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Katy Haas

Service Workers’ Words

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Magazine Review by Katy Haas

Since March, we’ve been relying heavily on service workers, those operating the essentials while the rest of the country slows or stops. The second half of the Fall 2020 issue of Rattle features work by poets who have served long periods of time as service workers.

In this section, readers can find Marylisa DeDomenicis’s “Excuse Me” and Jackleen Holton’s “The Hunter,” both of which discuss working in a restaurant. DeDomenicis writes of the prevalent racism in the kitchen where the speaker works, and Holton focuses on the sexism and harassment the women face at the restaurant where her speaker works. In both of these, the other workers advocate for each other when the higher-ups either do nothing or contribute to the problem. The speaker in DeDomenicis’s piece sticks up for the bullied Mexican bus boy, and the waitresses in Holton’s piece work the buddy system together so they’re never alone, lessening the severity of their harassment.

Laurie Uttich’s “To My Student with the Dime-Sized Bruises on the Back of Her Arms Who’s Still on Her Cellphone” stuck out to me most starkly. In this poem, the speaker notices her student’s bruises and implores that she put down her phone, her abusive boyfriend on the other end, so she can trade it for a pen and “Take a piece of the dark and put it on a page.” Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf stand by as supporting characters, offering comfort and a room of one’s own. Uttich’s use of language as the poem addresses the student is clever and flows quickly, familiar images flashing through the lines.

While we continue to rely on service workers to keep the world running, make sure to take time to hear their voices and their stories in their own words.

PoArtMo Anthology: 2020 Artists

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We could all use a little positivity and Auroras & Blossoms agrees. This is why the literary magazine has established PoArtMo which stands for “Positive Art Month and Positive Art Moves.”

In the month of June, the PoArtMo creators urged writers and artists to “celebrate positive art for 30 days.” A collection of this positivity is to be memorialized in the PoArtMo Anthology. The anthology will feature drawings, paintings, photography, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and six-word stories by the writers and artists who participated in the challenge. The magazine has announced the featured artists readers can expect to see in the anthology.

Congrats to the selected writers, and thank you for spreading your positive outlook!

Smith’s Final Season

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Guest Post by James Penha

Summer is the fourth and final novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. I loved Autumn, Winter, and Spring. Summer is my favorite. It has what one expects from Smith: wonderfully idiosyncratic characters, interlocking story lines, humor, social and political themes. But the special shock of Summer is its timeliness—not just Summer; Summer 2020! Its present tense is our pandemic present. Ali Smith had planned for this novel from the time (2016) she published Autumn if not long before. How did Smith manage to integrate COVID-19 and lockdown so seamlessly into a novel already envisioned? I call it a miracle . . . and a great book.

Summer by Ali Smith. Pantheon, August 2020.

A native New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past quarter-century in Indonesia. He edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.

Get in the Halloween Mood

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Guest Post by Claudia Gollini

The Shunned House falls into the supernatural and folk genres. It is a horror fiction novelette by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in October 1924 and first published in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

Lovecraft links, at the story’s beginning, the tale to his idol Edgar Allan Poe. The unnamed narrator finds it ironic that during Edgar Allan Poe’s Providence sojourn, the master of the macabre many times passed a certain house on Benefit Street without recognizing the site of real horrors.

The Shunned House is a house on Benefit Street where a large number of people passed away. With the amount of fungus present in the house, it was declared to simply have “unhealthy” conditions. At worst, the house was deemed “unlucky.” No one suspected anything supernatural was going on.

However, the narrator’s uncle, physician and antiquarian Elihu Whipple, has a shivery fascination for the house. The house was built in 1763 by William Harris. Shortly after the Harrises moved in, his wife Rhoby delivered a stillborn son. For the next 150 years, no child would be born alive in the house. Once the narrator learns of his uncle’s suspicions, they decide to investigate the house.

The story’s narrator suspects that the family is connected to Jacques Roulet of Caude, who was condemned to death for lycanthropy in 1598 before being confined to an asylum.

Jacques Roulet was a real person, whom Lovecraft had read about in John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers. “The family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity—dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror.”

The Shunned House of the title is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, still standing at 135 Benefit Street and the novelette carries the perfect Halloween mood.

The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft.

Reviewer bio: Claudia Gollini is a makeup artist, fashion/beauty blogger and journalist, editor and writer, and body painter of events and TV shows.

NewPages Book Stand – September 2020

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It’s that time of month again: a new Book Stand is now up on the website. With the September update, you can find five featured titles, as well as a selection of new and forthcoming books to check out.

In the forthcoming I’ll Fly Away, Rudy Francisco’s poems savor the day-to-day, treating it as worship, turning it into an opportunity to plant new seeds of growth.

The essays in Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World by Jennifer Sinor offer a lyric exploration of language, love, and the promise inherent in the stories we tell: to remember.

Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From is Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product.

Hafizah Geter’s debut collection, Un-American, moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration.

Joseph Harris’s interconnected narrative You’re in the Wrong Place presents characters reaching for transcendence from a place they cannot escape in a landscape suddenly devoid of work, faith, and love.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website and find them at our our affiliate Bookshop.org. You can see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

New Kooser Gem

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Guest Post by Guinotte Wise

I see where the bookmark is in the closed pages of Ted Kooser’s Red Stilts and realize I’ve been reading faster than I meant to; it’s a new Kooser book and I like to savor the first read. It’s like a dish of something especially good and you want it to last longer than it does. Each poem is a pleasure. Even the epigraph at the start is Kooserian, though it’s a Tolstoy quote from “Father Sergius”: “After he’d walked away, she stood in the yard in starlight, listening to dogs bark, each more faintly as he passed the farms along the road.”

I can see it, hear it, feel it. That’s a summation of Ted Kooser’s poetry. The cover of this newest gem from Copper Canyon Press is a rather entrancing painting of an alley by Don Williams, an oil titled Nebraska City Alley and it, too, echoes Kooser charm and clarity.

Once finished with this, I’ll never be finished; I’ll return to it often. I have a shelf of Ted Kooser poetry and whichever book I pull from it, it takes me quietly away from whatever dissonance the outside world is shoveling at me, and into a gently masterful poem that seems so simple, so connected to everyday things we miss in our confusion.

Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Kooser, for this kid you had in 1939. And thank the world for carving his genius. Simply awesome.

Red Stilts by Ted Kooser. Copper Canyon Press, 2020.

Reviewer bio: 5-time Pushcart nominee and author of seven books, Guinotte Wise’s poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals. Some work is at http://www.wisesculpture.com.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Avian Inspiration

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Guest Post by Amber Thompson

I discovered Graeme Gibson’s The Bedside Book of Birds while watching Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power. The day after I watched the documentary, my husband and I rescued a pair of near-fledgling doves. This, coupled with the fact that I found Atwood and Gibson’s relationship moving and relatable, convinced me I had to get this work for my husband, a lover of both books and birds.

Online it was selling for much more than the original list price, but at a bookstore a week and a half later, I watched my husband pick up a more reasonably priced copy. I told him a little about the book: that Atwood’s late husband had compiled it and that it was a collection of works on the relationship between birds and humans—in a sense, the awe the former has long inspired in the latter. I also told him I’d been hoping to get it for him and that if he liked the look of it, I still wanted to.

As we drove home, he cracked open the book. I peeked over to see the title of the first piece, a poem: “Night Crow” by Theodore Roethke. When he read it to me, I had the sudden realization that it was a poem I’d been searching for for years. These miraculous-feeling events coalesced into an experience of serendipity that we had not felt in a long time. When we curled into bed that night, he read more of the book aloud to me and we looked together at the beautifully included reproductions of sketches, paintings, and scientific drawings of birds. We rested quietly in the knowledge that we, through our friend Carol, the surviving fledgling, had been touched deeply by the avian world as well.

The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany by Graeme Gibson. Penguin Random House.

Reviewer bio: Amber Thompson is a Pushcart Prize nominee who recently published her debut poetry chapbook. She can be found at www.amberthompsonwrites.wordpress.com.

Read It Again

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Guest Post by Preksha Bothra

“Never let anyone make you feel ordinary.”

There were a lot of oh-I-wanna-read-this-again moments in Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Nothing, literally nothing, in this book went the way I expected. A couple of times I was completely surprised with what happened. I didn’t even fully get it until I read the novel twice. Not many books have had that effect.

This book will definitely not bore you, because it’s never slow. The chapters skip from one husband to another quickly but without leaving any important details behind. The only one time that I didn’t like what I was reading was somewhere in the middle of the book, where I became a little tired with Evelyn and her marriages, but that is my only complaint. Highly recommended.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Washington Square Press, May 2018.

Reviewer bio: Find Preksha Bothra at on Instagram.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

NewPages Mag Stand: Still Point Arts Quarterly

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The Fall 2020 issue homes in on “The Secret Life of Objects.” Featured artists include Cary Loving, Birgit Gutsche, Aaron M. Brown, Jeffrey Stoner, and more. Featured writers include Dawn Raffel, Judith Sornberger, Emily Uduwana, Kathleen Aponick, William Doreski, Keltie Zubko, Adrienne Stevenson, Susan Currie, and others. See more contributors at the Mag Stand.

NewPages Mag Stand: Spoon River Poetry Review

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The Summer 2020 Issue of SRPR is now on the Mag Stand. In this issue, you’ll find cover art by Brittany Schloderback; the SRPR Illinois Poet Feature with new poetry by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White, with an interview of the poets by Carlo Matos and Amy Sayre Batista; and new poetry by Jose-Luis Moctezuma, Paul Martinez-Pompa, Julia Wong Kcomt translated by Jennifer Shyue, Michael Leong, Emily Carr, and more.

NewPages Mag Stand: New England Review

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New England Review Volume 41 Number 3 is at this week’s Mag Stand. Featured work by May-lee Chai; Jeneva Stone; Laurence de Looze; Alyssa Pelish; John Kinsella; Clifford Howard; and translations of Scholastique Mukasonga, Karla Marrufo, and Nelly Sachs. Fiction by Kenneth Calhoun, Meron Hadero, Kate Petersen, and Kirk Wilson; poetry by Anders Carlson-Wee, Victoria Chang, Justin Danzy, Elisa Gabbert, torrin a. greathouse, Christina Pugh, and more; plus cover art by Heidi P.