Barbara DeMarco-Barrett  knows there are all kinds of ways to get by.  She’s been a semi-conductor inspector, auto parts runner, and Avon lady, a baker, a waitress, and a housecleaner.  Also, a restaurant manager, crisis intervention counselor, and bookseller, not to mention a voice-over actor and television publicist. No mystery, then, that she’d wind up writing about the darker side of The Golden State. DeMarco’s debut short story collection,  Pool Fishing , published by Kelp Books, is a...

Outliving Michael by Steven Reigns Review by Maria Duarte                  Steven Reigns’s Outliving Michael  is not just a collection of poems commemorating his friendship with Michael but also a fragmentated storyline of Michael’s life. Throughout the poems fragments of Michael’s personality can be seen by the reader which is not only getting Reigns’s perspective of Michael but also Michael’s way of living.                The images on the poems are clear and concrete and give the book a...

Surfers Just Know Other Surfers by Scarlett Davis   Before the surf lesson, before the sexual assault, I had spent the night researching snake trails on the beach. Sea snakes ! It was the worst kind of internet rabbit hole to fall down while on vacation. Yet thanks to TikTok, I had conjured an image that I couldn’t shake: a snake reverse-lassoing its way down from a coconut tree, edging towards the water for a morning cold plunge, all before sunrise or the tourists. And, other than the...