Interview by Matthew Walsh Writer Jane Byers’s latest collection, Acquired Community, is coming out this fall with publisher Caitlin Press. Byers’s work can be seen all over the city, and this self-described writer and poet has no intention of slowing down any time soon. Byers’s new...
Latest Stories
Dania
Fawn Parker I should’ve stayed there in the halo of your gleaming macbook pro, your chastity plate, your voodoo object. But I got distracted, wondering how many times this has been done better to you before. Hard to believe just yesterday I was in the bathroom, my face smothered in rose clay...
Character in Detail, with Suzette Mayr
How do you develop character through detail? I think it’s so interesting how different writers use detail differently in order to convey character. Ernest Hemingway in a short story like “Hills Like White Elephants” portrays the two main characters almost entirely through dialogue, and through no...
Coming Home in Small Beauty
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Published in 2016, Jia Qing Wilson-Yang’s Small Beauty is a debut novel that explores family connections and the legacy of racism. The narrative’s central character is a young mixed-race transwoman retracing her family history back through generations while living in...
Speaking Past Whiteness, a Review of Vivek Shraya’s even this page is white
Reviewed by Gwen Benaway Published in 2016, even this page is white is Vivek Shraya’s first book of poetry. She is already an accomplished and award-winning prose writer as well as a musician, photographer, videographer, and artist. Her entry into poetry marks other transformations in her...
Star Fag
Mitchell King I draw myself with smearing wrists unlifting and end up with three charcoal mouths talking into each other, leaving my body to her own devices; counting the brown hair on his forearm, counting the gray fuzz on his puppy-tongue, wishing to dissolve my identity in glitter and...
Pencil Head
Suzette Mayr This story is an excerpt from “Five Floors of Basement” (working title), a quasi-haunted-house novel that centres on a university professor named Edith who works at the fictional University of Inivea. Her office is in Crawley Hall, a building that produces “sick...
Good Enough to Eat: A Review of Lucas Crawford’s Sideshow Concessions
Reviewed by Sugar le Fae In Sideshow Concessions, Lucas Crawford writes fearless, shameless poetry, born, no doubt, from a lifetime of fear and shame. This is the rare alchemy of Crawford’s writing—no binary is safe (or distinct) from its perceived opposite, no genre or gender unbendable...
Sour Beer for Bitter Hearts
Adèle Barclay I forgot about my necklace in your mouth but then we spoke so easily on a heated patio in the brightest dying light of the newest year. I was busy casting you as a sorry Justin Bieber but really you’re as handsome and persistent as a meme and I’m a soft space for your sad...
