Featured Posts
Wine for a Shotgun
Wine for a Shotgun
Marty McConnell
EM Press, 2012
$15.00, 70pp.
Reviewed by Kelly Davio
Wine for a Shotgun and the Poetics of Raucous Restraint
Feeding the Birds
“Each time we run away from ourselves we are driven home again with greater force. Every effort to break out only pushes us further back into ourselves.” – Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
MADISON, NJ — When we moved into our new place, I decided the bird feeders had to go. It’s not that I mind birds. I mostly enjoy them, their colorful chirping. Continue Reading
Birds
I once took a poetry workshop led by Bill Olsen during which I felt alternately terrified and inspired, and for some reason a moment from that semester that has stayed with me was Bill looking out a window, pausing the discussion of a poem for a surprisingly long time, and saying in his almost-whisper, “Poets love birds.”
This, even outside the spell of Bill’s class, still seems true. Continue Reading
Appendages
A man born with no arms and no legs, all torso and head, and one two-toed foot, jumped into a swimming pool and used his body to undulate to the surface. On a swath of country club grass, he sunk a putt and later, spun a hula-hoop around his neck. At age ten, he tried to drown himself in the bathtub. He slipped under the water and turned face down. He said his body was willing, but his mind wasn’t. Continue Reading
Rose, 1937
I wait for Wiley on the bridge over the dam where two beavers swim figure eights in the quiet water before gravity pulls it down to the brook we call Sugar Run, our place since that first night. We ignored the Keep Away signs, the way a cigarette dropped through the grey-worn slats that buckled like Grandma Mimi’s cancerous teeth. I tasted that wood with my tongue more than once when he held down my face Continue Reading
Speculating on the meaning of birdsong
There is a space inside me dedicated to your needs.
I am thick, like the grass above a grave. There is nothing
glamorous about recollection. This morning, a sparrow Continue Reading
Meet James Tadd Adcox: June’s Featured Fiction Writer
"The power of a novel is that you have the illusion of everything fitting together, but just underneath that, there’s a ton of contradictions. The tension between those forces is what makes novels interesting."
-JTA in an interview with AR Fiction Editor Jamie Iredell
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