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Claire Hero’s manuscript “afterpastures” was chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winning entrant in the 2007 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. Here, corporeality shatters in flux, body and identity transmogrified so constantly as to seem a form of gesture, a language, a dance. The world of afterpastures is an infinite series of portals, new wombs in which a thing pulled through becomes beast, becomes feed, becomes dirt, and is again and again resurrected. “Where is death?” ponders a speaker. “Where does death enter our lives?” The questions scarcely scratch the surface of the cyclical, multiplicitous half-lives of Hero’s dark forest dwellers, but the words suggest a reflexivity that, where it falls, is haunting and sudden in its humanity. Beneath a jagged surface awash in spermsalt, leafmould and eggclay, afterpastures is, at its swollen heart, an exercise in empathy, deeply and bloodily felt, for animalia in all its gnashing, clawing, living, dying intensity. The cycle’s sibling, a cover photograph depicting Kate James’ knitted object for experiential synchronicity between woman and horse, depicts no one thing in afterpastures, but means all things to it. [Penned inside] [In afterpastures] [City with the bone still attached] [Mammaled, teat-] —like a furbeast [This flesh, loamy] —he drums while you dance [Over the control tower] [From huntress] Crackbone: [Brood-nursery bred] [Beswamped, the heart] [Domesticity, unforesting fiend,] [The king forest] [Sea-swallowed, severed] [Through the eye] —the half-life, the soon- [Out of the afterpastures] Acknowledgements CAB/NET: “[I am made of many doors]”; Coconut: “Molt”; CROWD: “[Through the eye]” (as “On a White Skull, Found”); DIAGRAM: “Stag,” “[The night was animal]”; Foursquare: “[Brood-nursery bred]”; horse less review: “[Crackbone carries the lamb],” “[Out of the afterpastures],” “[Redness in the grass]”; Octopus: “[From huntress],” “[Mammaled, teat-].” Text Copyright 2008 Claire Hero. |
Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our interest is in bringing you, reader, the very best in contemporary creative writing, full stop. Our goals are for each issue of our journal to submerge you in a birthing tank for gelatinous language monsters, young masses of tentacular foci undulating as directed (in all, at once) by our eclectic stable of contributors; for each new book to seduce and ensnare you, sometimes intangibly, always undeniably; and for you, reader, to be able to draw at least one passage from our banks that prods your mind with a precision and power that feels as if it was written for your eyes alone. To wit and to whet, here is a snippet, a slight nip of our delicious lit mix: New and Upcoming afterpastures, by Claire Hero Caketrain Issue 05 Loving 5_Trope, AGNI, Barrow Street, Believer, Black Warrior, Born, Bound Off, Caffeine Destiny, Canarium, Conjunctions, Controlled Burn, Diagram, Double Room, Drunken Boat, Elimae, FC2, Finishing Line, Fishouse, Flood, Found, Fringe, Frostproof, Future Tense, Ghoti, Harpur Palate, Hobart, Jubilat, Mad Hatters’, Many Mountains Moving, Mid-American, NewPages, New Yinzer, New York Tyrant, Nidus, Nightboat, Noon, Obscure, Parsifal, Pebble Lake, PENNsound, Pudding House, Quick Fiction, Rattapallax, Redactions, Salt, SleepingFish, Spinning Jenny, Starcherone, Steel City Review, Titular, Ubu, Unicorn Mountain, Unsaid, Web del Sol Mourning 3rd Bed, Alterran, Deek, Melic, Press 62
Copyright 2003-2008 Caketrain Journal and Press. Rights to individual works revert to their respective creators. ISSN 1547-6839. How’s Our Driving? Into Befriending Trains? Hosting by Doteasy |
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