A poem from Latest Volcano, "Leda Burning, Immendorf Palace, 1945" was featured on Verse Daily on April 17th, 2016. Very Cool.
The Marsh Hawk Crew at AWP 2016
Spring 2016 Featured Artist: Ekaterina Vanovskaya
Ekaterina Vanovskaya was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and grew up on the other side of the ocean. Ekaterina received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
"Painter Ekaterina Vanovskaya is inspired by sharp, clear memories of places and spaces of her childhood in Russia. At first glance, landscapes and interior scenes populated with figures appear to be about a longing for a place, but extended looking begins to reveal more. Vanovskaya's figures are often depicted in the midst of ordinary movement or gesture set within visually lush environments that recapture a different sense of time altogether - one that evokes a time of childhood and the rhythms of our dreams."
—Jennifer Riley, Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts MFA Catalog 2015
Winter 2016 Featured Artist: Kate Domina
Kate Domina is a Toronto based figurative painter. Using children and adolescents as her subjects, she incorporates classical representational oil painting techniques with whimsical and often ambiguous narratives. Her critical theory fixation (Lacan, Freud and Jung specifically) weaves it’s way into her work, evolving her portraits into studies of human frailty, and often, neurosis. Domina has training from the University of Toronto, Sheridan College and Ontario College of Art and Design.
Currently Reading: Juliana Spahr's That Winter the Wolf Came
THIS is why I love Juliana Spahr:
"It might be that there is nothing to epiphany if it does not hint at the moment of sweaty relation larger than the intimate. For what is epiphanic song if it doesn’t spill out and over the many that are pulled from intimacies by oil’s circulations? The truckers, the sailors and deckhands, the assembly line workers, those who maintain the pipelines, those who drive support in the caravans that escort the tankers, the fertilizers, the thousands of interlocking plastic parts, the workers who move two hundred miles and live in a dorm near a factory, alone, those on the ships who spend fifty weeks circulating with the oil unable to talk to each other because of no shared language and so are left only with two weeks in each year where they can experience tongue in meaningful conversation. A life that is only circulations." (from “Transitory, Momentary”)
Spahr’s poetry exposes those moments of “sweaty relation” we may not be aware of, or even those we are aware of, but may never think to think about. As in Spahr’s previous collections, the poems in That Winter the Wolf Came chart the entangled relationships and interconnections among and between all: including birds, oil, corporate greed, food, bays, oceans, our bodies, and other nonhuman living and nonliving entities.
from “Tradition”:
Later I pass the breast cup to not really me,
a breast cup filled with sound insulation panels and imitation wood
with a little nectar and sweetness.
And not really me drinks it and then complains a little,
rebuking me, for my cakes of nuts and raisins
are cakes of extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas,
for my apples are filled with televisions and windshield wiper blades.
© Juliana Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came, Commune Editions, 2015
Currently Reading: Brandi George's Gog
With lyrical intensity, Brandi George invites the reader into a Midwestern countryside filled with violence and possession, weakness and strength, a world reminiscent of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. And just like Allison’s protagonist, the first-person speaker of Gog is boiling inside as she becomes a fury that refuses self-pity:
from “The Shadow of My Black Dress”:
I’ll travel back in time, Mother,
hold your hand when
the giant lobster hovers
over your bed, clicking its pincers.
But I’m not sorry. I wore your wedding dress
to a séance, which was not really
speaking with the dead, but dancing
on your antique table. I haven’t slept since you
called an exorcist for me. Just
so you know: if that man you brought
home from the bar takes
off his hat, I’ll load my rifle. And Angel
of Death: blow me.
from “Why the Working Class Won’t Save Us”:
… Bitch, ice queen, feminazi. Every woman
in my family has been raped. My belated protection:
petrifaction, the tree’s innermost ring drained
of sap, black lipstick and necklace-dagger…
© Brandi George, Gog, Black Lawrence Press, 2015
Latest Volcano now available on Amazon!
Forthcoming in Poets & Writers Magazine
Marsh Hawk Press has prepared an announcement of its Spring and Fall 2016 releases for the March/April issue of Poets & Writers magazine; this ad below will appear on the back cover!
Advance Copies of Latest Volcano
My author copies arrived this week! The book officially goes on sale on February 1st, 2016.
Check out artist aleks bartosik in Art Battle Canada 2014!
Aleks Bartosik painted "Falling Teeth," the artwork on the cover of Latest Volcano, at the 2014 Art Battle Canada event. Check out this coverage of Aleks doing her thing at Art Battle.
Timothy Daniel Welch's "The Children"
Timothy Daniel Welch has a beautiful new poem in Green Mountains Review.