Winter 2010 Issue: "You own snakes like mine, you learn their poisons"

The year she is six my daughter dreams / of alligators in the closet: at home where / her uniform waits and at school / where the children hang their coats/in a room made of winter...
---from Faith Shearin's "Alligators"

Diah has lectured us.  The Big Bass is a careful fish, he warns.  Careful and reclusive, like a hermit hiding from the world.
---from Stan Lee Werlin's "In the Summer of The Big Bass, Forever and Ever"

On ogre's gaze, mosquitoes lift a twilight-coffin / of a dead woman above the bog land.  He remembers, / once he was beautiful in someone's eyes.
----from Sankar Roy's "A Swamp Tale"




The world has warmed up again, and thoughts of summer are stirring.  And so, in re-reading the Winter 2010 issue, this editor (who happens to be from Miami) can't help but hear the call of summer in the creamy pages--fishing and bugs and cold-blooded creatures basking in the heat!

If the idea of summer doesn't move you to pick up the latest copy of SHR, then perhaps the gorgeous August Macke cover, bursting with color, or the thought-provoking essay on Robert Musil, "Beyond this Infinity," by Claudio Magris and translated by Daphne Day, will.

Poems, fictions, essays and book reviews beckon!

The title of this post is an excerpt from Gary Fincke's essay, "Self-Defense."

We hope you enjoy this issue, and the sunshine, too.

-Chantel