Cincinnati Review

  Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This story opens with teen girls being teen girls together. The added twist? The mother of one girl is a real-life witch, with tarot cards and all. Mead-Brewer has crafted well-wrought scenes in which the teens try to scare each other, but there’s a turn late in the piece to …

Jim Palmarini gives a lyrical tour through fifty years of the poetry scene in the Cincinnati region.

  Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: The opening of this prose poem dazzles with description of scene, a super Mercado on Saturday night; I think of Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”: “Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!” Kathy Z. Price’s poem moves with the same energy, thought after cascading thought separated only by …

Pauletta Hansel details her experiences with the literary community in Cincinnati.

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This hybrid, elliptical piece draws from the language of fairy tales to illuminate the experience of adolescence (perhaps; in part), as one character is “a little girl on some days and a young woman on others.” With references to violence and the body—as well as an allusion to the environment in …

Sanctuary Sound effects are a parallel life made of common materials wood blocks for hooves et cetera I hear thunder above a prairie I know to be shaken aluminum I know there is a horse under it not needing to be fed or broken Diction Great wheel pushing the river behind it Under it the …

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In this poem—from her series imagining different cabinet members who preside over particular parts of the pysche—Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer scrutinizes the challenges of speech, in particular where our words come from. In spare lines, carefully lineated, we see the results of a divine gift of fire: Not so much “let there …

Norman Finkelstein pays homage to poets who’ve gone before.