Thomas Fucaloro on George Wallace.
Read MoreTwo Books: Linda Opyr, Nicole Terez Dutton
The Ragged Cedar by Linda Opyr (Writers Ink, 2012)
Read Moreto us as
Great weather for media has really become more than we could have ever hoped for. Reading through the submissions for the new anthology, it's just so gratifying the great writers out there sharing only their best with us. It's inspiring to us as editors, it's inspiring to us as writers. And thank you, to all the great weather poets who have really upped the playing field as in what a reading should be and do and without you there is no animal. So you got about 2 more weeks before submission deadline and we just hope you submit. We are excited to read your work. greatweatherformedia.com
Three Books: Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Laura Read, & Thomas Stock
Reviewed by GEORGE WALLACE
With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women by Jane Rosenberg LaForge (Aldrich Press, 2012)
Being and on-being, Lao Tzu said, produce each other. Rosenberg LaForge’s third chapbook of poems is smart like that. A prismic oscillation, with explorations and transmutations as ephemeral as dust that rises like mustard, as day that liquefies into heat. She offers up country girls who, failing to subsist on water and lard, diminish into sand. Faces of loved ones flicker into and out of being like improbable origami. Locked in the cambric of the world’s relentless weaving, it leaves us where it begins, where all things begin—in the whistling wind which sings in the heart of bone.
Instructions for My Mother's Funeral by Laura Read (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)
In these poems we find Laura Read in some unusual places; leaning out through a car window into the Wyoming dark, to avoid not hearing the silence of the man she rides beside. Riding the Octopus in Coney Island, heart like salt water taffy, screaming to get off. In the kitchen of a donut factory squirting raspberry filling into donuts, fingers thick with sugar and lips still swollen from a night of long dragged out kisses in ditches littered with anonymous boys. This is the America you were born into, dead so long you don’t even remember its voice, empty as pink Depression-era glass. “These breasts are heavy,” she intones, “Louisiana sweating down between them, and my body’s gone limp like the trees.” It’s enough to make you want to cut off your hair and offer it to the wind.
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Hidden Agenda: A Poetry Journal by Thomas Stock (Writers Ink Press, 2012)
We find poet and naturalist Stock "walking among pitch pines (and) mosses, crouched and touching their breast" in these placid and centered poems of his adopted home within the Long Island Pine Barrens ecosystem. Stock teaches us to live richly on little things—dragonflies in a zinnia patch, green frogs on the edge of a small pond. Stop here for a daily dose of the tender beauty of nature unfolding from the sometimes prickly stuff of bone-dry woodlands and tannin-brown water.
oooo not that one
So as many of you know, yesterday was Brant Lyon's birthday. He was one of the founding editors of our little press and he was also a presence that has remained long after his passing. While reading new submissions for our next anthology I can't get Brant out of my head. I hear him in my head saying, "ooo not that one" or "I like how this poem feels". He will continue to be a part of this press and its ideology of only printing the best. Thank you Brant, we all love you and like you said in your poem "Unlearning": Learning to unlearn what I've learned without forgetting. Thanks Brant. I finally understand.
The poem Unlearning is from Brant's book you are white inside from three rooms press.