Live Performances/Recording Sessions/Radio Broadcasts

Call for submissions:
(Note: List is not restrictive nor preclusive of other themes.)
Colors; Erotica (beyond anatomy); Dramatic Monologue (poetry: e.g. "My Last Dutchess"); Epigrams; Self-Portrait; Moving/Motion; Dust; Corridors; Insects; Cemeteries; Smoking; Infanticide; Music; Japan; Montreal/Quebec (surtout francophone); Surrealism; Monsters/Monstrosity (also images); Timepieces; Kites; Suicide; 'Lovesick'.
Consult Submissions for guidelines,Masthead for editorial policy, also Bridge City Lit and Big City, Little pages.
Query first on articles over 750 words.
editors@nycBigCityLit.com.

In This Issue:  December 2002

Trade Publishers:
Bookshelf presents Chapter II of Stephanie Dickinson's novel, Half Girl.

Poetry:
This month's poetry feature is "End Papers," with contributors Laurel Blossom, Ann Cefola, Jay Chollick, James Doyle, Paul Espel, Corey Mesler, and others. We also offer a special section, featuring poets from upriver, Roberta Gould, Will Gray, Susan Jefts, Catherine Norr and Matthew Spireng, whose work we discovered at the Nov 2nd book fair and reading at the Catskill Mountain Foundation, in Hunter, organized by Faith Lieberman and featuring Four Way Books publisher, Martha Rhodes.

Fiction/Short Prose:
Chapter Three from Meredith Sue Willis's new novel,Oradell at Sea.
'Zank heaven for little girls.' Not since Carson McCullers has anyone given us a Southern bell-ringer as scabbed and admirable as this motherless widow from Shacky Hill.—Maureen Holm

This month's Short Prose pieces are classic snatches of big city made small. Erin A. Dickerson contributes "Wanda R.I.P." from five storeys above nighttime Bleecker, while Ian Randall Wilson's "What Remained" rises from the noontide heat of L.A. pavement.

Essays:
Billy Collins:  The Laureate to Designate the Palliate for the Populate
by Patrick Henry
Collins spoke on BBC Radio in London in March 2002 . . . His quest, he said, was to liberate poetry from its customary immersion in misery, disaster and negative attitudes. . . . [L]ike that of a columnist in a smart magazine, his poetry is comfortable prose studded in gaudy images, glib opinions and disconnected flights of whimsy.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:  Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady"
by Paul Murphy
The masculine protagonist, so infinitely self-possessed, is, in fact, fractured with guilt and broken by the desire and denial which underlies this guilt. He sits in the park and rehearses his own feelings of alienation by pinpointing a variety of deracinated and distorted situations as symbols of his own plight.

Articles:
A Holiday Gift from Your Sole
by Linda Sands
Women wear shoes like men wear cars. The shoe is a substitute for the penis—of the man she has just met or would like to meet. (Hey there, Cowboy.) . . . I can't imagine buying a gift of shoes for my friends. It would be like dating someone's boyfriend and then declaring he is perfect—for her.

Ten Mile Meadow Project: A Conservatory of Land and Language (with photos)

Reviews:
J.D. McClatchy's Hazmat
Corrupted with Pleasure, Punished with More
by Reese Thompson
What sets McClatchy apart from most other formalist poets writing today is his ability to neatly frame his uniquely untidy subject matter. . . . In the turn of each sonnet, McClatchy takes on the voice of the mullah, the lulling, hypnotic chain of lies by which religion turns the angry, empty lives of men into weapons.

Interviews:
Memoir (a life and death Q & A in the fourth pew . . .)
by Terrence Dunn
"You're going to heaven, but not for a long, long, long time."
"How do you know?"
"Because you're asking me these questions."

Series on Series:
The new "Critic's Voice" series at the 92nd Street Y:  Harold Bloom et al.
by David Yezzi

Series/Event Reviews:
Reverie:  Geoffrey Hill Reads at the 92nd Street Y (Veterans Day, 11/11)
by Kimberly Burwick
In 1940, while New York's literary community was gearing up for its first year of distinguished guests [at the 92nd Street Y], eight-year-old Geoffrey Hill witnessed the Nazi bombing that destroyed Coventry. . . . Hill unabashedly implicates his readers in the act of witnessing, which is both an ecclesiastical and ecumenical feat. The evening could have easily been a funeral, a baptism, or a first communion—sermonized by the language of birth and death.

Poetry Uptown and Downtown—From the Bowery Poetry Club to
the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (10/27):  A Personal Essay/Review
by Daniela Gioseffi
Faced with the pickle of two book celebration party invitations to attend on the same Sunday—one for Angelo Verga at the Bowery Poetry Club, and the other for Molly Peacock just before the Poets' Corner Vespers Service at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (starring Dana Gioia, William J. Smith, Daniel Hoffman, Billy Collins)—I decided to try to visit both.

Other Arts:
"Curly and his Durable Surrey":  Vintage Broadway Benefits the Museum of the City of New York

Free Expression:
Breaking the Fast Food Chain: Upper West Side Neighborhood United in Self-Determination

Legal Forum:
From Gravy Train to 24-Mule Team Borax:  Excessive Tax Breaks to U.S. Exporters Provoke Retaliatory European Trade Tariffs [pending]

Bookshelf:  First Chapters
Stephanie Dickinson's novel, Half Girl, pulls you under at once, and when you come up for air, you are astounded to be in the same room where you began. Each sentence is a surprise—a trip in the mind of a sharply sensual and adventurous girl who is leaving home and immediately finding danger in cold, lonely places. You read in fear of what might happen to her, but also with a blind faith in her hopeful determination.—Meredith Sue Willis

Print Series:
With thanks for all of your orders by email query, we now offer a convenient listing and order form. You may still inquire about any Headwaters Print Series or monograph you don't see listed here by writing to us. Query Monographs of work appearing in the popular Jun '01 Vietnam issue are on back-order. We are preparing Big City Lit's Brightest Lights collection for 2002.


Degrees of Apprenticeship:
Sarah Lawrence mfa Collection
Poetry (56 pp) or Prose (64 pp) $10 each (full color)


Distance from the Tree
poems on fathers (64 pp $10) (full color)
Dana Gioia, Alice Notley, D. Nurkse, James Ragan, Ron Price et al.

Letters:
(The editors invite for publication well-written letters or speakeasy pieces on any topic of concern or interest to the magazine's readers. See Letters Page for length, language, and other details.)

~ . ~ The magazine is intended to be read in Palatino, and preferably in Netscape. ~ . ~
Note to contributors: To cite your work in the Archive,
indicate the month, e.g. Jun2001/contents/poetrydusk.html.