Article Category: Essay

by Margo Taft Stever Many poems in my chapbook, The Lunatic Ball (Kattywompus Press, 2015) and my following full-length collection, Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019) delve into the definition of sanity, and both collections include several found poems created from letters written by my great grandfather Peter Rawson Taft when he was institutionalized at the […]

by Andrew Sarewitz I finished Michelle Obama’s autobiography. It took me the summer. That’s not a statement on the quality of the memoir. I haven’t been finding enough time to read. After placing Becoming in my claw footed ebony and glass library, I went to one of the piles of dormant, unread books that crowd […]

By Quitman Marshall “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water…” –Psalms 1:3 I was there to seek and to honor a shared past we are still barely speaking about. Certain things have made us, certain things with no relation to the gushing of popular rhetoric that moats life in […]

by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa By the time the plane landed at Idlewild International Airport in New York City, the children had fallen asleep out of pure exhaustion and Elena was totally drained. As hard as she had tried to arrive at their new home in their best clothes and brightest smiles, a six-hour flight with a […]

Reported by Kallistos 1. I am sending my marriage certificate and six children. I have sevn but, one died which was baptized on a half sheet of paper. 2. I am writing the Welfare Dept. to say my baby was born two years old, when do I get my money. 3. Mrs. Jones has not […]

by Marc Jampole At first listen, Donald Trump’s speaking style when he eschews the teleprompter seems chaotically free form, as if he tossed a bunch of tweets into one of his MAGA caps and picked a few out, one at a time, and read them out loud, not bothering to supply connective material or an […]

by Robert Klein Engler “Blue Head” Painting by Robert Klein Engler During the waning days of the Republic, with so many political scandals in the news and the advent of a fundamental change in America advanced by a fabricated president, it may seem trivial to ask, “What is the role of American poetry in the […]

by Robert Klein Engler The world in which Karl Gary Kasberg lived and wrote his poems has disappeared from the face of the earth. Karl G. Kasberg’s world has disappeared not because of earthquakes or bombs, but because of time and the political decisions of men who came after him. It was politically expedient to […]

by Mark Doherty Previously published in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Anna Faktorovich, ed. Volume IX Issue 2, Summer 2017, pp 70-84) LHorreur by Anthony Petrie Joseph Conrad drank from the same molecules of water that exist on Earth today. A few drops of dark ink might not have clouded his glass, yet he seemed to sense […]

by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt Hilton Als, with all the confidence and aplomb of a Certified-Widely-Read-Professional-Theatre-Critic (for The New Yorker), states that “theatre is primarily a literary art.” Really, Hil? (May I call you Hil?) So Hil, what about a great deal of theatre of the past, oh say, sixty years? What about the costume sewer […]