91¶ÌÊÓƵ

VOL. 40, NO. 2 

(Spring/Summer 2024)

CONTENTS

Conversation
Charlie Vasquez, Laura Stott, and Sunni Brown Wilkinson, with Louise Glück; Álvaro La Parra-Pérez with Ran Abramitzky; Bailey Quinn and Abraham Smith with Sandra Simonds; Doug Fabrizio with Nikole Hannah-Jones; Heather Root with Nalini Nadkarni; Kathryn Lindquist with Jeremy Farner and Julie Rich; Venessa Castagnoli with Tamara Kostianovsky

Art by William Grill

Essay

Melora Wolff, Michelle Effle, C.R. Beideman, Kevin Maier, David Tippetts

Fiction
Terry Sanville, Michael McGuire

Poetry
Lex Runciman, Doug Barrett, William Snyder, Jim Tilley

“What obsession means is that the thing won’t relinquish you—an idea, a kind of language, oftentimes it’s a tone. And if it does relinquish you, then you can prop it up. You’ve gotten what you can from it. If you keep brooding about it, thinking about it, playing with it, toying with it, then it is doing the work for you. All you’re doing is succumbing. And when I say succumbing, you succumb with a certain kind of savvy as you write for many years. You will know when you have a fish on the line, but every fish is finite, the obsessions end.”

—Louise Glück, Weber—The Contemporary West, 2024

COMMENTARY:

READING THE WEST Spring/Summer 2024

One of the most invasive plant species in Utah is Phragmites australis. It has taken over much of the wetlands along the Wasatch Front. Phragmites was introduced from Europe over a century ago and is now found in all fifty states and on every continent except Antarctica.