Viola Clune We, The Unseen: A Note on Genre and the Unseen In the 12th track of Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter—2025’s Grammy-winning Album of the Year—Linda Martell quips “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” The 84-year-old Black female country…
Book Review The Too-Tidy Frame: James, by Percival Everett There is a lie that structures every level of our discourse and which, manifested now by bite-sized bullet points, reflects the all-too-“tidy” frame that Percival Everett, in his novel, James, aims…
Albert Kapikian Editor's Note NOTES ON ISSUE 75 A community college is a commons tasked with the search for the common interest. Montgomery College, through its literary journal, has been tasked also with the search for another kind of…
Hereinafter Denied, Hereinafter Forgotten: No Sign by Peter Balakian and History of Forgetfulness by Shahé Mankerian Artsakh is a sign, as is Mt. Ararat, where, according to the Biblical account, Noah’s Ark found its final rest. Genocide, the neologism coined…
An Imagination for Reality Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World and Elizabeth Hazen’s Girls Like Us Washington’s Literary Monuments: Mark Merlis’s American Studies by Albert Kapikian Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World and Elizabeth Hazen’s Girls Like Us…
Editor’s Note: A Reconciliatory Approach by Albert Kapikian (photo by Rochelle Cohen) The new heresy is to assume good faith, but since Potomac Review comes out of a community college, where we have no principle of sorting, where there is,…
Editor’s Note: Commonspire My reach exceeded my grasp, but when I coined the title to this note in an essay on the Potomac Review website in October 2016, the neologism was meant to suggest a vision for the future that…
Editor’s Note: Cadence and Disclosure by Albert Kapikian Like other literary journals, a literary journal that issues out of a community college issues out of a collaboration between the arts and the humanities, between, that is, writers and editors, those…
In Alan Rossi’s, Mountain Road, Late at Night, Nathaniel, from whose perspective the first quarter of the novel is told, has just lost his brother, Nicholas, who he remembers as having had “beautiful and ardent thoughts about life,” but who…
