Magazine Stand :: Colorado Review – Summer 2023

In the Summer 2023 issue of Colorado Review, readers encounter people watching and waiting, anticipating and missing signs of one kind or another, move uneasily through this issue. As when the narrator of Kelly Luce’s “The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion” says, “I liked scanning the sky, looking for signals. Even when nothing happened, there was still that heartbeat. It was a space—it was space—where I could process what was happening in my life.” And in Adam O’Fallon Price’s “The Famous Actress,” a man tries to recapture a time of possibility, of potential, as he flounders in a dream gig he’s unqualified for, the nearby ocean calling to “some deep, uneasy place in himself,” confirming his anxiety. After her baby is stillborn, a young woman in Dyanne Stempel’s “Crashing Shiva” attempts to process her grief by attending the shivas of strangers, looking for cues, hoping “to try on all the random pain of the room.” And in Analía Villagra’s “Need Her Badly,” two next-door neighbors communicate in a passive-aggressive code—thumps on the apartment wall, knocks, taps—to reach out in a strangely antagonistic friendship. “Wunderkammer,” Lesley Jenike’s lyric essay, contemplates our relationship with museums, the ways they speak to us, tell us who we are. Absent much information about her grandfather, Jo-Anne Berelowitz engages in the practice of midrash to create the narratives that give him a life in her essay “Looking for Joseph.” And in “Mirage,” Susanna Sonnenberg recounts the missed, and crossed, signals in her first marriage, the result of having “unconsciously agreed to Not Know things.”