NEW! Poem by Kelly Fordon

Kelly Fordon

MONSTER IN MY MIRROR 

Well, you are a very small monster. I have to give you that. It’s a big 

world and I wish I had a little rhinestone suitcase. Then I could carry 

you around like a miniature poodle. Of course, you are much smaller 

than that. You could hide behind two books on my shelf, you could 

fox trot with the dust bunny under the couch, quiver in anticipation 

of the broom. There! Over there! You could dart underneath the tea 

set. You could nestle into that score in the wood. Once, long ago, 

when you lived in the crib, I believe I remember you larger. I saw you 

shaking the slats. Escaping must have been scary! That may be when 

you shrank a la Alice, crawled underneath the wall-to-wall carpet. Set 

up camp there. Later, in the hospital, your size saved you, scurrying 

as you did up the IV pole and into your own vein. You made sure the 

infusion took. I will put you in an eggshell, in a locket, in a coin purse, 

under my tongue. Never mind what they say about you. You are not 

alone. Look in the woodpile, on the evergreen leaf, in the finch feeder, 

there are hundreds riding in the paramecium parade. Stick to the glue 

on the envelope and I will lick you. Someone will post you. 

You can pretend that wherever you are, there you aren’t. 

NEW! Review of Joanna Howard

Foreign Correspondent by Joanna Howard. Counterpath Press, $16.

Reviewed by Rebecca Quillen

Joanna Howard’s Foreign Correspondent is a brief testament to the world of high culture and the journalists who endeavor to report it, blending the tangible and the fantastical as it proceeds in episodic bursts of prose unified by a whimsical reverence for the allure of the past. The novel delineates the struggles of free-wheeling heroine Johnnie James as she strives to extricate herself from the feminine drudge work of the “domestic correspondent” and launch her debut into the glitzy, highbrow realm of the serious reporter. Along the way, platforms such as the study of jiu-jitsu, sports journalism, and extensive insect collections provide unexpected moments for reflection on the complexities of societal convention and human communication. 

Johnnie’s story unfolds in a series of charmingly told vignettes that take the form of various types of correspondence, from heart-wrenching, soul-baring love letters to casual missives hastily tapped out on the screen of a “magical touch device which was recently outfitted to exact specifications at a retail outlet by a male youth in a midriff sweater wearing a tag that said ‘genius’.” However varied the mediums of Johnnie’s communiqués may be, the narrative arc is pleasantly energized, rather than disrupted, by this multifariousness of form. Two running undercurrents connect Johnnie’s numerous dispatches and form the backbone of the girl reporter’s tale: her efforts to win the respect of the philosophical man of the world Alphonso, and her continued ineffectual attempts to form a lasting correspondence with Scooter Mackintosh, a reticent boxer who hails from her hometown.

Johnnie’s narrative is very much an exploration of dichotomies: the foreign is pitted against the domestic, professional against personal, and the highbrow against the philistine. Johnnie plunges headfirst into the mystical world of yakuza mobsters, Dominican monks, and exotic birds, hoping to discover that certain intangible quality that will enable her to ascend to stardom while Scooter, the local “Bricktown Butcher” and the embodiment of everything with which Johnnie is familiar, remains strangely elusive to her, displaying a perpetual and unexplained reluctance to answer Johnnie’s plea for a continued correspondence. Scooter’s mysterious distance serves as a poignant reminder that the “foreign” may be closer to home than we think.

Also at the heart of the narrative is a deep appreciation for--and allusions to--the world of vintage mystery and intrigue. Though concrete details ground the story clearly in our own time, nostalgic Hitchcockian tropes dance from page to page, paying a whimsical homage to the 1940 film from which the novel takes its name. Despite being thoroughly steeped in the trappings of the twenty-first century, Johnnie seems to express an impractical longing for the covert thrills of World War II-era espionage and intrigue, articulated in indulgent flights of fancy when the circumstances her own life fais to slake her thirst for adventure. She even resorts to the careful construction of a fantastical alter ego that evokes the glitz of wartime reportage. “Next I’ll take up my pen name Ute Brynstock,” Johnnie rhapsodizes as a sort of apology for the mundanity of her career thus far. “Ute Brynstock, reporting from the aftermath. Ute Brynstock, on the trail of the assassin.”

Beneath the surface of this admiration for the glamor of the past, however, is a compelling and, at times, troubling tension between Johnnie’s fanciful visions of a bygone era and the realities of her own contemporary existence. In no instance is this tension between archaic and modern clearer than when the girl reporter negotiates the perpetually shifting of her own femininity. Johnnie struggles to escape from the outmoded stigmas that plague her journalistic work (“This is Johnnie James from the intimacy of your kitchen!”),  yet the pursuit of her sometime correspondent Scooter sends her into a spiral of desperation as she contemplates the unabashed deployment of every possible weapon in her female arsenal, ranging from the melodramatic (“Passionate declarations followed by suggestions of how many men are vying for my attentions”) to the comical (“Would a photo of me sitting on the back of a Harley Davidson holding two chainsaws seem like I was trying to hard?”), and when these methods, too, prove fruitless she begins to wonder at her own readiness to abandon the liberation won through the efforts of her forbearers. “Am I sending my sex back to the dark ages?” Johnnie guiltily muses, “Am I at the mercy of my womb? Seriously, in the twenty-first century?” It is a question raised and left unanswered and it hangs over the novel’s uncertain conclusion. In one of the novel’s more pensive moments,  Johnnie laments the ghostly loneliness that marks her existence as a liberated female. “Females who haunt often haunt from sorrow, or from love,” she reflects, “We must make the most of our feminine wiles because we can now pass through materials unscathed.”

Howard’s novelistic creation is as much a reflection on the complexities of modern existence as it is a paean to the embellished and even unabashedly fictionalized past. Though clearly indebted to a series of stylized tropes and images for inspiration, Howard’s prose deftly resists the pitfall of merely falling into weepy nostalgia for the clarity of ages past. Instead, it is a testament to the way our personal and national histories weave into the fabric of human existence, as Johnnie’s fanciful journey urges the reader to reflect on attitudes both past and present, and the ways we attempt, and often fail, to communicate those attitudes to each other. 

Johnnie James is a heroine who inspires chuckles, frustration, and ultimately a deep sense of resonance as she struggles to find her place in a world that is half-real and half the construct of her own wishful imagination. Though the veneer of whimsy and imagination occasionally clouds the underlying bitterness of Johnnie’s reality, Foreign Correspondent is really a testament to the complex and ever-changing nature of popular and highbrow culture, as well as the often tenuous line that divides the real from the imaginary, the foreign from the domestic, and the distant from the accessible.

NEW! Two poems by George Elklund

George Elklund

Two poems

PAVANE

To endure the severe currents 
Trapped in the brain
One needs a strange bird call 
That comes only in sleep.
The mind wants to begin again in dark berries 
But finds it difficult to un-know itself.
It takes a large poisonous bug
To keep my creature in its cage.
How far from your mind is the sea?
My mother cannot find rest anywhere.
I begin to collect parables of sand
And coins that once were Spanish.
The mind makes its phone calls to no one; 
The orbit of the gray matter
Is difficult to escape.
My daughter made a dinosaur
Out of paper and tape.
The crows in their long history
Know the echo of an opera not yet written 
And the bleeding mechanism
On the new Pope’s head. 

BAY OF STARS

If the hands dehydrate
Something must have happened 
In the dream of the mind.
O sacred head surrounded
By the crowns of rivers
And the loam of the dead
The silt of time
The ecclesiastical flow
Of the eddy pools
Where my brother liked to fish. 
Tom, I like to imagine
You will come for me
And we might find ourselves
On a sunny incline
Overlooking the bay of stars 
Crashed upon the waters.
What is the history of a nerve 
What is the future of a nerve
We are given such sacred material 
In these vaporized remains 
Perhaps you could remember
A tree or a breast
And begin again. 

Call for reviewers

Verse recently assigned a bunch of books for review for the site, but there are still some new/recent books that we'd like to have reviewed for the Verse site. Reviews are generally 1000-1500 words long. Contributors receive a 2-year subscription to Verse.

Update: 30 books were assigned for review within three hours of this post. Thanks, everyone, for your interest in reviewing for the Verse site.

NEW! 2 poems by Naomi Tarle

Naomi Tarle

Two poems

LOVE SONG FOR SPACE, NUMBER 5

I am pig-hipped and knee-rich.
When I come up from the sea my ears crackle like snapdragons.


FIELD SONG FOR THE EARTH

song—this is earth

acquaintance me
with your wine mouth

grape seeds your grassy lips

jab your name between tooth and gum

move across your shoulder blade
          slime ice and wax cap

Submission deadline: 2014

Verse is reading for both the print edition (portfolios in any genre, 20-40 pages) and the site (3-5 poems, mini-essays, or micro fictions) until 3/31/14. To submit, follow the link on the right. Contributors to the print edition receive $10/page, $250 minimum.

2013 submission deadline

Verse's submission deadline for 2013 is December 15. To submit a portfolio (in any genre) to Verse, follow the link on the right. Verse pays $10/page, $250 minimum.

Recent & Recommended

14 books by recent Verse contributors / published in 2013 / recommended by the editors:

Robin Clarke, Lines the Quarry (Omnidawn)
Joshua Edwards, Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling)
Robert Fernandez, Pink Reef (Canarium)
Noah Eli Gordon, The Year of the Rooster (Ahsahta)
Joanna Howard, Foreign Correspondent (Counterpath)
Alissa Nutting, Tampa (Ecco)
Ethan Paquin, Cloud vs Cloud (Ahsahta)
Elizabeth Robinson, Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing)
Peter Jay Shippy, A Spell of Songs (Saturnalia)
Brian Teare, Companion Grasses (Omnidawn)
Shannon Tharp, Vertigo in Spring (The Cultural Society)
Daniel Tiffany, Neptune Park (Omnidawn)
Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Rewilding (Ahsahta)
Nicole Walker, Quench Your Thirst With Salt (Zone 3)

NEW! Three poems by Naomi Tarle

Naomi Tarle

THREE POEMS



not light of foot 
or of tongue 


*


when you visit the river— 
treadle up the stitch 


*

mr. fly, you are all push    

2013 submissions deadline

Verse's 2013 submission deadline is December 15, 2013. We currently are accepting portfolio manuscripts (20-40 pages in any genre). Although we are not reading submissions for the Verse site at this time, all portfolio submissions will be considered first for the print magazine, then for the site.

To submit, go to:

https://verse.submittable.com/submit

NEW! Poem by Travis Cebula

Travis Cebula

A POEM ABOUT AN INSURANCE MEETING

respect
fully
no thank
you you're
welcome
to your
rueful
roomful

review copies

publishers: Verse is preparing to send review copies to more than a dozen reviewers. We're interested in reviewing books published in 2013 and 2014.

Poetry, of course, but also fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid genres, translations, etc.

Review copies can be sent to

Verse
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173

NEW! Two poems by Jason Labbe

Jason Labbe

Two poems


MAP OF THE BLUE BLUE BLUE

I have a blue sliver of hot aluminum.
I have a hot blue sliver in my middle finger.
Just below my knuckle I have a flash
of blue glinting as though the weather 
were fairer than the fluorescent light
of my basement, warmer than the terrible 
voice mail I have informing me 
of the latest sighting. You’re back in town 
and your drunken face is all sunken in.
I have a sister who warns me of you.
I love my sister who hates the smell
of your lies and thieving as much as I do.
I have taken a year to take inventory.
What I have left I have bolted to the floor, 
except this sliver of blue aluminum infecting 
my middle finger. I have a workshop 
in my basement and a father who taught me 
how to design, fabricate, and assemble 
a precision machine. I cut and mill 
and turn and drill. Soon I will complete 
the Blue Machine to protect us from you.
My middle finger finesses my micrometer,
it adjusts the tooling when the dimensions 
from the blue print slip out of tolerance.
My middle finger is primary as the sliver
and grows bluer because I strangle it 
with a silvery blue ribbon, all nice and curled
at its ends. Here, have it and keep it
forever. The rest, everything else you see, 
is for me. But my blue, it gleams for you.



MAP TEARING INSIDE A TORNADO

My sleepless ice dwindles 
into the warming arctic, my every 
bit of plastic particulate swirls 
in the North Pacific, my gulf’s green 
suffocates on the dark-slicked banks—
A power line whips the sidewalk
but the images stay up on my screen
shaking so much it’s going to shatter.
The devices stop communicating.
A muscle car calendar scatters from a patio
and the pages catch in the maple 
with the wail of the sirens. 
The thinnest diseased limb snags me, 
I won’t decompose.
The flash flood through the side yard
is white noise at my knees,
I will go on to poison even stardust.
I am one hundred ninety pounds 
of preservatives, antibiotics, and caffeine
rain-soaked and panicking for shelter.
I was too late to board the doors, I forget 
the warning and press my chest 
against both sides of the picture window.
My last locatable belief was in the shift 
from weird grey to the lightness 
of a pickup truck, now all I know is
I would bury this berserk wind 
and collect the neon Chemlawn clippings 
blowing through the blown out
cellar window, my next spring
gone well before the first snow—
My affinity for unseasonable weather
cools. I collect and count the wet blades
and strip away the pesticides 
with my teeth. O my polar ice cap
creeping toward a lower river, O
my crowning ozone a hundred tons 
of satellite wreckage crashes through,
O my beloved house whose roof 
ripped clean off takes out the pages 
but not the siren in the maple.
My roof takes off the top of the maple.

NEW! Poem by Jillian Mukavetz

Jillian Mukavetz

say it again, on your knees


to fall in love in dreams is rare
the architecture
a handkerchief coughs into a man
.
closer
tears in your eyes
say it again, on your knees
to fall in love in dreams is rare
.
moving without moving

NEW! Two poems by David Blair

David Blair

PEACEFULNESS

In peacefulness, true. They were getting along,
just like the two Koreas. Denying each other
foodstuffs once in a while, every once in a while
moving some stuff around, shooting some stuff.


AT PARK STREET STATION

A season of beautiful raincoats
and squirrel phones,

their haircuts, skirts, and suits
always better looking,

to relationship negotiations
and other quail feathers,

dinner plates,
work stuff, couples

carry on their heavy work
the way the coyotes hold anvils,

the subway on one level,
slim streetcars up here,

walls, ceilings, tunnels
sprayed with fire repellant,

against fire, but not mud,
catacombs, a Venetian future.

Isn't it romantic,
and won't it be?

Yes, and yes.

new issue of Verse

The new issue of Verse (Vol 29 #s 2 & 3) is out, with portfolios of poetry and fiction by

Joanna Howard
Jasmine Dreame Wagner
Sarah Goldstein
Shannon Tharp
Lance Phillips
Adam Strauss
Matt Reeck


The 225-page issue is available for $8 (price includes postage). Send a check to Verse, English Department, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173.

NEW! 3 poems by Gina Barnard

Gina Barnard

Three poems

ALBA

Nudge my nose just under
your ear, sometimes we slather
too much praise, like mayonnaise.
After tea, the bed is still warm
with you, mayonnaise.


ELEGY

You eat a sweet potato so fast your chest fills with cement and you hiccup to catch your breath.


FIRE ANT

dug its head into the back of my thigh
sliding down
stairs in the bedroom, the old house.

*

A pinch--
a yearning.

NEW! Poem by Jess Novak

Jess Novak

IN PICTURES, EVEN THE WALLPAPER GLOWS

I’ve been talking to this girl online—Jack calls her 

Internet Crush Katie, but she’ll be Real Human Being Katie 

soon enough, & that’ll fuck 

everything right up. 

In the smartphone pictures she sends me, 

her breasts burn white, overexposed and chewable;

like a model in a Bacardi ad, she throws 

her head back, perpetually laughing, 

surrounded by girls, more girls, so many girls, 

girls who are all

just my imaginary type, girls who flaunt

cool band t-shirts & expensive haircuts, 

girls who might text me cute things: 

let’s watch ice cubes melt

or let’s poke bugs with sticks together.

Girls who wouldn’t ask why the porn I watch

is so weird or call my mom when they haven’t heard 

from me. I bet they wouldn’t still be friends with all my old friends

so I don’t get to see them. They would never remember 

to tuck in the sheets. 

NEW! Poem by Ethan Paquin

Ethan Paquin

NEIGE [THREE SCENES]

1.

aimless animal-coloured tumbler your library’s aphotically indeterminate

you morning the ground to groggier-than-usual’s millions of earmarks;

there are no students eternal only stop signs to bark commands rufescent,

only stalléd cirri shelves and shelves of them bustling ether of nowhere

only my eyes no millions of other watchers imprecise tumbler heft spills

from the seat of god onto our laps a necklace to be untangled with bones

and a half-erased script and stumps for motivations, ut pictura cirrus this’s

all that comes to mind Latin for curl of hair thus the portrait of a girl who’s

blanched perhaps she’s suffered, perhaps she’s been spooked, likely in love.

2.

in love and staring out a window ut drizzle poesis, so goeth poetry as drizzle,

lovers’ crazy ideas of where their object went the evening before, before snow

tumbled before her eyes saw the result of the katabatic front. Ut drizzle poesis,

long gray nuance between stanzas the meander from cup of tea to the next one,

snow’s meanwhile abstraction an easy metaphor for the week. Young woman

in love as you are please, do not comb your hair—I see you motion for a brush

through the window I watch and clasp myself, do not to the narrative of dawn

surrender, stay wild and pained and look that way. This is not mere entertainment.

Snow tumbles aimless, accretes aphotic my gaze though is fixed upon you.

3.

such sentimental passages about love, weather and fixéd male gazes hunter

as he is, supposedly, of erotic experience wherever to be found. I’m stupid

like dander, or clover. I transcend no fence reach no apple bough. Limitless

are other poetries of the engines, of the random, of the idiomatic, of the popunders

and overt flâneurist grit-amenities. I wear a poem like this like, say,

a dead braid or a last match, bit of its tip scratched off, the thing useless for

cigarette to say nothing of survival or bonfire at the beach where the talk’s

of sex and nothing but sex. A deadened band of cirrus is known to haunt us

at our windows the girl and I like snapped taper candles, outside the snows.

RIP Dennis O'Driscoll

Dennis O’Driscoll

FRAMES

for Patrick Taylor

I.

Rites of spring.
Bring out your dead grass
wedged to the blades
of a dormant lawnmower.
Time for cans of paint,
white spirits, rags.

II.

The cottage garden
in the mauve light
of delphiniums.with honeyed tongues.

Bird notes tossed
like blossoms.
A fern stretching
its wing.

III.

Night snails, pumped up
to full size, plump
as a colony of seals,
make the viscous journey
to a meal of hosta leaves.

IV.

Those daffodils,
you’d know it was
their first time:

so open, so eager to please,
so bright, so upright,
so unaware.

V.

The raw nerve of yearning
triggered off by hawthorn,
by the green of far-off hills
seen from your top-floor office
when sun pays out its light.

VI.

That it might 
always be spring,
a held note.

That we might
look forward
to long days

of growth:
haze lifting
like a screen,

waves peeling
off the Gulf Stream
one by one.


(from Verse Volume 21 #s 1-3)

NEW! Poem by Aaron Apps

Aaron Apps

FLESHLIKE ACTIVITIES

Suppose the arbitrary violence that is bound into action shapes us. Sexes us. Suppose each of us is oriented like an anchored vessel on a caustic sea. Suppose each vessel is anchored by a thousand strings of yarn that have no weight as they disintegrate in the acid body of the ocean. Fibrous expanse. Suppose each line of fiber within each strand of yarn is the type of vessel that pumps blood. Suppose further each small fiber is the type of vessel that holds the dark things themselves that move forward to what the dark hollow the mouth calls “now.” Now spoken out of the empty echoing tube that runs down into a series of fleshlike activities. Flesh bound by arbitrary violence. The violence of a thick thread. If the supposition is made that the acts of moving utterance are followed by a fire of wires is the binding principle that holds each contingent instance together believable? Livable? For each principle that is a thing amid a multiplicity of things there is a sense behind it. A sense of the plenum around which activity gathers. Split end, thread bare, eye wire. See: we might have a sense of what it means to echo the word “nature” after the word “now.” We might cut our own eye off. We might cease to be we. We might bend like the dark line of the sexed I. I suppose that these threads are sexed bodies perceiving down a tangle within a current within a tangle within a flood. I suppose that the violence of the flood is unavoidable as vomit after swallowing a gallon of opaque eye milk.