Month: March 2017

Hit It

By Karyna McGlynn
From the Spring 2017 Issue

 

You don’t have to believe in the Devil

to end up with him. God’s not so easy.

 

Say God takes the form of an egret.

Say the Devil also takes the form of an egret.

 

Both have

…

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (2017) and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (2009)—both from Sarabande Books—and several chapbooks. Her poems have recently appeared in the Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, Witness, and elsewhere. McGlynn earned her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, where she served as managing editor for Gulf Coast. Her honors include the Verlaine Prize, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, the Hopwood Award, and the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College.

The Trouble with Ceremony

By Steven Moore
From the Spring 2017 Issue

 

My grenadier, Specialist Taylor, did not attend our welcome home ceremony at the Marriott Hotel and Convention Center in Coralville, Iowa, because in the hour preceding the event, as we waited outside the hotel and as our families gathered …

Steven Moore received an MFA in nonfiction from Oregon State University and lives with his wife in the western part of the state. His essays have recently appeared in Ninth Letter and BOAAT, among others.

All Lines of Order

By Andrew Menard
From the Spring 2017 Issue

The Boquillas Trail is located in a remote corner of Big Bend National Park in Texas. It begins with several long steps sloping gently upward, followed by a number of shorter, steeper steps which veer out of sight to the …

Andrew Menard is the author of Learning from Thoreau (University of Georgia Press, 2018) and Sight Unseen: How Frémont’s First Expedition Changed the American Landscape (Bison Books, 2012). His most recent essays and articles have appeared in Antioch Review, The Georgia Review, Hinterland, Journal of American Studies, Oxford Art Journal, and the New England Quarterly. 

Hell and Reason

By Laura Sewell Matter
From the Spring 2017 Issue
Charles Fisk’s U.S Army ID from 1945. Image courtesy of C. B. Fisk, Inc.

In February 1943, as a boy just shy of his eighteenth birthday, Charles Fisk wrote home to his parents in Massachusetts: “The work I am doing means nothing to me. That is, I don’t understand what the object of it …

Laura Sewell Matter

Laura Sewell Matter is an essayist and teacher who lives in New Mexico. Her work has been anthologized in Best Creative Nonfiction and published in various literary journals, including The Georgia Review.

Little Double-Barrel

By David Huddle
From the Spring 2017 Issue

1.

Her grandmother’s shotgun came to Ms. Hicks by way of her brothers, Tommy and Jack. They insisted she take the thing, she was pretty sure, because A) it was the one weapon of the family’s collection they least wanted …

David Huddle taught at the University of Vermont for thirty-eight years, and he continues to teach at the Bread Loaf School of English. His most recent books are Dream Sender, a poetry collection (LSU Press, 2015), and My Immaculate Assassin, a novel (Tupelo Press, 2016). In 2019 his new novel Hazel will be published by Tupelo, and his new poetry collection, My Surly Heart, by LSU.

Winter Sky

By Doug Ramspeck
From the Spring 2017 Issue
…

Doug Ramspeck is the author of six poetry collections and one volume of short stories. His most recent book of poems, Naming the Field, is forthcoming from LSU Press. In 2013 his collection Original Bodies won the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, and in 2010 he received the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize for Mechanical Fireflies. Ramspeck’s individual poems and stories have appeared in such journals as the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, and Slate.

Queen of England

By Becky Mandelbaum
From the Spring 2017 Issue

Dewy and I were not good sons. At home, we sliced the drapes to make togas and blasted birds with pellet guns we weren’t supposed to have. To make our mother nervous, we pressed our skulls to the microwave door …

Becky Mandelbaum is the winner of the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2013 Lawrence Art Center’s Langston Hughes Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, Great Jones Street, Hobart, Juked, South Dakota Review, Midwestern Gothic, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Kansas City Voices. Her winning collection, Bad Kansas, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2017.

Crossings

By John Bensko
From the Spring 2017 Issue
…

John Bensko’s four books of poetry are Visitations (University of Tampa Press, 2014), The Iron City (2000), The Waterman’s Children (1994), and Green Soldiers (1981), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He is also the author of a story collection, Sea Dogs (2004), and coordinator of the University of Memphis MFA program.

Palace of Vicissitude

By Melissa Pritchard
From the Spring 2017 Issue
…

Melissa Pritchard, author of ten books, has received the Flannery O’Connor and Carl Sandburg Awards, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and three O. Henry Prize Story Awards. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Ecotone, AGNI, the Paris Review, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and many other journals. Pritchard recently moved from Arizona to Columbus, Georgia, and is at work on her fifth novel.