Huge congrats to Kerri Webster for winning the Whiting Award! Kerri was one of four poets to receive the honor this year, along with the cool 50K that comes with it. (Not too shabby.)

Kerri was our featured poet in our Summer / Fall 2011 issue with five — count em five! — poems. Here’s a brief taste from one titled “Diorama.”

See the cross-section opened on loss
so big you could charge admission? Hole
in the ceiling for the tree to grow through. Something
nests in the radiator. I don’t climb up.

Details on the Whiting Award here.

So here’s the Exquisite Corpse from the Issue 28 Launch Party. Gird your loins, as they say.

The Curfew by Jesse Ball

Vintage Contemporaries

ISBN-13: 978-0307739858

“William ate the rest of his lunch in silence. He put what he had learned in a box and he shut that box. To do otherwise would be to give signs that he had learned something, some new information, and such behavior—indicative of new information—is what alerts those who are looking for traitors. He could not even consider having learned that which he had learned, which after all was practically nothing. Just an idea, a hope of an idea. Away with it for now.”

The Curfew takes place in a city of invisible tyrants—a city where people go missing and grandmothers shoot police officers. Add to this a lost mother, a mute daughter, a father on a quest, and a puppet show. Jesse Ball (The Way Through Doors) creates a modern fable, nests and chops his narratives so that his reader is always pleasantly dislodged. Perhaps because of his background in poetry and art, Ball has meticulous methods of placement and composition. This book feels like something that was not written but put together from raw materials. Asides and observations mix with the story, and so The Curfew is full of aphoristic, fantastical flashes: “There is a theory that the sun is made up of thousands of suns arranged in a war against the others. It is a discredited theory, but it has never been disproven.” Think of this book as a novella and a sketch, a poem and a collage. It is pieces put together for a reason, and in the middle of it all there is still the story—a father who gives everything to keep his daughter safe, a daughter who reaches for anything within her power to learn her father’s fate—acting as a warm human thread that is never subsumed.

Cat Richardson, Managing Editor

Mariner Books

ISBN-13: 978-0395957769

Here we are presented with an unflinching account of one of the great, highly original confessionals, illuminated in no small part by Maxine Kumin’s introduction. This is a practical tome, a Sexton survey that is best read in twenty-page doses. It’s also a striking concordance of her poetics; the ability to track the devices which constitute Sexton’s sensibility may prove its most useful aspect. We follow her wary sojourn towards God—“God is in your typewriter,” she was told—where her most scathing surrealism emerges: “Jesus was fasting. / He ate His celibate life. / The ground shuddered like an ocean, / a great sexual swell under His feet.” We follow her rhyming as it develops from a decorative stand-in for gravitas to a resonant, architectonic feature; in Love Poems (1969), this utterly conversational musicality reaches its culmination in tandem with gripping lineation. Sexton then turned to the mythic, reworking all manner of fable and fairy-tale in preparation for her later poems, which tackle her Christian mythology with a taut, peculiar faith. Her poetry is particularly suited to the frenzied asymptote between the cerebral and the carnal, piety and appetite: “For they fling together against hardness and somewhere, in another room, a light is clicked on by gentle fingers.”  She finds curious objects which fulfill the dual role of holy symbols and meals, arranging them in absurd litanies as befits her taste for the liturgical cadence, if not the precise content.

To be sure, there are many clunkers once everything is considered. There are times when Plath’s rigor might have benefitted Sexton’s lines a great deal: “Angel of hopes and calendars, do you know despair?” Her fierce dedication to the actuals of the body (genitalia and all), while necessary, will not always be appreciated. She also has a tendency to wring a certain turn of phrase dry if it works once—her catalogue of sea-actions ages quickly, as does her taste for possessives. These, however, can’t touch the resplendence of the greater portion of her output, characterized mostly by successful poem-cycles. While she championed the self as an inexhaustible reservoir, meanwhile asserting the female voice with formidable creative energies, it is clear that her genius rests on neither confessionalism nor feminism alone. To borrow Kumin’s phrase, Sexton has earned her place in the canon by advancing the frontiers of the English language’s unique poetic territory: diction both brutal and sinuous, ritualization, mythmaking, and the talent for extrapolating Place from Self.

Peter Longofono, International Editor

What you can expect to find:

• Interviews with writers you’ve heard about and writers you might be hearing about for the first time but will certainly hear more about in the future.
• Updates on our brilliant masthead and the books on their bedside tables.
• Book news. LOLcats News. Weather News. News about My Lunch.
• Poetry and prose from our slush pile that’s too good to go unshared.
• Dispatches from behind the frontlines of the NYC/NYU literary scene. (In other words, what I saw when I spent all night in the corner closest to the wine table.)

There will be guest bloggers, there will be book reviews, and there will be whatever else you want to see here. If you have any suggestions for content, email me at: onsqublog@gmail.com.

My name is Julie Buntin. I’m a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at NYU, and I’ll be posting here regularly.

Nearly every scene in Platform is a sex scene, and each is extreme, explicit, graphic, and idealized. These are the sort of things that would make me normally define something as pornography, as opposed to erotica. The plot begins to seem a mere service to the sex scenes — another characteristic I think is intrinsic to most pornography. The only things that make me doubtful are the quality of the prose and the non-objectifying nature of the sex scenes. Generally, these scenes are a meeting of equals and are not objectifying to either the males or females involved. The prose is also of the highest caliber. So by the end of Platform, I was left baffled — a little embarrassed to be reading the book on the subway, too — but mostly confused about what sort of book I was really reading.

French writers can often treat sexuality in a more permissive way than American writers. In fact, the main character of this novel comments often on the prudishness of American attitudes toward sex: for Americans, the character argues, sex is more often a moral matter, and still tightly wrapped up with shame. The characters in this book, by contrast, see sex only as part of the pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure is never wrong. It may be my American sensibilities talking, but ultimately I was left cold by Platform because its romantic scenes left me with the feeling that pornography does with a reader: it is ultimately the depiction of physical acts entirely stripped of their intimacy or meaning.

A favorite story of mine was definitely “On the Show”, a story about the underbelly of the carnival world. Tower lets his writing abilities relax and unfurl in this story, becoming more lyrical and sinuous in style, using the present tense to allow the sights and sounds and smells of the carnival, in all its filthy splendor, to come to life. The peripheral characters operate on a dreamlike plane; nearly everyone has a story, some reason to be felt for.

Another highlight is the clever title story, which is about a crew of Vikings out on a pillaging trip, but is told in modern vernacular, as if a bunch of bar buddies today decided to go burning and looting as an ordinary weekend activity. It’s funny and oddly touching.

Other stories in the collection still felt like the work of a new writer to me, someone anxious to prove himself capable of imitating familiar structures. “The Brown Coast” pulls in its main story and compliments it with a “B” line story about fish that represents the main action too neatly, not allowing the story to breathe and become messy and life-like. That, though, is a nervousness that will probably evaporate as this writer continues to develop his confidence and his already impressive powers.