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Intimate Love and Tremulous Loss

May 17, 2023 - By Elisa Rowe

A Review of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris. (Alice James Books, 2023)

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.
   —Katie Farris, “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World”

In the face of medical vulnerabilities and the march of sudden illness, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Katie Farris’ full-length debut) embraces grief and wit, counters beauty with cruelty, and pairs eroticism with nostalgia. Farris is a poet, translator, fiction writer, and...

10 Questions for Chris Campanioni

May 16, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

Whenever my mom and dad were at the dinner table (the place of memorial and celebration, the place of conversation), I'd ask them about their days. I wanted to imagine their lives without me, their movements and rhythms when I was not there. What I was getting at, though I didn't know it then, was a desire to know what came before me, how I got here.
—from "Magic Marker," Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I’m often drawn to the task of accounting for “firsts,” which is a lot like asking how we might imbue the everyday with the charge of memory, the significance and ceremony of reproduction. I like to take inventory, imagining them assembled for some...

10 Questions for JC Andrews

May 11, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

I’m so in love with you all of a sudden, you
    machine angel. Angel machine. Because I am still learning
        your new smells. Plastic, salt, animal, finally and still

thinking plastic, salt, animal, finally. Because you are letting
    me stand you up in the shower and wash your hair like you are not
        my mother, like I am not your daughter.
—from "Momma, Refracted," Volume 64, Issue 1

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I don’t remember the first time I wrote a poem and took it seriously. I will say, though, that my grandmother used to write letters for me to her...

10 Questions for Lauren Hohle

May 9, 2023 - By Edward Clifford

Hannah doesn't get on-campus housing for the summer, but she doesn't want to go back to Missouri, back to her old life, back in time. The summer before, her first summer after starting college, she sat in basements sipping Budweiser as her formerly bookish friends swapped stories about frat parties. She sat through each Sunday's sermon as the pastor built God's army out of straw men, drew conclusions her professors would have docked her points for.
—from "Inland," Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I dreamed up a lot of stories when I was young but always kind of froze with the writing-it-down part. I somehow finagled my way into a creative writing independent study...

April 2023 Contributor Publications

May 4, 2023 - By Staff

Karin Cecile Davidson's collection of stories, The Geography of First Kisses, is out now from Kallisto Gaia Press. Her story "In the Great Wide" was published in our Spring 2020 issue.

Mary Fister'...