I’ve always had trouble stepping back and seeing the big picture. “Well, no wonder you’re struggling,” my tenth-grade U.S. History teacher said when we met about my failing grade. “You’ve underlined every single sentence in this textbook. You don’t know…
A Conversation with Tobi Alfier
An interview by Alicia Cole. Tobi Alfier is a multiple Pushcart nominated poet and Best of the Net nominee whose poems have appeared in The Chaffin Journal, Chiron Review, Gargoyle, Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Los Angeles Review, Spoon River Poetry…
Guest Post: Impeaching White Jesus: Recreating Poetry in Nigerian Literature by Shoola Oyindamola
In poetry and literature, I am most critical of the languages, styles, and techniques that many upcoming Nigerian writers employ these days. Because some of these writers do not have concrete foundation in poetry written by their own ancestors, it…
Guest Post: Stained by Jordan Abbruzzese
“Oh God. Do I have brown all over the back of my pants?” I spun around clumsily, my supervisor’s eyes wide. I had just torn into some chocolate from the jar at reception’s desk and dropped some on my new…
Guest Post: When You Feel Too Much Yet Not At All by Caitlin Cundiff
“Why are all of your poems sad?” That was a comment I found on a poem I wrote during my undergrad. I kind of laughed, it had never really crossed my mind that they were all sad sounding. More importantly,…
Guest Post: On Drinking and Driving, and On Writing by nv baker
(Dedicated to Idiots, Assholes, Delvers, and Thinkers) Topographies are important. The feel of the land. A lover’s feel, inspirited and hearthsick; caressing hands roughly over protrusions and pressing fingers into the furrows of the terra—that’s how you write, that’s the…
Guest Post: Nipple Slips and Murder: a List of Illegal Things by Julianne Berokoff
I was sitting in an office with my poetry teacher during my last semester at school. Her window faced the arching freeway onramp of the 57 North, shooting white glints from cars onto the finger paintings and crayon sketches pinned…
Guest Post: Laryngitis by Diana Conces
Laryngitis is, of course, a temporary loss of voice. You try to speak, and what comes out is this awkward, hollow hiss, like a particularly disgruntled ghost dragging a rusty pitchfork across a chalkboard, and then everyone around you puts…
Guest Post: You Are Stronger Than You Think You Are by J. B. Howard
As a child, I had terrible asthma. I spent hours every evening breathing fumes out of a noisy machine called a “nebulizer,” and most days I required puffs from my collection of inhalers—the blue one made me shaky, but the…
Guest Post: Blurring the Lines of Genre by Gwen Goodkin
It’s likely that anyone who writes in multiple genres has a main genre he or she identifies with first. For me, that genre is fiction. I’ve spent the most time and effort in the fiction realm. I am now to…
Guest Post: Lying in Poetry, or Hey! Guess What I Dreamed Of by Babette Cieskowski
It started and ended with dolphins. As a child, when asked by my mother what I dreamed about the night before, I would lie and say I had the most spectacular, mythical adventure doing something relating to dolphins. At ten…