Reading

“If I could I would cut off my lovers’ heads” : Eunice De Souza’s Nine Indian Women Poets
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“If I could I would cut off my lovers’ heads” : Eunice De Souza’s Nine Indian Women Poets

ByJohn Rufo

“Anthologists invariably make enemies,” Eunice De Souza notes in her introduction to Nine Indian Women Poets. This anthology is unlike most anthologies, as De Souza takes up her editorial role to rally against universality, mapmaking, and flattery. De Souza isn’t seeking to make enemies, but she realizes that all choices for anthologies suggest other choices:…

Interactivity and the Game-ification of Books
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Interactivity and the Game-ification of Books

ByMatthew Burnside

As an undergrad studying creative writing one of the first things I remember learning was the sin of gimmickry. Readers, I was taught, would see through your cleverness—it would be vile to them and they would hate you. But as a kid and teenager my favorite books employed some pretty neat sins and I don’t…

Telling the Stories of the Dead: Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery

Telling the Stories of the Dead: Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery

ByNancy McCabe

My own ancestors are interred in austere Midwestern cemeteries with small flat stones or rounded markers decorated with the occasional “Beloved Mother” or laser-etched photo. But Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, I discover on a field trip with Spalding MFA students to write about art and place, makes much more elaborate use of art, narrative,…

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The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Shifts” by Dan Reiter

ByRoss McMeekin

  Aldous Huxley once wrote, “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” In Dan Reiter’s “Shifts” (WhiskeyPaper), we’re introduced to a character in conflict over how to accurately perceive a series of strange events, as shown through the narrator’s language and structure. In the opening…

Borders

ByClare Beams

We moved to Pittsburgh from the Northeast almost two years ago for my husband’s job. I tell people here I’m new to the city, usually as a way of explaining that it’s new to me, that my mental map is hazy and lots of references still slip right past. Before we came to house-hunt two…

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The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Rain” by Ben Loory

ByRoss McMeekin

In her essay, “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale,” (from The Writer’s Notebook, Tin House Books) Kate Bernheimer discusses how the psychological flatness of characters in tales and fables “allows depth of response in the reader.” In Ben Loory’s “Rain” (Journal of Compressed Creative Arts), we’re given almost no access to the character’s…

REVIEW: Belief is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by Lori Jakiela
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REVIEW: Belief is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by Lori Jakiela

ByNancy McCabe

Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe Lori Jakiela August 4, 2015 Atticus Books 290 pages Preorder Halfway through her new memoir, Belief is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, Lori Jakiela comes across a mall kiosk selling Russian nesting dolls. “The doll in the woman’s hand looks a little like my daughter—blonde, rosy-cheeked,…

Half the World More: Juan Felipe Herrera and the Centering of Chicana/o Letters
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Half the World More: Juan Felipe Herrera and the Centering of Chicana/o Letters

ByDaniel Peña

Juan Felipe Herrera being named our 21st U.S. Poet Laureate is special for a few reasons.  He is the first Latino U.S. Poet Laureate in history, but also an unlikely if necessary one.  It’s no obscure fact that his writing has historically been underappreciated, undercelebrated even. Herrera’s writing has not, historically speaking, been the kind…