Prompts Trenton Pollard

Confronting Secrets in Poetry, with Trenton Pollard

What effect do negatives (“I did not come with a clean slate”, “I do not want to be my father”) and double negatives (“I do not want to not be my father”) have in poetry that confronts secrets and confessions? Lately I’ve been thinking about the photography of Diane Arbus, and how her work has a...

Fiction Literature Nikki Donadio

Cleats

Nikki Donadio   [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]I[/mks_dropcap]t was a girl who collapsed on the soccer field. Girl, I kept calling her, with her pink headband and red soccer uniform. Dead at thirty...

Ben Rawluk Literature Poetry

I Was a People Once

Ben Rawluk   Some days, the sky running pink and orange like powder paint hit sharply with water, I perch on the balcony.  I used to think about skinning myself, about there being something underneath, about all the ways my body could be modified or cut or altered.  Now I think of dress-up, of...

Asam Ahmad Reviews

Allegories of the Now

Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, her new collection of short stories, Randa Jarrar tackles themes of longing, infidelity, betrayal, and desire, themes the Palestinian-American novelist, translator, and essayist introduced in her first novel, A Map of Home. The stories in this...