Cleft Heart, by Karl Schonborn, is a multifaceted memoir, covering his life in great detail, from birth to adulthood. In the process, several different themes interweave to create the whole of Schonborn’s experience growing up in the 1960s.
The main theme, which underlies all the others, is that he was born with a severe cleft palate. The resulting heroism of his parents—especially his mom—in dealing with doctors and hospitals and operations for decades to fix this problem, is amazing. And since memoirs are written in first person, readers also learn of the mental stress all this put on him, and how well he coped, how well he made decisions—even as a kid—to deal with the bullying from others, and the intense frustration from knowing he looked different.
Don’t Look Back is a very good novel that begins in the late 1960’s. It is about Katerina Balducci, who grows up in a very dysfunctional family in New York. She has a 15 year-old sister, Simona, and a 13 year-old brother, Tony. She has a love/hate relationship with her mother and a loving relationship with her father and Zia Adrianna. She loves the Beach Boys and fashion. She is feisty and lovable. The story is both funny and tragic. When tragedy strikes, Katerina stays strong and is an inspiration to her sister. The story flows very well and will keep you on the edge of your seat page after page. I really enjoyed reading it and look forward to the sequel. The story is geared toward older teens and young adults, however, anyone would enjoy it. I love the book and am long past the young adult age! So, grab a cup of tea, sit down, read Don’t Look Back and enjoy!
Our bones pass from the earth and are gone, but the water stays.
When I die let me climb the veins of an oak tree
From the veins of an oak tree let me pass into air, into cloud
Let me fall over cities and towns
Over rivers and streams let me thrash in the rapids
In a clear glass bottle let me cultivate stillness
Let the eye of the sun find a clear glass bottle
Let it turn me into a pillar of light.
Jenny Williamson’s writing has been featured in 24Mag, Wild River Review, Poetic Voices, and in Philadelphia’s Writing Aloud series. She has also received recognition from the Academy of American Poets and NPR’s Young Poets Series.
Kenyatta Jean-Paul Garcia is the editor of ALTPOETICS and author of Yawning on the Sands, This Sentimental Education and What Do the Evergreens Know of Pining. After growing up in Brooklyn, NY, upstate has become home and is where the past few years were spent cooking and getting a degree in linguistics. More work can found at kjpgarcia.wordpress.com.
The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
— Isaac Asimov
March 2014’s issue of Synchronized Chaos tackles change, in different aspects and forms.
As this month’s writers remind us, not all changes are positive, voluntary, or desired.
The recent book and movie The Monuments Men, as reviewed by Bruce Roberts, showcases the work of a special crew tasked during World War II with the retrieval and protection of historical artifacts Hitler intended to destroy. National governments deemed culture important enough to risk lives to save, on behalf of future generations. Or because those instances of beauty, decency, and creative thought reminded them of what they were fighting to preserve.
Christopher Bernard points to the magnitude of the destruction greed and materialism can wreak on the planet and its inhabitants. In his poem, no species survives the violence we inflict, to relieve not our anger, but our boredom. This social critique itself becomes the means through which anything can be preserved.
In a much less serious vein, Kimi Little’s short story “The Three Billy Pigs Gruff” presents clever animals who outwit the larger forces threatening them, as ‘personified’ by a big, bad wolf. The pigs wish to improve their lives by building larger houses across the river, and so work together to be able to make this change.
Anita Cox’ sensual novel The Beginning, reviewed here by Sarah Melton,depicts a young woman figuring herself out after a divorce. No one would compare her to a genocide or eco-cide survivor, but she, also, takes action and makes choices when life confronts her with unplanned circumstances.
Tunisian writer Ali Znaidi offers up a study in contrasts, presenting a lively desert next to a depiction of nothingness. Unlike the common view of the desert as barren, he portrays a landscape full of all sorts of life, perhaps stronger due to their struggle to survive in the harsh environment.
Znaidi’s final poem reminds readers that people often carry within them a multitude of contradictions. When we, ourselves, are complex, it seems improbable to expect consistency and stability from the external environment.
Changing oneself, or becoming flexible, in the face of new circumstances does not have to represent surrender or weakness. At times, the strategy may empower people to survive while preserving as much as possible of what they most value.
While some changes are unpleasant and forced on us, others can be launching pads for creativity and new hope. We wish you a pleasant read through the thought and imagination reflected in this month’s issue.
Announcement: For those in or near the San Francisco Bay Area, our magazine’s spring reception will take place the evening of Thursday, March 6th, 6-9 pm at SF’s Cafe Boheme, 3318 24th st. in the Mission District. All welcome, please feel free to bring writing to share, books to sell, artwork to show off, or requests for partners, coauthors, volunteers, editors etc. We will hear book excerpts from guest readers Charles Ayres (Impossibly Glamorous), Joe Klingler (Mash Up and RATS), and Ryan Hodge (Wounded Worlds) as well as learn about how to virtually mentor writers in Afghanistan, from a guest speaker from the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (http://www.awwproject.org)
“Did I ever tell why I no longer call myself a humanist?” —Overheard at a climatology conference
So, the word’s finally out:
I am the world’s Caesar, and you are my Christians.
Not that I hate you absolutely—
on the contrary, for the most part
I enjoy you;
those of you I cannot eat
or flog into subservience,
to help me, or amuse me, or decorate my
upscale live-work high-end design space
now, or by no later than the end of next quarter,
are just in the way,
as I thrust ahead
to glory, to a sweet, psychotic power,
and a suffocating wealth
built on the dependable human delight
in the enchanted moment of acquisition.
I’ve got you,
I’ve got the world.
It is no longer God’s or nature’s;
it is mine,
I own you,
I who hate to have and love to get.
There was once a despot
whose footsteps bloodied his time.
After he had conquered the world,
bored with his possessions,
he decided to destroy them:
slaughtered his slaves, his women, his sycophants,
sent his soldiers to the ends of his empire
to pillage and sack it, out of boredom and rage
that he had no more worlds to conquer.
He burned his own palaces to the ground.
In a crazy drunk one night,
he broke his neck in a ditch.
The peasants crept up to his small, pale body,
the body that had conquered the world,
and watched the flies flickering above it.
Today there were no peasants.
There were no flies.
____
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins,The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs, and a collection of stories, In the American Night. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
