ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap. Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
Review of The Circus by Julia Vinograd
The Circus
by Julia Vinograd
Thorp Springs Press, 1974
As a teenager, I’d take the bus to a now-defunct feminist bookstore called Broad Vocabulary. A couple treasures from those mid-2000s trips survive, including Julia Vinograd’s The Circus published by Thorp Springs Press in Berkeley in 1974.
What a portal into early 70s California youth culture. Discussions of coffee houses, tourists, wine, cocaine, the FBI, guitar strings, hitchhiking, and the like abound.
Now that I’m thirty, I’ve outgrown some of the themes that originally drew me in: parents asking the speaker “What are you doing in Berkeley?” and lines that don’t land like “2 breasts tell an arm they want some acid.” What still compels is the energy of a youthful (and deeply cynical) speaker enchanted by the possibilities of the city and her own intellect. There are also mystical, surreal images like a hamburger “floating three feet above the ground” or “a jeweled knife,/a full balloon,/an embroidered belt.”
You needn’t time-travel to find a coffee-charged discussion about politics and art. But in this time of social distancing, what writer Samuel Delaney calls “contact,” the magic that blooms when strangers converse in the city, is rare.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
