THRIFT Poetic Arts

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SPECIAL NEWS:

NEW RELEASE – moonShine review – volume 5, issue 1. Order your copy at the THRIFT Store. And visit our moonShine review page for current Submission Guidelines.

CHAPBOOK HIGHLIGHT – Lemonade & Rumors – a chapbook of poetry by Julie Ann Cook. Order your copy today at the THRIFT Store.

Please note THRIFT Poetic Arts Journal is currently on hiatus. Our apologies for any inconvenience, but please check back for updates.

Newest Issue of moonShine review NOW AVAILABLE!

Enter at your own risk. This is a trepidatious issue of twists and turns, one-way streets, and often dead-ends. Where there is innocence, intrigue and deception follow. Shattered pasts meet splintered futures, and the wisest words are spoken by the dead.

Bullies dominate at times, but heroes and heroines shine through. These characters seek, as we all do, to find love; some just pursue the wrong paths. Though despairing in some respects, we must commend these protagonists for their enduring capacities.

And I, in turn, commend the authors this time for their enduring creativity and honest, now and then brutal, discourse.

Thanks to the following contributors: Kenneth Pobo, Janet Ireland Trail, Bob Strother, Jan B. Parker, Gene Hines, Richard Argo, Michael Lucas, Lynn Veach Sadler, Betty Wilson Beamguard, Tonya Staufer, Gary V. Powell, and Featured Photographer Julie Ann Cook.

moonShine review, volume 5 issue 1, is now available at the THRIFT Store.

Visit our moonShine review page for submission guidelines and deadlines, and check out who we are at ABOUT THE MOONSHINE EDITORS.

MOONSHINE REVIEW TO CELEBRATE ANNIVERSARY ISSUE IN FALL 2009

In celebration of our 10th issue in the Fall of 2009, we are requesting new submissions from all photographers and authors published in previous issues of moonShine review. Please stay tuned for more details. If you have questions or you would like to be added to our email distribution list, please contact moonshineeditor@thriftpoeticarts.com.

Editor and Publisher Anne Hicks Among Facilitators at this Year's
South Carolina Writer's Workshop Conference

The Annual South Carolina Writers Workshop Conference will be held October 23-25, 2009, at the Hilton Myrtle Beach Resort. Among the facilitators is Anne Hicks, editor and publisher of moonShine review. For more information, or to sign up for the conference, visit www.myscww.org/conference. (Note that registration opens June 1, 2009.)

moonShine Represented at Recent FemmeFest!

Julie Ann Cook and Claire Armstrong were among the women featured at the second annual Charlotte FemmeFest, held May 30, 2009. Representing moonShine review, Julie and Claire read from their prose works. Check out FEATURED AT FEMMEFEST to learn more about Julie and Claire and to sample their writings.

FemmeFest, held in Charlotte’s NoDa Arts District, featured national, regional, and local female songwriters, visual artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Proceeds from the event benefit the ECO Center for Women at the Center for Community Transitions.

Check out LEMONADE & RUMORS by Julie Ann Cook

Julie Ann Cook presents excerpts from her chapbook at a Reading at Smelly Cat Café.

The individuality of the narrator's voice throughout this collection is deceptively duplicitous. While the honesty here is courageously candid, be warned that, from the outset, this author has the power of poetic license to lie. But also know that there is truth in these poems that transcend the individual to become the human story for each and every one of us.

Order your copy today at the THRIFT Store. And check out our other chapbooks too!

THRIFT 6 Limited Edition: Some copies still available...

	Our sixth issue features cover art by Jason Mullis. Spider’s Creation was composed of three 6'x8' panels, torn down by the hands of Charlotte artists, writers, and musicians and glued to the covers of the sixth issue. Jason’s inspiration for the piece is an African creation story.
Jason takes one last look at Spider's Creation before the destruction.

POETRY CORNER

This “corner” highlights some of the poetry submissions we receive from time to time. You can also visit our POETRY CORNER ARCHIVES for any poets previously featured here. This season’s highlighted poet is David Spiering of Bowling Green, Ohio.

skinny prose: origins
By David Spiering

in a barroom on a
chilly autumn night
professor Dick Pinkflower
sips vodka gimlets—
his cheeks are bright
as raspberries—he says
to me, “read Pinkflower some Poe—
write a paragraph
for Pinkflower on what you’ve
read and Pinkflower’ll tell
you it sucks shit—Pinkflower
has the final word”—I
tell him I write poems;
he says, “repeat after
Pinkflower, ‘I
don’t write poems,
but skinny prose that
sucks shit”—he gets
another gimlet, his teeth
are foxed from smoking
his hair’s smoke-hinted around
his ears and pompadour—
“kid, I’ll teach you to write
narrative poems—in perfect
form”—then I thought
that way he hopes I’ll
immortalize his priggishness
in words bouncing
like a solitary tennis ball

an exhumed pulse meant as movement
By David Spiering

thick-witted people couple-up
while I sit at home drinking beer
and cooking my supper—my hands
have known many secrets my
mouth hasn’t the nerve to tell;
I stand in the night-shaded foliage
thinking about wet beer caches
and wire and how the ground
looks like a moist skull; my diction
swings from my outer edges
in at my soft middle; for
pleasure I run south, my
pelvis feels like it’s a stone crock
my legs are cut out from my bottom,
my eyes long to gleam at
an elderberry palace, slashed
and dumped as punishment,
because what had begun
to feel like reverence, became
a sense of intimate revenge