Departments

Dear Readers, This is the long-awaited “Fall 2024” issue arriving in January 2025. Here is part of the reason why—in addition to the arbitrariness of print publishing deadlines in the current era, the second half of 2024 contained more panic, rupture, and change than any previous year of my life: a sudden divorce, urgent move, dropping off son at college, overseeing son’s leaving said college, spending half the week as writer-in-residence at Smith and the

I love it when a poem teaches me something I didn’t know about the endless strangeness of our human past. I had never heard of chicken skin gloves before reading Evangeline Riddiford Graham’s wonderful poem about them. All the rage in Europe from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, the gloves were intended to soften and whiten the hands of aristocratic ladies, and were made not out of actual chicken skin (phew—that does sound rather gross)

To the editor of LIBER, I knew I was gonna love Jessica Baumgardner’s piece about Catherine Newman’s novel Sandwich (“Flesh and Blood,” volume 3, issue 1), and then I loved it even way more than that. The writing about Jessica’s inner life and relationship to her family is so vivid—it all resonates and shows me things I might have missed otherwise. (Like, a 4:30 p.m. rage hour is a thing?!) I loved what she says