Corn Goddess
by Stephanie Dickinson

Corn Goddess speaks to the sacred teenage time when a body blossoms and is maimed, about prairie and ramshackle farms and desolate cow lanes, the dirt’s remembering of recluses and long ago animal sex, about mothers, those angry and strong Midwestern women who feed their daughters the bone soup of self-hatred, and fathers who hunt the silver foxes running through farm girls’ imaginations. Corn Goddess describes the struggle to escape the seduction of gunnysacks and summer afternoons spent lying on cut hay after the balers have been through, of green corn and mystery growing in every direction, a fecund claustrophobia, and the darkness encountered once the wider world is found.

I have been savoring your poems, a few at a time, and so am still turning the pages.  They are among the best poems (tops actually) I’ve ever read by women writing about their experience.  I am amazed that darkness could be so rich.

Alixa Doom

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Corn Goddess

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STEPHANIE DICKINSON's work appears in Cream City Review, Mudfish, Green Mountains Review, Chelsea, Nimrod, PMS, Storyquarterly, Feminist Studies, Inkwell, Ontario Review, Water Stone, Columbia Journal, and the McGuffin, among others.

She took first place in the 2003 Pearl Fiction contest for "The Road of Five Churches" and third place in the 2003 International Fish Competition for "Fire Maidens, '57." Her story "A Lynching in Stereoscope" appears in BEST AMERICAN 2005 NONREQUIRED READING edited by Dave Eggers. She received a distinguished story citation for "Chicken Bus Girl" in Pushcart Prize 2005, and in 2006 Best American Mystery Stories for "Slavequarters."

Her novel, Half Girl, won the Hackney Award for best unpublished novel of 2002. It will be published this year by Spuyten Duyvil.

Corn Goddess - $10.00