This was a good edition of the monthly digest with 8 stories for the month as well as various editorials/columns, book reviews and poems.

What struck me as I read through these is that several felt like they had a better story to tell but it wasn't there. The idea was better than the telling. There are a couple of weak stories but also several better ones to balance these out. No real favorite for me among the stories, although I would probably say "Looking for Josh" by Robert Thurston if pushed. A story about an alien stranded on earth and the town where he lived his life, but the story is really about a man who grew up around Josh. Oddly, 7 of the 8 primary authors have their name on the cover. Thurston does not. One of the 4 poems I really liked: "Chimpans and Humanzees" by John Philip Johnson. "Filtered" by Leah Cypess was especially frustrating as I thought perhaps something profound was going to show up as it deals with a near future facebook type world where the feed is all important and a reporter wants to get a story through the filters to a wide audience. Looked promising until it rolled over and went to sleep with no appreciable conclusion that I could detect. The reader never even gets a clue what this important story was! sheesh

I did also like the last story, "Lost:Mind" by Will McIntosh. It's a future tech story where a man searches for the stolen pieces of a chess set that contain his wife's lost mind. Sounds strange but it was well told. ( )