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Editors’ Notes (Posit 40)

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Welcome to Posit 40!

The literary and visual art in this issue shines a rich variety of “lamps of truth” (Brenda Coultas, “Untitled I”) on these dark and dangerous times. These works share the courage and ambition to tackle the deepest, most fundamental quandaries of “this glittery self-contained life” (Mia Malhotra, “Wave Organ II”) in which “it takes a lifetime to be born” (Ma Yongbo, “Sleeping on the Street”). Time, death, love, and loss loom large in this issue, set against a background in which “somewhere, lovers wait[] for bombs to explode in their rooms” (Emily Kingery, “Home Front”) while “the man in the blue suit pays his own audience in luxury flights, flattery, and fast-tracked passage through loopholes paved with false intentions, his wheezing laugh lingering long after the last plant is plucked and the last polar bear blasted through its hot skull” (Oz Hardwick, “Hustings in the Age of Uncertainty”). “Saying anything and everything” about how “we fall upon the thorns of life, we / bleed” (Joseph Lease, “Wake”), the literary and visual art gathered here manages to find transcendence — assuring us, in various and stunning ways, that despite everything, “the light keeps coming over the mountain” (Bryan Price, “Light Coming Over the Mountain”).

In Marine Bellen’s poems featured here, language itself is set free to dream. Spectacularly in tune with language as a natural force, Bellen allows words to flow idiosyncratically into form and meaning as water creates its own stream bed. In “Petrifying Jack Things,” we are invited to wade into the dream of a single word, “Our goose flesh bumps into Night’s knife, the heat of Night, the seat in Night’s sleigh. Shredded Wheat Night, watery milk we wade in to travel though Night and the Milky Way.” In the sonically exciting “Mountain,” the “never static mountain” does just about all and everything to remake the world “as first echoes of walking mountain unmoors the morning.” Both the actual mountain in the landscape, “mountain as earth’s primal tree,” and the sound net Bellen magically weaves of the word mountain “bellow[s] into a hallowed abyss of emptiness.” Bellen’s take on a family narrative, “The Older One Becomes, the More Out of Order Time Comes to Be,” sidesteps storytelling’s so-called realism to revel in its intrinsic surreality as we follow the poet’s sonic breadcrumb trails until “The family says it has run out of lines, the narrative thread / snipped. The family says it doesn’t know what happens next. They know // what will happen but cannot say without lines, and then the apparition of father manifests at the foot of mother’s bed.”

The focused attention of these chiseled lyrics by Brenda Coultas is energized by their understated discipline. These superbly lean, densely packed poems can be read as ars poeticas, mining the resonance embedded in fragments of ordinary life, such as holiday stockings sniffed by old dogs, and “clouds basketballs traffic cones cows,” to contemplate the utility and imperatives of poetry. Through stanzas like “ornaments / glistening / in the light,” these oracular poems highlight the provocative distinction between truth and reason. What’s more, they enact what they exhort: their “lamps of truth” “let the sky have it” even as they “pull away from reason.” As graceful and sober as the Dutch masters’ Vanitas paintings they invoke, these poems both rue and honor the fragile ephemerality of life and art, akin to the “silken parachute” of “the seed’s soft down.”

We’re not surprised when a sonnet takes the famous “turn” we all learned about in school, but we are riveted to the page when John Gallaher’s vastly pleasurable sonnets start out turning and never stop. Gallaher has fashioned double sonnets that are dizzy with turns, all made, one after the other, with odd, lovely, and humorous conviction. Instead of expanding upon lines of amazing, yet logical-seeming premises, such as “Life, like any fancy dinner, started with soup,” we are given a new idea, contradiction, or unrelated image in the following lines. “Forgive me for jumping around,” says the poet, and we do. Directly after the poem opens with life’s soupy origin story come the lines “And then an inflatable backyard night club/and terracotta army.” In another poem Gallaher proposes, “You’re a goldfish watching a feather. Maybe it’s ash. / You have a concept of ground and sea coming to a point.” Yet, in these sonnets Gallaher refuses to follow landscape’s prerogative and come to a fixed point. If you like your sonnets with rhymes, they are here, too, but you may have to look for them. As Gallaher says, “What gets you here won’t get you there, /unless it does, as things are both complicated/and redundant.”

With sharp and insightful wit, Oz Hardwick uncovers the present of our world deep in the ruins of ancient and recent history. Both warning and reminding us what our failings may lead to, Hardwick captures the shallowness of our political life: its banality, dishonesty, and even danger, as the mindless followers of future generations march on: “A man in a blue suit speaks in a whisper but carries a megaphone, tunes his preparatory breaths to the pitch of air raid sirens” as he “summon(s) the two-faced faithful to free lunches.” In the face of our present dangers, the poet cautions, “we are falling . . . into the machinery like nameless sweatshop drones.” Not only are we falling into the machinery, but the machinations as well; we think we are using the technology, but we are the ones being used. Our knowledge is incomplete (“two wings don’t make a plane”), and our labor serves only to build mansions that won’t last as we “walk with backs bent through a stately pile falling down.” In an imagined scientific study of snails, Hardwick wittily leaves open the question of whether our endeavors will yield any valuable insight into our future: “We send out scouts in the cool of morning to scour chewed stalks for our new Rosetta stone. . . . We know in our bones that this is important, but we don’t quite yet know why.”

Dennis Hinrichsen’s poignant new poems stitch together and unify the damage and suffering afflicting our world on every scale: from fireflies to synaptic sparks, clouds to turbines, rain to fallout, Whitman’s “thin red jellies” to chemotherapy, and tumors to radioactive waste. With these verses, he constructs a bleak and exquisite multi-part elegy for human and planetary destruction. Courageously and thoughtfully exploring what dementia has taken from a barely recognizable father and his son, up to and including either’s chance to grieve, and what our absorption in our present needs has taken from our earth and bodies, these poems confront the “collateral damage :: feelings” of the wreckage inflicted by our “lifestyle loaded to the edges // even now / with future.” In a climax of despair and transcendence, the narrator even voices the desire to lose himself in the anonymous fabric of the universe: “to ride the overwhelm / and let // quantum purring ingest / this better // Eucharist :: body / and blood // of me.”

In David Hornung’s loose but constructed compositions, akin in some respects to Paul Klee’s whimsical works, playfulness and a certain logic combine with subtle and striking colors. Hornung’s colors, indeed, have the nuance of dreams, where we know what we are seeing is unworldly: a mauve bird-shape, a blue-green reminiscent of darkness, but no darkness has that shade. The elements in the paintings partake of the same sensibility: the geometries and the subtly-edged patches of color, the shapes that almost resemble identifiable objects, as well as the shapes that definitely don’t. Hornung’s process is also intuitive, but with purpose. The artist says that he has to kill the “lovely thing so the unexpected can come into view.” The charm of the work is in that challenge; each stroke, area, or color is unexpected, and no two works are recognizably painted in the same style, although the unity of the work is like a poem spoken in another language, alive and transporting, if not completely understood.

The high-key colors and swirling forms animating Sharon Horvath’s extraordinary collages contribute to their dynamic complexity. Psychedelic and hyperreal, her vertiginous assemblages are studded with primal, collectively remembered iconography that integrates the real and the imagined, the physical and the psychological. Each opulent composition is not only a visual feast but a psychological treasure map, populated with an abundance of resonant references: fish bones and antlers, totems and mandalas, feathers and fronds, light rays and flames, amoebas and nuclei, and especially planets and galaxies, with the infinite mysteries they represent. Glowing and jewel-like, pulsing with energy and movement, these lush cornucopias of grand and tiny marvels teem with sparkling, sparking bits of light and energy. Horvath’s is a heartening, optimistic vision of a reality — an amalgam of our physical and psychic landscapes — that is overflowing with sensory delights, if only we can open our minds to perceive them.

Emily Kingery conjures the real nature of home and family, considering the subtle interplay of people and place against a larger social context. In “Homefront,” Kingery’s powerful imagery hints at fissures and ruptures at a wedding of friends. There is violence in the wings as well as beyond the borders: “God bless, our relatives crooned through the cake. They drove their forks like tanks through the roses,” as “we sucked in champagne like helium, and somewhere, lovers waited for bombs to explode in their rooms.” Indeed, Kingery’s double-sided impressions of domestic life begin early: “I was a daughter fond of families, unbodied. I would dunk my hands in paint and smear the legs and arms right from the heads. No stomachs, lungs – just heads.” In “The Shelly Disciples,” girlhood memories alternate with glimpses into another kind of freedom. “I stood at the arm of my grandfather’s lawn chair. . . . I breathed in beer, prettiness; I studied the float of ash in a half-drunk lemonade.” In the narrator’s observations, we see the flicker of creation in the disciples’ own club, created for survival. We feel a kinship with their secrets and their unbinding, even when it is infused with violence: “The Shelley disciples speak, unbound. We brutalize. Our pens turn blades in the knife games they play in dive-bar light.” In “A Made Place, That is Mine,” Kingery again makes the connection between freedom and violence as it extends even to the closest personal relationships, and makes clear the aching role love often plays in both: “For years, your threaded bird-heads have hung starry in the hall. At night, I run a finger in my mind across their backs. I make for them a thicket, and beyond that place, a field. It is featureless as an egg. I raise a shovel to it and break.”

Joseph Lease’s “Wake” takes on the varied meanings of its title: a wake for the dead, a desired reunion with the loved one, the longing to follow in their wake, and waking to a new reality when we realize that person is gone for good. The poem shifts between speakers in both the remembered words of the dead and the responses of the survivor, urgent to be understood: “daydreams in hand,” although “there’s less now, just, there are . . . fewer useable minutes.” The artifacts and memories left behind shimmer with meaning: “he just doubled down and tripled / down on knowing the names of flowers / he seemed to come out of nowhere / filling the page with light, the page / as slab of light.” The poet asks bedrock questions, like “how can / you leave me, how could you die,” before turning to comforting the dead: “read this and imagine me: in Berkeley / in Chicago, drinking tea, eating apples / walking slowly in the blustery day, the / day . . . full of talking animals.” In “Buried Life,” Lease continues the theme of death, but on an existential scale, with the questions that come to us in the face of danger or other moments of fear and despair, when “(we’re / waiting to / die (we’re / waiting to / pray (God / the rabbit / afraid.” How easily it can all disappear: our flimsy buildings, the forests full of trees and animals. The poet asks the questions whose answers we are afraid to confront as the sensations of present and future meld: “(are / we / extinct? / (colors burn / like garbage / on fire,” while the spacing in the poem brilliantly evokes the fragmentations of mind, and perhaps the rush and flash of fire at the world’s end.

In Ma Yongbo’s lyrical, melancholy English-language poems, modernity and tradition seamlessly coexist. Although situated in the modern world, these poems’ reliance on traditional imagery and symbolism reveals the relevance of historical culture to the timeless philosophical concerns these poems address: matters no less weighty than change, time, and death. Like the placid surface of a lake, the ostensibly simple events populating Ma’s verses cover depths of submerged resonance. “Night Stay by Gongchen Bridge” considers events on a canal in imagery both ancient (dowries, lanterns, poetry scrolls, and swords) and modern (white plastic boxes), making the case for the wisdom of acceptance in the face of the inexorable passage of time: “Don’t regret, just turn off the lights, / this is your night, this is the world’s way.” Acceptance is an aspiration in the other two poems as well. Although “it takes a lifetime to be born,” and we may dread being “engulfed by endless darkness,” Ma’s poems reveal the beauty of that eradication. In lyrical verses, the snow, like death itself, can ease life’s tension by erasing the self, transforming us “beyond the ancient struggle between being and nothingness” until we are “relaxed and nameless.”

Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s poems featured here are remarkable for their intimacy. The reader is drawn close not by way of personal revelation, but by an openness to possibility and suggestion, to uncertainty and imaginative collaboration. Malhotra’s syntax in “If With You” is of anaphora and incompletion, of thought being interrupted before it is fully expressed — “If we made our way     past lichens & bearded moss;” “If I followed you     to where the trees thin;” “If I lay myself among the bracken fern.” When the concluding “then clause” never arrives, we recognize a modality of wonder — “if we pause to listen — sound poured.” The radical openness of Malhotra’s lyricism is expressed formally in “Wave Organ II” and “V.” Here the initial blocks of text reopen into fragmentary, impressionist collage. We join the poet in the middle of an ongoing speculation of what “might” be, but which, despite vivid description, ultimately resides in the tender realm of imaginative proposal — “she might feel her own frequency slow to a steady whoosh &     the little one sensing this shift / might draw nearer     & they might find themselves entering into phase all around them.”

A sense of wonder is both elicited and expressed by the ethereal beauty of Shari Mendelson’s delicate, glowing sculptures crafted from discarded plastic bottles. Mendelson has spoken of her admiration for the craftsmanship of her artist forbears, and her own virtuosity makes her a worthy heir. The reverence of these delicately beautiful works recalls not only their ancient devotional inspirations but art’s stunning capacity to fashion sublimity from scraps. Mendelson’s re-imagined votive sculptures are also boundary-defying, bridging the gaps between cultures and faiths, eras and species, through their representations of animal-human as well as animal-vessel hybrids, and even a reimagined, literal “lamb of god” in the arms of a human-ewe Madonna. By painstakingly using detritus to reference ancient artifacts that have managed to outlive the civilizations that created them, Mendelson comments upon our apparent indifference to our own future. These works push back against a culture of disposability that is part and parcel of our insatiable appetite for the new, and which increasingly threatens our own survival.

At their tender, plain-spoken core, these new poems by Stephen Paul Miller are devotional. Imbued with his customary wry but gentle optimism, the open-hearted candor of their wide-ranging appreciation is part and parcel of the radical/ecstatic acceptance they model. Most if not all of these poems are anchored by the transcendent nature of the moments they capture: as the walls of paradise are lifted by the arrival of poet and friend David Shapiro; as, in a vision, the narrator’s deceased “Angel Boss” mother orders him “around your [god’s] / sonnet factory;” as the speaker is transformed “heart in hand over a new aura” (and new era) by holding the “Living Force Field” of his beloved’s hand; and as the speaker becomes one with everything and time itself recedes: “when I / become the cliff I hover over / and time goes out with the /tide.” The candor and open-heartedness of Miller’s ecstasy underscores the depth of its conviction. These are love poems in the most universal sense, whose breadth of affection is as irresistible as it is restorative.

Finely attuned to the strobing presences of light and darkness in our lives, Bryan Price’s poems are searing and beautiful depictions of human vulnerability and violence amid nature’s troubled yet inspired and inspiring persistence. Images of light and dark seesaw ecstatically through these poems accreting to a spare, mythological intensity — “and when/he gave us his teeth we sharpened them on / a landmine the shape and color of a new moon.” Price’s light and dark world is pierced by the poet’s recognition of the limits of art-marking and of our desire for transcendence — “one cannot wear black theoretical tightrope-walker’s shoes and just walk into the distance between hazel and hazelnut” — but also by a sustaining, flickering hope because “a lilac a little finger a grain of sand / dust into dust but the light / keeps coming over the mountain.”

Gary Sloboda’s city is a gift of transcription, perfectly depicted images translated into the transcendental. In this poet’s view, our lives are both fragile and decorative; we seem almost another species. we live in the shadow of “tall buildings’ windows once dazed by the river. . . . of pressed wood and carpenter’s glue. glitter paint job in the moonlight.” We’re imperfect: “we stumble with our bags. as the last days’ dark melodies unwind from passing cars. in the salt pinch of the waves that corrodes the metal railings. along the walls of rock where the ocean begins. and goes on forever,” unlike our impermanence. But how human we are, how alive and how aware: “hollering on the street like it’s the end of the world. and on the walkway of the bridge. how the form of our breath ascended. like the ghosts of pigeons. floating through the city. and the stars fetchingly arranged.” This hollering, the ascending form of our breath, blossoms into a kind of freedom, an exhilaration, and possibly a deep empathy with the stars. Or maybe, we’re irrevocably earthbound, interpreting our lives as best we can, “our belongings piled everywhere. as if we’re about to or will never leave.”

We’re immensely grateful for your time and attention. Please take care of each another.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 39)

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Welcome to Posit 39! And don’t forget the turn.

Because if this issue of Posit had a slogan, that might be it. Although these works offer our usual range of styles and forms and unconventional echoes of styles and forms — including fresh new iterations of the sonnet — all of them, both literary and visual, are united by the turn.

The works gathered here may “forc[e] us to see what was concealed from thought” — including, but not limited to, the current reality of “book banning followed by sweeps” (MK Francisco, “Narrative”) — but their dark trajectories are destabilized by dazzles of light as “bright as a bullet // stuck in a black cloak” (Julie Hanson, “The Span of a Driveway”). And it’s the energy, insight, and ingenuity of these turns that ultimately transforms and transcends what “the overwhelming presence // of all this nowness” (Daniel Biegelson, “from Tekiah Gedolah”) might otherwise suggest.

Plus, by “allowing / how / rupture / is / luck” (Randy Prunty, “At the Level of Story Sonnet”) and “stepping back going forward” (Denise Newman, “Who is Anyone”), we believe they can help. Help us see and feel more deeply. Help us confront where we are in these drastic and alarming times. And help us imagine going forward.

Joan Baranow writes into the reality of a serious illness, observing with precise and humorous detail, “The surgeon says tiny incisions / will unstick your tongue / but the robot needs to breathe.” With masterful irony, Baranow recounts repeated trips to the hospital: “The parking’s free but you pay / with phlebotomies. He says, / You want your body back, you mean / the one you walked in with?” Then in a cento as nearly perfect as can be, so gracefully does each line move into the next, beautifully responsive, Baranow’s poetry soars into the realm of the numinous, “consciousness / estranged from the body.” In this lyrical imagining, not bound by illness or necessity, we travel freely: “the sky / pouring itself over and over / though sometimes it is only gauze, unrolling / toward heaven still / . . . and you can imagine the face / all feathered out in clouds, / long thin arms stretched out / fence post to fence post.”

Daniel Biegelson’s dream-script sonnets are a series of profound questions to god. Composed of fragments of the natural and deeply loved world, as well as song lyrics, news, and art, the poet praises the sweetness of the earth in the crow who “names you. Rounded wings lengthening as your body/ slims. Incident light refracted into iridescence.” But the poet also asks, “Is it possible / or righteous / to remain / in a constant state/of praise,” when we see the terrible pain of our world: “look at our children eating fistfuls of grass. Ask. How can you live / with burning trees / burning bodies / smoke in our damaged cells.” Searching for understanding, we “read even the space / between each seed of rain” and wrestle with ourselves: “I believe in many of my own failings. Believe / them inexcusable.” The nature of both god and human remains a question: “Now and still now. Where are you. Are you / the punctum / the spirit / the accident / which ‘pricks’ / and ‘bruises.’” Still, beauty catches us up, ephemeral: “The plum blossoms falling / Of course. Flowing. Downstream on black water . . . Pink petal by white petal,” and perhaps like us, “Latchkeyed to wind.”

In these poems, Charles Borkhuis continues “trying to get another angle / on what it means to be human,” probing the paradox at reality’s heart with just a hint of his signature noir idiom and scientific fluency. Indeed, paradox saturates Borkhuis’s language, overpowering the received ideas on which we too often lean, even though the fact that “the clues are everywhere” is probably “why you can’t see them.” These new works are especially concerned with “the opening and closing / of the unknown with each breath,” the “psychic rhizomes snak[ing] through restless / folds of sleep / where you hide the life / you can’t control in the hollow of a tree.” One notion summarily dispatched by Borkhuis’s powerhouse lines is the singularity of identity – “the celebrated self no more / than a can of holes.” After all, “who hasn’t inhabited another body / while living in this one / who hasn’t wondered where to place the cut / between self and other.” In the midst of this grim dissection of illusion and its discontents, Borkhuis offers dazzling glimpses of love and beauty that transcend our stumbling and suffering — luminous moments when we “inhale the dry breath of a cactus / and exhale a sky-blue river of silk / flowing through a lover’s veins.”

In the manner of dreams, where the lyrical and poetic entwine with stark and fantastic image, Julie Carr manifests a world that is both poignantly surreal and recognizably our own. A chilling scene recalls our current moment: “The manifestation was to be held on the steps of the Capitol where people would demand the end of killing. As the words flew from their mouths like ghosts from out of graves, the killing continued. There is no time, said the people, in which there is no killing. And yet, they said, we oppose the killing.” Seeking a remedy for her (our) personal and collective pain, the narrator in the poem tries to account for her world’s violence. “What are the “ten new things” that signal a violent upheaval as they float out of her open mouth? First the eyes (for crying), then the hands (for touch), there is fruit (red, overripe), a hunk of concrete (the broken) and the salt.” Sometimes incantatory, “as a fish in a tank from wall to wall / as the grackle from one tree to the next/with its yellow eye in its cobalt head,” sometimes strikingly suggestive, Carr’s sensitive use of language depicts our human mystery, and our crimes. But there is reason for hope, although it may be a difficult and dubious task: “a backwards butchery through which/ she might re-stitch / the body of the father, the body of the mother? / Through which she might / re-fill / the well, the well, the well?”

Shou Jie Eng writes of things built and things torn down, things built in spite of. These poems subtly and skillfully borrow the language of architecture and real estate, evoking the body as “a kind of gathering:” “clavicular fossa/into shoulders / fit we / into spaces / folding ourselves / into place.” As well, they consider the earth itself, “terra fossa” as “a kind of ditch,” “surrounded/by an earth/of wants.” The connection between people is also full of want. In suburbia’s “stumps of landscape around a cul de sac,” hopes become frayed: “I nearly forget where it began/for us      for ou-topos / means no place / I remember growing into you / I grew into you / and found / only saplings where trees should be.” And in the strange story of Graz, architects build an experimental monument that pervades the town with poison gas that “sat, pooling, in the Mur,” leaving behind a kind of emptiness just short of despair in which “the people of Graz stayed indoors and wore sweaters, and the architects drifted above in a balloon.”

MK Francisco’s “Narratives” are concise and lyrical, as each separate word is a story, and as memories are stories. These particular stories recount kinds of escape. Escape from political danger, escape from personal constraint. After an eerily similar-to-present-day “book banning followed by sweeps,” the narrator continues to go about the domestic business of family “in a pale-yellow kitchen peeling potatoes with a knife. Lighting your son’s heater with a match before daybreak. Responsible /accountable. A dilemma reflecting / the larger dilemma,” leading to the memory of a secret escape, “Your mother sewed lipstick, photographs and cash into her fox fur stole. Forcing us to see what was concealed from thought.” In a second “Narrative,” the history of the land merges with personal history, each with its expansion and constriction. “A westward expansion drawn to stranger corners. The rotten egg scent of oil fields floating on the Pacific Ocean … Defiance in your jaw, the places that made you.” Francisco’s people, like all of us, are shaped by events and the “places that make us.” We have no answers. Sometimes the only and perhaps sanest thing to do is “call (ed) upon the innocence of trees. Skin-to-bones-to-brain. Curved-to-spiked-to-porous. A visual mantra asking us only to sit and look.”

Shawnan Ge’s poems are emotionally dynamic, bursting with images that double and triple in their meanings to create far-reaching and far-seeing associations. In “Swans in their laurels,” Daphne and Leda (and their God-tormentors) consort with a modern-day mother who “swaddles her china with cloth, bumpy and skin-like the yellow of running yolk,” and her daughter who “neuters her words fruitlessly.” The mother “speaks in dialect” and the daughter learns that “Corpora means Bodies, fields of deadness in her nativity.” How can we not think of the killing fields of war and oppression? How can we not feel the presence of the refugee pressing upon the mythological nymph, the “corporeal” mother, “salt encrusting skin” who must flee for her life and the life of her child: “And still she flees, her feet embalmed in the earth, coursing—.” Ge’s poetic world is one in which even innocuous backyard chives are tormented by loss: “They ripened, keeled over / like a father who fears for his son.” These are poems that “want to know us into being, to show softness, to disgorge gracefully.” The unsettled and beautifully unsettling poems featured here are Ge’s first in print.

It is as if two discrete dances take place at once in Dale Going and Marie Carbone’s text and image collaboration. The dancers — Going (poet) and Carbone (collagist) — may at times gesture toward each other, even lightly touch, but more often they cross paths while remaining in separate pools of light. Yet their shared presence creates “an intensity that seems to bend the atmosphere around them.” The conjunction of Going’s “beauty of the word season conjuring” and Carbone’s “Trance abstractions sans words. / Sans voice sans sound” illuminates these works. In “Deadscape” the drama lies not only in the depiction of a torn raven’s wing looming over a draped inert body, but also in the vertiginous effect of reading across the two parallel columns of text: “I was afraid I would swallow my tongue      and kept falling as into an abyss/someone suddenly dies      slashed by the fragmentarity /that each of us is.” In “Assiduous Trees,” a collaged satellite dish “performed as a silent /yes but also lusciously precise graphically etched image” becomes synonymous with a tree’s leafy canopy and its “electronic soundtrack of chirping birds.” Going and Carbone’s pieces offer the “dazzlement of skill” we hope to find in art, and then, because their art is open to the impulse and disruption of the collaborating other —“the almost luminous partner / yielding to a bewildering angularity”— who can and does “come in & / ruin it // tossing / a shirt /on the furniture”— we hear something rare and authentic — the sound of a “solo tête-à-tête.”

Steve Greene’s paintings carry forward his expertise as a draftsman, charting the conceivable if not realizable place where documentation meets imagination. As pleasurable as they are provocative and as various as they are cohesive, the paintings featured here offer a graceful abundance of precise, synchronized lines that tantalize the viewer with the explicatory promise of maps, diagrams, and navigational charts, even as they stretch that expectation with their suggestion of unidentifiable biomorphic and celestial forms. Greene’s elaborate, diagrammatic lineations pulse with the exponential energy of primordial cells dividing their way to embodiment as unpredictable life forms and celestial vistas as well as architectural schema. Their bold, primary colors and multifaceted, quasi-geometric shapes emphasize their suggestion of mechanical and biological blueprints for the human imagination. These remarkable pieces destabilize baked-in dichotomies between organism and mechanism, micro and macro, overview and close-up, transcending the distinction between public and personal, phenomenal and psychological with a sense of unforced ease as well as necessity.

The privations of isolation drive the dark intensity of these powerful, expertly constructed poems by Julie Hanson, each of them illuminated by flashes of light “bright as a bullet // stuck in a black cloak.” “Ode to Luck” opens with a grim parable of the human condition as imprisonment, whose only grace is as impossible as “Prison Yard Soup” for which there is no “recipe, or memory thereof,” “no fire” and “no pot.” But in a brilliant volta, Hanson’s prison allegory illuminates our self-defeating tendency to “become unchangeably distant and who knows why?” – opening a path towards empathy for the “fear unknown and untold” that may drive it. The same spare but brilliant glimmer of grace animates the gravity of all of the poems in this selection: a moment of shared understanding with a deer that convinces the narrator “that the eternal // clocks us on its watch, mute as that doe, / when, in actuality, / I know better;” or the precious flash of revelation leading to the martyrdom of prophets like the miller Menocchio and Michael Servetus, both burned at the stake for the heretical inclusivity of their faith. “Worry,” as Hanson reminds us, may be “the only work,” but there is inspiration to be gleaned from the fact that “everyone wants what they want and will not be discouraged.”

Elizabeth Hazan’s landscapes blend invention and memory in abstract fields, glades and skies rendered in free-flowing curvilinear shapes and glorious, sometimes almost neon, color. The artist’s intention, to give viewers the “experience of nature as it is pushed to extremes,” is realized through both the abstraction of the images and a brilliant command of color palette to depict her love for the environment, but also her concern for its endangerment. Is that remarkable crimson the ecstatic sunset we are sometimes lucky enough to see, or is it the one that makes us feel uneasy, wondering if there is fire nearby? Is it a sunset at all, or the shape and color of a memory, powerful but elusive? In these almost surreal paintings, line and color converge to create light and atmosphere, a free passage for the imagination.

Men are supremely busy creatures in Denise Newman’s crystalline prose poem series “Men I’ve Known.” Relentless as actors in a silent-era comedy—they fall on clouds and can’t get up, interview dogs about happiness, declaim God’s intentions for man and nature, call things by “their money names,” and despite themselves “speak in the dark…. mouthing sounds of gunfire.” Newman considers all this strangely confident activity with clear-eyed prescience: “Remember, I’m the traveler, I bring only happy things,” one man explains to a woman he intends to abandon. Whether father, philosopher, teacher, soldier, or young boy yearning to “run in an open field like an impala,” in a reflexively patriarchal world one thing is clear — “freedom falls apart.” With bold wit Newman unleashes the tragic in the comic. What is language, if not itself surreal, when a father whose name “means good genes” oversees “encoding and decoding” the “secret messages” we call meaning? One man, returning from war, “whose name means supplanter,” goes to work in a factory and “never blows a whistle, not even when his leg gets caught in a machine and he has to cut it off himself.” Newman shows us that in patriarchy “the gap between fantasy and reality is as good as a moat, that is, when your home is a castle.”

Both abstract and geometric, Sarah Peters’ sculptures partake of the ancient and the modern in almost equal parts. Throughout art history, the medium of bronze with its smooth and shining surfaces and its undeniable actual and visible weight has often been reserved for monuments to gods and statesmen. In Peters’ enigmatic and impressive work, many of the sculptures are of women who exude the spirit of a goddess or oracle; one who speaks power, one who will be /must be listened to. The artist has caught them at the moment before they speak; the inhale of the breath and the parted lips, a negative space that complements the textured and stylized hair and the geometry of the (beautiful) faces. Also adding depth are the deep-set eyes, a literal depth that accents the mystery and profundity of the work; and in one piece seen here, eyes that see through literally, and perhaps figuratively, to the other side. In “Augur” and “Pleasure Principle,” especially, the skillful artistry of curves and planes and the sensual playfulness of the back views are reminiscent of the oracle’s riddle that amuses, but contains a deeper meaning to discover.

Randy Prunty’s sonnets are emphatically conclusive in form — each of the fourteen lines begins and ends with a single word — one and done. Well, not exactly, because word by word, with little preparation or unnecessary elaboration the poems develop unusual depths that delight and amaze us. Reading these poems is like threading our way down a tower built from the top down out of thin air. Associations of sound and image work a kind of magic in Prunty’s surefooted navigation of his edgy, steep form, opening stunning, unpredictable views: “I /expected /you /as /spectral. // But /as /spectacle? //Still, / welcome / back.” Where do we land? The poems are anything but conclusive in meaning — they reverberate — Prunty’s narrow minarets of words shake with tiny quakes: “Every / grave / is / a / groin / at / night. // Gravity /catches / all /things.” In “Semiotic Sonnet” Prunty suggests, “if /you /see /a /tow /truck /towing /a /tow /truck //then there’s /your /poem.” We suggest, if you read these sonnets towing their few and spacious words down the page, then there’s your pleasure, and your revelation.

In ancient Greece a rhapsodist (rhapsōidos) was an inspired singer, a stitcher (rapis’tēs) who wove together songs (ōidē) to make a free flowing, exalted poem. If you wonder if there can yet be a rhapsodist singing in our benighted days just listen to Elizabeth Robinson’s “Archipelago Rhapsody:” “Divinity made of blue /who pierces — /a sliver // in skin. Sutures /sew gesture to new shape.” It’s moving to read Robinson’s spirited rhapsodies, thankful for their air of spontaneous inspiration, exultant in language’s free-roaming, untethered heart. Robinson revels in the music that abides (and hides) in the linkages and lineages between words: “Sing bones or bonds, sing / apophatic catalog of // un-monster. Sing broth / and sing stirring. Sing spoon // slapped against the back of your / thigh.” In these gaps, so often misheard as empty and soundless, Robinson calls forth the feminine oracular, a doubling presence of the human and divine: “Dense / mats in her dark // blue fur. Her abrasive /kinship, whose tongue // undoes, whose voice insists it has / my smell embedded in it.” These rhapsodies resist the gesture of a comforting hand — “Her roses- / and-cream throat scorches the / open neck of your shirt.” Instead, they claim for us something much better — the viscerally real, ineffable beauty of all we feel the presence of but cannot name.

A serene but potent energy powers Dan Rosenberg’s magical and mysterious verses, which both describe and create the kind of transcendent epiphanies that emerge from eschewing the “too-much” that is everywhere around us in our “low-Earth orbit with all the trash / we’re raising like a sloppy wall.” An alternative, as Rosenberg reminds us, emerges from contemplation — whether of Sappho’s verses, Richard Kegler’s collages, or the hummingbird’s alchemical magic, creating “with enough tongue nectar / with a furious flapping stillness.” That very redolent and resonant stillness is the special nectar found, and shared, by these elegant poems: those moments when “the streetlight paints the snow // bittersweet” as the narrator sits “alone with history,” and even the “bright, fibrous undoing” of death and decay that “exerts itself upon // the world” as the dead “loose their memories” so that “the generative thrust” may “find / its holster on the wall of the sea.”

Thank you for being here.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 38)

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Welcome to Posit 38!

Now more than ever, we are grateful to our contributors for the generative depth of their creations. In this fraught and perilous historical moment of “radiated oceans / redwoods burning” (Judy Halebsky, “Fwd: The Problem”) when “the rules of battle are not followed” so “massacre replaces battle” (Gillian Conoley, “It is just as hot as in the age of the great religious wars”), the art and literature in this issue offers wisdom and succor for our troubled psyches “spinning, pining / For nostalgia and ubiety” (Edward Mayes, “Say We’ve Reversed Ourselves for the Umpteenth Time”). Whether addressing the crisis of our despoiled and smoldering, hate- and war-ravaged planet, or the stumbling grace of our personal struggles, these works find new and beautiful ways to suggest that “we can begin again” (Gillian Conoley, “War 10”).

In Gillian Conoley’s poems featured here, everything perceivable and thinkable matters, and matters more passionately, more urgently as the poet arrays images and thoughts in unexpected combinations — because “the world does not say what to ignore.” These poems are chock full of the world we live in now. Conoley’s distinctive use of the page with long lines interrupted by caesuras reminds us of a banquet table — each phrase a separate dish — distinct images and patterns laid out beside each other in abundant variety — what a feast! As in this passage “A tinge of excitement in my feet      the brief ache / flu-like in my ankles / one of the not-covid viruses the allergy clinic says are / ‘very around’     The peonies      have blurred into beauty” where the exuberant thrill of perception is extended to the misery of a virus and in the same breath to the wonder of blossoming and living in a “light-filled” house. We are home with Conoley reading a New Yorker article, texting friends, until with a surefooted leap her next phrase takes us to a war zone, reminding us that “decay is a world where one is in demand / to bring oneself.”

In this excerpt from Capitals and Cranes, Matthew Cooperman returns to Posit with dueling prose poems whose counterpoint evokes the Anthropocene’s life-and-death battle between mammon and the natural world. These eponymous pieces offer vivid, evocative, elliptical vignettes — but their similarity ends there. The horizontal prose blocks of “Capitals” narrate the victories of, well, capital, such as the land’s sell-off to real estate developers and oil derricks, or the manipulation of an unsuspecting couple “sitting down to lunch . . . wonder[ing] what silly video to watch” who are incited, unconsciously, to “give . . . their money to the microphone” by privacy-invading targeted advertising. By contrast, the non-human world in which “no grace or flight goes finished” is “inviolate and supreme” in the lyrical, vertical columns of “Cranes,” which posit an enchanting, optimistic alternative to Capital’s despoilment, in which “cracks in the foundation, assumption” blessedly allow “the wetlands [to] rest, recover.” Cooperman’s juxtaposition of these alternative visions for our planet is bracing and, as in real life, unresolved. We cannot know which forces will prevail, but these poems won’t let us miss what’s at stake.

Loren Eiferman’s biomorphic sculptural assemblages emit a talismanic aura. Reminiscent of cultural artifacts revered for their healing or spiritual powers, her imaginatively generated forms draw from the structures, colors, and textures of nature on every scale, from the micro to the macro. Although they echo with resemblances to leaves and trees, rattles and head ornaments, spiders and fans, it is fitting that several of these works respond to the Voynich Manuscript, since all of Eiferman’s creations radiate a similarly magical amalgam of familiarity and strangeness. The viewer feels awakened to an ineffable combination of recognition and mystification — the slightly unnerving excitement of encountering the almost-knowable. Not only is Eiferman’s loving attention to the forms that make up both her inspiration and material happily contagious – there is a tactile magnetism to these sculptures which have been meticulously assembled in her uniquely iterated process of destruction and reconstruction. We wish to experience their balance and texture with our own hands, as if the artist’s intimate connection with her natural materials is contagious as well.

John Einarsen’s photographs are concise yet expansive emblems; clear, beautiful, composed, finely wrought, yet lived-in, or perhaps dwelled in, a deeper and more intimate term for finding the essence of an object and letting it enfold you. Einarsen credits his physical and metaphysical perspective, in large part, to his introduction to the Miksang technique, which asks the photographer to find the essential moment, what Einarsen calls the “gap in thinking.” The viewer first enjoys the abstract image through the filter of Keats’s familiar definition of negative capability: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” which allows us to notice and more deeply appreciate the strangeness of reality. And yet there is delight in suddenly deciphering or discovering the shape of raindrop, leaf on asphalt, curtain, and window; all so daily, but newfound, newly seen. The double joy of the abstract image and the “real” image engenders its own poetic response in the viewer.

In Joanna Fuhrman’s new inventive and intimate video poems, the poet’s voice is anything but a detached “voice over.” The recited lines — sometimes brash, sometimes silken — are layered into the video images and music like bright threads at the shuttle. Every element is in motion — like the car with no driver described in “Cardinal” as “we veer through the leafy branches of a forest” and “the car keeps going.” The magic of Fuhrman’s video journals is that the sonic and visual multi-dimensionality comes together, finally, with simplicity and openness. In the spare and beautiful “Self-Portrait as Cloud,” the poet explains “I feel most myself / when — like today — / all of the sky is a single/ undifferentiated cloud.” Even when the images are blurred or only glimpsed at the edges of the frame, we feel our senses mysteriously lit like the sky from an unidentifiable source, or from many sources at once. By way of the surreal and the whimsical, dream and waking reality, Fuhrman invites us to trust that although the complexity of our lives is real, it is “mapped out in blue light/drawn in crayon on the topography /of a sleeping face.”

Judy Halebsky’s diaristic sequences embody a startling poetic paradox — honest and naked in reflecting on a brittle, yet tender domestic life, they hide little about the human condition, even as they leave out all explanation. The sad drama of “I’m naked with a sponge in the dark before dawn, cleaning the coffee while he tells me not to and cries,” is followed immediately by the examination of tiny snail shells — “he asks me to notice the coils, one flat and coiling outward, the other taller, coiling up / we need ways to tell different kinds of shells apart so we know which family of snails live here.” Don’t we all need ways to know and understand the family homo sapiens we belong to and what that belonging means? And so Halebsky looks not only at domesticity, but other structures we have wrought, examining the coils of money, time, and value. In one poem a friend comes to visit: “part of her illness means losing her job, no longer being able to put those two boys through school. so now there’s two unfurling. the one and then the other. a matter of accident, what we use as money, how we count and are counted.” But the art with which Halebsky shapes these brilliantly spare, non-self-sparing poems is no accident — they are translucent as shells.

Brian Johnson’s long lines meander and float through a dreamlike landscape that bridges the gaps and blurs the distinctions between dream and waking, place and time, reality and imagination. A ghostly, elusive aura of déjà vu hovers like early morning fog over these verses languidly “meandering in a city of squares, transfixing the old river, distancing the shoplights.” Johnson’s poems have the stillness and resonance of gelatin print photographs whose intimacy and focused attention manage to be turned inward and outward at once, showing us “the leagues between” a couple and their “late hesitations,” against the backdrop of “a wall, a bridge, a night, a city. The intersection of cries, smells and their evacuation. The neat forms of senselessness.” The cityscapes and intimate moments they conjure are the psychological artifacts of a narrator who “love[s], and lose[s] all bearing in the world.” Elegantly intriguing, these poems draw us into the quiet mystery of their contemplative spell, bringing us to consider and reconsider what we think we might have glimpsed.

Tony Kitt, somehow, deeply understands and appreciates the life of plants, as well as the foibles of humans. In the playful “Among Plants,” he defines the difference: “A tree is a hieroglyph; /a man, eighty pages of astronomy.“ Our own absurdity pointed out, the poet asks, “Who wears an itinerary to the feast of the non-calculable?” Obviously, we humans do. But Kitt also magics the reader into believing in a hybrid of human and plant. In “Yonder,” “This brook dancing you breathless… / Your paths are your veins; / your skull reveals your roots.” We are all dreamily connected through ”The feelings of a field; a colloquy / of farms…” Kitt has a way of getting under the skin, or perhaps the carapace, of nature’s creatures. In one characteristic surrealistic juxtaposition, he admonishes: “The bone thing: / be boneless (in a rigid way). / Don’t let your compound eyes / migrate south / or multiply in blending.” Possibly good advice? Through these surprising metamorphoses, this poet guides us to a different kind of understanding of living beings we usually only observe, even as he maintains a wary and humorous distance. As he says, “There’s always a two-finch gap / between a possibility / and an approach.”

In Peter Leight’s wry examinations of the stories we tell ourselves about our own disturbing vulnerability, “there isn’t anything / to conceal at the same time / there isn’t anything not concealed” even when the narrator (who of course claims to be “just as calm / as anybody else”) calms himself by covering his “head to cover up / what’s in [his] head.” Returning to Posit with hypnotic, rhythmic cadences and witty wordplay, Leight’s tender, humorous perseverations give voice to all of us wrangling our roiling stew of fear and yearning with awkward combinations of self-deception and oversharing. In these poems, Leight’s truths are, as ever, paradoxical. Self-examination is at once compulsion and slog, “a stress test” that requires “a couple / of aspirins first” in order to face the contradictory tangle of “so many things / we don’t know how to deal with.” Although, problematically, “people are a problem,” since “everybody wants to be needed,” the thought of turning away feels like “the end of the world.” Nonetheless, as these poems helpfully/unhelpfully suggest, “it’s important for people not to be unhappy / when they’re not happy,” so we might as well focus on “holding onto something / for as long as it takes / to let go.”

Edward Mayes’ sequence of playful, erudite poems seem to have been written in a trance-like euphoria of language and free-association — a tour de force that not only awes but welcomes us into its swift flow of ideas “since who of us can / Really draw a blank, who of us can really / Do without grace or some singular obeisance / To beauty and beauty only.” Mayes’ notes at the bottom of each poem further complicate and stretch the boundaries of the poetic line, inviting us to follow additional, related chains of language (and of thinking through language) that are personal yet tautly attuned to our reality as well as to the notions touched on in the “primary” verses: “vaccine, from cow, vacca, cowpox, smallpox; vacua/vacuum; vade mecum, go with me.” What a pleasure and enlightenment to roam the paths and thickets of these dense and cerebral abecedarians, following them down the page “as if we’re like vagabonds with a vascular / Bundle on a stick, beards of burnt cork, // Our heads full of rags and vol-au-vents, / Because we want to go somewhere where we // Haven’t been before or after.”

In these ghazals, Sheila Murphy foregrounds the evolution of the English language with bits of French, Latin, and Italian, alongside humorous play on words for a layered depth of both language and meaning. In addition, she evolves the language herself with words like “eventness” – an instantly understood and happy invention. Murphy returns to Posit with ghazals that retain the standard number of couplets and the idea of love that are the hallmarks of the genre, but the reader finds evidence of a love that is thoughtful and complicated. Although “Cantabile equals me when with you,” there is also the reality of “This moment of not wanting you / equals my not being wanted, losing myself.” In another poem, the passing of time lends its weight: “Autumn’s sadness resurrects feeling loss / School books fall to powder between my hands.” But still and happily present are the subtleties of new discovery: “I will sit with you and forget myself / to find a subtler self tucked in beneath,” as well as wry wit: “Oak leaves must not be left to dry on lawns / I would solo skate across that crispness.”

With line after declarative line of striking lucidity (reminiscent of a psychedelic Wallace Stevens), Jesse Nissim dares to dismantle the figures of everyday ordinariness and sense. The body, its sensations, thoughts, and perceptions are alive with the interpenetrations of the landscape as “a mind of trees streams voluminously” throughout the poems. Nissim offers a tantalizing surrealism, not of dreams and the unconscious, but rooted in the actuality of the body in the world. When the poet declares “I can’t split longing / from the water it moves in me, grieving the leaves’/ lost veins. Landscape is mind with persistent voice,” we feel ourselves transported on that moving water to strangely welcoming shores. Yet, with the poet, we take as our rule “keep moving.” Nissim’s work is that of a cartographer mapping a newly beheld reality by “plucking details from / what is, as if a sky could discard small portions/of itself aptly shaped for being lost.”

Gregory Rick’s tumultuous, dynamic, and explosive compositions reflect the stories in the artist’s life, offering striking portraits of people personal to the artist as well as historical and imagined personae. Many of these narratives are difficult: war, fear, and horror are portrayed; there are no happy flowers, but somehow one wants to look again and again. Because we do not know the details of the stories, we are drawn to interpret and re-interpret the context through Rick’s remarkable and unusual color choices, the balanced imbalance of his compositions, and his sometimes haunting, sometimes tender portraits of human beings (as well as significant and symbolic creatures) in impossible situations. Conjured by Rick’s powerful and energetic use of line, form, and color, these works, both narrative and abstract, burst with authentic feeling. Rick is truly, as he says, “painting on a shaky historical line cemented in humility and conviction,” with a passion that viewers can clearly recognize and meaningfully internalize.

Mikey Swanberg returns to Posit with tender, elegiac verses that grapple with the inevitability of loss. Everything in these chiseled, lyrical poems is ephemeral — not only love and its mementos, but the stable dailiness of life and even, in “mile marker,” life itself. “Iron Mountain” contrasts that eponymous secure-storage facility for the world’s most valuable information with the fragility of our actual lives, such as the photos of a former lover fed “into the narrow slit // of the confidential / recycling bin,” or the proximity of the “shaggy migrators” who “came and left / with the Halloween candy” like “Buy-one get-one Cormorants and Black Ducks. / An aisle of last season’s Herons.” As always, this poet’s vision is as gentle as it is courageous as he struggles to transcend the yearning “to make something / that preserved me” and accept, and even appreciate, “the short bruised / season we all get.” His epiphany may be achieved while picking wild berries rather than eating perfectly chilled plums, but it echoes Williams’s deep and graceful simplicity: “anyway      I am / coming home to you // anyway      the bag I brought / is getting full”.

There’s yearning and discontent in these poems by Martha Zweig, along with a dry and snappy pull-yourself-out-of-it attitude on the part of the narrator’s psyche. In “Ars Brevis,” a sparkling sculpture will only corrode to “fixed pits & crooked cramps just like your life.” In “Happy Return,” the narrator, coming home, describes herself: “Semiangelic, I descend / a measly sky through crisscross / layers of little untidy clouds.” Nothing in Zweig’s poems is quite perfect, quite tidy, or quite angelic. Even the sky is measly. And home is likely to be the same; the view is a “Long splashy drive, then all’s / gone fine back home. If I never left?” the narrator wryly asks, only to be answered, “Well I never” by “a chorus / of rural ladies exclaim[ing] / from their booth in my personality.” These poems take place in the memory, or even in the memory of a memory, where the minute details of where we were and what we were doing at the time — “Third jelly danish: home-sickening. / Sucking gooey fingers at age / forty-seven & counting” — are almost as important as the event remembered. The time passes, but we are captive to our memories, and the power they have of erasing years, if not feelings. “Do you love me still?” the narrator asks in “Hero,” ”You loved me once as if / I danced all night bravado in parachute silks.”

Thank you so much for reading, and please take care of one another.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 37)

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Welcome to Posit 37!

This issue showcases the generative energy of assemblage, juxtaposing a range of encounters with nature and culture, body and spirit, bringing humor and gravitas to bear on the human condition in a “world not long for this world” (Andrew Zawacki, “Droste Effect”).

On the literary side, we pursue our interest in the elasticity of poetic forms, including the prose poem, the cento, the sonnet, and a number of new approaches to the line and the field, while from the visual arts we bring together a text and photography amalgam, two radically disparate approaches to sculpture, and a set of drawings inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

These works revel in the “echo and bounce” of word and image (Karen Holman, “Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Marie”) to remind us how “the mote & motley” of our existence (Charles Byrne, “things could always be worse”) can “refreshen the void” (Mark DeCarteret, “The Year We Went Without Fables”). Enacting art’s capacity to descry “the fragrant invisible / at large / among the wheatfolds” (G.C. Waldrep, “Tye River”) these works turn “the power of the mind . . . that searches for links” (Susanne Dyckman, “&”) to the task of discovering how “the darkness at the center of darkness . . . may be another kind of light” (Jeff Friedman, “Done Time”).

Nancy Bowen’s sculptures recombine a range of organic, artificial, and cultural components to construct boundary-defying alternatives to our most basic assumptions. With wit and exuberance, Bowen’s totems juxtapose forms and materials, references and resonances that challenge the lines between abstract and representational, natural and crafted, ornamental and functional, sacred and profane. In organic constructions evocative of rocks and vines grafted onto utensils and shrines, Bowen generates an iconography rooted in the experiential qualities of the female body. Bowen’s incorporation of chairs and chains, beads and breasts, shells and glass ground the erudition and sensual energy of these assemblages, while her marriage of elements both ancient and modern, functional and sybaritic generate a uniquely synthetic vision.

Charles Byrne’s beautifully synced and variegated language draws on remembered poems, axioms, and slang, fascinating the reader with magnificent turns of thought and story, as if “borne aloft single-scruffed, limbs shimmering in wriggles, / a confusion of neuronal launches as from a McDonald’s / single-handled fry funnel to pentagonal prism packet.” Both philosophy and wit combine in ways we all might find familiar: “i would have given the shirt | off my back | had i ever been asked | but in truth | in fact | have i ever really | done anything for anyone?” Yet Byrne’s work, dense in imagery and meaning, encompasses an ironic honesty that reflects our human tenderness and vulnerability: “my body reacts in apocalyptic fashion to the loss of sense, as does my self. my efforts to anatomize leave only scatterings of atoms, akin to how my toothbrush simply breaks into bittier and bittier indivisible parts in the pacific garbage patch.” Still, the empathy and linguistic variety of this poet’s work helps to alleviate the despair it so vividly evokes.

Like the monumental inflatable sculptures for which she is renowned, Nancy Davidson’s new drawings pulsate with a vibrant simplicity that is manifoldly evocative and impossible to pin down. Pared down to essential biomorphic abstractions yet gesturally dynamic, these bilateral, braced, and weighted forms bring to mind inanimate figures like knots, balls and chains, and balloons, as well as cultural references such as the spread legs of cowgirls or ancient female idols. But above all, these works evoke the body: bringing to mind legs and heads, fallopian tubes and ovaries, testicles, nipples, and other erogenous knobs. As such, they evoke our life force: at once vulnerable and resilient, vibrant and comical, yet tinged with a whiff of the grotesque, as befits their inspiration by Beckett’s Happy Days. These energetic drawings speak not only to Davidson’s ground-breaking body of work, but to the absurd and valiant determination with which Winnie grasps at the fleeting imprisonment in a sinking body that is her only reprieve from the abyss.

Mark DeCarteret’s prose poem series featured here addresses “doing without” in a flurry of contexts, both personal and planetary — engaging retrospect, loss, deprivation, and necessity to identify what is essential and what is not. Like “a monster sun though not big on details” committed to “getting it right,” these irreverently witty meditations on a world in which “mighty oaths from little acrimonies grow” rant in staccato, rat-a-tat rhythms laden with an irony as thick as “dense winter fog.” Lyrical interludes (“colors slow-heated, steeping like tea, or cooled off and foolishly seen for themselves, charmed back to earth”) bring out the rhythmic zing of DeCarteret’s barbed insights into “this mess we’ve recreated” in which “there’s more than enough room for no one. What fun. O what fun.”

Sharon Dolin’s cento-sonnets are at once artful tributes and worthy heirs to the artistry of their source poets, offering all that those writers could hope for in these marvelously recombined fragments of their own voices. Dolin captures the spirit of each, and adds the fertile imagination of her own poetically “green green hands.” From Ruth Stone’s grief-tinged “ too much salt, burned edges” to a dangerous Plath, “Let there be snakes / rayed round a candle flame,” these poems brim with unforgettable images and lyric energy, offering a series of wondrous gifts in sonnet boxes like “some angel-shape worth wearing / with one tin eye.”

In Susanne Dyckman’s delightfully intelligent poems from After Affects, “the power and weight of the mind” resounds “as the joy of a forgotten treasure,” and, paradoxically, as “a study in weightlessness.” With the flexible, patterned, and weightless strength of a dancer, the poet wants to “push back the curtains and lay down embarrassed by so many dead flowers.” Repetitions abound — fascinating footwork that prepares us for italicized language fragments leaping across the bottom of the page — “left on the skin       the trick     of nature       I can almost hear.” While engaging head-on with the elemental — time, memory, nature, and the possibility of transformation — these poems, like our thoughts upon waking, are hushed and circular. Dyckman reminds us that limitation is also part and parcel with strength — “the mind that can change too little on its own, that cannot alter stone.”

Jeff Friedman’s prose poems conjure worlds in single paragraphs and individual characters in sentences. In these precisely observed and recounted micro-moments of an examined life, the physical detail conveys volumes. Enlisting defamiliarization to power perception and the manifest to reveal what lies beneath, Friedman casts his closely focused, unhurried gaze on the granularities of our deepest drive, to “let your mind raise its voice.” In their plain-spoken clarity, these poems are “done talking nonsense” and “done with the darkness at the center of darkness,” casting their lucid gaze on the ephemeral physicality of communication and what it means to lose it.

In his text and image series, Doug Hall yokes together meditations on time and memory with black and white photographs of the winter oaks of Olompali Valley. From “among the oaks,” Hall conjures the collapsing universe; the DNA of slugs, bananas, honeybees; the difference between “melodic memory” and “studied memory;” and our most distant star, Earendel. Hall has created a series of juxtaposing diptychs, each block of text chiming with the shape of the photographs. Framed centrally and filling the image with a single tree’s distinctive intricate branchings — some reaching for the sky, others heavily skimming the earth — the photographs dramatically accentuate each oak’s individuality. In his pairings, Hall suggests that the oaks have a way of approaching existence akin and parallel to our own. Hasn’t each tree responded to the forces of time and memory in an ongoing relationship to sky, sun, water, insects, nutrients? How else could the oaks persist, uniquely present in a changing landscape?

In Jeffrey Hecker’s Monopoly series, America, or perhaps its self-image, is reflected in a fun-house mirror warped by the quaintness of the game’s iconography as it dovetails with the harsh — and often comical — realities of 21st century America. Drawing upon the game’s association with wholesome American family bonds as well as its unfiltered capitalistic values, these poems render the absurd contradictions at the core of the American experiment, juxtaposing daycares and unemployment offices, luxury spas and homeless shelters, Truman Capote and Linda Ronstadt, Dodge Durangos and dust devils to drily comical effect. One poem even reminds us of the Ur-American utopianism of social experiments such as an “experimental village” in which an “empathy hierarchy” replaces those based on the materialistic metric at the foundation of the iconic game.

Karen Holman’s expert ear for sound — brief, abrupt, dazzling, and fulfillingly descriptive, excites the mind and invites the heart. In “Invoking the Inconsolable Divine,” she defines the divine as, among other things, the “ninety-nine named / and galaxy crowned / vaped, empty-bottle, recycled, / wretched, fetching, festering, / quotidian, misquoted and doting” as well as, wittily, the “crapshoot / radiant radical / sporadic and random / specific, fixer and fix.” In “Constellations,” she imagines the questions of our existence tangent to the stars: “chartreuse-new / seven sisters, veiled / in their own breath / opened and blinked / beating like my fist-wings / with a treasure in it.” The textures of earth are also invoked: “sleep is houndstooth / sky-forsythia / cemetery pinwheel flowers / animated, again / by air like us.” In Holman’s image-charged poems, the ineffable abides with the quotidian, the divine with the earthly, as if suspended together in our memories and dreams.

Marie de Quatrebarbes’ prose poems from The Vitals, translated by Aiden Farrell, interrogate language and its fraught relationship to the referents that we consider reality: the “fiction to which we can only respond with a nod when a vague idea, a very vague idea, vaporous even, comes to snatch it away.” These cerebral notes-to-self are like a diary written in radioactive ink, aiming their x-ray vision right through daily life to discover “The Vitals” — or expose what we assume them to be (“the afternoon, the children…”) as “a sort of ecstasy, delusion of ownership.” These linguistically packed and provocative poems favor disruption, applying the chosen uncertainty of their magic to put “on a drama of the abst. incompletion of a certain img” in order to “provoke uncert. fate.”

Judith Roitman’s spare, bold, and sometimes unnerving poems cut to the point immediately, asking without hesitation what we might hesitate to probe. Do you feel this? How can you not? Proceeding from the mysterious and somehow accurate description of birth, when we are “expelled from the body / like donuts / like trees,” Roitman asks, in the eerie “Shimmy:” “Do you come here often / Do you shimmy in darkness / Do you feed them,” capturing both a real and surreal human experience. Her brilliant response to an oft-asked question: “I asked poetry: what are you / and it slapped me in the face,” generates both more poetry and more questions for the reader. In “Language,” a view from a plane shows “midden upon midden below us,” and demands an important, perhaps profound, answer from us: “A whale is on the beach. / A crab reaches its destiny / Two dead seals on the sand — can you see this? / What language do you speak?”

Elise Siegel’s haunting sculptures evoke both airy modern portraits and heroic busts from an ancient culture, eroded by the rain and wind of centuries, as if rediscovered, but with no clue as to where they originated. These faces have the immediacy of selfies, but the psychological complexity of ritual masks, or the inner presence of oracles. Using clay as her material (perhaps the most historical of mediums) the artist imbues these gestural sculptures with individual lives and expressions even as we imagine a process of erosion gradually and minutely continuing the process of destruction. In these sculptures, we see our friends as well as our ancestors. It is as if these women are icons whose names are forgotten in history, but like a fleeting glimpse of a stranger’s smile on the street, or the felt dignity of a statue of a Jomon goddess, they have a timeless quality. Siegel’s powerful work compels us to believe that there is a life force particular to women’s spirit that survives the ages.

In these poems from Lost in Translation, Alison Stone has married the cento form with an iterated translation procedure to make collages not from others’ excerpted lines but from their repeatedly re-translated progeny. The resulting poems trouble and broaden our notions of authorship, reminding us of the range of choices it entails, even while offering a collectivized notion of creation that encompasses, with the poet’s use of Google Translate, more than human agency. At the same time, Stone’s aesthetics and sensibility unite these poems, permeating them with her sharp insight (“There are two types of disasters: women and men”), elegiac lyricism (“The world is your widow and she is still crying”), and warnings of our threat to our own planet: “The tide wave has opened, and everywhere.” As she drily observes, now that “the wind has been unhinged lately. / Alarm, and fire approaching. / When it comes, the landscape will listen” and “Twitter viewers swallow the sky.”

In these exquisitely worded poems, a powerful and invisible something is always behind, within, and surrounding the object of G. C. Waldrep’s nature-focused lens; a force made almost visible in “the pollen’s spark hidden in the air’s tongue” which is “anterior to the presence that commands begin” a force outside of us, but “not unobtainable.” In “Tye River,” the river reveals variants of its true nature, sometimes tragic; “a held motion” that “succors / debt’s visible passage / shoaled with all / the organs of mourning” but encompassing, pulsing, alive and beautiful, as “enlaced with hoarfrost / the zodiac glides / to your filament-feet.” This force also animates “the quince at dusk / expressing / its hitherto, its after—” and in “its brief for change” the bitter fruit may hold the “affirmation” or more subtly, and mysteriously, the “shadow” of affirmation, of a power that we sense, even if we cannot entirely grasp.

In these grave and erudite prose poems from These Late Eclipses, Andrew Zawacki considers the ways eclipses — that is, “figurations wherein a trace conceals, or cancels out, the whole” — characterize the threatened state of the nesting-doll-like layers of reality in which we live. From Vegas to Verkhoyansk, from family intimacies to the theoretical cloud of celestial bodies surrounding our solar system, Zawacki catalogues the iterated signs of distress everywhere in evidence, not least to our psyches, when “under a hematoma sun, everyone I know’s been broken down, like a cardboard box.” These brilliant poems urge us to recognize the grave danger in which we find ourselves, this 11th hour in which “dark is swooning in” to a “world not long for this world.”

We hope you love these as much as we do.

Thank you for being here!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 36)

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Happy Spring, and welcome to Posit 36! We are honored and excited to bring you this issue, filled with the luminous poetry, visual art, and collaboration of so many writers and artists we admire.

In keeping with this season of birth and regeneration, the work in this issue contemplates and demonstrates transformation and transcendence: considering trauma and damage, whether on a personal or collective level, to offer creations filled with insight, beauty, and hope. Even in this “ruined civilization, what we call the present” (John Yau, “Documentary Cinema”) in which “calm is wafer-thin, a filament of agreement” (Maxine Chernoff, “Diary”), “the firelight of meaning” in these remarkable works helps make “the chilly vacuum / inhabitable” (ash good, “a woman i love wonders if the lights are the departed floating around her crown each morning”).

Dennis Barone’s poems employ the concrete sensory vividness of the image to explore the organic relationship between past, present, and future as revealed by memory and perception. These poems offer a forward-looking optimism on the personal and societal level, even in the face of mortality, social violence, and climate change. Declaring “apocalypse an ancient mistake,” Barone urges us to take a lesson from our own ability “to / relinquish “I” and gather together as / “we,” as we do “waiting patient and kind” in an amusement park line while “each / greets the other one-hundred languages; / none, misunderstood.” Riffing with jazz-like linguistic freedom on childhood memories of the “Double or Nothing” gamble of the immigrant experience counting on “air-conditioned time coming / and days like vacations,” Barone encourages us to embrace the future with the same hope and courage.

Maxine Chernoff’s “Diary” series encompasses past and present, the delights of memory and the larger dark histories that have been pushed aside. “We lit sparklers and ran in joyous circles. Bedtime came and went. While in the world, napalm ravaged a jungle, and in our own South, dogs and water cannons spread their hate: that too, your childhood.” Indeed, this country was “no paradise” in spite of what many of our countrymen continue to believe. Chernoff’s vivid and lyrical imagery gives us peonies, but ants invade them; “Cassiopeia winks on the evening” but “we watch passively,” our privileged lives so completely “unlike the man who digs with his hands for his family lost in the rubble of war.” These poems survey our universe from constellation to earthworm, with the scent of daily sweetness: “The man who sells dahlias and always says merde lets her leash drop as she samples the neighboring vegetable booth’s sweet, earthy carrots,” but is bitterly honest about the silenced voices “of those whose place on earth has no migratory rights, just the bone-white stillness of harm beyond seasons.”

Ed Friedman’s deceptively casual and conversational poetry manages to be hilarious, tender, and profound all at once. Friedman unmasks the eerie in the personal, both mentally: “ I remember myself alone in / darkness with the faintest vertical green line, an uneven touch” and physically: “Blood is great. So is hair. I squeeze them closed, flat” and then makes it into a koan for us to ponder: “Squeeze anything closed about risk to make it bigger.” In a friendly exchange with his postal carrier, the poet lyrically confesses “deep love for pole vaulters who ready themselves by / visualizing a plush river of stars dividing darker cosmic quarters / themselves in that flow.” And, improbably, he receives “a postcard for me with a Rancho Palos Verdes return address / date-time stamped September, I-can’t-read-the-day, 1971 / written in 11th century Japanese ‘lady’s hand.'” Friedman also offers us some tongue-in-cheek (and perhaps true) philosophical advice when he counsels: “Bottles break / in the alley, but no one listens endlessly / to what they already know. Be glad of that.”

The exuberant linguistic energy of ash good’s poems animates the poet’s juxtaposition of the concrete and the figurative with the warmth and vitality of the living things they analogize to grapple with the inexplicable. In the process, they reveal the interconnectedness at the core of existence, celebrating the sensual pulse of a personified summer (whose “face is clean / & shameless” and who “can fit the moon in her mouth”); comparing the narrator’s ability to encompass the ambivalent effects of family relationships (“the horror family can be”) to cartoon Transformers; equating the tenacious patience of an unusual seed to the narrator’s determination to “take small temperatures with unanswerable questions” to “hear what i cannot hear;” and comparing the complexity of the multiplicit self to snakes slithering “in & out of our own understanding.”

In these searching, painful, poems, Mara Lee Grayson explores the psychic repercussions of a violent tragedy resulting in a lover’s coma that is “kind / of an umbrella, / after / all– / tobacco / smear and vodka, / vengefulness / and butterfly / tattoos / can fit / under / its canopy.” With love, anger, and frustration, these elegant verses capture the liminal state of the victim “who thinks himself afloat” and that of his caregivers: the lover, “the figured / stick // who isn’t / sitting still” and the mother with her figurative “sugar / spoonful set.” We feel the particular torture of a person who is at once present and absent, a victim of violence frozen into the unnatural stasis of a photograph, forced by violence to abandon those he loves and trap them in their attending roles until they are desperate to “shake the numbness,” much as he might wish for “a butterfly / to give her wings, two / weeks to / gaze upon the sea.” At least there is hope, if no certainty in the narrator’s restless limbo, counting off the months of the beloved’s suspended animation: “most / of May, all June, / July, if August.”

In the mesmerizing and absolute vividness of Catherine Howe’s self-named “blooms,” we see the vine-like growth of shapes and their blossoming as if we were watching them grow before our eyes, our impossibly slow vision transcended. Resembling no real flora, they tap into our lifelong inner experience of flowers and plants. Their bells and umbels, stars and coils, are an archetype for the hope of profusion and abundance that we wish for ourselves and our planet. The striking and ever-shifting colors add the dimensional movement of a vital and organic force, recalling the living interconnections of fungi or the state-sized stand of aspen we have so recently realized communicates on a different, and we hope, wiser level. These paintings speak in the language of color and form and movement, joyfully and wildly alive.

Drawing on the contrasts between the preservation of art and the despoiling of nature, John Isles’s beautiful imagery and deep vision lay bare the range of contradictions in ourselves and our surroundings: what we choose to preserve, what we have lost sight of in the process. In the museum, “each room [is] empty except for all / the things, immaculate in permanent / dusk of museum light,” but the human history behind the objects is darker and more complex: “some old / Da Da Conk drunk in the basement / granddaughters watching him / beaten by their uncles.” In “Wildfire,” Isles asks, “who set the fires, who sparked / who left a trail of accelerants?” And though “grass blames itself, its dry wish / for immolation,“ it may be “the incombustible in us—heat without ability to burn.” Still, the poet asks us, as poets and as humans, to seek the meaningful even in the detritus: “If each tree is introspection / an elegant gift, then so must be / telephone poles, birds on wires / streets and culverts draining into the bay / the shoreline littered / with gifts no one asked for—/ tampon applicators / lighters / vape pens…”

This collaborative visual and textual series by Alex Mattraw & Adam Thorman evokes a historical vision of earth and sky together; that is, our perceived whole. All our observations, fears and joys live in it. From beneath the ground, where water rises, to the constellations, and on to the further expansion of particle waves that permeate the universe, these pieces turn the “VOID” ( “I name OVID”) back around to our world, its myths and lore, its creatures, human and animal, and, as both texts and photographs reveal, its frightening beauty. “Wonder demands a tiny terror,” says the poem, and sometimes the vastness of the landscape does just that. But we hold the beauty cognate with our very real fears. In “Bombogenesis,” a new and extra-powerful manifestation of climate change, the poet says “in this terra, I am/ tracking every loop / Store, flood, wake. / Store, fret, wake / Store, wept, wake, flood, / store.” In “VOID,” our recent experience has brought newer fears: “The sun isn’t even big enough to make a black hole but/ [in the dark] all exists, pandemic.” Mattraw’s love of language finds a new and appropriate coinage to express both our hubris and how it might end: “How important we think/ we are ablyss.” Still, we have for our pleasure, “the Whiskey Way,” and hawks “cawing petals.” In the end, we can agree with Mattraw about poetry and perhaps about our future: “I argue she never names the bird because / hope is [never singular.]”

With an eye like a sharp and dangerous object, Rod Val Moore gives the reader a retrospective glimpse of a peripatetic childhood; if it’s true that all happy families are alike, others conjure the specifics of more bitter emotions. “Younger and older brother rotated /declined, took form in anger and sphere. / One was weaker, hair tipped with cold flame / one larger & dancing, thick with lumpen rage.” As often in recollections, actual events blend with emotional atmosphere to create a surreal truth. When a horsefly bites the narrator on a car ride, “What I had in my eye was just a tear / not the clear water of self. Mother / slept but held me on her lap, until she / dreamed I was a snake / and screamed and threw me to the car floor.” Even so, sometimes we are compelled to recall our memories in order to revisit our own place in them: “Tonight I need to remember this more clearly / There’s a tall green vodka bottle on a table in / Milpitas. My eyes focus on the not yet dead / Cigarettes pass from monster to monster to me.”

Luke Munson’s existential parables in verse are good natured in their ironic bleakness. The poems featured here are populated by characters who want to forget what they have built, retrace the steps that brought them to the present from the irretrievable past, or remain frozen in the impossible world of an artwork, pleading with those of us in the “real” world not to “break the spell.” As one narrator of these marvelously compressed, enigmatic, mournful meditations wonders, “How do you do it? How / is anyone still alive?” Yet there is a gentle absurdity to the Cervantes-like humor of this unique and imaginative work, as when a befuddled narrator offers cat food to an armor-clad stray from a centuries-past battlefield “wearing a battle-skirt /of leather strips, and when he paces, I can // see his balls,” who has “saved up years’ worth // of nail clippings” to help him find his way back to his own time.

In these pieces from The Monogamist, Ann Pedone’s blunt perceptions and sardonic sense of humor stand in defiance of conventional understandings of women’s relationships to sexual desire. Tilting at the presumed equivalency between women’s sexual experience and their victimization while continuing to focus on the depth of their trauma, these poems enact the very struggle for autonomous self-realization which they examine. When “hic, haec, hoc won’t stop fucking me” and the narrator has “run out of sugar to stop it,” we can appreciate why she is as calmed by “pouring someone / else’s hot soup all the way down the drain” as she is bolstered in her determination to move “the entire prehistory of my sex / life counter-clockwise.”

Rona Pondick’s beautiful and disturbing chimeras feature human heads cast from the artist’s own, integrated into plant, animal, and inanimate forms that embody, or perhaps re-body, the psychological interiority of life’s double-edged sword. The refinement of these creations recalls the polished perfection of classical Greek as well as Renaissance sculpture, while their disturbing, thought-provoking conception brings to mind the syntheses of Kafka, Ovid, classical mythology, and other religious iconographies. The sinuous curves of the woman-tree hybrid in “Dwarfed White Jack,” for instance, suggest a female leg and torso; in place of pinecones, its branches cradle heads, which look, from a distance, like fists, evoking the phoenix-like Jack Pine, whose resistant cones are opened by fire. This being may be trapped, like her mythological predecessors, in arboreal immobility, as well as twisted and dwarfed like a bonsai in her shallow tray, but she is also endowed with the power of creation after devastation, enhanced by the multiple perspectives of her numerous points of view. The eponymous emerging “Pillow Head’s” straining posture and pained expression suggest an arduous process of differentiation, as if the mind were trying to emancipate itself from the body at the very site of its independence. Pondick’s materials evoke her themes of metamorphosis and transcendence, like the bronze painted to a glossy sheen to suggest the pliant fragility of inflated rubber in “Pillow Head” and “Navel,” and the counterpoint between the animacy of her forms and the sterile ethereality of their pure white polish. The struggles of these human hybrids enact both the ordeal of mortal limitation and the possibility of transcendence.

With deep and detailed personal understanding, Lisa Sewell captures both the solace and the sadness of our desire for a deeper connection to the natural world. Standing on the shore, the poet watches as seals “slide into the surf and vanish,” “trusting the body can be held / as if in a hammock, free of burden, free of weight.” Her own wish, “I too must give myself over / forget the drone strikes / reported to have killed 200 civilians,” is perhaps reflected in the seal’s gaze, “ I am here on a rocky shore and I linger there to dissipate.” In “Field Notes on the Toroweap Formation,” Sewell’s literary companion on the 16 day journey is John Wesley Powell, and she lovingly catalogs the names of the rocks and side canyons, —Native American, scientific, and those that Powell himself used: Cocochino Shale, Vishnu Schist, Marble Canyon, Flaming Gorge. With her husband, John, part of the rafting party, Sewell details the mishaps that correspond to Powell’s own expedition: “I kept company with his dreams which were vivid / and made him scream or cry out, fuck you you fucks.” Though the trip is beautiful, the poet, like Powell, finds she has “brought back only scraps of what the expedition taught: names and profiles / of ghosts, all the riverine shrubs and grasses that no longer thrive.”

Zazu Swistel’s “Spatial Portraits” depict the desolation and disintegration of our psychic landscapes in a world ravaged by human control. Although there is a surrealistic, fertile freedom reminiscent of Escher and Dalí in this artist’s concrete realization of abstract, ineffable emotional and conceptual states, these coercive, cage-like enclosures are inhabited by damage, detritus, and death. The literal and figurative interiority of Swistel’s charted realities are at once foreign, impossible, and deeply familiar, in which everything is graphically and structurally interrelated. These works are graphic exposés of the damage, both internal (to the human psyche) and external (to the natural world) inflicted by our impulse towards restriction and control.

This selection of John Yau’s poems reveals the range and depth of this poet’s dynamic, delving restlessness. In these poems, everything, including our questions, is called into question. For instance, the haunting, contemplative lyricism of “Last Painting’s” parable of a final “pilgrimage to the incomprehensible” (i.e. death) undermines its own trope: although the artist becomes the “pigment on a surface” of her art, she does “not fit into the folds of the painting releasing her.” A similar question/answer dialectic is structurally embedded in the contrapuntal dialogue between telegraphically curt micro-narratives and aphoristic ‘morals’ of “Diary of Discontents,” just as linguistic and conceptual instability are enacted by the Ashberian collages of “Aging Elfin Blues” and “Documentary Cinema.” Each poem is a world in itself, even as Yau’s recurring subjects make appearances, such as painting, cinema, and the interplay of identity and society (“you cannot change history even after it changes you”). Rich in wordplay (“soon to be a major emotional picture”) and contrapuntal juxtapositions (“Tender bellow mortified by fat. Postcard gargoyle in need of a second bath”) these tightly crafted excursions expose the “pauses in leaky silence” and “station changes” with which we “climb into latest examples of a ruined civilization, what we call the present.”

We hope you, too, find pleasure and provocation in these wonderful works.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash

Editors’ Notes (Posit 35)

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Welcome to Posit 35!

It’s a new issue for a new year! This one is very special to us: marking not only Posit’s 10th anniversary, but our chance to welcome Barbara Tomash to our team. We have had the pleasure of working with Barbara before as a contributor – her brilliant poetry can be found in Posit 16, Posit 21, and Posit 31 — and we are honored and delighted for her to join us as a fellow editor.

And what a fantastic issue with which to celebrate! Characterized by both range and cohesion, this collection brings together artists many decades into their careers with others at the very beginning of their journeys, offering challenging work energized by biting social commentary alongside more contemplative poetry and painting, centered on the practice of observation and its restorative profundity. We hope you find the aesthetic conversation generated by their juxtaposition as satisfying and stimulating as we do.

Durell Carter’s poems bring linguistic music and warm-hearted grace to his own unique amalgam of morality tale, sermon, meditation, and blues. These poems reach for harmony, empathy, and stability in a world forever poised to “shift slightly to the left.” Although he feels at “home / anywhere something is at stake,” Carter’s narrators long to “envision the home of all your homes” and maintain “the strength . . . to carry one day to the next” even as they “can still smell the pain that isn’t [theirs].” In these poems, moral instruction comes from the more as well as less enlightened: from a grandma who “was the strongest person alive” to an entitled woman “throwing soul eaters / and verbal iodine / at the man reaching upwards / to God.” With admirable generosity, the narrator makes a point of empathizing with her by reminding himself of “whatever castle I had the audacity / to think was mine,” reminding us that we all need to “become resistant / to spiritual pneumonia.”

The light-hearted pop-culture iconography of Nancy Chunn’s phenomenal works is like sugar coating on chemotherapy, camouflaging as it conveys the challenging medicine our ailing society so direly needs. The scope and coherence of Chunn’s projects are as staggering as their prescience: the works from 1996 and 2001 excerpted here are distressingly apt. The painstaking nature of Chunn’s project is matched by its monumental scope: her series, “Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear” has 500 panels, while “Front Pages 1996” comprises 366 front pages from the New York Times that serve as physical and conceptual grounds for the artist’s graphic and verbal commentary on war, militarism, political corruption, gun violence, climate change, and more. Ultimately, Chunn’s humor sparks more terror than relief, leaving us with the uneasy feeling that the joke might be on us. Although Chicken Little might have been mistaken and her gullible followers fools, we would be fools not to respond to the alarm sounded by these deathly-serious works.

One can no more look away from Robert Feintuch’s paintings than from a miracle — or a shocking impropriety. In dialogue with Philip Guston and Samuel Beckett, Italian frescos and TV cartoons, Feintuch’s work unites and juxtaposes high and low, humor and dread, playfulness and gravitas. He may depict the ethereal pastel blue sky and glorious puffy white clouds of Renaissance paintings, but instead of Michelangelo’s heroically muscled divine Arm endowing Adam with life, Feintuch depicts one that is stick-like and dimpled, stretching down from on high like a rubber band to proffer us a fire bucket — or brandish a punitive cudgel. Instead of Adam’s human perfection, we must face our own embarrassingly exposed, inexorably aging, unglamorous and unglamorized physicality. Feintuch’s existential despair is leavened and sharpened by the witty bemusement of his visual and verbal puns, such as the scattering of tiny and shriveled mineral and anatomical “stones,” his pontificating Pontiff, or the mundane “line” being unglamorously “toed.” But Feintuch’s humor is humane as well as mordant, revealing the truth of our selves to ourselves with a wry, sorrowful, sympathetic grin.

Ed Go’s philosophical exploration of the meaning of words starts with “signifiers” but translates them and weaves a progressive structure of elements as varied and yet intriguing as a bower bird nest: history rewritten to a different timeline, imaginary literary and cultural myths, ideas about religion and the perspective of our own imaginations and memories. In “things that are not interesting and why and also things that are and why not,” Go begins by asking what are the questions that intrigue us, with surprising comparisons: “red rhinoceros is interesting not / because it is red red is not/interesting but because / rhinoceros like sea urchin is— / the ripe flowering fruit / apple pomegranate pear,” bringing these musings back to us and our singular and private imaginations: “the tree that grew in your backyard / whatever tree that is for me.” As the work progresses, witty and wild historical juxtapositions delight: what can we think about the possibility of “cool being birthed in the midst / of mccarthy & new england myths / i saw goody marilyn dancing naked / with the devil! / i saw ozzy osbourne live / in 83?” Go’s work amuses and provokes, but the observations at core remind us, with tenderness, of our humanity: “babies in cuddled bosoms breathing / also start in breath and blood / from tundra crust to overfarmed soil / to bleachers at your high school thing / where once with breath and tonguetips touching.”

Howard Good returns to Posit with five tales of a world terrifyingly out of balance. With restraint, compression, dark humor, and the voice of matter-of-fact reportage, he reveals tragically absurdist realities barely worse than our own. In these worlds, almost like in ours, “families brave oceans in paper boats,” “smoke from distant wildfires blots out the sky,” and “every street is a crime scene, every person both a suspect and a victim.” Worse yet, there, like here, “people [are] walking around … as if nothing terrible is happening” and “none of those responsible will be held liable” despite the crows crying, like this poet, “less as frantic warning and more as bitter recrimination or desolate testimony.”

Brian Henry’s spare and meaningful poems open a vast and quiet expanse to the reader, like standing on a hilltop and surveying a plain where the beauties of the landscape are almost visible but need the experience of a long view to be discerned. These poems, indeed, are so open that the reader can feel they are collaborating in the writing of them. The titles, too, are beautiful and far from explicatory. For instance, what might we find in “The Museum of Two Dimensions?” The inksplash denotes the silence between the line groupings; a necessary pause to explore, and sometimes point out what’s left unsaid: “Out of / an abundance of // *.” The riddling, aphoristic compression of these Koan-like poems is also wonderfully “open at all hours / and on all sides.”

To say John Howard’s poems are ekphrastic is to draw a stick figure of a symphony. The beauty of the imagery is only a part of the moving whole, portrayed first in a prose poem, whose series of unexpected questions begin, “If I said a sparrow was falling, would you look up or down?” and continue as an inquiry into death, culpability, and the evanescence of a life. In “Pyramide de crânes,” Howard responds to a still life of skulls by Paul Cezanne, seeing in these a continuing story, stretching through time. Howard directs us first to the resemblance of the skulls to “ the ancient masonry of the most holy / of trilogies: a mother & father with child,” / “rockpale when painted in ochre tones” then to the “dirt where the first great war dug itself in,” and “must now include the fields between each jaw & collarbone / absent ridges where no instruments can be placed, nor played, no music heard.” Although “we have worn these poems & paintings as robes, & as skin,” this familiarity, Howard reminds us, is, grimly, still part of our present and our future : “… there are always dead leaves to lament / always the wind shouldering so much dread for a future / in which there is no future, always the sounds to remind us / that wheeze & whisper as history, that little cough of bone grown / to an ocean-sized gullet of absence.”

With bespoke forms and sparkling language, Jill Jones’s poems remind us to, as E.M. Forster urged, “only connect.” Their wry tone and dire observations notwithstanding, these are in no small part love poems, addressed not only to an explicit or implicit beloved but to the chaotic rapture of being alive — despite our commercialized, technologically-mediated existence. The alienation of a mall-filled society in which “sirens line the road, plastics become / bedrock, streetview, the grand simulation” and we “loiter with powerpoint loyalty plans / bullet points with mercantile bang-bang” is contrasted with the organic pleasures of the natural world where “an almost-sweet & tangled smell lifts / from flowers, paths, the unknowable air” and “life is handsome, abundantly / strange . . . with every shining loaf / and complicated kiss.”

Burt Kimmelman’s poems celebrate the temporality of the material world to confront the mystery of the eternal. His adherence to formal restraints, such as the three, four, five, and six syllable lines that comprise each of these poems, instantiates his disciplined commitment to evoking “what was left unspoken” without letting the image stray from its concrete referents. His ekphrastic “Three Windows, Two Chairs” is typically faithful to its subject: a painting by Jessie Boswell which is all about people not portrayed within the frame. With deceptive simplicity and masterful grace, Kimmelman’s poem foregrounds human absence by carefully attending to and personifying its non-human presences, such as “a book / [which] lies open for any // breeze,” a tower which “paces the highest ridge,” and “windows [which] picture // the sea and sky as one.” All of these poems reveal the mysterious path by which attention to, and appreciation of “the waters of life, / our visible world” has the power to bring us closer to knowing the “unspoken” “absence” that “must become / of us all.”

In “Marginalia,” William Lessard’s darkly comical pandemic chronicle, the salience of the question, “do we have a plan B?” is demonstrated by the fragmented futility everywhere in evidence. In this Text + Image assemblage, paragraphs of complete, if not logically or narratively sequential sentences are interspersed with graphic panels whose gridded subdivisions call to mind the partitioned isolation of quarantine. Lessard’s monochromatic, self-enclosed cubicles resemble cells or cages in which even the quotidian monotony of “DRINK COFFEE DRINK COFFEE DRINK COFFEE” is walled off from ‘HUMAN RESOURCES” and “STAKEHOLDERS,” and the letters in “LOVE” are partitioned behind bars. Besides the coronavirus’s iconic spiked sphere, his dollar-sign motif suggests the overarching primacy of money — alongside death, brought to mind by somber blocks of solid black. In Lessard’s sardonic vision, we are “joyfully doomed” so long as “selfishness controls the means of production.” Although “now we are working together” on “another word to carry,” it is still “heavy with hatred at its center.” But perhaps there are glimmers of an alternative, such as “Melville in the breath & ripe / with seahorse in the evening.”

The mythical young women in Anna Meister’s poems retain their strength and exuberance in spite of the many calamities visited upon them, including disloyal followers and the Missouri River running dry. Meister’s wordplay is reminiscent of Stein: “give her citrus, citrus feels like / flying. She uses the rinds for / smiles— (there are no / wastelands here),” as are her unexpected turns: “Footstools they chant. // Stairs, they reply,” as well as touches of rhythm and song: “O Love, O Love, O Sweet O Love.” This young poet’s craft and originality are remarkable. In “Dustbowl Dreaming,” “invisible fences split into two-by-five / squares separate us only holding on / by the electricity between our collars.” Even though “we’re all in boxes again and i’m / yelling echo-location, i’m down in the / well! water’s at my ankles and my wrists / are blistered,” the reader can enjoy both the humor and the determination of personas making their way against the odds: “we are the generation of seaweed— / we maintain our shape when plucked for / flower bouquets.”

In her “Field Notes,” the emotional content of Carolyn Oliver’s observed nature that “resents root disturbance, a seed packet warns. In the garden bed where sorrel helped itself, a squirrel skull surfaces, with pinholes for missing teeth” contrasts with the object materiality of cigarette packs, silver trucks in the moonlight, and “headlights (that) smolder inside glassine envelopes.” Oliver notes the inevitable and ubiquitous intertwining of the two: “triumphant maple expels a rusted staple slowly, through eye-level moss and lichen.” The ostensibly journalistic title of this series belies the living breathingness with which she endows nature, but Oliver’s skill is such that we don’t see it. Rather, it feels to the reader “as if we see what the cold allows us to see. As if we are inside the snow. As if we are the cold.” Contrary to actual field notes, people make an oblique but necessary appearance, and a story takes shape in a few lines: “Abiding, a girl with green hair stands against a fresh gale.” “What is living? he asks at bedtime. (Only ever at bedtime.) What does this all mean? I feel that something is missing in my life.” But above all, Oliver’s images “follow a forked-tongue swallow-tail to a gold corner above the door to the cerulean house” and observances “like flexing knuckles, mornings straighten or crook back” richly reward the reader in a way that simple field notes can never do.

In “Six Poems from T O D A Y,” Stephen Ratcliffe’s project of daily poems might be called an observance in both the visual and ritual sense. The form, four daily sections of two lines each, is both a visual record taken from a single vantage point, and a work that deviates according to author’s choice. Like a ghazal, some lines and phrases change places. And as in any view, there are details that remain the same and others that change: the weather, the birds. Because of the form and the repetition, Ratcliffe’s “grey whiteness of fog,” “yellow and blue bed,” and “green leaves” take on a visual rhythm that almost transmutes the poems into paintings. The repetition of the same view is both hypnotic and compelling. Obviously, small changes are one contrast that makes this happen: “2 quails landing next to seeds on table below fence” becoming “4 pelicans flapping across horizon towards point.” But into this continuous painting (which could be called film, although it feels more fantastical) Ratcliffe adds statements/instructions that are impossible, ephemeral, and strangely attractive: “following cypress as subject in landscape translate sky color to language of long thin lines left blank;” “describe a certain grey of something or other visual element two straight lines equal or unequal length.” At the same time personal, locational, and universal, Ratcliffe puts into words the experience of time passing in a set of prayers in praise of the joining of the natural world and the human spirit.

Pablo Saborío’s poems sing with music and meaning, burning with “the fire / that only a human mouth // can ignite into language.” With stunning economy, his mellifluous words create worlds as intriguingly strange as they are resonantly familiar. Each of these poems is like a “house [that] hosts / an ecosystem of desires.” These poems of heart, hope, and subtle ideation expect the reader to be “writing / this by reading this” even as we embrace “uncertainty / as a tangible thing: // more actual than the mist / that blurs the horizon / after your thoughts arise.”

With nimble humor and a devastatingly sharp point, Jerome Sala skewers the vapidity of contemporary capitalist culture. The flattering mists of memory have no place in these wickedly funny poems, which gleefully dash any illusions we might hope to cherish for the superiority of some imagined alternative to the vulgar venality of “game show proletarians.” Neither one’s own “ethnic roots;” a French variation of Family Feud; the contemporary “art house crowd;” or last century’s asymmetrically-clad bohemians “heckling Diaghilev’s “decadent” Cleopatra” show any interest in rising above the lure of superheroes or “a brand new red car” to embrace aesthetic challenge. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose comes to mind as one savors these trenchant verses.

John Walker’s use of color, pattern and motif straddles the border between abstraction, symbology, and representation, referencing the landscape of coastal Maine as he carries on a dialogue with Matisse, Constable, and Australian Aboriginal bark painting. With the uncanny suggestiveness of asemic writing, his totemic canvases are like missives, bearing coherent if inexplicit messages to the viewer’s subconscious. A recurring fluid, rising dual shape brings to mind water currents as well as parted hair, wings (of bird or angel), and even Cezanne’s Montaigne Ste.-Victoire. Other recurring shapes suggest buoys, traps, shells, and pendant weights. Walker’s intense palette of cobalt and other blues, grounded and lined by cream, white, and black, evokes the awesome volatility of the sea and its dominion over nautical working life – not only fishing but painting. This is masterful work that reminds us of painting’s continuing potential for aesthetic pleasure at its most profound.

Thank you for reading!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 34)

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Welcome to Posit 34!

The singularly powerful literature and art in this issue challenges conventional dualities of appropriate and inappropriate, beautiful and unbeautiful – as well as the props of avoidance and aversion on which they lean. These ingenious and accomplished artists and writers find the through-line from body to beauty by celebrating the glory of unglorified physicality. It is a privilege and a pleasure to offer works of courage, conviction and love that are as profound as they are liberating.

What happens when a terrifically charismatic personage walks into a room? Galen Cheney’s dynamic paintings are that personage. These large and intricate abstractions of color and energy combine past with present as the artist reuses, rediscovers and recombines materials from past works to make new and exciting compositions. Her life-long interest in graffiti and other works that show the hand of the artist is reflected in the exhilarating movement and sure and brilliant color work in these passionate pieces. Her process involves collage, “fragments and strips of paintings that I have ripped or cut up” woven and painted into new compositions with a seize-the-day attitude that reminds us, as she says, “there is no time to make anything that is not true.”

Derek Coulombe’s musical and wildly imaginative ekphrastic poems are an exuberant and pointedly unglorified celebration of materiality. The graphic detail of his poetic reportage challenges standard notions of nature and artifice, beauty and disgust. Umberto Boccioni’s bronze sculptures (among other influences) come joyously to life in a very bronze way: “Three bronze-all-the-way-through runners running at speed under heavy sun and all atop these extremely green lawns. Bronze-all-the-way-through means bronze outers and bronze inners, bronze skin, blood, mucus, bronzy organs, bronze lungs blowing in and out all heavy under all the running, bronze colon moves bronze stool, and bronze urine comes out wet in bronze jets.” Coulombe invents a surprising, almost exhilarating moment in imaginary time: shrieking bronze runners “running heavy beneath a smiling and hot sunshine smile widely too, all three smile with smiles of bronze too, big and wide, toothy, with bronze tongues, bronze teeth and gums, and all with shrieks ringing out and upwards always.” To go further, some of the sculptures are torsoless, “and so every low roundness of every soft bronze part is a sort of smiling line, a big torsoless grin from all the hard running parts and all three times over.” Coulombe, too, details the bronze “meatuses” and “feces, mucus, spittle, wax;” in short, every anatomical organ and its concurrent actions and reactions that are strangely, yet familiarly, human. This delightful and joyous tour-de-force all takes place “under the big warmth of the sun and the kind color of the powdered blue sky.”

The queerness of Steve DeFrank’s painting defies assimilation into the stale dichotomies of conventional aesthetics in favor of a joyful and ambitious syncretism. With their orifices flowering, melting, and exploding in cartoon shapes, toy-like textures, and colors reminiscent of neon, play-dough, and bubblegum, these works combine the irreverent humor of a Shakespearian fool with a surrealistic visual vocabulary reminiscent of Dali’s dripping clocks and a graphic eroticism that brings to mind O’Keefe’s flowering genitalia. This is joyful work that challenges received ideas of beauty and humor with graceful and accomplished painterly technique.

The aural, visual, and conceptual elements of Jared Fagen’s poems operate in concert. His short, frequently one-word lines are austere in their spareness yet breathlessly urgent, enacting, in the poet’s words, “delay, deferral, suddenness, and respiratory performance” in order to reach and utter “the essential.” The “lapidary lilt” of Fagen’s prosody not only offers “a viaduct / to an / interior” via an “aria / of waves” but it operates on a visual level as well: these long, narrow poems lead the reader’s eye headlong down the (virtual) page like plumblines searching the metaphysical depths. Engaging the multiplicity (or non-existence) of identity, art’s quest for “agape” and “Tarkovsky’s gold,” and the ineluctable pre-eminence of time (“we lose / to what passes” until “we / shatter abruptly”) — these chiseled verses decline facile notions of closure with disciplined attention.

Thomas Fink’s “Yinglish Strophes” invoke the back-and-forth flow of the ancient Greek chorus to and from a point of origin to enact a dialogue with the poet’s immigrant roots. The “yinglish” of these poems channels the wry irreverence and blunt, evaluative stance of their Yiddish-speaking narrators, capturing the tension between the Old and New Country generations with humor but not condescension — or romanticization. These verses capture the economy and inspiration of their speakers’ admonitions, despite and because of their imperfect grasp of their adopted tongue: “Is brisket / shopping this?” captures every ogled woman’s sentiment in four words as efficiently as “[f]inds / the take with the / give” captures a realistic attitude towards marriage. These narrators may be dispensing advice in a new world, but their old world wisdom is clearly applicable, whether it be to love or politics, social trends or the manipulations of our market system (“would fib lots stores / from label truth”), poetry (“[t]o make / a living doesn’t flow // that river”), or popular culture. With unmistakable fondness and a poet’s ear, these verses take up the challenge: “Why not / of your origin be civil?”

Maxwell Gontarek’s intricate vision reacts to Vallejo and Lorca, language and “the stippling of science” through “lattices” that explore the idea of envelopes, and question what “envelopes” us, including history and politics, guns and antelopes; a history of the Americas where “my godmother worked at the envelope factory for 50 years + she still wakes up at 3:00 AM / you asked if she liked it I said I didn’t think it crossed her mind.” In this poet’s clear-eyed view, we may be living in “a hemisphere that is actually an envelope.” And Gontarek says outright what all poets sometimes think: that even “after the revolutionists stop for orangeade / . . . the most your poem can do to support a movement is to give someone a papercut.” Thankfully, Gontarek perseveres, giving us verses that show us hidden layers of the world we live in, slightly askew and loved: “It is such a cool night / No matter what our heads will remain cow-shaped and we will try not to tip.”

Jessica Grim looks through a green lens, sometimes dark, always compassionate, at our relationship with language, the natural world, and ultimately ourselves. We have little real control and sometimes great sadness: “west of here where / sun rises later you / could weep for the dark / compression of your thoughts.” Grim suggests we share this kinship with nature: “tiny bird / dislodging dessicated / leaves from the / smallest branch // as might become / a past we / have little relation to / outside / of having lived it.” Our own lived experience is narrow, but the vastness of our unknowing is compensated by this realization, and in unlooked for, unexpected joy: “Sky through shades / of green / defining color / screed / as it finally wanders into song.”

Heikki Huotari’s prose poems interweave internal references as well as concepts from science, mythology, philosophy, contemporary politics, and popular culture. Individually and as a group, these poems highlight the absurd yet melodious music of existence. At the same time, these “flights of fancy seek to serve.” With erudition, grace, and humor, they offer an incisive commentary on the complexities and contradictions of our lives. This work is concerned with the relationship between reality and our account of it, in which “reality is flowing and reality is ebbing on an oblique mile-wide boundary of misinformation,” and “what one knows with 90% certainty is 95% cliché.” Facing such a mismatch with our shibboleths, the speaker is sensible to “jealously . . . guard my wave state,” even as he undertakes to “sing the feedback loop into existence.”

In R.J. Lambert’s alchemical ekphrastic poems, the work of an unknown artist is addressed in the language of art criticism reminiscent of the 19th century writing of John Ruskin. But it’s as if Ruskin has been transported to a strange new realm where the membrane between poetry and art is transcended: “The draw of broken art, domi—— / The vitality. His p—— / his color—transcen——.” The work itself transforms during the course of the poem to an ecstatic and unexpected embodiment: “Minor color, L’art ancien / reports no brown ink. / Also, a mixture closer / to feathered time / which, in print / the bodily structure reveals.” The poet asks us to reflect on these marvels induced by art (“The future’s graphic/drawing of drawings / impacts the personal”) with sober joy, even wonder: “An artist playing artist, / filling out the forms / All of this is mine? / Even the cobwebbed moth / Even the flattened lizard.”

Brendan Lorber’s militant poems about the “not normal times” of the pandemic train a sharp eye and attentive ear on the exploitive underlying logic of capitalism, which makes us hope “that the economy / might not be totally over . . . despite / only ever having been a chasm we participate in by screaming.” The distress informing Lorber’s verses is balanced by the spirit of resistance animating his witty but urgent warning against the “oligarchs’ dark arts” tricking us into “driving [ourselves] down / a boulevard of faschy schemes.” These poems offer a wake-up call against the “self-lethality” of complicity. “Like someone full of sparkle in the form of batteries / and marbles they ought not to have swallowed,” we are urged not to surrender to the dominant narrative and let “ulterior neglect” become “a principle come to life within its victims.”

Suzanne Maxson’s poems are full-throated celebrations of life, even as they cast an unflinching eye on the artist’s struggle to “savor / life on two feet” and access “the catalog we call myself” after devastating damage to “those / neural threads where in the pons perception, attention, / and memory entangle.” Astoundingly, these poems find meaning even at the moment of loss: while a stroke renders “the air a bright translucent dimensional density / of motion,” the speaker finds herself “distracted and absorbed / by every beauty even in the form and utility / of that green plastic hospital mug.” These poems celebrate “the visible the tangible and the intangible / . . . this impermanent placement on the ground / called home” — the “sufficiency of beauty and feeling” of “what is.” Although “the day is only white noise / to which we dance a jerky jig // while above the birds that day / pours into itself as night,” Maxson proves that “everything is all right . . . even in the unjust / and violent world unfurling always into / chaos” because everywhere there is beauty to be found, if we know how to look: in those birds and that jig, in Rothko’s silence and Frankenthaler’s “fifty-one colors,” in a Welsh farmer’s “broken / brown teeth” and a mother calling “out to my children / Here I am for you, imperfect / but present,” and above all, in these powerful elegies to the gift of existence.

Mikey Swanberg’s poems can make you cry. They are full of humility, joy, and love serendipitously found in the details of the dailiness of life. “I knew I knew nothing / The dog of kindness / pressed her paw hard / on my hip / Wild blackberries / scratched the shit / out of my arms, but later / I couldn’t find a mark.” There’s a Frank O’Hara spontaneity and sweetness to these poems: “did birds once fly in and out of you / or was that me.” Swanberg has abundant love for the past in all of us: “my god I liked to stay up late / in the kitchen talking shit / being sweet and noisy / in those blue cat hours,” and old loves are not forgotten: “I’ve been wearing as a winter coat / what someone I love once said to me.” Along with love and life, these poems celebrate art, including poetry: “only half of the calls the birds make come with a purpose / the experts all agree / that they just really like to sing.”

Ken Taylor’s richly allusive poems combine echoes of Benjamin’s aesthetic theory, the nostalgic Americana of Western player pianos and tintypes, and Tintoretto’s “gay” depiction of Maundy Thursday, with a more personal evocation of the unsatisfying fragility of modern life, especially during the pandemic, “when the calendars quit” and “the sun rose and fell but nothing advanced.” Taylor exposes a hollow repetitiveness underlying the tales we tell ourselves, “framed as a constant stickup,” and the need to believe otherwise, “tightly bound in the chords of a pitched belief that i’d escape the lassoing abyss.” But he also celebrates defiance of stale norms, suggesting an overlap between the Holy Trinity and an anonymous, nonbinary protagonist, X (“the many unfolding as one”) who wants “to say what it is not what it means,” and “aims to make fibrous smooth — / returning to the grid of viscous promise” in the hopes of “moving closer to a feast they can almost taste.”

Kukuli Velarde’s ceramic sculptures contain multitudes and span millennia. With fertile imagination and impressive technique, she undertakes an ambitious investigation of, in the artist’s own words, “aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance . . . revolv[ing] around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture.” These works bring humor, anger, love, joie de vivre, and aesthetic pleasure to the complexities of “colonization and coloniality, contemporary history, social injustice and racism” – capturing and exploring colonialism’s generative as well as destructive impact on aesthetic expression. Velarde combines indigenous and Christian, ancient and contemporary iconographies to invent an oeuvre as organically rooted as it is original.

Mary Wilson blends lyrical images with a stunning and sensitive clarity about our response to the political and natural world. “It’s raining in the news / a storm or congress of box / jellies on the artificial reef / where some “they” sank / ships, planes and concrete.” In striking metaphors, Wilson notes some machine-like qualities in us, “Before the house stands a small girl / whose face, obscured in the rubble of / the foreground has been blurred / by some precision. It’s like, “look / here, you’re a tense lens mounted / to a vehicle.” Behind these original and somewhat disconcerting perceptions where “we get the very weight of looking,” there’s a deep understanding of who we are and what we could be, “[w]hen at last we’re hopeful / Secure from our want.”

We hope you enjoy these as much as we have!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editor’s Notes (Posit 33)

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Hello, and welcome to the Spring, 2023 issue of Posit! In keeping with the season, this issue is alive with generative intensity. The work collected here manages, like alchemy, “to mix / transformation into transformation” until “from lead: gold’s blood // pulses” and “sequence becomes epiphany” (Elizabeth Robinson, “The Voynich Manuscript”). These accomplished and provocative pieces derive their energy from the determination to transform surprise into recognition, mystery into insight, and suffering into resolve. It is a pleasure and an honor to present innovative literature and art that can engage the pain and puzzlement of our lives with such grace and depth.

Carrie Bennett’s powerful poems move from descriptions of familiar objects and daily tasks to the deep secrets of our fears, our histories, and their embedment in our bodies. We “want words to grow into something / green with leaves and it is never so easy / for the wound to close. / When I say rain is it the sound / of a chainsaw or how a father can drink / until his eyes are lost in his face?” But, as painful as it is to be alive when “[e]ach house is encased in its own danger,” there is always more to uncover: “[a]ny moment can be a pointed flashlight.” A poem considering the difference between poetry generated by men and women ends up comparing poetry to life and exposing the gap: “my body isn’t a leaf or a thought though it did make another body,” one that “is full of milk and shit and spit-up.” Reality may be “nothing like an idea of something else,” but we need poetry like this to bring the idea to life.

Zoe Darsee’s intricate poetry builds and dismantles structures in our lives, both actual and emotional. The structure of the poems themselves models the emotional experience, beginning as a bleak observation, and building to a spiritual plane, as if the object has ignited the emotion. In “House of Dandelion,” the description of a house starts with the impossibility of description: the house is gone. But it’s not just the house, lies and promises are at stake: “To promise described house, let it quiver in mouth like frame of word. // If I have ever once lied, describe promised house I said to you.” As the poem progresses, the narrator describes another impossibility, a place where they are “trapped, in which I describe myself with the vocabulary of a construction site.” The end of the poem finally names the problem: “To describe said house is to trap a lie in four or more walls.” Another poem, slyly titled “This is not about you, love, or your bride,” contains a poem within a poem, and begins with actual disaster: “There’s a house on fire in the avenue.” Loss, of place, love, and life take the breath away, but the narrator reads the mind of the lover: “You love the tree because it breathes opposite air. You think, the tree is all that is left of me. . . // There’s truth and then there’s tree.”

Jasper Glen’s poems apply a unique and muscular lyricism to grapple with the ‘watershed’ between artifice and nature, whether embodied by poetry as opposed to “its / Absence, all earth and forgettable body,” or a florist’s attempt to “replicate an outcrop reaching natural capability” with a “fine mirage” as opposed to the “[i]intoxicating green complex” of a “[v]eridical / coniferous / rainforest.” Cartesian doubt (“If not at the skin does speculation end / Somewhere?”) and psychic pain (“But if the body is practice, / Do I love this place?”) lend breadth as well as depth to Glen’s quest to “[h]ave an open focus,” “[f]orget the body,” and “spar in a dark field” for poetry.

Kylie Hough returns to Posit with three prose poems about the dark side of conventionality and the falsity with which it represents itself with “[a] kiss, a hug, a dozen lies swallowed.” In these satirical, bracingly painful poems, the “monotony rampant in the suburbs” is contrasted with the “Disney endings” and “castles made from yellow bricks” that might make “high school sweethearts” expect “all we hoped for. Except it’s not.” Instead, the narrator entrapped by these false narratives is “an unrealised nobody moulded from midnight,” for whom “freedom looks like walking fully clothed into salted black water.” The angst at the heart of these pieces insures that Hough’s prose is “not akin to some field trip to the zoo. No, this is warfare. This is sculpting a tin man with gloved hands.” Her penetrating wit and pitch-perfect pacing not only confer meaning, but offer the possibility of a better alternative to the wasteland they confront.

In keeping with Jane Kent’s practice of layering her compositions from a foundation of what she calls “bland forms” in order to “uncover the oddness,” the prints featured in this issue take mirrors, frames, and windows as points of departure from which to explore the nature of reflection. These works cast light on the notion of “reflection” in multiple senses: not only the self-consideration of any self/viewer, or the self-reflectivity of the artist contemplating her own practice and its constituent elements like light, color, and the nature of the frame, but the contemplative thought inspired by these bold, pared-down, almost sculptural illuminations of the liminal zone between representation and abstraction. Just as mirroring entails alteration and reversal, these works invite the viewer to reverse the artist’s exploratory process, probing the deceptive simplicity of their graphic power to unpeel their layers of implication and insight. Even Kent’s transformation of reflected light into bands of solid, almost metallic-seeming color is a comment upon the transformative nature of the act of looking – a truth whose relevance extends from the human psyche to the building blocks of matter itself.

Returning to Posit with works of deceptive Dickinsonian simplicity, Kevin McLellan displays wit and pathos simultaneously in these new poems. Honest about himself, that to be “tired of /my own / company / also means / a deficit,” and that he might “kick-in / my defenses /so i don’t / hear / the good / explanation,” McLellan is no less blunt about his relationship with language: “more / truth / in hyphens / in / emphases: /please / let them / be.” There’s an intrinsic deepening of each observation, as cryptic as they may be. The very sparsity of language in these one- and two-word lines integrates silence, as well as one of their preoccupations, solitude, into their fabric. McLellan’s wry takes on the hard, sad things we discover/remember about others, and all too often, about ourselves, resonate. “[N]ot the same/people—were we?” “so now / the climb / must happen / again.”

David James Miller’s “Burn Accord” flows with tidal rhythms and the rhythms of breathing, combining elements of sea, sky and fire into a wondrous if “indistinct” whole. But what is indistinct? Images of light and dark in a controlled burn have the import of a vision. The elements exchange and re-exchange to become “an evening psalmic / accord a listening light” and remind us how even “an indistinct sign night / can articulate(s) in listening.” In a recurring lyrical field of language, Miller’s poem moves “as sea become grasses an un / knowing breath calls into / manifest shadows mnemic.” It’s as if we are standing on a vast hill in the night, listening, watching, both remembering earth’s history and experiencing it as “a horizon evening empties / of listening” and “become(s) skies.”

Pat Nolan’s poetry juggles the Gorgiasian conviction that “nothing exists” with what “Heraclitus reminds:” that “in the end all I can do is point / at the way things are.” Ranging in their inquiry from the nature and purpose of poetry itself (including “the poetry memo of poetry // “abbreviate” ) to the delicate everyday glory of “the steady glazing rain’s / constant splash murmur[ing] at the eaves” or the “setting sun’s rich / light buttering / an upturned face,” to the “fine white grains of information” that make up everything in a universe in which “information is physical” and the physical is information, Nolan’s “surprising / tangents and keen insights” offer “a travel in time” narrated by a dedicated, supremely thoughtful observer searching for meaning in the “incipient enigma” of existence.

Elizabeth Robinson returns to Posit with a transformative ‘translation’ of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, accompanied by original illustrations of its notorious asemic “script that will bear no translation.” These haunting verses make us believe in a magical book of origin written by “[w]e women with our tiny, upright nipples” that both explains the document’s imagined content and interweaves it with images of the manuscript as a made thing, yet one that we inhabit. Thus, after a history of “page after page of bloodletting and vowels” in a “[s]equence wandering without shoes, then without feet / To renege on delirium,” we find that “s]orcery says / what we shall never understand can, at least / be beautiful.” But the authors of this quasi-religious history/tale (which is very like the structure of the earliest histories in English) maintain that “[s]urely no evil can attend when magic / cannot be attributed to any source / that evil is only a salutation, a spell / in preparation” — a miracle most devoutly to be wished for our world as well as for this delightfully depicted one.

Jeanne Silverthorne’s sculpture concretizes her engagement with the impenetrable mystery at the core of the physical world, both animate and inanimate, organic and synthetic — dichotomies which are challenged and undermined by this provocative and playful work. With wry humor and deadly seriousness, Silverthorne’s sculptures devise concrete and tactile expression of the abstract, the subconscious, and the ineffable. Her spare, almost minimalistic depictions of humble, quotidian subjects like tennis shoes and wood planks, children’s books and bubble wrap, office chairs and dollies, plumb the depths of the psyche and the existential questions at the heart of mortality. For instance, Silverthorne reconstructs that almost trivializing icon of the unknown, the question mark, making it literally weighty and impossible to ignore, despite our laughable attempts to subdue it beneath layers of bubble wrap, or suspended from a meat hook. Challenging the viewer to contemplate the fleeting nature of the physical and the murky depths of the psyche (that is, to confront the known-unknown), Silverthorne, in the artist’s own description of Louise Bourgeois, “wants to rip off the lid of latency under which art boils and steams,” whose “desublimation, an art of personal risk, offers raw power as a way out of the present deadlocked, postformal situation,” using “drama or theatricality,” “viscerality,” and “startling juxtaposition” to disturbing and profound effect.

Grace Smith’s writing captures the tragicomedy of the human condition with both empathy and irony, mining the liminal zone in which sorrow and humor, disappointment and appreciation mingle. Smith’s language is as surprising in its formulations and juxtapositions as it is spare and direct, leaving much of the crux of the matter to emerge from the unspoken: that reality is “Sadder and Deeper” for all of us struggling to reconcile what we find and lose with what we hope for, the “new / Lives” planned while drinking “a 5 PM can in the shower.” The deep sadness in these works is warmed by admiration for the heart and grace of those with the courage to keep trying, like the people who “have a bright pail of blood balanced on / the air above them, always about to topple . . . [who] laugh so easily,” or the homeowner able to admire the family home being taken by the city, whose “beautiful eyes . . . were gold like fall and trying.”

Jeneva Burroughs Stone’s advocacy and personal experience with disability informs, but does not limit, the scope and depth of her poetry. The poems featured in this issue grapple with the nature of mortality and the intense drive for knowledge. “Rapture” reacts to a child’s photograph to mourn the fragility of life, in which “[b]reath, a fabric washed too many times, wears thin” and “[e]verything evaporates.” “MRI” evokes the ability of medical science to concretize the “imagistic jazz” and “dark areas, danger zones” of a son’s brain condition which the mother already knows all too well: “[m]y anticipation . . . itself a form of knowledge.” And “Numinous” wrestles with the relationship between divinity and scientific truth, the “clean clear talk of mathematics” and the “body of eternity encoded like a closed door. I, too, want to knock and come in.”

David Storey creates self-contained worlds that stand apart from what we know, or think we know, of our own exteriorities and interiorities, even as they echo with its resonances. This work makes a persuasive case for the abandonment of common distinctions between the abstract and the representational, the observed and the imagined, the mechanical and the biomorphic, the animal and the human. Semi-abstract forms weave in and out of these paintings; design tropes that are as simple as they are irreducible to any one referent, be they scissors, surgical clamps, or eyeglasses (“Regulator”); fish or visors (“Big Sunset”); dragonfly wings or leaves (“Revolver”); fingers or tentacles (“Aquapiper”). These works offer a mind-opening sense of possibility: post-reality worlds in which physical and perceptual boundaries are transcended, making new forms of flowering — and mutuality — possible. Storey’s sharply delineated forms in bold, complementary, primary colors depict an energetic coexistence of opposites. Their complex layering creates the impression of multiple two-dimensional planes clamoring for the foreground. But the energy of their competition suggests an effusion of exuberance rather than aggression. The viewer is tempted, like Jack in the fairytale, to climb the “Ladder” of Storey’s proto-beanstalks and explore these alternative worlds, to encounter his wondrous beings firsthand, and perhaps even learn a thing or two about how to collectively thrive.

In Myles Taylor’s beautifully observed poems, different personae address our complicity in navigating the complexity of modern life: the skill and grace of the labor we take for granted, the forced secrecy of some lives, and the way we try to subsume sorrow in getting and spending. In “Unskilled Labor,” we are asked to notice how “the house painter’s pants /match every few buildings he passes, as if the city / were trying to copy them.” We observe behind the scenes at a restaurant, where “[i]t looks nothing short of telepathy, the slide / through narrow spaces like wrong sides of magnets” by “unskilled” laborers who also “has(have) a paper / to write, who’s playing a show later, who was up / until 4 am at their other job.” With justifiable pride, the narrator declares: “I only dream of labor if I can make it beautiful, / so I slice every scallion like a gift-wrap ribbon,” challenging the privilege and emptiness of consumerism: “What do you do? You take. / And you hold what you take. What a skill, / being handed things.” “Ode to the Mirror” exposes the pain of having to hide: “I take selfies in bathrooms / I could die in and keep doing / my makeup on the train. I have to limit my futures / based on where the corners/are darkest. / No one can see me because no one is looking. / But you.” And in a reminder of the line between wanting and having, the Patron Saint of Retail mourns: “the people flock to me / like a possession / could hold their grief for them.”

Nam Tran has gleaned old biographies and science books to make found poems that mirror the human psyche. The yellowed pages and the fonts themselves indicate the age of his source materials, as well as the language and syntax; but Tran has mined these works to match contemporary thought. These Zen-like aphoristic observations of “the restless waters of babble” bring to mind John Cage’s brilliant musical experiments with listening and attention. In “Primal,” selections from a chapter on How Animals Develop cleverly take the “im” in “animals” to turn the direction from a so-called objective view of other species to something very personal: “I’m an animal constantly on the move, running, breathing, catching food, eating it and so on.” And in “Child Memories,” we find an inspired conundrum about the nature of both childhood and courage: “the importance of heroism was hand delivered neatly to me in a half-whisper.”

Thank you so much for being here!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 32)

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Welcome to Posit 32! Depth and moral courage inform the formal and substantive genius of the poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and collage gathered here. This is art and literature that grapples with the current state of our selves and our world: the countless ways our possibilities for living are impacted by the pandemic and the abuses we wreak upon the planet and each other — while also exploring timeless human preoccupations such as beauty and desire, aging and loss: the “inevitable / And irresistant. Ubiquitous and sacred” (Andrew Levy, “Nicked”). Here is art that “renounces renunciation” (Laura Moriarty, “Which Walks 5”) to demonstrate the “embracing // moveableness in holding on still” (Rahana K. Ismail, “Burn on my Mother’s Forearm”) — shaped with a passion for the stuff of its own making, including “words . . . like plums in the mouth—plums spirit will never share” (Dennis Hinrichsen, “[readymade] [With iPhone in It and Two or Three Plums]”).

With their elaborate agglomerations of shape, color, and texture, Ron Baron’s vases fashion beauty and vitality from sorrow and loss. Assembling remnants of discarded household objects into vessels whose curvaceous contours and expressive handles strongly suggest the human figure, Baron celebrates the resilience of the human spirit. Standing tall and proud with their ‘hands’ on their hips, these figures are survivors, emerging from adversity to confront the future. At once exuberant and touching, these works speak to the potential of damage to generate the forward-looking self. These unities assembled from mementos of individual loss are also testaments to collective perseverance, with special resonance for our atomized isolation in the early days of the pandemic, when the series was conceived.

Michael Brosnan returns to Posit with a suite of elegantly crafted poems confronting the challenge of meaning-making when “[y]ou and I, we are here for a spell. / And we need to speak honestly” – and, to be honest, “our story is in tatters.” As cleverly structured as they are direct and plain-spoken, these poems deftly and probingly enact what they address, applying a disciplined practice of attention to the humble stuff of dailiness, “seeking new possibilities / in a small illusion with unambiguous lines” in order to come to terms with the fact that “we sip from words that sound like glory, / then rest on eternity’s pouty lip.”

C Culbertson’s poems create a magical space where body and intellect, emotion and abstraction commingle and sing. Culbertson’s enigmatic, sonorous formulations are as haunting as they are elusive. This gifted poet’s “thrown fragments, gathering what lush silences” manage to be at once rich and spare in an “attempt at articulating the attempt, not so much in discontinuities but // startling constants, infinite // palpable bitter its indulgent // sighs but still brackish, & / tender / heat.” “Inclined to embrace the sensuous agonies of the world,” Culbertson’s intrepid verses “trace an intensity” whose “reverberations of affect echo” in the heart and mind of the reader.

Elisabeth Adwin Edwards perfectly observes and renders the extraordinary/ordinary moments we all experience, and the questions and realizations they engender. Roaming in CVS for the obligatory 15 minutes after a Covid vaccination, she notes all the reminders of how we are limited by our capitalist consumption and its personal cost: “How many / gradations of gray / eyeliner all // the shades / of a depression,“ as well as the cost for our planet: “You say Someone //could build a raft /from these pallets/ of bottled water // if they drank the bottles first.” Then, in the face of personal loss, the stray bits of knowledge that we come across take on new meaning. We “learn that the tissues of ankles are the softest part of a body. How fragile the seams holding us together, how easily we come apart.” Even when mourning, the body reminds us, or we remind the body, that we still live: “At home I masturbate using those shorn and throbbing fingertips, the ones on my left hand, because coming means I’m alive. I’m doing everything I can to stay in this body.”

Sean Ennis’s almost-hopeful, witty but painful story of a narrator trying to cope with his partner’s mental health and his own insecurities works on several levels. In a conversation ostensibly about movies, “Grace and I talked about the type of story we’d like to see told.” Since “[t]here are, of course, multiple frameworks available to choose from,” the reader is treated to a story about the characters, but also about the act of writing itself. Everything in the marvelously unpredictable movement of this narration is tentative: the flowers that were not planted, the narrator’s struggle to make a living (“I’m becoming more non-profit”), the not-so-good meals he cooks, the “tiptoes on a sticky floor.” Ennis cleverly uses language to both shape the story and to show how language changes us as we think it, as well as how it could change us, if we’d let it: “It was a new day, but fragile!”

In poems that juggle and encompass magical shifts of time and perception, Peter Gurnis weaves the history of a place and time into the here and now, even as his narrator claims to tell time by the living detail: “I pay attention to lilacs, and such-like native fruit. / I pay attention to the birds.” In these poems grounded in a seemingly mundane domestic life, going to the post office, sitting at home, and even a simple walk engender questions of marvelous transformation. “What if you could only think of the name for a river by going on a walk? What if you could only think about a river by falling into sleep?” Gurnis’s narrator becomes absorbed into the language and events of the past, invoking Henry (Thoreau?) and further back, Increase Mather. He recounts memories and dark events: “a handful of feathers coming out of a loving mouth,” a child who “coughed up a handful of soot,” as well as “Invisible Furies” like “the Capitalist . . . or an indefatigable lynx,” but “This is but a speculation.” Yet, what happens in the brain also happens, doesn’t it? “For example, once / I saw a tanager being eaten by a hawk. And in the evening, he nailed /on the wall: / a landscape of greenish yellow, dark blues and black. / While his wife watched from a chair. / And the cat slept.”

Sue Havens’s ceramic sculptures have an almost icon-like presence. These are shapes that stay in the memory, in rich and various patterns and colors reminiscent of beautiful sea creatures like the nudibranch or different species of coral. Finding inspiration in such sources as thrift-store finds, miniature golf architecture, kilim rugs and tree bark, to name a few, Havens creates sculpted and drawn environments that incorporate layering, tactility, and the accidental. Havens is seduced by the world in its myriad forms and textures and her work offers the viewer a kaleidoscopic record of this world, so that, as she says, “content might be remembered, discovered, and felt.”

Dennis Hindrichsen’s pure honesty and explicit eye detail the brutality of loneliness and growing older, as well as our sure knowledge that we are destroying the planet, “besieged by end times // a toxic forever chemical feeling” in which “I am sarcophagus // but I don’t worry the half-life because they are better than plutonium and Jesus—the fluoropolymers—they do not break down // I ingest by pan (dearest Teflon™) // by clothing and pizza box” while exploiting people: “shirt Sri Lankan—pants Vietnamese—//the one or two women/from among the millions toiling on my behalf//muttering names under their/breath—harsh//names—mine again—their sweat and tears/falling into the fabrics (I love buying shirts).” We may say we love the planet, although it doesn’t seem to stop us from our shallow pursuits. Yet these poems also celebrate desire, “the substrate vector—why / deny it,” and the moments when love strips away our façade, as, for instance, for “a friend I love—he is failing— /death is in him like a leaf—or paddle into a river—/one heron angling crosswise. //He saw this once—shallows to deeper shallows— /and was moved by it—//and so I will pause here now (hearing voices) (reliving joy)—/obliterating all my coolness.”

In language heady with compassion and love, Rahana K. Ismail’s lyrical visual images of daily life and the natural world speak to the profound connection of the physical and metaphysical. In “Burns on My Mother’s Forearm,” “[a] moth alights on the clabbered cloudlet skin. / Brown sleep sprawled on wings, an embracing //movableness in holding on still, a cotton-woolled /confession smudging the edges…” And in “Crochet,” a troubled girl is set a frustrating task: “Having the amaranth yarn make the first hole is to open another hole another /hole another hole,” which becomes a moving meditation on loss and the learning of it. “Carrying loss is to open loss like a package: a snarl of yarn or a window you climb over/ when the bars fall away, the room you hear the ill /-oiled swing of a sewing machine, / the foot treadle groaning a rust-ridden elegy. To be unable to search for my sea-glass / quietude in the red-oxide drone.”

Jean Kane’s prose poems consider the limitations and possibilities of autonomy under existential threat. Cryptic and compressed to the point of codification, Kane’s potent, razor-sharp prose is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s virtuosic linguistic and conceptual puzzles. Evoking the emotional complexity of a father’s transition to death and a “Skewed History” of abortifacients as instruments of free will, these dense works are bookended by a meditation on the anxious vulnerability of being the “Unmasked” prey of human and virus alike, and a fantasy of what it might mean to “Unclench” and “soothe [the] knots” of the constraints of personal identity itself. Like two sides of the same coin, “Unclench” and “Unmasked Hours” evoke self-exposure’s potential for anxiety or liberation – to suffer “pit panic” or to “float walking under a bank of air,” “open and open without expulsion into the blue over bare trees.”

Francesco Levato’s fascinating combination of glitch technique and erasure strikingly portrays the social isolation of our attempts to cope with Covid and the disruption of the psyche the pandemic has caused. Words selected from pages of Jack London’s novel The Scarlet Plague reiterate our fear of death, while the distorted objects themselves, as well as the fractured movement in the glitching process, symbolize a reality that has undergone a profound change with chilling effects. Levato’s titles, too, lend weight to the seriousness of this societal earthquake and its repercussions. “Barcode, Notepad, Hospital Bracelet” evokes the dangerous and deadly consequences of the pandemic; and the allusion of “In Flag on Pole, Inert” is followed by text that suggests a society unprepared: “the way to kill it / went no / farther. /they /were /unable to move /and / years in discovering how.”

Andrew Levy invites the reader into the process of his brilliant and multiplicious thinking, which ranges (and sometimes rages) from postulating other strange and wonderful modes of being (“Nonhuman / intellectual property? //The other side of an opposable thumb”) to work that sharply makes plain the bitterness and absurdity of our inescapably political existence: “I gave a check for ten million to my friend who has been without any means of existence. // My own spirit observes the indifferent, the debris of a good atrocity.” Like a dark film, devastating and elemental, Levy’s language surprises us into a truth: “Gunmen break open / An alien distance,” as his elegant imagination leads the reader to an altered perspective: “And yet, from his writing desk, / Disenchantment inhabits the subject. Its rigorous /architectural elastic symptom.”

In this selection of poems and related artworks, Laura Moriarty heeds the exhortation of Yoko Ono’s Walk Piece to “look out / as the broken world // breaks again” in order to contemplate the variety of ways in which both world and artist are “drawn to bits.” The active reader has much to unpack in these formidable intellectual and prosodically dazzling excursions, richly conceptual and studded as they are with word play, double entendre, rhyme, and rhythmic riffs. The works of an artist “inwardly // directed to / arrange and play / as we (rapt) / are carried off,” these poems and multimedia creations emerge from a practice of “daily acquisition” not only of “beads… balls . . . brass. . . [and] steel” but of observation, insight, and recollection. Moriarty creates incantatory assemblages capable of managing “what we want: // an engine of past time, / creation, and abstraction // whose apparatus / reflects the precision of // wrapped glass / collapsed threading through / the fastness // of everything as everything / found or findable // resolves into action.” By “resolving the ‘made place” / into the made real day,” Moriarty is committed to bending art to the monumental and necessary task of changing reality itself.

Begun at the outset of the pandemic, the collages in Jill Moser’s Nude Palette reveal both shifts from, and continuities with a body of work dedicated, in her own words, to the “teasing of form and gesture each insisting on the other.” In these collages, initially assembled from fragments of past work in collaboration with poet Anna Maria Hong, Moser’s dense, vividly chromatic biomorphic forms evoke poured and pooling fluids, gels, bubbles, cells, and bodily organs layered over and contained by geometric structures in a saturated matte palette that glows with vitality. Any departures from Moser’s earlier work are in keeping with the circumstances of their conception in the early days of quarantine — from gesture to form; from line to solid; from dynamic to static (or at least contained); from a contemplation of signification (often in a tonal palette) to being (in the vital hues of Spring). But perhaps the seeming shift from gesture to form is better understood as an evolution of focus — since form, as Moser has remarked, is simply gesture suspended. And in fact, many of the ovoid, stacked shapes in these works are familiar from earlier series like Syntax, Topographies, and Naming Game. In some ways, these biomorphic forms appear as isolated and confined within their shelters as we all were during lockdown. But just as collaboration was their origin and animating impulse, these collages enact the collaborative interdependence of form and color – thereby celebrating deeper, if quieter, dimensions of connection. Texturally rich and dense as buds, these lovely works salve the anxiety of trying times by reminding us of the beauteous “thereness” of what is, ripe with the potential of what will be.

Julie Marie Wade’s Jeopardy poems contain multitudes. Playful, sly, carefully constructed verbal puzzles, they are also sophisticated meditations on the academicization of insight (“this phenomenon is college, where the lexicon begins to bloat at prodigious rates”), as well as frank considerations of desire and its elusions. This is the work of a writer who has “been studying Beauty all this time—assaying so as to essay? probing so as to poem?” – where the beauties in question are sexual, intellectual, and linguistic, as this excerpt from an extended abecedarian demonstrates. Noting the “little irony of our language that vexes as it woos” and musing about the nature and intensity of paradigm shifts in which “it’s your old version of reality that’s fading now, losing consciousness,” Wade notes that “sometimes a shift is a harsh slip. Sometimes a dig is a cruel joke. Sometimes what I actually know amounts to a weird log cabin made of used Popsicle sticks…”

Thank you for being here!

With love and gratitude,

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 31)

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Welcome to Posit 31! We’re excited to offer another selection of poetry, video, visual art, and text + image that is as aesthetically innovative as it is emotionally resonant. The works in this issue deal with matters of the gravest collective hazard: war, climate change, injustice and inequality, as well as the personal suffering caused by loss, loneliness, aging, and mortality. They also explore the tenderness and exuberance of love, hope, and the joy of being alive. Formally, these works engage a particularly exciting range of original and experimental approaches to the realities of memory and experience.

As TJ Beitelman’s “Broken Sonnet as Epitaph for Straight Talk” declares and enacts, the art in this issue offers a much-needed alternative to linear approaches which do not suffice when “topography plate tectonics free market . . . killed children six times” and “the fourth estate is dead.” Since sometimes “the only way I’ve ever made meaning // is to pile it all together” (nicole v basta, “where to begin or what are you bringing”) these works eschew the temptation “to cover the hole over” (Ben Miller, “Re: Writing”) at the heart of our messy lives. In place of any such flimsy and misleading patches, these works offer a fascinating and insightful range of approaches to its irreducible topography.

nicole v basta’s poems wrestle with the necessity and problematics of hope in a society in which materialism is more cause than salve for the misery and alienation at its core. These poems confront an “america, [where] instead of tenderness, we use plastic as the counterweight to all the violence” and a child anticipates dollar store “consolation prizes” from a mother who “prays the rosary” without hope, “knowing, deep down, we are the product of the same familiar thieves.” Aspiring to a forgiveness which may be just out of emotional reach (“on the top of my throat . . . standing on a chair”) these poems manage to grasp a wise kind of hope uncoupled from illusion and find the courage to ask “where to begin and what are you bringing” – all the way to “the end of the world.”

TJ Beitleman’s innovative “broken” works free the reader by departing from the familiar forms of hymnbook lyrics, sonnets and abecedarians to suggest new ways to interpret and perceive the text. In the “Broken Hymn” series, Beitelman offers, and scrambles, lyrics one might see in a hymn book, suggesting that the poem be read both traditionally and as a mirror image that has slipped like a fault line off its axis. All of the poems are “broken” in form as well as content, concerned with fragments of regret, broken minds and broken marriages: “Words are terrible. Music is terrible. Minds jumble in them.” With its combination of science and politics, history and geology, “Broken Sonnet as Epitaph for Straight Talk” tries to make sense of our fragmentary knowledge: “(A) Here lies topography plate tectonics free market / (B) Graveyard. This graveyard killed children six times // (C) The ranking member of this or that / (D) The fourth estate (to suit the truth // (E) Up. It never happened. It never happened.” In Beitleman’s (and our) world with its unrelenting violence, these startling juxtapositions of form and content give us a choice to either “Piece it together” or “Explain it away” in light of the fact that “Aftermath is still life.”

In DPNY’s innovative and piercing short films, the concerns of the I are shown to be inextricable from the concerns of community. In recounting personal challenges, collective experiences of war, and what it means to be human, both now and for our future, DPNY explores the visual of the body, collaged with written and spoken word, recorded interview, and innovative cuts of images meaningful to the artist’s history. In “Androgynoire,” images of the artist and their voice show us a person “fully splintered,” honoring the strength of the word “No” to reiterate “I regulate myself now.” In “Testimony 1,” a visual map of Lagos and collaged written words accompany the spoken testimony of refugees from a civil war, recalling the violence and death. We are confronted with the physical and emotional devastation of ordinary people who “used to do well” but “will never have the capacity to do it again.” As DPNY says, “The Otodo Gbame are survivors speaking their truth in the court of human conscience, calling on international bystanders, like myself, to act.”

With her signature insight and wit, Elaine Equi’s tightly crafted new poems consider how we live now with a bemused empathy that brings out the tragic humor of the human condition. These pieces center on time — “the hours that fly” and “drink the last light,” in the context of a planet reeling from a pandemic and facing the prospect of environmental doom. Yet despite their observations on isolation, decline, immorality, and death (“sweet, sharp / spider’s liqueur”), these poems are as funny as we are, teetering on the brink of our self-inflicted demise. As Equi dryly observes: “Darkness is relative / where backlit screens abound.” But the distraction of our backlit screens cannot undo the mess we have made IRL, so the time has come for “Everyone [to get] into the Pyramid,” bringing not only our “altars . . . avatars / and alter egos” but our “iPads . . . sex toys and . . . almonds/ dusted with pink Himalayan salt.”

Peter Grandbois’ bleakly beautiful verses confront the challenge of continuing to “walk through the labyrinth of days” after the loss of a loved one. Unlike someone “depending / on the safe lies of memory” the bereaved narrator cannot forget “how you said / you’d take flight / from this blind dream” rather than “sit / counting drips / from the faucet.” Eschewing the comforts of faith or illusion, these poems express a pain as palpable as the truth at its core: “There is no mistaking / this haunted sky / for a field // where you might dig free / of this chosen / silence.” Nonetheless, the narrator chooses to “walk through the soughing wind / into the dimming light” because “life hums with almost / blossoms” – thereby offering the hope of hope, if not yet the thing itself.

In another kind of sonnet, Justin La Cour writes detailed and fantastic stories for his lover’s delectation with the ease of intimacy, to “surprise / you w/a story of how a bird swooped down / & swallowed a venus flytrap, but the flytrap / gnawed a hole in the bird’s belly midair til /they both crashed by the orthodontics place.” These sonnets contemplate day to day incidents with the pathos of loneliness: “This day will disappear & / I won’t get to talk to you. /… (But if I wanted you to feel sorry /for me, I’d say I’m reading novels alone in the sarcastic/afternoon.)” Then, in an original and moving compliment to the loved one, “When you speak it’s like an animal breathing /deep inside an ice sculpture of the same animal. Even the / way you shake your umbrella is completely arthouse.”

Donna McCullough works with steel, bronze, wire, and mesh to reimagine iconic forms of feminine adornment such as ball gowns and tutus. As lovely and beguiling as they are bold and witty, McCullough’s armored bodices sculpted from vintage motor oil cans and skirts of metal mesh handily upend female stereotypes of helplessness and fragility. In their stead, these sculptures decisively enact an alternative physical and psychological narrative of fortitude and capability in which feminine strength and practicality is part and parcel of its grace and beauty.

Like maps of thought itself, Ben Miller’s graffiti-like gestures and faux-naïve doodles wander through a cornucupia of textual meditations on life, memory, and art-making. Branching and winding, traveling backwards and upside-down, Miller’s combination of abstract and representational images, sensorial memory fragments, and essayistic cogitations create a world in which Keith Haring meets James Joyce. These works explore the artist’s choice to “walk . . . out on the constructions of the page” in order “to allow the piece to have shoots like a plant” rather than “cover the hole over and hope it stayed covered.” The sheer profusion and intricacy of marks and text presented in such deliberate and exuberant defiance of conventional directionality enact Miller’s commitment to “remain enmeshed in the intent to get fully lost / in the trusted atmosphere of being,” richly rewarding the reader/viewer willing to surrender to their riches.

Soledad Salamé has created a wide-ranging body of work honoring the beauty of the natural world and the radiance of its life-giving elements while warning us of its vulnerability to our abuse— as well as our own vulnerability to the increasingly catastrophic consequences of our recklessness. The depth and scope of her investigations into our impact on our environment encompasses drawing, painting, photography, print-making, stage design, and life-sized installation, featuring dynamic, living elements such as water and plants. Salamé’s explorations of light, water, and time are as meticulously researched and executed as they are wide-ranging and inventive, featuring painstaking re-creations of natural phenomena like ice, water, and resin-interred life forms, as well as technological elements like barcodes. Salamé’s precision-crafted worlds mirror and comment upon our own with a balance, and serenity made all the more disturbing by their implications.

Mara Adamitz Scrupe finds the core connection of human spirit in the procreation and decay of nature and the beauty in the commingling of animal and vegetable as well as the human passion to be the thing, as well as admire it: “& here I am /an enterprise flawed & wounded in amalgamates /of shame & hubris / ambition & my own private /hungers / something creamed off as in /scoop the topmost richest layer as in /smash the glass door to get inside.” Scrupe’s ornate imagery binds the feminine to the life of plants: “do not think I don’t know the important /element of any fabric /landscape / wild ginger on the precipice the down /slope the true side soft /pubescent & tender.” And in “Rope,” another kind of human passion possesses a modern Leda in the hubris of youth: “I was / I know I thought I knew / enough to let go of the rope.”

In Ashley Somwaru’s brilliant poems, the speaker interrogates her own fear and shame as a witness to her mother’s life. In “Eh Gyal,Yuh Nah Get Shame” the first shocking line (“You /want / to be bludgeoned /don’t you?”) plunges the reader into a depiction of a terrible beating and the speaker’s fear and shame projected as disdain of the victim. The vivid imagery of despair and the language of remembered childhood show the inevitability of this abuse: “Spine arched /like the leather belt used for beatings. / Slicked with soap and Black / Label. Pata stink. / Your body /as boulders breaking / sea waves.” The poem-as-interview “Dear Little One” speaks with a wrenching honesty that both blames and tries to understand a child’s abandonment of, and distancing from, her mother’s failure to resist brutality. “You didn’t understand before your mother became who she was, she was a motorcycle rider, a woman who could hold her head under water long enough to show you what breathing means. You should’ve said, Mother, I’ll stop feeding off your arms. Mother, I’ll let you stop slipping yourself into the pot.”

Barbara Tomash’s sensuous imagery and serious questioning are lyrically and intellectually bonded in a modern and fantastical philosopher’s treatise, a little sacred and a little profane. The form of the poems, reminiscent of incunabula, enshrines beauty in the natural and spiritual worlds: “isn’t it better to err on the side of / the invisible than the visible a / fine film of capillaries gathered / into veins leads back to my heart / on the far shore the growling of / other animals intensifies.” But the poems are also a history of the deadliness of our human attempts at science, and our mixed prayers to be defended from our own experiments: “yes we poured vinegar / and pepper into the mouth / applied red hot pokers to the feet /let it not come near me but cells / that have been starved for more / than five minutes die not from / lack of oxygen but when their / oxygen supply resumes let it not fold round or over me.” What if this poetic history of humanity is the foundation of a new way to think about the world? “What if I told you there is a peg in my center secured to the ground and yet I am freely spinning.”

In John Walser’s lyrical descriptions of music, an afternoon, or a word, each further search he makes deepens the feel of the described object, which also turns out not to be the subject of the poem, but rather the unnamable feeling behind that object: “But then something lets loose just a little /some shell, some husk, some bark /some pod, some rind, some hull /some skin, some chaff, some crust /some peel, some case, some carapace;” and “Joe Williams’s voice / is candle wax / swallow snuffing /another flame / into loose smoke.” And in as beautiful a love poem as ever we’ve read, the word slough is defined, refined, and redefined into another word for love: “I love the word slough: always have: /its dryness: the way in my throat: /a chrysalis: it gets left behind /like a jacket on a bench…”

In considering the process of aging, Donald Zirilli’s poems are both witty (“Imagine how cool I look lying on landscaping bricks, wondering when the ants will reach me, / considering I might be in a Tai Chi position called Unable to Get Up”) and disorienting, as poetry itself is disorienting and yet centers us in truth: “I have a warning / about the poems I sent you. They’re not done. The poems that you asked for / are not quite written. Whatever you saw in them is not entirely out of me.” Some realizations can only come later, as the poet remembers his childhood numbness in the face of a grandmother’s death: “but I believe I heard her long ago forgiving me /already for today /for the wintry / blankness of my head / the dull abandoned / fireplace of my heart / in a house burned down /that she would answer /to whom I would not speak.”

In Martha Zweig’s compressed poetics, wordplay and prosody are not ornaments or highlights but the very stuff of the poem’s construction. There are as many levels of irony and pathos in these lines as there are layers of assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme, all delivered in snappy staccato rhythms underscoring the sharpness of the poet’s vision. Zweig’s punchy, high-friction linking of ending and beginning, creation and destruction, and ultimately, life and death throw off sparks of insight at gleeful risk of bursting into flame – not, perhaps, an altogether unappealing outcome for the narrator of “Gloaming” who prefers to “take another flirt at the world” rather than let herself get “suckered & sapped” by the “bluedevil dirty earth” with its “gory locks of lice / & beggary, strategy, calculus, scrapheap / scrubbed & pricked to glitter.”

Thank you so much for being here.

With love and gratitude,

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann