Pratik's Upcoming Winter Issue : Highlights

 

Wings Of His Heart

                                                                  MARIÁN PAUER 

on Luka Brase’s Art

 

Contemporary Basque Poetry

Koldo Izagirre  Felipe Juaristi  Jose Luis Otamendi  Karlos Linazasoro  Iñigo Aranbarri  Harkaitz Cano  Itxaro Borda  Tere Irastortza  Miren Agur Meabe  Castillo Suarez  Leire Bilbao

 

Celebration of Pure Thought :

James Ragan featuring a Selection of  Seven Czech & Seven Slovak Poets

 

Seven Czech Poets

Petr Borkovec  Milan Dezinsky  Sylva  Fischerova

Vaclav Havel  Martin Palous  Tereza Riedlbauchova  Olga Stehlikova

 

Seven  Slovak Poets

Radovan Brenkus Eleni Cay   Dana Podracka  Tera Vale Ragan

Milan Richter  Katerina Rudcenkova Ladislav Volko 

 

Novels in the Year of Covid

YEAR - END REVIEW OF BOOKS BY ROBERT SCOTTO

 

Eleven Erie Poets

Mabel Howard  Sean Thomas Dougherty  Thasia Anne Lunger   Todd Paropacic  Patric Nuttall  Matt Borczon Berwyn Moore   Cee Williams  Chuck Joy  Kim Noyes Luke Kuzmish

Eight Nepalese Poets

Anuja Ghimire Bhuwan Thapaliya Rajan Maharjan  Parbat Lawati

Luna Ranjit  Rupsingh Bhandari Rozesh Gautam  Sushant Thapa

 

Featuring

Carlos Ramos  Maria Mistrioti  Laura Johanna Braverman  Heather Dubrow Sherri Felt Dratfield Gueorgui Konstantinov  Yesim Agaoglu, Marian Clarke, Ratika Bhardwaj Swati Sharma Amar Aakash  Declan Collins  Sam Lott

 

BOOK TALK

“The ultimate close-up magic trick”

Shireen Quadri on editing

The Punch Magazine’s

inaugural anthology of short stories by Women Writers

 

BOOK REVIEWS

“Marco Polo’s Dilemma”  

JOSÉ GARCÍA OBRERO reviews inverse [2016-1979]

By Cuban American poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

 

“An embellished, crafted book”

RATNA RAMAN reviews

Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation

by Sudeep Sen

 

TRIBUTE

“Final Destination of Otis Kidwell Burger”

: KATHERINE BURGER pays tribute

to recently departed American Poet

  

Plus all regular Columns

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PRATIK LA SPECIAL : MICHELLE BITTING's "An Hour North of Lee Vining, California"

 

MICHELLE BITTING

 

An Hour North of Lee Vining, California

Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.)

Who remembers where we stopped

for jars of orange neon cheese and the tangled black

knots of faux flies my father taught me to thread,

hooks that pierced the lips of bright trout

skimming lagoons in the craggy High Sierras?

I remember ghost lines cast to blue nothingness

we watched dissolve in the lake’s dark bottom.

What did we say to each other, side by side,

swaying in the wooden dish? Or was it

just the music of the wind in trees parting

ash white branches, the Aspen banter?

Why don’t I remember reeling with the rush

of my glittering first catch, the zagging colors cinched?

I think it’s come to the moment

he showed me how to haul a fat fish up,

how to grasp it tight in my girlish hand,

the wriggling slickness releasing life

into my nervous palm as I raised it high above me

and in one grand swoop, brought the stunned head

down against our boat’s iron edge, a gavel felled,

a verdict delivered, stunning those wide round eyes

to stillness. I can be as cruel as you,

I wanted to say, with pride, but didn’t

and still don’t. It’s enough

to think of it now. Enough to toss it back,

to let that ugly beauty go.

 

 

 

Michelle Bitting won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, and a fourth collection of poetry, Broken Kingdom won the 2018 Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. She has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The Los Angeles Review, Vinyl Poetry, The Paris-American, Love’s Executive Order, The Raleigh Review, Green Mountains Review, Plume, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Michelle is a Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at Ashford U. 

 

 

 

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PRATIK'S UPCOMING WINTER ISSUE HIGHLIGHT : BASQUE POET LEIRE BILBAO's Two Poems

 LEIRE BILBAO

Two Basque Poems

 

Terra Nova

Very early in my life, it got too late

                                          Marguerite Duras

 

You were a late arrival

my mother would say to me.

 

I was two weeks over my time

for fear of the world.

I was a red fish in my mother’s womb

two extra weeks in the spawning.

 

Three point six kilos

she reported by radiophone to my father.

 

A birth-slap and

I bawled for my father.

 

My daughter!

My daughter!

echoed at the bow.

Fishing is fine

over and out.

 

Drinks for the crew that night

were all on my father.

My father slept well that night.

 

Six months passed before he could meet the shrimp

hanging from my mother’s hook.

 

When he took me in his arms

I swam for the first time in the sea.

 

Now I realise that it was not only my tears

in all that briny ocean.

 

Translated from the Basque by Paddy Bushe

 

 

I don’t want that

I don’t want a mother country that will bury me,

that will put what we yearned to be in my mouth.

 

I don’t want a love that will exhaust me,

that will rise to my neck, only to take revenge.

 

I don’t want a mother to protect me

if I’m not going to have her at my side when time passes.

 

If I have no mother country, no love, no mother,

whither shall I return?

 

Translated from the Basque by Sarah J. Turtle & Iñaki Mendiguren

 

Winner of the Euskadi  and Kirico Prize, Leire Bilbao is a celebrated Basque language poet. After a successful career in the world of oral improvisation, she made a leap to literature with her poetry collection, Ezkatak.  Several of his poems have been sung by different Basque artists. And she has translated the work of Nijole Miliauskaite into Basque, as well as other poems by contemporary poets. She has published about 20 children's literature books.

PRATIK LA SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: American poet GAIL WRONSKY's poem, "Conspiratorial We"

 

GAIL WRONSKY

Conspiratorial We

 

Hammers and fingernails withheld

Even in the midst of frenzied days and envies

Insolent sun which moves behind mountains

to caution the edges of our eyes

Mouths which nothing can out-die

Under the disordered dusk, through mysterious windows

We meet and conspire, bathe our daydreams in gin

 

So much said already in the twilight

We are alive, but do not demand much of it

 

We don’t believe in anything but ghosts

We don’t question people badly dressed in mourning

Under the heavy heel, we are alive and weightless

Under the capsized boat we fly

 

Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of thirteen books of poetry and prose, among them Dying for Beauty (Copper Canyon), Poems for Infidels (Red Hen), and Imperfect Pastorals (What Books). Her translation of Alicia Partnoy’s book, Fuegos Florales (Flowering Fires) recently won the American Book Prize from Settlement House Press.

 

 

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Pratik La Special : Caley O’Dwyer’s Art: Life as Revision

 

Caley O’Dwyer’s Art: Life as Revision

 

In my paintings, I’m interested in architectural forms both for their own sake and as analogues for, or signs of, interior experience. With lines and more fluid shapes, I explore the idea that the self is relational and plural along with the sense that persons are fluid and mercurial. I like the idea that people are both individual and multiple, that differences in context bring forth variations of self and that these changes happen across time. Gouache (on paper) and oil paint (on canvas) are favorable mediums for depicting change because they can be worked over and over again, heaps of solid opacity blocking out what was underneath it, or more transparent washes with less pigment inviting glimpses into the under layers. The cutting out and collaging of painted paper to reposition figures or painting over areas of oil painting speaks to my sense of life as revision, this process that happens in time and which never ends, but which still images can seem to “fix.” These paintings struggle against this sense of fixity, such that arguably beautiful passages are sometimes sacrificed in favor of painting over them or scratching them out. If painting is a kind of conversation wherein physical gestures merge ideas with materials, I’m increasingly interested in keeping the conversation going, with how to render “ongoing-ness” in a way that isn’t just a mess. But the process involves risking messiness because the paintings typically only feel “right” or finished when they’ve been worked up to an extent that seems almost irretrievable. When they work, some leap of faith into further conversation (more painting, more cutting, more pasting, more doing) eventually yields a new order I couldn’t have planned or known.

 

The Wanderers (2008)

from RUN (2015)

                                                                  A Day Without Violence (cropped)

Conversion (2016)

Caley O’Dwyer is a visual artist, poet, and teacher living in Los Angeles. His painting practice is driven by postmodern psychology, humor, wonder and musicality, emphasizing uncertainty, process painting and surprise. Alongside his painting practice at the Brewery Arts Complex in downtown Los Angeles, Caley teaches creative writing and psychology at Antioch University and was previously an Associate Professor in University of Southern California’s Writing Program. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Washington Square and other venues, including the Tate Modern Museum in London. He is a winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry. His first book, Full Nova, was published by Orchises Press, and his in-progress collection, Light, Earth and Blue, features poems written in response to the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. 

 

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PRATIK LA ISSUE SPECIAL: American Poet Genevieve Kaplan's poem

Genevieve Kaplan

You’ve shown interest in weather forecasting

 

And the tide, learning the tables and knowing the shore.

 

And there was at times, could be, interest in wildfires: for spotting

and recording and reporting, in sitting in towers and watching

for wisps of smoke from dry trees, tips of voices and elements

that rise.

 

It’s true the rocks might not know anymore, be unable to tell one

from another, a chirp from a lizard from a shell from a friend.

 

As for me, I was hoping not to have a body at all. To instead

be left to water and fire and the small bent or broken legs of ants.

And that sort of quiet feeling of walking legless along the shoreline

at dusk.

 

 

Genevieve Kaplan is the author of (aviary) (Veliz Books, 2020) and In the ice house (Red Hen, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s poetry publication prize. Her recent work can be found in Poetry, Spillway, The Laurel Review, and Thrush. She lives in southern California where she edits the Toad  Press International chapbook series, publishing  contemporary translations of poetry and prose.

 

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Pratik LA issue highlight: Judith Pacht's poem, "Circle"

Judith Pacht

Circle

Julia is losing clumps of hair.  She wears a wig out in the world, but at home or on long walks the wig stays on her vanity, her gray brown strands scatter. In the woods nearby, branches plunge into cool deep shade.  Mulch thickens from years of leaves & rain. She settles into a drift of loss to contemplate chemotherapy. The air sings: a chorus of cicadas, birdsong, the winged zzz of diving insects.  One tree limb rubs against another. A warm breeze lifts damselflies, birds, oak leaves on shafts of light – cool downdrafts drop them lower than shadow. Nothing is here, everything is here: spider silk & moss for nests, leaves for hatching swallowtail butterflies, the occasional cloud that darkens.  Two birds circle. Alight, take off. She watches them disappear into a thicket – thin strands in their bills will line their nest, shape their home.

 

A three-time Pushcart nominee, Judith Pacht was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society’s Edgar Bowers competition. Her work has appeared in journals that include Ploughshares, Runes, Nimrod and Phoebe, and her poems have been translated into Russian where they were published in Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia). Her work appears in numerous anthologies.

 

 

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