A poem by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ‘09) appears in Drunken Boat:
Your Questions, Answered
Rest at ease. All of the answers
to any concerns you may have raised
have been quietly prepared in advance
for your convenience. As for your final
question, nobody knows. Rest assured
we’ve pursued every possible
possibility and yielded no returns.
… continue reading here.
A poem by Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ‘02; fiction ’16) appears in Live Nude Poems.
Unsleeping
A cloud passes overhead
bringing 30 seconds
of exceptional rain.
Not enough to raise
the failing reservoirs
more than an eighth of an inch.
The cat prowls
the hallway’s outer borders
looking for some
kind of prey.
… Continue reading here.
Two poems by Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02; fiction, ’16) appears in The American Journal of Poetry:
“The Interference of the Women”
We gather against volition
on the town’s single hill.
The waters are rising
everyone smells salt.
The priest did not have time to dress
and is disheveled as are the rest of us.
… Continue reading both poems here.
A story by Katherine Rooks (fiction, ‘16) appears in The Masters Review:
“Mix and Match” by Katherine Rooks
I hear the distinct rustling of someone attempting to be quiet. I don’t need to see over the lumps of laundry padded around me to know that it’s Calvin; he’s only eleven, and at eleven it’s impossible to be quiet even when you’re trying so so hard and not even breathing. He’s prowling the perimeter of my room, scanning the floor with those blue eyes of his that are still too large for his face. Guaranteed, he’s looking for socks, but he won’t find any on the floor. I had Greg move all the laundry onto the bed before he left this morning because I was feeling well enough to try to sort, fold and match a few things. I’m less picky now. I used to be emphatic that socks had to be matched with their exact partner, but now I think in approximations: more black than blue, more sport than dress, roughly the same size. Even with those relaxed standards, the task still overwhelms me. The net result is that I’m living under a pile of laundry.
Continue reading here.
A poem by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (poetry, ’15) appears in Boxcar Poetry Review:
Dear Robber
Robert Frost is hard for me to get
excited about. Sacrilege you say?
But I need him now. In order to write—
don’t know what— not sure how. He loved him.
My father-in-law. Robert Frost. The world
he wrote about. Educated on site.
Continue reading here.
A story with audio recording by Abby Horowitz (fiction, ’15) appears in Superstition [Review]:
“I Want Her To Burn Me Forever”
I once had a friend who believed in happy endings.
In the weeks before his wedding, the woman he was going to marry kept tapping at her chest with one pretty finger and warning him, Don’t forget, it’s pretty dark in there.
And my friend the groom would put his ear to her chest for a listen, saying: Just some regular thumps, same as the rest of us.
[Continue reading here.]
A series of poems from al
um Hannah Fries’ (poetry, ’10) new book, Sea Paintings: Winslow Homer, appears at Terrain.org:
The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog
The artist’s mother, hours before he’s born,
stands before her easel in a wide, white,
streaked pinafore, a weather-beaten sail,
brush suspended briefly, midair. Outside
the window, the sun finds its way through
and the child inside her stirs, as if to sense
already his form within its envelope
Continue reading this poem and the rest of the series online…
Alum Hannah Fries’ (poetry, ’10) first book of poetry, Little Terrarium, is out now from Hedgerow Books / Levellers Press. Of the book, Maurice Manning wrote: “A mind and a mind’s eye for art are evident on every page of this fine book. Beyond the beautiful, however, these poems also register a sharp regard for the natural world, for our hands-on knowledge of it, and for the plain fact that we are alive at a time when the natural world is most threatened. That is a practical predicament, but it is also a moral reality. To face the practical is a matter of will; to embrace the moral, as this book makes clear, is a matter of love. The love on these pages is human and searching—such is the love we need for art and the love we seek for wisdom.
Alum Victoria Mlyniec (fiction, ’09) won the 2016 Able Muse Write Prize for Fiction, judged by Stuart Dybek. Here is what Stuart Dybek has to say about Victoria’s winning story: “Passerthrough” is an artfully constructed story that within a few pages switches point of view, employs flashback in order to counterpoint past and present narratives, and introduces three convincing characters.” “Passerthrough” will be published in the Winter 2016 issue of Able Muse, print edition.
Alum Robert Rorke’s (fiction, ’10) story “The Christmas Pyramid” was a finalist in the Boulevard Emerging Writers Fiction Contest
Alum Elisabeth Lewis Corley (poetry, ’10) had poems titled “New Eumenides,” “Full Military Honors, “ and “That Moment When You Want the Radio” published in New Haven Review print edition, July 2016
Alum Scott Challener (poetry, ’08) has three poems in the most recent issue (#9) of Lana Turner Journal: “Snowbound,” “Ghosts and Indices,” and “Route.”
A novel excerpt by alum Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09), which won the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Prize in 2014, made the Cobalt Review’s 2016 Earl Weaver Baseball Writing Prize finalist’s list: Cobalt Review 2016 Baseball Issue
A poem by alum Joseph J. Capista (poetry, ’16) appears at Poetry Daily:
Just look: the egret’s white
Reflects so like a cloud
Pursuing other clouds,
Which blow just like the white
Of wind-borne sand that winds
As if it were the wave
Atumble, breaking crest
All fracture like those shells
Continue reading online. “Telescope” is also featured in print in AGNI 84.
A short story by alum Matthew Zanoni Müller (fiction, ’10) appears at Halfway Down the Stairs:
Hank lived in a light blue trailer up a thin dirt drive some distance behind his friend Aaron’s house, who owned the property. Hank paid him a couple hundred bucks in rent to “hide out back there,” as Aaron said. But it wasn’t really hiding to Hank. It was where he felt all right with things. One of the few places. The trailer was surrounded by pines that shed pin-prick drops of sap in a painfully slow drizzle, against which Hank had strung a giant blue tarp like a sail over the roof of his trailer and pickup. Underneath, the light sifting through the canopy gave everything a blue tinge, like being underwater in a swimming pool whose floor was covered in pine needles. A smaller tarp hung like a kite over the outhouse he had built and which, he was happy, Suzanne hadn’t seemed to mind using the first time she had come over, two days before. That was after dinner, and then again later, after sex, when with much laughter, she got into his big boots and clomped out to make use of it, the door of the trailer screaming on its springs and slamming shut behind her. He liked the feeling of her being out there, and knowing she was coming right back in with his “big man boots,” as she had called them. It was a kind of aloneness he wasn’t used to. Usually there was no one coming back, and the space outside of his trailer seemed filled with a watchful silence that extended all the way to the top of the hill, where he had the vague intimation of being watched by something, a presence in the empty spaces between the trunks of the pines. Something that filled the darkness. A witness to his small life.
Continue reading online…
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