Feb 22

Independent Book Review: Radio Water by Francine Witte

Radio Water
By Francine Witte
Genre: Literary Fiction / Short Stories
Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

Francine Witte evokes the sorrow of separation, the fear of alienation, and a
snippet of hope in this flash fiction collection.

All under 1000 words, most of the 44 stories in Francine Witte’s Radio Water have appeared separately before in literary journals and anthologies. Individually each story impresses its emotion on the reader, from the fear of a possible unplanned pregnancy to the denial of a partner’s abuse.

Witte’s collection builds on itself, drawing the reader into various worlds filled with physical and emotional danger and sometimes relief. Whether the reader only has two minutes to speed through a single story or a few hours to power through the entire book, they will walk away still reeling from Witte’s carefully chosen words.

Radio Water begins with four short gestures, all leaning toward the domestic.
“Fishsweat” deals with a mother fileting fish, “thwacking the heads off one by one
and tossing them in the bucket like they were somebody’s father, somebody’s
husband.” It’s a hint at missing husbands, at men who drift away from family.

But these very brief stories merge seamlessly into the more straightforward four-page
narrative of “Mimi Comes to the Door and No One Can Stop Her,” a story about
unwanted pregnancy and a woman who lays claim to a married man. While the under
one-page stories focus on an image or a moment and spiral out from there, “Mimi…”
takes a similar tact before merging seamlessly into the future tense, however dark and
rather hopeless that future may be.

While Witte’s stories often tackle similar subjects of unhappy relationships, second
families, abortions, abuse, and trauma, the collection is far from monochromatic as
each story is a unique case, specifically and artfully handled. Witte’s prose is tight and
lyrical, filled with fresh descriptions like a father’s “snoozy chest” or “The salt lip of
the surf.” Some stories are told in disparately-titled sections like “Then, Thenner,
Thennest,” or “How to Answer a Door” which is split up into sections titled “Slowly,”
“Quickly,” “Asking,” “Not Asking,” etcetera.

With fresh language and unique patterns and forms, Witte explores many aspects of
her characters’ fears and traumas, encompassing a wide range of experiences for the
reader to dive headlong into and come away with a deeper understanding.
Witte tackles the toughest of personal issues, and though, at times, the writing borders
on the bleak, the stories, with all their weight, also offer hope. The ten-line “Middle of
the Night” ends with “the cloud of my father in someone else’s sky.” And “This is a
Secret, So Shhhhh” comes to the conclusion: “we slip secret out the door and into the
world.” Escape, independence, and freedom hover over the page and beyond it. The
very act of writing, and then reading these stories hints at life beyond the trauma, an
externalization of the trouble within. All the tough subjects of life and love and family
are laid bare, treated with beautiful language and reformed into a heartfelt wish.

Radio Water isn’t a guide to healing trauma. It is an acceptance of that trauma, an
owning of fear and uncertainty, and a reminder that we are not alone.

Purchase a copy of Radio Water at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/radio/153  or wherever books are sold online.

Feb 21

Review by Dan Denton: Disposable Darlings by Todd Cirillo

A look at Todd Cirillo’s Disposable Darlings

I have never met Todd Cirillo, and I’ve only read a few of his poems in online zines over the years. He has however been mentioned a few times in conversations with poets that I dig, so I was curious to take a look at his forthcoming collection of poems Disposable Darlings from Roadside Press. I read through it four times in seven days, and the book bears the mark of a good one: it gets better each time you read it.

The book is peppered with many short, punchy poems that snuggle in between the longer ones that read like triumphant anthems, odes and psalms to love, lost love, poetry, friends, lovers, poetic comrades, juke boxes, and dive bars. One of the first things I noticed and appreciated was Cirillo’s knack for humor and self deprecation. He decries the too polished and the too serious poets. He embraces the flawed and the laid back. He eschews signs and omens tossing his luck to the fates of fuckedupness. He sits comfortably with Willie and Waylon, elevates a one of a kind friend to legend status, canonizes the ordinary regulars of no name watering holes, finds adventure on the way to weekday coffee shops, and not only names his skeletons, but drags them out of every closet dancing with them down the streets of New Orleans. He celebrates each drink like it was his first, and his poem “Saints of the Neons” is by far one of the best I’ve ever read about regular barflies. “Here, we are all equal -/equally lost/equally broke/equally off/and we look almost innocent/under the neons.”

His poem “Dear Sweetheart” reads like a modern letter to a young poet from an unlikely Rilke, as Cirillo writes “…and have the sense/to fall in love/again and again/with that moment…”

In the poem “What the Hell Am I Doing Here” he describes a life lived “…like repeatedly/going on first dates/that no one shows up to.” A line so well written in it’s awkwardness that I wish I’d written it. There are other lines that make your heart skip a beat throughout the book like the entire poem “Moving In.” Man, it’ll be a favorite of mine for a long time coming.

And Disposable Darlings will be a book of poems that I’ll read a dozen times more. This is what poetry is to me, and should be to you. Playful. Observing. Saving judgement for those on pedestals and never the ones in the gutter. Poetry that finds company in the alone times and comfort in the ordinary ones.

My friends that told me about Todd Cirillo were right. He’s a poet worth reading, and now I find myself in the middle of one of the most exciting times for an avid poetry lover, that of discovering a writer that I like reading, knowing he has other books out there that I can’t wait to get my hands on. The only thing better than that is a bonafide great first date.

That’s what this book is: the next best thing to a great first date.

—Dan Denton, Author of $100-A-Week Motel and The Dead and the Desperate

Purchase DISPOSABLE DARLINGS at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/darlings/158

Feb 02

2 poems from Susan Ward Mickelberry’s AND BLACKBERRIES GREW WILD

Last Night I Sat Alone

Last night I sat alone waiting for you
on the ground in the sun under the oak,
as I had waited long ago.
The wind rustled the trees and the undergrowth.

I drew with a stick in the sand
what looked like a Mayan temple.
My white t-shirt reflected the last sun.
I waited, but you didn’t come.

A black dog came out of the woods
and caught me unaware. I waited,
but you were caught up in your living
and had forgotten me.

The wind blew over my shoulder.
Near me the raspberries grew.

 

Everything

Everything seems to be
moving toward me.

at a steady speed.

Until it gets close, and
then it slows down.

And then it comes right on in.

It doesn’t seem to be in my body.

Where did it go?

 

Susan Ward Mickelberry, born in Miami during WWII, has lived around the continental US and in Africa, where she spent several childhood years in Asmara, Eritrea, an event that colored her life. She earned an MA in English Literature from the University of Florida and lives with her cats in Gainesville where she worked as an editor and writer at UF. A lifelong student of ballet and dance, she teaches yoga and participates in regional poetry readings and events, including PoJam, the longest running open mic in Florida. Her poem “The Conversation” was Finalist in the Florida Poetry Contest at the Florida Review. Other poems appear in Blue Moon Review, Via I, Greensboro Review, Florida Quarterly, The Melrose Poetry Anthology, This is Poetry, Volume IV: Poets of the South, AC PAPA No. 3, and others.

Written over a lifetime, these lyrical poems reflect on childhood, early marriage, motherhood, and multiple long relationships in what proves to be rocky going. The author puzzles, attacks, muses, jokes, and meditates, seeking a way through ever-changing personal landscapes situated within the cultural tumult of late-twentieth-century America and more specifically in the strange beauty of north-central Florida. In several poems, she contemplates her nomadic youth as a military kid; born in Miami, she eventually lived in six states and spent two far-flung years in Asmara, Eritrea, Africa. The shadowy but powerful memories of those early years—hibiscus, clouds, elusive scents, radio tunes, flowering gardens and trees—permeate these musings by a poet trying to find some sense and intelligence somewhere in this always disappearing world, looking for grace, finding herself a little at a time. Influenced by authors as diverse as Mark Strand, Charles Bukowski, and the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, Susan Ward Mickelberry presents the outcomes in AND BLACKBERRIES GREW WILD.

purchase And Blackberries Grew Wild here >> https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/blackberries/155

Jan 23

Reading by Francine Witte: “Balance” from RADIO WATER

Jan 13

short interview and reading by Scot Young on JAM Sessions with Joe Mykut

Jan 13

Review by Nadia Bruce-Rawlings: RADIO WATER by Francine Witte

review first published on A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY (Anxiety Press)

Radio Water, published by Roadside Press, is a beautiful collection of flash fiction from author Francine Witte. Witte writes with such poetry and grace. Every word is thought out, every action flows. The theme is mostly the dysfunctional family, women and children who have been let down, which of course has been overtold, but not in this case. Witte makes it all new again with her sparsity of words and her gorgeous imagery.

Spoiler alert: what follows is perhaps my favorite of her “stories,” the final one of the collection, entitled simply “Sister:”

“She’d follow me, puppy that she was, the two of us new in the bicycle wind. The mist of adolescence just ahead but not just yet. She’d grab the flounce of my jacket, she on her roller skates, me on my bike. She’d squeal me to go faster, go faster. I wanted to slow down to an ooze. Never wanted to get to the part where her daughter calls one night to say she’s gone. How even now, I can’t help but look behind sometimes to see if she’s still there.”

Beautiful. The whole collection leaves one breathless. I honestly want to read it again – I had previously read the title story, “Radio Water” somewhere, and this time I loved it even more. It brought back memories of summers at the lake in British Columbia with a drunk father and codependent mother.

Another favorite (I hate to spoil the collection for everyone, but damn this is good). “Milk”:

“My mother and the milkman, because she is very old, and they used to leave milk in glass bottles in metal boxes and somehow it never went bad. Tuesdays, my mother would lean in the doorway, all sashay and catpurr while my father rattled to work on the 8:15. And my mother and the milkman, later rattling in my brother’s room, and my brother in the Vietnam sun, his shaky grenade hand at the top of his arm. How later, months or even a year went by, before we got the telegram. Mother shaking in the loop of Daddy’s arms. Milk sold now in cartons. In the supermarket. Where anyone could watch.”

Concise and gorgeous, Ms. Witte’s writing makes me want to write more frequently and better. Get this collection, you won’t regret it.

—Nadia Bruce-Rawlings, author of Driving in the Rain and Scars

Jan 11

Review by Steven Meloan: The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton

If you’re looking for a tale of personal purgatory but ultimate redemption, The Dead and the Desperate is the book for you. There have been many literary takes on blue collar life in America—dead-end jobs, dead-end relationships, and often mixed with substance abuse or variations of mental illness. But as a deft and brutally honest storyteller, Dan Denton manages to make such well-trodden paths not only compelling and personal, but literally a page-turner. You can’t wait to see what crazy shit will come down next.

And there is an overarching theme in the book of the soul-crushing toll that factory/blue collar life takes upon those trapped in grinding work hours and living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet amidst challenges and experiences that might have ended a lesser person, Denton manages a wry sense of dark comedy, mixed with an almost educational take on an American middle class that has been ground down by our current corporatocracy.

Assorted short chapters of the book focus specifically on truly illuminating topics like the economics/psychology of sex work, the history of the factory as an institution, economic disparity, the rise of inner-city crack and associated incarcerations, mood disorders/SSRI’s/Big Pharma, the disintegration of “the American Dream,” and the ensuant social fallout of globalization.

But it is the all-too-human ordeals that drive the story—a descent into the depths, the road back, and then a “return with the elixir” (in the form of this book). Denton has come away with a hell of a life-tale, is now many-years clean and sober, and living the life of a full-time writer.

Not everyone has a compelling story to tell. And not everyone with a compelling story quite knows how to tell it. Neither of those things are the case with Dan Denton.

Read it and see!

—Steven Meloan, author of St. James Infirmary

Jan 08

an excerpt from RADIO WATER, a collection of flash fiction, by Francine Witte

Night is a Man

A man without hands, without feet. Night has nothing but eyes and ears and a scrap of heart.

You left ten weeks ago, and Night is what I sleep with.

Tonight, I wake Night up and take him to the grocery store. On the way there, Night looks at the moon, down to a sliver now, but still. If Night had a voice, he would tell me how the moon is his.

I walk up to the doors that whoosh open. Night doesn’t fit. He is sky, after all. He is dreams, after all.

I tell Night to wait, and thank God for his ears.

I walk inside, my slippers back home, and I pad my feet down the aisles towards the bags and bags of chips.

Since you left me, I look at food. It looks at me. I have put on the weight I was afraid to. If you still loved me, you wouldn’t now.

I pay for the chips and slip them into my jacket. They make a bump. They are the child we will never have.

I walk through the doors. The sun has shown up and pushed the darkness aside. I look everywhere, but Night has vanished. All eyes and ears of him. And like you, nothing but a scrap of his heart left behind.

 

RADIO WATER is Francine Witte’s latest collection of flash fiction stories. The title story was recently featured in the most recent WW Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America (2023.) This story, like many others in the collection deal with Witte’s recurring theme of family in the process of breakdown. Other themes are romance, growing up, and the environment. The stories are all under 1000 words, and are told with Witte’s signature mix of quirk and poetic style. These are short, short stories that have a novel’s worth of emotion.

Purchase at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/radio/153

 

Jan 06

Review by Alan Catlin: Kiss the Heathens by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024

Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Kiss the Heathens, Roadside Press, available from www.magicaljeep.com 2023,
230 pages $20

Make no mistake about it, Kiss the Heathens, is a big ass book and true to its size and nature, it delivers the goods by taking names and seriously kicking ass. These are generally tight, clear- eyed narrative slices of life, as the poet sees it without extreme attitudes of drink, drugs, and general lack of focus. Yeah, there is a little of all that going on and some sleazy squeezing of tramp stamped women on the make, but there is nothing malicious or nasty about any of the carrying on. Who doesn’t, didn’t, want to get laid and have a good time when young? As the poems are not chronological, we share moments of Flanagan with his wife that show an intimacy based on a long term, positive, loving relationship. I might quibble that some of the later poems feel somewhat like padding on might have been best left out, but the final poem, “Arcade” dispels the less than wonderful moments with a strong closing picture of a group of heading nowhere video game addicts at play.

—Alan Catlin, author of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged and many others

Jan 05

Review by Alan Catlin: Nothing and Too Much to Talk About by Nancy Patrice Davenport

review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024

 

Nancy Patrice Davenport, Nothing and Too Much to Talk About, Roadside Press,  2023, 86 pages, $15-

There is a lot of smoking , all sorts of substances, chilling and communing with cats in Nancy Patrice Davenport’s latest book. I guess it should be expected from a poet whose previous work includes a book called, Smoking in Mom’s Garage. All of which is cool. Davenport describes herself as, presumably echoing a child’s observation, “a cool mom.” And she is. Her poems are easily relatable, unique in that they have zero punctuation, yet she manages to make that so organic to her style, you don’t notice until well into the book. And you never miss it, because the lines fit together perfectly. As she says of her work,

 

“I break open
rigid genre
shapes

push into revealing new selves

strip myself
to the bones

consider the power
of a self that’s been
scraped clean”
(from “Monday Morning Mars in Capricorn”)

And it works.

As Davenport observes, “life is a soap opera/not a sitcom”

—Alan Catlin, author of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged and many others