The third issue of Alternating Current's annual literary publication contains 45 works of poetry, photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by 24 authors about various historical topics. Within these pages, you will find contemporary outlooks on history right alongside little-known public domain works that feel as fresh and as vibrant (and as scary) as if they were written today. Here, the old meets the new, and you'll discover fascinating history from a personal, non-scholarly literary approach.This issue may be our most disturbing, intimate, and deeply personal yet, bringing forward challenging ethical questions and moral dilemmas of our past, and imbuing them with modern sensitivities. In this issue, you'll meet Lord Byron, Ota Benga, Mary Shelley, John Clare, Fanny and Joshua Chamberlain, and an aviator who couldn't match wits with the Wright Brothers. You'll go hunting on an 1800s kangaroo safari, graverobbing with Resurrection Men, and exploring the history of the theater and Tennessee Williams through the eyes of 9/11 New York. You'll hop from ghost towns to Fort Clatsop to Paxton, Illinois, to England to mourn the downfall of old abbeys and long-urbanized California byways. You'll learn of the horrors of human zoos, slavery, gynecological experiments on enslaved women, McCarthyism, and Jewish persecution, from the Rhineland Massacres of the Middle Ages, to Budapest in World War II. And we'll add on to history's endless list of women who never got their due, from female artists such as Kay Sage, Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, and Leonora Carrington, to the nurses of the World War I Red Cross.Our first Featured Writer, Toby Buckley, takes us from mythical mummies to Victorian ladies to the Radium Girls, with a dash of Louisa Ulrika's cabinet conspiracies. Our second Featured Writer, Joyce Schmid, travels from Gloucester Beach to Stanford University to the mining excavations of an Athenian agora well that turned up the bones of 450 dead babies, before making a quick stop with Fyodor Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad. Their work is showcased next to the winners and finalists for the 2017 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.

Footnote #3: A Literary Journal of History

Literature & Fiction

Shonkwiler, Eric

Potts, Laura

Bridger, Kierstin

Boon, Carl

Balkun, Stacey

Buckley, Toby

Schmid, Joyce

McConnell, Jon Chaiim

Helfers, Edward

Literary

Alternating Current

Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry - a survey of contemporary women poets working with the incorporation of real and surreal elements into domestic realms. This extraordinary collection brings together poets writing in the fabulist tradition: fable, myth, fairytale, or magic. These poems weave a spell. Within this one-of-a kind anthology, women-identifying poets boldly claim domestic landscapes to explore what nurtures and what breaks us. Why Domestic? A word once dismissive of women's writing, these poets unapologetically and boldly claim the domains of hearth and home as well as all the relationships that fall within. Domestic fabulist poetry is that which explores what nurtures and what breaks us. Since no comparable resource on contemporary domestic fabulist poetry existed, Editors Balkun and Moore curated a unique collection as both an introduction to and a survey of the ways women poets reclaim the domestic sphere and define a genre. Women-identifying writers representing all regions of the continental U.S. and abroad spanning four continents find home here. Contributors include Kelli Russell Agodon, Jennifer Givhan, Miriam Bird Greenberg, Carol Guess, Akua Lezli Hope, Colette Inez, Melinda Palacio, Susan Rich, Martha Silano, Cecilia Woloch, and many others.

Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry

Poetry

Liminal Books

Stacey Balkun's debut full-length collection, Sweetbitter, is an examination of youth, gender, sexuality, and yearning at an atomic level. The collection reads like a fever dream as Balkun uncovers the radioactive darkness that hides beneath the earth's surface and how it seeps into the lives of those who come near. The speaker takes us with them into the wilderness, wanting the world to be perceived differently, begging to be seen as more. From sapphic longing and poisoned baptisms to contaminated bodies and the gendered erosion of autonomy, Sweetbitter is the product of a restless coming-of-age story. In it, puberty is swimming in a toxic pond and recklessness is disguised as control. With Balkun's hazy, dream-like storytelling, the speaker is a wild creature challenging the social confines of being human, being girl. Sweetbitter is a gripping, sometimes suspenseful, poetry collection that leaves you hungry for more.

Sweetbitter

Sundress Publications

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Books by Balkun, Stacey