{"id":102927,"date":"2026-05-10T07:18:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T14:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=102927"},"modified":"2026-05-12T18:27:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T01:27:09","slug":"the-nomads-issue-4-moves-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-nomads-issue-4-moves-through\/","title":{"rendered":"THE NOMAD’s Issue 4 Moves Through"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>THE NOMAD’s Issue 4, “Breakthroughs,”<\/a> is more about the through than the break. There are few explosive moments, not many trumpet blasts. Instead, the issue gathers fiction, memoir, lyric essay, prose poem, and poetry\u2014fifty-four pieces by twenty-seven writers\u2014around breakthrough as passage, as a moving through. The variety of the issue is striking: gritty urban myth alongside comic elegy, lyric fragmentation alongside realist fiction, the formal compression of the triolet alongside expansive prose poems. What unifies them is that they are all, in some way, threshold pieces.<\/h4>\n

Michael Henson’s “River Dog and the Shadow Man” offers the issue’s harshest version of breakthrough. The young man begins with the arrogance of someone who thinks deprivation can be tested and then exited at will. He wants “to look rock-bottom life in the face,” but rock bottom looks back. River Dog, his mentor and anti-sage, strips away the young man’s fantasies of ownership, freedom, and control. “I got nothing,” River Dog says, and elsewhere: “A man can’t get more free than that.” But Henson does not romanticize this freedom. By the end, the young man’s “test” has become a heroin habit, and River Dog’s freedom ends in the flooded creek. The breakthrough comes when pride finally cracks and the young man is ready to seek help.<\/h4>\n

David Pace’s “Frank’s Buick” is gentler but no less concerned with thresholds. It begins with a perfect sentence: “I’m not sure when my late father-in-law’s town car became our car.” The essay follows that uncertainty across years, cities, repairs, resentments, and imagined conversations. The Buick is a car but it is also an inheritance. Pace’s relationship with Frank improves after Frank’s death, as the car becomes a medium through which the two men continue speaking \u2014 through Brooklyn traffic, up the West Side Highway, past Ground Zero, and eventually into the Utah desert. Near the end, on the salt flats, Pace imagines finally parting company with Frank and driving on in what is now, unmistakably, “my Buick.” That\u00a0 essay’s pleasure lies in how long and how honestly Pace holds the uncertainty before that belonging arrives.<\/h4>\n

Shari Zollinger’s “Found” gives the issue one of its purest formal breakthroughs. The essay enters “psychedelic space” through a microdose on the morning of an eclipse\u2014Alice falling through, the red pill and blue pill hovering at the edges\u2014and searches backward along memory’s “thread-gauzy timeline” for a self left waiting in a Taipei hospital. The strangeness of the piece, its Alice-and-Matrix layering, its eclipse-as-wormhole logic, enacts a consciousness genuinely working at the borders of what language can hold. What is found is not restored intact. Instead, the abandoned self is allowed to burn, scatter, and become movable. “It was okay to let a piece of me die,” Zollinger writes. “It was okay to blow away.” Her author’s note makes the connection explicit: the piece itself emerged from a breakthrough into the lyric essay, “at the crossroads between breakdown and breakthrough.” Form and subject meet as the essay’s fragmented, luminous movement enacts the kind of healing it describes.<\/h4>\n

In Christina Robertson’s “Exhaling Carefully,” breakthrough arrives through embarrassment, correction, and human contact\u2014and by Robertson resisting the tidier version of that story. Robert is a prickly observer of his immigrant neighbors who gets corrected into enlightenment. But he is also a man carrying decades of wreckage: a daughter he terrified, a marriage he dissolved through drinking, a self-image as romantic artist-explorer that has curdled into self-pity and complacency. His aesthetic attention to the neighbors\u2014painting Radha as “Princess Devi,” imagining dignified histories for the people whose noise interferes with his meditations\u2014is real artistic perception compromised by vanity and condescension. When the boy Aarev tells Robert that his turbaned-elephant drawing is an “assum-shin” and a “stereo-tyfe,” something shifts: “It dawned on him how misled he’d been.” But this is not the whole breakthrough. It is the catalyst for a longer labor\u2014going back to the library, standing up at the AA meeting, planning to arrive Saturday without escape hatches, deciding to give Aarev his worry stone. The story’s deepest pull is the thread connecting Robert’s guilt about his daughter Pauline to his tentative, uncertain care for this boy: what he failed to do for one, he is trying, with no guarantee, to do for the other.<\/h4>\n

The poems condense these types of movements into lyric flashes. Mike Wilson’s “This Horse Is the Boss of Me” imagines breakthrough as surrender to an unseen force. “An opening \/ in the ground \/ in my chest” leads to another world\u2014not surreal so much as visionary, the landscape “mind-blind,” the speaker moving through “frictionless pixelation \/ intimate \/ as my retina”\u2014and the poem closes in trust: the speaker allows the horse “to carry me \/ where I \/ should go.” Coven Grannick’s triolet, “When He Had to Travel,” turns repetition into revelation. “I remember how I’d pat the sheets\u2014 \/ dark green\u2014when he was gone,” she writes; the author’s note explains that the poem marks the night she knew she wanted to marry the man she was dating, later written during his final illness, so that absence and presence, early love and late grief, inhabit the same repeated lines simultaneously. Stephen Ruffus’s poem holds a different doubleness: the dead son appears as both man and child, “as though from a long absence.” Dennise Gackstetter’s “At the End of October” offers perhaps the quietest breakthrough: the speaker cannot see the cranes overhead, but continues “to listen long after their voices faded away”\u2014a posture of sustained, undeceived attention that the issue keeps returning to in different registers.<\/h4>\n

THE NOMAD, co-edited by Ken Waldman and Rachel White and published in the Mountain West, grew out of a conviction that worthy work exists “perhaps not entirely in step with trends of the moment but in conversation with a larger tradition.” That description fits this issue well. The magazine describes its vision as “a space that both embraces and transcends geography”\u2014and geography, in these pages, is less a location than a set of conditions: the particular pressures, losses, and openings that make a person ready to move through.<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE NOMAD’s Issue 4, “Breakthroughs,” is more about the through than the break. There are few explosive moments, not many trumpet blasts. Instead, the issue gathers fiction, memoir, lyric essay, prose poem, and poetry\u2014fifty-four pieces by twenty-seven writers\u2014around breakthrough as passage, as a moving through. The variety of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot-2026-05-12-at-7.23.43-PM.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-20 06:03:54","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102927"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102975,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102927\/revisions\/102975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}