Cincinnati Review

Cristi Donoso Best’s “Caul” opens in medias res with the birthing of a calf. As the child-aged speaker observes the scene, the poem moves cinematically between the birth and the act of watching.

Melissa Bowers’s hybrid piece “What I Know About Space” uses descriptions of the cosmos as a distancing tactic, its vignettes functioning as satellites swirling around a deeper issue for the speaker.

Cindy Juyoung Ok’s “Haunting Season” opens with a declaration that “the hunt” has begun. What follows is a series of reflections on the concept of the self, especially the self under surveillance, the self as an Othered reflection.

Someone holds the makeshift beach up from one end, and the world floods, swell surging to one side of the homemade wave machine before the water rushes back, quick, aggressive, eroding bits of the science-fair project with violence before softening slowly, slowly. Repetition eventually grinds everything down to nothing. We are supposed to make a …

Translated by Yuemin He, “End of the Year Poem, 2020” by Zhihao Zhang begins where many of us begin our days (regularly, but perhaps especially during a global pandemic): looking at our phones. This mundane act gives way to a reflection that, like the year 2020 itself, is filled with rote action, uncertainty, and contradiction.