Grandview Drive – Tim Blackett
Earl converses, dines, and laughs with the residents of Grandview Drive and, through the power of fantasy, its sense of control and infiniteness, makes a final attempt to fulfill the longing for lasting connection that haunts him.
Everybody has this backpack of stories we tell our friends or people at parties, and I think that’s a big part of how we make our identities. That’s what I’m interested in writing.
[This issue aims] to explore how the intersection of language, queerness, and shifting dynamics of racialization and belonging can help generate language to define oneself and to approach literary and arts criticism without centering Global North, white, male, cis-hetero standpoints.
The Case of Cem – Vera Mutafchieva
The Case of Cem takes place in the fifteenth century, when the world was crudely split between East and West—not unlike the Cold War world in which the novel was written.
The Capture of Krao Farini – Nay Saysourinho
Billed as “part Turing test, part circus flyer,” Saysourinho’s debut chapbook narrates the imagined inner world of a woman known as Krao Farini, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sideshow performer often called “The Missing Link” for her hypertrichosis.
Your Name, Palestine – Olivia Elias
As a child of the Nakba, Elias has dedicated her oeuvre to the Palestinian cause and to the memory of the repeated cycles of Palestinian displacement and oppression.
It would feel a little cheap for me to just write this nice character that bad things happen to, like the version of this story where Teddy is a really likable person, and her sister disappears, her father kills himself, and she’s just with a heart of gold?
Black Pastoral – Ariana Benson
The poet envisions history as a living, breathing entity that we are both beholden to and shaped by—this is not just swaths of greenery, but land that has borne witness to, and evolved around Black suffering.
Recital of the Dark Verses – Luis Felipe Fabre
Fabre blends serious (but not self-serious) social and religious commentary with punny nameplay humor and mutilated bodies to make a point about how fundamentalism itself arises from relatively picayune squabblings.
Her Body Among Animals – Paola Ferrante
There’s no denying, in these stories, that having a body means being vulnerable: to viruses, to heartbreak, to violence. Yet the stories also inspire hope. . . . HER BODY AMONG ANIMALS illustrates the insoluble contradictions of modern life while gesturing toward the possibility of redemption.