on A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Meron Hadero

When a man is murdered in small-town Texas, the town’s Ethiopian diasporic community convenes to decide where to lay his body to rest. The decision makers, dubbed the Elders, must choose whether to bury him in his country of birth—Ethiopia—or …

Sakinah Hofler is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She has won the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, and the Yemassee Poetry Prize. A former chemical engineer for the U.S. Department of Defense, she hails from Newark, New Jersey, and currently lectures in Princeton’s Writing Program.

on Are We Ever Our Own by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

In the Odyssey, Circe promises her famed traveler to “set him a course,” and throughout the short-story collection Are We Ever Our Own Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes offers this same gift to her readers. Fuentes proves an adept cartographer as …

Amy Sayre Baptista’s flash fiction collection Primitivity (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) won the Black River Chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared in Narrative, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. She is a CantoMundo fellow and performs with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artist’s collective. She earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She teaches Humanities at Western Governors University and is currently finishing a novel. 

To Dare a Future (on The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer)

1.

In a 1995 letter to Belle Randall, Thom Gunn writes, “I’d say that the canon emerges largely through luck—the luck of posterity . . . Of course, I don’t rate LUCK or POSTERITY any more highly than you . …

Toby Altman is the author of Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has held fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Beloit College.

Auden in the 21st Century (on The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939 and Volume II: 1940–1973, edited by Edward Mendelson)

When W. H. Auden visited wartime Shanghai with Christopher Isherwood in 1938, they took breaks from “their social consciences” to frequent a bathhouse where they were “erotically soaped and massaged by young men”:

You could pick your attendants, and many …

David Woo is the author of Divine Fire (Georgia Review Books, UGA Press), selected by Ron Charles of the Washington Post as one of the best poetry books of 2021, and The Eclipses (BOA Editions), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. His poetry and criticism have appeared at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books and in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Fate, Nation, and Fatherhood: Formula 1 Emerges during a Pandemic in America (on Formula 1: Drive to Survive, created by Formula One and Netflix)

The Worst Incident in the History of Motorsport

Circuit de la Sarthe
Le Mans, France, 1955

It’s a perfect June day, which maybe explains the turnout. Nearly 300,000 record-setting souls in attendance. Everyone’s packed in wherever they can fit, all …

Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of the poetry collection Yaguareté White (University of Arizona Press, 2024). He is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.

Painting What Is Said and What Is Kept Silent

INTRODUCTION

With a career spanning more than sixty years, Arpita Singh is among the most prominent living artists in India today, acclaimed for both her abstract period of the 1970s and ’80s and the large-scale figurative paintings that followed. But …

Arpita Singh was born in 1937 in West Bengal, India, and moved with her family to Delhi in 1946, where she has since lived and worked. Her art has been featured in exhibitions around the world, including at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Museo Nacional Centro de Reína Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. In 2019 a retrospective of Singh’s works was on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. Her paintings were also included in the show “Elles font l’abstraction” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2021 and 2022.

All the Little Clocks Wind Down; She Kept All These Things and Pondered Them in Her Heart; Incantation; & The Morning Will Be Bright, and Wrong

Jennifer Grotz’s most recent book of poems is Still Falling, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2023. Her most recent book of translations is Everything I Don’t Know, selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer (World Poetry Books, 2021). She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

Rilke Grieves for His Friend, Paula Modersohn & Natasha and Pierre

LaWanda Walters is the author of Light Is the Odalisque (Press 53, Silver Concho Poetry Series, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The American Journal of Poetry, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, and other literary magazines, as well as in Best American Poetry and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014). She lives in Cincinnati and received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020.

Gavial: an extinction; Margay: an extinction; & Kuhl’s Deer: an extinction

Kristi Maxwell is the author of eight books of poems, including Goners (Green Linden Press, 2023), winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize; My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020); Realm Sixty-Four (Ahsahta Press, 2008), editor’s choice for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and finalist for the National Poetry Series; and Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, 2009), editor’s choice for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She’s an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville and a 2022–23 American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow.