November 25, 2011

UNDONE by Maxine ScatesPosted by Rattle

Review by Erin Feldman Undone by Maxine Scates

UNDONE
by Maxine Scates

Western Michigan University
1903 W. Michigan Ave.
Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008
ISBN 978-1-930974-99-9
2011, 71 pp., $15.00
www.wmich.edu/newissues

It is difficult to know where to begin with Maxine Scates’ Undone. To begin with the first poem is to begin with the last one or one found in between the opening and closing poems. In this collection of poems, one cannot merely “begin.” No clear beginning exists. Each poem is invested in the intersection of memory with the past, the present, and the future.

Such intersections could be difficult to follow if Scates did not provide a framework for her collection. She begins it with a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “…so God shall uncreate, / Be frustrate, do, undo, and labour lose…” That framework permeates the work, but Scates adds additional layers to it through Greek myths, Shakespeare, and repeated images of trains, earth, and water. These additions sometimes serve as a way to locate the poems, but that is a secondary purpose. The primary one seems to be of introduction. In the final poem of Undone, she posits: “[W]e can see…each story feeding the one we don’t know / how to say yet, the one waiting in us for the right story / to come along.” The additional layers, then, become a way to introduce narratives, to remember what has or has not been remembered previously.

The stories found within the work vary, but they often dwell upon a fall of some sort. In “Clean,” the speaker remembers the fall of her father:

He wanted clean,
he wanted order, but he couldn’t get free
of what haunted him, think it into something winged
so he could fly across and finally he stopped trying.
The last year, the year before he left,
he didn’t bathe for months, the smell sickened us,
oddly sweet, then cloying, a decay,
belt slung under the belly of beer and Jack Daniels,
as his ruined body passed through the room.

Many of the poems focus on this fall, perhaps because, as the speaker states in “Threnody,” her father is the “one human who had hurt me.” Her statement is not made in anger; instead, most references to her father carry a sense of sorrow. She says in “Portal”:

…and men
whose lives are stalled, or like my father’s already over,
passing their days. Their failures are familiar,
friendly, something I’ve carried with me
since – not one of them would harm me, not even
the one who already has.

Other poems, such as “Friday Night Fights,” reflect a similar sadness:

…who is it I’m talking to when I’m talking him,

clown of a drunk who won’t remember
what he wanted, or why he wept? I’ve crossed

the river, and back again, know I’m talking to
the part of me I thought was dead.

The speaker’s sadness is not limited to her father. In fact, her own grief seems to make her capable of bearing the grief of others. In “Blue Boxcars,” she says, “So maybe it’s what grief makes of us, / the instruments of its sad music, the way the view / out any window sometimes makes perfect sense, / is greater than all its parts.” Prior to making this statement, she remembers the young woman who reaches into “the flute / of her own grieving heart and gave him / what he needed to lay down his arms” and states that “we learn / to claim or to ignore…these griefs of citizenry.” The final poem of the collection brings this idea to completion; she states:

…there is a river and we’re in it,
an osprey nest resting in the cradle of stadium lights
and now a woman telling a story riven with such loss
she has to tell someone and she has told you,
your head barely above water as you follow
the current filled with branches and upended trees,
filled with pawn shops and homecomings
and a boy who could be you or me
or my brother watching his father fall down.

The speaker’s sorrow sometimes is for herself, too, but it is not a self-pitying sorrow. Her sorrow often is the result of recognizing her own failures. She mentions her own problems with alcohol in several of the poems, such as in “Not There” or “Vice.” Both poems remark upon the speaker’s own responsibility; in “Not There,” she states, “But / soon I will awaken knowing I have been absent so long / I am in danger of never returning.” The poem “Vice” enmeshes her past with her present:

My almost sin lived

for its moment with the ringing bells, wild
horses and lush tremolos accompanying a fall.

But when the music faded, I saw
two of us were there –

me and you, the one I will not hurt,
who drank my flowering orchard for me.

In other cases, the speaker’s sorrow is the result of remembering the possibility of who she could have been. She says in “Residence”:

The pond is filling, just yesterday
I saw a white haired woman standing on the corner.
I saw the slender girl she was
the way we see Daphne in the willowy trunk of a tree
and I thought, Once I was a girl,
liking so much the idea of what that might mean,
a little surprised I had forgotten.

Her surprise may seem strange, but it is altogether fitting when the poem “Residence” is paired with the poems “Purple is the Color of Repentance” and “The Future.” Both poems struggle with the idea of future and what the future means when it is already known. In“The Future,” the speaker states:

I mean the future that allows me
to look back at him, the future that gathers plans
and expectations, making and remaking itself
in the form of the possible, alive in the way the Greeks
believed the hours were gods.

“Purple is the Color of Repentance” offers a much bleaker perspective of the future. In the poem, a girl ponders what her future will be. She even attempts to rewrite it although it becomes clear that she already has been irreparably harmed by her story, her past: “No burden laid down at her feet / in any larger way, she wants to know what lambent / means, believe kindness can still come from a human hand.”

If such a perspective seems dreary or fatalistic, the speaker fights such an interpretation in “Not There”:

…life resumes in a kind of flooding that I recognize
as my lifetime, broken as anyone’s, the pieces floating up,
the one that knows I could have been that drunk,
the weedy smell of the river in late afternoon, the crickets
humming the days small aches and pleasures in this
my present – which if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned
is never possible without the past.

The speaker also makes similar comments in other poems; in “The Giants,” she states that “[t]hey [the giants] / gave me everything I wouldn’t have known to love / without their whine, their roar, their terrible noise.” “Shame” also references the necessity of memory. The speaker talks about the man and the woman who are both learning to “balance”:

They’re new to it, trying not to
remember at the same time they’re trying not to
forget and maybe that is the other story…something
small teaching us how to make it through
the ordinary hours we used to love kaleidoscopic
as a shattered green bottle.

The final lines of “Shame” even mention the “sweet possibility of return,” offering some sense of hope or momentary reprieve.

Taken in its entirety, Scates’ Undone presents what only can be termed as reality. People are haunted by their past just as the speaker finds herself haunted by her father’s voice in “Friday Night Fights.” People cannot be divorced from that past no matter how they wish to be; their griefs define them and are necessary. As the speaker says in “Not There,” “[M]y present…is never possible without the past.” It is in remembering this that people–and the speaker found in Scates’ poems–find some way to cope, to “make it through / the ordinary hours,” to not be overcome by all “the pieces floating up.”

August 10, 2011

THE WRECKING LIGHT by Robin RobertsonPosted by Rattle

Review by Erin Feldman

THE WRECKING LIGHT
by Robin Robertson

Mariner Books
215 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10003
ISBN 978-0-547-48333-7
2011, 112 pp., $13.95
www.hmhbooks.com

Robin Robertson’s fourth collection of poetry, The Wrecking Light, is an elegy; it is a work both permeated with and punctuated by loss. The speaker in the opening poem, “Album,” states:

…When you finally see me,
you’ll see me everywhere: floating
over crocuses, sandcastles,
fallen leaves, on those
melting snowmen, their faces
drawn in coal – among all
the wedding guests,
the dinner guests, the birthday-
party guests – this smoke
in the emulsion, the flaw.
A ghost is there; the ghost gets up to go.

The theme of loss is indicated even earlier; the book’s introductory quote says, “I dropped it, I dropped it, / and on my way I dropped it.” The “it” is not defined, which allows for the loss of many things – identity, people, life itself – throughout the work.

The Wrecking Light is divided into three, named sections: Silvered Water, Broken Water, and Unspoken Water. Silvered Water, which refers to a Scottish rite of blessing or a preparation for a wish, is the most personal of the sections. In it, the speaker loses his wife, his lover, and his daughters. He says in “About Time”:

I swim one length underwater,
pulling myself up on the other side, gasping,
to find my marriage over,
my daughters grown and settled down,
the skin loosening
from my legs and arms
and this heart going
like there’s no tomorrow.

The speaker also mentions a lover, but her presence is as transient as that of the wife and daughters. It also is unsatisfactory and associated with death. The speaker recognizes this fact in “Tulips”: “Look / at what’s beached here on the night-stand: / a flipped photograph and a silk scarf, a set / of keys. These tulips, loosening in a vase.” The lover takes on renewed and deadlier force in “A Gift”; in the poem, she acts as a femme fatale who proffers the speaker with a variety of flowers, all of which are poisonous. The loss of wife, lover, and children culminate in the final, two poems of the section, “Tinsel” and “Leaving St Kilda.” In “Tinsel,” the speaker can hear “the thin noise that losing makes – perdition.” “Leaving St Kilda” has a two-fold purpose: it reveals that the speaker is being forced to leave his “island” and the things that occupy it, and it acts as a transition into the second section, which delves into the world of myth. The poem accomplishes this transition primarily through the creation of an Odyssean atmosphere:

At last we turn away, and see them
leading us: bow-riding dolphins,
our grey familiars,
and thirty gannets in a line
drawing straight from Boreray:
a gannet guard for this far passage,
for the leaving of St Kilda.

The second section, Broken Water, opens with the poem, “Law of the Island.” The poem finishes the transition from the personal history recorded in the first section to the accounts of myths and religions in the second. The poem itself reads as one of the islands Odysseus might have visited:

They lashed him to old timbers
that would barely float,
with weights at the feet so
only his face was out of the water.
Over his mouth and eyes
they tied two live mackerel
with twine, and pushed him
out from the rocks.

They stood, then,
smoking cigarettes
and watching the sky,
waiting for a gannet
to read that flex of silver
from a hundred feet up,
close its wings
and plummet-dive.

The mythic quality of the section is sustained through the appearance of other myths, including translations of Ovid’s “Pentheus and Dionysus” and “The Daughters of Minyas.” Other religious practices are addressed; Christianity is mentioned in the poem “Religion,” and Hinduism is addressed in “Kalighat.” Even Norse paganism receives attention in the poem “The Great Midwinter Sacrifice, Uppsala.” The various traditions are united through themes of loss, death, and passion. Loss occurs at a much more physically violent degree than it did in the preceding section. A goat is sacrificed at Kalighat, his “legs…trembling, / pedalling at the dirt – slowly trying to drag / the body back to its loss.” In Uppsala, sacrifices are tied to the tree in front of the temple:

At the top [of the tree], what look like cockerels, rams
and goats, then dogs and pigs, and hooked
to the lowest, strongest boughs – their legs
almost touching the earth – horses and bulls.
I count nine of each of them, and nine
that aren’t animals but hang there just the same,
black-faced, bletted, barely
recognisable as men.

Passion, like the lover in Silvered Water, is affiliated with death, although, ironically, it sometimes is the refusal to embrace passion that results in death. Pentheus dies a gruesome death because he refuses to honor Dionysus or to indulge in Dionysian rites. The daughters of Minyas don’t die, but their refusal to indulge their passions – and they are passionate based upon the stories they tell each other – results in punishment: they are transformed into vesper bats that can only speak in high-pitched squeaks. It would almost seem that the poems encourage the indulgence of passion, but that is not the case. “Pentheus and Dionysus” is an apt example; Pentheus’ mother and aunts are so consumed by their desire for Dionysus that they lose their ability to recognize or remember Pentheus. As a result, they tear him to pieces “with their own bare hands.” If that story does not illustrate the dangers of passion, the poem “Lesson” does:

The green leaf opens
and the leaf falls,

each breath is a flame
that gives in to fire;

and grief is the price
we pay for love,

and the death of love
the fee of all desire.

Perhaps it is the recognition of that truth that results in poems like “Grave Goods” and “Web.” In each of those poems, the speaker or main character is trapped. In “Grave Goods,” the “he” desires to “outlive the grim husbandry / of battle order” and “to reach a place / of peace and honour, fresh running water, / a morning of porcelain and lavender / combed by light, folded and smoothed over.” What the man discovers is none of those things:

He came instead to a closed silence.
…A seated woman with a baby
in her lap, dusted in red ochre, next to a man
wearing a crown of antlers. Between the two,
and dead like them, a young child laid down
into the wing of a swan.

The speaker in “Web” also is incapable of escape. He says, “I am ravelled here / to the live field, in a rig of stress,” and is left to watch as “the spider unknots itself / slowly, and elbows out of the dark” toward him. That immobility and impossibility of escape culminate in the final poem of the section, “White.” Like “Leaving St Kilda,” it serves two purposes. It closes the section with its apparent suicide attempt – “I just felt light and very cold at the end, / astonished at how much red there was / and my wrist so white” – and it bridges the second and third sections of the work.

The third section, Unspoken Water, refers to another Scottish rite in which running water is taken from under a bridge over which the living walk and the dead are carried. The first poem of the section, “The Wood of Lost Things,” finishes the transition from the second section to the third section through its melding of the personal and the mythic. The poem refers to the speaker’s wife, daughters, and lovers as well as mementos from childhood:

…The rows of lovers.
Mother and sister. Wife. And my daughters,
walking away into the blue distance,
turning their heads to look back.

Hung on a silver birch, my school cap
and satchel; next to them, the docken suit,
and next to that, pinned to a branch,
my lost comforter –
a piece of blanket worn to the size of my hand.
My hand as a boy. The forgotten smell of it,
the smell of myself.

It maintains ties with myth and folklore through lines that are reminiscent of the Hansel and Gretel story: “We went walks here, as children, listening out / for gypsies, timber wolves, the great / hinges in the trees.” The merging of myth and personal history continues throughout the third section; in “At Roane Head,” the speaker is given a sealskin by his lover and is revealed to have fathered sons that are “more / fish than human.” The poem “Widow’s Walk” blends the fairytale of Peter Pan with the speaker’s desire to escape:

Trying to escape myself,
but there’s always
someone
wanting to sew my shadow back.

Life and death, like myth and personal history, intermingle in the final section. It begins with the first poem, “The Wood of Lost Things,” when the speaker and the corpse state that the wood is their home:

I see the dead unbury themselves
and take their places by the seated corpse
whose face I seem to know.
He was shivering. It’s cold, I said.
He looked up at me and nodded. It’s cold.
What is this place? What brings you here?
This is my home, we replied.

It is mentioned in “Widow’s Walk”:

I felt like going in,
there and then,
like a widow
toppling forward at the grave;
going in after myself.

The final poem of the section and of The Wrecking Light, “Hammersmith Winter,” perhaps is the most ambiguous in its integration and contemplation of life and death. The speaker states:

It is so cold tonight; too cold for snow,
and yet it snows. Through the drawn curtain
shines the snowlight I remember as a boy,
sitting up at the window watching fall.
But you’re not here, now, to lead me back
to bed. None of you are. Look at the snow,
I said, to whoever might be near, I’m cold,
would you hold me. Hold me. Let me go.

In this poem, it is not apparent whether the speaker is alive or dead. His lines reveal a kinship with the corpse in “The Wood of Lost Things” who shivers and complains of cold. Although he shares that bond with the corpse, he seems to both desire and decry it. He first says, “Hold me,” which suggests he wants to join the dead, then undercuts that statement with the final words, “Let me go.” It seems, then, that the speaker is trapped in an in-between world where he is neither alive nor dead, simply “a drowned man, waked / in this weathering ground” (“Signs on a White Field”).

The ambiguity and ambivalence contained within the final section seems appropriate, considering the themes at play within and the elegiac quality of the work. What does one do with the grief that accompanies love? What happens when that love disappears because of the “hot accelerant of drink… / [t]he rot of desire” (“Strindberg in Berlin”)? What is the appropriate response when the wife and daughters are gone? What does one do when a person recognizes his or her culpability in the events that have transpired? The speaker contemplates those questions, but he does not provide answers to them. He is as trapped as the gentleman he addresses in “Arsenio” is:

[Y]ou are a reed that drags its roots behind you;
they cling so tight you’ll never be free;
trembling with life, you can only stretch out
to a ringing emptiness of swallowed grief;
the crest of that old wave rolls you,
overwhelms you again,
everything that can reclaim you
does – street and porch and walls and mirrors – all
lock you in with the frozen myriad dead;
and if you feel the brush of some gesture,
the breath of a word,
that, Arsenio,
might be the sign – in this dissolving hour –
of a strangled life that rose for you; the wind
carrying it off with the ashes of the stars.

____________

Erin Feldman received her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from Texas State University-San Marcos. She works as a freelance writer and social media manager. She can be contacted at: factotumllc@ymail.com.

July 10, 2011

THE CROWS WERE LAUGHING IN THEIR TREES by Peter ConnersPosted by Rattle

Review by Erin Feldman

THE CROWS WERE LAUGHING IN THEIR TREES
by Peter Conners

White Pine Press
P.O. Box 236
Buffalo, New York 14201
ISBN 978-1-935210-20-7
2011, 59 pp., $16.00
www.whitepine.org

To read Peter Conner’s The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees is to be initiated into a darkly comedic and surreal world. Readers are given fair warning. The book opens with a quote from William Carlos Williams: “We leap awake and what we see / fells us // Let terror twist the world!”

Williams’ quote informs the entirety of the work, which consists of prose poems divided into five sections. The book depicts a world that constantly shifts or is askew, perhaps reflecting the interim between dream and reality. In “Animals and Other People,” the speaker remarks:

When I play with hummingbirds it is easy to break their hollow bones. Their yellow blood decorates the inside of pickle jars. In the morning, they sing me down to breakfast. We forget our dreams. In the morning it is easy to forget your dreams.

The final poem of the first section, “The Owners of Things,” also presents a strange world that informs other sections of the book; a boy plays with earrings like a “dog worrying a clean, white deer skull” only to have the dog metamorphose into a coyote and the skull to turn into a porcupine. The final lines of that poem–“The man moved to Slayer the way toddlers dance to any music; disjointed, utterly absorbed, the definition of tragic”–resonate with other sections of the book. In the fourth section, for instance, the language itself is disjointed, often unpunctuated, and constantly shifting from one image or narrative to another. In the poem “Long House,” the speaker begins, “I was a slave in another life,” only to move seamlessly from that statement to other lives and worlds which are inhabited by mastodons, berries, trout, and other people.

This world isn’t merely strange; it also is observed by seemingly capricious beings. The speaker in “One Morning at the Lab” states:

They put the mouse into a cage and told him he wasn’t a mouse…He was given the name Lucky Star to make him feel more celestial but the next day it was changed to Sun and then Vapor and then God and finally Mickey which gave them all a good laugh. When he sang it was as if memory itself were sighing and shivering with delight. This was the best part of their day.

Other poems, such as “Waiting” and “Meat Zoo,” also allude to some sort of show and an audience. In “Meat Zoo,” the speaker observes, “The monkeys had been burning all morning. In the midst of it all, peanuts were sold at a discount.” The poems in the fourth section also are obsessed with the idea of a show; however, the show has become a parade. It is first mentioned in “Entrance: Where We Leave From”: “The parade goes swimmingly. And then there is pudding.” “The Church & The Steeple” and “Charred Remains” also refer to parades, although the parade in “Charred Remains” is, in a way, more painful: “You may have it [your worst experience] scrubbed from your memory, but first you must parade it for the entire world.”

The world also is death-ridden. Death is insinuated in the first section and poem of the book, “Bite the Pomegranate,” and is brought to fruition in other sections. In “Bite the Pomegranate,” the speaker says:

Blessed is the girl who observes brains in the bloody pustules set before her. Blessed the incisors popping those pustules devouring the places where memory bleeds toward violence against one’s self. Heal thy self. Love the shadowy movement of thine own imagination. Eat your fruit. Fall from trees.

In the second section, spider monkeys and a woman die. A window cleaner kills himself. A wristwatch outlives its owner by decades. Death is alluded to in the third section, a single poem entitled “Movements Forward, Movements Away”:

This quilt sewn from the memories of generations, the baby blankets of ghosts, the longings of raindrops merging into ponds where the boy and the girl swam down holding hands. The legend says that they never returned.

Death maintains its omnipresence in the fourth section. The final poem of the section, “Into the Sky Falls an Executive,” concludes with the words “a woman considers the terms of her final internment but comes to no conclusions.” The fifth section, another single poem entitled “Discussions with the Bridesmaid,” makes an explicit reference to death: “If by die you mean invisible and ineffectual, then yes. I am / conducting electricity like never before.” The death appears to be more metaphorical than literal, but such a death isn’t without precedent. Other metaphorical deaths occur throughout the book. Shelly, the barista in “The Coffee Barista’s Experiment,” is trapped: “It was in that instant that you glimpse the outside world before the bathroom door latches shut…It was almost dawn. She couldn’t bear to think of what might happen next.” In “Postcard from the Banquet,” the metaphorical qualities of death are directly addressed. The speaker says, “Aware that the metaphorical properties of Death were exhausted, the visiting scholar vowed to avoid it altogether.”

If parades, shows, and deaths are common motifs, so is memory, or, to be more precise, the fracturing of memory. Memory is first mentioned in “Bite the Pomegranate.” The speaker remarks, “The juice of a red pomegranate seed impregnated by the memory of its mother branch in the family grave,” referring not only to memory but also to death. Memory resurfaces in “Tragic Old Love”: “Four days ago music held the place for his most important memories; now she lowers herself down knowing that she will be back in Europe before the rubble is cleared.” The mouse in “One Morning at the Lab” sings as though “memory itself was sighing and shivering with delight.” The third section of the book consists of memories; it’s written in the past tense and shares the love story of a boy and a girl: “They fell in love in the most common of ways.” In the fourth section, memory is fractured further. “Long House” is a series of disjointed memories, perhaps true, perhaps false, as well as disjointed language. “Here Are Some Things” addresses the impermanence of memory directly; the speaker desires that “the meandering willow tickling the wind…last in your memory.” The final section is a succession of memories, many of them dealing with loss, as in the lines “There is only mourning here only the essence of saffron amid / simmering Rose petals” and “You may hold your only child but you must hold the sorrow of / this memory alone.”

For all the dark elements found within The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees, the work avoids descending into total despair or pessimism. That avoidance is partially due to the absurdity of some of the tales. “Animals and Other People” is particularly comic; the speaker’s flat tone in stating that his uncle is a monkey and his cousin is a panda injects humor into an otherwise dark poem. Section three, the love poem “Movements Forward, Movements Away,” also keeps the work from becoming abysmal. The poem depicts love in the following manner:

The boy raised his hands to his sides and swiftly clapped them together over his head. As he did, the entire sky – stars, moons, galaxies, solar systems – went dark. The sky was pure black. The boy pulled the only light in the universe from his pocket and placed it on the girl’s ring finger.

The fourth section, which delves into some issues of belief and faith, builds upon earlier poems, such as “One Night a Girl in the Suburbs” and “The Coffee Barista’s Experiment,” in its desire for freedom. The desire is equivocal; in “The Directions That We Move (slight refrain),” the speaker acknowledges he can “never fully leave / [his] …old life behind.” A similar sentiment is expressed in “The Prayers of Strangers”:

I want so badly to eat your monsters, my stranger, to make them mine. But we are trapped in these thoughts – mother standing over daughter – while I long to be praying with you.

The desire to be free and the impossibility of satiating that desire proliferate throughout the fourth section, ultimately coalescing in the woman who considers her final internment but reaches no conclusions. It is only in the fifth and final section that the speaker seems to come to some sort of resolution: “The wind shows the sun and the tree the frailty of exposed bone. / If by broken you mean earthbound, // I apologize for my hunger: it was not meant to offend.”

The thematic elements of The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees–and there are many of them –are barely contained within the chosen form of the prose poem. Sometimes, the language escalates to such a degree that it is a literal torrent of words. In other poems, the narrative holds sway. Conners occasionally imposes some sort of form upon that narrative- or language-driven force. In “The Church & The Steeple,” he forces the poem into a shape that reflects the church structure and childhood rhyme. The shape devolves in the final lines–altogether fitting considering the words: “prayers like this lock step a bayonet scar a shrapnel / bazaar the wind through our shelter”–as well as the ambiguousness regarding faith found within the poem and its containing section. Conners even employs line breaks in some of the poems and creates visual space on the page through the arrangement of lines, a “twisting” of the form that only complements the twisted world contained within the work. Into that cacophony of form, motifs, language, and narrative, Conners superimposes sections. Those sections provide welcome relief at times and indicate some sort of “shift.” The first and last sections work as introductory and concluding pieces, although that conclusion is nebulous at best. Rather than providing a solid conclusion, the final lines of the book compel a return to the beginning in which the speaker blesses the girl whose hunger causes her to eat the fruit, the “bloody pustules,” and to a contemplation of the other sections that detail what is found within those pustules, those seeds of memory.

Entering the world of The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees is to entertain a place that is twisted both in form and subject matter. It is a world that is both surreal and all too real. The dreams–if they are dreams–resonate too much with reality. It is a space that, once twisted, cannot be untwisted. It remains a miry, shifting place of form, memories, absurdity, death, hope, language, and faith.

____________

Erin Feldman received her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from Texas State University-San Marcos. She works as a freelance writer and social media manager. She can be contacted at: factotumllc@ymail.com.

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

Erin Feldman

November 25, 2011

August 10, 2011

July 10, 2011