Congratulations Mary Kovaleski Byrnes!

Congratulations to Mary Kovaleski Byrnes on her forthcoming poetry collection So Long the Sky  (Platypus Press)!

Two of Mary's poems, "Centralia, PA" and "X, 1926," appeared in Split Rock Review (Issue 5). 

Mary teaches writing and literature at Emerson College, and is the co-founder of the emersonWRITES program, a free creative writing program for Boston Public School students. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Salamander, the Four Way Review, the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, Poet Lore, Cimmaron Review, the Best of Kore Press, Best of the Net, PANK, and elsewhere. She served as Poetry Editor for Redivider and has been a poetry reader for Ploughshares since 2009.

So Long the Sky is scheduled to be released on May 11, 2018. You can order it from Platypus Press. 

Congratulations Mary on this wonderful achievement! 

Contributor Spotlight: Doug Van Hooser

Doug Van Hooser on "Wild Phlox"

I have a house in Wisconsin on the edge of the Kettle Moraine State Forest. When we moved in the prior owner had grassed over a tiered garden in the front yard. I tore out the grass and started planting. The wild phlox across the street did too. I have a hard time pulling out any plant that blooms and the phlox quickly took advantage of this flaw. Seed finds every nook and cranny and the next thing I knew there was a mass of blue. I love the big show. The Morton Arboretum in Illinois has a field of naturalized daffodils that is a special sight. I planted a hundred scilla in the front lawn and after twenty-five years the thousands of tiny plants put on an early spring show that mesmerizes everyone who sees it. And the phlox? No matter my annual efforts, it keeps its grip. Survival is never in question.

Contributor Spotlight: Lauren McKenzie Reed

LAUREN McKENZIE REED on "What You Might Not Have Known"

I love antiques.  My home is furnished with my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ tables, textiles, and artifacts tucked in throughout.  When someone enters my home for the first time, after a few questions about where items have come from, guests can accept this “style” as a dutiful daughter, drawn to her own history.  This is partially true, however I learned in 2009, while spelunking through a secondhand shop in West Virginia, that I can become attached to other peoples’ histories as well.

It wasn’t me who stumbled over the inconspicuous boxes of 35mm slides in Bubba’s Garage; someone who knew my sentimentality called me over to them.  And it wasn’t instantaneously that I felt as if I needed them in my life; over several days they burrowed in me, and I just couldn’t shake them.  A couple had travelled the world and here were their memories lovingly categorized and labelled, yet left in a dirty warehouse, for sale alongside doorknobs, mattresses, and broken kitchen appliances.  Who were they; when had they taken all of these amazing trips; why did no one keep them?  After a day or two I realized what a treasure they were and knew I had to rescue them. 

I immediately ordered a slide machine and poured through their images; I slowly started to feel as if I knew these people, although I only really knew the truth I had invented for them.  No matter their real names, she will always be Bernadette, and him Henry, and their adventures abroad have forever aligned themselves with my wanderlust heart.  I, too, have travelled all over the world, and I too crave photos so that when I’m old I can travel back to the way all those places made me feel.

I knew I wanted to write about her, in particular – I saw myself in her, which is apparent when I assign her some of my quirkier personality traits (a love for random facts and trivia about nature and the Earth, for example).  Even though she gets her own separate sections, and moments are described from her perspective, I’m still in there, and couldn’t fully separate myself from her.  She has since become a part of several projects of mine.  Describing anyone is a frightening thing, and describing oneself is a horrible power.  Sometimes other voices are necessary to complete the picture, and somehow I knew she completed mine. 

“What You Might Not Have Known” is a blending, of street scenes in Norway and me in my bedroom smelling the burning dust of the slide machine; of this woman I will never meet and myself; of then and now.

Her story needed telling.  I hope some memories of mine never end up caked with dust, having been sold at an estate sale, forever lost from those who actually knew me.  But if they are, I hope to be found, re-imagined, and considered by someone who comes along, and sees how much we may have had in common, despite never meeting.

Contributor Spotlight: J.I. Kleinberg

J.I. Kleinberg on Found Poem/Collages

Drawn from an ongoing series of more than 1600 pieces, my found-word collages exploit the accidents of magazine design—the places where, by happenstance, unrelated words stack upon one another or cast unintended meaning across the boundaries of sentence, paragraph, and column break. Each poem/collage is made up of two to eight text fragments, each fragment the approximate equivalent of a poetic line. The text includes no attributable phrases and the lines that make up each poem are sourced from different magazines.

The words are harvested from my near-obsessive perusal of magazines and set aside until I overhear some resonance between them. I am drawn to the music in the words, the iambic lilt, the assonance and alliteration, the potential and potent meaning contained within each fragment of text. It’s a visual and auditory process, somewhere between Dada and Twitter, between ransom note and haiku.

The words are more than language; they are physical objects, paper-color-font, sliced from magazine pages with an X-Acto knife, edges torn, words separated from prefixes, suffixes or punctuation to suggest new meaning, and arrayed across the work table that is my palette. From sense I excise nonsense, turning words back into raw material, then recombining them to disclose this new syntax. What propels me is the surprise, the accident, the noticing that allows me to recycle the unintended into this curious, evolving, personal, visual-verbal form. The pieces do not adhere to a recognized poetic structure; if they resemble a known form, that too is accidental.

This process grew out of a years-long parallel course of writing and art, including collage. Collage emphasizes both the new and accidental meaning of each line and the subtle shaping of breath as we read a poem. While the words could be transcribed into more conventional form, the language and the shapes are, for me, inextricably linked.

While the series addresses various topics, this collection reflects on how we function in the world, how (or whether) we change and what we’re made of: rocks, water, light, time—the elements that that are both the substance and the surroundings of our bodies (actually or metaphorically).