Winter 2016

What Lies on the Mind

The fog rose off the lake like puffs of smoke blown into the atmosphere. Heavy drops beat down the humidity that tried to creep up from the soil. It didn’t have much of a fighting chance. Autumn gave up on its lie of better days to come with each dying leaf. The…

Geographies of Pluto

We do not know the geography of Pluto as intimately as those celestial bodies closer to Earth. Looking up, one eye closed, I could trace the Moon’s Mare Serenitatis with my pinky finger as if grazing the dark circles under a lover’s eyes. The lunar maria, plains of basalt astronomers…
Interview: Kathleen Driskell

Interview: Kathleen Driskell

“I’ve had a lot of different experiences with graveyards,” says Kathleen Driskell. As a child growing up in rural Peewee Valley outside of Louisville, she often hopped a fence to visit an old Confederate cemetery near her home. “My mother and father argued all the time, and to get away from…

Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia (Blevins & McElmurray)

Adrian Blevins & Karen Salyer McElmurray, Eds. Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2015. 288 pages. Softcover. $26.95. The anthology Walk Till The Dogs Get Mean: Meditations of the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia, edited by Adrian Blevins and…

Laundry Woman

My great-grandmother agitated Mrs. Worldly’s wash every week over the hot flash and glow of the fire in the misery shed. Hand on rough stick, grandmother pulled around the glob of tangled shirts and sheets; she stirred as if hauling the weighted laundry about an axis, sloshy seas yielding a…

Mot (Einstein)

Sarah Einstein. Mot: A Memoir. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2015. 168 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. The story of Mot and its author, Sarah Einstein, might be unbelievable as a work of fiction, which makes this memoir all the more remarkable in its telling. Serving the story of an improbable friendship are…