Associate Editor Molly Reid: We first had the pleasure of featuring Jolene McIlwain’s work in our miCRo series. Her story “Drumming” captures a tender moment in a diner between Dusty, who works behind the counter, and Elbert, a customer and former classmate. Because of the deft, subtle narrative maneuverings, these characters remain with the reader …
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: In his poem “The Collectors,” Stephen Kampa explores a far too common figure in American life, “a nearly / incomprehensible boy” who walks into a “fear-flung classroom” with a gun. In taut language layered with complex and often paradoxical implications, Kampa examines the human tendency to fit other people into narratives …
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: “Girl 1994: Gawd.” by Faylita Hicks combines narrative tension with a kinetic command of diction. As Hicks’s forward-driving couplets propel us down the page, the speaker’s awe toward “Gawd” imbues her with a kind of mythos that supercharges the poem’s language. The rich and constantly ricocheting sounds in this poem make …
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: Alexandra Teague’s “[It is undone business I speak of, this morning]” asks us to confront the all-too-narrow distance between safety and danger in our daily lives. In her examination of the “ordinary spells against gravity” that keep ruin at bay, Teague never lets us forget that annihilation is always just a …
Editorial Assistant Chelsea Whitton: “Someone says it is difficult to write poems / that are both domestic and ambitious,” writes Victoria Chang in Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017), her fourth collection. This book rejects the implication that domestic poems—work about childbearing and rearing, about caring for one’s aging parents, about social anxiety and the link …
We’re pleased as punch to announce the tenure of our second guest literary nonfiction editor this year (Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen was awarded a Taft Center Fellowship for the 2018–19 academic year and is on sabbatical). Starting this week, through mid-June, Lee Martin will read submitted essays and curate our literary nonfiction section for …
Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: When working in the micro form, writers often struggle to distill a single scene or experience into a 500-word-or-less narrative. How does one establish a beginning, middle, and end while also including the backstory or exposition necessary to pull an emotional punch? In his micro essay “The Flipping Years,” Kent …
After each issue lands in readers’ hands, we encourage our contributors to say a little bit on our blog about their work. For issue 15.2, our first such post comes from poet Rose McLarney, who worked with artist Gary Hawkins on a broadside of her poem “Old Road” from our pages, as described below: Rose …
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