Issue 4 of K’in is Live!
We’re so excited and honored to share with you the amazing work in K’in, Issue 4!
The Festival Seeking New and Diverse Voices for Fall Issue
Deadline: Rolling
The Festival Review seeks new and diverse voices in literature and media arts for upcoming Fall 2019 issue. Anything under 5k words accepted. No special formatting required. Free to submit. Small stipend paid to contributors. Submit or inquire to thefestivalreview@gmail.com
Ace Boggess is author of the novel A Song Without a Melody and four books of poetry: I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled. He earned degrees from Marshall University and the West Virginia University College of Law. His fiction appears in Notre Dame Review, Lumina, Belmont Story Review, Superstition Review, and other journals. He received a fellowship for fiction from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
Mercy Adams, the young existential heroine, follows a path of self-discovery through chaos at the turn of the millennium and beyond. Her friend Lucian Lang narrates the story of her struggle to overcome hurt in a world in transition. Violence, drug abuse, and a growing diversity of approaches to spirituality are the norm, setting up barriers to understanding and, ultimately, transformation. States of Mercy explores questions of identity and belief, but also friendship. How far can friends travel this road together before one goes where the other cannot follow? Mercy and Lucian intend to find out together, unless the mad world destroys them first.
Thanks to Sammy Greenspan and all the good folks at Kattywompus Press ❤ Here’s a peek into this odd, little book ❤
Woman Made of Pond Water and Mud
mouth o’ing like fish, fighting for breath in the run-off, in the sludge, in what’s left
of the autumn light gold-slicking the green green surface. She fights to recall what it means to keep breathing.
Meaning is, she knows, manufactured, manufacturing, making, made. What will
we construct today, this day where cold rain pools all across the yard, and where
the gathering dark makes it hard for even the slightest steps of dreaming?
As a child she learned early to clean fish, buckets of struggle she and her brothers carried
home from the creek, the pond, the river, home to the scrape, the knife, the filet,
the tweezer pull of pin bones, careful delicate extractions, lessons in vigilance,
before her mama’s sure hands transformed their catch into sustenance.
She never could look in there, in the pail, couldn’t watch as those fish–
bass, stripe, crappie, cats–fought so hard, banged in circles against the smooth
unending plastic, ramming and gasping, drowning in air. She didn’t have to, look,
or ask, when even now her own small amphibious heart thudded
within the curve of her ribs, this breath, then that, the only meaning
even vaguely in reach of her grasp.
-Mary Carroll-Hackett, (Un)Hinged, Kattywompus Press, 2019
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