NewPages Blog

The fiction in TriQuarterly ranks among the best today, but whereas many journals contain excellent fiction of one variety, TriQuarterly’s strength lies in its diversity. Jonathan David’s hilarious “The Sub” tells the story of a horrendous substitute teacher through (mostly) anonymous letters from the students themselves. “The Sub” is (intentionally?) reminiscent of Donald Barthelme’s classic “The School.” The latter’s strength lies in how the stakes are raised, the former’s is in the variety of voices, the smart and the not-so, the misbehaving and the apple polishing, the liars and the too-honest.

Continue reading “TriQuarterly – 2007”

Tin House continues their run of excellence with this superb issue – one of their finest. The hot-button piece is Steve Almond’s collection of responses to the hate mail he received as a result of quitting his position at Boston College in protest of Condoleezza Rice being named commencement speaker. The e-mails are shocking, and Almond’s responses vary from whip-smart to insightful to hilarious to scathing all the way to heartbreaking. Almond’s concern for Tom and Katie’s baby in the face of being compared – no, equated – to bin Laden and Zarqawi is touching.

Continue reading “Tin House – Winter 2007”

Tampa Review does not look like a literary magazine. The size and shape of a children’s storybook, this hardcover journal elicits the same expectation of entertainment – some pictures, stories, perhaps a lesson or two. There are plenty of pictures, in all types of media. Charlee Brodsky photographs calves and feet, and Jim Daniels describes them in poetry in a series of four connected works. Daniels opens “Glow” with the memorable lines, “The scarred knees of the world / imagine their prayers might be / forgiven.”

Continue reading “Tampa Review – 31/32, 2007”

An exceptional collection as is typical of this attractively presented journal.

Continue reading “Santa Monica Review – Fall 2006”

I’ve always enjoyed the poetry magazine Rattle for its modernity and humor, its willingness to mix the political, the sublime, and the silly. Each issue, in addition to a selection of poems, reviews, and interviews, contains a special tribute section, and this issue’s theme is The Greatest Generation. I loved the plainspoken-ness, the bald, unbeautified statements made in the poems of these elder writers, who maybe don’t have it all figured out, as Nan Sherman in “Don’t Ask Me Any Questions”:

Continue reading “Rattle – Winter 2006”

So this magazine rambles, big deal! We all do, and for this magazine, it’s a positive quality. What’s original about this magazine is that a portion of the short stories and poems are inspired by artwork and photography that can be found on the magazine’s website. In this issue, it’s the short stories that stand out. Some of the pieces are thought provoking, like “Short Letters I’ve Been Meaning to Write” by Dave Korzon.

Continue reading “The Rambler Magazine – March/April 2007”

Editor of Poet Lore Rick Cannon describes the sound of a poem’s beauty as “a steady hum.” I don’t think he could have described it any better. A consistent vibration sounds through the pages of this sleek, perfect-bound journal.

Continue reading “Poet Lore – Fall/Winter 2006”

There’s a division in literary magazines that’s becoming more pronounced as time goes on – there are those that treasure new voices and are a beacon of hope to the unpublished, and then there are those that serve as a seemingly untouchable golden palace upon a hill to be envied from afar. Both are viable, and as journals proliferate, this division was inevitable and necessary. The Paris Review is one of the most blindingly golden palaces in all the land, with a statue of George Plimpton standing watch, perhaps in the uniform of his Paper Lion days.

Continue reading “The Paris Review – Winter 2006”

A Canadian acquaintance recently bemoaned the state of American small publishing to me: why, even in San Francisco – clearly the New New York of the Lulu.com era – is it impossible to find work in publishing? I had no answer for him. Canadians are indeed a lucky bunch. For a land with such a sparse prospective audience, there is an abundance of funding for the arts. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised to find it more exuberant about its own import. The New Quarterly has devoted an issue to the topic of “The Artist as Activist.”

Continue reading “The New Quarterly – Winter 2007”

“I want to tell you about the skunk cabbage” is the first line in “The Book of Spring,” a poem by Sam Taylor. If a writer can make me want to go out and embrace a skunk cabbage, I believe that’s some pretty good writing.

Continue reading “Meridian – Winter 2007”

GUD is a splendid collection of the unexpected, surprising, and unsettling whose greatest common denominator may well be all of the above. From the sci-fi and fantasy with which the magazine abounds, “Moments of Brilliance,” by Jason Stoddard – “Illumination: I am a biological machine, designed for this specific task” (1984 and then some!), to “Trying to Make Coffee” by William Doreski, whose attempt results in a cloud of chlorine gas (eerily timely on a day in which the headlines relate this substance as the latest hazard in Iraq), to “The Infinite Monkey Protocol” by Lavie Tidhar, and this wisdom: ‘”The first law of computer security,’ he said, ‘is don’t buy a computer. [. . .] The second law of computer security’ he said, ‘is if you ever buy a computer, don’t turn it on.'”

Continue reading “Greatest Uncommon Denominator – Spring 2007”

Dedicated to sisters and to dreams, this issue of Glimmer Train offers its readers, in addition to a dozen stories, an interview with author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen/Faulkner Award, Michael Cunningham. “What would you say to new writers working on their first stories or novel?” asks Sarah Anne Johnson. His advice: “Have patience. Don’t panic.” Know what type of a writer you are, he seems to say, and be yourself. Writers published in this issue seem to have already passed this test; they know themselves. They create stories which are good because they are allowed to expand on their own terms.

Continue reading “Glimmer Train – Spring 2007”

upstreet’s second effort champions the minimalist aesthetic: an all-black cover is graced only with the journal’s name and issue number. There are no pictures to be found anywhere.

Continue reading “upstreet – 2007”

Reviewed by Ever wondered where the word “cocktail” came from, or been annoyed by some corporate entity referring to itself as a “family?” Have you pondered what dictionary publishers ought to do in regards to including words that are registered trademarks of companies with overzealous lawyers?

Continue reading “Verbatim – Volume 30”

A rich, resonant read, WHR’s academic foundations are never far from the surface. I’m torn between wanting them to be flaunted shamelessly, and keeping it in check with a list of self-conscious characters (character formation found, it seems, in the world of realism). In both cases, the world is defined by a set of objects; for example, DaVinci = academic; Guns n’ Roses = quotidian.

Continue reading “Western Humanities Review – Winter 2007”

Perhaps the most instantly recognizable literary magazine being published today, the ever-beautiful The Gettysburg Review enters its twentieth year with this excellent issue.

Continue reading “The Gettysburg Review – Spring 2007”

True to its name, this journal’s stated ambition is to provide college instructors with new ways of organizing their material for classroom presentation. Comprised entirely of literary essays, I was often hard-pressed to find evidence of the CL’s pragmatic impetus, which was often sequestered in the endnotes, or tacked on as an afterthought in the concluding paragraph. Cross-pollinatory or not, the essays in College Literature are recommendable on their own merits; Zora Neale Hurston finds her home in a multiplicity of pedagogies, while Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin’s prejudice against the poem (too self-assured to be a truly dialogic, and thus vital, enterprise) is called into question. D.H. Lawrence, LeRoi Jones, Brigit Pegeen Kelly also make appearances.

Continue reading “College Literature – Winter 2007”

There’s nothing particularly distinctive about Borderlands, but it does contain some fine poems, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Many of the poets here take small moments for their subject matter, suggesting larger introspection, as in a poem by Eric James Cruz. Here, an early morning run in a beautiful, pastoral place puts the poet in a meditative state of mind: “It is good to come here, / this happens to be your life, / this cradle of dark things, / this place in need of naming.”

Continue reading “Borderlands – Fall/Winter 2006”

BPJ publishes some serious poetry, and by that I mean finely-tuned, well-crafted poems that may require two or three or twenty readings to reveal themselves to you. There’s nothing “fun” or “hip” here, and I say this not as a value judgment on “fun” or “hip” or even “serious,” but so that readers new to this venerated journal know what to expect.

Continue reading “Beloit Poetry Journal – Spring 2007”

A lot of litmags call themselves contemporary, but Backwards City Review is one of the few that truly feels like a product of the 21st century. It’s not just the alt comics and offbeat fiction, but the awareness that literature and art can, indeed, be fun. Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat and Girl comic, for instance, presents a waitress (girl) and an indecisive customer (cat) trying to decide on an order. (What’s “the anthropomorphic platter?” “Beef tongue on a roll.”)

Continue reading “Backwards City Review – Spring 2007”

Peter McGehee’s “The Ballad of Hank McCaul” is a story whose setting begins in a hotel room, moves out to a pool hall, onto Claredon, a town an hour’s drive away from Little Rock, and then ends back in the hotel room. It begins with a problem that, by the end of the story, the narrator solves. Although it’s not as simple as all that, really, because the underlying conflict is deep and rooted and thick. The narrator, Sammy, having just visited the newly dug grave site of his lover, Hank, sums it up when he glimpses, as he is drinking beer, a sideways view of the Seventh Wheel’s clientele. “The whole world may change,” the story goes, “but the town you come from never will.”

Continue reading “Arkansas Review – December 2006”

Practice is a beautifully designed journal, an elegant compilation of literary (prose and verse) and visual work (photography, paintings, and graphics) that successfully mines the past and present. The creators preface their work as well as being prefaced themselves with that ever-present brief bio. Most artists and authors are presented through multiple or multi-part works.

Continue reading “Practice: New Writing + Art – 2007”

Call doesn’t include contributors’ notes, but few of these poets require them. The twenty poets represented here include Diane Wakoski, Annie Finch, Peter Gizzi, Virgil Suarez, Rachel Hadas, Nathaniel Mackey, Cole Swenson, Mary Jo Bang, and Jerome Rothenberg, among other poetry greats.

Continue reading “Call: Review – 2005”

Enclosing 76 pages of innovative wordplay by contributors, Bird Dog constitutes a thin journal. But the density of material it contains ranks Bird Dog’s seventh issue among my favorites, one of the reasons for which is the cover—an electric orange with many dogs howling at a birdlike black gnash. My first dive into the material brought to face a labyrinth of giddy texts, where sentences sprang in every direction with ease. Most works deserve praise for their innovation.

Continue reading “Bird Dog – Spring 2006”

This slender, elegant prose poetry journal is full of rhythmically lucid, semantically challenging works. The digital ululations of Andrew Zawacki’s “Roche Limit” crackle with imagistic suggestiveness never yielding to static; Jason Zuzuga’s tight-lipped description of abandoned cargo containers in “Donald Judd” proves that “nothing” can be bordered, defined, organized, and given a delightful shape. Most successful are David Lehman’s wry facsimiles, particularly “Poem in the Manner of Ernest Hemingway.”

Continue reading “CUE – Winter 2006”

Each text in this issue of The MacGuffin is precisely located to aid the journal’s reading. Consider the opening lines of the first piece, Sara Lamers’s poem “California, Long Distance”: “Let’s drift through these looming / vineyards all afternoon.” Then wade into inter-national and inter-cultural exchanges in Elizabeth Khan’s “Saeeda” and Efrem Sigel’s “The Boy Who Always Told the Truth,” the former a family saga set in Pakistan, the latter a disillusioning tryst of a volunteer teacher in one of the African nations so terribly in need of things other than volunteer teachers drifting in and out of their deserts. The thick middle pages are full of imaginary leaps through age and time. In Oyri Thuhp’s “No Eyewitness” an old people’s home has residents fighting over a glass eye, mulling over a love triangle and determined to be crowned monarchs of their dotage. There’s a parable, “The Poet,” by Herman Hesse, and it blends into the issue as well as the poignant, and just enough photographs. Lynn Pattison, a late-but-resplendent-bloomer poetess is especially featured, with an interview and six poems, the first of which, “Catching Her,” is beyond compare in its evocative accuracy. It opens with: “Four minutes ago, the light told a different story, / but the man holding the camera wants this one.” After this halfway point the texts begin to embrace disintegration and a nostalgic longing develops until it is at crescendo near the end. Near the back pages are the aptly placed “Poetry Reading, State Prison” by Shelby Allen, which ends with “becoming what you are capable of”; and Connie Harrington’s “Texas Armadillo” flash piece “Texas Armadillo,” in which the said animal is “alive” and induces a man to reach for his “wife’s hand, and hold on tight.” What an armadillo. What an issue!
[www.schoolcraft.edu/macguffin] 

The 50th Anniversary issue of Portland Review offers a mixed bag of poetry, fiction and photography. The editors favor prose poems and unpretentious narrative verse, which is of varying quality. The fiction, however, is quite appealing, including “Plenty of Room in Heaven” by Jonathan Evison, which kick-starts the journal. The narrator writes of a depressed former philosophy professor: “He even went so far as to devise what he called the Sweats to Pants Ratio (S.P.R.), by which success was measured relative to the number of days a week one spent in casual versus formal attire, formal being anything with pockets.”

Continue reading “The Portland Review – Spring 2006”

Why did it take me so long to read this magazine? Like so many, I have shied away from “speculative fiction” not sure exactly what genre it might be (a controversy even among those who favor it), but what I have found here is a rediscovery of why I (like so many) was fascinated with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. And like those timeless classics read in my college days, Zahir is a journal I would highly recommend to teachers of short story and sci-fi/fantasy lit.

Continue reading “Zahir – Winter 2006”

The Hollins Critic publishes a single, digestible piece of criticism in each of its five issues per year. This issue George Garrett examines the genre of the Hollywood novel with special attention paid to the work of Bruce Wagner. The journal’s economy and presentation, rather like a chapbook, makes the sometimes unenviable task of reading criticism more palatable. This is only aided by Garrett’s easy-going prose and obvious love of Wagner’s work. Garrett argues that the Hollywood novel, defined as “stories about movies and movie people,” is a “conventional, self-reflexive, allusive arrangement and rearrangement of various versions of itself.”

Continue reading “The Hollins Critic – December 2005”

A theme-based literary magazine from Vancouver, the fiction, poetry, commentary, memoir, and photography in the current issue of subTerrain explore the idea of “neighborhoods,” both fictional and real. Much of the work is vivid, raw, and gritty (poems Christopher Shoust and John Roberts, stories by Hungarian writer Grant Shipway and Katherine Cameron). Given the edginess of so much of the work, Diana E. Leung’s commentary, “Buying-in-Security: Safe Zones and Sanitized Living” about the culture of fear in which we live and the building of crime-free zones in Toronto seems appropriate, and given the times in which we live, it is satisfying to find a thoughtful commentary about these issues in a literary magazine.

Continue reading “subTerrain – Number 43, 2006”

This is my favorite issue of this handsome annual yet. It’s smartly edited, with a collection of pieces that seem very much to belong together and to belong in exactly the order in which they appear. The issue opens with a silver print by Jerry N. Uelsmann of a sky inside a hand holding up both a house and a naked shadowy figure looking to one side, but approaching the house. On the facing page, Kathleen Spivack’s poem, “Seeming to Happen,” concludes “I, who thought myself ‘indecisive,’ find indeed I was only waiting: / waiting for you, for me, for a path, for a way to walk into this / painting.”

Continue reading “Tampa Review – 2006”

Guest editor Kimiko Hahn has compiled a collection of poems and stories based on research, paintings, photographs, and other source materials, several essays about writers’ relationships to influences and original sources, and lengthy contributors’ notes describing the writers’ processes and approaches. Hahn provides an introduction to the issue in a poetry/theory style, “Notes Re: Trawl/Troll,” and includes two poems of her own in the issue. As a reader who is partial to research-based writing, I was especially interested in this issue, but I am confident that readers with no particular connection to this type of work will find a great deal to appreciate here.

Continue reading “TriQuarterly – 2005”

Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry judge Nancy Eimers, prose guest editor Victoria Redel, and poetry guest editor Roger Weingarten have selected strong, original work for this very satisfying issue. Poet and novelist Redel offers a short and fabulously poetic introduction to the “rigorous fictions” she has chosen in which she praises “the surprise and heart-stopping happiness of a sentence.” I don’t know if it is by coincidence or design that she has selected several pieces by excellent poets who, like herself, are also successful prose writers, including work by Sheila Kohler, Terese Svoboda, and Richard Katrovas.

Continue reading “Hunger Mountain – Spring 2006”