NewPages Blog :: Magazines

Specs presents itself as a journal of contemporary culture and arts. Each issue has a theme, and this one is “faux histories.” A brief introduction from the editor-in-chief explains the theme is inspired by the “Renaissance Wunderkammer or wonder cabinet,” and the hope is that this collection of pieces will “allow for an uneasy coexistence between the campy, the sentimental, the political, and the repulsive – a mobile archive of committed fakeries in print and digital form.”

Halldor Gudmundsson’s essay, “Halldor Laxness Across the Universe” opens the Winter 2010 issue of Brick, a Toronto-based literary journal. Using Nobel-Prize-winning-novelist Halldor Laxness as an example, Gudmundsson explores how literature travels and meaning evolves based on culture, language, and ideology. Building upon this premise, Bernardo Atxaga explores the publishing history of Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl” in Franco-era Spain. Yet, Jose Teodoro’s conversation with British writer Geoff Dyer and a subsequent excerpt from his novel, Out of Sheer Rage, serve as the thematic anchor for the rest of the journal. Continue reading “Brick – Winter 2010”

The inaugural issue of this self-defined “independent poetry magazine” presents the work of three dozen poets with no fanfare, pronouncements of intentions or predilections, no submission policy statement, no announcement of prizes or awards, no editorial commentary, and no explanation of its name. In fact, the only information about the journal appears at the end of the its 74 (small format) glossy pages: one page listing the four staff members and editorial address in Salt Lake City, UT and a note that the journal is published biannually; the other a “thank you” to the journal’s sponsor (“Thank you to our sugar daddy”), Nations Title Agency, Inc. in Midvale, Utah. Continue reading “Sugar House Review – Fall/Winter 2009”

I opened Cadences, a Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus wondering whose story would be honestly told and how well. Having lived in Turkey for a couple of years in the 1990s, I knew Cyprus – a pretty island in the Mediterranean and “shared” by both Turkey and Greece – to be caught in a political tug of war between the two countries. Published by the European University of Cyprus, Cadences presents itself as a bridge between the Greeks, Turks and other peoples on the island and lets the reader know its advisory board is made up of writers from the Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, Armenian Cypriot, Palestinian-American, American and London Cypriot communities. Once the “Editorial Statement” covers all these bases, the editors get down to business, stating: “Writers inevitably see things differently from politicians.” Continue reading “Cadences – Fall 2009”

Putting together a journal on literature from across the world would be a daunting task, but the editors of World Literature Today have pulled it off wonderfully in the January-February 2010 edition. The journal’s international scope is clear from the cover, which announces its two special sections – one on Taiwanese literature, another on Korean – as well as introducing a poet from El Salvador. The journal further contains an essay from a Croatian writer and Mayan poems, with the Mayan and Spanish versions included with the English translation. A pair of Irish poems and an excerpt from US author David Shields’s forthcoming book round out the range of nations represented here. Continue reading “World Literature Today – January-February 2010”

Carpe Articulum defines itself “the original magazine of its kind,” its kind being a “cross-genre international literary review that embraces all of the peripheral literary arts, including non-fiction, interviews with accomplished writers, novellas, short fiction, scientific papers, and even photography, understanding that a great photo is in fact, worth a thousand words.” The journal is not “barred from timely issues” or to “hundreds of pages of colourless excavations.” It’s also as heavy as a globe. Printed on glossy stock with a thick perfect binding, oversized (probably 9 x13 or so), photos that bleed across the page with poems printed in the foreground, and ads that look like feature pages and feature pages that look like ads, the journal is, indeed, one of a kind. Continue reading “Carpe Articulum – October 2009-January 2010”

The winter issue of The Gettysburg Review features the captivating and bizarre artwork of Mark Greenwold. In her insightful essay on his work, Shannon Egan writes, “The paintings consider the societal boundaries and concerns of sexuality and physical decorum and, as such, pictorially catalog certain Freudian anxieties, corporeal urges, and dreamlike situations.” So, too, do the essays, short stories and poems in this issue. From Aaron Gwyn’s “Drive,” a short story depicting a couple’s highly sexual flirtations with death, to Kim Adrian’s “Questionnaire for My grandfather,” an essay in the form of questions through which the narrator explores the physiological motivations for her dead grandfather’s molestation of her mother, and how this abuse continues to shape her, this issue is all about the fascinatingly twisted psyche. Continue reading “The Gettysburg Review – Winter 2009”

Shannon Canning’s bold, yet intricate painting of a revolver, “Balance of Power,” sets the tone for this “Open Issue” of the magazine – works with bullet-like precision that are also foreboding or dark or solemn. Like Canning’s close-up of the gun handle, they reference danger, without being dangerous, and they intrigue us because they dazzle (the gun is quite beautiful), but their beauty is derived from their darkness. Continue reading “Iron Horse Literary Review – December 2009”

This issue is dedicated to work by North American indigenous authors. With work from emerging voices like Sara Marie Ortiz, Eddie Chuculate, and Eric Gansworth as well as the acclaimed writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, LeAnne Howe, and Joy Harjo, the writing in this issue is as vibrant and dynamic as the indigenous literary tradition it represents. Compiled here is a stimulating survey of indigenous poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Continue reading “The Kenyon Review – Winter 2010”

In this issue, an essay by Lisa Ohlen Harris most stirs my mind, encouraging me to return for a second and third look. I like her outlook on life as much as the writing itself. In the piece entitled “Exiles,” the author ponders the death of her father-in-law. She lives in Jordan with her husband and two children, one a newborn. When her husband returns to the U.S. for her father-in-law’s funeral, leaving her alone, she becomes contemplative about her father-in-law’s anger toward religion that alienated him from his three sons, who chose to become Protestants. She also mourns the hope, now lost, that the relationships may be mended. The piece explores challenging family relationships, feelings of being cut off by distance and religion, and then expands to discuss broken ties between nations and with the land. I loved the history, as research abounds in the piece. Continue reading “The Laurel Review – Summer 2009”

This issue is themed “The Therapy Issue” with a disclaimer that they “promise it won’t cure you.” Instead, this compilation of poems, short stories, and an essay offers multiple views into the human psyche. Continue reading “The Literary Review – Fall 2009”

Hayan Charara’s poem, “What Is Mine,” begins this issue and sets the tone for remaining selections of exemplary fiction, non-fiction, poetry and artwork. Charara writes, “It’s like that – / to know something / is for it to become / something else.” Multiple pieces in this volume seem to explore the idea of knowing, of seeing something more clearly through experience and knowledge. One example is Melinda Moustakis’s mother character in “This One Isn’t Going to Be Afraid,” who is known in body parts: nails, biceps, calves, shoulders, hands, feet, skin, teeth, eyes, stomach, and cheekbones. Each part tells a different story of a life, told through the daughter, as she seeks to understand the mother and herself. Or in Sara Majka’s “White Heart Bar,” where the disappearance of a young woman is explored from multiple perspectives. Continue reading “The Massachusetts Review – Winter 2009”

This issue of the magazine seems particularly serious (in the sense of “of consequence”), which I find entirely appropriate for the present moment (historically, politically, socially) and in keeping with my expectations for New Letters. Steve Paul interviews poet Edward Sanders and in his introduction quotes him as having said, “Poets should again assume the responsibility for the description of history.” And as it happens, this issue’s special feature section, guest edited by Mia Leonin, is titled “This Side of War,” with work by 15 poets who, for the most part, explore both recent and current wars, accompanied by the black and white photographs of soldiers by Stephen Grote. The poems offer a range of perspectives on “being at war,” from deployment abroad to the civilians who remain at home to the experience of civilian victims of military violence. Continue reading “New Letters – 2009/2010”

Art Director Jennifer Gunji-Ballsrud introduces the latest edition by saying, “We struggled with the line between elegant restraint and dullness, between expressiveness and eye-candy.” These are tensions exclusive to the talented, and they are made possible by the equipped and impressive staff of artists, alumni from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Indeed the issue is visually striking, but it is also careful and deliberate. Add to it new fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from Sherman Alexie, Ander Monson, Benjamin Percy, Matt Donovan, Stephan Clark, John Warner, Robert Campbell, Marianne Boruch, Cathy Day, among others, and the result is a sexy literary journal, filled with substance. Continue reading “Ninth Letter – Fall/Winter 2010”

Higher education is the topic of this edition of North Dakota Quarterly, featuring the trends, idiosyncrasies, problems, joys, and goals of the college and the university examined in poetry, memoir, and prose that both engages and challenges, providing a wide variety of views on academia. Continue reading “North Dakota Quarterly – Spring 2009”

Martha Zweig’s poem “Carolina” could be an ars poetica of sorts, or a Poetry manifesto, or the platform of a new (and possibly more satisfactory) political party, or a prayer: “Won’t somebody please start / something other & oddball soon // narrow her down out of folly /& trivia to destiny?” Or perhaps she is (without knowing it) responding to Robert Haas, who begins “September Notebook: Stories”: “Everyone comes here from a long way off / (is a line from a poem I read last night).” Maybe they are both responding (without knowing it) to J. Allyn Rosser’s “Impromptu”: “as if something I could say were true, and every / moment from now on would be my cue.” And all of them would have to ponder, with Joshua Mehigan what it means to be at the “Crossroads”: “This is the place it happened. It was here. / You might not know unless you knew.” Clive James seems to want to help them sort it out in the concluding lines to “A Perfect Market”: Continue reading “Poetry – February 2010”

A dormant but beautifully ominous volcano sets the mood for this compelling issue of Southern Humanities Review (SHR). From the Japanese art on the cover, to the final poem “Resurrection: Ivorybill,” by Ashley Mace Havird, an undertone of imminent eruption, and the realms that will be, are, or have been downstream from the event, pervades each piece. This is not to say that every piece is dark and looming; rather, whether fissures of perception, or pyroclastic flows of meaning and connection, this issue conveys that the effects of earth-shattering change are worthy of being felt, remembered, and revered. Continue reading “Southern Humanities Review – Fall 2009”

This volume features the first-, second-, and third-place winners of the Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest and the Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest, as well as poems, fiction, and book reviews from other writers. The first line of Jennifer Houle’s first poem – “I don’t listen much for birds” – sets the tone of the issue by inviting the reader to look for birds and every manifestation of the flighty or strange, both in this poem and throughout the rest of the issue. Continue reading “The Antigonish Review – Fall 2009”

Thema, the literary journal that boasts “many plots/one premise,” stepped into the kitchen for this edition. Editor Virginia Howard, drawing on memories of her time at a New Orleans bed and breakfast, called for short stories, poems, and artwork “varied as a recipe collection in a cookbook . . . concocted from a wide variety of ingredients for the theme ‘In Kay’s Kitchen’.” The result is a delightful compilation of five illustrations, eight poems, and eleven stories that transport readers into the various interpretations of Kay’s kitchen. Continue reading “THEMA – Autumn 2009”

I read a selection of stories from three different online publications and was bored with the same old same old (I find it hard to believe that editors think anyone is going to read this banal stuff), and then I stumbled on to The Barcelona Review. Thanks goodness! The editors really live in Barcelona and say, “We like good, powerful, potent stuff that immediately commands attention, shows stylistic and imaginative distinction, and is literarily sound.” Well, who doesn’t? But these people really publish it. Continue reading “The Barcelona Review – December 2009”

The selections in this issue reflect the goal of the editors who claimed they sought to “embody different methods of collection and obsession.” The magazine is rich in literary diversity from Jesse Jacob’s comic, “Oh, What a Cruel God we’ve Got” to K.A. Hays’s chapbook, Some Monolith. Continue reading “Black Warrior Review – Fall/Winter 2009”

This issue of West Branch contains a single piece each of fiction and nonfiction, and the work of eighteen poets. To begin, this excerpt of Kelle Groom’s nonfiction manuscript City of Shoes is particularly frantic and gripping. Groom – a mother who gave her son up for adoption – yearns for her now-dead and buried boy with a childlike fear of loss and faith in re-finding. She asks her own father, “‘Can we go to Brockton today, to Tommy’s cemetery?’ I wouldn’t say grave.” Her father resists, worried (Groom thinks) that in asking the adoptive parents for directions, “We’ll remind them I gave them Tommy, and Tommy died.” Continue reading “West Branch – Fall/Winter 2009”

Short and sweet is probably the most appropriate description of Magnapoets, a biannual literary journal out of Ontario, Canada. The 8×10, saddle-stapled journal features four essays on poetry, six pages of Free Verse and Form poetry, six pages of Haiku and Senryu, and six pages of Tanka.

Continue reading “Magnapoets – January 2010”

In this volume of Mare Nostrum, poems, prose, translation, and reviews are inspired by the traveling exhibit, to Seattle, of Florentine art restored after a 1966 flood. Each piece here is lively and deserving of praise, and has a prominent sense of belonging within these pages. The reader gets a glimpse of this in editor Kevin Craft’s foreword. To wit, “Seeing them restored was like witnessing the first gleam of the Renaissance all over again – the emergence, literally, of perspective as a compositional axiom, of naturalism in the fine shades of feeling etched into each attentive figure.” And, like art itself, the pieces here are both alluringly ambiguous, and wrought with imagination that begs to be understood. Continue reading “Mare Nostrum – June 2006 – May 2008”

As the average attention span continues to decrease and the printed page is replaced by the teeny tiny screen, practitioners of flash fiction seem poised to take advantage of this evolution. The editors of NANO Fiction take the idea one step further. While many flash fiction narratives extend into the several hundreds of words, the stories in this volume are far shorter. The great struggle for the writer is to increase the potency of their narratives as the word count decreases. Continue reading “NANO Fiction – 2009”

In these oh-so-unsettled times, I like to have something I can rely on. New England Review never lets me down. I know the quality of the writing will always be strong, serious, sophisticated, and that there will always be something unexpected, fresh without trying to impress. This issue lives up to the task – a good portion of the issue is devoted to an essay by the late critic and editor Ted Solotaroff (1928-2008), along with brief reflections of Solotaroff by more than a dozen and a half writers, editors, and literary colleagues. These remembrances are preceded by a long excerpt from Solotaroff’s, “The Literary Scene Changes,” an unfinished, unpublished memoir (his third). I enjoyed very much these personal recollections from Philip Roth, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Robert Stone, Robert Cohen, Hilma Wolitzer, Gerald Stern, Bobbie Ann Mason, Georges Borchardt, Gerald Howard, James Lasdun, Jill Schoolman, Russell Banks, Anton Shammas, Hy Enzer, Irene Skolnick, Douglas Unger, Allegra Goodman, Ehud Havazelet, and Max Apple. The diversity of ages, genres, and types of relationships to Solotaroff makes this little collection of tributes all the more appealing. Continue reading “New England Review – 2009”

This literary magazine holds a contest every four months with a theme. The contest is free to enter but has a number of prizes, the first prize being $140. This is obviously a great bargain, and consequently, the editors receive plenty of entries. I don’t know of another deal like this on the internet. Continue reading “On the Premises – November 2009”

The opening invitational forum of PEN America was given to writers as choice on “Make Believe.” The first option: “Imagine a book you wish you had written, either by yourself or by someone else, living or dead, real or imaginary.” I loved Cynthia Ozick’s playful answer: Continue reading “PEN America – 2009”

This lit mag is generally considered to be one of the better on the web at the present time. They state rather proudly that they have received a special mention in the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology, along with two Best of Web anthology awards, and a top ten Million Writers Award – pretty good stuff. In reading their latest collection of fiction and poetry, it is easy to see why. Continue reading “Per Contra – Fall 2009”

From artist Joomi Chung’s colorful gouache on clayboard “Scapes” and her intricate ink drawings, to the many insightful personal tributes to the late painter Michael Mazur, Agni’s strength is, as always, distinctive and authentic voices and visions. Continue reading “AGNI – Number 70”

Never has PMS been so delightful! PMS PoemMemoirStory is a journal of women’s writing, full of energy, life, color, politics, love, and verve. Issue number nine combines 40 pages of poetry, 47 pages of memoir, and 41 pages of fiction—all well-crafted and all high-quality. Continue reading “PMS poemmemoirstory – 2009”

“After a disarmingly calm opening, this issue plunges right into the temptations of sex and chocolate, which even Death seems to find irresistible,” says editor and publisher Dan Veach in his “Welcome.” The calm is Catherine Tahmin’s “Small Talk” (“It’s raining and that’s all / we want to know.”); the sex is Michale Myerhofer’s “First Crush” (“Across our little circle jived this ribboned thing / with her anatomical differences / of which we Catholic boys knew nothing.”); Janet Jennings and Mary Soon Lee contribute the chocolate with “The Chocolate Factory” (“You can smell the roast from two miles away”) and “Master of Chocolate” (“After fifty-six years selling chocolate, / he knows what his customers want”). It’s Soon Lee’s poem that brings us death, too, though somehow it seems unfair that it’s the person who sells the chocolate, not the one indulging (“The old woman who leaves her dachshund outside / wants foil-wrapped liqueurs for her sister / and a single hazelnut cream for her dog.”) who must die. (To be fair, death eats her chocolate slowly and allows the salesman “to write a last note to his wife.”). Continue reading “Atlanta Review – Fall/Winter 2009”

This issue features more than four dozen poems in a general section, the work of Rattle Poetry Prize Winner Lynne Knight and ten honorable mention recipients, the work of 30 poets in a special “Tribute to the Sonnet,” and lengthy interviews by editor Alan Fox with Alice Fulton and Molly Peacock (Fulton and Peacock in the same issue! Too good to be true!). It’s hard not to be curious about nearly two-hundred pages of poems that begin, as this issue does, with Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s oh-so-American-current-preoccupation: Continue reading “Rattle – Winter 2009”

The front cover of the 2009 issue of Barn Owl Review depicts a destroyed playground, the aftermath, perhaps, of a tornado: a blue twisting slide on its side, trees smashed into the remnants of a swing set, what might have been a plastic fort. On the magazine’s back cover is a picture of a little plastic lion cub sitting on a toilet, tail lifted. These photos are nothing too out of the ordinary yet convey states of mind caught between damage and play, humor and humanity’s excreta, metaphoric and otherwise. Continue reading “Barn Owl Review – 2009”

The editors of The Southeast Review like to present the familiar in unusual form. This attitude is made clear with the playful front cover photograph depicting a baseball player with index finger extended at an umpire who was apparently in the wrong. Bat in hand, posture aggressive, the ballplayer clearly won’t tolerate an unfair call. The twist: the ballplayer is a woman, apparently a member of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League’s Fort Wayne Daisies. The fiction, poems and nonfiction in The Southeast Review play by the rules, but reserve the right to imbue them with a slightly askew tone. Continue reading “The Southeast Review – 2009”

Everything in this issue was (happily, happily) unexpected. Karl Elder’s “Snowman” in the shape of a snowman that could have then been silly, but was not: “this is snowballing toward a title below – / both visible and invisible like like without / the ‘k,’ like the buzz word for a buzzard / sitting on a blind man in a blizzard.” Mary Molinary’s series “poems composed for the left hand,” which combined verse in lines, prose poems, verse in columns, and childish hand-written scrawl (“to keep dementia away”). “Leaning in from the Sea” by Kerry James Evans, short bursts separated by bullets and punctuated by bold, violent outbursts (“Fucked the green out of her eyes,” and “All that blood. All those feathers.”). Philip Pardi’s “My Father’s Christening,” a poem in nine numbered segments that begins with the utterly seductive single line “After the story, its telling, and only then is it a story.” Don Shofield’s “Harmony, USA,” a poem in a dozen numbered segments that ends: Continue reading “Beloit Poetry Journal – Winter 2009/10”

South Loop Review, a journal of creative nonfiction and art/photography published by Columbia College in Chicago, “publishes essays in lyric and experimental form.” The editors prefer “non-linear narratives and blended genres…montage and illustrated essays, as well as narrative photography.” While a good deal of the work in Volume 11 is considerably more traditional in both form and style than this description, there are a number of provocative “non-linear” and “blended” efforts. Continue reading “South Loop Review – 2009”

There are lots of reasons to read this issue, but here’s what you won’t want to miss: poet Khaled Mattawa, author of four books of poems (one forthcoming from New Issues Press) introduces and translates the poems of Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser (now based in London). The translations are lovely, fluid, authentic, and credible. Nasser’s poems are marvelous, deceptively simple and incredibly powerful in a subtle and lyrical way, as in this excerpt from “Once Upon an Evening in a Café”: Continue reading “The Cincinnati Review – Winter 2010”

This edition of Straylight has everything: a life-like horror strike that comes on like lightning; a story that asks you to suspend your disbelief (and you willingly do); an amusing take on a bridge’s history; a travelogue of sorts; and a doppelganger in a poem. It gives the publication a sense of completeness rarely found in literary magazines. It made it, quite truly, a joy to read, and an honor to review. Continue reading “Straylight – 2009”

Great short fiction exists! This issue of Colorado Review confirms it. Volume 36, Number 3 features three extremely good short stories, including the magazine’s annual Nelligan Prize winner, Angela Mitchell, whose first-ever published story, “Animal Lovers,” is both unpredictable and reasonable, by which I mean credible, realistic, and emotionally compelling. Mitchell has an ear for natural and believable dialogue, a great sense of timing, and casual, but carefully composed prose that is readable, but not incidental. Continue reading “Colorado Review – Fall/Winter 2009”

Upstreet’s fifth annual issue contains over two-hundred pages of stories, poems, creative nonfiction essays, and a very entertaining and insightful interview with Robin Hemley by Vivian Dorsel. Continue reading “upstreet – 2009”

There are so many stars in this issue one almost needs sunglasses to get through the Table of Contents. Reading the work, one sees that these bright names (Francine Prose, William H. Gass, Peter Gizzi, Maureen Howard, Cole Swensen, Nathaniel Mackey, Ann Lauterbach, Rachel Plau DuPlessis) deserve their shiny reputations. Some of their work conforms to the issue’s theme, “Not Even Past: Hybrid Histories,” described by editor Bradford Morrow as “works in which past moments in history play a centralizing role.” Other work is categorized simply as “new.” Continue reading “Conjunctions – 2009”

I know I sound like a broken record, but I can’t say it enough. I just don’t think there is a magazine published on this side of the border that can compare with the Canadian magazines. Grain is published in Saskatchewan and like the many marvelous literary journals produced across the vast and exquisite land to my north, it is exceptionally good. The theme of this issue is “Conversation,” which I understand to mean dialogue, relationship(s), images that reverberate and connect, and language in the service of vision, understanding, and meaningfulness. Editor Sylvia Legris traces the word’s roots to “the act of living with” or to keep company. Grain is all this and more. Continue reading “Grain – Fall 2009”

This journal, by choosing a different international city with a substantial Jewish population for each issue, examines the effects of Jewish culture on its surroundings as well as its own evolution. In the Moscow issue, the brooding Russian presence digs deep into the Jewish cultural consciousness. Themes of loneliness, death, estrangement, emigration, and abandonment permeate much of the writing. However, hope and redemption also lurk. The journal itself is book-sized, with a brilliant night photograph of Moscow on the cover, and is less than 200 pages. Continue reading “Habitus – 2009”

Keith Flynn, the editor, proudly states that this is the only poetry journal in the United States that subsists entirely on retail sales and subscriptions. It boasts a circulation of 3000 and has fourteen staff members. The latest production is 223 pages and contains a wide variety of poetry, interviews, essays, and book reviews. It was founded in 1994, and my only regret here is that I lack sufficient space to give this subject proper justice. Continue reading “Asheville Poetry Review – 2009”

“The Aurorean seeks to publish poetry that is inspirational, meditational and/or reflective of the Northeast.” In this issue, the magazine carries out its mission to reflect the Northeast with poems that specifically name or make reference to the area: “Mohonk moon” (“Scarlet Turnings” by Mike Jurkovik); the Atlantic ocean as seen from a “bed & breakfast” in Ogunquit, Maine (“Yellow Monkey” by Lainie Senechal); New England’s “slate skies” (“January Poem” by Ellen M. Taylor); a frosty New England context for the hammering of fence posts (“Fences” by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith); a salt marsh at Plum Island, Massachusetts (“Boardwalk” by Margaret Eckman); a weeping beech tree at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston (“Weeping Beech” by Alice Kociemba); a cranberry harvest near Beaver Dam Road (the specific state is not mentioned in Judy Snow’s “Harvest off Beaver Dam Road”); a nighttime ride to Mt. Riga (“Mt. Riga” by David Sermersheim); an unusually warm first-day-of-fall near Mt. Adams (“If, Ands, or Buts” by Russell Rowland); a view of middle age as seen against the context of the view of a heron at Hall’s Pond (“Middle Age” by Robin Pelzman); the varieties of apples grown in the Northeast – McCoun, Northern Spy, MacIntosh, and Cortland (“The Ingathering” by Carole W. Trickett); and the wild Lake Superior cold (“Lone Baptism” by Steve Ausherman). Continue reading “The Aurorean – Fall/Winter 2009-2010”

This lit mag specializes in flash fiction and publishes stories on a regular basis nine months of the year. Then they publish their Top 50 selections: fifty short fictions that come from other journals. Several editors from Wigleaf routinely monitor what is being published throughout the country, select the two hundred they like best, and send these stories to another editor who chooses the fifty he judges to be the best of the best. A wearying process to be sure, but it makes for some great reading. Continue reading “Wigleaf – December 2009”

The first few pages in this volume of The Bitter Oleander feature international poems, each first in the author’s language followed by the translation. I’m not multi-lingual, but I like seeing the poem in its original form. It gives me a feel for what can’t be completely translated. One such challenging poem is Rafael Jesús González’ Mexico, a “homage to the country in erotic hue.” The sexually charged imagery, such as “The banana bloom hangs like a horse’s sex / & your rough breasts give oil to suck,” makes me wish I could read and understand it in its original Spanish, as some of the nuanced sensuality is probably lost with the hard consonant sounds of English. Continue reading “The Bitter Oleander – Autumn 2009”