#The Inflectionist Review

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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Tree Surgeon by Alecia Beymer

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Tree Surgeon is a series of captured fragments that conjure and question notions of closeness, distance, home, loss, and grief. It is a rumination on how the mundane envelopes us, how place remakes in us daily. The #poems linger in an interstice of the #environmental #world, the global pandemic, the death of a father from Covid-19, and the leaving and returning to the remnants of a steel town along the Ohio River. The book begins in the impossibility of sound and language and the layered grief of loss. It continues through offered intimations and excavations on how we interpret, and learn to believe in, the complexities of intimacy and attachment to #place, #people, and #ourselves.

Alecia Beymer is an Assistant Professor – Educator in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have been published in SWWIM, Bellevue Literary Review, The Inflectionist Review, Radar Poetry, Sugar House Review, among others. In her research and creative work, she is interested in ecopoetics, forms of attachment and intimacy, and the poetics of teaching.

PRAISE FOR Tree Surgeon by Alecia Beymer – NWVS #18

Alecia Beymer is a poet who creates a new language replete with reverberations of philosophy, mystery, love and longing. In “Tree Surgeon,” a speaker navigates the loss of a literal and metaphorical home, the loss of a father, and, more broadly, fissures that attempt to break us internally; fissures that attempt to distance us from others. Here is a music that rumbles through fields like a tractor, a landscape of tree limbs “lit/with icy sweaters,” “a horse gasping oats/ from your flat palm.” Listen, look, feel, and you will find Beymer’s first collection like “that lamp left on,/a reminder/that we are alive.” I feel tremendous kinship with this poet and her poems, and, somehow, a little less alone in the world. You, too, will find a friend in Beymer, one who captures essence, who magnifies the human experience, and who offers gentle guidance: “If a tree dies, plant a new one,/maybe two.”

–Janine Certo, author of O Body of Bliss, winner of The Longleaf Press Book Prize

What can be made of a grieving body attached to its loss? What is home for a body longing to be held? Alecia Beymer‘s poignant Tree Surgeon moves us through the precarious terrain of childhood where solace is found in nature, especially trees. These poems remind us that excavating painful roots can form fresh systems of belonging and new senses of home. They remind us of the power of reaching, with longing, for the land we come from, for the moments that have held us. Tree Surgeon is both testament to a chronic illness of living with loss and an elegy to unyielding desires. “Give me more than I know to ask for.” I am grateful for Beymer’s clear, vulnerable voice that isn’t afraid to call out “like loss, like two hands unclasping.” This collection brims with heart and wisdom.

–Maya Pindyck, author of Impossible Belonging, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

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[eunoiareview]

pergola...

pergola…

pergola the wisteria finds each tree in the forest Joshua St. Claire is a accountant who works as a financial controller in Pennsylvania, USA. He enjoys writing poetry on coffee breaks and after putting the kids to bed. His work is published or forthcoming in Delmarva Review, The Inflectionist Review, Blue Unicorn, ubu., and bones, among others, and has received nominations for the Pushcart.

[1000reasonsnottostartmakingart]

I love her poems and I love her voice

[leahhuetemaines]

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: RAMADAN IN SUMMER by Bruce Parker

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Bruce Parker holds a BA in History from the University of Maryland Far East Division, Okinawa, Japan, and an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. He has taught English as a second language, worked as a technical editor, and as a translator He is an Assistant Editor at Boulevard and lives in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in, The Inflectionist Review, Cloudbank, Blue Mountain Review, The RavensPerch, Hamilton Stone Review and elsewhere.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR RAMADAN IN SUMMER by Bruce Parker

In Ramadan in Summer, Bruce Parker ponders a world in perpetual transition, even as we transition out of it. The sadness of everyday existence is mixed in these pages with a healthy dose of magic, which makes the author’s experiences meaningful and infinitely relatable. “No one cared how everything ends,” the poet points out in his recollections of earlier, more naïve times. By contrast, now “is like a shower/ over us/ the good// dripping off/ every moment / running away.” These elegant, inquisitive poems touch the reader deeply but tenderly as they run along with the escaping time.

–A. Molotkov, author of Synonyms for Silence

These are the poems of a fascinated heart and mind, of lucid seeing and simple language that celebrates both nature and our part in it. Reminding us that beauty is inherent in the details, Ramadan in Summer celebrates the diversity, color, and subtlety of life, grounding us in a familiar world that eventually open us up to something greater.

–John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another

Bruce Parker‘s title poem captures it all – sun, heat, thirst, weakness, a sense of ritual observance, a sense of the ineffable, “even if one did not understand the Arabic.” For Parker’s central theme is the ever-present varieties of beauty offered to those who may see. Attuned to such vision, Parker’s speakers acknowledge change and decay; they understand “how everything ends.” Yet they also affirm what is marvelous, in nature, in human company, “there before the symphony begins, / there after the poem’s last sigh.” In its scope and range, in the care evident in each poem’s construction, this little book invites and compels and rewards.

–Lex Runciman, author of Salt Moons

Please share/please repost [PROMO]#flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry

[calexanderpoetry]

Published in The Inflectionist Review

Published in The Inflectionist Review

Thanks to The Inflectionist Review for publishing my poem: Polly, Like Polyamorous in their newest issue. You can find that here: Inflectionist Review Vol. 8

    Want a personalized poem from C. Alexander? Don’t forget to check out his store: Right Here

[ginamariewilliams1]

Thank you so much to The Inflectionist Review journal for including my poem, "Dear Captor" in the new issue. I hope you'll take a moment to read it & enjoy the full edition with amazing work by poets around the world and incredible art by @hazelsebastianglass. https://www.inflectionism.com/11/gina-williams/1 #write #poetry #justice #TheInflectionistReview https://www.instagram.com/p/CG-CuGDpBVU/?igshid=1c7rxq6o50lkx

[yespoetry]

Jen Rouse: Like Hungry Gods

Chambered

 Unchallenged, you build

38 rooms around you, sealing

each for perfect buoyancy and

balance.  You fill

your final spot with three

pulsing hidden hearts.

I know them now        after 200

million beating years and         you

are a Weston photograph,

trapped in the truest light.

You said I want to be honest

about this. I said you have feet

like hungry gods.             And when

you rise in the shedding skin

of the moon, I am left

astonished.  You are a Fibonacci

fragment.  You are my last

living fossil.

Jen Rouse’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Pretty Owl, The Tishman Review, The Inflectionist Review, Midwestern Gothic, Sinister Wisdom, the Plath Poetry Project, Occulum, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. She has work forthcoming in Up the Staircase's 10th anniversary issue. She’s the 2017 winner of Gulf Stream’s summer poetry contest. Rouse’s chapbook, Acid and Tender, was published in 2016 by Headmistress Press. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.

[char27martin]

John Sibley Williams: Poet Interview

Please join me in welcoming John Sibley Williams to the Poetic Asides blog!

John Sibley Williams

John Sibley Williams is the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies and the author of nine collections, including Disinheritance and Controlled Hallucinations. A seven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry.

He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Arts & Letters, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, Baltimore Review, RHINO, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Learn more here.

Here’s a poem I really enjoyed from his collection Disinheritance:

November Country, by John Sibley Williams

My grandfather digs a double plot with his bare hands in case winter can be shared though he knows grandmother will outlive her heart’s thaw by a decade. I could give him a shovel. Instead

I ball the half-frozen river’s slack numb around my fist, tighten into ice. I will try to be less hard next time. Here in the gray and two-dimensional house we know the answer to rain.

A perforated black arrow of birds moves southward, array. Shrill reports from every side and from the sky the trajectory of abandonment.

Our surfaces are like the river. Our circles have learned to grow edges and crack. Even the birds we compare ourselves to

have left us.

*****

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Click to continue.

*****

What are you currently up to?

Apart from being a new father of twins, which, along with writing, sort of defines me now, I’ve just completed two full-length poetry manuscripts that I’m submitting to various contests and publishers.

Skin Memory is an amalgam of free verse and prose poetry that focuses on bodies—human, animal, celestial, landscape—and how they affect each other. Keeping the Old World Lit is a tightly structured set of poems that explores our relationship with history, nostalgia, and cultural and personal regret.

I loved reading Disinheritance. How did you go about getting this collection published?

Thanks so much! I really appreciate that. Disinheritance was a bit more personal, more intimate, than most of my work, so there was a greater emotional risk when introducing it to the world. I’m genuinely touched when someone tells me it resonated with them.

Luckily, the publication process was quite simple. Although I experienced the usual and expected rejections from a few contests and major publishers, Apprentice House Press took it on within a few months of the manuscript’s completion. I wish I had a powerful or inspiring story to share here, but Disinheritance came together easily and found a publisher fairly quickly.

You’re the author of nine poetry collections. Do they get easier or harder as you go along?

Not to sound coy, but both.

Putting together my earlier chapbooks felt like a simpler process, but that’s likely because each was a unique entity with poems written to work together toward the same goals. Those earlier poems were envisioned as short collections. Also, and perhaps more importantly, back then I hadn’t really studied how other poets structure their books.

There’s a true art to making 50, 80, 100 poems read fluidly. There are so many interesting techniques one can employ to create threads for the reader to follow throughout an entire collection. And there is so much culling, so much editing, so many lovely poems that must fall to the cutting room floor for the sake of overall consistency and flow.

So the process of organizing a book has become almost as complex as the writing itself, though it’s also become far more fun and rewarding.

For the individual poems, do you have a submission routine?

Absolutely, and a rather strict one.

It’s taken me years of research and reading hundreds of magazines to create a thorough spreadsheet for my individual poem submissions. I keep notes on their changing editorial focuses and open submission windows. I do my best to match each poem with a few magazines that I feel might enjoy them.

And I track all submissions so that every poem I truly believe in is submitted to around five magazines at a time. It’s a time-consuming process, taking up at least a third of my creative time each week, but it’s worth it.

As a follow up, do you have a writing routine you try to keep?

I became the father of twins about six months ago, so I’m now carving out new, flexible routines that balance writing with life’s many other joyful responsibilities. I still write daily, though usually in fragments, in stolen moments, taking notes that will, hopefully, band together into poems.

I’m currently able to set aside about three days each week for true composition. To balance with the babies’ schedule, I tend to write for a few hours each weekend morning, just after dawn, and I’ve tweaked my full-time work hours a bit to allow me one or two afternoons of writing time.

As to the where of writing, when the notoriously rainy Oregon weather allows it, I prefer to write outside, in open-aired cafes or a nearby park that runs along the southern banks of the Willamette River.

One poet nobody knows but should. Who is it?

I shouldn’t assume what poets readers are or are not already familiar with, but one of my favorite books from last year that didn’t seem to make any of the Best of 2016 lists is Ramshackle Ode, by Keith Leonard. Admittedly, it was published by Mariner Books, so not exactly an unknown press, but I haven’t noticed much buzz in the poetry community about this incredible collection.

Each poem paints a fragile yet stubbornly persistent world, and somehow Leonard manages to both celebrate and eulogize life with a natural grace that feels so intimate, so familiar.

If you could pass along only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

There’s a reason “keep writing, keep reading” has become clichéd advice for emerging writers; it’s absolutely true. You need to study as many books as possible from authors of various genres and from various countries. Listen to their voices. Watch how they manipulate and celebrate language. Delve deep into their themes and take notes on the stylistic, structural, and linguistic tools they employ.

And never, ever stop writing. Write every free moment you have. Bring a notebook and pen everywhere you go (and I mean everywhere). It’s okay if you’re only taking notes. Notes are critical. It’s okay if that first book doesn’t find a publisher. There will be more books to come. And it’s okay if those first poems aren’t all that great. You have a lifetime to grow as a writer.

Do we write to be cool, to be popular, to make money? We write because we have to, because we love crafting poems, because stringing words together into meaning is one of life’s true joys. So rejections are par for the course. Writing poems or stories that just aren’t as strong as they could be is par for the course. But we must all retain that burning passion for language and storytelling. That flame is what keeps us maturing as writers.

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Check out these other poetic posts:

Amorak Huey: Poet Interview.

20 Best Tips for Poets.

WD Poetic Form Challenge: Clogyrnach.

The post John Sibley Williams: Poet Interview appeared first on WritersDigest.com.

from Writing Editor Blogs – WritersDigest.com http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/john-sibley-williams-poet-interview

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FINISHING LINE PRESS CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: After by Babo Kamel $14.99, paper https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/after-by-babo-kamel/ Originally from Montreal, Canada, Babo Kamel now resides in Venice, Florida. Her poems have appeared in literary journals in the US, Australia, and Canada. Some of these include Painted Bride Quarterly, Abyss & Apex, The Greensboro Review, Cleaver, The Grolier Poetry Prize, Rabbit, Contemporary Verse 2, Rust +Moth, Mobius, a Journal of Social Change, 2River Review, The San Pedro River Review, Redactions, and The Inflectionist Review. She was a winner of The Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize and is a three-time Pushcart nominee. You can find her at www.babokamel.com What does it mean to live with a communal memory so catastrophic that one has a permanent sense of coming AFTER? Babo Kamel, in these beautifully cadenced poems of understated passion, draws on the vivid, fanciful dreamscapes of Chagall against the nightmare of history, intensifying by contrast both the value and the violation of a world forever lost. Powerful, poignant, and timely in today’s world of refugees: this true folk tale—“the story of breadcrumbs/how birds ate the way home.” –Eleanor Wilner Open this small book and enter a world of feeling bright with music and lit with clouds trailing streams of color: Babo Kamel’s After is “a whole circus of violins/ tasting of amber and rain”. Her poems dance through our understanding, large with history, and leave “red memory / on the skin”, calling us and our beloved dead “back again into the half-light of being”. Kamel’s light illuminates experience that becomes our own, vivid as the paintings that have evoked these passionate and beautiful poems, and gives them their living presence on the page. –Deena Linett, author of Translucent When Fired: Poems New & Selected, and What Winter Means, a novel. PREORDER SHIPS JULY 6, 2018 RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/after-by-babo-kamel/ #poetry

[calexanderpoetry]

I got published in the newest Inflectionist Review. Pg. 73. Just google Inflectionist Review. It’s the first link. #published #publishedpoet #poetry

[finishinglinepress]

FINISHING LINE PRESS BOOK OF THE DAY:Islands And Men by C. Alexander

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Alexander is a small-town Southern born poet who now lives in New England. He has his MFA from Lindenwood University, and dabbles in print and spoken-word poetry. He has a spoken word EP called “Cosmic Aging” that you can find from all online music sources. He has been published in Cathexis Northwest, Paragon Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review, The Inflectionist Review and Wizards in Space Magazine, among others. He also has a collection called The Cosmic Hello now available on Amazon.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Islands And Men by C. Alexander

“What does it say about us/ that solitary confinement drives us/ insane?” In islands And men Caleb Alexander explores our relationship with the world and each other. Often questions like this spark the inquiry. Then pithy diction speaks bold truth: “Most of time/ we are not here” —“There’s more not than is”—“Paint a smile on your scars.”

Wordplay makes this an amusing read. You will laugh. Often. “I can’t find myself sometimes/ but you always seem to,/ and always seem too.” His images are sharp, visual, fresh, irreverent: “our parents walked upright/ like Godzilla while we hid/ behind skyscrapers/ like a tan loveseat”—“Rorschach blot of Freudian naughtiness”—“long-fought 22 minute battle/ with lung cancer.” There’s dry self-deprecation about our questioning “so we can live a little longer,/ keep asking questions, believing/ there is poetry/hidden in the answers.” He bares the humor of intimacy “in an awkward embrace that feels/like lying in your driveway and discussing/YA literature like it’s Hemingway.”

Alexander crafts with skill, most notable in “Dust” where the S sound in combined alliteration and consonance makes the entire poem hiss. His homage to Muses applies synecdoche masterfully: “out of my hands/ your lips and tongue fly.” The unique closing, prose fiction, depicts Carl, a decomposing yet somehow active corpse; in it, Alexander applies a motif of the malodor Carl increasingly exudes to explore our connections to death and each other. The images at the end stick. Thus Alexander delights, start to finish.

–Elizabeth Robin, Where Green Meets Blue (2018), Silk Purses and Lemonade(2017)

“A impressive exploration that weaves through the fantastical while grounded in the harsh realism we live in every day. Whether your head is in the clouds or your feet on the ground, this collection steals your attention from the first to last word.”

–Olivia Dolphin, founder and editor-in-chief of Wizards in Space Literary Magazine

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[shereewrites]

https://issuu.com/johnsibleywilliams/docs/tir__8_6ae62ebc0c863a/62 I have a new poem up at The Inflectionist Review, "I Dreamt We Quarreled." Dedicated to my youngest daughter Katie. I love & miss you every day. Thank you, John Sibley Williams, and Anatoly Molotkov. I will be forever grateful for this. #idreamtwequarreled #dearkatie #mothersanddaughters #iloveyou #poetry #theinflectionistreview #writers https://www.instagram.com/shereewrites/p/BwChrGRHRg6/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1n2c1guaaw4ti