For a collection steeped in drowning, Wilson continuously keeps readers afloat, buoyed by the promise and ever-present force of a mother’s love.
Main Content
POETRY
Motherhood and Mental Illness: On Blue by Erin Wilson
2022 Micro-Chapbook Poetry Contest Results!
Congratulations to all our participants in the 2022 MAYDAY Micro-Chapbook contest!
FICTION
Every Kind of Woman
by Kristine Morgan
The first casting call was a genesis. I’m sure of it now. I walked into a warehouse on the southeast side of town.
Fountain of the Dying
by Austin Sanchez-Moran
On a whitewashed island in Greece, where the brass church bells chime out into the sea
every evening, there is a slender old woman in a red head scarf who yells out, “Soup! A scoop of
soup!” while banging her tin drum with a ladle and wandering the cobblestoned alleyways.
NONFICTION
Q&A with Novelist, Memoirist, and Nonfiction Contest Judge
Darin Strauss by Elliott Bueler
“Memoir is not quite a record of a life; it’s a record of your memory about some part or parts of your life.”
Thirty Things Overheard While Attending My Friend’s Wedding
by William Musgrove
1. One half of a couple staring at a woman in a pink dress resting her head on a picnic table: Shh, she’s the one from the hotel.
2. The other half pointing at the man sitting next to the woman in the pink dress: Maybe he kidnapped her, and she has Stockholm syndrome.
TRANSLATION
Answer Yes Or No by Khairi Hamdan
translated from the Bulgarian by Katerina Stoykova
Answer the call of the flute—
the lost impulse of the absent poets,
the incomplete painting, the unrained cloud,
the prophecy of an upcoming confession—
From Decarceration by Charline Lambert
Translated from the French by John Taylor
Before grasping, taking
the pulse,
consider the litigation
REVIEWS
The Owner of the Sea by Richard Price
reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
The Owner of the Sea by British poet Richard Price, published by Carcanet, is a poetic retelling of three Inuit stories. It’s not a translation of those stories. They are based on folk stories told by elders and some other sources such as tales by the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen. Price describes them as “poetry based on prose translations of live storytelling.” If you thought Inuit busy themselves with fishing and chewing seal skin all day long, let these poem refresh your perspective!
Shit Cassandra Saw: A Unique and Thrilling Debut
by Angelina Mazza
“Women can never be emancipated from the stupidity of men.” For MAYDAY, Angelina Mazza reviews Gwen E. Kirby’s remarkable, dark, biting feminist project, Shit Cassandra Saw.
CULTURE
Sex, Youth and Power in Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir
by Megan Jones
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas is a novel with, as is increasingly prevalent in modern literary fiction, an “unlikable female narrator.” But her unlikability stems from her refusal to sugarcoat the realities of aging and its attendant loss of power.
Race Against Time: How White Fear of Genetic Annihilation Fuels Abortion Bans
by Carla Bell
Still, in the foreseeable future the country will be, as Elliot puts it, “mostly brown.”
