This year we asked our editors at Gulf Coast to list their five favorite books of 2016. They did just that, and the lists that they provided are in no particular order (it was hard enough for most of us to narrow it down to five). The rules also allowed…

"Tigue has a storyteller's eye for digging up the roots of trivia; she uses them to fasten together the poem’s emotional nerves."

Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez is at the forefront of decentering Colombian literature as it's commonly known: the magical realism, the polite political allegories, the associated orientalist gaze that threatens to broad-stroke all of Latin America…

Ford Over is a collection of word and image from writer, interpreter, and translator John Pluecker that takes as its source material the language of colonial explorers and cartographers—travelers through a place we’ve come to call Texas. Pluecker begins…

These new, abstract, modestly sized paintings (most are smaller than four feet square) by David Aylsworth are strangely familiar yet entirely different than this Houston-based painter’s previous body of work. The artist keeps titanium white obediently…

On the sprung floors of the Eldorado Ballroom, in Houston’s Third Ward, before Fred Moten read from his new book The Service Porch, he began with a track by Carmen McRae, “Sometimes I’m Happy.” He let McRae’s riff on the jazz standard play through, without…

Like many good short story collections, Amina Gautier's third collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, traces heartbreak in its many forms. In these stories, her characters struggle to navigate feelings of disconnection brought on by kidnapping, abandonment,…

Karyna McGlynn’s new poetry collection The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost On Her Way to the Execution offers a visceral, seductive exploration of language and sound. McGlynn’s narrator is eerie but compelling as she slips a hand “under the black lace of language…

The best poems in Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby’s Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse, an anthology of commissioned still life poems, take to heart the central focus of the genre: the object and its evocative properties. Some…

There is an innate holiness to Jennifer Grotz’s newest collection, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press, 2016). Indeed, the collection itself is marked by the author’s own travels to a French monastery, but more so than that, Grotz’s meditative tone and keen…