“Song of a Masjid’s Floor” by Ammara YounasPosted by Rattle
Image: “Lahore #44” by Faizan Adil. “Song of a Masjid’s Floor” was written by Ammara Younas for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2024, and selected as the Series Editor’s Choice.
Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “Two things immediately struck me about Faizan Adil’s artwork: First, the cultural and religious significance, and second, the sense that the figures in the foreground seem to be lost in their own worlds, as though each is a universe unto themselves. Ammara Younas’s poem prioritizes both of these elements. The poet paints a vivid tapestry of the life of a Muslim family, and though the poem is superbly cohesive, each stanza dedicated to a family member could easily stand alone as its own poem. The distinctive language, both earthy and elegant—‘tongues harvesting/love off-season’; ‘dust trembling like a lost child’—mirrors the image’s contrast between ornate reverence and human humility, a dichotomy that is also encapsulated in the poem’s last stanza.”
“What You Thought You Lost” by Wendy VidelockPosted by Rattle
Image: “Terry’s Keys” by Kim Beckham. “What You Thought You Lost” was written by Wendy Videlock for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2024, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “‘What You Thought You Lost’ begins with comparing what was lost to a prayer–an apt simile, given that this poem feels like a prayer, with its reverent language, melodic sound, and spiritual references. What a transcendent connection, too, the poet draws between the concrete image of keys hanging on a beach fence and the abstract concept of something lost (we don’t know what, but somehow we have a sense of it) hanging in the air ‘by a thread like an ancient/pagan prayer.’ There’s already an intangible quality to artist Kim Beckham’s beach scene, a sense of possibility, but the metaphysical tone of the poem adds greater complexity to the photo. One of the things I love most about the ekphrastic challenge is how differently I can see a piece of art after I read a poem about it, and ‘What You Thought You Lost’ made me look at this image in a way I never could have without it.”
Image: “Terry’s Keys” by Kim Beckham. “Bigger Than Us” was written by Emily Walker for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2024, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
Comment from the artist, Kim Beckham: “‘We ran out shrieking.’ I really like that the poet created characters and a world to fit the scene. They truly captured all of the senses in the images, sounds, and heat of Terry’s day at the beach. It felt really tight with the perfect image to punctuate the ending. Pinky swear!”
Éanlaí P. Cronin: “Born and reared in a small, Irish-speaking village in the southwest of Ireland, I learned, early in life, that language and land were intertwined. Indeed language and life itself were married in such a way that the singular incantation of a proverb or prayer evoked the nature of the Gael inside the blood, no matter how cold or indifferent one had become to one’s own native origins, no matter how deep a schism history had created in the marrow of the Irish psyche. An Irish verse or a psalm could bring a grown man or woman to tears in our winter kitchen. And I, as a child, could spend hours weeping in a quiet corner at something I didn’t fully understand but knew to be true and real. As real as the thinning carpet on which I sat. Or the small footstool upon which I perched at my mother’s feet by a roaring range. It seemed, back then, in the 1970s, and still to this day, that to hear the native tongue, to sing a traditional song, to recite an epic verse, ‘as Gaeilge,’ was to rebirth within the Irish skin something nearly dead and gone. To make room, not for the terrible beauty Yeats mourned, but for the trembling truth of the savage restored. Savage because we had, even in my childhood, come to view ourselves, through the eyes of long oppression, as mongrels of a kind, uncivilized, shameful, wanting in some way. Yet, not a word of such a thing ever spoken or dissected. As though to be Irish and to be broken were the common weather through which we moved. All of us flawed tokens. My task, as an Irish child, is to pen whatever I can that will rouse the Irish soul in my beloved homeland, and in me. To make sound that which has been silent and dying. To become once more unbound, her and I, in all our original splendor.” (web)
The Fight Journal is a heartsick elegy for a failed marriage. Written in couplets that mirror the back-and-forth of two parties alternately warring with each other and struggling to hold a family together, Evans explores the depths of longing, bitterness, resignation, and hope that humanize the struggle to live and parent during and after divorce. As much a story of resolve as it is vulnerability, The Fight Journal is a bittersweet account of the complexities of connection, the power of sympathy, and the many forms that love takes in lives that continue.
From the Author
I wrote the poems in The Fight Journal to make sense of an experience about which I felt strongly biased: my divorce. I wanted to recognize the humanity of all involved on the page because this was something I struggled to do in real life. I hoped to find closure, healing, and an answer to two questions. Why had my marriage failed? How had I been complicit in that failure? Adrienne Rich’s “From An Old House in America” was the formal model for the long title poem. Marta Tikkanen’s “The Love Story of the Century” was a precedent for writing about these dynamics. Both poems are personal favorites.
John W. Evans is the author of Should I Still Wish: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Young Widower: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and The Consolations: Poems (Trio House Press, 2014). His books have won prizes including the Peace Corps Writers Book Prize, a ForeWord Reviews Book Prize, the River Teeth Book Prize, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and the Trio Award. Should I Still Wish is published in the American Lives Series. John is currently the Phyllis Draper Lecturer in Nonfiction at Stanford University, where he was previously a Jones Lecturer and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in Northern California with his three young sons. (web)
Details
Cover art by Max Beckmann
ISBN: 978-1-931307-53-6
Cover price: $6.00
Chapbook: 40 pages
Size: 6″ x 9″
The Spring 2022 issue of Rattle featured a Tribute to Librarians. Librarians work on the front lines of literature and are often the last bulwark against censorship, as we discuss with former librarian Janice N. Harrington in the conversation section. The theme includes 16 poems by librarians and their always-interesting contributor notes. The open section features 22 poets exploring the mysteries of life, both large and small.
John W. Evans is the author of Should I Still Wish: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Young Widower: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and The Consolations: Poems (Trio House Press, 2014). His books have won prizes including the Peace Corps Writers Book Prize, a ForeWord Reviews Book Prize, the River Teeth Book Prize, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and the Trio Award. Should I Still Wish is published in the American Lives Series. John is currently the Phyllis Draper Lecturer in Nonfiction at Stanford University, where he was previously a Jones Lecturer and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in Northern California with his three young sons. (