2016 reading period ends on March 15

Verse's 2016 reading period ends today. You may submit a portfolio (20-40) pages in any genre or combination of genres (including visual art). Verse pays $10/page, $250 minimum.

NEW! fiction by Rich Ives

Rich Ives

Something Sleepy That Happened in Heaven 

I know that I am in heaven because the table is white. There seems to be room for a small apartment in my thoughts, but no apartment. Come in come in, says the shot-gunned door. Something unnatural seems to be rising with the dawn, trending into coffee and a bagel and a gently tortured conversation about mutation, but without words, the way a silence can be focused, an ache you think sleeping awakens.

If I can’t remember what I’ve said to cause you to feel this way, that may be because it’s only a toy, but you can fix it, make it do something unimportant and wonderful. It’s the kind of sincere carelessness demonstrated by diligent blind consortiums of inspectors of questionable intentions, who might just be a little too curious about the condition of our understanding. I told them I was empty. If I had had any less, I would have eaten my words or saved them for later in a small bag of fragrant apple stems. I can remember how cute the words were. They were right next to the carefully lined bag of equally fragrant pudding stems. They stirred as frequently as wind chimes.

I was trying to eat something that didn’t require teeth, but I had teeth. A bag of preserved fruits seemed to be squatting in a generous glove box. One of my thoughts had been wounded and was licking itself. For a while I did some things people thought I should remember. Then I didn’t do them anymore. Then I thought about doing them again.

This might be a sad story because nothing really works out. You could take it away like bad food, the kind of food that gets you in trouble when you’re hungry. You could avoid ingesting its temporary privileges. Life says start and you start, badly perhaps, and life says stop, and you do not, though all who know you may remind themselves with it that you are no longer merely you.

   

new issue of VERSE

The new 450-page issue of VERSE (Volume 32, Numbers 1-3) is out and features 14 portfolios by:

Natalie Eilbert

Sandra Simonds

Timothy Liu

Eric Pankey

Karla Kelsey

Leonard Schwartz

Kate Colby

John High

Kathryn Cowles

Douglas Piccinnini 

Laressa Dickey

B.J. Soloy

Aleah Sterman Goldin

Kevin Varrone

The issue may be ordered by mailing a check for $15 to Verse, English Department, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173, or by going here: https://verse.submittable.com/submit/51055

NEW! Review of Danielle Pafunda

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison by Danielle Pafunda. Coconut Books, $14.

Reviewed by Brittany Capps

Danielle Pafunda abolishes the stereotype of prissy, dainty girls in her thrilling poetry collection The Dead Girls Speak in Unison. Set in a surrealistic underworld, takes on the collective voice of empowered female corpses and ironically uses quaint language and structure to describe the true nature of women.

The first poem sets up the dynamic between the collection’s lulling rhythms and sounds with the grotesque imagery and sensory elements. Pafunda begins the poem with a traditional pattern and a slant rhyme, “On the front page / life has smeared. // We get no news / of home down here,” followed by a less standard, “No before, no news of storms,” and then throws off the rhythm with a jarring “No new noise, no newsy skin, / on the surface of things,” before switching to prose-like verse. She then brings in a worm, “our sorry conduit,” which will serve as a motif and a metaphor for the female body throughout the book. 

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison includes 35 poems interspersed with “chants,” “hymns,” “lullabies,” and “fragments,” which could pass for sing-songy threats from a horror film. The chants seem to serve their purpose well, as they resemble witch-like incantations. The hymns and lullabies, however, are used ironically as they portray sensory imagery that is anything but soothing. The fragments seem devoid of the beauty and embellishment conventionally associated with women and offer the most “bare-boned” version. 

Most of the poems are written in tercets, giving them a false sense of coquettish neatness. The “tra-la-la” structure sets readers up for skipping in Sunday school dresses, but are instead served “a glass eye / in a glass jar / in the snapped jaw / of an alligator girl.” Additionally, Pafunda uses internal rhyming and assonance such as “Though our sticks are split / we still get eventide / still get lit,” but the auditory sounds and onomatopoeia she includes are dissonant and gruesome: “Your toenails hooked, ashen heels, / scuffing the bed sheets // tearing the bed sheets / to ribbons / selling the ribbons.” Pafunda wants to be clear that the women she speaks of do not play with dollies or host tea parties.

Speaking to what appears to be the male gender as a whole, her voices threaten, “We’ll come for you. / And in your domicile / we’ll paint our hooks // and in your eyes / we’ll hook our beaks.” She claims “We haven’t made any progress,” but swears to keep trying. Pafunda’s collection leaves readers craving more of its “rotten pages.” “If you’re looking for something pretty,” don’t look here. 

NEW! Review of Wayne Koestenbaum

My 1980s & Other Essays by Wayne Koestenbaum. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16.

Reviewed by Becky Peterson

Poet and scholar Wayne Koestenbaum gives hope to those of us who, committed to an intellectual life of wandering and obsessively pursuing one idea after the next, are often dismissed as dilettantes. Koestenbaum defends us, as well as the marginal, the rejected, the invisible, and the incoherent. My 1980s & Other Essays displays Koestenbaum’s meandering interests in essays that range from the traditional to the experimental, and from the brainy to the corporeal, and which are consistently both eye-opening and entertaining.

Despite the title essay, My 1980s spans a range of time periods and subject matter. The 1980s are important in their formative role in Koestenbaum’s consciousness as a writer: “when AIDS hit in the early 1980s I decided not to waste my maybe-very-short life writing what I did not want to write or obeying rules that in the grand scheme of things (death) didn’t exist.” Koestenbaum’s distinctive style, which mixes autobiographical and theoretical analysis, is at the foreground of this collection. The text moves among the worlds of film, literature, and art, devoting attention to a variety of individuals, including Susan Sontag, Cary Grant, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and taking multiple creative and theoretical risks that result in a rich assemblage. 

“Privacy in the Films of Lana Turner” merges memoir and pop culture analysis, exploring the intimacy between fan and celebrity. Koestenbaum muses, “I have long wondered how people whose private lives are public knowledge experience mundane daily consciousness unfolding. What is it like to eat breakfast when millions of people know your intimate affairs? Is the experience of eating breakfast altered?” Using a diary form, Koestenbaum captures immediate emotions and realizations, and at the same time reflects astutely on the movement of his own mind. He instructs: “Find Cheryl Crane’s autobiography, Detour, and devour it.” I obeyed, and was happy I did.

In addition to offering up provocative reading list recommendations, Koestenbaum enacts a philosophy of writing that, as he explains, “[chooses] blur over clarity.” A mix of multi-disciplinary musings, Barthes-influenced analysis of detail, and what he calls “self-ethnography,” Koestenbaum creates, as he says about Ashbery’s poems, “an instruction manual on how to spend time fruitfully by wasting it, by growing distracted, blurry, foggy, garrulous, horny, contrapuntal.” Poetry, painting, film, and biography are guides to living as well as expressions of lives, and the “opaque surface” is worth our close attention.  Koestenbaum mentions a parallel between the poetics of opaque language and queer studies—“the point of queer poetry may also be to make murky, to distort”—and I would have liked to have heard more about this intriguing connection.

On the level of the sentence, Koestenbaum revitalizes simile and metaphor by pulling together unlikely elements. For example, in “Hart Crane’s Gorgeousness,” he compares Hart Crane and Stella Dallas in a meditation on poetry and the outsider. Studying Warhol’s serial portraits, he describes the experience of looking as “a tsunami of hyperesthesia, like what I imagine Roman Polanski felt when he first had sex with Sharon Tate, or vice versa.” In an essay on painter Forrest Bess, Koestenbaum speaks of Bess’s “comic sense,” “his off-kilter, snake-oil-vending taste for ceremonies-in-a-void, like a Saharan five-and-dime remake of Alla Nazimova’s silent Salomé, but with a spartan décor—or like a shell-shocked yet carnivalesque Paul Klee who’d studied tantra.” These similes, which build on each other with increasing surprise and energy, help mark this as a stand-out collection, worthy of examination for its art as well as its theory.

2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize winner

Congratulations to Felicia Zamora, whose portfolio Of Unknowing won the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize! 

Her portfolio, along with the portfolios of the finalists, will appear later this year in the print edition of Verse.

more James Tate from the Verse archives

James Tate

Vale of the White Horse

That’s where I first met my bride. She was standing under a chestnut tree during a summer shower. I stopped my car and offered to give her a lift. She didn’t seem to hear me. I got out of the car and walked up to her. Her skin looked and felt like porcelain. Are you okay? I asked. She blinked her eyes as if coming out of a trance. “I was looking for the white horse,” she said. I drove her to a hospital where the doctor diagnosed her as being my bride. “There’s no doubt about it, she is your bride.” We kissed, and thus the Trans-Canadian Highway was born.


Boom-Boom

A man and a woman meet in an alley. They kiss but they don’t really know one another. You smell like violets, he says putting his head on her breast. You’re strong, she says rubbing herself on his thigh. He runs his hands through her hair and pulls her tighter to him: I must have you, he says. Yes, I want to make love to you, she says touching him between his legs. Yes, you must give up your treasure to fructify the crops, he says. Oh yes, I want to fructify very much, she says. The crops, I mean.

[originally published in Verse, 1999]

RIP, James Tate (1943-2015)

James Tate

Where Babies Come From

Many are from the Maldives,
southwest of India, and must begin
collecting shells almost immediately.
The larger ones may prefer coconuts.
Survivors move from island to island
hopping over one another and never
looking back. After the typhoons
have had their pick, and the birds of prey
have finished with theirs, the remaining few
must build boats, and in this, of course,
they can have no experience, they build
their boats of palm of palm leaves and vines.
Once the work is completed, they lie down,
thoroughly exhausted and confused,
and a huge wave washes them out to sea.
And that is the last they see of one another.
In their dreams Mama and Papa
are standing on the shore
for what seems like and eternity,
and it is almost always the wrong shore. 

[originally published in Verse, Volume 14.2, 1997]

15 days to enter the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize

The Tomaž Šalamun Prize honors the great Slovenian poet who inspired several generations of poets around the world. Because Tomaž was especially supportive of emerging poets, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize is open to poets of any age who have published no more than one full-length poetry collection. (Publishing multiple chapbooks or books in other genres is not a disqualification.) Previous publication is not a requirement for entering the prize. Translations into English are acceptable if the original author is still living and has not published more than one full-length collection. Prose poetry and hybrid forms are also acceptable.

All submissions will be considered for publication in the print edition of Verse, which has been publishing only chapbook-length portfolios since 2009. All finalists will receive offers of publication in Verse. Published portfolios receive $10/page, $250 minimum. The prize winner will receive $1000.

Because the winning portfolio will be published in Verse and because every submission will be considered for both the prize and publication in Verse, everything in the portfolio must be unpublished. Response times to submissions will be 3-4 weeks (longer for finalists).

Entry fee: $15

Deadline: July 15, 2015

Requirements: Do not include your name anywhere on your submission. (Manuscripts will be read blind.) Your name should be listed only in the required fields in Submittable. Your submission must be a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.

Contest Process: 1st round: all manuscripts will be read blind, and up to 10 portfolios will be selected as finalists (finalists will be notified at the time of selection) / 2nd round: finalists' manuscripts will be read blind by the judge, who will select the winner

To submit, click on the link above or follow the SUBMIT TO VERSE link on the right.

NEW! Poem by Rob Cook

Rob Cook

THE SONG OF THE WATER PLANET

The water is a lie. 
The water will be blamed for its own disappearance.
The water flows to us from the basements of the earth.
The water goes brown in its invisible cities. 
The water moves with expeditions of punctured tarpaulin.
The water breeds only uncountable and useless water.
The water will be punished for revealing its unforgivable information.
The water will be poisoned and devoured by human lobsters.
The water will return because there are no other gods. 
The water will be given only the protection of the pelican word for “water”

while it weakens with the stillness of all plankton.

The water’s father will be fed the lost laughter of a hermit crab. 
Treat the water as an animal flowing with cellophane mist.
Invest in the toxic potentials of water. 
Buy and sell water! 
Predict the prices of water, the demands of the crowds of water.
If water does not advance, then water will be killed.
None of the water is new.
Water is an old and hackneyed master.
Water is less valuable than television movies of ice.
Water is less valuable than a dress pregnant with octopus.
Water is less valuable than men fighting in cell phone pictures.
Water that can be thought of as a vertebrate now. 
Water that can be heard when its bones of a thousand windows point toward the sky.
There are no longer spaces between people and the red robot sounds of water.
There are no longer sanctuaries of benevolent water in the petroleum eternity.
There are no longer songs whose water has never been touched.
There are search towers instead of oxygen on the microscope slides 

of slowed river water.

The water cannot be trusted: it is no longer a proven place of healing.
The water cannot be trusted even when our spies have infiltrated 

the fish cameras of algae hotels.  

The water can’t be tasted: it can be guessed at, but never known.  
The water’s people will have no water to drink, no water to cut open for the deeper water.
They will have to sip the false glacier melt from their own parched bodies.
They will forget the lakes and reservoirs and underground oceans of fog.
The water can be discussed, but only in leviathan apocrypha. 
The water can be felt as pain because the insides of the water are turning human now.
The water is despised, the water is overcrowded, the water is herded 

and forced into plastic bottles with no mother, no father, 

not a word or a prayer or a breath from the next labeled crack of light.

The water can be listened to because its molecules are thickening from a horrible thirst. 
The water is not dying, the iron people will tell you

while the water cowers in the bottomless aquifers of antifreeze, 

unable to move the heavier water, unable to reach the iron surface

where the ships are not afraid and the sonar is an advancing predator

that survives now in fleets of shark memory.

No one listens to their weeping that can be drilled and tested and taken away. 
No one feels the stronger water nuzzling 

the weaker water during the body’s mutilation dramas.

How will anyone survive the stillness of water, 

how will anybody endure the secrets among the water’s many selves. 

Each person betrays, through a blunted thirst, his or her graveyards of rain.
Each person hears and ignores—as difficult, wasteful, and unproven—

the cries of the dark and falling water.

NEW! Review of Matthea Harvey

If The Tabloids Are True What Are You? by Matthea Harvey. Graywolf Press, $25.

Reviewed by Brynne Rebele-Henry

Matthea Harvey’s If The Tabloids Are True What Are You?  resembles a museum, every section a glossy curio cabinet. Harvey weaves a tight sharp world where girls are made of glass and mermaids can grow legs and become costume designers. Each of the book’s sections is accompanied by strange multimedia art (personettes of mermaids with household appliances for tails, embroidered cloth, pictures of everyday objects encased in glass, and so on). Harvey is like a surrealist sculptor who makes miniature worlds out of pinecones, and the result is stunningly beautiful, disturbing, genre-migrating writing. 

The women-girls in this book take male fantasies and exaggerate them, stretching them out until they break. They are aquatic, insubstantial or too substantial, held back by either a physical defect or dysfunction, such as the mermaid who can’t swim because she is half tuna, or the mermaid in “Telletrefono” who is slowly killed by the world she wasn’t meant to inhabit.

The book opens with a group of prose poems about malfunctional, objectified, male fantasy-warping mermaids. The poems are accompanied by mermaid silhouettes, in which the tails are household tools.  One mermaid is too straightforward. Another is inside out, her organs are her skin. The Impatient Mermaid is too fast and wired, longing for death. The Tired Mermaid is perpetually exhausted.  Morbid Mermaid is enraptured by death, but dissatisfied with the foam that mermaids turn into when they die.  Backyard Mermaid is trapped in a suburban neighborhood. The Objectified Mermaid  is doing a pin-up photo shoot and working in a dive bar. Deadbeat Mermaid is an aquatic hick.  Homemade Mermaid is botched: 

The Homemade Mermaid is top half pimply teenager, bottom half tuna. This does not make for a comely silhouette, and the fact that her bits are stitched together with black fishing wire only makes the combo more gruesome. The Homemade Mermaid floods Mermag’s  “Ask Serena” column with postcards that read, “O why not half salmon or half koi?” signed Frankenmaid. Sure, she’s got the syndrome—loves her weird-eyed maker who began his experiments with Barbies and goldfish in a basement years ago—

The book’s fourth section, “On Intimacy,” houses a collection of poems (“My Zebra Son,” “My Wolf Sister,” “My Owl Other”) about woman-child-animal hybrids. Like the mermaid poems in the book’s previous sections, these poems characterize the stigmas surrounding womanhood and family. 

Another part of the book, “The Glass Factory,” is a long poem broken into sections and framed by images of household items filled with glass. The girls in the factory have never been outside. First they make a girl from glass, then they make new worlds: 

The thermometer hits one thousand

degrees and suddenly she’s standing there—

hot, glowing, almost still liquid. Like them, 

but unlike too. They don’t question that

she is alive, walking, gesturing. But no one 

imagined that she, with her new glass eyes

would be able to see the glass lock 

and the glass key. In an instant, she opens 

the door and they stream outside into

the solid world. This isn’t at all what 

they imagined. The sky is like lead

above their heads. The once-silent birds

flood their ears with clashing arias. 

Harvey follows “The Glass Factory” with a group of animalistic dystopian poems with retro images that juxtapose the harsh realities of Harvey’s writing with kitschy multimedia images of miniature household items and small, seemingly random objects. 

Harvey uses the mermaid as a token of womanhood again in the last section of the book, “Telletrefono”: 

Preset Antonio Meucci Monologue Mode: 

It looks plastic and unbeautiful, no? But oh if you filleted this telettrofono, the wonders you would see. Two tubes lined with fish scales and mercury, sparks of electricity tripping up tiny gold stairs, a spirit level stitched into a swimbladder, a microphone made of minimolluscs, and, floating in a small stoppered vial, one petticoat snippet, one mermaid tear, and a cell from the gill of an electric eel. You are holding in your hand “the telephone which I invented and which I first made known and which, as you know, was stolen from me.” 

…..

Preset Mermaid Monologue Mode (Esterre Meucci) 

Look up. The clouds are a pod of belugas,

the sun, a bloom of jellyfish fluorescing 

a few fathoms up, or no, make it nighttime—

the light underwater was never this bright. 

That was once my life. I moved through it

smoothly, too smoothly—sometimes just to feel 

something, I’d take—between my thumb

and forefinger—one of the many hooks 

that were hunting underwater and give it a tug. 

Hello, I mouthed underwater, hello?

In “Telletrefono,” a mermaid who dares to leave the ocean because she is craving sound faces the consequences as her legs and body break from the noise, a metaphor akin to the shaming and punishment inflicted on women in fairy tales and in the real world for their expressions of sexuality. The mermaid is punished for coming ashore, and, metaphorically, for becoming immoral because of it. Her inventor husband creates bright, loud worlds for her as their life becomes increasingly ruinous. Throughout If The Tabloids Are True What Are You? Harvey takes stereotypes and destroys them, leaving a trail of shards in her wake. 

NEW! Two poems by Rob Cook

Rob Cook

Two poems

TENEMENT SCENE 

When the tenement loses 

its place in the light, 

thirty pigeons bleed 

from the gray brick sky

where crowded bedrooms dwell.

Fat with plague 

and sidewalk plumage

the pigeons descend as a single shroud

and peck at the cement 

like starving asphodels. 

And the people, always talking,

always feeding their obedient phones

and ignoring their outdated dogs,

scatter like the scattered 

seedlings of a colossus that fell. 

A TRILOBITE PREPARING FOR ITS BIRTHDAY

Dear trilobite and all your advancing crayon
mammals, it is never night.
The sunlight is just broken
or hunted down or self-conscious
from the way its turtles twitch like sea lungs.

The dinosaurs, made from shelves
of shale, have just led the world
to a different room of oranges and wind
and everything the trees and hills can see,
everything the mountains shy with stone can see.

And even though the rabbit-shaped kings cannot play
and the tomatoes cannot play, nor the leaves,
and the faces seem scary in the sky today,
it is not raining—

it’s just your shirt stripes
mining the cephalon forests of a mirror
when it’s closest to the happiness 
stolen from your toothpaste shades of sky,
that bedtime era.

And there the frowns 
from a more slight and missing day
become bright listening for your trails 
through fossil ranges of salamander and cynodont
and a pre-school apricot nephew. 

With a clown’s twelve giggling fingers,
you hunt the sugared cliffs of a cake
for a brachiopod’s grandmother
and a Norian granddad, both still 
next to the sounds a rock made
back in the mythological light.

And still tall with miles and stories
and hugs of dandelion worlds,
they bring five windswept candles,
five hives of ice cream,
five soda bottle amphibians
and hold your newly sprouted hand, 
its house and the little way it laughs

without windows on a Silurian, birthday afternoon.

NEW! Poem by Lane Falcon

Lane Falcon

Compass

I’ll roll up the road 

behind you, child, not so 

no one follows, nothing skips 

beside you but the leaves— 

so you can bury your horse 

in peace.