Contributor Update: G.C. Waldrep

G. C. Waldrep‘s “The Limits of Metaphor” first appeared in Issue 76 (Summer 2011) of the minnesota review. Since then, Waldrep has put out another collection of poems, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, with John Gallaher (2011), and he is also co-editing two anthologies, one on the life and work of Paul Celan and the other on postmodern approaches to the pastoral in contemporary poetry. Waldrep is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Bucknell University. He is the author of three additional full-length collections of poems: Goldbeater’s Skin (2003), Disclamor (2007), and Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize. His work has appeared in many other journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, and Tin House, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. At Bucknell Waldrep teaches creative writing, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, serves as Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review and is the Editor of West Branch. He has been selected as the first recipient of the Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professorship in Poetry and Creative Writing.

THE LIMITS OF METAPHOR

When you think about it, a lot of things
used to get made in America, but now they’re not:
bowling balls and bowling pins,
wire hangers, the machines that mix milkshakes,
the enormous bits mining drills use.

Somewhere, probably in the vicinity of
Danbury, Connecticut, there was once a factory
that made whistles, the metal kind
with the little balls inside.

And it’s closed now, or else it’s become
a warehouse, or some ultra-chic mini-mall
the local economy can’t really support.

There were people who worked there,
and now they don’t. Some of them were lovers.
Some of them liked the work, and some of them
did not. A few tried to make it
more interesting than it must have been:

See, this is the part where the igloo
dives into the mountain, and this is the part
where great tropical birds come flooding into the sky
at the hour of the setting sun….

Love is like that—
The cracked sidewalks, the supermarket aisles,
product testing and market share.
The elm trees dying in the city parks.

The suspicion that somebody is making something
better, something cheaper, somewhere else.

Contributor Update: Susan McMaster (Issue 68)

At Midnight Talks Fail

And here we are: herded into a ragged string
burdened with signs, wrapped in scarves
against sunrise cold. They chivvy at our heels,
bark us into motion—colleagues, familiar
from a morning hello, a shuffle of paper,
are suddenly strange, imbued with command.
I thought they were sheep like the rest of us shufflers,
but, heated by conflict, they’ve shrugged off wool,
become dogs or mules who snap at intruders,
nip us into strength.

And we, are we still sheep for the shearing?
I glance at the tower where I stabled for so long,
at the stall where I nosed and snuffled for hours
clocked by the tick in a well-lit box.
Beside me, my fellows lift their heads
to scan the horizon, breathe the air.
Cut off from feed, barred from warmth,
we’ve pulled on coats over shorn shoulders,
jumped the fence. Here, on the loose,
the sky is our cover, legs our heat.
The wind grabs my sign.
I leap to hold on, leap like a goat
kicking its heels
at the arc of the sun.

Susan McMaster’s “At Midnight Talks Fail” was published in issue 68 of the minnesota review as one of the winners of the “Being at Work” Poetry Challenge.  Since “At Midnight Talks Fail” was published in 2006, McMaster has published two books, Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Black Moss 2010), which was a finalist for the 2010 Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award, the Ottawa Book Awards, and the Archibald Lampman Poetry Award and Paper Affair: Poems Selected & New (Black Moss 2010), and was included in the anthology Pith and Wry: Canadian Poetry (Scrivener Press 2010). McMaster is also the Past President of the League of Canadian Poets and the founding editor of Canada’s first feminist magazine, Branching Out.

Contributor Update: David Keplinger (Issue 65-66)

Finger

The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father worked the night shift
At the grocery store. You could see him

Weighing lunchmeat in the deli section.
What a falling off that was, to watch

The great man at the sliver, the armored
Blade whirring deeply as the meat pressed in.

He knew exactly what to cut to make
One pound, though sometimes on the scales he used his thumb.

***

My cousin the policeman finds a finger
In the ruins at Ground Zero. He puts it

In a bag and takes it to a place where other
Severed limbs and clothing and some personal

Effects are being gathered. The pieces
Are piled in hopeless disarray. My cousin

Is a good man with a broad, kind face. The face
In the bag points everywhere he goes.

David Keplinger’s “Finger” first appeared in Issue 65-66 of the minnesota review. Keplinger reflects on writing the poem: “I wrote this piece about ten years ago, just after the 9/11 attack. My cousin did work as a policeman in its aftermath. I was writing a book at the time which paired objects and images in poems of equal length, two to a page. That poem was later included in my book, The Prayers of Others. And a portion of it also appears in my new book, The Most Natural Thing. It’s interesting to look back on it now, because these short, imagist pieces would go on to define ten years of my writing life. I didn’t know that at the time. I still think the poem offers a glimpse at the shock I was, we were all, experiencing, a kind of flat toned deadened-of-feeling existence, in which anything can happen next.”

Keplinger has published four books, The Rose Inside (Truman State), which was chosen for the T.S. Eliot Prize by Mary Oliver, The Clearing (New Issues Press), a short-listed finalist for the Akhmatova Prize, and The Prayers of Others (New Issues Press), which won the Colorado Book Award. In 2013 New Issues will publish his collection of prose poems, The Most Natural Thing. He is a member of the faculty at American University, where he directs the MFA Program. Keplinger has received an NEA Fellowship for his poetry, as well as grants from the Danish Council on the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. His poems were translated into Chinese in the 2011 Beijing anthology, Contemporary American Poetry and he has been included in 2008′s New Voices: Contemporary Poetry from the United States, published by New Pages in Belfast. His translations of Nielsen include House Inspections (BOA) and World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (New Issues Press).

Contributor Update: Eric Gudas (Issue 67)

945 Pecan Place

Since ten you’ve been standing behind a cash register, passing vermicelli,               skim milk, chicken breasts, and bottles
Of carbonated water over the scanner’s secret red eye. “Will that be ATM               or credit? Would you like a bag?” Before noon
An embalmed-looking woman, her nails lacquered purple, held up your
line asking for “a small bag of cat litter–
You’ve only got the large ones.” This Sunday afternoon squeaks by on a   conveyer belt, counted out in pennies and clammy nickels;
Wan sunlight across the asphalt and squashes’ lichen green are the colors          you survive on while the clock’s minute hand
Twitches, stuck, at 1:32. Back home, I gulp down toaster waffles and      lukewarm coffee, not even changing

Contributor Update: Carmen Giménez Smith (Issue 70)

Moonrock

My father stood watch
over night’s deficient tidepool:
the weight of it so upon him,
he locked himself in the car to think.
By day he’d wear us
into onionskin. At night, he’d flee
to the driveway where he lived
in unkempt hair.