Absence populates Rachel Khong’s stellar debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. It’s a book about the absence of reliable memories, the absence of people you thought were permanent, and the absence of self-understanding. It’s about the memories that follow and haunt you, and the ones that only leave behind traces of themselves, their negative space haunting you all the same.
When we meet our narrator Ruth, she’s in her thirties and the life she envisioned for herself is in shambles. Her fiancé broke up with her on the day she thought they were moving in together. If that weren’t enough, she’s dispassionate about her job and her father, Howard, has Alzheimer’s disease, which is getting progressively worse. Everything she thought she could depend on has been upended.…
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if there were ears
to hear
there is no sign,
only ebbing ripples show
where I threw that stone.
no sounds
no flecks of color
no cheerful splashes
mark the site.
that missile
plucked carefully
from fertile dirt,
smooth
and true within my hand.
lofted with a shout
then turning,
shining
briefly in the air.
now sunken, dark
and out of sight.…
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I hadn’t been there in decades and planned to speak
to the people who lived in it now.
A neighbor said it was vacant, sale pending.
A peaceful home full of the past,
set back from the road several hundred feet behind a serene lake.
I drove in beyond the tall trees, ones I helped plant as tiny seedlings, parked,
and walked around the outside.
My window was unlocked, close to the ground.
I climbed in.
Inside, memories crowded around me.
Long ago, seated comfortably on a deep, red, sectional sofa
in front of a window, as an only child,…
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Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), and Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016). She’s also the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). She received an MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and is the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and Civil Coping Mechanisms, and an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of their writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Brooklyn Magazine, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, BUST, and elsewhere.
In this episode, Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum sits down with Valente to discuss her writing history and inspirations, as well as her feelings on social media, the lit community, and even some pop culture stuff (like music, The Leftovers, and Twin Peaks).…
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The best love poems are
about the possibility of flight,
the phases of the moon
the endless Arctic night, a ring found
in the melting snow in spring.
They are about a
chimera of lust,
the dust train tracks make
carrying refugees
to an uncertain future.…
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After the annulment of light
In the stubborn kiln of winter
There is a beginning that hurts.
You hear it in the troubled cry
Spun from treetops,
In the muffled bending of trees
Cracking off the frost.
When you wander through the streets
Stunned by the bright emergence,
The wakened sunshine,
You start to remember
The endless colors of the world:
The Adriatic with its whitened dazzle,
Michelangelo’s angel-bitten blue,
All the faded shades of longing
In the remnants of the Roman Forum.…
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I. Then & Foreshadow
Blank page, dredged out fish bone
not so different, containers of what will be
and was.
Fossils. Left impressions, vestiges
in sand and smoke, crumbs of old
mixed with new light and sound.
II. Now, with Breathing
The living telephone wire. A laugh
I just had with you
ran over by the impulse of a cycling dryer.
Back to bleach and white,
penciled spheres around words
from a Yellow Pages. I see Psychotherapy,
there is only one name.…
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