Sonya Bilocerkowycz
Her presence has a grounding effect. It seems to settle a room, deepen it, prepare its people for the wildflower-growth of conversation. Sonya Bilocerkowycz writes and exists in a way that calls her witnesses to more carefully examine their own histories. She documents the myths we live through. She articulates error in a way that…
Read MoreAndrew J. Graff
The strange turns toward Andrew Graff’s writing. Faith, in his latest story in Image, is explored like a body, etched into existence by the outline of embrace. Graff’s writing does not preach; instead it examines, examines faith as furiously as it describes blue-painted horses, or the electrical fire in a brick-backed closet, or hydrangeas straining…
Read MoreMichael Shewmaker
Beginning many poems with a scriptural epigraph, as he did for his latest poem in Image, Michael Shewmaker fleshes story from line. Shewmaker’s poetry dwells on words and their character, manifesting in a grander creation of character by such obsession. In his work, one meets a variety of personas, each one of whom is compelling. The…
Read MoreCyan James
Chalked with earth, Cyan James’s writing has an almost mythic physicality to it. Place permeates her stories. In her work of fiction in Issue 98, the smells of mangoes and athletic tape, bright purple, drift across the page, and vultures drift through sky and memory, their shadows cool. Landscape and mindscape are overlaid; the retreat…
Read MoreNancy Naomi Carlson
Nancy Naomi Carlson does it all; she edits, writes poetry and prose, and translates. She is, quite simply, a master of language—of multiple languages. Her work has appeared in every journal on my dream list, including our own, where, in Issue 95, she translates three poems by Abdorurahman A. Waberi from their original French. Her…
Read MoreZeeva Bukai
“Identity is a stone, he’d say. They’d write these words in their notebooks, pens hissing like insects scuttling across paper. America is a river that wears it away.” These lines from Zeeva Bukai’s story “Like Water on Stone,” as it appears in Issue 95, demonstrate the simple beauty of Bukai’s writing, which allows readers to glide…
Read MoreZeina Hashem Beck
“If I keep still / long enough, I hear the music inside / my veins; it sounds like women, singing.” These closing lines from Zeina Hashem Beck’s poem “Layla” reveal her gift not only as a speaker, but also as a listener—an apt role for the woman who founded PUNCH Poetry Dxb open mic night…
Read MoreTrung Pham
It is impossible to exchange even a few words with Trung Pham without being warmed by the depth of his sincerity. It emanates from his body, and from his body of work: paintings, sketches, and sculpture. His paintings are deeply relational, even in collections such as Crack or Wound, one sees opposing sides yearning toward…
Read MoreYerra Sugarman
“Every poem is a memory of some kind,” Irish poet Eamon Grennan once said. For this reason, he called the poem “a celebratory elegy”: words are elegiac by their very nature, since they are not only a sound but a tribute to the thing that inspired them. Yerra Sugarman’s writing is elegiac in this manner.…
Read More