NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
“too much
of a good thing
is a good thing
that’s the secret”
—Maslen Bode Ward, “The Secret”
If you happen to teach or be a student at Bennington College in rural Vermont, it is hard to avoid reading or at some point talking about alumna Donna Tartt’s blockbuster 1992 novel The Secret History, a thriller about impressionable college students whose desire to have a richer, more intense experience of life than those around them—a longing to matter—causes them to fetishize the history and culture of ancient civilizations, to break social norms and engage in wild bacchanals, and also, to commit murder. Tartt’s novel is a book of secrets, transgressions, and mysteries that connect the main characters’ present to the generations that preceded them, the written and unwritten past, the story of the rise and fall of civilizations. The fifteenth issue of Bennington Review means to perform a similar undertaking, as its various poems, short stories, flash fictions, and essays are interested in public and private histories, shared and individual traumas that consume us as we try to bury them, the intersections between the personal and the global, ancient violence and the well-worn path from Babylon and the Old Kingdom of Egypt, which we return to in the poems of Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer and Brandon Downing, to the 20th and 21st century Ages of Exhaust and Exhaustion that appear in Rick Snyder’s poem “Ages of Man.”
“Recent American history is so very American,” Mark Nowak points out in Again, his long poem on gun violence, excerpted here. Yes, and recent American history is also so very Babylonian and Egyptian and German. Politically and privately, there are the stories we tell ourselves as we rewrite what actually happened, and then there is what actually happened, as inconvenient as the silent facts may be. It’s hard to acknowledge sometimes, as Rob Schlegel points out in “Another Green World,” that “You are not / Your generation's self-flattering notions / Of imminent collapse, nor history's / Ultimate protagonist.”
The Secret History issue of Bennington Review begins with a startling, unsettling photograph by Jonathan Kline, and goes on to include work by 71 poets, seven fiction writers, and eleven fiction writers, as well as a conversation poet Camille Guthrie conducts with the poet and translator Donna Stonecipher. We are thrilled and grateful to have as this issue’s guest fiction editor the writer Libby Flores, who serves as the Associate Publisher of the journal BOMB. We also thank our outgoing managing editor Katrina Turner, who shepherded the magazine through nine issues, and are excited to announce our new managing editor, the poet Delilah Silberman.
Michael Dumanis, with Delilah Silberman
North Bennington, VT and Brooklyn, NY
February 2026