Three centuries, four continents—the spring issue of The Southern Review travels far and wide. Conflict is a recurring theme: readers travel from a Virginia fort on the eve of the Mexican-American War in Nicholas Mainieri’s “Port of Embarkation” to envisioning WWI soldiers in the trenches in Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s “Soldiers Washing (1927),” and from a Civil War battlefield as seen through the eyes of a painter in R. T. Smith’s “Still Life: Notebooks of A. Bierce, 1862” to a Nigerian fleeing the terror of Boko Haram in Iheoma Nwachukwu’s “Urban Gorilla.” But amidst the wars, there is also levity: Bruce Beasley’s car trouble turns into a mediation in “Truth, Says the Truism”; Amy Silverberg gives coming of age a fresh, funny twist in “Surburbia!”; and Carrie Shipers’s workplace poems have no shortage of slyness. As in most literature, human connection forms the center, demonstrated in this issue by the poems of Lindsey Alexander, Steve Myers, and Cathie Sandstrom. We also feature paintings by Ramiro Gomez, whose work makes visible the Latino workforce behind many of Los Angeles’s domestic and public spaces.
