"Troubleshooting Your Advanced Degree" by Michael Jones

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the Poet: 

Michael Jones teaches at Oakland High School in Oakland, CA. His work appears in Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other places.

the Poem: 

The lexicon of the library-dwelling graduate student is perfect for this poem. It serves simultaneously as an expression of frustration and a description of the source. What’s best, though, is the title: as if graduate study is a piece of equipment like a printer, where most problems can be solved by checking cables and restarting the power. Imagine being able to do that with the archived papers of a famous writer: restart to find all the misfiled pieces back in their proper place. Or to upgrade your brain’s software when a new piece of writing refuses to take shape. Alas, some things remain stubbornly analog. 

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Perfect DOS VGA 437 by Zeh Fernando 

Body: 18pt Kubasta by Kai Kubasta

Everything old is new again, or more accurately, the humanities departments of any given university will have the most outdated technology on campus. Perfect DOS VGA and Kubasta both recreate the dot matrix printing you still might see on a bulletin board here and there. Who knows? Maybe the printers have been upgraded, but this notice, still true, hangs on.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"After After Sappho" by Maggie Colvett

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the Poet: 

Maggie Colvett is an M.A. candidate at the University of Georgia. She served as 2014 editor of The Mockingbird, the arts and literature magazine of East Tennessee State University. A collection of her poems entitled The World by Memory and Conjecture was awarded ETSU’s Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize in the Humanities for outstanding work in any area of the humanities. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cumberland River Review, and Still: The Journal. She lives in Athens, GA and Piney Flats, TN, where her family keeps many dozens of chickens.

the Poem: 

“All bicycles/ are your bicycle.” Isn’t that the essence of falling in love? Before, bicycles didn’t even register. Afterward, they are everywhere. And it’s that division, that mark in time that Maggie Colvett understands so well. All other events of life are re-ordered in relation to this one, seminal event and the everyday objects associated with it take on new significance. That’s true of encountering new ideas and writers, too. Images and turns of phrase take up residence in our minds and leave us “swirling in [their] wake.” It needn’t even be a whole poem. It could be a snippet of something from antiquity, something by Sappho, say, that renders all else capital A “After After.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 30pt Bordeaux Roman Bold

Body: 14pt Optima 

Sappho is ancient and mysterious – we have just fragments of her work – but she’s also very much alive because her concerns remain current. The typeface for the body of a poem that invokes her therefore had to be timeless but also a little mysterious. Optima provides a clean, modern silhouette but is it seriffed or sans? That depends on whom you ask. Bordeaux Roman provides a flourish to the ragged edge of a layout patterned after ripped notebook paper. The pair of lower case g’s in the poet’s name could be the wheels of a bicycle; those striking capital a’s could be the bicycle’s rider, spine leaning slightly forward on her long arms.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"she tames the small things that consume us" by Dan Sicoli

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the Poet: 

Dan Sicoli, of Niagara Falls, NY, writes about hope and the fallout that comes from offering it up. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks from Pudding House Publications (Columbus, Ohio), Pagan Supper and the allegories. In addition to co-founding and co-editing the literary press and magazine Slipstream (www.slipstreampress.org), his work has appeared in numerous litmags, e-zines, anthologies, and poetry audio recordings including Chiron Review, ONTHEBUS, Quercus Review, Bop Dead City, Barbaric Yawp, Dog River Review, Bathtub Gin, 2River, Rock Salt Plum, Stirring, Up the Staircase, and Nerve Cowboy. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, he can be found in local dives, saloons and barrelhouses banging on an old Gibson 335 as a rhythm guitarist with an area rock’n’roll band. In late summers, he oven dries home-grown plum tomatoes.

the Poem: 

Enchantment is still possible in the modern world. What else can explain this woman’s gift? How else to describe this poem’s effect? Not just on the bees and the speaker, but on the reader, too. Is it the idea of being tamed? That it might be possible for another person to calm the wild, buzzing chaos of our inner and outer lives? What a good feeling it is to be fed, to sit in a field knowing the bees won’t sting, to let someone else sort out the details that would consume our time and energy. As long as “no one has her measurement” she’ll stay a source of wonder.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 16pt Didot bold 

Body: 11pt American Typewriter

Bees are rounded creatures with curvaceous flight patterns. Their wings make little clouds around their bodies… so the typeface also needed to be rounded, but with the flourish of a serif to suggest the tendrils of plants the bees service. Didot fits the bill perfectly, as does American Typewriter, chosen for its throwback to a less electronic time. The nuts and bolts of beekeeping haven’t changed all that much – and you still have to develop a knack for it as you would an old typewriter with a sticky key or two.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Last Year Without" by Haley VanJeukelom

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the Poet: 

Haley Van Heukelom is a recent graduate of the University of Northern Colorado. She is the 2013 winner of the Rosenberry Prize, UNC’s award for exceptional student writing. She also won first prize for creative non-fiction in Northern Colorado’s student literary awards. She has published several poems in publications including: Gravel magazine, Isthmus, Lingerpost, and the Four Ties Lit. Review. Haley currently lives and writes in Bend, Oregon.

the Poem: 

We tell ourselves “the possibilities are endless” so that we can cling to what we desire. Our hearts cry “tell me… tell me” we can dance on the roof in the moonlight. Tell me we’ll laugh and wake up happy together. Hope – for companionship, for love – lingers, creating an imagined landscape that can change as quickly as the words “I walked out the minute I knew.” What the poet understands and what makes this poem more than just a series of wishes: our hearts don’t let go of those possibilities so easily. We exchange one imagined landscape for another where the same people play new roles, in this case of longing and loss. In our hurt, we cannot conceive of a world without the beloved so we let the idea of them linger “that whole year.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt & 18pt Bodoni 

Body: 12pt Bodoni roman & italic

The lines borrowed from poet Richard Siken inspired the choice of Bodoni, the eponymous typeface of typographer Giambattista Bodoni whose advice on design guides much of what happens on Architrave’s pages. Beyond homage, Bodoni’s high contrast between thick and thin strokes echoes the way the poem addresses presence and absence. The title has been kerned to feel open, almost empty like a living room with only people and no couches.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Eternal Flame" by Bruce McRae

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the Poet: 

Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 800 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on YouTube.

the Poem: 

Every allusion used here is a cliché (the cigar, the Bluestockings, tunnels, etc.) and yet we still smile, happy to be ‘in on it’. It’s as if the poet has just nudged us while delivering an exaggerated wink. And while we might cringe to actually be so nudged, and as much as we might hate to admit it, in truth sex is everywhere in our daily public lives. We don’t talk about it as much as we should, even though “bells are going off all over town.” Or more precisely, we talk about it but don’t really change. We’ve only just entered “the FIRST of the long dark tunnels.”

the Design: 

Title & Name: 24pt Noir-et-Blanc bold 

Body: 14pt Champagne & Limousines bold

The typefaces needed to be a bridge between the Victorian and the modern, something sans serif but still with a self-conscious curve. Champagne & Limousines provides the curves, the o’s and a’s and even the bowls of the lower case g’s all resemble the mouth of the long dark tunnel at the poem’s end. Noir-et-Blanc curves, too, but with a little excess of ornament on the capitals. The kind of flourish a Bluestocking might pencil onto the world-renowned psycho-analyst’s name in her program.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Angel Bones" by Michael Hallock

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the Poet: 

Michael Hallock is a poet and songwriter living in Pittsburgh. “I’m from the magnolia south,” he says, “as you may surmise from ‘Angel Bones’ – but I’m equally at home up north. New flowers to grow and there’s some undeniable connection between snow and contemplation.” Hallock has several folk-rock CDs to his credit, the latest being “Up A Winding Stair” with his band High On Loretta. “Songwriting has wonderful virtues,” he says, “but poetry offers no hiding place, entirely focuses the mind and spirit. It’s harder and scarier. I can’t say why but I relish that challenge. I love the freedom of modern poetry, though I think I use it in an old way – to tell stories – or at least to suggest them, rather than going for strange arrangements of words for their own sake.” Hallock’s poetry has also appeared recently in The Tower Journal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and is forthcoming in Angle Poetry.

the Poem: 

That dragon at the end of this poem is many things: the mother herself, indomitable, insisting on beauty even in an “unworthy” hotel; the disease that will kill her; and her son’s emotions which leave him barely able to count the beats of the waltz. What’s most dragon-like about this lady, though, is her complete lack of fear. Hallock’s portrait takes pains to show just how close to death, how “full of dust” she is but still, she insists she will be transformed. Here is the parent who rages against the dying of the light, who gives her disease no sway even as it consumes her. It’s tempting to think that such a death would be easier for the survivors to process and yet it doesn’t lessen her son’s struggle at all. Even as the dragon “folds itself into feathers” it keeps its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 18pt Gill Sans semi-bold italic 

Body: 12pt Gill Sans light

This is a heavy poem full light imagery. The typefaces therefore had to convey how a person can be both present in the world but also leaving it. They also must be able to hold deep emotion without contributing any of their own. Gill Sans’ thin, even strokes leave most of the page white, a light footprint. The title and poet’s name are the anchors, a thicker version of the same typeface.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Watermill Elegy" by Moriah Cohen

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the Poet: 

Moriah Cohen’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, Word Riot, and Narrative where she was runner-up in this year’s “30 Below” contest. She received her MFA from Rutgers University – Newark and currently teaches at Ramapo College.

the Poem: 

This poem is so tender. Those noisy kids down by the water don’t get told to keep quiet. Neither does the speaker’s younger self get a talking to about his or her behavior. Instead s/he lingers in the spell cast by those glowing cigarettes, remembering a similar night and its loss. It would be easy to stay in that moment, to make what’s elegized mere virginity, but Cohen doesn’t aim her mourning at “what [your hands] could never give back.” Instead her speaker focuses on the youthful ease that allows a person to casually do momentous things and then just as casually fall asleep. It’s the unencumbered mind that’s mourned here, an innocence more subtle than any physical experience.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Desdemona 

Body: 12pt Didot italic

What’s missing in this poem is most important, so the typeface for the title needed to signal as much. Desdemona’s curves make a beautiful outline of both presence and absence. They also compliment the curves of Didot italic, which manage to be both sweeping (the lower case f’s especially) and regular, like waves in the water downstream from a water mill.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"The 18th Birthday" by Scott Morgan

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the Poet: 

Scott Morgan is the first registered mutant to graduate from the University of Missouri’s MFA program in creative writing. While masquerading as a normal human, Scott received his bachelors’ degree in English from the same institution. He currently lives in Fenton, MO, where his wife and two children function as a cover identity while he spies on all humanity for GWAR. Somehow, miraculously, Scott has poems appearing or forthcoming in Bellerive, Tar River Poetry and others.

the Poem: 

Light shoots through this poem, but not the easy, pleasant light of a spring graduation day. Instead, Morgan gives us difficult, explosive “lightening [that] squeals” through the car radio and the “smoky remains of fireworks.” These are violent flashes in the night, made beautiful by a father’s view through his son’s eyes: angels in steamy rain, sea creatures in the sky. The tension between dark and sudden light makes palpable the difficulties of the relationship. These two inhabit different worlds within this world, and the work of translation will always be necessary. By the time the speaker heads out to the porch with a six pack, the weight of it all – the future as well as the past – is almost too much. There seems to be only darkness. But like many parents are inclined to do when their child reaches adulthood, this father reaches for another image – because memories are bound to images just as children are bound to their parents – and he is careful to make it another image of light, to leave us with both the beauty of the possibility of translation and the gulf that makes translation necessary. This rite of passage is hard won.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 30pt Goudy Old Style bold 

Body: 11pt Century Schoolbook

This poem fills almost all the available space on a 5 1/2 x 8 inch card, so the poem’s overall heaviness would be apparent in any typeface. The tenderness of the speaker, though, is important so the typeface couldn’t be a heavy one. Century Schoolbook has thin enough strokes that even a solid block of it lets plenty of white space through, appropriate for a poem that ends with the glyphs of fireflies. The title has a different function: it’s both the occasion of the poem and its anchor. It therefore belonged within the body, along with the poet, who has given a voice to a difficult family transition and a complicated kind of love.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"The Farm, The Sky" by Sarah Coury

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the Poet:

Sarah Coury has worked as a small business owner, field biologist, and park ranger. She gardens in the summer and writes in the winter. Her poetry, prose, and nonfiction have appeared in a number of literary journals. She lives with her family in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

the Poem:

Mysteries abound. Who is the “we” who speaks? Did they “buy the farm” literally or figuratively? They’re not part “of the old wood, the rough temple” but they have certainly merged into the landscape. Their long stillness seems almost disembodied, choral, as they observe their environment. They invite us past the decay, beautiful though it may be, to witness something more liminal: a landscape left fallow invites the sky downward, brings it “close, immediate,” refigures it as another form of wildlife. And as exhilarating as the sky falling to earth as a winged creature might be, what is even more thrilling is the suggestion that there are creatures able to lie still enough to witness it. Which circles around to the initial mystery: who speaks?

the Design:

Title & Name: 36pt & 30pt Gloucester MT Extra Condensed

Body: 16pt Show White

The small caps of Snow White are rough hewn (the w’s and s’s especially) which makes each line into a “vast and quiet cedar beam.” Its tiny punctuation amplifies the effect, eliding the sentences together into solid text. Gloucester’s curves and weight provide a slight relief from the blocky body, like a sign that remains upright long after its farm has been abandoned.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Alliteration" by Paul Hostovsky

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the Poet:

Paul Hostovsky is the author of five books of poetry and six poetry chapbooks. His Selected Poems was published by FutureCycle Press in 2014. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac, has won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net Awards, and was a Featured Poet on the Georgia Poetry Circuit 2013. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com 

the Poem:

This speaker’s voice is truly ecstatic, attuned so finely to the liveliness of the surrounding woods that he’s compelled to join it. It doesn’t even matter which season it actually was (in fact it was probably all of them at one time or another). All that matters is the feeling of complete release, of surrendering to one’s body so fully that you abandon your clothes, your speech… all the trappings of civilization. The poet is careful to arrange his syntax to mirror the crescendo of climax, so that as the vowels and then the consonants make their appearances we feel the arc as much as read it.

the Design:

Title & Name: 60pt & 36pt Garamond

Body: 14pt Mona Lisa Solid

Everything about this poem is standing at attention so the typeface for the body needed something with exaggerated ascenders and descenders. Mona Lisa delivers, its effect on the page a wood of its own. Pealing the body of the poem away from the left margin is as much for the sycamore’s bark as it is for the speaker’s remembered erection. To frame it all, the title and poet’s name are tree and ground, respectively. Garamond keeps them from becoming too stylized, too unusual to be true.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

Edition 7 Gets Born with a Playlist Reading

Once again we'll be at the Tavern of Fine Arts for our release reading and party.

Reading at 7pm

Scott Morgan
Kelli Allen
Ryan Smith &
Ray Holmes
will read their playlists of favorite Architrave poems, some from E7 and the rest from E1-6. Scott may bring some new work as well.

No one is conferring so we'll see if/where tastes converge!

Coming in September: SPEx!

 Look for me at the St. Louis Small Press Expo on September 27 and at the kickoff party the evening of the 26th - I love meeting readers and contributors!

"At the Native American Film Festival" by Jenny Cropp

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

The Poet: 
Jenny Yang Cropp is the author of one chapbook,Hanging the Moon (RockSaw Press). Her poems have appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. She grew up mainly in Oklahoma, received her M.F.A in creative writing from Minnesota State University-Mankato, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of South Dakota.

The Poem: 
This poem is divided in two, like its speaker. First there are the things that don’t fit, her peculiar marks of otherness. What follows, though, isn’t a simple discovery of belonging – it’s the illusion of belonging in which the speaker eagerly participates. The ache of it is palpable in the abrupt change in tone; matter-of-fact acceptance is quickly replaced by the wishful idea of being “her daughter.” In fact, the idea of being the Comanche woman’s child overtakes the speaker so fully that she says, “I think of the blue/ born on her daughter’s back” instead of “on [my] back.” It makes the last line – “I am part of something whole” – ring a little hollow, revealing the longing that coexists with acceptance.

The Design: 
Title & Name: 27pt & 24pt Engravers Gothic small capitals 
Body: 14pt American Typewriter 
American Typewriter is uniformly heavy with lots of squiggle in its lowercase g, curvy lower f, t, a… like a “mass of dark veins… bruise-like” on the page. Engravers Gothic provides the title with a marquee quality, announcing what’s playing at the film fest. Together with the poet’s name it forms three sides of a box, tilted, since the speaker is between worlds and not likely to fit into any single place.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

Two Haiku by Ben Moeller-Gaa

Click on an image to read the full text of the poems, or purchase them here.

The Poet:
Ben Moeller-Gaa is the author of two haiku chapbooks, Wasp Shadows (Folded Word Press 2014) and Blowing on a Hot Soup Spoon (poor metaphor 2014). His haiku, essays and book reviews have appeared in over 25 journals worldwide including Acorn, Modern Haiku, A Hundred Gourds, Frogpond, Shamrock and World Haiku Review as well as in several anthologies such as Haiku 21, the Red Moon Press's yearly "Best of English Language Haiku" anthologies (2011, 2012, 2013) and The Haiku Foundation's Mobile Haiku App.

The Poem:
When Matsuo Basho wrote, “Even in Kyoto/ hearing the cuckoo’s cry/ I long for Kyoto” (tr. Robert Haas) he was both celebrating his present moment and mourning it as it passed. Ben Moeller-Gaa celebrates two such moments: the moon’s reflection on the water is the essence of a calm summer’s evening; the flight of the goldfinch is the energy of spring. Like the cuckoos that sing in Kyoto every year, the koi and the goldfinch have a fleeting beauty all their own. They can be revisited, but each new encounter will differ from our memory – what has become an idea about summer evenings or spring – and remind us that nothing stays the same.

The Design:
Title & Name: 30pt & 22pt Engravers Gothic
Body: 20pt Chalkduster
These two haiku are at once the same and opposite. Rather than reflect their differences with separate typefaces, Chalkduster, with its airy, brush like strokes, represents their common feature: impermanence. All moments pass; all chalkboards and sidewalks get washed clean. The mirror arrangement requires the reader to choose a dominant point of view even as the other remains in sight. Setting the title and poet’s name on a circle make this a coin to be tossed.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Variation, Without Chickens" by Devon Miller-Duggan

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

The Poet:
Devon Miller-Duggan's first collection, Pinning the Bird to the Wall, was published in 2008 by Tres Chicas Books. A chapbook of off-kilter poems about angels was just published in September by Finishing Line Press. She teaches Creative Writing at The University of Delaware.

The Poem:
It’s a tricky thing, writing homage. Stray too close to the original and you’re ripping off your hero. Venture too far afield and your readers won’t make the connection. With this poem Miller-Duggan pulls it off because she riffs on sound where William Carlos Williams riffed on image. Each stanza swells to a crescendo by varying the combinations of r, w, d and s sounds; each stanza break lets the sound “glaze” “the spaces… in between.” The overall effect is a series of quick summer storms that swirl around the “red wheel/ barrow” of the source material. Indeed, “something must fall away – feathers, the sky,/ Much that flowers” for Williams’ poem to be born. The poet has imagined those lost details and made them her own.

The Design:
Title & Name: 24pt & 18pt Bodoni reverse italic
Body: 14pt Bodoni roman, italic & small capitals
So much of literature depends on what went before it; even when we’re not building on the past we’re breaking from it. A classic book typeface like Bodoni offers a long history but it also looks good doing things it’s designer never intended, like small capitals and reversed italic. The various styles are deployed to underscore the poem’s nods to WCW’s famous piece while maintaining a harmonious, modern integrity.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"My Oldest Memory" by Luke Daly

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The Poet:
Luke Daly lives on the west side of Buffalo, NY with his artist wife and two daughters, and he teaches writing and literature at Villa Maria College of Buffalo. His poetry and criticism appear in Basalt, the Blue Earth Review, Comstock Review, The Corresponder(Mankato, MN), and the Cream City Review. If you’d like to view more of his work, visit:http://www.creamcityreview.org/category/poetry/.

The Poem:
This poem is haunted. Sure, the title calls it a memory but the line between the living and the dead has blurred to a fog of pipe smoke. Curious how the room is filled with “ancestors” instead of family, how their “flotilla” rows “to a dim house in a new country” as if crossing the River Lethe. All of this before the speaker calls himself a specter, “paralyzed” in a doorway. Maybe the line between death and life isn’t the pipe smoke. Maybe the line is that doorway and he is visible to the “one/ who can’t see past her knuckles” because neither are alive. Maybe this is the speaker’s day of birth. Maybe it’s just an odd memory dominated by a bright carpet and elderly relatives. Happily it’s a poem, so it can be both.

The Design:
Title & Name: 24pt Filament by Gaelleing
Body: 14pt Skinny Chick by Blue Sky
Skinny Chick and Filament are each spectral in their own way, legibly ghostlike, caught “between kitchen and pallor.” For Skinny Chick it’s those extra long descenders and ascenders plus the slightly uneven baseline that give it the anxious feel of a child’s handwriting. Filament is that same child grown up, blocking capitals with several parallel strokes, trying to etch something tenuous into a more solid state. Together they look ad hoc, slight, ephemeral.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Lilith" by Janet McCann

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The Poet:
Journals publishing Janet McCann’s poems includeKansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’wester, New York Quarterly, Tendril, Poetry Australia, etc.. She has won five chapbook contests, sponsored by Pudding Publications, Chimera Connections, Franciscan University Press, Plan B Press, and Sacramento Poetry Center. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she has taught at Texas A & M University since 1969. Her most recent poetry collection: The Crone at the Cathedral (Lamar University Press, 2013).

The Poem:
So often Lilith is depicted as mad in one sense or another, so much so that the first line of this poem feels like a feint. Could she really be at peace with her life? Won’t the rest of the poem give the lie to her claim? How refreshing, then, to find this Lilith does actually “rest there” (from the quotation from Isaiah) in her self-proclaimed “No Man’s Land.” Even as she addresses Eve, the woman who replaced her in Adam’s life, she makes no threats, insists only on being heard. She knows she is frightening, too, but doesn’t seek to inspire terror, only her own “image in the brackish pond.” The poem then, gives the lie to the idea that a woman who desires solitude must be mad.

The Design:
Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Roman Antique by Dieter Steffmann
Epigraph: 10pt Century Schoolbook
Body: 12pt Aji Hand by Ajith R
There are two stories here: the official, codified one from the Bible and Lilith’s own, personal statement in response. The two typefaces had to reflect those different sources and yet complement each other visually. The passage from Isaiah is represented in Century Schoolbook, the most traditional of the three faces used. It’s regular italic echoes the motion of Aji Hand, which approximates a quick scrawl. Roman Antique’s straight lines and grainy edges lie somewhere between the two styles, uniting them further.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Retreat" by Susanna Lang

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The Poet:
Susanna Lang’s newest collection of poems, Tracing the Lines, was published in 2013 by the Brick Road Poetry Press. Her first collection, Even Now, was published in 2008 by The Backwaters Press, and a chapbook, Two by Two, was released in October 2011 from Finishing Line Press. She has published original poems, essays and translations from the French, in such journals as Little Star, New Letters, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, Southern Poetry Review, World Literature Today, Chicago Review, New Directions, and Jubilat. Translations include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, both by Yves Bonnefoy. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.

The Poem:
Retreat: a verb and a noun, an action as well as a place. This language play is essential in the compressed space of poetry and Lang constructs her poem around it. There is the journey to the beach house, then the beach house itself; the spiders’ scuttle and the crack in the plaster where they hole up to wait; the departure of day leading to darkness; the long conversation that arrives at comfortable silence. In fact, the poem itself is a daylong journey toward stillness. What’s to be found in the space after the poem stops talking? The poem poses a question without asking, provides no answer beyond a sense of peace.

The Design:
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Optima
Body: 12pt Gill Sans Light
The environment of this poem is so quiet it seems to swallow any sound louder than the call of a loon. Such a poem needs a thin, light presence on the page, something to suggest the filament of a spider’s web. Gill Sans Light is both wispy and crisp, like the spiders’ handiwork. Optima is slightly heavier but equally crisp, a broom put to good use at the beginning and end of each visit. In the title, though, an extra, reversed t hints at the spiders’ retreat occasioned by the broom as well as their life in the house sans people.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Dementia" by Katie Phillips

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

The Poet:
Katie Phillips grew up in Maryland & Colorado and lived in Montana before moving to the Chicago suburbs, where she now enjoys walking her Alaskan Malamute to her job at a local non-profit organization. Katie’s chapbook "Driving Montana, Alone" was published in 2010 and the title poem was later read by Garrison Keillor on NPR's The Writers' Almanac.Since then, she has continued to write and travel around the country studying with various poets. She can be reached at DrivingMontanaAlone@gmail.comor through www.facebook.com/katie7phillips.

The Poem:
Phillips uses her couplets to create fragments; separate pockets of meaning and image that enhance the poem’s overall sense. Each addresses the title in some way, ranging from common ideas about dementia (“dis-remembering,/ details slipping”) to the idyllic (“away like a room/ full of light”) to the ominous (“were darkening./ Then she broke”) and finally desperate (“looking for/ a way out”). All of these exist simultaneously within “Dementia” the poem and the diagnosis, even as the poem’s sentences trace the overall progression of one woman’s disease.

The Design:
Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Bodoni small capitals
Body: 14pt Averia by Dan Sayers
Bodoni’s thick upright strokes feel solid even as the title and poet’s name have been kerned open to make that hold on normalcy a little looser, a little more tenuous than normal. They are holding together, more or less like the speaker, who’s had a rough surprise on top of the difficult realities of losing a loved one to dementia. Averia’s letterforms have the rounded look of something more solid that has begun to dissolve. They feel right for scattered couplets, a poem barely holding its pieces together.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Zen Advertising Co." by Bruce McRae

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

The Poet:
Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 800 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, The So-Called Sonnets is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on YouTube.

The Poem:
As consumers we know we’re being sold an “illusion of happiness” along with our paper tissues and radial tires, but we know it through image and the quality of the voice “disclaiming… side effects.” The connection between our purchases and our self-image is unstated so it can remain unexamined. Bruce McRae will have none of that. He loads his poem with Zen-like language to give the lie to the implicit claims of advertising in general and his own poem in particular. “There is no product” is a half-truth – the product is the customer, a Zen koan every advertiser has mastered.

The Design:
Title & Name: 24pt & 20pt Century Gothic
Body: 12pt Gill Sans
Zen practice works against self-focus, so the typefaces for this poem needed something neutral, something that almost disappears behind the text. Gill Sans has a thin stroke that leaves a very light mark on the page, forming the text and then receding, without judgment, into the surrounding white space. Century Gothic offers just enough additional weight to pin the poem down, suggest the column of other classified ads from which it’s been cut.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"The Builder" by Dolores Hayden

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

The Poet:
Dolores Hayden’s poetry collections are American Yard (2004) and Nymph, Dun, and Spinner (2010). Recent work appears in Poetry, Raritan, The Yale Review, Shenandoah, Best American Poetry, andAmerican Scientist. She’s won awards from the Poetry Society of America and the New England Poetry Club and been a poetry fellow at Djerassi and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is also the author of several non-fiction books on American urban landscapes including The Power of Place and A Field Guide to Sprawl. At Yale University, she teaches a class called “Poets’ Landscapes.” Her web site iswww.DoloresHayden.com.

The Poem:
It’s hard not to ache for the house as it’s being demolished. The poet takes pains to personalize it (“clapboard skin,” a chestnut skeleton), which makes the speaker sound callous, shortsighted. But Hayden leaves out what’s to become of the cleared property and in so doing, doesn’t seal the builder’s indictment. Instead she gives us that amazing line from Frost. Flowers are most beautiful during their bloom, but that time “after the petals go” is part of their life cycle, too. If the speaker is wrong about anything, it’s that “masonry is nothing like a flower.” Even without being pulled down by the builder, the house would eventually have succumbed on its own, just like Old man Smithson. So the poem becomes a Rorschach test for the reader: is the builder blindly violent, or will the “possibility” he measures rise like “tulips…/ through rubble”?

The Design:
Title & Name: 100pt & 24pt Garamond
Body: 14pt Garamond italic and roman
The poem isn’t just another demolition story for this builder, it’s part manifesto, part apologia. It’s personal, so the body of the text needed a similar intimacy, an italic lean forward as if the letters were as eager to tell this tale as the builder himself. Garamond offers an easily legible italic that mixes well with its own roman, allowing the quote from Frost to feel solid amid the story of the tumbling house and letters of the title. All these elements together vibrate on the page, a visual irony to go with the poem’s verbal one.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Poem on the Fridge" by Paul Hostovsky

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

The Poet:
Paul Hostovsky is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Naming Names (2013, Main Street Rag). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net awards. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and was a Featured Poet on the Georgia Poetry Circuit 2013. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com.

The Poem:
Certainly the fridge door is a place of honor, but the “highest honor/ a poem can aspire to”? At first this reads like sarcasm. And the poem seems to take itself so seriously, giving a triumphant speech about its own achievement. It smacks of the self-important posture often assumed by art considered “high,” which is why we chuckle – the fridge is decidedly hodgepodge and common. But then the poem changes focus, “the song in its head” changing from the physical words “lined up here” to what they signify: “a dispensary of indispensable details” observed from surrounding life. Happily there is lots of food and a little medicine. Essential stuff is “seeping through this white door” as well as the white page that holds the words to the poem, alive and infectious.

The Design:
Title: 50pt Gabriola
Name: 36pt Gabriola
Body: 14pt Franchise by Weathersbee Type
This refrigerator poem is so proud, so honored to have that magnet “like a medal/ pinned to its lapel.” It stands very straight against the fridge’s fuselage, at attention like a general who has just been awarded his fourth star. The typeface for the body therefore needed a straight spine and squared shoulders; Franchise delivers, adding its distinctly medal-like colons for good measure. The title needed a bit more curve, something worthy of a personal invitation to “Stop here a moment/ and listen to the poem… It’s having a party.” The kind of script that might issue from the hand of a very upright, formal being trying to let down their hair a little: Gabriola.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

Edition 6 Release Reading!

Friday April 11, 2014

Tavern of Fine Arts
313 Belt Ave, 63112

Reading 7pm sharp will be:

Ben Moeller-Gaa
Nicky Rainy
Catherine Rankovic

The Tavern has new art on the walls and a great menu, the inserts are printed on 'pink lemonade' paper this time, and Edition 6 = Three Years of Architrave! I hope you'll come help celebrate.