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Acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Jean Thompson (The Year We Left Home) guest-edits this issue of prose and poetry. As she writes in her introduction, \"The thing that gives me hope for the enterprise of writing is the incredible variety and vigor of the terrain.\" With poets ranging from Erin Belieu to the Uruguayan Tatiana Orono, and stories that move from the eerie (Peter Rock's dreamlike story of a mysterious stalker, \"Go-Between\") to the comic (Elizabeth McCracken's story \"Hungry,\" about an overweight young girl) to the tragic (Dan Chaon's \"What Happened to Us,\" about a family transformed by fostering a disturbed child), Thompson's issue celebrates writers as they \"grapple or dance with the world we live in, reflect or distort it, embrace or escape it.\" The issue also features Jesse Lee Kercheval's Plan B essay about learning to play the accordion (\"Welcome to Hell\"), and an exploration of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities by John Domini.

Meanwhile, too many conversations go on too long, with no particular emotional content or outcome. New characters, who later turn out to be insignificant, are described in what feels like a fuss of detail. And when people say \"well, screw him\" or \"screw you,\" it begins to seem not so much vernacular as just plain lazy. Maybe most disappointing of all, [Jane]'s blank-outs never truly earn their narrative keep. Whether seizures or premonitions, they lend the novel little forward momentum. In fact, cut these red herrings altogether, and it's possible you'd be left with a more robustly complex piece of work. I sometimes feel -- and please forgive the gross oversimplification -- that when it comes to engaging a reader, there are just two types of novels. First, there are the mysteriously deft ones that convince you from Page 1, exerting some magical force that arrests all critical powers. Then there are those that earn your attention more gradually, beating you into submission through the sheer energy, quantity and scope of their detail. However hard you try to resist, they won't let go. \"O.K.,\" you shout -- hands over ears -- \"I believe you, I really do, and I care!\" It should not be read as criticism to say that [Jean Thompson]'s new novel, \"She Poured Out Her Heart,\" falls firmly into the second category.