Wyoming Highways by William Notter—National Poetry Month 2023

 

                                        William Notter.

I never drove but Wyoming Highways by William Notter  makes me yearn for the wide open, empty highways of my old home state. 

Notter grew up in Northeast Colorado.  He earned a BA from the University of Evansville and a MFA from the University of Arkansas. His book Holding Everything Down received the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and was published in fall 2009 by Southern Illinois University Press. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, AGNI Online, Ascent, The Chattahoochee Review, Connecticut Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Willow Springs, the anthology Good Poems for Hard Times.  He was also featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.

He was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press for More Space Than Anyone Can Stand, and has received grants from the Nevada Arts Council and Sierra Arts Foundation. He has taught writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids, Michigan.

                                        Notter is comfortable with the wide open spaces of the semi-vacant West.

Wyoming Highways

Most of the traffic is pickup trucks

caked in bentonite from the methane roads,

or one-ton flatbeds with dually axles

and blue heelers balancing on the back.

But the blacktop slicing through rabbit brush flats

and weather the color of heated steel is perfect

for opening up a highway-geared American car

from the days of cubic inches and metal.

You could wind that Detroit iron up

to a sweet spot well above the posted limit,

where torque will casually pull the grades.

The car would rock on the springs, and growl

from deep in the carburetor throat

yanked wide open, gobbling down pure light.

 

—William Notter

 

From Holding Everything Down. © Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.

 

Lionhearts by Karyna McGlynn—National Poetry Month 2023

 

      Karyna McGlynn.

Karyna McGlynn grew up in Austin, Texas, and earned an MFA at the University of Michigan and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston.  She is the author of three books of poetry— I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande, 2009), which won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize;  Hothouse (Sarabande, 2017); and 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse (Sarabande, 2022.  She is also the author of three chapbooks— Scorpionica (2007), and The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (2016). Her work has been featured in the anthology Best American Nonrequired Reading (2010).

McGlynn uses psychological ephemera, pop culture, and improvisational plots to investigate danger and human longing. “Part film noir, part horror flick, these innovative poems dwell in the cul-de-sac badlands where crimes and heinous misdeeds are recurring,” noted Karla Huston in Library Journal. In an interview for SHARKFORUM, McGlynn noted the importance of temporality to her work: “The past is always present in my writing. … We are not purely products of our own time—we are a decoupage of memories, both individual and shared.”

A member of five former National Poetry Slam teams, McGlynn has served as the organizer of the Houston Indie Book Fest and as managing editor of Gulf Coast. She is also the Director of Creative Writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

What drew me to today’s selection, Lionhearts, is the shared experience of communal ecstasy inspired by a work of art.  In my case it was a gathering decades ago on a Chicago Easter Sunday during an epic ice storm.  We came together for a group reading from James Joyce’s Ulysses and were fueled not by box wine but by potent acid, pot, and shots of Jameson’s Irish whiskey.

McGlynn's inspiration--Lionhearts, an album by beloved and iconic English singer/songwriter Kate Bush.

Lionhearts

One very cold night in Ann Arbor

 I went to a party where “Kate Bush”

 was the password. I put on my Uggs

 & trudged through the slush.

 I climbed the fire escape to an attic apartment

 where five other writers & I

 sat around a Crosley turntable

 & a box of Bordeaux Blend

 & a stale bâtard with expensive butter

 & listened to Lionheart

 & talked about line breaks

 & grew increasingly drunk

 & complimentary & eager

 —for aesthetics’ sake—

 to investigate each other up close.

 Some of us kissed. Kate stalked us

 from the cover—crimped mane

 & lion-skin suit—as two people

 with silk scarves tied someone

 to the radiator & danced madly,

 leaping on chairs, licking paws!

 Leo rising, downward dog!

 Candles sputtering their last magic

 into the rafters as we sank straight

 through the secondhand loveseat:

 floral flickering, ticking undone.

 This is one of my fondest memories.

 The whole room a gold & rolling

 ship of girl flame! But there—

 in the dark, catholic corners

 where I can’t quite see—a stowaway

 sometimes darts. Imagine such a creature:

 subsisting all this time

 on the dusty crusts & vinegars

 of someone else’s slight

 & misplaced shame.

 

—Karyna Mc Glynn

 

Published in the October 2022 issue of Poetry magazine.

 

The Kingdom of Debt by Erika L. Sánchez—National Poetry Month 2023

Erika L. Sánchez.

Erika L. Sánchez is one of the leading lights of the robust Latinx poetry scene in Chicago.

She was born in 1983 in the western suburb of Cicero to Mexican immigrant Parents.  She has two brothers and they all grew up speaking both Spanish and English at home.  She attended Morton East High School and then the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. After college she traveled to Madrid, Spain, to teach English with the Fulbright program and pursued poetry.  She then earned an MFA in poetry from the University of New Mexico.

Sánchez won a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship in 2015.  Her first poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017. The Washington Post named it to a list of best poetry of July 2017, calling it a “fierce, assertive debut”.   In The New York Times, Kathleen Rooney praised Sánchez’s “wrenching explorations of guilt and shame, grief and misogyny...Her depictions of misery hurt and haunt.”  The same year, United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith recommended Sánchez as among the best new voices in poetry.

Sánchez’s acclaimed young adult novel was I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.  It follows 15-year-old Julia Reyes who first struggles to live up to the rule-following example set by her sister Olga, then begins to learn things were not as they seemed when Olga dies unexpectedly.  It was a finalist for the National Book Award for young people’s literature and It also won the 2018 Tomás Rivera Award.

Her next book, a memoir, Crying in the Bathroom, was a wrenchingly honest look at her difficult decision to seek an abortion and how the pregnancy, paired with debilitating depression, made her feel suicidal.

I will never pretend my abortion was easy. It was, without a doubt, the worst experience of my life but I believe the procedure saved me.

She was a professor at DePaul University.

A Mexican Police woman marks the shell casing left by a hail of automatic weapon fire at a murder scene in Juarez, a border town that had more than 400 killings last year.

In today poem, The Kingdom of Debt is typically brutally honest about the tsunami of murder in Mexico in recent year.  Victims include those caught up in deadly drug and gang wars,  workers in the maquila factories near the border,  those caught up in simmering rebellions like Chiapas, refugees making the long trek from Central America to the U.S. border, and has now even touched foreign tourists in supposedly safe vacation destination enclaves.  And women, especially women.

Sexual violence is rampant and has spread from Mexico City, other urban areas, and the border zone to once-safe traditional villages with strong family values where women were respected and honored.

Over a million women took to the streets of Mexico City on International Women's Day in 2020 to protest the wave of murders of women.

On International Women’s Day in 2020 over a million women swarmed the streets of the Capitol dramatically protesting the misogynistic violence.

The Kingdom of Debt

According to a report from the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico

project, 138,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since 2006.

                                                         

They call it the corner of heaven:

 a laboratory, a foot at the throat

 of an empire. Before the holy

 dirt, the woman with the feline gait

 waits with tangled hair, mouth

 agape — the letter X marked

 on what’s left of her breasts

 and face. Nuestra Belleza

 Mexicana. A roped mule

 watches a man place a crown

 on her severed head. Tomorrow

 the queen will be picked clean

 by the kindness of the sea.

 Shuttered shops and empty

 restaurants. Stray dogs couple

 in a courtyard. Under a swaying

 palm tree, a cluster of men

 finger golden pistols, whisper,

 aquí ni se paran las moscas.

 Two boys, transfixed, watch

 a pixelated video: a family fed

 to a swarm of insatiable pigs.

 A butcher sweeps blood

 from an empty street. Death

 is my godmother, he repeats.

 Death is a burnt mirror.

 When the crackling stereo

 dithers between stations — amor

 de mis amores, sangre de mi alma — 

 a gaggle of silent children

 gather before a sputtering

 trash bin. Together they watch

    the terror hover like flies.

 

—Erika L. Sánchez