​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

​Bluets by Maggie Nelson is a nonfiction piece which explores the personal history and significance of blue as a color, life event, and feeling. Throughout the essay, Nelson addresses a “you”, which we learn was once a lover, but now no longer. We get moments discussing Nelson’s visits to her friend who was paralyzed by an accident, moments of sex, and her observances life around her. It also brushes against the history of blue as a color and its uses in literature and philosophy.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

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
 

​The Iowa Review Winter 2023/24 is a collection of poetry, essays, and short stories. This issue had some really strong short stories that I particularly liked. The first was ‘Invisibilia’ by Tom Howard which features a family on the brink of divorce while all the family members either start to become invisible or shrink. I was also a big fan of ‘Family Video’ by Gracie Newman where two brothers take their grandmother’s old VHS tapes to a video rental store, fighting and remembering the love and abuse of their grandmother. There was ‘Human Resources’ by Brynne Jones which is about a woman working a corporate job when a strange girl appears at her door and as the story goes on, the girl becomes younger until she’s just an egg. And finally, I really enjoyed ‘Rifleman’ by Alex Burchfield about a Home Depot manager who befriends one of his workers, Andromeda/Andy, before a shoplifter comes into the store with a gun. For me, the stories in this issue really packed a punch, treading sometimes into the surreal.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Granta Issue 67 is a collection of essays and stories centered around, ‘Women and Children First’ (i.e. the idea that they are the first people to be saved during tragedies). The issue opens with a discussion on the movie Titanic and the truth behind whether the band actually played as the ship sank and what song were they playing. Another essay documents the experience of being bombed for a year in Yugoslavia. Another featured essay from Edward Said describes his upbringing as a Palestinian and the norms and cultures his parents surround him in. There’s an essay about Iraq, a photo collection of Mennonites in Canada, and an essay on the experience of a journalist witnessing the inhumane conditions and slaughtering of refugees in Kibeho, Rwanda as the UN officers watched on. The story that I particularly enjoyed was, ‘Telling Him’, by Edmund White in which a gay American in France has a relationship with a married Frenchman. All the while, the American knows he is HIV positive and is worried that when he tells the Frenchman, they will fight or become violent. This issue of Granta felt especially prescient in its discussions of war, refugees, and Palestine even though it was published in 1999.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​New Ohio Review Issue 34 is a collection of poetry, short stories, essays and reviews. I particularly enjoyed ‘visiting the Natural History Museum with my 97-Year-Old Dad’ by Michael Mark, ‘The Hair Cutting’ by Ockert Greeff, ‘In Our Nature’ by Sunni Brown Wilkinson, ‘My Body is a Cemetery’ by Eliza Sullivan, ‘Pantoum’ by Maria Martin, and ‘Kate Sessions Park’ by Bruce McKay. In ‘Kate Sessions Park’, McKay describes a girl, Fatima, who helps an intellectually disabled girl, Cici. When Fatima and the speaker bring Cici to a junior lifeguarding event, Cici pees herself, which causes Fatima to drive her to a beach 90 miles away, effectively getting her fired from helping Cici. It’s a raw story that works with the speaker’s sense of observations and intuitions.
 
Final Rating; 3.5/5

​Bones Worth Breaking by David Martinez is a memoir about a pair of brothers both struggling with drug addictions, childhood trauma, and the reverberations of living as mixed-race kids. Though, it’s so much more than that. It’s about skateboarding, the brother’s unbreakable bond, Martinez’s LDS mission in Brazil, his marriage, his writing journey, and his brother, Mike’s, death from sepsis due to COVID while in prison. The memoir spans Martinez’s struggles with doing hard drugs which were used to cope with his childhood sexual trauma, strict conservative household, and his bipolar disorder. It’s a deeply personal and important story which shows the divergence of the two brothers bonding over skateboarding and doing drugs, and the difficulties of hiding mental illness and drug abuse. While the whole memoir infuses itself with importance of the brother’s love, I felt the greatest connection when reading Mike’s emails while Martinez is on his mission in Brazil. The pain and knowledge of what is to come for Mike is raw and bleeds in each moment. Martinez writes about a painful and hard life, and I feel now changed because of it.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​When They Tell You to be Good by Prince Shakur is a memoir about being Black, gay, and struggling with the absence of a father and a mother’s refusal of acceptance. Shakur describes his years of travel to France, the Philippines, Jamaica, South Korea, and throughout the US. It’s in these places where he attends protests, stays with the locals, meets and falls in love, all while trying to understand his place in a family that hates gay people and how he’s meant to deal with the story of his father’s death. In childhood, Shakur’s mother finds his journal which detail his feelings for another boy, which enrages her. Throughout all his travels, Shakur then processes his mother/community’s reaction, both getting close to other men and pulling away when the pain is too much. Shakur’s family is embroiled in a history of violence: his two uncles in Jamaica were shot and killed due to drug disputes, his other uncle in the US was killed by police, and his step father was arrested because of his citizenship status. Near the end, Shakur comes to realize his father is alive in Arizona, where they talk in a diner and part ways knowing their relationship existed only in imagination.
 
Throughout the novel, Shakur pulls in quotes and discusses James Baldwin, W.E.B Du Bois, and Frank B. Wilderson III to contextualize and make meaning out of the horrors that Black communities face. There were moments that felt as if some paragraphs were tangentially related, which sometimes gave a disconnected feeling while reading. Though, on the whole, I felt that Shakur’s synthesis of his life brought an intensity that I was glad to read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​The Florida Review 47.2 features a collection of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction of which I enjoyed a few. I particularly liked ‘Antidote’ by Ben Kline, ‘Indulgences’ by Garrett Biggs, ‘Elegy with Snake Twisting my Blistered Tongue’ by Alejandro Lucero, ‘Suspended in Flight’ by Diane Gottlieb, ‘OWLS’ by Kathryn Campo Bowen, and ‘A Chest of Drawers’ by Jason Brown. I liked the flow of ‘OWLS’ in the way that the two men try to find their friend, Vanessa, after a night drinking where she wanted to have sex with one of the men. All the characters are studying law, with the speaker planning to write a novel but it never comes to fruition. In the end, they find Vanessa, as she is not lost, and is annoyed they went looking for her. I found this collection to be a generally solid read.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Shadowings by Lafcadio Hearn is a collection of Japanese legends, songs, girl names, and essays focused particularly on dreams. In the legends, one features a samurai who returns to his first wife one night only to discover that that she had died from his absence. Another features a man who must ride the dead body of a woman in order for her not to haunt him. There’s an essay on cicadas and how the Japanese infuse them into literature. Then an essay on the etiquette and minutia of girl names which catalogue hundreds of names and their meanings. There’s an essay on old songs and the contexts from which they come from. Finally, there are an assortment of essays ranging from how the author levitated in his dreams, to why we fear ghosts, to words he had dictated from a book in his dream. There are weird moments, though I appreciate the amount of detail Hearn goes into on how he categorizes and explains the names, songs, and cicadas.
 
Final Rating: 4/5