GenPop Magazine is back from a few weeks’ vacation, rested, revamped, and rolling out a long poem by Karin Gottshall, a series of sonnets from Micah Robbins, and Charles Freeland’s review of Jamey Dunham’s The Bible of Lost Pets from Salt Publishing.
An excerpt from Karin Gottshall’s “Evelyn & Amelia at the Charity School”:
My comfort at this time was Amelia, a girl my age who had no compunctions about copying out her sums for me. Also she had hair the color of caramel. She would come to my bed after the candle was blown out and we would whisper stories about the unrecorded miracles of Mary, the Greek deities, and the denizens of cupcake shops. In truth, we were so poorly fed that many of our stories featured rich foods. In class we exchanged notes so cunningly encoded that we didn’t understand them even as we wrote them. To my missive, if apricot jam, then the gray mare cross the river, I received the reply, the heart is fit precisely in its wedge. This correspondence was kept between the pages of our hymnals.
An excerpt from Micah Robbins’ “Crass Songs of Sand & Brine”:
The tide is high & it’s time for punk rock
girls & 40oz Steel Reserve passed round
the pavilion deep in stench, deep in bay rot
salt rising off the sea, rising toward kids
in black singing crass songs, sending
PA daughters home drunk—MD 20/20
& old school licks fluid on the tongue
An excerpt from Charles Freeland’s review of Jamey Dunham’s The Bible of Lost Pets:
At the school where I teach, the creative writing students, through close contact with Jamey Dunham’s work, have been for some time filling their prose poems with all manner of small animals doing cute and/or zany things. I hope this will stop….
See you in GenPop, peeps . . .
