SOL Books

The off-key clarinetist will never hit the high C
in ”Tequila,” but she keeps on blowing
and the marching band keeps on enlarging
its column right corners in the final rehearsal
before school begins. All August

a school daze has been approaching
like a glow-worm. The fifth-year senior
has tattooed his forearm with a naked woman.
In the parking lot he is flexing and flexing
until his veins pop up like autumn sedum.

He drains down a beer he bought with fake ID
from Maine. He guns his truck engine.
In a month he will drop out
for hunting season, bag a buck and honk
past the school displaying the antlers.

A refugee from the sailing team picks up
a class schedule and admires the wiry lines
of the girl who’s hanging on to the school’s
smoothest drug dealer. Her fingers
are getting high and still higher up his thighs.

Tomorrow the ringing bells will summon ghosts
of former students, dead in Iraq. The words
new students are learning will challenge the books
where they live where they murmur where they
memorize graffiti and undress their syllables.

April 25th, 2010 | Category: Gigs | Leave a comment

Two trains are racing as two trains
are wont to do, one at 50 mph
from Memphis, engineer chewing
on a blues tune, flicking it around
his tongue like a toothpick.

The other train is hustling up from Albuquerque
at 70 mph, engineer longing for his darling,
singing an empty-saddle song, tipping his hat.
Which train will arrive at Tulsa first?
Memphis is on Central Time,

Albuquerque on Mountain Time, and between them,
heading west, a tornado is expected
though it’s guesswork which train track
will be ripped up, and besides,
heading east is a fleecy green sedan

blasting rap, windows down, bass thumping
while prairie dogs, terrified,
hump it back to their holes. In my eighth grade
Rate times Time equals Distance problems,
it was always two honest trains chug chugging,

no railroad company wanting a government bailout
or union concession. We never had prairie dogs
or tornados. And there were never any
rapper wannabes distracting the engineer
as you know that engineers are wont

to be distracted down the track at some
railroad crossing in some town where some
baseball player who can’t hit a pig’s ass
with a banjo, bears down at batting practice
in a semipro league and smashes

a slider over right field into the window
of an oncoming train. And which train?
And what’s the rap distraction?
And why do trains want to race to Tulsa in the first place?
We never asked why the trains were racing.

So, between the blues in my backyard someday train,
the darlin darlin my stallion’s named Marvin train
and the rapper wannabe Yo homie don’t smoke my sedan,
America’s children are solving the story problems
of tomorrow. Call them the M generation:

children IM and TM in the AM and PM and listen
to their FMs, or is it their iPods? Their problems
are Greenland and Antarctica melting, raising
the world’s waterline by twenty feet. Which Philippine island
will flood first? And how will children resolve the music

of Muslims and Jews? They will create clichés,
find that the good old days are still good, and still
old, find that fewer people ride trains when they
could be burning up fuel and fooling themselves
most of all of the time as people are wont to do.

April 21st, 2010 | Category: Gigs | Leave a comment

I saw my father standing
outside the bus station

with his life jumbled
and knotted in nylon duffel

bags; I pass him thinking
how he was similar

to the wind flicking rain
from its hands; after

he passes from my sight,
I search for the figurative

father, giving council
unprejudiced by nature

or other concerns,
a father I observe

kneading out his dreams’
kinks, using the skill

of his cunning to graft
them toward fruition.

April 17th, 2010 | Category: My Father's Gloves | Leave a comment

This week, the Reading Minnesota blog is featuring Connie Colwell Miller. Read a poem from her collection, Bodywearers, below.

I-94 Westbound through Minnesota

On a roundbale, a red-tailed hawk,
and farther down, fields of corn,
waxy eartips bent earthward
in breeze. Behind me, a swayback
barn and a silo with glint on its head.
Later, milk cows, their flanks still
and hocked, and then the lakes —
sun-side in shimmer, set-side in oil.

So, after a lengthy season of snow-sunk
cars and frozen knees and every window
cleanly frosted over, I come to this: one
perfect July evening in northern Minnesota.
And with it, the beginnings of something
like understanding. Tired Norwegian
immigrants pushing north and north
on the hottest summer days, dirtsweat
trickling down the folds in their thick
skin, and still they keep on northward.
Until suddenly — a day like this.

April 13th, 2010 | Category: Bodywearers | Leave a comment

At night, I see the dead
in my dreams. Rotting,
stinking, they become
the stuff of root and earth.

By day, I see the dead
on the roads. Raccoons,
housecats, chunks of deer,
bloated or stiff with rigor mortis.

One day, these corpses remind me,
your mother will die. One day,
too, your father. You must burn
their lovely bodies — the skulls and palms,

even the uterus that held you.
So I pose my parents near the window,
snap their pictures, hoping
to capture their souls,

just in case some mighty god does not.

April 9th, 2010 | Category: Bodywearers | Leave a comment

doors left open
keys dangle like forks in the ignition
a Polaroid of a man playing a piano
rosary beads hang from the rear view mirror
a wet handprint on the dashboard
chip in the windshield looks like a cat’s eye
an open black leather purse with a silver clasp
a paper bag filled with beef jerky wrappers
tissues with spots of dried blood
a Polaroid of a woman in white pajamas
three tan bottles of prescription pills
two unrolled sleeping bags tossed in the back seat
one condom, foil folded at the corners
driver’s side empty
passenger empty
I.V. tubes strewn about
on the floor a plastic bag of saline bleeds
a hospital bracelet on the ground outside the driver’s door
the dome light flickers
one set of footprints heading toward the water

April 5th, 2010 | Category: Pacific | Leave a comment

And what better way to get things started with one of our authors, Scott R Welveart, being featured in a local paper. Here is a poem from his collection.

Waiting to Meet Harrison Ford at the End of His Driveway

If they stand on their tiptoes and weave their heads
around the gate and trees, they can see him hammering
a rail to a fence, his shirt wet in the armpits,
a tool belt hanging off one hip. From a distance
he is any man in any town, fixing a fence, sweating
his shirt.

In her mind, he is her father raising his hand
to a troublesome daughter, a girl who bends
the nails while hammering and bangs crescent moons
into the wood, and as his father,
he is saving a life, his arm stretched past the roof’s edge,
taut and sinewy, catching a fallen son
who chased a shingling nail too far.

They split a sack lunch and sit
down outside his gate and lean back to the midday sun.
They close their eyes and his pounding
rifles through the valley like a bullwhip, like a starship
jumping into lightspeed.

When they awake, their cheeks
are burned and tight, tanned like a horse’s saddle,
and the sandwiches are gone.
There is a note in its place:
You make a damn fine sandwich, young lady.
His hammering dances between the trees all around them.

April 1st, 2010 | Category: Pacific | Leave a comment

Sol Books has been featured on the Reading Minnesota blog, a forum for Minnesota based publishers and authors.

In the near future, Connie Colwell Miller will appear on the blog.

March 20th, 2010 | Category: Pacific | Leave a comment

by Dominic Ward

Planning a work is a vital step in the process of writing. Many writers simply choose to neglect this stage, allowing the form of their work to build up around them. It is rumoured that Stephen King wrote in this manner, just jumping in at the deep end and learning the book that way. While I agree it is a beautiful romance, this method is severely flawed. Unless you are extremely well-practiced in this ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants’ technique — and in possession also of an amazing sensibility that has been honed by years of hard slog — the results are likely to be somewhat discouraging. I personally know of a writer who tried this method (or lack thereof) and ended up with an absolute confusion of a work. Yes, it may have been cut of a fine fabric, but nothing of its fibres made any sense whatsoever. It was not published.

Time must be taken to place all the concepts that form your work into a concrete whole, for only then can they really take voice. And this planning, really, is all about arrangement. In the same way that the music that treats us the most more often than not follows a tight arrangement, literature must also do this. William Burroughs liked to arrange his ideas in a method he labelled ‘cut-up’. J.G Ballard envisioned a more traditional construct for his novels. I allow my intuition to inform this process of arrangement. Whatever method you use to arrange and collate your concepts, it must produce a strong, cohesive framework onto which the meat of the work can be hung to dry, cured. For it is the arrangement that forms the backbone to a work, and should it lack rigor, it will fail, sick with caries, unable to carry its meat.

The very idea of research is anathema to many creative writers. They say the imagination should be enough. And maybe it can, at least in those cases where its fecundity prevails. But there is no work that could not be improved, even faintly, by a dose of fact. Research does not always entail hours spent poring through texts; it can take the form of personal experience. Really, research is only all about knowing your subject matter. It is the direct or indirect personal experience of fact. It is not necessarily even active and contemporary — research may be undertaken passively at any chronological point. Most best-selling writers have researched their works exhaustively, and if you’re a big star like Tom Clancy, you can even pay to have a whole team of people do it for you. The risk you run in denying a certain real-world authenticity to your work is to allow a sense of ‘so what?’ to pervade. The images, grammar and words that are used to prop up a concept that has no real-world grounding often come across on the page as weak, pretentious and, ultimately, dithering. A strong process of research should be innate in any writer’s technique.

Dominic Ward currently has a novel and poetry in print. Balloon Cotton Bush was published by Small Dogma mid-2009 and represents a risk taken in literary development. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his partner and two children.

March 10th, 2010 | Category: Writing Matters | Leave a comment