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Cross-Ties

1/12/2023 0 Comments

Emily Dickinson :: Anne Anthony

Young Emily Dickinson, black and whiteEmily Dickinson

​For the seventh-grade talent show,  I performed something different from the other girls — I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance, and forget the baton twirling — so I read poetry. It wasn’t until recently while reflecting on one of the poems I selected that I realized why my 13-year-old self chose this poem. 
​

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
 
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
 
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              —Emily Dickinson
​

At the time, I struggled with my place in the world; in the middle of my large six-child family and in school where other girls had grown up together while I was a transplant from another town. As a child, I read this poem literally, feeling like a nobody. Now, looking back, Dickinson’s deeper message of social presence, of it not being so important makes it clearer to me that I used the idea that it really didn’t matter as a strategy to pass through that awkward phase of my life. Dickinson’s poem, though written in the mid-1900s, still holds true today and perhaps even more so. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that “Growing up means being left out sometimes, especially when friends splinter into new social groups during middle school and teen years. With group chats and social media, kids can more easily see when they’re not part of the crowd.” (Wall Street Journal)

Poetry offers a way for young adults to connect to the deep, unconscious (and sometimes not so unconscious) stirrings of their hearts by reading and writing poetry as a way to express their emotions.                                                               
​                                                                           ~Anne Anthony

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12/6/2022 0 Comments

Rebecca Kenny :: Emma Conally-Barklem

Book cover. Dark blue with a white spine and pink flowers.
It was the winter of 2021 in the latest lockdown in Northern England. I was deep into therapy, grieving, and had started the rich seam of writing which would be the start of it all. Relatively new to social media, I saw a call out for Northern, working-class writers to submit a poem written in Northern vernacular. Somebody like me. From my background. It was rare and surprising. I’d been asked to take elocution lessons as a lecturer in English Literature and often damped down my flat Yorkshire vowels in the rarefied worlds of academia, then yoga, but this was something different. This was a call for me to be myself, to honour the culture and place I was from and more than that, to celebrate it.

My grandparents had been on my mind so a poem poured out in the inky light from the TV, written on the back of a newspaper. It was a tribute to their lives, their love for me and all they had meant, so the poem’s title was their address. I submitted it and forgot about it. As a new poet, I had no idea whether what I was writing had any value, I was just grateful that this specific and inclusive call-out had inspired me to write about my grandparents for the first time.

And that is how I met Rebecca Kenny.

The poem was accepted, not with a dry nod and direction for a short biography, but with warm, effusive, genuine feedback, warm as an Eccles cake, and oozing with all I had meant the poem to be. It gave me confidence, made me feel seen and valued, so I read further. Rebecca was the director of Bent Key Publishing, so named because she had been in an horrific car accident which left her dazed, hearing her own bones crack, her neck chip in two places, her pelvis and sternum break as the cold rain beat a tattoo on her face. She nearly died. When she eventually got back to her home, she found her front door key bent in her coat pocket; a symbol of all that would come after. New starts, risks, a new life carved out with bravery and generosity despite her broken body and traumatised mind. She was a gifted poet. She wrote an ebook The Girl Who Broke Her Back and her magnificent collection Crash & Learn as she recovered from her injuries. She didn’t stop at that. She founded her own publishing company with the aim of representing writers often marginalised from traditional publishing. She’d lost her job and had no government support but this is what she did at a time of great uncertainty for herself and during a global pandemic.

Her collection makes us all cry. There is pain, joy, grief, tiny moments in time peculiarly Northern which chimed at our hearts, these hearts being her team. The fragile but talented writers she has championed who have been brought together by her, lioness, fierce, cubs behind her every step. I had the confidence to submit the collection I had written to Bent Key Publishing and it was accepted. The joy of this and the warmth of the acceptance was an indescribable feeling. The dream of being a writer I had carefully shelved at the age of eight was alive again and more than this, I knew she thrived on this, making people feel appreciated and happy. She is a good person. We met for a Bent Key Showcase. I arrived just in time to see her opening set and stood transfixed as she performed without notes or hesitation. Her oratory filled the cloisters of the beautiful old church, our venue, and I knew, if I hadn’t known already, she was one of a kind. I went up to perform, faltering, and oh lord there’s a microphone. She adjusted it quietly and cheered me all the way. As she cheered all the poets and as she continues to release collection after collection for all the lost poets, despite the continued physical, mental and emotional fallout from the crash that nearly did for her. I’ll always be grateful we met.

                                                       ~Emma Conally-Barklem

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11/16/2022 0 Comments

Amie Whittemore :: Angela Joynes

Picture

Until I met Amie Whittemore (director of the Middle Tennessee State University creative writing certificate program called MTSU Write), I didn’t know that feminist sci-fi and fantasy poetry even existed. In fact, as a lover of prose, I hadn’t given poetry much thought for years. But in the end, who could resist a summons to delve into extraordinary, offbeat worlds wrapped in the perfect phrase?
​
As a writer and educator, Amie is so much more than her prestigious academic credits, awards, and countless literary publications. Her website simply can’t capture the warmth of her personality or the light in her eyes when speaking of teaching English and mentoring students at MTSU. In a poem published by Hobart, September 9, 2019, which might appeal to readers of The West Trestle Review, she addressed a student in response to an evaluation for one of her science fiction classes:




​MY SUPERPOWER
​
Student, it’s true—I prefer women
to lentils, to crossfit classes,
to retirement plan selection,
leaf blowers, plastic bags
and roller coasters; it’s also true
I’ll take a female protagonist
over a ham sandwich any day
and that women befriending
robot spiders, sexing up aliens,
and becoming fierce mermaids
congregate on my syllabus…

Those of us lucky enough to be touched by Amie’s work, cherish her energy, grace, and candor as rare gifts indeed. Her sensual debut poetry collection, Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) which was published in 2016, resonates with secrets, explorations of nature, and dissonance within families. The lyricism of the language may draw you to tears. Many of Amie’s poetry and prose pieces are available online, but I’ll definitely be watching for both of her forthcoming collections, Star-Tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books, 2023) and Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024).

I guarantee it, you won’t regret RSVPing yes to any invitation to set sail in Amie Whittemore’s world.

                                                                     ~Angela Joynes

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11/6/2022 0 Comments

Mónica Gomery :: Rage Hezekiah

Picture

​I first fell in love with Mónica Gomery’s work when her collection Here is the Night and the Night on the Road was released in 2018. Mid-hike, I sat cross-legged under a tree and wept over her book, in awe of what she had captured and conjured in its pages. In her rich and lyric new collection, Might Kindred, Gomery’s manipulation of language is striking. I am continually impressed by her ability to appropriate words and usage in new ways, evoking the unexpected. 

In her poem, “Now We Live Together,” she describes her lover making cabbage soup, saying:

…we knife it apart
and delight at its ruffled density. 
The cut open crossfolds
look like outlines of bodies
with v’s nested between legs.  

Reading these lines, I’m captivated by the intimacy and the disjunctive nature of her description, and taken with the unifying musicality of “knife,” “delight,” and “like outlines.” In the same stanza, “density,” “bodies” “v’s” and “between” echo a different soundscape. Gomery’s lush work surprises, evoking tenderness and weaving a rich tapestry of sound and image. Might Kindred radiates with power, celebrating and interrogating queerness, ancestry, and home.

​                                                                                                ~Rage Hezekiah

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11/6/2022 0 Comments

Rage Hezekiah :: Mónica Gomery

Picture
I think, what a bright day
god has given, what a way to live
without a knee on your throat.
“In June”

Reading Rage Hezekiah’s Yearn (Diode, 2022) I gasp audibly again and again. I ask myself—how did the author give herself the permission to say what these poems say? It’s hard to extract yourself from the book’s energy once you begin. Propelled breathlessly from poem to poem, I traveled Hezekiah’s wide-ranging forms and razor-sharp language.  

The book begins and ends in the body, in the rawness of desire—first, a youthful and robust sexuality, and by the end, the labor of wanting and creating a child. In the words of Evie Shockley, these poems show “a woman making her desires known to herself, so she can step out to meet the life she wants to live.” The speaker’s voice grows ever more rooted and earthbound, experiencing wonder and grief in the same tight line, able to both pierce the world with her looking, and turn inward to reflect on the self. 

There’s so much to admire about Hezekiah’s use of language. She has a knack for brevity. I can feel the intentionality of each word, charged and carefully chosen, playing its role in a concise, measured amount of space. Her poems say only what needs to be said. They sparkle with clarity and precision. I love how the short, economical poems in this book work in harmony with other sweeping, spacious poems. This collection is full of breath, longing, and revelation. 

This is Hezekiah’s second collection, following her debut Stray Harbor. Each of her books has moved me deeply. In landscapes of community gardens, orchards, grasslands, and so many glittering bodies of water, she names and renames the divine, a God who “planted/ kinesthetic stars/within the bay, bright/ sparks flowering.” Reading her books, I connect to my own ancient longings, part of a larger body that weaves all bodies together. Her language brings me home.
​                                                                               ~​Mónica Gomery

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9/10/2022 0 Comments

Vaune Trachtman :: Juliana Gray

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Vaune Trachtman (@vaune.art)

In February 2020, I had the good fortune to spend two weeks at the Vermont Studio Center. It turned out to be their last residency session before the Covid lockdown forced them to close their doors, but we didn't know that then, and I was ignorantly happy to write all morning and hang out at meals and evenings with my new friend and housemate Vaune Trachtman. When I visited her studio, we laughed as we sipped gin from tiny paper cups meant for mixing chemicals. All around us, hanging from the walls on great sheets of heavy paper, was her work: gravure prints, layered black and white images that combined Vaune's photographs with snapshots her father had taken in the 1930s. The resulting images are haunting, surreal, and intimate, blurred with time and memory. Yet their details--a man's stare, a woman's profile, a boy's threadbare shirt--are so sharp they could cut you open. 

I'm lukcy to have had that time--one last pre-pandemic moment--to have worked among a community of writers and artists, and I'm so lucky to have met Vaune Trachtman and to have experienced her work. She takes my breath away.

                                       ~Juliana Gray 

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4/30/2022 0 Comments

Dilruba Ahmed :: Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

Picture
God breathes life into us, it is said,
only once. But this case was an exception.
God drew back in a giant gust and blew life into the boy
and like a stranded fish, he shuddered, oceanless.
​
                Dilruba Ahmed

               from "Snake Oil, Snake Bite" /  Poetry Foundation                    
                                             

​I heard Dilruba Ahmed’s work before I ever encountered it on the page, which seems fitting, given the masterful way she attends to sound and music in her work. She was reading poems that would become part of her debut collection, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf 2011), at a summer multi-genre reading at the low-residency program I was attending at the time as a (poet-disguised-as) fiction candidate. She leaned towards the microphone and, a stanza in, I felt the room lean forward.
 
A few months later, I would take leave from the program and I wouldn’t write anything for almost a decade, but I kept my memory of that reading as a bright spot and continued to seek out Ahmed’s work. In 2020, when the state of the world revealed/re-revealed poetry as an essential coping strategy, I picked up her second collection, Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020). 
 
Whether she’s writing about the personal, the environmental, or the political (and their various intersections), Ahmed’s work embodies a deeply sensory presence that echoes timelessly. Her attention towards the world is clear-eyed and piercing and (still, somehow) open-hearted. The range of her subjects and formal approaches diffuses texture, imagination, and surprise throughout her collections. 
 
I’ve also been lucky enough to experienced Ruba as a teacher (at Hugo House’s and Murphy Writing of Stockton University’s online classes) and I can confirm both her sharp insight and generosity. My work has been enriched by the time I’ve spent with hers. 
                                                                             ~Violeta Garcia Mendoza
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1/2/2022 1 Comment

​Margaret Whiting :: Kelly R. Samuels

Stumps made of pages of text on a wooden floor
Courtesy Art Space Vicennes LLC / Instagram
She is not, no, the Margaret Whiting who sang that song some of us might know. Rather: Margaret Whiting the artist who currently resides in Iowa, where I was introduced to her work back in 2013. Catalog was the piece in her solo show at the Dubuque Museum of Art that spoke to me, prompting one of my first ekphrastic poems. Comprised of library catalog cards and items from the natural world—an egg, a shell—the work spanned a gallery wall.
I walked its length more than once, stopping to study the honeycomb and the delicate seed pod, to make out what one book that one card spoke of. There’s a blurry picture I took of the egg—what I think might have been a quail’s—and another from the end, showing the gentle curve of the cards that called up for me, then, memories of water and a pier stretching out into the distance. Now, when I think back, the cards, lined as they were, resemble the underside of a Browning Parasol mushroom.
 
Whiting’s work, overall, focuses on the environment, something that matters to me. Her framed pieces that use human anatomy textbook illustrations and geologic survey maps illustrate the connection we have with nature. As she writes on her website, “Our impact on the land affects human health since air pollution and disposed waste will ultimately lead back to us.” Her installation piece Deforestation is a room full of tree stumps made from vintage law books. Like Catalog, the tight packing of paper—its semblance to another form—readjusts our view and, more importantly, provokes us to think carefully about what we are doing to save this place we inhabit.
​
                                                                                             ~Kelly R. Samuels

1 Comment

11/12/2021 1 Comment

Camille Dungy :: Emily Franklin

Picture
Camille T. Dungy
Don’t
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed

Camille T. Dungy, "Trophic Cascade" ​
Kenyon Review 

​There are poets we return to again and again and specific poems that—even on first reading—are indelible on the soul. Somewhere on my body is the entirety of Camille T. Dungy's "Trophic Cascade." What begins as an ecological exploration of wolves bring reintroduced to Yellowstone quickly escalates into the wild territory of motherhood. The writer shows immense skill: in structure, with tight line breaks that demand the poem be read aloud (although often my voice breaks when I try), and language that is at once compelling, scientifically detailed, and emotionally devastating. Dungy's ability to cast wide and quickly narrow makes this the kind of poem we all strive for—the global as told through the specific. She is talking about the reintroduction of the wolves, but winds up talking about her own reintroduction - as a person in the world of parenting and the ferocity with which this this wild love changes us in the world. Of course this is only one of Camille Dungy's poems—there are many and they are all so rich and powerful. But this one I like to read and I like to teach as it covers so much ground in such a short time.

​                                                                                                         ~Emily Franklin
1 Comment

8/29/2021 1 Comment

Madge Evers :: Kathryn Petruccelli

Blue paper with white imprint of plant material

I encountered Madge Evers and her spore print art at a neighborhood festival a few years back. Looking at her ghostly, exuberant work stole my breath, and I knew I couldn't take it in the way I wanted to while standing under a makeshift tent at a folding table in the last minutes of a one-day event while my kids begged for popsicles. I pocketed her card and not long after she invited me to visit her home studio. 
I fell deeply in love with her process of using living mushrooms and other plants to build stunning impressions and herbariums on paper. I'm excited that since that time I've gotten to know Madge better and watched her work branch into cyanotypes and pieces that play off of, or "compost" as she puts it, other works. (Reimagining Audubon's birds, anyone?)
 
Madge is an artist in conversation with the earth. She is both someone with keen vision and a brave channeler for what might happen that is out of her control. These qualities are perfect guidelines for art and poetry and life. Her work offers me true awe and wonder, joy, complexity and inspiration. It sings the unsung. I can't think of what else I could ask for.
                                                                   ~Kathryn Petruccelli 
Art: Studying Dandelion, mushroom spores on cyanotype by Madge Evers
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