Two Poems by Liza Katz Duncan
September 6, 2023
Dispatches
All posts tagged: New Jersey
Review: Not For Nothing: Glimpses Into a Jersey Girlhood by Kathy Curto
April 20, 2021
Reviews
By CARLA ZANONI
Kathy Curto’s memoir, Not for Nothing: Glimpses Into A Jersey Girlhood, is a dynamic and bittersweet retelling of the author’s childhood in which she seeks to understand and reconcile the inner workings of her family while lifting the veil of the American dream. The book, Curto’s first, is told through a series of 52 loosely-connected humorous and poignant vignettes. It takes a close look at her Italian-American family, from behind closed doors as well as in the eyes of the southern New Jersey community around them.
In the Garden of Invasive Species, I Offer Gratitude
December 22, 2020
Dispatches, Poetry
Port Murray, New Jersey and Milwaukie, Oregon
for my grandparents, who did not teach me
how to farm, and yet they scattered these seeds:
How a dunk into scalding water slips
the skin from a peach, leaves it unfuzzed, slick
for canning. How the trick to shucking corn
is one clean jerk. How jars of beet brine turn
eggs to amethysts that stain my fingers,
my lips. They left me to play in cellars
stocked with preserves and jam, in rows of trees
that released chestnut burrs for my bare feet
to find. What would they think of my pea shoots
left unlatticed, free to tendril one noose
after another around other plants,
my slapdash harvest, larder left to chance?
Offerings
June 19, 2019
Dispatches
By JANE WONG
Matawan, New Jersey
Over and over, I dig thin flower stems into the earth, as if mending a hole in an old shirt. The earth buckles at my persistence. I imagine the worms, deep in the ground, ducking each stem in slow, pink frenzy. The flowers are from Safeway along Route 18—dip-dyed daisy petals in blue and pink food coloring. It’s strange to return these gaudy flowers back to the soil. But they were the only ones we could find in the store that weren’t browning at the edges. If you’re going to bring flowers for the dead, they better not be dead themselves.
New Jersey, the Garden State
March 1, 2011
Issue 01, Issue 01 Poetry, Poetry
By RAFAEL CAMPO
“A state of mind,” my grandfather would say,
the sun as fierce as Mr. Cossimo’s
critiques of everything, from his wife’s sauce
to Senator Bill Bradley.
