11.18.2013

"Love Sonnet" by Amy Milton

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


the Poet:
Amy Milton is a writer in St. Louis who graduated from the University of Missouri - St. Louis fiction MFA program in May 2013. She is currently employed in the communications and marketing department at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health. When she is not working or writing, she performs stand-up comedy at various local venues, goes on a lot of hikes, and reads too many science and feminism blogs. Despite all evidence to the contrary, she believes that the most perfect car ever is the 1996 Toyota Tercel and will be devastated when they are no longer available.
the Poem:
Amy Milton is sticking to her iambic pentameter guns, a bandolier of end rhymes draped across her chest. What’s truly dangerous, though, is her sharp, English Renaissance-style wit. Clever turns of phrase like “A selfish love…/ turns organs into ornaments” convey, in compact detail, both the pitfalls and high stakes of love. How frightening, then, to realize the safety of our organs relies on others’ perceptions (“Not who you are, but who you are to me”) something we can’t control. It’s enough to make a person want to pass on love entirely, but “even the most rotten, callous soul/ …has needs and longings out of her control.” So what to do? Despite describing love as warfare (two places where, as the saying goes, “all’s fair”) this poem advocates for the golden rule. Not because it offers a guarantee – there are none of those – but because being kind is most likely to endear you to those you’re closest to, the very same people who can hurt you most deeply. It’s at once selfless and Machiavellian. Ben Johnson would be proud.

the Design:
Body: 14pt Mona Lisa Solid
A poem that addresses intimacy and its pitfalls using the lexicon of warfare should look both delicate and dense, cold and warm. Mona Lisa Solid’s thick vertical strokes, small bowls and tall ascenders create a solid field of hash marks while maintaining significant white space. The apostrophes ride high above the letterforms like balloons or grenades mid-arc. The dots of the lower case i’s could be daggers or candle flames. It’s all in how you decide to see it.
online ISSN 2651-3801

11.14.2013

"Of Five Fears: Three of them Light" by Kelli Allen

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

the Poet: 
Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has won awards for her poetry, prose, and scholarly work. She served as Managing Editor of Natural Bridge and holds an MFA from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She currently teaches in the MFA program for Lindenwood University. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books in 2012.
the Poem: 
Why does being human seem to require a stubborn preference to remain unaware of ourselves? Allen knows we’d rather not be illuminated, that the shadows are more comfortable because the low light is more forgiving. If we stay in the shadows, we don’t have to “see a wing, feel/ a ripped feather.” A very old idea, indeed, but with a twist this time: the poem’s own self-awareness. Overlaid on the light and shadow is the speaker’s frustration with cliché. She’s a writer, for sure, and not happy about having to use an overworked set of words. But they are the right words, the best words to express this idea. And so the speaker’s grudging lexicon is a reflection of the force exerted by the “bloated” sun to make her really see.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 24pt & 16pt Futura Medium, Roman & small capitals 
Body: 12pt Futura Condensed Medium, Roman & Italic 
A poem about light should cast a shadow. Not toward the right – that would be too similar to traditional italic. Toward the left, then, the whole poem pulling against its italicized fears: “shadows, light, darkening.” To take the shear and remain legible, the typeface needed to be sans serif and have evenly weighted strokes. Futura’s solid, unfussy letterforms hang together in a cool, dark swath.
online ISSN 2165-3801

11.11.2013

"Avocado Lake" by Daniel Mahoney

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

the Poet: 
Lately, Daniel Mahoney has been writing music reviews for bands and albums that do not exist, or exist only in his head. Look for them under your boot soles. You can find him physically in Maine and virtually at http://rusticatordeluxe.wordpress.com/
the Poem: 
It’s appropriate “Those radiant opals/ That mumbled between our legs” don’t show up until the penultimate couplet. They’re the root of the speaker’s masculinity, the thing he’s driven to protect and that drives him to run long after the Indian and Avocado Lake are history. In fact, they propel the speaker through a whole catalogue of abandonment that on a first read seems headed toward regret. But that poem has been written before. That ending would read, “We listened too well,” implying a sense of loss, especially for “distant sons.” Instead Mahoney surprises with the speaker’s unapologetic allegiance to his opals – “We listened well.”– and underscores their power by keeping his speaker performing their imperative: “We ran away,/ Became fathers of distant sons.”

the Design: 
Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Footlight 
Body: 12pt Helvetica 
Place anchors this poem so the title needed to anchor the design. The last lines of the body slip just a little lower, like the speaker slipping out of town but never really growing beyond the behaviors learned there. The thin strokes of the o in Footlight are off center so the letterform looks like it’s about to roll away. For the story itself the typeface needed to echo the unvarnished clarity of hindsight. Helvetica tells it like it is without getting in the way.
online ISSN 2165-3801

11.07.2013

"The Birds" by Ellene Glenn Moore

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

the Poet: 
Ellene Glenn Moore is a poet and MFA candidate at Florida International University, where she holds a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship. She earned her undergraduate degree in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. During a brief stint in Cleveland, Ohio, Ellene led two introductory poetry workshops at Grafton Correctional Institution, in conjunction with the Northeast Ohio Community Outreach Project. Her work has appeared in Barn Owl Review, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, and other print and online journals.
the Poem: 
The birds of this poem are invasive, destructive, an unexplainable event, and almost none of them are described as singing. Instead, the poet embeds their song in her language. Each line has patterns of vowels or consonants, which become layered as the poem progresses. The repeated n sounds of the opening line prime the reader’s ear for “numinous and plenty as sunspots” two lines later. In the second line “littering the eaves and lintels” sends out a call of l’s that are answered in line four with “fluttered… to splinter” and so on until the whole poem is resounding with call and response. The finale is provided by the three deep o sounds, like breath across a large pipe, in “humming through knotholes, throating their notes/ in the radiator.” It’s loud without ever saying so. When the music continues after the birds have departed, it feels like a ringing in the ears in the sudden silence. The house shudders. The couple is stunned. They sleep under stones and murmur to each other about what might still be in the trees. It’s possible they might never recover.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 48pt & 30pt Stampede by Manfred Klein
Body: 9pt Century Schoolbook Italic 
There is so much movement in this poem. The text needed to reflect both the erratic energy of the individual birds and their tidal, flock-like arrival and departure. A smooth italic with strong vertical strokes like Century Schoolbook reflects that movement but also gives it a visual weight consistent with the poem’s ominous tone. For contrast, Manfred Klein’s Stampede is perfectly messy, as if the letters have been trampled and shat on, disrupted from their regular alignment. The title is stuffed into the poem’s middle like a bird that has squirmed its way into the space between the refrigerator and the wall.
online ISSN 2165-3801

11.04.2013

"K" by Marilyn Annucci

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


the Poet:
Marilyn’s poems have appeared in a variety of magazines online and in print, and three are forthcoming in Echolocations, Poets Map Madison,from Cow Feather Press (available Fall 2013). She is the author of Waiting Room, which won the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Award, selected by Tony Hoagland (Hill-Stead Museum, 2012) and Luck(Parallel Press, 2000). She hopes that her manuscriptThe Private Lives of Letters (of which “K” is a part) will one day be a book. For more info on Marilyn and her work, go to: 
the Poem:
K may be the title character, but this poem is really about her relationship with n. The rules are clear: K leads with her “drop/ kick,” starts or ends any word in which she appears with a good crack. Unless n follows behind her, carrying the power of K’s own secrets. In that case n – shorter, rounder, dull – does the talking. What we readers can never know, looking in from the outside, is whether n’s knowledge of K holds her hostage or lightens her burden. Does she “talk/ smack” and stash “junk/ in her kiddy/ bank” because she likes to, or because she feels angry and trapped? “Only n/ knows/ what K/ won’t show,/ can’t speak.”

the Design:
Title: 375pt Phosphorus Dihydride by Apostrophic Labs
Name: 24pt Phosphorus Iodide by Apostrophic Labs
Body: 12pt Gil Sans
K is quite a character. She lives large and casts a shadow. Phosphorus Dihydride sports a shadow plus fine outlines, because K is also vulnerable (if only to n). For the body of her no-nonsense portrait, K needed a sans serif typeface of the same weight as her outline. Gil Sans slides nicely along her side, an entourage of letters without shadows, following K’s every move.
online ISSN 2165-3801