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Buoyant Beers & Light Limericks: A Summer Sip-Along

June 16, 2023 - By Marsha Bryant

The incredible lightness of beering,
So refreshing with summertime nearing!
O they’ll flow flavorfully
With their low ABVs
When the afternoon heatwaves start searing.
 

#1
Take an Air Bath when temperatures rise.
Finely bubbled, its bite will surprise
You with tongue-tingling zip
To enliven each sip
Of this Session so brightly devised.
 

#2
A drinkable language that’s clear-
ly straw-colored, delightful Kölsch beer
Is so crushable, fruity,
and lightly hopped: we
Can keep cool in this time of the year.
 

#3
Do you like your beer juicy with haze,
Seek some lightness amidst NEIPA craze?
Just a kiss of the hops...

10 Questions for Alexa Doran

June 15, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

For every year you aren't a tongue away:

America clogs. I ice the White
Zin, choose a filter, call this mood.

Not to say I'm a hunter
but I refuse to see the syllables
which luck your name
—from "A Toast to the Narcissist's Exit," Volume 64, Issue 2 (Spring 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I’m thinking of the first poem I had published, called “Every Poet is a Partition; Every Love is a Sea” published in Ekphrasis magazine. This poem was based on the work of Jason deCaires Taylor, a British sculptor who created the first underwater sculpture park, and has since built several underwater museums and parks, all of which feature “living...

perennial fashion presence falling

June 12, 2023 - By Michael Thurston

A Review of perennial fashion presence falling by Fred Moten (Wave Books, 2023)

I’m going to be straight with you: in important ways, this book might not be for you. You might be, as I suspect I sometimes am, inadvertently but consequentially, one of the motherfuckers addressed in “are you one of these motherfuckers?” Which is to say one of those readers who frames and interprets Black experience past and present through the scrims and frames of ideological whiteness. In something of an ars poetica (for this volume and for much of this brilliant poet/critic/theorist’s work), Moten writes:

when...

Whale

June 7, 2023 - By Ellie Eberlee

A Review of Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, Translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim (Archipelago Books, 2023)

“Stories,” writes Cheon Myeong-kwan near the end of his lush and sprawling Whale, “are an exploration into a life filled with injustice.” Translated from the original Korean by Chi-Young Kim and shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, Myeong-kwan’s second novel explores the unjust life of Chunhui, a 27-year-old-woman nine days out of prison for arson and mass murder she may or may not have committed.

The novel’s prologue returns Chunhui to her family’s previously thriving, now deserted brickyard...

May 2023 Contributor Publications

June 5, 2023 - By Staff

Isabel Zapata's essay collection, In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation, (translated by Robin Myers) has recently been published by Coffee House Press. Her poem, "Horse in Motion" was published in our Summer 2021 issue, A Gathering of Poets. 

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