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b'What were you wearing in the \\u201890s, Slushies? Sleeveless flannel and crochet? Paco Rabanne? We\\u2019re beguiled by Emily Pulfer-Terino\\u2019s poems on this episode as we discuss how she slides us back to the \\u201890s. She has us sniffing magazine perfume inserts and marveling at the properly cranky voice she invokes for an epigraph, borrowed from Vogue\\u2019s letters to the editor. What were we thinking wearing all those shreds? Only the girls on those glossy pages know for sure. For more context, check out Karina Longworth\\u2019s excellent podcast, You Must Remember This, and her recent deep dive into the bonkers eroticism of the 1990s. Plus, Sentimental Garbage\\u2019s episode on Dirty Dancing featuring Curtis Sittenfeld.\\xa0\\nFor a great collection of poems that draws its title from grunge-era jargon (kinda, sorta, wink, wink), we recommend a book we love by our pal Daniel Nester:\\xa0 Harsh Realm: My 1990s.\\n\\xa0\\nThis episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song \\u201cSpaghetti with Loretta\\u201d now opens our show.\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nAt the table: Jason Schneiderman, Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Samantha Neugebauer, and Dagne Forrest\\n\\xa0\\n\\n\\xa0\\nEmily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Collagist, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays the Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers\\u2019 Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative nonfiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.\\n\\xa0\\nAuthor website: http://emilypulferterino.com/\\nInstagram: @epulferterino\\n\\nGrunge & Glory \\n\\n\\u201cYou\\u2019re kidding. Tell me you\\u2019re kidding. At least I\\u2019ll know where to find my new wardrobe this year...in the nearest dumpster\\u2026talk about the Emperor\\u2019s New Clothes. Tsk, tsk.\\u201d\\u2014(Letter to the Editor)[1]\\n\\n\\xa0\\nWhat\\u2019s more glorious than a girl in a field,\\xa0\\ncurled in the whorl of a deer bed, alfalfa\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nhaloing her dreams of fashion magazines\\nwhile she plies matted hay, untatting her world?\\n\\xa0\\nBales score the landscape, parceling\\nendlessness, parsing this solo tableau,\\n\\xa0\\nwhile her heroes wrench their music\\xa0\\ninto being in Seattle, gray, time zones away.\\n\\xa0\\nWhat\\u2019s grunge if not her dense crochet\\nof castoff couture curated from dumpsters\\n\\xa0\\nand worn with a frisson of pride and shame:\\xa0\\nflowering nightgown, old ski boots, sweater\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nturned lace in places by moths and age?\\nAnd this field like where models pose\\n\\xa0\\nin Vogue, each page itself a piece of land\\nand an ethos framed inside a storyboard.\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nScala Naturae\\n\\xa0\\nLike prying pods of milkweed\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 so those astral seeds effuse\\u2014\\n\\xa0\\nunseaming magazine ads for perfume.\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 Anointing my wrists with scented glue,\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nrunning each over the edge of a page,\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 testing scents I aspired to buy\\n\\xa0\\nand classifying my olfactory taxonomy.\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 Grass evoked the world I\\u2019d known\\n\\xa0\\nwith hints of rain and magnolia\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 slight as fog above an unmown field.\\n\\xa0\\nDNA\\u2019s rosemary, oakmoss, and mint,\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 ancient and clear as purpose; glass\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nspiraled bottle signifying sentience\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 and enduring iteration. Both\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nethereal and hyperreal, Destiny\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 offered apricots, orchids, and roses--\\n\\xa0\\nbottle opaque as an eyelid,\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 veil of petals sheer as promise.\\n\\xa0\\nSamsara was amber, sandalwood,\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 ylang ylang, peach. Syllabically lulling,\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nits s and a extending, repeating, suggesting\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 endlessness. Cycle of birth and death\\n\\xa0\\nrebranded as serenity in ongoingness.\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 Angel\\u2019s burst of praline and patchouli\\n\\xa0\\nlit the crystal facets of that star,\\n\\xa0\\n\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0 making heaven of my pulse and ordinary air.\\n\\n\\n\\xa0\\n[1] \\xa0Wynne Bittlinger, letter to the editor in Vogue US, February 1993'