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FOUR WAY REVIEW

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE NIGHT THAT SYLVIA PLATH LAYS HER HEAD IN THE OVEN by Hannah Matheson

Monday, 11 November 2019 by Hannah Matheson

Sometimes what kills me is serene
as snowfall. Proliferating frozen,
soft inundation, the ceaseless
and so many ways of wanting

to die. I can’t sleep
for the 2 a.m. murmur
of the plows, making their rounds
for hours now, unseeing

metal sweeping and salting.
Rusted chrome in near collision,
compelled by the Sisyphean
labor of cold. To roam

the black in the absolute
zero before dawn;
                                                           imagine,

gathering and gathering and gathering the ice.

 

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  • Published in Issue 16, Poetry, Uncategorized
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TWO POEMS by Katie Condon

Monday, 11 November 2019 by Katie Condon

I’m a Kick-Ass Woman


Ask anybody. This ass has never been kicked 
to the curb. I do the kicking. I’m a nasty-ass woman 
drinking chamomile tea at dusk. I know what I’ve got 
& it’s a throne for an ass. Grab it. Kiss it. Pop 
the pimple on that ass. See what happens when you
disagree with my ass. I’ve got a bad-ass ass. A kick-ass ass.
A good-pair-of-jeans-is-hard-to-find-type ass. Cue Flannery’s 
ass, as broad & innocent as a cabbage. I’m getting literary 
on your ass. Listen: you can’t have passion 
without ass. Or Parnassus. Make way for my poetic ass, 
as essential & enduring as your thesaurus
but sexier. I’d tattoo the Cantos on my ass 
if it would make it less boring. This Is Just to Say: A Carafe Is a Blind 
Ass, or: I’m no Modernist. I’m the future 
of The Poetics of Kick-Ass—the voice of a nation 
from the mouth of a woman with the keys 
to the van that fits all of your sweet asses. Climb in. 
We’re bound for the coast. Bet your ass 
we’ll be there before dawn. Sit back & watch 
my Walt-Whitman-dashboard-hula-girl shake his ass
all the way across the American desert 
we’ll make an oasis of by the time we’re through.

 

Poem From the Mouth of God

 

There is a reason 
I have yet to let anyone
see my face. I am a lonely man

& socially inept. I send angels 
into women’s rooms 
because I never mastered the art 

of non-offensive pick up lines
& even with a wingman 
only one woman’s ever said yes.

She is tired of me.
Who can blame her
when I spend my days 

at every window in the house
shuttering & unshuttering myself 
from the view I created

& grew afraid of. My son 
doesn’t visit anymore 
& you’re not surprised.

Me neither. After centuries, 
the first miracle I performed 
was this morning

when I raised myself
out of bed & lifted a razor 
to my horrible face.

What advice do I have left
except that you should make things
& keep them closer to you than ethers away.

Do not be like me.
This light is the only good 
I’ve offered you,

but even light, too often, dies
in a furious burst.

 

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  • Published in Issue 16, Poetry, Uncategorized
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THREE POEMS by Dilruba Ahmed

Monday, 11 November 2019 by Dilruba Ahmed

THE CHILDREN
 

How each one is taken  
with care from car 

to school doorstep, each one 

hand-in-hand with an adult.  
How the mothers 

and fathers kiss 

their foreheads, first 
pushing aside their bangs 

or smoothing 

a stray wisp.  One 
parent straightens 

her daughter’s velvet 

headband; another wipes 
dried oatmeal 

from his son’s pink lips.  

How carefully 
each child is guided       

around the bumpers 

of cars. How some turn 
to wave goodbye 

one last time while others,   

drawn to friends 
by an invisible cord,

move together, first left

then right, with 
the synchronicity 

of fish.  How even the child 

with tears in his lashes
who cowers near a teacher 

knows that in a matter of hours, 

a loved one will return  
to him, to return him 

to the facts of home: 

butterfly net 
for trapping monarchs.

Foil blanket

from a space museum.
Four-leaf clover 

charms on a chain.

 


ANOTHER FORM OF SKIN


Hiding us all the times               
we prefer to stay hidden.
                                        
Piled by the door 
                                                                                 
rumpled, forgotten. 
Brought forward 
                          
in offering: burnt mittens, 
                                                                  
torn shoes, bloodied handkerchief.  
I have hung on a clothesline 

                                                     shirts so white that I 
                                                                                
felt surrounded by clouds 
or by the impossible words 
                                                                   
of God.  Sometimes the wind 
blows through me 
                                       
as though I do not exist, 
                                                                                             
as though all form 
could go formless without notice. 
                                                                              
Think, for example, of the way 
no one stands at the door 

                              offering a cabled sweater, saying 
here you might need this 
                                              
it’s cold out today no one
                                                                                             
except me, for example.  
And though 
                          
there is no one, now, 
                                                                              
inside the sweater 
here I am                        securing each button
                          
all the way to the top, 
                                                    
delicately lifting
             
imagined lint                                            from a sleeve.

 


IN THE HOURS JUST AFTER, IN THE HOURS BETWEEN

 

Caught between one world 
and the next, between the buzzing actual 
of air breathed, streets crossed, 

food chosen, prepared, 
consumed.  Of sleep slept 
but broken 

again and again into waking—

caught between the easy language     
of regret and viscous words of loss, 
words that, like timid creatures, 

have tunneled deep into caves
for the long winter, and may never 
emerge again, such is the lure 

of the darkness
and the mind & the mouth hollowed out.
Caught between laughing 

about what he would’ve said
about attending to his own death           
Easy now, easy, take it easy now now now

and absorbing the infinite chill
of seeing he could 
no longer say it—

we speak of him, still, in the present
tense. Caught between calling, first,
the one who’d prepare his body 

for the grave or the one who’d 
tend to his soul as he’d wished.
Morgue or mosque, we ask 

him, mosque or morgue we ask
ourselves.  Again and again, 
the sound of no voice,

just the specter of one nurse 
and then another
shuffling down the hall in scrubs, 

doctors in angel-white gowns 
and shoes, their hairnets 
like deflated haloes 

clinging to their heads.

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  • Published in Issue 16, Poetry, Uncategorized
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G-D POEM by Joshua Sassoon Orol

Monday, 11 November 2019 by Joshua Sassoon Orol


Oh the g-d in you.
                                                    Thank you for what g-d you did today

g-d as gold            g-d as gone                    You believe there’s g-d out there somewhere 

among trash heaps that smell less these days                      because the plastics in them  
         no g-d old organics

you know it’s g-d because it smells as it rots                      most g-d things don’t last long

What kind of g-d don’t you believe in

My word is g-d                     He’s a g-d egg                                        No news is g-d news 

You don’t want to hear how g-d you are                        It’s not that anyone actually knows
                                                                                            
but you look g-d, Girl, really g-d

Take a look in the mirror
you see nothing at all
That’s gotta be g-d
            or at least the image of g-dliness 

                                                                                                   At least you’re in g-d hands 

You don’t want to be g-d
because if you’re g-d that means                                              g-d can have cracked nails
                                                                               
         with sky blue polish in the cuticles
g-d can have mistweezed eyebrows

g-d might be wearing dirty underwear                                  never as g-d as you hoped for
under a sundress that’s a bit too short                                                              no g-d at all

A g-d way to go                                                                                A chapped kiss g-dbye 

 

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  • Published in Issue 16, Poetry, Uncategorized
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TWO POEMS by Carlina Duan

Sunday, 10 November 2019 by Carlina Duan

WHAT IF


my lips weren’t chapped. the candles: unburned.
what if they’d stayed like that all year: whole, slender
sticks, separate & shy. what if the ants didn’t
run in slow lines across the table, didn’t crush
to dark soot beneath a stray thumb. 
if I hadn’t touched the cake: unghost
the icing slipping through a fork. if I’d crammed
sugar into a plastic box instead. if I’d gone to bed 
on time, if I’d showered, if I’d combed
through each strand of my wet & blackest hair. 
would I have seen what I saw that night? 
across my phone screen, those grains of salt 
& rosemary rubbed into the roast chicken? 
your hands and her hands curled
across the knife? slash, slash. cut
me up. if I hadn’t known you or that year
we plucked apples from the branch, I 
would’ve laughed. chicken thigh 
on a blue plate in the kitchen I’d once 
loved you in. the candles lit. your hands
and her hands. flashing knife. and ants.
damn, those ants. scuttling beneath.
black as bolts. craving whatever: grease,
the hurry of lips over skin. 
a single, stupid crumb.  

 

DEAR SILVERFISH


respect me. you slim,
slimy insect I try to trap
first with a jar, but you
glint, real sly, then slide
beneath the ratty blue
rug. you slinky spasm.
you thousand-leg. 
make me squirm
‘til I grab the lavender
spray, lift the rug,
then spray a ferocious
cloud for minutes,
wetting your antennae
to the linoleum floor.
still, you live. 
body bigger than
a nickel, pointed
like a stick of lead,
stuck beneath my
glare. Just use
your clog, my sister
texts, yet something
about your whip-
thin body I cannot
strike. 

once, in a public park, I watched
the man I loved pare a fuji apple
with a knife. skins curled and fell,
lazy ribbons onto a lap. months 
later, I stood at the intersection
where green trees erupted 
& the park began, grief in me
whirring like a pest. o, old 
love. I cannot smush you 
with a shoe or douse
you in a clean scent. try to
violence you out yet still, 
you stay. a silverfish atop
my bathroom floor, shiny as
scrap metal. pulsing with
the dust, & stuck.

 

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  • Published in Issue 16, Poetry, Uncategorized
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LIFT THE MORATORIUM ON ANGELS by Kristin Robertson

Sunday, 10 November 2019 by Kristin Robertson

in this poem one sec for Pearl Vision
and an optometrist who looks exactly
like an uncle who died two years ago.
He’s saying quick puff of air and hot air
balloon in the distance   look through
here    see it      see it now?   and now?
But this, this is the good part: He asks
out of the blue, out of thin, thin air—
Do you still read books? I’ve never
laid eyes on this man before. I just
moved here. Still like pond water. Like—
wait—lift the moratorium on deer too, 
one brief moment—still like the ears 
of the mother and her fawn behind 
the privacy fence. It’s only been two
years. Of course I read books. Still.
How much time has passed in his nebula 
of wings? I say yes. Yes, I read. And 
get this: He smiles. He smiles and nods 
and adjusts the lenses in the phoropter.  
Since my lease is one year, and I won’t 
ever return for my follow-up, I ask him 
if he’s happy, if where he is now is 
better. He chuckles but stays behind 
the machine: Tell me which one is less
blurry. A or B. A or B.   Here.     Or here.

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  • Published in Issue 16, Poetry, Uncategorized
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THREE POEMS by Christine Gosnay

Sunday, 10 November 2019 by Christine Gosnay

Grand Teton

A limber pine wave gives way to woodsmoke.
I am deeply interrogated
and I am not understood. 

The sun hits the logs 
and plays with their legs and shoulders,
pushing away their modesty.

The man who boxes my firewood
has eyes three blue meters deep. 
His birthday has come with the snow in July.

There are forceful creatures here
and I will not surprise in the dusk.
I swing my broken locket for a bell. 

In the tent village, a woman is bending off her jeans
on the warm side of the canvas.
My hands rise like two consuls to my lips.

 

Spring in Aqaba

Something far away handles 
the instruments of my death.
But the wine is cold and dry, 

and upon my leg 
I make my hand into your own, 
leaning back to receive my arrogance. 

When this wild grip visits me
there is a vast silk sail
tied to the sky. 

 

Nacco Junction

The train that passes is three songs long. 
It’s pulling fruits and tractors
to sow a paradise with. 

Into the sun and the heat the dirt rises
and dresses the weeds
with its sweetness.

Everything I can remember here
is a shape that cuts itself into the light
behind it, turning lie into form. 

The tender mountains make a cup
around all this. The kindness
of limiting the eye’s greed.

I try to drag a line from my mind
into this blistered sweep
but it is tangled in the vernal pool

where memory 
stays plunged 
in its watchful surround. 

To my surprise what comes
is a bud so fragile
that blades clip its stem in the dark.  

 

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  • Published in Issue 16, Uncategorized
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“MY DADDIES HAVE VOICES LIKE BACHELORS, LIKE CASTIGATORS & CROONERS…” by Tiana Clark

Tuesday, 15 October 2019 by Tiana Clark


Daughter, you make me shudder, make music of my bones, don’t you? 
Yes, like castanets. The best blood of my blood, soft blood, boiled 

blood of not knowing, bright blood is still in you now, blushing 
scarlet cells blossoming in your face, plasma rich as juicy figs, cut 

open & gleaming. Muscling that dark abyss, I am the jumbo starfish 
skimming and slurping the wounded deep-sea floor. To get close 

enough—I came to Nashville once. I wanted to feel the friction 
and fiction of having a daughter there. I watched you working 

at the restaurant near the replica of the Parthenon with the massive 
statue of Athena burning hot and fat and gold inside like a secret sun. 

I didn’t sit in your section, but near it. I saw your almond eyes 
(my eyes). I saw your nose (my nose). The pressure of my face 

in your face, barometric. The first words I could not gather 
were on your cheeks, passerines perched on telephone wires, 

soundless black ovals and lines like unsaid musical notes on a scale. 
I said nothing as you passed by swaying dirty martinis in your hands 

aglow like a censer, perfume of blue cheese & briny olive juice, murky 
as the memory, strained as the jade distance between us. I was the last 

guest at the bar, still pushing my slick steak across the white china, 
knife clinking, carving the wet meat into smaller pieces of meat: dark 

animal juice, gristle tug, tough then delicate tearing—I was stalling. 
I didn’t want to eat it. I didn’t want another reason to get up & leave 

you. You walked by me again, I whispered & mouthed slowly: olive juice. 
Didn’t you watch my greasy lips as I said it? Almost looked like I said it, 

huh? Dear Daughter, say it in the mirror & that’s me saying it, ok? 
Would that, could that mouthing (of silent love or persona love 

or mimetic love or epistolary love, or your pain-is-misplaced-here 
kind of love or even the dinging repetition of daddyless love 

or any kind of damn love love ever be enough? Or, I didn’t know 
how to finish this poem love and I’ve been editing it for years love 

until Jessica Jacobs made me rip it up love across a table until I could 
see the scaffolding until I could see the secret of my poem love, which

is—father, daughter, reader, lover—I don’t have to tell you everything. 

 

*The title is borrowed from a line in Terrance Hayes’ poem “ARSPOETICA# 789.”

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TWO POEMS by Kendra DeColo

Tuesday, 15 October 2019 by Kendra DeColo

Ode to When the Music Video Doesn’t Match the Song 

            After Ryan Burton and Noah Taitano

What isn’t lovely 

about a group of men 

moshing to a slow song

whose notes drip

around their bodies

like a halo of sweat

the way I drive through

suburbia blasting Beethoven’s

6th in a silver Honda as each traffic light

closes its fist and I must stop

between Panera’s

and Elder’s Bookshop

where a friend’s brother

used to sell stolen goods to buy 

heroin and the owner was hip

to the scheme would give him

just enough for the merchandise

lifted from a rich friend’s house

and if that is a kind of mercy

then it is also a mercy

when my husband says

“why don’t you take some time for you”

meaning “you need to go take care of your shit”

because I have that look in my eye

that says I need to be far away from people

including/especially my own family

I need to wear my heaviest coat

and skulk in the cold 

pretending I’m a person

who has the luxury of such things  

as solitude and avoiding eye contact

I make my own sanctuary

I listen to “The Wind Cries Mary”

while actual wind 

tosses a plastic bag down the middle of the street

following me two whole blocks  

and I don’t believe in angels

but if I did it would be one

foolish or bored

enough to do nothing

but play pranks

I would believe in the angel

who is out of mercy 

and only wants to mess  

with us into a silly kind of mirth

while god isn’t looking

who says: who are you

to be this sad 

and slow-dances

with us to the roughest anthem 

under a street light

that sputters in time

with our two-step

before it burns out

 

I Could Write a Poem about Electric Scooters


the ones self-described disruptors 
created and left scattered 

in the touristy districts 
of Nashville— which is to say white—

which is to say I don’t know 
how to travel and not be grotesque 

as the blonde bachelorette parties 
on their booze wagons that leave me breathless—

the desire to sprawl and achieve
just like Jesus himself who must have said 

thou shalt fuck 
over thy neighbor if it makes a profit—

I could write the scooters are lime green
and today I saw a woman riding one

in a tattered wedding dress    
she found in Good Will— the kind of slip 

I was never tough enough to wear 
but envied the girls who could, the ones 

who channeled Kathleen Hannah 
and Courtney Love and gave  

blow jobs behind the bleachers—Oh 
to be at home like that in my own body—

to be in the world like a tech   
entrepreneur and possess so little

consideration for the world  
I can glide right through it

like the frat boy who bought 
the historical home next door  

and turned it into a bicycle shop
who also rides a red pick-up    

with a sticker of an AR-15 that says
“come and take it”

which is another way of saying
“who’s going to stop me”

which is the smirk of Kavanaugh
which is the smirk of a every man  

who’s been stockpiling
alibis since he was 17— 

thou shall not—
fuck sustainability

I want to be the girl  
burning down this street at rush hour,

dress like the iridescence 
of an oil-soaked wing—

“come and get this pussy”
written on her forehead 

in blood  
ready to take down

the motherfucker
who tries to grab her next.

 

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BLINDKEY POINT by Norris Eppes

Tuesday, 15 October 2019 by Norris Eppes

 

Most Blindkey Point locals thought the help-line stickers were enough. Tilda disagreed.

            Without answers to the strange phenomenon, they built the Here For You Center. It was a building full of skylights. There were four round tables, varnished wood. The backs of the white chairs were curved like swans’ necks. In the center of each table were notepads of serene blue. Also, a mason jar filled with gray aluminum pens, in the event the visitor needed to re-write, jot ideas, brainstorm. A water fountain with decorative rocks. Moss-green plastic cups. Four tutors sat around a larger table on the opposite side of the room. On the wall behind them was the clearly marked Exit.
           
Four tutors, of whom Tilda counted herself the most eager to help.
           
A thirty-something scribbled his name on a blank card and plinked it into the tin box.
           
“I’ve got this one,” she said.
           
They sat at one of the round tables and he said his name was Tim. He wore thin wire frame glasses and had an Eastern European accent. Tilda introduced herself and asked how far along he was in the writing process.
           
“It’s finished,” Tim said, pushing his note across the table.
           
He made startling eye contact. To describe Tim’s eyes as soft? They were flickering lightbulbs, probably should change that soon. His voice was dim, too. Quiet? No. He smiled a lot, which was always a troubling sign. She’d bring him back to earth.
           
To whom it may concern, the note started. Last night I thought so long about what album to play on my headphones as I walked into this sea that I ended up swallowing the pills and passing out on a bench instead. I couldn’t make up my mind between albums. It was Iggy Pop for Ian Curtis. But really that’s not the album I want to go to, the water sloshing as I sit on the cinderblock tied to my ankles. Waiting for high tide. It is between Boxer and Either/Or. The truth is I’ll throw my phone away long before the tide gets up to my nose, but I want you to know it was one of those two albums. God, the sunset is lovely. I could live with it.
           
Tilda glanced at the guy after she was finished. She had marked up the note with her pen, and she went in with the starter questions.
           
“So, Tim,” she asked. “Who’s the letter for?”
           
He spoke so softly he might have been talking to someone sitting closer. His hair was thinning adorably, like snow flurries unsure of their sticking power. He was funny with his “s” sounds, not quite slurring them but not quite rolling them, either. Czech, Hungarian, maybe?
           
“It’s for my brother and my parents,” Tim said. Sounding more like it’sch.
           
“Right,” said Tilda, “so there’s the audience you want to impact, which leads to my first question. Would they be familiar with these two albums? Or with Ian Curtis?”
           
From behind the thin frame glasses, Tim blinked. 
           
“Because I’ll admit,” Tilda continued, “the references fell a bit flat for me. Not that I am not familiar with these two albums. But by using them as your main device to elicit emotion, you might be missing out on a real opportunity here.”
           
Tim crossed his arms and leaned forward.
           
He asked: “Do you get a kick out of working here?”
           
Tilda put her head down, pretending she was busy editing his note.
           
“This line about the sunset at the end is nice,” she said. “Same with the bit about your phone. What is on there, anyway? Secret text messages. Voicemails. Emails full of the real you, the real Tim. But the real Tim they will never know. That is nice. But the album thing seems like a wasted opportunity to me. You’ve only got an index card to work with here.”
           
Tim spoke quietly. Tilda leaned forward.
           
“Music was my brother and me, the way we spoke.”
           
He pronounced music like mushick, and spoke sounded less like part of a bicycle and more like the sound the waves made below the Blindkey Point overlook.
           
Tilda flickered her pen over the notecard.
           
“And my family,” Tim said. “None of them are alive. That is why it says, to whom it may concern. I am going to tape it to a bench, so that someone who does not know me can talk with me through those albums.”
           
Tilda suggested that if it was such a personal knowledge, Tim should revise so that the music felt a little more significant in the note. Was there a way to make it as important as the line about the sunset? She passed him another index card.
           
“But I do not know how to speak, unless it is with music,” Tim said. “That is why I came here.”
           
“I am not going to write this note for you,” Tilda said. “But I do have some suggestions.”
           
She stood, walking to the tutor’s table and grabbing a handout from the stack in a plastic tray. She went through it with Tim, some commonly used rhetorical devices, turns of phrase, techniques. Tim stood. They shook hands.
           
“How old were you when your brother died?” she asked.
           
“Sixteen.”
           
Tilda ushered him toward the door marked Exit. It shut behind him. She slumped into her office chair at the tutor’s table. 
           
Tilda measured her workday in the lock-clicks of the Exit door. Good at psychiatric work, history, music therapy, soccer, sailing, the completion of extensive jigsaw puzzles, getting better than average grades in more than an average number of subjects, Tilda knew herself well enough to know that she was an F student at goodbyes. Flunked them after Thanksgivings: “Goodbye, take care.” Flunked them when parents had left. “Goodbye: Tilda, have a good day at school.” Flunked them after semester’s end: “Goodbye, see you in the fall, stay in touch.” 
           
Her great aunt Meon never went to family funerals. Her extended family was large, so as a kid there had been many—grandfather, great aunt, great uncle, that uncle who wasn’t really an uncle but that she called uncle anyway, grandfather, grandmother. Meon had watched the toddlers while everyone else went to the services and burials; Tilda had wished she could stay and babysit.
           
After her grandmother’s funeral she’d driven away before the wake, in absolute shame for not going, but thinking: I will not attend another one. The only way she could handle goodbyes was when she did the leaving herself. 
           
Tilda never checked on the people she tutored, once they were down the hallway and into the hospital. She’d gone down the hallway herself with the newly hired staff, before the hospital opened, when it was absolutely empty, sterilized, bright. There was an underground garage where cars were ready to drive the released patients to the airport or train station. 
           
“Could you tell the difference between the hallways if you didn’t know?” 
           
“They are identical.”
           
A patient who went through the Exit door entered a hallway that looked identical to the Entrance. The difference, though, was that the hallway out the Exit door led to an attached psychiatric hospital. The Exit door locked automatically behind whoever entered. The hospital employees took over from there, beginning the admission process. The walls to this second, disguised hallway were sound proof, so as to give those still at the tables no clue about the truth behind the Exit door. Tilda often wondered what noises they made in there, thinking they were stepping back onto the streets of Blindkey Point.
           
She watched the Exit door click shut behind two more sets of hunched shoulders before Here For You closed at five. She ate and had drinks at a sea-food restaurant with Charlie, Jack and Allie, Parker, Chandler, and Morgan, then window shopped her way home, walking her mom’s Trek racing bike beside her.

 

*

 

Chubbs and Rosenthal—who did the award winning Blindkey Point documentary—did not know the building’s secret. They lambasted Here For You as some sick joke, under the pretense of self-expression therapy. Following the instructions of Doctor Marian O’Brien, each of the tutors gave the same story: it was therapy through writing. The process of editing one’s own suicide note was actually a life-saving activity. The awareness of death offered a weird hope. Anyway, it was more than help-line stickers on the benches at the overlook. 
           
“Why here? Why don’t other towns along the coast experience this phenomenon? What factor does the wind contribute?” Doctor O’Brien asked, wringing the sleeve of her lab coat. “There is no explaining why Blindkey Point attracts so many suicides. But because this place does, it needs to offer more than just a phone number.”
           
Here For You was Doctor O’Brien’s career idea. She was a leader in the research and implementation of alternate treatments, especially those which circumvented medication. Marian O’Brien had also been Tilda’s family doctor growing up. Tilda graduated in the same month that construction of Here For You was completed and was among the first hires. A year after opening, and Here For You was busy. Those in the community help-line office, who had always been a little bored, started a sudoku league.

 

*

 

The boardwalk went from the golf course at one end of the bay to the rocky outcrop at the other. The town of Blindkey Point took its name from this dangerous outcrop, which was marked by warning buoys. There was a small park area on the cliffs with a monument to each shipwreck from the 1800s to the 2000s. The links course on the south end of the beach had particularly low greens fees, due to the wind. It funneled into the bay and through the course with such ferocity that touristing golfers in search of the authentic links experience usually abandoned play by the ninth hole and drove down the coast for the better designed courses.
           
Overlooking the golf course were enormous prehistoric sand dunes. These dunes looked more like hills and were four, five stories high at their tallest. The Waterfront Commission was in perpetual conservation efforts. Tilda and her older sister Jenna had named the largest dune the Big Castle after the sand-fort they dug into its peak one summer. It would feel silly to claim that a town’s main attraction were old piles of sand if it weren’t true.
           
Tilda answered questions for a tourist family outside the ice cream shop. They shielded cups of soft-serve from the wind and sand grit. Their little boys wandered among the evening beach-walkers and the parade of dogs. Their noses were red from the cold, their lips chapped from the wind.
           
“Some people use the dunes for exercise,” she said. “There’s a thick rope that goes from bottom to top, attached with stakes.” 
           
“Want to race?” one of the boys asked his brother.
           
“Can dogs make it to the top?” asked the youngest of the three, pointing at a sand-struggling terrier.
           
The three boys glanced at their parents, sprinted away, then ran back, waiting for a reaction; getting none, they sprinted off again, this time a little farther away, before returning. The youngest boy pulled at his dad’s coat-sleeve.
           
Tilda waved and continued along the boardwalk by herself. When it ended she took off her shoes and placed them in the grass by the golf course fence. She stepped into the cold sand. Transferring the cup of coffee to her left hand, she grabbed the rope in her right and began climbing the dune. She reached the wooden stake near the dune’s top. Below her the three boys played loudly. They climbed uphill, feet pointed outward like ducks. 
           
People were spread out across the dune, taking selfies, having picnics, watching the ocean. Tilda wore a heavy windbreaker over a white fleece. She grabbed her phone from the windbreaker’s pocket and laid on a patch of grass. She scrolled through texts from friends, a parent, a friend who hated his job, the other parent, a relative she should call, the group thread. She scrolled through the older texts down to the very bottom, to the text from her sister.
           
Hey Tilda, I know you’re busy today, but just saw this free concert and thought you might like to go if you’re not too busy.
           
She sat up and let the phone drop into her lap. Rock beach (gray, darker gray), golf course, the inland fields (green), the sand in her bare feet (cold, dun), the sea pushing, battering, licking townward (silver and white with sundown blue). 
           
“Excuse me,” the boy asked. “Do you get a lot sand in your eyes if you try to roll all the way down?”
           
“Keep them closed,” she said.
           
The boy’s brother kicked a cluster of grass. All three ran across the top of the dune with their arms spread, holding their polar fleeces out behind them as parachutes. They looked inquisitively over the edge. 
           
An old man yelled at the kids to be careful.
           
“It’s only sand,” one of the boys yelled back.
           
That was exactly what she or Jenna had said every time an old person yelled at them to be careful when they’d played up here.
           
“There really is enough wind up here,” one of the boys yelled.
           
“It feels like a tornado!”
           
“We need bigger jackets,” said the youngest.
           
Tilda stood and brushed sand off her pants. She threw her heavy white windbreaker to the boys so they could use it as a parachute.

 

*

 

After they flew down from the dune, the tourist children walked, tired, toward their parents at the ice cream shop. The lights in the hotel flicked on behind the shops at the edge of the golf course. The youngest boy tripped on his heels and fell backward off the curb. The moment he tripped, Tilda could just see him falling and hitting the back of his head on the cement. But a woman stuck her arm out and caught the kid. He rolled away from her and darted through the parking lot after his brothers. 
           
The woman wore a green sweater, burgundy hiking boots, and stood beside a lead-gray truck. She joked that she’d just saved a few stitches, then grabbed a jacket from the rolled-down window of her car. She was tall with dark hair, in her late 50s.
           
“So many tiny, fluffy dogs,” she said. “A surprise more birds don’t go after them. I’ve seen an osprey take the ear right off a dachshund.” She pointed to a gaggle of Pekinese pulling an old tracksuit along the boardwalk. 
           
Tilda laughed, but the woman held a stern grimace. Tilda stopped laughing and straightened her face. But then the woman winked and walked past her toward the beach.
           
She followed the stranger along boardwalk, then down onto the beach and up toward the point, trailing her by fifty yards. Would the woman turn and see she was being followed? 
           
Tilda admired the nonchalance and lazy purpose of the woman’s stroll. Being a small town, it was easy to recognize the difference between residents (a slow gait, a familiar face), happy vacationers (weird, sometimes aggressive stares, with cameras, louder and in groups), and the suicides (alone, either sluggish or quite fast). The woman’s pace was relaxed and her demeanor was purposeful, yet she was no one recognizable.
           
Tilda ran into a group of friends who were having happy hour on the beach and in the bluster of conversation, she lost sight of the stranger. She went with her friends to Jack and Allie’s apartment and stayed for a while, until Amber gave her a lift home. 
           
Before bed she went through the house, turning off the lights. The clicks from the lamps echoed off the hardwood floor like racquetball. Again, she thought about putting some of the rooms on AirBnB. 
           
The old home was way too big and empty for a single person. Tilda’s parents had taken the furniture when they moved away after Jenna died. It was the same house she and her sister had grown up in. The summer after college, Dad was into his hand-made sailing skiff project, Mom was into her triathlon training, Jenna was home between semesters of her PhD program, and Tilda was applying for her first real job.
           
The two rooms in the house that were not empty were Tilda’s bedroom and Jenna’s bedroom. Jenna had been killed by a distracted driver a week before the triathlon. She had been cycling with mom back into town on the two-lane highway. 
           
Her parents had left Blindkey Point for good. But Tilda convinced them not to sell the house, and to let her rent it. She did not harbor any weird superstitions about keeping her sister’s room the way she left it. Sometimes she went through Jenna’s drawers, borrowed a CD from her collection, or stole a sweatshirt. However, she did keep the lights on all night so that when she fell asleep or when she woke in the dark, she could see the strip of light shining under the closed door to Jenna’s room.
           
Tilda set her alarm for work. In the ridiculous way that pre-sleep silly dreams evolve, she had the urge to throw on a jacket, put on her boots, and see if the gray truck was still parked in the beachfront lot. Or had the woman driven out to the point?

 

*

 

The next day, two minutes before five, the stranger walked into Here For You. Gyles, the receptionist, asked her to put her name on a card and drop it into the box.
           
She picked up a card, pretended to write on it, and dropped it into the box. Gyles did not notice this. She wore a hunter green sweater with two white stripes around the sleeves and hem. She sat at a table and put a piece of folded paper down in front of her.
           
The three other writing tutors were basically ready to leave. They flicked the zippers on their bags and screwed tops onto their travel mugs. Who would volunteer to take this last one? It had not been a terrible day, but it had been more difficult than usual. Not busy. Just heavy, tough.
           
“I got this one,” Tilda said, nodding to the others.
           
“Thanks, Tilda.”
           
“Yes, thank you.”
           
“Bye. See you later.”
           
They walked out the Entrance door. Gyles did not seem to notice that the center was about to close. He was doing something on his computer.
           
“This will not take long,” the woman said. Her voice and expression had a deadpan absence of inflection. 
           
Tilda thought: She must be, like, an aunt who tells her niece or nephew to suck it up and get the first aid kit, right after they’ve sliced their thumb open on a pineapple can. She knows how to stitch back skin to skin.
           
Tilda said it was no trouble, sat down at the table, and asked: “What stage of the writing process are you at with this note?”
           
The windows flooded the room on all sides the color of runny egg yolk. The skylights overhead filled the ceiling with pink, orange, and dark streaking clouds.
           
“This is what I have written,” the woman said.
           
“Right, well, I’ll read this, and then we can talk about it. Suggestions to make it better.”
           
Pulling the folded paper across the wood-grain table toward her, Tilda got the distinct impression that there were no suggestions she could offer this woman. She unfolded the wide-ruled tan paper, which had been torn out of a notebook. The paper felt so thin, divorced from its binding, which clung in remnants to the un-trimmed edge. Tilda wanted to turn the slip of paper on its side and examine it from that direction. But that’s not how you read a page. 
           
Dear you, the note started. The internet is not real. In this regard it is much like a dream. There are wires and cables under the ocean, apparently, but are they the internet? I have been led to believe it is a cloud. A reality which I can access with a computer or phone, a fancy block of metal. In this regard it is like a dream. Closing my eyes I dream. I access a place which, does it exist? Going somewhere, but not really. If one dies in one’s sleep, does one just keep on dreaming? In the past I was afraid, sometimes, to close my eyes before bed. I told myself that keeping them open would mean I’d stay alive. When I stick my face in wet grass, then I feel alive. I have stuck my face in the grass after rain. I have gone to find the under-ocean internet cables.
           
“What have you got?” the woman asked. 
           
Tilda had stared at the note for longer than it took to read it through. Instead of making any marks with her pen, Tilda had pressed it into the note so that a blotch of ink had formed in the corner of the page. 
           
She is being polite, now, Tilda thought. Of course she would be polite. 
           
She put the note back on the table. She could not think of how to say it. The woman’s face, wrinkles, and eyes said: Get on with it. But, in a supportive way. Can you give stitches out of love?
           
“In parts the logic of it is a bit disconnected,” Tilda said. “Specifically between the last sentence and the one before it.”
           
The woman murmured acknowledgement.
           
“If you could do more to establish the logical connection between wet grass, ocean, internet cables, and”—Tilda choked, cleared her throat, and continued—“death, well, it might make the note’s end even more powerful.”
           
“Thank you,” the woman said, glancing at the nametag, “Tilda.” 
           
She took her note, pushed back her chair, stood, and left.
           
Tilda put her head in her hands. She had not written a thing on the note. Not one mark, besides the bleedy ink blot. 
           
Does she know I followed her last night? How was she there at the right moment to stop the boy from cracking his skull open in the parking lot? Did she know I worked here? How did she say goodbye like that? She just pushed her chair back and left. How do you tell the person who has just brought you their suicide note for grammar help not to do it?  
           
Lifting her head, Tilda hoped to catch a last glance of the woman walking through the Exit door. She wanted to remember her. What would the woman’s reaction be when she found herself in a psych hospital? In that moment Tilda, was relieved, thankful for the presence of the hidden hospital.
           
“Forty-eight patients,” Dr. O’Brien had told the four tutors at the end of the previous week.
           
Forty-eight bodies that the police did not have to lift off the rocky beach and bring to the morgue. Forty-eight bodies that did not interrupt a fishing trip, requiring a phone call to the coast guard. Forty-eight times a child would not be scared to peeing himself because his foot, while swimming, was touched by a lifeless hand.
            Tilda cursed at herself and told herself to get on with it. She reached for her backpack just as she saw the woman walking out the Entrance door, instead of the Exit. 
           
“Gyles!” she shouted. “Stop her!” 
           
The Entrance door thudded shut. She wanted to punch Gyles on the nose for not paying attention. Through the window she caught a glimpse of the white stripes on the hunter green sweater disappear around the corner.
           
She told Gyles to buzz a code yellow. She swung out the door frame and sprinted down the hall. She threw open the front door. She popped the kickstand on her mom’s Trek road bike, then bent it to her and stepped over the frame. Where would the woman go? 
           
Tilda’s feet circled fast, then slowed as she clicked down into a lower gear. She swung a wide turn onto the road that led up to the point. A pair of snappy terriers yapped at a boy who tried to pet them. He leaned too far and fell off the edge of the picnic table bench. A car without headlights sped past her, veering into the other lane. Another with its headlights on coasted slowly around her.
           
The grey truck was in the gravel lot, along with four other cars. To the front: ocean, wind roaring in. Two hundred yards out to sea, a surfer in a wetsuit. To the right: farmland, grass brushed down and trees that tilted inland. To the left: the town, the golf course, the school and homes, stores and restaurants, cars and people. At the overlook, an elderly couple sat on a bench. Beside another bench was a man in a wheelchair, vaping.
           
The woman stood at the edge. The onshore wind stung Tilda’s contacts. She shut her eyes tight, and when she opened them, she saw that the woman had one leg raised, as if to step off the edge.
           
Should she run forward and grab her? What could she yell? 
           
The woman put her foot back down.
           
Tilda went for her. The gravel crunch-runched. 
           
The woman lifted her knee again as if to walk right over.
           
Tilda stopped.
           
The woman set her foot back down, then turned.
           
Tilda hid. From behind the information board she watched the woman walk back from the overlook, sit on a bench, and take a notepad from her back pocket. She set it on her lap, hunched over, and wrote against her thigh. 
           
In the gloaming, all the people at the overlook became dark shapes. A canvas was propped against another bench. The painting was a sunset in acrylic, except there were two suns, and the ocean was purple. It looked like something a kid would paint.
           
The white stripes on the woman’s sweater were barely visible as she ripped the page out, placed it under the bench, and covered it with a handful of gravel.
           
She got in her truck. The headlights partially illuminated where Tilda stood, so she walked around the other side of the info board. The truck backed up and drove away.
           
Tilda went to the bench and grabbed the letter from under the rock. It nearly tore away in the wind, but she folded it and put it in her jeans pocket, then got on the bike.
           
A dry leaf rattled over the concrete on the road next to her. A fallen branch in a lawn reared up, looking like a cobra. As she passed each streetlight, the shadow of herself on her bike raced up from behind, then rode level with her, then raced past. She knew that whatever the letter said, she would have to get better at saying goodbye, so as she clicked along with the bike chain she practiced it—goodbye, goodbye.

 

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INTERVIEW WITH Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Wednesday, 15 May 2019 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Oceanic is the fourth collection of poetry by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). Concerned the fragility of the natural world and the humans who live within it, Oceanic moves in and out of ecopoetry. She explores various forms, creatures and voices to create a vivid portrait of a world at once beautiful and at risk of irrevocable change.

Nezhukumatathil was the 2016-2017 Writer in Residence at  the University of Mississippi, where she is a professor of English in the MFA program. She has received, among other awards, a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships to the MacDowell Colony. She is also the author of three previous poetry collections: LUCKY FISH (2011), AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003)––all from Tupelo Press.  Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of nature poems with the poet Ross Gay.


 

FWR: What spurred the writing of Oceanic?

AN: I never set out to write a book—even after 4 books, I still find that prospect daunting. Instead, I focus on the individual poems, getting those done week after week. And sometimes some quiet times in between too. Lots of ‘not-writing.’ And after some time, I take inventory of my poems and see if anything is gelling together or having arguments with one another.

FWR: I was struck by the appearance of the haibun in your collection. What brought you to this form?

AN:I started experimenting with haibun more seriously after having my first child. I was head over heels in love with this new creature and while I loved articulating this newness in poems, I also wanted to be private about this special new time for my family. Traditionally speaking, the haibun’s focus is on landscape or travel—more outward than inner observations, though of course how you describe the outdoors can evoke an inward glance. During those sleep-deprived months, I could just about think in haibun and then write haibun more than any other form. Something about that concentrated sensory experience with a sort of ‘rose clipping’ (the haiku) at the end was very conducive to my state of being those heady first years of being a new mom.

FWR: While thinking more broadly of form, you range through different forms, utilizing prose poems and ghazals, and dipping into poems that seem their own form (“Daughter” and “Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth”). Could you talk a bit about your relationship to form?

AN: I love using form as a way to corral and round up the ecstasy of writing a line that wants to unfurl messily down the page. I’m all for mess, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes a large initial image needs a little belt-tightening, a little trimming—so it becomes a puzzle in the best sense of how to lock and align your poem to a form.

FWR: I’d love to look specifically at “The Falling: Four Who Have Intentionally Plunged Over Niagara Falls with the Hope of Surviving.” These poems seem to speak to a love of destruction inherent in us (whether causing pain to another or the planet). Yet, there’s such joy in the destruction rendered in these poems, even as Annie Edison Taylor says, “Don’t hate me because I sent the cat first” or “Look / at your life: it can count” from the “Steven Trotter” section. Could you expand on what drew you to these poems?

AN: My (not-so) naughty little secret is that I read way more natural history/ science/ history/ biographies than I do actual poetry. I remember reading a newspaper article that celebrated the anniversary of Annie Edson Taylor’s first plunge over the falls, and I just became intrigued/ horrified/ delighted about the history of the number of people who intentionally went over Niagara Falls. Many of these people died in relative obscurity and I was hungry to hear their voices, their rationales, their fears, and their desires through a contemporary lens with persona poetry.

FWR: I’m interested in how you play with images of the body and motherhood, and juxtapose those against images from nature. In doing so, there’s a freshness that appears (I’m thinking of a poem like “In Praise of My Manicure” or “The Body”), which might seem pat in another’s hands. Did you find yourself resisting any of these poems or images?

AN: Thank you so much! But no—98% of the time, I start a poem with an image and I’ve had to learn to trust my digging towards (and away) from that image to see why it had lingered with me in the first place.

FWR: I saw that you are working on a book of illustrated nature essays (World of Wonder, 2020, Milkweed)— how is the process of writing essays different from (or similar to!) the writing of poetry? What lead you to that project?

AN: It came from a very real and deep love and wonderment about the animals and plants of the world that don’t always get heralded or adored. I feel lucky that though my parents did not directly encourage my writing; they very much unintentionally encouraged it by making sure my younger sister and I had family road trips to outdoor landmarks all over this planet from such a young age, and they taught me the names of animals and plants that weren’t usually found in zoos or nurseries. Most of all, they showed me by example what it means to be curious about this planet: it means you’ll never be bored or lonesome. How could you, knowing there are such wondrous creatures that live below hundreds of feet of ice, or deep in the backwaters of south India? But in all my reading as a young girl—I never saw brown women authoring these books. Of course, there must have been marginalized voices writing and publishing about the outdoors back then, but I certainly never had teachers who taught these authors. And I tried and tried to find them in the library myself to no avail. One would think brown women did not even go outside if you looked at the average library shelves in the 70s and 80s. This absence of Asian American voices praising the outdoors, naming the precariousness some of these animals, and frankly showing how extraordinary this planet’s strange and beautiful inhabitants are before they disappear is something I’m hoping to remedy.

FWR: Is there a poem (or poems!) that you love to teach or share?

AN: I love to teach Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Mint Snowball.” It’s quite literally the first poem I ever fell in love with from a living writer, and I love to see the smiles and delights on my students’ faces when we discuss it together now too.

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INTERVIEW WITH Jessie Chaffee

Tuesday, 19 March 2019 by Jessie Chaffee

Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence In Ecstasy (Unnamed Press), was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2017 and has been published or is forthcoming in Italy, the Czech Republic, Russia, Poland, Turkey, and Romania. She was awarded a Fulbright grant to Italy to complete the novel, during which time she was the writer-in-residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Slice, and Global City Review, among others. She lives in New York City, where she is an editor at Words Without Borders. Find her at www.JessieChaffee.com and @JessieLChaffee.

Florence In Ecstasy follows Hannah, a young American in Florence who is recovering from an eating disorder that has severely affected her emotional and physical health. Determined to defeat the disorder, Hannah joins a rowing club, propelling her into the vibrant and tight-knit community of Florence. However, Florence’s mystical history and art, particularly as it pertains to the saints –– women who starved themselves in the name of God –– is seductive, triggering in Hannah a desire to return and reclaim her disorder. Throughout the novel, Hannah asks herself the questions we all must eventually ask ourselves: “Who was I?”, “Who am I?”, and, “Who will I become?”


 

FWR: To begin, I want to ask you about the origin story of the novel. Did you always know you were going to place Hannah’s story in Florence or was it a discovery along the way?

Jessie Chaffee: The origin was really two things. One was that I was in graduate school and I was reading a lot of books about women on the fringes. And around the time when I started this book, I read the full canon of Jean Rhys, and in particular, her book Good Morning, Midnight, which is amazing. Good Morning, Midnight is about a woman who is descending into alcoholism in Paris and her rendering of that mental state –– which is really hard to do, I think, to capture altered states and addiction believably –– and what is really a love affair with alcohol was so powerful. I wanted to know how to do that.

Almost a decade earlier, I’d had an experience with an eating disorder in my early 20’s, which was less extreme than Hannah’s. I hadn’t written about it and hadn’t been able to write about it, but it left me with questions, and questions are always a good place to start a book. I hadn’t seen an eating disorder written about in the same way that I had experienced it and really Jean Rhys’s account of alcoholism came closest.

FWR: That’s interesting that you say that you hadn’t seen eating disorders written about the way you experienced it. So often I feel that eating disorders are written through tropes and act as warning stories. Like, these characters are the consequence of low self-esteem, or women who have experienced major traumas and destroy their bodies as a result. Much of Hannah’s experience with her eating disorder is wrapped up in art. While so much of her experience seems to come from a search for meaning, especially towards the end of the novel, it also comes from this desire for ownership. She describes the disorder as creating, carving, and sculpting. Can you say something about Hannah’s relationship to art and her disorder?

JC: Thank you. That’s a great question. So, her background in the book is in art and it is how she understands the world and sees the world. And one of the reasons that I wanted to set the book in Florence was because I wanted to put this woman in a place where she would be alone, but also not alone. Florence operates like a small town, so inevitably she can’t remain anonymous forever. But also because Florence is full of art and history –– it’s everywhere –– it made sense to me that she would go there looking for answers, so to speak.

In terms of the artistic creation, one of the things that I wanted to capture about the disorder was the high of it. When I began the book, the saints weren’t a part of it. It was in the writing that they emerged. Reading their accounts of ecstasy and about their very sensual, fulfilling, but ultimately painful relationship with God, I found their experiences resonated with somebody who’s caught up in an addiction. To the outside world, of course, it looks like Hannah is simply starving herself and abusing herself. But the reason that the disorder is so hard for her to get out of is because it’s seductive. It gives her a high. Because there is something about it that makes her feel as though she’s creating herself in this really powerful way. So, I think that’s where the connection to art comes in. She feels as if she’s creating herself. And it is not about beauty. It’s not really about how she looks. It’s about what happens internally when she’s in the process of doing that that drives her.

FWR: Yes! I realized that you’re exploring this idea, especially with Hannah and the saints, of erasure as a way to create. Hannah and the saints are making space by erasing what is already there, in order to create. For the saints, it’s more of a spiritual creation. But for Hannah, it’s a kind of knowledge of the self through the erasure of the physical self, which seems both counterintuitive but also so clearly what we’re often doing as artists–– clearing the space to actually create. Even when you’re filling the page, you’re removing the initial space, you’re changing the actual platform. When you’re painting, you remove the color or the absence of color, and sculpture is also a removal of physical parts. Especially in writing, so much of the work is actually erasing so much of what you put on the page in the first place. There is something in Hannah’s experience that rings so true about the agonizing but also amazing experience of being an artist, just creating and erasing, creating and erasing.

JC: Absolutely! And you’re also trying to erase the self. The best writing for me, and the best moments of writing, are when I disappear, when I feel like I’m no longer in it. I think there really is that kind of total self-erasure where you hit whatever it is that you’re reaching for. It doesn’t happen most of the time, but when you get there, it is almost like this ecstatic state. It is, I think, what can make artistic creation addictive and make you come back to it. And in those moments, I feel like I’m really gone.

FWR: And that brings me back to this theme of ownership. There’s a moment in the book where the reader thinks Hannah’s going to be alright, she’s in a relationship, she’s eating, she has a job at this library full of rare books. But then she steals all these old manuscripts of first-hand accounts of women saints’ spiritual ecstasies, and their experiences trigger her addiction, sending her into a downward spiral. While this is happening she starts talking directly about the disorder, and she’s saying that she “loved it,” that she “clung to it,” but also that it was hers. There’s this real desire for ownership, but she also says that she belongs to it. So then, it seems to me, the big question the novel begins to ask is one of ownership, whether it’s ownership of the self, or art, or history, or the body.

JC: Yeah, that’s great. Hannah does repeat throughout the book this idea that whatever this thing was, it was hers. She states directly, “It was mine.” You know, that’s not necessarily said with pride but is said with a recognition that this relationship is so intimate that it is necessarily a part of her. It’s not just something that is being done to her. And she’s also a part of it. That’s the tricky thing about any addiction, I think, that getting out of it is so difficult because you’re not just letting go of the thing but you’re letting go of a part of yourself. You’re letting go of a version of yourself that is yours. With the saints, I was really interested in their desire to erase, both their individual identities, and also their physical selves through starvation, other kinds of self-mortification, or other behaviors to deny the body. Because their purported goal is to totally erase themselves, right? To give themselves over completely to God, to erase their physical bodies, to be fully in the Spirit, to be completely pulled away from all things earthly and all things of the flesh. However, when they’re practicing this extreme behavior, they’re actually creating these very powerful identities that were long-lasting. And so they were creating the exact opposite of erasure. They were creating a legacy for themselves. And I think there’s real ownership in that. I’ve mentioned it in the book, but the fact that there are all these accounts that begin with “I, Angela”, “I, Catherine”, “I, Claire”. That kind of “I-ness” of the saints is really about the legacy they’re creating through the stories they’re telling about their experiences.

FWR: You do such a good job telling their stories through Hannah’s experiences and growing obsession with the saints. But what I found so interesting is that while she, and the saints, are wanting to erase, so much of Hannah’s experience with them, and with Italy, is physical. You’ve got all these relics, and she goes to see Saint Catherine’s head, and she’s got all these old books that she hauls home. And she’s also in Florence, and is physically experiencing Florence, and joining a rowing club. So much of her identity, in Florence, then, is developed through the physical, and through physical intimacy and pleasure with Luca, as well as pain, like the saints. Can you talk a little bit about how the book is looking at the relationship between the physical and visible and the spiritual and intangible?

JC: I think the saints are so fascinating because their descriptions are so physical. Even though, supposedly, it is about erasure, they have these incredible visceral descriptions. They are very much in their bodies. Even the mortification of the self is really about being in the body and the pain inflicted on it. And I think for Hannah, part of the struggle is to come back into her body. I purposefully set the book after she has really lived in the depths of the disorder because I didn’t want to romanticize that. You see glimpses of it because the reader has to understand her experience, but she comes to Florence to live. She’s trying to live and she’s trying to be back in her body, and so I think she comes to a place that really forces her to be present. Her relationship with Luca forces her to be present, too, and to be present in her body, and so does the rowing. You can’t row without a body. You can’t row with a weak body. You can’t do that if you’re starving yourself. So I think the physical ends up being important to her and that ultimately, even though she’s bumping into all of these remnants of the saints and recognizing the power of their ecstasies and also their mortifications and the behaviors they practice to gain their independence, and to gain their voice, that part of her becoming a body again, is rejecting some of that.

FWR: You said you didn’t want to romanticize the actual disorder addiction. I think one of the ways that you achieve that is actually showing not only her wrestling with it but also the physical pain that she’s experiencing. For example, there’s that scene where she runs and shoves saltines down her throat and drinks a bunch of water, but instead of reducing the pain, she becomes more uncomfortable. It’s not that you are giving the reader these grotesque images of it, but it’s just very real. It’s a very real kind of desperation. Also, what I loved is that you don’t give an origin story or blame the disorder on a huge trauma that happened to her. It seems really important that it is just a state of being that Hannah struggles with, in relation to her status as a woman, not only now, but throughout history.  

JC: Yeah, it’s an old story.

FWR: Totally! And you seem to be hitting on a larger societal ill in relation to feminine subjugation. Could you talk a little bit more about what you were thinking as you were developing Hannah’s addiction, but also her intellectual experience of it, because the reader is so much in her head.

JC: A lot of what she’s trying to figure out in the book is: why did this happen to me and where did it start? Thinking about structures and things that you get rid of in books further along, when I started the book, any flashbacks where distinctly set off in italics, and they all began with the line: “This is where it starts.” And it was all sort of an indicator of her searching for the origin of how she ended up in this place where she really lost herself. I appreciate that you say that I don’t give an origin story because I didn’t want there to be an easy answer for “this is why this happens.” And I think that makes some people uncomfortable. I’ve certainly had people ask me, “Why did it happen to Hannah?” And I don’t know if you would get that question when it comes to other addictions, right? Why does somebody become an alcoholic? I mean, you start engaging in a behavior that becomes addictive. Certainly with not eating, there’s this initial positive response. There are so many women of all ages who are at war with their bodies and have negative relationships with food. Hannah is on one extreme end of an eating disorder, but when you think about the spectrum of people’s relationship with food and their bodies, women and men have really disordered behavior all the time. I didn’t want to give a single reason for why this is happening. Also, I was less interested in the reason that it was happening than why somebody would get caught up in it, and what would make it hard for them to get out of it. I also was hoping that people reading the book would be able to relate to it so that whatever kind of addiction or abusive relationship anyone has experienced, they might be able to find some of that in Hannah, rather than saying, well, I didn’t experience this trauma so I don’t relate to this.

FWR: I don’t think you need to have experienced a major trauma or addiction to be able to connect with Hannah. She’s simply struggling between the desire for control and the desire to let go, which is innately human. Yes, Hannah is an extreme version of that, especially in today’s world. But these desires were also experienced by the women saints. Their ecstasies are about control and fulfillment, right? And meaning. So many of the saints’ lives are interpreted historically as a way to escape a strict patriarchal system that limited their agency. Saint Catherine didn’t want to get married. Saint Bernadette also wanted to avoid being forced into a relationship with a man, and so many other female saints experienced ecstasies or visions in order to remove themselves from the society that wanted to control them. But they also wanted to remove the feminine connected with that society, maybe perhaps in order to have control over their own selves. And with Hannah, she has this conversation with Luca about not eating, and Luca asks her if it’s because she wants to be skinny, as if it has to do with being sexy or attractive, and she immediately rejects this idea. And it reminds me of all these conversations I’ve had with friends and essays I’ve read about wanting to hide the body, to avoid being seen as sexy and feminine, and instead attempting to hide the self through baggy clothes, or boyish looks, or anything that might help make the feminine part of the body disappear.

JC: Right. Wanting to not go into the world body first, which is what happens for girls as soon as they hit adolescence. Your body is no longer yours once it begins to be seen and noticed. Throughout the book, Hannah has this sense that she’s being watched all the time. There is this desire in her to disappear, which in a certain sense is a removal of the feminine. But that ultimately isolates her and her ability to connect intimately with other people. And I do think a part of her actions throughout the novel are about wanting to disappear. The disorder is certainly not about her wanting to be beautiful, but it’s about something different. Part of that does become about erasing herself. But part of it too, and this is the hard thing about any addiction, is that it starts as one thing, and then it becomes something else. So it begins as maybe a control, or self-erasure, or the desire for something that she hasn’t found, and it becomes a place of meaning. You know, it becomes a kind of philosophy. It’s great to find meaning and it’s great to find your philosophy if it’s in a place that’s healthy, but often we find those things in places that are unhealthy and that makes it really hard.  

FWR: One of the things I think the book is doing so well is that it makes some really interesting statements about what it means to form identity, and what are the consequences and risks of claiming, creating, or denying identity. And so much of Hannah’s eventual reclaiming of her identity is dealing with those consequences. She goes to Florence, she starts rowing, she becomes romantically involved with a man, and so much of the trajectory could just move towards this idea of the runaway love affair that will save her, but then you take an entirely different turn. And, without giving too much away, so much of Hannah’s reckoning with her own identity is dealing with the world she’s run away from.

JC: Much of that was very conscious. Many of my favorite books are incredibly dark, where things don’t end well. And I didn’t want to write a book that had this easy, unrealistic, happy ending, but because I was writing about something that I’ve experienced and I know a lot of people experience, I didn’t feel like I could leave the book in a totally dark place. There had to be some hope. I feel hopeful for Hannah and her ability to not necessarily get out of things, but to live with things and survive. It’s not something that can be answered and fixed by somebody else loving and accepting her. So, I always felt like she had to go home because part of actually taking ownership of her life is dealing with her life. Part of being an agent in her life is facing it and dealing with it. That doesn’t mean her relationship with Italy and with Luca isn’t meaningful. It is meaningful. But just because it’s meaningful doesn’t mean it’s the answer.

 

An excerpt from Florence In Ecstasy

               I wake the next morning to rain that doesn’t let up. At the club, everyone will be indoors—all bodies crowding in, all sounds echoing loud, all the older men clustered in the bar instead of on the embankment, all eyes and voices. I avoid it. I should open my laptop, look for work, but I avoid that, too.

               I visit San Frediano in Cestello on the other side of the river, the Oltrarno. Luca was right—the church is beautiful. A small plaque on the wall outside announces that the mystic, Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, lived and died in the adjacent convent. Inside, there is a chapel dedicated to her with a painting of the saint in ecstasy, and in the chapel’s belled ceiling she welcomes souls into Heaven with sweeping arms. This is why he sent me here. There is nothing more, though—not in the little brochure I was handed and not in my guidebook—and the gates leading to the convent beside the church are locked.

               I find a small café not far from the church, glowing warm on this gray day. I stop for a coffee, but the place seeps in, holds me there, and I stay from early afternoon into evening, alternately reading and watching people battle the rain through the wide window. I return the next day and the day after that. The waitstaff has no qualms about my making the transition from a coffee and salad to a glass of wine when the café empties and they have their staff dinner, scraping at plates and laughing, while I watch the gray light stretch across the tables in shifting bands and catch in my glass.

               I’m still reading about St. Catherine. As a teenager, she pleaded to join the Mantellate, a group of older widows cloistered in the Basilica of San Domenico, but her parents refused—she was not old and was not a widow. She would be married. Until she grew ill, so ill that even when her father took her to the thermals baths, the boiling waters had no effect. Her illness was a sign from God, she said, and so her parents acquiesced, allowing her to join the widows in prayer, and Catherine was healed.

               Her career began with a movement inward, with visions and ecstasies. When in a trance, she did not wince at the needles that disbelievers jabbed into her feet. This and her vision of a mystical marriage to Christ secured her celebrity. As she grew older, she looked outward beyond San Domenico. She cured the lame, drew poison, and drank pus from the sores of the sick. She learned to read and became politically active, composing letters of criticism to the pope.

               And she made herself empty for prayer. By age eight, she was slipping meat onto her brother’s plate. By sixteen, she ate only fruits and vegetables, then used instruments—a stalk of fennel, a quill—to throw them back up.

               As another steaming dish arrives nearby, the thick, smoky smell drifting my way, my stomach turns over—with desire, then revulsion—and in this, I understand the saint’s denial. I remember well when my days became punctuated by sharp sensations:

               Chills.

               Sunlight too bright.

               Sounds attacking.

               Counting. And with the counting came praise and with the praise came questions. How do you do it? Claudia asked, one of a chorus when I began losing flesh, December into January into February. There was admiration in their voices, and I knew what they were asking: How do you cut so close to the bone? By the time Catherine joined the Mantellate, she had stopped eating almost entirely. This body of mine remains without any food, without even a drop of water: in such sweet physical tortures as I never at any time endured. She was empty, open. I’d like to think that she belonged to no one but herself, that the sweetness of the pain was hers alone. But she writes, My body is Yours.

               Love. Her letters are filled with the word. The soul cannot live without loving… The soul always unites itself with that which it loves, and is transformed by it. I envy her ecstasies, emptied of everything. Is that love? All that emptiness and the trance that follows? Love is a tunneling, I think. An envisioning and then a tunneling of vision, the edges disappearing until all that remains is the beloved. I had hoped that I would feel that with Julian, that with him I might escape the mornings when I woke tamped down and pressed myself back into dreams that did not soothe. But he was no match for the other solace I found. He fell away with all the rest.

               By the second day of my residency at the café I’m almost all the way through Catherine’s life. The soul is always sorrowful, she writes, and cannot endure itself. Outside, people are hurrying through the rain to the evening service. The bells begin to clang furiously, ricocheting off one another as one of the staff appears.

               “Un altro bicchiere?” he asks, lifting my glass.

               “Sì,” I say, wanting him to leave me to listen to the bells. They are playing a hymn. It is familiar to me and I feel a rush of happiness, uninterrupted. Even in this gray light it grows, and I’m afraid of the moment when I’ll slip over the peak and feel it dissipate. I close my eyes and the bells continue. They are asking a question: Are you searching for? Are you searching for?

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