Category: Uncategorized
Anderson Inside the Hurricane
By Stefi Weisburd
Featured Art: A Vagabond Walking Along a Lane by Alphonse Legros
The wind has come to remind us of our wings — Mississippi artist Walter
Anderson, who tied himself to trees in order to experience hurricanes
Lashed to the mast, ears thrashed
by sirens in the eyewall, Anderson
is the squall’s canvas, ravaged
by wind that wants to strip
his skin from skull
and howl.
Only yesterday he sank
to hands and knees
to understand the guano of green heron, to paint
the violet frog. Lying by a quiet
lagoon, inking a white-throated
sparrow, he saw cadmium and red madder happily
flare in foliage. In the slash pines of Horn Island
where imagination fills the space between trees, art
defers the evil moment. Contour of bark
or butterfly is ballast; it calms the
gale within him, bulrush pool, always a balm until
a storm makes land.
Then it froths and spits, rain
needles him, ankles deep in the surge.
How will he paint the sting
of maddened sand, the batter of root
torn from loam, blue strafed from
sky? Titanium whitecaps throttle
the mangrove beach. All around him, palms
flash and flinch like broken
umbrellas in brash light, the shed
in shivers under
the blotted sun. A locomotive
in his ear, wind
wrenches his breath from
its palate, whips
him beyond himself, out
of his sleeve of pain, sopping
and so close, so
close to capsizing . . .
Something in the cyclone
cries out.
Something wheels
and sings.
Originally appeared in NOR 4
Degeneration
By Stefi Weisburd
Featured Art: Stoke-by-Nayland by John Constable
Through the forest’s dark persistence, hugging
the relentless road, you search the inevitable
for the sad address, then find yourself paused
in front of the driveway, just
before your halogens startle the dim
windows, the porch out of joint, in that moment
before you are knotted irrevocably
to the future, to her avocado refrigerator whining
like a beast, its gullet full of Ice Age ice cream and the odd
trap-sprung mouse in a Ziploc, before the legions
of art magazines piled in solemn cairns and the Old Countries
purpling her arms, her throat’s
dry drapery and the keys to abandoned
rooms clutched
like a crucifix. In that moment
before her body slips
out of itself and she dampens the floor, before
her ears traffic in the static of her dead
father’s scolding, before her dull
doe eyes fever with fury and shadows hunch like Dante,
before she calls you “Mother,” demanding
you wipe her ass, before her heart cherries and
Tolstoys, in that moment, turned in the driveway, before
all that, back out. Gun it.
Read More
Eight Photographs
By Kim Adrian
Featured Art: The Child’s Bath by Mary Cassatt
The current set of complications involves a three-unit bridge—the kind a dentist puts in your mouth. Actually, I’m talking about half of a six-unit bridge that at some point during my mother’s cleaning rituals got cracked down the middle. In any case, my mother swallowed this thing while she was driving out from Chicago after my sister kicked her out. She was taking a handful of pills when the bridge, which was loose, dislodged and got swept down her esophagus.
You see, already, how complicated?
Three-unit bridges are weighty little constructions made of porcelain and gold. At the base, where they fit into the gumline, they are, as my mother puts it, “sharp as razors.” I don’t think they are actually that sharp, but that the metal tapers to a very thin point is certainly the case.
Reunion
By Bruce Weigl
Featured Art: Woman at Her Toilette by Edgar Degas
Now, as the popular girl walks among us with the microphone,
most of the stories are about loss,
or include exquisitely precise medical and pharmaceutical details,
as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath.
I came here to dance with the Puerto Rican women
of my class of 1967, and to remember a few pals lost in the war,
who had been so beautiful, you were happy just to look upon them,
and one more
lost to his own drunken wildness
under a moon who doesn’t remember us.
It’s not a going back we long for, but a staying still
for one incomparable moment, all the lost loves’ faces
spinning in the mirrored ball.
The Last One
By Bruce Weigl
Featured Art: Two Plant Specimens by William Henry Fox Talbot
The anonymous brown song bird
is annoying in her insistence
on repeating the same three syllables
in exactly the same way, endlessly.
She must know something
about inevitability,
to sing so long,
no one else in sight.
The persistence of nature;
the blind and infinite dedication to a thing
in the face of emptiness and silence
that won’t let you believe that you are the last.
Read More
Travel: Choler
By Neil Shepard
Featured Image: Old Sarum by David Lucas
For Robinson Jeffers
We had come to the Great Wall’s end
in the desert of Jiaguyuan. Our tempers flared
across the crumbled battlements, out into the red heat.
There were weeds, thorns, a few hard-
shelled bugs. Love reduced to a black
carapace, under which a stinger,
a biting mouth, a reflex, a poison.
Heat withered our patience. Our bowels,
stung by a virus, made us say words we’d regret—
peevish, pernicious—wo yao, wo yao,
I want, I want, and nothing else.
We both stormed off—“stormed”
could have brought some moisture
to this desert, but no, this storm
was a hot wind, stinging sand
in the face, chipped sandstone
from the last outpost, that would cut
and bury us. Wei guoren. Barbarian.
Watchman, Tell Us
By Michael Chitwood
Featured Image: Mountain Brook by Albert Bierstadt
The thief was none other than the wind.
The thief was the color of nickels.
The thief hummed in the downspouts, around corners.
I’ve already told you.
You should know better.
Mister Know-it-all. Mister Hands-in-your-pockets. Mister Sleep-for-the-morning-is-coming.
The thief had the cinnamon of fallen leaves on his breath.
The thief put a tear in our eyes.
Read More
Facing
By Maya Jewell Zeller
Featured Image: A French Market Scene, possibly Boulogne by David Cox
At seventeen I worked after school
and most weekends for a local grocery,
and when it was slow I would straighten
the shelves—we called it facing—
which helped me memorize where everything was,
right down to the canned loganberry topping
Eleanor loved for her cheesecakes
or the clam juice or the coriander
or the yellow food coloring I knew could give people
impotence, and really what would be so bad
about that, I was familiar with most of the customers
who came in and frankly it wouldn’t hurt them
to have fewer babies, the way they laughed
at the Mexicans who brought vans on Saturdays
to fill three grocery carts with tortillas, bagged
chilies and metal-clipped tubes of ground beef,
the way they would ask me what I was doing
when I got off, did I want to come out
to their campground where they were fishing
and no, I didn’t, but I’d smile, ring up
their hot dog buns and Coors Lights,
while they grinned at what little skin I had showing
beneath a black apron that said Okie’s and a button shirt
and I wished instead of their eyes it was wind
at my collarbone, thistle-sweet air while I ran
the road toward Altoona, birds
following my legs with their call,
those honest phlox faces lilting in the wet ditch.
Read More
Tableaux Vivants
By Katherine Lien Chariott
Featured Image: Icebound by John Henry Twachtman
1: Winter
Here is the beginning. I’m walking down the sidewalk and then the curb, sidewalk and curb again, under a sky full of tiny sad stars that light up this city as well as they can, but not as well as the neon signs all around me, not as well as the rainbow glitter of the Strip, just five miles away, I’m walking with the glitter and the neon and the stars, in front of the Sav-On Drugstore and then past it, towards the Dottie’s—video poker and snacks, cheap smokes and booze, twenty-four hours a day. I go into the Dottie’s, with money in hand for two packs of Reds, and a hey there to the man working security. I’ve seen him before, know that brown skin and that smile, so I can look at the carpet instead of at him while I tap my hands on the counter, waiting to be rung up. He’s watching me, I think, and when I look at him, I know. Just like I know he hasn’t seen or doesn’t care that I came in with someone.
Read More
Uh-Oh Time
By Kenneth Hart
Featured Image: Odalisque by Jules Joseph Lefebvre
It’s uh-oh time again when a woman asks me out
after a year of being on my own
and her number on the bar napkin is the permission slip
to stop hating myself
Stop walking around all day in sweat pants, stop leaving
a nest of dental floss stuck to the tiles
where it missed the garbage can
I’ve got to start taking better care of myself
is what her voice on the answering machine suggests
Got to get back on the StairMaster Got to learn new recipes
Having Not Heard Back from You
By Kenneth Hart
Featured Image: The Print Collector by Honoré-Victorin Daumier
I suspect you must be dead.
If you are reading this,
then you are not dead—
after I chose the wine,
and teased the waiter for spilling a little on my good shirt;
after the appetizers arrived,
and I told the joke about the priest and the porcupine
The Way Things Look
By Kenneth Hart
Featured Image: Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man! by Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault
Some things are easier than they look
and some things are harder than they look.
Riding a bike, for example, is easier than it looks,
unless you are five and your feet don’t reach the pedals.
Playing guitar is harder than it looks, as is milking a cow.
Fall down when you are skiing,
forget someone’s phone number, be used by others as a bad example—
failing is easier than it looks.
Read More
Damn the Manacle
By Alix Anne Shaw
Featured Image: David in Prayer by Rembrandt van Rijn
Don’t give up Hopkins, my brouhaha. The manacle is crafty, oh yes. He has his agent oranges. There are some he trains to look just like Jung and Mead. But we will thwart the manacle. Thwart him at every turn-on.
When the manacle comes, we will open our windpipe. We will turn on our air mail. We will seal the crackerjack with Marxist tape recordings. We will hide our topaz under the doorjamb. We will make a blow job by putting dryer sheet music into a cardboard tube rose. We will not answer the doorjamb when the manacle knocks.
Read More
Heroine in Repose
By Rick Bursky
Featured Image: The Vase of Tulips by Paul Cézanne
I wasn’t sure if she kissed me
or simply used her lips
to push my face away. Yes,
the moist warmth was enjoyable,
but when my head was forced
back over the top of the sofa
the intention grayed.
Earlier that day I planned
to quit my job and pursue
a career writing romantic novels
that would be confused with memoirs.
But if I couldn’t distinguish
between a kiss and a push
what chance do I have
of writing romantic novels
that would be confused with memoirs?
After the kiss, and I prefer
to think it was a kiss,
she sank back into the pillows
and watched me
out of the corner of her eye.
Read More
The Reversal
By Billy Collins
Featured Image: The Annunciation by George Hitchcock
It’s so beautiful outside today
and we’re all going to die,
especially me,
is an observation that drenches
the pages of every anthology of poetry.
The trees are brilliant in crimson,
and I am one day nearer the grave
would be one way to put it.
Red and white tulips are swaying
in a mild breeze this morning,
and just look at the dark gullies under my eyes
would be another.
So many variations,
you have to wonder how would it be
if the picture were flipped the other way
and poets never tired of declaring
in poem after poem
that the world is a mound of ashes
and that they will never die.
How crummy the flowers look!
How well I feel!
How hideous the mountain range!
How handsome I will always be!
How fine to live forever in the midst
Of such relentless and unspeakable ugliness!
Which brings us to the question:
how much more of that would you have to hear
before you longed for
a bead of dew on the tulip
and that cough that will be your undoing?
Read More
Bathtub Families
By Billy Collins
Featured Image: Beach at Cabasson by Henri-Edmond Cross
is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.
I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.
It’s enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.
Chicken
By Stephen Cramer
Featured Image: For Sunday’s Dinner by William Michael Barnett
At the festival when we were celebrating
harvest with pumpkin tarts & cider,
an older farmer asked what I was into
& maybe my answer was muffled a bit
from the cider’s tang because he started
talking passionately not about his favorite poet
or the use of weather in haiku
but about his chickens: White Leghorns,
Silkie Bantams, Rhode Island Reds,
Plymouth Rocks, how, in Corporate Agriculture
the birds are bred so big that their legs
cripple beneath them & isn’t that a shame.
I tried to break in, to tell him he misheard.
But he shook his head & held up his finger.
That’s not the case with his birds.
When his hens are laying he puts oyster shells
in their grit to give them extra calcium
for their own shells. His birds are free range—
not debeaked & stuffed two dozen
to a pen. No, his birds can go anywheres they want
from the barn to the bog & even in the house.
Read More
The Effects of Laudanum
By William Todd Seabrook
Featured Image: Blasted Tree by Jasper Francis Cropsey
name this particular spot after me. I don’t know where I was going with that. I have a tendency to lose track of things, as Mom used to say. I think it’s just impossible to focus and live in Laudanum at the same time. Laudanum’s the name of my town, not that you’ve ever heard of it since it is mostly just the one intersection of Chillicothe and Route 87 out in Ohio Amish country. No ones calls it Route 87, they call it Boulevoux Road, after some guy named Boulevoux, whom I never met. The rest of the town is Amish people and strip malls and the two rarely conflate. I stand next to the Marathon station and across from the Dairy Queen, 197 feet from where Boulevoux’s daughter died, and I am positioned so that when five-speeds come off a red light they down-shift as they pass me, as if I’m the catalyst for their propulsion instead of just a cow, or a guy in a cow suit with a high school diploma and a sign that reads Ranchero’s Restaurant in lazy letters.
Read More
The Night I Proposed
By Peter Stokes
Featured Image: The Kiss IV by Edvard Munch
This is a whole new world to us, and
We drove up to some rooftop parking garage
To look out on the Western night
There up above the Terminal Bar & Grill
And later moving on down darkened East Colfax
Past all the whores with their narrow old asses
And bars wide open with their doors bent back
I thought I saw Bo Diddley
At the wheel of a cream-colored Cadillac
Like out of some wet dream from my Visions of Kerouac
And I knew that at last we had arrived.
Haircut Talk
By Peter Stokes
Featured Image: Baby (Cradle) by Gustav Klimt
Lenny’s elbows jut from the sleeves
Of his blue barber’s shirt
And carve the air about my head
In a series of unreadable signs
That I trace in the glass of his square barber’s mirror
Where I watch myself watching his face give expression
To the subtlest whir from his scissors and comb.
Or we talk for a moment
About a change in the weather
And I realize for the first time
That Lenny is gay.
“So how’s married life?”
He says through the silence,
The strange edge in his voice
Like a barb on a wire
In the point-blank talk of our new acquaintance,
And I smile a smile that communicates nothing
And it’s suddenly clear that Lenny is drunk.
How much, then, I wonder, does he want to know
About my wife in the hall
With the bread knife in her hand,
Or the one about me,
It was midnight at Tim’s place,
Falling down drunk from the top of the stairs,
Or the sub-zero talk in the car outside Lena’s
And making her cry until 3:00 a.m.
And I talk to myself,
Three speeches in the silence,
And all of this world,
On the still point of a pin,
Spins through the minutes
With nobody talking
As we confess to ourselves
Everything we conceal
And the hair from my head just falls to the floor.
Read More
Third Street Muscles and Fitness
By Mark Kraushaar
Featured Image: The Drinkers by Vincent Van Gogh
It’s rained all night,
and it’s rained all day, and by evening
when I get to the gym it’s started to thunder.
Still, here we are anyway, all of us, all the regulars,
George, and Phil, and Johnny B, and Bob,
and me and the big guy, the lifter from Janesville.
So first off George (who’s zipping his coat)
asks Phil who’s on the treadmill and the only
one raising a sweat, will he run a mile
for every beer last night.
Which very funny, but Phil follows with, Hey,
I’m not drinking any more in ‘08
(beat, beat) but I’m not
drinking any less either which, again,
very funny except we all know Phil has
problems with alcohol, but since he’s getting no laughs
he looks up and on the tv over the rowing machine
there’s the real life trial of a woman, blond
and twenty-three, a teacher who’s
had sex with an eighth-grade boy.
Are you kidding, says George,
Are you kidding, says Phil, I’d clap her erasers,
and someone else, I’d polish her fruit,
and everybody’s nodding yes and yes again
until, at last, George who’s had problems with school
and problems with money and women and work tells
us he’d have majored in meredial reading
which is where the tv goes to an ad
and George waves once and steps into the weather.
So as the rainy wind flips his cheap rug straight
off his head like a flattened cat
it’s strange, nobody’s laughing, in fact, we’re quiet finally,
Phil with his crashed marriage and the daughter
on drugs, and even handsome Bob
and Johnny B, even the big guy
with those silly disproportionate arms,
and for a moment, for a discrete, small portion of
what I will one day refer to as the past, there’s
the five of us facing three
double-door sized panes
of rattling glass:
rain on the awnings, rain over the windows,
rain over the gutters and rain
in soft, sparkling ropes along the curbs,
and into the drains and under the ground.
Read More
Interview with Frederick Barthelme
By Gary Percesepe
Featured Image: Seated Youth Writing in Book by Raphael
Gary Percesepe: You wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review in April 1988, back when the “minimalism slash postmodern” discussion in literature was still in vogue. It had a wonderful Veronica Geng title, “On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean.” Your essay sparked a lively discussion among academic folk which was published in Critique in 1990 as “Postmodernism: The Uninhabited Word, Critics’ Symposium.” Looking back twenty years later, what has changed, and what remains the same?
Read MoreNew Ohio Review Issue 3 (Originally printed Spring 2008)
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Issue 3 compiled by Ellery Pollard.
Nothing Stays Buried, Hector Flores
By Andrew Michael Roberts
Featured Art: Daedalus and Icarus by Giulio Romano
Not your sad little sister nor the boy of your youth some doors down who shot himself twice. Not even dirt. It churns for years and surfaces as something alive. We name it old names we know by their taste on our tongues. Humus and bone, a song in the blood. Hector, we’re all descendants of conquistadors and graveyards. If you were thrown a sword, you’d know how to hold it. Know which tombstones to walk behind, whistling. Which mountain to climb and when to take flight. How heavy your tired arms. Hector, look down on us tenderly before crossing over and descending into the desert. Remember us as the sand swallows and sings you. Before the sun takes you, cast your winged shadow across it. We are the grains in your grave. We are buried there with you.
Read More
There Was a War
By Andrew Michael Roberts
Featured Art: I Saw it, plate 44 from The Disasters of War by Francisco de Goya
and it wasn’t ours because we didn’t believe in it, but they shot at us anyway because we stood somewhere in the middle of them killing each other. What could we do but lie down and wait? We lay a long time, thinking, the grass like trees shooting into the sky. Bullets like birds shooting across it. Too many hours of sun in our eyes. We were thinking: if we had guns we’d use them to get the hell out of the middle of this war.
Read More
Dunes
By Mark Cox
Featured Art: Sand Dunes, Harlech, North Wales by George Elbert Burr
Despite the curvatures adapted each to the other,
The slackening skin that in sleep feels lost without that other’s;
Despite the slatted fencing that marks their yard from others’,
And the offspring at play within, their testament to others;
Despite all the others they have embraced and refused;
Despite all otherness between them
They’ve acknowledged and recused;
They can no longer in mystery come to each other,
With the quickening and total surrender to another
That both empties each and fills the other.
And so they go on, because each goes on, despite the other:
To each their own wind-ironed waters,
To each their own bruised sky and horizon,
Their own shames, their own redemptions,
Awakening to each night’s newly shifted sloping,
Each day by unremitting day’s abiding,
Without need for another day or lover,
They endure side by side, in their time, no other.
In which I first discovered
By Emily Pérez
Featured Art: Woman Writing by Zabitz
Quite suddenly, at least it seems in retrospect
Though I still seek a complete
My relationship to my past
It was as if my past had taken
Without warning, understand,
Had slipped in such a way that it uncovered
No, that’s not right, for it suggests a lack of deliberate
It wasn’t that I didn’t try
Miss Peach Considers #8: Reproduce
By Catie Rosemurgy
A paperweight of sorts.
A shiny genetic clip for the stack of notes she’s become
on carbon dating, lozenges, and “getting over it.”
On a park bench she could lean over
to the other stunned, unmade-up mothers
who stare like cruelly unfinished paintings.
She could say, we are the giant price tags
that once hung off them.
A penny to toss in the well.
Mindlessness held together by bones.
Something that happened once in the distance,
like a war or an arctic expedition.
A list of ways she would try not to feel about a son or a daughter.
A list of choking hazards and a list
of times she will have peeled back the curtain
for him or her by age seven.
A list of golf courses and shades of blue.
Her penmanship begins to pile up and look like sticks,
like an attempt at a tiny fire left on a stone.
Read More
Miss Peach Considers the Human Condition
By Catie Rosemurgy
Featured Art: A Bouquet of Flowers by Clara Peters
It’s OK to feel important.
The swelling between our legs
indicates we are the rarest of flowers.
We bloom in only the most
idiosyncratic conditions: rubber,
misery, great shoes. The other day
I realized that we can’t spit
without hitting grass or something else
that implies the necessity
of our experience, of our greatness.
The Disappeared
By Blake Butler
Featured Art: The Sick Child I by Edvard Munch
The year they tested us for scoliosis, I took my shirt off in front of the whole gym. Even the cheerleaders saw my bruises. I’d been scratching in my sleep. There were bugs coming in through cracks we couldn’t find. There was something on the air. Noises from the attic. My skin was getting pale.
I was the first.
The several gym coaches, with their reflective scalps and high-cut shorts, crowded around me blowing whistles. They made me keep my shirt up over my head while they stood around and poked and pondered. Foul play was suspected. They sent directly for my father. They made him stand in the middle of the gym in front of everyone and shoot free-throws to prove he was a man. I didn’t have to see to know. I heard the dribble and the inhale. He couldn’t even hit the rim. The police showed up and bent him over and led him by his face out to their car. You could hear him screaming in the lobby. He sounded like a woman.
Read MoreThe Bad Wife
By Elizabeth Powell
The door’s made of gingerbread that the rats have eaten through.
You finger your record albums like cold, frigid women.
You could be more silent than silence without much of a fight.
I float, a birthday party balloon you let go into the deepening sky.
How I once felt my life against yours, two pieces of burnt toast.
The town had zoned me for you, now I’m a wetlands—
You can’t run your cable under my land anymore.
There’s nothing wrong with you, just as there is nothing wrong with the sky.
At my core, a humming gas heater, rusted, though still useful.
Nothing loves the world as a mortal soul can.
Yet the very word domestication sounds like a zoo for housewives.
Let’s see—what prayer was it we were saying?
Yes (of course), the one that got us here.
Once I loved you madly, like a girl pirate,
Now I use my sword to pick up moldy, low-loft towels from the floor.
Now we wear headsets because we can’t hear our own music.
Once I was your bride, now nothing more than a mermaid nun,
And the sea is so choppy, torrential, wild, biblical with sadness.
Oh, once you smelled of mint, of truth.
Unearthing the Sky
By Claire Bateman
Featured Art: Masury Versus Sky by Arnold Wiltz
It was filthy, of course,
with red clay streaks & embedded chips of loam,
as well as boulder-scored, chipped,
& even fractured in places,
a great big glorious suffering thing
further damaged
by the very means of its rescue,
the violence of pulleys & clamps.
Areas that had been dredged from under water
were warped & bowed
where detonation had been necessary
to dislodge them.
Intellectual Property
By Claire Bateman
Featured Art: Rank Badge with Peacock by unknown
The day the trucks began arriving
with the materials for my Big Idea,
it’s not that I wasn’t delighted,
rare as it is to behold your very own
Big Idea beginning to take shape
in your back yard—
& it’s not that I wasn’t grateful
for that segment on “All Things Considered,”
for the honorary doctorate from Stanford,
& for the offers from think tanks
both progressive & neocon—
but all the same,
I couldn’t help feeling uneasy;
April 1: Dropping & Carrying
By Claire Bateman
Featured Art: Spring Blossoms by Winslow Homer
The second-graders just don’t get it,
those 10s diving invisibly
into the blank space between
the columns, only to bob up
at the very top, one line over,
displacing each other
westwardly in wave reaction,
but on the children’s smudged pages,
disappearing altogether, or showing up
in the wrong place.
One child has found his way
to the wrong conference room,
& sits there alone;
I send a child to find him,
who also doesn’t return.
This morning, my grocery bag ripped
bottom to side, eggs cracked
& oozing in their styrofoam nests,
apples careening around the parking lot
like gleeful winos.
In spring, you can’t hold on
to anything.
Read More
He and I
By Natania Rosenfeld
Featured Art: The Couple by Charles-Edouard de Beaumont
He: patient, methodical, can spend hours at the computer figuring something out.
I: Impatient, messy, shout, “It’s broken! I broke it! Come fix it!”
“Hang on, Griselda!” he says to me. Or: “Keep your hair on!”
/
I say, “You have no sense of time. You’re always running late.” It isn’t true.
He says, when I really overdo it, “You stupid woman!” I start laughing, admiring him for saying it just like that.
I’m a curser, full of epithets when angry. Cruel, even abusive. I hate this about myself.
Read More
Hampstead Heath: A Sketch
By Natania Rosenfeld
Featured Art: Hampstead Heath, London by Bertha E. Jaques
Recovering from a stomach flu like a hurricane, I board a double-decker bus for Hampstead Heath. I want fresh air, and to see other people enjoying themselves. My man and I hold hands, and I sit very still.
On a twisting street somewhere between Bloomsbury and Hampstead, I look out and see a woman leaning from an upstairs window, slightly above my eye level. A girl, really, in bright pink pjamas, the top a camisole edged in black lace. A cross hangs from her neck. Shall I add a cigarette to the description? There might well have been one.
Read MoreElection Day
By David Gullette
What dragged me out of sleep was a nightmare about chaos:
I was trapped in rising water, and some idiot had lost the key
that would free the hatch or gridwork, the woven net of chains
in which I roared like a beached sea creature, but
I groped in the ship’s belly only to find
mis-mitred joints, screws without threads, seams oozing caulk,
and behind the last partition a cabal of mutinous carpenters
pissed at me for discovering flaws that were after all
clearly within the province of their fallen craft,
spelled out in terms precise on a typed bid
I somehow couldn’t find, rummage as I might
in Silver’s seachest, and even in the light of the real day,
the crows scattered off-key-cawing as I pushed out the door:
they knew my mind was unforgiving hornets,
they could smell a man disorder had enraged
to a cluster of snarling buckshot,
and the people of the city shrank back
as I strode toward the Capitol, chanting
a mantra vengeful and Sicilian, sixguns and grenades
clanking against my polished chainmail vest.
Read More
What It Feels Like to Be This Tall
By Dobby Gibson
Featured Art: Giraffe by Max Rosenthal
Not one of my costumes is believable.
I’m constantly away on business.
The morning, chiropractic, saddles me
beneath its colossal gravity.
In search of a breath, kneeling at the shallows,
the minnows scatter.
Wind farms hum atop the prairie.
Wilt Chamberlain’s bones groan from their earthen locker.
In my most private thoughts,
radio signals from distant lands
argue invisibly over static,
and like an ice-cream headache,
the only thing worse than feeling this way
is not having a reason to feel this way,
hoping against hope, against nature,
versus self—I miss you all so much. Send money!
Read More
Why I’m Afraid of Heaven
By Dobby Gibson
Featured Art: (Illustration for Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám) The Throne of Saturn by Elihu Vedder
If you stand on Venus,
where the atmospheric haze
is so thick that it bends light,
it theoretically would be possible
to stare at the back of your own head.
Which would mean you’d never
again have the pleasure
of helping a beautiful woman
fasten the clasp on her necklace.
On Jupiter, a beautiful woman
would weigh 400 pounds,
but you would, too,
and you’d be far more worried
about suffocating to death
on poisonous gas.
We’ve all desired what we can’t find here.
We’ve all left our gum beneath the seat.
Read More
Wrong Time for Caution
By Eric Freeze
Featured Art: (Autumn Mountain Landscape) by unknown
The gas station where I work is a 7-11 that sells Slurpees even in the middle of January, which, if you don’t know Crowsnest, can be cold, sixty below Celsius with a wind chill. We have customers all day, and we’re open twenty-four hours, and the night till carries only fifty dollars as a policy, although I’ve never had occasion to suspect we needed caution much. Past midnight, the only people passing through are truckers and skiers, and sometimes Benny the Indian comes in for a plug of Chattanooga Chew. Benny goes to the Mormon church in town because they will pay his rent if he says he’ll stop smoking. He hangs around the pop machine and fills a small Gulp with ice that he sucks on with his mouth open until we tell him to find some money or get out.
Put Crowsnest Pass anywhere urban, Vancouver or Toronto, or even Calgary, for that matter, and what you have is a four-lane road, a freeway, but without the traffic. Here it’s just a road for hikers or skiers or loggers to make their way up into the mountains. My station is past Frank Slide, near Blairmore, just after the limestone boulders that cover the valley, at the mouth of the Pass. I work regular hours during the winter and then take off time during the summer to volunteer at the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, where I tell folks, kids or senior citizens mostly, about when Turtle Mountain shed its limestone face and crushed the min- ing community of Frank below. In the winter, the centre is closed, and the boulders are covered with snow, and the valley looks like a huge, lumpy blanket. Only on the side of the road where the plow trucks spray salt as they pass can you see the boulders underneath.
Read More
104
By Rodney Jones
Featured Art: White Lines by Irene Rice Pereira
I studied philosophy at the dream university.
Nietzsche, Kant, the less algebraic Whitehead.
Honors the first year, but the second began badly.
The room was missing when I went to the first class.
Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,
I would go and find 103 and then 105.
When I asked, advisement insisted the room was there.
When I phoned the professor’s house,
she was on sabbatical in another country.
This is how I learned it was an independent study.
I read Tolstoy’s Christian writing and Bertrand Russell.
After that, both church and philosophy went to hell.
Just as well, I thought finally, to think without direction—
Better than the class before, when I was the only one naked.
Read More
Feelings, by Ashley Higgins
By Rodney Jones
For every true emotion there is an objective
correlative; a rainy day, for instance,
might mean a person feels a little gloomy.
Or the convertible that carries the Peach Queen
from the parking lot of Kroger West
to the front lawn of the junior high school
could suggest a person’s innermost feelings
about how the war goes on right in front of her
every night on CNN and all the other channels
and no one says what a dumb war it is,
the way no one comes right out and says
that the convertible girl became the peach queen
because she slept with one of the judges, Roy,
who maybe happens to be the ex-boyfriend
of the person writing the poem. I mean
many poems do not come right out and say
the feeling. They just give you the things.
Read More
Truce
By Jerry Williams
Featured Art: Rocky Seashore by Louis M. Eilshemius
On Thanksgiving morning, I gulp down triplicate
diet pills so I don’t have to eat.
Unafflicted with an invitation anywhere, the gym closed,
I sit on a bench facing Bristol Harbor.
This is Rhode Island and that’s ocean water.
Maybe I should drive up to the State House
with the Quakers and act useful,
but I stick to this cracked white bench and think of women
in coffee shops writing in leather-bound journals,
cups of adult herbal tea at the ready,
their calm separateness foreboding as boiling oil.
I’m over-and-done-with, a set of monkey bones in outer space.
I can’t even take pleasure
in the perpetuity of shimmering marina,
bright orange buoys, and the eccentricity of sailboats
still anchored out of season, naked masts too proud to move.
I look straight through the occasional jogger or cyclist
preemptively working off an engorgement.
Mute seagulls plunge along the jagged shore,
gloating on the wing and hunting for scraps, ancillary to nothing.
Postcards
By Kelly Luce
Featured art by Joanna Kosinska
The in-flight magazine said Bucharest was notable for graffiti. I suppose they had to pick something. And guess what, today I passed a brick wall that says “I FUCKED YOUR GIRLFRIEND.”
The city is un-beautiful, so I picked a postcard of a place I’ll never go that’s prettier. It’s still in Romania, though, so it counts.
/
This is the orchestra building. Looks like a prison, doesn’t it? At the show last night they did one called “Scherzo Fantastique,” by a composer named Suk. Poor guy. He’s actually pretty good!
Wisdom: no matter who they are or where they come from, people love a good house of mirrors.
Read MoreNew Ohio Review Issue 2 (Originally published Fall 2007)
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
Issue 2 compiled by Gina Gidaro.
From The Presence of Their Passing
By Andrew Mossin
Featured Art: The Old World by Creative Commons
I am unable—words can’t recover it. A landscape back of those who carried me through my first days: mother, that “she” who bore me. The extrinsic realism of these few facts I know and have preserved: I was born in the Hospital for Children in Athens, Greece on April 20, 1958. My mother’s name, Angeliki Sakkas, became known to me in my mid-20’s when my father presented me with my birth certificate and an index card on which her name and that of my father—Efthimois Kooroubis—were written. Initial knowledge of the circumstances of my birth parents came to me from my adoptive mother, Iris. I was perhaps five or six, had already come to understand that my place in our household was pre-emptive, uncertain, dependent on the fluctuations of my mother’s temperament. One understands so little at the time of each event, but I remember her hands holding the book close to me as we sat together on the sofa one afternoon (a cup of tea just made? some pieces of orange left on the plate from lunch? what did she wear? how did she move into the light from outside?) and she tried to explain my origins. In one version, my birth mother and father were peasants who lived in the countryside, not far from Athens. One day my father accosted my mother in an olive grove near her home and took her into the field and raped her. When she became pregnant, my father (who lived in a nearby town) refused to help and abandoned her to return to the city. My mother traveled to Athens to find him, without luck.
Read MoreNotre histoire sinister
By Michael Joyce
Here is our lurid history, the days that were before us once
have slipped behind now and press against us as in a crowd
stumbling from the circus. The circus again! How it haunts
their memories, the afternoon at the Tibetan resto juste en face
where the young clown reminisced about life as a dominatrix
in San Francisco and how gentle it all was finally, her smile
truly angelic, framed in a corona of spun gold hair, le coiff’
paillé, soft, vaguely leonine, the archangel with golden hair
at Petersburg perhaps or Raphael’s lost “Portrait of a Boy”
pillaged by the Nazis from the Musée Czartoryski. This she
recognizes in herself, how in the snapshot from her troupe
she had them guess which one she was, eyes giving her away:
the boy in the pale blue jumper, a play upon Pierrot, fey,
younger, at that age where gender is permeable, apt to slip
hermaphroditic back to girlish, qualis ab incepto processerit
et sibi constet, as Horace had it, i.e., let him stay what he was
at first, but what that was hardly any of us can remember.
And now the children come pouring out from the matinée
into rue Amelot as dans le coin de la salle the three of them
whisper softly lost in each other over tea and dumplings
Read More
Une danse des rêves
By Michael Joyce
Sleep like babies’, the undifferentiated terror and dull pain
of becoming once again upon them, unutterable bone ache
as muscles stretch into some new being, Bachelard’s auberge
à fantômes, rooms swept clean each morning as they resume
themselves, shadowless, bereft beneath the thin cover of
gray overcast, “à la base, le zombi est un mort qui marche,”
basically a zombie is walking death, says the online bestiary
propagated by children in a game world, presided over
by an elf, what could they know of growing into this
restlessness? how lovers fall from a preternatural embrace
into dream semblances of themselves, mewling once again
like astronauts tethered to the tumbling apparatus circling
the blue planet from which they come and which seems
at this distance Verlaine’s moon of masks and Bergamasks
the bed a costume ball in which we play ourselves at last
Read More
My Father’s Photograph
By Jenny Boully
Featured Art: by Creative Commons
I no longer have the photograph that I wish to write about; when I was younger, I gave (very foolishly) the photograph to a boy I thought I was going to marry. I did not really give this boy the photograph, but rather, in that naive youth, when I believed in the reunion of what was rightly mine, I said that he could hold on to the photo album in which the photo was enclosed.
In the picture, my father looks much older than thirteen; he is wearing a suit and stands next to his adopted parents. There is a white house in the background and a car poses alongside them. It is the first time that I have seen my father as a boy, and the car, of a make and model that I’ve only seen in old movies, makes the photograph and my father automatically ancient.
Read More
Water We Made Ourselves
By Sara McKinnon
Featured Art: by Creative Commons
My mother said to do it standing up. To make it damp. To push it up and down. To press it back and forth. To keep moving. To start on the inside. To turn it over. To keep moving. I saw my mother do it on the kitchen table. She wasn’t standing up. She didn’t make it wet. My father had to be at work by seven thirty.
I never listen to my mother. And when my boyfriend’s father dies, I pay another woman to do it for me. I drive across town in dark glasses. I walk up the steps to his front door. His shirt, under plastic, in my arms. I help him to pull it out. I watch as he puts it on. I stand in the hallway with my hands on his shoulders. I turn down the collar myself.
Read MoreThe Five Enslavements An Essay in Four Parts
By Lisa Samuels
Chapter 1: We hold ourselves eventful
In those clouds figures ignite, shadows are visitable outlines at the back of
rooms—I have a club and pointer holding them upright, or I am
ill-dressed and need to be given a blue shirt, a red shirt, something deep
offsetting the plain strangeness no one ‘has’ (but betting it) any plans nor I
fixate on a tromp de l’oeil can tell you
A dog barks in the patio, he is stuck forever in a moving position;
seeming delicate wings on the sky tip-top, the lit approaches gather up
their meanings to take them home or canvas tells itself without dementia,
though I stand looking like a crazy without wheels
All the patio given to itself without reprieve, the nice ones smiling you
know it’s really sincere, the caustic ones wheeling and twirling intention
on their fingers: from the corners where the dancers
have no experience – you will be swallowed up in dark ideas of art
Longing
By Natania Rosenfeld
Featured Art: by Creative Commons
I’m not sure what it has to do with length, but it makes sense to think of them together. For longing by definition has no end.
The O.E.D. gives as one definition, the cravings of women in pregnancy. Those objects can be had, though some are quite unhealthy. But cravings are concrete, and they come to substitute for longings. Krunch Kones at the Dairy Land instead of scintillating talk, achievement, the limelight. Whiskey instead of love.
Perhaps “longing” suggests the power of the want, not its unattainability. Perhaps I confuse “longing” with “pining,” which is a word containing pain. To pine is to long with pain for something you’ve lost and can’t have back, ever, or for a very long time: home, or a lover. (The pine tree strained at the sky, stripped, attenuated, its trunk graying.) But I think you long for something you’ve never had, that’s always just beyond the horizon. At the end of a long road whose end is invisible.
Read MoreNew Ohio Review Issue 1 (Originally printed Spring 2007)
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
In Memory of the Rock Band Breaking Circus
By Stephanie Burt
Featured Art: Fight by Ján Novák
You were whiny and socially unacceptable even
to loud young men whose first criterion
for rock and roll was that it strike someone else
as awful and repulsive and you told
grim stories about such obscure affairs
as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge-
laden marathon runner from Zanzibar
who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth
Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate
sarcastic showtunes abject similes
feel like a piece of burnt black toast
for example threaded on a rusty wire followed
up by spitting too much time to think
by fusillades from rivetguns by cold
and awkward bronze reverberant church bells
percussive monotones 4/4 all for
the five or six consumers who enjoyed
both the impatience of youth
and the pissiness of middle age
as if you knew you had to get across
your warnings against all our lives as fast
as practicable before roommate or friend
could get up from a couch to turn them off
The Immortals
By Rick Bursky
In the painting of the young couple kissing
on a bench in a museum hallway
I’m the subject of the portrait
hanging on the wall behind them.
I’m wearing the blue velvet jacket
of an eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry officer
standing beside a white horse that’s too large to be accurate.
Though I’m rendered with lifelike precision. Obviously,
I couldn’t have served in the eighteenth-century Prussian cavalry.
I don’t speak German, and was born centuries late.
I’m not the first person to pay
a famous artist to be in a painting.
Though I wanted to be the man being kissed.
Unfortunately, my famous artist didn’t believe
a girl that lovely would kiss me in public.
I offered photographs of previous lovers
but unless one was kissing me on a bench
in a museum hallway his answer was no.
That’s unfair. Otherwise I’m pleased
with the painting. The couple kissing,
I suspect, also paid to be in the painting.
Though I’m certain they were strangers.
Her eyes are open, peering at where
we might stand admiring the painting.
Instead of resting on his cheek, the palm of her hand
is pushing, proving that while she desired
to live forever in art, her desire didn’t include him.
I once fell thirty-seven feet
from a railroad bridge into a river.
Riding the ambulance to the hospital
is when I decided to pay a famous artist
to put me in a painting.
What brought the woman to the painting
is something I’ve often fantasized about.
The oxygen mask’s elastic strap
pinched the back of my neck.
I kept the discomfort to myself.
Read More
New Journals We Love
| The following are literary journals being produced by students in Dave Wanczyk’s Fall 2024 Editing and Publishing class at Ohio University. Please peruse and submit! Writing prompts for many of the magazines appear below. |
20 High Afterwards Beyond the Green Cat Chronicles Concinnity Fellowship of the Unmoored Foodstuff Fragile Forms The Gilded Fable The Great Dark Underworld the scoreboard Kindred Late-Night Horror Review Loose Leaf Journal Open Space Zine Screen to Page Trauma Dump Unearth Verity The Wistful Moth 20 High Prompts What if we breathed through our skin? Have you ever done something that wasn’t good for you that turned you out for the better? What if people aren’t real when we leave their area? What music affected you the most in your life and how? What’s that weird thing you know way too much about? Write about a group of smoke people deep in the woods. Write about a social issue or historical moment you believe to be important/ you want to teach about to other people. |
| Afterwards Prompts -Describe a post apocalyptic reality -Tell story that takes place on a distant planet -What will Earth be like in hundreds or even thousands of years? -Take a current large/worldwide problem and expand upon it. What would life be like if that problem was never solved hundreds of years from now? -Tell a story about someone living in the future -What would humanity look like life from an outside perspective? Foodstuff Prompts Creative Writing Example: – Write a story of how you encountered a ghost on your way to make mac and cheese at 4:00am. Non-Fiction Example: -A tale of the foods that you ate when you were younger, how they now remind you of those times. The nostalgia inherent to some foods and what that means to you now. Poem Example: -A poem that could double as a recipe, sprinkled in-between lines concerning the greater intricacies of life. How specific ingredients start as plants in a garden and end in your recipe. Kindred Prompts 1. Describe an unusual tradition your family partakes in. How did it begin? How has it evolved over time? 2. (poem) Create a dating profile for a close friend that you consider family. What are their most endearing qualities? What are their loving “icks”? 3. Is there a specific food/meal that brings your family together? Describe it. What memories does it bring up? Does it hold cultural significance? 4. “To be loved is to be changed.” How has love from your family changed you for the better? 5. Describe the feeling of summer through a child’s eyes. how was it made better alongside family/friends? 6. Interview, or write an interview from the perspective of an elder in your family. what have they endured to get to the present? Beyond the Green Prompts Write about how the color green might represent hope, healing, or rebirth in the face of terminal illness. Tell a story that challenges traditional views on mortality or illness, focusing on unexpected emotions, humor, or the complexity of relationships. Explore different “shades” of green as symbols of life stages, from beginnings to inevitable endings. Reimagine what “healing” means in the context of terminal illness. Late-Night Horror Review Prompts 1. Think about the last truly terrifying horror movie you watched. What cinematic techniques enhanced the terror of that movie? What made it so effective at scaring you personally? 2. When was the last time you felt like you were being watched? Has anything you’ve experienced gave you the feeling of “uncanny valley”? 3. Do you have a favorite horror director or actor? What about them makes you want to see a horror film? 4. Have you experienced something unexplainable, as if it were supernatural? Share that experience. Fellowship of the Unmoored Prompts – Have you ever had a dream or nightmare that felt so real, you still felt it when you woke up? – Is there an aspect of yourself you feel you need to ‘perform’ for others? Or a ‘mask’ you wear in certain settings. What purpose does it serve, and what would it mean for you to set it aside? – What is a fear or insecurity that has haunted you for a long time. Trace its origins and how it has shaped your journey – Describe a day when everything felt out of place. – Describe a moment when you felt like an outsider in your own life. What led you to feel this way, and how did you respond to it? – Write a short story about an actor who spends so much time in character can’t tell where their real personality ends and the role begins. Loose Leaf Mag Prompts 1. Write about a place in nature that you have an emotional connection to. What is it like? Why is it so special to you? 2. What’s a bizarre plant you didn’t know existed? Research it. 3. You’re gardening one day. You run your hands through the soil, and they brush up against something hidden in the dirt. What is it? the scoreboard prompts Uniform and Identity: Reflect on the gear, uniforms, or even hairstyles you’ve adopted for sports. How does your appearance on the field reflect who you are as an athlete and as a woman? Game Changer: Narrate a significant win or personal achievement that felt like a breakthrough. How did it change your perspective on your sport, your abilities, or the recognition of women athletes? The Sound of Victory: Describe the sights, sounds, and feelings of a memorable victory, either personal or as part of a team. What did this moment mean to you beyond the game? How does it reflect the community or sisterhood in women’s sports? Reflect on a time when you witnessed growth, even subtle, during grief or after the loss of a loved one to cancer. Beyond the Green Prompts Write about how the color green might represent hope, healing, or rebirth in the face of terminal illness. Tell a story that challenges traditional views on mortality or illness, focusing on unexpected emotions, humor, or the complexity of relationships. Explore different “shades” of green as symbols of life stages, from beginnings to inevitable endings. Reimagine what “healing” means in the context of terminal illness. Concinnity Prompts • Write about how a stranger that interacted with but never spoke with, inspired you. • Write about connecting your past self with your future self • Write about being a part of the human experience on this planet. How or where do you fit in? • Write about a significant connection or a missed connection and how that affected the path you have taken in life. • Write about three different peoples life evens and how the three ultimately connect with one another. • Use emotions to think about (and write about) how a lost friendship or family connection has affected you. • Write about how your community (or family, or friends) came together during a crisis. • Write about one of the most difficult times in your life and how someone unexpected helped you through it. • Write about an odd (or inspiring) moment you had with a stranger and how it affected you (or how/why it has stayed with you). • Write about how a teacher (or doctor, or mentor, etc.) in your life provided one of the most important lessons in life. • Write about how an unexpected person (or animal/pet) has helped you when you felt most alone. Fragile Forms Prompts What are your experiences with body image? How has your family, culture, or identity impacted your body image? How has your body image changed since you were a kid? How has social media impacted your body image? How has your body image affected your mental health? Describe your journey with body image, is it a positive experience? Is it negative? Has the way you looked influenced the choices you’ve made in your life? Describe what it would be like for someone else to live as you for a day. Is there a pivotal moment when you felt a strong emotion towards your body image? What did that look like? Imagine you could separate yourself from your body, what would you say to it? What do you hate about your body? What do you love about your body? The Wistful Moth Prompts 1. Talk about a time when you wished you could be a child again. 2. Think of a memory so vivid and cherished that you wish you could relive it once more. Tell me about it! 3. Describe a photograph, video, or writing that holds deep nostalgic significance for you. 4. Write about a moment from your past when something changed unexpectedly—something that felt so small at the time but now seems pivotal. 5. Tell me about a time when you felt sad but somehow peaceful. 6. Have you ever lost touch with a family member or friend? Maybe you grew away from them? I’d like to hear about it. 7. Have you ever felt sad even though there “wasn’t a reason to be”? That sounds like something I’d love to read about! 8. Do you miss your childhood pet? Write about that! (Not great) a. What is the craziest thing that your childhood pet has ever done? (Not great) 9. Has there ever been a moment in your life when you’ve felt happy and it seemed more appropriate to be sad, or somber? 10. Tell me about when you revisited a place you frequented as a child but stopped as you got older. What changed? You or something else? The Great Dark Underworld Prompts Prompt 1- What would be a moment in which you would describe that you felt the most vulnerable when having an emotional moment with someone regarding a personal relationship? Prompt 2- Have you ever had an argument with someone, where you and the other person were looking at a situation in fundamentally different ways, and which was never fully resolved, yet affected you in both a positive and negative manner? Prompt 3- How often do you have moments where you are left to stew in your mind about scarring memories and what can you tell us about how you deal with them? Perhaps describe how these felt to you in and out of the moment? Unearth 1. How might compost relate to a relationship in your life? 2. Imagine stepping into a body of water and sinking into the mud below. What is the worst thing that you could experience in this moment? 3. What do you expect to see on a list of items to bring on a camping trip, and what would surprise you the most? Open Space Zine Prompts Write about a first queer date. How did it feel? Just dump your feelings, thoughts and how you felt. Write about your first queer breakup. How did it feel? Write about your first queer experience. How did it feel? Write about the time you came out. If you haven’t come out yet write about how that makes you feel in a society that is everchanging. Echoes of queer people. Set your story in a specific time period where Queerness wasn’t as visible as it is today. Tell the story of two characters who find each other despite the dangerousness among society. Specifically set the story during the time period when the Lavender scare was happening leading into the AIDS crisis (if you want) Write about a character who comes to terms with who they are in a place where they might feel wanted. This setting could take place in a night club, online, etc. The idea of the prompt is that they don’t really come to terms with their sexuality until they see other people celebrating its openness outload. Write a letter to someone that will never be sent. This could possibly include a crush, someone like a parent that didn’t accept you for being queer, the idea is to get these thoughts and feelings out whether you include something like a confession, or an apology is up to you. This could also possibly be a letter to your past self and how you regretted some things. Write about maybe a place you never felt wanted or someplace that has past rejection or shame connected to it. The idea of maybe a loss of youth in a high school is a good one because maybe you grew up in a place that didn’t really accept being queer. Or maybe your home for example. Write about a queer relationship where one of the partners dies? How does the character take this news? Do they turn to some substance? Depression? It can be really open ended. Write a coming out scene between a character and their parents. Maybe the idea is that they’re accepted just as they are, or maybe they aren’t excepted. Write something based off that and take it anywhere. Verity Prompts Write about a time when someone tried to define you by a stereotype. How did you respond or redefine yourself? Describe a moment when you felt like you were on the outside looking in. What did you see from that perspective, and how did it shape you? Explore the legacy you’ve inherited from your family, community, or culture. How does it influence your identity and decisions today? Describe what “home” means to you—whether it’s a place, a person, or an internal feeling. How has this sense of home evolved over time? Describe a personal act of defiance, big or small, that was meaningful to you. What did it reveal about your values and identity? Write about a word, phrase, or label that you’ve reclaimed. How has reshaping its meaning empowered you? Share an experience or a side of yourself that you feel is often hidden or misunderstood by others. What does it mean to you to reveal it? Page to Screen -What’s your best Letterboxd review? -Have you ever walked out of a movie, and why? -What movie have you unashamedly watched multiple times at a movie theater? -What’s the weirdest movie you’ve ever watched, and why? -What is one movie you’ll never even think about watching again, and why? -What movie resonates with you most on an emotional, spiritual, and/or psychological level? -What is one movie you like that no one else does, and why? -Film and MDIA Students – What are your passions, motivations, fears, and concerns about trying to make it in the industry? -Write a one-page screenplay with no dialogue, just screen action. -What’s the best film review you wrote for a class? -What movie industry figure has influenced you the most, and why? |
Journals We Love — 2025
| Bulletin of the Bizarre Coop Flyer Embrance Enmeshed Enter Center Stage From the Archives GG! Literary Grave Hypnagogia Junk Drawer Otherworldly Scripts Psychea Ready, Set– Thresholds Your Eyes as Honey Prompts Bulletin of the Bizarre When was the last or most significant time you experienced deja vu? When was the last time you felt like you were being watched? Has anything you’ve experienced gave you the feeling of “uncanny valley”? Have you experienced something unexplainable, as if it were supernatural? Share that experience. Describe a day when everything felt out of place. Write a story you would tell a group of preteens as a camp councilor around a campfire to scare them. You inherit an antique mirror. Whenever you look into it, the reflection is just a little… wrong. A hitchhiker you picked up won’t stop humming a tune you’ve only ever heard in your dreams. A cornfield at night whispers your name. Something in the air changes, but no one can agree on what changed. The world develops a faint background hum one day. Only you notice when it stops. An object in your room has started moving slightly when you don’t look at it. You’re no longer sure which object it is. Write about your last paranormal encounter. The horizon is closer than it should be. You can hear a sound that no one else seems to notice. It isn’t loud, but it feels close. There’s a door that leads to nowhere—yet every time you open it, the “nowhere” grows more familiar. Every hallway seems just a little longer than it was the day before. ______________ Coop Flyer Embrance What’s something you used to hate and now love? Write a letter to your future/past self Tell us about the last date you went on What does a journey of self-love look like to you? Best piece of advice and what you did with it Are you who you thought you’d be? What’s been your biggest obstacle in life so far Write a poem about how your style (fashion, music, self-care, etc.) has evolved Make a bucket list…or maybe write a story about a bucket list..that could be cool Biggest regret or fear…you could write about this along the lines of how your younger self would answer versus you now? A poem perhaps?? _____________ Enmeshed Write about a moment you realized someone in your family wasn’t what you thought they were. Write about a discovery or secret in your family that made something click for you when it came to light. What’s a relationship in your family that you wish was different in some way? Is there someone in your life who’s replaced the role of a family member? Write about the impact they’ve had on you. What’s something you’ve always wanted to say to a family member, and what’s stopped you from saying it? _______________ Enter Center Stage We want to hear essays about the unsung creators about the theater-making process that people never see but defines the success of a production. Whether lighting design, costume construction, stage management or rehearsal, how did it shape the story on stage? Share your experience as a Queer or BIPOC artist within theater. How has your identity shaped the way you perform, collaborate or create? What triumphs or challenges have you experienced in bringing stories to the stage? Tell a story of a production that involved you from the first script reading to opening night. How was the show transformed along the way? Who were the key people who made the show happen? _______________ From the Archives _______________ GG! Literary What was a game you used to play as a kid? Do you still play it now, and did it shape your life in any way? Think of a game you have on your phone. Do you play it while waiting in line or do you play it every chance you get? Imagine some characters you created taking a break from their journey. What kind of games would they play to pass the time? Have you ever wanted to make your own game? What would it look like, what would the rules be, how would you play it? ________________ Grave Hypnagogia A conversation between your childhood fear and your biggest fear now. What do they look like, sound like? Do they get along? Are they protective of you or seek to hurt you? A renowned artist (does not matter their preferred medium—painting, sculpture, writing) is being hounded to make something new, yet suddenly they can only draw, create, or write the same thing over and over again; there may be small distinctions but it is the same every time. What is it that they are creating? Is the thing itself scary or does the horror come from repetition? Is this psychological or supernatural? How does this effect their life? One part of your body begins aging more rapidly than the rest. There has always been a melodic hum in the back of your head, some sort of gentle classical music that followed you everywhere that no one can hear. One day it stops. You are hunting something. You think it is running from you. It is running from something much bigger. It is your turn to run. A small intelligent civilization lives in an open wound on your body. As you heal, you know they are dying. Recurring nightmare. Classic. Reality tv dating show but things get real spooky… possibly murderous (not my best but you could probably doing something cool with it). You’re not gullible enough to be hypnotized. You’re too guarded, too skeptical. But wouldn’t it be great to let go of that? To lose control and let someone else decide? What are you really doing with your body anyway? What heights of greatness could be achieved with a living body that isn’t accompanied with such an anxious, small-thinking mind like yours? Someone you love died. The only person you want to talk to about their death is them. You must find a way to talk to them. “Came back wrong” trope but they come back normal. It’s you that changes. No one goes to the hill that glows like the northern lights on quiet summer nights. There is no rule that says you can’t though. In fact no one talks about it. How has no one ever talked about it? How have you never thought to bring it up? An abandoned house you used to sneak into as a teenager is still there when you return as an adult. You have only fond memories of it. Maybe you wish to fix it up. Maybe you want to explore it one last time. Why is it scarier now? Why is that fondness gone? Why is it hostile now? ___________________ Junk Drawer ___________________ Otherworldly Scripts You find yourself in your favorite video game, in the oc that you created, what do you do? What do you see? Do you want to return home or stay there? You die and wake up as the “villain” of a book you have read before. When is it? Before they become the villain, is it after, during, or? What is your next course of action? How will you steer this story? Same as 2, except you are a side character that dies to aid the Hero/Main Character, what do you do now? Will you change the story to survive? Will you hide, stay, or die? Dungeons (think dnd) open on Earth in modern day, what changes? How does it change? What happens to humanity? You are reborn after you die, but you retain all of your memories from your past life. How does this change your way of thinking? _______________ Psychea _______________ Ready, Set– ________________ Thresholds Write about a period in your life where you had to rebuild who you were—after loss, love, illness, moving, or growing up. Write about a memory that has shifted meaning over time. How do you see it differently now than when it first happened? What does that change reveal about who you’ve become? Write a story about a character that’s going through a transition—to a new place, a new identity, a new memory. How does this change affect them? Are they better or worse off for it? Write a poem addressed to someone who exists beyond a boundary—distance, belief, life. Explore what happens when trying to cross that boundary. Art/Photography Create a piece that contains a door, open or closed. It can be themed however you like–fantasy, modern or otherwise. Capture a photograph that depicts a doorway, archway, mirror, or passage that feels symbolic—a space that invites crossing, hesitation, or wonder. _____________ Your Eyes as Honey Write a letter to a younger version of yourself. Write a story about a concept you think is queer. Write a poem in the setting of your first heartbreak. |
New Ohio Review Issue 16 (Originally printed Fall 2014)
Newohioreview.org is archiving previous editions as they originally appeared. We are pairing the pieces with curated art work, as well as select audio recordings. In collaboration with our past contributors, we are happy to (re)-present this outstanding work.
All-Time Table of Contents
NOR 36 -Fall 2025 (Available online, February 27th)
Poetry
Somewhere, Anywhere by Kathleen Lee
When I Played You “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by John Jay Speredakos
Schnitzel Wants the Good Stuff by John Jay Speredakos
The Last Photograph of Laura Before We Found Out She Was Autistic by Kim Farrar
One Christmas by Faith Shearin
Sports Illustrated by Joshua Boettiger
The Fool’s Vow by Joshua Boettiger
Miracle-Proof by Emma De Lisle
Origin Story by Dean Marshall Tuck
At the Dry Cleaner’s by Lora Keller
My Foreman Reaches by Lora Keller
Bourbon Street, Deuces Wild by Kathleen Loe
I Learned the Small-town Stuff by Kathleen Loe
Ode to a Barracuda by Suellen Wedmore
Ode to my Curls by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Old Friend by Jessica Barksdale
The Worst Scene by Jessica Barksdale
Ways to Wear It by Melissa KcKinstry
Dinosaurs in the Basement by James Davis May
How to Use This Book by Christopher Brean Murray
The Predicament by Christopher Brean Murray
True Account by Christopher Brean Murray
I Try Not to Die Every Chance I Get by Rebecca Boyle
Somerville, Winter 1976 by Mark Kraushaar
Among the Paths to Eden by Mark Kraushaar
Pinball Wizard by Gregory Lobos
Contemplative on the Train by Thalia Geiger
[Philosophy Is a Way to Find Out . . .] by William Archila
Somewhere North of Extinction by Phillip Schultz
To My New Synchronizing Pacemaker by Sydney Lea
Not too bad either by Ada Lowenthal
Congratulations! Your Grief Is About to Stop Being Relevant! by Bridget Bell
Widowhood (with Clouds and Fish) by Bridget Bell
Excerpts from Falling in Love by Bridget Bell
Deadhead the Marigolds by Bridget Bell
For My Husband Out Too Far by Chelsea Rathburn
Unaccompanied Minors by Chelsea Rathburn
Blue-Handled Grabber by Maura Stanton
Lunch with Heron by Maura Stanton
On Learning to Play the Shakuhachi Before You’re Dead by Ash Good
Wedding Present by Rodney Jones
The federal government banned lead paint in 1978 by Caroline White
The Growth of the Bureau of Infinite Growth by Lucas Jorgenson
Malpractice Insurance for Poets by David Gullette
Questions for the Lord in the Court of Divine Indifference by Kerry James Evans
First Joy by Jana-Lee Germaine
The Unhealed by Brad Aaron Modlin
Fiction
Something You Should Know by Swathi Desai
Nonfiction
Displacement and Other Sins of the Flesh by Sofie Llewellyn Riley
Feature: Reviews of Current Books
Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World by Patrick Swaney by Claire Bateman
The Deletions by Sarah Green by Bethany Schultz Hurst
Drawbridge Sewn to Jawbone: A Review of Derek JG Williams’ Reading Water by Johnny Cate
The Saddest Girl on the Beach by Heather Frese by Ashley Cowger
The Poetics of Ecology: Kathryn Nuernberger’s Held: Essays in Belonging by Anna Farro Henderson
Play This Book Loud by Joe Bonomo by Kyle Minor
Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years by Robert Rebein
NOR 35 –Spring 2025
Poetry
Of a Million Earths by Susan Browne
Small Project by William Wenthe
Nazarene Dream by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
Self-Portrait After Three Years in Outer Space by Michael Derrick Hudson
Heaven by Michael Derrick Hudson
News from Nowhere by Elton Glaser
It’s Like This Every Night by Sally Rosen Kindred
Poem for Emily Dickinson by John Hodgen
Bloodstain on Storm Door by Jeffrey Harrison
Wolf Moon Blues by Johnny Cate
Who Among Us by Suzanne Cleary
My Pet Mouse by John Sieracki
Walking to Work by John Sieracki
My College Boyfriend is at Bolt Coffee by Julie Danho
Western Mount by Madalyn Hochendoner
Here I am Participating by Madalyn Hochendoner
I Just Wanna Be Somebody by Nacy Eimers
Instructions by Rose Lambert-Sluder
Strike a Blow for Liberty by Rose Lambert-Sluder
Hospital in Blue Dark by Deborah Allbritain
Thinking About My Father’s Erector Set from 1948 by Jen Siraganian
Covenant by Gail Griffin
On Seeing Quail While Hiking in the Arastradero Preserve by Joyce Schmid
Napkin by David Thoreen
Frank Buys Groceries by David Dodd Lee
High Tide and Full Moon in Paradise by Ken Holand
In the Midst of It by Gregory Djanikian
Fiction
Mothers in the World Above and Below by Abby Horowitz
The Kingdom by Charlie Schneider
Nonfiction
Fruiting Bodies by Rose Skelton
Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective by Jodie Noel Vinson
Feature: Dance as Joy and Resistance
My Mother, Baryshnikov: Dance as Joy in Ross Gay’s “Burial” by Sara Henning
“Breath” and “Death” in Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” by Mary Jo Firth Gillett
“dancing the syllables”: Lucille Clifton and Dance as Poetic Practice by Sarah Nance
The Many Ghosts of Ponoma by Christopher Kempf
Rocking, or Rolling, on Silent Chrome Coasters by Hugh Martin
The Dancing by Jesse Lee Kercheval
The Echo of Meter: On En-Rhythming and The Furious Sun in Her Mane by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
Beneath Her Feet: Rilke’s “The Spanish Meter” by Bonnie Proudfoot
“Doing the Undoing Dance”: Anne Sexton’s Brutal”—and Brave—Struggle for Agency by Therese Gleason
Online Exclusives: Dance as Joy and Resistance
“The Dancing” by Gerald Stern by Lisa Bellamy
Blinded by Love by Karen Hildebrand
girls/all night long: (re)constructing Sappho by Jocelyn Heath and Joanna Eleftheriou
Sur Les Pointes by Renée K. Nicholson
Why is it Love by Victoria Hudson Hayes
NOR 34 – Summer 2024
Poetry
We Were Talking About Words We Did Not Like by Jessy Randall
Visiting the Natural History Museum with my 97-Year-Old Dad by Michael Mark
The Cost of Living by Mark Kraushaar
The Year Time Capsules Started Showing Up by Seth Peterson
The World as It Is by David O’Connell
You Must Act As Though You’ll Live by David O’Connell
If I’m Honest by Jaya Tripathi
Evicted by Mary Jo Firth Gillett
Old Black Water by Dion O’Reilly
Any Single Thing by Meryl Natchez
LinkedIn Said Your Dad Visited My Profile by Chrys Tobey
The Morning I Turn Forty-Five, I Wake Up by Chrys Tobey
Alcobaça in Autumn by Patricia Colleen Murphy
The Hair Cutting by Ockert Greeff
In Praise of the Hand Tool by Megan Blankenship
Sleep Singing by Sara Fetherolf
The Museum of Death by Sara Fetherolf
I Look for You by Jen McClanaghan
Ode: Man in a Baseball Cap by Steve Coughlin
Distant Shore by Steve Coughlin
Unifying Theory by Steve Coughlin
Who I Passed While Running by Kenneth Tanemura
Grief Mentor by Kenneth Tanemura
My Soul Refuses to Write Itself by Veronica Kornberg
My Sister by Veronica Kornberg
My Dental Hygienist Confides in Me by Rose Zinnia
Go, Went, Gone by Sara T. Baker
My Mother’s Breast Prosthesis Falls Out by Sara T. Baker
The Mouse by Michael Pontacoloni
Annual Business Trip by Michael Pontacoloni
Safety Deposit by John Bargowski
The Chaplain by John Bargowski
A Good Review by A. J. Bermudez
Kintsugi as Bob Marley, Yo La Tengo, Thelonius Monk, and Over the Rhine by Becca J. R. Lachman
My Darling, You Aren’t Mine by Becca J. R. Lachman
100% illuminated: Or, Nine lines with nine syllable for Luna by Becca J. R. Lachman
Late to the Table by Becca J. R. Lachman
Reading Shackleton During My Husband’s Cancer Treatment by Michele Bombardier
Third foster placement: age two by August Green
Fiction
A House So Vast by Adrienne Brock
Seeing it Through by Allegra Solomon
My Body is a Cemetery by Eliza Sullivan
Kate Sessions Park by Bruce McKay
Nonfiction
In Our Nature by Sunni Brown Wilkinson
The Ground Beneath the Bars by Jessica Lee Richardson
Feature: Review of Current Books
Review by Erin Redfern: Katie Berta’s Retribution Forthcoming
Review by Kevin Prufer: John Gallaher’s My Life in Brutalist Architecture
Review by Denise Duhamel: Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems
Review by Claire Bateman: Carrie Oeding’s If I Could Give You a Line
Review by Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal: Abigail Rose-Marie’s The Moonflowers
Review by Gwen E. Kirby: E. M. Tran’s Daughters of the New Year
Review by Nicole Walker: Zoë Bossiere’s Cactus Country
NOR 33 – Fall 2023
Poetry
Self-Portrait as Someone Not Supposed to Be Here by Brad Aaron Modlin
Fortune Cookie by Brad Aaron Modlin
At Home in the Dog Days by Elton Glaser
Theory of Knowledge by Fay Dillof
Different Planet by Fay Dillof
helen of troy recalls the tenth date by Maria Zoccola
Has this happened to you by Rebecca Foust
We All Know That Something Is Eternal by John Gallaher
How to Sweep a Garage Floor by David Thoreen
Eavesdropping by Taylor Byas
Hunters in the Snow by Linda Bamber
What’s With All These Foxes by Gwendolyn Soper
High Stepping by Angela Ball
Étude en douze exercices, S.136 by Weijia Pan
Red Tulips by Stephanie Coyne DeGhett
Viper by Kimberly Johnson
The Shades by Kimberly Johnson
All I Want by Justin Rigamonti
The Great Conjunction by Sarah Green
Barred Owl by Robert Cording
My Vera Cruz Road by Steve Myers
Canary by Nick Flynn
Irish Traveler’s Writer’s Block by Joanne Dominque Dwyer
Inherit by Joanne Dominque Dwyer
Essay on the Devil by Adele Elise Williams
Yes, There Is a Paris, Idaho by Bethany Schultz Hurst
Visit With My Daughter by Joyce Schmid
Drought Interrupted by Craig van Rooyen
Human Observed Preserving Cucumbers by Wes Civilz
The End of the World by Susan Browne
29th Anniversary by Susan Browne
Circus School by Cassie Burkhardt
On Our Way Home by Jill Michelle
Why I Don’t Want to Be Young Again by C. O’Sullivan Green
Avenue of Soviet Heroes by Andrew Payton
Self-help by Andreas Nussbaumer
Potentially Anyway by Matt Hart
That Evening Sun by Kate Fox
Questions for the Singer of the Last American Folk Song by Matthew Thomas Bernell
Fiction
Mythology by Chi Siegel
Errands by John Honkala
Red Skies by Danielle Batalion Ola
I Am Cunigunde by River Adams
Devices by Claire Bateman
The Self-Correcting Language by Claire Bateman
Baby Suits by Jonathon Atkinson
Smithereens by Tyler Sones
Encounter by Xingzi Chen
Nonfiction
Grieving with Wordsworth by Robert Cording
Shed by Ashlen Renner
I Am No Beekeeper by Arya Samuelson
Feature: Ohio Stories II
“Enduring Mystery” and the Ferryman Farmer in Mary Oliver’s “The River Styx, Ohio” by Rachel Rinehart
“Above the River”: James Wright’s Ohio “Bloodroots” by Therese Gleason
Elegies for Home: An Interview with Amit Majmudar by Betsy K. Brown
Ohio Geometry: Hanif Abdurraqib and the Shape of Home by Vrinda Jagota
A Writer in America by Molly Rideout
Ohio Hip: In-betweenness in Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel” by Caitlin Horrocks
“An Other for Ohio’s Self”: David Foster Wallace’s Great Ohio Desert by Michael O’Connell
NOR 32 – Spring 2023
Poetry
Front Page by George Bilgere
Insult to Injury by George Bilgere
Nine by George Bilgere
Car Talk by Constance Campana
Women Alone in Cars by Pamela Davis
Heist by Chris Greenhalgh
What I Am Telling You, Jessica, Is That Those Chickens Are Fine by K.T. Landon
Dependable Lies by Isaac George Lauritsen
Unspirit by Matt Hart
Gown by Dobby Gibson
Sometimes it feels so animal— by Alice White
Blink Once for Yes by Mark Cox
The Triple Goddess with a Bird’s Head, on My Dad’s Side by Sue D. Burton
The Numbers by David Dodd Lee
8 Ball at Sportsmen’s Bar & Grill by John Bargowski
In the Red Vinyl Booth of the Horseshoe Cafe by Carol Tiebout
The Happening by Josh Luckenbach
Aubade by Josh Luckenbach
Their Every Yellow Leaf by Sarah Sarai
The End of the Story by Damen O’Brien
Patience as a Crocodile by Damen O’Brien
Oncology by Corinne Wohlford Mason
The Stories That Told You by Carolina Hotchandani
Leaving by Kevin Boyle
Rabbit by Kevin Boyle
Job Interview: Where do you see yourself in five years? by Carrie Shipers
The Hiring Committee Makes Its First and Final Offer by Carrie Shipers
Questions for the Tech Founder by Carrie Shipers
7-Eleven Sermon by Craig van Rooyen
Omen by Sydney Lea
Halfway to Vermont by Owen McLeod
The Exaltation by Ronald Okuaki Lieber
Sometimes I believe, by Dion O’Reilly
Shelf Life by George Kalogeris
In Memory by Bruce Beasley
Superglue by Robert W. Cording
Phone Calls by Robert W. Cording
Fearfully & wonderfully by Stacey Forbes
Revealed by Jessica E. Pierce
Hard-boiled Elegy by Lynn Emanuel
The Unassuming Objects of Film Noir by Lynn Emanuel
Lucidity by Ken Holland
Betwixt and Between by Ken Holland
Mother Standing in the Atlantic by Eben E. B. Bein
Looking Through My Mother’s Dresser as a Child by Joyce Schmid
Dandelion Is the New Guru by Lisa Bellamy
Our Grandmother by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Mysterious Ways by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Fiction
Costumes by Carlee Jensen
Wolf by Julia Strayer
Hair of the Dog by James Sullivan
A Blueprint for Escape by Anna Farro Henderson
Our Trouble by David Hansen
Nonfiction
The House, the Russian, and the Dying by Raphael H. Kosek
Ode to My Minivan by Cassie Burkhardt
Feature
Reproductive Rights in Literature
Breaking the Silence: Abortion and Knowledge in Summer and Weeds by Jana Tigchelaar
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Birth Without the Gendered Body by Rebecca Richardson
Monstrous Body Horror in Transition: Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt and Jeannette Winterson’s Frankisstein by Emrys Donaldson
Getting It Behind Them by Wendy Rawlings
Unwinding Unwind by Hilary Brewster
Finding The Boundary Line: A Look at Ayelet Waldman’s “Rocketship” by Jennifer Furner
Tove Ditlevsen, Abortion, and Dependency as Birthright by Anna Rollins
Hall of Mirrors by Lee Ann Roripaugh
Something Has Tried To Kill Me: Race, Poetry, and Reproductive Rights by Sarah Green
Abortion Is Like Art: Red Clocks and the Facts of the Body by Madeline ffitch
NOR 31 – Fall 2022
Poetry
Near Miss by Bill Hollands
August, Incessant by Catherine Harnett
Heatwave by Laura Linart
Our Bedroom by Rebecca Foust
Who knows why the bay was that color by Rose Auslander
Residue by Maria Dylan Himmelman
Self-Portrait as a Half-Deserted Town in Germany by Greg Nicholl
O Isn’t This Just Easy by JC Andrews
Sneaking Out to Play House with Ana by JC Andrews
Fugitive by Karen Pojmann
Tails by William Wenthe
Little Manifesto by Jeffrey Harrison
A Message from Tony Hoagland by Jeffrey Harrison
Homework by Tony Hoagland
Siberia by Tony Hoagland
Why I Like the Hospital by Tony Hoagland
Ode to My Father’s Body by Jeri Theriault
Winter Solstice by Natalie Taylor
Late, Dark, and Windy by Kathleen Lee
Sad As Is by Kathleen Lee
Assimilation by Kelly Rowe
Reading Li Bai During Social Distancing by Jenna Le
Dollhouse by Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo
Allegory, NJ by Julian Koslow
Opportunity by Robert Wood Lynn
What I Could Not Take by Erin Redfern
There, There by Erin Redfern
Ode to the White Girl at the Gym by Shavahm Dorris-Jefferson
Before We Rushed Our Daughter to the Hospital by Lina Herman
Mood Lighting by Lara Egger
The Age of Reckoning by Lara Egger
Caveat Emptor by Lara Egger
To Avoid or to Embrace by Matthew T. Birdsall
Sand by Justin Rigamonti
On the Cusp by Carol Moldaw
Donation by Linda Hillringhouse
Intersection by Linda Hillringhouse
A Business Problem Arises by Alan Feldman
A Story Often Grunted Across the High Plateaus of Our Island by Rich Smith
I’ve Always Wanted to Be Truly Alone by John Sieracki
O Youthfulness by Dean Young
Fiction
The Windowless Room of Wisdom by Drew Calvert
The Pillow Museum by Claire Bateman
Sometimes Creek by Steve Fox
A Good Thing Going by Marguerite Alley
Listen by Pamela Gullard
Eyrie Hours by Stephanie A. Pushaw
The Mentor by Lexi Pandell
Nonfiction
On Throwing Things Away by Amelia Mairead McNally
How Do You Name a Hurricane? by Amy Lee Scott
Feature
The Poetic Environment
Before Poetry Can Save the Planet, It Needs to Shift Our Souls by Marcia LeBeau
At Home in the Cosmos: On the Poetry of Don Domanski by Tarn MacArthur
Indivisible by Martha Serpas
How Blank an Eye? Seeing and Overlooking Nature in Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” by Matthew VanWinkle
Reflections in Lake District Mist by Alycia Pirmohamed
Poetry as a Lakeside Trailer Park by Tina Mozelle Braziel
NOR 30 – Winter 2022
Poetry
A Mind at Home With Itself by Marcia LeBeau
A Covered Dish by Katie Condon
Poem in the Romantic Tradition by American Adult by Katie Condon
Befuddled by Kim Farrar
The Classical Archaeology of My Skeleton by Michael Derrick Hudson
On Finding Out My Genome Includes About Three Percent Neanderthal DNA by Michael Derrick Hudson
Sonnet with Acne and Hawk by Robert Thomas
Bad News, Baby, Good News, Dog. by Britt McGillivray
Deep Nostalgia by Peter O’Donovan
Scene of the Crime by Peter O’Donovan
The Cabbage by Peter O’Donovan
The Last Day of America by Benjamin Grimes
Despots by Peter Maeck
Black Site by Peter Maeck
Adrift by Peter Maeck
A View of the World by Linda K. Sienkewicz
Snapchat at the Magical Arctic Puffin Exhibit by Shelly S. Cato
Graduation Day by Ian Christopher Hooper
Nobody wants to hear about other people’s dreams by Nina Reljic
A Flaw in the Mirror by Ted Kooser
A Stained Glass Window by Ted Kooser
Dancer by Ted Kooser
Alone by Ted Kooser
Picking Up After the Dead by Ted Kooser
Mimicry by Allison Funk
What Else the Grapefruit Said by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
Chain of Custody by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
October by Hannah Sullivan Brown
Not Seeing Lorca’s House by Hannah Sullivan Brown
Chiba by Amy Alvarez
In Jezero Crater by Kate Gaskin
Lightning Dragons by Kate Gaskin
Our Eyes Can See Colors that Don’t Exist by Lisa Alletson
Mukahara by Jessica Poll
205 Bistro by Brock Guthrie
Future Perfect by Susan Kress
“You May Want to Marry My Husband” by Susan Kress
Nothing Will Happen by Jeff Tigchelaar
A Day at the Museum by Kathleen Holiday
A Fortune in Trades by Cecelia Hagen
Open Mic at Tony’s Bar and Grill by Tracey Knapp
A Working List by Tracey Knapp
Absolution by Kathleen Loe
Tapping by John Bargowski
Upcountry Detour by Sydney Lea
The hardest part of losing her mother in 2020 by Nancy Miller Gomez
My Family by Nancy Miller Gomez
Cultural Appropriation by Nancy Miller Gomez
Siren Song by Nancy Miller Gomez
Watching the Wind by Roger Mitchell
After Petrarch by Emily Wheeler
The Missing Poem by Emily Wheeler
Vernal Equinox by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Fiction
Doppel by Max Bell
The Dog Run by Anne Cooperstone
Callejeros by A.J. Rodriguez
The Hofstetters Go Back to the Hotel by Will Kelly
Keepsakes Tanya Bomsta
Abu Hani’s Middle Eastern Foods and Gifts by Sarah Cypher
Nonfiction
Winter by Faith Shearin
One of Us and The Other by Lisa Buchanan
Feature
NOR 29 – Summer 2021
Poetry
Ode to the Fresh Start by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Entropy by Elton Glaser
A Summer Wind, a Cotton dress by Kate Fox
4D by Jon Fischer
Heron of Plastic Bag by Jon Fischer
What the Drawing Explains by Jon Fischer
Spring Reflection by Stephanie Choi
In the Garden by Kelly Rowe
Garden Sitting by Jennifer Dorner
Raw Numbers by Jasmine V. Bailey
Ocean City, New Jersey by Jasmine V. Bailey
All Animals Want the Same Things by Jeanne-Marie Osterman
Encore by Maura Faulise
Heels by Justin Rigamonti
Anne Lester by Emma Aylor
Mt. Athos by Emma Aylor
We Don’t Die by Darius Simpson
Essentials by Todd Boss
Tracers by Todd Boss
He Divides His Time Between by Todd Boss
At the Coffee Shop on Rogers by Robert Wood Lynn
The Delay by Emily Sernaker
January Dispatch by Emily Sernaker
Palm Beach International Airport by Roy Bentley
Tapestries by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
She Asks Me, Who is Roger? By Chrys Tobey
Me/n by Sarah Suhr
Incubus by Emily Nason
Doctor’s Office Behind Plank Country Store, Feet in Stirrups, I Think my Grandmother’s Hand Deveining Shrimp by Emily Nason
Sertraline by Emily Nason
Widow’s Weeds by Courtney Huse Wika
San Francisco Bay View, November 2018 by D.R. Goodman
Moon Facts by Dan Pinkerton
Exile by Margot Kahn
Ditch by David Thoreen
Prayer to Mercury by Justin Jannise
Ordinary Ode by Michael Lavers
Unvocation by Michael Lavers
Three Buttered Muffins by Michael Lavers
November Elergy by Michael Lavers
Great by Emily Blair
The Emperor of Mashed Potatoes by Emily Blair
Pomegranate by J.C. Scharl
An Answer Without a Question by Robert Cording
Koi Pond: Failed Meditation by Robert Cording
Doves in Morning Fog by Robert Cording
Everett Avenue Facing East by David Gullette
The Unanming by Hadara Bar-Nadav
Saturday by Ruth Baumann
epitaph for time travel by Amy Bagwell
Amends by Samantha Padgett
Dark Forces by Tara Orzolek
kind of by Dylan Ecker
Prairie Box by Peter Krumbach
Last Request by Theresa Burns
A Fox by Ted Kooser
Fiction
How to Peel an Orange by Stephanie Wheeler
Albuquereque Sunrise by Ashley Hand
Violent Devotion by Gwen Mullins
Landfall by Jermey Griffin
Fetus Egg by Annie Trinh
The Sisters Jeppard by George Choundas
Before He Made love He Made Light by David Lerner Schwartz
Nonfiction
The Frozen Shoulder by Rose Strode
Swamp Lunch by John Hazard
Feature
Poets on Children’s Literature
The Lady Whispering Hush by Pichchenda Bao
When The World’s Worst Readers Met The World’s Worst Children by Marcia LeBeau
Worth the Wait by Jared Harél
Love for the World: The Poetry of Frog and Toad by Sunni Brown Wilkinson
“Because they grow up/and forget what they know”: On the Strange Wisdom of Children’s Poetry by Erin Redfern
You Are What You Read by Adrienne Su
Over and Over by Sarah Green
The Fabric by Jeff Tigchelaar
NOR 28 – Fall 2020
Poetry
The Time Traveler Chooses an Arrival Point by Emily Blair
Broken by John Glowney
The Other Big Bang by Mason Wray
Gone by Jennifer Burd
Ruthless by Emily Lee Luan
When My Sorrow Was Born by Emily Lee Luan
I Was Startled It Was Death by David O’Connell
Love Song by David O’Connell
We’re Thinking of the Black Hole at the Center of the Galaxy by David O’Connell
America as a History of Arterial Circulation by Alison Powell
Force of Habit by Kathleen Winter
What is There to Do in Akron, Ohio? by Darius Simpson
It Was As If We Were on Vacation by Jen Ashburn
Self-Imposed Exile by Lucas Cardona
Invisible Bodies by Aza pace
Daughter Poem by Lisa Dordal
A Coyote Runs Down Michigan Avenue by Sara Ryan
Circumstances and Disappearance by Sara Ryan
the grove again by Aurora Lee Shimshak
Chickens in Your Backyard by Miriam Flock
Live From the Met by Miriam Flock
Another Refugee Poem by Pichchenda Bao
I’m Only Dancing by Chris Ketchum
Love Letters by Susan Browne
Icarus by Robert Cording
Epistle to Myself on my 70th Birthday by Robert Cording
Ode to the Impossible by Matthew T. Birdsall
(R)egret by Danusha Laméris
Anachronism by Terese Gleason
Blue Camaro by Owen McLeod
The Elks at the Watering Hole by Steve Myers
Aubade From the Snake Pit Alehouse by Maggie Glover
Something Implausible by Gregory Djanikian
Prenup by Marcia LeBeau
Eleventh Anniversary by Marcia LeBeau
Lucky by Marcia LeBeau
The Love Poem by Marcia LeBeau
Fulminate by Kimberly Johnson
Fusion by Kimberly Johnson
Ode to the Wild Heart by Mary Jo Firth Gillett
Thursday Night, DivorceCare by Jana-Lee Germaine
The Measuring by Veronica Corpuz
The Bees by Rick Viar
how we end by Paula Harris
sisters by James Lineberger
tree with ice, under amber light by James Lineberger
North River Shad, c. 1910 by Lindsay Atnip
Long Division by Jessica Tanck
Last Night I Told a Stranger by Mary Leauna Christensen
Life Through Glass by Jonathan Duckworth
Polar Bear by George Bilgere
The Scar by George Bilgere
Homecoming by Christopher Brean Murray
Currency of Survival by Natalie Taylor
Gothic by SM Stubbs
Jesus and My Way of Seeing Him Go by Jeanie Walker
forecast for tomorrow says snow by Bernard Ferguson
My IRS by Adam O. Davis
The Arachnologist by Benjamin Gucciardi
Leaf Light by Emily Tuszynska
Night Train by Emily Tuszynska
Awe by Peter Krumach
Amtrak Psalm by Craig Van Rooyen
“Take the Neck Step Against Aging” by Craig Van Rooyen
Requiem with “Little Wing” by Craig Van Rooyen
Fiction
The Names You Choose by Nicole VanderLinden
The Ways You Lose by Samantha Edmonds
Memorial Day on Fire Island w/ Laughing Buddha by Ed Falco
Prime Cuts by Lara Palmqvist
We Are the Bachelorettes and We Insist by Susan Finch
Nonfiction
Exodus by D. Gilson
There Will Be Salvation Yet by Tania De Rozario
Feature
On Ongoingness: a Conversation with Ada Limón and Jaswinder Bolina
NOR 27 – Spring 2020
Poetry
Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in an Empty Lot in Newark by Theresa Burns
I propose we worship the mud dauber by Jessica Pierce
This is a Love Poem to Trees by Hannah Marshall
How I’ve Wanted You by Mark Anthony Burke
Wants by Chris Greenhalgh
Final Visitation by Dan Albergotti
Watching for You by Connie Zumpf
Run in such a way that you will obtain it by Justin Danzy
Interrogation Scene by Allison Elliott
What I Meant to Say by Emily Alexander
How it Ought to Be by David J. Bauman
St. Cuthman of Steyning by Edison Dupree
Stolen Hard Drive by John Moessner
No, Nothing by Daryl Jones
Suite Ending with the Middle School Symphony Orchestra by Erin Malone
Learning by Kelly Michels
The Pasture Ponds by John Bargowski
Tackle by John Bargowski
Knife and Salt by Justin Hunt
The Worst Thing Ever Done to Me by Rodney Jones
American Horror by Jessica Alexander
Chip’s Laundromat by Stephanie Rogers
Dear Sister of My Childhood by Stephanie Rogers
Tilt-A-Whirl by Nancy Miller Gomez
Bayou Newlyweds by Rome Hernandez Morgan
Fireworks: Albuquerque by Kate Fetherston
Lap Dance with No Ending by Kathleen Balma
Photo of Betty at Mass Ave and Third by Mark Kraushaar
Layover by Caitlin Cowan
When a Friend Writes of her Pregnancy by Josephine Yu
When the Doctor Calls After the Final Round of IVF by Josephine Yu
CVS by Erin Redfern
The Wild Barnacle by Billy Collins
Cahoots by Suzanne Cleary
Brief Guide by Suzanne Cleary
Thinking vs. Feeling by Katie Brunero
Sonnet with Hound and Sequins by Robert Thomas
When They Were Handing Out Superpowers by Robert Wood Lynn
God Is Going to Be Late to the Party by R. Bratten Weiss
New Year’s Resolution by R. Bratten Weiss
Immediately Following Mandatory Happy Hour with the Boss by Molly Kirschner
Saturday by Veronica Kornberg
Ode to My Pink Bathroom by Julie Danho
Love, Again by Sarah O. Oso
Rodeo by Sarah Brown Wilkinson
Palacios by Mark Alan Williams
Free Association by Henrietta Goodman
Second-Hand Tongue by Tamara Miller
Donovan by Susan Browne
Fiction
Squids by Liz Breazeale
The Tour by Erica S. Arkin
The Problems of the Wild by Abby Horowitz
Miss USA 2015 by Yxta Maya Murray
Nonfiction
Smoke by Jerald Walker
Feature
Machines, Mortality, and the Lyric Poem by Bethany Schultz Hurst
The Transitional Voice: Exploring Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Texting” by Claire Bateman
The Technology of the American Sonnet by Brian Brodeur
On Language, Bombs, and Other Things That Exist by Kimberly Grey
NOR 26 – Fall 2019
2019 Contest Winners
IN FICTION
Coyotes by Terri Leker
IN POETRY
The Flash by Jennifer Givhan
IN NONFICTION
Promised Lands by Christie Tate
Poetry
Sad Rollercoaster by Jared Harél
The Men at Snowbowl Teaching Their Daughters to Ski by Henrietta Goodman
Lisbon Haibon by Melissa Oliveiera
The Summer Before Your Birth by Christine Fraser
Keeping Warm by Faith Shearin
From a great height by Natalie Taylor
Goodly the Sum by Julie Hanson
Postcards by Eleanor Kedney
Virga by Joyce Schmid
On the First Day That Feels Like Fall I Think of Her Then, the Age I Am Now by Beth Marzoni
What If We Wake Up Dead by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
Valentine by Susan Browne
No Good After Midnight by Jessica Hincapie
You Once Felt Gigantic by Jonathan Greenhause
Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning by Elton Glaser
Until We Do by Sydney Lea
Note to My First Wife by Steven Cramer
How Young Boys Survive the Ghetto: 101 by Taylor Byas
Sunday Service by Taylor Byas
Failing to Master the Art of Erasure by Wendy Taylor
Throwing Rocks by Wendy Taylor
At Sixty-Two by Dion O’Reilly
Liberal Father by Dion O’Reilly
Silbar by Dion O’Reilly
My Beatification by John Gallaher
Pollution by Amelie Meltzer
Meg Francis by Kate Sweeney
Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil
Twilite Motel and Lounge by Mark Kraushaar
A Letter to My Former Employer One Week After My Untimely Death by Nancy Miller Gomez
Suspensions by Claire Bateman
The Virgin Mirror by Claire Bateman
Scatter by Claire Bateman
The Strategic Plan by Carrie Shipers
Rules of Order by Carrie Shipers
Questions for the Office of Public Relations by Carrie Shipers
When the AI Program That Writes Biographies for Every Human Who Ever Lived Gets Around to Writing Mine by Walker Pfost
How to Be Better by Being Worse by Justin Jannise
Wethersfield by Michael Pontacoloni
Moving the Piano by Kathryn Petruccelli
One Step by Betsy Sholl
Alexa by Ruth Bardon
The Oldies, at Island Pond, Vermont by Allen Stein
Morning Rig by Angela Sorby
The Dog in the Library by Catherine Stearns
Anti-Confessional by Catherine Stearns
Exile Queen by Bethany Schultz Hurst
Fiction
16 Days of Glory by Jill Rosenberg
Soda Money by Emily Johns-O’Leary
Melbourne Beach by Eric Boehling Lewis
Nonfiction
On the Walls by Julialicia Case
Feature
Jean Cocteau and Orpheus: The Poet as Filmmaker by Steve Vineberg
Keep Me In By Keeping Me Out: Poetry On Screen by Carrie Oeding
A Personal Affair: The Making of a Poetry Film by Michele Poulos
Beautiful, Brilliant, and Dead: Portraits of the Female Poet in Film by Danusha Laméris
NOR 25 – Spring 2019
2019 Contest Winners
IN POETRY:
Quail on the Airfield by Ellen Seusy
IN PROSE:
Rabbit Summer by Jane Marcellus
Poetry
Work in Progress by Lance Larsen
Compost by Lance Larsen
No Blueprint, by Mary Jo Firth Gillett
Poem for the Peony by Mary Jo Firth Gillett
Landscape with iPhone by Emily Mohn-Slate
Roost by Janice N. Harrington
Selling by Judy Kronenfeld
What is your favorite past time? By Robert Danberg
My Life Is Like This by John Mark Ballenger
Marriage Prayer by John Mark Ballenger
Manhattan Afternoon by Ansie Baird
Portrait of Love as Failed Vocabulary Quiz by Kristin Robertson
Toyota Yaris by Dan J. Vice
You Want to Go Back by Fleming Meeks
Miracle of Life by Joanne Dominique Dwayer
Shallow Person by Joanne Dominique Dwayer
Success by Tony Hoagland
Sunday at the Mall by Tony Hoagland
Learning Swedish in Secret as a Joke by Bobbie Jean Huff
You Are My Sunshine by Bobbie Jean Huff
Spring by Lauren Shapiro
Poem Beginning with “My Father” by Craig van Rooyen
Three Bells by Craig van Rooyen
Mailing a Letter by Dawn Davies
Graduation by Maria Nazos
I Go Back to Mykonos 1976 by Maria Nazos
Without Pain by Kelly Michels
Lucky by Steven Dawson
Repossession by Steven Dawson
Train Prayer by Steven Dawson
Then and Now, the Essex Street Market by Roger Mitchell
Thief by Owen McLeod
Confirmation by John McCarthy
In Dog Dreams by Karla K. Morton
Trattoria Tagliati, Positano by Karla K. Morton
The Illusion of Belief by Kate Fox
If Your Spouse Dies First by Stephanie Johnson
After the Date by Lana Spendl
World Order by Lesley Wheeler
Uncivil by Lesley Wheeler
Monarch by Kathleen Radigan
Drag Heavy Pot to Shed (Ars Poetica) by Janine Certo
Fiction
Recovery by Max Bell
Devil’s Advocate by Becky Hagenston
Tough Love by Paul Hansen
A Fistful of Dirt by Sujatha Fernandes
Bliss by Amber Wheeler Bacon
Flower World by Jeremy Schnotala
Nonfiction
An Oral History of Hands as Told to Me by My Grandmother by Mercedes Lucero
Feature
Shadow and Shine: Ohio in the Literary Imagination by Jana Tigchelaar
“On the Lip of Lake Erie”: Toni Morrision’s Ohio Aesthetic by Dustin Faulstick
The Importance and Depth of “Ohio” in Two Poems by Rita Dove and Ai by Marcus Jackson
Buckeye Sci-Fi: “Does Anything Exciting ever Happen Around Here” by Christopher A. Sims
Sometimes a Vague Notion by David Armstrong
NOR 24 – Fall 2018
2018 Contest Winners
IN FICTION:
Return by Analía Villagra
IN NONFICTION:
Who’s Loving You by Kelsey Ronan
IN POETRY:
My Babysitter Karen B Who Was Sent to Willard Asylum by Jessica Cuello
Fiction
The Deluge by Alan Sincic
Real Things by Nicole Hebdon
Weanie Tender, PO by Jennifer Christman
Coach O by Robert Hinderliter
Here Comes Happy by Shauna Mackay
Nonfiction
The Uber Diaries by Kyle Minor
Poetry
My Hometown, the Hypothetical Guided Tour by Dan Wiencek
Trouble by Danusha Laméris
Bird by Danusha Laméris
Stopover on a Road Trip to L.A., 1981 by C.W. Emerson
We Have Got to Get Out of L.A. by Suzanne Lummis
To Inscribe by Anne Starling
Asking for a Friend by Emily Sernaker
Thing-Poem After the Social Event by Karen Benning
Talking by Christopher Brean Murray
Merriweather by Christopher Brean Murray
Happy Lamp by Catherine Carter
Soulmates by Peter Krumbach
Box in a Closet by Faith Shearin
On the Ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles by Kirsten Abel
Calling Annie Oakley by Kirsten Abel
Calchas Reading the Signs by George Kalogeris
Europeans Wrapping Knickknacks by David Kirby
My Father Visits Not Long After My Mother (His Wife Twenty Years Ago) Dies by Brock Guthrie
Leaf Blower by Alan Shapiro
Hole in One by Alan Shapiro
Closer by Alan Shapiro
Bay Sunday by W.J. Herbert
Stateline Lake by Arlyce Menzies
The Petrified Man by Pamela Davis
Ode on a Midlife VW by Craig van Rooyen
Interstate 5 Ode by Craig van Rooyen
Ode to My Backyard Gopher by Craig van Rooyen
Costco Ode by Craig van Rooyen
Naked, Fierce, Yelling Stone Age Grannies by Lisa Bellamy
Our Fathers by Lisa Bellamy
Moo by Chrys Tobey
Cockadoodledoo by Chrys Tobey
Women in Treatment by Theresa Burns
Calculations by Linda Hillringhouse
An Education by Molly Minturn
Wex in Totus Taggle by Owen Doyle
At the Wives’ Coffee by Abby E. Murray
Language Immersion by Jeff Walker
The Missing Friendship Network by Tony Hoagland
The Blackbird Whistling by Linda Bamber
Trees in March by Linda Bamber
Mango Languages by Linda Bamber
Near the Campo Aponal, on My Father’s Birthday by David Brendan Hopes
Feature
The Pursuit of Ignorance: The Challenging Figuration of Not Knowing by Tony Hoagland
The Power of Coldness by Tony Hoagland
The Wild Life of Metaphor: Prehensile, Triangulating, Insubordinate by Tony Hoagland
NOR 23 – Spring 2018
Fiction
Roland Raccoon by Karin Lin-Greenburg
Wings of Wind by Eliot Fintushel
No Moon Night by Marti Boone Mattia
The Blue Goodness by Maureen McGranaghan
Guardian by Rebecca Haas
No One Dies in Fiction Anymore by Kaj Tanaka
Swimmers by Bryan Fulton
Nonfiction
Of a Burrito de Buche by Patrick Mainelli
Haunting Houses by Jacqueline Doyle
This Is How It Will Feel by Jennifer Watkins
Poetry
Midnight at the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company by Sandy Gingras
Los Angeles, 1990 by Jerry Williams
May My Enemy Be Overcome By His Own Glitter by Laura Paul Watson
Google Map by Connie Zumpf
Strangers I Think I Know by Connie Zumpf
Dancing Horses are Becoming More Beautiful and More Useful Every Day by Mari Casey
Not the Wolf but the Dog by Jacqueline Berger
Another Version of My Confession by Lara Egger
Day Residue in Winter by Wes Civilz
Dragonflies by Danusha Laméris
The Problem by Grant Clauser
Here’s the Plan by Patrick Meeds
My Younger Self Attempts Breakdancing at the Sadie Hawkins Dance by Kerry James Evans
Creed for Atheists by Matthew Buckley Smith
The Spiritual Exercises by Lisa Ampleman
The Jesus Bus by Melissa Studdard
Fez Postcard / Call to Prayer by Jacqueline Osherow
Blessed is He by Jeff Tigchelaar
This Is a .50-Caliber Wound by Jeff Tigchelaar
Reverse Sculpture by Richard Dey
Free Will by Daniel Eduardo Ruiz
Arrangement in Gray and Black by Laurie Rosenblatt
Ye Are of More Value than Many Sparrows by Elton Glaser
April 21st by Billy Collins
The Card Players by Billy Collins
Made-up Saints by Claire Scott
Aubade with Looney Tunes by Matthew Luzitano
Tightrope by William Fargason
Loose Ends by Gregory Djanikian
Judgment Call by James Lineberger
In the Gas Station Bathroom with My New Son by Amy O’Reilly
At the Outpatient Clinic by Andrea Hollander
And Later I Will Forget About the Bread by Andrea Hollander
Confusion of Privilege by Tony Hoagland
Local News by Christopher Kempf
These People by Anele Rubin
Timeless Beauty by Brian Hall
Black Sesame by Adrienne Su
The News of Touch by Craig van Rooyen
A Small Prayer by Craig van Rooyen
Feature
What Essy Stone Done to Us by Anders Carlson-Wee
Speculative Solutions to the Political Poem: Ann Killough’s “Statue of Liberty” by Tony Hoagland
“Your Body Everywhere”: Time and Forgiveness in Carl Phillips’s “Since You Ask” by Chiyuma Elliott
“Arch-Talk” and the Postmodern Gall of Josh Bell and Mark Bibbins by Keith Kopka
Stumbling into the Sublime: Claire Bateman’s “Another Poem on Blue” by Veronica Schuder
The Present Deeply: The 21st-Century Love Poem by Mario Chard
NOR 22 – Fall 2017
Poetry
The Burden of Humans by Michael Lavers
I’m Trying to Write a Joyful Poem by Emily Mohn-Slate
First Train Ride Together: Northeast Corridor by Linda Bamber
Zenyatta by Grady Chambers
Ending the Poem by Theresa Burns
Gentleman Caller by Elton Glaser
Waitress in an All-Night Diner, West Virginia by Rebecca Baggett
Bag Lady Muse by Rebecca Baggett
Laundromat by Ted Kooser
The Clipper Ship by Ted Kooser
Hilltop Cemetery by Brendan Cooney
Experiment. Kathryn Cowles. Metal, treadmill, button, psychiatrists, the artist. 2014 by Kathryn Cowles
Topology by Christine Gosnay
Cedar Waxwing, Late November by John Hazard
Yesterday, Northern Michigan, Interstate 75 by John Hazard
My Lifelong Relationship with God by Julie Hanson
The Thing About Dumb Jokes Is You Have to Be There by Emily Blair
Nest by Suzanne Cleary
Laundry by Robert Cording
At Milward Funeral Home, Lexington, KY by Jeff Worley
The Last Father Poem by William Varner
Meditation on My 44th Birthday by Jason Irwin
46 Years Old by Karen Skolfield
Walking the Dogs by Veronica Schuder
Lunatic, Time by Rachel Rinehart
There Was a Young Woman with Cancer by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Ode to Texting by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
And Another Thing by Gregory Djanikian
You Are My Sunshine Alpay Ulku
On Rereading Madame Bovary at Forty by Erin Redfern
A Brief History of Hunger by Mary Jo Firth Gillett
Happiness by Daniel Arias-Gomez
It’s a Sad Day That’s Full of Sadness by Peter Leight
Evening with Little Comfort by Caitlin Vance
James Bond by Eleanor Wright
My Mother’s Neck by Sarah Suhr
Maintenance by David Gullette
Borges’s Farewell to Meadville, Pennsylvania by Stephen Myers
It Depends by Lisa Rhoades
Florida Man Throws Alligator into Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window by Mitchell Jacobs
The Reflex by Mitchell Jacobs
Villa Jovis by Aaron Baker
Seafaring by Marie-Elizabeth Mali
I Never Met a Flower That Yelled At Me by Julie L. Moore
Here Below by Sarah Carleton
Giverny by Emily Sernaker
Fiction
Delectable Hazards at the Animal Drive by Michael Chaney
Chosen by Hanna Halperin-Goldstein
Love’s Been Good to Me by Andrew Robinson
Nonfiction
The Getaway by Rebecca McClanahan
The Oregon Trail by Corey Van Landingham
2017 Contest Winners
IN FICTION:
Clean for Him the Ashes by David E. Yee
IN NONFICTION:
Sometimes the Mother Eats Her Young by Rachel Cochran
IN POETRY:
Where the Stars Are Hived by James Lineberger
Convocation by James Lineberger
Feature
Writing What You Know and Whom You’ve Known by Joey Franklin
What Binds Them Together by Rachel Peckham
More than a Vanished Husband: Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” by Holly Baker
Breakup, Break Down, Break Open: Intimate Partner Violence and Life Inside a Daily Ending by Sonya Huber
On Breaking Up with the Dream of Your Former Self: Megan Daum’s “My Misspent Youth” by Kelly Kathleen Ferguson
In Search of the First Person Singular by Ned Stuckey-French
On Natalia’s Ginzburg’s “Human Relations” Dinah Lenney
NOR 21 – Spring 2017
Fiction
Your Mother Wouldn’t Approve by Krystal Sanders
Some Things Rosa Can’t Tell Little Esmerelda by Barbara de la Cuesta
Year of the Rat by Lucas Church
Dune Cat by Winnie Anderson
Bodies that Drift in the River Flow by Scott Gould
At the Edge of Everything by Traci Skuce
Nonfiction
Princess Party by G.C. Esselstyn
Parents and Guardians by G.C. Esselstyn
Loving by Numbers by Frances Orrok
Sneakers by Patrick Crerand
Poetry
Push by George Bilgere
Void Unfilled by George Bilgere
Horseplay by George Bilgere
I Tie My Shoes by George Bilgere
Stuff by Claudia Monpere
Facebook Sonnet by Tanya Grae
The Worn-Out West by Pamela Davis
And God Created Woman by Connie Voisine
What Kind of Man by Tony Gloeggler
What My Massage Therapist Girlfriend Discovers When I’m On Her Table For the First Time by Robert Wilder
A Race Car Made of Sand by Margot Wizansky
Miles by Craig van Rooyen
Mitigation by Craig van Rooyen
Parrots Over Suburbia by Craig van Rooyen
Steno by Mark Kraushaar
Fable by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Other People’s Ranch Dressing by Kate MacLam
Nightmare on Elm Street by T.J. Sandella
Facebook Stalking My Ex-Boyfriends by Emily Sernaker
Advice by Emily Sernaker
Mawwage by Catherine Stearns
Marriage at 17 Years by Gary Dop
The Double by Gary Dop
Red Beans and Rice by J Spru
Safehouse by Sandy Gingras
My Mother’s Dogs by Sandy Gingras
Serenity Room by Linda Hillringhouse
Catpants by Richard Allen
The Meat of It by Michael Bazzett
Now the Truth Can Be Told by David Guttette
Nobody Can Pronounce the Name of This Volcano by Mike Wright
A Friend Encourages Me to Travel to South America by Mike Wright
Nomenomancy by Mark Wagenaar
Men’s League as January by Michael Pontacoloni
Midnight Snack with Leon by Darren Morris
Just Say No by Kelly Michels
Coronation with Plastic Flowers by Kelly Michels
Cousin Josh Goes Off on Food Stamps by Anders Carlson-Wee
Last Seen on a Milk Carton by Reese Conner
The Resort by Preston Martin
Detective Story by James Lineberger
Sunny Day by Joyce Schmid
Of Course Death by Roy Mash
Feature
On Being Asked to Contribute to the Villains Feature by Richard Cecil
Villainous Villanelle by Denise Duhamel
Milton’s Satan and the Grammar of Evil by Kimberly Johnson
The Pleasures of Browning’s Villains by Robert Cording
The Villain Who Shut Down an Epic by Jeanne Murray Walker
“Guilt as Magical”: Adultery as Poetic Villainy by Catherine Pierce
Maker and Prophet: Frank Bidart and the Mask of “Herbert White” by Mario Chard
The Unredeemed Villain?: Ai’s “Child Beater” by Denise Duhamel
Villains of Confessionalism by Kathryn Nuernberger
NOR 20 – Fall 2016
Fiction
How to Survive on Land by Joy Baglio
Moksha by Alexander Weinstein
The Killing Square by Michael Credico
Black Telephone by Robert Long Foreman
We Handle It by Gwen E. Kirby
Cooking with Fire by Cady Vishniac
The Genesee Towers by Kelsey Ronan
Nonfiction
At the Threshold by Marilyn Abildskov
Our Family Walks by N.R. Robinson
Poetry
Bobcat by Andrew Cox
Reno Redux by Ansie Baird
Chino, California by Darla Himeles
Certain Things by David Brendan Hopes
She-Monster Gets Fired by Kim Farrar
Why It’s Hard To Write About My Brother by Kim Farrar
My Good Brother by Young Smith
Here There Was a Stool with a Crippled Leg by Young Smith
Gorilla by Young Smith
Bluebirds Are Cavity Nesters by W.J. Herbert
Anniversary Gift by Robert Cording
The Cave by David Gullette
Still by Alison Jarvis
Morning by James Tolan
November 1st by Chanel Brenner
January 12th by Heather Bowlan
Facebook Friends by Lisa Badner
Parent/Teacher Conference by Lisa Badner
This Is Not an Obituary by Lisa Badner
Response to Medical Questionnaire by Graham Coppin
Furnished by Mount Sinai by Graham Coppin
Horse on a Plane by Joyce Peseroff
Ammo by Marc Tretin
Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring by Charles Hopper Webb
Watching Nature on PBS by Angela Voras-Hill
Full Disclosure by Emily Sernaker
History Will Remember by David O’Connell
The Potter’s Field by Amit Majmudar
The Skeleton in My Grandfather’s Closet by Peter Schmitt
Checkup by Daryl Jones
Bag It, Box It, Haul It Away by Jay Leeming
Black-Eyed Susan by Lisa Bellamy
Grounded by Claire Bateman
Ancient Stone Coin, Diameter Six Feet by Claire Bateman
The New Loneliness by Claire Bateman
Cake-o-Rama by Claire Bateman
Night Dodge by Jill Leininger
Abandoned Settlement by Christopher Brean Murray
2016 Contest Winners
WINNER IN FICTION
Audition by Leslie Rodd
WINNER IN NONFICTION
A Creature, Stirring by Gail Griffin
WINNER IN POETRY
Henry’s Horses by Michael Pearce
The Pale Man by Michael Pearce
The Boy on the Ridge by Michael Pearce
Feature
Buzz Can Happen Here: Sinclair Lewis and the New American Fascism by Michael Mark Cohen
Take Me to Your Lady Leader by Kristen Lillvis
Of the People, for the People, by the Robots by Christopher A. Sims
NOR 19 – Spring 2016
Fiction
The Stability of Floating Bodies by Craig Bernardini
A Meadow by Lee Upton
Necessaries by Tina Tocco
That Boy’s a Catch by Tina Tocco
Safety by Catherin Carberry
Chemistry by Michael George
Old Married Couple by Robin Messing
A Million Tigers Who Aren’t Mad at You by Sandy Nietling
Siccità by Stephen Jarrett
Poetry
The Most American Thing I’ve Ever Seen by Rich Smith
Letter to the Gone Lover, Late May by Laura Maher
Revery by Elisabeth Murawski
Prayer While Driving Home After My Yearly Physical by Robert Cording
Little Red Book by Jeffrey Harrison
Sky by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
Black Ants by Fay Dillof
The First Time We Went Camping by Fay Dillof
What I Remember Most by Robert Nazarene
Lieu d’hiver mémoire by Angie Estes
Stick Season by Sydney Lea
Good for What Ails You by Elton Glaser
Phone Call by Stephanie Rogers
We Remember You for Now by Stephanie Rogers
Timestamps by Katie Condon
The Present by Billy Collins
A Box of Records by James Haug
My This, My That by Sarah Brown Weitzman
Pie by Michael Chitwood
Flipping Through King Leopold’s Ghost by Paul Carroll
Depleted Uranium and Other Facebook Posts by Okla Elliot
Night Blind by David Yezzi
Aubade by David Yezzi
Face to Face by James Lineberger
Here’s My Love Poem by James Lineberger
They Used To Be So Valuable They Were Free by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Query by Sandy Gringas
When We Were Neanderthals by Chrys Tobey
Like A Fish Needs a Bicycle by Jessica Plante
Ibis by Meg Kearney
Bank Shot by Greg McBride
Cousin Josh on His Lizard by Anders Carslon-Wee
Cousin Josh on Doomsday by Anders Carslon-Wee
White Earth, Minnesota by Anders Carslon-Wee
Jenny Perowski Is Ahead of Me in the Grocery Store Line by Julie Danho
Grammar School by Mark Belair
When Mr. Bridges Died by Mark Kraushaar
If I Could Have Your Attention by Jonathan Louis Duckworth
Directions by Matthew J. Spireng
The Rubaiyat of Omar Aqta by David Barber
Fantaisie by Donald Platt
Nonfiction
Etymologies by Krista Christensen
Critical Learning Period by Chelsea Biondolillo
Feature
I Second That Emotion by Rebecca McClanahan
Tell It Cool: On Writing with Restraint by Debra Marquart
Staying with Argos: Odysseus and His Dog by A-J Aronstein
Yeats and Heaney: The Poetry Without the Pity by C.L. Dallat
Designs Less Palpable: Emotional Manipulation and Even-Handedness in Keats by Matthew VanWinkle
NOR 18 – Fall 2015
Fiction
Hardly a Word About the Vegetarian Lasagna by Thad Kenner
This Bed You’ve Made by Samuel Ligon
The Devil’s Best Friend by Vincent Poturica
Change in Hat or Glove Size by Darrell Spencer
The Villanos by Z.Z. Boone
Sometimes It Snows In Florida by Michael Cooper
A Whole Lot of Men with Guns by Jonathan Muzzall
Laura’s Brother by Ryan Ruff Smith
Poetry
Travel Plans by David Wagoner
Believe that Even in my Deliberateness I was Not Deliberate by Gail Mazur
Sintra by Gail Mazur
The Anatomy Lesson Bruce Bond
Girl with the Red Stockings by Julie Hassett
Drizzle Living by Michelle Boisseau
With the Roots of an Alp by Michelle Boisseau
Talking to My Dead Mother About Dogs by Stephanie Gangi
At the Columbarium by Jackie Craven
After the Funeral by Holly Day
An Evolution of Prayer by Stephen Dunn
Lately I’ve Been Writing a Lot of Poems About Your Husband by Sarah Carson
Gray Whale by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Plato and You by Christopher Flannery
This Contract is Complete by Kyle Norwood
Dear Reader by Dean Young
Get Out of Jail Free by John Gallaher
We Don’t Always Want What We Say We Want by John Gallaher
Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:PINK by Bryan Owens
Open Mic by Jesse Wallis
Accelerated Learning by Laura Read
Mute Swan by Fleda Brown
Leather Coat by Maxine Scates
New Regs by James Lineberger
Tag Sale by Scott Brennan
Against Silence by Andrea Hollander
My Mother Who Told Me by Martha Silano
The First Straw by Billy Collins
Sixteen by Mary Angelino
Blood Buzz, AZ by Shane Lake
My Mouth Versus Your Mouth by Devon J. Moore
Grace by Craig van Rooyen
Lost by Craig van Rooyen
Nonfiction
Sisters Peeling by Julie Henson
Manhandled by Tamie Parker Song
Feature
Conversation with Amy Bloom with James Miranda
Conversation with Marie Howe with Brad Modlin
WINNERS IN FICTION
Neighbors by Suzanne McConnell
Rock Harbor by Susan Finch
WINNERS IN POETRY
Not Holding the Gun by Keith Kopka
You, Strung by Keith Kopka
The Wall by Christopher Kempf
In a Year of Drought, I Drink Wine in a Los Angeles Hot Tub by Christopher Kempf
Before the Storm by Christopher Kempf
NOR 17 – Spring 2015
Fiction
Bonita Springs by Sam Duncan
The Abandoned by Chaitali Sen
The House That Griffey Built by Ian Denning
Smoke by Tom Cantwell
May B by Lois Taylor
We Are All Beyond Disgusting by Jill Kato
The Know-It-All by Jeff Spitzer
Poetry
Chandler Brossard by Kevin Prufer
Big Media by Kevin Prufer
Love You Excavation Work by Donald Platt
In Flight by Lloyd Schwartz
Tuesday Night by Corrie Lynn White
There’ll Be an Enormous Party by Patrick Ryan Frank
Hooked by David Yezzi
Let by David Yezzi
By a Car Door by Mark Belair
Brendan Lexicon by Brian Komei Dempster
Three Sacraments by Brooke Champagne
At the Narrows by Meredith Davies Hadaway
We Buy, Sell, Trade by Betsy Sholl
Summer Night by Suzanne Carey
One Solid Chassis Among Us by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Looney Tunes by Nathan Anderson
The Day They Let You Go by Jocko Benoit
Inspiration by Mark Kraushaar
Rescue by Peter Leight
In the American Landscape by Peter Leight
The Lives of Puppets by Peter Leight
That’s Me Smiling in the Back Row by Elton Glaser
Venus Out on the Town by Shakira Croce
The Tenants of Feminism by Denise Duhamel
The Lake by Billy Collins
Alive by Lauren Hilger
On His Way in Finding the World by Dennis Sampson
Rumors About Dread Mills by Rodney Jones
The Ends of Stories by Karen Loeb
BBC by Mike Wright
My Mother Comes to Dinner by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
To Think of How Cold by Eleanor Wilner
Underworld by Eleanor Wilner
Jester’s Cap by Brandon Amico
Hum by Albert Goldbarth
Banality by Gregory Djanikian
Nowadays by Judy Rowe Michaels
Harping by Judy Rowe Michaels
Frog-Song by Tony Hoagland
Protection by Tony Hoagland
Fetch by Tony Hoagland
Nonfiction
Three Sacraments by Brooke Champagne
Regarding Isabelle Huppert by Tom Whalen
Where My Father Went by Sandy Gringas
Someone Else by Sandy Gringas
Feature: Uses & Abuses of Dialogue
A Trompe L’Oeil for the Mind’s Ear by J. Robert Lennon
Staying on the Elevator by Peter Mountford
Inside the Cave-Speak of Saunders by Leslie Daniels
I Deserve Two Firing Squads: Dialogue and Conflict in Fiction by Robert Anthony Siegel
A Brief Personal History of Dialogue by Kelly Luce
The Dialogue of Gesture and Silence by Alyce Miller
Dialogue: The Footfall of Its Wandering by Darrell Spencer
That Dialogue Assignment by Rebecca Makkai
NOR 16 – Fall 2014
Fiction
Innocent by Michael Caleb Tasker
Last Call by Penny Zang
The Hag’s Journey by Kim Addonizio
Coins for the Ferryman by David Denny
Tutti Frutti for Me by Andrea Simon
Poetry
The Light Factory by Sandy Gingras
POOF by Sandy Gingras
Tenderness by Dorothy Barresi
What Those Who Qualify Receive by Dorothy Barresi
The Egg by Eric Nelson
Gun on the Table by Eric Nelson
My Life with Pines by Tom Wayman
Activity Room by John Bargowski
When Luck Turns on You by Mark Smith
When Time Slows Down by Lawrence Raab
The Road by Lee Ann Dalton
Intercession by Jennifer Luebbers
Union Camp Music by Daneen Wardrop
Late December by Jacqueline Osherow
Pavlov’s Dog by Derek JG Williams
Nationally Competitive Cheerleader by Lauren Higler
Mexico by Dana Goetsch
Mrs. Morgenstern’s Cocktail Party by Dana Goetsch
Fast-Paced World by Dana Goetsch
Photograph Albums by George Kalogeris
For My 1st Ex-Lover to Die by Francesca Bell
Dialing the Dead by Mark Kraushaar
The Game by Steven Cramer
Sitting in a Simulated Living Space at the Seattle Ikea by Abby E. Murray
Seafood by Amanda Williamsen
Quality Control by David Clewell
Crisis on Infinite Earths, Issues 1-12 by Bethany Schultz Hurst
The Soul All Morning by A.V. Christie
The Pain Suit by Claire Bateman
Tropospheric by Claire Bateman
Purchase by Claire Bateman
Nonfiction
What You Said; What I Meant by Susan Morehouse
Envy by Patricia Horvath
Whatever I Might Say by Sydney Lea
2014 Contest Winners (Selected by Aimee Bender and Alan Shapiro)
WINNERS IN FICTION
The Undersized Negative by Robert Glick
Second Prize in Fiction
Small Boy by Joseph Scapellato
WINNERS IN POETRY
So That is What I Am by Stephanie Horvath
Cades Cove Water Wheel by Stephanie Horvath
Medicine by Stephanie Horvath
SECOND PRIZE IN POETRY
A Theory of Violence by Jennifer Perrine
Embarrassment: from baraço (halter) by Jennifer Perrine
Feature: Poems and Literal Truth
Should Poems Tell the Truth? By Lawrence Raab
Truthiness Demands by Daisy Fried
Where Are You Really Writing From? Reading and Writing Place and Experience by Adrienne Su
A Brief Response by Louise Glück
Telling the Truth in Poetry by Carl Dennis
Pants on Fire by Kim Addonizio
“Father” by Michael Ryan
NOR 15 – Spring 2014
Fiction
The Darkest Part of the Cloud by Jessica Langan-Peck
A Toast in Cancun by Charles Haverty
Connect by Glen Pourciau
All Ages by Conor Broughan
Unemployable by Dustin Nightingale
Everything is Flammable by Ashley Wurzbacher
Happy Endings by Kevin Canty
Poetry
Fear of the Bird Migration by Darren Morris
My Keats Year by James Davis May
Mystery Object by Sarah Galvin
The Professional by Michael Bazzett
Fastball Shy by Mike Schneider
Sunrise with Hydra by Michelle Boisseau
Still Listening by Robert Cording
My Dead Father Remembers My Birthday by Lesley Wheeler
Patina by Mark Cox
Finality by Mark Cox
Expecting by Audrey Naffziger
Sex and Death by Judith Pulman
Holy Sonnets with the Father by Judith Pulman
A Distant Relative by Ryan Meany
Hook and Eye by Sarah Barber
Rome in Us by Thomas Grout
A Poet in Rome by Franco Pagnucci
Pythagoras by Bruce Bond
Bobcat by Mikko Harvey
At the Metropolitan by Ellen Devlin
The Museum of Might-Have-Been by Anne-Marie Fyfe
A Gift From Wales by Carl Dennis
Three Houses and a Wish by Linda Bamber
My Grandmother the Mohel by Barbara Hamby
If You See Something by Billy Collins
Kickboxing with God by Jeffrey H. MacLachlan
The Ideal Budweiser Customer Watches a Budweiser Commercial by Danny Caine
At the Precise Moment of Your Awakening by Matt Morton
Telling the Truth by J. Anna Luz
À la Carte by Denise Duhamel
Aftermath in Brine by Elton Glaser
Point of View by Jonathan Johnson
Nonfiction
Cups by Cecilia Pinto
At the Grave of Sadie Thorpe by Miles Harvey
Feature: Beguilling Beginning In Fiction
On Lauren Groff’s “L. DeBard and Aliette” by Caitlin Horrocks
On Edward P. Jones’s “The First Day” by Marjorie Celona
On William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow by Maura Stanton
On Graham Greene’s “Under the Garden” by David Lehman
On Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter by Maud Casey
On Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” by Alyson Hagy
On Stanley Elkin’s “A Poetics for Bullies” by Tom Noyes
On Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha by Julia Glass
NOR 14 – Fall 2013
Fiction
Irgendwo, Nirgendwo by Dave Madden
The Tattoo Artist and the Barefoot Bandit by Pamela DiFrancesco
My Lovers #1-5, or Why I Hate Kenny Rogers by Donna Baier Stein
The Party by Ihab Hassan
Close Call by Tamara Dean
No Try, Only Do by Alan Rossi
Poetry
Joe’s Tax by Dana Goetsch
Looking on the Bright Side by John Brehm
Back Then by John Brehm
Late January Protest Against The Betrayers of The Dream by David Rivard
Scooter by David Rivard
The Song of the Lark by Albert Goldbarth
At a Pet Shop by Tom Whalen
probity by Michael Casey
this is it by Michael Casey
For Claude Monet by Michael Casey
My Phoenix Period by Ellen Wright
Rats by Rosanna Warren
The Rescuer by Mary Di Lucia
The End of Parallel Play by Mary Di Lucia
Attachment by Mary Di Lucia
Delivering Christmas Dinner to My Daughter, Second Shift Charge Nurse on the Alzheimer Floor by John Bargowski
Up on Blocks by Jim Daniels
Revision by Catherine Freeling
The House by Brian Swann
The Novel by Brian Swann
All Eyes by Billy Collins
Divinity by Billy Collins
What Forever Means by Maria Nazos
My Father Works on Dying by Mary Parham
Memo by Todd Hearon
Reciprocal by James Davis May
The Star of “Interstate” by Chard deNiord
Kodachrome by Mark Cox
Alcohol by Mark Cox
No Picnic in the Afterlife by Mark Cox
Doing Demolition Work Again by Jamie Thomas
Sappho as Sibyl by Lynn Hoggard
Ichor by David Wojahn
Nonfiction
The Skirts and Blouses are Hatched by Tam Lin Neville
Seven to One by Eleanor Stanford
Feature: Translation Cruxes II
Like a Struck Tuning Fork: On Translating Sound in Tranströmer’s “The Station” by Patty Crane
On Translating Choctaw Poems by Marcia Haag
Sense and Serendipity: The Masochistic Art of Translating Surrealism by Mark Polizzotti
Finding the Just Name: On Translating Ismailov by Robert Chandler
Translating Thai Artist Wisut Ponnimit from Japanese to English by Matthew Chozik
The Stones and the Earth: On Translating Wieslaw Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone by Bill Johnston
On Translating Cavafy’s “Come, O King of the Lacedaimonians” by George Economou
The Homophonic Imagination: On Translating Modern Greek Poetry by Karen Van Dyck
2013 Contest Winners
WINNERS IN FICTION
The Best Man by Brian Trapp
Crimes of the Video Age by Bradley Bazzle
WINNERS IN POETRY
Feeling Sorry for Myself While Watching a Really Bad World War II POW Movie on TV by Michael Derrick Hudson
Ambassador of the Dead by George Kalogeris
NOR 13 – Spring 2013
Fiction
The Thing in the Trees by Anna Shearer
The Rules of the Game by Simon Barker
Fault Line by Margot Singer
The Tunnel by Kate McIntyre
The Lady from TV is Coming by Sabrina Jaszi
But it Moves by D.J. Thielke
Poetry
Not Ready for Our Close-Up by Elton Glaser
Ode to the Republic by Tony Hoagland
Namaste by George Bilgere
Snorkeling by Allison Funk
June by Michael Bazzett
Nothing by Lawrence Raab
A Beverage and the Weather by Isabel Brome Gaddis
The Nod by Kenneth Hart
Couples by Kenneth Hart
Never Better by Mark Kraushaar
My Chance by Maria Karp
Song for the Returning of the Year by Marcia Karp
Earning a Title by Jaclyn Dwyer
The Sweet Spot by Ange Mlinko
How I Save My Husband’s Life by Patricia McMillen
Dannon by Anya Silver
Deep Ink by Albert Goldbarth
Short Lists on a Diagnosis by Aran Donovan
A Simple Request by Patricia Corbus
Announcement: The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed by Dana Roeser
Night Party by Fay Dillof
The Difference Between Us by Jill Osier
I Take the Bullet for Him by Mary Di Lucia
He Knows by Mary Di Lucia
Keyring by Maura Stanton
Jonah by Maura Stanton
Two Fuzzy Bees by Maura Stanton
First Place by Suzanne Cleary
1974: The Raspberries by Campbell McGrath
Recitations by Estanislao Lopez
The Call by Michael Chitwood
Title Search for the Italian Ashbery Book by Damiano Abeni
Nonfiction
This is Marquette by Richard Hackler
Wheels by Ann Harleman
Whose Story is This? By Barbara Hurd
Feature: Translation Cruxes
On Translating Virgil by David Ferry
from an alphabet of Proust Translation Problems: Z by Lydia Davis
On Translating Strand and Ashbery by Damiano Abeni and Moira Egan
On Translating Tolstoy by Rosamund Bartlett
On Translating Cavafy by George Kalogeris
On Translating Szymborska by Joanna Trzeciak
On Translating Eco by Geoffrey Brock
NOR 12 – Fall 2012
Fiction
Mr. Lindsey’s Angels by Erika Seay
Play it by Ear by Claudia Peirce
Animal Science by Michael Davis
From The Secret Correspondence: A Novel of Novels by Tom Whalen
2012 Fiction Winners
A Man’s Game by Elizabeth Buchanan
Return of the Media Five by Maya Sonenburg
Poetry
My Father’s New Woman by Fleda Brown
The Lawyer Formerly Known As Me by Craig van Rooyen
If Only I’d Met You Earlier by Adrienne Su
The Circus Lion’s Lament by Michael Derrick Hudson
Appropriate Interjection by Brock Guthrie
Might by Nate Pillman
Dialysis by Emily Schulten
Circe and the Baby by Janet McNally
Chimera by Janet McNally
Dispensation by Johnathan Johnson
250 Rebel by Leslie Anne Mcilroy
Running With Daddy by Leslie Anne Mcilroy
Clods of Snow by Eric Higgins
Let Me Bore You With My Powerpoint by Lee Upton
I Came Back From the East by Mark Neely
The Sinking of the Library by Claire Bateman
Aunt Lydia Tries to Explain the Many Worlds Theory by Sarah Lindsay
Carnivorous Sponges of the Antarctic Ocean by Sarah Lindsay
Radium by Sarah Lindsay
The Banks of the Seine, Before the Divorce by Catherine Freeling
Making the Bed by Sarah Wells
Haiku For a Divorce by Emily Leithauser
Baltimore on Fire by Emily Leithauser
Last Night Ferguson’s Caught Fire by Laura Read
2012 Poetry Contest Winners
Craigslist by Maya Jewell Zeller
Whisper to the Coast by Christina Hutchins
Nonfiction
In the Second Month of Parched Land by Daiva Markelis
En (E)spiral by Michelle Richards
Feature
On a passage from Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women by Ann Harleman
On a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby by Ralph Lombreglia
On a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse by Cornelia Nixon
On a passage from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway by Elizabeth Searle
On two passages by Lewis Nordan by John Dufresne
On a passage from Pam Houston’s “Dall” by Melinda Moustakis
On a passage from Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House” by Bret Lott
NOR 11 – Spring 2012
Drama
Poetry
Old Love Poems by Denise Duhamel
Clear and Cold by Lisa Ampleman
The Muse of Work by Ellen Bass
Dispatches From the Interior by Geoffrey Brock
The Dark by Maggie Smith
Lanterns by Maggie Smith
Dhaka Nocturne by Tarfia Faizullah
Cold Front Approaching by Jene Erick Beardsley
Birds in Cemeteries by George Kalogeris
Unfinished by Richard Schiffman
Beach Towel by Alan Shapiro
The Open Door by Alan Shapiro
Tauromaquia by Deborah Casillas
Standing on the Desk by Donna L. Emerson
Back Flip by Dana Goetsch
Clarence, Sunday Meditation Meeting at the Surf Club by Dana Roeser
When People Watch You by Nathan Anderson
Stupid Sandwich by Nathan Anderson
Opening the Cottage by Christina Cook
Funeral Service by Albert Goldbarth
Away by Albert Goldbarth
Child With Flower, 2011 by Albert Goldbarth
Remembered Grace by Jim Daniels
Should I Take it As A Sign by Sue D. Burton
The Suggestion Box by Billy Collins
Collaboration by Billy Collins
Fiction
What you Find, When you Find It by Jeff P. Jones
Zig Zag. Yeah. by Scott Kreeger
Crow by William Kelley Woolfitt
Wax Museum by William Kelley Woolfitt
The Jaguars of Southtown by Amos Jasper Wright
Everything Equal by Joseph Holt
Nonfiction
Throw it Up by Suzanne Richardson
Take Your Trash and Let It Fly by Devin Murphy
Intervention by Shannon Robinson
Feature
Preface to “Making It Up” by Ron Padgett
Woody Woodpecker Goes To Paris by Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch
Some Remarks on Collaboration by Tom Whalen
Love as Rehearsal for Writing by Lee Carroll
Changing the Record: A Poetry Collaboration in the ‘70s and ‘80s by Ron Horning and David Lehman
The Story Behind Penguins by Patty Mitchell
Where the Path Leads: Collaboration, Revision, and Friendship by Lawerence Raab
NOR 10 – Fall 2011
Poetry
Women’s College by Kenneth Hart
When It’s That Time for Piranhas by Michael Derrick Hudson
Writing Memoir by Melanie McCabe
After Rosenkavalier by Natalia Rosenfeld
I Am an Emerging Poet by Ellen Wright
The Ante by Rodney Jones
The Morning Table by Albert Abonado
Awareness by Daniel Hoffman
Night Journey by Daniel Hoffman
A Night’s Work by Marcia Menter
Satori by Marcia Menter
At the Family Graveyard by Catherine Freeling
Collision by Catherine Freeling
Ridge, Wedge, Ring by Catherine Freeling
Saying Goodbye to Dad by Kate Fetherston
Snow by Kate Fetherston
Downloading the Meltdown by Elton Glaser
In the Season of Early Dark by Elton Glaser
Solo in the Skeleton Key by Elton Glaser
One Day Your Parents Confess You Have a Twin by Todd Boss
Spring Cleaning by Laura McCullough
The Marathon by Richard Cecil
Traverse City by George Bilgere
Gaia’s Inn by Greg Delanty
Commuter Buddhist by Jeffery Harrison
2011 Poetry Prize Winners
Pretending to be Asleep & Owen and Paul by Angie Mazakis
Fiction
The Last Speaker of the Language by Carol Anshaw
Sixteen in Vegas by Anastasia Selby
Massage Parlor by Patricia McMillen
Hurricane Season by Julia Jackson
A Gift by Patricia Ann Sanders
Fuchsprellen by Rob McClure Smith
2011 Fiction Prize Winners
The Rush of Losing by Daniel Larkins
The Truest Thing by Emily Nagin
Nonfiction
Times Pieces by Susan Morehouse
I Love Your Sunhat by Patricia Foster
Feature
On 35 Shots of Rum by Claudia Rankine
Antonioni at Nineteen by Jeffery Harrison
Death, Cashews, and No Country for Old Men by George Bilgere
On Lubitsch’s Angel by Lloyd Schwartz
On Tomorrow is Forever by Laurence Goldstein
Acting the Truth by Linda Bamber
NOR 9 – Spring 2011
Poetry
Where Do We Go After We Die by Steve Orlen
Stage IV by Anya Silver
Leaving the Hospital by Anya Silver
What Comes Next by Maxine Scates
Shadow Crossing by Barbara Siegel Carlson
The Prize by George Eukland
Match.com by Elizabeth Powell
Chemistry.com by Elizabeth Powell
Aubade with Mascara by Chelsea Henderson
Dear Doris Day by Pamela Davis
How it Happened by Chelsea Rathburn
Wet Carpet Awakening by Kevin Stein
In the Family by Catherine Freeling
Playing My Part by Sharon Dolin
Any Time Soon by Joshua McKinney
Mrs. Buddha Calls on Mrs. God by Patricia McMillen
The Age of Iron by Tony Hoagland
The Messenger by Tony Hoagland
Fiction
Elevator Roulette by Dan Moreau
July 4th, 1984 by Maggie Mitchell
Survey of my Exes by Joseph Bates
Amerikanka by Maria Kuznetsova
Nonfiction
Ancient History by Adam Gilbreath
The Two Lances by Scott Nadelson
Feature
On Susan Wood’s “In America” and Dana Levin’s “The Nurse,” by Wayne Miller
On Carol Ann Duffy’s “Rapture” and Michael Laskey’s “Offering,” by Helena Nelson
On Mark Strand’s “The Idea” and Dennis Schmitz’s “Kindergarten,” by David Rivard
NOR 8 – Fall 2010
Poetry
Bell Tower by Dean Young
Pear by Emily Wheeler
Honeycomb, Calling by Albert Goldbarth
Smallish by Albert Goldbarth
End Times by Albert Goldbarth
How to be Sad by Laura Read
Extracts from the Consoler’s Handbook by Amy Gerstler
Misterioso by Sydney Lea
Heroic by Lawrence Raub
The Ruins by Knute Skinner
Her Sister by Knute Skinner
Ocean State Job Lot by Stephanie Burt
Here, Pulling by Daneen Wardrop
More Lies by Karin Gottshall
Minneapolis by Campbell McGrath
Geography Lesson by Christopher Howell
All About Skin by Leslie Adrienne Miller
Carnival Nocturne by Mark Wagenaar
I’ll Meet You in the Isenheim Altarpiece by Terry Witek
Midnight Train by Karina Borowicz
On a Thursday Afternoon of His Life by Michael Chitwood
The Elements Will Have Their Way by Michael Chitwood
Introduction to my Latest Effort by Robin Hemley
Qu’est-ce qu’il y a? By Julie Hanson
Always a Little Something Somewhere in the Purse by Julie Hanson
Ankle Deep by Mary Christine Delea
Old Snapshot by Jay Rogoff
Illustration from an Early Reader by Nick Norwood
At Sea by Nick Norwood
Last Days of Antarctica Women’s Prison by Mary Di Lucia
The Crypt on the Rock by James May
Disintegration of Purpose at Cocoa Beach, Florida (Part 1) by Michael Derrick Hudson
The Businessman Cleans a Mermaid for His Supper by Michael Derrick Hudson
Fiction
Critical Insect Studies by Tom Whalen
Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History: The Great Pyre of Egypt by Phong Nguyen
Too Much by Natania Rosenfeld
Is That You, John Wayne? By Scott Garson
Living with the Dead by Patrick Hicks
An Heiress Walks Into a Bar by Karen Brown
Communication with Distant Life Forms by Josh Peterson
The Red Bird by Joanne Fisher
Nonfiction
Putting Girls on the Map by Irene Keliher
Opera, or: Longing by Natania Rosenfeld
Feature
On Grace Paley’s “In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All” by Michael Griffith
On Jean Rhys’ “I Used to Live Here Once” by Sylvia Watanabe
On Rereading Gabriel García Máquez by Juliana Baggot
On Rereading Donald Barthelme by Peter Ho Davies
On Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Peter Turchi
On Virginia Woolf’s Orlando by Karen Brennan
On Paula Fox’s The Widow’s Children by Charles Baxter
NOR 7 – Spring 2010
Poetry
My Sky Diary by Claire Bateman
A Pocket Introduction to Our Universe by Claire Bateman
What Bliss, When Exuberance Overruns Its Banks by Lance Larsen
Between the Heaves of Storm by Lance Larsen
Brushes with #3 by Emily Toder
Jenne’s Rose by Jacqueline Osherow
Given a God More Playful by Christian Wiman
Hermitage by Christian Wiman
Mysterious Neighbors by Connie Wanek
Possum by David Wagoner
California Father by Colette Inez
The Woman Who Didn’t Know How by Maya Jewell Zeller
Help is On the Way by John Brehm
An Iris Murdoch Reader by John Drexel
Compline by Cynthia Huntington
Love Song (Lame) by Courtney Queeney
Knuckling Down by Dennis O’Driscoll
What I’ll Settle for by Sarah Grieve
Lonesome While Kissing by Jim Daniels
Two Satellites by Laurence Goldstein
La Vie Ordinaire by Mark Kraushaar
Bridal Shower by George Bilgere
Kalypso by Ernest Hilbert
Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry by Bob Hicok
Even So by Richard Jackson
The Day After My Death by Jeff Worley
Another Poem After César Vallejo by Suzanne Lummis
House on the Lake by Liz Robbins
At the River View Café by Chard deNiord
Half-Acre by Kristen Staby Rembold
Piano Lesson by Gregory Djanikian
I Want to Talk About You by Angie Estes
In my Dream, Coleman Hawkins by David Clewell
Grunge by Yusef Komunyakaa
A Poem Written Inside a Big Round Machine by Yusef Komunyakaa
Fiction
Ballade Pour Jardine by Nicole Lee
Prostate Frank Finds True Love by Ron MacLean
Murray’s by Richard Dokey
Nonfiction
The Last Litter by Melissa Cistaro
Men and Refrigeration by Heather Sellers
Waterfront Property by Barrie Jean Borich
Homer and Jazz by Ralph M. Rosen
Feature
ALTERED VIEWS
From a Broken Ant-hill by Peter Campion
On James Merrill by Rachel Hadas
Resisting The Rape of the Lock by Laurence Goldstein
Cellular Change by Marianne Boruch
Tight Spots by Brad Leithauser
A Fish and a Pity by Steven Kramer
Self Beyond Recall by Eleanor Wilner
Just a Goll-durn Minute . . . by Stephen Corey
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers by Nancy Eimers
On the Author of “The Paddiad” by Christopher Ricks
NOR 6 – Fall 2009
Poetry
Letter to Myself, in Remission, from Myself, Terminal by Anya Silver
The Stairwell by Knute Skinner
The Hot Dog by Knute Skinner
Objective Correlative by Ann Keniston
Takeout, 2008 by Denise Duhamel
Grimace by Heather June Gibbons
All that Shimmers and Settles Along the Roads of our Passage by Mark Cox
A Discreet Charm by Stephen Dunn
Superman at 95 by Gregory Djanikian
1959 by James Harn
Don’ Like by Charles Harper Webb
Dismantled for Goodwill, Our Son’s Crib Leans by Charles Harper Webb
In the Light of Day by Tadeusz Różewicz
My Lips by Tadeusz Różewicz
High Noon by Eleanor Wilner
Anathema by Natasha Sajé
Aphorism Aporia by A.E. Stallings
Summer at Pitch 77 by Alex Green
They’ll Know When You’re Gone by Alex Green
Blue Door Option by Alex Green
Cherry Pop-TartsⓇ by Heather McNaugher
The Whole of the Law of Our Human Vision by Albert Goldbarth
A Weather by Albert Goldbarth
“He held out his hand . . .” by Albert Goldbarth
Screensaver: Pharaoh by David Wojahn
Why Men Don’t Write About Their Wives by Dennis Sampson
My Daughter’s Narcolepsy by Keith Taylor
Anthropomorphic Duck by Robert Wrigley
Horse, Alone, November by Joyce Peseroff
Fiction
Reverend Tyree (excerpted from the novel Haints) by Clint McCown
How Someone Can Not Recognize You by Aja Gabel
Nonfiction
Quite a Storm by Brenda Miller
A Permanent Home by Nicole Walker
Foreign Excellent by Michelle Herman
2009 Contest Winners
FICTION
The Animal Trade by Christine Nicolai
POETRY
Fireflies by Cecilia Woloch
Carpathia by Cecilia Woloch
Features
On Lucia Berlin’s “Maggie May” by Lydia Davis
On Gerald Shapiro’s “Bad Jews” by Stuart Dybek
On Stephanie Vaughn’s “Dog Heaven” by Carol Anshaw
On Donald Barthelme’s “The School” by Max Apple
On Bernard Malamud’s “In Kew Gardens” by Alan Cheuse
On John L’Heureux’s “The Comedian” by Erin McGraw
On Gilbert Sorrentino’s “The Moon In Its Flight” by Robert Cohen
On John Fowles’ “The Ebony Tower” by Nicholas Delbanco
On Anita Desai’s “The Accompanist” by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
On Alice McDermott’s “Enough” by Tracy Daugherty
On James Kaplan’s “In Miami, Last Winter” by Steven Schwartz
On Mavis Gallant’s “The Remission” by Andrea Barrett
On Mavis Gallant’s “Mlle. Dias de Corta” by Francine Pose
On Robert Stone’s “Helping” by Jim Shepard
On Charles Baxter’s “Fenstad’s Mother” by Rosellen Brown
NOR 5 – Spring 2009
Poetry
Tool Box by Maura Stanton
Fortune Cookie by Maura Stanton
Penny Red by Maura Stanton
On the Beach (1959) by Maggie Smith
The Mood by Carl Dennis
Recall Notice by Carl Dennis
Things we Demand to Know by Glenn Shaheen
Variation on a Letter from Schoenberg to Mahler by Nina Corwin
On Velvet Turf by Mary Ruefle
Helium by Mary Ruefle
Dylan’s Lips by Michelle Boisseau
It’s Fun to Feel Superior by Michelle Boisseau
Feel Better by Mary Ann Samyn
Give Me a Moment by William Olsen
Cabbages Across the Manitou Island by William Olsen
Indoor Municipal Pool by Alan Shapiro
Downtown Strip Club by Alan Shapiro
Wet Jade Someone by George David Clark
To a Rose by Kim Addonizio
Yes by Kim Addonizio
Cocaine Saturday Nights by Stephanie Pine
Pediment by David Gewanter
Teddy Agonistes by Teddy Macker
My Father Tells Me a Story by Tony Hoagland
Migrants by Barbara Siegel Carlson
Outbound Fall River 1967 by David Rivard
Wordsworthian by David Rivard
Free Period by David Yezzi
I’m sorry it has nothing by Sydney Lea
Early Life by Sydney Lea
The Exegete by Terri Witek
New World by David Baker
Saint Monica and the Devil’s Place by Mary Biddinger
Chrystal and Shane by Bridget Bell
Sparrow by George Bilgere
Whirlpool by George Bilgere
Faculty Lounge by George Bilgere
Breakfast with Salesmen Before the Poetry Reading by David Wagoner
The Meeting by Catie Rosemurgy
Omens by Kathleen McGookey
The Ache by Kathleen McGookey
After by Kathleen McGookey
How She Lost Her Mind by April Linder
Y at the End of It by Nancy Eimers
Glacier by Nancy Eimers
A Moment by Wislawa Syzmborska
The Three Strangest Words by Wislawa Syzmborska
Little Girl Pulling Off the Tablecloth by Wislawa Syzmborska
The Puddle by Wislawa Syzmborska
A Note by Wislawa Syzmborska
ABC by Wislawa Syzmborska
Fiction
Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry by Christine Sneed
A Lost Ashtray by Edward Mullany
The Number One by Ashley Cowger
The Beard by Phil Edwards
Barbeque by Roberta Allen
From the Life of a Project Manager by Tom Whalen
Nonfiction
Inheritance by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Truck by Jerry Williams
The God-Blurred World by Joe Bonomo
Camouflage by Richard Robbins
Feature
Considering Wislawa Syzmborska
Thinking Out Loud by Lawerence Raab
On Szymborska by Carl Dennis
That Threshold (If It Is a Threshold) by Sally Ball
Vaster: Wislawa Syzmborska and Elizabeth Bishop by Kathy Fagan
“Non Omis Moriar”: Reading Szymborska in Translation by Jennifer Clarvoe
On Szymborska’s “Travel Elergy” by William Olsen
To Keep On Not Knowing by Michelle Boisseau
All the World’s a Stage: Some Thoughts on Szymborska by Rachel Wetzsteon
Everything, All At Once by Marianne Boruch
Heaven by Subtraction – Szymborska’s Skeptical Wonder by Tony Hoagland
NOR 4 – Fall 2008
Poetry
At the Dinner Party by Stephen Dunn
Constant Craving by Kathy Fagan
Birth Day Party by Jack Myers
My Life by Jack Myers
Plans by Jack Myers
The History of Forgetting by Lawrence Raab
The Weed Wacker Makes Me Yearn for the Scythe by Lawrence Raab
So Near Yet So Far by Angie Estes
Here Lightning Has Been by Angie Estes
Anderson Inside the Hurricane by Stefi Weisburd
Degeneration by Stefi Weisburd
Reunion by Bruce Weigl
The Last One by Bruce Weigl
Travel: Choler by Neil Shepard
Charlie Chaplin by Ryan Fox
Fantaisie Basque by Mary Di Lucia
Beauty Russe by Mary Di Lucia
Watchman, Tell Us by Michael Chitwood
Letter to a Feverish Child by Peter Mishler
I Enter an Ancient City in a Dream by Steve Orlen
The Purple Cloak by Steve Orlen
Heroine in Repose by Rick Bursky
I Want Kalypso by Mitchell Metz
Bathtub Families by Billy Collins
The Night I Proposed by Peter Stokes
Haircut Talk by Peter Stokes by Mark Kraushaar
Third Street Muscles and Fitness by Mark Kraushaar
Fiction
Failight by René Houtrides
Tableaux Vivants by Katherine Lien Chariot
Freesoil by Aaron Hellem
The Effects of Laudanum by William Todd Seabrook
Nonfiction
Loneliness: Fourteen Variations by Barbara Hurd
Bullies by Emily Douglas
Features
2008 Contest Winners
IN NONFICTION
Eight Photographs by Kim Adrian
IN FICTION
The Way Lighthouses Work by Andrew Brininstool
IN POETRY
Having Not Heard Back from You by Kenneth Hart
The Way Things Look by Kenneth Hart
Frederick Barthelme Feature:
Sun Deluxe by Frederick Barthelme
Interview with Frederick Barthelme by Gary Percesepe
Rereading Frederick Barthelme’s “Shopgirls” (Minimalism and Prosaics) by B.W. Jorgensen
Feature: Poets on Novels
on Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee by David Gewanter
on American Genius: A Comedy by Lynne Tillman by Robert Polito
on Mr. Mani by A.B. Yehoshua by Natasha Sajé
on Waiting by Ha Jin by Adrienne Su
on The Death of the Detective by Mark Smith by Mark Cox
on The Road by Cormac McCarthy by Rodney Jones
NOR 3 – Spring 2008
Unearthing the Sky by Claire Bateman
Intellectual Property by Claire Bateman
April 1: Dropping & Carrying by Claire Bateman
The Disappeared by Blake Butler
The History of Longing by Steven Coughlin
Wrong Time for Caution by Eric Freeze
What it Feels Like to Be This Tall by Dobby Gibson
Why I’m Afraid of Heaven by Dobby Gibson
Manifesto of the Disabled Text by Johannes Göransson & Joyelle McSweeney
From Home/Birth a lyric essay by Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker
Election Day by David Gullette
Blonde by Tony Hoagland
Playboy by Tony Hoagland
Growth by Marc Elihu Hofstadter
Feelings, by Ashley Higgins by Rodney Jones
From Nearest Istanbul by Phillip Kobylarz
Incinerated with a Rose by Carole Maso
From Sonnagrams by K. Silem Mohammad
From Demosthenes’s Legacy (II) by Jonathan Monroe
From Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak & Ian Teh
In which I first discovered by Emily Pérez
The Bad Wife by Elizabeth Powell
The Ear of the Behearer: A Conversation in Jazz by Jed Rasula & Brent Hayes Edwards
Elegy by Bill Rector
From A Hundred Preambles by Ariana Reines
Nothing Stays Buried, Hector Flores by Andrew Michael Roberts
There Was a War by Andrew Michael Roberts
Miss Peach Considers #8: Reproduce by Catie Rosemurgy
Miss Peach Considers the Human Condition by Catie Rosemurgy
Hampstead Heath: A Sketch by Natania Rosenfeld
From The Autochronotistics Epicycle by Paul Stephens & Robert Weston
It Was When by Cole Swensen
In Waves by Cole Swensen
Susurrus Stanzas (Sutro Baths) by Brian Teare
NOR 2 – Fall 2007
Neg by David Abel
Spirit Photograph by Dorothy Barresi
My Father’s Photograph by Jenny Boully
From Snow Sensitive Skin by Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern
Sock Monkey by Jennifer Bryan
The Sworn Unknown by Leslie Bumstead
Still: Dollar by Matthew Cooperman
Still: Winter by Matthew Cooperman
Still: Life by Matthew Cooperman
Wind by Michael Czyzniejewski
A text made of by Jill Darling
From Talking out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman by Kass Fleisher
Psalms by Sandy Florian
To the Writer by Graham Foust
Resuscitation by Cal Freeman
Home Video of the Tiger Swallowing by Erin Gay
I Will Carve Like You’re on Fire by Johannes Göransson
A New Quarantine Will Take My Place by Johannes Göransson
Spiriting, Our Hive by Rob Halperm
A Conversation on the Objective Reading of Poems by Barbara Hamby, Kevin Prufer and Michael Theune
Notre histoire sinister by Michael Joyce
Une danse des rêves by Michael Joyce
From Scrambler: The (Un)Sheeted Mirror by Kenneth King
My Dark Places by Laura Larson
Girlş by Brian Lennon
Placebo and the Minutiae of Tiny Instruments by Clay Matthews
Water We Made Ourselves by Sara McKinnon
Decussation: Notes on the Quincunx; or, Autobiography; or, Another Place to Begin by Laura Moriarty & Brent Cunningham
From The Presence of Their Passing by Andrew Mossin
The Price of Silence by Jennifer Moxley
Day Poem by Mel Nichols
Day Poem by Mel Nichols
Charles Babbage’s Black Book Parsed via Brian Oliu by Brian Oliu
From The Powers of Sleep by Jacqueline Risset
Longing by Natania Rosenfeld (translated from the French by Jennifer Moxley)
Language by Tomaž Šalamun (translated from the Slovenian by Joshua Beckman and the author)
Porta di Leone From Gozd in kelihi (Woods and Chalices), 64 by Tomaž Šalamun (translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry and the author)
Vases From Gozd in kelihi (Woods and Chalices), 53-54 by Tomaž Šalamun (translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry and the author)
The Five Enslavements: An Essay in Four Parts by Lisa Samuels
Something like a Buick by L. E. Smith
Jade Talks by Rod Smith
From The Spider Poems by Rod Smith
sprawl by Matthew Ira Swaye
V by Jon Thompson
XXIX by Jon Thompson
In the Yard with Clara by Nance Van Winckel
The Boy Who Ran Away from Me by David Wagoner
Walking along the Beach with a Five-Year-Old by David Wagoner
From One Way/No Exit by G. C. Waldrep
Berlin Wall / Buchenwald by Barrett Watten
The Doctor by Kara Westerman
At the Core by Corinne Wohlford Taff
NOR 1 – Spring 2007
Diary of a Journalist by Joshua Auerbach
Chaos Effect by Joshua Auerbach
Draft 68: Threshold by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Draft 76: Work Table with Scale Models by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Dinner Party by V.L. Bond
Tribute to Richard Pryor by V.L. Bond
Wiara / Faith by Andrzej Bursa (translated from Polish by Kevin Christianson and Halina Ablamowicz)
In Memory of the Rock Band Breaking Circus by Stephen Burt
Feathers from the Bird of Paradise by François Camoin
Prelude & Fugue by Tyler Carter
Sprocket vs. Cause by Tyler Carter
Blessing for Protest by Karla Clark
Psalm by Adam Clay
Sonnet (from “Styles of Love and Negation”) by Stephen Cope
Aboulia by Joshua Corey
Lithophobe by Joshua Corey
Public Poem by John Gallaher
The Disease of Clocks by John Gallaher
From Figures for a Darkroom Voice by Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Treason by Allen Grossman
A Gust of Wind by Allen Grossman
A Kiss for You by Allen Grossman
From Adorno’s Noise by Carla Harryman
From Bicentury (New Rows and Locks) by Erika Howsare
Jewish Community Center of Houston by Lisa Jarnot
Alberta, Canada by Lisa Jarnot
From Bass Cathedral by Nathaniel Mackey
Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa
From Nylund, the Sarcographer by Joyelle McSweeney
From Liner Notes by Andrew Mister
The Age of Dinosaurs by Rosalind Morris
The Pampering of Leora by Thylias Moss
World View by Thylias Moss
Affair-Proof Your Marriage: A Manual (Installment Seven) by Kirk Nesset
Dear Editor: 5 October 2005 by Amy Newman
Dear Editor: 30 October 2005 by Amy Newman
A Critical Exchange on Selected Poems: Expanded Edition, Including Selections from Day by Day by Robert Lowell with a Foreword by Frank Bidart by Marjorie Perloff and David Wojahn
Journal Excerpts by Tom Pickard
The Cigarette / La cigarette by Francis Ponge (Translated by Graham Foust)
The Candle / La bougie by Francis Ponge (Translated by Graham Foust)
Rain / Pluie by Francis Ponge (Translated by Graham Foust)
The Last Simplicity / La dernière simplicité by Francis Ponge (Translated by Graham Foust)
From The Distance between Here&After by Kristin Prevallet
Snow White: Taxidermy by Donna Prinzmetal
Four Suggestions by Khadijah Queen
Excerpt from the Novel U.P. by Ron Riekki
Are We Alone? Is It Safe to Speak? By Mary Ruefle
Countryside by Zach Savich
From Conversations with My Father: A Meditation on Life and Death by David Shields
Hiding Places by Charles Simic
One Wing of the Museum by Charles Simic
You Are Only Half of You by Shannon Tharp
The Whole Scene Comes before Us by Shannon Tharp
From Truax Inimical by Rodrigo Toscano
Gnosis by Theodore Worozbyt
Beans by Theodore Worozbyt
Song by Dean Young
Rose Prick by Dean Young
Online Exclusives
December 2025
i am out with gloves, foraging for myself by Amanda Nicole Corbin
Infinity Net by Jaye Kranz
Ecstasy Facsimile by Mark Anthony Cayanan
Prognosis by Richie Zaborowske
Samsara by Matthew Williams
Dedication for a Plot of Ground by Matthew Williams
Joy Riders by Michael Mark
The Lines, the borders by Julia Ferry
Grief in the Potting Shed by Allisa Cherry
The Knot by Sarah Suhr
The News from North Korea by Jim Marino
Far From a Mother by Madeline Simms
The Uncertainty Principle by Rodd Whelpley
A Toast to My Son’s Last Drink by Rodd Whelpley
Animal Control by Anna Sheffer
Basketball by Christopher Shipman
Trick of the Light by Jessica Jo Staricka
Angling by Matt Miller
Irish Nocturne by Derek Jon Dickinson
A Space Unfilled by Theresa Burns
Original Sin by Anna Davis Abel
Pride by R.M. Harper
Duplex (Gray-Blue Staircase) by Theo Jasper
Nativity by Theo Jasper
Mask 13 by Annemarie Neary
Riddle by Emily Banks
The Algorithm Sells Me a New Bra by Emily Banks
Vernonox by Rick Andrews
Naturism by Michele Lombardo
The Church of the Dermatologist by Amy Miller
Addicted to Plastic by Victor McConnell
Difficulties by Wes Civilz
Fly on the Wall by Wes Civilz
THE CANYON OF UNKNOWN WATER by Kent Nelson
A Prayer by S.J. Stover
SELF-PORTRAIT AT THIRTY-THREE by S.J. Stover
Elegy by S.J. Stover
Landscape as Restoration by Hannah Smith
Acres of Gold by Katharine L. Weigele
Trying by Kim Farrar
Lesson Plan by Kim Farrar
Little Giants, the Story of a Fire Hydrant and Other Heroes by Heather Buchanan
The Journey and Return of Elizabeth Fisher by Elise Therese Napolitano
The Foremothers by Maria Dylan Himmelman
The Word Committee by Maria Dylan Himmelman
Roaming the Labyrinth — Review by Claire Eder
Review: Bill Hollands’ Mangrove by Evan Green
Review: Dear Boobs by Cassie Burkhardt by Tyler List
Review of Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh by Nicholas Skaldetvind
Review: 12 Oxen Under the Sea, by Craig Bernardini by Jenna Brown
Review: George Choundas’s I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever by Grace Cooper
Review: A Preponderance of Starry Beings by Samantha Edmonds by Emilie DeOreo
June 2025
Drink it up, buttercup by Natalie Taylor
Miracle-Proof by Emma De Lisle
Wall of Clocks by Kathleen McCoy
How to Test White Guys by Paloma Martínez-Cruz
5 things getting attacked by a dog taught me about mid-level B2B sales management by JB Andre
Fritura Sunday by Diego Arias
MY WIFE, IN HER ELEMENT by Jeff Worley
Watching Football with My Dad by Mark Williams
Butter by Megan Chou
Providence by Logan McMillen
Ichetucknee by J.D. McGee
Not Now by Ivy Goodman
The Surgeon’s Wife by Dena Pruett
Self Portrait as Horse Mouth by Laura Vitcova
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Susan Cohen
A Woman, Splayed by Alison Theresa Gibson
The Names of Those We Love by Kenyon Geiger
Taxonomy of the Self by Maya Friedman
Tooth by Colton Huelle
Can Mickey Dance? by Sayandev Chatterjee
AND THAT WAS IT by Jeff Worley
Review: Helen of Troy, 1993, by Maria Zoccola by Sarah Haman
Review: Such a Good Man by Dustin M. Hoffman by Dylan Loring
Poetry Goes Pop: Michael Chang’s Toy Soldiers by Rocco Prioletti
Book Review: Claire Bateman’s The Pillow Museum by Clare Hickey
The Power of the Turn: Quantum Leaps in Susan Browne’s Monster Mash by Dion O’Reilly
Review: Dion O’Reilly’s Limerence & Ghost Dogs by Riley Miller
Book Review: Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event by Shelbie Music
Review: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s Rodeo by Evan Green
Poetry, Pain, and the Power of Expression in Therese Gleason’s Hemicrania by Bridget Rexhausen
The Greatest Granny: Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had by Madison Liming
December 2024
(a)rs poet(i)ca by Baylina Pu
Aural Projection by John A. Nieves
SHASTA GIRL by Noah Pohl
Trying Not to Lump Together More Unknowns by Matthew Birdsall
Mrs. Love by Elizabeth Murawski
today which is hotdog day by James Lineberger
Flying into Darkness by Mary Cross
The Skater by Jonathan Cate
Down Jersey by John Wojtowicz
Like Communion by Ellen Skirvin
In the Days of Childhood and Violence by Shelly Cato
Tilting by Matt Cantor
Hymenoptera by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
Acquainted with the Night by Erin Redfern
Flights by Jill Schepmann
The Registry by Dustin Faulstick
It’s Better this Way by Madalyn Hochendoner
Ground Control by Lesa Hastings
Blood Moon Blues by Jonathan Cate
Feeling Sorry for Myself After Failing to Tame a Unicorn by Michael Derrick Hudson
Covenant by Baylina Pu
PORTRAIT OF LUCI (ON FRIDAY NIGHT) by Jonathan Cate
Baby Shower by Annie Schumacher
Echo-Delta by Teresa Burns Gunther
A Kind of Terroir: Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples by Jenna Brown
Review: The Boy Who Reads in the Trees by Ron Mohring by Kate Fox
Review of City Nave by Betsy Brown by Tessa Carman
June 2024
Arizona Snow Globe by Dan Wriggins
It’s Not Always About the Lemmings by Olga Maslova
Transitioning Glasses by Lauren Camp
In Which I Compare My Brain Surgery to a Slope Mine by Evan Gurney
Things of the Earth by David B. Prather
We Grow Apples by Owen Thomas
Evie and Adam at the Farmer’s Market by Linda Ann Strang
How to Remove a Hot Sauce Stain by Dan Wriggins
Remedies by Mickie Kennedy
Jam Sandwich by Patrick Kindig
Steal a Grape by David B. Prather
In haraqa al-film by Jory Mickelson
Chapter IV. The Suffocation of the Mother by Savannah DiGregorio
To Be Stevie Nicks Cool by Jennifer Martelli
Almost Heavenly Babies by Aimee Parkinson
Miraculous by Pam Baggett
The Grandmother Tree by Pam Baggett
A Small Room Off To The Side by Ockert Greeff
Coworker by Kate Hubbard
No One Wants To See Morning Doves Fucking by Patrick Kindig
Leave rocks here by Georgina McKay Lodge
A Peacock on Niner Hill by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
HEN by Steven Winn
Pitching and Staving by Evan Gurney
Grimace by Mickie Kennedy
College Days by Rob Cording
Lore by S Graham
In poetry school by Leigh K. Sugar
What It Looks Like by Emily Wheeler
The Man in the Mirror by Marissa Yuan
Impossible by Dion O’Reilly
The Lyric Moment Lasts by Dion O’Reilly
Love Poem in The Unfortunate by Danny Caine
Review: Sonnez Les Matines by Jane Clark Scharl by Betsy K. Brown
Vitality in Poetry, a Review of Ponds by J. C. Scharl by Jonathan Geltner
Review: Newly Not Eternal by George David Clark by Michael Lavers
December 2023
Improvisation for Beginners by Joseph J. Capista
The Elko Butter Chase by J. Dominic Patacsil
Slow Fruit by Robert Long Foreman
Note on Human Who Has Been Insulted by Wes Civilz
Flying Objects by Daryl Ogden
Stick Season by Rosamund Healey
Should You Choose To Accept It by Emily Blair
Down in the Valley by Mary Birnbaum
Sweater Weather by Cara Lynn Albert
Masking by KT Ryan
Horses in a Field by Emily Blair
Acting Out by Caroline Koopford
Skin Check by Steph Del Rosso
The Strange Situation by Valli Jo Porter
The Nigels by Linda Bamber
Lone Star Jubilee by Cyn Nooney
Praying I Wouldn’t Be Last by Maya Afilalo
The lone wild goose sticks out his toungue at me by Joyce Shmid
“Let Our Bodies Change The Subject” Review by Pichchenda Bao
June 2023
Cheap Thrill by Mike Santora
Twenty-pound flower by Mike Santora
Garage sale bible opened to the Book of Genesis by Mike Santora
Air Guitar at Goblin Hills by T.S. McAdams
Bandits by Terry Dubow
Love is a Kingdom of Obsidian by Andrew Hemmert
Coins by Lorenza Starace
I Want to Explain by Justin Rigamonti
Keno King by by Dwight Livingstone Curtis
History of Desire by Lisa C. Krueger
The Country Husband by Jared Hanson
A Little Longer by Matthew Thorburn
Balloons by Catherine Uroff
Scavengers by Mark Neely
Empty Chamber by Mark Neely
Come as You Are by Ryan Shoemaker
Review: “What is our calling, after all, if not to be astonished?” Deni Naffziger’s Strange Bodies by Bonnie Proudfoot
Front Page by George Bilgere
December 2022
Lazarus by Arah Ko
Thank You For the Tulips by Lisa Bellamy
Speak Up by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Thanksgiving with Kerouac by Bonnie Proudfoot
Hot Enough by Bonnie Proudfoot
heaven whatever it may look like is filled with conversation so loud a person can barely hear themselves by Aidan Dolbashian
The Art of Attention by Erin Redfern
If You’re Single and Touch-Hungry and Hear a Knock at the Door by Erin Redfern
Tour by Jana-Lee Germaine
Crapshoot by Therese Gleason
The Man with the Yellow Hat by Dustin M. Hoffman
Ode to the Yellow Pages by Benjamin Voigt
The Tenure of Moorings by Eilín de Paor
Newspaper Clipping by Eilín de Paor
When They Say All is Lost by Abby E. Murray
When My Husband Asks What He Can Do To Convince Me He Loves Me, I Say by Abby E. Murray
The Silence of It All by Andrea Bianchi
A Walk by Nick Reading
Amerykański by Annabella Mayer
Cahokia by Kathy Nelson
Mr. Levine: On Lineage and Compassion by Kathy Fagan
June 2022
To Save a Life by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Home Fires by Anne Kenner
Triage by Lance Larsen
Pretends Everything Is Fine by Beth Andrix Monaghan
Anthropologist of the Apocalypse by Samantha Krause
The Natural World by Chris Crockett
Buried Fruit by Robert Stothart
Partition by Carolina Hotchandani
Culprit by Carolina Hotchandani
12th and McGraw by Hillary Behrman
Bumping Around by Eileen Pettycrew
The Year After Jeff by Andrew Polhamus
Dear Austin, by Brian Builta
If by Marie-Claire Bancquart
Evergreen Oak by Marie-Claire Bancquart
Margins by Marie-Claire Bancquart
Mass by Jeff Tigchelaar
When she calls me and confirms it it’s by Jeff Tigchelaar
To the Israeli Soldier- by Emily Franklin
Lonely, Lucky, Brave by Jillian Jackson
Ice Cream by Kandi Workman
What We Did at the End of the World by Sunni Brown Wilkinson
December 2021
homecoming by Caro Claire Burke
On the Inadvisability of Good Decisions by Louise Robertson
Jetson Whirr by Louise Robertson
Seven Ways to Get Blindsided in a Restaurant by Melissa Bowers
A Shark Story by Erika Warmbrunn
Reading the Ancients by Matthew Tuckner
Viriginity by Zuzanna Ginczanka
Zuzanna Ginczanka Biographical Note by Joanna Trzeciak Huss
Prayer for Reconciliation by Kelly Rowe
What Will Kill Them by Christina Simon
Watching a House Renovation Show by Hannah Marshall
What is Mine by Claire Robbins
Nights of Noise by Rachel A. Hicks
Ms. Appalachia by Rachel A. Hicks
To Love Love the Beloved by Rachel A. Hicks
Stomach Pains by Danie Shokoohi
Compassion Fatigue by Mary Ardery
My Mother Meets the Cast of Hair by Adam Grabowski
If the manufacturer’s promise holds true, the new roof will outlast my father by Jessica Pierce
How to Choose a Mattress by Leslie Morris
Love, Dungeons, Magic, Dragons or Some Combination Will Save This Marriage by Marvin Shackelford
Clue Junior by Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio
I Have Two Moms by Luciana arbus-Scandiffio
Poem for Paul Who Never Forgets My Birthday Even Though I Never Remember His by Alyssandra Tobin
I Love You Too, Bro by Alex Howe
Turn To Kristen Bell by Alex Howe
Domestic Chess by Andrea Bianchi
My Daughters Sometimes Dress as Ladybugs by Brian Simoneau
June 2021
Essential Worker by J.C. Talamantez
On Our Way Back From the Protest by Shawn R. Jones
Some Kind of Palace by Chrys Tobey
Cursing Lessons by Jackie Craven
The Secret by Bridget O’Bernstein
The Last Vacation by Shannon C. Ward
La Malinche, La Llorona, and Cristine Ortiz by Micahel Leal García
Artist with Newborn by Riley Kross
Superpowers by Bonnie Proudfoot
Reminiscences by Matthew Valades
On Seasons by Christopher Nelson
The Stick–Up by Dwight Livingstone Curtis
Why You’re Going to Eat That Pelican by Jon Fischer
December 2020
In the Morning I Wake Up Feeling Unmoved by Emily Lee Luan
No Most of the Time by Nick Reading
Love and Homeostasis by Jessica Fiorillo
First Night at Super Paradise by Laura Linart
The Last Innocent Moment by Janine Kovac
The Terms of Agreement by Patrick J. Murphy
Beef Jerky That Makes People Sad by Mari Casey
In the Winter of my Sixty–Seventh Year by Susan Browne
June 2020
We Can Fry Anything by Abby E. Murray
Fourteen Meals by Stephanie Early Green
I Should Know a Millionaire by Erik Wilbur
Preparations by Madeleine Cravens
The World We Wanted Shone So Briefly by Gail Martin
The Helms Man by Kathryn Jordan
He’s Fine with a Little College (or, All Those Pups) by Jeff Tigchelaar
Donna Was Not a Cat Person by Halle Ruth
You Start To Grow Old By Haolun Xu
Sacred by Shelagh Connor Shapiro
Second–Hand Tongue by Tamara Miller
Difference by Sara Moore Wagner
I Went, Running by Caroline Manring
Olympia Traveller de Luxe by Robert Long Foreman
Sonnet with Hound and Sequins by Robert Thomas
Walker County Rites by Cheyenne Taylor
Self–Portrait as Minor Prophet by Craig Van Rooyen
The Universe is Just One of Those Things That Happens from time to Time by Jacob Griffin Hall
A Pocket Introduction to Our Universe by Claire Bateman
December 2019
Coyotes by Terri Leker
Revising Bosch’s Hell Panel for the 21st Century by Kelly Michels
American Bachelor Party by Conor Bracken
Red Flags by Whitney Collins
The Dock Hand by Kathryn Merwin
A Cure for Grief by Emily Franklin
Thresher Derby by Patrick Bernhard
Lunch Duty by Barry Peters
Lucy’s by T.J. Sandella
Deluge by Rachel Eve Moulton
Heartbeat Hypothesis by Robert Wood Lynn
Somewhere Outside of Loveland by Amy Bee
June 2019
Flight Lessons by Barbara Ganley
Just Like All the Girls by Francesca Bell
Elegy with Two Portraits by Dan Clark
SKIN by Janice N. Harrington
Wind & Sand & Stars by Matt Prater
Stage Four by Kate Wisel
Morning Commute with Revenant by James McKee
Holding On is [ ] by Kay Gram
Northern Flicker by Kathryn Jordan
Subject Matter Experts by Laura Jok
Bacon by Alan Sincic
Construction Paper Flags Tacked to a Primary School Bulletin Board by Adam Tavel
Now in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama
An Unordered List of the Not–Beautiful by Katie Pyontek
After Hours by Maria Nazos
Heat Index by Kerry James Evans
December 2018
Dark Matter by Caro Claire Burke
Hurricane, 3rd Day by Melissa Studdard
Parliament Lights by Jonathan Durbin
Told You So by Craig Bernardini
In the Borderlands by Kateri Kosek
National Pastime by Daniel Paul
Europeans Wrapping Knickknacks by David Kirby
The Roots of Phobia Lie in History by David O’Connell
A History of Clouds by Christopher Brean Murray
A History of Clouds (Film) by Caitlin Morgan
Mexican Standoff by Dylan Loring
Aphorisms for a Lonely Planet by Lance Larsen
Box in a Closet by Faith Shearin
from Real Things by Nicole Hebdon
June 2018
A Non-Orientable Surface by Mari Christmas
Roses and Begonias; Or, Things That Can Crush You by J. H. Bond
マ I 克 (ma-i-ke) by Warren Decker
The Red Bird by Joanne Serling
First Date by James Lineberger
Hilltop Cemetery by Brendan Cooney
Wings of Wind by Eliot Fintushel
The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest by Mark Williams
At the Edge of Everything by Traci Skuce
Mini-Issues
The Poetics of Blues (2019)
Perpetual Reckoning: An Interview With Kiese Laymon
From the Archive: Jazz and the Blues in Poetry
Horn by Robert Pinsky
I Want to Talk About You by Angie Estes
Misterioso by Sydney Lea
Piano Lesson by Gregory Djanikian
Harmonica by Eleanor Kedney
From the Archive: “Influence” and “Homer and Jazz”
Influence by Sydney Lea
Homer and Jazz by Ralph M. Rosen
Pantoum With Lines From Lucille Clifton’s Memoir by Angela Narciso Torres
From the Archive: “Audition” by Leslie Rodd
Dispatches from the Future: Tech Lit (2019)
Juvenile Federation of Genetically Modified Youth by Joseph Rakowski
reCAPTCHA by Jiordan Castle
“Uber” and “Alexa” by Ruth Bardon
The Uber Diaries by Kyle Minor
Landscape with iPhone by Emily Mohn-Slate
Facebook Sonnet by Tanya Grae
Depleted Uranium and Other Facebook Posts by Okla Elliot
Recovery by Max Bell
Love in the Time of Online Literary Exclusives (2020)
Late-Season Outdoor Wedding by Chelsea B. DesAutels
If French Kissing Was As Good As Promised Shouldn’t I Be Happy By Now? by Emmy Newman
The Art of Longing by Emily Sinclair
“Metaphor Offers the Promise to Move Us”: A Conversation with Nicole Walker, Author of Sustainability: A Love Story by Kay Keegan
Couples by Kenneth Hart
Love You Excavation Work by Donald Platt
When We Were Neanderthals by Chrys Tobey
All That Shimmers and Settles Along the Roads of Our Passage by Mark Cox
Entropy by Tracey Knapp
Look by James Lineberger
Why Men Don’t Write About Their Wives by Dennis Sampson
Solo in the Skeleton Key by Elton Glaser
“Endangered Hawaiian monk seals keep getting eels stuck up their noses and scientists want them to stop” by Emmy Newman
Marriage at 17 Years by Gary Dop
Animal Lit: A Shrewdness of Poems, a Parliament of Prose (2020)
I propose we worship the mud dauber by Jessica Pierce
Delectable Hazards at the Animal Dive by Michael Chaney
The Dog in the Library by Catherine Stearns
Ekstasis by Erika Brumett
The Problems of the Wild by Abby Horowitz
Y at the End of It by Nancy Eimers
Octopus on Ecstasy by Geneviève Paiement
Dune Cat by Winnie Anderson
Critical Insect Studies by Tom Whalen
Birds in Cemeteries by George Kalogeris
In the Second Month of Parched Land by Daiva Markelis
Monarch by Kathleen Radigan
The Last Litter by Melissa Cistaro
Roost by Janice N. Harrington
The Good Life by Susan Allison
The Personal Political (2020)
What Comes Next by Maxine Scates
Small Boy by Joseph Scapellato
Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in and Empty Lot in Newark by Theresa Burns
Putting Girls on the Map by Irene Keliher
Mango Languages by Linda Bamber
Buzz Can Happen Here: Sinclair Lewis and the New American Fascism by Michael Mark Cohen
“This Time I’m Going to Fool Somebody”: Willie Stark and the Politics of Humiliation by Dustin Faulstick
Take Me to Your Lady Leader by Kristen Lillvis
Of the People, for the People, by the Robots by Christopher A. Sims
New Ohio Review 