Month: March 2014

Guest Post, Rodney Rigby: The Reincarnation of Annie Larsen

Rodney Rigby

Some time back, playing cricket, I slipped, injuring my neck. A slight muscle strain, at worst, or so I thought. Within days I was in agony, acute muscle spasms, unable to sleep and a redundant left arm. After a prescribed dose of hallucinatory pain killers failed to have the desired effect, I ended up in hospital, and eventually, on traction.

Before being strapped up to it, I was informed by the physiotherapist that the machine was rarely used. I later discovered he actually had to dust it down and read up on how to use it.

It was, in medical terms, a last resort. Several intensive weeks, and much stretching later, it had worked a treat. Not only did I feel better than I had for a long time but I was also five centimetres taller.

I was told the height thing wouldn’t last. As it turned out, neither did.

Rodney RigbyFast forward to this past November. After struggling for three days with a painting that should have taken me three hours, I woke with the same pain I had until then completely blanked from my mind. I was immediately referred for another course of physiotherapy.

When I suggested traction, the doctor could not have looked more surprised if I had told him I was the Marquis de Sade.

I don’t think they still do that, he told me. He was right, they don’t. I resigned myself to what would be a lengthy healing process. Deep massage and stretching, hand work this time, and a list of exercises a page long. Pain killers if I couldn’t sleep. Which I couldn’t.

For a while, at least, painting was out of the question. I had to find something else to occupy my mind and time. Then it was, on a dark December day, that Annie Larsen came into my life. Squirreling through the dusty shelves of a second hand book shop I came across a wonderful, antique collection of song sheets and black and white lithographs. Images of a romantic, idyllic, rural England.

The music I didn’t recognise either. Unfortunately the pages were badly water stained and beyond repair, but the gilt card covers had a lustre and patina that only comes with being around for the best part of 200 years. I have always loved antiquarian books, old papers and ephemera, antique toys and photographs or just about anything that looks like it has a story to tell. Increasingly, I’ve been using such things in my art.

This would be the perfect addition. I parted with my £3.

Leafing through the pages further, I found the name Annie Larsen, inscribed in faded blue ink. The book was published in the early years of the nineteenth century, in London, though I had no way of knowing where Annie Larsen came from.

The name Larsen, a Danish-Norwegian patronymic surname, pronounced ‘La:sn, literally meaning, ‘son of Lars’. Though the most famous, or infamous, Annie Larsen I could find, certainly up to the mid twentieth century, was an American three masted schooner. Born in 1881 and dying an ignominious death when she ran aground in the South Pacific in 1918.

Might this explain the water stains?

There is record of a Annie Sophia Larsen being born June 29, 1847, in Denmark and entering the US through Canada, in 1881 or 1882. Though there is no record of her musical tastes, if any. The 1910 census data for Mishawaka Precinct, Clatsop Co. Oregon, lists a Annie Larsen together with her brother Willie and her sister Maggie, children of a farmer, John Charles Larsen and his wife Elizabeth. There even exists a Real Photo postcard of the three children, though I have yet to find it. Perhaps Annie, right there in the photograph, is holding her beloved book for all the world to see. What the world didn’t see was Annie dropping it some time after. Into a puddle. Or perhaps the duck pond. I can almost hear little Annie’s cries.

Overactive imagination.

Overaktiv fantasi.

Another Annie Larsen, born about 1879, in Utah Territory to Oluf Christian Larsen and Anna Maria Pederson, had no less than eight siblings. Orson, Oluf, Niels, Emelia, Johanna, Olevia, Olivia and Caroline. Though to date no known carriers of Annie’s ancestors’ mitochondria DNA have taken an Mt DNA test and no close relatives have taken a 23 and Me, Ancestry DNA or Family Tree DNA test.

Is the book the only link left to Annie Larsen of Utah Territory? Disappearing Object Phenomenon. Or DOPler Effect. In this case, Annie. There is also the Larsen Effect. A positive feedback which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input and an audio output. First discovered by the Danish scientist Soren Absalon Larsen, 1871-1957. Incidentally, the first use of feedback on a rock record is believed to be the introduction of ‘I Feel Fine’ by the Beatles, recorded in 1964. Another Beatles related fact, my son’s school is just across the road from the original Strawberry Fields.

I digress.

Jeg sidespring.

More research turned up a newspaper headline for October 22, 1930.

ANNIE LARSEN PASSES AWAY.

Spanish Fork – Mrs Anne M Larsen, 68, widow of Marinus Larsen died. Sunday night at the family home after an illness of several weeks from a complication of troubles.

Rodney RigbyOf course, the Annie Larsen who dipped her pen and wrote her name with such a sure hand, could just as easily have lived within a two mile radius of where I sit now. Though I do like to picture her down on the family farm, beneath a big old tree, or better still, in a big old tree, over hanging the duck pond, singing like a meadowlark, imagining the country I call home. Maybe it’s because when I was a child, I too lived on a farm. Though we didn’t have a duck pond or for that matter, ducks. But we did have chickens, and lots of them. Which is odd, as my dear Mum had a life long fear of feathers and particularly birds.

It wasn’t the birds themselves she feared so much, as the thought of one getting inside the house. Mum was Dublin born and bred and as superstitious as they come. She would take great delight in telling how a bird flying in to the house was a sure sign of a death.

So any windows were kept firmly shut. But people still died. My Mum being one of them.

Strangely, on the drive home from the hospital, in the middle hours of that night, an owl flew right across the path of the car, staring clear in our direction, before disappearing into the darkness.

That was odd, my wife said.

I said, do you think it was Mum?

Reincarnated as a bird. And not just any bird but the one most associated with death. Do things work that fast in the afterlife? And if so, with such perverse humour?

Actually, not all owl stories are bad. Afghanistan legend states it was the owl that presented humans with flint and iron to make fire. In return man gave owls their feathers. To the Inuit of Greenland, the owl is a symbol of guidance and help. And my favourite, the Aborigines of Australia believe owls are the spirits of women and are therefore sacred.

Perhaps Annie Larsen had a fear of birds and never went near a duck in her life. Maybe it was a bird landing in the tree she was sitting that caused her to drop her book in the pond. Though why she would be sitting in a tree if she were afraid of birds, I do not know.

Surprisingly, to me at least, I read that Anatidaephobia is the fear that you are being watched by a duck. Individuals believe that no matter where they are, or what they are doing, they are being watched by a duck. Hard to imagine, I know, unless one’s earliest memory is being woken by an Eider pecking at one’s eyes. That could be one reason, though I am sure there are many more, much too horrible to contemplate.

Maybe ducks too have phobias. Sitiophobia is a fear of food though the Greek root suggests it ought to be fear of bread or grain. I can not imagine a worse phobia for a duck to have. Except perhaps Pteronophobia, a fear of feathers.

You weren’t alone Mum.

I digress again. Jeg sidespring igen.

So, Annie Larsen. Annie ‘La:sn. Of the faded blue ink. Farm girl. Daughter. Sister. Postcard subject. Who sang from tree tops. Pioneer spirit. Wife. Widow. With your complication of troubles.

What would I have done without you? And your precious book. Which I confess, I cut up. Its gilt, stained covers a blank canvas. And you, my inspiration.

Guest Post, Maureen Alsop: Aspersions

Maureen Alsop

SpringI gathered a sense of how the human face demands rooms by which to mark calendars, then I made record of whose singing was enough. When my flock was sent to the egress, it seemed as if hundreds of horses traversed the open grassland. When somehow I’d followed back into the mire, their quick crescent-shaped steps; when I stood, somehow stalled; a sense of the last ghost was conveyed to me as a guide.

The redirection that I thought I agreed to was a tendency. Infrastructure impaired by vibration and extinguishment. Visually loyal to the mind of the learner, smoke-tree’s drop a euphoric identity. This is clinical to their nature. A luggage of small leaves, signal images, crucial imitations which wood-pigeons sing.

I didn’t survive the horse’s synchrony.

Yesterday, having returned from the dialect, opening from the trance of my small death, I read the dull arrangement, solving what had gone extinct under quivering waters. The studded plains were small studied voices; the activity of convergence, an eluded dialogue. Listening offered charms, a prod of trinkets. Those who I met through the stubble, over the canyon’s platinum topography asked me into the kill of winter. This is what I took from the landscape. As if collections of pebbles become administrative, communal. Rescue by rescue, someone will be worth the trawl.

What did I carry, asking the years I loved to be held in bottles slung from strings around my neck?

Guest Post, Sherril Jaffe: Life and Art

Superstition Review

WoodsWhen I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

So begins Thoreau’s Walden. I had such a cabin myself for five weeks one summer, my own writing studio deep in the forest primeval, amidst the murmuring pines and the hemlocks. It was here, after an extended period of paralysis—the eighteen months since my husband had died—that I was at last able to earn my living, so to speak, to find once again my justification for existing, which for me had always been writing.

The cabin was in an artists’ colony where I had a fellowship, and here all the mundane chores of life were taken care of. I had applied the previous winter, not believing I would be chosen, but in desperate straits and trying to survive. For my entire life up to the moment of my husband’s death, I had been a writer, but when a stranger called to tell me my beloved was gone, the thought that had immediately entered my head was now I will never write again.

Was this was simply a fact on the ground now, since my husband’s death had turned the world topsy-turvy? Had my reason for writing died with my husband? Since we had met, had I been writing solely for him, for his amusement and delectation, continuously to charm him? That I should sacrifice my writing on his funeral pyre seemed to me what was now demanded.  I had been stricken, so now it was incumbent upon me to make a sacrifice to the God of Death.

What else had I to give up? My children were off the table. I had only this left, to bring as an offering, this sacred activity, most precious to me. By the time these thoughts had run through my head, my fingers had frozen.

But writing had always been my way of being and knowing. Now, without writing, I knew nothing. For eighteen months I had no way to process my experience, and it sat in me like a lump, undigested.

But someone had believed in my writing enough to grant me this fellowship, and perhaps that is what finally gave me the courage I had been lacking this year and a half, so when I went to that cabin in the woods I went deliberately, hoping to break the spell and annul the vow. And so, though I had been weeping steadily for eighteen months, when I walked into my cabin, the tears retreated back inside my head, and I began to write.

Words poured from me now like those tears had, breaking the spell I had been under and annulling the vow, and for five weeks, I wrote nine hours a day, seven days a week, happily alone, spending most of my waking hours in the dream of the story pouring out of me and building my story with the labor of my hands only.

Each night, however, I joined with the other artists at dinner, and one night, I said to a woman I had just met, “This is unbelievable. This is art all day, every day!“ She was a fiction writer like me.

“But it’s not life,” I added, because I was somewhat concerned about this.

Now that my husband was dead, I had been wondering if my life, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t over also. By “life” I meant, actually experiencing something instead of merely imagining things all day, writing my story alone in my cabin. By “life” I meant, having intimate human relationships instead of superficial, if pleasant, interactions with acquaintances like her and the other artists in residence.

“No, you’re wrong,” the woman I had spoken to, responded. “This is life. Not the other.”

That was several years ago, when I dipped into eternity each day in that cabin during those five weeks, but now I find myself a sojourner in civilized life once again.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Martha Silano

Superstition Review

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Martha Silano.

Martha SilanoMartha Silano is the author of four full-length poetry collections—What the Truth Tastes Like(1999), Blue Positive (2006), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist), and Reckless Lovely (2014), also from Saturnalia Books. Her work has appeared in Paris Review, North American Review, Kenyon Review Online, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Martha serves as poetry editor of Crab Creek Review and teaches English at Bellevue College.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

Guest Post, Carrie Chema: The 8 Stages of Art Making

Carrie Chema

Chema ArtEvery artist has their own individualized workflow and some of them can be pretty strange. Truman Capote and Marcel Proust famously penned their pages while lying down while Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus preferred to write while standing. German poet Friedrich Schiller is said to have kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his workspace because their pungent smell motivated him to continue writing. The list of the bizarre routines of creative individuals is a mile long but what about the psychological stages of creating artwork?

Here are the eight distinct stages that I have identified in my own workflow.

  1. Nausea and Terror of a Blank Canvas, Followed by Diversionary Tactics and Despair:

This is the first identifiable stage because it is the first step that involves some kind of action. Indeed, there is almost always a pre-stage where you bask in the glow of your most recent project while you put off starting a new one for days or weeks or months for fear of facing stage one. But when the fanfare (or, more often, self-congratulation) surrounding your latest work dies down, you’re left with the realization that you must start all over again…from the beginning… from scratch. Once you’ve mustered the courage, stage one sets in. Hard.

You sit down, face the blank canvas and, after a half a moment of eye squinting, decide that you should probably make a coffee. Caffeine in tow, you try again but this time the pile of dishes overflowing in the sink catches your eye and, how can you possibly produce your next great masterpiece with last night’s dinner rotting in the sink (you’re no Friedrich Schiller, after all). You complete this ritual sub-phase of stage one only when your bathroom is spotless, all bills are paid, you’ve “exercised”, showered and done the laundry.

Finally, when all known diversionary tactics have been exhausted, you return to the canvas. Panic truly sets in as you think of the wild success of your previous work, in your stage one mind it was an achievement akin to -insert your favorite master work by any dead European artist-. You feel resentful of your past self, cursing that pompous, over-achieving, genius! Overwhelmed by the enormity of the task at hand, you slither out of your chair, crawl across the living room floor and into your bed where you pull the covers tight over your head. Assuming the fetal position under your down comforter, you remain in what is rapidly becoming a sweat lodge until you fall asleep or have to pee.

  1. The Search for Inspiration.

You finally manage to drag yourself out of bed when you realize the obvious solution to the problem at hand; consult your past self! The past you became such a hero in your mind during stage one that they must have had some valuable insights that your present self can now plunder and take credit for. You consult numerous old, half used moleskine notebooks searching for the genius of your past self. You scour through pieces of poems, old shopping lists and half-hearted doodles before reaching a page with “ideas” scrawled across the top. There are two things on this list:

1) Dog phone solution for interspecies communication?

2) Ask Dad to see his list of ideas.

Instead of being disheartened by this finding, you’re oddly liberated by the realization that your past self really isn’t all they’re cracked up to be, in fact, they’re just like the present you!

Reinvigorated, you consult the Internet to see what insights StumbleUpon or Pinterest can offer. You click a Twitter link to a new show opening at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and BAM…

  1. An Idea Wallops you in the Stomach

It’s all you can think about. You’ve never been more excited in your life but unfortunately, it is now 3 o’clock in the morning and you have to be up at 8. You attempt to quiet your mind (which is doing some kind of wild, flailing interpretive dance inside your skill) telling it “Hush now. You have an idea. Everything is going to be alright.” But, of course, after days or weeks or months of struggling for a new idea, there is no way to turn your brain off now that you’ve found it. You toss and turn as your idea becomes more and more grandiose

Original idea: a life size statue of Paris Hilton dressed in rags.

Evolves to: a four times life size statue of Paris Hilton wearing rags that I will create from the discarded clothing I’ll find in a landfill.

Evolves to: I’ll live in the landfill for a month, all the while constructing clothing out of filthy, discarded rags and then I’ll walk to New York and do a performance as Paris Hilton in the middle of Times Square.

The final, impossible permutation of the idea comes at 6 am when you’re on the brink of sleep. Fortunately, you do not remember the latest version when you wake up.

  1. The Letdown of the Groundwork

After your sleepless night of imagining all the incredible possibilities presented by your new idea you’re invigorated and anxious to begin your new project. Perhaps you spent the entire day at “work” skirting your responsibilities and instead spending your time daydreaming about minute details and embellishments that you’ll add to your project

I’ll rub decaying apples all over the Paris Hilton rag ensemble to channel the late great Friedrich Schiller… how’s that for a conceptual twist?

At five o’clock, you leave a meeting with your boss in mid-sentence to race home and finally begin work on the idea. Only then do you realize that you still need to stretch and size your canvas, or format your document or mix the plaster for your Paris Hilton statue. This is a great letdown when, after hours of fantasizing about your finished project, you begin to understand that you actually have to make it when all you really want to do is rub decaying apples all over it.

  1. Hitting the Wall

After all the frustration of finding an idea, the ecstasy of fantasizing about it and the letdown of having to do the ground work, now you’re elbows deep in your project. All the prerequisite formalities of setting the stage for your masterpiece are done and now all you have to do is fill it with your amazing idea. The only problem is that a few hours in, and nothing is working the way you thought it would. The Paris Hilton mold you cast is coming out way more Wynonna Judd and the supermarket doesn’t even sell rotting apples. You start to feel completely discouraged as you begin to forget what was so compelling about your idea in the first place. After the emotional rollercoaster of the past few days or weeks or months your brain has short circuited and you fall into a trance-like-state. Staring off vacantly into the distance.

  1. The Push

This stage is, in my opinion, the most critical in the entire process and, ironically, it is the one in which you are least involved. Also, I’ll add, it is very tempting to stop at stage five and revert to stage one but DON’T! That path is an endless feedback loop of despair, misery and unrealized dreams and inexplicable miracles are about to happen here in stage six.

As your brain checks out entirely from the creative process, somehow, your hands continue to mindlessly interact with your complete failure of a project. No one knows what exactly happens here at stage six because everyone who experiences it has temporarily become a mindless drone carrying out the initiatives of the Unconscious, or God or the Alien Race of Ant-People. Eventually you snap out of your stupor and begin to see what your body has been doing for the past day or week or month.

You can’t believe your eyes when you notice that the project before you has completely transformed into something that actually has some miniscule flicker of potential. Confused, you look around the room to make sure that no one is playing a joke on you. After you look in all the closets and under the bed, you allow yourself to feel excited about your project again. This quasi-mystical experience had given you back your mojo and you do a little dance to celebrate.

  1. Flow

With the new understanding that you’re on the path laid out by your Unconscious, or God or the Alien Race of Ant-People, you resume your work with a furious sense of purpose and drive. Nothing can distract you from the task at hand.

Afraid of the fervor with which I’m working as my wide bloodshot eyes stare fixed two inches away from the computer screen, my husband says something like: “Sweetie, I made you this French inspired five course meal. Aren’t you hungry? You’ve been in that same position for three days…. Honey…?”

I chuckle and reply vaguely: “That’s funny, dear”

You gain a super human ability to work for hours on end without food, water or rest. You don’t notice the passage of time until….

  1. The Click

Suddenly, the project is finished. You can’t explain why or how you know, but you have an instant realization that if you add one more embellishment then entire thing will collapse in on itself like a dying star. With a great sense of calm you can at last tear your eyes away from your project. The first clue that something is amiss comes when you notice that a faint layer of dust has descended on every surface of your workspace. Only then do you locate a clock and calendar and, with a jolt of shock, realize that days or weeks or months have passed inside the black hole that is stage seven. You make a mental note to ask family and friends what’s been going on in their lives and in the world, but only after you fill them in on the triumph of your most recent project. Turns out, your sister had the baby, the war ended and Coke came out with a new Diet version that uses Stivia instead of Aspertame.

You do leave your workspace eventually but return every few minutes or hours to stare lovingly at your masterpiece, astonished by your naivety in stage one when you thought you’d never be able to top your previous work. That work was terrible, you think, this new piece is the pinnacle of my creativity. And with that one, small, innocent thought your project becomes the property of your genius past self and you stare, horrified, down the barrel of stage one.

 

 

Guest Post, Maureen Alsop: The Flowering Self Smaller, Frozen

Maureen Alsop

Maureen Alsop

I cannot begin with a metaphor. Who you were in pieces?  It was insistent work, quickened by observation. But hadn’t we been warned? What we saw was not the same as what we understood. I tried to find every person in the wrong so that I would recognize my true hallow. When will you choose to know me? Will you linger there? Will the great pull of air around you do the same? Will the cold fall away from the underbody? Then as you are telling, in brimstone, the lies that you tell the liars, then will you remember the advantages we shared?

Perhaps now I am your empire. You who created me with openings through time.  I will not clear this of you. I followed you as well as I could through silver corridors, entered the topmost valley of the sky, beyond the whole of the sun. You wore gloves. Christmas snow pasted its voluminous pages over alleys, oxen. You were among spindled volumes of wool- season’s ornamentation.

Clay layerings, my internal pigeons were indiscriminate. The flowering self, smaller, frozen.  Yeah, it was fine, I guess.

Here I am looking upon a page upon which a woman is looking into font as if drawn to what is real. The emergence of idealizing eyes fall upon trees, trenchant her distance, the mount of her sea smooth iris. Firs, the willow, are perfect listeners. Real silence traces change from the darkened corners of her composed mouth. Snow covets the lilies, thickly astonished. You are so near.

I trace the river which breathes through our sleep. I guard the given valley.

Sometimes I breathe a reversal, your mind winding back, sacred and unaccustomed to place. Sometimes we are modestly smaller than our disappearing

But if this were to be read aloud, as I read it, I begin to imagine our love has been like connectivities beneath the grass, indeterminate voices buried, splice the whole of the inland together. I displace myself so I might be true to the wrong words. Among tangled patterns we shift between gullies, grassland, mountainous- irregular swoon. Birth-heavy.  At times we were fired. Sardonic, we are sinister in tone.

Surrender, beggar. We are multitudinous.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Heather Altfeld

Superstition Review

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Heather Altfeld.

Heather AltfeldHeather Altfeld teaches English and Honors classes at California State University, Chico.  Her recent and forthcoming publications include poetry in Narrative Magazine, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, ZYZZYVA, Sow’s Ear Review, Greensboro Review, Squaw Valley Review, Jewish Currents, Laurel Review, The New Guard, and Zone 3.  She has completed her first book of poems and is currently working on a second book of poetry and a book of stories for children.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

Guest Post, Kim Eugene Hood: Becoming Reverent

Kim Hood

I was told that there are four stages in life; you are born, you grow into adulthood, you marry and have children and finally, you give up earthly possessions and seek God. I have completed the first three. I am now an artist and pilgrim. In 2008 I traveled to India and completed the Hindu pilgrimage Char Dham.

Wind Prayers

In 2010 I made the overland journey into Tibet where I completed the Buddhist kora around the sacred mountain Kailash. And in 2012 I walked the 500 miles of the Catholic Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. It is the immersion and interaction with other pilgrims that has defined my search.

Tibet: As the trail rolled over another rocky bulge of earth I looked ahead at a pilgrim stretched out on the dirt. His arms reached out in front of his body where he would mark the ground, stand and walk to his hand prints, where he would lay down once again. He was demonstrating devotion to his Buddhist faith, something fewer and fewer are now choosing to do according to Geljen. As I stepped to the left to pass, the tired and grimy figure looked up at me and motioned for water. I dropped my pack and pulled out my water bottle. As he stood up and opened his mouth I unscrewed the lid and gave him a drink.

He swallowed and nodded for more and I filled his mouth with water for a second and then a third time. Finished he looked into my eyes, bowed his head and returned to his prostrations. I gathered my pack and as I walked away it began to lightly snow even though the sun was still shining. The clouds parted and Mt. Kailash appeared. Snowflakes mixed with emotion as I walked on in solitude.

 

India: The loose dirt gave way under my feet, spilling rocks down the slope as I made my Kim Hood Photographyway to the river. I reached the sandy bank and stepped onto a flat rock where I could kneel down to touch the cold glacial water. A hundred yards upstream it rushed out of the bottom of the ice wall. This was the “Mouth of the Cow,” Gaumukh, the source and headwater of the sacred river Ganges, beginning its long journey towards the plains of India. I cupped my hands in the frigid water and lifted them up and over my head, letting the drops fall, wetting my hair. As I walked back along the trail I passed an elderly man on his own pilgrimage who smiled and said what a happy day this was. I grinned and agreed that yes, this was a happy day. He looked intensely straight into my eyes and hugged me and repeated, ” Yes, this is a very happy day.”

India: As I passed the men who were bent over hand shoveling the embankment one stood up and calmly asked “What is the name of your God?” I responded “God.” He smiled and laughed. As did I.

Spain: “This 34 day walk has been a mental and physical purge. I have become emotional and cried so many times: in the small hamlet churches, at La Cruz de Ferro, over thoughts and memories of those who passed beyond this life and in front of the cathedral in Santiago at the end of the walking; tired, cold and finished as I leaned against my walking staff. Sitting towards the back of the cathedral, I waited for the Pilgrim Mass to begin. A fellow pilgrim who I had seen many times over the last month walked over and shook my hand and told me his name. We are both tired and overwhelmed. A young woman knelt next to me and sobbed. I feel I have come closer to my personal God.”

India: The hike to Vasundhara falls was only another five miles but after the long trek earlier that morning I was moving slowly and tired. Arriving, I dropped my pack and sat in the dirt exhausted. Over my shoulder and up the hill a voice pulled my attention from the valley. Sitting above me on some rocks was a shaggy haired man wrapped in a blanket motioning me to come up and join him. I grabbed my bag and joined him in front of his stone shelter and took the hot flower tea that was prepared by his attendant. I smiled and nodded; him also. He pointed at the flowers, the tea’s ingredient. I sipped the brew, sitting on the stone bench next to him and marveled at the towering peaks and valley that snaked into the mountains. I asked the name of one peak and he laughed as I poorly repeated his words, enjoying my poor pronunciation. Soon, five men hiking up the trail joined us. Taking off their shoes they knelt down and pressed their heads on the feet of my new friend, a holy man, a sadhu. They then bowed to me, one might say reverence by association.

Contributor Book News: Rochelle Hurt

Superstition Review

We at Superstition Review are proud to share the news of poet Rochelle Hurt’s new book!

The Rusted CitySelected as the eighteenth volume in the Marie Alexander Poetry Series at White Pine Press, The Rusted City is a hybrid collection of prose poetry and verse that reads like a novel in poems. Told through the experiences of “the smallest sister,” it is a coming-of-age fable set in the haunting dreamscape of the Rust Belt, where industrial corrosion becomes a funhouse mirror of personal loss. Poems from The Rusted City have been published in the Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Versal, Superstition Review, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. 

Attend Rusted City events and readings: check here for updates. Add The Rusted City on Goodreads!

Excerpts:

From A History of the Rusted City in Superstition Review

Individual prose poems in The Prose Poem Project and The Portland Review

Praise for The Rusted City:  

“In Hurt’s sparkling debut, the tinny, melancholic, gorgeous stir of Baudelaire’s heartbroken metropolis is heard again, but this time its flesh and spirit are rusted.  Its lung is rusted, its heart and belly are rusted.  Its mother, father, and sister are all rusted.  In this city, though, rust is no death rattle but the life rustle.  In this city, the prose poem scrapes the sky until rusted clouds burst, sending rusted beauty clattering down.  Hurt brings the prose poem back to life.”
—Sabrina Orah Mark

“The Rust Belt Gothic is a new political-aesthetic category, wherein the ignored or statistical pain of the nation’s abandoned industrial heart is made to glow with a Poe-like anti-vigor, an undead (but unnatural) force. Rochelle Hurt’s Youngstown is rife with fairy-tale inmates—a smallest sister, a favorite father, a quiet mother—yet the ruling spirits of the place are not humans but the corpsey avatars of place itself—the shuttered factory, the ruined ballroom, the big hungry plural baby of ‘the century’ with its singular familiar, Rust.  Rust paints its red sigil everywhere, blurring the inside and outside of bodies, homes, the city itself, which eventually, like a body, must split open to expose its red and rusty heart. This is a gory, half-delirious business, wonder- and grief-stricken, urgent and exacting, tender and hot, like an iron filing shifting in the palm.”
—Joyelle McSweeney


“In Rochelle Hurt’s breathtaking mixed work of prose poetry and verse, a history of place is caked in a ‘deep layer of red dust.’ The Rust Belt’s rattling structures and sutured-up asphalt roads are palpable here in every syncopated line and every musical sentence—in the flash of a worker’s lunch pail and in each drink stirred by a rusty nail that leaves ‘iron orange streaks’ on readers’ tongues.  And we know that this too is the taste of our blood. We know that in the broken heart of a country, what beats is the familiar pulse of a mother, a father, and siblings, slowly hammering scraps to hold family together. We know, from this new century, that it is art like this that endures.”
—Oliver de la Paz


“As moving as it is formally innovative, Rochelle Hurt’s The Rusted City is an elegy for the Midwest rust belt, and for a history that is not yet even past—and also the gorgeous tale of a family told through the eyes of its smallest daughter, who greets her rusted world with every magic word of childhood, all the serious play and terrifying loves of her youth.”
—Matt Bell


“Through the tiny window of the prose poem, The Rusted City paints a surreal landscape of an alternate Midwestern Rust Belt. Small domestic events resonate with the description of centuries (eons even) of the city’s history, causing macro and micro levels of sense-making in this strange, beautiful, and heart-breaking world. Through surprising image and impeccable timing, Rochelle Hurt has somehow managed to make a single family into an apt metaphor for American life. The Rusted City is outstanding, unique, and new—one of the best books I’ve read this year.”
—Sarah Messer


“Scrap gardens, metal shards, blankets of rust. A city collapsing, a house shut against itself, everywhere fragile bodies. A chronic cough, corrosion, exhaustion haunting the landscape. In a story too painful to tell, in a flood of stories so small yet so heavy that only archetypes can carry their weight (The Oldest Sister, The Quiet Mother), in increments of time so grand, so trivial (The Century of Silences, Spring Cleaning), Rochelle Hurt manifests shifts of perspective that are at once tectonic and barely perceptible. Her portrait of the hapless Rusted City and its inhabitants is unsettling, provocative, visionary, its magic hard won—a phoenix rising out of ash.”
—Holly Iglesias