The Latest
Corrine, Edna, and Imogene: A Family of Good Women by Teddy Jones
Review by Peter Mladinic
Against the backdrop of this male-dominated world, Imogene raises her voice, as she ponders fundamental questions: What is family? Where is home? Who am I?
Squirrel Fish
Ann Yuan
I meet my future husband on the eve of the Lunar New Year. A forty-seven-year-old Beijing native: a decent job, two apartments, recently divorced, and seeking a stepmother for his preteen son—my auntie posted only this much in the family WeChat group.
Ignoring Poetic Schools: Premeditations by Klipschutz
Review by Art Beck
This book has been out for a half dozen years and was well received for a small press volume. But I just came across it a few weeks ago and was so happy to read it that I feel compelled to publicly respond with my thanks to the one-named San Francisco poet, Klipschutz.
Issue 33 | Fall 2025
Prose
Leeuwenhoek’s Lens
Eric Williams
Cate’s Upstate or Fashion After the Apocalypse
Elisabeth Sheffield
from Cityscape with Sybarites
Israel Bonilla
The End of My Sentence
Roberto Ontiveros
Storing Dinosaurs
Dan Weaver
Winners
Julia Meinwald
Tiered Rejections
Stephen Cicirelli
Brother from Another
Jaryd Porter
The Robinson-Barber Thesis
Joyce Meggett
Point of Comparison
Of the Lovers
Addison Zeller
Another Place
Addy Evenson
Poetry
Let’s Sit on the Bench and Chat
Tatyana Bek, translated by Bita Takrimi
Blueberries
Edward Manzi
Crow calls from the top of a pine.
Crow dreams an eerie peacefulness laced with fear
Peter Grandbois
past is a flame
Karen Earle
Cover Art
Ocean Beach I
Judith Skillman
Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases”
Girl Crushed – 1985
Phyllis Rittner
In the office kitchen, all lashes and cheekbones, gift-wrapped cozy in your cashmere sweater, peeling an orange like a surgeon, sectioning each sliver, the way you segment our time, a juicy burst here and there, little pink hearts dotting your calendar.
Two Funerals
Toshiya Kamei
The phone call had come that morning. Etsuko’s sister-in-law, Akiko, her voice thin and stretched tight as a wire. “Kenji passed,” she’d said, no preamble, no softening.
The Inescapable Nightmare: Gods of Unfinished Business by Nina Kossman
Review by Art Beck
“Kossman’s poems evoke Joyce’s characterization of history as a maze of nightmares that his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is trying to escape.”
Author Interview with Herself: Karen An-hwei Lee about Marimo, Mon Amour
“After the pandemic’s saturation of the vernacular lexicon—virus, plague, quarantine—language felt fatigued, emptied of resonance. By writing around the forbidden words, I wanted to recover creative intimacy with expression itself.”
A Highway of Whispered Rain
By Victor D Sandiego
“All the dead truckers from the pileup on the highway gathered around the afterlife elm to proclaim their retroactive innocence.”
A List of the Reasons Women Feel Shame
By Sage Tyrtle
“My whole big self stumbles into a woman in a baseball hat who mutters fat bitch and I open my mouth to say I’m pregnant, as if she’s right to say it.”
Certain Writers Make Me Want to Die
By Jupi Bowen
“For some masochistic reason, I have a subscription to Poets & Writers Magazine. Mostly because I want to peer into the publishing world and see what normies are reading without completely fucking my algorithm online.”
We Were Just Girls
By Sarah Lynn Hurd
“We never meant any harm. We were just girls, picking at our nail polish—pink, and teal, and silver glitter.”
The Summer After Kurt Cobain Died
By Ashleigh Adams
“That June, I stole a red-and-black checkered flannel from my stepdad and frayed the hem with kitchen shears.”
Listening to Rilke Redux
By Wally Swist
“In Rilke’s praises, we find our own praise—of ourselves, of others, of mostly anything, actually. When anyone experiences an epiphany, that person wants to share that epiphany.”
don’t ask what any of this means
By Carla Bessa
Translated by Elton Uliana
“all I know is that I have to run. that’s the premise of my being-in-the-world: running, that’s how I’m programmed.”