Bellingham Review Archives
“Rice Farmer,” 2024 Medium: brown rice, white rice, black rice, farro, yellow lentils, chickpeas, mung beans, and acrylic “Rice Farmer” was featured in What You Bring to the Table at Slip Gallery, curated by Alaina Stocker Artist statement: My piece “Rice Farmer” is part of a series I’m working on called “Rice, Roots, and the …
Winner of the 2024 49th Parallel Award (Poetry) Touch the soft space beneath my clavicle from the port they removed. Or the radiation tattoos. Blurred ink stains on favorite linens. Here the holes burrowed into my liver because I let them take the healthy breast along with the diseased, but what else was I supposed …
Winner of the 2024 Tobias Wolff Award (Fiction) I always felt that the Aquarium was the eye of the city. From the top, it looked like a deep well that cast a shimmering dark blue shadow on people’s faces, making them seem transparent. The circular corridors of the gallery enclosed it like the Colosseum. Wearing …
Winner of the 2024 Annie Dillard Prize (Nonfiction) “Maybe my thinking has been wrong all along. Maybe silence is not something to interact with, to be filled in, but rather to let wash over you, to exist within.” —Victoria Chang, Dear Memory Father:I have never heard your voice, other than in the conversations that neither …
Rae Gouriand’s long poem The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press, 2024) is a deeply visceral and textured exploration of grief, queer commitment, and desire. Gouriand’s work rejects stasis – both in terms of voice and form – through the speaker’s meditations on artistry, marriage, and the self, woven through the poem as velvet. The Velvet Book …
“Reflections and Projections”Medium: Oil Paint on Canvas Artist Statement: I began these paintings as a way of processing my grief, my inherited grief, where did this start, where does it come from? Exploring the intergenerational impacts of my grandmother’s suicide from the perspective of a granddaughter who never met her, exploring and building a narrative using secondary sources, …
Arctic Play by Mita Mahato (The 3rd Thing Press, October 2024, pre-order here) Mita Mahato is the author and artist of Arctic Play, forthcoming from The 3rd Thing. Her poetry comix have appeared in places including Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades. …
Arctic Play by Mita Mahato (The 3rd Thing Press, October 2024, pre-order here)Read an excerpt here on BR! Michelle Peñaloza: What inspired you to create Arctic Play, and how did your experience as a part of the Arctic Circle artist residency in the Norwegian Arctic of Svalbard influence the direction of the project? Did you …
Former Bellingham Review contributor Andrea Hollander’s newest collection of poetry, And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books, 2023), is a stunning display of wisdom, intimacy, and heart. The author invites us to sit with moments of grief and distinctive experiences of longing, allowing the reader the opportunity to feel everything at full capacity. With poems …
Dear Reader, I’m currently sitting in a café with my roommate, who’s illustrating incredible imagery while rain drenches the verdant town of Bellingham. I’ve been flipping through a book about gay werewolves as I’m procrastinating writing this letter to you all, since I don’t always like to think about endings, and a large part of …