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 […]
With a wry humor that softens reality’s hard edges, the poems in Jenny L. Davis’s Trickster Academy highlight how Indigenous people have become experts in the sorrows with which white oppression has left them. The collection explores the meaning of being Native in academia, and to do so it presents elements most readers fail to […]
The poems in Prelude by Brynne Rebele-Henry strike like lightening on the night sky, with imagery so spare and halting that my own imaginings stunned me to inner silence as my pencil starred passage after passage while I read, marking many worthy lines. This poetry collection comprises the imagined exploration of gay female sexual experience […]
The suffering and displacement of refugees from the brutal Syrian civil war are given agency through the poems of Jazra Khaleed. The Light That Burns Us is the first collection of Khaleed’s poetry translated into English. The poet situates himself as the refugee,¹ the immigrant, the one who has nothing. The nobody, the Other. While […]
When circumstances change, we change. As with any organism, a human’s survival is predicated on homeostasis, the processes of self-regulating stabilization. In addition to our physiological adjustments, we must also adapt psychologically to altered conditions. Some changes create extraordinary imbalance: the death of a loved one, a debilitating accident, the loss of one’s homeland. Exiled […]
Erin Rodoni’s And If the Woods Carry You shimmers with a mythos equal parts wondrous and perilous. The woods these poems wander teem with not only elves and mythic white deer but also with monsters, some of them wearing human faces. Like most fairytales, this collection has the power to enchant readers with its beauty […]