Fates: The Medea Notebooks / Starfish Wash-up / Overflow of an Unknown Self - Softcover

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Ann Pedone is the author of the chapbooks The Bird Happened (Leave Books), perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho. (Cup and Dagger Press), DREAM/WORK, and Everywhere You Put Your Mouth (Halas Press.) Her work has appeared in numerous journals including American Journal of Poetry, Narrative Magazine, Juked, Carve Magazine, Abralemin, JuxtaProse, and Menacing Hedge. Ann has a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Bard College, and a Master’s in Chinese Language and Literature from UC Berkeley. 

Katherine Soniat’s life has moved around a lot in the last few years: trying hard to find the RIGHT HOME, and why not be most concerned about our planet EARTH? Starfish Washup will be her ninth collection of poetry, to be published in Spring, 2023. The Swing Girl (LSU Press, 2011), Bright Stranger (LSU Press). Polishing the Glass Storm will be available through Louisiana State University Press in fall, 2022. The Goodbye Animals won the Turtle Island Chapbook Award (2014). She has been on the faculty at Hollins University and Virginia Tech, and has taught in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC/Asheville. Her poetry has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Poetry, Iowa Review, The Nation, Women's Review of Books, and Superstition Review, among others. 

D. M. Spitzer is author of A Heaven Wrought of Iron: Poems from the Odyssey (Etruscan 2016), abyss of departures, an image|text collaboration with digital artist SaraShiva Spitzer (Hawai’i Review, 2020), and editor of the volume Philosophy’s Treason: Studies in Philosophy and Translation (Vernon Press, 2020). Spitzer’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Research in Phenomenology, Epoché, Diacritics, Ancient Philosophy, Mosaic, and Translation Review, while his poetry and translations have been published in Ancient Exchanges, The Maine Review, North American Review, TRANSverse, and elsewhere. Currently, Dr. Spitzer is co-editing a volume in Translation Studies and editing another collection of essays on ancient Greek philosophy (both under contract with Routledge). In addition, Spitzer is writing a book on the ways migration and trauma shaped the thinking of the earliest Greek philosophers, as well as working on a translation of only the similes from the ancient Greek epic The Iliad.

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Ann PedoneMedea’s Prologue I made of their flesh no more than a sieve. I had no idea what she meant by this but maybe it was just a bad translation. I looked at her and all of the earth’s matter fell from her face. Come, let’s count out all the different ways there are to enter a woman’s body.Out Of The Mouth Of The Bosporus I remember the sweet smell of the Peirene that heady mix of freshly cut cyprus sweet pear and bone on which I suckled as a child. For the love of a man I traveled over salt water dark as night through the waves of Pontus’ Gate to live as an exile a barbarian in this land of Hellas. Now with a husband who has left our marriage bed in tatters my body nothing but a watery hollow thick with the scent of betrayal darkened with salty mollusk broken glass and blood through which no man will ever again choose to enter. Language flows backward up through this fleshy hole between my thighs into a belly now emptied of all of its milk. The pomegranate seed he placed in my hands that night did not mean love, as I had thought.iMessage July 1, 2014 5:56 PM [The Writer of The Medea Notebooks and her husband, Jason] W: You almost home? H: No, still at the office. W: Remember the reservation is at 8:30. Sophie is coming at 8 to watch the kids. H: Text me the address, I’m probably going to have to meet you there. W: What? I was really hoping we could go together. H: Don’t make a thing out of this. It’s just dinner. W: I’m not making a thing. It’s impossible to make anything with you recently. H: Ok, so maybe I should just quit my job and then I could stay home and take you out for dinner every night. And then you could pay the mortgage with your poetry. W: Look, I’m not going to do this. You want to meet me there, fine. H: Fine.Katherine SoniatTelemachus SeekingAt war, the present-tense of our world—bodies marched off two legsat a time. Swine, lambs, heifers and lovers rolled up as one and fedas slaughter. Leave at once, you greedy scoundrels: wail of those long agoobscured and deleted near the Aegean.~Telemachus kneels on the shore, the gray waves breaking. He scansthe horizon for his father. If not by the sea spread before him, he’sbaffled by the hypnosis of looking—home changed to a vaultedmuseum of men baying for his mother.~Calm then wild, the sea confounds. Where but the shoreline can a ghostand his son be familiar?The constancy of lost Odysseus—he and Telemachus as if they were ropedtogether in foam. They share the ocean-keeper’s eyes.~Supplicant at the missing fathers’ feet. Sons beg for a guardiannot departure. But it’s a child’s guess as who actually crossesthe threshold. Either way, the doorway fills then empties.No lit gods cure Telemachus, hoping. History’s bloodiedadore endless battle—those the never-banned idols of men.Ghost-makers all.~Burst of thunder as from wide and far the Greeks gather. Fartheraway Odysseus sails.Telemachus imagines boats and men that come to nothing. Shipwreckof stars in the sky at dark. Phantoms pay homage to nothing.~This boy’s Bring My Lord Home song twists the mind. Chantof sons that need more. He cannot stop his father-husband menfrom arriving at night (one for Penelope too). Thoughts swiminside him but not a soul stops to think that such wishingnever will do. Stories of home tell us so.Penelope’s WombTelemachus glides about the dream-table of fresh bowls of milk.Mother and father look at him then to each other. Nursesmiles from the womb currant tarts warm in her apronso boy first will know sweetness.What brilliant shocks wait for the newborn.~Telemachus (grown taller now) sits in a sea-cavewith the gulls to figure his own charging body.He touches new hairs down past his belly—goldenbraille continent of fathers leaving.Taken by the sea Odysseus sailed blew then flewinto the arms of Circe—enchanter attached to the heart.Lure for men to leave wives, daughters and mothers.House-of-cards son running (to and away from) home:Penelope with her would-be lovers.~Islands blow from the ocean floor. Wars glisten.Our shattered lineage.Losing Touchi. Himat war on the Pacific. Always that ocean. Swine, lamb, heifersand lovers rolled up as one, and fed as garbage.No more family near the Washington Zoo. My father aboundswhere it’s tidal, and for decades thereafter I sense him springingabout—bombers headed for his hot metal deck of munitions.ii. To hellhe screams back at the war when he comes home to curseand drink. Drunk, he does not want to go where the big greenvases fly in a westerly direction . . . those he hurled at sunset.When the bureau collapses into the hallway, he can’t back awayfast enough. Stuck to his ship most nights, he’s an oceanon fire.iii. My twilighthouse reels with the up, down and jump nowcommands to the living. Screams. Lungs raw. Fleshof men overboard. Those paralytic times repeatlike paleontology: Neither bones nor the failed human heartcan be better behaved. To [be able to] do anything at thatpoint in time. . . the sheer magnitude of roll over, and die again.iv. YouYour hands go down then up over your head in the bathroom.Lukewarm plunges from the tub faucet behind you. That heard,you surrender. Water stupefies. Medicine-chest mirrorwith water running wildly through you . . . the shock of catchingyourself time-lapse in a mirror— another cracked, crooked-facedsoul on its feet.v. Adrenalinrushes are worth other wars . . . you stormingthe kitchen as if best friend to a hungry sea of animals.Walls and ceiling loudly tilt. Ready to drown,I am the part that can’t find land. Won’t you, please,go away, with all those flames wiggling wetly around you.vi. Familytrees for those who patiently wait to be born. Mychance at daughter. Mouthful of devils I keep handy.Little spit-fire, you yell. Thoroughly informedI turn loose as lions in cages roar alongwith so many people from so much time scurrying across the earth:just not to be lugged away shoved under or forgotten.vii. Humansclipped away by the great cosmic fan. Flesh in fiery blue garbstreaks inside my planetary doom. Dome, I mean, that yellowbedroom ceiling. My kitchen zoo and bathroomcrazy for peace.I pick the past from your eyes. It makes me snap my teeth—one,two, three—to hold you at a distance. Not believing in the possibilitiesof water, you explode and I need something solid to live on.viii. Creaturesof war learn hate early. My job is to seal gold paperwalls. The voice says, Play you’re alive. Open your mouth widebut don’t make a sound. I’m mostly feeling the whales and howtheir guts must be hurting. You think about this one with me.But still there’s this woman we have between us . . .the mother/wife who cannot leave us aloneix. StrengthI don’t have the strength to get us all up off the floor at once—mass of melted bourbon mixing with your Pacific.Any way terror is absorbed what matters most is how(quickly) a body stands up. Then to get backto the prehistory of quietly. And delicate.Or at least to have records, annals of the muddled,broken soldiers. The sheepish and mute.Our most secret garden.x. Kwan Yin WaitingMothers seem less visible at the end or morevisibly convoluted In my family we had a total of sixarms with muscles and three heads—one made for only a childThose parts were intact . . . unlike my brush with Kwan Yinthe goddess of compassion who rides her foamy dragonsacross a dark China Sea.Cross the water, she points a way to me.Then too [and mainly with her eyes] she warnsMercy to a world in misery.Kwan Yin stands above the ragged ripped and soul-deadas they cry water touch Look at meand she offers a literal translationto live without / and inside the flesh / and from the heartand never ever to stopEven as the mind launches its fireball of...