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

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...

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'...

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...

This story is Episode One of a Miniseries Novel. Each story leads into the next one, but is complete by itself.Johnny wants to be a hero, but it isn't all its cracked up to be for him. He runs into a burning building to save a child in danger and finds out he was carrying a ghost. Later on he rescues a teen from a truck accident only to find out she's invisible. What's going on?To make matters worse his favorite cartoon character, a beautiful blonde, is speaking to him from...

Semi-autobiographical but mostly fantastical essay on growing up in the outdoors of California in the 1970s, and the importance of having family just as quirky and not-quirky as you are. A coming of age story not really about adolescence, but maybe about being an oddball among oddballs.Keywords: memoir, California, Steven Spielberg, Saratoga, Bay Area, metaphysical and visionary, philosophical, environmental, coming of age, apocalypse, end of the world, family, growing up, childhoo...

This poetry collection reads like a transformation, with me, the narrator, being the figurative Old Monarch. Documenting this journey, the book is separated into three sections, "Sonoran Milkweed," "Longing In Flight," and "Eucalyptus Tree (My Arrival to Rest)."In the first stage of my journey, I explore my childhood in Arizona and the naive assumptions of youth. At this stage in my journey, I am impressionable, seeing the world with all its nuances for the first time. Through the l...