Contributor Update, Christopher Nelson

Join Superstition Review on congratulating past contributor Christopher Nelson on his new poetry collection, Blood Aria, out now. “In his powerful debut, Christopher Nelson examines the progenitors and forms of violence in the twenty-first century, from Cain and Abel to the damming of rivers. In everyday moments, spare poems depict pain with visceral sharpness, meditating on hate crimes against gay men, a father’s abuse of his son, and children murdered in their schools.” “There is loneliness in this poetry…but there is also redemption. We see glimpses of the speaker’s quest to find and know God, seeking answers everywhere, from Spanish cathedrals filled with holy relics to withered winter fields. The poems of Blood Aria ruminate on the sacrament of passing one day to the next, asking how much it matters what we believe.”

“In meditations ranging from a child’s incomprehension of a father’s violence to the suffering of those cast out for their sexual desires to the horror of mass shootings, the poems of Blood Aria pulse with an urgency that is both anguished and exalted. And transformative. To experience poems as passionate, as charged with wisdom as these is to enter into a kind of spiritual quest.”

Boyer Rickel, author of Remanence

To order your copy of Blood Aria click here. Also be sure to check out Christopher’s Twitter and website as well as his past work in Issue 15.

Authors Talk: Meghan McClure and Michael Schmeltzer

Meghan McClureToday we are pleased to feature authors Meghan McClure and Michael Schmeltzer as our Authors Talk series contributors. Meghan and Michael were brought together when they both had poems published in Issue 6; more recently, they collaborated on a work of creative nonfiction, A Single Throat Opens, which releases in June.

Michael Schmeltzer

In their podcast, the pair says that the best advice they can give to a writer who wants to improve their writing is to read. Meghan says, “I think that writers and just people in general should read widely until you want to read deeply.” Michael echoes this and adds, “Read what interests you, first and foremost.” Meghan and Michael then delve into book recommendations; not only are these books that they love, but they are books that they believe will help writers better their own craft. For example, they offer recommendations that will teach you how to be observant, how to look at family in a different way, how to read and write through the lens of obsession, how to put together a linked collection, and more!

You can access Meghan’s pieces in Issue 6 and Issue 18 of Superstition Review, and you can access Michael’s pieces in Issue 6 and Issue 10. You can also preorder A Single Throat Opens here.