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Articles by John Brantingham
Chances Are — John Brantingham
By John Brantingham “Chances Are” was selected for Litro’s The Odds Are In shortlist through a blind editorial process. Shortly after submission, we were informed that its author, John Brantingham, had passed away. We publish the story as it was chosen — on its own merit — and in recognition of the voice behind it. “Chances Are” is a story that understands how much can sit inside a single moment — and how quietly that weight can shift. A moment held long enough to understand what it carries.
How Hope Outlasts Despair: An Interview with Yahia Lababidi — Cleveland Review of Books
Yahia Lababidi’s newest collection, Palestine Wail, comes at a time when well over 50,000 Palestinians, approximately one third of them under the age of eighteen, have been slaughtered.
Review: Morpheus Dips His Oar by Tamara Madison
I have always admired Tamara Madison’s poetry, and especially the way that she approaches death. One of the poems Madison is known for is “Drop Dead.” In it, she takes the epithet and turns it into a wish for her mother. She hopes that her mother will at some point simply drop dead rather than having to endure the indignity of dying slowly in a hospital.
Review: Small Mammals by Cati Porter
Cati Porter’s Small Mammals is an exploration of a number of things, but primarily what it means to be the mother of teenage boys. It is both what one might expect and not expect at the same time. Of course, there is the chaos of the teenage years, but there are also many scenes of surprising tenderness and love from her boys. There are moments of violence, and of compassion, and a discussion of what friendship means.
Indiana Twilight
Somewhere in Indiana, Ellen says, “Do you know what these fields are?” You look out the window and say, “That’s corn.” “They don’t look like cornfields.” You gaze at them zipping by and say, “Well it’s autumn.” Ellen looks at you with that little crease forming between her eyes. You know she’d normally understand, but it’s been a long day, driving through four states. So you say, “It’s autumn. The corn’s been harvested, and that’s what’s left of the stalks.” “Oh,” she says. She smacks her forehead.
Sleeping Arrangement
By John Brantingham Poem by Eric Barr Illustration by Jane Edberg Eric Ba rr taught acting and directing at University of California, Riverside from 1975 until 2013. He has written screenplays, plays, essays and three of his short stories are online at Connotation Press In addition...
Review: Yours, Creature by Jessica Cuello
Yours, Creature, the newest poetry collection by Jessica Cuello, is a collection of epistolary persona poems written from the point-of-view of Mary Shelley. These poems capture the romance that we as a culture often project on what it must have been to be Shelley and also the horror too. Shelley’s life has often been idealized and seen as beautifully artistic, but of course, she lived through the trauma of losing multiple children and her mother.
Review: Our Song by Lynda Smith Hoggan
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The Art of Denise Kufus Weyhrich
by John Brantingham I recently had the chance to interview Denise Weyhrich for the Sasse Museum of Art's third Saturday interview series. She's an artist who has created installations for years in the Los Angeles/Orange County area, reflecting what is happening in her life and the world. I find much about her work to be interesting, but what I find fascinating about her is that she creates work and discusses subjects that are often avoided because they can bring up awkward moments.
Rethinking Memoir
Writing Flash to Find the Meaning within As a young person, I mistakenly believed I could not write memoirs. Part of it was that I thought memoirs were something old people wrote. Another part was that I couldn’t think of an long narrative that fit my life. I hadn’t done anything big. Eisenhower and Churchill wrote memoirs because they had something to prove about what they had accomplished. Bruce Campbell and Kirk Douglas wrote memoirs because they had lived entertaining lives.
In the locker room
by Aruni Wijesinghe In the locker room they affect nonchalance in their nakedness, avoid one another's gazes. Instead, focus on pinning up hair, toweling off legs and backs. They avoid bare feet on the shower floors, opt for flip-flops in pastel colors. They wrap themselves in terrycloth, avoid standing in drafts, never sit on bare wooden benches. Mostly they avoid mirrors, deny their own frank stares. Instead look at floor, ceiling, phones - anywhere but old.
Review: A QUILT FOR DAVID by Steven Reigns
A Quilt for David by Steven Reigns feels like a sacred book to me. I lived through the AIDS crisis and the disinformation and fear mongering that went along with it. This poetry collection chronicles the difficult story of a dentist, Dr. David Acer, who contracted HIV and continued to practice on patients during the 1980s. Some of his patients contracted AIDS and sued him. A Quilt for David is about the pain of AIDS and the politicalization of the crisis.
Review: Rich Ferguson’s Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates
When I first read Rich Ferguson’s Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, I thought he was only cataloguing what makes life chaotic and difficult.
Memoir Review: Allen Callaci's 17 & Life
It must have been difficult for Allen Callaci to follow his memoir Heart Like a Starfish, which is a painfully intimate discussion of his near-death heart replacement surgery and the way he dealt with the reality of mortality. His newest memoir, 17 & Life, takes just as sensitive an approach to life and death. I don’t know that this story would have been possible without his publisher, Bamboo Dart Press’s, choice to publish prose chapbooks.
Alan Swartz at the Sasse Museum of Art in the Progress Gallery, Pomona
Alan Swartz’s career as an artist began in the 1950s. He is a sculptor and painter whose one-artist show, Illusion Intrusion, opened on June 12 at the Sasse Museum of Art, which has recently moved to the Progress Gallery in Pomona. This is a collection of great humanity, a body of work that tries not only to capture what exists in and around the Inland Empire, but the way that we experience those things we see and experience.
An Interview with Michael Torres
By John Brantingham on May 5, 2021 in Conversations, Main Posts, Poetry Michael Torres’s An Incomplete List of Names was one of the most exciting collections to come out of the Inland Empire last year, but Torres, has moved from Pomona to Minnesota, where he works as a professor at the University of Minnesota, Mankato.
Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures
Poetry Review By John Brantingham on March 24, 2021 inPoetrySpotlight The wide ranging and devastating effect of toxic masculinity is one of the topics that Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures explores deeply and richly. Gómez is aware of the danger of the violent urges running through him, and he is trying to move past them even as they are often reinforced as virtuous by our society. Gómez takes these forces seriously in this collection as he takes seriously the anger that rages inside him.
Review: Beth Ruscio's Speaking Parts
Poetry Review By John Brantingham on March 17, 2021 in Poetry, Spotlight In Speaking Parts, Beth Ruscio explores among other ideas the link between appearance and reality especially as it relates to women. Ruscio, who has been a working character actress since the 1980s, draws on her life on television and theater and draws a parallel to the way people see women and the way women start to see themselves.
DIY Paint Ideas for Craft Night
By Our Friends on February 22, 2021 inLifestyle Who doesn’t love a craft night with your besties? Making memories that last forever should be as easy as pie. It does get difficult to come up with new ways to spend your precious nights off after awhile. We have done our best to come up with some excellent options for you! Enjoy trying the following activities. Fluid Art Fluid art is all the rage and for good reason, it is fun, easy, and yields beautiful results.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer: Excerpts from Rescue Plan
Selected by Alexis Rhone Fancher, Poetry Editor By Stephanie Barbé Hammer on February 17, 2021 inLiteratureSpotlight 1. Gomer Faithcutt liked swimming. The feeling of weightlessness. The power to do things he could never do on the ground: somersaults — back and front — handstands, and dives from the highest board. Then, he had started learning to save people from drowning a year ago, last spring. He’d completed the class work for Junior Lifeguard and even taken the written test.
Review of Rescue Plan by Stephanie Barbé Hammer
Book Review By Kendall Johnson on February 17, 2021 in Literature, Spotlight Suppose the proverbial genie popped out of the bottle and offered you the chance to lead a whole second life. “The catch,” the genie would laugh, “is that you’d have to go through being 15 again.” That might be a deal-breaker for you, as it would for me. As a former trauma therapist and high school teacher, this much I know: far too much angst.
Jason Irwin: Three Poems
Selected by Alexis Rhone Fancher, Poetry Editor By Jason Irwin on February 10, 2021 in Main Posts, Poetry POEM ABOUT MY FATHER DISGUISED AS THE END OF THE WORLD Everyone knows this landscape is a façade: propped up horizon of corkboard and tin. Curve of flesh. Lick of salt. It’s all we can do to endure the next few hours: gridlock on the drive home, the unavoidable reckoning of empty rooms. Who can say for certain we are not descended from the stars?
Jason Irwin's The History of Our Vagrancies
Poetry Review By John Brantingham on February 10, 2021 in Poetry, Spotlight Jason Irwin’s new collection hits me where I live. He is facing middle age and the loss of his parents as I am, so that’s no surprise. This is one of the reasons that I love to read contemporary poetry. It makes me feel less alone in a world that often feels chaotic, but in no way do I feel that his poetry fan base should be limited to fifty year-old men.
Why Gambling and Creativity Go Hand in Hand
By Our Friends on February 10, 2021 inGamblingLifestyle When Fyodor Dostoevsky first published his novel The Gambler in 1866 he was simply confirming what many had suspected for some time: that artists of all kinds, not simply writers, were fascinated by gambling in all of its forms. In the story, the central character, Alexei Ivanovich, frequents the casino in the town in which he is employed as the tutor for a wealthy family.
A Review of American Ash by Michael Simms
Poetry Review By Alexandra Umlas on February 3, 2021 in Poetry, Spotlight The final poem of Michael Simms’s recent book of poetry, American Ash, ends with the lines “… and everything is / Beautiful as you feel yourself / Floating over the city and you wish / The story didn’t have to end” (79). Simms is talking about getting old, but this was also exactly my sentiment as I finished reading— I wanted the book to go on and on.
My Name Is Romero
Selected by Alexis Rhone Fancher, Poetry Editor By David A.
David A. Romero’s My Name Is Romero
Poetry Review By John Brantingham on January 27, 2021 in Focus, Poetry I have never attended one of David A. Romero’s spoken word performances, but when the quarantine is lifted, it will be one of the first things that I do. His work on the page is extraordinary, and I can only imagine the life he brings to it as a professional spoken word artist. His debut collection My Name Is Romero is an exploration of what it means to be a part of a family and of that family’s legacy.
Kareem Tayyar and the Complexities of Joy
By John Brantingham on January 13, 2021 in Focus, Literature, Poetry I had my students study the work of Kareem Tayyar in my Introduction to Modern Poetry class this last semester, and in it we wrestled with the question of what is joy. The answer that they came to at first, which I expected they might, was that joy is a kind of appreciation of simplicity. They demonstrated that by pointing out some scenes from Tayyar’s work. In these joyful poems of his, there is simplicity.
Brantingham on Brantingham: The Art of Ann Brantingham
By John Brantingham on December 2, 2020 inArtMain Posts When I met Ann in our early twenties, she was studying architecture, doing good work in the estimation of my young eyes, and I asked her what it was about architecture that moved her. She told me that it didn’t move her. She told me that she had said to the people in her life that she wanted to study art, and they had manipulated that into architecture, and that now she was changing her major to fine art, and soon after she did.
Snake in the Garden: Review of Salaam of Birds by Rachel Neve-Midbar
By Eileen Murphy on November 25, 2020 in Focus …stones worn soft by a thousand laments, stones etched by a thousand feet, …a wall of stones 3500 hundred years of stones, each as smooth as the skin that has rested there.
John Brantingham: Flash Fiction
By John Brantingham on November 25, 2020 in Literature, Main Posts Orange You’re sitting on the back porch, peeling an orange, getting down to the deeply spiritual part of the orange, down where you can taste the bitter rind just from smelling it because you’re pulling off the skin, high, close to your nose.
Book Review: Life—Orange to Pear by John Brantingham - Cultural Weekly
By Kendall Johnson on November 25, 2020 in Literature, Spotlight Once a wise and powerful wizard pulled a small but brilliant gem out of a leather pouch and laid it on the table before a cluster of his closest friends. As they leaned over and and peered into the depths of the tiny gemstone, the mysteries and terrors of the universe were revealed.
Rediscovering David Park, Bay Area Realist
By Stephen West on November 18, 2020 in Art One of the best things museums do is to introduce you to an interesting or important artist you’ve never heard of, or just barely, through a full-scale presentation of a life’s work. That’s what the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has done with David Park: A Retrospective, documenting the evolution of Park’s paintings and drawings in more than 125 examples.
Delicious “Raw” Poems: Review of My Soul is a Broken Down Valise by Rob Plath
By Eileen Murphy on November 18, 2020 in Poetry, Spotlight a father beats his son w/ in its walls where bones are broken more than bread sounds fucked up but it’s the price we pay for the birth of a true fucking poet (“the price”) When I was little, we’d help my grandpa scoop up buckets of live oysters in their shells from one of Tampa Bay’s causeways (they weren’t polluted back then—it was the Stone Age).
Raymond Pettibon at Regen Projects
By Tressa Berman on October 21, 2020 in Art, Main Posts From Black Flag to MOMA, the work of Raymond Pettibon, if not known to you by now, has been hiding in plain sight for decades. His punk sensibilities have honest roots in the movement, and his word-coded images are no less a cold slap to get woke.
An Art Show During a Pandemic?
By Samuel Son on October 7, 2020 in Art, Main Posts It’s been seven months since the lockdown order in Louisville. So, putting on my wine-dark-red tie to join my wife, Suyun Son, for her art show on Friday night, I felt alive and excessive. Wine and art! How much more hedonistic can one get in these lean times? That tie had been racked in my closet since early February. I even walked into a mist of Calvin Klein cologne before jetting downtown.
Book Review: Tricks of Light by Thaddeus Rutkowski
By John Brantingham on September 30, 2020 in Poetry, Spotlight What drew me into Tricks of Light, Thaddeus Rutkowski’s newest collection, was how he captures the universal sense of alienation that seems to be a part of human existence especially in this new age of COVID. That is, it felt universal, and it might be, or it might be that he’s just that good a poet.
Butterfly Alley - Cultural Weekly
By John Brantingham on August 26, 2020 in Art, Focus, Literature My favorite surprise in downtown Riverside is Butterfly Alley, which has surprised me several times. I forget it for a while and then I’ll be walking downtown, going to a restaurant or meeting friends, and I’ll come around a corner and rediscover it, and it’s a place of beauty and whimsy that I love. What I love is the way that it captures the beauty of the monarch migration that moves through California every year.
Book Review: Open the Fist by Elya Braden
By John Brantingham on August 19, 2020 in Focus, Poetry I meant to write the review of Elya Braden’s Open the Fist fairly quickly. It is after all a chapbook, and those generally take less time because they are short and generally fairly focused on one topic. I’ve found myself sitting down at the computer and staring at it and then taking long walks trying to find a way in. The problem is that I am the product of a culture that is flawed in so many ways.
Brian Sonia-Wallace’s The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter
By John Brantingham on August 19, 2020 in Literature, Poetry Brian Sonia-Wallace’s mission and vision as a poet is beautiful and compelling. He is a full-time poet, and he is able to make a living writing poetry, which is an impressive feat, but simply paying his bills is neither his mission nor his vision. Sonia-Wallace is a kind of performance poet, someone who will come to your party or mall or sit on the street and write poetry for you for a fee.
Storylandia Issue 32, J. H. Malone’s Drunk on Time
By John Brantingham on July 29, 2020 in Literature, Main Posts I started reading science fiction when I was a teenager in the 1980s, and I subscribed to as many magazines as I could afford. What I liked about science fiction then was that it was both distracting and engaging.
Book Review: Prime Meridian by Connie Post
By John Brantingham on July 22, 2020 in Focus, Poetry Connie Post’s newest poetry collection, Prime Meridian is more than just a book that investigates the ongoing life of a family that has been damaged by an abusive father, but that is perhaps the largest theme that runs through it and certainly as a reader, that is the part that I am left contemplating after having read it. Such a book can be healing for the poet, and the best can be healing for the reader as well. This is one of those books.
Millard Sheets and the Inland Valleys
By John Brantingham on July 22, 2020 in Art, Literature, Main Posts It’s impossible to get away from the artistic influence of Millard Sheets especially in the Inland Valleys. Sheets was primarily a watercolorist who grew up in the Pomona Valley and who worked and lived in this region as well. I first came to know his work as a child. I lived near a Home Savings Bank that had commissioned one of his murals.
Seeing and Re-Seeing Dan Romero’s Work In the Inland Valleys
By John Brantingham on July 8, 2020 in Art, Main Posts, Poetry Art museums have opened up again, but I’m not comfortable going yet. I’m not worried for myself, but for my parents and immunocompromised friends and neighbors, and this fact is hard for me as a poet who writes ekphrasis (writing that talks about art, think “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” not that I’m comparing myself to Keats).
In Brazil, Curation is Just Another Word for Censorship
By Gustavo Prado Sampaio on July 1, 2020 inArtFilmLiterature Censorship just isn’t fashionable anymore. Not in the Americas, anyways. So Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has a great new marketing strategy for censoring the arts. Brazilian artists who lived through the military dictatorship have plenty of stories to share.
Book Review: That Strapless Bra in Heaven by Sarah Sarai
Poetry Review By John Brantingham on June 24, 2020 in Poetry, Spotlight Sarah Sarai’s new collection That Strapless Bra in Heaven is in parts both scatological and surreal. I mean that statement as high praise. Here, powerful images and ideas are pressed up against and juxtaposed with equally powerful images and ideas, and the reader is left to find meaning through contemplation. I read this collection slowly, giving myself time to understand and then expand upon the ideas that she suggests.
Book Review: The Doctor Will Fix It by Bunkong Tuon
Book Review By John Brantingham on June 10, 2020 in Poetry, Spotlight Bunkong Tuon’s poetry collection, The Doctor Will Fix It, follows his journey from the time that he becomes a father to his daughter Chanda until she is about three years old. She is a force that fills him with hope despite the fact that he is a Cambodian refugee who has lost family members and must face racism and being an outsider every day.
Book Review: Bulletproof by Matthew Murrey
Poetry Review By John Brantingham on May 27, 2020 in Poetry, Spotlight In the third poem of Matthey Murrey’s Bulletproof, Murrey tells the story of his mother going to the backdoor of his childhood home and firing his father’s pistol into the sky. When the family comes running at the noise, she speaks to her husband: She just slowly turned and said, “I don’t know, Honey— I just felt like shooting the gun” (11).
Book Review: Dandelion Riot by Jeanette Powers
By John Brantingham on March 18, 2020 in Main Posts, Poetry For me the lines that summarize what is most beautifully humane and real in Jeanette Powers’s Dandelion Riot is found in the following lines: For the abandoned it feels like everyone has been beating on them for their whole lives and they are the only ones paying the price (30). Powers does a lot in this collection, but I feel the greatest connection to their work when they draw me into the world of the outsider.
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