Issue 72!

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Sonora Review 72 - Cover

We’re happy to announce that Issue 72 is out in the world! To purchase a copy, check out our Store.

And from Issue 72 Co-Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Rafael Barber:

Dear Reader,

Some insist upon comparing the release of a literary magazine to sending off a child to college (for the sake of rhetorical patterning, we will preserve the anonymity of these actors). For five months (eighteen years) you and you alone are cognizant of the undiscovered potential simmering (frothing) in your magazine (child). For this period you encourage the characteristics and instill the values you seek your creation to contribute to the world. You fixate, you obsess. You share an unrelentingly uncomfortable, devastatingly perverse intimacy with your magazine, your child.

Of course, despite the intensity of engagement, despite the establishment of what feels to be a permanent routine, time passes. Nothing haunts like the passage of time. Suddenly, you can no longer speak for your magazine, protect your child. Can no longer refine the page layout, teach life lessons. They are independent, they are alone.

Human women meet your child. Think her poorly mannered. Human men meet your literary magazine, read a story engaging with systematic geopolitical violence through the conduit of drone strikes and do not consider the sociological psychic implications of decades of sustained destruction waged by agents half the world away. Read a particularly perceptive, humorously titled poem and say, “Huh?” Say, “Tigers debasing what, now?” In considering marriage and moths, focus not upon the other side of hollowness (let alone this side of hollowness), but instead regurgitate, “Happy wife, happy life.”

Suddenly, our station wagon pulls up at the freshman dorm. I turn to Danielle. We tear up. We insist Sonora Review issue 72 phone home every Sunday night, insist Sonora Review issue 72 remember us, forgive us for our failings, our deficiencies. Suddenly, Sonora Review issue 72 turns away. Mumbles, “You’re embarrassing me, guys.”

– Samuel Rafael Barber, Co-Editor-in-Chief