Review: Lorrie Ness

On Anatomy of a Wound by Lorrie Ness

by Tyler Truman Julian

Lorrie Ness’ chapbook, Anatomy of a Wound, is an intimate dissection of grief and close, personal examination of growing up. The chapbook’s narrative poems explore illness, suicide and the fallout surrounding a loved one’s death, moving effectively from imagist-esque moments of body horror to the lyric occasion to show the beauty and tragedy of the loneliness that comes with losing a parent. A story as singular and personal as this is made universal across the pages of Anatomy of a Wound by inviting the reader into the place of grief and the familiar memory of growing up through vivid imagery, powerful storytelling, and the condensed cohesion of the chapbook form.

The chapbook opens with “Unzipped,” a no-nonsense poem describing the speaker’s mother’s autopsy. The speaker describes how the mother’s body was observed after death and allows this poem to ground and direct the rest of the chapbook: “Time of death, 11:11. Manner, / suicide.” The concise and intentional framing of the mother’s death colors the remaining 21 poems of the chapbook, helping the reader understand the personal tragedy. This allows Ness’ speaker to present several personal, lyrical poems presenting her family history before returning to her mother’s death. For example, the speaker explores her relationship to her mother in relationship to a recent relocation and another girl in the area. She shares,

We were new to Florida, living with dad’s parents
in a mobile home edging an unpaved road. 

There was no AC, just aluminum roofing
sealing in the summer heat. 

Sweat from four adults and one child
marinated inside the walls.

Most evenings I came outside with mom
airing my legs in cutoffs as Mikki streaked by. 

Lap after lap. Orbiting
like she was caught by the gravity of this place. 

Nightfall was our renewable resource,
its shadows filling in the gaps of her ripped clothes, 

transforming her briefly
before the sunrise tore her up once more. 

She’d wait for her folks’ light to go out,
then lean her bike against the chain link, tiptoe in. 

Every evening it was the three of us
keeping vigil under the moon.

(“The Move”)

The childhood poems throughout the chapbook tell a story of closeness between mother and daughter, grown through solidarity and isolation. This relationship builds as the poet-speaker ages and the mother gets sick and ultimately dies by suicide. The speaker explains,

The facts are simple.

She came into my room that February morning,
flipped the lights and smiled,
backed out the door. 

I had been using an alarm
since she got sick two years before. 

Every day after,
I’d been waking her with an injection
before catching the bus to school. 

This was the only morning
she said she wanted to do it herself.
I was a teenager, happy to be off the hook. 

The facts are simple.

This was the last time I saw her alive.
I was in US history as she pulled the trigger.

(“Goodbye”)

The reliance on one another ends in this moment, and the speaker is now alone, forced to confront grief and trauma on her own. What follows are poems about the poet’s discovery of her mother’s body and the emotional impact of that. It is in the act of writing though that the poet is able to find solace and understand that in her mother’s death “[s]he was seeking comfort” (“Autopsy Report: Between the Lines”). Before coming to a close, the chapbook challenges the reader to make this connection, to bear the poet’s burden of grief in solidarity. Exploring the often-toxic dynamic of a writing workshop, the speaker tells the story of how a writing group’s

comments were constructive, supportive,
until they got to mine. This is totally implausible!
How could a woman get ahold of a gun?
You’re asking too much here. 

Too much of what?
The only reason you bring up suicide
is to get sympathy. You’re burdening the reader.
The poem explored the stigma of suicide—
the multiple reasons why loved ones
stay silent.

(“The Sin of Telling (Not Showing)”)

The personal is universal in this specific instance and throughout the chapbook as a whole because Ness makes sure we understand her story and recognize ourselves in it. Are we going to be those workshoppers or someone else entirely?

Grief and coming of age are common subjects in our current poetic moment, but Anatomy of a Wound by Lorri Ness adds a forthright look at suicide and the search for solace to these conversations in an intentional and significant way. This chapbook should be added to anyone’s reading list on grief, for in it the reader will not only experience grief, but come away with the challenge to walk side-by-side with those who are processing loss.

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

Body Cartography

She Spoke with Urgency

Visual Distortions

Review: Kyle Vaughn

On The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places by Kyle Vaughn

by Tyler Truman Julian

The American Mid-South has produced its share of poets, but their work is perhaps underappreciated on a regional scale. Given the ecological and social concerns that plague our present moment—ever more complicated at the ecotone—ignoring the role of place in literature seems misguided. Cue Belle Point Press, “a new regional small press founded in 2021,” with a mission “to celebrate the literary culture and community of the American Mid-South: all its paradoxes and contradictions, all the ways it gets us home.” Their focus on the regional in its paradox and contradiction is timely and important—politically, ecologically, and socially. This specific attention to place, arguably, needs to be at the forefront of literary analysis and even our own writing for us to make sense of the present age. In fact, Leonard Lutwack in The Role of Place in Literature argues, “An increased sensitivity to place seems to be required, a sensitivity inspired by aesthetic as well as ecological values, imaginative as well as functional needs. In so far as the representation of place in literature has an important influence on how people regard individual places and the whole world as a place, it may be concluded that literature must now be seen in terms of the contemporary concern for survival.” Lutwack’s groundbreaking study on place and literature appeared in print clear back in 1984, but it seems all the more significant now. From Arkansas, Kyle Vaughn writes of his Mid-South home in The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places, but easily moves beyond its borders in the elegiac chapbook to explore environment, memory, and ultimately, transcendence. This chapbook not only explores the individual and the individual spaces and places that individual can occupy, but interrogates what Lutwack calls “the contemporary concern for survival.”

            Kyle Vaughn’s poems take his reader to mountain tops and grassy plateaus, exploring philosophical questions of loss and metaphysics. Vaughn’s speaker asks, “And in any hard season, who / are you, are you one who will find / enough to live on in this world?” (“Blackland Prairie”). This question, central to the chapbook as a whole, connects the disparate threads of Vaughn’s poetry. Not only is the poem rooted in a specific place (Blackland Prairie, a large native tallgrass grassland in central Texas that has been 99.9% lost to other use), but it conflates the individual (a reflexive you, i.e. the speaker) with the vulnerable place. This is significant. Vaughn’s speaker is in nature. He is a part of nature. Vaughn comes by this honestly, developing setting and a personal story in tandem throughout the chapbook. Initially, the speaker is lost, bereft even, mourning a beloved. In “Lonely Traveler,” Vaughn writes,

            Anywhere I’ve roamed was never far enough 
to find myself. Cathedral, citadel, temple in which

no animal may be harmed. Old mountain lodge, petrified
forest, cold dunes. Always I set out to make it

all the way around, get to some unlonely heaven on
the other side of things. Only found the solitary

trails…And always my silence
is an apology, a penance for carrying my worry to

so many places.

The searching never ends for Vaughn’s speaker. The mourning never ends. For our speaker, “ghosts // bloom from any absence” (“The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places”). Yet, as the poems progress, as he moves through time, the speaker’s understanding of grief and spirituality shift. He gains a clearer understanding of who he is across the poems and describes how his wandering search has been a result of his grief for his lost love, not a pursuit of some intangible transcendence: “Up western summit to go further out / from grieving…I went up but didn’t rise” (“November, Sol Duc Falls Trail”). Vaughn’s speaker is rooted to the earth, he doesn’t rise; therefore, he is only human, only one part of the greater-than-human world. This realization seems to reinforce the challenge of literature to interrogate why we engage with place—why attention to place and our position in nature is not only a concern for survival but a way of coming home. Lutwack’s work explores the metaphorical relationship of place in literature and how place and character and even reader share a dynamic relationship. The Alpinist Shearches Lonely Places embodies this dynamism. Vaughn’s speaker travels across the country, literally up and down mountains, to understand his grief and return home with a sense of peace. In “Leaving My Desires at the Sol Duc River,” the speaker transitions into this peace, explaining,

            I carried your image to an old growth forest.
you will never love me. My life’s meaning
is to be present for the first snow. To be

subsumed by winter, wardened by
evergreen. To set out as landscape
my heart through which timber fell.

As showcased here, the metaphysical and spiritual moments in Vaughn’s work are tempered by a deeply human voice and a speaker unafraid of vulnerability. As a result, the poems in The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places are not only accessible, but they create a compelling grief narrative that satisfies Lutwack’s goals of writing about place, personalizing the drama of humanity’s place in nature.

            Kyle Vaughn’s The Alpinist Searches Lonely Places is a chapbook, for all its breadth, that centers around the personal desire to find your center. For Vaughn’s speaker that center is in and through grief and nature. Much can be learned in these pages about the feelings, ideas and places wrapped up in the word home.

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

Memory of September

Inscape with Aviary

Vocabulary

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Eight

Dear Reader,

Issue 8 of The Shore takes on pasts, unflinchingly facing grief, movement and the ephemerality of the current moment. It is filled with rivers and rose gardens, crayons and hermit crabs, chickens and fields. These poets give language to the fleeting, providing a voice for what would otherwise pass by unspoken.

Here is what the contributors of issue 8 have been up to over the last two years:

Doug Ramspeck published his ninth poetry collection, Book of Years, in 2021. His poems have recently been published in Thrush and The Southern Review.

A Prevett received the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passages North in 2021, and has recently published poems in Frontier Poetry, Western Humanities Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Penn Review, Sixth Finch, Booth and Dear.

Donald Platt published his eighth book of poetry, Swansdown, in 2022. 

Jane Zwart has recently published poems in Plume,  Juxtaprose, Pidgeonholes, Bear Review, Salamander, and Issue 13 of The Shore.

Iheoma Uzomba won the Lagos/London Poetry Competition. She has recently published poems in Rattle and Arts Lounge.

Aiden Baker has recently published in Jet Fuel Review and Drunk Monkeys.

Jennifer Loyd has recently published poems in The Rumpus, Shenandoah and Poet Lore. She also edited a special feature for West Branch.

Jane Satterfield has recently published poems in Interim, Burrow Press Review, The Common and Literary Matters. 

Emry Trantham has recently published in Split Rock Review. 

Dylan Ecker has recently published poems in The Arkansas International, Twin Pies Literary, New Ohio Review and The Penn Review. 

Trivarna Hariharan has recently published poems in The Temz Review, Counterclock and Atticus Review.

Karah Kemmerly has recently published poems in Hooligan, Mason Jar Press, Crab Creek Review, Whale Road Review and Dear.

Su Cho published her first poetry collection, The Symmetry of Fish, a 2021 National Poetry Series winner.

Laura Minor recently published a poem in The Normal School.

Hannah Bridges published a poem in The Atlanta Review.

Eileen Winn recently published in Small Orange and received a 2021 AWP Intro Award honorable mention. 

Ann Pedone published The Italian Professor’s Wife in 2022, and her book The Medea Notebooks is forthcoming in 2023. She has also recently published poems in Inksounds, The American Journal of Poetry and Narrative.

Kelly R Samuels published a book of poems titled All the Time in the World and has recently published poems in The Normal School, Bear Review and Sweet. 

Nicole Stockburger has recently published poems in Had, Beloit Poetry Journal and The West Review.

Michael Battisto has recently published poems in Fly Paper Lit, Wrong Publishing, Eunoia Review, Wales Haiku Journal, Poet Lore and Counterclock. 

Simon Perchik published his 30th collection of poetry, The Family of Man, in 2021. He recently published poems in Plume and The Bombay Review. Simon passed away in June 2022 at 98 years old, may he rest in peace. 

Steven D Schroeder published a book of poems titled Wikipedia Apocalyptica in 2022. 

Jed Myers third full-length poetry collection, Learning to Hold, is a winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award and is forthcoming in 2024. He has recently published poems in Rust & Moth, Terrain and Rattle.

Michael Garrigan has recently published in River Teeth, Orange Blossom Review, and Orion.

Veronica Kornberg has recently published poems in On the Seawall, West Trestle Review, Rhino, and Lake Affect.

Kate Sweeney published the chapbook The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us in 2022, and has recently published poems in Jet Fuel Review and Northwest Review.

Adam Houle recently published poems in Sequestrum and Guest House.

Ellery Beck has recently published art in Phoebe, Interim, Santa Clara Review and So to Speak. They have recently published poems in Runestone, Rappahannock Review, Thin Air and The Pinch.

Congratulations on all your brilliant accomplishments!

Sincerely,
Sarah Brockhaus

Pushcart Nominees 2022!

Congratulations to our 2022 Pushcart nominees!

Ellery Beck “In Winter, We Tried to Write”
Jill Crammond “How to Bury a Bird”
Derek N Otsuji “Hunting for Octopus at Night”
Jess Smith “Retreat”
Nano Taggart “On Selecting the Contents of Care Package Number Three”
Any Wang “Summer fire”

Thank you so much to all our contributors for making this such a difficult decision. Please join us in celebrating the nominees.

With love and admiration,
The Shore Crew

Review: Carolyn Oliver

On Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble by Carolyn Oliver

by Tyler Truman Julian

Carolyn Oliver’s Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is a skillfully crafted debut, powerfully rendered with the talent of a poet sure of her craft and steady in her ambition. The collection moves easily through time and subject; the speaker engages, one moment, with her son, discussing koala bears, the next, tracks Eve and various saints as they interact with different artists and the speaker herself. Oliver does this effectively, maintaining a sure command of both the collection’s narrative, arc, and poetic structures. Across narrative, prose, lyric, and occasional aubade, epithalamion, and structurally experimental genres, Oliver builds a cohesive, interesting, and moving collection that in less capable hands would feel disjointed.

Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is ambitious, yet finds ground in the real world. The saints, the art, the academic moments throughout the collection are all rooted in human moments that connect to themes of nostalgia, childrearing and family relationships, and liberation. Oliver begins the collection with a poem about her son and a larger question of ecological, social, and personal survival. The poem, “My Son Asks if I Would Rather Live in a House Infested by Bees or a House Infested by Koalas,” is predicated on a realistic, childish question, climbs to a crescendo that connect the three themes above, introducing them to the reader. She writes,

            So, my son’s question. Survival means
koalas on the stairs, lamps turned boughs,
menthol in the mouth. Means marked territories

and the slow click of claws in the dark, days
safe in a house full of sleep. But sometimes—
it feels right to tell you this—sometimes

  inside the storm I want to touch the tremble
of a colony warming its queen. I want
walls seeping honey. I want a willing tongue.

So much rests on the you of the poem’s eighteenth line. There’s the personal address to the son and the address to the reader. Here, we begin to learn the collection’s crucial conflict between the speaker’s desire for liberation and the need to care for others, a conflict that returns often throughout the collection. It’s a complicated conflict, and Oliver offers many entry points to help the reader come to understand. Eve reflects on the freedom of her fall, St. Ursula encourages Emily Dickinson toward individualism, John Donne takes comfort from Leonard Cohen as the world ends, and in “Ohio, the late 90s” the speaker observes a classmate, wise beyond her years, and explains how complicated it is to look at another with admiration. Of the classmate, the speaker tells us,

Behind the girl, a dark hedge, a melon-curve of sky ripe for summer.
This is twenty years ago.

She has her own baby girl now, real sick, and the insurance company
won’t approve her medicine.

(“Skin”)

This example emphasizes the-care-of-others-versus-care-of-self-conflict because the speaker is mesmerized by the knowledge this eighth grade girl has and craves her freedom and maturity in the early lines of the poem, but by these last four lines, Oliver’s speaker emphasizes how time has leveled the playing field and the freedom the preteen had twenty years ago has now been absorbed by caring for another. Clearly, this is not a black and white conflict, but memory and family relationships can rarely be delineated into black and white. There’s something lost when either choice is made, to love another or to love yourself. Nowhere in the collection is this more poignant and pointed than in “Listening to Ralph Vaughn Williams on a Tuesday Night,” an elegy to a lover:

            Tonight I close a book, note
the oval smudge on its edge. You held
your books this way, index finger braced
against the spine’s opposite—the sternum?
Your fingerprint in pencil means
you were writing the day you turned these pages
though the margins are First Communion white,
a record of that pristine attention
you offered other poets,
you gave it again and again
as if rehearsing a longer silence.

Opening the book once more I find
the inscription I missed, and then
your spiky initials inside the back cover.
Your letters look always like they want a life
off the page, the y in my name diving
twice as deep as the word,
and how is it you will never write
the poem that’s waiting
about gasping letters getting the bends?

Appearing approximately halfway through the collection, this poem only adds to the overall cohesion of it, emphasizing the problem of losing oneself in memory and the opportunity to recreate oneself after loss. The final pages of the collection capitalize on this desire. Oliver’s speaker revisits images and ideas from earlier to create a sense of resolution and completion for the reader. In “Midlife,” the speaker looks forward, declaring,

            And on this soft morning
nine years from now,
the days behind gone hollow,
the days ahead milling,
buzzing in their thousands,
waiting for you and
watching the bees drunk
on the stranger’s gift,
I could answer: yes.
This is the time, the place
to end, and start once more.
Let me be born again,
here with the laboring bees
in the last throes of their valiance.

Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is a masterful work. It pulls together disparate themes, characters, genres, and structures to build a debut that feels like the work of a poet who has honed her craft and written many books over many years. Oliver’s debut reminds us that complex poetics can be accessible. This collection should find its way onto reader’s shelves regardless of their level of formal poetic knowledge. Carolyn Oliver is a poet I will watch out for years to come.

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

Horses in the Mist

Saint Agnes Meets a Hawk on the River’s Edge

Best of the Net Nominations 2022

Congratulations to our Best of the Net Nominees for 2022! Your poems continue to stun and inspire us.

Lisa Compo "Postscript"

Fatima Jafar "Silence"

Flourish Joshua "Akeldama"

Stephen Lackaye "The Poet at Seventeen"

Marlo Starr "Ghost & Gun"

Aron Wander "Often, we forget"

Thank you to all of our contributors and readers for being part of The Shore fam.

With Our Deepest Admiration,

The Shore Crew

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Seven

Dear Reader, 

Issue 7 of The Shore is brimming with the strange and aching: a rosebush stomach, neighborhood bobcat, the moon growing a sweaty upper lip, a termite in an apple. These poets get up close and specific in their work, never letting you dare to look away.

Here is what the contributors of issue 7 have been up to in the past 2 years:

Melissa Crowe was the 2021 winner of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She had a poem featured in Poetry Daily and poems published in New England Review, Four Way Review, Poetry Northwest, The Bear Review and Sugar House Review.

Lisa Ampleman had poems published in The Rumpus, Sweet and Ecotone.

Susan Rich published a collection of new and selected poems titled Gallery of Postcards and Maps.

Taylor Byas won 1st place in Frontier Poetry’s 2020 Award for New Poets and the Beloit Poetry Journal 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Award. She has also released two chapbooks, Bloodwarm (2021) and Shutter (2022). Her debut full length collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is forthcoming in 2023 from Soft Skull Press. 

Joely Byron Fitch published an essay in Blue Earth Review. 

Emma Aylor published poems in Diagram, The Yale Review, Terrain.org, Roanoke Review and AGNI. 

Jill Mceldowney published poems in Barren Magazine and Muzzle Magazine.

Samuel Adeyemi won the 2021 Nigerian Students Poetry Prize. He published poems in Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, Brittle Paper, Afro Literary Magazine, Indigo Literary Journal, Kissing Dynamite and more.

Taylor Fedorchak published poems in Counterclock and Gigantic Sequins.

Susan Moon published poems in Lammergeier, Porridge and Honey Literary.

Owen McLeod published poems in Copper Nickel and The Southern Review. 

Olúwádáre Pópóọla published poems in Palette Poetry and Frontier Poetry.

Isaac George Lauritsen published poems in Muzzle, Hobart, Sidereal and Jabberwock Review. He also published fiction in The Maine Review. 

Duncan Mwangi published in Shift.

Adam Day published poems in No Contact, Overheard and Interim. 

Natalie Young led a workshop and read at the Utah Poetry Festival in April 2022. 

Dan Wiencek published his first poetry collection, Routes Between Raindrops. 

Andy Keys published poems in Twyckenham Notes.

Vincent Poturica published poems in Telephone and his fiction was selected for the Best Small Fiction Anthology 2021. 

Katherine Fallon published a chapbook titled Demoted Planet in 2021. She also published a poem in The Los Angeles Review and fiction in AGNI.

Sarah Lilius published a full-length poetry collection titled Dirty Words. She also published poems in Two Hawks Quarterly, Fatal Flaw, Coal Hill Review, Kissing Dynamite and more.

Troy Varvel published poetry in River Styx.

Katherine Eulensen had a poem from Bear Review featured by RevisitLit on twitter.

Mayowa Oyewale published poems in Blue Marble Review, The Cardiff Review, Sand and Gutter.

James Grinwis published poems in Painted Bride Quarterly.

Barbara Daniels published poems in Apple Valley Review, Atticus Review, The Dodge and The American Journal of Poetry. 

David Spicer published poems in Delta Poetry Review. 

Christen Noel Kauffman published a collection of lyric essays titled Notes to a Mother God in 2021. She has poems published or forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Rhino, South Florida, Prism Review and Sugar House Review, among many others.

Jeffrey Hermann published poems in Blood Tree, One Art, Feral, Rejection Letters and Lost Balloon.

Jude Marr published poems in Leavings, Moria, Icefloe Press and Boats Against the Current. 

Emily Lake Hansen received the 2022 Longleaf Poetry Fellowship. She also published poems in Up The Staircase Quarterly, Limp Wrist, Poetry Online, So To Speak, One Art, Glass and more.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi has published widely, most recently in Sugared Water, Trampset and Gone Lawn. She has poems forthcoming in Pidgeonholes, The Cortland Review, Salt Hill Journal, Rhino, Moon City Review and Counterclock. She also published a poetry chapbook titled Cartography of Trauma and a micro chapbook titled Cinophile.

Gary Fox has a new poem forthcoming in The Shore.

Jack B. Bedell published collections of poetry titled Color All Maps New (2021) and Against the Wood’s Dark Trunks (2022). He also published poems in Iamb.

Joe Lugara was the cover artist for Pithead Chapel Magazine (2021) and The MacGuffin (winter 2021).

Congratulations on your numerous well-earned achievements, we look forward to seeing what you achieve next!

Sincerely, 

Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Rachel Marie Patterson

On Tall Grass with Violence by Rachel Marie Patterson

by Tyler Truman Julian

From the outset, Tall Grass with Violence by Rachel Marie Patterson is rooted in the erotic, as Audre Lorde sees it. Lorde once wrote, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” For Lorde, the erotic isn’t only about sex and sexuality, it’s a “deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” The erotic is about desire, reclamation and freedom. Knowing oneself is the beginning of freedom and Tall Grass with Violence’s deeply human, often personal poems, exploring change and growth, revenge and resilience, create a truly powerful work of art.

The poems of Tall Grass with Violence are sensual, image-driven, building on one another so that the four sections of the collection tell a story of self-discovery and shifting power dynamics. The speaker sets the stage for this growth early in the collection, announcing in the second poem, “If nothing changes, / nothing ends” (“Metairie II”). And what ends? The first section of the collection presents a series of poems examining the theme of isolation: “I have tried to have a joyful heart, / to be made perfect” (“Metairie III”). The tone of this section signals to the reader that this pursuit of joy is ongoing, and we wonder if this isolation will, in fact, end. The speaker even desires the aloneness, to an extent, confiding in the tenth poem of the Metairie series, “You can always be alone / here with the salt grass, the rigs and their / perfect lights.” This speaker is experiencing the depth of her feelings. Even if the lonely feelings are unrealized and their import is uncertain, the speaker finds connection to the Louisiana landscape and it is in this connection to a fragile and shifting environment that she takes her first steps deeper into the erotic, self-realization and ultimately, power.

The second section of the collection pulls back from the imagist-influenced poetry of the first to wax narrative. Between memories, Patterson uses the lyric occasion to help the speaker sort through the emotions of the first section and give the reader a foothold in her world. Where the speaker seems lost and pensive in the first section, she uses the second section to explore the idea of freedom and what it takes to achieve it. In “The Seahorse Motel,” a coming-of-age poem, the speaker muses on rebellion and giving into feelings that spur on action:
My cousin taught me how to drink
in a half-priced room at the Seahorse Motel
with a handle of 151 and a liter of coke.
…
It was just the first drop, but
that night I understood the clean thrill
of forgetting, the numb thrill of waking
sleep. We stumbled to the street to smoke
our Newports, my spectral body teetering
against the salted air. I loved him for what
we shared, our mothers as nervous as purse-dogs,
our fathers severe and reticent. We stayed
awake all night, and when I finally blanked out,
I dreamt that there was no reason for all
our meanness—just that half-kicked bottle.
There is physical and emotional danger in the rebellion in this poem, but this rebellion also leads to a deeper understanding of self. Perhaps the attention to this risk is what Lorde means when she writes, “We have been taught to suspect this resource [the erotic], vilified, abused and devalued within western society.” In fact, it is after this poem remembering the Seahorse Motel that the collection turns again, often conflating human emotion with the actions of animals and shifts into the third section that relies heavily on allusions to myth and folklore. Patterson’s poems move from the realm of memory to the realm of fantasy to investigate liberation and how it is, to borrow from Lorde, vilified, abused and devalued. She uses the myth of Melusine, a mermaid-like serpent woman, the legend of seal-women, the classic story of sirens, and a general mysticism to highlight how feminine power is linked to the monstrous. And in this mythmaking, the speaker becomes aware of the power she holds, revealing,
I am not anything you ought to want,
                        or anyone—still, I’m the electric fence
                                    you keep touching.                                                         (“I Am the Match”)
And
            If I am bright,
if I am burning,

who’s to say I’m not
the sun? All your body
will be a pocket

for my impulses. So comb
your pockets; find the charm
you think will moor me.

I’ll bloom for you, then
I’ll pucker to a lime, but you’ll
go on admiring

my shoulders, my painted wings.                                                                            (“Siren”)
These are the words of a speaker grown into herself, someone who has come to understand the erotic.             The last section of Tall Grass with Violence presents a mature speaker, blending the image-driven poetry from the collection’s early pages and the narratives of its middle sections to create a sense of self-actualization for the speaker and resolution for the reader. The poems frequently show the speaker, who is no longer alone but has found a lover, claiming her own space. In “High Acres Drive,” the speaker reflects on the process of moving into a new house, replacing her home’s previous tenants:
The last woman who lived here
bought bricks and a kitchen, planted
a garden, then became a widow.
We spend our first spring mowing
dead nettles along the rusted gate.
I line three amber bottles above
the sink where you won’t forget—
aspirin for your blood, iron for your gut,
and the daily capsule that slows
your heart. We should fix the steel
windows, caulk the tile, have a baby.
First, scrape the old name off the mailbox.
This claiming of space suggests the alteration in Patterson’s speaker, one who has recognized the power in feeling. In the poem immediately following “High Acres Drive,” this shift is further illuminated when the speaker reveals, “For a long time, I was afraid that only good people / were able to be happy” (“The Worst Thing”). The speaker is happy but seems to recognize that the depression and loneliness present in the preceding poems were equally as important emotions as joy is now. It is in recognizing emotion and the power of expression that the speaker finds wholeness. In a quasi-ars poetica, the speaker posits, “To write a poem, you have to be afraid” (“Lake House”). Poetry, specifically the poems of Tall Grass with Violence, confronts fear, often gently but in order to cultivate power. “Giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity,” Lorde writes, “is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.” This reclamation of fear is at the heart of Tall Grass with Violence and adds meaningfully to conversations of power and change.
In Tall Grass with Violence, Rachel Marie Patterson creates an erotic exploration of change and a powerful story of self-discovery. The erotic “is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing,” writes Lorde, and it is in this question that Patterson’s speaker rests, offering narrative, image-rich poems, rooted in revelatory lyric moments of growth and motivation. “Only now,” Lorde summarizes, “I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange.” It is in the creative nature of the erotic that individuals make change, and in this way, Patterson both challenges and shines light on the weary drama of everyday life. Tall Grass with Violence recognizes the political in the personal and Patterson motivates each of us to be brave enough to feel deeply with her.

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

Market

Review: David Greenspan

On One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan

by Tyler Truman Julian

            With a title like One Person Holds So Much Silence, it’s easy to default to a state of questioning with David Greenspan’s new chapbook. Some questions that arise from this short collection are What is the speaker withholding? and What is he inviting the reader into? Greenspan is not without answers, however. The chapbook’s answers to these questions rest in familial and generational trauma and pain, addiction and sickness, and not to mention, hope. But when it comes to silence, potentially the most nuanced and compelling aspect of Greenspan’s work, it is contained into the white and blank spaces of the collection. These moments of caesura force the reader into a poem’s overt and material silences, asking them to sit and reflect and to feel a necessary discomfort.

One Person Holds So Much Silence is a challenging read, parked at the intersection of many roads. It tugs between humanism and naturalism, narrative and erasure, and active participation and passive acceptance to cultivate a bold communal vision of poetry. The collection pulls the reader to that busy intersection with the speaker and asks, What silences do we hold? And can we hold them together?

            In Greenspan’s collection, the figure of the body acts as a conduit for spiritual experience. I do not mean to suggest a kind of divinity at work, but rather a pure and transcendent significance of experience. In the long Q&A style poem, “Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the speaker espouses his life’s philosophy: “There is no blood without blood.” In the biological sense, there is no life without blood; abstractly, there is no living without a little bloodshed. Nonetheless, there rests a deep desire for living in these poems, but also flirtatious descriptions of death and decay. Both descriptions of life and death seem tied to this idea that there is no living without bloodshed. both connect to the reality of bodily experience making us human. The speaker further explores this idea of experience as life-giving, saying, “What do we think when we hear sensual. A feeling of hands along other hands, water along filament. How much more can we syllogism. All ash is tactile. Lungs are ash” (“We the Dead Balk”). This prose poem uses the page, breaking at paragraphs, jumping to the next page, asking you to sit with the images of body parts and flashes of earth. The reading itself becomes a physical act as the reader is propelled to the next page, repeatedly, to finish the poem. Several pages later, “We the Dead Balk” continues, exploring experience and humanity, but taking them further and inviting the reader to make their own conclusion: “Our body has not found a destination & will be declared stateless unless claimed before [          ]” What makes us human? What connects us to the body that is our planet? What happens when we die and individual physical pain subsides, but others remain behind? We fill in the blank.

            The connection of spirit to body to earth is concrete in these pages in a complicated way that the reader is forced to come back to again and again. If they can’t fill in the blank in “We the Dead Balk,” they get more opportunities later. For example, the speaker becomes more explicit in “A Poem to Pass the Time.” He asks,

                                                what use is a landscape
            without hair    a landscape meatless
            pitied
…
                                    I guess my entire body
wants to scream          say please
say one person holds so much
silence

This poem provides another glimpse into a childhood connected to nature and Vicodin and anxiety and ends the chapbook. The words jump across the page in alternating short and long lines, with an abundance of white space. The reader has ample room to feel the silence, ask and answer the speaker’s questions, and participate in the poem itself. Rounding out a dynamic, communal collection, the poem is cathartic for speaker and reader, clarifying nuanced moments of the chapbook and inviting further reflection

            David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence is a haunting work, where the ghosts are not only the speaker’s but also our own as readers. Readers of this work participate in Greenspan’s project as much as the speaker himself and we may not come out unscathed, but we certainly come out better for having done so. We are asked to leap from word to word, page to page, and poem to poem, hoping to avoid the frequent white space for fear of the possibilities that might lay within it. But of course, we will fail, as intended.

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

Language for the needy thing in your lungs

Portrait of the ocean as a young artist

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Six

Dear Reader,

Issue Six of The Shore came out in the summer of 2020. In a moment of isolation, the poems and art in this issue find ways to reach beyond—exploring the ordinary with newfound patience & precision, reflecting on self & memory and redefining human connection.

In the last two years, the poets and artists of this issue have continued reaching out and impacting the world. Here is what they have been up to:

Catherine Pierce published her newest book, Danger Days with Saturnalia Books in October of 2020. She became poet laureate of Mississippi in April of 2021. She won her second Pushcart Prize in 2021.

Kim Harvey published micro chapbooks with Kissing Dynamite Press and Ghost City Press.

Beth Gylys published a collection of poetry titled Spot in the Dark in 2021 which received the Ohio State University Journal Award. She also had poems featured in The Best American Poetry and Verse Daily.

Joshua Garcia is a 2021-2022 Stadler Fellow and received his MFA in poetry from College of Charleston in 2021. He was interview by The Massachusetts Review. He has published poems in Yes Poetry and The Georgia Review, among many others. He has received Best New Poet 2022 nominations for poems published in The Massachusetts Review and Arts & Letters.

Sara Moore Wagner published her second book Tumbling After in March of 2022. She received the 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and was a finalist for the 2022 National Poetry Series. She has published extensively, most recently in Permafrost, Jabberwock Review, Atticus Review and Little Patuxent Review. She has poems forthcoming in Meridian, Limp Wrist and The Pinch, among others.

Kristi Maxwell published poems in The Gravity of The Thing, Another Chicago Magazine, La Vague Journal, and Storm Cellar.

Dillon Thomas Jones published his first poetry book with word west press.

Matthew Bruce had a poem published in Coal Hill Review.

Lorrie Ness has published widely, most recently in journals such as Rogue Agent, Empty House Press and Rappahannock Review. She has poems forthcoming in many journals, including River Heron Review, Eunoia Review, and Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art.

C.C. Russell published poems at No Contact.

Travis Truax published poems in Baltimore Review and Cumberland River Review.

Stanley Princewill McDaniels published poems in Icefloe Press, Libretto and Jalada.

Njoku Nonso published poems in Lumiere Review, Bodega and Nigerian News Direct.

Erin Rodoni published a poetry book titled And If the Woods Carry You which won the 2020 Michael Waters Poetry Prize.

Phillip Sterling had a poem featured by the Poetry Society of Michigan. He also had a poem published in Cider Press Review.

William Doreski published multiple book reviews in Harvard Review and published poems in The Westchester Review and New World Writing. He also published his most recent book of poetry in 2021, titled Mist in Their Eyes.

Emma Alexandrov is the editor for Windows Facing Windows Review.

Jay Kophy published poems in Four Way Review, Lolwe, The Indianapolis Review, and Rogue Agent Journal.

Ajay Kumar had poems published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Alipore Post and Isacoustic.

David Greenspan published a book of poetry titled One Person Holds So Much Silence in March of 2022. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is now a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. He also had poems published in Superstition Review, Diagram and more.

Carolyn Supinka has published widely in journals such as The Indianapolis Review, Radar Poetry and Sixth Finch. She also has poems forthcoming in The West Review and Birdcoat Quarterly.

Carlo Rey Lacsamana has published creative nonfiction at Citron Review, an essay at Rigorous Magazine and fiction at Amsterdam Quarterly.

Maya Lowy has published poems in Black Coffee Review and Quaint Magazine.

John Sibley Williams published a book of poetry titled The Drowning House which won the Elixir Press Poetry Award. He has published widely, recently in Breakwater Review, Solstice and Waxwing.

Amanda Pendley published poems in Kalopsia and Fools Magazine.

Dorsía Smith Silva published poems in Pidgeonholes, Superstition Review, The Hopper, Porter House Review and ANMLY.

Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau was interview by Literature Voices. His manuscript, The Morning The Birds Died, was a finalist in the 2021 Sillerman Prize. He has published poems at Have Has Had, Frontier Poetry and Lolwe.

Brooke Sahni published a book of poems titled Before I Had the Word in 2021. She has also published poems in Frontier Poetry, Interim, Zocalo, and Nimrod.

Caroline Shea received her MFA from New York University. She has published poems in Glass and Narrative Magazine.

Luke Johnson has had poems published by Louisiana Literature, Frontier Poetry, Cortland Review and Vox Populi. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press and The Vassar Miller Award.

Liza Katz Duncan received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her book, Given will be published in 2023 and won the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award. She has had poems published in The National Poetry Review, AGNI, About Place and more. She has poems forthcoming in Poet Lore, Poem-A-Day and Broadsided Press.

Connie Wasem Scott published a chapbook titled Predictable as Fire in 2021. Her full-length poetry collection, The Open Hand of Sky, will be published in August of 2022. She has recently published poems in American Poetry Journal, Pontoon Poetry, Streetlight and Wildroof Journal.

Brenda Edgar recently published a poem in Rust + Moth. She also has poems forthcoming in The Blue Mountain Review, The Main Street Rag and Crosswinds.

Michael Lauchlan has recently published poems in Cumberland River Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal and The Briar Cliff Review.

Natalie Shapero published her third poetry collection in 2021, titled Popular Longing.

Katie Delaney was an artist in the 2021 ICA Flat File Program.

Cleo Jones recently published her art in Beaver Magazine.

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

Sincerely,
Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Kathleen Winter

On Cat’s Tongue by Kathleen Winter

by Tyler Truman Julian

Memory is the thread that connects the poems in Kathleen Winter’s probing new chapbook, Cat’s Tongue. Memory runs through poems exploring aging, childhood and inheritance, asking what it is we keep from our ancestors and what we leave for others in our wake. This is sensitive poetry, aware of past, present and future, and both the speaker’s and our collective impact on all three.

It is not easy work to break down our impact on time and the people around us, but Winter’s poetry is more than equipped for the challenge. Unafraid to climb into abstraction, Winter pulls the poetry back to earth and humanizes this short collection through the confessional moment, often embracing humor and the uncanny. She writes,

This is temporary       a misunderstanding
between myself and me.

How I came to be caught in my own net,
the red blur of an old girl.

Half-submerged body—craft to carry just one animal.

I pull myself up

by the boot-strap of my braid.

Memory! I send the last dog to greet you

with his one wild eye.

(“Beside Myself”)

This short poem opens the chapbook and captures so much of what the collection is. As if to put a period on this first poem, Winter’s speaker tells us in the next poem, “I’m not thinking of/how time was, but of what the instance felt like,” and of course, this second poem is about a childhood memory of holding a snake and the breakdown of expectation, and of course, this second poem is called “Some days I want certainty, some days, revelation.” Winter’s poems are relatable, even when they wax abstract or personal. The poetics carry them and we can easily see ourselves sitting “on the floor, waiting/for the snake to make the rounds,” wondering what it feels like, only to be surprised at the unexpected, forced to grow up. This could be our childhood memory or a parent’s, told to us at the dinner table. Regardless, we inherit a lesson, just as the speaker does. We learn about expectation and adulthood.

This is it, the crux of the chapbook: What can we learn from memory and its inheritance? And Winter lays this out throughout the collection, building finally to “Call It Like You See It,” an almost response to “Some days I want certainty, some days, revelation.” Her speaker, reflecting on a cold, dreary day, declares,

            The Labrador inside his faux fur rug
is Sultan of Dog
and wouldn’t say no to a pastry.
Why rise from bed
when the owl yet sings in the mesquite
and no one has made coffee.
Tomorrow without fail
brings rain, more cold.
The Sultan and his retinue
have each grown up and almost
old. Who knows what song
the owl pronounces now
in oval tones—the fable’s knell,
or an avian solicitation?

Who knows what tomorrow might bring beside the cold? But we can call it as we see it and learn from it as we go. Cat’s Tongue is Kathleen Winter and her speaker’s opportunity to call it as they see it and sits as a challenge to us to evaluate our memories and how they impact our lives and those around us.

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

Finally the Girls

Phone Interview with Medusa

Review: Daniel Biegelson

On Of Being Neighbors by Daniel Biegelson

by Tyler Truman Julian

Daniel Biegelson’s Of Being Neighbors is a complex inquiry into what makes us human and what makes us artists. From dense prose poems to winding narratives, Biegelson adeptly moves a speaker around and through all sides of the varied realities of childrearing and writing in our postmodern moment. This collection, reminiscent of Grace Paley in its deeply human, often wry and humorous explorations, leaps to strange and disquieting heights in search of answers to unsettling questions that plague the contemporary poet: What role does poetry have in a world so troubled? Are my troubles as large as those of the world’s? Circling these answers takes time, takes a frequency of word and image that Biegelson handles well, utilizing imagery, repetition, and metaphor to beautiful effect, forcing his reader to slow and reflect and question in their own experience: What makes living worthwhile?

            From the outset, Biegelson’s speaker’s foot is on the gas, his hand is heavy on the pen. The repeated and revised poem “Neighbors” opens the collection, pulls us in, and never lets us go:

Do you believe in eternity. Infinity. Affinity. For once. Can we pray without ropes around
the prayer. Exchange branches for wires. Extinguish the clouds. We are the murmuration
turning over the earth with our predatory eyes. We are the field turned over and under.
We want to preserve our singularity. We can no longer look at each other.

(“Neighbors (I)”)

The small tragedy of neighbors failing to look at each other is compared and equated to questions of eternity. The microcosms of a cul-de-sac, a family, and a writer with their pen mirror the drama of the larger world and require special attention. With the skillful blending of his own words with those of others, Biegelson’s work addresses both extremes as equal, though such a stance is complicated:

                                                We don’t really speak anymore
of what it means to be human. As if we were dying.
We speak of clothes and their cast. Of cars and rigs
mangling people. Of grievance and violence. Shuttering
or drifting toward a mass extinction. Can we convince
ourselves that we are real.

(“The New Light”)

Again, what is poetry’s role in responding to our present moment seems to be the question at the heart of these complex lines. Can art reveal our humanity in the face of dehumanization and isolation on the global level? Slowly, the poems in Of Being Neighbors build into a clear yes. “Even you are responsible,” Biegelson’s speaker warns us, “to more than you. / What is light. What is rain. Now a metaphor” (“Notes on the Winter Holidays”). Life and art blend in almost Gertrude Stein fashion here to emphasize this yes. Biegelson challenges us to see the world and respond:

We are witnesses to our own evolution…We are the genderless sea heaving upon the
breathless shore. The tired. The poor. The masses. ‘Yearning to breathe.’ But what we
need is (not) also. What we need is. Is. No adherents. And oxygen.

(“Neighbors (I-X) Revisited”)

The mosaic that is crafted by Biegelson’s blending of his words with the words of global as well as distinctly American poets, artists, pop culture icons, and philosophers is sprawling, a complicated image of the present moment, of what it means to be good neighbors. How can artists add their piece to this puzzle? The speaker says it best in “Henny Penny Blues,” “We cannot / be quiet even in our most intimate whisper.” This is deeply human writing elevated by appeals to a muse that the author can’t seem to shake, even if he wanted to. Writing is vocational, and poetry is vital. The personal is truly political. Evocatively four-square, Of Being Neighbors raises questions of responsibility and impotence that cloud both the parental role and task of the writer in the modern age. “We’ve been thrown back onto the shards / of questions we thought we had answered,” the speaker further posits in “Henny Penny Blues.” In the face of questions, Biegelson writes, Biegelson raises his children to be good neighbors. Bearing witness is art, and art is something greater than survival; in fact, it is how we find our “footing in depthlessness” (“Only the Borrowed Light”).

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

(ק) :: To See What You Cannot See

In the Current with Sarah Brockhaus Issue Five

Dear Reader,

Issue 5 of The Shore came out in the Spring of 2020, on the brink of the global pandemic. It is difficult to believe two years have passed since, and yet it feels like a world entirely separate from us today.

The work in issue 5 lives on the cusp of change, it challenges and explores the bounds of memory, plays with opposition and dances through problems of identity and image.

In the face of the pandemic, the contributors of issue five have continued to boldly make art and share it with the world:

Julia Bouwsma is the poet Laureate of Maine, the guest editor for The Ilanot Review, and recently published in The American Poetry Journal.  

Charlie M Brown has poems forthcoming in Cincinnati Review.

Nicholas Samaras published poems in Ruminate and Image.

Sarah Marquez published a poem in Mud Season Review and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Library Science at San Jose State University.

Nicholas Holt received his BFA in creative writing from Florida State University.

Rachel Small published the poetry collection, Where Do We Go from Here?  with Whispering Wick Chapbook Press in 2021.

Noah Stetzer published poems in Waxwing, The Cortland Review, Hobart, Green Mountains Review, Under A Warm Green Linden, Scoundrel Time and The Night Heron Barks.

Kathryn de Lancellotti was interviewed by Shoutout SoCal and published poems in Night Heron Barks and Beaver Magazine. In June 2020 she published her chapbook Impossible Thirst with Moontide Press.

Molly Tenenbaum published a poem in Moria.

Jide Badmus published poems in Neuro Logical and African Writer.

Satya Dash published poems in Superstition Review, Wildcourt, Atlas and Alice, Sangam House and Cincinnati Review.

Wheeler Light published a poem at Broadsided Press.

JK Anowe had work featured in Bakwa 10: Family Politricks.

Jennifer Saunders published poems in Whale Road Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, Heron Tree, and Twyckenham Notes.

David Dodd Lee published in Rattle, Packingtown Review and Thrush Poetry Journal.

Maxine Patroni received an honorable mention in Broad River Review’s 2021 contest.

Stephanie Seabrook published poems in Birdcoat Quarterly and Kissing Dynamite.

Tara Ballard published in Diode, Glass: A Journal of Poetry and The Normal School and is currently a PhD candidate in English at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Ned Balbo received a 2022 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council and was a 2021 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He was also interviewed by Hocopolitso.  

Joanna White was a 2021 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Panelist on the topic of Cross Art Collaboration.

Pat Hanahoe-Dosch published poems in Thimble, Rust & Moth and Red Fez.

Barbara Westwood Diehl is the founding and current managing editor of The Baltimore Review, and recently published a poem in Matter Press.

KG Newman published poems in Gasher Journal, Reed Magazine, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Harpy Hybrid Review, Sledgehammer Lit, Rough Diamond Poetry, Hash Journal, The Crank and Miniskirt Magazine.

Bryan D Price published poems in New World Writing, Josephine Quarterly, Hole in the Head Review, Barzakh, Watershed Review and The Broadkill Review.

Kathryn Merwin has had poems published in American Literary Review and Puerto Del Sol.

Jenny Irish published her third poetry collection, Toothbox. She also has poems forthcoming in Grist and Constellations.

Nicholas Molbert had a poem accepted by G U E S T and poems published in Flyway Journal and TIMBER.

Alicia Hoffman published the poetry collection ANIMAL with FutureCycle Press in May of 2021. Alicia has a poem forthcoming in Rock Paper Poem, and published poems in Marrow Magazine, SWWIM, The Night Heron Barks, Feral, South Florida Poetry Journal and Thimble Literary Magazine.

TW Selvey had art published in Waxing and Waning.

Theresa Senato Edwards published in Naugatuck River Review. Theresa was also a poetry mentor for the 2020 and 2021 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective and is currently a senior poetry editor for Harbor Review.

Clay Matthews is the current poetry editor at The Tusculum Review and published a poem in Appalachian Review.

Anna Sandy-Elrod has recently published poems in Limp Wrist Magazine, Angel City Review and Florida Review. She has poems forthcoming in Exhume and Stained: An Anthology of Menstruation.

Clifford Brooks is co-hosting a podcast called This Business of Music and Poetry.

Stephen Furlong is the current staff reviewer for the journal Five:2:one.

Melissa Marsh continues to create across multiple genres, her work can be found on her website.

To the contributors of issue 5: congratulations on your incredible achievements and thank you for sharing your talents with us.

Issue 5 closes with the words of Stephen Furlong, which seem as appropriate today as they were two years ago, “I used to believe
the one true teacher was grief                        
revealing itself as a butterfly
such beauty     from chaos     
for as long as I could remember         your light has shined through
the corners of the home I’m building—”

Sincerely,

Sarah Brockhaus

Review: Erin Rodoni

On And If the Woods Carry You by Erin Rodoni

by Tyler Truman Julian

Erin Rodoni’s And If the Woods Carry You is a commanding interrogation of motherhood and the many complicated relationships that come with it: mother to child, mother to nature, and mother to self. Though often tender, these poems, unlike many similarly themed poems, roar from the page, asserting agency, demanding attention and asking hard questions of both motherhood and the reader. In a lynchpin poem of the collection, Rodoni’s speaker announces, “I want the poem to hold everything the way my body holds / the whole and holy me” (“Time Capsule: The Poem”). And hold everything these poems seem to do. There’s a depth to these poems; they face the pain of birth and the difficulty of explaining death to a child; they confront climate change and the myths we tell ourselves to hide from painful truths; they play in apocrypha and rule, forest and carpet; and they craft a complicated, relatable speaker, unafraid to admit, “childhood is mythed / and monstered” and wonder where that leaves the mother (“Lullaby with Fireflies and Rising Seas”).

            Where is the mother in all the monstrous myth of childrearing? Rodoni’s speaker-mother declares,

            In ever fairy tale, the mother dies

            and is replaced by someone wicked. It’s true,
            I want to keep you safe, but I want

            to keep you mine. I never meant to fly
            you like a kite. I never meant to stay

            behind. But the mother is a cottage
            the daughter flutters from, the mother

            more cage than bird, and the parting clean
            as licked sword. The future, a castle that can’t be

            childproofed. And the fairy tale, still
            open on my lap, is not a map.

(“Lullaby with Fireflies and Rising Seas”)

Where is the mother? The mother is lost. In the tight linework of Rodoni’s poetry, her speaker tracks motherhood’s frightening lack of a map and, furthermore, dives into a mother’s need to find her place in the world and in her personal journey in order to better accept her inability to childproof the future. In this way, the collection works—satisfyingly—full circle, following both poems that explore childhood trauma and adults reckoning with it, ultimately coming back to mother and daughter. In the penultimate poem, “Caesura,” the speaker-mother returns to themes of truth and mythmaking:

I remember hearing about them, the babies               my grandma never had,
and though I’d never held such a seed                       in my body, I felt the want
of them. Five children with ghostspaces                    between. She believed
unbaptized souls went to Limbo,                   which to me meant low,
so I saw them spread like mica          in the soil beneath her roses,
and in the gauze of grasshoppers                   that rose with every step
through summer grass.

…

After our cat died my oldest kept asking        Where is she? I know she’s dead
but where is she? First, I spun a heavenplace,           then I changed my mind,
stood her barefoot in the garden and said                   Here, look down.
The dirt is full of root and bone.                     Oh, my darlings, we are so small.
Lie down, back to summer grass. Feel                                   how we are always falling
into that starspread black expanse.                 And feel too
the way the earth holds us,                 and we are held.

The truth that interrupts the mythmaking emphasizes the speaker’s growth of understanding, a clear arc in the collection. Her maternalism is not wrong because it is different from her grandmother’s, nor is it wrong because it is different from that in a fairy tale. The last poem emphasizes the complicatedness of motherhood, the desire for a fairy tale ending, but the speaker knows better, and Rodoni creates an ideal end—one that doesn’t deceive, one that maintains hope, but one, too, that is rooted in reality. In “While Hunting Mummies at the Museum,” the speaker-mother confides,

            And because I might be vague
            about the Tooth Fairy
            and Santa, but swore I’d never lie
            I have to say Yes 

            when she wonders, inevitable,
            if she will die. The next
sarcophagus is empty, so I myth
it with a mummy, bandage-
wrapped and risen, then make
the promise, that is, at best,
only half mine to keep:
But baby, not for a long, long time.

            “Love is laced always // with a stunning sadness” Rodoni’s speaker-mother tells us (“While Hunting Mummies at the Museum”). How true that is, especially for a mother. There is nothing trite or cliché about these poems. Every poem contains a surprise and takes you one more step on the speaker’s maternal journey, and also a life journey—nuanced in its challenges yet relatable in its anxieties. This makes And If the Woods Carry You a bracing wind in the forest of motherhood poems, chilling when you’re caught unprepared, your red cloak left at home, refreshing when you’re fatigued from a long day of chopping wood. This is a collection not to be missed.

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

Time Capsule: Days of Ash from Elsewhere

Review: Kimberly Grey

On Systems for the Future of Feeling by Kimberly Grey

by Tyler Truman Julian 

Recently, a friend in the middle of studying for her Creative Writing Doctorate’s comprehensive exams sent me a picture of sentence diagrams, a linear breakdown of a sentence with offshoots that label each part of speech in the sentence. They look a little like a tree blown over in a storm. The longer the sentence, the more complicated they get. The tree trunk (the subject-verb base) may fork with conjunctions, and the number of branches only increases, expanding as the sentence is broken down into prepositions, adjectives, objects of prepositions, and adverbs. I’d seen sentence diagrams before and even filled some in (in Spanish classes though, not English), but looking at them in relation to my friend’s doctoral program, they seemed heavy and interesting. Words carry a lot of weight, so much so, these diagrams seem to say, that sentences can collapse under it into their various pieces. Interestingly, it’s somewhere around this idea and the study of semantics that Systems for the Future of Feeling by Kimberly Grey takes off and finds its genius.

            The poems of Systems for the Future of Feeling seek new ways to make meaning of age-old questions in a postmodern world. Grey approaches love, lost love, and catastrophe in this collection, working through various imaginative and philosophical diagrams all her own, looking for the right words to give voice to emotion that is much older than the perceived apathy of our present moment. The first section of the collection, aptly titled, “Rhetoric,” is a long poem that builds to the question: “can we be happy still?” This question, in isolation, is tired, over-asked, but from the first line on, Grey’s speaker offers new questions and images to lead the reader to it, with new meaning:

            If language formed a center.

            If the center were true and tugging.

            If the tugging kinged us and we were fully assembled.

            If we were translated into compasses and the wind spun us around.

            If the ground imagined us raveled.

The poem continues on the next page, after sufficient white space to sit with these images. Grey’s speaker builds,

            If we string milkweed around our shoulders and walked north.

            If we found a little house and labeled it covet.

            If it were contemptible to be personal and diamondly lit.

After several pages:

            If we are unkinged.

            If we suffer for language and a little house.

            If truth is contemptible and wonder is a symposium of god.

            If we build god with a compass and bath.

            If the neighbors watch and wonder.

After a page break:

            If language equals failure and failure is the end.

            If we disassemble the center.

            If we wander back to where we arrived.

After one last page break:

            If the ground is a gallery of horse tails.

            If we bury our failures in the ground.

            If we wait for them to bloom.

            If a horse comes and pisses on them.

             can we be happy still?

This long poem sprawls across pages, a complex breakdown of semantics, and comes full circle in a winding, probing way, asking questions of the language used in the poem, asking with each rhetorical situation, can we be happy still? Knowing the postmodern, postindustrial reader is not interested in the romantic, Grey’s speaker builds and builds before dropping the question. This is effective. This adds meaning. And this poem sets the stage for the rest of the collection, allowing the poetry to climb to romantic heights, while the rhetorical and semantical play keep it grounded and frequently academic.

By way of moving forward, the speaker admonishes and invites in the poem immediately following “Rhetoric.” Grey writes, “For too long / now I’ve been spoiled by what I don’t know…it’s never enough, to be astonished” (“System of Knowing”). Why can’t we be astonished—by beauty, love, romance? Grey’s speaker seems to be asking. And the inability seems to lie in the inability to find modern words to capture the emotion created by these themes. The speaker looks back to find the language, interviewing various Bigs of linguistic history: Gertrude Stein, Sina Queyras, Anne Carson, Jack Gilbert, and Ludwig Wittgenstien, at the same time, she recognizes that “Time deserves to be studied, as I study you and me and how we are linked. See we’ve become almost like holy things, while the reverse is also true and every time I see you, while I’m looking…I’m thinking of a long river, something with no end” (“Simultaneously”). The speaker learns, as the readers learn, that time always moves forward, and we with it; therefore, language always changes and capturing the large emotions of life is always going to be a challenge, just as it has been from the dawn of time. Still, the speaker tells us, “It’s valuable to know language / will not make us beautiful;” it’s our working through the big emotions that makes humanity beautiful (“System with Some Truth”).

Once the speaker draws this conclusion, she looks for ways to better articulate the impact, both for the speaker and the larger world. She explains,

We need a form to form us, we need a form to teach
us the facts. How, actually, it is form that un-renders us
now: my back against your back.

…

Is love really a mountain

that just stops? When I say, why aren’t you weeping
I mean, weep with me. We need an affectionate form,
we need a home various

with love. This is experimental. Everything is sad
but I cannot describe the sad. I can only describe
the outside of sadness

            (“Love in the Time of Formlessness (or Form in the Time of Lovelessness)”)

This poem points to the need for poetry, even as language fails, in an almost ars poetica kind of way. Humanity craves forms to categorize and define their feelings, but nothing quite captures them. Grey’s speaker knows this. After all, language will not make us beautiful—but art and poetry can move us and describe experience, making the personal universal and vice versa.

            Why does this matter, especially if language equals failure and failure is the end? Grey has an answer. Her speaker bookends the collection in another long poem, this time titled “Reason,” and stretches various responses from page to page. Ultimately, language matters, poetry matters, this collection matters because there is so much pleasure and pain in life, and we need to describe it, we need to see the romance of the present moment to emphasize its existence, even at the risk of failure. Why does this matter?

Because in German world is Welt.

…

Because the law says everything is in conflict.

…

Because objects were empty and infinity, robust.

…

Because we couldn’t leave.

Because we whispered Welt, Welt.

Because arranging the future is violence.

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

Intellectualization (An Excerpt from A Mother is an Intellectual Thing)

In Support of the Purdue MFA and Sycamore Review

At Purdue University, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts has withdrawn funding completely for all graduate student admissions to the Department of English for the next academic year. This moratorium on graduate student admissions, as well as the Dean’s plans to severely reduce admissions in following years, threatens the existence of the MFA program in creative writing and Purdue’s student-run literary journal, Sycamore Review.

What Purdue’s administration doesn’t seem to understand is the immense value of MFA students, not only on-campus (as instructors, editors, mentors, tutors) but off-campus, nationally and internationally, as poets and fiction writers who contribute to their fields in ways made possible by the mentorship of the MFA.

When my fellow editors John A. Nieves and Caroline Chavatel and I released our first issue of The Shore in March of 2019, I had applied to several MFA programs (and had not yet received an acceptance.) A few waitlists and offers later, I was on the phone with Professor Donald Platt, creative writing faculty at Purdue. It was several talks over the phone with Don, now my MFA thesis advisor, it was his persistence and attention and lengthy descriptions of the Celery Bog near campus, that made me feel like Purdue could be home without ever having traveled to the Midwest.

Purdue is home to creative writing faculty who are incomparable in their fields.

Professor Kaveh Akbar describes the MFA program as his “education,” stating, “I’ve been faculty here for nearly a half-decade, and each student who has passed through my classroom has expanded for me the aesthetic and moral possibilities of our field.”

Purdue is home to my program-mates whose creative work, intellect and compassion continue to astound me.

Just these past couple months in the program, I listened to Paul Riker read one of his short stories, forthcoming in Salt Hill, while creative writing students and faculty raised money for our local foodbank; I read a poem written by Aiya Sakr published in Palette Poetry that I had first read and admired in workshop; I attended Zoom readings that featured Purdue MFA alumni who have gone on to publish award-winning books; I deliberated with my poetry co-editors at Sycamore Review to accept the highest caliber of work from emerging voices.

The actions of the Dean not only threaten the existence of an incredibly successful program but the existence of a vibrant and diverse community.

Kaveh describes this community as such: “The sincere rigor, curiosity, and collective spirt upon which this program has been built are rare in the literary world. It’s an oasis, a miracle. It should be celebrated, cherished, exalted. Our program is the exact antithesis of the malignant machinations of bureaucrats whose confusion at the sight of real beauty and community provokes them to threaten it.”

The Purdue MFA community extends beyond our program and into the lives of the undergraduate students that MFA candidates teach every semester.

Creative writing courses teach students how to question and pay close attention to the world around them. The Dean is misguided to believe English and creative writing instruction aren’t essential to students at large. Attention to the intricacies and possibilities of written language is useful to us all.

Creative writing graduate and undergraduate students understand what Purdue’s administration fails to: the exciting possibilities that occur when both the arts and sciences are respected and allowed to flourish.

A recent poem I wrote, forthcoming in Salt Hill, was inspired by reading a Purdue email about an engineering professor who invented an ultra-white paint that can cool surfaces below air temperature, leading to my meditation on what it means to live in the current climate crisis.

Undergraduate student Isabella Escamilla, who has poems published or forthcoming in esteemed national journals like Passages North, Adroit Journal, PANK Magazine and others, studies crop and soil management AND poetry at Purdue.

The College of Liberal Arts is doing a severe disservice to its students by defunding English graduate programs and Sycamore Review. A decision, that if allowed, Purdue will pay for with a lessening of innovative thought, communication skills, community and conscientiousness on campus.

As a fellow literary journal, The Shore stands with Sycamore Review and the Purdue MFA. We hope you will too. Please send an email to the administration. Retweet. Sign and share the program’s petition. Talk to your friends and colleagues. We won’t get another chance to be loud enough.

With love,
-Emma with the support of the Shore Crew

As direct evidence of the program’s excellence, please enjoy the incredible work of Purdue Creative Writing faculty and students past and present published in The Shore:

Donald Platt
XV. Album of Figure Studies
XVI. Male Model Resting
XVIII. Figure and Pool

Emily Rosko
First Lesson
Shard & Smoke

Jennifer Loyd
Rachel Carson: Juvenalia
Rachel Carson: Genealogy
Rachel Carson Leaves Springdale, PA for The Sea
Some Mothers Are As Lighthouse to Ship
The Shore Interview #16: Jennifer Loyd

JK Anowe
An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward
A Road’s Guide to Kill

Katie McMorris
Allowing Your House Ghosts to Steal Your Loafers
cannibal ant from special object 3003

Kelsey Carmody Wort
Our Three-Quarters Phase
I Watch My Girlfriend Put Poetry Under Her Microscope
O
Gemini Drunkenly Scrolling through Her Twitter Feed in the Bar Bathroom
The Shore Interview #17: Kelsey Carmody Wort

Lauren Mallett
Porfa

Review: Kelly R. Samuels

On All the Time in the World by Kelly R. Samuels

by Tyler Truman Julian 

Kelly R. Samuels’ All the Time in the World is a collection that explores cause and effect. For every here, in Samuels’ poems, there is a there. Everything global has a personal connection. Each effect has a cause. It is in these clearly defined connections that Kelly R. Samuels reveals, in striking poems that elevate the mundane to a mythic level, that humanity does not, in fact, have all the time in the world when it comes to responding to climate change.

The poems of All the Time in the World track a speaker who knows she is inextricably connected to the changes happening around her in real time. This speaker is a type of at-home sleuth, uncovering these connections, moving beyond conspiracy to point out how all the threads tacked to her wall converge. In “Geographical Changes,” the speaker highlights the sprawl of it all, putting the pieces together, and declares,

            Fragments make more sense, both visible and not.

                        What has been found—fragments of yet another—

maybe meaning we are more than, that if we delve
            we may learn something.

Is there another wall, where I could draw the timeline, see
what I need to see?

I’ll take down some of the art that matters
to me—that painting
there, or that one.
                                    Though I’m growing weary
of understanding, of holding this knowledge in my head.

Samuels’ speaker carries a lot of weight on her shoulders, and the poet carefully unloads it piece by piece. The poems are jagged and fragmented, like the drowning islands and cracking ice shelves they describe, but they come together to create a compelling whole, a narrative tied together by the timeline of the speaker, the individual in our fraught ecological moment.

Samuels clearly sees how the individual is impacted by the global. She writes,

            Flotsam and what sinks.

                                                Bits
            and pieces.      Dregs.
            The dregs of this brew,
            this day,
            these hours.
                                                            Toss the cap

            there.
                        Throw the bottle elsewhere.   

…

            All the lines are now plastic, hauled up
            and photographed. Catalogued
            as evidence of what is borne on currents,
            carried and bobbing—                                                caught
            in the throat. 

            As girls, we slid the plastic
tabs on our ring fingers and said, Darling,
how lovely.

                                                                                    (“Plastic Debris, Borne”)

Environmental degradation is personal in these poems. The speaker is perpetrator as well as victim. She is each one of us. That is the heavy “knowledge” she carries and works out frantically on the walls of her home. “Or so it seems to me,” she reports, in “Here’s Now, Alteration.” And still, life goes on. It’s a troubling existence, but one Samuels knows humanity must reckon with, even if it feels “as if there is no use / in knocking at the closed door, asking for reassurance” (“Here’s Now, Alteration”).

In All the Time in the World, Kelly R. Samuels has written a prescient and timely poetry, elegiac, odic, and lyrical. Samuels’ poems capture the human condition and describe the world around us, changing and confusing as it is. This is an important collection for now. It’ll be an important collection later. It’s a collection for here and for there. Everyone should read All the Time in the World.

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

Wool as Gatherer, or Seven Years

Talking of a Kind

Pushcart Nominations 2021!!

We are proud to announce our 2021 Pushcart Nominations!

Chris Cocca “The Effects of Ground-Level Ozone on the Ecology of Pennsylvania Highways”

Jessica Poli “To My Second Lover”

Paige Sullivan “Crystal Palace”

Kyle Vaughn “Memory of September” FORTHCOMING 12/21 in ISSUE 12!

Julia Watson “The Playlist Reaches At the Bottom of Everything”

Shannon K. Winston “Mustard Seed” FORTHCOMING 12/21 in ISSUE 12!

Congratulations and thank you all for sending us this vital work that makes our little journal go!

With Our Deepest Admiration,

The Shore Crew

In the Current with Renae Tucker Issue Four

Dear reader,

In the winter of 2019, The Shore released its fourth issue.

This issue was composed of old and not-yet-haunted grounds. Of ghost stories and doors opening onto other doors. Of shadows and all the things we could not know.

Contributors filled issue 4 with the best kind of poems--the tangled and gnarled, the ones that refuse to save face.

Here’s what these amazing writers have been up to since then:

Jen Schalliol Huang had poems published in Compressed Journal of Creative Arts, Flock, McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, Shenandoah and Sou’wester.

Elizabeth Bradfield Had poems in The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic and Quarterly West.

Precious Okpechi had a poem taken by Pallette Poetry.

Bob Hicok had a poem published in The New Yorker.

Emily Rosko Had poems published in Tupelo Quarterly.

Simon Perchik had a poem taken by Guernica.

Andres Rojas published his book of poems, Third Winter in Our Second Country--congratulations, Andres! He also had poems taken by Ice Floe Press, Diode, First Things, The Banyan Review and Psaltery and Lyre.

Martha Silano published widely in magazines like SWWIM, On the Seawall, Eco Theo Collective, Atticus Review, Vox Populi, Rappahannock Review, TAB, Bracken, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Cincinnati Review/Verse Daily, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Westchester Review, The Fourth River, The West Review, Plume and West Trestle Review.

Kathryn V. Jacopi published in The Awakenings Review, Whimsical Poet and Sky Island Journal.

Sarah Uheida has been widely published in magazines like Eunoia Review, fresh.ink., Plume, the South African, Sonder Midwest, Stone Thursday, Everyday Fiction, Wend, Flock and Atlanta Review. She was also the recipient of the 2020 Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets-- congrats, Sarah!

Taylor Schaefer had an essay taken by Runestone, poems published in Hawai’i Pacific Review, Santa Clara Review and The Pinch. She was also a semi-finalist for the Spring 2021 Black River Chapbook Competition--Congrats, Taylor! She is now the Interview Editor for The Shore!

Michael Hettich published a book of poetry, The Mica Mine--congratulations, Michael!

Kathleen Hellen has published widely in West Trestle Review, Okay Donkey, Bracken, Josephine Quarterly, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Book of Matches, Not Very Quiet and Superstition Review.

Bridget Tevnan had a poem taken by The Bushfire Literature & Arts Journal.

Jeremy Rock has had work published in Ninth Letter, Waccamaw, Cider Press Review, Sugar House Review, Beaver Magazine and Bear Review.

Derek Annis was interviewed in Art Chowder.

Catherine Weiss has had poems published in perhappened, counterclock, Flypaper Lit, Hobart After Dark, Birdcoat Quarterly, Fugue, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Okay Donkey and Freezeray.

Ronda Piszk Broatch had poems taken by Whale Road Review, The Missouri Review, Indolent Books,  Juxtaprose and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

Mariah Bosch had poems published in Superstition Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy Magazine, ctrl+v journal and Hobart. She also won CSU Fresno’s 2020 Ernesto Trejo Memorial Prize--congrats, Mariah!

Joanna Gordon had a poem published in Nimrod International Journal.

Carolyn Oliver published widely in both poetry and prose. Her work can be found in Plume, Dialogist, River Mouth Review, Ninth Letter Online, Shenandoah, Phoebe, Porter House Review, The Hopper and Letters among others.

Bill Burtis published a book of poetry titled Liminal--congrats, Bill!

James Owens published a book titled Family Portrait with Scythe: Poems--congratulations, James!

Suzanne Frischkorn had poems taken by Terrain, SWWIM, Pine Hills Review, [PANK], The Night Heron Barks, Ms. Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Juked, House Mountain Review, Ecotone and Diode.

James Miller had poems taken by Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Bone Parade, Sweet Tree Review, Soft Blow and Phoebe. He also won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020--congrats, James!

Carly Madison Taylor had poems published in Ghost City Press, Crepe & Penn Literary Magazine, Boston Accent Lit, Ghost City Review, Stone of Madness, perhappened, 3 Moon Magazine and Delicate Friend Lit.

Mehves Lelic is a photography MFA student at Bard College. You can see more of her art on her website.

We’re so excited to see what these amazing artists do next! Stay tuned for when we catch up with contributors of Issue 5.

Happy writing,
Renae

Review: Jack B. Bedell

On Jack B. Bedell’s Color All Maps New

by Tyler Truman Julian 

Color All Maps New, Jack B. Bedell’s sixteenth poetry collection (an impressive feat in and of itself), is the remarkable work of an artist sure of his craft. Bedell’s poems sit easily in the intersections of place and memory, narrative and description, humanity and ecology, moving just as easily between personal, regional, and universal lenses. With an incisive and reflective voice, reminiscent of Mary Oliver, Bedell has developed a collection that captures his home state, Louisiana, in its present moment, shining a hopeful (and always believable) light on the landscape, even as it shifts before his eyes.

            Hurricane Ida made landfall at the areas described in Color All Maps New in late August 2021. Revisiting these poems post-Ida brings new meaning to many of the lines throughout the collection, emphasizing those tied to climate change, environmental degradation, and importantly, sustainability. In a poem in which Bedell’s speaker describes the draining of a lake for oil extraction, the onlookers seem surprised to find that a rainstorm would bring the water back:

            Silt bottom dried slowly,
stared at the sky like a blank face, 

until one night after a rain
the water came back.

Pine trees swayed in the breeze
coming off Lake Peigneur. Shore birds
swam in patterns between stumps.

  First morning light brought
the gift of fog settling
above the tusks of mastodons,

reminders this place will be,
whether or not we are.

(“Jefferson Island, 1980”)

This collection, like Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, is a tracker of the social impact of environmental change. As Bedell points to this change, the impact, he also points to how change, in general, is inevitable, and how it causes movement and growth. Even as waves cause erosion, “will color all maps new,” as Bedell writes, the “[s]ilence in their loss / rises from the water as psalm” (“Nuage,” “Exhumation”). There is destruction here, but there is also renewal. Honesty tempers the hope in these poems and makes it palatable.

            The inevitability of change extends beyond environment in Color All Maps New, and it is in this pattern of change that Bedell looks at themes of family and community. In “Gulf, Waves,” Bedell’s speaker describes his daughter writing names in the beach sand. He explains,

            She wants to spell out the names
            of all the people she loves,

            but the closer the water gets,
            the more she knows

            she’ll have to edit her list
            on the fly, leave some names

            behind in the air to beat the tide,
            its hunger boundless, and time.

In this collection, Bedell is a mature writer, sharing reflections on life and death and time. Time does not stop, an idea reinforced throughout these poems and mirrored by the ever-cresting waves that bring both disaster and joy. This duality is something that many people in harsh landscapes love and struggle with in the places they call home. It is Bedell’s experience and clear-eyed wisdom that can walk us effortlessly to poems like “Communal,” which tells us that “togetherness, time, and a little help / will fill our bowls to overflowing,” and make us believe.

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

Serpents and Insects, 1647

Cardinal