Poetry journal Unleash Lit publishes “Her Debut as a Public Singer” and “Hecate, My Fixer”

Online arts journal Unleash Lit published two of my poems today, “Hecate, My Fixer” and “Her Debut as a Public Singer.” They also posted a Q&A with me, which includes this:

Do you write to prompts? If so, what's your favorite? If not, why not?

JF: … the most productive prompts for me are the ones that happen more spur-of-the-moment, such as when I’m reading a news article and there’s a bit of incongruously poetic language that hints at a whole other world. For instance, I was reading an article about the post-pandemic, city center real estate crash, and a market analyst was quoted saying this: “We’re approaching the acceptance stage of the grieving process for office properties.” The idea of grieving for buildings struck me as a window into the human condition. 

I wrote both “Hecate, My Fixer” and “Her Debut as a Public Singer” earlier this year.

Specifically I wrote “Hecate, My Fixer” in March, in the aftermath of Dad’s death; it won a 2nd place poetry award in July from Common Ground Review, where it was first published.

I wrote “Her Debut as a Public Singer” in January under the influence of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose writing, consistent with a lot of 19th Century European literature, explores two defining divides of the emergent industrial revolution: City versus country, and factory workers versus factory owners. Unlike most of the narratives from this era, though, which cast the city as being removed from God’s natural design, Gaskell’s Manchester, London, and Liverpool, are inspirational, (and at heart) kind places.

Along with being written under the influence of Gaskell, “Her Debut as a Public Singer,” mines other city sources that are meaningful to me, such as: Fagin’s pickpocket gang, The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera, Billie Holiday, and my own youthful summer playing in a band in New York City. It’s also a reaction to William Wordsworth’s Romantic nature poetry, thus my opening line:

”Choosing to live in the city is not a retreat from the natural world.”

The line, which I repeat at the end of the poem (I was originally trying to write a pantoum), works as the mission statement for pretty much all my poems. I explain this in the Q&A when—asked who inspires me—I say “it always seems to come back to Pirate Jenny from the Threepenny Opera!”

If you scroll (way) down here, you can find my review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton and of the Penguin Classics’ Wordsworth collection.