special feature

STICKS: An Interview with Catie Rosemurgy

| Rebecca Valley

For our second special issue on writing from rural America, I talked with Catie Rosemurgy, a poet who understands and writes intimately about the realities of small-town American life. I fell in love with Rosemurgy’s winding narrative collections and shape-shifting characters nearly ten years ago now, and in our conversation I asked her some difficult questions about writing rural in this political climate, the stories behind her characters, and how she constructs the cozy, strange worlds that shape her collections. 

Continue reading →

STICKS: Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard

| Rebecca Valley

u34+1F!EVWH7ngw7NLVXIcKIKW2pmYA+Gl!w8rbMsYH!BRIAG5OUet9tcq9F2XjffXkZsjELHH1dotzfe59AzyGvF052d2UykJBErmXhkayWsW1OYzkgsRAdZgmVYczuSunshine State by Sarah Gerard (HarperCollins, 2017)

Reviewed by Brenna McPeek

Sarah Gerard’s collection of essays Sunshine State reads as an ode to the living, breathing juxtaposition that is the state of Florida.  In her essays (some personal, some journalistic, some a hybrid of the two) she has her authorial finger on the pulse of the people who live there.  She manages to trace the dreams the state breeds, but also pokes holes in these dreams effortlessly and gorgeously, revealing in the process imperfect portraits of humanity trying its best to grapple with The American Dream. Continue reading →

STICKS: Maximum Sunlight by Meagan Day

| Rebecca Valley

indexMaximum Sunlight by Meagan Day, with photographs by Hannah Klein (Wolfman Books, 2016)

“When Tonopah’s lights appear, I rejoice. I feel I’m alighting on Paris – the streetlamps and the Clown Motel’s flashing marquee bulbs seem astonishingly cosmopolitan. Tonopah is a shaggy little town, but coming in from the desert it looms large, an electric miracle in the annihilating dark.”

In college, I remember an afternoon when a professor of mine, an elegant retired ballerina with a degree in philosophy and a dancer’s walk, turned off all the lights and projected photos of cacti in Death Valley on all four walls of our conical lecture hall. The desert, she said, is a nowhere place. An in-between. It is defined not but what it contains but by what it does not. Continue reading →

STICKS: The Body Toxic by Susanne Antonetta

| Rebecca Valley

41BTYVH6CEL._SX334_BO1,204,203,200_

Body Toxic by Susanne Antonetta (Counterpoint Press, 2002)

Reviewed by Rebecca Valley

This review is part of our special issue on books from and of rural America. For more on this theme, check out the issue here.

“We are the Roof Dwellers, the People Who Speak in Darkness; we’re also the DDT People, the Drink-Cadmium People, the Breathing Isotope People.” (137)

How do we think about our bodies? As moving systems of bone and muscle? As vessels to hold our brains in, or a shell to decorate and present to the world? In an article about politics and our fears about the fragile positioning of our own bodies, philosopher and bioethicist Joel Michael Reynolds writes: “… here’s the catch. We aren’t trapped in our bodies. We are our bodies, as philosophers from Frantz Fanon to Simone Beauvoir have argued. These changing, leaky bodies afford us opportunity and choice. If static or permanent, they’d be less bodies and more stones or gods. To be sure, bodies marked by racism, sexism, cisgenderism, classism, and ableism get trapped.” Continue reading →

STICKS: St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

| Rebecca Valley

0307276678_01__sclzzzzzzz_.jpg

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopff, 2006)

Reviewed by Leonora Simonovis

In an interview for The Missouri Review (2013), fiction author Karen Russell was asked about her life in Florida and how it has influenced several of her works. She replied by referring to a “matter –of– fact strangeness” that her native state seems to possess. Continue reading →

SNOW: Stand Still. Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg

| Rebecca Valley

imagesStand Still. Stay Silent. by Minna Sundberg (Hiveworks)

Reviewed by Rebecca Valley

Maybe it’s the current political climate in the U.S., but I’ve been reading a lot of dystopian fiction lately. I’m about halfway through Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, and for the past few weeks I’ve been diving deep into the archives of Minna Sunberg’s award-winning web comic Stand Still. Stay Silent. (In a funny twist of fate, Mandel takes the title of her book from a fictional graphic novel written by one of the characters, which makes my reading life feel like one strange, interwoven loop of trolls and Shakespeare and doom.) Continue reading →

SNOW: Swedish Folk Tales, illustrated by John Bauer

| Rebecca Valley

swedish-folktales

Swedish Folk Tales by Elsa Beskow, Anna Wahlenberg, et al., illustrated by John Bauer (Floris Books, 2004)

Reviewed by Rebecca Valley

When I sat down this weekend to write about John Bauer’s illustrated anthology Swedish Folk Tales, the weather did nothing but cooperate. Snow came down in fist-sized flakes, and we were covered in a thick, wet, white blanket in a matter of hours. Though not quite the dry, bitter cold of a Scandinavian winter, it felt appropriate to write about trolls and blonde maidens in shimmering gowns while the boughs of the evergreens grew heavy with snow. Continue reading →

SNOW: Hyperboreal by Joan Naviyuk Kane

| Rebecca Valley

41lqajq58il-_sy344_bo1204203200_Hyperboreal by Joan Naviyuk Kane (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013 / Pitt Poetry Series)

Reviewed by Rebecca Valley

Joan Naviyuk Kane begins her collection Hyperboreal with a question: “June really isn’t June anymore, / Is it?” (3). It is a question that echoes, unanswered, as ice melts throughout Kane’s collection, creating a steady, solemn drip that reverberates until the very last poem. It is a collection of survival, of singing, and a collection dedicated to place — specifically, the ancestral land of the poet. Continue reading →