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At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!

New Book :: Weave Me a Crooked Basket

Weave Me a Crooked Basket: A Novel by Charles Goodrich book cover image

Weave Me a Crooked Basket: A Novel by Charles Goodrich
University of Nevada Press, October 2023

It’s the summer of 2008, in Charles Goodrich’s novel Weave Me a Crooked Basket. Thirty-five-year-old Ursula Tunder, on the heels of a bad marriage and abandoned career, moved home to the family farm for a fresh start and to care for her ailing father, Joe. Her younger brother, Bodie, comes home as well, to try his hand at organic farming. Their land at the edge of a prosperous college town is coveted by developers. Ursula wants to sell the farm, but Bodie and his idealistic wife are committed to farming. Enter Nu, Ursula and Bodie’s Vietnamese-American cousin by adoption, and an up-and-coming visual artist. When Nu gets arrested after a fight with a pair of dirt bikers, Joe persuades him to take refuge at the farm. Fates change each of their futures as Ursula leaves only to return again to help save the farm from bankruptcy and preserve a way of life.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Where to Submit Roundup: August 4, 2023

35 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

Where to Submit Roundup 2023

Welcome to the first roundup of submission opportunities for August 2023. Hard to believe the summer is nearly over. If you’re in denial or procrastinating about the big back-to-school scramble, NewPages has you covered with plenty of submission opportunities to keep you distracted.

NewPages Newsletter subscribers with a paid subscription get early and first access to our submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site. Consider subscribing today.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: August 4, 2023”

Magazine Stand :: Colorado Review – Summer 2023

Colorado Review Summer 2023 cover image

In the Summer 2023 issue of Colorado Review, readers encounter people watching and waiting, anticipating and missing signs of one kind or another, move uneasily through this issue. As when the narrator of Kelly Luce’s “The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion” says, “I liked scanning the sky, looking for signals. Even when nothing happened, there was still that heartbeat. It was a space—it was space—where I could process what was happening in my life.” And in Adam O’Fallon Price’s “The Famous Actress,” a man tries to recapture a time of possibility, of potential, as he flounders in a dream gig he’s unqualified for, the nearby ocean calling to “some deep, uneasy place in himself,” confirming his anxiety. After her baby is stillborn, a young woman in Dyanne Stempel’s “Crashing Shiva” attempts to process her grief by attending the shivas of strangers, looking for cues, hoping “to try on all the random pain of the room.” And in Analía Villagra’s “Need Her Badly,” two next-door neighbors communicate in a passive-aggressive code—thumps on the apartment wall, knocks, taps—to reach out in a strangely antagonistic friendship. “Wunderkammer,” Lesley Jenike’s lyric essay, contemplates our relationship with museums, the ways they speak to us, tell us who we are. Absent much information about her grandfather, Jo-Anne Berelowitz engages in the practice of midrash to create the narratives that give him a life in her essay “Looking for Joseph.” And in “Mirage,” Susanna Sonnenberg recounts the missed, and crossed, signals in her first marriage, the result of having “unconsciously agreed to Not Know things.”

New Book :: Take Creek, For Example

Take Creek, For Example by Chris Rugeley book cover image

Take Creek, For Example by Chris Rugeley
7.13 Books, October 2023

In Chris Rugeley’s forthcoming novel, Take Creek is one of the most prestigious art schools in the United States. An unnamed photography major attends to study under Salter, a famous and perhaps out-of-his-mind professor whose works rival that of Cindy Sherman and Garry Winogrand. When Salter asks his protégé to surveil Manning, the new transfer, as his final project, what follows is a wild, unpredictable last year of college full of drugs, nudity, shifting viewpoints, and the occasional making of art. “I drew a lot of inspiration from other classics in the genre,” says Rugeley, “novels by Vladimir Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, Don DeLillo, Donna Tartt, Tobias Wolff, Elif Batuman, And Elisabeth Thomas.”

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Take What You Need by Idra Novey

Take What You Need by Idra Novey book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Novey’s novel alternates between Jean and Leah’s narration of their relationship, following Leah’s trip to Jean’s house now that she has died. Jean was Leah’s stepmother before she left Leah’s father, and he forbade any interaction between the two. They only saw each other once in the intervening years, and that meeting didn’t go well. Jean has been welding sculptures in her living room with the help of Elliott, a young man who lived next door for a time, taking inspiration from two twentieth-century female sculptors. She finds a freedom and solace in her art that eluded her for most of her life. Leah works as a translator in New York City and looks on her childhood home in rural New York with skepticism, especially when Donald Trump begins his campaign for president. The novel explores the divide between the small towns that have deteriorated over the past years and the larger cities that have thrived. Leah is suspicious of Elliott due to that divide, and the misunderstanding that takes place during Leah and Jean’s meeting is complicated because of the broader political climate. This work, though, also holds up the power of art—especially art from overlooked female creators. Leah’s final narration imagines a scenario that might exist, but might not. Leah says that, for the sake of the tale she’s telling, a number of events happen (which lead to Jean’s artworks ultimately ending up in a museum), even, possibly, one other woman who sees the sculpture (that might be in a museum, but might not be) and finds inspiration to create her own art.

Take What You Need by Idra Novey. Viking, March 2023.

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/.

Magazine Stand :: The Twin Bill – Issue Twelve

The Twin Bill Issue Twelve cover image

The baseball-themed literary journal The Twin Bill celebrates the Major League Baseball All-Star Game with the release of Issue Twelve. The poems and fiction included in The Twin Bill cover an array of subjects that celebrate the rich history of baseball, including topics that recognize the sport’s vibrant present and its complex and captivating past. Issue Twelve readers can enjoy writing and artwork from Jack Albert, Frank J. Albert, Susie Aybar, Jeff Brain, James Callan, Jason David Cordova, Darel La Prade, Kenny Likis, Elliot Lin, Tommy McAree, Lawrence Miles, Mark Mosley, Edwin Romond, James Scruton, AJ Speier-Wallace, and Sam Williams. The Twin Bill welcomes writers of all levels and experience and publishes based on the MLB schedule: Opening Day, the All-Star Game, the World Series, and Jackie Robinson’s birthday.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing

Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing by Esra Mirze Santesso book cover image

Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing by Esra Mirze Santesso
The Ohio State University Press, September 2023

Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing by Esra Mirze Santesso offers the first major study of comics by and about Muslim people. Santesso assesses Muslim comics to illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Focusing on contemporary graphic narratives that are primarily but not exclusively from the Middle East—from blockbusters like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis to more local efforts such as Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi—Santesso explores why the graphic form has become a popular and useful medium for articulating Muslim subjectivities. Further, she shows how Muslim comics “bear witness” to a range of faith-based positions that complicate discussions of global ummah or community, contest monolithic depictions of Muslims, and question the Islamist valorization of the shaheed, the “martyr” figure regarded as the ideal religious witness.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Lit on the Block :: Twin Bird Review

Twin Bird Review Summer 2023 cover image

Seeing double can be a good thing, as Twin Bird Review can attest. This new open-access online biannual publishes poetry, creative nonfiction, art, comics, and graphic narratives. The name comes from legend, says Editor Amanda K Horn. “Sailors used to get a tattoo of a swallow after the first 5,000 nautical miles traveled, and then another after 10,000 – barn swallows to represent birds’ ability to travel very far abroad and yet still return home. These ‘twin birds’ can also be seen in the human imagination, through which we’re able to explore this world and others, ourselves, the past and the future, all without leaving home.”

Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Twin Bird Review”

Magazine Stand :: Redactions Poetry & Poetics – Issue 27

Redactions Poetry Poetics Issue 27 cover image

Redactions Poetry & Poetics Issue 27 is “The Sitcom Issue” and has poems revolving around sitcoms, including M*A*S*H, Gilligan’s Island, Seinfeld, Hogan’s Heroes, Night Court, Leave It to Beaver, My Little Margie, The Facts of Life, Three’s Company, The Brady Bunch, The Simpsons, and more, as well as an essay about M*A*S*H. This is in addition to the regular content of poetry and poetics, including Kelli Russell Agodon’s interview with Jeannine Hall Gailey about her recently released book from BOA Editions, Flare, Corona.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Fig Season

Fig Season: Poems by Joan E. Bauer book cover image

Fig Season: Poems by Joan E. Bauer
Turning Point, May 2023

In Fig Season, the poet Joan E. Bauer explores what it has meant to her to be Italian-American. She mingles stories about her own quirky family with portraits of Fellini, Frank Zappa, Diane di Prima, Pasolini, Enrico Fermi, Anna Magnani, John Fante, Elsa Schiaparelli, and more. In writing about history, culture, and family, Bauer also shares what, over time, she has learned about love and vanity, courage, and forgiveness.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Imagine: A Tale of Love, Art, and Anarchy by Francesca Nesi

Imagine by Francesca Nesi book cover image

Guest Post by Eleanor J. Bader

Imagine: A Tale of Love, Art, and Anarchy, Francesca Nesi’s first novel, is a paean to chosen family. But the sweeping, multi-layered saga is also much more than this. Seminal moments in world history – the late 19th and early 20th century anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe; the opening of the first Nazi concentration camp in 1933; the US civil rights movement of the 1960s; and 2011’s Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, among them – form a vibrant backdrop for a story that probes what it means to live ethically.

Central to the tale are Emma Roth, a bisexual Gen X art historian turned Manhattan gallery owner; Curtis Mayland, an older lesbian who works as a realtor; and Catherine Kroeger, a straight 20-something heiress whose billionaire dad bears a striking resemblance to Donald J. Trump.

The three are brought together by Tom Aldridge, a sadistic, misogynist hedge fund manager. As they collaborate on a plan to avenge his predatory behavior, the story takes numerous turns that force them, and consequently, us, to imagine a world without sexual or political violence. It’s heady stuff. And while the novel contains a few improbable threads, all told, Imagine is an inspiring ode to creativity, community, sisterhood, and social justice.

Imagine: A Tale of Love, Art, and Anarchy, by Francesca Nesi. Chelsea Books, January 2023.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Magazine Stand :: Blue Collar Review – Spring 2023

Blue Collar Review Spring 2023 cover image

Blue Collar Review: Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature Spring 2023 has much to offer readers looking for both solace and inspiration during these tumultuous times. The editors introduce poems by Lyle Estill, John Zedolik, and Ada Negri, as translated by Thomas Feeney, which “describe workplace injuries” as well as “poems of resistance to the workplace threats of harm and to the unlivable pay and limits placed by government assistance that impact our health, our lives beyond the workplace, and our chances of being injured on the job [. . . ] a poem by Cathy Porter reminds us many are forced to choose between food and medicines, [. . . ] and Mary Franke’s poem ‘May Day 2023’ informs us, child labor is back.” Blue Collar Review offers several sample poems on its website, including “The Current Political Scene” by Marge Piercy. Blue Collar Review is a quarterly journal of poetry and prose published by Partisan Press with the mission “to expand and promote a progressive working class vision of culture that inspires us and that moves us forward as a class.”

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week – July 31, 2023

Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!

Black Warrior Review Spring/Summer 2023 cover image

Cover artist Aris Moore won my imagination with this Spring/Summer 2023 cover image for Black Warrior Review: “Her work explores contradictions of strength and vulnerability, and attraction and repulsion, to create beings that are simultaneously awkward and unbelievable, yet familiar.”

Fourteen Hills Issue 29 2023 cover image

From the SFSU Dept. of Creative Writing, Fourteen Hills Issue 29 (2023) features “Lost in the Grandeur” by Jewel Rodriguez.

Room Issue 46.2 cover art

Room issue 46.2 features their 2022 contest winners for short forms, fiction, poetry, CNF, and cover art. This seemingly whimsical work by semillites hernández velasco, Ghost No More, is from a poignant series of self-portraits exploring the artist’s demand for visibility while not being “ready to be fully seen.”

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Optometry

Optometry by Xiang Yata book cover image

Optometry by Xiang Yata
Driftwood Press, November 2023

Optometry by Xiang Yata is a 250-page, full-color graphic novel that follows the story of a woman who is transported to an experimental kaleidoscopic world during a visit to the optometrist. As the eye doctor calibrates the optometry machine to investigate the faults and fractures in her eyes, the protagonist is transported to a new world, a place full of overlapping images, dots, curves, houses, and light reflections. As she struggles to navigate these various unique planes, she must confront the endless versions of herself to avoid becoming forever lost in a daze. Artist Xiang Yata guides readers through multiple art forms, combining elements of traditional comics, animation, and illustration, to investigate the myriad ways we perceive ourselves. A Kickstarter campaign to help bring Optometry to life launches on July 31, 2023.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Magazine Stand :: Club Plum – 4.3

Club Plum online literary magazine logo image

In Volume 4, Issue 3 of Club Plum, unexpected small worlds light up before us. Maybe the light stings in the Whiskey a Go Go or throbs from the freight train up in the hills. Maybe it reflects off your wet paddleboard or dazzles from your Windex-blue gemstone on your finger. Maybe it nips our geese-girl ankles as we run in the garden or whistles in the ears of the university men who won’t let us speak. Or maybe the light shines from the eyes of a man who was once a little girl and who lays her to sleep forever with love, keeping her safe and remembered. Discover these and more in creative nonfiction by Sloane Gray and Amanda Seney, flash nonfiction by Heather Vaughan, flash fiction by Lisa Piazza, prose poetry by Amy DeBellis, Phoebe Houser, CiCi Logan, Iris Rosenberg, and art by Margaret Karmazin and Steven Ostrowski.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Hooked by Michael Moss

Hooked: Food, Free Will, And How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss may cause skepticism for his claim that the major manufacturers of processed food design their products to addict consumers, his book just might convince them otherwise. He spends a few chapters early in the work to set up that idea, pulling from research into drug and alcohol addiction, but also from the tobacco industry. The food product manufacturers often ended up owning tobacco companies, in fact. Moss also digs into evolutionary biology to explain why people have such difficulty resisting processed foods, especially those that include artificial sweeteners, which our bodies haven’t adapted to. He draws on a wide range of research and experts to support his argument, yet he makes that necessary science easily accessible to the general reader. Ultimately, he points out that we can be smarter than the food product manufacturers, and that we can use our knowledge of their tricks to make wiser choices when it comes to what we eat. While he’s clear that those manufacturers are interested in nothing but making more and more money, he provides readers with ways to see through their claims, allowing people to make healthier choices for their lives.

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss. Random House, March 2021.

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/.

New Book :: Ma

MA by Ida Börjel book cover image

MA by Ida Börjel
Translated by Jennifer Hayashida
Ugly Duckling Presse, June 2023

MA is Ida Börjel’s award-winning abecedarian, a maelstrom of voices cast in the underwater shadows and nuclear light of the Anthropocene. MA is a refraction of Inger Christensen’s seminal Alphabet, published in 1981, and speaks a furious incantation in the past tense, a grammar of loss, from the vantage point of a disintegrating here and now. Appearing for the first time in English in Jennifer Hayashida’s luminous translation, MA is less a curative than a testimonial, speaking simultaneously for the one and the many, the solitary mother and the insurgent multitude.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Magazine Stand :: Sky Island Journal – Summer 2023

Sky Island Journal Summer 2023 cover image

Sky Island Journal’s stunning 25th issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 125,000 readers in 145 countries and over 750 contributors already know; the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Wordly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs

Wordly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Worldly Things, Michael Kleber-Diggs offers readers the opportunity to tune to his point of view as a middle-class Black American: “this is what I witness; / I want you to notice it, too.” Kleber-Diggs shows up to the page with a direct address and his “full humanity,” allowing the reader to come to know him as a generous poet, an ethical person, a family man, and community-minded soul, seeking and contributing to a socially just world. His poems recount the great suffering caused by “circumstances / marginalized, disenfranchised, and unheard”—the zeitgeist of his time and ours. Because he “wanted it different,” through his poems, he offers “aid.” As Kleber-Diggs’s lungs “take in / send out—oxygen/words,” his poems help us “know how twisted up our roots / are,” and dreams that “we might make vast shelter together—” Selected by Henri Cole as winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Michael Kleber-Diggs’s haze-clearing, solace-offering, and love-illuminated debut Worldly Things expands the gamut, “the entirety of it”!

Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs. Milkweed Editions, July 2021.

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/

Where to Submit Roundup: July 28, 2023

34 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

Where to Submit Roundup 2023

July is officially over with on Monday. If you still have some time left to devote to writing, editing, and submitting before the back-to-school craziness ensues, NewPages has your back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.

NewPages Newsletter subscribers with a paid subscription get early and first access to our submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site. Consider subscribing today.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Roundup: July 28, 2023”

Magazine Stand :: South 85 – Spring/Summer 2023

south-85-journal.jpg

The Spring/Summer 2023 issue of South 85, the Converse College Low-Res MFA Program, features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, and art by new and established writers and artists. Readers can click over to find fresh fiction by Matt Izzi, Patrick Strickland, Christie Marra, Mike Herndon, Mark Brazaiti; creative nonfiction by Linda Briskin, Alice Lowe, Honey Rand, Harris Walker; and poetry by Dana Tenille Weekes, David Galloway, Susan Michele Coronel, Michelle Holland, Patrick Wilcox, Ellen Roberts Young, Nadine Ellsworth-Moran, Greg Nelson, Ellen Roberts Young, Ann Malaspina, Kevin Pilkington, Christina Baumis, Gordon W. Mennenga. “The Dollmaker: Why You Should Have Read This Book Long Before Now” is an essay by Jody Hobbs Hesler and the issue features photography by Linda Briskin.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Dreaming in Cantera

Dreaming in Cantera / Sueños en Cantera: Poems by Bonnie Wolkenstein book cover image

Dreaming in Cantera / Sueños en Cantera: Poems by Bonnie Wolkenstein
WordTech Editions, February 2023

In 2019, the author set out to journey—abroad and within. Although she planned to experience several countries, the pandemic created a unique opportunity to deepen her knowledge and exploration within the limits of one place, one person, and the overlap between them. The place was Guanajuato, Mexico, a 500-year-old city with secrets and success, conquests and divides, myths, legends, the ghosts of past inhabitants and the bustling energy of those who currently call it their home, all set against a blaze of color, winding stone alleyways, and an arid semidesert surrounded by low mountains. The result is this collection of poems, which mirror the author’s exploration of the unknown and the universal, the cyclical flow of any journey, from leaving, to what we seek and what we find, our return home, and if we’re fortunate enough, our preparation for the next frontier, inner or geographical. Some poems came first in English; others originated in Spanish. Every poem has been translated, creating a rich melding of language and place, offering the reader the chance to feel what it is like to dwell in a new self in a new land, to remember past explorations, and to spark the next longed–for journey.

New Book :: The Legible Element

The Legible Element by Ralph Sneeden book cover image

The Legible Element: Essays by Ralph Sneeden
EastOver Press, July 2023

The Legible Element by Ralph Sneeden is a lyrical memoir of a life lived in and out of the water. In his first book of essays, award-winning author Ralph Sneeden combines poetry, prose, and narrative in a search for the origins of his passion for buoyancy and immersion. The collection’s narratives about surfing, sailing, fishing, scuba diving, and swimming are earthly dispatches from an ongoing voyage fueled by joy, longing, loss, and humor.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Lit Mag Review :: Ecotone – Spring/Summer 2023

Ecotone Spring/Summer 2023 cover image

The Spring/Summer 2023 issue of Ecotone literary magazine includes four graphic literature pieces that drew me into the publication. Focusing on “Reminaging Place,” Ecotone’s mission is “to publish and promote the best place-based work being written today.” This includes graphic literature curated by invitation, with this issue offering four distinct works. The first is actually a tribute piece by Editor David Gessner for the feature Out of Place. “The Dead Writers’ Society: One Day I Hope to Join” is humorous, heartfelt, and historically informative using hand-drawn images and text as well as photos and photocopied ephemera. It is available to read on the Ecotone website. The three content pieces are offered in a full-color portfolio with an intro by each artist.

Image from "Network of Want" by Angie Kang

“Network of Want” by Angie Kang is hands-down my favorite piece, mainly because it explores desire paths – those pathways made by people and animals following their desired route. Kang uses a limited palate of blue-greens to violet for each scene with the pathway rendered in hot pink. She examines the myriad mindsets and biologies driving these pathways, to take shortcuts, to avoid, to be nearer, and to survive. Her work is a desire path in itself, as I find myself returning to it again and again to meditate on the shared meanings a simple worn path can offer. The intro to this work is available to read on the Ecotone website, but the work can only be viewed with a subscription.

Image from "Whale Fall" by Mita Mahato

“Whale Fall: Sequences 1, 2, 3” by Mita Mahato sources the term “whale fall” to create a series of images that reflect a system of metamorphizing by combining grids, letterforms, and colors. Whale fall, Mahato writes, “is “the ecosystem that emerges when a whale carcass falls to the ocean floor” and describes how “enmeshed” this phenomenon is with both marine and terrestrial systems of existence. My appreciation for Mahato’s work increased exponentially after seeing her process, which she shares in several videos and images on her Instagram page @mita_mahato. There is an intense amount of cutting out the grid and letters with an Exacto knife that cannot be fully captured in the print images, and that factors into the interpretation as well. Mahato’s intro and work are available to read on the Ecotone website.

Image from "Becoming Water" by S. J. Ghaus

“Becoming Water” by S. J. Ghaus is a hauntingly dreamy sequence exploring their sense of identity through self-naming. Ghaus opens the intro, “Four years ago, I picked up a blue colored pencil on New Year’s Eve and began to draw. I’ve been drawing and writing in that specific shade of blue ever since, and I don’t know when I’ll stop.” Coincidentally, this piece is about water, being in water, and identifying as water. Its compelling strength is that singular color and the depth and complexity Ghaus can create with this self-imposed limitation. This work is also available to read on the Ecotone website.

Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews material based on her own personal interests.

Magazine Stand :: Split Rock Review – Issue 20

Split Rock Review Issue 20 Spring 2023 cover image

The Spring 2023 online issue of Split Rock Review features poetry by Joy Arbor, Nisha Atalie, Kellam Ayres, Rebecca Brock, Angelina Oberdan Brooks, Bethany Cutkomp, Scott Davidson, Barbara Westwood Diehl, Monica Joy Fara, Daryl Farmer, Gail Hosking, Christine Jones, Brandon Kilbourne, Jennifer Loyd, Marjorie Maddox & Karen Elias, Monica Mankin, Nathan Manley, Kathleen Mctigue, Megan Moriarty, Nick Powell, Barbara Rockman, Patricia Rockwood, Erika Saunders, Heidi Seaborn, Nancy Squires, Gary Thomas, and Maggie Yang. There is also a comic by Nathan Holic; creative nonfiction by Rebecca Lee Clay, Emily Ford, Dana J. Graef, and Marin Smith; and art/photography by Harry Bauld, David A. Goodrum, Shara K. Johnson, Susan Soloman, and Luke Tan.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Saving Sunshine

Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi; illustrated by Shazleen Khan book cover image

Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi; illustrated by Shazleen Khan
First Second, September 2023

In Saving Sunshine, written by Saadia Faruqi and illustrated by Shazleen Khan, it’s hard enough for twins Zara and Zeeshan to get through a day without being teased for a funny-sounding name or wearing a hijab, but the two really can’t even stand each other. During a family trip to Florida, when the bickering, shoving, and insults reach new heights of chaos, their parents sentence them to the worst possible fate—each other’s company! But when the siblings find an ailing turtle, it presents a rare opportunity for teamwork—if the two can put their differences aside at last.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Lit on the Block :: The Howl

The Howl logo image

An homage to Allen Ginsberg, The Howl is a new online venue for young creators (grades 9-12), fittingly borrowing for their tagline as well, “the best minds of your generation.” As the editors explain, “Much as Ginsberg’s poem details the complex lives of others, we amplify the content that whirls out of the unique storms that young people brave.” An open-access online journal for readers of all ages, The Howl publishes on a rolling basis and accepts poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, scripts, photography, traditional and digital art, music, videos, journalism/op-eds, and other genres ‘best minds’ want to explore.

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Magazine Stand :: Under the Gum Tree – Summer 2023

Under the Gum Tree Summer 2023 cover image

Under the Gum Tree Summer 2023 issue opens with a Letter from the Editor titled “Unimaginable Resiliency” in which Janna Marlies Maron writes, “By the time you read this it will be nearly one year since I experienced a major relapse of MS in August 2022 that caused debilitating neuropathy throughout my body.” And further contemplates, “I continue to be committed to personal storytelling. If there is one thing I know for sure it’s that our stories always demonstrate an unimaginable resiliency—even what I’ve shared in this letter I never would have imagined that I’d be surviving, until I actually did.”

Contributor writers to this issue include Kristina Ryan Tate, Ali Saperstein, Kathryn Leehane, Suzanne Lewis, Tawnya Gibson, and Alex Noelke. Artwork from Ryan Taylor and Seth Pitt are also featured in this issue.

Under the Gum Tree is available for digital or print copy purchase.

Magazine Stand :: The Awakenings Review – Spring 2023

The Awakenings Review Spring 2023 cover image

The Awakenings Review Spring 2023 issue is available for readers to enjoy online and features works by writers and artists with mental illness as well as from family members and friends of people with mental illness, though the contributions themselves need not focus on mental illness. The Awakenings Review occasionally dedicates issues to specific topics or features authors who live with a particular illness. The newest issue features poetry, essay, and short stories by W. Barrett Munn, Benjamin Shalva, William LaPage, Carol Lee Saffioti-Hughes, Jesse White, Lloyd Jacobs, Hugh Anderson, Linda Logan, Hope Andersen, Alexander Perez, Richard Risemberg, Adrian Harte, Katherine Szpekman, Valerie Wardh, Brooke Lathe, Anna Adami, Kristina Morgan, Vitoria Perez, Mary Anna Scenga Kruch, Meg LeDuc, Brian Daldorph, Elizabeth Brulé Farrell, Christine Andersen, C.M. Mattison, Alan Sugar, Kate Falvey, Dave Fekete, Kristine Laco, Timothy Lindner, Emily Kay MacGriff, and Jane Marston.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Magazine Stand :: Vita Poetica Journal – Summer 2023

Vita Poetica Journal Summer 2023 cover image

Vita Poetica Journal Summer 2023 issue of the online quarterly publication of creative work explored through a spiritual lens opens with the editorial “Forces of Endurance” by Caroline Langston and includes poetry by Hannah Hinsch, Paul Hostovsky, Phillip Aijian, Jack Stewart, Charles Haddox, Rachelle Scott, Sydney Hegele, Ginnie Goulet Gavrin, Joseph Byrd, Lane Falcon; fiction byd Emily Ver Steeg, James Roderick Burns; visual arts by Lucy Bell, Sarah Walko, Willy Conley. Cover art by Lucy Bell.

Features include the interview, “Art as Attention, Presence, Prayer: Visual Artist Scott Aasman” in conversation with Emily Chambers Sharpe and two reviews: “Spirit in the Dark Brings Religious Influence to Light: A Review of the Smithsonian Exhibit on Religion in Black Music, Activism and Popular Culture” by Mary Amendolia Gardner, and “To See Beyond Walls: A Review of Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen” by Cheryl Sadowski.

There are also two Contemplative Practices, which include guided practices with recorded as well as written instructions: “A Blessing for Your Breath” by Rebekah Vickery and “Drawing Praise: A Creative Reflection on Psalm 148” by Samir Knego.

New Book :: Restless

Restless by Joseph Kai book cover image

Restless by Joseph Kai
Street Noise Books, September 2023

Restless by Joseph Kai is a graphic novel Set in Beirut, Lebanon, 30 years after the end of the civil war, and a few months before the disastrous explosion of August 2020. Samar, a young queer comic book artist, wanders between anguished dreams, childhood memories, sexual experiences, and Beirut’s alternative communities. This abstractly autobiographical story tells of the author’s anxiety over living in a complex city of changing colors and moods. Three powerful themes: art, sex, and political uprising, are interwoven in a compelling narrative and an otherwordly color palette

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi

Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi; illustrated by Shazleen Khan book cover image

Saving Sunshine, written by Saadia Faruqi and illustrated by Shazleen Khan, examines the complexity of familial and cultural identities in relationship to the various roles of each character. While the story is premised on saving a loggerhead turtle nicknamed “Sunshine,” that act seems secondary to everything else going on here. Pre-teen/teen twins Zara and Zeeshan Aziz are at that age where they constantly annoy one another, and parents Bilal and Rasheeda, both doctors, have hit their limits with the bickering. On a conference trip where Dr. Rasheeda is being recognized for her work in pediatrics, the twins have their phones taken away as punishment and must not separate when their parents are off conferencing. Pure torture! But the youths find activities to occupy themselves, ways to tolerate one another, and in the end, support and encourage one another’s interests. Layers are added to the story with flashbacks, represented in sepia-toned imagery, filling in details that help explain why the characters behave the way they do, and peeling back judgments even the reader may have made before fully understanding the whole picture. This work offers a treasure trove of topics for discussion with an overarching message of the difficult but important act of standing up and standing firm – both for oneself as well as for others.

Saving Sunshine written by Saadia Faruqi and illustrated by Shazleen Khan. First Second, July 2023.

Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.

Magazine Stand :: Apple in the Dark – Summer 2023

Apple in the Dark logo image

Apple in the Dark online magazine’s Summer 2023 issue features entries from their Flash Fiction Contest judged by Chelsea T. Hicks: Winner Ashley Beresch and Honorable Mentions Brenda Yates and Xochi Cartland, as well as works by finalists Cemile Guldal, Liz DeGregorio, MaxieJane Frazier, Brandi Ocasio, Robert Warf, and Juliana Warta. Readers can also enjoy new fiction by Clara Roberts, Brendan Todt, Bibi Berki, Jan Allen, Kayla Wiltfong, Tyler Barlass, Brooks C. Mendell, Kathy Sherwood, Lea Murray, and nonfiction by Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez, Lorraine Hanlon Comanor, Katharyn Howd Machan.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Boomtown Girl

Boomtown Girl by Shubha Sunder book cover image

Boomtown Girl: A Collection of Short Stories by Shubha Sunder
Black Lawrence Press, April 2023

Winner of the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, Boomtown Girl by Shubha Sunder is set entirely in the Bangalore region of South India and explores the ambitions, delusions, and struggles of people navigating a rapidly developing city. A rebellious teenager and her workaholic father confront their mutual distrust while dining at a newly opened Pizza Hut; a tailor nostalgic for his past glory in the employ of an Englishman grows obsessed with an American customer; a techie, his fiancée having broken off their engagement, takes a young, eager intern into his confidence. These stories trace Bangalore’s warp-speed transformation from a leafy backwater into India’s Silicon Valley—a place where Digital Age values clash with tradition, where British colonialism casts its strong shadow, and where visions are inspired and distorted by the forces of globalization.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week – July 24, 2023

Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!

Catamaran Summer 2023 cover image

Catamaran is the kind of publication that makes me say “gorgeous” out loud just by looking at it. Equally well-designed inside and out, the Summer 2023 cover features Orchid with Limes, oil on panel, 2023, by Pamela Carroll.

Arkansas Review April 2023 cover image

I’m mesmerized by the layers of light and depth of color captured in Sierra Tribbet-Collins’ photograph Little Rock Evening Sky on the April 2023 cover of Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies.

Seneca Review Spring 2023 cover image

From Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the Spring 2023 covert art of Seneca Review doesn’t pop with color but it mesmerizes with geometrical design and depth – Signs I by Nicholas H. Ruth.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Magazine Stand :: Allium – Summer 2023

Allium Magazine literary magazine cover image

Allium Summer 2023 online issue upholds its mission to publish “work that is provocative, evocative, and bold,” and that represents a range and diversity of wrters’ voices. In this issue, readers can enjoy several watercolor panels from featured artist Leela Corman, whose graphic novel Victory Parade is set during World War II in Brooklyn, New York, and is due out in April 2024. Other works in this issue include fiction by Gemini Wahhaj, Greg Golley, Shelley Ettinger, Miranda Dennis, Max Smothers, Zoe Hanlon, Mary Lewis, Charli Andrews, Katy Gathright, Jeiyanni Hollings, Anthony Koranda, Jay Bigboy; nonfiction, Lauren Hohle, Carmelinda Escuder, Laura Hodes, Alexandra Ernst, Becky A. Benson, Daphne Reed, Ethan Dulaca, Jeffrey Ihlenfeldt, Justine Feron, Cristina Benavides; and poetry by Susan M. Schultz, Jan Beatty, Samantha Johnson, Sarah Iqbal, Denise Miller, Lorraine Carey, Izzy Dimiceli, Josette Akresh-Gonzales, Mole Hart, Moira Barrett, Gretchen Shull, Alorah Welti, Mara Tillman, Stephen Jackson, W.J. Lofton, Jake Bailey.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Paper Cuts

Paper Cuts: Lighter Verse by Gail White book cover image

Paper Cuts: Lighter Verse by Gail White
Kelsay Books, May 2023

Gail White’s first new chapbook in seven years shows no abatement in her trademark formalist cynicism as she takes on cats, gators, Edna Millay’s goldfish, and God. She expresses sympathy for the snails found mating inside her garbage can “because on Friday nights / I look ridiculous myself.” If the heat is getting you down, some iced light verse is highly recommended. Gail White was born in Florida but has disowned it for political reasons. She currently lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where Cajun food is available at all hours. Her other books, Asperity Street and Catechism, are available on Amazon.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder

Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Ephemera, by Sierra DeMulder, offers readers a “camaraderie among / women and death, ” acknowledging “the ecstatic briefness of it all.” In the first two sections of the collection, the poet focuses on her origins and roots, offering faceted responses to where she comes from: “the body / is a body for such little time.” The first section attends predominantly to “the women in my family,” especially the poet’s grandmother, who “waits for death.” The second section traces the progression of love the poet has known, from first love to queer love to lasting love, asking: “Who would sign up to love something / so impermanent.” The second-half of the collection focuses primarily on pregnancy—wanting and trying to become pregnant, ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and a viable pregnancy, and “waiting for our daughter.” These poems acknowledge “a thousand unrewindable moments” of grief “where all unfinished things dwell.” As these poems “leave… space for death,” they also offer “a blessing for each stitch.” In spite of or rather because DeMulder “give[s] thanks / for the loss,” recognizing life has “a levy on the road to” everything, she arrives triumphantly at the realization of an “intoxicating” and ephemeral “impermanence of enjoyment… everywhere.” Read these poems and “wake up back at the starting line, salvaged and full of hope.”

Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder. Button Poetry, June 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/

Magazine Stand :: The 2River View – Summer 2023

The 2River View Summer 2023 cover image

The Summer 2023 issue of The 2River View features new poems by Ed Coletti, Trent Busch, Rupert Fike, Matthew Freeman, Jeff Friedman, Jane Ellen Glasser, Jane McKinley, Brent Pallas, Judith Skillman, Tonya Suther, and Ellen June Wright as well as artwork by Christian Quintin. 2River quarterly publishes The 2River View, occasionally publishes individual authors in the 2River Chapbook Series, and blogs from Muddy Bank. All publications, online and printed, are free.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: World Too Loud to Hear

World Too Loud to Hear: Poems by Stephen Kampa book cover image

World Too Loud to Hear: Poems by Stephen Kampa
Able Muse Press, November 2023

The poems in Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear confront today’s zeitgeist of dark social norms online or off. Our litany of individual and collective shortcomings is laid bare or castigated—as, for instance, with obligations we abhor, avoid, and “can’t wait / to pass down to the upstart generations.” The delivery ranges from straight or subtle to rants and execrations, while the settings range from historic and current affairs to the imaginary, dystopian, sci-fi, or surrealistic. This sui generis collection is fearless in hope, with a sobering take on our acceleratingly fearful national and global trajectory.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New & Noted Lit & Alt Mags – July 2023

NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Literary Magazines and Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay the most up-to-date on all things literary!

American Indian Past & Present, 50.2, 336
American Poetry Review, July/August 2023
As You Were, Spring 2023
Bending Genres, June 2023
Clinch, 3
Colorado Review, Summer 2023
Copihue Poetry, 2
Cutleaf, 3.12
Ecotone, Spring/Summer 2023
Eggplant Tears, 2
Epiphany, Summer 2023
Epoch, Fall 2023
Erato, 2
Event, 52.1

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Book Review :: We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White book cover image

Tyriek White’s novel We Are a Haunting follows three generations as they live in Brooklyn public housing. White shows the struggles of the family and the community, both in terms of the limited choices they have and the pressures that lead them to make some of those choices bad ones. However, he also portrays the joy so many of the characters find in the people who surround and support them, as they forgive old wrongs and work to make their neighborhood and themselves better. White also uses magic realism to explore whether his characters are fated for ill ends, as all three family members—Audrey, Key, and Colly—have the ability to see ghosts. Key crosses time, in fact, to speak to her son Colly well after she has died and he is still living, and she explains one of the family’s greatest problems: “Guess all of it stays with us. We’re a family of ghosts, of half-living.” Yet, by the end of the novel, Colly is learning how to make a life in a land that doesn’t seem to want him to have one, that views his and his family’s bodies as “reminders of toil and burden.” He’s learning how he can be more than a haunting to the place he loves.

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White. Astra House, April 2023.

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/.

Hone your craft, find your community with Spalding MFA

Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing logo

The Spalding University MFA is one of the nation’s first low-residency MFA in Writing programs, and it remains one of the most respected. You’ll write more here and receive more one-on-one faculty feedback than in nearly any other MFA program. Our students thrive with this extra attention in our encouraging, non-competitive environment. Over four mentored independent-study courses and five residencies, you’ll work with our outstanding faculty of actively publishing and producing writers. You’ll hone your craft, explore across genres, learn about the business of writing, and build a lifelong writing community.

We believe artists flourish in a culturally rich environment. We’re located in downtown Louisville, known for its arts, dining, parks, and historic neighborhoods. Friendships form at our “dormitory,” the elegant 1920s-era Brown Hotel, a short walk from campus. Each residency includes an interrelatedness-of-the-arts element, be that a theatre performance, museum visit, or other memorable experience.

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New Book :: The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side

The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side Turns into a Tunnel of Love: Poems by Kimo RedeR book cover image

The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side Turns into a Tunnel of Love: Poems by Kimo RedeR
CW Books, January 2023

As its steeplechase of a title suggests, The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side Turns Into a Tunnel of Love is a book of oral and acoustic wordplay pressed to a precarious brink. These poetic experiments use alliteration, assonance, and related sound-devices to twist the tongue and tickle the eardrum while exploring matters of grammar, logic, and semantics. “Kimo RedeR’s writing explores the neuroscience of literacy, sensory overlaps between verbal meaning and oral flavor, occult aspects of the alphabet, and ecstatic, visionary states of language-use like graphomania and glossolalia.”

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Where to Submit Roundup: July 21, 2023

29 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.

Where to Submit Roundup 2023

NewPages is back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the week of July 21. It’s scary to think that back-to-school time is just around the corner. Before you get too bogged down with all of the preparations, let us help you keep your submission goals going strong.

There is only one full week left in July, so don’t forget to check out the NewPages Big List of Writing Contests to scope out the deadlines in August and September!

NewPages Newsletter subscribers with a paid subscription get early and first access to our submission opportunities and upcoming events, the majority before they go live on our site. Consider subscribing today.

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New Book :: Excisions

Excisions by Hilary Plum book cover image

Excisions by Hilary Plum
Black Lawrence Press, April 2023

Excisions by Hilary Plum investigates the feeling—the problem and the syntax—of being on a threshold. If you don’t know what will happen next, you can’t yet say what has happened. These poems arise from states of precise unknowing, desperate imagination, inchoate emotion, encounters with mortality and power when they’re closing in but haven’t caught you yet. What is choice, given the terms of an ill body, survival in a grotesque empire? Tenderly and acutely, these poems examine the life of before and after: when something is excised from you, it was you, and you are what remains.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore book cover image

Plot is not the point in Lorrie Moore’s latest novel, If I Am Homeless This is Not My Home. Some people die, while some people live, and some of the living people have conversations with the people who have died. And not all the ghosts in the novel are those who have died, though some certainly are. Moore wants to explore what it means to be alive, to have a life, while also digging into mourning and grief and death, primarily through Finn, the main character. Finn’s ex-girlfriend, Lily, has struggled with mental illness as long as he has known her, and she has tried to commit suicide numerous times. Finn’s brother, Max, is dying of cancer. Finn doesn’t deal well with either of these situations, often refusing to face the reality of their mortality, but also ignoring the truths about their relationships. There are also interspersed chapters from letters written by Elizabeth, a woman who ran an inn in the post-Civil War South, a minor storyline that ultimately connects both literally and thematically to Finn’s story by the end of the novel. Lest this description sound rather bleak, Moore is as humorous as she always is, though more clever than funny. Still, she acknowledges the joy and laughter we must continue to find, even when—perhaps especially when—life and the end of it becomes miserable.

I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. Alfred A. Knopf, June 2023.

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/.

New Lit on the Block :: Compass Rose Literary Journal

Compass Rose Literary Journal Spring 2023 issue cover image

“A compass rose,” explains Kelly Easton, founding Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the online quarterly Compass Rose Literary Journal, “is the visual representation of the cardinal directions on a map, nautical chart, or compass. CRLJ was founded in late 2022 as a home for all voices that seek direction. As our mission intersects the literary, the philosophical, and the spiritual, the compass rose speaks to our shared journeys as fellow searchers. Our tagline is ‘bushwhacking through art’; we are unafraid of tackling the wild, the unknown, the messy, the difficult, to find our way. We are particularly welcoming to traditionally underrepresented voices, including BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and the neurodivergent, along with survivors of addiction.”

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Magazine Stand :: Kaleidoscope – Summer/Fall 2023

Kaleidoscope Summer/Fall 2023 issue cover image

A pioneer in its field, Kaleidoscope magazine publishes work that creatively explores the experience of disability. With the theme of “The Ties that Bind,” there are two prominent threads woven into Issue 87: family and deafness. Our featured essay, by Paul Hostovsky, contains elements of both. The featured artist is Kelly Simpson. Kaleidoscope hopes readers will enjoy the work by these contributors: Roly Andrews, Caitlin C. Baker, Shanan Ballam, Rebecca Brothers, Connie Buckmaster, S. Leigh Ann Cowan, Benjamin Decter, Ellis Elliott, Robert Douglas Friedman, N.J. Haus, Shelly Jones, Susan Whiting Kemp, Lori Lindstrom, Claire McMurray, Gloria g. Murray, Wendy Nikel, Rachel Papirmeister, Ujjvala Bagal Rahn, Melanie Reitzel, Kate Robinson, Seth Schindler, Nancy Scott, Margaret D. Stetz, Marya Summers and Lee Ann Wilson.

To find more great reading, visit the NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Literary Magazines, the NewPages Big List of Alternative Magazines, and the NewPages Guide to Publications for Young Writers. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Broken Metronome

Broken Metronome: Poems by Connie Post book cover image

Broken Metronome: Poems by Connie Post
Glass Lyre Press, May 2023

Connie Post’s chapbook poetry collection, Broken Metronome, is about her brother’s journey and eventual death from Parkinson’s disease. These poems explore the difficult realities of the disease and its end stage. The work examines the closeness of siblings and how that bond is not broken, even when illness strikes. The poems delve into the many corners of the long goodbye and its aftermath. Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California from 2005 to 2009 and hosted a popular reading series in the San Francisco Bay Area in Crockett, California. She has published numerous collections as well as individual works that have received a variety of awards and recognitions beyond publication. Her collection Between Twilight was released in February 2023 by New York Quarterly Books.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!