Volume 43, Issue 2 — Fall 2013

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In this issue: Vikings marauding through our blood, Emily Dickinson's small sleigh bed, unbuttoning your heart one blood vessel at a time, cuddling a flour-sack baby, subterranean adolescents talking beauty in Mongolia, roses and maps on children's backs, a stolen dog, a welterweight son, and a glaciating landmass in sandalfoot nylons

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Jackson Patterson | Recollected Memories

Editor's Note

A couple of years ago, on a trip I took across Eurasia,* somewhere in the vast nothingness between one Siberian village and another, our train stopped where there was no station and no light. I came out of my compartment, stood next to another passenger, who was smoking at the open window, and asked where we were. “Nechistaia sila,” he answered between puffs. I looked out and understood he was joking. The words, which literally translate as “unclean force” or “impure power,” are a folk reference, though I knew them from Nikolai Gogol’s stories set in the Ukrainian countryside, where lonely spots like this one were typically haunted and often represented as demonic. “Devil’s Landing” might be appropriately evocative.

The reference immediately conjured up a whole range of associations and an entire worldview, a way of framing and making sense of things, most often things encountered unexpectedly. I suspect I’m no different from most readers of TIR in having long ago acquired the habit of this way of approaching the world, grabbing little chunks of it through phrases, images, characters, and scenes encountered in books, a product of reading too much in one’s formative years no doubt. The search for concise, telling frames and wordings, once you realize you’re doing this, can become a life pursuit. Words are always key, as individuals and in groups. These capture and convey distinctive visions of the world and interactions with it in the manner of folk taxonomies, like names for reindeer among steppe dwellers in Mongolia, species of fish in Polynesia, or, closer to our own experience, descriptive phrases for wine or perfume.

I am reminded of Christian Bobin’s lyric reflections on reading at the beginning of A Little Party Dress, where he writes, “One day you recognize a word on the page, and you say it out loud, and it’s a little piece of god departing, a first fracture in paradise. Then you go on with the next word, and there is nothing left of the universe, which once was whole; there’s nothing left but sentences, lost continents in the white of the page.” Words, the white spaces that surround them, and the pages on which they’re printed or not printed become not just what you look at but what you look through, how you see, appreciate, understand, come to terms with. And then there’s another step, which Bobin doesn’t quite get to, but which critics, teachers, and, of course, editors of literary magazines understand intimately: you start to evaluate how well, how convincingly the words and their contorni evoke the world, this one or some other.

In editing TIR these past several years, I have come to realize that this is how I read most often, and that this is probably why I’m not an especially fast reader. An affliction when the writing is bad, a joy when it is good, this way of reading would have handicapped me severely for the job of editing a literary magazine had I not been fortunate to work with a host of professionals who did most of the work, while I, most often, just said “yes.” As editor of The Iowa Review, I have been privileged to work with enthusiastic, energetic genre editors and volunteers doing the bulk of the initial reading, knowledgeable senior editors to whom I could turn for advice and counsel, experienced designers and web consultants, and a managing editor with the skills and experience to run the whole thing with dexterity and poise. Reading submissions has been a particular joy for me because, more often than not, I got to read the especially good submissions, and that was the case thanks to these colleagues.

Thank you, then, especially: Michael, Emily, Jenna, Sarah, Catherine, Bryan, Rae, Hannah, Jeremiah, Mal, Elliott, Nikki-Lee, Robin, Nick, Hugh, Lauren, Amber, Jenna (again), and Lynne.

What I mean by good writing is something that the fundraisers will tell me I need to be more specific about. You can’t, they say, just say we take only the best stuff, or we publish only fine fiction or high-quality poetry. You have to be more specific if you want to invite people to join you in your mission (another favorite arts funding phrase). Contrary to what Lawrence Venuti suggested in his piece for our forum on literature and translation, workshop culture, especially the kind of workshop culture that is linked to publishing in literary magazines, is not always dominated by a “belletristic” mindset, though it is certainly dominated most often by one focused on belles lettres.

The best answer to the question of what TIR publishes and why is to look at what it has been publishing, because there is an aesthetics to it, and there has been for some time, though it is never thematic per se, never prescriptive, and never formulaic. During my time as editor, it has probably pushed towards international literature somewhat (and I am very pleased to note a handful of translated works in this issue), though the focus has not shifted considerably away from reflective essays, poetry that pushes the boundaries of what poetry is often expected to be, and fiction that is authentic and focused on voice and character. I have been particularly interested in writing that evokes the world that Bobin thinks we lost when we started to read, because I suspect in fact it is the opposite: namely, it is writing we need in order to see the world again, to feel it and smell it and taste it.

For this, sometimes you need soup and tones, a bridge, a shoe, a job, or oh, that munchy dizzy. Sometimes you need a big top, a big big top, or a particularly successful—wouldn’t you say?—line, or you really need your mom to hold you down while the needle pierces the skin of your back, or to watch an old movie, when your father looked so young, tossing a Frisbee. Sometimes you need to be taken a devil of a long way from anywhere and brought back, to travel far away from your supposed self, get diagnosed, lay hands on your own body, lose almost everything. Almost. Sometimes you need to make something out of nothing, a lot of nothings. Sometimes you need to be reminded of how beautiful eternity is and how non-eternal beauty is, unbuttoning your heart one blood vessel at a time, building bridges with your nose, or the mucus thereof. Or it helps to have the surprise of intellectual, fractured lyrics, or just that hint of violence in dissolution (a gas leak? an explosion?) and in personal life (that shotgun), witnessing the exploration of the words in which we sit, in a chair, in the air, good. Sometimes we must save a gourd for breaking over our heads on our wedding day, our eyes ojo, our lips made up with red achiote. Sometimes we need to have a dog that we’ve stolen look us in the eye, or have someone calculate the implacable arithmetic of one, howling it like a cat in heat as we dream of Valhalla, giving each other our bodies, unlocked locks, lacking all purpose and all restraint, filled with risk. Sometimes you really need to remember braking your childhood bike in a Trojan army of wet leaves, there where the earth meets the weeds, oxidizing under a topic brilliance, extruded little white squirts, flung from the sun, in the least tongue. Sometimes we need to hold watch, watch trucks thicken, bodies soften, suns sidle.

* To read more about Russell Valentino’s trip through Eurasia, visit his blog entries http://iowareview.org/blog/crossing, http://iowareview.org/blog/crossing-2, http://iowareview.org/blog/crossing-3, and http://iowareview.org/blog/crossed.

Contributors' Notes

NATE BROWN is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Vermont Studio Center, the Kimmel, Harding, Nelson Center for the Arts, and multiple scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Carolina Quarterly, Mississippi Review, and Wag’s Revue. He is the Deputy Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and lives in Washington DC with his wife.

Prizewinning author of several poetry collections, NANCY NAOMI CARLSON holds a PhD in foreign language methodology. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Recipient of grants from the Maryland Arts Commission and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, she is an editor for Tupelo Press and the translation editor for Blue Lyra Review.

NIKIA CHANEY is a poet from the Inland Empire of California. She is the author of two chapbooks, Sis Fuss (Orange Monkey Publishing) and ladies, please (Dancing Girls Press), both forthcoming in 2013. She is also the founding editor of shufpoetry, an online journal for experimental poetry, and an associate editor for Inlandia, a literary journal for regional literature. She teaches English at San Bernardino Valley College.

Hailed by Prime Minister Jacques Chirac as “the greatest French poet of the twentieth century,” RENÉ CHAR (1907–1988) was active in the French Resistance and continued to be a social activist throughout his life. Known for his economy of style, including his aphorisms and short bursts of prose, Char’s poems are mysterious, thick with imagery, and infused with music.

PETER CONSTANTINE’s recent translations include The Essential Writings of Rousseau, Sophocles’s Theban Trilogy, and works by Gogol, Tolstoy, Machiavelli, and Voltaire. He was awarded the pen Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann and a National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov.

SUZANNE DRACIUS, author and playwright from Martinique, won the Prize of the Society of French Poets for the body of her work, as well as the Prix Fetkann. Dracius’s work emphasizes Martinique’s complex cultural history, including métissage, which refers to the blending of two distinct elements, in either a biological or cultural sense. Dracius and her translator, Nancy Naomi Carlson, presented “Nègzagonale” last November in Fort-de-France, Martinique.

JEN FAWKES’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, the Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, and other journals, and has been nominated for a Pushcart. She holds an MFA from Hollins University and a BA from Columbia University.

STEVEN W. FLORES is a first-year MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is currently working on a novel.

HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent of which is Red Clay Suite (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007). She teaches at the University of Oklahoma.

CHRISTINE HERRMANN is at work on her second novel. She lives in Washington DC. Some of her earlier short stories have appeared in University of Maine’s Stolen Island Review and the Maine anthology The Way Life Should Be.

DAVID JIMÉNEZ is a war correspondent and the Asia Bureau Chief for Spain’s leading newspaper, El Mundo. He has contributed to CNN, BBC, The Guardian, and the Toronto Star. His latest book is El Botones de Kabul (The Bellhop of Kabul), a novel based on his experience covering the Afghan war.

DEBORA KUAN is the author of Xing, a book of poems (Saturnalia Books, 2011). She lives in Brooklyn.

KATY LEDERER is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex and The Heaven-Sent Leaf, as well as the memoir Poker Face. These poems are from a new collection entitled The Engineers.

ELLEN LESSER is the author of The Shoplifter’s Apprentice (stories) and two novels, The Other Woman and The Blue Streak. She is a longtime member of the MFA fiction faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she also directs the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. “Rose” is part of a linked collection-in-progress.

FARID MATUK is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine). His poems have appeared most recently in Third Coast, Mandorla, Critical Quarterly (UK), and online at Esque and Poets.org. He lives in Dallas with the poet Susan Briante.

MOLLY MCQUADE is currently completing a series of essays composed as letters addressed to various and sundry writers. Her prose and poetry have appeared previously in Yale Review, Literary Imagination, Poetry, Parnassus, American Scholar, Daedalus, and elsewhere.

VI KHI NAO is pursuing an MFA at Brown University.

THOR R. NYSTROM is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the foreign language department at Chonqing University in China, where he teaches creative writing, Western culture, and English. A former Major League Baseball reporter and NBC Sports writer, Nystrom holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a BS from the University of Kansas. He’s currently working on a memoir based on his Rolling Stone–awarded article, “To Hell and Back.”

CARYL PAGEL is the author of Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death. She is the co-founder and editor of Rescue Press and a poetry editor at jubilat.

JACKSON PATTERSON received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009. He has been exhibiting his photographs in Pennsylvania, Vermont, Texas, Colorado, and elsewhere since 2000 at various institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Morris Graves Museum of Art, and the Pendleton Art Center. His work is in various private collections and in the Paul Sack Collection at the SFMOMA. He resides and works in San Francisco.

ANDREA ROSENBERG is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Brooklyn Rail, and the Quarterly Conversation. She may be reached at andrea.rosenberg@gmail.com.

MARGARET ROSS lives in Iowa City. Her poems can be found in Fence, Volt, Colorado Review, Petri Press, and The Claudius App. Her chapbook is published by Catenary Press.

CLEMENS SETZ (b. 1982, Graz) is an Austrian poet, novelist, jazz pianist, and mathematician. He was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and has received the Ernst-Willner-Preis, the Bremer Literaturpreis, the Outstanding Artist Award, and the Leipzig Book Award for Fiction. A translation of his most recent novel, Indigo, is scheduled to be published by W.W. Norton in 2014.

ARDELL STAUFFER lives and works in Hesston, Kansas. He is a native of Iowa.

CLARE SULLIVAN directs the Graduate Certificate in Translation at the University of Louisville, where she serves as Associate Professor of Spanish. Her poetry translations have appeared in the Two Lines World Writing in Translation series, World Literature Today, KIN, and Asheville Poetry Review. In 2010, she received an NEA Translation Fellowship to translate Natalia Toledo’s Guie’yaase’/Olivo negro.

NATALIA TOLEDO (Juchitán, Mexico) was the first woman to write and publish in her native language, Isthmus Zapotec. She has published four volumes of poetry in bilingual form (Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish). Her poetry has also been translated to English, French, German, Vietnamese, and Italian. She received the 2004 Premio Nacional de Literatura Nezahualcoyotl for her book of poetry, Guie’ yaase’/Olivo negro.

NATALIE VESTIN is a writer and health researcher from Saint Paul. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Chautauqua, Poydras Review, Switchback, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2013 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize, the 2012 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 2012 Sonora Review Essay Prize.

JULIA WHICKER attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Iowa City, IA, and has a dog.

EMILY WILSON is the author of The Keep (2001) and Micrographia (2009), both from University of Iowa Press. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and two young sons.

LEILA WILSON’s book, The Hundred Grasses, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. She is the recipient of a Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and she teaches at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago.

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Russell Scott Valentino, Editor

Lynne Nugent, Managing Editor

Jenna Hammerich, Asst. Managing Editor and Web Editor

John D'Agata, Hugh Ferrer, Robin Hemley, Nick Twemlow, Senior Editors

Elliott Krause, Nonfiction Editor

Mallory Hellman, Fiction Editor

Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Poetry Editor

Lauren Haldeman, Webmaster

Pocket Knife Press, Type Composition

Catina Bacote, Alex Ryan Bauer, Amy Bernhard, Erick Brucker, Chad Campbell, Van Choojitarom, Ashley Clarke, Gemma de Choisy, P.S. Dini, Olivia Dunn, Fatima R. Espiritu, Emily Ha, Jessie Hennen, Olivia Kaiser, Sarah Kosch, Brent Krammes, Jacob Lancaster, Chansi Long, Lucy Morris, Hong-Thao Nguyen, Christian Perelló, Alyssa Perry, Daniel Poppick, Montreux Rotholtz, Daniel Simonds, Stephanie Spencer, Joshua Wheeler, Justin Wymer, Editorial Assistants

Derek Heckman, Katherine Kraabel, Katharine Monger, Interns

Lan Samantha Chang, Ed Folsom, John D. Freyer, Loren Glass, Christopher Merrill, Adalaide Morris, Horace Porter, Editorial Board

Jenny Boully, Yiyun Li, Tom Lutz, Dora Malech, Ben Marcus, Khaled Mattawa, Vanessa Place, Cole Swensen, Wendy S. Walters, Contributing Editors

David Hamilton, Editor Emeritus

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