Issue 145
Winter & Spring 2014
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Welcome to the new TriQuarterly. In addition to the most recent issue and featured content, our homepage now features The Latest Word, a new component designed to keep you up to date with the latest TQ content while providing deeper integration with all of our social media outlets. Additionally, the What’s New page features an infinite scroll of TQ content. Our responsive new design includes upgraded functionality on mobile devices, enhanced audio and video presentation, and improved search functions to promote streamlined content interaction. We’re also expanding our Past Issues section and presenting digitized selections from our rich print archive. We open with TriQuarterly 116, the New Pastoral issue, guest edited by John Kinsella and Susan Stewart. We’ll be adding content regularly, so please check back for updates. We thank our media architect, Harlan Wallach, and his team of technical advisors, Nick Gertonson, Alex Miner, and Rodolfo Vieira, who have designed and built our beautiful new home. We hope you will enjoy exploring the new site, where you’ll continue to find bright, new work from both established and emerging voices.
This issue features compelling new short stories from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, John Dufresne, and Ron Rash, and an excerpt from Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga’s forthcoming novel, Chronicle of an Indomitable Daughter. We have new poems from Kwame Dawes, Timothy Liu, and Beth Bachmann, along with creative nonfiction from Rilla Askew, Garry Cooper, and Bonnie Nadzam. We are also excited to share three new works of cinepoetry, and a group of poems curated by Mary Hawley of Chicago’s Palabra Pura poetry reading series.
We couldn’t be happier to share Issue 145 and the new site with you. Enjoy the work, and, as always, thank you for reading TriQuarterly.
Cheers,
Matt Carmichael
Managing Editor: Matt Carmichael
Assistant Managing Editor: Dan Schuld
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Literary Editor: S.L. Wisenberg
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Undergraduate Intern: Erik Tormoen
Fiction Editors: Carrie Muehle, Dan Schuld, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editors: Michelle Cabral, Karen Zemanick
Poetry Editor: C. Russell Price
Social Media Editor: Ankur Thakkar
Staff: Ignatius Aloysius, Ish Harris-Wolff, Ahsan Awan, Rebecca Bald, Jen Companik, Jim Davis, Aaron DeLee, Jesse Eagle, Adrienne Gunn, Beth Herbert, Noelle Havens, Alex Higley, Sarah Hollenbeck, Nath Jones, Jen Lawrence, Adam Lizakowski, Marina Mularz, Amber Peckham, Lydia Pudzianowski, Nate Renie, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Tara Scannell, Michi Smith, Travis Steele, Megan Sullivan, Myra Thompson
Image from War Movie
A Simple, Declarative Sentence
Years ago, the wife of the married man I was seeing gave me a sort of maternal talking-to, which was generous on her part, if not a bit perverse, and which in some weird way, made sense: she was thirty years older than I was—slightly older, in fact, than my own mother.
The Tornado that Hit Boggy
On the day that President Roosevelt died, a tornado hit Boggy, Oklahoma, and wiped it off the face of the earth. My Uncle Granvil was away working on the railroad when his rented house vanished into splinters, his wife and baby girl sucked skyward.
Excerpt from The Middle Notebookes
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If only it were possible to wake outside from sleeping in a bed, turn over and be in the damp grass, hot sun and walk in instead of having to walk out.
Hope at the Edge
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In 1995, in my late forties, I almost died in New Mexico’s Pecos Wilderness. I’d gotten lost and had been desperately trying to find my way out, fearing I was headed in the wrong direction but not knowing what else to do except keep pushing on.
In Case of Firenze
Banishing the Voices
See the mouths open before you finish telling them you’re going.
Watch the breath being drawn. Watch the lecture-on-the-brink fire their gazes:
Bastards of Freedom
God, isn’t it beautiful? The year is 1967. Welcome to my town—a virtual sonic prison, with but one solitary radio station that plays anything resembling modern music.
Transistor radios are the aesthetic weapon of choice here in this jerkwater, deep-South hellhole. Downtown you got the JC Penney’s, which features a sad-sack selection of country-and-western horse farts, and other than that, there’s no such thing as a bona fide record store hereabouts.