Issue 150
Summer & Fall 2016
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We are pleased to present TriQuarterly’s 150th issue. Throughout these pieces, imagery and movement explore the human condition and its relationship to the physical world. The issue opens with Ander Monson’s video essay, “Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies,” in which he juxtaposes human extinction and technology, joining sounds, images, and words to encapsulate the natural and digital existence. Blair Braverman offers a contrast between grayscale images and layered language in “Two Poems About X, 2009 and 2014.” And Heather Hall creates an echo between the visual and the verbal in her dreamlike “Shark.”
The poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction here also offer imagery that moves between human consciousness and the world that surrounds it. Whether it is experienced hardship and loss in Keveh Akbar’s poem “Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives,” the discovery of perspective in Marc Nieson’s “Orientation,” or the memory of carefree young love in Bonnie Nadzam’s “The Silver Motorcycle,” the movement of mind, body, and soul come together within the confines of space and time.
This issue could not have come together if not for the talent and dedication of our contributors and staff. My gratitude to everyone who had a hand in this issue.
We present the 150th issue to you. Enjoy.
Cheers,
Noelle Havens
Managing Editor: Noelle Havens
Assistant Managing Editor: Carrie Muehle
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: Kristen Radtke
Fiction Editors: Carrie Muehle, Mark Rentfro, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editor: Martha Holloway
Poetry Editor: Dane Hamann
Social Media Editor: Ankur Thakkar
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Staff: Ahsan Awan, Emily Barton, Jen Companik, Aaron DeLee, Jesse Eagle, Jeshua Enriquez, Dan Fliegel, Andrea Garcia, Ish Harris-Wolff, Katie Hartsock, Alex Higley, Barbara Tsai Jones, Katharine Kruse, Jen Lawrence, Adam Lizakowski, Robin Morrissey, Marina Mularz, Lydia Pudzianowski, Nate Renie, Paula Root, Caitlin Sellnow, Michi Smith, Megan Sullivan, Myra Thompson, Ted Wesenberg
Image from Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
Orientation
Excerpted from Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape, a memoir forthcoming from Ice Cube Press in October 2016.
Sometimes it is like a dream. A sleepwalking. The way you move through your surroundings—through doorways, backyards, decades—one unconscious foot following the other. Perhaps for a moment you’re able to focus on a color or sound or even a face, yet before you can name it, it passes.
Color TV
The lessons come in the mail. Packages like gifts. When opened, there are capacitors, transistor sockets, and circuit board connectors, neatly arranged along with the assembly manuals. These my father will carefully follow, filling in the question-and-answer sections in his cramped script.
An Interview with Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Nothing in Nature Is Private (1994), The End of the Alphabet (1998), PLOT (2001), and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004).
Flicker
Later that day, after we find out about the adhesions in my uterus, I see the summer’s first fireflies. My husband and I sit on the front porch while the dog sniffs the perimeter of a flowerbed. And there, in a thicket of shadow along our neighbor’s fence, small sparks of green in the dusk.
Five Rules for Arranging Funeral Flowers
1. Choose flowers that still have enough life left in them to make it through the service. Many florists will tell you that funerals are the perfect opportunity to purge the cooler of older flowers. While it is true that the funeral service only lasts a few hours, the worst call you can get as a florist comes from an outraged family member, because the $300 spray they ordered wilted. The whole point of putting up a bunch of flowers at funerals is to distract from death, not remind everyone of it.