Anselm Hollo Call For Submissions

Bombay Gin Issue 40: Anselm Hollo Call for Submissions open May 1, 2013 through September 1, 2013.

In January, our friend and colleague Anselm Hollo passed away at the age of 78. A native of Helsinki, Finland, Anselm taught poetics and translation in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado since 1985. Anselm was the author of more than forty books of poetry, including Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000 (2001), which won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; AHOE (1997); Corvus (1995); Finite Continued (1980); and Sojourner Microcosms: New and Selected Poems 1959-1977 (1977). He also published a book of essays, Caws and Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets (1999). His many translations include works by Paavo Haavikko and Pentti Saarikoski, for whose Trilogy (2003) Hollo received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.

In accord with Naropa University’s 40th Anniversary and in memory of our beloved Anselm Hollo, Issue 40 of Bombay Gin will include a section devoted to Anselm, which might include work dedicated to or inspired by Anselm as well as remembrances, essays, or critical responses to his work.

This call for submissions runs from May 1, 2013 through September 1, 2013.  In general, we welcome manuscripts of prose, poetry, and cross-genre work. Poetry submissions should be comprised of 3-5 poems; prose and cross-genre manuscripts should generally consist of no more than 15 pages. We accept submissions via Submittable. Please do not snail mail or email your work.

Please support the journal in which you want your work published. Bombay Gin can be purchased through SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION, on our website, or by sending a check for $12.00, made out to BOMBAY GIN. Thank you for your interest in our magazine.

BOMBAY GIN

NAROPA UNIVERSITY

2130 ARAPAHOE AVE

BOULDER, CO 80302

 

Women of Naropa Event

Bombay Gin editorial board would like to invite you to Thursday’s Women of Naropa Reading!

Along with the earth-shaking Anne Waldman, the night will include performances by Lisa Birman, HR Hegnauer, Maureen Owen, Andrea Rexilius, Laura Wright, and a collaboration between Michelle Naka Piece and Ariella Ruth.

Attendees will also enjoy readings by Bombay Gin’s own editor-in-chief J’Lyn Chapman and editor Jade Lascelles, as well as a collaborative performance by Bombay Gin editors and Jack Kerouac School (JKS) students June Lucarotti and April Joseph.

This event offers a rare opportunity for JKS students to share the stage with celebrated faculty, providing an exciting showcase. The audience will be graced by performances from additional JKS students Erin Likins, Rachel Newlon, Elizabeth J. Sparenberg, and a collaboration between Elyse Brownell and Tiara Lopez.

Please join us this Thursday at 7:30 PM in the Performing Arts Center on Naropa University’s Arapahoe campus. The event is $5 for Naropa students and faculty and $8 for the public.  All proceeds go to Bombay Gin and Friendship Bridge, “a nonprofit, non-governmental organization that provides microcredit and education to Guatemalan women so that they can create their own solutions to poverty for themselves, their families and their communities.” Together we can help make the community a better place and join Anne Waldman in keeping it “safe for poetry.”

Writing from the Body

As you write and revise to submit to Bombay Gin’s next issue, here are a few simple writing exercises and prompts to help you along in connecting to the body and “flesh memory.” Keep in mind that these are not required exercises for submission. They are simply exercises that can help in any and all of your writing. The italicized are parts of our submissions request. Below you will find the exercises and prompts:

With the late Akilah Oliver’s spirit and thought in mind, Bombay Gin invites submissions for issue 39.2 that explore “flesh memory.” We encourage contributors to extend Akilah’s “flesh memory.” Consider the following:

…what the body knows that the mind can’t hold, the DNA-memory of 500,000 years of human experience and 4 billion years of life on Earth, thinking is one way of knowing the world, the other is being…

Our heads are not directly attached to our spinal cords, so if there is a feeling of disconnection between the mind and body, you are not imagining it. Here are a few tips to connect with the body throughout the day and then begin to write in a new way:

Before sitting down to write, do a body scan. It is helpful to sit or lie down for this practice, with your feet rooted in the ground. Start by focusing on your breath and watching it move from the bottom of your spine to the top of your throat. Sometimes it is helpful to envision a ball of light moving up and down the spine or to chant while breathing. This focuses the attention. Then you can begin the body scan. This is as simple as focusing on each part of your body individually for a short period of time. First, start with your toes. Feel whether they are tense, tingly, numb, or any other sensation. Tell your toes, “I accept that feeling” and then allow them to relax. Allow them to melt into the floor. After it feels like they have melted, move up to the higher levels of your feet, then ankles, even up to elbows and crown of the head. You can continue this practice throughout the day with your whole body or just one part of your body. When you are especially busy, it may be helpful simply to touch one of your chakra centers – put a hand on the heart, on the belly, on the solar plexus below your chest – and ask to connect to that energy. The key is to write from that space once you have done the body exercise. Don’t put too much pressure on it. After you have done these exercises, just start writing stream-of-consciousness style and see what emerges.

…the memory of trauma, through repetition and the reinforcement of patterns, the body learns loneliness, self-destruction, body memory is paved into neural and muscular pathways….

Acknowledge the current patterns. In recovery circles I once facilitated, this was extremely important. The samsara cycle is a pattern of thought and suffering that sometimes gets etched into our brains like rocks being washed over by the same rocks continuously. The water deepens the etchings in the rocks. This is interesting to notice. Some of these patterns are helpful and some are not so helpful. This is interesting to notice. Also, don’t be afraid to build new patterns. I recently coached a friend of mine in doing a creative statement for a graduate school application. She was trying to see how the different parts of her life had connected. We had just seen an exhibit at the Brooklyn Musem titled “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui” which contains a few pieces made entirely of linked together bottle caps and tin can tops. At first glance, the pieces are impressive, large tapestries and golden legs that reach outward like the roots of a tree. Upon closer look, we see the bottle caps and tin cans and realize the intricate details necessary in building these structures. We worked on a few of the following exercises: Observe your own patchwork. Draw a map – a map of your childhood landmarks, of what you think your neural connections look like, whatever emerges. Even if images don’t seem to connect at first, draw or write them anyway. It is important to do this exercise from the body or from other media – draw, paint, play music, dance – and you will be amazed at the connections you can make with words after reflection on these pieces. If you are stuck, go see an art exhibit, a concert, or a play. See what inspires your body as well as your mind. Give yourself time and space without words – set a specific time – and then set a time to only write after that experience.

… neuroplasticity—through consistent, positive action, dance, body work, we can heal the mind’s trauma that lies trapped in the body; like everything else, it is a matter of practice and patience, trial and error, repetition…

These are just a few simple exercises. If they seem frustrating or don’t work for you, don’t do them. In uncovering what the body holds, it is most important to be patient. Our bodies are holding some of these traumas and memories to protect us. Let them sit if needed. Or peel them away gently. Try to enjoy the process. Let yourself laugh. Or let yourself cry. And then wait for the writing to pour out.

-June

Please support the journal in which you want your work published. Bombay Gin can be purchased through SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION, on our website, or by sending a check for $12.00, made out to BOMBAY GIN. Thank you for your interest in our magazine.

Peggy Alaniz Reviews Travis Ortiz’s Variously, Not Then

Motivated by fear, what might have been. The mind creeps, creating language that lives in its own zone of experience. Shifting parameters afford access and change. Temporal variations and parallel modes of materiality.  A meditation on what is to come progresses along with determination towards change.

–Variously, Not Then, Travis Ortiz

When afraid, the mind tends to wander in thought; it creates its own language called worry.  Together, fear and worry imprison the mind in a place from where there seems to be no escape.  Yet with the proper guidance, the mind and spirit can be freed from the trap of fear through reflection.  Meditation, to be present in the moment, provides the necessary tools in order to change. To release fear through surrender is like exhaling the breath from the body.  Variously, Not Then, a contemplative piece of literature by Travis Ortiz, invigorates the reader’s mind and spirit in a similar way.  The book contains insights into the worries and fears that a person may encounter on a daily basis, something which the reader may reflect upon for guidance in his or her own life.

Always noticed in the breath, that which is not inexpressive.

Frequently in the text, Ortiz makes references to returning to the breath as an act of cleansing the mind or spirit. It is as if Ortiz is reminding the reader to breathe, to let go of the anxiety which his words may have built up, to contemplate the message he has written. This allows the text to speak, so the reader may hear what the words say.  When he mentions the word “breath,” Ortiz asks the reader to return to his or her center, release the fear that weighs the spirit down.   The word “breath” acts like a trigger for the reader, inviting him or her into the text to be mindful of the present moment, to breathe, live and enjoy life.  A person should experience life, its beauty, as a living piece of art.

The use in forcing the breath and approaching cyclical time theories which leads to an interpenetration in the best of taste, tone on tone so to speak. 

Ortiz, an author as well as graphic designer, intends for Variously, Not Then to be a graphic piece of art as well as a literary work.  The book’s design subtly draws the reader’s attention to the beauty of each expressed thought.  Blank spaces upon the page reflect a pause in the mind and body for the words.  Ortiz adds depth to the contemplative nature of his book by expressing the printed words in an innovative matter. His visual art allows a natural energy of joy to flow, freeing the mind to function in its highest state of freedom; therefore, allowing the reader to be attentive. Water markings, in the form of various shades of lightness and darkness in text, function to imprint his ideas upon the reader’s subconscious minds. Ortiz plants the seeds of contemplation in the mind, which will later bear fruit. He uses the water markings to form their own separate narrative on the page, complementing the darker text. Larger, bolder text allows Ortiz to shout typographically, gaining the reader’s attention and stressing the importance of the ideas that he expresses.  The blank space on the page between words once again reminds the reader to return to their center.

One keeps going back in an attempt to realize there is more than one narrative running through here on the breath of excitation. 

Ortiz wants the reader to digest the material, to create his or her own personal meaning to the text, to read and re-read in order to experience the text from different viewpoints.  The book contains no formal introduction so the reader cannot develop any preconceptions of the text.  Ortiz does not want to taint his audience’s experience with his personal viewpoints. His carefully chosen words serve as a contemplative guide.  By being deliberately vague he allows the readers to interject their own memories upon the page.

A single voice emerges reminding one of the fact of breath. 

Another interesting characteristic of the book would be its title.  When broken down, the title of the book contains contemplation unto itself, a simple reflection that Ortiz wants to convey to his audience while they read his work.

Variously- In several different ways

Not- Nothing

Then-immediately or soon after

The title brings up images of a reflective state of existence.  Meditation tames the mind.  At the same time, meditation is a tool that allows surrender to happen. When the contemplative state of mind is released it brings peace, and balance to life. Ortiz wanders through so many concepts, such as language, art, politics, history, what is beyond life, in order for the reader to meditate upon them, gaining a sense of peace within. Variously, Not Then provides the reader with a tool to take a deeper look into their own life. The words create a search into the soul, challenging the reader to be mindful of life in this world.

-Peggy A. Alaniz

Peggy A. Alaniz is a low-residency student at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She resides in the small rural village of Jonesville, MI; however, come summer she will be living and attending school in Boulder full time.  She holds a BA in History from Hillsdale College and a Level I & II Attunement in the art of Reiki. Peggy also holds the rank of Sho Dan in Sanchin Ryu Karate, which she volunteers to teach at a local community school .

Please support the journal in which you want your work published. Bombay Gin can be purchased through SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION, on our website, or by sending a check for $12.00, made out to BOMBAY GIN. Thank you for your interest in our magazine.

Win Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler

Bombay Gin editors are excited to continue our series of book giveaways celebrating our latest issue.  I’m proud to announce the second of our Dorothy double-feature.

In collaboration with Dorothy, A Publishing Project, we are offering a free copy of Fra Keeler by burgeoning writer Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.

Naropa University M.F.A. candidate Denise Kinsley’s review of Fra Keeler appears in our latest issue. Denise has written grants for several non-profit theatre companies and most recently won an award from The National Endowment for the Arts. She has been involved with theater companies in New York, Portland, and San Diego.

From Kinsley’s review:

…Fra Keeler summons thinking that traces back through my own memories and propels me forward to dreams of future events. It is an extended, manic episode through an unnamed character’s exploration of what’s real and what’s true.

…Fra Keeler is an exploration and a performance of human consciousness. It reveals how the mind constructions illusion—such as momentary blindness—by attaching to dreams and memories.

To read the full review, along with the latest in experimental literature and art, buy a copy of Bombay Gin 39.1: The Contemplative as Transgressive.

For a chance to win a free copy of Oloomi’s haunting Fra Keeler, simply leave a comment below telling us why you’re interested.

The window to enter this giveaway will close at Midnight MST on Monday, March 11th, and the winner will be randomly chosen via random.org.

-Sally Jane

Please support the journal in which you want your work published. Bombay Gin can be purchased through SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION, on our website, or by sending a check for $12.00, made out to BOMBAY GIN. Thank you for your interest in our magazine.

Reflecting on Reed Bye’s Contemplative Poetics

Because the theme of Bombay Gin 39.1 (January 2013) is “The Contemplative as Transgressive,” I thought I’d offer an interpretation of Contemplative Poetics, based on my course work with Reed Bye at Naropa University. The following are excerpts from an essay, “Transitioning Inbetween to Open Space: Three Gates of Contemplative Poetics.”

Contemplative Poetics, an investigation of perception, mind, body and speech to join heaven and earth, is the foundation for discovering the true nature of being: open space (Trungpa). The practice of meditation and poetry, along with teachings by Buddhist and literary scholars, illustrates spaciousness, to remind the practitioner, “Are you breathing?” As Allen Ginsberg wrote in “Meditation and Poetics,” “real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness, or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with a phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it” (262). Mind awareness begins with understanding the nature of reality and the mind. In order to glimpse our true nature, or bodhicitta mind (enlightened mind), contemplative practices (e.g. poetry, sitting meditation, yoga, dance) enable equanimity as one begins to practice non-dualism and non-judgment. Contemplative Poetics also introduces the notion of human existence as pertaining to three gates: body, speech, and mind (Thrangu Rinpoche 19). Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche’s “The Six Collections of Consciousness” questions, “What is a body for?” and “What are the limits of the body?” While the elements of the body, speech, and mind differ, they cannot be separated from the whole and lead to an awareness of the roots of attachment and aversion. This understanding is our capacity for a stable mind, happiness and the ability to live in open space.

As we begin to recognize our ultimate state of being, slowly-slowly, dancing to the quality of our breath, writing what we notice: dust dance, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings in “The Development of Ego,” further defines this ultimate awareness. “Fundamentally there is just open space, the basic ground, what we really are.  Our most fundamental state of mind, before the creation of ego is such that there is basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious quality; and we have now and have always had this openness”(74). Ultimately, contemplative practice can allow one to understand the poisonous emotions that rule the mind, and eventually opens the heart to truth.

Poet-Bodhisattva

Allen Ginsberg’s “Meditation and Poetics” bravely calls the poet to take up a position, to explore consciousness and garner awareness of the “nature of reality and the nature of the mind” (262).  Poetry becomes a “probe,” a tool to purify the mind and eventually one is free to “let go” of thoughts. This practice of shedding the ego is an on-going practice that may begin in stillness; the body becomes the vessel in which one can begin to cultivate awareness, instead of solely being in the mind. Trungpa taught the importance of synchronizing the mind and body in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, as “connected with how we synchronize or connect with the world…looking and seeing directly beyond language” (52). Thus, the poet may discover a vision that is beyond conventional language; cultivating space to wake up, to aid in the cessation of suffering. In this way, poets might live as bodhisattvas, those who are awakened and vow to live and work to awaken others who suffer. With the innovation of poetic forms, the poet begins to illustrate the three- interdependent gates of humanity: speech, body, and mind.

Birth of the Kerouac School

Awareness of open space containing human experience sparked the meeting of Trungpa and Ginsberg, and as a result, established the Jack Kerouac School, a ground for exploring humanity, including the five skandhas, or “heaps:” form, feeling, perception, concept and consciousness, which make up the ego, the gate of the mind and intellect (Trungpa 73). As poetry is a craft, a work of art that artists may attach a sense of self to, sentient beings can become overwhelmed with perception, “fascinated by our own creation, the static colors and the static energies. We want to relate to them, and so we begin gradually to explore our creation” (Trungpa 77). And yet as we engage in creation, Trungpa also wrote in “Joining Heaven and Earth” the absurdity of labeling oneself an “artist.” “We have to recognize how much neurosis comes out in works of art” (149). This identification as artist “prevents us from reaching beyond that particular scope” (149). “We begin to realize that the principle of dharma exists within us…relaxation can happen because such trust has become a part of our existence. Therefore, we feel we can afford to open our eyes and all our sense perceptions fully” (152). Since sentient beings have innate “basic wakefulness,” or “basic goodness,” a term Trungpa uses to describe our fundamental state of being that often becomes clouded by the ego, we have the capacity to end suffering by recognizing egolessness, through the renunciation of ego fascination. As we take up our pen to communicate our inner peace, we begin to bridge the gap between the inner and outer self, self and other, and realize interconnection.

Return to Open Space

When we realize open space, we realize the five elements: Vajra (white water) Ratna (yellow earth), Padma (red fire), Karma (green wind), and Buddha (blue space/sky). Contemplative Poetics investigates how the body, mind, and speech return to the elements, in life and death. With life and death staring me in the face, my body aches, my heart hurts, other organs feel tense, and yet, I find the means to breathe this tension into the earth, releasing the sensations from my grief. I can write to heal, I can sing, tone to move the energy through my body, to pay homage to life and death. James Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life” illustrates life as a delicate balance between suffering and awareness: “And someone/ you know well is suffering… I misunderstood silence for disapproval, see now it was/ Sympathy. Thank you, May, for these warm stirrings” (155-156). As I see my local and global community struggling with open space, the challenges it brings, the suffering, I look for the fine cutting edge that all at once illustrates the vastness and depth of reality. As we sit with these intense emotions, and study the dharma, through contemplative practices we return to the fundamental mind… bodhicitta mind.

-april joseph

Reflecting_Reed_Bye_Works_Cited

Please support the journal in which you want your work published. Bombay Gin can be purchased through SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION, on our website, or by sending a check for $12.00, made out to BOMBAY GIN. Thank you for your interest in our magazine.

Letter from the Editor: Bombay Gin 39.1

When Art and Layout Editor Brenna Lee gave CAConrad a choice between fertility, transgression, and contemplative poetics, CA choose “transgression” and “contemplative poetics.” And so the theme of issue 39.1 is “The Contemplative as Transgressive.” Actually, the idea originally occurred as I considered a contemplative writing course I was set to teach this fall for the Jack Kerouac School’s low-residency MFA program. At the beginning of the summer, I posed it to the 2012-13 Bombay Gin board, and, as a thought will, it became spirit and then body.

All themed issues are a mix of constraint and spontaneity; the result is a rich interpretation of Bombay Gin’s unique contemplative heritage. Naropa University was founded in 1974 as the Naropa Institute by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a lineage holder of both the Kagyü and Nyingma Buddhist traditions. To this day, Naropa identifies itself as a Buddhist-inspired university, committed to integrating the active life of scholarship and activism with the contemplative life of study and meditative practices. In the Jack Kerouac School in particular, we grapple with how to articulate the synergy between contemplative practice and “radical exploration and experimentation” (as our website boasts).

I think part of this difficulty lies in the necessity to (meta)articulate what is obvious: writing is already a contemplative practice, and, in this way, to write contemplatively requires both innovation and a conscious return to origin, whether this be self or intuition. As Marketing Editor Sally Smith brought to my attention, “radical” is one of those curious terms that contains in its definition the full range of extremes. Its Latin etymology means, “having roots,” while its more recent definition jettisons the term toward “extreme change from accepted or traditional forms.” I find this mongrel term especially fitting as a modifier not only because of its inclusion of the whole linear iteration of “exploration and experimentation,” but also because of the way that path becomes event, rupturing and redoubling (to use Derrida’s description of structuralism).

I suppose I originally proposed “transgressive” to mean something like “radical exertion”— transgression is what happens when the soul heaps “itself on that ridge” of “a self-evolving circle” and then “tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansion,” as Emerson writes in the essay, “Circles.” Western culture often understands the contemplative life as hermetic and isolated, bound, but this issue of Bombay Gin indicates that transgression is the inevitable trajectory of awareness. In the introduction to his five poems included in this issue, Reed Bye writes of  contemplative poetics, “What is ‘transgressed’ in such a contemplative approach are all the conceptual reflexes and boundaries mind encounters, beginning with biases toward oneself and extending out to judgments or ideas felt or perceived in the world.” Like the term “radical,” Reed’s insight both introduces and directs this issue of Bombay Gin, which, in ways we could have never predicted, follows the mind’s emergence from its backgrounds, its conditioning, its habitual responses.

One pattern of note is resonance with existentialism’s pour-soi or the conscious process of estranging the self from ideology and reification. In addition to CAConrad’s insightful interview with Brenna Lee, “(Soma)tic Disobedience,” I want to highlight Rebecca Brown’s “Transgressive Meditation”; Anna Joy Springer’s “Identity as Encounter: I as Thou in Discontinuous Memoir,” which directly references the existentialist theologian Martin Buber; Erik Anderson’s excerpt from Estranger; and Michele Auerbach’s essay on kari edwards, “Can I Do This Spiritual Drag.” Interfaith and interdisciplinary, these prose pieces push at boundaries of self, gender, and animal and suggest that while only the individual can do the work of revealing the reality of herself, she cannot access the truth of the self without also seeing herself in context of others.

The lovely “lyric” pieces (both prose and poetry) collected here also evidence this dialectic of self and other, even as that other fades into context of the poetic utterance. Barbara Henning, Mg Roberts, HR Hegnauer, Chris Martin, and Matthew Cooperman, to name only a few, express “a practice of active attention and direct engagement with things as they arise in perception, thought, or emotion, based in open curiosity and appreciation for experience as a whole,” to quote again from Reed Bye. In this same vein, we are also proud to curate two portfolios with art from Olivia Locher (whose photographs are on our cover), Debbie Carlos, and Ian Rummell. In a departure from our typical design, in which the image shares the page with its title and the artist’s name, we’ve allowed these images to saturate their space on the page, to be fully present lyric spaces.

Finally, we close the issue with several “experiments,” including CAConrad’s “(Soma)tic Exercise: Grave a Hole as Dream a Hole,” Angela Stubbs’ “Blue Ritual,” and Richard Cohen’s “Play the Platypus Game.” These exercises, rituals, games appropriately close the issue by opening a space for you, reader, to enter. To again, quote Reed Bye, “For the creative aspect of making (poetics), anything and everything happens from there.”

-J’Lyn Chapman

Please support the journal in which you want your work published. Bombay Gin can be purchased through SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION, on our website, or by sending a check for $12.00, made out to BOMBAY GIN. Thank you for your interest in our magazine.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR BOMBAY GIN 39.2

Bombay Gin is taking submissions from February 1, 2013 through April 1, 2013.

In her introduction to the she said dialogues: flesh memory, Akilah Oliver offers the following definition of “flesh memory”: “the body’s truths and realities… everything that we’ve ever experienced or known, whether we know it directly or through some type of genetic memory, osmosis or environment.” Recognizing “the multiplicity of languages and realities” the bones hold, we can begin to identify the “demons” that haunts us. Grounded in dance and performance art, flesh memory becomes an embodied practice, an expression of culture and ancestral memory, as when Akilah writes, “this text is situated in the on-going work I’ve been doing in performance with the concept of flesh memory as it relates to a critical interrogation of the African American literary/performative tradition.”

With the late Akilah Oliver’s spirit and thought in mind, Bombay Gin invites submissions for issue 39.2 that explore “flesh memory.” We encourage contributors to extend Akilah’s “flesh memory.” Consider the following:

…what the body knows that the mind can’t hold, the DNA-memory of 500,000 years of human experience and 4 billion years of life on Earth, thinking is one way of knowing the world, the other is being…

…the memory of trauma, through repetition and the reinforcement of patterns, the body learns loneliness, self-destruction, body memory is paved into neural and muscular pathways….

… neuroplasticity—through consistent, positive action, dance, body work, we can heal the mind’s trauma that lies trapped in the body; like everything else, it is a matter of practice and patience, trial and error, repetition…

…how has the world impressed itself upon the body, how does the body hold its experiences? what does the body know? how do we return to the body? what does it mean to write from the body? how might flesh memory access the feral space below and beyond reason, the animal instinct and animal body?

We welcome manuscripts of fiction, essays, poetry, and cross-genre work. Poetry submissions should be comprised of 3-5 poems; prose and cross-genre manuscripts should generally consist of no more than 15 pages. Accompany each manuscript with a self-addressed stamped envelope for reply, and mail it to the following address:

BOMBAY GIN
NAROPA UNIVERSITY
JACK KEROUAC SCHOOL
2130 ARAPAHOE AVE.
BOULDER, CO 80302

Please support the journal in which you want your work published.  Bombay Gin can be purchased through SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION, on our website, or by sending a check for $12.00, made out to BOMBAY GIN. Thank you for your interest in our magazine.

Win Andrea Rexilius’ Half of What They Carried Flew Away

As Bombay Gin eagerly awaits our January 25th release party for issue 39.1, there is still time to win some of the books reviewed in the issue. In collaboration with Letter Machine Editions, we are pleased to announce a second book for our book giveaway:

Andrea Rexilius’ brilliant Half of What They Carried Flew Away

                         

Issue 39.1, in keeping with the theme of contemplative as transgressive, includes a provocative review of Half of What They Carried Flew Away by Ginger Teppner. Ginger is currently working on her MFA in the Low Residency program at Naropa University, and her forthcoming work includes Yew Journal and Upstairs at Duroc.

Below is an excerpt from Ginger’s review:

Some people fear movement away from what is comfortable, fear contradiction. Rexilius is not afraid. She embraces paradox by dispersing time. Time is always now despite perception; time is open—open as noun. She writes, “They come to the open between each breath.” In essence, she creates a system of being which chooses to stay in one place (form) while transitioning seamlessly in(to) another. There is no need for preparation. Time is both visible and a multiple of itself—both witness and the observed. To accept this discrepancy is to trust Rexilius when she directs us, the readers, to investigate how we normally look at the world. Looking, apparently, is not the same as seeing. In this era when separation and discontinuity (instability) reign supreme, the possibility of existing in wholeness while alone but not isolated (stability) allows catharsis.

Excited to read more? Come get a copy of 39.1 on January 25th!

For a signed copy of Half of What They Carried Flew Away, please leave a comment below telling us why you’re interested.

The window to enter this giveaway will close at Midnight MST on Thursday, January 17th, and the winner will be randomly chosen through random.org

Bombay Gin Announces Release Party for Issue 39.1

We are pleased to announce the release party for Issue 39.1. Celebrate our writing community and join us for an evening of readings and performances by some of the contributors to this issue. This event is free and open to the public:

Bombay Gin 39.1 Release Party

Friday, January 25, 7 p.m.

Goldfarb Student Center (basement of the Admin Building next to Allen Ginsberg Library)

Naropa’s Arapahoe Campus

2130 Arapahoe Avenue

Boulder, CO 80302

Performers Include:

Anna Avery

Reed Bye

Matthew Cooperman with Aby Kaupang

Angel Dominguez with Jason Burks

HR Hegnauer, Serena Chopra, and Michelle Auerbach

Robert Snyderman with Sam Knights

Promises to be a great night! Hope to see you there.

-Chris