"My Oldest Memory" by Luke Daly

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

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

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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