Nancy Reddy’s Pocket Universe is a tender and expansive poetry collection on new motherhood. Following Reddy’s National Poetry Series-winning Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), both collections delve into cultural depictions of womanhood and expectations of femininity, from the broadest tropes to the most intimate moments between two people. Take for instance the probing ending to […]
Tucked between descriptions of the close combat occurring throughout major Ukrainian cities and the very real possibility of Russian nuclear engagement, the word “irredenta” might have appeared in your reading of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, and it might have been a word you glossed over in favor of trying to assess how this conflict will […]
While reading this wonderfully expansive anthology, I was reminded of what prolific feminist writer bell hooks said in Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work: “No woman¹ has ever written enough.” This truth demands that we make space for the essential writing of mothers, too. Motherhood is an experience central to all our lives, and The […]
Catalogue Beginning with a Line from Marcelo Hernandez Castillo Photo By Radek Homola The music stopped playing years ago, but we’re still dancing. The naked maple still has so many leaves to release before we have any right to call it dead. How our children out back wildly thrash angels into snow without losing […]
Sophia Wants a Baby and So Do I Photo By Jeena Paradies On a large screen TV my uterus is projected in a darkened room. My uterus a shadowy field that a technician searches for growths, for water sprouts, that steal my natural resources. The technician searches the parts of me I cannot reach, […]
Her Singing Horses Photo By Nati Melnychuk My big sister’s horses are mostly dead horses. …………Once, her horses were talented horses; once, her horses were singing horses; once, people said …………my big sister’s horses had the most gorgeous young voices they’d heard. Everyone said …………she had show-stopping horses. Everyone said her horses were stars. […]
Great Plains Photo By el-toro I would wake up hollowed of home, like the womb-loving part of me had cracked itself open: a mockingbird egg sluiced across the new morning. I would leave bed to tear parcels out the floorboard, pour thick red soil and seed lupines, watch them sink blue teeth into the […]
Whenever I read John Yau’s poetry or fiction, I am reminded of Johannes Gӧransson’s “foreigner,” who is a grotesque, bastardized version of the citizen, seemingly permitted by society to do wrong and be wrong because his motives and intentions cannot be understood, and for the citizen to empathize would be, of course, an impossible act. […]
In her debut poetry collection, A List of Things I’ve Lost, Tiffany Babb lingers on what remains of the ephemeral. When grief takes many shapes and memory appears ever fragmented, how may we live in the patchy present that refuses to detach itself from the past? As the poet notes in “Living Memory”: “We know […]
In his debut collection, Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara, William Fargason explores his own grief, generational trauma, and the process of coming to grips with what it may mean to be a man. His catalogue examines several typical adolescent male experiences—like that of a hunting trip, religious upbringing, or struggle with anxiety […]