First, in the Saturday Essay, Cindy Lamothe writes about Central American street gangs, folklore, and how “more than a decade’s worth of war [has] left El Salvador in an aggressive tailspin of poverty and violence.”
Then, Ryan Werner reviews poet Katie Schmid’s collection, forget me / hit me / let me drink great quantities of clear, evil liquor, writing that Schmid’s poems are “a love letter, one that reaches out in blind bravery to the isolated bittersweetness of the Midwest and the women who circle around—or are circled around by—manhood.”
Finally, in the Sunday Essay, Ariel Gore offers us a beautiful, if heart-rending, essay about cycles of violence as she takes us from her childhood with a troubled father to the present, where she finds herself raising a child of her own with another troubled father in, and out, of the picture.
