Book Reviews: August 2013
In the Kingdom of the Ditch, Poems by Todd Davis
Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, Memoir by Poe Ballantine
But Our Princess Is in Another Castle, Poems by B.J. Best
On the Dark Side of the Moon: A Journey to Recovery, Memoir by Mike Medberry
The Quantum Manual of Style, Fiction by Brian Mihok
1996, Poems by Sara Peters
The Biology of Luck, Novel by Jacob M. Appel
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In the Kingdom of the Ditch
Poems by Todd Davis
Michigan State UP, June 2013
ISBN-13: 9781611860702
$19.95; 112pp.
Reviewed by Renée K. Nicholson
At the intersection of what is nature and what is human one might find a Todd Davis poem. “I dream of peaches on the tree by the river, / of my youngest son lost along its muddy banks” he writes in “What Lives in the Wake of Our Sleep.” In a Davis poem, the natural world merges with the relationships we form on a personal level. The poem continues: “When I wake night’s worry trails me to the bathroom / and later to the breakfast table. It’s winter here / and the trees are bare.” Somber and bittersweet, these lines convey worry, hope, and a sense of interconnectedness between the harshness of winter and the desire to protect what is dear. The poems that comprise In the Kingdom of the Ditch hold quiet wisdom not unlike the solemnity and silence of personal prayer.
These poems are experienced as much in gesture as in the sweep of language. Davis probes losses as different as an old coal mine to the image of his father dying during hospice care in ways that feel remarkably similar on an emotional level. In “Fishing for Large Mouth in a Strip-Mining Reclamation Pond near Lloydsville, Pennsylvania,” the speaker claims, “Most of the tunnels are gone, filled in or forgotten, holes / in our memory where the black line of money vanished.” Damage to the land is held in personal memory. This theme of reclamation is made even more personal in “What We Do While We’re Dying,” where Davis shows us what it is like to see someone pass:
…After this many days, I think that’s what he’s doing.
Chewing over his soul. Preparing to slip it through
the body’s swinging gate.
Whether the land or one’s soul, we are brought back to our proper form. Or maybe the hope is that to be reclaimed is to transform into some better state.
Along with loss, Davis celebrates by softly intoning what is simple and good in this world. In “Give Us This Day” the language elevates like a hymn; “Who blessed by this dark / sugar could stay quiet?” And, in “Crow Counsels Me in the Ways of Love” he shows how the simple gesture of picking raspberries to put on cereal can be the best to show affection. Perhaps the collection’s center is implicit in a line from “Perigee.” “What can we really know?” Davis writes. “Illumination is a beautiful word.”
Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere
Memoir by Poe Ballantine
Hawthorne Books and Literary Arts, 2013
ISBN-13: 9780983477549
$16.95; 322pp.
Reviewed by Natalie Sypolt
Typically, when readers hear “memoir,” they expect a book that will explore the author’s life and perhaps illustrate a struggle toward understanding or a change in the author over time. Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, Poe Ballantine’s first memoir, does take the reader on that kind of journey; however, Ballantine is also an astute cultural critic, using humor and wit to prompt readers into questioning their own behavior and beliefs, as well as the behavior and mores of their society.
Although Love & Terror primarily centers around the mysterious disappearance of Steve Haataja, a college math professor and Ballantine’s neighbor, the book is much more than “true crime” or a “whodunit.” Haataja’s story will keep the pages turning, but it is Ballantine’s search for identity and his exploration of the way people learn—or sometimes don’t learn—to navigate the world that will engage the reader emotionally. Chadron, Nebraska, is full of characters who speak their own “language” in order to operate within society, including Hazel Devine, whose physical deformities do not stop him from selling and driving cars (with his feet); Ballantine’s wife Cristina, who struggles with mastering English and becoming an American citizen; and Tom, Ballantine’s son, who is suspected of being autistic.
The mysterious and grisly nature of Steve Haataja’s death became the source of widespread national speculation and brought unwelcomed attention to the small Nebraska town. Ballantine writes of the time immediately following the discovery of Haataja’s burned body:
A legion of blathering, blundering international TV-trained Internet sleuths joined the fray…the explosion of misinformation, consternation, shock, bewildered exhilaration, and whimsical conjecture ran panting circles around any circus or rodeo that might’ve rolled unannounced into town. The value of an innocent life was temporarily lost in the feast upon its misfortune.
After deciding to write about the Haataja case, Ballantine himself becomes part of the same “legion” that he criticizes. However, he is also a member of the Chadron community and therefore “someone in the middle of [a true crime story], someone who knows all the players, someone who is not simply boarding an airplane with a tape recorder and staying at a nearby hotel to catalogue and ‘exploit for profit’.” This creates a complex situation for the author and for readers as they weigh a variety of ethical dilemmas along with Ballantine.
What makes Love & Terror different from other “true crime” pieces is that the crime itself acts as a backdrop in order for Ballantine to push readers to question, as he is questioning, who they are, what they believe, and what they deserve to have in their lives. Love is as prominent as death here, and, in fact, sometimes the two go hand and hand. Ballantine writes, “But everyone needs to be loved…and the way some of us make inroads into each other’s fugitive secrets, furtive beliefs, and festering denials, is to knock down their walls. That’s a funny way to describe love, which is less like a map or a type of caramel-flavored opium than it is a hard-won fight….” As the story unfolds, the reader watches as many walls—including those Ballantine himself has put up—begin to crack and crumble.
Much of Steve Haataja’s life and death remain a mystery, one that will stay with Ballantine and the people of Chadron, Nebraska, long after the reporters have departed. And yet Ballantine reminds the reader that, in spite of the terror on the howling plains, there is also love and happiness. He writes, “Happiness is about contrasts: heat when you’re cold, pay when you’re broke, the peace that follows war…Happiness is like this, not handed out by the bucket from your television set but measured from a thimble by a stingy but wise old God and so we savored it…” Love & Terror is a read sure to be savored.
But Our Princess Is in Another Castle
Poems by B.J. Best
Rose Metal Press, 2013
ISBN-13: 9780984616688
$14.95; 92pp.
Reviewed by Michael Luke Benedetto
If the title of B.J. Best’s third book of poetry, But Our Princess Is in Another Castle, brings to mind the joys and frustrations of youth, then navigating these pages will stack the nostalgic memories up faster than speeding Tetris blocks. This collection of prose poems chronicles a young man progressing through life in our digital age hand-in-hand with a cavalcade of pixelated protagonists.
But Our Princess Is in Another Castle is divided into eight parts, each titled as a different “world” in standard video game fashion to provide a subtle theme that loosely ties the section together. Each prose poem shares a title with a video game—or references a classic character, console, etc.—and draws from physical and virtual reality simultaneously with language that oscillates between lucid narrative and vibrant poetics.
From childhood civilizations in a SimCity sandbox to the exuberance of young love, to the intricacies of long-term relationships and ultimately the surreality of early parenthood, every meaningful life event is tied thematically to video games. God and faith are even tackled in “Doom” as the speaker admits to being an atheist because “luck favors the prepared” and contemplates, “I wonder what God thinks of me, if He thinks of me at all.” Like most subjects in this collection, the figure of God is presented with greater levity when he is found later slapping the side of an arcade machine, wondering why he created free will.
As Best states in “The Legend of Zelda,” “It is human to expect narrative, to thread meaning,” and a great deal of both are woven throughout this collection filtered through the lens of classic arcade and console titles. Many one-off adventures exist as well. Video game fans are treated to the latter years of the Mario Bros., Ms. and Super Pac-Man’s initial meeting at Overeaters Anonymous, and a poem titled “Where in the Retirement Home is Carmen Sandiego?”
Best’s final offering, “Congratulations, Enter Your Initials,” caps the collection off by blending the culmination of most arcade experiences with a candid consideration of a life replete with digital accomplishments and little else. The speaker scrutinizes the “three letters like runes” cast upon him by his mother at birth and wonders “when they might start spelling something sensible. Something more than a sweatshirt, an old car that needs new brakes, frozen pizza.”
These prose poems are at the same time teeming with introspection and pop-culture minutiae. Dedicated gamers will enjoy the subtle hints and references tied to the narrative. Even if the majority of classic video game allusions elude you, you may still find the initials “BJB” high on your scoreboard of recent reads.
On the Dark Side of the Moon: A Journey to Recovery
Memoir by Mike Medberry
Caxton Press, October 2012
ISBN-13: 9781283804370
$14.95; 150pp.
Reviewed by Ann Beman
I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language
No doubt W.S. Merwin’s “Witness” holds great significance for author and environmentalist Mike Medberry. When Medberry suffered a massive, nearly fatal stroke while surveying Craters of the Moon National Monument, he struggled to regain language. As a conservation advocate concerned with the very place in which he lay for hours before friends found him and medical help arrived, he struggled in his mission to urge further protection for Craters of the Moon. Communicating about anything at all was a struggle.
Medberry begins his slender memoir in medias res, as he and three friends recon the remote and arduous landscape of parched lava pocked with islands of blowing grasses. As he hop-scotches through lava on the way out of the monument, the stroke takes him down, out of sight of his companions. Seven hours later, a helicopter airlifts him to medical care. In those intervening hours, the helpless author finds himself connecting to the place in spirit:
I felt myself a part of this fantastic landscape, no more than the lava and no less. I gave myself to it, to its aching brightness and growing shadows, to its burning heat and its cold sleety winds. In a moment of pure calm, an unparalleled peace and balance, I felt my life in exquisite detail.
As the narrative progresses, Medberry interweaves his endeavor to recover speech, mobility, and coherent thought with the endeavor to protect and restore a place of stunning beauty as well as frank brutality, a place not unlike the dark side of the moon.
In 1964, Congress and the President designated the Craters of the Moon Wilderness, and in the 1970s federal law established Wilderness Study Areas on the BLM land. Finally, thanks in part to Medberry’s pre-stroke efforts, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt recommended in 2000 that President Clinton expand Craters of the Moon from 54,400 to 737,000 acres.
“Babbitt’s provisional victory paralleled my own tentative win over the stroke,” Medberry writes. That this book exists shows us that he has indeed recovered, but, as we all know, it’s not about the destination so much as the way there:
I have been changed by the hard path I’ve travelled … This was exactly the lesson for me of having a stroke: getting well will take time, each step will bring painful progress, and I cannot always get the things that I wanted.
This memoir’s transient victory lies in its author’s renewed powers of description—the path through the “raging wildness of his brain,” how the pieces of his brain were “a blizzard of blowing pages ripped from a book, cast to the wind, scattered like confetti or tickertape, with all the little letters falling down one by one.” Throughout the book are poetic refrains of paths, journeys, trails, trees, grasses, flow, words, language, and, most reverberant, healing. Subplots, too, thread the narrative. We briefly flash back to the author’s childhood in Hawaii, where we meet his father, who died of a stroke when Medberry was barely a teen. We meet his mother, an anchoring presence throughout his long recovery. And we meet his girlfriend, glimpse their married life, and glean a whisper of the marriage’s disintegration.
In the center of the book, black and white photos put faces to names. Among the images is the cover photo, in which a silhouetted hiker ascends from the craggy blackness of a cave into the light clouds of day. “I climbed out of darkness and into light in the Craters of the Moon Wilderness,” the caption reads, in yet another spoiler for the outcome of this inspirational memoir.
The Quantum Manual of Style
Fiction by Brian Mihok
Aqueous Books, February 2013
ISBN-13: 9780988383753
$14.00; 164pp.
Reviewed by Edmund Zagorin
For those who appreciate the enigmatic organization of The Quantum Manual of Style, Brian Mihok’s quixotic prose presents a delightful morsel of ambiguity with the ludic charm of a Zen master. From its table of contents that reads as an instructional poem (“…9. Recognize a singularity when one happens. 10. Be particular with your wardrobe 11. Keep an appropriately sized apartment…”) to the uncanny reappearance of a cat named X-ray within the recurrent example-text, The Quantum Manual of Style represents a curious experiment that buoys the reader between a series of disconnected objects, precepts, and comparisons.
The perfunctory genre of “style manual” is recurrently interrupted by poesis, such that the final text ends up reading more like a whimsical prose poem á la Anne Carson or Robert Creeley than Strunk & White’s Elements. Consider its stylistic lines such as; “17. Keep longevity in mind longevity in mind even when listening to music,” an aphorism supported by several stanzas, including the following:
Second, longevity matters in terms of substances. Consider the time it takes for the following,
a piece of bread to moulder (7.35 days)
a cup of Assam tea to steep perfectly (2 minutes)
the first moment you feel old (10 years)
a nuclear reactor to become fully operational (5 to 7 years)
However, readers searching for an introduction to quantum mechanics or even philosophical insights of a quantum nature may find themselves disappointed. Philosophically, there is a slippage of terminology that causes later sections to lose some of the book’s forceful treatise-like opening. Conceptual designations such as “substance,” “accident,” and “singularity,” which begin as meaningfully distinct, become interchangeable by the end. Mihok’s “substance” equates much more with a Latourian “actant” than with Spinoza’s use of the term, something that is singular rather than underlying. Like Latour, Mihok’s primary use of his catchword is to disarticulate mereological hierarchies. For instance, Mihok argues that the finger and the hand must be taken on their own, despite their conjunction of physicality. Mihok is also quick to recognize the importance, though not primacy, of non-tangible and non-physical substances (thoughts and other mental events are a good example) as well as more physical non-objects, e.g. “15. Keep favorite substances near… Some examples of what might constitute favorite substances, // the memory of spontaneously agreeing to wake up at 5 a.m. and drive to a town that is still closed except for a café in order to patronize the café.”
Those familiar with Levi Bryant’s “flat ontology” will note similarities to Mihok’s equivalency of forms, which are often achieved by highlighting disparate orders of magnitude, as when Mihok writes: “12. Recognize coordinate substances and accidents on an astrophysical scale.” Mihok’s approach thus destabilizes the relationship between theoretical frame and example in style manuals, taking Strunk & White’s Elements as contrast here. The examples continue through an ambiguous micro-narrative of a family in Arizona, which ends up reading like its own palimpsest of a novel. We are introduced to Terry and Pam, a frustrated narrator, the cat X-Ray, and a house in Arizona where the narrator is coming of age (“You put on your favorite clothes, played your favorite songs, bought makeup secretly and put it on under the blankets, but still when you walked out into the living room, it felt like a big empty cave. You never realized how big the room was and now you wished more than ever that Arizona had never been invented.”) Readers unfamiliar with this approach should pay close attention to these examples, since these are the moments when Mihok’s skill shines through.
Conceptually, Mihok runs into problems. Chapter 2 defines singularity as an “…inevitable, undeniable occurrence…” when the property that makes singularities ontologically fascinating, particularly at the quantum level, is precisely their contingency (which is here an antonym of inevitability), the understanding that any singularity could have been otherwise but wasn’t. Consider a six-sided dice roll. There are six equally likely possible outcomes but only one actual outcome. How many sides does the die of timespace have? Quantum mechanics suggest that this contingency of outcomes is true in the present tense for the spatiotemporal location of matter’s tiniest particles—that they are moving so fast against the surface of twelve-dimensional space defined axially by phenomenological time that, at any given moment, particles occupy multiple contingent locations. Mihok’s blithe insistence on inevitability as a quantum property is unhelpful, whether or not it ought be a manner of style.
Perhaps The Quantum Manual of Style is guilty of what Haruki Murakami calls the “minor sin,” (a joke, it seems, and one of 1Q84’s most obvious moments of self-critique) or the sin of leaving readers in “…a pool of mysterious question marks.” However, the flotation devices are colorful and, as both Murakami and the text itself note, there are far worse sins, such as rigidity, analysis, and sought understanding. Revelation can only arrive unbidden in this entangled universe and, for those willing to follow Mihok’s trickster’s smile on everything from inhabiting apartments to overcoming the “concrete realities” of “suburban logic,” there are many worthy insights to discover among the insistence on the absolute uniqueness of the small and large, the instantaneous and geologically eternal. Though occasionally frustrating, The Quantum Manual of Style offers many refreshing departures from stultifying conventions and a remix on the manualization of style itself.
1996
Poems by Sara Peters
House of Anansi Press, April 2013
ISBN-13: 9781770892712
$19.95; 65pp.
Reviewed by Gina Vaynshteyn
Sara Peters’ debut collection of poetry, 1996, is as loud as it is ominous. Peters’ work is resurfaced, raw, and filled to the brim with nebulous clouds. Ghosts of an exorcised young girl and a murdered boy fit in perfectly with the rest of collection, which focuses on violence, sex, cruelty, and control. The poems are all expertly teenager: morose and brooding, simultaneously aware and unaware.
1996 begins with “Babysitters,” a poem that plays with the mythologized babysitter, a young woman sexualized to a pulp over and over again. The speaker, narrating in second-person, says, “When the Babysitter arrived, with her turquoise belt / and raw mouth, your father had never seen / such a fine wrist, such a way with an onion!” The speaker’s voice is observant and unapologetic as the young girl witnesses the truth behind her esteemed babysitter: “But when she thinks herself / alone, you hear back seat of the car, then / with a trench knife, in the orchard.” This hint of a more turbulent past complicates the narrator and her babysitter and also suggests that all idolized creatures have their unfortunate secrets.
Other poems, such as “Cruelty” and “Winter Jewelry,” also depict violence as well as the need for control. “Cruelty” begins with “When I was eleven, I watched my cousin cut open a gopher / with a serrated top of a tin can.” The familial brutality is not even clean-cut; the speaker, once again the quiet observer, is exposed to effortless cruelty that shows no remorse. Although she takes no part in it, she doesn’t do anything to stop it, either. An older female influence appears in “Winter Jewelry,” where the woman seems to show possession over the narrator that is both sexual and sisterly
I felt her before I saw her:
she ran her hand down my spine
It happened so fast I had no time to pose.
Nothing felt better to me
than being touched possessively.
As in “Cruelty,” the narrator seems to find comfort in the subtle abuse.
In part two of 1996, Peters experiments with different personas and themes, such as a bewitched teenager in “Mary Ellen Spook” who lights objects on fire with her eyes and says, “Mother I am afraid,” in the last stanza. A monster approaches a three-year-old boy in “Cryptid” while his parents have sex on a beach towel. The speaker states
Now they sleep to the sound of rogue waves crashing. Dreaming,
they pick their way through dying jellyfish
to find you waiting (not for them) behind a rock,
content amid the iridescent quivering.
As salty as a “potato chip,” the boy becomes part of the monster and the sea. Here, Peters plays with the idea of children becoming lost or separated from their parents as a result of the supernatural, which perhaps masks or symbolizes negligence and abuse.
One of Peters’ most powerful poems is “Abortion,” a narrative that centers on pro-life protests from the perspective of a six-year-old girl who has yet to experience tremendous blood loss. The form of the poem builds upon itself, creating tension as the stanzas lengthen by one line. By the final stanza, abortion is being compared to the Holocaust:
The gravel shoulder was bright with trash,
and drivers sometimes spat or tossed takeout,
but it was only twice a year, this protest of
The New Holocaust, as my poster proclaimed,
The speaker, gripping onto a poster, is unaware what she is fighting for and allows herself to be possessed by something larger than her.
Peters’ achingly stoic poetry collection of poems is vibrant with narrative voices that are clear, confident, and unforgiving. 1996 means to show its readers how the past stays with you forever; it haunts you and your new memories by not letting go. Wildly gripping and honest, 1996 conveys the same daunting feeling in thirty distinct ways with thirty poems that illuminate the power of dusk.
The Biology of Luck
Novel by Jacob M. Appel
Elephant Rock Books, 2013
ISBN-13: 9780975374689
$16.00; 222pp.
Reviewed by Joe Ponepinto
The prolific Jacob M. Appel, whose stories have graced more than 200 literary journals and whose first novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, debuted in 2012, has already published a second book. The Biology of Luck, like his first novel, takes place in Appel’s beloved New York City, exploring the apple’s boroughs and the lives of those who, it seems, could live nowhere else.
Appel is much like his city. His personal life mimics the pace and determination for which New York is famous—he is as prolific in real life as he is behind the keyboard. Those familiar with his work know him as a physician, attorney, and bioethicist, but in this volume his biography lists him as a licensed New York City sightseeing guide. Readers have long since ceased to wonder how he finds the time and drive to accomplish so much and have learned to enjoy the many perspectives he is able to bring to his work.
In The Biology of Luck, Appel has married a tour of New York’s municipal history to the heart’s convoluted journey into love—or something like it. These dual tracks parallel through the book and intersect through the aspirations of the protagonist’s romantic quest. Larry Bloom, a sightseeing guide himself, describes the city to his charge of Dutch tourists while simultaneously preparing for an evening with Starshine Hart, the bicycling, free-spirited and beautiful (as everyone in New York seems to attest) object of his desire. But Larry knows that she does not view their dinner as a date. Starshine has two suitors already and has no room in her life for a third. Plus, Larry is an unattractive man, by his own and the world’s assessment, not remotely in the young woman’s potential gene or dating pool.
Larry’s job takes him past the city’s most popular and sometimes most romantic settings. It’s those places where his frustrations are most obvious and in which Appel best combines his knowledge of New York with his skill as a writer:
Battery Park resonates with lust as the sun approaches its zenith. A primal impulse takes hold of the young couples strolling the gravel walkways, the newlyweds who have paused to admire DeModica’s bronze bull, the truant teens laid out on the cool grass. Maybe because all flesh tantalizes in the early summer, in the right light, or because, at this time of year, there is more flesh exposed, midriffs, cleavage, inner thighs, the park is suddenly transformed into a dynamo of panting and groping. This desire is not the tender affection of evening, the wistful intimacy of the twilight’s last gleam. It is raw, concupiscent hunger.
However, Larry has a plan to accompany his hopes. He has written a book about Starshine, in which he describes how she spends the day in anticipation of their rendezvous. He imagines her present and her past, reporting how she deflects the advances of virtually every man she meets and copes with the frustrations of being young and poor in Gotham. And as he tours the city in Leo Bloom-like wonder, he carries with him a letter from Stroop and Stone, publishing industry stalwarts, which he hopes contains their acceptance of his manuscript, and which he forbids himself from opening until he and Starshine sit down to dinner. What woman could resist a man so launched into stardom before her very eyes? Although any writer who has ever sent off a query letter suspects what’s really inside, it’s still a nice hook to ride the quixotic hopes of an unpublished author to the end of the trail.
Appel alternates chapters in Biology between a traditional account of Bloom’s day and the chapters of Larry’s masterpiece, which shares the novel’s title. At first a reader may be surprised that the tour guide’s writing style is no less sophisticated than Appel’s as narrator. Here, Larry describes Starshine’s latest job, soliciting donations for the Cambodian Children’s Fund:
Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying interest is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine’s favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure.
Despite the stylistic resemblance, it eventually becomes clear that the author’s intentions are more complex than the mere novelty of a book within a book. The threads in this novel don’t just parallel and intersect, they become strands of DNA, wrapped and mated to each other to produce a separate offspring, a deeper realization.
The similarity of the author’s surname to his city’s nickname (Appel/Apple) seems more than serendipitous. Biology serves as paean to New York, but also to the dreams and hopes of its residents. Appel understands what motivates his people as well as he knows what drives his city.
Reviewer Bios:
Renée K. Nicholson lives in Morgantown, WV, splitting her artistic pursuits between writing and dance. A former professional dancer, Renée earned teaching certification from American Ballet Theatre and an MFA in Creative Writing at West Virginia University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Chelsea, Mid-American Review, Perigee: A Journal of the Arts, Paste, Moon City Review, Fiction Writers Review, Redux, Cleaver Magazine, Poets & Writers, Dossier, Linden Avenue, Blue Lyra Review, Switchback, The Superstition Review, The Gettysburg Review and elsewhere. She serves as Assistant to the Director of the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, and was the 2011 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona. She is a member of the book review staff at Los Angeles Review, as well as a member of The National Books Critics Circle and of the Dance Critics Association. Renée co-hosts the literary podcast SummerBooks and co-founded Souvenir: A Journal. Her website is www.reneenicholson.com.
Natalie Sypolt lives and writes in West Virginia. She received her MFA in fiction from West Virginia University and currently teaches creative writing, literature, and composition. Her fiction and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train, r.kv.r.y., Superstition Review, Paste, Willow Springs Review, and The Kenyon Review Online, among others. Natalie is the winner of the Glimmer Train New Writers Contest, the West Virginia Fiction Award, and the Betty Gabehart Prize. She also serves as a literary editor for the Anthology of Appalachian Writers; is co-host of SummerBooks, a literary podcast; and is currently the special guest prose editor for Banango Street Review.
Michael Luke Benedetto hails from New England but currently lives and writes in San Diego. His work has appeared in the Long River Review and The Essay Connection.
Ann Beman is LAR’s nonfiction editor.
Edmund Zagorin is a writer and argument teacher in Detroit, USA and Iowa City, USA. His novelesque Sorry, Our Unicorn Has Rabies is serialized electronically through Jukepop and he curates the monthly print broadsheet Stories By Mail. Read his data-fossils @multiplicit.
Gina Vaynshteyn is currently studying poetry in San Diego and has work published or forthcoming in PANK, Treehouse, Milksugar, and The California Journal of Women Writers. She regularly writes for Hellogiggles and The Rumpus. You should read her thoughts on breakfast cereal and quasi-politics on Twitter @ginainterrupted.
Joe Ponepinto is the former Book Review Editor for The Los Angeles Review, and is now a principal with Woodward Press, a Michigan publisher. His stories and criticism have appeared in dozens of literary journals. Joe was a journalist, political speechwriter and business owner before turning to creative writing full time in 2006. He lives in Michigan with his wife, Dona, and Henry, the coffee drinking dog. His blog on the writing life is at http://joeponepinto.com.