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The BPJ team is thrilled to announce that the 2020 title in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series is Victoria C. Flanagan’s Glossary of Unsaid Terms. Flanagan earned a dual-genre MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Virginia Commonwealth University. Their writing has been awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Emerging Poets Prize from Palette Poetry, and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, among other honors. Their work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, The Boiler, Crab Creek Review, New South, and elsewhere, and they are the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing’s 2020-21 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow.
The collection, chosen by the editors, grapples beautifully with the challenges of inheritance—physical, cultural, and psychic. Editor Melissa Crowe writes, “Flanagan's book is a coming-of-age narrative—but not the kind we've seen before. Its speaker, in their twenties and in treatment for cancer, reveals in poem after poem how hard it is to grow into one's full personhood while also engaged in an effort to survive. What's remarkable is that Flanagan never lets us believe the project of becoming is less urgent than the speaker's effort to stay alive; it's precisely this intermingling of urgencies that gives the collection its electricity and its import."
When you subscribe to the BPJ, you’ll receive as part of your subscription a copy of the forthcoming chapbook in the series. Not a subscriber? Purchase a copy of Glossary of Unsaid Terms here.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei
My father taught me well: you can split whole cords
with a chipped maul & still forsake
the shed. Proof: corner store ruptured
by weeds chin-high, even the high school
has closed. Out here, where tire plants landmark,
mill men drift and jaw:
If you cut both a man’s hands from his body,
even his family will think him dead.
Father, debtor, crankhead, snitch.
No one revenge
will do—harm has a hectare
of timberwoods & a zip code
where people say belief
is what gets them through.
To be girl in a place where bruise
is prelude. We all learn quick
as a clip point blade—cool and nicking
threat against the inner thigh.
My father taught me well:
Can’t chase away a name. This is the earth
I shall inherit: Steam idles over
the recycling plant, slack bales queue up
in these, our dry fields, & his bones
won’t thaw before March.
Out here, you ask a man for mercy
he’ll spit and call you senseless.
You tell this land Forget me
but it gives you sons instead.
My father taught me well: you can split whole cords
with a chipped maul & still forsake
the shed. Proof: corner store ruptured
by weeds chin-high, even the high school
has closed. Out here, where tire plants landmark,
mill men drift and jaw:
If you cut both a man’s hands from his body,
even his family will think him dead.
Father, debtor, crankhead, snitch.
No one revenge
will do—harm has a hectare
of timberwoods & a zip code
where people say belief
is what gets them through.
To be girl in a place where bruise
is prelude. We all learn quick
as a clip point blade—cool and nicking
threat against the inner thigh.
My father taught me well:
Can’t chase away a name. This is the earth
I shall inherit: Steam idles over
the recycling plant, slack bales queue up
in these, our dry fields, & his bones
won’t thaw before March.
Out here, you ask a man for mercy
he’ll spit and call you senseless.
You tell this land Forget me
but it gives you sons instead.
