Rug

Rae Gouirand     In one direction I thought elephants— trunks geometric, consistent, boxed.   Around those a border of phoenixes cascading from triangular forms.   All on a sea of red. For years I saw these   whenever I…

In Return

Rae Gouirand     She wakes in the cool from her sound place beneath, her back   to me, and asks if I would please touch her back again,   just touch her, before she opens her eyes. As badly…

Review of “Hardcastle” by John Yount

Justin Mundhenk   Too often the Appalachian experience—like so many marginalized American experiences—is trivialized and caricatured, and unfortunately, the literary world is no stranger to such practices. Local color writing introduced 19th-century Americans to the hillbilly bumpkin, a stereotype that…