into the leftover blue by Anna King Ivey
The virus and the tumor are the stillborn children of three discarded words—the inspector traces these with her thumb as a sky becomes the column of shattered embers . . . Yes, it did.
1918: As the world's young men crisscrossed the globe in pursuit of some restoration of order, they carried within them the makings of further disarray. From the trenches of the Western Front to the island paradises of the Pacific, influenza spared few it touched. Five percent of the human population perished, from India to Iowa, Samoa to Sierra Leone. For a species already engaged in the war to end wars, the speed and force of the epidemic were simply too much; upward of one hundred million lives were lost in a matter of months. And yet, that rapidity combined with the psychological toll of WWI resulted in the virus' relatively minor significance in our collective history.
Anna King Ivey's into the leftover blue examines the legacy of this forgotten pandemic as a means of reconciling the grief of a deceased parent. Opening as a third person analysis of historical sources detailing the outbreak and its aftermath, the narrative ultimately shifts to a first person acceptance of death and its lingering ache. It reminds us time is often the only remedy for catastrophe, no matter its scale.
64 pages, handmade and numbered • 2016
The virus and the tumor are the stillborn children of three discarded words—the inspector traces these with her thumb as a sky becomes the column of shattered embers . . . Yes, it did.
1918: As the world's young men crisscrossed the globe in pursuit of some restoration of order, they carried within them the makings of further disarray. From the trenches of the Western Front to the island paradises of the Pacific, influenza spared few it touched. Five percent of the human population perished, from India to Iowa, Samoa to Sierra Leone. For a species already engaged in the war to end wars, the speed and force of the epidemic were simply too much; upward of one hundred million lives were lost in a matter of months. And yet, that rapidity combined with the psychological toll of WWI resulted in the virus' relatively minor significance in our collective history.
Anna King Ivey's into the leftover blue examines the legacy of this forgotten pandemic as a means of reconciling the grief of a deceased parent. Opening as a third person analysis of historical sources detailing the outbreak and its aftermath, the narrative ultimately shifts to a first person acceptance of death and its lingering ache. It reminds us time is often the only remedy for catastrophe, no matter its scale.
64 pages, handmade and numbered • 2016
The virus and the tumor are the stillborn children of three discarded words—the inspector traces these with her thumb as a sky becomes the column of shattered embers . . . Yes, it did.
1918: As the world's young men crisscrossed the globe in pursuit of some restoration of order, they carried within them the makings of further disarray. From the trenches of the Western Front to the island paradises of the Pacific, influenza spared few it touched. Five percent of the human population perished, from India to Iowa, Samoa to Sierra Leone. For a species already engaged in the war to end wars, the speed and force of the epidemic were simply too much; upward of one hundred million lives were lost in a matter of months. And yet, that rapidity combined with the psychological toll of WWI resulted in the virus' relatively minor significance in our collective history.
Anna King Ivey's into the leftover blue examines the legacy of this forgotten pandemic as a means of reconciling the grief of a deceased parent. Opening as a third person analysis of historical sources detailing the outbreak and its aftermath, the narrative ultimately shifts to a first person acceptance of death and its lingering ache. It reminds us time is often the only remedy for catastrophe, no matter its scale.
64 pages, handmade and numbered • 2016
Anna King Ivey is currently working on her PhD in poetry at Georgia State University and is the Director of Student Support Services at Eagle's Landing Christian Academy. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, as well as Sundress’ Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has been featured in So to Speak, The Unrorean, Antithesis, Stone Highway Review, Sukoon, Dirty Chai, and West Trade, among many others. She was offered a fellowship by the Summer Literary Seminars to attend a writing program in Lithuania in 2008 and 2013. She has been published academically in the Ellen Glasgow Journal of Southern Women Writers, Florida English, as well as in The Apalachee Review.