by KARAH MITCHELL Caleb Johnson, Treeborne: A Novel (New York: Picador, 2018), pp. 304 Caleb Johnson’s debut novel, Treeborne (Picador, 2018), begins and ends with a flood of biblical proportions.  When the De Soto dam in Elberta, Alabama breaks, it conquers everything … Read more

by KATHLEEN SANDS Otabenga stood and spoke with purpose: “I will undergo both trials on the same day.”   Under his prestigious hat of spotted fur, Old Liboyo lowered his forehead. “That would be too much pain at once. Let … Read more

by CAROLINA HOTCHANDANI The trees, the redwoods, waving, skimmed her thought of the trees the way the wind grazed the canopy of the forest. Some trunks creaked, while her mind fell quiet, heightening to the falling capacity of trees that … Read more

by KYLAN RICE Selah Saterstrom, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics. Essay Press, 2017, pp. 290 The poets’ rightful mood is ecstasy. Poets dwell in ekstasis—that is, outside themselves, bodies without organs, effusing their very flesh “in eddies and…in lacy … Read more

ANNOUNCING OUR CONTEST WINNERS! 1st Prize: “Cryptozoology” by Kathleen McNamara 2nd Prize: “Haunting Grounds” by Tessa Yang 3rd Prize: “Undertaker” by George Hovis Honorable Mention: “Colby Jack Accords” by Craig Sanders Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone who … Read more

by STEVE PEET The boy lay in a dried out wallow beneath freshly cut rhododendron boughs. To passersby, had there been any, it was an ordinary brush pile worthy of no notice whatsoever. Except for a fuzzy pink hippo seizing … Read more

by ELISA FAISON An Tran, Meditations on the Mother Tongue. C&R Press, January 2017, pp. 154 An Tran’s debut collection Meditations on the Mother Tongue (C&R Press, 2017) is composed of twelve stories. The setting stretches from Sumatra, to the mainland United … Read more

by JOHN MARCHINKOSKI The man on stage can’t explain how it feels to burn. Nothing describes the sensation well enough. The fluorescent stage lights overhead remind him of the burning. He considers invoking them, but the audience doesn’t know their … Read more

by PAUL BLOM Deepak Unnikrishnan. Temporary People.   Restless Books, 2017, pp. 227. A suitcase sprouts limbs and eventually turns into a man. A woman tapes shattered bodies back together. Laborers are grown from seeds. A revolution grows from seeds … Read more

by ANNEKE SCHWOB Valeria Luiselli. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  Coffee House Press, April 2017, pp. 136.  Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican writer whose novels and essays are formally complex and often surreal. In 2015, having … Read more