John Berryman made the famous observation “Life, friends, is boring” and many poets today seem to agree. A great deal of modern work seems to be concerned with mining through layers of the mundane to access some nugget of meaning. We often conflate the everyday and the possible.

Birdwatching in Wartime suggests that the problem may be geographical. Most of us simply don’t live where it’s dangerous. We no longer feel overwhelmed by physicality— hunger, pain, and wild beauty. Jeffrey Thomson brings us back to this world.

Thomson’s poems wind through the Amazon, detailing the fantastical creatures that seem to emerge from every direction. The poems are at times overwhelming, but leave me with a terror and fascination unmatched in any other poetry I’ve read. Much of the effect comes from Thomson’s lyrical dexterity:

…a pity not to have seen

the spattered sun

scribbled down to nothing more than matchlight on army ants

engraving leaf litter,

the cuneiform of tapir prints in the mud of that flat-banked stream,

not to have seen

the wattled jacana scrawl across water lilies with her vast, forked feet

a pity

never to have taken piranha from the river and watched them slap

their gibberish

across the bottom of the boat.

But unlike many lyrical poets, I get the sense that Thomson’s language is lagging behind the reality of the experiences, not dominating them. I picture him running through the jungle, breathlessly jotting down what is happening around him without enough time to focus on any particular wonder.

There is an almost inconceivable breadth and strangeness in Thomson’s landscapes. In “Landscape with Flooded Forest,” Thomson shows us a world where “the horizon rises up around the shoulders of trees/ and fish fly through branches in flocks of scale…a wire-tailed manakin flames/ through the middle-story treetops and pink dolphins/ slalom through the sunken trunks.” The impossibility of these images and their apparent reality challenge the imagination. But there is a darker side to these worlds; a constant danger:

when those wasps

stapled my back and sides and face

…

…when the splotches flushed across my back

my neck, my sweat-licked face,

when the diaspora of venom wrote a question across my back

in hot letters that left me

cold and shaking

The less personal but no less fierce violence of the “Tarantulas that hunt fish” or “piranha, red-bellied as rage…that dissembled a swimming sloth” also stalks through the poems. Thomson’s cocktail of fear and wonder is potent. It keeps the poems engaging even when the density of creatures and events threatens to overwhelm them.

Though Thomson’s Amazon poems are the vanguard of Birdwatching in Wartime, they are not the totality of the army he has deployed. He also experiments with two long multi-part poems.  The first, the “Celestial Emporeum of Benevolent Knowledge,” plays with the idea of cataloguing experience into a handful of categories. Thomson’s fresh use of language is an asset here and the poem sparkles with clever metaphorical gems. Though it’s length and wit are impressive, the poem seems to buckle under the freedom afforded by its scope. The second long poem, “Blind Desire,” is largely successful, with a coherent series of three-tercet sections interlocking through a sequence of overlapping images.

Other directions abound in Birdwatching, including commentary on religion, imperialism, and desire, a poem entwined in the philosophy and desperation of Jack Gilbert, and a poem comprised solely of footnotes. But it is really the Amazon poems and their “Landscape” form, which re-appears throughout, that give this book its thrust. “Beauty is a theatre of risk” writes Thomson, and in terms of form and content, this book goes all in.

Dmitry Berenson is pursuing a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon
University. He is an avid reader and writer of poetry.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s second book of poems, Apocalyptic Swing, resonates with a quiet intensity. Issues of the body, love and sex, of fighting and falling and yet rising again because there is no choice flow through this collection involving a boxer who is caught up in the fight and world that exists around it in a small American town.

One time you hit a guy so hard

even he looked impressed before he fell
to the mat and started to seize.
She didn’t let you touch her for days

after that.

Calvocoressi works from within the ring, as poems become the victor, loser, referee, someone shouting from the crowd.  Small town concerns take precedence, become all that matter.  These poems are the lights, the sweat shining on the floor after, evidence of what’s left. Apocalyptic Swing holds a sense of struggle, fight and courage and power, combined with a profound feeling of loneliness that plays part, even as an entire community’s inhabitants become a single entity of pride, anticipating something better.

These poems draw on people who are struggling to survive, whether in the ring or in their everyday lives.  The boxer is any one of them, and he becomes the whole town, which could be any town, and they are all fighting, deserving to win, but usually walking away broken, beaten.

A sad history of short-lived triumph shifts through, coupled with hope.  This time will be better:

It will feel better than any floor
that’s risen up to meet you.  It will rise

like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother’s hands.  She’ll come back,

heaven having been too far from home
to hold her.  O it will be beautiful.

Calvocoressi’s language is controlled with a confident, relaxed tone of honesty that quietly tells of a town and its people, one story, one memory at a time.  Her poems take the hit, get back up, train for the next fight, keep going.  Family and community encircle, push the importance of effort and love into the face, wrap it up between the knuckles, prepare for the punches.  Small wars, small fires move from mouth to mouth, family to friend, keeping everyone warm, and relying on the chain to prevail, to stay lit, to stay alive.  There is the fight and what’s worth fighting for—there cannot be one without the other.

Amanda Brant is a current MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is originally from Indiana but now lives in Pittsburgh’s Southside with her dog, Maddie.  Her work has recently appeared in Invisible City.

Submissions Guidelines:

Fiction:
Hot Metal Bridge is interested in your well-crafted literary fiction, whether short story, flash fiction, or novel excerpt. What counts as literary? Just don’t send us a story about spaceship-flying dinosaurs. That said, we like aesthetic diversity, from realism to surrealism, maximalism to minimalism. And if you simply write stories and don’t care about literary classifications, send us your work too. We accept submissions as Word attachments sent to fiction@hotmetalbridge.org. Please keep submissions under 7,000 words and make sure to include your name and contact information.

Poetry: 
We are many, and our tastes differ, but as this is an entirely online journal, there’s no reason not to read the past issue before submitting (it’s good, we promise). If you can smell what we’re stepping in, then send something our way. Down to business. We welcome poetry submissions of five (5) pages or five (5) poems, whichever comes first. Please attach your submission as one document (we prefer .doc, but .docx .rtf or .pdf will all work) with your name appearing at the top of the first page. E-mail subject heading should read “Spring Poetry Submission” and in the body, you may include a short bio or cover letter, if that strikes your fancy. Send your work our way:poetry@hotmetalbridge.org.

Nonfiction:
We’re looking for nonfiction writing in all its disguises: memoir, travel writing, literary journalism, satire, etc. We want to hear about dirty kitchens, ill-mannered exchange students, and hydrogen bonding. We will read about decaying vineyards, heroic mall guards, disenchanted cartographers, and sweet potatoes. Look, just don’t James Frey us and everything will be fine. If it’s new and it’s true, send 500 to 5,000 words as a Word or RTF attachment to nonfiction@hotmetalbridge.org.

Criticism:
Hot Metal Bridge criticism is looking for innovative academic or non-academic work from professional, student, and other sources. As a forum for a variety of approaches to cultural criticism, we want your seminar and conference papers, your unpublished chapters, your articles and miscellany. Our aim is to create a space for previously unpublished pieces which may not find an easy home elsewhere. Because critical work is inherently creative, we encourage interdisciplinarity and hybridity in both form and content. Send us your poor, your tired, your huddled pages yearning to breathe free. We want to give voice to ideas that might otherwise be confined to obscurity. Submissions should be about 1 to 30 pages in MLA style. Send Word documents as attachments to criticism@hotmetalbridge.org.

And finally, good luck to all of you and we hope you’ll stay turned for upcoming book reviews, podcasts and our glorious fifth issue.

-Sal Pane and Geoff Peck
Editors

Our fourth issue is nearly set to debut! Like an anxious dancer it waits in the wings, pulling down its too-short tutu.
Barrring any kind of editorial/personal meltdown, the finest fiction, art, criticism, nonfiction and poetry we could find should arrive on your proverbial doorstep this Monday.

So tighten your suspenders, friends. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

Yours,
The Editors

Many thanks, and happy submitting.

Yours,

The Editors

We are now accepting submissions for our fourth issue! Please send us your damned finest writing in nonfiction, poetry, criticism, or fiction. Submissions close on September 30, a date that hastens upon us like sleep, the desire for cheese, and the spectre of Ichabod Crane.

See our call for entries. Drink Ovaltine. Submit today!

Yours,
The Editors

PS: Hot Metal Bridge now has a Facebook group. That’s right. Join it.

We apologize for the slight delay and promise to repay you in gold coin — or rather, in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, criticism, and art, all of which we’d take over gold any day.

Yours, with anticipation,
The Editors

Luckily for you, Hot Metal Bridge is both more fortunate and more attractive than a slack-jawed neanderthal. Also, as an online magazine, it has no odor to speak of.

Submit! Submit quickly! And make it good.

Yours,
Kelly and Ashleigh

Prizes are $1,000 for first place, $500 for second and $250 for third. Postmark deadline is December 1.

The best part? No entry fee.

Full details here. Good luck.