The job was pushing a rod. Steel rod in a V-channel with a stick. With a stick pushing a rod against a wheel. Which spinning ground the rod. Which screaming made sparks which bit my skin. Pushing a rod with a stick while being bitten by sparks was the job. Which required breath at the…
What I find unusual in Alissa Valles’s poems is a very strong expression of intellectual passion invested into the historical—or strictly personal—world. Her poetry is coming close to a kind of a "dynamic wisdom" maybe best exemplified in poems like "Two Gods." I think there’s an exceptional promise in her work, in her spiritual energy….
Transparent as a think-tank fantasia, my dream of April expands its empire without resentment, dissolving all estrangements into an intimacy that makes a god out of difference, equating Madonna Ciccone’s torment on Biography with Blake’s engravings of the Inferno— an amalgam of awe and abhorrence at times beatifying the damned. Next week the secret life…
I was reading the Hindu epic The Ramayana. It was spring in North Carolina: the birds fabricating their nests while I was dipping myself like a tea bag over and over in my own despair. What I like about The Ramayana is how each character suspects there is more than they know to the story….
This special Emerging Writers issue features forty poets and ten fiction writers who have yet to publish a full-length book, nominated by authors who have. When we put out a call for submissions to the issue, our hope was that writers who had already established their literary careers would be inclined to help others get…
One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi, another a tail of color-coded wires. One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings, another a flicker with a wounded head. All flew like leaves fluttering to escape, bright, circulating in burning air, and all returned when the air cleared. One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower, deep…
A pot found while digging, slipped out of the soil as a fish is deboned. God is said to have formed man as easily, molding him from dirt as on a potter’s wheel, but what men could you find crossing the borax flats that shine whitely, the air thick with salt and residue of rare…
MASTHEAD Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Managing Editor Gregg Rosenblum Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O’Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O’Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Jay Baron Nicorvo. Editorial Assistant: Reem Abu-Libdeh. Bookshelf Advisors: Fred Leebron and Cate Marvin. Proofreader: Megan Weireter. Fiction Readers: Kathleen Rooney, Maureen Cidzik, Eson Kim, Matthew Modica,…
set out across the fields anonymous, drawn inward like a sea of dusk beneath the cribbed retreat of sun. Remember us against the vinyl in that summer like an apocalypse across the sheetless rising chipped repeat of artificial light of grocery lists wrung. Last night and last night’s last night you cheat the snow, my…
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