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

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Johnson, Couri. I’ll Tell You a Love Story. Bridge Eight Press

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 what Couri Johnson’s debut short story collection, I’ll Tell You a Love Story, manages to achieve: a suspension of belief, that hunger to consume—more and more—pages curled beneath a comforter with a flashlight in hand. Continue reading “Fairy Tales with Teeth: A Review of Couri Johnson’s I’ll Tell You a Love Story”

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 this corporeal utopia: we fashion language as a means of apologizing for our bodies, for the space they take up and take away from others. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa—just a short step from corporeal to culpable, that indelible link between mind and body by way of confession. We are sorry for the manifestation of thoughts in bodies, and vice (versa): another act of contrition for the impurity of self.  It’s how we were taught to be polite—proper Catholic manners.

Continue reading “The Poetics of Working Corpus”

Melismas Review: Directly addressing the inadequacy of language

The cover of Melismas

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 place that’s both familiar and foreboding:

After I was returned to the primeval nature
of the ordinary, I felt as if an eruption
of words went off in my chest. I suspected
movement of the divide that stifles the articulation
of whatever it is I let roll across my tongue,
that night has fastidiously gathered from nearby places

Continue reading “Melismas Review: Directly addressing the inadequacy of language”

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 coming out this month on the blog. Kristine agreed to answer a few questions about her translation work.

Her work has been translated into French, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian. “The translators, who approached me and asked for permission to translate, just happened to be from places in Europe … Except for the Czech-language translation, the French, Serbian, and Bulgarian translators asked for permission to translate the same story,” she explained. Continue reading “Important insights on translation work with Kristine Ong Muslim”

Book Review: Someone You Love is Still Alive

Book Cover provided by Jacar Press

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 in Dread and stands firmly with the dynasty-naming skills displayed in Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary. Throughout 69 dynamic poems, his use of documentary and investigative poetics incorporates intimate scenarios that engage current topics ripped from contemporary news headlines. Continue reading “Book Review: Someone You Love is Still Alive”

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

Heartland Calamitous by Michael Credico

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 by longing; babies are born by being found under the sink; and lovers are turned to goldfish and are flushed away. But behind all the fantastic conceits in this collection remain very real, very poignant questions that will cut readers to the bone. Questions about what it means to be a man, questions about what it means to have a home, what we owe our families, and why these things often hurt more than they should. These are the fables of the modern-day—the stories that place us in myths and dreams that distort the world around us so that we might see it all the more clearly.  Continue reading “Strange Landscapes of Loss and Longing in Michael Credico’s Heartland Calamitous”

Winter 2018 Masthead

Co-Editors-in-Chief: Leigh Camacho Rourks, Patrick Holian
Managing Editor: Drew Attana
Copy Editor: Stephanie Marker
Assistant Copy Editor: Ali Cortez
Web Editor: Leigh Camacho Rourks

Creative Nonfiction Editor: Rebecca Hazelwood
Fiction Editor: Saul Lemerond
Assistant Fiction Editor: Patrick Donovan
Poetry Editor: Tori Moore
Assistant Poetry Editor: Daniel Altenburg
Visual Arts Editor: Haley Fedor

Summer 2018 Masthead

Co-Editors-in-Chief: Daniel Altenburg and Gina Warren
Managing Editor: Britton Andrews
Copy Editor: Britton Andrews

Social Media Editor: Rebecca Hazelwood
Web Editor: Daniel AltenbuCo-Editors-in-Chief: Daniel Altenburg and Gina Warren
Managing Editor: Britton Andrews
Copy Editor: Britton Andrews

Social Media Editor: Rebecca Hazelwood
Web Editor: Daniel Altenburg, Gina Warren, Leigh Camacho Rourks

Creative Nonfiction Editor: Josie Scanlan
Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor: Katie Baxter
Fiction Editor: Dustin L. Hyman
Assistant Fiction Editor: Emily Fontenot
Poetry Editor: Patti Pangborn
Assistant Poetry Editor: Hannah Chapple
Visual Arts Editor: Martin H. Fulmer

Readers: Jenny Robertson, Jake Brewer, Ali Unalrg, Gina Warren, Leigh Camacho Rourks

 

Winter 2019 Masthead

Co-Editors-in-Chief: Daniel Altenburg and Gina Warren
Managing Editor: Britton Andrews
Copy Editor: Britton Andrews

Social Media Editor: Rebecca Hazelwood
Web Editor: Daniel Altenburg, Gina Warren, Leigh Camacho Rourks

Creative Nonfiction Editor: Josie Scanlan
Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor: Katie Baxter
Fiction Editor: Dustin L. Hyman
Assistant Fiction Editor: Emily Fontenot
Poetry Editor: Patti Pangborn
Assistant Poetry Editor: Hannah Chapple
Visual Arts Editor: Martin H. Fulmer

Readers: Jenny Robertson, Jake Brewer, Ali Unal

Summer 2019 Masthead

Co-Editors-in-Chief: Ali Ünal and Patti Jeane Pangborn
Fiction Editor: Jason Bargueño
Assistant Fiction Editor: Jarrett Kaufman
Poetry Editor: Lindsey Taylor
Assistant Poetry Editor: Em Tielman
Creative Nonfiction Editor: Catt Evans
Visual Arts & Instagram Editor: Caitlin Vance
Public Relations & Social Media: Alyssa Beckitt
Blog Editor: Jahidul Alam
Copy Editors: Emmanuel Kuada, Chrystyn Albarado

Readers: Delicia Daniels, Chrystyn Albarado, Spencer Silverthorne, Kimberly Cunningham, Aleya Washington, Couri Johnson, Kristen Frank, Katie O’Neill Baxter, Sydney Doyle, Michael Keen