We chose the creative work for this Summer 2020 issue back in December and January. I loved these pieces then, but I need them even more now: “A friend’s trying to sneak past death,” Michael Lauchlan’s poem begins. Reading this issue again after the latest violence against Black people in the U.S. and after 2.5 months of sheltering in place feels like traveling through time and space with the ghost of summer past. Here are the good times and dark undercurrents, the brothers and flawed parents, the nursery rhymes and arcade games, the tanning beds and cancer cells, the pools and lakes and beaches, and so much more.
Issue 19 features new poetry and short prose by Jordi Alonso, gina marie bernard, Chloe N. Clark, Linda Dove, Samantha Duncan, Suzanne Edison, M. Brett Gaffney, Ben Groner III, Ken Hada, Karen Bjork Kubin, Michael Lauchlan, Elizabeth Joy Levinson, Christopher Linforth, D.S. Martin, Shawnte Orion, Lee Potts, Lex Runciman, Elizabeth C. Taylor, Kami Westhoff, and Paul Willis.
The pedagogy papers in this issue draw from the sacred and the secular: Jacob Stratman offers a poetry exercise based on a Catholic tradition, and Jason D. DeHart makes a case for using popular texts to energize students’ writing.
This issue’s reviews by Alex Carrigan, Robin Gow, and Evan Reibsome already persuaded me to buy new poetry books by Zefyr Lisowski and Robert Fillman, along with the newest anthology of women’s writing from Quail Bell Magazine.
We hope this issue provides you with some comfort and company in these overwhelming days. Please take good care of yourselves and others. If you enjoy this issue and are able, please tip the authors whose pages have a “Tip the Author” link under the bio. Thanks for reading.
Katie Manning
Editor-in-Chief
P.S. If you’re also a writer of poetry and short prose, please visit our guidelines and send us your work during our June reading period. We’ll consider pedagogy papers and reviews any time.
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