Photo by John Morton Outside, a tree, dried out & skeletal, moans. Dead in spring. The roots can’t find water. It’s May, the city isn’t greening anymore, & trees are sick of the sun. Say the sky’s the sickblue of hospital walls. Say her name as she coughs & gags in predawn heat. She tried […]
Photo by Intermountain Forest Service, USDA Region 4 Photography Pennock Trail There was a boy who was a boy who was a tree who was a river and a rock and a cloud. Who was a nothing more than a something who wanted to be nothing but a flash under sky over field. Who wanted […]
The new Żaba grew to be an ugly dog: disproportional, with long, thin legs and big, elongated paws that contrasted with an average-sized body.
If ten men stand by, the crime they witness must be multiplied by a hundred, because if they don’t stop each other, who will ever stop them?
It surely comes as no surprise that the content of each issue of Colorado Review is selected months, sometimes a year or more, before publication. But it’s remarkable how the stories, poems, and essays often strike us somewhat differently as we prepare to send an issue to the printer, how their resonance changes in relation […]
As we prepare this issue, it happens to be the time of year for envisioning change. And in that spirit, we’re trying something new: after many years of arranging our issues by genre, we’re mixing things up, interspersing the stories, poems, and essays throughout the magazine. We hope that this new layout gives readers a different, […]
In every fall issue we celebrate and publish the winning story from the year’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, established to honor the memory of writer, scholar, and literary editor Liza Nelligan, an alumna of Colorado State University’s English Department. In this issue, we are delighted to present the prize’s sixteenth winner, Bryna Cofrin-Shaw’s “Loss […]
Perhaps it’s because I was born in July that I feel most at home in the summer, when I know myself best, when I feel most knowable to others. And while summer is my country, it has always been an in-between place (such is life on the academic calendar) and one that I am always […]
It’s quite early in the new year as we prepare this spring issue, and resolutions still abound: the yoga studio is suddenly mat to mat, Facebook posts are rife with challenges and promises of change, and many of us are taking this time to consider who we are, who we hope to be, how we […]
Every fall, we have the true pleasure of featuring the winner of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. This year, final judge Margot Livesey selected Shannon Sweetnam’s “Aisha and the Good for Nothing Cat.” This story, Livesey writes, “is set in a place of tragedy—Syria—but the story itself is not tragic. Despite losing various family […]