Blog

Triage

October 28, 2021 - By J. Malcolm Garcia

Some names have been changed for privacy

After Kabul fell to the Taliban, I knew I could do little for my friends and colleagues, Hamid, Faiz, and Aman. Various NGOs and veterans' groups organized Dunkirk-like efforts online to extract Afghans, and their staff insisted they could still help. Time and again these organizations asked me to complete immigration forms for them, the same forms I had already submitted at the behest of other groups. But now, more than two months after Kabul fell, I receive few encouraging messages; those that do come in have mostly devolved into chest thumping, rote insistence that “the mission will continue.” I hoped it would. Yet I have concluded that, despite their best efforts and through no...

10 Questions for Pam Baggett

October 22, 2021 - By Edward Clifford

Outside my mother's bedroom window
in the memory care unit, sparrows
and Carolina chickadees play hide-and-seek
in holly bushes lit with winter's red berries.
—from "Stripes," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first poem I wrote was about standing by the pond at dawn watching a beaver quietly backstroke as sunrise turned October’s gold-leaved hickories briefly pink. The poem was probably terrible. When I got news later that day that my beloved uncle had died at that very hour of a heart attack, it seemed as if someone had handed me poetry and said, “Here, you’re going to need this.” Four years later, my first published poems appeared...

Märzen Madness and Florida Festbier

October 19, 2021 - By Marsha Bryant

Limericks for Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest beckons anew
With festivities, hullabaloo.
I’ll parse Märzens for you
So you’ll know what to do
At your bottle shop picking out brew.

If you can’t fly to Munich, don’t worry—
American brewers have scurried
To release in due season
The beer lover’s reason
For drinking outdoors before flurries.

When it’s Autumn and weather behaves,
Tis the malts that the beer lover craves.
Don’t put pumpkin in beer!
(That’s for baked goods, my dear.)
Märzen madness tastes good, not depraved.

I’ve a trio of them that I tried,
Independents that I verified—
Ranging sweeter to...

Last Summer of the City

October 16, 2021 - By John Gu

A Review of Gianfranco Calligarich's Last Summer in the City, Transl. Howard Curtis; Foreword by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021)

Is there a more fertile experience for literary aspirants than to be poor in a great city? Every generation of young would-be novelists searches for their own version of the Lost Generation’s Left Bank in Paris, and a few are lucky enough to find it. Around the year 1970, a young Milanese journalist named Gianfranco Calligarich came to Rome on an assignment for a Milanese newspaper. After his assignment ended, he decided to stay in the city rather than return to Milan, and one product of this decision was a novel, L'ultima...

10 Questions for Christopher Schmidt

October 15, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Aristotle imagined that red occured when "luminous transparency is covered by a thin burning smoke." In California, in the Amazon, wherever forest fires spread, visions of a red future multiply. "With all the dust and smoke in the air, the world will begin to look different," writes one reporter.
—from "Fugitive Reds," Volume 62, Issue 3 (Fall 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In college I wrote a poem about the oboe. Or perhaps it was a poem that used the oboe as a metaphor. Clearly, the poem itself was trash. What remains indelible to me is the word I lifted—daedal—from a then unpublished poem by Elizabeth Bishop. As transgressions go, it’s mild stuff. Yet...