I first met Claire Vaye Watkins shortly after her collection Battleborn came out, at a reading at Susquehanna University, smack in the middle of Central Pennsylvania—all that green, those rolling hills stretching out along the Susquehanna River for miles. …

At the end of a workshop Carolina Ebeid and I took several years ago under the instruction of Mary Ruefle, Mary wrote a poem to our class, entitled “Stress Is Their Vocation.” In the poem, she had this to say about Ebeid’s poetry: “Carolina is obsessed…

Simplicity of form and exquisite choice of materials lend elegance and a psychological edge to Maria Fernando Cardoso’s work, Woven Water: Submarine Landscape, recently on exhibit in the show, “Contingent Beauty,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. …

Rosalie Knecht’s Relief Map is a classic coming-of-age novel set in Lomath, Pennsylvania during a slow, boring summer. Much like any summer in small-town America, until police and FBI barricade the town: they’re looking for an international fugitive,…

“This is a story of Bulgaria,” Anna Kovatcheva writes in the acknowledgments of The White Swallow, winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition. Drawing on Bulgarian folklore’s figuration of the white swallow as healer, the fantastic…

The second time I talked to Ann Pancake, she told me she was taking a walk down to the river, asked if I knew how to get there. My boyfriend and I had just gotten back to our apartment from campus, me from a conference with her, the visiting writer in…

Rebecca Morgan Frank’s poetry collection The Spokes of Venus presents a smooth, sensitive exploration into the subtleties of perception and art. The book takes as its starting point the story of Percival Lowell, an astronomer who testified that he had…

By inverting the phrase, primeval forest, the title of Vievee Francis’s newest collection of poems, Forest Primeval, foreshadows the kinds of spaces readers will inhabit, inviting us to consider worlds previously unimaginable; that is, until we experience…

Claudia Cortese blew us away with her genre-bending nonfiction piece, “The Hunger Essay,” featured as one of Gulf Coast’s Online Exclusives for Spring 2016. Cortese is a fearless writer, exposing the deep, dark history of body dysmorphic disorders­—how…

Each year, CounterCurrent establishes its roots a bit deeper within the Houston art scene. April 12 – 17, 2016 brought the third iteration of this experimental festival organized by the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts.…