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Editors' Advertisements Patrick Hicks’ Soldier in the Dark captivated me with its opening line and never let me go. With its fable-like tone, this powerful story offers hope for redemption through the eyes of Milo Hewitt. As Milo sorts through his intuitions of revenge and forgiveness, his understanding of what it really means to see helps readers do the same.” – Gianna Jacobson “The rich and comically inventive story, The Family Unit, is built around a terrific concept: what if the best and brightest family in your neighborhood could be bought by a corporation and turned into a franchise? That’s a nifty and evocative idea. Somehow the story’s author, Laurence Klavan, makes it all spring fully formed to life. It’s terrifically smart. It’s very funny. And it reminds us of something complicated and true: happy and secure families are held together as much by chance as by virtue.” –John Dalton “In Hunting with a Coworker in an Undisclosed Location, the narrator reflects on the craft of mushroom gathering in a misty and mountainous landscape, comparing the trade to those of other hunters. A tradition in and of itself, mushrooming is done with delicacy, strategy, and skill; but the narrator pauses to consider that it is a hunt from which these trophy mushrooms do not even have the luxury to flee.” –Anna Eggemeyer “There is something Nabokovian in the verbal playfulness and anti-scholasticism embedded in the story of Totenbein and his quest for archaeological glory. The protagonist suffers from overblown ambition and personal hypersensitivity; yet Totenbein and his neglected, loyal wife remain rooted in pathos. Will Totenbein's hunt in Mammoth Cave result in just another hoax? Fans of fiction have to ask: what well-crafted story is not, on some level, a perfectly contrived hoax?” -Inda Schaenen “I read and reread Kara Moyer’s poem Plums and Anodyne, mesmerized by the way in which the poet renders grief palpable. In the poem “dawn dissolves/Like sugar…”., and so too do the worlds of death and life merge. A dear one’s mortality inhabits essences of the living world: a trip to the bakery, a loaf of bread. Art historian John Berger argues that what we know determines what we see, and Kara Moyer's poem embodies this idea: grief and loss are the poem’s lenses.” -Leeli Davidson “Laura Lee Smith’s This Trembling Earth skillfully explores the interplay of fate and parental influence. As the arrival of a colicky newborn destabilizes a Georgia family, the narrator reflects, with unflinching honesty, on her two grown, dependent children. She questions her own role in shaping the lives of her neglectful teen daughter and an impulsive son, who roams the Okefenokee Swamp at night hunting snakes.” -Megan Barnett “Alison Morse does something really smart in her poem, October Starlings. Not only is ‘murmuration’ the proper word for a multitude of starlings, it also suggests a low, discontinuous sound, an inarticulate speech, perhaps a distortion. ‘This Moment’s Angel,’ however, doubles the seraphs spread through Rome, and is doubled by the blur of geography and mythology (Tibernius). It exists, but signals that which does not (‘a sculpture carved in cloud’). This is how the multiple becomes singular, ‘pulsing like a net flung out,’ commanding a presence counter to Rome’s expressions of eternity. And the censure of emperors earns its place in the dung of starlings even today, at this present moment.” -Brit Blasingame “Don Thompson's Pastoral aligns itself with the tradition of pastoral poems in an admirable and modern way. The reflection held within the poem, the uniqueness and crafting of image and line break, serve to provide the reader a pleasurable poem. Finding this poem early in the reading period, it provided a measuring stick for every other poem submitted to this issue.” -Joe Betz “In Excursion, an excerpt from Donald Lystra’s just-published debut novel, Season of Water and Ice, we follow astute yet naïve Danny DeWitt through a back-road, coming-of-age story that the author infuses with poignant detail. Along for the ride is one of the novel’s most vivid and finely nuanced creations: Charlene. She commands Danny’s –and the reader’s--full attention.” –Jen Nord . “In a contemporary take on epistolary form, John A. McDermott’s Your Luggage is Your Life lets readers peek into the life of an ordinary man in love with a woman that isn’t in love with him. This in itself is nothing new, but the fact that the story is written from the point of view of Transportation Security Administration employees in a letter to this everyman—after they had inspected the contents of his luggage and read his journal out of boredom—gives the story a kind of Orwellian twist while avoiding the familiar.” “In Poem with Blueberries, Brian Simoneau's epigraph by Robert Hass prepares the reader for the twist that follows the simple, but touching, narrative first section. Relationships deepen and darken in the next sections as he explores why the humble blueberry better captures the contradicting truths of his life in contrast to the “In Maud Kelly's poem, The Consort, the soul of the narrator and her animal ‘consort’ seem to spiral in and out of each other with intoxicating and surreal movement. This poet is adept at such totemic imagery, employing a grounded owl as a stealthy metaphor for grave illness in her poem Rise That We All May Rise. These poems are tight yet expansive in meaning, familiar yet enlightening, and beg to be read over and over again, as the poet's emotional interior unfolds anew each time.” –Bridget Healey “In Eugene Baker’s wonderfully subtle and provocative short story, The Borrower, the reader follows Charlie Holtz during his time of self-imposed exile as an American living in rural France. Recently retired and divorced, Holtz knows something is missing in his life, something he hopes he can find if he simply allows himself to fully immerse in a culture and in its language. But, through his encounter with the resident beggar, Turcotte, who comes to him to borrow money, Holtz soon discovers the inadequacy of mere language. Alas, for Holtz, so much more is yet to be learned and understood about the inner workings of love and friendship and the complex--and confusing--nature of belonging”. –Angela Mitchell-Phillips
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