Review
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters by Bonnie Jo Campbell
“I need an interesting character in a difficult situation in order to write.”
Poetry
Towels at Sunset: Winner, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize
They must bear no stain, they must come perfect
Poetry
The Rules: Runner Up, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize
I don’t believe in girlhood. I don’t believe we are ever small, or ever don’t know what it is
Poetry
Ascension Day Planting, North Philly: Runner Up, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize
“God does what she wants.
Poetry
Big Mama’s: Runner Up, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize
The day is made up of language the way everything is made up of something else.
Poetry
A Point on a Map: Honorable Mention, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize
Pull yourself together, sky. Listen up! It’s not like you’ve been buried alive.
Poetry
The Weight and Dimensions of my Prayers: Honorable Mention, Sandy Crimmins Poetry Prize
prayers of lead prayers of limestone and pages for
Fiction
“Mommy, wanna play Kings and Queens?” It’s my older son asking in his five-year-old speak if I want to play his version of chess. Which I don’t.
Poetry
The Black American Gets Her Travel Fellowship and Goes Abroad
I. an exercise: the positionality of placeholders
Poetry
Two domesticated parakeets will find each other in the wild forest, the bell becomes unnecessary,
Non-Fiction
The Narrow Door: Remembering Denise Gess
Now, six years after her death, at 57, from cancer, comes Paul Lisicky’s memoir The Narrow Door, which meditates upon their long friendship
Review
Review: The Word of the Day by David Kertis
David Kertis begins his first full-length book of poems, The Word of the Day, by letting us in on his secret, that is, most of life is hidden, secret.
Interview
Interview with Author Gary Lee Miller
Museum of the Americas, Gary Lee Miller’s debut story collection, published in 2014 by Fomite Press, ponders love and longing and loss and redemption through the experiences of highly unconventional characters, the kind of people who, says Miller, “nobody pays much attention to.”
Column
Are there any topics we cannot write poems about? Can we write about love or death or the soul or suicide or any other abstraction when Shakespeare and Dickinson and Frost and Plath have covered that territory so well already? Can we write about the funeral of our grandmother with her cold hands folded as [...]