Tag: excerpt

Excerpt from Roadkill: New Fiction by Alana I. Capria

I am roadkill. I am a body bag with a crying tumor inside. I have no value beyond my womb. Put on life support, my body is cracked like a raw egg. No one cares that the shell is broken so long as the yolk remains intact. I’ve gone necrotic on the mattress; my rot…
Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon.…
Book Excerpt: Six New Clark Coolidge Poems from Radium Out Cold

These poems are a kind of pure poetry that reflects the the writer’s life work of interacting with language. For those who are drawn in, this work can take on an importance that permeates how we think and hear and see and live, complete with an ongoing sense of play and utter joy in the…
New Prose Poetry: Excerpts from Girlfriend by Barbara Henning

When my longtime yoga teacher, Genny Kapuler, read what I had written about her, she said, “I feel honored to be one of the beads in your mala, one of your sisters.” I like to think of this book like that, as a poetic prose meditation on my friendships with girls and women. I started…
Sneak Preview: “Prologue: Eternal Weimar” from David Leo Rice’s New Novel The Berlin Wall

Europe, 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall, once a living entity, is coming back together, its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war, either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria,…
“RIPE”: An Excerpt from Ross McMeekin’s Short Story Collection Below the Falls

Two climbers in the North Cascades risk their friendship and lives ascending a frozen waterfall. The girlfriend of a famous comedian in Greenwich Village must decide whether she wants to raise a child in the spotlight of fame. A mysterious Bird of Paradise makes daily overtures to an elderly widow in the frigid Midwest. A…
An Excerpt from Danny Joseph’s Shortish Novel Danny the Ambulance

Danny the Ambulance is a novel about a man who walks into a bar and over the course of the night realizes everyone in the bar is named Danny. The Jury Room feels like a long thin unendurable shack and the rain pouring down overtop has the cadence and impact of tiny hammers falling on…
Zach Savich: Two from The Motherwell Sonnets

“. . . the purpose of abstraction in any field—art, science, mathematics—is, out of incredible richness and complexity and detail of reality, ‘to separate,’ ‘to select from’ the complexity of reality that which you want to emphasize . . .” (Robert Motherwell, “On the Humanism of Abstraction”) The Motherwell Sonnets considers what this kind of abstraction…
The Future: Excerpts from The Mergered by Matthew DeMarco

Messages from the Mergered The three mergered billionaires, who share one body, prefer that I work from a different location than them for the duration of the day, except for during our prescheduled face-to-face-to-face-to-face meetings. On our calendars, these events are sometimes abbreviated as F2F2F2F’s or F4s. Fortunately, there are numerous places throughout the Plaza…