Tag Archives: Thomas Fink

Thomas Fink

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Yinglish Strophes 31

They don’t recognize you

the minute they get
elected. Before—they’re all
over you. Marriage optimum

a beautifully soul to
with. My cousins for
youngest bashful always on
the outlook. Is brisket
shopping this? Retrospect that

forty, fifty—a glimpse
may have then to
quality a soul. Finds
the take with the
give. Trying to equal.
Attentive some days enough
be marital. Or political.

Yinglish Strophes 32

Are you going for

dinner out? “Moderation too
much”—you clucking. Well:
fancy it crave don’t

feed no wiser a
stomach or push living
a spell endure sick.
There’s yesterday a doctor.
About the nutrition is

everything you gotta eat
natural. So where find
always anywhere this natural?
Would fib lots stores
from label truth. Is
bodies differing machines built
to same behave?

Yinglish Strophes 33

Poetry is just for

sense yourself feelings from
pondering in. To make
a living doesn’t flow

that river. You took
up a profession that
kills the eyes. What
painters I’ll museum for?
The clear good ones

I can stay from far
shadows bloom sunning bright with
people crowd or few, only.
Rembrandt—he’s my pet painter.
We saw all his life.
Was going in a series.
Picasso—he’s new to me.

Yinglish Strophes 34

Noise up culture countering. Those

hippies! Still coverage they count
extreme the media. Why not
of your origin be civil?

Who else could blanketing you
that much? Your father— not
so natured ill. Only want
for him each items nice folded.
Mine: from me early cut ambulance

succumbs the house. To grow of
understanding you’ll older sweeten, too hippies
maybe. I have for you chocolate

cake a piece. Come. I have.

Thomas Fink a Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, has published 12 books of poetry—including Zeugma (Marsh Hawk Press, 2022) and Selected Poems & Poetic Series (2016). He is the author of Reading Poetry with College and University Students: Overcoming Barriers and Deepening Engagement (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), two books of criticism, and three edited anthologies. His work appeared in Best American Poetry 2007. Fink’s paintings hang in various collections.

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, mucous, 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

Thomas Fink

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Dusk Bowl Intimacies 36

Leave the fig leaf alone, and everything could be fine. And she lives to dress up, and she has the right clothes—to milk the province’s uncombed masculine goofiness. Oh, this has been a terrible era for the ardent designer of outcomes reassessment. Fish come swimming up at any hour. To gawk at how bumbling “sapiens” sap sincerest intentions. Call me ancient, uncorseted and uncoveted by fresher generations, but I hereby spurn the charge

of
pickling rust-
plated American tenets.

Dusk Bowl Intimacies 37

That mind is always super-crowded. Yet I don’t want to rue all those particles, if I’ve brewed them wrong. I have to pursue another purse. Pilar has taken the wrong pillar. Indolent fit. Altogether, I think the alimony should turn out fine. But she’s much more than that. She insists on snaking her way out of the cloud sum of blaring indulgences. Bartenders and assorted bystanders hunt for every dent in the reconstituted. Instead, I prime to be a doer. Will you enjoy whatever opening? And the color, too?

Each
time I
see you flush

with
investments, I
get slap happy.

Thomas Fink, a professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, is the author of 11 books of poetry, most recently A Pageant for Every Addiction (Marsh Hawk Press, 2020), in collaboration with Maya D. Mason, and Hedge Fund Certainty (Meritage & ie Press, 2019), as well as two books of criticism. He has also edited two critical anthologies.

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