Her Read, a forthcoming book-length graphic poem by 2015 poetry graduate Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, was recently featured in Pleiades and Guesthouse. Read an excerpt below:
Selections from Her Read
See the graphic poem, as excerpted in Pleiades, here: https://pleiadesmag.com/selections-from-her-read-by-jennifer-sperry-steinorth/
Poetry alum Dinah Berland was recently featured in Forward. Hear her discuss her mentee Amanda Gorman, who recently read at President Biden’s inauguration, below:
Amanda Gorman’s former mentor knows what drives her
A lot of us shed tears when Amanda Gorman recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of President Joe Biden.
Dinah Berland didn’t just cry, she screamed.
“Oh my goodness, I was just thrilled,” Berland, a Jewish poet and author who has been a mentor to the young poet laureate. “I knew she would rise to the occasion, because of who she is.”
Berland started working with Gorman, who is now 22, six years ago. She has seen an already-gifted girl grow, through hard work and focused ambition, into the young woman who commanded the national spotlight — and will be in it once again on Sunday when she is scheduled to recite a poem at the Superbowl pre-game show.
They met in the spring of 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, where Gorman was reciting a poem as part of WriteGirl, a nonprofit that empowers girls through self-expression. Berland, an accomplished poet and author, had come because she wanted to serve as one of the group’s mentors.
“Amanda got up there and she was so far superior to the other kids,” Berland recalled in an interview last week. “I wanted her to know she was special.”
So Berland followed her out of the museum and found Amanda sitting alone on a bench.
“I introduced myself, and I said hoped she would take her work seriously,” Berland said.
A few weeks later, someone from WriteGirl called Berland to say the group had “the perfect young girl” for her—Amanda Gorman. She was already well on her way, having been selected as Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate in 2014, and publishing a book of poetry, “The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough” in 2015.
Gorman’s passion was clear. In a poem published in a WriteGirl anthology when she was 14 years-old, she wrote, “Poetry is your voice when you don’t have one/It is who you are when you don’t know.”
Berland, who has an MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, has published prize-winning poetry, and also wrote “Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda’s Book of Prayers for Jewish Women” (Schocken, 2007), a verse adaptation of the first Jewish prayer book by a woman. Her poetic translations channel Neuda’s 19th-century voice through a modern sensibility.
The two women, 60 years apart, began working together at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in West Los Angeles.
“She was primarily a spoken-word poet,” Berland recalled. “Maya Angelou was her favorite. So we studied poetry on the page, how poems live on as literature.
“She’s really a genius, totally brilliant,” she added. “She wanted professional guidance from a writer.”
Sitting in the noisy café, Berland and Gorman read poets like Terrance Hayes and Yusef Komunyakaa. They read Rita Dove, the first African-American to hold the title of U.S. Poet Laureate, and Natasha Trethewey, a more recent U.S. Poet Laureate.
Berland gave Gorman assignments she herself had in graduate school, which she said Gorman aced, though she was just 16. Berland gave Gorman prompts to write from, and Gorman, to Berland’s astonishment, would be able to concentrate and write amidst the din. On her own, Gorman devoured biographies of poets.
“She wanted to understand how poets became poets,” Berland said.
Read the article in its entirety here: https://forward.com/news/463367/amanda-gormans-former-mentor-knows-what-drives-her/
“Dumb Luck,” a poem by faculty member Christine Kitano, was recently featured in The Margins, a publication of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Read an excerpt below:
Dumb Luck
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://aaww.org/dumb-luck/
Split Mother, I wish I could twin myself and tuck you in to your blanket cocoon. You say the cold eats at your bones, and I know, because last time I heard crumbling marrow roll through you like rain. Mother, there are feathers stuck in my throat. I wish for a twin with telepathic lips against your good ear. Let her relay that yesterday a swarm of cedar waxwings picked clean your daughter’s ligustrum of fruit. The daughter who moved to warmer climes, because you said—remember?—everything would be okay. Let this slightly more beautiful child help you find the perfect tilt, suspend your legs, undo gravity’s pressure. I made sure she knows your fleece throw should fold under your feet, that your worn pillow is to cradle your head, and it’s your left ear to which she should bend when she says: your far-away daughter sends love from her new, green yard. Her voice chimes like mine, but may sound sweeter as it swirls into your inner ear. Mother, don’t let her vibrations fool you if through thin cochlear fluid you hear: I am the girl who loves you best. My twin is prone to lie, even as she leans, her silken hair glancing your eyes. The laws are different here. From twelve hundred miles away, I duplicate. I splinter. I fly. Mother, I float to your ceiling, drift over your body. Your body my heart once beat in, where as a dark cluster of cells I began furiously to split.
Warm Spell, February For the first time in weeks the wind doesn’t cut like an insult. My dog feels it too. I slacken her leash so she can dig her nose in the wet underbrush, letting her sniff as long as she likes. A woman walking on a San Francisco beach once told me, We need to give them time—meaning the dog, snout-deep in tangled seaweed. To them, it’s like reading a good book. Somewhere I read Haruki Murakami trained for marathons the way he writes— pushing his legs to the next mile like he pushed his pen to the end of one sentence, and then the next. Today I’m in no rush. I tread slowly, sipping the air the way the Pacific Ocean swallowed our brown bodies just outside Manila, our mothers waving us back to steamed rice, fried fish, mango on a stick. Why do I remember? Would I think of this now if the air weren’t soft with last night’s showers, warm as a mother’s breast? Would I dare to say, the twigs are chandeliered with rain like pearls from a girl’s ear? I breathe. For the first time in weeks I’m returned to my skin.
Charles Douthat, a 2019 poetry alum, was recently featured in the Threepenny Review. Read “Polk Street” below:
Polk Street
I don’t remember who chose the shabby tavern
on Polk Street three blocks north of Market,
only that we landed there afternoons after another
tedious law school class, lounging at its lacquered
mahogany bar near the square, filthy, street-facing
plate-glass window and its neon MILLERS sign.
There was the one ancient gimpy bartender coughing
his smoker’s cough in the shadows, and an erratic
overhead flickering from bare-bulb fluorescents,
and liquor stocks shelved before a mirror reflecting
both a second image of each bottle and our own
two faces stenciled by the bar’s tinseled, mirrored light.
No doubt you know a place like it. There must be
a thousand places like it. But no other with my sister
on the high leather stool beside me, lighting up
a mentholed Newport, sipping her vodka martini,
still droll and sun-blonde, fresh and wicked-clever
and cocky at twenty-eight for all her weaknesses.
I’d complain about our dull professors. She would
make me laugh as only she could, turning the hour
privileged and superb, reducing our current troubles
to brief stations we’d glide through effortlessly
together. Carolyn would do good work in the years
ahead. She would draft laws still on the books
in California, and before drink took over her life
she made the world better for people. For many
people, those who know her work still maintain.
They say you can’t go back but I ask what matters
more after everything that happens. My sister slips
a Newport from its box. I strike a match and watch
the red glow of tobacco igniting as her cigarette
nears my half-cupped hand. Fruitless maybe,
yet I go back if only to save a fraction of her liveliness,
even just the match-light’s flare in her face. Though
doubtless she’d argue, if she could, that I also return
for last word in what became our life-long debate.
Calling for a fresh martini and swinging back my way
Carolyn cheerfully tries to persuade again that nothing,
not she nor I nor anything else can be saved.
With permission from the Threepenny Review.
Poetry alum J.C. Todd was recently featured in Mezzo Cammin. Read an excerpt of “FUBAR’d” below:
FUBAR’d
for Cathy
Piece of shit war. Her mourning’s a blight zone,
her bristle and snarl an off-limits compound
that no one goes near. She will not rebound,
she’s so FUBAR’d. She’d gotten the patient home-
free to Ramstein. Deplaned. Passed from her own
command, transfer signed. Stable. The on-ground
med crew bungled the airway—a profound
inanity that screwed the vitals. Full-blown
systems failure. Not resuscitated,
although they worked on him, a non-com who
should have gone home to the girl he dated
or married, or Mom and Dad, where he’d undo
their fears. But fantasy’s Oprah-rated.
Now this one’s the soldier who didn’t come through.
This one’s the airman who’s got to come through
the flight alive, cocooned in twilight sleep,
a patient pumped with meds designed to keep
the range of organ function within a value
defined as viable for transport. True,
she’s been trained to follow orders that overleap
good medicine, good sense, but not to sweep
aside her oath to heal. On-ground, she knew
that prepping him was packaging a lie—
one less war zone body count. A fake out.
She’ll land him live although the indices
have turned against survival. Verify
his status. Joke, this mercy flight’s a take-out
delivery. He’s cold to the elbows and knees.
Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.php?vol=2020&iss=2&cat=poetry&page=todd
“The Mean World,” an essay by poetry alum Lia Greenwell, was recently featured in Waxwing. Read an excerpt below:
The Mean World
I’m riding in the car with my mother when she tells me that she has heard a new way women are being abducted into sex trafficking.
Say you’re in a mall bathroom and someone in the next stall asks for toilet paper. As you reach for their hand to pass some under the stall, they stick you with a fentanyl patch. You’re rendered unconscious by the dosage and hauled away.
I tell her I don’t think this is true. How would they remove your limp body without raising a few red flags? She says it’s what she read. I imagine Facebook is the source. She also tells me about how a woman was nearly abducted from Hobby Lobby after being followed in and out of the aisles.
Later I pull the threads of these stories to see where they lead. I search fentanyl patch, abduction, sex trafficking on the internet and find nothing. I search Hobby Lobby near abduction and find a debunked story from 2015.
I’ve become alert to how fear can operate as a flashing neon sign, a sort of GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS that draws our attention. Fear as warning but also entertainment, an adrenaline-surging what if.
Read the essay in its entirety here: http://waxwingmag.org/items/issue23/33_Greenwell-The-Mean-World.php
Poetry alum Noah Stetzer was recently featured in The Night Heron Barks. Read an excerpt of “Grindr 1993” below:
Grindr 1993
I have no idea how it happened when the blizzard
hit and the wind had stopped we all just showed
up at the gay bar on the corner: Jeff and Michael
and Kevin and Frank and Darren. That’s when you saw
who was from the neighborhood and who was not:
the ones that slummed from their suburb straight houses far
enough from home that no one knew them.
Read the rest of this poem here: https://nightheronbarks.com/winter-2021/noah-stetzer/
Fiction faculty member Caitlin Horrocks was recently featured in Electric Literature. Read an excerpt of “Chance Me” below:
Chance Me
“Just,” his son corrected him at the airport. “Just ‘Just.’ ”
Bond, James Bond, Harry thought. Like they were starring in a rip-off action flick and not the road-trip buddy comedy he’d been hoping for. “Harry, Harry Krier,” he said, holding out his palm for an ironic handshake.
“I know,” Just said, horrified. “I know your name.”
“I know! I know you know. It was a joke.” Harry had insisted on meeting his son at baggage claim rather than at the curb outside, but now he was dismayed at all the witnesses. Also, Just didn’t have any luggage. Only a ratty backpack slung over one shoulder. Harry went in for a hug instead of the handshake. Just raised his arms, awkwardly returning the embrace, and Harry caught a whiff of body odor. His son had grown tall enough that Harry’s nose was armpit height. Willow had been tall, Harry remembered. Willow had been an Amazon. Maybe she still was.
After fifteen years without seeing Just, Harry had steeled himself for almost any physical manifestation of his son, for Just to look exactly like his mother, Willow, or exactly like Harry himself. He was ready to be bludgeoned with memory, or guilt, or joy. But Just was a nearly blank slate — brown hair and eyes, a body that gave no hint of what its occupant used it for, no swimmer’s shoulders or runner’s wiriness. Jeans and sneakers and a plain black T-shirt. Such an ordinary boy, Harry thought, and the words seemed heartless, but not the emotion. Whole and healthy and ordinary. He could deserve no better fortune. He didn’t even deserve that.
“Sorry,” Just said, breaking the hug. “I probably need to shower.”
“You’re fine,” Harry said. “You’re perfect.”
Commentary on the flight (okay), the autumn weather (chilly, gray), and the traffic (heavy) got them out of Logan and onto I-90 heading toward Brookline.
“There are a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts here,” Just observed, looking out the car window.
“Do you want to stop for anything?” “No. I was just saying. There’s a lot.”
“I thought we’d have dinner at home, if that’s okay.
Miriam’s picking something up.”
“That’s fine,” Just said, and he asked Harry how he and Miriam had met.
“I sold her a condo.” After closing, they’d gone out for a celebratory drink. Six months later he’d moved into the condo with her. There was no stipulation against this in the National Association of Realtors bylaws. Second marriage for her. First for him, technically.
“Do I want to know what technically means?” Miriam had asked.
“I was very young,” he’d said, and the truth of this had hit him with unexpected force — a load of bricks, a piano out a window. He’d been very young when he was living in Arcosanti with Willow, and he wasn’t any longer, and he never would be again. Wherever else his life might take him, it would not take him back there, to the red desert hills and the bleached sheet of sky snapped open every morning above them, their baby squalling in a hand-painted card-board box. Now that baby was sitting in his Lexus, six feet tall and applying to Harvard.
On the phone, Willow had rattled off names like she was reading an online list of Boston-area colleges, not just Harvard, MIT, Tufts, but the off-brand schools out-of-staters never applied to, like Lesley, Suffolk, Simmons. “I thought Simmons was a girls’ school,” Harry had said. “I mean, women’s. A women’s college.” Was his son transgender and no one had bothered to mention it to him?
“He’s still narrowing down the list,” Willow had said. “There’s a school counselor who helps.”
Harry hadn’t realized that tiny Jerome, Arizona, even had a high school. After Arcosanti, Willow had ended up in a mining town turned vertiginous ghost town turned artist colony / tourist trap. She’d bought a house and a metalworking studio for almost nothing because it was at geologic risk of sliding off the mountain. Uninsurable, but she hadn’t cared. She’d sent photographs of Just posed with the lawn ornaments she made and sold; birdhouses on sticks were popular.
“He buses to Cottonwood,” Willow said, like she could hear what Harry was thinking. “It’s a good school. Pretty good, I guess.”
“It’ll have to be if he’s applying to Harvard,” Harry said, pointlessly.
“Look, everyone understands how competitive it is. Can he stay with you or not?”
Harry hadn’t wanted the conversation to go this way. He felt like no conversation he’d ever had with Willow had gone the way he’d meant it to. “Of course he can stay.”
“He just needs a place to sleep. He can get himself to the campus visits on the subway. Right? I think that’s right.” Her voice was suddenly uncertain.
She’d never lived in a town with more than five hundred people, he remembered. Neither had their son. “I’ll show him around,” Harry said. “I’ll take time off work.” “You don’t have to.” Willow never told him he had to do anything. She hadn’t made him the bad guy. He was the no- guy. Not the villain, just written out of the script entirely, and he’d let her do it. Miriam had rented that movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, the one where his character screams, “I abandoned my child! I abandoned my boy!” At least that guy abandoned the little deaf boy to become an oil baron, Harry thought. I abandoned my boy to become a real estate agent. The saddest movie never made. Or maybe it was a road-trip buddy movie after all, now that Just was finally here, and the real movie of Harry’s life had simply had a very, very long setup.
Read the story in its entirety here: https://electricliterature.com/chance-me-by-caitlin-horrocks/
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