Kimberly Ann Priest’s fifth poetry collection tether & lung (Texas Review Press, 2025) is a fierce, dynamic, and deeply personal collection about grief, forgiveness, fury, and sexuality. tether & lung has an intensity that is at once severe, haunting, and tender. Priest’s work is often focused on gender-based trauma and domestic ecologies, and this collection is no departure from that. Divided into four sub-sections, “The Gelding,” “Her Hand,” “A Tether,” and “Of Lungs,” tether & lung indulges in what it means to be a sensual, yet brutal woman facing the aftermath of heartbreak—but not the kind you are thinking of. 

Lush with nature personification, tether & lung employs nature as a way to reckon with one’s own feelings. Horses, barns, as well as vivid imagery of the surrounding planes of rural Michigan invite readers into Priest’s home. Nature becomes an anchor that Priest uses to connect her own suffering with that of her husband’s. The natural world around Priest and her family, as well as a particular horse, “The Gelding,” become characters of their own in the collection, dictating the direction of Priest’s journey of healing. An additional foundation of the collection lies heavily in the ecodomestic setting surrounding Priest and her family. A narrative foundation underpins Tether and Lung, which tells the story of Priest’s husband emerging into his sexuality, disrupting her marriage. Her children are integrated into several poems, filling in a portrait of Priest’s very own domestic ecology, such as in “We Dance” and “On Needing Someone to Be a Little Like God.” Themes of grief, compassion, gender, sexuality, divorce, and motherhood ebb and flow throughout the collection. 

A striking echoing of 24th Poet Laureate Ada Limon’s work appears in tether & lung. While reading this sensual, melancholic collection, I couldn’t help but think of Limon’s own interest with horses (“How to Triumph Like a Girl) and tendency to dwell on the mundane features of nature in order to illustrate a larger pain. Much to my delight, Limon is mentioned in one of the poems, “Gomorrah”! Specifically Bright Dead Things (Mildweed Editions, 2015) is quoted: “There are dead things—bright dead things says the poet / Ada Limón—in my flower sink” (Priest 55). This allusion is sharp and well-done, and a similar evocative style leads Priest’s collection to affect readers in similar ways as Limon’s work.

While Limon lingers in the pages of tether & lung, Brenda Shaughnessy poem “Our Andromeda” comes to mind along the topics of pregnancy and motherhood in Priest’s poetry. Shaughnessy writes, “We will find our kind in Andromeda, / we will become our true selves. / I will be the mother who / never hurt you, and you will have your / childhood back in full blossom, / whole hog. Wherein Shaughnessy focuses on wanting a different path for her son, Priest writes about how her children are affected by their father. Her children’s relationship with their father is explored as well as her own challenges with parenting. This was, perhaps, the most surprising feature of tether & lung. Priest’s children embody a small space in the collection, one that is potent with the malleability of childhood, the importance of receiving support from an early age.

These poems are filled with kindness and a deep sense of introspection that will be sure to impress readers. Poems “The Good Wife,” “After My Husband Tells Me He is Gay, My Body Contemplates Suicide,” “Nest,” and “A Most Harmless Hour” are, in my opinion, the strongest poems in the collection, the poems that conveyed the most impressive sense of vulnerability, intimacy, and power through Priest’s voice. For readers who enjoy the combination of narrative driven stories and symbolic language and the natural world, tether & lung is sure to inspire. 

The poems within tether & lung spark a deeper conversation on gender and sexuality. Priest’s exploration of sexuality, and of her husband’s, is gentle and intimate. Even bold at times. She elaborates on the plasticity that surrounds her own relationship with her husband. In a particularly beautiful poem, “A Young Man is Beautiful,” Priest writes,

The courage of Priest’s own emotional journey is tested as poems like this depict the dialectical nature of forgiveness, or change. Priest is able to detest her husband, while also allowing space to grieve and love the man she once knew, and still does. 

Beyond anything else, though, this collection is brave. The forms undertaken in several poems, such as “Film Noir [with Car & Cigarette]”, are experimental and successful. The vulnerability required to tell the story the Priest shares with readers requires an astute sense of courage and perspective. These qualities are what makes tether & lung anything but ordinary. The collection speaks volumes on the emotional journey of healing, forgiving, and the refusal to resist loving the ones you hold close. It is brave, beautiful, and sure to affect readers looking for narrative-driven, imagery-dependent poetry.

tether & lung is available from Texas Review Press

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Emma Goss is a senior English major with minors in Film and Linguistic Anthropology. A passionate reader, she prefers to always be juggling a poetry collection, a literary fiction novel, and an audiobook. Emma is especially drawn to poetry rooted in nature symbolism and metaphor. Some of her favorite collections include The Tradition by Jericho Brown, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has been published in Pangyrus Magazine and by the Princeton Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Poetry Contest. Originally from Los Angeles, she spends her time hiking local trails or browsing the poetry shelves at Barnes & Noble Studio City when not at Vassar.

Sarah Giragosian’s Mother Octopus (Middle Creek Publishing, 2024) is a moving poetry collection that explores themes of queer intimacy, consumption, environmental collapse, phonology, lineage, and motherhood.

The collection, winner of the 2023 Halcyon Poetry Prize, first embraces readers with a haibun, “Saltonstall Residency, Ithaca, NY Haibun.” This poem is abundant in intricate, compact imagery that creates and describes the world in Mother Octopus, a world riddled with loss and grief. The haiku portion acts as a focal point: “A mother’s vast tongue / licks her calf into being, / flush with a new idea” (Giragosian 7). Giragosian highlights the bond between mother and calf while intertwining the themes of nature and the creation/degradation of environmental health. This poem, along with Giragosian’s dedication to her late mother, lingered with me throughout the collection, reminding me how deeply rooted mothers are in our ways of thinking, even as we grow independent.

A poem that especially resonated with me during my read was “Diet and Feeding Behavior of the Hagfish, Practicing Witch of the Sea,” which focuses on a hagfish’s brutality. Initially, I assumed Giragosian was writing on queer intimacy, displaying how romanticism was lost in this act of love between “her” and “I” in the poem. The speaker describes how the hagfish has “—evolved to dine and dash—” (Giragosian 57). This metaphor serves as a way to compare sapphic love to the heartlessness the hagfish has upon its prey. However, there’s a self-reflection of grief underlying here; the hagfish may serve as the speaker’s grief, devouring them from the inside out. This can be seen in the first stanza, which reads:

This hagfish devours from the inside out, wounded or compromised creatures, similarly to how grief devours humans. From my own life, I’ve experienced how grief forces one to rest and be introspective. The line “Your calm will be your counterattack” (Giragosian 57) left me feeling introspective, as I recall moments of calm and near silence have been the best opponent to depression during grief. It’s safe to say this poem has many layers and in fact encapsulates this collection as a whole in some aspects.

Returning to the theme of sapphic romance, my mind immediately remembers “Gift of Ammonite.” This poem is formally playful, almost mimicking the tides rushing back to shore— an unbreakable and natural force. This connection contradicts some of the stigma in LGBTQ+ relationships, as some claim it to be unnatural. Giragosian’s form validates the relationship and the connection, emphasizing how the speaker’s love is a force that cannot be stopped. The poem utilizes enjambment at the end of lines and stanzas, allowing it to run smoothly. Beyond form, “Gift of Ammonite” explores a relationship between two (presumably female) lovers, their profound longing for one another, and the “eons” spent waiting for the right time. I found Giragosian’s ending especially soul-crushing: “Listen for ruptures in time signature. / Wait the way you waited for her love to arrive” (62). These lines are indefinite, as they end the poem with a period, rather than continuing the pattern of enjambment and flowing seamlessly into the next poem, demonstrating both the confidence in the relationship and one another, as well as the understanding that these lovers are content to wait as long as necessary to be together. This poem was overwhelmingly confident and analytical of their love, which was refreshing and uplifting. I found this tone was abundant in the collection, and when discussing sapphic love, it was extremely validating. The vulnerability queer folk experience in everyday life is obvious, but sometimes the victories aren’t as vocalized. Mother Octopus balances both, making for an insightful read that forced me to reflect on relationships and hardships I’ve experienced at the hands of some who might not be understanding.

“Promenade à Deux” reminds me of growing up in a place where queer people are misrepresented and misunderstood. Being a dancer, I knew this poem would discuss a partnership, dance, or walk. Learning about the scorpion’s courtship while comparing interactions the speaker’s experienced with men was amazingly insightful and intricate. Growing up in rural North Carolina, I have heard—and experienced firsthand—the pressure, microaggressions, and hatred from people in a town I was to call “home.” Giragosian writes so visually, with the alliteration and personification guiding me through the piece; I could truly feel this poem and all it had to offer.

Mother Octopus was intriguing, compelling, and captivating. Giragosian created worlds within each poem that transformed my thoughts on personal experiences. With themes of grief, queer love, femininity, and environmental collapse, I truly believe there’s something for everyone in this collection. As I look back on my reads of this collection, I’m inspired to play with form and personification to propel my writing and branch out in how my writing looks and reads. Giragosian and the collection are a testament to resilience, using poetry as the vessel to express these experiences.

Mother Octopus is available from Middle Creek Publishing

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Caroline Eliza is a poet and writer from Asheville, North Carolina, currently completing her degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College with minors in Pre-Law and Poetry. Her creative and academic work explores the intersection of poetry and movement, often blurring the lines between the written word and physical expression. Beyond the page, Caroline finds joy in crocheting and dancing, grounding her artistic life in tactile practices and performance. She will graduate in December 2025 and plans to further her education and continue exploring the connections between art, advocacy, and embodiment.

In The Years of Blood (Fordham University Press, 2025), Adédayọ̀ Agarau boldly walks us through a landscape of grief, pointing us to anguish, yes, but also to beauty. This multilingual and reflective poetry collection is full of hauntings—images of death and dreams of family members finding safety. The speaker here is never alone, which can sometimes feel nightmarish and other times act as a reminder to hold onto hope. Agarau honors Nigeria with every poem, both bearing witness to reality and conjuring a future desired by every person who calls this place home.

While scenes of brutality saturate many pages within The Years of Blood, Agarau writes with humanity. The collection starts with “Wind,” a prose-block poem from the perspective of a speaker with anxiety. Agarau writes,

This imagining comes after the speaker lists other possibilities of what could be—all depictions of violence enacted on close family members. The speaker here so strongly wants, needs, to feel connected to his loved ones, even as a ghost. He dreams himself as the wind—perpetual and permeating all spaces, especially home.

Agarau’s unbreakable bond to where he is from elevates The Years of Blood apart from other collections, all the while remaining intimate and sacred. “Boys who never die” is a list-like ode poem to the three-dimensionality of men and boys in Ìbàdàn that I found especially moving. Not only is there an entire stanza naming over twenty boys, but Agarau shows us their hearts, their minds, and their souls. He describes “Boys who dance / around plastic chairs,” “Boys who gaze at the moon,” and “Boys who call me friend” (25). Even as we readers are introduced to “Boys who carry scars their fathers give them” we also meet “Boys the hope of a chameleon— / always changing, always changing” (Agarau 26-27). There is multiplicity in this community, full of good, trouble, beauty, and pain. I can feel Agarau’s love so strongly, even when the poetry is written “in a language wet with loss” (15). There are few better ways to honor your home more than to write about it, with full honesty.

Religion is also a prevalent theme throughout these pages, with many poems to or about God/gods. In “It begins with gratitude & ends in rage,” Agarau expresses thankfulness, “I am grateful that I have been given this day, dear Lord” (49). While addressing God here, for most of the poem, the speaker contemplates his lineage, particularly his relationship to his father. Slowly moving towards the rage indicated in the title, the speaker can’t help but compare his (birth) father to his (religious) Father. He asks,

Lord, shepherd, father, king…God is depicted and realized in many forms. As this poem sits around the middle of the collection, I take particular note of Agarau’s questioning of his own name, which is listed in the book’s Index as “A Yorùbá name given to sons of royal descent…[meaning] ‘The crown has morphed into joy’” (89). This existential self-reflection is not only striking but is also deeply connected to Agarau’s spirituality. Just over ten pages prior, “Fine boy writes a poem about anxiety” ends with another arresting mention of God that also reflects the connection between family, faith, self, and safety. Agarau writes, “your god is everything / that lets you come inside. / mother, lover” (38). While this time referencing mother instead of father, the speaker is noting how our lineage, parents, and ancestors are our safety and home.

Tenderness book-ends the collection. In the last poem, “Litany in which my father returns safely at night,” there is no direct mention of the wind from the opening poem, but many instances of sound that draw our attention to the air: “a small decibel of music escaping someone’s window” and “a dog barks” (Agarau 86). What the speaker hears directly from people, however, is what Agarau uses to guide us towards his gentle wish:

Like a skilled cinematographer, Agarau holds his hands up, making a camera with his thumbs and index fingers. Slowly, he narrows us readers into the heart of the poem, his father, the addressee of this litany, this prayer. At the last line, of both “Litany” and the entire collection—“We all go to sleep”—I found myself dropping my shoulders in relief. Agarau writes so beautifully, offering this gift to himself and his community.

Simultaneously recounting terrible horrors and blessing loved ones, Agarau trusts his memory to guide readers through a variety of poetic forms and storytelling techniques. He is an honest but kind navigator, one that is unafraid to bear witness and invested in a better future for himself, for Black boys, and for all. The Years of Blood is a must read amidst today’s world’s violence at home and abroad, both as a wake up call and a source of hope.

The Years of Blood is available for pre-order from Fordham University Press

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Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is currently the Assistant Chapbook Editor and Reads Editor at Sundress Publications, and has been awarded recognition from The Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the Writers’ Room of Boston, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Her writing has found homes in Colorado Review, CV2, Gasher, The Journal, Osmosis, and Thrush, among others. Since earning her MFA in Poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.

If the past is gone, can it be said to even exist? And if the past doesn’t exist, what does that mean for history, for identity, for memory? I won’t pretend to have a definitive answer, if even there is one. Nor would, I expect, Brent Ameneyro, the author of A Face Out of Clay (University Press of Colorado, 2024). But in reading his brilliant poetry collection, I quickly realize that here is a writer who has experienced that question of identity with razor-sharp attentiveness.

The book’s first poem, “Making a Face Out of Granite,” serves as something of an epigraph in itself, hinting at Ameneyro’s poetic insight in short three lines:

“How the smallest ges-

ture can rewrite a million-

year-old narrative.” (1)

Indeed, it actually hints Ameneyro’s incisive, tactile, and portentous collection of sensory ephemera from the past throughout the book. Memories are evoked by the smallest of observations and sensations, recreating the lived experience of remembering in real time. The poem, “A Walk in Mercado de la Merced,” exemplifies this perfectly. It begins with an imperative to “inhale” and then, like the opening of floodgates, a brilliant collage of scents pours through: “fried pig skin…tortillas…cigarette smoke…violin strings / fresh paint” (Ameneyro 9). The details here are elevated from much other contemporary poetry for their eclecticism—it’s almost Nerudian, the idea of inhaling violin strings. Then, from this olfactory background, a series of four questions emerge, each one more resonant than the last for their specificity and strangeness. The first one gives the poem its undeniable power: “when did my hands get so many wrinkles?” (Ameneyro 9). “A Walk in Mercado de la Merced” no less than transmits the experience of being immersed in recalling a specific place at a specific time, and then having certain moment of details of both the present and the past snap into sharp focus, and the violent clash between past and present. Who hasn’t thought back on a favorite spot from their youth, only to be reminded of how old they’ve become?

The seeming violence—or at least, confusion—of the passage of time is also structurally represented in a series of four poems, each called “Tectonics.” According to a note in the back, a “Tectonic” originates as a paragraph prose poem which is then duplicated. Parts of one poem are cut out and erased. Whatever has been erased in one poem must remain in the other. According to Ameneyro, the poetic fragmentation is meant to reflect “The chaotic and destructive events that occur along [tectonic] plate boundaries…[which] often leave civilizations broken and disoriented” (83). This is a fitting metaphor. Tectonic movement can be instantaneous and explosive, or slow and erosive. In either case, an indelible mark can be left on the Earth, or memory. Ameneyro’s “Tectonics” are just as resonant and innovative as they sound. Take this line from the third “Tectonics”:

“it’s     easy to talk            the heart but it’s          in a

      painting             or en español          maybe it’s easier to  

talk about           the earth.” (Ameneyro 45)

The gaps in the poetry and the way the sentences are on the verge of making sense lead to thrilling suggestions.

For how fracturing and confusing time can be, moments from the recesses of memory are rendered with undeniable warmth. In “Puebla,” there are “Houses like parakeets / perched on a dirt road. / There’s an arcade / down two blocks where we used to play” (Ameneyro 42). In “Leaving Before Christmas” this warmth is juxtaposed with an emotional strife looming in the near future, one never described: “there was a keyboard / powered off / every note imaginable / played on dad’s knee / emptiness grew in the room…and there was turbulence / waiting” (Ameneyro 16–17). Every emotion is evoked and experienced with these poems, sometimes even simultaneously.

What really elevates Ameneyro’s poetry is his mastery over storytelling and surrealism. A relatively early standout in the collection is “The Overwhelming Scent of Rosemary.” It has, at its core, a simple Proustian scene. A man picks up some rosemary, crushes it in his fingers, and the scent brings forth “a memory of a house, a yard, / children playing around a rosemary bush” (27). But the poem is from a perspective of a bird who “mid-flight, / gains human-level consciousness” as it flies above the man. It can see into his mind. By the end of the poem, “the overwhelming smell / of rosemary from his fingers / makes the bird forget how to fly, / how to be bird: / it lands next to the man / and walks” (27). It reads with the simplicity and impact of a fable and it filled my heart with warmth, the way it suggests a certain kinship between the bird and the man.

The masterpiece of A Face Out of Clay, in my view, is “The Chairman.” Spanning six pages, and tells the story of the narrator’s friend and his amateur pro-wrestling alter ego, The Chairman. After many beers, he grabs a metal chair and repeatedly smashes it against his head. At first, the characters greet the stunt with enthusiasm and cheers. But with each subsequent bang against the skull, the applause diminishes; the echoes of the metal chair reach further and further, making “some unsuspecting neighbor / drop and apple / out of their grocery bag” (Ameneyro 71). By the third hit, The Chairman’s eyes are “blue and delicate / like a newborn no longer / open wide or trying / to connect with anyone” (72). The fourth and final hit follows the narrator into his dreams, and we are left with an achingly beautiful, unsettling image:

This poem is vivid, haunting, and spans countless emotions and lives. While Ameneyro writes from a specific place, with a specific identity, his poetry touches the elemental and attains the universal. A Face Out of Clay is a work of literature, quite simply, that is not to be missed. 

A Face Out of Clay is available from University Press of Colorado.

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Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge Magazine and Emerson Green Mag, and he won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize, a competition that included Guggenheim Fellows and winners of the National Jewish Book Award. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend and her cat and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.