We recommend enjoying this issue with an Albemarle pippin.

Our fifty-eighth issue is packed with dazzling poems and phenomenal flash fiction. It opens with “The Perfect Zen Dance of the Boulder” by a poet we first featured in our Poetry Special Issue last year, William Doreski. Next up are Devin Strauch with “Substitute Angel,” a story that will change the way you think about pasta, and Mansour Chow with two haiku that might raise Basho’s eyebrows. Anna Lea Jancewicz’s story has a fresh take on what to expect when you’re “Unexpecting,” and Anton Rose reminds us why they call them the wee small hours of the morning in his poem “Back Garden, 2 AM.” A client gets “Even” with his barber in Fredric Sinclair’s story, Sally Houtman answers the “Question Mark” with a poem, and Annesha Sengupta finds herself in the “Wrong Dream” in a fanciful fiction piece. Closing out the issue is the newest member of our staff, Amanda Chiado, who appeared in our Poetry Special Issue and also contributed a lovely poem to our special issue for Eirik and Monica, the founders of Jersey Devil Press. (For more on Eirik and his shiny new lungs, please visit our homepage—double-lung transplants are literally lifesavers, but they don’t come cheap.) Also, Telmo Pieper reimagines a childhood doodle in this month’s cover art, “Walvis.”

Read it online or download the PDF.

Not to brag, but our production editor, the talented Samuel Snoek-Brown, has written a book that’s already being hailed as “a novel for the ages, with shades of Cormac McCarthy and William Gay,” as well as “a page-turner of the very best sort” by those lucky enough to get their paws on advance copies.

How’s this for an awesome premise? “As the Civil War winds violently down, fears of the South’s uncertain future fuse with its unraveling traditions. Against the backdrop of this post-apocalyptic landscape, so littered with corpses and mythology and desperation, two women, stranded and alone in the Louisiana bayou, fight to survive.” Oh, and did we hear something about a rougarou?

Hagridden is being published by Columbus Press; the official release date is August 19. In the meantime, there is information about the book tour and lots of other good stuff over on the novel’s official website, so go check that out.