256 pages.

Our Spring 2012 issue is distinguished by a special section on Mexico’s ongoing and far-reaching drug war, taking our readers “to the front lines with pieces by Mexico’s bravest and most talented independent journalists. Anyone who reads it will get a strong dose of Mexico’s darkness, but also of the exhilarating new winds gathering force every day.” (Francisco Goldman).

Featuring compelling writing, published in English for the first time, from internationally acclaimed Mexican journalists and novelists, the issue includes reportage from Diego Enrique Osorno, who tries to puzzle together what exactly happened when the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel clashed in the border town of Ciudad Mier, and from Marcela Turati, who visits a morgue in a northern Mexico and talks to the desperate people who have long been searching for their missing loved ones; an essay from Cristina Rivera Garza on finding reasons to write amid the mayhem; and a stunning short story from the late Daniel Sada, who relates the dilemma that arises when three heads are discovered in an ice chest during a cartel party.

Plus these stories:

• Peter Orner’s “Meditations on the late 1970s”—on the peculiar imaginary world, one involving a fictitious town government, shared between two young brothers in Chicago
• Wanda Coleman’s “In This Annihilated Place”—on the sole white family living in a Watts neighborhood just after the ’65 riots
• Don Water’s “Deborah”—a disturbing tale of a woman who rescues animals and her excruciating visits to a cougar at a zoo
• Elena Mauli Shapiro’s “Commuting”—the melancholy story about a crumbling office affair
• Lindsay Thordarson’s “What Will Do”—a 19th-century teen makes a life alone in the woods, with the help of her drawing abilities
• And debut works from new talents Patrick Coleman and Benjamin T. Miller

Verse from Philip Aijian, Kathleen Boyle, David Hernandez, Jonathon Keats, Ada Limon, D.A. Powell, Corey Van Landingham, Renee K. Nelson, Henry W. Leung, and W.S. Di Piero, whose poem “There Were Such Things” won a 2013 Pushcart Prize. And in commemoration of the Catharine Clark Gallery’s 20th anniversary, we reproduce a sampling of work from their renowned artists: Sandow Birk, Timothy Cummings, Stephanie Syjuco, Travis Somerville, Anthony Discenza, Chester Arnold, Packard Jennings, Andy Diaz Hope, and Walter Robinson.