FEATURE
Review: TO THINK OF HER WRITING AWASH IN LIGHT by Linda Russo
Linda Russo begins her collection of creative and critical essays with a quote from Gertrude Stein: “Analysis is a womanly word./ It means they discover there are laws.”
Local Spotlight: An Interview with Ashley M. Jones
People should know that Birmingham is AFLAME with literary culture, and it’s only spreading faster.
2017 Poetry Contest Winner: Sarah María Medina’s “From a Poet to her Rumbero”
At the center of “From a Poet to her Rumbero” is a bucking heart, grappling with its fanged history & unbreaking fever.
From the Archives: Pollution People by C Pam Zhang
Pollution People C Pam Zhang from BWR 44.1 An hour south of the border and Dad tips over with a whump that makes the forest explode like a cutscene. The ancient car rattles, Nim brakes into a gully, and shrapnel flings from the trees. Nim waits for death. But...
Review: BLUETS by Maggie Nelson
I was late to reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. There is much that can be said about this book, and so much has already been said, that I am only going to concern myself with p90 on which Nelson states, “Recently, I found out that “les bluets” can translate as ‘cornflowers’
From the Archives: The Feels by Megan Milks
“I should say first of all that I would dial the numbers just to listen to your breath. The only emotions I propose expressly to consider are I would stand inside my hell and hold the hand of death. That there are feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and excitement, bound up with how far I’d go to ease this precious ache, would, I suppose, be held true by most readers. “
2017 Flash Contest Runner-up: Beth Bachmann’s Ursonate
I admire the confidence of this short and beguiling piece. The author sets in motion a tarot-spread of elements—the war, the wheel, the gold—and alchemizes a novelistic series of arrivals and reversals. The result is timeless, but, like a dream, it...
Local Spotlight: Interview with Dr. Hilary N. Green
I can see the tours as art. The tours disrupt the current landscape by inserting voices who have been historically silenced. By relating the history as well as the names of specific enslaved men, women, and children, the typical soundscapes of the University are disrupted, transformed, and remade.
2017 Poetry Contest Runner-up: Noah Baldino
The beauty of this poem is how it resists the urge to pull punches, placing its readers in a position beyond that of witness: if this is what I must endure, you must help me endure it. Help me gather the teeth, confettied against the glinting pipes. Help me see the dead flies / mottled / a swarm of distant, dark balloons. Do not be mistaken – this is no sad resignation but, instead, the blood-holy howl of a body refusing to be shaped by its enemies.
An Interview with Sarah María Medina – 2017 BWR Poetry Contest Winner
I use white space to play with the rhythm and beat of an open rather than set structure. There’s another song I love which switches from Rumba to Bembé and I like thinking about what that would look like on the page. I like to use Spanish to subvert English, to reclaim tongue, but Spanish is also a colonizer language, so I like to find Taíno and Yorùbá words too.