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46 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
And time keeps marching on. Happy December! Mother Nature is having fun with us deciding to mix rain and snow together to create a big slushy mess for us in Michigan today. If you’re weather is just as messy, NewPages is here with our first weekly roundup of submission opportunities for December 2023. A perfect excuse to stay indoors and keep those submission goals you set for yourself going as strong as possible. As it is the first of the month, there are a host of new opportunities to enjoy.
Don’t forget 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.
In her Colorado Review Fall/Winter 2023 essay, “Reconsidering the Sunflowers,” Stephanie Harrison recalls her father’s habit of painting just one side of their family’s house a different color each year and the moment she saw this through fresh eyes: “Something in me had blinked and refocused. It was like the optical illusion I’d marveled over in fifth grade: beautiful woman or hag? Definitely hag. Once I’d seen it, I couldn’t stop seeing it.” A stand-in for her father’s sense of self, the house reflects the elusiveness of his identity — ever-shifting throughout their relationship — and ultimately his struggles with mental health. Questions of identity and self are at the heart of this issue, as characters — and writers — examine themselves closely in pivotal moments and ask some hard questions. This issue also features work by Jonathan W. Chu, Christopher Citro, Timothy Donnelly, Lindsey Drager, K. S. Dyal, Suzie Eckl, John Gallaher, Adam Giannelli, Jacob M. Hall, Chengru He, Karan Kapoor, John Kinsella, Arah Ko, Brandon Krieg, Jami Macarty, Caleb A. P. Parker, Susan Rich, Petra Salazar, Liane Strauss, Amy Stuber, Jaz Sufi, Eugene Stein, Cole Swensen, Sher Ting, Marc Vincenz, Hannah V. Warren, Tana Jean Welch & Brad Wetherell.
Kathleen Rooney’s, Where Are the Snows, is dedicated “To the future.” This book of prose-influenced poems seems longer than seventy-three pages. Mainly consisting of long sentences reaching across the page like obsessions, it is beautifully made, with attractive cover and front matter graphics. The Table of Contents seems demure because of its scallop-edged border. Line breaks are not of concern here. Instead, being entertaining is. Underneath the jokes and ironic spins, Rooney blends advice column writing with poetry. Each poem is about a fact or observation and explores every facet as far as the imagination will go. In “The Point in Time or Space At Which Something Originates,” Rooney explores “newness,” the word “new,” and “beginnings.” She writes: “Can beginner’s luck apply from moment to moment? Not sure, but I hope so.” I wouldn’t go as far as saying she uses the techniques of stand-up comedians, but elements are here in what gets turned around. In the poem, “Foretelling the Future by a Randomly Chosen Passage from a Book,” Rooney concludes: “Quick! Somebody give me another assignment. Somebody tell me that what we do matters.” Rooney’s book matters. Laughing during the pain of life matters.
Where Are the Snows by Kathleen Rooney. Texas A&M University Press, September 2022.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
Consequence Volume 15.2 (Fall 2023) features works from authors and artists from around the world who offer hard-won truths and insights into the realities of war and geopolitical violence. These realities include a young transgender man making sense of his father’s experiences while fighting in Korea, the multiple perspectives surrounding US soldiers being spit on when returning from Vietnam, and the history of a country as revealed to a young woman by anonymous, pre-WWII photographs. There are also works that address the ways we express these realities in the latest installation of our “What is War Poetry?” series. Earlier installations focused on these expressions via The Iliad and the Bhagavad Gita. In this iteration, writers explore these depictions through a different lens, through texts and ideas that could be construed as antiwar. The editors are excited to share this volume!
Established in 1967, The Malahat Review is a quarterly literary magazine dedicated to publishing the best poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by Canadian and international writers. Their current fall issue #224 showcases cover art by Cammie Staros, Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction winner Eleanor Fuller, and new work by Odette Auger, Chee Brossy, Alicia Gee, Karine Hack, Warren Heiti, Mark Anthony Jarman, Joseph Kidney, Y. S. Lee, Winshen Liu, Sadie McCarney, Matt Robinson, Kawai Shen, Sun Tzu-Ping (translated by Nicholas Wong), Rhea Tregebov, and Olivia Wenzel (translated by Sylvia Franke). Visit their website for more info and to sign up for their email list to receive their monthly newsletter with author interviews, contest entry deals, info on upcoming issues, and more.
In Janice Deal’s linked story collection, everyday people navigate the uncertainties of life in the American heartland, seeking order in chaos with a very human mix of resilience and folly.
At first glance, the fictional Ephrem, Illinois, seems a friendly, familiar town—it draws you right in, even if you don’t need supplies at the mall or a snack at Brat Station. But as you come closer, you discover people who are complex and unpredictable. Life itself is capricious, and loneliness can turn a person strange. Yet there’s much affection here, small and large examples of human kindness.
For years, Janice Deal has been publishing award-winning stories about Ephrem. (Reviewers have compared them to Anton Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson, and Flannery O’Connor.) Now assembled for the first time, these extraordinary tales offer a masterful snapshot of life in today’s small-town America.
Janice Deal is the author of a novel, The Sound of Rabbits, and a previous story collection, The Decline of Pigeons. Stories from Strange Attractors have won The Moth Short Story Prize and the Cagibi Macaron Prize. Janice has also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose.
The Fiddlehead No. 297 (Autumn 2023) features poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and reviews written by some of the best new and established writers. Contributors include Anne Marie Todkill — winner of our 2023 Creative Nonfiction contest — Jack Wang, David Ly, Annick MacAskill, Bryn Harris, and many more. Visit The Fiddlehead website to see a full list of contributors, read excerpts from selected works, and order a copy of No. 297. Cover art is Fall Canoe Route by Réjean Roy.
Linda Villarosa’s Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation exposes the overt and hidden racism that runs throughout the healthcare industry, as well as other health-related concerns—such as the influence of social and physical living conditions on mortality. Villarosa draws on the history of health and medicine to show the variety of ways the then-legalized and socially accepted racism continues to affect how healthcare professionals today see people of color, especially African Americans. What was once obvious and intentional is now built into systems, whether that’s the way research privileges the white body or medical technologies continue the bias against Black bodies. One of her main throughlines is how the medical establishment doesn’t listen to African Americans, especially women, and especially mothers. No matter what their socioeconomic status or education level, African Americans have to work to convince those in the healthcare system that their pain is real, that their suffering needs attention. Time and time again, those pleas are ignored, leading to higher rates of mortality among minority communities, again, especially in maternal deaths. Villarosa ends the book by focusing on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but she also ends with hope that changes are happening, even amid such continued suffering.
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
45 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
I hope that you all had a happy and safe Thanksgiving filled with good food and good company. If you’re ready to tackle some more submission goals while munching on all the Thanksgiving leftovers, NewPages has you covered with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the week of November 24, 2023. As November will officially be over with next week, don’t forget to get submissions in for November 30 deadlines!
Don’t forget 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.
The First Line Fall 2023 issue tasked writers with the line, “As soon as Harriet entered the building, she headed to the seventh floor.” Contributors include Brian Shaw, Gretchen Oliver, Footnotes by Doug Devaney, Georgi Presecky, Ruswa Fatehpuri, Alison Morretta, Vernon McDonald, Harriet Takes a Ride by Mary Corbin, and an essay by A. R. Cochrane. The First Lines for 2024 have been announced along with their deadlines. Visit the publication’s website for complete submission information.
The Fall 2023 (8.2) issue of Collateral is now online for readers to share in the contributions of literary and visual art revealing the impact of military service and violent conflict beyond the combat zone. The publication features poetry by Karen Arnold, Sarwa Azeez, Sarah Colby, Leonore Hildebrandt, James King, Ron Lavalette, Antony Owen, Zara Raab, Siavash Saadlou, Danielle Sellers, J.C. Todd, B.A. Van Sise, and Charles Weld; fiction by J. Malcolm Garcia, Marc Levy, Joseph Porter, and Yuhan Tang; creative nonfiction by MaxieJane Frazier, Barbara Krasner, and Jennifer Eden Rogers; and an interview with featured visual artist Amber Zora.
So Late in the Day, Claire Keegan’s latest collection of stories is subtitled “stories of women and men.” That could just as well read, “stories of women who are trying to live their lives and men who attempt to thwart them.” The middle of three stories, “The Long and Painful Death,” originally published in 2007, tells of a writer who just wants to use her two weeks at a retreat to produce new work, but one man intrudes upon her solitude. She reverts to societal expectations of what a woman should do to entertain a guest, ruining her day. The final story, “Antarctica,” first published in 1999, is more extreme in the complications that ensue. It’s the title story, though, that is the gem of this strong collection. Keegan published it last year, and it is a story that speaks to the gender dynamics of our time. The premise is simple, as it follows a man who meets a woman, then proposes to her. However, their relationship doesn’t go as planned, and he has the opportunity to learn about the world and women, but he learns exactly the wrong lesson. Keegan’s style, as always, is sparse and powerful, much like Chekhov, her favorite writer (who makes an appearance in the middle story). Keegan creates women who want to craft meaningful lives in the world, but the men who interact with them do their best to prevent those lives from coming to fruition.
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 or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth by Marie-Claire Bancquart Translated from the French by Wendeline A. Hardenberg Orison Books, November 2023
Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) was a prolific and prize-winning French poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. In her poetry, she combines an erudite vocabulary and references to classical literature with an earthy sensibility and a fascination with experiencing the smallest moments of everyday life fully. The deceptive simplicity of her poems lays bare the mysteries underlying the world we inhabit and our very existence. Wendeline A. Hardenberg’s careful and skillful translations are sure to broaden the audience for this significant poet as yet too little known outside of France.
In Good Grief, the Ground, Margaret Ray’s debut collection, “we are in Central Florida.” It is late summer. We are coming of age, making out at the movies, sneaking into a pool, navigating gender tensions and expectations, and “no one is dead yet.” The poet writes personally of “the cusp of childhood” and adulthood and expands socio-politically to “the border / between” a “violent history / of colonialization” and what we “get away with… because” we “are white,” between queer desire and autonomy, between “this woman and wanting” “and wanting to be.” There is “a glow of danger and ferocity pulsing off” Ray’s lines, a ”buzzing-heat-made-into-sound that means” “we change // when we can name things.” But in reality “naming it’s no inoculation against / what happens in every parking lot alone at night.” There are “too many dead women.” In these poems, Ray is the one who carries both her younger and adult selves “across the threshold” where “[c]hildren are made of risk” and “someone says hysterectomy.” Whether we are children or adults, “everything / has always arranged itself into before / and after.” Everyone has to be “fluent in the grammar / of emergency.” The poems emit “the feeling of being ready to go somewhere,” but soon realize “there were never any good exit strategies.” Considering this ground of no exit, do we continue to risk “betting on anything” or do we go about “inoculating … against / hope”? Ray’s poems strive toward “self-sufficient womanhood” to “build the version where memory works,” to “feel at home in this life.” Isn’t that what we all want, dear reader? Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground “sparkles with impermanence,” “the most delicious tingling.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean is about relationships near and far. What is the poet’s relationship to situations, people, and other everyday items? I see Dean’s poems in a creative, concrete way; and see them as points on an astrology chart, which is circular and the connecting points to various houses/states of being. This is a sacred, esoteric book of poems not to be approached offhandedly. Slowly, by studying these dialed-up, circles of potency, there is a lot revealed, as in these lines from “House of Values”:
[. . . ] movies on repeat. ice cream on repeat. dinner at bedtime. toys kept in Crown Royale bags.
At first, I did not get that these were astrology charts. They looked like maps with scroll and script writing. When I went back and examined them, it was plain as can be. In these lines, Dean remembers her grandmother’s teachings:
[. . . ] her eyes lit like bright swans when her mouth formed the words.
I love, “her eyes lit like bright swans” so much. I can see and feel this image. The mystery, the sacred, and the overcoming of what was endured make for careful reading. If I read nothing else, I would be satisfied.
Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean. above/ground press, April 2023.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
The Capture of Krao Farini by Nay Saysourinho Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023
The Capture of Krao Farini is part Turing test, part circus flyer. Written in the imagined voice of Krao Farini, a real sideshow performer brought to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, the book dissolves the line between algorithm and spectacle to reveal the ultimate consolation prize – to be acclaimed as human enough. Nay Saysourinho is a writer, visual artist, and recipient of a 2023 Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship. She was previously a Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell and a Short Fiction Scholar at Tin House Winter Workshop. She holds a Berkeley Fellowship from Yale and has received support from Kundiman, The Writers Grotto, and the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.
Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, like other neo-slave narratives—Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer— uses the mystical and the magical in her portrayal of slavery. Annis is separated from her mother and sold further South into even more brutal conditions. One way she survives is by drawing on the spirits of wind, water, and earth, as well as her ancestors. However, Ward doesn’t use these supernatural elements to make Annis’ existence easier; in fact, Annis often argues with these spirits about what they have done and where they have failed her or her family. Annis must ultimately rely on herself and those around her in order to survive and find a way to exist in a brutal system that consistently tries to break every bond she has, including the one with herself. Ward focuses more on the psychological and emotional effects of slavery than she does the physical abuse, though that’s certainly present. She is more concerned with Annis’ inner life and her relationships with her family and others who are enslaved than she is with recreating the brutality of the system. She ultimately wants to celebrate the resilience of the human spirit rather than relying on the supernatural spirits to provide an unrealistic survival for Annis.
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
Deadline: November 30, 2023 Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to Black Fox Literary Magazine’s Rhapsody of Regret Writing Prize! Deadline: November 30, 2023! We are also accepting free submissions for our winter 2024 print issue. Free subs close on November 30, 2023! Visit our website and view our flyer for more information.
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Discover the latest issue of Amsterdam Review with poetry, translations, interviews, and visual arts by local and international artists. Featuring an exclusive interview of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and works by Rae Armantrout, Laynie Browne, Marin Sorescu, Jocelyn Ulevicus, Paul Cunningham, Ruth Lasters, and many more. View our flyer and visit our website for more information.
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Application Deadline: December 10, 2023 Our Winter Online Workshops offer participants a unique opportunity to learn from three faculty members in the same genre over six weeks. Workshops meet every Saturday 2:00–4:00 pm ET starting January 20, 2024 (no meeting on February 10). Workshops are generative, with a focus on creating new work. Visit our website and view our flyer for more information and to apply.
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Poets & Writers Magazine is happy to offer NewPages readers an exclusive offer. You’re invited to subscribe to Poets & Writers Magazine at our guaranteed lowest rate. For only $9.95 (a 79% discount off our cover price), you’ll gain access to the magazine that informs, connects, and inspires the literary community. Every issue is for the serious writer, and reader, like you. Subscribe now.
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Deadline: November 30, 2023 We want to see your work! Fiction, creative nonfiction up to 1000 words, three poems, and art and photography. Our mission is to explore the edges of things, to find the hidden cracks that let the light shine through. We publish quarterly and are a paying market. Have you got something for us? We can’t wait to see it! Submissions open November 1.
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Application deadline: December 15 (priority); January 15 (final) UNC Greensboro’s MFA is a two-year residency program offering fully funded assistantships with stipends. Students work closely with faculty in one-on-one tutorials, developing their craft in a lifelong community of writers. UNCG offers courses in poetry, fiction, publishing, and creative nonfiction, plus teaching opportunities and editorial work for The Greensboro Review. Note our 12/15 priority consideration deadline! Visit our website and view our flyer for more information.
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Deadline: December 1, 2023 Dorianne Laux will judge. Prizes: $1,500 & publication (winner); $500 & publication (honorable mention). All finalists will be published in the 2024 Spring/Summer Awards issue. Submit up to 3 poems per entry. $20 entry fee includes a copy of the awards issue. Submit October 1 to December 1, 2023. For complete guidelines please visit our website and view our flyer.
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“A tender, transformative novel for all who sometimes feel they don’t fit in, for anyone who’s ever been struck down by scamming or bullying, and for anyone who ever suffers profound pangs of loss—you will never forget this terrific story.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States 2019 – 2021
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Deadline: December 31 The Tartt First Fiction Award is in its nineteenth year. The award is open to any American writer who has not yet had a book of stories published. Publication and one thousand dollars awarded. View flyer or visit our website for more information.
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In Meltwater, Claire Wahmanholm buoys her poems between the loss of a child and glacial ice melt, between “wail / and wishing.” Her poems read like a glossary of “every passing catastrophe,” acknowledging that everything is “made of / vanishing.” And, the poet is “living,” “alive / to notice,” asking, What are the implications of artistic fertility and motherhood when we are killing Earth? Perhaps because the “clock is about to start,” poetic form and sequence are important aspects of Meltwater. In the abecedary poems “O,” “M,” “P,” and “XYZ,” there is an alliterative and assonating accumulation “between mist and milk.” In opposition, words melt “white letters of dread invisible against / their surface of snow” in the eight erasures entitled “Meltwater.” In another series that makes use of variations of the statement “Everything Will Try to Kill You,” Wahmanholm invokes Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me.” In her poem, Clifton asserts “something has tried to kill me / and has failed,” but Wahmanholm admits she has “no plan to keep the chemicals separate / from the lake, the acid separate from the rain, the bird from the glass.” A series of four other poems entitled “Glacier” recounts visiting “the bright blue undersides turning over and over in the bay,” which “sounds like a metaphor but isn’t.” Wahmanholm is “talking about water.” The glacial ice melt and sea level rise that will flood coastal areas. Unlike other writers who write about climate crises, I get the feeling Wahmanholm does not write to either avert or despite disaster. Wahmanholm writes “to be ready for whatever [is] left of the world” and what “we suffer the empty universe for.”
Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm. Milkweed Editions, March 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
42 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! NewPages is back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities just in time for some bad weather rolling in, so the perfect excuse to keep you indoors and accomplishing those submission goals. Plus, you’ll find even more opportunities and goodies in our November 2023 eLitPak Newsletter!
Don’t forget 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.
The prose poems in How To by Heather Cadsby are hilarious, and their titles are satisfying enough, let alone the bodies of the poems. Some examples: “How to catch flamboyant bohemians,” “How to tell if it’s different,” and “How to look at a broken fountain.” Each one offers its own non-advice and leads me to hunger for more.
I love how Cadsby plays with expectations. These poems offer surprises that are language-based without being frustrating to read. They are LOL poems, as in this line from “How to know if your venn diagram is pentimento”:
Golf is geometry as is burlesque.
These are funny and my mind creates illustrations or comic images to go with them as I read. I am challenged by this as a reader and also immensely entertained. Not a lot of poetry is funny. Many times, when poets try to be funny, they start rhyming or sound like Dean Young imitators (even though that is a good thing). Thank goodness to have read Cadsby’s inventions, I say to myself, wondering how I will manage to set this book down and get my mind back.
How To by Heather Cadsby. above/ground press, September 2023.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
The Louisville Review’s Summer 2023 issue Number 93 features Alfred Conteh’s painting Aaron on the cover image and an essay about the work contributed by Alice Gray Stites. Poems by Rosa Nevadovska (1890-1971) open this issue, both in the original Yiddish text—a first for TLR—and in English translation by Merle L. Bachman. This issue offers a wide range of voices and subjects engaged: from an exploration of the too-often-hidden contributions of Black distillers of Kentucky bourbon, in Kentucky Poet Laureate Frank X Walker’s poem, “Masta d’ Steala” to a speculative view of a not-so-distant future deeply impacted by climate catastrophe in J. D. Strunk’s short story “Tokyo, 2031,” to an assertion of reliance and vibrance in advanced age in Alice Bingham Gorman’s poem, “The House of Eighty”—plus much more!
High Lonesome: Poems by Allison Titus Saturnalia Books, October 2023
High Lonesome by Allison Titus is a radio left on in a candlelit room, playing softly into the shadows as the hours fall through the evening. Interruptions of static, a slow confetti of grief drifting into the corners, mysterious white noise dispatches. Here is a meditation on estrangement—from an other, from the world, from the self—and its long aftermath spent learning how to cultivate tenderness and devotion in a world “where nobody / is tender enough,” a practice that alternates between sorrow and transcendence. These poems are little ceremonies of attention to a variety of lonelinesses, both human and non-human.
White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link’s collection of short stories, draws from Grimm’s fairy tales and uses them as inspiration for new stories. Some of those new stories are quite contemporary, while some read very much like the fairy tales that inspire her—most are a mix of that feeling. For example, the final story, “Skinder’s Veil” is based on “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” but it tells the story of Andy, a graduate student who hasn’t been working on his dissertation. A friend from graduate school offers him a three-week housesitting job at a rural home in Vermont. There are rules, though, in that he must welcome anybody who comes to the back door, but not the front door, including Skinder himself (who seems to be Death, but that isn’t clear). As in fairy tales, Link purposefully omits important information, leaving it to the reader to decide who some characters are or what particular events or places mean. In “The White Road” (based on “The Musicians of Bremen”), for example, the white road seems to be some portal to another place, but it could also simply be the evil that exists within each of us. Though Link has modernized some of the settings and plots from Grimm’s collection of tales, humanity never seems to change.
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
South Dakota Review is delighted to wrap up Volume 57 with a marvelous roster of authors! Volume 57, Number 4 includes poetry by Craig Blais, Maggie Bowyer, Lawdenmarc Decamora, Deidra Suwanee Dees, Aidan Dolbashian, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Joanna Doxey, Kristin Entler, Kennedy Amenya Gisege, Korey Hurni, Evan J. Massey, King Tina, Sara Moore Wagner, Terin Weinberg, Kenton K. Yee, and Hafsa Zulfiqar; fiction by Ryan Burruss and Noah Pohl; creative nonfiction by Alyse Bensel, Anna Oberg, Emily Stedge, Caroline Sutton, and Natasha Williams; and a scholarly essay by Joanna Acevedo. Issues can be ordered here.
The Common‘s annual postcard auction opens for bidding on Monday, November 13. If you aren’t familiar, it’s an annual fundraiser where you can bid to receive a postcard from your favorite author. This year’s list of 40+ authors includes folks like Anthony Doerr, Gina Chung, Sandra Cisneros, David Sedaris, Rick Russo, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Anne Tyle, Alison Bechdel, Julia Alvarez, and Rabih Alameddine just to name a few. Authors always put a lot of their creative energy into writing (and drawing!) these, and they’re always completed by the holidays if you want to buy one as a gift for someone. Bidding closes at noon EST on December 4, 2023.
The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones Rose Metal Press, October 2023
In The Hurricane Book, Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones pieces together the story of her family and Puerto Rico using a captivating combination of historical facts, poems, maps, overheard conversations, and flash essays. Organized around six hurricanes that passed through the island with varying degrees of intensity between 1928 and 2017, The Hurricane Book documents the myriad ways in which colonialism—particularly the relationship between the United States and the island—has seeped into the lives of Puerto Ricans, affecting how they and their land recover from catastrophe, as well as how families and citizens are bound to one another. Through accounts of relatives, folklore, and necessary escape, Acevedo-Quiñones illuminates both the tenderness and heartbreak of bonds with family and homeland.
Set in 1898, Chris McGinley’s rural noir saga Once These Hills introduces the reader to life in eastern Kentucky on Black Boar Mountain, a world relatively untouched by modernization. Gaining momentum quickly, this story follows protagonist Lydia King, then aged 10, as she navigates life in a world that favors only the few. By championing strong female characters throughout the book, McGinley emphasizes the hardships of life in the early part of the twentieth century in rural Appalachia and how survival truly was reserved for the fittest.
As life starts to change on Black Boar Mountain, McGinley explores the relationship between big business and politics where the arrival of the Railway Company and its single-minded pursuit of advancement serves as a brilliant metaphor for our North American history of colonialism and capitalism. Through its insightful and nuanced dialogue and well-paced storyline, McGinley highlights the relationships between power, influence, and affluence, and how modernization often leaves some behind. In Once These Hills, McGinley has created a full-circle story with well-developed, three-dimensional characters, wrapping them up in a saga that successfully reminds us of the inevitability of the future; it is coming, and McGinley wants us to be prepared.
Reviewer Bio: Ashley Holloway gets bored easily, so she lives her life according to an ‘&.’ She teaches healthcare leadership in Calgary, AB, and is a nurse with a Master of Public Health, a graduate diploma in Global Leadership, with further studies in intercultural communication and international development. She writes in a variety of genres with work appearing across Canada and the US and has co-authored three books. Ashley is an editor for Unleash Press and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She also really loves punctuation.
Uncollected Later Poems (1968-1979) by Ernst Meister Translated by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick Wave Books, November 2023
In these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity. Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence (2015), In Time’s Rift (2012), and Wallless Space (2014) —provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities.
Cutting the Stems by Virginie Lalucq Saturnalia Books, October 2023
Translated from the French, Cutting the Stems by Virginie Lalucq is a playful, long poem in sections that contains a pastiche of various unlikely influences: manuals on gardening and plant propagation, etymological dictionaries, gemstone and mineral guides, a how-to for florists, and other “un-poetic” texts. Lalucq’s poem incorporates word play, linguistic borrowings, and etymological references, and McQuerry and Bourhis’s translation captures, and, at times, reinvents, that word play for an English audience. Translated by Claire McQuerry and Céline Bourhis.
For nearly two decades, Broadsided Press has released monthly collaborations of poetry and artwork for readers to enjoy and share by posting far and wide. This Fall 2023 marks the launch of their biannual folio, bringing together multiple collaborations, lesson plans for teachers to use in their classrooms, and book reviews. Each collaborative work is published alongside a conversation between the artist and the writer – perfect for teachers and students of the craft. The Fall 2023 issue features eight collaborations: Poet Darren Demaree/Artist David Bernardy; Poet Alica Mteuzi/Artist Donna R. Charging; Poet Michelle Whitstone/Artist Regin Igloria; Poet Rose Strode/Artist JoAnne McFarland; Poet Nicelle Davis/Artist Michele L’Heureux; Poet Rajiv Mohibir/Artist Janice Redman; Poet Geffrey Davis/Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata; and Poet Tomas Nieto/Artist Kevin Morrow. Visit Broadsided today, and download these gorgeous broadsides to enjoy and post around your community.
43 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Does your state practice Daylight Savings Time? It can definitely throw off your routines and schedules, can’t it? Speaking of schedules, NewPages is back again this Friday with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities to help you out.
Don’t forget 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.
I love seeing the various styles/forms of poems in Hood Vacations by Michal “MJ” Jones and the way they’re never the same from one to the next. This variety shows hard work and willingness to bend. I especially admire how one moment we could be skirting Nate Mackey’s style in Double Trio, and then the next poem is like a small concentration in the mode of Tom Clark. Filled with backslashes, “Turnstiles” is a one-stanza poem about the author’s young son. It is interesting to see how the use of this punctuation flips readers through Jones’ narrative in the poem:
Societal and racial violence, family issues, birth, identity, and travel to hot springs are topics Jones makes fascinating through restrained telling that turns wild, full of expletives and eroticism. I appreciate that there are longer poems here. “Channelings” is seven pages long, in seven sections, so it is a pleasure to read in such a sensible layout and such a relief to see and read a poem this way. Hood Vacations is a break with something to show for, something to keep us there. Exquisite!
Hood Vacations by Michal ‘MJ’ Jones. Black Lawrence Press, January 2023.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
Rita Bouvier invokes Linda Hogan’s belief from The Radiant Lives of Animals (Beacon Press, 2020): “The cure of susto, soul sickness, is not found in books.” And yet this Métis writer gives readers a beautiful rebellion, a book “carrying ancestral memories of the land,” and “adding to the story / like old times around the fire / giving thanks always giving thanks.” The ethos here: “as long as we have more to enjoy / than another we have responsibility / to lift each other again / and again.” In odes, elegies, “call it prayer if you want” or “an invocation for the sick and the dying,” Bouvier’s are poems that both “ponder the murky waters of truth and reconciliation” and “the massive weight of colonial history” as well as celebrate the “new greening of spring” and praise her “relative’s warm hands,” “crying out / marrsî my relatives!” As Bouvier strives “to wash away the pain and sorrow / as right renewal,” “her questions are very simple / who counts? what counts?” Bouvier suggests that to find answers, we must “look beyond ourselves to others / human and non-human / with whom we share this marbled blue and green planet.” With “wild rose” and “the scent of sage enveloping” in a beautiful rebellion, Rita Bouvier offers readers “a gift of renewal / / understanding that language is the sinew / connecting us to a life force” and “when we tire… / … / a bed of mustard-yellow dandelions.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
The November 2023 issue of The Lake online journal of poetry and poetics is now online featuring Fizza Abbas, Ken Anderson, Maria Berardi, Jennifer Blackledge, Clive Donovan, Matt Gilbert, Elizabeth Goodall, Maren O. Mitchell, Ronald Moran, Jason Ryberg, and Fiona Sinclair. Reviewers offer their take on Rachael Carney’s Octopus Mind, Frances Sackett’s, House with the Mansard Roof, and Charles Rammelkamp’s Transcendence. “One Poem Reviews” offers readers one poem from a newly minted collection, with works this month from Lorrain Caputo, Diane Elayne Dees, Kris Falcon, and Sarah Leavesley.
The title of Carlos Soto-Román’s 11 evokes the “other” September 11: Chile’s September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile. The poetry in this book adopts the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the language emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto-Román’s work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory. How does censorship translate into another language when translation already involves so many degrees of selective removal? This collaborative version in English, taken on by eight translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma, and politics.
Consequences. AGNI 98 fronts the world as we find it, parsing enigmas and celebrating the drive to engage necessary truths. This newest issue includes essays by Mara Naselli and Peter Balakian that take on misogyny and cultural suppression while poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Rochelle Hurt, jason b. crawford, and Sharon Olds probe the surprising energies of duress. Stories by Lucy Sweeney Byrne and Mylene Fernández Pintado (in Dick Cluster’s translation) test commitments to decisions made. Cover artist Eva Lundsager sets the tone, finding motion in landscapes at the edge.
I am the dead, who, you take care of me by Anthony McCann Wave Books, November 2023
The poems in Anthony McCann’s I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead. Following the poet’s recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is “a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat.” By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. “I want life—but for the living” he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these works ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.
The Main Street Rag Fall 2023 issue, in keeping with the long-standing tradition of hosting interviews to open the magazine, invites readers to enjoy Editor M. Scott Douglass (& friends) in conversation with Minion TRUNION – who is also featured on the cover and whose origin story is provided in the “Welcome Readers” intro. After that good laugh (or maybe cry), readers can go on to enjoy “Stories & Such” bySydney Lea, Kevin Brown, Maria Hardin, Burt Rashbaum, Michael Pikna, Michael Sadoff, Bill Spencer, Richard Widerkehr, Kevin Winchester, Marie Gray Wise, and Poetry by M. J. Arcangelini, Joe Barca, Jane Blanchard, Ace Boggess, Alan Catlin, Deborah H. Doolittle, Mirana Comstock, Paula Brancato, Casey Killingsworth, Carol Levin, Kevin McDaniel, Richard Merelman, Yvonne Morris, Richard Thomas Murray, R. Nikolas Macioci, Charles Rammelkamp, Kevin Ridgeway, Russell Rowland, Maeve Stemp, Jane M. Wiseman, Richard Weaver, Liza Wolff-Francis, and many more.
Heating the Outdoors, an intimate lyric written by Marie-Andrée Gill and tenderly translated from the French by Kristen Renee Miller, is a “love story like all others.” As a result, the poems balance precariously between “simple happiness” and “storm damage.” More pointedly, Gill writes: “love is a virgin forest / then a clear cut.” The reader enters at the “clear cut,” then follows Gill through three phases of her love story as she experiences break-up, objectivity, and rebound. Throughout the collection, there is the feeling that Gill is “writing to survive” after “turbulent intimacy.” Despite the colonization of her heart, there is “something” in her that “keeps a lamp on”; something beseeches “where do I even begin to switch off my hopes”? It may be hope that prevents acceptance and leads to the repetition of “old dramas” and “sex bombs reigniting” once again. The poems do not provide an easy answer, but they do reflect how the constant battle for a woman’s sanity and autonomy inside a love relationship is analogous to skating on thin ice. In Heating the Outdoors, Gill determines that the woman not “end up in an asylum,” but instead “seeking [her] place somewhere out on the trail” in the boreal forest. “Outside is the only answer I found inside,” she writes. Turning toward a new intimate, nature’s “aspen,” “elk,” “bright paths of snowflakes,” Gill, an Ilnu and Québécoise woman, begins to “feel worthy of its / voice” and her own.
Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill translated by Kristen Renee Miller. Book*hug Press, March 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/
DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach Elixir Press, January 2023
DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach won the 2022 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. As contest judge Candice Reffe describes the book, these dazzling prose poems are a portal into “a realm where some great secret is to be divulged, the gate to what’s been sought but never found briefly ajar.” Enter. Details of ordinary life—the scraping of a spoon, the “fat blue mailbox bolted to a sidewalk”—shimmer like auras the poet reads in the world around us. Part observation, part divination, the poems send messages in invisible ink that appear when you tip them to the sun, the dispatch you’ve been waiting for.
Two-time Lambda Literary fellow and co-editor of The Common‘s Issue 26 Miguel M. Morales offers these words to consider as we head into a season of feasting and celebration: “our farmworking hands helped harvest the feast.” The Common is a Whiting Award-winning literary magazine based out of Amherst College, and their latest issue features a portfolio of work from Latinx farmworkers, exploring issues of labor, immigration, identity, and “the farming culture that once coursed through the valley where Amherst is now located,” as David Applefield fellow Sam Spratford writes in the magazine’s opening essay. Issue 26 also features a new translated story from O. Henry Prize-winner Amar Mitra, a haunting essay about coming of age in 1990s Yugoslavia, and a poem from Whiting Award-winner Rickey Laurentiis, “Tall Lyric for Palestine (Or, The Harder Thinking).”
