Even though I’ve been anticipating its return ever since late September, I find that I must still re-orient myself to summer, or rather to my world in summer. The vibrant light of the longer days, the heat, and the change in pace sometimes render the familiar slightly strange. The stories and essays of this issue each touch on that phenomenon in varying ways. As he completes an anthropological homework assignment, a boy begins to see his family in an entirely different light in Lauren Watel’s “Happiness Sucks.” Chaitali Sen’s “The Immigrant” presents Dhruv, an Indian working and traveling in the United States, trying to locate himself among the many cultures he encounters. In Robert Yune’s quirkily dystopic “Cottontails,” an ambitious woman working in the field of product placement seeks to plant memory and desire in the mind of a college football player, who begins to have trouble recognizing what is real and what has been imagined for him. Engaged to her longtime boyfriend but in love with one of her teammates, tennis player Digby must imagine a life without her true love at the center of it in Erika Seay’s “The Great Barrier Reef.” Kelley Clink’s essay “Surfacing” examines the disorienting world of grief after her brother’s suicide, and the even more unrecognizable world when her grief begins to subside. Jessamyn Hope writes about the bizarre micro culture of bargain-wedding-dress shopping at Filene’s Basement, made more unsettling by the absence of her mother, and facing the long years ahead without her in “The Running of the Brides.” And one of this year’s AWP Intro Journals Project winners in creative nonfiction, Karen Maner, takes a second look at one of the most ordinary acts—owning a pet—and asks some uncomfortable questions in “Hugo.”
This issue also features fantastic poems by Brent Armendinger, Heather Christle, Nathan Hoks, Michael Martin Shea, Rodrigo Toscano, and many others.
Whether you are a longtime subscriber or new to Colorado Review, I hope you’ll find yourself transported someplace new and delightfully unfamiliar by the fine work in this issue.
Featured in This Issue
Brent Armendinger, Monica Berlin, Heather Christle, Darin Ciccotelli, Kelley Clink, Jesse DeLong, Nathan Hoks, Jessamyn Hope, Courtney Kampa, Ashley Seitz Kramer, Karen Maner, Beth Marzoni, Edward Mayes, Shane McCrae, Jena Osman, Erin Rodoni, Kate Rosenberg, Erika Seay, Chaitali Sen, Michael Martin Shea, Rodrigo Toscano, Sarah Vap, Lauren Watel, Robert Yune
