Scott Ferry, The Long Blade of Days Ahead (Impspired, 2022) 122 pages, poetry, $9.99.
This collection comes from those emotions or states of being we tend to struggle with integrating into our experience as humans.
It starts with anxiety. Poems like "4/26":
"so I better just be ok
be ok be ok I better just be"
set the tone. But it soon becomes apparent that the anxiety likely stems from grief. Many are the poems exploring Ferry's journey with learning to accept and move forward with the death of his father as a father himself.
"4/1"
i miss my father most
when my son screams
daddy and runs to me
with so many years
in his hands
The natural human tendency to confusion in the face of these overwhelming emotions is seen here too. Ferry mocks and belittles faith. At the same time, he often speaks of ghosts and hauntings, believing that his father is visiting him in his afterlife state. Yet he seems not to be aware of the contradiction inherent in holding both these viewpoints at the same time. All of this holds true to the illogical emotional noise that accompanies grief and anxiety.
And it all makes for some intriguing poetic moments. Overall, this is a collection worth buying and reading.
I'm not thrilled with self-help books, to be honest. Generally, they are too quickly read and forgotten. The real benefit comes from application - and that rarely happens without the buddy system, someone to gently hold you to account and enthusiastically encourage you along the way. This is why working with a professional therapist has a much better success ratio than reading some random book.
This particular book, however, is different. This one is interactive. It is set up like a workbook. Get your pens and pencils out and write in it, please. Get interactive. Get involved. Journal. Take notes. Be specific. This one encourages you to actually apply the suggestions it makes to real scenarios in your life. In real time. In a realistic way.
Would you still do better with the buddy system? Absolutely. But this is a solid place to start. This is a self-help book that is actually designed to help. If you do get your pens and pencils out and do the exercises, you'll be less likely to just trash this book in a week. You might even remember a few of the suggestions when emotions are peaked. And that's about as high a bar as a self-help book can reach. Bravo.
Is(sue) 11 went live around 10 pm EDT on June 15, 2022. With this Is(sue), AvantAppal(achia) entered year 6. Thank you all very much!
This is(sue) features 3 countries and 12 states. Almost all of Appalachia is represented and a number of other places as well, along with Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina. You will also find chapter 4 of Jim Meirose’s mind-bending Beckettian novel that flips the concepts of death and resurrection on their head.
The submission period for Is(sue) 12 is now open. The deadline for that is November 30, 2022. We need your weird, fun, experimental poetry, art, and short stories. Please read Guidelines and follow them because the reading period is only 2 weeks, so we will now have to automatically reject any submission which does not follow the instructions.
Also, stay tuned for an announcement from our sister endeavor North/South Appalachia, which should be dropping into your email or on social media channels in a couple of days. Exciting, I know!
Until we meet again!
https://www.avantappalachia.
Sincerely,
Sabne Raznik
Poetry/Art Ed(itor)
"A little girl, a young lady, and a mature woman walk into a bar and order a pint of Guinness. Only the mature woman leaves.
Why?
Because "hope has wings" and only the mature woman has the experience enough to manipulate "the sadness in our will : the courage of noble righteous doomed, who defy and defy ... because we must, if only for those who lack the strength to fight". Because, as I told you, "she's lived more than you'll ever read".
The collection is a taste of mental growth in action, weaving dreams, reality and over the top stardom into a father figure only to outgrow him in the most superlative way.
A carry in your pocket lifting of burdens to peruse over and over again. Why? Because "hope" is making a ruckus to get your attention! -- Marica, Artist"
Get yours at Voicelux
The Modern Plague Years Special Is(sue) is live under the Special Is(sues) menu tab on www.avantappalachia.com! Thank you so much for sharing your work with us.
If you did not receive a yay or nay email from us about your submission during this reading cycle, know that David Sykes and I have read it and decided it would better suit a regular is(sue) and kept it for Is(sue) 11 in June. You will receive notification concerning it during that reading cycle.
Please remember to check out the Guidelines on the website when you submit and follow these. As a writer myself I know submission anxiety is real and I do not wish to be strict, but the volume of submissions we now receive and time constraints force me to it. If you fail to include the state or country of your current residence or fail to follow any of the other guidelines, we will be forced to reject your work regardless of its quality. So please – please – read those guidelines thoroughly and follow them closely. Thank you!
The deadline for Is(sue) 11 is May 31, 2022, for a publication date on June 15, 2022. We need your avantgarde, experimental, and weird poetry, art, and short stories.
Thank you for making this ezine the stellar publication it is!
Sincerely,
Sabne Raznik
Poetry/Art Ed(itor)
Kai Coggin's latest collection is modern confessional poetry. Here you will find no symbolism or imagery for its own sake. Every poem is straightforward, literal, and usually long. It leaves nothing to the imagination. These are COVID pandemic poems, a nearly chronological journal of the poet's experience of 2020. Some are optimism in extremis, others are angry, others almost despairing. All of them are starkly honest.
The best poems are introverted rather than extroverted, self-reflecting rather than social and political. These poems tend to be a little shorter and leave the reader with more breathing room for interaction by filling the little blanks that are less literal and more suggestive within them. As in "When the Stars Fall":
the rain falls
hard heavy
on the white petals
of jasmine
that have entwined
their soft bodies to the steel
that holds our house
to the earth
swirling galaxy of stars
that affixes
us to the ground
and to the heavens combined
in the morning
a universe is scattered
under our bare feet
Some of these poems are too much of their moment to remain relevant 10 or 20 years from now. Some are truly sublime. In that sense, it's a potluck seeking to be comfort food. Its strongest argument for itself is that it will continue to be an honest, individual chronicle of a year which will surely be of interest to history.
In January 2020, I was completing an audiobook of Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of Plague Year", which - although being fiction - is the nearest thing we have today to an actual journal of an individual living during the last substantial outbreak of bubonic plague in London just a year before the Great London Fire. I did not then know, of course, that I would immediately begin to live through a modern plague of different cause. I have often had occasion to think back on that book in the 2 years since listening to it and make comparisons and to be grateful for the differences that modernism makes in how humanity weathers such an event. (How fortunate we are to have refrigerators so that we do not have to go to market literally everyday for food! How wonderful is having the internet so as to stay in touch!) I imagine books like "Mining for Stardust" will serve a similar purpose for future generations in helping them to understand the human stories of this time.
