Doubleback Books, an imprint of Sundress Publications, is pleased to announce the upcoming release of The Opposite of Work by Hugh Behm-Steinberg. This poetry collection was selected in our 2019 open reading period for fall publication. The Opposite of Work was originally published by JackLeg Press and we’re excited to bring it back for new readers.
The
meditative poems in The Opposite of Work are paired with intriguing images
on opposite-facing pages. The images, which operate as a flipbook, were created
by Mary Behm-Steinberg. Doubleback will also release a companion video of the
book.
On
The Opposite of Work—
“Hugh
Behm-Steinberg has built a dream-rattled space. It is a space of stretched
ideas and ideals,” Tony Mancus, PANK.
“Delicately explores the effort to come to
terms with one’s own soul and the Other,” Charles
Kruger, The Rumpus.
“Extraordinary magic and possibility,” S. Marie
Clay, Ghost Town.
Hugh
Behm-Steinberg is a poet and short fiction writer. His
books of poetry include Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books, 2007), as well
as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery (2007), Good Morning! (2011),
and The Sound of Music (2015). A collection of prose poems and
microfiction, Animal Children, is forthcoming from Nomadic Press in
January, 2020.
Behm-Steinberg is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA fellowship. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize for short fiction, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018. From 2007-2017 he served as Faculty Editor of Eleven Eleven, and he is currently the Chief Steward of the adjunct faculty union at California College of the Arts.
Look for The Opposite of Work, book download and video, coming soon at Doubleback Books.
WITHOUT CONFERING, WE BOTH ASK FOR A SMOKE & DAGGER
smack me so hard I’m a toothache / enforcing myself, a victor over savage time / give me one glass of brut & everything else give me nothing that might fin you or make this saltier Gloucester / can you see the harbor on me anymore / or that savage snifter size of a lampshade / Shahir sparked a strike anywhere match & singed sense to a faint smell / my hair so long now but still blue / we eat & eat these animal piles then climb down into the warmth of it / how much we tartare how much we pretend no one sees us leave raise our eyebrows / laugh as though we’ve had each other for breakfast more times
than you drink / coffee to wake up / three cups until you vibrate through the shift, laughing one clipped shout / tell me to ask for cold brew tell me Cynar or cider or whatever fruit you spend on an empty afternoon / just yellow peppers just Italy / along your lineless forehead where have I been that you remember / what do you taste when I round my mouth / kiss, a kind of chef’s table your friends can see me faking / how I always shake with two hands / a politician / you bite your lip the Christmas orange / chug from a bottle of chartreuse / ask who noticed our cab, our hands our table / full of more plates than we can handle confidently / I keep the secret by not speaking the bartender brings bone broth in the most beautiful pot then pours / the onions & the chanterelles are still alive when you swallow
This selection comes from the poetry collection, a falling knifehasnohandle, available from YesYes Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Tierney Bailey.
Emily O’Neill teaches writing and tends bar in Cambridge, MA. Her second poetry collection, a falling knifehasnohandle, was released with YesYes Books in fall of 2018 and was one of Publishers Weekly‘s ten most anticipated poetry titles of the season. Itwas also longlisted for the Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican, was the inaugural winner of YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize for women and genderqueer writers, as well as the winner of the 2016 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Series in Poetry. O’Neill is also the author of five chapbooks, most recently You Can’t Pick Your Genre (2nd edition Big Lucks, 2019). Her recent poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Best Indie Lit New England Anthology, Cutbank, Catapult, Redivider, Salt Hill, and Washington Square, among many others. She holds a degree in the synesthesia of storytelling from Hampshire College.
Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Currently, Tierney is an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, and a freelance graphic designer. Tierney earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.
I bought a bottle of rye tonight / some dark salted chocolate, a plate of linguini / a seat for three hours after hearing you sigh from Chicago little lemon tongue floating / could I ever impress you when you are a perfect last name / when you know everyone sitting & every rotten part of me make the bed with us in it always / furnace / you make me furious / porter risotto at two in the morning / sherry vinegar / peanut butter / my hand hooked under your left ear or / what you called the worst part & the most comforting thing of all / sorting herb leaves / propping up a thought / could I arrive in time to catch your suitcases / the correct garnish for an unexpected delay / as if I’ve known for years how to carry this
a letter delivered by hand / copper patina / conducting me towards the wrong sleep ungated flight / unabated sweetness here the ice is not enough / I know to pour too generously / I know it’s only one or two more days this waiting / I know how I am greedy / what work starving takes
This selection comes from the poetry collection, a falling knifehasnohandle, available from YesYes Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Tierney Bailey.
Emily O’Neill teaches writing and tends bar in Cambridge, MA. Her second poetry collection, a falling knifehasnohandle, was released with YesYes Books in fall of 2018 and was one of Publishers Weekly‘s ten most anticipated poetry titles of the season. Itwas also longlisted for the Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican, was the inaugural winner of YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize for women and genderqueer writers, as well as the winner of the 2016 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Series in Poetry. O’Neill is also the author of five chapbooks, most recently You Can’t Pick Your Genre (2nd edition Big Lucks, 2019). Her recent poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Best Indie Lit New England Anthology, Cutbank, Catapult, Redivider, Salt Hill, and Washington Square, among many others. She holds a degree in the synesthesia of storytelling from Hampshire College.
Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Currently, Tierney is an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, and a freelance graphic designer. Tierney earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.
I carry keys to half a dozen houses / but no memory of the walk to yours / oak leaves hissing under my boots / I’ve kept the roses carved from grapefruit rinds no one makes me anything but you this, some accidental guilt admission a quail’s egg, no lipstick sticking to you or your glass / my mouth a proud trick I play by saying always / what can I offer that might taste new? when I was wrapping your breakfast in wax paper I was supposed to be loving someone else
This selection comes from the poetry collection, a falling knifehasnohandle, available from YesYes Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Tierney Bailey.
Emily O’Neill teaches writing and tends bar in Cambridge, MA. Her second poetry collection, a falling knifehasnohandle, was released with YesYes Books in fall of 2018 and was one of Publishers Weekly‘s ten most anticipated poetry titles of the season. Itwas also longlisted for the Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican, was the inaugural winner of YesYes Books’ Pamet River Prize for women and genderqueer writers, as well as the winner of the 2016 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Series in Poetry. O’Neill is also the author of five chapbooks, most recently You Can’t Pick Your Genre (2nd edition Big Lucks, 2019). Her recent poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Best Indie Lit New England Anthology, Cutbank, Catapult, Redivider, Salt Hill, and Washington Square, among many others. She holds a degree in the synesthesia of storytelling from Hampshire College.
Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Currently, Tierney is an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, and a freelance graphic designer. Tierney earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.
I doubted my father would send communiqués through a
medium. But he turned up right on cue. The medium said Dad
was concerned about the frequency with which I wield “the
sword of injustice.” I knew exactly what he was referring to
having just called my neighbor a bitch. Dad went on to goad
me about my hypochondria. “Well,” I said, “if he’s joking that
must mean the cyst is benign.” The medium used an etch a
sketch. Every now and then I could hear him shaking it through
the phone. My uncle showed up. He was dancing. He didn’t
respond when we asked whether his son had been wrongly
convicted. A former neighbor appeared and reminded me that
I had once coveted her Pottery Barn rug, but, when pressed,
offered no explanation for the suicide. My friend’s husband
wouldn’t reveal whether he’d been poisoned, instead he spent
ten minutes describing his beloved Corvette.
This selection comes from the poetry book, Goodbye Toothless House, available from KATTYWOMPUS PRESS. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Tierney Bailey.
Kelly Fordon is the author of three poetry chapbooks. The first one, On the Street Where We Live, won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award and the latest one, The Witness, won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was shortlisted for the Grand Prize. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, was published by Kattywompus Press in February 2019. A new short story collection, I Have the Answer, will be published by Wayne State University in April 2020. She teaches at the College for Creative Studies, Springfed Arts, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. www.kellyfordon.com
Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Currently, Tierney is an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, and a freelance graphic designer. Tierney earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.
Rise: The last thing you ate was a small smidge of birthday cake. Fall: Now you swell and molder on an army green tarp. Rise: A raccoon raked your chest open like a bag of potato chips last night Fall: but sometimes your sun-dappled breast still looks like it is…. Rise: While I was watching, your neighbor, Number 27, shimmied then popped his bloated tongue pressed into the ground. Fall: I long to flick the small spider traversing the length of your belly, Rise: a monk pressing on across the desert thirsty, but resigned.
This selection comes from the poetry book, Goodbye Toothless House, available from KATTYWOMPUS PRESS. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Tierney Bailey.
Kelly Fordon is the author of three poetry chapbooks. The first one, On the Street Where We Live, won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award and the latest one, The Witness, won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was shortlisted for the Grand Prize. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, was published by Kattywompus Press in February 2019. A new short story collection, I Have the Answer, will be published by Wayne State University in April 2020. She teaches at the College for Creative Studies, Springfed Arts, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. www.kellyfordon.com
Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Currently, Tierney is an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, and a freelance graphic designer. Tierney earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! In our latest installment, Nate Logan shares two of his favorite James Tate poems. He talks about his appreciation of the “deceptive simplicity” that underscores Tate’s poetry and the ways in which Tate’s work has influenced his own. Thanks for reading!
Riley Steiner: Why did you choose these two poems for Lyric Essentials?
Nate Logan: For me, these poems were relatively easy choices. “Consolations After an Affair” is my favorite Tate poem and my all-time favorite poem. “I sat at my desk and contemplated all that I had accomplished” was the last poem Tate wrote. If you’d asked me to pick three poems, I couldn’t say who I’d put the bronze medal on. “A Wedding,” maybe? Can “I Am a Finn” and “I Am Still a Finn” count as one?
RS: What do you admire about James Tate’s work?
NL: I’m not the first person to say this, but the deceptive simplicity of Tate’s work always invites me in. In On James Tate, Lee Upton writes: “The banal that we are presumably to control in daily life proves, if not entirely uncontrollable, to be possessed of near-demonic force. That is, in his poems the banal asserts itself.” I love that. Tate’s speakers are in our almost-world: they encounter people and situations that are slightly off, but not so off that I can’t imagine it happening in real life. Even though Tate abandoned writing about his waking life early on, the poems are not devoid of our collective lives.
RS: It wasn’t until I started reading about James Tate that I found out that “I sat at my desk…” was the last poem he wrote before he passed away in 2015 after a long illness. Do you think this poem reflects anything about that time of his life?
NL: I never had the opportunity to see Tate read live or take a class with him. I’ve heard various stories about him and am friendly with other poets who did have him as a teacher and/or see him read. I’ve watched some videos online where he appeared frail, but that’s the extent of my personal knowledge of him.
“I sat at my desk…” was discovered in Tate’s typewriter after his death (there’s a picture of it in his last book, The Government Lake). The poem reads as a meditation on age, which seems as natural a topic as any for a poet in his 70s. But still, that singular voice is there. “I ate / a cheeseburger every day for a year. I never want to do that again.” And the end of the poem, it made me tear up the first time I read it: “A policeman stopped me on the street and said / he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked just like / me and had the same name. What are the chances?” That last sentence, “What are the chances?” is a perfect summary of Tate’s work. I ask this at the end of every Tate poem, not as a way of measuring suspension of disbelief, but as a way to express wonder at what I just read.
RS: Has his work influenced your own in any way?
NL: Oh, certainly. It’s flattering whenever a poet or reader says my work reminds them of Tate. I don’t care to write from my waking life either, so my poems are also filled with situations and speakers from a world like our own, but not exactly. Readers have also told me that my work contains an understated thread of humor, which is also a staple of Tate’s work.
RS: Is there anything you’re currently working on that you’d like to tell us about?
NL: Currently, I’m just writing poems in the routine I established during my MFA. I do have a few poems written with Clu Gulager as a protagonist, which may turn into a chapbook-length manuscript, but he doesn’t need my help making fans.
James Tate is a poet from Kansas City, Missouri. Over the course of his career, Tate published more than 20 collections of poetry. He won the National Book Award for Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994) and the Pulitzer Prize and William Carlos Williams Award for Selected Poems (1991). His final collection, The Government Lake, was published three years after his death in 2015.
Further reading:
Read a feature about James Tate in the New Yorker Read a review of The Government Lake in The Paris Review Purchase The Government Lake
Nate Logan is the author of Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He’s editor and publisher of Spooky Girlfriend Press and teaches at Marian University.
Riley Steiner graduated from Miami University, where she studied Creative Writing and Media & Culture. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she enjoys baking, cheering for the Green Bay Packers, and spending way too much money at Half Price Books. Her creative work has recently appeared in the Oakland Arts Review and Collision.
Sidewalks replete with roving red-eyes, swindlers who swarm our daughters, slip into their ear buds, caress their baby faces, lull them into dreams of the perfect Still-life in Bloom.
This selection comes from the poetry book, Goodbye Toothless House, available from KATTYWOMPUS PRESS. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Tierney Bailey.
Kelly Fordon is the author of three poetry chapbooks. The first one, On the Street Where We Live, won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award and the latest one, The Witness, won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was shortlisted for the Grand Prize. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, was published by Kattywompus Press in February 2019. A new short story collection, I Have the Answer, will be published by Wayne State University in April 2020. She teaches at the College for Creative Studies, Springfed Arts, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. www.kellyfordon.com
Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Currently, Tierney is an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, and a freelance graphic designer. Tierney earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.
You do not want to enter but she has you by the throat. At this point, you are not armed.
Rose-colored building, 1950s art deco, long white hallways, smells like under the kitchen cabinet, smells like under a limey rock, smells like dirty handkerchiefs, smells like dark cavities.
A head on a white plate. A nurse holding it up by its greasy tendrils, spooning yellow mash on to the cracked pavement tongue. Watch the mash seep out onto the white plate. Watch the bag underneath the bed fill with mud.
A room with pale blue walls, dirty blue, corrosive blue, pewter, blue that makes you want to weep, blue that makes you want to bang your head.
Listen as she chatters and clicks around the room in three-inch heels: How about some air in here! Have you been watching the French Open? Are you comfortable? Would you like me to turn on the light? The doctor certainly seems nice. I’m sorry we’re so late. We brought you some ice cream. Do you think you can stomach some ice cream?
Laugh. Asking a dying man…
Duck tomahawk glare.
Thirty years pass. Visit various heads in beds including but not limited to: your autistic aunt, your homeless uncle, your agoraphobic grandmother.
Do Not Touch. Each one has been carefully preserved in cellophane.
Arm yourself.
Your cat should have known better than to stare you down.
Killer heels.
You will be frisked.
A cylinder in back catches some of the black effluvium and another one underneath catches the rest.
Did you watch the U.S. Open last night? Did you read the life section today? I think I need a cup of coffee. Is anyone ever going to change the garbage? Didn’t you see this coming? I saw this coming. I’ve always known how this would end.
This selection comes from the poetry book, Goodbye Toothless House, available from KATTYWOMPUS PRESS. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Tierney Bailey.
Kelly Fordon is the author of three poetry chapbooks. The first one, On the Street Where We Live, won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award and the latest one, The Witness, won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was shortlisted for the Grand Prize. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, was published by Kattywompus Press in February 2019. A new short story collection, I Have the Answer, will be published by Wayne State University in April 2020. She teaches at the College for Creative Studies, Springfed Arts, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. www.kellyfordon.com
Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Currently, Tierney is an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, and a freelance graphic designer. Tierney earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.
AndresRojas is the author of the chapbook Looking For What Isn’t There (Paper Nautilus Debut Series winner, 2019) and of the audio chapbook The Season of the Dead (EAT Poems, 2016). His poetry has been featured in the Best New Poets series and has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and Poetry Northwest. Excerpt-four lines from “New Year’s Eve:”
Again we turn our heads to lessen the wind’s sting. Again
we hope to become neither prey nor hunger, the children in them nor the chain-link kennels.
Remi Recchia is a transgender poet playwright from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University, where he served as Assistant Poetry Editor for the Mid-American Review and taught Creative Writing. Remi is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared in Barzakh Magazine, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Front Porch, Gravel, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Haverthorn Press, among others, and he may be found on Twitter at @steambbcrywolf.
Excerpt My hands are sometimes corduroy & I’m wondering
if I still fit inside your jeans, inside your lightbulb pocket.
Alyssa Molina is a Knoxville based poet and is a senior in her undergrad at the University of Tennessee studying creative writing. Alyssa was born and raised in Miami, “Little Havana,” FL, as her Cuban family says. Being first generation American, she is profoundly inspired by the tenacity of her family’s immigration story, their will to survive, and her hispanic culture. Alyssa is loud and proud with a laugh that is often heard before she is seen. If she isn’t laughing, she’s trying to make others laugh with elaborate stories. She was a traveling poet with The Fifth Woman in 2017-2018, and performed at Bonnaroo. Molina has hosted four poetry workshops with Marilyn Kallet, Seed Lynn, Daje Morris, and most currently with Sundress Academy. Alyssa defines happiness as bare feet, a cigar, and salsa dancing.
