Christopher holding If We Had a Lemon in the snow

When Life Gives You Lemons…


Congratulations to past contributor Christopher Citro on his recent poetry collection If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun, which was published by Elixir Press in April. The collection is Christopher’s second poetry book.

The title poem was originally published in Gulf Coast Literary Journal in 2018:

If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun

I’d like to invite you to the party but I don’t
know your name, have your address, or
know you well enough to really want you
around my cat. I feel a kinship with all people
and then I share a beach with them and want
to yell use your inside voice. We’re outside
but that doesn’t mean we’ll not dissolve
if raised to the light. Some days the sea wants
to chew us into shattered two-by-fours.
Some days she’s a kitten pasting soft hairs
around our ankles. I know—I know this for
a fact—there are moist pasta salads being
prepared and eaten all around me—in those
bushes for instance—and I’m not getting any.
I tried to start my life out right and still
lost track of where I was going. Example,
I picked my college because my girlfriend
went there. She slept with my best friend.
I went there anyway. That determined
the course of the rest of my life. I wiped
the table down with bleach before sitting
and now my forearm smells. It’s going
to be okay though. I’m going to need this
bleach-arm for some purpose. To identify
some wanderers in the sky it’s helpful to
determine the color. At a distance everything
for me goes gray. A mountain range in
a black-and-white film. We’ve been walking,
my horse and I, for days. For water we
think about rivers and lick our own ideas.

Check out this video to hear Christopher read two poems in the collection, “It’s Something People in Love Do” and “Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks.”

Christopher Citro reads two poems from If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun by Christopher Citro, August 3, 2020

The collection is the winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award and is available from Small Press Distribution. Find more from Christopher on his website, Instagram, and Twitter.

Contributor Update: Anthony Varallo

Hey everybody! We have some great news today that’s been some time in the making: past contributor  Anthony Varallo, featured in the Fiction section of our 5th issue, has a new short story collection titled Everyone Was There, out now from Elixir Press. You can read the title story of the collection here, and when you’re finished, go ahead and grab the rest of the collection at this link hereEveryone Was There was the recipient of the Elixir Press 2016 Fiction Award, and we here at Superstition Review could not be any happier than to have been there along the way to this wonderful accomplishment.

Buy this book!
Everyone Was There, the new collection of short stories out from Elixir Press, written by past contributor Anthony Varallo.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet John A. Nieves

John A Nieves

Today we’re proud to feature John A. Nieves as our second Authors Talk series contributor, discussing his poem “Honing the Edge (Acquisitio).”

According to John in the opening of his discussion, this is “a poem that deals with the fundamental question of what do we ask when we don’t expect the traditional sort of answer, maybe any answer at all?”

The poem’s stanzas are planned to resemble the geomantic figure Acquisito (gain), but an endless number of interpretations and circularities within its lines balance out this structural rigidity. The resulting open-endedness seems a major factor in John’s stated theme of exploration. It might make us, the readers, wonder what we’re ‘supposed’ to gain from the poem. That’s a difficult question to answer, when the answer is up to us. As John hints at the beginning of his discussion, it may not be a question with a traditional answer, or any at all.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can follow along with “Honing the Edge (Acquisitio)” in Superstition Review.

 

More About the Author:

John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, and Minnesota Review. He won the 2011 Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio (2014), won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Salisbury University. He received his M.A. from University of South Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.

 

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’re now establishing a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Kathleen Winter

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

kathleenwinterhsKathleen Winter’s collection Nostalgia for the Criminal Past won the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award for a first book of poems. In 2012 the book won the Antivenom Poetry Prize and was published by Elixir Press. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, The New Republic, AGNI, Field and Memorious. Work is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Poetry London and Alaska Quarterly Review. She was awarded fellowships by Vermont Studio Center and the Prague Summer Program, and will be the Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House in January 2015. She teaches writing at Napa Valley College.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Liz Robbins

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

Liz RobbinsLiz Robbins’ third collection, Freaked, won the 2014 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award, judged by Bruce Bond. Her second collection, Play Button, won the 2010 Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. Poems are in recent or forthcoming issues of Beloit Poetry Journal, Cortland Review, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Kenyon Review. She’s an associate professor of creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Deborah Bogen

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

deborahbogen_1Deborah Bogen’s poetry books are Let Me Open You a Swan (Antivenom Prize, Elixir Press, 2010) and Landscape with Silos (National Poetry Series Finalist and winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, 2005.) Her YA Novel, The Wych of Lepyr Cove, was made available on Kindle and other E-book sites in Dec. 2013.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.