James Fowler – Postcards from Home
From Kelsay Books in Southern California comes word of the publication of Postcards from Home, a new collection of poetry by retired UCA English faculty member James Fowler.
In May of 2023, Jim retired after a distinguished career as a teacher and scholar, a career that included 25 years as editor of SLANT.
As a poet and fiction writer, Jim has published work in dozens of literary journals over the years and published two previous volumes: The Pain Trader and Other Poems (Golden Antelope Press: 2020) and Field Trip: Stories (Cornerpost Press: 2022).
To honor Jim on his retirement, as well as Richard Hudson, his predecessor as SLANT editor, the UCA School of Language & Literature created a new award in 2023, the Hudson-Fowler Prize in Poetry.
One early reviewer of Jim’s new book notes, “These well-crafted monuments to memory by Fowler are neither monolithic nor overly ornate but thoughtful and sensitive meditations on people, places, and the passage of time with images as evocative as photos of Niagara Falls or the Eifel Tower.”
Also From Kelsay – Light Verse by Paul J. Willis
Losing Streak, a new collection of rhymed and metered and mostly light but sometimes serious verse by Paul J. Willis, has just been released by Kelsay Books.
This is Paul’s eighth book of poetry, preceded by Somewhere to Follow fromSlant Books in 2021. Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, SLANT, Christian Century, and the Best American Poetry series. He lives with his wife, Sharon, near the old mission in Santa Barbara, California.
Among the early reviewers of Losing Streak, Jeanne Murray Walker (the author of Helping the Morning) has written: “The world feels divided right now and tense and many of us are beleaguered by stress. In Losing Streak, Paul Willis shows himself a master of stress—the metric kind—as well as irony, wit, and humor. As I read, the happy jog of these lines wafted me from stress to laughter and light and sometimes, even, hope.”
Cornell Honors Mary Gilliland with Emeritus Position
Cornell University, through its John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, has awarded poet Mary Gilliland with the position of Senior Lecturer Emeritus. Mary began teaching writing at Cornell in 1978 with the Committee on Special Education Projects and retired from the Institute in 2008.
During that time, she taught creative writing and the expository writing course “America Dreaming” for the Department of Literatures in English. For the Biology & Society Program, she created the First-year Writing Seminar Program’s first interdisciplinary course, “Ecosystems & Ego Systems,” in 1983 and taught it annually through the 2006 section at Cornell’s branch campus in Doha. There she also advised on the initiation of the Foundation Program and on the staffing and development of the Writing Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar and was a featured poet at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival.
From 1991 Mary directed the Knight Institute’s Writing Walk-In Service, composed The Writing Walk-In Service Handbook, and developed a pilot for Peer Writing Mentors. She assisted with faculty development at the Knight Institute Summer Faculty Seminars and at the International Knight Consortium for Writing in the Disciplines. Conference presentations included papers at the Associated Writing Programs, Conference on College Composition and Communication, European Association for Teaching Academic Writing, International Conference of Women in Higher Education, International Writing Centers Association, National Women’s Studies Association, and Writing Development in Higher Education. She has served as faculty advisor for Ursus: Cornell’s Environmental Journal and on the boards of the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Durland Alternatives Library, Light on the Hill Retreat Center, and Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies.
A New Translation of Beowulf
Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom, an iambic translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic by Donald Mace Williams, was published April 23 by Stoney Creek Publishing.
Donald has approached his translation as both a published writer of modern metrical poems and a scholar in the verse structure of Beowulf. His Ph.D. in that subject was done at the University of Texas under the direction of the noted prosodist and philologist Thomas M. Cable.
Donald was editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial in Arkansas for a couple of years in the mid-1980s. His newspaper career took him also to Long Island, Kansas, Texas, and other places. His sixth book of original work, Wolfe and Being Ninety — a hybrid of narrative poem and prose memoir — appeared in 2023. He now lives in Austin, Texas.
A Debut Collection from Libby Maxey
Congratulations to Libby Maxey on the publication of her first full-length poetry collection, Indwelling, from Resource Publications. Libby is also the author of the chapbook Kairos (2019), which won Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Contest.
Libby is a senior editor and poetry editor at the online journal Literary Mama, where she has been on staff since 2012, and she is a recent a winner of both the Princemere Poetry Prize and the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. Her poems have appeared in SLANT, as well as Crannóg, The Maynard, Mezzo Cammin, and elsewhere.
The new collection has been described as “poems of connection attempted in the face of mortality, loss, and absence….They dignify the mundane, past and present, and find hope there, too.”
Lily Jarman-Reisch Garners Pushcart Prize
Congratulations to SLANT contributor Lily Jarman-Reisch of Los Angeles. California, who is a 2024 Pushcart Prize recipient for her poem “Chemo Becomes Me.” The poem, originally published in Light Poetry Magazine (Winter/Spring 2022 issue), appears in Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses (2024). Lily is also a Contributing Editor for Pushcart Prize XLIX.
Lily most recently appeared in our Spring 2023 issue with her poem “Craft of the Medusa.”
Accolades for Sara Backer
SLANT contributor Sara Backer has received word from the Chicago-based Querencia Press of its plans to publish her new chapbook later this year. Titled Dressed in Paper, the collection deals with childhood and illness. Among her other publications are the poetry collection Such Luck and two earlier chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt and Bicycle Lotus, which won the 2015 Turtle Island Chapbook Award.
Adding to Sara’s already impressive array of accolades is news that she has been awarded second prize in the Beauty of New Hampshire Poetry Contest. She also claimed second prize in “The Beauty of New Hampshire Poetry Contest.”
In addition, Silver Blade Magazine published Sara’s speculative poem about “Monkeys in a Park in Japan,” and an ekphrastic poem about her Japan years, “Comb Poem,” is forthcoming in White Enso.
Sara lives in New Hampshire and reads for The Maine Review.
New Work by Michael Hoerman
From Northwest Arkansas, Michael Hoerman reports on the acceptance of his poem “Rivermaid’s Blues” by Dashboard Horus: A Bird’s Eye View of the Universe, a literary arts blog based in Los Angeles. Dashboard Horus publishes “travel themed poetry, prose, and art, to places real or imagined.”
Neurodivergent activist-artist Michael Hoerman has developed community-based poetry happenings in the Ozarks, New England, and Gulf Coast regions since 1994. His poems appear in the noteworthy anthologies Off the Cuffs (Soft Skull Press, 2003); Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Strategies (Red Hen Press, 2004); and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel (No Tell Books, 2006) and in many outlaw journals. He co-founded and debuted the National Poetry Slam team from Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1995. His critical recognitions include a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship in the category of Poetry. He divides his creative time between Fayetteville and Springdale, Arkansas.
Afterimage by Kathryn Weld – A Review
The following review appears courtesy of Patricia Hemminger.
Kathryn Weld earned a PhD in mathematics from the Graduate Center of the City university of New York and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Sewanee School of Letters. She is currently a professor of mathematics at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York. She is the author of a 2019 chapbook, Waking Light, and her poetry has appeared in SLANT, The Cortland Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Blueline, The Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere.
The title of Kathryn Weld’s full-length debut collection, Afterimage, is aptly chosen since many of the poems describe memories of impressions of a vivid sensation (especially a visual image) retained after the stimulus has ceased. The sonnet from which the book takes its title illustrates this in the ending lines, “What stays? A girl’s finger/ tracing her mother’s mouth.”
In the opening poem Weld asks “What part, /preserved by ice, might reappear?” after the discovery of an arm and hand ejected from a melting glacier. This foreshadows the appearance throughout the poems of vivid impressions that reappear in elegies, loss through dementia, loss of childhood and anticipation of loss. These poems acknowledge the inevitability of death, and evoke grief but also compassion in the death of parents, friends, a coworker and even the foreseeing of the speaker’s own death, “always looking forward/ to the coming end. Of you, of me. / And yet — and yet we have been born.”
The mystery of life and gratitude for having been born, alluded to in this last enigmatic line, is a parallel thread that runs alongside grief and loss throughout this book of intricate, well-crafted poems. A poem about dementia, for instance, is titled “Living on This Earth is a Peculiar Blessing,” and in a poem that questions whether the sun is conscious, the speaker questions the meaning of life itself, “Uncalibrated weight of bone/ and warm of body gladness make me cry/ aloud, “What means alive?”
Many of the poems express finely detailed memories of moments in day-to-day activities such as cleaning, closing a summer house, sailing, gardening; moments which are often co-opted as metaphors for loss: “I cannot find you. Blackness roots/In the cold frame of your mind.” Even a rotting tree trunk is a compassionate simile for an aging father: “His warmth/ is felt like sweetened rot inside an aging trunk, /or light through emptying space. It marks the route home.”
Just as loss and gratitude for life are threaded together through the poems so light too, appears alongside darkness, “A camera palters, /spatch-cocks light to speckle/ shade.” Light in one poem is synonymous with waking and questioning, “I wake to body – and grope for/the switch that turns on the wordless/ floodlight of inquiry.” Light is also a vehicle for a different way of seeing, experiencing the world. Looking indirectly the speaker can see “the speckled forest light filling space, and experience/ the self as contained object and the world/ as whole.”
The poems are peopled with plants and trees. Forsythia becomes a metaphor for a joyful departure from this world: “…I prefer/to think it ends with forsythia – cheery, / alien harbinger of spring.” And the yew tree, which has long been associated with death but also represents eternity, makes its appearance: “and my sorrow – dense as putty. / And yet, there is a sparrow in the yew.” A girl in a dream passes grottos of bouquets of lungwort, lupine, and corydalis, flowers that symbolize joy, devotion, renewal, and happiness. She tries to stop the train but here again death is acknowledged as an inevitable part of the cyclical nature of life: “but the flowers cannot stop/ their endless work of bloom, of deadhead, their flutter/ of fragrance and going to seed.”
Different formats are chosen to reflect or emphasize the poem’s meaning and content. A loose sonnet about cleaning and closing up a house for winter ends in a turn that startles, bringing us back to the vulnerability of being human, the sudden recognition of frailty: “suddenly I realize/each bone of my finger is vulnerable.” A prose poem is employed to tell the fascinating narrative of one summer that the speaker, as a young child, spent living in the woods in the Adirondacks, which also form the backdrop to other poems. In a striking poem about dementia, the unpredictable indentations on the page remind us of the unpredictable nature of dementia. The extensive white space in “Gone, Still Warm” echoes the disintegration of the speaker’s state of mind on the death of the mother, leaving blank spaces and moments of deep questioning.
This is a fine collection of poems, steeped in the natural world and daily life, that explore both the unavoidable suffering that must be faced by being human, as well as the profound mystery of being alive: “What is this life? /I know nothing at all.”
Patricia Hemminger’s poems have appeared in many journals including Spillway, Streetlight Magazine, and Peregrine Journal and in her chapbook, What Do We Know of Time. She holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and is a graduate of NYU’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program and of Drew University’s MFA Poetry and Poetry in Translation Program.
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