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 10th,
followed by a reading in Spokane on May 17th. 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
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