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 theme of the 2023 spring issue of Valley Voices is “Goodbye,” which may mean departure, detachment, death, divorce, breakup, change for a new life, promising career, or bright future. There are different ways to say goodbye, such as farewell, adieu, bon voyage, or zaijian. Sometimes the word carries nuances of meaning. Pretty much the opposite of the word is badbye or sadbye, so bye can be awful, beautiful, fearful, joyful, mournful, mirthful, painful, peaceful, sorrowful, tearful, or wistful. Goodbye has been a charming theme that attracts writers to explore from different viewpoints. This special issue includes 7 fiction/nonfiction, a photo essay about the South, poetry by 24 poets, 10 book reviews, and a featured interview with DC Berry.
The Wilson College MFA program is designed for working professionals with a low-residency schedule tailored to meet the needs of artists allowing them to reach the next level in their field. Visit website and view flyer to learn more.
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Deadline: May 31, 2023 Apple in the Dark is taking submissions for its inaugural flash fiction contest, judged by Chelsea T. Hicks. Fee: $6. Prize: $150. Deadline: May 31, 2023. Submit here.
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Find community and grow your craft in our online summer workshops taught by leaders in the lit community. Join us for one-day Sunday masterclasses with topics like “Delusions of Grammar” and “Building Your Writing Brand” and multi-week workshops in all genres. Whether you’re a new writer or a well-published pro, you’ll find motivation, structure, constructive criticism, and a dedicated cohort. See our flyer and visit our website for more information.
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Are your characters compelling enough? Welcome to “Write the Next Famous Novel Character,” a comprehensive online workshop that will help you turn your readers into die-hard fans. We believe every writer has a legion of memorable characters inside of them, waiting to be unleashed. Let’s unleash yours. View flyer and visit website to learn more.
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Deadline: Rolling Chatham’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing enables students to improve their writing through one-on-one interaction with mentors and other students at the Summer Community of Writers residency. Complete your MFA at your own pace. Join our vibrant creative writing community today! For more information, view our flyer and visit our website.
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The 10th Annual Chesapeake Writers’ Conference takes place June 18-24, 2023, and our excellent faculty will help you tell your story as only you can. Join us to see what happens when you immerse yourself in the words, water, and woods at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Mention this ad by May 24 for a 10% tuition discount!View flyer.
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Exile Editions is seeking the best short stories by Canadian writers for the inaugural Nona Macdonald Heaslip $15,000 Prize. All genres and styles considered. Stories cannot exceed 6,000 words. Deadline to enter is Friday, June 30. $35 fee. View website and see flyer to learn more.
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From March 1 to May 31 Flying South 2023 will be accepting entries for this year’s contest. There will be three categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. In each of the three categories, the awards will be $400 for First Place, $200 for Second Place, and $100 for Third Place. Finalists will be awarded publication in Flying South. Visit website and view flyer for more information.
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Winning Writers will award a grand prize of $10,000 in its ninth annual North Street competition, and $20,400 in all. The top nine winners will enjoy additional benefits from co-sponsors BookBaby, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, and Book Award Pro. Gifts for everyone who enters. Submit books published in any year and on any self-publishing or hybrid-publishing platform. $75 entry fee. Enter online or by mail by June 30. Learn more at our website and share our flyer.
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Our Lady of the Lake University’s 100% online Master of Arts-Master of Fine Arts (MA-MFA) and Master of Arts (MA) in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice prepare critically engaged and socially aware scholars, writers, educators, and professionals. This nationally unique, virtual program combines creativity with practical skills and critical knowledge, while keeping in mind the pursuit of social justice. View flier or visit website to learn more.
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54 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Mid-month deadlines have passed, and end-of-month deadlines are looming. Plus, don’t forget the beginning of June deadlines coming up! NewPages is here with your weekly reminders in our Where to Submit Roundup series for the third week of May 2023.
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In her latest book, New Life, Lambda Award–winning poet Ana Božičević writes, “For my birthday I want a cake / revealing the color of my soul.” Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all—surprising. New Life is a book that is Dantesque in its ability to commune with the dead without becoming fixed in the past. Instead, the poems here have a distinct sense of nonlinear time, where each line feels like an ancient bone discovered, only to be reassembled into a chimera of another self. In this way, Božičević continually greets herself as a stranger, reminding us that in some respects every poem is a love poem.
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!
The May 2023 issue of The Lake online poetry magazine is now live and features work by Kevin Carey, Mike Dillon, Ted Jean, James King, Norman Minnick, A. N. Other, Jane Pearn, Fiona Sinclair, J. R. Solonche as well as reviews of Jo Clement’s Outlandish and Claudia Serea’s In Those Years. “One Poem Reviews,” in which one poem is featured from a poet’s newly published collection, this month spotlights Catherine Esposito Prescott, Etheridge Knight, and Caridad Moro-Gronlier.
Editor-in-Chief Daniel Lawless writes, “Perhaps it’s best, as Plume nears its 12th year, to describe the current issue (#141) with reference to our initial mission statement: [We hope to present] a magazine dedicated to publishing the very best of contemporary poetry. To that end, we will be highly selective, offering twelve poems per monthly issue. A provisional indication of our tastes might include a sense of the uncanny, and of the fineness of language, the huge absences to which it points and partakes of, and the urgency and permanence of its state of departure — the coattails forever –just now—disappearing around the corner. But also a certain reserve, or humility, even when addressing the most humorous or trying circumstances.”
Only, now, those twelve poems are accompanied by essays, reviews, and longer featured selections. In the May issue, Plume includes, for example, a portfolio of poems from Mariella Nigro’s Memory Rewritten and an interview by Mihaela Moscaliuc with translators Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas; and Chard DeNiord’s essay “The Poetic “Engine” in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction.” These, together with new work by Julie Bruck, Nicole Cooley, Volodymyr Tymchuk Denise Duhamel, Angela Ball, and Amit Majmudar, among others, make for a typical issue. Plume‘s cover art this month is Jacob Lawrence’s “The Photographer.” Readers are invited to enjoy the full content open-access online.
In a Friday Night Comics session for Sequential Artists Workshop, Will Betke-Brunswick explains that using birds as characters allows an “access point into emotional-heavy material,” and even though advised by a mentor “not to do birds,” Will says, “I feel connected to birds.” There is no doubt readers will also develop a connection, if not immediately, then over the course of topics covered in the graphic memoir A Pros and Cons List For Strong Feelings. These topics include Will’s mother being diagnosed with terminal cancer during Will’s sophomore year of college and going through treatments as well as Will’s coming out as genderqueer. There are flashbacks to Will’s youth, sharing thoughtfully tender and supportive moments, like when Will’s mother creates math problems for them to solve on the school bus to alleviate anxiety and when she writes a note for Will’s school when picture day rolls around to say it’s okay for them to wear a hat. It’s easy to sort Will’s family of characters, all represented as penguins, from other characters: buzzards, quails, parrots, toucans, and more. Betke-Brunswick uses line drawings with some fill, minimalist backgrounds, just two colors throughout, and varying framed and frameless compositions to express events, which include observational humor and situational poignancy. This is the kind of memoir that offers brief but deeply intimate and sometimes discomfortingly honest glimpses into someone’s life. In the same way Betke-Brunswick expresses feeling connected to birds, readers will develop their own connection to humanity through these feathered depictions.
Opening at the culmination of a disastrous trip to Puerto Rico, the first page of the graphic memoir Impossible People finds Julia standing stupefied in the middle of the jungle beside a rental Jeep she’s just crashed. From this moment, the story flashes back to the beginning of her five-year journey towards sobriety that includes group therapy sessions, relapses, an ill-fated relationship, terrible dates, and an unceremonious eviction from her New York City apartment. Far from the typical addiction narrative that follows an upward trajectory from rock bottom to rehab to recovery, Impossible People portrays the lesser-told but more common story: That the road to recovery is not always linear. With unflinching honesty, Wertz details the arduous, frustrating, and hilarious story of trying and failing and trying again.
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!
The Iowa Review’s new double issue, 52.2/52.3, includes poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and translations by emerging and established writers such as Mark Chiusano, Kwame Dawes, April Freely, Annelyse Gelman, Kimiko Hahn, David Hernandez, Tom Lutz, Leslie Pietrzyk, Craig Thomas, Teresa Veiga (translated by Jeremy Klemin), and more, including the winners of the 2022 Iowa Review Awards: Amanda Barrett, Ruby Hansen Murray, Stephanie Ramlogan, Avia Tadmor, Bret Yamanaka, and Melissa Yancy. In this issue, readers will find pieces that feature a home for girls, the bardo, weddings, a mountain lion, pending Amazon orders, zero, hurricanes, Ree Drummond, and Juan Felipe Herrera.
Seeing the There There: Visual Poems by David Alpaugh Word Galaxy Press, September 2023
In Seeing the There There, David Alpaugh intermixes his poetry with his visual artwork, realized in collaboration with artists and photographers worldwide. The result immerses the reader in surprises of sense and meaning. Alpaugh’s poetic musings and preoccupations range from the irreverent to the meditative and include people, society, culture, nature, and the universe—visible, theoretical, imagined. This is a unique book that engages the reader with written and visual treats at each turn of the page.
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!
The Louisville Review Editor Sena Jeter Naslund says of issue 92: “I don’t think TLR has ever received more compliments on our front-and-back cover image-and-layout (that’s since our #1 issue in 1976).” The issue’s cover design is by Jonathan Weinert and the featured artwork is by Ying Kit Chan. TLR 92 also has a moving tribute to Kentucky Poet Laureate and Bellarmine professor Frederick Smock, who passed away unexpectedly last year, in addition to a wonderful variety of poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and children’s poetry.
Contributions include Cornerstone Poetry (from K-12 contributors) by Kate Rowberry, Faye Zhang, Emma Catherine Hoff, Jiayi Shao, Yunzhong Mao, Helena Wu, Mary Virginia Vietor, Cloris Shi; Nonfiction by Chris Reitz, Dianne Aprile; Fiction by Patricia Foster, Jody Lisberger, Mrinal Rajaram, Lynn Gordon, Elizabeth Schoettle, Catherine Uroff, Sarah Martin, David Wilde, Bob Chikos; and Poetry by Frederick Smock, Tony O’Keeffe, Congxia Ma, Daisy Bassen, Kristin Camitta Zimet, Karen McAferty Morris, Elya Braden, Juan Pablo Mobili, Angie Macri, Joe Schmidt, Josh Mahler, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Michelle Glans, Michelle Bonczek Evory, Michael J. Galko, Mary Buchinger, Rebecca Thrush, Mark Smith-Soto, Ciara Shuttleworth, John Repp, John A. Nieves, Jeff Hardin, Renee Gilmore, Matt Dennison, Lana Spendl, Gaylord Brewer, Diane Scholl, Marianne Kunkel, Melissa Madenski, Jeremy Paden, Rosanne Osborne, Robert Eric Shoemaker, Marcia L. Hurlow, Chelsie Taylor, Joseph Anthony, Luke Wallin, V. Joshua Adams, Denise Duhamel, Pat Owen, Donald Illich, James B. Nicola, Hollie Dugas, and Millard Dunn.
In the Spring 2023 issue of Colorado Review comes this ominous bit of advice, “Whatever plans you think you got, you better get some others.” Given in Brendan McKennedy’s “Deep River” to a young woman struggling to make a meaningful life as a millhand in 1920s North Carolina. In Joanna Pearson’s “The Favor,” a couple become the hosts to an unexpected houseguest at a time when they are questioning the boundaries of what makes a family. The narrator of Deepa Varadarajan’s “How to Give a Best Man Toast” wrestles with the shifting of attachments as his beloved older brother gets married. And in Naihobe Gonzalez’s “Southern Cemetery,” a young woman spontaneously spends an evening with a new friend, exploring the risky space between safety and uncertainty, confronting her relationship to fear. The essays are concerned with the spaces we inhabit—and how they shape us. “First you live in a house, and then it lives in you,” writes Emily Winakur in “Who Lives in That House,” an essay that explores the relationship of place to memory. Jonathan Gleason’s braided essay “Proxemics” is a meditation on architecture, spatial relationships, family, penitence, and forgiveness. In “The Other Erica,” Erica Goss contemplates the multigenerational impact of her grandmother’s death, leading her to search for the house in Germany where her mother and grandmother endured WWII, seeking clues about her mother’s, grandmother’s, and her own identity.
New to the scene, RockPaperPoem publishes three times a year online (April, August, December) in an open-access format. The editors seek “today’s finest poetry from established, emerging, and new poets residing anywhere in the world.” Their mission is to include a diversity of voices while highlighting work “that expands the boundaries of contemporary poetry, without sacrificing accessibility for experimentation.”
NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry 1/6 Volume 1: Remember This Day Forever, OneSixComics Abyss and Song, George Sarantaris, World Poetry Books Awaiting, Charisse Pearlinna Weston, Ugly Duckling Presse Bar of Rest, Sara Epstein, Kelsay Books Before Wisdom, Paul Verlaine, World Poetry Books Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems, ed. Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins, Orison Books Bone Wishing, Tara Flint Taylor, Slapering Hol Press The Book of Noah, Yoni Hammer-Kossoy, Grayson Books Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham, CavanKerry Press Don’t Leave Me This Way, Eric Sneathen, Nightboat Books Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Orison Books Embarrassed of the (W)hole, Ugly Duckling Presse Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., University Press of Kentucky How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) In a Hot-Air Balloon, Joseph D. Reich, Sagging Meniscus Press
perennial fashion presence falling by Fred Moten Wave Books, May 2023
Much like the poems found in The Feel Trio (Letter Machine 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist, and All That Beauty (Letter Machine, 2019), the poems here present Moten’s “shaped prose” on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia. Within this collection, the poems hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future. Poems beget poems, overflowing and flowering, urging deeper etymological investigations. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten approaches the sublime, relishing that intermediary space of microtonal thought.
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!
The Society of Classical Poets Journal publishes a print annual of poetry, translations, and essays selected from those published on the SCP website between February and January as well as artwork for inclusion in the print copy. Throughout the year, readers can find these works on a rolling basis, making each visit to the website a new reading discovery. Recent contributors include Paul A. Freeman, Leland James, Cheryl Corey, C.B. Anderson, Susan Jarvis Bryant, Andrew Benson Brown, James Sales, Paul Martin Freeman, Isabella Bethe, Russel Winick, Mark Stellinga, Brian Yapko, Jeffrey Essmann, Mary Gardner, Roy E. Peterson, James A. Tweedie, Tod Benjamin, Janice Canerdy, Margaret Coats, Joshua C. Frank, Monika Cooper, Evan Mantyk, D.T. Holt, Damian Robin, Stephen Binns, and Warren Bonham,
NewPages maintains two guides where young readers and writers can find print and online literary magazines to read, places to publish their own works, and legitimate contests: Publications for Young Writers and Writing Contests for Young Writers. Both of these are ad-free resources regularly updated with carefully vetted content, and “young” can be from K to college undergraduate. As long as there is clearly “dedicated” space to a young age group, we will consider listing it here.
Please share these with any young creatives in your lives and with adults who want to encourage youth in the creative arts – parents, teachers, community organization leaders, librarians, etc.
If you know of any great resources for youth that we do not have listed, please contact us. We love to keep these resources alive and growing!
In the Editor’s Note introducing the May 2023 issue of Poetry, Guest Editor Charif Shanahan writes, “In this issue, I have endeavored to include a range of voices, aesthetics, geographies, languages, identities, and subjects. We have poems from first-time contributors and long-time ones; folks with one book and folks with a dozen; and poems from six different countries, in as many languages. The unifying thread—at times subtle, at times demonstrative—is how we shape one another, for better or for worse; how we induce change and growth in those around us, intergenerationally or laterally; and how this influence shapes, or even dictates, the ways in which we live our lives.”
Contributors to this issue include Marie Howe, Robert Wood Lynn, Brian Tierney, Danusha Laméris, Álvaro De Campos, Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari, Mona Kareem, Sara Elkamel, Cynthia Cruz, Kathryn Nuernberger, Lucia Cherciu, Rodney Gómez, Kim Hyesoon, Rachel Linn, Diana Marie Delgado, D. Nurkse, Randall Mann, Toi Derricotte, Rodrigo Toscano, Tomaž Šalamun, Brian Henry, and J. Mae Barizo. There is also a folio of work by Assotto Saint introduced by Pamela Sneed.
In Daniel Galef’s Imaginary Sonnets, a cast of people and objects from mythology, history, the news, and the quotidian parades through a variety of imaginative scenarios. In dialogues, dramatic monologues, satires, lamentations, eulogies, and execrations, the sonnets adopt perspectives ranging from the familiar to the novel to the twisty and surprising. Characters include not only widely known figures such as Cassandra, Pandora, St. Augustine, Byron, and Doris Day, but also obscure ones such as Henrique of Melacca, Emmett Till’s father, John Taurek, and—more startling—a salmon, a snowflake, and a pair of parallel lines. Imaginary Sonnets entertains and entrances with every turn of the page.
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!
Fictive Dream is an online magazine for short stories (500-2500 words) that give an insight into the human condition. The publication features stories “with a distinctive voice, clarity of thought, and precision of language. They may be on any subject. They may be challenging, unsettling, uplifting, cryptic but, above all, they must be well-crafted and compelling.” The publication accepts submissions on a rolling basis and publishes one story every Friday and Sunday. Recent contributors include Claudia Monpere, Brian Sutton, Heather Haigh, Catherine McNamara, Gay Degani, Robert Sachs, Robert Pope, Sandra Arnold, Louis Gallo, Chrissie Gittins, Jennifer Fliss, Jo0Anne Cappeluti, Gary Finke, Susan Elsley, Joan Leotta, Sarah Turner, Linda Briskin, Shelley Trower, Lisa Johnson, Mitchell, and Mike Fox.
Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions: Stories by Mariana Rubin Crowsnest Books, January 2023
Insightful, and often wickedly funny, Marina Rubin’s Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions is a collection of stories of desire, damage, and human meandering. The profound, “Man in a Fedora,” examines the depths and reality of friendship; In “Smorgas,” a woman’s relentless quest to have it all hurls her into a passionate and intricate relationship with two men who happen to be best friends; “Who to Call in Case of Emergency” is a unique take on the #MeToo movement, and “You Can Live with This Nose” is a conversation about plastic surgery overheard at an LGBTQ synagogue. Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions is filled with drama, irony, humor, and unforgettable characters.
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!
Topical Poetry contributors share poems based on a recent public news/event, preferably from the previous or current week. Editors select the best ones and publish them on the website twice a month, on every other Sunday. “Poetry on current events can be transformational, thought-provoking, and everlasting.” Recent works include “DEMAND DEMAND DEMAND” by Veronica Caporuscio, “Quantum Physics Proves There is No Such Thing as Nothing” by Gabby Gilliam, “Baker’s Farm” by Dale Hensarling, “10,000%” by William Aarnes, “Wokeness” by Garry Unmey, “Another End of the World Type Scenario” by Chris Bullard, “Full Circle” by Rick Blum, “Marjorie Taylor Greene” by David Blumenfeld, “It’s My Birthday!” by Meghan Martin, “A Week Of Shootings” by Jefferey L. Taylor, “On Lies Many Shapes” by Jen Schneider, “R.U.D” by J.B. Hogan, and “Careless Consequences” by Keziah Simms.
Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, Old God’s Time, explores the ripple effects of trauma that stems from the violence and abuse Irish priests inflicted on children. Barry doesn’t portray the traumatic events directly, but readers should know there are a number of references to such events, as well as others related to harm to children. The person suffering the most—or at least the one who has endured through the suffering—is Tom Kettle, a retired police officer. He is enjoying his retirement until his former supervisor sends two officers to talk to him about a case related to a priest whom Kettle knows has abused many children, a case Kettle worked on earlier in his career, only to see it covered up by church and police authorities. Barry uses a third-person close narration, as much of the novel takes place in Kettle’s thoughts, which are more important than his and other characters’ actions. Kettle has to relive his past to come to grips with who he is now and what he and others have done. Though the book is dark and heavy, the language is lovely, filled with music and imagery that helps carry the reader through the awful realities Barry portrays, almost—but only almost—letting the reader forget about the suffering Kettle and so many others have endured.
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/.
When Did We Stop Being Cute?: Poems by Martin Wiley CavanKerry Press, April 2023
Martin Wiley grew up confronting and embracing a world as mixed and confused as he was, surrounded by beautiful words one minute and screamed at with hate the next. Set to a soundtrack of ’80s hits, When Did I Stop Being Cute?, a novel in poetic form, tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of being mixed-race, growing up, facing the police, and confronting himself. It is a time of change, for himself and the world around him, as he seeks to “remember / just when I stopped / being cute.” A longtime activist, spoken-word artist, and slam poet, Wiley earned his MFA from Rutgers University-Camden, where he was a Rutgers University Fellow. He is now the Adult Learning Lead Instructor for Project HOME, a nonprofit focused on ending homelessness and poverty within Philadelphia, and an adjunct professor at Rosemont College.
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!
ANMLY #36 is loaded with poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, comics, translations, and two feature folios — it’s a good day to be trans!, on trans joy, edited by SG Huerta and Queering the Nigerian Divine, edited by Logan February. Readers can access the publication for free online.
53 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
May is half over with on Monday. Don’t forget to check out the mid-month and end-of-month deadlines below so you don’t miss out on these submission opportunities.
Don’t forget that NewPages Newsletter subscribers with a paid subscription get early and first access to our submission opportunities and events, the majority before they go live on our site. Consider subscribing today.
Wolf Trees: Poems by Katie Hartsock Able Muse Press, September 2023
The forestry term wolf tree for a large specimen with spreading branches—“prominent and self-isolating,” just as “[b]eing a good diabetic is lonely work”—is a central conceit in Katie Hartsock’s second full-length collection, Wolf Trees. Hartsock muses on classical and modern figures (such as Hermes, Thetis, John the Baptist, Wyatt Earp, Dervla Murphy, Jane Jacobs), family, motherhood, the wolf and coywolf, glucose tablets, and the lot of the diabetic “in a body that would have perished years / ago” if not for medical advances. Through loss and hope, trials and triumphs, and the challenges and blessings of life and living, Katie Hartsock’s Wolf Trees uplifts the spirit.
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!
Salvaged is the Spring 2023 Wordrunner eChapbook anthology exploring what can be salvaged from lost or damaged relationships, troubled times, or long lives well lived. Twelve authors write about retrieved memories, industrial waste, car wrecks, lives rescued from despair or death, and what the dying leave behind that may or may not be salvaged. This 48th issue explores emotional residue ranging over time and space from pre-industrial Europe to 1930s Taiwan to an Afghani war zone. New to this issue is Prose Editors’ Choice: “Imperfect Machines” by Joyce Hinnefeld, a meditation on her mother’s life (and the history of the sewing machine). This issue can be read online or downloaded as a pdf along with all the previous Wordrunner eChapbook publications: 26 fiction, 5 memoir, and 5 poetry collections, each featuring one author — and 13 anthologies by multiple authors.
Have you ever tried to talk to anyone about the Holocaust? Have you ever had someone try to talk to you about the Holocaust? It’s harder than you think. Most people start with comments like, “How could anyone let that happen?” Or “Why didn’t anyone know about it at the time?” Or, more simply, “I don’t understand it.”
New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, edited by Howard Debs and Matthew Silverman, is a good place to start that conversation. The volume is a compilation of poetry, fiction, and essays by contemporary writers who are confronting that horrific past by responding to photographs which are unfamiliar to most of us: A photo from the 1930s of a small Jewish boy with his teddy bear; a photo of Karel Ancerl, conductor of the Prague Radio Symphony in 1944; and others. And readers can take these modern responses in small doses, one poem at a time, one piece of flash fiction at a time. Probably a necessary approach for this kind of topic. Literature, history, and the depths of the human soul come together here — a must-read for anyone who clings to hopes that we can avoid atrocities like The Holocaust in the future.
Reviewer bio: Kate Flannery is an Editor-at-Large for The Journal of Radical Wonder. She lives in a small college town where she also practices law. Her essays, poetry, and fiction have been published in Pure Slush, Chiron Review, Shark Reef, and Ekphrastic Review as well as other literary journals.
Part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem, Awaiting begins by detaching phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and entangling them into centos or poetic remixes. Through the incorporation of these entanglements, original poetry, and a surreal landscape, what develops is a new work blurring the sightlines of narrative space by way of the spiral, by way of the fragment and the self-reflective slip of the fold into and out of itself.
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The most recent quarterly issue of Brilliant Flash Fiction (March 2023) is an eclectic mix of stories. In “A Bottle Cap” by Sean Burke, a dysfunctional family party illustrates how badly we can hurt the ones we love. “Yasmin” by Lucy Hooft hauntingly describes a Damascus emigrant’s yearning for her native land. “Across the Bay” by Bayveen O’Connell is the story of a daughter‘s struggle for independence. “Where the Light Killed the Stars” by Aston Lester is the depiction of a boy’s love/hate relationship; “the writer’s voice is phenomenal,” remark the editors. “On Hold” by Jennifer Lai is a witty and melancholy snapshot of life as a single divorced mother. “They Will Feel Lucky” by Slawka G. Scarso is a tale with a twist, clever and moving. Leah Mueller’s “To the Sword-Swallowing Woman in Uranus, Missouri,” is a great fun piece of flash, well-summarized in the last line: “… I never cared much for normal folks.” “Constant Vigilance” by Matt Goldberg is a tongue-in-cheek look at violence in America and our tragic lack of viable solutions. “Four Square and Ray-Ban” by Rashmi Agrawal is a first-person account of a ‘have and have-not’ friendship. Brilliant Flash Fiction is a nonprofit organization celebrating minimalism at its finest.
NImrod International Journal‘s Spring/Summer 2023 issue, Body Language, explores any and all ideas about the body. Indeed, this issue’s title may say “the body,” but the editors especially wished to acknowledge and embrace that there is no one body, that our bodies, the way we use them, and the way they feel, span an astonishing range of experience. Each of us lives in and as a particular body, and each of our bodies has its own stories to tell, and the stories told in these pages, whether as poems, creative nonfiction, or short fiction, demonstrate this idea with grace, wit, insight, honesty, and tenderness. Also in this issue, readers will find the winners and honorable mentions of the sixth Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, which honor the work of talented emerging writers.
Written in short vignettes of narrative that make it difficult to put down, John West’s Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery is a thoughtful and poetic memoir, beautifully written and rife with striking imagery. West vulnerably and honestly engages with his own life story. As he does, he explores the joys and pains of new parenthood, the agony of addiction, the contradictions of faith and atheism, and so much more, all in the form of a traditional Anglican Christmas service. Devastating emotion is packed into vignettes making up a single page or even just a few sentences. It’s not all dour rumination, though—West’s narrative voice includes sly and sometimes self-deprecating bits of humor.
The cast of characters rises to unwieldy numbers by the end; it grows difficult to keep track of who everyone is, especially people in addiction recovery with West, all christened with just a single letter (N, for instance). But this does not detract from the beauty of West’s writing, messaging, and storytelling. Anyone interested in narratives about faith, atheism, queerness, mental illness, and profound questions will find more than one thing to treasure in these pages.
Reviewer bio: Jack Bylund teaches and studies English literature and fiction at Utah State University. He loves contemporary lit, Panda Express, and books about the end of the world.
At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others.
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Dream of Xibalba: A Poem by Stephanie Adams-Santos Orison Books, May 2023
Dream of Xibalba, Stephanie Adams-Santos’s incantatory long poem, draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits. The influence of such poets as Cecilia Vicuña, Federico García Lorca, and Yvan Goll is evident here, yet Adams-Santos’s voice and vision are entirely her own. Dream of Xibalba is a unique, epic work of cultural and spiritual significance.
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Readers can now enjoy the Spring 2023 issue of Months to Years, a beautifully curated online space to share compelling and original works that explore mortality and terminal illness. The newest issue includes work by twenty-two creators, including ten pieces of nonfiction, nine poems, and three visual works. Blair Hurley’s piece, “When Is a Pair of Shoes More Than a Pair of Shoes?” explores the conflicting emotions objects can sometimes trigger when we are in grief. In “Midnight Cowboy,” Erica Driggers delves into the recklessness to which grief drove her. Craig Jackson Schuler’s “Leiomyosarcoma Haiku Sequence” juxtaposes existential horror with the quotidian in reflections on life as a terminal cancer patient.
Readers can access Months To Years in multiple formats. Digital versions—which include an online flip book, a downloadable PDF, and a web-based experience of each creative work—are all available for free. Glossy magazine hard copies can be purchased via third-party vendor Blurb. A small portion of each hard copy sale helps support the publication’s work as a nonprofit.
Preacher is not a preacher, though death’s vicissitudes clamor around him in a disturbingly ecclesiastic manner. When he finds a pit bull puppy by the side of the road and gets a job at a boxing manufacturer, he declares his luck changed. One small-town cop has doubts: “It ain’t your luck needs changing, but the folks you meet.” And so it stands, as the sun and moon revolve in their tango—or is it a waltz?—and whisper to one another. Forever Director of Livingston Press, Joe Taylor’s seventh novel, with previous works revealing his mastery in a variety of forms, from comic novels-in-verse to a multiple view-point murder mystery/love story and more. Readers are always in for something new and different when reading Taylor’s work.
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The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis Dzanc Books, June 2023
The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis, Winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, explores the deaths of four family members across three generations: an inexplicable double murder, a fatal car accident, a long illness, and a conscripted solider killed in action. Piece by piece, each essay explores the death a loved one in a collage of vignettes: the loss, the aftermath, the funerals, and the rituals used to say goodbye to the body. As the investigation deepens, Davis lines up other forms of death—capital punishment and murder; medically-assisted suicide and “natural” death from disease; military conscription and “freak accident”—to see what comes to the surface.
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Containing History: How Cold War History Explains US-Russia Relations by Stephen P. Friot The University of Oklahoma Press, June 2023
Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural in its scope, Containing History employs the tools and insights of history, political science, and international relations to explain how twenty-first-century public attitudes in Russia are the product of a thousand years of history, including searing experiences in the twentieth century that have no counterparts in U.S. history. At the same time, Friot explores how—in ways incomprehensible to Russians—U.S. politics are driven by American society’s ethnic and religious diversity and by the robust political competition that often, for better or worse, puts international issues to work in the service of domestic political gain. Looking at history, culture, and politics in both the United States and Russia, Friot shows how the forty-five years of the Cold War and the seventy years of the Soviet era have shaped both the Russia we know in the twenty-first century and American attitudes toward Russia—in ways that drive social and political behavior, with profound consequences for the post–Cold War world.
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Rise above the River: Poems by Kelly Rowe Able Muse Press, May 2023
In Kelly Rowe’s Rise above the River, we find a sister powerless to redress her brother’s fall from grace after the trauma of his childhood sexual abuse by a female authority figure. Rise above the River interrogates in a quest for answer, meaning, reason, justice, and mercy—along the way, exploring the conceit of the fallen angel with ekphrases on artwork such as Alexandre Cabanel’s L’ange déchu and Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel. This powerful and emotionally charged collection is the winner of the 2021 Able Muse Book Award.
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The Boxer of Quirnial: Poems by John Barr Red Hen Press, June 2023
All animals struggle to survive. In John Barr’s The Boxer of Quirinal poems, the success of the heron hunting, the albatross breeding, and the inchworm spinning give proof of life. But for us, that struggle includes the eternal presence of war. Does the fall of Rome, the Battle of Shiloh, the Normandy Landings – and today’s wars – give proof of life or only of the struggle? Poet John Barr grew up in a rural township outside Chicago. An honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he served on Navy destroyers for five years, including three tours to Vietnam. His poems have appeared in the New York Times,Poetry, and Flaunt Magazine among many periodicals and anthologies. He was president of the Poetry Foundation and publisher of Poetry magazine for its first decade. The Boxer of Quirinal is his tenth to be published over the past thirty years.
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