Painted Bride Quarterly

Issue 94

Wendy Cannella: This Fierce Life:      An Interview with Laura McCullough

by

WC: In his article “Ode to Joisey” (New York Times: April 27, 2003), Robert Strauss talks about the great many accomplished poets to emerge from the Garden State. I wonder what it is about New Jersey that breeds poetry, or maybe even embodies it. Much of your work seems to try to get at the […]

Wendy Cannella: Finding the Body:      on Laura McCullough’s Jersey Mercy

by

Part empathy, part ferocity in subject and voice, a living, breathing language bobs along like an electric jellyfish —fearless, vital, often urban in the poems in McCullough’s new collection Jersey Mercy. Immersed in various tensions—the sort that McCullough has been teasing out for a decade— these poems seem to be uttered aloud as they unfold. […]

Britt Melewski: from Letters to Powerful People, 6

by

Dearest Senator Enzi, Disregard my last correspondence. I was successfully able to find a peanut butter and jelly store. It will satisfy my cravings for the foreseeable future. On second thought, don’t disregard the entire message— only parts of it. I stand by my opinion that the Emblem Muskrats of Emblem Wyoming be the next […]

Ephraim Scott Sommers: I Won’t Be Able to Say This      When I’m Dead

by

You know I will get what I deserve for this— Tristan’s always been the sucker-puncher who spent every evening trashcan-bowling his rummed-up Cutlass around A-town with the devil in his ear bud. He peed on every coffee table that wasn’t his, and when the branch snapped like a skateboard in the middle of the Mardi […]

Purvi Shah: Eschew not I spires & domes but inhabit     devotion in a Taj of my own

by

Eschew not I spires & domes but inhabit devotion in a Taj of my own. In self’s shrine unshackled, I loose liberated erotics in a Taj of my own. Every seeker shivers in sorrow to ecstasy/despair to elation. With each infirmity of desire, I concoct an ilaaj of my own. Unabashed desires can be the […]