As we turn our calendar pages forward with the new year, Blackbird is also turning a virtual page, inaugurating its new site and its new faculty advisors. And yet. And yet.
While things certainly look quite different, our staff humbly aspires to maintain the exceptionally high editorial standards of our journal’s founders and honor their commitment to publishing powerful literature and art from writers and artists at all stages in their careers. As a result, returning readers will find works by past contributors as well as offerings from others who are appearing in Blackbird for the first time. We are so grateful to all of these talented individuals for trusting us with their work.
Our new format also heralds in a new publication schedule, one in which we will be working busily behind the scenes to bring out four smaller issues (flights) each year. While we live in unprecedentedly complex times, Blackbird hopes that the works you find here will bring you as much inspiration and comfort as they have brought to us.
Here are a few of the writers featured in this issue:
At the core of Matthew Baker’s short story “Parenthetical” is the continuous, simultaneous nature of time, with no distinct beginning or end, which stands in sharp contrast to the human invention of measurable time. Baker speaks to this theme by employing a multitude of parentheses within parentheses, presenting scenes within scenes of a young couple becoming infatuated on a nebulous timeline.
In her poems “The Bat” and “Home Viticulture,” Olivia Sokolowski uses imagery and personification to showcase what it is like to prefer solitude. The question that both pieces circle is “have you ever been at your own party and just needed / to hide?”. The ending of each poem solidifies the introverted nature of these works, allowing readers to experience the tranquility of privacy.
“Once, / when no one was near, / a split tree / calmed me,” says Kim Addonizio in her poem “Solace.” Peace of mind is what Addonizio’s poems center around. Both her poems “Solace” and “According to the Buddhists” serve as a way to explore the freedom of detachment and the sense of calmness that comes from a bit of isolation.
G.C. Waldrep’s poems “Morraine,” “Never,” and “Ballast” explore the connections between existence, spirituality, and identity. Centering around the concept of “bleared impermanence,” his work contends with the ever-changing state of the internal and external world in which even “the root of light / which, broken, absolves / nothing.” Buoyant yet detached, this rumination immerses the reader in the liminal space of uncertainty.
“The truth is that these acts, even in their pain and violence, are not without their kindness.” A heartfelt examination of loss, Elise Thi Tran’s essay “Cortege of Small Things” dives headlong into our human desire to prolong the inevitable. Beneath the fear and grief, Thi Tran highlights the love which cradles these moments and our ability to find “a simple comfort that we are, at times, permitted to hold that which we cannot save.”
“Best to scoop hearts / with a handsaw, to propagate gravel / from lung to lung like a song / before today lurches into tonight.” Dynamic and vivid, Dan Rosenberg’s poems ponder the nature of consciousness, fatherhood, the passage of time, and our relevance within its cycle. Suspended within the liminal in-between of pre-dawn, “Earthshine,” “A Narrow Berth,” and “Morning Half-Light” envelop the reader in a dreamlike space of intangible moments which give way to understanding.
Vic Alvarez’s short story “Para Las Latinas” deconstructs the unspoken, and often contradictory, codes of conduct by which Latin American women are expected to live within their families. Transgressive and passive women alike are made examples of in this Spanglish list interwoven with the narrator’s personal experience, exploring hand-me-down gender roles, familial trauma, domestic abuse, and double standards.
This issue’s Levis Loop honors both the work and legacy of Larry Levis and the poetry of Corey Van Landingham, who won this year’s Levis prize for her collection Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens. In his essay accompanying Larry Levis’s featured poem “Some Grass Along A Dark Ditch,” Greg Donovan examines how keenly Levis depicts the particular mixture of responsibility, sympathy, and resentment felt in one who owns and labors over “some piece of land / That never gave up much / Without a mute argument.”
Also in the Levis Loop are Corey Van Landingham’s poems which showcase her ability to display both profound personal and acute political themes. In “Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens,” she says, “Before man dreamed up the flying machine / we owned the air as far above our land / . . . Because air, in the days of tangible / property, was nothing.” This loop also features recordings of her reading her poems and her short craft essay for “Tracking the Muse,” where she explains her discovery how tools such as “the ars poetica, literary allusion,” and “self-conscious questions about poetry and process” allowed her to “unlocked a kind of ambiguity [she] hadn’t yet been able to access, an aesthetic distance that wasn’t quite as self-righteous,” a distance that allowed her to be “a fuller self.”
Chelsea Woodard’s poems give the natural world qualities that reflect the human experience. In “Heron,” the absence of human presence gives the heron described in the poem a feeling of comfort and familiarity: “I’ve sought your slow wisdom / . . . I want to know / the labor of your flight.” In “Luna Moth,” the nature of a luna moth is a reflection of human love, as well as the human grief that follows it: “. . . I long to leave / the underside of every love I grieve.” In “Lentic Systems,” descriptions of water are reminiscent of giving life with repeated imagery of a mother’s womb: “We are each born / into body-locked waters, washed / by our mother’s blood in amniotic / baths.”
Kim Garcia’s poems give the reader a sense of nostalgia for times long gone and mourning for an unfulfilled life. “And what / did we feed on all those years? Something hidden, something you / had to love, couldn’t help but love in us, in others? Or did we imagine / we had that power?” asks Garcia in her poem “All the good intentions” as she reflects on her relationship with her mother and how in her youth she had viewed life through an idealistic lens, feeling that she could do no wrong. “The grief window” has a stronger presence of misery, mourning a life that is felt to have no purpose: “Let me have a use / and a life worth grieving.”
“The great irony of my impending diminishment is that I have not felt this physically healthy in years, perhaps ever,” John W. Evans writes in his essay “Stenosis and Solitude.” Evans’s piece is a raw and human retelling of the pains of a worsening disease and the impending difficulties that follow treatment. “Stenosis and Solitude” gives the reader a sense of relatability. The casual tone of the piece drives home the point that situations such as diseases could very well happen to anybody.
Nick Martino’s poem “The Stag” weaves a sterile hospital room with the wild, untamed nature of a stag. The stag may only exist as an image on the TV, but Martino pulls it and its cold winter forest through the screen and into the room with his unconscious father. In “The Stag” Martino captures both the essence of uncertainty and denial: “If there is a lesson here,” he writes, “I refuse to learn it.”
In “On Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life’ and the Drive to Disappear,” Amy Hassinger guides readers through the life of jazz legend Billy Strayhorn, as well as through her own life and relationship with herself. Hassinger writes, “Sometimes it’s precisely when I feel myself dissolving . . . that I feel the least despairing, the most complete.” She reflects on the tension between visibility and self-expression versus the desire to dissolve into something greater.
Cesar Piedra’s art subverts stereotypes of the modern Mexican-American by mining tensions between contemporary diasporic culture and ancient Mesoamerican iconography, artifacts, and historical accounts. The Beautiful Game, for instance, juxtaposes today’s fútbol with the Mexica Tzompantli, a structure displaying the skulls of war captives and ceremonial sacrifices. Validating the sense of in-between many Chicano people feel, Piedra situates himself not as Mexican or American but as the hyphen between the two.
Saadi Youssef’s poems, translated from Arabic by Khaled Mattawa, are “clear as documentary cinema, and wounding.” In “Aqaba,” the history of a Jordanian port town is interspersed with rich scenes, weaving together a complex tapestry of regional and personal memory. “Gardens” brings complexity to a moveable paradise, providing a small window into Youssef’s exile, reminding us that, for Youssef, “that garden was my homeland / on days when the world narrowed around me!”
