Literature from America to France, and Beyond

Cerise Press is an international online journal based in the United States and France. As this suggests, the content is multicultural and filled with translations, poetry, fiction, and art from across the world (not to mention, interviews, reviews and essays). This is both exciting and overwhelming, like a four storey high sweet shop. The journal’s design is beautiful with tasters of contents collaged into a single page, but it is also somewhat confusing until you notice the handy right-hand side table of contents. To help you through the large content, I have picked my favourite cherries from the tree (forgive the pun) to share with you.

In the poetry section, it is hard not to be affected by Ai’s ‘The Cancer Chronicles’, submitted whilst the poet was still alive. The poem is divided into four stages, each attempting to honestly gauge her reactions to the disease as it progressed and told in the third person to detach herself from the pain:

‘Well what do you know.
She was still alive,
Even though she’d decided she’d die in December.
Now it was February
And she was very anxious instead of relieved
That she had deceived herself
Into believing she’d never be seeing a new year again.’

The most moving aspect of this poem is the loneliness that permeates it. Save for the presence of a cat (who dies of feline leukemia), the narrator involves no one else in her plight, there are no visitors, family or friends mentioned, just her destructive, hopeful, and resigned thoughts.

Another stand out for me was Jehanne Dubrow’s ‘A Small History of Shopping’ whose content quietly subverts the predictability of the title. Dubrow is adept at undercutting dazzling dépaysement with sharp words that jolt you out of your enjoyment:

‘girls cast in miniature,
articulated joints,
each bisque mouth seamed shut —

a kind of glittering
answer to absence,
which filled the bookshelves

in my room. No wonder
that all shopping bags
became an opening,’

Christine Boyka Kluge’s 'They Seek an Inky Elixir’ is a prose poem that reminds me favourably of Francis Ponge. Kluge’s exhilarating imagination observes poems in the wild as ‘[T]heir unfurled tongues bore into the sapwood.’