Tampa Review 47/48

Every work of literary and visual art can be said to offer an experience of “augmented reality,” making us aware of hidden dimensions, perceptions, and truths about our world that heighten and enhance our understanding. This issue of Tampa Review, however, presents Augmented Reality for the first time in a digital mode. The cover art by Kendra Frorup includes a gateway to a virtual reality, and readers with the Aurasma app on an iPhone, iPad, or smart device can view the emptiness within that arch as a threshhold to moving images from Turks and Caicos in the Bahamas.
Augmented Reality is only one of many “firsts” in this double issue. It’s also the first time that we have highlighted our own University of Tampa art faculty as the featured artists for the issue.

One phrase that comes to mind with respect to the contents is “foreign and domestic,” a term pointing two ways that turns up in federal swearing-in ceremonies and in oaths of citizenship. It also resonates throughout this issue, from the homeland security of “A Family of Interest” in James Gordon Bennett’s Danahy Fiction Prize story to Martin Cloutier’s disturbing “World Brought Close,” with its images of need and vulnerability. Foreign and domestic explorations can stretch the boundaries of the worlds we know, and this issue probes both home and outer limits. Reality is continuously augmented in this issue, cover to cover, rolling out in unexpected directions and connections near and far—spokes on a wheel, cords and ties that bind, new ways of reading that open the doors of perception.