Hello and welcome to Episode #12 of PBQ’s Slush Pile! For the first time on our podcast, we are discussing fiction! Today, we will talk about a short story, “Prufrock” by Terry Dubow. We were nervous about discussing this longer format, but super excited to try it out.

In this podcast, we discuss three of Laura McCullough’s poems. The box score above is the spoiler alert: though today’s podcast crew spanned from the east coast to Iowa, included an undergrad and people who’ve done this work of editing for more than two decades, we were unanimously enamored of all three poems.

Welcome to Episode 10 of the PBQ’s Slush pile! Episode 10!!!! Can you believe it?  Thus far, we have released 10 episodes of our podcast.  We’d like to say thank you to our listeners, supporters, authors and editorial board!

All 3 of the poems on today’s episode were submitted by poet Brittney Scott.* The Abu Dhabi editors flagged Scott’s previous submissions—we wanted to publish them!—but we moved too slowly. Other publications nabbed them. So Scott sent us another batch of poems to consider and we discussed them on this special edition of “The Slush Pile,” the “all Abu Dhabi all the time edition,” featuring members of our Abu Dhabi editorial board.

First up in this episode is Todd Pierce, with “If Only You Could Remember” which had us both as lost as the speaker (in a good way) and mesmerized. Todd is currently rereading War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad, by Christopher Logue and the chapbook Weird Vocation, by Art Zilleruelo.

Both of the poems we discussed in Episode 7 were submitted for our “Monsters” Issue and both poems, Coyote and Coyotes, were written by Paul Nelson. Tantalizing and intriguing, we were “seduced into loving this animal that will eat your face,” as Tim pointed out.