https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

Blossoms are beginning to drift across the wind, along with the new pages of The Southern Review. Join us for a trek to warmer temperatures in the desert with Mesha Maren’s “Tonopah,” contemplating the night sky and grief and light, or reminisce about the eighties with Marilyn Abildskov’s “Fur.” Ponder the sinister politics of a neighbor committee with Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez’s “The New Neighbor,” or endure the trappings of a disappointing after-wedding chain restaurant in Chelsea Rathburn’s “Love Poem with Bottled Steak Sauce.” You can also watch the Final Four with Bobby C. Rogers’s mother, or join Jane Hirshfield to consider the future, and also the wonders of the turnip. Philip Schultz, Mairead Small Staid, and El Williams III are also featured. This issue highlights the artwork of Keren Kroul, whose large-scale painting and watercolor installations evoke memory as landscape through fragmentation and white space.

TSR Spring 2025 Audio Gallery

Marilyn Abildskov’s “Fur” is an eighties story. In the eighties everything was big. Shoulder pads. Perms. Gas prices. Crime. But first, something small. A memory. A stretch of road. An unremarkable railroad town.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

"Fur" by Marilyn Abildskov

Andrew Hemmert’s “Who Would Destroy Me” catalogues potential sources of annihilation in a suburban landscape and turns towards joy regardless.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Who Would Destroy Me” by Andrew Hemmert

Fires, both wild and domestic, haunt but fail to overcome the speaker's landscape and homescape in Andrew Hemmert’s “Yellow Tanagers.”

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Yellow Tanagers” by Andrew Hemmert

Bobby C. Rogers, on his poem “Someone Else’s Story”: “Forgive me for not being a UCLA fan or showing legendary basketball coach John Wooden the proper respect, but just about anything can go in a poem.”

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Someone Else’s Story” by Bobby C. Rogers

As a renter, Aram Donovan can’t hoard survivalist gear (or anything really), but “I Worry These Are the Good Times” reflects a desire to somehow prepare . . . for later.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“I Worry These Are the Good Times” by Aran Donovan

p. e. garcia’s “Other Animals” is about troubled students, and the confusion a teacher can feel when trying to extend empathy.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

"Other Animals" by p.e. garcia

Olga Livshin’s “Deadbeat Gods” explores much of the world's passive stance on Russia's war in Ukraine. It blends the Deist belief in a disengaged god with humanity's indifference to war victims.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

"Deadbeat Gods” by Olga Livshin

Mairead Small Staid’s "Amnesia Sounds Like a Kind of Flower" is, despite its refrain, about remembering.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Amnesia Sounds Like a Kind of Flower” by Mairead Small Staid

Philip Schultz’s “Good News” is an attempt to balance the imbalance of bad news with good news, using an old black and white film as inspiration and “the smallest scrap of certainty.”

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Good News” by Philip Schultz

“Spoiled Prayers” is inspired by a photo of a lone American soldier walking amidst Jewish pillage piled ceiling high in a German cathedral just after WWII.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Spoiled Prayers” by Philip Schultz

“The Art of Wailing” uses the comedy of personal astonishment to deal with and understand the upheaval accompanying a heart attack.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“The Art of Wailing” by Philip Schultz

During the first round of fires in California, in a New York Times photo Tom Sleigh saw a herd of deer, mostly young bucks, huddled at the bottom of a field, all of them staring in what looked like shock at the flames racing toward them.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Deer Fleeing a Forest Fire” by Tom Sleigh

Weston Cutter’s “Just the Whole Ocean” is sort of about how we reckon with the lives we end up with after (for most of us) spending the first twenty-plus years wanting—in other words, how we contend with having (or, anyway, how I do).

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Just the Whole Ocean” by Weston Cutter

Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s "Here, God" is an elegiac poem for every homeland wrestling with unrest and war. It's also a memorial, a way of remembering the victims of this unrest and war.

https://www.thesouthernreview.org/issues/detail/Spring-2025/272/

“Here, God” by Rasaq Malik Gbolahan

The Southern Review is one of the nation’s premiere literary journals. Hailed by Time as "superior to any other journal in the English language," we have made literary history since our founding in 1935. We publish a diverse array of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by the country’s—and the world’s—most respected contemporary writers.

Established at Louisiana State University, The Southern Review immediately became a literary tastemaker. The launch of The Southern Review came about "On a bright Sunday afternoon in late February, 1935," when Louisiana State University’s president drove his black Cadillac to Robert Penn Warren’s house in Baton Rouge to invite him, his wife, and their friend Albert Erskine on a drive to discuss creating a magazine of "distinctive character and quality." Cleanth Brooks and Charles W. Pipkin were consulted; both joined the editorial staff. The Southern Review’s first series ran 1935 to 1942 before closing due to the war. In 1965, the journal was revived under the editorship of Lewis P. Simpson and Donald E. Stanford, who launched the second series to great acclaim. LSU Press became The Southern Review’s publisher in 2011, allowing the journal to undertake new initiatives, such as reaching readers through a digital version in addition to the print quarterly.

TSR Spring 2025 Audio Gallery

The Southern Review/LSUP