Why We Chose It: ”On The Cape of Sleep and Wellbeing”

On the Cape of Sleep and Wellbeing, by Drew Calvin McCutchen, was selected for publication this spring and published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI.

On the Cape of Sleep and Wellbeing is a magical story about dreams, community, and the human experience. Readers follow one girl who, for no fault of her own, is unable to join in a dream shared by the entire town each day at 4pm. The story follows her as she attempts to navigate this lonely existence, disconnected from her peers’ reality, reaching for connection by painting them as they dream. The strengths of this piece are its voice, the clear imagery of the town, and the originality of the plot. In its exploration of one character who finds herself living at odds with her community, this story draws influence from folklore, but though it may remind us of some fairy tales we grew up hearing, this story, reminiscent of folk horror, ramps up its tension to an explosive ending that’s as original as it is hard to forget. 

—Samuel Burt and Chloe McConnell, MAR

Book Review: I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom

I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, edited by Shelly Oria. San Francisco, California: McSweeney’s, 2022. 480 pages. $21.99, paperback.

In the months since SCOTUS’s overturning of Roe v. Wade it’s been incredibly difficult to feel like the voices of women and gender minorities are being listened to. While it’s easy to feel completely powerless, I’ve managed to take comfort in the ways I’ve seen individuals, communities, and creators work to take care of and empower those most affected. I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, edited by Shelley Oria, has been one of those sources of power and comfort. This book does exactly what needs to be done right now; it gives marginalized people a place to talk about their decisions, bodies, and lives as if they are important (because they are). The anthology consists of the work of 28 creators and includes works of fiction, poetry, photography, creative nonfiction, plays, and even a comic. The collection was done in collaboration with and works to financially support the The Brigid Alliance, a long-standing organization that helps people access abortion care and travel funds in underserved areas.

One of the many great strengths of this book is that it refuses to limit the narrative of reproductive justice to one kind of story. So often conversations around this topic work to solely center able-bodied cis straight white women who need an abortion because of specific circumstances. Not only is this narrative reductive, it’s offensive and extremely harmful to those who are most vulnerable. This anthology gives the microphone to BIPOC, queer, and disabled artists who work to show an honest and complicated range of experiences. I’m grateful to Mcsweeney’s for giving this book a platform and grateful to all of these creators for their stories in such a violent time. There is something important to be gained from each and every one of the pieces in this anthology. I hope you all go get this book and/or request it at your local library.

—Gen Greer, MAR

Featured Writer: Bianca Stone

At 7:30pm EST, on Thursday, September 29th, poet Bianca Stone will read her work as part of the 2022 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. This event will take place virtually, via Zoom. 

Bianca Stone is a writer and artist from Vermont. She has published several books of poetry and hybrid work including Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, and What is Otherwise Infinite. In Vermont, Stone teaches on poetry and consciousness, and serves as Creative Director for The Ruth Stone House literary nonprofit and studio. Her poems, essays, and comics may be found in Poetry Magazine, Powder Keg, The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, Conduit, and elsewhere.

Bianca Stone’s work strikes a keen balance between existential woe and items of human scale; her precision, as well as her ability to forge significance through detail, never flags. Her poems frequently wrestle, as many poems do, with what it means “to be,” though Stone’s work sets itself apart from others examining the same questions by nature of its careful attention to, and occupation of, varied existential positions. “It is said this planet came to be / when I was pulled apart,” says God, in her poem “God Searches for God.” And whether embodying God, barbers, or the ego-space of self-realization, Stone uses poetry as a lens through which she looks not at, but through the self. 

That said, these poems do not often linger in overtly heady territory, rooting their questions of belonging and meaningful existence instead in wine bottles, artichokes, and plastic sports apparel. “I thought we fit well in the bottle from the wine club,” Stone writes in “Even Moon,” “though I wasn’t happy with the grape.” It is in these always vivid details where Stone’s eye for poetically expedient gestures toward existential questions is most apparent. However, she also expresses that a cost sometimes accompanies such rapt attention; in “Again Trying to Write a Poem About a B&W Photograph of a Wolf” Stone writes that “at times poetry fills me with loathing / for what cannot be left alone.” Indeed, these poems peel scabs and worry at wounds, making meaning as much from what is in us as the little things which surround us, intriguing us and causing us pain. 

—Samuel Burt, MAR

“And of having felt

like a small event for so long—having felt

like an artichoke, scraped away at with the front teeth,

one scale at a time, worked down

to the meaty heart, but with the ultimate

disappointment of meager flesh—

of being thus, I bet I will live again.”

—From Bianca Stone’s poem “Artichokes”

(Poems and biographical detail courtesy of poetrycomics.org) 

Why We Chose It – ‘Book of Dolls 3’ and ‘Book of Dolls 8’ by Bruce Bond

“Book of Dolls 3” and “Book of Dolls 8” by Bruce Bond were selected last autumn and published in Mid-American Review Volume XLI in 2022.

Something in MAR that we gravitate toward is the peculiar and uncanny. Work that tugs at our emotions on a deep human level and won’t let go. In poetry we look for things that as editors and readers we can’t get out of our head. Lines that we keep returning to long after putting the packet away. We love a poem that knows who it is and what it wants. The doll poems by Bond do a wonderful job at using repetition to bring a sense of movement and unsettling-ness to the piece, but also comfort. For our editorial staff, it was a deep and whole-hearted yes.

-Megan Borocki 

“I take them to my therapy session, / the one I have online. To my surprise, / my therapist is broken, arm here, foot / there, lonely head weeping on a chair.” – From “Book of Dolls 3”

I really admire how Bond makes the strange familiar in these two poems. In “Book of Dolls 3,” he characterizes the dolls as a kind of burden, though is closely connected with them, and it feels almost delightful that the speaker gives the therapist a doll. There’s a strange innocence there, I think. In “Book of Dolls 8,” there is this sense of inevitability with this growing doll: “Soon it will become a horror.” which Bond follows up with, “Go on, hold it,” gesturing again to connection. There is a closeness in these burdens, and a strangeness that feels emotionally accessible.

-Michael Beard

“Imagine a real-time feed of the beach / so tedious with heavy objects it cannot / be imagined. Only suffered, held.” – From “Book of Dolls 8”

In comments shared among readers, Bond’s use of surreal doll imagery—to untether otherwise banal human experiences from the familiar, before bringing them right back to earth—was met with high praise. I felt a keen pace and music in these poems too, speeding unrelentingly to weighty finishes. Dolls are the perfect catalyst for Bond’s exploration of pain: these almost-human objects can be broken, made up, filled with whatever we wish, and exist utterly at the mercy of our imaginations. Bond’s “Book of Dolls” poems ask that we imagine ourselves, too, with such customizability, able to rearrange, detach, and repair our broken parts, or fill ourselves with sand that we might live with a weight which feels truer to a life beyond our often ungraspable suffering.

-Samuel Burt

Chapbook Review: All Small Planes

All Small Planes by Eric Roy. Whitman, Massachusetts: Lily Poetry Review, 2021. 19 pages. $12.00, paperback. 

Eric Roy begins All Small Planes with a statistic: 72,000 opioid deaths in America in 2017, which comes to 197 daily deaths, an death toll equivalent to a 737 jet fatally crashing every single day. But Roy’s collection doesn’t toss around rates as abstract signifiers of widespread tragedy; All Small Planes invites the opioid crisis into your living room, following the narrator/speaker’s brother—nicknamed Small Plane after a childhood shoplifting incident—as he bums cigarettes to his daughter at an airshow, exemplifies the Irish goodbye before a party’s end, and crashes on the speaker’s couch. After all, “you get the feeling at any moment / he could fall apart mid-flight. So, if not your couch / then crash where? A suburban lawn? Golf Course? / Mother’s aging mall? The Pentagon’s garage?” 

Unfolding in just fifteen poems at one page apiece, All Small Planes tells a full story of nostalgia and grief while leaving much unsaid. Roy lets this brevity and quiet speak for itself, much like Small Plane and his daughter “finally having a decent conversation / but in the form of quickly fading black redacted clouds” as they smoke together in silence while the airshow rushes overhead. Though conversational at first glance, Roy fills these poems with moments of sonic delight, gorgeous observation, and striking figurations of landscape: “upside-down, / blue sky below no lake or ocean, the straight arm of horizon / beckoning his descent as he spirals for control.”

Landing, crashing, taking off or being jumped from, Small Plane brings color and life to the statistic which begins the book. Whether or not we understand, beyond the numbers, just how widespread the opioid epidemic is, Roy’s work reminds us what these losses look like on a human level, at the scale of daily life. Every day, this crisis touches more and more lives; All Small Planes is a collection both for those whose homes have only ever been brushed by graphs and data on a tv screen, as well as for those whose friends and family—their stories, dreams, obsessions, and nicknames—have been lost in the numbers. 

-Samuel Burt, MAR