Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
I’d like my spinach to manifest childcare. Dan wants it to offer legal advice. Martha wants the spinach to fold her laundry, wash her dishes, and maybe clean the bathroom? Jennifer just wants the spinach to write a goddamn poem. But the scientists that make the spinach better—into the Superfood we know it as today—just teach the spinach to send emails. “What bullshit,” says Dan….
/ˈɑːf.tər/ Preposition Alice met her father for the first time after her school recital. Her hands were so sweaty they slipped on the keys a couple of times and despite the encouragement from the audience, she knew she’d botched it. Her mother was waiting behind the scenes, flanked by a tall, lanky man. Years later, supine on the white leather sofa of a Freudian analyst,…
Our sixty-fifth year of publishing, and our second year of Portland Review’s online-only format began with the usual questions — where would we be taking the Review this year? Or, more interestingly, where might our authors take us? To answer these questions, we posed one of our own: Truth, or Dare? We received the truth of a compartmentalized self in Ana Maria Caballero’s “Room”; of…
There is a term in visual art called chiaroscuro, which, in Italian, can translate to a compound phrase: lightdark. In this year’s series for Portland Review, two of the oldest artistic tropes— shadow and light—meet another profoundly finicky duality: work and play. You can’t have one without the other. Or can you? Everyday, some work at dawn, some the graveyard shift; kids play at recess…
In the spring of 1983, Russian choreographer George Balanchine, at the age of seventy-nine, lay dying of a rare neurological disorder in Roosevelt Hospital. According to his biography by Bernard Taper, dancers from the New York City Ballet, the company Balanchine founded and spent a lifetime nurturing, came by to visit in dribs and drabs, for he had been there for many months. Not only…