Virgil Ballard’s Come Into My Garden: Volume Two contains nearly two hundred poems composed of cute rhymed stanzas that cover everything from macaroni to thwarted love. The tone runs towards the sentimental, even edging into Hallmark... Read More

It’s no surprise that "Mike Tyson Slept Here" won the Fabri Literary Prize. It’s also no surprise that Chris Huntington earned his MFA from Bennington College or worked for the Indiana prison system for almost ten years—he’s done... Read More

Memory is the food of the mind. We are a composite of our memories—and what we do remember is as important as what we forget. Each person’s past is unique terrain, formed by the events that have shaped who we are: that rusty swing... Read More

In his excellent book How Fiction Works, critic James Wood says, “The ideal of writing is a procession of strung details, a necklace of noticings.” He distinguishes between the real world—what the writer sees—and the noticed... Read More

A good poem, it seems, is a delicately, perfectly crafted lie: a thin thread that coils around itself, telling a story that relates both to itself and to the world it knows we must believe in. A good poem leads us down a trail through... Read More

“The empire of facts will have its say,” Mark Slouka says. “Although Octavio Paz may have been right when he suggested that Americans have always preferred to use reality rather than to know it, we may yet have that acquaintance... Read More

For the millions of women (and men) who single-handedly tackle domestic life, there is help, and even better, a reality check for those with unrealistic expectations. "Pretty Neat" is a guide for the woman who finds herself overwhelmed,... Read More

“All the evil in the world is from envy,” says Szymek, the hero of Wiesław Mykśliwski’s novel "Stone Upon Stone". “If you look around the world you see mountains envying each other, and rivers, small things envying big ones,... Read More