CL Black Reviews Patricia Colleen Murphy's Hemming Flames
In the "throw-things house" where the speaker of Patricia Colleen Murphy's debut collection Hemming Flames grows to adulthood, a father asks of his wife, "could you / try not to murder yourself / in front of the children." Murphy opens with Bolsheviks; her mother, a Stanford graduate, communist, a woman with mental illness; and the speaker finding her mother after another suicide attempt. This entry into the family is casual, the implication that it's a commonplace occurrence, that at the dinner table, peas passed in irritation, we come to that query and enter into a family with more to show than can fit in a dining room window peek, so the pane (pain) is thrown wide open.
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A Mini-Q&A with Willie VerSteeg
Willie VerSteeg discusses the epigraph, formal technique, & Donald Justice
KJB: Like the epigraph that opens the piece, there is a diffusion of things seen in this poem. If the light that Justice speaks of conveys happiness, the speaker in "Porch Season” seems to diffuse the scene with a tone that is almost-sentimental ambivalence. The dusk “tumbles in”, the flower petals get stuck like “misplaced romance”, even the boy ignores the speaker. Yet, the ending carries readers to a sense of relief, which can quite easily be associated - though isn’t parallel to - happiness. Was this poem an attempt to rectify these two similar emotions with one another, or to hold a mirror up to Justice’s concept of happiness?
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A Mini-Q&A with Kate Greene
DOCK CONTRIBUTOR KATE GREENE EXPLAINS complicity in an age of mass-media
KJB: In Pierogies from the Old Country, the speaker seems to torn by their complicity in the creation of disaster. Yet, the exit from the poem pushes the idea that our voyeuristic tendencies can both highlight a problem while making it seem distant/other. Do you find this happening more and more in an age of what some pundits term “slack-tivisim”?
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Sitting on Palimpsests: An Interview with Alvin Pang
Singaporean poet Alvin Pang met several HFR editors at AWP in Minneapolis and, upon discovering that many of us would be in Singapore that summer on various fellowships, casually suggested meeting up. One May afternoon, he kindly crammed as many of as us as we could fit into his car and took us for a tour of Singapore. Between pointing out the most haunted building in Singapore, lunch at a hawker center, and wine at the Flower Dome, he sat down with us in the National Library for a conversation.
-Sue Hyon Bae
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A Mini-Q&A with Muriel Nelson
DOCK Contributor Muriel Nelson shares the secret behind the delicious final stanza in her poem, "On Silent Haunches"
KJB: The line from Psalm 19:2 seems to be a perfect companion for the way in which you respond/pay homage to Sandburg’s, “Fog”. Did you find any of the rest of the Psalm informing the poem, or did the line just spring out to you organically?
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WE ARE OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS
Dear wonderful readers, past contributors, up-and-coming authors, and old souls,
We are officially open for submissions.
Love,
Hayden's Ferry Review
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Ernesto L. Abeytia Reviews In Like Company: The Salt River Review & Porch Anthology
In Like Company: The Salt River Review & Porch Anthology, edited by James Cervantes, is equal parts reminiscent and refreshing measured over the course of thirty plus years of poetry and fiction.
For longtime readers of the former print journal Porch (1977-1981), and its later online counterpart the Salt River Review (1997-2010), this collection serves as a spring well of memories, eliciting fond recollections of such things as “The shared silence / in the land of ants. / The sleep of lizards / that never hear the bell. / Talk of fish / about things liquid. / Stories of the spider / at war with the mosquitoes” (9).
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Kyle J. Bassett Reviews Ruth Baumann’s wildcold
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.
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