john compton’s my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store
Disease lives in this collection, oftentimes manifesting itself through acts of intimacy and startling realizations made about the ephemeral composition of the body and mind. john compton’s ghosts are many and purposed and puzzling–physical echoes branded with the terminal, the terror of difference, and the totalitarian states of diplomacy—bent sideways—in this post-apocalyptic state of residing we currently find ourselves claiming existence in.
“but the hands that own me are only photographs / & i’ll have to wait to know / whether i’m still a reason to declare war”
(from “poem for the poets like me”)
my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store brought an onslaught of personal remembrances to pond’s surface: oftentimes, I avoid cancer narratives simply because of the pain they promise, but his was different, his–so overladen with purity (some call it love)—that this reader didn’t look away, but instead found myself rejoicing at the tenderness in which he treats the difficult subject of cancer.
compton narrates the trajectory of his partner’s leukemia diagnosis in writing that serves as the weft for a calico weave laden with disease: cancer, certainly, but also brain pain, the infirmity of the soul, and the sickness of homophobic action and thought, all token reminders of a larger problem: societal illness, chronic and so advanced that World War III’s a common topic amongst college age students, common enough that it has its own trending hashtag on a Wednesday afternoon.
At the same time, compton’s collection speaks to spiritual matters, which saves it from the despair it so rightfully deserves—if it wanted it—it doesn’t. “on earth we’re briefly gorgeous” serves as introduction to compton’s husband’s diagnosis, discussing the effects of chemotherapy in lovers’ terminology: “estranged” pulls emotional weight in the midst of a poem about duality, sex during treatment, the savage reality that in order to cure yourself, you must methodically kill parts of yourself.
In “lifeline”, compton writes: “i wear your cancer / around my neck / like a pendulum”, aestheticizing shared trauma in ways that jimmy open the liberation of acceptance, giving it over to Time. A discovery of agency in moments of waiting.
In “eleven things i like about summer”, compton writes: “i like summer like how leukemia / destroys the body,” subsequently re-addressing the monster in the hospital room. The poem itself is filled with the season’s sticky-hot oppression, curiously beginning in the dark, wielding a narrative met with monsters and air conditioning and unsatisfactory sex.
compton’s way of handling realism is succinctly matched with his penchant for the deceptively lightweight line, the short clause, the breathless bite to the cadences that I, as reader, imagine him reciting them in, forward-facing a crowded room of non sequiturs.
Mental health is an equally prominent member of compton’s motifs, bringing the collection to the near-dip-tilt of the depressive pond, saving itself from the crude terminology of navel-grazing through its obvious merits.
The collection stands for community–“i’ve seen gorgeous men / aligned in rows / with horoscope eyes / pledging a truth” (“i’m practicing to be a pornstar”)–is, in many respects, a selfless act of loving. In “my dirty language”, compton writes, “your thin bottom lip / makes an exceptional / brace. i use it / to prop my wrist. / it calms the tremors: / the diaphragm of my mental health.” Take a moment to examine those lines and try to tell me that love isn’t the greatest power on the planet. “dreamers of a real world” examines gayness, suicidal ideation, and emotion in tandem:
“i sat too close to crying / too close to throwing my body / off the edge too sentimental / too gay”, while “a conversation” clutches to its breast one of the most chilling lines of verse I’ve read about madness: “i’ve got shoes inside my head”.
In what I’ve decided is compton’s magnum opus, “the house in the attic”, the poet milks dry twelve pages of their life force, leaving the reader with a radiant, stand-alone poetic architecture mindfully in tune with (bear with me) Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”.
Let me defend this. compton’s poem is structured in response to The Epic, relaying a barrage of apocalyptic vignettes, beginning–in sly self-acknowledgment–with the act of writerly creation: “i drop / ink / onto paper / like / machine gun / shells,” leading us then to a disturbance of images.
Fish swimming beneath skin, pitchforks–protest–a prophetess, nightmares sanctioned by beds of petals, before, four pages deep, the penultimate line in the poem: “look into the portrait / of your eye / the shine produces / exact replicas”. The effect is a stunning one, similar to what I imagine it would feel like to discover a poem–sprung to life–staring back, as you blithely examine it like an inanimate.
Moving forward, “the house inside my head” transitions to a hellish landscape replete with sound and physicality and mention of paradise.
The reader’s thrust into a different landscape: Love–demonic, even, and perhaps of the literal and literary variety–reigns supreme. Chronologically, the poem begins unwinding backwards towards birth—provoked by a removal of jaw—before placing us briefly in Boyhood to sit in attendance to an ode to a former self.
Our next stop is conception, blurred with the staccato cries of “dictator”—the dictatorial demands of new life—or something wilder, before the poem forsakes the maternal for the tempest. Storm in sky and verse nudging the insect from inside the skull:
“symptoms exist / in the precipitation / the sky / over-exaggerates / the cause of illness”
The language moves into the communal, then generational, which is exactly appropriate for madness dialogue, which absorbs the remaining five pages of “the house in the attic”. compton quietly compares his own father’s generation’s beasts (war) with his own (medication), before, once again, brushing “Kubla Khan” on accident with moon and sun, demons–the variety of which–argue ultimatums of exorcism by doctors, only to place our narrator in labs of deceit: “...that the doctor has left open / because inside there held / a masterwork”. Angels populate the tail-end of the poem, leaving both reader and narrator restless and breathless with lines like, “i wake to an unstable environment / something like heaven”. The poem leaves us with imagery of pigeon and poison and the wary glancing of fragility. Possibly, his ending pierces to the pointlessness of life; however, on another reading, “dirt” speaks to our rehoming, our eventual decay, and redistribution into the ground.
I’d like to leave you with community–it’s something we direly need in this strange tilt-a-whirl time, something I’d say from first-hand experience that a marginalized person requires most–more than medicine, more than clothing, and certainly more than the transient—oftentimes foolish—popularity on the internet, that we buy into the same way the down-and-out gambler buys his metallic scratch-off cards every Sunday morning. It’s all foibles, a gesticulation of ego hoot-hoots that bear witness to nobody, nothing, not even the enormous crater in the sky, save the self. What I mean to say is that this faux community lacks the necessary new-tire center of true value. Lack of community proper (and pure) brings about violence–the scariest thing about this statistic is that it’s a choose-your-own-character variety of the action. Mental? Physical? Or possibly the most detrimental of all—spiritual—as it sparks the others into headlong and dangerously blindered agency.
“we make community of buildings / at a glance, the windows are mirrors / & reflect everyone sent out to work.”
(from “tender community of fabled people”)
compton’s collection gets this.
It understands the assignment better than most, and that’s a given: he’s experienced those slim, rare portionings of pain that edify, rendering nuance moot in times of dear, honest-to-God anguish, the kind that splits, then collapses a person into the elemental building blocks of both other and ether. And yet he lives and writes about it. Let us rejoice in that.
Evelyn Berry’s Grief Slut
In Evelyn Berry’s Grief Slut, Hauntology of Self claims its rightful place as avenue for exploration in gender politics and spirituality, taking a scope of sex and bodies that is gracious in its language, fevered by a modern-made-old religiosity, yet systematic in its approaches to chronological narrative despite the text’s compulsive, lyrically fitful reboots and rebirths:
“we show each other magic tricks / we learned from the internet. / we swipe the apps, hypnotized pixeldumb…”
Recounting, recollection, the re-remembrance of childhood flattened by abiding misplacement, shined by the spit and spirit of a youth gone stagnant and sideways, Berry reenacts and rebels against the parameters of language to spellbind the reader with lines reading like lightning bolts to the gut:
“home is what we swallow”,
“he learns to knot his brainstem”,
“holyspirit-hamstrung”.
Berry’s text is measured by Easter Eggs of the jubilant, Vanitas variety: glitter, koi fish, mouths, rotting fruit, and gin, offering a rare glimpse into the psyche of the Trans mind and body/soul. The esoteric vision, the myth-hood of Self and self-making is placed at the center of this collection—serves as offering—like some small statue of a favorite patron saint. Sex as possession, the carcass made magic by the censorious droplets of sweat on the body, perceived—bidding desire, a replacement of what secular society’s been taught about the spiritual contracts of sexual acts. Self as religious artifact, kept on the cradle of alter: alteration of selfhood, the body, the sharp bend of genre and gender that Berry so fervently scrutinizes with symbol, psychic scalpel, and fishing pole.
“I hold my ear to marble & listen / for the living person on the other side. / how do I enter a person, a portal?”
Boyhood is romanticized with specificity of atmosphere and such care to setting that a breathing portraiture forms below the reader’s rosy face, a sense and smell of the place arrives beckoned on cue by lines like:
“grief is a clown car we can all fit inside.”
Home is cut adrift like an alien limb shot through by white, hot light, in lines like:
“…to discover home, first, / one must study / the contours of loss.”
Berry meticulously arranges her first gender’s death on the page like precious artifacts, posing it in likeness to the constant crucifix, rouging its lips and cheeks with absented grief, the sort one has, out of necessity, to make minor moons of.
“i lick each star. / hold them in my cheeks / like luminescent jawbreakers. / i cannot see heaven from here, / but i can see your house.”
She accomplishes this through relic: makes and meets and metes out to memory with gloved hand a sparse, glittering sharpness that hangs the moon up better for us to glimpse the ghost of the other by:
“[m]emory is a museum with a leaky cealing, / an archive slowly filling with water. / the artifacts become damp & undistinguishable.”
Review: Sarah Connell’s Pay the Piper
The debilitating lifelong trauma of early parental death and the specific emotional solitude of the orphan is the engine of this slim novel about lost and found magic. Mischief abounds, and there’s plenty to delight in: witches and bishops and ravens and magicked objects, but plenty more, too, to consider in the silences—what I mean to say is that Sarah Connell’s brilliance lies in the areas of quiet melancholy found between the blood and action sequence; nested joyfully in her studies of cognitive shadow, and the particular, mindful resilience of well-wrought thought. Set carefully against Pietro Lorenzetti’s “The Burial”’s muted intentionality, the novel scrubs some flavor of medieval stoicism back into the light that, for the most part, is lost in today’s drunken stabs at the fantastic—this is the stark imagery that I’d utilize to describe Connell’s novel to an interested friend. Connell’s confident stabs at capturing the adolescent desire for sanctioned identity in Pay the Piper are commendable, easy-breathing things that live and talk in that alive way only fully-reasoned characters are want to do. The action is breathless and well-designed, while the plot cradles the reader’s desire for the comfort of the familiar, while still providing surprise, laughter, and the much-needed ingredient of heartbreak. We’re speaking Fable, after all, and Connell’s reimagining doesn’t disappoint. The scenes between children flower foremost in my thoughts due to their remarkable innocence; there’s both candor and light, and have the proper makings for the stunning youthful blemish of the re-calibrated fairy tale to function fully and heartily beneath the pages of this brief novel. Sarah Connell’s Pay the Piper utilizes trauma and history to fashion a story about marginalization that places loving emphasis on the yesteryear and the heritable potency of community, while establishing the medieval teen as speculative fiction’s hottest new archetype. The kids are alright, after all, despite it all, and then some.
Review: The Art of Washing What You Can’t Touch by Ewen Glass
There are few writers who can make loss funny, do it well in a way that sticks to the inside of the brain like a welcome neuro-film of reprieve from a world so overladen with terrifically morose accounts of heartbreak that one’s scared to crack open a book these days for fear of messing up their mascara. Ewen Glass has a new collection out called The Art of Washing What You Can’t Touch, and it’s imbued with a sense of good-natured humor that I’d like to devote this entire opening paragraph to. In his poem “Placing in a competition”, Glass juggles the pivotal last moment of seeing his father with Scottish setting, choosing to place the absurd comfortably in context with family. “Placing” is capable, erudite, offers the option of a nostalgia either just missed or retroactively remembered next to the poignant in lines like
“is it right then that saying, / parents become children? / There was a rainbow so low / across the loch I thought / it was a seaside attraction.”
We needed a rainbow for that particular goodbye.
Each piece in his collection contains the unexpected variable that’s so obviously paramount to getting good prose poetry just right for the reader. In “Self-Care”, Glass is generous with his surprises, ricochets from the downright lyrical…
(“the substance of stars…”)
to the colloquial…
(“And my partner calls me dramatic,”)
…in a matter of six lines and a handful of beats.
This not only speaks to Glass’s level of craftsmanship, but it foretells a writer who has a keen, intelligent grasp on the inner-workings of a well-laid line.
His sentences trap the reader in the nest of these small, oftentimes slightly mad scenarios, providing us sanctuary for a few seconds from bare-knuckled reality; in its place, Glass gives us generous helpings of parody–such as “The Cinema Experience Is Here To Stay”–and cut-glass wit, replete with requisite lilt–as so delightfully found in “Get O My Lawn & While You’re Doing So Don’t Judge Me”.
In The Art of Washing What You Can’t Touch, you’ll find earthy exteriors and a heartbeat purified, poured, and held at a certain angle to the light. You’ll examine its pulp of previously felt pain and recognize the collection for what it is: a funny valentine equally portioned into the type of slice-of-life narratives that sing of the due sadness and strength of a man courageous enough to write about it.
Interview with Ricardo Victoria
What’s it been like for you these last several months?
Relatively quiet. I’m working on a strange mish mash of horror, comedy, and urban fantasy for a stand alone and seeing if I can pull it out. I’m trying to get my short stories into shape to publish a couple of collections: one for SFF and one for horror. Other than that, it has been mostly promoting my Tempest Blades series and my book on sustainability explained through SFF.
Feel free to share your publication journey, discuss the amount of labor it took in regards to your project’s editing process, the delirious nature of third drafts, or that one late night you spent staring into a glass of wine, wondering if it’d ever truly come together.
Long story short: I started writing in highschool, paused for years to get my degree and my PhD, meet people that wanted to write but like me were unsuccessful, so after a drunk chat we shared our skills and created a micro press to publish our short stories (got nominated to awards a couple of times for a couple of stories), while I worked on my first novel. Got a lot of rejections and through a mutual friend from a writing group contacted my current publisher, Artemisia Publishing, who decided to take a chance on this crazy mexican author who wanted to write a science fantasy novel and puts with my ideas while helping me to get the best stories I can write in my second language. Along the way, my wife has supported me, putting up with my loooooooong binge writing nights to get the series done, as well as my academic book on SFF and sustainability, and my mood swings derived from my chronic depression. Right now, I’m taking it slow and working on my next writing projects and my day job obligations.
Share freely any publication news you may have, and please include any links you’d like us to include.
At the moment I have no news yet, so I can only share the link to my Tempest Blades series.
And to my Sustainability explained through SFF book: link.
In two sentences, would you summarize your novel for us?
I would summarize the whole novel series as this:
found family has to save a world where magic and science collide, while dealing with their individual personal issues… lots of issues.
You’ve mentioned in correspondence that mental health is featured throughout your novel. Was this something that you came into your project knowing you wanted to discuss? If so, did you set any parameters in place for yourself around how you wanted to approach this sensitive subject?
Not really at first. When I started writing my first novel The Withered King, the mental health part was not on the horizon, just informed the way characters reacted to certain events, due their PTSD caused by the way they got their special abilities (they had to sorta die first, that certainly causes a lot of mental trauma). Because I put all I had into that novel–as I didn’t know at the time if I would have an opportunity to publish more– it reads as sort of a stand alone. When I got the blessing from my publisher to work on the whole series, that was when I started to put mental health as one of the central themes of the story. With The Cursed Titans, it became the main arc for the main POV character of that book, mostly because I was going through a serious bout of depression that was affecting my personal life, and it was the first year of the COVID pandemic. I had to start therapy and taking meds to get by and decided to add that to the book as a way to deal with my depression. In general, I have done that since highschool (when I started writing), because I’ve been suffering chronic depression for decades. So, one of my heroes in the second book onwards suffers from depression, has to go to therapy, take meds, and keep enough presence of mind to still save the day.
The main parameter I keep myself within is to present mental health–in this case, depression, in an objective and balanced way–as any other illness that can be treated; that it’s good to ask for help when it gets too much. Usually in SFF stories, mental illness has been coded as a shorthand for villains, or characters that need to be saved, which is unfair for those of us that suffer from them. Thus, this is why I decided to show that one of the main heroes (and possibly one of the most powerful ones of the cast) suffers from depression, and is the hero of that particular story (and the general arc of the series). I wanted to show that suffering from mental health issues and being the hero are not mutually exclusive. My guideline was to offer a positive representation of a character that suffers from mental health issues, which is not different from suffering any other chronic illness, and that it doesn't stop you from living a normal life–if treated–and certainly doesn’t make you the villain, or the one making awful decisions.
What is something you’d like readers to take away from your work in regard to mental health advocacy, discussion, or criticism?
That mental health issues shouldn't be coded as a shorthand for villains, that you are not alone, that it’s OK to seek help, that things can improve, that suffering from mental health issues doesn’t stop you from being the hero of your own story, and that it’s OK to seek help. Also, mental health issues need a better, more informed representation and depiction in the media in general, specifically in SFF.
Anything else you’d like to share or for us to share on your behalf?
Other than that, please buy my books, support indie authors, BIPOC authors, and small indie presses? Stay tuned for my next book release, and remember that you are not alone, and that it’s OK to seek and ask for help.
Drop any social media or website links you’d like us to link to in the interview.
I spend most of my time on Bluesky.
I also have a website/blog (that I need to update more frequently).
And I have a FB page as well.
Some Things in This World by Joyce Thomas
Historically, elegies to nature aren’t hard to come by in poetry collections, but very few achieve the prismatic symphony—the swell of image, concept, and perfectly proportioned reference—as Thomas’ does. Notes of a restrained, though well-loved and looked-after, romanticism crop up throughout the collection. The shocked delight of the lyrical is well-paced with other hardier, intellectual stoicism, serving to reinforce the treasure of Thomas’ softness when it does appear:
“the tarry darkness / of the future— / the future now / that is ours.”
The collection is erudite in its empathy; Thomas nurses an emotional congressing of ecological passion and scholarly affinity for her subjects: beast, terrain, topography, weather, and wildness. Blindingly so, in similar ways a bolt reaches earth—too fast for sound, only the deliverance of rudimentary impact. It’s the breaking down of matter into its most elemental, a sensorial reboot with the power to stop time, or in our case, speech.
This begs the question of Thomas’ inspiration, its genesis and lean quality of power: something of the omniscient mythic resides in these poems; dually, the assured voice of astute scientist plays an equally pivotal role. The reader learns things. A schooling of both craft and inquiry. The osmosis that takes form in these poems is fastened with knowledge that alarms, shares space with galvanizing magnanimity, witty inference, and barbed ecological treatises that stretch the filaments of nature writing into something ecclesiastical. Such as in “Storm Warnings” when Thomas tackles the national memory of our most recent and deadly hurricanes:
“One thinks of omens and Holsteins, / the Second Coming, Of rough beasts bawling / like drowning saxophones.”
We come away cleansed and weather-bitten by the sheer expository collision of language; her grasp on the miracle of cadence is remarkable.
Thomas’s collection shrewdly allows us glimpses at the titanium infrastructure of her poems, in the same way I’ve often imagined it feels to glimpse a vision or version of the divine: fast, unfathomable, with undeniable markings of the inspired. Her sophisticated grasp on the structure of language hard-fists elegance out of the commonplace.
“I imagine stillborns / soaring heavenward to God; / recall deft hands forming / faceless dogs, tigers, giraffes— / hear the plaints of latex / being twisted, see the bodies plumped / that too soon deflated.”
The language recipe of Some Things in This World holds holiness up to geological and natural thumbprints and announces them blood bound, while weighing the Penguin’s famous tuxedo and a beloved dog’s death in tandem with the inevitability of extinction. Thomas juggles an eviscerating eye for meter with equal generosity for the unbidden loveliness of off-kilter detail. Bloom of surprise on the page, and the sober delight of finding oneself enough lost, and exactly so, to give ourselves fully over to the guiding strength of her narrative hand.
The reader oftentimes finds themselves in the outlands of space and time and history: primordial starlight, the baked lands of prehistory and bone, as Thomas does in “La Brea Tar Pits”:
“until only the trunk remains, / periscope up / as if to grasp the last breath of air.”
Behold, the sole camel grazing in Vermont pasture like Biblical beast—placed there as prophet—a partly esoteric pastime for deeper introspection: foreign and local diverge, leaving the reader breathless and uneasy with withheld knowledge. “Like the Cheese, the Camel” positions Animal on the page as both warning and savior, leaves us intentionally alone with the creature; we’re being taught a lesson, and it’s cruelly just, in the vein of Mother Nature. In the poem, Thomas leaves us with a philosophical image to chew on:
“While in Vermont the lone camel / stands knee-deep in grass and flowers wild, / dew-glazed dome crowned by the sun / as if to remind that beauty / incongruous often is.”
The poem forces us into a bizarre solitude in the found spaces of pasture and misplaced creature. In one of the collection’s most memorable poems —partly due to the brilliance of its title (which contains and maintains resolute pathos, while blithely navigating a special absurdity, a certain sweetness and simplicity that further remarks on its subject matter)—Thomas addresses the Penguin and his funny attire and impending extinction and the crucial, killer element of young life lost to nature. An everyday occurrence, but something, the poem argues, that still deserves proper mourning.
“Think of Penguins” is everything I want in a poem, and only further highlights Thomas’ dexterity with language and form: “the tusked elephants / trumpeting apocalypse” and “Think of the pale zeroes of their eggs”.
I wonder about the reasoning behind the placement of her poem “Praise of Three-Legged Dogs”. It opens the collection, was obviously meant to set the tone and tweak our attention toward certain themes, particular essences of important truths which Thomas felt determined to conquer. Disability floods the page, pulls no punches when it comes to precise language around topics so easily bruisable to the human heart. The dog lives next to his loss and seems at peace with its phantom limb, has gained easy control over its life again through the remarkable, creaturely habit of adaption.
The poem curiously ends on a note of hunger: starvation made metaphysical. It isn’t the kibble the dog longs for but a furry, missing paw, a final fourth contender to his rapturous doggy mobility. I wonder what Thomas meant by the poem’s entrance. It holds the collection’s door ajar for us to step through, all the while, we have soft tears in our eyes. Humans, by instinct, fall to pieces at the sight of a hurt animal. We’re given a relatively happy ending in “In Praise” but the heartstrings she’s so suddenly pulled are loose, looped, now, in tangles, our emotions are neither our own or anyone else’s, we can now safely enter into the land of beasts and enchantment she’s architect to.