Cincinnati Review

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.

In less than 500 words, Ayad’s sweeping essay takes us from the speaker’s mother’s baklava to the rams sacrificed on the family’s farm to the “grapey surface” of a “dissected sheep’s eye.”

In these translations, readers must counter assumptions about who provides narrative resolution and begin new understandings of old symbols as meaning accumulates and distills through the language.

This wicked sharp dreamscape begins with our tween-boy narrator and his father being chased through a middle school by a bear.