Steal Me For Your Stories
Robb Todd
Tiny Hardcore Press, 160 pgs., $11
Robb Todd wants us to remember that we need to be comfortable in our loneliness, that we need to remember every day is made of 1,440 moments and we never know which ones will be the loveliest, yes, Robb Todd wants us to remember these things and while he may not stick with you immediately, you will find yourself wanting to keep returning to his pieces to remember to discover them again.
Feeling is an extremely unavoidable, but perhaps not entirely necessary, part of AWP.
Sleep does not equal rest.
Elders needn’t always act like them.
Cab drivers like listening to poetry, too.
Also, cab drivers are sometimes adorably nosey.
If there were a way to avoid having a “real life” that required coming home to, we would all avoid it.
Facial expressions which you believe to be neutral but can actually be interpreted as full of a desire to kill are best avoided.
Free shots are dangerous.
Situations for which the emotional reaction is a foreign conclusion are an easily avoidable, but perhaps entirely necessary, part of life.
There are a lot of things I’ve never done. One, review a lit mag. But when I saw the list of contributors for Salt Hill 28, I was excited. And when I read Salt Hill 28 in full in one sitting, I was even more excited. The editors note sets the tone stating,
Each of us is contained by and immersed in personal experience, our brackish travels of the past and their briny apparitions in the present. We bring these journeys to the page to create and confront life, to embody the paradox of being conscious…Yes this life may constrict but in its vessel, seas are held, ones upon which we both float and drown.
I love that. And I love the lines from the following pieces and the way in which that editor’s note is fulfilled in each. In each one is multi-dimensional thought, thundering words and encapsulation that threatens to break boundaries.
From “Because Thought Isn’t a Prayer” by John Gallaher
We’re going through alone,
or asking for help, and how can we get there as us
or as ghosts, with this tin cup. This ocean.
From “Abstract Lessons” by Nate Pritts
Emphasis is a trick we apply
to the stupid animal hum when the real feeling
employed isn’t right, or enough.
Whenever I get confused I use maps
to help me; they show how our limbs
are nothing but bundles of blood & twisted.
From “Falling in Love with the Death Thought” by Zachary Schomburg
This is how you
love: you try over and over again to throw a
red balloon across the river from a tree.
“Foreign Wedding” by Maile Chapman and “Gown Rain” by Sarah Rose Etter also instigate, investigate and enamor.
Sometimes, no matter how much we try or how much we want to, we can’t get rid of things. They are constant, stagnant.
You confound me every day. You are not who you look like. You are not you. Look at your tiny eyes and lips.
Their value dissipated, they remain. The way we can’t get rid of memories, the smell of cigarettes. The way that we can’t stop taking what we read and applying it to what we know, what we have. When I read this piece, published at [PANK] by Rachel Bunting, after my brain slowed down and my eyes seemed able to see again, I couldn’t get it out of me. It refused to go away.
Oh how you hate to be humid.
I read it over and then I read it again. Today, I went back to it. I printed it off and read it out loud and then I pinned it on my wall. And now, as I read it once more to write about it, all I can think is that some things keep coming back. That this piece could be read a hundred times and not lose its value.
Your sharp edges. Yes, you confound me.
when all our days are numbered marching bands will fill the streets & we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds by Sasha Fletcher has been on my coffee table a long while. Too long a while, in fact. Yet I now feel that it was there so long a while because it was waiting for the perfect moment to be devoured and last night that perfect moment came. When I read Sasha Fletcher’s words, I was reading our restlessness, there is a resonance in his voice that will carry across generations, across obligations across spaces a many.
We were all of us waiting to become electric.
We were all of us waiting to become something.
We were all of us waiting.
There are stories that once we get to the end, our eyes are not tempted to skip ahead and read those last lines, not because we do not want to know the ending but because we are so entranced with reading the stream of words that they cannot be torn away. This is one of those.
Sometimes we want to leave and we want to forget our responsibility, no matter how trivial or massive that responsibility be. Sometimes we want to throw our clocks out the window thinking it will stop time but knowing it will only create silence. Sometimes we want to throw our clocks out the window because then we can see something shatter out of our hands.
Speaking of being hungry, of running out of time, of the ambiguity of why we are here, Sasha Fletcher joins together the real and the not yet real, the brutality of the daily grind and the hopefulness of our daydreams, our night dreams and our nightmares.
Available from:
mud luscious | Powell’s | Amazon
Us
Michael Kimball
Tyrant Books, 180 pgs, $14.95
“She was breathing too much of herself out and not enough back in.”
Faced with our own mortality Kimball shows us gently, urgently the loveliness of the minutia, slowly pushing us forward through a story of a life’s love in the same slow pace that death sometimes takes, we are reminded that in an age of ambiguous diseases and a desire for classification we can still pass of old age.
Available from:
Tyrant Books | Powell’s | Amazon
Someday This Will Be Funny
Lynne Tillman
Red Lemonade, 164 pages, $14.95
During BookExpo America week, I saw Lynne Tillman read at Brooklyn’s WORD bookstore, and I was compelled to read her newest collection of short stories, Someday This Will Be Funny. As much as I was interested in Tillman as an author, I also wanted to engage with a product of Richard Nash’s new Red Lemonade Project.
Intimidation is easy to come by, and as I thought about how this was a book that had been reviewed in the New York Times and how this was a book written by an established author, I also thought about how this is a book from a young publisher, a book that while prodding and introspective, is also accessible in that necessary sort of way. It is too much without being too much. It is transformative, but not paralyzing. And so we find, validation comes in many ways.
While a collection of short stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, is not a collection that can be picked up and set down. At first, I was continuously trying to squeeze in a story here and a story there, and the words were not resonating as I wanted them to. And so, on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by white walls and beige carpet, sitting on a couch that looks through a window to architecture that could place me anywhere, I immersed myself.
These words require immersion, seeming to say to me as I read, “The longer you spend with me in one period, the more you will benefit.” The collection takes on a sort of study feel. Some stories took over the whole book with their resonance. I felt as though I had been lost in this language for days. Jumping from context to context, I felt an almost overwhelming absorption, an increasing curiosity. Mixing verse and prose, Tillman creates sentences that drive the reader forward in a beautiful game of reflection.
Tillman reinvents the idea of knowing what to keep and what to discard. She reinforces the idea that what is perhaps most important is telling stories. It was as though the words would not stop coming and when they did, on that final page, I was left wanting, my mind in a kind of wet chaotic expansion.
Forthcoming in November from Melville House Publishing is “Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto” by Gianni Rodari. “Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto” is “a fable for children and adults: a story of life, death and terrorism…”
Gianni Rodari gave free rein to his imagination, with inspired panache and gleeful lightness. :: Italo Calvino
Read more about the book at Melville House.
Download the leaked .pdf version here.
Some things we will always question. And then there are things that are different, little bits of wonderfulness that seem to, in some way, explain exactly what we want to be explained at that moment.
This piece by MG Martin at elimae does just that.
“and I’d like to get naked and into bed and be hot radiating heat from the inside these sweaters and fleeceys do nothing to keep out the out or keep my vitals in…”
Read the rest of “I’d Like a Little Flashlight” here.
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