"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty
Deadline: After first 500 submissions are received.
While Aji publishes poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, graphic art, and photographs on all subjects in every issue, the theme for our spring 2017 issue is music, the tempo of a city street, the dissonance of a conversation—what are the melodies, the harmonies, and the rhythms of your life? Send us work on music of all types, classical, jazz, experimental, pop, and of course the thundering and whispering of storms, the jangling of traffic, the noise in your head that won’t let you sleep. We’re a small staff—we will close submissions after the first 500 submissions. www.ajimagazine.com
I grew up in Hurricane Alley, eastern North Carolina, so the preparation for these big storms is something I learned early. Hurricane Matthew has ripped through Haiti, and is on his way to the US East Coast. All my provisions are laid in, flashlights and emergency equipment in place and ready, and I’ve battened down as much as I can. But sometimes Mama Nature’s just too big and unpredictable for any kind of preparation.
Make art about preparing the best you can.
10/5/2016
Thinking a lot today about all the ways people find their way to, or demonstrate faith. Took me immediately to one of my top three favorite songs, The Mountain, by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer.
Excerpted Lyrics by Dave Carter
Some build temples and some find altars, some come in tall hats and robes spun fine. Some in rags, some in gemstone halters, some push the pegs back in line.
I see the mountain, the mountain comes to me, I see the mountain and that is all I see.
Make art about temples or altars or shrines, faith in some unexpected way.
10/6/2016
Road Angel Andrea at Walmart today told me about her grandmama teaching her to sew, first by making curtains, long straight hems, she said, over and over again, summer curtains, winter curtains with their heavy lining. She said her grandmama was patient but tough, making her tear out crooked stitches, and try again til she got it right. “I learned to take my time,” she said. “I learned to take my time, look ahead of the foot, and how a pair of curtains can make all the difference in a room.”
Make art about curtains. Or about what you learned from an elder.
The most recent book from one of my always favorite poets, Pattiann Rogers.
Ms. Rogershas published eleven books of poetry; two book-length essay collections, The Dream of the Marsh Wrenand The Grand Array; and A Covenant of Seasons, poems and monotypes, in collaboration with Joellyn Duesberry. She is the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for poetry. She lives in Colorado.
“I believe Pattiann Rogers walks the world at night when we are sleeping. Her poems are translations of our dreaming life—what we know to be true but fail to remember. We read her words, sentence by sentence, image by image, and return to all that is beautiful, mysterious, and erotic.” —Terry Tempest Williams
“Pattiann Rogers is a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed. Her language, unmarred by clichés, springs up out of a sense of how various and endlessly amazing are the forms of life and the human ability to notice them.” —Denise Levertov
“How the densely detailed, thickly textured, imaged stanzas of Pattiann Rogers result in so much light-as-air wonderment is surely one of the greater questions—one of the greater magics—of contemporary poetry. But however it happens, we must be thankful—for both the science text and the psalter of her work, for both the physical abundance and for the spirit flimmering over it.” —Albert Goldbarth
Dreamt I sat by a river, stacking stones, gray pebbles, that I built into a small curved wall, then dismantled, piece by piece, the stones smooth and slick in my hands.
Rocks act as the memory for our planet. By examining their elemental makeup and physical structure, scientists can understand the history of the earth. The fossil records left in rock formations literally describe our planet’s journey through time. Seen in this light, even the stones and pebbles we find in our backyards are pieces of the ancient past and the secrets of how we came to be in this vast universe.
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”– T.E. Lawrence
Ms. Rogers
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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