Assistant Editor Maggie Su: It’s proofreading season here in The Cincinnati Review office, which means we editors are hunched over the upcoming fall issue with our colored pencils, Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, and dog-eared copies of The Chicago Manual of Style.
I’m not being sarcastic when I say: It’s a magical time.
Great art rewards close attention, and nothing will make you appreciate the craft of writing like spending ten minutes debating the necessity of one comma. Proofreading also reveals patterns between pieces, resonances that emerge from the collection of distinct voices. For me, it was food. As I feasted on piece after piece, I kept thinking: Man, I’m getting hungry.
In one of the pieces in our new issue, Rachelle Cruz reviews I Was Their American Dream by Malaka Gharib and writes about the ways in which the protagonist “relies on food to reconnect with her sense of home. And yes, to survive.” You can find this concept demonstrated everywhere in our pages as an array of writers use food to connect us to culture, identity, and memory.
I hope this tasting menu of our next issue makes you hungry for the rest, which will be available in November. Bon appétit.
Ira Sukrungruang’s essay “Duluth”:
The smells out of the kitchen were not the smells of a Thai kitchen. Where was the sting of fried garlic? The pungency of fish sauce? Where was the sweet of coconut milk or the complicated herbal mixture of red curry? Where was the flowery scent of jasmine rice?
Miriam Bird Greenberg’s poem “Of Mneme”:
. . . What could I eat
then but the strange cupboard I’d amassed: salt-preserved turnips
cut in cubes, Finnish herring-licorice, loquats
canned and swimming in their syrup . . .
John Shakespear’s story “We the Living”:
Olive Garden was Papa’s favorite, even though we all avoid the place in our everyday lives, which are continuing on as the restaurant’s signature garlic breadsticks arrive, robed in napkins and drenched in what we all hope is olive oil.
William Woolfitt’s essay “Vera Hall Sings ‘Another Man Done Gone’”:
Her mother gave her bran-meal coffee and greens: collard, turnip, washed in several waters, pokeweed, patience leaves.
Lee Upton’s story “The Muse”:
I kept studying the shrimp on my plate, nestled upon the linguine. It occurred to me that the shrimp looked like the cut-off legs of very tiny bowlegged elves wearing striped stockings.
Elyse Durham’s story “The Canadian”:
We can smell the sweetness of the pudding drifting out to us from the kitchen—anise and cinnamon—and the blooms of bougainvillea. Magda’s daughter sighs. “I think I am in love with the Canadian,” she says.
See the full table of contents for issue 16.2 here! It’ll be available for order as a single issue in November, or you can order a subscription in our online store now, and we’ll send the issue when it’s out.
