Good news! You still have time to submit your entry (or entries) to PRISM’s Poetry and Short Fiction Contests! We’re extending the deadline to February 3rd! Enter online or send us your submission snail mail.
Pretty
By Greg Kearney
Exile, 2011
Reviewed by Veronique West
Awkward, overweight, washed-up, sexually-frustrated, disenchanted: the incredibly average misfits who people Greg Kearney’s set of short stories are anything but pretty – and therein lies their appeal. Kearney’s narratives are delivered in bite-sized slice-of-life narratives. His voice, clever, irreverent and unabashed, captures the reader’s attention. His ability to ridicule and make theatrical the very unglamorous nature of modern domestic life, sometimes to the point of parody, truly engages. It is this ability which fuels Pretty, making it an undeniably entertaining read – though the witty criticism it presents of contemporary living and the sympathy it stirs for those unsuited to its expectations falls somewhat short of thought-provoking insight and profundity.
A graph on Ngram Viewer, that’s what. Drawing from five centuries of the printed word (that’s 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish), the free online tool provides hours of word-geek delight. How long was “thou” preferred over “you?” Which came first, the “chicken” or the “egg?” Google’s digitization of books has stirred much debate in the publishing and writing world. This tool is a glimpse into how some of that data can be used. Except when you enter the search phrase “never, gonna, give, you, up.” Then strange things happen. Always.
With all the talk on SOPA and PIPA this week, here’s a tidbit from a writer’s perspective.
Do we hang onto copyright with sharpened fingernails, or is there a chance we can let go and make merry?
Hey sports fans. Join us for an issue launch on February 3rd in Vancouver, and brighten up your leap year. PRISM is teaming up with Event Magazine and Poetry is Dead so that we can put on the best February party everrr. Garry Thomas Morse and Marita Dachsel will be reading. There will be cake. DJ That’s so Raven will be spinning us into the evenin. Hope to see you there!
Girlwood
By Jennifer Still
Brick Books, 2011
Reviewed by Leah Horlick
I first encountered Jennifer Still’s nest as a chapbook released by JackPine Press in 2010. Enveloped in a macrame and cross-stitched pouch crafted from 1970s upholstery, Still’s poems were nestled in exactly what they evoke — domesticity at the turn of the second wave of feminism, a femininity that itches and swells within its confines. nest is woven into Still’s second full-length collection of poetry, Girlwood, to create a mixtape of poems that chronicle the metamorphosis of girlhood. Readers familiar with Still’s chapbook will be pleased to note that nothing is lost as nest takes its place, folded snugly into the poems of Girlwood.
Girlwood opens with a table of contents styled as track list on a cassette tape, with each section of the work prefaced by a sing-song childhood skipping rhyme, a tsk-tsk from a mother figure, or cautionary tales and checklists from a high school yearbook. Mascara, safety pins, pennies, daisy chains, and stretchmarks — Still’s poems leave a trail of childhood emblems of femininity. As we watch a daughter grow through adolescence, pennies tremble on train tracks; concealer covers bruises; crushed velvet is revealed as the curtains of an abductor’s van. A chorus of voices haunts the daughter at her every turn, admonishing and advising.
Tracing what Daphne Marlatt calls “the wilderness of adolescence,” Girlwood details at once the fairy-tale heroine about to take a path less travelled, and the minutiae of natural processes taking place in the wood and world: the chrysalis of insects, the “purr of the Conair-dryer-set-on-low bird” (“The Bird,” 53), and “feathers, fingernails/raking the dark” (Morning After,” 64).
A particular strength of Girlwood is this sense of wildness, and Still’s illustration of the nuances of girlhood that are at once adolescent and rural. It is here, perhaps, where my own prairie roots are showing, as I consider the poems in the section entitled Moth to be among the most powerful in the collection. Mirroring the life cycle of an insect, the Moth poems are incandescent in their sensuality, rooted in the wild at the edge of a lake “when you spare the wild strawberry my tongue’s crush/when the wood rose gathers bud dew in the night.” Still’s feminine construct is not only artifice, concealment, and domesticity; it is also made of skinny-dipping, canoeing, and midway rides. It is in “a crinoline spin of conifers” (dance, 95) and “in veins, where the storm ripens cloud/in night, where the forked tongues dowse us” (Lightning, 107). While the fragmented style of the work may present a challenge to the reader, Still’s use of powerful, recurring imagery acts as a guide when the narrative arc becomes more fragile and the terrain of girlhood more uneven. Still leads us on wing and deftly-placed foot through the pitfalls, trials, and thrills of an adolescent femininity that is at once wild, delicate, and dangerous. The journey of Girlwood is a journey well worth taking.
Sheryda Warrener, a finalist in PRISM international’s 2011 poetry contest and author of “Hard Feelings” talks to first-year MFA student Leah Horlick about travel, writing, the ordinary, and the remarkable. Read the full interview here.
Sheryda Warrener, a finalist in PRISM international’s poetry contest last year, is a graduate of the MFA program at UBC and the author of “Hard Feelings,” a collection of poetry released by Snare Books in 2010. First-year MFA student Leah Horlick had an opportunity to ask Warrener a few questions about writing, travel, the ordinary, and the remarkable.
LH: I was fortunate enough to hear you read from your new book, “Hard Feelings,” at Green College this fall. The poems in this book have a strong sense of place, rooted in locations ranging from Japan to New Mexico. What was the process of creating this book like for you? What is your writing process like when you’re traveling?
PRISM international is published by the Creative Writing Program of the University of British Columbia.
