Barbara Marie Minney’s fourth poetry book, A Woman in Progress (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), is unapologetically authentic, much like the author herself. Minney’s work explores the vulnerable experiences with gender, memory, love, and transformation, allowing the readers to grasp at understanding the soul of a woman’s becoming – and being – herself. From the opening poem, “No Experience Needed,” detailing a critique of her artistic credibility and paving the way for the rest of the unflinching but expansive collection, Minney makes it clear that her uniqueness “counts” for something, something that will neither apologize nor dilute the complexity of her existence.

A Woman in Progress is a memoir, an act of reclamation, and a bold assertion of identity all in one. A section that particularly stands out is:

I have lived most of my life being what others wanted me to be.
Now that I am closer to death than birth, I want to feel like I’m
living for myself. I have experienced anxiety and depression and
even contemplated suicide. I looked at suicide as a romantic way
to die. I once asked a psychic if she thought I would die by
suicide. She said no one had ever asked her that question before.
Then, she answered no, but hedged her bet by adding unless I
was ill, and the pain became overwhelming. She added that I did
not fear suicide. (Minney 25)

Despite the visceral themes of despair, mental illness, and dysphoria, Minney’s poetry is a journey reaching for light and hope, resisting collapse and even shifting power dynamics. Written in a fragmented way reflective of trauma’s nonlinear unfolding, the title poem, “A Woman in Progress,” becomes a manifesto of the reclamation of power. It opens with a male narrator cuffed to St. Andrew’s cross, nauseated by the recurring flogging and feelings of shame. As the poem concludes, the perspective shifts, and it becomes apparent that the now female narrator has taken charge, flogger in her hand. The duality and yet monologue-like fluidity of self turns the imagery of domination and submission on its head, not for spectacle but for profound metaphor.

Minney’s work is arguably the most profound and authentic when she discusses her wife, Marilyn, whom she dedicates their book to. Both “October 7, 2018” and “Tomato Sandwich” are filled with intimacy, humor, and pride. These poems are not idealized and cheesy, rather, they’re lived-in, honest, and timeless. From the “Tomato Sandwich,” the sandwich and “Eleven on the McDonald’s pickle scale” (Minney 18) become more than just humorous quirks—they become symbols of heritage, queerness, nostalgia, and a shared life.

Minney’s unrestrained method of describing her love is also reflected in her most vulnerable poems dealing with her father’s death, suicidal ideation, and mental illness. “Depression Poems,” “Psychiatrists Are (Not) for Sissies,” and “Silent Suffering” are so beautifully simple, filled with raw emotion, fear, exploration of death, and hope. In “Masochistic Murmurs,” Minney writes,

it can be to be female,

The author acknowledges that her transformation is a slow and gradual death and rebirth, perpetually stuck in a liminal space. She describes her process as: “Confused by not wanting to die / but not wanting to be here anymore either / in that void of nothingness” (Minney 30). The simplicity and bluntness of her language radiate candor.

That, precisely, sets her and this book apart. Poem after poem, Minney refuses to romanticize her journey but also refuses shame, making “A Woman in Progress” deeply human and transformation. A must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the transgender experience and navigating their own identity, as Minney’s title suggests, an act of continued resistance, redefinition, and radical love.

A Woman in Progress is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions

Noor Chang is a writer and aspiring editor with a rich, multicultural background. Half-Syrian and half-Korean, she spent most of her life in the Middle East, specifically Syria, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates before moving to Knoxville, Tennessee, to pursue higher education. She is a student at the University of Tennessee, double majoring in English Literature and Jazz Studies. Noor’s diverse upbringing has shaped her perspective and fueled her passion for storytelling, leading her to explore a variety of creative avenues, including writing, music, and cultural exploration. An avid pianist, Noor enjoys playing music with friends and immersing herself in different genres. Her love for travel allows her to experience new cultures and she hopes to continue traveling for the rest of her life. In her free time, Noor is often found with a good book, making music, or working out to stay active and grounded.

Old California Strikes Back (Flowersong Press, 2024) by Scott Russell Duncan is a spunky whirlwind of a journey, reclaiming Indigenous roots, stories, and property. This work of autofiction is a successful exploration of Duncan’s mixed-race identity through both his own reflections—making up a memoir aspect of the book—and the telling of the story through two distinct characters: Zorro, our white and inflated definer of Chicano folklore, and Scott Russell Duncan himself—a Chicano American navigating his journey to reclaim Chicano culture. Duncan corrects Zorro who has edited Chicano and Californio (Native Californians descended from Spanish settlers) lore to appeal to tourists, and writes his own tale with corrections on top of the guidebook narrated and originally written by Zorro; the two voices intertwine almost conversationally. Old California Strikes Back transforms into a fantastically real journey equipped with sidekicks, villains, and real fight scenes to illustrate the uphill fight against structures of violence enacted against Indigenous Americans. Duncan also transcends his own personal timeline, telling a memoir not only of his Indigenous experience, but also of the experience of those who came before him.

In his quest to reclaim Chicano culture, Duncan searches for the hidden treasure of a famed Chicano, Ramona, with whom he aligns but who has also become a theme of tourists traps along Chicano areas in Alta California. The Chicano story of Ramona is introduced to the reader through Zorro, who asserts himself as an Indigenous narrator and the voice of a guidebook on touring through Alta or low California. His unreliability is revealed through the linguistic harm he does to Californio society in his aggrandized and objectifying version of the Ramona tale. Duncan writes his reflections and edits in what he refers to as his Ramona diary on top of the pages of Zorro’s guidebook. The diary is made up of a collection of vignettes, reflections, musings occurring to the author along his journey to reclaim both his story and his wealth. He corrects, adds personal history, but most of all narrates his journey to find the treasure associated with Ramona: the Ramona jewels. In both his journey and the chapters he inserts between what he keeps of Zorro’s guidebook, Duncan takes his history back from Anglo-Saxon exploitation. Through the Ramona story, and his navigation to the jewels, Duncan finds that his mixed-race identity does have a home in Indigenous folklore. At the outset of his journey, he states,

“The jewels could be anywhere here, but I know they’re also in my blood, in my head, in the only California that’s real to me, the one I carry, the quaking California inside. But I’ll find them. Because whatever there is to Ramona, fake or real, the half-caste, the Mexican American, the Californio, the Native American, the Scotswoman, it belongs to me, the (true) son of the son of the son of the son of the son of Ramona.” (Duncan, 12)

In the diary, Duncan opens up about a complicated family life, separated parents, and understanding why his family kept certain aspects of his culture hidden from him—including language—while also longing for those aspects. For one, he navigates understanding how his Chicano grandfather is treated; although much is the same discrimination as himself, Duncan feels worse seeing it on someone else, especially compared to the treatment his white father receives. “I was tired of the Brown experience,” he states, “something that drew in all the anger and suspicion in my life from other kids, teachers, cops, clerks at the mall, security guards, and the parents of friends who wouldn’t let me or any other Mexican in their house” (Duncan 80). Growing up with his Chicano mother, Duncan has found himself experiencing this discrimination from an early age, something he can sometimes escape when with his dad.

Through both Zorro’s description of their culture and his own experiences, Duncan highlights the objectification of Chicanos, how colonizing actors looking to capitalize on their culture are turning them into zoo attractions and tourist traps. Zorro turns the Californio into the other, talking about them as less than human. At one point he states, “much more worthy than the average Mexican, the noble Californio is nearly gone from their native land due to cross breeding and the inevitable, pre-ordained thrusting rise of the Anglo-Saxon” (Duncan 108). Duncan himself experiences this otherness and objectification from a young age. He fives the example of playing “cowboys and Indians” with his childhood friends, an instance in which he would always have to be the Indian (Duncan 104). Duncan adds an understanding of additional female oppression to this—demonstrating an early indoctrination into the mode of thought that Indigenous women are property to be conquered. He can balance an understanding of how his upbringing allowed him to recognize this oppression of women, while also understanding aspects of his upbringing that led to his participation in those same systems of oppression. I found the nuance with which he approaches this issue refreshing and intelligent.

Old California Strikes Back culminates in an action-packed fight between Duncan and Zorro over the Ramona jewels, or the ownership of Duncan’s cultural identity. Duncan imprisons Zorro and can question him head-on. The conversational tone of the Indigenous history-teaching and Duncan’s matter-of-fact narration make the lessons of this book not only compelling to read but also more than easy to understand. As a reader, I was instantly rooting for the reclamation of personal culture, history, and land by the author.

Old California Strikes Back is available from Flowersong Press

Annabel Phoel is a junior studying English and Government/International Relations between William & Mary and the University of St Andrews, where she currently resides. She is a staff writer on St Andrews’ Not Applicable Magazine and helps on their editorial board. When not writing or studying, Annabel is rowing on various lochs in Scotland.

Practice for Becoming a Ghost (Susquehanna University Press, 2024) is a collection of sixteen short stories from critic and author Patrick Thomas Henry. It is a twisting, surreal book about ghosts, fate, and the void; I knew immediately it was going to right up my alley. Henry is an alchemist mixing Murakami, Kafka, Freud, and Nietzsche with extreme poise. The result is a dynamic and multivocal explosion of sensation, a biting jouissance that melts into a lingering awe.

Practice for Becoming a Ghost is the literary equivalent of a wandering merchant trading in oddities and marvels, offering everything from psychosexual fever dreams to fairy tales and imagist flash fiction. In one story, a “painting automaton” powered by a windmill is tormented by small children and birds (Henry 59). In another, a young intern describes two nightmare roommates: one with a golden retriever tattoo on his chest that he treats like a real dog, the other a domineering heiress who demands rent in the form of stories about textures. My personal favorite, “Of the Throat,” is about a schoolteacher, haunted by a love interrupted, who wages her own war against fate. Naturally, fate is embodied by a daytime-television psychic and those little paper fortune tellers you’d make in grade school.

It is this range that makes Practice for Becoming a Ghost so difficult to pin down. It is a thousand-pronged, teeming, multivocal rat-king of a collection operating by the logic of dream. Try and grab a hold of it and watch as it reconfigures itself before your very eyes, furious and gnashing, all tooth and claw. In one story, a demented man barely clings to life, ashing cigarettes into fishtanks and letting dishes pile up in the sink, while his daughter berates her husband, downing gin and tonics and referring to him almost exclusively as “ass-butt” (Henry 18). At one point she throws a bronze statue at him. In another, this one only a few pages long, two brothers are regaled with tales of battlefield horror by a veteran who thinks they’re playing war (they are actually pretending to be Mario and Luigi). Years later, after a deployment to Kosovo, one describes what he saw to the other:

“He asked if I’d seen any action. I whispered to him: underneath a debris-shadowed sky, I had seen the red clip of bullets, like fireflies blinking a message throughout an eternal night, sparking from the muzzles of their firearms. Hollow-voiced, I told my brother of the leaning walls that crumbled, shed bricks like tears as we marched past.” (Henry 119)

Henry has an eye for the tragic and a vibrant, compelling imagination. These moments where his dream worlds veer into nightmare are enthralling in all their bitter irony. Fittingly, Practice for Becoming a Ghost, even when it isn’t veering into nightmare, is fascinated with “the deep:” sea monsters, the subterranean, cemeteries, and the unspoken. In “Of the Throat,” the unspoken (i.e., what is stuck in the throat) seems to literally hold the power to kill. The final story, “Him in the Gorse,” is a fairy tale set in 19^th-century Ireland involving a woman with terrifying premonitions and a poet who wishes to collect stories about faeries (who, in Irish folklore, are powerful illusionists). In prying a tale out of this young woman, the poet digs up a repressed past and sets in motion a chain of events that will forever alter the fate of both.

Interrogation of the depths is the thread that ties the collection together. Tellingly, collection begins with an epigraph from Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto, which reads:

“That road I had been on didn’t lead anywhere, this trip would never end—it seemed to me as if next morning would never arrive. It occurred to me that this must be how it feels to be a ghost. Perhaps ghosts are trapped forever in a time like this, I mused.”

These two sentences voice the thread binding the collection together. Ghosts, and all other forms of earth-bound dead, are condemned to restless, solitary wandering. All ghosts are hungry, driven eternally to quench desire left unfulfilled in life. The ghost story is a nightmare of eternal alienation and unconsummated desire. The cyclical nature of desire and the hard kernel of alienation that cannot be resolved, if not part and parcel of “human nature,” at least present themselves as such and are universally felt by post-modern subjects. We are all hungry ghosts “practicing” for eternity, waiting for a dawn that never comes.

It is not just Practice for Becoming a Ghost that orbits this void; in truth, all art is libidinal. Unlike other modes, however, the surreal is uniquely suited to interrogate the relationship between the self, the unconscious, and the world. The surreal is always encountered violently, as extreme discordance between sense and thought. Like the analysis of a dream, the very act of making sense of the surreal brings to the surface what is repressed. What makes Practice for Becoming a Ghost unique is that it raises the question of eternal recurrence: would you repeat this life forever? It is with this Nietzschean flourish that Henry resolves the terror of the unconscious laid bare. “Of the Throat” ends on this note:

“The memento mori cease to arrive, but I redeploy them as decorations around the classroom. During recess, I watch as Wendy and the others gang around Enid. There are no fortune tellers. Whatever premonitions they may have contained, Enid has altered. This is a future unaccounted for in the medium of Sharpie on heavy stock paper.” (Henry 56)

The illumination of the unconscious and of the structures of global capital both call into question the notion of human agency. This realization threatens to destroy the very foundations of the world as we know it. The ghost story is still the story of our times, whether we want to admit it or not. Perhaps the intractability of this condition calls for a new understanding of the human condition. If we are all ghosts of ourselves, driven in ways we cannot understand, and condemned to repeat these same patterns forever, there is nothing left to do but embrace fate.

Practice for Becoming a Ghost is available from Susquehanna University Press

Natalie Gardner is a trans writer hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is currently pursuing a BA in English with a minor in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. She loves transgressive fiction, hiking, and schlocky, B-tier horror movies. When she isn’t working, you can find her haunting the coffee shops of Fort Sanders and DIY shows across East Tennessee. Her work in the field of linguistics can be found in Feedback Review in Second Language.

Simultaneously, our lives change and stay the same. We always end up where we began, our home. With regards to family, home can be complicated or simple or both. Each year I age, I settle into the idea of always needing to go home. In my late teenhood and early 20s, I demanded a reason to visit my small town in south Texas. A birthday party, an ill family member, celebration of new life and death itself. That demand has turned into a longing and gratitude to still have a reason because despite all of our differences, I want to know the stories that came before me.

Ruthie Marlenée’s Agave Blues (Pelekinesis, 2024) follows main character, Maya, on her journey home to Mexico upon her estranged father’s death. Marlenée playfully weaves history and family stories with Maya’s painful present as she reconnects with her daughter Lily, extended family and friends on their agave farm. She has spent her life avoiding the inevitable return after immigrating to America upon her mother’s quest to leave for good. Maya’s character states,

“There’s something about death you can’t escape. But I didn’t cry now over the death of my father. I cried over the death of my childhood; a childhood I’d never get back. And none of it had been my fault. I’d only been a kid.” (Marlenée 36)

Through spirits, a blue genie, tequila, and family, Maya’s past is unraveled. Pushed back in time she faces visions of her abusive, drunk father and his dark history that came before him. The more she learns, the more she forgives and rekindles her love for herself.

While on the farm, Maya spends time painting with the ghost of her childhood best friend Gabriel. He guides her back into creativity which she had forgotten she loved. By painting alongside him, she remembers to love herself and who she once was. Inevitably, she learns she has cancer just as she begins to be curious about the idea of staying. When sitting with her diagnosis she thinks,

“Time was a healer. But I also knew now that the denial and its consequences had indeed taken a toll. At that moment, I was happy to hang it all up in the back of the closet of my mind as if it were just last season’s old dream, so out of style. I’d spend no more time thinking about it and got out of bed.” (Marlenée 36)

What can weigh the most is not the fear of forgetting a memory but the fear that it will be with you forever. What we let sit in our bodies may decide to borrow deep and never leave. Maybe it is the ache in the back of your neck or the heavy drag of your right leg that has yet to find its way to the left or worst of all, the dull ache in your chest that makes you wonder if your heart has any more to give. When painting and seeing Gabriel’s old work, Maya witnesses a younger version of herself come to life. At first she doesn’t recognize the girl as she has been removed from who she once was for a long time. Yet, the more she visits her past self she becomes familiar. By seeing this version of herself, Maya is able to reconcile with her shadowed past. She is able to move forward and consider that instead of returning to California, Mexico might be the most healing place for her.

Reading this novel has reminded me of my drive south to my small hometown. I watch the flat land littered with oak and cactus flash by the windows. I see the train tracks as I enter the town and homes I once knew. My childhood friends appear young again, walking down the street translucent. The Texas sun peering through them like ghosts, and I know they aren’t really there but it sure feels like they are. I see many versions of myself running through the yard I was raised in. Like Maya, we return home for a reason only for the reason to end and wonder why we wanted to leave in the first place. There is something peculiar about growing up to realize there are just as many reasons to stay as there are to go.

I feel there are many more ways this novel can conjure home for the reader. Marlenée does not shy away from stunning and detailed imagery. Even if you aren’t from Mexico or states along its border, the imagery can still trigger your sense of home because of the emotion that is held in it. There is something about the way she describes the landscape, weather, and even food that can be so universal but also deeply personal. Magic is working throughout these pages and I know I can’t be the only one who loves a good spell.

Agave Blues is available from Pelekinesis Press

Em Fullenwider (she/they) is a queer writer/poet born and raised in south Texas who received an MFA in poetry from Texas State University. They are currently working on a full length poetry collection and value building and maintaining community in Texas. You can catch them making coffee and craft or listening to good tunes in their free time. 

Ruth Rotkowitz’s novel, The Whale Surfaces (Okapi Press, 2021), is an exploration of inherited trauma set against the backdrop of post-Holocaust America. The world of The Whale Surfaces envelops its characters in a shroud of past horrors, leaving them to navigate a present tainted by history.

The world and characters of The Whale Surfaces are infested by their pasts. The protagonist, Marcia Gold, grows up surrounded by stories of the pain and terrors her parents—Holocaust survivors—experienced in their youth; she is haunted by ghosts that are not her own. When Marcia complains about having to visit her grandparents one weekend, upset that her brother isn’t similarly bound by this familial duty, her father violently snaps, yelling, “What’s not fair? That you have grandparents who are alive when so many people have no grandparents! When so many grandparents were killed in Europe, like Mom’s parents… You don’t know how lucky you are!” (Rotkowitz 19). Unfortunately, while Marcia’s parents may intend for knowledge of this family history to instill more appreciation in Marcia for her daily life, it instead causes Marcia to feel undeserving and view herself as “a worthless parasite” (Rotkowitz 47).

Acutely aware of her parents’ past, Marcia’s life becomes one of constant hypervigilance and fear. Attuned to potential threats, Marcia becomes separated from her present reality. Since childhood, Marcia would have inescapable nightmares, causing her to toss and turn and scream in her sleep. Simple acts like her mother leaning into their apartment’s dumbwaiter to talk to her aunt upstairs would trigger Marcia’s panic over an imagined decapitation. Marcia is unreasonably enraged by her mother’s action, unable to understand why her mother couldn’t understand the contraption’s danger. 

Marcia’s unease extends to her time in the classroom, where she meticulously chooses her seat based on proximity to an exit in preparation for any catastrophic events. In one of her first college classes, Marcia immediately slides to a seat in the back row “so she could feel safe” (Rotkowtiz 36). From Marcia’s point of view, “Stormtroopers in big boots, Nazis with rifles, anyone at all could suddenly burst into the room and start killing…But she, in her chosen seat, would be able to make a quick getaway out that back door, if need be” (Rotkowitz 36). This constant alertness makes it difficult for her to relate to peers and friends, leading to intense feelings of isolation even during seemingly pleasant moments, like shopping with her girlfriends.

One of the novel’s most compelling elements is its depiction of how historical trauma is internalized and transmitted. Throughout The Whale Surfaces, Marcia has extended visions of a large whale—sometimes threatening to swallow her family, other times offering protection—which illustrate the conflicting relationship survivors and their descendants have with their traumatic past. In one particularly vivid childhood vision at the beach, Marcia sees a massive whale emerging from the sea onto the shore, its gaping mouth pouring out an endless stream of goose-stepping Gestapo soldiers. In Hebrew school, Marcia’s teacher recounts the biblical story of Jonah at dinner, and Marcia is initially terrified by the idea of being swallowed by a whale. However, at dinner, her mother offers an alternative perspective, saying, “Jonah is certain he will die when he gets thrown into the sea. But a whale saves him. He is safe and protected inside the whale. The ocean can’t harm him” (Rotkowitz 21). This duality illustrates how trauma can be both terrifying and a source of resilience, with the past offering both fear and, paradoxically, protection.

Marcia’s experience is further complicated by the gendered expectations placed upon her by her parents. While her older brother Eliot enjoys freedom—attending college away from home, dating openly, and living on his own—Marcia is constantly scrutinized and discouraged from pursuing her own desires. This disparity exacerbates her feelings of alienation and guilt, as she struggles to reconcile her family’s traditional values with her own yearning for independence.

Marcia comes of age during the 1960s, a period of intense social turmoil. She feels guilty about her relatively comfortable life and experiences intense empathy for victims of tragedies such as the Munich Massacre and the Kent State shootings. Rotkowitz skillfully portrays Marcia as a nuanced and complex character, whose empathy and moral compass—shaped by her family’s traumatic history—may not always align with readers’ expectations. Through Marcia’s struggles to process global events and personal relationships, including her friendship with the troubled Natalie, Rotkowitz invites readers to reflect on their own responses to tragedy and the complexities of human empathy. 

The Whale Surfaces isn’t all anxiety and fear. Rotkowitz’s characters strive for normalcy—they fall in love, they make difficult choices, they experience joy and embarrassment and empathy. Marcia uses her studies to ground herself. Her parents struggle to protect their children while grappling with their own past. Rotkowitz handles potent feelings such as guilt, fear, and loneliness with grace. 

Rotkowitz inspires readers towards openness and care, offering hope in The Whale Surfaces that our world may foster more compassion for the hidden burdens many carry. A call for understanding and empathy lurks beneath the novel’s exploration of Marcia’s struggles: while we cannot erase the past, we can strive to recognize its impact and support those still grappling with its legacy.

Sophia Zhang is a Chinese-American writer from California. Her poetry and memoir—which centers around diaspora, joy, and womanhood—has been recognized by YoungArts, Columbia College Chicago, The Pulitzer Center, and others. In her spare time, she likes to browse thrift shops and binge movies. She is an incoming undergraduate student at Harvard University.