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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Guest Post by Kate Gaskin

In Wider than the Sky, Nancy Chen Long’s second book of poetry, the biological constraints of memory merge with the practice of storytelling to show how families create intimate legacies and private lexicons that both heal and stifle.

Long uses the language of science to meditate on the power of stories to determine—or even rewrite—reality. In “Interstice,” she writes “Our memory is flooded with holes, pocked like cotton eyelet.” To participate in narrative, then, is to admit its fallibility: “There are gaps in our stories / and in our history. People are missing.” “In the Family of Erasure” shows a daughter and mother engaged in a complicated dance through each other’s individual memories in order to arrive at a shared history they can both tolerate.

Throughout this collection, Long mines both the personal and the general to show how memory is a mutable and ever-evolving force that steers migrating butterflies around long-gone mountains and compels a daughter to clean “off the family’s stains . . . to keep her memory-rooms blameless.” In the closing poem “Wordlust,” Long writes of the bittersweet futility of determining shared history: “The world is filled / with words. We are a seaward-bound people, / chasing a flood / of sorrows our stories cannot explain.” These are tender and insightful poems that probe the fallibility of memory, asking which parts of our legacy we can control and which parts are inherited by complex forces that stretch back into our DNA.

Wider than the Sky by Nancy Chen Long. Diode Editions, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War (YesYes Books 2020). She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal. 

Guest Post by Rebecca Moon Ruark

“Eve, / How often do you think of me? / the house now, the kids, and / Everyone needs to eat, I know how tired / You are to mother the world”— “Oh” from The Desperate Measure of Undoing: Poems by Jessica Fischoff

Poetry is meant to be read aloud, preferably to an in-person audience. Luckily, one of the last live poetry readings I attended pre-pandemic featured Jessica Fischoff reading from her poetry chapbook.

The Desperate Measure of Undoing: Poems is a little book with big impact. Fischoff’s poems borrow from women of myth but are their own unique creations. The poet plays with persona, writing her poem, “Oh,” quoted above, not from Eve’s perspective but from that of the serpent. In a recent interview, Fischoff told me that “Oh” came from a prompt to write from the perspective of a villain. The poem reads as a letter from the serpent, who has been abandoned in the garden by Eve, and grants age-old Eve new agency and power.

There is a lot to admire in this chapbook that explores the feminine through the ages and through fresh takes. Original cover art and flower-illustrated front and back pages complement the poems and provide the reader a garden-like respite from our world’s current situation.

Read more about Fischoff and her debut poetry chapbook in a new interview at Parhelion Literary Magazine.

The Desperate Measure of Undoing by Jessica Fischoff. Across the Margin, 2019.

Reviewer bio: Rebecca Moon Ruark is features editor for Parhelion Literary Magazine, which publishes features, along with fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in winter, summer, and fall issues.

Guest Post by Heidi Seaborn

Finishing up my MFA at NYU, I wanted to read a first collection by a poet who had travelled this same path, Jen Levitt. While I waited for the delivery of Levitt’s The Off-Season from my local bookstore, I went in search of her poetry online. When I found “The Reality Show,” I knew I had met a kindred spirit—someone who delivers ironic humor but approaches it without a suit of armor. Her emotional temperature is tempered only by coolness of her cultural references.

Any poem about physique, about not feeling attractive and the brutality of middle school brings its own pathos, but this poem embeds, “In montage I mourn the boy killed by this classmate / for liking to wear heels & makeup, / also the jury’s devastating hearts / that go out to shooter / because twenty-one years is a lot of time” in the middle, a turn that is both jarring but important to weight this poem. The stakes are suddenly clear. With the line, “like the time it takes to get over middle school,” the reader accepts the burden of living in the speaker’s body, as well as one’s own.

Body and sexuality dominate this Levitt collection. In the titular poem, “The Off-Season”, the speaker wrestles with the awkwardness of coming of age—made more acute by her growing awareness of her sexual orientation. When I read this poem to my queer daughter, she said the poem was so evocative of that ‘puzzling’ experience. Levitt is piecing together the puzzle that is her—as she matures. She is also coming of age as a poet, under the influence of Elisabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson. Yet, her poems in conversation with Bishop and Dickinson steer clear of worshipful dialogue, instead they reveal a more naked self. The Offseason is a graceful revelation of body, sexuality, growing into one’s self as a person and a poet.

The Off-Season by Jen Levitt. Four Way Books, 2016.

Reviewer bio: Heidi Seaborn is Editorial Director of The Adroit Journal and author of the award-winning collection Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019) and two chapbooks.

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