The Sewanee Review – America's longest-running literary quarterly

Poetry

Five Love Poems

Kaveh Akbar

I meant to invite you / to my confession / and maybe I did / it might / have gotten lost in the mail or in the back / of my mouth / who can keep track of such / loss / I was so focused on what / I would confess / and in whose language

Nonfiction Online Feature

The Curses: Part I

John Jeremiah Sullivan

In discussing twentieth century American popular music and its most essential genre, the blues, there have been two main channels for getting into the history, or, as we like to say, the roots, of that tradition.

Fiction

The Caretaker

Mónica Lavín

She had eight long hours to come up with a plan. She decided that there was no other way. When the man returned that evening, Marisela received him with a smile, wearing one of his wife’s dresses, which featured a low neckline and, since it was a bit small on her, was rather tight around the hips.

Poetry

Two Poems and a Piece of Prose

Mary Ruefle

Most of the time, I haven’t had time / In general, time has not been there to hold me / For much of my life, I haven’t felt that I am special to time / I have rarely had time give me sound advice / I find myself clinging to time because I am afraid it will leave

Nonfiction

The Curses: Part II

John Jeremiah Sullivan

This is the house where the boy was born, and where he played on the floor as a toddler while the Civil War began. Look up from the floor where he’s sprawled in his rag diaper with his crude toys at the family as it existed at the start of the 1860s.

The Conglomerate

A Conversation with Jenny Offill

"Any writing by a woman that insists on the whole range of emotional experience is a feminist act. We have been shoehorned into narrow ways of narrating our lives (the good mother, the bad mother, the young beauty, the old crone, and so on) but the truth is much more complicated."

Archival Content Fiction

The Dark Waters

Cormac McCarthy

He never even felt the water. He couldn’t hear them any more, hadn’t heard them call since he left them somewhere backup the creek, when he hit the bullbriers full tilt, not feeling them either, aware only of them pulling at his coat and legs like small hands trying to hold him.

Fiction

Cow Man

Tom Franklin

A bull, dead in a field, this field, just before dusk, the giant creature mangled, broken. Its backbone was snapped mid-way down and its neck snapped, too, red jags of bone sticking out, flies and yellow jackets congregating at the torn hide. Miller stood up for a different angle, cocking his head.

Archival Content Poetry

Clearing

Christian Wiman

It was when I walked lost / in the burn and rust / of late October that I turned / near dusk toward the leaf-screened / light of a green clearing in the trees. / In the untracked and roadless open / I saw an intact but wide-open house, / half-standing and half-lost.

Craft Lecture

Only Connect

Alice McDermott

Until the work of your heart and your mind and your hands meets the printer’s work of paper and ink and binding, your novel is a fluid thing, an unpredictable thing, and every page, every paragraph, every sentence you add to it runs the delightful risk of changing everything that has come before.

The Conglomerate

Foreign Bodies

Lily Davenport

We’re all deviant—and domestic—in some regard, even if we’re not queer polyamorous vampires, or actively endeavoring to live outside binary notions of gender. But that doesn’t mean we’re ideal beings, or that we should pat ourselves on the back.

Poetry

Poems and Pictures

John Randolph Carter

The wrist. The waist. The black-and-white western. / The whispering thistle. The trembling vessel. / The whistle, the pistol, the whimpering waiter. / The tumbling bouncer. The pink topless dancer. // The smirk and the snicker. The flickering nightlight. The cake in the hallway. The musical tie tack.

Nonfiction

Stations of the Cross

Roger D. Hodge

I was wandering through downtown El Paso, not far from the old neighborhood of Chihuahuita, when I saw the white van. It was parked in the shade, under a tree, and spray painted across the side was the word YAHWEH. I parked and walked over.

Fiction

Ava Gardner Goes Home

Erin McGraw

I used up all my capital for this: a visit to my sister’s house at the junction of Nowhere and No Reason. Panic, which started ticking when I told Myra that Frank and I were coming, took over on the flight, and by the time we get to her house I’m chewing gum and smoking at the same time.