Ruth Baumann’s chapbook, wildcold, opens with Rilke’s instruction, “Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow”. Here, I must admit my hesitance to dive into any work that prefaces itself with an oft-quoted (and often misquoted) poet. And here is where I am glad to say my literary-prejudice had its teeth kicked in.
Read MoreELKE “a little journal” was founded in 2015 and their first issue released in November of that year by former Hayden’s Ferry Review intern Elijah Tubbs and Kennedy Dawn Stearns. The magazine consists of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, interviews and an occasional art piece now and then. ELKE prints their magazine whenever they feel they have received a good amount of work they find worthy of putting on a physical page, but will try to keep to printing at least three times a year. The print copies of their magazine are small and cute, measuring up at six by four inches, just big enough to fit in a jacket pocket or comfortably in a bag. Along with the physical copies, ELKE runs a website where work is published often.
Read MoreRW: The story focuses on food and household items rather than people, is there a specific value you are trying to place on objects in household routines, maybe more so than the actual people?
DA: I was trying to prioritize objects over people, but couldn’t manage it. After the idea for SoBT was born I stuck with revising it for a couple years because I wanted to write a story without people that was still interesting for the reader.
Read MoreJohn Williams’s Stoner — which this month is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a tastefully geometric hardback edition from New York Review Books — is a quiet novel; a portrait painted in sober tones of the life of a somber, unremarkable man, a story that unfolds softly and with grace. The book treads along with William Stoner, from his birth and childhood on a small family farm in rural Missouri, to university where he is awakened to his inner life, on through World War I and the Great Depression, his years as an instructor, his marriage, the birth of his family, the destruction of it, and finally, inevitably, his death. It’s the stuff of Russian literature, and a novel that has become more necessary today than ever before.
Read MoreA surprising take on the dance of continents, Trever Ketner's poem Erode is one you're not soon to forget. He is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2015, we're just happy we got to him first.
Check out the interview between Kyle Bassett and Ketner below, then head over to The Dock for a fresh catch.
“A Man in a Monkey Suit Believes in Himself” has two settings, at least two settings, as many poems do, as stories do, and in fact as people do.
Don’t we?
It’s set in the vastness of space, of course, and it’s set on some monkey bars. But it’s also set in two different parks, two different playgrounds, and in the dreams where the night-grass and the darkened swing-sets in those parks and playgrounds mix and mingle. They swap details like lined-up chromosomes. They fail to tell themselves apart. They insist that all the crushes you’ve ever had in your life are one and the same. (They aren’t?)
