Georgios Merianos, A Sunflower Stands Against Darkness
issue 9.1
the poems
31 poets 46 poems 7 nations
the art
video photography fiber art figure drawing
the stories
Flat Earthers, AI Wars, and a girl saving her people
the essays
humor and insight from canada and nigeria
schools
CLASSES, WORKSHOPS, AND GROUPS
Soundings
REVIEWS, PROFILES, INTERVIEWS, AND FEATURES
Jeffrey-Michael Kane
Geographers call it second nature: the built world, the humanized landscape, the earth as we have remade it in the image of our requirements. Asphalt is not second nature. It is a third thing — one that moves freight without intention, generates chemistry as a consequence, and assumes the hydrological role of what it replaced without any of the functions that made the original viable.
Lena King
“Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century”, by Kim Fu is a collection of short stories that at no point shies away from the difficult and complex questions that have plagued humans from the beginning. Think grief. Think connection. Think love. Think lust. But what makes this book sting is the way these emotions and quandaries come up against the technology that is shaping the experience of being alive in the 21st century.
Richard Hurst
Suburban life, we are told, is defined by quiet desperation: stable but emotionally hollow, full of relationships that function but do not fulfill. The claim has become so familiar that it rarely needs to be defended. Stability itself is taken as evidence of something missing. Yet the problem may not be that suburban life fails to produce fulfillment. It may be that we have lost the ability to recognize fulfillment when it appears in ordinary form.
From Spark to Submission, November 2026, Trish Hopkins
