blackbirdonline journalSpring 2009  Vol. 8  No. 1
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INTRODUCTIONS: A READING LOOP

        Dedicated to the memory of Thomas B. Gay, educator, painter, poet, friend.
        (read more about Thomas B. Gay)

Each spring we use this reading loop to bring to your attention writers whose work you may be encountering for the first time. In this issue, the group includes several who have already made their way to other lists and anthologies acclaiming their remarkable work. We expect that you will be glad to discover them now—and to hear of them again later in their careers, as you no doubt will. We also dedicate Introductions to the memory of Thomas B. Gay, Richmond artist and writer and keen supporter of those beginning artists of any age or medium.

Nicky Beer
Nicky Beer’s work offers a strikingly diverse and complex sensuality—whether discovering the handicraft of Venusians in the lacework of a cancer cell, the assembly line decadence in a Van Dyck portrait, or the myth of a kraken monster magically devouring a waking city in the cloudy visions of Rimbaud. She is a collector of states of mind and visionary landscapes rendered in language which is radiant and necessary.

Nicky Beer  
     

Kara Candito
Kara Candito specializes in a poetry of the unflinching gaze, a penetrating investigation of the difficult situation and the accused self entangled in it. In sharp, crisp language she delivers challenges (“Say something interesting and I might stay/ for five minutes”) and sticks around to see what happens. Her interrogation searches through crime and punishment, damage and regret, rapture and betrayal, arriving at nuanced revelations of pain and self-realization. 

Kara Candito  
     

Thomas Cooper
Thomas Cooper’s character driven fiction provides a story that is often in equal parts poignant and hilarious. His primary creation is Captain Carlson, a sorry drunk with a mean streak a mile wide, and what Cooper achieves is the grudging affection that we assign to an immoral, cruel, and broken man. The redemption that Captain manages is earned through a reader’s respect, a deft authorial maneuver that endows the Captain with a soul.

Thomas Cooper  
     

Anna Journey
Steamy and athletic, transgressive yet wise, Anna Journey’s poems display rich sonic effects that amplify rapidly developing action and imagery, impelling her readers along the paths of astonishment described by Joseph Conrad’s Stein in Lord Jim: “in the destructive element immerse.” The manifold selves these poems reveal construct a Baudelairean personal mythology, erotic and spiritual, promising to “lie in your hot shallows and, with our / dark smiles, raise your pulse.”

Anna Journey  
     

Taylur Thu Hien Ngo
Taylur Ngo’s fiction lives in the interstices between what we know and what we expect. A boy and a rooster make a home in a neighborhood where belonging means moving out. The author spins us into the fabric of the boy’s concern for his jury-rigged life, and fosters our understanding that some things can’t be fixed. As Ngo tells us, “A hen’s good eyesight allowed her to face her killer with an awful clarity, but for all the daily squawking, chickens choked once cornered.”

Taylur Thu Hien Ngo  
     


Introductions texts appear in different sections of Blackbird but are organized in this alternative menu, a featured reading loop allowing easy navigation of the material.

An Introductions menu link appears at the bottom of every Introductions-related page. You may also return to this menu at any time by visiting Features.