Long before we realize Luca and Alberto can't swim at the beach, we are half-shown the sleek length of the first creature, the sparkle of the lanterns on the scales as it arcs over the skiff. We claimed all the fish movies ages before the fisherman with his harpoon had time to stammer, What a monster! Horrifying! The gramophone sinks to the seafloor and becomes ours, along with every other treasure. Ariel, longing for legs, longing for her voice. Ursula glammed up in Divine's makeup. Protect the children, they screech, driving us to the cave with their tridents or scribbling over our outlines with (frankly bodacious) tentacles. The more the merrier when it comes to appendages.
MICHAEL POGACH (he/him) is the author of the award-nominated Rafael Ward series: The Spider in the Laurel (2018 Kindle Book Award finalist), The Long Oblivion (2019 Kindle Book Award semi-finalist), The Tyrant Gods, and The Hidden Empire, as well as the chapbook Zero to Sixty. I (Abigail Michelini, Poetry Editor at ORP) had the privilege of speaking with Michael in September 2022 about his newest book, Slip. In the interview below, Michael shares with us his process of finding his way through the “swamp of writing” and the ways in which his characters both reflect his life and surprise him with their demands.
Challenging norms and convention feel like an instinct for our millennium generation. Amy Tan (1952 — ) tells heartfelt stories in the first person point of view of four pairs of Chinese mothers and Chinese American daughters during and after WWII in China and the US, investigating the value of family legacy and memories within the scope of an era's history.
Wayne Miller doesn’t hesitate to probe our insecurities and hopes, but more precisely our assumptions about what we think we understand about our present America in his new book of poetry published by Milkweed Press, We the Jury.
Kirschner’s work forces us to struggle on multiple levels—with the sentences, with the stories, with our own expectations. I felt like Jacob wrestling the angel by the end of it—bruised and blessed.
The seam between devastation and wit runs through Parks-Ramage’s whole novel. It is the art of blurring the traumatic and the trivial that is at the heart of sophistication, the native aesthetic of many gay communities, including the cadre of New York City queens who populate the novel’s pages.
Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is a voice, long throttled, summoning ancestors for strength, for guidance, and for language to enable a radical articulation of self in a place of historical trauma.
The Boys and the Nuns follows a coterie of Boystown gays (and one adamant lesbian) and the unlikely group of nuns who befriend and defend them as Chicago considers passing the Human Rights Ordinance in the late 1980s.
The film is not a coming-out story, though there is a moment of revelation. Nor is it a romance, despite a pair of tender scenes. It is primarily a study of toxic masculinity and the cost of surviving it.
JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY (he/him or they/them) is a Black queer poet, storyteller, & first-generation United Statesian. We are honored to present a selection from his first book length collection of poems, Original Kink.
On the first night we sleep together you cup my face in your hands and say, “I see you. I really see you” and I know you’re talking about my gender and I believe you so deeply my body shakes…
