Review: Susan Rich

On Blue Atlas by Susan Rich

by Tyler Truman Julian

Susan Rich’s newest collection, Blue Atlas, is a complicated work that artfully blends the personal and the political, avoiding didacticism to create a timely narrative that explores the themes of choice and liberation. Where many poets wax romantic or end up preaching, Rich has instead crafted a speaker who leaves room for reader interpretation and who also asserts herself. Rich adeptly transitions between experimental and structured forms, highlighting the speaker’s evolving and solidifying self-conception. When Rich’s speaker declares, “I’ve always desired a different life than the one I am living,” the reader is compelled to believe her. Yet, this same woman can also assert she is “the proud ‘I’ that does not apologize, / the ‘I’ that no one holds by the throat” (“From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”; “Single, Taken, Not Interested”). Accepting these two contrasting ideas simultaneously is challenging, but Rich makes it feasible. This is the power of Blue Atlas and the genius of the work.

            Blue Atlas invites dialogue and asks readers to confront the reality of choice or lack of choice from the initial poems on. Rich’s speaker fearlessly addresses taboo topics, notably naming abortion, and uses universal reverences, particularly through nature imagery, to connect with personal experiences. This approach guides the speaker through trauma toward self-realization, and the reader journeys alongside her. We see this operate effectively on the micro-level throughout the collection, but a prime example comes early in the collection through “Post-Abortion Questionnaire Powered by Survey Monkey,” one of the more experimental poems of the collection. The speaker responds to questions about her experience with abortion, using the language of nature, especially in cultivation (flowers, gardening, etc.), and her personal experience to engage with a subject often shied away from:

1.     Do you feel reluctant to talk about the subject of abortion?

In the center of the ceiling a marigold weeps

or perhaps it’s an old chandelier.

Look. Inside there is an otherworldly glow,

shards illuminated in violet-pink

and layers of peeling gold leaf.

Such minds at night unfold.

2.     Do you feel guilt or sorrow when discussing your own abortion?

The cabbage is a blue rose,

an alchemical strip show. They scream

when dragged from the earth,

only to find themselves plunged into boiling water.

The narrative unscrolls from cells

of what-ifs and hourglass hopes.

The poem is disorienting at times, specific and familiar at others. While the speaker appears unafraid to discuss abortion and, in fact, seems to have reached a point in her development of self to need to discuss it (“Does anyone escape her own story,” she asks later in “Post-Abortion Questionnaire”), the narrative is troubled by what could have been. This ambiguity causes the reader pause. This human appeal, marred by confusion, may be confusing for the reader. Yet, by crafting the narrative this way, Rich invites the reader into the story. By breaking down the stigma sometimes attached to abortion, she invites speculation and, hopefully, empathy on the part of the reader.  

It is only later in the collection that the reader fully grasps the context: the abortion mentioned in the poems was coerced by family. Rich presents a complicated notion of freedom—one that suggests freedom and choice become much more complicated if one is not in a position to fully exercise their free will or lacks support. In this way, Rich’s speaker wrestles with the past constantly and is left to wonder what choice means. In “The Abortion Question,” she explains,

            The abortion question is: did you want it?
          the abortion question is did you have a choice?

            The abortion happened in Manhattan—

            the Big Apple shaken and stirred along Madison Avenue—
          just two days after being kicked out of his 5th floor Paris walk-up.

            The abortion question watches you through sideview mirrors—

            the self-satisfied gaze like that of an undertaker,
            as if it holds the answer 

            to the future of your body.
           …
            Abortion is no joke to this body which ate
            enough for two: chips and kosher pickle sandwiches 

           well into the second trimester. 

           The abortion question places its miniature sticks
            into the cervix,

           small bundles of twigs made from seaweed. 

            See you tomorrow! The abortion question waves.
            And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
~
This is not an anti-abortion poem.
           No one will be killed with a 22-caliber rifle

            as in the two women’s health clinics in my hometown.

            No one pushing fetus prom outside the central post office.
           But the abortion question really loves to attract attention.

            It lives in a clock tower, chimes strongest at three months.
           …
           The question hangs about me like a pest
            tugging at my knees. Begs. 

            It will not go away.

            Offers another drink—
            a Manhattan, shaken and stirred—

The details about the abortion, along with the developing understanding of freedom that comes out in this poem is part of a larger, slower reveal of key details spread throughout the collection that clarifies the larger narrative of the collection and slowly ends the reader’s speculation, but never their empathy. These details help craft a clearer picture of the speaker for the reader.

As in “Post-Abortion Questionnaire Powered by Survey Monkey,” Rich turns to an experimental form in “Outline for Freshman Composition” to emphasize the speaker’s lack of self-understanding and control over her story. This is a pattern that continues throughout the collection, and in “Outline for Freshman Composition,” the speaker uses the medium of a first-year college-level English paper to explore her experience with abortion further, writing:

            Question at issue:                    Did you agree to an abortion to appease a sister? 

            Question at issue:                    What did you fear? 

            Question at issue:                    Are a bomb and an abortion detonated the same?

            Possible thesis statement:      Maybe not a sensible idea to allow someone else to
determine the future.

While the form initially seems to help organize the speaker’s thoughts and helps bring about a possible “thesis” statement about choice and the future, the form quickly becomes overwhelmed by the magnitude of the topic and emotion, ending in quasi-catharsis: a refuting argument and conclusions that deepen the reader’s understanding of the speaker and help the speaker develop a concept of self. She concludes:

            Refuting Argument:               Wanted out. Wanted    none of it. None
                                                           of this  ever     happened.
           …
           [                       ]                       If I didn’t make the choice but it was the right choice.
                                                            If I made the choice but it was the wrong choice.
                                                            If I could go back and find my own way. 

           Unintended Consequences: The rest of my life.
 
                                                          I will never visit Paris
                                                           or acquiesce again. 

                                                           For four decades, no words came between us.

            Possible Conclusion:            Yes. No. Yes. No.
                                                           The abortion wars come, but do not go.

            Possible Conclusion:            Mybodymmybodybodymyboymybodymy
                                                           bodymybomb—

Rich employs more traditional structures between these experimental occasions to highlight those post-cathartic breakthroughs. The speaker’s internal conflict translates to the structure used to present it throughout the collection, another shrewd move by Rich to help engage the reader in an emotionally and politically fraught conversation. As the speaker matures and gains insight into her past and herself, Rich often employs couplets and conventional poetic forms to mirror form and content. In “Burn Barrel,” the speaker clarifies why she is telling her story, and the poem has a tone and humor that many of the poems that appear earlier in the collection do not have. She explains,

            You think I write about you to remember…
            I think of you this way— 

            Rotting at the end of the season.
            The trouble that’s gone and the burn 

            barrel of delight that went with it.
            I write of you to stake a claim

            not to make sense of a man who
            worshipped only his own words— 

            who never tried to read the bright leavings
            nuanced and telling in mine.

These more structured, traditional poems become more prevalent as the collection progresses, aiding the reader in immersing themselves naturally in the speaker’s story and experiencing her nuanced journey toward self-realization.

            Blue Atlas is both compelling and challenging, nuanced and boundary-breaking. Susan Rich fearlessly plunges her readers into discussions that many writers avoid, guiding them through with a speaker as engaging as the various poetic forms she uses. Rich is a bold poet, whose work resonates in our present moment. Readers across the political spectrum should be unafraid to read and engage with Blue Atlas, but regardless of where you sit politically, be prepared to be challenged as abstract concepts become concrete and political issues become deeply personal.

In case you missed it—here is Rich’s poem from The Shore:

The K Word

In the Current with Siobhan Jean-Charles Issue Thirteen

Dear Reader, 

The contributors of Issue 13 were nominated for Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the Net, had their work featured in anthologies and won contests. When searching the recent activities of our past contributors, it’s always thrilling to see writers and artists accelerate their literary careers by publishing a book or continuing to have their work featured in magazines. Sometimes, we discover that a talented poet who had a poem or two taken by The Shore a few years ago hasn't seemed to publish since. We lose great poets all the time—often, when their work is not available for an audience. A few times, an online search for a writer has turned up an obituary. Featured in Issue 13, Kevin McIlvoy passed away September 30, 2022. He published six novels during his prolific career that included years as the editor-in-chief of the acclaimed literary magazine Puerto del Sol. We are saddened by his loss, may he rest in peace. He has had multiple works published posthumously, including a book of fiction called Is it So? Additionally, with the permission of his wife Christine Hale, he had a short story published in West Branch. We are reminded of the importance of community, of loved ones who believe in us and our writing and who will push on our legacies. 

Lisa Compo has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She recently had poems in Colorado Review, Muzzle Magazine, Permafrost and elsewhere. She recently became the social media manager here at The Shore!

Stephen Lackaye had poems published by Radar Poetry and One Art.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman published a book of poems, Exploding Head with Persea Books in 2024. She had poems taken by Bennington Review, Radar Poetry and The Indianapolis Review among others.

Jen Gayda Gupta had poems taken by Rattle Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, One Art and elsewhere. She was recently an intern for Sundress Publications.

Jess Smith won Hayden Ferry Review’s inaugural poetry contest. She recently had poems in Sixth Finch, Verse Daily, Sweet Literary Magazine and elsewhere.

Jane Zwart published poems in Muzzle Magazine, Superstition Review, The Indianapolis Review and elsewhere.

Simon Montgomery is an MFA candidate at Georgia State University.

Lee Potts was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He had poems in UCity Review, verum literary press, Riggwelter and elsewhere.

Calgary Martin published a poem in Booth.

Daniel Ruiz published poems in Tupelo Quarterly and New Letters.  

Shannon Ryan graduated with her Bachelor’s degree from Salisbury University.

Wendy BooydeGraaff was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was also nominated for the Best Microfiction Anthology. Her work appeared in Blue Earth Review, Barely South Review, The Broadkill Review and elsewhere.

Lori Lamothe published a fourth poetry collection with Kelsay Books, titled Tulip Fever. She published work in The Chamber Magazine, Mason Jar Press and SugarSugarSalt Magazine.

Adam J Gellings published a debut poetry collection, Little Palace, with Stephen F. Austin State University Press. He also had poems in The Academy of American Poets and Salamander.

Mikko Harvey published a poem in Four Way Review.

Sy Brand published a micro-chapbook, on having needs, with Trickhouse Press. They published poems in Ghost City Review, Parentheses Journal, WriteNowLit and others.

Sam Rye had a poem in Propel Magazine.

DS Maolalai had poems taken by Arboreal Magazine, North of Oxford and Porridge Magazine.

Carolyn Oliver was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She published poems in Copper Nickel, Phoebe, Superstition Review and many others.

Victoria Mbabazi published work in Queer Little Nightmares Anthology, No Contact Mag, Violet Indigo Blue Etc and more.

Samuel Prince published work in Red Door Magazine, Acumen, Apricot Press and others. 

Christien Gholson had poems published in Permafrost, The Tiger Moth Review, Wilderness House Review and others.

Michael Battisto had poems published in Poet Lore, Eunoia Review, NOON and elsewhere.

Sara Fitzpatrick published a poem in Feral: a Journal of Poetry and Art.

Ja’net Danielo has poems published or forthcoming in the Maine Review, Cider Press Review, SWIMM and others. 

Stephanie Kaylor has a debut poetry collection titled Ask A Sex Worker! forthcoming from CLASH books. They published poems in Michigan Quarterly Review, Four Way Review, Split Lip Magazine and others. 

Afton Montgomery has poetry published or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Passages North and Prairie Schooner. 

Jenny Della Santa published a poem in Bracken Magazine. 

José Angel Araguz released a poetry collection, Ruin and Want, with Sundress Publications.

Sihle Ntuli published poems in Frontier Poetry, Moria and Adda Stories.

Jeanine Walker published a debut poetry collection, The Two of Them Might Outlast Me, from Groundhog Poetry Press. She has poems in Bennington Review and The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.

Julia Hands’ chapbook was a semi-finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition.

Matthew Herskovitz published a poem in Strange Horizons.

Katherine Huang is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She won Phoebe's 2022 Greg Gummer Poetry Prize.

Malorie Varnell graduated from Georgia State University.

Meredith Arena was a poetry resident at Bethany Arts Community in Ossoning, NY.

Laurie Sewall published a poem in The National Poetry Review.

Ariel Clark-Semyck published a poem in trampset.

Kevin McIlvoy passed away in September 2022. His posthumous essay was published in West Branch, and recent poems appear in Cincinnati Review, The Common Terrain and others. His posthumous book, Is It So? was released in 2023 with WTAW Press.

Rachel Marie Patterson published work in Sixth Finch, The National Poetry Review and Cumberland River Review. She released her debut collection, Tall Grass with Violence with FutureCycle Press.

Nadine Rodriguez was nominated for the Best of the Net for their hybrid visual-text series, Sainthood.

Congratulations on your achievements! We cannot wait to see what you do next.

Warmly,

Siobhan Jean-Charles

Review: Rhienna Renée Guedry

On Root Rot by Rhienna Renée Guedry

by Tyler Truman Julian

Rhienna Renée Guedry’s debut chapbook, Root Rot, holds no punches. Embracing the condensed nature of the chapbook medium, Guedry skillfully explores themes of family and heartbreak, embraces a strong sense of place, and effectively navigates various poetic forms. Guedry traverses great distance in these poems—moving physically from Louisiana to Oregon and artistically from narrative to experimental forms to highlight different emotional moments in the chapbook’s throughline: the speaker’s pursuit of a lost “you.” As a result, Root Rot is a master class in the chapbook.

            The opening prose poem, “Mt. Tabor,” sets the tone of the chapbook, referencing the volcanic peak in Oregon, and evokes its Old Testament namesake as Guedry’s speaker spends the poem seeking an unnamed “you.” “You were a combustible thing,” the speaker declares as she ascends the mountain, connecting both the mountain and the unnamed, lost subject in this moment. “I came in pursuit of fire. Induction to extinction—” This use of nature to describe the state of human affairs continues throughout the chapbook and helps the reader understand the personal emotions and memories explored in each poem. The effective movement between descriptions of nature and reflection on the speaker’s relationship to the invoked subject in “Mt. Tabor” allows the reader to later fill this void with various characters who appear in the chapbook: an absent mother, an aging friend, another friend who has already passed on, and even the speaker’s beloved. Immediately following the speaker’s claim that she came to the volcano to experience its power, she explains, “that described you, too…You lived for the heat, the ejecta; I am trying to, in your name.” For such a slender volume, the stakes are high from the project’s opening poem on.

            The narrative takes the reader to the Louisiana swamp, employing experimental structures to depict the speaker’s childhood and the changing landscape:

            like swamps, storms will come and go
            everything this humid defies static categories: weather,
                        permaculture,
                          land as uncertain as floodwaters inside a house where
            water ain’t supposed to be, a wild solstice thing
            you know better than to sink your ankles in
            when you’ve had too many whiskeys
            the swamp is a shapeshifter from sci-fi:
            they are the shoreline not the tide,
            they are putting roots down,
            they are licking oyster beds
            because it’s that season
                                    kneel down on what is land
            today but tomorrow may be water (“The Swamp Is a Third-Gender Thing”)

The nature of the swamp, reflected in the changing structure of the poem itself, mirrors what becomes the upbringing of our speaker where she

            moved on, and then on again
            five times in five years to another swamp,
            another state—though never home to me,
            just another wet place—another damp suburb
            where I learned to spell rhododendron
            and chrysanthemum not because I knew
            their blooms, but because we moved
            onto streets named after them, streets
            where flowers used to grow (“The Name of Streets”)

            Outrunning floods and hurricanes put strain on the speaker’s family, and mildew begins to grow between their relationships, just as it does in their home. “You can’t forget the smell,” the speaker reports in “Mildew,” another experimental poem, highlighting this initial fragmenting in the family. She continues,

            it’s a texture, the raised level on a Styrofoam cup
                        condensation       white pepper       it changes
                        with your fingerprints,
            it reminds us that there is water under us all

The use of the narrative mode to relay information and the experimental mode to emphasize moments of increased emotion or complicated ideas that the reader needs to pay attention to, along with the continued use of nature to highlight the speaker’s relationship to those around her, builds narrative tension from poem to poem. This ultimately creates a more cohesive and fuller picture of the speaker and Guedry’s themes.

            Ultimately, the rotting landscape and the outward gaze of the poems turn inward. Using the language of nature in “Entanglement,” Guedry’s speaker describes “the rot of me”:

            My doctor called them cobwebs
            She watched
            as a surgeon wrestled loose
            the parts of me he was tasked
            to remove from the adhesions
            none of us expected to be there;
            detritus, seaweed tangles, my pelvis
            a shipwreck whose rusted bulkheads
            gave way to spoils and deep sea gardens

Now, the reader understands even more clearly how all these pieces fit together. Humanity is a part of nature, not an entity capable of controlling it. The family is a microcosm of nature, and children can’t control what happens in the family unit. The human body is an even smaller microcosm of nature, and it is equally as unpredictable. In “Disaster Planning,” the speaker tells the reader she moved, finally, to Oregon “because I was tired of the floods and hurricanes and I didn’t pick California because they have their own problems.” However, what follows this throwaway explanation is the more significant, more poignant engagement of Guedry’s speaker with the chapbook’s themes. Exploring fear and safety, she says, “Some demons you can plan for better than others, so we stick to natural-disaster planning.” Human relationships and human health are less predictable, less manageable than natural disasters.

            Nevertheless, Guedry’s speaker comes full circle, returning to the ideas that appeared in the chapbook’s first poem. She chooses to draw power from destruction. In “Compartments,” she explores this dynamic, saying,

            You know what they say
            about other people’s trash
            When they rummaged me
            and found delights 

           A grapefruit appendix
            little stones like boba
            copper 

            I get the appeal; I’m part scavenger
            searching for gems with skillful fingers
            —rot never troubled me

This light sarcasm grows into a guarded freedom that she explains in “Departures,” the chapbook’s last poem, as

            I think I’d like to do some leaving, too
            Except I am locksmith and proprietrix, my metal
            To stay put. Bolted seams of worn lock
            And warped key, this mess of loving
            Shadows in lieu of farewells 

            —the lesson I am teaching
            myself before the next time:
            when to lock up, when to hand
            over the tangle, and when
            to swallow the keys

The chapbook returns to the beginning here. The speaker is attempting to establish her own boundaries and decide who to live for, even amid the unpredictability of life.

            Across 35 short pages, Guedry shows her strength as a poet and storyteller by crafting a chapbook that showcases the beauty and power of the medium. Root Rot’s condensed yet expansive nature captures the human condition, juxtaposing it with the natural world, making it a compelling read for both newcomers to the medium and seasoned enthusiasts alike.

In case you missed it—here is Guedry’s poem from The Shore:

This Corrosion Beats On

Review: Melissa Crowe

On Lo by Melissa Crowe

by Tyler Truman Julian

As we enter the new year with its accompanying books, now is a good time to reflect on the past year, revisit our "To Be Read" lists, consider why certain books made the list, and prioritize them before moving on to the next trend. It can feel tempting to rush onto the newest books, especially at this point in history when we have more access to the written word than ever before. Maybe in the new year, we should strive to read those books that truly excite us, rather than what’s hot off the press.

For me, this meant returning to Melissa Crowe’s Iowa Poetry Prize winning collection Lo, which was released in May 2023. When The Shore published Crowe’s poem, “America You’re Breaking” in Issue 7, I knew I needed to read the collection it lived in. The collection itself is expansive, even larger than “America You’re Breaking,” with its exploration of the political division of the United States. Lo spans a lifetime, starting in childhood, exploring themes of ruralness, violence, community, and differentiation, before pulling up in the speaker’s mid-life, marking that period of one’s life with both hope and realistic ennui. 

The poetry of rural spaces is typically marked by an attention to nature, individualism, family, labor, politics, decay, and accessibility. These markers are most noticeable early in the collection as Crowe’s speaker explores her childhood and offers important background for the rest of the collection. In the collection’s opening poem, “The Self Says, I Am,” the speaker wants the reader to know several things about her before proceeding: 

Say I’m clover and Queen Anne’s 
lace, devil’s paintbrush and lupine. 
I’m a yard of junked cars, each 
with its corona of broken glass 

and never-mowed grass. Dirt trail 
to cattail. My heart this sudden 
pond, this skipped stone. Say 
I’m a girl in a sundress, perpetual 

beginner in a cloud of bees 
and blackflies and my heart a foraged 
apple, still green. 

As Crowe’s speaker looks back on childhood, she wants the reader to know there is hope and resilience there, a hallmark of rural life. This “girl in a sundress,” the “perpetual beginner” adapts and overcomes over and over throughout life and contains multitudes. 

When the collection progresses and turns thematically to violence, the speaker also reflects on early love interests and queerness, juxtaposing the beautiful and painful to paint a similar picture of resilience. Several subsequent poems explore unrequited love and allusions to sexual violence and then Crowe’s speaker breaks down many of the life lessons she’s received by the time of her late-teens: 

...I was sixteen when I learned my grandfather 
could no longer tell me from my mother or that year from 1975-- 
Sandy he kept saying that bitch sat on the shed roof waving 
a whiskey bottle and laughing while they buried my mother & 
by bitch he meant my Gram from whom I’d learned men are hooks 
I shouldn’t let into me & it’s okay to sleep alone without  
drawers on under my nightdress. At seventeen I learned no house 
is emptier than one you've begged to be left in while your father 
takes your mother south again to have the cancer out hopefully 
but definitely her uterus & whatever else they find eaten by the 
stuff that made her bleed so much on the bed the mattress couldn't  
be saved. Even with the dog in the yard I didn’t feel as brave as 
I thought I would & though I could see my grandfather’s house 
from the porch of my own I didn’t go there where I'd be called 
by the wrong name. Instead I called you & you came as you always  
did & as you still do--with a carton of Five Alive & a fistful 
of daisies & you said Melissa, Melissa & I let you in. I let in 
whatever that might bring & you touched me in ways that made me  
forget—want to forget—every single other thing I'd ever learned.                 (“Lessons”) 

In “Lessons” we see the impulse for differentiation. The speaker begins to separate from the family and become her own person to break the pattern of trauma. The speaker finds love, makes her own family, and confronts past trauma in her personal development outside of the family unit and the dysfunctional rural space. When the man who sexual assaulted her as a child is caught, for reasons unknown to the reader, she feels both relief and pain:  

Thank god I thought, burning, 
Somebody will ask me. Nobody asked me. 

Thank god I thought, burning, knowing  
for the first time maybe what he’d done to 

me, that what he’d done to me was 
wrong enough to go to jail for, if you told. 

Nobody asked me. I understood they knew 
Already. I understood they didn’t want to know 

...  

but to stay free don't we have to call a hole 
a hole, a goddamn shed a shed?                                       (“When She Speaks of the Fire”) 

There’s a sharp maturity in this long poem that directs the rest of the collection and shifts the reader into the adulthood poems of the collection. The speaker must also recognize the limitations of family life and establish boundaries to continue to grow.

In “The Parting,” the speaker turns her gaze outward onto a husband, showing how her life has changed in adulthood. She has found, maintained, and cultivated love, and as a result, she is able to focus on the pain of others and support them, rather than her own, establishing further this sense of growth. The speaker relates, 

Husband, I didn’t know the beautiful 
broad-winged shape riding the air above us 
as we lay in the hammock under the loblolly  

pines was a buzzard until you told me. 
Namer of whatever dark thing hovers, 
you too deserve the truth, so when the police 

find your father in a slick of blood 
and offer no other explanation but natural causes, 
I say he drank himself to death  

This poem highlights the push-pull relationship of a couple who are comfortable with each other and who rely on each other to help make sense of the world. This relationship seems a far cry from the girl who was surrounded by family but was alone in the pain, violence, and self-discovery of her childhood. 

Lo concludes by underscoring continual personal growth and highlighting the speaker's enduring love for family amidst a poignant past in “General Absolution.” The poem employs the shared communal symbol of 9/11 to delve into themes of forgiveness. With shrewd realism and accessible engagement with the subject, Crowe’s speaker explains that general absolution is a type of blanket forgiveness for sins in an emergency, then asks, 

Will you know what I mean if I say 
we should have designated all the water  
holy? I’m trying to forgive you. And if you’re 
wondering who you are, you’re everyone. 

The forgiveness in “General Absolution” is imperfect. Yet, it is notable in its attempt and extension to everyone: the speaker’s mother, the man who assaulted her, the hijackers on 9/11, her husband, and even us, the readers, who have voyeuristically peered into this world unable to do anything about what we have seen. This human, imperfect resilience is the power of Lo by Melissa Crowe. The collection spans a lifetime, childhood to mid-life, leaving room for future growth and narrative discovery, but each moment in time is deftly and poignantly handled. There’s anger, fear, and sadness in these pages, but there’s also humor and beauty. In Lo, Crowe has created a deeply human work of art. 

In case you missed it—here are Crowe’s poem from The Shore:

America you’re breaking
I cry each time we say goodbye because I know I’m always sending you to war

In the Current with Siobhan Jean-Charles Issue Twelve

Dear Reader,

Issue 12 of The Shore was released in Winter 2021 and it’s filled with parts. A gun that shapes a pair of hands, a cold mouth, teeth in a drawer, spindly knees, feet on a staircase. These poems create a whole that’s longing for warmth in winter, they will pull you in and refuse to let go.

Shannon K Winston has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Sweet Lit, Cider Press Review, Parentheses Journal and elsewhere.

Marlo Starr published poems in BOAAT, Ghost City Press and Napkin Poetry Review. 

Lynne Ellis won the ​​2021 Perkoff Prize. They recently had work in Barzakh, Moving Parts Press and Pontoon Poetry.

Kyle Vaughn recently published his book Calamity Gospel, and had work recently published in The Journal, The Museum of Americana and Juke Joint.

Eunice Lee received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her work recently appeared in Honey Literary.

Lauren K Carlson had poems appear in Terrain.org and The Inflectionist Review.

Fatima Jafar published a chapbook with Bottlecap Press titled, Being There. Her recent work appeared in The Aleph Review, Eunoia Review and Wasafiri Magazine.

Taiwo Hassan was nominated for Best of the Net, and published a chapbook with River Glass Books titled, Birds Don’t Fly for Pleasure. His poetry appeared in ANMLY, The Lumiere Review, Olney Magazine and elsewhere.

Stefanie Kirby was nominated for Best of the Net and published poems in The Offing, Portland Review, Passages North and elsewhere.

Charles Hensler published work in West Trade Review, Rust & Moth, ONE ART and elsewhere.

Simon Perchik was widely published in journals such as The New Yorker, The Poetry Foundation, North American Review and many more. He passed away in 2022, may he rest in peace.

Stephen Ruffus was a semifinalist for the 2022 Morgenthau Prize. He published poems in Third Wednesday, JMWW and Stone Poetry Quarterly. 

Kathryn Knight Sonntag had work appear in Colorado Review, Four Way Review, Wayfare Magazine and elsewhere.

Amy Williams published poems in Rust & Moth and ONE ART.

Meghan Kemp-Gee had work appear in ANMLY, Frontier, JMWW and elsewhere.

Matthew Murrey published poems in Bear Review, Redheaded Stepchild Magazine and The Dodge.

David Dodd Lee published poems in Verse Daily, The National Poetry Review, Rattle and more.

Lorrie Ness had work appear in Rappahannock Review, The Inflectionist Review, Eunoia Review and elsewhere.

Julia Schorr graduated with her Bachelor’s from Salisbury University and published work in The Allegheny Review.

Jake Bailey published poems in Allium, Guesthouse Lit and The Carolina Quarterly.

Katie Kemple published poems in Rattle, Rust & Moth, Valparaiso Review and more.

CC Russell published work in No Contact Mag.

Adam Deutsch published work in East Jasmine Review, Jarfly Magazine and Broken Lens Journal.

Nick Visconti has work in Palette Poetry, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly and elsewhere. 

Andrea Krause has poetry in Third Wednesday, Eunoia Review, The Inflectionist Review and elsewhere.

Sam Moe earned her PhD from Illinois State University. She won Invisible City’s Blurred Genre Contest in 2022, and published her second chapbook, Grief Birds. She also published work in Beaver Magazine, The Museum of Americana and The Hyacinth Review.

Patrick Wright published poems in Sweet Lit, Rough Diamond Poetry, Leon Literary Review and elsewhere.

Brittney Corrigan published a poetry collection, Solastalgia with Jackleg Press. She published poems in North American Review, Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly and more.

Alex C Eisenberg published poems in I Sing the Salmon Home Anthology and River Heron Review.

Liane Tyrrel published work in The Offing, Roanoke Review, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.

Lindsay Stewart published her debut chapbook, House(hold) with Eggtooth Editions. She has recently published work in The Pinch, Nashville Review, Red Wheelbarrow and more.

Natalie Marino was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work appeared in Eastern Iowa Review, Sweet Lit, Rust & Moth and elsewhere.

Mary Morris released the poetry collection Late Self Portraits with Wheelbarrow Books. She published work in North American Review and Blue Mountain Review.

Rhienna Renée Guedry released a collection with Cooper Dillon Books titled Root Rot and published work in Maudlin House.

James Miller published work in Identity Theory.

Terry Ann Wright published work in The Hyacinth Review.

Roy White published work in On the Seawall.

William James released If I Forget Thee Lowcountry.

Mary Rose Manspeaker had work in Brooklyn Poets and Poetry Northwest.

Kelly Grace Thomas was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry. She published poems in Tupelo Quarterly, ONE ART and diode poetry.

Daniel Biegelson published poems in Superstition Review, The Journal and The Glacier Journal. 

Michael Quattrone published work in Poet Lore, Harpur Palate and EcoTheo Review.

Abu Bakr Sadiq won the 2023 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for his collection, Leaked Footages. He is the winner of the 2022 IGNYTE award for Best Speculative Poetry.  He published poems in Palette Poetry, Poetry Online and Boston Review.

Shannon Ryan received her Bachelor’s from Salisbury University. You can find more of their work on their website.

Congratulations on your achievements! We cannot wait to see what you do next.

All my best,

Siobhan Jean-Charles

Pushcart Nominations 2023!

Dear Lovely Readers,

We are honored and excited to announce this year’s Pushcart Prize nominees! A few are from our forthcoming Winter issue (out December 21st), so this is an exclusive sneak peek. Thank you to all of our contributors, submitters and readers for helping The Shore publish such exciting poetry!

Sarah Barber “How to Tolerate the Ambiguous”
J P Dancing Bear “The Boss”
Samantha DeFlitch “November Eclipse”
Jenny Munro-Hunt “The Drying Green (Glasgow Green, 1732-1977)”
M M Porter “On Shaking Hands”
Melody Wilson “Resting Bitch Face”

With Deepest Admiration,
Sarah, Caroline & John

Review: Chelsea Dingman

On I, Divided by Chelsea Dingman

by Tyler Truman Julian

I, Divided, Chelsea Dingman’s ambitious new collection, is a masterful interrogation of pain, cycles of violence and desire. The collection makes use of those powerful standards that make Dingman’s work so engaging—mindful enjambment, attention to the natural world, and lyrical and confessional moments that ring true for most readers—yet the work also showcases Dingman’s continued growth as a poet and the creative leaps she makes to keep her poetry fresh and nuanced. The poems of I, Divided have all the hallmarks of what makes Chelsea Dingman a top-tier poet, but seem more structurally daring than her previous work. Playing with space, form, and even length, Dingman’s poems hone in on the marital drama that unfolds when a partner becomes ill and investigate the impact that past familial trauma can have on one’s present. The result is a spotlight on the lonely personal struggle of a woman in the face of personal illness. This collection is heavy, even dark at times, yet there is the glimmer of hope in Dingman’s motif of motherhood. The poet’s command of language adds depth to the images she paints. All of this framing creates a wonderfully moving collection, showcasing Dingman’s strength as a poet, but also creating work that if one can’t personally connect with thematically, they can definitely commiserate with and feel empathy toward.
            I, Divided opens with a speaker whose marriage has soured. Her world is a hurricane-season Florida, and a storm is always on the horizon:
            Sweat gathers between my breasts
                        & thighs. Every morning, I wake
            to heartache—

            the lilies cry from dry beds. You say: no life is without loneliness.
 
            At a courthouse, the justice of the peace witnesses us
           vow to turn off the lights
            & put down the toilet seat. 

            You say you love me.

            You haven’t yet handed me your heartache. Saw-
                      toothed. Looming.
 
            You aren’t yet another version
            of the lilies, lost to the ellipses between rains.           (“How to Live in Holy Matrimony”)

The metaphors here are significant. The rains are not only the literal threat of inclement weather, but the husband’s unpredictable moods. There is threat here, but there is also devotion. The speaker hangs onto the husband’s words, oracular and strange, seeking meaning and prediction in them. She continues,
            Consider the conditional if. What aches to be other than itself? 

            You used to call the rain
                                               degenerative. Like any long sickness. 

            In some iterations, we don’t know each other.
           The rivers are lonely.
            A life is all that’s holy.                                               (“How to Live in Holy Matrimony”)

Quickly, the reader uncovers the husband’s life as a professional hockey player has caused traumatic brain injury, resulting in dementia-like symptoms that impact his mood and memory. These moments of decreased function, the rainy days in the couple’s married life, cause loneliness, are degenerative to the point the speaker is left wanting safety, intimacy, and what once was. There’s no surety any of these desires will be satisfied:
            The children cry when he stays up all night 

            and tears apart the house. They are afraid 

           for my life. I rise and rise, the winds
            high. I pull the birds’ slight bodies into me,

           cruelty the only country they’ve known.
            I fear the rot the rainy season will leave.

            In the retention ponds, a pattern is the wake

            left by protected species that cannot flee. Past lives
            hurricane in my head. No surface is safe 

            from weather. I’m careful. I take all valuables
            down from the shelves. The kids’ pictures 

            hide in the cloud on my phone, along

           with whatever devastation that downloads
           while we sleep.                                                                                                   (“Fractals”)

The unpredictability is the hard part. When charting the progress of a storm, one never truly knows when and how hard it will make landfall, and yet there is even a desire for that crash of thunder and rain: “Let the rain come soon and be done with us” (“Memorial Day”). This fatalism is balanced by moments of hope and beauty that remind the reader that all is not lost. Motherhood and nature connect frequently to let the reader know that even if this speaker must run, she and her children will survive. In “A Small Life,” she declares,
“And love is a kind of survival—
            the river rushing past
            that teaches the fields how
            to pray. The small flowers
            that erupt in spring.

Life always returns after a storm.

            The second section of I, Divided clarifies this truth by moving the speaker out of the present rainy season back to a wintry, Canadian childhood. And while “There are few // words for loneliness / like a child’s,” in these reflective poems, the speaker explores the death of parents, alcoholism, and violence in detail (“While Reading Plato during a Lockdown”). What has the speaker taken away from the past that informs the present reality at home? In “I Remember, I Remember,” she reports,
           I remember everything.

           I remember living. I remember dying.

           I remember dying to live.

There is a persistence in these poems that speaks to survival. That survival prepared the speaker for motherhood, and these poems give the reader a glimpse at what it means to be a mother: Explain disease, my young son says, how someone lives with pain. 

I never got to tell my father: I miss you.
He’d already been gone for months when he died. 

To live, I need to make meaning of the dark
          again tonight. 

What I mean is: I want to love the world
           as though it’s something I’ll survive.                                          (“After a Suicide”)

Self-preservation is complicated when you must take care of others, which is the reality of motherhood, and Dingman’s poetry navigates that complicated gulf between the desire for self-determination and domestic responsibility with ease. However, her work does not minimize the complexity. This is perhaps the genius of these poems. They feel emotionally real at their core, even as the desires outlined by the speaker compete with one another, a quality that especially rings true in the collection’s third section.
            The third section of Dingman’s collection explores a personal medical diagnosis. Suddenly, the speaker is forced to deal with the repercussions of individual pain, rather than the fallout of someone else’s. This is further complicated by the political, female body. The poems of this section cover fertility issues, cancer and the loneliness of suffering. In this way, the speaker engages with more personal poetic mode, where questions become increasingly prominent and agency climbs to the top of the speaker’s list of desires. In a life spent resisting, surviving, what does it mean to give in? She asks, “did I ever tell anyone                 I’m not comfortable being touched // or did I let the world enter without using a door / in order to prove what I’m willing to surrender?” (“When the Wind Culls Its Name”). But she also admits, “I have to tell you: / nothing saved me from believing in the future” (“Occupation”). When you spend so much time caring for others, a husband, parents and siblings, children, what happens when suddenly you must care for yourself? Surrender can seem like weakness. Hope can feel weak. This is complicated but real philosophy, laid out by Dingman through her speaker, and the reader can’t help but feel its gravity. As if putting a period on it, the speaker reports on a dream she had about religion and power, saying,
           
I dreamt I was a god last night, but I couldn’t save anyone
            from their suffering. 

What good is power? 

The roses are dying on their stems. 

I am lonely. (There is no meaning in this.)                                                     (“Imperium”)

What good is power in the face of the chaos of the world? Dingman reminds us that we don’t get to choose our parents, that our partner could get sick, that we could get diagnosed with a terminal illness. Yet, she also reminds us that we persist, for ourselves and for others, because we have no other choice. In the collection’s final poem, “Economic Theory,” Dingman’s speaker makes this clear:
                                                                                    Always,
a man had all the power when I was young,
            & didn’t have any money for food. There 

isn’t a day in this life that I haven’t gone
            hungry. But quiet in my kids’ mouths
means I’ll work twice as hard to feed them
            full. The garden, under snow. Forever, breath
is an argument against failure. With Botox
            & heady songs. Other rituals, like leaving
a conflict region, a woman invests in
            by beginning. I’m tempted to say I begin.

 In case you missed it—here are Dingman’s poem from The Shore:

The Columbia River Taught Me How to Run
For a Thousand and One Nights
Letter From the Dead to the Living
Nachträglichkeit
Tenderness

Review: Jill Mceldowney

On Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney

by Tyler Truman Julian

From the opening line of Jill Mceldowney’s full-length debut, Otherlight grips the reader with an emotional and ontological intensity that leaves them gasping for air. While difficult to read for its subject matter, especially in one sitting, the collection is best read as a whole. Reeling through the grief and survivor’s guilt of a boyfriend’s death by overdose, the speaker takes the reader through the deep-water of depression and the heady, torturous heights of attempting to make sense of untimely loss. Taken in its entirety, the collection becomes a devastating love story and reflection on mortality and, across the poems, the reader experiences every emotion of the speaker, eventually understanding (as much as they can without actually living it) that opening line: “I know it scares you when I say I’m not afraid to die” (“The Lake Will Wait”).
Otherlight poses questions about life and death that rarely, if ever, get answered. But how does one make sense of unexpected loss? This question is one both the reader and speaker of the collection must wrestle with throughout Otherlight, and while that could seem to be a logical goal for Otherlight’s speaker, she doesn’t want to make sense of the loss. Instead, she points the reader to the carnal and emotional reaction one has when confronted with questions of the hereafter and the reality of grief:

            when will you stop believing me when I say I’m getting better
            about taking my meds,
                    when I say I stopped thinking of jumping a long time ago?

           I disappoint you. When I talk about the comforting gloom
                      of a birdless sky, that lake
           of quiet, I hear my own shadow

           call it want. Call it impossible—
                        to heal, to understand,

           to shake a ghost bird back to life in its cage, impossible to build
          cages under every bridge I’ll ever cross—you can’t

                        make someone want to be alive no matter how hard you shake them.

(“The Lake Will Wait”)

The speaker not only creates questions for the reader but is bombarded herself with external questions in her lover’s absence. Her own: When will you believe me? Why did he die this way? Where is he now? Will we meet again? And those of others, specifically, therapists, who appear throughout the collection. Attempting to answer these questions may seem a type of healing to those unacquainted with grief, but to do so would separate the lover from the speaker in her mind. When she is able to mull over questions of God and disaster, he appears. If she gets closure, he’ll disappear. In the first of a series of poems that mirror the conversations between a therapist and the speaker, when the therapist asks why the speaker has made the appointment, the speaker fleshes out this dynamic, responding,

            As if I could explain that easily

            when there are places on this earth that grow so wild
            even our maker was not sure where to begin.

            And how could I hope
          to begin knowing

                        what it will cost me to say what I really mean?
                       When you see me in so much pain I am unable to speak

            will you call me ice?
           Will you rip my life wide open?                                             (“Psychotherapy: Prologue”)

The speaker may not fear dying, but she fears losing the grounding that grief brings, as irrational as that may seem to those unaffected by loss. However, revealing too much or probing too deeply into this trauma will cause the speaker to lose control of what she does have control of, her grief. The questions—implied, rhetorical, and sincere—in Otherlight root the reader in the speaker’s story and give important context to her emotional state and the specific loss she has experienced. “Everyone has their own overdose story to draw from,” the speaker declares in “Psychopharmacology: Half Life,” and the questions she asks, and the images used to illustrate them, offer the reader a foothold to connect with the specific grief of the speaker.
Through the collection, Mceldowney crafts a powerful narrative. Each of the poems propel the reader forward and deeper into the speaker’s story, linking what came before and what is yet to come. In this way, Mceldowney deftly helps her reader see connections not only between the work and their life, but between individual moments in the work itself. As the therapy series continues, the speaker maintains her exploration of loss and the fear that it has inserted into her life. If she moves on, looks to the future, there is now only uncertainty. In “Psychopharmacology: Levels,” the speaker furthers this idea,

                                    The worst part of loss is that you live
          after it and my life

                        has been annihilated by this loss.

           I miss him and I have been
           missing him and
           I am allowed to be afraid that I will never be the same.

The speaker makes sure the reader understands everything that was lost in her lover’s death. She saw a future, albeit gilded, with him:

           It was clean.
           It was impossible, angels
                       lit by polar auroras. I’ll never get over it.
           He kissed my hair to wake me, my face
           against his shoulder.
           I felt the heel of a child in the small of my back.

            I’m allowed to be angry.                    
Look at what’s been lost.                                             (“Psychotherapy: Epilogue”)

The speaker’s loss is cemented here in some ways because the relationship has now moved beyond young, although passionate, love to something larger. Moreover, presenting this moment at the end of the collection, at the end of the therapy series, gives the reader a significant and well-earned payoff. Mceldowney’s narrative skill is on display here and throughout the collection.
Otherlight gives the reader ample opportunity to both commiserate at a distance and experience (almost) first-hand the speaker’s grief. The framing is almost cinematic as Mceldowney zooms in and out on her subject. This is a masterful approach to the challenging subject matter of the collection. As the speaker continues to explore the question of moving on from loss, it becomes clear that she cannot. Instead, she walks the reader through what it feels like to try to move on in a modern, structurally complex spin on the confessional poem:

                                                Every new man tastes like your name.

            I would do anything
                                                to keep him—anything—
            is not enough to keep him                   alive. I listen
                        to the horse beats of his heart rush him further.
            Loss
                        like your’s—again, can I take it?                                            (“History of Sleep”)

The speaker’s fear of unexpected loss is reasonable. The guilt that compounds that fear though is tragic. Mceldowney illuminates this reality with ease as her speaker oscillates between both guilt and fear believably. “Overall, how would you describe your mood?” the therapist asks in “Psychotherapy: Epilogue.” The speaker takes this opportunity to finally say it plainly, “I feel guilty / that I am alive // when he is not. I am guilty // all of the awful things that I have done to stay alive.” This form of magical thinking is going to be familiar to anyone who has experienced grief, but also adds a sad literary irony to the text because the reader knows there’s nothing the speaker could have done to prevent her boyfriend’s death.  
            Otherlight is both otherworldly and fixed squarely in the human experience. The tragic-beautiful story Mceldowney crafts across the poems of this collection is an expert display of the poet’s attention to audience and technique. She skillfully makes sure the poems remain in conversation with one another and build off one another as the reader moves through the collection. This keeps the reader necessarily grounded while Mceldowney probes deeply into the emotions of loss. The work’s questions about life after loss, posed by a troubled, relatable speaker, brush against the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell as she sits with grief, and ultimately, Mceldowney is brave enough to write out what many readers who have experienced loss would like to say to God, others, and ultimately, themselves. Otherlight is essential reading for both those who are and aren’t afraid to die.

 In case you missed it—here are Mceldowney’s poem from The Shore:

 The Believing Brain
Dream Tree
Sleep on the Floor
Birds Of

In the Current with Siobhan Jean-Charles Issue Eleven

Dear Reader,

Issue Eleven of The Shore was released in Autumn 2021. Traditionally, autumns with their falling leaves symbolize endings, and this issue is full of them– the end of a playlist, the end of relationships, the ending of the planet, the end of memory. But autumn, associated with the harvest, also represents life and new birth. One poem is written from the perspective of one of the millions of ants who were trapped in a Soviet bunker and devoured their own before Polish scientists helped them move to a new nest. These poems explore endings as much as they push for beginnings, juxtaposing to create meaning in a way that the best poetry does.

Since their publication in The Shore two years ago, contributors have been nominated for awards and won prizes, pursued their degrees, released books and continued pushing their work into the world. Here’s what they’ve been up to:

Paige Sullivan was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize and recently published poems in The Journal, Southeast Review and The Florida Review.

Julia Watson was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize and a runner up in Identity Theory's Best 22-Word Poems of 2022. She recently had work published in Reckon Review.

Chris Cocca had poems published in Dodging Rain.

Dhwanee Goyal published poems in Plum Recruit, Honey Literary, Barrelhouse Mag and others. They were recently nominated for the Best of the Net anthology, the Orison Anthology and ​Best New Poets.

Paige Welsh is a dual English MA and MFA candidate at Chapman University. She had a poem published in Pidgeonholes.

Caroline Plasket had work published in Gulf Coast. She recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published by Pleiades.

Katie McMorris recently published poems in The Rupture, The Pinch, Passages North and elsewhere.

Vismai Rao was nominated for Best of the Net and the Orison Anthology. She recently published poems in Jet Fuel Review, iamba and ucity.

Debarshi Mitra had poetry featured in Mad Swirl.

Tatiana Clark recently published poems in Thrush, Dream/Nightmare Anthology, Lumiere Review and elsewhere.

Abi Pollokoff has published poetry in Palette Poetry, Cream City Review and Radar Poetry, among others.

Sophia Liu recently published poems in Muzzle Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rattle, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere.

Mia Bell published a poem in Beltway Poetry.

Loisa Fenichell recently published poems in Poetry Northwest, New Delta Review and Bear Review, among others.

Barbara Daniels recently published poems in Cider Press Review, As It Ought to Be Magazine and Open: Journal of Arts and Letters.

Julia McDaniel was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, RHINO’s 30 Below and the Founder’s Contest for Narrative Magazine. She recently published work in The Pinch, Beloit Poetry Journal and Poet Lore, among others.

Jennie E Owen is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University. She won second place in the Briefly Write Poetry Prize. She recently published poems in Neon Literary Magazine, Atrium Poetry and Ink, Sweat, and Tears.

Melissa Strilecki is a reader for Variant Literature. She recently published poems in Hyacinth Review, Volume Poetry and Gordon Square Review. 

Corinna Schulenburg has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has recently published poems in Poet Lore, Canned Magazine and miniskirt magazine, among others. 

Odukoya Adeniyi has published work in Palette Poetry.

David Donna recently published poetry in The Rupture Magazine, Rust + Moth and Constellations, among others. 

Robin Gow published work in Poet Lore, POETRY Magazine, Miniskirt Magazine and The Baltimore Review, among others. 

Ben Bartu was a Fishtrap Fellowship finalist. He published work in Poetry Online, The Hunger Journal and Elsewhere Magazine.

Linds Sanders published work in Scapegoat Review and Fever Dream.

Bill Neumire recently published work in Ghost City Review and On The Seawall.

Aaron Sandberg was selected for the Dwarf Stars anthology and was nominated for Best of the Net. Recent work appeared in No Contact Mag, Armstrong Literary and Mockingheart Review, among others.

Leah Claire Kaminski was a semifinalist in the Boston Review Literary Contest. Recent work appeared in The Florida Review, The Rumpus and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others.

Justin Lacour published poetry in B O D Y Literature, Atlas and Alice, Concision Poetry and others.

AD Harper published work in Cordite Poetry Review, bath magg, The Interpreter’s House and Dream Pop, among others.

Ellie Altman published her debut chapbook, Within Walking Distance and recent work appeared in The Keeping Room.

Ben Kline was a finalist for Best of the Net, and had poetry selected for the anthology of Ohio Appalachian poets. His recent work appeared in POETRY Magazine, Southeast Review, Ghost City Review and Pangyrus, among others.

Catherine Rockwood released a chapbook, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, and she has a second chapbook forthcoming, titled And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death. They recently published poems in Thrush and Ariadne Magazine.

Rachel Small had recent work in Kissing Dynamite, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ample Remains and elsewhere.

Nancy Lynée Woo received the 2022 Artists at Work fellowship. She released a book titled I’d Rather Be Lightning, and her poems have been published in New Delta Review, About Place Journal, Invisible City, Nixes Mater Review and elsewhere.

Cady Favazzo had recent work published in Cimarron Review, Nimrod, and Five South Anthology.

Congratulations on your achievements! We cannot wait to see what you do next.

All my best,

Siobhan Jean-Charles

Review: Suzanne Frischkorn

On Fixed Star by Suzanne Frischkorn

by Tyler Truman Julian

In her third collection, Fixed Star, Suzanne Frischkorn delves into the process of mythmaking that shapes identity, while exploring the multifaceted aspects of being first generation Cuban-American. The collection intricately examines the complexities of politics, locations, and family dynamics in defining this distinctive identity. Frischkorn’s poems do not hesitate to delve into these complications, relying heavily on the imagery of place and embrace the sonnet form to give the collection its backbone. Fixed Star is beautiful and singular, telling a story often politicized and manipulated with nuance and personality. As Frischkorn’s speaker works through her personal family history, the reader also reckons with Cuban-US relations, the power of language to build bridges or create islands and the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves.
           Fixed Star is filled with locations, both domestic and foreign, and all contain deep meaning for the speaker and the content of the collection. Within a postcolonial context, these locales can represent dispossession and identity struggle, and Suzanne Frischkorn’s speaker knows there is something about the soil that makes a person. Just as different soils render different flavored grapes in winemaking,

          It is the dark,

dusty ground that gives

to tobacco its aroma and flavor.                                                                   (“My Body Translated”)

This reality is complicated for the children of immigrants, who become American citizens as a result of jus soli, the right of the soil, when they are born in the United States but their family is from somewhere else. These children often live in a state of limbo— neither here (the United States) nor there (the parents’ home country)—and the speaker of these poems lives in this liminal space, trying to articulate where home is:

          If you speak quickly I will understand if I don’t
try to understand my first language. You must

          understand it was stolen—
          legend, song, all of it
                                                            a fading stain by firing squad.                        (“Papaya”)

The impact of the Cuban Revolution and the diaspora that ensued is pressing in these poems and has resulted in a loss of culture and familial understanding. “My parents only used Spanish to curse,” the speaker explains about this loss.

                       The scent of Cohibas,
          a recipe for black bean soup

          and how to roll the r in naranja.
          That’s all the Cuban my father gave me.                                             (“How Do You Say Orange?”)

She adds,

What it means to be Cuban

hyphenated?                I don’t know—

My father’s from Cuba. I’m American.

He wanted me to learn one language really well. (“What It Means to be Cuban, Hyphenated”)

Frischkorn’s attention to detail is sharp and clear in the titling of these poems. The revolution has instigated the move to the United States, but the speaker declares that her body is also a revolution:

Its propaganda tucked
inside a push-up bra.                                              (“My Body as a Revolution”)

The move out of Cuba itself may be radical, but growing up and making her own story in the face of erasure is the true revolution. This exploration of self is interrupted by a sequence of sonnets exploring the father-daughter relationship in which the speaker continues “with my father’s story, / making up details as I go along” (“IX”). In these poems, the speaker can imagine her father’s experience in Cuba and participate in the revolution. She continues in the next sonnet,

          Making up details as I go along
          I held my hands up to the generals.
          I walked around investigating:
          the endless star, an empty net, the fish

          trapped inside the wind.
          The first night was wonderful—
          adrift amid the remnants.
          In the empty house I hear the sea. 

          The boats were manned by brothers,
          uncles, cousins, blood ties, a bond
love can twist. All the years by the sea
taught her every definition of blue.

  There was a lot of lechery and disorder.
And I am queen on that island.                                                                                         (“X”)

This imaginative play and the formal poetic treatment of the subject through the sonnet form allow the daughter to build a relationship with the father and Cuba, creating the proverbial Beloved out of both, and allowing self-actualization and meaning making. The speaker knows that this is, nevertheless, incomplete; it is “how we lose ourselves to myth, to legend, and how you find me, with regrets only” (“Spanish”). It’s in traveling to Spain and seeing herself as an individual person that she finds Cuba: “I came to the source, seeking the shape // of my eye, my nose—I passed as a native, and at last / found a way home. I discovered Cuba in Retiro Parque” (“Granada”). Through a second sequence of sonnets taking the speaker to tourist locations in Spain, the speaker develops an internal, personal Cuba that defies political and social boundaries. The Beloved this time may actually be herself.
          Fixed Star tells a powerful story of myth, family, and self. As a result, Suzanne Frischkorn’s poetry retells and adds to Cuba’s story of American exile, while also remaining deeply personal. Fixed Star becomes truer in its search for truth than most mainstream commentary about US-Cuban relations. As we continue the necessary work to understand both our own histories and the histories of our neighbors more deeply, we should not forget to also turn to poetry. Poetry is political because it is personal and it tells human stories, adding depth and truth to stories that become one-sided when they hit the mainstream. Fixed Star by Suzanne Frischkorn is a just such poetry. It should be read, internalized, and ultimately, enjoyed.

In case you missed it—here is Frischkorn’s poem from The Shore:

Victors of Tiny, Silent, Invasive Insect

Best of the Net Nominations 2023!

Dear Amazing Readers,

It is with great pleasure we take a break from the crazy heat to share some really good news, our 2023 Best of the Net nominations! There are links to each so you can enjoy the poems. Grats to our nominees—it was tough to narrow down our selections this year. Thank you so much to our lovely contributors for making that job hard—it rocks to have such high quality work. Here are the noms:

Laura Apol “Regret”
Sara Femenella “Infidel”
Pamilerlin Jacob “Dark Fruit”
Erin Little “I’ll never forgive you for loving me most beautifully at the Super 8 in Lake Charles, LA”
William Littlejohn-Oram “Neon Moon with Cicadas”
Haley Winans “While I Watch Flesh Erode off a Raccoon Skull in a Pickle Jar”

Thanks again for your loyal readership. We never take it for granted.

With deep admiration,
Sarah, Caroline and John

Review: Debarshi Mitra

On Osmosis by Debarshi Mitra

by Tyler Truman Julian

Osmosis by Debarshi Mitra came out in 2020, at the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, making it hard to separate the collection from the slow and grief-filled days of the deep pandemic. It’s hard to believe it’s only been three years since the world paused in response to COVID-19. While the publishing world didn’t pause—books continued to come out—the attention around these books, the marketing, the promotion, even the reading of these new books definitely slowed. For this reason, it makes sense to revisit these works and give them their due—even three years on. As a result, Osmosis deserves attention as a document of that period, but also a profoundly relatable look at grief and human relationship.

            Osmosis is a slim, tightly written collection, choosing to focus on description and detail (often with haiku-like brevity) to explore its themes of grief and relationship. To some this may appear too simple, but it’s Mitra’s subtle attention to detail that adds depth to his themes. For example, “On Arrival” presents a speaker returning home, and in this home, “The air is stiff” and “the floors have / shoe stains on them.” The word choice is intentional; the use of stiff rather than still or musty implies not only that the house is empty (and has been for a while), but that there is something uncomfortable about the homecoming. Further, shoe stains imply a history, ghosts even. While the caesura and linework feels less important to the poem’s structure and meaning (and less important through the collection as a whole), the brevity of the lines adds intentionality to the images and message of the poem:

            My books and other things
            are exactly where
            I last saw them
where they always were,
only my mind

is elsewhere.                                                                                           (“On Arrival”)

While the speaker is physically in this old familiar space, their thoughts are elsewhere, and they feel separate from the connections made in the space. The poem makes this clear, and this idea colors the rest of the collection. This is particularly interesting looking back at this collection knowing it came out at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowing the isolation and loss of the pandemic, this collection reads differently, has a prescience to it that is remarkable.

The intentionality of image and message in this collection give the reader something concrete and universal to cling to in poems that could feel immensely personal. How many of us felt “all alone” during the early days of the pandemic? How many of us have been “All alone” “led astray / by a thought / barefoot / walking / on a winter night” in our daily life? These five lines highlight the relatability of the speaker’s lack of relationship to others and even to the place they have found themselves in, even if the reader is left with room to insert their own emotions.

The juxtaposition of personal detail and the universality of the moment being described continues throughout the collection. In “Family Sundays,” the speaker places the reader in the center of a family event:

            Anecdotes of
            grandparents
            and dead aunts. 

            On the centre table
            a decapitated wax turtle. 

            I look both ways
            to cross a one way street.

This personal moment, tied inextricably to the loss and lack of connection the speaker feels, is universal in its simplicity, even if the chosen details are specific. The reader is able to connect with the speaker and imagine their own family events (“anecdotes of grandparents / and dead aunts”). And the speaker’s inability to feel secure in their relationships, looking “both ways to cross a one way street,” is something most readers can relate to, especially post-COVID. In “Loss,” Mitra’s speaker is more forthright, embracing a more narrative form:

            It was always this way,
            was always a metaphor
            built on fragments and
            a physical space stretched
            by light streaming in
            from one side of this endless
            corridor.

It is more than the corridor that stretches endlessly; it’s also the speaker’s grief and the lost connection they once felt with a beloved relation. The speaker continues from that corridor,

            It is here that
            I preserve the image
of you bending
to pluck tulsi leaves
from a yellowing tulsi plant,
and suddenly remember that
for all these years now
after your passing,
I have forgotten even
to part curtains.                                                                                               (“Loss”)

This moment is personal, but relatable, and the shift to narrative poetry is intentional. The reader has already added their own personal details to the spare poems in this collection, building a connection with the speaker and the places they describe. Now, the speaker can specify the grief they feel and the reader will be invested. The reader may have to read between the lines, fill in the ample white space around the images painted by the speaker, but in doing so, they will find “the pale, / imperceptible shadow / of death itself” (“Between the Lines”). Even if the speaker feels adrift through the collection, the poems effortlessly link the reader and the speaker, cultivating some sense of solace amid the loss riddled throughout the collection. It is the writing itself that creates this relationship because the only thing “between two eternities / of darkness” (death and grief) is “the vapour trail / of language” (“Osmosis”).

            COVID-19 has created a universal experience of loss, and looking back on the art produced through the pandemic, we can find community and language for our grief and missed connections. Poetry of loss (regardless of if it is written in response to COVID) is powerful because it gives language to emotions we often can’t readily articulate. In Osmosis, Debarshi Mitra not only gives language to loss, he leaves room for the reader to join their loss to the loss explored in the collection’s poems. Personal tragedy becomes universal in Mitra’s poetry, and the timing of this book’s release makes this exploration of grief and lost relationships even more meaningful.

In case you missed it—here are Mitra’s poems from The Shore:

Morphogenesis
Abscissa
the flick of a lighter
Parallax

Masthead Updates!

Dear Lovely Readers,

We are excited to announce some updates to our masthead. After the departure of our wonderful co-founding editor Emma DePanise, we have made a number of staffing changes. We want to welcome our new co-editor, our former blog editor, Sarah Brockhaus, who will begin her duties as part of our three-headed poetry team for issue nineteen. Taking over as blog editor, will be Siobhan Jean-Charles, our previous social media manager. Moving into Siobhan’s former role will be new edition to the staff, Lisa Compo. We are very excited for the future of The Shore. We wish you a lovely summer.

Sincerely,

Sarah, Caroline and John

Important Announcement

Dear Lovely Readers,

It is with incredible gratitude and deep sadness we announce that Co-Founding Editor, Emma DePanise, is stepping away as a Poetry Editor. Over the past 5 years, Emma's commitment, vision, keen editorial eye and overall ingenuity has helped shape The Shore and its success. It is hard to imagine The Shore without her. As we move forward into our next phase, please keep in mind that Emma will always be part of the foundation of this journal and a part of The Shore family. Please join us in thanking Emma and wishing her the very best in her future endeavors. She truly is one of the best ever.

Sincerely,

Caroline and John

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Ten

Dear Reader, 

Issue Ten of The Shore was published in the Summer of 2021 and it embraces every aspect of this season. This issue is a brilliant collection of art and poetry that challenges perceptions and creates perspectives through which the world can be seen anew. The poems in this issue play with the position of the reader, bringing us underground, on a poet road trip, into the labyrinth of a wasp nest, jump roping and into the miniscule as a means of approaching the maximal. You cannot enter this issue and leave unchanged, these poems will break you from birdcages and challenge you to grow dandelions on your lips.

Over the last two years, the contributors of issue ten have continued to create art that explores and pushes boundaries. Here is what they have been up to:

Lindsay Lusby has recently published poems in Copper Nickel,  Puerto Del Sol, Epiphany and the micro anthology Haunted.

Jenn Koiter published her debut collection, So Much of Everything, which won the 2021 DC Poets Project.

Sarah Brockhaus has recently published poems in Sugar House Review, Tupelo Quarterly and North American Review. She is now your humble blog editor for The Shore.

Grace Li recently published a poem in Tupelo Quarterly.

Karen Rigby has a poetry book forthcoming in 2024 titled Fabulosa. She has also recently published poems in Quarterly West, Revolute and Ex/Post.

Brittany Atkinson received her MFA from Western Washington University in 2022. 

Erin Wilson published her second poetry collection Blue in 2022. She has also recently published poems in Body, Jet Fuel Review, Verse Daily and On the Sea Wall.

John Sibley Williams’ latest book of poems, Skyscrape, won the 2022 WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest. He has also recently published poems in Portland Review, Colorado Review and Break Water Review.

Paul Ilechko has recently published poems in Impspired, The Night Heron Barks and North of Oxford.

Audrey Gidman has recently published poems in The Night Heron Barks, Luna Luna Magazine and The Inflectionist Review.

Stella Lei recently published a poem in Narrative Magazine which placed second in their High School Contest. She also recently published poems in Four Way Review and perhappened mag.

Todd Osborne’s debut poetry collection, Gatherer, is forthcoming in 2024 from Belle Point Press. He has also recently published a poem in Scrawl Place.

Bobby Parrott recently published poems in Across the Margin, Oddball Magazine and Modern Literature.

William Littlejohn-Oram has recently published poems in Muzzle Magazine, Eco Theo Collective and Amethyst Review.

David Ford recently published a poem in Speckled Trout Review.

Matthew Valades has recently published poems in Redivider and The Indianapolis Review.

Melody Wilson has recently published poems in Cleaver, Silver Birch Press, Two Hawks Quarterly and Sugar House Review.

Jared Beloff published his debut poetry collection, Who Will Cradle Your Head, in February 2023. He also recently published poems in The Night Heron Barks, River Mouth Review and IceFloe Press.

Russell Thorburn recently published a poem in Streetlight Magazine.

Toti O’Brien’s latest book, Pages of a Broken Diary, was published in 2022. She has also recently published poems in Harbor Review, A-Minor Magazine and Whimsical Poet.

Trey Adams was recently published in Gone Lawn.

Dare Williams has recently published poems in Frontier Poetry, West Trade Review, Had, The Journal and San Pedro River Review.

Rebecca Patrascu has recently published poems in Deep Overstock, Smartish Pace, Glint Literary Journal and Heron Tree.

McLeod Logue has poems forthcoming in The Sonora Review, Gulf Stream and The Southern Poetry Anthology. She has recently published creative nonfiction in Pithead Chapel and fiction in 34 Orchard. 

Jeremy Rock has recently published poems in The Broadkill Review, Flyway Journal, Beaver Magazine and Sugar House Review.

Jen Karetnick’s latest poetry collection, Inheritance with a High Error Rate, is forthcoming in 2024 and won the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. She has also recently published poems in A-Minor Magazine, About Place and The Broadkill Review.

Jordan Deveraux recently published poetry in Tilted House Review. 

Ifeoluwa Ayandele has recently published poems in Another Chicago Magazine, The Concrete Desert Review and Emerge Literary Journal.

Mandira Pattnaik published a poetry chapbook, Anatomy of a Storm-Weathered Quaint Townspeople, in 2022. She also recently published a flash fiction collection, Girls Who Don’t Cry, in January 2023, and her novella, Where We Set Our Easel, was published in May 2023. 

Jeffrey H MacLachlan has recently published poems in The Woodward Review and Red Ogre Review.

Matthew Burnside has recently published in No Contact Magazine, Berlin Lit and Cheat River Review.

Lawrence Di Stefano has recently published poems in Bear Review, Southern Humanities Review and Sepia Journal.

Majda Gama’s forthcoming chapbook, The Call of Paradise, won the 2022 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. She has recently published poems in The Adroit Journal, The Night Heron Barks and The Offing.

Congratulations on all your accomplishments! Your contributions to literature are incredibly valuable and it is a privilege to see what each of you have been up to in the two years since the publication of issue ten.

Sincerely, 

Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Lucy Zhang

On Hollowed by Lucy Zhang

by Tyler Truman Julian

Lucy Zhang’s debut fiction chapbook, Hollowed, probes the depths of the human experience, zeroing in on the theme of agency. Zhang’s compelling characters, poetic imagery and body horror build a cohesive and disturbing collection of short shorts and flash fiction. Hollowed’s strange but accessible fiction is definitely for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Han Kang.

            In “Soft-Shelled Turtle,” a woman reflects on a childhood of eating turtle soup while fairies play mahjong in her kitchen. The fairies want to eat turtle soup and demand it of the woman, who appears more prepared to offer them her firstborn child. But what the fairies know and the reader learns across the story’s two short pages is that this child is purely theoretical, something that may or may not happen one day. The woman’s memories of childhood help paint the picture the fairies see clearly: This woman is not living up to the imposed expectations of her race and gender. In this way, this fairy story, like most fairy tales, has a moral. The fairies still take from the woman, like they do in most fairy tales, and something is sacrificed. Relationships with family are severed by her lack of a marriage and children; a turtle is cooked and eaten.

Through “Soft-Shelled Turtle,” the reader is plunged into the strange, often tragic, sometimes humorous world of Hollowed. In Zhang’s tightly-crafted world (so often mirroring our own, even if the mirror is sometimes a funhouse mirror), women can be disobedient and punished, but independent as in “Soft-Shelled Turtle.” They can be loved (but only when they teach others to love them): “Be soft, like you’re coaxing a sparrow off a bridge rail” (“How to make me orgasm”). They can be broken, as in “The Stone Girl,” a story that solidifies the poetic nature of the chapbook. Not only does Zhang rely on the metaphor of rock to describe the girls of “The Stone Girl,” but each vignette seems closer to a prose poem than a literary sketch. Each word of the story has a purpose, creating meaningful poetic imagery. The stone girl, made of “something else” (the others in the story are made of basalt and travertine), can think and feel, and she is carved into a statue reminiscent of Venus de Milo. And what does she think? “She thinks she has never looked so symmetrical, so delicate, and she wonders if this is what having skin is like. Or maybe this newfound fragility is because she stays awake the entire night. She waits for dawn, for its rays to heat her face” (“The Stone Girl”). When her sculptor awakes, he realizes her face has cracked, whether a flaw in the stone or a product of his carving is never discussed, but “I can work with this, he thinks as he picks up his chisel and attempts to pivot his artistic muse…but when he strikes the mallet onto the end of the chisel, a chunk of her face cracks off, falls to the ground, crumbles to unevenly sized chunks and dust” (“The Stone Girl”).

So much of this collection circles around questions of agency. And, here, in “The Stone Girl,” an extended metaphor for a controlling relationship between a man and a woman, there is no agency, and the statue remains standing, half of her face gone, “staring at him, as though to ask what he’d do next.” The stories in Hollowed continue exploring agency through its interesting women and language, but also by diving deeper into body horror. In “Thigh Gap” a grandmother hands a young woman a knife to “carve out your thighs.” Even after the woman cuts away her flesh, creating a large thigh gap, she realizes she is still the same woman, thigh gap or not. The theme of agency and the conflict between the lack of agency and asserting one’s agency continue even if the horror is more subdued in the chapbook’s story most rooted in realism: “Cracked.” “Cracked” explores pregnancy and the narrator’s preoccupation with death. When she trips and falls, dropping a large watermelon, narrator realizes the watermelon, having been plucked from the vine some time ago, was already dead when she dropped it. She says, “It couldn’t have died twice when it rolled down the stairs and revealed its insides to the world” (“Cracked”). The watermelon becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s pregnancy and the pregnancy is a type of death, a loss of agency. “Code Baby” and “Hatchling” further explore pregnancy and loss, both the mother’s loss and what the loss of a baby can mean. Horror comes both in the body and connections between motherhood and monstrosity. “Code Baby” shows how numbers and code cannot capture the complicated emotions and reality of pregnancy and loss, while “Hatchling” shows the fear attached to pregnancy and childbirth. Both stories lean heavily into metaphor and intentional, figurative language, daring to cultivate poetic moments amid their prose.

The collection closes with “Room Tour” in which a time traveler visits a woman in the present who will one day be his lover. The narrator says, “My lover from the future says I am dead in his time” (“Room Tour”). The narrator refuses to ask her future lover the tough but expected questions (How do I die?); instead, she asks whether or not they are happy together and about love. Rather than answering, he tells her to make her own choices, stay healthy, and live the way she wants to live. When she says she can do that and he acts incredulous, the narrator responds, “I mean, how else am I supposed to live?” (“Room Tour”). This question lingers into the chapbook’s final paragraph in which the narrator muses on why someone would worry about someone else’s future when they should be worried about their own, leaving the reader with the question of how else am I supposed to live? This is the question Zhang seems to want to leave her readers with, and after spending time with nine stories rooted so deeply in the theme of agency, what else is the reader supposed to take away? Without self-determination, without a sense of agency, the reader will be hollowed, much like Zhang’s characters.

In case you missed it—here are Zhang’s poems from The Shore:

Only We Were Left

Lacto-Fermentation

Maillard Reaction

Announcing Our Earth Day 2023 Special Collection

Dear Shore Readers,

We are proud to announce our first ever special collection, the 2023 Earth Day Special Collection. It was inspired by a collaborative reading occurring 22-Apr-23 in Easton, Maryland jointly hosted by Shore Lit, The Talbot Free Library and The Shore. We looked for poems that were eco-inspired and whose authors had a connection to the area. Our special collection features original art by the Eastern Shore's own, Ellery Beck. We hope you enjoy it and that it inspires you to think about your environment and the systems that govern and inhabit it.

Happy Earth Day,

Caroline, Emma and John

Review: Dani Putney

On Dela Torre by Dani Putney

by Tyler Truman Julian

Dani Putney’s newest chapbook, Dela Torre, defies the limitations of its length. Embracing the sensitivities of a postcolonial lens and confessional and narrative forms, the poems of this chapbook cross oceans and time to shape a global and familial history that is at once arresting and compelling. The poem’s elevated sense of detail causes both reflective pause and a breathless race toward the end, as the reader grapples with the legacy of empire and craves closure and wholeness in the speaker’s fractured existence.

            When engaging with postcolonial texts, it’s necessary to reflect on the body, and throughout Dela Torre, Putney’s speaker wrestles with identity. Their attention to detail consistently points back to their body and how their familial history impacts it. In “Los pioneros,” the speaker asks, “La atmósfera está infectada, / ¿la ves? El pasado / no nos dice nada—” Do we see the infected air? And with this question, the speaker seems to say, The past can’t tell us anything. It just infects. What does this mean for the postcolonial body? What does this mean for the speaker? What does this mean for the reader? These questions drive the reader forward and deeper into the chapbook. In “Kimchi,” the speaker synthesizes the “nervous conditions” of the colonized body (transferred through the generations) into a clear, descriptive narrative for anyone willing to attempt to understand:

            Nothing gives me more hope
            than spicy cabbage—
            …
            my Filipina mother didn’t eat
            ramen growing up, or like
            kimchi, but my picture of Asia
            was painted in America—
            …
            I’m my most Filipinx version
            of myself with white friends
            in a Japanese-style ramen shop—
            Filipinx, not Filipino,
            not because of my non-binary
            identity but because x marks me
            as Anglo, barely yellow—

            and the truth—I don’t become
anything by eating kimchi,
no metamorphosis,
my face still a question—

In postcolonial studies, the body is a text, a space in which conflicting discourses can be explored and imperial power can be rejected or reinforced. And this is the work that happens in “Kimchi” and the poems throughout Dela Torre. Putney’s speaker navigates identity, subjectivity, and ultimately, American-ness shrewdly, with clear cut usage of contemporary cultural references, language, ideas to assert individualism and a nuanced poetic style. They tell us, “I’m not the first to say life is / a perception of reality. Our bodies / exist because we make them” (“Pauli Excursion”). Just by existing and asserting their identity Putney’s speaker is creating a new reality and responding to history. “I was born,” the speaker explains in “Dela Torre,” “with Ma’s blaze along my tongue, // her plea to never forget our past: / colonization in two languages.”

            Dela Torre’s attention to detail offers a ready corrective to the abstract ideas it is so tempting to apply to conversations about race, colonialism, and American empire. Putney’s speaker places these conversations into a living context, fraught with familial and historical tension. Dela Torre is a powerful chapbook and its wealth extends well beyond its short length, to where it enters, intersects and complicates the narratives so firmly rooted in America’s sense of self that they have become sacrosanct.

In case you missed it—here is Putney’s poem from The Shore:

Sidewind into the Universe

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Nine

Dear Reader, 

Issue 9 of The Shore is filled up with skeletons and not-babies, with names for the un-nameable. In this issue, poems profess love for a squeaking grocery cart and pay careful attention to the soft shape of a snail inching, smiles play in reverse and powerlines buzz like something alive. Here is what our wonderful contributors have been up to in the past two years:

Dana Blatte published her first chapbook, Lone, in 2022. She also published poems in Roanoke Review, The Adroit Journal and Polyphony Lit. 

Jessica Poli has a forthcoming poetry collection, Red Ocher, which was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She also has recently published poems in North American Review, South Carolina Review and New Ohio Review.

Matthew Tuckner recently published a poem in Yalobusha Review, which won the 2022 Yellowwood Poetry Contest. He has also published poems recently in The Cortland Review, Four Way Review, Dialogist and Pleiades. 

CD Eskilson has recently published poems in Pidgeonholes, The Florida Review, Booth, Ninth Letter and Beloit Poetry Journal. They were a 2022 Best of the Net finalist. 

Dakota Reed has recently published a poem in Nelle. 

Kelsey Carmody Wort has recently published poems in Southeast Review, Ghost City Press, Rejection Letters and South Carolina Review.

Martha Silano has recently published poems in Bracken, The Inflectionist Review, Diagram and The Shore. She also published a poem in Colorado Review which was featured in Verse Daily.

SK Grout has recently published poems in Moria, LEON Literary Review and Moist Poetry Journal.

Hilary King has recently published poems in One Art, Ms. Magazine, Rogue Agent and Maudlin House.

Babo Kamel published her second poetry collection What the Days Wanted in 2022. She also recently published poems in Thimble and Third Wednesday.

Noa Saunders recently published poems in The Mantle and Ghost City Press.

Jeremy Michael Reed recently published poems in Still: The Journal and Moist Poetry Journal.

Lucy Zhang published two chapbooks in 2022, Hollowed and Absorption. She has also recently published short stories in Craft and The Spectacle, and nonfiction in Salt Hill.

C Samuel Rees recently published poems in Action Books.

Becki Hawkes published her first chapbook, The Naming of Wings, in 2022. She also published a poem in The Broken Spine.

Kevin Grauke has recently published poems in Ninth Letter and May Day Magazine, and flash fiction in Atticus Review, Thimble Literary Magazine and Jet Fuel Review.

Jenny Wong has a debut microchap, Mouthed, forthcoming in 2023 from Kissing Dynamite Press. She has also recently published poems in Hennepin Review and Porridge. 

Steven Pfau recently published essays in Astra Magazine, Diagram, The Offing, Guernica and Passages North.

Ashley Steineger published her microchapbook. Ebb/Flow, in 2021. She also published a poem in Palette Poetry.

Danielle Pieratti published a poetry collection, Approximate Body, in 2023. She also translated Maria Borio’s Transparencies from Italian to English in 2022. 

Eric Steineger has recently published poems in The Ekphrastic Review and The Night Heron Barks. 

Farnaz Fatemi published a full-length poetry collection, Sister Tongue  زبان خواهر, in 2022, which won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. She also published poems in Olney Magazine, Nowruz Journal, Pedestal Magazine, Jung Journal and Catamaran Literary Reader.

Scarlett Peterson has recently published poems in Barely South Review, Drunk Monkeys and Josephine Quarterly. Her first collection, The Pink I Must Have Worn, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in Fall 2023. 

Sarah Elkins has poems forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, SWIMM and Painted Bride Quarterly. She has also recently published poems in Porter House Review, Quarterly West and Rappahannock Review. 

Katie Holtmeyer has recently published poems in Superfroot, Stanchion and Jupiter Review. 

Robert Fanning’s fifth poetry collection, Cage, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. He has recently published poems in 3Cents Magazine, Diode, Good River Review and Humana Obscura.

Jean Theron published two poems in The Minnesota Review, which both received pushcart prize nominations. She has also recently published poems in The Tiny and Cathexis. 

Heidi Seaborn recently published poems in The Bellingham Review, Fjords Review, Missouri Review and Radar Poetry.

Caroline Riley received her MFA in poetry from West Virginia University in Spring of 2022.

Sarah Stickney recently had a poem published in Carolina Quarterly featured on Poetry Daily, and poems published in Guest House.

David Keplinger’s 8th poetry collection, Everlastingness, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2023. 

Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan has recently published poems in Bracken, MudRoom, Strange Horizons and No Contact. 

Tara A Elliott had poems published in Ninth Letter and Poetry Super Highway.

Lauren Mallett has recently published poems in Cola Literary Review, Night Heron Barks and The Seventh Wave. 

Richard Prins has recently published a poem in Redivider. He also received a Pen/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations from Swahili. 

Sam Sobel graduated with his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University, New Brunswick and is an editor for Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine.

Joshua Young has been working on graphic design, you can find his recent work on Instagram @jyoungdesigns.

Congratulations on all your well-deserved achievements! 

Sincerely, 

Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Mary Morris

On Late Self-Portraits by Mary Morris

by Tyler Truman Julian

Mary Morris’ Late Self-Portraits is an artist’s incisive look at her life as she navigates chronic illness, a type of self-portrait itself. Morris’ speaker is adept at navigating intimate and vulnerable moments of illness, high art and history, resulting in the cultivation of a poetry collection that interrogates death, change and art itself. Approaching these large topics with nuance is a challenge for any poet, but approaching it through the lens of a mother with epilepsy, Morris makes unfamiliar moments universal and compelling. In Late Self-Portraits, the reader is led from poem to poem by the maternal hand of the speaker and is always granted a solid footing in the collection’s arc.

            Morris’ speaker sets the stakes of Late Self-Portraits early in the collection. She introduces the reader to Salem “witches,” Joan of Arc, Marie Laveau, Marie Curie and other misunderstood women in history to ultimately form a connection between these women and those with epilepsy. “Sometimes we slip out of our bodies,” the speaker explains of those who experience seizures, but this slippage also causes snow to fall “through late night poems” (“Sometimes We Slip Out of Our Bodies”). The speaker continues, emphasizing how epilepsy serves as a gateway to artistic production and how doctors easily explain this away:

            Neurons misfire
            Muscles stiffen 

            Years disappear          morph
            through synesthesia

(“Sometimes We Slip Out of Our Bodies”)

What doctors see as tragedy and medical emergency, while not romanticized by Morris’ speaker, is in fact the connection point to the mythic women of history that pop in and out of these poems and art itself. This connection begets art and brings solace: “the body is an empire filled with past lives” (“Portrait of Orpheus, Frida Kahlo, Love & Death”). Where else can we turn when faced with pain but to art and story? It’s from these connection points that beautiful things (joy, consolation and art) come. Once the speaker and reader reckon with this reality, they can face death as fully realized individuals:

            When death makes its move
            close enough to dance
            breathing down my neck
I want to tango
fall into its arms
in love with the music
swing low
trust its compass
let go
my breath.

(“Last Tango in Red”)

This acceptance of death and connection to those who have gone before (whether in true history or folklore) only deepens the collection’s narrative arc. The frequent reliance on ekphrasis and narrative further reinforces the themes of the collection, building a community of artists, musicians and storytellers that offer consolation and “tell us / how to draw death close, paint ravens in” (“Rembrandt, Late Self-Portrait”).

            The emphasis of dying well that these poems embody is matched by their expectation that the poetic I and, in turn, the reader also live well. For every poem about meeting death with trust, there is a poem about living in a creative state, as a parent, as an artist. This, the speaker tells us, is the only way to live well: Remember your death but remember to live. The speaker leaves us with this reminder, the work of poem craft turning a reflexive you into a command, “you / are hungry, and you eat” (“Act of Faith”).

In case you missed it—here is Morris’ poem from The Shore:

Portrait of Spain, Cubism