“B.K.” by Robert James Cross stands out in Issue 52 of Fiction International. Instead of straightforward text on the page, he utilizes other means: telegrams, “handwritten” and typed letters, an illustration, and official documentation.

The story unfolds in messages between Michael and Linda, siblings growing up without parents and left to rely on each other. Their letters take place from 1963 to 1967. In between the chatter about family, the two discuss their current historical events of John F. Kennedy’s death and the Vietnam War. Between this all, their love for each other brightly shines through.

The variety of means of communication makes the piece visually appealing and turns the idea of storytelling through letters on its head. Seeing these written or printed items given a physical form makes the piece feel more real and personal. Cross’s bio claims he is “under the influence of the unconventional,” and that definitely shows in this piece.

Cross isn’t the only one getting creative in this “Body” themed issue. Plenty of other writers push the limits of their craft, including Carol Guess & Aimee Parkinson in “Girl in Medical Trials¹” Ivars Balkits in “Brain Talking to Brain,” and D.E. Steward in “CRISPR.” In Issue 52, Fiction International offers readers a group of talented writers unafraid to push boundaries.

Review by Katy Haas

“The Suit,” published in the Spring 2019 issue of American Literary Review, is an essay by Julie Marie Wade in which Wade questions, but never resolves, what it means for her to be born in a female body.

Much of the essay is set in scene and centered around a tight-fitting suit that Wade’s mother is committed to squeezing her husband—Wade’s father—into. When Wade’s image-obsessed mother is not home, her father splurges on James Bond films and hotdogs and explains to Wade that “every man wants to be James Bond,” even though he doesn’t believe he will ever be similar to the handsome agent.

Meanwhile, Wade’s mother encourages Wade to nominate her as “Most Inspirational Mother,” via a department store writing contest. Between scenes, Wade gives us drafts of her contest submission where she wrestles with representing her mother in “equal parts nice and true.” Wade tries to define her mother as a woman who “can see through who people appear to be and identify who they might be.” In these drafts, we understand that although Wade praises her mother, she also examines how her family relationships influence the way she approaches her own identity.

Through metaphor, shopping with her parents, and contest drafts, this coming-of-age essay is a story that explores gender identity in a home that explicitly encourages traditional roles.

Review by Alyssa Witbeck Alexander

In the Fall 2019 issue of Southern Humanities Review, William Walker concocts a suspenseful, haunting tale with “Saturn Devouring His Son.”

The short story brings readers out into the country where William and his mother live. The piece begins: “A car idled at the end of our driveway, and its lights were setting the living room curtains aflame. Somebody was out there walking around, but we could only make out the silhouettes stepping and out of the high beams near the pine trees.” The first pages continue with suspense as the two wonder if it’s William’s father outside watching them, the mother and son then learning how to shoot a gun in self-defense and surrounding themselves with familial support.

We’re momentarily lulled into putting our guards down as Tom Kaczynski comes into the picture, inserting himself as the new father figure to William and the new lover to his mom. William’s annoyance at his presence takes over the piece. Even as Tom takes measures to make the family safer, William’s dislike for Tom eclipses the worries of William’s dad.

However, the story reaches a brutal, explosive climax, shocking readers back into the state of tension from the beginning of the piece and we must watch as William tries to sort through his feelings in the days after tragedy strikes. Walker writes with clarity and detail, causing me to double check which genre I was reading several times. Was this fiction or nonfiction? At times I could believe either, a testament to Walker’s skill.

I recommend reading this story with several lights on, and only after you’ve double-checked the locks on your doors.

Review by Katy Haas

Issue 19.4 of DIAGRAM gives us “Call of Duty,” a riveting essay that explores the juxtaposition of needing and wanting. In this piece, Amy Long shares her experience with the unintended effects caused by opioid addicts for those who truly need the medicine and the lengths she went to in order to find relief from her own pain. Through beautiful and sharp phrases such as “I’ve betrayed the one person who really trusts me,” “I don’t want to turn into that patient,” and “I don’t lose everything. I don’t lose anything,” we get a sense of the narrator’s pain and the mask that she puts on and lives with in order to keep the trust of the people who matter most to her.

As most essays in DIAGRAM, Long’s relies on form and structure to move deeper the fear of judgement and misunderstanding. The essay comprises words, printed and cut up, that have been scanned onto paper in unique designs. Glassine envelopes are replicated in the story as well, providing more words, thoughts, and stories that are kept safely at first, but eventually spill freely onto the page. Stories such as these cannot be contained. We see, too, that through the use of font size, italics, wisely placed words, and bolding, Long remains apprehensive about the revelation of such truths; she still struggles with making any sense out of them. Only by letting the story spill out of the glassine packet does she even begin to make sense of what has happened to her body, her health, and her future.

Review by Tyler Hurst

Greg November opens the Fall 2019 issue of Boulevard with “The Business of Killing Tony.” After initially skimming the first sentences as I paged through the issue, I found it nearly physically impossible to stop reading: “Tony’s death—the first one, I’m talking—last a week. We had nothing to do with that one, Gwen and I, at least not directly.”

The story follows three siblings, the narrator Don, Gwen, and Tony, in the days and weeks following Tony’s death and subsequent resurrection and even more subsequent deaths. Prior to the death, their relationships are strained: Don is detached from the other two siblings as he separates from his wife and moves into a new condo; Tony, addicted to drugs and alcohol, orbits as the family black sheep; and Gwen halfheartedly takes on a motherly role as she attempts to organize an intervention for Tony (which is where he dies the first time) and get Don to participate. Tony comes back with a newfound clarity, death becoming the push he needed to finally sort himself out. But he has one problem: he wants to stay dead and can’t.

November’s characters are wry and detached, and the universe he’s created is lightened with dark humor. The siblings react to the news of Tony’s resurrection relatively level-headedly and are brought together by this new task of killing Tony again and again. There are moments November works in feeling, though he never careens into sappy sentimentality. The plot is inventive and interesting, readers not knowing quite what to expect out of a universe where a man can come back to life and make ties between the lands of the living and dead.

“The Business of Killing Tony” is a great opener for this issue of Boulevard and I look forward to checking out more work by November.

Review by Katy Haas

In “Bought and Sold,” Issue 30 of True Story, author Renata Golden locates herself in the complicated history of the American West after inheriting two half-acre ranchettes outside of Deming, New Mexico.

Purchased in 1969 by her father, a man ready to leave the ordeals of the Chicago Police Force behind him, the land promised a “welcoming warmth.” Fifteen years after his death, Golden steps on ground that had been handed down to her as the American narrative of land leading to wealth and a better life. Instead, the barren landscape and hard crusted earth force her to confront “how primitive land could be.”

Though her father believed the winds of the West “carried a hint of hope instead of despair,” as Golden mines the history of her inheritance, she discovers the injustice, violence, and death inflicted on the natives and land grant owners who first called the land home.

Despite framing each scene of the essay with excerpts from historical documents, Golden writes, “I know that some voices have been lost to the winds that carry a palpable sense of grief. I do not know the truths of the past. I know only the stories told around campfires and corrals, in letters and ledger books, that have survived. Stories repeated became history.”

Review by Emily James

The Tiger Moth Review publishes art and literature that “engages with nature, culture, the environment, and ecology” from Singapore and beyond.

In Issue 2, ko ko thett drew me in by writing about one of my favorite animals: elephants. “Funeral of an elephant” speculates on what is needed to mourn the death of the creature: the amount of men needed to carry the casket, how the casket should be made, what traditions to apply to this funeral, whether or not it weighs more dead than alive. thett prompts readers to hold this death in as great esteem as a human’s. I feel this is especially relevant after recent reports of eleven elephants dying as they attempted to save one another at a waterfall in Thailand. With their actions, as in thett’s poem, we see the humanity in the lives of these creatures.

thett also dedicates a poem to “The Chindwin,” a river in Burma. thett humanizes the river, comparing it to a “soon-to-be single mother,” a dominatrix, a woman puking, pissing, bleeding. There are no gentle verses here, just the ripping force of a river tearing away the landscape and the humans who have wronged her.

In both pieces, thett makes readers consider the humanness of nature, a nice selection to usher in the rest of this issue of The Tiger Moth Review.

Review by Katy Haas

From the introduction to the final sentence, Leslie Jill Patterson’s flash essay,“Study in Self-Defense: Lubbock, Texas,” published in the September 2019 issue of Brevity (Issue 62), kept me on the edge of my seat. A perfect read for this October, Patterson tells the story of the tense moments that follow her dog’s ferocious reaction to something, or someone, outside her house at one in the morning—an event that gives her “a lesson in self-defense.”

Patterson sets the scene by painting a sense of isolation: a woman living alone, lurking shadows, the man she is afraid might come after her. She then fully engages the reader’s fight or flight response through dark strokes of impending danger, her dog’s protective instincts engaged. From the moment of her dog’s jolt from a sound sleep to an adrenaline punched awakening, the reader finds themselves breathless as her “lesson” unfolds.

Patterson’s essay brings the scene to life with detailed imagery and an all too relatable reaction to terror. You can hear the furious barking of the dog as he “pinball[s]” from room to room, see the woman hiding as if to play “peek-a-boo,” and feel afraid even to look up from your own screen, your “covers,” and catch that terrifying glimpse. A thrill to read.

Review by Kelsie Peterson

According to William J. Doan’s visual narrative “Dear Family and Friends,” in Issue 27 of Cleaver Magazine, “17 million adults had a major depressive episode last year.” Despite affecting so many people, it can be hard to articulate the experience, and even harder for the people around them to understand, especially when the sufferer is wearing a mask of “normality,” a mask of laughter and smiles. As Doan says, “Sharing what it’s like to live with anxiety and depression is a lot like undressing in front of strangers. It’s AWKWARD.” But after a while, masking began to feel like lying to Doan, and “Dear Family and Friends” is an attempt at breaking that silence and “coming out” to those around him.

By using visual means of communication, Doan offers a more concrete way of explaining and understanding the feelings of depression and anxiety. His images are grayscale, with smudges of cool colors creeping into some panels. Scribbles and dots of ink show how it feels to be filled with anxiety, to have your brain feel weighed down and blotted with dark ink.

“I’ve barely reached the heart of the matter in this brief letter,” he says of his eighteen panels, “But it’s a start.” Not only is this piece a start for Doan, but it’s a good way to start difficult conversations with our own friends and family as we remove our masks.

Review by Katy Haas

The works in the latest issue of Runestone Journal, which publishes writing by undergraduates, is splashed with color.

In nonfiction, Eli Rallo harnesses the power that a change in color brought to her as an eleven-year-old struggling with anxiety. A touching piece on family, “Color the Walls,” plays back moment from her past when her hardworking, serious father allowed his children to paint the walls red and green for Christmas, a gesture of pure silliness that gave her stillness during a difficult time.

In fiction, Whitley Carpenter captures colors in “Memories of Green,” with narrator Pell taking care of Ella, an older relative whose memories come in and out of focus as dementia starts to set in. From the blue veins beneath her skin to the green surrounding the farmhouse, Whitley’s details stand as a strong backbone to the characters’ struggles. In the same section, Renata Erickson creatively imagines a world where color is something that can be physically taken from its source in “The Color Crisis,” the narrator learning where they belong in this new type of environment and how they’ll contribute to it.

There is no shortage of color in the poetry section, however. Damaris Castillo’s “The Passing of Marigolds” brings us “a golden road to home.” Cole Chang’s “In the late Afternoon” brings a summer day in the wetlands to life in hues of brown and green, purple and gold. In “An Evening at Inch Strand Beach Just Outside Dingle, Ireland,” Emilee Kinney describes a sunset, the “Deep pink” and the “sunlit-stained shores.” Mariah Rose turns “flamingo-pink,” sunburnt in “NOLA,” then describes “Muddied water the color of chocolate milk” in “Sedona, AZ.”

Carve out some time to check out Volume 5 of Runestone Journal. It will be sure to give your day the pop of color it needs.

Review by Katy Haas

Gabriela Garcia’s “Mrs. Sorry” can be found in the latest issue of ZYZZYVA. Focusing on class and gender, the short story is narrated by a young woman working at a cosmetics counter. At work, she helps rich women (and one in particular who comes to be known as the titular character) pick out skincare products. At home, she feels herself slipping away from herself and her boyfriend, who begins offering her the Roxicodone pills he’s been stealing from his work at a pharmacy.

As the story progresses, we see Mrs. Sorry’s husband, a man who gaslights her in front of and with debatably inadvertent help from the narrator. While Mrs. Sorry and the narrator are leading entirely different lives, they’re both women who are being manipulated by the men they trust most, the difference in their social and economic classes keeping her from speaking out on Mrs. Sorry’s behalf. “Nothing cracks in my presence,” the narrator thinks at one point as she considers her weaknesses and the futility with which she handles both her home and work life.

Eventually she finds the strength and the weight to make cracks, the ending a defiant fist in the air. Just long enough to create tension, Garcia masters her narrator’s voice in four short, satisfying pages.

Review by Katy Haas