"Hungry Ghosts" pub. in "Boxcar Poetry Review"

The May issue of Boxcar Poetry Review is up. Do check it out. Here's Neil Aiken, the editor, on the issue:

A wide range of elegies; explorations of the complexity of love, of family, and of goodbyes; the problems of fate and portents; loss and return; what we leave behind. In this issue we walk through Buddhist hell, lose fathers and teachers, question, doubt, and sometimes believe. Arthur Westover's stunning photography once again accompanies our journey. We also are treated to a great interview with Oliver de la Paz conducted by Diana Park, and Tatiana Forero Puerta reviews Sally Bell's Annus Mirabilis.

Poetry

* Jeffrey Alfier: "Last Words to an Old Miner Leaving Albuquerque"
* Jon Ballard: "Trees Make Me Think of Other Things"
* Pris Campbell: "Undertow"
* Heather Green: "Valentine's Day at the SF MOMA, Again"
* Rachel Eliza Griffiths : "Wake for Memory"
* Jee Leong Koh: "Hungry Ghosts"
* Ted McCarthy: "Lines with a Latin Dictionary"
* Rhonda Mino-Melanson: "Memories and Condolences"
* Tolu Ogunlesi: "On Reading 'A Wedding in Hell' by Charles Simic"
* Doug Ramspeck: "Oneiromancy"
* Sam Rasnake: "This is not my testament"
* Yun Wang: "Space Journal: Day Dreams"
* Joe Wilkins: "North Carolina By Greyhound: First Christmas After the Funeral"

Interview

* "Obsession, Grace, and the Second Book: An Interview with Oliver de la Paz" ~ Diana Park

Review

* "Sally Ball's Annus Mirabilis - Logical Affect" ~ Tatiana Forero Puerta

Photography

* Arthur Westover: "Field" and "Walkway"


This issue is dedicated to my father Kenneth George Aitken (1947-2007), who passed away last month on April 21 from ALS. Although most of you never met him, he was a staunch supporter of this journal and of literature in general, and provided much encouragement at the onset of this endeavor. In fact, I wouldn't be here without his love for poetry -- as a young man he wooed my mother with poetry :)

We are currently behind schedule on the anthology, but are back to working on the layout and should have copies for sale at the end of June or beginning of July.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Nice one, Jee. I liked that poem a lot (in its Merciless incarnation).
6:16 PM
Jee Leong said…
Thanks, James. It did not get many comments in Merciless, and I've always wondered why. I'm glad to find a home for it.
7:20 PM
Anonymous said…
I dare say I wouldn't have been much up to critting it back then, otherwise I might have had a go. I imagine the length may have put some critters off.
8:27 PM
Jee Leong said…
Yeah, I hesitate to crit very long poems myself.
7:33 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more