#anna journey

[the-final-sentence]

Poe laughs at the irony, but Larry, you rise on your black boots' stacked heels in an exhalation of smoke, roll your eyes as if to say, Isn't that creature just like a poet, rabid, already beginning to foam at the mouth.

Anna Journey, from "Visiting the Poet Larry Levis's Archive in Virginia, I Pull His Black Cowboy Boots from Box Number 40"

[rachelspoetrycorner]

Mississippi: Origins (2013) by Anna Journey

In Episode 165, Rachel shares a poem that might feel a bit familiar.

Rachel: Y'know when you read, like, a David Sedaris book, and you're like, ―How fortunate that his family is so unusual, because that gave him so much content. And then you think like, ―Maybe all of our families are that unusual, and we‘re just not as good at writing as he is. 

The stories you tell about your family... are you just really good at telling these stories, or do you really have just this really kind of unusual experience? And I feel like Anna Journey is really good at just saying like, this is poetic in itself, and I'm just gonna tell you it plainly, and you'll kind of enjoy the story along the way, and it'll be a poem when I'm done. [laughs]

Rachel’s previous submissions of Simone Muench, and Bob Hicok’s A Primer, almost inevitably come to mind whenever I read this poem. In different ways, they all feel intimate, like cracking open a window and letting us take a lil peek inside, as a treat. Yet, even if we’re not from Mississippi, or Michigan, or another M-named place, there’s an undeniable recognition in their experience with our experience. Who hasn’t thought, at least once, why is my family like this?

If you’d like to hear more about the quirks of Anna Journey's family (like the skull fragment from medical school her grandfather used as an ash tray) you can do so here: Commonwolf, from 16:48 - 24:46

[lifeinpoetry]

[...] I’ve always been

wanting to disappear like this, bite by bite, into someone’s mouth.

— Anna Journey, from “Upon Asking the Cashier at Kroger to Scan that Old Tattoo of a Barcode on My Forearm,” The Atheist Wore Goat Silk: Poems

[therumpus]

In the first essay, her distress over these events and their catastrophic impact on her personal, professional, and family life is so profound that she calls a suicide line, consumed by guilt, unable to write. A more straightforward memoir might take us step-by-step through the process of putting her life back together, but this is a less direct, more subtle story. Journey approaches this fault-line in her life in archaeological fashion, unearthing the layers of history that surround it, from a long-buried family secret to her glancing acquaintance with the perpetrator of a terrible local crime.

Michalle Gould reviews An Arrangement Of Skin by Anna Journey

[exceptindreams]

Accidental Blues Voice | Anna Journey

“Accidental Blues Voice” Anna Journey

My ex-lover received it at seventeen skiing the steep slope at Wintergreen called

Devil’s Elbow. The early snowmelt along the Blue Ridge had slipped the white limb of a birch

through the crust, jutted that camouflaged tip into the center of the trail. He hit it, full speed,

flipped over his ski poles. One of them split his vocal cords with its aluminum point. He sprawled

in the snow, his pink throat skewered like Saint Sebastian or the raw quiver of his Greek father’s

peppered lamb kebobs. The doctors didn’t let him speak for a year and when he finally tried his choirboy

voice had gravel in it. His tenor had a bloody birch limb in it, had a knife in it, had a whole lower

octave clotted in it, had a wound and a wound’s cracked whisper in it. The first time I heard him

sing in his blues band, five years after the accident, I told him his smoked rasp sounded

exactly like Tom Waits. Like my grandfather sixty years since the iron lung. I couldn’t believe

a growl like that crawled up from the lips of a former Catholic schoolboy. But as he shut off

the halogen overhead—leaving only the ultraviolet of his bedside’s black light—he stroked my cheek,

crooned, Goodnight, Irene. His teeth and his throat’s three-inch scar glowed a green neon.

[lifeinpoetry]

One thought of you will char this city

Anna Journey, from “Confessions of a Firestarter,” Vulgar Remedies