Now Read This: June 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators

Sex With My Family by Jessica Anne

Musings on infertility, cows, longing & freedom by an anemic woman in the winter of her 41st year.

Glass Essays by J. A. Bernstein

Glass Essays juxtapose the miracles of parenting and birth with the mysteries of death and armed conflict.

Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda

Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children, and bodies of water, it asks: What is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present—and to live.

Do you have a lit journal issue, chapbook, book, or other work that’s about to be published? Email us at vagabondcityliterary@gmail.com to be added to our Books Available to Review list and featured on an upcoming Now Read This list.

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Vagabond City Literary Journal

Founded in 2013, we are a literary journal dedicated to publishing outsider literature. We publish art, prose, reviews, and interviews from marginalized creators.