Issue #16: The Little Prince
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What Does the Fox Say?
Each issue of NonBinary Review has its own particular character—a piece of the source material that garners more interest than any other. For The Little Prince, it was the fox. All the more intriguing because in December, we accepted a book of fox poems as our Viable chapbook selection for the month (if you’re interested in our Viable chapbook series, please check out our Patreon page!).
It seemed like a quarter of our submissions had to do with the fox, and from the perspective of someone on the outside of the submission process, I have to admit myself baffled. What is it with foxes and our society?
Foxes have long symbolized the trickster, characterized by cunning, discernment, and quick action. Take a look at those traits for a second. Do they look familiar? They look an awful lot like the traits of the other current pop culture obsession, superheroes. We don’t just love Batman or Iron Man or Wonder Woman because they’re stronger than we are—we love them because they don’t freeze in a crisis. They instantly know what to do and just as instantly jump to do it.
It’s no wonder that the fox archetype speaks so clearly to us. The Little Prince’s fox, seeing the Prince sad and lonely after discovering that the precious flower left behind on his own planet is not unique, understands immediately how to remedy the situation, and saves the Prince from his loneliness.
Modern life is hyperconnected. We have millions of hours of entertainment available on demand from any one of a dozen sources, any time of the day or night. We can instantly communicate with nearly anyone on the planet. We can broadcast the inner workings of our own minds to hundreds of millions of people as easily as we make a grocery list. And yet, we’re still lonely. Sitting at our computers, typing on our phones, speaking into the black boxes sitting on our kitchen counters, we feel as though we project only a portion of ourselves, and that if people knew who we really were, they wouldn’t love us. That we may be fundamentally unlovable to anyone who gets beyond our electronic perimeters. We are sad, because we have not been tamed, nor have we tamed anyone.
What is the solution?
The bad news is that the only solution may be that offered by The Little Prince. If we want to tame something, to be tamed, to become responsible for someone else and have them be responsible for us, we may have to leave the safe little planets of our own houses, our own televisions, our computers, our phones, our own heads…and venture out. And, like the Little Prince, we will undoubtedly meet a host of people who baffle or repel us. But we cannot let that take away our hope. We may have to travel far, we will almost certainly become discouraged, we may have our hearts broken, but the opposite is also true. We may find a new home, we may become inspired, or we may find the kind of love that helps us feel connected to the world. You will never know, if you don’t venture out.
Thankfully, those lonely fox pieces were balanced by a flood of personal essays about how The Little Prince has impacted the lives of people, helping connect them to each other and to their world.
We hope these pieces, from writers who ventured far enough to take the risk to send us their work, connects you closer to this most beloved of books.
Lise Quintana
MANDEM
The Little Prince (cover)
MANDEM is a media-fluid artist conglomerate. Their work on disability poetics, the visceral body, gender and childhood is in critical dialogue with art history, religious iconography/mythology, and various -punk aesthetics. MANDEM serves as art editor for The Deaf Poets Society journal. They have recently been artist-in-residence at Il Palmerino (Florence, Italy) and Negative Space Gallery (Cleveland, Ohio). MANDEM’s current painting series, Hypermobility, is documented online here.
E. Kristin Anderson
Les choses que l’on apprivoise
E. Kristin is the author of eight chapbooks, including We’re Doing Witchcraft, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, and 17 seventeen XVII. Kristin is an editor at Red Paint Hill.
Jan Chronister
Waiting for Golden Snakes
Jan lives and writes in the woods near Maple, Wisconsin. She devotes herself to her flower gardens but has never had any luck with roses.
Richard Craven
Sonnet 24
Richard has written three novels, Amoeba Dick, Pretty Poli, and Odour Issues, numerous short stories, 155 sonnets including one in French, and a solitary play, The Senseless Counterfeit. He lives in Bristol in the UK.
Heidi Czerwiec
A Crash, A Collage
Heidi serves as Senior Poetry Editor at Poetry City, USA. She is the author of Conjoining, and the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She lives in Minneapolis.
Jenny Gaitskell
I Am She
Jenny lives, writes and hunts for antique dictionaries in Lewes, Sussex. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the anthologies Tales from the Old Hill, Hysteria 6 and Everyday Epics.
Slade Graves
Rose #2
Slade has been a fine artist showing in galleries for over 25 years. Her art is about: the exploration of ideas, concepts, questions and practices that examine the past, describes the present, imagines the future.
Glynn Hiller
The Little Prince Goes on a Date
Glynne has published chapters of her memoir, Passport to Paris, in the East Hampton Star, and “Colette, Gourmand/Gourmet” in the New York Times Magazine.
Laura Hogan
The Prince Decides
Laura is the author of I Live, No Longer I and O Garden-Dweller. Her poems can be found in or are forthcoming in America, The Windhover, The Christian Century, Plum Tree Tavern, Penwood Review, and Riddled with Arrows.
Liz Hutchinson
On Belief
Liz is a horticulturist living on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Her first collection of poems, Animalalia, is available from YesNoPress.
R. Mac Jones
Come Marvel at Barnum’s Diminutive Prince
R. Mac is the co-editor of Found Anew: Poetry and Prose Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library Digital Collections. His poems have recently appeared in ellipsis…, Star*Line, and Shot Glass Journal.
Monika Kalina
Letters to the Queen
Monika was born in Poland, and came to Boston to study mysticism. She is an ESL teacher at Rice University in Houston, and a student at the Solstice MFA program in creative writing at Pine Manor College.
Kate Kastelein
Rose
Kate has works slated for publication in Masques by Laughing Medusa Press, and She Loves You: Women Writers Tell How a Teen Idol Changed Their Life by McFarland & Co. She is studying for an MFA at the Stonecoast Writers program.
Catherine B. Krause
The Tippler
Catherine is a polyamorous queer trans woman living in Niagara Falls, NY. Her poetry has appeared in Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, Gargoyle, MARY, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Opiate, and NonBinary Review #14.
Christina Lloyd
St. Exupéry
Christina has work in various journals, most recently in The North. NonBinary Review published my poem “Clytie” in the Bullfinch’s Mythology issue a few years back.I am pursuing a PhD in creative writing through Lancaster.
Quinn Lui
letters to a little prince
Quinn serves as a Feedback Editor for Sooth Swarm Journal. They have always been in love with words, stories, and the sky. You can find more of their writing @abstractedfocus on Tumblr and Instagram.
Béatrice Machet
B-612
Béatrice is the author of 14 poetry books in French, and two in English. She translates many Native American contemporary poets into French and managed to gather and get anthologies of Native authors published in France.
Erstwhile M
A Thousand Miles From Any Inhabited
Erstwhile is a sentient house of indeterminate gender, in which the rooms are prone to changing position with startling alacrity. One is advised to memorize the particularities of the doors for best navigation.
Toti O’Brien
Lost Planet
Toti has illustrated two children books and two memoirs. Her artwork has most recently appeared in Brain of Forgetting, Riddled With Arrows, Longridge Review, and Scryptic.
Jillian Phillips
The Rose’s Soliloquy
Jillian has written poetry under the names Pablo Neruda, Yu Xiuhua, and William Shakespeare. Her work can be found in The New Yorker (page numbers), The Atlantic (classifieds) and Harper’s (that one line on page 126).
Steph Post
The Star Thief
Steph is the author of the novels Walk in the Fire, Lightwood and A Tree Born Crooked. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Rhysling Award and was a semi-finalist for The Big Moose Prize. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Brian Salmons
Lay down in greener grass to cry
Brian writes and occasionally performs at open mics. His work has appeared in Eyedrum Periodically and Man in the Street Magazine and he is the host of @BrianAndTheNight, a poetry podcast on Facebook.
Eric Scarboro
The Dirtiest Hands, the Littlest Prince
Eric is a retired comedian, artist, welder, bus driver, surprisingly good centre-half and not bad actor. Can’t plaster to save his life. He lives in County Durham, collecting art and raising stories.
Leonora Simonovis
Matters of Consequence
Leonora is a Contributing Editor for Drizzle Review. Her poems have been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Fron//tera, The Acentos Review and Roar, and coming in Tiferet Journal and Cosmographia.
Kimbol Soques
Essential Questions
Kimbol strives to pare her poetry down to the bone, using white space like breath. Her work has been included in Festival Writer 2:13, Texas Poetry Calendar 2016, and di-vêrsé-city 2015 and 2016.
Kevin Wetmore
Machiavelli’s The Little Prince
Kevin is an actor, director, comedian, and stage combat choreographer. He is the author and/or editor of over two dozen books and three dozen short stories, including his famed H.P. Lovecraft/Judy Blume mashups.