In 2005 I wrote an essay titled “Mountain Boy Meets Plato,” a personal chronicle of intellectual insecurity triggered by my sudden exposure to a world beyond my rural roots. It was published by River Styx, a St. Louis literary magazine.

Nineteen years later, a writer who was not me submitted “Mountain Boy Meets Plato,” word for word, to Arts & Letters, a literary journal in Georgia. An editor there liked it well enough to try to learn more about the author. She immediately discovered the theft and wrote me a friendly note to call my attention to it.

Naturally, my jaw hit the table, but then came some feelings that I wouldn’t have expected. For a moment I was disappointed that the lie hadn’t succeeded. With another publication, the essay would have had fresh exposure to a second round of readers. I also felt flattered. Whoever this fellow was—let’s call him John, as he called himself in his submission cover letter to the magazine—he must have admired the essay to want to steal it. My vanity outweighed my outrage.

But the benefit to my ego was short-lived. The submitted essay turned out to have strange line-spacing issues that the thief hadn’t bothered to correct when he proofread it. But never mind proofreading—had he even read it? How could “John” have overlooked the fact that people in the essay address the author as “Dave”? Deflation was complete when I made the mistake of asking the editor if she would have published the essay if she hadn’t spotted the plagiarism. No, she said. She didn’t like the way it ended.

John, it turns out, has been a tormenter of literary magazines for some time. He has stolen and republished dozens of poems under various aliases. I am not aware of any prose that he has landed, but it’s probably out there somewhere. When such a crime is spotted after publication, editors must issue apologies to readers and to authors of the originals and pull the works from their web pages. The editor of Moon City Review discovered one of John’s thefts just days before publication, and he had to scramble and incur extra expense to remove the stolen work before the printer’s deadline.

The only preventive against plagiarism is for editors to cut and paste passages from accepted submissions and search for identical word strings—tedious labor that would fail to capture undigitized work appearing only in print. For most literary magazines, survival from one year to the next is far from certain. Their small staffs don’t need John and his other aliases wasting their time and money.

Why would this fellow repeatedly behave like this? The Big Three that motivate writers—money, glory, and the need to connect with others by moving, informing, or entertaining them—can play no role for John: literary magazines rarely pay writers; no glory redounds from an alias; and it is doubtful that the plagiarizer felt the need to move, inform, or entertain with content that he might not have even read. John must be ruled by a different Big Three: impishness, revenge on a literary establishment that somehow wronged him, and one more that I can’t conjure because his behavior is so bizarre. When editors confront him, he does not respond. For this reason, and also because I try to avoid sociopaths, I took no action against him.

If the mildness of my reaction to the theft of my work surprises you, here’s a different tale with outrage aplenty. On an otherwise calm day, a friend alerted me to some peculiar sentences she had spotted in a grammar guide on the website of an eastern college.

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES IS PRESCRIPTIVELY CORRECT?

A. Reading Carkeet’s new novel far into the night, he became more and more convinced that Carkeet had plagiarized him.

B. Reading Carkeet’s new novel far into the night, the notion that Carkeet had plagiarized suddenly occurred to him.

C. Both of the above

D. Neither of the above

First, to remove distraction, let’s take care of the grammatical issue, a dangling modifier. The correct answer is A. Sentences beginning with participles like “reading” require identity between the implied subject of the participle and the subject of the main verb that follows. The “he” of A satisfies the rule; “the notion” of B does not. The participial phrase in a sentence like B “dangles.” To the punctilious reader, it does not feel properly attached to anything.

Now to the issue with a lot more at stake. Below is the exchange of emails between me and the fellow who ran the website containing the test question. Carkeet fires the first shot.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Question number 32 on the grammar exam administered on your website contains a question with sample sentences suggesting I am a plagiarist. Can you tell me why this is? It is no small matter to make such an insinuation, even in this apparently innocuous context. Please contact the creator of this exam, inform him or her that the sentence is offensive and irresponsible, and change the sentence immediately.

David Carkeet

Mr. Carkeet,

The sentences in question are not referring to you, or for that matter, any other author using the name Carkeet (a quick search on the net listed at least half a dozen). It’s simply a randomly selected name and nothing is being insinuated about you or anybody else, as is evident by the context. No first name is given, and there is not even an indication as to Carkeet’s gender, so I’m not sure what leads you to believe this has anything to do with you.

Still, we would be happy to consider changing the exam in order to avoid any further misinterpretations. If you would like to request such a change, please submit your request in writing (all change requests must be signed by the requestor) to the mailing address given on the website. I will be happy to pass it on to the appropriate people.

FYI, the creator of the site passed away last year, so I cannot pass along your comments to him, even if I were so inclined.

Regards,

Trent Anderling, Webmaster

Mr. Anderling,

Look, I’m not an egomaniac. “Carkeet” is a “randomly selected name”? That must have been some “quick search on the net” you did. My own search resulted in exactly zero other Carkeet authors, or at least zero who are candidates for this particular reference. Yes, there’s Peggy Edwards-Carkeet, who has illustrated books about California shrubs and wildflowers. There’s the Australian ophthalmologist Andrew Carkeet, who has written some lengthily titled articles on the eyeball. And there’s me, who has written novels with linguist heroes and a number of essays on language—works known by some grammarians and no doubt by the fellow who made up this exam. What he has against me I’ll never know. It’s almost as mysterious as the reason your institution would require a formal, signed request for alteration from “a requestor.” Does this come up that often?  How many people does your test slander? I think this email should carry sufficient legal force as a request. Change the damn name to “Johnson,” or “Trent Anderling,” for that matter, and it will still test the same grammatical knowledge. 

David Carkeet

Mr. Carkeet,

As I said previously, we would be happy to consider changing the exam in order to avoid any further misinterpretations. If you would like to request such a change, please submit your request in writing.

By policy we do not accept content change requests submitted via external email for any of our websites. This policy is strictly enforced, particularly when the request is made in the context of an unsubstantiated accusation against a former faculty member.

Trent Anderling, Webmaster

Mr. Anderling,

You’re wrong about who has made an “unsubstantiated accusation.” My last email substantiated mine beyond any reasonable doubt. Your grammarian simply made his accusation against me and put it out there on the internet without substantiation.

David Carkeet

Trent Anderling is clearly an institutional stooge, but I had to admire his iron resistance and the studied care of his language. His words dutifully protected his establishment in case of a civil suit. He practically dictated the college counsel’s future brief: “Defendant disproved any identity between Plaintiff and the purely hypothetical plagiarist. Moreover, Defendant, though under no obligation to do so, swiftly proposed a remedy.”

I sent the letter. A few days later, I read the remedy online. It consisted of the same set of sentences, but instead of “Carkeet,” the plagiarist was now identified as “David.” Trent Anderling was worse than an institutional stooge. He was evil.

I found it far more disturbing to be accused of plagiarism than to be plagiarized. Writers with whom I have shared both stories have reacted just as I did: curiosity and puzzlement about plagiarist John, moral horror and loathing for false accuser Trent. Sadly, our correspondence came to an end. I was satisfied that I had bested him, which is easy when you’ve got the truth on your side. Still, there was a gnawing. Trent had presumably inherited this website from his predecessor, the Carkeet expert, whose demise Trent had reported as if I had killed him. Just who was this dead man and why did he hate me?

A “quick search on the net” showed him to be a poet and grammarian who had died too young and was evidently beloved, so I’ll stop calling him a dead man. He was respected locally as a longtime professor and college webmaster and known nationally for his immense online grammar guide, which he had made available to any and all without charge. The tradition continues. The site is presently referenced by, to name a few: Smith College, San Jose State University, Gallaudet, USC, UCLA, Hofstra, Michigan State, the Universities of Wisconsin and Delaware, many secondary school districts, and the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. Yes, even Saudi Arabians can learn about plagiarist David, formerly known as Carkeet. According to the college’s public relations department, the grammar site has had as many as 30,000 hits per day.

My research further revealed that the grammarian received a master’s degree in English from Washington University in St. Louis. This unsettled me. His time in the city could have overlapped with my own years of teaching at UM-St. Louis. He could have driven north a few miles to take a class from me, perhaps in a subject not offered at Wash U, and my tutelage could have generated enough bile to spill into his grammar guide years later. When I finally found a date for his degree, I was relieved to see it had been awarded five years before I arrived in the city. As far as I knew, personal acquaintance had not created his enmity.

This conclusion satisfied me until I realized that a less direct kind of acquaintance was possible. My accuser’s grammar site is fiercely prescriptive. That is, it is about good and bad grammar. Prescriptivism teaches us not to say “He don’t.” Linguistics, on the other hand, teaches us that some people say “He don’t,” others say “He doesn’t,” and let’s go find out why. Linguists can’t stand prescriptivism. They find it willfully ignorant of the reality of language change and superficial in its approach to a subject of infinite depth to them. I once observed the fate of a prescriptivist who happened onto a linguistics listserv to offer a few gentle usage recommendations; within hours he had been bullied off the forum by the regular gang.

My graduate school training was in linguistics, and somewhere in one of my novels I state the official position. A character finds herself hesitating over alternative expressions, perhaps “lie” vs. “lay,” and she asks a linguist which of the two is correct. The linguist says, “It doesn’t matter.” Or maybe he says, “Either one.” I can’t find the scene, though I’ve tried like the devil. I know it’s somewhere in my little canon. The linguist’s indifferent response is antithetical to my slanderer’s credo, to which he had devoted much of his life. If he had read it, he would have felt insulted, just like the poor sap who had blundered onto the listserv.

This answer pacified me for a while, but then I began to wonder, “Why plagiarism?” The specificity of the charge made it unlikely it had been plucked from the air as a random smear. Did the accuser think my work drew too heavily from that of other writers? I did indeed steal a solution in a mystery novel from Peter Dickinson’s The Poison Oracle, and one of my novels closely follows the structure of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. I also must confess that the field manager in my baseball novel is none other than Vincent Gardenia from the baseball film Bang the Drum Slowly. But this kind of thing isn’t plagiarism. It’s indebtedness, or influence, or intertextuality, whatever that means. And of course I’m the only one in the universe who knows these secrets about my books. Writers who needlessly fret over their originality beg for the rebuke “Get over yourself.”

I got over myself and dumped the theory. Then I had a new thought, based on a fresh reading of one of the slanderer’s test questions: “Reading Carkeet’s new novel late into the night, he became more and more convinced that Carkeet had plagiarized him.” The “him,” rather than being an unaffiliated pronoun in some imagined scenario, might actually be the author of the sentence, the grammarian, speaking about his actual life. Carkeet had stolen his words.

But from where? To find out, I ordered the grammarian’s two books of poetry, where I discovered no overlap between his language and mine. I did find, to my chagrin, some very good poems. Several had been published in literary magazines. Garrison Keillor chose four of them to read on his public radio show The Writer’s Almanac. The poems are sweet—“tender,” to use a word my minister sister favors. Many were magnificently conceived, like the one lamenting the death of Christopher Robin Milne (son of A. A.) in the melancholy voice of Eeyore. Or the one about a deaf man signing to someone in an airport terminal while, perched on his shoulders, his small son signs his own story as well. Or the one in which the speaker explains shadows to his young grandson and describes Wendy’s sewing of Peter Pan’s shadow back onto his feet. I’d forgotten that!

But enough poetry. Enough tributes to mine enemy. A more likely body of material was his online grammar guide. However, it was huge, and I didn’t want to read it and declare of every pairing of grammatical options, “It doesn’t matter.” A better methodology would be to begin with my work. What grammatical nuggets might I find there that could also plausibly occur in a general treatment of grammar? As soon as I had the question, I had the answer.

It was a joke, a silly one about ending sentences with a preposition. A little boy in his pajamas, eager for his bedtime story, is disappointed to see the book his father is carrying up the stairs. He says, “What are you bringing that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?” A character in one of my novels tells the joke. I’ve milked it many times in public readings, so it was the first nugget that came to mind.

Sure enough, it took me only a few minutes to find the joke in the online grammar guide, in a section on prepositions. The grammarian could have presumed that his own knowledge of the joke was so unusual that any occurrence of it after he had posted it had to have come from his website. I had indeed imported the joke, but not from there. It had come to me from the air, from soundwaves that had drifted my way, most likely in graduate school. It felt like something I had known forever. How do you credit the air? I am sure my accuser had picked it up as I had, via some untraceable transmission going back to an obscure Homeric originator.

The source was actually not Homer but E. B. White, I have since learned, in a 1962 letter to his editor. Neither my nemesis nor I credited White, and neither did Steven Pinker when he retold the joke in The Language Instinct. Pinker calls it “an old grammarian’s saw,” suggesting he was as ignorant of the source as I was.

My conclusion: the accusation that Carkeet had committed plagiarism was a retaliatory act that is ridiculous on three counts: (1) the accuser did not originate the joke; (2) Carkeet did not get the joke from the accuser; and (3) the joke, by virtue of its renown, is likely governed by the doctrine of fair use.

It all made sense.

Or did it? On further, inevitable reflection, the grammarian struck me as too intelligent to have drawn the conclusion that I owed my knowledge of the joke to his website. Also, he was beloved and sensitive, even tender, and such a man wouldn’t attack another writer unless the provocation had been deeply injurious. My conclusion seemed inconsistent with his character.

When someone doesn’t like you, you want to know the reason. I can’t rule out a return to the subject. His grammar guide is a sprawling continent yet to be fully explored. It’s going to take a while.

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David Carkeet has written six novels, three of them New York Times Book Review notables of the year—Double Negative, The Full Catastrophe, and The Error of Our Ways. His essays have appeared in The Village Voice, Smithsonian, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Oxford American, and Salon. For the past ten years he has been writing short plays—adaptations of short works by Mark Twain and Edith Wharton as well as original comic plays—and some of them have had productions here and there. He lives in Vermont. davidcarkeet.com

This year at AWP, Third Coast hosted our first Dice & Draft Bookfair Contest. Contestants rolled four dice, randomizing the genre, setting, character(s), and an item that should appear in their poem or story. Submissions were judged not only on the quality of each piece, but on how creatively authors used the prompt they rolled on the dice. Editors selected two winners, one poem and one flash prose piece. Congratulations to Harper Wood for their flash piece, “Stubborn Remains,” which was written in response to the following prompt:

Horror (Genre), House (Setting), Animal (Character), Photograph (Item)

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Stubborn Remains by Harper Wood

There is a fox in the henhouse, and it keeps killing our chickens. The collie was supposed to keep the chickens safe, but three weeks ago the gate was left open. We hung posters and handed out photographs to other dog walkers. At my teenage son’s insistence, I posted the photo to Facebook, but deleted the post five days later when I got tired of the crying face emoji every time I opened my phone. My son knocked on doors until a stranger living at the end of the cul-de-sac told him with no hesitation that one morning while sipping his morning coffee he saw that very dog get hit by a black truck. Said that the dog got up and ran into the woods surrounding the neighborhood, leaving only a smear of viscera on the pavement. I nearly hit him for his apathy, but I try not to be a hypocrite where my kid can see it. Weeks later, the pavement still bleeds crimson after a storm, a dark pool in the pothole where clear rainwater should reflect the sky.

In autumn, something kills the fox. Leaves it at the back door for my son to find when he goes out to collect eggs at dawn, red fur pale in comparison to the dark blood stubbornly coagulating on the stone patio. I insist on burying it right at the edge of our backyard where the woods begin. My family still can’t decide if the dog is dead or not. Sometimes they speak like the dog is still around in the woods or as an angel. Either way they both agree he’s doing a terrible job guarding the coop. They’re right, but neither of them are insomniacs as I am, so I’ll never confirm it. On those nights I wake with a pit in my stomach and fingernails bitten raw to the point of bleeding; on those nights I crumple toilet paper in my fist to staunch the blood as I watch four-legged shadows slip into the henhouse. Whatever waits in there must be gone by dawn, because when my son returns he only mentions which of the hens is missing.

The dog returns in springtime, bounding out of the woods where he has been all along. Clean teeth, bright eyes, we take him to the vet and my wife is overjoyed to receive a clean bill of health; our jobs won’t cover vet insurance. While my son cuddles the collie on the couch, my sister parks her black Ford in my driveway and meets me at the fence gate. We do not speak, we only make a circle around the yard with the pretense of checking on the chickens—making note of the upturned dirt only we knew to look for—before entering the house. The dog leaps from the couch, stretching its front paws up toward my shoulders, grins at me with all his teeth. So close, I spot the soft and fluttering feather between his canines.

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Harper Wood is a Michigander by birth, though they currently live in Massachusetts as an MFA candidate at Emerson College and the Publisher at Redivider. In their limited free time, they can be found making cocktails for their friends, working through their shelves of unread books, or playing fetch with their cat. Otherwise, find them on Bluesky  @hnwood.bsky.

This year at AWP, Third Coast hosted our first Dice & Draft Bookfair Contest. Contestants rolled four dice, randomizing the genre, setting, character(s), and an item that should appear in their poem or story. Submissions were judged not only on the quality of each piece, but on how creatively authors used the prompt they rolled on the dice. Editors selected two winners, one poem and one flash prose piece. Congratulations to Chris Mikesell for his poem, “Smudge,” which was written in response to the following prompt:

Horror (Genre), Space (Setting), Senior (Character), Weapon (Item)

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Smudge by Chris Mikesell

[The following was found written on the walls of the lavatory in the senior officer’s cabin of the derelict ship U.C.S. Cavalcade. The computer’s memory was wiped, including NavHistory. Other than United Commonwealth Syndicate labeling of catalogued equipment, no other writing was found in the craft. The first four entries were written in ink. The fifth is believed to be blood, MedSci Division identification pending.]

The stars are backward. 
I, alone, bear witness to 
the final terror.

Our mission failure 
began with trusting the [smudge]. 
Beady-eyed bastards.

Ship’s hull breached. We drift, 
drift at the mercy of the 
merciless cosmos.

I hear them coming. 
I try to stay conscious, but 
the void whispers peace.

U.C.S. vermin: 
Our warnings go unheeded. 
Don’t make us [smudge] you.

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Black Lawrence Press, 2026. Paperback, 180 pages, $17.99. ISBN: 978-1625571809.

Review by Cash Rabley

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In her debut short-story collection, Esquire Ball, Lisa Slage Robinson takes readers to the Great Black Swamp, a region of Northwest Ohio where frogs are molded into wives, women trap souls in windows, and a teenager is crushed into the form of a mermaid underneath tons of grain. Throughout the collection, Robinson cuts her surreal fantasies with grittily realistic tales of lawyers and their loved ones, no doubt informed by her own experience as a former attorney. This co-mingling of the surreal and the mundane, married by recurring characters and the almost mythic law firm of Strathy, McMahon, creates a chilling collection of linked Midwest-Gothic tales that never lets you know what to expect next.

Seemingly random at first, every story in Esquire Ball connects in an ornate web that Robinson has woven with the utmost care and precision.

Seemingly random at first, every story in Esquire Ball connects in an ornate web that Robinson has woven with the utmost care and precision. She reveals only tidbits of backstory at a time, leaving readers hungry for the characters’ history from the first story, “Fruits of the Forbidden Tree.” The narrator, unnamed at the time, recalls her hoard of collected (read: stolen) trinkets in a fashion so grimy it’ll make you want to wash your hands. The “macaroni-encrusted and blood-stained tooth” she dug out from under a nine-year-old’s pillow is a particularly gag-inducing example. This “curiosity” is but one of the narrator’s many trophies. The others were taken from Jimmer, Margot, Mrs. Stevens, and her own parents. These names, casually tossed out on the first page, become pivotal in unlocking the secrets of Cecelia Armstrong.

Cissy, as she’s more commonly called, isn’t the only one who graces readers with a narrative in Esquire Ball. The perspective and point of view shift constantly, unveiling characters, calling back to previous stories, and shining a new, though not necessarily brighter, light on those characters who appear throughout. As a result, Esquire Ball reads more like a novel. Readers will grow attached to the recurring cast, recognizing them through mentions of black licorice, their older brothers, and hushed recollections of what happened with “the mailroom guy.” The hints are masterfully placed, disguised as unnecessary details that add characterization or flesh out the setting. These hidden stitches glide through the stories’ fabric until Robinson pulls the thread tight, sending readers flipping backwards through pages looking for something they just know they’ve read before.

These hidden stitches glide through the stories’ fabric until Robinson pulls the thread tight, sending readers flipping backwards through pages looking for something they just know they’ve read before.

The endless tapestry of plants and call-backs makes it impossible to even take a guess at the order in which Robinson wrote the thirteen stories contained within Esquire Ball, many of them previously published as stand-alones. The final piece, “Legend,” which originally appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review in 2025, utilizes the same narrator as a preceding story, “Bird with Lavender Tongue,” published four years prior in Prism International. Rusty plays poker with a slew of characters from across Esquire Ball while recalling his intense sexual experience with a tree and his girlfriend. This woman, a PhD candidate known for changing her name, is almost certainly the same woman that Cissy lets her hair down with in “Devil’s Hole Road” (Storm Cellar, 2021). Where in the book Robinson started, and whether she worked forwards, backwards, or sideways, is indecipherable and inconsequential. Esquire Ball is a final product so smooth you can’t even tell where the pieces interlock.

While not every story contains something as explicitly magical as a revelatory threesome with a tree, even the more mundane tales in Esquire Ball are still anything but normal. Brought to life by Robison’s imaginative prose, they carry a certain sense of the uncanny and the impossible, featuring twists and revelations that leave readers reeling. The Ice Princess’s kiss leaves lips bloody and mutilated in the dark of a file room; the unforgiving legal system further mutilates a maimed man; an affair begins and ends by the movement of giant pandas; and a client shows off her collection of windows that house souls. In Esquire Ball, Robinson summons the surreal in even the most common and concrete. Her description of the lawyer Mad Dog as having something “more like duck feet than paws,” for example, brings a nickname to life while subverting the expected comparison.

The women in these short stories are just as ambitious, clever, and downright dirty as their male counterparts, often even more so.

Through her unbelievably vivid writing, Lisa Slage Robinson draws readers into, and sometimes forces them to become part of, a collection that questions what won’t be done to climb the ranks. Often centering Cissy and her ambition, Esquire Ball showcases magical feminism without compromising its use of complicated characters. The women in these short stories are just as ambitious, clever, and downright dirty as their male counterparts, often even more so. Whether they’re interrogating sick old women, stealing candy from coworkers, or throwing stones at tree spirits, everybody in Lisa Slage Robinson’s work commits their fair share of sins. One thing’s for sure: every character in this collection is guilty of something. There are no angels at the Esquire Ball.

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This year’s contest saw a 160% increase in submissions. Readers, editors, and judges were blown away by the quality of the submissions. Both judges expressed how difficult it was to make their selections from among the stunning poems and stories we received. We are so thankful to everyone who trusted us with their work for this contest, and our huge congratulations to the winners.

Poetry Results as judged by Karyna McGlynn

Winner: “When you ask why there are so many names for God” by K. Hari

“I kept coming back to this poem for the way it understands naming and spirit as something tactile—something you can taste, hold, pass hand to hand. The language is lush without ever tipping into decorative excess. Each image carries real, sacred weight: saffron steeping, earthworm sluice, hard raisins. What I admire most is how the poem resists the urge to resolve its central question. Instead, it keeps opening up—into language, into various forms of devotion, into the quiet ache of inheritance. It feels deeply rooted and yet porous at the edges, a poem that knows some things can only be approached sideways, through sound and texture and love.”

Runner-Up: “This is a poem about desire” by Madeleine Poole

“This poem locked in early for me and didn’t let go. The invisible fence is such a clean, brutal engine here, and the poet trusts it. It does its work without over-explaining. Line by line, the poem tightens, mapping the strange negotiations between power, money, touch, and selfhood with a kind of icy precision. There’s no wasted motion here. What stays with me is the way the poem implicates the speaker without collapsing into pure confession or absolution; it just holds the tension steady and makes you sit inside it. Unsettling in the best way.”

Finalists: Jesse Watson, Cora Schipa, Janine Certo, Beste Yilmaz, Seth Peterson, John Muellner, Elaina Edwards, Emiliana Renuart

Fiction Results as judged by Dustin M. Hoffman

Winner: “Cuties” by Michael Cullinane

“‘Cuties’ glimmers its sequins of style with punchy prose. Sentences that seem at first like humor end up crushing us as the sequins flip to reveal their razor-sharp side. The story dives deep into the mind of this high-school teacher’s psyche that’s straining for last threads of optimism on her first day back at work after trying to recover from a carjacking. The details of the work bleed with authenticity as we encounter the bored, desensitized teenagers, apathetic coworkers, and a hilariously bombastic guidance counselor who administers a hackneyed exam about the titular cuties. But summarizing the splendid details or trying to recap the perfectly paced day-at-work plot does little justice to this marvelous story. The writer draws us so close to Tina’s interiority in a way that makes so much room for sympathy in a character’s raw moment back to work, fresh from trauma. This masterful writer doesn’t waste a single syllable in crafting a story with such strong voice and such immediacy.”

Runner-Up: “Millboro’s Least Wanted” by Sammi Chiyao

“This writer’s style has that flowing-water clarity that steps aside to make room for brilliantly complex characterization. The relationship between the narrator and her friend is full of wounding that the writer escalates in scenes of exchanged honesty that turn to jabs. Though the narrator shows up for her friend during a moment of vulnerability, during abortion clinic visits, the emotional scars turn to calluses. I especially appreciated the nuance of the narrator’s care that she desires to offer her friend, yet their painful pasts continue to divide them. This story masterfully explores smalltown culture and its strangling racism in both past and present to capture this moment between friends that is both moving and tragic. Here is a writer deeply attuned to characters desperately needing to be seen by each other.”

Honorable Mention: “Silk” by Qing Qing Chen

“The prose’s style is stunning—the decadent details of tourist trappings and consumerism captured in the daringly intimate psychic distance. That closeness allows us to travel through this cluttered setting on this day right along with the main character on her flaneuse adventure. The story leaves us in delicious ambiguity when the narrator is confronted with the awareness of being fooled. But we and she also get to luxuriate, to wear silk, without being told our attention is misplaced.”

Finalists: Sophie Aanerud, Corin Michael Mellone, Natalie Moore, Brad Eddy, Kevin Binder

Regalo Press, 2025. Hardcover, 256 pages, $30.00. ISBN 9798888457214.

Review by Ashlyn Merritts

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Although self-exploration is what helps people grow, finding yourself is not an easy task. In Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s novel Transplants, the dual perspectives of a Chinese woman, Lin, and a Chinese-American woman, Liz, begin in Qixian, China. In the midst of an international pandemic, Lin and Liz are forced to understand the reality of identity. For Lin, identity begins as something ascribed to a person born in China. Since she’s so determined to honor those around her, Lin seeks everyone’s approval. In Liz’s eyes, identity is built by the individual—yet that doesn’t mean it can’t be tested. Liz moves through life unapologetically in the US, but China’s “one for all” mentality scrapes against her personal freedoms. As Lin and Liz move through many of life’s harsh lessons, the two only grow stronger. 

Transplants begins with Lin in a pet shop, promising her mother she’ll make a friend in university if she can adopt yet another pet. When she risks her education for a whirlwind romance, Lin ends up losing the only thing that made her mother proud. Fortunately, Liz steps in and offers Lin the chance to attend college in the US. As Lin adjusts to American life, the COVID-19 pandemic short-circuits her education once more. On the open road, Lin is forced to learn what living for herself looks like. Back in China, Liz realizes that Chinese living means giving up individual freedoms for the good of others, condemned by the government to an apartment with her new lover.

As Lin adjusts to American life, the COVID-19 pandemic short-circuits her education once more. On the open road, Lin is forced to learn what living for herself looks like.

Lin, despite starting out afraid of the world, presents a compelling character. In the beginning, her pets are only friends and she wears shame like a second skin. On the very first page, readers can see her insecurity in the way she “walked the halls of her high school avoiding eye contact, counting the cracks in the hexagonal tiles, and waiting to hear ‘Fang Xue Ge’ pipe in over the tinny loudspeaker to signal the end of the day” (3). Right away, Lin is painted as reserved and uncertain. Such a combination rings true for a girl raised to put the good of the community before the good of the individual. Yet, Lin is also a dynamic character, capable of clawing her way through an unforgiving world. By the end of the book, after the pandemic clears up somewhat, Lin even makes a friend in Ruth, her neighbor in Seattle. Occasionally, “Lin would settle in for an entire evening, making them both steaming mugs of hot water and getting Ruth ready for bed” (224). Despite not having made a friend in university like she promised, Lin has effectively solved her isolation in a more organic, meaningful manner. In addition to her new connection, Lin stands her ground with her mother when she chooses to stay in Seattle. Lin is not the insecure woman who began the story, but the woman engineered to put an end to the narrative. 

Liz, on the other hand, experiences an opposite transformation as a US-born Chinese American with a penchant for taking large risks in an attempt to understand the world around her. Having been raised in Ohio, Liz focuses on herself throughout the book. After losing her mother, Liz moves to China in search of a place to belong. “Liz felt like she had to hold more tightly to her identity, like she had something to prove” (26). After her mother dies, Liz feels lost. The only thing she can do to understand why she has never fit in and why her mother one day stopped talking about her Chinese heritage is cling to the very thing her mother sought to drain from her. In order to find her place in the world, Liz chooses to start at the beginning, where her mother came from. After traveling through China, she chooses to remain in Qixian as a teacher. In her final chapter, “Liz found herself reveling in a kind of normal she didn’t expect” (235). Qixian feels like a home to her, even though it once seemed like a last resort in the effort to understand herself through her parents. Despite losing her familial roots, Liz feels more grounded than ever before. 

The story is deeply compelling, and the characters are highly relatable.

The theme of resilience in Tam-Claiborne’s Transplants shows up in the character growth of Lin and Liz. Lin becomes more brash as a result of the world plague, while Liz becomes trapped. Despite being deeply afraid of disappointing others, Lin’s character from the beginning of the book is tested repeatedly, transforming her into someone with worldly knowledge and self-confidence. Back in China, Liz learns to let go of her late mother, embracing her American identity as well as her Chinese identity. This book is about finding yourself through new experiences and challenges. The story is deeply compelling, and the characters are highly relatable. When Daniel Tam-Claiborne writes a story about two women finding their place in the world, he masterfully crafts each sentence to leave the reader craving more until the very end.

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AIM Higher, 2025. Hardcover, 220 pages, $33.00. ISBN 979-8986369945.

Review by Kyra Cochran

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Christina Cook’s Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart takes readers on a journey through Paris as the narrative dances through prose and poetry alike, telling stories of myth, death, and the human connection to the living world.

In this collection, Cook seamlessly blends translations of Marie-Claire Bancquart’s bewitching poetry with her own prose and poetry, which is magical in its own right. Readers are transported to an afternoon in Paris that “took on a magical life of its own: one rife with the work of the Bateleur and her mythical entourage.” Cook does not shy away from enchanting imagery, threading magic throughout the mundane as she explores the city—birds sing siren-songs, Cook meets kind and alluring friends, and readers follow her adventure as she explores the winding streets of Paris with poet Marie-Claire Bancquart.

This collection of poems is thoughtfully curated, blending perfectly with Cook’s prose to create a linear narrative. The transitions from memoir to poetry delicately jump from one stone to another down a winding river of memory. Cook has the ability to stretch a poem into something more expansive, using her prose to nestle each poem within the context of its creation. She gives each poem a detailed narrative background, aided with textual analysis. “Death is on your mind because children all around you are dying of the same disease as you. Because it is World War II, and birds aren’t the only things flying through French skies,” writes Cook, depicting Bancquart’s grim childhood in order to set the stage of the book’s prologue.

The transitions from memoir to poetry delicately jump from one stone to another down a winding river of memory. Cook has the ability to stretch a poem into something more expansive, using her prose to nestle each poem within the context of its creation.

This analysis, as well as the narrative portions of the collection, are part of what stand out to me most: this is a story that only Cook could have told. Her fourteen-year friendship with Bancquart has given her profound insight into Marie-Claire’s writing, allowing her to analyze and understand her work in a way no one else could. Cook writes, “Marie-Claire is every bit the Bateleur, bending reality into an arc of unvarnished truth that enters and exits our lungs in what she describes as ‘a concrete respiration that encompasses us all…men, animals, plants, stones, stars.’” Quotations and anecdotes of Cook’s time with Bancquart elevate both the poetry and prose; each translation is carefully done, and each analysis provides insight into Bancquart’s mind.

Cook’s translations of Bancquart’s poetry are attentive and nuanced. “As the translator of French lines,” Cook writes, “I saw the critical importance of disregarding the meanings I’d personally made of the poems in order to create the same collaborative space for Anglophone readers that Marie-Claire had so generously created for her Francophone audience.” Still, Cook knows when to allow readers the space for their own understanding and when a translation might need a little more contextualization than was originally given: Cook writes, “When translating ‘Summer,’ I made a decision that I rarely make as a translator: to replace a word…with more descriptive language…My goal in translating the word was to more closely replicate not the original text, but rather the sensual impression that text made on the source-language reader.”

Tarot and myth thread themselves through this collection, giving it an air of otherworldliness. Several poems are named after specific tarot cards, and the mythological figures of Theseus, Icarus, Eurydice, and others all make appearances. They are approached, however, from an angle that is upside down, or perhaps tilted, as though Bancquart is looking at the myths through a refraction. Of this, Cook writes, “Throughout her poetry and fiction, Bancquart reinvents many mythic characters’ journeys or perspectives in order to breathe expansive new life into their ancient archetypes.” The idea of the mythic is laced into the prosaic narratives as well, with Cook herself taking a sort of mythic journey as she traverses the Parisian streets.

The beauty of Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart is not just the translations of Bancquart’s work; Cook’s style of writing is lavish with imagery, replete with dazzling and provoking descriptions of her own life, as well as her time in Paris. Highlighted at the end of my copy is a beautiful example of Cook’s poetic language: 

Before a Coltrane kind of smooth swing breeze blows by, high-brassed whines of a slow moody sax, lips girdling woodwind reeds, Green Dolphin Street slink as black & white & blue in mood as some low grove where Tarots jut from the moss: Star, Tower, Wheel of Fortune, luck in the dark of our jazz vespers, our life-laden houses of cards

Cook’s language is sensual and alluring, inspired, as is Bancquart’s, by myths, tragedies, life, and death. Form is also danced with, done with an emphasis on purpose and engagement in meaning.

Cook also includes her own poetry in this collection, which is inspired by but distinctly different from Bancquart’s work. “In translating Marie-Claire’s poems and coming to know her as an incredible—and incredibly kind and generous—force of nature, I’ve learned that such magic is mine for the taking. That words, especially potent when poetic, are pure magic.” Potent is exactly right—Cook’s language is sensual and alluring, inspired, as is Bancquart’s, by myths, tragedies, life, and death. Form is also danced with, done with an emphasis on purpose and engagement in meaning. One particularly memorable poem, “Tarot: VII. The Chariot,” uses blackout poetry to create a wrenching impact: “I listen as Marie-Claire recounts a story of her city/ too heartbreaking,/ too hard to hear the whole of…” Cook recounts Bancquart’s story on the next page, though large sections are completely blacked out. The impact immediately causes a recoil, the harsh black lines visually representing the destruction that readers are only partially exposed to in rough scraps of brutal description.

Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart is not simply a collection of “Poems, Prose, & Translations” as the cover-page suggests—it is a poignant, rousing narrative of two women from different generations, told through the mysticism of myth and tarot. Readers navigate the labyrinth of life, death, and reality alongside Cook and Bancquart, following their thought processes as they experience the world’s divine and occult perceptions.

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