Volume 43, Issue 3 — Winter 2013/14

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Table of Contents

In this issue: how the Shed Lady died, perfect wax hands, translucent honeymoon, fifty things about my mother, a mother becoming a bird, a bird renting a womb, a father-built playhouse, a father-gifted gun, dangling bulbs in stopgap towns, the body making room for our favorite ways, Kuwaiti latrines, and Who shoved Greg into the pool?

Poem

Brandi George | Lessons in Sacrifice | Two or More Daemon-Animals
Jerimee Bloemeke | Our Father Who Art in Heaven | Complete and Selected
Kim Sa-In | End of Mourning | Rainy Season | Springtime Sea | A Flower (translated by Brother Anthony of Taize and Susan Hwang)
Meredith Stricker | Hazardous Materials
Josh Kalscheur | Katari [selected for Best New Poets 2013] | The Final Place to Go
Cate Lycurgus | [I find every stopgap town]
Andrew Seguin | Notes from a Museum Guard | Apprentice
Colby Cedar Smith | To My Internal Cellist | The Roots Are Horizontal Ladders | A Pool of Colorful Koi | It's That Pop | I Want to Swing on That Swing Next to You
Kenzie Allen | Forensics | Pathology
Eric Weinstein | The History of Cardenio
Rebecca Lilly | The Orchardist | Abelon Graveyard | Hairy Old Man | Our Family Business | Uncle Lowry | The Water Goddess
L.S. Klatt | Suffused | Emergency on Waxed Paper
John Kinsella | Canola Anti-prayer
Martha Ronk | Drifts slid further off | Evidentiary | Illegibility
Ales Debeljak | Tightrope Walker | James Joyce Slept Here (translated by Brian Henry)

Story

Jennifer Bowen Hicks | Old News, Unverified
Shannon Robinson | Birdie
Marc Berley | What Kind of Bird Are You?
Ronit Feinglass Plank | Rick's Wax Hands
Elise Winn | Honey Moon
Melina Kameric | Red Lace Lingerie (translated by Jennifer H. Zoble)
Katie Cotugno | The Shallow End

Essay

Laura Lynn Brown | Fifty Things about My Mother [featured on Slate.com May 2015 and named a notable essay in Best American Essays 2014]
Bruce Snider | Ammunition [reprinted in the Utne Reader, May/June 2014]
Meghan Flaherty | Womb
Elizabeth Merritt Abbott | The Female Latrine
Garth Greenwell | A Valediction

Review

Lee Konstantinou | Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge
Alan Wald | Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens
Stephen Lovely | Jonathan Blum's Last Word

Artwork

Colin Edgington | [Umbrae]

Editor's Note

In Jennifer Bowen Hicks’s short story “Old News, Unverified,” which opens this issue, the young narrator, Ruthie, and her mother argue over whether a previous tenant really burned herself up in their backyard shed. “That shed is just a shed.... There was no fire,” her mother tells her. Still, Ruthie persists in furnishing and peopling her imaginary landscape, as children (and writers) are wont to do. Like Ruthie with her reporter’s notebook in hand, trying to interview a ghost, the writers whose stories, poems, essays, and reviews fill this issue interrogate imaginary spaces that intersect with our own: psychological worlds; worlds constructed of language; fictional worlds filled with the untrue or the impossible; the past.

Hicks’s story was an unsolicited submission, plucked from the hundreds that arrive each fall by our genre editors with the help of many volunteer readers. Most of the other pieces in the issue came to be published by a similar route, but three were chosen by outside judges in our 2013 Iowa Review Awards contest. Laura Lynn Brown’s essay “Fifty Things about My Mother” delineates her grief in fifty verbal snapshots, one for each year of her mother’s life. Meredith Stricker’s poem sequence “Hazardous Materials” juxtaposes quotations from the likes of Walter Benjamin and Samuel Taylor Coleridge with images from an ecologically fragile world. Elise Winn’s story “Honey Moon” conjures a parallel reality in which terminal illness is manifested in a growing transparency. Congratulations to these writers and to the runners-up in the contest, Rebecca Lilly, Ronit Feinglass Plank, and Meghan Flaherty, whose work we are equally thrilled to present in this issue.

Another contest brought us our cover and insert images. Colin Edgington’s series [Umbrae] won over the judges of our 2013 photography award with its subtle lyricism. “His work whispers, makes you move in closer in hopes of hearing a secret,” wrote judge Alec Soth. Stay tuned for our next issue to see the work of the runner-up in the photography contest, Maury Gortemiller.

Genre editors, volunteer readers, outside judges (not to mention our indefatigable interim managing editor, print designer, webmaster, and interns, who make each issue happen): as always, The Iowa Review is a collaborative effort. And this issue has been even more collaborative than most, since it is transitional between editors in chief. Some of the work was accepted  by our former editor, Russell Scott Valentino, who has moved on from the University of Iowa to a new academic position at Indiana University; some of it was accepted by me during the interim period; and some was accepted by our new editor, Harilaos Stecopoulos. We thank Russell for all his hard work and send him best wishes, he of the dapper fedoras and car coats and frequent international travel (leading at least one intern to regard him as a mythical figure on par with James Bond), and we extend Harry a warm welcome as he embarks on this new adventure with the trademark great enthusiasm he brings to all his endeavors.

Despite the number of people involved in the issue, this one seems, as each one does to me, one organic thing. How this happens is as mysterious as the alchemy that produces a child (and, by the way, there are a lot of children in this issue). The narrator of one of Brandi George’s poems, haunted by a mother’s religiosity, could have coffee with the narrator of one of Jerimee Bloemeke’s poems, haunted by a father’s crudeness. Shannon Robinson’s “Birdie,” about a woman becoming landlord to a bird, could inhabit a surreal avian anthology with Marc Berley’s “What Kind of Bird Are You?,” about a boy whose mother has become a bird. Bruce Snider learning to defend himself with a gun resonates both with Melina Kameri´c’s protagonist trying to evade a sniper and with Elizabeth Merritt Abbott finding her weapon useless against her real enemy in Afghanistan. There are many other correspondences I could mention, but I’ll leave them for the reader to discover.

To return to “Old News, Unverified,” both Ruthie and her mother come to realize that, whatever the facts, the imagination does have a reality of its own, that intangibles like longing and betrayal can kindle conflagrations just as easily as any match. “This awful love” is how Ruthie describes what is revealed to her in the course of her investigative reporting. The other writers in this issue arrive in very different ways at the same conclusion. Old news, continuously made new.

—Lynne Nugent, Interim Editor

Contributors' Notes

ELIZABETH MERRITT ABBOTT left the Army in 2011. She now lives in Minneapolis with her wife and dog. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota.

KENZIE ALLEN is a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and is a current MFA candidate at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Zell Graduate Fellowship, a Meador Family Award, and fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Aspen Summer Words. Her work has previously appeared in Sonora Review.

MARC BERLEY’s fiction has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He recently completed a collection of short stories and is at work on a novel. He holds a PhD from Columbia and lives in New York City.

JERIMEE BLOEMEKE was born in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He has a BFA from New York University and an mfa from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His writing has been published in several chapbooks and various journals and magazines, both print and online. Most recently, he is the author of 25¢ CASH (Slim Princess Holdings, 2013). He is the sole remaining representative of Human 500.

LAURA LYNN BROWN sets small things right and makes the rough places smooth as a copy editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She earned an MFA in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. The essay in this issue led to the publication of her book, Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories (Abingdon Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Art House America, and elsewhere. She writes occasionally at lauralynnbrown.com.

KATIE COTUGNO is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in Mississippi Reivew, Apalachee Review, and Argestes, among others, as well as on Nerve.com. Her first novel, How to Love, is due out from Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins in the fall of 2013. She lives in Boston.

ALES DEBELJAK has published eight books of poetry and twelve books of essays in Slovenian. Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems appeared from Persea Books in 2010. He has won the Preseren Foundation Prize, the Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize, the Chiqu Poetry Prize, and the Jenko Prize. He teaches at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

COLIN EDGINGTON received a BAFA in studio art from the University of New Mexico and an MFA in photography from Rutgers University. Edgington’s photographic work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and his writings have appeared in Exposure, Afterimage, and Fraction Magazine. He teaches photography at the College of Staten Island–CUNY and at Raritan Valley Community College.

MEGHAN FLAHERTY has an MFA in nonfiction and literary translation from Columbia. She’s currently working on a book-length personal history of Argentine tango.

BRANDI GEORGE’s work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and Best New Poets. She currently resides in Tallahassee, where she is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and the editor of the Southeast Review.

GARTH GREENWELL is the author of Mitko, which won the Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for both the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.

BRIAN HENRY’s most recent book of poetry is Brother No One (Salt, 2013).

JENNIFER BOWEN HICKS is a 2012 Loft Mentor Award Winner in Nonfiction and Honorable Mention in Fiction. Her work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, The Rumpus, Brevity, Defunct, and other journals. She’s the founding director of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and has received support from the Minnesota Arts Board for prison education.

SUSAN HWANG is a doctoral student studying modern Korean literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She received an MA at Columbia University and is presently writing her dissertation on the history of literary  criticism in South Korea since the mid-1960s, with a focus on the changing relationship between dissident politics and literary production.

JOSH KALSCHEUR’s first collection of poetry, Tidal, won the 2013 Four Way Books Levis Prize and will be published in spring 2015. His poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Boston Review, Slate, Ninth Letter, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

MELINA KAMERIĆ was born in 1972 in Sarajevo. She writes at night. Her short fiction collection Cipele za dodjelu Oskara (in English translation: Shoes for Oscar Night) was published in 2009 by Buybook (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Rende (Serbia). A Ukrainian translation was published in 2012 by Folio Publishers Ltd.

KIM SA-IN was born in Boeun, North Chungcheon Province, South Korea. He has published two collections of poetry, Night Letters  (1987) and Liking in Silence  (2006), four collections of criticism, and a book of essays. Among his awards are the Sin Dong-Yeop Grant for Writing, the Modern Literature Prize, and the Daesan Literature Award. He teaches creative writing at Dongdeok Women’s University and participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2010.

JOHN KINSELLA’s most recent publications include the poetry volume Jam Tree Gully (W.W. Norton, 2012) and short story collection In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Swallow, Ohio University Press, 2012). He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.

L.S. KLATT has published poems recently in Colorado Review, Washington Square, Indiana Review, and New Orleans Review. New work will appear in The Common, Columbia Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, and American Letters & Commentary. His second collection, Cloud of Ink, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

LEE KONSTANTINOU wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse and coedited the collection The Legacy of David Foster Wallace with Samuel Cohen. He is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.

REBECCA LILLY has published several collections of poems, most recently two books of haiku: A Prism of Wings (on butterflies) and Light’s Reservoir (a companion volume on wildflowers). She holds degrees from Cornell and Princeton. Her author’s website is rebeccalilly.com.

STEPHEN LOVELY attended Kenyon College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first novel, Irreplaceable, was published by Hyperion/Voice in 2009. He lives in Iowa City, where he directs the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio.

CATE LYCURGUS is pursuing her MFA at Indiana University, where she served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Washington Square Review, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. 

RONIT FEINGLASS PLANK’s stories and essays have appeared on Salon.com, Lilith, Niche, Switchback, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle and is at work on a book.

SHANNON ROBINSON’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Joyland, Nimrod, and New Stories from the Midwest. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and recently served as Writer-in-Residence at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other honors include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.

MARTHA RONK is the author of nine books of poetry. Her most recent publications include Vertigo, which was a National Poetry Series selection, and Partially Kept, which was published by Nightboat Books.

ANDREW SEGUIN is a poet and photographer. He is the author of the chapbook Black Anecdote and is a 2013–14 Fulbright Scholar in France.

COLBY CEDAR SMITH holds degrees from Colorado College and Harvard University. She is the author of the chapbook Seven Seeds of the Pomegranate (Penny Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Memorious, Potomac Review, Redivider, RUNES, and Perigee.

BRUCE SNIDER is the author of the poetry collections Paradise, Indiana, winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2012, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he is currently the Jenny McKean Moore Fellow at George Washington University in Washington DC.

MEREDITH STRICKER is the author of Mistake (Caketrain, 2012), Alphabet Theater (mixed media performance poetry; Wesleyan, 2003), and Tenderness Shore, which received the National Poetry Series Award (LSU, 2003). She works in visual poetry collaborative, a studio that focuses on architecture in Big Sur and projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians, and experimental forms.

BROTHER ANTHONY OF TAIZÉ was born in England in 1942 and joined the Community of Taizé in 1969. He has lived in Korea since 1980. He is an emeritus professor of English literature at Sogang University in Seoul and has published more than thirty volumes of translations of modern Korean poetry.

ALAN WALD, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan, recently published American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (2013).

ERIC WEINSTEIN’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.

ELISE WINN’s stories have appeared in Hobart, Indiana Review, and American Short Fiction. She was raised in Missouri and holds an MA in creative writing from the University of California–Davis.

JENNIFER H. ZOBLE coedits InTranslation, a project of the Brooklyn Rail, and teaches in the Liberal Studies program at NYU. She earned MFAs in literary translation and nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and a master’s in teaching from The New School. Her translations from Melina Kameric’s short fiction collection Cipele za dodjelu Oskara (in English translation: Shoes for Oscar Night) have appeared in Anomalous, Ozone Park, Washington Square, and Staging Ground.

Masthead

Harilaos Stecopoulos, Editor 
Lynne Nugent, Interim Editor
Jenna Hammerich, Interim Managing Editor

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

Nikki-Lee Birdsey, Poetry Editor
Mallory Hellman, Fiction Editor
Elliott Krause, Nonfiction Editor

Lauren Haldeman, Webmaster

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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, Riley Johnson, Olivia Kaiser, Sarah Kosch, Katherine Kraabel, Brent Krammes, Jacob Lancaster, Chansi Long, Lucy Morris, Hong-Thao Nguyen, Pramodini Parayitam, Christian Perelló, Alyssa Perry, Daniel Poppick, Holly Richard, Montreux Rotholtz, Daniel Simonds, Beatrice Smigasiewicz, Stephanie Spencer, Joshua Wheeler, Justin Wymer, Editorial Assistants

Derek Heckman, Katherine Kraabel, Audrey Smith, Interns

Lan Samantha Chang, Ed Folsom, John D. Freyer, Loren Glass, Christopher Merrill, Adalaide Morris, Horace Porter, Editorial Board Jenny Boully, Robin Hemley, Yiyun Li, Tom Lutz, Dora Malech, Ben Marcus, Khaled Mattawa, Vanessa Place, Cole Swensen, Russell Scott Valentino, Wendy S. Walters, Jan Weissmiller, Contributing Editors 

David Hamilton, Editor Emeritus