Volume 29, Issue 1
editorial staff
readers
Featuring work byPOETRY Elizabeth Jackson • Gary L. McDowell • B.J. Best • Suzanne Marie Hopcroft • Christopher Ankney • Carol Hamilton • Maggie Kennedy • Ann Pelletier Saudamini Siegris FICTION Wendell Mayo • Lindsey Drager • Charles Haverty • Squire Babcock NONFICTION Man Martin • Geeta Kothari • Judith Hertog • Gretchen VanWormer • Tara Mae Mulroy • Alison Townsend • Kat Meads • Matthew Gavin Frank TRANSLATIONS Patrick Donnelly Stephen D. Miller INTERVIEWS Kat Meads BOOK REVIEWS Robert Campbell • Tyler N. Moore • Shannon K. Winston ART Philippe Pirrip
Matthew Gavin Frank
When we name our state pie after the sweetest thing we can think of, grab your knees, rub at all that syrupy blood collecting at the base of your skull. Predict the inevitable exhaustion, the crash into the orange recliner in the middle of the house in the middle of the country. Remember its common name: Sugar Cream Pie. Remember: in renaming our favorite dessert after a nonsense demonym that even we incompletely understand, the origins of which even we debate on Sundays after football and church and 4x4x4x4 breakfasts (eggs, pancakes, sausage links, bacon strips), we are perpetuating the narrative that we can think beyond sugar, easy sweetness; that there is some relationship between strip and link beyond the source animal; that, in the mysteries of Hoosier, we can usurp everything that’s obvious about us.
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Our Hoosier Cream Pie is so soft we can cut it with our pinkies. So sweet, we can think only of how it moves us, speeds our hearts, allows us to run from towns called Amboy and Amo, Trafalgar and Troy. Running, we can think of all of our dead aunts and uncles, all of the filled-in quarries, their ceilings waiting to collapse, the kinds of state histories buried beneath rock dust and tablespoons of sugar we allow to burn, harden, lacquer the tops of our Hoosier Cream Pies. So sweet, the glucose will undo our knees, and we will forget why we’ve run all the way out here into the silos and soybeans and water towers that are missing their own towns’ names.
READ MORE>The question of identity often begins with a curious tendency among people to ask what before who. That is to say, people feel the need to ascribe certain restrictive identifiers, like gender binary (female-male), before ascribing personhood, as though a person weren’t fully a person at all until proper pronouns or labels can be placed. When someone walks by us swiftly, before we even realize who the person is, our mind makes a quick sweep of the person’s age, gender, race, shape, et cetera. In other words, identifying someone or something is initially dictated by our objective perceptions and our subjective, often habitual, and peripheral exercise of categorizing in types and schemata. In this process, we also negotiate our sense of individuality within a collective framework of difference by avoiding further questions of identity. Yet, it is our individual differences, which are shared and rooted in the very idea of identity, that inform us and enrich our culture; respectively, our culture, our collective effort in attending to our shared differences, helps us grow and better understand ourselves as individuals.
news & events
contests
Zone 3 Press sponsors two book competitions: The Zone 3 Press First Book Award in Poetry and The Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. Winners receive $1,000 and publication of their book, as well as an invitation to give a joint reading at Austin Peay State University with the contest judge.
Zone 3 Press publications are made available from the Zone 3 Store and your favorite booksellers.
Featuring work byPOETRY Elizabeth Jackson • Gary L. McDowell • B.J. Best • Suzanne Marie Hopcroft • Christopher Ankney • Carol Hamilton • Maggie Kennedy • Ann Pelletier Saudamini Siegris FICTION Wendell Mayo • Lindsey Drager • Charles Haverty • Squire Babcock NONFICTION Man Martin • Geeta Kothari • Judith Hertog • Gretchen VanWormer • Tara Mae Mulroy • Alison Townsend • Kat Meads • Matthew Gavin Frank TRANSLATIONS Patrick Donnelly Stephen D. Miller INTERVIEWS Kat Meads BOOK REVIEWS Robert Campbell • Tyler N. Moore • Shannon K. Winston ART Philippe Pirrip
Matthew Gavin Frank
“When we name our state pie after the sweetest thing we can think of, grab your knees, rub at all that syrupy blood collecting at the base of your skull.”
READ MORE>The question of identity often begins with a curious tendency among people to ask what before who. That is to say, people feel the need to ascribe certain restrictive identifiers, like gender binary (female-male), before ascribing personhood, as though a person weren’t fully a person at all until proper pronouns or labels can be placed. When someone walks by us swiftly, before we even realize who the person is, our mind makes a quick sweep of the person’s age, gender, race, shape, et cetera. In other words, identifying someone or something is initially dictated by our objective perceptions and our subjective, often habitual, and peripheral exercise of categorizing in types and schemata. In this process, we also negotiate our sense of individuality within a collective framework of difference by avoiding further questions of identity. Yet, it is our individual differences, which are shared and rooted in the very idea of identity, that inform us and enrich our culture; respectively, our culture, our collective effort in attending to our shared differences, helps us grow and better understand ourselves as individuals.
