Reading Room

Little Cat

Little Cat

Following the success of Maidenhead, which won The Believer Book Award in 2012, was short-listed for the Trillium Book Award in 2013, and was the most reviewed book of 2012 according to the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts Count, Coach House Books has released...

Whisk

Whisk

Reviewing a poetry book by a collective in a magazine created by a collective is a lovely fit, and Whisk by Yoko’s Dogs is an utter delight to read. Pedlar Press has produced a beautiful little book full of gems. The members of Yoko’s Dogs work together on all the...

Bone and Bread

Bone and Bread

The thing about Saleema Nawaz’s Bone & Bread is that I expected a book, (your typical book maybe?) about the larger sister and the anorexic sister. The tension between the two. How they navigated high school. How they were approached, or not, by boys. How they...

Everything Rustles

Everything Rustles

In Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” she writes “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” Such simple words, but the personal essay is an intimate form, full of reflection and creative misremembering, or as Didion calls it, when note...

King of the Class

King of the Class

Politics, religion, and science fiction are an ambitious mix in Gila Green’s first novel; her version of the near future affirms that religion-based misogyny is alive and thriving, as is technology: robot child-minders and glitchy mind-reading cell phones serve as...

How Poetry Saved My Life

How Poetry Saved My Life

Amber Dawn’s second book, sections of which were first published in Room (30:2; 35:4), is a mixed-genre work chronicling the author’s experience in the sex industry and her experience of poetry as a life-changing force. The book attempts to de-stigmatize sex-work,...

Maheen’s Collage

My mom loves us, loves to make us beautiful, make my sister and me into one girl— a pageant of Persia. “Murder me if this is all it takes to make me beautiful” —Iranian proverb, only used by women My mom loves us, loves to make us beautiful, make my sister and me into...

The Undefended Border

My husband wants to know why the line is always broken. I say the poem is made of words, but the words are not the poem. The words are the way in. The broken lines are openings. I remember how his skin turned gold under a streetlight the first time he took off his...

This Kind of Fairytale

We polish our big bellies with creams, we henna Eden vines on them, we Buddha rub them, as do strangers, for wealth. In birth class they tell us your body was made for this. They tell us           your mothers were strapped down and drugged. We are capable of doing so...

Saturday Family Picnics

I learned how to pick locks in prison. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon; the adults were drunk and some had paired off to have sex in tents pitched on the lawn. I was sitting on the scratched wooden pew of a picnic table, playing backgammon by myself. I shuffled the...

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Cover image for Room Magazine Issue 49.2, Science. Art by Candace Cosentino of an old-fashioned computer monitor with a bounty of dandelions growing from it.

ROOM 49.2 SCIENCE

I hope this issue makes you curious and furious, leads to 2 a.m. Wikipedia rabbit holes, fulfills urges to seek out knowledge-keepers. Quickly or slowly, dive in: -ologies of all varieties await you.

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ROOM 49.1 No Future for Who?

In Room Magazine 49.1 No Future for Who?, we are really asking. We are coming in hot. We are causing a scene. We are being unreasonable. We are not fucking around. We are not taking “no” for an answer. “No” is the only word we still know. For who? For who? No.

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