Why We Chose It: “Do Not Hold the Birds” by Carlene Kucharczyk

“Do Not Hold the Birds” by Carlene Kucharczyk was selected for publication by Mid-American Review poetry staff in Volume XLII, Number 1.

When I read this poem, I can’t help but think of those little workshops that Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other home improvement retailers held back in the day. The ones kids would be dragged to by their parents on Saturday mornings. They’d be handed planks of wood, hammers, nails, screws, and other tools they had no clue how to use. An aproned employee wearing a ball cap would walk everyone through how to build whatever was on the agenda for the day. Mothers, fathers, older siblings would do their best to reign in their little builders, trying to guide their soft hands, hoping they could complete the project, bring it home to show off to the rest of the family. 

Sometimes they’d build birdhouses. 

And while they never turned out quite as expected, there was an element of unique beauty to each of the misaligned walls, the splotchy paint, the circular hole that wasn’t exactly quite a circle, but worked all the same. 

I like to think some of those birdhouses became homes to our little, winged companions. 

In “Do Not Hold the Birds,” Kucharczyk captures the beauty of creation, the synergy within the shared melody we have the opportunity to experience with nature. The poem acts as a guide for how to live in concourse with these earthly elements we’re rather lucky to be in conversation with.

The poem opens with the lines: “Do not hold the birds, do not make / little homes of your hands, do not ache / into a man. He will be silent”

There’s something so gripping and enticing about the beginning of this poem. If we are not to hold the birds, then what are we to do? Kucharczyk responds to this question with ultimate grace and flowing language that tingles our poetic taste buds like a cup of coffee on an April morning out on the back porch—the air buzzing with birdsong and other nice things. 

What’s most impressive about this piece is its subtle ability to subvert our expectations near the conclusion. We finally learn what we are to do with our hands, with the birds, and with our lives––and we are better off because of it. 

––Caleb Edmondson, Mid-American Review  

Why We Chose It: “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion” by Alyse Knorr

Mid-American Review poetry staff selected “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion” by Alyse Knorr for publication in Volume 42.1 

In MAR, we gravitate toward poems that create a peculiar and uncanny feeling in the readers. Knorr’s poem was selected for its overall strength, particularly the lyrical meter and cadence. The poem successfully takes on the mystical world of werewolves and holds so much weight in the world being created. According to Managing Editor Mary Simmons, “It’s a short poem, but it holds so much weight.” In poetry, editors look for poems that we cannot get out of our heads. Knorr evokes the unshakableness we aim to capture in MAR. Knorr’s poem elicits the feeling of reading a ghost story in late October under the covers with a flashlight. After reading “Wolf Tours: Special Full Moon Excursion,” readers are left to contemplate painful bones in a new place where the poet asks, “Will you choose to accept, or will you choose to allow? / The bones will hurt most, and they will not be speedy.” 

“I love that this is a werewolf poem that is so lyrical and subtle. I’m a huge fan of folklore and myth, and the way Knorr weaves that in with haunting imagery and beautiful cadence is particularly enchanting. My favorite thing about this poem is how easy it is to get lost in.” ––Mary Simmons, Managing Editor 2023-2024

“The moment I knew I would fight for this poem was the line ‘You’ve never had enough / legs or teeth.’ Along with the title, I love how Knorr works with the ideas of transitions, the feeling of never having enough (never being enough), journeys, and the inevitable. The line coming after, ‘The less you want to hurt someone, the more likely you will,’ feels like a connection of all those ideas: the wanting to change, the inevitability, the feeling of never being enough (or not quite right). I think this section is so well crafted and thought out. I also love the question of accepting versus allowing; the subtlety in those words, questioning whether actually have agency or just let things happen. The full moon, the wolves, the transitions, the wanting, the allowing. So good.” ––Michael Beard, Managing Editor 2022-2023 

––Elly Salah, Mid-American Review

Why We Chose It: “Forcemeat” by Henry Goldkamp

“Forcemeat” by Henry Goldkamp was selected for publication by Mid-American Review poetry staff for issue 42.1.

“Forcemeat” brings you into a unique moment between two people as they play a game of deciding if something is more like a muskmelon or muskrat. “The felled log we set on this noon. // That would be muskmelon.” But, more than a game, these images take you as a reader through an emotional journey that is set by the speaker but up to the reader to interpret. The form and spacing works to guide you through the piece, to pause at the right times, to experience the new.

“Forcemeat” is uniquely itself, and unlike many poems we receive in our submissions manager. It was something as poetry editor I’m always keeping my eye out for, something that surprises me, changes me, and lingers. “Forcemeat” was a poem I couldn’t shake. The distinct voice Goldkamp works into this piece helps ground it and give these unnamed characters life. There are many things our editors found to love in this piece, and images that felt distinct to something Mid-American Review gravitates toward. As a reader you walk away with part of this poem following in your shadow, hiding in your mind. It leaves you looking at everything and asking, “Is it closer to a muskmelon, or a muskrat?”

––Megan Borocki, Poetry Editor

Why We Chose It: “Some Kinds of Drifter” by Justin Thurman

Mid-American Review fiction staff selected “Some Kinds of Drifter” by Justin Thurman for publication in Volume XLII.

Thurman’s piece was selected for its overall strength but particularly for its nontraditional use of form and genre. The piece takes the form of an ethnography, detailing the different spiritual and cultural norms common amongst different groups of drifters. Drifters, in this piece, are homeless individuals distinguished from hoboes, who are mentioned but not examined, by the element of choice. “Hoboes are proud of their vagrancy…. Drifters do not suffer from wanderlust to the degree that hoboes might. Drifters have no choice.” The piece also makes use of a cartesian graph upon which individual drifters might be placed to complete the aesthetic of an academic report. 

This notion of choice, and its absence, is an undercurrent throughout the piece that helps to ground it and bring a balance to the absurd sense of humor present throughout. Thurman’s narrator has a strong voice that reads almost as a mix of Ken Burns and Raoul Duke. 

The further details of “Some Kinds of Drifter” are best experienced firsthand, but suffice it to say that the story is one that we on the MAR staff will still find ourselves talking about long after the selection process has ended.

-William Walton, Mid-American Review

Why We Chose It: “Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn

“Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn will be featured in an upcoming issue of Mid-American Review.

“Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn is an astounding metafictional work that shifts the authorial lens back onto the author (fictional, in this case). Though the story maps out the traits and behaviors of an oil CEO, the story also reveals the biases and preferences of the writer, an implicit character in the narrative. The writer deliberates over whether the CEO can be blamed for the cataclysmic oil spill his company has likely caused. The writer agonizes over this guilt in the same way the character might: “he is just a single person in such a large system, does he really matter that much, can he really be blamed? Can he?” The unfamiliarity of hearing this wavering from the writer exposes the tendency of writers to replicate themselves in their characters.

This story also challenges perceptions of how real characters are and what their creators owe them. Intimate description is usually considered a fundamental tool of characterization: an achievement when used well. Quinn makes it feel like an invasion. “You could follow him into the shower, describe the way he washes.” We chose this piece not because it sketches an Oil CEO well—though it does—but because it makes us doubt whether we should be sketching him at all. Perhaps he does not want to be “summoned by every sentence.”

—Daniel Marcantuono, MAR