At Rest
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In this issue, three sisters recount a heart wrenching childhood memory in Amanda Cecilia Lang’s “At Rest.” In “London Calling: From the Back of a Dodge Caravan,” Travis Roberson re-thinks his past to the tune of The Only Band That Matters. And William Woolfitt both laments and celebrates the complicated history of coal mining in West Virginia in two poems beginning with “Coal Creek Litany.” These poems are excerpted from Woolfitt’s new collection, The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go, available for pre-order from Belle Point Press.
This issue features images of the planet Mars that demonstrate how we see what we imagine more often than we suspect.
We bring ourselves to what we see in space. In 1895, Percival Lowell popularized the idea of canals on Mars, suggesting the presence of intelligent life. This first image is from his book Mars as the Abode of Life (1895). The second set of images are an imagined map of Mars by Eugene Anoniadi, a Greek-French astronomer who initially supported the canals, but later dismissed the idea in favor of the regions depicted here—Antoniadi’s image is here redrawn by illustrator Lowell Hess in the 1965 book Exploring Mars (via Tom Ruen.) The third image is by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona and was widely thought to look like a bear, though it is in fact a hill with a v-shaped collapse and two craters surrounded by a circular “fracture pattern” in the rock.
