In the Current with Ella Flores Post One

In the Current

Inaugural Blog Post: What, When, and Who?

Welcome! In the Current will be a periodically updated thread shouting out recent publications, awards, books, or accomplishments by contributors that have appeared in The Shore. Roll out will first catch up to the current issue. Afterward, updates will be seasonal and around big events. A little about myself: my name is Ella Flores, poet and recent MFA graduate from Northern Michigan University. In the Current is meant to serve as a platform to share contributor achievements while also functioning as a sort of archive, providing links, journal names, events, programs, etc.. The work I do on this blog is primarily based on scouring and cross referencing online publications and bios. As this blog grows, I hope to provide, at some point in the future, an easy method for contributors to direct my way any news not readily available online. So, with that out the way, let’s see what strange and wonderful web we create.

Alexandra Teague had her work read on NPR’s Poetry Moment and her new book, Or What We’ll Call Desire, is out now at Persea Books (book review coming soon on The Shore). Congrats, Alexandra!

Chelsea Dingman had poems published in The Rumpus, Narrative Northeast and Kenyon Review. Her collection Through a Small Ghost won the Georgia Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Georgia Press (see our review here)! And read our Dingman interview here. Yes, yes, yes!

Check out Christine Spillson’s essay in Crazyhorse! She also had three pushcart nominations this year. Congrats!

Claire McQuerry had four poems in the museum of americana, was a finalist for Southeast Missouri State University Press’ Cowles Poetry Prize AND for the Journal’s Wheeler Prize. You rock, Claire!

Matthew Woodman had poems appear in Bone & Ink Press and was named poet laureate of Kern County, California. Congrats, Matthew!

Lisa Compo had poems accepted by Santa Clara Review and New Mexico Review. She was also a semi-finalist for the 2019 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Congrats, Lisa!

Rodd Whelpley had poems appear in Barren Magazine and The Wellington Street Review.

William Bortz had poems published in Ghost City Press and Back Patio Press.

Matty Layne Glasgow had poems appear in Cosmonauts Avenue and his poetry collection, deciduous qween, was selected by Richard Blanco as winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. It is available at Red Hen Press. Congrats, Matty! Read our Glasgow interview here.

Daniel Lassell had poems appear in Slice Magazine.

Giles Goodland had poems appear in Michigan Quarterly Review, Parks & Points & Poetry and won first prize in the Torbay Poetry Competition. Congrats!

Ryan Clark had two poems published in CONTRA VIENTO and appears in Posit and K’in.

Lauren Yarnall had two poems taken by Waxwing and was a Yemassee contest finalist. Nice!

Bruce McRae had poems published in Backchannels, Biscuit Root Drive and Black Bear Review.

Jill Mceldowney had work appear in Glass Poetry Press and Salt Hill Journal.

Brennan Sprague had poems appear in Jet Fuel Review, Glass Poetry Press and was a finalist for the 2019 Adroit Prize for Poetry. Congrats, Brennan!

Thank you to all our contributors, I am so excited for the great accomplishments we’ll get to share next!

All the best,
Ella

Review: Chelsea Dingman's Through a Small Ghost

On Chelsea Dingman’s Through a Small Ghost

by Tyler Truman Julian

It’s been said that the most traumatic experience of anyone’s life is one they can’t even remember: their birth. If we are to understand this as truth, then the question that remains is how this trauma impacts us for the rest of our life. The inverse of this, according to Chelsea Dingman in Through a Small Ghost, is that that a mother never forgets that “birth is sometimes about destruction: blood / & shit & sound. Or no sound. Just blood.” Dingman’s newest collection presents a speaker reflecting on her stillborn daughter’s death and the life she has built since. In this way, the speaker explores mortality and life, humanity’s propensity to accept that which may not make us better in order to feel some semblance of normalcy, and the complicated relationship between a man and woman who are left reeling after loss. There is an obvious heaviness to this work, but as I read, I marveled at the beauty of Dingman’s words and was pulled along by the clear narrative thread that wove each poem together.

I have been a fan of Dingman’s work for years and found her familiar appeal to image, masterful use of enjambment and the line break, and moving narrative arc in this new collection, but was struck by the use of space in this work to highlight the themes of absence and loss and the speaker’s confusion at them. The poems in Through a Small Ghost use the page, direct the reader to this absence, attempt to name it, then rename it in a way that I have not seen previously in Dingman’s work, showing the evolution of the writer and a shrewd reworking and understanding of her subject. In “A World within a World,” the speaker reckons with the way the world has sought to rename and stigmatize her and how that differs from her troubled self-definition. Dingman writes,

            You say mother means [         ]. Maybe it means

                        genius. A plaything for the dark

world. The pretty one.

…

Remember

                        when you were [

                                                            ].

This attempt at renaming runs through the collection, highlighting the speaker’s struggle to understand what it means to be a woman whose body seems to have betrayed her, whose body does not adhere to society’s expectations of the maternal. Dingman’s speaker reclaims this lack of definition in a poem directed to her male partner, someone who experiences the grief of a stillbirth but in a way distinct from the speaker. In “Let the Night Come, Monstrous, & Make Use of Us,” the speaker asks, “Am I the red-eye? The receptacle. / The body where others leave themselves. Gutted, // you leave me to the rain. / You pretend a body can’t be named— / the daughter we lost.” The conflict of father and mother in this loss revolves around this stigmatization, the desire by one to “move on,” the knowledge of the other that moving on is a simplistic understanding of the situation and an impossible reality. As the poem continues, the speaker declares, “I want to name the blood. The hurt / of her. The shadow-prayer of her. // I want to name the dark. / I want to name you bastard. // I want.” The speaker’s shadow-prayer pushes her to elevate her body, name it holy. This won’t be a moving on, but it does represent an acceptance and reclamation of self, and across the pages, Dingman asserts through the speaker, that in her “failed” body, the speaker is “almost / home…Almost / something holy.” This shift in thinking allows the speaker to live with her “small ghost” and appeal to a deeper spirituality, a naturalism that invokes fertility and loss all at once. In this nature, I find the human condition, according to Dingman. In “Revisions,” she writes,

we are the dead, the blue, the ghosts

of trees & rivers, the countries

where there is no one to damn

us & someone else tends the light

                                                & sometimes

there is only me, this light untended,

this world I don’t want to wake in.

In this collection, there is a communal invitation into the speaker’s grief, but as the excerpt from “Revisions” shows, Dingman’s poems also pull away, maintaining a confessional distance that roots the poem specifically in the speaker’s story and highlights her experience as a woman and mother. This authorial control of the collection highlights the disconnect between the speaker herself and her partner and appeals to an audience that may, at certain times, exclude some readers. This is not a flaw of the collection but rather an extension of the reading experience and poetic narrative deftly crafted by Dingman. Through a Small Ghost, as a result, is a stirring and humbling read. In “How Briefly the Body,” Dingman writes, “[T]he body is a story…[but] in the body, all things / have an end…every story I’ve known / carried off like tree pollen // in the white spring wind. But I enter, however / briefly. Asking nothing.” If I am to ask anything, it is that we all enter the story of Through a Small Ghost and ask ourselves what traumas we carry, maybe from birth, and what we can learn of empathy in the community made by words.

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

For a Thousand and One Nights

The Columbia River Taught Me How to Run

A Note from Home

Dear Readers & Writers & Editors,

In this disorienting new world, our tasks are more important than ever. As we move through this quickly evolving crisis, people will need new ways to understand the world around them and the worlds inside them. We will help create and translate our new reality. We will help remember who and what and how much was lost. We will author new hope and new pain. So please, think deeply, feel deeply, write and revise and revise and revise and submit and publish and curate with everything you have. We will write this new tomorrow together even while we are so very very far apart.

Love Always,

John

Welcome to Shore Things!

Hi Lovely Readers,

Welcome to our new blog space! Here you will find an exciting mix of contributor reviews & news along with other assorted stimulating odds and ends. We hope you enjoy it. Our first review will be posted shortly after the issue 5 launch. Our review editor Tyler Truman Julian will be reviewing contributor Chelsea Dingman’s killer new book, Through a Small Ghost. We hope everyone is doing well and that our new content will provide some joy in tough times. Thank you for being a part of The Shore family. We love you all and wish you well.

Very Best Wishes,

The Editors