kingsoftrain

I .

thru June 21st, Lulu is offering 20% off all print books with coupon code of TWENTY18

poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

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private publications are available via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock, as such:

chapbook, [BASILISK], 64 pages $5.00
(Feb 2017)
chapbook, [the accepted field], 84 pages $5.00
(May 2017)
chapbook, [in this life another is you], 64 pages $3.00
(Oct 2017)

I I .

also:

I have privately published a work of mine consisting of 60 poems that I am calling {mood piece for baby blur}, and am making it available to anyone donating 5.00 or more to my poetry journal {isacoustic*}

donation can be made, here:
https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock
or it can be sent to (bartsmock@gmail.com)

be sure to provide a physical address, to include your name, for the send.

You can check out {isacoustic*}, here:

site: https://isacoustic.com/

How to describe Heather Minette’s Half Light? Half-asleep, “half-awake,” half-empty, “half-asking,” half-full, “half-note,” half-life, “half-moon,” half-dark, “half-light.” Each poem is a sparse vignette (in both meanings of the word), mostly colloquial in tone and expertly half-finished in a way that allows for a cosmos of unremembrances to enclose every stanza, navigated by a vague meditation.

Across these pages, Minette is mourning memory and remembering mourning. For example, in “Christmas ’88,” while the narrator watches a VHS of Christmas past with her brother, noting that the family members in the video are changed or deceased or both, she is struck with a spasm that causes her to knock her brother’s wine glass onto the rug and “I watch the kidney-shaped stain fade from purple to gray/ and I will it to settle,/ so that if I lose him like the others,/ there will be tangible history/ of this night/—a memory…

Triin Paja is an Estonian, living in rural Estonia. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Portland Review, The Adroit Journal, and Entropy, among others. She also writes and publishes poetry in Estonian, and is the author of a poetry collection in Estonian, “Nõges” (Värske Raamat, 2018).

[]

October Snow

the women stand for hours and do not
complain. it is the sternness
of a plastic rose, of muted wives
and servants once entombed, alive,
beside husbands and masters, laid down
like silk, gold, a weapon, a language.
it is the way lampposts are valued
as winter fruit that does not rot,
a light that blurs enough
to say shadow, memory, girl.
speech moves in them
like a starling murmuration
before filling a river with
the apple petals of their
photographs. it is a rotting
window-frame barely holding.
it is to believe one’s heart, like a hand,
has furrowed…

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]