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What if every poem had its own fragrance, beyond the literal smell of the materiality of the page? What if one could smell a poet’s imaginative, conceptual, intellectual world, the text unfurling into an aroma?

Poetry subscribers can look forward to a fresh scent in their mailboxes this month as The Poetry Foundation has worked with Brooklyn-based perfumery D.S. & Durga to create a custom scent for Jeffrey Skinner’s poem “The Bookshelf of the God of Infinite Space.” Like old-school scratch and sniff, the scent has been added to an insert with the printed poem.

The insert celebrates the poetry and scent exhibition Volatile! hosted at The Poetry Foundation Gallery in Chicago through February 19, 2016. “In Volatile!,” the Foundation explains, “curator and design historian Debra Riley Parr presents a number of objects and experiences that invite speculative connections between poetry and scent. Scent artist David Moltz tells the story of a young boy who is transformed into a mythical beast through a series of 12 scents captured beneath 12 glass cloches. Works by artists Amy Radcliffe, Eduardo Kac, and Brian Goeltzenleuchter, poet Anna van Suchtelen, typography artist Ben Van Dyke and ceramicist Seth Bogart are also featured.”

Drunken Boat is inviting applications for all of their staff positions for 2016. Drunken Boat is re-launching in 2016 under new editorship: Erica Mena, poet, translator, and book artist [and cat lover], formerly the Managing Editor, will be taking the helm as Editor and Executive Director. As part of this transition, Drunken Boat is strengthening its commitment to being a leading space for writers and artists around the world to publish provocative, experimental, and otherwise difficult work, alongside the exceptional work we have been publishing continuously online for 15 years.

Drunken Boat is issuing an open call for interested writers and artists to join its (currently all-volunteer) staff. Open positions are:

• Poetry Editor, Poetry Assistant Editor, and Poetry Reader
• Non-Fiction Editor, Non-Fiction Assistant Editor, and Non-Fiction Reader
• Fiction Editor, Fiction Assistant Editor, and Fiction Reader
• Art Editor
• Reviews Editor and Reviews Assistant Editor
• Translation Editor, Translation Assistant Editor, and Translation Reader
• Publicity Editor and Publicity Assistant Editor
• Blog Editor and Blog Assistant Editor

For more specific details, view this Googledoc Applications should be received by December 20, 2015 for consideration.

Eastern Iowa Review is a new annual print publication, providing select essays online for readers to sample. Founding Editor Chila Woychik [pictured] embarked on this venture with six years’ editorial management experience from Port Yonder Press as well as expertise publishing other literary magazines over the past several years. Assistant Editor Beverly Nault and other staff with Eastern Iowa Review bring both academic and professional experience, creating an eclectic team that provides plenty of input from which Eastern Iowa Review will take its direction.

With all her experience, Woychik not only knew what she was getting into with a literary magazine start-up, but sought it at this point in her career. “Book publishing is a lot of work,” she told NewPages. “I loved what I did at Port Yonder for those six years, loved every minute of it, but it became too much. Once I discovered the literary journal market and began to see my own writing being acquired, I felt it was time to move from small press book publishing to journal publishing. It’s been a great change for me; I’m enjoying it immensely.”

The first issue of Eastern Iowa Review actually had a predecessor, Woychik explained, “We actually did a pre-issue we called the Bonté Review (French for ‘goodness’) but found the name didn’t quite portray the sense of place I felt it needed. I’ve lived in the eastern part of Iowa for twelve years now and am enamored with this state, its people, and its topography, especially the rolling hills, trees, and wildlife in this area. I found it to be a fitting name, and though similar to another well-known publication in the state, I feel our focus is different and therefore have no need to compete with or be compared to another. Besides, Iowa is such a fantastic literary venue in itself that it deserves more than one or two journals.”

The (true) inaugural issue of Eastern Iowa Review includes creative nonfiction, literary fiction, and art, while the second issue, Woychik hopes, will be narrowed down “to the thing I love reading and writing the most: Annie Dillardesque lyric essays and Gertrude Steinesque / Anne Carsonesque experimental essays.” The Review isn’t ruling out the hybrid essay at this time, “though terms overlap so much that we’re actually receiving a good number of generic creative nonfiction essays, a few of which we’ve accepted because they were good, though not necessarily containing the lyricism we’re seeking,” said Woychik. “What we’re after is the song, the lyricism, and the uniqueness, the experimental. There are plenty of outlets for general creative nonfiction but I want to wean us off that, if we can find enough of what we’re seeking.”

For their first issue, Eastern Iowa Review was fortunate enough to snag Fulbright Scholar, Pew Fellow, Kingsley Tufts and Pushcart winner Afaa Michael Weaver to contribute an autobiographical piece on craft, and Stephanie Dickinson contributed three short literary fiction works. “As far as I’m concerned,” Woychik said, “Stephanie is one of America’s most brilliant writers; everything she pens is linguistically beautiful, achingly so, even given the tough topics she often broaches.” Although the publication is new new, Woychik hopes that within the next few years they can attract both top-notch and beginning writers. “I would love to see Eastern Iowa Review be the breakout journal for a few soon-to-be nationally well-known authors,” keeping with their overall desire to “attract great writing, lyrical writing, experimental writing, from whomever, and see entire families enjoy it from front to back.”

Writers who submit works can expect that they will be treated to a thorough review process. Submissions are sent through Submittable, then Woychik assigns each piece to one reader/editor or possible more, even up to all four readers/editors. They record their recommendations, Woychik reads those, reads the work itself, and makes the final decision.

It’s a process that will provide readers with “the strongest, highest level, prose” the editors can find in the lyric and experimental realms. Woychik added, “I also have a special interest in seeing young people, beginning in middle grade or so, discover a love of the literary world, something beyond ‘simple’ reading. I’m not sure why we often wait until a person gets into university to introduce them to the world of literary writing. I would like to see young folks catch the rhythm of fine literary writing, the lyricism inherent in good writing, long before they reach college. So we have a ‘wide audience’ requirement, that is, we would like the material, literary and high level as it is, to also be fitting for most all ages.” Beginning with the second issue, Eastern Iowa Review will be able to offer accepted contributors a complimentary copy of the issue plus a small stipend, and also enter their work into the Eastern Iowa Review Essay Award pool, an annual award for the most outstanding lyric and/or experimental essay accepted.

PRISM international – Canada’s oldest literary magazine with its first issue published in 1959 – has taken a huge step in preserving its history. The Prism staff initiated and funded the digitization of its entire archive of magazines. The University of British Columbia’s Digitization Centre completed the task over a four-month period, making 194 issues available online; new issues will be added when published. “The digitization of PRISM international’s archives is an important step in preserving and promoting influential literature, both Canadian and international,” says current Poetry Editor, Dominique Bernier-Cormier, “connecting different communities, and generations, of writers and readers.”

Promotions Editor Claire Matthews entices readers to dig into the past issues, “You can check our early works by writers such as recently [Governor General Literary Award] nominated Robyn Sarah whose work first appeared in PRISM 13:1 [Summer 1973] or Seamus Heaney, who published two poems in issue 12:1 [Summer 1972]. In 1996, PRISM also managed to publish a translation by Seamus Heaney of the Irish poem ‘The Yellow Bittern,’ originally written by the 17th-18th century poet Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna. In a brief interview, Sarah O’Leary, author of When You Were Small (Simply Read Books, 2008), divulges how she was able to get her hands on work while she editor of PRISM international.”

The Fall/Winter 2015 issue of University of Alambama’s Black Warrior Review features the latest in their chapbook series: Loudermilk by Colin Winnette, author of Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio, 2015), Coyote (Les Figues Press, 2015), Fondly (Atticus Books, 2013), Animal Collection (Spork Press, 2012) and Revelation (Mutable Sound, 2011).

“Just what makes an essay literary ?” begins David H. Lynn’s Editor’s Notes in the Nov/Dec 2015 issue of Kenyon Review. “I’ve been challenged on that recently, not least because I’d like to extend the capaciousness of creative categories. These notes provide an early opportunity.”

Included in his discussion were these comments:

• Referencing Montaigne – “typically founded on memoir, reflection, or some other form of particular personal experience.”
• The writing can be “rich with the lyricism, the punch of fine fiction”; employ “rhythms, repetitions, and dramatically significant details.”
• “engages something external in the world and undertakes the research or journey necessary to bring the subject back to readers for reflection and meditation and greater knowledge.”
• Language: “Its rhythms, its diction, its metaphors are more than merely precise and effective—they exhibit a particular beauty of sound and sense and expression.”
• “The end here for the reader is pleasure. And literary writing strives always toward such feelings. We delight in, for example, le mot juste.”
• “the experience of fully engaging an essay’s tenor—the argument or subject or meaning—may sweep a reader toward a far deeper sense of fulfillment.”
• Reading the literary essay is “a process that catalyzes us into seeing in a new way, to grasping what may intuitively lie beyond language itself.”
• “readers themselves, engaged and moved by sharing in the transformative experience of the narrator, are not only enabled to see the world differently, they themselves are subtly but meaningfully transformed by the crucible of the literary.”

Read the full edtiorial here.

The newest issue of The Sewanee Review (Fall 2015) focuses on war literature with Architecture of Death: War and the Literature of War. The feature includes fiction and poetry as well as essays by Richard Tillinghast on Nathan Bedford Forrest and Robert Lacy on the home front during WWII along with essays by George Bornstein, Gerald L. Smith, Christopher Thornton, and Robert G. Walker. Jeffrey Meyers’ essay “Hemingway and Goya” can be read on The Sewanee Review website along with Ann Lohner’s fiction “The Iron Trap.”

According to the editors of FIELD Magazine, the publication’s “association with Russell Edson goes all the way back to FIELD #7 (Fall 1972), which featured five of his prose poems, among them ‘An Old Man’s Son’:

There was an old man who had a kite for a son, which he would let up into the air attached to a string, when he had need to be alone.

…And would watch this high bloom of himself, as something distant that will be close again…

“Those weren’t the only prose poems in that issue; we also had one by W. S. Merwin, two by Jean Valentine, and four by Erica Pedretti . . . But everyone knew that if you wanted to talk about the prose poem in contemporary poetry, you began and ended with the strange, commanding genius of Edson.”

Featured in FIELD #93 (Fall 2015), Russell Edson: A FIELD Symposium includes John Gallaher (“So Are We to Laugh or What”), Dennis Schmitz (“Edson’s Animals”), Lee Upton (“Counting Russell Edson”), Charles Simic (“Easy as Pie”), B. K. Fischer (“Some Strange Conjunction”), and Jon Loomis (“Consider the Ostrich”).

Margaret Gibson, author of the memoir The Prodigal Daughter and seven books of poetry, most recently Broken Cup (LSU Press, 2014), is featured in the Fall 2015 issue of The Georgia Review. Editor Stephen Corey writes a special thanks to Margaret Gibson in his introduction “for her cooperation with our proposal to present her sequence of poems as a singled-out chapbook feature.” Set off with a title cover, artwork, and a font style different than the magazine’s, Richer Than Prayer or Vow is fourteen unnumbered pages of eleven poems for readers to really sink into and enjoy.

The newest issue of World Literature Today features poetry written about art. As Assistant Director and Editor in Chief of the publication describes it, “In this issue’s cover feature devoted to poetry inspired by post-1950 visual art, thirteen international poets fashion word-pictures that attempt not only to verbalize a visual analogue but to liberate moments of stasis from the prison-house of space. With each poem, you’ll find reproductions of the art that inspired it, allowing readers to witness the acts of transposition first-hand.

“As their point of departure, the twenty poems included in the section describe mostly paintings—oil, acrylic, gouache, or watercolor on canvas, board, masonite, wood, paper, cardboard, etc.—but also faded black-and-white photos from a family album and etched gourds. Several of the painters who inspired the poets have work in major art museums—Salvador Dalí, Elizabeth Murray, Remedios Varo, among others—yet some of the artists are relatively unknown. The majority of the poems featured are translations from other languages—Arabic, French, and Spanish—and all are published here for the first time in English.”

Alaska Quarterly Review‘s Fall/Winter 2015 issue includes an incredible special feature, “They Were My People” by John Luther Adams. AQR introduces the seventy-five page section: “Drawn from his upcoming memoir Silences So Deep: A Memoir of Music and Alaska, Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams writes about his music and deep friendship with Gordon Wright and John Haines. They were for him ‘larger-than-life figures’ and ‘the embodiment of Alaska.’” Adams also shares photos and the score for “Mountains Without End” from A Northern Suite and “How the Sun Came to the Forest” from Forest Without Leaves. Alaska Quarterly Review has generously made this entire feature available online for readers to enjoy.

Without much ado, James Smith has stepped into the role of Editor for the Southern Poetry Review. In issue 53.1, he writes of working with Editor Robert Parham [pictured]: “Over the past six to seven years, I have attended with pleasure to our daily work of the journal, the direct contact with poets, the layout of each issue. A steadying voice, Bob always stayed close to what we do. It is an honor now to hold the title of editor and to continue with the work (and play) of the poetry journal that Bob has long cherished.”

Poet David Kirby also offered “David Parham: An Appreciation” which appears alongside Smith’s comment. Kirby writes: “I read once that pioneer anthropologist Franz Boas told his students that evertything is material, even one’s own boredom, that we should never think we’ve seen something twice, because we haven’t. In that sense, Robert Parham is not only a poet and teacher, as all of Southern Poetry Review‘s editors have been, but something of an anthropologist as well, that is, an observer first and foremost and then an illuminator of the small things that shape our lives and thus turn out to be much bigger than we think. [ . . .] Here and elsewhere, Parham echoes something that Mark Strand said, which is that we are lucky simply to be here at all, and because we are, we’re obliged to pay attention, to respond to the world, to witness.”

Parham will contiue on as Editor Emeritus, and he is honored (and likewise honors the publication and its readers) with several of his poems in this issue.

The Common offers a great ‘package deal’ for teachers who want to use the publication in their classrooms, including discounted subscription prices, plus a free desk copy and sample lesson plans. Classroom subscription includes two issues for every student, plus an in-person or Skype visit from Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker [pictured]. Subscription price: $17/student.

The Common features contemporary literature and art from around the world and can recommend issues for curriculum in:

Contemporary Literature
Creative Writing
Editing and Publishing
Travel Writing
Web Writing
Comparative Literature
Landscape and Architecture
Place-Focused Seminars
First-Year Seminars
Rhetoric and Composition
Interdisciplinary Studies
Translation Programs

The Common editors recommend the publication for high school, undergraduate, and graduate-level courses, helping meet the folowing objectives/core standards:

Help students develop critical thinking, close reading, and rigorous analytic writing skills.
Inspire creative expression.
Encourage students to think of themselves in the roles of editors and publishers.
Enrich knowledge of domestic and global languages, histories, and literatures.

The Wax Paper is a literary magazine “produced in a beautiful newsprint, broadsheet format (22″ x 27.75”) that still smells like ink when you open it up,” Publisher Nicholas Freeman boasts. But readers can also find The Wax Paper online on all digital formats with tech features not available in print, balancing the best of many worlds.

Freeman, founder and director of The Finch Gallery of Chicago, brought together resources from this and Hey Rat! Press of Los Angeles to publish all forms of moving words and still images in the print edition; the website posts images, texts, audio recordings, film, and animation selections in a full archive of contributor work.

Publishing four issues per year, Freeman tells me The Wax Paper name is derived from Studs Terkel’s first radio program, The Wax Museum. “We adopted Studs as our spirit animal while we were mapping out the aesthetics of The Wax Paper. It was only natural to honor him in the name of our project. Through The Wax Paper, we are devoted to continuing Studs’ sensibilities and charisma by publishing an eclectic range of work from artists skilled in their field and empathetic in the depiction of their characters.”

The Wax Paper Editor Hans Hetrick has writing experience from poetry to technical manuals. As Freeman tells the story, the two “became acquainted 60 feet 6 inches away from each other as the famed battery in Chicago’s Mexican Baseball League. Post-game conversation found a common interest and belief that great art must possess a generosity of spirit, a genuine respect for its audience and its subjects, and a dedication to craft. We immediately began work publishing a chapbook, Fighting Love, filled with Hans’ poems and my illustrations. After the publication of Fighting Love, Hans started trying to sell me on founding a magazine. Eventually, I relented, and The Wax Paper was born.”

Freeman and Hetrick took their first cooperative publishing experience into their work on The Wax Paper as a publication open to all forms of written word, image, and any combination of the two. “The first priority of The Wax Paper,” Freeman explains, “is to expand our understanding of the people we share the world with, and in doing so, expand our understanding of ourselves. Works will be selected on their ability to illuminate the humanity and significance of the subjects that inhabit the work.”

Readers of The Wax Paper can expect to find well-crafted, lively work that explores the diverse range of the human condition. Contributors include poets, painters, playwrights, photographers, comedians, screenwriters, illustrators, essayists, fiction and nonfiction writers, translators, songwriters, muralists, storytellers, and anyone skilled in moving words and still images. The Wax Paper features unpublished and veteran artists like Richard Robbins, Thomas Maltman, Becky Fjelland Davis, Roger Hart, Karen Byers, Mike Lohre and Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author Garry Wills who honored the publication by writing their opening essay.

The Wax Paper accepts all forms of moving words and still images for their quarterly printed broadsheet. They are distributed nationally and all written work will be archived on their website. Current reading period is open until June 30th. All contributors are given a lifetime subscription.