Contemporary Authors

• If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting: Poems University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2009
• Vulgar Remedies: Poems Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2013
• The Atheist Wore Goat Silk: Poems Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2017
• An Arrangement of Skin: Essays Counterpoint Press (Berkeley, CA), 2017

1. An arrangement of skin : essays LCCN 2017003953 Type of material Book Personal name Journey, Anna, 1980- author. Uniform title Essays. Selections Main title An arrangement of skin : essays / Anna Journey. Published/Produced Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2017] Projected pub date 1705 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9781619028470 (hardcover : acid-free paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. The atheist wore goat silk : poems LCCN 2016027489 Type of material Book Personal name Journey, Anna, 1980- author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title The atheist wore goat silk : poems / Anna Journey. Published/Produced Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2017] Description 84 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780807165683 (softcover : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS3610.O6794 A6 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. Vulgar remedies : poems LCCN 2012049696 Type of material Book Personal name Journey, Anna, 1980- Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Vulgar remedies : poems / Anna Journey. Published/Produced Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Description viii, 78 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780807152195 (paper : alk. paper) 9780807152201 (pdf) Shelf Location FLS2014 013258 CALL NUMBER PS3610.O6794 V85 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 4. If birds gather your hair for nesting : poems LCCN 2008048667 Type of material Book Personal name Journey, Anna, 1980- Main title If birds gather your hair for nesting : poems / by Anna Journey. Published/Created Athens : University of Georgia Press, c2009. Description xii, 90 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780820333687 (pbk. : alk. paper) 0820333689 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3610.O94 I38 2009 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Journey

  Anna Journey
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Anna Journey (born November 1980 in Arlington, Virginia) is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.[1] She is the author of the essay collection, An Arrangement of Skin (Counterpoint Press, 2017) and three books of poems: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is an assistant professor of English.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Life
  2 Awards
  3 Works
  3.1 Criticism
  3.2 Anthologies
  4 Reviews
  5 References
  6 External links
  Life[edit]
  She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, with an MFA in creative writing. She taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, and served as an associate editor for Blackbird. She received her Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, where she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.[2]

  Journey is the author of the poetry collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (Georgia, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Film director David Lynch called her book, via Twitter, "magical." Her poetry appears in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, FIELD, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, 'Shenandoah, Gulf Coast,' and Blackbird.[3] Her critical essay on Sylvia Plath ("'Dragon Goes to Bed With Princess': F. Scott Fitzgerald's Influence on Sylvia Plath") appears in Notes on Contemporary Literature. Her essay, "Lost Vocabularies: On Contemporary Elegy" appears in Parnassus: Poetry In Review." In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Plath's early sonnet "Ennui" that was published in Blackbird.[4]

  She is married to the poet David St. John and lives in Venice, California.

  Awards[edit]
  2005 Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry
  Yaddo residency
  2005 Wabash Prize for Poetry
  Academy of American Poets' Prize
  2007 Diner Poetry Contest
  2008 National Poetry Series
  2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry[1]
  Works[edit]
  If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. University of Georgia Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-8203-3368-7.
  Vulgar Remedies. Louisiana State University Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0-8071-5219-5.
  Criticism[edit]
  "Review: The World in Repair: Steve Gehrke's The Pyramids of Malpighi", Blackbird, Spring 2005
  "Dragon Goes to Bed with Princess: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Influence on Sylvia Plath", Notes on Contemporary Literature, 09/01/07
  Anthologies[edit]
  Reviews[edit]
  Anna Journey's first book of poems, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press: 104 pp., $16.95 paper), is a deeply American debut that deals with the author's Southern childhood and adolescence as a pretty, redheaded girl from the bayou. It's lush with Romanticism: Journey writes with near-perfect pitch about flowers, the suburban eeriness of garden centers, her closeted gay psychiatrist grandfather and the mother who broke her back.[5]

  References[edit]
  ^ Jump up to: a b National Endowment of the Arts 2011 Poetry Fellows Archived 2010-11-27 at the Wayback Machine.
  Jump up ^ Anna Journey. Blackbird.
  Jump up ^ Poetry. Blackbird.
  Jump up ^ An Introduction to Sylvia Plath's "Ennui". Blackbird.
  Jump up ^ Laurel Maury (May 24, 2009). "If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting by Anna Journey". The Los Angeles Times.
  External links[edit]
  Official website
  "How Do You Bottle the Lightning?: Anna Journey sits down with David Wojahn", Gulf Coast

• Anna Journey - http://annajourney.com/about/

  anna journey

  Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist. She’s the author of the essay collection An Arrangement of Skin (Counterpoint, 2017) and three books of poems: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (LSU Press, 2017), Vulgar Remedies (LSU Press, 2013), and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series.

  Her poems have been published in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, FIELD, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The Southern Review. Her essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Utne Reader; and her criticism appears in American Poetry Review, FIELD, Kenyon Review Online, Parnassus, and Plath Profiles. Journey has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and elsewhere.

  Having spent the first seven years of her life in South Asia—five in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and two in New Delhi, India—Journey came to the United States in the late 1980s and settled in Fairfax, Virginia. At eighteen, she moved to Richmond, Virginia, where she resided for eight years, studying ceramics as an undergraduate student and poetry as a graduate student, at VCU. For much of her time in Richmond, Journey lived across the street from Hollywood Cemetery: a sprawling, magnolia-filled graveyard, dating from the 1840s, which overlooks the James River.

  Journey holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, as well as a B.F.A. in Art Education and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, both from Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives in Venice, California with her husband, poet David St. John, and teaches creative writing and literature as an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California.

• Poets - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/anna-journey

  poet
  Anna Journey
  Tags: NEA Fellow
  Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California.

• The Southeast Review - http://southeastreview.org/interview-anna-journey/

  QUOTED: "Houston’s a different place entirely. It’s diabolical. It’s extreme. It’s relentless. I could barely go outside for the heat. I had to hike the swamplands with a “spider stick,” which I’d swish between close-canopied live oaks to clear the spider webs, which grew as thick as angel hair spaghetti between branches because, you know, no one else really hiked there. Why would they? So we all have our muses. Mine are sometimes persecutory landscapes that want to smother or strangle me and then hide my body. It’s a complicated dynamic."

  Interview: Anna Journey
  by skopel on October 4, 2013 in Uncategorized
  756-Journey_Author's Photo_Credit Stephanie Diani.jpg

  Vulgar Remedies Ambien, and Eros:
  An Interview with Anna Journey, by Anna Claire Hodge

  1) I had the pleasure of seeing you read years ago alongside the dashing Thomas Lux (who chose your first book, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, for the National Poetry Series) and was struck by an image (“men smooth // as conchs in softcore seascapes”) from your poem “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever.” In fact, I’ve been fascinated by that line to this day, and am extremely jealous I didn’t write it! Can you share an image or line from a poet you admire that you’d like to steal?

  What should we call this covetous place, where we drool over certain poets’ lines and wish we could steal them—a kleptography? There are many lines I’d love to lift, and which I probably have lifted, albeit indirectly, through an indebted cadence, similar rhetoric, related subject, or imagistic riff. Or why not just steal the line outright, and make it a poem’s title (with a nod to the author in an epigraph), which can be a pain-free way of drumming up a title as well as a mode of acknowledging—and perhaps conversing with—your favorite authors.

  One moment that especially resonates with my imagination is the following stanza from the middle of Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s “Prologue as Part of the Body,” the initial poem in her fourth collection, Lie Awake Lake:

  But it was summer trying to enter, swoon its way
  into the skull, the Parfum Fatale collapsing
  on the organ of Corti
  I love the hypnotic force of Goldberg’s music; her language’s lush yet subtle assonance; her lines’ dizzying and dazzling enjambments. I also admire her inventive coinage of the proper noun “Parfum Fatale” to evoke the encroaching presence of summer as a kind of sinister femme fatale that destroys a delicate part of the inner ear: the organ of Corti. Goldberg’s use of synesthetic imagery, too, seduces readers to continue into what becomes a rather foreboding elegy—or a “prologue” to a death, rather—through a fusion and scrambling of senses, a disorienting transformation which is perhaps mimetic of the onset of death.

  In Goldberg’s synesthetic burlesque or sensory-conflating danse macabre, the scent of “Parfum Fatale” becomes tangible, capable of “swooning” and “collapsing,” like a stereotypical character from a romance novel. But like a darkly erotic and potent femme fatale, Goldberg’s weather system brings not only summer’s seductive perfume, it triggers the collapse of the mortal body, beginning with the vulnerable and interior locus of hearing. This imagistic conflation enacts the bewildering approach of death: it’s not supposed to happen to us, we think. It’s wrong—like scent entering an auditory organ; it’s a corporeal violation. It’s the body confused and confounded by a dire scent. And Goldberg achieves all this within three lines! I mean, goddamn.

  2) Your second collection of poems, Vulgar Remedies, comes out from Louisiana State University Press this August. How was the process different, this go around?

  Psychologically, having one’s second book solicited by the director of a reputable press is very different from sending one’s debut through the contest circuit, otherwise known as the Hyena Circus of Humiliation and Dread. I was surprised and grateful to have my first collection emerge, via the National Poetry Series. The reality of the contest circuit, however, is that many presses aren’t in the position, financially, to take on second collections or acquisitions outside of their contest books, as they’ve come to rely on those external subsidies. I feel so fortunate that LSU Press has a robust and enduring poetry series and that—most important—they’re loyal to their authors; they invest in a poet, not a single book.

  3) Your poems are imbued with images of the natural world that are so unexpected and rendered in a way that makes them startlingly beautiful, yet they sometimes feel sinister. Tell me about your relationship with nature and how/why it pervades your work?

  Adam Gopnik, in his recent article about Florida crime fiction, from this year’s noir issue of The New Yorker, references a writer (whose name Gopnik doesn’t specify) in a passage that particularly resonated with my own feelings toward place. To paraphrase and revise the quotation, I often get the feeling that, when I write a poem about a woman and a man, there end up being three characters: the woman, the man, and the weather. (Or you could replace the noun “man” with “Ambien” or “bioluminescent shrimp” or “fistulated dairy cow…”) Each place has its own particular ecosystem and inhospitable clime, but I think there’s a uniquely persecutory quality to the South, a physical and psychological weather that seems to permeate everything in sight. It’s aggressive; it’s all encompassing: the weight of your sheets; the humid scurry from your AC’d apartment to your AC’d car; the summers that drag on for six months. The weather seems to permeate everything out of sight, too: the longing to escape; the craving for bodies of water without algae and alligators; the corrosive sense of history that lingers, complicating your relationship to the place you wish would love you back. For me, to write poems linked to the South is to write in the tradition of the jilted lover. It’s unrequited.

  Landscape can be a home or a haunted vista—or both, as in the cinematic peculiarity of C.D. Wright’s Ozarks or the mortality-infused Blue Ridge of Charles Wright’s Appalachia. I’ve lived a number of places, having spent the first seven years of my life in Dhaka, Bangladesh and New Delhi, India, before moving to the suburbs of Fairfax, Virginia. The landscape of Richmond, Virginia, however (where I lived for eight years as I earned my BFA in art and MFA in creative writing, both from VCU), dominates my first collection, whereas Houston, Texas (where I lived for three and a half years as I earned my Ph.D., from UH) inflects my second book. I loved living in Richmond. I loved the funky tangle of cobblestone alleys; the slow-moving and lukewarm James River; the magnolia-and-ivy-dense cemetery, from the 1840s, just two blocks from my brick row house. I spent hours outside, nearly everyday, walking to the cemetery or the river, “to get the cool,” as C.D. Wright would say. Houston’s a different place entirely. It’s diabolical. It’s extreme. It’s relentless. I could barely go outside for the heat. I had to hike the swamplands with a “spider stick,” which I’d swish between close-canopied live oaks to clear the spider webs, which grew as thick as angel hair spaghetti between branches because, you know, no one else really hiked there. Why would they? So we all have our muses. Mine are sometimes persecutory landscapes that want to smother or strangle me and then hide my body. It’s a complicated dynamic.

  4) I would read Vulgar Remedies based on the poems’ titles alone! For example, “Elegy Where I Initially Refuse to Eat Sand” and “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned.” Many of your titles are lengthy, but some, like “Alarm” and “Mercy,” are spare. Please share some insights on your titling choices.

  I like a long title. As a poet who loves narrative but writes in the lyric mode, I find I can get a lot of potentially burdensome “scene setting”—the who, what, when, where, why of the poem—out of the way by freighting a title with information. Doing so swiftly grounds a reader and establishes a framework for the dramatic context. Also, when titling a poem, I like to imagine the title printed in a hypothetical table of contents: “Would I flip to that poem?” I ask myself. Many times the answer is: “Nope.” So I go back to work until I arrive at a title that feels vivid and compelling enough to satisfy my demands for clarity, surprise, strong imagery, and an orienting context.

  Titling, for me, is like writing a miniature poem. How much can I do? What can happen in this space? Just look, for example, to Thomas Lux’s deadpan and eerily fabular approach to evoking the absurdist heights of war’s inhumanity in “Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls Into Besieged City;” or Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s sensual and mythically charged imagery in “Nights in the Constellation of the Tree Stepping from Its Robe;” or Larry Levis’s phantasmagoric and slyly self-referential metaphor in “The Poem Returning as an Invisible Wren to the World.” Conversely, there are times when I’ll gravitate toward a simpler, more succinct title, especially if the poem itself is short or if it’s comparatively quieter or starker in tone. I don’t want the structure of each title to become predictable, which would bore me, and probably other people.

  5) As a fellow insomniac, I have a great affinity for your “Sonnets to Ambien.” I’ve always been too frightened to try the sleep aid myself, mostly because of the horror stories I’ve heard. Can you tell me about your experiences with Ambien and how insomnia informs your work?

  Insomnia and stress are linked for me. While I was a stressed-out Ph.D. student in creative writing and literature in Houston, I experienced some pretty freaky Ambien-induced hallucinations. They’d occur if I stayed awake too long on the drug and began to see objects appear in my bedroom. I’ve hallucinated some outrageous creatures: a phosphorescent lynx; a goblin orgy; a faceless woman wearing her hair in a black bun; a pile of people with their arms sawed-off at the shoulder sprawled on the rug next to my bed. I’ve had auditory hallucinations in which I hear the scratchy whispering of multiple voices but can’t follow the narrative threads. I once thought my cat looked like a demon and cried. Let me tell you: they weren’t cheerful apparitions.

  Because I love Rilke’s poems, including The Sonnets to Orpheus, I decided to write my own “Sonnets to Ambien” to see if I could conjure the mythic textures of that slippery liminal space: of insomnia and the desire for rest, of affliction and its elusive remedy. Also, I liked the idea of insomnia being a place, a country, and Ambien being some sort of eerie “nocturnal angel,” who my speaker could address. So she and Ambien could have it out, I guess. I decided to write a brief sonnet sequence because I find the form inherently obsessive—like an insomniac’s urgency—and I hoped that giving some structure to the speaker’s defiantly unstructured predicament would provide tension in the poem and an assurance to its shape. The sequence that comes later in the book, “Sonnets to the Egyptian Chamomile Farmers,” is the companion poem to “Sonnets to Ambien.” Alas, that fair-trade chamomile tea didn’t work out so well for the speaker, either. What’s next, anyway, horse tranquilizers?

  6) I’ve often thought that the love poem or erotic poem is the most difficult to write, or rather, write well. You handle both iterations deftly, though. How do you manage to illuminate such tender physical moments or declarations of love without falling prey to the sentimental or trite?

  Anne Carson reminds us, in her erudite and lyrical book about romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet, that it was Sappho who first termed eros “bittersweet.” So every time we think of a bittersweet parting or memory (or chocolate?) we recall the wisdom of the
  ancient Greek lyric poet. The erotic situation, then, combines both pleasure and pain, love and hate, which makes the dynamic a fundamentally paradoxical one. There’s an acute tension to that opposition that interests me. (By the way, I love that, as I glance at my copy of Carson’s book, next to her passage about most love ending badly in poems, my old marginal notes contain the highbrow literary observation: “Ha! True that.”)

  The event of eros—an emotional and psychological event—creates a paradox, so there’s a tension to that disorienting and seemingly impossible simultaneity. Desire isn’t satisfied; it’s all about lack. It’s about wanting something out of reach. That’s where the tension comes from. So, necessarily, tropes about desire are often conflicted, contradictory, paradoxical. Desire “splits” the mind or soul into antithetical states (the sweet and the bitter), and so a poem must enact that drama, which Carson terms “a dilemma of sensation, action, or value.” It’s when “love and hate converge within erotic desire.”

  In honor of my elopement several years ago, I sat down to write an epithalamium. I typed its initial title: “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony.” I couldn’t abide the sweetness of the scenario, its lack of tension, its sentimentality (even with the weird tomato), so I completed the title: “Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned.” Hey, look: the sweet and the bitter! Thanks, Sappho. I think, when we sit down to write the erotic, it’s important to dramatize the full dilemma of eros, in all its rich complexity and psychological darkness. If we ignore the latter state, we often wind up with a poem of sentimentality. After my poem took its dark turn, I asked my husband, somewhat sheepishly, “Should I still dedicate this poem to you?” He said, “Absolutely.”

  Also, I should clarify that by “dark,” I don’t mean to suggest that a poet can achieve gravitas through being merely gloomy or grim. I mean that a poem—even a poem celebrating the intricacies and excitement of a romantic partnership—takes on fuller dimensions and expands its psychological or emotional depth through acknowledging mutability: an awareness of time, impermanence, imperfection, and our mortal circumstance. It’s what makes us the complicated creatures that we are. I, for one, intend to celebrate (in this poem’s case, a wedding), even as those waves, which once drowned the actress Natalie Wood, keep rolling in.

  Anna Claire Hodge is a PhD student in Florida State University’s creative writing program. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, Copper Nickel, The Collagist, Bellingham Review, A Poetry Congeries, and others. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2013 and Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo, 2013).

  Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, FIELD, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her creative nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in At Length, Better, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships in poetry from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she teaches creative writing in Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program.

• Arts.gov - https://www.arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/anna-journey

  Anna Journey

  2011 Poetry

  Author's Statement

  At this point in my career--that space between graduating from the University of Houston's PhD program and finding my first academic teaching job--receiving a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts means I'll have the freedom to focus entirely on my creative work. I'll use my grant from the NEA to complete my second book of poems and begin work on my third collection.

  Similarly to my debut collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, my second book, Whisper to the Hive, references the quirky magic of a folk superstition. According to an English tradition, after a family member dies one must go to a beehive and tell the insects about it. This way, the bees won't abandon their hive. I'm drawn to the elegiac implications of such a myth, as well as its hints of seductiveness and danger. I'm looking forward to completing my new

• VCU Alumni - http://enews.vcualumni.org/2017/05/an-interview-with-anna-journey-author-of-an-arrangement-of-skin.html

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  An interview with Anna Journey, author of ‘An Arrangement of Skin’
  Posted on May 17, 2017
  Share
  When Anna Journey (B.F.A.’04/A; M.F.A.’07/H&S) was a student in the master of fine arts in creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, she attracted international news coverage for her discovery of an unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath in the archives at Indiana University. The poem, “Ennui,” was published in November 2006 in Blackbird, an online literary journal of the VCU Department of English and New Virginia Review Inc.

  Today, Journey continues to attract attention, but it is her writing rather than her research that is the source of her renown. Journey is the author of the essay collection “An Arrangement of Skin” (Counterpoint) and three books of poems: “The Atheist Wore Goat Silk” (LSU Press), “Vulgar Remedies” (LSU Press) and “If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting” (University of Georgia Press), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have drawn praise from such luminaries as the film director David Lynch, who called Journey’s poetry “really magical,” and the poet Erin Belieu, who said Journey “brings me surprise after surprise in language so vivid, peculiar, truthful, and moving, that I gulp the poems down, a glutton for their strange energies and observations.”

  Journey holds a B.F.A. in art education from the VCU School of the Arts, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. She’s currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California. “An Arrangement of Skin,” which was published in March, is Journey’s latest work. In his praise for the book, Mark Doty, the National Book Award-winning poet, said Journey “might be our first Southern Gothic essayist, and she invigorates the form with both a poet’s lyricism and the distinctive signature of her character: a vulnerable heart wedded to an acute, comic, unsparing eye.”

  Read more.

  This entry was posted in College of Humanities and Sciences, School of the Arts, VCU Alumni, Virginia Commonwealth University. Bookmark the permalink.
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• How A Poem Happens - http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2009/10/anna-journey.html

  QUOTED: "“The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more directly autobiographical than many of my poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. The poem’s setting though, is perhaps more slippery and oblique than others in the book. A good number of the poems in my collection are anchored in highly specific, if strange, concrete settings: a costume ball in a basement, an artificial limb factory, a Confederate cemetery, the garden section of a suburban hardware shop, a city bayou. The landscape of “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more of a psychological projection."

  How a Poem Happens
  Contemporary Poets Discuss the Making of Poems

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2009
  Anna Journey

  Anna Journey is the author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems are published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Kenyon Review, and her essays appear in Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and Parnassus. She’s won the Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Diner Poetry Contest, fellowships from Yaddo and Bread Loaf, the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the J.A. and Isabel Elkins Fellowship from Inprint, a University Presidential Fellowship, and the University of Houston’s Inprint/Barthelme Fellowship in Poetry. She’s currently a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston. In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Sylvia Plath’s early sonnet “Ennui” and the influence of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on it.

  THE MIRROR’S LAKE IS FOREVER

  That’s when I knew the mirror was all sex and hard
  fact. Unlike knowing my grandfather

  posthumously. Because a ghost can’t be
  androgynous as a lamp is,

  as peat moss is,
  as the smell of cedar—

  knife-feathery. Because the dead
  can watch me pee without

  even a trace of embarrassment. And who
  has the right to more? Mirror

  that couldn’t reach my dead
  grandfather’s closet—his jewel-colored

  medical books in former editions,
  his gay porn magazines: men smooth

  as conchs in softcore seascapes. My mother,
  who found them while cleaning

  out his house, asks, Are you sorry
  I told you? I said, No,

  I’m not sorry. As if staring
  into his horn-rims and my grandmother’s

  coral dress could help me understand
  the selfishness of portraits—

  their shut door splintering the past’s
  exact coffin-space.

  I know that shame
  is beard-high with two daughters—the blonde

  one with cats and the dark one with red-
  haired girls. I know

  the mirror’s lake is forever
  dragged for corpses, lily-buoyant

  arteries, livers, and cocks. I know
  he’s caught there: doctor,

  with his white coat, and gold-veined
  tobacco. And what is more haunted

  than the smoked voices
  of cicadas under plums? And what

  heats faster than silver? His constellation:
  cold instruments raised

  over useless space. Somewhere
  there’s a ghost

  I’ll open my shirt for, recount my
  Entire Medical History for,

  who I’ll forgive for wearing
  tweed and love beads and for hiding

  stacks of magazines in the dark, who will press
  that silver scope to his ear, who will listen.

  When was this poem composed? How did it start?

  I’d been reading a lot of Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s poetry at the time—this was during the spring of 2007, I think. That spring was my last in Richmond, Virginia, as I finished up my MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. I’d received a thesis fellowship, which gave me a semester-long respite from teaching. I’d wake up at noon, caffeinate, maybe stay in my plaid pajamas until four, and then take a stroll around Hollywood Cemetery—named for the thorny ambience of the holly trees and not the movie industry—or cross the arcing footbridge to Belle Isle and dangle my feet in the muddy James. It was a kind of paradise, actually, except that I had to fry my own veggie sausage.

  Anyway, I’d been devouring Goldberg’s Lie Awake Lake like a crazed beast. The collection consists mostly of elegies regarding the death of the poet’s father. There’s a strange, incantatory energy to Goldberg’s lines that makes even the frightening or macabre seem irresistible. Her wild images and surprising associations, her lyrical repetitions, and the defiant voice of her poems thrilled me. In Goldberg’s poem, “Sly Sparrow,” in which a sparrow gets shaved for surgery and a new wing grafted on, the bird says:

  I began to call up song like a knot.
  I became one mean musical
  motherfucking sparrow: Call me Nicole. Though
  by nature
  we are a tolerant sort, like therapists
  or pears.

  I want to be one mean musical motherfucking sparrow! You know?

  Also, the fact that Goldberg’s speakers are occasionally posthumous ones (like the resurrected mutant sparrow, for example) got me thinking about how I might engage these kinds of fabular characters, or ventriloquize them, in my writing.

  How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

  Well, it’s been awhile, so my memory isn’t even remotely reliable. But when is it ever? I’d say the poem went through many drafts (which means, for me, probably six to ten), with a year elapsing between the first and final drafts.
  The penultimate draft seemed to be motoring along just fine, right up until the ending slammed into a wall. I considered cutting the poem from my first book, actually, because the ending felt so abrupt. That draft stopped when the speaker discovered “the mirror’s lake is forever / dragged for corpses, lily-buoyant // arteries, livers, and cocks.” I thought, “Yeah, ending on ‘cocks’ would sure be a high-volume ending,” but it just felt showy and unearned. I needed something more risky and emotionally resonant, not just a big, profane cymbal-clang. I mean, so the speaker stares into a lake. So what?

  A year later, faced with the unpalatable notion of cutting the poem, I decided to tackle the ending. It’s unusual for me to return to a poem after so much time, but I wanted to keep it in the mix if I could. I realized during that final revision that the grandfather must fully materialize from the lake’s floating organs, that the speaker needs to commune more directly with her specterly relative. I needed the speaker to become more exposed.

  Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?
  hance at really knowing him was long vanished.

  The sexuality of our own parents, or grandparents, however, isn’t something most of us are comfortable with; it’s transgressive; it’s taboo. Especially taboo, too, was my grandfather’s living simultaneously as a closeted bisexual man and the patriarch of a nuclear family, in Mississippi, before the civil rights movement was in full swing. My grandfather was an active member of the community: he shrunk the heads of all sorts of people in town; he founded an Episcopal church; he volunteered his time to work toward advancing integration policies. He was a painter, guitarist, collector of newfangled technologies; he was the first person on the block to purchase a television. In the sixties, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the front yard of his suburban brick home in Jackson. He also got passed over for promotions with some regularity at the hospital, despite his popularity with patients and effectiveness as a psychiatrist.

  In this context, then, keeping his bisexuality a secret from his children, as best he could, seems an act of bravery and protection. Surely, though, it must also have been a deeply painful and self-destructive sacrifice to make. The project of the poem is most certainly elegiac and yet one that, in spite of the speaker’s hauntedness, I hope, is also tender and celebratory.

  Anyway, when I start to wonder, “Should I really be writing about this?” I know it’s exactly what I ought to be doing. I like to challenge myself; it keeps me off the couch.

  How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?
  I do believe in inspiration. I also believe, however (to paraphrase Randall Jarrell), if you want to be struck by lightning, you have to be there when the rain falls. For me, being there when the rain falls involves reading (poems by my old favorites or by new authors, nonfiction articles in The New Yorker, even some zany local city paper feature on North Carolina’s Kudzu Jesus on a telephone wire, whatever)—with my feelers out searching for triggers. Being there when the rain falls also involves my actively making space and time to write for an uninterrupted period of time. So I plunge in, write with risk, revise with energy, and, hopefully, the poem keeps on getting better and better as I stick with it.

  Many of my poems grow from stories I hear that resonate with my own peculiar obsessions. My interest in the macabre probably comes from my family’s certain oddness of perception. We’re the kind of family who, on Christmas Eve, sits up late on the grey couch flanked by red and green sequined stockings poring over old crime scene photographs on the internet (courtesy of Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper). I’m not kidding; my mom, my sister, and I really do that.

  When my mother finally revealed her discovery of my grandfather’s telling stash of magazines while cleaning out his house after his death in 1987, I knew instantly that the story would wind up informing a poem. I was surprised, of course, but I also experienced a disorienting sense of loss; I felt like my grandfather had prevented us from fully knowing him. I kept thinking, “If he’d only told us, he would have met with complete acceptance, understanding.” I felt deprived; I felt like my c
  I often choose to write in couplets; perhaps that’s because they’re about as far away as you can get from prose. There’s a cool restraint to couplets, a formal clarity, and a kind of—I don’t know—buoyancy that helps give my speedy, image-packed, lush language room to breathe. So, it’s about balance; it’s my recipe for staving off some sort of baroque implosion.

  How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

  About two years after I finished the poem, the online journal Blackbird published it, along with audio clips and five other poems from my first collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. Click here to read them.

  How long do you let a poem “sit” before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

  I don’t have any rules about how long I wait to send out poems. Usually, if I return to a poem after a week or two and still think it’s good, then I go for it.

  Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

  Wallace Stevens calls poetry the supreme fiction. After all, why should we poets cede any damn territory to fiction writers? When I make use of factual details, as I do in “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” I also try to allow plenty of room for invention. If I cleave to my autobiography, then the poem falls flat. I suspect one reason I’m drawn to writing about my grandfather is that I never got the chance to know him as an adult; he died when I was seven. Because I have such a limited understanding of him, I suppose I feel freer to make up details—to elaborate, invent, exaggerate, and omit—until I arrive at a poem that speaks the truth through the necessary art of fiction’s lies.

  Is this a narrative poem?

  The poem contains narrative elements. There’s a story at work here; there are characters; there’s a setting; there’s a discernable plot. I suspect the poem has more in common with the lyric mode, however, in that it emphasizes personal feeling and a single moment rather than a narrative. But that’s the line I constantly walk and upon which I slip and blur the boundaries. I’m happy with that. I love getting way out there in moments of lyric, cosmic drunkenness just as much as I love the vivid stories that weave throughout narrative poetry—Larry Levis and Norman Dubie are gods to me.

  Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

  I mentioned before that I’d been excited by Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s approach to elegy in Lie Awake Lake. I’d also been reading Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems (Judith Hemschemeyer’s translation). There’s a brilliant poem of Akhmatova’s, “In Tsarskoye Selo,” in which the image of lake as a mirror, in the second section, really stuck in my head:

  …And there’s my marble double,
  Lying under the ancient maple,
  He has given his face to the waters of the lake,
  And he’s listening to the green rustling.

  And bright rainwater washes
  His clotted wound…
  Cold one, white one, wait,
  I’ll become marble too.

  I borrowed Akhmatova’s line, “He has given his face to the waters of the lake,” for the title of another poem I wrote during that time. Although I don’t remember which poem came first, both “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” and “He has given his face to the waters of the lake” are sister poems of sorts; they’re closely related in that they both sprang from the lake image as a kind of haunted psychic landscape.

  Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

  Although I don’t have a particular audience in mind when I sit down to write, I do think a lot about clarity: clarity of image, dramatic circumstance, syntax, etc… I often recall a dear mentor’s simple mantra: “Clarity is never a vice.” This isn’t to say that you can’t have both clarity and mystery in a poem; because you can. Leaving room for mystery is important, but it’s not the same thing as being vague or imprecise.

  Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

  I wrote the poem during my MFA at VCU, so my teachers Gregory Donovan and David Wojahn read it and advised me. At that point, however, I was no longer taking a formal workshop; I met with them each one on one. Both Greg and David worked tirelessly and generously with me, for three years, on most of the poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. I couldn’t have done it without their devoted mentorship.

  A little later in the book’s evolution, after I moved from Richmond to Houston (to begin my PhD at UH), Mark Doty helped me immensely. He said, “You should try a seduction poem,” so I wrote a whole series of devil/eros poems that wound up going in the manuscript. Those poems with a sharp sexual edge added new textures and tones to the collection, which excited me quite a lot; they helped tip the scales away from an onslaught of total gravitas.

  My boyfriend, Patrick Turner, reads most of my drafts. He’s an upright bass player, but he trained early on in creative writing, so he offers me all kinds of valuable insights. He also brings me little snippets of stories he reads or hears that might be poem-worthy. (I wonder if he does this to make up for all the basses, banjos, fiddles, singing saws, etc, that sit around our apartment like they own this place…)

  How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

  “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more directly autobiographical than many of my poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. The poem’s setting, though, is perhaps more slippery and oblique than others in the book. A good number of the poems in my collection are anchored in highly specific, if strange, concrete settings: a costume ball in a basement, an artificial limb factory, a Confederate cemetery, the garden section of a suburban hardware shop, a city bayou. The landscape of “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever” is more of a psychological projection.

  What is American about this poem?

  I’m an inheritor of confessional verse, which is, I think, a particularly American mode of writing. Sylvia Plath, especially, is a great heroine of mine. Much of my poetry is highly personal, like “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever.” I refuse to be boxed in, however, by What Really Happened, or “paralyzed by fact,” as Robert Lowell says of the trappings of confessional verse in his poem, “Epilogue.” I’m loyal to poems, not facts.

  What’s also American about this poem is probably the setting—however in flux and bizarre it may be—which is the cicada-inflected, fraught American South. Some of the images and associative leaps, though, pull not from the stars and stripes but from European surrealism.

  Was this poem finished or abandoned?

  For me, it’s both. I don’t give up on a poem until I’ve reached an ending that has certain qualities; it has to make some kind of unexpected, exciting turn. The rhythms have to be emphatic; the last image or phrase has to be resonant, strange, and precise. Charles Wright says somewhere that you’ve got to “hit the right notes hard,” and that’s what I always try to do, but especially when I gear up to end a poem.

  I know when to stop revising when I keep making the same changes over and over again, like a little OCD worker bee; I’ll change an “a” to “the,” for example, or I’ll delete a conjunction and pat myself on the back, sipping my coffee. Even when I reach an ending that I feel good about I do still find myself scratching my head, wondering if there’s a better one out there. At that point, though, I just try to keep my fingers away from the keyboard!

  In “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” I surprised myself when, toward the end of the poem, my speaker sits before her dead psychiatrist-grandfather as a patient. I surprised myself even more when she started unbuttoning her shirt, exposed and ready to recount her “Entire Medical History” for him. I thought, “Whoa, this is kind of disturbing! Should I be doing this?” That’s when I knew I had to follow through with it and hit the right last note, when the grandfather reaches out and, even posthumously, listens. I had to balance the shock of the floating cock imagery and the weirdly sexual undressing with a note that laid bare the speaker’s own vulnerability and need.
  Posted by Brian Brodeur at 12:21 PM
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  Brian Brodeur is the author of the poetry collections Natural Causes (2012), which won the 2011 Autumn House Poetry Prize, and Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks Local Fauna (Kent State University Press 2015) and So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (2007). A former Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Associate Editor for The Cincinnati Review, he is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University East. He lives with his wife and daughter in Richmond, IN.
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QUOTED: "exceptionally vibrant collection."

An Arrangement of Skin
Michael Ruzicka
Booklist.
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p18.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
* An Arrangement of Skin. By Anna Journey. Mar. 2017.224p. Counterpoint, $25 (97816190284701.814.
One night, poet Journey found herself calling a Houston suicide hotline. How she got to that dark place in her life is the
subject of this exceptionally vibrant collection. A seven-year relationship broken by her own infidelity and a
subsequent end of a mentoring friendship are repeated anchor events as she examines her life. Like the first essay, a
detailed account of being a student in a beginner's taxidermy class taught by a former Disney employee, Journey
carefully constructs a near-living creature out of her past and selective histories. She recalls her father being mistaken
for a spy in South America; the uncontrolled vining of wisteria throughout the history of Richmond, Virginia, and
haunting reminders of bad decisions. Zoos of antiquity, modern-day tattooed pirates, and ghost stories are all drawn
together with Journey's poetic talent. Memories of Virginia Commonwealth University, Houston, and California are
presented as though Journey was conducting a tour of her most intimate transitional moments. This retrospective does
not alienate with its personal tone. Rather, the reader is invited to reflect on a life's many transitions and how they
become part of the self.--Michael Ruzicka
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Ruzicka, Michael. "An Arrangement of Skin." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 18. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442464&it=r&asid=42c0bcb5fd5a15df56f0930857628e51.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442464

---

QUOTED: "quirky, earthy, lyrical essays."

8/28/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1503972246870 2/4
Journey, Anna: AN ARRANGEMENT OF SKIN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Journey, Anna AN ARRANGEMENT OF SKIN Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-61902-
847-0
Poet Journey (English/Univ. of Southern California; Vulgar Remedies, 2013, etc.) gathers 14 quirky, earthy, lyrical
essays, a number of which have been previously published. In "Modifying the Badger," about the author's transforming
a badger into a raccoon via taxidermy, she discusses C.D. Wright's poem "Personals" and how, "through accumulation
and refraction, Wright's slivers of personal history...expand into a larger social matrix." So do Journey's essays, many
of which are autobiographical. Each piece is like a "sliver" of a photo album in which we observe the author's
grandparents, parents, sister, friends, and boyfriends. Sometimes it's not pretty, like when she writes about calling a
suicide hotline or when she describes herself and her best friend burning their arms with the ends of cigarettes. There
are many secrets in closets, and there's also glorious prose, beautiful images and metaphors composed by a fine poet. In
"A Common Skin," about how a rider and horse "share a common skin," she describes her rigid calf muscles as "dried
corncobs," her heels hanging down, "hard as rubber." Many of the titles are poetic: "Epithalamium with Skunk Pigs,"
"A Flicker of Animal, a Flank" and "Prologue as Part of the Body." Readers will learn intriguing tidbits along the way--
e.g., how to stuff a starling, that "taxidermy is about life, not death," how to be a potter, give a tattoo. We also visit
interesting places, like dusty Deyrolle, part Parisian taxidermy shop, part museum of oddities, and Los Angeles'
Museum of Death, home to the preserved head of the vicious serial killer Henri Desire Landru. These elegant essays
are sometimes-bewitching meditations and musings: a "unique mixture of pathos and humor, revelation and
concealment, banality and wonder." Even though they get a bit precious at times and sometimes lose their way, the
essays always come together "to resurrect and walk."
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Journey, Anna: AN ARRANGEMENT OF SKIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652332&it=r&asid=54bd4a486a918e3db60447e34e60f70c.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473652332

---
QUOTED: "The essays sometimes repeat information ... but all the same, this is a fine volume and well worth reading."

8/28/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1503972246870 3/4
An Arrangement of Skin: Essays
Publishers Weekly.
263.48 (Nov. 28, 2016): p59.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
An Arrangement of Skin: Essays
Anna Journey. Counterpoint, $25 (224p)
ISBN 978-1-61902-847-0
Reading these essays feels like stepping into a used bookstore crowded with cobwebs, kitsch, and stuffed owls, at once
spooky and comfortingly predictable. With an air that's equal parts Alfred Hitchcock and John Waters, poet Journey
{The Atheist Wore Goatskin) floats across the macabre, the literary, and the damaged: graveyards and mental asylums;
L.A.'s Museum of Death and Richmond, Va.'s tattoo artists; Rilke and Coleridge; a broken relationship with boyfriend
Carrick (Journey cheated on him); her mother's more literally broken back. In her strongest essay, "Birds 101,''Journey
describes with precision the art of stuffing a starling, learned in a taxidermy class. (She is best when she moves from
herself to the wider world.) Taxidermy, a touchstone throughout, becomes her Grecian urn, a way to meditate on art's
relation to life and death, and on how we inhabit our skins. Journey has the poet's eye for detail and knack for taut
sentences, strong verbs, and arresting images. The essays sometimes repeat information, as if a group of standalone
pieces were gathered with no attention to the whole, but all the same, this is a fine volume and well worth reading.
Agent: Chris Clemans, Clegg Agency. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"An Arrangement of Skin: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 59. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149942&it=r&asid=79783e665c0660cf67c3ae539c0125fd.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473149942

---

QUOTED: "compelling" "at once a delight for the senses and a high-speed trip through her past."

8/28/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1503972246870 4/4
Vulgar Remedies
Publishers Weekly.
260.38 (Sept. 23, 2013): p57.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Vulgar Remedies
Anna Journey. Louisiana State Univ., $17.95 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-0-8071-5219-5
A wild best friend from the poet's teen years, "your hoarder aunt," "my young mother ... brunette/ in a blue velour day
robe," a "Tooth Fairy Pillow," and "a dress that clings/ like a Jackson night, late summer--strapless,// black crepe": the
people from a family romance, and the objects that focus their memories, make this compelling second outing from
Journey (If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting) at once a delight for the senses and a high-speed trip through her past.
Journey packs her poems with long sentences and their emotional overload: "When I'm the girl who daydreams// her
own funeral, then asks you about the salivary/ habits of ponies, that hissing Shetland,// Princess, muzzles up." So
boldly rendered, such sketches from memory--some from long ago, some from recent travels with a husband or
fiancee--make Journey at her finest a kind of Southern Gothic answer to Laura Kasischke, with the same zigzag free
verse, the same connections to her younger selves. At the same time Journey's special topics--extended family, animals,
insomnia, folklore, rendered in animated contemporary diction--make her verse no dead ringer for anyone else's.
(Sept.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Vulgar Remedies." Publishers Weekly, 23 Sept. 2013, p. 57. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA344154185&it=r&asid=7403a443d55a154ee24246c15aa4be67.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A344154185

Ruzicka, Michael. "An Arrangement of Skin." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442464&it=r. Accessed 28 Aug. 2017. "Journey, Anna: AN ARRANGEMENT OF SKIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652332&it=r. Accessed 28 Aug. 2017. "An Arrangement of Skin: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 59. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149942&it=r. Accessed 28 Aug. 2017. "Vulgar Remedies." Publishers Weekly, 23 Sept. 2013, p. 57. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA344154185&it=r. Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/03/an-arrangement-of-skin-by-anna-journey/
  Word count: 1039

  QUOTED: "At times, it seems the author is holding back, giving us the facts but not the motivations behind them."
  "This is what Journey does in this book, taking all the fragmented scraps that make up her story and arranging them for our consumption. If a piece or two is missing here or there, isn’t it always?"

  AN ARRANGEMENT OF SKIN BY ANNA JOURNEY
  REVIEWED BY MICHALLE GOULD
  March 7th, 2017

  Anna Journey’s collection of essays, An Arrangement of Skin, explores the devastating aftermath of the breakup of a seven-year relationship in the wake of the author’s affair with another man. Here is how she describes what happened:

  I’d cheated on my boyfriend of seven years with a poet twice my age, humiliated Carrick by the explosive gossip that ensued, lost one of my best friends, Lee, who was also my most important literary mentor, and felt so wrecked by shame, shock, and a lacerating, self-aimed rage that all I could think to do was to vanish back into Richmond, where I’d once felt safe.

  In the first essay, her distress over these events and their catastrophic impact on her personal, professional, and family life is so profound that she calls a suicide line, consumed by guilt, unable to write. A more straightforward memoir might take us step-by-step through the process of putting her life back together, but this is a less direct, more subtle story. Journey approaches this fault-line in her life in archaeological fashion, unearthing the layers of history that surround it, from a long-buried family secret to her glancing acquaintance with the perpetrator of a terrible local crime.

  Amid this is material about the body and all the different ways we try to alter and re-form it, from tattooing to plastic surgery to self-harm. Journey develops an interest in taxidermy and describes her participation in classes in which she learns to mount a bird and later a badger. This is the source of the book’s title An Arrangement of Skin, from Greek taxis (arrangement) and derma (skin).

  This idea of arrangement is important. Taxidermy involves the presentation of dead animals specifically for display. Implicit in the process is the expectation of their ultimately being seen, whether in a formal setting like a museum, or an informal one like the owner’s home. So a once-living thing goes through a process of being literally disassembled and re-assembled in order to be made to resemble something living again. This serves as a metaphor for what Journey goes through in the wake of her break-up.

  For me, the strongest essays in the collection are the ones that deal with the author’s family and community, particularly “The Guineveres,” about her mother. The essay takes its name from a folk group her mother was part of in college, but also touches on her mother’s childhood living adjacent to the grounds of a mental hospital where her father was a resident, her love of telling gruesome stories, her cancer as a young woman, and a terrible spinal injury she suffers when the author is ten years old. The legacy of openness and storytelling that the author receives from her mother is contrasted with the longstanding secret that is another part of her family history—the strong likelihood that her mother’s father was gay and had a long-term partner.

  My grandfather would get drunk and drive over, alone, to Jim’s house and stay for hours. My mother believes Jim was her father’s long-term partner, although she never asked either of them about it, even after her father’s death, even after she found the magazines, even after—at the funeral—she saw Jim’s anguished face.

  Although at times the sections of the book dealing with taxidermy and tattooing and other related topics might seem unrelated to the more personal material, each deals with this idea of “arrangement” and perception, the way we want things to appear to others vs. the way things actually are.

  Tattoos, the creation and removal of scars, and plastic surgery are all ways that we can try to create a body that looks more like the person we feel ourselves to be on the inside. Sometimes, as in the essay “Little Face,” which touches on a plastic surgeon who used Botox so much that he erased all expression from his face, this goes terribly awry. Keeping secrets can be a way of doing the opposite. Journey’s grandfather kept his secret because he lived at a time when he must have felt that it would have negatively affected how he was perceived by those around him. The author invents a ritual to “stop time” because she is so afraid of her boyfriend finding out about her involvement with another man.

  At times, it seems the author is holding back, giving us the facts but not the motivations behind them. I wondered what drove her interest in this older poet who she eventually married. Although it’s clear how traumatic this event was for her, I never felt that I truly got to know these two men in her life, or the friend who betrayed her by revealing her secret. My knowledge of them still feels superficial. I couldn’t help but ask myself whether she was holding back to protect them, while her mother freed her to be more honest about her family.

  At one point, the teacher of one of her taxidermy courses tells the author the story of how he created a composite polar bear for an exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles by taking several old polar bear rugs out of storage, cutting them into hundreds of pieces, and arranging them and gluing them down onto a bear form he’d constructed with his assistant. This is what Journey does in this book, taking all the fragmented scraps that make up her story and arranging them for our consumption. If a piece or two is missing here or there, isn’t it always?

• The Adroit Journal
  http://www.theadroitjournal.org/issue-ten-leila-chatti/
  Word count: 1393

  QUOTED: "Anna Journey’s second book Vulgar Remedies takes the reader through the elusive world that exists between waking and sleeping, between present and memory. With its vivid—and often grotesque—images bordering on the surreal, reoccurring symbols flit by in our periphery, appearing and then vanishing as quickly as they came. The feeling of déjà vu lingers throughout the dreamlike Vulgar Remedies: moments of tack-sharp clarity are juxtaposed with fluid, unexpected leaps that leave the reader intrigued."

  Leila Chatti
  Anna Journey’s second book Vulgar Remedies takes the reader through the elusive world that exists between waking and sleeping, between present and memory. With its vivid—and often grotesque—images bordering on the surreal, reoccurring symbols flit by in our periphery, appearing and then vanishing as quickly as they came. The feeling of déjà vu lingers throughout the dreamlike Vulgar Remedies: moments of tack-sharp clarity are juxtaposed with fluid, unexpected leaps that leave the reader intrigued.

  There are a number of poems that directly address slumber—most noticeably the insomnia sonnets (to Ambien and Egyptian Chamomile Farmers)—but the book focuses primarily on the dreamlike qualities of memory. One theme that remains consistent throughout Vulgar Remedies is the desire to retrace one’s steps. This appears in the book’s structure, as images—the sea, fire, birds, cigarettes—resurface repeatedly throughout Journey’s poems detailing childhood, failed relationships, and places left.

  The book begins with a poem of reminiscence. In “Why Bioluminescent Shrimp Remind Me of Laura,” we are transported to the past via cocktail shrimp: “There are girls who exist,/like Laura and me, who’d glow—//at fifteen—who’d go up/in flames.” This poem examines the relationship between Laura and the speaker, one that is characterized by sexual tension and bodily mutilation. The two girls sit in a parking lot playing “the cigarette game” in which they burn each other, waiting to see “[w]ho can stand it//the longest?” The power of withstanding also applies to sexual fumblings later that night, in which Laura says the speaker doesn’t “know what to do//with a woman’s body” and the speaker responds by “[flinching]//from her kiss, [turning her] spine/to her lips.” In the present, the speaker is unable to shake this distant memory as her body still bears the visible proof, a “row of scars” on her arm she “now [lies] about as chicken pox.” She feels the ghost of Laura’s memory vividly throughout the rest of the collection, imagining it crouched beneath the window.

  When she remembers another childhood romance, Journey uses images of smoke and fire to reflect on another instance of sexual experience; in “Warning,” she writes:

  My pupil

  rolled under his tongue, the one
  whose scent was clove smoke and a soft brie,

  winging after a blinding light.
  I must’ve singed the buds

  in his tongue to desert thistles—
  left a taste like a saint’s

  charred footprint. As you recede,
  memory, a warning: my eye (“Warning,” 12-20)

  As with Laura, this relationship feels dangerous; throughout the poem, there are images of fire, a slow burning just below the surface. This boy appears again later in the book, in “Moose Head Mounted on the Wall of Big Pappa’s Barbeque Joint” and “Saint Bruise,” and each time he is identified by this particular fetish. The speaker’s eye has been tainted by this act; when she looks back, it is with that eye.

  Throughout Vulgar Remedies, there is a fixation on the body—her own, and the bodies of others. The body is both an anchor in the present through its immediate sensory experience, as well as a lens through which to view the past. In “Dermatographia,” the body of the speaker’s mother is placed at the center, and the past is unfurled through her skin condition. “When I Reached into the Stomach of a Fistulated Dairy Cow: Sixth Grade Field Trip to Sonny’s Dairy Barn” shows the speaker simultaneously reflecting on a former lover and her experiences reaching into the bodies of other animals. “Saint Bruise” details the story of a bruise that remains from adolescence. In the poem, she examines it in a mirror and writes:

  [...] the flush
  of blurred nerves, the old

  border, those forked veins: that

  door which remains
  open for the patron

  saint of what breaks, that ghost

  of what’s always
  been broken. (“Saint Bruise,” 34-41)

  As the poems continue, the body continues to root us in the past. Often, these glimpses are tinged with darkness, a sense of shadowy grief. When the speaker recalls the death of her uncle, her memory of him is inextricably attached to his last words to her: “Where’d you get those boobs?” (“Elegy Where I Initially Refuse to Eat Sand” and “The Devil’s Apron”).

  The “Vulgar Remedies” which lend the book its title also involve the body, grief, and memory. In “Vulgar Remedies (2): If you Hold a Dying Creature during Childhood,” the speaker recounts her first encounter with death and the mythical consequence it had on her body—her shaky hands. When mourning the loss of her childhood home in “Nightmare before the Foreclosure,” the speaker fixates on the door which marked her and her sister’s heights through childhood; her nightmare, then, is a bodily one, a fear of being erased, as she writes, “I awoke believing//there’d be no proof left/that my sister and I had ever been/that small” (20-23). “Moose Head Mounted on the Wall of Big Pappa’s Barbeque Joint” opens with two lines that compare a moose’s severed body to her lost childhood: “His form half-disappeared like the hind/legs of your childhood.” Journey concludes the poem by using the moose’s turned head to comment poignantly on her own grief, powerfully writing, “Who knows/how long he’s looked back.”

  Furthermore, in “Tooth Fairy Pillow,” the speaker uses her body to haggle for the past. She calculates the trades with unnamed urgency—hangnails, fistfuls of hair, and her thumb tip in exchange for her cat, her grandfather, and her old screened porch. In this way, the speaker mourns the past to the extent that she is willing to disfigure her body for one more glimpse of it. Journey writes:

  There’s a way
  back, I know, through the twin bed’s

  shallow frame. There’s a way
  back to the life

  where my blond nightstand holds

  a square pillow trimmed
  in eyelet lace. (“Tooth Fairy Pillow,” 9-15)

  “As I Rewind,” the final poem of Vulgar Remedies, is a fitting conclusion to a collection that expertly travels through time. Ghosts reappear in the rewound footage: the cat, the grandfather, the childhood home, and, perhaps most importantly, the speaker herself as a child. She is at the center of this home video; her grandfather, she writes, “can’t stop//focusing the lens on me.” This poem has a softer sense of grief to it, a mature sadness nearer to acceptance. At the end, the ever-present smoke “ciphers back into leaves.” In its quiet way, it is made whole once again.

  Anna Journey is the author of If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships in poetry from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Vulgar Remedies
  by Anna Journey
  Lousiana State University Press, August 2013.
  $17.95 paperback, ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-5219-5
  88 pp.

  Chatti 10
  Leila Chatti never stays in one place. A dual Tunisian-American citizen, she drifts between two continents, and then some. She currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is an instructor and MFA candidate in poetry at North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared recently in Rattle, decomP, and Cartridge Lit. She reads poetry for The Adroit Journal.

• Iowa Reviews
  https://iowareview.org/blog/i%E2%80%99m-girl-who-daydreams-her-own-funeral-vulgar-remedies-anna-journey
  Word count: 1466

  QUOTED: "Like the exhibit from which Vulgar Remedies takes its name, this incantatory collection curates a space where past concurs with present, and where the narratives of the living and the dead braid in a single continuous insight. ... Journey puts the past in these pages, not suffused in the gauzy veils of memory but sharpened to its most vivid, most torqued and graphic. In so doing, she makes the past the present. She makes it forever."

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  I’m the Girl Who Daydreams Her Own Funeral: Anna Journey's VULGAR REMEDIES
  TUE, 10/01/2013 - 9:00AM
  MAGGIE MILLNER

  Anna Journey’s second book takes its name from an exhibit at L.A.’s Museum of Jurassic Technology called “Vulgar Remedies: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition.” The exhibit comprises folk cures and rituals predating modern medicine; the poetry collection features hypnotic fabulations on memory, fauna, and the body. At times tender and anecdotal, others grotesque and nightmarish, Vulgar Remedies explores the boundaries that divide—or fail to divide—the past from the present, the dead from the living, and the self from the object of its love. If these poems are remedies, they treat symptoms of heartbreak, pubescence, and the vertiginous business of being embodied.

  Like Macbeth meeting Banquo’s phantom over dinner, Journey confronts her ghosts in unexpected places: in a blanket, a hummingbird, a streamer of red seaweed. But her world is far from grim; wrought with dazzling chimerical characters and an intense awareness of the body—its maturation and decay, orgasm and metabolism—her language is bold and bewitchingly erotic. In her bovine ode, “When I Reached into the Stomach of a Fistulated Dairy Cow: Sixth Grade Field Trip to Sonny’s Dairy Barn” (the kind of long, expositional title she prefers), she writes:

  I feel a whole
  bitten pasture as it broke

  down inside her—blue barn
  sweet with the atomic

  shudder of barley.

  There is so much going on here: the synecdochical substitution of “whole… pasture” for a stomach’s worth of grass; the double gaze outward (to the barn) and inward (to the atom); the translation from tactile to gustatory experience; the literal and figurative muddling of the boundaries between bodies. The rhythm of the language is nearly as regular as the peristalsis it describes, so that we read these sophisticated lines with ease. Journey’s imagination—liberated, libidinal, and rich with Proustian association—transcends the bounds of skin and subjectivity. The eleven-year-old poet tries on the persona of the cow, thereby fabulating a new, hybrid identity.

  The conception of ulterior and often preternatural personae is one of the hallmarks of a Journey poem. Though a fierce, tonally consistent female voice carries through the length of the book, this narrator is also a raconteur who dreams herself into the bodies and interiorities of those around her. Neither the persona poems of Norman Dubie nor the Transformations of Anne Sexton, these poems manage to dramatize the act of poetic personification without compromising the constancy and personality of their narrator.

  Thus, Vulgar Remedies stars a menagerie of characters who double as spectral iterations of the speaker, and figures from her past occasion deep meditations on her own materiality and memory. Take for example an excerpt from “Elegy Where I Initially Refuse to Eat Sand:”

  …Like the letter my newly dead
  uncle must now sit down to write
  since his heart attack slumped him

  in the sand near his yellow
  house on stilts. He died digging
  to heal his hurricane-

  split sewer line. I was willing
  to forgive his last words to me—
  two weeks before—as we swam

  through the lukewarm gulf: Where’d you get
  those boobs? he laughed through
  his backstroke. He wore red

  seaweed over his bald spot. He refused
  dentures, drawled with a lisp that hinted
  at what was missing. I was

  willing to forgive his last words
  because I coughed up a salt wind,
  because I hummed, Way,

  hey, blow the man down! as I kicked the dark
  glass: a Budweiser’s end. By then the bottle’s note
  had vanished, or got soaked clear through. By

  then I knew Where’d you get
  those boobs, meant how violently childhood
  bites its mirage into the waves, or I painted

  the beach house yellow after
  your favorite storybook bird.

  Journey’s sense of irony, by turns hilarious and tragic, features prominently here. Her uncle’s unsentimental goodbye (which recurs a third time in “The Devil’s Apron”) becomes the mantra of the bereft adolescent: “Where’d you get those boobs?” Moreover, this phrase suggests the physical substitution of the breasts for the uncle: one body budding as the other decays “like a grilled sweet onion with one side / charred from a fire.” Again, Journey seems to assert that the confines of the body are less static and hermetic than fluid and correlative—constantly adapting to the erotic call of their surroundings.

  Journey’s characters recur unpredictably throughout the book, making them all the more portentous. A childhood cat appears in four poems, portrayed variously as a kitten, a couch companion, a bathtub stowaway, a “tuft of grey fur in the brass urn / on the mantle.” The speaker’s mother wanders these pages, conjured often by a mention of coffee or cats. Images of deer repeat in altered forms like Eadweard Muybridge photos: a roadkill buck whose throat the poet slits; white-tails feeding at a neighbor’s garden; a mounted moose head in a barbecue joint. In “Mercy,” a hunter “wakes to the dull warmth / of limbs kicking the sheets, to the scream / of a deer becoming a woman,” and later, Journey describes her childhood as hoofed.

  Why the strange, echoic recurrences? Why the conflation of the body with what it has seen? Perhaps because everything the poet witnesses becomes an element of personal apocrypha—and as such, a part of her spiritual and corporeal self-conception. Perhaps because Journey is an expert at seeing and performing the resonances between self and other, and between remembered and immanent experience. She convincingly rearranges time and space into her own associative patterns, just as she rearranges the English language into her own virtuosic idiom.

  Like the exhibit from which Vulgar Remedies takes its name, this incantatory collection curates a space where past concurs with present, and where the narratives of the living and the dead braid in a single continuous insight. “The past needs somewhere to go,” reads the epigraph to “Wool Blanket Covered in Nipples,” taken from Beckian Fritz-Goldberg. Journey puts the past in these pages, not suffused in the gauzy veils of memory but sharpened to its most vivid, most torqued and graphic. In so doing, she makes the past the present. She makes it forever.

  Maggie Millner is a poet living in Monterey, CA. Her work has appeared in Third Coast, PANK, Phoebe, Stone Canoe, and elsewhere.

  Vulgar Remedies
  Anna Journey
  Louisiana State University Press, August 2013
  $17.95 paperback, ISBN: 9780807152195
  78 pp.

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• Ploughshares
  http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/review-an-arrangement-of-skin-by-anna-journey/
  Word count: 1330

  QUOTED: "Fractured, fragile, and fantastical, Journey uses etymology, odd acquired knowledge, and poetry to illuminate one dark year, and her slouching toward forgiveness."

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  Home » Book Reviews • Nonfiction » Review: AN ARRANGEMENT OF SKIN by Anna Journey
  Review: AN ARRANGEMENT OF SKIN by Anna Journey
  Author: Guest Reviewer |
  May
  05
  2017
  Posted In Book Reviews, Nonfiction
  arrangement of skin_anna journey

  An Arrangement of Skin
  Anna Journey
  Counterpoint Press; March 2017
  224 pp; $25

  Buy: Hardcover | eBook

  Reviewed by Annalia Luna

  Sometimes being a poet means something inside you snaps, but not like a balloon too close to the ceiling. It bends and begs and burrows, and you, flailing like a sad firefly, break all the things you’re not supposed to break, trying to find it. You start with the things that keep you sane, and move outward, until the most feral version of yourself is alone on the phone with a stranger.

  You call a stranger because of the shame, or because other lines have been cut. You’ve cut them, with the breaking. Except the phone call isn’t really about the things you’ve done—it’s not about the recitation. It’s asking someone, anyone, if you can still exist apart from your mistakes. Can you see me? Can you hear me?

  For Anna Journey, it starts at the University of Houston, during the last year of her PhD program. Away in Richmond, Virginia, for a literary conference arranged by a close friend and mentor, Journey begins the affair that will end her seven-year relationship.

  It’s not messy, at first. Journey breaks up with her boyfriend, and this other man is not the reason. They even continue to live together because they “knew that one—or both—of us might not finish up if we suddenly abandoned our routines.” They “slept in separate bedrooms but met up nightly for dinner as [they] finished the final months of [their] respective graduate degrees,” she in creative writing and literature, he in bass performance and pedagogy.

  When they fly home to see their families for Thanksgiving, two weeks before they would both leave Texas, all their possessions are divided and packed away, “each [cardboard box] with either my name or his and our different destinations.” Then, Journey’s friend and mentor who arranged the conference, her closest confidante, “emailed me an ugly, judgmental diatribe,” which she knew “from the gratuitous details—dates, locations, hotels” had been blind copied to her roommate ex-boyfriend.

  He calls, and it is the last time they will ever speak. Journey defends her dissertation the next day “in a pursed-smile stupor,” caught up about getting kicked out of her apartment and her friend’s betrayal. In the title essay, she writes:

  Afterward, instead of celebrating my years of hard work in graduate school and the fact that I could now plunk ‘Dr.’ in front of my own name, I returned to collapse on a friend’s mattress, with her silver tabby, Slider, watching the cat chase phantom mice among the amber patches of her quilt.

  Some time later, Journey calls Houston’s local suicide hotline, which is where the book opens. Throughout An Arrangement of Skin, Journey revisits this dual betrayal, in essays that must have been written over the years—a theme and its variations. Sometimes she names the beloved ex (Carrick) and the traitor mentor (Lee) but the most compelling passages are when Journey allows for them to stray from the roles she’s made for them.

  One such moment is when she reveals she managed to rescue her relationship with her former mentor. After she had been living in Los Angeles for a year and a half, he reached out to her via e-mail and Journey says she “knew this gesture—defensive, contradictory—was as much as he’d ever be able to offer.” Not free of bitterness, she mourns him “never [apologizing] for abandoning our friendship or for ratting me out to Carrick for my affair,” but also mentions they “hang out” in mixed company (their spouses are always present) and speak on the phone once or twice a year. She only mentions this resolution in one essay.

  The most tender moment with Carrick is buried in the last third of the book, in an essay framed around the upright bass, Carrick’s instrument of choice. The two of them have been separated but living together for a couple months, and she performs the girlfriend-type duties at his final recital. She left her “aisle seat early to meet the delivery guy who was scheduled to bring several aluminum troughs of pulled pork, brioche buns, and coleslaw for the after party,” stayed until they were the last car left.

  Excited from the rush of performing, he suddenly grabbed my hand, and swung it back and forth through the air as if we were kids charging across a playground. “Let’s give things another shot,” he said, turning to me. I looked away and shook my head. “I can’t,” I answered, letting go of his hand.

  Here, the reader is left to wonder if the “can’t” is Carrick or because Journey’s lover (future husband) is waiting for her, and Carrick has yet to know.

  There are other threads in the book—taxidermy (“Birds 101” and “Modifying the Badger” are intense in their detail of the process, terms, and tools), family stories, a quirky friendship with a tattoo artist, one childhood peer who turned out to be a murderer (“The Goliath Jazz”)—but the overarching theme is an attraction to the morbid.

  In “Epithalamium with Skunk Pigs,” an essay about myths and marriage and muses with red hair, Journey talks about the Cigarette Game she played with her childhood friend Laura. A form of chicken, the girls would “drop a lit Newport or Camel, lengthwise, between our forearms, and press our flesh together,” burning each other until one of them would jerk away.

  Fractured, fragile, and fantastical, Journey uses etymology, odd acquired knowledge, and poetry to illuminate one dark year, and her slouching toward forgiveness.

  Annalia Luna is currently a contributor at HTML Giant. She earned her B.A. in Literature & Music from Butler University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming at The Rumpus, Literary Hub, & Heavy Feather Review. She lives & writes in Houston, TX

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