Features

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 …

Survival Strategies by Tennison S. Black (University of Georgia Press, 2023) Tennison S. Black’s poetry collection Survival Strategies (University of Georgia Press, 2023), selected by Adrienne Su as the winner of the National Poetry Series, bristles with the sound, texture, and experience of life in the Sonoran. Black digs up roots, tenderly dissecting the speaker’s …

Winner of the 2023 49th Parallel Award for Poetry I want to fit something here about how my father used to console me—told me I was a poor thinker because, when I was a baby, I got so smart so fast God placed a worm in my ear to eat my wisdom. Balance me out. …

Winner of the 2023 Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction I fell fast, to my knees, both hands buried deep in the mud of a newly turned field saturated by the Seattle January rain. I bent to the earth, too tired to move under the weight of my upended twenty-five-year-old world. My mother, now sleeping in …

With her award-winning memoir Red Paint (Counterpoint, 2022), Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe has emerged as a writer who can convey deeply personal material while delighting readers with her mastery of language and formal experimentation. With her poetic debut Rose Quartz (Milkweed, 2023), LaPointe shows similar prowess as a poet who can dance along the line between …