Category: Columns

  • A Heightened Way of Being: On Aaron Poochigian’s American Divine

    By Sydney Doyle The title poem that opens Aaron Poochigian’s latest collection, American Divine, serves as the perfect epigraph for poems that act as rendezvous points for the mythic and the ordinary:

  • Fairy Tales with Teeth: A Review of Couri Johnson’s I’ll Tell You a Love Story

    By Kym Cunningham In the interest of full disclosure: this review does not pretend to be unbiased (as if writing can be), as Johnson is a colleague and friend of the writer as well as her Co-Editor-in-Chief. It is not often that reading a book makes me feel like a kid again. But that’s exactly…

  • The Poetics of Working Corpus

    By Kym Cunningham We begin, like we always do, with the body—that occupation of space that separates I from us, the problematic corpus forever embalmed with liminality. I am nowhere but not nothing, just as the separation between us is nothing and yet it is not nowhere. And so we try to make something from…

  • Melismas Review: Directly addressing the inadequacy of language

    By Hayden Bergman Early in Marlon Hacla’s second chapbook, Melismas, this reader gets the sense that Hacla must speak, though for him, the stakes seem to be much higher than they are for most, and, perhaps, more violent. But maybe that’s too strong a word. The poet speaks of arrival in an inhospitable place, a…

  • Important insights on translation work with Kristine Ong Muslim

    By Jacob Richard Bergeron Kristine Ong Muslim has authored nine books including The Drone Outside, Grim Series, and Night Fish. Some of her work has been translated into other languages. She has translated Three Books, Walang Halong Biro, and others. Melismas by Marlon Hacla is an upcoming work that she has translated which has a…

  • Book Review: Someone You Love is Still Alive

    A geography of sex and violence permeates throughout Ephraim Sommers’s Someone You Love is Still Alive. This energetic text presents readers with contemporary insight into poetic archives that contort racial violence and love, shifting kisses amid murder reports that bend quietly under police badges. Sommers’s pragmatic aesthetic aligns with the vigor of Ai’s fairy-horror narratives…

  • Strange Landscapes of Loss and Longing in Michael Credico’s Heartland Calamitous

    By Couri Johnson In Michael Credico’s debut collection of short stories, Heartland Calamitous, he takes us from fever-dream to fever dream in a strange and fragmented Midwest. Corpses bloat in backyard pools for days, dissolving alongside a marriage; a bear is taken into a family to replace the son he devoured, only to be devoured…

  • Writing the Midwest: An Interview with Frank Bill

    By Jarrett Kaufman Rougarou: Can you talk about your connection to the Midwest? Frank Bill: I was born in Corydon, Indiana. A small rural midwestern town. Raised on my grandparent’s farm and in VFW and American Legion Halls. I was either in the woods with my cousin, father, or grandfather hunting deer, rabbit, squirrel, building…

  • Mythic Humor and Personal Vendettas: Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed

    By Couri Johnson In his new novel Kansastan, Farooq Ahmed mixes dystopia with myth, the Old West with the Old Testament, and creates a narrative that is full of both humor and dread. His un-named narrator, a goatherd abandoned at a mosque in war-torn Kansas, both garners the sympathy of readers while repulsing them.

  • My Body is Bound: The Inevitability of Auto-Theory for this Creative Writer

    By Em Tielman Auto-Theory is a contemporary form of writing said to blend critical theories with personal [embodied] experience. Think of the fiction workshop adage “write what you know” amended to “write what you directly sense with what you suspect to be true” and you may begin to conceive of how this blending occurs.