A Year in Blogs
What’s fascinated CR blog-writers these past few months?
Staff Picks
Gwen E. Kirby Reads “A Good-Looking Couple” by Etgar Keret
Ever wonder what our staff reads when they’re not reading your submissions or reading for exams or reading for academic papers they’re writing? Assistant Editor Gwen Kirby gives voice to one of her favorite pieces of flash fiction in this episode of Staff Picks.
Staff Picks: Favorite Poems and Prose Passages
We’ve begun asking CR staff and volunteers to read their favorite poems and passages of prose. Exciting stuff. First up, here’s Assistant Editor James Ellenberger reading Paul Celan’s “So Many Constellations.”
Why We Like It: “Make No Bones about It” by Cindy Beebe
Rochelle Hurt: In music, riffing usually refers to a method of composition in which a single element (like a series of notes in a specific order) is repeated, sometimes changing slightly with each new iteration, in order to form a pattern—though riffing is often improvisational. It’s a technique common to poetry as well. For example, …
What We’re Reading: The Locusts Have No King
Alex Smith: Hemingway once called Dawn Powell (sarcastically, perhaps) his favorite living writer, and Gore Vidal dubbed her “The American Writer.” She was, indeed, a contemporary and friend of many famous novelists of the mid-twentieth century. And yet her work is virtually unknown today. Hence my surprise upon reading Powell’s brilliant The Locusts Have No King, …
Why We Like It: “Abeyance” by Amanda Lee Kallis
Rochelle Hurt: Hybridity is a topic of much discussion of late: hybrid cars, hybrid crops, hybrid dogs (the Goldador, the Peekapoo, the Schnoodle). It’s always exciting to encounter something that inhabits two seemingly separate worlds at once. What I love most about hybrid dogs is the way their breed labels carve out entirely new spaces …
Why We Like It: Daneen Bergland’s “Animals Invaluable to Epidemiologists for Tracking the Spread of Disease Will Appear to Us as Angels”
Sara Watson: As an animal lover, I was immediately drawn to the subject of Daneen Bergland’s “Animals Invaluable to Epidemiologists for Tracking the Spread of Disease Will Appear to Us as Angels.” This poem not only considers our relationship with animals, but even offers them an autonomous dream life. The speaker in this poem is …
Putting the Period on Our Reading Period
Nicola Mason: As they say in the auction world when something is about to go, Fair warning! In this case, our Submission Manger is about to go offline for the usual issue-filling bits of poetry and prose. If you want to shoot us something for consideration, do it this weekend. The hammer falls on April …
Staff Picks
While awaiting proofs for our Summer 2013 issue, due out in May, we CR editors decided to write a little something about our favorite pieces. Here’s Assistant Editor Brian Trapp: As soon as I read Michael Reid Busk’s faux-encyclopedia entries from “The Eighties: A Brief Primer,” I forwarded them to Managing Editor Nicola Mason with …
Staff Picks
We’ve just finished finalizing edits on our upcoming issue, which means that we’ve become very familiar with the stories, poems, and essays contained within. Like, super familiar. Like, sit-three-to-a-seat-on-a-school-bus-on-a-hot-day familiar. After all that quality time spent with prose and poetry, staff favorites tend to emerge. Here’s Associate Editor Becky Adnot-Haynes on why she likes Aharon …