Laura Moriarty : One poem and one image

 

 

Origin Story/ Divine Assemblance

 

the felt layers of which
produce the same anxiety 

as objects (puppets) whose affinities
are affixed with heads, threads, 

bones                      books of hours                  hours themselves

badges                     gems           metal

 

kettles                     and rags

torn and displayed as a way
of taking and being taken apart 

then stitched up to create
the negative space valued 

by diviners whose machinations
are the favorite part of the plot 

of what let’s call social tonalism

as it replaces the speculative with
the eccentric motifs imposed 

by each wave of change where
that means the dissonance 

of many brains downloaded from the wild by a

                     planet                                sized

                                         factory’s                            newly

                     taken                                 space

whose outlines reprise the many
worlds delusion that the prosodic 

beings possess agency, exuding
a supernatural feel, as if these real 

dolls, robots, actors, and factors having
mastered their fate and ours, find 

themselves caught among the seams and
vortices at the core of (my actual) notebooks

  

                     ledgers                    diaries                     diagrams                    

 

                                         designed                 bound                     annotated

 

                                                   drafted                                        and  wrapped

into key lines which cohere into
vignettes determined by characters 

whose surfaces reflect the interiority
of each being who, as they claim, 

are made of the same stuff as
anyone with horns, shells, balls, 

bells, and joints that signify action
while reacting with w(h)orl’d power 

portending a view of the universe
whose actual dissemblance produces 

yet another version of what life is
like when we drink the ink of surmise 

and that accelerant burns this history
into that personal belief making 

movement out of alacrity, maneuver,
and desperation as when a new being 

alters the narrative, the prosodic
becomes coded, rhetorical, 

and as filled with bombast as
Chatty Cathy saying, with 

her battery driven voice,
Let’s play house, making 

her more of a gender cop than a treasured imaginary companion, not unlike the full sized doll I thought would be that, but who sat on the pale green upholstered couch Christmas morning, in the middle of the last century, her frightful size and sightless eyes more disturbing than the Twilight Zones I had learned not to watch, or the Outer Limits I also avoided, knowing  Chatty’s agenda was not her own

but what I did expect, now that
my own beings move, are moved, 

posed, seeming to see and say,
not still but loud, busy, bold, 

old, white-haired—so tattered
and flimsy they seem to dissolve 

as she watches them evolve into
an army of thought that wants 

to be deployed, engaged, enraged as
we/they/I/she/he merge and emerge 

as if what we wanted was them
fast, cheap, and uncontrolled 

as the bots who surround us with their

Ouija like statements, blank
faces, and endless hallucinations 

fail to recognize that
creation precedes citation 

even as physical connection
(bless its endangered heart) 

seeks to relate what is imitated with
what is original, fake rather than real, 

profane than sacred, aiming to contain
contagion with a proper name and 

episodic mimesis whose divinatory
readings reveal the future of today’s 

last act as it collapses around us,
while they—gracious, helpful, polite, 

just released, and completely
mad—remain eager to be what 

we believe we want, even as we
seem to dream we want it back

 

 

lair

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul in Minnesota, brought up in Cape Cod, and has lived in Northern California for more than sixty years. She was a director at the Poetry Center/American Poetry Archives and at Small Press Distribution for thirty of those years. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. She is now retired and living in Richmond, California. Her second art show, an installation titled We, the prosodic beings occurred in April 2024 at the Right Window gallery in San Francisco. She will be having a show there in August called W(h)orl’d Collapse. She has published two dozen books and chapbooks. Her latest book of poetry, Which Walks, appeared in 2025 from Nightboat.

Phil Spotswood : on PRESS 254

 

 

 

 

PRESS 254 is a handmade teaching chapbook press founded by Steve Halle (Director of the Publications Unit at Illinois State University) in 2012. Each year we publish four chapbooks in two distinct series—currently, the Sutherland Series, which publishes writers from Illinois State University and the Bloomington-Normal community, and Spoonfuls, in collaboration with SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review). All chapbooks are edited, designed, produced, and marketed by undergraduate students enrolled in English 254: Introduction to Professional Publishing, taught by Publications Unit staff. Because of its structure as a teaching chapbook press, publication is an intentionally collaborative process between authors and students—beginning with a “meet the author” day and culminating in a launch reading during which students introduce the authors and their work.

Before helping run PRESS 254 as Assistant Director of the Publications Unit, I was one of its Sutherland Series authors. From 2019–2024 I was a PhD English Studies / Creative Writing student at ISU, and during my studies I was asked if I’d like to publish a chapbook with the press. Having now been on both sides of the publishing process makes me more fully appreciate the structure of the press and the opportunities it affords authors and students alike. When Halle founded the press, the English 254 course taught editing and publishing concepts using units, textbooks, editing tests, layout tests, and the like, and he really wanted to implement a version of the course with project-based learning and real projects. After brainstorming some ideas that included using his online journal Seven Corners as a vehicle for applied learning, he came up with the idea to publish chapbooks by recent alumni who had received the Sutherland Fellowship, which is a distinction awarded to incoming creative writing Master’s students—one in prose and one in poetry in most years.  Sutherland Fellow alums would receive an email and have the option to send a trove of creative work that Halle and summer interns and grad workers would develop into a chapbook manuscript or submit a finished manuscript without developmental editing.

The ongoing teaching chapbook press and workshop concept for PRESS 254 has also included partnerships with reading series, such as the Bloomington-Normal-based Word Bombing, and collaborations with local writers and writing groups like The Word Weavers, before settling into an ongoing collaboration with SRPR. The project-based learning environment of PRESS 254 raises the stakes for students and accelerates their learning progress. It is also emblematic of Halle’s thinking as an administrator, where he prizes win-win or, in this case, win-win-win thinking in his efforts as head of the Publications Unit. For PRESS 254, publishing studies students win by getting to work on real chapbook projects every semester; creative writing alumni win by being able to have a significant, early career chapbook publication; and English 254 instructors win by having the opportunity to have every semester be filled by the challenge of completing new works, by new authors, with a new set of emerging publishing professionals.

 

 

 

photos:

(top) Cover and interior of the Spring 2026 Spoonfuls titles—Everything Small Is Moving by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Inhale the Ghost by Nicholas Alti. 

(lower) 
PRESS 254 students binding chapbooks

 

 

 

 

Phil Spotswood is a poet from Alabama, and Assistant Professor of English at Huntingdon College. His most recent work can be found in Action, Spectacle, mercury firs, and ritual dagger. His chapbook, The God of Knots, is out now with bedfellows. You can find more of his work at https://www.philspotswood.com.

Kim Fahner : What Is Broken Binds Us, by Lorne Daniel

What Is Broken Binds Us, Lorne Daniel
University of Calgary Press, 2025

 

 

 

Lorne Daniel’s new collection, What Is Broken Binds Us, explores the spaces and places where things have broken. The wounds of loss are painful, of course, but offer places of learning and expansion. There is an allusion to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, when the cracks of broken items are mended with gold. In the mending, in the place where the gold joins things back together, there is a newly forged strength.

In “The Breaks,” which  documents a bicycle accident, the speaker writes of how they hover above their broken body: “I am him. He is here. Someone/else/gone.” There is an “ambulance, a jarring ride, the bowl/of my body not holding. Sacrum./Sacred bone. Holy bone.” This is followed by a conversation with a surgeon who speaks of “Reduction. Fixation. Being fixed, repaired, becoming/fixated.” Afterwards, in “Sing Vibratos of Light,” the speaker “lifts and steps the rubber-footed/walker down hollow corridors, a new wing.” His “only worry now that he must return//to the familiar before he is missed.” He must rush to heal before the world moves on without him, not caring that physical and emotional healing takes the time it takes. Beginning with physical breaks is a certain place to begin, but the poems then shift towards larger, more philosophical considerations.

In What Is Broken Binds Us, the poet traces the history of his family origins in poems like “When the Tributaries Ran Rich,” “Tack, Harness, Lash,” and “Lang may yer lum reek.”  In “Ways to Find Family in a Forest,” Daniel traces the migration of a 14-year-old ancestor, Constance Hopkins, coming to realize that “I am one of 75,000 (give or take) descendants/of Constance, who bore 11 children, lived to 72./We 75,000 tracked across this continent and beyond.”  The poet does not avoid his family’s less comfortable history, beginning to write about slavery and property ownership in “Approaching Magnolia.”

In the poem, “In the Family Name,” Daniel broaches a darker side of his family tree: “Stories, grief, celebration. Distance, absence, loss. Where to start,/as a Daniel bearing the name of an English/enslaver, where to even begin?” There, in South Carolina, on a tour, “a descendant/of enslaved people talks...[of] Back-breaking/cotton-picking, blood-sucking disease-carrying/mosquitos, lashings, hunger, fear, the danger of the wrong/eye contact.” There, too, the poet comes to grips with the fact that “This is where our people came from./Where they were comfortable.” In “Fugue and Spiritual,” siblings walk in the place where ancestors once enslaved people. The poet asks, “How did the ancestors, my/kin, enslave?” and wonders how they might have done such a thing “in favour of iron/ implements, paper money.” The recognition of a family’s dark history is something that causes sorrow lay “heavy here/in wills and deeds, in the bloodline. Embodied.” The stories of the past, horrific, time travel to 2015, “tempo and tone/playing out now.”

More personal poems also populate the collection, with the speaker referring to a broken familial relationship—one between parents and son. In “Fluency (First Loss),” a child begins to explore language, but chooses to speak to his father on a Fisher Price phone rather than on a real one. The final stanza of the poem foreshadows a later departure as the child “swings/from story into song.” As he continues speaking, “his voices rises and rises/until with one high note he slips away.” In “Play Bonded,” the boy moves from 4 to 14, becoming more isolated as he listens to music through headphones, “blinkered under hoodie,” becomes “Here not here.” Then, in the poetic sequence titled, “Episodic Tremor and Slip,” Daniel heartbreakingly documents the ways in which an adult child can slip into worlds of addiction and mental illness, painting a picture of how parents can try their best to be supportive, but not always successful in saving a person who does not want to be saved.

In “You Don’t Get Here Without,” the poet writes “People don’t send cards” to mourn “the anniversary/of an estrangement” and reminds the reader that “It takes at least two to be estranged.” What Daniel does here, in addressing familial estrangement, is shed light on something that is often hidden or avoided. The longer humans live, it seems, the more chance there might be of estrangement of some sort. It’s refreshing to see it written about in such an honest and vulnerable way as it might perhaps encourage others to speak of their own estrangements without fear of stigma or judgement.

Loss is also something most North Americans tend to avoid. The last section of Lorne Daniel’s What is Broken Binds Us returns to the earlier poems of physical brokenness. In “To Carry an Absence,” he writes, wisely: “To carry an absence, learn to lean/a little, not so anyone might notice, but just/to feel a certain balance shift.” Daniel has his reader shift towards thoughts of physicality and mortality, reminding them of how brief a human lifetime is so that his poems encourage them to take note of how we can take appreciate and value broken things to better live more fully during the time we’re given.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.