8
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2016 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY NICOLE SARROCCO
When a word gets taken away from her it’s the worst she says every time you let go of one the whole world shrinks up like a cheap t-shirt it doesn’t matter how it goes
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Babble
away it could turn into a product or just a rock in her pocket hardened out of sense invisible and blunt but deadly it hurts too much to hear it like that song playing that day at the Skate Ranch like the wreckage of her first car and like every dish her mother ever cooked for her father it turns to dust in her mouth
The Impossible Knife of Memory, 2015 (paper on paper collage, 12x15.5) by Margaret Sartor
NICOLE SARROCCO lives in Raleigh. She teaches English and History at the North Carolina School of Math and Science. Her published works include a collection of poems, Karate Bride (Arundel Books, 2004), and two novels, Lit By Lightning (Chatwin Books, 2015) and Ill-Mannered Ghosts (Chatwin Books, 2016).
MARGARET SARTOR was born and raised in Louisiana, graduated from UNC Chapel Hill, currently teaches courses in memoir writing and documentary photography at Duke University, and lives in Durham, NC. Her memoir, Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s (Bloomsbury, 2006) was a New York Times best-seller, and a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year. Her book What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney (Norton, 2000; co-edited with Geoff Dyer) was chosen by the Village Voice as one the “Top Ten Photography Books of 1999.” Images from her photographic project Close to Home have been published in numerous books and periodicals, among them Aperture, The New Yorker, and A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, NC; the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC; and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York. Her work is in a number of private and museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. See more of her work on her website.