These new, abstract, modestly sized paintings (most are smaller than four feet square) by David Aylsworth are strangely familiar yet entirely different than this Houston-based painter’s previous …
On the sprung floors of the Eldorado Ballroom, in Houston’s Third Ward, before Fred Moten read from his new book The Service Porch , he began with a track by Carmen McRae, “Sometimes I’m …
Like many good short story collections, Amina Gautier's third collection, The Loss of All Lost Things , traces heartbreak in its many forms. In these stories, her characters struggle to navigate …
Karyna McGlynn’s new poetry collection The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost On Her Way to the Execution offers a visceral, seductive exploration of language and sound. McGlynn’s narrator is eerie but …
The best poems in Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby’s Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse , an anthology of commissioned still life poems, take to heart the central focus …
There is an innate holiness to Jennifer Grotz’s newest collection, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). Indeed, the collection itself is marked by the author’s own travels to a French …
I first met Claire Vaye Watkins shortly after her collection Battleborn came out, at a reading at Susquehanna University, smack in the middle of Central Pennsylvania—all that green, those rolling …
At the end of a workshop Carolina Ebeid and I took several years ago under the instruction of Mary Ruefle, Mary wrote a poem to our class, entitled “Stress Is Their Vocation.” In the poem, she …
Simplicity of form and exquisite choice of materials lend elegance and a psychological edge to Maria Fernando Cardoso’s work, Woven Water: Submarine Landscape , recently on exhibit in the show, …
Rosalie Knecht’s Relief Map is a classic coming-of-age novel set in Lomath, Pennsylvania during a slow, boring summer. Much like any summer in small-town America, until police and FBI barricade the …
“This is a story of Bulgaria,” Anna Kovatcheva writes in the acknowledgments of The White Swallow, winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition. Drawing on Bulgarian …
The second time I talked to Ann Pancake, she told me she was taking a walk down to the river, asked if I knew how to get there. My boyfriend and I had just gotten back to our apartment from campus, …
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s poetry collection The Spokes of Venus presents a smooth, sensitive exploration into the subtleties of perception and art. The book takes as its starting point the story of …
By inverting the phrase, primeval forest, the title of Vievee Francis’s newest collection of poems, Forest Primeval , foreshadows the kinds of spaces readers will inhabit, inviting us to consider …
Claudia Cortese blew us away with her genre-bending nonfiction piece, “The Hunger Essay,” featured as one of Gulf Coast’s Online Exclusives for Spring 2016. Cortese is a fearless writer, …
Each year, CounterCurrent establishes its roots a bit deeper within the Houston art scene. April 12 – 17, 2016 brought the third iteration of this experimental festival organized by the University …
With premonitions of climate change and the exhaustion of the Earth’s resources ever-present, humans may be gazing up towards Mars more frequently. Despite the defunding of NASA, commercial space …
While sound may be the least tangible of artistic mediums, it can also be the most penetrating. It’s a form of expression that slips through and around you. More rarely, it can touch you—its …
Andrea Lee writes the kind of dazzling, lyrical prose that delights with its boldness—over three acclaimed novels, a New York Times Notable short story collection, and many essays and articles in …
I was backpacking in Malaysia when, on a whim, I picked up a copy of Infinite Jest . I knew the book was very famous and that people liked to make a big deal about having read it and understood it, …