Prick of the Spindle announces the print edition! Issue 2 releases late April 2012. Order here. Check out our guidelines and submit here.
Second annual Prick of the Spindle Poetry Open Competition open for submissions.
See guidelines here.
Congratulations to the 2011 Prick of the Spindle Pushcart Prize nominees:
We accept short film submissions. To submit your work, send an inquiry with a link to your work to pseditor (at) prickofthespindle
(dot) com.
Aqueous Books, a print publisher, a relative of
Prick of the Spindle.
Congratulations to Monique Hayes, whose play, "Echoes," was selected through Prick of the Spindle's Outreach Initiative for Youth Drama Competition for production through the Pensacola Little Theatre. See the press release and poster. Production was May 12 and May 13, 2011 for the world premiere in Pensacola, Florida.
We are interviewed on Fictionaut.
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He Took a Cab
by Mather Schneider
Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk, The Poetry Cheerleader
NYQ Books, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-935520-21-4
Perfect bound, 108 pages, $14.95
I’ve been a secret admirer, with a not-so-secret desire to ride around in a taxi with him, ever since Mather Schneider first sent poems to RHINO when I was an editor there. By “not-so-secret,” I mean I have since confessed this to Mather, who had forgotten who the heck I was, and whom I have never met, and, even though I was in Tucson, Arizona once, waiting at the airport for a ride, I did not get to ride in his cab.
But, through poetry, I feel as if I have taken that ride, alongside every other passenger he’s ever picked up, and what a scary thrill it was, and it pushed my heart open wide for lots of people I have never met and never will. Some have died, and some I don’t want to meet. I definitely don’t want to meet those mean, impatient truck drivers, those rich, impatient tourists, or those nuns who share “Three Lanes of Hell” with Mather on the roadway, nuns who are arguing “in the Prelude // in my rearview mirror.”
One of them flails her arms
like a black windmill around a facetwisted with hatred
like a g-force.
The other white knucklesthe wheel
and looks straight
into my eyes.
See what I mean? Scary. But while I don’t want to meet these people in real life, I know they exist and that I must be aware of them, and wary of them, and Schneider takes care of that for me. Know this exists, he says, relentlessly, poem after poem, having been face to face in the rear-view or side-view mirror, with some of the worst human behavior any of us has ever had to witness.
And then there’s the compassion, the beautiful, deep, loving feeling he conveys about the lost and forlorn, lonely, sick, and dying people he takes to their doctor’s appointments or chemotherapy treatments, to the airport or bus station, or wherever they need to go, which is all too often a heartbreaking place.
I don’t know who the woman is in “I’m Sorry I Never Fixed the Toaster,” but the title suggests a domestic intimacy. His mother? If so, he learned compassion early and probably in hard circumstances. A fellow cab driver or dispatcher in an office with a toaster? At any rate, I care for her and feel his grief and regret in these poignant lines:
You would turn and smile
the way people smile
when they use too many front teeth
to bite into their blackened toast.
Then you’d tell me good morning
the way a woman does
when her mouth is full of ashes.
Poignant, scary, and hilarious all at once. Makes me ache in all kinds of ways. Lots of these poems do that. Even when he’s looking at the scenery or the highway, Schneider sees all the ready horror and ironic humor in things. “Feast or Famine” begins:
The turkey vulture digs out a dead snake’s eyeball
and staggers on the yellow dotted line
like stitches
down the spine of the highway.
What a great precise yet ragged image. The weird hilarity of the poem comes when a passenger is scared of snakes, “even dead ones.” The passenger, her daughter, and the driver all share in the moment’s woe, however irrational:
She can hardly breathe through her choked sobs
and we are all on the verge
of panic,
all except for the vulture
who looks at us,
takes his prize and rises
into the clean blue air.
Who is calm and does what is needed? A turkey vulture, doing what he’s supposed to do: eat carrion, and avoid death by cab.
The lines I’ve quoted show you the sharpness of image in this book, the irregular line breaks that suggest quick turns and secret routes, and let you hear that voice of the cabdriver who’s seen it all and whose heart hasn’t hardened, even if he has to look tough on the outside.
An epigraph to the whole book explains the title (and the title poem, “He Took a Cab”): In the old jazz argot, when it was said of someone, “He took a cab,” that meant he died. And people do die in this book, and have to make hard decisions as well as hard right turns. It’s sad when a life turns on a fare:
You know the hope
in your life is the same
as your hesitation,before you stand up
to chase a mandown a dark alley,
for fourteen dollars.
I know I needed to know this. It will help me figure out whether the hope in my life is the same as my hesitation. And I recommend that you find this out, too—quick, before you take a cab.
Kathleen Kirk is a writer whose work appears online and in print in Confrontation, Eclectica, Poetry East, Sweet, YB Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Selected Roles, Broken Sonnets, and Living on the Earth, with Nocturnes forthcoming this winter from Hyacinth Girl Press. A past editor and reviewer for RHINO, Kirk is poetry editor for Escape Into Life. She blogs about poetry, reading, and life eight days a week at Wait! I Have a Blog?!
My Mother Received a Wound from Eric Bosse on Vimeo.
Eric Bosse is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, recovering journalist, and occasional film-maker. His stories have appeared in The Sun, Mississippi Review, Zoetrope, Exquisite Corpse, Wigleaf, and Night Train, among other journals. His poems and essays rarely appear, but those dark years as a newspaper arts critic still haunt his nightmares. Ravenna Press published his story collection, Magnificent Mistakes, in the fall of 2011. Eric lives in Norman with his family and teaches writing at the University of Oklahoma.
____________________
Shatter Me
by Tahereh Mafi
Reviewed by Chelsea Clemmons
Read the review here
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New Artists Added to the Galleries,
Including:
* Regina Valluzzi
* Eleanor Bennett
* Sheri Wright
* Ryan Richey
* Andrew Ek
* Brett Stout
The Prick of the Spindle online art galleries feature standing exhibits from more than 30 artists.
Visit them here.
____________________
Prick of the Spindle welcomes talented artist Dr. Regina Valluzzi as its guest artist for the Winter issue, Vol. 5.4. Dr. Valluzzi often paints using ideas and inspiration from her decades of experience in the research sciences. She believes that we are all influenced by what we see, even in the sciences, where much of what is seen is either difficult to interpret or entirely in the mind's eye. Dr. Valluzzi's work dances around key concepts from the point of view of a physicist, touching on ideas, processes, and interactions in the disciplines of Soft Matter, Polymers, Nanotechnology, Physics, Chemistry, and the Biosciences.
Scientific imagery can be as impenetrable as it is intriguing and beautiful. Underlying many technical diagrams, presentations of data, and scientific images is a set of commonly accepted rules that are learned and internalized over years of study and publication. These rules and tightly codified visual metaphors help scientists communicate complex ideas reliably amongst themselves, but they can also become barriers to new ideas and insights. Because her images are abstracted and diverge from the typical rules and symbols of scientific illustration and visualization, they provide an accessible window into the world of science for both scientists and non-scientists. Her approach is often irreverent and mischievous.
The name “Nerdly Painter” describes Valluzzi's approach to her subject matter, while also providing a handy alternative to the myriad misspellings of “Valluzzi” that are common. There are number of numbers, mostly from apocryphal stories, describing the names Eskimos have for types of snow. Communities of Engineers and Scientists, notably the MIT community, have a large number of nuanced terms to describe variants of nerdity, which is as ubiquitous to peoples of the technical regimes as snow is peoples of the polar regions. “Nerdly” is a gentler, less hard-edged and more generally humanistic form of nerdity than the more common “nerdy,” or the unwashed computer-tanned “geeky.”
"D-Branes," debuting for publication in the current issue, has been selected for a Juror's Choice award by the Attleboro Art Museum Members' show. Among the awards given are two Best awards and 6 Juror's choices from roughly 170 exhibiting artists. "Leafy Jewels," (forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle Print Edition, Issue 2), was part of a competitive international show in Budapest. "Rite of Spring," also debuting in the current issue, has appeared in two regional juried shows. "Green Function" was a finalist in the Next Big Idea Festival's international SMART in Los Alamos and was also selected for the Bridges Mathematical Art Organization's International Juried Show at the Joint Mathematics Meeting (in Boston, January, 2012).
Dr. Valluzzi has won awards for her drawings and paintings on the national and international levels. Her work is in private collections in the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Japan, Germany, and Malta. She shows frequently through the Massachusetts and Eastern New England area. Many of her smaller works are available online at http://NerdlyPainter.Etsy.com, and giclee reproductions of her work are also available at http://regina-valluzzi.artistwebsites.com.
