RD MORGAN
RD Morgan lives in Southern California with her young daughter, and they both appreciate art, sharks, and sea urchins. Much of RD’s poetry draws inspiration from the decades she spent in the American South. Her first collection of poetry, Meditations on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South between Eras of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, was published by Match Factory Editions, and she serves as an editor there. Her work has appeared in journals such as Third Coast and Packingtown Review. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and works as a web marketer for a national nonprofit organization.
MEDITATIONS ON THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE IN THE SOUTH BETWEEN ERAS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION
From the early hours of the morning to the eerie stillness before a storm, RD Morgan’s poetry exists in unsettling interstitial spaces. Meditations on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South between Eras of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation is searing, gritty, and relentless, and it explores identity and isolation through a feminist lens within the landscape of the American South. The title’s reference to Ross McElwee’s 1986 documentary Sherman’s March is mostly tongue-in-cheek, and plenty of humor and irony glints through the debris of broken relationships, dead-end jobs, budget cars, and lost homes. The book summons such disparate figures as Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Erica Jong, Axl Rose, jellyfish, alligators, pelicans, clams, and Okavango lions. The biosphere of this book is diverse, and its language is an adventure.
sample poem:
BUT IT’S NOT FOR ME TO SAY
Distant ships hold every woman’s wish on board.
A stowaway. Chum trapped in a Styrofoam cooler.
We looked in the tide pool and then to the ocean.
But it’s not for me to say what you were feeling then.
Beneath you I felt uncomfortably small. Human. A lone
sand spur attached to your heel.
That island with the wild horses?
Someone told me they’re all gone now. I don’t believe it.
I believe they’re adapting like the Okavango lions,
on an island in a body of water going nowhere.
sample poem:
serenata
You can’t step into the same river
twice; you have changed, and the river
has changed, so goodnight, Mrs. Calabash,
wherever you are, stripping yourself of day
wear and giving the day’s
fragile menagerie of moments extended
release out the window void
of screen. You have looked at the curve
of the river and told of the island it belonged
to, knowing that the shoals would keep it
safe for at least another season, and the sea
gulls’ beaks rest aquiver on the day’s gentle
seam as it folds over, one single wave
attempting to outlast the shore.
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