Greetings, Readers,
I have a guest event for you this week that features two of the three co-editors of the long-running, online, literary journal, Switched-on Gutenberg (23 issues since 1995).
Linda Malnack, an editor at S-oG, has a new chapbook out, and co-editor Roberta Feins wants to sing its praises with a brief review. Linda’s chap is titled 21 Boxes (2016), which may be ordered from dancing girl press and studio.
In 21 Boxes, Linda Malnack has created twenty-one, box-shaped, prose poems that
define and hold grief. The narrator’s husband has moved out, and she has found twenty-one cartons in the crowded garage. These boxes contain the possessions of his
lover. What were they doing there? What is to be done with them? What is to be done with betrayal and anger?
The poems function like boxes where letters, bills, and birthday cards are tossed in higgledy-piggledy. Malnack uses the poems to unearth and examine the past for clues,
explanations and emotions. Details, for example, the “sunset colors” of a pillow, or the address on a mattress receipt are juxtaposed with phrases packed with emotion: “The wife lays awake at night. . . . When [she] looks up at the dark ceiling sometimes she sees clusters of angels, their arms outstretched.”
There is not a single narrative line through these pieces, but as you read, a picture of
the past emerges. The narrator called her husband “The Lie,” an engineer too cold to
touch his wife. Slowly the poems change tone—from list and parable to poems where
the narrator speaks in the voice of an anguished “I”: “I make of myself a mannequin in a
window, and of reason, loss. I make of loss a cake with raspberry filling.”
The beauty and art in the poems would be hard to contain in many more poems, in
many more boxes.
~Roberta Feins
Author bio: Roberta Feins received her MFA in poetry from New England College, where she studied with Judith Hall, D. A. Powell, Carol Frost, and Alicia Ostriker. Her poems have been published in Five AM, Antioch Review, The Cortland Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. Her chapbook, Something Like a River, was published by Moon Path Press in 2013.
Now, it just so happens that Roberta, also, has a new chapbook out, titled Herald — which won the 2016 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Contest. Herald can be ordered from Autumn House Press.
Here’s an excerpt from a review of Roberta’s chap:
Roberta P. Feins’s "herald" is a compelling and fascinating chronicle of one woman’s struggle to
maintain her selfhood in a world that often relegates women to second-class status. The poetry of
Feins offers an alternate vision of feminine existence in this world.
~Sonja James, in The Journal (WV)
So, readers, if you'd like to support our hard-working editors at Switched-on Gutenberg, who are also noteworthy poets, I hope you'll read their chapbooks.
*from "Little Boxes," sung by Pete Seeger, written by Malvina Reynolds