Cincinnati Review

“Origins” by Kelly Fig Smith weaves together issues of identity, history, and the body to form a complicated and compelling picture of family and motherhood.

“Those Statues of Old,” contextualized by the 1897 massacre and looting of Benin City by the British, is a simultaneously expansive and intimate meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of poems to speak to the dead

In Alina Stefanescu’s “Why One Cloud Is Kin to Not Liking,” a deft observation of a cloud’s “power of chilling” follows a list of reasons why the speaker’s in-laws don’t like her.

“Sam Less” by Jonathan Cardew demonstrates the limits of language by subverting the need to find the correct words in order to form self-knowledge.

1 Get a job at the local bowling alley when your mom starts drinking again. Take whatever position they are willing to give you. You will be fifteen years old with no experience, three-fifths of a mustache, and the charisma of a dried pickle, so your only offer’ll be to man concessions for what you …

In just nine lines, some only one or two words in length, Sheikh uses the salwar kameez as a guiding image to unravel a reflection on girlhood.