Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron, was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. The collection itself feels like a circular strand of …
A few days after my grandma was formally diagnosed with ALS, she wheeled into an appointment with her neurologist – a man who had ignored her requests for ALS testing for over a year – with a …
Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir Reading the Waves is a literary exploration of memory and the transformative power of storytelling. In a book she describes as “not a memoir,” but “a space of …
I converted to Catholicism earlier this year, though I dislike calling myself a Catholic convert. The phrase suggests conservative politicians like J.D. Vance, who wield Catholicism to achieve harsh …
At the movie theater that had become a college for kids said to be special they took a math class with a man who was frustrated with the amount of paper being balled up and tossed in the air around …
Her goal in life was to write a short story in the fourth person. This was something she had to do without me. I was told to leave our two-bedroom apartment. The day I moved out it was raining. I …
Lying in bed with Kevin, I’m playing a game of boredom chicken. I won’t reach for my phone until he does. I’m in the crook of his arm, looking at his out-of-focus face. Now that we’ve done …
Mr. Gland said he wanted my hair for a wig because his wife was bald from cancer treatments. I said there are other wigs that she could have, surely, and he said true, but my hair perfectly matched …
You enter from the garage to the wag of dog tails and the sound of their sharp nails on hardwood. Work has drained and exhausted you. You have reflux, eyestrain, a slight throbbing in the temples. …
& ignores it. Instead, the artist paints himself & his easel perched on the edge of a landscape of stone edifices & staircases that hug the earth like the rumored hanging gardens of antiquity.
There are many ways to leave and not all of them involve disappearing into yourself. Some are easy as (_____). Say it: flight. (_____), etymology archery, the passage of days, tail of a dart, a …
Aza Pace’s debut full-length book of poems, Her Terrible Splendor , hovers in a space where poetry meets incantation. Conjuring the mythic figure Circe, the collection lyrically explores …
Fled Sheeran: Ed, but a coward. Dead Sheeran: Ed, but RIP. Undead Sheeran: Ed, but even paler. Bread Sheeran: Ed, but sourdough. Bred Sheeran: Ed, but stuffed with a …
if Lady Gaga was a barracuda, she would be Lady Gargar _____ I’m a Marksist, as in I despise all men named Mark …
Schefflera photos and collages are by author unless otherwise noted. Plant photos on 11-13 are by photographer friend Uli Schackmann with digital manipulation by the author.
If Wednesday, the doctor’s. Trees stationed, canceling the first light. If Wednesday, blue of no privacy. Boston hospital where in me we see. The overwhelming matter. The whole mind. …
Matthew Zanoni Müller and I first met in 2008 as wide-eyed incoming students at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. After graduating, we kept in periodic touch over texts and …
“May you live in interesting times” is a curse I’ve thought about often, especially in the context of reading. Who am I if I retreat to the fantasy of the page when so much of the …
“A person has to get used to the idea that we live among mortal remains”: this is what Mimì tells his childhood friend Lello and his girlfriend Nina, and this is also the key to …
In Dino Enrique Placentini’s novel The Invasion of the Daffodils , a young boy named Chico Flores finds a crate of daffodils washed up on the cove of an island. He and his brother plant the …