“Weightless”
“Let a baleen of laughter
disenmesh itself and land sweetly in my
loves’ open mouths.”
Volume 55 Issue 2 | Fall 2025
Bodies In and Out of Control
Guest Edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham
“This themed issue of The Iowa Review grapples with the dynamic forces of bodies in and out of control.” —from the Editor’s Note
On our cover: Katherine Bradford, Fear of Waves, 2015. Oil on canvas, 84 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist and CANADA gallery. Photograph by Joe DeNardo.
Fiction
Mary Kate McGrath | Camp Deb
Silvia Spring | Cuentos de Hoy
CP Chang | The Ghosts of John and John
Aaron H. Aceves | Visions
Elizabeth Vidas | iWalden
Adrienne G. Perry | War Stories
Claire Tafoya | Return to Form
Michael Colbert | Why We Broga
Charlie Sorrenson | The Thing About Breasts
Chidima Anekwe | Eye Candy
Will Alden | Matthew
Fatima Ann Sulaiman | Beggars
Chimezie Chika | The Silent Boy
Poetry
Samantha Stevens | Weightless
Aaron Landsman | From Box Set, Summer Rental EP
Emily Skaja | Wards for October | It’s the stage of grief where | God Save Hibiscus Child
Laura Adrienne Brady | The First Home Is the Body
Colin Pope | (because I didn’t know what affection meant between two men) | On the Various Disciplines of Losers| Empathy | Delivering Flowers
Alix Anne Shaw | The Core Is Molten, Though the Crest Has Cooled
Scott Dalgarno | Patina | After-Math
Estelle Price | An ideal body | Waiting for the biopsy results
Rage Hezekiah | The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding
Nina Peláez | On Seeing My Birth Mother’s Occupation Listed as Poet in Her Obituary
Base | Cloister | Eve Contemplates the Mandible
M. Privitello and Claudia Cortese | Epistolary Letters
Jessica Lawson | de/li(v)e/r
Tola Sylvan | Brazilwood
Lis Sanchez | Mother to Nine-Year-Old Manuel Ruiz | From the Train: Guard Alves’s Complaint
Ibe Liebenberg | salmon factory
Nathaniel Calhoun | Potted
Suzanne Swanson | Threshold | The day—January 12, 2022
Nonfiction
Molly Higgins | Born for This
John Janelle Backman | Tic
Tippy Rex | The Short Corners
Cyrus Stuvland | Letting the Want In
Jodie Noel Vinson | Cadavre Exquis
Rebecca Stanfel | An Apostate’s Journey with Medieval Saints
Visual Literature
Harriet Y. Woodford and Steven Erickson | The Torso Project
Lisa Huffaker | Erasures from Fascinating Womanhood
Ashwini Bhasi | The Cuff
VK Preston | Dipytchs and Pieces of Loss
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