some author activity: parizeau, Ball, Rukeyser, mclennan + Burgoyne,

df parizeau has a new poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series via the dusie blog; there is a short write-up on the work of the late Nelson Ball, as well as some poems, up at brief poems; Susan Rukeyser reads her piece "Less a man than a gun" over at YouTube; rob mclennan is interviewed by Colin Dardis over at Fill Your Books!; and Sarah Burgoyne reads work from her new Turret House Press chapbook over at YouTube.

Susan Rukeyser's Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) reviewed by Alice Kaltman at Heavy Feather Review

Alice Kaltman was good enough to provide a review of Susan Rukeyser's Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) over at Heavy Feather Review. Thanks so much! This is actually the third review of Rukeyser's collection of short prose, after one posted to the Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library website, and a further posted by Al Kratz over at his blog. You can see Kaltman's original review here.

Susan Rukeyser’s new chapbook may be short in stature, a mere twenty pages, but there is nothing slim about the rich, emotionally resonant prose within. Whatever Feels Like Home reads like a songbook, each of the ten stories, melodic and masterful, ask that age-old query; What truly is home? With Rukeyser at the helm, the answer comes in fresh and alarming ways.

Here are tales of longing for belonging, of place and displacement, of family and estrangement. Each story is awash in wonder, regret, envy, and disappointments. Home is where the heart is? With Rukeyser’s sober and honest perspective, that’s not always the case.

This unusual collection showcases Rukeyser’s impressive range of narrative style. She’s as masterful in humorous first person as she is writing in a deeply mournful third. Some stories are no more than a paragraph long, lengthier ones barely brush past two pages. Still each story has heft.

Poetic lines are dropped in just the right places, always without pretense. At times I gasped at their potency and beauty. For example: “Everything shellacked with filmy silence” from “Stuck Shut,” a story about escape from disappointment and domestic claustrophobia. Or “Forgiving slacks were armor. Her smile, a shield,” from “Hers,” Mrs. Anderson’s brief but powerful story which sits in the very center of this marvelous book, across the page break from “His,” Mr. Anderson’s companion piece, as if on the opposite side of a bleak, marital divide.

There’s also a quiet humor threading its way throughout this book, even when a story is anything but funny. The first piece, “Yes, You Can Eat Your Goldfish,” starts with “Yes, you can eat your darling goldfish. He is most likely a form of ornamental carp, and he will taste as you expect: muddy and full of bones.” From there, Rukeyser leads us (in one brilliant page no less) from what appears to be a funny list of instructions but is ultimately a sobering tale about impossible romantic notions of love, of squashed expectations, and ultimate loss.

Really, every story in Whatever Feels Like Home is a winner. There’s the laugh out loud “FOR SALE: Galloping Horse (brass wall art)>>>Mint<<<,” where heavy wall art wreaks all sorts of violence and relational mayhem.

And then, the alarming “You Were the Girl Who,” chronicling gushing adoration in unrequited youthful friendship (you were the girl who made our town interesting), a cautionary tale which takes a surprising, devastating turn, setting the idea of the safety and comfort of ‘home’ completely awhirl.

Rukeyser writes in “Human/Nature”: “I want to be that rock, she thinks. I want to be yielded to … I want to be that rock, she thinks. I want to be pushed.” Read Whatever Feels Like Home. Yield to this book and guaranteed; you will be pushed along by the solid, sumptuous, powerful prose in this startling collection.

some author activity: Boyle, Rukeyser, Logan + Scroggins,

Frances Boyle has a poem in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets; Susan Rukeyser has a new short story up at Arch Street Press; Nate Logan is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Mark Scroggins writes on Anne Carson and David Hadbawnik for Hyperallergic.

some author activity: Naughton, Boyle, Rukeyser, Iijima + Scroggins,

Katie Naughton has a poem up in the Tuesday poem series via the dusie blog; Frances Boyle has a poem in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets; Susan Rukeyser's above/ground press title gets a curious (and positive) review/mention by Gabriel Hart as part of Echoes from the Bear Creek Lending Library via the Bear Creek Gazette; Brenda Iijima has a new piece in collaboration with Janice Lee up at Annulet; and Mark Scroggins writes on Jack Spicer for Hyperallergic.

the first review of Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) by Susan Rukeyser

The first review of Susan Rukeyser's Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) is now online at the Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library website. Thanks so much! You can read the full review here. As the reviewer writes:

I love the poetry Susan includes in her fascinating flash fiction. For example, this line about a goldfish: “His translucent fins fanned like the scarves of an old burlesque dancer still going through the motions.”

These ten stories take us deep into the lives of the characters, and not the normal fiction characters of politics and fame. Susan instead focuses on our friends and neighbors, and manages to reach in and expose my own foibles to myself. My gut tells me that you too will find yourself in at least one of these stories, and members of your family in other stories, and for sure your next-door neighbor. And, those characters whose stories are unique and new to you will become life-long friends due to Susan’s love of her characters. I know Hank now has a soft spot in my heart, and I wish him a long life with good friends.

Susan’s descriptions of events are precise and vivid: “And wasn’t this what you did, when you lost a guy who probably wasn’t your forever guy but what if he WAS? You go crazy. You rage. You weep. You break into his trailer and sit on his couch with a knife across your lap, so he will shit himself when he opens the door after a long shift, sore and beat, and all he wants in life is a shower and to be left alone.” Another story paints a colorful picture of living together full-time, “Resentment, old as this marriage, sticks to doorknobs and window sills. It gums up the corners.”

I marvel at how Susan seemingly effortlessly embeds seventeen syllable micropoems into her stories. I just stare in wonder at and savor the skill, and admire the work that goes into this precision. From two different stories: “Mrs. Anderson stretched as birds chittered, a brook sputtered over stones.” And “You were the girl who could never leave. How did they know you slept through it?” With this careful, pristine writing throughout, I highly recommend this book for your reading pleasure. The stories I have seen previously live just as strong with re-reading, and I know this will be a small book I’ll return to with pleasure.

new from above/ground press: Whatever Feels Like Home, by Susan Rukeyser

Whatever Feels Like Home
Susan Rukeyser
$5

Yes, You Can Eat Your Goldfish

 

            Yes, you can eat your darling goldfish. He is most likely a form of ornamental carp, and he will taste as you expect: muddy and full of bones.

            You can eat all your darlings, once you kill them. Although why you killed Prince Harry the goldfish I cannot understand. Was it all the staring, his bulging eyes? Was it his flashy orange scales, so out of place in your dark, dusty cabin full of your ancestors’ ghosts? Or was it that his beauty faded by the day, in your care, and you could not bear to watch it — how his scales grew dull and his swimming listless, until he mostly stayed put in the middle of the small, round, glass bowl that was his world since you brought him home from that Memorial Day carnival? His translucent fins fanned like the scarves of an old burlesque dancer still going through the motions.

            You sure looked like you wanted him when you paid $3.00, six times in a row, tossing rings onto a pole. Prince Harry watched you from the table of glass goldfish bowls and saw how you labored for him, how you fought against your own shortcomings to win him as a prize. But now it’s August, and you should have set him up with a proper tank by now, some plastic plants and aquarium gravel, at least.

            Prince Harry was an $18.00 goldfish, which makes him as expensive as any other freshwater fish on the menu at an upscale seafood place. But you should know that the diet you fed him of dehydrated fish flakes won’t please your palate nor your conscience. (Maybe you could have treated him better?)

            What’s done is done, I get it. I just hope you killed him with kindness.

            Because, you know, Prince Harry the goldfish was miserable in that little glass bowl. He was never going to become the best fish he could be, trapped in there. In the wild — if you had released him, an invasive species — he could have grown beyond your expectations. (Seriously, he could’ve grown to be a foot long!) But at what cost to the other fish in that lake that butts up to your cabin? Prince Harry would crowd out the ones that belong there.

            Your darlings can be eaten, and they should be, if they fail to thrive. If you fail them.           

            But Prince Harry the goldfish will leave a bad taste in your mouth. He watched you toss all those rings at the carnival. For him. He thought you loved him. He thought he was home.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the thirteenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
November 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Susan Rukeyser no longer believes in polite silence. Her debut novel, Not On Fire, Only Dying (Twisted Road Publications), was an SPD Fiction Bestseller. She just completed a new novel. Her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and multimedia work appear in numerous places, online and in print. Susan founded World Split Open Press to publish select titles including Feckless Cunt: A Feminist Anthology. She hosts the feminist, queer, and otherwise radical Desert Split Open Mic. In 2017, she moved home to Joshua Tree, California, although she hails from Connecticut. susanrukeyser.com   

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