Our Poem of the Week is an ekphrastic piece from William Snyder, a North Dakota poet who has appeared in the pages of 3rd Wednesday a number of times. It’s a preview from our fall issue, which should be out near the end of September.
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3rd Wednesday Fall Issue
We’re excited to show you this preview of the cover art for our fall issue due out at the end of September. The cover painting, “Poet Under Pine Tree”, is by Hedy Habra of Kalamazoo, Michigan. A true renaissance woman, Hedy’s poetry has also appeared in our magazine.
Cityscapes – Rebecca Ruth Gould
Traversing the urban geographies of the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe, Cityscapes offers searing and intimate portraits of Damascus, Yerevan, Hyderabad, Delhi, Isfahan, and many other cities through the lens of war, peace, love, and despair. The collection opens with poems about the cosmos, before moving to earthly urban topographies, and concludes in a series of still lives chronicling urban spaces. Gould combines the insight of someone who has resided in the geographies she describes with a poetic gift for generalizing her personal experience. Includes original photography of Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), India, and Armenia.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (Yale University Press, 2016). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian, including After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry (2017) and for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize (2017). This is her first poetry collection.
Published by Alien Buddha Press, Cityscapes is available at 
The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face – Mitchell Grabois
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over 1,500 of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes, and was awarded the 2017 Booranga Writers’ Centre (Australia) Prize for Fiction.
Pski’s Porch Publishing prides itself on promoting passionate, weird, unfashionable poetry, and The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face is a prime example—far, far away from the MFA poetry mill, and a breath of fresh air.
I kissed the woman who slices lunch meat
at King Sooper’s
She shoved smoked turkey at me
leaned away
and called: Next!
Midwest Medley: Places & People, Wild Things & Weather – Patricia Williams
Patricia Williams planned to write about Chinese art after retiring from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, as a professor of Design History. Things took a different turn and in 2013 she began writing poetry – proof that it’s never too late to do something new. Life, like poetry, is always subject to revision.
Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Poetry Book written in 2018.
I’ve read lots of poetry and appreciate a good poet’s careful and often spare use of words. Patricia Williams belongs to that group. In two of my favorites, “The Midwinter Night is Long” and “Magic in Collapsing Stars” much is expressed in a few words about the aspects of being human. I especially like the poignant lines from “Islands” and the great story, vast application and wonderful ending in “There Goes the Neighborhood.” – Jerry Apps, Award-winning author of 35 books on rural history and country life, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin
Williams’ intimacy with the Midwestern countryside, its souls and circumstances, tumble forth from these well-crafted poems. We sojourn through “the season’s bullying chill” as “gales sweep the lawn clean of needles” and sense the “mortuary stillness” before a twister. In lovely language, her Midwest Medley resonates elegant simplicity and truth. — Nancy Austin, Author of Remnants of Warmth
Patricia Williams’ poems about “the middle of America” virtually glow with the beauty – and many of the irresistible quirks and foibles – that she finds there. Some gleaming freeze-frames of winter are particularly stunning, as in “The long-night moon / shimmers over a glacial setting / polished by winter’s breath”. We’re also treated to Williams’ fresh take on the area’s Great Indoors, where we feel right at home under the antlers and beer signs of the Northland Bar and Grill or crashing a sing-along with Aunt Mae at the player piano. Williams’ guided tour through a part of the country too often bypassed (or flown over) is a poetic experience not to be missed. – Marilyn L. Taylor, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Emerita
Midwest Medley: Places & People, Wild Things & Weather is available at:
Someone Left the Ocean Running…
Our Poem of the Week form poet, Kelli Russell Agodon. It appeared in Volume XII, No 3.
The Taste of the Earth – Hedy Habra
Hedy Habra is a 3rd Wednesday contributor of both poetry and visual art. Her poem, “Or Have You Ever Wondered Why She is Looking Back?” was featured Volume XII, No 2 of Third Wednesday and her painting Poet Under Pine Tree graces the cover of No 4.
Hedy has authored Under Brushstrokes and Tea in Heliopolis, winner of the USA Best Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention. A fourteen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work appears in numerous publications. Her website is hedyhabra.com
Her third book, The Taste of the Earthwas released on July 1st 2019 from Press 53 and is available from Press 53 and from Amazon
“The poems in The Taste of the Earth weave together personal history with the complex cultural heritage of Hedy Habra’s countries of origin. Steeped in memories, loss and longing, these poems invite the reader to revisit Egypt’s mythical past and Lebanon’s turmoil, recalling the intersecting roots of culture and language in an act of artistic recollection that bridges time and space. Through the lyrical power of the senses, Habra’s poems bring to life scenes of strife and upheaval as well as profound joy. Such images linger in the mind and keep evolving in search for the permanence of beauty within suffering as they are evoked by trees, houses, fountains and familiar objects, each voice offering with its testimony a broader perspective on the interconnectedness of worlds and universality of emotions.”
Editorial Reviews
The Taste of the Earth contains numerous histories—from Egypt’s distant past to the Lebanese Civil War to the Arab Spring—though history is not “the straight line that accompanies silence.” These poems confess that image can hide the smell of blood and the smell of jasmine, both the terrible and the sweet in the story of a place. Habra also teaches us that it is not just language and maps that tell history, but that objects carry what they have witnessed, the truths they are waiting to speak. —Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade
In this lush collection, the force of the lyric brings imagination, witness, myth, and memory into an opulent confluence. With formal variation—from the Japanese haibun, to the Malay pantoum, to an abecedarian composed of Phoenician letters, to an intersection of the senses and mathematics via the Eye of Horus—Habra’s poems enact art as the process of “remembering and forgetting,/telling and retelling.” As the focus here, often, is war and its devastations, witnessed and remembered, The Taste of the Earth is rife with sorrow songs, but each is moored by the speaker as a beholder of earth’s beauty as it pours in through the senses and finds a home in language: “[T]he jacaranda’s blue light anchors me back,” Habra writes, “whispering, yes, it’s here, deep inside, fluttering like a dove’s wings.” —Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
These are a painter’s poems, sensuous and filled with scenes under the surface. In her journey, Hedy Habra digs into the roots to find stories of wisdom. What’s special about these stories is that, even though they are painful, their exotic flavor is of earth, which belongs to everyone. They wander through memory and, image by image, settle in the soul “as sand in an hourglass.” —Dunya Mikhail, author of In Her Feminine Sign
You may be sitting in your favorite chair at home when you begin to read Hedy Habra’s latest collection of poems, The Taste of the Earth, but that’s not where you’ll be. You’ll be in Damascus, Heliopolis, Beirut, Aleppo. Before you know it, as if dreaming, you’ll be gliding along the streets of these cities, listening to their sounds, overhearing bits of conversation. Born in Egypt, Habra is part of the diaspora of Middle Easterners compelled to leave lands they love due to war and upheaval. There is longing for home in every sense of the word—for a place, a person, a taste, a story, a particular light, a language, a gesture, a laugh. It is this longing that makes these poems universal, regardless of where you are as you read them. —Susan Azar Porterfield, winner of the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize for Dirt, Root, Silk.
Books by John Stanizzi
John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, and Chants. His newest collection, Sundowning, will be out this year with Main Street Rag. Besides Third Wednesday, John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Blue Mountain Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, and many others.
John is a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John is the prose editor for the online journal Abstract Mag TV. He teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.
You can order John Stanizzi’s books at these links:
Hallelujah Time! (Big Table Publishing, 2014), Dance Against the Wall (Antrim House Books, 2012), Four Bits (Grayson Books, 2018), Chants (Cervena Barva Press 2019).
Write Us a Poem on a Paint Chip
Just for fun, give it a go. Pick one of the colored tiles. The title of your poem is the printed name on the paint sample. Write your own poem in the reply section. It should be short enough that it would actually fit on a paint chip. We have no plans to do anything with these.
Official Business – Ted Kooser
Though he didn’t intend it for our recent One Sentence Poetry contest, 13th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser, sent us this example of what a poet can do with a single sentence.
