THE FUTURE IS HAPPY by Sarah Sarai

The Future Is Happy, by Sarah Sarai, BlazeVOX, ISBN: 9781935402350, 83 pages, 2009

About the book:
"While I write this, / a lucky few grow into new humanness." The Future Is Happy is about that humanness. The discovery is personal, global and of the spirit. Every poem is a presentation of the business and process of the now, how to be one of the "fleshy ladies, joyous despite / bellies, bulges, striations life makes." ("Six, Seven Strawberries") References are spun from mythology, philosophy, literature and "Miss Piggy Bubblebath."

About the author:
Sarah Sarai is an unsymmetrical woman with a symmetrical she. Poems from this collection were first published in reviews including Threepenny Review, Minnesota Review, Mississippi Review, Eleven Eleven and Fifth Wednesday. She lives in New York City, though also claims L.A. and Seattle as home.


Remorse

When he lumbered in the way of men
who use their hands to till earth,
he knocked a rough doorway
and sobbed for unfairness and
the slaying. Dull, trembling,
he threw on three pelts against
a desert night, and feared heaven’s
white stars. We’ve all killed our brother.

The dead roam through us.
We toss beneath old gods’ blazing navigation.
Cain? It’s morning. He bites a sweet seedy fig



Outside the Ritz-Carlton

Pine bowers and electric stars
strung on the canopy over-top
three blonde bouffants of scrappy
imperfection with locks straying
like deft housecats into heated
territory familiar and claimed.
Three high-heeled pair of black
boots and as a yellow cab glides
to a perfect stop, three cigarettes
smashed until their fanned glow
is hypothetical as any after-life,
including reincarnation which
aligns with a felt logic of follies
we blindly interpret as suffering.

THE BOOK OF HOPE AND DREAMS edited by Dee Sunshine

THE BOOK OF HOPES AND DREAMS is a charity poetry anthology to raise money for Spirit Aid. It was originally published as a book, but there were huge problems with the publisher and I had to withdraw it from circulation. It has now been re-launched as an e-book. More info about the project, the poets and the charity at BOOK OF HOPE AND DREAMS.

From the book:

Interlunar

Darkness waits apart from any occasion for it;
like sorrow it is always available.
This is only one kind,

the kind in which there are stars
above the leaves, brilliant as steel nails
and countless and without regard.

We are walking together
on dead wet leaves in the intermoon
among the looming nocturnal rocks
which would be pinkish grey
in daylight, gnawed and softened
by moss and ferns, which would be green,
in the musty fresh yeast smell
of trees rotting, earth returning
itself to itself

and I take your hand, which is the shape a hand
would be if you existed truly.
I wish to show you the darkness
you are so afraid of.

Trust me. This darkness
is a place you can enter and be
as safe in as you are anywhere;
you can put one foot in front of the other
and believe the sides of your eyes.
Memorize it. You will know it
again in your own time.
When the appearances of things have left you,
you will still have this darkness.
Something of your own you can carry with you.

We have come to the edge:
the lake gives off its hush;
in the outer night there is a barred owl
calling, like a moth
against the ear, from the far shore
which is invisible.
The lake, vast and dimensionless,
doubles everything, the stars,
the boulders, itself, even the darkness
that you can walk so long in
it becomes light.

Margaret Atwood

For more information about Dee's writing, art and music projects visit his website.

MARY JANE GO ROUND by Ginnetta Correli

"Mary Jane Go Round is based on a character from the novel called: The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli. The book is about the emotional victims and perpetrators of life. Most of my writing I feel can become anybody’s fictional life told in reverse. As the tragedy of any persons life becomes more clear in my mind I want others to see it through photography, video and music.

For me art is a daily process. I want my work to connect to whatever my goal is at the time. The goal for now is for the movie to never end. Bad or good."

Bio: Some of Ginnetta Correli's work can be found in print and online. She's been published in Ink Sweat and Tears, Diet Soap, The Bannister Review, Sein Und Werden, Poesy Planet, Insolent Rudder, Bicycle Review and Omega 7. Ginnetta Correli is also the author of a the depressing novel called: The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli and just released an album about the novel called: Nurse Lucy. Presently, Ginnetta is making films.

GAS Original Poetry and Music Variety Show

Original poetry and music from around the world this time featuring Jim Clark, Dee Sunshine, Tom Bradley, Tree Riesener, David Seddon, City of Statues, Linda Benninghoff, Swapan Basu, Shanti Perez and Casey Mensing. Photo by Aad de Gids.

The show is located here

I will review 3-5 minute mp3 submissions or original poetry, music or songs on an ongoing basis. Please announce the name of your poem/piece and YOUR Name at he beginning of your submission. If you have collaborators, announce them too. Send high quality mp3s to gypsysubmissions@yahoo.com

Milspeak: Warriors, Veterans, Family and Friends Writing the Military Experience

Editor Sally Drumm, a retired Marine and president of Milspeak Foundation, developed Milspeak Seminars because she recognized the value of narrative as a stress management tool for military people. She is a former editor of Apostrophe: USCB Journal of the Arts. Her memoir, essay, fiction and drama have been well received within the U.S. publishing community.

Order book from Press53

Each of MILSPEAK’s selections is a carefully crafted reminiscence, the telling of a particularly eventful moment in a military life and created by military people who learned to share their stories through Milspeak Creative Writing Seminars. Also included are poetry, essay, and memoir by Michael Kobre, Dinty W. Moore, Richard Peabody, Rebecca McClanahan and others who assisted in developing the seminars or mentoring Milspeak Writers. This anthology is designed to resonate with military people seeking to heal from wounds of war and to help civilians understand military life. Visit MILSPEAK for more information.

BETTER WITH FRIENDS by Helen Losse

Helen Losse is the author of Better With Friends (Rank Stranger Press, 2009) and two poetry chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces, available from FootHills Publishing, and Paper Snowflakes, published by Southern Hum Press, and the Poetry Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Better With Friends is a book of poetry that explores the intersections of memory (factual and embellished), dreams (daydreams and night dreams), reverie, and prayer, so that all of one’s thoughts can be envisioned as prayer. Although the book has strong spiritual overtones, it is not a religious book nor a book of poetic devotions.

Better With Friends is also available from AMAZON.


To Be

A house is visible behind the right of way.
I hate that house, and sometimes, when it
disappears in the fog, pretend it isn’t there.

I sit in my chair and look into the yard.
I imagine I belong. But this morning
after the yard was white with snow—

later when the brown grass emerged from its
hiding like a flag newly un-furled—
the house snickered. “Over here,” it called,

waving and fluttering its shutters,
hoping for eye contact like our patulous neighbor
with her other seasonal and too-tight pants.

The Art of Pamela Gaard

Born in Minneapolis, MN, in 1955, Pamela Gaard writes:

"I examine the anxieties and exigencies of everyday life. My work invites a sustained gaze, like an icon or altar piece – and, conversely, can be read quickly, like a road sign. The portraits are made from life in 2 hour sittings. They are intended, in the words of Arthur Danto, as ‘emblems through which we confer honor by preserving the likenesses of those portrayed . . . which can be channels for adoration.’ My small paintings are influenced by an alchemy of memories, fantasies, superstitions, obsessions, beliefs, and fears. The pleasure for me in making art is partly pure invention, and partly a way to remember and re-remember events from the past.”

"The color tips you off this is an artist who searches for the mystical through whatever passes by, and the respect for otherness makes her portraits seem alive." Manny Bag Artpolice News Services

Portrait of Avrom, 2008, Mixed media on canvas, 20” x 16” (top)
Portrait of Catherine, 2009, Acrylic on paper, 30” x 23” (left)
Portrait of Lu, 2008, Acrylic on paper, 30” x 23” (right)

Visit Pamela's web site.

VITAL FLUID by Tom Bradley

Tom Bradley presently collaborating on a graphic ekphrasis in verse and an illustrated novel with artists David Aronson and Nick Patterson respectively, both to be published by Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink, and a nonfiction flip book with Deb Hoag for Unlikely Books. Further curiosity can be indulged at Tom Bradley and Wikipedia.

Synopsis:

A pair of rival hypnotists stage an increasingly bizarre series of shows across America, mesmerizing teenagers in an Indian Reservation, a Mormon polygamist's military academy and a Columbine-like high school. This wizard war climaxes at an East L.A. ghetto community center full of gang-bangers. Things get so far out of hand that mercenaries from the Department of Homeland Security must be called in.
Published by Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink

Excerpt from VITAL FLUID:

It's the wee hours, and Phil is driving his dad home. Professor Percival sits in the death seat, withering into himself with despair till he looks no bigger than Shit-Heel, who remains parasitically fastened onto the old man's lap, hissing Chopin’s Funeral March into his ear.

They enter a run-down Las Vegas neighborhood, a zone of vacant lots and abandoned mob cars. The whole block's on the verge of being reclaimed by the desert. Mailboxes along the street indicate the physical presence of washed-up stage entertainers, show-biz dinosaurs who still cling to something resembling life. One mailbox has a clown face painted on it.

Parked in a lean-to carport is a shitty old jalopy, its back seat stuffed with a magician's stage props. The words VLADIMIR THE ESCAPE ARTIST are scrawled on the side. Vladimir himself stands at his rotting bungalow's front door, having forgotten or lost his house key. He ponders his feet and weeps.

The professor looks up from his own pit of despair just long enough to say, "That putz couldn't conjure his way into a clip joint."

Phil’s car passes the Star Dust Talent Agency, located in a shabby office on top of a boarded-up liquor store.

"Are you going to drop in on our so-called agent while you’re in town?" asks Shit-Heel.

"Why? Just in case he’s found some rich and powerful movers and shakers who want to be hypnotized? I doubt Mo Katz has a time machine in there."

The car pulls into a raunchy trailer park.

* * * *

RACHEL SARAI'S VINEYARD by Deborah Rey

Deborah Rey (1938) was born in Amsterdam. From an early age she has worked in radio, television, publicity and the theatre, as a broadcaster, entertainer, scriptwriter, translator, editor, and actress. Today, retired, she finally has the time to be a full-time writer and editor, and lives at the French Atlantic coast with her husband, two dogs and five cats. Rey is recognised by the Dutch Foundation 1940-1945 as a participant in the Resistance during the German occupation of The Netherlands during World War II. “Rachel Sarai’s Vineyard” is her first novel and, like most of her poetry and prose, deals with WWII, child abuse and the truth about a person’s roots.

Very short synopsis:

*When, during the Second World War, five-year-old Rachel Sarai must take over her father’s work in the Dutch Resistance, she distributes messages, smuggles people to safety during nightly curfew hours, lies, steals, and confronts the Gestapo. One child, two wars: Rachel must also survive the sick hatred, and mental, and physical abuse of the woman supposedly her mother. She does, thanks to the unadulterated love of Marie, a Jewish violinist in hiding,

‘Rachel Sarai’s Vineyard’ relates the life of a ‘baby courier’ during WWII. It tells of fear and lost morals, child abuse, of the death of the child within, and the cruel annihilation of her roots.*

Publisher: Merilang Press UK (launch in London on Sept. 19th, 2009)ISBN: 987-0955543098
More info at the publisher's website.

Review of Nine . . . Ten . . . and Out! The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith by Ron Ross

Certain lives, in the right hands, can make for tidy stories. While celebrity status is a useful ingredient for a financially successful biography, the better authors know that the important stories are not guided by the marketplace. It’s the story that matters; if the story—the life being presented—can also be placed within a greater context, then the biography is able to breathe even deeper. Author Ron Ross has accomplished such an artistic breakthrough with Nine . . . Ten . . . and Out! The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith.

The double entendre title of the book is a less-than-subtle clue that the biography is going to be more than a sports chronicle. Emile Griffith is a legitimate legend of the boxing ring and among the most notable sports celebrities of the twentieth century, and Ross’s bio gives full credence to these points, but the author perceptively realizes that the depth of the story is not the celebrated prizefighter’s career; history has already recorded the name of Emile Griffith the boxing champion. The story of Emile Griffith dwells beyond the encyclopedias and videos. It’s a complex story, and it’s a story that matters.

Perhaps concerned with the treatment such a subject might receive from an insensitive publisher, Ross accepted the imprint of DiBella Entertainment for his emotional study of Griffith. DiBella Entertainment is a world renowned promotional firm specializing in professional boxing but not a book publisher, facts which should be considered if one notices a few inconsistencies in the presentation. There are a few too many typos present, and the style guidelines used for printing appear to be those of journalism rather than book publishing, but these are minor points that will bother only the editorial-minded among us. Most readers will be too engrossed in the story itself to notice, and DiBella should otherwise be applauded for entering the difficult world of independent book publishing with such a worthy title.

With Nine . . . Ten . . . and Out! Ross seems to be making sure that he is recognized as a prose stylist beyond being a sports writer or biographer. To this end he is even a little too poetic in places—which is an unlikely criticism to be levied against a book thematically linked with the manly arts—but ultimately it all works and Ross successfully melds the public life of a sports champion with the struggles of a warm and sensitive kid from the Virgin Islands whose profound intimacies are at great odds with the professional life of a boxing champion.

Emile Griffith, who not only authorized the biography but personally encouraged its honesty, is a fine human being with a story worth preserving. Ron Ross’s Nine . . . Ten . . . and Out! eloquently provides that preservation.

More info at the book’s web site.

Review by Phil Rice, Canopic Publishing