Archive for the ‘Why We Chose It’ Category

Why We Chose It: “History of the World” by Caitlyn Klum

By Justin Nash, Managing Editor

I certainly don’t speak for all editors when I say this, but it’s rare that a long poem catches my interest. Seeing a submitted poem that’s three, four, five pages long among a sea of others the usual half to three-quarters of a page—I feel often like a writer is throwing the gauntlet. There’s something about that length—not an epic but certainly not a short, pressurized lyric—that so often leaves me thinking, all right, let’s see if they pull this off.

And despite my admitted bias against the medium-long poem, Klum’s “History of the World” got me on board more immediately than any poem I read this period. Its initial lie, that “The balance beam was invented between 1047 and 1465,” tells us the common fixture of modern gymnastics, widely cited as being invented in Germany at the start of the 19th century, was first created somewhere in the mid to late medieval period. We can’t be sure, specifically. But what may, at first glance, be something to flag for fact-checking quickly becomes a hilarious manipulation. The second and third lines: “At the time, there were no children, only being // disappointed, which was invented in 1438”

Not always funny, exactly, but perpetually absurd, “History of the World” goes on with statements that cast doubt on truth and precision. The speaker’s mother was invented in 1203, their father in 1406. Their mother also invented the interstate and the color blue, and (of course) the balance beam. Their father “was invented quickly.” And among all these strange statements is the speaker describing “The sky stretched / skinny and red across the earth like a wound” or “the first instance of a girl sobbing / for no reason, shaking her one self inside.” There’s weirdness and tenderness and beautiful imagery, all layered together to highlight the complexity and intentional craftiness of a poem that a person could otherwise be too quick to write off as confused.

The truth is, this poem doesn’t always make perfect sense, and I’m not sure a poem should have to, and either way this particular poem clearly isn’t especially interesting in that anyway. Klum’s poem is three pages long and every bit of it is compelling. I think, probably, that preparation was invented before 1905, but I also think I believe wholeheartedly that fathers are often invented quickly. Ultimately, what “History of the World” has is something to say, and a uniquely interesting way of trying to say it. Whatever my own preferences for the shape something may take, that’s a ride I’ll always be along for.

Caitlyn Klum’s “History of the World” appears in our new Spring 2024 Issue 115.

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Justin Nash is a poet and visual artist from Delaware. A former intern of Copper Canyon Press and the Fine Arts Work Center, he currently serves as the Managing Editor for The Greensboro Review and is a senior reader in poetry for Cherry Tree.

Why We Chose It: “You Can Never Come Back to Now” by Edmund Sandoval

By Sierra Stonebraker, Fiction Editor

 

Sharp and exciting language is the most immediate way I engage with a story, and my favorite aspect of “You Can Never Come Back to Now” (issue 115) is the prose, which functions as a main engine of the narrative. The first few sentences conjure images of a world-ending asteroid veering toward Earth before shifting gears to ground the reader into the perspective of Evan. These first few sentences will grab you by the collar with visions of the end of the world. The rest of the story will put its arm over your shoulders, smooth out the wrinkles in your shirt, and walk alongside you while relaying a compelling story about a couple struggling to find their footing in a capitalist system that may not be as immediately world-ending as an asteroid, but in many ways, feels like it is.

This narrative focuses mainly on the quiet dynamics of a couple living in a world ruled by technology that is becoming increasingly interpersonal and on track to replace human-to-human connection. Evan and Em attempt to relate to each other while Evan is unemployed and struggling to place himself in an industry that no longer has use for his skills, and Em is employed, loves her job, but her connection to Evan dwindles as she remains focused and steadfast in her career of producing apps. As a way to cope with his fears and loneliness, Evan becomes obsessed with a crystal he ordered from a website, praying it can bring good luck to his life. At the same time, instead of attempting to connect with Em, he uses a mindfulness app named OptiBot to catalogue his hopes and fears, an app that, unbeknownst to Evan, Em has access to the backend of and is able to see everything Evan reveals to the app.

This is a story that captured me with its complex prose while keeping me grounded in the narrative of a young couple existing in a world that refuses to make room for them. The prose is able to get away with complicated and long sentences that support its themes of technology and mysticism because, at its core, the story is not really about the end of the world, but about two people who continuously wake up with this sense that the end is near. Even if they are unable to see the asteroid veering down on them, the sense that it’s on its way seeps through in every word.

Edmund Sandoval’s “You Can Never Come Back to Now” appears in our new Spring 2024 Issue 115.

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Sierra Stonebraker is a second-year MFA student in fiction at UNCG. Her work has appeared in The Greensboro Review and Allegory Ridge’s fiction anthology Archipelago. She grew up in the high desert of Southern California and lived in Seattle, WA for four years before moving to Greensboro. She currently serves as a Fiction Editor for The Greensboro Review.

Why We Chose It: “Interiors” by Leah Yacknin-Dawson

By Katie Worden, Editorial Assistant

Against the backdrop of Chicago, Leah Yacknin-Dawson unfolds a story of grief, pain, and love—probing the limits of each. “Interiors,” indeed, relishes the inner. It is defined by the introspective eye of its narrator, Anna, who renders her emotional landscape with as much detail and acuity as she does the outside world. The present moment of this story is short—an afternoon in the Museum of Contemporary Art—but, through Anna’s narration, becomes something expansive. Each memory or moment of introspection opens unto its own world, not unlike the artwork that Anna so carefully scrutinizes as she browses the MCA galleries. Through this deft manipulation of narrative structure, the present problem of the story—whether Anna and her sister should visit the deathbed of their mother’s abusive ex-partner—is weighted by memory made immediate. We are made witness to love and violence’s frightening overlap, to the confusion our characters find therein.

With striking prose, Dawson draws us into this uncertain world. We see this uncertainty in Anna’s tendency to define herself against and around her sister, and we see it in the story’s final image, rendered through dialogue: “‘You can’t see it, but the Sears Tower is just behind the clouds. . . . You can’t see it, but it’s there.’” The weight of things unseen, the promise of the horizon. “Interiors,” too, points toward something almost palpable, but just out of reach—an easy way out, an answer, a definition. I was reminded, here, of a line written by Elena Ferrante: “Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.” Dawson’s story is real life, or as close as it gets.

 

Leah Yacknin-Dawson’s “Interiors” appears in our new Spring 2024 Issue 115.

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Katie Worden is a fiction writer and second-year MFA student from New York. She is a recipient of the Fred Chappell Fellowship and the Jiménez-Porter Literary Prize. In addition to teaching undergraduate writing and composition, she currently serves as an editorial assistant for The Greensboro Review.

Why We Chose It: “A Slow Poem” by Daniel Liebert

By Matt Valades, Poetry Editor

Back in the pre-virus Fall of 2019, a seemingly distant past grown fond and yellow at the edges, when the coming year held only promise instead of plague, the poetry editors here at The Greensboro Review sat down less than six feet from editor-in-chief Terry Kennedy to discuss and select poems. I happened to bring up “A Slow Poem” by Daniel Liebert, one of a series of similar short prose poems in his submission. While many of these poems stayed with us, both Julia, my coeditor, and I admired this one most, the first in the set.

“A Slow Poem” struck us for its economy as well as its tension between the casual voice and intense, lucid images that, as Terry brought up in our meeting, raise the stakes over the course of the poem. This poem, unusually, does not have an “I” in it, no involved speaker for the reader to identify with. Instead, the separate images in the poem’s hypothetical poem become more specific as it proceeds from “a madman scrubbed and suited for visitor’s day,” then culminates in final lines that are simply unforgettable. The circular, repeating syntax and phrasing describes a poem in the act of its own making, which fits well with its quiet build. A lack of sentimentality but a powerful feeling comes from this poem, despite being only four short sentence fragments. We finished reading it together feeling curiously satisfied but not quite sure how, a good sign.

We chose it to close out the issue for its sense of closure with a lightness of touch. Hopefully, the poem’s care and power offers some much-needed (though temporary) satisfaction to readers of Issue 107. We think it will.

 

Matt Valades is a poet and recent MFA graduate from The University of North Carolina – Greensboro. His poems have been published in Subtropics and Carolina Quarterly, while a review of his has appeared in PN Review (UK).

Why We Chose It: “The Fair” by Will Hearn

By Evan Fackler, Fiction Editor

When Nic, the African-American narrator of Will Hearn’s story “The Fair,” travels to Neshoba County to meet his girlfriend’s all-white family for the first time, his interactions are shadowed by the general history of race in the American South, as well as the specific history of the murder of several Civil Rights activists in the area during the Civil Rights Movement. Meanwhile, Nic’s own upbringing in Louisiana and his knowledge of (and love for) the Creole language (as opposed to his girlfriend’s continental French) come to mark him in complex ways as a body differently situated within the cultural and historical space of The Fair. 

In prose both strikingly clear and richly evocative, “The Fair” is both deeply personal and profoundly political. It’s a story that explores not only how the histories we share end up coloring the specific ways we relate to one another across various sites of difference, it also explores the central irony of this legacy: that we are rarely ever actually present for those historical moments that give context to our most intimate interactions. The pervasive but unsettling disembodiedness of this shared history is suggested by Nic’s experience of the fair—a place where he goes throughout the story without ever being able to fully recall it.

This is complex and interesting work, and a prime example of what I search for when I’m reading through submissions for The Greensboro Review: stories that locate a shared political and cultural history within the minutiae of daily, intimate life.

Will Hearn’s “The Fair” appears in our new Spring 2020 Issue 107.

 

Evan Fackler is an MFA candidate in fiction at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he lives with his wife and their cat, Zadie. His reviews and interviews can be found at Entropy Magazine and storySouth.

Why We Chose It: “Violation” by Sharon Solwitz

By Richard Moriarty, Fiction Editor

What we loved about Sharon Solwitz’s “Violation” (in our Spring Issue 105) when we first encountered the story was how seamlessly it alternates between two very different perspectives while maintaining a consistent point of view. Attempting this style of narration comes with plenty of challenges: it’s hard enough to capture all the complexities of just one character’s perspective as a story unfolds. Sydney is a high school student recently bereaved of her younger sister; McCann is a police officer who carries the guilt of failing to prevent a shooting while on duty at the school where he worked. The events of the story elucidate the struggles of these two very different characters; they also manage to depict the common ground between them. The fine balance of character summary and present action in this story creates this sense of a similarity in experience between the characters. Sydney cannot listen to her friend describing her own familial difficulties without becoming wrapped up in her own: the narration allows us to feel her regret for not being able to treat her sister better while she was still alive. McCann is unable to so much as sit down by himself for a meal at home without his thoughts drifting back to the day he was taking his lunch break when the shooter entered the school’s library; we can feel his remorse because of the way his memories follow him throughout the story.

“Violation” is the work of an author who knows her characters so thoroughly that she can move around in time—stepping back into the past or throttling ahead into the future—to provide an insightful detail at just the right moment in a scene so it deepens our understanding of her characters without distracting us from the moment at hand. From our first read of the story, we were convinced the series of events that unfold was the right sequence needed to render its characters as close to life-like as possible. After encountering characters as richly detailed as Sydney and McCann, we decided to accept the story right away.

 

Richard Moriarty just finished his second year in the MFA program at UNC Greensboro. He’s originally from Kansas City. He went to University of Miami (the Florida one) for undergrad, where he studied advertising. He’s working on a collection of stories tentatively titled River Runners. Books currently on his nightstand: The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and Run the Red Lights by Ed Skoog.

Why We Chose It: “my other mouth //” by Maya Salameh

By Michael Pittard, Poetry Editor

One of the most exciting poems I came across while reading for Issue 105 was a gorgeous and thundering piece by Maya Salameh. “my other mouth //” is a poem unafraid to deal with the complex realities of being of Arabic lineage, confronting its reader with both beautiful language, syntax, and images but also with dark, brutal scenes and diction, as in the following lines: “…my Arabic loves like mint / in stalks & leaves / a mouthful of holy water / the splintering of ships / the crucifix / on my grandfather’s wrist /.” Language and culture create our ideas of self-hood, and Maya’s poem breaks down both society’s desire to fully embrace differences but also its desire to ignore them completely.

There is so much that is human and vibrant in this poem that stands out at first blush, and on subsequent re-reads Maya’s skillful wordplay and more nuanced arguments emerge: “/ if you ask me if I am fluent in Arabic / I will tell you / I am a poet / & a poet owes a language her tongue / hands / toes / I will say / before its arrival / the world was prose /.” The poem’s form, with line break notation embedded in the lines, argues against Western poetic tradition but doesn’t completely reject it either. The poem’s speaker, and Maya, understands that people, places, and the world can be more than one thing at any given time. Yet they are not bashful about standing up for what they believe in. It is one thing to be young and full of passion, as Maya so clearly is, but it is another to be young, full of passion, and capable of seeing the world in all of its complications. The Greensboro Review loves to elevate lesser-known (and often lesser-heard) voices, and Maya Salameh, at the time of publication a college freshman, is a poet clearly on the rise.

 

Michael Pittard is a recent MFA graduate of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His poems and reviews have appeared in such publications as Tupelo Quarterly and Red Flag Poetry. He lives in Greensboro with his cat, Roosevelt.