Blog

The House That Rape Built

By Emily Waples   |  February 4, 2022
This enduring presence is no small feat, especially when—as Saterstrom intimates by way of, or rather in lieu of, closure—the dominant cultural narrative is that which comes after: the meaning-of, the healing-from, the accounting-for, the reckoning-with.

2020 - What Cannot Be Undone by Walter M. Robinson

February 4, 2022
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,

Zero at the Bone

By Heidi Czerwiec   |  January 31, 2022
Emily Dickinson knew something about—holding space—the power—dashes have— The white spaces hold so much—the ghost of her white dress—posing in the corner. They may be silent—but are not empty.

Flower Salute

By Anne Leiby   |  January 24, 2022
The flowers bob on the brown swirls of the river bloated with spring rain. As they float downstream, I serenade them with poetry - “the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief“ - words from a Wendell Berry poem, that you, a poet, once told me “was damn-near perfect.”

Reenactor

By Laura Rose   |  January 17, 2022
My father was orphaned at eighteen, and though he'd made his own family, we weren't enough to satisfy his craving for deep roots. For that, he had his sixth great-grandfather and the American Revolution.

Hard Frost

By Yelizaveta Renfro   |  January 10, 2022
On the morning of the day the jury would return, snow swirled with fallen white blossoms in the gutters of the streets. April can be cruel like that. The next day, as I drove, all over town I saw plants that had been protected from the hard frost with sheeting and tarps, and the covered shapes seemed to shift before my eyes...

Attention Maximally Paid

By Sebastian Matthews   |  January 7, 2022
The author chooses one very specific day in her recent past—November 19, 2019—to write a “memoir” about. The day “sticks in my head,” Huber writes, “because of the chemistry of adrenaline, downtime, and notes made in a journal.”

Amelioration

By Mariah Anne Agee   |  January 3, 2022
I want waking up to feel like shuffling a new deck of cards: smooth and full of intention. The citrus sun rises early now. I remember that my body is also a tender peach, wrinkling as I stretch to the horizon line.

Echo

By Ann Guy   |  December 27, 2021
On nights I was restless as a child, my grandmother, Ama, would put her gentle hand under my shirt and rub my back. That time when my family lived in the small house and there weren't enough bedrooms or beds for everyone, she and I shared a twin bed.

Bird Families

By Renata Golden   |  December 20, 2021
My mother taught me to look at birds by pointing out their details, like bill shape and breast color. She taught me the names for American Robin and House Sparrow—city birds, the kind we could see in our Chicago backyard.

Dam

By Laurie Klein   |  December 13, 2021
We share the rowboat. I'm nearly nine; he could be 100, my uncle, sole survivor of his platoon. “Losing it,” neighbors say, and “Claims he hears Voices.” I say a person can hold back some things, by naming others.

Celebration and Lamentation in Place and Time

By Robert Root   |  December 10, 2021
Robert Miltner is best known as a prose poet and most of the pieces here reflect in their brevity the concentrated lyricism of his poetry even as their perspectives are expanded and enhanced. If Robert Miltner gives us intimate reflections on interrelations in place, Barbara Hurd offers a most expansive perspective on existence. In The Epilogues: Afterwords on the Planet, her reflections are separated by brief comments about the extinctions the planet has witnessed since its creation, including the sixth extinction that we’re living through now.

Developmental English

By Jessica Rapisarda   |  December 6, 2021
Julie's name is Adriana or Alessandra. I can't remember, because she insists on Julie. More American. It's not that she doesn't love Brazil, but she worries that her real name will be too big for American mouths.

Marion Peters Denard

November 30, 2021
Marion Peters Denard is the founder of Writers’ Room, a creative writing studio in Jacksonville, Oregon. She studied writing at Dartmouth College and the University of Puget Sound. Her work appears in Cleaver Literary Magazine, Adanna, Peregrin

Jan Shoemaker

November 30, 2021
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. Her work has appeared in many magazines and journals.

Michael Garrigan

November 30, 2021
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He loves exploring the riverlands with a fly rod and believes that every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. He is the author of two poetry collections—Robbing

Tiffany Isaacs

November 30, 2021
Tiffany Isaacs is a PhD student at the University of North Texas where she writes fiction and essays. She is an assistant fiction editor at Narrative Magazine and a scholarship recipient at Bread Loaf Writers’ and Bread Loaf Environmental Write

Tyler Mills

November 30, 2021
A poet and essayist, Tyler Mills’s nonfiction manuscript-in-progress, The Bomb Cloud, recently received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. She is also the author of City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Pre

Jessica Johnson

November 30, 2021
Jessica Johnson writes poems, essays, and things in between. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals, and she has newer work in Four Way Review, Entropy, Burning House Press, and Dream Pop. Her

Aaron Landsman

November 30, 2021
Aaron Landsman is a New York City theater artist, writer and teacher. His book No One Is Qualified (about both democracy and performance), co- authored with Mallory Catlett, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2021. He teaches part t

River Teeth Issue Preview 23.1

November 30, 2021
River Teeth 23.1 features the writing of Desiree Cooper, Michael Garrigan, Tiffany Isaacs, Jessica Johnson, Aaron Landsman, Sarah Layden, Bret Lott, Tyler Mills, Marion Peters Denard, and Jan Shoemaker.

Sarah Layden

November 30, 2021
Sarah Layden is the author of Trip Through Your Wires, a novel, and The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, winner of the Sonder Press Chapbook Competition. Her short fiction appears in Boston Review, Blackbird, Moon City Review, Zone 3, Booth, Best Mi

Desiree Cooper

November 30, 2021
Desiree Cooper is the author of the flash fiction collection, Know the Mother (2016). A Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, her essays and fiction have appeared in the Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Best Small Fictions. After 30 years in Det

Bret Lott

November 30, 2021
Bret Lott is the author of fourteen books; “Security” is from the next one, Cherries on the Golan, Olives in Jerusalem, about food and Israel and Palestine and hope. He lives and teaches in Charleston, South Carolina.

Ticking

By Steph Liberatore   |  November 29, 2021
She wanted people to see the antique clock when they entered the house. That's why she put it on the shelf to the left of the window, the one you see when you first come through the door. The black mantel clock, with its golden dragons for handles and clawed feet, sits inside her cheap white bookshelves from IKEA. But it used to sit in her father’s dining room.

Editor's Notes 23.1

November 29, 2021
Before writing these editor's notes on a cold Saturday morning in mid-November 2020, I thought back to the words penned in the editor’s notes of the previous issue by my friend and co-editor Dan Lehman, with the country and the world

Brood

By Jehanne Dubrow   |  November 22, 2021
Soon the insects would come up from the ground. It said so in the newspaper. After seventeen years—five longer than I had been alive—the cicadas would tunnel upwards from sleep into the hard touch of daylight.

Green Apples

By Brianne Kohl   |  November 15, 2021
I cut green apples into fourths and then eighths. I slice them into smaller and smaller pieces, the flesh slippery in my fingers. I arrange them in a careful line on the plate, counting as I go—one through twenty-four.

Starter

By Alison Asagra Stoos   |  November 8, 2021
I've forgotten about the sourdough starter again, bubbling in the warmth of the oven light, the only temperature-controlled environment we have in our apartment. The only control I can exert lately, as the world keeps somersaulting into another new normal.

Meditative, Lyric, Useful: Two New Books on Writing

By Marcia Meier   |  November 5, 2021
From Michigan and Milkweed come two new books about writing, personal explorations on self, identity, and nonfiction form.

23-1 (11)

book review (105)

river teeth literary nonfiction prize (3)

walter m. robinson (2)

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