A Review of Jennifer Militello’s THE PACT
If you are someone like me who usually – but not always – closes her correspondence to friends and family with the word “love,” Jennifer Militello’s “The Pact” (Tupelo Press) might make you want to think about what it means when you use – or withhold – that word.
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
The World Already on Fire: Dzvinia Orlowsky’s Bad Harvest
Bad Harvest is a resonant folk song that fills the chambers of the future with echoes of the past. Its complex twists of hereditary and personal relations with language and work open a chasm of concern for the future that Dzvinia Orlowsky locates and does a little dance on the edge of. She stares openly, even mockingly, into the pit of impermanence and unpredictability, spinning the prescribed doom and mortality of what we all know shall end: health, love, and livelihood.
Two Poems
One can hold a crossbow and a pussy / Willow with the same affection. / One can dream her own body in the arms / of the blue Mary
No One Should Feel That Alone
Jane was handing someone a bouquet of satay, / gushing about Muller’s Foreign Cinema and Laszlo, / when I told her about the abortion. A party / not the best place to breathe new disclosures, to say: / The baby would be three years old now.
Reverse
J.G. MCCLURE is an MFA candidate at the University of California – Irvine, where he teaches writing and works on Faultline. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Fourteen Hills, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. His essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Colorado Review, Cleaver, and Rain Taxi. He is the Craft Essay Editor and Assistant Poetry Editor of Cleaver, and is at work on his first collection.
In Handfuls
CYNTHIA ATKINS’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Letters & Commentary, BigCityLit, BOMB, Caketrain,,Clementine, Del Sol Review, Denver Quarterly, Harpur Palate, Inertia, The Journal, North American Review, Sou’wester, Tampa Review, Valparaiso Review, and Verse Daily among others. Her second collection, “In The Event of Full Disclosure” was recently featured on the Huffington Post and the Bill and Dave Cocktail Hour, and reviewed in [PANK] and the North American Review. She earned her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and holds residencies from the VCCA and Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and currently is currently the new associate poetry editor of MadHat Lit, and an assistant professor of English at Virginia Western Community College. She lives in Rockbridge County, VA on the Maury River with her family.
How to Be a Hero
When the shooter climbs the emergency exit stairway to your floor, when he pushes the door open into the office hallway, when he turns to face you with his gun, you must scream.
Groundspeed
EMILIA PHILLIPS is the author of two poetry collections Signaletics (2013) and Groundspeed (forthcoming) from the University of Akron Press. Her poetry appears in Agni, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, West Branch Wired, and elsewhere.
The Tillinghast Machine
MATT BIALER is the author of eight books of poetry including Radius (Les Editions du Zaporogue), Already Here, Ark, Black Powder (Black Coffee Press), Bridge (Leaky Boot Press) Tell Them What I Saw (PS Publishing, UK) and Ascent.
The Sea
There once was a man who fell in love with the sea. When he woke in bed at night, he did not look at his wife.
Two Poems
DIDI JACKSON’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Passages North, Sierra Nevada Review, and Poetry South. Her chapbook, Slag & Fortune, was published in 2013 by Floating Wolf Quarterly. She divides her time between Vermont and Florida, and currently teaches humanities at the University of Central Florida.
New Issue! GMR Vol. 27 No.2
Here comes the new issue (Vol. 27, No. 2), featuring work by Heather Altfeld, Nancy Dwyer, Meg Kearney, Emilia Phillips, Sean Prentiss, and many others!