The Greensboro Review 109 features the Robert Watson Literary Prize-winning story, Casey Guerin's "What Consumes You," and the Prize-winning poem, Chelsea Harlan's "Some Sunlight." This spring 2021 issue also includes an Editor's Note by Terry L. Kennedy and new work from Rachel Abramowitz, Allyn Bernkopf, Melissa Bowers, Michelle Poirier Brown, Colin Dekeersgieter, Amina Gautier, Isabel Geary Phelps, Emily Greenberg, Miah Jeffra, Louisa Lam, Gary Percesepe, Simon Perchik, Lucas Daniel Peters, Kimm Brockett Stammen, Beth Weinstock, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, Jim Whiteside, Kris Whorton, Kathleen Winter, and Joe Woodward.

WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD WINNER OF THE PETER LOVESEY FIRST CRIME NOVEL CONTEST Friday Night Lights gone dark with Southern Gothic; Eli Cranor delivers a powerful noir that will appeal to fans of Wiley Cash and Megan Abbott. In Denton, Arkansas, the fate of the high school football team rests on the shoulders of Billy Lowe, a volatile but talented running back. Billy comes from an extremely troubled home: a trailer park where he is terrorized by his mother’s abusive boyfriend. Billy takes out his anger on the field, but when his savagery crosses a line, he faces suspension. Without Billy Lowe, the Denton Pirates can kiss their playoff bid goodbye. But the head coach, Trent Powers, who just moved from California with his wife and two children for this job, has more than just his paycheck riding on Billy’s bad behavior. As a born-again Christian, Trent feels a divine calling to save Billy—save him from his circumstances, and save his soul. Then Billy’s abuser is found murdered in the Lowe family trailer, and all evidence points toward Billy. Now nothing can stop an explosive chain of violence that could tear the whole town apart on the eve of the playoffs.

The 44th issue of International Poetry Review (IPR) appears in a year shaped by change, social and political tensions. Social distancing has frustrated our human need for sociability, contact, and interaction, but has also gifted some of us with time for introspection. Our peer reviewers and members of the editorial team selected submissions that reflect a vast diversity of experiences, voices, and tones. The poems and translations cover issues such as the passage of time, the fragility of life, nature, the choices we confront and the ones that elude us, and the need for social justice and recognition. Against the backdrop of the transformative events of 2020-2021, this issue underscores the role poetry plays in building communities. By structuring IPR around the core principles of empathy, solidarity, inclusion and accessibility, our goal is to become intentional about the capacity of language to enact change. The editorial committee hopes that the poems included here make poetry accessible, move readers to play with words, and inspire them to become writers and translators themselves.

The 'sit-ins' at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro launched the passive resistance phase of the civil rights revolution. This book tells the story of what happened in Greensboro; it also tells the story in microcosm of America's effort to come to grips with our most abiding national dilemma--racism.

Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poet I think now more than half Of life is death but I can’t die Enough for all the life I see In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s racial history, as well as his own. Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.