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Issue #55 (Spring 2017) of Rattle includes a selection of poems on the theme “Civil Servants.” “The collection features seventeen civil servants — poets who have worked for various government agencies, including the EPA, the FDA, the CIA, the Census Bureau, and many more,” write the editors. “Apparently working for the public produces a dry sense of humor, because many of the poems lean sardonic. These poets are also smart and down-to-earth, and just may restore your faith in bureaucracy.” Some of the writers included: Lisa Badner, Dane Cervine, A.M. Juster, Bruce Neidt, Pepper Trail, Jane Wheeler, John Yohe. See a full list of contributors here.

Editor Wayne Miller has announced several changes to Copper Nickel with its recent re-launch, including paying contributors: “starting with issue 24, we’ll be paying $30 per printed page. (We wish it could be more!)” Indeed, it is more than nothing, which is a great step for any literary publication to be able to take. Additionally, issue 24 of Copper Nickel includes a flash fiction portfolio featuring 22 works selected by Fiction Editors Teague Bohlen and Joanna Luloff. Cover image: “Tape Loops” by Eleanor King.

“It bears acknowledging that Drunken Boat 24 arrives in the wake of a substantial loss,” opens Nick Potter’s editorial to the comics section of the newest issue. “Amid the varied responses,” he writes, “I’ve noticed a subset of my friends on Facebook who have updated their profile pictures to a black square. In our increasingly globalized, increasingly visual culture, this act seems intuitive, marking absence, marking erasure, marking the digital equivalence of donning black in mourning, marking a kind of death. In comics, the filled-black panel has often been used as contextual shorthand for death—a kind of visual euphemism in the structural language of the form.”

Potter goes on to offer several panels of black squares, acknowledging the loss of famous people, those whose lives taken made news for their injustice, and for victims of the Pulse Nightclub Massacre, as well as a couple personal losses from Potter’s family. “And so,” he closes, “as we’ve endured so many black panels this year, it’s worth noting that, in comics, all panels, black or otherwise, are given meaning by the panels that surround them. And how we choose to fill those panels, as artists and patrons, comprises the politics with which we envision humanity.”

Executive Editor Jim Hicks opens the newest issue of The Massachusetts Review: The Music Issue with this from his introduction: “For this particular quarterly, given that ‘public affairs’ is the kicker to our moniker, the first reaction of readers might well be, ‘Why?’ Certainly if you think of music as entertainment, as remedy or therapy, you might not see such a theme as urgent. And yet what social movement, what new political formation, hasn’t had its unforgettable soundtrack? Where, after all, do those in the struggle find the force and inspiration to keep moving forward, to get up, stand up, in this world full of tunnels and only occasional light? What brings them together, what lifts their voices, what beats the drum?”

The front cover features “The Music Issue, 2016” created for The Massachusetts Review  by Bianca Stone, and a full list of contributors with access to some of the works can be found here.

Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction January 2017 features three new craft essays: “The Essay and the Art of Equivocation” in which Brandon R. Schrand [pictured] considers our ability to equivocate artfully in the essay; “Truth & Delight: Resisting the Seduction of Surfaces” in which Peter Selgin examines the need to resist total seduction by sounds and surfaces; and  “Beyond ‘Craft for Craft’s Sake’: Nonfiction and Social Justice” with Rachel Tolliver and M. Sausun discussing nonfiction and social justice in the new political era. Brevity’s full content can be read online.

The fall 2016 issue of Seneca Review is a book of poems, Deborah Tall’s final collection, Afterings. “It is a remarkable volume by a poet and nonfiction writer at the peak of her powers. Eavan Boland has called it ‘an essential collection,’ and Mary Ruefle says the poems have ‘not what is to be expected – hints of cessation – but an overwhelming sense of blossoming.'” Deborah Tall edited Seneca Review  for twenty-five years, until 2006. This winter, Seneca Review  will include a copy of Deborah Tall’s final book of nonfiction, A Family of Strangers, with any new subscription to the journal.

In its regular “Rediscoveries” section, the newest issue of Middlebury’s New England Review (v37 n4) features “Two City Sketches” by Charles Dickens. Editor at Large Stephen Donadio provides an introduction, noting that after the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, “there was indeed popular demand for a second selection of sketches. . . The complete collection of some fifty-six pieces came out in 1839, by which time Dickens’s commanding presence on the scene had been securely established. In that 1839 volume, the pieces are grouped in four categories: ‘Seven Sketches from Our Parish,’ ‘Scenes,’ ‘Characters,’ and ‘Tales.’ The two city sketches presented here are the first two included under ‘Scenes’; they are taken from the illustrated Sketches by Boz in the Standard Library Edition of Dickens’s Complete Writings published in thirty-two volumes by Houghton Mifflin & Company (Boston and New York) in 1894.” NER  treats readers to several selections from its current print issue to read online, including these sketches by Dickens.

Editor Nathaniel Perry [pictured] of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review considers in the Winter 2016 Editor’s Note “that poetry is both a serious lifeblood and something seriously fun.” And further questions, “. . .how many poets are still willing to admint that it’s the fun of poetry that maybe primarily attracts us to the art? . . . why must we always take ourselves so seriously? What’s wrong with an occaion for poetry?” And so, Perry set out to creat both the occasion and the invitation to have fun. “I thought if an issue of the magazine could empahsize the fun of the moment, the pleasure in working out draft – it might be a tonic kind of enterprise and, who knows, soemtimes something bigger happens anyhow. In that spirit, this year’s issue was commissioned specifically for the magazine. Writers, both solicited and unsolicited, were told they could write on one of five themes – A Walk, Silence, Water, Frames and Containers. Each poet only had an hour to compose a poem . . . and ‘sonnet,’ formally, could be in interpreted in whatever way was useful to the writer.”

The contributions fill this annual issue of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, including A.E. Stallings. Stephen Dunn, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Mira Rosenthal, Bob Perelman, Katrina Vandenberg, Jon Pineda, Laynie Browne, Rob Shapiro, Eamon Grennan, and many more.

It may not seem that far a stretch for a literary journal published at Mississippi Valley State College to theme an issue on the Mississippi Delta, but indeed, since its inauguration in 2000, Valley Voices has been a publication renown for presenting a global perspective of thought and voice. Past issues have focused on New York School and Diaspora, Michael Anania, Perspectives on African American Literature, Poetic Translation in a Global Context, and issues on southern writers. So, indeed, it is a ‘special issue’ of Valley Voices when the content is fully dedicated to the Mississippi Delta. Editor John Zheng writes in his introduction to issue 16.2, “The Mississippi Delta isn’t a region where tourists can easily seek out natural beauty as they do in Yellowstone or in the Smoky Mountains; its beauty remains to be discovered with a little exploration. . . . We run this special issue for literary or artistic expression, for doumenting the region, for people deeply rooted here or having moved elsewhere. It is hopeful that these voices, literary or visual, will tell interesting stories.” See a full list of the issue’s content here.

Arroyo Literary Review recently announced an exciting addition to their website. A new Excerpts page has arrived with selections from past issues now available as PDFs, and with more on the way. Read six pieces from the current Spring 2016 issue, or travel back in time a few years for Pushcart Prize nominees and other noteworthy work. Writers considering submitting to the magazine can now get an idea of what the editors are looking for without a physical copy. There’s a lot there to keep both readers and writers busy as more winter weather rolls in.