Inch: North Carolina Bundle

Description

The Heretic’s Bestiary (Inch #61)

by L. Danzis (Candler, NC)

Part meditation, part vivisection via personal essay, The Heretic’s Bestiary (Inch #61) grapples with questions of queer identity, faith, and what it means to be “unnatural” in a naturally miraculous world. This book is for casual scientists, birdwatchers and gardeners and stargazers and museum-goers. This book is for God’s eyes only. This book is a light for anyone in the closet. This book is for people who put too much faith in bizarre dreams. If you’ve read this far, this book is for you.

Shiny Girl (Inch #60)

by Marianne Gingher (Greensboro, NC)

A bride on her honeymoon eats her husband; a young boy’s dreams materialize to save him from bullies; a daughter recalls a family vacation that felt more like a kidnapping; a feral cat identifies with an unruly girl whose father attempts to isolate and tame her. In Shiny Girl (Inch #60), relationships evolve or devolve, as quickly as a match struck and blown out, and love mostly remains aspirational: as trial, magic trick, prison, or the fairy tale one wants to believe. The stories that happen to both humans and animals are arranged chronologically (youth to old age), focusing on characters who, though often self-sabotaging, are ultimately insightful and resilient. Whatever their impediments and diminished circumstances, these characters find ways to persist and bloom, sometimes through insight and pluck, sometimes because of the fairy tales they tell themselves or attempt to live.

When God Was a Child (Inch #56)

by Annie Woodford (Deep Gap, NC)

The poems in When God Was a Child (Inch #56) by poet Annie Woodford explore the rural and mysterious allure of the Appalachian and Piedmont regions of Virginia and North Carolina. Throughout this collection, the beauty and pain of those geographies intersect with the speaker’s personal history as well as broader cultural histories. The landscape and all that inhabit it—the verdant plant life and animals, too—come alive in themselves and in community with each other, all in survival of difficult times, with the fraught and fragile pain and persistence of familial love. As Tayari Jones put it, these poems engage with how “our real human hearts intersect forces that are so much bigger and older than we are.” In the cadence and spirit of fellow North Carolinian poet A.R. Ammon’s work, Woodford’s collection is deeply lyrical and strikingly precise; these are poems that linger.

The Wall Where You Leave Me (Inch #51)

by Martina Litty (Laurinburg, NC)

The Wall Where You Leave Me (Inch #51) from North Carolinian poet Martina Litty is a collection of compact, breathless poems that ask: what does it mean, that we are meant to live alone? What does it mean, that to accept love means to invite grief? Poems range from ekphrastic pieces to golden shovels and ghazals, as the speaker navigates her Southern pastoral surroundings while grappling with sexuality, loneliness, risk, loss, and love.

Whistler’s Mother (Inch #48)

by Sophia Stid (Wilmington, NC)

In lyric sections meant to evoke the experience of wandering through a museum, Whistler’s Mother (Inch # 48) takes a closer, deeper look at the subject of one of the most iconic paintings from the nineteenth century, reckoning with legacies of racism, misogyny, industry, imperialism, and place. The titular portrait, or Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1, by James McNeill Whistler has come to symbolize a specific Victorian ideal of motherhood and domesticity. Written on location in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Whistler’s mother was from, this micro-chapbook asks: How do we responsibly engage with historical memory? What do our places know that we do not? How do we live with grief, both individual and collective?