Prose
Special Registration
Corzo
One day when I was in the seventh grade, I came home to my father—Eduvigo Herrera III—cutting his heart out with a steak knife. He was sitting at the little kitchen table when I got home from school, his hand in a ragged chest wound the size of a plum. "Mija, I need you to …
Lion
When the old man died, I laid him out in the bathtub because he was small and neatly fit. I took him by the ankles first and then, moving slowly toward his neck, gently scrubbed him down. I lifted him at the back and washed his ribs all the way around until he was like …
Emergency Brake by Ruth Madievsky, Tavern Books, 2016.
Lungs, throats, doors: these images recur throughout Emergency Brake, the debut collection from poet Ruth Madievsky. Each names a portal, an opening where smoke or speech or someone may pass between inside and outside. "I think the body is a door," muses one poem’s speaker. Emergency Brake makes brilliant use of this insight, that to …
Hilda Raz: A Celebration
I recognize some people as much by their lexicon as any other aspect of their personality. Although there are many words distinct to Hilda, “exquisite” is the word I most closely associate with her. It’s Hilda’s expression of highest approval and the word that best describes Hilda herself. She’s a writer of exquisite poetry, a …