Magazine
Ruth Bavetta: “My Father’s Shirts”
Jacob Butlett: “Feeding Time at the Zoo”
John Compton: “the musical of the bell jar”
A.M. Hayden: “Ghost Leg”
Joshua Lillie: “What Becomes A Tumbleweed”
Joseph Mills: “Retinue”
J.R. Solonche: “The Ceiling”
Alicia Wright: “She doesn’t wish me dead”
Sam Culotta: “A Winter Coat”
Paul Ilechko: “Memories of a Memory”
Madison Isbell: “corpus christi, early march”
Lindsay McLeod: “Sleeping Dogs”
Andrew Mulvania: “Self Portrait As The Grasshopper Trapped Inside Van Gogh’s Olive Trees”
Abner Oakes: “Floating Teeth”
Sterling Warner: “Slap Shot”
Susan Cossette: “Five Things I Will Do in Aegina”
Tony DeGenaro: “Flight Path”
John Grey: “On a Funeral Pyre”
Jeremy Jusek: “Prescriptions Written in Calligraphy”
Cindy Rinne: “Ghost Turkey”
Patricia Russo: “The Dead Time Traveler”
Sarah Angstadt: “Counterproductive Side Effects”
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal: “Hearing Aid”
Sue Blaustein: “Serving Orders at Brother’s Foods”
John Brantingham: “The Greening of Creatures”
J.D. Isip: “Triceratops”
Paul Jones: “Two Flamingoes at Pea Island Reserve”
Samuel Prestridge: “My Father, Hailing from Ignorant Hill, Texas…”
Diana Rosen: “NEWS ITEM: Westside Pavilion to be UCLA Biomedical Research Center”
James Benger: “Entrance”
Barbara Daniels: “White Horses”
Cal Freeman: “Always”
Mari Kitina: “Only the Rice Cries”
Michael Lauchlan: “Trout”
Richard Levine: “For Want of Care”
Dudley Stone: “Turbulence”
Meredith Wattle: “Erie Goliath”
Ann Weil: “Living Through”
Jean Biegun: “On Call”
Karina Castrillo: “I never wanted you to be like us”
John Grey: “Photographs”
Geoffrey Heptonstall: “Floating”
Andrea Horowitz: “Behind Midnight’s Curtain I Recompose Your Birth”
Leonard Kress: “A Night at the Opera”
Laurie Kuntz: “Sooner or Later”
Leigh Parsons: “Still Frozen”
Matthew Pritt: “Joseph F. Seaborn, 1898-1956, Mary B. Seaborn, 1906-“
William Taylor Jr.: “Poem for the New Year”
Rose Mary Boehm: “Boil them”
Rebecca Clifford: “Climatic Divinations”
Sam Hendrian: “Magazine Ads”
Paul Ilechko: “A Clock Is Ticking”
Tricia Knoll: “Next Time You Interview a Unicorn Prepare Better Questions”
H.K.G. Lowery: “Villa Diodati”
Samuel Prestridge: “Why I’ve Not Cut Down The Yes Ma’am Bush”
Tamarah Rockwood: “Persephone’s first day out”
Jason Ryberg: “No Great Hurry”
Matthew Ussia: “Home Improvement Advice for Anyone Owning a House More Than One Hundred Years Old”
Sue Blaustein: “A Song for Centipedes”
Felicia Clark: “Chrome Cheers”
john compton: “[we play scrabble—]”
Sam Culotta: “Voices in the Other Room”
Jenna K Funkhouser: “The House at the End of the Road”
Ken Gierke: “After the Rain”
Julia Hatch: “A Thoughtless Moment of Zen”
James Croal Jackson: “Drymouth”
Daniel Edward Moore: “From the Castle of Resentment”
Jimmy Pappas: “The Ineffable”
John Brantingham Reviews
K. E. Semmel’s The Book of Losman
Santa Fe Writer’s Project, October 1, 2024
I love any novel that affirms courage and hope, especially when the world seems shoddy and evil. Kyle Semmel’s The Book of Losman (Santa Fe Writer’s Project) is such a book. At the outset, it doesn’t seem very hopeful. Daniel Losman is a divorced American man living in Copenhagen with joint custody of his three-year-old child. For a living, he translates Danish novels into English, and this profession suits him because he has Tourette syndrome, and his tics cause him to feel embarrassment and shame. However, he answers an ad for a study on his condition and finds that Dr. Pelin and Dr. Jens are developing an experimental drug called BhMe4 that will allow him, through his dreams, to access memories all the way back to his birth, so he can identify why the tics began, if there was a triggering incident, and to possibly cure himself of his condition. He journeys to these moments in his sleep while under the scrutiny of the medical professionals. He especially wants to go back to a memory where an early teacher shamed him for his tics. Losman is suffering, but as he works through this process, he finds a new way to see him, and as he begins to reject this process, he sees himself in a more holistic way. The Book of Losman is therefore not a book so much of loss and being lost as it is about hope and how Losman is able to reevaluate the shame-based approach to life that others have imposed on him; instead he finds a way into life’s richness that goes beyond binary ways of thinking and accepting other people’s diminishments as a kind of truth.
Continue reading “A Review of The Book of Losman”
Jason Baldinger: “a time capsule of dust”
Stephen Barile: “Cedar Crest Cove”
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella: “Quilted Rainbows”
Lorraine Caputo: “And That Wind Twirls”
Rick Christiansen: “Borrowed Blood”
John Dorsey: “Jerry Garcia & German Root Beer”
Howie Good: “Uketopia”
John Grey: “Flower People”
Judy Lorenzen: “Anyway”
Tim Peeler: “Untitled”
LB Sedlacek: “Art vs Life (Dream 09/19/15)”
As It Ought To Be 