"A Week of Meaning and Grieving and Bliss"
Angels, cults, the sentence as apparatus and ideal, kings of convenience, and the (im)possibility of change
/ Now at AC: Benjamin Niespodziany, “Final Meat”
Cliff
after Jon Boisvert’s “Fall”
You jump off a cliff and get caught in a cloud. You weren't the first. There's a tricycle and a violinist and an elephant gun and a tongue. They use their tools to claw through the cloud, to fall back down to earth, but nothing seems to work. As if the smoke refills. Or the plastic reseals. Or the cloud heals. You look above for others tumbling off the cliff. You remember the line. You remember volunteering. You thought you were the first. You weren't in a hurry but everyone was cheering. You look at your watch. You don't know when it will be okay to ask for help.
“Final Meat” is a suite of five thematically connected poems, featuring angels, appliances, rats, innocent criminals, and lines borrowed from Annelyse Gelman, Johannes Goransson, Orpaz Averbuch Yitzhak, Rodrigo Marquez Tizano, C.T. Salazar, Dalton Day, Gregory Ariail, Paul Colinet, Lucia Estrada, Jean Giono, Joanna Ruocco, Jane Yeh, John Redmond, Karen Elizabeth Gordon and Kings of Convenience.
Read “Final Meat” in full here.
/ From the Archives: Kolby Harvey, “On Cults”
A terrifying animated chapbook for the preapocalyptic era, and one of the most beautifully wild things we’ve published. Access “On Cults” here.
/ Elsewhere
“One Eight Hundred,” a new story by AC Issue 2 contrib Dolan Morgan, appears at the Offing:
If you would like to make an adjustment to your reservation, if you believe that a change is somehow possible, that your choices can actually impact the trajectory of your reservation, then go ahead and press the numbers that you think will make that happen.
AC contrib Grant Maierhofer is teaching a class on Sentence-Making for X-R-A-Y, in which students will examine “the apparatus of the sentence as an ideal in itself…. to get a sense of the range of ways–from Stein, to Schutt, to Blanchot–writers can enact things at the micro level that can enhance not only our writing, but our reading.” Tuition is sliding-scale, with a suggested amount of $75. November 18, via Zoom.
Our friends at Meekling Press are currently open for book-length submissions, through Nov 19th. They’re particularly open to manuscripts that “play with the relationship between text and image, between text and text, between image and image.” Collaborations welcome, too. Meekling has previously published work by Jay Besemer, AC Issue 1 contrib Anne K. Yoder, & Carrie Olivia Adams, among other good folks.