

the sort of pony who is dear and a little silly
and wears a hat with a ribbon.
A little of this and a little of that – lacking a territorial integrity,

she slides vertiginously from apprehension to sourness to glee.
She told me she had a wandering eye as a child,
but in fact, she still does.

To think she doesn’t know how the one eye floats out
to the right, or that resulting air
of being wholly lost.

Frankly, Cubism is painful, as much for the viewed
as for the viewer:   the girlish gewgaws
and the monkish face above

and the fixed, unaligned eye.
She looked out at us with the other eye.
To her we were as paper, without dimension,

viewed as the Cyclops viewed Ulysses
and his men in the cave –
foreign, and a scourge.

Visit the magazine’s website for more from this issue of Ploughshares, including “The Complex Sentence,” a poem by faculty member Tony Hoagland.

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The Country and the City

“The Country and the City,”  a story by Denise Delgado (fiction, ’10) appears online at Hinchas de Poesía.

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In the beginning I died to see a movie. I’d never seen one. Where we lived was all farms. Before we married, my husband came to my parents’ house and we’d sit in the living room and talk. Domingo was always a tremendous talker. He harvested pineapple as a kid and he was built like a tree trunk. His shoulders looked like they would burst through his suit. And while he talked I imagined he was projecting a movie out of his mouth. Moonlight from the window hit the wall across from him. While he talked and talked and talked and talked I looked at the wall and imagined his mouth played a man and a woman kissing. Or a woman running from houses to beach. Or a woman writing by machine. Honestly, I don’t remember.

How did the other Beatríz and I end up living together?

After we got married my husband was a lawyer. Practically a lawyer. He worked for this political man named Arturo Betancourt. They’d go out to dark bars to smoke and scheme against both Castro and Batista. Domingo always came home saying he was the only muerto de hambre in the party—the only one dying of hunger. The only poor one. So I’d starch his one white suit so nice you thought he put on a new one every single day.

Read more

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The Stone Lion

“The Stone Lion,” a poem by Abby Wender (poetry, ’08) appears online at the New Orleans Review.

The lion on the family mausoleum lies still,
mossy-backed and obedient.

When no one watched I rode it.

I never thought of those buried,
only wanted to escape the living
who were so easily offended.

Beatrice hated the place
and liked to tease,
“When everyone you know is dead,
you won’t like it either.”  …[Keep Reading]…

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6th Gift of Freedom Award to Diane Gilliam

Poet Diane Gilliam (poetry, ’01) has won the 6th Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own.

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The $50,000 Gift of Freedom award is the largest of its kind for women writers. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s tenet that a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write, the Gift of Freedom commissions a creative project by a promising woman writer/artist ready to restructure their life in order to complete their work within the two year period of the grant.

In her proposed grant project, a book of poems titled The Blackbirds Too, Gilliam will map the course of “identity accomplished by breakage of the structures a person might depend on to become someone:  work, knowledge, marriage, family, goodness.  The culture at large defines our first versions of such things and it seems inevitable that as we grow into ourselves the received definitions begin to fail us.”

Gilliam is also the author of One of Everything (Cleveland State University Press, 2003) and Kettle Bottom (Perugia Press, 2004).  More information about the award can be found at: http://www.aroomofherownfoundation.org/.

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Adoration of the Foot

“Adoration of the Foot,” a poem by Mary Jane Nealon (poetry, ’01), appears online at Spark and Echo Arts.  Read the entire poem at Sparkandecho.org.

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This piece is my attempt to highlight the body as the warrior for the spirit.  In every situation of suffering that I have witnessed, the body asserts itself as a force for life. I am convinced that despair often comes with physical pain and that comforting the suffering body is what makes way for praise.  I am especially drawn to the power of the human foot, which is the element of praise in my poem.  The body in despair is often curled and tight and touching the foot with compassion and love is a way to honor the suffering person, to praise the body’s struggle to live and in doing so, one often sees the body uncurl, open out and release the suffering spirit.

Mary Jane is the author of Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse’s Life (2011, Graywolf).

 

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Masticated Light

“Masticated Light,” a poem by Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) appears online at Ploughshares.

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In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center,
my fingers trace the outline of money folded into pocket
and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there
is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend
but will spend on a calm voice to tell me
how I am to be repaired. But legally blind
and nothing can be done means I’ll spend
the rest of the week closing an eye to the world,
watching how easily this becomes that.
The lampposts lining the walk home
are the thinnest spears I’ve ever seen, a row of trashcans
become discarded war-drums, and the teeth
in the mouth of an oncoming truck
want to tear through me. Some of me
always wants to be swallowed.  …[Keep Reading]…

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