Quick Sips - Mithila Review #10 [poetry]

With the fiction done yesterday, it’s time to look at the poetry from the latest Mithila Review! And wow, there’s a lot of it. Seven poems and all flesh out themes of cycles and birth and death, family and resistance and war. These pieces together seem to me to speak to the strengths of language and poetry—to capture the mercurial and the non-literal, to evoke sensation and meaning, and to make brilliantly alive all those things that might be obscured by darkness. Poetry is often a light to shine on truths otherwise too difficult to face, and even in the storms of violence and tragedy, poetry can find beauty, and hope, and connection. So yeah, let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Apex #84

At first glance the May issue of Apex Magazine could be accused of playing it safe. Time travel? Monsters? The issue is packed with classic SFF tropes, and yet there's nothing about this issue that I would accuse of being cliche or tired. No, these are stories that take those classic elements and twist them until they howl, until their screams become something that rings through the halls of night and off the page and into the brains of the reader. This is one of the shorter issues of the year but it more than makes up for it with stories that grip and don't let go. That, just when you think you have a handle on them, dip down again into someplace deeper, darker, calling you to follow. So follow if you dare, dear readers, it's time to review!
 

Art by Robert Carter

Quick Sips - Farrago's Wainscot #15

Well the newest issue of Farrago's Wainscot is finally here! I apologize for the dramatic exclamation point, but I was a little nervous that it wouldn't arrive in time for me to have time to review it. And it has carved out a nice place for itself as a nice source for weird stories and poems. It offers up a nice variety of each this month, with four stories and four poems. The fiction moves from pumpkins to pennies to chickens to cocksucking and is a very strong issue, and the poems provides four glimpses into some strange places. So let's get to the reviews.