November 04, 2024
An excerpt from the forthcoming novel The Opening of the Mouth
Chantal James
Visitation
Jade hadn’t mentioned this train ride to her mother. When they’d spoken recently, she’d filled any space that had opened for it in their conversation with some remark about rising crime, gossip from the law practice where she’d started as a paralegal, promises to take her mother, Veronica, to a new restaurant in ...
October 25, 2024
Issam Zineh
Beach Reading
Earlier when you told me green was a hard color to wear, I thought you said it makes the skin look fallow. I could barely hear you over the specific musicwe came here for: esses and effs of oceansound.We will want, at some point, after having had our fillof muscular Danes and Saxon blood and facts about the blockade runner that wrecked not too far off the eastern end of the ...
October 22, 2024
Katherine Yang
A World Encoded
I had never thought so obsessively about poetry as I did when I was learning about syntactic linguistics.
There were different kinds of verbs, my professor had told me. If John threw a ball, that throwing was a doing. But if John loved Mary, my professor stressed that, within the structure of the sentence, John served as what was called an “experiencer” of the emotion of ...
October 17, 2024
By Oli Peters
You. Rosa Alcalà. Coffee House Press, 2024. $17.95
Recently, a father told me of his daughter's first catcall. She was confused. How could her body, walking down the street, listening to music, betray her like that? How could it elicit commentary so sharp that it pierced through her headphones? No noise-canceling device is strong enough to protect people from the publicity of their body in a world that ...
