Bellingham Review Publishes Issue 72

The Bellingham Review is pleased to announce the publication of the first issue under the editorship of S. Paola Antonetta, Issue 72, which includes a special section of new writing from Hong Kong titled “Hong Kong: After Occupy,” the winners of our annual literary contests, as well as a remarkable collection of stories, poems, and essays from US and international writers. With a fresh design, both inside and out, including new cover art from Susan Bennerstrom, we can’t wait to share it with you.

Marking the first of four Spring issues of the Bellingham Review which will feature a folio of international writing, Issue 72’s “Hong Kong: After Occupy” contains eight essays, poems, and short stories from Hong Kong writers, including the essay, “Everyone Could be Batman,” which explores the way the Occupy Hong Kong movement drew on American superhero iconography. A short story, “Fouis Vuitton,” explores the life of a family supporting themselves by creating and selling designer knockoffs in a Hong Kong street market. S. Paola Antonetta praises the work as “politically candid and gripping,” and heralds the publication of this special section as “a coup” for both the journal and Western Washington University.

Also featured are the winners of our 2015 literary contests, Ming Lauren Holden, Eric Roe, and Leigh Claire Schmidli.

Contest judge Bruce Beasley selected Holden’s poem, “For My Aspirated,” as the recipient of the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. Beasley said the poem “stunned me every time I reread it for its collision of mystery and absolute clarity . . . its insistent repetitions and piled-on rhetorical questions pounding against the unplumbable mysteries of loss.”

Roe’s short story, “Notes From Lazarus,” earned the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Contest judge Kristiana Kahakauwila called the story, “a lovely meditation on love, devotion, and hope . . . finely crafted and controlled but never overwrought.”

S. Paola Antonetta, contest judge for the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, described the pleasures of reading this year’s winner: “‘This Sonata, into the third movement’ is an essay that puns deeply to get at the deep truths of all those ways in which language, like life, evades our meanings for it. Divided, like a musical piece, into movements, ‘This Sonata’ evokes movement itself in all its forms . . . Piercingly lyric, haunting in its details.”

You can subscribe to receive this and future issues at bhreview.org or on our Submittable page, at bhreview.submittable.com.

The Bellingham Review is the literary journal produced by Western Washington University’s MFA program. For more information about the multi-genre MFA program, click here.