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04-12-2018
The Floodgate Poetry Series, Volume 4
The Floodgate Poetry Series is edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum and has three previous volumes. Volume 4 collects three chapbooks in a single volume: Regina DiPerna’s A Map of Veins, Ryan Teitman’s Jesuits, and Paisley Rekdal‘s Philomela.
Regina DiPerna’s first collection of poems, A Map of Veins, tells the story of the death of a lover and her healing process. In these elegies, DiPerna faces the guilt of finding new love, death taunts her years after the fact with postcards and gifts, and memory haunts her dreams.
Jesuits, Ryan Teitman’s second collection, Jesuits, explores childhood, fatherhood, and the holy spirit in rich lyrical verse and prose. In often surreal poetry and prose, Teitman’s mother appears as a curtain in the window, he wears a shadow for a suit, and plays on the train tracks with a child version of his father.
Paisley Rekdal’s fourth collection of poetry, Philomela, unabashedly parallels the myth of Philomela with her own experience with violent sexual assault in a combination of verse and lyric essay. In these brave, somewhat experimental verses, Rekdal challenges the definitions of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape as she parses out her own experiences with them.
-Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, founder and series editor
Elegy For What Adapts
-from Map of Veins by Regina Diperna
No one knows why the first human stopped
breathing, or where his body lay as it changed
from flesh to earth to emptiness. What position
was the last one his limbs held before they became
something else—moss, nest, shadow,
an animal’s expelled breath? I keep a photograph
of a dead lover beneath my bed. It is blanched
from too much looking, too much trying to touch
a gone thing. It is next to a black and white striped
scarf he gave me, and some things I’d written
when he was living. Artifacts. What becomes
of our maps, our little remembrances? His face
a sketch of home. Now, his color drained,
his bones dissolved like feathers,
an extinct bird snared in a net
of soil. What part of death is he now?
What animal, what markings,
what armful of atoms will he become?
Work
-from Ryen Teitman's Jesuits
Some mornings, the clouds
settle rooftop low,
holding us in place
like a specimen slide.
I spend my days
wondering how a hammer
weighs the hand
that holds it,
or how the starlings apron
the stoplights
at Alcatraz
and Adeline.
A glassworker told me
once that she could tell
by the scars
who bandages their fingers
and who kisses closed
the wounds. I don't
know how
my father woke
hours before sunrise
each morning and worked
until long past sunset.
Sleep was a country
to retire to, an Ecuador.
I live where the light is
thin, and clothes us
like linen.
In the hills above town,
a black snake scrawls
across the path
like a signature.
I still have countries
left to discover, and ballets
of work
for my hands to learn.
Quiver
-from Philomela by Paisley Rekdal
What do we do
with memory, do we burn
or do we embellish it, do we
study it like the elk
projected onto the archery
studio screen, summer’s
gelatin halo shivering
between its antlers, replayed
whether or not
anyone will come
to practice on or witness it: is this
what memory is:
static, unchangeable
mind we step into
and the clearing opens: again,
light rain, the scent
of moss, puffs of steam
rising off the slick,
black muzzle? Does the image,
over time, brighten
so feverishly inside us,
tearing through
the eye, the mind, the body: is it we
who wander out, tentative,
into late morning light?
What does it mean
to forget so much,
happily, greedily, if not
that we are nourished most
on loss? The video
spools, the elk steps into
then out of its field,
who cares, it was dead
the second the camera
found it anyway, captured
and projected endlessly
so that we might practice making it
dead again.
Is this the image to convince you
of the blinding
limits to our world?
Is this another entry
to our newest opening?
The animal turns, the screen
inside its body shakes:
open, bright, pocked
by tips of arrows
that never find their mark.
-from The Floodgate Poetry Series, Volume 4, Upper Rubber Boot Books (2017)
Regina DiPerna holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her poetry has been published in Boston Review, Missouri Review, Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Gulf Coast, Meridian, Redivider, Tinderbox and others. In 2014, she received a three-month fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Residency in New Mexico. She currently lives and works in New York City, where she is hard at work on a second poetry collection.
Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012), and his awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Philadelphia.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text entitled Intimate; and five books of poetry. Her newest collection is Imaginary Vessels, and her latest nonfiction work is The Broken Country, which won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, and various state arts council awards. She teaches at the University of Utah and is Utah’s Poet Laureate.
