With all these poets from Copper Nickel showing up on Verse Daily and so forth, you might say "What about the fiction?
Well, here's a little horn.
Alyson Hagy, a contributor to Copper Nickel 11, has a new collection of stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, out, featuring the novella "The Sin Eaters" that appeared first in our pages, and that novella is getting special attention in the reviews, including this one from the Boston Globe:
Hagy's final and most powerful tale, "The Sin Eaters,'' captures the bewildering clashes of an earlier, wilder Wyoming through the eyes of an outsider. In 1889, a young Protestant missionary from Iowa is traveling to Fort Washakie, where he will compete with Roman Catholics and Episcopalians for the souls of the natives. Riding from one homestead to the next, he finds a gruff hospitality everywhere. Yet the people who give him berth turn out to be a complicated lot: cattle rustlers, whores, and killers, locked in unnavigable feuds with each other. Even the mixed-race mule driver who takes the young man under his wing - a hallucinatory figure with mules named Terpsichore and Betsy Ross - is far from pure of heart. He can only warn his Midwestern guest that this is no place for him.
Hagy renders this tale as vivid and surprising to readers as it is to the young preacher. She offers little explanation, simply letting the players and the landscape unfurl before us. Her Wyoming is a harsh world, but one shot through with transcendent moments, as when the traveler and his hosts raise their eyes to the night sky: "The silver hook of the moon seemed poised to lift them all into the net of heaven's stars.''
Maybe you read it here first.
