“I was still just some guy at a party:” Andrew Martin on Success, First Novels, and the Role of Revisions 

There’s a moment in the short story “No Cops” where the heroine of the story Leslie is hanging with her closest friend as she closes up a patron-less bookstore in Missoula, Montana. Leslie holds a “waifish” book of contemporary poetry as she spaces out and contemplates the merits of intention […]

Blistering | Alasdair Rees

Tyson’s thigh is touching my thigh. Where our legs meet on the bench, the radiant heat from his body moves through the fabric of his pants and the fabric of my pants. It’s a strange communication, I think, taking the last gulp of my mason jar of sparkling rosé. Condensation has gathered on the bottom of the jar, and I cannot help but hold the jar in the final position of my gulp, focusing and unfocusing my eyes; seeing through the bottom of the jar, letting the dew obscure the image; watching the strange blobby shape of Evelyn’s flower, watching it dissolve into an even blobbier smear.

Awash in Elsewhere, Twisted Anew: A Review of Jennifer Soong’s Suede Mantis / Soft Rage

There is a lyrical lilt to Jennifer Soong’s recent book, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit), one could find familiar, yet it meanders from kept usual quarters, the work converses with the breeze, its specificity disarming. Soong’s poems shift us here, there, then back—changed, “moving the meaning again and again away from us.” Her collection in three tempos carries the reader across the span of many-faced moons. Her words reverberate and emit a crosswind memory of what once was, woven with breath, with silence, with tumbled currents “crashing on an adjacent rock.”

In Between Two Voids | Nahid Keshavarz, translated by Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi

Darya is uncomfortable. Controlling the group doesn’t seem to be easy. She keeps thinking of Reza Sa’adat, and their last phone call where he said fear of death is perpetually with us, that sometimes we acknowledge it consciously and other times, hide it until it manifests in other things. The fear of loneliness and fear of death are similar. Perhaps if we can overcome the fear of solitude, we can overcome the fear of death as well.

excerpt from Silver Repetition | Lily Wang

To remember is to deny memory — to remember is to reimagine, restructure, recombine. Only through memory’s silver window can my cousin reappear. The soft, round nose, the open shell of her ear, a droplet of sweat on her temple, the skin there a little shiny, a little pink, never anything but enchanting. My hand is small in hers; in the pale grass, she harvests a fistful of black hair from the field and wraps it around her wrist like a circle of leeches.

Business | Theadora Walsh

Theadora Walsh is a writer based in Oakland, California. Her digital poetry has been shown at The Glucksman, the Granoff Center, and Pratt University and published by Oral.Pub, Inpatient Press, and Unbag. Her essays and art criticism can be found in Art in America, Artforum, Variable West, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast Magazine and elsewhere. Currently, in collaboration with Gabriel Garza, she runs a curatorial project called In Concert.