Contributor Update: Adam Tavel

Adam Tavel‘s poem “Letter to A.S. Kramer Written on the Back of a Mushroom Soup Can Label” was first published in Issue 77 (Fall 2011) of the minnesota review. It will also be featured in Tavel’s new chapbook, Red Flag Up, available through Kattywompus Press. Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award, and his first poetry collection, The Fawn Abyss, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2014. His latest poems appear or will soon appear in West Branch, Indiana Review, Zone 3, South Dakota Review, Bayou, Yemassee, and Diode, among others. Tavel is the poetry editor for Conte and an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Letter to A.S. Kramer Written on the Back of a Mushroom Soup Can Label

8:03 a.m. & already the skunk funk wafting
off the reservation is enough to gag
a goat. Our pimply local gang
corpuscular & indolent as poor boys are
call it The Rez because all the streets
wear the names of the dreamcatcher dead
the way I wear my uncle’s bombardier jacket
as if it holds the forlorn magic of a war
in its stitching. Apache, Monoa, Seminole
& the blocks droop their concrete tongues
over & over, like the Lakewood driveway
five hundred miles from here where Paul,
your neighbor, thumbed a stack of junk
before he felt the forlorn magic of his heart
wince into nothing. In my mind he bayonets
his way through the Ardennes in slow-mo
while a gillion tons of ordnance fall
on France’s heart. My distaste for the word
‘heart’ rumbles so deep that the homily
I’m giving a class of goats at 9
will instruct them to avoid altogether
words that sugar the tongue. I’m praying
the river blows this rank air to the next county
over. Their wives can take it. Their goats
robust & the color of fog never chew tin
for want of grass & though it is a county without
a river, when the spring rain weeps the world
the color of fog yellow ribbons
glisten & flap on fences for the postman.

[From the Archives] Religious Cosmopolitanism? Orhan Pamuk, the Headscarf Debate, and the Problem with Pluralism

Justin Neuman’s “Religious Cosmopolitanism? Orhan Pamuk, the Headscarf Debate, and the Problem with Pluralism” originally appeared in Issue 77 of the minnesota review. 

Ka, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow (2005), is an Istanbul-born secular intellectual who “couldn’t see how [he] could reconcile . . . becoming a European with a God who required women to wrap themselves in scarves,” and so, in dismissive fashion, he “kept religion” and its “bearded provincial reactionaries . . . out of his life” (96). Returning to Turkey after a dozen years in Germany as a poet in exile, Ka travels to the eastern Anatolian city of Kars, where he encounters a range of Islamic practices and performances among the observant members of the population: a Kurdish sheikh, the Islamist mayoral candidate, young men labeled radicals and terrorists, and the leader of a group of girls protesting the ban on headscarves at the local university. As he discovers, however, these locally specific and globally networked forms of religious experience are a far cry from the Atatürk-era conception of Islam as the parochial antithesis of modernity and worldliness.

We’re giving it all away!

Okay, not really. But we are giving away a free copy of Issue 75 to two U.S. readers, and there are two ways you can win:

1)  Follow our blog through WordPress. Current WordPress followers are already eligible for this giveaway.

2) Leave a comment on this post telling us what kind(s) of content you’d like to see on the blog.

You can enter twice by both following and leaving a comment, though you can only win once. We will randomly select the two winners at 9 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, March 20, 2012. 

An Interview with Rachel Ida Buff

Rachel Ida Buff’s essay, “Duluth,” appears in Issue 77 of the minnesota review.

Interviewed by Christopher Linforth

How long was the gestation period of “Duluth”? When did you feel this was a story that needed to be told?

“Duluth” is based on a true story, so it is about a friend I had who really did up and disappear. I wondered about that for a long time before I started to write about it. I wrote a draft of the piece about a decade ago, but I was an assistant professor at the time in a fairly hostile work environment, and I was completely in the closet about what I think of as my “real writing.”  So I only showed it to a few friends and hid it in a file in my computer.