The speaker diffuses bits of herself and her very visceral memories to a friend, lover or regular haunt, but it also clear she has absorbed parts of these people and places into herself as well. Indeed, the collection opens with a poem FROM a Goodwill, which is a perspective I’d never imagined correspondence from before.

A decades-long friendship is celebrated in “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,” recalling scenes like:

Do ​you remember going public braless? I can’t
but I can’t undo the truth of flesh-and-blood photographs.
Rip them and the smallest shreds contain atoms of the youth.

Intimate recollections like this suggest that the speaker’s life has fused with the people in it on the atomic level.

“Diffusely Yours” is a work about locations and personal memories, but also the speaker’s own body. Again from “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,”

Spider
veins remind me of heaven and they’re reality now
that I’m 30, joke age turned real.

These poems witness a changing and aging body, and yet the intellectual or emotional connections made along the way remain constant.

The memories shared throughout this chapbook could come across as inside jokes that most readers are on the outside of. But the language is so sharp that the specifics illuminated actually point to broader, even universal, truths.

I think my favorite in this collection is “Letter to a Wife from an Almost-Wife,” in the voice of a guest at the wedding of an ex. The speaker is sloppy but still elated.

We will always need mothers
because we can’t sew zippers ourselves, will
always love thrifting for the romantic salvage
& rescue vibes. I’m writing on your two-thirds
anniversary because every month needs fresh
champagne.

“Romantic salvage” is an intriguing turn of phrase and, I would argue, the nucleus of the project that is Diffusely Yours.

Kate Garklavs lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has appeared in Juked, apt, Leveler, Tammy, and The Airgonaut, among other places. She’s the prose editor for the Submission reading series. She tweets @ueberkatester.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post “Diffusely Yours” by Kate Garklavs Suggests We Are All Connected on an Atomic Level appeared first on Newfound.

“Assertion” may be too strong a word. These 12 short-short stories employ what I suspect is purposefully dull and vague language, creating characters numbed by the constant stimulation of modern American society. Narrators (often unnamed) drift through recreation activities but don’t have any fun—they don’t feel much of anything. The sparse language evokes Kerouac, but with a more limited vocabulary.

“A Very Small Forest Fire” opens with the titular piece, where a stoned narrator seemingly sleepwalks through roller coaster spins and a theme park evacuation due to fire. Our protagonist was riding the park’s tallest ride while the fire broke out, but not even this woke up his senses. He reports,

We went out towards the parking lot, filled with trucks and crowds of people staring at them. This went on for several hours. We left to go to the bathroom and get hamburgers.

Kerouac’s biography comes to mind again during “Defecation,” a flash piece about a youngish man milling around unhappily in his parents’ house after a move home when college ended. That discomfort of returning to the suburbs after a cigarette-fueled adventure through less manicured places is present here and it was essential to the disjointed existence of Jack Kerouac. (Kerouac’s relationship to his mother: So. Weird.)

Throughout these stories, zoned-out characters are surrounded by books, computers and television programs but don’t focus on anything very closely. Not even food holds any pleasure in the universe of “A Very Small Forest Fire.” I struggle to imagine a less inviting meal than this one described in “Calling Back Home”:

She went to the kitchen. Fried chicken from the night before was left in the fridge. She microwaved it. She scooped some potato salad onto the plate, pushed aside some of the pot to make room at the table, lathered the potato salad and fried chicken in hot sauce.

This artless style is most convincing when delivered by a first-person narrator. It is easy for a reader to believe that these characters experience their own surroundings in fragments and could only describe them in broad strokes. When an omniscient third-person narrator is employed, the delivery is frustrating. The sentiments ring false. Again from “Calling Back Home”:

Patti quit smoking and drinking after her son was born. One reason was she didn’t want to set a bad example. A deeper reason was that she no longer felt the need to fill those desires. She held Donnie in her arms in the maternity ward and felt nothing else mattered in the world.

Probably every mother on the planet would call shenanigans on this. We humans write about motherhood a lot (A LOT) and it is never this neat or easy to describe. The notion that motherhood obliterates all desire isn’t new but it also isn’t authentic.

The most effective piece in this collection is “Everyday Mr. Kent,” formatted as a journal entry of the exclusively trivial aspects in a day in the life of one Mr. Clark Kent, reporter for “The Daily Planet.”  Superman isn’t called into action on this day, so regular old Clark lolls in ennui. He thinks about his own arc:

He imagines someone making a movie about his every day. It would reject all the tenets of conventional literature: plot, character, setting, conflict. It would focus on a man, but not the man as a character, but as an idea. The idea would be profound and simple and normal and real at the same time. There wouldn’t be any romance or drama or arch. It would just be a man, who was just an idea, which wasn’t ever defined, but rather, merely, felt.

This is actually what this story achieves, though perhaps another reason this works is that readers are likely quite familiar with Superman’s back story, so we can plug in the gaps in storytelling. Also, the corresponding cartoon illustrations help convey more ambience and setting.

I’ll leave it up to other readers to determine if the short works collected in “A Very Small Forest Fire,” resolutely minimalist and solipsistic, succeed in any other goals: breaking new ground, entertaining readers, maintaining interest. Though I suppose these characters would snooze through any critique, anyway.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Small fires, dulled senses in the short fiction of Andrew Duncan Worthington appeared first on Newfound.

The collection is divided into four sections: “(in)visibly femme,” “the garden,” “love notes to you” and “the binary of love & death.” While it is the nature of reading to start at one end of a book and conclude in another, the divisions and flow of this collection are probably better read as a circle. Every poem is part of a journey, but it’s OK if no single entry in “the new gods” is considered an ultimate destination.

We enter the collection on a strong note, with “organic material.” Some of the imagery recalls Plath’s “Ariel,” but the speaker here not only defies death but gender, then arises from the ash:

“i peel the fat parts of my
self away, toss them on

the dirty floor. watch
stinging flies buzz around  

the meat of me. I’m
deconstructed. i’m red hair  

like copper, blood so iron rich
my body is a foundry.”

“Deconstruction” here means not only the breakdown of a body, but the interrogation of what a body means. At the conclusion of this piece, the speaker’s gender may be partially “synthetic” or fluid, but this is a playful notion:

“… would it be  

easier if i turned to liquid?
and i sloshed in cups, pouring  

foam off the top. i’d take
the shape of tin glass bronze  

but never ugly plastic. never
wholly synthetic.”

To further explore the organic or synthetic nature of body and gender, Lopez returns to one origin story for all humanity in “rewriting genesis in my image.” The piece, dedicated to Joanna C. Valente, uses the language and style of myths and legends to celebrate the creation, re-creation, or re-birth of the speaker.

“i morph into eve become a mother goddess

an agender creation

i form adam from a loose molar
they become a saint in my mouth”

Where the first section, “(in)visibly femme” details the destruction or deconstruction of the body, “the garden” follows with lush images from nature for a possible reconstruction of body. The poem “rebirth” offers equal parts whimsy and metaphor:

“it’s okay that i’m read as a snake,
slithering on the wet ground, coiling
in the warmth of sheep’s wool.  

i transform every day.

i tried to live as a bird, wings opened wide, sun
on my face, wind blown
feathers, dusty beak,

was shot down.

i died as a rabbit, a
nuisance, a tribute to the woods.”

While “the new gods” examines what bodies mean, the collection also delights in what bodies can do. The third section, “love notes to you,” contains luscious descriptions, like the opening lines of “blistered tongue”:

“i burnt my tongue
with melted sugar  

today. the flinching
pain reminded me  

of the way you taste
when you’re fresh  

from a hot shower,
or my favorite,  

covered in salty sweat.”

Identity with body or gender does not have to be settled or static to find love or delight (in) a lover. My favorite poem in this collection is short and sweet and lives in the “love notes to you” section:

recipe for the self

i am chopped
parts suspended
in salty broth

pieces of everything

a universe personified

you are the gravity
that anchors me  

Finally (never finally), “the binary of life & death” mingles family wounds, the sensual memories from adolescence and the pop culture that shaped an era (’90s music, movies and TV are cited often). Personally, I yelped with recognition at mentions of the “Scream” horror movie franchise, and it is referenced several times.

This deconstructive and also delicious collection is available now from Bottelcap Press.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Deconstruction and Rebirth in the Poetry of Caseyrenée Lopez appeared first on Newfound.