We are glad to announce that IHLR readers can now subscribe or order back issues online! For more details, click the “Subscriptions” tab at the top of the page, or go HERE and scroll down to make your selection. You can pay with credit card or PayPal.
In addition, we currently have a “Gift Horse” special offer: With your purchase of a 2-year subscription, we will send a 1-year gift subscription to a person or library of your choosing, absolutely free!
So you’re stumped about how to fill your loved one’s stocking this Christmas, or you want to share the gift of great writing with the reader in your life. Or maybe you want to make sure there’s something besides the yearly package of new underwear in your own stocking, or simply treat yourself for less than $5. From now until Christmas, you can purchase copies of the 2008 Iron Horse Literary Review Christmas Issue for just $3 each. To order, send cash or a check made out to “Iron Horse” to the address below, and be sure to include a note with your mailing address. If you want to send the issue as a gift, we’ll even include a gift message on a holiday card.
The issue includes cover artwork and a short story by Melanie Rae Thon, fiction by Philip Gerard and Stacey Elza, and poetry by William Keener, Tina Dybvik, Elisabeth Murawski, Kris Bigalk, Carol Coffee Reposa, and Chris Willerton. To see a complete list of contents, click on the cover image at right.
Send requests & payment to:
Iron Horse Literary Review
Texas Tech University
English Department
Box 43091
Lubbock, TX 79409
Iron Horse Literary Review is pleased to announce our nominees for inclusion in the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology:
In addition, we are pleased to nominate two writers for the 2012 Micro Award:
Poets Christine Kitano, Jessicca Daigle Martin, and Ruben Quesada, all current PhD students in the Creative Writing Program at Texas Tech and current or former editors of Iron Horse Literary Review, will give a reading at Texas Tech University on Thursday, November 10, 7:30-8:30 in English 001.
Christine Kitano’s first book of poems, Birds of Paradise, was published in 2011 by Lynx House Press. A native of Los Angeles, she earned a BA from the University of California, Riverside and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University.
Jessica Daigle Martin’s poetry chapbook is Always After Our Fall (Southeast Missouri State Press, 2011). She was the winner of So to Speak’s Winter/Spring 2009 Creative Nonfiction Contest, and finalist in Arts & Letters’ 2010 Poetry Award, and Ruminate Magazine’s 2010 Poetry Award. She has been a writing fellow at the Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts.
Ruben Quesada’s first book of poems is Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011). He holds an MFA from University of California, Riverside. His awards include residencies at Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Lambda Literary Foundation Retreat, Vermont Studio Center, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
This is the third reading in this year’s Contemporary Authors Reading Series sponsored by the TTU Creative Writing Program.
Issue 13.4 of Iron Horse Literary Review, our annual single-author issue, is now available. Hastings Hensel’s chapbook of poems, Control Burn, was selected by Erin Belieu as the winner of our 2011 Single-Author Competition.
Hastings Hensel teaches at Coastal Carolina University and lives in Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Johns Hopkins University and of The University of the South, where he still works each summer on the staff of the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review,The Hopkins Review, New South, Valley Voices, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and others.
To order a copy of Control Burn, send requests & payment (a check or money order made out to Iron Horse Literary Review in the amount of $5.00) to:
Iron Horse Literary Review
Department of English
Texas Tech University
Box 43091
Lubbock, Texas 79409-3091
The 2012 Iron Horse Literary Review Single-Author Competition will consider chapbook-length collections of short fiction and creative nonfiction. Submissions will be accepted January 16 – February 10, 2012. Stay tuned to the website for guidelines.
Poet Aracelis Girmay will give a reading at Texas Tech University on Thursday, October 20, 7:30-8:30 in English 001.
Winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Award, Aracelis Girmay is the author of Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011). She was born and raised in Southern California, with roots in Puerto Rico, Eritrea, and African America. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and the poetry collection Teeth, for which she was awarded a GCLA New Writers Award. Girmay has taught youth writing workshops in schools and community centers for the past ten years. She is assistant professor of poetry writing at Hampshire College, and also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University. Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow and an Acentos board member.
This is the second reading in this year’s Contemporary Authors Reading Series sponsored by the TTU Creative Writing Program.
Poet Sydney Lea reading at Texas Tech
Poet Sydney Lea visited the campus of Texas Tech University on September 22, 2011. A few hours before his reading that evening, Lea was kind enough to answer questions from students and faculty. What follows is an excerpt from that conversation.
Q: Why would a guy have a truck full of stunks? [laughter] You don’t quite get at it in the poem, which I think is beside the point, but I still ponder it and ponder it to this day. [The poem in question is titled “Fathomless” and appears online here.]
A: Well, I think the point of the poem is, “Why?” I don’t have an answer, that’s the thing. Quite a long time ago I walked into a little general store, and it smelled like every skunk in Vermont lived there. I couldn’t figure it out, but then I traced it to an individual who was walking around and smelled like he had taken a bath in skunk spray. Then when I went out into the parking lot, I noticed he had all these dead skunks—I say in the poem it was in a truck, but it was actually a Bronco. And I felt like somebody should’ve spoken up, said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
But I didn’t, and nobody else did either. I felt bad for the couple of old women, whom I knew, who ran that store, you know, both of them eighty or so. They were too polite to say anything, but clearly it was gonna be a long time before people walked in there without saying, “What the hell? Did you have a skunk under the house or something?”
And then, ten years later, I just happened to smell a skunk, and I thought of that and I began pondering why, but I don’t think the poem answers the question. . . . I don’t know why.
Q: I guess I’ll ask the real question I want to get at, considering that poem and maybe some of just your general aesthetic. There seems to be a lot of restraint in that poem, because you’ve just juxtaposed the death of your brother with this horrid experience that happens at the same time. That smell recalls all this stuff, and you refrain from trying to figure out how these two things are connected, other than by the smell. Can you talk about how, in your work and in the stuff that you like to read and in other poetry that’s out there, how you think restraint works, and how it should work?
A: That’s a good question. I remember way back in the seventies, I applied for an NEA fellowship, and in those days you could write in and get a report—I didn’t get one [a fellowship], and so I wanted to know, and I read several critiques, and you know, [feigning arrogance] obviously they were crazy, stupid. But there was one that said, “Trivial subject matter. Verbose treatment.” So I think he was twitting me (or she) for not being sufficiently restrained. I thought you were going to ask a different kind of question . . . but since you didn’t, I’m going to try and address that. [laughter]
Q: You can answer the other one. [more laughter]
A: No, um . . . [sighs]. I don’t know that I would have an answer, that I can draw a line in the sand and say, “You go too far, you’re not being restrained enough.” In fact, and I’ve quoted this sometimes in workshops with my own students, I remember that an early mentor of mine (speaking of not always being completely restrained) was Richard Hugo, and he invited me to send him some poems, one at a time over a period of time in the early eighties. I think I had one book out, but I’d been working on another one. I sent him a poem and I said, “I’m afraid that it might be corny.” You know, I might have gone too far. And he wrote to me back, and he said, “If you’re not risking being corny then you’re really not in the ballgame at all.”
So it’s a matter of stepping up to that line. The things that we call “corny” are just too much of a genuine thing, right? An overstatement of things that are genuine enough, or else they wouldn’t have fallen into the great sort of poet-well of sentimentality.
But as to when you know that is, I still trust my wife. She’s the only person I show my work to now, and she’s pretty good at detecting that line. She’s the kind of critic I want, because she’s very literate but she’s not literary. She’s good at detecting that and saying, “You’re just going over the top here, you’ve already made that clear.” And the other thing she’s good at detecting is when I’m just sort of faking it. She has her own little series of marginal comments—you know, most editorial comments are like stet or del or whatever, maybe a little carat—she’s got one that’s NASG, which is New Age Sensitive Guy, which means I’m faking a little bit. She says, “I know you well enough, you’re not that good. Come on!” [laughter]
But I’m very reliant on her, and particularly in that way, because I think in my case, I’ve got one of these sort of all-you-can-eat personalities. I’m inclined at times [to fake it]—I hope less as I’ve gotten older; I think I’ve learned a little the matter of restraint. I think it’s often a matter of learning to trust yourself, you know, that what you’ve observed and what you’ve rendered and what you’ve said is adequate, that it doesn’t need to be expounded upon so that the reader will get it.
And I know that myself, in teaching especially beginning writers, one of the more common things I will see is that urge to explain. Especially at the end
of the poem, when everything has been made perfectly clear. It’s what I call the Arthur Miller ending, you know, when you watch the play and everything’s perfectly clear, [at the end] there’s a character who comes on stage and tells you what it was all about. And there’s a curious way in which, as a reader, I feel condescended to. It’s like, “You thought I was so damn dumb that I didn’t know this, so you had to put in all this extra explanation.”
But I think—I hope—the capacity to say enough and not too much is something that, like anything else . . . anything you do for a long time seriously and regularly is something you get better at, whether it’s shooting baskets or writing poems. . . .