Past Issue
Issue 8.1 / January 2022
Letter From the Co-Editor
Rosanna Gargiulo
Photographs by Aaron Burden
The Maine Review’s Author Interview Series
Radicle: The Roots of Writers
featuring Fred D’Aguiar
Discover the breakthrough moments of award-winning writer Fred D’Aguiar, author of YEAR OF PLAGUES: A MEMOIR OF 2020, published by HarperCollins in 2021. With Interviewer Shanta Lee Gander, D’Aguiar discusses reckoning with history as a prerequisite for embracing future optimism.
Following the interview, read and listen to new work from D’Aguiar: a poem dedicated to his late friend and fellow poet, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze.
Fiction
Seraphic Clowns and Saintly Mourners
James La Bella
The Half-Life of Human Memory
Adrian S. Potter
We Are the Ghosts in the Rafters, Murmuring like Doves
Rowan S. Olmstead
Lamentation
Rachel Browning
Best Wishes for a Speedy Recovery
Marc Allen
Butter
Lydia Pejovic
Poetry
My Birthfather Explains His Death
Amanda Auchter
Elegy with Steam
William Fargason
These Things Permit Less Gratitude
So Many Dead
Robert Carr
Anima
Lilian Dube
because horse is the closest i can get to it
Patrycja Humienik
I Loved Lucy
Maureen Seaton
[SPECULUM] ENVY
Robin Gow
Chemistry
Manaal Azhar
The Devotions
Lauren Camp
Achromatopsia
Hyperosmia
Lillo Way
The Answer for Everything
Tara Ballard
Basho’s Death Poem, New York City
Winner of the 2021 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest
Mike Bove
Nonfiction
Loretto
Coyote Shook
Tell Me the Secret of Your Great Strength
Colleen Abel
The Atomic Age
Albert McFarland
Dissociation
Aisha Ashraf
Faith at A&W
Shawna Ervin
Until All the Matches Are Burnt
Paul Rousseau
A Catalog of Forgotten Joys
Rebecca Turkewitz
Congratulations to Mike Bove, winner of the Belfast Poetry Festival’s 2021 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest!
Read his award-winning poem, “Basho’s Death Poem, New York City.”
Contest judge Alexandria Peary described the winning poem:
“If ‘Basho’s Death Poem, New York City’ decided to stop being a poem, it would probably become an origami finger game, one of those paper contraptions that children use to amuse playmates. The poem is a series of poetic-logical folds, intuitive and deductive at the same time. The interplay between Basho, a death poem, poems that apparently stay as prewriting in a notebook (preferring seclusion like someone napping in a hotel) but somehow push the speaker out the door, and the contemporary urban setting is sheer magic!”
Congratulations to the Finalists, including Katherine Hagopian Berry, a Poetry Reader for The Maine Review.
