Ilan Mochari

Helena Rho’s debut memoir, American Seoul, has earned rave reviews, with Kirkus calling it “a poignant, personal, sometimes painful chronicle of self-awareness and understanding.” Two years before this astonishing debut, Helena’s essay “Becoming Korean” appeared in our pages. We recently interviewed Helena about the creative process behind American Seoul—and how the release of her book

The Queen of Queensby Jennifer MartelliBordighera Press, 202279 pages   In “Cisoria,” Jennifer Martelli writes: The finger rest and the finger ring: wingspivoting on the steel heart of a fat screw.My friend once asked me: don’t you think scissors  kind of look like angels? if you open them?Outside, the extra ashy Lenten light: crucifixionsin the

The Yellow Book ([PANK], 2020), Sam Cha’s anti-genre opus, is intentionally, wonderfully, and sublimely elusive to conventional description. To quote the blurb: “The speaker opts for camouflage, transformation, and evasion. The book, similarly, aims to elude identification, to contradict itself.” For all of these reasons and more, Solstice was elated when Sam agreed to guest-edit

Quintin Collins’ second collection of poems, Claim Tickets for Stolen People, was selected by Marcus Jackson as winner of The Journal’s 2020 Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize.   Ilan Mochari: In your notes you mentioned the inciting impulse for Claim Tickets for Stolen People was the poem “The Moon is Trans” by Joshua Jennifer Espinosa.

Jonathan Papernick is the author of two short story collections, The Ascent of Eli Israel and There Is No Other and three novels, the most recent of which, I Am My Beloveds, debuted in April. Ilan Mochari: The book is narrated from a close third-person perspective that stays with the protagonist, Ben Seidel, throughout the

Donald heard a mermaid sing, Susy spied an elf, But all the magic I have known I’ve had to make myself. – Shel Silverstein, “Magic”   The forty-two-year-old waiter reached for the lone utensil with his flabby right arm. His elbow was one inch from the left breast of a coed who reminded him of