A poem by alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) appears at Prairie Schooner:

When I steady your step on the stairs, you ask not once but twice
where we’re going—to the car, to the store, Mom, remember?

You laugh and say you thought we’d be walking and we are,
right into the part of your brain where you’ll lose me, lose

the child who picked all 43 tulips you waited a solid Chicago winter
to watch bloom. Lose the girl who pedaled her Schwinn

up and back the U-shaped driveway while you fried bacon
behind the evergreens in an electric pan so the house wouldn’t smell.

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“Sinewy Modifiers in Tracy K. Smith’s ‘The Museum of Obsolescence’,” an essay by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appears at Red Paint Hill:

Upon first reading Tracy K. Smith’s poem “The Museum of Obsolescence,” I was engaged by the musical sound and texture of her lines. In fact, my favorite lines in the entire collection Life on Mars are from this poem: “Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts / Ticking through our shirts. We’re here / To titter at the gimcracks, the naïve tools / The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks” (6-9). I love what Smith does with sound (assonance and consonance) and her diction is perfect; I had to look up several words, such as “gimcracks,” and wrote a list of all the words she used that I loved for their richness of sound and texture, their denotative and connotative potential, and that I want to try to incorporate into my own personal lexicon. However, as much as I appreciated the word choice in this poem, I wanted to dig deeper to figure out what kept the poem as a whole from being merely a stale metaphor or trope, a preachy environmentalist call to action.

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A story by alum Kathy Bratkowski (fiction, ’02) appears at Drunken Monkeys:

Like always, it’s Luis who unloads our boxes from the trunk of the Escort.  He knows our names; every Saturday that we’re at Goodwill, he is too.   His supervisor starts to approach our car but Luis rushes to get to us first.

“I’ll open the trunk,” I say, and jump out to have a better look at Luis. His arms are tanned to the color of pecan wood from working outdoors at the donation dock. “Hey, Monica,” he says. “Ma’am,” he nods to my mother through her open window. “Can I get you a receipt, Mrs. Evans?”

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A poem by alum Francine Conley (poetry, ’14) appears at Juked:

What could I wring from salt, what sweetness, say,
from the anchovies I was forced to stomach as a child
even after I refused.  You eat what’s on your plate
whether you want to or not. Say we eat what we refuse.

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