Please enjoy five new poems by our contributors.
May 2015
May 7, 2015
Poetry
All posts tagged: 2015
Review: My Sunshine Away
May 4, 2015
Reviews
Book by M.O. WALSH
Reviewed by
Most of us who are over 20 can point to a few big events that set us on the road to adulthood. For the never-named narrator of M.O. Walsh’s debut novel, My Sunshine Away, it was the rape of his teen crush during her sophomore (his freshman) year of high school, Lindy Simpson. The narrator and Lindy have been neighbors since grade school, during which time he has harbored an innocent, but obsessive love for her. The search for the unseen rapist—who knocked her off her bike and forced her face into the ground—brings all the neighborhood oddballs into suspicion. It also brings the narrator closer to realizing his puppy-like fantasy. Unfortunately, he implicates himself in the process, in multiple ways. During this time, his divorced parents are still acting out their drama, and then his sister is killed in a car accident, leaving no adult—except a loveable but unstable uncle—with time or emotional bandwidth to spare for him as he lurches toward maturity.
Plymouth
April 29, 2015
Dispatches
By JOHN MARTIN
Even viewed from a distance, the harborfront tests the capacities of peripheral vision, tall masts and rigging far off to the right, and in front of us, here, clumsy, rectangular structures painted white with enormous, clear windows that darken in the afternoons.
Two Flat Tires
April 25, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
On the same side
turn a car
into a parallelogram,
an oft-read Bible,
a shelf of books
with a few
missing, a man
sitting and a woman
standing. Her hand
is on his shoulder.
Yelabuga
April 25, 2015
Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry
The King of Bubbles
April 23, 2015
Fiction, Issue 09, Issue 09 Fiction
By EDIE MEIDAV
Sinking lower in the club’s hot tub and today a birthday marks his face one notch less recognizable when anyway, meeting someone these days means who you say you are matters both less and more. Who cares, really? Get older and it becomes easier to say who you are not. No king of industry, that myth abandoned before anyone finished saying Constantinople, but who even says Constantinople anymore, such flourish abandoned in his particular past as a history major, an epoch in which windmilling toward the future seemed to matter, toting around the flag of belief that what happened before could actually help you later. Now just a service-minded bumbler close to retirement going around to enlighten the masses and so what if certain efforts fizzled? Could happen to anyone.
Review: Thorn
April 23, 2015
Reviews
Book by EVAN MORGAN WILLIAMS
Reviewed by
The protagonists of the 15 stories in Thorn, by Evan Morgan Williams, are a diverse cast: Native American, white, black, Asian; young and old; men, women; rich, poor. Yet Williams, who won the 2014 G.S. Charat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, with this debut collection, is able to inhabit his protagonists, as well as to empathize with them. This is no mean feat. Many of Williams’s protaganists are women in crisis, and he has an uncanny ability to take on their voices.
All his characters are struggling, isolated, and vulnerable. They harbor secret yearnings and are ashamed of themselves for them. None get what they desire or need in these stories, many of which are heart-wrenching.
Amherst College Reports on about Contemporary Arabic Literature
April 23, 2015
News and Events
Amherst College covers a conversation in which panelists discuss the challenges and opportunities of translating and publishing Arabic literature.
April 2015 Poetry Feature
April 17, 2015
Poetry
Celebrate Poetry Month with 9 new poems by our contributors!
Ask a Local: Melissa Kwasny, Jefferson City, MT
April 16, 2015
Interviews
With MELISSA KWASNY
Your Name: Melissa Kwasny
Current city or town: Jefferson City, Montana
How long have you lived here? I live four miles up a dirt road from Jefferson City, a stage stop that has seen better days, hence the unlikely name Jefferson City. It consists of a post office, a bar that closes and reopens depending on the fortunes of a nearby gold mine, and a hall for the volunteer fire department, wherein we vote. I have lived in this particular canyon for 25 years, and in the shade of these particular mountains, on and off, for 40.
