August 21, 2015

Photograph by Aparna Pathak

Image: “Goats” by Aparna Pathak. “Cruelest of All Are the Gods Who Never Frown” was written by Michael Meyerhofer for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2015, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF)

__________

Michael Meyerhofer

CRUELEST OF ALL ARE THE GODS WHO NEVER FROWN

I am tired of goats walking on ledges—
how calmly they disregard their own peril,
how even those nubby little horns
seem less like swirls of keratin
than middle fingers poised above faces
that have evolved into wide, permanent grins.
Maybe it’s our ancestors’ fault
for wanting smiles on their milk cartons
instead of missing children.
Did you know that goats sometimes
get their heads stuck in fences and have to wait
until a farmer comes by to free them?
It’s the horns. To remove them
is called disbudding. It takes a tool
like an Inquisitor’s pliers, castration bands
that resemble swollen wedding rings,
and a big glass of water to soak them in.

from Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2015
Editor’s Choice Winner

__________

Comment from the editor, Timothy Green, on his selection: “Part of the fun in making this selection after the artist’s choice is highlighting a poem that’s very different from the other winner. While this month’s image filled many poets with either anxiety or awe, no one but Michael Meyerhofer responded this way—with disdain. Coupled with a voice as sure-footed as these goats on the ledge themselves, the effect is transformative—what were once faces of casual confidence suddenly become smug and menacing. That’s no easy feat, and makes for a truly memorable poem.”

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December 15, 2014

Michael Meyerhofer

ON MY FIRST TRIP TO A STRIP CLUB

You’d better jack off first
one of my friends advised the night
before my eighteenth birthday,
the group planning
to drive me up to Davenport
where the treatment for birthday boys
was a lap dance on stage
while their friends cheered—
the implication being it wouldn’t do
to get too excited over
the proximity of all those fake breasts
and press-on nails, bad hip-hop
twisting out of the speakers,
the regulars using this as an excuse
to step out back for a smoke.
I remember the lead dancer had
a gap between her teeth
and no one raised their eyebrows
when they smiled. Later,
a brunette with roots like fools’ gold
talked me out of fifty bucks
in a back room where I made
too much eye contact while she opened
like a desert highway. I remember
thinking how all of this seemed
a little related to the rape
reenactments they showed us
in Health Class, Susie and Brian
struggling in some cardboard room
full of bottles with the labels turned away,
interrupted only by a narrator
as far removed as that
announcer from The Twilight Zone
who breezed in with his gray jacket and tie
and told us what we’d just seen
and what to think and how to feel.

from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

[download audio]

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Michael Meyerhofer: “There’s a passage in J.D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction that describes writing as religion. That was probably the truest thing I’ve ever read, even twenty-odd years later. Sometimes, writing is a monastery on a hill, surrounded by dogwoods; more often, though, it’s a bottom-of-the-valley shack full of snakes and loud music.” (website)

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January 1, 2014

Michael Meyerhofer

VIRGINITY

Poetry refers to something you have not done—
in this case, a kind of primal square dance

for which at least one partner is required.
Poetry is just something you’re born with,

the loss of which is a big deal in most cultures
predating the Suffragettes, when girls

were prodded before their wedding nights
to make sure they were still full of poetry,

whole anthologies clamoring to get out.
The word for poetry derives from the Latin

for maiden, meaning someone with their hymen
intact, the implication being that the loss

of poetry will leave you forever broken,
though obviously for our species to continue

many of us will have to sacrifice our verse.
Long ago, poets were closer to the gods

and wore fine robes and drank wine all day.
There are also stories of poets being sacrificed

to spare their village from dragons or drought,
like they could perform a kind of miracle

just by existing—then, not. When I was a kid,
nuns assured me that the Poet Mary never once

became prose though in statues she’s smiling,
always, like she knows something we don’t.

from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

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Michael Meyerhofer: “The first time I read the poems in What the Living Do by Marie Howe, I was so blown away that I said something like ‘Holy shit’ after pretty much every poem. This was followed, naturally, by a desire to share those poems with everyone—and to try and pull off the same miracle, if humanly possible. There’s a lot to be said for making somebody so stunned (hopefully in a good way) by something as seemingly innocuous as writing that all they can do is raise their eyebrows and swear like a sailor.” (web)

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November 25, 2013

Review by Michael Meyerhofer

If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany
IF I FALTER AT THE GALLOWS
by Edward Mullany

Publishing Genius Press
2301 Avalon Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21217
ISBN: 978-0983170655
2011, 84 pp., $13.25
publishinggenius.com

As a poet, editor, and generally over-opinionated loudmouth, part of my soapbox issue is that many experimental poets seem to be experimental just for the sake of being unconventional and pseudo-provocative—in other words, their poetry is innovative but gutless. Not so with Mullany’s If I Falter at the Gallows. These poems are stylistically unique, mostly short (often just a few lines) with an obvious stream-of-consciousness vibe to them, but what really makes them leap off the page is their underlying tenderness, their unabashed examination of the human condition that reminds me of those famous Chinese poets, Li Po and Tu Fu. There are echoes of William Carlos Williams and James Wright here, too, especially in the following, short poem:

In Praise of Narrative Poetry

Into the bleak
lake on the estate

on which no
one resides, falls

the quiet
rain.

At the same time, these poems are distinctly postmodern, almost always favoring brief, lyrical snapshots over richly textured storytelling. For instance, consider the following, two-line poem in which the title (“The Horse that Drew the Cart that Carried the Condemned Man to the Gallows”) serves as a de facto opening line: “lived for a while longer/ and then died.”

The risk of such a poem is obvious; however, for me, the brevity serves to do an end-run around my natural contempt for blanket statements about mortality by focusing not on the condemned man (referenced only in the title), but the equally mortal beast-of-burden whose survival was simply a stay of execution. In that, it somewhat reminds me of “By Their Works,” a Bob Hicok poem in which Hicok tells the story of the Last Supper by focusing not on the central characters, but on the perspective of a waitress.

While a potential criticism of such short poems is that their ambition is overshadowed by gimmick, that would be missing an additional element that adds tension to Mullany’s work: the element of surprise. Often, that surprise resonates with social commentary that, exactly because of his poems’ blindsiding brevity, has an additional haunting quality. Consider the following five-line poem, New Light:

The sun is hardly
up over

the fields at the edge of the city

when the city
itself explodes.

Usually in poetry workshops, I find myself telling my students over and over again to be specific. What beer did you drink? What movie were you watching? What city were you in when a lover broke up with you over text message? In the case of this poem, though, the lack of background detail—especially when coupled with the points earned by the gentle pacing and pastoral beauty of the opening lines—frees my mind to imagine everything from literal atrocities (such as the atomic bombings of World War II) to more generalized, post-Cuban-Missile-Crisis, Hollywood-inspired fears engraved in our collective subconscious.

As I said, though, Mullany’s poems aren’t simply clever; while his poems are far from confessional, what really drives them is their underlying humanity. Take this short example, “No Children”:

When I come back
as a ghost, and try
to tell you all the things
for which I’m sorry,
you will hear nothing
but the sounds of the dryer,
which doesn’t mean
you’re not listening.

This playful but distinctly metaphysical poem reminds me of Hemingway’s oft-referenced Iceberg Theory in that its sparse details hint at a rich and tragic backstory, despite the fact that the poem also has echoes of dark humor that help carve it into the subconscious for further analysis.

Put another way, many of these poems remind me of Zen koans in that they short-circuit the brain in the best possible way. For instance, I feel like I get the following poem, even though I couldn’t explain it to you for a million bucks (except maybe to say that it has something to do with opposites and contrasts and the tension created between life and death):

The Entombment of Christ

Assume a black
dot on a white

wall and a white
dot on a black

wall are facing
each other.

Probably my favorite poem from this whole book, though, is “The Not So Simple Truth,” which manages to be unabashedly philosophical precisely because it draws its energy not from rote philosophical statements, but tactile, gentle imagery culminating in a musical, final turn:

Potatoes. Dirt and
water. And a soft

towel left for us while
we shower. These

things are no
truer for their

plainness than peas
or pus or leprosy.

Despite the fact that virtually all the poems in this book are crafted with an extreme economy of language, the book itself still feels as broad in style as it does in subject matter. Again, these aren’t confessional poems, nor do they make much use of narrative, but their raw lyricism, twists, and humor speak to a deep intellect bolstered by innovation and, above all, a quiet sense of compassion.

__________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest.  His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also published five chapbooks and is the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. (troublewithhammers.com)

 

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September 10, 2012

Review by Michael MeyerhoferMy Index of Slightly... by Paul Guest

MY INDEX OF SLIGHTLY HORRIFYING KNOWLEDGE
by Paul Guest

Ecco Press
HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
ISBN: 978-0061685194
2010, 96 pp., $13.99
www.harpercollins.com

Rarely are we given a book that so elegantly marries intellectual and lyrical acrobatics with the emotional equivalent of matter spooned from a neutron star. My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, Paul Guest’s third book of poems, affects the senses like an unexpectedly tender burlesque show held in the basement of a speakeasy that once upon a time used to be a church. (And just in case it isn’t clear, I mean that as a compliment.)

The first poem, “User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation,” confronts the author’s paralysis due to a childhood bike accident; and it does so with stunning deftness, blending elevated lyricism, gut-wrenching bluntness, and a surprising dose of gallows humor:

Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart

you, or your beleaguered caregiver
should turn to page seven where you can learn,
assuming higher cognitive functions
were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,
how to leave the house for the first time in two years.

Those already familiar with the poetry of Paul Guest know that in the Age of the MFA Program, he is still in a stylistic league of his own, confessional but not quite Confessional, reminiscent of the New York School but not exactly academic (or anti-academic, for that matter). And in the canon of poets with beautifully quotable lines, Guest is as good as anybody, living or dead. The Dallas Morning News (cited on the cover) rightly praises Guest’s first lines, their ability to “zigzag from one eye-opening image to another,” but it’s the final line of “Early in a New Year” that has been haunting me for days:

When I’m quiet and still,
when I stop speaking out
to the motion of the water ringing in the drain,
I listen like a child to the darkness
where monsters sing.

The sheer unexpectedness of this, a poignancy of grief and derision reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye, is just phenomenal. I don’t have a tattoo but if I did, I think those last two lines in particular would make a good addition.

These are extravagantly layered poems–something I normally take as a symptom of emotional distancing, but the layering of Guest’s poems is no mere hipster gimmick; rather, his poems are a textbook example of genuine function mirroring meticulously crafted form.

“Eulogy” reminds me of Tony Hoagland’s famous poem, “Suicide Song,” in that both are sarcastic condemnations of self-destruction counter-balanced with subtle self-indictment and acknowledgement of not only the existence but the sustaining nature of sorrow. In that sense, Guest is irreverently reverent, which I tend to think is exactly the place you want to be. He is also supremely clever with his line breaks:“Tell me where / you were when you heard / but tell me later, much later / the kind of later mathematicians get excited about.”

“One More Theory About Happiness” is another fascinating poem that compares happiness to “an accident / with a powder-actuated nail gun and a man whose arms dead-end / at the bulbs of his elbows / kicking a dog.” Despite tones of bitterness and sardonic humor, this is also a poem that resonates with survival, in which happiness multiplies “with the mythic, sexual frenzy of the rabbit” and the before-mentioned dog-kicking amputee understands, like the Buddha, that “desire is the cause / of all human suffering.” In other words, it’s a poem of duality, neither a defense nor condemnation but a celebration of human frailty and metaphysical contradictions. As the poem’s title also happens to be the title of Guest’s well-praised memoir, one is invited see the same topics explored through these different mediums and in so doing, develop an even greater appreciation for Guest’s distinctive, gutsy style.

It’s sometimes tough to place these poems on the slide rule between cynical and optimistic–precisely because Guest is indirectly pointing out the sheer absurdity of thinking of cynicism and optimism as inflexible polar opposites, rather than hopelessly/hopefully interwoven depending on the time of day. And interestingly enough, given that these poems often incorporate elevated language, there is a refreshing lack of filler; that is to say that reading this book with an editor’s eye, I notice an accessibility and economy of language in Guest’s poetry that one would normally associate with Deep Imagists. I can imagine Guest being unfairly lumped in with more esoteric poets who try to be hip just for the sake of being hip, but in Guest’s case, one gets the distinct feeling that his aesthetic is less a product of style than sheer necessity.

In other words, reading these poems, I can’t imagine them being written in any other way. Guest has effectively created his own form for the task at hand, and in that sense, he deserves as much praise as other luminaries like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and James Wright who told their story the way they needed to tell it and in so doing, helped bolster and reshape the literary canon for generations to follow.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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March 10, 2012

Review by Michael MeyerhoferThe Melancholy MBA

THE MELANCHOLY MBA
by Richard Donnelly

Brick Road Poetry Press
P. O. Box 751
Columbus, GA 31902-0751
ISBN 978-0984100569
2011, 116 pp., $16.00
http://www.brickroadpoetrypress.com/

The Melancholy MBA is the debut collection of Richard Donnelly, and in addition to being timely, it’s also pretty damn impressive. Donnelly’s style is unique in that he manages to break new ground (especially in how his frequent use of caesura forces the reader to take his/her time, really digest the language of these poems) while deftly sidestepping the pretension and unfriendliness all too often found in “experimental” poetry. Put another way, these poems are wonderfully fresh and original yet distinctly human in their accessibility.

The “quiet desperation” famously mentioned by Thoreau is everywhere in these poems, made palatable by wry wit blended with the seething frustration and guilt of Middle Management, America. In “Office Window,” the narrator remarks how he’s just been given “a new office with a window” and, nearing middle age, is finally able to see “Minneapolis sunshine.” One could point out the irony of this, suggesting he could just go outside if he wanted to see the sun, but then you have to wonder how visible the sun would be in the city—not to mention the American ridiculousness of having to choose between a paycheck and sunlight.

Another example is “Jelly Beans,” an early poem in which an unnamed character seems unfazed by the near loss of a “three hundred thousand dollar” account, but sternly questions whether the narrator is the one who has been stealing jelly beans from the jar on his desk. On first read, it’s a funny poem combining the frustration of trying to deal with an incompetent who cares more about safeguarding his sweets than keeping his job. On second glance, though, there’s something sad and familiar about that situation, a bit of human frailty staining the machinery gears. We see this again in “She Tricked,” where we read how an unattractive woman famous for tricking “a man into getting her pregnant” flirts with the narrator, who “[doesn’t] blame her,” perhaps because he recognizes something of his own loneliness and desperation in her actions.

Fans of films like Office Space or even the much darker He Was a Quiet Man will find much that is familiar here, to say nothing of those who themselves have actually worked in factories or offices and experienced firsthand the struggle to maintain individuality in a setting that, perhaps by necessity, wears down the creativity and complexity of the human experience in favor of mechanical productivity. For instance, in “Cabo,” the narrator overhears a group of salespeople being berated like disappointing children, warned that they may lose their “spiffs” if they don’t meet their quota. You can almost see the salespeople hanging their heads, shifting nervously, even though we (like the narrator) have no idea what a “spiff” means in this context.

Those themes continue in “Your Life,” which contains perhaps the book’s most striking scene. There, an obviously dissatisfied narrator contemplates an affair with a woman who claims his life is “so perfect,” but instead of taking decisive action one way or another, he hangs up, clears his schedule, then simply spends “half an hour… staring at the wall.” The poet need provide no further details for the reader to imagine the indecision, excitement, and self-loathing that may be going through the narrator’s mind, all being clear illustrations of the very mortality the narrator both fears and seeks to embrace on the deepest level possible.

However, these poems are not merely concerned with dissecting futility, posing the question of what constitutes a physical or a moral life worth living. Nor is The Melancholy MBA a two dimensional view into the mind of a modern businessman (stereotypically as foreign to most poets as, well, poetry to Wall Street). One of this book’s strengths is its unassuming ambition, plus its ability to maintain verisimilitude while illustrating the paranoia, classism and/or racism interwoven in the business community. “Poor People” is an excellent example (reposted here in its entirety):

there are some poor people
in the world
I see them at the Northland Park
Community Center or
Dell Foods in
Avery
they wear dirty sweatshirts
stained sweat pants old
broken tennis shoes
their hair hangs
around their faces
their oily hair
it’s almost like being crazy
is what it looks like to
me until one of their kids
kicks in your
door at two a.m. and says
crazy
I’ll show you crazy

Some of Donnelly’s best uses of tongue-in-cheek humor occur in poems about the opposite sex, many of which also have some underlying feminist commentary or critique of the human condition. For instance, the sectioned poem “Six Short Poems about Love” begins with a vignette about a woman who refuses to bring the narrator coffee, saying she’ll only do that for her husband, but in fact, “not even for / him.” The rebuke seems playful, though, whereas in “The Good Manager,” a frustrated narrator tries to distance himself from a female employee who seems to be asking for leniency, a raise, and a personal shoulder to cry on, though he finishes by telling her to “button / up the top / of that blouse.” While that poem could be read as a lighthearted critique of an inappropriate worker, an alternate view would be to read the poem’s title satirically, so that the rebuke is how the narrator feels he should respond, for whatever reason, but doesn’t. Perhaps my favorite example, though, not to mention my favorite line from the book, is the beginning of “Sex Poem,” which artfully blends eroticism with measured self-deprecation:

A woman’s body
is a foreign country
and you are not a native
you are a man with a stamped
passport.

Underneath these small, often funny tales of lust, ambition, and petty betrayals, the real strength of these poems is their obsession with mortality, coupled with the absurdity of our daily situation. Somehow, though, Donnelly manages to illustrate all this with the timing, charisma, and lyrical acrobatics of a stand-up comic. The end result is that we not only agree with him, nodding and sometimes laughing as we turn the page, but we feel better (and stronger) for it.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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May 10, 2011

Review by Michael MeyerhoferOvertime by Joseph Millar

OVERTIME
by Joseph Millar

Eastern Washington University Press
Spokane, Washington
ISBN 0-910055-74-2
2001, 61 pp., $29.99
http://ewupress.ewu.edu

I have always had the deepest admiration for poets who know what to say and what not to say: wordsmiths who sense when it’s time to just shut up and let a scene describe itself, free of heavy-handed pretension. Joseph Millar is such a poet. With wit rivaling that of Tony Hoagland and Stephen Dobyns and a sense of timing and elegance reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, Millar treats the reader to humor and poignant observations complimented by fluid lyricism and superbly orchestrated line breaks. Consider this first stanza from Sitting Bull in Canada, which is about as tight a stanza as any written in the English language:

It’s three years since Little Bighorn,
               the Month of Blackening Cherries;
Crazy Horse has been murdered
and civilization keeps rinsing its glittering face in the dawn,
               perfecting the treaties and blueprints,
while the railroad pushes its stained fangs
                                             west through the rivers of grass.

In just eight lines, Millar not only sets the stage but uses masterful alliteration and imagery to take a scene that might very well be cliché in the hands of another poet—the tragic mistreatment of Native Americans—and makes it seem not only engaging, but unexpectedly poignant. While some poets surprise us with lyrical end-runs, Millar utilizes an uncompromising, direct approach that sacrifices nothing and astonishes the reader with its heartfelt grace.

Though Millar’s poems often address the lives and attitudes of Middle America, they do so without that air of condescension often present in today’s socially conscious narrative poetry. Put another way, Millar’s poems are the antithesis of snobbery. For instance, in “Autumn Rainfall,” Millar describes a woman who “…makes her supper late, moving slowly / in the bare kitchen, between the entertainment channel / and the glass tray of leftovers bubbling in the oven.”

While these lines contain obvious commentary on the human condition, they provide said commentary in a way that resonates with tenderness and humility. Also, as a matter of style and craft, Millar knows how to calm the reader and engage him/her before elevating his language for the profound observation that follows in the next stanza: “To be brave is to be tired much of the time, / half stunned by the continual dusk.” Now, a lesser poet might have been charmed into beginning the poem with that line, based on its music and meaning, whereas Millar’s approach seems infinitely more affecting because he allows the poem to open with a character, relying on image and description rather than the ruminations of a heavy-handed narrator.

And when Millar does begin his poems with the narrator, he knows the best way to convey a serious point is not to take himself too seriously. One perfect example is “Sunday Night,” a poem about mortality and guilt, that begins on a humorous and unassuming note: “This is my first time trying to make beef stew / and I remember the Indian stories / about thinking kind thoughts while cooking…” Here’s another example from “Names I’d Forgotten”: “I used to get drunk in the morning, starting awake / in the sinister warmth of the couch, tangled up / in my raincoat and pants like a trapped animal.”

Millar also goes beyond the self with that same biting wit, as in poems like “Heart Attack”:

You’ve always suspected the voice of defiance
would carry you only so far, wondering
when your life might end
even as you lounged on the high school steps
smoking a Lucky Strike.
In those days you considered it honorable
to make yourself drunk with fear…

As much as I like Millar’s sense of humor, though, I think what’s most pleasing about these poems is their humanity, their blend of strength and vulnerability. “Somehow I’ve told her everything,” Millar writes. “In this bed I’ve exploded every grief into her body, one by one… the drinking, the failed marriages and jobs, / the weight of my children pressing me down.”

Joseph Millar’s Overtime is one of those rare books that combines narrative brevity with lush descriptions, the result being a book that is both accessible and joyfully, smartly lyrical. This can be seen in the opening line of “Love Pirates”: “I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle / under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing / into your hair and thinking of nothing” Another prime example is “Ed’s Auto Repair”, one of my favorites from this book, in which the narrator watches a mechanic’s “…torch flame splash / its lizard shapes onto the dark steel.” Like all of Millar’s poems, “Ed’s Auto Repair” resonates with visceral, luxurious descriptions: a shop “smelling of gas and iron,” “air hoses [hissing] in the corners,” “the shadows under the muffler, / the new metal ticking.”

I first came across Millar’s work in various literary journals and was immediately struck by Millar’s ability to accomplish some kind of lyrical feat in every line without sounding heavy-handed. I ordered this book and have been recommending it ever since. In short, Overtime is just a lovely example of wordsmithing at its best. Pick it up; your bookshelf will thank you!

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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