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Guest Post by Lynn Levin

Poet and writer Chris Bullard is blessed, or maybe tormented, with a brilliant and surrealistic muse. In his new chapbook Continued, Bullard graces us with a comedy of lost souls and a range of humorously morbid imaginings.

The poet delivers his meditations and perturbations in a range of quirky and hybridized forms perfectly paired to the content. The prose poem “Cartoon” satirizes a New Yorker-type cartoon of a person stranded on a desert island. And if being shipwrecked were not bad enough, the cartoonist draws himself a hole and plummets through it into the sea. In the flash fiction piece “Miracle,” a man runs over a herd of migrating abalones as he drives to a job interview. He hides this awful secret from his wife who is sympathetic to the mollusks and later turns into an abalone himself, much to his delight. Bullard’s humor is so desperate that it becomes hilarious. I laughed aloud at his crossword puzzle poem “Down,” the word “down” evoking both the direction of the crossword clues and the speaker’s mood. Sample clues include “4. A slipping away of consciousness” and “9. The phenomenon of chaos.”

The list form is one of Bullard’s favorites. “More Prompts for the Writer” is a send-up of workshop exercises, and each evokes the tormented mindset of the instructor. Number 13 invites the writers to “Imagine a car, a ship, a flying saucer, anything for chrissakes, taking you away from here forever.” Some of the pieces in Continued are more morbid, some more hilariously absurd. I often found myself laughing aloud at the author’s deconstructions of normalcy and the self. I could go on tantalizing you with snippets of Bullard’s work, but I think you should explore these comic and disturbing poems for yourself.

Continued by Chris Bullard. Grey Book Press, July 2020.

Reviewer bio: Lynn Levin’s most recent book is the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020).

Guest Post by Emily Cinquemani

Megan Fernandes’ collection Good Boys takes a fresh and brilliant look at the anxieties and violence of our world, as well as the stories we create to accept them. These poems are both vast and personal. In them, I ran in the suburbs, visited Paris, and imagined what I would miss about the earth. Fernandes’ speaker is both vulnerable and bold. She gleans revelation from each new experience, including tarot readings, goat miscarriages, and knocking on the metal of an airplane before taking flight.

In this collection, mythology is an intimate part of the present moment. The speaker imagines herself stuck between Scylla and Charybdis and hears Virgil sing in her ribcage. We are asked to look at our own stories critically: what narratives do we have of our reality, and which of them are true? Which of them are harmful? Fernandes recognizes the stories we condone while unweaving them, and she does so with precision. She writes, “Only white people // can imagine a past / that was better // than now.” In the poem “Regret is a Blue Dive,” the speaker insists, “Things that are brave are often painful,” and wrestles with the possibility of being alone. These poems have an insistent, challenging, and beautiful honesty. They ask us to face uncertainty and let it linger, rather than running away.

Fernandes’ work also gives language to experiences I have previously been unable to name. For example, in her poem “Fabric in Tribeca,” her speaker refers to her sadness as “very adult” because it “will not make a scene” and asks, “Who makes curtains to give their sadness a perimeter?” Fernandes writes that, on earth, “everything is a portrait of gravity.” In every poem, I discovered something new or rediscovered something familiar. I am grateful for Fernandes’ voice and for the company these poems afford me as I move through the world.

Good Boys by Megan Fernandes. Tin House, February 2020.

Reviewer bio: Emily Cinquemani’s poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, 32 Poems, and Indiana Review. She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal. 

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Guest Post by Shannon Frystak

Jen Hirt is first and foremost a nature writer. Having grown up in her family’s greenhouse in Ohio, her latest essay collection, Hear Me Ohio takes us on a journey from Iowa to Idaho to Pennsylvania and Maine, as she grapples with the meaning of her varied and often mundane experiences traversing the country through multiple job searches, to a “reality house” church, a man and his ball of string, the views from her front porch where she muses on the lives of spiders and befriends a stray cat, to the forest where she and her dog encounter dead deer, and on the waterfront at her home in Harrisburg, where she grapples with a premonition about a dead body.

Jen Hirt’s gift is her attentive and detailed descriptions of the natural landscape—both flora and fauna—allowing us to travel alongside her, revealing herself and, sometimes, her family, through her peripatetic life seemingly searching for meaning and magic in all things, not the least of which include bats, one-eyed deer, and unicorns. Hirt always finds her way home, to Ohio—in a hundreds-year old horseradish bottle, her family’s history, and her mother’s death. Insightful and contemplative, this collection of short meditations is a beautiful and thought-provoking compilation of memoir essays.

Hear Me Ohio by Jen Hirt. The University of Akron Press, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Shannon Frystak, Ph.D. is a Professor of History at East Stroudsburg University where she specializes in Black, Women, and Civil Rights History. She is the author of Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924-1967, and is currently working on a collection of essays Confessions of an Academic Bartender: Essays on Life Inside and Outside of the Guild.

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