T H E
H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Winter 2007 (Issue No. 11)
Table of Contents
Poetry
Fiction
Nonfiction
Contributors' Notes
Poetry
Elizabeth Kate Switaj
Career Crisis Alchemist
Jason Wilkinson
The Haberdasher
Tethered Dials
Maurice Oliver
"& Riddled With Ambiguities" Sonnet
Or Distinctly Odd Circumstances
Rodney Nelson
Song of Yo Mismo
Island Park
Andrew Burke
Poem beginning with a line by Fannie Howe
and ending with a line from Reuters
Maxianne Berger
These Are the Particles
Somewhere Between Maroon and Indigo
James Davies
Film (268)
Study of Manchester Bus Numbers
Sally Van Doren
Morning
Friday
Simon Perchik
"Into this headwind"
Michael Young
That Once Was
Changming Yuan
Chinese Chimes
R. L. Swihart
Honeypot Ants and Plate Tectonics
Roger Day
"At night I lie . . ."
Mary Rising Higgins
2 Sections from ShoreTrace
Fiction
Sybil Kollar
Theft
Marilyn Coffey
The Bathroom Imbroglio
Julie Compton
Flying Lessons
Suzanne McConnell
Do, Lord
Harold Klapper
The Stroke
Nonfiction
Jim Murphy
Narcissism
Contributors' Notes
Maxianne Berger writes in form–from haiku through nonce to Oulipo. Compromis, the French version of her first book, How We Negotiate, was published by Écrits des forges in 2006. In 2003, with Angela Leuck, she co-edited the anthology Sun Through the Blinds: Montreal Haiku Today (Shoreline). When not wearing her poet hat, she is an audiologist at the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal.
Andrew Burke, an Australian poet, novelist, and sometime academic, has six collections of poetry to his credit. He is currently waiting on a publisher's decision on his New & Selected Poems, tentatively called Free-Range & Domestic. The title refers to Burke's main subject areas of family and home-life, and his recent adventures in England and the People's Republic of China. His novel High Spirits should see the light of day in 2008. He is exposed on a daily basis at http://www.hispirits.blogspot.com.
Marilyn Coffey's best known work of fiction is Marcella: A Novel, published in the United States in hardcover (New York: Charterhouse, 1973), in paperback in England (London: Quartet, 1976), and excerpted in Ms. and in Danish and Australian serials. Now considered a classic, Marcella is the first novel written in English that depicts female masturbation as part of its theme. Atlantic Monthly, Natural History, American Heritage and others have published Coffey's nonfiction, collected in Great Plains Patchwork: A Memoir, parts of which were reprinted by Harper & Row, Macmillan, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and McGraw-Hill. Coffey also won a Pushcart Prize for her poetry. She lives in Nebraska, where she's an Admiral in the Nebraska Navy. Her work can be seen at www.marilyncoffey.net.
Julie Compton is a lawyer by profession but a writer at heart. Her first novel, Best Intentions, is being published by Pan Macmillan and is scheduled for a UK release in February 2008. Though a native of Missouri (the setting for "Flying Lessons"), she currently lives in Longwood, Florida, with her husband, two daughters and a myriad of pets. "Flying Lessons" was a top 25 finalist in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers in Spring 2000. To learn more, please visit Julie at www.julie-compton.com.
James Davies' recent poems have appeared or are appearing in Liminal Pleasures, Shampoo, The Ugly Tree, Lamport Court, The Argotist Online, Hutt, Greatworks and onedit. For a living he is Head of English at a sixth form college in Manchester, UK. He edits the poetry object Matchbox, which can be found at www.matchbox.org.uk.
Roger Day draws (landscapes, life), prints, paints (mostly abstracts), paper-folds (origami and paper-craft), and writes. He's done an arts residency in Durness, Scotland, where he attempted to follow Auden's "Night Mail" with his own abstract film and words written by Durness students. He occasionally makes films, and is interested in French and German literature. He plays the mandolin, on which he is currently stressing out Springsteen's "The River." He lives in Cambridge, England, but is going to Australia this year to find his true vocation. By day, he is a programmer in the Black Art of Scripting. His past lives include a stint at sea. His website is at http://badstep.net.
Mary Rising Higgins writes from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The triversen stanzas and couplets appearing in this issue of Hamilton Stone Review are taken from a midlong poem called "ShoreTrace," which will be part of her third, concluding book for the TIDES series. )Joule TIDES(( is forthcoming from Singing Horse Press during 2007.
Harold Klapper is considered one of the leading trial law/litigators of his generation. He is currently working for the New York firm of Boies, Schiller and Flexner. He is a novelist and short story writer. His short stories appear in New Works Review, and in Skidrow Penthouse (forthcoming, Summer issue). His literary criticism has been published by Prairie Schooner and Lost Generation Journal. He is the author of two novels set in New York City, and currently lives in Miami, where he was born.
Sybil Kollar's poetry collection Water Speaking to Stone was published by Pivot Press, and her work has been published in many literary magazines and anthologies. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and has written text for a song-cycle for mezzo-soprano and flute composed by Donna Kelly Eastman that was included in the Society of Composers, Inc. CD series. She won the first Chris O'Malley Fiction Award from the University of Wisconsin and the CCS Fiction Prize, New York City. She has had writing residencies in Germany, Scotland and Spain, and is currently working on a short fiction collection titled Viral Patterns.
Twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Suzanne McConnell's stories have appeared in journals such as Orchid (forthcoming), Saint Ann's Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Calyx, Green Mountains Review, The Fiddlehead, and Personal Fiction Writing. Her poems have appeared in Earth's Daughters and A Sense of Place, and her non-fiction in Poets & Writers, Cape Women, and Discovery Channel Publishing's Travel Series. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches fiction writing at Hunter College, occasionally at Rancho La Puerta spa, Castle Hill Center for the Arts, and in private workshops. She has been awarded residences at Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and she is Assistant Fiction Editor for Bellevue Literary Review. Her first novel, Fence of Earth, was a finalist for the James Fellowship for Novel in Progress, and is currently being revised for publication.
Jim Murphy has a BA from the University of Connecticut, and has studied for a masters in linguistics at Interamerican University in Puerto Rico. For a while, he was in business in New York and in Puerto Rico, and when the Puerto Rican business went broke, he started teaching. For twenty years now, he has lived in Puerto Rico, where he has been part owner of a manufacturing business, done audits for the Dept. of Commerce, been a crewman on a chemical barge, and worked as a welder's assistant constructing a power plant. Currently, he is an adjunct English professor at Universidad del Este in Yauco. Teaching is better.
Rodney Nelson got into print in 1970 (Georgia Review and Nimrod), and chapbooks followed; then he turned to fiction and plays and did not write verse for twenty-plus years, returning in 2004 to publish in the ezines: e.g., Cipher Journal, nthposition, Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review. He was in Who's Who in America (2000) and has an entry in P&W. Nelson's narrative poem Bytime in Yangland takes up an entire issue of the online Sugar Mule (May 2006). His chapbook Swede Poems is due out at Shearsman of the UK. A lifelong nonacademic, he lives in his native Dakotas.
Maurice Oliver, after almost a decade of working as a freelance photographer in Europe, returned to America in 1990 to work for the Los Angeles Times. Then, in 1995, he made a life-long dream reality by traveling around the world for eight months. But instead of taking pictures, he recorded the experience in a journal, which eventually became dozens of poems. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Journal, Circle Magazine, The MAG, Tryst3 Journal, Eye-Shot, Pebble Lake Review, Wicked Alice, The Surface, Word Riot, Taj Mahal Review (India), Dandelion Magazine (Canada), Stride Magazine (UK), Retort Magazine (Australia), & online at unlikelystories.org, lilylitreview.com, thievesjargon.com, subtletea.com, interpoetry.com (UK), kritya.com (India), blueprintreview.de (Germany) and elsewhere. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a private tutor. You can visit his poetry blog at www.bloxster.net/mauriceoliver.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Hamilton Stone Review and elsewhere. Family of Man (Pavement Saw Press) and Rafts (Parsifal Editions) are both scheduled for publication 2007. Readers interested in more are invited to read his essay "Magic, Illusion and Other Realities" at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet, which site lists a complete bibliography.
R. L. Swihart lives semi-peaceably in Long Beach, California, with the wife and kids. He publishes occcasionally, most recently in the Avatar Review and Softblow, teaches high school mathematics to feed the kitty.
Elizabeth Kate Switaj's poems have recently appeared in The Subway Chronicles, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, and Listenlight. She has work forthcoming in Art:Mag, California Quarterly, The Other Voices International Project Anthology, and Scribbulations LLC's anthology, Gratitude with Attitude. She is an ESL teacher, a kimono copywriter, an ex-expat, a Seattle native, and a Brooklyn resident. She holds an MFA in Poetics and Creative Writing from New College of California and blogs at http://qassandra.livejournal.com.
Sally Van Doren has recently had poetry appear in Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, LIT, Margie, Parthenon West Review and Pool. On October 14, 2006, her poem "Reading Time" was featured on Poetry Daily. In February 2007, her long poem "The Sense Series" served as the text for a multi-media collaboration involving dance, music and art at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louus. She divides her time between Cornwall, Connecticut, and St. Louis, Missouri, where she curates the Sunday Workshop Series for the St. Louis Poetry Center and teaches in the city public schools.
Jason Alan Wilkinson is a writer living in New York. He is thirty years old.
Michael T. Young's collections include Transcriptions of Daylight and Because the Wind Has Questions. He has received a 2007 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He received the 2005 Chaffin Poetry Award and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has appeared in Heliotrope, Hidden Oak, RATTLE, and numerous other journals. His work is also included in the anthologies Phoenix Rising and Chance of a Ghost. He lives with his wife in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Changming Yuan grew up in a remote Chinese village and published several books before moving to Canada. Currently, he teaches English in Vancouver and has had over 100 poems appearing in dANDelion (CA), Kritya (IN), the London Magazine(UK), Porcupine (US), Private(IT), Stylus Poetry Journal (AU) and others. Email: yuans@shaw.ca
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