Black Lawrence Press, 2026. Paperback, 180 pages, $17.99. ISBN: 978-1625571809.

Review by Cash Rabley

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In her debut short-story collection, Esquire Ball, Lisa Slage Robinson takes readers to the Great Black Swamp, a region of Northwest Ohio where frogs are molded into wives, women trap souls in windows, and a teenager is crushed into the form of a mermaid underneath tons of grain. Throughout the collection, Robinson cuts her surreal fantasies with grittily realistic tales of lawyers and their loved ones, no doubt informed by her own experience as a former attorney. This co-mingling of the surreal and the mundane, married by recurring characters and the almost mythic law firm of Strathy, McMahon, creates a chilling collection of linked Midwest-Gothic tales that never lets you know what to expect next.

Seemingly random at first, every story in Esquire Ball connects in an ornate web that Robinson has woven with the utmost care and precision.

Seemingly random at first, every story in Esquire Ball connects in an ornate web that Robinson has woven with the utmost care and precision. She reveals only tidbits of backstory at a time, leaving readers hungry for the characters’ history from the first story, “Fruits of the Forbidden Tree.” The narrator, unnamed at the time, recalls her hoard of collected (read: stolen) trinkets in a fashion so grimy it’ll make you want to wash your hands. The “macaroni-encrusted and blood-stained tooth” she dug out from under a nine-year-old’s pillow is a particularly gag-inducing example. This “curiosity” is but one of the narrator’s many trophies. The others were taken from Jimmer, Margot, Mrs. Stevens, and her own parents. These names, casually tossed out on the first page, become pivotal in unlocking the secrets of Cecelia Armstrong.

Cissy, as she’s more commonly called, isn’t the only one who graces readers with a narrative in Esquire Ball. The perspective and point of view shift constantly, unveiling characters, calling back to previous stories, and shining a new, though not necessarily brighter, light on those characters who appear throughout. As a result, Esquire Ball reads more like a novel. Readers will grow attached to the recurring cast, recognizing them through mentions of black licorice, their older brothers, and hushed recollections of what happened with “the mailroom guy.” The hints are masterfully placed, disguised as unnecessary details that add characterization or flesh out the setting. These hidden stitches glide through the stories’ fabric until Robinson pulls the thread tight, sending readers flipping backwards through pages looking for something they just know they’ve read before.

These hidden stitches glide through the stories’ fabric until Robinson pulls the thread tight, sending readers flipping backwards through pages looking for something they just know they’ve read before.

The endless tapestry of plants and call-backs makes it impossible to even take a guess at the order in which Robinson wrote the thirteen stories contained within Esquire Ball, many of them previously published as stand-alones. The final piece, “Legend,” which originally appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review in 2025, utilizes the same narrator as a preceding story, “Bird with Lavender Tongue,” published four years prior in Prism International. Rusty plays poker with a slew of characters from across Esquire Ball while recalling his intense sexual experience with a tree and his girlfriend. This woman, a PhD candidate known for changing her name, is almost certainly the same woman that Cissy lets her hair down with in “Devil’s Hole Road” (Storm Cellar, 2021). Where in the book Robinson started, and whether she worked forwards, backwards, or sideways, is indecipherable and inconsequential. Esquire Ball is a final product so smooth you can’t even tell where the pieces interlock.

While not every story contains something as explicitly magical as a revelatory threesome with a tree, even the more mundane tales in Esquire Ball are still anything but normal. Brought to life by Robison’s imaginative prose, they carry a certain sense of the uncanny and the impossible, featuring twists and revelations that leave readers reeling. The Ice Princess’s kiss leaves lips bloody and mutilated in the dark of a file room; the unforgiving legal system further mutilates a maimed man; an affair begins and ends by the movement of giant pandas; and a client shows off her collection of windows that house souls. In Esquire Ball, Robinson summons the surreal in even the most common and concrete. Her description of the lawyer Mad Dog as having something “more like duck feet than paws,” for example, brings a nickname to life while subverting the expected comparison.

The women in these short stories are just as ambitious, clever, and downright dirty as their male counterparts, often even more so.

Through her unbelievably vivid writing, Lisa Slage Robinson draws readers into, and sometimes forces them to become part of, a collection that questions what won’t be done to climb the ranks. Often centering Cissy and her ambition, Esquire Ball showcases magical feminism without compromising its use of complicated characters. The women in these short stories are just as ambitious, clever, and downright dirty as their male counterparts, often even more so. Whether they’re interrogating sick old women, stealing candy from coworkers, or throwing stones at tree spirits, everybody in Lisa Slage Robinson’s work commits their fair share of sins. One thing’s for sure: every character in this collection is guilty of something. There are no angels at the Esquire Ball.

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This year’s contest saw a 160% increase in submissions. Readers, editors, and judges were blown away by the quality of the submissions. Both judges expressed how difficult it was to make their selections from among the stunning poems and stories we received. We are so thankful to everyone who trusted us with their work for this contest, and our huge congratulations to the winners.

Poetry Results as judged by Karyna McGlynn

Winner: “When you ask why there are so many names for God” by K. Hari

“I kept coming back to this poem for the way it understands naming and spirit as something tactile—something you can taste, hold, pass hand to hand. The language is lush without ever tipping into decorative excess. Each image carries real, sacred weight: saffron steeping, earthworm sluice, hard raisins. What I admire most is how the poem resists the urge to resolve its central question. Instead, it keeps opening up—into language, into various forms of devotion, into the quiet ache of inheritance. It feels deeply rooted and yet porous at the edges, a poem that knows some things can only be approached sideways, through sound and texture and love.”

Runner-Up: “This is a poem about desire” by Madeleine Poole

“This poem locked in early for me and didn’t let go. The invisible fence is such a clean, brutal engine here, and the poet trusts it. It does its work without over-explaining. Line by line, the poem tightens, mapping the strange negotiations between power, money, touch, and selfhood with a kind of icy precision. There’s no wasted motion here. What stays with me is the way the poem implicates the speaker without collapsing into pure confession or absolution; it just holds the tension steady and makes you sit inside it. Unsettling in the best way.”

Finalists: Jesse Watson, Cora Schipa, Janine Certo, Beste Yilmaz, Seth Peterson, John Muellner, Elaina Edwards, Emiliana Renuart

Fiction Results as judged by Dustin M. Hoffman

Winner: “Cuties” by Michael Cullinane

“‘Cuties’ glimmers its sequins of style with punchy prose. Sentences that seem at first like humor end up crushing us as the sequins flip to reveal their razor-sharp side. The story dives deep into the mind of this high-school teacher’s psyche that’s straining for last threads of optimism on her first day back at work after trying to recover from a carjacking. The details of the work bleed with authenticity as we encounter the bored, desensitized teenagers, apathetic coworkers, and a hilariously bombastic guidance counselor who administers a hackneyed exam about the titular cuties. But summarizing the splendid details or trying to recap the perfectly paced day-at-work plot does little justice to this marvelous story. The writer draws us so close to Tina’s interiority in a way that makes so much room for sympathy in a character’s raw moment back to work, fresh from trauma. This masterful writer doesn’t waste a single syllable in crafting a story with such strong voice and such immediacy.”

Runner-Up: “Millboro’s Least Wanted” by Sammi Chiyao

“This writer’s style has that flowing-water clarity that steps aside to make room for brilliantly complex characterization. The relationship between the narrator and her friend is full of wounding that the writer escalates in scenes of exchanged honesty that turn to jabs. Though the narrator shows up for her friend during a moment of vulnerability, during abortion clinic visits, the emotional scars turn to calluses. I especially appreciated the nuance of the narrator’s care that she desires to offer her friend, yet their painful pasts continue to divide them. This story masterfully explores smalltown culture and its strangling racism in both past and present to capture this moment between friends that is both moving and tragic. Here is a writer deeply attuned to characters desperately needing to be seen by each other.”

Honorable Mention: “Silk” by Qing Qing Chen

“The prose’s style is stunning—the decadent details of tourist trappings and consumerism captured in the daringly intimate psychic distance. That closeness allows us to travel through this cluttered setting on this day right along with the main character on her flaneuse adventure. The story leaves us in delicious ambiguity when the narrator is confronted with the awareness of being fooled. But we and she also get to luxuriate, to wear silk, without being told our attention is misplaced.”

Finalists: Sophie Aanerud, Corin Michael Mellone, Natalie Moore, Brad Eddy, Kevin Binder

Regalo Press, 2025. Hardcover, 256 pages, $30.00. ISBN 9798888457214.

Review by Ashlyn Merritts

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Although self-exploration is what helps people grow, finding yourself is not an easy task. In Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s novel Transplants, the dual perspectives of a Chinese woman, Lin, and a Chinese-American woman, Liz, begin in Qixian, China. In the midst of an international pandemic, Lin and Liz are forced to understand the reality of identity. For Lin, identity begins as something ascribed to a person born in China. Since she’s so determined to honor those around her, Lin seeks everyone’s approval. In Liz’s eyes, identity is built by the individual—yet that doesn’t mean it can’t be tested. Liz moves through life unapologetically in the US, but China’s “one for all” mentality scrapes against her personal freedoms. As Lin and Liz move through many of life’s harsh lessons, the two only grow stronger. 

Transplants begins with Lin in a pet shop, promising her mother she’ll make a friend in university if she can adopt yet another pet. When she risks her education for a whirlwind romance, Lin ends up losing the only thing that made her mother proud. Fortunately, Liz steps in and offers Lin the chance to attend college in the US. As Lin adjusts to American life, the COVID-19 pandemic short-circuits her education once more. On the open road, Lin is forced to learn what living for herself looks like. Back in China, Liz realizes that Chinese living means giving up individual freedoms for the good of others, condemned by the government to an apartment with her new lover.

As Lin adjusts to American life, the COVID-19 pandemic short-circuits her education once more. On the open road, Lin is forced to learn what living for herself looks like.

Lin, despite starting out afraid of the world, presents a compelling character. In the beginning, her pets are only friends and she wears shame like a second skin. On the very first page, readers can see her insecurity in the way she “walked the halls of her high school avoiding eye contact, counting the cracks in the hexagonal tiles, and waiting to hear ‘Fang Xue Ge’ pipe in over the tinny loudspeaker to signal the end of the day” (3). Right away, Lin is painted as reserved and uncertain. Such a combination rings true for a girl raised to put the good of the community before the good of the individual. Yet, Lin is also a dynamic character, capable of clawing her way through an unforgiving world. By the end of the book, after the pandemic clears up somewhat, Lin even makes a friend in Ruth, her neighbor in Seattle. Occasionally, “Lin would settle in for an entire evening, making them both steaming mugs of hot water and getting Ruth ready for bed” (224). Despite not having made a friend in university like she promised, Lin has effectively solved her isolation in a more organic, meaningful manner. In addition to her new connection, Lin stands her ground with her mother when she chooses to stay in Seattle. Lin is not the insecure woman who began the story, but the woman engineered to put an end to the narrative. 

Liz, on the other hand, experiences an opposite transformation as a US-born Chinese American with a penchant for taking large risks in an attempt to understand the world around her. Having been raised in Ohio, Liz focuses on herself throughout the book. After losing her mother, Liz moves to China in search of a place to belong. “Liz felt like she had to hold more tightly to her identity, like she had something to prove” (26). After her mother dies, Liz feels lost. The only thing she can do to understand why she has never fit in and why her mother one day stopped talking about her Chinese heritage is cling to the very thing her mother sought to drain from her. In order to find her place in the world, Liz chooses to start at the beginning, where her mother came from. After traveling through China, she chooses to remain in Qixian as a teacher. In her final chapter, “Liz found herself reveling in a kind of normal she didn’t expect” (235). Qixian feels like a home to her, even though it once seemed like a last resort in the effort to understand herself through her parents. Despite losing her familial roots, Liz feels more grounded than ever before. 

The story is deeply compelling, and the characters are highly relatable.

The theme of resilience in Tam-Claiborne’s Transplants shows up in the character growth of Lin and Liz. Lin becomes more brash as a result of the world plague, while Liz becomes trapped. Despite being deeply afraid of disappointing others, Lin’s character from the beginning of the book is tested repeatedly, transforming her into someone with worldly knowledge and self-confidence. Back in China, Liz learns to let go of her late mother, embracing her American identity as well as her Chinese identity. This book is about finding yourself through new experiences and challenges. The story is deeply compelling, and the characters are highly relatable. When Daniel Tam-Claiborne writes a story about two women finding their place in the world, he masterfully crafts each sentence to leave the reader craving more until the very end.

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AIM Higher, 2025. Hardcover, 220 pages, $33.00. ISBN 979-8986369945.

Review by Kyra Cochran

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Christina Cook’s Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart takes readers on a journey through Paris as the narrative dances through prose and poetry alike, telling stories of myth, death, and the human connection to the living world.

In this collection, Cook seamlessly blends translations of Marie-Claire Bancquart’s bewitching poetry with her own prose and poetry, which is magical in its own right. Readers are transported to an afternoon in Paris that “took on a magical life of its own: one rife with the work of the Bateleur and her mythical entourage.” Cook does not shy away from enchanting imagery, threading magic throughout the mundane as she explores the city—birds sing siren-songs, Cook meets kind and alluring friends, and readers follow her adventure as she explores the winding streets of Paris with poet Marie-Claire Bancquart.

This collection of poems is thoughtfully curated, blending perfectly with Cook’s prose to create a linear narrative. The transitions from memoir to poetry delicately jump from one stone to another down a winding river of memory. Cook has the ability to stretch a poem into something more expansive, using her prose to nestle each poem within the context of its creation. She gives each poem a detailed narrative background, aided with textual analysis. “Death is on your mind because children all around you are dying of the same disease as you. Because it is World War II, and birds aren’t the only things flying through French skies,” writes Cook, depicting Bancquart’s grim childhood in order to set the stage of the book’s prologue.

The transitions from memoir to poetry delicately jump from one stone to another down a winding river of memory. Cook has the ability to stretch a poem into something more expansive, using her prose to nestle each poem within the context of its creation.

This analysis, as well as the narrative portions of the collection, are part of what stand out to me most: this is a story that only Cook could have told. Her fourteen-year friendship with Bancquart has given her profound insight into Marie-Claire’s writing, allowing her to analyze and understand her work in a way no one else could. Cook writes, “Marie-Claire is every bit the Bateleur, bending reality into an arc of unvarnished truth that enters and exits our lungs in what she describes as ‘a concrete respiration that encompasses us all…men, animals, plants, stones, stars.’” Quotations and anecdotes of Cook’s time with Bancquart elevate both the poetry and prose; each translation is carefully done, and each analysis provides insight into Bancquart’s mind.

Cook’s translations of Bancquart’s poetry are attentive and nuanced. “As the translator of French lines,” Cook writes, “I saw the critical importance of disregarding the meanings I’d personally made of the poems in order to create the same collaborative space for Anglophone readers that Marie-Claire had so generously created for her Francophone audience.” Still, Cook knows when to allow readers the space for their own understanding and when a translation might need a little more contextualization than was originally given: Cook writes, “When translating ‘Summer,’ I made a decision that I rarely make as a translator: to replace a word…with more descriptive language…My goal in translating the word was to more closely replicate not the original text, but rather the sensual impression that text made on the source-language reader.”

Tarot and myth thread themselves through this collection, giving it an air of otherworldliness. Several poems are named after specific tarot cards, and the mythological figures of Theseus, Icarus, Eurydice, and others all make appearances. They are approached, however, from an angle that is upside down, or perhaps tilted, as though Bancquart is looking at the myths through a refraction. Of this, Cook writes, “Throughout her poetry and fiction, Bancquart reinvents many mythic characters’ journeys or perspectives in order to breathe expansive new life into their ancient archetypes.” The idea of the mythic is laced into the prosaic narratives as well, with Cook herself taking a sort of mythic journey as she traverses the Parisian streets.

The beauty of Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart is not just the translations of Bancquart’s work; Cook’s style of writing is lavish with imagery, replete with dazzling and provoking descriptions of her own life, as well as her time in Paris. Highlighted at the end of my copy is a beautiful example of Cook’s poetic language: 

Before a Coltrane kind of smooth swing breeze blows by, high-brassed whines of a slow moody sax, lips girdling woodwind reeds, Green Dolphin Street slink as black & white & blue in mood as some low grove where Tarots jut from the moss: Star, Tower, Wheel of Fortune, luck in the dark of our jazz vespers, our life-laden houses of cards

Cook’s language is sensual and alluring, inspired, as is Bancquart’s, by myths, tragedies, life, and death. Form is also danced with, done with an emphasis on purpose and engagement in meaning.

Cook also includes her own poetry in this collection, which is inspired by but distinctly different from Bancquart’s work. “In translating Marie-Claire’s poems and coming to know her as an incredible—and incredibly kind and generous—force of nature, I’ve learned that such magic is mine for the taking. That words, especially potent when poetic, are pure magic.” Potent is exactly right—Cook’s language is sensual and alluring, inspired, as is Bancquart’s, by myths, tragedies, life, and death. Form is also danced with, done with an emphasis on purpose and engagement in meaning. One particularly memorable poem, “Tarot: VII. The Chariot,” uses blackout poetry to create a wrenching impact: “I listen as Marie-Claire recounts a story of her city/ too heartbreaking,/ too hard to hear the whole of…” Cook recounts Bancquart’s story on the next page, though large sections are completely blacked out. The impact immediately causes a recoil, the harsh black lines visually representing the destruction that readers are only partially exposed to in rough scraps of brutal description.

Roaming the Labyrinth with Marie-Claire Bancquart is not simply a collection of “Poems, Prose, & Translations” as the cover-page suggests—it is a poignant, rousing narrative of two women from different generations, told through the mysticism of myth and tarot. Readers navigate the labyrinth of life, death, and reality alongside Cook and Bancquart, following their thought processes as they experience the world’s divine and occult perceptions.

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by Amy Clark

The hypotheticals started maybe six months into the relationship. My boyfriend and I were at the new square-shaped pizza place on Valencia when he swallowed his bite, cleared his throat, and asked, “What would you do if we walked in here and all your ex-boyfriends were sitting around a table together, staring at you?”

He held his Coke at his lips, his eyes on mine. “Would you cry?”

“I’d probably have a panic attack,” I said.

“Would you talk to them?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I’m just so curious about how people respond to weird situations,” he said. He had always been curious. It was something that had drawn me to him—he peppered our time together with open-ended questions, ones that gently shone a light on parts of my interior world I found too boring or shameful to share uninvited. But in this question, there was no gentle light, no reassuring touch of hand.

“I guess I’d probably still have a panic attack, and leave.”

“What if they weren’t sitting together? What would you do then?” he asked, leaning forward.

I looked away and changed the subject.

But the questions didn’t stop. In the morning, after our usual lazy kisses, he whispered, “What would you do if you woke up and your exes were just standing there, at the foot of your bed? And they were like, ‘we want to get back together.’”

“I’d be confused,” I said.

“Yeah, but what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, turning over.

I couldn’t escape. Over coffee: “What would you do if you were on an airplane and the safety video was your ex-boyfriends doing a cringey rap about you?”

Before I left for work: “What would you do if you get to work and your exes show you a petition they’ve signed to get your citizenship revoked, and when you ask them why, they say it’s because you’re so small?”

He was the kind of man who always brought me back a little pastry every time he went to get coffee, who could laugh off a missed bus or a dropped glass, something I’d never had before in a relationship. Everything else was good, so I felt I ought to just let him have his fun. I resolved to take the questions in stride, but each time he conjured one, I felt an unrelenting queasiness that could only be described as despair.

So I asked him to stop. We were on our way back from a new draft cold brew bar, cold brews in hand, and I said, “Hey, can we cool it on the hypotheticals about my ex boyfriends?”

He was silent, and I added, “I’m really happy, I just feel like—this one little thing between us is confusing me.”

“I guess,” he finally said, “I don’t see the harm in them. It’s not like this stuff is actually going to happen.”

“I know,” I said, trying to put the situation back together, “sorry. It’s just a weird thing for me.”

“Hmm.”

We sipped in silence. On the way home, I pointed out a colorful bird and he said nothing.

As we got into bed that night, he turned to me and said, “What would you—” and then he stopped. “Oh, sorry. I forgot I’m not allowed to do that anymore.”

“No,” I said, “You can ask.”

“Well, I was thinking. What would you do if aliens came down to earth and singled you out specifically to come aboard and be studied, and when you get on board the aliens point to these tanks and in the tanks are bodysuits, and they’re all your ex-boyfriends, and all your ex boyfriends it turns out were just aliens doing research on you?”

Before I could answer, I was crying. He sighed and turned back to his phone.

He stopped asking me anything else. Even when we were distracted, watching a movie, I could hear his thoughts churning, the world a theme park in which to install ex-boyfriend-themed rides. He sent relentless texts about aquariums and NBC sitcoms and jail, all featuring one or all of my exes, and sent follow up “?”s when I didn’t respond. When I said I didn’t want to answer he would just change the hypothetical. When I broke down, said I couldn’t do it anymore, said I felt like I really was going crazy, he put his toothbrush in a Ziploc bag and called himself an Uber. I talked him out of it, in the end. I apologized and he patted my head and agreed to let up on the questions.

And then one night, I stepped into a vegan ramen restaurant where he had asked to meet after work and saw them there: my ex-boyfriends. He was at the head of the table, beer in hand, and they sat around him, four of them, their arms draped over the backs of their chairs. He caught my eye and made a hook with his finger to beckon me.

I did indeed feel the sizzle of a burgeoning panic attack. It took effort to walk over to him, but I thought running away might be cowardly. He held my gaze, bottle at his lips.

Faltering, I took his beer from him and let it fall to the ground. It landed with a clunk and spun around, beer pooling out of its mouth. He continued to watch me.

I turned around and took off running. I ran up and up to the top of a hill and threw up on a tree, the wind and my blood howling in my ears. I wanted to go back inside and ask him a thousand questions: how he did it, what he’d told them, how long he’d planned it. But I knew there was no point, that he was done, that he already had his answer: this is what I would do, this is what I did.

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