The small poems that have heart, hipsters calling each other hipsters, and end of the world parties are what count.

It doesn’t matter if you hate YOLO, you can’t live here forever. Move on.

Beachsloth is a steely-dan playing poetry-leaking faucet in the shape of a smiling face.

That which does not kill you is fodder for the internet. Keep tweeting and be awesome, Like this book.

The pangs of hunger that keep us awake like a Murakami story are what make up the words on the screen like a “lifetime of isolation.”

Seriously, read it. It is strange and absurd and silly and everything one would hope a poetry collection by the fabled Beach Sloth would be.

I’d write more of a review, but It doesn’t matter. It never does. And it never should. This is a collection of awesomeness written by Beach Sloth and that’s what makes it count. If you don’t its your loss. It’s available to buy here.

 My favorite poems in random order:

Incoming Mail

Hope against hope

[email protected]

Kenneth

Philosophy Course

Stars of the Lid

The Vice Guide To

Communism

October

Bottlecap Press started in the summer of 2014 with a dream. A dream to spit in the face of the establishment, give rights back to the authors,  and in the process shake up the literary world. Now one year and 25 books later, Craig Mullins (aka CA Mullins) and Brendan Kolk are ready to take that dream further than ever before. So we sat down with them and discussed whats next for the experimental thought-factory known as Bottlecap Press.

1.   Let’s start with how Bottlecap started. How did you two meet / start working together?

Craig: Well, I started BCP all on my lonesome in Summer '14. At the time, it was a rinky dink little operation, and I had no idea what I was doing, but I was determined, dumped my savings into printing equipment, taught myself to bind books, the whole shebang. I'm just a guy with a dream, though. Brendan coming in in Jan '15, I think was think was what gave Bottlecap Press real direction. He helps me get my head out of the clouds and turn ideas into actions. We've been close friends since high school, we're both creative people, and spent a fairly large portion of the last eight years coming up with cockamamie ideas for projects. Conversations always used to start with "let's start a podcast" or "let's write a comic book." Most of the ideas were half-baked, and they almost never amounted to anything tangible, but we've always been schemers. It was only natural that once I finally got BCP off the ground, he would end up playing a role. Originally, the deal was that he'd stick around for six months, and then decide whether our growth in that amount of time warranted a long term commitment. Of course, six months passed, and we haven't looked back since. I think we're probably both going to end up retiring with this company someday.

 Brendan: Craig and I met in High School, sharing an honors English class of course! We quickly became friends, gelling well with a goofy, geeky sense of humor, and a desire to push the envelope.

One project we had to work on in that class was a video project. I don't particularly remember why, but we had to make a parody of something, and we did it in our style of course. A buzzing topic at the time was the 2008 election, and political debates, and so we ended up doing a parody of the debates. Which we did so in such a way that I think many people either didn't get it, or thought we went “too far” with our ideas and jokes. So maybe the seeds for this ultra creative publishing company were planted there. We both were always guys willing to push the envelope a little bit in order to do something creative!

 2.   What is your weirdest story behind making a book?

Brendan: I'm not sure I've got a particularly weird story about making a book. But around BCP, the funniest story I've got is our BCP X campaign. BCP X is the name of our monthly ebook subscription service, where every month we release one of our previously released books through that. So when we were trying to think of what to call this thing, I just started using BCP X as a place holder, which one of us remarked sounded like some sort of toxic secret chemical. So we were off and running with that as a dumb joke, which eventually turned into a whole marketing campaign. Which was a lot of fun to make, with a bunch of funny videos of us being goofy, and portraying ME as a villain!

 Craig: Not really a story, and not really about making a book, but a weird observation: something we say a lot is that time means nothing here. We keep ourselves so occupied with our projects, and things have grown and evolved so rapidly that we often look back just a week or two into the past and it feels like an eternity has gone by. I wouldn't be fazed to hear something that happened as recently as November being described as "the good old days." To confound things even more, because our work hours are so random, and often so intense, our sleep schedules tend to be fairly bizarre. I don't think I've seen daylight in the last week, and that's normal here. And there are times when there's been so much work to do that I've sat down and my desk and become so engrossed that I didn't get back up for more than 24 hours. I love it.

 3.    What is it about indie lit that excites you right now?

Craig: I think the most exciting thing about indie lit, to me, is the innovation. I see language used in entirely new ways almost every day. There's so much artistry, and so much talent. The mainstream presses are missing something huge here, and I am grateful and floored that I get to be a part of it.

Brendan: I think personally, the way the indie lit community is weaving itself together, helping and networking with other members. That's really great to see. 

My background as a creative person was more in music at first, and so to see indie lit catching on maybe in a way that indie music did years ago is refreshing and revitalizing for my own interests in literature.

4.   Can you tell us a bit more about how you personally got involved in the literary community?

Brendan: Well, my involvement is a bit less grand than Craig's. It really simply comes down to, for years I was a friend supporting Craig's writing, while studying communications and journalism at University. So when Craig went to start Bottlecap Press, and needed someone who could do editing and some graphic work and the ilk, it made for a good match for my interests.

Since then though, I've definitely become more involved, and love participating through BCP in the community. I like the idea that this is a way of helping authors grow, while I myself and BCP also grow. Or if it's not authors that need to grow, authors that might be overlooked by larger publishers.

 Craig: Although I've been writing for quite a while, community eluded me for a long time. I (much like your book!) am a bit antisocial. My first couple books were distributed almost exclusively among friends. I was naive, and I thought that was just how it was done. It wasn't until BCP started up that I actively began seeking out community. At the time, finding writers I fit in with, and that my dreams for BCP fit in with, was simply survival instinct. In a way, being broke and determined was what got me out of my shell. The internet played a big role. Message boards and Reddit, and eventually Facebook and Twitter started pointing me toward thriving communities of writers who I had so much in common with, and I was amazed that these communities even existed. It was a little intimidating at first, coming in as an outsider during a time (mid '14) when indie lit was in such a huge upheaval. I was afraid I wouldn't be accepted. Now, I don't know what I'd do without all the wonderful people I've met along the way. The writing community filled a hole in my life that I didn't even know was there. There are so many amazing writers and small presses all helping each other out for the sake of their art. It's beautiful.

 5.   Bottlecap Press is known for being experimental in all context of the word. What drives you guys to keep pushing the limit on what literature is? Is there an end goal?

Craig: Well, out of Brendan and myself, I'm the more experimental of the two. We've got a bit of a yin and yang thing going on. I like to push the envelope. I suppose it's in my blood. I've been writing in a fairly experimental fashion for years now, though I was mostly without a community until BCP opened up. My first book, Day Drunk Blues, was pieced together from scanned typewriter pages and pencil drawings. There are so many things that literature can be, and I want to help to express them all. It's important to me that the boundaries of literature be expanded to embrace new forms. It's a fine art, but I don't usually see it treated that way. I want to change that. It seems to me that most of the greats wrote in styles that were considered wild and experimental at the time, and it's shameful that mainstream presses have moved away from publishing risky books. Bottlecap Press is willing to take the chance on projects that try new things. We're misfits, and I don't think the world of art can survive without misfits. There's something to be said for tradition too, though, and I don't think traditional writing is unrepresented in BCP's catalog. Part of it, I think, is just that we publish books we like.

Brendan: Well, it's not us that's pushing literature, it's the work of our excellent roster of authors, which grows larger every month!

As far as why we enjoy that direction, I think it's part of the evolution of literature and art in general to push the boundaries, stake out new territory.

Although there are several titles we've been involved with that are less “out there”. I'd think. Certainly some of our best sellers so far, like Uptalk by Kimmy Walters, are very popular, so there's a certain level of universal enjoyability to a work like that. And one title I was very happy to work on was Amanda Dissinger's “This Is How I Will Tell You I Love You”, which was a collection of very unique poems about love and heartbreak. But it's the way that they're told, and not the subject, that I fell in love with. It felt like a very genuine collection.

 6.   What changes and experimentation can we expect to see from the Bottlecap in the future?

Brendan: Well, I'm glad I get to answer this one!

BCP X launched in December, and so while maybe that's the past, I think its best days lie ahead. The ebook market is one we were keen to get into, but we wanted to find the perfect way to do it, so that it wasn't just our entire catalog, but as ebooks. That can happen in the future too, but we wanted something more intriguing for our readers. Some way we could turn the ebook market into a way to promote all of our authors.

I've personally been working on a bit of a project in CD manufacturing and music production. Being a musician, the idea of expanding BCP into the music market, and helping artists there, has always been something that appealed to me personally. I don't have any project lined up just yet, but it's another medium Bottlecap will be looking into. Bottlecap Records, maybe? Hmm...

Any way to give artists (authors, musicians, whomever!) another chance to get out there, that's what I'd love to see, and what I love doing.

Craig's been working on some video channel ideas. For more specifics on that, you'd have to ask him.

Craig: We want to expand from simply publishing chapbooks and the occasional novella into a much greater variety of media. My ultimate goal for Bottlecap Press is to bring people together from across the artistic spectrum, and to help foster a wider arts community as a whole. This means working with visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, you name it, and creating entirely new types of artistic endeavors. I want to create a literary world that isn't tied down to words alone. Anything can be literary in the right context. We're preparing to dip our toes into the music scene fairly soon, I've got some animation projects in the works (it's always been a hobby of mine), I'm fascinated by certain types of software projects, we've even tossed around the idea of making a board game. I'd like this press to slowly evolve into something that falls in the grey area between the old Parisian literary salons and Andy Warhol's Factory. Most of this is long term, but you'd be surprised how many different types of projects we've already begun conceptualizing. It won't be a departure from what we're already doing, and I we'll always have our roots planted firmly in the book world, but in time, you can expect so much more.

 7.   Give us the lowdown on your GoFundMe. We are psyched for Bottlecap to make it happen.

Craig: The GoFundMe is an answer both to immediate needs and to future growth. BCP recently moved into a new house in Illinois, and as great as this place is, it needs a lot of expensive repairs that are going to set us back. On top of that, if we want to start producing more volume, we're going to need to upgrade a lot of our printing equipment, and in some cases, buy new equipment altogether. We published 20 books in 2015, and we want to double, maybe even triple that number in 2016. We'd also like to start buying our materials in bulk so we can cut costs down, both to provide more profit to our authors, and to be able to set aside more money for bigger projects. As well as that, If we meet certain goals, we want to use some of the funds to make the equipment purchases necessary to start diving into new types of projects: things like CD burners, a 3D printer, the list goes on. We're doing our best to keep our feet on the ground though, and so the primary goal here is to take the Bottlecap Press you know and make it bigger and better.

 Brendan: We've got some videos and rewards lined up for contributors, and the money will be put toward direly needed things for BCP to take the next step, or new equipment to make what we do better, or to break us into those future plans I mentioned previously. And one thing I've been saying recently is that BCP's greatest asset is it's employees and authors, so a project like this will hopefully go towards feeding some starving artists!

 8.   One Last Question: What do you think sets Bottlecap Press apart from other presses in the community?

Brendan: Well, I guess my best answer would be that Craig and myself are what is different. Craig and I, having the camaraderie we have, we work hard to exude our philosophy in what we do.  The belief that publishers should work for authors, and not the other way around. The idea of pushing the art in new directions. Not clipping the wings of those who are inherently creative and unique.

 Craig: This is a hard question to answer, because there are so many small presses that I love and respect. I think the biggest thing that sets Bottlecap Press apart is its philosophy. We believe the artist should remain firmly rooted in the artistic process, and because of this, we treat our authors as friends. We believe in working with artists on all levels, both established writers and ones who are brand new to the scene, and helping them grow. Our active interest in multimedia also means that writers with new and unconventional types of projects can find a comfortable home at BCP. We're flexible, and open to wildly new ideas. Aside from that, Brendan and my long history and camaraderie play an important role. We work together in ways that many can't. My wild imagination brings big new ideas to the table, and his common sense helps to turn those ideas into a reality. We balance each other out, we're able to successfully navigate a wider range of possibilities than many presses would even consider. We have a camaraderie that encourages us to grow, and grow, and grow, sometimes in surprising new directions, and I think the biggest thing we can offer to artists is the opportunity to come and grow with us.

                                              A Review by Mallory Smart

A novel as a nightmare. A novel as NSA watchdogs. A novel as tin soldiers following. A novel as the perpetual war. 

“Surviving Does Not Absolve You From The Sins Of Living”- Bronis

Dark Satellites, WT Paterson’s first novel, paints a picture of a world. A strange yet familiar world. A world with elephants that are not quite elephants and satellites that aren’t quite satellites. The mere act of living in this world is warped and nightmarish and the human mind lay broken in the ruin of it. Populations are distorted by fear and paranoia. War is everywhere. 

There is no war zone when the satellites can access your thoughts. The dark satellites are out to get you. Manipulate you. Distort you. Bend your mind to their will and laugh at your inability to cope with the strain like elephants with glowing eyes. Death is the only cure. The euphoria of the kill outweighs all. Destroy the dancing silhouettes.

There exists a man-made island built of high walls in the shape of a seven point star. People so shattered by the horror of the death all around them, fling their bodies off the walls and into the ocean. 

Walls cannot protect you from your own mind. Death and war is maddening. 

The novel as a whole is a fluid and poetic, dark atmosphere. Lynchian and prophetic of perhaps our own future.

Paterson presents us with a non-linear narrative that follows ubermensch-soldier, Poe– a man fighting the satellites. A man without fear. A who loves battle. Sometimes coming off as a walking masculinity complex, Poe exemplifies the psyche of a man not just in love with war, but broken by it: 

"feeling a man die in his hands and then feeling the soft body of the young girl in front of him made him unusually complete."

This novel pulls no punches. WT Paterson lays all forms of horror out in this gripping sci-fi fantasy, whether it be the shocking images of children dead or the carnival like sex atmosphere of the island. 

I saw the book as an allegory of a post-9/11 world. It highlights the ways we sacrifice our lives and freedoms to protect against fear. How we let technology intrude our daily lives and let those who would exploit our fears manipulate it. This book may be a sci-fi fantasy, but it is deeply entrenched in reality. It provokes deep thought and reflection. I highly recommend checking it out, even if you aren’t typically into this genre (I wasn’t before reading it).

    A Playlist To Read By:

                                                       by Olivia Olson 

 Dalton Day’s latest collection, Fake Knife, is available now through Freeze Ray Press. Find out more about him at myshoesuntied.tumblr.com.

 1. How do poems take form for you? Do you start with a form in mind, or does one surface as you write?

Usually my poems start with an image, & then everything else sort of unfurls from there. There's that saying that a poem will tell you how it wants to be written, I think. I think that's a saying. Maybe I just made it up. Poems are ghosts just trying to tell you what they need to move peacefully into the afterlife. There, I definitely made that up.

 2. You often use untraditional punctuation in your poetry. What do you think a poem gains by playing with punctuation?

I think poems without punctuation are more immediate - less controlled. A flood. A small flood, where you're like, "if that were any bigger there would really be a problem, but for now I just like watching it." & your friend is like "it'd be a lot more enjoyable to watch if you'd shut up." & your other friend is like, hissing the whole time.

 3. What do you do to make sure your writing never falls into a rut?

I read a lot of poems. I read a lot of different poems. Poems I could never write. That's the most important thing. I try not to listen to poets talk about writing poems too much. Or at least try to be really good at filtering out the folks who are just masturbatory instead of actually care about writing & the people it affects. I consume other forms of writing / creative output: films, comics, music, Twitter. I pet a lot of dogs.

 4. Your poems often borrow writing styles from forms other than poetry—I’m thinking specifically of the “One Act Play” suite recently published in Pretty Owl Poetry.  What do your poems gain from this style-bending?

I love plays. I love setting & drama & the idea that no two performances are the same, nor could they ever be. I love the immediacy of an audience. So, in making a poem that was a play, I changed the stakes, I think. I allowed myself to build rather than demonstrate, & then watch, helplessly, as the whole thing collapses. & isn't that what writing is? No, really. Somebody tell me. I'm so scared.

 5. Can you think of a poem that was particularly difficult for you to write? Why was it a challenge?

Inject / Extract / Inject / Extract (from the first issue of Wildness)

You say you feel like a needle, dropped.

You don’t say that, exactly, but you feel that, exactly.

Swollen is not what we ever mean.

Moon, instead.

Moon, like, Moon the first time we ever made it there & joy was said but fear wasn’t.

Fear.

Fear.

Fear?

The body can’t attack itself.

I don’t say that, exactly, but I believe that, exactly?

I don’t believe that, exactly, but the wind wants to make a sound when it moves through you.

I can’t hear it.

The body does what it does, without asking us.

I’m covered in hands, Mountain. & now, only some of them are yours.  

This was a challenge because diagnoses are a challenge. Because grief makes even less sense before it's called for. Because writing something down only helps me see it a little more.

 6. What are you absolutely terrified of?

Bees. Losing my memory. My mom dying. My grandmother dying. Climate change. Men. Drunk men. Being in a car. Driving a car. Car horns. Loud noises in general. The idea that something is wrong with me & I don't even know it. Freaky Fred from Courage the Cowardly Dog. Donald Trump. All my teeth falling out. Etc.

 7. If you could magically transform one poem published online into a person so as to be best friends with it, which poem would you choose and why?

Sara Woods poem "Dear Juniper" published in Guernica. Because Sara's poems always make me calm, & it would be nice to have that calm as a person I could talk to & go to St. Vincent concerts with. Because this line: "I'm tired / of pushing against my boundaries like there isn't light / slipping in from everywhere all the time & those cracks / are us-shaped."

 8. If you could redefine “maudlin” what would you make it mean?

                                         JOY by S. Kay (January 27th 2016)

Become Death or Atomic Rain on the Shoulders of Atlas by Luis Neer (January 27th 2016) 

                                    EMOJI DEATH MASK by Trey Pharis

      Portrait Of The Artist As A Viable Alternative To Death by Ross McCleary

                                 An Interview with Emily O’Neill by Olivia Olson

Emily O’Neill has a chapbook coming out from FreezeRay Press early next year called You Can’t Pick Your Genre, and some of her work can be found in Maudlin House here. We asked her some questions about her work and her book, and she was kind and fierce enough to answer.

1. “Superbitch,” one of your poems from You Can’t Pick Your Genre and published in Maudlin House, is written to Rose McGowan. What inspired you to write to her?

Rose has always been a hero of mine and also a mega-crush. During my extensive rewatch of the Scream movies for You Can’t Pick Your Genre, McGowan was very publicly calling out rampant Hollywood misogyny, so as I was watching her pal around with Sidney, I was also watching her saying so many things I identified with on my Twitter timeline. I wanted to write a kind of love letter to all the versions of powerful that I've seen her be. She's had a lot of roles as an actress where she has a sharp edge to her, and on my best days, I hope to be that sharp. The poem started as a kind of reaching towards what makes her fierce, and became a little anthem for the kinds of women I advocate for and surround myself with--superbitches pushing back against the stupid trope that a good or successful woman has to do everything without agitating anyone in power.

2. Both “Neighborhood Watch” and “These Kids Today” are written to an unidentified “you.” Is it the same you or totally different you’s? Do you find yourself often writing to a generic you?

My relationship with poems addressed to a "you" is complicated. Those two poems could certainly be written in the direction of the same poem, but I feel like that's not entirely accurate. "Neighborhood Watch" is a poem/play that comes from a frustration with suburban codes of silence. Plenty of violent, terrible things are happening all the time, even in the communities that want you to believe them bastions of moral uprightness. As a survivor of domestic violence, I do a fair amount of writing that speaks to that, and people who think they know me well often respond by saying "I'm so sorry, I had no idea," but even more often than that, there's gaslighting that happens, where my experiences or the experiences of others are denied entirely. I'm really sick of the stigma attached to testifying to your experiences, and even sicker of the refrain "how could this have happened here?" It happened here because these things happen everywhere. There is no such thing as a community deserving of violence. The running undercurrent in Scream and its sequels is that the violence is entirely unexpected in the suburbs, that these people lead "acceptable" lives that are interrupted by outrageous killing sprees. But think about how many people are dealing with death or its cousins on a regular basis, and also how invisibly that happens.

"These Kids Today" is speaking to a different kind of disgust I experience in communities insisting they have no problems, and that's with the way violence is simultaneously denied and normalized. It's not happening, but it's all we see. It's not our problem to repair until it touches our lives directly. Billy Loomis, (spoiler alert) the killer in the first film, is a sick kid who is sick because of his own entitlement. He feels entitled to a perfect life, and when his life loses that perfection, he brutally murders the woman he sees as responsible, then systematically ingratiates himself with her daughter so that he can terrorize her further. The movie is campy, which is good, because the plot is chilling.

In general, I write "you" poems the way a lot of people write essays. They're a way of working out what my relationship is to things I'd like to be critical of. When I write a poem with a "you," that you is separate from myself, but in the writing I'm able to identify what in myself is also present in the subject I'm picking apart. If you can recognize a societal failing, chances are there's some small shred of it internal to you, and I wrote many of these poems trying to tease out what shape my privilege takes.

3. Is it important to you to include current events in your writing?

I wouldn't say current events influence me directly, but I'm also not unaware of what's happening in the world I'm writing in. I rarely write poems towards specific historical moments, but I know that current events will send me spiraling around collecting ideas and language around a theme, which is usually where a poem starts for me.

4. A number of your poems include references to religion, particularly Catholicism. Is that an important theme for you? Why?

I was raised Catholic and went to private Catholic school until I was 16, at which point, during a college prep meeting with a guidance counselor and my mother, I was told being an artist was a waste of my intelligence. I dropped out immediately upon hearing that, which was probably the most definitive choice I'd made in my life up to that point. So, thank you Academy of the Holy Angels for trying to force me into a high paying career track. I'm a waitress and a teacher now and generally a really happy person. That wouldn't have happened for me if I didn't break with the church. As a queer person, as a working class person, all the rhetoric of waiting for a reward from God for piety rang false to me. There are still things about the Catholic traditions that I really respond to on a visceral emotional level, but more of that is tied to the rituals of mass and prayer than anything else. I don't feel close to a god, but I do feel close to the comfort of repetition. There's a lot of power in having a routine. I suffer from a pretty intense chronic anxiety disorder and ritual and routine is a thing I took with me when I left being Catholic. I think a lot about God in the lives of the people I love, and how that God does work for them. My mother's mother is one of the most faithful Catholics I'll ever meet, and she is also one of the best humans I've ever known. Her religion is so important to who she is, but the kindness inherent to her is a product of her selfless choices, not some invisible creator. I know she'd be sad to hear me say something like that, and a lot of my writing is a dance where I'm trying to negotiate the sadness the faithful people in my life experience when I tell them I don't believe the way I once did. God is a character in my story, but it's a lot more complicated than I was raised to believe.

5. Can you think of a poem that was particularly difficult for you to write? Why was it a challenge?

There are so many hard ones, but one in particular stands out in my mind--it's called "Everybody Knows That I'm a Mess" and is in the most recent issue of The Journal. It's about an abusive relationship I was involved in during my first two years at college. The person I was with harmed me in so many ways and for a long time it was too painful to face what had been done to me, especially because subsequent partners, upon finding out about these horrible things, either left me or used the abuse as leverage to belittle me or make me feel dependent on them. Abuse begets abuse for so many of us, and in writing that poem I was ripping a wound back open so I could close it. It's another "you" poem and is aimed directly at this man who assaulted me countless times and once I was through the first draft I was physically ill. The first time I ever read a draft of it in public, I ran from the venue crying afterwards. It's still really raw to think back on the events contained in the poem, and the poem's form reflects that. The language is fragmented, the memories are not fully intact. But I exorcised them by making them into an object separate from myself, and that is an act that gives back the power he tried to steal from me by doing what he did.

6. What is your loftiest poetic ambition?

Loftiest poetic ambition--I just want to keep writing until it stops feeding me. Any success is the product of the work, but the day the work stops feeling urgent to me is the day I'll stop writing. What I want more than anything as a writer is for what I'm making to feel urgent and for that urgency to draw me closer to people who will teach me, with the words and works, what being better looks like. I want to get into grad school, I want to be paid for my writing, I want to have more time to make, but all of that would be incidental without the urgency. My goal, the big thing I keep pinned above me always, is urgency. If the poem isn't urgent, I should be spending my effort elsewhere.

7. If you could pick one poem published online that would define your day so far, what would it be?

These three from That Which Comes After by Alexis Pope are little worlds I think of so frequently and today feels like one of them. Food and skin and little snapshots. Not wanting to get out of bed. Quiet, but not quite just that. I woke up too warm but didn't want it to stop and these poems get at that well.

8. If you could redefine “maudlin” what would you make it mean?

                                                                                              By Olivia Olson

Sonya Vatomsky’s first full length collection of poems, Salt is for Curing, will be published this month, so we took the opportunity to ask some questions about it—its witchiness, its earthiness, and all its literal exorcisms.

 What kinds of thematic threads run through the poems in Salt is for Curing?

Oh, well, there’s definitely a lot of food in there, but it’s not really about food. Things occur as motifs: teeth, dill – salt obviously. And women, and bodies, and autonomy, and trauma, and power. But at the very root of it, it’s me exorcising my demons – literal demons, literal exorcisms – while making people think they’re reading a witchy little book of folklore.

Something that I really admire about your writing is the way you use parts of the body in strange and interesting ways—I’m thinking particularly about the burning eyelashes in “Dame à la Capuche” and the marrow in "Дача.” How are body parts important to your poems?

Thank you! I was particularly obsessed with the body while writing those poems – specifically with the idea of body-horror as a genre and with the destruction of the body, the body made meat. A lot of the book was coming from this very female place, which is where I was at the time, and I wanted to work with violence to the female body* without sexualizing it or othering it – making meat of the body in a cooking way, a drawing-power-from-the-hearth kind of way. Making nourishment of myself.

*And by “female body” I mean specifically my body, though through poetry it gets sublimated into something that includes women and/or people assigned “female” at birth and/or people perceived as female… basically anyone who has experienced, to any degree, the weight of what it means to physically navigate a patriarchal world.

What was the process of collecting poems for Salt is for Curing like? How was it different from putting together My Heart in Aspic?

Well, I wrote both of them fairly quickly. Or in a short period of time is maybe more accurate. I think the oldest poem in both books is from late November or early December of 2014, and then I started sending Aspic out that December. Salt I finished at the very end of May. It’s all talking to a very specific point in my life, so that timeline made sense for me. Otherwise, the difference is mostly in breadth and, yknow, actual quantity of poems. I put all of the Aspic poems in Salt because I still felt very strongly about all of them, so they’re not companions so much as Salt is like a trilogy set and Aspic is its first book – though that metaphor doesn’t really work because poetry isn’t linear like that.

Did you have a poem in Salt is for Curing that was particularly difficult to write, or one that surprised you particularly?

Oh, they’re all difficult. They are very intense little poems. As far as surprise goes, I’m more surprised by which poems tend to resonate the most with people. The one I’ve gotten the most positive feedback on is maybe my least favorite of the bunch, and that’s always curious and weird.

Why poems? Why not another kind of writing?

I do other writing as well, but I’m interested in myself quite a lot, and like using art as a way to dissect and pick at that, so creative nonfiction and poetry tend to be the most useful formats. I think I prefer poetry to creative nonfiction because it’s a little more secretive. Like moon runes, or something, where you have to be in this specific place at a specific time of year with the moon at a specific fullness for the meaning to show up – so it’s enjoyable literature in daylight but for some people all of the words will sync up and glow and be potent and mind-blowing.

Russia turns up in your poetry fairly frequently. What does Russia mean to you?

I was born there, and lived there till I was six, so it’s a lot of my experience – first being Russian, then being a Russian immigrant, then being an American with this kind of hidden second life of different languages and food and traditions. Being Russian was something I experienced a lot of harassment around until maybe the second or third year of high-school, and harassment’s a thing that can make you defiantly cling to a part of your identity in a way you might not have otherwise. So it’s evocative of my childhood, which was the time before I let my life and choices and whatever get really swept up by the current of depression and anxiety, so it’s a good metaphorical (or literal?) stand-in for my authentic self.  

  When does a poem feel finished to you?

When it’s good?

Do you listen to music when you write?

Well, one of the medications I take makes my ears ring constantly, so sort of. But intentionally, no. And not when I read, either – mostly I’ll only listen to music when I’m doing something more tactile and less cerebral, like cooking or yoga or whatever.  

If you could redefine “maudlin” what would you make it mean?

I just looked up the etymology of “maudlin,” and apparently it’s descended (through French) from Magdalene, like, Mary’s tears, Mary crying, sadness, and so on, which is something I did not know and would not have guessed. My tendency with incorrectly defining words is towards pulling roots from incorrect linguistic sources, so here I’m thinking of maedl/maedchen in German, which means girl – where we get the word “maid,” “maiden” etc. The vowels are off, but German is pretty into vowel shifts so maybe it could have worked out, in another universe. I know that’s not exactly redefining, but I’m more into deconstructing and destroying than making, in a way.

Sonya Vatomsky is a Moscow-born, Seattle-raised ghost and the author of poetry collection Salt is for Curing (Sator Press) and chapbook My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press). They are an asst. editor at Fruita Pulp, where they also review poetry. Find them by saying their name five times in front of a bathroom mirror or at sonyavatomsky.tumblr.com.

Kyla Bills’ Everything Dies and I Guess That’s Okay is a collection of poetry that whispers the truth while it screams the emotions. Bills captures a love that pulses from possibilities but bleeds out black with concrete uncertainties. A type of lust and longing that bubbles under too many synonyms and day-old mac n cheese. Her poems chart through the confusion that millennials shift through to find themselves, to find a calling, to find one who they can be swept up by.

Bills is painfully self-aware, a both broken and indestructible woman who continues to fight a battle she knows she will lose. One we will all inevitably lose. She swells up with questions and then pops them with insights only to shatter those with another perspective — a lens smeared with contradicting opinions and she does this effortlessly.  

 “i like to think that love can’t be bad

  but i don’t think that’s true”

She understands the fleeting and romantic aspects of love and bright city lights as well as the anxiousness and confinement of Cul-de-sacs. She is the ode to the non-traumatic adolescents but the overly-emotional childhoods. Her love, her boyfriends, her un-antiquated view of the world shimmers out her poems like crackling light at dawn which never warms what it touches. But it wants to. Her statements are bold and loaded and at the same time easy to digest.

“where are you?”

“somewhere between accepting that you don’t want me

 and still being angry at you for it.”

Everything Dies and I guess that’s Okay is the darting screenshots and mirrored aftermaths of a tech savvy girl trying to piece together the unknown that is her life. That is the afterlife. And she is scared of piecing things together too well, fitting the edges without any sort of resistance because if she is good at it — she will get addicted.

“our society is pretty fucked in that way

 doing anything well is probably unhealthy

 everyone is addicted to something

 and we all just pretends it’s okay

 usually”

Her poems are the beauty in back alleys and the walks to museums. Never the art. It’s her flaws and the awareness of these flaws that make her words inviting and make her fascinating.

“art is the day that we forget about each other

 art is the first day we met”

Her words stand alone because she is alone. When she is with someone else, she still is and when she is truly alone, she is more so. Her blacked vulnerability trails off each phrase with swift cadence and a slow progression to the understanding. Slow but necessary. It is a lingering thought that whips across rooms until it hushes but never leaves. Bills’ poems are drunk stupors right at the beginning of dusk and the day’s weight at 7 a.m. Understanding that only come from living.

It is remarkable the amount of gusto littered in her poetry for a women her age. She is beyond her years while staying relevant and relatable to the millennials. And I am beyond changed after reading.

You can buy a copy of Everything Dies and I Guess That’s Okay from Ghost City Press here.

                                       A Review by Mallory Smart

 Cameron Pierce is at the edge of the world. Gazing at the vast nothingness. The water: an abyss that both drowns and sustains. He is in Portland. We are with him. Here we all stand, youthful/ innocent/ ambitious. We are dumb / idealistic. We fill up our time only with little moments and they are both wonderful and equally beautiful.  We want these fragile things to last forever. Like dreams that fade away as we wake up or snapchats that disappear after we miss that 10-second window to hold onto them forever/ fish that are just beyond our grasp. Some things just aren’t meant to be permanent and that’s what makes them beautiful. We can’t stay this way forever / we wish we could harness these feelings of wide-eyed wonder. But we can’t. And one day we will die. And this is sad but also beautiful and also kind of fun to think about. It is this brand of sadness that makes up The Incoming Tide, a book written for all sad men and what sad men do: drink beer and fish. 

Cameron Pierce’s meditation on adulthood, love, and these “little moments” is 73 pages combining both poetry and prose.

Here is a glimpse:

 from “THE PROMISE OF WATER”:

 And yet I don’t wake early just to fight with dinosaurs.

I wake because of the promise of water

isn’t a thing a man can hold for long,

like a love song from another world.

 From “THE LAWNMOWER CHAPTER”:

 For now, I’m back to mowing my own lawn. The dead man’s lawnmower runs great. Someday, when I’m old and gray, maybe I’ll climb inside.

Life is fleeting and these small things / these fishing trips / the things that haunt us– these are the things that fill our life. They are the things that make it worth living and what makes us wake up each day. The Incoming Tide is conversation about all of these things. A study of the ephemeral and the weird. So read it. It’s pretty damn good. 

 It’s available from Broken River Books here.

                                            A Review By: Kailey Tedesco   

           In Ada Limón’s “Miracle Fish,” she beckons her readers to “think of how far a voice must have to travel to go beyond the universe.” Surely, Limón’s Bright Dead Things (2015) is a direct answer to such a command. With a vast scope that takes its readers from Kentucky to Brooklyn and through the gaucheries of youth to the resigned wisdom of womanhood, this collection is a testament to the lasting wonderment of American poetry.

           A seasoned poet having released Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers, Limón immediately asserts her aplomb in the opening “How to Triumph like a Girl.” In a style reminiscent of Sharon Olds, the poem communicates ideas of feminism and oneness with gusto. The speaker imagines how it would feel to have the heart of a horse:

                       Don’t you want to believe it?

                       Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

                       the huge beating genius machine

                       that thinks, no, it knows

                       it’s going to come in first.

             Perhaps the most enticing aspect of poems like these is Limón’s ability to pull the reader into the poem. We are not mere observers of these wonders, but instead a part of the conversation. In a mix of prose and verse poems, an unpretentious verisimilitude evades. In the prose poem, “The Quiet Machine” the speaker navigates the quieter parts of the country, by trying to emulate their inwardness:

                                                                                     There’s how I don’t

                       answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the

                       floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock.

             The narrative writing straddles the accessible and philosophical in a way only a masterful poet can. Beauty is found in everything from roadkill to the dogs of America, and more importantly, Limón asserts, the self is found in these beautiful things. In “I Remember the Carrots” the speaker recalls the “bright dead things” of her childhood. There is magic in the ability to tear living carrots from the ground and still watch them glow neon:

                                                 What I mean is: there are days

                       I still want to kill the carrots because I can.

             This strive for power over self and nature occurs again and again. It seduces the reader into finding their own, indigenous power. I mean “seduces” in every sense of the word, as Limón’s poems are sexy and charged with language meant to awaken. For example, What separates a woman from a pitbull? “Service” say they are the same:

                                                 So, right then, in the dim lights

                       of the strange garage, I lifted my skirt and pissed

                       like the hard bitch I was.

           Conversely, “The Whale and the Waltz Inside of It” answers that there is nothing that separates person from whale:

                         Did you know giant whales have a spindle cell

                       making them capable of attachment

                       and of great suffering?

             What makes Bright Dead Things so remarkable is its constant grab at the readers attention. Imagine sitting alone in a coffee house and eavesdropping on an intimate conversation. Before you know it, the conversation has ended, the bill has been paid, but you still find yourself wanting to hear more. This collection propels the reader in a similar vein. It is irresistible in its almost Kantian reminder that there is beauty in all things, especially all things we’ve forgotten. The final lines of “Field Bling” read:

                         my light flies all

                       on its own, neon

                       and bouncy like a

                       wannabe star.

          Let the familiar light of Limón’s collection remind you of the light inside of everything.

                              You can buy Bright Dead Things here.

                                           A review by Andrew Larimer 

In Noah Cicero’s first poetry collection, Bipolar Cowboy, we get to look at the inner workings of a mind strangled by love’s void-like tendrils and left as fragments from a debilitating mental illness. The collection charts through the love that he has gained, lost, and misunderstood. He digs deep and uncovers the uncertainty of self that seeps out like black tar once relationships are over as well as once anything has come to its end. Or maybe it’s because he knows some things will never even begin. His language is short, concise and simple — allowing us to grasp what he is really trying to say within each poem.

Bipolar Cowboy captures the idea of forgetting why we came in the first place. Why the tiny things in everyday life will always matter a little too much. It is about his pain that is almost soothing and kind eyes that can’t help but grow still. In “Jesus in Walmart,” Cicero asks himself why he is so sad and then says, “He remembered everyone who tried to help him in the last six months,” and proceeds to list all the names of those who tried. So, it seems that everything he builds regarding all his relationships lead to nothing without him veering. And he is engulfed in a sadness because he is aware that he leaves these friends without ever truly knowing who was there for him at all. He regrets this trait and he encapsulates this remorse beautifully with a subtle hint of how the mundane can be monumental.

Despite the confusion his poems encompass, the usual moments he chooses to write about are always clear-cut. “Starbucks Pigeon” is an example of this. It is about a boy running in a Starbucks parking lot and scaring a pigeon until it flies away. It invites us to bask in the confusion with him instead of being swept up by it and left scratching our heads when it ends. We know what’s happening, a boy is terrifying a pigeon, but he means we will never fully know what is bound to head our way until we are consumed by its giant shadow.

This poetry collection is ruthlessly self-aware, heartbreakingly unstable in thoughts that are clear, and is how beige, nothingness sand can sit pretty on tepid heat where nothing grows, like the desert he wants to die in. It tactfully shows us hushed judgments that heap and love which will fall victim to mental instability every time. While it artfully showcases guilts that curdle and goals we give to ourselves and to those we love that will continue to wane.

Cicero is both honest and a liar. He is quick like flowing river water: a lifeless and stagnant-like cracked sediment. He is two entities clashing inside one person trying to be whole so he can be someone else’s half. But he will probably never get there and he is saying that neither will some of us.

You can snag a copy of Bipolar Cowboy here from Lazy Fascist Press.

         (a stream of consciousness review of Joe Giordano’s Birds of Passage)

                                                  by Brennan Burnside

Imagine a Hubert Selby Jr. world where a Nicholas Sparks protagonist is being chased with the bloody, emotionless meat cleaver of Mike Hammer.

Imagine the mania of the rhizomic cesspool that was turn-of-the-century New York City for shivering masses wandering through the gates of Ellis Island, receiving new names, becoming homeless for the first time in their lives.  

This is Leonardo Robustelli, Joe Giordano’s protagonist.  

I see him walking through his hometown of Naples. Shoulders down and confidence (along with the economy) at an all-time low –he’s trying to shake off the shame of unemployment.  

Mother pushes him to marry.  

Father utterly despises him.  

Italy is a land of obstacles.  It’s too old to survive in any longer.  Every decision Leonardo would ever make was made for him a long time ago by some vicious cartographer in an ivory tower millions of miles high.

Enter two-bit swindler Signor Moretti and you know the type. There’s always the end of the world in their eyes.  They sell you sweaters to protect from the mushroom cloud.  They’ve got a vial of tears to cure death and only need your whole life saving.

This is snake oil he pushes on Leonardo: if you survive the voyage across the ocean, then a bountiful life awaits you and your family!  

Bullshit.

He fails to mention the Irish crime bosses and WASP government officials could care less whether he lives or dies.  He fails to mention the poverty, disease and loneliness awaiting him in the Canaan across the ocean.  

It doesn’t matter if you speak Italian either. Money is the true language. Mammon is the god of the world.

It strips the flesh away.  It rips it away.  The organs are next.  They’re replaced with cheap cogs and levers.  You run on gasoline or diesel in Giordano’s world.  You bleed rust.

Readers watch the brutal circus.  We’re asked to see only shadows.  We’re given walking skeletons.

Scenes almost verge on bullet points.  

Character development is done through a removed juxtaposition.  There’s little investment otherwise.  There is no time for reflection.  We’re moving at the velocity of will.  Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is the presiding muse of this work: an id of pure capitalistic mania that is drawn to the surface through the slow erosion of the self.  The dehumanizing process of becoming “American”.  

Short spurts of gain are followed by sudden collapses that erase entire histories.  Lives are ended with the emotionless clank of a closed account. We fly through the narrative imagining that speed has a meaning, but when things seem to finish we are raw, hollow.

Think of Kafka’s hunger artist.

Imagine him sitting in the cage at the back of the fair. The exposure to the elements, year after year.  Storms batter him.  Insects sting his flesh.  God fixated on the rich and well-dressed, staring out from the small window of his slender white tower.  In a weak voice, the hunger artist explains that he starves himself because the food he longs for has never existed.  If it had been, then he would eat.

Leonardo survives.  Understand that.  But many do not.  Many are intentionally forgotten in the cracks of the narrative.  And we understand this about the immigrant experience by the end: that people suffered, people died to live in poverty in a “New World” not because they are masochistic.  Rather, the food which they crave will never be given.  It is impossible to produce.  Because it is the act of striving for the impossible food that they long for that will inevitably destroy them and, whether they know it or not, this is the food that they all end up begging for.

Birds of Passage: An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story is available from Harvard Square Editions.  More information is available at harvardsquareeditions.org or joe-giordano.com

                                                    By Andrew Larimer

Luis Neer, a senior at Oak Glenn High School in Chester, West Virginia, is publishing his first Chapbook with Ghost City Press on October 27 titled, “This is a Room Where You Wait for New Language.” His poems are like constant, glittering tidal waves. They shine with promise of change and understanding while reaching for truths; but sometimes recede back into the ocean, sending him in the direction he first travelled from. His words grip stars unafraid of their heat. They listen to the whispers in school hallways and project those secrets into a void-like night air, both infinite and confined. And they detach Neer limb by limb as if he were on a metal slab, uncovering what can be found within and attempting to grasp that which will always loom on the edge of fingertips. Even if it’s a concept that is completely out of reach, he manages to put it in his sight. Neer’s Chapbook is the radial line that pierces through our lives that we have constructed with or without our consent. It lends knowledge from a young man whose own answers begin to ask the questions that should reverberate through our minds, but we simply didn’t look or think hard enough to conjure them.  

What bubbled inside you that triggered you to write This is a Room Where You Wait for New Language?

I just sort of fell into it, I guess. I had been working on another manuscript for a few months, but it never felt fully cohesive, no matter how much work I put in. At some point I stopped writing completely, which is normal for me. I have creative draughts. And for that entire month when I wasn’t writing, I was watching the poetry world. When I started again I could see the style of the new poems becoming increasingly weirder and more abstract.

Then in July, I was in Morgantown, West Virginia for a four-day writing workshop at WVU, and attended a craft talk by a poet named David Hassler. He remarked that poetry is like a waiting room—a place of indiscriminate longing. I wrote that down. The line from my own poem, “Stanza Room,” that came from that notion is “this is a room where you wait for new language.” It puts a parallel between poetry as a waiting room and heartbreak as a room where your thoughts are indecipherable. You just disintegrate. You don’t know what to say.

Normally, there is a motif found in the way poetry collections order their pieces. Is there a certain flow to the prose you want your readers to capture and understand? What is the encompassing intention of your first chapbook? What do you want readers to take away from it?

The order of the poems is meant to echo the process that the mind goes through when things go bad. You freak out, you feel trapped, you begin to search for meaning. It’s like a circle. There’s only way to go forward.

My only intention during composition was to do what I’d always done: use poetry to help myself understand aspects of my life. At some point, I realized that the poems I had been writing recently were pieces of something that could become more involved. I started to compile them, and at that point sensed a loose kind of secret narrative. It was like a rhythm. I started to compose poems according to what the book needed.

I remember my high school experience very well, perhaps too well, do you highlight on some gut-wrenching truths about your take on what is considered one of the hardest times of a person's life? Not just the tangibility of our high school years but our mentality regarding life, love and change—and all things that are completely new?

There’s a sense of mourning for the death of the past, one that leaves this continual corpse: heartbreak, depression, isolation. I can’t speak for anyone else on this, but everything in my life moves either rapidly or not at all. High school is a blur. I barely have time to check my reflection or tie my shoes. Every event of my personal life is staccato and brief, always occurring after a sickening build.

What kind of questions arose as you wrote this? What are answers you discovered that you never thought you would be able to grip and handle?

How does the end relate to the beginning? How does the soul relate to the journey? How does the abstract relate to the physical? A hypothesis for one of those questions would suggest that everything expands, and that everything—the abstract concept, as well as the physical object—leaves tangible scars on our existence. The past swells like a thunderstorm.

What is one of your favorite pieces in This is a Room Where You Wait for New Language? And Why is it special to you?

I like “New Waltz for the Old World,” which is one of the last poems in the book. It’s the last one I wrote before sending the manuscript out to publishers. It offers some answers while posing new questions (i.e., “What is the opposite of longing? Surely there is some place where we can just be idle”), in an attempt to bring the book’s message full circle. I think. I hope.

What piece do you hate so much you love it?

I kind of hate “any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit.” Like, I really despise it. There are so many gimmicks pumped into that poem. I wrote it from a writing prompt while I was in Morgantown. The working title was “Obstacles” because we were told to write a poem that dealt with three obstacles. “Any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit” is a phrase I copied and pasted from the Wikipedia page for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Ooh, aesthetic! Right? Kill me. I almost took it out of the manuscript, but every time I read it in-depth, it doesn’t seem so bad. I guess.

What was the span of time it took to write and edit and piece together your chapbook?

Most of the poems were written over the course of this past summer, from June to August. But there were a few moments during composition where I read through what poems I’d compiled and my mind would wander to some poem I’d written a long time ago, and then I would either search through computer files or dig through the physical filing cabinet in my bedroom which is full of typewritten manuscripts. I started finding these weird old poems I’d written. Some of them got dusted off and put into the book. So in my mind I place the date when I started composition somewhere toward the end of June, when I wrote “poem made out of leaves.” Most of the poems were written after that point, but the oldest poem in the book was written close to the first football game of last year’s season. Which is close to when I started writing poetry.

Looking back on it, what lessons have you learned through writing, understanding, and exploring the truths you did on in This is a Room Where You Wait for New Language?

The truths proposed by the poems in This is a Room are all personal ones. That’s all I can manage. I shoot for understanding but that’s difficult to obtain. For me, the biggest takeaway from having worked on these poems is that there is a way to exist as a human being. Because I’m sensitive, but I’m insensitive. I’m seventeen years old and I’ve left a lot of things in ruin. I’ve spent a lot of time submerged in self-loathing, which often seems like the correct thing to do, but just isn’t productive. I can’t think of any excuse for trying to justify my own bad decisions, so the solution is to venture outside the self. That’s why I search for meaning, and write about this investigation. It’s the only thing, for me, that can rationalize continued endurance. That would be the ideal answer: writing This is a Room Where You Wait for New Language made me realize why I write.

Peering into the future, what is in Luis Neer's crosshairs that we should watch out for?

I have another manuscript complete that I’m hoping to have published by the end of 2016. I sent it to Maudlin House Press earlier this week. I haven’t had much time to write lately, but as my senior year progresses I hope to find ways to incorporate subjects in my schoolwork into my writing.

(You can pre-order Luis Neer’s book, This is a Room Where You Wait for New Language, now at Ghost City Press.)

Goodreads review:

The book gets a 5/5. This is some hard-hitting stuff that really gut-punches you and forces you to respond. The best poems trend towards the beginning, but this is not to say that the ending isn’t satisfying. It’s just that the poems including and around “Aggressiveness of Century,” meaning “Forgotten,” “Excommunication,” “A Girl Lost in Time” and “Empty” are absolute dynamite. Again, this is not to say that the rest of the book isn’t wonderfully pugilistic and necessary verse for an America with its priorities out of whack; it’s more to say that the book establishes its themes (escaping tyranny, defeating evil, empathy in the midst of extreme circumstances and self-actualization being achieved through fighting for a noble cause) very early and effectively.