Right. 2016. The world is another year older, but hey, still looking good! Well, except for the icecaps. And the ozone layer. And, er, all the trees that were burned to a crisp in the Northwest. And, um, all those flooded towns in the Midwest. But on the bright side, we mailed out a sparkly new issue over the holiday break! Well, some of them were sparkly. We ran out of glitter midway through the mailing. 
Peteroy wanted to substitute crushed corn chips, but Mason vetoed. She didn’t want subscribers licking their issues, which would be undignified. Yes, we here at The Cincinnati Review care about your dignity—among other things, such as your reading pleasure. On that score, so far so good. We’ve received some lovely notes from some lovely people about the poems, stories, and essays in 12.2. Secretly we’ve been calling it the Issue of Darkness, because, on the prose side, anyway, there are some pretty rough pieces. We shed tears over it. For real. Then we got on with things . . . like drinking heavily and stuffing our gobs. But now it’s a New Year, and we’re right back at it. A little chubbier, and we’re pretty sure Hurt still has a hangover, but she’s reading submissions like a champion . . . submission reader. Okay, seems like we’ve had enough fun here. We plan to get back to regular blogging (and FBing and Tweeting) posthaste. What did you miss during our cyber silence? Well, for one thing, we nominated Steve Almond, Brandon Amico, Tom Howard, Safiya Sinclair, Ashley Wurzbacher, and Changming Yuan for Pushcart Prizes. Assistant Editor Jose Angel Araguz’s new poetry collection—Everything We Think We Hear—was officially released. Former staffer Lisa Ampleman got some great play on Vinyl (vinylpoetryandprose.com). Charles Rafferty’s “Leisure” (12.1) was featured on Poetry Daily. Managing Editor Nicola Mason had a solo show opening at Sidewinder Coffee. And CR brought on its first creative nonfiction editor, Kristen Iversen (of Full Body Burden fame). It’s been an eventful month.
As we start out the sixteenth year of the third millennium, we want to remind everybody that we no longer accept hard-copy submissions. We are still getting a few, of course, but now we are sending them back unread (with a wee note of explanation). Also—a teaser—we have some big news coming up. Not really, really big. We’d say medium big. Or bigly medium. Or something. Stay tuned! Visual clue to right:
