Today his world was not serene, because just before lunch, Menser lost his cuff key. A pleasing day would be O’Brien working on Max with enough Bubble time to end each shift, driving straight to the gym while sipping … Read More
Pinning As a child I was terrified of bugs, so I made illustrated catalogs of them. Encounters with real insects meant tears and fits, yet I forced myself to confront them on paper. Drawing as ritual: I would lay … Read More
Who’s to say what prompted this. Who’s to say if this display of bodily might, this performance of scorned womanhood, is justified, justifying some wrongdoing, some emotion repressed. The skin of his cheek is still red and supple through … Read More
Maidencane isn’t half as elegant as it sounds. Not even close. When I came across the plant’s name in a copy of Gulf Coast Flora I had checked out from the library—the first to do so since 1976—I had … Read More
Winner Christina Leo, “The Blue Bull” Second Place Michael Howerton, “Hopewell” Finalists Catalina Bode, “A Bedroom in the Kitchen” Shubha Venugopal, “Belonging” Steven Fromm, “Po-Ya 6” Ethan Feuer, “Quartering winds” Joyce Li, “The Boxer” Holly Menino, “The Boy’s Horse” Craig … Read More
The Arrangements by Kate Colby (Four Way Books, 2018). “Were we born with eyes / or when we saw ourselves // seeing?” Kate Colby asks in “The Beholder,” a poem that appears early in The Arrangements (Four Way … Read More
Let Me Out Here: Stories by Emily W. Pease (Hub City Press, 2019). If the cover image of Emily W. Pease’s new short story collection—a stone-faced little girl staring squarely at the camera, legs planted on a desolate … Read More
House is an Enigma by Emma Bolden (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018). Emma Bolden’s House is an Enigma lives inside a continual unfolding, moving fluidly and fluently between outer surfaces and the meaning-making within, centering on the … Read More
Bad Harvest by Dzvinia Orlowsky (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2018). The title of Dzvinia Orlowsky’s sixth book, Bad Harvest, evokes the Holodomor, the man-made famine that affected and killed millions across the grain-producing Ukraine during Soviet occupation, presumably including … Read More