Contemporary Authors

• The Luckless Age: Poems Red Hen Press (Pasadena, CA), 2011
• Little Black Daydream ( poetry) University of Akron Press (Akron, OH), 2013
• Panorama ( novel) Little, Brown and Co. (New York, NY), 2018

1. Little black daydream LCCN 2012033425 Type of material Book Personal name Kistulentz, Steve. Main title Little black daydream / Steve Kistulentz. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created Akron, Ohio : University of Akron Press, c2013. Description 52 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781937378202 (cloth : alk. paper) 9781937378196 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2013 010989 CALL NUMBER PS3611.I875 L58 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 2. Panorama LCCN 2017945031 Type of material Book Personal name Kistulentz, Steve. Main title Panorama / Steve Kistulentz. Edition 1st edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Little, Brown and Co., 2018. Projected pub date 1803 Description pages cm ISBN 9780316551762 Item not available at the Library. Why not? 3. The luckless age : poems LCCN 2010041520 Type of material Book Personal name Kistulentz, Steve, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title The luckless age : poems / Steve Kistulentz. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2011] Description 76 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9781597094948 (pbk.) 1597094943 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER PS3611.I875 A6 2011 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Little, Brown - https://www.littlebrown.com/contributor/steve-kistulentz/

  Steve Kistulentz is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Florida State University. His fiction has appeared, among other places, in Narrative and a special issue of Mississippi Review on emerging writers guest edited by Rick Moody. He is also the author of two books of poetry: The Luckless Age, which won the Benjamin Saltman Award, and Little Black Daydream. The director of the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida, he lives in Tampa and is currently working on a second novel.

• Bloom - https://bloom-site.com/2018/03/06/the-pivot-point-at-which-life-becomes-completely-different-q-a-with-steve-kistulentz/

  The Pivot Point at Which Life Becomes Completely Different: Q & A with Steve Kistulentz
  Posted on March 6, 2018 by sonyachung Leave a comment

  by Ericka Taylor

  In Steve Kistulentz’s debut novel, Panorama, a commercial airliner crashes on its approach from Salt Lake City to Dallas, killing everyone on board. Among the victims is Mary Beth, the older sister of cable- news talking head Richard MacMurray. With her death, Richard becomes the sole living relative of Mary Beth’s six-year-old son, Gabriel.

  Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgWhile this event is central to the novel and Richard is its main character, Kistulentz recognizes that tragedies of this scale tend to ripple outward. Consequently, he populates the story not only with the people most directly affected by the disaster, but also with the characters whose connection to the event is more distant. Thus the reader follows Gabriel’s babysitter, Richard’s ex-girlfriend, Mary Beth’s boyfriend, first responders, airport employees, and an array of others as their lives approach and then recede from that fateful day. This results in a narrative that contains, in truly panoramic fashion, multiple settings and subplots, while remaining true to its exploration of how “huge public events have a personal toll.”

  Kistulentz is the director of the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida. He has previously published two collections of poetry, The Luckless Age, which won the Benjamin Saltman Award, and Little Black Daydream, an editor’s selection in the Akron Series of Poetry. He was kind enough to share some of his thoughts about Panorama and the writing life with Bloom.

  *

  Ericka Taylor: You’ve said that the seed for Panorama was planted when your older sister asked whether you were willing to become your nephew’s caretaker in the event of her untimely death—a circumstance that the novel’s main character finds himself thrust into. That’s a defining moment for him, and the novel is as much an exploration of these defining moments as it is a testament to loss. How did these themes emerge for you?

  Steve Kistulentz: I don’t think about Panorama as a book about loss, but I absolutely think of it as about moments. For every character, I wanted to show the pivot point at which their life becomes entirely different. That was deliberate. I was 21 when my father died, and almost every day since, I think of some way in which I am missing his presence and counsel. I tried to make sure that some of those pivot points did not revolve around the crash of a commercial airliner, which is the most obvious moment in the novel.

  For most of us, those huge moments involve either tremendous loss or tremendous joy. But as often as those moments center around loss, so too do they involve choice; I wanted the novel to speak to that idea as well. Richard has to choose the kind of life he is going to try and provide for his nephew.

  ET: Panorama is a truly expansive work, populated by over a dozen characters whose perspectives we follow. When did you realize you wanted to focus on multiple characters and how did you decide which ones would be more central and which we’d spend less time with?

  SK: I fell in love with novels that attempt a type of emotional largeness. The novelist Edward Carey introduced me to The City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza, a messy and sprawling book about Barcelona between its two World’s Fairs. A lot of what ended up in Panorama, the movement between Salt Lake City and Dallas and Washington, comes from the old-fashioned idea of the picaresque. That geographic spread felt natural, and with the geography came the idea that people in all of the major locations of the book would feel the emotional heft of what happened.

  At the same time, I’m a tremendous admirer of writers like Charles Baxter, Alice Munro, Edith Pearlman, and Rick Barthelme, those kinds of writers who seem to effortlessly inhabit the interior worlds of characters in quieter situations. The minor characters in Panorama serve as a reminder of the possibilities of those smaller stories.

  ET: Your characters also come from a wide range of professions, from someone who sells airport security screening equipment to a television pundit, and you do a really good job grounding the reader in the details of their work lives. What was your research process like when you were learning about these fields?

  SK: I am reminded of a story Jim Crace told my graduate workshop. Jim’s novel Being Dead follows a married pair of zoologists, Joseph and Celise, and we learn about Joseph’s research into the sprayhopper, an indigenous coastal insect. After the novel’s release, Crace received letters from scientists; the sprayhopper couldn’t possibly exist where Crace claimed it did. This gave him great pleasure, because he’d invented the landscape, and most especially the insect, out of whole cloth. I took the same kinds of great liberties with some of the characters, particularly the airline employees who notify the next of kin about the crash. That’s purely made up stuff, for dramatic purposes.

  Much of what I know about the working world, from politics and the media, got grafted on to characters in this book. When I lived in DC, people like Richard MacMurray were always in my orbit. I worked for the trade association that represents commercial airports, so I knew about the business behind putting explosive detection equipment into airports.

  About the only true research I did for the book was into the specifics of the plane. And I read some old newspaper articles about plane crashes, and some various government reports, just to make sure I had a plausible cause for the incident.

  ET: How did you go about structuring such a complex novel?

  SK: Figuring out how to handle time and such a large cast of characters was an issue until Elizabeth McCracken suggested to me the image of a nylon rope: it’s really made up of a braid of a bunch of other little ropes, and it can unravel from either end, and that metaphor stuck with me. All the characters start as their own little strand, then become braided together by the events of the crash, and in the aftermath, unravel a bit into their own separate experiences of grief.

  I wanted to try a construction where you could see both before- and after-images of characters as they exist outside the main events of the novel. So each character gets their moment where we see them act prior to the crash, and one in which we find out what happens to them—albeit sometimes in a condensed fashion—afterwards.

  In the editing, I removed whole chapters about ancillary characters, such as Gabriel’s biological father and Richard’s ex-wife. The end result was a book much more centered around the crash and its consequences for Richard MacMurray. That was the intention I’d started with, that his story would become the most important strand of the novel’s theoretical rope.

  ET: Most of Panorama is written in a close-third point of view, but periodically, as with the opening chapters in both of the book’s two sections, you step further back and use a purely omniscient narrator. Could you tell us about that decision and what you were hoping to evoke with that omniscient voice?

  SK: To my thinking, the omniscient voice works in an almost operatic mode, evocative of the high drama that follows in the places where it appears.

  The scene of the actual plane crash was probably the first or second piece of the book I wrote, and the omniscience there wasn’t intended so much as a voice of God-type narration, but rather as a voice that could go wherever it wanted, from seat 14B to 26C. I first thought of the crash as a kind of prologue or a set piece that starts the book. It wasn’t until I had a complete draft that I realized that I wanted the book to start on a quieter, more domestic note and build to those longer, omniscient riffs.

  ET: Speaking of drafts, how many versions of Panorama did you work on or complete before it was ready to go out into the world?

  SK: There were so many! After the first two, I shared the book with a pair of Iowa classmates, Tom McAllister and Kurt Gutjahr, and with the novelist Jennifer Vanderbes. The notes they gave me went into draft three, which was the version that I used to shop for agents. After I signed with my agent Wendy Sherman, I undertook a serious overhaul based on her feedback. Then, when the book went to market, the acquiring editor at Little, Brown requested more changes. But because of the episodic nature of the book, and the large cast of characters, I couldn’t really say how many drafts there were. If I had to give an answer in whole numbers, I’d say that all added up to five complete drafts. At least.

  ET: Our readers are especially interested in writers whose first novels are published after they reach the age of 40. You spent nearly two decades working in national politics in DC. Could you tell us about your transition from politico to writer and what led you to make that shift?

  SK: I always knew that writing is what I wanted to do. I simply had no idea how to get there. And that really concerns me, because so much of our literature is becoming produced by writers who come from backgrounds of privilege. I’m always aware that we may be inadvertently creating a kind of homogenized literature, one that excludes the economically disadvantaged, students who don’t know about assistantships and work-study and need-based aid. The 22-year-old me didn’t know about any of the nuts and bolts ways that people pay for graduate school. And that’s a direct consequence of my background.

  My father was only able to manage college because of the post-World War II GI Bill. Any time I mentioned my artistic ambitions to him, his first question was always the same: how are you going to make a living? That’s logical, especially coming from a child of the depression.

  A few things anecdotally pushed me to the point of looking for an exit from political work. The first was seeing on a daily basis how voters demand impossible things from our candidates. We expect them never to make the same kinds of human mistakes that we ourselves have made, which essentially gives them carte blanche to lie to us.

  Whether you do issue advocacy or represent corporate clients or work on a campaign, it is a difficult and physically demanding life. On the corporate side, the workday when Congress is in session is often 7AM to midnight. That takes a toll.

  But the final straw for me was September 11. By the time I finally decided to leave my office, just three blocks from the White House, the exit to my parking garage was blocked by a tank. I walked home at midnight, through a city echoing with the noise of patrolling fighter planes and helicopter gunships, knowing immediately that the world I knew had been changed forever.

  A few weeks ago, my family went away for the weekend and our Uber driver claimed that no plane had hit the Pentagon. That kind of willful gullibility—about politics or vaccines or science or climate change—makes me furious, and I could see the sprouting seeds of anti-knowledge incubating along the political extremes even back then.

  That being said, I’m an optimist about the American experiment. As the grandson of immigrants, I feel a certain obligation to roll up my sleeves and work to help make our country fulfill its best promises to all its people, not just one percent of them.

  ET: In addition to being a novelist, you’ve also published two poetry collections. Do you see yourself as more of a poet or a novelist, or are you equally interested in both forms?

  SK: I started as a fiction writer; all my graduate degrees involved the study and writing of fiction, so I suppose if I had to choose, that would be my answer. But I often say to my students that genre is a problem for librarians and bookstore owners, not for writers. I think of all the work I do as writing, trying to say something that is unflinchingly honest, that shares a little of how I see the world, and offers an invitation to readers to see the world that way too, if only for a little while. I’ve published essays, reviews of books and music, shorter portions of a memoir I’ve been working on, and I’ve written for television. I’ve also written speeches, corporate promotional materials, and campaign platforms and policy statements. That idea—inviting someone to participate in your thinking and maybe even to push back a little bit—is probably at the center of all of the disparate work I’ve done.

  ET: How much did the process for publishing your poetry collections differ from publishing Panorama?

  Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgSK: Each book had its own wildly different path into the world. My first poetry collection, The Luckless Age, had been a finalist in seven or eight different first-book contests before it found a home with Red Hen Press. With Little Black Daydream, I was honestly surprised that the book was accepted when it was.

  Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgIf I am being honest, the common thread through the publishing process for each book is anxiety. For an artist, I’m very type A, and the collaborative part of publishing isn’t a natural skill for me. With Panorama, I’ve been blessed by a great team in marketing and publicity, and their skill made it a lot easier for me to focus on that collaboration.

  The real lesson I’ve learned is this: ask. Ask your publisher to outline exactly what they intend to do, and how, and what they expect from you.

  ET: You’re now at work on your second novel. Is there anything about that you’d like to share?

  SK: Next year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. That was an event I never could have imagined. I’m a Cold War kid, and through my childhood, the Eastern bloc existed as a kind of permanent monolith, Reagan’s evil empire. But just a few years after the Wall fell, I found myself walking through Red Square in the heady days of what we thought might become a free and democratic Russia. Today, we are seeing exactly how naïve that hope may have been.

  Our natural focus on the courageous dissidents of that era often comes at the expense of overlooking a more rarified group, those who fled the Eastern bloc in the immediate aftermath of World War II and made a life for themselves in exile in the United States. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of those emigrés returned to their homeland, seeking to reconnect with their own history and reclaim family histories (as well as fortunes) seized from them during the Communist era. I am fascinated by that decision, its consequences, and the way it plays out between generations.

  Bloom Post End

• Connotation Press - https://www.connotationpress.com/hoppenthaler-s-congeries/3125-steve-kistulentz-poetry

  Steve Kistulentz - Poetry
  KistulentzSteve Steve Kistulentz directs the Saint Leo Master of Arts in Creative Writing Program and serves as an Associate Professor of English. He is the author of the forthcoming novel Panorama, to be published by Little, Brown & Co. in Spring 2018, as well as two collections of poetry, Little Black Daydream (2012), an editor’s choice selection in the University of Akron Press Series in Poetry, and The Luckless Age (2010), selected from over 700 manuscripts as the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. His short stories have appeared in many journals, including Narrative Magazine, Quarter After Eight, Crab Orchard Review, and in a special issue of Mississippi Review focused on emerging writers, selected by guest editor Rick Moody. His narrative nonfiction—mostly on the subject of popular culture—has appeared widely in journals.

  ---------

  The Upside of Suffering in this Manner

  Let us not forget about the scars, the self-
  mortifications that we wear as garland
  or shroud. Let us not forget the scars

  hidden beneath the clothing, trying to burst
  through muslin as if a compound fracture
  tells more than one story, saying anything

  other than its most profane announcement.
  This is my body, blessed, wrecked, broken
  for you. Let us not forget the scars of experience,

  hard won, the tree rings of betrayal, grief,
  and or divorce, any combination of the three.
  Let us not forget how these scars, anointed

  and salved, sprout the most incredible blooms.

  Extravagence

  So many parlor games, but that day, our only extravagance
  was Spanish wine, its bathwater-warm undertow pulling us making it an afternoon.
  Otherwise, a sensible lunch, a tuna salad done rare, tartare of cold pink.
  Her confession: the last time she cooked, she was drunk, inattentive,
  felt as if the nearly raw fish stared back in accusation. I know this feeling, as
  I’ve been baited here myself, an invitation promising easy celebration,
  but the real truth is we are here to grieve, for the sicknesses
  and bathroom infidelities, every electric truth we’ve ever denied. It’s just lunch,
  she argued, told me how her own cooking made her sick, cost her husband
  two days of work, how crouched over the toilet, she took the sounds
  of his retching as symbol, everything she wasn’t as a wife. It’s just fish, I said,
  between absent touches of her hands. But the truth is, by then I wasn’t
  listening. I was deciding instead what parts I would save for next time,
  some listless night when we’ll shuffle together at the bottom of her front step,
  when we won’t count our drinks, when in careless fear, we’ll stay out too late,
  avoiding what faces us, the hardest truths, our empty beds.

  The Upside of Suffering in this Manner (Reprise)

  Let us not forget about the scars, the self-
  mortifications we still wear as garland
  or shroud. Equally let us not forget the scars
  hidden beneath our clothing, trying to burst
  through muslin as if a compound fracture
  told more than one story, saying anything
  other than its most profane announcement.
  Let us not forget the stories, how the scars
  raised on a diet of beatings and white bread,
  how like a fungus they grew when fed
  the proper amounts of bargain liquor.

  Let us not forget the songs about the scars,
  or how those who know nothing of ritual
  scarification think they are listening to love
  songs, as if the people who commanded us
  to wear our love like heaven or taste lips
  like sugar weren’t talking about the same kind
  of cutting, of torture. That’s why I listen
  only to the great hits of yesterday and today,
  songs to learn and sing that tell the truest story,
  how I have suffered here, and there. Give me
  your hand, slide a most wicked finger over

  my wounds, the only thing that proves I believe.

• Shelf Awareness - http://shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3211#m39781

  Reading with... Steve Kistulentz
  photo: Kira Derryberry

  Steve Kistulentz's debut novel is Panorama (Little, Brown, March 6, 2018). A former political consultant, he now directs the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida and is also the author of two volumes of poetry. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and holds a doctorate from Florida State University. He lives in the Tampa area with his family.

  On your nightstand now:

  I'm one of those people who has anywhere from three to five books going at a time; I'll switch between them based on my mood, my level of exhaustion or what I'm working on writing-wise. For research on the book I'm writing now, it's a lot of Cold War-era nonfiction. I've re-read and annotated George Kennan's famous diplomatic cable commonly referred to as "the long telegram." For the same reasons, I'm deep into William Taubman's excellent biography Gorbachev. It's fascinating to me how Mikhail Gorbachev has all but disappeared from the institutional consciousness of the Western world, and how reviled he is in the former Soviet Union. Taubman makes clear the complexities that Gorbachev had to balance daily.

  I've also got a ton of music books sitting around. Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us and Lizzy Goodman's Meet Me in the Bathroom are wildly different yet remind me of the very reasons I spend so much time immersed in the music I love and the reasons why I'm an evangelist for certain songwriters and certain bands.

  I'm a tennis player, so my wife gifted me with String Theory, David Foster Wallace's collected essays on tennis. It's got his famous piece about Roger Federer, which I was thrilled to see immortalized in such a beautiful book.

  On the fiction front, I've been reading the whole catalogue of Dana Spiotta. I read some review that referred to her as a female Don DeLillo, and since DeLillo is and has always been one of my favorites, that was enough to send me on a deep dive into her work. She's a wholly original and imaginative writer.

  Favorite book when you were a child:

  As a small child, I was all about books about the special relationships between animals and people. Sometimes, they could be very small animals, like The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary. Later, it was Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. First off, what a bizarre title. But for a child who grew up in the D.C. suburbs, where the National Institutes of Mental Health are actually located, it was thrilling to think that there was a secret world of smart rodents living among us. I'm still fascinated by animals, incidentally, and I've put a version of my dog in every book I've ever written.

  Your top five authors:

  Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, Joan Didion, Richard Powers, Andre Dubus.

  Book you've faked reading:

  Finnegans Wake. When I was working on my doctorate, there was a graduate seminar that studied a page of this book per week. One page. I still don't get the wild allegiance people have for this book, and honestly for Joyce in general outside A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  Book you're an evangelist for:

  Don DeLillo's Mao II. In teaching, I often ask this question (somewhat rhetorically): Does a great novel reflect a culture that already exists, or anticipate the culture that is about to emerge? Mao II is a novel that manages to touch on terrorism, media culture, urban decay and the definition of what is art, all within a compact novel that is tremendously well-paced. It's a much more resonant book to me than some of his other novels that have become syllabus mainstays.

  Book you've bought for the cover:

  Larry Brown, Facing the Music. I was in college and walking through the old Scribner's Bookstore on Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg. The book was on a display alongside other Southern writers that I didn't know then, people like Peter Taylor and George Garrett and Barry Hannah. But that Larry Brown book had a bright yellow cover, and a blurb from the late Harry Crews that ended, "Talent has struck." I'd just finished Harry's A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, and if Harry thought that book was okay, that was good enough for me. And damn if he wasn't right.

  Book you hid from your parents:

  Erich Segal, Love Story. Hid it up until I did a book report on it, whereupon my teacher called my parents to say that my reading was a little advanced for my age. I was in the fourth grade.

  Book that changed your life:

  John Irving, The Water-Method Man. I read it in high school and laughed until my ribs hurt. One of Irving's earlier novels, this one had everything--bears, motorcycles, prosthetic breasts, sex, academic fraud, rivalry, deception--that would appeal to the inner Beavis and Butthead voice of a high school boy. It was the first adult novel that forced me to realize how reading could be entertainment and not drudgery.

  Favorite line from a book:

  I started writing as a fiction writer, then detoured into poetry for nearly a decade. So perhaps it's appropriate I acknowledge that with a line from one of my favorite poets, Albert Goldbarth. In his poem, "A Story," he writes, "I walked through the rubble/ and glitz of the latter twentieth century, and I saw X,/ which was flabbergastingly horrid, then Y, then Z,/ these left me beaming out a living light/ like an angel pricked with breathing holes." This always struck me as a line that gently criticizes the worst repetitive tendencies of contemporary poetry and somehow does so in metapoetic fashion.

  Five books you'll never part with:

  Don DeLillo, Underworld. Rick Moody, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven. The Stories of John Cheever. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. An Amateur's Guide to the Night by Mary Robison.

  Book you most want to read again for the first time:

  Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver. I'd like to be able to see this book through the eyes of the more mature writer that I am now.

  One book that you wish more writers would stop praising:

  The Catcher in the Rye. I've never understood the love for this book, and perhaps it's simply an artifact of its time, when that sort of adolescent voice was underrepresented and seemed shockingly new. But I've never liked Holden Caulfield, and I'd heard enough from him after about two paragraphs. The cult that surrounds this novel baffles me.

• Barn Owl Review - http://www.barnowlreview.com/kistulentz_interview.html

  An Interview with Steve Kistulentz, Author of The Luckless Age

  -by Mike Krutel

  Q: Congratulations on The Luckless Age. I’m a bit curious about this first collection of yours. You also write fiction and, from what I understand, you even received an MFA in fiction. Why is this first book one of poetry and not prose? How do poetry and prose intersect/diverge in your own writing?

  A: I tend not to think in terms of genre. I'm more interested in whether something is true at its emotional core. I don't mean true in the sense that a poem or a story or a novel is literal reportage, but rather whether it registers on the emotional Richter scale. The books that I own are heavily annotated with my own marginalia and typically my response to a text explores that idea of emotional veracity; I've been frustrated for years by the distant tone of recent novels, and that frustration comes from a resistance to the post-ironic stance that so many novelists adopt. My work, regardless of genre, is much more invested in the idea of finding an emotional connection between its constituent parts—the author and the reader, the reader and the text, even the text and other texts. For me, poetry is often about immediacy, the intimate tone of a whisper in the ear, or the surreptitious nature of discovering what is hidden. Novels can do that work, too, but it's much harder to sustain.

  And then there is the human answer, which begins on my first Saturday night in Iowa City. The second-year students at the workshop invited the newcomers out to a bar to play pool and have a few beers. At the party, a woman came up to me and asked, "What are you?" I had no answer for her (I'm a Capricorn, a Democrat, a husband, a former political operative) because I was taking her question literally. What she was really asking was whether I was a fiction writer or a poet, and when I said that I wrote both, she said, "You can't do that here." And I'm contrarian by nature, so telling me that I can't do something is the perfect way to ensure that I'll try.

  Q: In reading The Luckless Age, I could definitely feel prose and narrative elements in many of the poems. Considering your work with David Kirby, who has a penchant for long and prosy lines in his own poetry, in what ways has working with him influenced your writing?

  A: There is a natural affinity between a lyric narrative and a longer line. That being said, David's work is much more invested in the idea of a true narrative than mine is; most of the poems in The Luckless Age that use a longer line do so with a nod towards a central incident or two that is factual, but they resolve themselves in a fairly declarative voice. I don't know if that is apparent to the casual reader, and I've already experienced the kind of criticism that I've heard leveled against David's work, that sort of unspoken preference many readers have for the lyric. He has a great poem on the subject, “Borges at the Northside Rotary,” that addresses this with far more eloquence. Mark Halladay coined the term “ultra-talk” to describe these kinds of conversational, discursive poems, but my loose relationship with the literal truth makes me think of my work as what I might call ultra-expressionist; I’m more interested in making people radically reconsider things, but I am giving the reader a highly subjective viewpoint.

  Mark Doty said that what makes something a poem is that there is no way to paraphrase its content. That sentiment seems logically attached to the imagistic work of the most economical lyric poems, but I'd argue that it too is the perfect way to consider what makes narrative so thrilling. When we encounter a great film—which after all is nothing but an extended, image-driven narrative—our discussion veers at some point from the content of the film or our aesthetic judgment to a simple declarative statement: you have to see it. In other words, the high-wire walk is only successful if the narrative is both inviting and surprising.

  The most important thing I learned from David though is this: be generous with your heart and with your time.

  Q: Can you talk about the way you brought together pairs of text in your poems, such as: “The End of The Affair as Foretold in Language from the Revelation of Saint John the Devine” and “The David Lee Roth Fuck Poem with Language Taken from Van Halen I, 1984, and the First Letter of the Apostle Paul to the Church at Corinth”?

  A: My interest in the Bible as a source stems from thinking about the origins of the Bible as a selective anthology. As an undergrad, I struggled through a course in historical Christianity, and part of my struggle was the difficulty I had in reconciling the historical with the doctrinal, probably because until that point, I'd only encountered those texts in a purely doctrinal fashion. I’m astounded at how few people know and understand the sacred texts of their faith, or how few people even know that there are far more contemporaneous accounts of the life of a person named Christ than the four that have survived various canonical purgings. So I’m interested in what is there, too, but equally in what was taken out.

  As a reader, I’m drawn to the tone of Pauline epistles, if only because they so often sound like a combination of gentle instruction and consolation. The lines from First Corinthians that I paraphrase within the “David Lee Roth Fuck Poem…,” appeal to me in the same way I return to favorite songs in search of a kind of peace. I’m always thinking about this kind of taxonomy of texts, trying to figure out why this thing appeals to me, this film, this band. Finally though, it just means that as a writer, I wanted to encounter the Bible as a reference in the same way I might use Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. As a person of faith, I treat it differently.

  Q: I find it interesting that you acknowledge treating the doctrinal differently in your life outside of your writing than you do within the exploration of your writing. Considering how your poetry has a foot in the confessional, how do you view the divisions/coalescences of writing with lived daily life?

  A: I tend to explore the divide between my daily life and my writing life by not having any segregation between the two. My obsessions are frequent and transient; I don’t have hobbies so much as I have all-consuming intellectual passions that last a year or two. If there is a strategy on how I navigate between the two lives, the best analogy is probably triage. I’ve learned to forego a lot of distractions in order to make time for the work.

  And now I’m afraid that I have to offer the disclaimer that all poets offer when they get labeled with the word confessional. But I think of the subject of my work as personal only to the extent that the “I” of the poems has experiences that might be unique to a generation, as opposed to an individual. In a strange way, rather than using schools of poetry to discuss how we might locate and identify the persona who speaks these poems, I’d much prefer to think about schools of painting. I worked to exclude overly specific reportage of things from my own life in hopes that what remained would be a kind of radical distortion of an emotional event, the way that you might find the visual perspective altered in an expressionist painting. That distortion has a literal counterpart in rock and roll. Expressionism too gives us a literal narrative, but its psychological content also provides an implied one. And expressionists resisted the prevailing academic standards of the time in favor of the intense experience. And I was most interested in recreating some of those intense experiences.

  Q: Thankfully for my research, your blog is fairly young and I was able to scour through it. As for your social views and how they accompany your poetry, I think its fair to say you've been open about your liberal leanings and your anti-Reaganism. But what about other specific instances or influences of the social in your work? I am specifically thinking about music. Punk plays a significant role in your poetry. Can you give me some specifics about the influence of music, punk, and the underground on the voices behind/in your poems? Also, for fun, maybe a word or two on a few names (and any others you think of) including: Iggy Pop, Jello Biafra, Joe Strummer, GG Allin.

  A: Of those names that you listed, maybe all of them except G.G. Allin transcend the ethos of punk; G.G. Allin was a spectacle, a carnival act. The others are exemplars for me.

  The book does a pretty thorough job of conveying the respect I have for punk—after all it was the music that literally changed my life—but I hope it also reflects my ambivalence. I never realized how privileged I was to grow up in that DC scene until I went away to graduate school; the shows that were a normal three-dollar Friday night for me are the stuff of legend to a kid who grew up in St. Louis.

  But that DC scene was clearly bifurcated between hardcore kids and the straight-edge crowd, and I think the book articulates fairly well why I didn’t get along with the straight-edge kids. I go to music, then and now, for catharsis, and in my experience the straight-edge kids never got that catharsis. This will sound like phony romanticism but there was something sacramental about running headlong into strangers, about rolling home at 3 a.m. bruised and sweaty and purified. In straight-edge bands, the rage was always there, and it’s strangely militant and off-putting. And if you look beneath the surface of a lot of straight-edge icons, what they really have to say is nothing. Their lyrics don’t sound particularly educated or articulate; it’s mock heroism supplemented by a mock profundity, or at best a sort of Pollyanna-ish liberalism.

  I moved pretty quickly away from the nihilists towards political punk. And because of the emptiness of their message, I really had no use for punk ideologues. Henry Rollins is pretentious and uneducated, and the fact that people pay money for his spoken word performances baffles me. The only thing worse was what happened to his music. The Rollins Band churned out exactly the kind of derivative crap that would have caused the Henry Rollins of Black Flag to puke.

  Jello Biafra was incredibly important, because the Dead Kennedys were the Spiderman decoder ring of punk rock for me. They showed that a band could be both irreverent and serious, even within the same three minutes. But it wasn’t until I discovered the Stooges that I heard music that sounded like how I felt. The Clash taught me how to be aware, how important it was to be engaged with the world. They had this slogan—though it’s so disappointing to learn that a record company hack thought it up—but the Clash really were, “the only band that matters.”

  Where those things show up in my writing I think is only apparent in retrospect, but maybe the largest influence comes from the Clash. Listening to a record like "Sandinista" gave me tacit permission to try just about anything as a writer, from amusements to lyric narratives to the fuck poems. I hope what distinguishes them is the same thing that distinguishes good music, its intensity and its honest emotional core.

  Q: In a post on your blog you describe the term “Luckless Age” as “a landscape populated by the forgotten and marginalized, reported from the mosh pit and the boardroom, the bedroom and the bar.” You focus heavily on the dominant culture of Reagan-era conservatism as a re/enforcer of values that fuel such marginalization. Can you tell us more about the marginalization of the individual in this societal clusterfuck? I’m specifically thinking of the poem “Wild Gift” in which an already marginalized, self-indentifying group of “leather jacketed boys so busy being homo- / genous” want even more to be cut from the cloth as individuals, that to some degree cry out for a self-marginalization in their prayers, each saying, “Let me be the only one”.

  A: There's a tremendous amount of money and energy that our culture spends in an attempt to define the individual. And I find it disturbing that so many people attempt to construct their identity through consumerism. What makes an individual? A pierced labret? Doc Martens? The meanings and currency of tattoos for example has been almost totally degraded. I mean, John Mayer has a full sleeve, for God's sake. It says something sad about our culture that we think of image as something we can purchase.

  I don't necessarily think of that as a product of Reagan-era conservatism. But I do think it's the logical result of the free market. The best example that I can think of is terrestrial radio. In any major city, the radio stations are almost completely homogenous. There's a classic rock station, a rap station, a sports talk station (or multiple versions of each), and an alternative rock station. But there isn't any such thing as alternative rock. How can an album that sells five million copies be alternative?

  Part of the process of writing THE LUCKLESS AGE was for me to reconsider and reinvent my entire set of aesthetic values. And I discovered that I am honestly resistant to any art or commerce that baldly embraces its derivative nature. I don't for example think of Andy Warhol so much as an artist as a maker of a commodity. I adore John Ashbery and I discover something new every time I re-read his work, but I'm bored to tears by 90 percent of the imitations he's spawned. I remember reading a recent interview where a well-known poet was criticizing the blue collar ethos of Philip Levine's poems; the bulk of the criticism was that Levine hadn't really been the coverall-wearing, time-card punching union guy that his poems set out to portray. The other poet said something like, "Levine worked in a factory for 6 months 45 years ago," as if somehow writing about the experience made it less authentic. But to me there is value, something tremendously useful in knowing that poetry spurred Levine to seek deliverance from that life, just as there is something inspiring in knowing that he could see the dead end that is the Rust Belt so many years ago.

  I do think there's something compelling in the Reagan era's simultaneous rejection of both rugged individualism (the kind that we might find in the do-it-yourself ethos of punk rock) and communitarianism, that sense of shared endeavor that bound American communities from the beginning of the republic. I remember when Oliver North testified before Congress, The Washington Post did a story on how his public appearance spawned a rash of high school and college-aged boys to get their hair cut like the Colonel, a sort of modified high-and-tight. It dawned on me then that they had no idea they were celebrating someone who was involved in a criminal conspiracy to subvert the Constitution (breaking an oath Colonel North had taken twice, once as a Marine and once as an employee of the National Security Agency). What those haircuts said was that here was a generation of young men who, when confronted by the truth, chose to ignore it.

  Q: In your opinion, what is the writer’s responsibility to social activism/involvement in dealing with culture at large?

  A: I don't know that a writer has any particular obligation to social activism. The obligation of the artist should never exceed the obligation of the ordinary citizen. In my mind, the artist is only required to produce a highly subjective version of the truth. I don't mean the literal truth of course, but the emotional one.

  In many ways public activism—particularly of the celebrity variety—does a cause more harm than good. Thousands of people can tell you that Sting has done advocacy on behalf of the rainforests of Brazil, but you would be hard-pressed to find one who could articulate just exactly what Sting was advocating, or whether his involvement had any lasting results. Even something as monumental as Live Aid seems to me at a distance of 25 years to have been about glorifying and institutionalizing the bands themselves far more than it was about putting an end to famine. There are few artists who take on a role in social activism that is both informed as well as morally and politically consistent, and there are even fewer who are willing to take a stand once the cameras disappear.

  Perhaps this is the inevitably jaundiced answer you get from someone who worked in politics for 15 years, but I cannot help but feel a sense of relative despair about the future of social activism. There are very few grassroots success stories. Some scholars have argued that a rise in activism is the inevitable consequence of the democratization of social media, but what I'm observing is just the opposite. There are millions of people who think that they are being responsible citizens if they donate their Facebook status to the cause of the week, but that's just another example of a culture that is always seeking the easier, softer way. I live in a city where a church with thousands of members will spend $20,000 to send missionaries to the Caribbean or Central America, and not one dime to feed the hungry children that live within a mile of their sanctuary. Too few people are willing to get their hands dirty locally.

  I see precious little writing that is engaged with the culture, unless it is to glorify materialism, and in almost two decades of teaching, I've never had a student turn in a story or an essay that was overtly political. If social upheaval is born when children reject the values of their parents, that hasn't happened in America in almost 50 years; even artists who pretended to be reporters on the culture at large—I’m thinking here of Jay-Z for example—have been so co-opted by commercialism that they no longer stand outside the culture. They are a product, a corporate identity, and they can't risk what happens if they are no longer bought and sold by the public at large.

  Perhaps Philip Roth had it right when he said America now exists beyond satire. We don’t have a Sinclair Lewis or a Dos Passos or a Steinbeck. Whatever friction we have in art today is at the level of name-calling, and artists that are institutionalized within the academy are incredibly homogenous in their values. To me, that's a byproduct of the larger political climate, but the end result is that we have an awfully large number of inward-looking writers, and very few whose engagement exists beyond facile parody or mere reportage.

  Q: Any there new poets or new books of poetry that readers should look into?

  A: This is such a hard question for me, because I'm worried that I will forget someone I love. And I'm going to take some liberties and say that for me, I don't think of books as new or old; there's so much out there that I will never be able to read that I tend to think of anything that I haven't discovered as new. I was in New Orleans a few weeks ago and bought a hardcover first edition of Richard Hugo's 31 Letters and 13 Dreams and it was like meeting a long lost relative. I'm deep into the whole oeuvre of Albert Goldbarth, who is just amazing.

  You can add me to the chorus of people who love Matthew Zapruder's Come On All You Ghosts. Michael Dickman's Flies and Nick Flynn's The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands are both great. C. Dale Young's Torn is a lovely book. I learn from everything my friends write, especially people like Erika Meitner and Mary Biddinger, who have both taught me to be a more generous teacher and a more caring poet. I brought Erika and Mary to the college where I teach as part of our visiting writers series and they just mesmerized my students. Mary's new book Saint Monica is amazing; I was lucky enough to read it in manuscript and Mary asked me to provide a blurb for it, and well, you never forget your first blurb.

  Q: You were one of the poets featured in BOR 4. In your Ohiotica, you say that you shared your first adult beer with your father in a Canton, Ohio, parking lot. What was that beer?

  A: I think we need some context. We didn't randomly drink beer in parking lots, at least my dad didn't. I was in high school at the time so it was probably a far more common occurrence for me than for him. But we'd fled an awful family visit to my godmother in Pittsburgh and made the drive to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. We checked in to a Holiday Inn and dropped our gear and headed out in search of pizza and ended up in a bar somewhere watching a Browns game, with my dad lying about my age so we could stay. We went around the corner and got a six pack to go and after not letting me drink in the bar, he opened one with great ceremony and handed it to me in the car. And because my dad was a Pennsylvania guy through and through, that beer was a Rolling Rock, in the seven-ounce pony bottle.

• Have Book Will Travel - http://havebookwilltravel.com/steve-kistulentz/

  Steve Kistulentz (Fiction, Poetry) | St. Leo, FL
  Booking Fee:

  Negotiable
  Will Travel:

  Anywhere
  Contact:

  kistulentz_at_gmail.com
  Website:

  http://www.kistulentz.com

  Steve Kistulentz is the author of the novel Panorama, (Little, Brown & Co., March 2018), as well as two collections of poetry, Little Black Daydream (2012), an editor’s choice selection in the University of Akron Press Series in Poetry, and The Luckless Age (2010), selected from over 700 manuscripts as the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. His short stories have appeared in many journals, including Narrative Magazine, Quarter After Eight, Crab Orchard Review, and in a special issue of Mississippi Review focused on emerging writers, selected by guest editor Rick Moody. His narrative nonfiction—mostly on the subject of popular culture—has appeared widely in journals.

  His honors include the Benjamin Saltman Award for The Luckless Age, as well as fellowship support from Writers at Work, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and an individual award from the Mississippi Arts Commission. He has previously taught at the Johns Hopkins University; the University of Iowa, where he was the Joseph and Ursil Callan Scholar; the Florida State University, where he was an Edward and Marie C. Kingsbury Fellow for Excellence in Thought; Millsaps College; and the University of Tampa, where he directed the MFA program and ran the Lectores Reading Series. He is the founding director of the graduate program in creative writing at Saint Leo University. Previously, he worked in national politics in Washington, DC for nearly 20 years.

  Kistulentz was born in Washington, DC. He earned a BA in English from the College of William and Mary, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and a PhD from the Florida State University.

  Books
  Panorama (Little, Brown & Company, 2018). Novel Fiction.
  Little Black Daydream (University of Akron Press, 2012). Poetry.
  The Luckless Age (Red Hen Press, 2010). Benjamin Saltman Award. Poetry.

• author's site - http://kistulentz.com/

  About

  Steve Kistulentz is the author of the novel Panorama, (Little, Brown & Co., 2018). He has also published two award-winning collections of poetry, Little Black Daydream (University of Akron Press, 2012) and The Luckless Age (Red Hen Press, 2010), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award.

  Kistulentz was born in Washington, DC. He earned a BA in English from the College of William and Mary, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and a PhD from the Florida State University.

  His shorter works have appeared in such journals as The Antioch Review, the Cincinnati Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, New Letters, Quarterly West, Quarter After Eight, The Southern Review, and many others.

  Kistulentz’s honors include the Benjamin Saltman Award for The Luckless Age, as well as fellowship support from Writers at Work, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat and an individual award from the Mississippi Arts Commission. He has taught at the Johns Hopkins University; the University of Iowa, where he was the Joseph and Ursil Callan Scholar; and the Florida State University, where he was an Edward and Marie C. Kingsbury Fellow for Excellence in Thought. He directs the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida and lives in the Tampa area with his family.

  Prior to writing, he spent nearly 20 years in national politics in Washington DC, directing political strategy for corporations mostly in the transportation and infrastructure areas.

• Spine - http://spinemagazine.co/articles/steve-kistulentz

  The Writer's Practice: Steve Kistulentz, Panorama
  Susanna Baird
  The Writer's Practice: Steve Kistulentz, Panorama
  Courtesy Photo
  Courtesy Photo

  Courtesy Photo

  Twenty-first century America visually consumes cataclysmic events. A shooting, a plane crash, a terrorist attack — these tragedies we process through videos captured by strangers' cameras, presented to us by newscasters or posted by unknown users online. Watching, we may feel pain or horror or shock, but also we experience a disconnect, pulling these moments into our minds via screens.

  "We don't really encounter what we see on television news as being events that happen to real people," writer Steve Kistulentz told Spine. Kistulentz is the author of the novel Panorama, released last month by Little, Brown, as well as two collections of poetry. "I've always been interested in the idea of how news prioritizes some memories over others, and how it gives primacy to stories that have accompanying visual images.

  "Most of the big stories of the latter 20th century stay with us because they have associated video — the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, the beginning of the first Gulf War, the terrorist attacks on September 11. What each of those stories neglects is that those are real things, happening to real people."
  EP-303029990.jpg
  EP-303029990.jpg

  In Panorama, Kistulentz explores the spaces surrounding tragedy, public and private. The novel takes place in the 24 hours before and after a plane crash. It follows multiple people intimately involved in the incident, including first responders, passengers, victims' families, airline employees, and a guy who caught the whole thing on video.

  Though he's been long interested in ideas surrounding public consumption vs. private experience of tragedy, Kistulentz can also trace the origins of the novel to a job and a phone call.

  Kistulentz moved to Washington, D.C., after college and worked on Capitol Hill, eventually landing at a trade association representing large airports. When TWA Flight 800 exploded and fell into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island, in July 1996, Kistulentz became part of a task force aimed at providing aid to families involved in aviation disasters.

  "Prior to September 11, most airports had no significant contingency plans for dealing with grief-stricken friends and family members after a crash. We held listening sessions at the Federal Aviation Administration; after hearing those stories, I understood that there was the potential there for crisis, but also the potential for the beginning of the healing process. That was something that I probably wrote in my notebook that day. It's always been in the soup of things I think about," he said.

  Around the same time, Kistulentz fielded a questioning phone call from his sister, making her will. Should she die, would he serve as guardian for her son, then six? "I said absolutely, of course, and then I hung up the phone," Kistulentz recalled. He took a look around his bachelor pad. "At the time I was single and living a very urban, professional life in D.C., and realized I didn't know any of the fundamentals about children. I had no idea where I would even live."

  Holding on to these issues — parenting someone else's child, processing tragedy from multiple angles — Kistulentz eventually left D.C. to pursue a life of writing and teaching. After publishing two books of poetry, he turned to the concepts that had long been swirling around in his "soup."

  Perhaps because he'd been thinking on the book, or the ideas behind the book, for so long, Kistulentz knew exactly where to begin his first novel: a plane crash. Wanting to place a tight timeframe around his characters, he planned to move forward from there, through the next 24 hours, but "realized pretty quickly there were obstacles." In order to fully express the emotional impact of the crash on certain characters, he needed to offer glimpses at relationships in place before the tragedy.

  Having established his new timeframe – from 24 hours before until 24 hours after the accident, Kistulentz moved smoothly through the book, writing chronologically, inserting each character's voice when it felt necessary to representing the full impact of the plane crash. Centering his book around the central event, a big-picture story, rather than around a central character, is a technique Kistulentz adopted from film and television.

  "I'm much more interested in films and high-profile television shows that tell grand stories with large casts than I am in three-camera network sitcoms. I think that pushing the envelope in terms of the way that stories are told is one of the unique things that films can do, whether it's a movie like Memento, which tells the story in reverse chronology, or whether it’s a television show like The Leftovers, where you have a character who is first among equals, but the main cast is an ensemble of a good ten people who can appear in various timelines and even on various continents. You spend substantial amounts of time with all of them. That's what real life is like."

  The ideas in Panorama marinated for decades before Kistulentz sat down to write, but once he had a draft, he had a publisher. He sent agent Wendy Sherman the manuscript on a Monday, and by that Friday, he had signed on with Wendy Sherman Associates. Sherman had clear ideas for edits, and the book's eventual Little, Brown editors, first Amanda Brower and later Ben George, also had clear ideas for streamlining. So the draft became book.

  In March the book arrived on shelves and e-readers.

• Barrel House - https://www.barrelhousemag.com/onlinelit/2018/3/5/my-big-little-break-steve-kistulentz-on-his-first-publication

  My Big Little Break: Steve Kistulentz on his first publication
  March 05, 2018 in Series
  A BARRELHOUSE INTERVIEW WITH STEVE KISTULENTZ

  In My Big Little Break, we ask authors to talk about the first piece they ever had published, how it felt to finally break through, and what they’ve learned since then. This week, writer Steve Kistulentz answers.
  panorama.jpg
  panorama.jpg

  What was the title and genre of your first-ever published piece?

  My first published piece has one of my favorite titles I’ve ever come up with, “Tough Talk at the Papaya King.” It was a short story about a college-age kid that became a mid-level cocaine dealer. It was based on two ideas: the first was a magazine feature I’d read about the son of 1984 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. He’d gone to Middlebury College and gotten popped for cocaine distribution. The second was a stanza from a song from 1986, “Welcome to the Boomtown” by David and David. “Handsome Kevin got a little off track/took a year off college and he never went back/now he smokes way to much/got a permanent hack/deals dope out of Denny’s/keeps a table in the back.”

  I’d taken a year off college, too. But I went back.

  Who published it? Are they still around?

  It appeared in the Crescent Review, a small independent journal edited by Tim Holland. I knew Tim from the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. A lot of the other Writer’s Center faculty helped put the journal together, served as first readers. I’m not sure when they stopped publishing, but it was a good run, and they published a lot of writers who went on to bigger things.

  Give us some context: how old were you? How long had you been writing and submitting? How many times had the piece been rejected? Anything else we're missing.

  I was thirty. I’d been writing seriously for about five years, and I’d just finished my M.A. at Johns Hopkins and I was tremendously depressed that I’d had to keep working in politics. I kept reading these magical anecdotes about people who sent a story unsolicited to the New Yorker or to the Atlantic, and walked away with huge book deals. My stories seemed to set land speed records in getting rejected. Back in those days, rejection still came in the mailbox.

  “Tough Talk” got taken as a compromise, because it was the second-best story I had around at the time. The best story I’d written to that point was a story called “Sarah, of No Fixed Address,” which earned the high honor of handwritten rejections from places like Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly. I didn’t know much about journals then, and I was at a loss as to where to send it next.

  That summer, I got a scholarship to a summer writer’s conference at Bennington College, where my workshop leader was George Garrett. George loved that “Sarah” story, and after class one day asked me if I had submitted it anywhere. I told him no.

  He said, “I’m the fiction editor of the Texas Review, and I want to put it in the magazine.” He told me to send it to the editor-in-chief, with a note that George had already seen it and recommended it for acceptance. So I did exactly what he told me. I mailed it Monday and the following Monday it was returned to me as a rejection. Perplexed, I called George and he surmised that maybe some grad students had rejected it without reading the cover letter, and he suggested I send it again.

  So I did.

  And it got rejected again. This time with a scrawl across the cover letter, rather large and insistent, that said, “THIS IS NOT TEXAS REVIEW MATERIAL.”

  The story was about a recently discharged Marine who returns home to Tidewater and takes a job as the night desk person at the county morgue. He’s on the job about a month when a Jane Doe body comes in, and the body turns out to be his ex-girlfriend. He knows from their past that she wouldn’t want a church service, so he steals her body and gives her a quiet, one-person funeral. I guess it was pretty dark. But everyone who’d read it loved it.

  I sent that story to Crescent Review, because to my inexperienced mind, there were really no journals between the big New York ones and the tiny regional ones. I just didn’t know much if anything about the market then.

  And Tim Holland loved that story, but he felt it was a little out there for his readership, and asked to see something else. So, dead bodies were bad, but college-age addicts were ok.

  Did getting that acceptance feel as triumphant as you'd always hoped? Walk us through the moment when you found out.

  Tim called to tell me. It was a Friday late afternoon, and I was on my way to the Insect Club, where I DJ-ed Friday happy hours for a couple of years. I got paid in cash for the DJ shifts and after I was done, I usually blew it all on drinks at one of the other clubs that were owned by the same group of investors, and that particular Friday was no exception.

  The feeling of triumph came a few months later when the print issue showed up in my mailbox. This was early 1997, and one rainy February evening, I went to the old Chapters bookstore near 15th and K Streets NW in DC to see a reading by John Dufresne. John had just published his novel Love Warps the Mind a Little, which is to this day one of the most generous and humane novels I’ve ever read. The main character says, “This is how love becomes irrelevant,” and I was in the middle of that, and man, it just crushed me.

  John read from the opening chapter of the book, which is laugh-out-loud funny, and afterwards, we talked a bit. He signed my copy of the novel, and at some point in the conversation, I’d mentioned that story to him.

  A few minutes later, after he’d signed books for the other customers, John came up to me with a copy of the Crescent Review, open to my story, and asked me to sign it for him. I can’t tell you what a gift that gesture was to me. It gave me courage, and validation. A few years after that, John wrote one of the recommendation letters that helped convince the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to take a chance on me. I owe a lot to those two gestures, so thank you, John.

  Are you still proud of that piece? Have you re-read it recently?

  I can see the good and the bad in it, which I suppose is what most writers would say about their juvenilia. I know one writer friend who won’t sign copies of his first novel, because he feels like he became a different writer soon thereafter, and while my feelings for that story aren’t as severe, I do kind of understand. To my eye, I can see the mechanisms in the story, and the influences it holds are all far too obvious.

  Now that you've been doing this for a while, collecting plenty of rejections and acceptances along the way, what advice do you wish you could give your younger self?

  Be patient. Which honestly has never been a skill of mine. I’m doing well now, because I’m prepared, and because I’ve worked hard at it. And I intend to keep doing that.

• Jackson Free Press - http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2010/dec/08/steve-kistulentz/

  Steve Kistulentz
  By Katrina Byrd
  Wednesday, December 8, 2010 11:30 a.m. CST
  0

  photo

  Jerrick Smith

  On a warm and cloudy day in November, professor Steve Kistulentz sits calmly at a table at Millsaps College. He smiles and tilts his head slightly as he remembers the events that brought him to Jackson.

  "The job at Millsaps College became available in a couple of ways that suggested it was part of a larger plan for me," says Kistulentz, who received his doctorate in English from Florida State University in 2009. His graduate professor, a Millsaps alum, encouraged Kistulentz to apply for the position of assistant professor of English at Millsaps.

  Kistulentz, 43, always wanted to live in a city with a good family atmosphere and a liberal arts college. After discovering that Jackson has both, he applied for the position and started working at the college in August 2009.

  "I remembered thinking, if they offer me the job, this was going to be the place for us," Kistulentz says.

  In addition to working as a professor, Kistulentz is also an award-winning author and creator of the Millsaps Visiting Writer Series. His book of poems, "The Luckless Age," won the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, and is due for release Feb. 1.

  "Writing is deceptively easy," says Kistulentz, who developed the series in 2009 to show students the work involved in literary writing. Its programs bring nationally known writers like novelists Richard Bausch, and poets Mary Biddinger and Erika Meitner to Jackson to discuss their writing process. The writers meet with the students during the day, and that evening, the writers read their work. The public readings are typically on Wednesday nights.

  Kistulenz says that while Millsaps students are more-than capable of producing academic papers, many of them become frustrated at the time and effort it takes to complete a literary work. "Many people don't understand the commitment that it takes for literary writing," Kistulentz says. "Writing is a life choice and a career."

  The Washington, D.C., native says he always knew he would be a writer. He earned his bachelor's degree in English from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., his master's degree in English from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., and his masters of fine arts from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Before he went back to graduate school, he spent 15 years working on Capitol Hill where he lobbied for various industry groups. He says the political world taught him how to listen and observe others; manage his time and juggle responsibility.

  "These were very fundamental skills to my writing," he says.

  Kistulentz is dedicated to mentoring writers, and believes writers learn from other writers. His advice?

  "You are always working, and it is your job to experience and to think about what you see," he says

• How Poems Happen - http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2011/07/steve-kistulentz.html

  Steve Kistulentz
  Steve Kistulentz's first book of poems The Luckless Age was selected by Nick Flynn as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award and was published by Red Hen Press this February. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Antioch Review, Barn Owl Review, Black Warrior Review, Caesura, New England Review, New Letters, Quarterly West and many others. Individual poems have also won recognition from such noted poets as former Poet Laureate of the United States Mark Strand, who selected "The David Lee Roth Fuck Poem…" for the 2008 edition of the Best New Poets anthology, and by Mark Doty, who included the John Mackay Shaw award-winning poem "Bargain" in the ninth volume of its Helen Burns Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. He currently is an assistant professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and popular culture.

  FIXING

  What I did
  I did in the dark,
  nightclub bathroom door
  held shut by my bulk,
  a 20-dollar descent
  into the uproar
  of mad stupidity.
  At least I used
  a fresh needle,
  and before I went
  sick, drew the plunger
  back, pressed it down
  four times, filling
  and emptying, and
  filling again with blood.
  I used a needle
  only once, the night
  before I married.
  That ought to be enough
  to convince anyone
  in omens. Let’s resist
  moralizing here, just
  say it was wrong,
  meaning incorrect,
  a subtle offense.
  They call it fixing;
  you do it because
  you are broken;
  and you hope
  it will help,
  and still later
  you talk about it, this
  one thing no one saw.

  When was this poem composed? How did it start?

  Despite the relative darkness of the subject, this poem came from wordplay. I was thinking about the slang that surrounds heroin, a subject the book returns to in the poem "Wild Gift." At a friend’s funeral, I’d overheard someone say, "I didn’t know he was back on the horse," and I’d obsessed over that phrase for maybe three months, knowing that in conversation, the speaker had meant exactly this: despite pretentions to the contrary, our dead friend had never really kicked drugs. But even in that phrase, there is this hint of hope, this peculiarly American urge to confront and defeat failure.

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

  The version in the book is probably draft three. The first two contained slightly longer lines, and a joke: "A subtle offense/ like men wearing black socks/ with sandals at the shore." I’m grateful for whatever voice told me to cut that. It might have worked in some version of the poem itself, but that moment of levity was contrary to the movement of the whole first section of the book.

  Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was "received" and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

  Barbara Hamby pointed me to an answer that Picasso gave. "Inspiration exists, but it must find us working." When I am not working on any particular project, I find myself combing through favorite books, my journals and notebooks, magazines, anything, just looking for words that trigger some secret association. The myth of inspiration causes otherwise ordinary people to believe that they too can write a novel or a collection of poems, if they only had the time. Which of course they can; it’s the great and saving illusion of democracy and graduate school. And while I do not necessarily want to be the voice that extinguishes someone’s faith, I think it is important to demystify process. I don’t get inspired; I work. When I write, what I am putting on paper is the sum total of all the reading, thinking, ruminating and previous writing that I’ve ever attempted. Said another way, I find my inspiration in the act of working. It may not produce results today, but it lays a foundation for tomorrow’s work.

  How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique? Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you’d care to disclose?

  I remember going through a phase where I was reading poets who were mostly absorbed in their own reporting of these little domestic scenes; I’d been deep in to C.K. Williams at the time. I envied the scope of those long lines but mostly I envied the kind of voice that could say to the reader something like, "The only time I ever fell in love with someone else’s wife…" I had to learn how to be that fearless, and though I might seem comfortable with the public aspects of the writing life, it’s an acquired skill. To me, it’s a shame that Williams often channels that ambition into poems about infidelity and the bourgeois limits of conventional morality. So perhaps Williams was an influence in that I was responding negatively to the people who populate his poems and their relative affluence in the world. "Fixing" is like the antimatter to the poems in a book like Flesh and Blood.

  A number of poems in The Luckless Age were also written as part of my effort to be aware of the speed of sound; I’d been playing bass for a friend who is a wonderful singer-songwriter, and he would record these elaborate demos using an old Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine. At rehearsal, he could tell the rest of us that the click track was, for example, set at 108 beats per minute, which is a pretty moderate tempo for rock and roll. I pretty much always wanted the songs to go faster. Those clipped lines are my effort to distinguish "Fixing" as a much more visceral jab than the rather panoramic lyric narratives that precede it in the book.

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

  C. Dale Young took this poem for the New England Review and it appeared in the Spring 2003 issue, so it was probably about a year old by the time it came out.

  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?

  Generally it’s a poem-by-poem decision. I don’t always know when I have succeeded, but I am acutely aware of when I have failed. I have a few trusted readers, and we tend more towards trading larger blocks of poems, a cycle or a whole manuscript. But my relationship with those people is such that we tend to only raise our voices if something is seriously awry. If the poem in question feels particularly risky to me, I might wait a tad longer to send it out.

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

  Are you asking why the Library of Congress categorizes poetry as a distinctly non-fiction endeavor? That’s always been a great mystery to me. I am by no means a genre loyalist, and I like to push the limits of what we think of as discrete categories. In this particular poem, the owner of the first-person voice is almost inconsequential. I’m much more interested in a sense of emotional authenticity than I am in whether or not something is literally true. Of all the poems in the book, "Fixing" is the one that people most often assume springs from some sort of impulse to practice a type of documentary or post-confessional poetics. And perhaps it does, but the poet isn’t necessarily the subject of that documentary. Interestingly, in the few poems in my book that do spring from a documentary impulse, I do not feel any obligation at all to the literal truth. My obligation is to a sense of unflinching honesty that convinces the reader to make the investment in the book. Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that criticism’s goal was to complete the text, but since I am a writer first and scholar second, I have an extraordinarily ambivalent relationship to the practice of biographical literary criticism. To me, trying to map the actual life of an author or a poet on to a text not only defeats the purpose of reading, but it’s a perverse and lazy way to approach a text. Biography informs the text, but it doesn’t complete it.

  Is this a narrative poem?

  Perhaps. If it is, it contains narrative only in the sense that it is an extended synecdoche and the reader is invited to complete the narrative. Though I return to the subject matter later in the book in a poem called "Wild Gift," and that poem is more a traditional narrative. The original title of "Wild Gift" was "Fixing (Reprise)" but I already had a poem in the book called "Luckless Age (Slight Return)" so I thought maybe I was better off limiting myself to one inside reference to 1960s classic albums per book.

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

  Again, the answer varies. When I was eighteen, I had this horrific summer job raising money for progressive political organizations. One night after work, a few of us went out for beers in the Georgetown section of DC, and my boss, his name was Pete, said to me on the walk home, "You know, no one ever knocks on your door at three in the morning with a twelve-pack once you’re married and 26." And he said it with the most complete air of defeat I’d ever heard. Many years later, as a grad student at Iowa, those 3 a.m. visits and phone calls were a part of the landscape. After one particularly brutal workshop, a guy named Thomas Derr came up to me and quoted a sentence from one of my stories back at me. And he said, "Anybody who can write a sentence like that is going to go a long way." Of course, there might have been beer involved in this discussion, but I took it to mean this: if one person can read this and want to share it with someone in the middle of the night, then maybe I’ve done my job. Also, if you are knocking on the door at 3 a.m., you damn well better not come empty handed.

  What is American about this poem?

  It’s pretty much all-American I think, with all the contradictions that implies. For all of the contemporary discussions about what America is and isn’t, I think it’s important to remember that we are a nation built on a foundation of shame. When John Winthrop gave his sermon to the members of the Massachusetts Bay company, he wasn’t speaking to victims of persecution or even idealists who saw themselves as the foundation of the American project. Rather, the Puritans were people who believed that the Church of England and the Crown were possessed of a decaying moral authority that would soon be insufficient to govern. Even at the remove of four centuries, we are still shackled to that shrill Puritan voice in our national dialogue. The voice that tells this poem struggles with his own shame, but in his heart, he knows everyone else has such secrets, too.
  Posted by Brian Brodeur at 3:14 PM

• wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Kistulentz

  Steve Kistulentz
  Born January 18, 1967 (age 51)
  Washington, District of Columbia
  Occupation Poet, Editor, Academic
  Nationality American
  Education B.A., The College of William and Mary. M.A., The Johns Hopkins University. M.F.A., The Iowa Writer's Workshop. Ph.D., the Florida State University
  Website
  www.kistulentz.com
  Author Steve Kistulentz in a promotional shot for his novel PANORAMA.

  Steve Kistulentz (born January 18, 1967 in Washington, DC) is an American novelist and poet. He is currently director of the graduate creative writing program at Saint Leo University in Florida.
  Life

  His most recent work is a novel, Panorama,[1] scheduled to be published by Little, Brown and Company on March 6, 2018. Advance praise for the novel features quotes from such notable authors as Robert Olen Butler, Darin Strauss, Chris Offutt, Tom Franklin, and Richard Bausch.

  “Panorama is a remarkable literary work, rare in its ability to be both thematically complex and a compelling read. Kistulentz transforms our TV culture’s participatory tragedy into a deep meditation on human connectedness. This is a stunning debut by an important new writer.”

  —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

  “Panorama lives up to its title. This is a novel aswim in language, in drama, in character. It has the kind of bigness we too rarely see in fiction anymore. Steve Kistulentz is a hell of a writer, and this is a hell of a hard book to put down.”

  —Darin Strauss, National Book Critics Circle Award winner for Half a Life

  Kistulentz's first book of poems, The Luckless Age, was selected by Nick Flynn as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award and was published in early 2011 by Red Hen Press.[2] His second book, Little Black Daydream, was an editor's selection in the Akron Series in Poetry and was published by the University of Akron Press in 2013.[3]

  His poetry has appeared in such literary magazines as The Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, and New England Review, New Letters, Quarterly West, and many others.

  Such notable poets as MacArthur Genius Grant winner Campbell McGrath, National Book Award nominee David Kirby, Beth Ann Fennelly, Allison Joseph, and Dean Young (poet) have praised his work. McGrath writes,

  The Luckless Age captures the wicked energy and anarchic entropy of American culture and so gives voice to an age, a place, a human life. This is an auspicious and heartily welcome debut."[4]

  Individual poems have also won recognition from such noted poets as former Poet Laureate of the United States Mark Strand, who selected “The David Lee Roth Fuck Poem…” for the 2008 edition of the Best New Poets anthology,[5] and by the Academy of American Poets, which included the John Mackay Shaw award-winning poem “Bargain” in the ninth volume of its Helen Burns Anthology, edited by Mark Doty.[6] His poem "The Rosenstiel Cycle" won the 1999 Writers at Work Fellowship in Poetry. His work appeared in Barrelhouse Review.[7]

  His essay, "Home from the War: An Appreciation of Magnum PI," appeared in the debut issue of the independent literary magazine Barrelhouse, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The essay was later anthologized in the sold-out collection, Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays From Barrelhouse.

  He has taught previously at the University of Tampa, where he directed the MFA program, and at Millsaps College.[8] He received his doctorate from the Florida State University, where he was the Edward and Marie C. Kingsbury Fellow, an award given to the outstanding graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences; he also holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,[9] where he taught creative writing as the Joseph and Ursil Callan Scholar, List of Iowa Writers' Workshop people, and was a classmate of such notable writers as Yiyun Li, Nam Le, and Daniel Alarcón.

  He was awarded an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University,[10] and a B.A. from the College of William and Mary in Virginia.[11]
  Works

  Panorama, Little, Brown and Company, 2018. ISBN 978-0316551762
  The Luckless Age: Poems, Red Hen Press, 2011, ISBN 9781597094948
  Little Black Daydream, University of Akron Press, 2013, ISBN 9781937378202
  Ava Gardner: Touches of Venus, Entasis Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0980099959
  The Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets Vol 9., Academy of American Poets, 2010. ISBN 978-0615319407
  Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse, 2013. ISBN 978-0988994508

• Saint Leo U - https://www.saintleo.edu/creative-writing-faculty

  Steve Kistulentz,

  Steve K2Director and Associate Professor of English

  The artists I admire (in film, visual art, music, and writing) are the ones who take risks, who see the world with empathy and compassion, are unflinchingly honest, and who invite you to be a part of what they see.

  I’m intrigued by the critic Dave Hickey’s suggestion that art should interrogate beauty and pleasure, though I’m not convinced that I agree with him. I’m not fond of distinctions that separate high art and low, because there are times when each of us needs to be serious, and times when we need to lighten up. This is easy for me to say, because I’ve written about things like David Lee Roth, Evel Knievel, the Knack, punk rock, andMagnum, PI, but also about political philosophy, the fall of communism, Mikhail Gorbachev, and plane crashes. In short, art can be found in the everyday, if you know how to look. I try to teach that in every class I lead.

  One last thing: I don’t believe in what the musician Todd Rundgren called the “ever popular tortured artist effect”; there are plenty of working artists in every genre who are stable, hardworking, and approach their career in the manner and style of being a true professional. That’s something that my gracious mentors taught me, and it’s something that I try to teach in return.

  Steve Kistulentz is the Director of the Saint Leo Master of Arts in Creative Writing Program and an Associate Professor of English. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Little Black Daydream (2012), an editor’s choice selection in the University of Akron Press Series in Poetry, and The Luckless Age (2010), selected from over 700 manuscripts as the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. His short stories have appeared in many journals, including Narrative Magazine, Quarter After Eight, Crab Orchard Review, and in a special issue of Mississippi Review focused on emerging writers, selected by guest editor Rick Moody. His narrative nonfiction—mostly on the subject of popular culture—has appeared widely in journals. He earned a BA in English from the College of William and Mary, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and a PhD from the Florida State University.

Panorama
Kathy Sexton
Booklist. 114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p29.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Panorama. By Steve Kistulentz. Mar. 2018.400p. Little, Brown, $27 (9780316551762).

Kistulentz's debut novel explores the fallout of a tragedy through his characters' hopes and fears. Mary Beth has flown to Salt Lake City to celebrate New Year's with her boyfriend (who's also her boss), leaving her young son, Gabriel, in the care of a coworker. Her brother, Richard, is a "hey, it's that guy" cable-news talking head based in D.C. Both siblings are unsatis fied with their professional or personal lives but are trying to change that--when Mary Beth's plane crashes, leaving no survivors. Over the course of New Year's Day, several lives will be affected by this event; Richard, first, as he makes plans to retrieve Gabriel, but also a server at a bar whose husband is on the plane; teenagers who caught the crash on film; the plane's mechanic; and several of the passengers. The first part of the book is an interesting dive into lives that haven't exactly gone as planned, while the second half feels a bit rushed. Readers of character-driven fiction who appreciate a happy ending will enjoy this.--Kathy Sexton

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "Panorama." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 29. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771821/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=247f77a7. Accessed 4 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771821

Panorama
Publishers Weekly. 265.5 (Jan. 29, 2018): p166+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Panorama

Steve Kistulentz. Little, Brown, $27 (400p)

ISBN 978-0-316-55176-2

The plot of Kistulentz's poignant debut novel (after the poetry collection Little Black Daydream) centers on a New Year's Day plane crash in Dallas that kills everyone on board. But this is neither a thriller nor a traditional disaster story. A short opening chapter describes the tragedy, then flashes back a day or so. The reader follows the highly self-reflective activities of Richard MacMurray, a discontented cable news anchor, as well as his sister, Mary Beth. She has been dating her boss, Mike Renfro, and considers him her leading prospect for marriage. Having a husband is a priority for Mary Beth, single mother to her six-year-old son, Gabriel, who has never known his biological father. Richard eschews the glare of the public spotlight for an evening alone with a bottle of wine, while Mary Beth and Mike ring in the New Year with a romantic getaway in Salt Lake City. The crash occurs near the novel's midpoint, and the story then follows the families and loved ones of the victims as they cope, grieve, and try to understand their losses, particularly Richard and Gabriel, who are brought together after Mary Beth dies in the crash. This is a lyrical and moving debut novel. (Mar.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Panorama." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 166+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116507/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ba9747be. Accessed 4 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A526116507

Kistulentz, Steve: PANORAMA
Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kistulentz, Steve PANORAMA Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $27.00 3, 6 ISBN: 978-0-316-55176-2

The lead-up to and aftermath of a commercial jet crash are seen from the perspectives of many people whose lives the tragedy touches.

Kistulentz's debut novel begins at the Salt Lake City airport on New Year's Eve 2000--"the last day of the last year when we still felt safe"--with an unhappy 48-year-old airline mechanic who makes a mistake in the preflight check of a 727, preoccupied with getting home to his wife to celebrate New Year's Eve. Though the crash won't actually occur until the following afternoon, its utter devastation is described in this chapter, "soot and ash and oozing plastic and blood spatter, the implied presence of human remains." This choice trades in some of the suspense of the situation for a heart-wrenching certainty about the outcome for several of the characters, of which there are many, though some only get a chapter or two--for example, a kid who films the crash, various airport employees, members of the airline's Adam and Eve teams who go out to notify the next of kin. The central cast member among the passengers is Mary Beth Blumenthal, a single mother who's left her 6-year-old son home in Texas with a co-worker so she and her boss can spend the weekend together in a Salt Lake City hotel, though she's still wondering why he chose Utah. Her brother, a Washington, D.C.-based television pundit named Richard MacMurray, who presumably will be inheriting her orphaned son, is followed even more closely than Mary Beth, including very detailed chapters on his career options and love life, including even the post-breakup sexual adventures of his ex-girlfriend. These chapters seem marginal to the main concerns of the book and, once the crash has occurred, verge on tastelessness. Though Kistulentz confidently sets up and populates the panorama of the book's title, there's a paint-by-numbers quality to his depiction of his characters' emotions that keeps the reader at arm's length when we should be most swept up.

This book has the architecture of a great novel but falls short in the execution. A writer worth watching.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kistulentz, Steve: PANORAMA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520735834/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bc819578. Accessed 4 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A520735834

Sexton, Kathy. "Panorama." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 29. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771821/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=247f77a7. Accessed 4 June 2018. "Panorama." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 166+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116507/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ba9747be. Accessed 4 June 2018. "Kistulentz, Steve: PANORAMA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520735834/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bc819578. Accessed 4 June 2018.

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