"Of Course, Loss" by Tom Montag

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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

"Turning the Corner" by Polly Brown

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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

"I Have Half a Mind" by April Salzano

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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

"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

"Green Lake, Michigan" by Preston Craig

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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

"Ghost Dog" by Lindsay Ahl

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the Poet: 

Lindsay Ahl’s chapbook, The Abyssians, was a finalist for the 2013 National Poetry Chapbook Award. Her poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, RHINO, Vellum, Drunken Boat, New Delta Review, and many others. Her fiction includes a novel, Desire, out with Coffee House Press, and stories in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Fiction magazine, and others. She publishes Shadowgraph, an arts & culture journal.

the Poem: 

“You see that meadow over there?” An innocent enough question quickly takes on a life of its own. The hiker’s memory of the dog, long buried, brings a shade of her into the physical world. The dog is an echo of the question, “You see the meadow?” created as the memory of the dog and this place intertwine in both hikers’ minds. This is how memory propagates. One person’s direct experience becomes an echo in the mind of a person hearing of that experience. Both the echoing story and the original experience are real memories.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Phosphorus Oxide 

Body: 14pt Roman Antique italic

These two typefaces represent different forms of decay: Phosphorus Oxide disappears from the inside out and Roman Antique dissolves inward from the outside. Neither maintains complete spatial integrity against the white of the paper, perfect for a poem about the thin places between memory and the present moment.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Where do you get your ideas?" by Michael Bazzett

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the Poet: 

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Oxford Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest. He was the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for his first full-length collection, You Must Remember This, (Milkweed Editions, 2014).

the Poem: 

The writing process can be mysterious—sometimes even to writers—so is it any surprise to find a tall tale filling in for a satisfying answer? It’s certainly more entertaining than the truth that lurks beneath the fanciful elements of this poem: creativity isn’t passive at all. There’s no muse to hand you something beautiful and fully realized. You’ve got to get out there, dodge the bad ideas and run the good ones down. And when you find them—the truly creative ideas—you won’t be sure what to make of them at first. Only then can you be still, or try to be still in the presence of something wild, something with the means to hurt you, something that will very likely mark you with its teeth.

the Design: 

Title & Name: 36pt & 24pt Euphorigenic 

Body: 14pt Phosphorus Bromide

Without a satisfying explanation of their origins, ideas become fantastical creatures, surfacing from our subconscious like the Loch Ness Monster. The typeface for this poem had to capture that unbounded outlandishness while remaining legible through increasingly intense curvature. Phosphorus Bromide does just that, and Euphorigenic provides a complimentary whimsy. After all, the teeth aren’t real, but the idea of teeth.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Love Sonnet" by Amy Milton

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the Poet:
Amy Milton is a writer in St. Louis who graduated from the University of Missouri - St. Louis fiction MFA program in May 2013. She is currently employed in the communications and marketing department at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health. When she is not working or writing, she performs stand-up comedy at various local venues, goes on a lot of hikes, and reads too many science and feminism blogs. Despite all evidence to the contrary, she believes that the most perfect car ever is the 1996 Toyota Tercel and will be devastated when they are no longer available.

the Poem:
Amy Milton is sticking to her iambic pentameter guns, a bandolier of end rhymes draped across her chest. What’s truly dangerous, though, is her sharp, English Renaissance-style wit. Clever turns of phrase like “A selfish love…/ turns organs into ornaments” convey, in compact detail, both the pitfalls and high stakes of love. How frightening, then, to realize the safety of our organs relies on others’ perceptions (“Not who you are, but who you are to me”) something we can’t control. It’s enough to make a person want to pass on love entirely, but “even the most rotten, callous soul/ …has needs and longings out of her control.” So what to do? Despite describing love as warfare (two places where, as the saying goes, “all’s fair”) this poem advocates for the golden rule. Not because it offers a guarantee – there are none of those – but because being kind is most likely to endear you to those you’re closest to, the very same people who can hurt you most deeply. It’s at once selfless and Machiavellian. Ben Johnson would be proud.

the Design:
Body: 14pt Mona Lisa Solid
A poem that addresses intimacy and its pitfalls using the lexicon of warfare should look both delicate and dense, cold and warm. Mona Lisa Solid’s thick vertical strokes, small bowls and tall ascenders create a solid field of hash marks while maintaining significant white space. The apostrophes ride high above the letterforms like balloons or grenades mid-arc. The dots of the lower case i’s could be daggers or candle flames. It’s all in how you decide to see it.

online ISSN 2651-3801

"Of Five Fears: Three of them Light" by Kelli Allen

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the Poet: 
Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has won awards for her poetry, prose, and scholarly work. She served as Managing Editor of Natural Bridge and holds an MFA from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She currently teaches in the MFA program for Lindenwood University. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books in 2012.

the Poem: 
Why does being human seem to require a stubborn preference to remain unaware of ourselves? Allen knows we’d rather not be illuminated, that the shadows are more comfortable because the low light is more forgiving. If we stay in the shadows, we don’t have to “see a wing, feel/ a ripped feather.” A very old idea, indeed, but with a twist this time: the poem’s own self-awareness. Overlaid on the light and shadow is the speaker’s frustration with cliché. She’s a writer, for sure, and not happy about having to use an overworked set of words. But they are the right words, the best words to express this idea. And so the speaker’s grudging lexicon is a reflection of the force exerted by the “bloated” sun to make her really see.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 24pt & 16pt Futura Medium, Roman & small capitals 
Body: 12pt Futura Condensed Medium, Roman & Italic 
A poem about light should cast a shadow. Not toward the right – that would be too similar to traditional italic. Toward the left, then, the whole poem pulling against its italicized fears: “shadows, light, darkening.” To take the shear and remain legible, the typeface needed to be sans serif and have evenly weighted strokes. Futura’s solid, unfussy letterforms hang together in a cool, dark swath.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"Avocado Lake" by Daniel Mahoney

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the Poet: 
Lately, Daniel Mahoney has been writing music reviews for bands and albums that do not exist, or exist only in his head. Look for them under your boot soles. You can find him physically in Maine and virtually at http://rusticatordeluxe.wordpress.com/

the Poem: 
It’s appropriate “Those radiant opals/ That mumbled between our legs” don’t show up until the penultimate couplet. They’re the root of the speaker’s masculinity, the thing he’s driven to protect and that drives him to run long after the Indian and Avocado Lake are history. In fact, they propel the speaker through a whole catalogue of abandonment that on a first read seems headed toward regret. But that poem has been written before. That ending would read, “We listened too well,” implying a sense of loss, especially for “distant sons.” Instead Mahoney surprises with the speaker’s unapologetic allegiance to his opals – “We listened well.”– and underscores their power by keeping his speaker performing their imperative: “We ran away,/ Became fathers of distant sons.”

the Design: 
Title & Name: 60pt & 24pt Footlight 
Body: 12pt Helvetica 
Place anchors this poem so the title needed to anchor the design. The last lines of the body slip just a little lower, like the speaker slipping out of town but never really growing beyond the behaviors learned there. The thin strokes of the o in Footlight are off center so the letterform looks like it’s about to roll away. For the story itself the typeface needed to echo the unvarnished clarity of hindsight. Helvetica tells it like it is without getting in the way.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"The Birds" by Ellene Glenn Moore

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the Poet: 
Ellene Glenn Moore is a poet and MFA candidate at Florida International University, where she holds a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship. She earned her undergraduate degree in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. During a brief stint in Cleveland, Ohio, Ellene led two introductory poetry workshops at Grafton Correctional Institution, in conjunction with the Northeast Ohio Community Outreach Project. Her work has appeared in Barn Owl Review, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, and other print and online journals.

the Poem: 
The birds of this poem are invasive, destructive, an unexplainable event, and almost none of them are described as singing. Instead, the poet embeds their song in her language. Each line has patterns of vowels or consonants, which become layered as the poem progresses. The repeated n sounds of the opening line prime the reader’s ear for “numinous and plenty as sunspots” two lines later. In the second line “littering the eaves and lintels” sends out a call of l’s that are answered in line four with “fluttered… to splinter” and so on until the whole poem is resounding with call and response. The finale is provided by the three deep o sounds, like breath across a large pipe, in “humming through knotholes, throating their notes/ in the radiator.” It’s loud without ever saying so. When the music continues after the birds have departed, it feels like a ringing in the ears in the sudden silence. The house shudders. The couple is stunned. They sleep under stones and murmur to each other about what might still be in the trees. It’s possible they might never recover.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 48pt & 30pt Stampede by Manfred Klein
Body: 9pt Century Schoolbook Italic 
There is so much movement in this poem. The text needed to reflect both the erratic energy of the individual birds and their tidal, flock-like arrival and departure. A smooth italic with strong vertical strokes like Century Schoolbook reflects that movement but also gives it a visual weight consistent with the poem’s ominous tone. For contrast, Manfred Klein’s Stampede is perfectly messy, as if the letters have been trampled and shat on, disrupted from their regular alignment. The title is stuffed into the poem’s middle like a bird that has squirmed its way into the space between the refrigerator and the wall.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"K" by Marilyn Annucci

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the Poet:
Marilyn’s poems have appeared in a variety of magazines online and in print, and three are forthcoming in Echolocations, Poets Map Madison,from Cow Feather Press (available Fall 2013). She is the author of Waiting Room, which won the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Award, selected by Tony Hoagland (Hill-Stead Museum, 2012) and Luck(Parallel Press, 2000). She hopes that her manuscriptThe Private Lives of Letters (of which “K” is a part) will one day be a book. For more info on Marilyn and her work, go to: 

http://www.madpoetry.org/madpoets/annuccim.html

the Poem:
K may be the title character, but this poem is really about her relationship with n. The rules are clear: K leads with her “drop/ kick,” starts or ends any word in which she appears with a good crack. Unless n follows behind her, carrying the power of K’s own secrets. In that case n – shorter, rounder, dull – does the talking. What we readers can never know, looking in from the outside, is whether n’s knowledge of K holds her hostage or lightens her burden. Does she “talk/ smack” and stash “junk/ in her kiddy/ bank” because she likes to, or because she feels angry and trapped? “Only n/ knows/ what K/ won’t show,/ can’t speak.”

the Design:
Title: 375pt Phosphorus Dihydride by Apostrophic Labs
Name: 24pt Phosphorus Iodide by Apostrophic Labs
Body: 12pt Gil Sans
K is quite a character. She lives large and casts a shadow. Phosphorus Dihydride sports a shadow plus fine outlines, because K is also vulnerable (if only to n). For the body of her no-nonsense portrait, K needed a sans serif typeface of the same weight as her outline. Gil Sans slides nicely along her side, an entourage of letters without shadows, following K’s every move.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"My Dearest Darling" by Erin Alisha Hillam

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the Poet: 
Alisha Erin Hillam grew up outside of a small Indiana town. Now she is a freelance writer drying out in Arizona with her husband and two ankle-biters. She is the recipient of several literary awards from Purdue University and, in addition to five published or forthcoming book chapters, her work has appeared inInscape, decomP, Corium Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, and The Monongahela Review.

the Poem: 
Found poetry presents an interesting challenge: the text is set, so the poet’s decisions are limited to line and stanza breaks. For “My Dearest Darling,” Hillam uses her lines to reinforce the letter’s emotion. As prose, “I sure hate to think about it but that is that” has a stoicism we’ve come to associate with the WWII era, but it’s amplified when combined with part of another idea, in this case the uncertainty of the duration of the war: “for a short long while. I sure hate to think about it.” Likewise “but that is that” is tempered by the gratitude of “For the wedding I’m glad you want.” A little further on the poet gives “& I sure would like to have another one” its own stanza, allowing the desire for children to reverberate separately from the logistics of military service that precede and follow. It’s an effective way to signal the heart of the poem. Life persists, Hillam reminds us, even in wartime. Especially in wartime.

the Design: 
Title: 20pt Baskerville Bold Italic 
Body: 12pt Baskerville Italic 
Name: 24pt Bank Gothic Light 
Notation: 10pt. Bank Gothic light; 10pt & 14pt Bank Gothic Medium 
Military service hangs over this letter, so the design needed to have a more regular, regimented feel than a handwriting typeface could offer. And yet it is also deeply personal. Baskerville bridges those two worlds, while Bank Gothic suggests a Teletype draft notice. The poet’s name runs down the side like the stripe on dress uniform trousers.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"Buck Skin" by Jamieson Ridenhour

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the Poet: 
Jamieson Ridenhour is the author of the P.G. Wodehouse-meets-Lon-Chaney murder mysteryBarking Mad (Typecast, 2011) and its sequel Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Typecast, forthcoming 2014), as well as the short films Cornerboys and The House of the Yaga (both featured at GeekNation.com). His poetry and fiction has been published in The Lumberyard, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and others. In Darkest London, a study of the Victorian Urban Gothic, was released in 2013 by Scarecrow Press. Jamie lives and writes in Bismarck, North Dakota.

the Poem: 
It’s easy to get caught up in the sound and imagery of this poem, how the s and t sounds repeat in a phrase like “bristle-stiff/ skin parts like drapery,” how that same phrase honors the animal’s beauty without flinching from the hunter’s task. What really makes this poem hum, though, is its central question: “Why are you afraid?” Surely seeing a deer disemboweled for the first time creates some of it, confronting the blood and viscera that precede a trophy and a meal. But if that were the poem’s only concern, it would amount to nothing more than a cheap shock. Instead the poet shows us the mess then steps back to consider how “skilled and focused” the men are. This is old hat to all of them, “even him,” a man singled out again as the speaker tries to calm his fears. “There is nothing he can’t see,” nothing about killing and gutting a deer that is shameful, and yet the speaker’s heart tells him otherwise.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt DpQuake by Dead Pete 
Body: 12pt Didot 
“The knife/ is curved and sharp” the better to take apart the deer’s body, layer by layer. The typeface needed to have a similar shape, something with marked contrast in its strokes, plus round bowls. The s’s and o’s of Didot provide that shape, an echo of the knife sliding, half hidden between skin and muscle, then flashing visible as it cuts the organs loose. DpQuake goes a step further; the thin, horizontal strokes disappear entirely as the knife bites deep.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"Totentanz" by Mitchell Storar

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

the Poet: 
Mitch Storar is a medical student at Ohio University. His work has appeared in Jelly Bucket, Weave, Fugue,and several other publications. He lives outside of Athens with his wife, Sarah, and daughter, Morgan.

the Poem: 
William Blake, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, uses parallel poems to compare two views of the same subject: one ideal and one fallen. But Storar knows these two states exist simultaneously in our minds. We vacillate between perfect ideas and their flawed reality. “I suppose it was more poetic in our heads,” the speaker says of “living simply,” and the realities of wood-burning heat certainly wore the couple down. What hints of joy there are (homemade bread, playing sundial in the middle of a fairy ring) quickly fall apart. Beautiful ideas keep appearing (fruit, gold wine) but they’re never realized. Instead they hang at the poem’s end, just a glimpse of something better amid the disappointment.

the Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Roman Antique Italic, designed by Dieter Steffmann 
Body: 11pt Roman Antique 
What life there is in the place of this poem (a cabin? and old farmhouse?) is the life associated with decay: mushrooms, a garden gone to seed, nearby fire. But the place still stands and the couple persist awhile, so the typeface needed to reflect that weathered state. Dieter Steffmann’s Roman Antique is mostly there, but its edges waver, as if once crisp letterforms can no longer hold the line against encroaching white space.

ISSN 2165-3801

"Method" by Rob Talbert

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

the Poet:
Rob Talbert has worked in a jail, an ice cream store, and on a cruise ship. Before moving back home to Texas, he received his MFA from Virginia Tech. His first book of poems, Jagged Tune, is forthcoming from the very awesome Mad Hat Press.

the Poem:
This poem starts clearly enough with “I took a cab down Commerce Street” but what sense can be made of a line like “I drank from the mall of lit bottles”? And was there or was there not a cover at Citrus? Unlike everyday language, poetry isn’t required to convey clear, concise information. Meaning can derive from sound and emotion, too, which is this poem’s strength. Talbert’s method is kaleidoscopic: the same words and phrases tumble like colored beads into startling new images like “The sky was a cab door shut on a dress.” And they keep tumbling, so the mall can be both closing and closed; ribbon can mean the street or a girl’s hips; the speaker can both ride and walk along Commerce Street. It’s all so confusing and anxious, the rhythm of each line pounding like a drum. And even though the poem itself must end, it gives the impression that it never will, even before the last line tells us so.

the Design:
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Garamond Bold Small Capitals
Body: 12pt Garamond in combinations of Roman, Italic and Small Capitals
The jumble of images and phrases in this poem chafes against the regularity of its couplets. Using different styles of the same typeface accentuates that repetition without destroying the continuity provided by regular structure. To be successful, though, that single typeface had to be versatile, which is to say legible in many styles: Garamond.

online ISSN 2165-3801

"Ode to the Lovers Upstairs" by Jennifer Fandel

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

the Poet: 
Jennifer Fandel's poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, RHINO, The Baltimore Review, Calyx, Architrave Press Editions, Midwestern Gothic, and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press). She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, in a house, though she remains attentive to the actions of her neighbors.

the Poem: 
So often love sonnets flatter and promise eternal devotion without stating their true goal: getting the beloved into bed! How refreshing then, to encounter a sonnet that takes sex as its subject, that turns annoyance – startled awake, light fixture shaking – to invitation. The “turn” is one of the joys of the sonnet form: an established idea challenged in some way, reexamined in a new light. Our comfortable downstairs couple gets to rethink themselves, enjoy something both new and renewed while we readers smile slyly, thinking of our own plans.

The Design: 
Title: 34pt Optimus Princeps 
Name: 24pt Optimus Princeps 
Body: 12pt Euphorigenic, designed by Typodermic 
Shaking windows, a reverberating ceiling… this poem requires a typeface that sways, something just a little out of control. Euphorigenic lets its capitals descend from the baseline to match the descenders of the lower case letters. The lower case t half dangles and the crossbars of the lower e and a have a precipitous slant, yet it all shakes together. Optimus Pinceps provides a little more discipline for the title with a dash of fun in the pronounced serifs, arranged as steps to mount before the poem can begin.

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis 
Letterpress printed by Paper Boat Studios, St. Louis

online ISSN 2165-3801