BRINE

Check out our interview with professor and contributor Sarah A. Etlinger! Sarah has the distinction of being chosen to end our first issue. The last work of a collection is, in some ways, the most important, as it is charged with leaving the reader with the final, lasting impression. Sarah’s “Crossroads of America” does just that. The poem gripped us and never let go. Its portrayal of middle America is both stunning and honest, grounded and somehow whimsical. Brine Lit: Tell

Sarah A. Etlinger is an English professor at a community college in Rockford, IL, where she teaches writing, literature, and film. A Milwaukee transplant, she enjoys the Packers, traveling, cooking, and exploring the Great Lakes with her family. Her work has been published in The Penwood Review, The Gyroscope Review, Little Rose Magazine, and many others. Currently, she is working on a chapbook as well as a longer manuscript that explores the connections between everyday life

A four-time Pushcart Prize, five-time Best of the Net, & Bettering American Poetry nominee, Lana Bella is an author of three chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016), Adagio (Finishing Line Press, 2016), and Dear Suki: Letters (Platypus 2412 Mini Chapbook Series, 2016), has had poetry and fiction featured with over 500 journals, Acentos Review, Barzakh, EVENT, The Fortnightly Review, Ilanot Review, Notre Dame Review, Rock & Sling, The Stillwater Review, Sundre

Isa Guzman is a Nuyorican, Titere poet out of Los Sures, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His work is dedicated to the exploration of issues surrounding Puerto Rico and its diaspora, to the confrontation and exploration of masculinity, and to the general mood of precarity surrounding the day to day. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Brooklyn college and is working on his first collection of poems. You can read some of his other work in magazines such as The Acentos Review, Somos en