In God of Nothingness, Mark Wunderlich’s poems conjure reluctant ghosts and waltz with rusted memories. Embracing regret, grief, and death, this collection makes mourning and melancholy tangible, intimate moments through earthy lyric. By sharing his vibrant hauntings, the speaker delivers brief afterlives to loved ones, landscapes, and saints, all the while asking, “Who witnesses our […]
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Welcome Hauntings: A Review of Mark Wunderlich’s God of Nothingness
An Institution More Suitable and Equipped
by Alissa Hattman
Friday, January 27, 2017 Dear Mr. and Mrs. Douglass-Saad, This is to advise you that pursuant to the provisions of Section 24 of the School Act and Administrative Procedure—Student Discipline and Expulsion—your son, Jean-Pierre (JP) Douglass-Saad, age six years, a student in Grade 1 at Thomas Jefferson Elementary, has been expelled due to conduct injurious […]
Holding Myself Together
by John R. McCoy
“Your skills are not what we need at this time.” Five years ago, my boss, Laura, not her real name, terminated my employment with these words. Face-to-face in an office the size of a coat closet, sat this middle-aged white woman, Chief Development Officer at the foundation, and I, former Director of Cause Marketing and […]
Gina Prince-Bythewood: Feminism Frame by Frame
by Jennifer Gauthier
Four minutes into The Old Guard, released this summer on Netflix, Charlize Theron’s character Andi savors a piece of baklava and pinpoints exactly where it came from: “Hazelnut, not walnut. The Black Sea. Rosewater. Pomegranate. Eastern Turkey?” She’s right, of course – anyone who has eaten baklava for 6,000 years has learned a thing or […]
Journey to the End of the Night
by M.P. Powers
With a bottle of Belgian beer, I stand among pigeon feathers and a choir of darkening leaves, the murky Landwerkanal traveling under my feet, choppy ripples painted with amber horns and a blotch of floating swan. I watch it pass into the mists. I watch the clouds devour a Ferris wheel and a flying […]
Life of the Party
by Meghan Beaudry
The windows are plastered with paper skulls. Black crepe streamers drape across the ceiling fans. The poured alcohol awaits — Reservoir Dog’s Grim Reaper, although you’d wanted absinthe. By any account, it’s going to be a killer party. Bethany pads onto the front porch and plops down on the chair beside you. The screen door […]
6,746 Miles To My Happy Place
by Kara Donovan
Before going to Korea, I hated being Asian. Growing up in a very white community didn’t help either. I grew up where we rarely learned about other cultures, and when we did, I was beyond anxious. I thought of myself as being white, and when someone brought up my being Asian, I would be so […]
The Tender Satire of Gregory Barnes’ The Touch of the Master’s Hand
by Emily Brown
Gregory Barnes’ The Touch of the Master’s Hand is a Mormon movie, a twelve-minute short about a young missionary ashamed of his masturbation habit. It premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and won the Short Film Jury Award for U.S. Fiction. Despite its look into the cultural oddity of Mormonism, the film is relatable […]
Please keep a safe […]: Chin Chin – Grass Jelly Drinks
by j.p.mot
j.p.mot’s object of research centers on reclaiming the orientalist gaze depicted by colonial ethnographers. Within his creative process, he is interested in serendipity and in-situ chance encounters leading to the creation of mixed-media installations. These diverse assemblages center around the study of canned humor and subversive semantics underlined by words, characters, corporate branding, and iconographies […]
Apocalypse Singing: A Review of Claire Wahmanholm’s Wilder for Pandemic Times
by Robin Gow
In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come. The collection’s striking red moon cover drew me in with its strangeness. There’s something ominous […]
