Editors for Issue #50
Spring 2024:
Dorian Gossy
Kevin Stein
Contributors' Notes
Table of Contents
(Click on title of the poem or prose piece to go directly to it.)
The Bob Hicok Special
Introduction by Kevin Stein:
“Purpose in our dervished days”: Bob Hicok and the Art of Collage
Literature
Forecast
MLK day
E nough
Thirst
Art history as I have practiced it this morning
Poetry
Michael Hettich
The Distant Music
A Kind of Happiness
J.R. Solonche
The Horses
Claire Scott
IN THE ICU
Karen Weyant
Little Girls in Factory Towns
The Summer of Cigarette Butts
Tony Beyer
An unwritten poem
John S. Eustis
My Forever Friends
Phillip Sterling
Words Frequently Confused: Forlorn, Forsaken
Nature’s Kindness in Reminding Us
Julia Wendell
Siren
Sand and Palmettos and Drab Winters That Bring Grey Rain
Carol V. Davis
Of Course
Ace Boggess
Looking Back
"I Mean Who Really Cares about Another Person's Dog?"
Stephen Gibson
Night Game—Yankee Stadium, 1981
Tim Suermondt
Going to the Burial
Dana Yost
Let Us
Troy Schoultz
Tarot Reading in the Canning Plant Break-room
Craig Kirchner
Somebody Else
John Savoie
Thank You Note Gone Awry
Sandy Vrana
The Other House
Sally Zakariya
Implacable Wheel
Prose
Mary Ann Cain
Teetering the Bones
Thomas Healy
Hang Fire in the High Country
Diane Lefer
Marrow
Tim Millas
I Believe in Horticulture
Niles Reddick
The Great Pretender
Timothy Reilly
Heroic Deeds
Contributors' Notes
Tony Beyer writes in Taranaki, New Zealand. Recent work has appeared in Hamilton Stone Review, Landfall, London Grip, Mudlark, and Otoliths.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021). His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.
Mary Ann Cain’s books include a poetry collection, How Small the Sky Really Dreams (Dos Madres Press, 2021); a biography of Chicago artist-teacher-activist Dr. Margaret Burroughs, South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs (Northwestern University Press, 2018); a novel, Down from Moonshine (Thirteenth Moon Press, 2009); and two scholarly books, Composing Public Space: Teaching Writing in the Face of Private Interests (Heinemann 2010) and Revisioning Writers’ Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing (SUNY Press 1995). She is Emerita Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne.
Carol V. Davis is the author of Below Zero, Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023, Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017) and Between Storms (TSUP, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches at Santa Monica College, California and Antioch Univ. Los Angeles. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020, postponed because of Covid restrictions and now cancelled.
John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.
Stephen Gibson has published eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2024 Able Muse Press); Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press); The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press); Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize winner, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title, Red Hen Press), Paradise (Miller Williams prize finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press). See his web page at stephen-gibson.com.
T.R. Healy was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and is the author of a collection of stories, "A Time of Times."
Michael Hettich's poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in many journals and anthologies, and he has published more than two dozen books of poetry across five decades. His honors include several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize, a Florida Book Award, the inaugural Hudson-Fowler Prize in Poetry, and the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. His website is michaelhettich.com.
Bob Hicok's eleventh collection of poetry, Water Look Away, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023. His seventh, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and published in a German translation by Luxbooks in 2013. His other books are Red Rover Red Rover (Copper Canyon, 2020), Sex & Love & (Copper Canyon, 2016), Words for Empty and Words for Full (Pitt, 2010), Insomnia Diary (Pitt, 2004), Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), also finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Plus Shipping (BOA, 1998), and The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin, 1995), which received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. Recipient of nine Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of Best American Poetry. (See the Bob Hicok special page in this issue.)
Craig Kirchner is retired and thinks of poetry as hobo art. He loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He has had two poems nominated for the Pushcart, and has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. He houses 500 books in his office and about 400 poems in a folder on a laptop. These words tend to keep him straight. After a writing hiatus he was recently published in Decadent Review, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag, Hamilton Stone Review and several dozen other journals.
Diane Lefer’s most recent novels feature scientists who become terrorism suspects (Out of Place) and baboons with broken hearts (Confessions of a Carnivore). Her three story collections include California Transit, which received the Mary McCarthy Prize. She lives in Los Angeles with a cat, without a car, and where her only phone is a landline. More at dianelefer.weebly.com/
Tim Millas lives with Susan and Charlotte in New York and Maine. His stories have appeared in Adirondack Review, Amarillo Bay, The Battered Suitcase, Confrontation, Dirty Chai, Eclectica, Exquisite Corpse, Gargoyle, Unlikely Stories, and others. This is his first appearance in Hamilton Stone Review. You can reach him at t.millas@att.net.
Niles Reddick is author of a novel, three collections, and a novella. His work has been featured in over thirty collections and five hundred publications including The Saturday Evening Post, Muleskinner, New Reader, Cheap Pop, Citron Review, Right Hand Pointing, Nunum, and Vestal Review. He is a five time Pushcart, a two time Best Micro nominee, and a two time Best of the Net nominee. His newest flash collection Who’s Going to Pray for Me Now? and his novella Forgiven are forthcoming this spring.
Timothy Reilly had been a professional tubist (including a stint with the Teatro Regio of Turin, Italy) until around 1980, when a condition called “Embouchure Dystonia” ended his music career. He has published stories in Fictive Dream, Superstition Review, and many other journals. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti: a poet and scholar.
John Savoie teaches great books at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. His poems have appeared in Poetry,Best New Poets, and Poetry in Motion. His first collection Sehnsucht has recently won the Prize Americana.
Troy Schoultz lives and writes in Oshkosh, WI. He is a published poet since 1997, and author of three collections. He also discovered analog collage art four years ago. He enjoys collecting physical media and is currently working on a novel he started twenty plus years ago.
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
J. R. Solonche has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of 38 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Phillip Sterling’s books of poetry include Local Congregation: Poems Uncollected 1985-2015 (Main Street Rag, October 2023), And Then Snow, Mutual Shores, and five chapbook-length series of poems, most notably Short on Days (February aubades). A collection of essays and memoir, Lessons in Geography: The Education of a Michigan Poet, is forthcoming in fall 2024.
Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems A Doughnut and The Great Beauty Of The World came out in 2023 from MadHat Press. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, Smartish Pace, The Fortnightly Review, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
Sandy Vrana, a daughter of a coal miner, grew up along with six siblings in a western Pennsylvania coal town. A Professor of Literature and Writing at a small private college in West Virginia, she was a member of a writing group there and for years edited Grab-A-Nickel, a small publication of prose and poetry. Currently living in central Pennsylvania, her interest in reading and writing poetry and prose is ongoing, and she gains inspiration from so many contemporary poets, memoirists, and fiction writers.
Julia Wendell’s sixth collection of poems, The Art of Falling, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2022. Another collection, Daughter Days, will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2025. She is Founding Editor of Galileo Press, lives in Aiken, South Carolina, and is a three-day event rider.
Karen J. Weyant's poems have been published in Chautauqua, Copper Nickel, Fourth River, Lake Effect, Rattle, River Styx, Slipstream, Spillway, Tahoma Literary Review, and Whiskey Island. The author of two poetry chapbooks, her first full-length collection, Avoiding the Rapture, was published last year by Riot in Your Throat Press. She lives, reads, and writes in northern Pennsylvania.
Dana Yost was a state and national award-winning daily newspaper editor and reporter for 29 years. Since 2008, he has published eight books, with a ninth, Free-Fall, coming this July from Finishing Line Press. He has lived in the Upper Midwest his entire life.
Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.