The Nepotist

How else to bear our sex as sarcophagus / for the body, D. Antwan Stewart asks. The following three poems feel very familiar to The Nepotist because he has found himself at various moments in his life both in the spinning throes of love and in the stalwart, stall wall, blowjob-behind-the-dumpster vice-grip of lust. Who hasn't? And who doesn't know exactly what's meant when Darius writes "It’s night again; it’s night with the moon as an ear / turned sideways so I know it’s an ear, so it’s eavesdropping, / so I know it must be thinking I’m a son-of-a-bitch, / that it must be thinking oh your poor mother, because I fell in love & needed to escape, to come here, a place / I know only by map, by reputation..."? Because love isn't love without its twin brother trouble and lust isn't worth its effort unless its met on that tricky precipice where balls-out loss is an entirely possible (and likely probable) outcome. These are salty, sultry poems. They dry out your mouth even as they moisten your... tongue. Therefore you should read them with a glass of water nearby. Better still, make it a Bourbon.

Thanks, Darius.

***

Sex/Love           

We’re hoping to get lucky after months of foolhardy misses,

taking our licks—that is our losses—

in stride as best we can if our best is a spectacle.

We’ve never experienced the true wham-bam of love,

the turn-me-on-my-ear-&-spank-me kind of

foolishness we drool about until our faces run like legs

in a swirled glass of wine. & who said sex & love

were mutually inclusive? We want sex-beneath-the-bleachers-

after-the-high-school-jamboree but not the glory-hole

vulgarity, the fingering against the stall wall.

We want a man who can’t finish his after-dinner flan

to drive us home, a man we can invite in for a glass

of Bordeaux to coax him— but not ply him—

into a walk along the promenade, conversation

never turning to sex since in the past it’s been a train wreck no one takes

their eyes from, as though it’s become the lead story

on the 6 o’ clock news, with men in vestibules weeping

because how else to bear our sex as sarcophagus

for the body—as if we were a horned-up seventeen

wishing only for tastes of flesh? We think tonight’s the night

we might get lucky. If not, we’ve lasted all these months now,

never explaining our way of seeing things:

that we’ve always been our own best date, that

no one woos us better than we do.

***

In Richmond, In Love

            “One of the things which makes love beautiful is it’s fatal . . .”

                                                                       —Adrian Blevins

When the old man pulled into the Exxon in his silver Mercedes,

waved at me from only a small distance, I thought I might know him

& waved back & continued on my way to the bus stop,

but when he followed me to the station exit, asked me,

How are you today, dahling, I can’t find what I’m looking for over there,

I thought it’s about fucking time I was noticed, but fuck off

you old perv, & stood at the curb with my hands through the pouch

of my pull-over, watching him disappear promptly,

as if he were following instruction in a bedroom sex game,

because he wanted to be punished, for his feelings to be executed

like a criminal convicted of petty theft but nonetheless sentenced to death

the way they do in Texas or Florida or some other state red as a stripe in a flag.

I’m in Richmond, VA, a foreign city to me as I’ve never tasted its air

the way the air in Tennessee tastes like too many allergens & sometimes

like the first kiss you have with a man who smoked too many cigarettes

right before, as if he were testing you to pull away, to grimace

& squirm & crack your neck because you couldn’t say but gesture.

There are no old men in Mercedes parked at Exxons in the early hours

in Richmond, but skies multi-color darks like Technicolor before they got it

just right. In Richmond when it rains it falls through the drain pipes in tinks

like the chips in Plinko on The Price Is Right, & tree branches

bend over the rooftops as if to rest their gaunt, leafless arms,

weary from seasons of blooming & bearing the elements,

the changes of weather that chafe & make them brittle,

which makes them ornery, as they refuse to stretch upright,

because they need a good lotioning, some tender loving

to make them lithe again, like a sapling, like a baby’s bottom

smooth after a diaper change.

I want to be in love again & this is what it’s all about.

             Say you’re told this: when you catch a fish you have to bang it

over the head to keep it, otherwise it’ll slip from your hands;

then it’s lost forever & you

must go home, bowed head, with an empty pail

banging against your knee.

You want to call bullshit. But instead you get up

from your chair & grab a beer, a cigarette, walk to the back porch,

& you smoke & sip & narrate your life because this

gives you pleasure & you imagine the voice-over

is Morgan Freeman & he’s calling you a sissy, a cunt-rag,

& you’re saying what the fuck!­ I though you were classy. You

won an Oscar! But you know he’s right & then what?

You hear Nina Simone winding up the stairs from some stereo

down below, & you’re in Richmond, far from home, from Tennessee, writing

about a boy you’re in love with, a boy who once sat on your hand in a bar

as if he wanted you to tickle his bottom & you chickened out & left your hand idle

like a stale piece of bread on the counter

& this is why Morgan Freeman calls you a cunt-rag

because that’s exactly how you behave. Even a bloody tampon has

more gumption than you. So you sit & wallow until dark, until

the stars appear one by one, like a bulb

blinking, struggling to illuminate, until finally

full-blown light. To you they appear to be kernels

of corn raked off the husk & the wind picks up & howls

though you know it’s really the collective breath of

bar hoppers you should be commiserating with over beer

& shots of warm tequila, your hand resting in the bowl of nuts

on the bar top because you can’t make up your mind whether you want

cashews or almonds. So you stay in sitting in an almost darkness

sick to your stomach because you know this is what

unrequited love does to the heart when it’s beating.

Makes you want to live without your body for a week,

subsisting on what-could’ve-been or what-could-be, rationing

it by bits you can chew, thinking, as your teeth grinds

parcels of truth, you might want to look up the old man

in the Mercedes when you get back to Tennessee, & it won’t

be fatal, & maybe start saying I again, instead of you.

*** 

Woe Is Me

It’s night again; it’s night with the moon as an ear

turned sideways so I know it’s an ear, so it’s eavesdropping,

so I know it must be thinking I’m a son-of-a-bitch,

that it must be thinking oh your poor mother,

because I fell in love & needed to escape, to come here, a place

I know only by map, by reputation,

from the news hour, from neighbors at the grocery store

whispering & clutching their shirt-fronts, from mothers

wrapping their children so tightly in their arms

their little eyes bug out, their skinny arms flail

& wiry legs slice through the air like string,

which doesn’t even make a whoosh, that it’s all

to no avail because love has a strangle-hold

because at one time one of the highest murder rates

in the country was in Richmond, & I wanted to go there,

to risk my life, to see if the city had changed, if it could

change me. But I’m harangued by the moon,

as it’s now an eye that can’t look at me. I want

to say it’s winking, but that couldn’t be true because it’s turned

into a smile with clenched teeth telling me to go straight

to hell. I should. I still don’t know the difference

between cilantro & parsley, even when I smell it, therefore

the guacamole tastes like shit. When I hold a baby

I often forget to support its head because I’m too busy

waving my free arm making a point about the tastelessness

reality t.v. Of course it’s tasteless! So the baby’s neck

snaps back! But I’m making excuses now, like a child

who tells his teacher the dog ate his homework, which isn’t

an excuse at all, but a lie, because dogs don’t eat homework,

they tear through the trash & eat garbage: gobs of bread slopped

with gravy & string you have to pull out of their asses & old chewing gum

they blow bubbles with when they fart—which is disgusting—but is

what they do, because they’re dogs who don’t give a damn

about homework unless you cram it down their throats

or tease them with it like a chew toy they wrestle until

bits of paper with multiplication tables are strewn

over the floor (69 X 69= . . . whoa! be careful). She should tell him to go

fuck himself & to hell with being fired, because

that’s how I see the world when I’m feeling woe-be-gone-

or-I’ll-get-plastered, which is brute honesty,

the square root of all, like this cat

I see tottering across the alleyway

slicked with the last of this evening’s rain

so it becomes crystalline beneath the lamplights, this cat

proving that this is life, not noir because there’s no steam

rising from the gutters or a mute trumpet singing its sad sonata

hoping the femme fatale will grab the mustachioed man

with tilted fedora & harness him behind the dumpster

for a blowjob, because the trumpet is plain perverted, has been

for years. It can certainly go to hell

& I’ll take it there accompanying on my clarinet

because I love a good combo,

because I live in irony, which is good for the body, like

wheat germ or liver or brussel sprouts,

 a fight with the moon that’s disappeared & out chasing it,

following a trail of sorrowful, half-lit stars,

chasing it for the life of me.

***

About the Poet:

D. Antwan Stewart is a former fellow in poetry at the Michener Center for Writers. His chapbooks, The Terribly Beautiful (Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series, 2006) and Sotto Voce (Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series, 2008) are embarrassingly underselling and are in desperate need of buyers (http://www.mainstreetrag.com). Recent poems appear in Callaloo, Meridian, Many Mountains Moving, Verse Daily, and The Best Gay Poetry 2008, among others. He currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee where he cracks lobsters for a living, writing poems about the ooey-gooey tomalley that leaks from the body—that is when he isn’t toeing the line of the semi-sentimental, woefully overwrought verse.

On the Identity of The Nepotist:

S/he could never finesse a batch of chicken wings into delicious goodness, nor braise a pork ass that melts in your mouth, as these are my specialties; though being the faceless specter s/he is, spirits of the imbibing sort are often indulged, which makes me forgive the fact s/he might be bamboozling all of us for poems.

Posted by Editor at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The following three poems by the poet Jennifer Reeser are so skillfully turned, so lusciously vivid and descriptive that The Nepotist trembles a bit to write of them lest Jennifer fail to find a pleasure in these words of introduction. Because the wicked fact is this: Ain't no Voodoo like Louisiana Voodoo.  

Fear and boot-quaking aside, The Nepotist reaches easily for the metaphor that the author herself has graciously offered out: When done as well, as seamlessly, as attentively as this, the execution of formal verse is a kind of voodoo.  It's unapologetically archaic to the eye and ear alike, which makes it exotic and intoxicating, a heady potion we cannot keep from imbibing.  Read these poems aloud and the metered pulse of the iamb becomes the drumbeat under the poems' incantatory words.  Then there are the words themselves and the images they hex together.  It's difficult to speak too highly about such crafted art.  And poems like these have power.  Power to seduce, power to heal, power, even, to harm.  And it's a beautiful thing to be wounded by a beautiful poem.  It's like having your heart broken by a beautiful woman.  The pain is explicit and exquisite.  These are painfully exquisite poems.

Thanks, Jennifer.

***

Self-Portrait As Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen of New Orleans

Don’t claim this corner of my shop lacks air,

and is too dark to be appreciated –

not here, where I am happy and surrounded

with warped and webbed familiars, tokens, where

glare never comes, and nothing has a cost.

I hear a wailing, pagan call to prayer,

and wonder if, indeed, I’ve gotten lost;

if Christ, in all high gravity, astounded

by my pained superstitions, hasn’t crossed

me off his list.  A cat should have this chair,

long-whiskered, barely breathing, well-behaved,

to gracefully rebound from broken wicker

to metal threshold at the front screen door.

Don’t censure it for having loved the shade,

the gris-gris pouch.  This corner of the store,

couched in angora cushions, fleur-de-lis

of iron or rope-tied fur, possesses light

enough to showcase burlap, skull and barrel.

I haven’t held a thing, I haven’t paid.

I’m captured by the art of what is free.

Don’t call this ante-chamber too beguiled.

I’m stricken by the art in what is hard.

The fortune teller warned me as a child

never to elucidate the cards.

“Good morning, little girl,” he said, and smiled,

en route between his sympathies.  Well-known

to him was this desire to stand alone

among the magic trappings, dust and wax.

Beside me, in repressing reverie,

a mannequin brunette extends one hand

for potions mixed to make her beauty last.

Museums elevate our sordid facts.

She will be fixed forever, understand.

Within this twilight, everything is fair,

for everything observed is indistinct:

a court, a case, an intimated lair

for sundry shriving shadows on the toe,

brown sugar and confections, space to think.

Reflections from the other side lay bare

a slave’s regrets when it is time to go.

This is the place one’s palette turns to coal,

one’s bed turns to a pallet, stately taste

to grime upon the palate, where the whole

vivid giddiness of feeling goes to waste,

and pride and moral posture rot.

Two blocks

away, as many years ago, two painters

from Paris came to Royal Street, the rue

of red impressions.  Exhibitions primed,

they strewed a show of poppies on thick stalks,

traced ladies – no display was ever quainter,

but this is not a jocular salon

in which the lingerie of life is drawn.

A premonition of cremated milk

enthralls my sense of smell, a walnut clock

upsets my sense of the contemporary,

its face immortalizing the fourth hour.

I disturb the fringe cord tiebacks, cayenne bowl.

There is no shame in touch for texture’s sake.

The sugar pralines in a week will sour.

Seclusion is the ransom of the soul.

***

Vampires of Youth

Still, on twig stools under concert pianos,

listless, they’re stammering Bach’s best concertos.

Stained with repasts from some previous evening

feast, they are lingering, stiffened and yellow.

Waistbands of bandage, historical sleeving

twisted, they’re hungering: yarns made to mellow.

Molded through mist, looking out on marsh mallow,

over one skin-stinging moment they sorrow –

blistered eternity turning their halos

tarnished, their hostels to stranglehold shallows.

***

Noli Me Tangere

"...for Caesar's I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame. "

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Whoso List to Hunt

Yet I must stiffen on paved stone, and stare

Through lowered lashes, rigid at attention –

A priory hind who must not ever mention

In passion or respect distress or care;

While with a stance of disavowal there

Before me in blindsided apprehension,

You snap, you joke, to circumvent the tension

Of this ascetic pose.  But if I dare

Deliberately deliver with a croak

Weak oaths, small sobs, suppose I’m making music,

Wild only by comparison to some.

Suppose I sing you hymns, instead of choke,

Intrepid in travail, un-trapped, not tragic,

And that my eyes are lifted, and not plum.

***

About the Poet:

Jennifer is the author of two collections, An Alabaster Flask and Winterproof, published by Word Press, and the cycle Sonnets from the Dark Lady. Her poems, essays, and translations of Russian and French literature have appeared internationally in magazines and journals such as The National Review, POETRY, Light Quarterly, CHRONICLES, First Things, The Dark Horse, The Chimaera, MEASURE, Unsplendid and The Formalist. Her work has been gathered into numerous anthologies, online and in print, including Longman's Introduction to Literature, (edited by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia), and the Internet anthology Famous Poets and Poems. She is a former assistant editor to Iambs & Trochees, and lives in southern Louisiana, USA.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

Who is The Nepotist? The sender of the enigmatic invitation-to-submit in my email box declined to identify himself; though reassuring as to his personal approval of me on a personal level, opting to end his mysterious solicitation with a mere, impersonal and unassuming "The Nepotist," followed by the enigmatic signature line "a friend in deed..." A friend? And a friend in deed? Was this a general mass-mail signature, or an addition, a hint regarding the nature of our acquaintanceship, addressed specifically to me?  I toyed with the temptation to find hidden meaning in the separation of the words, the tacked-on nature of their transmission. Perhaps it was my dear friend, poet and literary critic Dana Gioia, recently retired from his position as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who -- weary of his growing reputation as Aesthete Messiah -- seeks to convene more of his original "Can Poetry Matter?" effrontery by having a bit of fun with us, launching yet another project with a deliberately provocative title. But no. My friend Mr. Gioia, unsettled by the prospect of too much obscurity, most likely would have signed "your Sicilian Catholic friend in deed..." Maybe, then, "The Nepotist" was in fact the ingenious British actor, Alan Rickman, who -- having recently added me as a "friend" to his Facebook fan page -- has discovered a new avocation to occupy his leisure hours between the filming of cinematic masterpieces, and, impressed by my astounding archaic forms, quotidian rhymes and primitve rhythms, has decided to invite me along. But no -- impeccable and classic as Mr. Rickman's artistic discernment clearly is,The Nepotist "speaks" with a decidely American inflection. No, no on both counts, I felt sure, the science so falls through.  The possibilities flashed at me as myriad as facets of a crystal in a lab of science. But poetry is at least as much Art as it is Science; and while it matters, it matters more to me in the feel of Art than in the way of Science. In heeding the philosophers, we learn that friendship is the least necessary and needful of all affections, and thus our purest and most superior of ties. Poetry being my labor of love, neither commerce nor law to me, in the end, I concluded there were far too many other matters to concern myself with detective work directed toward friends. Who is The Nepotist? Surely not one who constructs barriers in order to keep others out, but one who constructs them in order to see who cares enough to break them down. Hence, let his identity be that Tree of Knowledge set in the Eden of verse, whose enlightenment, set in a scape of otherwise real "need-to-knows," might somehow only lessen the innocence -- and pleasure -- of my existence.

Posted by Editor at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Nepotist knows few poets who are as kind, as lively, as generous, or as committed to living a true life of letters as David Lehman is.  There's something incredibly gladdening about this man.  His work, too, stirs a sure but happily unnamable joy in me.  Take the following poem, for example.  To begin with, it's mildly subversive (between the title and the prose form, there's a lovely audacity he invites to the tango by even calling it a poem).  Also, the subversion is accomplished without snark or recrimination.  I like that.  Also, it's a sad poem, but the poem manages its tristesse in a controlled, even-keeled way that doesn't make me suspicious of it (for as we all know, melancholy most always serves itself in hyperbole). This is a mercy and a talent.  David effects this by employing plain, straight, matter-of-fact sentences, even when (especially when?) the images veer into strangeness or surreality ("like ocean foam in the mind of someone sipping liquid morphine from an aluminum flask," would be a good example of this).  Finally, I want to point out the poem's impeccable sounds.  "There was this wind," he writes.  "We were inside and yet there was this wind." Between the soft hiss of the -ess sounds and the overwhelming majority of short vowels (I count only two long vowel sounds in this example) David's managed to mimic the wind itself--the deflated, ominous, empty, devastating wind.

Thanks, David.  

***

Poem in the Manner of Contemporary American Fiction

       I have an eating disorder. I am bi-polar. We were married last year and now we're pregnant. I was among the few boys who chose soccer over football in p/e. Food is definitely better than sex and more reliable. How do you think it feels to have only one breast? Better than none, my mother said with that fake cheerfulness you tolerate only in mothers or characters in sit-coms. I hated my bra.

        There were these two persons, you see. There was the girl and there was her dress. I was her dress. She wore me once.

        The pills were jewels of many colors. There was this wind. A feeling of well-being washed over the lovers like ocean foam in the mind of someone sipping liquid morphine from an aluminum flask.

        Someone had forgotten to take down the awning of the boarded-up shop near the beached whale in the postage stamp on the corner of an envelope addressed in a feminine hand to the elementary school principal of a city devastated by a hurricane. There was this wind. We were inside and yet there was this wind. Death blew out the candles on his birthday cake.

***

About the Poet:

David Lehman is an author, editor, poet, teacher, etc. Summer is his favorite season. When he paints, his favorite color is lemon yellow. When he sings "I Wish I Were in Love Again," it is in the key of G. He collects stamps and loves having an attic.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

As to a stab at your identity, I have no idea. I was going to take a wild guess and say Elizabeth Bishop or possibly James Schuyler, but maybe they're not eligible? Anyway I'm glad to know you, if I do. You rock.

Posted by Editor at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Danielle Pafunda is made of awesome.  So classy and lovely is she that The Nepotist adjusts his habit of publishing up to three poems per poet just for her. These poems-- all four of them-- are each titled "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison."  It's easy to think of them as a series, though I'd discourage that. Instead try this: think of each poem as the same poem, only written with different words.  It's not so strange, is it?  I'm convinced that I've been writing the same poem for years.  We all do.  It's whatever hectors and nags us.  What we can't let go of or what won't let go of us. The germ of an idea, the impetus of an image, that squinting twinge of truth in a stereogram's squiggles.  Yes, that's what these poems are like, those Magic Eye pictures. Only through a choreography of alternating focus and dilation can they be truly seen.  I won't quote from the poems here as I usually do.  Just read them.  These dead girls will haunt you. As they haunt me.

Thanks, Danielle.

***

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

We’re ever so tired of sleeping.

When we wake up

we find we’re still in this immense bed,

and our eyes focus on this middle distant wall,

which is blue enough, granted,

and these curtains, everywhere, windowless, stained with

all sorts of excrement, reminding us

that it is the world down here,

too.

Too late

we’re asleep again.

At the end of each soggy hour

we recognize our failure.

We failed again, today,

at length, we failed.

Which is why the vision

came upon us.  She scalded us,

she stank up our room,

we yelled, fuck you to death,

but there she stood, with all her

wiry hairs shooting out

with her waxen skin

frozen, slumped.  We won’t

try to burn her again.  What a failure!

We roll over, thinking

maybe we can’t see her from here.

***

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

The surface world, too bright now,

wasn’t made for us,

anyhow.  We were made

its ridiculed, its honeybunnies.

We were tense up against a rack

displaying our fine cuts of—

a thousand gluey rhinestones

spilling out onto a very predictable

warehouse floor.

The surface world, with all its oil

stains, pockmarks, flecked metals,

its beetle visitors, its skeletal pollens,

its multiply coded salts, its loams

of night, like meat veins in a white urn,

you cannot. 

***

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

We can recall in great detail

the startled thread of skin pulled,

revealing the pathogen chasm.

What we once thought we were

on the outside

squeamish of,

ewwwwing,

we turn out to be entirely

composed of.

Turning, first on the spindle,

then spun

into the greasy fabric,

mutton smell,

deteriorating harbor,

flesh filled spectacle

itching away in the corner.

We recall the moment when

the knee exploded, when the curse

of bone-black bled,

a name scrawled in ash

on the adulterous hide.

Mother, what mutton.

What kneeling has done.

***

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

Supine, we roll our eyes back

like the doll’s, and the night

is a starry dome.  The night,

the tarry inner crust of the earth,

and the stars each one a salty

maggot.

A murder of ghosts appears

on the hemlock; it’s extra deathy

around here, for sure, but don’t be stupid,

human cylinder.  There is no near

to death.  There is only yes

or not

yet.

***

About the Poet:

Danielle Pafunda is author of Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press 2010),My Zorba (Bloof Books), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming Manhater (Dusie Press Books). She's an assistant professor of gender & women's studies and English at the University of Wyoming.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

The Nepotist is very shiny, made entirely of bones, filled with beetles!  The Nepotist has a dozen passports!  The Nepotist gets every haircut in the book! What cheerful creatures gathered in the forest where the Nepotist hums!

Posted by Editor at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As The Nepotist prepares to publish this stirring poem by Patrick Hicks, he wonders to himself (without actually going through the archives to check) if this is the first poem he's posted that addresses-- bluntly, unflinchingly-- historical atrocity.  "Framed in the center of the picture, / stiff posture and eyes seeing no one-- / like a lodestone, you attract raised arms. / As Goebbels smiles in the back of your Mercedes, / and swastikas snap to permanent attention," Patrick writes. Whether or not it's this journal's first politically charged poem doesn't matter; the poem is driven by its consideration of unnamed faces, 'ecstatic and fearless,' about which the poet wonders.  And it makes a political statement that it would likely do our own modern selves much good to consider: If we knew better than, would we do better than?  That's the question at the heart of this poem.  Would that we asked it many times daily, in the manner of the nun who prays the Liturgy of the Hours in her cloister.  We should say it like a prayer, all of us. Those of us who fight in the trenches, and those of us who sit behind big, important desks in important government offices, and any and everyone else in between.

Thanks, Patrick.

***

The Evangelist of Hate

Framed in the center of the picture,

stiff posture and eyes seeing no one—

like a lodestone, you attract raised arms.

As Goebbels smiles in the back of your Mercedes,

and swastikas snap to permanent attention,

I wonder how everyone around you,

all of them fanatically stiff-armed, will die.

I know how you will die,

and see your unbloodied forehead,

but of the thousands around your car,

I wonder about their ends.

Perhaps on the Eastern front or in North Africa—

that blurry woman near the church

will see firestorms in Dresden.

Just out of view, only a few years

in the future, this cheering parade

will become a corpse field.

These faces are ecstatic and fearless,

but if they knew how their actions,

and your smug duplicitous smile,

would smash apart lives,

river the blood of their families,

if they knew all this, would they still

teach their children the terrible lies:

Deutschland Erwache, Juden Raus?

*** 

About the Poet:

Patrick Hicks is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College as well as the author of five poetry collections, most recently Finding the Gossamer (2008) and This London (2010), both from Ireland's critically acclaimed press, Salmon Poetry. His fiction and essays have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Utne Reader, Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Natural Bridge, and many others. His stories have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize, he recently won the *Glimmer Train New Writer*s Fiction Award*, and several of his stories have been nominated for Best American Short Stories. He is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford as well as the recipient of a number of grants, including one from the Bush Foundation to support work on his first novel. Originally from Minnesota, he has lived in Northern Ireland, England, Germany and Spain.

On the identity of The Nepotist:

In the 1960s there was a popular British television show called "The Prisoner". The protagonist was stuck on an island and couldn't figure out who was #1 (that is, the leader who kept him imprisoned). Then in the 1970s we have "Charlie's Angels" where Charlie was equally shadowy. I'm also reminded of the Wizard of Oz and Batman. So who is the editor of the Nepotist? I'm not sure but I do know this: it's the mystery that counts. I wish she or he all success as they---like a good hearted Macavity---continue to vex Scotland Yard. May you vanish into smoke, Nepotist, and reappear elsewhere with new words. I'll just close with the words of TS Eliot: "He always has an alibi, or one or two to spare:/ And whatever time the deed took place--Macavity wasn't there."

Posted by Editor at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)