Harp & Altar
POETRY

Shane Book is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His awards include a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a National Magazine Award. He teaches at Stanford and is producing and directing the documentary film Laborland.

 

Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). He lives in Michigan.

 

Josh Dorman’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at galleries including 55 Mercer, The CUE Foundation, and Pierogi in New York, George Billis in Los Angeles, and Hallwalls in Buffalo. His work has also been included in group shows at the Drawing Center, the National Academy Museum, the Islip Art Museum, and Hunter College, among others, and has been exhibited internationally, in Traun, Austria, and Leipzig, Germany. He received his MFA from Queens College in 1992 and has been granted residencies at Yaddo and the Millay Colony. Images of his work are available at www.joshdorman.net.


A Canadian currently living in Brooklyn, Corey Frost's stories have appeared in Matrix, Geist, The Walrus, and other magazines. He was named the Best Spoken Word Artist in 2001 by the Montreal Mirror. He is currently writing a book about spoken word scenes around the world as part of a doctoral dissertation. A CD of his performances, Bits World: Exciting Version, is forthcoming. His books include The Worthwhile Flux (2004) and My Own Devices: Airport Version (2006), both published by Conundrum Press.

 

Sarah Gridley received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. She is the author of Weather Eye Open (University of California Press/New California Poetry Series, 2005) and is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Poetry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

 

Elise Harris is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. Her profile of the poet Noelle Kocot appeared in the first issue of Harp & Altar.

 

Joanna Howard's work has appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. Her chapbook In the Colorless Round, illustrated by Rikki Ducornet, was published in 2006 by Noemi Press. She received her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver in 2004 and currently lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown University and is an editor for Encyclopedia Project.

 

Steve Katz was one of the founders of Fiction Collective (now FC2). He has taught creative writing at Cornell University, Brooklyn College, Queens College, the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, from which he retired in 2003. He's also tended bar, worked construction, waited tables, and mined for mercury. His books include Creamy & Delicious, Wier & Pouce, Florry of Washington Heights, Swanny's Ways, Saw, Moving Parts, and Stolen Stories. His most recent books are the novel Antonello’s Lion (Green Integer, 2005) and the collection Kisssss?, which is forthcoming in 2007 from FC2. The stories in this issue are from an ongoing project of memoirs titled Memoirrhoids.

 

Joanna Klink's second book, Circadian, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2007. She teaches poetry at the University of Montana.

 

Michael Newton is a current MFA candidate at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, though his artwork is kind of hard to explain. His gallery reviews also appeared in the first issue of Harp & Altar.

 

Peter O'Leary's book of criticism, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, was published in 2002 by Wesleyan. A new book of poetry, Depth Theology, appeared last year from Georgia. He lives on the West Side of Chicago, in Berwyn.

 

Katie Peterson was born in California. She is the Robert Aird Professor of Humanities at Deep Springs College in Deep Springs, California. Her book of poems, This One Tree, won the New Issues Poetry Prize and was published in 2006 by New Issues/Western Michigan University Press.

 

Johannah Rodgers is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. Her chapbook Necessary Fictions was published by Sona Books in 2003, and her short stories and essays have appeared in Fiction, CHAIN Arts, The Brooklyn Rail, Pierogi Press, and Fence. Her book sentences, a collection of stories, essays, and artwork, was published this year by Red Dust Press.

 

Brandon Shimoda’s writings appear in recent or forthcoming editions of MiPOesias, Free Verse, Practice, Washington Square, Xantippe, the tiny, and elsewhere. He has projects forthcoming from both Corollary Press and Flim Forum Press. He currently teaches at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he also curates the New Lakes reading and performance series.

 

Kate Schreyer is currently studying fiction in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

 

Michael Zeiss’s story “Notes Toward a Supreme Action Movie” appeared in the first issue of Harp & Altar.

Northern
Joanna Klink

With the onset of darkness it calls.  The clipped

shapes of the note flair out, somewhere at the woods’

 

sharp edge, into senselessness.  A fine rain

suspended in the air unrelieved.  Night-winged,

 

with large forward-facing eyes and in truth I have

never heard it—though it calls.  Though I could

 

scarcely make it out from the narrow bed,

though a brief rain fell inside the room

 

and the brushwood miles away made a leaping weir

in the stream and the shape of a swallow dove

 

over reeds of wheat that swayed, though there was

no wind, somewhere behind its eyes

 

or brushed the discs of feather on its face

and I could not understand what I had lost,

 

having not heard it or cared, having moved

through the rooms of this house for several hours,

 

months, turning off hall-lights or the stove or turning

over in my head what I no longer believed,

 

unwell but for the whites of my eyes where once

the sun could be seen rising in winter as now it

 

calls and the call breaks easily in all directions

and slips beneath the hovering maple trees

 

and I think it must pass over beetles, minerals,

wildflowers and thin bones, over pale-and-dark

 

needles of pines, highway bridges, boatlights

on muddy rivers and the untallied golds of farm-

 

fields where seeds float, low piano notes

over lakes of air into which rooted things

 

rise, and yield, like the arable blues and blacks of

foredawn and the blue tint of the cloth awning

 

over the man’s face turned down to the street in grief,

and had I known I would be so long here

 

I would have seen that certain rains never

do sink fully into the ground, felt the shape-shifting

 

speech of leaves was part of who I was and

wondered a little longer about the source

 

of the rainbed and the two irises suspended in

each of our eyes’ black liquid and the flowers

 

in lake ice in a northern wilderness where an owl,

unable to adjust, unable to open its throat, sings,

 

regardless of what I thought or had sensed, through such

merciless blankness, ceased to sound long ago.