The Frame Called Ruin by Hadara Bar-Nadav
(New Issues, 2012) 


reviewed by Michael McLane

I should admit up front that I’ve been waiting for Hadara Bar-Nadav’s second collection of poems for some time. Her first collection, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Good Night (2007), was a relentless hunger of a book whose opening scenes of butchering were breathtaking and deeply unsettling. I return to them again and again. And so I’ll also readily admit that when I sat down to start distributing the review copies received from numerous presses at the end of the year and opened a New Issues package to find The Frame Called Ruin, I announced to the otherwise unoccupied room “this one is mine, all mine.” I was not disappointed.

The Frame Called Ruin is as much a study in place and space (and the tragedies that try to fracture the former from the latter) as it is an ekphrastic exercise. The “Frame” of the title envelops the confines created by buildings and cities, particularly those under siege, just as much as it does the edges of Rothko’s paintings, Nevelson’s sculptures, and the walls of Zaha Hadid’s architectural brilliance. It seems no small coincidence that the artists who receive the bulk of Bar-Nadav’s attention all hailed from places of long-running strife and revolution—Rothko and Nevelson from Czarist Russia and Hadid from Baghdad. Such places are claimed and reclaimed through violence, yet these artists transcend their fractured roots and identities through artistry in the same way that the love and humor and lyricism at which Bar-Nadav is so adept allows her speakers to transcend the horrors that surround them. Creation is the ever-present counterbalance to oblivion and hate as illustrated in her first poem for Nevelson, “Night, White and Gold,” when she writes “A wall has / certain mass and weight. Focus on forms and vacancies. I own my voids, deepest black. / And now my secret is out: I’m motherhouse” or in “III. Operatic Space,” where Hadid’s curving, effortless architectures illustrate how “Like any set of religious guides / these things are fluid, not rigid. Even building can allow / air and light. Through precision and interpretation / you can eliminate wasted space.”

There are small reclamations in so many of these poems. There is no wasted place, no matter how bombed or burned, as long as making and longing arise from the rubble. Likewise, there is no wasted space here, even when the terse, constrictive lines that make up much of the book give way to fluid prose of the artist persona poems. Even the transitional spaces in the poems—between peace and war, between calm and tumult, between one Rothko red and another—provide opportunity for reflection and to be engulfed, whether by passion or pain, as with the speaker in “III. The Art of Untitled” when she says

    A period says when to begin or end but who really knows. I spend hours and days
    inside red trying to solve syntax. Savage. Salve. Save.

Even within the labyrinth, the pinnacle of confinement and misdirection, the minotaur of the “Inside the Maze” series find ways to transcend the literal and categorical restraints placed upon him. The box forms of the poems belie the reflections and desires of a being that is as lonely as he is monstrous, as fanciful as he is ravenous

    In springtime, my lush season
    To  feed,  I  never  even  try to
    Leave. Berries (reds and deep
    blues) line the maze  plentiful
    and nipple sweet […]

                                      […] I could
    Ram the walls and tunnel through
    But   where   would   I   live?   Exile.
    And  why  leave?   Pariah.  Derelict.
    My palatable palace […]

Nevelson and Hadid represent another site of constraint and violence in the collection that appear in many of Bar-Nadav’s less prominent characters as well—the female body. Both women overcame overt prejudices in their respective disciplines and Bar-Nadav addresses these conflicts both overtly, as in Nevelson’s question about her sculpture “If I were a man would you call it ‘dollhouse,’” and more subtly in the fluid and fertile images ascribed to Hadid’s buildings. However, women in other poems are subject to far more heinous kinds of violence that points back to an effort to frame, constrain, and reduce. In “Lust and Smoke,” the speaker begins “You overwhelm me with your dress / always lifting, always falling. / Velvet parting” only to lose all of the “you” except the dress “breathtaking on TV, the reporter bleeding from her mouth,” the ruin complete by the closing lines. Likewise, Snow White is disembodied to nothing more than a televised head in “I Used to Be Snow White” and the woman in “Show Me Yours” is reduced to
    
    The names you yell at night,
    In the day, The names
    You chew like pebbled break.

    Breakage is such sweet sorrow

Nonetheless, love and companionship are what keep the darkness at bay in these poems. Though it does not seem to have the personal immediacy of A Glass of Milk to Kiss Good Night, the new collection is every bit as unrelenting in its brutality, and also its healing, as Bar-Nadav’s earlier work. From the opening image of Tel Aviv’s face wearing “a makeup of ash,” we are in the heart of ruin that is simultaneously reiterated and renounced. The world explodes again and again, “Days crumble unceremoniously,” only to reveal some small blossoming in the bedlam.  In one of the book’s most startling moments, amidst the knifed and torn and mutated world of “Let Me Hold the Kaleidoscope,” two lovers rush to their room where
  
    Everything unbuttons and we
                 forget about war,                 
                 its itchy apparatus.

    Romance nevertheless is true,
                 The moon a cluster of shredded sequins,
                 Deconstruction a song for two.
 
Likewise, in “Blur,” victims of the Eilat suicide bombing long for “wine / to drown this red day” and describe the aftermath of the explosion:
      
    lights and fire balloons,
                  a painterly gasoline blur. 
                 Let’s find a sailboat,
    bread, za’atar and figs
                  and watch the distance burn.

These moments, among many in the book, illustrate an unwillingness to be framed, both in terms of constraint and in terms of incrimination, by the horror humans are willing to visit upon one another. Life is affirmed again and again, in spite of the crumbling Twin Towers or the wreckage of a baby carriage abandoned on the beach, as in the speaker of “Meet Me (Breathless)” who begs a companion to “Bring your accordion mouth and your love / of emptiness. Bring a fire and the wild nest of your neck. Bring your open throat.”  Even in Bar-Nadav’s litanies that choose as their focal point phrases such as “my wife,” “less lonely,” and “to be dead,” we find that the commonalities and the finalities of being human bind more closely than any framework’s religion and geopolitics have to offer. We rise from ruin in the same impossible ways to watch, like Rothko “how slowly life eats. And so full of color.”

The Frame Called Ruin is, like the “impossible stairs” in one of its poems—kaleidoscopic, so much “torsion and thrust.” For every step, there is uncertain footing, a likely fall. The reader feels them equally, especially in the poet’s uncanny knack for condensation, for tiny couplets that explode in their oscillating humor and devastation. Bar-Nadav sums up our persistent cycle of failure and longing in one unfettered line:

    We love beyond all these drippings, 
               a love that lasts.

Clangings by Steven Cramer
(Sarabande Books, 2012) 


reviewed by Dylan Mace

More than ten years ago, I worked in an emergency room as a clerk. With the flow of heart attacks and car crashes, strokes and lacerations, came the crisis patients. Mostly, they were suicidal. Ambulances rushed them in, brought them to the locked rooms where nurses fed them a slurry of charcoal to counteract whatever poison they had ingested. By the time I saw them, their eyes were red and swollen, their mouths stained black from vomiting charcoal. They were pitiable; and easily understood. Sometimes it seems better to end it. More rarely, the patients were psychotic.

One of the many symptoms sometimes displayed by people experiencing psychosis is clanging, which is typified by compulsive rhyming and alliteration, the use of words based on how their sounds relate to other words, rather than their meaning, and disorganized speech. In his book Clangings, Steven Cramer has taken this symptom as the basis for a collection of poems.

My first experience of clanging was in one of the crisis rooms, while attempting to get personal information from a schizophrenic patient. His eyes glanced around the room, and he incorporated the things that he saw into a rush of alliteration and rhyme. Even though I could see his sources, his speaking made little sense. I asked his name and he answered with a singsong rhyme, which, so far as I could tell, bore no information that I needed. Another patient was paranoid and psychotic, but was deemed by the doctor and social worker to not need inpatient care. So, in the middle of the night, during a rare downtime in the emergency room, he sat waiting in the lobby and talked to me until his cab arrived. He told me a little about his life, but he kept veering into concerns about aliens. There were moments of lucidity, then he’d plunge back into his rhythmic concerns about the aliens’ plans. The cab took terribly long to arrive. Reading Clangings, I had another experience of the rhythm, rhyme and alliteration

    feral sheikhs, in the sheets, amigo
    Wrecked rexes, they preach shrieks,
    refluxes inbred, steppe-tundra freeze reflex.
    A good sniff, out snorts an inner wooly rhino.

Clangings feels like a book-length poem rather than a collection. The entire collection is tightly rhythmed in more or less rhyming quatrains. This structure allows the reader a way through the chaos of the poetry, though it is not easy going (reading a few pages left me exhausted as those long-ago conversations). Cramer is acrobatic in his wordplay, and the reader is quickly caught up in this. The simple structure of the quatrains belies the difficult syntax and slang and creates the reading equivalent of running down a steep hill, when momentum is the way that the runner keeps their footing. Thrown into this, are moments of lucidity. After being battered by lines like:

    If an elf owl’s about to kill, he’ll nick
    its greedies in time, strafe my mouth,
    take a summer pump and cool off…
    Dickey’s what a tear in the eye’ll reflect
 
the reader suddenly comes across something like

    I’m speaking with my mother’s voice
    because she always told me what to say.
    Because he always told me what to say,
    I’m speaking with my father’s voice.

It may seem a welcome break, but in the rush of clangings that the reader is accustomed to, such clarity becomes alien. They trip the reader as much as they provide a point of relief, and are quickly followed by the difficult and perhaps nonsensical words that follow.

Throughout Clangings, in spite of the tumult of the narrator, Cramer manages to convey portions of the life of the character, though it is usually difficult to put a finger on specifics. The reader grasps at scraps and tries to cohere them into a narrative. Sometimes a relatively obvious meaning hides, easily, within a poem. Multiple readings bring clarity. I had to read passages such as

    Stashed my secret name in its haven.
    Think I mean dick when I say Dickey?—
    I do and I don’t; or did, but won’t say
    anyway. Makes a greener chameleon […]

at least twice before it struck how simple the meanings can be. The book contains a biography of casual abuse from parents, lost homosexual love and inability to maintain normal human relations because of mental illness. The themes of this biography are not particularly unusual. It is the clangings and confusion Cramer uses that give the reader a deeper understanding of the narrator, that give us some insight into his suffering and his inability to hold onto reality.

Cramer has done his research while writing this collection. Numerous lines come from books and articles about the disorganized thinking that manifests during psychotic mental illness. He has taken these phrases, modified and repurposed them for the poems. These lines, however, are inconspicuous within the poems. It was only when I finished reading that I noticed the citations at the end and knew that they were not Cramer’s. That the whole sounds so similar to these legitimately psychotic phrases shows that his research allowed him the ability to mimic the sounds and rhythm of speech of psychotic individuals. Cramer’s method also suggests that the human experience of any person,  be they mentally ill or not, is relatively similar to that of the rest of the species. Even when their communication is garbled and disjointed, we are able to glean meaning and understanding, and to empathize with their suffering.

I had not thought much of the time when I worked in the emergency room, until reading Clangings. Only a few pages into the collection, I remembered those experiences clearly, as if they had just happened, propelled by stanzas, such as:

    the outlets, swipe the prints
    off DVDs, weep up the tea
    stains where once were coffee.
    Not one seep from him since.

These moments pile up and overwhelm. I had this reaction initially, eager to get through the experience. This in itself would have made me declare Steven Cramer’s book a success—he hit close to the mark and was able to vividly recreate such disorienting, and often impossible, conversations. However, as I made my way through this collection, I realized that there were bits that I could connect together to find meaning and understanding in the confusion. Clangings made me remember the humanity of those people, to think again about the frustration and fear experienced when confronted by mental illness, no doubt to the greatest extent by those who are ill; to empathize with those patients who so confused and frightened me over a decade ago.

Commemoration by Lisa Dordal
(Finishing Line Press, 2012) 


reviewed by Patrick Thomas Henry

The seventeen poems in Lisa Dordal’s chapbook Commemoration strip remembrance and mourning of their ceremonial trappings and observe the practice of everyday living as a continuous recollection of those who have passed before us. But Dordal’s poems care little for honeyed nostalgia, for words and sentiments that are “hovering in the air between us / like some sweet angel of you, returned.” These poems are not elegies that lament the loss of the past, but calm meditations mulling over how we become ourselves because, and perhaps in spite, of the impediments to happiness, to easy explanations. This collection, quite understandably, is a wealthy store of sincere yet evocatively understated language, subtle yet precise euphemisms betraying concealed truths, and frank diction.

The chapbook opens with the seven-part “Holy Week,” an elegy in which the poetic persona treks through her mother’s depression, alcoholism, and death before arriving at her own spiritual and sexual awakenings. Such recurring images as hidden mason jars filled with bourbon, secreted notes, dyed hair, and makeup acquire symbolic freight in “Holy Week” and transmit the mother’s fears and insecurities to the speaker. “Passing On,” the sixth episode in this poem, meditates simultaneously on the mother’s death and the speaker’s inheritances via a note that the speaker discovers taped to the underside of a desk. The note relays how the mother came into possession of this piece of furniture:  “I received this desk from Sheila, today’s note begins, / who bought it from her co-worker, Beth McKinley / who inherited it from Helen Smith, a friend dear to us both.” Euphemism functions powerfully in these three lines, as elsewhere in “Holy Week”:  the lineage of women suggests the bequeathal of an estate and of identity, even as “a friend dear to us both” suggests sexual intimacy between the women—a precursor to the speaker’s own sexual orientation. These notes and reminders convey the mother’s latent homosexuality, addiction, and loneliness, and through these the speaker learns how each of these traits “passed on until it opened out inside of me / falling out of nothing.”

This process of searching, locating, and striving cycles throughout Dordal’s chapbook, yet it is often accompanied by stark reminders that the soul’s findings are invisible to other observers. This shifts somewhat in “On the Way to Emmaus,” when the speaker cannot penetrate the inner thoughts of Jesus and Cleopas, who are seen hiking to Emmaus:

    I know what it’s like not to be seen but, still,
    my eyes faltered and all I saw was two men walking,
    one of whom, true stranger in the text, was you.

Here, Dordal reminds us that sometimes we are the viewers—the outsiders—who cannot perceive a disguised reality. Still, her message comes across quietly, without blatant moralizing.

Dordal’s poems avoid chastising her readers only because of the collection’s greatest strength: her terse, yet sincere, diction. These poems challenge presumptions with a candidness that can only stem from common sense: of course, these poems seem to say, if others appear inscrutable to me, I must be equally impossible to read. This awareness charges the appeal in “A Dream for the Earth,” in which the persona pens a letter responding to Robert Hass’s inability to see beyond superficial details in his famous poem “State of the Planet.” Similarly, the two-parted “Christmas Pageant” plays with this in recalling a childhood pageant in the first section, while the second component depicts a visiting poet dissecting and misreading that reflection; the visiting poet continuously fails to navigate these lines about a Christmas pageant, and he paddles confusedly through a stream of thoughts with numerous strokes of “Unless of course, unless of course…”

The sparseness in the best of Dordal’s lines causes her more cumbersome phrases to sound foreign and heavy-handed, if not overwrought. “Small Metal Boy,” a poem that deftly chastises a culture that prizes male crudeness, is one site of this tension. The central conceit of this poem is a functional kitchen decoration—a metal Grecian boy that, when a button is pushed, urinates whiskey into a glass. The Greek child, the “Ancient Age” of the dispensed whiskey, and the “coliseum of Woodlawn Avenue” suggest that this male privilege is outmoded, but the second stanza’s figure of the speaker’s grandfather, who always pulls over by Al’s Market to urinate in the shrubs, informs us that this preference for masculinity is at least as insidious as Hellenic allusions in poetry. The three lines of the final stanza identify the inequality at work: these privileges would never be afforded to a girl due to the aesthetics of the patriarchy’s Old Boys’ Club. The whiskey-pissing statue and the grandfather

    Could never be a girl. The unseemly squat.
    Or standing there—naked and seductive—
    wet whiskey on her thighs.

While this closing stanza is indicative of Dordal’s acerbic frankness, the first two stanzas are redundant. Here, the repetition forcefully reminds us of easily remembered images. Dordal harps on the diminutive features of the statue, with “small” appearing three times in the body of the piece: “the small metal boy” with “the small metal penis,” a body part later referenced as the “small public part.”  Likewise, redundancy drums into the poem when the grandfather stops to “unzip his pants / and piss straight into the mess of scraggly bushes.” A few excisions in the first two stanzas could have amplified the speaker’s discontent, preparing readers for the last stanza’s articulation of the new aesthetic of the female body—an art that is “naked and seductive,” rendering all these bawdy, urinating men lewd at best.

The collection nonetheless reveals how we ultimately stumble into a self-awareness that remains invisible to others. Speaking precisely this message, “The Lies That Save Us” provides a fitting coda for Commemoration. Here, a pair of lovers has embarked on a road trip through Georgia, and the people they’ve encountered constantly ask, “Are you sisters?” The poem’s women respond in unison:

    Yes, we answer, Twins, even.
    Though we are dressed similarly
    [. . .]
    we look nothing alike.
    Thought so, people say,
    as if they have figured out
    some secret code.

The other characters only see confirmation of what they already believe and desire. To fulfill those values and yearnings, the climax of this poem hinges on the muddle of the “secret code.”  Have these people pegged the women as lesbians? Do they fall for the ruse of twinship, reading the matching clothes as a sign of sisterly closeness? It hardly matters. The lovers in “The Lies That Save Us” manipulate this ambiguity: it saves them from misinterpretations, from harsh Southern judgments.

What matters in this poem, as elsewhere in Dordal’s chapbook, are the unspoken sensations and the ghostly presences that form us—what Dordal depicts as “the power of things unseen: / of atoms, quarks, and auras / and all the love that lies between.” Commemoration avoids the easy resolution of surrendering to nostalgia and dreams of a fulfilling community. Though surrounded by lovers and friends and family, the poetic personae in Dordal’s book journey through their reflections alone. Progress, awareness, selfhood: these are private riches, acquired through introspection and stored in the soul, that will remain personal secrets, invisible to the world. Others will stare, oblivious to this inner self that her speakers celebrate simply by living. Closing the volume in another of those provocative ambiguities, Dordal at once dismisses and welcomes these ogling strangers: “all they can see,” she writes, “is something.”

The Sound of Sugar....Matthew Ivan Bennett

“The Mormons Are The Only Utopia That Ever Worked.”

—Peter Drucker, Deseret News, January 13, 2010 

On a pew in 1983 I believed this, but now the imagined bonnets are
slow to smile. Years converted me from organ strains into sympathy for
wife number seven who stares over cracked wheat, eyes full of Goshute
wilderness.

She rides West, expecting snowmelt to bleach Temple clothes—but the
chill only taunts. Bites down to bone with its questions.

Yet Seven lasts the interrogation, & spring water calls the woman upward,
to uncorseted yellow pine, where she gulps down the crystal syllable of
“No.”

Once inside her, the sound rips Masonic stitching from her underwear.
Gold-plated dreams fall through the holes.





About the Poet:

Matthew Ivan Bennett began writing at 10 when he saw a writer on TV in a comfy green sweater. Through years of commitment Matt earned his own green sweater, and wears it while workshopping plays with Plan-B Theatre and jumping on the mini-tramp serving as his office chair. His poetry has been published with Kolob Canyon Review, Western Humanities Review, and Mixer.



About the Sound of Sugar:
We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.

The Sound of Sugar...Elijah Burrell

Bones

I.
At school, my daughter made a skeleton:
She cut little swabs of ribs, toes, and eyes,
broken Q-Tips held down by slick-smooth pearls
of glue against matte black construction paper.

II.
Flipping channels from the couch, we see a show
about Africa. Perhaps we’ll learn about lions.
As corpses appear, I quickly cover her eyes.
I click off the TV, amazed at my lapse.
Quiet seconds pass. Then, “Daddy, what
was that?”

III.
Sixty-five thousand fled the church, stampeded
to the school, the grave of masses. Armed with dirt
clods and rocks, fingernails and teeth, no match
for the Hutus. Then they watched each other die.
There’s a place called Murambi, where the walls are lined
with the bones of babies. Eggshell skulls are cracked.
Shivers of femurs. Fractured ulnae.

IV.
Saying grace, I feel the bones in my daughter’s hand.
The Q-Tip skeleton stares from the fridge.



About the Poet:
Elijah Burrell holds his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. His writing has appeared in Measure, The Sugar House Review, Structo, Swink Magazine, Cedars, The Country Dog Review, and many others. He received the 2009 Cecil A. Blue Award in Poetry and the 2010 Jane Kenyon Scholarship at Bennington College. Recently, two of his poems were featured on The Missouri Review’s audio podcast. Burrell teaches creative writing and literature at Lincoln University and resides in Jefferson City, Missouri with his wife and two little girls.



About the Sound of Sugar:
We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.

The Sound of Sugar...Julia Bouwsma

Bodil The Animal Lover  

Bodil Joensen was a Danish pornographic actress who also ran a small farm and animal husbandry business. Known for performing acts of bestiality with her dogs, stallion, and boar in footage that was exploited for numerous pornographic films, she died in 1985 as the result of alcoholism and possible suicide.

In the old pictures, I am solemn-faced—my hand
is around the neck of my collie, knobby
knees under my school kilt. Always,

I stand apart from the other children.

•

Escape was simply anywhere out of Moder’s gaze.

At twelve, it was the Hundige train station. There were always
stray dogs there, and I kept crusts of bread in my pocket.
One day, I sat watching two dogs sniffing
each other under the tail, circling, sniffing
each other’s asses again,

when a man saw me watching.
I said, Wouldn’t it be funny if people greeted each other that way?

The man and I talked until someone told Moder.
Moder called the police.
The man, a known pedophile,
was sent to jail.

Moder thought I’d been raped, so she beat me in the attic
to let the Devil out.

I raged in the attic for days—
it seems the devil did not want to leave me. I screamed,
When I grow up, I’ll fuck boars!

I did not live with Moder much longer after that.

•

Dogs just lick when they want to lick—

Spot is my friend. Alone
in the house, without heat or light,
we go to bed together. We share
a biscuit, talk until we fall asleep.

She understands what I am.

•

During his first mating, a boar must be taught
to make love.

At the breeding center, it is my job to teach him.

Young boars run together develop bad habits,
the most common—servicing
the rectum.

It is my job to ensure vaginal entry, also
that he does not mount the front end
of the sow.

The development of his confidence is vital.

•

The farmers’ wives all hate me.
Their husbands all try to screw me.
I do not let them,

but the money stops coming in:
the farm rent due
and then the truck…

Finally, one day, I go
to Copenhagen to
answer the ad.

•

When the movie men come from far away: America, Japan,

I welcome them all.




• Some language from the third section is adapted from a 1980 interview: http:// bit.ly/RaxcK. Some language in the fourth section is adapted from an article on pig husbandry: http://bit.ly/HHU1nw. 


About the Poet: 

Julia Bouwsma's poems and reviews have appeared in publications such as Colorado Review, Cutthroat, The Progressive, Puerto del Sol, Weave Magazine, and Wisconsin Review. A self-employed writer, editor, teacher, and farmer, she lives off-grid in the mountains of western Maine. More information about her work can be found at www.juliabouwsma.com

About the Sound of Sugar:
We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.

The Sound of Sugar....Stephanie E. Schlaifer

Similitude

The room that they
have brought us to
is dark            you cannot
see the body
     not because of this
but because of this
you might expect
a service       someone
to officiate
but it’s nothing
but waiting
you and the room’s
true elephant
handsome as a piece
of furniture   accordingly
appointed           Purposely,
no one is looking
in it           Ask why
it is so dark
why the room
is red       why
the room is always
red      and gracious
as a hotel bar
a red room
like the one
on television         heavy
curtains covering
false windows
a riddle in its sleep
which hastens you
to navigate
an opening              Imagine then
an otherwise clear
night in winter
sharp glass
a quarter-mile from the
Fort George
Island Bridge
the glove compartment
splintering
her chest                  And now
so many visitors
cake makeup
a barricade
of tacky wreaths
If navy blue
is dark enough
ask why
you cannot
see the body





About the Poet:
Stephanie E. Schlaifer is originally from Atlanta, GA and works as an artist and freelance editor in St. Louis, MO. She received her BFA in sculpture and BA in English literature from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MFA in poetry from the University of lowa. Stephanie is a combative Boggler and a compulsive baker. It is rumored that two men once arm-wrestled each other to death for the last slice of her pecan pie. She is currently working on a series of poems about historical weather events and a collection of children’s books in verse.


About the Sound of Sugar:
We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.