Overtures by Lana Hechtman Ayers
“Lana Hechtman Ayers’ Overtures is capacious and lyrical, a compendium of poems
that showcase her imagination and her empathy, her attention to the small miracles of
daily life, the passage of time, the natural world, as well as to the disorientation bred of
our disconnection from the real, the ancient, the sacred. It includes fables and fairytales
and homages to other poets, from Pablo Neruda to Wallace Stevens to Mary Oliver. As
a collection, it is ample and generous; the poet tells the story of her life, which could be
yours, by way of what she insistently, almost obsessively, observes and records. And
while you ‘can’t erase / what has already happened,’ she reminds us, in poems like
these, at least, ‘Your life flows back to you.’”
—Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan
Winter on the Yaquina
The river’s a mirror of sky,
blistered white,
and bare Alder branches spell out
what can only be uttered
by chattering teeth.
Even the grass under foot stone cold,
dew frozen as the tears of fallen angels.
Cat mama, dog mama, sky-watcher, recovering coffee-addict, former New Yorker Lana
Hechtman Ayers writes in a room over the garage. Her work appears in such places as
Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, The MacGuffin, and Verse Daily.
Author of eight full-length
poetry collections, the most recent are: When All Else Fails (May 2023) and Overtures (September
2023). In 2024, her ninth collection, The Autobiography of Rain, will be released by Fernwood
Press.
Lana also delves into romantic time travel fiction and mystery. She leads generative writing
workshops in the Amherst method, helps poets assemble their own collections, facilitates a
Zoom Poetry Book Club, and manages three small poetry presses where she’s fostered over 100
books in the world. Lana spends entirely too many hours watching HGTV and solving
cryptograms with her spouse in Newport, Oregon, a town famous for its barking sea lions.
At the Car Wash by Arthur Russell
In his chapbook, At the Car Wash, Arthur Russell investigates and cross-examines his
experiences growing up and working in his family’s small business, a car wash located in
Brooklyn, New York. The poems find their center in the physical plant, the men who work
there, and the family relationships, particularly Russell’s relationship with his father, who was
the inventor of the conveyorized car wash and the owner of the business. The poems are often
unsparingly frank, such as “How to Replace a Toilet,” and sometimes surprisingly lyrical, such
as “Mom Would Be a Cardinal.” Always, however, the poems find their evocative power and
resonance in Russell’s willingness to drill down deeply into the minutiae of everyday life in an
unquestionably unromantic setting and to find both beauty and belonging. As he says in the final
line of “The Jetty,” the final poem in the book—“I will never leave this place.”
Legacy
Before the Automatic Car Wash Association,
ACWA for short, was taken over
by R. R. (Gus) Trantham, doing my father
out of a shot at the presidency,
the logo for the association featured
Neptune with a Trident, long hair
dripping, as though risen from the sea,
while in his palm, a Ford Fairlane gleamed.
Arthur Russell is the winner of the 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize, as well as the 2023
Fractured Lit Flash Fiction Prize, the second-place winner of the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Prize, and
of Brooklyn Poet’s Poem of the Year for 2015, and he was the runner up for the same prize in
2021. He has received fellowships from Syracuse University’s creative writing program and the
Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and stories have appeared in Copper Nickel
and Glimmer Train among many other publications. He is one of the directors of the Red
Wheelbarrow Poets of Rutherford, New Jersey where he co-leads their weekly workshops, co-
hosts their monthly reading series and co-edits their annual journal.
