Six Questions for Barrett Warner, Editor, Free State Review
Each poem or story is searching for freedom, but does the reader care if it can’t find the door to the emerald highway? Here are a few doors. https://sixquestionsfor.blogspot.com/2019/10/six-questions-for-Free-State-Review.html
National Poetry Day to Drake’s Birthday
October 3 to October 24, when the beach rentals are price reduced, and the municipal pool is closed but not covered up, and it’s still a month before Thanksgiving, and the threat of new syllabi is long gone, and it’s cold then it’s warm and if it’s cloudy it...
Steven Cramer
To Francis Jammes In a manner, we all pray. So I've walked out at 6 a.m.into the sound and look of things.Arc lamps hum in the city park,and accepting resistance,swallows lift in a sudden breeze.What presses against me now?Francis Jammes, you prayed to be...
Texas Crude: A Realistic Portrait of Gay Rural Life
by Derek Berry Texas Crude, the debut short story collection by Thomas Kearnes, offers an intimate portrait of gay lives in East Texas. In equal measures erotic, heartbreaking, and rousing, the collection invites us into his characters’ inner lives, whether they be...
They Promised Me a Cosmopolitan
We've added The Book Tavern in Augusta, GA--a great Indie bookstore. When I visited to ask if they'd carry Matthew Graham's The Geography of Home as well as our current issue of Free State Review the manager said maybe, but first they wanted to...
Matthew Graham
Our poetry consultant, Edgar Gabriel Silex, says: "Walt Whitman was a racist who called African Americans 'baboons.' White scholars attempt to dismiss his racism by claiming 'everyone back then was racist.' Here's a note to all those who buy into that scholarly...
Steven Cramer
Bitter Exercise Sit up, lie down, sit up, lie down, runaround and around the blockuntil a little of myself is leftat each corner. The dogs know it and try to help,nipping at my feet to speed me up, snarling my path into wider, aching circles.The best pain's...
Sarah Gorham
Alice in the Rabbit's House I'll call you Alice, unborn childrumbling in my sleep, productof a distant summer's urge. Now I amstuffed to the gills, a house puffed upby someone's mischievous lips.It all happened so fast-- the closing trees,the shrinking sky, the wrong...
Mark Irwin
The Invention of the Snowman Somewhere beyond the bounds of sleepmy bones undressed, rising from their fleshto become this selfless, falling dust. It was then I wanted earswith which to hear the familiar criesof those children building me. And of course I had no...
Gary Soto
Occasionally Making Sense When I was twenty, in college and living on a street that was a row of broken apartment buildings, my brother and I returned to our apartment from a game of racquetball to sit in the living room and argue whether we should buy a quart of...
