ISSUES | spring 2018
41.1 (Spring 2018): “Heroes”
Featuring the 2017 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize winners, plus debut prose by Sara Read, Andrew De Silva, and Rose Smith. Also featuring the work of F.J. Bergmann, Jonny Diamond, Sharon F. Doorasamy, Rick Hilles, Meghann Plunkett, Tamara Titus, Denis Wong, and Stefanie Wortman.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Nonfiction
Apr 24 2018
The Meat Must Float
Invite as many people as you want. That’s what I tell Neela, my mother-in-law. But she sucks her teeth and says, “I have no thick or thin friends.” Translated, this… read more
Poetry
Apr 24 2018
Poetry Feature: Rick Hilles
From “The Invisible Thread”
Poetry
Apr 24 2018
Poetry Feature: F.J. Bergmann
“Ascension”
“Break”
“Lowered Expectations”
“Presence”
“Rationalization”
“Massive Perturber”
“Tend”
Fiction
Apr 24 2018
Coach Schwartz
He’d put on a little weight, yes, but this was always going to be a sugar-cereal household. Any single uncle guardian who didn’t stock the cabinets with unhealthy shit was… read more
Fiction
Apr 24 2018
Deadwood Soldiers Take a Cruise!
Bonnie starts: We were somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, between Puerta Vallarta and Puerta Quetzal, and Tyler wanted to go ice skating. It was a little before midnight. I don’t… read more
Fiction
Apr 24 2018
The Resurrection of Ma Jun
Mother bends over Older Sister and hovers above Qian as if she is searching for a secret to keep from us: Father in his newly bought Li-Ning winter jacket and… read more
Fiction
Apr 24 2018
Kimmo in the Pisgah
The man we called Great Uncle Kimmy lived three quarters of his life alone in a cabin perched on a mountainside so steep that if you stepped wrong in anger… read more
Reviews
Apr 24 2018
Panic at the Playground: Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki. Hogarth, 2017, 320 pp., $26 (hardcover). The End of Pink by Kathryn Nuernberger. BOA Editions Ltd., 2016, 96 pp., $16 (paper). Good Bones by… read more
Editor's Prize Winner
Apr 24 2018
Editors’ Prize Poetry Feature: Meghann Plunkett
“In the Fist of the Blade Holder”
“Boston, 1992”
“South County, Matununk, RI”
“1996”
“To My Assailant, 15 Years Later”
“Awaiting the Elegy”
“The Dove”
Editors' Prize Winner
Apr 24 2018
Rachel’s Wedding
The early September light on the lake is unreliable. It’s late afternoon; clouds race on the wind and the water laps the shore. Flashes of sunlight glint off restless waves… read more
Editors' Prize Winner
Apr 24 2018
Exit Seekers
Even before I open my eyes, I smell smoke. At first I think I’m still dreaming—too many memories of my time under the stars, when everyone smelled like smoke or… read more
Foreword
Apr 24 2018
Unlikely Heroes
Over the centuries, heroes in literature have metamorphosed from god-like leaders to all-too-fallible humans. Prince Hamlet—brilliant, bedeviled, articulate, self-destructive—is an unforgettable early archetype. By the past century, literary protagonists had… read more