March brings four short stories and a poem to Fireside Magazine, and the pieces deal rather intimately with distance, with relationships, and with family. They find characters brushing against the unknown or plunging right in, driven by their dissatisfaction and their hope, their stubbornness and their pain. They trace wounds old and new as they try to avoid old patterns of grief and loss and lean towards something new, with all the terrible and beautiful potential that brings. To the reviews!
It’s a new year and a brand new issue of Fiyah Literary Magazine meets the new year with a bang! The issues doesn’t have an official theme, but I find that a lot of the works seem to circle around water. Rain, floods, seas, potions, rivers, tearsÑthe stories feature people with connections to water. Who have been transformed by it, who seek to protect it, and who in turn are protected and embraced by it. Like islands in a wide sea, the stories wait for readers to risk the waves and currents to sail from one to the next, drawn by the resilience, the need reflected in the stories and poem to live your truths, to fight for them, and to revel in the wonder and beauty of them. To the reviews!
It’s a special guest-edited issue of Apex Magazine this month, with Maurice Broaddus in the driver’s seat. And people, poetry is back for this special occasion! It’s a full issue with four stories (three shorts and a novelette) and two poems. And the pieces all seem to center on narrative and voice. These are stories that look at how we pass along roles and expectations. How we prepare people to accept being abused and tortured, and how people still manage to find ways to stand up and take back their names and their voices and their skins. These are stories that center acts of violence and pain and fear, and seek for ways to bring justice and healing and hope back to people who have little reason to feel them. It’s a wonderful and challenging issue of dark fiction and poetry, and I’ll get right to the reviews!
