Issue 98.3 Now Available

Our Fall 2024 Issue opens with a poem called “Lineage.” In it, Brenda Cárdenas writes back to the bisabuela she never knew, asking what if—what if there had not been the murder, the violence, the displacement. Into the past of the Mexican Revolution she looks for a future.

Stories from Dana Fang and John Kinsella pick up this thread with their own questions about lineage and history. Fang’s story, “Outdoor Education,” narrates the main character Tatianna’s realization of interiority and, simultaneously, isolation. Tatianna spends a week at summer camp away from her mother, and by the end of the week she has secrets that she cannot share, fundamentally altering their relationship. It’s a queer, Asian American coming of age story that will keep you guessing. In Kinsella’s “Premonition,” the narrator processes his grandfather’s death alongside the ecological destruction of the forest where he lives. “I just caught a premonition and let it go,” Kinsella writes. “It was a fluttering silhouette against the floor, and I gently caught it by a wing.” Along the way, the narrator follows these premonitions—storm moths—which appear at the advent of a storm, and this journey leads him to discover the lies and deceptions inside the forestry industry. The story asks: what if new maps can be made to find a way out of the destruction and death brought on by colonialism?

Urvi Kumbhat’s poems write into the lineage of revolution. “At the Museum in Athens” begins with the line: “All the women have lost their heads / to history.” In her poem “Lecture Series I” she writes, “I say at dinner, / don’t confuse me for that useless overeducated postcolonial bourgeois class / Fanon decimates. I say, in my scholarly work I will show you with ease / the place of a woman in the revolution.” ire’ne lara silva writes in her poem “[panther]”, “how do you think i survived i was / hungrier than the others not smarter / not stronger not faster only more / desperate and i would not give up / this is my nature.” In “Field Notes at Dusk,” iheoma uzomba writes, “Are the greens only gorgeous / when their stems learn civility, / to stay / ruler-straight / in grief & bounty? // & who would garden a park of wild / thorns, / its long / wiry / stems / curling / all the way to insanity.” Also included in the issue are poems from Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Hajjar Baban, and Bruce Parker, among others.

The issue includes Amy Nolan’s essay, “The Shape of Her Hands,” which was the runner-up to the 2024 Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest. The essay narrates the story of a turtle, which “began on a hot spring afternoon, a few days before I was to return to Michigan to bury my mother’s ashes.” It narrates Nolan’s attempts to save a life while grappling with the loss of another. And at the end of the issue, Marcia Lynx Qualey reviews Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s novel, Samahani.

You can order the new Fall issue now through our online store. Our store also offers subscriptions for a full year (4 issues) of the journal. New subscriptions will start with our upcoming Spring 2025 issue.