What makes a piece of writing an Under Review piece?
I asked myself this before I started reviewing submissions for this issue. It was meant to be a sort of recalibration of my inner scale and a focused pause before cannonballing into the always fast, sometimes choppy waters of issue production. I should tell you that we have no formal rubric for evaluating the work we receive, no consistent scoring system or formula. I like it that way; I think Meghan and Terry do, too.
Read MoreNo throngs of spectators lining the streets.
No streets! Gravel driveway to gravel road
and a single participant, sober as a farm boy can be,
in tenuous balance over rutted pasture,
Read MoreThe surfer sits, straddling the board, slowly moving up and down with the swell as mountains of green water shift beneath in the unfathomed deep.
Read MoreI lift the first Atlas stone, the lightest, place it easily on the platform. I can’t hear the arena crowd: I can only see their hands clap, their mouths move.
Read MoreWhen I first saw Tai Tzu Ying on the badminton court, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to be her, or wanted to be with her. Is this what KT Tunstall meant when she sang about Patti Smith?
Read MoreThe echoing cacophony of the seventh inning pounded through the tunnel. He stood with his daughter mere feet from the field, separated only by the dugout and short concrete steps. He’d maneuvered his back to the tunnel wall, eliminating some of his rising anxiety in the confined space.
Read MoreDespite stemming from one’s shortcomings,
backed up sliders symbolize baseball’s grace.
Baseball is a failure-centric sport, you see; displayed by
backed up sliders aspiring to be standard sliders. Standard sliders are pitches
Read MoreTy Chapman is an author and poet based in Minnesota. He is the author of SARAH RISING (Beaming 2022); LOOKING FOR HAPPY, a Minnesota Book Award finalist (Beaming 2023); STOKES, written with John Coy (Lerner 2024); JAMES FINDS THE BEAT (Free Spirit 2024); and TARTARUS (Button Poetry 2024). Ty was a 2024 Cave Canem fellow; a 2022 Center for Arts + Social Justice Fellow; a Mirrors & Windows fellow; and a Mentor Series fellow. He holds an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Read MoreThe hydrants are open—
roll the windows up
and approach the spray,
clear that all joy-filled screams
would be drowned out by the
Water. Pelting the windows.
Read MoreNichols brought the ball up the court with controlled urgency. With twenty-three seconds left and his Roadrunners down one, it was go-time, but not panic-time. In moments like this—in the clutch—the game slowed down for Nichols.
Read MoreFor Brook Lopez, Center
Up here in stadium section 207, you are ordinary
seven-foot man mountain. L.A. native slope
of bluff ribbed rock.
Read MoreThe Seattle Mariners are exceptionally bad. Spectacularly bad. Supernaturally bad. They are one of six MLB teams never to win the World Series and the only team to never even play in it.
Read MoreI remember you as God in a fold-out lawn chair.
Clipboard, stopwatch, lemonade at your elbow.
Read MoreWe were just kids. Ball players. Hoopers. Most of us couldn’t point out Argentina on a map. Was it in Southern Europe or South America? I knew it was one of the two, but it was difficult to remember which.
Read More1) Do not buy eggs at Whole Foods. Eggs are cheapest at Target, but the quality of produce is much better at Whole Foods. They also have good ready-made dinners when you are too lazy to cook like eight salmon rolls for $10.99.
Read MoreShe didn’t care about basketball, but she loved it when Mr. Dyson pulled the TV cart into the classroom and put the game on.
Read MoreHalfway through an alley
smoke & a classic third
quarter Knicks collapse,
the kid upstairs who shit
Read More
