Welcome to our eleventh online issue of Steel Toe Review.
It’s essentially Spring now, I guess, though here in Birmingham we really didn’t have a winter this year. I think I wore my leather jacket for about a couple of weeks in December and January. What seems to be the most on everybody’s mind is the Republican primary. We’re voting in Alabama today, as I type this. We’re here to take your mind off of politics for a little bit though. Let the world burn down around us. We are interested in mostly in things that are beautiful, even if they are beautiful in their ugliness.
As excited as we are about this issue, it is almost eclipsed by the release of our print anthology, which features the best pieces from our first year online.
But after you’ve ordered copies of that for yourself and all your family members, please do check out all the new pieces we will be posting here over the next two or three weeks. In fiction, we have the third and final installment of “Blow Satchmo Blow” by Melissa Bobe and new work from Jan Wiezorek, Dan Townsend, Lauren Eyler, and Teri Brown-Davidson. William Matthew McCarter has sent us his latest essay about the othering of rural Southerners in American pop culture. In our poetry section, we’re featuring old friends Thomas N. Dennis, Karla Linn Merrifield, and Howie Good. We also have work from Allen Berry, Philip Theibert, and Lyn Lifshin. In visual arts, we are featuring illustrations that Justin Wayne Butts did for our anthology, as well as haunting photographs from a sixteen-year-old artist named Eleanor Leonne Bennett.
Steel Toe Review 