On "Always the Same Dream" by Andy Mozina (1961 words) ****

This piece reminds me a bit of Mike Birbiglia's work, perhaps because it has to do with sleep, and because sleep dysfunctions had a major role in Birbiglia's movie, I tend to associate them together. The story also has the kind of kooky humor that Birbiglia has as well. A man with a brain dysfunction has repeated dreams--strange ones at that. The stories worth reading just for those. Check them out here at Diagram.

On "The Scar" by Cathy Barber, "From Don't Leave Me Scarlett Johansson" by Thomas Patrick Levy, and "Half-hearted Apology" by Nicole Koroch

I find Barber's "Scar" to be a powerful poem in part because of what it hints at. Like many a good short story, it leads us down a path of history and drops us off just before things are about to turn, or at least may turn. That we don't know--but that we suspect--the final ending is the scary part. Read the poem here at Marco Polo.

Levy's poems are musings from a lover--or a fan--and they're spectacularly poetical, full of odd turns of phrase and metaphor, unexpected dabblings in linguistic dexterity. Levy asks Johansson not to leave him, but my question is, is she listening? Because if she isn't, she needs to be. Read the prose poem here at Diagram.

Koroch's apology pulled me in just with its title, and the poem is pretty much what the title says. As you can imagine, it's kind of funny--and kind of sad. I hope to avoid building friendships like this one. Read the poem here at Ramshackle Review.

On "A Study of the Circular Velocity of a Shooting Star" by Morgan von Ancken (2902 words) ****

This piece will keep us interested with its energetic language, an energy the mirrors its subject matter--the shooting star--which comes into our atmosphere like some gift thrown at us from above and, in this case, dips into the water, where there's this mate, this perfect mate, waiting for us, and we share this moment, and it's fantastic because we both know what this moment means having shared it like this, with no one else, but the real kicker is that after all of this, it just keeps going and going and going and going on even after we've read this piece here at Diagram, this piece . . .

On "Oregon Convinces Straight Men" by Kelly Magee (265 words) ****

Here's a prose poem. I'm not a huge fan of the form generally--I'm tied to convention: poems break into lines, prose doesn't. Flash has a plot or explores a moment. I don't know that this does any of those. But like a poem--indeed, as a poem--this piece is built on metaphor. It's about a stripper. No, it's about the landscape. Doesn't matter. The language here is beautiful, the two ideas wonderfully tied together. Read the piece here at Diagram.

On "The Basketball Captain's Wife" by B. J. Hollars (1261 words) ****

This is a tough story, a disturbing story (and a very tight one as well, coming in at just over 1000 words but with back story only hinted at that demands rereading). I remember writing at some point about a story involving a man with Asperger's syndrome published at Summerset Review, and I wonder here if the narrator of this story suffers from the same complex but without being aware of it. Or maybe not. Because it's also a strange story in which the cruel behavior of the narrator becomes not just something tied in to an inability to catch others' emotions but rather an ability to catch others' emotions precisely and exploit them for cruel ends. Or maybe not even cruel ends--just self-justifying ends. Maybe even ends to help assuage grief in some twisted sense. In the end, that is part of what makes this story mysterious. Anyway, the one thing I do know, after reading the story, is Wheeler is a place I'd rather not visit. Find out why by reading the story here at Diagram. (Warning: This story involves adult language and situations.)

On "Snow" by Mark Leidner (2560 words) ***

There are moments in this story I am jealous of, little thoughts this author is able to stick in print that I wish I'd have thought of myself. Much of the piece centers on dreams and nightmares, on the mind, on thought itself. And what, with an opening about a house made of nothing, it would figure. Read the story here at Diagram.

On "Modeling" by Sarah Scoles (3506 words) ***

If stories are often built out of motifs, this one is built out of mathematics. There's something nice about applying something as seemingly nonliterary as math to fiction. Not that it's not done or that one couldn't, for example, try to apply mathematics to a given Chekhov story, but math in fiction, frankly, is not usually on the surface, not something folks in the humanities put front and center. Perhaps it's our own discomfort with the subject, the way that some English majors do all they can to avoid math. Myself, I often wonder if maybe that's what I should have done instead--I was usually better at math than vocabulary. But the upper echelons of the subject might have scared me off eventually, even though it's there that the more interesting elements of math come into practice, the philosophy and theory. And it is this theoretical component that the author, an astrophysics major, begins to explore in this story, along with psychology and the whole world of fate. Read the story here at Diagram.

On "Girls Who Love Horses" by Amanda Goldblatt (3926 words) ****

I am persuaded to love this piece because of the beauty of the writing. The tale of a journalist sent to write a wedding announcement (don't families write their own?) is in itself not the most interesting fodder, but the images Goldblatt invokes, the reworkings of old lines, and the metaphors make this tale seem fresh. Case in point: There's a paragraph where the narrator talks about her ex-husband and his paintings. The paragraph ends with a standard cliché and then it broaches one more line, making readers take stalk of the cliché and it's actual meaning, rethink what's been said. Read the linguistic play here at Diagram.

On "There Will Be Sense" by Amelia Gray (3406 words) ****

What is your responsibility? If this were a movie, that's the line that might end up getting repeated over and over again the way Cool Hand Luke's "What we have here is a failure to communicate" does. Sure, What is your responsibility? doesn't have quite the same ring, but it becomes a kind of mantra in this story that takes on extra shades of meaning as the story progresses. Or try this: create a list of food you eat every day. Does it prove that your life is, like, boring? (If not, congratulations Mr./Ms. Cook.) This story is full of great techniques that convey things better than words by themselves could. Read it here at Diagram.

On "The View from Union Square" by Mika Taylor (2122 words) *****

Here's a story I love, in part because it does something different, something I've not seen before. That seems rare these days. Taylor set out to write a story from one hundred points of view, and came close. The setting seems mostly appropriate--a park, a man discovered dead. Such could, theoretically, gather a crowd (these days, though, I think most people would simply go on about their business--and in fact, many of those nearly one hundred people do). As the story started, I was left wondering if Taylor could pull this off, if there could be a story here, and if there could be any sort of ending that would manage to tie all things together. The answer, as I found out, is yes. Read the story here at Diagram.