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The Ocotillo Review, based in Austin, Texas, showcases the best in Shortform Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction. While we are Texas-based, we welcome and publish submissions from across the country and internationally. It's all about the quality of the work.

A collection of short fiction, poetry, and essays from an international perspective. Juried selections from post-graduate editors assembled in a thematic compilation - entertaining, thought provoking, and educational.

The work of a young 1st generation American poet with strong cultural ties to India. Her obsevations on social dynamics exhibits skill and insight beyond her years.

Roger Hart writes with savvy, grace, and abiding tenderness about people in love and in trouble. He's an enchanter casting his spell with impeccable sentences and exquisite details. He knows that characters only truly exist when they interact and entangle with other characters. What ingenuity on these pages, what nerve, and what an exhilarating collection of stories Mysteries of the Universe is. And in this universe, future events can influence the present, characters pop in and out of existence, and premonitions upstage reason. I have a feeling that you'll read this collection in one sitting and that you'll start reading the stories slowly, as I did, so they will not end. This book is a revelation. And now I'm going to read it again.- John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote

The 13th volume of The Ocotillo Review. This theme of Alternative Family occurred organically through the selections presented by our team of editors and editorial assistants. It is the most diverse and expansive edition we have released in our seven years of publishing international poets, writers, and journalists.

In The Geography of First Kisses, one finds portrayals of quiet elegance reminiscent of early-20th-century art films. The fourteen ethereal stories are tethered to the bays and backwaters of southern Louisiana, the fields of Iowa and Oklahoma, the pine woods of Florida, places where girls and women seek love and belonging, and instead discover relationships as complicated, bewildering, even sorrowful. A New Orleans girl spends a year collecting boyfriends and all the while considers the reach of her misadventures; a newlywed couple travels to Tulsa in search of a horse gone missing, perhaps more in search of themselves; a new mother is faced with understanding the miracles and mysteries of faith when her baby disappears; a young daughter travels to Tallahassee with her mother, trying to unravel the meaning of love crossed with abandonment. Saturated with poetic illusion and powered with prose of a dark, pulsating circuitry, the collection combines joy, heartache, and tenacity in a manner sorely missed in today's super-structured literature.

Since 2013, Dan Smart has devoted himself to writing a poem a day. After the 3,000+ poems this project has so far produced, he has proved that the old masters were right when it comes to the value of ritual: daily devotion invests "the ordinary" with curious new powers. Crafting unseen connections between mundane objects and events of this world-the rotting flesh of an avocado, the sound of a bell not being rung, the decision to either crush or spare a spider-Smart uses sparse poetic forms and wry humor to cultivate moments of genuine surprise. The Flowers of Nonchalance gathers a few dozen of these simple-yet-eclectic poems and arranges them into a snapshot of a turning year in his life as an artist-from spring through winter, and back again to spring. Recalling at times the inventive economy of William Carlos Williams, the haunting musicality of Emily Dickinson, and the backyard mysticism of Wallace Stevens, each of these short missives reads like an air-tight Logic proof; the conclusion? That existence is as funny as it is interesting-as strange as it is precious.

Not Yet a Jedi is the 2022 winner of the Saguaro Poetry Prize.Partridge Boswell's Not Yet a Jedi rockets through the late 20th century and into the present with its diction in hyperdrive, fusing whimsy to seriousness, blunt statement to syntactic complexity. These tautly constructed poems evoke the aspirations, fresh-cut grass smell, and low-level depression that characterize cookie-cutter suburbia-and the ways the adults who grew up there cling to a played-out, optimistic vision of the American Dream despite themselves. Poems span a range of emotional registers, but even in their pensive moments, they are so kinetic that their full force can only be appreciated if you read them while popping wheelies on your BMX or grooving under the splattering light of a disco ball, where the melancholy will still find you, as "your black-lit heart blooms luminous in the blue dark."

Iconic San Antonio poet, Charles Darnell completes a multi-decade quest to create character and motivation for the famous, infamous and lesser known characters from the worlds all-time best-selling and most controversial book using the language of poetry. Did you ever wonder what motivated these well-known Biblical figures to pursue the often strange and violent methods and interactions they chose? Have you given thought to why the minor characters often played such a major role in these stories? Do you dare to question God? Here you will find the nuanced motivation of demons, angels, and commoners caught up in this macabre dance we only thought we were familiar with.

A collection of 43 literary artists from around the world contribute to this 11th compilation of fiction, poetry, and truth. The thematic content organically developed around spirituality. The authors and poets represented include the winners of the Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize and the Chester B. Himes memorial Short Fiction Prize.

This collection of mostly very short stories will take the reader to common settings with everyday folks but the perspective and social interaction between characters comes from a unique and often quite strange perspective. Impossible Naked Life will take you on a bizarre journey that you won't soon forget. "The energy coursing through Impossible Naked Life is barely contained by the page. Mostly told in quick bursts, these stories pack more sharp images and lines of deep beauty and intensity in four pages than most authors can fit in twenty. Some of the stories are abstract and surreal and others feature small "normal" moments told with such precision that the real world somehow becomes even stranger. The people in these stories will stay with you, and I get a feeling I couldn't shake them loose even if I tried."- Richard Z. Santos (judge, 2021 Acacia Prize)

Unaccustomed to Grace is a collection of short stories where the unlikely outcome for irresponsible acts and unfortunate events result in redemption. Bannatyne''s mastery of the written word informs these stories of common conflict with a brilliantine magic rarely found in contemporary literature. From the unlikely romance between a zoo employee and a spiritualist/activist to the redemption of a grandmother''s long-rehearsed vengeance, these heart-warming stories are the contemporary fables we need in these stressful days.

Renee Rossi's exceptional collection of poetry is a gift in defining how courage opens the arc of survival. Motherboard explores compelling internal and external connections about familial bloodlines primarily related to generations of mother/womanhood. Deeply stirring narrative-threads consider observations through the nature of the "farm & the forest," clinical and holistic medicine, and reconstructing myths. Rossi's brilliant lyricism and cinematic lens share personal truths and grit about how one might heal the past and future -- or shape a pathway for sustainable resilience.

Chapbook, the poetry of GeneX Cuny. The text includes poems written from 2018 through 2021 in a mostly rhyming format. They include observations of societal mores as well as some that could be described as political statements.

"In the 'Razor Wire Wilderness' of Stephanie Dickinson's exquisitely lyrical portrayal of female incarceration - intimately researched by becoming pen pals with many inmates over many years - she reveals her own dark attraction and identification with Krystal Riordan. ... It is not, 'There but for the grace of God go I, ' but because of Dickinson's grace and amazing god-given talent that she is able to take us into the heart, mind, memory and imagination of Krystal, passive accomplice to a nightmarish crime. In prison where there is no weather, Dickinson manages to encompass the great Outside; her rendering of Maximum Compound is the opposite of a claustrophobic read. Like Hamlet, bound in a nutshell, Dickinson is king of Infinite space, Infinite empathy, and the Infinite beauty of bad dreams."Part memoir, part true crime, and part meditation on the resilience of the human spirit, Razor Wire Wilderness is penned with precision and grace. Due to Stephanie Dickinson's unique ability to identify and magnify the personal details that are often unknowingly or willingly overlooked, this book transforms the way we see not only the complexities of a tragic crime but also the way violence becomes embedded in our lives and collective social systems. At its core, this is a story about friendship, but it is also about survival, what happens to us, and what we get to decide during our brief existence. It is about the way we live when we are caged, be that literally or figuratively, and the beckoning light of genuine human connection."