Harp & Altar
POETRY
Jessica Baran is assistant director of the White Flag Projects in St. Louis and the art writer for the Riverfront Times. Her first book of poems, Remains To Be Used, is forthcoming this winter from Apostrophe Books.  

Roseanne Carrara lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of A Newer Wilderness (Insomniac Press, 2007), from which the poems in this issue have been selected. She is at work completing a novel entitled The Week in Radio; drafting a second collection of poems, Spectral Evidence; and, with her husband, Blaise Moritz, producing an English translation of Silènces, the poems of the philosopher and anarchist Jacques Ellul.  

Andy Fitch is an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program. He is the author (along with Jon Cotner) of Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse). His chapbook Island is forthcoming from The Song Cave, and his critical study Not Intelligent, but Smart: Rethinking Joe Brainard is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. The audio recording from which Island derives has been published in a special issue of TextSound.
 

Eileen G’Sell teaches at Ellis University and Washington University in St. Louis, where she serves as publications editor at the Kemper Art Museum. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in Ninth Letter, Super Arrow, Zone 3, and Boston Review.
 

Amy King’s most recent books are Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox) and the forthcoming I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press), and she is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett. She teaches English and creative writing at SUNY NCC, works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and co-edits Esque with Ana Bozicevic and Poets for Living Waters with Heidi Lynn Staples. Please visit amyking.org for more.
 

Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster's Dictionary of American Authors, HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, and Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.
 

Jesse Lambert was born in Hudson, NY, and received an MFA from Hunter College. He has exhibited his work at eyewash@SupremeTrading and Klaus Von Nichtssagend in Brooklyn, White Columns in New York, Miller Block Gallery and Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, and Joseloff Gallery and Artspace in Connecticut, among other venues. He lives in Jackson Heights, NY, and works in Long Island City. More images can be seen at www.jesselambert.net.  

Lawrence Mark Lane’s writing has appeared in Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction, Double Room, New Orleans Review, and Oxford American, among others. He lives in Missoula, Montana.  

Jesse Lichtenstein
lives in Oregon where he writes poetry, fiction, journalism, and screenplays (and helps run the Loggernaut Reading Series). His poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Paris Review, Diagram, EOAGH, Gulf Coast, Octopus, Boston Review, and other journals.
 

Dan Magers is founder and co-editor of the online poetry magazine Sink Review and runs the chapbook press Immaculate Disciples. He has poems published or forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Eleven Eleven, and Forklift, Ohio, among other places. A regular contributor of book reviews at New Pages, he lives in Brooklyn.
 

Patrick Morrissey’s chapbook Transparency was published last year by Cannibal Books and his poetry and criticism have appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar. He lives in New York.
 

The American novelist and critic Charles Newman (1938–2006) was raised in the Midwest and taught for many years at Northwestern University, where he founded the literary magazine TriQuarterly, and Washington University in St. Louis. His books include The Post-Modern Aura (Northwestern University Press, 1985), White Jazz (Dial Press, 1984), and In Partial Disgrace, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press.
 

Michael Newton’s gallery reviews appear regularly in Harp & Altar.
 

Leslie Patron lives and writes in Providence, RI, where she received her MFA in literary arts at Brown University. Recent poems and stories have been published in Dewclaw, OCHO, and Parthenon West Review. The work in this issue comes from a recently completed manuscript entitled The SeaMaids, a collaborative work with illustrator Margaret Powers. Her hometown is San Jose, Calif.


Lauren Russell is the author of the chapbook The Empty-Handed Messenger (Goodbye Better). Her critical writing has appeared in Scapegoat Review, and recent poems are forthcoming from Eleven Eleven. She grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Neruda.


Rob Stephenson is the author of Passes Through (FC2). He lives in Queens, NY. Visit rawbe.com.  

Stephen Sturgeon’s first poetry collection, Trees of the Twentieth Century, will be published by Dark Sky Books early in 2011. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cannibal, Eyewear, Harvard Review, Jacket, Open Letters Monthly, Typo, and other journals. He is the editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.
 

G.C. Waldrep's fourth collection, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts—in collaboration with John Gallaher—is due out from BOA Editions in April 2011.  He has work in recent or forthcoming issues of American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Nation, and other journals. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., and teaches at Bucknell University.
 
The End of the Novel
Roseanne Carrara

Though it belongs to everyone dwelling here,

and all claim it as their own, this is not a country.

The lovers here are tortured by their orthodoxies

and appearances. They both cheat. One, so we can see it,

heaving and raw during his brief exile in America,

the other, only in retrospect, as evidenced in her

accumulation of material objects and her more staunch

religious devotion. When they come together,

having found themselves wanting, after all,

their reunion is supposed to appear high ecstasy

against the background of an embattled Israel,

the amphitheatre of fiction itself. Whatever kernel

of romance the author would convey remains

spoiled, though, for all their initial, heavy cheating –

too much representative of the war after all,

though perhaps it was meant to be so. In another,

 

the problem is not love in excess but its

extinction in installments. There’s the initial

passion, but someone else, angered by it,

in the old fashioned way, sends one of the lovers

away against their will. When they meet again,

the pair’s diffident. They appear alienated from one

another. Though only a quick diffidence is allowed

before they are lost in a bombing – more dreadful

because its sound is muted in the excitement over

the end of the war. All this is supposed to sore trumpet

again when we are told the reunion itself is a sham.

It has never happened, the lovers coming together, at last,

not their dying together, either. This last bit, as it turns

out, is just the villain’s therapeutic, part of the new

trauma revealed to us in the epilogue. I find

 

I am the woman in the third. Kidnapped by an ex-

boyfriend, a sex maniac who claims I am his first

and only love, I appear dull, obviously not much

of a catch because my memory’s fagged out, and I’m

trotting around his back parlor an amnesiac, applying

makeup on the hour (I’ve turned ugly or perhaps I

always was). No matter my appearance he can’t help

trying to convince me he’s done something very real

for us, even or especially as I make my escape. That he

also claim’s my adopted son’s his own’s easily conceived.

He’s had half a universe of women, after all, and he’s

desperate. Though the point’s that he’s diminished neither

by my going nor the death of my son that’s his loss now, too.

No, the point’s that after all these attempts to betray us out

of our senses, he makes a healthy conversion, if only a slight

one, to frank, old mysticism, finding some statue endowed

 

with the same little spirit that pervades them all. Having

read them, now, and experienced this last in more

than the ordinary fashion, I am equipped to speak on behalf of you

novelists, tell you that your capitals, romance, and realism,

have broken up at last and gone into hiding. Do not leave it

to poetry to reunify them, ask for the live space of the lyric

or the sonnet as your alternative, say, superior, transport here.

Sacrifice your own. Send your children out (like the kids

of the big movie stars, yours are bound to amplify themselves,

as well, in your fame and fortune) searching with the old

pitchfork and scythe. Get a few good hurricane lanterns and go

back hunting for a moral and a bind for the good organ’s

writhing in this rush to make the psyche, callow personage,

promiscuous as an old miser in one of his jangling hypos.