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Gilt by Jamie Brenner

   

Jamie Brenner writes beach reads with a twist, including the national bestseller THE FOREVER SUMMER and her latest GILT.  People Magazine call her books, “a delightful escape wherever you are.” Publishers Weekly says of her new novel, GILT, “This beach read sparkles like a diamond.”

Jamie grew up in suburban Philadelphia on a steady diet of Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz novels.  After studying literature at The George Washington University, She moved to New York City to work at HarperCollins Publishers, Barnes&Noble.com and Vogue.com before becoming an author.

Today, she spends her summers visiting the beach towns that inspire her novels.

 

Review of Jamie Brenner, Gilt

by Hannah Michael

No one does family dynamics quite like author Jamie Brenner, and in her newest release, Gilt, proves just that. Similar to last summer’s Blush, Gilt centers around a family business. In this case, it’s Pavlin & Co., the decades old, family-run jewelry empire that changed the game for jewelers everywhere when they began selling diamond engagement rings. Pavlin & Co. told the world that, “A diamond says love.” However, when a publicity stunt gone wrong pits the three Pavlin daughters: Celeste, Elodie, and Paulina, against one another to receive a famous family jewel, the love they once shared is fractured. The fallout over the Electric Rose sends one daughter to start a new life on the shores of Cape Cod, another is left unlucky in love, and the third meets an untimely death. Now, as the company is coming up on their centennial anniversary, long ignored secrets in the Pavlin family are brought to the surface and demand to be reconciled.

The dual timeline of this story really allows readers to immerse themselves in both sides of the Pavlin family. We get to see Elodie, Celeste, and Paulina at a pivotal point in their lives, when the publicity stunt changes their relationships with one another forever. Then, we are in present day with Elodie, Celeste, and Gemma, Paulina’s daughter. Still grappling with her mother’s death, Gemma tries to piece together the past of the family she never knew. She decides to confront the Pavlin’s and claim the inheritance she never got, which she believes includes the Electric Rose. This sets off a series of events that takes readers from New York City to Provincetown, as the Pavlin family is finally forced to dig up the events of the past, and how they each played a role in the aftermath.

Something that has always struck me about Jamie Brenner’s writing, especially when it comes to family stories, is that there is never an absence of love. The Pavlin family may be estranged due to greed and competition, but at their cores, they want nothing more than to reconcile the wrongs of the past. We watch both Celeste and Eloide grapple with a fair amount of guilt that holds them back, but when Gemma reemerges in their lives, they are reminded that there is a future to the Pavlin family name, if they are willing to swallow their pride and move forward together.

Jamie Brenner never fails to deliver the perfect beach read. Gilt has the glamour of the New York City jewelry scene, the heart of the long-awaited family reconciliation, and the small town charm of Provincetown that makes you feel like you’re a part of the community. With fast-paced chapters and a cast of characters you will grow to love, Gilt is the beach read you will be more than happy to take with you into the fall!

Hannah Michael is a current student in the Rosemont College Graduate Publishing program. A lifelong reader, she is seldom found without a book more than ten feet from her person. She is either reading a light beach read, or a gruesome thriller– there is rarely any in-between. Hannah holds a BA in Theatre from DeSales University, and is thrilled that she will soon hold degrees for studying both the loves of her life: musicals and books.

Museum of Things by Liz Chang

   

Liz Chang was the 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate in Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Rock & Sling, Origins Journal, Breakwater Review and Stoneboat Literary Journal, among others. Her chapbook Museum of Things is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in early 2023. Her creative nonfiction recently appeared in Oyster River Pages, and her flash fiction has been published internationally. Chang’s translation of Claude de Burine’s work is anthologized in Paris in Our View from l’Association des Amis de Shakespeare & Company.

 

Review of Liz Chang, Museum of Things

by Anna Huber

Museum of Things by Liz Chang is ekphrastic in nature, allowing the reader to walk through a small selection of objects in the “museum” of the poet’s life. Her story takes time to piece together like a complex, beautiful, and verbal jigsaw puzzle. Chang presents a view of the world that is unique by the objects she displays that people may find familiar, bridging the gap between her and the reader.

From the very first poem, there is a dichotomy of sadness and mysticalness that seems to reverberate across each page. Though very different, the two feelings of sadness and mystical enchantment are captivating, inviting the reader to go deeper, to read the poems again and feel their love and heartbreak trickle down the page in tangible streams. In her writing, Chang has made her story very accessible to her audience.

Focusing on the objects in the poems- a snoopy lamp, a white shelf, a handful of stickers-  nostalgia is present in every poem, bringing somber sweetness to the page. In my own life, I grew up with many objects passed down to me from different people. Though I am very different from the writer, I find some of the objects she writes about to be a sort of a commonality we both share. The vivid descriptions of the objects bring the museum of Chang’s life to fullness. In those descriptions the poems become honest. These objects allow the reader to walk through her memories displayed in a way that nurtures. As objects were at times passed down to her, Chang passes a part of those memories down to the reader and it is mystic.

Chang’s ordering of words and use of language are masterful. She conveys her history as a girl in a way that is magical and reminiscent of fairytales. Her poem, “It’s a Lamp, Charlie Brown” shows the reader a glimpse into her life where grandparents live in a far away land and she deals with the trauma of a helicopter accident that seemed to put a hole in the haziness of childhood. While the balloons and kites in the poem may be weightless, her words are heavy with grief.

Like balloons, Chang pulls on those emotions and memories to the surface where they can tangle with her own understanding of life. She nurtures and comforts the reader with her life history so masterfully in these poems. They are sweet on both sides and yet hard as rocks in the center. These poems are made to be read and should not be passed over.

Anna Huber is a student at Monmouth University in New Jersey. She currently works as a writing assistant at Monmouth’s Writing Services and is in the process of completing an undergraduate thesis in literature. Her love for literature began at a young age as her mother is an English teacher who read to Anna often. After graduating in May 2023, She plans to pursue a career in higher education and impart an understanding and greater respect for literature to the next generation of students.

ONLINE BONUS: Italy

My cousin sold 2 paintings for the down payment
We were all there my mother my grandmother my aunts
Maybe we were dead
Maybe my mother was dead
I was in bed with a tall good-looking stranger who offered me a joint
We could not close the curtains
His body tasted like Christ’s
My mother and I arranged the furniture
My grandmother moved the furniture though she could hardly walk
The teacups she stacked one on the other fell 2 stories to the floor
My stranger disappeared
My uncle tried to kiss me
I could no longer use my writing desk
I tried to move out
I tried to move on
There was no sex
Maybe there will never be any sex
The man selling the apartment sent me to a Manhattan address

Paula Brancato is a NY-based, Sicilian-American writer, filmmaker and Harvard MBA. Her literary awards include The Booth Poetry Prize, Danahy Fiction Prize and Brushfire Poet Award. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Mudfish, Bomb Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly, Ambit Magazine, Georgetown Review, Litchfield Review and Southern California Anthology. Paula taught poetry and screenwriting at USC and Stony Brook Southampton and is a graduate of Hunter College and LA Film School.

ONLINE BONUS: Retreat

The low, washed buildings swamped in white dunes,

the afternoon courtyards laden in silence;

I walk the solid beach, wind plucking

at hair, clothes, my very soul.

 

I am here to contemplate,

meditate, whatever –

yet it is difficult to tear

memory from teases and taunts.

 

Sole seagull so high up in the stratosphere must

symbolize something—at least it would

in literature or art, but in reality,

I cannot grasp it.

Ray Greenblatt is an editor on the Schuylkill Valley Journal and teaches a “Joy of Poetry” course at Temple University-OLLI.He has written reviews for the Dylan Thomas Society, the John Updike Society and Joseph Conrad Today. His latest book of poems is Until the First Light (Parnilis Media, 2020).

Words Remain Unsealed

At Tupperware parties
The ladies sold nothing but containers
Full of nothing

Hostesses in hose and skirts
Demo-ed the patented airtight seal
Taught housewives how to burp
Like expectant madonnas at a new mother class

The optimism of a starburst lid
Avocado Green
Burnt Orange
Harvest Gold
Cheap hydrocarbons in every kitchen

Genius commercial speech
Plastic dyed a hue named for the color of ripening wheat

Grasshopper oil pumpjacks
Fueled the Tupperware party revolution
Powered by women converted to capital
And party games

*

When I interviewed at the big Silicon Valley tech company the young woman in the break room
saw the red apples among the cornucopia of bananas, grapes, oranges, snacks and kombucha.
She said, “Damn it. There aren’t any green apples. I can’t think unless I have the green apples”

Amy Beth Sisson is struggling to emerge, toad-like, from the mud outside of Philly. Her poetry has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, The Night Heron Barks, and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon and is upcoming in The River Heron Review and The Shoutflower. She is currently an MFA student studying poetry at Rutgers Camden and a Graduate Assistant for the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.

Bless Amtrak

for their quiet cars, no raised voices, no phone calls
all devices muted or used with headphones
but how about a party car blasting Chili Peppers
passengers dancing with strangers
they sneak off with at the next stop

what of a weapons car where macho men
with shaved heads and skull tattoos
can flaunt their gun obsession disorder
while the rest of us are spared the sight
of a Glock 19 or an AK-47

or maybe a widows’ car, Kleenex at every seat
where you don’t have to explain
smeared eye shadow, mismatched socks
or the strange sounds escaping your mouth
a moan, a sigh, a sob, a shriek

and no one stares

Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

Retired

I was stationed near Biloxi, Mississippi,
before the time of Martin Luther King.
One night I went to a restaurant
with some white guys from South Philly,
but the man told us go around back.
And if we got stopped by the police,
forget about comin’ home.
You asked me why I wear this uniform.
Because it’s the way I get respect
from those ladies sitting over there
who think I’m some kind of general.
They talk to me when I bring them gifts,
just like the young men do.
I spend my days at this coffee shop.
People think I’m important.
I give them advice or conversation
or money when I’m not broke.

Robert Coles has lived in and around Philadelphia most of his life. He writes, “Since 1990, I have published over one hundred poems in various literary journals, anthologies, and magazines. My most recent poems have appeared in the summer issue of Philadelphia Stories, 2021, and I placed as a semifinalist in the 26th Macguffin Poet Hunt Contest, 2021.”

My Father and His Sky

Lead foot in a Lincoln, nothing stops an object
so completely in motion.

My father has seen cornfields bigger than
the sheeted sea of my bed,

vast as ever, vaster without him.

He used to sit on the edge of my bed
and talk about the sky.

He’d throw constellations like pop-flies
through the windows,

stipple clouds with his swollen hands.

Children listen to sky stories as long
as they end in sunrises.

I didn’t beg the curtain of dawn from
his grinning mouth—

I wanted something newer than mornings.

My father isn’t new anymore but his car is,
black and big-rimmed.

He rattles a century of coins across
Pennsylvania,

shaking them loose every mile.

I watch him in the curve of the Earth now,
a flickering corona.

He is the reaching horizon or someone
reaching for the horizon,

loosed by the wind and a rest-stop coffee.

I think he might still sing with the radio
like the leather seat is me.

 

I think he hears the hills sing their mappings
in return, their topography,

the echo of blue dreams in the brush.

Men can fly in the open like this,
wingtips splayed.

They tell as many stories of the sky
as the hot asphalt

is willing to listen to.

Dina Folgia is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was an honorable mention for the 2021 Penrose Poetry Prize, and a 2020 AWP Intro Journals Project nominee. Her Her work, which has been nominated for Best of the Net and the AWP Intro Journals Project, has appeared in Ninth Letter, Dunes Review, Stonecoast Review, Sidereal Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, and others. She is a poetry reader for Blackbird and Storm Cellar. Keep up with her work at https://dinafolgia.com/

Baby Long Legs

I mourn two feet of hair so I arrange ragweed
in a halo until I start sneezing. Sometimes I call
myself Bulb Queen, sovereign burr-catcher,
playing house in the phlox like a big girl.
Sunlight arrives on Earth at 100 decibels
but still slips through spring leaves silent.
There’s a chalk line around a corpse
in my yard that still hasn’t been identified.
There’s a seed pod too, hanging from a sprout
and it’s probably better I lost sight of it
or I might have wanted to pluck it again.
Would you believe me if I told you that
daddy long legs aren’t spiders? Don’t ask
me what they are because I might say aphids,
round in the center, wreathed in knees, could
spin in a circle without moving their head.
If I thought I could stand the tickling I would
smear my scalp opilionid, something finally
living, ouroboros as head eating leg eating leg
eating leg. I don’t need to be a spider. Anything
can throw a web even without silk glands, even
if tripping over joints and wayward grasses seems
like the only thing left to do. I could cocoon
if I wanted. I could suck the water from my chest
until I’m nothing but leg. I could eat my skin,
huskicide, dry like irises once bulbous, now
crisped in the shape of paper-thin wings,
translucent. I could dehydrate, too.

Dina Folgia is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was an honorable mention for the 2021 Penrose Poetry Prize, and a 2020 AWP Intro Journals Project nominee. Her Her work, which has been nominated for Best of the Net and the AWP Intro Journals Project, has appeared in Ninth Letter, Dunes Review, Stonecoast Review, Sidereal Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, and others. She is a poetry reader for Blackbird and Storm Cellar. Keep up with her work at https://dinafolgia.com/

 

Three Dead Mice

The twilight gloom buries me, its weight landing heavier on me than on my husband or our three young children. We climb from the car and plod up the asphalt path, wielding a shovel and two garden spades. Now I hold the shovel and the hand of our toddler daughter while my husband gently empties a plastic bag of carcasses into the hole he has just dug in a lightly wooded hill. We stand next to him, silent witnesses on the blacktop outside my third-grade classroom. Our older two, seven and not quite four years old, are on guard, ready to scoop the displaced dirt into the hole with the spades when sufficient time or maybe a few reverent words have passed. If anybody can think of some.

 

It felt like a lucky day, this first April Sunday of daylight savings time. The gift of time, an extra hour, was suddenly squandered in panic and hasty planning as we jumped up from the dinner table, grabbed tools and a flashlight, and headed to school. On the ride, my oldest soothed me with words of hope, reminding me I might be worried for nothing. All would be well. Maybe I remembered just in time.

Not so, we discovered, upon unlocking the classroom door and being flooded with the scent of decomposition in the air. Not so.

 

Until dinner, I had enjoyed day ten of an eleven-day spring hiatus, almost refreshed. Tumbling into the break, I was exhausted—tires flattened, no steam left in my engine, out of gas, and no longer finding fumes to run on. So for the first time in my career, I pledged to take the word “break” literally. I hit pause on planning, on preparatory reading, on school-related emails, and even on laying out the year’s final, ambitious projects. For eleven days my focus would be my own three children, my own family, and my own home. With any luck, I might spare a thought for myself.

 

Even that final weekend felt celebratory. The Sunday stone-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling that perhaps every teacher knows, even those who love our work and cherish the children for whom we labor, was missing. We chattered around the dinner table, discussing what games or movies we might relax into that night.

 

Privately, though, with only one day left in my self-imposed “clean break,” I was slipping away. As we talked I began a mental inventory of my classroom. I would arrive on Tuesday an hour earlier than usual, set up the book display for a new project, review the notes from our most recent math work, replace the art hanging in the room with more recent examples, and of course, feed the…

 

Oh…oh…no!

 

Dinner screeched to a halt. Eyes on me. My eyes were wide and brimming with tears and I stumbled through an explanation. “I locked the door…I thought…I have eleven days, I’m taking eleven days…I even left my bag. My bag with all my stuff…so I wouldn’t do work…but I forgot…I forgot the mice!”

 

They know the saga of the mice—the mother in my class who donated rodents to the group, the class trip to the abundantly kind small animal vet when one of the mice experienced seizures, and the arrival of additional mice when nature had taken its course and they grew from three mice to…a lot more.

 

Three dead mice. Three dead mice. Or thirty. Or thirteen. I can’t bring myself to remember the number. What is certain is that a young mother mouse, captive to a class of eight and nine-year-olds, was desperate enough to devour every one of her litter before succumbing herself. Her cannibalism was not a capricious act driven by natural impulse, but the direct result of my forgetfulness and negligence.

 

It is the result of the insurmountable exhaustion to which I succumbed. It is the natural consequence of unmet basic needs.

 

We complete the burial, our still presence the only ritual we can bring to the moment. We do our duty in somber silence. Quiet compassion replaces assurances.

 

I have never felt so guilty. Or so loved.

 

As planned, I arrive at my classroom an hour early. I wander through routine tasks and brace myself for the morning check-in circle. Yesterday I wrote a letter for the children to take home, the same explanation of the demise of the mice I offer them this morning—the unvarnished truth, minus any description of the wholly missing and partially consumed remains that we saw when we entered the room that Sunday.

 

My children—my classroom children—and I hold a ritual for our furry friends. They prepare a short reading, some final words, planned and impromptu, and a moment of silence. With that, we added a sticks-and-stones marker to the burial spot.

 

When a small group of children asks with heartfelt curiosity whether they might dig up the remains to have a look at the decomposing mice for themselves, I decline. I am not squeamish about such things, but this time I side with those who can’t bear the thought over the natural interest of those other few.

 

The demise of the mice leads to difficult conversations with a few class families and I spend the rest of the year working to heal relationships, to restore trust with the children. The demise of the mice starts conversations with my own family as well. It takes another year and twice daily use of a nebulizer in response to worsening stress-induced asthma, but I finally act.

 

I devise a plan to meet my basic needs, to escape the consequences of ignoring them for so long. I resign my position to build a teaching life that I can survive. For the next fourteen years, that means homeschooling with my own three and teaching other people’s children only on a part-time, occasional basis. Unlike that poor mother mouse, I realize I was called to this work. I am not held captive by it. Tormented by my choice to leave the classroom—until about 20 minutes into my new life—I begin to breathe freely again. After two months, the nebulizer gathers dust on a shelf in the closet.

Diane Webber loves to learn. From the suburbs of Philadelphia, she has learned alongside young children, young adults, and every age between for decades. Diane continues to teach, coach teachers and families, and learn for a living, but now pours more of her energy into writing essays as well as nonfiction and historical fiction for young readers. She is a current student in Spalding University’s cross-genre MFA program.