Volume 56, Issue 1 | Spring 2026

In this issue: zorses, false memories, taking this noggin for a walk, a psychosexual sunlick, many Marys, the Camperdown Elm, Orpheus as a trans icon, Cruel Optimism, warm turmeric soda, questions for a reader who loves Marvin Gaye, and a fictional draft profile of a famous photographer.

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Poetry

Fiction

Nonfiction

Alex R. Jones | The Stand
Kristin Kovacic | On Mary
Alexander Pines | Orpheus is My Trans Icon
Margaret Whitehead | Thin Ice

On our cover

self portrait (An Echo), 2022 by Claire Whitehurst. Oil and spray paint on linen, 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm).

Editor’s Note

Weird Intro

Ever since our editor, Lynne, asked me to write this editor’s note, I’ve been returning to the prospect in preparation, categorizing it in my head as “Weird Intro.” Time to write my weird intro! I’d think as my husband and I would fall into a moment of quiet contentment while walking our dogs through our Iowa City neighborhood on a cool spring evening after a storm, hostas and orange daylilies arching over the sidewalks. Weird intro time! I’d remember with a pang of anticipation while waiting in line at New Pioneer Co-op, whichever seltzer brand on sale (or the occasional prize of the sought-after rotisserie chicken) weighing down my basket. Might this help with Weird Intro, I’d muse as I rolled through the Muriel Spark novel I’ve been reading to wind down at night (itself a debatably “weird” way to relax). And now it’s here, my weird intro time, except I should probably explain what else I mean by that term. So far, everything about this note has been entirely normal (especially for someone who lives in or recognizes Iowa City).
I’ve never much been one for normalcy as a rule, and I expect that most readers and writers have felt that way, too, for one reason or another. But when I stepped into the role of Managing Editor of The Iowa Review back in 2024, I felt a little trepidation about how my own sense of literary “weirdness” might interact with the journal’s gold standard lineage, the work that has appeared in it having shaped, for over half a century, the spectrum of contemporary nonfiction, fiction, and poetry (and for you, readers this far in, an Easter egg—we’re going to resume publishing reviews, interviews, and criticism, will be open for these submissions during our upcoming reading period). I’ve had time now to spend reading further into The Iowa Review’s archive, and I’m here to say that the record is a trove of literary heterodoxy, from Stegner Fellows to Language poetry, Pushcarts and postmodernism. It is never boring, nor does it stagnate. This, in my view, has everything to do with the journal’s long-held, democratic emphasis on the individual writer’s voice, rather than an exclusive focus on how well a text matches existing trends or conventions. From this vantage, voice is the kernel of the essay, the pathway through a short story, the texture of a poem, the nature of a work seen through the added lens of a translator. No two people sing or sound the same, though in the case of a literary magazine, many are singing at the same time.
As editorships have cycled through, graduate student readers’ and editors’ influences charted, and as the tides of contemporary writing themselves shift and swirl, over the years The Iowa Review, cherished for its characteristically bright, direct, and reliable excellence, has consistently found space for the “weird” that channels through waves, large and small, of new writing. For longtime readers this is no surprise, but perhaps for newer readers, in our age of institutional uncertainty or skepticism, and in a media environment that is increasingly pressurized, this fact might come as a welcome human flourish. Literary magazines, The Iowa Review included, exist on that live edge, mediating aesthetic and cultural fluctuations. By claiming the present’s weirdnesses, literary journals create the past’s first pass.
It seems a bit weird, doesn’t it, for me, as a newcomer to the masthead, to be chronicling (though in miniature) a history that I have read rather than lived. And I’ve so far skirted the question of defining my own sense of what “weird” is, nor have I made the crucial distinction between how I use it as a marker of positive value rather than a pejorative dismissal. So, as a means of introduction, I’m Alicia, and I’m weird. Here I’m an editor, elsewhere I’m also an editor, poet, and literary critic. Weird, for me, is just the beginning. I think that writing that appears in a literary journal should both confirm and expand its established parameters, the edge of the edge of a journal’s pages. The weird is a singular sound. I’m not here to read or assemble for you, reader, work that idly follows a formula, which slides, however inadvertently, towards resembling artificially generated slop. True weird ripples along that edge between what is and what could be, not a hallucination but an enigmatic vista. I think here of Sarah Ligon’s short story in this issue, “Draft Profile of the Artist Laura Brooks,” how it is a test of genre and fact, of resemblance and creativity, or Emily Featherman’s story that compresses veracity and dream-logic into a whole new kind of emotional reality, and of Patricia Lockwood’s two poems that each play on the real made weird, the weird made real. Maybe that there’s so much weird here has something to do with me, but I imagine it’s likelier that it has something to do with that same uncanny quality that brings us to these pages in the first place. If I’ve been reminded of anything so far in this work, it is that there’s room for all of us, dreaming, living, and writing together under literature’s totally weird auspices.

—Alicia Wright