"The 18th Birthday" by Scott Morgan

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

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

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

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

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 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!