The Other

kiss the sound i make with my feet. i am far from everything but i try. i can’t read what people say about trans women anymore or i stop feeling for months. such is life. soon i will turn 28. i am approaching the sky. every birthday after 30 will feel like a statistical anomaly [...]

Anand Prahlad – As Good As Mango Stephen F. Austin University Press 2012 Page Length: 90 Retail: $15.95 Much of contemporary American poetry centers on expressions of “identity politics.” This mode of poetics, which has taken many diverse and brilliant forms, is most commonly articulated in assertions of identity: celebrations of self in its various [...]

“I know and have always known my body was mine.” (from the poem “The Difference.”) Sarah Frances Moran’s Evergreen (Weasel Press, 2016) brings us a speaker whose vulnerability and strength resembles the beauty and transience of the tall Evergreen. Its branches may be chopped, its needles may burn—but the trunk, the soul, is strong. A [...]

Jansport Backpack I swap out key fobs like lovers I haven’t had— blue broken heart, glitter skull, sassy attitude jokes. Three boys vie for my number, but they don’t speak English, and their calls come in like water hallucinations in a desert. In Spanish class I learn dialogue I never mastered in English— small talk, [...]

Stay with Me Awhile By Loren Kleinman ISNB: 978-1941058350 April 2016 Winter Goose Publishing Reviewed by Brian Fanelli Loren Kleinman’s last collection of poems, Breakable Things, had a lot of references to Charles Bukowski, even in terms of subject matter, specifically the poet’s willingness to not shy away from raw subject matter, such as drinking [...]

The Sinister Barista Meets the Loch Ness Professor “Let us prepare for a life of rational happiness.” —Emily Dickinson’s father in a courtship letter to her mother The summer everyone I knew was going to Italy. The June everyone got engaged. So much getting down on one knee, so many surprises (but not really) in [...]

Marcus Elliot is a jazz musician from Detroit who has been playing professionally since the age of 15, and continues to garner increasing recognition for his imaginative improvising and fervently thoughtful voice on the saxophone. Elliot has led the Marcus Elliot Quartet for the past eight years; they perform weekly in the Detroit area. He [...]