SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: K. HOLDEN PUMPHREY

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ONE GOOD THING ABOUT YOU IS YOU’RE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR LIGHT REFRACTION
for Ryan Joseph
by K. Holden Pumphrey

1
Where I grew up, in thunderstorms
everyone comes in from the rain out of breath and says
Oh my God it’s like a WAR out there!
People in Chicago get prideful about surviving the weather
It’s fun, because you still feel like you survived.
Which is a good feeling to have.

You won’t remember this, because it was a dream,
but we descended from the bus
in some French-colonized place
and I didn’t know you
but I think we’d both given out some kind of war cry that day.
We cross the street together
as if we knew ourselves. READ MORE

Help Them Free Their Words

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Help Them Free Their Words: Tom Kerr discusses his work with Steve Champion and his death row memoir

an interview by Jason Tucker

An associate professor of writing at Ithaca College, Tom Kerr began working with Steve Champion while teaching an undergraduate writing course. The idea was to get college students to engage with people and worlds beyond their own. Naturally, this happened to Tom as well, forging an unlikely friendship and giving personal depth to otherwise abstract political philosophy. After much work and much negotiating of the complex ethics of such a project, the two have shaped Champion’s story into the memoir Dead to Deliverance. READ MORE

“Blowfly” by Andrew Hudgins

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Blowfly

by Andrew Hudgins


Half awake, I was imagining
a friend’s young lover, her ash blonde hair, the smooth
taut skin of twenty. I imagined her
short legs and dimpled knees. The door scraped open,
but eyes closed, I saw nothing. The mattress sagged.
She laid her head on my chest, and murmured love
against my throat, almost humming, approaching song,
so palpable I could hold her only chastely,
if this was chaste. I couldn’t move my hand
even to caress her freckled shoulder.
So this is how imagination works, I thought,
sadly. And when at last she spoke,
she spoke with the amused voice of my wife,
my wife who was at work but also here,
pleased at the confusion she was causing.
This is a lesson about flesh, isn’t it?
I asked. Blowfly, she whispered on my throat
as we made tense, pensive love. Blowfly, blowfly. READ MORE

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: DAVID BLAIR

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AS ONE PUTTING THE PHONOGRAPH NEEDLE BACK ONE SONG AFTER FINDING A COVETED RECORDING
by David Blair

Most of the country is not hung up
on Rome as we are, a couple of yard pagans—
that was a wonderful smile
under that big Blonde Venus afro wig
that you stole from Marlene Dietrich
to shine at me in a dream
as reassuring as a rainbow
up near the lip of the Maelstrom.
There’s gladness at the heart of being a person
most of the time impervious
yet visible to our speculation,
as sorrow eats cake at happy weddings. READ MORE

Incomplete Thoughts on Wisconsin and Political Enthusiasm

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Incomplete Thoughts on Wisconsin and Political Enthusiasm

by Okla Elliott (with photos by Jenna Bowen)

“In Kant’s philosophy of history, crisis or tension is necessary for human progress. He is pessimistic about individual success[es] but confident about mankind.” —Sidney Axinn, “Kant, Authority, and the French Revolution”

Much was made in leftist circles of the fact that an Egyptian protestor purchased a pizza online to help feed the protestors in Wisconsin—and rightly so; it was a touching and telling moment. The international solidarity and the shared humanity this gesture showed are truly inspiring. But aside from the feel-good aspect, not much else has been discussed about it, which is in fact indicative of a larger gap in our discussion of recent world events. There have been some minor gestures at connecting the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Greece, France, and Wisconsin, but no serious theoretical investigation has yet been undertaken. This is not entirely a bad thing, since there are moments when action is called for, not theorizing. That said, however, mass movements that do not have a (self-)critical or theoretical component have a habit of either failing or turning into things almost as bad as what they sought to depose. READ MORE

“In Search of a Canon” By Jordan A. Rothacker

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In Search of a Canon

by Jordan A. Rothacker

Lists have always fascinated me. From descriptive lists in fiction to shopping lists on a refrigerator, they have always seemed an art unto themselves, prose broken down into a basic skeleton of information. I remember being nineteen and finally getting around to reading Franny and Zooey and being floored by how much Salinger was able to convey about the characters and the way that they lived by the content list of the bathroom medicine cabinet. Once I started making a conscious effort to face and indulge my fascination with lists I found them everywhere. Not only were lists present as the creations of others, in fiction and out in the world, but I found myself processing phenomena in list form. All the things to do today, friends to call, articles and stories to write, and books to read; oh so many lists and oh so many books to read. READ MORE

Small Press Review Series: One Last Good Time and the Literary Platypus

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One Last Good Time
Michael Kardos
Press 53 (2010), 185 pages, $14.95

The trouble with interconnected story collections is that they are interconnected.

I know, I know: the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club. But in this case, it’s not an argumentative fallacy to say that the qualities that make interconnected story collections theoretically interesting can make them disappointing in practice. It has to do with reader response: we come to a short story for a discrete experience – a world we enter and leave in the same sitting. If we recognize a character, a setting, or a matrix of events from a previous story the sense of separateness is lost. And at the same time, we don’t get the total immersion of a novel. READ MORE

Flash Fiction Series: Sarah Sarai

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Vows

by Sarah Sarai

It is no secret that there is a lot of jabber in the world coming from everywhere including the streets and the houses with their people and telephones and radios and TVs, all of them blasting at you day and night so there is no peace.  I know none of these things, these inventions or these people, are really saying anything to anyone, let alone to you or me.  This is a fact.  Some of the people who live here claim otherwise.  They slink up to me real nefarious, ask me if I’ve heard the message and then slink off.  I walked into the communism room last night, with all these empty chairs but one and the TV going real loud and this guy sitting but kind of jerking towards the TV.  He looked at me like I was an emissary of the third coming — the second coming is past tense to most of the people around here — and pointed like we had this shared secret knowledge, at the tube, then directed his eyes right into mine as if there was anything in his stupid mind to communicate.  I said, “Shut up,” and walked out.  I said it loud to make sure he heard me because if you don’t stick up for yourself it isn’t my problem. READ MORE

Tragedy in Haymarket Square

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Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, The First Labor Movement, and The Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America by James Green.  New York: Pantheon, 2006.

On the evening of May 4, 1886, laborers gathered to attend a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the city police force’s use of lethal force in suppressing a strike at the McCormick Reaper Works several days before. Speakers addressed the crowd in several languages, and as the  speeches drew to a close six police divisions arrived to break up the demonstration. At this moment, a sputtering red fuse became visible  as a small projectile arched its way through the night air and landed amid the police. READ MORE