Joan Gelfand’s reviews, stories, and poetry are in many national and international literary journals, including Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Kalliope, California Quarterly, Toronto Review, Marsh Hawk Review, and Levure Litteraire. She’s the Development Chair of the Women’s National Book Association and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She also blogs for the Huffington Post and coaches writers. You can find out more about her here, as well as support the campaign for her new novel, Fear to Shred, here.
Please describe your duties as editor/writer.
I am a full time writer who speaks at conferences on getting published and on poetry and video. I coach writers around the country. Once a month, I host the San Francisco Poetry Podcast show which airs on line on U–Verse. …
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Yet another storm shivers the trees,
reeling even the towering
sequoia. While walking the dog, I weep,
forced by icy wind
to abandon stoicism, your plane not yet
airborne. Once again,
I strip your sheets, reshelve books you never
opened, find, on the sill,…
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river city sky
spectrum of grey
ungiving surfaces
nothing immediate
available here
suspended
between cities
someone…
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Do you know that feeling you get
when giving up
when you don’t care for another day,
when you realize you are your childhood
no matter how much you try to smother it?
As you wonder if anyone will care after you’ve departed
as you walk through the gate alone
in the same way you arrived. …
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I saw him resting under a tree, my tree. Or at least everyone called it my tree since the incident. But since it was being called my tree, however spitefully, I would claim it as such. So I’d say my bit and I’d kick him out from under my tree. Then, I’d watch him lumber off and I’d take a nice nap. It was a good day for a nap too, balmy and quiet. Much like the day that ruined my life. Just thinking of it made me bristle with anger. But I called upon that to fuel my speech and I scampered on over to him.
“I need to talk to you.” He slowly craned his neck to look up at me. He blinked his beady little eyes at me, and slowly, ever so slowly, opened his mouth.…
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Anyone who saw me reading Things We Lost in the Fire in public must have thought I was suffering and in deep pain. Every story in Mariana Enriquez’s debut collection had me grimacing and squirming, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. But her stories are so thoroughly transporting that I lacked the self-awareness to care. I was far away in Argentina, worried about the news of the decapitated child flashing across the television screen, and the one-armed girl who went missing in a haunted house, and on a murder tour of Buenos Aires. Enriquez’s stories all center around life in Argentina, often detailing the lives of disadvantaged youth. These stories are dark and unsettling, written so beautifully that the whole experience of reading them leaves you in a macabre trance.…
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I know the girl with the ashes in her hair,
the one with the dreams piled like logs, the one
who goes up in smoke because her daddy promised her the world
and who is gone, as fast as he came.
I know what it feels like to be those morphing feet,
those unseeding pumpkins, to return to a mouse from a stallion,
to pray and pray in someone’s locked room
that that someone, somewhere
will find you.
– Penney Knightly…
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