The Contest

Details:  ”You are asked to write a poem of no more than 30 lines about family relationships. You can write in English or Dutch. We are looking for poems that look at one’s relatives in an original way; we are especially interested in poems that use a personal experience to create general empathy. Provided it touches on relationships, everything goes, happy or sad, touching or funny, as long as it expresses your original voice in content as well as form.”

For more information, visit Holland Park Press.

Photo by ailatan, Flickr

“Sorrow”

When I was little I thought I’d never sleep alone.

Sleep in the dark alone.

Live on my own.

For fear of sleeping in the dark alone.

And I did
     Live alone
     Sleep alone
     Sleep in the dark alone.

The fear stopped for a while
Now it shoots up randomly in pangs.

And I get afraid
     That breathless
          transparent
               panicked fear.

But know I’m too old now
               too far now
               for sanctity to hold me.

For more on The Voting Booth After Dark, click here.

SOLSTICE: A MAGAZINE OF DIVERSE VOICES announces our SECOND ANNUAL LITERARY CONTEST.

Deadline Approaching: April 5, 2011

* Winners get published in our Summer Awards Issue.
* Finalists offered publication also.
* Winners receive national exposure.
* All submissions read by published authors.

Fiction/Nonfiction Prize fiction of $1,000.
Final Judge: David Huddle, author of the novel, The Story of a Million Years,
and many story and poetry collections.

Poetry Prize of $500.
Final Judge: A. Van Jordan. Author of Macnolia and Quantum Lyrics.

Reading fee: $15.
Open to published writers, up-and-coming writers and writers on the margins

Visit www.solsticelitmag.org/contests to submit your entry.

The Hole in the Wall

This is the story of two families that bisect generations and have one major thing in common. Each character is shaped or misshaped by the event that caused the hole in the wall.

Fisher weaves together odd parings of characters and puts them in situations that seem so real and strange that they just might happen.

While the novella is only five chapters, each chapter unfolds a bigger piece of the mystery and still eccentric:

Other stories I told were about the people that lived in Caroline and Michael’s briefcases. What they did was, they went to all the sad places in London and asked if any of the people there wanted to feel better. Some of the people were too sad to hear them, but other said ok. Caroline and Michael told these people to climb into their briefcases. The people didn’t believe they’d fit, but when their toes touched the leather they shrank. Caroline and Michael took these people to their office. They opened the briefcases. They ran out of the office, locking the doors behind them. The office had a window in one wall, and through that they watched to see what the sad people would do. (Chapter 4: Treasure)

–Ansley Moon

The Hole in the Wall
by Claire Fisher
available from Philistine Press

Call for Submissions:
carte blanche is now accepting poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translation, graphic fiction, and photography for its Spring Issue (#13). If you’ve got a narrative, we want to see it.

New to this issue, carte blanche is seeking submissions for a themed feature on crisis. From burning the cookies to global disasters, we want to hear about the moments or events that changed everything.

All submissions received by the deadline will be considered for the Spring Issue. Please indicate in your cover letter if you would also like to have your work considered for the feature on crisis.

The submission deadline for the Spring Issue of carte blanche is March 15th, 2011. Contributors receive a $45 honorarium per published piece. Check out our submission guidelines for more information: http://carte-blanche.org/submissions/

Deadline: July 1, 2011

Submit manuscripts online at www.BLReview.org. Prose should be limited to 5,000 words. Poetry submissions should have no more than three poems (max five pages). Work previously published (including on the Internet) cannot be considered. Entry fee is $15 per submission. For an additional $5, you will receive a one-year subscription to the BLR.

Before beginning his literary career, Sarnat, a medical doctor, seeks out the advice of a friend in the poetry world. His friend gives him this advice: “Write what you know.” And Sarnat, a man of science, thinks about what he really knows — where he comes from, who he is, how the world affects him and vice versa. Then he compiles it all into about 70 pieces of poetry and prose, and sends it to press.

The result: an exercise in self-exploration that still manages to have something meaningful to say to its readers. In other words, a rare collection.

Many of Sarnat’s works tell the story of his family history: stories of his great-great-grandparents, their children, and down through the ages to Sarnat himself, and to his own children and grandchildren. He also tells stories from his own early life as “pallid carrot-topped Gerry Sarnat” ["Exfiltrated"]. But these aren’t just diary entries. Sarnat’s work is infused with cultural references, from the use of Yiddish words to broader themes of racism, insiders versus outsiders, overcoming adversity. By the time readers reach the book’s final work, “Rites of Spring,” which we excerpted in our Spring 2008 issue, they’ve shared a coming-of-age experience with the author.

Visit www.gerardsarnat.com, and check out Homeless Chronicles here.

–Ciara LaVelle

I love maps. The gap between the plateaus
and sow. The fields filled with Comma,

and music. Each arpeggio dictates
with space, an empty chord, strong and stringed.

You sting me with you….

“Song, After” offers a fine glimpse of experimentation employed in word play:

I’m thinking no, but maybe a flinch
in your engine will sail
you my way. Word beside word, I spelt

pricelessness in a dark cove. I’m a drifter
amidst fog and mist, a curse,
begging to begin the race….

as does “Blind”:

Only if we were structures
throughout historical measure-
& in tablespoons we measured,
what’s felt by sense within; two objects, a bifocal

In the same space?
How to define this plan?…

Although far removed from latinate, the surrealistic aspects coupled with keen awareness and liberal usage of rhythmic subtleties is reminiscent of writings of Spanish poets, Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis de Gongora. Wahlgren’s poetry often seeks to dismantle and explore hitherto uncommonly discussed relationships between an object and an idea, or say ‘void’. Like, for example, the lines from “The Cove”:

I am a cup, an oval of great stature-

The wreckage of the ship, the helm cannonball
I am born anew from the counterculture.

Flames in water; we salute

the cove- from which love came into being.
The stem of the apple falls

into the on- fire- bushes.

The true hero of the compilation is, undoubtedly, the poetic imagination. Words given birth to, molded as soft putty, whisked and cast into something not so tangible, yet felt as if it were. A cohesive collection of poetry, these poems may require several readings in order to fully comprehend the intricacies and connotations of complex metaphors. As described in the poet’s own words, Valency, is “the affinity of atoms reacting with one another or metaphorically one’s affinity for certain poetry.” Aptly named, indeed.

Valency by J. Michael Wahlgren ( publisher: BlazeVOX books); cover artwork by Sarah Schneider.