NewPages Blog :: Magazine Reviews

“Poetry on tap,” is this journal’s tagline. But who needs booze when there are poets like Jane Mead? I was thrilled to find her here as I have loved her work since her first (watery, in fact) book, and she did not disappoint in “Dust and Rumble”:

Continue reading “Alehouse – 2010”

“This is how it ends.” That’s the first line of a poem by Jess Wigent. Could there be a more wonderful beginning? I love it. I don’t necessarily understand it, but I love it. That’s my overall assessment of the issue—weird endings and beginnings I find compelling and exciting and often perfect, even though I don’t necessarily always understand them or believe I can explain them or even know what genre I’m reading. Wigent’s piece, “This One Thing Truly Makes,” is a marvelous prose poem/story with visual complements of post-it-note/memo style fragments. It’s the idea itself of “what truly makes” that makes the journal appealing, the search for essential meaning. Continue reading “Caketrain – 2010”

With its generous letter-sized pages alone, Camas evokes the open space of the West. This winter issue includes stunning outdoor black-and-white photography, much of it full page, by David Estrada, Doug Davis, Doug Connelly, and others. Between these images is woven a collection of poetry and essays celebrating the many facets of nature and how we humans interact with it. Continue reading “Camas – Winter 2010”

The cover of the 2010 poetry issue of Coe Review features a striking photo shot from inside a shed, peering out through two square openings onto lush green farm fields as far as the eye can see. It seems appropriate to the content within these pages, as each poem carves out its own unique opening through which to view the world. Continue reading “Coe Review – Fall 2010”

Here is a journal that truly is of consequence—poetry, nonfiction prose, fiction, artwork, memoir, and a “discourse,” all by accomplished writers writing about subjects that matter. There isn’t a contribution that doesn’t warrant attention, but it would take me longer than the US has been at war in Afghanistan to describe and critique every piece in the issue, so I’ll preface my brief review with this disclaimer: the selections I’ve chosen to highlight here are not the only ones worth your time or $10 of your disposable income, if, indeed, you have any. If you don’t and you’re lucky enough to live in a community where the public or university libraries offer literary journals, do ask them to subscribe to Consequence. Continue reading “Consequence – Spring 2010”

By design, coincidence, or some intersection of the two, this issue focuses on writing about families. There are fathers: Judith Skillman’s prize-winning poem “June Bug” (“Heat dozes in the road. / You think of your father, / his love for the stars, / those summer evenings”); Kip Knott’s memoir-style prose “Gabriel’s Horns” (“My father, Gabriel Andrew Henry, had horns and a forked tongue”); and Dorothy Deaver Clark’s story “Still: Life” (“LeeEarle motioned the doctor to follow her to the bedroom where her father lay in his bed with hands clasped over the neatly drawn bedspread and his head propped up by two pillows sheathed with masterfully ironed pillows slips.”). Continue reading “Emrys Journal – 2010”

This is a progressive journal that understands the advantages of being online, and offers the reader a number of options that are simply not available in the print format. In the past they have presented an animated version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe, a live reading of the same story by Vincent Price, various live comedies by different comedians, artwork by Dali, Goya, and El Greco, and even a Flamenco dance. One never knows what they are going to present each month, but that’s part of the fun. Continue reading “Moon Milk Review – Winter 2011”

Here is what I appreciate about New Letters: “a whispery shriek like cracked clarinet reeds.” That’s a characterization, by the first person narrator, of the voice of a character in Abby Frucht’s story “Tamarinds,” and if you know anything about clarinets it will be music to your ears. It’s that precision, and the unique and exacting sensibility of New Letters’s writers, that I anticipate and am perpetually grateful to encounter. The writing is unceasingly original, competent, and always worth my time. Continue reading “New Letters – 2010/2011”

This is one gigantic Happy Meal of an issue! Or maybe it’s more like Cracker Jacks—that surprise at the bottom of the box that sweetens the whole crunchy-munchy experience. The editors call these goodies “Supplements,” but they are integral to the whole gestalt. The magazine comes shrink-wrapped with a motel key-fob, a pink striped birthday candle inside a small seed envelope, a postcard with an illustration of a take-out dish of “Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato Combination,” a “Newspoem” by William Gillepsie on a skinny folded sheet, an enormous “Corn in the USA” diagram, and a variety of other illustrations, texts, and diagrams on different types of paper stock, which adds to the tactile/sensual pleasure of print. The Art Director’s note explains: “By unwrapping the contents of this issue, you have dislodged the original cover design and set in motion an unpacking of parts that together create a kind of landscape within which the stories, essays, and poems can situate themselves.” Continue reading “Ninth Letter – Fall/Winter 2011”

The Hollins Critic is one reason why print publications must never be allowed to perish. You simply cannot duplicate, imitate, or recreate this type of pleasure online. Just 24 pages, a sleek, understated experience of intelligent reading. One full-length essay; a few short reviews; a few well-chosen poems. You can read it one sitting, though you may wish to make it last longer. This little publication always reminds me of the adage “less is more.” Continue reading “The Hollins Critic – December 2010”

Good things do come in small packages. I’d rather read 47 terrific pages (a small journal by most measures) than two or three times that many mediocre ones. This fine, slender issue includes nonfiction from Kevin Kerrane (a favorite of editor Leslie Jill Patterson’s) and Gary Fincke; poetry from Mathew Thorburn (another of Patterson’s favorites, she says), Marie Gauthier, Liz Kay, Fritz Ward, Emily Symonds, Jim Daniels, and Andrew Kozma; and fiction from Amy Knox Brown. Continue reading “Iron Horse Literary Review – Fall 2010”

It may or may not be intentional (though given this journal’s outstanding editorial management, it is likely to be deliberate), but the relationship between this issue’s cover and the poem “Desert” by Adonis, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa, is nothing short of exquisite. The cover photo is a 1938 “Night View” of New York City by the always-amazing Berenice Abbott. The Adonis poem begins: “The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust / Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space.” The poem and photograph are both, as they should be, impossible to describe accurately, except to say that each evokes a particular atmosphere that could not be a better example of the medium’s potential and success. “The city’s voice was too tender,” writes Adonis (such a beautifully translated poem). This is a long poem of shifting tones, expertly rendered, as Abbott’s photo is a composite of so many lights, creating one whole ultra-real vision. Continue reading “The Kenyon Review – Winter 2011”

What I like most about the Poetry is Dead Magazine Society is how serious they take their role as the poetry imp. You can almost hear the stifled giggles breaking as you begin to catch the joke. “Poets tend to take the art form a touch too seriously,” writes Editor-In-Chief Daniel Zomparelli. “Try it next time you are around a poet… Just say something like, ‘the only true form of poetry is lyrical’ or ‘conceptual poetry is here to kill off the fossil we call lyrical poetry’ or ‘if it’s a project than it is not poetry’ and watch their faces turn red.” Art Director Easton West writes in his letter, quoted here in its entirety: “I gota actually wrtie some shit [sic].” Continue reading “Poetry is Dead – Summer/Autumn 2010”

This issue of The Sewanee Review glorifies the intellectual and emotional benefits of immersing oneself in the cosmopolitan ideal of the Western tradition of knowledge. George Core and the rest of the Sewanee staff offer the reader a slow and relaxing trip around the world, using a Western lens to illuminate people and society from several different cultures. Interestingly, that lens is also used to remind us what the United States was like before blind ethnocentrism was considered a cardinal virtue. Continue reading “The Sewanee Review – Fall 2010”

The Straddler takes the cultural temperature of America and reads it back at a pitch and slope that we of the era of entertainment “news” are hard pressed to find in more popular venues. It is not a straightforward look at the nation, though the topics discussed are at first glance fairly frank. This issue is a fragmented offering of subtle depth, taking on the System, the Administrator, the Economy, and looking at them sideways, questioning conventional notions of responsibility and control, beauty and aberration. Continue reading “The Straddler – Fall 2010”

Alimentum toasts its 5th anniversary with tasty bites from members who regularly sit around its table: Fiction/Nonfiction Editor and Art Director Peter Selgin, Web Editor Eric LeMay, Managing Editor Duane Spencer, Poetry Editor Cortney Davis, Assistant Web Editor Ruth Polleys, Art Director Claudia Carlson, Menupoems Editor Esther Cohen, and Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Paulette Licitra each deliver a morsel. Every course on the menu is nutritious and filling in its own way, but one of my favorites is Selgin’s “The Muffin Man,” a history of and personal treatise about his relationship with that now ubiquitous treat, the muffin. From the “flat, round, spongy, air-filled concoction prepared with yeast-leavened dough and cooked on griddle” (the English muffin) to “granola muffins, cappuccino muffins, strudel muffins, pumpkin, blueberry, applesauce, yogurt, oatmeal, and chocolate chip muffins—muffins whose entire purpose in life seemed to be nothing more or less than denying their muffinhood,” Selgin captures the surprising rise (pun intended) of this American phenomenon. Continue reading “Alimentum – Winter 2011”

This issue is an eclectic, sometimes compelling online presentation of poetry, fiction and art, which features established authors, and neophytes in a surprising mix. The site is charmingly accessed by “Blue Leaf,” cover art by Christopher Woods; a little sip of Lewis Carroll’s work greets the reader. Nice touch. Continue reading “The Fine Line – Winter 2010”

As a journal dedicated to literary works focused on “the environment” (here, interpreted as the natural world), Flyway is an unusual publication. The magazine is atypical, as well, for its inclusion of a complete chapbook of poetry (selected through a contest), Lois Marie Harrod’s “Cosmogony.” Selections from contest finalist Corrie Williamson’s chapbook are also published in this volume. An interview with fiction writer Ann Pancake, poetry from four additional poets, five essays, and three short stories round out the issue. Continue reading “Flyway – 2010”

Freefall is true to its name, and you never know where you’ll land. John Wall Barger’s prose poem “Scream” begins on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 and winds up in India in the early years of the next century: Continue reading “Freefall – Fall/Winter 2010-11”

Always a great balance of established and lesser-known poets and fiction writers, this issue’s more recognizable contributors include Philip Dacey, D. Nurkse, Simon Perchik, David Trinidad, and David Wagoner. Their work is strong, as always. Dacey’s offerings are consistent with his by-now-long-and-respected tradition of creating poetry of the biographies of famous artists of many genres—dancers and writers this time in “American Choreography” and “Vaslav Nijinksy on Walt Whitman.” Continue reading “Hanging Loose – 2010”

Artifice announces that its editorial aims are to showcase “by context and content” work “aware of its own artifice.” Issue 2 is certainly true to this mission, beginning with the self-conscious Table of Contents, divided not by genre but by more abstract classifications (“Those That Tremble As If They Were Mad”; “Innumerable Ones”; “Those Drawn With a Very Fine Camel’s-Hair Brush”; “Others”; “Those That Have Just Broken a Flower Vase”; “Those That From a Long Way Off Look Like Flies”). Continue reading “Artifice – 2010”

The latest issue offers a high quality mix of poems exploring international themes and the idea of language. It announces the 18^th annual Chad Walsh Poetry Prize winner, Charles Wyatt, for his poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens,” and includes an extensive review of the anthology Best American Poetry 2010. Continue reading “Beloit Poetry Journal – Winter 2010/2011”

Not Volume 1, Number 1! The inaugural issue of The Common, published at Amherst College in Massachusetts, is numbered “Issue No. 00.” (Why is that so pleasing?) This is a “mock issue,” a prototype, says editor, Jennifer Acker in her Editor’s Statement. Hence, the non-numbers. This mock issue is not “an official publication,” insists Acker. It’s more like a trial run. (And all of the contents may not make it into the first “official” issue, she says.) This new triannual intends to be a “public gathering place for the display and exchange of ideas…that embody…a sense of place.” Continue reading “The Common – January 2010”

This issue opens with a moving tribute to and a series of poems by widely published poet and former Fiddlehead editor Bill Bauer (1932-2010). Bauer was a Maine native and long-time resident of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, where the journal is published. It’s hard not to tear up on reading his first title here, “If I Don’t Tell You, No One Else Will; or, How Lucky You Are To Have Your Whole Lives Before You.” Lucky, too, to have a journal as pleasurable—and as enduring, the journal is in its sixty-fifth year—as Fiddlehead. Bauer is joined by 25 accomplished poets and fiction writers and a half-dozen smart book reviewers. This issue’s cover, too, deserves mention, a beautiful muted watercolor of seashells in a silver bowl by Fredericton native Andrew Henderson. Continue reading “The Fiddlehead – Autumn 2010”

“Some time ago, we decided to devote most of one issue to Irish Pages/Duilli Eireann to contemporary writing in Irish, so as to illustrate the still-thriving literary life of the island’s old language. We appreciate that much of the this issue will be inaccessible to many of our readers, but hope that those without Gaelic will nonetheless glean some sense of the rich Irish-language dimension of contemporary Irish literature,” write the editors. And we do! Continue reading “Irish Pages – 2010”

Along with the expected personal and family stories in prose, “memoir” in this issue includes the journal’s Best Graphic Memoir pick, “The Rejection Collection: A Visual Poem,” by Corey Ginsberg, a clever composition created of a series of photos of phrases from rejection letters received and the author’s musings about these hurtful strips of paper and their disappointing news: “How was it that my standard, hour-long wait in line at the Miami Post Office, enclosed $20 reading fee and eight months spent floating in ‘status of my submission’ Limbo didn’t even afford me an entire sheet of paper when I was rejected?” In the end Ginsberg’s rejection collage project seems to have been more encouraging than discouraging, as expressed both in the piece and in the lengthy “About” notes (a convention the journal uses for pieces with visual content). In any case, it turned into an acceptance! Continue reading “Memoir – 2010”

Published by the Kanto Poetry Center at Kanto Gakuin University, Poetry Kanto publishes English translations of Japanese poems (along with the originals) and “exciting English language poetry from anywhere on the globe.” The journal is handsomely produced and clearly an effort of editors passionate about poets and poetry. The work of ten poets is presented here, each series of poems preceded by a long bio and photo of the poet. Continue reading “Poetry Kanto – 2010”

“For every poetic action there is…Redactions,” is the journal’s tagline. This issue’s “poetic actions” include poems by two-and-a-half-dozen poets, including such well-known names as David Wagoner, J.P. Dancing Bear, and Gerry LaFemina, and the less-widely established, but quite widely published Jeanine Hall Gailey and Walter Bargen; as well as “poetics,” substantial reviews of poetry books and blogs. Continue reading “Redactions – 2010”

A special tribute issue of this journal of Midwestern African American Literature is devoted to Allison Joseph, Aquarius Press Legacy Award Recipient, five of whose poems appear here. The cover is an evocative portrait, “Mattress Man,” by accomplished photographer and fast-becoming ubiquitous poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, whose poem, “Absolute Otherwhere,” appears in the issue. Sayers Ellis has an eye for desolate views and an ear for inventive diction: “We know there’s a recognizable We, / an I-identifiable many.” Continue reading “Reverie – 2010”

Florida is a wildly unique collage of environments, from the gritty urban core of Miami to dense crocodile infested swamps; from the upscale shops of tropical Longboat Key to the historic architecture of Jacksonville, where the nights are distinctly northern with their chilly edges. This journal reflects this rich diversity from the edgy, tongue-in-cheek poetry of “spotlighted” poet Denise Duhamel, to the arch intelligence of prose stylist Janet Burroway (an interview and a story)—I have always admired them both. Continue reading “Saw Palm – Spring 2010”

The theme for this is “Refrigerator Mothers: ‘Just happening to defrost enough to produce a child’…and other things we said that we wish we could take back,” and I would recommend it to any writer who is a mother or expecting mother. The issue includes short stories and poems from the perspective of mothers and some from the perspective of the writer thinking back on their mother. “A Good Day,” an essay by Jessie van Eerden, is a moving, detailed look at the seemingly ordinary, everyday aspects of her mother that defined her. Continue reading “The Literary Review – Fall 2010”

Guest editors Philip F. Deaver (fiction), Nancy McCabe (nonfiction), and Kelly Moffett (poetry) join drama editor, Charlie Schulman, and Louisville Review editor Sena Jeter Naslund to offer up yet another notable issue. From accomplished poets Eleanor Wilner, Stephen Dunn, and Frederick Smock—among many others—to the surprising accomplishments of poems in the “Children’s Corner,” featuring work more polished and successful than one expects from high school students, this is a particularly appealing issue. Continue reading “The Louisville Review – Fall 2010”

Monkeybicycle’s cover for this issue seduced me with its sleek matte finish of an image of red smoke over a white background. It was a pleasure to just hold the journal, and I couldn’t wait to see under the covers. The interior layout is conventional but easy to read, and I’m very thankful the editors didn’t try to do something fancy with the table of contents; they keep it simple and clean. The real beauty of this issue isn’t the cover or the layout, though. It’s in the stories and poems. Continue reading “Monkeybicycle – 2010”

“Flight in Word and Deed” is the theme to this issue—transcendence, explains editor Robert Stewart. His introduction is, nonetheless, a defense of the grounded nature of the literary journal as an object, something “weighty” we can hold in our hands. (“As America gets fatter, it seems to want its art to become weightless,” he writes of e-books and cyber publications). He doesn’t need to convince me that the printed page, the bound volume, the variation in texture from the uncoated paper of the pages containing stories and poems to the glossy coated stock of the extraordinary reproductions of paintings by Fabian Debora are worth their weight in pixels, providing a kind of pleasure hard to replicate in digital spheres. Continue reading “New Letters – 2010”

Rattle‘s winter issue features a special section of poetry entitled “Tribute to Mental Health Workers,” which includes poetry on a variety of issues in the field, from Alzheimer’s to therapists to hospital workers. While some poems delve into the grief and sadness of these illnesses, others approach them with hope. Gwenn A. Nusbaum’s poem “Hospital, Spring,” is one such poem, describing a man waiting during his wife’s surgery, while “babies are being born.” This section also includes an interesting article by Maryhelen Snyder, “The Art of Waiting: The Parallels of Poetry and Therapy.” Continue reading “Rattle – Winter 2010”

The cover explains the selections within very well: things are going to get weird. The publication is filled with more questions than answers; each story leaves you in a new locale, and while rereading may make things more understandable, true clarity is never given. The biggest mistake one can make entering these works is assuming that a solution, a character, or a situation will be made explicit. Often one is simply forced to fight imagination with imagination. Continue reading “Sleeping Fish – 2010”

I have always loved the organizing principle of this little journal: thirty-two ways to write (or read) a poem: Continue reading “32 Poems – Fall 2010”

The cover art of this issue is from Dan Hillier’s collection of altered engravings, four which appear inside the magazine. Hillier’s pictures are odd, collaging the real with the imagined. Many of his engraving show humans with animal features. For example, the engraving on the cover depicts a woman in Victorian dress whose skirts branch out into octopus tentacles. This weirdness seems intentional and thematic for the issue as a whole. Continue reading “Washington Square – 2010”

A snarling wolf graces the front cover of this issue. This jolting art, titled “The Queen/Bitch,” by Jennifer Murray provides an intriguing introduction to the central themes of the issue: loneliness and isolation. Continue reading “Anamesa – Spring 2010”

When I read for pleasure I want to be transported to another place: another world, another time, another headspace. But it is a particular treat when I am able to get a fresh perspective on the art of writing and storytelling itself. Continue reading “Western Humanities Review – Summer 2010”

This fifteenth anniversary issue of The Aurorean, published in Farmington, Maine, celebrates the fall/winter seasons in New England. This issue features poets Jim Brosnan and Martha Christina, and includes a special section of Haiku and “related poetry.” Continue reading “The Aurorean – Fall/Winter 2010-2011”

“Animals take center stage in this fifth issue of Wild Apples,” writes Linda Hoffman, the founding editor of the journal. Humans are a part of this issue too, but more precisely the pieces are about how we fit into the animal world—and even how the animal world fits into us. (In some cases, literally; in “The Animals Within Us,” Greg Lowenberg discloses that four hundred species of parasites live in and on us, including our intestinal tracts.) Thus, the interconnection between humans and other creatures becomes the thematic thread that strings together all the pieces in this issue. Continue reading “Wild Apples – Spring/Summer 2010”

ZYZZYVA, besides having name difficult to pronounce, is a triannual publication out of San Francisco and features only West Coast writers. The name itself refers to tropical American weevils and is the last word in most dictionaries. Continue reading “ZYZZYVA – Fall 2010”

Unaware of any necessary precautions in the handling of “The Contaminated Issue,” I consciously folded back the front cover and crossed my fingers in hoping its pages were not infected with some sort of incurable disease. But it was already too late; the truth is that I was already contaminated; we all are. Continue reading “Dislocate – 2010”

Marideth Sisco’s essay “You’re Not from Here, Are You?” gives this issue of Elder Mountain its integral sense of place, a right-away taste of the people, culture and world of the Ozarks. Sisco remembers “lying on the porch on summer nights or curled up by the woodstove in winter,” listening to her relatives tell stories. Indeed stories and the people who tell them are the heart of Sisco’s writing and all the varied pieces that follow in this volume. Continue reading “Elder Mountain – Fall 2010”

For this issue, the overall theme can be summed up in T. Allen Culpepper’s poem “My Life Is Not a Very Good Poem,” which starts, “My life seldom rhymes / (or reasons either, for that matter).” The genres in this issue are nicely mixed up in the ordering, and the result is an elegant, ever-changing reading experience. Continue reading “Florida English – 2009”

This lit mag is classier than its somewhat obscene name. The writing generally is clear and of high quality, the website is well laid out, and each story or poem is accompanied by engagingly colorful artwork. There is a certain in-your-face irreverence to many of the stories, but they are also entertaining as a whole. Frigg often presents two or three pieces of flash fiction by the same author – unusual in the universe of online literature today. Continue reading “FRiGG – Fall 2010”