Permutations of a Self: Poems [1 ed.] 1680032143, 9781680032147

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Praise for Permutations of a Self “Two things stand out in Thomas Nguyen’s debut chapbook Permutations of a Self: an ability to express deep personal pain in searing metaphor, and to connect his experience to a wider world, often by extending the metaphors of science. For this future physician, these worlds are continuous. As example, ‘All the men here strangle the fruit from trees.’ (from “When We Talk About Fathers”)—one among so many heartbreaking lines; and transformed by his wisdom, ‘All I am still be scattered like tar on tires & this story will be someone else’s,’ (from, “first law of thermodynamics”). His writing is luminous and his voice, sure. We welcome with great anticipation this exceptional and promising poet.” —Owen Lewis, author of Marriage Map “‘All other stories begin / with a man who left.’ His vision both vigilant and tender, in Permutations of a Self, Thomas V. Nguyen writes from the lived experience of first-generation American birth, poets whose family history and lineage are rooted in countries known mostly through the accounts of others. Whether centered on his mother’s flight from Sài Gòn in 1985 or navigating the family dynamics surrounding an absent father in an oppressive Texas summer, the poems approach all ties, no matter how fraught, with a care that refuses constriction. Nguyen breathes life into the fragile bubble of the world he builds. We watch as it levitates above his hands and he questions his place, not only in an ever-shifting present, but in the realities of the body as it is both created and inherited. Inside these deeply felt poems is the recognition that the journey is never complete, it is but passed from one generation to the next and loss is guaranteed: ‘in all my dreams, the cubs that leave / do not recognize each other as lions.’” —Laurie Saurborn, author of Industry of Brief Distraction “In Permutations of a Self, Nguyen explores his complex and shifting relationships to family, language, lineage, and landscape. From Vietnam to Texas to New York City, the surroundings crackle with life, while at the center is a kind of absence—a desire for connection and belonging, a grieving for all the possible lives that could be lived. Throughout, Nguyen is the quiet observer, who, with astonishing skill, guides us through moments of static with rigorous self-questioning as well as original and insistent imagery. This gorgeous debut is a finely woven intergenerational portrait, as singular as it is timely.” —Micaela Bombard

permutations of a self

Copyright © 2019 Thomas V. Nguyen All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Nguyen, Thomas, author. Title: Permutations of a self : poems / Thomas V. Nguyen. Description: Huntsville : Texas Review Press, [2020] Identifiers: LCCN 2019052176 (print) | LCCN 2019052177 (ebook) | ISBN 9781680032147 (paperback) | ISBN 9781680032154 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Memory—Physiological aspects—Poetry. | Vietnamese Americans—Ethnic identity—Poetry. | Vietnamese American families—Poetry. | Adjustment (Psychology)—Poetry. Classification: LCC PS3614.G96 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PS3614.G96 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052176 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052177 Cover photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Designed by Lisa C. Tremaine

permutations of a self poems thomas v. nguyen

TEXAS REVIEW PRESS HUNTSVILLE • TEXAS

CONTENTS The Greenhouse Effect 1 now and then 2 first law of thermodynamics 4 Sài Gòn, 1985 5 mythologies 6 Ethology 7 The living can never be weightless 9 birthday dinner 11 bloodline 12 communion 13 origin 14 When We Talk About Fathers 15 january sixteenth 16 I go back to 2001 18 saint joseph’s oratory of mount royal, 2014 20 Lineage 22 in which the act of observing is determinative 23 Impermanence 24 To the Snow Settling in Morningside Park 25 how I survived the winter 26 roots, 2013 27 Morphology of Regret 28 dinner as diorama 29 I See the Cycle as Determinative 30 Acknowledgments 33 List of Phillips Winners 34

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The Greenhouse Effect Texas summer & the AC is set to eighty-two. Home is a greenhouse that captures light & turns it to heat. Sister complains & argues with mom that they shouldn’t have to live like this to save money. Home lets nothing out. It is glass & shield. No cracks of crude air in the greenhouse. Brother sees more than he should. Mom comes home from work. Wishes sister was more like brother & remembers to tell her that before dinner. In the greenhouse, rows & rows of crops grow orderly under strict supervision. Staked with wooden sticks to grow upright, wire cages to stay put. Lineage of rot buried in secrecy. Only growth on display. Brother wonders what it would be like to move into another life. Says nothing. Watches moisture boil to steam.

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now and then I gather air like I gather firewood, just enough for the night. come dawn, I stir my fists to the drum of the sky, wait for the sun’s glistening eye to shut, my own pupils to become frosted glass. I count black gum dots on concrete, flock to permanence like sheep. I didn’t know there was any other way to walk. I plunge deeper, watch the light before me thin like a blade. ― where else could I go, but here? here, where each day is seen through moth web and grain. where I look into mirrors and wait for a miracle the size of my own body. instead, I see branches of a dissolving fig inching toward sky. instead, the pockets of clouds reveal a tunnel and again I’m on my knees and elbows, crawling toward another damp place. ― once, my mother asked, do you miss me? and I was fallen spruce, tender needles in a thawing puddle. and I was breezeless breeze nestled in the hollow of an upturned leaf. and I was lichen waxing on bark, rust-red bloom of many more suns. and I was chiseled mica, one thousand prisms of light. ― once, the night ferried song to a distant ocean and I imagined my father at the shoreline, waving to a son he’d soon forget. I didn’t know this would be the price of regret. I didn’t know I could contain such absence. I folded myself into sheets, into boxes. ―

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o strip of concrete untouched by rain / o river o shuffling current, breath of white foam / o chapped rock-wall, silent scrape and peel of winter / o mud-glow, body of dew and silt / o draining moon in the cold hour / why did I ask to be any place but here?

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first law of thermodynamics I arise from storm clouds surging in the night, a cratered ship making home with the sea floor. white catalpa flowers sprouting on wooden arbors at the shore, wilted petals fading into the stream like dye. there is no birth or death here, only stories of enduring. every particle of me was once something else & so on. if there is a god, he’s perched wide-eyed in the trees like an owl. but I believe in convergence. I’ve seen things come together like a still-life dinner table, so fine it shatters when touched. when I eat with my siblings, we are distance between plastic china. the mantle of moths unmoved by our quiet. when I moved across the country, I carried parts of myself like a blood-thin lullaby, slept soundly with holes in my chest. in all my dreams, the cubs that leave do not recognize each other as lions. this is not a nightmare but what my aorta whispered when it crept from my ribcage. the eyes I learned to close. in a lifetime, all I am will be scattered like tar on tires & this story will be someone else’s—a crow laying eggs in a nest of ashes, a fish falling for the sunlight’s glistening hook, a boy lulled from room to room by a desire for some connection— a million beautiful creatures recoiling from their own nature.

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Sài Gòn, 1985 The boat is made from salvaged wood, withered nails, rusted sunlight. People are stacked in rows, cargo, single-file. Your brother is crouched next to you, yet there is only the rustle of wind over empty sea, hollow tides of the body. Cracks in the hull let water seep in, the water a murky brown, tinged with blood. You spread it around the soles of your feet to wash the dirt away. Everywhere the ropes have knots. What does the sky look like, mother? Always raining very blue, you say, in your broken English, and I think I see it.

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mythologies & remember you were born of the river’s silt. when your mother knelt, thirst became prayer, timeworn & plea. her hands, another offering. remember that the water held her. that when the sun burned veins into her arm, there was no crackle & hiss, only choiring sparrows that roost within the night of her hair. remember the froth above the stream’s marl, porous & bone-white. that the brittle press of her spine was formed from nothing but shiver. when wind filled the grooves of her frame like a home. when her body lay sealed in its shrine, you were the friar chanting for its rise.

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Ethology the study of animal behavior, teaches us that newborn animals bond to those they meet at birth and adopt their behavior. The parent is the first living being that provides the necessary resources for comfort and survival. Greylag goslings imprinted on scientist Konrad Lorenz, followed him like they would their mother, simply because he was there at the beginning. All other stories begin with a man who left. My father used to tell me to be a man, and I watched his words knife at the distance between us. Even then, I felt their pull writing volumes in my chest, the lungs I hold to the light to feel inside me. Attachments formed at birth persist into adulthood, when the goslings returned to Lorenz whenever he was present. If life is a series of migrations,

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my father is the land I left to get here. I have learned to be a man is to leave, that a child who looks for his father finds the lawlessness of bare earth, of laurel now dust, and so begins the process of replanting. Under a full baying moon, I was taught to pray, that good things come to those who ask, are distracted. In this absence, I walk with my arms outstretched, reach for the first moving object I see.

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The living can never be weightless When my grandmother was in the hospital for kidney failure, I imagined the deep violet of her organs shutting down like lights of a building. At 13, I learned the news by following my mother’s voice from the kitchen, whispers heavy with devotion. When I saw my grandmother, I saw the pale light leftover from trees. The space between our hands passing like birds. I told her, con thương bà ngoại nhiều lắm, and listened for the faint static of a heartbeat. Say more, Mother said. I couldn’t. ― I rode in the front seat of the hearse, was the first to the burial plot—a privilege because I had been her favorite grandchild. The Minnesota bluffs gave me a face I could wear, shoveled eyes from lightning bugs humming low on the banks of ponds. My interactions with my grandmother had been controlled by my mother, her voice then a rifle clap in an open field. Go on a walk with your grandmother. Help her cook bún bò huế, water the rau thơm. I obeyed because I had learned fear in the same way a boy who sees shuffling grass in a field learns to suspect cottonmouth, viper. ― What comes after death isn’t absolution but a long wait, interspersed with throbbing nerves and heart palpitations. To think: how much of me was my mother. To think: my grandmother knew and loved someone else. I shouldn’t have been at the front of the procession, leading –9–

my family to the cemetery’s mouth. I shouldn’t have been sitting next to the priest who kept asking me if I was all right. I went back to a home of mourning doves, deciduous trees leafless in the black of winter. The sky with its lips sewn shut.

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birthday dinner so the night felt like ash. so the leaves felt like animal hide. here, our ancestors speak to us through desire. here, my mother offers me tiết canh, blood pudding, & I refuse. my cheeks rash-red with embarrassment, though this was before I had the language of description. all I knew was that I wanted a white lunch for school, my own invisibility cloak. say soup, say stew. practice: Campbell’s. remember: silent p. at home, the dining table a sheet of ice just before it gives. my hands mending cracks as they form. in my seat, I see a penumbra of light just beyond a silk screen & kneel to be closer. iridescent, like the sun viewed through a veil of winter. my fingers extend to touch it—no longer a screen, but a sharp-toothed window. my mother is singing hymns, but all I hear is the sound of silos rising around me. so I cut my hair & move two thousand miles away. so I stand before god & he tells me I’ll never leave.

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bloodline there: sprig on bare elm. below, a hotbed of marigold. ankle deep in autumn. leaves & pressed cigarettes. above, horizon in eventide. the time between fire & ash. mirror image. there: my skin crimson. my father & his hands crimson. I watch my blood pool around my lips & smooth the cracks in my cheek with my tongue. boyhood unfurling the way a fox tail unfurls. there: his voice. grind of mortar on pestle. grate of sedimentary rock & the gruff of a sparrow wing—talon moving against the direction the hair grows. there: a shooting star. I asked for another life & was given distance. a thousand miles of wires & asphalt. see: cicada on driftwood, exoskeleton abandoned. moth born again from chrysalis, eyes wide, full. there: his chest. heave of cinder-block walls. salt & the outside in his breath. I watch my father in the mirror & learn he could tire of running in a way he could never tire of his hands. & so I remembered. & so I ran.

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communion say the tongue / is a vessel / to give & receive. say the tongue / is inheritance / is title / is debt all / at once. say gia đình / say bố mẹ. know / an open mouth is / nothing / more than mirage. that the noise of crickets / trilling / in the moor / is only me / trying to remember / my own tongue / a little longer / & failing. there’s a harbor / not far away. some nights / I am the widow / on the roofwalk waiting / for my own return / from sea. other nights / I am the sea itself / gutting all / in its wake. come daybreak the sky / so thin / it is sharp. the air stacks like firewood / like hours, & only time separates / fire & flight. say may mắn / say số phận. say you’ll never / leave / again. look: there is water / in the collection bin though / it hasn’t rained / for weeks / & the plastic ice cream cartons / I ate from as a kid / are now flower pots: easter lilies / nested in ditch weeds. so, let / nothing / go to waste. tell me: / can a tongue / be salvaged too?

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origin in dreams, I map the telephone wires between cities. what is distance if not a circuit arranged in series, the edges frayed, burning toward the middle? I trace borders of lands known to no history, as if they rose from absence, an interlude in evolutionary time. how do I explain the movement of time, of peaks that level and spread? how do I explain my mother, her high school education, her voice the dreg when the water drains, her body the ocean tide when the moon pulls and pulls? in dreams, my mother is the maiden melted from ice. in dreams, my mother’s blood is the river that jolts with vigor. if I stayed asleep, would it mean I might mistake the lone yucca tree curving over my body for arms? the flicker of lights on these dark walls for a heartbeat?

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When We Talk About Fathers “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”—Magnolia (1999) The margin between void and enough: salt-lined, weather-dependent. All the men here strangle the fruit from trees, leave their sons with a sky on the verge of collapse. Small burrows of dirt hide what we’ve told them to hide, which is a past where boys brace their childhood like teeth, pull them at the first display of growth. Dad? When you come, you will hear your name echoed like the billowing flames on a sea of candles, the moment before they expire. For the sake of momentum, I let my fears carry me like static through phone lines. When I write, I feel your shadow marching over my hands like a marauded city. Your voice chiseling at my spine like an ice pick. But what can we forgive? When you left, I found a seething red core beneath my flesh. A child of embers. Have you ever been hit by lightning? It’s an electrical charge built from tiny, tiny collisions. It doesn’t happen to everyone. It finds its way across the universe for you.

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january sixteenth it has been eight years since your body fell apart, and I still find myself trying to find you everywhere. the way flashes of light seem to converge from a point just beyond the clouds and reach, I think it might be you trying to get through to me. you used to trace the contours in my palms, calloused fingertips trailing from the curves as you struggled to tell me they were lifelines. tell me bà ngoại,

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would you let me rebuild you? calcified bone netted rib with bloody heart and the living body’s noise.

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I go back to 2001 after Sharon Olds of my first and only year of catholic school, I remember only a sky of contrails, a reminder that, once, birds flew here. once, a wren christened me: fugue, it said, as in music, as in loss of a past life. of that year, my sister tells me I used to tuck in all of my shirts, even on days I didn’t have school, and we laugh, my voice my own and not. I step with her into the river-mud, and we wade, watch the water lap our toes, turn imprints back to unscuffed soil, untouchable country. I wait for my sister to speak, her voice a mirror I use again and again to find myself. she calls my name: migration, as in passing from one roost to the next, and I wonder if the brain

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is like that too: one padlocked room after another. and if the rooms switch, so each time we are surprised at what we unearth. if the spare might also be the master key.

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saint joseph’s oratory of mount royal, 2014 years from now, all that will remain is a photograph, the oil of thumbprints. years from now, the boy will have grown & lost, become a permutation of a distant self. picture this: the boy & the dark spots around his eyes, becoming daylight. his smile the smile of the blackest crow, of carved lips. when he sleeps, a starless night is weaved to twill, threads alternating in a pattern of parallel ribs. when he wakes, the cloth is taut like skin. picture this: the boy on a balcony overlooking streaks of knifed grass on a checkerboard field, pale rows of a lawnmower’s dent. his family out of frame, wistful for a time of preservation, of scaffolding holding the church like a net. they tell him to smile & the light is opalescent. they tell him to jump, for posterity. & he does. & he does. so what does it mean. deconstructed: the science of artifice. meaning,

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the boy became the silence of birds, hid the nightfall of his body like a phantom limb. meaning, he wrote himself into a photo of a basilica in Montreal & stayed there.

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Lineage I. Here is a gravel road, Việt Nam. Here are patches of tropic grass that line the road, & within them leaves that rattle like saltshakers. Here is your home, fences of bamboo tied together in black arches, & above them roofs of damp thatch that drip to the sleeping bodies below. Here are doors so blood-warm you can see handprints, the air’s breath a hollowed white. II. Children in a swarm. Rickshaws drop like fly’s eggs, their drivers resting in a sweat-smoked ease. Outside, the churchyard sycamores howl, & inside, you hold tight onto your sister’s hand, pray one day to be on the other side of the Pacific, in America, your body bowed like a bowstring. Overhead, God throws stars like knives. Finches glisten in & out of moonlight. III. We kneel in pews together every Sunday in Houston suburbia. You count dreams like feathers plucked from quail’s underbelly. I count fluorescent lights on the ceiling & ask myself how much darker the room would be with one singed. We listen to a sermon on faith, & I calculate its equivalent in miles, the size of another ocean to cross.

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in which the act of observing is determinative & I do not look. instead, I turn inward. I am in those hours between dusk & dawn. right now the sky is no color. the birds are still nestlings that point their bills upward, utter flares not yet song. the lake nestled in a chorus of trees sleeps, forgets it will turn into a hive of barking dogs with the pelican’s first dive. when I told myself I want no more of this, I meant memories of my father telling me to run. his voice the rumble of the radiator grate, steam traveling in convection currents. the steel of his hands telling me listen, my body hairs of sawdust. in this dream, his shadow is not stained in the wallpaper, does not hover over my bed like the glow-in-the-dark stars I tore out on the fifteenth day. the skin I shed in my fifteenth year & the boy of sinews I found underneath. in this one, I look into a mirror & do not see his markings on my arm spilling like light on tarmac, only a cast of flies where there used to be blood.

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Impermanence I pass another day from my window. The trees a constellation over the roads. Bikes in the garage dreaming of hills. The hydrant still a perch for crows. Twelve hundred miles away, your headstone is adorned with candles, incense. My prayers float skyward like dandelion seeds. Once, we spent a similar afternoon burrowed at the dining table. You microwaved chicken wings, helped me open ketchup packets saved from McDonalds with your teeth. My feet hung from the chair like limp stems, pendulums swaying to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb. You sat across from me reading the newspaper while the wind billowed through our clothes, like we were ascending. Do you remember this, bà ngoại? You were once as real as the pool of light I still feel surround me, as vivid as winter’s breath curling into pine, circling before settling. I never thought it would come to this, me holding onto you like the lanterns we used to release together. Come on, you’d say. Let go. Overhead, the finches pulsing like stars.

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To the Snow Settling in Morningside Park, It must be the contrast / purity of vision / that attracts me. All colors fall / to a gradient of dust. Nothing / in the landscape left unswallowed / by your salt-white yawn. Stair steps & handrails / blacker now / the presence of humans rarer now. My mind wanders / like a stray balloon. I see wisps of hair / where there used to be branches. I pretend I’m not lonely. The fog is constant / & the park becomes ongoing. One patch of white sod after another. Your lightness thins / between my fingers. I walk through your filled hollows / to get home. I tiptoe / so as not to reveal / any depth. You hastily coat / the absences like a homeowner painting / cracks in his house. How long can we stay / like this? How full we seem / here, now. How pained, / like a city of cards.

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how I survived the winter if not for the wren in song with the huff of the gale. if not for birch leaves falling. ground a coat of apricot, another artifice of warmth. stray aster in pause. to know: loneliness nestles within the walls of a home, like bones in this body. & my voice, seized in the plaster like a frame, knows no echo. only scratch & tear, so tell me the river is near. sound of water calming cattail. white dandelion gently welcomed to sky. to know: speaking of stars softens their glimmer, so whisper. the boy walking westward into the open arms of manhood walks alone. don’t worry. the sun will consume him eventually. silence turns in revolutions, & the hollow moon a constant. don’t worry. this story will go under with the sift & tremble of the first snow’s fall. to know: ice thaws in hues of midnight, blue fog. & the boy will be exhumed long before he knows how much is lost.

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roots, 2013 once, I tried to articulate how reeds gather / in the marshes of my mind / & failed. once, I felt the marble of your hands / embrace me / & shivered. in may / in texas, my gown is nothing / but a target on my back. each time I look at pictures / I notice more happy family around me. even here / I’m burning into sun / evaporating into sky. the draped cords unravel to moss / medals rust to mold. maybe ferns grow in the distance / & a sky darkens. call it graduation / gradation. call it the beginning / of some end. I tell myself to leave / & go nowhere. I tell myself distance is psychological / trouble with telephone wires to bridge miles / asphalt to ground us together again.

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Morphology of Regret My hands at eye-level, hairs a reaped hayfield. Palms up, so I can see it—my skin stitching my bones like a seam. Maybe this unraveling is growth, age. Maybe each year is nothing but a switch in shells, like a cicada. I was taught than an insect will shed its exoskeleton when it grows too big to fit inside. If it doesn’t molt, it will be crushed. When I lived at home, I held my breath, let my exhales stir mudslides. My mind was a sputtering engine, stilled thunder. I could hear a shell hardening around my body, the sound another burning. I read that when an insect leaves its exoskeleton, it sheds its tracheal lining as well. As a result, it cannot breathe during this process. It’s like having your lungs ripped out, one ecologist says. I woke to sounds of buzzing, mayflies low in a summer marsh. My lungs morphed to willow leaves, my ribcage curled into roots and surged with air. I looked around—roads paved with honeysuckle— and began to pick blossoms like offerings. I returned to a house with its porch lights off. Through the window, I could just make out, in the living room, a family huddled in prayer.

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dinner as diorama pass the bowl of greens with salad tongs, family-style. stare at the centerpiece, faux hydrangea in bloom. watch the candles being lit, silhouettes blowing on the walls like trees. the light outside shaking like an old film. the room with all of these people getting closer. the flame in front of us, quivering like fletchings of an arrow in flight. I watch laughter like a hawk, look up when the conversation lulls to remind myself I’m still here. how long will this dinner last? inhale, feel your diaphragm contract, your lungs reaching for the pine and cedar of clean air. exhale. how often are we all here, together? in the night, the fields growl and the city mutates into a bloodthirsty wolf who hunts solitude. Are we only connected by blood? look at them again through the hues of the horizon, these disappearing hours. when’s the last time I told any of them I love them? somewhere, a paper crane is placed into an ocean and a boy kneels near the shore, makes waves with his hands, then lets it go.

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I See the Cycle as Determinative The story begins with two suitcases, yarn tied around the handle of each for easy spotting­—mother’s idea. A bus draws wide circles with every turn, brief devotion to one southbound stop after another. You make your home under eaves of red mortar, window-watch the clumsy reflection of streetlights in a city entirely unknowable. You meet people who leave impressions like growth rings in wood, traceable to an age. If you are the sea, they are the skiffs that feel your every tide and surge. The sound of ship horns skim the water’s surface like a whistle, but you hear warning sirens, brace for turbulence. The rudders move like landlocked flags at topmast, creating ripples and bursts of air. How rotten it would be for you to stop their motion, so you withdraw, let time become yesterday’s pained metaphor. Your monologue map dries from disuse, burns like a wick—another invocation turned to air. You tell yourself a sea is safest empty, but when winter froze the water midexhale and the boats slept in garages, loneliness tugged at your body like blown milkweed. When spring comes, it brings soil from another time. Daffodils sprout from sluiced water, milled seeds. The world, again, as it once was.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “I Go Back to 2001” draws on Sharon Old’s poem “I Go Back to May 1937” for the title; Olds, Sharon. Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980–2002. New York: Knopf, 2004. “When We Talk About Fathers” draws on and uses quotes from the film Magnolia, Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. “Morphology of Regret” uses a quote from the following scientific article: Erik Stokstad, “Insect Molting is ‘Like Having Your Lungs Ripped Out,’” Science Magazine, August 29, 2014; http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/ insect-molting-having-your-lungs-ripped-out.

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The Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize Established in 2001, The Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize seeks to highlight one book each year that excels in the chapbook format. Previous Winners 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001

Gregory Byrd, The Name for the God Who Speaks  Evana Bodiker, Ephemera Mark Schneider, How Many Faces Do You Have? Loueva Smith, Consequences of a Moonless Night  J. Scott Brownlee, Ascension Harold Whit Williams, Backmasking David Lanier, Lost and Found John Popielaski, Isn’t It Romantic? Ingrid Browning Moody, Learning About Fire David Havird, Penelope’s Design Rebecca Foust, Mom’s Canoe Rebecca Foust, Dark Card Lisa Hammond, Moving House Taylor Graham, The Downstairs Dance Floor Kevin Meaux, Myths of Electricity Ann Killough, Sinners in the Hands: Selections from the Catalogue Nancy Naomi Carlson, Complications of the Heart William Notter, More Space Than Anyone Can Stand

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