Occult Studies | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
IF YOU HAVE TO ASK … | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Occult Studies | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
IF YOU HAVE TO ASK … | IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM
Fiction by Paul Cunningham: an excerpt from The Middlecirclehole
"All that rain. All that rain that gets down in the soilmeat under the mulch and sometimes it all slides down the hill that faces the backporch. Everything collects at the bottom of the backporch stairs. Night crawlers ooze out too a lot of the time. Coil-nerves. Dead rabbit parts—couple times. Raccoon parts. Never know what to expect oozing out of the ground with a mouth froze open or lifeless eyes making a seize on me. I tell the other kids at school about this stuff and they say I have satanic addictions but I just like to describe things as they happen because I like to describe."
Vanessa Place interviewed by Eireene Nealand
After talking with former prisoners about how beside-the-point their presence in court felt; after being called up and not selected for jury duty; after wondering about the metaphysics of court trials Eireene Nealand wrote to Vanessa Place, a poet and defense appellate attorney, who specializes in sexual offense cases.
Lisa A. Flowers’ diatomhero: religious poems reviewed by Zack Kopp
"Gods and myths and works of art. And through it all a slack jawed, salivating artful rearrangement of half-unconscious social and mythological tropes, reflecting characters like Houdini, or Pinocchio, or Rorschach, in ancient Greece, or Los Angeles, or Egypt, offset by the smell of sex on johnnycakes. Characters like Jenny Greenteeth, the river hag of English nursery rhymes said to drag errant children to watery death, or Abyzou, birth-killing female demon and partner of Lilith, are briefly historied in the appendix provided by Ms. Flowers at the back of the book...."
Sarah Fox's The First Flag reviewed by Joseph Harrington
Sarah Fox’s second book is The First Flag, and it is one fierce standard to follow. The book dispenses a potent compound of divination, memoir, psychoanalytic insights, placental rites and resolute feminism. This list might evoke what Kathleen Fraser referred to in 1989 as “immediately accessible language of personal experience as a binding voice of women's strength,” a “poetry of content” resistant to “fragmentation and resistance” at the level of the sentence. While The First Flag is all about women’s strength, its style of writing is consistently inventive, innovative and imaginative. Yes, there is Voice in these poems, but it speaks paratactically and goes in unexpected directions; it out-foxes patriarchal syntax; it is as often bemused and reflexive as it is rhetorical or representational....
New at Montevidayo: “West Memphis Three, Witch Hunters, and the Cult of the Violent Femme”
At Montevidayo, TS Publisher Christian Peet examines the now infamous WM3 case, particularly law enforcement and prosecutors' obsession with Damien Echols, as part of a long history of witch hunters' predilection for the perverse.
Literally Cursed: Reviewing Marc Perrusquia’s Frightening Two-Decade Obsession with Damien Echols
It appears that Memphis Commercial Appeal journalist Marc Perrusquia is still suffering from The Blood of Innocents, his co-authored mass-market failure from 1995, which had hoped to profit from the State of Arkansas's fictional case against the West Memphis Three. Readers might reasonably expect that Perrusquia would have politely ignored the recent publication of Damien Echols' memoir, Life After Death -- or that Perrusquia might have even used the occasion to apologize for getting the case so wrong. Instead, as if cornered, flying in the face of reason, Perrusquia decided to attack. To take one last swipe at the man who lost 18 years to Perrusquia's satanic fiction, but survived, and then had the gall to write about it.
Fiction by Paul Cunningham: an excerpt from The Middlecirclehole
"All that rain. All that rain that gets down in the soilmeat under the mulch and sometimes it all slides down the hill that faces the backporch. Everything collects at the bottom of the backporch stairs. Night crawlers ooze out too a lot of the time. Coil-nerves. Dead rabbit parts—couple times. Raccoon parts. Never know what to expect oozing out of the ground with a mouth froze open or lifeless eyes making a seize on me. I tell the other kids at school about this stuff and they say I have satanic addictions but I just like to describe things as they happen because I like to describe."
Vanessa Place interviewed by Eireene Nealand
After talking with former prisoners about how beside-the-point their presence in court felt; after being called up and not selected for jury duty; after wondering about the metaphysics of court trials Eireene Nealand wrote to Vanessa Place, a poet and defense appellate attorney, who specializes in sexual offense cases.
Lisa A. Flowers’ diatomhero: religious poems reviewed by Zack Kopp
"Gods and myths and works of art. And through it all a slack jawed, salivating artful rearrangement of half-unconscious social and mythological tropes, reflecting characters like Houdini, or Pinocchio, or Rorschach, in ancient Greece, or Los Angeles, or Egypt, offset by the smell of sex on johnnycakes. Characters like Jenny Greenteeth, the river hag of English nursery rhymes said to drag errant children to watery death, or Abyzou, birth-killing female demon and partner of Lilith, are briefly historied in the appendix provided by Ms. Flowers at the back of the book...."
Sarah Fox's The First Flag reviewed by Joseph Harrington
Sarah Fox’s second book is The First Flag, and it is one fierce standard to follow. The book dispenses a potent compound of divination, memoir, psychoanalytic insights, placental rites and resolute feminism. This list might evoke what Kathleen Fraser referred to in 1989 as “immediately accessible language of personal experience as a binding voice of women's strength,” a “poetry of content” resistant to “fragmentation and resistance” at the level of the sentence. While The First Flag is all about women’s strength, its style of writing is consistently inventive, innovative and imaginative. Yes, there is Voice in these poems, but it speaks paratactically and goes in unexpected directions; it out-foxes patriarchal syntax; it is as often bemused and reflexive as it is rhetorical or representational....
New at Montevidayo: “West Memphis Three, Witch Hunters, and the Cult of the Violent Femme”
At Montevidayo, TS Publisher Christian Peet examines the now infamous WM3 case, particularly law enforcement and prosecutors' obsession with Damien Echols, as part of a long history of witch hunters' predilection for the perverse.
Literally Cursed: Reviewing Marc Perrusquia’s Frightening Two-Decade Obsession with Damien Echols
It appears that Memphis Commercial Appeal journalist Marc Perrusquia is still suffering from The Blood of Innocents, his co-authored mass-market failure from 1995, which had hoped to profit from the State of Arkansas's fictional case against the West Memphis Three. Readers might reasonably expect that Perrusquia would have politely ignored the recent publication of Damien Echols' memoir, Life After Death -- or that Perrusquia might have even used the occasion to apologize for getting the case so wrong. Instead, as if cornered, flying in the face of reason, Perrusquia decided to attack. To take one last swipe at the man who lost 18 years to Perrusquia's satanic fiction, but survived, and then had the gall to write about it.