Staff Pick of the Week

 The Winter 1999 issue of the journal was before my time here at CALYX, but I’ve always been drawn to this issue’s interesting cover (it looks like a combination of an lover in early morning and something from the movie Beetlejuice).  It’s a sculpture called “Belly” in clay, glaze,  and nylon by Leslie Rech.

My favorite poem from this journal is “Hens and Chickens” by Nancy Dalhberg. Not only because I have several chickens at home, but because of the line “And then I suddenly / remember my mother cleaning chickens / in the kitchen, pulling out pullet eggs while I / tugged at the tendons in the cut-off feet, / making the claws grasp and release, grasp and release.” 

What about life isn’t a “grasp and release, grasp and release.” 

I hope you enjoy taking a look at this issue as much as I have.

-Becky Olson, Assistant Editor

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Staff Pick of the Week

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This week our staff pick is Open Heart, a full length collection by Judith Sornberger, to celebrate the news that a CD including a song written to her poem “Pioneer Child’s Doll” has received several Grammy nominations. “Pioneer Child’s Doll” appeared in Open Heart in 1993.

Judith writes, “The song by that title is part of a song cycle called ‘Within These Spaces’ on a CD of composer Lori Laitman’s songs by the same title. In addition to the other nominations for the album as a whole, the song cycle has been nominated under the ‘contemporary classical composition’ category.”

We on the staff still cannot get enough of her poems, even seventeen years later. Hilda Raz, editor of Prairie Schooner, praised Open Heart saying “Judith Sornberger’s superb first collection of poems is about the fracture of conventional wisdom under the pressure of women’s experience…. The poet’s control of form holds her readers in place while Sornberger steals, retells, and resignifies women’s stories.”

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