By Sara Marchant In Suleikha Snyder’s Big Bad Wolf, the world is full of strangers and strangeness, but it is recognizably our world. “Different,” she tells us, “unequal, but same.” The novel is set in the Divided States of America after the Darkest Day of 2016, where Sanctuary Cities are more than lip service and operate to protect the rights…
By Kathryn E. McGee I had the privilege of meeting Lisa Quigley and Mackenzie Kiera while studying with them in the UC Riverside Palm Desert MFA Program about seven years ago. We were beginning our careers by working on horror and dark fiction projects, and I remember how remarkable it felt to suddenly know these amazing women who were trying…
In this episode, we asked our reviewers—readers from various marginalized communities—to write about any book by any marginalized author that has stayed with them in some way. Their choices spanned the globe and reached deep into what it means to be human. Ranging from nonfiction to thrillers, these four books take readers around the world and to different time periods,…
by D.S. Grauel Gloves, nitrile with the scent of industry, Mask, moist with fetid breath, the two—a double-edged salvation– are not with me at this tender moment. One in the trash. The other, laundry room sink. My face is nude. I open the door with Barbaresco Nebbiolo in hand, a cellar selection gifted from a friend in Porta Venezia,…
by Sara Grimes Elizabeth A. I. Powell doesn’t pull any punches when satirizing her lovers in Atomizer. The collection is a sassy, whip-smart treatise on the deceitful nature of love, using the extended metaphor of scent as a cover-up. Powell brings each love under the microscope of her fierce poetry to see if it is in fact a gem or…
By Kailash Srinivasan In Karol Bagh, New Delhi, the streets are narrow, crammed with low-rise houses, people and bicycles and the housewives prefer buffalo milk to cows’. You’re Bala, you’re twelve and your hands are soft, your school uniform is white and boring, and your handwriting is right-slanted and cursive. You live with your grandma, who perhaps hasn’t seen a…
By Lisbeth Coiman I love you in Spanish because in my mouth your name sounds thick like honey A slow drip down my thighs Each vowel open accented marking the syllables like a poem in Braille My fingers sliding softly on your chiseled biceps with dexterity on the darkness of your skin The rhotic erres roll from the…
By Adaora Raji When sand flies with the whirlwind and lands in my eyes, I do not close my eyes because I know that if I do, they may never open again. I am not afraid when a dust devil takes a fierce swipe at my face. I am not afraid of the rattlesnakes that hide in the sand or…
By Jed Myers To have breathed all these days and crossed another winter’s start— to have ridden this rolling pebble through the light’s narrows again! To weather the long dark falling on toward the chance of skunk cabbage clean out of the mud— I spotted a hummingbird poking the shrubs for buds in the lean sun, days past the solstice,…
By Miguel Murphy St. Jerome Writing (1605), Caravaggio Memento mori as apology for assaulting the lawyer Pasqualone, earning him Papal favor! There, in his brow, not Lear, let’s say, but Hamlet, if he’d survived to annotate his latest on guts, tears, and semen: Some Notes on Treatment as Prevention, in which he’d snigger, Don’t eat the malus. pate. What…