Sharon F. McDermott: How to Love a Transcendentalist
Walking across the quad, on my way to my first class, my senses swooned at the sight and scent of blossoms capping the apple trees with billowing clouds. Pink and white petals perfumed the air and spiraled down on breezy days. Bees hummed in the canopies; birds nested there.
Charles Harper Webb: Appetite
The crowds seem endless, tramping past
the Hunger Artist’s straw-filled cage to see
the panther’s glinting teeth and lethal stride.
Baron Wormser: Groovy
It’s fair to say that “groovy” has passed out of daily parlance. As words go, it was a bit silly, a bit mystic, a bit glib, a bit droll, a bit low-brow, a bit artless, and a bit wonderful. It spoke to an era and seemed, accordingly, germane to that era and almost sensible in its glad frankness.
Michael Simms: Five Pieces of Advice to Writers Who Want to Publish
Since I’ve been an editor and publisher for a long time, I’m often asked to advise first-time authors on how they can get their work into the world.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Hermanas
You’re the same, you two, J, my lover, said. Of course you feel an affinity. I stared at the Frida Kahlo self-portrait in his hands. Frida’s soulful sweetness stared back. You … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: Dark Time
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
Ed Simon: Introducing The Pittsburgh Review of Books
A call for submissions
Baron Wormser: The Fury
Politics requires suppleness, the ability to compromise, to fit means to ends, to temper principles for the sake of reaching agreement, to turn burning moral issues into administrative questions, to convert moral enemies into amiable opponents, the duel into a debate.
Angele Ellis: Memory’s Self-portrait
Seeing Things by Marjorie Maddox. Wildhouse Poetry (an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing), 2025.
Rachel Hadas: Three Poems
Wait. Something I had never thought to see
again clanks forward from obscurity-
that creaky train I’d once been riding on,
a journey slow and grim.
Baron Wormser: Dissident
Of necessity, the path of the dissident, since it depends on the exactions of conscience, is a solitary one. I think of Henry David Thoreau’s night in a jail … Continue reading
William D. Hartung: The New Age Militarists
According to this view, the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”
Rachel Hadas: Why Trump’s rage defies historical and literary comparisons
As he has gained fame and power, Trump’s contemptuous rage at his opponents and his appetite for vengeance appear to have sharpened.
Mike Schneider: Stirring Up the “Great Folk Scare”
There’s nothing easy-going about the folk songs of the Greenwich Village revival, not the ones Dylan sang — a man-killing woman, catastrophic floods, a man driven insane by love — songs that taught him there’s nothing new on Earth.
