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!
Lingerpost offers a fruit salad of poetry (some long, some round, some sweet, and some are fun to utter out loud—like kumquat or papaya) and accepts a wide variety so long as it, as the editors say, is “interesting.” Well, there is certainly a lot of interesting poems in this collection, in several different forms. Continue reading “Lingerpost – January 2013”
This issue of Terrain features the winners and finalists for the magazine’s third annual contest—in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Themed “ruin + renewal,” the issue is filled with stories of survival and growth amongst the destroyed, the decayed, and the dirty. Continue reading “Terrain.org – 2013”
American Athenaeum invites you to step into their “museum of words” with their latest “Understanders” issue. Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s unwavering dedication to his craft in the face of stinging criticism, the editors dedicate this issue “to every artist who stays true to their art and vision amid the naysayers.” Continue reading “American Athenaeum – Winter 2012-2013”
From the rugged state of Montana comes Camas, a unique literary journal that focuses on environmental and cultural issues in the American West. Their winter 2012 issue features essays, fiction, and poetry revolving around work, but they’re not talking about white collar jobs here, folks. This issue is dedicated to the men and women who perform manual labor found in the rural parts of the United States. It celebrates, questions, and examines all aspects of this form of work, whether good or bad, legal or illegal. Continue reading “Camas – Winter 2012”
Mudfish, a journal founded by Jill Hoffman in 1984, marries poetry and art in a spellbinding series of verve and verse. For a quick and accessible view of the art in full color, the Mudfish website has an exquisite introduction to a moving collection of drawings, paintings, and photographs included in this volume. The poetry is likewise compelling and contains this year’s contest winners, as selected by Mark Doty. But for the poetry in its entirety, you may have to schlep it to a Barnes & Noble, where select stores feature the journal—see the website for participating locations. Continue reading “Mudfish – 2012”
North Dakota Quarterly is a scholar’s delight. The well-chosen creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction are bookended by two incisive papers and eight book reviews. All of the work is informed by an interesting frame of reference; the beautiful Great Plains can be found in these pages, as can knowing glimpses of the rest of the world. Continue reading “North Dakota Quarterly – Fall 2012”
Here, complete, is Mathias Svalina’s “Poetry Prompt: Reformation” from this thoroughly intriguing second issue of Phantom Drift: Continue reading “Phantom Drift – Fall 2012”
By the time you read this review, the so-called Mayan Apocalypse has passed, and the human race is still kicking (whether we like it or not). But just because we missed our extermination date doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the latest batch of poems, essays, and stories from River Styx. Editor Richard Newman has dedicated issue 88 to the End of the World: “Something in us, often a small, barely suppressed voice, roots for destruction. Evangelicals have their own reasons—eternal rewards in heaven—but most of us harbor an itch to see the demise of things.” The works presented in this issue deal with The End in different ways, from personal and absurd to global and horrific. Continue reading “River Styx – 2012”
The Northwest Institute for the Literary Arts (NILA) is a community of writers on Whidbey Island (Washington state) which supports, teaches, and guides upcoming writers by means of a freestanding low-residency MFA program, an annual conference, and this publication, Soundings Review. This was the last issue to be produced under the direction of founding editor Marian Blue. Subsequent issues will be produced by students and faculty in the Whidbey Writers Workshop, the Institute’s MFA program, where, according to the website, production of the Review is to become an aspect of the proposed MFA in Publishing and Editing. It’s apparent from the bionotes of the journal that much of the work published in Soundings comes from within the NILA community—but that doesn’t mean it’s local, or even regional. It especially doesn’t mean that it’s anything but “high quality poetry, fiction, and nonfiction” by writers whose deepest value is to create community and contribute to the field of writing. The institute’s website is emphatic about this; I find it very exciting. Continue reading “Soundings Review – Spring/Summer 2012”
Currently in its second issue, The Hare seeks short essays on the poetry, prose, and drama of the English renaissance, and reviews of foundational, seminal, neglected, or overlooked books in the field. The Hare is a peer-reviewed, on-line academic journal.
Ecotone‘s “The Abnormal Issue” announces that Editor Ben George will be leaving the magazine to pursue his career in NYC. Editor-in-Chief David Gessner writes an intro to the magazine, dedicating several pages to recognize his gratitude for Ben and acknowledge Ben’s hard work, ambition, and dedication. Spending a great deal of time editing and developing strong relationships with the writers, Ben, as Gessner says, will be “dearly missed.” Gessner writes, “We wish him luck and many sharpened pencils.
The issue itself features David Shields, Lia Purpura, Darin Strauss, Nicholas Kahn, Richard Selesnick, Lauren Slater, Beth Ann Fennelly, Paul Crenshaw, Jen Percy, Dash Shaw, Olivia Clare, George Makana Clark, Edith Pearlman, Andrew Tonkovich, Douglas Watson, Callan Wink, Geoff Wyss, Gerard Beirne, Marvin Bell, Billy Collins, Adam Giannelli, Mark Halliday, Janet McNally, Christoper Merrill, Donald Platt, Diane Seuss, Bruce Smith, Charles Harper Webb, and Robert Wrigley.
Brevity online magazine of “concise literary nonfiction” also regularly publishes craft essays. Recent contributions to this feature include “On Writing as an Act of Living: An Interview with Terry Tempest Williams” by Jeanette Luise Eberhardy; “The Ant in the Water Droplet: Locating the Mystery within Memory” by Philip Graham; “Tipping the Whippers” by Mary Clearman Blew (examining the demands of the writing life and writers’ responses to them, “Drink Wild Turkey” she advises); and “Not Every Sentence Can Be Great But Every Sentences Must Be Good” by Cynthia Newberry Martin.
The Winner of the 2012 No-Fee RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest at Anderbo is Martha Clarkson of Seattle for “Her Voices, Her Room.” The 2013 No-Fee RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest, now in its 10th year, is open for submissions until January 7, 2014.
Anderbo.com magazine welcomes three new editors. From Anderbo’s newsletter, here is a description of the new staff members:
Leslie Fields, Associate Editor
Leslie Fields holds an undergraduate degree in English and Theatre from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Graduating in 2011, Leslie studied under the tutelage of award winners’ Mary Morris, Brian Morton and Joan Silber. She is also the author of two plays, “Never Have” and “Hecho in Ecuador,” a compilation of short pieces created for Dramatic Adventure Theatre (DAT). Both plays were performed off-off Broadway in New York City. She is currently working on a collection of interconnected short stories.
Suzannah Windsor, Associate Editor
Suzannah Windsor is a Canadian writer and editor whose work has appeared in Sou’wester, Grist, Anderbo, Saw Palm, Best of the Sand Hill Review, and others. She studied English Literature at The University of Windsor, and Education at Lakehead University. Currently, she lives in Australia.
Claudine Levy, Associate Editor
Claudine Levy is graduating with an English degree from Bristol University this summer, having regularly written for the student newspaper, Epigram, and online arts forum, Inter:Mission. She has also written for Psychologies Magazine and is currently contributing online editor for Suitcase Magazine. She continues in her endeavors to write a pithy, self-aware novel detailing the dull life of a middle class Jewish girl plagued with pseudo-existentialist crises and an insatiable appetite. Above all things in life she loves analyzing, eating and writing.
Rose Metal Press has announced the winner of its Seventh Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. The Kind of Girl by Kim Henderson of Idyllwild, CA was declared the winner by judge Deb Olin Unferth. Henderson’s stories will be published as a limited-edition, handmade chapbook this summer. Rose Metal Press subscribers will receive a copy as soon as it is published.
The five contest finalists are:
River Traffic by Emma Torzs of Missoula, MT (Runner-up)
Reprieve and Other Stories by Amy Bergen of New York, NY
The 28 Mansions of the Moon by Lydia Suarez of Verona, NJ
This Is All the Orientation You Are Gonna Get by John Jodzio of Minneapolis, MN
What to Say to Aliens by Marc Sheehan of Grand Haven, MI
And semi-finalists include:
Basically People by Anji Reyner of Missoula, MT
Factories by Brandi Wells of Tuscaloosa, AL
Only Tourists Get Their Shoes Shined by Tyler Gillespie of Chicago, IL
Patient by Erika Mikkalo of Chicago, IL
The Measure Everything Machine by Mark Wallace of San Diego, CA
Rose Metal Press has also announced an open reading period for full-length submissions, from April 1 to May 1, 2013. The press focuses on hybrid and cross-genre works, especially short short, flash, and micro-fiction. For more details visit their submissions page.
DIALOGIST is a brand new online magazine, released quarterly. Publishing poetry and art and photography, DIALOGIST was designed “to serve as a platform for diversity through discourse.” They wish the focus to be on the content and not on the aesthetic. Founding Editor Michael Loruss says, “We expect that our featured work be clear, dynamic, and start a conversation.”
Though “dialogist” in the dictionary means “One who takes part in a dialogue” or “A writer of dialogues,” Loruss says that they “want readers to approach [the] name as more figurative and less literal, therby avoiding writing toward the name.” More simply put, he says, “the work we select will have an honest exchange with the reader, and vice versa.”
Other editors of the magazine include Brandon Courtney (poetry editor), Rachel Lin Weaver (art editor), and Lia Snyderman (website manager/contributing editor). If they are able to secure outside funding, they hope to offer a select print compilation, featuring the poetry and art from each of the quarterly online issues.
The first issue of DIALOGIST features poetry by J. Scott Brownlee, Robert Campbell, Heather Cox, Rebecca Dundon, Brad Efford, Mercedes Lawry, Adam Moorad, Charles Rafferty, Daniel Ruefman, Mark Simpson, Linda Umans, and Changming Yuan as well as art by Kev Anderson, Joel T. Dugan, Erin Robinson Grant, Anders Johnson, June Yong Lee, Kate MacDowell, Andrew Maurer, Devin Mawdsley, Rachel Seed, and Kimberly Turner.
Submissions are taken on a rolling basis via Submittable. Please visit their website and Facebook for more information.
Don’t Deny My Voice: Reading and Teaching African American Poetries is a fifteen-month program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that responds to the resurgence of interest in contemporary poetry, its expanded production and wide circulation. The program focuse on the history, changes and modal transformations of African American poetry in our cultural and social landscape and consider three critical periods: 1900-1960, 1960-80 and 1980-present.
Special attention will be paid to the divergent and yet cross-fertilizing trajectories of black poetry since the 1980s, which has produced both the sharp and vocal critiques of spoken word poetry and the refined academic poetry that garners so much critical attention from the literary establishment.
The application deadline for the summer institute July 14 – August 3, 2013 at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS is March 4, 2013.
The winner of the Black Lawrence Press 2012 St. Lawrence Book Award is Craig Bernier for winning the competition with his short story collection Your Life Idyllic.
Craig Bernier is a graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit and was the Jacob K. Javits Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh from 2002 to 2005. His stories have been published in The Roanoke Review, Western Humanities Review, Dogwood, Gigantic Sequins, and in a story anthology from Akashic Books titled Detroit Noir. His nonfiction has appeared in the journal Creative Nonfiction. Originally from southeastern Michigan, home is currently a stone’s throw from Pittsburgh, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. He is at work on a novel and a collection of motorcycling essays.
Complete lists of the 2012 St. Lawrence Book Award finalists and semi-finalists can be found on the Black Lawrence Press blog.
Been keeping up with Screen Reading? If not, stop by and read reviews of online literary magazines by Editor Kirsten McIlvenna. Recent reviews include Cleaver Magazine, Lingerpost, Terrain.org, ARDOR Literary Magazine, Imitation Fruit, Literary Juice, Miracle Monocle, Ontologica, Redheaded Stepchild, Rufous City Review, Scapegoat Review, The Sim Review, storySouth, Thrush, Valparaiso Fiction Review and more!
Thanks to those of you who have dropped us a line letting us know how much you appreciate this weekly column. Readers find it helpful for locating good reading and writers like getting a professional opinion of the publication for submission consideration.
NewPages continues to provide thoughtful reviews on these online publications as well as our regular monthly feature of literary magazine reviews and book reviews.
Good reading starts here!
On Sampsonia Way: The Staging of Poetry’s Voice: An interview with Poet Luis Bravo
SW: What’s the difference between staging of the voice and mise en scène?
LB: The staging of poetry’s voice has an infinite number of possibilities that are distinct from theatrical techniques, because theatrical techniques usually end up turning the staging of poetry’s voice into something predictable. The poet’s voicing has a stamp of personal composition that might be for live reading, or recording, or to be spoken in a passageway, or on a neighborhood street. It doesn’t have to use the technology of the mise en scène. In other words, the poet elaborates the text in such a way as to make the way it’s delivered vocally into an art form too. I’ll say this clearly: poetry should sound, if the poem doesn’t sound and the poet doesn’t elaborate this in its poem, then the poem is incomplete or the poetry does not come up.
Iron Horse Literary Review‘s newest issue is a special issue in honor of Nathaniel Hawthorne. “‘Why Nathaniel Hawthorne?’ you will ask,” writes Editor Leslie Jill Patterson. “For starters, he’s been good to me. My first college composition was a character analysis of Robin in Hawthorne’s story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’ and the paper earned me the only A in the class… And getting intimate with Hawthorne’s stories, spending hours and hours with them, taught me something about language. Like all my faovrite classic writers, Hawthorne is an artist who manipulates the mechanical—dense language; winding sentences; dependent clauses; the letters themselves, with hooked tails and antennae—until his paragraphs transform into something surprising: a story that takes flight and fills us with wonder. And because he can do this…I ask, ‘Why, not Hawthorne?'”
In this issue, Gina Ochsner, Toni Jensen, and Edith Pearlman take Hawthorne’s tales and put on their own spin. “I was pleased and surprised to see these writers: a) manipulate geography, moving ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ to the harsh High North; b) tease out racial as well as gender issues in ‘The Gentle Boy’; and c) even deal with environmental issues in ‘Young Goodman Brown,'” writes Patterson.
Alongside these pieces are the three regular columns: “In the Saddle” (this time featuring the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts where Hawthorne lived with his new bride), “Bits & Pieces” (facts about Hawthorne), and “From the Horse’s Mouth” (“an interview with Nate Hawthorne”).
Fred Hobson is retiring after 23 years from co-editor of Southern Literary Journal. Co-editor Minrose Gwin writes, “In those years, he has shaped the course of southern literary criticism. Consistently open to new approaches and directions and graciously ushering in new scholars and their work in southern studies year after year, he has made the journal what it is today by always insisting on high standards and responsible, meaningful scholarship.” She writes that he will be missed and that this issue is dedicated to him.
Florence Dore will be stepping up to fill the position, starting with the current issue, available now. Gwin writes, “Florence’s interests in post-1945 American literature and southern studies, especially her interest in globalized approaches to southern literature and southern modernism, as well as her editorial experience as co-editor of Stanford University Press’s Post 45 Series will be of great value as we move forward.”
Harriet Pollack is taking over as book review editor (also taking over for Hobson). And finally Patrick Horn is stepping down from the Managing Editor position. “Unflappable and diligent, careful and innovative, Patrick has expanded the function of the Managing Editor in a number of important ways.” Jameela F. Dallis, who served before as his assistant editor, will be filling the position.
The Main Street Rag magazine explains in their current issue that Richard Allen Taylor will be taking over as the magazine’s review editor. “Richard will be retiring from his day job March 31 and going back to school to earn his MFA,” writes Editor M. Scott Douglass. “So, while other students may be working a day job to complete their Masters, he hopes to be a full time student with projects like this on the side.”
In the issue itself, featured is an interview with MSR Poetry Book Award Winner Colin D. Halloran; fiction by Mackenzie Evan Smith, Terresa Haskew, John Christopher Lloyd, and Eric V. Neagu; and poetry by Steve Abbott, Phillip Barron, Llyn Clague, Joan Colby, Lyle Daggett, Davis Enloe, Robert Gamble, Logan C. Jones, Mike Jurkovic, Dan Memmolo, Leland March, Brady Rhoades, Maria Rouphail, Scott Vanya, Travis Venters, and more.
According to David Wagner of the Atlantic: “…filmmaker Shane Salerno has completed Salinger, a documentary eight years in the making that’s being touted as ‘an unprecedented look into the mysterious life of the author of The Catcher In the Rye.'” Wagner questions this in consideration of previous promises to give insight into the recluse author’s life – with no return on those promises. Wagner explores several questions on his own: “Here’s what we still don’t know about Salinger, along with some educated guesses about how these new projects might address the gray areas.”
“…equines carry great material, functional, and symbolic value for humans, making them prime subjects for artistic representation; and equines convey extraordinary visual beauty, physical stature, and dynamic movement, making them ideal objects for aesthetic treatment. The status of the equine in literature differs.”
The Horse in Poetry and Prose by Charles Caramello is the fourth in a series of articles that look at horses in paintings, memorial statues, and theatre and film, published online in Horsetalk.
Redivider starts off volume 10 with a cover designed from previous covers. Inside, the 2012 Beacon Street Prize winner is featured. The winning piece, “Mathematics for Nymphomaniacs” by Tasha Matsumoto, was selected by Michael Kimball.
Here are his comments on the piece: “‘Mathematics for Nymphomaniacs’ shows a wide-ranging imagination and an original sensibility that is so rare. I’ve never before read anything like this audacious story created out of absurd versions of those standardized tests that we all hated to take. I love that Tasha Matsumoto makes choices that I don’t expect and didn’t imagine until I read [the story]. That this story is also so full of a strange and beautiful and sad kind of implication makes it all the more amazing. I’m excited to find out what she does next.”
Also featured in this issue is writing from Kim Addonizio, Jeff Allessandrelli, Nan Becker, Rob MacDonald, Jen Hirt, Emily Kiernan, Ben McClendon, Nicole O’Connor, M. Owens, Jennifer Perrine, Anne Valente, Christopher Watkins, Wendy Xu, and Monika Zobel.
Alimentum – The Literature of Food is now officially an online monthly magazine. They were close to this ever since they became online, but they have now announced that during the first week of each month, a new issue will be published: “a new roster of food works. Tasty fiction. Juicy poetry. Tantalizing essays. Mouth-watering mutlimedia. Cozy-smart book reviews.” February’s issue should be out shortly.
The Furthermore Program is concerned with nonfiction book publishing about the city; natural and historic resources; art, architecture, and design; cultural history; and civil liberties and other public issues of the day. Their grants apply to writing, research, editing, design, indexing, photography, illustration, and printing and binding. Furthermore applicants must be 501(c)3 organizations. They have included civic and academic institutions, museums, independent and university presses, and professional societies. Trade publishers and public agencies may apply for Furthermore grants in partnership with an eligible nonprofit project sponsor. Applications from individuals cannot be accepted. Grants from $500 to roughly $15,000 are awarded in spring and fall with March 1 and September 1 deadlines.
I came across works by Dan-ah Kim while doing some googling and was swept up by her images. Born in Seoul and residing in Brooklyn, NY, Kim is a graduate of Pratt Institute, and currently “makes art” and works in film and television. Her works are prints of original, multi-media composition. She has very reasonably priced prints for sale on Etsy, including these two here that I thought writers and readers might appreciate. Her works have appeared on and in the Washington Post Fiction Issue (how appropriate!) as well as on the cover of How to Paint a Dead Man by Man Booker Finalist Sarah Hall.
The New Quarterly‘s newest issue features the runners up of the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, which is sponsored by the St. Jerome’s University English Department:
Andrew Forbes: “The Rate at Which He Fell”
Kari Lund-Teigen: “Down to Here”
Susan Yong: “When Genghis Khan Was My Lover”
The rest of the issue features short fiction by Leesa Dean, H.W. Browne, Joe Davies, Amy Jones, Russell Smith, and Betsy Struthers. New Poetry is by Rafi Aaron, Katherine Edwards, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Tanis MacDonald, Symon Jory Stevens-Guille, Susan Telfer, and Patricia Young. There are also featured essays by Jeffery Donaldson, Warren Heiti, Zachariah Wells, and D.W. Wilson.
Bateau magazine, with volume 5, now offers color not just on the cover but also inside on the pages. This allows for some creative color art to pop out. The editors say, “Volume 5 is a kind of breath. A pining and permitting. A thing that gives you patience when you can’t come up with it. A gift that eases a gift.”
Featured writers include Maria Adelmann, Benny Anderson, Glen Armstrong, Julie Babcock, Caitlin Bailey, Josh Bettinger, Caroline Cabrera, Megan Garr, James Heflin, RIch Ives, Timothy Kercher, Sara Lefsyk, George Looney, Lisa Allen Ortiz, Eliza Rotterman, Leona Sevick, D.E. Steward, Chelsa Whitton, and many more.
The Baltimore Review has announced the winners of their winter issue contest:
Le Hinton, 1st place, for “Epidemic”
Shenan Prestwich, 2nd place, for “Settling”
D.M. Armstrong, 3rd place, for “Take Care”
The final judge for the contest was Bruce A. Jacobs.
The winning poems and story are included in the online issue launched February 1. The issue also features work by Linda Pastan, Reginald Harris, Gregory Wolos, Sally Rosen Kindred, Jen Hirt, Kristin Camitta Zimet, Brad Rose, Priyatam Mudivarti, Grace Curtis, Noreen McAuliffe, Angie Macri, Helen Degen Cohen, Brandel France de Bravo, Joanna Pearson, Megan Grumbling, Patrick Milian, Amanda Leigh Rogers, Michael Ugulini, Jon Udelson, and Elizabeth Wetmore, as well as responses to two visual prompts.
February 1 also marks the beginning of the current submission period for The Baltimore Review.
The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), announced its 2013 list of Best Fiction for Young Adults (BFYA). This year’s list of 102 books was drawn from 200 official nominations.
The books, recommended for ages 12-18, meet the criteria of both good quality literature and appealing reading for teens. The list comprises a wide range of genres and styles, including contemporary realistic fiction, fantasy, horror, science fiction and novels in verse. The full list can be found here.
The Best Fiction for Young Adults committee also created a Top Ten list of titles from the final list, all published in 2012:
Andrews, Jesse. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Abrams/Amulet Books.
Bray, Libba. The Diviners. Little. Brown Books for Young Readers.
Hartman, Rachel. Seraphina. Random House/Random House Books for Young Readers.
Kontis, Alethea. Enchanted. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Harcourt Children’s Books.
Levithan, David. Every Day. Random House/Knopf Books for Young Readers.
McCormick, Patricia. Never Fall Down. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray.
Quick, Matthew. Boy 21. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Saenz, Benjamin. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Simon & Schuster/Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
Stiefvater, Maggie. The Raven Boys. Scholastic.
Wein, Elizabeth. Code Name Verity. Disney/Hyperion.
In 1994, Vermont College of Fine Arts hired Mary Ruefle to teach poetry to graduate students in their low-residency writing program. A reluctant public speaker, she was terrified to learn that the job would require her to give biannual standing lectures, and she responded by writing out her lectures, which she then read aloud to students. It turns out that Ruefle’s discomfort with public speaking is a gift to readers, for this book is the collection of those written lectures. However, to relegate the book to that narrow definition would be a mistake. Ruefle’s lectures are thoughtful, thought-provoking essays about art, literature, the moon, life, love, language, and philosophy viewed from the perspective of a wise poet who prefers asking questions to making proclamations. Continue reading “Madness, Rack, and Honey”
Kevin Goodan’s new collection of poetry, Upper Level Disturbances, takes us deep into the forests and fields of an unpopulated landscape. The solitary wanderer who narrates this collection depicts an outdoor world of animals and weather, rivers and fires, ghosts and slaughter. Rarely are we sheltered from the elements or in the presence of other humans, which creates a lonely shadow of observation. Throughout, the ghost of the speaker’s father haunts the perceptions of his weather-ruled world. Continue reading “Upper Level Disturbances”
Ali Hosseini’s The Lemon Grove, the author’s first novel written in English, is a moving story set in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. The characters are well-defined, the landscape vivid and the culture personal—we care about what happens to the characters, and we learn more than most Americans know about the country. Continue reading “The Lemon Grove”
In Steve Stern’s story collection The Book of Mischief, rabbis and lonely adolescents will themselves into flight. From such heights the stories track the Jewish trajectory from nineteenth century shtetl to post-assimilation present; from Galicia, the Lower East Side, the North Memphis Pinch to the Borscht Belt. We might expect to find familiar characters out of Singer, Shalom Aleichem, Woody Allen, and Phillip Roth. But Stern’s perspective is wholly his own. Taking off into surrealism and fairy tale, he observes the mortals below in the places they’ve come to ground and misses not a crumb of realist detail. Continue reading “The Book of Mischief”
The Arcadia Project’s massive size reflects the depth and quality of its content—poems that reexamine the relationship between our perception of the natural world and how natural environments are represented in contemporary poetry. Using the term “postmodern pastoral” to define the works included in the anthology, Editors Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep have carefully arranged a wide array of poems from both established and emerging North American poets in order to try and define a different facet of this term. In the anthology’s introduction, Corey explains how the “postmodern pastoral retains certain allegiances to the lyric and individual subjectivity while insisting on the reality of a world whose objects are all equally natural and therefore equally unnatural.” The poems in The Arcadia Project, then, remain inclusive rather than exclusive in subject matter, incorporating and adding, not subtracting. Continue reading “The Arcadia Project”
In “the stigma(ta) of autopsy. [an introduction]” Trisha Low writes: “[Kim] Rosenfield’s book is a bricolage of dense and tenuous single-line poems, swelling at mid-section, only to bleed away.” She goes on to refer to this text as “a dynamic dream-state of everyday language, grammatical imperatives and overheard clausal-tidbits” and rather conclusively states: “our only readerly option is to follow these poems.” I would beg to differ. Considering two successive lines on just as many pages which read “How long did you wait? / I waited for you for nearly an hour” as “single-line poems” is a bit of a stretch. We may choose to follow the stilted and fragmentary conversation(s) scattered throughout the book or we might just as well choose not to. Continue reading “Lividity”
Bernardo Atxaga has written the perfect book for deep winter reading. His latest novel, Seven Houses in France, takes you to the steamy Congo in the year 1903. Here you will join a cast of characters belonging to the Force Publique (a sort of military gendarmes) and ruled by King Leopold II of Belgium. The King apparently thought this spot in the Congo was his for the taking and dispatched his men to develop the area as well as take advantage of its rubber, mahogany, and ivory. Atxaga’s novel chronicles a collection of 17 white officers, 20 black non-commissioned, and a crew of 150 “askaris” (volunteer black soldiers). This conglomeration of characters is as diverse and as exotic as in any Shakespeare play. Their interactions are the meat of this novel. Continue reading “Seven Houses in France”
Future Hall of Fame pitchers Tom Glavine and Greg Maddox once lamented in a classic Nike TV spot that “chicks dig the long ball.” According to Mark Spencer, the charms of an overweight, balding pro wrestler with “big bags under his eyes . . . like miniature pot bellies” are considerable—not to mention complicated. The Masked Demon chronicles in entertaining mock-epic fashion the tribulations of Daryl Lee, aka Samson, Bible Bob, and Masked Demon. He is literally at the crossroads of his career and triple-secret life. Continue reading “The Masked Demon”
Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever are Not Afraid is different from anything I’ve read and informative about a way of life that people outside of Israel are probably unfamiliar with. It is a story of three female friends—Yael, Avishag and Lea—during and after their obligatory military service, and the effects that service has on their lives. It is unlike the usual coming-of-age story, though the girls are young, in their twenties at their oldest. They come from a nondescript town, consisting of nothing but buildings, near the Lebanese border. Not only is the scenery bleak, but the service at remote checkpoints is full of boredom and brutality as well. Consequently, they come out of service brutalized and almost devoid of feelings. This is the effect of nonstop war becoming normal. Continue reading “The People of Forever are Not Afraid”
This is both an interesting and useful book, particularly as a text of poetic collaboration that is at once an investigation and interrogation of, as well as elaboration on, ecological poetics. Forrest Gander and John Kinsella have gathered together poems along with various bits of investigative prose which they’ve been trading back and forth in personal correspondence to produce a hybrid text with simple intentions addressing a global issue of escalating crisis. Continue reading “Redstart”
Rahimeh Andalibian calls The Rose Hotel a “true-life novel,” and aside from made-up scenes where she was not present, the book is a factual account of her family’s tragedies and secrets that reads like a novel. In spite of the chapters’ brevity and the book’s fast pace, the fully depicted scenes put us in the story while also proving informative regarding various cultural details. Continue reading “The Rose Hotel”
Science fiction is nothing if not an enigmatic and eclectic genre. It’s a category of literature that would seem to take a number of subgenres—from imagined alternate histories, fantasy, magical realism, cyber punk, and everything in between—and deliver it as a multiplicity of reading experiences for its fans. As Ray Bradbury argued, “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. . . . Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done.” Continue reading “Walking the Clouds”
Amber Sparks has sloughed off all constraints on imagination to blend story with science, fabulism with deep truths, narrative prose with language play—lists, boxing-match transcripts, poetics—but who can think about form when reading these shorts? Instead, think: Andrea Barrett meets Karen Russell meets Kurt Vonnegut to sustain bullying in the chemistry lab, preach scantily-dressed on the streets, trip up to heaven, or sink inside the rotting tissue of a body. In Sparks’s fictional world, Death is just a regular guy who “looked kind of like a J. Crew model,” a disenchanted dictator longs for the life of an American cowboy and practices on his people, a bathtub splurges up a new configuration of family, and wives turn into animals leaving “the husbands to worry, most of all, that their wives will finally fly or crawl or swim away, untethered from the promises that only humans make or keep.” This is the kind of thing you’re in for with Sparks in charge of the page. Continue reading “May We Shed These Human Bodies”
Carolyn Kellogg of the LA Times will be streaming a live video chat with Dave Barry on Monday, February 4 at 10am PST. Viewers can RSVP using Facebook, Twitter, or an e-mail account.
At the stop sign at the end of her subdivision, I noticed her candy bar wrapper on the floor. I leaned over, picked it up, and saw a smear of chocolate on the shiny surface. I lifted it to my nose and took a deep breath. My head popped from the smell, and I felt intoxicated. Before I knew it, my tongue licked the chocolate clean from the wrapper, but I couldn’t stop. I kept licking the way a dog licks a plate long after it’s been clean of leftovers. A horn honked behind me, and I threw the wrapper down and floored it through the intersection, not looking to see if there were any cars coming.
My first magic number was 122 pounds. That’s when I could do yoga and Creative Movement and volleyball. My second magic number was 130 pounds. That’s when I could go off the unit but stay in the hospital. My big granddaddy get-me-discharged magic number was 145 pounds. When I first got here, I weighed 112 pounds, so those numbers seemed pretty big to me at first. It may as well have been 200 pounds to gain. From where I sat, there wasn’t much difference. But as I got to 120 and 121 pounds, believe me, I noticed the difference. Freedom, or something sort of like it, was within reach now.
What I saw made me think of the cop shows and the chalk outlines of dead bodies. There I was, down on that paper, drawn out in black marker, like a dead person. I didn’t take up much space at all. The outline looked so thin. I felt huge though! There I was, on the floor, not huge at all. It was like Steve had taken someone from a concentration camp and drawn his body. That couldn’t be me; it couldn’t I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing . . . Who was this skinny boy on the paper? And what happened to him? Where were his parents? Why did they let this happen to him?
Does Starved have a happy ending? It’s hard to say. Nathan lives, that much I think I can safely give away. But, as is the course with such mental and emotional disorders in our society, eating disorders are for life. Nathan’s gaining enough weight to earn a day pass is only the beginning of what he will need to continue achieving on his road to recovery if he hopes to truly live again. I think Somers would like to have us believe that Nathan has been helped and that there is hope, but the reality this young adult novel delivers is that happily ever afters are for fairy tales. Nathan, just like the rest of us, has a long road ahead of him, but at least he has a road, and that’s way better than not having one at all.
In the online lit mag, Sweet, William Bradley’s review of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction takes a unique approach. Since the book is a guide to practicing the craft, after assessing it’s editorial content (contributed by Dinty Moore), Bradley offers three rough drafts of writings he completed based on the exercises in the book. Bradley’s writing is inspired by three writers of the form who contributed their insight/instruction, sample essays, and exercise prompts: Carol Guess, Bret Lott, and Patrick Madden. Read the full review with rough drafts: Briefly: Three Short, Rough Drafts and a Review of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction.
Editor-in-Chief James B. M. Schick announces in the new issue of The Midwest Quarterly that it is last issue in that position. Having served as editor since the autumn issue of 1981, he has been with the magazine for 31 years. “Over that span the journal has changed in many ways,” he writes. “What has not changed is the inspiration countless academics have displayed in their submissions, not all of which have been accepted, and their dedication , as revealed in their willingness to undertake revisions, often of a substantial nature, that I have asked of them.”
He ends his note with a thank you to the readers: “I must express my appreciation for your loyalty. To all of you, thank you for making my task more easily accomplished and profoundly more satisfying. I now being a period of phased retirement after teaching forty-five years at Pittsburg State University, a winding-down that will, if taken full term, finish with a half-century of service to this institution.
