Pricks in the Tapestry by Jameson Fitzpatrick The thread that ties together Jameson Fitzpatrick’s writings in Pricks in the Tapestry is not linear; there is neither chronology nor anachronism, development nor necessary trajectory. Stanza to stanza, page to page, poem to poem, speaker to speaker: the speakers don’t strive to be unified or explained. Forming a carefully tangled web, the the collection constitutes various selves submerged in a confusing world of sex, gender, race, class, family, and history. The force that moves the reader across the web from locus to locus, allowing disparate ideas and feelings to connect to one…
The Oldest College Literary Magazine in the Nation
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Sunday Staff Picks: November 1st
Obit by Victoria Chang Grief scatters us. In Obit, Victoria Chang attempts to put us back together. Chang writes to document her mother’s 2015 death and her father’s 2009 frontal lobe damage, but her poems truly rest in the innumerable micro-deaths in between. The death of the mother is simultaneously the death of the mother’s teeth; of appetite; of language; of hindsight; of Victoria Chang. The book largely consists of 70-odd obits: vertical, dense, tombstone-like poems, each dedicated to a specific loss. Through this rigid form, she entertains, and ultimately rejects, the objectivity and finality of newspaper obituaries. Instead, Chang…