July 2019 | visual art
SkyOceanBirds ii
Linda Briskin
SkyOceanBirds is in the tradition of surrealism which appreciates idiosyncrasy, juxtaposition and contradiction. Surrealism challenges the boundaries between the normal and the fantastical, promotes the unexpected combining of found objects, and embraces dreamscapes and imagery emerging from the subconscious. Linda Briskin is a fine art photographer who lives in Toronto and Palm Springs (CA). She has ever-shifting photographic enthusiasms, what she calls photoglossia: the juxtaposition of objects and reflections; the ambiguities in what we choose to see; and the permeability between the remembered and the imagined. Photocollage constructs unique and painterly images layered with nuance and narrative which both embrace and displace the original images. Her focus is often on inventing images rather than capturing them, an approach that is fictive rather than representational. In 2018, Briskin was selected for The New Feminist Gaze at Simeon Den Gallery in California. Her photograph Motorcycle Women was published in Best of Photography 2018 by Photographers Forum. Three photographs from her series aqua botanica are forthcoming in Tiny Seed Literary Journal (2019). Recently in Toronto, she had a solo show at Helen & Hildegard Apothecary as part of the Junction Contact Festival and a window installation at Rapp Optical. She has also participated in several group shows including Spectra at Gallery 1313 during the 2019 Contact Photography Festival. Upcoming is Luminous, a group show of ten women photographers at the Heliconian Club in Toronto.
July 2019 | poetry
Swamp
is all about
quiet death
and the slow
cellular work
of decompostion
in a wet
dark place.
Say it. The word
itself, breaching
with that swishing
sucking, sibilant
swooping its
big wings
around an ample,
nasal-vowelled body
detonated by a plosive
that lifts
like a long-legged bird.
After the rape
of the three little
girls in the grass
by the Maoist
army, there was
no grass left.
Janet Joyner
Janet Joyner’s prize-winning poems have been honored in the 2011 Yearbook of the South Carolina Poetry Society, Bay Leaves of the North Carolina Poetry Council in 2010, 2011, Flying South in 2014, and in 2015, as well as anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii, North Carolina, and Second Spring 2016, 2017, 2018. Her first collection of poems, Waterborne, is the winner of the Holland Prize and was published by Logan House in February, 2016. Her chapbook, “Yellow,” was published by Finishing Line Press in November, 2018. Wahee Neck, her third collection, will be published this summer by Hermit Feathers Press.
July 2019 | poetry
The explosion.
the earth bursts and curls
with february yellow. daffodils,
cruel colour
and abundant
in freshness and reds. we didn’t plant them –
the person who lived here
before us did – but still,
I’m glad
they’re there. drinking
from his coffee cup, summer
coming out of the ground
to surprise us,
tapping the windows
with a long thin hand;
the first spark
of a slow explosion,
set to expand
all year.
A sign of respect.
it’s a small cove,
and I stand at its center. wind crawls
the cliffsides,
cold as rivers
in high altitudes. and a river flows
at a low one
over to my left –
barely a stream, really,
though perhaps it was this
which cut the cove
at one time
out of rocks. I think
I think this way only
because today
I am in the company
of geologists. they climb over the cliff-face
and search for interesting seams. I
was mainly brought along
as a driver. me and aodhain,
showing them the countryside. but he
is a geologist also, and just as interested in rocks. I stand
with my shoes off
and watch the surf
as it grabs handfuls of sand
and collects crabs
like a commuter
bus-service. high on the dunes
a dolphin decomposes, dropped
in the last storm of autumn
and dragged up there – I guess as a sign
by someone
of respect.
it stinks salt
and dead seawater
and flies swarm the carpark. there were seagulls too,
flapping all over, until we pulled up and threw rocks at them.
DS Maolalai
DS Maolalai has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His first collection, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden”, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press, with “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019.
