Harp & Altar
POETRY
Stephanie Anderson is the author of two chapbooks, In the Particular Particular (New Michigan Press, 2007) and The Choral Mimeographs (Dancing Girl Press), which is forthcoming in 2009. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Handsome, Octopus, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she is the co-editor of Projective Industries.

 

Walter Arndt is Professor Emeritus of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth. He has produced a number of notable translations including Goethe’s Faust, Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. His translation of Eugene Onegin won the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize in 1962.

 

Jessica Baron is finishing her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The poem that appears in this issue is from her thesis-in-process, “My Art in Play,” based on the work of Constantin Stanislavski. While pursuing poetry, Jessica also continues to act professionally in Colorado. She has work out or forthcoming in Matter, Wheelhouse, Listenlight, Parcel, Reconfigurations, and Mrs. Maybe.

 

Joshua Cohen is the author of four books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2007) and A Heaven of Others (Starcherone, 2007). Another novel, Graven Imaginings, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper’s. North Vain, Bluff, from which the piece that appears in this issue is excerpted, is the second book of a series entitled Two Great Russian Novels. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Julia Cohen has six chapbooks out or forthcoming from horse less press, Small Fires Press, H_ngm_n B__ks, Dancing Girl Press, Transmission Press, and Greying Ghost Press. She lives deep in Brooklyn and blogs at www.onthemessiersideofneat.blogspot.com.

 

Claire Donato is an MFA Literary Arts candidate at Brown University. Recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in Coconut, Caketrain, Shampoo, and Cannibal. A first chapbook, Someone Else’s Body, is forthcoming from Cannibal Books in 2009. Her hometown is Pittsburgh, PA.

 

Evelyn Hampton has fiction forthcoming in Unsaid Magazine and published in Smokelong Quarterly, among other places. She lives in Seattle. Occasionally she updates her blog at endtable.net/evelyn.

 

Mark Harman, a native of Dublin who has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature, is a professor of German and English at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, PA. His translation of The Castle received the Modern Language Association’s first Lois Roth Award in 1998. His newest book is a translation of Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person, published by Shocken in November 2008.

 

Matthew Henriksen edits Cannibal Books and Typo from Fayetteville, AR, and is the author of Is Holy (horse less press, 2006). Two new chapbooks will appear in 2009 from Cue Editions and Single Sheet Press.

 

Lily Hoang’s first book, Parabola, won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest. She is also the author of the forthcoming novels Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press), Invisible Women (StepSister Press) and The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press). Her eBook Woman Down the Hall is available through Lamination Colony. She currently teaches English and Women’s Studies at St. Mary’s College in Indiana.

 

Peter Markus is the author of three short books of short-short fiction, Good, Brother (Calamari Press, 2006), The Singing Fish (Calamari Press, 2006), and The Moon Is a Lighthouse (New Michigan Press, 2003). His newest book is the novel Bob, or Man on Boat, published this year by Dzanc Books.

 

Patrick Morrissey’s poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Typo, Tarpaulin Sky, and Colorado Review. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Bryson Newhart holds an MFA from Brown University. Recent or forthcoming publication credits include No Colony, Sein und Werden, Defenestration, 5_trope, Caketrain, elimae, Tarpaulin Sky, The Dream People, and BDtDaEAtC. Older writing can be found in Taint Magazine, Snow Monkey, 3rd bed, Failbetter, and others.

 

Michael Newton’s gallery reviews have appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar.

 

Formed by choreographers Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs in 2003, robbinschilds presents performance, installation, and video works that explore the intersection between architecture and human movement. The company’s work has appeared in venues including Dance Theater Workshop, the New Museum, BAM, P.S. 122, and Autumn Skate Bowl in New York; Fritz Haeg’s Sundown Salon and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in L.A.; and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. robbinschilds was recently commissioned to create original choreography for David Byrne on his world concert tour and is currently preparing a new performance work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, to premiere at The Kitchen in May 2009.

 

Elizabeth Sanger graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh in 2004 and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2006. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Phoebe, Meridian, Touchstone, Past Simple, Typo, and Verse Daily and is forthcoming in the Saranac Review and Drunken Boat. She lives in Florida with her partner and three wildly spoiled cats.

 

Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves’ Latin (University of Iowa Press, 2003), Alphaville (BlazeVOX Books, 2006), and a novella-in-verse, How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic (Rose Metal Press, 2007). His poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Shenandoah, among others. He teaches literature at Emerson College in Boston.

 

A.L. Steiner is a Brooklyn-based artist whose photo and video installations, curatorial, and performance work has been presented internationally. Steiner is a member of the collective Chicks on Speed and co-curator of Ridykeulous. She is represented by Taxter & Spengemann, New York.

 

G.C. Waldrep is the author of Goldbeater’s Skin (Center for Literary Publishing, 2003), Disclamor (BOA Editions, 2007), and Archicembalo, which won the 2008 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press and is due out in 2009. He is also the author of two chapbooks, The Batteries (New Michigan Press, 2005) and One Way No Exit (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008). He lives in Lewisburg, PA, and teaches at Bucknell University.

 

The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) was a self-taught and prolific artist who published three novels and ten volumes of short prose during his lifetime. Despite the praise he received from figures such as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, much of his writing remained unpublished or unread until the rediscovery of his work in the 1970s. After a period of time in Berlin, he returned to Switzerland in 1913, where he lived for the rest of his life. Confined to a mental institution in 1929, he spent his remaining decades in asylums. His books available in English include Robert Walser Rediscovered, edited by Mark Harman (University Press of New England, 1985); Jakob von Gunten, translated by Christopher Middleton (NYRB Classics, 1999); and The Robber, translated by Susan Bernofsky (University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

 

I Carry a Basket for the Fingers That Fall
Julia Cohen
The nests outside swing wider

than my house            my hilltop

the crest on the mantel calling            for veins

 

When I fork this light two bodies

             blend into the face you held

Jumbled letters            glisten on the backs

of flowers

 

In the frozen garden I feel

fetching            how I met you            how sleep

             mists our daily envies

 

so the ovals upturn & open

 

* * *

 

Small breaths penny            the floor

into soft nooks & wetness

             descends down the chimney

 

When I take my gloves

off the water is            wetter

             tastes like the day I learned

 

to run with a basket of sheets

 

* * *

 

Don’t back away from

the face’s missing fingers            I’ll be at the altar

of your sleepcoat            an emaciated tree

 

with my offer of nametags

             & a broken dinner plate

 

I’ve never moved slower

 

No oily necklace            no bicycle seats offer

             to cut the sheet into smaller sections

 

* * *

 

I could saw the trees into a bed

             to angle your sleep

 

But you would still be sleeping

             Yelps from the chimney

are the victors