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Nosegay on a Marble Plinth
“She was looking at me and I wanted to cry again because I didn’t know what she was, but I felt the warmth of her, and it was different than heat.” A series of visits from her dead mother stirs up a woman’s long-buried feelings and memories in Elizabeth Bull’s story.
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Hart
“’Are you crazy?’ Zhanna punched him in the shoulder. She was giving off a pungent wave of animal, earth, and rot.” In Sophia Andrukhovych’s “Hart,” translated by Ali Kinsella, you will share the transformative encounter of a woman, a man, and a hart in an imagined future Ukraine.
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This Must Be the Place
Buying a Halloween costume, snowmobiling to school, making out after field hockey: Eli Karren’s “This Must Be the Place” careens through a landscape of memories that are equal parts joyful and embarrassing. These comic couplets prove—once and for all—that Tony Soprano was wrong about the lowest form of conversation.
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In an Unexpected Emergency, I Find Myself
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In the lovely, centerpiece poem from his latest collection, Birth Center in Corporate Woods, BJ Soloy reminds us—with couplets that are manic, comic, and deftly enjambed—that “We’ll find a way though this like an inmate / finding a way // to hang himself.” This is a poem for our moment, whether we like it or not.
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Nemo
“You must understand what I cannot make you understand,” Raymond McDaniel writes about Micronauts, the 1970s action figures: “I used these toys in the same way I used reading itself: to be the other that was actually the self.” This essay’s observations—on humanity, selfhood, autonomy, and vision—are a delight to behold.
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The Dreams and Damnation of Bishop Koyle
“The figure then looked Koyle in the eye and said, ‘Brother Koyle, do you believe that even a man’s lust for gold can be consecrated for the work of the Lord?’” Revelation sets a man on a path that will transform geography and transcend reality in this excerpt from Jeremy Grimshaw’s novel-in-progress.
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from “Thend”
Ekphrasis, self-Googling, and Sotheby’s all collide in this excerpt from Ben Doller’s long poem, “Thend.” In sonnets that rat-a-tat-tat like an auctioneer’s call, Doller discovers his doppelganger, considers his mortality, and learns that “it’s hard to say when one’s saying goodbye.” The results are stunning and funny and self-aware.
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The Last Crusade
In her characteristically sure-handed mix of the Classics and the confessional, Katie Hartsock investigates faith, learning—as her tercets and braided narratives accumulate and sing—“that God does not abandon so much // as He lets be.” And yes, to our great joy, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery come along for the ride.
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Module E6: Quest for High Ashes
Years in the making, Ernest Hilbert’s “Module 6: A Quest for High Ashes” is a fully playable Dungeons & Dragons adventure campaign for character levels 8-12—replete with a map and illustrations! Call up your friends. Dust off your D20. Your author is “adept at spells, including ventriloquism […] and dry sarcasm.”
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The Afterlife
In the ten elegiac sections that comprise “The Afterlife,” Sarah Green explores fertility, reproductive health, and how “[r]egret like a car alarm […] follows [her] / through the neighborhoods.” This poem will appear in Green’s forthcoming collection, The Deletions, this year.
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Weirdo Carrot Cabaret
In panels that are both breezy and substantive, Caite McNeil’s comic, “Weirdo Carrot Cabaret,” will send you back to the farmer’s market with fresh eyes. Come for the personified produce. Stay for the recipe at the end.
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End of the Season
A crown of sonnets, a portrait of a marriage, and a delicate exploration of how place nudges our lives forward, Brian Brodeur’s “End of the Season” is a world unto itself. “Feeling his phone vibrate against his thigh,” Brodeur writes in pitch perfect pentameter, “he knew her text before he read it: Bye.”
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“Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’”: On Elizabeth Bishop and Disappointment
In prose that’s erudite and accessible, former Editor-in-Chief of At Length, Jonathan Farmer, explores why “[s]o many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems end with something audibly, willfully unsatisfying.” Covering Bishop’s career from “The Map” (1946) to her late elegy for Robert Lowell, “North Haven” (1977), Farmer’s claim will send you back to Bishop’s poems with new eyes.
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Whistlejacket
“[W]hat am I to do / about beauty, about / my fear that beauty // has made me arrange / every experience in a word / and image too neatly // for them to bear / much semblance to life,” Paisley Rekdal asks in this confessional, ekphrastic poem written in response to George Stubb’s famed painting of an Arabian thoroughbred, “Whistlejacket” (1762), on view at the National Gallery in London.
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Three Weeks
“I am going to try to write / A little. // I have nothing at stake but my life.” In Dawn Potter’s sequence, a 19th century woman alternates between diary entries and poems, trying to make sense of her life, her obligations, her hunger for holiness, and a feeling of disaster or deliverance just out of view.