FEATURE
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.
2018 Contest: Interview with Flash Judge Jennifer S. Cheng
Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms. Her debut book, HOUSE A (2016), was selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and her forthcoming hybrid collection, MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (May 2018), was...
2017 Fiction Contest Runner-up: TABOO by Ruth Mukwana
“Taboo” immediately gives us a connection to the narrator: visceral and particular descriptions of a boy in a refugee camp. The story—the characters in their situation—never wavers in its assurance. The writer very economically sets up a series of very human conflicts—of age, culture, gender, privilege—without resorting to easy cliché. They leave the reader to ache with ten year-old Timothy and, alongside him, wonder what will happen.
From the Archives: Sonnet Infinitéismal n°3 / Matérial Girl n°8 by Aristilde Kirby
Sonnet Infinitéismal n°3 / Matérial Girl n°8 Aristilde Kirby from BWR 44.1 Aristilde Justine Kirby (27 | 4/11/1991) is a poet, Louise Montalescot's daughter, amateur chansonnier, recovering overthinker, picaresque girl & paper champion. She has...
44.2 Feature: Craft Essay by Samantha Edmonds
Samantha Edmonds' fiction and nonfiction appears in Day One, Pleiades, Indiana Review, the Ploughshares blog, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. She currently lives in Knoxville, where she's an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee. Visit her...
44.2 Sneak Peek: THE NIGHTGOWN by Taisia Kitaiskaia
Rabbits have bitten holes in my nightgown,
Which have only made her more sensuous.
44.2 feature: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint reads BLISS PLACE
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Myanmar and grew up in Thailand and California. She is the author of The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press, March 2018). Her short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly,...
44.2 Sneak Peek: MARY by Carlina Duan
Carlina Duan hails from Michigan, and is the author of I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and Narrative Magazine, among others. She is a current MFA...
44.1 Feature: Craft Essay by Aristilde Kirby
The poem as translation, the star collapsing on itself, a collective locus for brightness in the infinitude of space has potential for renewal outside the bounds of copyright.