Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 04/20/2020 & Samovar 04/27/2020

The back half of April brings not only a new story and poem from Strange Horizons, but a new issue of Samovar as well, with two stories and two poems in translation to enjoy. As always, neither publication disappoints, offering up worlds and characters that walk in shadows, that encroach upon the strange and the weird and haunting. That find characters wanting very much to break free of the constraints corruption and industrialization have shackled them with. And finding that maybe there is a way out. Maybe, through cooperation, through partnership, they can reach for freedom. Or maybe that too is a bit of an illusion, and what they're really reaching for is comfort to live with the injustices they can do nothing about. In any event, let's get to the reviews!

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!