✱ ISSUE 13 OUT NOW
✱ ISSUE 13 OUT NOW
A Note From Our Editor:
A few weeks ago, on a rainy Los Angeles day, during a heated debate about finding solutions to fixing our ailing world, a friend of mine, a gifted young scientist, asked me a genuine question: “But, what can poetry do for us?”. In a world that needs swift and immediate repair, from finding cures to diseases to battling climate change, political instability and economic injustice, my friend posed a truthful inquiry. If we need answers here and now, how can a poem help us out? Adrienne Rich, one of the greatest poets of the past century, knew the answer: “The reading or hearing of a poem can transform consciousness, not according to some pre-ordered program but in the disorderly welter of subjectivity and imagination, the seeing and touching of another, of others through language”. For Rich, the language of poetry is the singular vein that allows us the wild and unforeseen burst of new ideas, of understanding and of change. If not for our ability to “see” ourselves and each other through metaphors – those windows to our imagination – we wouldn’t ever take a step to fix the world around us. Rich tells us, in essence, that to break ourselves free of our challenges, we need the language of poetry – as we would need air, food and love: to discover each other, to secure a different world and to ultimately survive.
Read More →Featured Works
Summer Supper, by Sam Moe
My skin is my fur is blown about / by the wind. You arrive after the mothers have gone / and the warnings were plenty, yet you’re here with / a lamp in one hand, my cheesecloth heart in the other
Read More →Self-Portrait in Air, by Salvatore Difalco
Free styling doesn’t flush everyone with euphoria. / Many desire stairs or ladders or sturdy handrails / to reach their comforting plateaus and plazas. / And who could fault them when everything fails, / even our finest machines and conceptions?
Read More →Angels, by Virginia Watts
We all loved that nearby graveyard / behind a church none of us went to, / one gnarled tree, easy to climb, / birds calling, butterflies floating, stray cats dozing in the sun, / ancient headstones, chiseled / numbers and names we stuffed / with yellow buttercups. We knew / about old age, death, funerals, / skeletons, didn’t care.
Read More →Submissions Open!
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Send us the wild and divine, the eccentric and experimental.
Read Our Most Recent Thoughts:
In The Guest, Emma Cline cements her reputation as a master of quiet menace. This time, the sunlit dread of Southern California (so vivid in her debut The Girls) gives way to the salty, drug-hazed unreality of Long Island in late summer—a landscape as decadent as it is decaying. Cline's protagonist, Alex, a twenty-something grifter floating between gigs, men, and lies, is perhaps one of the most hauntingly passive heroines in contemporary fiction. Yet in her passivity lies power, and in her slipperiness, an incisive critique of the illusions upon which class, gender, and agency are built.
Cline’s prose is razor-sharp, sparse, and sensory. She doesn’t waste time with exposition or moralizing. Instead, she allows the reader to sit uncomfortably close to Alex’s unfiltered perceptions. The novel’s strength lies in its control: Cline doesn’t demand we sympathize with Alex, only that we follow her. We watch her lie about where she’s staying, sneak into parties, attach herself to strangers, and make increasingly reckless decisions. And still, we can’t look away.
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