Rattle

Natalie Young’s All of This Was Once Under Water

Superstition Review
Natalie Padilla Young

Congratulations to Natalie Young for the release of her first book, titled All of This Was Once Under Water, published by Quarter Press. The collection is “part of a manuscript that mixes factual scenery and history with speculative fiction, in order to explore peculiarities in human nature, culture, identity, and environment.”

The book’s cover art and illustration were done by Maximiliane Spieß. Maxi is from western Germany where she works as an illustrator and writes novels in her free time. The Limited Edition hardcover book includes 8+ illustrations by Maxi in offset printing on matte pages. The book is printed in full color and comes with a blue vellum dust jacket.

All of This Was Once Under Water by Natalie Padilla Young (Published by Quarter Press)

The book has received many reviews regarding the beautiful narrative it establishes and the themes it is able to intertwine across each poem. Read them below:

“All of This Was Once Under Water is entrancing, beguiling, disquieting—a collection of poetic dispatches from a terrain of lost faith and ecological decline. A genderless alien from another world, a philosophical monster residing in the Great Salt Lake, and a human “She” with a long-buried trauma: these are just some of the dramatis personae in this compendious collection that make the familiar strange again. Interspersed fragments of history about the birth of the Mormon Church comment ironically on our current state. The tone isn’t elegiac. There is hope in these searching poems, in their sensuous encounter with nature—not to mention a love affair between alien and human. The wondrous attention, the wry melancholy, and the sly humor of these poems will allow readers to glimpse their own lives with new eyes.” —Dan O’Brien.

“In All of This Was Once Under Water, Natalie Padilla Young conjures a physical and metaphysical universe in which the history of the Great Salt Lake and the struggles of her Mormon ancestors intertwine. Narratives of suffering, phantasmagorical legend, environmental threat, science, faith, love, and gender fluidity unspool in language as pristine and biting as salt. A great imagination is at work in these poems as Young probes the enmeshed lives of an alien, a lone human She, and a mythic monster in startling diction and syntax and haunting imagery.”  – Teresa Cader, History of Hurricanes, The Paper Wasp, Guests.

Natalie Young is a founding and managing editor of Sugar House Review, a poetry magazine. She also works as an art director for an ad agency based in Salt Lake City. Her poems from this series have been published in Green Mountains Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, South Dakota Review, Terrain.org, Drunken Boat, Pilgrimage, and elsewhere.

View her poem “Notes on Earth Life” in issue 18 of Superstition Review.

The limited edition is currently in preorder. Only 250 copies have been printed. Order yours today here.

SR Pod/Vod Series, Recording Marcela Sulak

Superstition Review

Marcela SulakThis Friday, we are proud to feature a podcast of SR contributor Marcela Sulak. 

You can follow along with Marcela’s poem in Superstition Review, Issue 17.

Marcela Sulak’s most recent collection of poetry is Decency (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Her nonfiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rattle. She’s translated four collections of poetry from the Czech, French and Hebrew, and is the co-editor for the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Genres. Sulak hosts the TLV.1 Radio podcast “Israel in Translation,” edits The Ilanot Review and directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.

SR Pod/Vod Series, Recording: Laurie Uttich

Superstition Review

Laurie UttichThis Tuesday, we are proud to feature a podcast of SR contributor Laurie Uttich reading her poetry from Issue 17.

You can follow along with Laurie’s three poems in Superstition Review, Issue 17.

More about the author:

Laurie Rachkus Uttich is a lecturer of creative writing at the University of Central Florida. Her prose has been published in Fourth Genre; Creative Nonfiction; River Teeth; Brain, Child (nominated for a Pushcart Prize); Sweet: A Literary Confection; Burrow Press Review; Poets and Writers; Iron Horse (fiction recipient of the Discovered Voices Award); So To Speak (recipient of the Creative Nonfiction Award); The Writers Chronicle; The Good Men Project; and others. Recently, she began writing poetry and has been published in Rattle and The Missouri Review. She can be reached at laurie.uttich@ucf.edu.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Jennifer Givhan

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 Jennifer Givhan.

unnamedJennifer Givhan was a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, the DASH 2013 Poetry Prize winner, a St. Lawrence Book Award finalist and a Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways finalist for her poetry collection Red Sun Mother, an Andres Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and a 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize finalist for her collection Karaoke Night at the Asylum. She attends the MFA program at Warren Wilson College with a fellowship, and her work has appeared in over seventy literary journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2013, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and Rattle. She teaches at Western New Mexico University.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review

Blitzkrieg, Poems by John Gosslee

Superstition Review

Blitzkrieg

The website dedicated to the extensive project is www.blitzkreighq.com and contains video, review, interview and article links. John Gosslee’s second book, Blitzkrieg, covers a lot of territory, literally, from the Atlantic Ocean across the United States to the Pacific Ocean in prose and just as much ground figuratively in the thirteen poem sequence that begins the book. Blitzkrieg begins as a 13-poem sequence that progresses through a number of cities, symbolic locales and hauntingly provocative metaphors. The non-narrative style of the sequence was inspired by the life-changing poem “Portrait of an Inner Life.”

Dedicated to the growth of “Portrait of an Inner Life,” the second chapter of Blitzkrieg chronicles the poem’s painstaking creation, initial rejection, national publication and international acceptance. “Portrait of an Inner Life” eventually spawned a cross-country book tour and led to numerous other projects through which a community of artists and writers grew.

Because of the poem’s wide acceptance, the author felt it was important to re-envision how the poem could reach an even wider audience in other provocative ways. To exercise the art form of persona, a false identity was created to support the poem’s new mission; “Portrait of an Inner Life” was printed on 2000 stickers and posted in major cities throughout the United States by street teams managed by the persona. The poem was also placed in 100 bottles, set adrift in the ocean, and pitched into waterways until the bottles were almost confiscated by police in Texas. The conclusion of the second chapter features critical analyses of the poem written by NEA Award Winner Morri Creech, Rattle editor Timothy Green, and translator Steve Komarnyckyj.

Introduced by a four panel illustration of “Portrait of an Inner Life” by cartoonist Yumi Sakugawa, the third chapter features 25 pictures of the poem posted by street teams in Chicago, Los Angeles, Pheonix, Charlotte, New York and other cities. Photographs of the poem in a bottle taken by Brandon McCrea and three full size paintings of the poem by artist Scott Kirschner demonstrate how fine artists visualize the poem.

Fro booking and other information please contact Alex Carpenter: booking@blitzkrieghq.com

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Taylor Supplee

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 Taylor Supplee.

taylorsuppleehsTaylor Supplee is an undergraduate at Missouri State University where he serves as an associate editor for Moon City Review. His poetry is forthcoming in Rattle and SLAB, and has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Paddle Shots: A River Pretty Anthology, The Missing Slate, Revolver, and Shadow Road Quarterly.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Josh Rathkamp

Superstition Review

Josh RathkampEach Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Josh Rathkamp.

Josh Rathkamp’s first collection of poetry, Some Nights No Cars At All, was published by Ausable Press and is now distributed by Copper Canyon. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and public art projects, including most recently American Poetry Review, Arts and Letters, Poet Lore, and Rattle. He is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Mesa Community 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 Virginia Smith

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 Virginia Smith.

Virginia SmithVirginia Smith is a graduate of Northwestern’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her poems appear in 2River View, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Stirring,Southern Poetry Review, Stone Highway Review, and Weave. Her first poetry collection, When I Wake It Will Be Forever, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.

You can read along with her poems in issue 10 of Superstition Review.

To subscribe to our iTunes U channel, go to http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/superstition-review-online/id552593273

SR Pod/Vod Series: Poet Karen Skolfield

Superstition Review

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature this podcast and vodcast by Karen Skolfield.

Karen Skolfield lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two kids and teaches travel writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a contributing editor at the literary magazine Bateau and her poems have appeared in The Adirondack Review, Apple Valley Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Conte, Memorious, PANK, RATTLE, Slipstream, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others.

You can read along with her poem in Issue 8 of Superstition Review.

To subscribe to our iTunes U channel, go to http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/superstition-review-online/id552593273