The Literary Review
  • Read
  • Submit
  • Subscribe
  • Archive
  • About
current issue

Looking Backward

Selections from the TLR Archive

Toggle navigation

An International Journal of Contemporary Writing

cover of the archive issue, type over picture of porcelain sailor boy
Subscribe

Categories

  • Books
  • Coming of Age
  • Editor's Letter
  • Essays
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • TLR SHARE
  • Wonder
Fairleigh Dickinson University

Artificial Intelligence

Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engines

May 22, 2014

Mark Bibbins

    NO. 1 First I was fellating an African despot for his diamonds, next I was paying a hooker to give me back my teeth. You think I’m kidding about the diamonds; I was looking also for some gold. … Continued

Nurse Clappy Gets His

May 1, 2014

Walter Robinson

  A twelve-year-old girl, her hair pulled into a messy ponytail, waits for anyone other than me to walk by the glass walls of her hospital isolation room. She half-sits half-lies on a high mechanical bed with hard gray plastic rails; seven days … Continued

That the Soul Discharges Her Passions upon False Objects

February 19, 2014

Okla Elliott

The amorous part that is in us, for want of a legitimate object, rather than lie idle, does after that manner forge and create one false and frivolous. —Montaigne, from his essay with more or less the same title as this poem … Continued

Happiness

January 1, 2014

Jack Garrett

It began with the smell of burning. Daily, before my eyes even opened, dream narratives, swept up into Suddenly the sky turned black climaxes, collapsed, undermined by the identification, all too familiar, of the acrid scent nearly universally recognized as … Continued

Ballast

January 1, 2014

Maggie MK Hess

    The orchestra has committed suicide.   I never wanted love. I never wanted   love. I want fuchsia, frying pans, the sea, my name seeks atonement,   I’m sinking to the floor, a red skillet, duck fat,   … Continued

Pollice Verso

January 1, 2014

Jesse Goolsby

Three months after his prison stint for starting a forest fire that killed a man, Armando’s father drives his family past the Supermax outside Florence, Colorado. He’s in good spirits. “You know the guy that invented the Richter scale? Dude … Continued

© 2023 The Literary Review