​New Ohio Review Issue 35 has a variety of interesting pieces, a part of which is a folio on how dance in poetry is an act of resistance, joy, and the taboo. Other parts of the issue expand on themes of pets, humor, and an essay comparing Darwin’s illness with the writer’s own Long COVID. Pieces I particularly liked were ‘The Smoker’ by Johnny Cate, ‘Carls’ by Craig Bernardini, ‘Spring Cleaning’ by Emma Wynn, ‘Strike a Blow for Liberty’ by Rose Lambert-Sluder, and ‘Thinking About My Father’s Erector Set from 1948’ by Jen Siranganian. For me, the highlight was the story by Craig Bernardini with how intensely humorous it was in referring to the Carls (as neighbors) and then their Carl (their son). The story follows the parents as they try to keep their son away from the neighbors because they know he’ll become indoctrinated by them and turn out badly. And its tone really worked for the narrative. Overall, the issue had very few misses, though not as many hits as I would’ve liked.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​The Kenyon Review Fall 2023 is comprised of two main folios: a folio on and about food, while the other is about ‘Gender as a Vessel’. These two themes create a delightful issue in which stories about people being eaten in Douglas Silver’s ‘Taste’ are situation alongside discussions about the body being remade and changed. Other pieces I was fond of were ‘Lemon Season’ by Rebecca Ackermann, ‘Thunderhead’ by Gregory Spatz, and ‘Gulp’ by Dare Williams. I think my favorite—for how strange the story was—was ‘Taste’ in which a man’s hollandaise sauce was so good, it caused people to eat each other. A decent issue overall.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Paris Review Issue 135 is a collection of fiction, poetry, interviews, features, and art that is quite jam-packed with heavy-hitters. Though for the first half of the issue, nothing particularly stood out, except the interview with P.D. James—in a bad way. The interviewer, over the course of multiple questions, goads James into discussing feminism, eventually producing a very outdated understanding of the movement. James says, “I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.” James is referring to how in a college she visited, there were posters up informing students about help-lines for harassment and date-rape, which she disliked. Now, over thirty years later, the same line about people being too “PC” is spouted from the mouths of actual fascists—or in the very least neoliberals who deride the left rather than the right. Regardless, the question stands: how does political correctness instill fascism? Is it how, as a society, we’ve agreed upon a set of words to describe people and that other words are deemed inappropriate? In that case, no one was stopping P.D. James from saying what she wanted. Sure, the consequences of James’s words could bite her back, but that would be expected with anything one is to say. This interview was a low point in the issue because the rest I quite enjoyed. There was quite a bit of poetry by Carl Philips that I liked. The interview with Thom Gunn was fascinating when he talked about the classics and his process. There’s a diary of taking a semester with Allen Ginsberg, which was insightful into Ginsberg as a poet and as a person. It was alluded in his talks and in the excerpts of Ginsberg’s past lovers, and the fanboys who lingered at the edge of his class. Though, for me the breakout piece was a story by Rick DeMarinis called ‘Experience’ about a 14-year-old boy who has a Ham radio set-up in his bedroom that’s in the basement, a step-father that wears a green pinstripe suit to every meal, and a friend whose cousin showed him her privates.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Paris Review Issue 235 is a collection of poetry, prose, interviews, art, and stage plays published essentially at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. I found the interview with Edward Hirsch to be quite funny and also enlightening. There were other pieces that enjoyed such as ‘The Loss of Heaven’ by Dantiel W. Moniz, and “1976: A Lyric, A Memory, A Lie, The Absolute Truth” by Mary Crockett Hill. Though the stand out story for me was ‘River Crossing’ by Jack Livings which is about this town that’s centered around trying to cross the river to another encampment that’s far livelier. However, the river is infested with killer hippos and alligators such that it’s almost impossible to cross. There’s lore about the town building billboards on the river to signal to the other side, and the main industry of the town is an idea generation of how to cross the river. There are also people who decide to trek to outposts higher up the river that takes multiple lifetimes to get word back about what’s going on up north. Essentially this town’s strangeness and customs surround the desire to cross the river. So one day when the narrator’s daughter wants to become one of the people trekking northward, the narrator and his wife freak out. They try to convince their daughter to stay, but she’s unwilling to change her mind. Eventually the wife asks to join the trek. But before they can do anything, the narrator decides to go to his brother who was hiding a possible way across the river: a mechanical hippo. The story ends with the narrator starting his crossing. It’s a strange story and reminds me of another story called ‘The Sleep’ by Caitlin Horrocks which involves a whole strange town. Overall, I found this issue quite delightful.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Black Warrior Review Issue 52.1 is a collection of poetry, essays, fiction, and comics. The fiction in particular displayed the monstrous, the strange, and the surreal while the poetry interrogated the political. The pieces I enjoyed were ‘Four Teachers Stapled Together’ by Brett Hymel Jr., ‘Bring us to the Egalitary, Bring us to the End’ by Rishona Michael, ‘Dear Property Owner’ by Renata Golden, and ‘How to Catch and Cook a Mermaid’ by M. Lea Gray. One of my own stories is featured in this issue, but it was a delight to read such brave works of art.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​American Short Fiction Issue 82 is a collection of six short stories all revolving around relationships in turmoil or that fizzle out. ‘When We Go, We Go Downstream’ by Carrie R. Moore is about this brother and sister whose family has said to be cursed and that all relationships end afoul. It’s set in the days before the sister’s wedding where the brother has brought along a new date and problems arise when the sister’s partner goes missing. The brother soon realizes the curse is real and thus cuts off his own relationship. ‘Archer’s Paradox’ by KJ Nakazawa-Kern is about a man who has started dating a woman after a divorce and takes up archery in his house to start coping with it. Though, I think the most interesting story was ‘The Skilled Anatomist’ by Colleen Rosenfeld in which a woman’s friend is attempting to get over the grief of losing her family by getting procedures done by anatomists to be where the grief goes. Eventually none of the procedures work, so the woman is asked to become pregnant with a baby and her friend’s grief.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Story Issue 21 is a collection of stories which feature characters in weird, sometimes titillating parts of their lives. In ‘Family Travel’ by Grace Chao, a father’s fear of flying forces a family travel onto a train which kills another family. In ‘Neon Genesis’ by Robert Ren, a man begins to receive emails from his old college roommate about a current life, thus becoming so obsessed the man arrives at his old roommate’s doorstep. And my favorite story of the collection is ‘Naked Man’ by Max Kruger-Dull which is about a stage actor who sends videos of himself naked to a man on the internet named TT while also having a role in a play where he becomes naked.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Copper Nickel Issue 40 is a collection of poetry, fiction, and essays. There were a few poems I particularly liked, such as, ‘Man Bowls a Perfect Game with Father’s Ashes Inside the Ball’ by Matt Donovan, and ‘Spring Snow’ by David Hopson. Though, the sand-out piece was ‘Ritual’ by Yang Hao, in which a man helps dispose of dead bodies in the near future. Though, the rest of the pieces didn’t feel as full as the ones mentioned above.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​American Short Fiction Issue 80 is a collection of short stories that are sometimes quiet, sometimes blaringly loud. In Joshua Henkin’s ‘Outer Boroughs’, a daughter is trying to buy a car at the behest of her cancer-stricken father. In Laura Grothaus’s ‘A Place Where Sadness Cannot Go’, a babysitter watches over Eli, a child who gets bullied and has a robotic dog that tries to fix him. And in Matthew Lawrence Garcia’s ‘Harmony’, a high schooler learns that his best friend, C, was sexually assaulted after boxing practice. These stories in particular were painful in a quiet, but meaningful way.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

Tin House Issue 60 is a collection of poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and interviews. Most notably, they interviewed Karl Ove Knausgaard on his six-book series autobiography. I also particularly enjoyed the fiction in this issue, ‘About My Aunt’ by Joan Silber, ‘When We Realize We Are Broke’ by Manuel Gonzales, ‘Before the Bombing’ by Jonathan Lee, and ‘Primal Scenes’ by Kenneth Calhoun. Though, I think the story that was the most haunting, dark, but needed was Adam Johnson’s ‘Dark Meadow’. I liked this issue, and found myself enraptured by the interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
 
Final Rating: 4/5