WHY THE PERSONAL BECOMES POLITICAL

By Beverly Gologorsky

In Essay

10 Min read

W

Poverty invites illness. Growing up, I saw many people afflicted by sickness that kept them homebound, or only able to work between bouts of physical symptoms. We are all somewhat powerless when sickness strikes or an accident occurs. What do poor people, including those who work low-paying jobs, do in such situations?

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Home Is Where the Heartbreak Is

In Criticism

16 Min read

H

The system is built to fail a lot of us. It made me feel better about the fact that these women felt connected to somebody else like me when I thought I was completely alone in this scenario. It turns out I’m not.

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Privilege-agony, guilt-grief of a half-distant war

by Herb Randall

In Essay

21 Min read

P

The ease with which we consume these tiny bites of war’s ultimate violence is as troubling as it is ironic: the frame rate and resolution of real-life war footage pales in comparison to the first-person shooter game my son is playing right now in the next room, yet both have that same pulsating soundtrack and endlessly spooling comment thread.

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Excerpt from So Long, Annemarie

By Andreas Unterweger

In Fiction

11 Min read

E

Ignoring the instructions, the man stuck the pointy end of his tool in the slot of the little box I’d dropped my coins in. He then proceeded to hammer it in, angling it down to widen the gap just enough for the coins to spill out. He expertly caught them with the plastic cup meant for the laundry detergent, and then returned the container to the contraption with a quick, well-aimed blow from his...

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Excerpt from “Alfred Leaves His Heimat (The Native Land I Never Had)”

by Martin Jankowski

In Narrative Non-Fiction

12 Min read

E

The past was officially over, and the present was a completely different story, or so they said. The revanchists were those old racist ethnopolulist speechifiers in West Germany, members of folkloristic landsmen’s clubs and leagues of expellees over there who liked to parade around in what he saw as a relentless gesture of political bluster toward the East.

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Magic Carpets, Muddy Sticks, and Shit Hills: A Memoir in the Making

by Lucy Jones

In Essay

14 Min read

M

I had no idea how to begin writing and not be foolhardy. Did I just sit down and start? It occurred to me that I’d been asking my professor for permission, not advice. In my family, people didn’t become writers. It was all right to come up with a nice text bordered with pretty pictures in creative writing classes at primary school, but after that, you shook yourself down, studied—not for...

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“It’s the Accessibility I Like”

In Interview

7 Min read

“

An Interview with Erika T. Wurth

By Jordan A. Rothacker

I first became acquainted with the work of Erika T. Wurth when Astrophile Press sent me an advanced edition of Buckskin Cocaine for review in 2017. I instantly loved the book and was excited to write about it. I was captivated by the interconnectivity of the “Hollywood Indian...

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Domači glasovi

by Andrea Scrima

In Essay, Narrative Non-Fiction

21 Min read

D

I studied the explanations of astronomical quadrants and astrolabes and the armilla equinoziale, the armillary sphere of Santa Maria Novella, made up of two conjoined iron rings mounted on the façade that told the time of day and year based on the position of their elliptical shadow, when all at once it occurred to me that I’d wanted to write about something else altogether, about a...

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On Queer Poetry

by Alexander Graeff

In Criticism, Essay

12 Min read

O

My poetic writing is a carpet. Unfurled, it displays the colorful strands of my linguistic development, regionalisms and academic language alike. The results of this writing are not works of genius, not creations of one singular genius. They are iridescent and ambiguous exposures, spotlights bringing some of the world’s previously invisible facets into focus.

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The War Against Nostalgia

by Maxim Matusevich

In Essay, Narrative Non-Fiction

16 Min read

T

Sergei is a proud, almost ideological beer drinker, but getting drunk for him is secondary to the sacred ritual of inebriated male bonding. In other words, he is sentimental.

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Passions Pursued: A Review of TOBIAS CARROLL’s “Ex-Members”

In Criticism

4 Min read

P

One might think you’d have to know a band’s music to have much interest in the “behind-the-scenes,” but Carroll manages to draw the reader in with quirky bits of nostalgia. Lines like “They had two songs about farting, and one song about setting lawns on fire. I’m pretty sure their drummer is a cop now. . .” capture the banality and naivety of aspiring musicians—tales of recording sessions, inter...

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Ousia

by Verena Stauffer

In Poetry

4 Min read

O

Oil production shrinks, corporations only secure  / cash flows in downstream oil. A downward spiral / The fat red balloon has burst / The pink scoop of strawberry ice cream has fallen / out of the cone and melted on boiling hot asphalt

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