It’s time for a new feature here on the blog. Now that it’s submission season at Runestone again, we thought it would be nice to hear from our previous contributors.

First up is Zach Weber, who allowed us to publish his simply elegant poem, “Teddy Bear,” in volume one.

First question: How do you make time to write?
While not having a job as an undergraduate definitely gave me extra time to get writing done, I think the discovery that I write most naturally in the morning allowed me to be more efficient with my output of work. I can try as hard as I want to grind out new lines late at night, but my mind is often too clouded at the end of the day—and no one wants to read a clouded poem.

Could you tell us three books you love?
Three books I’ve been reading religiously are:

All-American Poem, by Matthew Dickman
Come On All You Ghosts, by Matthew Zapruder,
and What the Living Do, by Marie Howe—though I could easily list more.

What was the hardest part to get right in your poem, “Teddy Bear”?
The difficulty I usually face in writing poems is achieving that level of emotional seriousness—however, given the personal nature of “Teddy Bear,” that wasn’t the problem. I’d say the real challenge was in grammatical flow; the poem itself is one complete sentence, so I had to be extremely particular with how I divided up lines and stanzas with breaks, commas, and dashes.

Suppose the piece you published in Runestone had a soundtrack, much like the Book Notes at Large-Hearted Boy. What song(s) would it be, and why?
This question troubles me the most! I might have to go with “Oh Messy Life,” by Cap’n Jazz. It has the right amount of childish angst and raw energy, while the opening lyrics, “Fire is motion / Work is repetition” really strike a chord with my views on the subject matter in “Teddy Bear.”

What are you up to these days?
Currently, I’m working as a TA in a Houston high school, while preparing all the materials for MFA applications. I’ll be applying to around 10 programs for Creative Writing, so hopefully one of them accepts me!

Thank you, Zach, for taking the time to answer our questions and for thinking of Runestone as a home for your work.

Meet the contributor:

Zachary Weber graduated from the University of Houston with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. He has served as the reviews editor for Glass Mountain, and his other work has appeared in The Aletheia, Silver Birch Press, Glass Mountain, and The Blue Route.   

Reviewed by Cole Pentico

In his new novel, Uncle Janice, Matt Burgess depicts the life of an undercover cop in New York. Burgess creates a complex character in 24-year-old Janice Itwaru, as well as the entire force of NYPD “Uncles” (undercover narcotics officers) out making buys (drug busts) on a daily basis—shown through Janice’s partner, Chester Tevis, “ghosting” her to make busts; “Eddie Murphy” being the comic relief at the station; and the myth of the greatest uncle in the field, “Charlie”.

This novel is a down-to-earth analysis of the life of an undercover cop, not an average CSI embellishment where the DNA lab comes through just before the credits roll. The characters and the situations they confront aren’t morally black and white. Burgess even goes as far as to use modern references, poking fun at things like Goodfellas, The Godfather, and EDM (electric dance music) club kids and the stereotypes they embody—which are sometimes painfully accurate, as in the story of Henry Vega killing a cop and chomping down spaghetti dinners to try to get his foot in the door of a bigger operation.

Burgess creates an enthralling story of undercover cops because the protagonist, Janice, is so flawed. The reader learns through flashbacks that she has cut her teeth in the narcotics division and has by no means had an easy road on her way to becoming an uncle.

Young, brown, from the city, no college, desperate to move up, single and childless, without anyone to collect her pension if she got killed in the line of duty, she looked on paper like the perfect uncle, a narco lieutenant’s dream.

The more the reader learns about Janice, the more he/she roots for her and wants her to break through the glass ceiling—to make a huge bust. Janice is revealed as a character little by little and becomes more endeared to the reader with her anecdotes of struggle, sibling rivalry, and obligation to take care of her mother, Vita, who suffers from a degenerative mental disorder.

Janice worried that her mother—who started everything early: marriage, pregnancy, dementia, dinner prep—had deteriorated to the point where she had mistaken her for an intruder.

Janice also has to deal with the increasing pressure from her boss to make arrest quotas and the suspicion that somebody from internal affairs is snooping around her unit. As the pressure mounts, Janice has to consider poaching buys from fellow uncles, or even persuading young men into breaking the law so she can hit her quota and get the promotion she so desperately needs.

Burgess has succeeded in creating all the tension and entertainment of undercover cops wearing wires and trying to get confessions from lowlifes without all the glitz and glamour of melodrama.

Uncle Janice is a fantastic, gritty novel about the real hardship that every beat cop has to go through, not only to make it onto the team (in this case, the Uncles), but the struggle they live with at work, home, and every hour of every day.

Reviewed by Deziree Brown

“I feel most colored when I am thrown against / a sharp white background” writes Claudia Rankine, quoting Zora Neale Hurston, in Rankine’s fifth collection of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric. She links Hurston’s experience to the recent experiences of Venus and Serena Williams, reminding us how far we have not come in the fight for equality.

Rankine’s book of prose poetry is broken into seven sections that paint a bird’s eye view of the black body’s trials, gaining momentum as the lyric continues. She covers all the bases, commanding you to become her and to be her through the use of 2nd person:

The real estate woman, who didn’t fathom she could
have made an appointment to show her house to you,
spends much of the walk-through telling your friend, re-
peatedly, how comfortable she feels around her.
Neither you nor your friend bothers to ask who is making her feel
uncomfortable.

Her relentless authenticity makes readers’ skin crawl. No matter how the reader identifies, Rankine forces the reader to encounter the shame and profiling black bodies endure through her use of simple language. The heavy-handed bluntness she incorporates into her prose leaves no room for excuses or comfort; she is determined to portray the experience as plainly as she can.

She writes: “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s / buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard,” creating a social justice text and putting words to the repeated experiences of black people being told to ‘move on’ from the past.

Rankine inserts artwork and photography into her poetry, displaying a mastery of imagery that is evident in her previous collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2004). The image placement is intentional, giving us a needed break from sections of intense prose. This brilliant insertion of imagery is so different from the rest of the book, inviting the reader to drink it in.

Carrie Mae Weems‘ photo, Blue Black Boy, comes before Stop-and-Frisk, an account of racial profiling; it resonates with the tone and adds another layer of depth to the reader’s experience throughout this text. The boy’s somber face echoes throughout the piece until the end:

The charge the officer decided on was exhibition of speed.
I was told, after the fingerprinting, to stand naked. I stood
naked. It was only then I was instructed to dress, to leave,
to walk all those miles back home.

And still you are not the guy and still fit the descrip-
tion because there is only one guy who is always the guy
fitting the description.

Citizen is a call for the removal of racial blinders that many Americans wear comfortably over their eyes. The unapologetic prose lays bare the racial conditions of present-day America, and demands an end to the micro-aggressions and stereotypes that plague America’s society.

Toward the end of the book, Rankine lists the names of four black men that have died at the hands of police brutality: Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Gardner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown. After their names, she lists “in memory” until it fades into the bottom of the page, a powerful indication of the future casualties she predicts:

because white men can’t
police their imagination
black men are dying

“I feel most colored when I am thrown against / a sharp white background,” Rankine writes, and by the end of this book my body said it with her.

Citizen gives a voice to the many brown bodies that navigate 21st century America. Her words paint a plague that haunts each black’s psyche; a monstrous pain that stems from racialized injustice and the world’s unwillingness to accept of the color of their skin.