Editors’ Page

Twelve years ago, with the support of Steven Schwartz, now Colorado Review’s fiction editor, and his wife, Emily Hammond, we founded the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction as a way to honor the memory of Liza Nelligan, a dear friend and Colorado State University English Department alumna. Nelligan passed away in 2003, and the Prize seeks to celebrate her life, work, and love of creative writing by awarding an honorarium and publication each year to the author of an outstanding short story. This year’s winner, featured in this issue, is Luke Dani Blue’s “Bad Things That Happen to Girls,” selected by Lauren Groff, who says of this story,

The magic in this story is subtle and slow-building and so unprepossessing that, while reading it, I understood I was holding my breath only when the story started to swim before me. Poor Birdie, poor Tricia! This story’s wisdom resides in the complicated web of emotion between mother and daughter, the gnarl of tenderness and fury and frustration and embarrassment, of primal loss and of overwhelming love. It’s a story that aches with truth and desperation, and I marvel at the way Blue ratchets up the motion, breath by breath, to the story’s logical but stunning end.

Also in the fiction section, we have Robyn Carter’s “Orphan Girl Mine,” in which a woman meets the brother she never knew she had as they attend to the remains of the father who abandoned them both. Christopher Torockio joins us with “Township,” the story of two people who form a decades-long bond over the death of a stranger. And in Melissa Yancy’s “Hounds,” a reconstructive-surgery program coordinator and the former patient with whom she’s had an affair have an uncomfortable reunion.

In nonfiction, Jan Becker finds solace in The Tibetan Book of the Dead as she works through her grief in “Inside the Chönyid Bardo.” Dionisia Morales contemplates the meaning of home as she and her husband consider moving to Germany. And Ira Sukrungruang recalls his first visit, as a very young boy, to Thailand in “Eat.”

It’s an issue packed, as usual, with compelling stories, essays, and poems. Please join us, as the chill begins to creep into the air, and wrap yourself in these pages.

—stephanie g’schwind

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star,” says Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, and perhaps he is right. Amid the disheartening maelstrom of the refugee crisis in Europe, the disintegrating state of Syria, isis, Russia’s military bluster, Donald Trump and his cohort leveling multiracial civility, and a new round of poetry wars, there is reason to think chaos a very powerful black hole. But then there is Pope Francis’s visit to America, a candid message of love and tolerance and, indeed, recognition: climate change is real; we are the makers of our own star. And a courage teacher—C. K. Williams—passes into Night, reminding us of the grace of attention:

The space within me, within which I partly or possibly mostly exist: so familiar it is yet how little I know it, I’m not even sure of its volume; sometimes it expands behind me like a wing, sometimes it contracts, and while the world is often in it, it’s rarely congruent with it.

Such a strange interval: I wonder if this is what the last, indivisible instant before death might be, before the absolutely unluminous absence. To open one’s tangible eyes just then, as I do now: light, shapes, color! Close again; darkness without end, but wait, still glow, still sentience: bliss.

(“Space,” Repair)

You will find evidence of spaces near and far in this issue’s poetry. From the acute forest alchemy of Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s “Charms for Ash” to Brenda Iijima’s bead on our “sprawling carceral state” to Auesta Safi’s visionary “immigrant train” there’s reason to hope attention might, if not save us, pass the time tangibly. There’s a smattering of “translation”—Spencer Lenfield’s Leopardi and Lucretius, Jesse Morse’s “Ezra” series, Christopher...