By Corey Van Landingham, Poetry Co-Editor
Hi everyone! I’m Corey Van Landingham, and along with the lovely Jacob Sunderlin, I am an incoming Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review.
I grew up in Ashland, Oregon before moving to Portland, where I served a lot of milkshakes and poured a lot of wine. I moved to Indiana two years ago to pursue my MFA in Poetry Writing at Purdue University, and that is where I currently live, in Lafayette, Indiana. You can win my heart with pickled anything. I’ve never stopped loving pop music. Aquariums may be my favorite places ever ever.
After being a reader for Sycamore for two years, I can’t wait to continue to read the wonderful work submitted to us and to step in as Poetry Co-Editor. After Mario Chard and Josh Wild, we have big shoes to fill, but I promise that I will continue …MORE
by Corey Van Landingham, Co-Poetry Editor
Congratulations to Issue 22.1 contributor Bruce Snider, whose book Paradise, Indiana was chosen by Alice Friman as the winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Weyer Todd Poetry Prize! The book will be published by Pleiades Press in April of 2012 and distributed by LSU Press.
After reading his poem of the same title in Sycamore Review, we weren’t surprised that he has received such an impressive accolade. We look forward to continuing to read more of his work, and to continue to cheer him on.
BY LILAH HEGNAUER
(for Karen)
Tell me the story again, how you made another body of your own and kept him well & here. Imagine: his enormous leather mittens, still filled. Bucket crowded with unwashed russet potatoes. Loss is a far cry from utterly unhinged, just me and my lattice windows. …MORE
BY NANCY K. PEARSON
–for my Grandfather James
I asked James, can you feel you’re dying? Can you feel the water pouring from the hose turn to nothing in the grass? James loved his big rigs. I love the sweet metallic reek filling my own gas tank. All day the train shuttles heaps of carpet scraps through the wild blue phlox of Georgia …MORE
BY GREGORY SHERL
Mel Gibson is a thundercloud. He formed somewhere over the Midwest, a few years after World War II. They say he emigrated from Australia, a son of prisoners surrounded by water—that they hated the dryness, but what to do? Mel found Catholicism in an unplugged fan. Me, I was born in a billboard. A wave came, the billboard stood. I washed up close to the last place she slept. I smelled cherry blossoms, found bristles from an old toothbrush. The truth about Mel Gibson is that his heart is every drug-free commercial. This is Mel Gibson’s heart when he looks at your olive skin: a frying pan against glass bowls. In the summer you can sleep above the thinnest sheets, eat chilled soup & still sweat from the neck. I have thought about touching every person who looks at me but doesn’t look away. The satisfaction …MORE
BY DANA BISIGNANI, Publicist
In a review of The Penultimate Suitor, Arielle Greenberg noted that Mary Leader’s work “generally gives the impression that the poet is having a really good time.” A lawyer and poet with an insatiable curiosity, Leader is simultaneously formal and wide-leaping, playful and experimental. She has published two books of poetry, Red Signature, which won the 1996 National Poetry Series, and The Penultimate Suitor, which won the 2000 Iowa Poetry Prize. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Her newest book, Beyond the Fire, has just been released by Shearsman Books.
DB: Your first book Red Signature was published by Graywolf, and your second book, The Penultimate Suitor, was put out by University of Iowa Press. What …MORE
By JOSH WILD, Poetry Editor
We here at SR would like to extend our congratulations to contributing poet Ryan Teitman for being awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship for the 2010-2012 school years. Ryan’s poem, “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning,” is featured in our current issue, as well as here online (to read the poem, just scroll about halfway down this page or click here).
The Stegner Fellowship, a two-year appointment out of Stanford University, allows the recipient time to write with no curricular or teaching responsibilities. With a $26,000 stipend, a tuition remission and health care provided, the Stegner is one of the most competitive fellowships in the nation; ten recipients (five poets and five fiction writers) were selected this year out of a pool of nearly 1800 applicants. Some past fellows include Raymond Carver, ZZ Packer, Lan Samantha Chang and Robert Pinsky.
Again, congratulations Ryan!
BY RYAN TEITMAN
When our eyes can’t adjust to the fog of late light burning
off under a heat of darkness, a black flower blooms
for a single minute, and the bees waiting for its nectar
die of thirst. They drop one by one into a furry pile around the stem,
not knowing that the scarcity of its opening fails to make the juice
any sweeter. We lie when we think that the rare and the sacred
are like twin, unborn colts—legs tangled as they float in the barrel
of their mother’s belly. A girl keeps a halved pear in a jar by her bedside
and says that it’s her dead puppy’s ear, so everyone believes her
when she kisses the glass container goodnight, and carries it on walks
around the neighborhood. You can learn the most horrible things, if you listen
in the moment between night and day. …MORE
Charles Bukowski died sixteen years ago today, March 9. Just a few years before his death, the hyperprolific Buk sent a startup literary journal a small bundle of poems—and a friendly warning, of sorts. In honor of his memory, we here at Sycamore Review have decided to open up the archives and share with you one of those poems, as well as its accompanying “letter to the editor.” Click below on “…MORE” to read Bukowski’s “One More Day” and to see a true Buk artifact. (We’re pretty sure the attached doodle is a “good doggie,” but extra marks to anyone with a more creative interpretation.) …MORE
BY RITA MAE REESE
The word is the making of the world. Wallace Stevens
It’s a filmstrip afternoon and we’re all grateful to the humming projector in the middle of our desks, the closed blinds, the absence of a real adult.
There’s a vague promise of revelation from the title and the dark, tree-lined streets, the voice calling from a house carrying within it our freedom not to answer.
Inside another house, a little girl in a pretty dress is falling asleep at her father’s desk, turning into Alice in Wonderland as her mind falls down the rabbit holes of grammar.
The Madhatter and Jabberwocky tell her to lure the letters into a trap so they can beat them to death with mallets. We’d like to see that. Without words
no one could tell us what to do. We know grammar is just a byproduct, like schizophrenia, …MORE
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