Fence 37-38 Print issue Sold Out; Fence 39 Coming Late Fall 2021
#37-38 / SPR-SUM 2021
CONTRIBUTORS: Johannes Gorannsön ⋅ Carl Martin ⋅ LM Rivera ⋅ Stine An ⋅ Sarah Duff ⋅ Caitlyn Tella ⋅ Siwar Masannat ⋅ Ell Davis ⋅ Zosia Wiatr ⋅ Jordan E. Franklin ⋅ Kyle Booten ⋅ Scott Lambridis ⋅ Rodrigo Toscano ⋅ Oscar Oswald ⋅ Josh May ⋅ Francesca Coppola ⋅ Chiara Bottici ⋅ Caren Beilin ⋅ Delicia Daniels ⋅ Austin S. Lin ⋅ Anne Waldman ⋅ Christopher Randall ⋅ Randy Prunty ⋅ Erik Kennedy ⋅ Hillary Plum ⋅ Samantha Burns ⋅ Katie Marya ⋅ Maria Zoccola ⋅ Jeff Sirkin ⋅ Andrew Seguin ⋅ Benjamin Niespodziany ⋅ Kathryn Mockler ⋅ Jackelyn Hoy ⋅ Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer ⋅ Jessica Holburn ⋅ Beth Roberts ⋅ Veronica Kuhn ⋅ Stella Corso ⋅ Adam Veal ⋅ Mona Kareem ⋅ Julia Cohen ⋅ a smith ⋅ Laura Mullen ⋅ Andrew Levy ⋅ Hally Parry ⋅ Ashunda Norris ⋅ Martha Ronk ⋅ Jordan Davis ⋅ Ted Dodson ⋅ Michael Holt ⋅ In the Flesh portfolio intro ⋅ Dominic Mitchell ⋅ Emily Bevan ⋅ Luke Newberry ⋅ Adra Raine ⋅ Rob McClennan ⋅ Elizabeth Robinson & Suzanne Dyckman ⋅ Adeena Reitberger ⋅ Kay Gabriel ⋅ Claire Dougherty ⋅ Michelle Suzann ⋅ Michael Borth ⋅ YL Xue ⋅ Patricia Hartland ⋅ Bp Sutton ⋅ Rebecca Wolff & Sara Black
The full cover is a collage of photographs of a computer screen on which appear actors Emily Bevan and Luke Newberry as their characters "Amy Dyer" and "Kieren Walker" from the British television show In the Flesh, written by Dominic Mitchell and featured in this issue.
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JANUARY 1st (RUBEN A)
by Dominic Jaekle and Hoagy Houghton / October 9, 2021
The first in a series of 36 photographs and correspondent texts in a collection titled 36 Exposures (forthcoming from Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Over the course of a single year, Houghton would send Jaeckle three photographs a month from his archive; Jaeckle would respond with an accompanying prose-work for each image...The texts number fragments, at turns essayistic and anecdotal; short stories, prose-poems, and assimilated citations. The images are largely personal: snapshots; familiar faces; passing objects of interest and attention.
THIS VIEW UNCOMFORTABLE / A VERGE
by Hazel White / October 7, 2021
"Colonel in the U.S. Army greets me one morning. He enlisted in 1984, knows the 'armpits of war.' I sidestep to our view—Marin Headlands, Pacific Ocean. “In Afghanistan, there was hardship. I was engaged with the terrain, we had to move supplies through it, the view of the mountains there was enough,” he says. This view, 'a place where I should feel, . . . oddly uncomfortable...'"
THE MENTAL DISLOCATION IS A WONDERFUL FEELING
by Carly Stone | October 7, 2021
"I wish I had something funny to say about the garlic clove but all I can think about is how small and happy I feel when I hold it. Look at the picture of the old man again. Something inside you has shifted and now the onion isn’t very big at all. Through some cognitive miscalculation, the onion becomes normal-sized, and the old man becomes very small. This is good. You feel like your head has come off your body. Let your mind rearrange the proportions of the world. Let your body dissolve into the soup of reality..."
INTERPOLATED VISIONS @ INDETERMINATE INTERVALS: MOTH, THIN NIGHT, BRILLIANT SKY, DENSE NIGHT, TEAR GAS, & SHROUDS
by Brenda Beardsley | October 6, 2021
"[Interval] moth: A moth flusters at the screen, needs to be in, while I yearn to be out. Cool air carries a far-away voice. Across the road, reedy, pubescent bodies gather in what is left of the light: nowhere to go, because of the pandemic, not even supposed to be together. While dusk slips into night, they pass an ash-laden cigarette from one pouty mouth to another..."
'Window Portrait
by Nathan Dixon | October 5, 2021
"I heard what sounded like a muffled scream as we unloaded beach bags from the car. 'Did you hear that?' I asked Caroline. 'Hear what?' she responded. 'I don’t know.' I couldn’t tell from which direction it had come. I sometimes hear things that are not there—songs in the static of sound machines, whispered conversations in brewing coffee pots—a trait perhaps inherited from my father’s father, who in his final years complained of a baritone singing 'Silent Night...'"
Can estadounidenses watch a 'foreign film?' On Cuarón’s Roma
by Whitney DeVos | September 2, 2021
"For me, on that particular night, ROMA had been, above all else, a film about all the quotidian ways in which men are de mierda cagado by/under/a causa de/debido al patriarcado...how it is the particular social world into which we are born, the particularized enmeshment of power relations, that sets the conditions of possibility for the extent to which we are able to reach our creative potential—y/o externalize our own inevitable suffering onto others..."
BIRD OF ONE
by Leah Umansky | September 2, 2021
"I take out the stones and sit there, imagining a new wall, a new way and then I quiet it. I am not an escapologist. I can’t escape. I’ve actually been grounding myself in earth, in trees, in birds and blues. I’ve been returning to nature, to the body and the body of the world. Sometimes, I lose myself in fear, but then I return to rebuild. Sometimes, I take myself out of it all. I take out all the I’s, and then I put them back in."
excerpt from SEAL/WOMAN
by Katie Schaag | September 2, 2021
an erasure of Ronald Lockley's novel Seal Woman (1974)
An undulant fantasy for fanciers of Wild (female) Things who make the heart sing even underwater, as does that of the narrator who pursues the smooth Pinnipedian form of Shian, the seal-woman...
grief_place.txt (15)
by William Lessard | August 8, 2021
"When Mike Kelley strung thrift store rag dolls and stuffed animals from a canvas, he was mapping the territory of abuse. Each doll a tiny parcel holding the sweat and tears of their former owners. Bodies sewn head to toe, toe to head, between a scream of blanket. Like Rauschenberg’s Bed from a generation prior, More Love Hours Than Can Be Repaid (1987) unspools yellow tape around the scene, marks the spot where the victim anticipates nocturnal recurrence..."
Badlands is a 1973 American crime drama written, produced and directed by Terrence Malick, starring Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, and Warren Oates. The story is fictional, but inspired by the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1958. In the film, fifteen-year-old Holly Sargis...
Back when Suez was a hot topic, it wasthe Gladiator of Tennessee vs. the Alabama Murderer,and my fella took a few blows but knocked out the champ,defeated in Montgomery, in record time!The amateurs all came looking.If you want victory, I said, you must train like him, eat like him, and...
The FENCE Cast episodes include the published journal's contents read aloud by the authors, conversations, music, and other audio adventures.
Fence Books is scaled down through 2021 while the editor is committed to public service in her home city. During this time we are publishing The Ottoline Prize, and seeking fiscal sponsorship for our two other book prizes: The Fence Modern Poets Series and the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Contact the editor with questions and ideas.
Multimedia electronic poetry, fiction, and hybrid works that reify the emergent “thingness” of the digital
