kingsoftrain

Heather Minette’s collection Half Light is an exploration of death, both real and imagined, of people and of romance. It moves from a child-like fear of death, of the loss of a parent, to a mature portrait of how to deal with the loss of a child and a lover. Minette has the keen ability to relocate the reader into these often simple, domestic spaces through unadorned imagery wound around an emotional core. Lines like “I tell them he is not here. / And the Fireflies are gone, too” (from “Penitentiary”) convey this loss in simple, but profoundly moving terms.

The first section ends with the poem “Sand Mermaids” where she compares the impermanence of her mother to “papier-mache faces that fall from tall bookshelves,” an image which captures the ethereal and often panic-inducing feeling of the loss which awaits us all as we transition from childhood to adulthood.

The…

Thanks to all who took part in the release of Heather Minette’s Half Light on Friday.

Heather, myself, and isacoustic* are deeply grateful for the support.

If you ordered the book, we encourage you to take a photo as such when you receive it and post it to isacoustic’s instagram at:
https://www.instagram.com/isacousticvol/

if you have words for the words of Heather Minette, let us know, here, there, or on goodreads at:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40533588-half-light

book is available here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/heather-minette/half-light/paperback/product-23679092.html

[removal musics (ii)]

how naked
the alien
as it paints
pictures

(nest
after nest)
for the ghost

of a bird
birds
want

~

[removal musics (x)]

this father
handing bibles
to prison scene
extras, his sadness

sorrow’s
nondescript
editor…

the drive-in’s
elegiac
dog
/ nose
to the scarcity
of theatrical
emptiness…

the fish a cigarette burn on the body of god
gets bigger
over time….

how unfair
to insomnia
the monster
with child

~

[give god my space in the unleft church]

as you count on your teeth the losses
I’ve turned
to stone

~

[no musics]

I am to bed without supper for hiding my face from the lord. in the city, my brother is handcuffed for biting his wrists. still unborn is the calf that invented sadness. do I look like what you feel when you look at me? I think there is only hell.

~

[prognosis musics]

A few months ago, poet Heather Minette, a former contributor to {isacoustic*}, asked if myself and our revolving editors might take a look at Half Light– her unpublished second book of poems. The hope was to maybe have a few of the poems accepted for publication on-site and in volume fourth of {isacoustic*}, and to see if the work warranted an advance blurb or review. After reading the work, it seemed to us that perhaps within this Half Light was an act of direction, a phantom compass. As such, we approached Minette about publishing the book via {isacoustic*}, and from there we prayed for the blessed north.

While waiting to hear, I read the book a few more times and felt my seeing needed some saying, and so wrote the following reflection on the book:
~
~
As a child, I told my mother the alphabet was broken…

Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness, yea press, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Gigantic Sequins, Poetry East, Tinderbox Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, Fugue, The Boiler Journal, Salamander, BOOTH and others. She is a Lambda Writer’s Retreat Fellow in the 2018 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. A Chicago native, Dana is currently an MFA candidate and a teacher at Emerson College.

https://www.danaalsamsam.com

~*~

Hair Cut

Your mom was the kind of person
who forgot the leftovers on the stove—

she didn’t even flinch opening the door,
my hands twist-tangled in your long, girl

hair, your striped, Target t-shirt crumpled
beside us on the floor—a small monument

to matching bodies, to holding pinkies
in school halls, to me: queer homecoming queen

royalty. You wore slacks, a terrified grin
and slouching ruffle socks as we walked

in a fluorescent gymnasium—hypervisible—a sea
of eyeballs…