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Chella Courington
Poet
Indigo Ink Press Publications: Paper Covers Rock (Flip Edition, September 2011)
Nominated for the 2009 Best of the Net Anthology (Sundress Publications) and the 2009 Best New Poets (University of Virginia), Chella Courington received her Ph.D. in literature from the University of South Carolina and her MFA in poetry from New England College.
She currently teaches literature and writing at Santa Barbara City College in California. She was previously a professor of English at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Ala.
Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, lo-ball magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Opium Magazine, and Pirene’s Fountain. “Diana loved anything orange” was runner-up in The Collagist’s 2009 Flash Fiction Contest.
Her first chapbook was Southern Girl Gone Wrong (Foothills Publishing, 2004) and her second chapbook of prose poetry, Girls & Women, was released by Burning River (March 2011).
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Chella is available for readings and signings in the greater southern California area. Please contact us to schedule an event.
Related Authors: Kristen McHenry
Sample Poem from Paper Covers Rock
LYNETTE’S WAR
Cousin Lynette says she’s tired from cleaning
East Main houses of rich bitches. They don’t even shit
like us, got toilet seats that float to the bowl,
never make a sound, & she hands me the baby
over the front seat. Days off Merry Maids
we like to drive her ’97 Trans Am to Gulf Shores—
kd lang over eight speakers.
I’m tired too, tired of being the babysitter.
Leah, grabbing my earrings, covers me in crumbs.
She bites off the heads of animal crackers.
Only eats heads.
Don’t know why I hang with her.
She’s like the girl who cut my hair at Cinderella’s
saying I had the ugliest strands she’d ever seen.
I kept going back for more till Lynette blurted
you don’t need to pay for that kind of shit.
But Lynette says outright
she’s sexy & I’m not. We both know it.
Junior high she called me a mutant. Boobs
like raisins on a fifteen-year old’s wrong.
Mama took me to the doctor & he shook his head.
At least Lynette is a good mother.
When the kid has fever, Lynette won’t go
to work. I’d rather lose my job
than leave a sick baby at daycare.
Guess that’s why I hang with her.
She might call me names, but let somebody else do it,
she’d scratch their eyes out. At the Sonic,
some boy from Crossville leaned in the window,
drop the fat chick & let’s go driving.
She clawed his left cheek & screeched away,
tray still on the car, cokes & fries flying.
Son of a bitch thinks he can dump on you and have
a good time with me. Stupid bastard.
I thought Lynette would always be the one to leave.
Good looking. Smart. She never let anybody
walk on her, or me, though she did
what Cochran girls do after getting their
driver’s license. She got knocked up.
Wouldn’t tell a soul who the father was.
We all thought it was Sonny Cruz.
He went to Iraq in August & emailed Lynette every day.
Like they were junk, she’d hit delete.
He started writing letters she stacked on her dresser—
unopened. Keeping in touch with soldiers
is talking to the dead. Sonny could come back,
I say. Lots of boys make it. Lynette turns away
he might, but he won’t be the Sonny I knew.
After homecoming she carries his letters out to the grill.
They catch on the third match.
Every last word.
Acclaim for Paper Covers Rock & Chella Courington
Reviews on LibraryThing | Reviews on GoodReads | Reviews on Amazon
“A dazzle and a delight, Chella Courington’s poetry will carry you through the brave discoveries of adolescent sex, then turn around and chill you with what she knows of being a grown woman, then turn again and fill you with compassion for human distress. Travel with her on these journeys and you’ll be going with beauty all the way.”
Alicia Ostriker, author of The Book of Seventy
“Crisp narrative lines filled with energy, indignation, and fierce beauty. The images can take your breath away, and the title poem is one I’ll never forget.”
Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire & editor of Brevity
“In Paper Covers Rock, Courington narrates familiar poetic scenarios— adolescent girls exploring their sexuality; a poet/teacher observing her students in a prison—but always with bright, surprising details: one girl doesn’t just kiss the other, she ‘uncloses my eyes with her tongue,’ and a confident, authoritative tone that brings readers back ‘to the point of mooring.’ In this collection, loss is described with ‘words / like sour tree roots’ and trouble becomes so appealing, one can’t help but wonder ‘if Satan’s the hero’ in her story.”
Sara Tracey, author of Flood Year
“Chella Courington’s voice of quiet reflection leads us through sensual memories of youth, struggles for affirmation and the middle-aged acknowledgment of frailty. These poems together form a tight weave of body-knowledge, experienced through time and the pull of first relationships.”
Jen Pearson, reviewer, PoetryLog
(www.poetrylog.wordpress.com)
“The young girl on the cover of Courington’s book holds her shirt open so blackbirds can fly into her chest. This image encapsulates the themes of sexuality and the body, which thread throughout the poems.” Read more…
Barbara P. Lovenheim
Prick of the Spindle Volume 5.4
Paper Covers Rock was first runner-up in the qarrtsiluni Chapbook Competition (2009) and a finalist in the Hot Metal Press chapbook competition (2009). The poem “Lynette’s War” was a Goodreads winner (October 2009) and a finalist in Winning Writers Sixth Annual War Poetry Contest (November 2007).