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NewPages Blog

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!

The Understory

“Let me explain. I hunt for twins,” says Jack Gorse, narrator of Pamela Erens’s The Understory. “Not your run-of-the-mill fraternals, your IVF side effects, but identicals only, life’s natural aberrations. Nothing so far but Nature can make those mirror images, her rare gift of likeness in the world of infinite variety.” Originally published in 2007 by Ironweed Press and reissued this past April by Tin House Books, The Understory is a book about doubles, a search for second selves and other halves. It is about what it feels like to be alone and the lengths we will go to in order to find completion. Continue reading “The Understory”

Lake of Two Mountains

What is this life all about? That type of philosophical query may seem an unlikely undercurrent to a book of poems ostensibly focused on a writer’s experience of a specific place. Yet, when read as a whole, the direct, lyrical poems in Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains, weave a wide web of overlapping stories and impressions that casts a deep sense of wonder on the nature of particularity. Continue reading “Lake of Two Mountains”

Things To Do With Your Mouth

The reader has a lot of work to do after entering Divya Victor’s piece of expression, Things To Do With Your Mouth. The writing is a hybrid of text, speech, and performance. The body, the vocal cords, the mouth. This is about who can speak and be heard and who cannot, about who has power in the system and who does not, and we experience this from the side of those who are not heard and who do not have power in the system. Continue reading “Things To Do With Your Mouth”

Nonfiction

Shane McCrae in Nonfiction, a collection of poems, urgently requires readers to face both the visible and invisible truths of our American culture and society, present and past. Throughout these poems, the lyric voice of our culture and its various speakers emit a language that insistently stammers and stutters, resulting in poems that stun readers with pure lyrical beauty. The rhythm of the line, the stutter and repetition, so closely mimics the messy, rarely perfect, inner dialogues of the soul. Continue reading “Nonfiction”

Heart of the Order

For fans, baseball is poetry in motion. One team that continues to demonstrate grace is the Los Angeles Dodgers. Love or hate them, the team of Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax who has Magic Johnson among its co-ownership are still captivating, starting with manager Don Mattingly. As a Yankee in the 1980’s, “Donnie Baseball” and Keith Hernandez, his equal, opposite number on the New York Mets, gave daily clinics on the art of playing first base. No line drive or off-balance throw was too impossible for either of them. Continue reading “Heart of the Order”

Ecodeviance

I usually start a book review with some information on the author, including past publications, academic affiliations and other markers of importance that might help the reader slot the work into whatever framework he or she has for deciding what books are worth reading. While CAConrad definitely has the required pedigree, detailing it seems counter to the ethos of the book’s rejection of received knowledge in favor of lived experience.

Continue reading “Ecodeviance”

Elise Cowen

Elise Cowen is a name unlikely to ring a bell for any readers unfamiliar with the now rather legendary American literary phenomenon of the Beat Generation. Yet her writing will likely intrigue and warrant interest to a readership well beyond that demographic. Cowen’s brief life (1933-1962) proves rather remarkable for a young, unmarried woman of the era: she freely and openly explored her sexuality with multiple lovers of both sexes, including Allen Ginsberg, with whom she appears to have formed a deeper attachment, likely unreturned in kind; spent time living in both New York City and San Francisco, establishing relationships and friendships with artist communities in both cities; experimented habitually with drugs and alcohol; and dedicated herself to the pursuit of a poetic, intellectual life as much as possible all the while. Continue reading “Elise Cowen”

Corridor

One gets the feeling that she is always stuck in a hallway, or a “corridor.” But a corridor is not only a way of connecting rooms or railway cars; it also serves as link between two lands, and as a migratory path for birds. Continue reading “Corridor”

Broken Cage

Joseph P. Wood’s most recent poetry collection, Broken Cage, is a short book that takes ideas of symmetry and formal constraint to the extreme. Broken into three sections, the poems grow longer as the book progresses, and then shorter again in the third section. Wood focuses most of his energy on the triolet, an eight-line French form that includes rhyming as well as repeated lines.

Continue reading “Broken Cage”

My Favorite Tyrants

Smart, funny, tender, and always sharp with language, Joanne Diaz’s new book of poems My Favorite Tyrants is both elegy and celebration of those tyrants—cultural, historical, mythical, and personal—that shape our understanding of our current selves and the world we’ve produced. Divided into three sections, “The Perimeter of Pleasure,” “Elegy,” and “Metastasis,” the occasion for these poems is centered around the sudden and tragic loss of the speaker’s mother, a mother while dearly loved and respected, was perhaps, in her own way, a bit of a (shall I say it?) tyrant. Continue reading “My Favorite Tyrants”

Zymbol Fundraiser Offers Limited Edition Print

Zymbol magazine was started in 2012 as a publication which joined art and literature inspired by symbolism and surrealism. In the short time they have been publishing, they’ve shared the work of artists and writers from over 20 countries, some of whom have gone on to publish award-winning books, opened solo shows, and speak at various conferences and festivals.

Now Zymbol is fundraising to support printing their publication, including some full-color issues, distributing copies to students and contributors. releasing eBook versions and free content on their website, and hosting free literary events a various festivals.

If they exceed their fundraising goals, Zymbol will co-sponsor awards for young artists & writers to further their craft through education, artist residencies, and exhibitions/publications.

kimonoLike a lot of fundraisers, you get cool stuff for various levels of support, including this limited edition fine art poster print, “Kimono,” by Susanne Iles – at just the $25 level. In addition to supporting a great literary/art organization, this seems a great bonus!

New Book from Jesse Glass

jesse glassBased on a widely celebrated case of senteenth century lycanthropy and embodying the Sadean idea of literature as a crime unlimited by time, space, and circumstance, The Life and Death of Peter Stubbe was From Knives Forks and Spoons Press comes Selections from The Life & Death of Peter Stubbe by Jesse Glass. From the publisher: “Based on a widely celebrated case of seventeenth century lycanthropy and embodying the Sadean idea of literature as a crime unlimed by time, space and circumstance, The Life and Death of Peter Stubbe was originally composed from 1980 to 1985 and published in a fine-press, limited edition by Birch Brook Press in 1995. . . In 2012, Glass returned to the manuscript, excerpted from it, and illuminated the redacted text using gouache, pencil, pen and ink, and the result. . . is a further added dimension to the original exploration of metaphysical violence, social chaos, night, and the autonomous nature of language.”

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

meridian

Geogrpahic Tongues is a photo series by Elisabeth Hogeman featured both on the cover and the inside of Issue 33 of Merdian. And yes, it’s really tongues. And yes, they really are quite lovely.

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slipstream 34

Aptly entitled “Rust,” this image by nyk fury sets the theme for issue 34 of Slipstream: Rust, Dust, Lust.

 
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room

Room‘s cover art by mixed media artist Sandra Chevrier is a beautiful expression of this issue’s theme “Geek Girls” (37.3). The piece is “La Cage aux fenêtres laissant entrées un soleil déja mort” (2013).

American Life in Poetry :: Karina Borowicz

American Life in Poetry: Column 495
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

We’re at the end of the gardening season here on the Great Plains, and the garden described in this poem by Karina Borowicz, who lives in Massachusetts, is familiar to tomato fanciers all across the country.

September Tomatoes

The whiskey stink of rot has settled
in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises
when I touch the dying tomato plants.
Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms
flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots
and toss them in the compost.
It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.
My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village
as they pulled the flax. Songs so old
and so tied to the season that the very sound
seemed to turn the weather.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2013 by Karina Borowicz, whose most recent book of poems is Proof, (Codhill Press, 2014). Poem first appeared in the journal ECOTONE and is reprinted by permission of Karina Borowicz and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Gimmer Train Very Short Fiction Winners

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their Very Short Fiction Award. This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers for stories with a word count under 3000. The next Very Short Fiction competition will take place in October. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.

Luchette cred Kate Van BrocklinFirst place: Claire Luchette, of Brooklyn, NY, wins $1500 for “Full.” Her story will be published in Issue 95 of Glimmer Train Stories. [Pictured; Photo by Kate Van Brocklin]

Second place: Omid Fallahazad, of Framingham, MA, wins $500 for “Arrested.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue, increasing his prize to $700.

Third place: Louise Blecher Rose, of New York, NY, wins $300 for “Deux Ex Machina.”

A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.

Deadline coming up! Family Matters: September 30 Glimmer Train hosts this competition twice a year, and first place has been increased to $1500 plus publication in the journal. It’s open to all writers for stories about families of all configurations. Most submissions to this category run 1200-5000 words, but can go up to 12,000. Click here for complete guidelines.

Idaho Review Awards & Recognitions

idaho-review-v14-2014Awards and recognitions abound for the Idaho Review: Nicole Cullen’s short story, “Long Tom Lookout,” which appeared in our 2013 issue, has been selected for reprint in The Best American Short Stories 2014, edited by Jennifer Egan. “How She Remembers It” by Rick Bass, also from the 2013 issue, will be appearing in The Pushcart Prize 2015.

The newest issue features the Idaho Review 2014 Editor’s Prize, “Tough Love” by Janet Peery.

Structo Atwood Interview & More

Structo12coverPlainThe most recent issue of Structo features an interview with Margaret Atwood that took place in London after she gave the annual Sebald Lecture at the British Library. Interviewer Euan Monaghan follows up on the talk, entitled “Atwood in Translationland,” in which Atwood spoke on the “many kinds of translations” she has lived through in her life as well as her work creating a challenge for translators. Atwood and Monaghan also discuss play writing, the use of genre labels on Atwood’s writing (touching on LeGuin, Bruce Sterling, and slipstream), and of course, the process of writing. Twenty pages in all, this interview is no light fare.

Structo specializes in the true, conversation interview, and three months after publication, makes the interviews available on their web site. There now you can find interviews with Richard Adams, Iain Banks, David Constantine, Lindsey Davis, Stella Duffy, Steven Hall, Inez Lynn & Aimée Heuzenroeder, Ian R. MacLeod, Chris Meade, Kim Stanley Robinson, Sarah Thomas, Katie Waldegrave, and Evie Wyld.

Contest Winners :: Arc Poem of the Year & Diana Brebner Prize

arc-poetry741Arc Poetry Magazine #74 features the winners of the Poem of the Year Contest. Selected from over 500 submissions, one winner receives $5000 – a daunting process even the editors recognize the “craziness” of, beginning with: How were we going to agree on what was the best poem when we sometime can’t even agree on what a poem is? How can anyone just have one “best” poem when so much of what poetry does is question the very ideas of aesthetic hierarchies and commonly agreed upon truths?

Alas, the editors were able to sort, select and agree upon “Consider the Lilies” by Kristina Bresnen. Judges, editors, and e-poetry readers also helped select other poets worthy of “high accolades”: Nancy Holmes, Matt Jones, Michael Lithgow, Steve McOrmond, and Jennifer Zilm.

Additionally, this issue features winning poems of the annual Diana Brebner Prize, open to poets in the Ottawa area who have not yet published a book. Judge Pearl Pirie chose Anne Marie Todkill as the winner and Vivan Vavassis as the runner-up.

The Black Dog of Depression & Alzheimer’s

Another commntary of interest from Psychology Today, this time from reporter and storyteller Greg O’Brien whose memoir ON PLUTO: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s is out this September from Codfish Press. O’Brien uses the Black Dog from literature – engaging refrences to Robert Bly, Homer, Apollonius of Tyana, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Winston Churchill – as a means of exploring the “demons of depression.” O’Brien writes about the misunderstandings of what depression means: “It is not a mood swing, a lack of coping skills, character flaws, or simply a sucky day, a month or a year; it’s a horrific, often deadly, disease. . . In depression, there is no off button.”

O’Brien’s book is also the subject of the short film, A Place Called Pluto, directed by award-winning filmmaker Steve James. In 2009, he was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s. His maternal grandfather and his mother died of the disease. O’Brien also carries a marker gene for Alzheimer’s.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

gargoyle-n61-2014

Gargoyle‘s covers are regularly striking, but this issue in particular for its lack of any identifying information about the publication printed over the image, “Urban Graveyard Crows,” © Donna Snyder 2010.

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cimarroncover188

“Disambiguation” is the name of this photo by Nosael Gleason on the Summer 2014 cover of Cimarron Review. Despite the vividly images prickly spindles, I was completely drawn to grab up this issue and run my hand across its cover.

 
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tar online-03

There’s just something hauntingly sweet about this cover image, “Birds” by Jennifer Balkan, on the second issue of The Austin Review.

Poet Lore Turns 125

poet-lore-v109--n3-4-fall-winter-2014

Established in 1889, Poet Lore celebrates 125 years of publication with this Fall/Winter Issue. Aside from the who’s who among contemporary poet contributors (nearly 70 in all), the journal includes a special selection of essays. Review Editor Jean Nordhause comments: “To highlight Poet Lore‘s contributions to American letters over the past 125 years, we’ve asked scholars and poets to contribute essays about aspects of the journal and its history.”

Poet Lore Essays: Melissa Girard “‘ Who’s for the Road?’: Poet Lore, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the Open Road of 19th-Century American Poetry” Joan Hua “ Without Borders: Poet Lore’s Early Attention to World Literature in Translation” Megan Foley “ Lovers: A Tribute to Poet Lore’s Founders” Bruce Weigl “ Learning to Hear the Spirits Rumble: My Four Years with Poet Lore” Rod Jellema “ Finding the Undercurrent: Three Reflections on the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry”

The Longbox :: Collecting Comic Book Memories

AmazingSpider-Man050Got a box of old comics hanging around somewhere? The Longbox Project would like you to pour back over them, not to see what they may be worth for sale, but to have you share your memories of reading them, of collecting them, of keeping them all this time.

Yes, The Longbox Project is “a memory project for comic geeks.” Inspired by Max Delgado and Kevin Leslie’s own reminiscing through boxes of old comics, The Longbox Project started online in March 2013 with the mission: “To create the most comprehensive anthology of collector-focused memoirs anywhere on the web.”

The prompt is a simple one: “Why is this comic book important to you?”

The Longbox Project publishes interviews, personal stories of comic book writers and artists, and personal stories from any collector looking to share what made that book special, memorable, worth keeping in the box.

A Tribute to Alistair MacLeod

antigonish-reviewThe Antigonish Review Summer 2014 issue features a memorial section to Alistair MacLeod, including a tribute by Associate Editor Sheldon Currie, “Alistair Macleod – Memories in a Window” by Randall Maggs, “The Splendid Man from Dunvegan” by Reynold Stone, and three poems by MacLeod from previous issue of The Antigonish Review.

Westchester Review Writers Under 30 Contest Winners

The newest issue (volume 7) of The Westchester Review: A Literary Journal of Writers from the Hudson to the Sound, includes the winners of the 2nd Annual Writers Under 30 Contest, which is open to writers of poetry and fiction who live, work, or study in the Lower Hudson Valley and who are under the age of 30. The prize for fiction was awarded to Matt Nestor for his short story, “Bushwick,” and the prize for poetry was awarded to Kay Cosgrove for her poem, “Study in Blue.” Both winners received $100, publication, and two copies of The Westchester Review. Runners-up will be considered for publication.

Call for Contributions :: The Virtual Education Project

From The Virtual Education Project: One of the most effective ways of learning is to immerse ourselves in the cultures we study; yet, we often encounter problems when these cultures are separated from us by constraints such as geography or time. When studying various people, places, events, and works, students and teachers rarely have the resources to visit each (if any) historical landmarks pertaining to their subject matter, restricting both research and teaching to textbooks and/or an amalgam of materials from various resources. The Virtual Education Project (VEP) is a large-scale pedagogical undertaking directed at providing both students and teachers with visual introductions to historical and contemporary landmarks (worldwide) relevant to the study of the humanities. Thus, the purpose of the VEP is twofold: 1) to provide educators with a central resource that facilitates both teaching and research, and 2) to encourage independent inquiry amongst students, regardless of their locale.

The Virtual Education Project is currently seeking submissions for photo (or video—email for details) tours of domestic and international sites relevant to the study of the humanities. We are interested in tour submissions that explore local museums, author/artist homes, memorials, public artworks, and any significant cultural or community sites that will aid in the study and/or teaching of the humanities.

We welcome proposals for virtual tours related to the study of the arts, humanities, and sciences, including literature, theatre and/or performance, history, philosophy, rhetoric, and the STEM fields (e.g., the Nikola Tesla Museums in Brograd, Serbia, and Shoreham, NY). The list of examples for this initial Call for Contributions is a starting point, and we encourage you to submit a proposal for a site near you.

Potential tours topics might include (but are in no way limited to):
The Old Manse (Concord, MA)
Emily Dickinson House & Museum: The Homestead & The Evergreens (Amherst, MA)
W.E.B. Du Bois’s National Historic Site (Great Barrington, MA)
Walt Whitman House (Camden, NJ)
William Carlos Williams House (Rutherford, NJ)
Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, VA)
Thomas Wolfe House (Asheville, NC)
Mark Twain House (Hartford, CT)
Harriet Beecher Stowe House (Hartford, CT)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett House (Chicago, IL)
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago, IL)
The House of Happy Walls Museum, Jack London (Glen Ellen, CA)
The Wolf House Ruins, Jack London (Glen Ellen, CA)
John Steinbeck House (Salinas, CA)
Andalusia, Home of Flannery O’Connor (Milledgeville, GA)
Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield (Kennesaw, GA)
Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum (Key West, FL)
Lamb House, Henry James (Rye, East Sussex, England)
Monk’s House, Virginia Woolf (Lewes, East Sussex, England)
Thomas Hardy’s Cottage (Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England)
Capela dos Capuchos (Sintra, Lisbon, Portugal)
The Houses of Pablo Neruda (Chile)
Vladimir Nabokov House Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Borobudur Temple Compounds (Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia)
Nelson Mandela’s Capture Site (Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa); Prison Site (Robben Island, Wescape, South Africa); and The Mandela House (Orlando, Soweto, South Africa)

Arkansas Review Celebrates Hemingway

Fifteen years ago, the July 1999 issue of Arkansas Review celebrating the opening of the Hemingway-Pfieffer museum in Piggot, Arkansas, and now, the August 2014 issue celebrates the museum’s 15-year anniversary. Guest edited by Adam Long, current museum directly, the issue contains “essays, images and creative pieces that evoke the Hemingway-Pfeiffer connection and updates the scholarship on Hemingway’s creative output during the years he spent as part of the Pfeiffer family.”

Literature in the Age of STEM

Well, if this isn’t a “must read” in our age of STEM and “how will that degree get you a job” mentality toward college:  The Second Greatest Psychologist of All Time  by Michael Karson, Ph.D., J.D., who begins his article , “One of the main reasons I switched my major in college from English literature to psychology was that I was worried about making a living.”

So on my list of great psychologists, I would put George Eliot, Shakespeare, and Leo Tolstoy near the top. I would literally prefer that my students read Middlemarch, the great tragedies, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina than any psychology book, even my own (except Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior). The Magic Years by Selma Fraiberg is a wonderful professional book about childhood and its passing, but Stephen King’s It and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn are even better and they’re more fun to read. The list of important works on attachment theory is lengthy, and you ought to know it if you want to look credentialed, but if you really want to understand attachment, you won’t do any better than Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. There’s a terrific corpus of work available on family dynamics, but as glad as I am that I’ve read some of it, I’ve gotten even more mileage in my consultation and therapy work out of reading Junichuro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

It wasn’t my intention when I started posting covers here, but it seems I found myself in a “white” theme that worked out fairly well for the week.

nowhere

The cover of Nowhere Number 12, an online journal of literary travel writing, is a strongly composed image of balanced whites and beige. A very simple but striking image, a still life that moves the reader to travel to the inside.

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permafrost

This rainbow greyhound on the cover of the Winter 2014 Permafrost issue is a stand out. Of course, generally anything with a dog will garner my attention.

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literaryreview

The Literary Review‘s Summer 2014 cover is in keeping with the publication’s theme, “The Glutton’s Kitchen: Tales of Insatiable Hunger.”

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chagrin-river-review

To finish out the covers comes this one from the online publication Chagrin River Review, which features a painting by JenMarie Zeleznak.

Call for Non-Fiction Digital Stories

Afterlife of Discarded Objects is “a digital non-fiction storytelling project that explores the stories that discarded objects can tell about our history. The project will examine how people’s memories of their childhood games with discarded material objects inform the way they imagine the cultural landscape of their childhood.”

Curated by Natalia Andrievskikh, Fulbright alumna and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, plans are to transfer stories “onto an interactive map where users will be able to click on marked locations and read stories from that location.” Andrievskikh will also reflect on the shared stories in the book that she is am currently working on, titled “Afterlife of Discarded Objects.”

American Poetry Review :: Stephen Berg

american-poetry-review

American Poetry Review September/October 2014 features a special supplement in honor of Stephen Berg (August 2, 1934 – June 12, 2014), with eight sonnets, a prose piece entitled “Hello, Afterlife!” and a selection of works “Versions of Poems by Zen Master Dōgen.”Also included are essays “What do I know?” by David Rivard and “Being Here, Like This” by Edward Hirsch.

Out of Print – June 2014

Out of Print is an online magazine hailing from India that publishes short fiction in English or translated to English with a preference for literature that reflects the subcontinent. G. Sadasiv reimagines the end of Guy de Maupassant’s famous short story “The Necklace,” or, rather, he continues the story for one more final twist. The piece starts as a brief retelling of the original story over the phone and then delves into the continuation of the story as one character imagines it, starting with Mathilde regaining the expensive necklace she had returned. Continue reading “Out of Print – June 2014”

Whitefish Review – Summer 2014

Whitefish Review carries a constant byline of “Art, Literature, Photography.” This particular issue carried a special theme of “fire,” and some of its words will continue to smolder inside me for a long time. Poetry, fiction, and visual imagery all have some very bright spots, but the nonfiction entries take the cake! Every page felt like it was making the most of itself to give pertinent information while remaining entertaining. Continue reading “Whitefish Review – Summer 2014”

AGNI – Number 79

Because Agni 79 begins with an editor’s note titled “Ten Broad Swipes at the Problem of Structure in the Essay (and Perhaps Other Genres as Well),” I first turned to the essays collected in the issue to see how they managed to meet Sven Birkerts’s argument for the arbitrariness of chronological structure. “As we all know,” Birkerts writes, “there is a huge difference between a narration that unfolds an experience in sequence (as they say in the movies, when the witness is being questioned, “Just start at the beginning”)…” Continue reading “AGNI – Number 79”

Bellevue Literary Review – Spring 2014

Published by the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, Bellevue Literary Review explores literature that addresses aspects of the human condition that relate to health, healing, and disease. In this volume, selections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction recover images from hospital rooms and doctors’ offices, caregivers’ homes and nurses’ stations. They find language deeply rooted in the human body, with all its strength and resilience, limitation and vulnerability. These selections speak a common language with which most of us can identify and relate. Continue reading “Bellevue Literary Review – Spring 2014”

The Bitter Oleander – Spring 2014

The Spring 2014 issue of The Bitter Oleander is like a smorgasbord laden with curious-looking food that you’re not sure you would like, and which even seem a little intimidating. But egged on by your adventurous spirit and that childhood admonition at the dinner table—you don’t have to like everything, but you ought to try everything—you pick it up and discover that the rewards can be great indeed. The magic lies in the deft mix of the accessible and the unfamiliar, in the selections as a whole as well as in the individual pieces. Continue reading “The Bitter Oleander – Spring 2014”

burntdistrict – Winter 2014

One of the best young journals out there is burntdistrict, each issue promises tons of beautiful, thought provoking, and unique contemporary poetry and this issue is no different from all the rest. In its third year of publication, burntdistrict is still going strong and publishing some of the best up–and-coming and well-established writers from across the world. One of the most interesting poems in this issue is Alexander Lumans’s poem “What We Don’t Know About Natalie Portman Can Still Hurt Us.” This poem masterfully uses the narrator’s obsession with the actress and the narrator’s lack of knowledge about her to reflect how obsessed society is with things unknown Continue reading “burntdistrict – Winter 2014”

Cleaver Magazine – September 2014

Not having reviewed Cleaver Magazine since its launch with the preview issue, I felt it was high-time I check back in to see how it is evolving, and this issue did not let me down. Each contribution to the issue is well thought-out and carefully crafted. After reading Amelia Fowler’s “Space and Time,” I was surprised to find out that it is her first publication. Props to Cleaver for snatching her up, because I imagine there is only more publications to come for this writer. Continue reading “Cleaver Magazine – September 2014”

Conduit – Spring 2014

This issue of Conduit carries a byline of “Failing Famously.” It is roughly 11 inches high by 4 inches wide and is a visual pleasure with interesting color schemes and artwork sprinkled throughout. The physical layout truly lends itself well to the presentation of poems that might not have fit on more traditional 7-inch pages. Viewing a poem on a single page carries substantial effect for empowering the words! I would love to be able to give specific pages of reference to anyone interested in picking up a copy of Conduit based on this review, but I can’t. Editors made a very bold choice to use words associated with failure as their method of pagination! What some might call page 1, the creative team at Conduit decided to call “accident.” The last page of the magazine is called, “zero.” Continue reading “Conduit – Spring 2014”

CutBank – 2014

CutBank is a biannual literary journal run by the English department at the University of Montana. The journal is in its 40th year of publication and prides itself in publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art from both established and up-and-coming writers and artists. CutBank proclaims they are “global in scope, but with a regional bias” that allows people joy by helping them to “discover and develop a fondness for the new work” that it features. In this issue of CutBank, there is page after page of phenomenal writing that your heart will grow fond to love. Continue reading “CutBank – 2014”

Drunken Boat – August 2014

For an online literary, Drunken Boat has a huge amount of content to read, from the regular fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to translations, art, a Greek poets folio, and a special section of funny flash. While there is way too much here to touch on even every genre, I simply offer you some of my favorites: “On Monasteries” is a piece of nonfiction that weaves together stories of clients Allison Vrbova had as a social worker with her desire to visit and her experience with Taize, “a magical place where pilgrims join the life of the monastery, eating, praying, singing and working in a community.” Continue reading “Drunken Boat – August 2014”

Nimrod International Journal – Spring/Summer 2014

Stories build bridges in the human community, and this issue of Nimrod explores the rebuilding and re-purposing of many such bridges. As Eilis O’Neal points out in the editor’s note, the focus of this themed issue is work that reimagines “fairy tales, myths, historical events, and family legends, as well as work that reimagines voice, poetic form, art, and even language via translation.” Life reimagined in the presence of death, temporal and spatial reality reimagined in terms of various binaries, old tales adjusted to newer realities, language reconceived with fresh nuances, all this and more is here. Continue reading “Nimrod International Journal – Spring/Summer 2014”

Open Minds Quarterly – Summer 2014

One of the older philosophies of critical theory maintains that good art should reflect reality or enlighten us about the real world. The variety of approaches and perspectives that are available promise us that we can always be surprised by the next work of the next author. Such surprises come quickly in this issue of the Open Minds Quarterly. A ‘new’ reality comes to us through the works of artists who have to deal with a world that we may not have experienced. All of the contributions to the quarterly are meant to create an awareness of mental health issues, and they all do it very successfully, whether the piece is poetry, photography, an interview, or an essay. Continue reading “Open Minds Quarterly – Summer 2014”

Students at Risk: A Letter to MFA Programs

open-minds-quarterlyOpen Minds Quarterly is a publication whose content continually and consistently packs some of the hardest-hitting writing I’ve ever read, with its unabashed focus on the poetry and literature of mental health recovery. The Summer 2014 issue is no exception, with one feature in particular that might well strike a deep chord with many of our readers: “An Open Letter to the MFA” by Hannah Baggott. Written in the epistolary style, Baggott addresses the stresses and pressures MFA students face in their programs. While often told to “take care of yourself first,” Baggott confronts the contradictory nature the expectations of such programs foster. “Our workshop leader last term said you have to be sad to write well. This is the fallacy that you keep perpetuating.” Baggot is “happy” in her program and “would not choose a different path,” but she does offer some advice that if the MFA programs themselves won’t follow, then the individuals in them should seriously consider how to better “take care.”

Roxane Gay on Food & Family & Loving Hard

tin-house-v16-n1-fall-2014The most recent issue of Tin House (v16 n1), themed “Tribes,” features an essay in the Readable Feast section by Roxane Gay, “The Island We Are: At Home with Food.” The quote line the magazine chose was “When you are overweight in a Haitian family, your body is a family concern.” That caught my interest (well, and of course, it’s Roxane Gay for cripes sake), but what stuck with me throughout her piece was the repetition of ‘loving, and loving hard’:

“We talk about our lives. We debate and try to solve the world’s problems. We are a holy space. We love each other hard.”

Following the “overweight” quote, Gay writes: “Everyone – siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, grandmotehrs, cousins – has an opinion, judgement, or counsel. They mean well. We love hard, and that love is inescapable.”

“They want to help. I accept this, or I try to.”

“As I eat the foods of my childhood prepared by my own hand, I am filled with longing, as well as a quiet anger that has risen from hard love and good intentions.”

Her writing is a mirror of that: subtle, persistent in keeping you reading, and hard hitting in its meaning, which isn’t at all sneaky. It’s there throughout, and you can’t help but to keep reading it, wanting to be a part of it, loving it.

Poetry Postcard Festival 2014 Wrap Up

WP 20140907 006It was another great year for the August Poetry Postcard Festival! Organized by west coast poet and teacher Paul E. Nelson, over 300 people from a dozen countries signed up to write a postcard a day and send it to someone in the month of August.

As of today, I’ve received 22 postcards of the 31 expected. I imagine a few more will trickle in, considering the countries they are coming from may take a bit longer, and, well, if some were like me, that ‘poem a day’ promise might have slipped a bit. I did send a couple out a few days into September.

But I did send all 31! And it’s an amazing feeling to be doing it, struggling to do it some days (maybe a few times even resenting the guilt feeling when I didn’t do it), and when it’s all done, feeling a bit forlorn.

The premise is simple but challenging: put a poem on a postcard and send it. Postcards aren’t that big, so it’s not that much to write. Still, the intention is to just sit and write daily – a necessity writers understand as such but still seem to struggle with as if some kind of luxury.

My own poems came to me in two ways. On my morning walks, I might see something that would cause me to reflect on the image and feeling in language, or a line would simply jump into my head, like this one: “It was summer when you said you would…” That’s not a line that has any connection to anything in my life, it was just language that formed that thought and then became the poem about broken promises. As soon as I got home from my walk, I’d be jotting down lines, then rummaging for a postcard and getting it down as a poem.

The other way the poems came to me was simply sitting down with the postcard and writing using the image on the card as a kind of prompt. Sometimes I wrote on the front of the card right on the image, sometimes on the back. But it was from my mind to the pen to the paper. The only editing I did happened when I reread the poem and would scribble out or correct a mistake, or simply try to make the writing more legible.

I type up and save all of the poems I write. I make note of who I sent them to and the date as well as any notes about the card that may have prompted the poem. Going back and rereading these for the past seven years is a fun reflection. There’s some really bad poetry in there, and yet, there’s some pretty good stuff too.

And what else I have is a box of great poetry from other writers. I love going back through those cards, from so many people from so many countries. Some were famous then, some have become famous since. Some are unsigned and I’ll never know who wrote them. But all of them are truly wonderful works – not just as poetry, good or bad, but in knowing there are so many others out there who would do this. Who would take time from their day to get themselves to write and to share. It’s an amazingly warm and comforting experience to feel this kind of connection with total strangers. But then, isn’t that the power of poetry? Of poets?

I’m happy to have completed PPF 2014 and appreciative of all the others who did the same. I look forward to this event every year. Huge thanks to Paul Nelson for taking it over.

See you in August 2015!

Celebrating Grad Student Writing :: The Masters Review

masters-reviewNow in its third volume, The Masters Review is a collection of ten stories from students in graduate-level creative writing programs across the country (MFA, MA, PhD). Selected by such well-known authors as Lauren Groff (Volume I), AM Homes (Volume II), previously featured authors have gone on to publish novels, short story collections, and win awards, including a Nelson Algren Award finalist, an Academy of American Poets Prize winner, and a Fulbright Fellow. Many have gone on to continue their publishing in literary journals nation wide.

Volume III, with stories selected by Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author and Times book critic, includes Drew Ciccolo (Rutgers-Newark University College; MFA), Amanda Pauley (Hollins University; MFA), Eric Howerton (University of Houston; PhD), Maya Perez (Michener Center for Writer; MFA), Shane R. Collins (Stonecoast University of Southern Maine; MFA), Courtney Kersten (University of Idaho; MFA), Meng Jin (Hunter College; MFA), Joe Worthen (University of North Carolina Wilmington; MFA), Andrew MacDonald (University of Massachusetts Amherst; MFA), Dana Xin (University of Montana; MFA).

In addition to its annual anthology, The Masters Review also accepts submissions year round for its regular online feature New Voices. This is open to any new or emerging author who was not published a work of fiction or narrative nonfiction of novel length. Fiction or narrative nonfiction up to 5000 words accepted for New Voices pays .10/word up to $200 with no submission fee.

October Writer’s Regimen Sign Up Now

Twice annually, The Southeast Review Writer’s Regimen is a 30-day set of emails containing daily writing prompts, a daily reading-writing exercise, a Riff Word of the Day, a Podcast of the Day, a Quote of the Day, craft talks, weekly messages from poets and writers – tips and warnings on the craft and business of writing, a dedicated Writer’s Regimen contest for a chance to have work published, a print copy of a current or back issue, and access to the online literary companion.

Gees! Is that enough?! All  for only $15 starting October 1.

It’s like boot camp for writers! Teachers: This could BE your class for the month! Students: What a great way to supplement your classes! Writers: Make October your best month by signing up now!

Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award Winners

The newest issue of Paterson Literary Review (#42) features the 2013 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award winners, including the full list of honorable mentions and editor’s choice selections. In the top tier:

paterson-literary-reviewFIRST PRIZE (shared)
Svea Barrett, Fair Lawn, NJ
Grace Cavalieri, Annapolis, MD

SECOND PRIZE (shared)
Charles H. Johnson, Hillsborough, NJ
Carolyn Pettit Pinet, Bozeman, MT

THIRD PRIZE
Alice Jay, Miami, FL

More information about the prize as well as the full list of winners can be found here.

The First Line Tries The Last Line

first-lineSince 1999, The First Line magazine has been issuing the starting point for writers to engage their creativity and publishing the finished works to share with readers the many different directions writers can take when given the same start point. After so long a successful run of sharing first lines (like the one for the next issue: “We went as far as the car would take us.”), The First Line is ready to mix it up a bit.

The Last Line is an “experiment” to see how writers respond to using the prompt as the final sentence of the story. The guidelines are the same (300-5000 words), and the editors will publish selected works in a December issue. If it seems to go well, there may be more in store for last line writers and readers. The experimental last line: “Brian pocketed the note and realized it had all been worth it.”

Start the creative engines and put it in reverse! Submissions are due October 1, 2014.

Bonus: The editors are looking for a creative cover idea for The Last Line issue. Visit their website here.