And—because it's Sunday, and it's late, and we're nerds—here's a thread of us naming (and fawning over) some of the lines of the works published in Issue 3 (1/?):

"Tell me what to do with these hungry mouths / and this body I don’t know how to touch." THIS LINE in Christen Noel Kauffman's "Offering." Oooo my goodness. http://westreview.org/offering  (2/?)

"You name my demons like road signs, // and I wish to be the rattle snake, a mouth that requires warning, / but this time you call me little sound, barely even a brushfire." The simile! The metaphors! Christen Noel Kauffman's writing is to die for. http://westreview.org/a-body-looking  (3/?)

Really, it's the ending of Chelsea Dingman's "Occupation" that we want to talk about, but we won't give it away. Instead, the first two lines:

"This isn’t love, I keep telling myself. The body,
an interrogation room that I will never leave."

Oof. http://westreview.org/occupation  (4/?)

And Dingman's "When the Wind Culls Its Name":

"Somewhere, / in these lean months, survival reduces the ragweed // to nothing. The first time anyone touched me / wrong was the first time."

The accuracy with which the poet captures girl and womanhood: all terror and beauty.

And all the incredible music and repetition in Chelsea Dingman's "Even in an Emergency":

"It has been winter for years.
It has been years since I could breathe

without fear."

Everything Dingman writes is almost unbearably good. http://westreview.org/even-in-an-emergency (6/?)

The first lines in Sara Henning's "Self-Portrait as Winter Gazebo" pull you right in:

"What do you call it,
when snow muscles into
the shingles,

clenches there until
heat takes it? Marriage."

Us: !!??!!!!!?!!!!!!!?!!

So, so good.

http://www.westreview.org/self-portrait-as-winter (7/?)

Carrie Chappell's "Quarantine Daybook #7" is a gorgeously-rendered duplex, after @jerichobrown. It begins:

"I am a woman breaking garlic at dusk.
I am a woman drinking to get drunk."

The form! The music! O mi o my. Read it. http://westreview.org/quarantine-daybook (8/?)

The dangers that come with womanhood appear again in Sara Pirkle's "Why I Didn't Say No," a heartbreaking poem made even more so with its ironic humor:

"Some part of me understood...the idea of it, a man so crazed / by my angles and curves / he couldn’t help himself." Powerful.

Margot Douaihy describes "O Star-Crossed Lovers" as a "subversive Shakespeare-inspired poem," and it is. We love its queerness, its music, its rhythm, its repetition, its back-and-forth...

It's short but positively epic. Read it all right here: http://westreview.org/o-star-crossed  (10/?)

After reading Kasey Jueds' "Keeper" in college, I ( @itsdbouts) sent my very first "fan mail." What a dream to include 3(!) of her poems in this issue.

"Poisonwood Tree":

"There is no queen here / but water and sky / and the distance / they conspire between them." Oof.

The first lines of "The Islands" will make you want to send fanmail, too:

But not in the weeks of falling, of unswerving
streets scumbled by rain. Of plums
stunned from trees, damp and tender
on sidewalks, those islands fog-shuttered
just off the bridge.

http://westreview.org/the-islands 

And the seamless weaving of then-and-now, past-and-present, in Jueds' "Florida." Of course, it is expertly-done. The poem begins,

"The first time I tried
the pocket knife you gave me, it slipped

and sliced my palm. We were
driving south."

Read the rest: http://westreview.org/florida 

We're new to Sarah Marquez's poetry, and now we're obsessed with it. Some lines we love in "August 13, 2020":

"When you tell me
after a kiss that I turn you on,
I know what pretty feels like — ​
being exposed, the missing color
in your chameleon eyes."

http://westreview.org/august-thirteen 

C. T. Salazar is so wonderfully talented and inventive. "When the Crows Came" is gorgeous:

"Every

morning my body’s outlined in feathers,
the whole bed dappled dark
as a beginning."

http://westreview.org/when-the-crows-came (14/?)

"A Midwinter Move Northwest" by Maria McLeod is gorgeous. We love the rhythms and imagery:

Birds hide, the sky goes blank, gray
slate, a milky chalkboard. We erase

what was, start over, immigrants
rewriting ourselves in an icy rain.

http://westreview.org/a-midwinter  (15/?)