[poetry] Sonnet II: We’re Not in Chinatown Anymore Philly’s Chinatown has no Hollywood, just a bunch of ripped up movie billboards, blockbusters translated into Chinese, signs right in front of the bookshop where I wait: my father is buying his zodiac books, fortunes for the new year. He’s psychic— it’s the Tiger telling his Snake […]
Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress is a quintessential hard-boiled mystery novel. Mosley’s protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is on par with two of the genre’s most notable characters, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer. Set in 1948 Los Angeles, the sharply written first person narrative pays homage to its traditional genre conceits. […]
[creative nonfiction] My mom sent me letters from Indiana. Stacks of cards with flowers and curly, purple ink inside. Breathtaking cursive spanned the card. My small hands touched the parts where she’d written sweet girl or my name. She had her first nervous breakdown when I was six years old, and was admitted to a […]
Cormac McCarthy’s third novel Child of God, based loosely on an infamous murder in Sevier County, Tennessee, portrays a cycle of extreme isolation, perversity, and violence as representative of the natural human experience. The novel tells the story of Lester Ballard, “a child of God much like yourself perhaps,” who, facing a series of unfortunate […]
Stories from Classical mythology have pervaded European culture. My work seeks to address how mythology and the retelling of myths serve to reflect, reinforce, and influence our gender ideologies. Our perception of women is directly affected by how they are portrayed in art, from the stories and poems from antiquity to the way we see women and girls currently depicted in contemporary art and […]
Create Dangerously begins with an essay about the public executions of Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa in Port-au-Prince. Drouin and Numa were Haitians who had met while living in New York City and had returned to Haiti as part of a guerrilla army that intended to take down the Duvalier dictatorship. François Duvalier—Papa Doc—made sure […]
[poetry] Freehanding Maps of Minnesota I have called you feather down in my sleep, christened you the verge of memory, painted your rivers in the rain. I have written the scene before I even arrive; The breeze floats just enough to rustle the edges of the paper, lines only tenuously drawn. Do your lakes ever […]
Things That Are is Amy Leach’s whimsical collection of nonfiction essays about the natural world. These essays blend poetry, nonfiction, and nature writing—bending the genre and exploring the boundaries of what form creative nonfiction can take. It’s through the unexpected and illuminating prose that Leach seeks to create a relationship between the reader and the […]
[fiction] You don’t know I have a picture of you, because you are dead. Before you were dead, I wondered what it would be like to be trapped in your mouth for eternity, like a wedded Jonah. Whenever you said honey or Leeza or, more likely, Lisa, I would feel the rib cage constrict. I […]
There is a real casual ease by which the poems in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth present themselves. They are not struggling to find a voice, but are grounded firmly in their style and language. This little chapbook feels solid, weighty, and Shire does a fine job of creating consistency in such a short […]
The blurb for the paperback printing of King reveals the title character, our narrator, is canine. But John Berger blurs species lines in this poignant tale of twenty-four hours in the life of the marginalized inhabitants of a French homeless camp. With Berger’s spare, lyric prose, King is granted first person point of view. He […]
[fiction] What would you do if you weren’t afraid? I walk out to the car in a state of unusual calm. In the house over there, which I share with my husband and son, my husband has just now informed me that he isn’t in love with me anymore, that in fact he is in […]
Night Sky With Exit Wounds is woven from deep threads—the experience of fleeing war and becoming a refugee, migration and the sea, parent-child relationships, and queer sexuality. Life is complex. Layers of emotion, memory, and transformation unite in this journey of one human being. Vuong’s stories and structures made me feel huge possibilities in poetry. […]
[poetry] I remember the smell of rusty handlebars, of rotten onions, smoke, garlic meatballs, stale fried fish, and clogged toilets. The local train smelled of skin of man and animal, of cheap tobacco and unwashed clothes, the smell of poverty and cold. The peasants carried raffia sacks stuffed with bread, food for chickens, and pigs. […]
Near the end of her abortion memoir Annie Ernaux writes, “…these things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, …causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people” (92). Not […]
These images, taken in 2016 in the Pacific Northwest, demonstrate my interest in using tonalities and arrangements to elicit abstract shapes from natural objects. My art photographs utilize isolation of detail as a tactic to focus attention; I enjoy discovering how realistic contents can be grasped in new ways when guided by the discerning camera lens […]
On the face of it, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a collection of ten short stories, many of which take place on the same island, many of which contain strong elements of magical realism, and all of which employ precise, evocative language. In “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” against the backdrop of […]
[fiction] I’m wearing my banana-yellow pantsuit and my best ash-blonde, bob-styled wig. He’s an hour late. One of my fake lashes falls on my lap. The glue still sticky on my eyelid. He yells from outside my window. You up there? I press the eyelashes back in place and stumble out of the apartment and […]
Martín Espada, where have you been all of my life? I believe that the universe sends artists, writers and poets gifts of inspiration when they truly need it. Espada is a Latino poet, like me, born in America, who has the eloquence of Walt Whitman and the passionate pulsating spirit of Charles Bukowski. Espada’s poetry […]
late night fireplace hiss; you bury yourself in rumpled quilts; woolen sanctums for solitude. circling your callused chest is a prison and epiphany— mouths and pectorals make a reckless truce to learn the metaphors of symmetry. we slipped one quarter in love and the rest in snow; our crumbling house is beige-mess of carpet string, […]
This collection of poetry opens with epigraphs by Charles Darwin, including one that lists similarities in the “framework of bones” between different animals: fins and hands, vertebrae in giraffes and elephants, “and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent” (11). The poems shift their subjects from animals to humans, […]
Each piece is made from ordinary items such as balls, light fixtures, outdoor flowers and even a jelly fish. The ordinary does not have to stay as such and this collection is meant to challenge the concept of ordinary and take you to the universe of infinite space, where the impossible is possible.
The 2016 edition of The Best American Short Stories, edited by Junot Diaz, plumbs the multiplicity of writing within the English language – and it may be a beacon for the future of the North American canon. The stories contained within this collection represent the vast experience of writing within an “American” life, as opposed […]
Ascension When at last it tilted worse to land than leave what happened was this: the birds snipped their gravitational strands. They took two or three or five final wing strokes heavenward and on that momentum traveled, up and out. Kingdom, Phylum, Class: Aves the birds folded splendor, resisted iridescence, overrode any hints of song. […]
Live Girls by Beth Nugent is the story of Catherine, twenty-years-old, who abandons her first year of college at a women’s religious university, moves to the nearby city where she takes up residence at a seedy transient hotel, and accepts a job as a ticket seller in a squalid, decaying porn theatre. Catherine is pretty, curiously […]
When business was slow, the curandero would take his skills to the stable to heal horses. To the ladies at the barn, he speaks English, recommending an ointment, but there is no saying it in English. So, he says it in in Spanish: Cebo de Coyote con Aceite de Víbora. To the horses, he speaks […]
“Somebody’s got to bleed if anybody’s going to drink” (164). In his climate-fiction (cli-fi) novel, The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi’s cinematic writing begs to find its way to the big screen where his vast landscapes, dramatic dialogue, and poignant message on water consumption can reach the masses. While his story lands big, juicy punches, Baciglupi’s […]
In the last year, both my mother and father died. They were gone within 42 days of each other, one to a stroke, one to heart failure. These paintings, part of a much larger collection, were attempts to convey feelings of being submerged, of being unable to put words to experience, being unable to surface […]
Coal Mountain Elementary is a noteworthy example of investigative poetry, which incorporates data and reportage—including statistics, historical documents, news media, interviews, and images—into, most commonly, lyrical and prose poems. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) is a well-known example of the former type as it lets the reader enter the […]
[fiction] Our room is around the back of the motel, away from the highway floodlights. Hiram and Baby are sleeping in the backseat by the time we pull up, and Mama carries Baby while Daddy slings Hiram over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Myself I walk. I’m grown enough to see the motel […]
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