We start with a pair of bunny ears and some fishnet stockings.  If there’s anybody out there—either a drooling caveman or a feminist of some narrow reactionary stripe—who still believes that a woman can’t be brainy, bookish, and knock-down sexy all at the same time, then Gabriela Anaya Valdepeña’s “Books and Bunnies,” when taken with a full dose of the author photo, should permanently rattle that particular bias.

Much of the same can be said for Mary McFarland’s “Best If Used By.”  If you see a woman baking bread and don’t think there’s anything else going on inside her head, or if it doesn’t occur to you that the bread-baking itself might be a metaphor for her yeastier impulses, then you need to be surprised by the intellectual workout that this deceptively white-bread essay will require of you.

Just as deceptive are many of our notions regarding war.  We think of it as white or black, lose or win, down or up with the thumbs.  We’re for it or we’re against it.  Christopher Allen’s “Coming Home” scatters all of these preconceptions into irrelevance.  By focusing on the personal reality of what it means when a soldier comes home—or the terrible possibility of that soldier not coming come—Allen forces us to abandon all of the leftwing or rightwing categories that we might hold going in.  Is war worth it or not?  It hardly matters when the ultimate question becomes: “Is my loved one coming home or not?”

On the domestic front, most of us already think we know what we believe about dog ownership.  There are people who think they have a deep communion with their canine friends—and then there’s Amy Holman.  Her “Lounge Act” will convince you at once that you are reading about something far deeper, far more imagistic, far more meaningful, and perhaps even far more transcendent than pet ownership.  I leave you to explore that vast consciousness for yourselves.