Volume 43, Issue 1 — Spring 2013

Horizontal Tabs

Table of Contents

In this issue: trading a Playboy for a hat, lines for telephone calls, lines for Rembrandt, lines along the circumferences of yams in the kitchen, killing time with muted baseball games and cheap metal detectors, a dusty dog and remembering to remember her name, supervillains with paralyzing beams, museums of drones, streets a latticework of fire, and what's morality to you?

Poem

Story

Essay

John Teschner | On Drones
Aleš Šteger (trans. Brian Henry) | Guilt at Lindenstrasse 9

Comic

Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López (trans. Erica Mena) | The Eternonaut

Artwork

Drew Cameron, Drew Luan Matott, Jesse Albrecht, and Chris Arendt | The Combat Paper Project

Editor's Note

When the family of Vietnam War veteran and antiwar writer and activist Jeff Sharlet approached us about establishing a writing contest for veterans in his memory, we thought about the central importance of the return of U.S. veterans in the country’s social and cultural life—after World War II, with the massive increase of college students through the GI Bill, the paperback revolution in publishing (whose story is recounted by Jason Epstein in Book Business), and the dramatic expansion of the middle class; after the Vietnam War, with America’s questioning of its place in the world and the spectacular changes in behavior, values, rights, and tastes that followed. It occurred to us that with war a recurring figure in the history of the United States, and with our nation having been at war continuously for the past eleven years (much of that time with two wars running concurrently), there are veterans from previous and current wars who have returned and are still returning every day, attempting to reintegrate themselves into the lives they interrupted, start anew, and sometimes share their experiences.

We know return is one of the most powerful themes in all storytelling, that the memory of what is still or perhaps no longer there intensifies when one is here, and the projected possibilities of what was there then make what is here now radiant, or excruciating, or both. We know how the distances, imagined or real, physical or temporal, both separate and unite in such stories, and how our sense of what we can or should do now or tomorrow turns out so clearly contingent on who we find ourselves with, where, when, and, then again, sometimes on none of that, and nearly on nothing at all—a glitch, a harsh word, a miscue, a silly thought, the whims of the gods. We know such stories have been with us for a very long time, and that they show us how little our choices can mean in some circumstances, and how much they can mean in others.

And so the idea of a contest for veterans who are also writers, or rather writers who are also veterans—we are a literary magazine after all, so the distinction needs to be articulated—found a place amid the existing contests that The Iowa Review runs each year, in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The Jeff Sharlet family provided the seed money for three years’ worth of prizes. All U.S. military veterans and active duty personnel would be eligible to enter. The genre and subject matter would be open. We decided to read the entries in summer, when we had a little more time, sending the finalists on to our judge, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Olen Butler. We wondered whether we would receive any entries, or more than a handful. We were prepared for neither the number nor the high quality of the work we received and soon found our reduced summer staff completely taken over by the 268 entries in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and the many inquiries that came with them. It was hard to choose the best.

So hard in fact that we decided, for the current issue, to showcase not only the winning entry—poems by Hugh Martin—but also the work of ten other finalists. (All are listed on page vi.) Our cover and artwork insert feature the creations of the Combat Paper Project, an initiative in which veterans turn their uniforms into paper and then use the paper to create art.

As usual in our pages, subtle connections abound among the various works published here, half of which, it should be noted, did not come from our veterans’ contest. These are the sorts of connections that become apparent when you’re not quite looking, when, by virtue of one thing being placed next to another, being experienced alongside another, you’re made aware of what you might not have paid attention to otherwise, the details that make all the difference, and that help you make sense of and appreciate more fully all the rest. But we cannot help but be struck—when we do begin to look in earnest—by the intensity of many of the other connections, their lack of subtlety. With veterans and non-veterans writing in such overlapping ways—about home, technology, power, peace and violence, intimacy and estrangement—we realize how much war and the legacy of war shape us all.

—Russell Valentino

Contributors' Notes

COLE BECHER was a sergeant in a Marine Corps Combat Engineer Battalion. He served in Habbaniyah, Iraq, in 2008, and has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English. He misses a world without cell phones, reality TV, and Kardashian-esque anything. He does not miss officers, drill, or dust storms.

GUY R. BEINING published four chapbooks in 2011: Nozzle 1-36 (Presa Press), Take Me over the Wheel of It (Moon Press), Out of the Woods into the Sun (Kamini Press), and Measurements of Night III (CC. Marimbo Press). His work has recently appeared in Slab, A cappella Zoo, Fourteen Hills, Illuminations, and Skid Row/Penthouse.

NATHAN BRADLEY is an active-duty Army officer and Afghanistan war veteran. His work has previously appeared on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

RAYMOND FLEISCHMANN's short stories have appeared in journals such as River Styx, Silk Road, and The Pinch. He received his MFA from Ohio State University, where he completed a collection of short fiction. He is now at work on a novel.

HÉCTOR GERMÁN OESTERHELD (born July 23, 1919; disappeared and presumed dead 1977) was an Argentinian journalist and comics writer. Considered the most important Latin American comics writer, he is best known as the creator of The Eternonaut. Oesterheld’s work took on increasingly political tones in the 1960s and 1970s, and he and his four daughters (two of whom were pregnant at the time) were arrested by the Argentinian military government. There is no information about what happened to them, but they are all presumed dead. The Eternonaut was published in Hora Cero, edited by Oesterheld, in weekly installments beginning in 1957.

BRIAN HENRY is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Brother No One (Salt Publishing, 2013). His translation of Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. He has received numerous awards for his work, includ ing fellowships from the NEA, the Howard Foundation, and the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences.

TERRY HERTZLER has worked as a writer, editor, and teacher for more than thirty years. His poetry and short stories have appeared in The Writer, North American Review, Margie, Literal Latté, Nimrod, and Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, and have been produced on stage and for radio and television. He has published numerous chapbooks as well as two books of poetry and short fiction: The Way of the Snake and Second Skin. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

BROCK MICHAEL JONES will graduate in 2013 from the University of Wyoming’s Creative Writing MFA program. He served three tours of duty in Iraq.

O.A. LINDSEY’s writing has appeared in the Harper Perennial anthology Forty Stories; Fourteen Hills; Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art; and Yalobusha Review. Lindsey studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Mississippi and is a combat veteran.

HUGH MARTIN is a veteran of the Iraq War. His chapbook, So, How Was the War (Kent State University Press, 2010), was published by the Wick Poetry Center, and his first book, The Stick Soldiers, just out from BOA Editions, won the 2011 A. Poulin Jr. Prize. He is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

ERICA MENA is a poet and translator. She holds an MFA in translation from the University of Iowa and is an MFA candidate in poetry at Brown University. Her translations have appeared in Words without Borders, Two Lines, Kenyon Review, and PEN America, among others. She is the founding editor of Anomalous Press.

CHINELO OKPARANTA’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, and the Southern Review. “Designs” is from her forthcoming collection, Runs Girl and Other Stories.

ROCHELLE OWENS has published eighteen collections of poetry and plays, the newest being Solitary Workwoman (Junction Press) and Out of Ur: New and Selected Poems 1961–2012 (Shearsman Books).

USMAN RAFI was born in Pakistan. He is a medical doctor by education (who refuses to treat anyone, including himself), an entrepreneur by profession (still searching for someone to blame his failures on), and an aspiring writer by default (something to do with evolution and a faulty operating system, or so he claims). He lives in Pakistan with his family and is currently working on a novel and other stories. Note: any writer can contact him for no valid reason.

NELL REGAN is a Dublin-based poet. Her previous collections include Preparing for Spring and Bound for Home. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in the fall of 2011.

TONY SANDERS has published four books of poetry, the last a collaboration with the poet Chard deNiord. He lives in New York City.

FRANCISCO SOLANO LÓPEZ (1928–2011) was one of the most important Latin American illustrators of his generation. Perhaps best known in the U.S. for his erotic comics, he illustrated a number of edgy, dark works, including Deep City (written by Carlos Sampayo). He produced artwork for a number of publishers in Madrid and London after fleeing from Argentina to avoid potential arrest. These works included Galaxus: The Thing from Outer Space and The Drowned World.

ALEŠ ŠTEGER has published six books of poetry, a novel, and two books of essays in Slovenian. He received the 1998 Veronika Prize, the 1999 Petrarch Prize, and the 2007 Rozanceva Award. His work has been translated into fourteen languages, including German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. The Book of Things, a volume of poetry translated by Brian Henry, appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 as a Lannan Foundation selection and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award.

KENNY TANEMURA is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Purdue University.

PHILIP TATE lives with his family in upstate New York, where he teaches English at Tompkins Cortland Community College.

JOHN TESCHNER has coached high school basketball on the Kenyan savanna; written award-winning stories as a reporter in northern Virginia; and trained undergraduate creative writing students to teach at-risk middle schoolers in Georgia. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Georgia College and is currently a grant writer at AchieveMpls and an instructor at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He writes a monthly column of essays for tropmag.com.

JONATHAN TRAVELSTEAD works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro, IL, while finishing his MFA at Southern Illinois University. When not on duty, he backpacks twice each year in Central America and Europe and works on an old dirt bike he hopes will one day get him to Peru.

S. BRADY TUCKER’s poetry manuscript, Mormon Boy, won the 2011 Elixir Press Editor’s Poetry Prize and was released in 2012. He is a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar and volunteers in literacy programs for inmates and returned combat veterans. He teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at the Lighthouse in Denver. His poetry and fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in the Antioch Review, Connecticut Review, Chautauqua, River Styx, and elsewhere.

LINDSEY WATERMAN served in the United States Army and did a twelve-month tour of duty in Iraq in 2004. She received her bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, in 2012.

MICHAEL WHITE’s latest poetry collection, Vermeer in Hell, is forthcoming soon from Persea Books.