Moe Lionel, On Prayer

“Remember how magic works,” Moe Lionel pleads as much to himself as to the reader, navigating death, race, memory, sexuality and violence.  What else can we do in the face of terrible loss, the inevitability and omnipresence of death? The prayer of this poem is memory of the possibility of hope.

An excerpt:

does your body feel it?

bug bitten and burned

you're not made to be outside the mind

you're made to breathe through this container

you're made to breathe though blessed be,

            be still

you're made to breathe though

            you're not so awful

you're made to breathe past survival

you're made to breathe beautiful

MOE LIONEL is a Minneapolis-based poet, fiction writer and performer whose work focuses on the intersections between genealogies, disease, trauma, (queer) families, and the body. He has received grants from Intermedia Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board for his short story collection What Was In Fact. He yearns for and in moments, finds hope for a world where it is a little bit easier to breathe. Reach him at moe.lionel.moe@gmail.com. On Prayer is for Gabrielle and Kyle.

Douglas Kearney, The Techniques of Acting

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As Douglas Kearney makes clear, “objects make shoddy models.” With lyrical verve, he dissects the objectified black stereotypes of television and film, the drug dealer, athlete, servant, and more, to expose the “spoo,”of the inner parts.

An excerpt:

shut-eyed children believe themselves invisible.

do likewise with eyes open for biz.

      yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes
 
yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes   yes

     yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes  yes

note: a scripted response of no is a split-second aria.

on awards night wear white thank and thank

         and thank.

DOUGLAS KEARNEY is the author of Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014), The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), and Fear, Some (Red Hen Press, 2006). He has received residencies and fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Washington Square, and Callaloo. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley and teaches at CalArts.

wifthing, Pattie McCarthy

"This thing needs thorns," writes Pattie McCarthy, this wife + thing submerged seamlessly in images of the quotidian daily and the reliquary past. Here, McCarthy marries the female body in its role of wife/mother to repetition, humor, and surprise unfolding on the page.

An excerpt:

it was a real word once a wifthing
has the flavor of the whole
day in her throat before she
gets out of bed she is successfully
camouflaged by her nice linens
& a wifthing's sons wake at 6.00 to watch
squirrels together on a windowsill

PATTIE McCARTHY is the author of six books of poetry: nulls (Horse Less Press, 2014), Quiet Book (Apogee Press, forthcoming), Marybones, Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Verso, and bk of (h)rs (all from Apogee). She has several forthcoming chapbooks: scenes from the lives of my parents (Bloof Books), fifteen genre scenes (eth press), and x y z && (Ahsahta Press). She was a 2011 Pew Fellow in the Arts and had a residency at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia, in summer 2013. She teaches at Temple University.

From ORDER, Dawn Lundy Martin

In the words of Fanny Howe, Dawn Lundy Martin’s poetry is “dense and deep . . . necessary, and hot on the eye.” Line, sentence, and stanza cohere in this sequence—taken from a longer series—that considers the body as site of “contained delightfulness” and terror.

An excerpt:

Order, we know, is love. Without clothes the

body feels its own flesh suddenly. To imagine fear

when it’s not present is to evoke the erotic, is to

prepare, a cool wet cloth on the body’s surface,

a cleansing, a room is tied down, a single chair as

anchor.

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN is author of A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2007), Discipline, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize (Nightboat Books: 2011), and the forthcoming Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2014). She lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

What monsoon is this, Purvi Shah

An imagistic collage of longing and language, What monsoon is this measures and mediates states of bliss, inquiry and questioning. “Here,” Shah writes, “all bodies searching for common language, an aspiration common to drench.” To match its lyric intensity, Number 20 in the WinteRed Series is also printed on gorgeous bright pink.

An excerpt:

What makes sky, sky?

Perhaps: it is descent of rain in unexpected
busts, the re-appearance of a cloud that
bears dew to balm your unsoothed soul.

Perhaps: it is the unheard song of birds you
imagine, migration of wings from one verse
to another.

PURVI SHAH is author of Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press: 2006) and winner of the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Service Award in 2008 for her work fighting violence against women. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Mausoleum, Caryl Pagel

After a long hiatus, we are pleased to present Caryl Pagel's new chaplet, Mausoleum. One part inner monologue and one part pure haunting, these poems circle and measure 'the precise details' of inner states of loss. Pagel's work is pleasurable for its formal elegance and for its ghostly or opaque voice, one that unfolds mysteriously on the page.

 An excerpt:

Once when you were young

you committed errors              Once when you

were young you fell in love

with a moody bard              There were

no stakes and from the grave

in which you wait you have

little to do but forever regret

it

CARYL PAGEL is the author of EXPERIMENTS I SHOULD LIKE TRIED AT MY OWN DEATH, published by Factory Hollow Press. She is the co-founder and editor of Rescue Press and a poetry editor at jubilat. She lives in Chicago.

Because Icarus-Children, Tiff Dressen

Lyrical and spare, this long poem from Bay Area poet Tiff Dressen lifts an image from Inger Christensen's work, developing it into a meditation on embodiment. This chaplet is printed in broadside-style, which accents the poem's elegant line breaks and expansive nature.


An excerpt:


Because Icarus-children scale to the sun

diaphanous membranes seal our lungs' intention

beacuse the earth-born herdsman has one hundred eyes

we have watched closely the impossible becoming

the inevitable


TIFF DRESSEN lives in Oakland, works at UC Berkeley and peregrinates in between. Along with being a member/editor of Kelsey Street Press, her lifelong pursuit is the synchronization of her left and right brain. She makes little books of poetry on occasion and frequently finds herself meditating on the color of Ionian sea and the Ionian sky.

WinteRed's New Address

For backissues and orders, please contact me by e-mail at: mori0181@umn.edu

or by mail:

2917 22nd Street East
Minneapolis, MN 55406

Though production has slowed, WinteRed is still going! Check back for new issues forthcoming in 2010.

Hermes is the god of the roads, Kate Greenstreet

Dreamspace and story combine in this meditation on rivers, secrets, dogs, pizza, and visitations. Kate Greenstreet's words create an atmosphere of mystery that won't disappoint.

An excerpt:

Things collect around a man, let you notice
who's at the center. We had chosen the theme "ghost"
but were having second thoughts.

Michael won't cut the reason
why. Knows the river names. Says:
"But we're still young." Then says, "I'm kidding."
The challenge was: "Things collect."

KATE GREENSTREET'S first book, case sensitive, was published by Ahsahta Press in 2006. Her second, The Last 4 Things, was published by Ahsahta in September 2009.

Threnody, Juliet Patterson

Threnody, the 16th edition of WinteRed, reads as a moving elegy for bees lost to Colony Collapse Disorder. Here, Patterson weaves together image and music to illuminate the loss of time implicated in the devastation of our natural world.

An excerpt:

Chance and chance
all that is visible
moves the eye
and pierces or erodes
the mind's structure.
Everything moves
on, the heather, the clover,
the juniper bushes, cheat grass.
And into land: water, the river
running into sea, and the sea, open ocean
contracted by a time-scale
of exponential growth,
the hale and the whole, effaced
and on the silent coasts,
failed wings


JULIET PATTERSON'S first book, The Truant Lover, was selected by Jean Valentine as the 2004 winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a 2007 Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 26, American Letters and Commentary, Bellingham Review, Bloom, Conduit, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Painted Bridge Quarterly, Swerve, Washington Square, Verse, and other magazines. She edits poetry for Konundrum Literary Engine Review and teaches poetry and creative writing in Minneapolis through the College of St. Catherine, Hamline University, and The Loft Literary Center. Visit her website: http://www.julietpatterson.com

When the Shadow Filled Window Opens, Eléna Rivera

Using elegant, meditative sentences and the form of a long prose poem, Rivera takes her readers on a journey through the varied thoughts, memories, and images involved in one moment of perception, with its contractions and expansions.

An excerpt:

The way the meadow observed from my desk becomes a site for daydreaming, for moving away from reality. Immensity glimpsed at by just ("just"?) changing one's position. The difference another makes as to how one hears things, the way grass follows a path, goes from yellow to blue to green and one remembers the smell of it, wiggling ones toes."

ELENA RIVERA'S recent publications are Mistakes, Accidents and a Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006), Suggestions at Every Turn (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), and Disturbances in the Ocean of Air (Phylum press, 2005). Her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howard's Secrets of the Breath is forthcoming from Burning Deck.

The Lawrence Welk Diaries * The Hallucinogenists, John Colburn

Our first poem-as-play. Colburn's The Lawrence Welk Diaries is a poem in four scenes featuring conversation between Lawrence Welk, Michel Foucault, Eartha Kitt, and Sam Shephard. The poem/play is followed by a "detour through a flaming hoop," or Colburn's poem, The Hallucinogenists.

An excerpt:

LW: In North Dakota I heard a pony
count handclaps through dirty teeth and
I understood, the gayer the lights, the
better the luck; we were all tripping
on that tour. I don't see getting drowned.
I don't see looking unlovely. It's mother's fault.
The hundredth bang, very sore, it makes
me smaller, I'll live on, I'll nude, I'll
swerve notes until the old Greek scales
fall from our eyes. As the pumping organ
cannot speak, I can guarantee you love.


JOHN COLBURN is originally from Mantorville, MN. He is a publisher and editor at Spout Press and teaches writing at the Perpich Center for Arts Education and at Hamline University. His first chapbook, Kissing, was published by Fuori Editions in 2002.

Elizabeth Robinson, The One Big Secret

The six poems in Elizabeth Robinson's new series meditate on the violence of the "briefly animate" body taken and taken apart. With their stripped-down line and chilling delivery, these are haunting poems.


An excerpt from "Creature"


The afterlife is its own dunce,

furred, stupid with bewilderment So

who did it--from or to us--

mixing sebum and

grime into a paste: briefly animate The

ground beneath us is slippery with it, cruel and

puling runt So life goes



ELIZABETH ROBINSON is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Apostrophe from Apogee Press, and Under That Silky Roof, from Burning Deck Press. She lives in Colorado and co-edits 26 Magazine, EtherDome chapbooks, and Instance Press.

GLINTS arrives

GLINTS is hot off the press. The 13th in our WinteRed chaplet series, GLINTS is a fantastic long poem in fragments by Twin Cities performance artist and poet, Gabrielle Civil. Here's an excerpt:

***

at the edge of the firewall

dark skin exaggerated like a church

stacks of books.
the scruff of deer.

fucked up
around the lake


It is Already Morning.


your brain feels and feels

like gold lining

on a rooftop

turned inside out.

reverberation

****

GABRIELLE CIVIL is a black woman poet, scholar, conceptual and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University and currently teaches literature and writing at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN. The goal of her work is to open up space.

Order GLINTS by sending $1.39 to WinteRed Press, 2306 27th Avenue South, Mpls. MN 55406

Song On, Thomas Sayers Ellis

Song On, by Thomas Sayers Ellis, offers six new poems that soar with inventive music and syntax. An excerpt:

Afro(Fisted) Pick

A symbolic growth tender-headed as protest,
The genre beneath
Blackness.
All red, black and green
Without being
Red, black and green.
All social work
And struggle.

The revolution at the root
Of every groove
Of grooming.
Soul wouldn't be Soul
Without it
And neither would America
Or where America
Bogarts peace.


THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS is an Associate Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University and a faculty member of the Lesley University low-residency M.F.A. program. He is the author of a chapbook, The Genuine Nego Hero (Kent State University Press 2001), The Maverick Room (Graywolf Press 2005) and the editor of the forthcoming Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets (University of Michigan Press 2006). His poems have recently appeared in Fair Trade, Lit, Mosaic, Tin House and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Visit his website: http://www.tsellis.com/

I Promise, Fanny Howe

Eleventh in the WinteRed series, I Promise is a broadside elegantly designed and printed on 8.5 x 14" paper.

An excerpt:

It is winter. Thick wet snow padding. Branches are broken, trees cracked by a recent ice storm. I cross over the bridge. On the right and below, where the river flooded and now is thick and iced, I see a deer hanging over the branch of a tree.
Velvety, frozen, not even the birds have set to eating it. The deer hangs like the fate of beauty among the branches and snow.

FANNY HOWE is the author of over twenty books of poetry and fiction, including On the Ground, Gone, Saving History, Famous Questions, and The Quietist.

Balm to Bilk, Rodrigo Toscano

Rodrigo Toscano's Balm To Bilk (a poem for two voices) riffs and rhymes its way through a playful discourse on language, politics, and the aesthetics of the poem. An excerpt:

exactement. when they blurt, we brandish
when they brandish, we blurt.

on the level of aesthetics you mean?

yes. but how do you pare the imperialist
from the imperialist aesthetic,
and the imperialist aesthetic
from the imperialist?
not an easy 'formula' as you say.

RODRIGO TOSCANO is a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. He is the author of To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya Books, 2004), Platform (Atelos, 2003), The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002) and Partisans (O Books, 1999). His work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry, 2004 (Scribner) and War and Peace (O Books, 2004) and In the Criminal's Cabinet: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction. He lives in New York City.

Sleep/Echo/Song, Dan Beachy-Quick

Ninth in the series is Dan Beachy-Quick's Sleep/Echo/Song. This chaplet mixes lyrics and lullabies written after the birth of the poet's daughter. An excerpt:

When a child I thought myself
A thought--
Then thought became my home--

When thought became my haibt
The ocean grew
Absent above the stone

DAN BEACHY-QUICK teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has two books: North True South Bright (Alice James) and Spell (Ahsahta). A third volume, Mulberry, will be published in the Spring of 2006 by Tupelo Press.

Paradise, Wang Ping

Eighth in the series is Wang Ping's Paradise, a series of poems and oral histories that chronical the effects of globalization on Chinese workers. An excerpt:

My Mountain Lotus,
Is this the paradise you've been seeking--
sweatshop, factory, restaurant, hair salon, house cleaning?
You wept in each letter: lonely, tired, broke, broke.
"Come home," I said, "better poor together than rich apart."
"Only fools like you plough the fields," you wrote back.
Then no words or money, only cousin's message:
"She rubs foreigners' feet in hotels
and hangs with fat old men.
Earrings, bracelets, hair like a bird nest . . .
Oh man she look shot, but not for you.
Hurry, claim your right as a man.
Enclosed is travel money.
Work on construction sites to pay me back."

WANG PING was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. After three years of farming in a mountain village, she attended Beijing University. In 1985 she left China to study in the U.S., earning her Ph.D. from New York University. She is the acclaimed author of the short story collection American Visa, the novel Foreign Devil, the poetry collection Of Flesh and Spirit, the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, and most recently The Magic Whip, a second collection of poetry. Wang is also the editor and co-translator of the anthology New Generations: Poetry from China Today. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and teaches at Macalester College.