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

Poetry Review: Traveling With the Ghosts

Traveling With the Ghosts by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. Asheville, North Carolina: Orison Books, 2021. 107 pages. $16.00, paperback.

invocation 

by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

those eyes you love

the violet eyes

of Spring     the girl

descending 

the hill     or Spring

itself in violent

wind—

let me clean the air

with a vowel

or two & start 

the healing     can you be 

more human 

Death

as we are flying now on our

broken

    wings 

Traveling With the Ghosts, Stella Vinitchi Radulescu’s latest collection of poetry, demonstrates how immense language can become when distilled. Between these pages, the sounds of leaves and shade spell out names, poems take as tangible a shape as mountains, and rivers become what cleans “the void / between your soul & your / tongue.” Yet despite the physical power of words to call down old gods and scrub the air clean, Radulescu’s work in this collection occupies the tenuous spaces that wisdom and keen observation uncover in the world. In poems as musical as they are meditative, images grow inside the speaker, language weighs upon the body, and exterior surroundings impose themselves, like “hills darkening on your tongue.” There is psychological and spiritual power in the reciprocal exchanges between the body and what it bears witness to, and this is Radulescu’s currency: “I don’t have wings / but I can fly with all the leaves / the birds the clouds / I speak your language god / & you speak mine.” 

These are vivid, singular poems that refuse easy truths and settle best in hands open to the challenges that visit when they attempt to hold onto nothing, or everything. “stay by your night stay by your / emptiness // it will call you,” Radulescu affirms: “this is how shadow by shadow / & void by void I put together / a new sentence.” Just as the speaker remains open to the world and to the voids we pull language from, readers must open themselves to these poems. And as vivid images and profound realizations spill into one another throughout Radulescu’s sparsely punctuated, heavily lineated work, any demands that the reader entered with for absolute, binary certainty on matters of presence/void or language/silence will begin to slip away. This is the gift of Radulescu’s Traveling With the Ghosts: providing a space outside of the definite, or the confines of the sure, in which readers may discover and rediscover the divine scope of language.

-Samuel Burt, MAR

dusk dusk

by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

find

a rhyme ask

our gods to light

a candle

the page lies

blank

too far the stars

too deep the grave 

speak     your

life

a word can burn

forever

Winter Wheat 2017: Fiction Panel Features

Are you a fiction writer and attending the 2017 Winter Wheat conference? Here is just a taste of the wonderful fiction panels we have planned!

 

“Beginnings. Where and How Does Your Story Start?” with Brad Felver

This session will aim to differentiate between strong story openings and weak ones. What makes one compelling and the other forgettable? How can you catch the eye of readers (and editors!) without relying on gimmicks? How much pressure is fair to place upon a story’s beginning? We will look at famous beginnings, as well as some lesser-known ones, as we discuss how exactly they are juggling all the various demands. Finally, we will spend some time writing some new beginnings of our own.

Brad Felver is a fiction writer and essayist. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in magazines such as One Story, Colorado Review, and New England Review. He teaches at BGSU.

This workshop will be held on Friday, November 3, from 3:00-4:15 pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A2 when you register!

 

“Speaking of Death: Dialogue & Funerals in Fiction,” with Dr. Kasie Whitener

Funerals are cliché and all editors will tell writers to avoid them. However, what if we just did a better job with them? This workshop provides samples of good and bad funeral conversations in fiction. Dr. Whitener will provide a checklist for evaluating effective funeral dialogue and some “shan’ts” and “musts” for novice and emerging writers. Learners will then practice their own. Seasoned and journeymen writers will enjoy this chance to break through clichéd treatments of death in fiction.

Dr. Kasie Whitener is a regular contributor to the South Carolina Writers’ Association Columbia II Chapter where she recently blogged “Writing About Death” and got interested in how to keep our universal death experience from dragging down the drama of our fictional funerals. Dr. Whitener is a member of the South Carolina Humanities Council Speakers’ Bureau, an entrepreneur and frequent workshop presenter to the Kauffman Foundation’s 1 Million Cups Columbia. Her fiction has appeared in The Petigru Review and Spry Literary Magazine. Her short story “Cover Up” won the Carrie McCray Award for fiction and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016.

This workshop will be held on Friday, November 3, from 3:00-4:15 pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A7 when you register!

 

“Using Prompts to Create Scenes and Character in Fiction,” with Susanne Jaffe

A prompt is a method to jumpstart your creative juices, and to get you thinking about the possibilities for a story, a character, a plot, or a scene. It is an effective tool whose primary purpose is to inspire a writer’s vision, not replace it. The class will consist of a great deal of writing in response to various prompts—usually short, maybe 500 words—and then reading a few of them out loud.

Susanne Jaffe is a former executive and editor in New York City trade publishing and the former executive director and creative director of Thurber House, a nonprofit literary center in Columbus, Ohio. She has taught at Thurber House and a library learning organization in Columbus. She is the author of several published works of fiction, many of them published traditionally and the most recent two self-published with 5-star ratings on Amazon. For more on Susanne, please go to either: www.susannejaffe.com or to her Amazon author page at: http://amazon.com/author/susannejaffe.

This workshop will be held on Saturday, November 4, from 11:00-12:15 am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D3 when you register!

 

“Brainstorming the Novel,” with Lawrence Coates

“Brainstorming the Novel” will be a discussion/workshop on conceiving and developing your novel idea. The presentation will feature an outline of the seven basic plots, some guided exercises that can be shared, and some questions that can be used to strengthen your idea or the manuscript you’re currently working on.

Lawrence Coates has published five books, most recently The Goodbye House, a novel set amid the housing tracts of San Jose in the aftermath of the first dot com bust. His work has been recognized with the Miami University Press Novella Prize, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction.

This workshop will be held on Saturday, November 4, from 1:30-2:45 pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select E1 when you register!