The Hemlock: A Literary Arts Journal – Spring Issue 07 | May 2025The Spring 2025 issue of The Hemlock is a vivid tapestry of voices and visions from around the world. This edition brings together an extraordinary collection of poetry, fiction, flash fiction, non-fiction, visual arts, and book reviews, showcasing the work of writers and artists from diverse nationalities, cultures, and creative traditions.Each page is a doorway into...

Fifty leading writers retell myths from around the world in this dazzling follow-up to the bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.Icarus flies once more. Aztec jaguar gods again stalk the earth. An American soldier designs a new kind of Trojan horse—his cremains in a bullet. Here, in beguiling guise, are your favorite mythological figures alongside characters from Indian, Punjabi, Inuit, and other traditions.Aimee Bender

NPR commentator Mary Sojourner, "a pithy yet sensuous, spiritual yet ferocious writer" (Booklist), delivers a powerful memoir about the joys of rejecting the pace, addictions, and false values of society...and learning to live without compromise.Twenty years ago, Mary Sojourner was a mental health consultant and counselor in Rochester, New York, a divorced mother of three, longing for her real work, her real home. She found it in Flagstaff, Arizona, in a remote two-room ca...

Celebrated for her indelible, Oscar-caliber performances in some of the most memorable films of the 1980s and 1990s, Debra Winger, in Undiscovered, her first book, demonstrates that her creative range extends from screen to page. Here is an intimate glimpse of an artist marvelously wide-ranging in her gifts.In fact, as this beguiling book reveals, Winger is that rare star who dared to resist the all-consuming industry that is Hollywood becoming her entire ...

A collection of love poems and fierce raps, Millefiori is Omar Musa's third book of poetry. Both dream-like and gritty, it also includes gorgeous illustrations and draft poems from Musa's notebook. Heartbreak, cocaine, colonial violence, memory and cave paintings: this is a world full of unbearable beauty and brutality.We know the world is a horror story,but it's also got love notes in the margins.

With care and vulnerability, novelist and poet Lang Leav explores what it means to live a purpose-filled life as a woman in search of fulfillment and visibility.Through poetry, micro-essays, and ruminations, Soon It Will Be Sunday delves into the purpose and impact of the interpersonal attachments that women form during different stages of their lives. Internationally bestselling author Lang Leav reflects on the perilous and winding road of being a woman, ...

a breath of fresh air… a moment of repose by Marcia Twain Brett Brady's "wind in the pages: haiku" lends the reader an oft-overdue moment of repose. Each haiku is a breath -- an unconscious “flash” that, once considered, illuminates the simultaneous significance and futility of thought -- of the act of thinking. Indeed, each page transports us beyond this plateau, as the visceral experience reminds us of what lies beneath and beyond the self-importance we construe through our memory of nam...

A deeply personal collection of poetry and art by the award-winning actor, comedian, and composer.With a poetic voice that is by turns lyrical and plainspoken, Charlyne Yi writes about the uncertainty of relationships, the absurdity of societal expectations, family trauma, and identity. In this intimate collection, you'll find poems and accompanying line illustrations that are playful and profound, sometimes darkly funny, and often acutely moving."Dir...

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal...

A genre-bending collection of dramatic monologues shining a light on the anxious, self-directed gaze that defines contemporary consciousness.Borrowing stylistic elements from the prose poem, faux memoir, online diatribe, and philosophical investigation, the twenty-five dramatic monologues in Spencer Gordon’s genre-bending collection shine a light on the anxious, self-directed gaze that defines contemporary consciousness. CEOs lose their obscene wealth in lurid hell...

The Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O'Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology features Deb Olin Unferth serving as final judge, four essays & other insights, and eighty-three of the world's best very short short stories.

"Charming, melancholy, hip."-Publishers Weekly, starred review"Zapruder's innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. . . . Highly recommended."-Library JournalMatthew Zapruder's third book mixes humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to "a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun." The title poem is an elegy for the heroes and mentors in the poet'...