Audrey Rose: Who’s this Sardine you’ve been writing about the last week?

Jackson Andrews: Joe already explained who he was.

Paul Peterson: I remember him mentioning it. The Sardine’s a moron.

Joe T.: Maybe you should unfollow me, Paul.

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Generally, we’re all useless bystanders to the events happening around us or that we’re involved with. Anything significant goes on behind our backs. As if we’re programmed to ignore all the bad crap that happens in our lives.

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But the full, necessarily subjective, effect of each piece—the elements and their arrangement—takes the work to another mind-space, a different perceptual dimension, at times ineffable but always communicating.

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When the Sardine speaks outside this column, nothing he says can be taken at face value. Nothing he says he really means. Half the time he’s quoting from movies, and half the time he’s quoting movies completely out of context.

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Apophallation Sketches: A Theater of Affective Extremes (j/j hastain, MadHat Press, 2016). [“Then suddenly one slug gnaws off its partner’s or its own penis, . . .That act is apophallation: take a gulp of ephemeral air, then chomp down, amputate your lover’s (or your own) dick.”]

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What These Random Acts of Wildness does confirm is that the sonnet does not have to be the occasional toy of a writer out for a stretch, nor does a work of traditional poetry need to be only from a house thus dedicated.

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“Instead of writing new Sardine articles, you should re-make the original book,” Joe T. interrupts my thoughts.

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Once aware that I knew what was happening he schemed and forced my Khmer friend to lie and have me arrested for blackmail and sex trafficking. I was arrested for what he was doing. I learned that innocence doesn’t mean anything in some countries; Cambodia is one of them.

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Really, who would publish, let alone read, this type of article in a newspaper?  The column’s concept had developed in isolation from the public it had wished to attract.  He was sorry for dreaming up the project.

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Worse, the Today Show and Newsweek have contacted the Sardine for interviews, which the reticent fish wants to blow off.  Also, the less the column has to say, the more intensely the nation’s readers have accepted it.

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At first, he wanted to be part of the Sardine’s crew and be known by hundreds of thousands of people – and maybe more if the rumor about a television series had validity.  This single-minded desire had kept him going through the barren days when he met hundreds of people who had never heard of the column...

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About four years ago, I did five readings in Louisiana and Alabama with Wendy Taylor Carlisle and Jeff Weddle, arranged by publisher Jonathan Penton. Poems I can hear or read a few times and still enjoy and find nuance in are hard to come by, and Wendy and Jeff were bringing those in the tour.

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I feel frightened, angry, and helpless. I don’t know what to do about the growing global spread of fascism, and I don’t know what to do about it here, in the United States.

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We have the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to swing OUR DICKS AND DILDOS for the fences so that we can ensure Florida remains number one FOR ALL QUEERS, INCLUDING BIPOC AND TRANS FOLK.

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I couldn’t tell my secrets to people in real life, but the characters in my books understood me. Now, kids in Florida don’t even have the full range of fictional characters to turn to for solace or kinship or just basic entertainment that isn’t stripped of everything potentially interesting.

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All of these things are at issue in Florida and since Desantis declared his run for president and, honestly god-forbid, if he wins, America itself could become a place which no longer can legitimately call itself the land of the free, at least not in the eyes of the majority of people who live here.

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I came across The Muslims’ Fuck These Fuckin’ Fascists, a 12-song, 22-minute blast of pure punk resistance. The Black and Brown, all-queer, Muslim three-piece pushes back against white supremacy, the rise of fascism, racial inequality, gender inequality, and islamophobia.

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So, yes, Fuck Florida. But also see Florida for exactly what it is right now: an articulation of masculine dominance through any and all outlets provided by the dominant culture. Florida wants to be something it believes it is not: powerful. It especially wants to be seen that way.

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Australia’s federal government would prefer that we forget this crime against humanity, this X in flesh in the air. Will you let them?

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Then the shooting in Florida happened. The NRA wanted to bring guns to teachers. I couldn’t even get my students not to steal my candy or ink themselves with my stamps that were in my desk.

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I’m IOWA pariah. I’m heterodox writer. I workshop Twitter, they says all. I brought shame. Esteemed institution happen. I’m IOWA pariah.

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Mashinski’s book privileges me to enter another’s memory and dilemmas: her story in lyrical prose, a story in poems—written at times in the flattest voice of acknowledgment about how the earth and its devils will give you enough lives--enough to have one, after choosing to leave another.

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Later that night, I was haunted by images of mortars and shell cartridges, but remember distinctly that even before the tree-planting school trip I used to think, “what if I wake up in the middle of the night to find myself in the fascist encampment?”

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In my neck of the woods, we call any switcheroo like that, finding Jesus. If you finally decide you need a divorce, finding Jesus. If you are an alcoholic, and decide suddenly to go to rehab, finding Jesus. If you go to your job with no plans in mind one morning and quit your job that afternoon, finding Jesus.

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With these grievous events upon our collective experience, how we respond is how we will go forward. Sycamore’s introduction encourages us to “talk about everything, so we can feel everything. Let’s feel it all, so our future remains possible”

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So, our conversation encompassed a myriad of topics: music, art, nature, why humans are nearsighted and stupid (despite his species affiliation), Why chocolate, wine and cigarettes are the most important contributions humanity has given earth, and ultimately, poetry.

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In line and prose the poems blunt with humor and cynicism, in this dance that’s like having sex with someone new, or listening to anecdotes about your mom’s love life: it makes you uncomfortable at times, but you come back, it itches...

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These may be dark times, but look on the bright side—the effervescent bubbles are beginning to lift our convalescent outlooks and are uniting everyone—even Death Row and Puff Daddy, which has been sponsored by Schweppes’ parent company, Dr. Pepper.

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These paired repetitions in both stanzas make the lines more permanent, like a magic mirror effect and affect. Subtle as a disaffected kid, they play with mature audacity.

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As a symbol, a hand becomes a want, a yearn, a chain, a command, a judgment, a labor, a seizure of sharing, affection, and property. The hand, the biological equivalent to the symbol of gesture, the means of participating in the play of life, the gesture.

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With this piece I am interested in learning if there are more human senses that exist both inside and outside of White western culture. I am also interested in if Black peoples 5 human senses are different. Yes Karan, solely because we are black.

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Grabill samples widely across the here and now, the American landscape, the landscape of human consciousness, a scaping that moves through time, species and possibilities.

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o corrosion of coriolas
o cauterization of victrolas and cylinders and disks
of the uncanny silence of lands and lakes
o the noisy skies, jewls of the viscous depths
o kupu, hanasu, mourning

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Thomas Bulfinch, whose collections of ancient myths remained the popular standard in the United States for more than a century until the 1942 publication of Edith Hamilton’s Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, was an anti-homosexual activist as well as a lifelong bachelor. Was he in fact a closeted gay man who sought to hide behind a door of homophobic zeal?

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The author is a master of proportion, a noteworthy quality, so that the bulk of the main theme (loss) and the other themes are revealed almost like video fades. The lines are clear, simple, precise, eloquent and politely unforgiving.

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I wanted to explore the afterlife with my characters, I wanted to let myself fully free, while still tense in the form of literature I have chosen to lock myself into. The death of the world, the death of the ego, the death of the self, the death of god.

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Impulse and Warp nobly attempts the impossible: to describe the chaos of time with respect. The poems can’t be rushed and aren’t easy on first impression. The syntax fucks itself, breaks up, then comes back to show that even grammar is relative.

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Late Beat poets are still among us, but the generation who held fire most akin to The Beats was Punk. For efficient evidence, consider the Nobel for Lit anointing Bob Dylan, and how it was Patti Smith who took the stage—she of well-documented punk cred.

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The Hoedads were real hippies. They weren’t television and movie hippies—all flowers and headbands and incense—but actual funky, fiercely independent and often downright ornery Freaks, who were also idealistic and compassionate almost to a fault.

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But when I was growing up, when I was hearing them tested every Tuesday morning at 10:30, the sirens were still called what they were when they were first installed during WWII all across a frightened America – air raid sirens.

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