Spring Issue of Crab Creek Review

Hello, dear readers!

The spring issue of Crab Creek Review is now available on our website, and at select bookstores in the Seattle area. The issue is brimming with brilliant and important works, by Allison Adair, Andrew Cox, Chelsea Dingman, Jessica Goodfellow, JordanHartt, Kathryn Hunt, Tina Kelley, Erin Malone, Diane K. Martin, Gail Martin, Donna Miscolta, Fernando Pérez, Susan Blackwell Ramsey, Lisabelle Tay, Julie MarieWade, Ellen Welcker, and more. These writers and poets cover a lot of ground—climate change, inequalities and injustices, love and loss, death, illness, the body—just about everything that makes up the human experience. 

Here are poems of water—too much, too little, or too dirty, explored by poets Allison Adair in “If Water Can Carry Us Anywhere, It Can Bring Us Home” and Fernando Pérez, in “Where Plants Go to Die.”

“We’re so sure / tree roots have a good grip on whatever it is that lies / beneath us. But tonight I saw a low shingle roof / float down that river near Eureka and let’s / be clear: the house was still attached” – Allison Adair

“The river lives inside a concrete box, / it too is confined, running / to where the ocean is tongued / by sediments of garbage” -- Fernando Pérez

And poems of the body, in sickness and in health, among them “The Third Descent,” an essay by Kristine Langley Mahler, and Steve Gehrke’s “Gilgamesh Alone.”

“And you, selfish, brittle-hearted king / in me, who long only for your own / acquittal, when death comes to lap the last / sip from the dish of milk going sour / in your chest, if you could borrow just / a day, just an extra hour, from the child / whom you love, would you take it?” 

– Steve Gehrke

“There are eating disorders and there is disordered eating and I am limiting myself if I say one is not the other.” – Kristine Langley Mahler

Tina Kelley probes the science of virtue, in “Aretaics” – “Who’s the best, she who stops / to move the bumper from the center lane, the soldier / diving on the live grenade, kidney donor, hospice / nurse, foster parent? I aspire to be each, and fail.”

Empathy and grief intermingle in Moira Linehan’s “Shawl” – “There’s no space / I can find to slip in beside you. His dying // rows forward. On the far other side of this / city, I begin a shawl for you”

In “A Strange Feeling in a Parking Lot/ the Tree” Raynald Nayler looks at America through a critical lens:

“They say the Darkness is close to this place. / Past the edge of town, and some go there / with torches.”

The poems, stories, and essays in Crab Creek Review will both wreck and renew you. We invite  you to support these writers and poets, and the journal, by purchasing a copy or subscribing, and/or by attending a reading. Two issue launches are scheduled in May. West of the Cascades, a Seattle reading is slated for May 10^th, followed by a reading in Spokane on May 17^th. See our Facebook events for more information, and stay tuned for a summer reading at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference in July!

Happy Earth Day from all of us at Crab Creek Review. May this year bring you good reading, good writing, and a heaping measure of peace.

Warmly,

Jenifer Lawrence

Editor-in-Chief, CrabCreek Review