Dedicated to the memory of Thomas B. Gay, educator, painter, poet, friend.
(read more about Thomas B. Gay)
Each spring we use this reading loop to bring to your attention to writers and artists whose work you may be encountering for the first time. In this issue, the group includes several who have already made their way to other lists and anthologies acclaiming their remarkable work. We expect that you will be glad to discover them now—and to hear of them again later in their careers, as you no doubt will.
| For work published by George Garrett in Blackbird, as well as Kelly Cherry's essay “The Achievement of George Garrett,” please see
In Previous Issues |
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Liana Quill’s presence in this loop is dedicated to the memory of George Garrett. Blackbird invited R.H.W. Dillard, student, colleague, and friend of George, to select and introduce a student of his own to honor George’s remarkable generosity to emerging writers and his resonant influence as a teacher and mentor. George was a friend to Blackbird and a contributor to our first issue as well as to others. Our thanks go to Richard and, always, to George.
We also dedicate Introductions to the memory of Thomas B. Gay, Richmond artist and writer and keen supporter of beginning artists of any age or medium.
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Jocelyn Cullity In a woman’s voice resurrected from the past yet made blunt by suffering and loss, Jocelyn Cullity offers us a poignant historical narrative set in India during the devastation of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. Euphemism and evasion encircle a young wife and mother trapped by mutiny and siege. Whittled by misery and angry ghosts, driven by the urge to survive, she sees her choices narrow, sharply, to death or endurance. “We didn’t hear my husband open the door.” |
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Zachary Mason Zachary Mason’s terse dialogue provides a guiding oracle whose voice is palpably creepy yet somehow familiar and authoritative. The questioning seeker is intrepid, but hesitant. “For now, you can still turn back; there are more games, endless unexplored branches of the underworld, though in time even these will stale for you, and if you are to keep playing you will have to become numb, have to embrace a gradual erosion of self.” |
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Airin Miller Airin Miller’s “Singing for Dixie” traces a cresting and oddly familiar rockabilly trio at the iceberg tip of stardom. Miller’s voice invites her reader to ride shotgun, to experience a speculative road trip into the heart and process of a budding icon. “. . . through a chapel of cheers, the audience upraised their hands. The band stopped. He stood steady in his noiselessness. His eyes were fierce. He cuffed his guitar. The howl lagged in the air, two strings ripped clean.” |
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Ben Jurgensen Ben Jurgensen has created a piece for Blackbird that he uses as an opportunity to invert his sculptural practice, as he applies logic embedded in the physical world to digital content. “Missteps,” he states, “is a curatorial project in which found digital imagery has been organized through the lens of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Dawkin’s theory of memetics.” The result is frequently hilarious, often disturbing, and entirely thought provoking. |
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Melody S. Gee Though mindful of transience, Melody Gee offers a lucid vision of life’s unending cycles. Her work is observant and contemplative, precise yet intense, whether encountering a violent and chaotic demise, as when “gulls hover, then rain hard, parting crab // flesh from armor,” or the mythic, quiet departure of the mother in “History Filled In,” where a daughter’s grief is preserved in “this cold that burns. / Cold with a thickeness of braided hair / or a man’s hand.” |
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Joanna Pearson The dream work here in Joanna Pearson’s poems gets us to put on the skins of other selves: twisted and masked, or animal and nearly lost in that otherness. The hallucinations there discover and unveil the terrors of love, until the poems surface again into their aftermath as, with a voice both familiar and grounding, Pearson deftly awakens her readers, leaving us mesmerized and pensive. “Three weeks in, the masked man whispered, / Let me disfigure you gently.” |
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Liana Quill Liana Quill is introduced in by her teacher, R.H.W. Dillard in “An ABC of Reading the Poems of Liana Quill.” Dillard notes, “Her tiny poems, seldom longer than eight words, are the result of a long and considered discarding of those words unnecessary to the essential mission of any given poem . . . The result is a new kind of poem, carefully composed in such a compressed language that it renders them as dense as diamonds—and as brilliant.” |
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Sara Quinn Rivara Spun with surreal imagery and scintillating diction, Sara Quinn Rivara’s poetry employs metaphors dangerously and delightfully extended; riffing on Williams yet moving beyond him, “In the Fields of Asphodel, Evening” takes a wild journey through a mythic underworld both disguised and revealed to an ending tranquil, illuminated, and transformed: “Hand over your sorrows, cross the tangled line. This is the last / blessing. Look: your body has begun to shine.” |
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Introductions texts appear in different sections of Blackbird but are organized in this alternative menu, a featured reading loop allowing easy navigation of related material.
A link to this “Introductions Reading Loop” menu appears at the bottom of every Introductions-related
page. You may also return to this menu at any time by visiting Features.
In addition, be sure to check out our coda to this loop, which closes out features for v9n1. In Tracking the Muse, we invite those featured in the Introductions Reading Lloop to provide us with some insite to their creative process.