Episode 77: Belly-up!
b'If you are like us, Slushies, then you love a good duality. We\'re hooked on the way "belly-up" can mean to be a flop and to roll in closer. So, belly-up to this episode where we discuss two poems by Judith Roney-- \\u201cBelly-up\\u201d and \\u201cRelictual Taxon.\\u201d After some laughs about how it\\u2019s easy to mistake our basement studio\\u2019s relative isolation as evidence of a Zombie apocalypse (and name our weapons of choice), we talk about Marion\\u2019s vertigo in her new apartment, Jason\\u2019s strategies for alternate side street parking, Samantha\\u2019s tips on how to properly pronounce Abu Dhabi, and the global proliferation of pumpkin spiced lattes. Judith Roney\\u2019s poetry reigns us in and rewards our focus. Listen in as the The Slush Pile crew has an epiphanic, intertextual jam session with \\u201cBelly-Up\\u201d and \\u201cRelictual Taxon.\\u201d\\xa0 We start with \\u201cBelly-Up,\\u201d which immediately had us contemplating room dividers and family tensions and an array of resonances and literary echoes. Listen for Jason\\u2019s references to Rickey Laurentiis\\u2019s poems and to Adrienne Rich\\u2019s Aunt Jennifer\\u2019s Tigers. From \\u201cBelly-up\\u201d we turn to \\u201cRelictual Taxon.\\u201d Hear why we love poems that make us smarter about our cultural predicaments. Poetry, climate change, and the anthropocene:\\xa0 no better way to reckon with extinction than huddled around a mic talking poetry & flipping thumbs.\\nJudith Roney tends to write about dead people (a lot), relatives, the abused & murdered sent to the Dozier "School" for Boys, the forgotten and misunderstood, hauntings & ghosts. The city she grew up in, Chicago, haunts her. Brick, soot, single pane windows, frost-covered, small protection against wind howling in from Lake Michigan. Sometimes it seems everything haunts her. This is probably because she read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier when she was quite young, but it\'s still her fav book ever. Ever.\\nJudith Roney is the author of According to the Gospel of Haunted Women (ELJ Publications, 2015), Bless the Wayward Boy, (Honorable Mention, Two Sylvias Press), Waiting for Rain (Finalist, Two Sylvias Press 2017), and Field Guide for A Human (Runner-Up, Gambling the Aisle 2015 Chapbook Contest). Her poems and other writing have appeared in many anthologies, most recently in the UK\\u2019s Shooter Magazine\\u2019s \\u201cCity\\u201d themed anthology, as she \\u201cpoetically takes the pulse of Orlando following last year\\u2019s nightclub shootings in \\u201c'