Latest Writing
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INTERVIEW with SOON JONES
If I had only one word to describe These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, the debut collection of poems by Soon Jones, it might be lush. This collection is lush in its immersion in the natural landscape of the rural American South. It is lush in the language of emerging sexuality, in what it means to…
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FEBRUARY INTERVIEW with ASA DRAKE
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the first of Asa Drake’s two debuts, Maybe the Body from Tin House, is flush with the fruits and flora of a flamboyant garden, given that she lives in rural Florida. Nor perhaps is it a surprise that the book is fecund with cleanly honed commentary of what it’s like to be…
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OCTOBER INTERVIEW with EDWARD SALEM
Edward Salem is a poet who hasn’t lost his sense of humor. “Palestinians,” he shares in our interview, “are insanely funny.” It’s this sense of humor that jumps off the page of Salem’s debut poetry collection, Monk Fruit, surprising readers, even as he’s tackling topics like the occupation of Palestine, American imperialism, torture, and genocide.…
POETRY
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THOUGHTS ON EVAPORATION – A ZUIHITSU by Sarah Mills
In one of my earliest memories, my mother asks me what I want to be for Halloween and I say a lake, which she mishears as leek, so she starts talking about how leeks accumulate dirt, something I didn’t appreciate until the first time I made potato-leek stew, the grit like tiny beads that had…
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LULLABY* by Tran Tran
Con cò mà đi ăn đêm** Đậu phải cành mềm, lộn cổ xuống ao *** Night darkens on an egret’s porcelain wings. A lullaby begins and ends with silence. Mother’s love begins and ends with silence. A branch snaps. The egret tumbles into death. A bomb blasted. My mother tumbled into orphanhood. What’s unsung: the baby egret’s hunger—orphaned…
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I CONSIDER WHAT TO SAY WHEN MY DOCTOR ASKS ME TO DESCRIBE MY PAIN by Emma Bolden
Nothing. I can’t construct a sentence able to withholdthe weight of it; I can’t explain or calculate the kind of weightI mean, what it is that I am with or holding. In high school a teacher explained the difference betweenmetaphor and simile in terms of distance. I imagined likeor as as a door cracked, light…
FICTION
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QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT by Linni Kral
The day Dick disappeared, I woke up fuming. We’d had a row—the word we’d agreed to use when it wasn’t quite a fight. We overpronounced it for effect, yawning the vowel like we were English, like cow, like ow. We hadn’t gotten to bed ‘til north of midnight, or rather, we’d gotten in bed, then…
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SPLIT UNIT by Ryan Bender-Murphy
For so long, the first thing I’d see in the morning was Gabby, her head against the pillow, and it was enough to complete the day. I didn’t need to look at anyone else or go anywhere else; I could simply go back to sleep. But whenever I woke and saw her, I thought I…
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ONCE, THERE WAS HOME, by Karla Hirsch
once, there was time, there were moments that made up your life, there were hours and minutes, a morning’s routine, the bitter coffee you brewed in the copper pot you had longer than you could remember, mixed the hot liquid with sugar and spices, let it fill you awake to prepare you to journey to…
TRANSLATION
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THE HEART OF A SIREN by Margo Rejmer, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
From the recent collection The Burden of Skin. The sea was groaning like a wounded beast. Is the sea hungry? Or thirsty? Is it afraid? Dawn was slipping through holes in the thin curtains. Lying in bed, Enriko began to make out the contours of objects. He listened to the sea. It was calling…
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THREE POEMS by Bejan Matur, translated from the Turkish by Nell Wright
No spring The Judas-trees have bloomedwe’re mourning againno springno countryand blood everywhere. When kissing the earth They talked about a cavalry girlwalking. Tenacitycrossing valleys, mountains.Saying as she goes,how much I believedhow bound I was.Foremost when climbingmountains and valleys,kissing the earth with a breathno one knows.As if the mountains were beginning for the first…
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INTERVIEW with Khairani Barokka
FWR: “To enter the indonesian language is a science fictional enterprise,” you write in the first section of amuk. Reading forward, you show readers how Indonesian tenses permit a simultaneity of temporal possibilities not included within the narrower scope of English; traveling through time or existing beyond the limits of time altogether. What does it…
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