Author: Travis Shosa
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Medea’s Flower: On Ariana Reines’s The Rose
Ariana Reines | The Rose | Graywolf | April 2025 | 96 pages Ariana Reines’s latest collection of poetry is fizzing with phrases but her unique style takes some getting used to. Many of her poems are allusive, but sometimes what they’re alluding to eludes the reader. Reines refuses to dumb down her lines and subjects (dumbing…
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What mathematicians think about when they fall in love
curvessurfacessymmetrysizeapproximationdistancedimensionprojectionconvolutionconvergenceinclusionembeddingsretractionsresolution Sharon Hoffmann is a writer based in Atlantic Beach, Florida. Publications (past and forthcoming) include The Hooghly Review, New York Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives (Harvard University Press), Magazine1, Paddler Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Letters, Wild Roof, Sho Poetry Journal, Blood+Honey, Burial, and other magazines. Awards include fellowships from Atlantic…
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A Requiem for Olive Groves
I woke up before seven, which I rarely do, to the sound of pigeons cooing. Those greedy little fuckers are everywhere here. They have become so comfortable with people that they’ve lost any sense of propriety. In America the people are fat and the pigeons skinny; in the Riviera, it’s the other way around, and…
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I’m Okay at Being a Person I Guess
A hedgehog runs onto our futon, waking me up. “It’s me, Susan!” she chirps. “Sorry to be back so late, I was out drinking with, um, friends; we wound up at this after party at the witches’ house, someone goes, ‘drink this and you’ll swap bodies with a hedgehog,’ and I thought why not, hedgehogs…
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3 Poems by Ursula Carroll
Can You Believe A Big Gulp Is $1.79 Now? I used to live in a Big Gulp cupI had a little bed in there that floatedon top of the Diet Coke, tied anashtray to it so it wouldn’t float away I’d watch TV in my styrofoam houselying there idly dipping my toes into sodalittle plumes…
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Of “Seen” Messages and Unrequited Digital Love
I asked ten times,and you gave me ten silences.I guess it’s fate. We will never drink fridge-coldChardonnay in lipstick-stained flutes,you will never meet my room, the turntable,our shadows won’t dance under trembling lights. How much must someone’s heart bleedto rub its love in pixels,like a stray cat, always damp,needy, lost in the midnight rain? Your…
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Sound
Those who heard it reported a tingling in the earlobe, spiraling deeper, like a coin dropped into a mall funnel, a warmth which spread into an awareness of the bones inside, the ossicles whose names they never learned but could now trace like the splayed fingers of a hand— …
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Shows I Left Last Year, a List
Autechre in the Black Tent in August, Helsinki,Where it was not black, where the sun was setting outside,Where the noise did not overwhelm,Where I walked off free into the early night Racket where the man on stage was so young and so slight,Dwarfed by his coat, which a musician should never be,Unless they are David…
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The men who hurt me
always have long necks,protruding Adam’s apples,blue eyes, red hats.He doesn’t understand transgendersand listens to Cumtown.He likes me naked andbumping lines on cloudy afternoons.He wants nothing moreafter we fuckin the front-facing windowof an abandoned home. Davi Schweizer (they/them), from Philadelphia, is the author of “Only Seconds Until Detonation” (forthcoming, Querencia Press) and “Echo Decay” (Kith Books).…
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Lost Girls: On Claire Adam’s Love Forms
Claire Adam | Love Forms | Hogarth | July 2025 | 271 pages Dawn Bishop, the main character and narrator in Claire Adam’s latest novel Love Forms, grew up in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Her father Kenneth Bishop ran a fruit juice empire that made the family rich, but his modesty prevented any ostentatious displays…