An excerpt from “Disney Villains If They Practiced Self-Care,” by Olivia Olson (Fiction ’08), published by Slackjaw.

The Queen in Snow White

The Queen dusts off her old talking mirror and asks it to name the fairest woman in the land. It’s sort of a loaded question, she knows, but she’s recently been ghosted by the huntsman and needs a shot in the arm. The mirror rudely shows some younger woman, and the Queen observes an unattractive rush of jealousy flowing through her body. After a long meditation followed by some joyful movement to a Spotify playlist of Lizzo music, the Queen remembers she’s an mfin’ queen and is pretty much over it. She re-gifts Snow White a Henry & David fruit basket and puts the mirror in storage.

Ursula

A natural introvert, Ursula spent her 20s gardening, honing her witchcraft, and making lengthy YouTube makeup and lifestyle tutorials to great acclaim. Now, it seems like mer-creatures are swimming out of the woodwork asking for help. Before she knows it, she’s stretched so thin she’s resentful of everyone and is shocked to find herself vengefully turning others into seaweed. One morning she stumbles across a Brene Brown TedTalk and feels like it was written just for her, and she vows to practice boundaries. When yet another plucky young princess comes to her cave to ask to be transformed, Ursula practices saying no. It’s as uncomfortable as she expected it would be, but she sits with the discomfort and assures herself that it will get easier with practice.

Continue reading Olivia’s piece here: https://medium.com/slackjaw/disney-villains-if-they-practiced-self-care-fd02e9d45470#47dd

“The Summer My Cousin Went Missing,” by Tariq Luthun, was recently published by the Michigan Quarterly Review. Read an excerpt below:

The Summer My Cousin Went Missing

“I should have asked how our khalto was holding
up, but I knew where she would be: her body

weary & unkind, buried in the day’s tasks; back
turned to the home she grew up in; seeds in the

farm’s soil, like miracles, sprouting as
she tends to them. Is this not always the case?…”

Find the rest of this poem here: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2020/01/the-summer-my-cousin-went-missing/

“For All The Deer,” by Noah Stetzer (Poetry ’14) , published by Sixth Finch.

For All The Deer

“found dead or killed by or near us in all
the poems let me say: I too share the guilt
for making mysteries from your sad ends;
in the straight line margins of this straight line
highway it’s hard to miss the knot of limbs:
a scribble caught in the act of twisting
last minute from a foregone conclusion…”

Find the rest of this poem here: http://sixthfinch.com/stetzer1.html

An excerpt from “Are You Really Sisters?” by Lauren Alwan (Fiction ’08), published by Catapult.

“Not long after my paternal grandmother turned eighty, she gifted my sister and me with two Spanish shawls. She’d bought them as a young mother in Brooklyn when my grandfather ran the family bakery on Atlantic Avenue, and decades later, here they were at her home in Los Angeles. The size of tablecloths, they had been packed away carefully, the silk of each was in perfect condition, heavy with embroidery that was lustrous and intact. One shawl was cream-colored, with clusters of pink roses; the other, black, with a graceful network of entwined buds of coral and pale green; both were trimmed with luxuriant silk fringe. I’d long coveted the Spanish shawls I’d seen in vintage shops and could never afford. “Take one,” my grandmother said, “and give the other to your sister.”

But how to decide between them? I loved them equally, knew I’d be happy with either, and guessed my sister would feel the same. Born of the same parents, we have always been a study in opposites, especially our coloring—I’m light-skinned, with straight, dark blonde hair, and blue eyes, while my sister has an olive complexion, black curly hair, and deep brown eyes. Though this now strikes me as a case of overthinking, at the time, I worried that whichever shawl I chose would seem like a comment on our differences…”

Continue reading the essay here: https://catapult.co/stories/column-sisterhood-identity-culture-in-multicultural-family-lauren-alwan

An excerpt from “On Poetry and the Necessity of Aimless Wandering,” an interview with Alan Shapiro by Amanda Newell (Poetry ’17), published by Plume.

AN: “In his recent essay for Plume on the prose poem and other hybrid forms, Chard deNiord observes that “[i]n the irrepressible, ever-evolving, experimental process of ‘making new’ many poets today are finding the traditional line inadequate for expressing and/or accommodating their urge for adopting liminal and hybrid forms that obviate the line. Which raises the question: how can a poet write poetry without lines?”

I have noticed that much of your recent work, including several selections for this feature, are prose poems—or at least what I would categorize as prose poems. And yet, you are someone who pays fastidious attention to the traditional poetic line as well, which we can see in “Ghost Story.”

Can you talk to me about your approach to the poetic line, and take a stab at answering that question—that is, how can a poet write poetry without lines?”

AS: I don’t know if I have an “approach” to the line. The line is only “a line” in relation to a sentence or a phrase it either reinforces or interrupts. And the line itself will vary to the degree it either reinforces or interrupts that phrase or sentence. And the effect of those various interruptions and/or reinforcements will depend on the lines before and after them, on the larger patterns of relation they either depart from or approach. For me it all comes down to pattern and variation, variation that depends on pattern for its significance.

Same holds true of a prose poem. Even without the line, you still have to establish some kind of pattern that suggests its own completion, some expectation of recurrence you can upend, modify or adhere to in varying degrees at every point in order to vocalize or enact a felt change of consciousness. Every sentence is a form or pattern in and of itself—that arouses grammatical expectations, that promise certain directions and outcomes which are either realized or disappointed.

The long sentence makes the short sentence that succeeds it more conspicuous, a loose sentence which begins with a main clause and then tacks on list-like a series of dependent clauses in apposition creates an open-ended expectation that it could go on forever. Depending on context, it could enact a feeling of indeterminacy, or a feeling of excited or oppressive abundance, ecstatic noticing or crushing boredom; whereas the antithesis of a loose sentence, a periodic sentence whose dependent clauses come at the beginning, its main clause at the end, seems more conducive to increasing degrees of anticipation, to the build-up of tension, since the longer you defer or suspend a main clause the more we’ll long for it and the greater sense of fulfilment we’ll experience when it finally comes. Likewise, complete sentences potentially intensify the effect of sentence fragments; just as a passage comprised of fragments will make whatever full sentence that follows them that much more surprising or emphatic.

There are, what, six kinds of sentences one can write: loose, periodic, compound, complex, compound-complex, and simple (seven if you count the fragment). You can’t set up an effect without setting it off from something else. In a prose poem the sentence is the principal expressive resource for enacting or embodying. A prose poem (like all poetry, like all art I would argue) depends for its life blood on pattern and variation. In a prose poem that expressive tension arises primarily (not exclusively) from the interplay of sentences whereas in lineated poetry it arises primarily (not exclusively) from an interplay of sentences and lines…”

Continue reading the interview here: https://plumepoetry.com/on-poetry-and-the-necessity-of-aimless-wandering-an-interview-with-alan-shapiro-by-amanda-newell/