October 30, 2008

Between Liberties and Weave Magazine Celebrate on Nov 9th!

Weave Magazine is very pleased to announce that our release party will now feature a musical performance by Between Liberties. Between Liberties rocketed onto the scene in Pittsburgh late in 2007, quickly garnering a dedicated underground following with emotionally charged songs that surpass their years. The event is being held November 9th at 5pm at Your Inner Vagabond in Lawrenceville, PA.

We are so honored to have Between Liberties as part of our celebration for the first issue of Weave Magazine. This party promises to be a magical evening filled with music, art, poetry and of course, excellent company that we hope includes you! If you haven't already, be sure to RSVP to our Facebook event.

Here is a lovely music video performance by Between Liberties.

October 21, 2008

Weave Magazine Release Party!


Weave Magazine is pleased to invite you to an evening of poetry and music to celebrate the release of our inaugural issue hosted by Your Inner Vagabond Coffeehouse & World Lounge on November 9th, 2008 beginning at 5:00pm.

The event should be a splendid evening (especially if YOU are there!) and will include poetry readings from the first issue, silent auction, musical performances and the sale of works by local artists. The event is free and open to the public.

The first issue of Weave Magazine will also be for sale.

Sunday November 9
Begins 5pm / Free
Your Inner Vagabond Coffeehouse & World Lounge
4130 Butler St. @ 42nd, Lawrenceville,
Pittsburgh, PA 15201 / 412-683-1623

October 13, 2008

Review: Flats and Riots by Michelle Stoner

Michelle Stoner’s first book Flats and Riots is a provocative journey that is both political and personal. A quick flip through the pages of this book and you’ll see that Stoner is most comfortable with a brief style, with most poems averaging less than ten lines. But it is her brevity that makes each poem so hearty; each word, phrase and line break is carefully crafted so the reader follows her through both the “flat” and the “depth” of each poem.

Each of the four sections includes snapshots of emotional experiences, wandering travel, and portraits of characters the narrator meets along the way. In the first section, Provocation, you get a feel of wanderlust, a fascination with movement and a curiosity of the role of a world traveler. In this section, an untitled poem showcases these themes through Stoner’s economy of language:

You whistle,
you eat fruit,
you go West, you try.

Stoner’s work also serves as political, both as a whole and as a more focused effort in certain poems. Throughout the book, the reader experiences the narrators growing desire for movement, both physically and socially. She often expresses the narrator’s frustration with seemingly fruitless attempts to use art for political and social change. This frustration is best showcased when Stoner comments on American culture. In her third section, Polimerica, Stoner’s words are a brief but biting commentary on Americans, like the line in her poem “Dirty Face”

dig at it
until it is just red and swollen and
empty, like an American.

This bubbling momentum builds to the fourth and final section called The Flagstaff Poems, written during Stoner’s experiences while living in Arizona. This focus does not signify a settling in the emotion or limit her subject matter but continues to build on her themes to demonstrate that the personal is political, that artistic expression can be activism. In the poem “Going for ice cream in an Arizona winter with the boys” Stoner comments on poverty,

We blew through the cop-proclaimed “crack” hoods;
ain’t no ghetto here

and also on the lifestyle choices of modern women;

“You live with these two guys?”
I sure do.

Flats and Riots is a powerful and moving book of people, places and things. Whether commenting on sexual politics or expressing homesickness, Michelle Stoner’s Flats and Riots delivers an emotional (and sometimes physical) punch-in-the-gut that will make you laugh, cry and think all at once.



Flats and Riots by Michelle Stoner was published by CustomWords in 2008 and can be purchased via their website.

October 2, 2008

Review: Forms of Intercession by Jayne Pupek

Forms of Intercession by Jayne Pupek is a collection as unsettling as it is beautiful. In (I) Forms of Intercession, the first of three sections in this imagistically dense, narrative work, we are introduced to gentle-seeming female narrators with a desire for an almost violent rebellion. The women (or woman) in these poems are aware of a magical property in their own bodies, watching the lifeline in their hands deepen or making a potion of hair and feathers with a sense of both longing and simultaneous understanding. This, combined with the sexual, but not at all titillating element the poems often take on, gives the characters in them a shamanistic, earth-mother quality.

In the second section, (II) What If?, there is an increased sense of the magic of the female body with the narrator becoming a mermaid and the lines between waking and dreaming life, between real life and fantasy, blurring even further. This section also offers up my favorite poem of the book, Withholding, where Pupek writes,

“Set in fields, poppies survive.
Nature strengthens by withholding.

Perhaps it’s the same with a woman.
Withhold love, watch how far she’ll go to find it.”


This section shifts to a tone of uncertainty and doubt, even fear as Pupek’s narrators, always in the intimate “I”, speak of cheating spouses, of children dead of stillbirth, infanticide, or abortion, always with a hauntingly beautiful voice and the ear for soft, low sound that Pupek maintains throughout the book.

In the final section, (III) Slivers, the tone shifts again to one of persistence and belief. Men become impotent and weak rather than having the delicate balance between equals and prey demonstrated in the first section or as perpetrators of harm as they are presented in the second section. In this section there is also a movement from simply understanding and consciousness of the magical quality of the female body to an attempt to utilize that quality with an element of openness and power as in Scoliosis where she writes,

“I turn, raise my dress
shoulder-high
and show my spine,
a curved snake
hissing inside bone.”


Indeed, there is still a darkness to Pupek’s writing, even in this section, but as she closes the book in the poem Sliver,

“Life is full of broken combs and blisters. Still we go on
because it is in us, the need for continuance,
that sliver of persistence inside every cell.”



Forms of Intercession by Jayne Pupek was published by Mayapple Press in 2008 and can be ordered from them or on amazon.com.
Jayne Pupek's website may be found here.
She has also recently published a novel, Tomato Girl, which may be found here.

October 1, 2008

Weave Issue One Preview!

We are very pleased to announce that we have published some sample works from Weave's premier issue on our website. Our contributor list has been updated to include the titles of all pieces being published in issue one. We have included fantastic poetry from both Molly Prosser and Dana Guthrie Martin. For fiction, we do hope you'll enjoy Jack Swenson's piece as much as we do. For artwork, be sure to check out the lovely Nashay Jones and the amazing cover art by Heidi Richardson Evans.

We are so very excited and honored to include all the work of our contributors and we do hope that these samples will whet your appetite for a bigger taste of what's cooking in Weave's first issue. We also hope that if you are considering submitting to Weave for consideration in future issues, that you'll take a gander and these pieces to gain a clearer picture of our aesthetic.

We will soon be open for pre-orders for issue one and will thank you in advance for your support. Be sure to check back - or better yet, sign up for our mailing list or subscribe to our blog (see right side column). That will ensure you have the latest news for all things happening with Weave.