Fjords third issue is dedicated to progressive art. New York artist Jason Starkie graces the cover and southern belle Vadis Turner's original ribbon paintings are both found inside. New translations of Bolivian Poet Edmundo Paz Soldán by translator Kirk Nesset and two poems by poet Kelli Allen appear with Kristina Marie Darling's Melancholia, three works by Richard Murphy and poems by Frederick Smock, D.E. Steward, Vanessa Blakeslee, Ha Kiet Chau, Jennifer Lauren Collins, Anna Weaver, Marit Ericson and Ray Holmes. Short Stories by Stephanie Dickinson, Elizabeth Parsons and Jeff Fearnside compliment appear with reviews of the films Drive and Boy by Fjords’ Kayti Doolittle.
Featured Poetry
Melancholia
A History of Melancholia: Glossary of Terms
Footnotes to a History of the Beloved
by Kristina Marie Darling
About Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling's fourth book, Melancholia (An Essay), is forthcoming from Ravenna Press in 2012. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as grants from the Vermont Studio Center and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is also the editor of a forthcoming anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (Moria Books, 2012).
Poetry in Translation
21st Century Bolivian Poet Edmundo Paz Soldán
Disappearances
Man of Fictions
In the Library
Pilar
After the Breakup
translated by Kirk Nesset
About Kirk Nesset
Kirk Nesset is author of two books of short stories, Mr. Agreeable and Paradise Road, as well as a book of translations, Alphabet of the World: Selected Works by Eugenio Montejo; he is also author of a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver, and a book of poems, Saint X (forthcoming). He was awarded the Drue Heinz literature prize in 2007 and has received a Pushcart Prize and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His stories, poems, translations and essays have appeared in hundreds of journals, including The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Sun and Prairie Schooner among others. His short short fictions have been widely anthologized, appearing in W. W. Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, Sudden Fiction Latino and elsewhere. https://kirknesset.com/
Poetry
The Only One Ashamed
What the Other Inherits
by Kelli Allen
About Kelli Allen
Kelli Allen is an award-winning poet, editor, and scholar. Her poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Echo Ink Review, Poetry Quarterly, Fjords, Abridged, Other Poetry,Lyre Lyre, The Blue Sofa Review, WomenArts Quarterly, The Caper Review, It Has Come to This: Poets of the Great Mother Conference, Foliate Oak, Greatest Lakes Review, Lugh Review (where she was the featured author), Blackmail Press, The Chaffy Review, Euphony and elsewhere. She has been the featured poet for Desperanto Press's segment "Tea With George" for September 2011. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she was a finalist for the 2011 Rebecca Lard Award. She is the author of two chapbooks (Applied Cryptography; Picturing What Breaks) and has served as the Managing Editor of Natural Bridge. She is also the founder of the Graduate Writers Reading Series for the University of Missouri St. Louis. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of English at Lindenwood University and Florissant Valley. Allen gives readings and teaches workshops throughout the US. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, is forthcoming from Fjords New Book Series October of 2012.
Dogged
Tips About the Buttocks and Brain
by Richard Murphy
About Richard Murphy
Richard Murphy's credits include the 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award for his book-length manuscript Voyeur; a first book The Apple in the Monkey Tree; chapbooks Great Grandfather, Family Secret, Hunting and Pecking, Phoems for Mobile Vices, and Rescue Lines; poems in Rolling Stone, Poetry, Grand Street, Trespass, War Literature and Art, The View from Here, New Letters, Pank, Segue, Tryst, Big Bridge, EOAGH, E.Ratio, Borderlands, Paper Nautilus and Confrontation; and essays in Folly Magazine, The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe and Journal of Ecocriticism.
Moon
Morning
by Frederick Smock
About Frederick Smock
Frederick Smock is associate professor of English at Bellarmine University, in Louisville. His new book of poems is The Bounteous World (Broadstone).
The Room of Gold
by Vanessa Blakeslee
About Vanessa Blakeslee
Vanessa Blakeslee received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her short fiction, poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The Southern Review, The Paris Review, The New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, The Bellingham Review, and other reknowned literary magazines nationwide. She was one of four finalists for the 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminars as well as the Philip Roth Residency at Bucknell University. Her short story "Shadowboxes" won the 2011 Bosque Fiction Prize.
Early Capitalism
by Joe Wenderoth
About Joe Wenderoth
Joe Wenderoth is an American poet, writer and professor. His work is widely anthologized, appearing in collections such as: The Anchor Book Of New American Short Stories, Isn't It Romantic, State of the Union, Poetry 180, The Next American Essay, The Best American Prose Poems: From Poe To Present, The Body Electric, The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, American Poetry: Next Generation, Best American Poetry and The Best American Essays 2008. Wenderoth teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Davis. He is from Baltimore, Maryland, and received his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College.
Blue Streak Café
by Marit Ericson
About Marit Ericson
Marit Ericson is a poet originally from New England. Some of her recent work appears (or is forthcoming) in The Chaffey Review, Forge Journal,and L.E.S. Review. She lives and writes in New Jersey.
Hometown
by Anna Weaver
About Anna Weaver
Anna Weaver is a professional writer who lives in the thriving art hub of North Carolina's Triangle area. Her poems have appeared or will appear in two anthologies of the best of Raleigh area open mic venues, Star Line and Wild Goose Poetry Review.
Catalpa
Taprobane
by D.E. Steward
About D.E. Steward
D. E. Steward writes serial month-to-months in a project now in its twenty-sixth year. Of the 302 completed, almost 200 have been published in literary magazines, and a few electronically. Shorter poetry and prose appear in the same manner. Books: Contact Inhibition (1986), Torque (2006), and various chapbooks.
Coyote as a Young Boy
Popular Mechanics
by Ray Holmes
About Ray Holmes
Raymond Holmes is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. In my spare time, he serves as an Associate Editor for WomenArts Quarterly Journal. His poems have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Greatest Lakes Review and Chariton Review.
Sideways Equals
by Jennifer Lauren Collins
About Jennifer Lauren Collins
Jennifer L. Collins is a Teaching Fellow at Duquesne University and the Editor of Lexicon. Her work has recently been published or is forthcoming in such journals as Puerto Del Sol, Caduceus, 13th Moon, Anobium, Redivider, The Birmingham Arts Journal and The Potomac Review. Currently, she lives and teaches in Pittsburgh, PA.
Killing Time
by Ha Kiet Chau
About Ha Kiet Chau
Ha Kiet Chau is a poet and freelance writer who has been published in Asia and the United States. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Asia Literary Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Zaum Press, Everyday Other Things, Stone Highway Review and many others. She was nominated for the Best New Poets anthology of 2011 and is now working on a collection of verse. Ha teaches art and literature in San Francisco Bay Area.
Short Story
Papoose House
by Stephanie Dickinson
About Stephanie Dickinson
Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Iowa, Texas, Louisiana and now New York City. Her novel Half Girl is published by Spuyten Duyvil as is her recently released novella "Lust Series." Corn Goddess and Road of Five Churches are available from Rain Mountain Press. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the South, Best of 2008 and 2009. She is an associate editor at Mudfish.
Ghost Parade
by Elizabeth Parsons
About Elizabeth Parsons
Elizabeth Parsons spends a good part of her life en route which is just how she likes it. As a journalist, she has published over 200 articles covering women's leadership to travel to art for various regional magazines. Recently, she applies her communication skills to a development role with Kissito Healthcare International, a non-profit healthcare organization that works hand-in-hand with nationals to improve healthcare for vulnerable people in Africa. Elizabeth holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Mary Washington University.
Znamenskaya Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov (The Holy Sign Russian Orthodox Church)
The Cat People
by Jeff Fearnside
About Jeff Fearnside
Jeff Fearnside's fiction has appeared in many journals and been honored with several national awards in the U.S. Most recently, he won the 2009 Mary Mackey Short Story Prize (sponsored and judged by author Mary Mackey) for a story set in Central Asia, where he lived and worked for four years. Other stories in this cycle have appeared in Rosebud (2007), Crab Orchard Review, Potomac Review and Bayou Magazine.
His short-story manuscript Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air: And Other Stories of Flight was named a finalist (Top 7) in the New Rivers Press 2009 MVP Competition. Stories in this collection have appeared in The Pinch, Rosebud (2009), Many Mountains Moving, Lake Effect, Controlled Burn, Aethlon, Isotope, Eureka Literary Magazine, Arroyo Literary Review, Cantaraville, Rock & Sling, SFWP: The Journal, and the anthology Scent of Cedars: Promising Writers of the Pacific Northwest. His fiction was nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife and two cats in Prescott, Arizona, where he is at work on a novel. For more information, please visit his website at www.Jeff-Fearnside.com
Cover Artist
Fireplace Barricade
Ladder Fiddle Hole
Pots and Orange Barriers
by Jason Starkie
Art
Ripe Dirt/Fresh Burial
Red Candy Black Mold
Smoldering Garden
A Rather Violent Merger of a Wedding Dress and Swamp
Storm and Fire
Primrose Path
Engulfed in Smoke
by Vadis Turner
About Vadis Turner
Turner's current work synthesizes a mixed media palette with a painter's background. Ceremonial adornments are partnered with destructive agents to generate compositions that are in a similar state of transition. Satin ribbons and flowers are fixed in a stilled state decay inspired by stages of fire, mold or submergence. The union engages, consumes and repurposes the materials. The mixed media paintings capture the dark beauty of change and loss. Working with traditional forms of craft, Vadis Turner has developed a language that re-imagines rites of passage and the classification of heirlooms in a contemporary context. In 2009 her series of contemporary heirlooms comprised her Dowry. During her Dowry research, she became interested in how subjects and spaces are adorned for transformational ceremonies. Culturally specific adornments idealize and purify subjects as they transcend from their current identity into a new identity. They simultaneously embody a climax and a demise. The rite of passage isolates the brief state of in-between. www.vadisturner.com
Reviews
Review of Drive
by Kayti Doolitle
About Kayti Doolitle
Kayti Doolitle graduated from Missouri State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and a minor in Creative Writing. She is the Art and Film Reviewer for Fjords Review. Kayti is writing an anthology of essays about the sex industry in countries around the world, while living in South Korea.
Review of Boy
by Kayti Doolitle
About Kayti Doolitle
Kayti Doolitle graduated from Missouri State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and a minor in Creative Writing. She is the Art and Film Reviewer for Fjords Review. Kayti is writing an anthology of essays about the sex industry in countries around the world, while living in South Korea.
Recordings
Poetry
Elegy for the Stem
by Derek Palacio
About Derek Palacio
Michael Salcman, poet, neuroscientist and art historian, was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia and came to the United States in 1949. He attended the combined program in liberal arts and medical education at Boston University, was a fellow in neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and trained in neurosurgery at Columbia University. Former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and past president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, he is the author of almost 200 scientific and medical papers and six medical and scientific textbooks translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese and Chinese. As Special Lecturer at the Osher Institute of Towson University, Salcman lectures widely on art and the brain, including his course How The Brain Works on the Knowledge Network of the New York Times. His poems appear in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, New Letters, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Ontario Review, Poet Lore and Raritan, and have received six nominations for a Pushcart Prize. His work has been heard on NPR's All Things Considered and in Euphoria (2008), a documentary film on the brain and creativity. He has given readings at the Library of Congress, the Pratt Library of Baltimore, The Academy of Medicine in Atlanta, The Writers Center in Bethesda, the Bowery Poetry Club and the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York. Author of four poetry chapbooks and two collections, The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press, 2007), nominated for The Poet's Prize and a Finalist for the Towson University Prize in Literature, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011), his anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors and diseases is forthcoming.