From Jose A. Alcantara:

If we must rant and rave, then let us
do so as they do, inconspicuously,
close to the ground, in all the wet places
until something with a stinger comes
and mounts us, turning us inward
where we learn what it is to sweeten.

– Violaceae, from Rattle

THE LODGE – COMING 2019

some wonderful, wonderful news: i have a book coming with mcclelland & stewart – The Lodge will be published in spring 2019!!

from the transatlantic agency:

 

Anna Maxymiw’s The Lodge, for readers of Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill and Fire Season by Philip Connors. This extraordinary memoir offers a glimpse into the joy, fear, filth, and ferocity of working at a remote fishing lodge in the boreal forest.
McClelland & Stewart publisher Jared Bland has acquired Canadian English-language rights at auction. An excerpt from the forthcoming memoir won Silver in the Humour category at the National Magazine Awards, where the piece was also nominated in the Personal Journalism category. Maxymiw’s work has been published in the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, The Walrus, The Malahat Review, and Maisonneuve. The Lodge is slated for publication in May 2019 with senior editor Jenny Bradshaw and publishing manager Kelly Joseph editing. The deal was arranged by Stephanie Sinclair at the Transatlantic Literary Agency.

this fabulous news has been in the works since february and i can finally shout it from the rooftops!! it’s out! no longer a secret! right now i am in the thick of edits and will be until august, and then again, so expect me to be a hermit for a year and make lots of posts about pike and bears and boreal trees.

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From sam sax:

there are many words for transformation / metamorphosis
metaphor / medication / go to sleep / beside the man you love
wake up next to a dog / maybe the moon brought it out of him
hound hungry for blood / maybe it’s your fault / or maybe
it was there inside him / howling all along

– Bestiary

From Nikki Giovanni:

she tried to be a book
but he wouldn’t read

she turned herself into a bulb
but he wouldn’t let her grow

she decided to become
a woman
and though he still refused
to be a man
she decided it was all
right

– W O M A N 

From Erika L. Sánchez:

am I asking to be spared
or am I asking to be spread your body
smelled like cathedrals and I kept
your photo in a bottle of mezcal
semen-salt wolf’s teeth you should have
touched my eyes until they blistered

–Saudade, found on Rattle

From Carmen Giménez Smith:

I was light from the mouth from every part of me
I was of the earth or a scar in the earth rent through
the ruins of late civilization and bubbled from it and
became a saint’s reptilian spirit and I could taste
the wheat and coal and gold like a trinity of bounty
and I was vapor like a smog that becomes a wraith
over the city then back to its animal form decompressed
and atomized into its past life as star and I was that animal
truth
– “Post-Identity”, found on Rattle

From Aimee Nezhukumatathil

When I hear your name I can’t forget

how your long torso pressed against my bare back,

bluish in this early light. Your fingers shot into me, popped

my spine into a wicked arch. There is no lack

of how it haunts me still—what I bid—lost, sacked

and wrapped for other girls. I should have looked up

to see who else was bidding, but I studied the folds in your jacket.

My limit is spent, loud and certain as the auctioneer’s racket.

– From After the Auction, I Bid You Good-Bye