“A child’s worry was not like an adult’s. It gnawed deep, and was so unnecessary. Why did people not realize children could withstand the truth? Why did adults insist on filling children with the deceptions their own parents had laid on them, when surely they remembered how it had felt to lie in bed and …
“However much Connie’s absence permeated my every though, I had never once said so out loud. Never recounted to anyone the lost, dark-edged hours, knowing that the words themselves, the weight of them in my mouth, would be like drowning, and all at once her disappearance would cease to be a series of frantic flashes, …
I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review. “Yes, baby…That’s exactly what a purple bear should do,” (“Purple Bears,” Ghadery 47). I adore flash fiction. I think it’s an underappreciated form of writing and incredibly challenging to develop character, plot, and setting in a story that typically consists of only 1-3 …
Sometimes I forget that my hair is blue. Or I guess it’s not that I forget that it’s blue but I forget that it’s a part of me altogether. I’ll be walking down the street or sitting at the desk at work when a stranger or customer will tell me that they like my hair, …
“Many times there are no reasons that will ever make sense,” (Conlin, “Occlusion,” 145). Watermark is an absolutely astounding short story collection. Conlin writes characters that are so intriguing, who you both root for an try to understand, whose stories you desperately want to know. I love how some of the characters pop up or are mentioned …
I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review. “We are all having / the same nightmare, overcome / by an invisible, relentless enemy / completely unable to protect ourselves,” (Connors, “Virus”). Patrick Connors newest poetry collection covers a variety of themes mostly connected to the Covid-19 pandemic. Connors touches on topics …
“Is it some disorder of the mind that causes me to see things, hear things, that then vanish as though they never were?” (Gish 230). Spinster Ada Byrd has just started a teaching position in Lowry Bridge, an isolated town where no one knows of her disgrace and shame from her last post. As she establishes …
“Some are born anxious, some achieve anxiety, and some have anxiety thrust upon them. I am lucky enough to have been blessed with all three,” (Donahue 7). I heard Anne Donahue read from her collection of essays a few years back (the same literary festival where I heard Claudia Dey read from Heartbreaker, so I guess I’m …
“Some of us are forced to eat spring mix in the half-dark of our low-ceilinged studio apartments and still expand inexplicably. Some of us expand at the mere contemplation of what you shovel so carelessly, so dancingly into your smug little mouth,” (Awad 74-75). I’ve been a fan of Mona Awad’s since first reading Bunny but it’s only …
“This is what I know: She left last night,” (Dey 3). Billie Jean Fontaine is missing. Seventeen years earlier she arrived to a smalltown far in the territory and now she’s left her teenaged daughter Pony, her husband The Heavy, her devoted dog, the teenager Supernatural who always seems to know more than anyone, and the …
Sarah O'Connor 