Author: Scott LaClaire

on Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan

By Oluwaseun S. Olayiwola
From the Summer 2024 Issue

A trace is a small, but non-negligible amount of a thing implying a larger amalgam of it elsewhere. A trace is a presence, however miniscule, that points away from itself toward an absence. Say, a fallen autumn leaf that conjures …

Oluwaseun S. Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer, and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in The Guardian, The Poetry Review, The Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Olayiwola has an MFA in choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018–19. His debut collection, Strange Beach, is forthcoming in 2025 from Soft Skull Press (U.S.) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (U.K.).

on Fatal Attraction, created by Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes

By Felice Arenas
From the Summer 2024 Issue

Cheat with the wrong woman, and you may find a bunny boiling in your kitchen. Such is the enduring legacy of 1987’s Fatal Attraction and fount of the shorthand for modern infidelity’s consequences. The 2023 television series of the same …

Felice Arenas

Felice Arenas wrote Netflix synopses for a decade and covered cinema and music for HuffPost before earning her MFA from New York University, where she taught creative writing and was a Global Research Initiatives Fellow. She teaches editing at Berkeley. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Hub, Harvard Review, Stanford’s Mantis, and more. Born and raised in Chicago, she has lived in Los Angeles, New York, Brooklyn, and Shanghai.

on Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt

By William Shaw
From the Summer 2024 Issue

Both of Alison Rumfitt’s novels open with a content warning. As well as flagging potentially distressing material, these warnings function as upfront statements of Aboutness. “Tell Me I’m Worthless is a book about two things, primarily, and those things …

William Shaw author photo

William Shaw

William Shaw is a writer from the U.K., currently living in Virginia. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Doctor Who Magazine.

Wildness in Contemporary Poetry (vs. Poetry about Wildness) (on Jeanne Heuving’s Mood Indigo and Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property)

By Charles Altieri
From the Summer 2024 Issue

I keep fighting off awareness that my imaginative life has been stuck in a rut for a long time. When one dismisses specific contemporary volumes of poetry, one can blame the authors. When one persistently rejects such poetry, one has …

Charles Altieri is retired from University of California, Berkeley’s English Department, where he taught for twenty-eight years. He is the author of many books and articles, the latest of which are Literature, Education, and Society: Bridging the Gap (Routledge, 2022) and Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory (University of New Mexico Press, 2021). 

Making Scenes: Three Writers on Puerto Rican Syndrome (on Justin Torres’s Blackouts; Urayoán Noel’s Transversal; and Éric Morales-Franceschini’s Syndrome)

By Michael Dowdy
From the Summer 2024 Issue

Scene 1

A small, stuffy bedroom in a boardinghouse called the Palace, window thrown open to the desert night. Two men have reunited after meeting nearly a decade ago when both were committed to a mental hospital, where they knew …

Michael Dowdy

Michael Dowdy is the author of the forthcoming book of lyric essays Tell Me about Your Bad Guys (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). His other books include the critical anthology Poetics of Social Engagement, coedited with Claudia Rankine (Wesleyan University Press, 2018); the collection of poems Urbilly (Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, 2017); and the study of Latinx poetry Broken Souths (University of Arizona Press, 2013). He teaches Latinx literature at Villanova University. 

The Space Between Things

By Garry Noland
From the Summer 2024 Issue

INTRODUCTION

Collage is all about depth, I remember reading, though I can’t remember where. Although the collage is conventionally characterized by its flatness, the hallmark of a collage should be, as the argument goes, where a hand-cut edge of an …

Garry Noland was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, and lives in Independence, Missouri. Noland has worked in Kansas City and Los Angeles since 1978, when he received a BA in art history from University of Missouri–Kansas City. Noland has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts/Mid-America Arts Alliance Fellowship in Works on Paper/Painting, a Studios Inc. Residency Fellowship, and a Charlotte Street Visual Artists Fellowship. Selected solo exhibits have been at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Cleve Carney Museum of Art, and Kiosk Gallery in Kansas City. Selected group exhibits have been at John Michael Kohler Art Center, California State University–Dominguez Hills and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Future projects include a two-person show with Laura Nugent at Northwest Missouri State University and an installation project for Key Loop, National Building Arts Center, in Sauget, Illinois. Since 2020 Noland has operated Holsum Gallery, an artist-run space, in Kansas City, Missouri.  

Iodine; At the Pripyat Hospital; & My Hematologist Listens to My Love Songs

By Virgil Suárez
From the Summer 2024 Issue

My Hematologist Listens to My Love Songs

 

As he daintily places the stethoscope on my skin.

First the heart, my left bundle branch block(ed) heart

where no electricity has seen the light of day.

His breath is fig-marmalade sweet.

…

Virgil Suárez

Virgil Suárez was born in Cuba. He is the author of a multitude of books, most recently Amerikan Chernobyl (2023) and The Painted Bunting’s Last Molt (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). He lives in Florida.

Poem of the mind in the act of finding lag & The rising sea of available dukedoms

By Daniel D’Angelo
From the Summer 2024 Issue
…

Daniel D’Angelo’s poetry has recently appeared in Granta, Harvard Review, and The Rupture. Born in Davenport, Iowa, he lives and works in Washington, D.C. 

Coronado Beach; The World Doesn’t End; & On Eating

By Alison Zheng
From the Summer 2024 Issue
…

Alison Zheng is from Ohlone Land/San Francisco. Her poetry has been published in or is forthcoming from The Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and more.

View Cart Checkout Continue Shopping