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These Italian Pastries

By Amy Suardi   |  April 13, 2020
These Italian pastries were decorated by an 87-year-old woman in a drawn-out process involving almond paste and mandarin oranges. I bought them at a cliffside stand in a cellophane bag tied with red curling ribbon on the Sicilian island of Lipari.

Allusion as Structure in Sean Ironman’s “And I Will Give You As Many Roast Bones As You Need”

By Jonah James   |  April 8, 2020
Sean Ironman’s essay, “And I Will Give You As Many Roast Bones As You Need”(River Teeth, Volume 21, Number 1, Fall 2019)—is the longest essay in River Teeth 21.1, and in the same way its name winds and wends, so too does the essay, bridging memory and history and theory together to form one long road that leads its way through the many ways humans and dogs have loved each other and lived together over the years.

Beneath

By Laura Stott   |  April 6, 2020
Think about the spirit of an animal that could occupy a house this big – the whale. There goes my first born, gliding past me at the pool with her dad in a man-made river, smiling and carrying the sun like she was born to do. . .

A Tragic History. Its Legacy Still Troubled.

By Richard Goodman   |  April 1, 2020
Imagine my delight in finding that Siberian Exile, by Julija Šukys, about the search for her grandparents’ past, weighs in at a mere 166 pages. What I didn’t know was that even in such a brief book about her grandparents’ fates in war-torn Lithuania and Siberia, there is a Gordian knot of drama, pain, loss, and speculation. I don’t think 166 pages can be more complex than they are in Siberian Exile. This is both exciting, enlightening, harrowing, and frustrating for the reader.

Beginning of Spring

By Leanne Ogasawara   |  March 30, 2020
The Chinese calendar had it right. Insisting that spring begins in February is to begin a season at the beginning, when the season is only just awakening, a quiet stirring.

In the Car She Drives, the Air is Always Fresh(ened)

By Carla Panciera   |  March 23, 2020
A cardboard pine tree of Caribbean Colada swings from the rearview mirror, the mirror in which my daughter considers whether she needs eyelash extensions, teeth whitening. Whether she needs her eyebrows threaded. Onto the vents, she's clipped mini-clothespins...

How Do They Find Me?

By Donna Steiner   |  March 16, 2020
My mother's greatest pleasure since her stroke is to sit in the courtyard of the rehab center. It's not a beautiful space, just a square of concrete surrounded by high walls. If she could lean her head back, she could see the sky.

The Delicacy

By John Yu Branscum & Yi Izzy Yu   |  March 9, 2020
The "Eight Mountain Delicacies" are among the most sought after dishes from the Imperial Banquet of 1720, but they are nearly impossible to make. Some of the more exotic ingredients, such as leopard fetuses, are unobtainable . . .

Nesting

By Erin Wood   |  March 2, 2020
After the very worst winter, spring pushes back the smell of antiseptic, the taste of iron, the pain of useless milk, and fills the air with the green aroma of life once more. It draws me out again, bare feet in cool grass blades . . .

Their Home Is Not Here

By Lindsay Hickman   |  March 2, 2020
The Ungrateful Refugee is a perfect title; readers may feel Nayeri’s inner demons waging a war of gratefulness for the endless opportunities her citizenship in the United States has brought her as well as for the memories, roots, and customs her new status has taken away, particularly a close relationship with her father in Iran.

Another Workday

By Robert Erle Barham   |  February 24, 2020
"Daddy, are you going to work?" my son asks when he sees me wearing a jacket and tie before I leave for campus and a day of teaching. Years ago my father's work boots and overalls prompted the same question from me. . .

My Sister Passes Me on a Bench at the Zoo

By Misty Urban   |  February 17, 2020
On a bench in the zoo a girl walks past me wearing my sister’s face—my sister’s smooth, pre-teen face, before acne, before irony, before the long humped shuffle of illness.

Picking Up Lint

By Mary Potter   |  February 10, 2020
My dad was an exacting man. When he ran a motor assembly plant in Belgium, he plastered the shop floor, break rooms, and bathrooms with signs that urge-warned in Flemish, WHAT YOU DO, DO IT RIGHT! At home he was equally demanding.

Make Present the Experience of the Other: Three Memoirs of Political Witness

By Glen Retief   |  February 9, 2020
Memoir has, of course, never carried the cachet of poetry. Yet like the poetry or fiction of witness, the outward-looking, politically engaged memoir and essay have a rich and respected literary pedigree, including slave narratives (the predominant form of African-American literature until the twentieth century); Mark Twain’s pamphlet about the genocide in the Congo Free State; James Baldwin’s and George Orwell’s searing dissections of racism and colonialism; Ivan Turgenev’s descriptions of Jean-Baptiste Tropmann’s execution; and Mary McCarthy’s brilliant denunciations of American Stalinism, to name just a few.

2018 - Try to Get Lost by Joan Frank

February 7, 2020
Finalist for the 2020 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction Through the author's travels in Europe and the United States, Try to Get Lost explores the quest for place that compels and defines us: the things we carry, how politics infuse geography

River Teeth Journal Issue 21.1

February 7, 2020
River Teeth Issue 21.1 features the writing of Jan Shoemaker, Sean Ironman, Lawrence Lenhart, Laurie Uttich, Leonard Winograd, Nicholas Dighiera, Molly Gallentine, Beth Ann Miller, Stephen D. Gutierrez, Susan H. Greenberg, and Noah Davis.

Eulogy for a Dog with Sad Eyes

By Margaret Emma Brandl   |  February 3, 2020
You were always underfoot, in fibers of the carpet, your big shape blocking doorways and chair-paths until you decided on your own where to go. You shook when there were fireworks, you barked when we got locked out, you smiled up at the camera...

Noah Davis

January 31, 2020
Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front.

Nicholas Dighiera

January 31, 2020
Nick is a meat machine that is animated by electrical signals that originated from a fat computer that, subsequently, received its guidance from a melange of powerful chemicals necessary for survival amongst mammoths and short-faced bears.

Molly Gallentine

January 31, 2020
Molly Gallentine's nonfiction has appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Fourth Genre, and The Normal School, and is forthcoming in The New England Review. Her work can also be found in The Pushcart Prize Anthology XLIII.

Susan H. Greenberg

January 31, 2020
Susan H. Greenberg is a journalist and essayist who teaches writing at Middlebury College. She spent 22 years at Newsweek magazine, and has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among others.

Stephen D. Gutierrez

January 31, 2020
Stephen D. Gutierrez is the author of Live from Fresno y Los, which won an American Book Award, and The Mexican Man in His Backyard.

Lawrence Lenhart

January 31, 2020
Lawrence Lenhart studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage (Outpost19), Of No Ground: Small Island/Big Ocean Contingencies (West Virginia University Press), and a book-length essay bout the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret to the Colorado Plateau.

Beth Ann Miller

January 31, 2020
Beth Ann Miller is an Assistant Professor in Humanities at New England College and Guest Fiction Editor at the Saranac Review. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals such as The Normal School, PANK, and The Northern New England Review.

Jan Shoemaker

January 31, 2020
Jan Shoemaker is the author of the essay collection, Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World, and the poetry collection, The Reliquary Earth.

Laurie Uttich

January 31, 2020
Laurie Uttich's prose and poetry have been published in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Rattle, The Missouri Review, Superstition Review, Sweet, and others.

Leonard Winograd

January 31, 2020
You can find Leonard Winograd's work nowhere. He's the author of no books and while he's written plays, none has ever been professionally performed.

Editor's Notes 21.1

By Joe Mackall   |  January 31, 2020
The other day I had occasion to drive through a town named Red Haw, just a few miles from my home in rural Ohio. I live in a small community, but it’s a booming metropolis compared to Red Haw, a town of Trump re-election signs, a smattering of houses, a few barns, and a Methodist church. Red Haw is an easy place to ignore, and it’s an even easier place to think you know.

Sean Ironman

January 31, 2020
Sean Ironman’s nonfiction and comics have appeared in Fourth Genre, Redivider, Nashville Review, and Salt Hill, among others.

Nails

By Kristine Crane   |  January 27, 2020
My mother’s fingernails were sculpted and strong—not like salon nails, more like the backs of beetles. Every Saturday night she’d paint them for Mass the next day—usually deep red, her favorite color.

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