Pulp Literature Winter 2020: Issue 25

With the beautiful red pointe shoe of On Thin Ice cover artist Ann-Marie Brown offers this issues poignant opening act. Just as a dancer en pointe appears weightless suspended in a moment of grace so too do our authors balancing the weight of beauty and sorrow.Blood and booze set the stage in Wrap Party as featured author AM Dellamonica takes us behind the scenes of community theatre.Its turtles all the way down as Frances Rowat explores the itch and scratch of reckoning in The Smell of Antiseptic and Graham Robert Scott and Wallace Cleaves consider the weight of legacy in A Parable of Things that Crawl and Fly.Two very different genies awake when Susan Pieters casts off ill-fitting confines in Buddha in a Bottle and Akem explores capture and deliverance in Shotguns and Jinn.Elusive moments slip away as Rebecca Ruth Goulds Hands and Allison Bannisters Ghost Room remind us that love and memory are companion phantoms.Adult children ask what is owed by a daughter to her mother and a son to his father as our Hummingbird contest winners Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki and Chad V Broughman explore loss and longing in Afterlife and Featherweight.Poets David Troupes Matthew Walsh and Nicholas Alti deftly guide us through landscape dreamscape and escape each finding unique ache in the ties that bind.And finally two fan favourites reappear: Mel Anastasious Frankie Ray arrives in Hollywood in part three of The Extra and JM Landels gives us a prequel glimpse of Irdaign her twin sister and the caper gone wrong that sets the wheel of the Allaignas Song trilogy in motion.