The Carolina Quarterly articles from March 2003

The Carolina Quarterly archives from March 2003

Intuition of the news.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... It was Flynn's father's gun, a Smith and Wesson .38. When Flynn swiped it that morning he was probably more afraid of his father's finding out he'd sawed off the lock on the cabinet than of anything he might do with the gun. That's Flynn all...

How the TV book club nearly saved my life.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... When Bunny's Book Club chose my book, I knew I had it made, easy street, the sweet dreams of the saved. No more halving spicy poorboys, no more baldy tires, no second-hand paperbacks, obsolete WordPerfect or American beer. Cormac and I would...

Seven sketches for Papa.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... I. HAIL I will make a sketch of a man and a girl. Of a summer in Kansas. A father and child. The girl is seven or eight years old. The father, maybe, is forty-two. He takes her out to see a film. It is a film he wants to see, that is to...

The way the wind is blowing.(Short Story)
March 22, 2003... It's just one month after the September 11th terrorist attacks. I am supposed to be working this morning--writing--and I can't decide if I'm unable or just unwilling. Of course, I have had nightmares--dreams of bombs on a train, of flaming...

Dedication to Rex McGuinn.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
March 22, 2003... Rex McGuinn always felt like kin to me. We were from the same corner of the North Carolina mountains (he was born in Hendersonville in 1951); we were both poets, though he was much more experienced, having already published a chaphook; we...

Listen up, evildoers everywhere, now.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Chappell, Fred Listen Up, Evildoers Everywhere, Now. that I have my secret credentials from the FBI, CIA, and NSA I will be on your ass like crankcase oil on Gomer Pyle no crime so horrid that I shall blench no misdeed so...

Resolution and Independence.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Resolution and Independence. all night long from out of the shadows that passing headlights thundered against my bedroom wall the dread Four Horsemen of Insomnia galloped powerfidly upon me and the first was furious Politics...

Swagger stick.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Swagger Stick after a photograph of my great-grandfather He looks like someone you know you should know: barrel-bellied, chest puffed round like a grouse, chin jutting as if to balance a crown. Even in this dog-eared and foxed...

The toolbox.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Toolbox Who knows how long it held their ash-can like an urn on a mantel? Soot-dusted, until it crusted black with cinder grime and the furnace's slow burn, it took dad and me both to derrick that box up grandma's rot-sagged...

Letter.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Letter One Sunday morning I started building a white house of marble without any windows. A mistake, you mumbled, on Monday, although a landscape can still be absorbed without looking. Late Wednesday I painted a piece of the...

Beautiful.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Beautiful Looking back at you directly, lady realtor on the cell phone, is just not possible. It is forbidden by the gods. Besides my safety leaving the curb to consider, crossing without the light, knowledge of your vast...

Verses for the Madonna of humility with the temptation of eve.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Verses for The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve Carlo da Camerino ca. 1400, tempera and gold on wood 1 This museum will be my refuge, this painting, my chapel. The lighting's low, and the window's shaded in...

Dinosaur Hall.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Dinosaur Hall Crossing the dim threshold from bright Independence Avenue is like a special effect of time: I can't focus immediately, the scene bends and wobbles as if distorted by heat or reflected in a wind-skimmed pond. My...

Original Sin.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Original Sin One evening, an old monk, Forgetting he was flesh, Rode his horse to death, Having forgotten, too, that his horse Was not spirit, but heavy Of limb, and as old and weary. The wild thorns of the trees ...

An interview with James Applewhite.(Interview)
March 22, 2003... James Applewhite is a highly acclaimed poet and a much-beloved teacher. Born in 1935 in Stantonsburg, a thousand-person town in eastern North Carolina, Applewhite has crafted poetry resonant with the life and landscape of his tobacco-country...

Last night we saw South Pacific.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Last night we saw South Pacific. I wake to see a cardinal in out white crape myrtle. My eye aches. Bees celebrate morning come with their dynamo-hum around a froth of bloom. Though presently it's...

Angel and autumn.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Angel and autumn All night in a house like a witch's hat in a bed up the stairs I dreamed on a mountain among the stars. I expressed my years as leaves, a maple by a lake. Weeping, an angel sphered his tears with the fall,...

Salt bones and holy sands.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Salt bones and holy sands I From sand blown into curves by a night wind the morning smelts cold sheets of black layer by layer, condensing yellow to silver. A white air burns the serpent's eye. If Leviathan had rotted on...

Through the black ranges.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Through the Black Ranges They are just alike, there are too many. We have walked through them for days. When we look south, a thousand fall away toward the Ganges. North, they range between us and the great ones, the unwatching...

Baboosic lake.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Baboosic lake My mother would row us out-- the sky streaked with fresh blood, the black flies biting hard. Trout would gain the air, flop back as if yanked. She'd row and bait her hook. Balanced on the center plank I bore once...

At Lake Michigan.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... At Lake Michigan I hold the flat stone, pale blue and mellow as the great lake's farthest shore. It has lain in the awkward paths of sea- gulls who sneak their skinny toes between the stones deep as...

Force.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Force Seeds beneath the snow wait for detonation--trigger of water, temperature, light. And the days thaw; nights freeze: rivulets of ice wedge into granite. * Around a bend in the road a sudden motion-- ...

Natural curl.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Natural curl Afterwards, my hair started to curl. Hormones, they said, common, after miscarriage. Changing chemistry, they said, like clock hands advancing, one notch clicking after another inevitable as hunger. Part of our...

Three blues.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Three Blues "Dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres" -- Mexican saying "Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are" Tell Me And what if ...

Character study.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Character study If he's aware that the light is going, it doesn't show. He's here to read, and if the park occurs to him at all, it can't be any more than what the book is in his hands-- mere form, mere feel, the crying kids...

White Summer. (Poetry Project 2003: First-Book Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... by Joelle Bide Southern Illinois University Press, 2002 67 pages; $12.95 paperback The poems of White Summer combine a field biologist's eye for detail with the melodic sense of Schubert's best lieder. In unfailingly graceful...

The Bower of Nil: A Narrative Poem. (Poetry Project 2003: First-Book Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... by Frederick Glaysher Earthside Press, 2002 71 pages; $21.95 hardback Set in the space of one night, this three-part, free-verse narrative poem examines Peter Marsh's realization that everything he formerly valued in his...

Leviathan with a Hook. (Poetry Project 2003: First-Book Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... by Kimberly Johnson Persea Books, 2002 69 pages; $23 hardback These rich, earnest poems display a mind, sense, and imagination in love with the natural world. Dense with allusion and a specificity of naming that recalls...

World's Tallest Disaster. (Poetry Project 2003: First-Book Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... by Cate Marvin Sarabande Books, 2001 75 pages, $12.95 paper Gate Marvin's brash, sensual, and skillful voice arrests us in "Reader, Please," which kicks off her first book: the "reader" is not only us but also the apostrophized,...

Approximately Paradise. (Poetry Project 2003: First-Book Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... by Don Schofield University Press of Florida, 2002, 95 pages; $12.95 paperback In Approximately Paradise, Don Schofield, an American who has lived in Greece for the past 20 years, integrates loneliness, loss, and familial strife with...

Monster Zero. (Poetry Project 2003: First-Book Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... by Jay Snodgrass Elixir Press, 2002 64 pages; $13 paperback An entire book of poems centering on Godzilla, Monster Zero recounts the poet's childhood on Yakota Air Base in Japan and his postmodern unease through the lens of a...

The Reservoir. (Poetry Project 2003: First-Book Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... by Donna Stonecipher The University of Georgia Press, 2002 70 pages; $16.95 paperback Donna Stonecipher's poem "The Specialists" starts, "You came and went through my head like a small storm," beginning "another dreamy rampage...

By Reason of Breakings. (Poetry Project 2003: First-Book Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... by Andrew Zawacki The University of Georgia Press, 2002 72 pages; $15.95 paperback Andrew Zawacki's ear for the percussive music of consonants and vowels is so keen that on a casual reading, one might mistake these poems for...