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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

Editors’ Notes (Posit 30)

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Welcome to our (gulp) 30th issue! Although (to paraphrase David Byrne) we’re not quite sure how we got here, we’re thrilled that we have, thanks to the vivid and continuing engagement of our growing family of contributors and readers. For this milestone issue, we have once again gathered the work of distinguished artists and writers (both acclaimed and emerging) that is as resonant and relevant as it is aesthetically exciting.

Here you will find poetry and prose by Isaac Akanmu, Tyrone Williams, and Pearl Button that confronts the historical and contemporary poison of racism and colonial appropriation, alongside work by Julie Choffel, Erika Eckart, Vi Khi Nao & Jessica Alexander, Jo O’Lone Hahn, Sam Wein, and Nancy White exploring gender repression and violence – as well as its persistent, sometimes even exuberant defiance “swinging ourselves to wonderment” (Sam Wein, Season of Fanny Packs). The innovative poetics of Kristi Maxwell, Benjamin Landry, and Dennis James Sweeney speak to the state of the planet and even the dubious nature of the future itself, while the visual art of Andrea Burgay, Taraneh Mosadegh and Ana Rendich grapples in a different idiom with the existential challenge of living as moral and emotional beings in a threatened and threatening world.

In this abused and abuse-riddled world, the need for art that speaks to the struggle between fury, despair, and hope is as great as the necessity for wonder and delight. Defying the temptation to let “your horror here . . . be unheard” (Tyrone Williams, History, History, All is History) these works confront the way our “sense . . . of apocalyptic expectation, wars with the roiling beauty” of existence (Pearl Button, to Mr. B. Spinoza). That our species is blighted and blessed is inescapable. This very duality is addressed by these works, even as their virtuosity offers proof of the latter.

Isaac Akanmu’s inventive prose texts with lyric counterpoint begin in first person at a cookout that turns into a shooting, move to the descriptive third of a “teenage alien who searches for rest in [the] tired song” of the national anthem, and finally pan to a prison ballgame. Each poem exposes the experience of America’s promises violently broken. The protection promised by the mythicized “rockets’ red glare” is no match for the “red glare, blue glare, then red glare . . . of cop cars.” And at Pelican Bay prison, “uncle sam has them under duress. clamped. shackled. locked up. the defensive player of the year. unanimous. four hundred years running.” But as a coda, in spite of all this, a sweet, sad lyric keeps singing of the persistence of life as resistance in itself: “perhaps red blue glare, then red glare again is proof / through the night that he too still lives.”

By preserving the shapes and structures of the books whose covers and pages she deconstructs for her sculptural collages, Andrea Burgay reorders and builds upon their ruins to reconstruct new artifacts of singular energy and intensity. Mysterious, disturbing, and ultimately inspiring, the works in this series comment upon and take flight from our literary legacy – from anonymous vintage paperbacks to Dante’s Purgatorio and Shakespeare’s plays – to engage the limitations and potential of verbal narrative. Peeling open and exploding the problematics of the past — the very “rhetoric and false decoration” identified by T.S. Eliot and incorporated into the title of one of these works — these complex and probing artifacts uncover and create fragmented and elusive glimpses of the multitude of futures our problematic past might seed.

Pearl Button’s delightful and poetic postcards are full of the erudite and charming personality of the sender, whose name and essence we never know, and who is an intimate friend of Spinoza and Newton, the Venus Hottentot and the Venus of Willendorf. The postcards effortlessly shift from witty to lyric and back. She seems equally at ease admonishing Spinoza: “The wonder of your conception of the relative nature of morality, snaps against the absence of chance in your necessity. I am no abstainer from reason, but can’t you see that . . . we only inhabit reason as one does a cottage in the summer?” as she is evoking her own physicality to a 30,000 year old statue: “When I walk? Mostly it is a rushing of sky. . . My knees became soft levers emitting a contralto hum; hips lilac rockers, arms, golden clock hands on silicate wheels, spinning Mingus’ goodbye pork pie hat.” These excursions of intellect and imagination are a celebration of the cerebral and the poetic. Button also captures our yearning for connection and our hope for the future in a redressing of our cruel and colonialist past, imagining “a world where you [Saartjie Baartman-Khoikho] are what counts as normal, and you can imagine a world built for someone like me.”

Julie Choffel’s poetry grapples boldly and bluntly with fundamental questions of living and parenting, like how to “find. . . beauty in the terrible world” and “see abundance in the wreck,” or how to teach our children anything of value beyond the plea that they “pretend I DID THIS DIFFERENTLY.” These darkly witty verses challenge the value of human industry and its fundamental egotism, exposing the mess we humans have made with the very impact whose value we so grossly overestimate. The radical alternative proposed by this brave and brilliant “conscientious objector of /the whole way” is a “not-lesson / not wealth accumulation / not permanent structures / not award ceremonies.” These poems offer an ambitiously unambitious inaction plan, modeled on the modest efficiency of gleaners, grounded in the admirably ego-less goal of making “nothing but room / for something else.”

In Erika Eckart’s brilliant and moving short fiction, women desperately struggle with the consuming worry of being a parent despite the societal forces stacked against them. In Sight, the pain of a parasite in one eye creates an alternate, desired vision of an alcoholic daughter’s life, in which she is “sober, happy, apple-cheeked, riding a fucking horse, lisa-frank style” although “[i]n the other open, still-operational eye, the daughter is running up a hill mostly naked, it is cold out, she is warning the neighbors about hallucinated phantoms.” In Prepper, a woman so used to trying to keep her children fed through a lifetime of poverty that she “for dinner once prepared a box of Jiffy muffin mix with nothing but water and split the rubbery yield among 5,” continues to hoard stale food after the kids are grown, despite the fact that “[m]uch of it was boxes of dust,” because “[w]hen reconstituted with water it transforms to the equivalent of stacking all the furniture against the door.” In the pull of the water, a mother struggles to keep her small boy from climbing a fence to get to the swirling creek below because “[h]e needs to throw himself in, to be the thing dragged by the current and pulled under, to dance against the rocks.” Eckart’s answer to the question posed by a passing stranger, “What are you going to do when he’s too big for you?” brings light and a wry kind of comfort.

Benjamin Landry’s penetrating and resonant engagements with The Arcades Project build on, and take off from, Walter Benjamin’s contemplation of the aesthetic and societal significance of Paris’ Galeries de Bois. With meticulous economy, Landry’s spare and musical verses consider aspects of the “[f]eatureless desert of now” such as the problematics of closure (“you’d / never guess completion’s sickness,”) the “dissolute gravitas” of grandeur in contrast with “the wet white teeth / of modesty,” the dehumanization of war, with its capacity to convert us into “regiment[s] of brute-faced / animals” by suppressing the “crucial information” that “everyone / has a mother,” and the soulless ease of mercantile capitalism so effectively served by the Galeries de Bois to offer a seductive “place out of the weather where the remains / of the world are brushed clean, cataloged, / reconstructed, finally understood.”

Kristi Maxwell’s extinction poems delight the ear, the tongue and the intellect, while reminding us that language used inventively can uncover, through humor and surprise, a deeper and sadder truth. “Chromosomes form self’s reef—we reek of luck” begins extinction (Giant Panda), calling into question our human tendency to believe we somehow deserve a superior place on the planet; no matter how much we value ourselves, we too, are subject to extinction: “Messy crumb of us crumbles more. We’re else.” We are also the means of extinction for many species, and likely our planet itself; we’re “da bomb’s damp wick.” But maybe there is yet a way for us to “unbecome to become.” After all, “[w]e’re our souls’ humus, yes?”

Taraneh Mosadegh’s reverse-glass paintings depict abstracted organic forms in translucent, jewel-toned layers that explore the interconnectedness of existence. These works feature reiterated motifs recontextualized to reveal the porous nature of conventional distinctions between sky and sea, animal and vegetal, animate and inanimate, and micro and macro, by way of images resembling plankton, flowers, and stars; cells as well as eggs; and human heads as well as planets. Layered over Mosadegh’s generous engagement with the unbounded and un-boundaried plentitude of the natural world is her engagement with human culture and social justice. The land of her birth is invoked in The Wind Will Carry Us, which is named for either Kiarostami’s film, the poem by Forough Farrokhzad for which that was named, or both. Her depiction of Mount Damavand, the iconic “roof of Iran,” recalls Cezanne’s studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Other works take their titles from the poetry of Bashō and Celan (including an image, in the latter, reminiscent of a hooded Guantanamo prisoner). Mosadegh’s use of a Venetian technique not used in Iran until the late 19th and early 20th centuries further enacts the syncretic inclusivity of this artist’s vision.

In A Dead Cave Called Sleep, Vi Khi Nao and Jess Alexander’s intense color exposures of a train station mirror the bold and surreal text made up of both actual and internal journeys of the narrators/lovers. Changes in color and font within the text heighten the emotional impact of every element, from recalling newspaper accounts of a tennis star’s abuse to observing an abusive interaction in real time: the outer observation and the inner pain mingle. In a frighteningly familiar scenario, “[t]he door opened and the angle of their bodies was so covert and revelatory, you felt as though you’d crawled into a stranger’s bed and you apologized and let the doors close on them again and took the steps up to the pedestrian bridge. And when you arrived she was stepping out of the elevator and he was gripping the back of her neck and telling her they’d work it out. They’d work it out.” These almost-daily assaults on women’s psyches are one of the sources of pain for the narrator and color these lovers’ relationship as intensely as the photos, preventing, perhaps, the intimacy that would heal it: “You wished I had a pain free life. That’s called death, I said, and you disagreed. Death isn’t life you said and repeated yourself, knocking each word out – like a mallet sounding out the hollowness of a wall.” Or, perhaps, like this powerful piece, sounding out its resonance.

Jo O’Lone-Hahn’s stark and artful cycle of interconnected poems confront a young woman’s struggle with the ever-present threat of violence. In these powerful poems, the toxicity of objectification embodied in a trophy of feminine desirability, a County fair princess sash, is exposed for what it is by a refrain which evokes the dread “draped across your breast” by the menacing reality of the stalker’s ‘admiration.’ In a brutal world defined by power, where “eating is always / death & equally / so for / all things / eaten” and “scientists / often choose / to save only / creatures that / eat smaller / creatures,” a preyed-upon young woman is driven to contemplate suicide in order to “decide between // sacrifice or triage” in her desperation to regain control of her own fate.

Ana Rendich’s masterful variations of intensity and translucence in color in both painting and sculpture, and her innovative use of materials such as resin, paper, and old tools, combine to make powerful, startling statements about the emotional nature of our lives. Rendich says, “Hope in the light of loss and displacement is my primary subject,” and indeed, joy (surely a form of hope) is invoked in the viewer in pieces like littlegiant, a delightful assemblage of machine, resin and paper; while on the other hand, we feel the loss in the tattered grey of the moving Rescued pieces, and Mourning and Hope (a response to the artist’s research into personal letters from World War II). These works remind us that although we experience fear and loss, art is a form of reparation and healing.

Dennis James Sweeney’s singing poems alternate between the communal “we” and the personal “I” while operating on both the immediate and figurative levels. One can imagine a community of beings who express themselves in images rather than narrative, viewing history and its most problematic elements through a more purely lyrical lens. In Sweeney’s complex formulations, imagistic and idiomatic implications build meaning in layers: a “moon as blue as gold / the chosen pockmarked in it” draws a parallel between the rarity of gold metal and a ‘blue moon’ while evoking their glowing colors scarred by damage. Sweeney’s resonant neologisms recall Celan’s, and add to the sense that this work creates its own idiom to address the puzzle and paradox of existence: the body’s “box- / house of organs,” the “already-said” “rightlanguage” to which “[w]e gave the years,” the “rest-road” that “does not flake / but hollows / with throat talk.” In the almost neo-Imagist poem, “I built a subtle,” emotion (gasp) is embodied in startling metaphor: “I slept like an egg through the ungulate night: I clenched like hard bread, gray in back of blue.”

Sam Wein vividly details the pivotal moments in a closeted childhood when the wide-open future could suddenly be envisioned, in spite of the social mores of the time. Although the narrator had a loving and perceptive grandmother who he wants “to think . . . knew about all my boyfriends like I knew a handful of treats would be waiting” whenever he visited her, it was the discovery of the magic of defiance as a self-defining experience that was pivotal to his self-realization: learning “how to talk my way under the water slide /over the sledding hill, up the chimney / where I grow glittery wings / Wings made/of lies.” He recognizes the delight and necessity of pushing against the expected when he sees “a queer, 70s themed dance troop from/ the Valley with packs at their waists” and thinks, “I need / to be that. I need to be them. The judges told them I want / to see the fellas dance like fellas and they didn’t—they didn’t listen.” The reader applauds, and is inspired by, his exuberant breakthrough: “I’ll have style at my waist, like you. I won’t listen to anybody.”

Nancy White’s poems consider the sorrows and joys of life and death with serenity and tact. If entire poems can be onomatopoetic, these gems of craft and compression are just that. Deftly enacting what it depicts, Spell rings with an incantatory music that is as compelling as it is hypnotic, casting a spell designed to ease one’s passage from weight to weightlessness (“Instead of stalking, flutter. Swap pound / for patter and shank for shim”) and life to death (“Soften, offer, / drift. Oh, weep. Waft, puff, / settle. Widen. Stop.”) And Traveler, like its eponymous narrator going home to a land of “homes drastic and identical” to visit parents who “were not [her] people,” hints at the wrenching pain of her dislocation — and the more drastic measures we surmise she later needed to take in order to fully chart her own course, as well as the victory of that liberation — with delicate subtlety, aware that the “correct way” the family “embraced at formal events” might “corrode” “[s]hould the sight of [her] uncovered throat” or “the smell of joy provoke.”

The spare, objective imagism of Tyrone Williams’ A Little Coffee In A Saucer recalls William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow and purple plums — haunted by the ghosts of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and the countless other victims, past and present, of racist violence. Tyrone Williams’ musical prosodics elegantly ‘rhyme’ with the visual effect of his one- and two-word lines to keep the stanzas flowing in a long, thin, liquid stream. But the spilled brown coffee that “cools / as it pools” over the (white?) “faux / porcelain” chillingly recalls the unchecked stream of cooling Black blood still being met by “brown // lips” with a “black shiver.” History, framed by a haunting quote from a documentary about Lebanon’s home-grown 1960s space program, laments the endless cycle of colonization and appropriation, from concealment (“In the lawn around an island of sycamores the roots are beginning to show”) to denial (“Throw a few bags of denial on ‘em”) to the complicity of difference and distance that lets us “slip into the trance of another life, needing your horror here to be unheard.” Not only, the poem reminds us, are such differences and distances illusory, especially when a “patch of Yankee know-how updates the trick,” but we have no choice but to “resign . . . ourselves to one another” since the cycle will go on “indefinitely.”

Thank you for helping us celebrate this milestone by honoring their incredible work!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 29)

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Welcome to Posit 29!

As we find ourselves heading into a third year of the “cruel ongoingness” (Jared Stanley, Air is Normally Invisible) of this pandemic in which “we / are all held captive” (Burt Kimmelman, Cicadas, July), we’re grateful to offer this exceptional selection of poetry, prose, and art as a salutary and substantive alternative to doom-scrolling and despair. Much as we may feel like “[t]he chaos wheel is gaining momentum” and we are “cage mates together / in some psychodrama” (Barbara Henning, Naked), the rich variety of work in this issue offers enough wisdom, resourcefulness, and creative mastery to make even the worst of our “world-weariness . . . fade.” (Patty Seyburn, Against Weltschmerz).

Many of the pieces featured here directly address the experience of living during this pandemic, whether to “sketch out / this prison” (Rodrigo Toscano, 21st Century Odyssey), or to remind us of what persists, or might emerge, beyond the bars. But more importantly, all of these works illuminate ‘how we live now,’ even as they remind us of the inspiration, and sometimes hope, that can be found in what is all around us: “postcards // of French women smoking long cigarettes” (Glen Armstrong, Cherry Cola XVI), “[f]og – when the car light hits it just so” (Dennis Barone, Copious Notes), “the beauty of pigeons” (Barbara Henning, The Beauty of Pigeons), “a little treat, something bubbly but uncaffeinated, something with tropical packaging” (Elise Houcek, Whose Shirt Was Surely Fleece), “a vee of geese/ push[ing] south” (Jill Khoury, chronic lyric: corrosion), “white trees, forest- / dark trunks to no end” (Burt Kimmelman, Mid-February at the Parapet), “’Rent Me’ / billboards // on a ghostly interstate” (Richard Peabody, The Show Me State), planets which “touch on the lip of the horizon” (Jared Stanley, Air is Normally Invisible), Greek mythology (Holly Wong’s assemblages), the properties of light (Al Wong’s installations and videos), organic forms (Tamar Zinn’s canvases, Adrien Lürssen’s cyanotype erasures), and even the “dozen discourses // . . . vying / for your attention” (Rodrigo Toscano, 21st Century Odyssey) – as well, of course, as language itself, from “Aureole. Aurora. Antibody” to “Wreath. Zodiac” (Maureen Seaton, Corona) – not to mention “words with spit in them like ferkakte” (Patty Seyburn, To My Daughter: a prophecy).

Glen Armstrong’s Cherry Cola series documents how the themes of childhood and the strangest and smallest bits of the past – “the crawl spaces, / attics // chambers for squirrel bones, baby hair / and broken Christmas ornaments” – still play upon us in the present. In both form and content, the poems brilliantly and seamlessly shift time for the reader, as well as for the narrator and “sister” who, as in a gently haunted house, are the childhood characters who find themselves grown up and grown older, living still in the enthusiasms of childhood; living perhaps, as “[c]ircuses . . . [which] think of themselves as yesterday / while arriving tomorrow / night.” This time shifting has advantages: “Sister hears the trailers that unfold / into wonders, hears the / elephant / dreaming,” and the caring relationship between the siblings continues, preserving hope, even in the face of the foreboding future: “Hope or the way you have to think in order to go on.”

Dennis Barone’s lyrical and elegiac prose poems from his forthcoming Field Guide to the Rehearsal grapple with the frustration and wonder of the human condition, as well as the inspiration to be found in the “millions of facts in the night of knowledge.” These powerful, understated pieces remind us that “everything has to start: blue water in the oceans, for example . . . and endless charts that correct error and a fragrance that perpetuates gospel hours.” At the same time, we are “[g]hostlike,” “the batteries that hammer our steel in the shadow of an abandoned factory.” Barone also takes “copious notes” on the full range of poetic muses embedded in living, from the quotidian details of inanimate objects like a “coffee-mug with no coffee,” to the lyricism of the everyday: “a voice speaking and the listener not yet ready to hear it,” or “scarecrows. . . lift[ing] their faces to the moonlight.” And, in addition to the wonders of the imagination, like “a meeting with the speaking tiger,” there is the dialogue of art itself, such as “Wallace Stevens in winter” or “a melody: oboe concerto” by Bellini to sustain and be sustained by this accomplished poet.

Barbara Henning recounts the experiences of the poet living in the city, literally living the phenomenology of what she sees, hears, and experiences, written into clear moments of conscious existence. Like the drama of a breakup unfolding in real time “[a]t the table next to me in Veselka’s,” in which the narrator “overhear[s] a couple arguing. You idiot. This judgement of me and you tell me now?” Ambulating within and around her living map, the poet notes the reality of the metaphysical: “in a secret, dark, ambiguous language the trees in Tompkins Square, my big old friends, spread out.” Henning writes the events of life with uncensored honesty; aging and the ills that come with it, the shock of a diagnosis, then the mind’s instinctive turn to the visual and concrete, so much easier and more comforting to ascertain and inventory: “Hello, I just found out / I have a heart abnormality. / Three teaspoons and six handles / of dessert spoons.” And yet, Henning shows us we are timeless beings, too: “In the mirror, my lips look young / and swollen like orange segments.” Henning’s characteristic ingenious and beautiful enfolding of simple statement and stark emotion encompasses the very spirit of poetry, its pathos and wit. Her voltas bring to mind the familiar perception puzzle of woman and vase: “The century’s turned and I’ve / lost my remote control.” Wandering in Henning’s city of the mind, we find the depth in what we daily see and hear, and a hoped-for connection to a life profoundly lived.

The pathos of Elise Houcek’s prose meditations on our frightfully narrowed pandemic lives is leavened by their sharp and sparkling layer of irony. This suite of poems takes off from the non-events of pandemic life: grocery shopping as “a date idea,” a walk past a stone lion guarding a small white house “in this frenzy-ornamented town,” and the “deconstructed tableaux” inside the closed eyelids of a narrator lying in the “Saturday morning casket” of her bed, contemplating the possibility that she “would never return to work again.” These poems open out from the specificity of our myopic historical moment to illuminate universal challenges of identity itself, reminding us that “the real beauty” of the word for a certain failure is “not its clicking into this particular question but its clicking more generally.”

With lyrical musicality, Jill Khoury’s poems distill chronic illness’s saturation and domination of the sufferer’s psyche – evoking not only the isolation it engenders, but the courage it demands. In pure o, the poet’s wordplay and prosody give voice to a consciousness locked in a harrowing inward spiral of doubt, the “i myself in blame only / this self- / appointed pointed i.” And in these three chronic lyrics, we get an intimate glimpse of how pain can commandeer a life, becoming, seriatim, the architect of its “brutalist masterpiece . . . dollhouse;” the companion “lay[ing] across me like a crust — / dissembling, our easy husk;” and its fate – a hyena “pac[ing] by the front doorstep / . . . scent[ing] an abundance of gifts.”

With tanka-like quiet and perception, Burt Kimmelman’s short and intense poems capture the beauty of nature, and more. With their seeming simplicity of attention to ocean, snow, and wind at a particular time and place, these poems reveal the disquieting and impersonal (as the gods are impersonal) essence of nature, and the delusion of our apparent indifference, that “we no/longer care for/the dark blue sea.” Because we are human, we want to believe that somehow, benevolently, “The snow bounds, / binds us / to our pact” offering “stillness / to catch us when we / fall,” although the question is, rather, do we have the strength to endure among the “white trees, forest- / dark trunks to no end.” Perhaps, in the end, we are not really the actors on our surroundings or the engineers of our fate, relative to the “sun in morning / trees, summer heat” by which “we / are all held captive.”

Adrian Lürssen’s cyanotype erasures from Rudyard Kipling’s A Second Rate Woman produce visual artifacts of resonant calm and glowing beauty. Their spare and lyrical texts are salvaged from the yellowed pages of an old paperback, allowing rips, creases, and ragged edges to enhance the fractured glow of the few words left to float on cerulean grounds. The minimal texts Lürssen extracts are quiet and intense (“The City / silent and I / open;” “first / to speak / but / their / teeth / un- / earthing”), layered over the ghostly shadows of vegetal forms which bring to mind lithe aquatic plants swaying in limpid blue water, as well as starry night skies. Created in the midst of the pandemic, these works extract ineffable beauty from a historical moment as freighted and problematic as Kipling’s text itself. In this poet’s hands, the notion of erasure takes on new interest. Like swords into ploughshares, Lürssen’s excisions of Kipling’s texts answer a moral imperative, even as the act of salvage and the loveliness of its artifacts is optimistic.

In Richard Peabody’s punchy, plain-spoken poems, the stagnation and provincialism of “Banana Republican” American culture is juxtaposed with the synthetic, and ultimately transcendent power of art – not least the poet’s own. Peabody’s sharp, spare, unflinching observations of a culture in which “every highway / . . . is a runaway truck ramp” deliver a complex critique tempered by appreciation. These poems take us on a road trip that yields not only a “one-way ticket / to Biscuitville” but also a “walk / through / Gabor Szabo’s / dreams.” In Peabody’s clear-eyed but undaunted view, Susan Rothenberg’s abstract yet recognizable, moving yet mysterious canvases offer a critical answer to the “[w]hirlwind / in the distance” that it is “[a]s necessary and / ephemeral as that.”

Maureen Seaton’s poetry contemplating the subject of death is “astonishingly open.” The very aliveness of her approach, its humor, gratitude, and compassion, gives us a new way to understand the commingling of our pasts with our certain, inescapable future. This poet’s joie de vivre and insight, with the aid of the muse, help stitch it all together, from the youthful freedom of inspiration, the “words straight from the horizon where light begins // where if you wanted / to be quiet w/a hat pulled over your ears // or wrapped in a silence / even multitudes could not pierce // you couldn’t,” to desire: “the scrappy nuns warned us / from our biblical beginnings / that messing around with boys / would be the death of us /and they were right, oh God! / Now here I am, tarnished / as a sad old silver gravy boat” – all the way to the present. In Corona, a tour de force combining definitions with quotations from an early British 20th century novel, Seaton’s insight and contagious optimism delight and inspire, even when “the world simply continues to be witless in ways that involve the dying and the dead.”

In Patty Seyburn’s supremely well-wrought verse, insight and humor emerge organically from a sparkling amalgam of erudition and colloquialism, intellectualism and humility. In these poetic pep-talks, a hyper-educated yet down-to-earth narrator is “relying on the 7 Greeks for solace. / The 7 Greeks, and leftovers” to cheer herself up. That she loves “spatulas because they flip things over /so you can see the other side / and know there is another side” should come as no surprise, as Seyburn wields her prosodic spatula with sly grace, dazzling agility, and impeccable timing. Juggling references to Archilochus and broccoli, Plato and pump toothpaste, Marvel comics and homo habilis, fovea and shayna punim, these sure-handed constructions master volta after nimble volta, striking the bull’s eye of irony and insight (without a hint of hamartia).

Jared Stanley’s dreamlike evocation of the uncertainty of our world right now, in which “snow melts in the gaps between pavers” with “a faint scent (cool) / born in peacetime, fooled by permanence,” reflects our disorientation with the pandemic, the myriad effects of climate change, and our efforts to cope. Although we do what we can, and what we hope will work, “teach[ing] the kid to eat tubers and avoid roads,” these poems remind us that “it won’t help when things get serious.” And they do: “On Saturday my son lost his sense of smell” / it had no public meaning.” We are as helpless as “lungs in Pompeii, lungs in plaster.” But Stanley’s poems offer a prayer, a wish, that catches the shimmering beauty of the world and gives us hope, “crack[ing] the window enough to let him / glide through on a hairstreak’s back.”

Rodrigo Toscano’s new poems take a grave yet playful giant step back to reveal the universal nature of the social and psychological predicaments of our times. These poems “sketch out this prison” of our 21st century, pandemic-shrunken lives to expose the ways that ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ From sexual politics to aesthetic camps, Toscano looks backwards and forwards in time at the “constraints / and liberties,” the “ends” and “means,” the “rituals” and “vying” and “vanguards” that have been “retrofitted / jimmied / just enough to /make relevance.” These humorous, hard-hitting poems hold a mirror to our species, forcing us to confront the “sentiments, sediment / surfeit of silly stances” making us so “frisky-frightened” of ourselves, and what we have wrought.

Viewing Al Wong’s sculptures depends on our experience of moving through opposites like dark and light, as separate entities that make a whole. In his video, Fire on the Line, the element of time gives us a further dimension. Instead of the slow moving of time we associate with the pandemic, and the longing that it be over which makes it seem even longer, the movement in Wong’s light sculpture explores another aspect of time; its ineffability and changeability. We can suddenly apprehend a brightness like a butterfly or a falling star, brief delights that are somehow part of the whole. Throughout the film, we are held by the interplay of opposites: shadow and substance are interchangeable, sound is evocative, although it gives no clue to its nature, and we are invited not to analyze but to experience iterations of movement and color, luminous canes of light. We see and hear rhythms separately, but time makes them whole: a ritual chord of music, the shapes of light and darkness that make strangely compelling suggestions of icicles, wind, a fountain, a waterfall becoming fire – elements that embody both presence and absence. It is this harmony that Wong asks us to notice and delight in.

Holly Wong’s vibrant, dynamic multimedia works embody a synthesis that is as optimistic as it is ambitious. Uniting a wide range of visual elements and cultural referents, the interconnected multiplicity of her constructions evokes the living, breathing energy of communities, and even worlds. Suggestive of petals, vines, hair, muscles, and scales, webs, grids, nests, wings, and flames, Wong’s interdependent forms swirl, flow, and spiral outward and upward, unfurling from their energetic centers to float and reach, grow, and become. The delicacy of her interwoven forms reveals the power of motion, the strength of flexibility, and the resilience of porosity. Intertwining the organic and the geometric, vivid color and black and white, wind and water, flowering and flames, Wong’s creations synthesize the resonance of their mythological and cultural referents with her visual and tactile imaginative fertility to harmonize the past with the future, adversity with hope.

Tamar Zinn’s paintings and drawings come from personal meditation where breath provides the opening for the spaces in the work. In the drawings, line is the delicate boundary delineating separate moments, while always moving and exploring the space of the canvas. In the paintings, unnameable colors range from subtle to shimmering. Not depictions, but suggestive of clouds or stormy weather, the shift of these forms evokes the feeling of evanescence, while the forms themselves create the soft and mutable “lines” of the work. Formally, Zinn’s paintings touch on the glory of a Turner sunset or seascape, but untethered, as if they are the free and drifting presence of a dream.

Thank you for being here.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 28)

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It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to this 28th issue of Posit.

In these times, when discouragement threatens to become permanent and loss is increasingly entrenched, the works in this issue offer views of unexpected benefits and under-appreciated treasures – the silver linings of hardship, the x-factors of deprivation, the collateral benefits of constraint. In these pages you will find literature and art that makes grace from the found, the fallen, and the discarded; harmony from entropy; and humor from sorrow.

It is not only the visual artists featured here — Joan Tanner, Robin Croft, Judith Henry, and Sarah Sloat — who penetrate and re-imagine the undervalued, ignored, and overlooked. Michael J. Henry imagines humor as well as pathos in the interior life of a gun; Ian U Lockaby harnesses the energy of linguistic combination to spark unexpected connections; and Rose Auslander, Lizzy Golda, Bryan D. Price, Rebecca Pyle, Nathaniel Rosenthalis, and Marvin Shackelford synthesize value from loss and insight from despair.

We hope and trust that all of these remarkable works will revive your sense of wonder and even hope, as they have ours.

Kirstin Allio’s poems are marvels of compression and prosodic control whose wry and penetrating preoccupations wrestle with the challenge of adaptation to our digitized, mediated lives (Adaptation II, III, and IV); the bargain we must make with death (Demeter, Wild); and our problematic compulsion and capacity for invention (Icarus). In a time when we may “miss the taste / and touch of things” and recall that “Every / one was a Special // character back in the day,” the author warns us that “Enlightenment / Thinking” may yield too much “of the wrong magic” — “a bright bland / Reason a stagnant / Season an anti-love.” To embrace the alternative, these poems suggest, requires humility and courage: an endurance of pain that amounts to “being / One with pain;” an acceptance of “the drug of not knowing / why the grassy bank across the hard / working river remains wild.”

In Rose Auslander’s beautiful and haunting poems, despair is a demon that takes on various vicious yet beguiling masks to torment us, despite our defiance: “It better keep its hands / to itself, better not / slit your wrists & / say you did.” But the demon doesn’t allow a moment of contentment: “maybe I wake singing / just a note / maybe two & / it steps on my throat. / says smile.” Still, the self fights against the insidious “carrion flower says // sssh / lie still / . . . who cares / how deep it might reach up / in you.” At each new ambush, despite the menace lurking in even the loved guises of earth, water, or a breeze through the window, the self recognizes and captures it in the written word. Even as “it seasons me / in weeds & mud,” the psyche works to transform the “softened, seeping” into a beneficent essence to “become frankincense, // almost. like / forgiveness / invisible, pure.”

Robin Croft’s site-specific installations assemble found materials to explore the effects of time and place on meaning and form. Croft’s oeuvre, including his sculptures and works on paper, with their implicit and explicit references to such “greater and lesser gods” as Van Gogh, Camus, Kafka, Guston, and Duchamp, brings us face to face with the melancholic and bitterly comedic drama of mortality. Shipwreck Irene juxtaposes the locality of its materials with the incongruity of what Croft and his collaborators have so carefully constructed, grounding a ship in a forest, the vessel meticulously woven from the deadfall like an enormous basket. The same work “in decay” reveals its integration into its unlikely setting. In contrast to its challenging namesake (Duchamp’s Étant Donnés), Croft’s A taunt done, eh? creates a window onto an actual idyllic landscape without the shocking interposition of Duchamp’s spread-eagled nude. That work, like Pandemic Portal, with its vision of an arch reminiscent of a rainbow waiting at the end of our viral tunnel, seems to offer a glimmer of hope to balance the grim humor imbuing Croft’s works on paper, notwithstanding their reminder that there “ain’t nothing funny about despair.”

A life force animates Lizzy Golda’s poetry, which casts a clear gaze on life’s joyful and generative dimensions side by side with its pain, abuse, and demise. Contemplating the remains of a home, the narrator, observing that “No one likes to be / abandoned but we enjoy / escaping problems,” nonetheless identifies with the ruin, since: “when adrenaline touches / me between the eyes, / I’m riding a horse / so giddy she thrills to throw / me like winds throw rain.” (Stone House). An address to the Aztec goddess of love and beauty celebrates the fact that “All the little seeds / of every fruit and flower / are inside of us,” while The Dybbuk speaks for the haunting and haunted spirit of a “Yiddish play / full of music no one knows / in [the] dead language” of people “They thought . . . were so ugly.” These poems sing with sensitive attention to life in all of its complexity with a gifted “tongue / curled around a star.”

Judith Henry’s photography and sculpture delve beneath the surface of appearance, broadening the implications of identity by troubling the line between self and other, us and them. In Beauty Masks, the self-portrait is re-imagined and expanded as the self is multiplied yet hidden by magazine images, composing new identities from the expected and the ‘found.’ Casting Call repurposes detritus from the artist’s studio to sculpt a fanciful assortment of humanoid figures which evoke the multiplicity of identity itself. Henry’s use of juxtaposition and repurposing enact the complex relationship between the surface and the inner life; between the notion of beauty promulgated by the fashion magazines from which her images are sourced and a deeper layer of identity hidden beneath the ‘acceptable’ and expected surface – depths into which these works allow us to peer, even as they peer out at us.

In these poems by Michael J. Henry, intimate and often surprising aspects of American aggression and its existential angst are embodied in the persona of a gun. Sympathetic as Gun is — he “wants to feel good / about coining of phrase, knowing the known,” Gun is also like “us fellas, us boys” who are “all knowers . . . big talkers . . . always lecturing.” What’s more, Gun is lonely, “his body far from all other bodies,” perhaps because, even to his own dismay, his mere attention is destructive: when “Gun thought of a hockey game — / the ice rink melted and /became a tsunami.” His thoughts alone are capable of “smashing everything to smithereens.” These poems’ analogy to American meddling is as inescapable as their evocation of its pathos is perceptive: after the “teens running from the high school . . . didn’t seem to appreciate / the kind gesture” of his “kind” wave, we are reminded that Gun “curled up fetal on his creaky bed / and wept.”

There are practical truths as well as wit and wonder in Ian U Lockaby’s pieces on work on a farm where “the sides of the well collapsed, vegetable and anxiety farmed all up the sides of the water source.” In these poems, dense with linguistic energy and implication, “the meter is the motor” and “all utility must be watched.” Lockaby’s brilliant and rhythmic use of wordplay recalls Gertrude Stein’s arch linguistic play (“There’s water in the well, well, well;” “To nib with the dibble is to wear the long red gown of the weather”) even as it beautifully conjoins the language of the trade with a seasonal and poetic sensibility. We are left with the home truths of the laborer — or any of us, for that matter – but with a brilliant and elusive twist: “Shuffle your green and wilting feet. The work’s not over it’s under you. Rising up in to and through you.”

In Jonathan Minton’s evocative espistolary poems — letters, perhaps, from another civilization, or from an imagined future for us all — the addressed “you” is a powerful personage as well as a lover. There is something of the yearning of Donal Og in Minton’s repetition of the second person address: “When I stitched my mistakes into yet another monster, / you said it was fate, but you locked the tower gates. / You took my grief into a faraway kingdom, and built a room for it, / where impish creatures scratch the floors in the dark.” But the yearning is based, perhaps, on regret for a collapsing civilization as well: “The wood is dissolving around the nails and rare coins. / They are like smooth, lidless eyes staring up from their depths.” However, it may be that memory, like a lantern, is what will keep us going on: “I carry this memory like a lantern or a cup into its next sentence. / Something imaginary keeps it there, as with all ships in their harbor, / or swords that carve their plunder into smaller treasure.”

Bryan D. Price’s starkly beautiful poems speak to, and for, all of us whose lives are “held in place with safety pins,” “just / gesturing toward life and persisting.” Despite the desperation of their “cr[ies] for help” these poems remind us of “of trying to / be your beautiful actor,” urging us not to “waste the / command to go forth and reciprocate.” The harshness of Price’s assessment of his fellow “self-contained vessel[s] of putrid annoyance” also manages to encompass and enact an implicit belief in the value of observation and representation, in “render[ing] pain . . . us[ing] small words as bitten down as seeds” “until you have made sense of the brutality.”

The women in Rebecca Pyle’s mordant and witty stories live predominantly in their own imaginations, convinced, even to the literal moment of death, that “royalty really is in your head.” Yet, somehow, there is pathos in their preference for dreams and their perseverance in what they acknowledge as impossible loves, and impossible hopes. Both stories feature idealists who “could have found someone. But they didn’t want just anyone. Not yet. They were holding out for the perfect one.” Both are “almost-astronauts” hoping to dodge “the law of averages” by which “outer space . . . would kill you somehow . . . Unless you had extreme backing, extreme luck, extreme in-the-right-place at-the-right-time luck.” In Cartoon of Goodness the narrator provides a service called “Hold You Close” in which she offers her “sweetly laundered” bed as a temporary “home base, to which frightened almost-astronauts returned.” And in The Dying Plane, the protagonist is returning to the US, soon to move “to a huge numb city in America,” after a year away in “the red-velvet-dressed great sweet bed of geographical amnesia.” As she falls asleep on the plane, thoughts of the smartly dressed airline steward, Norse-named English towns, King Lear and royalty all mingle until she wakes to the knowledge of a disaster she considers “a tailored match to her despair.”

Max Ridge’s poetry is “Half mettle and half swoon” if not also “equal parts honest and bleach.” With charming archaic phraseology (“Grains green up / and the ewe doddles / probably”) and thoroughly modern insight (“That’s the shanty, and / that’s the turncoat / who made the check out / to scandal and personality”), Ridge takes account of the suspended time we are all cognizant of living right now: “the present, / where careful heroes sit waiting / for photographs to tint.” Maybe this “time vs time” we are living through has given us a clearer self-knowledge. As the persona in Hello, Caesura says wryly: “We need not be perfect. / I, for one, gave up good / in August,” although “When I love someone . . . I want to give them everything. / I give them everything in the wrong order, / or allow it all at once. That / is how I beach the thing.” “With / interpretation, inpatient warmth” these poems’ insightful and “provocative passes at the truth” can be counted on to hit their marks.

Nathaniel Rosenthalis’s “Self Portraits” address unvarnished elements of love and longing with haiku-like economy. The blunt candor of these spare poems is balanced by their aesthetic control to combine pathos with bathos and insight with humor. Plain-spoken and vividly imagistic, these poems convey the pain of abandonment and desire for attentions that are far from idealized: a kiss like “a tiny / desktop garden / of fake succulents,” or “embarrassing / underarm stains.” These poems confront the gulf between ‘seems’ and ‘is’ when even the former is far from ideal. The intimacy of their revelations is as courageous as it is funny, and their poetic craftmanship as masterful as it is modest.

It’s easy to envision Marvin Shackelford’s vivid work as film. He has an eye for the cinematographic glance that gives the viewer the complete scene. In the hospital: “The door to five was closed, locked, but someone the other side bleated like a sheep. In four a woman lay snoring loudly, a rhythm to her breath suggesting the tremulous ringtone of an older phone.” But Shackelford’s stories move swiftly from the almost surreal-real we recognize directly to the threatening deep: “And there at the entrance you shucked rainwater from your pink umbrella. The fountains of the deep threatened to swallow you.” In The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail, a brilliant characterization of a recognizable persona in our world, the “third living pope,” explores the tailoring of religion to fit a charismatic individual who “wonders aloud what the keys he’s taken hold from Saint Peter are actually supposed to start. He pictures Heaven like a cherry-red Mustang and Hell its fuel tank, launched into the backseat when it’s struck just right.” Shackelford’s secret skill is in getting the reader to see the irony in our behavior, and yet to sympathize with our frailty: “We weren’t the warrior sons and priestesses’ daughters who took this place by force and sealed it in stone. We were a disappointment,” say those left with a world destroyed by the storied ancestors in whom they “wanted to believe.”

Sarah Sloat layers cryptic aphorisms reminiscent of Franz Kafka and Jenny Holtzer along with digital graphics over archival postcards whose relationship to the overlying material is anything but straightforward. Layered almost ominously over these quaintly antiquated scenes, Sloat’s texts and graphics seem to loom over the unsuspecting innocence of a bygone era. Against our contemporary backdrop of Instagram and SnapChat, Sloat’s revival of the postcard is pointedly resonant, reminding us of the long pedigree of the bourgeois impulse to display just how far one has come from where one began. Despite the compositional grace and mysterious beauty of these assemblages, they convey a subtle unease: All is not right in Sloat’s worlds, and nothing is simple.

The title of Joan Tanner’s series, FLAW, exposes just the kinds of assumptions her art explodes. What, after all, is a flaw? How are we to look at what is imperfect, discarded, or no longer useful? Tanner’s sculptural compositions reveal the shallowness of our hierarchical and utilitarian assumptions. Her complex groupings of category-defying materials and unidentifiable forms ask us to attend to the actual in all of its unruly and unexpected grace. Tanner re-envisions the materials of utility and function –– unfinished plywood, tubular steel, nuts, bolts, netting, gear chains, plastic tubing, wires, etc. — in forms that suggest no recognizable use. Although she neither ornaments nor refines her materials to more predictably identify them as “art,” Tanner arranges the detritus of the functional in compositions that transcend it. By suggesting such purely “artistic” images as landscapes inhabited by figural groupings, clouds, and waves, or subtly biomorphic forms floating and dancing like birds or butterflies on currents of air or water, these works transform how we perceive, until what at first blush seemed harsh or chaotic becomes graceful and harmonious. Tanner brings out the hidden music in the everyday world we might otherwise ignore.

Thank you so much for visiting. Stay safe, stay well — and take care of each other!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 27)

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Happy Spring, and welcome to Posit 27!

For well over a year, the human race has lived in a state of isolation, anxiety, and loss. And although the pandemic is (hopefully) loosening its grip on some parts of the world (however limited and privileged those may be), it seems apparent that Covid-19 and many of the ways it has changed our lives are likely to be with us for the long run.

Which is only one of the reasons the prose, poetry, and visual art in this wonderful new issue is both resonant and relevant. Some of the pieces in this issue address the pandemic more or less directly (see, e.g., the poetry of Michael Brosnan, Patrick Kindig, and Peter Leight, and the art of Dee Shapiro). Others, with their focus on the paradoxes of our needs for both autonomy and connection, as well as the many kinds of damage caused by isolation and loss, speak to recognizable if less specific facets of our experience in these extraordinary times (see, e.g., the prose works of Joey Hedger and Kylie Hough, or the poetry of Zach Savich).

But all of the remarkable work in this issue demonstrates that “the practice of intention is / its own discovery” (Elizabeth Robinson, Augur) while managing to “shadow twitch with tradition” (Edwin Torres, Northern Star) — even as it manages to meet V. Joshua Adams’s strict but essential demand for “no art without passion” (Another Country [II]).

V. Joshua Adams tallies the absurdities of our present and the thin membrane that separates us from an absurd future: “They sent me to school in the great forest / planted by the timber company where each morning the chaplain / would pray to the trees.” In our consumer world, there’s both fascination and anxiety in “Clever chicken wrap, that fantastic pink,” and we know, unfortunately, that “our lawns, sirs, shall outlive us.” Adams’s clever and indelible images, like “My empire-builder chugs: pa-thump. Those dying generations don’t die quick enough” make the point that we are still, as a society, spewing an outmoded, useless, and dangerous material philosophy.

Michael Brosnan’s In the Meanwhile praises and exhorts us to the noble modesty of a daily life helping others “practice the stubborn art of hope.” Contemplating “the antonym of contempt / In a world so humanly torn,” these verses display a rare and courageous intimacy whose vulnerability (“when I’m drinking alone in a winter-wrapped house, / Eating two-day-old cake and regretting many of my choices”) makes them all the more powerful. Written “with kindled care,” and fully cognizant that “Sometimes our need . . . carries short of anywhere,” this poem “respectfully ask[s us] to trade in our shared notion of progress / For one that will give future life a chance.”

The penetrating insight of Gabe Durham’s fables is slyly embedded in the subjectivities they so deftly voice. There is a dedicated accuracy to the observations that power these morality tales, undergirding the reliability of their fabulist yet subtle whimsy. A Fox in the City voices the vigilance and hunger of all who are marginalized, “living on the fringes” – whether by virtue of their “fox tail,” skin tone, or any other indicia of exclusion. And New People probes the dissatisfaction with the self which motivates our appetite for novelty, even at the cost of morality: “I love the smell of cigars I hate the smell of wafting from the yellow lips of boldly dying new people.”

There is something profoundly reassuring about the smooth solidity of the forms anchoring Christina Haglid’s compositions. More sculptural than two-dimensional in effect, these works on paper depict shapes as concrete and convincing as they are wholly imagined. With their focus on glowing light, gleaming water, and curved matte surfaces in calm, earth-tone palettes, Haglid’s serene yet mysterious compositions open like windows on worlds that both soothe and beckon. To gaze through these windows at Haglid’s imagined realities is to partake of a solace and serenity more vital in these anxious and uncertain times than ever.

Joey Hedger’s short fictions perform magic tricks of narrative economy, exposing the psychological depths of their bereaved narrators’ angst with the barest hints at backstory. In Paper Teeth, the narrator is confronted with a Sybil-like stranger who forces him to confront the fragility he is so keen to avoid, even as he seems bent on provoking its consequences with his self-destructive choices. And in Blurry Exit Signs, the narrator, who “can only focus on the immediate to get by” “as if there is a wall up ahead that [he] will soon hit, an incomprehensible, constantly moving wall,” is triggered by a medical vulnerability to confront the ambivalence of his complicated grief.

Kylie Hough’s wry, smart and self-aware narrators insist they are inarticulate, or sometimes deliberately quiet, but the reader gets the benefit of their very precise thoughts about relationships: “I told you it works like eggs. You shrugged your shoulders, said you never knew. I thought, there are a lot of things you don’t know about eggs and guar gum and binding and being bound.” They speak in startling and unexpectedly resonant images: “Like an egg navigates the oiled sides of a wok there was this feeling I got with you.” And in a darkly humorous imagined dialogue, a particularly controlling male personage is silently served with the narrator’s imagined response: “You’re not thinking of the future, he said and she raised an eyebrow because she was always thinking of how good it would feel to disarticulate him. Can you see you’re torturing yourself? he said. Yes, she thought and took his right leg and plucked it from its socket much like she would a carrot from her vegetable garden.”

Patrick Kindig’s lyric and idiosyncratic exploration of the multiple meanings and usages of the term “corona” includes what we might wish from a perfect definition: resonance, beauty, and surprise. They cannot help but bring to mind the virus which has transformed human life on this planet even as they remind us of the bigger picture: “a sun throwing its voice,” “a shining in the night,” “crown (of light), light (of God).” Each of these short poems begins with another accepted definition. But in Kindig’s dictionary, definitions include instructions (“Get in your crate, sun, and / do as you are told”) as well as philosophical musings (“in a clean, well-lit place, / there is no need for wonder”). And yet there is wonder, too: “a sheen, / a shining in the night, the night / a cloud of air, the air a jar of lightning / unlidded . . . a gesture electric enough / to make the heart beat faster, not / strong enough to cause a spark.”

Peter Leight returns to Posit with lineated and prose poems about the paradoxes of social isolation and organization that are as penetrating as they are understated, and as timeless as they are relevant to our pandemic lives of quarantine and Zoom. In Private Time, the narrator inhabits an isolation so resolutely enclosed that he tell us “I’m leaving the keys to everything I need to open / in a drawer I’m not going to open,” until he must physically pry apart his own lips to speak, or even to offer himself the gift of his own breath. In City of Separation we get an all-too familiar glimpse of the exclusionary rationale for social cohesion, in which “we stay on our side and they stay on theirs.” And in City of Meeting, we see how the cheeriest inclusivity, in which “the same place is reserved for everybody, like a pie chart that’s undivided, without a single wedge,” is also the death of individuality.

Gina Osterloh’s riveting film of a hand grasping at fruit (Apples and Bananas) references an early film by artist Richard Serra, but with a difference. Along with Janis Butler Holm’s hilarious yet thought-provoking textual accompaniment (“their boyish tuna casserole,” “their manliest horizon line”), this film leads viewers to ponder our own gendered expectations, and laugh at their all-too consequential absurdity: “their girly-girl electro shock,” “their fruity naval exercise.” The juxtaposition of adjectives like “girly,” “manliest,” and especially “fruity” with images of literal fruit highlights the artificiality of popular gendered tropes, prodding us to think again about how we have been inculcated to divide our world into such binary absurdities.

The scarf in Elizabeth Robinson’s profound and mysterious long poem acts as an Augur that is at once evanescent yet grounded, transforming, as in a fairy tale or myth, the search for a grail that ultimately contains elements of discovery and destruction. “The promise did not promise / to be beautiful. // The promise was of labor, / not virtue.” It is this grail that “attests / to its existence, but, as always, // refuses to disclose its whereabouts.” The journey has its discoveries: “Broken / perception is a place, even // “home,” if you will,” but there is never a final achievement. The making and breaking, and the almost finding (the scarf both stops our mouths and flees as we follow) are perhaps the only grail we will ever find. But the continued search, painful as it is, “becomes its own imperative,” leading to a kind of joy with which we can make do. In this powerful poem, “Never / a map but a disemboweling, discovery // joyously fractures what it finds” – namely, that “Reciprocity // means also exit.”

Zach Savich returns to Posit with a set of poems that capture the mysterious allure of what is “over by the time you see.” Not only personal mortality, but the fleeting nature of all existence is at the heart of these wise and subtle meditations in which someone procrastinates sending a condolence note “assuming grief will wait, or still be arriving, or be something else, whenever dry becomes preserved,” and “Day mak[es] its losing speeches.” Savich’s work is as precise as it is sensitive, as sorrowful as it is grounded, reminding us that “whatever road is down the road once we’re a few roads / down” “chances are . . . [we]’ll mostly respond / like most people do,” taking our chances that we can find a way to live on with the makeshift solutions we manage to construct.

Dee Shapiro’s art integrates the symmetries and asymmetries of mathematical, architectural, and biomorphic patterns to create work whose energetic mastery encompasses a sense of interconnected complexity as various and inclusive as nature itself. These intricately patterned, brilliantly colored and immensely vibrant works apply feminist narrative to mine and re-envision historical representations of the female body as well as traditionally feminine and ‘decorative’ textile arts to generate a rich, potent, category-defying form of art. This issue features lush and exciting new pieces referencing the Covid pandemic, along with re-interpretations of canonical depictions of the female nude by masters such as Botticelli, Ingres, and Manet.

Hester Simpson’s compact, controlled canvases glow with preternatural intensity. The kinetic, almost vertiginous energy of her geometric patterns and biomorphic shapes presented in such high-octane, super-saturated, candy colors is just barely reined in by Simpson’s rigorous discipline and flawless precision. Many of the compositions are reminiscent of swatches or samples, suggesting the possibility of vast, even infinite planes where these eye-popping patterns might unfold forever. Simpson’s work offers thrilling if tantalizing glimpses of an imagined reality in which the vividness and energy of color and pattern might be freed of the dulling constraints and inhibiting limitations of what we take to be the “real.”

In Celestial Suite, Edwin Torres’s poetic compass encompasses the crossroads and crossings and endless white lines of North, East, West and South to guide our navigation of this “dispossessed globe” in the essential and elusive quest for “not an ending … but a sequence.” With Torres’s signature rhythmic musicality and nimble linguistic turns, these dense and condensed verses explore “the connective tissue of missing imperfections aligned / by the edges of our flight” to reveal “what we say / to hear what we hear.” The process carries the poet’s aphoristic brilliance in a “freefall [that] is exhilarating,” confirming that Torres’s “poetry can anything / if you let it.”

Nance Van Winckel’s witty, thought-provoking collages combine text and old-fashioned images to interrogate the slight and fleeting nature of the self against the scope of historical and even astronomic time. These one-frame marvels juxtapose text and image for an effect that is at once nostalgic, surrealistic, and cerebral. In these works we find Egyptian and early 20th century figures cheerily hailing each other from either side of history; antique diagrams of meteors whose metaphoric relevance to our own brief and tumultuous existence is highlighted by captions identifying their “spectacle of the old self” and “double nature” which “floats free;” a surrealistic building containing a stairwell filled with floating hats, a mountain lake, and a hot air balloon revealing that: “A. we came. B. we gawked. C. we lost ourselves;” and an antique map of the moon heralded by cherubim framing text evoking a self so slight it can “slip through the eye of a needle.”

Using Chinese idioms that themselves have become proverbs, Lucy Zhang skillfully crafts intricate folk fables set in a pastoral past which brilliantly illuminates more timeless meanings. Spear Against Shield explores the predatory relationship between vulnerability, commerce, and violence: “A man is trying to sell a spear and a shield. He boasts that the spear is so strong it can pierce anything. He continues to boast that the shield is so strong it cannot be pierced. When someone asks what will happen if you pierce the shield with the spear, the man falls silent.” And yet, after unsuccessfully haggling with neighbors fearful of war, he offers: “if you buy both a shield and a spear, you’ll get one additional weapon of choice free.” The “addition” abruptly catapults the reader into contemplation of yet another philosophical dilemma. And in Playing Zither for the Cow, a paradox of art-making is revealed by the way a musician’s skill is both best and least appreciated by the musician himself, who “taps and strikes and plucks to the view of the backs of his eyelids” as he “wonders how long it has been since he last listened to his music.”

Thank you for reading — and for doing your part for yourselves and each other by GETTING VACCINATED!

With gratitude and love,

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 26)

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Happy new year, and hopefully, new era! And welcome to Posit 26. Although the human race is still locked in struggle with the virus ravaging the globe, and dark forces led by our former president did their best to derail American democracy, we bring you this powerful new issue in a spirit of hope — even celebration. Not only did the US manage, albeit by the skin of our teeth, to achieve a desperately essential change of regime, but a substantial majority of its citizens exercised their real if fragile democratic prerogative to put an end to the Trump administration’s criminal indifference to justice, decency, and truth. Through it all, science, along with the hazardous labors of untold numbers of essential workers, have struggled to save us from ourselves, and might just manage to succeed. While art, and artists, persevere, nourishing our similarly essential need for insight, beauty, and meaning.

The remarkable work in this issue offers all of those qualities, and more. New poetry by Chuck Wachtel, Charles Borkhuis, and Joe Elliot directly addresses the current crises, alongside poetry and prose by Peter Grandbois, Lisa Lewis, Tom Fink, and Hannah Corrie that resonates with the pandemic in deep and prescient ways. Most if not all of these works grapple with mortality, identity, or both, at a time when the former is so terrifyingly foregrounded, and the latter eroded by isolation and the social-fabric-fraying hazards of human contact. And at this important historical moment, when activism has once more managed to bring the mandate for racial justice to the forefront of our societal agenda, we offer powerful poetry and visual art by David Mills and Donté K. Hayes that speak to lives and identities once stolen by slavery and still brutally undermined by racism.

With profound sorrow, we dedicate this issue to one of our most honored contributors, Lewis Warsh (November 9, 1944 – November 15, 2020). Lewis’s greatness encompassed not only his prodigious and extraordinary literary output, but his outsized generosity as an editor, publisher, mentor, and friend. For a taste of his wisdom, humanity, and wit, don’t miss his contributions to Posit, including some of the last poetry published in his lifetime: Lewis Warsh (Posit 24); Lewis Warsh (Posit 4).

And now, a bit about the work in this issue.

Charles Borkhuis returns to Posit with a looping and leaping elegy to the absurd and tragic disconnect at the heart of existence. In the circling and cycling dance of these tragicomic verses, “if someone knocks / no one is home” although “if no one knocks / someone is home.” Like the paradoxical worm “eating at the heart” of the bewildered self, these agile verses probe the enigma at the heart of consciousness. In this dazzling poem, “the constant flow of words /from nowhere to somewhere // keeps someone watching / for tomorrow’s nameless someday” only to reveal that “the worm dining / on the human heart // dreams” – like those upon whom it dines? – “of one day awakening / as a butterfly.”

Hannah Corrie‘s restrained but powerful poems reveal the stark gulf between the “poetic justice” of narrative and the random loss of a reality populated by “so many small things clamoring to survive.” In the world of these finely crafted verses, we may be “killing ourselves // with our living” but “there is no meaning in irony.” A finely calibrated tenderness balances the uncompromising depth of this poet’s gaze, cast here on young children reluctant to end the school year, an aged man unwilling to surrender to his own decline, and a narrator’s determination to find meaning in coincidence. Like Galileo experimenting with gravity in his blindness, these poems bring out “the song of the soft plummet” which “tethers us to this Earth / after all.”

By inviting the viewer to participate in deciphering their complex etiology, Mary DiDoardo’s paintings depict as well as and enact relation. These paintings reveal, as if in media res, a dynamic and ongoing interaction between line and ground, exposing the scars and failed stages interaction entails. DiDoardo’s line seems at times to loop through three-dimensional space, suggesting the traces of movement itself, like wakes or vapor trails recording the trajectories of bodies in motion. Her ground, at times pristine and untouched, at others, deeply distressed, reveals the traces and scars left by those trajectories. These paintings are alive with arcs and angles which might be fluid and graceful or broken and fragmented, advancing in fits and starts, reversals and stalls. DiDoardo’s surprising juxtapositions of intense color enhance the kinetic energy of these lively compositions.

Merridawn Duckler’s pointed and poignant studies of how the created worlds of reading and art bind us to past and present begin with the wickedly witty history of a young woman’s life as seen through an “agony” column of the past, complete with questions such as “Should I be prehensile by now” as well as slyly familiar musical pleas like “Help me, Irma. Get him out of my house.” Another poem, narrated from a doctor’s waiting room, considers a travel magazine, where our lives are vicariously lived. Its “pages and pages of turnstiles and castles” lead to a memory: “Silver Falls, where I once stood under the roar and understood this land was lodged in me like a bullet.” In the ekphrastic Five Grey Mirrors, the quiet and clear observation of Gerhardt Richter’s painting leads to an overwhelming and dire feeling of imprisonment: “The gas is so undetectable, / as we sit in the designated chairs// still, they will not allow us / to return home.”

In Joe Elliot’s profound probe into the brevity and meaning of our lives, the author reminds a dying patient: “We are all dying. You are just doing / the hospital part of it,” noting that sometimes “time seems to expand, / giving your life a malleable dimension / and shape, as if it could go on forever.” Nonetheless, there is true consolation in the dailiness: “the falling in love part of it, the running around / with the kids part of it, the carrying laundry / up the stairs and binding tomatoes and hopping on / your bike and riding to work part of it.” And in a truly apt poem for this moment in US history, Elliot exposes the limits of our understanding and commitment to other humans stemming from the “arrested development” of those who “think other people are the problem” in a society in which “Growth Eternal is the staple / of this state religion that eats. Eating / by indirection each other is its sport. Its sporty / Galilean runs for office. Its office is to grind / and mash a bratwurst of they. They are unnamed, / although all around you.”

With a nimble mix of wordplay, prosodic flourish, and social critique, Thomas Fink’s Dusk Bowl Intimacies consider the “rust- / plated American tenets” of capitalism in decline via a unique poetic form, reminiscent of Haibun. These densely-packed prose blocs concluded by brief, Haiku-like tercets entice us to “gawk at how bumbling ‘sapiens’ sap sincerest intentions” even as they compel us to face what we may not want to admit, preferring to “snak[e] [our] way out of the cloud sum of blaring indulgences” in the fading “dusk bowl” of contemporary capitalism.

Peter Grandbois’ Hole explores the conundrum of the dreamer and the dreamed, and our compulsion to make things right, to make them fit our understanding and expectations. This compelling and disturbing story creates the accepted certainty of the dreamworld. Its meticulous logic builds and leads us forward through its unnamed protagonist’s perfectly understandable and yet ever stranger choices, all of which seem to follow inevitably from the moment he suddenly notices a hole in the wall he is painting, and the enigma it reveals. Like him, we question, and then accept, each metamorphosis from the expected to the actual. And like him we are carried by the elusive, ecstatic detail of the moment to moment, like “breaths that made you feel as if you could float away on them. Breaths that could carry you to the cusp of clarity.” As the painter tries in vain to force the enigma back inside its hole, we are forced, with him, to face that our resources, like his, are “Not enough. Still, he applied it religiously, hoping somehow it would do the job.”

The ceramic sculptures of Donté K. Hayes resonate with the echoes of millennia of human artifacts. These remarkable creations honor the cultural and physical experience of the Black Diaspora, even as they grapple with the historical centrality of slavery at the core of racism today. Although these curvaceous, muscular, biomorphic forms concern themselves especially with the iconography of pineapples, whose signification of hospitality is directly connected to slavery in the Americas, they are also suggestive of serving vessels, head ornaments, ritual figures, and the (Black) body itself. With lush and intricate surface textures suggestive of both fur and bristles, these works have a sensual complexity that is both gentle and strong, welcoming and steadfast, nurturing and resolute. As balanced as they are sturdy, Hayes’ creations radiate a warm and inviting power.

Genevieve Kaplan’s remarkable poems marry the concrete with the abstract to yield a rich and unique mix of recognition and surprise. With equal parts precision and inspiration, these “delightful, pulled out, loosely / skeined” poems parse plain language and ordinary experience until what they offer is anything but plain or ordinary, “read[ing] / the situation with such careful / attentiveness,” “ask[ing] each word” and “hon[ing] in on their availability” to plumb fresh and unexpected depths of wonder and wisdom – until “one detail actually manages to encompass the entirety of the other” and each poem becomes “a way to begin.”

Kristin LaFollette’s striking collages combine the energy and spontaneity of abstract expressionism with a surrealist sensibility. Organic elements contrast with inorganic via intensely colored painterly brushstrokes and drips juxtaposed with magazine cut-outs of text and images. In ‘The Accident,’ black paint has been scribbled over a washed blue background layered over the repeated phrase “I’m sorry.” The focus of the collage is a photo of a model deer cut up and reassembled with a pipe and a skateboard. Sandpaper and marble appear along with cutouts of technical drawings of cells. The free placement of the text and visual elements suggest emotion, if not agitation, while the skateboard contributes an element of humor. What exactly, is this “accident,” and why are we “sorry?” The combination of bold visuals with suggestive, enigmatic text invites us to make our own connections. In ‘like a cell of your skin’ a fire hydrant appears in front of a snowy neighborhood alongside medical drawings of a dissected heart; the bloody red swathes underscore the parallel between the pump of the hydrant and the pump of the heart. And in ‘Old Bones,’ the opposition/attraction of dry and wet suggests more than just a change in weather.

Lisa Lewis’ poems unite form and content, masterfully enacting the structured, multi-layered grasping at meaning they describe: “the gear and the grind” of clockworks, the architectural designs “chasing space” for the love of “beauty and the mystery of beauty,” the still life “primarily concerned / with religion and allegory,” the highway scaling “a precipice of light / flinching at the raised hand of gleam.” These poems capture the heartbreak of what we have made of the land, interrogating the city/country dichotomy and how it affects our souls. They evoke the long spaces of the Midwest, the sun on them, the buildings that shouldn’t have been built on the prairie, the skyscrapers “wrong for this landscape but proud in horizon light” erected by “donors who admire the endeavors of the business college and take as their doctrine its longing to rise above the prairie and the ghosts as if also wingéd and holy” – unlike the “impure and lustful” partridges, sage-grouse, and wild turkeys who “barge right into town . . . pacing fledged measurements” of their dwindling habitat. With exquisite craftsmanship, Lewis evokes the humble tragedy of ordinary life: the “shadows / we hardly get the chance to know before /someone rises from the gray with a blade.”

David Mills’ exquisite, devastating series, Talking to the Bones, gives voice to the spirits of enslaved 18th Century New Yorkers. In these tragic and profoundly moving dialogues, Mills offers a glimpse of the eloquence and wisdom, insight and humanity of men whose own humanity was brutally denied. With maximal economy and delicate grace, Mills renders these men’s aphoristic utterances to reveal a brief but tantalizing glimpse of their untapped reservoirs of wisdom (“Death: a sad cabinet is it not?”) and a resolve as necessary as it is inspiring: that “[t]he first shall have a last and the last shall have a first.”

JoAnna Novak’s high-octane meditations assess the relationship between self and other, work and domesticity, with its “hoard of / hand-me-downs and sentiment, the flinch and shrink / and scowl before savings.” As succinct as they are popping with rhythmic energy, these verses ground their explorations in the tangible and the tactile in all of its vivid and various glory: the “joints / joists vices files ferries roses and fathers.” Optimism as well as angst propels these bold yet questioning poems, in which a narrator “surrounded by black hills / and an enemy with busy lips and a tank to burn and / pockets stuffed with chips” asks “what if simplicity saves nothing? If my monochrome / chant is a mere red grunt?” With eyes wide open, this poet has “advanced along / the plank and called it a path, an El Dorado of rubies / and routine” in the conviction that, like these verses, “we are the gale in an ordinary machine.”

Elizabeth Shull’s magical and restorative paintings consider homo sapiens as a humble but fortunate inhabitant of the natural world. In place of hegemonic exceptionalism, Shull’s humans have the great good luck to share the wonder and beauty of nature side by side with a remarkable range of fellow creatures who, as these canvases reveal, are literally, and thankfully, everywhere around us. Hers is a world teeming with graceful form and glowing color, rich texture and harmonious compositional balance, joyous vitality and an intrinsic, ineluctable strength that is humbling but never threatening. In these lush, optimistic canvases, what lies beneath the luminous surface is even more wondrous than what shines above, and surprises are gifts glowing with a life we cannot help but treasure.

To close, Chuck Wachtel’s “Sheltering in Place” directs its tender, laser gaze on the modest beauty of ordinary life under extraordinary threat. This deep and moving elegy to the “fierce, continual” struggle to survive is dedicated and addressed to Lewis Warsh, a friend and kindred spirit whose poetry and prose also confronted issues of identity and mortality via specific and loving attention to the day to day. The gentle understatement of Wachtel’s elegy to the fragile hyper-normality of our current lives “sheltering in place / for the entire moment we hover in the serene eye // of this raging storm” offers a balm for our weary, grieving psyches, even as it confronts the reason for that need, those fearful forces threatening to “come crashing through the walls.” The real challenge, Wachtel reminds us, is as modest as it is daunting: to “try to continue being who we still, mostly / are.”

On behalf of our contributors, thank you for reading. Please protect each other, and stay strong.

with love and hope,

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann