Ford Over is a collection of word and image from writer, interpreter, and translator John Pluecker that takes as its source material the language of colonial explorers and cartographers—travelers through a place we’ve come to call Texas. Pluecker begins…

These new, abstract, modestly sized paintings (most are smaller than four feet square) by David Aylsworth are strangely familiar yet entirely different than this Houston-based painter’s previous body of work. The artist keeps titanium white obediently…

On the sprung floors of the Eldorado Ballroom, in Houston’s Third Ward, before Fred Moten read from his new book The Service Porch, he began with a track by Carmen McRae, “Sometimes I’m Happy.” He let McRae’s riff on the jazz standard play through, without…

Like many good short story collections, Amina Gautier's third collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, traces heartbreak in its many forms. In these stories, her characters struggle to navigate feelings of disconnection brought on by kidnapping, abandonment,…

Karyna McGlynn’s new poetry collection The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost On Her Way to the Execution offers a visceral, seductive exploration of language and sound. McGlynn’s narrator is eerie but compelling as she slips a hand “under the black lace of language…

The best poems in Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby’s Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse, an anthology of commissioned still life poems, take to heart the central focus of the genre: the object and its evocative properties. Some…

There is an innate holiness to Jennifer Grotz’s newest collection, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). Indeed, the collection itself is marked by the author’s own travels to a French monastery, but more so than that, Grotz’s meditative tone and keen…

I first met Claire Vaye Watkins shortly after her collection Battleborn came out, at a reading at Susquehanna University, smack in the middle of Central Pennsylvania—all that green, those rolling hills stretching out along the Susquehanna River for miles. …

At the end of a workshop Carolina Ebeid and I took several years ago under the instruction of Mary Ruefle, Mary wrote a poem to our class, entitled “Stress Is Their Vocation.” In the poem, she had this to say about Ebeid’s poetry: “Carolina is obsessed…

Simplicity of form and exquisite choice of materials lend elegance and a psychological edge to Maria Fernando Cardoso’s work, Woven Water: Submarine Landscape, recently on exhibit in the show, “Contingent Beauty,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. …