Amanda Cordero

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Issue 128 | Spring 2026

Image issue 128 includes work on health, illness, medicine, and the body:

Leila Chatti on three films on the struggle to conceive a child
Emily Rapp Black on Carl Shuker’s dystopian novel of medical editing
A profile of Rae Stern, for whom a traumatic head injury changed how she made art
A conversation on climate change, the Bible, cancer, and music with poet Rebecca Gayle Howell
Lindsay Forbes Brown on her mother, the medical anomaly
Fiction by Sharon Pomerantz on what the process of dying reveals
Poems by Bruce Beasley on DNA, Alex Chertok on Alzheimer’s, Jehanne Dubrow on Covid, Annelies Zijderveld on scars, Maryann Corbett on the ER, Will Smiley on a workplace injury, and more

Also: fiction by Cynthia Martin, art by Becky Moon, Manuel Andreas Dürr, and Heather Lyon, poems by Scott Cairns, K.A. Hays, William Wenthe, and more

On the cover: Lisa Nilsson. Angelico, 2012. Mulberry paper. 22 x 19 x 1½ inches.

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Download discussion questions

VISUAL ART

In the Studio: Manuel Andreas Dürr

VISUAL ART

Sibyl, May We Speak

Heather Lyon

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

Molly McCully Brown, The In-Between

FICTION

Sharon Pomerantz, Line of Credit

Cynthia Newberry Martin, Everywhere You Go

VISUAL ART

Andrew Johnson, Translucent Symbols: Rae Stern’s Experiments in Fusion

Becky Moon, In the Studio

Heather Lyon, Sibyl, May We Speak: Performance and the Geomythic

Manuel Andres Dürr, In the Studio

ESSAY

Lindsay Forbes Brown, Martyr Huntress Architect Child

CULTURE

Leila Chatti, Mother as Event: Three Films on the Struggle to Conceive

Emily Rapp Black, America, Always to Return: Carl Shuker and Félix González-Torres

INTERVIEW

Rebecca Gayle Howell, Living in This Quiet

POETRY

Karan Kapoor, Elegy vs. Obituary

Alex Chertok, Alzheimer Translation: World-End Cipher; Alzheimer Translation: World-Begin Cipher

George David Clark, Assembly; Dance of the Mulberry Grove

Addison Schoeman, California’s Monarch Men

Jehanne Dubrow, Tiny Song for the Body; Yitro

K.A. Hays, I keep watching these bugs pocking the lake

Emily Shevenock, A Global Health Crisis; Errata, Stigmata

William Wenthe, Holy Saturday

Bruce Beasley, Homing; Intercessionary

Taylor Supplee, Coffin, Laughing

Scott Cairns, Creation without Conclusion; Backward Christian Soldiers

Annelies Zijderveld, Blessed is he who comes in the name

Alfonso Sasieta, What We Want in a Montuno

Nat Sufrin, New Hearse

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Wally Swist, Dies überstanden haben: auch das Glück; Komm du, du letzter, den ich anerkenne

Maryann Corbett, Emergency, New Year’s Eve

Abbie Kiefer, Twelve and a Half Stanzas on the Desire for Control

Chloe Hollowell Hooks, What a Spark; My Lover Thought He Resembled Plato

Elisheva Fox, psalm for time, all cinnamon and salt.

Will Smiley, Poem

Issue 128 Discussion Questions

Editorial: “The In-Between” Molly McCully Brown

Molly McCully Brown, “The In-Between” | Editorial Statement (Page 3)

Brown begins her essay with a famous passage by Susan Sontag. How do these lines strike you? Have you had times of feeling acutely like a citizen of either kingdom? Or neither?
Brown identifies several pieces in this issue that make meaning using the fragmentary or associative. Do you see additional examples of nonlinear meaning-making in this issue?
Brown describes her students falling in love with the word liminal. Are there words or sentences you particularly love the texture or meaning of? That you remember hearing for the first time and being excited by?

Fiction: “Line of Credit,” Sharon Pomerantz

Sharon Pomerantz, “Line of Credit” | Fiction

In the final paragraph, the narrator connects her experience of loss with the medium of film. Does this resonate with you? How do other art mediums capture the strange relationship between death and “the present tense”?
On p. 13, the narrator notices the repairman’s respect for “the dignity that should be accorded to suffering.” What does it mean to dignify suffering?

Poetry: “Alzheimer’s Translations” by Alex Chertok and “I keep watching these bugs pocking the lake” by K.A. Hays

Alex Chertok, “Alzheimer’s Translation” and K.A. Hays, “I keep watching these bugs pocking the lake” by K.A. Hays | Poetry

Both poets use sentence fragments and created words in their poems. What do these choices accomplish that standard phrasing and diction would not? How do they influence your reading of the poems?
Both poems’ narrators are wrestling with mortality or finitude. What images and phrases communicate this? Which images and phrases connect with your own sense of finitude or impermanence?
Both authors also use circle or sphere imagery. What do you think they are communicating with these images?

Nonfiction: Three Essays on Motherhood and the Body by Emily Rapp Black, Lindsay Forbes Brown, and Leila Chatti

Three Essays on Motherhood and the Body by Emily Rapp Black, Lindsay Forbes Brown, and Leila Chatti | Nonfiction

Black writes that “our bodies are variables over which we have almost no control.” Where in these essays do you see people face that lack of control? Is that lack hard or easy for you to face when it comes to your own body?
Black and Chatti connect recent film, fiction, and art with intensely emotional personal history. When have you experienced a work of art that activated your memories or emotions in a similar way?

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