I was born adult, but not to begin with—born again like some with Jesus. The death of kids’ stuff, kids’ concerns, kids’ love, all cashed [...]
You have been living in a horrible, angry, smelly place for the past 90 days. You are irritable because you are itchy and you are [...]
Before you sit down in that chair, there are two possibilities. Right now—there is this morning. Any choice could cause the flask to be shattered [...]
It’s my birthday. The other kids and I make wishes on our balloons and let them go. Before that, one of the planned activities is [...]
“I’d trust a lion to bite my head off, but I wouldn’t trust a president, pilot, the UPS lady, my principal, Dad, or you, to [...]
I get turned on by intimacy. I have this huge fetish, see, for monogamy. Sometimes I’m just like, ooh, baby, I want to read in [...]
Kale thanked the woman in the white CVS Pharmacy smock as she handed him change for a ten and a pack of Marlboro Lights. Common [...]
We arrive with nothing on the platter. All we know is mother’s milk. fruit 1. The fruit of our mating is an infant whose [...]
A while back, writer Ilan Mochari asked Carissa and I if we’d be interested in doing an interview for The Review Review, a website that promotes and reviews lit mags. We, of course, said yes, and then got to work trying to rein in the verbosity that is a question answered by both of us.
The interview has just been posted and you can read our thoughts on reading, editing, writing, being married, and more.
The World Will Deny It For You
Janaka Stucky
Ahsahta Press
Review by Randolph Pfaff
In his second chapbook (following Your Name is the Only Freedom), Janaka Stucky presents twenty-four brief ruminations on loss, longing, and the memories we keep long after the memory makers have gone. The World Will Deny It For You, winner of the first Ahsahta Press chapbook contest, gracefully addresses the ways in which we fail each other—and ourselves, in turn—and speaks self-consciously of our need to create tangible representations of those we have lost. Take this passage from The Opposite of Dreams:
Every lover is a home and what is architecture
A place which is nothing and indistinguishable
From all the other nothing until we place it
By placing something in it and thus experience time
The yearning in these poems is awash in dense, spiritual sexuality buffeted by time and the mishandling of promises and breakable bonds. Stucky paints the hollowness of pain clearly and succinctly, and makes the movements of the natural world a mirror for our own actions, as in Jennifer. Blood.:
Beneath the olive tree
Your tongue interrogating blade
Slips across my skinIn the grass
There are reminders here of the imagery of Paul Celan and Mina Loy, certainly, but Stucky’s consistency of thought creates a throughline of loss and reconciliation—and more than anything else, the vast space in between the two—that is all his own. The emotion here is raw as a fresh cut and Stucky’s thoughtfulness and lucid diction give The World Will Deny It For You a resonance that is often absent from contemporary poetry. This book will force you to acknowledge the fluidity of stasis, the permanence of the in-between, and the realization that when our lives seem most ambiguous, we are perhaps, most clearly our true selves.
Janaka Stucky is practicing the perfection of effort. He is the Publisher of Black Ocean and the author of The World Will Deny It For You (Ahsahta Press 2012) and Your Name Is The Only Freedom (Brave Men Press 2009).
Randolph Pfaff is one of the founding editors of apt.
