When I was younger, I often sang to cows to bring them to my family’s milking shed. Within an hour of this job, if it was winter or early spring, I would be feeding their stolen babies. Or at least the half …
A slow steady rip. This understated acute read of personal politics shows how choices made in the grass roots of the everyday create flourishing diversity or a dry monoculture that wilts as seasons tighten. The price of war always already falling due.
Cover detail
The writing, gut-punching strong. Relentless seductive words circle in and out of this memoir opening all the openings. The canyon as metaphor, names drop like cannonballs, trauma leaks with all the other waters. The invitation. Come, drown in here. Writers: ‘Tribe’/Sacred.’ (211).
Cover detail
newborn high cheekbones from your mother your father much younger her dowry of sheep goes astray you have his jet black hair his dark eyes your given name means splendid brilliant shining one//young child your aunt takes you on as slave
The Amphibian Literary and Art Journal Memory 10
Water is the saga of all time. To follow a drop over centuries is one way to rest against the holy prayer that makes up the bulk of our bodies. Here is Nisaba, a god/de celebrated on ancient tablets and inked skin.
Cover detail
If looks could kill, Maggie, the black and white cat who lives around here, would be long dead. What a glare I give her when she does that insouciant late afternoon wander down the hill, heading for her evening feed of the …
The Trumpeter 41 (1)
Photo credit: Mona Pyke
rabbit
kitten small as a toy
easter bauble bare cold body
stiff in the shade of hydrangeas
pricked ears grey fuzzed fur hardened flesh
kittens
weaning flat-scatter run
low under that old hydrangea
dead baby rabbit gone and more
blue grey feathers
Animal Studies Journal 14(2)
My critical autoethnography questions the discursive practices surrounding the consumption of domesticated junglefowl, birds scientifically known as Gallus domesticus and commonly known as ‘meat’ or chicken. I investigate the degree to which language might matter when it comes to the fate faced …
Animal Studies Journal 14(2). Photo of Sienna taken by Elaine Rollo
Patriarchy’s brutality. A father, ‘implacable and terrifying’ (37). A husband’s interior horror show with the ‘unending discomfort of a cold, monotonous dream’ (95). A woman with a ‘confined foggy, numbing’ pain that explodes into agony (259). Nothing about this book is easy.
Cover detail
Alps wall-papered on readerly consciousness, angst waits with the reader, finding room after exquisitely depicted room. Facts as stories, the reader, like the narrator, drawn into a fascination with almost anything. The knives as complicated as the Swiss. The timing, just so.
Cover detail