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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

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

Editors’ Notes (Posit 24)

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We’d like to welcome you to this very special 24th issue of Posit.

Although this is not the first time we have felt the need to temper our excitement to bring out a new issue with recognition of the troubles of our times, other recent troubles pale in comparison with the intensity of our current global crisis. It is difficult not to question the relevance of art during a pandemic which threatens our livelihoods, our lives, and the stability of our societies. However, curating the superlative work in this issue has reminded us of art’s capacity to transport us beyond our bodies and our trials — offering us the chance to look away, even while guiding us to look deeper.

And the work we have collected here could not be more resonant with these frightening times. For direct relevance, we are honored to present Laura Mullen’s penetrating and humane consideration of the pandemic itself. And we are proud to offer five master-crafted odes by D. A. Powell, as well as Lewis Warsh’s profound meditations on love, aging, and the brave if modest feat of perseverance. Many of the works collected here contemplate death, as well as the mysteries and perils of living, from the brilliant ruminations of Benjamin Paloff and Joel Chace, to the frank and forceful voices of Alexandra Egan and Shevaun Brannigan, to the analogical reasoning (by way of constellations on the one hand, and insects on the other) of Amy Strauss Friedman and Rich Ives, to the pared-down beauty of Laura Walker’s reimagined Psalms.

Like so many organizations in times of upheaval, Posit has undergone some restructuring. This issue is our first without the participation of Melissa Stern as Arts Editor. We could not be more grateful to Melissa for her magnificent and sustained contribution to this publication. Informed as it was by her taste, judgment, and knowledge of contemporary art, her curation greatly contributed to Posit’s eclectic aesthetic, enabling us to situate our poetry and prose in a more interdisciplinary, not to mention visually vivid, artistic context. In an era in which specialization too often devolves to Balkanization, the art Melissa gathered helped Posit chart another path.

Working on this issue, we have found solace and wisdom, release and renewal. We hope you will as well.

Susana Amundaraín’s renderings of place and light emit a quiet but intense energy. They are at once subdued and vibrant, somber and serene. Amundaraín’s paintings have an almost magnetic power: they beckon and pull, arousing in the viewer a desire to enter their layered and mysterious worlds. Interpretations of place rather than places, these abstract canvases are liminal, evoking windows, doorways, and crevices — pivot points where realities meet. Above all, they explore the seamless relation between light and shadow; layering subtle washes of rich blues, blacks, and umbers in a wide range of densities and textures, from the velvety to the translucent. Amundarain’s palette is at once earthy and ethereal: she works in soul tones. In these canvases, delicately layered sheets of color are dramatically punctuated — and brilliantly completed — by contrasting lines and dabs whose power and beauty recall Turner’s famous red buoy.

Shevaun Brannigan’s arresting imagery is as rich and resonant as it is surprising: “the road a run-over skunk’s tail,” the garbage truck with its “mouth . . . open, / a mattress stuck in its teeth,” the railroad crossing sign a raccoon mask, the sky a prom queen with its “taffeta layers, / that pink hue, a golden crown.” Many of these images wind through the course of Brannigan’s poems, accruing new implications even as they lead gracefully and organically to their successors. These powerful poems boldly confront the urge to escape the burden of trying to “be a good person” and push on past the narrator’s “frequent stops” and relish the “berries bursting in our mouths one note at a time” in “the den of our bed.”

As the title of his first poem tells us, Joel Chace’s verse is saccadic, exploring questions of aesthetics, philosophy, justice, and physics via nimble and erudite referential leaps, from Socrates to Zukovsky, from P.T. Barnum’s obscene exploitation of Joyce Heth to the torment inflicted on Io by Argos, from black hole cosmology to Charles Ives’ childhood. At choice moments the intellect informing these connections yields to lyrical beauty, leading the reader to pause “to / permit the golden dying of afternoon to relinquish / them.”

Alexandra Egan’s powerful and personal verse perfectly dissects the bitterness of death: not just the physical lack, but the emotional distancing: “I mourned each opulently . . . I cried and was ugly with it” but “each time I learned nothing, was selfish, maudlin.” In a definition of desolation, “the season stays cold as gangsters dirty rain tough as kindergarten.” And yet, we live in a paradox: “If I say I want to die / I only mean / like a matryoshka / each split doll / opens on another / shinier less useless/deathless.” Progress, in Egan’s view, is to “Know that you will die and marvel as you would at anything perfect and tiny you can crush with your hands.” But perhaps, “When you burn something the ash is soft like thank you.”

Amy Strauss Friedman’s brilliant constellation poems expand what the ancient Greek myths told in narrative form: human psychology. In rich and detailed language, the poems speak to us of our time, from the smallest connections of cells: “I diagnose you a cancer the scientific equivalent of pinned wrists in a burning barn,” to our terrestrial connections — “camouflaged in dermal scales,” pointing to the vastness of both our knowledge and our ignorance. As constellations of cells and vestiges of evolutionary change, our “fear of living small ablates us” as we look for “a fascicle of storms and thorns making the sky like nail holes in wood.”

In Karen Holman’s billowing universe, our understanding of creation, from “particle of conception in our extended family of Atom” through “each snip of code to the fluttering canopy of memory” with “everywhere women cooking, always cooking an alphabet soup” may be “proof of how lucky, unlucky we are” in “the documentary-romantic-dystopian-historical-musical tragicomedy. . . coming somewhere where someone is screaming fire in a theater near you.” Meanwhile, in the world of the minute, “a mining bee’s wings blows breath through his piccolo home, fish ascend to float through canopies of autumn” and we offer “bent knees . . . aquamarines brighter than oxygen.”

Rich Ives returns to Posit with two beautiful and mysterious prose pieces taking the perspective of particular insect species to contemplate the mysteries of identity, desire, destruction and remedy. The life cycle of Ives’ Black Swallowtail Butterfly, in which “inside was once outside and outside will soon be back inside before it’s released altogether” has wider resonance, as does the creature’s idea, which “walks on many legs to its own escape.” It is not only in that creature’s world that apologies are “voluptuous tired little savages” which “surround you with melody until you think you’re going to explode with such sacred knowing.” Like the human beings it observes, the Blister Beetle acknowledges: “I’ve been a parasite . . . but I’m growing,” observing boys who “liked to break things because [they] were broken.”

It’s an honor to include Laura Mullen’s masterful and moving response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The 14 sections of Virus brilliantly unfold the contradictions, reversals and recursions of our confusion and fear, enacting our struggle to come to grips with what is killing us. Its litany of symptoms exposes the deeper implications of the crisis, both personal: “these are the symptoms dry cough fever / Empty shelves shortness of breath disbelief. . . Some of the symptoms / Include refunds and slight social adjustments / Toward mercy moving in the direction / Of justice” and political: “The symptoms include poor people / asking for debt relief and healthcare / And rich people congratulating them- / Selves on their “abundance of caution.” Amidst the fear and venality it probes, this beautiful and tragic poem wryly echoes Frank O’Hara’s invocation to Lana Turner (“oh S & P we love you get up”) while graciously including a “note to say thank you” and express “gratitude for each / Person who was careful.”

Benjamin Paloff’s poems etch a perceptive and tender philosophy of the contradictions of daily life: personal, physical, yet always intertwined with the underlying life of the mind. In this life, the narrative ‘I’ has “no reason to contradict or doubt anything said by anyone who has taken care of me” and “a dream about the inner lives of bees can end with an actual bee stinging me on my actual mouth.” In these poems, our hopes are shaped by our intellectual perceptions: “The angels have faces quite unlike those in art books. The sirens are singing with their baited hooks just to drown you on the sand. To see the forward-facing footprints of the backward-walking man.” Although it may be “excruciatingly difficult not to be distrustful when people declare April the cruelest month, when what they really mean is that April is the cruelest month for them,” these poems temper judgment with wonder: “the starfish-shaped shimmers along the invisible edge could be anything.”

In Rick Pieto’s striking Glitch poems, the intriguing palimpsest of interrupted and repeated visual symbols, color, and text suggests a possible new history, and future, for poetry — one stemming from visual as well as auditory or conceptual juxtapositions. Repurposing conventional poetic tropes while rethinking and resisting them in purely visual terms, Pieto’s visual poems invite us into a new poetic and visual multiverse where we might be able to imagine the possibility that “the field (itself) thinks.”

These five odes by D. A. Powell demonstrate the poet’s extraordinary stylistic and formal range, coupled with a master’s trust in the power of simplicity to plumb depth, and playfulness to attain gravitas. From a guilty-laughter-inducing tribute to a beef steer; to a relaxed but lilting homage to the Brazil’s ineffable magic (“bc though proper / yr improper / when you need to be”); to the near-vispo feat of First Strains, recombining only three letters to achieve not only its visual resemblance to musical notation but its aural kinship with an owl’s hoot; to the colloquial bravado of The Next Big One (“Take me up in your Rolls and // Rock me daddy”); to the haiku-like solemnity of the 17-syllable Valentine’s Day — these poems demonstrate Powell’s ease with his chosen medium, along with his empathy, attention, and sly wit.

The human figures and their oversized avian companion/protectors at the heart of Alex Stark’s canvases are frequently doubled, but sometimes halved: connected to one another, if at times divided from themselves. The visual and thematic implications of doubling saturate these emotionally charged tableaux. For instance, Stark’s upbeat, almost naïvely rosy color palette conveys a gentle optimism even while suggesting unprotected flesh. The ineffable yet subtly distorted grace of these men and birds conveys a sense of harmony and vulnerability. In their faces we see both pain and joy, fear and wonder. These gentle, giant birds offer the men shelter and solace, as do their Edenic surrounds. Stark uses colored pencil and acrylic to create a light network of shimmering lines and patches of color that breathe with life and feeling.

In Laura Walker’s poems, the lyrical cadence and lovely simplicity of the King James Book of Psalms re-emerge and resonate in a contemporary context. The speaker’s words, like the psalms, encompass self and other, but are grounded in contemporary life. “I see you there or think I do / perched on a fence with your pantsleg rolled up / eating a pear or an apple.” Although the poems are responses to individual psalms, they eschew the literal. Walker subtly and brilliantly reworks both context and language from the King James version, such as “heathen rage” and “vain thing,” which are converted in psalm 2 to “a veined thing / rage.” In other poems, the relationship of praise and love inherent in the idea of psalms remains, while the music reverberates: “your name is a plucked thing in my mouth.”

These brilliant new poems by Lewis Warsh are tributes to the limited rewards and unlimited effort of life’s one-way, one-chance path. As powerful as they are understated, they look truth in the eye, eschewing the temptation to “drop a tincture of snake oil on / the scar tissue.” Instead, they honor the perseverance it takes to continue “after so many years of fighting our / way out of a paper bag” “while all the buildings where we spent / the night crumble into dust.” Recalling Keat’s To Autumn, Johnson Road peers from the literal and metaphoric season, when “each hour a little more light vanishes” to what lies beyond, “lost in shadow.” In Warsh’s remarkable volta, the gaze shifts from the pastoral to the stark specter of final judgment, when “the prosecutor /will present inadmissible evidence / to the jury of one’s peers.” Like Second Chance, Night Sky notes the humble rewards of carrying on: “Tuesday Matinees / at the Triplex. The forklift / operator’s wife at the end / of the bar.” Surveying such moments from a swift sampling of lives and eras, the poem hauntingly sums up the coda waiting for us all: “Night-life in the baggage / claim area with no where / to go.”

And Frank Whipple’s collages deploy fragments of antique images and ephemera to depict a speculative and surrealistic reality populated by disturbing human/object chimeras. Many are domestic scenes featuring adults and children in genteel 19th Century attire with inanimate objects, or even abstractions, for heads. At times there is a sedate, almost becalmed nostalgia to these tableaux, invaded by vaguely frightening intrusions from a universe not subject to our physical laws. What we glimpse is at once stable and unnerving, unfamiliar and yet incomprehensibly recognizable. The dream-like resonance of these images, along with their eerie relevance, adds weight to their compositional balance and rich, subtle color palettes.

We hope you enjoy these, and that you and yours stay safe and well.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 23)

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Hello, and welcome to Issue 23 of Posit!

Like most literature, the work collected here engages the poetic ramifications of relation: of “us” to “them” (Ryan Clark); of the artist to the art form (Ryan Mihaly); of one species to another (Jeffrey Hecker); and of the self to its own becoming (Paula Cisewski). Some approach romantic relation, at its beginning (Fortunato Salazar) and its end (Cassandra Moss, Katherine Fallon). Others focus on the relation of mother and child, at the beginning of that journey (Stephanie Anderson, Gail Di Maggio) and its end (Maureen Owen). And then there’s the relation, via gender, of the self to the self — and to the cosmos itself (Maureen Seaton and Denise Duhamel).

However, perhaps what unifies this poetry and prose most fundamentally is courage. Although these works emerge from a range of voices representing a breadth of aesthetic visions, all grapple with their demons and dance with their angels whole-heartedly. More than anything else, this writing is all in.

Now more than ever, we hope the integrity and commitment of this writing gives you the encouragement and inspiration we have so gratefully taken from them.

In her poems of Love and Rage and Love, Stephanie Anderson evokes the challenge to identity of new motherhood in all of its specificity as well as universality. These verses “go grasping / with language” even as the narrator’s “plush / body unravels.” Not to be silenced, the poet manages to nonetheless craft these powerful meditations on the challenge of motherhood, especially when piled onto the already full plate of a poet, job-seeking academic, expat, and life partner. The reader is reminded of the courage it takes to grapple not only with Baths and Summer and Irritation and Grief (not to mention with Love and Rage and Love), but with the “fluid facts” and “willful walls” of reality itself, until “what gets // unraveled / isn’t form, / it’s a form / of supplication.”

Paula Cisewscki’s brilliant observations on writing and its intimate life connections are also the confessions of “an inside person who frequents the insides of schools and museums, a little pet-like it now seems to me.” As children do, in the game of “becoming,” the narrator “shifted my bones around, sprouting feathers or hooves, whiskers or tusks.” She asks, “Are there people who don’t need to know how it feels to be every living thing?” Now, in a different becoming, “the loon I could see is gone. No loons and no hoot and no wail and no yodel and no tremolo. They found each other, I’m going to assume the silence means.” Remembering her (and our) own earlier silences, “What’s a term for the perfect thing you should have said to yourself?” But then, “Once I read a fairy story by this young girl who opened with the phrase, Once a pond of time.” Thankfully, “that girl’s perfectly mistaken phrase exists, and so, inside it I am reborn with joy.”

Like swords into ploughshares, Ryan Clark’s unique form of homophonic translation transforms an Arizona anti-immigration bill into a thing of beauty. His lyrical lines are interlineated with their source text to reveal just how they operate to rewrite and rebut the xenophobia and fear such bills codify. As antidotes to “our reality” in which “fear here is / a signature” and “our / view is fences . . . stately terror fences,” Clark’s lines have the grace and fluidity of “a river” in which “we flow where / carried,” like a “word signed as a wand,” “a sun on a / flag a story of living,” or a “note soaring for the need to soar.”

Many of Katherine Fallon’s sensuous and surprising works are love poems with fangs. In a possibly fading relationship, “we’ve still got some light left and a place to go to, go around, to harness. Think fainting goat, unshod.” And in a sinister desire for preservation: “Breastbone most visible, most wanted and so most likely to split open onto white meat, and really, the handsomest of purple hearts. I’d salt it to keep it safe, I would.” Here too, is “Hand on the gear shift, soft-centered truffle, oyster-splayed like a crime scene.” But in a turn from the “crime” we are offered this tender admission: “Always, a woman’s spirited breath the hot air of an oven, yeast risen against me.”

In Jeffrey Hecker’s dark and witty Ark Aft series, animals we may not have registered in the original biblical text speak, post on social media, and generally act in oddly recognizable ways. Retaining the charm and “moral” point of view of fables, these humorous and delightful animals also propound scholarly sentiments: “Boar notices Noah’s wife’s name varies depending on source text” (Boar & Cow), and personal concerns: “Ferret posts I feel everything I ever fancy or require within reach. Ferret’s alcoholism perturbs me, posts Hamster. I clench apexes, zeniths, vertexes, apogees, pinnacles, Ferret reposts” (Ferret & Hamster). And in Tiger & Lion, Tiger asks Lion questions not out of place for our time: “What type fire should we be, if we die wise? What type water should we be if we die dim?”

Gail di Maggio’s poems lead us into the worlds of dream and memory as the forges of identity. These verses paint deft and subtle portraits of a loving, restless mother who is full of life and unfulfilled desire, “begging the wind to to ripple her, / to make her . . . / over.” They are told from the point of view of an attached and dependent “girl-child” who is as inspired (“un-posed, / irresistible”) as she is frightened by her mother’s appetites, even as she must hide her own — notwithstanding the last of the “yellow blossoms like dragon faces . . . / still in [her] mouth.”

Ryan Mihaly uses text + visuals in these inspired three-part inventions based on clarinet fingering charts to enquire into the transcendent element of music “which unlike the saints . . . leaves no relics behind.” In these pieces, Mihaly transcribes the effects of music, its ekphrastic and emotional impacts upon us, like “rain suddenly stopping, daylight looking like someone who has just finished crying, identity torn away, face replaced by the look of revelation.” At the same time, he is mindful of the uses to which music has been put, “world eye closing or opening depending on what flags unfurl at the command to play.” Ultimately, though, and thankfully, “It costs nothing to play. The body is governed in the same way: the veins do not charge the heart for blood.”

The prose of Cassandra Moss combines the dispassionate analysis of scholarship and formal logic with the narrative immediacy of memoir to penetrate the volatile ambiguities of intimate relation. In these poems, as in life, “the weight of expectation swings wildly . . . from total ontological confirmation to complete withdrawal of mutuality.” Reading of the questing aftermath of a divorce, the reader is reminded, with the narrator, “not to think in terms of old and new” — especially when “the conclusions [she] hoped would be ready-made aren’t reachable.”

Maureen Owens’s spare and tender poems visit the universal ordeal of parental aging – of having once been tended, and now tending. As a child dyeing her mother’s hair, she “could see the black strands flow apart and the white of her scalp emerge in tiny winding rivers,” a child experiencing the parent as her entire landscape. The mother in memory who could “go full gallop up the cow pasture til the very end fencing,” is now the particulars of a declining person. In Owens’s characteristic titles, which work in counterpoint with the poems they open: “she could put on her left ear hearing aid / but not     her right       & sometimes / she could not put on her left either.” And in the poem “that same train / ironically / later that same day     robbed / by     different robbers,” “layers of pillows that won’t behave” belie the truth: “some nights we die several times a night.”

V.S. Ramstack’s elliptical and unpredictable images hum with an immediacy as powerful as they are challenging. Like a “silly scissor mouth,” they capture the reader’s attention and pique our interest with an intensity that is as impossible to pin down as a “soft wheel and brunt.” Treating us to one vividly startling image after another, such as the smell of hair on fire, “a death with / honeyed scythe,” these bold and beautiful poems remind us that we all “have a leash to neglect and this may be / the very time to do it.”

Fortunato Salazar, in these deeply perceptive anacreontic(s) scrawled in dior addict fuchsia pink on fair skin in alice, tx, touches on the oppositional juxtapositions of our outer and inner lives. Salazar queries the language and substance of argument: “I debate circumcised guy, he wrings out verse,” but the debate is really internal: “What am I in this proof”? “I’m mute and I barter at the door.” In this internality, “I’m untouchable like a distant diamond sky, I’m not insubordinate in the service of the enemies of bigotry and narrowness.” There’s maybe a good intent when “We restrain ourselves from each encroaching on the other” but “it’s like poison to me not to triumph in debate or even to leave the wrangling incomplete.” Too, the nature of god is queried: what if “God popped into your Master and spun birth certificate and $100 U.S. currency and water?” “God manned a tower for just such flutter.”

And, in a brand-new installment from poetry icons and long-time collaborators Maureen Seaton and Denise Duhamel, we are proud to feature two of their exuberant and life-affirming 12 Lines about Gender. These joyous romps into the expansive and expanding universe of gender unbound open their inclusive arms to embrace the genderfluidity of clouds, UFOs, manatees (like “androgynous / goddess[es] of rising sea and sinking city”), and mangroves (“their agenda agender”). Also celebrated are the “Two-Spirit / brackishness” of the Everglades; that “agender ex-planet, Pluto” and their genderqueer moons; and of course, the gloriously uncontainable cosmos itself.

Thank you so much for honoring these wonderful writers with your time and attention!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

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Welcome to the visual art of Posit 23!

The insanely intricate and detailed universe depicted by Alexis Duque could only come from his rich and multidimensional imagination. Using both conventional and original tricks of perspective and technical drawing, he creates drawings that pulse with an almost psychedelic energy. His work is tightly organized and precise, but because of its imagistic density sometimes borders on a delicious hysteria. The eye wanders through his drawings searching for a beginning, middle and end. They are always there; the logic that lies beneath these mad worlds is always impeccable.

The birds in Teresa James’s drawn and collaged constructions often sprout winged hands — an apt metaphor for the artist herself, whose work over the years continues to remind us of the power of her hands. Whether working as a master printmaker/collaborator in her print shop in Chicago, or through her poetic and lyrical personal work, James always displays a mastery of her field. The birds in this body of work sing out to us with songs of love and melancholy.

Cheryl Molnar’s work is a virtuosic combination of concept and technique. Her intricately constructed collage pieces on wood are a marvel of paper and paint engineering. Working with both found and fabricated images, Molnar’s work depicts landscapes, both real and imagined. Her locales are vaguely familiar – encouraging us to will them to evoke a memory of “place.” Her work is imbued with an ineffable spirit of nostalgia, all the while delighting the eye with their intricate plays on time and space.

Matthew Schommer’s extraordinary drawings sometimes feel like film stills. They often capture an image in the split second in which they occur. Time stops and the drawn is lit, as if by a flash illuminating a fleeting moment. The skill with which Schommer seizes an image, using only pencil and his keen eye, is remarkable. They are often slightly blurry, as if pulled from memory, or retrieved from an archive of vintage film.

And Viviane Rombaldi Seppey’s work is conceptually complex and fascinating. Her work with vintage and contemporary maps ponders the notions of being lost and finding one’s way through the world. Seppy describes the work as autobiographical insofar as they reflect her own global wanderings — a life spent living in many countries, and the complexities of language and culture that she has experienced. The objects she makes beg to be touched and searched for keys to their meaning. As mysterious as they are immediate, their beauty is made richer by the depth of their layers of meaning.

Enjoy!
Melissa Stern

Editors’ Notes (Posit 22)

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Describing the state of the world when the I Ching was written, Z.L. Zhou writes of a time “so distant from ours that some of its aspects are approachable only through inexact science, science that verges on divination itself.” Hopefully, we can all be forgiven for noting the relevance of this formulation to our own mystifying times — with its “scrappy few / . . . scraped-up many;” its “imagined nation in ruination” (Kristen Hanlon, This Week Can Go To Hell) — so “difficult to see       explain / impossible to nail down” (Benjamin Landry, It Walked Through the Clearing). Varied and diverse as the work in this issue may be, all of it “grapple[s] / toward / [a] present / understanding” of our world (Landry, Shaft of Light), and the past that brought us to this point, although “the boundary of / necessity is porous” (Heikki Huotari, The Feedback Loop).

We’re proud to include a potent selection of works strongly inflected by voice (see, e.g., Behm-Steinberg, Hanlon, Lawry, Seidenberg, and Wright) and undaunted by silence (Huotari, Landry, Zhou); laced with aphoristic gems and unforgettable lines (Behm-Steinberg, Hanlon, Huotari, Lawry, Lurssen, Price, Yakovlev, Wright). Here are dissimilar but equally accomplished takes on the sonnet (Lawry, Wright) as well as intriguing excerpts from book-length works (Behm-Steinberg, Seidenberg, Zhou, and Lurssen). These poems grapple with demons (Behm-Steinberg, Huotari, Yakovlev); the fate of our planet (Hanlon, Lawry); mortality (Landry, Wright); the past (Landry, Price, Zhou); and the present — not only its dark side, but “our rich, noble trying, our Now” (Adrian Lurssen, Alabama).

In short, here is nothing less than required reading, sweetened by copious amounts of wit, craft, humor, and beauty. Whether delivering good news or bad, these works will surely salve your spirits, as they have ours.

The incantatory ten-line sections excerpted here from Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s an end is the towards to whet our appetites, deliciously, for the rest of this longer work. Laced with allusions to popular culture and music, and song-like in their resonant repetitions, these verses, like the “next door devil” of which they sing, “put a spell on you, put a spell on you.” “Counting every never come again,” Behm-Steinberg turns phrases inside out and back again, interweaving mystery and colloquialism by way of a unique and persuasive alchemy which has “figured out // how to divide your life into little slots one bird long.”

Landing zinger after jaw-dropping zinger, Kristen Hanlon wows us with her linguistic agility and razor wit, even while compelling us to confront the gravest of questions: “What if the last chance to set things right / came and went without our noticing?” In this “backwater of nuts-and-dolts,” as she forces us to admit, our “heart’s a bag of frozen peas / closing in on irrelevance & irretrievability.” Hanlon’s vision of the status quo may not be encouraging, but it is persuasive: “If something’s gone rotten, cut it out.”

In Heikki Huotari’s small gems of meditation on the scientific and spiritual essence of nature, the deity is tweaked for indifference to the effects of its actions: Although “God stopped the lilies spinning with consideration, not pheromones,” that “consideration” included “thumbs on scales (that) precluded cataclysms and three other kinds of kindness.” “Bite me,” these poems say to the deity. “You might have spent the morning watching hummingbirds extracting nectar but you didn’t. In your stead, I did.” For Huotari, “the boundary of nature is porous.” “When in a sea of leaves and needles,” this poet “need only brandish an imagination.”

“Space it turns out is a brightness” in Benjamin Landry‘s poems, illuminating our experience of nature and contrasting it with our compulsion for measurement: “how to square a thing that cascades.” This urge, Landry shows us, may be “why we loved the topo maps/girded in concentrics /a ridge we know to its limit” — a limit that edges into the ineffable. We may think we believe that things we measure and make have to be “level true / and watertight,” but “a dowser / with a wishbone stick” (so unlike an engineer with her maps) can also find a source — while sometimes “winged things peer… down nervous and hungry.”

Mercedes Lawry’s sonnets are grim and gorgeous in equal parts, slaying us with the beauty of their music and the urgency of their alarm about the precarious fate of our planet. These are exemplary sonnets — contemplative, compressed, capped with stunning and stunningly prepared voltas. In language at once direct and artful, the imminence of winter becomes more broadly ominous, bringing with it: “the voice / of sabotage, the skin of denial . . . the mess of symmetry wriggling / in the gloved sky’s hiss.” By not privileging a human perspective, these poems bring home all the more viscerally “the ways the human / can evaporate.”

Adrian Lurssen’s Landscape No Longer In a Mother Tongue leads with an epigraph by Paul Celan, whose power and compression, intensity and transcendence resonate through the unique timbre of these finely crafted poems — along with the voice of the narrator’s mother, who “could will her // self into his dreams,” as well as that of his mother culture. These poems consider heritage as gift and shackle — or perhaps, as shackle and key to one’s escape, or at least appreciation: “Meaning formed // in the darker shades / of an uncovered continent.” That “there is no explaining / It is all part of the explanation” does not vitiate the hope saturating this poet’s vision of this “brief American moment, an attempt at affirmation . . . a flood of trying, a flight toward the innocent . . . a future engineered to be unerring.”

From the vantage point of a stark future/present, Bryan Price details how we will inscribe our species history on the Tree of Life: “Everything turned itself out broken: windows, curses, cures, cymbals, the edge of your cheekbone — a dumping ground for unspeakable horrors.” Caught in our present global catastrophes, “we can flee no further nor stay in this place ahold of the wolf this way.” However, in images that bring to mind a pre-Raphaelite painting of the mythic, we are granted a small but sparkling hope: “only ether remains as green as Night rising naked from Chaos.”

In this excerpt from Steven Seidenberg’s plain sight, the narrator’s wry humor and aphoristic morbidity are voiced in a direct address which could not be more indirect in terms of information divulged. Who is declaring that “A destiny destroyed is a destiny fulfilled?” Whose “mood clots quickly?” Who has “the patience to give voice to an illimitable silence?” Readers of Seidenberg’s book, Situ, might recognize the archaic diction and Beckettian stasis emitted by this persona, as well as the way these pieces bring us face to face with our own elemental quandary, the tension between the impulse to act and the reluctance to do so — between repulsion and attraction, the desire to know ‘what happens’ and the certainty that it will, as always, be ‘nothing’ — that we can’t read on, but we must read on.

The exuberant ease of Jeffrey Cyphers Wright’s playful, tragic sonnets belie their extraordinary craft and control. These meditation on our fate as the butt of “Laughing Matter’s” joke are no laughing matter. Wright’s virtuosic turns remind us that no matter how humorous the spectacle of our lives might be, “the gladiators are not all glad.” These missives from “the pang fortress” are sent by this profound trickster to demonstrate, if not explain, “how to draw a word out of a sword” and delight us with their inimitable display.

Anton Yakovlev’s confident voice and capacious imagination mine the fertile ground of reality’s bitter ironies to reveal ourselves to ourselves. The mirror held up to our gaze by these poems is not a flattering one, although for fleeting moments we might be forgiven for believing we have spied some bit that sparkles. In a world in which “contrails cross each other / like denial” and “thieves swarm every intersection,” we can only hope that “low-hanging fruit falls through [our] moon roof.” When this thoughtful and inventive poet considers “the architecture of love: steeples of inattention, pits of catharsis, coffins of hurry” a universal “fear touches [us] like a bouncing night.”

In Z.I. Zhou’s innovative and beautifully reinterpreted hexagrams, the ancient past is reanimated by the present, as lyrical prescriptions from the I Ching are conjoined with contemporary life and language, opening new vistas of insight and understanding. Images from “the ends of the world, the traditional fields, the\\pillars chaotic with birds. Here, mist; there, din, missed and\\empty” resound with and against the vividness of now, when “on yet another first date, when my foot brushes his, I am forced to wonder if I should withdraw the advantage.”

“Why not wear your rubber Donald Trump mask to a crowded theatre and flail your octopi limbs at the screen?” asks the narrator in one of Joanna Fuhrman’s new video poems. These sharp and funny pieces blend satire with fey lyricism, confronting the viewer with questions designed to bring home the urgency and absurdity of the current political climate and the existential crises of our age. “Did you mean to wake up with your nerves dangling like sneakers from suburban trees?” “Have you ever shaken hands with the bodhisattva of bitterness?” Fuhrman also captures the outsized influence of popular culture, where the reckless movie hero “is naked all the time” so that “even when he’s clothed, his dick swings unsheathed.” “The 21st century,” as Fuhrman captures it, with her light but devastating touch, “is riding a bloodshot Ferrari into the mouth of climate change, and it needs pure vodka to make it ok.”

Happy reading and viewing!
Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

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Jaynie Crimmins is a magician. Her work transforms the ordinary paper detritus from modern life — catalogues, glossy mailers, and paper – and repurposes them into gloriously beautiful art objects. On first glance, her pieces appear to be graceful organic forms, based on the patterning and structure of the natural world. Second glace reveals that these complex pieces comprise a paper trail of capitalism. One can sometimes make out the ad copy, but generally the words and images melt into pattern and color. They are both clever and smart. Her craftsmanship — tearing, rolling, folding and sewing paper into 3 dimensional objects — is superb.

Scott Kahn paints lush landscapes full of color and pattern that, to me, often hearken to the rich tradition of Indian miniatures. He documents his life and the places he’s been with a delicate touch and a deep and vibrant palette. There is a rigorous discipline to Kahn’s paintings. He works within a traditional flat structure sometimes associated with American folk art. His subjects, whether they are landscapes or portraits, are full frontal — often with a somewhat flattened perspective. Their rich surfaces convey a sense of calm introspection.

Alison Lowry processes not only a profound technical and visual talent, but also a fierce commitment to social justice. Her cast and fabricated glass pieces commemorate some of the terrible crimes committed against women and children by the Irish State and the Catholic Church. Even while we are wincing from the unblinking portrayal of betrayal and abuse, we can’t help bu marvel at the sparkling beauty of her work. Her use of humble domestic forms- an apron, a christening gown, scissors — underscores the banality of evil. Her glass pieces are often exhibited in tandem with audio and text interviews with survivors who continue to bear witness to the past. Her work is urgent, powerful and transcendent.

The fun and funny paintings of Fran Shalom are full of both a “pop” sensibility and a deep commitment to the portrayal of form and color. Her brilliantly hued paintings are fundamentally abstract, but often make sly reference to figurative form. Elegantly constructed and quite precise, they seem to marry a kind of mid-century modern aesthetic with a philosophical investigation into the lyrical relationship between figure and ground. Shapes are pared down to their essence, yet the work is never austere. The juxtaposition of bright color balanced by neutral tones keeps this work alive and lively.

The visual and performative message of W.A. Erhen Tool’s cup project is deeply moving. Tool, a veteran of Gulf War I, has taken the humble craft of cup making and elevated it to something extraordinary. Tool makes usable ceramic cups that commemorate veterans and the horror of war. Using ceramic decals of real photographs, military imagery, and the beauty of glaze, he has fabricated and given away over 21,000 cups to the public. The cups themselves convey a dry sense of dark humor and a razor sharp vision of the destruction of war. At the same time they are simply beautiful.

Enjoy!
Melissa Stern