“Little Brown Bat” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from “Little Brown Bat” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10), published at American Literary Review:

 

Little Brown Bat

​1.

That you must fall to fly. That you can live two decades or more.
That you have young like we do, one per year.

That you make a rich milk to feed your pup and to keep it warm
fold it between your wings.

That you eat every day half your weight in mosquitoes, found
by echolocation one winged speck at a time.

That you hibernate in utter torpor, absorbing the fat you’ve stored,
a very precise amount.

That you were, on that July night, a shy, soft thing, a vibration
just brushing my left eyebrow.

That you once were once unnumbered as Dante’s leaves in the fall.
​That you die from eating the insects

we poison. That you are cut down by wind turbines, not the blades
but the drop in air pressure popping you

like kernels of corn. That you swoop and careen arcs traced
by the streetlights of my childhood summers.

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“Heartwood” by Rose Skelton (fiction, ’17)

An excerpt from “Heartwood” by Rose Skelton (fiction, ’17), published at Four Way Review:

Heartwood

On the day after Hazel died – it was a Tuesday afternoon in early March – George stood at his woodworking bench, whittling a bowl. He pressed the piece of yew down, and used a bowl gouge to scoop a smooth sliver of the pinkish-white wood so that it curled upwards and away, falling to the bench. He did this repeatedly – he tried not to think of anything else, not Hazel, not the empty house – and then, tired of that singular motion, he reached for sandpaper and ran it over the burrs and birds-eyes until the wood was warm and smooth to the touch.

George looked through the window, out on to the loch, where the water was as flat and as grey as slate. On the loch’s far shore, lying low across the hills Beinn Bheàrnach, Beinn a’ Bhainne, and Beinn Taladh, was a bank of cloud that made the hills seem like stubs that ended only a few hundred feet up. These were the hills that George and Hazel had looked at every day of the 43 years that they had been married. Peat and granite and died-back bracken were George and Hazel’s winter-time palate; these were the hues that stayed with them through the darkest months of the year, until April when the first of the dog violets reared their purple nodding heads.

Hazel hadn’t been well, but despite the pains that tore at her bones, and then the operation just before Christmas, she had been out in her garden every day. A few weeks after the operation, even, she had pulled on her wellies, got her gardening gloves down from the hall shelf and wrapped her purple rain jacket about her. Concerned, George had watched her through the long window at the back of the house climb carefully up the steps, clutching at the wooden rail, and enter her labyrinthine vegetable garden. He had watched as she had become smaller and smaller, eventually disappearing behind the poly-tunnel, just a purple speck on the hillside, a trowel in her hand.

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THE POISONED CITY by Anna Clark

An excerpt from the book, The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy by Anna Clark (fiction, ’07), published by Metropolitan Books. The excerpt appears in Lapham’s Quarterly, with an additional piece published at The Guardian:

The Poisoned City

Looking through the photo archives of Flint’s parks and recreation department, I was struck by how water had such a rich place in the city’s history. Flint, the birthplace of General Motors, is famous as an industrial hub. But it is also a river town, only seventy miles away from both Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. It’s part of the Great Lakes ecosystem, one of the most abundant sources of freshwater on the face of the earth.

In one photograph after another, I saw the people of Flint gathering along riversides, pools, and reservoirs. The waterways built community—sort of. The photos were also revealing in what they didn’t show. Flint was the most segregated city in the North, and the third most segregated city nationwide. I found a 1929 photo of an integrated children’s baseball team—the league champs, according to the handwriting on the back. But in later years, when the African American population in Flint exploded, they vanished from many community spaces and from, it seemed, the photographic record. At Berston Field House, white children played in the pool while African American children were set up with sprinklers. Black children could swim in the Berston pool once a week, and afterward the pool was drained and cleaned before white children returned.

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“Aesthetics and Politics” by Nomi Stone (poetry, ’17)

An excerpt from the essay “Aesthetics and Politics: A Reaction to ‘War Poem’ as Film” by Nomi Stone (poetry, ’17), published at Motion Poems:

Aesthetics and Politics: A Reaction to ‘War Poem’ as Film

“When I’ll pray the sun won’t devour/ your northbound steps” –Javier Zamora

Last week, in over 700 cities and towns across America, protesters marched against the Trump administration’s brutal immigration and refugee policies, calling for the reunification of the over 3,000 children separated from their parents and an end to indefinite detentions. Amidst the photographs of children in concrete-floored cages with foil blankets, there were decades of suns devouring steps. It is in this same searing month that Motionpoems releases the film Tyler Richardson made of my poem, “War Poem,” a poem also about refugees.

Tyler Richardson turned my poem “War Poem” (The New Republic, 2017) into a film in Season 8 of Motionpoems. To start: let me trace where the poem came from. I am an anthropologist and research war and American Empire; my poems are often inspired by what I’ve seen and stories I’ve heard. My second collection of poems (Tupelo 2019) is about the two years of fieldwork I spent in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America for trainings. I’ve also done fieldwork about the refugee crisis in the Middle East. “War Poem” is inspired from several stories told to me by a migration aid worker—about moments that occurred in the Middle East and Africa. I wrote the poem while I was an MFA student at Warren Wilson, and my brilliant mentor Monica Youn read many drafts, as I worked to get it right: how much urban and how much pastoral; how to justly locate the voice of the poem and the witness within it?

When Tyler and I first spoke about translating the poem into a film, he told me he was thinking of shooting on the country roads of Upstate New York—and transposing the poem into a Westernized version of the refugee crisis. When he sent me the final cut some months later, he explained: “We decided to lean into the idea that this film is subtly referring to an Americanized version of the images that so often come from overseas––unrest, separation, refugees.” As Tyler wrote on “Director’s Notes,” he wanted to offer “a slice of just one journey shared between siblings and rooted in what is personal and relatable [to him].” He explained that he wanted to make a distant crisis more imaginable to a Western audience. I was immediately both anxious (at the thought of an “Americanized” version of the poem) and intrigued: what would a Western or American translation of my poem look like? I hoped for a portrayal of Empire at home.

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Two Poems by Peter Schireson (poetry, ’17)

An excerpt from “It Has a Wish,” one of two poems by Peter Schireson (poetry, ’17) published at Connotation Press:

It Has a Wish

It has a wish, she says.
When a skirt has a fold like this,
small and unintended in the hem, it means
it has a wish.
I bend over and straighten it,
trying to conceive what more,
beside brushing against her legs,
her pale green skirt,
sheathed about her, folded,
could be wishing for.

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“A Hiker’s Guide to Damascus” by Serene Taleb-Agha (fiction, ’12)

An excerpt from “A Hiker’s Guide to Damascus” by Serene Taleb-Agha (fiction, ’12) published at Ploughshares:

A Hiker’s Guide to Damascus

Syria is the country where I first began to hike. I had moved there from the US with my husband in the early 2000s to the approving nods of the elders of my family. Before then, I’d only gone on visits, to see relatives and learn the language. My move was supposed to be a homecoming. A graft cut from a tree only thrives in its native soil, my relatives told me. Syria is the only country where you will be unconditionally embraced. In the ambivalent years following 9/11, when I began to be noticed as something more than an oddly dressed woman whose parents came from a country no one had ever heard of, it sounded like an easy route to acceptance.

It turned out the acceptance was not so unconditional—more on that later—but it also turned out there was much more to embrace than the people. To this day, when I think of Damascus, I think of the land that cradles it: the pockmarked hills with sharp spines down their ridges like the bones of a stegosaurus, where the rains have etched away at the limestone; the dry valleys, where the road is rough, the water scarce, and you wouldn’t venture without a friend. In other words: hiking country.

I had trouble making friends the first couple of years. Then my husband read an article in an online paper about a hiking club and, knowing that I had a love for nature, forwarded it to me. That was how I found myself at a bus depot in downtown Damascus very early one weekend, prepared to take a bus ride off into the countryside with a few dozen complete strangers.

They called themselves the Nature Explorers, and unlike the independent, go-it-alone streak of the American hikers I’ve hiked with since, they considered themselves a family. Everyone paid a small fee, which went to the purchase of common meals, and before we embarked on the bus, we divided the packets of olives and cheese for breakfast, beans or pasta for lunch, into our packs. The bus was barely big enough to fit half of us, and most of the young men stood in the aisle. Leaving the city, the driver would play the mellow strains of Fairouz, the Lebanese diva. On the way home, our feet sore from ten to fifteen miles of all-day traveling, those still left with energy cranked up the dance music and clapped and shook their hips in the aisles.

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“In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors” with Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09)

An excerpt from “In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors” with Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09), published at  Water-Stone Review:

In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors with Angela Narciso Torres

1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be?

I was in a workshop with Terrance Hayes and we were looking at definition poems. So when I got home I tried to write one. I thought I’d take it a step further and use the various definitions of the word “between” in a sentence, as you often see in a dictionary. Inadvertently, the sample sentences somehow started to form a kind of narrative. Being a writer with a strong narrative bent, I’m always interested in finding ways to subvert the traditional linear trajectory of storytelling. Using the nonliterary form of the dictionary entry was a fun and sneaky way to do this. The use of blanks came later—I thought it would be interesting to leave spaces in the poem, inviting the reader to participate in the poem’s meaning-making. This gave the poem an element of surprise and unintentional humor, as I’ve found when I’ve performed this poem in readings.

2. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved writing in little notebooks. I read the Diary of Anne Frank when I was about nine and have been a diarist ever since. My first diary was a small clothbound Hello Kitty notebook with a lock. I wrote down everything in my Catholic schoolgirl script, even the most mundane things, addressing them to an imaginary friend named Daisy, e.g. “Dear Daisy, Today I woke up, brushed my teeth, and played with my dog, Wiglet . . .” and so on. Being an avid reader, I also enjoyed copying down esoteric quotes from books I’d read, whether or not I grasped the full meaning or implication at that tender age. e.g. (from The Little Prince) “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Back then it was more about the pleasure of getting things on paper than about the writing itself, then later looking back at how the pages filled up and made the shape and story of a life—my life! I was a serious, introverted child with a small circle of close friends and a huge inner life, prone to daydreaming. Most of the time, I felt “on the fringe of things,” an observer, looking on. I think this all made fertile ground for becoming a writer.

 

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“Storm, Lake Superior” by Ethna McKiernan (poetry, ’04)

An excerpt from “Storm, Lake Superior” by Ethna McKiernan (poetry, ’04) published at Poetry Ireland:

Storm, Lake Superior

If ever I were ever to fall in love
again, it’s likely not
to be with someone human,
but with a moment just like this one –

a lit expanse of water during storm
forked by lightning from sky to lake,
some crazed colour between silver and white –
light flashing staccato below a grey band

of clouds, waves that bluster in
while wind billows and thunder rumbles
deep. There I’d know a hum
of both aloneness and connection,

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“Iguana Iguana” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from “Iguana Iguana” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) published at the Massachusetts Review:

Iguana Iguana

Iggy was sweet. Everyone in the family said so, even if they didn’t share the boy’s belief that the iguana also was beautiful, with skin the milky shade of a raw lima bean, and along his spine a line of mauve dots, each ringed with an apricot halo. Picked up, he’d stretch along your forearm placid as cat sleeping on a sill, breath concaving his throat and inflating it again in a great, pale bubble. Bubble, blink. Bubble, blink. The boy sometimes stood like that for an hour or more until his arm went numb.

His mother found reptiles repulsive, but she was grateful that this one at least was not a meat eater. She couldn’t have faced buying live moth larvae, or worse, frozen mice embryos horribly called “pinkies” that had to be thawed then prodded with a broom straw to fool lizards into thinking they were stalking live prey. And, unlike the three-foot monster her brother-in-law had once kept in a bathtub, Iggy didn’t seem to be growing very fast.

Leslie had to admit that the lizard was a good friend to her son, for whom friends were in short supply even with expectations that shrank with each passing year. Small for his age, he avoided the team sports that bonded his fifth-grade classmates and after school generally went to his room to play video games or sit at the kitchen table to draw or do homework.

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“Realistic Absurdity in DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE” by Christina Ward-Niven (fiction, ’18)

An excerpt from “Realistic Absurdity in DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE” by Christina Ward-Niven (fiction, ’18) published at Craft:

Realistic Absurdity in DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE

There is so much to admire, craft-wise, in Don DeLillo’s classic novel White Noise: compelling, empathetic characterization; sharp dialogue; handling of theme through plot and subtext; a tone that consistently weaves wryness with heart. In this essay, however, I’m going to focus specifically on one aspect of the book I find most intriguing, as a writer: White Noise’s unique, slightly askew form of realism—which is not quite realistic, but also not wholly unrealistic or surreal. How does the author pull this off?

My copy of the novel features a blurb from Lev Grossman of Time that reads, in part: “Though it’s pitched at a level of absurdity slightly above that of real life, White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturated, hyper-capitalistic postmodern America so precisely …” I agree, and I’ll use this quote as a jumping-off point. Before I examine the “how,” I’ll consider the “why”—why might an author aim for this quality of slight absurdity? How does it serve the narrative? Why not write in straight realism? One reason may be that slight strangeness adds consistent interest to a narrative that is, in part, simply about the mundane—the dailyness of family life in modern America (supermarkets, TV commercials, tabloids, kitchen conversations)—a topic that by its very nature is at risk of being overly quotidian, if not outright boring. White Noise also centers on a quirk-filled but caring, functional family, featuring spouses Jack (the book’s first-person narrator) and Babette who openly, deeply love each other (even Babette’s eventual infidelity is rooted in spousal love!) and love their children—a subject choice that also risks boredom and/or sentimentality. Yet the light weirdness of the characters, their interactions, and their reactions, make this loving family both familiar and excitingly unpredictable.

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