There is nothing better as an editor than to get a chance to do this, to find something wonderful and brilliant and weird and surprising written by a person you had never heard of before, to be in a position to get that story poem essay out there in the world.

“I used to be the Goatman of PG county. It’s been eight years since I was unmasked,” Earl said. The others nodded. Joan made a warbling sound with her throat that was maybe supposed to sound like a farm animal. Carol punched her in her shoulder.

My daughter has a sound machine for when she sleeps.  It offers many bells and whistles — tinkling lullaby options, pulsing color change through a pediatrician-approved scroll of soft reds and blues — but we don’t use those. 

This is a hard book, in multiple senses of the word. Hard like difficult, like indestructible, like painful, like merciless.

I'm a big believer in hooking the reader from the first paragraph with a unique story or point of view and memorable language.

When I read a collection, I like to feel like I’m on a rollercoaster. Ups and downs, time and space to breathe before I sail (and maybe flail) down a hill again.

The thing about reading submissions is how quickly you realize that a story doesn't have to just be good. It has to be special.

Dynamism is important too. For me, the brevity of the medium means a poem must be functioning on multiple levels. As I read, I’m chewing each word for color, tone, texture

An author, professor, and mother, Christman worries about many things, “but mostly,” she writes, “I worry about the physical safety of my kids. All the time.”

The best story in Barbara Molinard's book Panics, and the one which establishes the thematic thread binding all the others together into a cohesive collection, is the author's own, which Marguerite Duras explains in the book’s preface.

For a debut novel, Courtney Denelle’s It’s Not Nothing embraces a remarkable degree of risk. Voice and a highly internal focus drive the fragmented narrative.

Early in Rebecca van Laer’s debut novella, our protagonist, Charlotte, states, “I have been wondering for a long time what to do about my poetry.”

In her new poetry chapbook L(eye)ght, Jessica Kim explores the power of the eye as it relates to the body and perceptions of identity.

When books aren’t melodramatically losing ground to the digital realm, they’re beckoning us inside their logical leaps and syntactic slides in Jefferson Navicky’s defiant Antique Densities.

“Ten years from now I will think of Texas as the end of girlhood,” writes Jenny Irish in the closing poem of Tooth Box. This end encapsulates the constant question Irish asks the reader throughout the collection: where were you when everything changed?

In David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence, a migration occurs in two dimensions.

ne of the challenges of writing about Aaron Angello’s The Fact of Memory is trying to categorize it. As the author explains in the introductory note, he tasked himself with writing a prose poem a day meditating on each word of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29.”

For all the in-your-face judgment of the title, it's not a judgment. We are all fallible, deeply flawed, and perhaps doomed — we are both the turtles of Barnegat Bay and the predatory forces of extinction.

Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini, a dreamlike (often nightmarish) examination of contemporary life, serves truth wrapped in whimsy, wonder, horror, and perversion, a perfect pairing for contemporary, post-satire reality.

For Beckett fans, this play is as if his two tragicomic acts were squeezed into one. Indeed, there are Vladimir and Estragon equivalents—though they are now women named Eliquis and Abigatra—and there is a lifeless tree in the form of an x-ray machine.