Featured Writer: Sara Moore Wagner

Thursday, March 23rd, at 7:30 PM, Sara Moore Wagner will be reading a series of her poems for the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University.  

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of multiple collections including Swan Wife, awarded with the 2021 Cider Press Review Editor’s prize, and Hillbilly Madonna, published by Driftwood Press in 2022. Wagner has also authored two chapbooks: Tumbling After released in March of 2022 and Hooked Through published by Five Oaks Press in 2017. Her work has appeared in several publications such as Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Western Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Cincinnati Review. Wagner has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times as well as Best of the Net and Best New Poets awards.     

Wagner’s poems explore relationships between mother and child, father and son, and other family ties in Appalachia. Several poems address the opiate crisis that heavily ravaged Appalachia and the entire country. Poems such as “Girlhood Landscape” explore the impermanence of beauty through a young girl waning optimism, stating: “because I want to remember blooming. // Because I think I could just bloom.” These poems also depict moments of trauma associated with miscarriages. Her work incorporates fairy tales and folklore, with several poems devoted to sharpshooter Annie Oakley, myths of Tantalus and Thetis, and Biblical figures in works like “Self Portrait as Judas.” 

In her work entitled “Invasive Species,” published by the Normal School in December 2020, Wagner talks about a nest created in a dated wreath. The relationship of mother/daughter and mother bird/hatchlings seems to blur. Both mothers are “separated […] by a door” from their young. The poem closes with: 

We’re all just waiting to crack open  
or be emptied out, to be forced  
from our homes or windows,  
to destroy what we love  
because we need it,  
because we think  
we’re safe.   

There is a sense here of the complicated necessity of letting our loved ones live their own lives, continuing to love them from a distance. This necessary and natural trajectory of love and how it operates exists in these final lines. Perhaps the complexities of love lead to hurt when love is needed most. The shared habitat of the nest on the house’s door creates all these avenues of focus. 

Poem excerpts appear courtesy of Normal School and Saramoorewagner.com. Biographical info also from saramoorewagner.com. 

–Michael J Morris, MAR

Interview Bites: James O’Bannon

James O’Bannon’s poems “Naming” and “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It” were published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI. In the spring of 2023, James agreed to answer a few questions by associate editor Christopher McCormick on his poetic work.

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Your poem “Naming,” (after a poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen) which appeared in Volume XLI of Mid-American Review, utilizes non-sequiturs and surrealistic elements, as in the unforgettable line “If there is a child who is dead there is a bird alive somewhere,” yet a firm wisdom seems to underpin the entire poem. Can you tell our readers a little bit about what you sought to achieve with this piece?

“Naming” is written after the poem “Grief Logic” by Diana Khoi Nguyen. In her brilliant poem, she utilizes hypothetical syllogisms to explore grief as well as other ideas. For “Naming”, I wanted to maintain the sense of logical leaping employed in Nguyen’s poem, while using the image of a bird to symbolize a child in sort of a spiritual sense.

I found myself thinking about the language used in the death or incarceration of Black children and how that differs from the language used with white children. Considering that dehumanization, I wanted a poem where Black children could exist/stay alive in perpetuity, hence the “If the child stays alive” line’s repetition. Lastly, in all of my work where a god figure is mentioned, I think of it as a means to wrestle with an aspect of faith and hopefulness in a world that consistently contradicts those beliefs and antagonizes them. 

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In your poem “Dad Keeps Saying Pray About It,” you write “I’d like to live / in a world where there is a god / who calls my name.” What role does religion and spirituality play in your writing? 

In being raised in a Black, religious household, participation in church and other aspects of Christianity were expected. I went to Sunday School, Bible study, participated in sermons, etc. As a child, you are never really allowed to interrogate your inherited belief system. As I got older, I found myself questioning many of ideas I was taught. Christianity felt too idealistic to me, and it excluded too many people I loved. 

In my writing, I see god as a figure used to interrogate those difficult questions.Much of my poetry deals in the questioning of how one could believe in not only a god-figure, but a god that is unquestioningly good, when so much of our world fails us in so many ways. 

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Your poem “and now the doctor asks if depression is a family,” published in Waxwing issue XVIII, speaks on subjects such as race and self-love. Can you talk about how those subjects have been an influence on your journey as a writer?

​I wouldn’t really call my relationship to these ideas an influence. Race is definitely embodied in my writing because as a Black person in America, it is tied to every part of your being. You wake up Black, you breathe Black, you sleep Black. In this particular poem, I chose for the relationship between mental health and Blackness to be overt because of the ways it is stigmatized. There are so many negatives poured onto the waywe view the mental struggles of Black folks; even medically. So, I would say my goal in marrying these concepts would be to allow people to see the struggle I’ve dealt with (and still deal with) in its most open and bare form, hopefully, as a means for people to embrace the humanity in that struggle. 

Book Review: Our Wives Under The Sea

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield. Flatiron Books, 2022. 240 pages. $16.73, paperback.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the lesbian ocean horror book I didn’t know I needed. Julia Armfield’s brilliant debut novel centers around the relationship between Miri and her wife Leah, after Leah returns from a six month deep sea submarine mission which was only supposed to last three weeks. While Leah was under, Miri was unable to communicate with her or even confirm she was still alive. While she is relieved her wife returns, Miri soon discovers that the ocean has changed Leah. Though they spend all their time together in the same apartment, Leah is unable to really connect with Miri about what happened and spends all of her time running the taps in their bathroom. As we move through the novel, each section titled after one of the four layers of the ocean, we alternate between Miri and Leah’s perspectives, learning about the intricacies of their relationship, the grief that comes from the loss of intimacy, and the truth about what Leah experienced under the sea.

Not only is this book a beautiful exploration of queer longing between two women, it’s also about the queer longing which has always been deeply tied to the sea. The whole novel works to beautifully highlight and reaffirm the many truths of the ocean. The ocean is shelter. The ocean is dangerous. The ocean is possibility. The ocean is a haunted house. The ocean is queer. The ocean is our mother. These truths and this book broke me open and I encourage you all to let it do the same for you.

—Gen Greer, MAR

What We’re Reading: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

I’ve been revisiting Alexandra Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (HarperCollins, 2015). I find the novel fascinating in that it was written in a pre-Trump, pre-2020 America and yet it feels like the novel is, if anything, a postscript to the last few years. The novel deals with a woman, known only as “A,” dealing with her roommate “B” and boyfriend “C” as she tries to break free from a sense of malaise. This malaise forms the core of the novel and it seems to be a symptom of, not of any mental illness on “A”’s part, but rather a result of her realisation at just how empty her life is under late-stage neoliberalism. 

What drew me back to the novel is its presentation of Wally’s: a fictionalized Walmart with its brand ethos pushed to the extreme. Throughout the novel “A” visits the supermarket chain as she tries to find a particular snack cake to satiate her cravings as she tries to navigate just how empty her relationships, and her life, feel. This does not work, and we are treated to passages like the following: 

Every Wally’s had a similar feel inside, the interminable rows of smooth color that began to break apart as you got closer to them, dissolving into little squares of identical logos. But the stores had a little trick to them… they were designed to baffle. The most sought-after items—candy bars, sandwich meat, milk—were places in the most inaccessible parts of the store…. Sometimes you ended up at a different desirable object, peanut butter, for example, and bought it instead, but more often you bought both, and the things in between. (113-114)

Ultimately, the novel does not point to a way out from this malaise. “A” tries one route, a cult, but it is a dead end. I mentioned that Kleeman wrote and published the novel before Trump, the coronavirus, and the BLM protests of 2020 but that it felt like it came after. I found revisiting the novel after all these things powerful because it creates a sense of a lost future. I worked as a reporter during 2020, and for a few brief months that summer it felt like things might change. But they didn’t, and now two-and-a-half years later we’ve returned to the same malaise that characterized the Obama years. Ultimately, I find the novel striking because it didn’t have to be as relevant today as it was when it was written. If the energy of Summer 2020 had persisted maybe, just maybe, the rejection of Trump could have been the birth of something new and not a return to the old ways of doing something. Kleeman makes me imagine and mourn that future as her 2015 feels just like 2023.

To try and counter the malaise of Kleeman’s work I’ve also been returning to a classic—at least in some journalist circles—Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Vintage 1998, originally published in Rolling Stone 1971). Revisiting Thompson’s gonzo trip into the weird world of LSD and journalism at the end of the sixties has paired with Kleeman’s novel better than I had originally anticipated. I think the more popular film adaptation of Fear and Loathing does the novel a disservice by placing attention on Thompson’s wild behavior over his political astuteness. The novel follows a barely fictionalized Thompson as he travels to Las Vegas to try and make sense of the failures of the hippy counterculture and figure out how to keep hope alive as the counterculture gave way to Nixon-era conservatism. I think I was drawn to read Thompson’s novel with Kleeman’s because Thompson does point to a way out. Thompson finds his way out by pushing the limits, simultaneously rejecting the dominant culture and immersing himself in it. For Thompson, the key is to look inward, not outward, and to be “just sick enough to be totally confident” (204).

—William Walton-Case, MAR

Featured Writer: Dustin Pearson

On Thursday, February 16th, Dustin Pearson will read his poetry as part of the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. The reading will take place at 7:30 at Prout Chapel at BGSU.

Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud, Millennial Roost, and A Family Is a House. Dustin also has work which appears in The Nation, The Boiler, Blackbird, Bennington Review, Poetry Daily, The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, among other publications. Dustin is an Assistant Professor teaching creative writing at the University of Toledo.

Pearson’s work explores themes of love, loss, abuse, trauma, and hope. His work is both raw and honest, and while woeful at times, still carries grace and hope in its folds. Pearson views his writing as a way to artfully call on his lived experiences and observations, zooming in on them in the process. In an interview with Florida State University’s English Department, Pearson iterates, “I like to think of the writing as holding a magnifying glass to different aspects of that experience. The aesthetic presentation of the resulting writing is determined by how much I prioritize my internalized perception of what I’ve experienced or a more assimilated or recognizable one, which I think people most often call reality.” Indeed, there is a malleability to truth, experience, and the expression of them; in his poem “Souls Side by Side” Pearson writes to that end:

“He creeps

around us

pining

like he hadn’t died

when he first left.

Father, why

are you dying?

We killed you.

You should be dead.”

(from theboilerjournal dot com)

With the pain in Pearson’s writing, however, love and tenderness comes hand-in-hand. In “A Difference,” a brother’s broken arm is bandaged. In “Fossil Fuel,” hope is within reach: “The loss is overwhelming, but ahead of you, there are tracks. You want to fall but think not again, and you think: no matter the man the tracks belong to, you must find him.”

—Mays Kuhail, MAR

(Poem excerpts courtesy of The Boiler and The Account Magazine, biographical information from dustinkpearson dot com)