"My Dearest Darling" by Erin Alisha Hillam

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet: 
Alisha Erin Hillam grew up outside of a small Indiana town. Now she is a freelance writer drying out in Arizona with her husband and two ankle-biters. She is the recipient of several literary awards from Purdue University and, in addition to five published or forthcoming book chapters, her work has appeared inInscape, decomP, Corium Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, and The Monongahela Review.

the Poem: 
Found poetry presents an interesting challenge: the text is set, so the poet’s decisions are limited to line and stanza breaks. For “My Dearest Darling,” Hillam uses her lines to reinforce the letter’s emotion. As prose, “I sure hate to think about it but that is that” has a stoicism we’ve come to associate with the WWII era, but it’s amplified when combined with part of another idea, in this case the uncertainty of the duration of the war: “for a short long while. I sure hate to think about it.” Likewise “but that is that” is tempered by the gratitude of “For the wedding I’m glad you want.” A little further on the poet gives “& I sure would like to have another one” its own stanza, allowing the desire for children to reverberate separately from the logistics of military service that precede and follow. It’s an effective way to signal the heart of the poem. Life persists, Hillam reminds us, even in wartime. Especially in wartime.

the Design: 
Title: 20pt Baskerville Bold Italic 
Body: 12pt Baskerville Italic 
Name: 24pt Bank Gothic Light 
Notation: 10pt. Bank Gothic light; 10pt & 14pt Bank Gothic Medium 
Military service hangs over this letter, so the design needed to have a more regular, regimented feel than a handwriting typeface could offer. And yet it is also deeply personal. Baskerville bridges those two worlds, while Bank Gothic suggests a Teletype draft notice. The poet’s name runs down the side like the stripe on dress uniform trousers.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"Buck Skin" by Jamieson Ridenhour

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the Poet: 
Jamieson Ridenhour is the author of the P.G. Wodehouse-meets-Lon-Chaney murder mysteryBarking Mad (Typecast, 2011) and its sequel Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Typecast, forthcoming 2014), as well as the short films Cornerboys and The House of the Yaga (both featured at GeekNation.com). His poetry and fiction has been published in The Lumberyard, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and others. In Darkest London, a study of the Victorian Urban Gothic, was released in 2013 by Scarecrow Press. Jamie lives and writes in Bismarck, North Dakota.

the Poem: 
It’s easy to get caught up in the sound and imagery of this poem, how the s and t sounds repeat in a phrase like “bristle-stiff/ skin parts like drapery,” how that same phrase honors the animal’s beauty without flinching from the hunter’s task. What really makes this poem hum, though, is its central question: “Why are you afraid?” Surely seeing a deer disemboweled for the first time creates some of it, confronting the blood and viscera that precede a trophy and a meal. But if that were the poem’s only concern, it would amount to nothing more than a cheap shock. Instead the poet shows us the mess then steps back to consider how “skilled and focused” the men are. This is old hat to all of them, “even him,” a man singled out again as the speaker tries to calm his fears. “There is nothing he can’t see,” nothing about killing and gutting a deer that is shameful, and yet the speaker’s heart tells him otherwise.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt DpQuake by Dead Pete 
Body: 12pt Didot 
“The knife/ is curved and sharp” the better to take apart the deer’s body, layer by layer. The typeface needed to have a similar shape, something with marked contrast in its strokes, plus round bowls. The s’s and o’s of Didot provide that shape, an echo of the knife sliding, half hidden between skin and muscle, then flashing visible as it cuts the organs loose. DpQuake goes a step further; the thin, horizontal strokes disappear entirely as the knife bites deep.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"Totentanz" by Mitchell Storar

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the Poet: 
Mitch Storar is a medical student at Ohio University. His work has appeared in Jelly Bucket, Weave, Fugue,and several other publications. He lives outside of Athens with his wife, Sarah, and daughter, Morgan.

the Poem: 
William Blake, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, uses parallel poems to compare two views of the same subject: one ideal and one fallen. But Storar knows these two states exist simultaneously in our minds. We vacillate between perfect ideas and their flawed reality. “I suppose it was more poetic in our heads,” the speaker says of “living simply,” and the realities of wood-burning heat certainly wore the couple down. What hints of joy there are (homemade bread, playing sundial in the middle of a fairy ring) quickly fall apart. Beautiful ideas keep appearing (fruit, gold wine) but they’re never realized. Instead they hang at the poem’s end, just a glimpse of something better amid the disappointment.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Roman Antique Italic, designed by Dieter Steffmann 
Body: 11pt Roman Antique 
What life there is in the place of this poem (a cabin? and old farmhouse?) is the life associated with decay: mushrooms, a garden gone to seed, nearby fire. But the place still stands and the couple persist awhile, so the typeface needed to reflect that weathered state. Dieter Steffmann’s Roman Antique is mostly there, but its edges waver, as if once crisp letterforms can no longer hold the line against encroaching white space.

ISSN 2165-3801

"Method" by Rob Talbert

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the Poet:
Rob Talbert has worked in a jail, an ice cream store, and on a cruise ship. Before moving back home to Texas, he received his MFA from Virginia Tech. His first book of poems, Jagged Tune, is forthcoming from the very awesome Mad Hat Press.

the Poem:
This poem starts clearly enough with “I took a cab down Commerce Street” but what sense can be made of a line like “I drank from the mall of lit bottles”? And was there or was there not a cover at Citrus? Unlike everyday language, poetry isn’t required to convey clear, concise information. Meaning can derive from sound and emotion, too, which is this poem’s strength. Talbert’s method is kaleidoscopic: the same words and phrases tumble like colored beads into startling new images like “The sky was a cab door shut on a dress.” And they keep tumbling, so the mall can be both closing and closed; ribbon can mean the street or a girl’s hips; the speaker can both ride and walk along Commerce Street. It’s all so confusing and anxious, the rhythm of each line pounding like a drum. And even though the poem itself must end, it gives the impression that it never will, even before the last line tells us so.

the Design:
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Garamond Bold Small Capitals
Body: 12pt Garamond in combinations of Roman, Italic and Small Capitals
The jumble of images and phrases in this poem chafes against the regularity of its couplets. Using different styles of the same typeface accentuates that repetition without destroying the continuity provided by regular structure. To be successful, though, that single typeface had to be versatile, which is to say legible in many styles: Garamond.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"Ode to the Lovers Upstairs" by Jennifer Fandel

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the Poet: 
Jennifer Fandel's poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, RHINO, The Baltimore Review, Calyx, Architrave Press Editions, Midwestern Gothic, and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press). She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, in a house, though she remains attentive to the actions of her neighbors.

the Poem: 
So often love sonnets flatter and promise eternal devotion without stating their true goal: getting the beloved into bed! How refreshing then, to encounter a sonnet that takes sex as its subject, that turns annoyance – startled awake, light fixture shaking – to invitation. The “turn” is one of the joys of the sonnet form: an established idea challenged in some way, reexamined in a new light. Our comfortable downstairs couple gets to rethink themselves, enjoy something both new and renewed while we readers smile slyly, thinking of our own plans.

The Design: 
Title: 34pt Optimus Princeps 
Name: 24pt Optimus Princeps 
Body: 12pt Euphorigenic, designed by Typodermic 
Shaking windows, a reverberating ceiling… this poem requires a typeface that sways, something just a little out of control. Euphorigenic lets its capitals descend from the baseline to match the descenders of the lower case letters. The lower case t half dangles and the crossbars of the lower e and a have a precipitous slant, yet it all shakes together. Optimus Pinceps provides a little more discipline for the title with a dash of fun in the pronounced serifs, arranged as steps to mount before the poem can begin.

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis 
Letterpress printed by Paper Boat Studios, St. Louis

online ISSN 2165-3801