Blog – Portland Review

Explosive Fragments: An Interview with Cooper Lee Bombardier

by Alexis Garrett

image of Cooper Lee Bombardier, a bearded, blue-eyed white man wearing glasses and a baseball cap, alongside the cover of his book, "Pass with Care" featuring an image of a pocketknife on a wooden background

Cooper Lee Bombardier is a transgender writer, artist, and activist. In this interview with Alexis Garrett, he discusses the making of his debut memoir-in-essays, Pass with Care, which traverses terrain from working-class New England to the queer punk scene of early-nineties San Francisco. In your memoir, Pass with Care, you combine personal essays, poetry, and lyrical nonfiction to create a modern blend of genres and storytelling techniques. This…

Submissions Open

by Portland Review

Portland awoke to yet another bleak day of trapped smoke, but we’re still eager to read your words! This fall, we’re looking for work born out of grief and a rage for justice. Work born out of boredom and loneliness, joystick escapism, essential labor, and kitchen-table kindergarten-by-Zoom. We want the fragments you composed mentally while tending your community and the epic you penned in isolation….

On Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes

by Jon Doyle

book cover of Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin

The central object of Samanta Schweblin’s latest novel, Little Eyes, is the kentuki, a smart-speaker-cum-Furby available in a variety of adorable skins. From pandas and moles to crows and dragons, customers can purchase their own personal smart pet, a device capable of moving around and responding to their every interaction. But owning a device, what Schweblin calls being “keeper,” is only half of the kentuki…

Two Poems from Katherine Fallon

by Katherine Fallon

abstract painting red on white background

Elegy for Q I. I stood above the kitten, freshly struck, fur a fluid silver like the side of a shark. Her blood was spilled nail polish on new carpet, skull only slightly cracked, blue eyes open against the road. I glanced to the windows of the nearby houses, imagined twitches amongst the draperies, lamenting that here, people are around when you touch dead animals….

The Topography of a Heartbeat

by Rachel Mans McKenny

The nurse left work at five o’clock, or later. For night shifts, she left at five a.m., the sun cusped in the mountains on the edge of town. The work never left the nurse, the nurse’s husband always said when he was alive. When she held his hand, she had felt for a pulse. The nurse’s husband used to leave for work at six-thirty. He…