Summer 2017

Fall is here. My favorite time of year. The days cool off a bit. I return to the classroom. Coffee just seems to taste better than I remember. Poets arise from their summer slumber. Already this September I have been to 4 readings and a workshop, and thought them all brilliant. Most enjoyably, I have gotten back together with my assistant editors, Jordan, Katelyn, Kati (this issue’s featured editor and our resident Queen of Everything Gothic), and Erin, sorted through the summer’s submissions to Wild Goose, made selections, edited, sequenced, formatted, made changes to the journal, and am now loading it all up to send across the internet to anyone who wants to read it.

There are some wonderful pieces here. I won’t tell you which ones are my favorites, but you’ll recognize some familiar names, Helen Losse, Larry Schug, Jim Zola, Alarie Tennille, and see some new ones as well, Kelly Slivka, Gale Acuff, Deborah Doolittle, Mike Ferguson. You’ll see poems with a sense of humor, Zola, Schug, Tennille; poems about classic poetic topics like love (Ferguson and Trisler) and nature (Sutter and McCord), and poems on things you’ve probably never imagined you’d find a poem about (muskrats, bowties, toasters). And you’ll find insightful reviews of 4 new books of poetry by Dede Wilson, Shane Manier, Iggy McGovern, and William Wright. Hopefully these reviews will spur your interest enough to have you seek out the books themselves or take advantage of the author’s visit to your own part of the world (McGovern will be in Hickory, NC – where I am – in just 2 weeks; Manier came through this summer; and Wright was here last week).

Mostly, we hope you enjoy and grow from the poems we’ve gathered here, and we hope you’ll send us a comment or two sharing your own thoughts on the work and the ideas brought up by these poets. We look forward to having you join the conversation!

 

Featured Editor: Kati Waldrop
Translating the Hermetica
Friendly Local Vampire
The Sundered Country
The Drowning Dark

Contents
Jim Zola, This is Not a Love Poem
Jim Zola, The Tongue Has a Mind of Its Own
Larry Schug, Coffin Shortage
Larry Schug, Muskrats
Larry Schug, My Mother’s Worst Nightmare
M. Nasorri Pavone, That My Body Was Lush
Kelly Slivka, We Who Feel Small and Exquisite When We Look at the Sky
Kelly Slivka, Written After Finding the Honeybees Dead
Kelly Slivka, Bodybreak
Deborah Doolittle, Mark Strand Examines the Morning Glory
Terri McCord, Reading a Lake
Bart Sutter, Marsh Marigolds
Mike Ferguson, Sunset Beach Revisited
Mike Ferguson, On Our Own
Anne Hunley Trisler, Artifice
Gale Acuff, Suit
Jonathan K. Rice, Desperate Faith
Helen Losse, Musical Warfare
Alarie Tennille, Dear Toaster
Alarie Tennille, Poetry 101

Reviews
David E Poston, Review of Dede Wilson’s Under the Music of Blue
Katelyn Vause, Review of Iggy McGovern’s A Mystic Dream of 4
Helen Losse, Review of Shane Manier’s Fallen Heroes of the Awful Waffle
Jordan Makant, Review of William Wright’s Tree Heresies