Issue 80 Now Out!

Issue 80 has now mailed, and we’re excited to bring you work from the following authors:

Creative

Christopher Citro
Jadyn DeWald
Katie Fallon
Keith Flynn
Taylor Collier
Sean Lovelace
Susan B.A. Somers-Willett
Erin Pringle-Toungate
Laura Wetherington
Roxane Gay
Benjamin S. Grossberg
Jon Pineda
Dean Rader
Christian Nagle
Patty Seyburn

Critical

An Interview with Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Special Focus: The Medieval Turn in Theory (Guest edited by Andrew Cole)

Andrew Cole   Introduction: The Medieval Turn in Theory

Kathleen Biddick   What Does “Deconstructing Christianity” Want? The Institutional Imaginary of the Incarnation

Amy Hollywood   Derrida’s Noble Unfaith, or What Reading Hadewijch Can Teach You about Reading Derrida

Andrew Cole   The Call of Things: On Object-Oriented Ontologies

Bruce Holsinger   Object-Oriented Mythography

D. Vance Smith   Death and Texts: Finitude Before Form

Maura Nolan   Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics:  Aquinas, Adorno, Chaucer

If you don’t already have a subscription to the minnesota review, access the Duke University Press website, available here. Subscription rates are only $30 per year for individuals and only $20 per year for students. In addition, you can also access the minnesota review through Project Muse if your institution carries a Project Muse subscription.

Tips for Authors on Promoting Your Work- from Duke University Press

the minnesota review would like to invite our authors to check out a new resource produced by Duke University Press. The new webpage, “Promote Your Article,” provides authors with tips and best practices for promoting their publications in their own professional and social networks. Topics include the importance of online usage statistics, how to update professional profiles, tips for effective tweets and blog posts, course adoption, and the Duke University Press academic conference program. To learn more, check out the Duke University Press website, available here.

[Call for Papers] Special Issue: Katrina- A Decade After

the minnesota review invites submissions for a Special Issue on “Katrina – A Decade After” to be guest edited by Gaurav Desai (English/African and African Diaspora Studies, Tulane University). Our aim is to reflect on the hurricane, the measures that could have been taken to prevent the massive devastation caused by it, and the immediate and long term response by the government, private industry, and civil society. How has Katrina left a permanent mark not only on the Gulf South, but also on our larger national imaginary? What lessons, if any, have we learned and what actions and policies have we adopted to better mitigate against future disasters? Haunting though the images may be, the impact of Katrina was not limited to flooded homes and emergency rescues from rooftops – it altered fundamental social contracts in cities such as New Orleans – from public education to public housing. It also awakened a new activism focused on calls for better levee protection to addressing the loss of wetlands in coastal communities.

We invite contributions that chart these changes and their significance to larger policy debates that confront the nation and indeed the world. In the spirit of the legacy of the journal, the best contributions will be those that take a stand, however controversial, and are prepared to make the argument in no more than 4000 words. In keeping with the multi-genre nature of the journal we welcome position papers, review essays, interviews with key figures involved with the hurricane, poetry, fiction, and photo-essays. Potential contributors are invited to consult with the editors before submission. The issue will be published in April 2015 to mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August 2015. Final submissions are due on June 1, 2014. For further information and consultation, please contact editors@minnesottareview.org.

New Submission System

We are pleased to announce that starting today, April 2, the minnesota review will be accepting creative writing submissions via our new online submission system. Critical authors may still send submissions via email to editors@theminnesotareview.org.

Please consider our submission guidelines before sending us your work:

• We only consider unpublished work. Please do not submit previously published material, including work published in anthologies, chapbooks, or online.
• We read creative work August 1-November 1 and January 1-April 1 of each year. Submissions may be uploaded at any time.
• Simultaneous submissions are permitted. Please notify us immediately if a work is accepted by another publication.
• Due to the large number of submissions we receive, we must place a limit on submission of new work until three months after your last submission (regardless of whether we’ve made a decision on your most recently submitted work). If a work is still under review, you may withdraw it and submit new work, up to the limits already mentioned.

If you have any questions about the submission process or our new submissions manager, please email Lorin Shellenberger at support@theminnesotareview.org.

Spring 2013 Reading Period Closes April 1!

The close of our Spring 2013 reading period is Monday, April 1, less than a week away!

If you are still mulling over whether or not to submit your work in this reading period, don’t wait until the last minute!  But if you do, here are a few hints to help you get through that last-minute submission.

• We cannot accept submissions via e-mail. If you have difficulties with the online submission system, I can generally walk you through the problem. Please check our help document or contact me (support@theminnesotareview.org) instead of e-mailing your submission.
• Don’t wait till 11:57 p.m. It will take you a few minutes to get through the submission process, especially if you haven’t yet registered as an author, and your work must be uploaded by 11:59 p.m. EDT (Eastern) on April 1 for it to be considered by the editors. If it’s marked 12:01 a.m. April 2, the editors will not be able to consider the work until the next reading period (August 1- November 1), and you probably don’t want to wait until then.
• Not sure how to register as an author? The help document will walk you through the process.
• If you’ve already registered, you can simply log in and begin the submission process. We’re going to ask all sorts of questions when you get started. Please don’t just skip past those questions or click them randomly. Those questions are pretty important – we do not publish previously published works, for example.
• Please don’t ignore our guidelines (available here). For example, we ask that you upload multiple poems as a single document. This streamlines the review process, which means you get a response more quickly.

Is there anything else you’d like to know? Send your questions/comments via the comment section below or e-mail me at support@theminnesotareview.org.

Lorin Shellenberger is the editorial assistant for the minnesota review. She will only understand approximately 17 percent of pop culture references and claims this is because she grew up on an island.

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.

Issue 80 Preview

Issue 80 will be out soon, and we can’t wait to share it with you! In the meantime, here’s a preview of the authors whose work will appear in the issue:

Creative

Christopher Citro
Jadyn DeWald
Katie Fallon
Keith Flynn
Taylor Collier
Sean Lovelace
Susan B.A. Somers-Willett
Erin Pringle-Toungate
Laura Wetherington
Roxane Gay
Benjamin S. Grossberg
Jon Pineda
Dean Rader
Christian Nagle
Patty Seyburn

Critical

An Interview with Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Special Focus: The Medieval Turn in Theory (Guest edited by Andrew Cole)

Andrew Cole   Introduction: The Medieval Turn in Theory

Kathleen Biddick   What Does “Deconstructing Christianity” Want? The Institutional Imaginary of the Incarnation

Amy Hollywood   Derrida’s Noble Unfaith, or What Reading Hadewijch Can Teach You about Reading Derrida

Andrew Cole   The Call of Things: On Object-Oriented Ontologies

Bruce Holsinger   Object-Oriented Mythography

D. Vance Smith   Death and Texts: Finitude Before Form

Maura Nolan   Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics:  Aquinas, Adorno, Chaucer

Subscribing to the minnesota review

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the journal, the minnesota review publishes contemporary poetry and fiction as well as reviews, critical commentary, and interviews of leading intellectual figures, and curates smart yet accessible collections of progressive new work. This eclectic survey provides lively and sophisticated signposts to navigating current critical discourse.

the minnesota review is published by Duke University Press and subscription information is available here. Subscription rates are only $30 per year for individuals and only $20 per year for students. In addition, you can also access the minnesota review through Project Muse if your institution carries a Project Muse subscription.

[Call for Papers] Special issue: Katrina – A Decade After

the minnesota review invites submissions for a Special Issue on “Katrina – A Decade After” to be guest edited by Gaurav Desai (English/African and African Diaspora Studies, Tulane University). Our aim is to reflect on the hurricane, the measures that could have been taken to prevent the massive devastation caused by it, and the immediate and long term response by the government, private industry, and civil society. How has Katrina left a permanent mark not only on the Gulf South, but also on our larger national imaginary? What lessons, if any, have we learned and what actions and policies have we adopted to better mitigate against future disasters? Haunting though the images may be, the impact of Katrina was not limited to flooded homes and emergency rescues from rooftops – it altered fundamental social contracts in cities such as New Orleans – from public education to public housing. It also awakened a new activism focused on calls for better levee protection to addressing the loss of wetlands in coastal communities.

We invite contributions that chart these changes and their significance to larger policy debates that confront the nation and indeed the world. In the spirit of the legacy of the journal, the best contributions will be those that take a stand, however controversial, and are prepared to make the argument in no more than 4000 words. In keeping with the multi-genre nature of the journal we welcome position papers, review essays, interviews with key figures involved with the hurricane, poetry, fiction, and photo-essays. Potential contributors are invited to consult with the editors before submission. The issue will be published in April 2015 to mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August 2015. Final submissions are due on June 1, 2014. For further information and consultation, please contact editors@minnesottareview.org.

Pushcart Prize Nominee: Margot Schilpp

the minnesota review is pleased to feature each of our nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize.  This week we are excited to bring you our final nominee, Margot Schilpp‘s “Casualties.” Please join us in congratulating all of our nominees!

Casualties

The thistle butterflies near the glass collapse
their weight collectively: they

close their wings

*
and it’s night again. It’s night with a scarlet flash
of light sparking through

the window’s bones.

*
It only seems like summer here. Go softly
into the sparse grasses

and ailing trees —

*
sumac, timothy, cocksfoot, oak — the stems
and trunks camouflaging India

ink and eiderdown.

*
Then here again: to be. A simple verb
for a complex state,

all bidden

*
in the aftermath of doubt and crutch and die.
We are, we are: the sudden

crisis undeterred.

*
Be sorry once in a while, even when the jet’s
contrails fall to vapor and quit

opposing what has been

*
and then what is. No one can follow you out
of childhood where the butterflies

land, pigments

*
cloaking the wings, the bright cells caustic
to the gray reflections, heavy doses

doubled in the glass.
“Casualties” was first published in issue 79 (Fall 2012) of the minnesota review. Margot Schilpp’s most recent book is Civil Twilight, just published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, wich has also brought out her two previous books of poems: The World’s Last Night (2001) and Laws of My Nature (2005). Her work has appeared widely in literary magazines, including The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Hotel Amerika, The Gettysburg Review, and American Poetry Review. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and will have a poetry reading Valentine’s Day in Hartford, Connecticut at 7:00 pm as part of the Riverwood Poetry Series, along with her husband, Jeff Mock, who is also a poet. You can read more about Schilpp’s work on her website, and you can read “Casualties” or any of our other Pushcart nominees by accessing our online archive at Duke University Press, available here.

Pushcart Prize Nominee: Christa Romanosky

the minnesota review is pleased to feature each of our nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize in the coming weeks.  This week we are excited to bring you Christa Romanosky‘s “Gutter.” Please check back next week for more on our nominees and their work.

Gutter

I’ve had it with holy. Relying on chai latte, negotiating
curves of lip, fad gap. I could not change the future
so I got very naked, learned early: the only thing I fetch
is godless. They want more, pour

down eggs, herb, say everything is better aged. Braille
corn fields, ruined underwear. With tits I can never
locate all my ribs. I make late night phone calls
Where are you!? I say. They are beneath piles

of childhood, sifting through manuscript
and Catholic veneer, mid-drift into pop psychology
and a drag of wildlife slag. There ought to be laws
against penalty. Body clerestory, tiny industry. I fume

with the best of them. Whole cities rise up from sewer,
electric mucus. Men brooming the animals, returning
lunch trays, tossing maxi pads to public girls
and saying, “come.” All of it without receipt.

“Gutter” was first published in issue 79 (Fall 2012) of the minnesota review. Christa Romanosky is a Pittsburgh, PA native. She received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2011. She has been published in Mid-American Review, Colorado Review, The Kenyon Review Online and elsewhere. She taught the course “Gaga for Gaga; Sex, Identity, and Gender,” and undergraduate poetry at the University of Virginia. Romanosky currently lives on a ranch in South Dakota. You can read “Gutter” or any of our other Pushcart nominees by accessing our online archive at Duke University Press, available here.

Visiting Writers Series: Emily Raboteau and Victor LaValle

the minnesota review invites you to the Visiting Writers Series craft talk with writers Emily Raboteau and Victor LaValle at 3:30 PM, Friday, February 1 in Shanks 370/80 on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA.

Emily Raboteau is an American fiction writer, essayist, and City College of New York professor who grew up in New Jersey and received an MFA from New York University. Her first novel, The Professor’s Daughter, was published in 2005. Her second book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, a work of creative nonfiction, has just been published by Atlantic Monthly Press.

Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, three novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, and The Devil in Silver, and an ebook only novella, Lucretia and the Kroons. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Whiting Writers’ Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York.

We hope to see you there!

Pushcart Prize Nominee: Maxim Loskutoff

the minnesota review is pleased to feature each of our nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize in the coming weeks.  This week we are excited to bring you an excerpt of Maxim Loskutoff‘s “The Dancing Bear.” Please check back next week for more on our nominees and their work.

The Dancing Bear

First, she was the sound of a breaking branch. A splintered knuckle­ crack shattering the quiet of these western Montana woods. It is a heavy quiet here, and no good comes when it is broken. Red men, gunslingers, and all manner of gold­crazy down­and­outs plague this wild country. My heart went to scampering.

I took up my Winchester and crept to the door. Early light played on the mud­daubed timber walls. I built this cabin ten years ago with naught but a hatchet, five yards of rope, and Jeremiah—a mule by then more dead than alive. Damned if I would give it up without a fight.

Another branch snapped and I toed the door open. The smell of dew­wet pine wafted in. I slid the rifle’s nose into the crack. I held my breath.

She was up on her haunches, weight back—all six hundred pounds of it, her arms raised—like the dancing bear I saw in Bar­ num Bailey’s Fantastic Roadshow when I was a boy. But this was no dancing bear. She was a grizzly. Eight feet tall and used to having her way in the world. Her dinner­plate paws thrashed apples from my apple tree. She huffed and snorted, blowing clouds of steam. She was gorging on fruit, preparing for hibernation, and I believe she was enjoying herself. The rising sun smoldered the crest of Scapegoat Ridge above her massive head.

I thought to shoot her. Even leveled the Winchester’s barrel. Her pelt would have fetched a hefty price. But I could not pull the trigger. She was magnificent. All the dreadful beauty of this territory was bound up in her figure. She ate the apples whole, picking them up between her paws and crushing them with her molars. Her fur shim­ mered and rolled in waves, like the windy prairie where I was born. Her pink tongue swept stray apple chunks from around her mouth.

I wondered if she had lips.

She stood to her full height, reaching for an apple high in the branches. Her body was shapely: trunk thighs widening into hips, slimming a bit through her middle before expanding again into the muscled bulk of her shoulders. She jumped and swung and caught the apple on her first claw — her index claw — and, with a snarl, tore it from the branch.

I had planned to save the apples and enjoy them as a treat on cold winter nights (nights when my cabin is a lump in the snow), but I was not angry at the bear. I was happy to watch her. I wondered if there were breasts beneath her fur.

I suddenly realized I was erect. Confusion and shame roiled my gut. I had never thought of lying with a bear before, but once I began I could not stop. I knelt, hiding my swollen cock behind the door­ jamb, and, instead of thinking of protecting my home, I imagined running into her great hairy arms. Licking her throat. Inhaling her thick smell. Finding her tongue with mine, tasting apples. Tumbling back into the high grass, her legs clamped around my buttocks, both of us sticky with apple juice. Warmth. Brown eyes. A roaring tangle of limbs.

“The Dancing Bear” was first published in issue 79 (Fall 2012) of the minnesota review, and was Maxim Loskutoff’s first story accepted for print publication. Since then, he has had four more accepted (in Narrative Magazine, Slice Magazine, Nano Fiction, and Willow Springs) and is hoping to complete a collection in the next year. Loskutoff is currently a Global Writing Fellow in Abu Dhabi, where he is basically sequestered in an apartment building in the middle of the desert, subsisting on Lebanese takeout and spending most of his time working on a novel about a small town in Montana, a coyote, and the end of the world.  You can read more about Loskutoff on his website, and you can read the rest of “The Dancing Bear” by accessing our online archive at Duke University Press, available here.

Pushcart Prize Nominee: Keith Leonard

the minnesota review is pleased to feature each of our nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize in the coming weeks.  This week we are excited to bring you Keith Leonard‘s “A Brief History of Fiction.” Please check back next week for more on our nominees and their work.

A Brief History of Fiction

If I get the story right
my mother’s empty bottles

will melt back into sand —
just enough for a shoreline

the size of our driveway.
We could hold our shoes

by their heels without talking.
In this version, I know

the password to leaven
the latch of fingers

wrapped around aluminum cans.
I hold a compact mirror

up to her nose to see the fog
of the living. If I get the story

right, a fog will settle
over the shore and there

will be no other place to look
but at each other.

“A Brief History of Fiction” was first published in issue 79 (Fall 2012) of the minnesota review. Keith Leonard is an MFA candidate at Indiana University. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and finalist for the Washington Square poetry prize, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Laurel Review, Meridian and Toad. His chapbook “All the Ships Tied In” has been selected for publication by YesYes Books, and is slated to come out this coming summer. He is currently working on a book of odes called “Ramshackle Ode,” and Southern Indiana Review nominated one of those odes for the Pushcart, and did a little recording of it which can be found here. You can read “A Brief History of Fiction” or any of our other Pushcart nominees by accessing our online archive at Duke University Press, available here.

Pushcart Prize Nominee: Paul Robert Chesser

the minnesota review is pleased to feature each of our nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize in the coming weeks.  This week we are excited to bring you an excerpt of Paul Robert Chesser‘s “Widening Gyre.” Please check back next week for more on our nominees and their work.

The Widening Gyre

Gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus):
 An Arctic bird of prey of the family Falconidae, the gyrfalcon is the world’s largest falcon with an adult height of two feet (60 cm) and a five-foot (160 cm) wingspan. The species’ diet consists chiefly of other birds, normally taken on the wing. They kill cleanly, breaking the back of the victim.

When I was twelve, I fell in love with Maude Butler from my English class, and my father bought me a Daisy BB rifle, took me in the back- yard and showed me how to shoot sparrows as he stumbled over the birds and bees. I wouldn’t kill them, and he said that was why I’d never kiss Maude Butler. When he went inside, I found the nest of parentless eggs in the mulberry tree. Hiding behind the wisteria bushes, I thought of Maude’s pink lip balm as I threw the eggs in the air and tried to shoot them. I think I wanted to find something inside, embryonic, glimmering and featherless, captured in flight, if just for a moment. I was too slow to aim, and the small eggs cracked against the grassless dirt near the fence. My father walked out again and found me squatted over them, looking at their insides. I can’t recall if either of us said anything then, when we looked at each other, but he let me keep the gun. I know I’ve never talked to you about my father before, nor anyone really. Maybe the way things have evolved, maybe now, maybe it makes a difference.

A few weeks later, he showed me how to balance an egg upright on the kitchen counter. We got out the carton and stood them up in a little breakfast platoon and he bet me five dollars I couldn’t do the same thing the next Sunday. He quietly took my money and made me clean the yolk and broken shells. I didn’t figure it out for years. I don’t think he and I ever really let me love him, and for years that was at the center of my world.

The last time I saw him, ten years ago, he was kneeling in prayer on the banks of a pond in Cypress Park, four blocks away from the house where he began to raise me. The gulls swooped over the water and caught silvery things in their mouths. He knelt there, head bent, his back to me. He couldn’t have known then how sick he was.

“Widening Gyre” was first published in issue 78 (Summer 2012) of the minnesota review. Paul Robert Chesser studied writing and literature at the University of South Carolina Aiken and Texas Tech University.  Recent publications featuring or due to feature his work include Copper Nickel, Nashville Review, Underground Voices and others.  Chesser lives in Lubbock, Texas. You can read the rest of “Widening Gyre” by accessing our online archive at Duke University Press, available here.

Pushcart Prize Nominee: Barrett Bowlin

the minnesota review is pleased to feature each of our nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize in the coming weeks.  This week we are excited to bring you an excerpt of Barrett Bowlin‘s “But I Can Only Do It Once.” Please check back next week for more on our nominees and their work.

But I Can Only Do It Once

Before the fire blows out a corner of the house where Jack Marsh and his family live, before my father’s oxygen tank overheats and sends shrapnel into the neighbor’s yard, he opens his eyes in the rental Trendelenburg bed, licks his lips, and tells me a story.

“So there’s this talent scout.”

My father’s face is now as gaunt and sagging as his scrotum, which my mother and I now wipe. He is blotchy and bruised in improbable places, like the top of his head, where all his hair has fallen out but is beginning to grow back in. We’ve been told this is what happens when you stop chemotherapy. He will do this occa- sionally: wake up from the middle of a horrible sleep, pick up on a conversation he thinks he’s having or one we’ve had already and from much earlier in the day. We talk a lot about breakfast.

It’s late for tonight, a Wednesday, and I’ve been having diffi- culty sleeping. Sleep feels less and less necessary, but I’m busy read- ing my Civics primer and learning about U.S. senatorial protocol. Concerned about the dark patches I’m wearing below my eyes most days, my mother has yelled up that it’s time for bed soon, but my father either doesn’t hear her or doesn’t care.

“And he’s taking appointments for new acts, and all these peo- ple are coming through the door, lining up and waiting for their minute with him.”

My father licks at the corner of his mouth. His breath smells like oatmeal.

“Dad,” I say. “Hey, are you thirsty?”

He picks at the new Fentanyl patch that’s driving concentrated morphine into his skin.

“And the talent scout hasn’t seen anything new all day.” He pauses, looks down at his arm. “And he’s just about to close up shop when this clown comes in and starts juggling.”

Next to his bed is the plastic water pitcher he’s brought home from his last trip to the hospital. I shake it. Ice clicks at the sides as the water sloshes.

“And the talent scout says he’s not interested. Packs up his brief- case and papers.”

I fill his cup up again and reposition the straw. Before coming home on hospice care, my father would receive straws in his drinks at restaurants without asking for them, pull them out, and lay them by the side of the glass. He would gulp and leave grease on the rims as he would drink.

“So the clown jumps on a unicycle and starts pedaling around the office carpet. The talent scout? He’s not even looking up.”

My father, Jack Marsh, blinks on and off and on again. He stares at me like he’s sleeping, and I have to stare back to see if he’s unconscious most days now.

“So now the clown knows he’s in trouble. And he’s desperate. So he says all quiet-like, ‘Hold your horses; you’ve got to see this.’ From some pocket or something, okay, he whips out a bottle of nitro- glycerin. Drinks that down like it’s lemonade.” He slurs out lemon- ade and rolls his eyes. “Then he pulls out a stick of dynamite and munches it down to the wick like a carrot.”

“But I Can Only Do It Once” was first published in issue 79 (Fall 2012) of the minnesota review. On his current projects, Barrett Bowlin says, “Short and sweet, my main work in Creative Writing these days has taken place over at Memorious: a Journal of New Verse and Fiction, where I serve as the mag’s prose editor. Since I’ve worked as an editor for so long now, and at a variety of journals and magazines, I feel most comfortable helping to identify these works of amazing fiction whenever they drop into our slush piles, more so than I do trying to make my own short stories functional. (However, I’m really, really, really excited that two independent publishing houses are currently considering my novel-in-stories manuscript.) And on a more personal level, I’ve been teaching my kindergartener and toddler how to play piano, in the hopes that they’ll someday find gainful employment at a steakhouse & bar as dueling musicians.” You can read the rest of “But I Can Only Do It Once” by accessing our online archive at Duke University Press, available here.

Spring Reading Period Opens Tomorrow (Jan. 1)!

Start the new year off right and submit to the minnesota review!

Our spring reading period opens tomorrow, January 1, and we’re looking for your best fiction and poetry. Please remember that we won’t be reading creative nonfiction during this reading period, and we never publish reviews of creative work.

More about our submission guidelines is available here. We are only able to accept submissions through our online submission site. If you have trouble uploading your work, please refer to this document or e-mail support@theminnesotareview.org with your questions.

We look forward to reading your work!

2012 Pushcart Nominees

the minnesota review is pleased to announce our nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize!  Please join us in congratulating the following nominees:

• Barrett Bowlin, “But I Can Only Do It Once”
• Paul Robert Chesser,”Widening Gyre”
• Keith Leonard,”A Brief History of Fiction”
• Maxim T. Loskutoff, “The Dancing Bear”
• Christa Romanosky, “Gutter”
• Margot Schilpp, “Casualties”

Be sure to check back in the coming weeks for more on these authors and their work!

Join us at the MLA Convention!

the minnesota review invites you to join us at the MLA Convention in Boston, January 3-6!  We have arranged a Cash Bar for Saturday, January 5 from 7:00-8:15 pm in Fairfax B of the Sheraton Hotel (session #654).  For more information, please refer to the conference program, available here.  We hope to see you there!

Introducing Unexpected Objects: An Idea for Reviving or Finishing Difficult Poems

Lately, I’ve been dropping lures into my poems. Lures that would otherwise catch walleye in some small lake in northern Michigan are cropping up in my work to help me explore difficult subjects. The fact that lures are objects used to do something, that they are part of an action, made them particularly interesting and useful to me.

When introducing a lure into a poem that perhaps was so personal it lacked imagery, the physicality of the lure and the automatic disjunction between the lure and the subject forced me to make connections between images I would not have made otherwise. For example, I’m using a Rattle Tot (an erratic sort of lure that moves quickly from side to side in the water to attract fish) to explore a very inconsistent, frantic time in my childhood. One way I specifically connected the lure with my subject was through linking the movement of the Rattle Tot with the movement of a character’s eyes in the poem. Thus, the tangible aspects of the lure forced me to identify more tangible aspects of the situation/difficult subject.

The reason I give my example of introducing lures into my poems is that I think sometimes poets want to grapple with difficult (perhaps incredibly personal) subjects, but don’t know how to do so in a way that gives the subject a tangibility, a physical aspect that allows others to grasp aspects of the poem and not flounder in vague language.  Also, I think introducing foreign objects creates an energy that has the potential to drive new meanings into the poem, and may actually help the poet identify parts of a difficult subject that he or she did not previously see.

For me, at least, the absurdity of the object placed in a poem, especially if the object also has an active sort of function (as strange as that sounds, like a lure moving through water to catch fish) may allow the brain to find connections it had not noticed, and perhaps would not notice otherwise. I remember one of my high school teachers once advising my class to memorize a fact by picturing that fact either being read or announced or illustrated in a completely nonsensical situation. For example, I might imagine a goat telling me that the civil war began in 1861 while brushing his teeth in my garage. Whether this tactic is really so helpful, I’m not entirely sure. But, in my experience, the introduction of images, objects, or scenery that don’t obviously jive with a subject matter allows for an tension that allows for incredible creative potential.

Perhaps because we want to make sense of the absurd situation, the not immediately understandable connection between two seemingly different things, we generate bridges of meaning. For me, introducing an object that doesn’t seem to fit out-right into my poems, helps create connections that seem more fresh, and introduce new levels to the poem and the subject I’m dealing with.

So, I urge you to try dropping an object into a poem you’ve had trouble starting, finishing or revising. Perhaps the object will help pull your mind out of the depths of the subject for a moment to generate connections you had not seen. You may also get rid of the object after introducing it to the poem. The object may lead to some new insights/images/directions that lift the poem out of its stagnant space and allows for that energetic flirtation of a fin breaking water. Then, you can discard the lure, or keep it.

Michelle Calkins is from Grand Rapids, Michigan and is currently studying poetry at Virginia Tech.