Issue 29 | Fall 2023
Issue 29 brings flirty game wardens, nuns in a cavern, mysterious transmissions, the world’s youngest knife thrower, the names of Argentina’s rivers, streams, and lakes, the fountain of youth, gray dawns, and ferocious appetites. It’s about war, lies and misinformation, languages and language, erasures, brutal occupations, bad reasons for enlisting, and signs that refract so deeply we can’t trace their path back to the world. It’s about sinister radio signals from the fillings in your teeth or maybe over there among the trees.
Review: All Out in the Open by Charalampos Tzanakis
Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
“About twenty years ago, I stole a translation of Jean Cocteau’s The White Book because the owner was homophobic. I suppose I believe (or at least hope) books find the right readers.”
Night at St. Pierre Hospital 2020
By Angeline Schellenberg
“She keeps close to the courtyard window she came through, her ears tuned to nurses’ flats slapping down the hallway. Her brother’s shaky hand reaches across the tray for a water glass.”
She Never Sees Her Mother
By Annette Gulati
“She never sees her ailing mother. She only listens to her on the telephone, rattling on about the dialysis treatments, the trips to the emergency room, the stabbing pain in her abdomen. Likely the cancer.”
Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases”
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
In the Name: The Power to Be Moved
By Robert Stewart
“Who is this him? If there were an actual him, the poem would do him a disservice.”
Nine Books About Your Life: Juliet Cook
In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their life. Juliet Cook is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, most recently including red flames burning out (Grey Book Press, 2023), Contorted Doom Conveyor (Gutter Snob Books, 2023), and Your Mouth is Moving Backwards (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2023).
More Than “Flyover Country”: Jack Driscoll’s Twenty Stories
Review by Al Dickenson
“The lyricism of Driscoll’s writing is a trait that brings the reader into the stories: when reading, you feel as though you are standing on the porch or sitting in the fishing boat, hanging on every word the characters say, as you feel not for them, but with them.”