Issue 95: Mary Ruefle

MARY RUEFLE’S WORK SURPRISES and disrupts assumptions of what language is and what a poem can be. A reviewer for The Kenyon Review writes that Ruefle’s work is comprised of “masterful, associative poems [that] exhibit a sharp intellect demonstrable of a mind of brilliant inventiveness.” Her poems offer a mix of humor and gravity, and, … Read more

Issue 94: Carmen Maria Machado

THE WEIRD AND THE WONDERFUL are more than welcome in the works of Carmen Maria Machado. Her prose explores the messy, and often grave, corners of the human experience all while playing with the typical conventions of literature. Machado reinvents our relationship with narrative by speaking to the reader directly: inserting imagined research to introduce a … Read more

Issue 93: Nance Van Winckel

EMBRACING IMAGE AND PERSONA, surreality and realism, form and disparate form, Nance Van Winckel’s poetry, fiction, memoir, collage, photomontage, and everything in between is as engaging an experience on the page as it is moving emotionally and intellectually. Throughout her work, Van Winckel contends with the personal, cultural, and political histories that shape people and … Read more

Issue 92: Molly Giles

MOLLY GILES’ WRY AND QUICK-WITTED, observational voice has given life to female characters disenchanted with their circumstances and the underwhelming men that surround them. She is a master of the short form; her language is tight, precise, and caustic and her stories darkly comic. Her endings tum on a heartbeat, often surprising and always resonant … Read more

Issue 91: Brandon Hobson

THROUGHOUT HIS WORK, Brandon Hobson presents stories of Native lives shaped by intergenerational trauma and atrocity and also by cultural continuity and hope. As his characters navigate familial separations and systemic racism, they find themselves in circumstances both relatable and astonishingly surreal. They discover and recover identity; they hurt, heal, fall in love, leave, and find home in a fractured contemporary society. … Read more

Issue 90: A Conversation with Albert Goldbarth

THE WONDER of Goldbarth’s work is in part its wild abundance, its ability to reach as far out as it can and, even within a single poem, move through a dizzying number of written modes and subject matters: quotes from scientists, artists, and writers, snippets of casual conversation, references to pop culture and historical figures, moments … Read more

Issue 89: A Conversation with Ada Limón

WEAVING NATURAL IMAGERY with memories of the past and moments of the present, Ada Limón’s work explores both gender and race while incorporating elements of the surreal. The Los Angeles Review describes her work as being filled with “discovery, and rediscovery of self and world.” Limón’s poems guide her reader through her speaker’s self-exploration and encourage them to … Read more

Issue 88: A Conversation With Kevin McIlvoy

IN SOME WAYS, Kevin McIlvoy is a musician first and a writer second. Although his career as a novelist is certainly longer and more widely celebrated than his tenure as a harmonicist, every word he’s ever put to the page has its own rhythm and melody. McIlvoy’s prose is as political as it is emotional, as … Read more

Issue 86: Ramona Ausubel: The Willow Springs Interview

TO READ RAMONA AUSUBEL’S WORK is to experience a rebuilding of reality. She does this carefully. Empathetically. Like the stranger and the young girl from her debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, who guide a small Jewish community into reimagining reality in order to survive the horrors of WWII, Ausbel uses metaphor and … Read more