NewPages Blog :: Magazine Reviews

The Gihon River Review’s spring 2005 issue offers a bountiful selection of stories and poems. Allan Peterson’s poem “Slight of Hands” I appreciate for his use of detail and personification, and fresh way in which Peterson reveals a sense of frustration: “The clock is holding its head in its hands,” he writes in the third stanza. Introducing the fourth, in which that sense of frustration seems to have ended when a “gnat burns itself crazy on the bulb.” Continue reading “Gihon River Review – Spring 2005”

“A job is like / Being without a shadow,” goes the first line in “Being Without.” A little further on, in alleyways with children there is “More purpose and meaning to their play / Than you with your wheelbarrow.” Meaningless spreads endlessly in poems, essays, oral histories, discussing life without work. Continue reading “Journal of Ordinary Thought – Spring 2005”

Usually, I take a week to read a good literary magazine, parceling out the pieces over long evenings sitting on my porch or during my thrice-weekly ride on the stationary bike. It’s a sign of respect that I don’t read it all in one sitting. Now I have a new magazine to add to my weekly ritual: Gulf Coast. Continue reading “Gulf Coast – Winter/Spring 2005”

Nik Hospodor’s “sophisticated flourenscentism” visual work, featured in “Landscape,” captures attention on Kaleidoscope’s front cover with a magical, surrealistic, fairytale world. Equally captivating is artist SylviAnn Murray’s “surreal -expressive” style. Continue reading “Kaleidoscope – Winter/Spring 2005”

There is even a collaborative review of a collaborative book in this fascinating issue of work conceived and produced in collaboration (Mary Austin Speaker and Sara Jane Stoner review Phoebe 2002. Continue reading “Indiana Review – Summer 2005”

If you pick up this issue of Lilies and Cannonballs Review, I encourage you to read the last essay, Arthur Saltzman’s “In Praise of Pointlessness,” first. Continue reading “Lilies and Cannonballs Review – Spring/Summer 2005”

The preference in Main Street Rag is for transparency, work with plain, strong language and a clear point of view — Scott C. Holstad’s “I Want It All,” for example (“Fuck the sweats, / I want the world. / No rhyming for me, / no structured / bullshit, I want / to spread out, / feel the bullets / whistle past.”); or Nicole Lynskey’s “Talker at the Café” (“The extrovert-talker / could be a pit-bull on a cell-phone / for all that her dark-haired friend / is allowed to speak, / in her ‘this-funny-anecdote’, / ‘that-divorced-couple’ conversation…”); or Glen Chestnut’s “The Pickup” (“Sometime in the 1950’s / A construction site / somewhere in the jungles of Colombia. / Work had stopped for the day. / The mountains to the west / had swallowed up the last rays of sun.”) Continue reading “Main Street Rag – Summer 2005”

A good publication to consult for fine contemporary poetry, The Manhattan Review here offers a special double issue for the 2005 Winter/Spring volume. Continue reading “The Manhattan Review – Winter/Spring 2005”

Though the editors of Make magazine cite Chicago literary patriarch Nelsen Algren as their inspiration, you don’t have to be a Chicagoan to be in Make’s debut issue. Continue reading “MAKE – 2005”

A generous and attractive volume, this 40th anniversary issue of Puerto del Sol contains a 60-page excerpt “El Malpais (The Badlands),” from In the Shadows of the Sun by Alexander Parsons, a compelling novel set in the New Mexico countryside of the mid-1940’s when ranchers were allowed to return to confiscated—and possibly contaminated—land: “It was hard to believe how quickly it had been ruined: they had made it to last, painstakingly fitting each stone so that the cement mortar was superfluous to the binding force of gravity. But the impact from the atomic detonation, two miles east, had undone this.”  Continue reading “Puerto del Sol – Spring 2005”

This is an attractive journal with the death images one would expect of the title on the slick cover. Nevertheless, Absinthe 4’s prose and poetry present fresh and unfamiliar prose rhythms from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, and Turkey. Continue reading “Absinthe – 2005”

There seems to be a resurgence of interest for comics in the literary world from acclaimed McSweeney’s comic issue and Chris Ware’s award winning Jimmy Corrigan to the recent works by Michael Chabon. Backwards City Review adds their voice with five comics here, including a delightful except from Kenneth Koch’s forthcoming book of comics. There is also a beautifully drawn and haunting anti-war comic by Nate Powell (a very underrated comic artist). Backwards City Review in general takes a humorous approach to their magazine (as evidenced by titles such as “Hockey Haiku” and “Constructive Criticism of Bathroom Wall Scribbling”). Continue reading “Backwards City Review – Spring 2005”

There are many magazines that claim to be eclectic, but The Canary is one of the few I’ve read that is truly deserving of the title. A five page free-form poem might be followed by a rhymed couplet, which might be followed by a narrative driven prose-poem. If it is going on in modern poetry, you can probably find it represented here. This all-poetry magazine has no art, non-fiction or even an editor’s introduction. Continue reading “The Canary – 2005”

This slim slick-paged journal contains, along with stories and poems, the interesting “On Writing, Stubbornness, and Food: An Interview with Leslie Pietrzyk.” Continue reading “Folio – Winter 2005”

In his editor’s note, David Lynn bemoans the Atlantic Monthly’s decision to discontinue publishing fiction and reaffirms his journal’s commitment to literary short fiction. Continue reading “The Kenyon Review – Summer 2005”

Excellent fiction. Those two words sum up everything that Night Train is about. There is no poetry and only two pieces of non-fiction here, an Amy Bloom interview and a segment on the city of Petaluma, California. Otherwise we have eighteen solid short stories that work with a range of styles and topics. Continue reading “Night Train – 2005”

Smack dab in the center of the issue is a portfolio of Marion Ettlinger’s extraordinary portraits of writers, sixteen powerful photographs that, like the work featured in this issue, suggest an intriguing variety of ways of interacting with the world—head on, sideways, with resignation, with appreciation. The issue is evenly divided between fiction and poetry (9 fiction writers, 9 poets) and concludes with the volume’s single piece of nonfiction writing, a beautifully composed family memoir by Amanda Bass Cagle, “On the Banks of the Bogue Chitto.” The 2004 Cooper Prize winning story, “Gone” by Glen Pourciau and stories by finalists Patricia Stiles and Karen Lorene are especially strong. While quite different from each other, they have in common an appealing emotional intensity. Wonderful poems by Reginald Gibbons, too, like Ettlinger’s photos and the prize-winning stories, inspire a range of emotions. Here are the final lines from his work “On Sad Suburban Afternoons”: Continue reading “Ontario Review – Spring/Summer 2005”

If you haven’t used all your vacation time yet this year, you might want to consider taking a few days off just to read this issue of Parnassus—it’s that good. Don’t plan to travel with it, at 470 pages it’s nearly too big to fit in a carry-on bag. But, if care about intelligent writing and about poetry, however you do it, make room in your life for this issue. Continue reading “Parnassus – 2005”

One of the standards, Prairie Schooner has published worthy prose and poetry for seventy-seven years, and this issue’s four stories, five reviews, and work by thirty-eight poets may be so described. The highlight for me is Ron Hansen’s “Wilde in Omaha,” in which the narrator, a local reporter, spends a few hours in Wilde’s witty, but taxing, company and experiences the truth (at least, for his lectures) of the Punch pronouncement: “The poet is Wilde. But his poetry’s tame.” There are poems and stories here of which Wilde would approve; not half bad—Rita Mae Reese’s “My Summer in Vulcan,” on catching the eye of an older sister’s boyfriend; Lon Otto’s “What Is Son?” – the question to ask if learning to dance on a rooftop in Havana; and a story of bitter betrayal, “Wooden Fish” by Matt Freidson. Continue reading “Prairie Schooner – Summer 2005”

Editor Dan Veach is enthusiastic and proud: “Welcome to the most joyful and enjoyable celebration of poetry you’ve ever seen!” The celebration is nothing short of enormous — 330 pages of poetry divided into a series of “stages of human life” (Birth, Childhood & Youth, Love, etc., Home & Work, Aging & Death, Animals & Nature, Humor, Cities, Poetry, Music and Art, and War) interspersed with a series of “expeditions” (Ireland, Asia, Latin America, Spain, The Caribbean, Africa, Greece, Australia, Great Britain, and America), along with serene black and white drawings from a half dozen artists. Continue reading “Atlanta Review – Spring/Summer 2005”

The debut of Ballyhoo Stories, a biannual print magazine aiming “to reach the broadest audience possible,” is solid. It loses points for presentation – a less than elegant black-and-white cover, oddly shifting black-on-white with white-on-black text pages, and distracting borders and page number fonts – but the content is stronger. The eight stories loosely collected under this issue’s theme of “Portraits and Snapshots” are character-driven works that are at best quietly ambitious and at worst tend toward the sentimental, an understandable side-effect of fiction grown from personal photographs (and from a journal concerned with establishing a large readership). Several works stand out, including Michael Hartford’s “Call Me Pearl” and Amy Brill’s “The Pursuit of Joe Kahn.” Continue reading “Ballyhoo Stories – Spring 2005”

It’s fair to say that Barrelhouse is the most promising recent journal so proudly founded in drunkenness; in the introduction to their debut issue, the editors quickly establish its origin, writing, “Fine, we’ll admit it, we were drunk,” thus establishing a youngish masculinity that reverberates throughout. Continue reading “Barrelhouse – Winter 2005”

Published in Chicago, Bridge is a slick culture-oriented magazine that cranks the volume to eleven. The content is comprehensive – interviews with filmmakers and artists get as much space here as fiction and poetry – but sadly seems a bit loose: too many typos really do frustrate a reader’s experience, and some of the pieces seem to swing and miss. Continue reading “Bridge – Spring 2005”

Diner‘s editors endeavor to “support diverse voices that speak across boundaries of time and place.” Toward that end, this issue’s offers “features” of two poets who couldn’t be more different from each other: “Blue Plate Special #1” is Sandra Kohler, and “Blue Plate Special #2” is Michael Casey. The menu also includes 40 other dishes…I mean…poets. Continue reading “Diner – Spring/Summer 2005”

“If” is the theme here, and Kent Bruyneel’s poem “Struggles and gives. Breaks.” kicks things off well: “Then the strange and / proud echo of her turning around. Interrupted. By the voice / wondering aloud when she is coming back and if.” The collected pieces are nicely unified – no loose theme is this – and ambivalence of course weighs heavily, especially in Ken Howe’s amusing mock-epic poem “Jerry’s Barbershop, an Investigation,” in which the persona freaks out over a bad haircut: “I beheld / the same geek who’d take the chair some minutes earlier, OK but / with shorter hair.” Continue reading “Grain – Spring 2005”

The Malahat Review is characterized by a generous editorial vision. This issue is especially eclectic with poems by nine poets and nine fiction writers whose work ranges from experimental to solidly traditional. Continue reading “The Malahat Review – Spring 2005”

What makes this issue exceptionally interesting is the range of sensibilities found here. Continue reading “Michigan Quarterly Review – Summer 2005”

If you are like me, you often find the unknowns packing more punch than the big names in literary magazines. So you will probably be excited to see the Mid-American Review devoting an issue to unpublished authors. Continue reading “Mid-American Review – Spring 2005”

“This is what we seek: Clarity, fluidity, unselfconsciousness, poems that guide us without fanfare into what is genuinely human—an insight, experience, or mood which, though we’d not perceived it before, we recognize it instantly.” Some of the more accomplished poets whose work satisfies the editor’s vision include Linda Pastan, Diane Lockwood, Jim Daniels, and Jane Shore. Shore introduces seven poems by Nadell Fishman that “recast the roles of mother, wife, and daughter, retelling her personal story through fairy tales and popular culture…” Continue reading “Poet Lore – Spring/Summer 2005”

Although it’s not meant to be a special theme edition, it almost reads like one: “the men’s fiction issue”—approximately 75 percent of the magazine consists of short stories by male authors. These are conventional, but highly satisfying pieces for the most part, the sort of well plotted tales that take one, ever so briefly and deeply, inside another’s life. While these stories are quite different from each other in tone, in style and in the subject matter they treat, they have in common their uncommon psychological insight. Each one of these stories is narrated with close and astute attention to what moves and motivates people. 
Continue reading “The Portland Review – 2005”

Quarterly West consistently turns out sparkling pieces of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and this issue is no different. Steve Fellner’s notable essay, “Are You There Judy? It’s Me, Steve,” is a bittersweet reflection on the impact of Judy Blume on the author’s adolescence. The fiction ranges from experimental to realism, and teenage thieves, dying in Israel, and raising exotic animals are among the wide-ranging subject matter.  Continue reading “Quarterly West – Winter 2005”

Salmagundi continues to offer up work that is challenging, not because it is unusual or inventive, but because it is thoughtful in the truest sense of the word. Thinking, is in fact, the subject of one of this issue’s many splendid essays: “The (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought,” by the ever thought-provoking George Steiner. Continue reading “Salmagundi – Spring/Summer 2005”

The latest issue of 96 INC. is dedicated to the memory of founding editor Vera Cochran Gold and contains her intriguing “Vegetable Monologues: Broccoli, Okra, Fennel, The Pepper Farm, Eggplants.” The suite of short-shorts are experimental in form, affecting mediations on isolation and alienation.  Continue reading “96 INC – 2005”

If you dislike the homogeneity of Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, here’s the magazine for you. The equivalent to a locally owned coffee-shop, Arkansas Review is a fiercely regional tri-quarterly; based on that alone, it’s a laudable effort. The poems of Jeffrey Renard Allen are as bluesy as you’ll ever see (“Bol weevil in the cotton / worm in the corn / Devil in the white man / War going on”), and the centerpiece essay focuses on the racial implications of lodging alternatives in Clarksdale, Mississippi: “Race and Blues Tourism” is a perfect example of how focused investigation, even (especially?) in an area so removed from ‘cultural centers,’ can enlighten and entertain. Continue reading “Arkansas Review – April 2005”

This is a beautiful journal. It uses the same elegant design with each issue, alternating only the cover’s color and the content – and included are usually a novella, a long poem, and black-and-white artwork. Because the number of works is so small, the pressure on the editors to publish good pieces is much higher – little room for error here. Continue reading “At Length – 2005”

In its 63rd year, The Antioch Review is still a benchmark. Robert S.Fogarty’s editorial quote from Claude Levi-Straus identifies its theme as, “the search for unsuspected harmonies.” In the lead essay—of seven solid essays—Daniel Bell’s “Ethics and Evil: Frameworks for Twenty-First-Century Culture” asks: “How do we contain wars of faith, and the spread of potent ideologies while giving people an anchorage for their lives?” while Alan Cheuse’s ”Reflections on Dialogue: How d’yuh get t’Eighteent’ Avenoo and Sixty-Sevent’ Street?” addresses the question of the narrator in “And God said let there be light, and there was light [. . .]” while tracing the origins of speech and story. Iraj Isaac Rahmim’s autobiographical “Sacrifices” defines poverty: “[. . .] being poor as a student is not being poor at all; it is simply getting an education.” Work from eleven fine poets (among them: Neil Azevedo, Michael Demos, and Marilyn Nelson) is included and in “Poetry Today,” John Taylor concludes his review of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Selected Poems and Giorgio Caproni’s The Earth’s Wall: Selected Poems 1932-1986 with poetry of his own: “[. . . ] intimations of citadels looming there above us, even as we pass below the ramparts [. . .].” Continue reading “The Antioch Review – Spring 2005”

This beautifully bound, map-wrapped volume is a treasure of outstanding short stories and poetry with new work by familiar names as well as lesser known. The quest theme applies to almost anything, as editor Bradford Morrow acknowledges, having summoned the timeless Robert Coover (“Dragons have no sense of time [. . .],” from “Sir John Paper Returns to Honah-Lee,”), William Gas, (“The Piano Lesson,” and a great deal more), and John Barth’s forgiven archness in “I’ve been Told: A Story’s Story,” as well as Paul West’s “Slow Mergers of Local Stars” (it is not enough to simply kill a lion), and Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Gravedigger’s Daughter” – a mother and child on the lam. Continue reading “Conjunctions – 2004”

Ready to stand at indistinct edges or walk vertiginous margins, the aptly named Ecotone is a brave new offering out of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. As editor David Gessner explains, it’s the edges, “between genres, between science and literature, between land and sea, between the civilized and wild, between earnest and comic, between the personal and biological, between urban and rural, between animal and spiritual” that Ecotone feels are “not only more alive, but more interesting and worthy of our exploration.” Worthy of exploration as well is this first issue, a nicely produced perfect-bound volume weighing in at over 150 pages, with a center section of art devoted to gorgeous collages by Pamela Wallace Toll. Continue reading “Ecotone – Winter/Spring 2005”

Field: (f?ld) n. any wide, unbroken expanse; in this case, one of terrific poetry. But longtime readers of the venerable journal, in publication since the 60’s, won’t find that news revelatory. As usual, there’s much here to be praised, with new work by notables such as Pattiann Rogers, Marianne Boruch, Dennis Schmitz and Sandra McPherson. Continue reading “Field – Spring 2005”

Gargoyle is the collection eclectic was invented for. Its contents include—in addition to the cartoon frontispiece by Patricia Storms offering aid and comfort to writers everywhere, and several photographic portraits—the non-fiction “Berkley Morning,” an excerpt from Phillip Henry Christopher’s Trippin’ with Charlie and “Dreaming Richard Brautigan” by Greg Keeler. Continue reading “Gargoyle – 2005”

From among the sage brush and juniper (not to mention the sprawling megalopolis that is the greater Phoenix area) Hayden’s Ferry Review continues to prove that dedication to an editorial vision pays off. Continue reading “Hayden’s Ferry Review – Fall/Winter 2004-05”

It always makes me happy to see a long-running literary magazine still going strong. Continue reading “Hiram Poetry Review – Spring 2005”

Alice would love Mad Hatters’ Review—as I do—there’s something, including the astral threats of summer, to delight everyone. Continue reading “Mad Hatters’ Review – Summer 2005”

From the web site: “Matter is a unique biannual publication of literature, poetry, photography, visual art and just about anything that is made of matter.” Continue reading “Matter – 2005”

Turning the page in Post Road always brings a new surprise. Will the next piece be a non-fiction essay on the local dogcatcher, a book recommendation made by one of your favorite authors, a poem or a long series of video stills? Post Road issue 10 is a real hodgepodge of writing with plenty that had me excited. The aforementioned Matt Roberts piece, “The Dogcatcher Hates Politics,” was a fun and clever piece containing this gem: “’Excitement,’ the dogcatcher says, ‘is a dumpster full of raccoons.’” Continue reading “Post Road – Spring 2005”

Spire is a slender volume of poetry, fiction, and stated purpose (from the web site): “Spire is dedicated to publishing traditionally marginalized voices of minority, low-income and young writers and artists who will create the future of arts and literature. Spire publishes new writers alongside more established writers in order to lend credibility and establish interest in the work of the new writers. Continue reading “Spire – Spring 2005”

Perhaps the best editors are prescient, equipped with a literary sixth sense that allows them to provide readers with apt reflections at the right moment. So it was that I found myself clipping an article on the necessity of craft in memoir (as opposed to mere emotional regurgitation) by the current editor of AGNI, Sven Birkerts, out of a recent issue of Poets & Writers even as I was reading it, so exactly did it articulate thoughts I’d been having. A similar sensation attended my reading of an essay by AGNI’s founding editor, Askold Melnyczuk, in the current issue of the magazine. Seventy pages earlier, I’d been reading Ben Miller’s “Romancing the Dankerts” and reflecting on what it was about his prose that made it dense and stunningly lyric, lush in a way that made me want to taste it (and all this in piece ostensibly about trash and trashy neighbors who object to the trash!). And then there was Melnyczuk, ruminating on the same question: “I’m curious about why certain sentences read quickly, why others force us to slow down…” and quoting Susan Sontag: “Every style is a means of insisting on something.” I must insist that editors of this ilk are the reason AGNI consistently dazzles. Volume 61 is no different; I starred so many pieces as worth mentioning that I can’t mention them all. Birkerts may begin this issue by lamenting that with Sontag’s death, he lost his “ideal reader,” the person he felt he was editing for, even if she’d never seen a copy of the magazine, but I have a feeling that even without her guiding presence, AGNI will continue to deliver what readers are looking for–even if they don’t know it yet. Continue reading “AGNI – Number 61”

boundary 2 is a serious journal—with cover art by Theodore A. Harris titled “On the Throne of Fire after Somebody Blew Up America (for Amiri Baraka).” Continue reading “boundary 2 – Spring 2005”

A chemotherapy ward is transformed into the visitation grounds of the Angel of Death. A game of American Indian wars interpreted by German boys is played while a real war wages in the background. A Kansas farmer anticipates her horse’s foaling while caring for her old friend, an aerial photographer sensing early signs of brain damage. These stories highlight Crazyhorse 67, whose style can be spelled out with traits—rural, man-versus-nature, agrarian mysticism, even the very presence of horses—but for all of which the prime mover is always the imagination. Christopher Burawa’s “Visitation of the Chemotherapy Angel” is a meditative prose poem; Maria Hummel’s “Peter at the Stake” is a fictional memoir inspired by true events; and Andrew Malan Milward’s “The Agriculture Hall of Fame” is a story about memory—narrated, to surprising effect, backwards and in fragments.  Continue reading “Crazyhorse – Spring 2005”