The following excerpt of The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe is reprinted with permission by A.A. Knopf. When I was eleven years old, I moved in with my aunt after my mother was sent to prison. That ...
New Fiction from Ken Galbreath: “Checkpoint”
In high school, I was invisible–acne and braces, last year’s wardrobe. I didn’t have close friends. My grades weren’t going to win me any scholarships. The football coach offered me the equip...
Reading Camus’ ‘The Plague’ in 2020: A Dispatch from Lyon, France, by Jennifer Orth-Veillon and John Tyrrell
“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” 20th-century French writer Albert Camus chose thes...
Poetry Review of Jabari Asim’s STOP AND FRISK
1. They say Stop-and-friskIs a brief and non-intrusive stop of a suspect.Which can be deadly in America where Statistics show being black in AmericaMakes you a suspect Even. When you aren’t. 2. The...
New Essay by Anthony Gomes: Is There Finality in Death?
All beings in this world, all bodies must break up: Even the Teacher, peerless in the human world. The mighty Lord and perfect Buddha has passed away. — The joy of renunciation in The Radical Buddh...
New Essay by Lauren Kay Johnson: Things Received
A portion of this essay was originally published in Cobalt Review. It came by helicopter twice a week, if weather and security were sufficient for air travel. In the shack next to the Helicopter La...
A Review of Rufi Thorpe’s New Novel ‘The Knockout Queen,’ by Andria Williams
“Who deserves anything?” asks Lorrie Ann, one of the protagonists of Rufi Thorpe’s first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar (Knopf, 2014). She’s putting the question to her stunned-into-silence f...
New Poetry from Matt Armstrong: “Covid Night”
Paris sirensPewter skyThe white laceOf a dogwood boughAt midnight Reach upClutch and huffHungry before bedFor the sweetnessOf a rose But a dogwoodIs a dogwoodAnd there’s no escapingThe sentenceFor ...
Poetry by Stephen Mead: Remembering Beirut, Halloween ’83; Map Pins; Forced Labor
Remembering Beirut, Halloween ‘83 The ground beds a stuffed effigy with bulging leaves.Through peculiar affinity it resembles some soldier. Notice the guise of these clothes.Consider its uniform gr...
New Fiction from Matt Gallagher: Excerpt, ‘Empire City’
Reprinted with permission from Atria Books. Mia Tucker woke before the alarm. She usually did on weekdays. She was a person of routine and that’s what routine did. Sleep whispered like a lullaby th...
New Fiction Review: Matthew Komatsu On Matt Gallagher’s ‘Empire City’
As Avengers was wrapping up last year, I mentioned how excited I was to see the finale to a friend, who responded with a barely suppressed sneer. Granted, it’s the same friend whose Blu-Ray copy of...
New Nonfiction from Charles Stromme: “The Army Profoundly Regrets”
1972 I was back from a year of flying helicopters in Vietnam. The Army gave me a make-work job at Ft. Riley, Kansas, a base over-crowded with dejected Vietnam returnees. I hated it there, where the...
Hostile Threat Detected: Adrian Bonenberger Reviews Joe Pan’s “Operating Systems”
Joe Pan popped up on many veteran writers’ radars in 2014. He had recently written the first great poem about what let’s call the Global War on Terror, “Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper.” At that time it was...
Three Poems from Suzanne Rancourt
The Shoes That Bore Us It is a dream of kind slippers that coddle bunions appeasedby hands mittened as the same kind slippersholding warmth as forgiveness for all the combat bootssogged by brackish...
New Fiction from Robert Alderman: “Shaved”
This is how the fight happened: earlier that morning, while waiting on reveille to bugle from the loudspeakers across the blacktop, Harvey forced it on the new kid, Private Gilmore, as the rest of ...
New fiction from Taylor Brown: Excerpt, ‘Pride of Eden’
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Taylor Brown’s newest novel, Pride of Eden, out March 17th, 2020. Reprinted with permission from St. Martin’s Press. Lope knelt before the ...
Poetry Review: “The Light Outside” by George Kovach
George Kovach’s poetry collection, The Light Outside, begins with a narrator who’s stuck holding open a window. He’s a little embarrassed about it. The window, that is. He accidentally painted over...
New Fiction from John Darcy: “Sorry I Missed Your Call”
An hour before the drive, Bubs finds himself sucking down an edible. A big blowout blowtorched dab of a brownie. He could feel it stonerizing his insides the second the swallow went down, that ashy...
Mr. Mendes’ War: Film Review, ‘1917’
“You have to construct a journey for the camera that’s every bit as interesting as the journey of the actor. What I wanted was one ribbon, like a snake, moving forward, in which the information tha...
New Poem from Olivia Garard: “Hurry Up”
Hurry up – Halt. And quiet, Marines sleep. – Covers askew necks cocked weighted by the waiting. Dozing softly in dark down- time flutters by. – Sweet & sour breath bellows, fl...
Poetry Review: Graham Barnhart’s THE WAR MAKES EVERYONE LONELY
1. The book arrives. By mail and on the cover. There are clouds. Gray clumped in altostratus heaps. A military helicopter headed. Into thick sky that stretches off. The bottom right hand corner of ...
Nonfiction from Caitlin McGill: “Paved in Gold”
“Even if one does not know the history, one feels the presence of the past.” ~Peter Balakian “You have to beat the egg,” my grandmother said while cracking shells over a mixing bowl. “Beat the egg?...
New Poetry from Amalie Flynn: “Celebrate”
1. Celebrate them. 2. Celebrate the soldier who went to war Just to kill. This soldier accused of shooting and Killing civilians. How the men from His own platoon. They say he did it. He shot civil...
Fiction from Peter Molin: “The Brigade Storyboard Artist”
Captain Alex Athens had been the undisputed master of PowerPoint storyboards within the brigade headquarters since the unit’s arrival in Afghanistan. No order was disseminated until he had compress...
New Poetry from Paul Lomax
Faces oak branches reach through villages &...
Poetry from Bryan Blanchard: “Pillar of Salt” and “The Mannequin”
Pillar of Salt Raining fire, burning steel …And now I see haunted Images of headlessBodies bathed in bloodstained Sand of a mannequinHead with a swollen face And lifeless eyes lookingBack at an exp...
Forgive Me
I have confused the bombs that were in the desert with those birth control devices implanted in the uterus Forgive me, war and women, I know nothing of either
...
Lauren Johnson Interviews Amy Waldman, Author of ‘A Door in the Earth’
Amy Waldman’s novel, A Door in the Earth, follows Parveen, a young Afghan-American woman who returns to her war-torn homeland after discovering a memoir by humanitarian Gideon Crane. Parveen ...
Representation: An interview with new literary agent Tracy Crow
Two years ago, Tracy Crow, an author, former Marine, invited me to be a part of the MilSpeak Foundation ON POINT Women Warriors Writing Workshops she took around the country, offering a free weeken...
Landslide / For Byron Who Was Separated From His Father At The US-Mexico Border
When you left Guatemala. Crossed the border Into Mexico. With your father or How there was a smuggler. Who Took you. On foot. All the way to America. How the truth is. When You went down the...
New Fiction from Amy Waldman: ‘A Door in the Earth’
Excerpted from A DOOR IN THE EARTH Copyright © 2019 by Amy Waldman. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York. All rights reserved. From Chapter Four: The Distant Fire On her thir...
It Just Keeps Going
The first time I heard the phrase “Hate Train,” I was stationed in Japan with the Navy, attempting to enjoy a bowl of oatmeal. Our previous officer-in-charge (OIC) had finished turning over with hi...
Fighting for All of Time: Katey Schultz’s Novel, ‘Still Come Home’
Still Come Home, the first novel from Flashes of War author Katey Schultz, opens in the tiny town of Imar, Afghanistan, where a young woman stands by the window, wanting an apricot. The weather is ...
New Poetry from Aaron Graham
PIXELATED WOMAN, WEBCAM SHADE Pixelated woman, even your shadowI know as my lover.It whispered.Ash-white dry-erase lipspart with a foreign tongue.A felt-tip that deletesas it divines.Voices like ac...
Film Review: JOKER, by Adrian Bonenberger and Andria Williams
Andria Williams: Hey there, Adrian. Adrian Bonenberger: Hi, Andria. Williams: So, I heard you recently saw “Joker” in the theater, as did I. It’s gotten a lot of buzz. I’ve seen various revie...
Happy Birthday, Afghanistan
October 08, 2019 The war in Afghanistan is now old enough to go to war in Afghanistan. Yesterday the war in Afghanistan, first to fall under the catchall designation of the Global War on Terror (GW...
The Spotlight Trial
“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” -The Gospel of John One day you’re a teenage girl in the arms of Fidel Castro and you’re carrying the Christ child of the Christless rev...
Poetry Review: Aaron Graham’s BLOOD STRIPES
1. I’m reading Aaron Graham’s war poetry. And I think violence is a volcano. How pressure builds. Between layers of rock. Trapped in a chamber. Or when magma pushes. Fissures like rivers. Up throug...
New Poetry from Michael Chang
the secret life of simon & the whale the boy inches close to the water barefoot ...
New Poetry from Edison Jennings
A Letter to Greta “…so pitying and yet so distant,” Cecil Beaton Among my father’s posthumous flotsam recently washed up in my house, I found a letter, postmarked 1928, addressed Miss Garbo H...
New Fiction from Brian Barry Turner
“So, you feel the earth rotating under your feet?” As Specialist Torres grasped tightly to the doorframe of the CO’s office, a litany of questions flashed before Captain Savalas’ mind, least of whi...
Knowing Your Father: DNA and Identity
“It is a wise child who knows its own father.” –Homer, The Odyssey Several women I know were stunned in later life by the discovery that the man they had long considered to be their fat...
New Fiction from Daniel Ford: BLACK COFFEE
Excerpted from the collection Black Coffee by Daniel Ford, September Sky Press, June 2019. “Are we ever going to leave this bed?” “God, I hope not.” “We have to at least attempt to do someth...
New Poetry from Abby E. Murray
Gwen Stefani Knows How to Get Everything I Want It takes a misdelivered Cosmo to finally understand what I want and how to get it. Gwen Stefani tells the truth on page 89. We believe in Gwen becaus...
New Nonfiction from Andrew Clark: A Church For All
On a spring day in 1984 my grandfather, Leonard Clark, whom we all called Papaw, gathered his children, grandchildren, and friends around a little building on a patch of land near the French Broad ...
New Nonfiction: Soft Target
When I was nineteen years old, in 2016, I joined the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). I sat at my family’s kitchen table, holding in my hands a contract for 13 years (standard length for a 00178 Armour...
New Nonfiction from Andria Williams: Reading Joan Didion in August 2019
In the summer of 1968, while starting several of the essays that would comprise her collection The White Album, Joan Didion began to suffer from a series of unexplained physical and emotional ailme...
Turn On, Tune Out, Drop In: Review Essay of Ben Fountain’s Beautiful Country Burn Again
D.H. Lawrence once claimed that the “essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” This sounds nice, something to be proud of in a masochistic sort of way; unfortunately (or fortu...
New Fiction from Roz Wiggins: “Lucky”
I. Under a ceiling topped by swirling fans and surrounded by walls whose windows had no glass, the Private lay on the bed like a slab of stone as hands went about the routine tasks that evid...