Author: Scott LaClaire

Transcript of My Mother’s Sleeptalk: Chincoteague [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner]

By Hannah Perrin King
From the Winter 2020 Issue

Was not a one-trick pony. 
Was the trick of many ponies.
Was the trick of swimming 
The ponies from the island 
To the mainland. So as not 
To burden the island, said 
The saltwater cowboys whose
Trick it was …

Hannah Perrin King

Hannah Perrin King, whose poem in this issue won The Georgia Review’s 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, was also named the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Eleventh Annual Poetry Contest and received AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry and New Millennium Writings’ 48th New Millennium Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, North American Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and Best New Poets, among others. She was a finalist for The Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize and her first manuscript is a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She currently lives in northern California. 

on Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante 

By Sandra Simonds
From the Fall 2020 Issue

Who should tell the stories of people suffering under repressive political regimes such as the United States today? This may be one of the most fiercely debated questions of twenty-first-century literature. Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante’s newest book, which …

Sandra Simonds

Sandra Simonds is an award-winning poet and critic. She is the author of seven books of poetry: Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019); Orlando (Wave Books, 2018); Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press; Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015); The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014); Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012); and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems and criticism have been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the 2014 and 2015 Best American Poetry collections and have appeared in many other literary journals.

on My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

By Julie R. Enszer
From the Fall 2020 Issue

In her ground-breaking, best-selling book Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), feminist Carolyn G. Heilbrun describes four ways to write a woman’s life: autobiography, fiction, biography, and an unnamed way in which “the woman may write her own life in …

Julie R. Enszer

Julie R. Enszer is a scholar and a poet who holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in women’s studies from the University of Maryland. She is the author of four poetry collections, Avowed (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), Lilith’s Demons (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2015), Sisterhood (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013), and Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2010). She is editor of several books published by A Midsummer Night’s Press, the latest of which is Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker (2018). Enszer edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal.

on Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016 by John Koethe

By Kevin Clark
From the Fall 2020 Issue

Throughout his life’s work, John Koethe has elegized a romantic sense of meaning, that is, an illusory if highly desirous union with the larger universe. As we see throughout Walking Backwards, a collection spanning fifty years, his poems often …

Kevin Clark

Kevin Clark’s several books of poems include the forthcoming The Consecrations (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021). His first collection, In the Evening of No Warning (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2002), earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets, and his second, Self-Portrait with Expletives (2010), won the Pleiades Press prize. His poetry appears in the Southern Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, and Crazyhorse. A regular critic for The Georgia Review, he’s also published essays in the Southern Review, Papers on Language and Literature, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. He teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop. 

Phenomenal Listening: The Art of Jason Moran

By Radiclani Clytus
From the Fall 2020 Issue

Then Creole stepped forward [on the bass] to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. . . . He began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He …

Radiclani Clytus works at the intersection of new media and nineteenth-century American literature and visual culture.

Picture the Dream: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Children’s Books, 15 August–8 November 2020, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta (featuring an interview with Andrea Davis Pinkney)

By C. J. Bartunek
From the Fall 2020 Issue

15 August–8 November 2020, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta

INTRODUCTION

Since spring, the coronavirus pandemic has forced art museums and galleries across the country to halt their programming, and while many have reopened, many would-be patrons remain unable to …

C. J. Bartunek received her PhD in English from the University of Georgia and her BA from the University of Southern California. Her writing has appeared in The Smart Set, Pacific Standard, The Big Roundtable, and elsewhere. 

Each of Us Chimera

By Tobias Wray
From the Fall 2020 Issue

Soon after he came home to Arkansas,
mother’s cousin Larry became a stone on a hill.
She tells of the monkey leashed

and taught to ride his shoulder
as he walked the couple blocks to Main
when they were young, …

Tobias Wray

Tobias Wray’s debut poetry collection, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man (Cleveland State University Press, 2021), was selected by Randall Mann for the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. His work has found homes in various literary journals, including Blackbird, Bellingham Review, Meridian, Third Coast, and Hunger Mountain. Some poems also appear in the forthcoming The Queer Nature Anthology (Autumn House Press, 2021) and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures (Seagull Books, 2021). He directs the creative writing programs at the University of Idaho on the Palouse, where he lives with his hiking partner, Andy.

Chorus of Raids at Night; Chorus of Battles at Dawn; Chorus of Peace at Dusk; Chorus of Shame at Midnight; & To-Do List Theater Nurse

By Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
From the Fall 2020 Issue
…

Stacy Nathaniel Jackson was born in Los Angeles and attended Ramona Convent College Preparatory School for Girls in a former incarnation of his life. He is a Cave Canem fellow and received an individual artist’s grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2011. Author of the chapbook Camouflage (MaCaHu Press, 2010), he has published poems, plays, and visual art in Black Arts Quarterly, Lodestar Quarterly, Enizagam, Poets 11 Anthology, New American Writing 25, and elsewhere.

It’s Like This I Told the Archangel; Fabulous Outrageous Termite Mounds; & Trees Line the Road Into

By Marianne Boruch
From the Fall 2020 Issue

 

It’s        Like This     I Told the Archangel

                                                                     who can’t swim—

crazy     crowded     under great waters

two hours from shore and so misleading   dull vast gray    not even blue if you 

look from the boat   a great nothing really      except …

Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch’s ten poetry collections include the recent title The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Australia last year at the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute, observing the astonishing wildlife to write a book-length sequence, a neo-ancient/medieval bestiary, which is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. The poems in this issue are a part of that collection.