4.27.2015

"Turning the Corner" by Polly Brown

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

the Poet: 
Polly Brown lives on a hillside in central Massachusetts, writes a blog about progressive education at ayeartothinkitover.com and has two poetry chapbooks in print: Blue Heron Stone (Every Other Thursday Press), and Each Thing Torn From Any of Us (Finishing Line). Recent poems have appeared, or will soon, in Clade Song, Sandy River Review, Soundings East, and Turtle Island Quarterly. Meanwhile, a manuscript called What There Is, which moves from geology to botany to zoology to human artifacts, will soon go scouting for publishers yet again.

the Poem: 
The line “together, the leaves have staggered” is really the crux of it: the action of individual leafs, taken together, signal momentous change. The poet then gives the tree the very human ability to “[make]/ its corner of the yard an image/ of itself.” Eventually there comes a point when (if we’re lucky) “the body/… has thinned” into old age. But that’s when Brown uses her images to throw a curve: that thin body, those staggering leaves have all given way not to cold or darkness but to a clear blue sky. It’s a transcendent moment that finds the beauty hidden in “let[ting] go.”

the Design: 
Title & Name: 24pt Century Schoolbook bold 
Body: 14pt Bodoni italic
As the tree’s canopy has thinned, so has the body of the poem: there’s an extra space between each word, and the text as a whole has been kerned open to let the white page really show through. Bodoni’s italic rolls evenly, like a few remaining leaves in the wind. Century Schoolbook is firm and upright, especially in boldface, providing what will stay through the winter: the trunk and the ground.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

4.20.2015

"I Have Half a Mind" by April Salzano

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

the Poet: 
April Salzano is currently working on a memoir on raising a child with autism and several collections of poetry. Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow, and Rattle. Her first chapbook, The Girl of My Dreams, is forthcoming in spring 2015 from Dancing Girl Press. The author serves as co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press.

the Poem: 
There is so much distance packed into this short poem. The speaker is a wife and (presumably) mother but she describes her children as if they were strange wildlife. She uses the word “husband” but insists it’s just a name. And who among us hasn’t had that disorienting “how did I get HERE?!” moment or wondered if it might be best to scrap everything and start over? The poet moves deftly through the rhythm of these moments: how our estrangement from ourselves first shows in our estrangement from those we love; how we feel out of sync with the rhythms of life (“Does anyone iron anymore?”) when in fact we’ve lost sight of what makes life worth living (I had no intention of laughing/ so little”). Closure in moments of unhappiness and indecision seems like it will never come. In this poem, it never does.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Garamond bold 
Body: 14pt Garamond roman
The speaker has only just begun to organize her thoughts, so the design is arranged loosely to convey a similar series of shrugs and turns, first this way, then that, spiraling on itself. While this circular pattern suggests a hurricane, an actual storm possesses a clearly defined eye at its center. The speaker here has no such clarity, so the form needed to remain a little scattered. The typeface for such an unusual shape had to be extremely regular and legible—the last line is almost upside down—and Garamond fit the bill perfectly.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

4.13.2015

"Called to the Water" by Moriah Cohen

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the Poet: 
Moriah Cohen’s poetry has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hoot: A Mini Literary Magazine on a Postcard, Baltimore Review, and Narrative. She lives in New Jersey with her two sons.

the Poem: 
Paddling away into the sunset seems like a simple teenage escape fantasy, but no matter how fast the current or how wide the body of water, there is no erasing the horizon. Not unless the current pulls you under. Is suicide what “should have happened” instead of survival? Does she wish she’d succeeded? That’s one possible reading. The other: Persephone under the sway of pomegranate seeds, called across the river to the underworld, the summer grass already growing stale in anticipation of her departure. Either way our speaker is weary with experience and what she most wishes to convey—what has remained true among the falsehoods, is the desire to escape.

the Design: 
Title: 36pt Courier bold 
Name: 24pt Courier roman 
Body: 12pt Gill Sans roman & italic
The lightness of floating down a river needed to be reflected by the body’s typeface; Gill Sans is so uniformly thin it seems to skim the page. The title is stretched out to echo the river’s pull on the girl and boldface to show the strength of that pull. Courier’s serifs provide a more rooted feel, perfect for the river’s solid bank.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

4.06.2015

"Green Lake, Michigan" by Preston Craig

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

the Poet: 
Preston Craig was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has previously appeared in Glitterwolf and Wilderness House Literary Review, among others. He graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, as a classical guitar major and is currently a junior at Harvard University, where he studies English.

the Poem: 
This is intimate terrain, a map of the speaker’s memory. On it, we find the body of the beloved as if he were Green Lake itself, his neck like “the mouth of a river” that “opens out into his shoulders.” Since this is actually a poem, though, we also have what is “unwritten on maps”: the associated emotion. It’s in the cracked chair that settles unevenly, the silverfish that scatter, but most of all in that crescent of hair “rotting beneath the heavy soil.” Whatever the reason for the beloved’s departure, Green Lake is abandoned, like the speaker.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Phosphorus 
Body: 12pt Futura Condensed Medium
Futura is heavy on the page so that each stanza resembles a clipped lock of dark hair, their collective arrangement in a “black half-moon” like the hair on the ground in the third stanza. Phosphorus’s descenders have a scythe-like quality that could alternately be crescent moons; its contrast between thick and thin strokes on the bowls of the letterforms create more crescents.

online ISSN: 2651-3801