"Of Course, Loss" by Tom Montag

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

the Poet: 

Tom Montag is a middlewestern poet and essayist interested in the relationship between people and place. His poetry includes In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013, The Big Book of Ben Zen, and Middle Ground. His prose includes Curlew: Home, a memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm, and The Idea of the Local, essays exploring the relationship of people and place. Montag serves as managing editor of the Niedecker Monograph Series, What Region?. He has been editor and publisher of a variety of small presses. He and his wife created The Wisconsin Poets Calendar in 1982. He was named a Founding Contributing Editor of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses in 1976. His work is anthologized in The Long Journey Home: The Literature of Wisconsin through Four Centuries, edited by Jim Stephens. He has been married to Mary, his partner in everything, since 1969.

the Poem: 

For two full stanzas the poet composes a laundry list of disappointments catalogued in general enough terms for readers to insert their own distressing particulars. The poet is aware he might lose his reader, though, so he uses rhythm and sound (e.g., the repeated l’s in loss, lesson, leaves; the regular stresses of “STAND and comPLAIN,/ if you WISH—it DOES no GOOD”) to pull us through. And it’s a good thing, because the poem’s turn in the last stanza is toward the hope that we can, after all, understand something of each other. The poem’s “small pulse of…hope” is for our common humanity, a surprising end to a poem that, at least at first, holds tight to loss.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Goudy Old Style italic 

Epigraph: 12pt Goudy Old Style italic 

Body: 12pt Luminari

This poem reads like an old lesson, rediscovered; Luminari resembles the careful penmanship of a monk whose life’s work was to copy text worth teaching. To keep the page from looking too antique, the remaining text needed a typeface that had a similarly regular curve but with a more contemporary feel. Goudy Old Style has slightly upturned serifs similar to Luminari’s but a more open letterform that balances the dense look of the poem’s body.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Crossing the Red Sea" by Edward Dougherty

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the Poet: 

Edward A. Dougherty is the author of 5 chapbooks, the latest of which is Backyard Passages (FootHills Publishing), as well as of the books Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree (WordTech) and Part Darkness, Part Breath (Plain View Press). After finishing his MFA in Creative Writing in Bowling Green, Ohio, Dougherty was poetry editor of the Mid-American Review. Then he and his spouse traveled to Hiroshima to be volunteer directors of the World Friendship Center where they served for two and a half years, witnessing the fiftieth anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They now live and work in Corning, New York.

the Poem: 

The Red Sea. An angel. This poem begins telling a familiar Old Testament story and then swerves into unexpected territory: “Are they escaping/ or are they illegal?” In an instant the poet has expanded the scene to include a second, similar landscape (the Rio Grande and surrounding desert) through which another group of refugees makes its way toward something “Beyond sight, beyond knowing.” It’s really just that word “illegal”—a very specific term in twenty-first century America—that creates the parallel to Mexican immigrants and the poem’s surprise. A comparison of the two Exoduses reveals us to ourselves—the true work of poetry—by pointing out how much a reviled, contemporary group has in common with a revered people from antiquity. We call what the Israelites did “escape” so that the illegal nature of their actions can be overlooked. Why then can’t we see the very human desire to escape in people we prefer to label “illegal”?

the Design: 

Title: 30pt Baskerville roman and small caps, bold 

Name: 24pt Baskerville roman 

Body: 12pt Baskerville roman, italic, small caps, and all caps

Like the blanching angel, we who read this poem are witnesses, so the design needed to mimic the scene. White space where the water has formed the sides of a valley, text staggered across and along the page where the seabed is exposed, as if the letters were written by feet slogging through the mud. The choice of Baskerville was as much for the exuberant flourishes in the italic as for the variety of available styles. Small caps and italics draw attention to the repeating elements of the poem, stressing the urgency of this risky, collective action.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Unquiet" by Heather Lang

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the Poet: 

Heather Lang is the online managing editor for The Literary Review, co-editor of Petite Hound Press, and an adjunct professor. She is a recent graduate from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program, and her chapbook manuscript, Common Prayers, was named a semifinalist in the 2014 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award competition. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published by or is forthcoming in december, Jelly Bucket, Mead, Watershed Review, and others, and she has reviewed for Atticus Review and HTMLGIANT, among others.

the Poem: 

Look at how the lines break around the subject of this poem and how the couplets illuminate the nature of this couple’s difficult year. “to survive./ Where is the space” functions as its own question, separate from the rest of the thought. The two lines that follow work in the same, separate way. These fragments of the poem’s central question are also fragments of the existential crisis embedded in the poem, where we can feel the hurt before we even know “It’s been a year/ since we lost her.” Lang then takes it one step further, breaking individual words across the ends of lines to underscore the broken state of her subjects. It’s especially effective in the closing lines where wings and flight are separated from the life of actual birds.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 18pt Radical Block 

Body: 12pt Optima

The emptiness that surrounds the two people in this poem is so heavy. The typeface had to reflect that weight as well as its effect. Radical Block hems in its letterforms with solid ink, making the title look as much like a slash as a word. For the body, though, greater legibility was needed. Optima’s strong vertical strokes hold their own against Radical Block and yet also feel delicate, like a bird’s wing. 

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"When All Else Failed" by Jennifer Goldring

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the Poet: 

Jennifer Goldring, originally from Arizona, is a writer and photographer based in St. Louis. She holds a BA Degree in economics. Despite her training she has given up on solving the world’s economic problems and now writes poetry, which she finds to be a much more meaningful endeavor. Her poetry can be found in Tar River Poetry, and her photography can be found at Juniper Tree Studio.

the Poem: 

The images in this poem are all grounded in the familiar wish to fly away to a simpler life, to assume an animal form where (we imagine) finding food would be our only concern. But the poet also uses her images to explore what lies beneath those wishes: not so much a need for escape or simplicity as the desire for agency and connection in a world “slippery with life and slippery/ with death.” The speaker swoops and dips, pins and rips, pecks and screeches, all of it self-directed, visceral, requiring a body. When at the last her raptor leaps back into the air, it’s a communion with the wind that carries her. She is renewed.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 30pt & 42pt Echelon 

Body: 12pt Optimus Princeps

Taking on a new form means leaving an old one behind. The words of the title especially read like the start of an epitaph, something written in stone to commemorate a person’s passage from one form to another. The typeface for the body needed to have a solid, block-like presence on the page and the kind of strong vertical stroke that survives weathering. Optimus Princeps is only available in small capitals, each letterform its own block, stacked and joined like precision-hewed stone. Echelon has more variance between thick and thin strokes, more curvature, but conveys a similar strength.

online ISSN: 2651-3801