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.”

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.

Five Poems | Laura Goldin

Laura Goldin is a publishing lawyer in New York. Her recent poems appear or are forthcoming in a number of literary journals including Driftwood Press, San Pedro River Review, Apple Valley Review, Mom Egg Review, One Art, and Rogue Agent. Earlier poems appeared in The Comstock Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Bellevue Literary Review.

Tear | Jared Daniel Fagen

Jared Daniel Fagen is the author of The Animal of Existence (Black Square Editions, 2022). His prose poems, essays, and conversations have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Lana Turner, and Asymptote, among other publications. He is the editor and publisher of Black Sun Lit, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York. Born in Jeollanam-do, South Korea, he lives in Brooklyn and the western Catskills.

Two Poems from Hyperphantasia | Sara Deniz Akant

“Hyperphantasia” and “Dear Phanta” from Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press, 2022) by Sara Deniz Akant. Published with permission of Rescue Press. Sara Deniz Akant is a Turkish-American poet, educator, and performer. She is the author of Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press 2022), Babette (Rescue Press 2015), Parades (Omnidawn 2014), and Latronic Strag (Persistent Editions (2014). She teaches poetry as Professor of the Practice […]

Three Poems | Emily Chan

Emily Chan lives and teaches in Iowa City, where she recently completed an MFA as the Iowa Arts (2021) and Alberta Metcalf Kelly Fellow (2022) of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. These pieces belong to a poetry collection in progress, entitled “Meta Verse.” Her work has appeared in collaboration with Hester Street and […]

Three Poems | Vi Khi Nao

VI KHI NAO, 2022 Lammy Award Winner of the Jim Duggins, PhD: Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, is the author of 17 books, including: A Brief Alphabet of Torture: Stories, which won FC2’s 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize; the novels Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016) & Swimming with Dead Stars (The University of […]

of course | Louise Akers

Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018. Their chapbook, Alien year, was selected by Brandon Shimoda for the 2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize. Akers’s work can be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, MIDTERM, Bat City Review, bæst […]