SFRW Issue Two is here! / Party August 28

Dear Readers,

San Francisco Review of Whatever Issue Two arrived from the printer yesterday. It’s been an honor and pleasure to chaperone the ideas within it this far, and now I can’t wait for you to read it.

The first opportunity to get your copy is at the release party! That’s next Thursday, August 28, at Et al. in the Mission, San Francisco (same as last time). There will be readings with an element of chance. There will be pizzas and bevs. Hang out, buy SFRWs for your friends and their friends, etc. Doors open at 6:00 p.m., and the program starts around 6:30 p.m. 

If you’re already a subscriber, you can pick yours up at the party (but no worries if you can’t make it, we’ll mail them out to you soon after). If you haven’t yet subscribed, you can do that, or you can purchase Issue Two in our shop. You’ll also be able to find them soon in stores (real ones).

WHAT’S IN ISSUE TWO? TWO BOOK REVIEWS. TWO SKATEBOARDING ESSAYS (SORT OF). ANSWERS TO TWO QUESTIONS IN OUR NEW ADVICE COLUMN. AND ONE OF MANY OTHER THINGS:

In “Vaillancourt Fountain,” skateboarder and art historian Ted Barrow situates everyone’s favorite fountain, currently under threat of redevelopment, on the past and future Embarcadero.

Robert Glück is a poet, essayist, and novelist who co-founded the New Narrative movement. Emily Harter is a painter, printmaker, and sometimes-tattooist whose images are “ruled by cartoon logic.” Forget all that because in Issue Two they’re in conversation about ceramics. 

In “Escolar: Creation of Space,” Cole Hersey visits an art gallery in a shipping container in the suburbs. Our penchant for shipping container topics carries on.

By way of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Simpsons, Beatrice Kilat weighs the risks and chances for love in her debut column: “Ask Bea.” She also considers the chihuahua. Do you have a question to ask Bea, for possible inclusion in the next issue? Send it to whoever@sfreview.org.

SFRW’s resident Ad Reinhardt (if he were more Ohioan), Kate Rhoades made another cartoon about the kinds of objects you might encounter in an art gallery. 

“I Feel Safe in San Francisco” is a delicate, ranging, topographic memoir by skateboarder-poet Rod Roland. Featuring photography by Reggie Guerrero and a new poem by Tenaya Nasser-Frederick and Rod Roland. 

In “The Magic Is Here, I Saw It,” poet Christina Svenson delivers an efflorescent review of Soft Core, the novel by local hero and professional dominatrix, Brittany Newell, that came out earlier this year.

In “We Portrait Together,” Anne Walsh reviews IF AN ELSEWHERE (The Burrow), a layered, allegorical collaboration between artist Cybele Lyle and poet Jocelyn Saidenberg. Walsh’s idiosyncratic and loving tactics demonstrate that “there are so many ways to write and read.”

Sophia Wang is a mother, a mammal, and a person who knows about bioengineering human breast milk. In “Mama Mammalia” she examines breastfeeding as work, as pleasure, and as a beautiful supply chain of two. With artwork by Craig Calderwood.

Chef and fiber artist Katherine Ross Ward suggests you learn one weird culinary trick when you eat tomatoes this season.

Issue Two also features a CLOUD INTERLUDE by Michael Walker; plus fragmentary reviews, events that unfolded, ways of looking, and reasons for optimism by Amanda Guest, Aaron Harbour, Rose Linke, Amanda Nadelberg, and Theadora Walsh.

🌝

Until soon,

Elisabeth Nicula
Editor
San Francisco Review of Whatever

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