A Muted Blue Star Muses
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Is(sue) 17 Deadline Reminder
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Review of Kalehua Kim's "Mele"
Kalehua Kim, Mele (Trio House Press, 2025) 100 pages, poetry, forthcoming on July 1, 2025. More info here.
Kalehua Kim explores themes of death, family dynamics, and the relationship between mother and daughter in this collection of songs as poetry. I was excited about this as an indigenous work. It seemed to have a lot of potential as a book that has many layers of possible understanding and prisms of viewpoints.
I was especially eager to learn some Hawaiian until I discovered that each time Hawaiian appears in the text, it is a repetition of an English phrase that has already occurred, making it merely decorative - a flower to signal that this is an indigenous poet - but serving no real depth of purpose in most cases. Identity as product placement?
My favourite parts of this collection are those that focus on the poet's personal memories of her mother: how she used to sing all the time, the songs they used to share, and the intimate moments by her deathbed. These moments carry the weight of depth and of real soul. This is where we feel closest to the emotional need that drives the poet to write in the first place and where the poetry feels the most original.
Favourite lines:
"I have lost all but one tale/ you told to me in childhood./ Days were longer then," - "Ka Hale, The Nurturing Place"
"You yearn for the days when your people died/ in the beds in which they were born." - "Dying Looks Like"
"we shared so/ many words/ all we didn't say/ full" - "Glottal Stop: My Mother's Last Words"
"Other mothers find me here://... they all come to me, mothers mothering me/ Mothering with a silence that is not her silence." - "Not One Parking Space"
"His silence, humid and thick as thunder,/ hangs heavier than the sun-sapped mangoes" - "Memory Sonnet"
"No cloth can keep you clean" - "Woman's Work"
"My belly ready to spill its light// ... I pushed until I broke open with light." - "Makalii and the Stars That Followed"
"the only way to look at time is to refuse to see time" - "Ha"
"The weight of fruit strengthens/ the branch eventually." - "Songs for the Life I Chose or How to Stay Together"
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Review of Han VanderHart's "Larks"
Han VanderHart, Larks (Ohio State University Press, 2025) 86 pages, poetry, forthcoming at the time of this writing. More info here.
There's a lot going in this collection in a comparatively brief space. VanderHart covers subjects as variable as sibling-on-sibling child sexual abuse, mental illness, generationally changing values on parenting, a love of nature and herbalism and birds, a deep sense of place, etc. All written in a familiar Appalachian voice (but not the Appalachian language. Not to worry, if you are from elsewhere, this is written in standard American English but the Appalachian voice very much comes through). A lot of the poem titles are quotes, revealing that VanderHart has understood the assignment of every good writer: they read more than they write.
They hook you in with some comfortable poems that root you in place without explicitly naming that place. And then they land the punches of the real battles this book tip-toes around. I say "tip-toes", because as hard-hitting as some of this is, there is always the feeling that VanderHart is holding back, swallowing the worst, because they know it's too much for us. I respect that.
Favourite lines:
"I do not know whether it is morning or mourning" - "Invocation"
"My mother's family dammed the river and trapped the fish so often/ it became their name." - "The Body Is Water and the Water Has Origins"
"I think you should use the language/ of where you come from" - "Artist's Statement In a Mountain Cabin"
"Some things you fix/ and they break again/ and again" - "Broken"
"I measure your beginning by a glass of water and the hands that/ caught you. Somewhere" - "How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them" Ann Carson
"... what's inside the heart and also/ the land: the dirt containing more" - "Virginia seemed like always right" David Lynch
"I Can't Let My Mind Go to the Thicket" - whole poem
"I want an otherworldly ex-/ planation for unkindness, which // is the milk of the world." - "Larks"
Ohio University State Press is a BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ Press.
Saturday, February 15, 2025
"Come Hell and High Water: Helene" Special Is(sue) Release
It’s here! The “Come Hell and High Water: Helene” Special Is(sue) is live! You can view it here:https://www.avantappalachia.com/special-issues.html. This is(sue) will remain readable on the website as long as the website exists under the Special Is(sues) tab on the menu. Thank you all for your heartfelt responses and tributes to this momentous event. Ironically, I am writing you this on the day that Central Appalachia is experiencing its annual Spring floods, except this year they are exceptionally fierce. Somehow, it feels appropriate.
Submissions are still open for our regular Is(sue) 17. The deadline for that is April 30, 2025. Send us your weirdest, most fun creations! Art, poetry, and short fiction. Please, follow the guidelines as we do reject submissions that do not meet the guidelines.
We wish everyone all good things and see you in April! Thank you for being wonderful, witty, experimental, and fabulous!
Sincerely,
Sabne Raznik
Poetry/Art Ed(itor)
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Review of Kiarah Hamilton's "this is what fifteen feels like"
Hamilton invites us to read this collection from the point of view of our 15-year-old selves so that's where I'm going to write this review from (mostly). I say "mostly" because I'm late Gen X and Hamilton is Gen Alpha, I believe, so our 15s are very different POVs. When I was 15, the internet was called "Prodigy", it was dial-up, extremely expensive, almost no one had it (almost no one had a PC), and social media didn't exist yet. Late Gen X are in general a nihilist group of people who believed the world would end before they finished college and as teenagers were criminals and gangsters who got away with everything precisely because they were the first generation with parents who divorced at high rates, worked two jobs, daycare didn't exist yet, and smartphones were sci-fi. It was ghetto. I'm sure it's extremely difficult for kids today too, just in very different ways. Same old threats with new avenues.
Thursday, January 2, 2025
Review of Stephen Spanoudis' "Final Orbit: Not All Ghosts Are Human: The Autobiography of Mario Ng (The Republic of Dreams)"
Monday, December 16, 2024
Is(sue) 16 is live!
Is(sue) 16 is live! It has work from 7 countries and 12 states in the U.S.
The Arch(ive) for Is(sue) 15 is a poem by John Paul Caponigro, artwork by Edward Supranowicz, and a short story by Barbara Kumari.
The submission period is open for the “Come Hell and High Water: Helene” Special Is(sue). It is absolutely vital that you put “HELENE” in the subject line of your email. Otherwise, we will assume that email is a submission for Is(sue) 17. The deadline for this Special Is(sue) is January 15, 2025. Please, read the guidelines under the submissions page tab and the information about this Special Is(sue) on the home page before submitting.
Kinfolk, you make this ezine everything that it is. So keep that weird, wonderful, experimental, fun stuff coming! You are amazing!
Sincerely,
Sabne Raznik
Poetry/Art Ed(itor)
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Review of Douglas Cole's "The Cabin at the End of the World"
Kevin Kiely Reviews "Faller"
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Announcing New Release: "Faller" by Sabne Raznik
A collection of poems written as if in the voice of some of the "fallers" on 9/11/2001, not from a political view, but as a way to process the collective trauma of that day and as a tribute to those lives lost.
Faller is another profound collection by Sabne Raznik. intense, emotional and surreal. "The world is beautiful/At velocity." is only the first line out of all these poems that caught my eye. it makes me stumble. the beauty of this image at the emotional terror that proceeds. moving back and forth from mundane tasks and thinking of children, to the thoughts and questions of falling. it touts your mind. it pulls you in many directions. and then the beautiful love sadness of:
I was afraid to jump alone.
The jacket of my waiter’s uniform felt
Claustrophobic
So I threw it out first.
Then a woman from Table 3
Took my hand and we jumped together
Wordlessly.
so i threw it out first. that line echos in my head. the way the jacket becomes a bird. an image of acceptance, before the calm. - john compton, my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store
In Faller, a collection of poems, Sabne Raznik makes you really feel for the people who fell from the Twin Towers on 9/11. These poems, written in the voices of those who fell, are heart-wrenching. They make you think about what you would do if faced with certain death. If you were judgemental of the people who fell, you won't be after reading these evocative poems. The voices in these poems are so realistic, it's like it actually happened to the author. She puts you in these people's shoes. I've complained about things like a fax machine on the job before, so lines like: "The coworker who complains/about the copier was/standing on her desk/ because the floor burned/through her shoes" really strike a chord in me, make me realize how miniscule and petty my office complaints are in the light of a building burning so fiercely that you have to escape, even if it means certain death. When you read these poems, there is no way you can possibly think of these fallers as suicidal. These poems have eye-opening lines: "The world is beautiful at velocity. Just colour./Like an abstract painting." You really feel the tragic quality of the situation when you experience these voices: "I quit yesterday./I'm just here to get my things." You will come away with a new perspective on having to face death after reading these sad but beautiful, evocative poems. - Lori Lasseter Hamilton, limo casketAvailable for free on Sabne Raznik's official website.