What Is Beyond: An Interview with Rachel Jamison Webster
byRachel Jamison Webster grew up in the small town of Madison, Ohio, on Lake Erie and now lives in Evanston, Illinois, where she teaches…
Naming as Failure and Prayer
byI imagine the Adam of Genesis 1 stirring to consciousness, birthed by the words “let us make…,” then whisked into the garden whenever we…
Bloom
byHesperoyucca Whipplei, also known as Our Lord’s Candle, Spanish Dagger, Spanish Bayonet, Quixote Yucca, Chapparal Yucca, Foothill Yucca Glimpsed from the freeway, and then in the…
Only Clouds
byDuring so much uncertainty, different genres can help us cope in different ways—fiction can offer an escape from reality; nonfiction can bring us closer…
The Fables Keep Failing: A review of Jonathan Andrew Pérez’s Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies
byThe elegy and eulogy, both as poetic form and social practice, fascinate me. While the poetic form of elegy orients itself in celebration and…
Crying on the Coast
byfor Moises Velasquez-Manoff and Gabriella Demczuk Wildfires are another accelerant.Saltwater marsh advancingon the pond pine with a blank checkand a taste for renovation,…
Engine, or What I Am Learning from the Animals
byAugust in Mississippi and everything is turning atmosphere. My sunglasses fog. My hair clouds. On the porch, the board game left out overnight warps like heat…
All We Can Hope: A Review of The World I Leave You
byTo be descended from immigrants, drawn to a vocation of words, and writing from a spiritual lens is to find oneself in a niche…
Two Poems by Stephen Wing
bySomewhere on the Mass Migration It’s an expanding universe. I imagineyou and I are fingersof a groping green god,budding twigtips, unfurledleaflets drunk with light,seeking…
Gesture and Omen
byYet you have gone to Nunnelly while the country is deep in its minusesand the nurses are dying.Praise the day you tired of crying every replyand mesmerized…
The Fragile Human: a review of Tess Taylor’s Rift Zone and Last West, Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange
by“Whose fault // our fault” the poem “Three Dreams, 2018” opens. Tess Taylor’s fourth collection of poems, Rift Zone, tenders to her reader the…
I’m starting to believe elasticity is a virtue
byLashing hickey on muddying sky is thunder’s vibrating ringtone. My begrimed hands never content with flash, they want rain. Is…
Two Poems by Gwendolyn Morgan
byA Note to Spotted Towhee: Listen, the clouds move slowly, sun-litBlack-tailed deer with wild bird seed on their nosestranslate hoof prints, Western red cedar…
The Thickest Chocolate Shake and the Tangibility of Christ
byWilliam Woolfitt’s third book of poems, Spring Up Everlasting, revels in the overlapping mysteries of spirit and language, nature and nature’s degradation. Recipient of…
Mirrorform Psalms
byMirrorform Psalm Can I do you some good? Are you too flush for favors? Do all your favorite flavors sweeten your spoon when they…
Our Lady of Eggplant
byDame of the Raging Apple,grant us flavored flesh, oily epiphanies, we moan the globed heft in our palms, in your shiny purple cloak, Empress of Solanum melongena,…
The Painful, Joyful Hours: A Review of Bruce Snider’s Fruit
byBruce Snider’s new collection Fruit, winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, turns and turns again around the subject of being childless, of…
Dancing Frog
byIt must be summertime, the season of outdoor dance parties and cookouts, because I just cannot get enough of dancing—and, more specifically, dancing animals….
A Higher Order of Beauty
byArtist Statement Being Cajun, I was raised as a Catholic. However, there was an almost pantheistic component to it from being so deeply intertwined…
We Learn the Names: a Review of Kathryn Nuernberger’s Rue
byIn her essay “Upstream,” Mary Oliver offers her reader a scenario of a mind oriented towards (and in, and through) nature: “When the chesty,…