There’s a sense of the fantastic in “Performance,” by Mario Loprete. The oil painting is at once intensely real—from the delicate hairs on the shin to the exposed arch of the foot—and strikingly impossible. We’re left to imagine the body out of frame, its necessary weight and seeming weightlessness, the invisible risk, the assumption of gesture—perhaps hands outstretched in the sky. The painting forces us to consider what is and is not concrete: what can we depend on and where do our bodies fail?

Latest Online Issue
47.4

Our current issue features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork from: Mario Loprete, Lesley Jenike, Katherine Plumhoff, Leila Chatti, Adam Gellings, & CD Eskilson.


What struck me first were the ways of exiting — via bird, via memory, via magic. Brent Ameneyro’s speakers are all knowing and all nostalgia. Producing not the sheen of romantic recall but the cleverness of reconstruction. In Ameneyro’s debut, A Face Out of Clay, there is no questioning, but lingering visitations. Portraits of loved […]


The particular landscape of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ first collection, Ghost Pains, recalls echoes of the “New Aesthetic,” a term coined back in 2012 to describe the leakage of the digital realm into the physical world. Characters point their phones at the sky, “as if to image-search the constellations,” travel by way of reading reviews on […]