There is News Along the Ohio River
The latest from Beth Gilstrap and River River Books.
Happy Day-Before-Publication-Day to Beth Gilstrap! Today, Monday, February 23rd 2026, is one day away from the official publication date of her latest collection, There is News Along the Ohio River, a series of dream-like nonfiction micros, out from River River Books tomorrow (i.e. Tuesday, February 24th, 2026.) I had the opportunity to read it in advance and I highly recommend it without reservations. Now, if that’s all you need, great. Go ahead now and purchase it. Support great writing from a great writer and a great independent publisher.
But if I may expound.
These are nonfiction pieces. Some are paragraphs, some a few paragraphs, each with varied poetics that knot the prose to the overall meaning, the theme. Well, let me say it this way. A while ago, I fell in love with the work of the New York School painters, the De Koonings, Pollocks, etc. What mesmerized me about their stuff is that, at the museum, you could stand back from one of these enormous canvases and take the entire thing in. All the color, movement, depth. And you could stand there for an hour, just captivated. But, then, depending on where the museum guard might be standing, you could walk right up the canvases, a few inches away, and plainly see the material the artists used to make the pictures. Piles of paint, thick brushstrokes, little pieces of glass or cigarette butts. And there was something about seeing the parts and pieces that comprised the paintings that humanized them for me. There was a foundational quality in those parts and pieces, on display as much as the entirety of the painting, that brought the art from the realm of the ethereal to the realm of the iron and snow and pain and love of the real world. It’s much the same with Gilstrap’s essays.
In reading them, you quickly realize you’re reading the work of a great writer. Naturally. That’s apparent. Gilstrap creates an immediate interest in a unique locale, these bridges that span the Ohio River. We see and feel the concrete, the rust, the graffiti, the wildlife—both flora and fauna—, the tragedies, the heartbreak, the confusion. And, as singularly interesting as the Ohio River is, Gilstrap gives us a reason for the setting in this collection. There is heartbreak, there is tenuous love, there is an off-the-page possibility of healing and regrowth. The bridges, then, assure us that they are places too, not just to be traversed, but to be acknowledged and dwelt upon for a time. They’re not just for walking over. So much of being human takes place on the bridges themselves, and not on the one side or the other.
The unique pleasure in reading There is News Along the Ohio River is peering closely at the pieces. Take, for example, the entirety of the forty second (XLII) essay…
“There is news along the Ohio River: red tulips have risen, lemon balm is greening, reaching, getting ready for the bees, pollen gathered like yellow pompoms on thin little legs known formally as corbicula, or pollen baskets for the optimists. Bees have a heart that runs from the brain, through the thorax and down the back of the abdomen. Imagine the weight.”
There is so much literary work being done, so much poetic dexterity here. We’re nearly overwhelmed by the colors of newness. There’s a ferocity to it. The red, the green, the implied yellow of the lemon balm are all in attack mode. You, reader, must not forget them, must not underestimate their qualities, must not mistake them for only a kind of dressing. And what rhythm too (“…lemon balm is greening, reaching, getting ready for the bees…”) We’re ushered along with a lyrical centripetal force. And each of Gilstrap’s essays posses similar qualities. Never in the exact same way, and each is a discovery of its own.
I must also say this. In a present and likely future in which the standards of good art are being assailed from all directions (e.g. book bans, AI, pure laziness, oversaturation, plain bad writing, etc.), Gilstrap’s collection reminds us that good art is different, higher, closer to the divine. Work that has been evidently and truly labored over, as Gilstrap has labored over every single word here, is inherently more valuable than the cobbled slop we’re being asked to also regard as art. It isn’t. This, Gilstrap’s work, is.
Please order your copy of There is News Along the Ohio River right away. You can do that from River River’s store here. Thanks for reading!