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

Ode to the Abused Body, by Fallon Sullivan

Fallon Sullivan lives with her dog in Seattle. She is the poetry editor for
Psaltery & Lyre, and was the 2016-2017 poetry editor for the Bellingham
Review. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Western
Washington University in 2017.

About the poem:

I wrote “Ode to the Abused Body” as a continuation of Sharon Olds’ tradition of
making the ode subversive just by writing within the form, as she does in her book of
odes. She defies convention under the guise of convention just by writing poetry of
praise to these “ugly” or base elements of humanity. I appreciate the way poetry can
serve as a platform for asserting self-acceptance and dignity, despite X, this unlovely
facet of your human experience.

The Young Eat What These Birds Disgorge from Their Crops, by Kathryn Smith

Kathryn Smith’s first poetry collection is Book of Exodus (Scablands
Books, 2017). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry
Northwest, Bellingham Review, Mid-American Review, The Collagist, and
elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a grant from the Spokane Arts Fund.

About the poem:

In “Saint Francis and the Sow,” Galway Kinnell talks about reteaching an animal
its loveliness. In setting out to do this for the vulture, I was made aware, instead,
of how an animal can teach humans about our unloveliness.

History, The Homemaker, by Scot Siegel

Scot Siegel has authored three full length books and two chapbooks
of poetry, most recently The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems
(2016) from Salmon Poetry of Ireland. His poems appear in Nimrod,
Coachella Valley Review, San Pedro River Review, Verse Daily, and Terrain.org,
among other publications.

About the poem:

History—real, imagined, revised, and mythologized—is a theme that runs
through my most recent full length book, The Constellation of Extinct Stars
and Other Poems. I am intrigued by the thought that just as one’s memory is
selective and unstable, history too is malleable and might even have a mind of
its own, which is the premise of “History, the Homemaker.”

Perpetual Country (Kick the Wall), by Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney

Philip Schaefer’s debut collection, Bad Summon, won the Agha Shahid
Ali Poetry Prize (University of Utah Press, 2017). Individual work can be
found in Kenyon Review, Thrush, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Bat City,
Adroit, and Passages North. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.

Jeff Whitney is the author of The Tree With Lights in it (Thrush Press), while
Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press) and Smoke Tones (Phantom Books) were
co-written with Philip Schaefer. His poems can be found in Adroit, Beloit
Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Colorado Review, and Poetry Northwest. He lives in
Portland.


About the poem:
The two poems in this issue were written as collaborations [by Philip Schaefer
and Jeff Whitney]. The process of putting them together was quite haphazard,
involving lots of cutting and Frankensteinian rearranging with other pieces
of writing we did together and individually. The result is a pair of poems that
contain both our voices and, hopefully, some third voice bubbling under that is
neither of us.