Cincinnati Review

“The Therapist Asks, How Does the Brain Feel” is an evolving answer, a rickety list, a masterclass in the semicolon.

Matt Greene’s microfictions take up the generation-defining question: how do we make sense of our place within an eroding world?

From their first sentences to their last, “Needlework” and “Gotunabe” pull the reader in with their odd, satisfying images. Drink these wonderful pieces up.

In Molly Bess Rector’s poem “Retail Therapy,” lonely girls go shopping. Across reflecting couplets, the surface of a lake in summer morphs into a department store window. Behind the window grows a garden of what was and what could be: “Oh, to dress / beyond ourselves.”

This piece is invested in collapsing time, in freeze-framing and rewinding inexplicable violence.