Wendy Barnes-Thomassen is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Trepan, Faultline, and Cargo (Paris). She lives in Brooklyn. Her chapbook, So-Called Mettle, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (December 2011).
Issue 84
Daniel Nester: The Writer is Present
Friday, March 11, 2011. A woman in large sunglasses and chunky jewelry, straight out of a movie’s end credits as “Arts Patron Doyenne,” plants her heels in front of me, as if hitting a mark. She looks down on the desk, up to the lamp, plant, and card file in front of me. “Just what […]
Carley Moore: Review for Painted Bride Quarterly
Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat Books, 2011) The first word of Dawn Lundy Martin’s newest collection of poetry, Discipline, is “excreta,” which is fitting because this is a book about what the body leaves behind and knows by way of its material leavings—feces, blood, sweat, and tears. In Discipline, Martin considers the ways in […]
Katy Resch: The Third Prophecy
In high school, I loved a boy who shaved his head with a hunting blade. We drove around our river village in his jeep, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and listening to metal or folk music, depending on his mood. Sometimes, he kissed me at every stop sign; sometimes, he clenched his face in fierce concentration, the […]
John Bargowski: Supering at 206 Ogden Avenue
Zero weather, expect Bill bent over half the night shoveling coal into the mouth of the great furnace pumping steam and hot water to the thirty apartments in 206, and if your sink or toilet backed up you’d probably find him in his bermuda shorts and fireman boots wading through six inches of shit- filled […]
R.A. Villanueva: Confluences
Because you will not talk about your mother’s hands or describe further the meat of her left thumb almost gone as if eaten down to the bone, and because it is too early yet to imagine your mother’s breast brushed with prep gauze, held in some nameless palm, an attendant knuckle There to mark just […]