The Fall Issue | 2023

The Fall Issue | 2023

Herewith, we present you our Fall Issue, a wonderful harvest of poems, short stories, novel excerpts, interviews, and reviews from the many hundreds of submissions we’ve received. Check back daily throughout November for great new writing selected by our editors.

Books in Brief

Books in Brief

Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors

Stefanie Kirby

Stefanie Kirby

My body opens like a highway sinkhole. It’s a baby someone shouts and I know they are wrong. It’s a baby I shout, still wrong.

Zuska Kepplová

Zuska Kepplová

We each have a role. I am the storyteller. She is the muse. She’s Romanian. She looks like a Gypsy. A beautiful Gypsy. She says that if it gave her more cachet in the academic world, she’d gladly say she’s a Gypsy.

Jennifer L Freed

Jennifer L Freed

We’ve worked / for this / intimacy—
/ me, letting go / of my need / to know, //  you, trusting me / to let you / be.

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The Fall Issue | 2023

The Fall Issue | 2023

Herewith, we present you our Fall Issue, a wonderful harvest of poems, short stories, novel excerpts, interviews, and reviews from the many hundreds of submissions we’ve received. Check back daily throughout November for great new writing selected by our editors.

Read the Editorial »

Alyssa Froehling

I’m a fair sacrifice. Steel tools pass in and out of me / like parishioners through the threshold / of a heavy door.  My flesh holds too much / that I cannot see.

Read Now »

Svetlana Turetskaya

October 25, 1917 and the place is Petrograd, Russia, / and the horse pulling my stagecoach is whipped / mercilessly all the way to the Mariinsky Theater

Read Now »

Gustáv Reuss

Everything seemed set for the trip to the Moon when the prudent Krutohlav, still lost in contemplation of the whole enterprise, imagined yet more problems that stood in his way.

Read Now »

Stefanie Kirby

My body opens like a highway sinkhole. It’s a baby someone shouts and I know they are wrong. It’s a baby I shout, still wrong.

Jennifer L Freed

We’ve worked / for this / intimacy—
/ me, letting go / of my need / to know, //  you, trusting me / to let you / be.

Gloria Heffernan

Why do they want to see pictures / of what they looked away from / in disgust?

Daniel Brennan

People never want to leave the party, do they? Drinks full, lips / red, lies told to the point of truth. We’re waiting out the silence.

Alyssa Froehling

I’m a fair sacrifice. Steel tools pass in and out of me / like parishioners through the threshold / of a heavy door.  My flesh holds too much / that I cannot see.

Zuska Kepplová

We each have a role. I am the storyteller. She is the muse. She’s Romanian. She looks like a Gypsy. A beautiful Gypsy. She says that if it gave her more cachet in the academic world, she’d gladly say she’s a Gypsy.

Gustáv Reuss

Everything seemed set for the trip to the Moon when the prudent Krutohlav, still lost in contemplation of the whole enterprise, imagined yet more problems that stood in his way.

Uma Jagwani

Jane always drove a little drunk. She was a really good drunk driver and insisted she’s even better at driving when a little drunk. I wasn’t worried — she’s never been caught or close to an accident. But tonight she was off.

Benjamin K. Herrington

I asked her if it was strange that sometimes he’d rub and stroke my almost sunburned unshirted shoulders, tousle my hair, offer me a drag off his smoke, and then tell me a dirty joke, or a story about eating pussy. I asked her if this was something that should concern me.

Tim Goldstone

An elderly ex colonel walking stiffly past me in the opposite direction takes the time to come carefully to a halt and explain to me how hundreds of years ago the villagers here destroyed the fish trap a landowner had built upriver to stop their supply of free fish.

Diane Simmons

Diane Simmons

There must be thousands of us non-Southerners with similar secret histories, people who profited from the crime of slavery and continue to do so.

Siegfried Mortkowitz

Because he wanted all the attention at the funeral, all the condolences, all the pity. The big man in sorrow. Jakob weeping.

Marina Porras

They are women who want to look into the mirror and be satisfied with their reflection. Envy is born when you look into the mirror and don’t like what you see there. Everything about this sin begins with the eyes.

Books in Brief

Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors

Kathryn Maris on Wave House by Elizabeth Arnold | Friday Pick

From her earliest work — before the idea of eco-entanglement was widely adopted by poets — Arnold viewed nature not as an ‘object’ or ‘other’ but as an inextricable (and clearly endangered) system in which humanity participates.

Favorites from the Last 10 Years, Selected by Michael Stein

If there is a common denominator among the translated fiction published in B O D Y, it is work that maintains a precarious yet exhilarating balance between wild flights of imagination, unbridled humor and grappling with an often harsh reality. Read my favorites here.

Favorites from the Last 10 Years, Selected by Stephan Delbos

Publishing writing you love is the greatest pleasure of editing a literary journal. It’s hard to believe B O D Y has been around for 10 years and I’m astounded by the quality and variety of writing in our archives. Herewith some of my favorites.

Art

Interview with Artist Johanna Strobel

Weaving together disparate references spanning across histories and geographies, German interdisciplinary artist Johanna Strobel explores the entanglement between philosophy, semiotics, and actuality.

Interview with Artist Padma Rajendran

Padma Rajendran’s works on fabric experiment with the clash and combination of patterning and storytelling. She received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and teaches drawing at Vassar College.

Michelle Sylliboy

Interview with L’nu interdisciplinary artist Michelle Sylliboy

Mi’kmaq/L’nu artist and author Michelle Sylliboy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised on her traditional L’nuk territory in We’koqmaq, Cape Breton. Her published collection of photographs and L’nuk hieroglyphic poetry, Kiskajeyi—I Am Ready, won the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award. Jessica Mensch interviewed her this summer at her home.