🎊Congrats to Stefania and the many finalists who we’ve been lucky enough to publish!🎊 . . Check out issue 5 for an excerpt from Stefania’s winning manuscript, “Hour Book”.

Dynas Johnson from beneath this skin razed with decay, there’s a heart that’s stopped singing a long time ago. blood on my shirt, dribbles of gore. hair clumped or clawed out. more dirt in my head than brain tissue. we’re peeling faster than oranges. these bodies melting from the inside out. wandering past empty police stations, confederate flags, white house. playgrounds and schools. chinatown, hoods, south street, north philly. by the time you start seeing the glaring bone of chicken-picked remains, who got the brain cells to care if you’re black white latino asian, from this or that country, beliefs, sexual orientation, if you used to be anything other than what you are now? can that even register in our instinct-driven existence? we’re dead. everything about us is gone. not trying to prioritize universalism over individual experience, though. or drag erasure over who we used to be. but i’m glad the neo-nazis aren’t here anymore. and the kkk. hard to hang someone or burn crosses when you don’t have the arms or the will to do it. too bad we couldn’t cut that out while everyone could enjoy it. but everything has a pro and a con. where is my name? i have no land or shore. my blackness no longer holds context. my summer honey glaze now festers a foul smell. half my face is missing. #GPissue8

Emily Heilker⠀ ⠀ from⠀ I had a lucky foreground⠀ ⠀ 1⠀ ⠀ Arm fell down across table, timber in the rustle, placemat on wood, on newspaper. Body testing impact: to die in a dream is said to be good luck. Listening to my voice, another’s mouth moves. Oil beetles cloud, convergent. A phone rotates into a dial.⠀ ⠀ 2⠀ ⠀ Happens almost as often as the dogs. Crabapples shaken, loose, my body leveraged from great height. This fight, we know, bears no future in the kinetics of dream. Obstinately, the angle of the picture plane opens a door. Outside an eye built.⠀ ⠀ 3⠀ ⠀ Not to lose perspective but to add to it. Wistful the flashbacks, utopic the variations. I tied a bag around the branches, kept the baubles in. Not just the sublime that offers to compel.⠀ ⠀ 4⠀ ⠀ In the not-dream, I get up from the table & declare my loserdom. State of comfort hanging in the aftermath. A joint passed round a circle that has assembled in a yellow room. Twice lipped into silence, mouth deepens its shiraz. As I fall into place on the carpet, question of his lengthening hair.⠀ ⠀ 5⠀ ⠀ When we go into a forest we do not see the fallen rotting trees. Mrs. Blank for whom we drew seven layers deep. This is the anger I am looking for. Pain of a pencil casually stabbed by a passerby in my arm.⠀ ⠀ #GPissue8

Now on the blog: Our very own Patrick Thornton reviews Wendy Chen’s breathtaking book “Unearthings”. . . “The messiness of remembering, the ease of forgetting, but ultimately knowing things have to be put a little out of place for their true meaning to be revealed.”

“Unearthings” by Wendy Chen (GP7)

Book Review by Patrick Thornton 

From its opening lines, Unearthings insists the reader becomes aware of both a personal and collective body. Wendy Chen’s debut collection of poetry, published by Tavern Books, focuses on the physical and the supernatural; what is seen and what is felt; the unnerving proposition that we never truly escape who and where we come from. Chen journeys from modern New England to Mao Zedong’s China and back, tracking the lives of family, lovers, and women whose lives often echo and inform Chen’s own experience.

 It was a delight to become reacquainted with Chen’s writing, having published several poems from this collection in Issue 7 of Ghost Proposal. In those poems we’re acquainted with Chen’s haunting interpretation of Madame Butterfly, a well-known figure that Chen crafts into a three-dimensional woman. We see in these poems Chen’s comparison of a woman’s body to physical objects. In one poem we see a woman’s body as a house. Here, we see it as an appliance. Chen writes:

 Here is her torso.

 It opens up

like a refrigerator.

 Inside,

see how neatly her organs are arranged

on built-in plastic shelving.

 Her real mouth also is here.

 We sealed it away,

in a deep jar.

  These unsettling yet vivid descriptions are a hallmark of Chen’s writing that keep the reader on their toes, and in a constant assessment of the body, and how bodies are used.

 Unearthings also plays a good deal with time, moving from Chen’s present-day experiences, to her grandmother’s life in China. In They Sail Across the Mirrored Sea, Chen reflects on the atrocities of war in 1940s and 60s China, while also noting the small wonders of daily life. Chen’s grandmother contemplates the lives of shrimp harvested from the sea, the net coming down on them, A fibrous constellation pulled out of the sky. Chen makes even the simple complex without ever getting mired down by overly complicated language.

 Chen deftly uses the epistolary form at various points in the collection, particularly in poems like Memorial where Chen writes to Chinese poet Li Qingzhao, who wrote under the name Yi’an during the Song dynasty. Li Quingzhao reappears at different points, much like Madame Butterfly and Chen’s ancestors. In her direct address to the famous poet Chen writes:

 Yi’an,

it has been almost a thousand years

since you last walked on top of the city wall.

Still, I follow you, doggedly,

like a child in a story.

And each year the snow melts on my face

the same way it did yours.

 This passage acts as a prime example of the way Chen shows the reader how our lives continuously overlap with those who came before us, no matter how many hundreds of years might exist between us.

 Woven between the narratives of family and history is Chen’s own love story, divided into five parts. Fastened I-V encapsulates the complications of loving someone with an illness, someone who has been hurt. I was struck by the simple brilliance of the line, You wanted to forget./You told me to remember. To me this line sums up the difficulties faced in writing personal and family narrative. The messiness of remembering, the ease of forgetting, but ultimately knowing things have to be put a little out of place for their true meaning to be revealed.

  Whether writing as herself, her family, her lover, or any of the myriad players who make up Unearthings, Chen’s poems are lived experiences and lived-in experiences. There’s a sincerity that echoes through each line that draws the reader in, while also leaving them in a certain state of wonder.  

  The collection will have you linger in that wonder and make you want to experience, question, and journey with it again and again. Let Chen wrap you in silk, take you forward, take you back, take you to these places you never knew you wanted to go.

Unearthings, Wendy Chen. Tavern Books. Winner of the 2017 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series. http://www.tavernbooks.com/books/unearthings

torrin a. greathouse⠀ ⠀ Ablution with Violent Intrusive Thoughts⠀ ⠀ spectrophobia is the morbid fear of mirrors. somehow different than eisoptrophobia—the fear of one’s own reflection—though i’m not sure how. a journal of psychology states that the difference is that spectrophobia is found in those traumatized by an event where they believe they have seen an apparition. still i’m not sure i understand the difference. my eye is a deep stain in my face imagine a razor blade slitting it like a cloud over Dali’s moon blue in the way a broken pen spoils a shirt. in the right light, the soft yellow light of morning, dirty mirror almost resembles a portrait under water with your hands bound behind your back the thrash of your drowning is quieter than a running bathtub’s water and i remember the names of every river i’ve ever imagined drowning in. it has taken me so long to stand in front of a mirror without flinching. i pick up a pair of scissors to cut your hair or your wrist and put them back in the drawer. run the water until steam rises like broken question marks. glide a razor over my cheek if you pressed deep enough you could peel all these imperfections away trying to hide the coarse hair breaking through my skin. i stare into the mirror and try to remember that it is the light that bends my face, the mirror that creates the distortion your fist can split a mirror into 1000 hungry knives, they are singing your name. will you answer them back? we are always singing not the other way around.⠀ ⠀ #GPissue8

Joanna Doxey⠀ ⠀ Dear Trust⠀ ⠀ My body is a lot of work⠀ My body works to keep me away⠀ ⠀ I feel constantly, but not specifically I need⠀ to be alone with the lake, dear Enormity- ⠀ I am at arm’s length⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Dear Trust, —⠀ ⠀ Dear Body,⠀ ⠀ Teeth by morning are foreign A tongue⠀ pretending to look at birds⠀ ⠀ Dear Trust, It makes me nervous to look at what’s missing straight on.⠀ As if all the lights on in the house will save my sight. Saviour is such a nice word — ⠀ Light at once⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Pray: too much light becomes its own problem⠀ ⠀ ⠀ I can look at several landscapes at once,⠀ Like so much light losing images⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Pray. ⠀ ⠀ #GPissue8

That's right! We've got books in hand, ready to ship. ⠀ Order your gorgeous copy of Jaime Zuckerman's "Letters to Melville" today, while quantities last. ⠀ Link in Bio.

Preorder Jaime Zuckerman’s “Letters to Melville” now! | Shipment begins March 23, 2018 | Limited Edition Print Run of 100 copies will be available | Link in bio

Roland Buckingham-Hsiao⠀ ⠀ Statement:⠀ These photographs were taken with a Holga toy camera in the Far East; they represent research undertaken into Chinese and Japanese aesthetic principles and traditions of representation. The elements and principles of art have been used to translate the characteristics of Japanese short poetry - such as economy and the linking of dissimilar things - into the syntax of visual language. As “visual poems” however, the works consist entirely of the associations and allusions suggested by the images. The viewer / reader is left to decide or create the meaning as the poems are open-ended and meditative, having floated free of words.⠀ ⠀ #GPissue8

Ashley Roach-Freiman & Emma Bolden⠀ ⠀ from "Woman Found Chained in Metal Container"⠀ ⠀ #GPIssue8

B.J. Best⠀ ⠀ 2⠀ i.⠀ the cold season. who would say the silver plane⠀ was worth the wind flooding⠀ the moon, like a steam room and now alight?⠀ this afternoon of a swan,⠀ the water grays to leave the gray. so you said⠀ to pretend to say the way to win hard and calls for the lake⠀ and what i have right.⠀ ⠀ ii.⠀ the birds are shovely, but our black hard will heart,⠀ the way the weeks could mean⠀ the standing stars from a staccato of the scales.⠀ ⠀ —i have not meant back on ripples,⠀ only you are water like paint ⠀ is a box of wants itself into a freckle.⠀ ⠀ the element is back of my panicked curse.⠀ it's the river of least,⠀ the common day wheels about blood.⠀ ⠀ i was like a sick stripping of air.⠀ consider the west, so help me,⠀ and i stand on the season of a suntrail january.⠀ ⠀ #GPissue8

Carrie Bennett⠀ ⠀ from EXPEDITION NOTES⠀ ⠀ [Every Field Contains a Frozen Bird]⠀ ⠀ Today an ice-field of yellow ribbons strung together by invisible thread. Where are the scientists that charted this land? Miniature bright flags flap and I close my eyes to see the sky fill with every songbird I’ll never see again. My backyard filled with green flashes of hummingbirds, a sharp streak of cardinal. Will I forget the redness of a ladybug? The miniature pattern of black dots, how they used to land on my hand? Sometimes I see phantoms, strands of smoke or breath or sprays of white flowers. I can stand for hours in front of fallen rocks. I am grateful for the wolf who has followed me for months.⠀ ⠀ #GPissue8

Brent Armendinger translates Diana Bellessi⠀ ⠀ What the Wind Carries in its Rumor⠀ ⠀ Inside, or outside⠀ the gaze impoverishes⠀ or regenerates. Minor⠀ art, what the wind⠀ carries in its rumor⠀ What goes on transforming⠀ its essence and leaves, imprints⠀ to be repeated⠀ in variation. Finally⠀ seed, nothing outside⠀ the frame the landscape⠀ offers I would like⠀ for myself, for you⠀ my voice of minor art⠀ ⠀ Then, perhaps yes⠀ I could say no⠀ to every monument⠀ to let us go⠀ after weaving rugs⠀ with the fragile fibers⠀ of the heart. Rugs⠀ ⠀ upon which others will dream⠀ the incessant dream⠀ of being in order to let go⠀ of being so sweetly⠀ that it cradles the sleep⠀ of those who will become⠀ What will come. What for?⠀ To better the world⠀ with minor art, in part⠀ trying to erase⠀ that pain it suffers⠀ and bestows. History⠀ where our error⠀ reposes. Which one? Not knowing⠀ we only exist in that⠀ which we let go. Backwards⠀ face of uncertain⠀ surplus, stare⠀ of the little girl that follows us,⠀ a lessening of pain⠀ Goldsmithing where⠀ today, I would like to leave you,⠀ minor voice of art⠀ ⠀ *⠀ ⠀ Lo Que Se Lleva el Viento en su Rumor⠀ ⠀ Adentro, o afuera⠀ la mirada empobrece⠀ o regenera. Arte⠀ menor, lo que se lleva⠀ el viento en su rumor⠀ Lo que va transformando⠀ su ser y deja, huellas⠀ para así repetirse⠀ en variación. Semilla⠀ al fin, nada afuera⠀ del marco del paisaje⠀ ofrece yo quisiera⠀ para mí, para ti⠀ mi voz de arte menor⠀ ⠀ Entonces quizás sí⠀ podría decir no⠀ a todo monumento⠀ para dejarnos ir⠀ después de urdir esteras⠀ con las frágiles fibras⠀ del corazón. Esteras⠀ donde otros soñarán⠀ el incesante sueño⠀ de ser para dejar⠀ de ser tan dulcemente⠀ que acune el dormir⠀ de aquellos que vendrán⠀ ⠀ Lo que vendrá. A que?⠀ A mejorar el mundo⠀ en arte menor, parte⠀ intentando borrar⠀ aquel dolor que sufre⠀ y otorga. Historia⠀ donde reposa nuestro⠀ error. Cuál? No saber⠀ somos sólo en aquello⠀ que dejamos ir. Cara⠀ inversa de incierta⠀ plusvalía, mirada⠀ de niña que nos sigue,⠀ un menos de dolor⠀ Orfebrería donde⠀ hoy, quisiera dejarte,⠀ voz de arte, menor⠀ ⠀ #GPissue8

Issue 8 is live! Link in bio.

Submissions are open!

Happy New Year’s Eve, and farewell to 2017! Don’t forget, submissions open tomorrow and sometimes revisions are best made with a glass of champagne in hand. 🍾