Fiction
Innocence – Summer Block
Abandoned Rooms – Indira Chandrasekhar
The Shape of Immortality – Hunter Choate
After The Summer of Love – Alexandra Isacson
Land-A-Hoe – Maryanne Grant Traylen
This Is One Among Many of the Stories That Take Place At The Lake – James Iredell
Something About The Rest – Joseph Riippi
Memento Mori – Timothy Reilly
Little People – Marcus Speh
Photographing For Ghosts – Sean Ulman

Flash Fiction Special
Puerility – David Backer
Reprieve – Amy Bergen
Cameo – Eric Burke
The Complex Social Lives of Animal Talkers – Joe Kapitan
Ekphrasis of You Getting Wasted – Rachel Lieberman
367378 726 – Henry W. Leung
Growth – Henry W. Leung
Seal-Blood Soup – Kirsty Logan
Bundle – Gary Moshimer
I Don’t Know A Thing About Charcoal – Heather Palmer
Numbers and Letters – Hannah Pass
It Can’t Start That Way – Kenneth Pobo
Magpies – Peg Alford Pursell
Cure – Michelle Reale
Haircut – Nicholas Ripatrazone
Cabbage In The Sun After Many Days of Rain – Brooks Sterritt
Instructions for Remembering – Beth Thomas

Poetry
Spring In Wartime – Barry Basden
Map of Heesakker Park and Woods, Little Chute, Wisconsin – Callista Buchen
Silver Dollars – Lynne Francis
Sweet Chariot – Keith Moul
Thoughts While Swimming Laps – Sami Schalk

Featured Writers
Diya Chaudhuri – Birthing series of poems & Interview w/ Tracy Youngblom
Ethel Rohan – “The Bridge They Said Couldn’t Be Built” & Interview w/ Amber Sparks

Essay
Sam Bell – Apologia

Your poetry collection, City of Regret is full of walls, alleys, contained spaces, bordered by entrances and exits which seem to delineate an interior rather than suggest something beyond the space. Is this feeling of containment something you intended in these poems?

Yes, I suppose it was something I intended. Once I had the poem “Dis” I knew that there was going to be some centering around the idea of a physical city, even if that city existed as well in metaphor and emotion. The construction of the book in sections named for elements of containment was an element that arrived pretty late in the book’s genesis. I think it was the third or fourth major revision.

But once that decision towards ordering was made, it not only brought out all the ideas in the poems that already addressed containment, but slanted the reading of those poems that weren’t obviously about interiors, physical or otherwise. And what I want the experience of reading the book to be is one of traveling through a defined space, even if it’s defined differently for each individual.

The critical event that generated this collection was the death of your father. Were you and he able to share language and poetry in your childhood and/or as adults together?

Both my parents are big readers, but my tastes run closer to my mom’s than my dad’s. As he grew older, his reading turned more and more towards religious philosophy, the mystics of various religions that, in the most basic way, all seem to be saying the same thing about the greater force that we call God. In short, a subject that I find almost inherently uninteresting.

But he had a chance to read my poetry and fiction before he died. Though I assume he must have read some of my writing, the only proof of his exposure to what I’d written comes from his attending plays I’d written. A year and a half before he died, my parents attended my undergraduate senior thesis, a series of four interlinked plays. Afterwards, they said that they realized, while watching them, that writing was actually something I could successfully create my life around. Which, I guess, meant that they could see how people who weren’t my parents could be moved by what I wrote.

How do you approach the work of writing poetry? Do you have a method or just enjoy the madness?

I approach writing poetry the same way I approach any writing. I sit down at a table and set my pen to paper and hope that something interesting will come out.

A gross simplification, I admit.

Here’s a slightly more complicated version. I write first drafts on paper. There’s something about the slide of the pen over the page that feeds back into the writing process, that lets me feel as though I’m truly engaged in creating. I write from the beginning to the end, starting with the first line or a title, and allow the poem to establish the rules for its own creation. An image leads to another image. An urge to rhyme in the first few lines might establish the poem as a sonnet. I almost never set down a line or a word just to push myself forward; I believe in everything I set down in that first draft, though I admit that creator’s blindness often hides flaws from me that become clear over the course of a few days or weeks.

And though that sounds like method, it feels more like madness. Each time I set down to write a poem I’m engaged in the hope that the end result will be meaningful, and hope is nothing but a form of madness.

I know that you like to write in many genres including drama and non-fiction. Tell us something about your dramaturgical life…

Mostly, it’s been private, even though productions of my plays involve direct interaction with other people. The problem is that I know how to get my poetry and my fiction and my essays out into the world where they will be read by people – even if I never see or meet most of the people who read my work. With theater, the entire goal is personal interaction, but the world of theater and theaters and production is an enigma to me at present.

Recently I co-founded a theater company in Houston – Theater 42 – as a way to get into the theatrical scene. We’ve only produced work that I’ve written so far, and I must admit that was one of the main draws to starting my own company, though I’d never consider doing a similar thing for my other writing. Starting a literary journal to publish your own work means that you’re the arbiter of quality, a significant act of hubris, whereas putting on your own play still leaves the audience as the final judge. If they like it, they will tell other people and the audience will increase. Otherwise, an empty theater.

Where does Bioshock fit into this picture? I thought gaming was supposed to be brain death and just plain evil.

I’ve been playing computer games since I was about ten. I see games and gaming as more interactive than television or movies, and exercising a different part of the brain than reading. In most games you’re constantly solving one problem after another. But that’s only a general defense.

With Bioshock and Fallout 3 and games of a similar ilk, what keeps me enthralled is the story. Here is where books, television & movies, and games all overlap for me – the story is all. That story doesn’t have to be narrative, exactly, but it has to be emotional and engrossing. In order for me to feel invested, I have to believe that the author or creators are invested. And when that happens, the art – in whatever form – inspires me to feel, to think, or to create art of my own.

And it’s true that sometimes I feel games as a drain on my life and creativity, but that’s mostly because I spend a few hours playing one only to realize that there’s no story at the heart of it to keep my interest. If all I’m doing is solving a math or physics problem, admittedly one with amazing graphics, I’m left feeling hollow.

Having had the good fortune to meet you on the road to Taos, I know that you have a playful, joyous aspect to your character and I was delighted to see that part of you show up in one of my favorite poems from your collection, “Not A Love Letter”.

“I cannot make myself a saint. I can make myself a sandwich.” Those lines made my day when I first read them.

And then I read, “Your Sketch of the Church In Mourning” which evoked such a deep wistfulness. How do these disparate moments fit into the experience of mourning?

I never think that there’s not a time for laughter, or for joy. When I learned that my dad was dead, I called my friends in Gainesville and got together a group to go out to eat and laugh, to have a good time with the living.

Similarly, I feel that anything can be made fun of. That’s not the right phrasing; it sounds too mean. What I mean is that anything can be joked about and, in my mind, should be. If our goal is to enjoy this life as fully as possible – and I think that it is – then laughter is simply a symptom of that enjoyment.

Of course, that doesn’t really explain “Your Sketch of a Church in Mourning.”

What does explain it, perhaps, is that I have to admit that laughter and enjoyment can’t be experienced all the time. Or, if it can, it does so only by overlaying sadness.

To take another tack, laughter is a way to deal with what’s happened, while wistfulness is a way of dealing with what has been lost and, so, will never happen. All the conversations that I could’ve had with my father, for example, had he not died so young.

Speaking of Taos, how was it for you?

The Taos Summer Writers’ Conference was really good for me. I met a lot of interesting people (Hi, Carol!) and enjoyed being in a part of the country I’d never visited before, but what was perhaps the most useful aspect for me was the workshop. I took a class on non-fiction with Debra Monroe. I’ve only written two complete non-fiction pieces and parts of several others. Through the class, I came to realize the ways I approach non-fiction, ways that are subconscious and that leave me, at the end of a draft, unclear about how to revise. After Taos, I’ve a clearer idea of what I have done, and what I should be doing.

What’s in the near and not too distant future for you? Conferences, readings, works in the works?

There are no conferences or readings on the horizon. At the moment, I’m enjoying being stationary in Houston and trying to focus on my writing. My current tasks involve working on plays, including a full-length about Christopher Marlowe, and revising and submitting stories to magazines. I’m also still shopping around a young adult novel hoping to capture an agent’s attention. Wish me luck!

POET WILL EAT HIMSELF

It is a statement absorbing all questions. Look out
at the darkness beyond the streetlamp. Who undresses
their hands to feel the raw snow while still miles from home?

During an average lifetime enough skin and hair is shed
to create ourselves several times over. Where are these
empty spaces? Who have I stepped away from?

It’s too late for breakfast, call it what you will. A treatise
on the life cycle is incomplete if it doesn’t say “simple cellulose
can not be absorbed without attendant organisms, without arrangements

of stomachs filtering in sequence.” With the cropped grass
come stunned butterflies, blind from the sun’s
sudden eclipse. There is always some beauty to be understood

only through digestion. The body itself is a corporation
of vested self-interests, the bacteria in balance with the blood,
the clotted marrow ending in the tiny blue tongues of veins.

from City of Regret, Zone 3 Press 2007

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For more on Andrew Kozma visit his website, his blog An Experiment on A Bird in The Air Pump, and for City of Regret purchase info you can visit SPD Books or Zone 3 Press.

Carol Reid is a Contributing Editor for Emprise Review

Several years ago a poet-friend recounted a humorous anecdote about a creative writing professor he took as an undergraduate. A respected short-story writer, the prof was teaching an introductory course where English majors would write in all four modes—fiction, non-fiction, drama, and poetry—as a means of honing their skills and gauging which was their “true calling,” if such a thing exists. The semester was a boon for all until the final unit on poetry rolled around, when the professor’s sage advice all but evaporated. The only wisdom she could conjure during lectures was “poetry needs to be as vivid as possible,” and her marginal comments on assignments were of two varieties: “hmm, I can’t see this,” or “yes, I see it!”

It was with this quaint allegory in mind that I read Mark Doty’s The Art of Description: World into Word, recently published by Graywolf Press. While I have always admired Doty’s poems—particularly his collections Sweet Machine and My Alexandria—I must confess that I half-expected to encounter some expressive-but-stale workshop chestnuts peppered with a healthy dollop of Poundian imagism. (“Throw the object on to the visual imagination,” Pound laconically wrote in 1934’s ABC of Reading.) While The Art of Description is ultimately geared for a beginning or emerging writer, Doty’s jovial and illustrative prose, surprisingly eclectic range of sample poems, and constant acknowledgement that the registering of experience (and thus language) is fraught with subjectivity all make this brief study worthy of any poet’s bookshelf.

At 128 pages, The Art of Description is far from exhaustive, but that doesn’t prevent Doty from establishing an ambitious trajectory. He succinctly encapsulates the quandary of description in “World Into World,” the book’s first chapter:

What we want when we describe is surely complex: To solve the problem of speechlessness, which is a state without agency, so that we feel impressed upon by things but unable to push back at them? To refuse silence, so that experience will not go unspoken? To be accurate (but to what? the look of things, the feel of being here? to the strange fact of being in the face of death?)? To arrive at exactitude in order to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world, in order to give those words to someone else, or even just to savor them?

Rather than offer proscriptive answers to the matrix of questions posed above, Doty opts to flank them, and his explications of a dozen or so poems over the course of six chapters (the last of which is a menagerie of brief, Zen-like meditations) serve as an apt and worthwhile approach. While the usual suspects take the stand—including Blake, Whitman, Hopkins, Pound, and Bishop—Doty’s most lively examinations consider an intriguing assortment of poets that some readers may encounter here for the first time, including Henry Vaughan, George Herbert, May Swenson, Alan Shapiro, and Tracy Jo Barnwell.

Doty writes with equal parts optimism and zest, and his personal asides—from his awe at a chromatic array of August fireworks to his wonder at a collection of Diebenkorns in a NYU gallery window while a blizzard rages outside—put The Art of Description in company with that greatest of craft books, Hugo’s The Triggering Town, which still strikes the perfect blend of wit, earnestness, and poetic idiosyncrasy three decades after it was originally published. In the end, Doty presents a keen interrogation of an unconquerable subject, and whether one is a baffled student, a more baffled professor, or simply stumped somewhere in between, The Art of Description reminds us, passionately, why we ache to render our world into word:

But when we have nothing else, and when words are tuned to their highest ability, deployed with the strengths the most accomplished poets bring to bear on the project of saying what’s before us—well, it is possible to feel, at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relation with the world that feels seamless and inevitable. If that is a dream, so be it.

Hey, Amber is readying a Flash Fiction supplement for Volume 16 (9/1/10) and since we’ve never focused on the genre we’re still just a bit short. If you’ve got something on hand send it our way. Even if it doesn’t make the supplement, if it’s good, we’d post it up on the front page for all to see, or use it in a subsequent issue. Interested?

The images in the clip represent 35 movies. How many can you get?

From the Publisher: Pirate Talk or Mermalade is a novel in voices about two brothers who meet a mermaid, fall into pirating, and end up in the Arctic. Henry Hudson said “mermaids are as thick as shrimp in these parts,” and fellow explorer (and pirate) Martin Frobisher dropped off part of his crew in the Arctic. To be released three days before “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” For more on Pirate Talk or Mermalade

Steeped in details and a ruminative tone, Brandi Reissenweber’s story in the current issue of Willow Springs, “What We’re Sure Of,” follows a group of homemakers as they live vicariously through  a compelling area teacher, even as the teacher endures personal trials. Read it Now.

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I felt like playing around with all the space we have in the layout and ran with a little bit of YouTube arithmetic I’ve been stewing over.

In other news we’ve got our Fiction lineup set for Volume 16, arriving September 1st. Very excited to share those stories with you.

Reminder: We’re looking for lists, reviews, and pop-culture (music, film, art, TV) essays.

Howl covers Ginsberg’s obscenity trial and I’d bet James Franco is a better Ginsberg than David Cross and that Jon Hamm–Draper!–can play a slick guy in a suit.