The third issue of The Author's Journal of Inventive Literature is finally here. The theme is "Life of Books," with writers submitting stories about the literary life and their experience with books both as readers and writers. This EPUB format will work with many generic e-readers. If you need a different ebook format (or a different PDF size) email us and we'll whip one up for you.
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The contents of this volume comprise 20 poems, 1 essay, 1 sketch, and 2 stories.
Alana K. Asby, the editor, contributes True Story Is Dramatic, an essay on rediscovering story-elements such as plot and myth, after the devestating "subtractions" or reductions of experimental writing in the 20th century.
Gillian Bruce brings Red Sails, a brisk-moving narrative poem with a nonce form of her own invention. It features fully musical rhyme and meter, archaic fantasy elements, and a romantic tale.
Lynn Michael Martin brings us a poem about poems: On Discovering that all my Tolkien Poems are Copyright Infringement, written in his signature dry wit. With more tenderness and a nocturnal sensibility, he also contributes A Hundred Poems Stir My Heart This Night.
Our "mad poet" Abender contributes a light-hearted poem about Judgment Day, of all things, with his loosely-rhyming When The Books Are Opened.
Arthur Bardsmane, who in a previous issue gave us a new take on alliterative verse, here delivers a more conventional rhyming poem with the narrative fan fiction-inspired Margaret March, a heartbreaking poem about Marmee's feelings on losing Beth (in Lousia May Alcott's Little Women.)
Leah M. Sommers contributes a bright and brief free verse gem in Ethan Frome, weighted with symbols and intimations of feeling.
Goddard Kay Ridley gives us the simple and heartfelt verse in quatrains, The Books I Love, delivering classicist sensibilities and figures.
Alena Casey contributes a thoughtful and at moments rapturous nonce-form ode To The Book That Changed Your Life, employing dwellable internal and end-rhymes, alliteration, and subtle rhetorical devices to praise the moment in life when one becomes a true reader.
Steve Bucher offers a picture of the humble, patient loyalty toward life and love gained by some chronic sufferers with his slim and efficient poem, A Solace Kept, drawn from the myth of Prometheus and his punishment.
Sophia White gives us a youthful and fierce defense of poems that float instead of plod, in Contra Modernism, employing the conceit of a double meaning for "concrete."
In the sonnet form, Robert Hegwood gently renders a wounding memory from childhood played through the struggle of a previous attempt to depict it in an unpublished novel. His poem is The Rumbling of the World.
Wendy Delmater profers the gracious and expansive Vers Libre Ulmo, making fair-use employment of Tolkien's "Sea-King" of the same name. "Nevertheless: seek Ulmo. Seek the deep." She also brings the impish Were-books, a rhyming poem about books that come to life under the full moon.
Charles Leggett, actor as well as poet, brings us no less than four thoughtful poems reflecting his interaction with fine literature and the stage, as well as literary peeves and friendships. His poems are Bards; Yiimimagaliso: The Mysteries; Generals; and Sapphics.
Lorraine Schein gives us the delightfully visual Tarot Harlequinade, a poem which makes use of figures from the tarot deck to interpret "the book of night," with delicate alliteration and subtle cadences.
Colleen Anderson brings us the unusual and striking Moonbone Myth, a primitive and urgently moving narrative poem based upon an Australian aboriginal creation story.
And finally, Charlotte Hevinwort gives us a sort of backward experiment in Rewriting The Poem 'Old Age', in which she renders a classicist poem about old age new, filling it with figures, narrative, and more overt musicality than the original. Both the original and the rewrite are printed, and both are rhyming.
In his feeling and melancholy short sketch Illuminations, Gustavo Bondoni portrays the declining years of a famous South American literary figure.
In her long fiction The Mad Poet Abender, Kat Liama Webb reveals the true origins of our favorite literary rebel, a neurodiverse and gifted rhymester (or "farmer's husband," as he was first described to us) who cares more about sound than meaning, and accidentally saves a movie star he doesn't even recognize.
And finally, Nathan Pitchford gives us a story about an estranged son's dream-like progression through a sort of bookshelf-netherworld, with a literary conspiracy moth taking the role of Dante's Virgil and addressing his relationship issues with both his father and God. The story is called Mothmuse The Inspirational.
Drop us a line at alana.k.asby@vulgarismedia.com and let us know how you liked this issue!