Year: 2019

“The Man Who Smells of Lemons”: A Poem from the Future by Jude Marr

The man who smells of lemons dresses in brown and red. He stands, still as a bleeding tree, in a city parking lot. Every day he plants himself in his usual spot, where tarmac cracks radiate outward from his feet, like roots. Every day he stands and waits for a white-hot sun to crack open…
Three Verses from the Vortex(t): Poetry from the Future by Jake Syersak

Identity Vortex [ “Can Rivers Be People Too? : Inside the Radical Movement to Gain Rights for Ecosystems—and Save the Environment.” (THE NEW REPUBLIC: May. 9. 2018) ] that this garden should fall may it fall less the weight of a sigh & more the weight of scythes the rivers read the lips of…
A Story from The Future: “Affliction” by Angela Woodward

I have fled to a floating island of trash to tell you stories of the peaceful north woods. Here’s one—A man woke up early, disturbed by his uneasy conscience, and went down to the stream. It was still so dark, the path appeared as a blacker indentation in the ground, the leaves and sticks and mud…
The Future Has Comics: “The Lonely Alien” by Marc S. Cohen

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. The Lonely Alien Marc S. Cohen is an artist, writer, and musician born in the United States and residing in Toronto, Canada. He makes little pen and ink drawings on existentially topical themes like alienation, dislocation and the construction of selfhood in a shifting semantic landscape. His…
“A fact I wore like jewlery”: Dan Alter Reviews Green-Wood, a Nightboat Books poetry collection by Allison Cobb

As far as what we must do in the crisis of humans and our environment, at least this much seems clear: poetry will not be the key field of battle. Nonetheless, some of us, for whom poems are an essential mode of understanding, need to write about poetry about it anyway. And so we’re led…
Noreen Hernandez Reviews The Wagners, a booklength poem by John Colasacco

The Wagners, a poem, tells the stories of different generations of Wagners. Or, that’s what we are told on the back cover. I tried, but couldn’t keep track of the Wagners because the bits do not form a historical family narrative. But it doesn’t matter, because the poem is a journal of the sensations that…
Give It to the Grand Canyon, a novel by Noah Cicero, reviewed by Zachary Kocanda

The novelist Nelson Algren was called a “bard of the down-and-outer,” a writer whose characters were people ignored by literature. Noah Cicero’s new novel Give It to the Grand Canyon continues this storytelling tradition by recording the deeds of the down-and-outers who scoop ice cream for tourists in the Arizona desert during the summer. In…
Hillary Leftwich on Monique Quintana’s Debut Novel Cenote City

Monique Quintana’s debut novel Cenote City drowns us in a surreal world of magic, folklore, and modern-day characters with their own tales to tell. The men and women in this collection all have their own battles to fight, and Quintana’s craft of spinning ancient ritual mixed with the present-day creates a vulnerable, fantastic tragedy that…
Tales from the Crust, an anthology of pizza horror edited by David James Keaton & Max Booth III, reviewed by Ann Davis-Rowe

I love pizza. I could eat it at least every day, perhaps even every meal. So when I had the opportunity to review Tales from the Curst: An Anthology of Pizza Horror, edited by David James Keaton and Max Booth III, I was stoked! But also, admittedly, a little concerned—what if these stories turned me…