The three others in the series focus on the witch’s strange lovers: a stricken scientist obsessed with freeing the body from pain armless boy-soldiers conjured from the dead and a bewildered, skinny-fingered ghost who braids chorales into her hair in a damp cathedral loft. The house turning shakily on its chicken legs. We heard my brother sighing in his dreams, What could I say to that? She waited out my silence Nights, she kept me up while my brother slept,Ī trance-faking sage-had run off with the woman It reads:Īs she ran her hand over and over the our heads, My favorite lines come from “Part of the Problem with the Witch” where a little girl befriended by the woman offers a portrait more frightening than her ovens. The tetrad of witch poems included in Ghost House is sexy, creepy and so rich in tactile imagery that they almost overshadow the more game-heavy narrative.
While her faith is a bit quieter in her poetry, the soul-searching is as enlarging, especially in the context of her “story poems,” which dip into fairytale themes to explore issues that haunt us from childhood. In them, she explores faith beyond the roots of her evangelical upbringing, often reaching surprising conclusions. Her essays have appeared in Response, Image Journal, The Christian Century and in the 2009 anthology Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing up Female and Evangelical, which she both contributed to and edited. Such theological questions are not new to Notess’ work. Augustine Enters the World’s Largest Pac-Man Maze,” where the philosopher’s quest is likened to Pac-Man’s relentless pursuit of hunger-quenching fruit. Later, a classics lecture sparks the trippy “St. Ghosts find us every day,īut we’ll go back to gather what we need. Killer we’ll meet or guess which creatures hatchĪ new world for us. Past missed jumps, wasted lives, buried treasure.īrother, so many times I died not believingīut I’m learning. Winner of Seattle-based Floating Bridge Press’ 2013 annual chapbook competition, this is a smart, fresh, almost organic meld of old-school game love and personal truth.ĭelicious from its opening lines, the first poem “Mario World” sucks you into an alternative universe while at the same time grounding you ever more firmly in harsh reality. Snap up Ghost House for its cool 8-bit cover and marvel at the depth of spiritual insight Notess manages to pack into one-clawed Street Fighter II battles and pastoral Yoshi forestscapes.
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