The Rialto Books Review vol.009
The Rialto Books Review vol.009 is now available and can be purchased here.
The Rialto Books Review vol.009 includes Veritas! Act I Scene II by Russell Block, Reading Ulysses by Russell Block, Lonnieland by E.L. Hugh, and a sonnet by Alex Ranieri.
Veritas! Act I Scene II by Russell Block
A range at the edge of the woods near the academy. Veritas, Erin, and Bronwyn stand on stage with bows. They take aim, draw the string, and let fly the arrows, but are never on target and dissimilar in their enthusiasms. About them, their spent arrows festoon the stage. Branches all interlaced above them form a canopy.
Veritas.
When science baffles, for that it will nothing do without exactitude, we know how simply plying the string relaxes the mind of care; for it is evident that these hours flying by, whether intention to targets they convey, or if we archers unproven should remain, allow us test the patient breath for unseemliness. What is denied by vile stress, lazed leisure does secure.
Erin.
Even in our escape to hawthorn breaks is your knack for analysis indefatigable.
Veritas.
All is all, leisure or industry, such that these bows from branches fashioned, if drawn upon in gainful sport, will no distinction make between action and thought, thinking from acts, if I but perfect the principles at the heart of archery.
Erin.
We need not this day succeed or fail, do or do not, try, nor abandon hope for all our trying.
Veritas.
Yes, but I feel very near serene mastery.
Bronwyn.
In the bower, the whips hovering yet, and drawing nutrients, do their trunks a leafy service but seem in our clutches purposeless.
Reading Ulysses by Russell Block
Excerpts are available at https://bapublications.substack.com
Lonnieland by E.L. Hugh
X. enters, once again, after departing for the mattress depot, engulfed by the unwieldy purchase with little in the way of internal structure supporting it. Only at the last minute did he realize he need not lie in the bed he made, indeed could not. Whereas he is meticulously provided for in every other supply, not to mention the vim and vigor, his art will require, the lack of this essential would have occurred to him sooner, had he not been preoccupied. Christmas break was spent successfully deferring explication on the pertinent facts of the matter apropos his formal education, which, somehow, he managed to not put too fine a point on until he was asked how school ‘is’ going Christmas day. Elucidating his mom’s misuse of the present tense ‘is’ caused nothing short of a conniption, and this he did just before family was supposed to arrive at the house, no less, to drink and eat a lavish spread in celebration. Asked what the deal was with the tense vibe, he recounted this to his cousin’s astonishment, both of them amazed that X. had not been murdered then and there, and that he had actually went through with it. That cousin nearest him in age and on the only side of the family he still sees wished him luck and was somewhere in Iowa continuing in his own four-year degree program when X. stood in his room in Detroit for the first time. Only then, enjoying an unfamiliar feeling of satisfaction, and with the bare floorboards extending before him, did he realize that he had not put any thought at all into what he would be sleeping on.
A Sonnet by Alex Ranieri
My soul, progenitor of my estate,
Seeing the poor condition of her land,
Unwilling yet to yield to pompous fate,
Set out to build upon these shifting sands
(…)
