In this issue, Fran Lock returns like Caius Martius to Rome. She has a new book out, The Mystic & The Pig Thief, from a prestigious UK publisher. We also have the return of Ian Watts, whose translations of Camilo Pessanha (issue 6) will certainly be in a Brasilia Review Best Of someday. Now he’s given us an original, a look at love that goes undefined.
Not to be missed: Jacqueline M. Pérez shows her range with an experimental, touching story. And Jeffrey Salamone-Callahan graces us with a cosmic-minded summation of society.
We welcome newcomers Mark Dimaisip, Desirée Jung, and Daniel Keightley. Mark and Daniel’s work do what good poems should: take us to somewhere we’ve never been so we see things newly. Desirée’s short story will have all the resentful boys asking why some women choose jerks. Not only do they, but sometimes they try hard to make it work.
Designer Nayrb Wasylycia models what consistent talent is.
The Brasilia Review sees on the insect spectrum.
Fiction
Strange Impulses by Desirée Jung
“The ceilings are high, and the lights appear small, distant.”
The End: A Continuing by Jacqueline M. Pérez
“Rhea had trained to battle Epidemic as all Medicine Warriors had at the Omphalos of Knowledge.”
Cinema King by Ian Watts
“With my façade, I’ve got you fooled.”
Poetry
Cold Storage Unit by Mark Dimaisip
“After I died, my heart lived / in another person’s chest”
Brevity by Daniel Keightley
“speak several / languages but our / tongues were twisted”
True Story by Fran Lock
“lippy, unhinged, howling / an off-topic hodgepodge of hand-me-down loathing”
Travels in American Hyperreality by Jeffrey Salamone-Callahan
“the massachusetts commission for the deaf / and hard of hearing won’t stop calling”