The following is a poem from The Thin Wall, a new collection of poems by faculty member Martha Rhodes.

(Click through to read entire poem).

 

It is the horse in her he fears,

her eyes, large and rolling,

the yellow crunch of her molars,

and her heavy foot aimed at him.

He hears her in the stall of night

approach, the other animals scatter,

as does the dry dirt of her path,

and the pebbles at his feet

as he moves aside, as if to invite her

to enter into the event horizon itself.

He sees all her parts stretch out,

a string speeding forward yet still,

next to him, suspended in the cessation

of time, the galloping fury of her finally

arrested so that now his sleep markedly

quiets enough for the shift of his breathing

to stir her. She licks his salty spine—

he is calm, now—pats his damp mane,

 

Wake little horsey.

 

 

“It is the horse in her he fears” is from The Thin Wall by Martha Rhodes, © 2017. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

A story by faculty member Peter Turchi appears in Prompt Press:

Cárdenas’s men spent three days looking for a passage down
to the river. Captain Melgosa and one Juan Galeras and another
companion attempted to go down at the least difficult place, and
went until those who stayed above were unable to keep sight of
them. They returned in the late afternoon, not having succeeded
in reaching the bottom. What seemed easy from above was not
so, but instead very hard and difficult.
–from accounts of the journey of Francisco Vásquez de Coronadois

“What is it about that place?” my wife asks.
She means the Grand Canyon; she wants to know why I need to keep going back. Though if anyone knows, it would be her: we saw it together—my first time—nearly 35 years ago, in August. I had driven across country with a kidney stone, the tiniest sliver of calcium compounds, a miniscule collection of crystals, an implausible cause of blinding pain. … Continue reading here.

An article by fiction faculty member Alix Ohlin appears in AWP: The Writer’s Notebook:

 

“Fiction in the Age of Social Media” by Alix Ohlin, December 2016

The first time I gave a reading, I shared the stage with a writer who introduced herself as “the inventor of the email novel.” Someone in the audience laughed, and she frowned. “It’s just like an epistolary novel,” she explained. “But with email.”

The writer’s tone, proud and defensive, implied that the email novel was a genre with both literary precedent and a bright future of its own.

… continue reading the rest of the article here.

A story by faculty member Lauren Groff appears at the New Yorker:GROFF Lauren, writer - © BASSO CANNARSA/LUZ

It is Halloween; she’d almost forgotten.

At the corner, a man is putting sand and tea-light candles into white paper bags.

He will later return with a lighter, filling the dark neighborhood with a glowing grid for the trick-or-treaters.

She wonders if it’s not hazardous to allow small uncoördinated people with polyester hems near so many flames.

Continue reading the story online, and check out an interview with Lauren about writing the story (which includes a Warren Wilson mention!) here.

RBoswell-1-thumb-240x342Faculty member Robert Boswell‘s short story “The Soul in Paraphrase” has been published in Ploughshares‘ latest Omnibus collection (purchase a copy here). Following is an excerpt:

Of the several people and one supernatural creature witness to the encounter between priest and sinner, Alas (pronounced Alice) Casher is the most affected. For many years she has known that she exists on God’s earth to redeem the lost, but she has resisted the calling. As long as she possessed a house into which she could retreat, she avoided her duty, baking bread for the church each day to appease her Lord, listening each night for His pronouncements, but avoiding the righteous path by means of books and the insistent bodies of local men, by cable television and the distraction of national politics. Her father, Alasdair Casher, willed the house to the church with the proviso that his daughter could keep it until she married or turned thirty unwed. Today is her birthday, and movers are emptying the place of her material possessions. It is time to accept her vocation. She chooses a summer dress, combs her leonine hair, perfumes her long neck. Bearing the morning’s warm loaves, she enters the cathedral of St. George the Divine to select her destiny.

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Following are two short stories excerpted from faculty member Karen Brennan’s latest story collection, Monsters, out now from Four Way Books:

THE RAT STORY

There was a story he liked to tell about a rat who wandered into a
Japanese teriyaki fast food restaurant. This was no mouse, he’d say,
This was—and here he’d pause to measure a length with his hands—as
big as a newborn: a giant Norwegian rat. It was here in the story that
she—since she’d heard it several times—would begin in her mind to
confuse the image of a rat with the image of a baby. She imagined the
rat, lying in a little wooden cradle, wrapped in a pink blanket, its eyelids
fluttering, and breathing in a labored, dying way and at the same time
she pictured a baby, dead like the rat, in a sad heap on the kitchen floor
of a Japanese fast food restaurant. While her mind shuttled between
attraction and repulsion, baby and rat, she studied his mouth forming
the words of the story in a way that was simultaneously charming and
off-putting. The rat headed for the kitchen, he reported, stumbling in a
kind of stupor, and everyone in the restaurant got up and left. He, on
the other hand, approached the counter to ask for a refund. Well, we
don’t know, said the girls who were in charge. These were very young
girls, he said, very wide-eyed and vacant-looking. We don’t know if we
can give you a refund, they said. We’ll have to check. Do you know rats
carry bubonic plague? he asked them. We know, they said. Well, it ran
into your kitchen, he said. We know, they said. But it died. At this, their
dinner guests usually laughed. Even she laughed, but her laughter felt
automatic and insincere.

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An interview with faculty member Monica Youn appears at Prairie Schooner:

1. More than a lot of poets, the form of the poem seems to matter as much of the line itself in your work. I was curious if you feel that about your work, and whether or not that’s a function borne from your prior life as a lawyer?

I think I am, on some level, trying to move from writing poems consisting of exquisite moments stitched together to writing poems with more cumulative and structural force. I’ve been teaching Yeats, and thinking about his movement from a symbolist poetics of sustained intensity to a more drama-inflected poetics of peaks and valleys. This doesn’t mean that each line isn’t important, but just that each line needn’t necessarily call attention to its own importance – a quiet rhythm is still rhythm.

Continue reading online

Following is an excerpt from “Absolute Zero,” a story in the new collection, Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, from faculty member Steven Schwartz (click through for full excerpt). You can also find another story from the same collection, titled “The Theory of Everything,” at Electric Literature, with commentary from fellow faculty member Robert Boswell.

Every morning before school, Connor ran four miles in the desert with the Marines. They did push-ups and bear crawls on the lawn in front of the recruiting center and shouted Oo-rah! at the top of their lungs. He’d shaved his head, his scalp as smooth as his mother’s, only she was going in one direction and he . . . well, he didn’t know where he was going. Since he was only seventeen, a year younger than most of his graduating high school classmates because he’d skipped eighth grade, he’d have to have his mother’s consent to join up. So far she’d been lucid enough when it came to this particular matter to shake her head no and vigorously refuse. “Over my dead body,” she said, not without irony. “I will stay alive as long as it takes to see that you don’t throw away your life.”

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Following is an excerpt from the novella “The Exit Coach,” from the story collection of the same name by faculty member Megan Staffel (click through for full excerpt):

At nine AM when the doorman rang and said, “You have a visitor Mr. Abram,” he knew that Jennifer hadn’t canceled. And now the whole tiresome business would begin. Two weeks later, if it lasted even that long, he would decide that his privacy was more important, and feeling like an ass, he would fire the overburdened, underpaid Caribbean, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican woman who had spent an hour on public transportation and then with poor language skills and a volatile mixture of hates and fears, tried her absolute best to understand his needs.

A knock on the door came next. Soft, but he heard it. He had lived by his hearing all of his life and in old age was still blessed with it. It was his legs that had given out.

“It’s open,” he called, wheeling himself into the foyer, preparing to meet the enemy.

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C. Dale YoungTwo poems by faculty member C. Dale Young appear at The Collagist:

Mestizaje

At the ruins of Tulum, on a boulder
half-buried in the sand on the famous beach
below the often-photographed pyramid
that stares out at the sea, I found

a petroglyph overlaid in white chalk
to better demonstrate the bird-like thing
carved into its side. I had seen it before.
In Cuba, maybe, or Puerto Rico, somewhere

Continue reading “Mestizaje” online, and find the second poem, “Precatio simplex,” here.