Colorado Review Summer 2025

Loss isn’t generally isn’t what comes to mind when we think of summer. And yet, this issue’s stories and essays are situated in mourning and letting go. In Lissa Franz’s “MonkeyMonkeyGirl,” a child’s decades-ago disappearance still haunts her sisters and mother. During the pandemic, in Janice Deal’s “BAE,” a couple’s college-aged daughter slips ever further away from them as she chooses to live among an enigmatic religious community. A woman and her overly critical father attend an academic conference together and find an unexpected opportunity for détente in Meghan Louise Wagner’s “Thought Experiments.” In Yvette DeChavez’s “Two by Two,” a young married mother meets a couple who challenge her notions of faith, motherhood, and desire. Judith Cooper’s essay “Heart Dissolving, Skin Marinating” is a fever dream account of her experience with a rare cancer, a stream of consciousness weave of clichés, word associations, and gallows humor. Aaron Kang Smithson meditates movingly on architecture, anemoia, and the loss of his father in “Palimpsest.” And in “Down and Out in Disneyland,” Maya Bernstein-Schalet considers the connections between escapism and addiction as she tries to make sense of her beloved cousin’s death.

Colorado Review Summer 2024

“I’d lost the skill. I’d lost the touch,” laments Sid, the narrator of Amy Silverberg’s “Poker Night.” Still reeling from the fallout of an ill-advised relationship, Sid has lost so much more: her career, her reputation, and her confidence, not to mention a fifty-dollar hand. This issue’s stories and essays are rife with loss. In […]

Colorado Review Spring 2024

Though “The Age of Anxiety” was Auden’s description for the unsettled mood of the mid-twentieth century, surely every era has a legitimate claim to the term. In early 2024, we find ourselves in undeniably precarious times—world unrest, a changing climate, threats to our democracy—and many of us are looking for meaningful ways to express our […]

Colorado Review Summer 2023

“I liked scanning the sky, looking for signals,” says the narrator of Kelly Luce’s “The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion.” “Even when nothing happened, there was still that heartbeat. It was a space—it was space—where I could process what was happening in my life.” We’re all probably looking and listening for signals most of […]