Shawl, by Moira Linehan

Moira Linehan is the author of two collections of poetry, both from
Southern Illinois University Press: If No Moon, and Incarnate Grace. She lives
in the greater Boston area.

About the poem:

This poem is for a very significant person in my life. It began as she became a
widow, rather suddenly, in early fall a few years ago. She had been a lifeline for me
when I was widowed. Knitting a shawl for her, making this poem as I was doing so,
became attempts to offer her strands of connection.

At the Convention Center, by Emily Koehn

Emily Koehn’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in FENCE,
Crazyhorse, Cincinnati Review, The National Poetry Review and elsewhere.
Her work has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. She grew up in
Hot Springs, Arkansas, received her MFA from Purdue University, and
currently lives in St. Louis.

About the poem:

The small town I grew up in had a convention center that was used for many
different purposes. I wrote “At The Convention Center” after I was thinking about
the myriad ways people’s histories and stories connect and how they can be
embedded in a single place. The poem also comes out of a larger project about a
beauty contest.

Aretaics, by Tina Kelley

Tina Kelley’s third poetry collection, Abloom and Awry, came out from
CavanKerry Press in April, joining Precise and The Gospel of Galore. Her new
chapbook, Ardor, won the Jacar Press chapbook competition. A former
New York Times reporter, she co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move
from Homelessness to Hope.

About the poem:

I was reading through a list of uncommon words beginning with A. It’s what I do
for fun. This word made me think of virtue in my life, in my toddler daughter’s
life, and in the world. It’s part of a project I’m launching, a field guide to North
American words. As per usual, pretty much everything is true.

Up In the Air, by Sean Kelbley

A 2017 Best of the Net nominee, Sean Kelbley lives on a farm in
southeastern Ohio with his husband, in a house they built themselves.
He works as an elementary school counselor. Recent poems are at Poets
Reading the News, Rise Up Review, and Tuck Magazine.


About the poem:
This, in its way, is a love poem to everyone who’s affected by the ongoing attempts
to “fix” healthcare in America, and specifically to those I love in my home,
Appalachia. It’s also a pretty accurate pastiche of surrealistic nightmares I’ve
been having since this past summer. There’s a little bit of regional fatalism to
it, perhaps. And I suppose it could be read as “uppity,” but that’s not the intent.

Observations, by Ashton Kamburoff

Ashton Kamburoff currently serves as the 2017-2018 L.D. and LaVerne
Harrell-Clark Writer in Residence. He lives in central Texas.

On Dissolution, by Margot Kahn

Margot Kahn is the author of the biography, Horses That Buck, and coeditor
of the anthology, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home. She
holds an MFA from Columbia University.


About the poem:

There’s a little desk in my bedroom where I like to write poems. The view looks out
to our old barn that’s in the process of falling down in the way that old barns do. I
have complicated feelings about the barn and the fact that it was built by people
who made their lives here, people I will never know. This year there has been an
unusually large flock of swallows in our fields and, as I try to make sense of my
place on this land, in this world, with so many things around me out of my control,
I watch them.

Do You Consider Yourself A Nature Poet?, by Kathryn Hunt

Kathryn Hunt lives on the coast of the Salish Sea. Her poetry collection,
Long Way Through Ruin, was published by Blue Begonia Press. She’s
worked as a waitress, shipscaler, short-order cook, bookseller, food bank
coordinator, filmmaker, and freelance writer. kathrynhunt.net


About the poem:
When I’m asked what kind of poems I write I’m always stumped. Long, short, lyrical,
narrative? I usually meet curiosity with a shrug—I don’t know—only that it’s pure
joy when one shows up in my notebook. I write that kind of poem: flabbergasted,
beholden, full of questions. Someone asked once if I wrote nature poems. I sat with
that a while and this poem was the upshot.

As Wife to the Protagonist, by Kathleen Hellen

Kathleen Hellen is the author of the award-winning collection Umberto’s
Night and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento.
Nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net, and featured on Poetry
Daily, her poems have been awarded prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and
Washington Square Review.


About the poem:
“As Wife to the Protagonist” is a meditation on the mythic resonance in domestic life.

Two Cedars, by Jordan Hartt

Jordan Hartt is a reader, writer, and writing retreat leader who facilitates
retreats in Kaua’i, Maui, Jamaica, Las Vegas, and the Big Island of Hawai’i.
He also facilitates the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. Work has
appeared in about forty literary magazines: a collection of narrative
poems, Leap, appeared in 2015.


About the poem:

“Two Cedars” is the final poem of a poem sequence called “Driftwood.” The poem’s
conceit is that a white drifter has found an old typewriter and is tapping out the
story of his life in a darkness barely lit by candlelight.

Chris Maccini and Julia Hands join Crab Creek Review!

Crab Creek Review is pleased to welcome Associate Editor Julia Hands, and Interim Fiction Editor Chris Maccini to our editorial team. You may have met Julia at a recent Crab Creek Review event-- she's our event organizer and social media editor. Chris Maccini is a former managing editor of Willow Springs, and will be editing fiction for the journal this fall. We are excited to work with these talented and energetic writer-editors! Please join us in welcoming Julia and Chris to Crab Creek Review. Our open reading period begins September 15, 2018; we hope you'll consider sending us some stories, poems, and essays this fall.

Chris Maccini holds an MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University and a BA in Economics from Colgate University. He previously served as Managing Editor of Willow Springs and his fiction has appeared in Fugue. Chris lives in his hometown, Spokane, Washington where he enjoys getting outside in all seasons with friends and family. His interests in fiction include realism, humor, family narratives, and explorations of the uncanny.

Julia Hands is a fiction writer and poet based out of Seattle. Since 2015, she has worked on a variety of literary magazines, including The Bellingham Review, 5x5 and now Crab Creek. In the summers, she works as the Assistant Program Manager at the Centrum Port Townsend Writers Conference, and the rest of the year co-organizes the Write Our Democracy Quarterly Reader Series. She also currently works with Lit Crawl: Seattle as the Marketing and Logistics Coordinator. You can find her prose in Blink-Ink and 5x5, The Evansville Review and The Dime Show Review.

At the Iron Bear, by Brett Hanley

Brett Hanley currently attends the MFA program at McNeese State
University and is the Poetry Editor for The McNeese Review. Her poetry has
been published in North American Review, Hotel Amerika, apt, and elsewhere.


About the poem:
“At the Iron Bear” was inspired by a raucous night with good friends at a bear bar
in Austin, Texas, a night that in some ways was healing and regenerative for me
as I was dealing with some difficult re-shuffling in my life. It was also inspired and
influenced by Terrance Hayes’s wonderful “At Pegasus.”

Mom Takes Us to Chester, by Andrew Hahn

Andrew Hahn is a current MFA in Writing candidate at Vermont College
of Fine Arts. His work has been featured in Lamp Literary Journal, R.kv.r.y
Quarterly, Lavender Bluegrass: LGBT Writers on the South, Past-ten, and is
forthcoming in Lunch.

About the essay:
Since I was a teenager, my mom told me her life would make a best-selling story,
so I started to write about my childhood with her. Writing about our relationship
from the perspective of my eleven-year-old self became a way to understand my
mom and ultimately forgive her.

Ghazal for a Sea Journey, by Jessica Goodfellow

Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press,
2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala (2015), and The Insomniac’s Weather Report
(2014). She’s had work in Best New Poets, The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily,
and Motionpoems. Last summer she was a writer-in-residence at Denali
National Park and Preserve.


About the poem:
I wanted to write a ghazal because I never had before. I loved the idea of internal
rhyme in each stanza, so I played with that, and eventually a seafaring theme
emerged.

Gilgamesh Alone, by Steve Gehrke

Steve Gehrke has published three books of poetry, most recently Michelangelo’s Seizure, selected for the National Poetry Series. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming at Poetry, Kenyon Review, Yale Review and others. He teaches at University of Nevada-Reno.


About the poem:
I’ve read and taught Gilgamesh many times over the last half-dozen years or
so, and I’m always most moved by those middle-passages when Gilgamesh has
abandoned his kingdom and is on his own and how frantic and weak this once
powerful character becomes when faced with his own mortality. Given that
Gilgamesh’s fear of death demolishes not only his love for Enkidu, but seemingly
all his worldly ambitions, one has to wonder: how solid would even our most
deeply held convictions be when “truly” faced with the fact of our own mortality.
The poem doesn’t have an answer to that, but it thinks it’s an interesting question
worth asking.

It’s Possible Sex is Elegy, by Chelsea Dingman

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win
the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). In 2016-17,
she also won The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore
Review’s Wabash Prize, and Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize.
Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.


About the poem:
This poem originated from a conversation with a colleague as to what the sonnet
form can be after reading a series of Terrance Hayes’ new sonnets. I wrote it the
week that the #metoo campaign exploded online & I used this form as a sort of cage
for the content. Breaking the traditional form, even slightly, feels like the smallest
act of resistance for this speaker.