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gone sane

Christal Rice Cooper

River King Press © 2011

By: Jenny Catlin

 

“Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing (actions shows on TV, film, etc), as long as the details are different.” (Andy Warhol)

 

What is pop culture and how do we identify with it? What is the relationship between art and pop culture? Christal Rice Cooper’s gone sane is, essentially pop culture free verse. I didn’t love this collection but the details are different.

 

Readers are unlikely to experience any great new insight within the somewhat scattered topics Cooper explores in ‘gone sane’. From Princess Dianna to domestic abuse with a smattering of serial killers, these ideas have been worked into the ground in virtually all artistic mediums.

 

This unusual collection needs to be read with a blank mind in order to really appreciate what she has managed to achieve. The issues and figures explored in these are familiar, if not redundant but there is real-tangible strength of prose in Cooper’s work. Her writing is clear, concise and well formed.

 

“She didn’t want to go toTexas,

those cowboys act as if they can ride”

                                                           -From Chorographer:

                                                                       Jaqueline Lee Bouvier Onassis

                                                                       Pink Blossoms

 

 

The pencil sketches (though lovely) and famous quotes are a bit of a distraction from Cooper’s work; personally I would have liked to see them used more sparingly but I can appreciate what she is trying to accomplish with their inclusion. Which I assume is an effort to more fully submerge the reader in the time/place/perspective of each subject.

 

This is actually a relatively enjoyable read, if you either appreciate a heavy pop culture tie in or are able to fully ignore them. Regardless, Cooper demonstrates a strong poetic ability and great promise for things to come from her pen.

Poetry # 141

As the winter vacation shrinks and dies, people will go back to school and still write poetry. For some reason.

The Editors,

Luis Rivas
Henry Ajumeze

Forgiveness
By Ronald Kichurchak Jr.

Shelly cowered in the corner

while the tears rolled down her face.

There was a shiner beneath her eye

and a bruise on her left cheek.

Blood trickled out her nose

as if it was a faucet whose handle

had not been cranked tight enough.

Mark stood near.

He said that he was sorry.

and reached out his hand for her,

but Shelly refused to look at him

and instead she covered her face with her hands.

Tomorrow she will cover it with make-up.

She can forgive him then,

after the bruises are hidden

beneath a fresh coat of concealer.

It will be easier to pretend

that it did not happen.

And once she believes that,

it will be easier to pretend

that it won’t happen again.

Continue Reading »

2011 in review

 

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 29,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

 

I had the pleasure of recently attending a book launch in Dublin in The Winding Stair, an independent bookshop where books were hung like wind chimes or dream-catchers in the window, exceptional for its picture-window view of one of the capital city’s most attractive landmarks, the Ha’penny Bridge.  Garlanded with icicle-blue Christmas lights, the view stretched over the dark waters of the Liffey, reflecting the festive lights back at us on the double, while inside the store it was warm and companionable with red wine flowing freely; the air rose with the melodies of flute and harp in accompaniment to a poet’s reading.  It was one of those evenings where people say, ‘You should have been there’.  It was a brief reading but one that would leave you with a desire to read more.  They say good wines don’t travel, that ambience is inseparable from the experience – but Michèle Vassal’s A Taste for Hemlock is one of those rare exceptions. Continue Reading »

Poetry # 140

I was standing in front of Bar 107 on 4th Street in Downtown Los Angeles, smoking. A man approaches me, admits he’s homeless and asks if I would like him to write me a poem for a modest contribution. The idea struck me as sad and beautiful (although, admittedly, if you are going to offer your services, writing poetry for strangers is probably not the most sought after service; maybe if he could sew or cook, he’d be better off, but, alas, some talents you do not ask for; they follow you forever like an unwanted child). Continue Reading »

Prose 129

Issue 129 of fabulous fiction brings you great distractions.  From life’s misfortunes to  frightful fortunes, these stories take you away from the here and now.  Sit back and let Neil Robertson, Andrea Danowski, and Eric Hawthorn take you on an out-and-back that may just leave you out there.

.

Fortune Cookie

Eric Hawthorn 

That woman across the restaurant—dark hair, eyeliner, velvet blouse—yeah, her. She’s been watching you for the last 20 minutes with a mix of curiosity and desire.

Thomas sits more upright in the booth of the Chinese restaurant. He reads his fortune again, just to be sure: dark hair… velvet blouse… watching you

This may be the most specific fortune cookie ever.

The restaurant resembles an airplane cabin. On the other end of this noisy fuselage, the woman in question—Velvet, he’s named her—is sitting with her friends. She and her friends are finishing their meal and laughing about something. Lacking anything better to do, Thomas polishes his glasses on his faded Iron Maiden t-shirt. With his glasses off, the woman is a velvety blur. Glasses on, she’s—incredible.

Thomas works to fit his glasses more comfortably along his temples. He needs new glasses. Not a new prescription, but a new frame. As Mother puts it, he’s “gained a little weight around his head.”

Thomas doesn’t usually read his fortune—he’s just here for the orange chicken—and he only read it this time because he’s waiting for Mother. Still, he’s never known a fortune cookie to display such awareness. How could a fortune cookie know who’s looking at him, let alone what she’s wearing? The fortune is 100 percent correct: dark hair, eyeliner, velvet blouse (skin-tight, plunging neckline, Thomas confirms with another glance). Maybe some bored members of the kitchen staff enjoy spying on the patrons, printing out custom fortunes and slipping them into the cookies right before the waitress, who’s probably in on it, brings them out with a quartered orange and their check. But if that were the case, how would these pranksters know which cookie Thomas would open? There were two: one for him and one for Mother, who’s using the ladies room. Thomas is dying to open Mother’s fortune cookie, but she’ll want to do that when she gets back.

Thomas reads his fortune once more:

That woman across the restaurant—dark hair, eyeliner, velvet blouse—yeah, her. She’s been watching you for the last 20 minutes with a mix of curiosity and desire.

Curiosity and desire? What does that even look like? Thomas imagines Velvet gazing in his direction. Once they lock eyes, she’ll do something really provocative, like scoop an ice cube from her water and roll it across her tongue (which is pierced, Thomas decides), the melting ice dripping past her so-red lipstick and down her chin and neck, over her bosom.

Continue Reading »

Poetry # 139

The leaves are turning, the winds of fall blow colder and yet the protests in America are staying put despite eviction notices, arrests, one death and disagreeable weather. Poets who do not write poetry sometimes make better poets than the ones that write as if it were a career. The collection in this issue shows the vast range of the poet’s mind: from blunt, cold realism to soft and cushy surrealism.

Fuck the world.

Yours truly,

Luis Rivas
Henry Ajumeze
Amber Bromer

The Editors of Poetic Gloom

All that fall
By Richy Campbell

In the midst of the
puddle, where she had been pushed
Mary leaned forward

to face him, as moist
brown countries soak into her
legging cloth. She sits,

supporting self with
palms, eyes yellowing, serpent
like. Billy watched as

arms grew from her back
and purged down into her throat,
deeper, reaching for

her spine which crashed to
the puddle like a tower
into a lake; skin

floating above the
pave. In noon wind, skin-Mary
wraps around his small

head like a dispelled
shopping bag, and as shaking
recedes, arms going

limp, she lets go, and
her spine enters where left
to fill the floating

flesh-phantom. She stands
over him, thick sweat lacquers
the yellowing, air

deprived stripes on his
forehead; his hands on knees, spit
seeping through teeth on

the granite. She smiles
before leaning over close to
whisper in his ear

stands, leaving him, ropes
of phlegm swing and rattle in
his throat with wheezes.

Bio: Richy Campbell is writer and musician based in Staffordshire, England. He has been published in a few journals and works as a freelance indexer.

Continue Reading »

Welcome to the non-fiction section of the Gloom Cupboard, temporarily edited by yours truly, Alan Garvey.  There’s a right grab-bag of writings selected for you, from the lives of ordinary people – take your pick: sobriety is under the microscope for an estimation of its worth, there’s a piece examining attitudes towards breast cancer and those who are enduring its effects, we also have the first published piece by a new author detailing some of the worst things she’s ever seen, heard, and done, and an interview with Australian poet and cartoonist Mark Niehus.  Enjoy.  Continue Reading »

If you must know, Paul Rogov is from Minsk, Belarus, lives in southern California, and will blog for you about war, art, and trauma. But he’s not giving up his biography. Not that it’s important. With narratives populated by men with Saussurean scars, failed fathers, and gawky boy soldiers disfigured by adrenaline, how much could any individual’s biography matter? If, as Kierkegaard describes, we become ourselves through our actions, then Rogov’s characters determine themselves, and their relationships, through their traumas—self-inflicted or otherwise. “Trauma unites people,” explains Rogov, the third author featured in the “The New Xорошо,” as he weighs in on spirituality, femininity, and the impossibility of shooting heroin like a gentleman. ~T.M. De Vos 

  Continue Reading »

Poetry # 138

So here we are. For some reason I’m in Chicago. For some reason thousands of people are occupying both public and private spaces in my country that’s not my country – that has been steadily and speedily destroying the Earth – flirting with the potential of an all-out uprising. Poetry, much like Bertolt Brecht’s take on art holds true:

“Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

I dig that. So as you read the poems, keep that in mind. Question everything. Break things. Fuck shit up. Continue Reading »

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