At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
Bloodied, embattled, but still singing, Matthew Cooperman’s the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless addresses us: “America, aren’t you tired of being a gun ode?” In one register, a chromapoetics that examines the “red, white and blue” as an embodied, if problematic nationalism, in another, an extended ode project that conjures our troubling emblems of Empire, the poems in atmosphere—in their various configurations of apostrophe, atomization, song, dialectic, citation & eucharism—attempt to neutralize the personal, cultural and environmental dis-ease of 21st century America. Whitman, who provides the title, hovers near, reminding us of the dreams and responsibilities of freedom: “…absence, inspiration / it’s everyone’s problem.”
A durational project written over twenty years, Cooperman’s collection feels uncannily pointed at NOW. And the ode’s the hour’s vehicle. And what of the ode? An ancient three-part Greek lyric form, or could be. It could be sung, or danced, depending on the occasion, joy or lamentation. The ode is also a plea for what’s missing, a supplication through the mouth to what might deliver us from harm. Cooperman’s eighth book sings anodyne into a darkening wind.
When Maya Smith was looking for a short-term rental so she could complete a research project, she answered an ad for an $800 apartment share in midtown Manhattan. It was 2014, and while the offer sounded too good to be true, when she arrived at the building the situation proved more fortuitous than she could have imagined.
The prime tenant, Alvenia Bridges, was now down on her luck but had once rubbed elbows with Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Hall, Bill Graham, and other celebrities. In fact, for a time, Bridges was an iron-willed concert coordinator, working for The Rolling Stones and Roberta Flack. She’d earlier been a highly sought-after model thanks to her friendship with race car driver John von Neumann, a man with well-oiled connections to the rich and famous of the 1960s and 70’s.
It’s a remarkable story, and as Bridges slowly confided in Smith, the pair decided to collaborate on a memoir. The result, Reclaiming Venus – Venus was von Neumann’s nickname for Bridges–is a gossipy but intriguing look at one woman’s escape from the racism and sexism of 1950s Kansas. As the story unfolds, readers learn that she sidestepped parental abuse and neglect, a feat made possible by her grandmother. Then there’s luck–being in the right place at the right time and meeting the right people–something that was no doubt aided by the fact that Bridges was a six-foot-tall beauty.
While her decline is not as clearly detailed as her ascent, Reclaiming Venus: The Many Lives of Alvenia Bridges is nonetheless an entertaining account of one woman’s determination to live boldly and on her own terms. Moreover, despite not being a civil rights or feminist activist, Bridges always modeled chutzpah, standing up for herself and other women and challenging white male domination of the music and fashion industries. Unsung until now, Reclaiming Venus brings Alvenia Bridges to public attention. At 80, she has earned her laurels.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Editor Stephanie G’Schwind opens the Fall/Winter 2024 Colorado Review noting that, by the time readers have this issue in hand, the elections will have passed, acknowledging that “many of us are particularly on edge about what lies ahead for our country, for our world. . . So perhaps it’s not surprising that the stories and essays here are freighted with anxiety.”
Those stories include fiction by Margot Livesey, Anne-E. Wood, Sammy Stevens, Nathan Blum, nonfiction by Emily Wortman-Wunder, Sara Heise Graybeal, Nina King Sannes, as well as poetry by Victoria Chang, Katie Berta, No’u Revilla, Thea Matthews, Miguel Martin Perez, Tommy Archuleta, L M Brimmer, Antonio Lopez, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Monica Rico, Sara Lupita Olivares, E. Huges, Kim Hyesoon, Nyds L. Rivera, Ayesha Raees, and J C Talamantez.
G’Schwind closes, “These are not stories and essays in which fear and anxiety are nearly conquered. But they are works that show us how we survive our fears. As Graybeal writes, ‘I have come to make my home beside that fear.’ And perhaps that is enough.”
The Main Street Rag Fall 2024 opens with Associate Editor Jessica Hylton’s interview with singer/songwriter Keely Faile and moves on to “stories & such” by Kathy McMullen, J. Allen Nelson, Jeremy Schnee, and Mark Wolters. There is also plenty of fresh poetry by Craig Beaven, Ujjvala Bagal Rahn, Paula C. Brancato, Chris Butters, Kevin Carey, Chris Bullard, Ricks Carson, Richard Cole, Patrick Dungan, Ken Fifer, Jan Ball, Matthew Friday, Patricia L. Hamilton, Leslie Hodge, Ken Holland, Terry Huff, Brad Johnson, Jeanne Julian, Tyler Lemley, Michael Mintrom, Cecil Morris, R.H. Nicholson, Angela Patten, John Perrault, Timothy Robbins, Russell Rowland, Bradley Samore, Claire Scott, Meganne Smith, Deig Sullivan, Kevin Sweeney, Eric Torgersen, Gabriel Welsch, Richard Widerkehr, and John Zedolik. Readers will enjoy book reviews of Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss, Daybreak by Mark Smith-Soto, Caravaggio’s Kimono by Ken Fifer, Dark Souvenirs by John Amen, and Dropping Sunrises in a Jar by Melinda Thomsen by reviewers Jeanne Julian and Richard Allen Taylor.
Sarah Smarsh became well-known for her memoir Heartland, about growing up in Kansas, but she honed her craft as a writer working as a journalist. As she describes it, she’s in the last generation to receive an old-school journalism education, but she has spent her career writing for digital publications, as newspapers slashed their staffs.
This collection gathers together thirty-seven pieces she published over the past decade, almost all of which center around issues of class and/or perceptions of those who live in the Midwest, including her family. Smarsh wants readers to understand what it means to live in poverty in America, including being a member of the working poor. For example, in her piece “Blood Brother,” she talks about her brother, who followed the traditional path to success by going to college, but who ended up selling plasma to be able to pay his bills. In “Rural Route,” she even explores the importance of the postal service to those who live outside urban areas.
The other main idea that runs through her essays are people’s misperceptions of Kansas as “Trump country,” a particularly timely topic. She’s especially critical of those attached to various forms of media who live on either coast of America and portray those in the middle (when they portray them at all) through such a narrow lens.
In “In Celebration of Rare and Exquisite Accuracy from Hollywood,” she praises the show Somebody Somewhere for a realistic portrayal of people in live in Manhattan, Kansas, pointing out that the people behind the show are from the Midwest. In several essays, she reminds readers that college-educated White voters were largely behind President Trump’s election in 2016, not the supposedly uneducated rural White voters who received most of the blame.
Near the end of her collection, she also includes three more personal essays about when she considered running for public office; her husband; and her mother. Overall, the primary focus of the book is on “the unseen,” to whom she dedicates the collection. She helps readers see them in all their humanity, the goal of any good writer.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
This four-session virtual workshop will provide poets and writers of all levels, genres, and backgrounds with the tools to write from their experiences with atrocity, the traumas produced by atrocity, and the healing (personally, communally, nationally) your words can make of it. Featured Speakers include Ellen Bass, Jacqueline Osherow, Joy Ladin, Geoffrey Philp, Jehanne Dubrow, Sam Fleischacker, and Mehnaz Afridi. View flyer for more information and link to registration information.
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The MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University focuses on the study and practice of the craft of creative writing. Our program offers a variety of craft classes, literature classes, and writing workshops, all in small-group settings and taught by experienced writers who are published authors, journalists, and editors. Students can participate in several industry learning experiences, such as serving as an editorial assistant for The Lindenwood Review, our national literary journal. View flyer to learn more.
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Application Deadline: December 10, 2024 Learn more about The Kenyon Review’s Winter Online Adult Writers Workshops and apply on our website! See flyer for more info and link to our website.
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Deadline: November 30, 2024 Third Street Review, a quarterly literary journal, welcomes submissions of Flash Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Art, and Photography. If you have something wild, wooly, and wonderful, we want to see it. We value the work of individual creators—show us who you are and what you can do. In addition to being a paying publication, we promote across social media platforms and nominate for awards. Jump in—we can’t wait to meet you! View our website to learn more.
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Deadline: January 14, 2025 $2,500 honorarium & book publication. Book-length poetry manuscripts accepted until January 14, 2025 (we observe a 5-day grace period). Final judge: Craig Morgan Teicher. $28 entry fee includes one-year subscription to Colorado Review. View our flyer for more information and a link to our complete guidelines. Questions? Please email us.
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Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
In a time when women’s rights and autonomy are under siege, Unsolicited Press is dedicating 2025 to amplifying womxn’s voices in literature. Through its “Year of Womxn” initiative, the press will release a catalog exclusively featuring works by womxn writers, all marked by bold red covers. This striking color, inspired by historic feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, symbolizes liberation and rebellion, making each cover a powerful protest and a testament to womxn’s voices. “Womxn are the backbone of publishing. They create, they support, they elevate the industry but are too often sidelined. Our 2025 Year of Womxn catalog is our way of championing their unparalleled creativity and storytelling,” said the team at Unsolicited Press.
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The Colorado Authors League (CAL) supports and promotes its community of published writers while connecting with and adding value to the reading world. Formed in 1931, authors become members to: keep up with changes in the craft of writing, publishing, and marketing, gain greater visibility for their writing, join a group of like-minded people who love writing. View our flyer to see November 2024 releases by members and a link to our website.
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The 19th print issue of Booth includes interviews with Jo Ann Beard and Viet Thanh Nguyen; a comic by Jesse Lee Kercheval; nonfiction by Jerilynn Aquino, and K.S. Dyal; fiction by Mialise Carney, Courtney Craggett, Sam Fouts, Rachel Salguero Kowalsky, Justin Noga, Adrian Perez, Tim Raymond, Dan Reiter, Claire Stanford; and poetry by nicole v basta, Michael Beard , Willow James Claire, Hannah Cohen, Fee Griffin, Naomi Leimsider, Hannah Marshall, Calgary Martin, Erin Pinkham, Maggie Yang, and Mimi Yang.
Included with this issue is Table Talk &. Second Thoughts a new memoir in prose poems by Michael Martone, serving up toothsome anecdotes of brief encounters with other writers. Each impromptu sketch, spanning 1976 to 2016, traces a memory menu of quotidian details, slightly seasoned, glimpses of the daily downtime between all the bon mots.
43 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
And just like that, November is half over with already! This week in Michigan was cold, wet, and dreary or just super windy. Definitely a great time to stay indoors and work hard on finishing up your submission goals for the month! As always, NewPages has your back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities. There are several November 15 deadlines (aka today) so don’t miss out!
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our November eLitPak will be hitting inboxes next Wednesday!
Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought is published by Pittsburg State University with the expressed purpose “to discover and publish scholarly articles dealing with a broad range of subjects of current interest” to encourage “discussions of an analytical and speculative nature.” The Fall 2024 issue includes articles by Stephanie Alexander (“The Spectacular Feminine Body: (Re)Writing Maternity in Rich, Walker, and Cisneros”), Christopher Au (“‘I think of old friends’: Reflective Nostalgia in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Speculative Fiction Narrators”), Pingfan Zhang (“The Cinematic Past and Literary Present of Yan Geling’s Novel The Flowers of War [2012]), David McCracken (“Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ as Recovery Story”), Ian Hall (“Shirkers and Sophisticates: Contrasting Notions of Class, Caste, and Status in Absalom, Absalom!“) Phillip Frank & Donald Baack (“Connection? Conspiracy Theories and Influencer Marketing: An Analysis Using Core Marketing Spokesperson Characteristics”). The issue also includes a folio of thirty-seven poems by Ted Kooser.
Bennington Review Issue 13 is themed “Family Gathering,” about which Editor Michael Dumanis writes in the “Note From the Editor, “While two-thirds of Americans have attended a family reunion and over a quarter say they attend them annually, high numbers report approaching them with dread. So why do we still gather?” Contributors to this issue exploring possible answers to this question include Rachel Lyon, Douglas W. Milliken, Angela Ball, Joanna Luloff, Rick Barot, Cole Swensen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Iain Haley Pollock, Adrienne Raphel, Stella Wong, Ish Klein, and Anne Waldman, who is also interviewed by Sandra Simonds. Cover art by the Thai-Australian ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa.
The editors of Midwest Weird hope their audience will be drawn by a certain level of morbid curiosity that will make them say, “Oooh, that show is so weird…and I can’t stop listening!”
A new audio literary magazine, Midwest Weird publishes fiction and nonfiction in podcast form with new episodes released every other week during their season, and transcripts posted on their website.
Publishing since 1934 from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the mission of New Letters magazine is to discover, publish and promote the best and most exciting literary writing, wherever it might be found, and to publish and serve readers and writers worldwide. This Summer/Fall 2024 issue continues this tradition with fiction by Hema Padhu, Bryan D. Price, Scott Ditzler, Christopher Coake, Richard Bausch, essays byt Ted Kooser, Rachel Weaver, Patrick Hunt, poetry by Abbie Kiefer, Lance Larsen, Bethany Schultz Hurst, Joshua Garcia, John Gallaher, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Jacob Sunderlin, Liane Strauss, and artwork by Melanie Johnson.
For readers who enjoy holding print copy in their hands, The Baltimore Review 2024 annual print edition features poems, stories, and creative nonfiction from the Summer 2023, Fall 2023, Winter 2024, and Spring 2024 online issues. Readers are invited to visit the publication’s website to read contributors’ comments and listen to recordings of their work. Founded by Barbara Westwood Diehl in 1996 as a publication of the Baltimore Writers’ Alliance, the journal became an independent nonprofit organization in 2004. Their mission has always been “to showcase the best writing from the Baltimore area and beyond,” as they continue to explore new ways to share the world of writing, writers, and the writing life with their audience.
Katherine Stewart’s latest book,Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, draws connections between the disparate groups and individuals who have spent the last 40-plus years working to turn the US into a theocratic, authoritarian regime. The players include Evangelical/Pentecostal/Catholic churches; men’s rights activists; funders; conservative think tanks, training entities, and organizations; homeschooling and voucher supporters; conspiracy theorists; people who want to erode church-state separation; anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-LGBTQIA “family values” activists; and MAGA-supporting elected officials and jurists at every level of government.
Stewart spent years attending conservative conferences and lectures, reading their materials, and interviewing people on the right. Her eyewitness account is riveting and will terrify anyone who believes in democratic governance. Her conclusion is stark: While the right-wing coalition is fragile, the many groups that comprise its ranks are united by purpose. But they no longer simply want “a seat at the noisy table of American democracy.” Instead, they “want to burn down the house.” Moreover, she writes that the rise of the right intentionally uses obfuscation “to advance its undemocratic agenda by actively promoting division and disinformation.” Ultimately, she concludes, it’s about power.
Lies, Money, and God is a compelling read. At the same time, Stewart stresses that resistance by progressive entities and individuals can defeat the right. She urges the left to think long-term, be strategic, and relentlessly exploit contradictions in conservative unity: “Does it want small government or does it want a government big enough to share your bedroom and your body? …Does it want free speech or does it want to ban books, limit the information doctors are allowed to share with patients, and compel religious speech in public schools?”
Good questions. Stewart argues that “heightening and exposing” these contradictions will benefit both the general public and “supporters of anti-democratic reaction.” It will require hard work, she writes, but if we want to preserve the republic, it’s the only option.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The November 2024 issue of the online journal of poetry and poetics The Lake has new works by Ruth Aylett, Belinda Cooke, Seth Crook, Deborah Diemont, Judy Dinnen, Julian Dobson, Michael Durack, Jeff Gallagher, Rosie Jackson, Sheila Jacob, Charles Rammelkamp, and Hannah Stone. Readers can also discover new poets with a review of John Amen’s collection Dark Souvenirs and the unique feature “One Poem Reviews” in which poets share a single poem from recently published collection. This month, readers can explore new works by Marianne Brems, Mary Gilliland, Tom Kelly, Michael Salcman, and Kirby Michael Wright. Poet Hannah Stone offers a tribute to “grande dame of literature” Fleur Adcock (1934 – 2024).
While the current spate of book bans and censorship attempts by Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have received a great deal of attention, essayist Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality reports that even in less politically-charged times, the books we read, the movies and television shows we watch, and the video games we play, are heavily controlled by market forces, fear of upsetting the status quo, and pressures from both the right and the left to influence our viewpoints and emotional responses.
This tendency, she writes, goes back to Plato, whose Republic warned that when people encounter tales of gods or heroes “behaving badly,” they sometimes emulate their negative traits. The Greeks called such imitation “mimesis” and many joined the famed philosopher to argue that society needed “to cut the heart out of fiction: all vice, all cruelty, anything that might tempt the masses by example.”
As is obvious, this was–and is–a fool’s errand.
Gold’s text is dense, but Dangerous Fictions is a soundly reasoned dive into how fictional representations are used and interpreted. “The problem isn’t that fiction contains the power to mobilize people for good or evil,” she writes, “but the deeper problem is simply power itself: who has it and who doesn’t…In the end, what fiction does, and what it’s capable of doing, is something quite different from political action.”
Take the emergent genre of climate fiction. “Only human beings can take political action: only human beings can dismantle the existent fossil fuel infrastructure and build the new structure of energy and mitigation that will be necessary to cope with temperatures that will keep rising,” she concludes.
Indeed, she’s right: Apocalyptic narratives will not save us. Likewise, while fiction can introduce readers to people and places they’d likely never otherwise encounter, expecting this exposure to eviscerate racism, homophobia, or sexism is unrealistic. In the end, fiction is neither dangerous nor safe. It just is.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
45 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Our brief flash of unseasonably warm weather has ended, and it is back to being more seasonably chilly. Frost is greeting us in the mornings again. A great time to keep to the indoors with your favorite hot beverage of choice and keep writing, editing, and submitting. NewPages is here to help you with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the first full week of November 2024.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our November eLitPak will be hitting inboxes next Wednesday!
Designed to stimulate creative thinking, THEMA challenges writers with a unique premise for each issue. The editors ask contributors to make the premise “an integral part of the plot, not necessarily the central theme but not merely incidental.” The premise for the Autumn 2024 issue is “The Missing Piece of the Puzzle” and features stories, short-shorts, poems, and photographs by Allan Lake, Erica Hoffman, James Scruton, John Savoie, Judith Overmier, Kathleen Gunton, Larry Lefkowitz, Linda Berry, Lora Berg, Lynda Fox, Morgan Carlock Clark, Paul A. Freeman, R.G. Halstead, Robinne Weiss, Sandra Schnakenburg, and Sarah Gay Edwards. THEMA invites contributors to submit theme-related works on the following upcoming premise “The lost sock” with a March 1, 2025 deadline.
The Fall 2024 issue of The Missouri Review is themed “Hard Truths.” As Editor Speer Morgan writes in the Foreword, “Most literature goes beyond period and type and deals with something hard, elusive, or even contradictory. Its power lies in the odd beauty and coherence of this particular engagement with a subject.” Inside, readers will discover powerful works ready to engage: new fiction from Parul Kaushik, Andrew De Silva, and Joe Wilkins; new poetry from Amy Miller, Austen Leah Rose, and Talin Tahajian; and new essays from Shannon Cain, Nancy L. Glass, and Joshua Ritter. Plus an Art Feature on Otto Dix, a Curio Cabinet about Peggy Guggenheim, and a brand-new interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. Cover art: The Death of Icarus, Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889).
According to acclaimed Harvard professor, Howard Gardner, “There is in the United States (and likely elsewhere) an enormous desire to make education uniform, to treat all students in the same way, and to apply the same kinds of one-dimensional metrics to all. This trend is inappropriate on scientific grounds and distasteful on ethical grounds.”
In fact, Gardner writes that by ignoring the “multiple intelligences” of each individual, school systems fail to recognize that people learn in different ways. This not only stifles creativity, but fails to build on student strengths, inclinations, and talents.
Small wonder that so many children hate school.
But alternatives exist. In place of rigid classes where standardized testing is routine, Gardner suggests apprenticeships and project-based learning as a hands-on supplement to didactic instruction. This, he argues, builds on the differing forms of intelligence exhibited by students and allows them to find their footing in whichever intelligence sphere is dominant, whether bodily-kinetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, linguistic, logical, musical, naturalist, or spatial.
Unsurprisingly, Gardner’s definition of intelligence is broad and encompasses “the ability to solve problems and to fashion products that are valued in one or more cultural settings. ” And while he recognizes that the ability to read, write, and calculate remains imperative – and requires rote lessons – he stresses that the time spent on standardized test preparation is ill-spent. Instead, he writes, when teachers know their students, they can easily evaluate progress as part of their daily interactions.
This makes good sense.
Likewise, the 29 essays in The Essential Howard Gardner on Education argue for “individual-centered schools” that allow kids to develop by utilizing their natural affinities. It’s a persuasive, if lofty, vision centered on respect for, and nurturance of, children and the adults they’ll become. Both students and teachers would be better served if schools heeded his wisdom.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
The marks the world leaves. The 100th issue of AGNIexemplifies the engagement, nuance, and spirit that are AGNI’s trademark. As Editor William Pierce writes in the introductory essay, “This last year at the magazine has raised more questions about publishing and literature than any other since I started editing. About purpose and scope, meaning and place – about caring for community and actively recognizing how one’s own ideals can clash.” Pierce goes on to examine the role of literary magazines, belles lettres, “the tailings of New Criticism,” the question of merit, and “the radical act.”
This issue’s cover artist, Chitra Ganesh, welcomes readers with a playful visual rendering of “Sultana’s Dream,” a 1905 feminist utopian fiction by Rokeya Hossain. Inside, stories by Colin Winnette, Xueyi Zhou, and Monique Schwitter (translated by Susan Bernofsky) follow women’s subversion of the gaze, into places of throttled emotion. A bounty of poets, including Paisley Rekdal, J. P. Grasser, and janan alexandra, join the formal ingenuities of DeeSoul Carson, Danielle Pierrati, and others to reach a new intimacy with the past. And essayists Wiam El-Tamami, Elvis Bego, and Anna Badkhen bring a rigorous, compassionate seeing to their meditations on loss and conflict. All this and much more, including loads of online content not included in the print issue.
After a brief hiccup, in which an irate dragon must be placated, this MG/YA fantasy begins—as now told by Christie and her new co-author, Marcus A. Dragon.
In the land of Deweydaire, which is ruled by (anthropomorphic) dragons, things are not fair. Humans work while dragons play. Princess Meredith, a dragon, leads others in fighting against the injustice, supporting the human cause. How could she have foreseen that she, like her human friend, young Peter Porter, would fall afoul of her bully cousin, Prince Rupert? Or that he would go to such lengths to silence her voice? Will intrepid Peter and the underrated court-jester Felix be able to help Meredith break the power of an illegal spell? In this Year of the Wood Dragon, The Voice of the Wooden Dragon is an entertaining-yet-inspiring story of transformation and new beginnings.
This is Christie and Lane Waldman’s debut novel as an author-illustrator team. Christie’s stories for children may be read at Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things, Skipping Stones, and East of the Web. Lane is also a writer whose sci-fi/fantasy stories have appeared in Uncanny, Daily Science Fiction, and Capricious, among other places.
The Fall 2024 issue of the Apple Valley Review features flash fiction by Mary Grimm; short stories by Franz Jørgen Neumann and Anna Gáspár-Singer (translated from the Hungarian by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess); a piece of creative nonfiction by Annabel Jankovic; and poetry by Judith Harris, Michael Diebert, Lulu Liu, Susan Johnson, Svetlana Litvinchuk, Zhang Zhihao (translated from the Mandarin by Yuemin He), Triin Paja, Susana H. Case, and Jeff Mock. The cover artwork is by Catalan painter and poet Santiago Rusiñol.
Ahead of their 15th anniversary next year, the Amherst College-based, Whiting Award-winning literary magazine The Common presents Issue 28, featuring a portfolio of contemporary writing by Catalan women in translation. Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker says, “So few books published in the US are translations, only about 3%, with works from German, French, and Spanish making up a full 45% of that. We wanted to showcase vibrant stories and poems from a tradition that our readers might be wholly unfamiliar with. These Catalan authors are award-winning, established women, but some have never before been published in English.” This issue marks a continuation of the magazine’s commitment to publishing translated works for English-language readers.
Each spring for the past eight years, The Common has published an Arabic fiction portfolio in translation. The spring 2025 issue will feature work from Amman, Jordan. Beyond the portfolio, Issue 28 contains writing from Disquiet Prize-winning poet Iqra Khan, MacArthur Fellow Brad Leithauser, environmental economist James K. Boyce, and fiction and essay writer Douglas Koziol, among others.
Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Mighty Red, appears to be about a young woman, Kismet, who is in love with Hugo, but marries Gary Geist, who seems to be protected by a guardian angel (or perhaps by his privilege), while also following Kismet’s mother, Crystal, who works driving a truck hauling sugar beets to the plant. There’s also a subplot about Crystal’s husband (though they’re not really married), Martin, who made poor investments for the local Catholic church’s renovation fund, losing everything in the 2008 recession (or embezzling it).
The novel is about those people and the area in North Dakota where they live, and their stories are interesting enough on their own to keep the reader engaged, wondering why Kismet would make the decisions she makes, how Crystal will cope with Martin’s disappearance (and the FBI’s investigation into that disappearance), and what secret Gary is hiding from Kismet.
It’s what characters don’t know or willfully ignore that truly matters, though, as Erdrich shows the effects humanity has on the planet, as well as on each other. Gary’s family signed a contract to raise only genetically-modified sugar beets, ones that will withstand the weedkiller RoundUp, refusing to see the effects that deal will have on their land and themselves. Americans willfully overlook the bailout of the banks, while people lose their houses, as well as church renovation funds. The country has always overlooked the way they treated Indigenous people, taking their land as well as their lives, leaving them with little of either, well into the twenty-first century.
Erdrich uses the sugar beets—and sugar, in general—as a metaphor for what we do to the planet and to each other. What the characters believe will be sweet in the short-term has long-term consequences, while the difficult decisions are the ones that lead to meaningful relationships. And all the while, the Red River runs through their lives, unchanging, ever-flowing, always changing.
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich. HarperCollins, October 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
46 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Spooky season has come to an end! If you are on a sugar high from all of the candy or goodies consumed between last night and today and just want to dive right into writing, editing, and submitting, NewPages has your back with our first weekly roundup of November 2024.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our October 2024 eLitPak is now available!
Writers need to be voracious readers, and there’s no better place to find the freshest works out there than the New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!
Each month, NewPages.com offers readers a round-up of new issues with content blurbs for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
By “digging deep / in [her] bone memory” with “unfailing hands,” Cree poet Rosanna Deerchild offers readers She Falls Again. In her third collection of poems, Deerchild devotes her attention to “cultural storytelling” and “sing[s] honour songs” while “carry[ing] / her broken notes” through “the voices / of [her] mother / her mother and hers.” The songs and stories are “history mementoes”:
“it is written on my mother’s residential school skin it is whispered by my grandmother’s tb ghost it is the lonely grave of my grandfather in your field of honour it is the target on my back”
“[L]ooking madder than a broken treaty,” “the-woman-who-falls-from-the-sky was an indian woman.” But hers is not mental illness; it is the intense rage of a “normal person” in an impossible situation where one person accuses the other of a fault which the accuser bears: “they call us savage / while they ravage // the earth our mother.” To the dominant/mainstream culture, an “indian woman” is “disney porn” and “a body of land conquered.” The “burial mounds // sharp and waiting.”
The poet “gathers all her grief” around Indigenous women who are “not /missing / just not here,” and for whom there is no explanation for “why so many / of just-us go without justice.” On the violence toward Indigenous women, she will “be silent no more.”
Rosanna Deerchild is “the returning voice / from the silence // the telling / story” of the women of her matrilineal line. Their “stories are scars [she] turns to stars / set free in the sky of telling.”
In She Falls Again, women rise up,
“making their way back to the front
making their way to lead”
In her “strong woman song,” Rosanna Deerchild “writes [women] alive.
She Falls Again by Rosanna Deerchild. Coach House Books, October 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Fall is the time to fatten up your reading list. To help you achieve that goal, check out the October 2024 New Books Received. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
In Blue on a Blue Palette, Lynne Thompson sings “Blues got me and gone” to “Say woman,” to claim her voice, her yes, and to say no. To “arrange a resistance,” the poet speaks with candor about the female body, desire, and aging, speaks from “anguish” about male violence against females and police violence against people of color, and, determined not to “fail history,” she claims her role as “a daughter” who has “livedto tell you this” about the “Blue Water” “sorry with our bones.” Dear Reader, “how the choices are few for / those who ignore women in revolution.”
To “forsake the grim, / or shake the shadows,” Thompson “practice[s]” in poems in a variety of forms from abecedarian and villanelle to cento. By my count, there are nine centos in the collection. What the ekphrastic form is to painting, the cento is to poetry. Derived from the Latin word “patchwork,” the cento offers the poet an associative compositional mode and a formal device by which she recontextualizes the writing and accentuates the voices of poets Ai, Wanda Coleman, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, and Sonia Sanchez, among others, as relevant, even essential, in lives “long as this.”
“Say history. Claim. Say wild.” As resistance engenders insistence, the poems of Blue on a Blue Palette “praise” survival, suggesting Lucille Clifton’s lines: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” Like Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” among other poems, Thompson’s poems express strength of self.
Celebrating her identity as woman and poet of color, acknowledging the “unnumbered regrets” of history, and honoring the friendship of poets in life and on the page, Blue on a Blue Palette is Lynne Thompson’s “praise-song.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Discover Megacity Review, a literary and arts journal that fuses the dynamic energy of Warhol’s pop culture legacy with the visionary brilliance of John Humble’s cityscapes. Featuring powerful contributions like Lynn Lieu’s moving narrative on identity in “Eyebrows,” the journal captures the pulse of urban life and its underrepresented voices. Through a unique blend of visual art and storytelling, Megacity Review pushes boundaries and reshapes how we see modern cities. Dive into a publication that celebrates creativity, diversity, and bold expression. Order your copy today and be part of this cultural conversation: www.megacityreview.org.
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 29th issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 150,000 readers in 150 countries, and over 1,000 contributors from 52 countries, already know; the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
When Auburn State Prison opened in 1816, prisoners were forced to do unpaid work in several for-profit industries: making furniture or manufacturing carpets, combs, carriage lamps, or animal harnesses. Harvard history professor Robin Bernstein calls it “penal capitalism,” and her riveting book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, tells the story of inmate William Freeman, a free-born Black teenager who was incarcerated from 1840-1845 for stealing a horse, a crime he denied.
From the start, Freeman bristled at having to labor without pay and opposed the prison’s nighttime solitary confinement, enforced silence, beatings, and water torture for worksite infractions. His resistance escalated after a guard battered Freeman so severely that his eardrum shattered and his temporal bone was damaged. This left him deaf and intellectually impaired – but still so enraged that he sued the prison for unlawful imprisonment and back wages after he was released. The lawsuit failed. Likewise, his attempts to find gainful employment.
Frustrated, Freeman began collecting weapons and in March 1846, he entered the home of George and Mary Van Nest, white people he barely knew, and killed both adults and a child. He then went to another home and killed again. Although Freeman subsequently tried to escape, he was quickly apprehended.
Freeman’s trial pitted those who favored execution against those who favored life imprisonment and prompted a slew of racially charged arguments about Black moral depravity and inferiority. Moreover, whether Freeman was insane, inherently criminal, or a victim of anti-Black prejudice took center stage. Freeman never testified. Although he was sentenced to hang, he died of tubercular phthisis at age 22.
Bernstein masterfully transports contemporary readers to the 19th century and details how popular culture sensationalized the murders and trial. She also depicts the city of Auburn’s development and charts the benefits of the prison economy for local townspeople.
Two hundred-plus years later, prisons continue to benefit. Auburn is now the oldest continually operating maximum-security prison in the US; today’s inmates earn just 65 cents per hour for their labor.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
In the expanded edition of Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women 1960 to 2023, Mojdeh Bahar has selected and translated the poetry by one hundred and four Persian women poets born after September 1941. The bilingual Persian and English anthology features poems that have not previously appeared in a book and include classical Persian poetic forms such as ghazals, do-beti (couplets), and robai’i (quatrains), though most of the poems have been written in free verse’s open form.
Here, an arresting quatrain by Fariba Arabnia:
“I am fine. Just like a farm Its crops razed by locusts No longer worried about sickles.”
An ethos of connection characterizes the spirit of the anthology. The poets connect to their feelings, to contemporary women poets from Iran and the Iranian diaspora, to the Persian literary tradition, and to literary and social themes through the triumvirate lens of history, ideology, and geography.
These women poets, “citizen[s] of the state of wandering” (Nahid Bagheri Goldschmeid), have traveled “inconsolable borders” (Pegah Ahmadi) with “bloody hands / in their pockets” (Shabnam Azar) and the “scent of petroleum” (Roja Chamankar) in the air, have “survived many storms” (Mana Aghaee) to claim their dignity, imploring “Let me be a woman” (Razieh Bahrami Khoshnood).
Here, a candid excerpt from Mahshid Naghashpour:
“Women strive for equality with men What a futile and ill-defined effort Equality with men who have caused chaos and war in the world! And who hold the detonator in their hand It can’t go on like this We must think of something! Maybe it would be better for men to strive for equality with women”
Writing against oppression, censorship, and exile, and “with dream / Hope / Anticipation” (Niki Firoozkoohi), these women poets take refuge in language, “writing… in order to live” (Maryam Jafari Azarmani).
Poem by poem, Song of the Ground Jay introduces Anglophones to the “vertigoes” of Persian women poets’ fierce hearts beyond the borders of their “shackled” lives. Like the Iranian Ground Jay (Podoces pleskei), the anthology’s sand-colored, black-throated mascot, adapts to dry habitats so too have Persian women poets adapted to their “battle with words” (Sanaz Zaresani). Despite “the lump in a throat” (Neda Abkari) the “razor-sharp tongue[s]” of these poems “shine” and offer readers trilling cries and melodic notes as they “kill with poetry” (Zahra Zaman)!
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
44 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to the final roundup of submission opportunities for October 2024! Hard to believe it will officially be November next Friday. With October ending and November starting, that means there are a lot of upcoming deadlines! NewPages is here to help so you don’t miss out.
Paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our October 2024 eLitPak is now available!
The world is all we know, claims the philosopher Wittgenstein. But Professor Dean Kirby is painfully learning this is not so, for his new neighbor in the mid-state swamps of Florida has turned his wife into a zombie, has turned him into something taunted by a darkly evil alter ego, and she has driven his son into suicidal insanity. On top of this, she’s opened a cavern that leads to the primal murderer Cain on her creepy, statue-filled property.
Rumors persist those statues stalk the swamps nightly, and that they could have been involved in the sacrificial murder of a child. When the police prove to be no help, a strange airline attendant and her beguiling daughter with the oddest interest in ancient Egyptian mummification arrive, but even they might be too late to help Professor Kirby and his family.
Joel Edward Goza, a white professor of ethics at Simmons College, believes that the United States cannot become a truly interracial democracy unless white people find ways to “repent, repay, and repair” the damage caused by slavery, Jim Crow, and the continued economic and social subjugation of Black Americans.
In Rebirth of a Nation, Goza makes his case, delving into history to find the ideological underpinnings that continue to classify Black people as intellectually and morally inferior to whites. The policies and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are parsed and each man’s complicity “in creating and perpetuating a nation divided along racial lines” is highlighted. But Goza does not let contemporary political leaders off the hook and the coded language of law-and-order, “welfare queens,” and personal responsibility is analyzed for its ongoing impact on policy and personal relationships.
Likewise, popular culture. Goza writes that notions of Black sloth, sexual deviance, intellectual inferiority, and irresponsibility popularized by eugenicist Madison Grant (1864-1937) and Baptist minister-turned-novelist Thomas Dixon (1865-1946), have had long-lasting resonance – leading to still-segregated and unequal public schools and still-festering white fear of miscegenation and Black power among many white Americans.
These realities, Goza argues, need to be reckoned with. In fact, he writes, it is high time for white people to grapple with the legacy of white supremacy and racism and excise both.
While this is an admittedly tall order, Goza is an optimist who believes that white folks will eventually support reparations, including monetary payments, an end to the school-to-prison pipeline, and the over-policing of underresourced and neglected Black communities. He also believes they’ll support changing the tax codes so that wealthy Americans of all races will be required to pay their fair share.
Rebirth of a Nation presents these necessities as both a challenge and an inspiration. It’s a powerful injunction.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
“Writing is important because of the voices represented through its art,” says DisLit Youth Literary Magazine Founder and Editor-in-Chief Miley Weiner. “Writing is a way that people, for centuries, have been able to communicate with one another and express themselves. Even in times long ago when people were separated from their loved ones, writing brought them closer together again. Writing can act as a bridge in people’s lives in whatever form that may be, and because of that, the power of words cannot be denied.”
Providing a new open access online platform to share that power, DisLit is a magazine with a mission to empower youth with disabilities or mental/physical illness. “We believe that teens with these conditions should not be stigmatized,” Weiner asserts. “We have created our magazine to be a safe space for them to express themselves through their writing.”
DisLit currently accepts all genres of writing with new content published daily with plans to accept art/visual submissions soon.
This week is one of our special weeks where all subscribers to the NewPages Newsletter have full access to the submission opportunities and upcoming events, not just paid subscribers! If you are not a current subscriber and want to take a gander, you can access the entirety of Issue 150 online via Substack.
The NewPages Newsletter is a weekly update of new issues of literary magazines, new and forthcoming releases from indie and university presses, book reviews, writing inspiration, and, for paying subscribers, an early look at submission opportunities and upcoming events before they are posted to our website.
All subscribers also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter featuring even more submission opportunities, upcoming events, new titles, and graduate writing program information.
Robert Colman’s Ghost Work joins recent fatherhood-focused poetry collections, including James Lindsay’s Only Insistence (2023), Bruce Snider’s Fruit (2020), and Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day (2019). While these other collections engage fatherhood by meditating on having a child or being childless, Colman’s Ghost Work offers readers a sober and heartbreaking meditation on the gradual loss of his father from dementia. The “father/son equation / now recognizably finite,” he asks, “What gain / to argue facts with him…?” “Is it his memory, or a ghost of mine?”
Throughout the collection, in what feels like close to real time, the poet-son seeks the “right words / to contain” what is disappearing, “‘Father’ in every sentence” and “‘Father’ like a sentence.” Words contain, sentences contain, and so does poetic form. The poet uses the received forms of the ghazal, pantoum, sonnet, and triolet to hold his grief and “stake the way.” Yet despite all attempts to avert loss, “We’ve lost the ear to identify the bird. / We’ve lost the language of the hollow / to find it.”
In Ghost Work, Robert Colman traces the evolution of loss and generously includes the reader in a most primal, personal time of grief. These poems face “death in facts” with dignity and love all the way through to their final breaths.
Ghost Work, by Robert Colman. Palimpsest Press, February 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timeline by Dave Birkett Reedy Press, October 2024
In Detroit Lions, An Illustrated Timeline, award-winning reporter Dave Birkett vividly recounts the most important people, games and moments of the franchise’s first 90 seasons, from the early days of Earl “Dutch” Clark, the team’s first superstar, to the 10 Hall-of-Famers who played for the team in the ‘50s, to the spine-tingling performances of Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson and the team’s resurrection under beloved head coach Dan Campbell.
The story Professor and Journalist Carrie N. Baker tells in Abortion Pills: US History and Politics takes place at the intersection of public health and political posturing. Players include feminists, doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug Administration, Congress, state lawmakers, and anti-abortion actors who, for four decades, have grappled over protocols for pill distribution and use, a battle that largely sidesteps the fact that abortion medication has been used to safely end unwanted pregnancies in 96 countries.
But overly-cautious US lawmakers aside, Baker reports that the pills – called mifepristone and misoprostol – are typically taken within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and now account for 63 percent of abortions that are arranged via telemedicine or by visiting US health centers or contacting online clinics.
It’s a remarkable figure, and Baker writes that she expects it to grow.
Moreover, the rapid development of informal pill distribution networks, largely promoted on the internet, presently help an untold number of people acquire pills. According to Baker, these efforts began to skyrocket after the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center (which upended legal protections for abortion.) “The overturn of Roe removed abortion pills from the medical system in many states and spurred the development of informal networks of pill distribution and support for using them,” she reports. “Rather than moving patients to providers, advocates worked to move pills to people.” The upshot is that people have become increasingly aware that pills can be easily purchased and used at home.
That said, Baker acknowledges that abortion medication is not a panacea and recognizes that abortion surgery will sometimes be necessary; she also cautions readers that people have been arrested and convicted for acquiring pills unlawfully. Still, despite legal risks, Abortion Pills celebrates the determined feminists and public health activists who have put abortion medication directly into women’s hands.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
“The first step is admitting it,” opens Barbara Tran’s debut Precedented Parroting. The “it” is either something the speaker wishes to forget or is the speaker “admitting” to being a “willful forgetter.” The speaker has “taken this step many times.” To remember poses risks. Memories represent something “that plagues” and cause the speaker to “become stranded”; the memories at the fore, those specific and unique to a Vietnamese family, their immigration, and the anti-Asian sentiments and violence they survive/d. Throughout the collection, the reader witnesses the struggle between forgetting, “admitting,” and “sharing.” In the poem “Blue from a Distance,” the poet writes, “There is a phrase / in Vietnamese chia buồn / sharing sadness.”
From poem to poem, Tran turns the pages of a family photo album, “slicing / open” or “framing” a “moment” of her memory within her family’s life. The poet defines trauma as the nesting of a smaller figure inside a larger figure — “each loss / encompasses smaller / losses” like a bird’s “feather each barb / holds smaller / barbs.”
A cacophony of birds flock Tran’s poems. In the first poem alone, a raven, drongo, kingfisher, kite, cormorant, heron, egret, and sandpipers appear. As the title suggests, the parrot takes precedent. Parrots, readers are told in the title poem, respond to trauma in ways similar to humans: “They rock themselves to comfort / themselves They scream and suffer / from insomnia and nightmares.” But birds also have the ability to “let go their contact / with the earth and water.”
These “poem[s] are a road map / writ” “in measured layers, offering facts withholding / crucial details” by a speaker who “comes from a family / of unreliable narrators.” That is because it is “really difficult / to learn / how to live,” “to find / [one’s] own feather.” The poems in Precedented Parroting mark a beginning “telling,” and in this beginning, Barbara Tran sings as birds do.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
