spring/summer 2011
The poems in this issue of Chaparral center around betrayal and politics, marriage and race, and the earth’s very terrain. They are poems of the world. And they leave nothing out: not the pain, not the ecstasy, not the loving and the dying. It’s the risk and innovation and craft that allow the world come [...]
autumn/winter 2010-2011
Aptitude tests, a creaking storm, the deep mist, baked goods, insects…there’s something haunting in the new edition of Chaparral. Not that these writings are filled with ghosts or supernatural beings, but rather the speakers are obsessed with a lingering spirit—a memory, moment, or single image. And like most hauntings, these works lead us to where [...]
summer 2010
“The ocean, I am thinking about the poor massive ocean…” writes Athena Fliakos in “Confessions Of a Beautiful Little Fool.” In fact, many of the writers in Chaparral’s summer issue are thinking of the ocean. For these writers, the ocean is a place where the simple act of change makes a kind of beautiful music. [...]
spring 2010
The poems in the new issue of Chaparral celebrate the simple fact of spring. Life continues to regenerate. There’s no sentimentality in this fact—the poems here merely catalog the details: a creeping showy evening primrose, a newborn’s lips seeking milk, a lost mother re-imagined as an angel “rising above Crenshaw.” And it’s the art of [...]
autumn/winter 2009-2010
Bats, rats, a loaded nine millimeter, love lost, outer space, the hardened earth, high wind—there’s a sense of violence and tenacity in the Fall/Winter issue of Chaparral. The new issue features work by some of Southern California’s most interesting voices—work that tears and burns and conveys a starkness, a hard-won resilience, a landscape re-imagined and renewed.
summer 2009
Welcome to the summer noir issue of Chaparral. Atmospheric, elegiac, and always courting mystery, the writings featured here are redefining this LA trope in new ways.
spring 2009
All the writers featured in this first issue live and write in Southern California, and we hope the work here represents the range, terrain, and virtuosity of this varied and surreal landscape we call LA.