The Rialto Books Review Vol.032--AVAILABLE NOW
The Rialto Books Review Vol.032 is now available for purchase. This Summer, we offer five exciting new works for your enjoyment.
The second canto of Casey Dwyer’s extraordinary new poem, “The Descent", opens this issue. In this section of the poem, whose form is inspired by the work of Dante, Peregrino hesitates to begin his journey and learns information as to the purpose of his descent.
A wonderful poem by Marie Brennan follows, “The Rose-Dimmed Tide”, a precise and unsettling piece on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. Once again Brennan chooses an unusual and lovely form, in this case the “tritina”, invented by American poet Marie Ponsot. Due to this poem’s short length, we cannot offer an excerpt, but we highly encourage our readers to seek it out in Vol.032.
Next we offer “Out of the Wilderness”, by Adam Kozak, a moving sonnet sequence whose speaker struggles in a spiritual mire until he comes to the Queen of Light, who leads him to peace and triumph.
Part One of “An Account of an Old House”, a new story by Franklin Scott, follows. This is poignant tale of a young man spiraling into self-destruction whose course is arrested by an unexpected invitation to join a fashionable trip to Europe. He arrives early to Dublin with a friend, and ends up on his way to an old house in the West of Ireland.
We close with Act One of “Mayerling”, a new tragedy by Alexandra Block. This play recounts the events leading up to the double suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary and his mistress, the Baroness Mary Vetsera, in 1889 at the hunting lodge, Mayerling, an event which indirectly led to the First World War. The first Act of the play may be read in Vol.032 in its entirety.
We hope you enjoy these excerpts from Vol.032 of The Rialto Books Review.
The Descent
Canto Two
by Casey Dwyer
Peregrino falters in fear before the journey begins. In response, Eliot tells of the impetus of his mission to find Peregrino and lead him through hell and beyond.
O move me now to live and write,
My God, Great Singing Voice behind what moves
In day, or dawn, or senseless night.
Now send angels to guide and prove,
As first, when winged Muse unloosed my tongue
Invoking songs that sang of love.
Calliope, whose name is sung
Beneath the voice of all who sing their verse
To match the mourning of your son:
Combine with stars and blackened hearse;
Give me words, set as stones, to the purpose
As in the Duomo, where songs are heard
By the work of silent arches,
Carved and set not to hold, but to bring forth
Cantors’ sacred songs undaunted. ...
“The Rose-Dimmed Tide” by Marie Brennan may be read in its entirety in Vol.032.
Out of the Wilderness
by Adam Kozak
I
The vulture soars overhead grim and black
To search and watch and grasp and tear away,
I shudder but refuse to turn my back
And shake a fist raised high as if to say
“Not today, friend! Not today, not just yet!”
This is the summer of my youth foretold,
I see the seasons now, the unpaid debt
Of time unknown to young, well-known to old,
As age merges this time with time unbound
Each moment faster faster ticks anon
Until a lifetime turns to seconds ground
And like a second is now swiftly gone.
Let the grim vulture come and find a soul
With love and wit and cheer to pay my toll. …
An Account of an Old House
by Franklin Scott
Nought but peaceful drudgery, when compounded with night’s pollution, grew disturbing enough to me, when I tried to sleep, that I would get into a run down old car, purchased just prior to the Great Recession, and set off to burn fuel, as well as a putrid oil of the body and combustible vapors of the soul. I swore that my depressive spiral, a waste that begot more waste, of physical substance, of time, of potential, of money perhaps most of all, would not outlast the snowmen used to decorate cold aluminum. Yet, there he was, being retired from his watch, by way of a spectacle of trucks, men, and ladders, contracted long ago to work then at our late hour with minimal disruption to life, whereas I had no such mechanism to relieve me of my station. Flowers were being hoisted to replace my tinsel hemmed colleague, holding in their false glamor no promise of renewal for me. Life, or its representation, continued around me, while the natural agents of life’s progress had quit me, leaving me to collect regrets and anguish until their level grew so high in the abstract that they spilled into my organs the evidence of my dysregulation. For what? In some respects it is wholly clear to me how I refined my misery, although I labored by the light of industry with happiness as my goal. Would I that such was sufficient. …
“Mayerling: Act One” by Alexandra Block may be read in its entirety in Vol.032.
You can read this journal with others on Papertrail.
