Magazine Stand :: Colorado Review – Spring 2023

In the Spring 2023 issue of Colorado Review comes this ominous bit of advice, “Whatever plans you think you got, you better get some others.” Given in Brendan McKennedy’s “Deep River” to a young woman struggling to make a meaningful life as a millhand in 1920s North Carolina. In Joanna Pearson’s “The Favor,” a couple become the hosts to an unexpected houseguest at a time when they are questioning the boundaries of what makes a family. The narrator of Deepa Varadarajan’s “How to Give a Best Man Toast” wrestles with the shifting of attachments as his beloved older brother gets married. And in Naihobe Gonzalez’s “Southern Cemetery,” a young woman spontaneously spends an evening with a new friend, exploring the risky space between safety and uncertainty, confronting her relationship to fear. The essays are concerned with the spaces we inhabit—and how they shape us. “First you live in a house, and then it lives in you,” writes Emily Winakur in “Who Lives in That House,” an essay that explores the relationship of place to memory. Jonathan Gleason’s braided essay “Proxemics” is a meditation on architecture, spatial relationships, family, penitence, and forgiveness. In “The Other Erica,” Erica Goss contemplates the multigenerational impact of her grandmother’s death, leading her to search for the house in Germany where her mother and grandmother endured WWII, seeking clues about her mother’s, grandmother’s, and her own identity.