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!
“To the Quick” by Karen McPherson is a brief poem made up of three tercets. It’s a poem of wizened recognitions that can truly only come with age, which the narrator acknowledges in her skin, “Hardening. // Softening. Veined and rugose.” where she wears her weariness for “hoarding my personal past while coveting others’ futures – ” (How does McPherson know my mind so well?) The speaker goes on to forgive and make plans, trim a kitten’s claws and compare those clever little mechanisms to her own nails, exposed and absurd as a result of tearing “away soft crescents with my teeth.” “To the Quick” delivers readers as promised, to that pit inside that yearns for understanding and connection while at the same time being fully grounded in the concrete non-attachment to time, which moves steadily forward. We eventually figure some things out, “forgive the lapses,” and remain mystified all the same. McPherson succinctly finds that sweet spot in “To the Quick.”
Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is the Editor of NewPages.com, which welcomes reviews of books as well as individual poems, stories, and essays. If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
In Tempered by Kate Kort, ten years after losing both his beloved mentor and his abusive father, Murray Henderson is still yearning for direction. He’s treading water in Cleveland, failing in his career and relationships. Anger, guilt, and distrust continually derail his chances at happiness. When an opportunity calls him to New York City, Murray finally sees a path out of his relentless grief. But as he navigates a hopeful new life, he soon falls back into old patterns of self-loathing and violence. A promising relationship starts to show cracks, and the friendships Murray has always counted on begin to fray. With his life shattering around him, Murray realizes he must confront his most devastating secret and the intertwined fear and anger that have haunted him for over a decade. Tempered, the sequel to Glass, explores the deadly pull of anger and how we are shaped by—and shape—the ones we love.
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!
Issue 22 of the print literary magazine Minerva Rising: Then and Now is a celebration of all the writers who have been published by Minerva Rising over the last ten years. The writers and poets published in this issue wrestle with what it means to be women in the world with all the complexity of life – trauma, domestic violence, aging, societal norms, mindfulness, well-being, reconciling with our past, depression, and grief. These beautiful stories, essays, and poems testify to the wisdom and creativity in every woman. They remind us that as women, we are all connected, and at Minerva Rising, our voices are not only heard but amplified. Visit the publication’s website for ordering information.
Issue 14 of Under a Warm Green Linden online poetry magazine is a double issue on Indigenous Ecopoetics, guest-edited by Beatrice Szymkowiak. Readers can explore thirty-eight poets whose new work expands the possibilities of ecopoetics—illustrating and reimagining relationships between culture, land, history, and nature: Kimberly Blaeser, Abigail Chabitnoy, Laura Da’, Diane Glancy, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Chip Livingston, dg nanouk okpik, Elise Paschen, Vivian Faith Prescott, Jake Skeets, James Thomas Stevens, Margo Tamez, among others. Under a Warm Green Linden offers recordings of many contributors reading their works, including featured poet Margaret Noodin, author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and two collections of poetry in Anishinaabemowin and English, Weweni and What the Chickadee Knows; Noodin has also translated over thirty books for children into Ojibwe. Visitors to the publication can enjoy hearing her singing her poem “Binawan / Dew Falls.”
Suzanne Frischkorn’s collection of poems, Fixed Star, braids loss and language. In her prose poem, “Nascent,” Frischkorn writes, “The yoked constellations—Capitalist and Communist—rang bright on her skin. Fidel, is it cold in Cuba?” As both the daughter whose “father’s from Cuba” and as the grandmother who will “twine a history with a silver thread,” the speaker cleaves to poetry. Frischkorn’s use of the sonnet crown throughout the book reminds us of her mastery of the craft. The sonnet becomes the braid, twining throughout the book. In “Letra,” Frischkorn writes,
In Cuba, right now, someone conducts
a symphony of furtive braiding for a tourist.
She’ll leave before the last braid is half-done.
The repetition of the sonnet balances the “dissonance” in the first poem, “Cuban Polymita,” which opens with the haunting statement,
Birth cleaved me in half—
the sea I grew legs in
now a dissonance
a fixed star—
The section closes with the image of cleaving, in “XII,”
but all she said
aloud was, “This is where I’m from.”
Birth cleaved me in half—
In Fixed Star, Suzanne Frischkorn assures us that, despite displacement and despair, it is the language of poetry that will “coax the palomas to follow you home.”
Fixed Star by Suzanne Frischkorn. JackLeg Press, September 2022.
Reviewer bio: Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.
Flesh-plastique, Dennis Hinrichsen’s tenth full-length collection of poetry, explores an array of debris fields, where we experience the repercussions of a life fueled by dirty, secular Eucharists. Moving at hyper speed through worlds—a compromising job in the nuclear industry, the purloined grave of the Apache chief Geronimo (not far from Atomic Annie, a cannon that could shoot a nuclear projectile)—Hinrichsen articulates each scene with a swift directness and capacious emotional range. In collages and atmospheric lyrics with stunning formal collisions, we hear anger and humor directed at the mess we have made of things, from the unsolved problems of nuclear waste and toxic forever-chemicals to the decay of the American family. But we also hear joy for the sheer pleasure of music and old technologies; we hear compassion for friends stricken with dementia; and ultimately, we hear notes of hopefulness for a world which swirls wildly and dangerously around us.
To find 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!
In addition to celebrating their 10th Anniversary, CleaverIssue 40 features selections from the first annual Cleaver Flash Competition. Judge Meg Pokrass comments, “It was only after rereading the stories for a number of weeks that my favorites became clear. Ultimately the winners were the ones that inexplicably moved me emotionally above everything else, and that I kept re-engaging with, trying to figure out how the writer worked their magic. It became a matter of recognizing that certain pieces had chosen me, not the other way around.”
Readers can enjoy works from First Place Winner Sabrina Hicks, Second Place Winner Janet Burroway, and Third Place Winner Dawn Miller, as well as Honorable Mentions by Paul Joseph Enea, Fannie H. Gray, Emily Hoover, Lisa Lanser Rose, James LaRowe, Andrea Marcusa, Christina Simon, Andrew Stancek, Laura Tanenbaum, and Kris Willcox, and Finalists by Joe Alan Artz, Madeleine Barowsky, Lyn Chamberlin, Nicholas Claro, Sarah Freligh, Theo Greenblatt, Amanda Hadlock, Meredith McCarroll, K. T. Moore, and Ron Tobey. Lex Lucius contributed paintings to this issue.
Whitney Collins graduated from Spalding University’s low-residency MFA program in 2018, won her first Pushcart Prize in 2020, and published her first book to universal acclaim the following year. I asked Whitney, author of prize-winning short story collection Big Bad and the forthcoming Ricky & Other Love Stories, how the MFA program at Spalding prepared her for the literary life. According to Whitney, it all came down to volume, community, and craft.
In her own words:
Volume.
“The sheer volume of work we were asked to generate was remarkable, and, yes, a bit intimidating,” Whitney said. “But it’s doable, and you will AMAZE yourself by being able to do it. The Spalding ‘packets’ prove to you that not only can you write, but that you can also write A LOT. I graduated with a newfound confidence surrounding my generative abilities. I also graduated knowing I had no excuses! Priceless.”
Community.
“The community at Spalding is like no other,” she said. “It’s diverse, both culturally and in genre, and delightfully non-competitive. As Sena (Jeter Naslund, Spalding MFA co-founder) always said: ‘Your competition is in the library, not the classroom.’ Your classmates at Spalding will be your cheerleaders not your critics.”
Craft.
“The short craft essays that you write at Spalding will not just teach you how to think critically about how and why a piece of creative work is working, but you will begin to read creative work differently,” she said. “You will start to dissect successful literature and figure out what is contributing to its success. And if you think critically and read critically, you will begin to write with more awareness. You’ll start hiking with a map instead of relying solely on instinct.”
And then there were the memories…
“My favorite Spalding memory? Just one? Probably just hanging in the Brown Hotel’s lobby bar. Eating, drinking, connecting, and laughing with other exhausted and excited writers.”
Whitney graduated from Spalding’s low-residency MFA program in 2018. Her short story collection Big Bad (Sarabande Books, 2021) won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her work has received a 2020 Pushcart Prize, a 2020 Pushcart Special Mention, and a Best American Short Stories 2022 Distinguished listing. Her second collection, Ricky & Other Love Stories, is forthcoming next year.
Spalding’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing is now accepting applications for an early-decision deadline of February 1. Email [email protected] to request an application fee waiver code and save $30 when you apply.
Students can begin their studies with Spring residency (May 27 – June 3 in Louisville) or Summer residency (June 25 – July 3 in Québec City). Or apply by August 1 for the Fall semester (November-April).
BIO: Katy Yocom is a Spalding alum, associate director of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, and author of a prize-winning debut novel, Three Ways to Disappear.
Exquisite by September by Shayla Hawkins EastOver Press, January 2023
In Exquisite by September, Shayla Hawkins chronicles the zeitgeist of the early 21st century United States and her place in it as an American Black woman, navigating and maintaining her sanity in a nation fraught with racism, pestilence, misogyny, and political upheaval. By turns humorous, melancholy, and sensual, this collection is a poetic museum through which Hawkins, as curator and guide, shares glimpses into different facets or “galleries” of her being. A poet from Detroit, Michigan, Hawkins is the author of Carambola. She is a winner of The Caribbean Writer Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for Short Fiction and The John Edgar Wideman Microstory Contest. Her collection of poems Exquisite by September was a 2020 runner up for the Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize.
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!
Appropriately named given their location in Central Kentucky – “horse country” – Yearling also fits because it is (still) new and is published annually by Workhorse. What name could be more appropriate for this print poetry journal now joining the herd?
While Yearling may be new, the publications’ masthead come with a great deal of experience. “We are educators, writers, performers, enthusiasts for language, and the voice of every single person.”
Manny Grimaldi (he/him), Managing Editor, began as a regional actor in Shakespeare, with a degree in Dramatic Arts and Anthropology from Centre College. He is cunning with the spoken and written word and has published single pieces of poetry in Club Plum Literary Magazine, Kentucky State Poetry Society’s Pegasus Fall 2022, and the Lexington Poetry Month anthologies for 2020 and 2021.
Christopher McCurry (he/him), Editor, co-founded Workhorse in 2015, a publishing company and community for working writers. He believes “everyone should write poems and that
Celebrating their 15th anniversary with Issue 30 of Superstition Review, readers can enjoy art by Corey S. Pressman, Jenny Wu, RAEchel Running, Shirin Mellat Gohar, and Valyntina Grenier; fiction by Amy Reardon, Gabriel Granillo, Michael Colbert, Mohamed Shalabi, Morris Collins, Patrick Henry Thomas, and JT Townley; nonfiction by Audacia Ray, Brooke White, Carlo Rey Lacsamana, Cassandra Whitaker, and Kaia Preus; poetry by Charlie Peck, Constance Hansen, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Danny Rivera, Joanne Diaz, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer, Natalie Giarratano, Rachel Nelson, Rebecca Griswold, Remi Recchia, Susan L. Leary, and Yong-Yu Huang; interviews with Angie Cruz, Leopoldo Gout, Manuel Muñoz, Raquel Gutierrez, and Rudy Ruiz. Superstition Review is an open access online publication.
Trace: Poems by Brenda Cárdenas Red Hen Press, April 2023
Through image-rich poems regarding migration, transcultural identity, loss, connection, dream, and aging—some translingual, some ekphrastic responses to ephemeral and surreal works of art—Brenda Cárdenas’ Trace explores conditions of displacement, liminality, and mutability. These poems transgress illusory borders between lands, languages, humans and the rest of the natural world, waking and dreaming, and the living and the dead as they unearth traces of experience that shape and haunt us, traces we leave behind for others to encounter. Although elegy resurfaces throughout this collection as does a poetics of social consciousness, Cárdenas also embraces moments of levity, story, and an effervescent internal music that balance her steps through fraught yet bewitching terrain.
To find 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!
South Dakota Review Volume 57, Number 1, kicks off its new volume with poetry by Ana Maria Caballero, Ross White, Dana Salvador, Jennifer Met, James Cihlar, Eloise Klein Healy, Sean Cho A., Claudia Putnam, Pen Pearson, and Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán; fiction by LJ Kessels and Charles Holdefer; and nonfiction by Lane Chasek, Mardith Louisell, Gail Hosking, and Richard Holinger, as well as an experimental collaborative essay by Corinna Cook & Jeremy Pataky.
NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles 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
Apocrifa, Amber Flame, Red Hen Press Becoming Couldn’t Sing for Anyone, Theresa Senato Edwards, Small Harbor Publishing Chaos, Crossing, Olivia Elias, World Poetry The Day Gives Us So Many Ways to Eat, Lindsay Wilson, WordTech Editions Exquisite by September, Shayla Hawkins, EastOver Press A Fire in the Hills, Afaa Weaver, Red Hen Press Her Birth and Later Years, Irene Klepfisz, Wesleyan University Press In the Cosmic Future, Jocelyn Heath, Kelsay Books In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful, Abigail Chabitnoy, Wesleyan University Press Instead, It Is Dark, Cynthia Hogue, Red Hen Press Irena Klepfisz: Her Birth and Early Years, Wesleyan University Press Kisses at the Espresso Bar, Anita Nahal, Kelsay Books Let’s Go For a Ride, William Livezey, Down East Books A Light to Do Shellwork By, Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, Scarlet Tanager Books Missing Addresses, Beth Bentley, Pleasure Boat Studios My Dear Comrades, Sunu P. Chandy, Regal House Publishing Night, Ennio Moltedo, World Poetry
This long-awaited collection is the final manuscript assembled by poet Beth Bentley, who passed away in 2021 after a lifetime devoted to poetry. Her wide-ranging poems reflect on her deep love of art and philosophy, crystalline remembrances of family, and on the lives of cultural figures from history. They explore her Jewish heritage, her fierce feminism, and her perception of herself from an early age as an “outsider.” Missing Addresses evokes our losses, via age and happenstance, lending insight into the touchstones of our existence: our friends and families, our memories, our identities.
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 Autumn 2022 issue of Storm Cellar: A Literary Journal of Safety and Danger, available in print or ebook, is nicknamed “Hobby Horse” and features fiction by David Busboom, Mandy-Suzanne Wong; flash by MAP, Carolyn Oliver, Ali Abid, DM O’Connor, JWGoll; creative nonfiction by Philip James Shaw, Theresa Lin; poetry by Tyra Douyon, Cecilia Díaz Gómez translated by Kiran Bhat, Natalie Louise Tombasco, Martha Zweig, Rigel Portales, Danielle McMahon, Stephen C. Middleton, Leigh Lucas, Ranney Campbell, Naomi Kanakia; images by Lesley Finn, Marija Mičić, Melody Serra, Sijia Ma, Jean Wolff, Mario Loprete, Erick Buendia, Dylan Willoughby, and cover by Maria Svartvadet Jakobsen. “We want everybody to get weird and enlightened and learn and fall in love and have superpowers,” the editors write. “We want to surprise and delight and horrify and provoke. Storm Cellar is not a distraction but a cure for boredom.” Your safety and danger await!
We’re back fresh in 2023 with our Where to Submit Roundup! The first officially week of January is over and we have added several new submission opportunities for you to enjoy.
Want early access to these opportunities, many before they go live on our website? Become a paid subscriber to our weekly newsletter. The cost is just $5 a month or you can subscribe for a year for only $50.
Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement by Wesley G. Phelps University of Texas Press, February 2023
In 2003 the US Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws across the country, ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that the Constitution protects private consensual sex between adults. To some, the decision seemed to come like lightning from above, altering the landscape of America’s sexual politics all at once. In actuality, many years of work and organizing led up to the legal case, and the landmark ruling might never have happened were it not for the passionate struggle of Texans who rejected their state’s discriminatory laws. Before Lawrence v. Texas tells the story of the long, troubled, and ultimately hopeful road to constitutional change. Wesley G. Phelps describes the achievements, setbacks, and unlikely alliances along the way. Over the course of decades, and at great risk to themselves, gay and lesbian Texans and their supporters launched political campaigns and legal challenges, laying the groundwork for Lawrence. Phelps shares the personal experiences of the people and couples who contributed to the legal strategy that ultimately overturned the state’s discriminatory law.
To find 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. Click here to sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Editor Speer Morgan, in the Foreward to The Missouri Review Fall 2022 issue, comments on the “compelling new techniques in the arts” that, while innovative at their onset, “are often picked up and imitated until they seem to have always been used.” This issue’s theme, “Deep Focus,” comes from the technique used in early film, such as the 1922 Weimar production of Nosferatu, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. He goes on to draw parallels with Walt Whitman’s “broad theme: We are large, we contain multitudes. We are partly right, partly wrong, but given the transience of life, we should fully visit this moment and this gathering of people with compassion, cheer, and attentiveness and then move on.” Great advice for the many seasonal family gatherings we encounter as well as other situations which bring us together, including reading the lives of authors and narrators in literary works. Included for readers in this issue is new fiction from Drew Calvert, Jonathan Johnson, Matthew Niell Null, Valerie Sayers, and Rohini Sunderam. New poetry from Andrew Hemmert, Rebecca Lindenberg, and Felicia Zamora. Essays by Robert Cochran, Jim Steck, and Mako Yoshikawa. Features on James Van Der Zee’s Harlem Renaissance photography, Florine Stettheimer and the Art of Modern New York, with an omnibus review from Lisa Katz on books by and about translators.
Editor Carolyn Kuebler opens issue 43.4 of New England Review with a reflection on the shift in submissions to the publication throughout the pandemic, how “Covid-19 is no doubt the best documented pandemic of all time” and how quickly the situation changed around us so that in choosing works to publish, “it was more often the defining factor in pieces we did not publish. We didn’t need anyone to tell us how strange this all ways. Something stranger still was already taking place.” Kuebler writes, “So much of this writing felt a few steps behind, even in just a matter of weeks or months.” Recognizing how it has become woven into contemporary works, and also that pre-pandemic writing or writing that does not acknowledge it at all, reveals how “writers are able to fully inhabit, imaginatively, a world that preceded 2020, as well as they can inhabit this new one.”
This issue offers readers a Covid diary by Zoe Valery, Leath Tonino’s defense of the American Outback, a short play by British author Charlotte Turnbull, multi-page excerpts from poem sequences by Sandra Simonds and Diana Khoi Nguyen, new shorter poems by Kim Addonizio, Aumaine Rose Smith, and Josh Tvrdy, explorations into the archives by Michelle Peñaloza and Nicky Beer, first English translations of poems by Meret Oppenheim and Daniela Catrileo, new short stories by Yume Kitasei, Megan Staffel, and J. E. Suárez, and in “Rediscoveries,” Donald Mackenzie Wallace’s excerpt “Revolutionary Nihilism And Romantic Notions” taken from the 1912 edition of Russia, published in London by Cassell and Company. Some content is available for readers to access for free online.
The Malahat Review Issue 220 features the winner of their Far Horizons Award for Poetry, “Inner Child Work” by Meryem Yildiz, as well as poetry by Chelsea Coupal, Joel Harris, Ana Rodriguez Machado, Richard Sanger, Susan Glickman, Rachel Crummey, Ben Gallagher, Shauna Andrews, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, A. Light Zachary, Manahil Bandukwala, Tasos Leivaditis, N. N. Trakakis, Annick MacAskill, Carl Watts, Camille Lendor, Jérémi Doucet, Erin Conway-Smith, Daniel W. K. Lee; fiction by Rachel Lachmansingh, Susan Sanford Blades, Zilla Jones, Shazia Hafiz Ramji; and creative nonfiction by Gabriel Cholette, Brian O’Neill, and Monica Wang. Readers can find an online interview with Shazia Hafiz Ramji about her story, “Selvon in Calgary.”
Like Keegan’s earlier book, Small Things Like These, Foster is slight in size, but not in emotional heft. This novella tells the story of a nameless girl in the Irish countryside whose parents must send her to stay with neighbors for a summer while her mother is pregnant. The main financial problem seems to be her father who loses cows in card games and has a liquid supper on a regular basis, while her mother has too many children to pay attention to all of them. The Kinsellas, who take the girl for the summer, don’t care much for her father, Dan, and it’s clear he thinks similarly of them. The situation is one of convenience more than care. Or so it seems. The Kinsellas love the girl in a way that neither of her parents do, a care they show in small ways that seem obvious: her new clothes and a bit of spending money for ice cream; a lack of shame when she wets the bed; lessons on how to read and cook. By the end of the novella, the Kinsellas have fostered the girl not only by keeping her for a few months, but by encouraging her, nourishing her, promoting her development, and, most importantly, cherishing her.
Fosterby Claire Keegan. Grove Atlantic, November 2022.
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/.
A Fire in the Hills by Afaa Weaver Red Hen Press, April 2023
In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa Weaver focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to a material focus. The racial references are explicit as are the complexities of life lived as a Black man born in America in the mid-twentieth century. These are poems emanating from an attempt to follow Daoist philosophy for most of his life. Knowledge of other is in relation to knowledge of self, and self is an illusory continuum, a perspective wherein the poet embodies the transcendent arc of Malcolm X’s life as credo.
To find 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 Naked Room by Willa Schneberg Broadstone Books, January 2023
Poetry is a form of writing ideally suited to the expression of emotion and the most profound and subtle workings of the mind. But what if that mind is shattered, and those emotions in disarray? Such is the subject explored in Willa Schneberg’s new poetry collection The Naked Room, which draws on her experiences as a therapist to take readers on a journey through the disturbing history of psychotherapy and the treatment of mental illness, and into the current state of the art and state of the world. What keeps this from being a grim undertaking is the sheer beauty and precision of her language, as in this passage from “Tiny Monuments” describing the urns that hold the cremated remains of patients at the Oregon State Hospital (depicted on the cover of the book in a photograph by the poet): “These tiny monuments to the scorned and unknown, / wear patinas of pink, burnt sienna, ocher, aqua, / and if you look closely you will find / moon craters, archipelagos, frozen waterfalls, / Big Dippers and dunes with lone tracks.” The goal of healing that drives her therapeutic practice informs these poems as well, ending in the necessity of love, her closing image that of a long-time couple spooning in bed, “as if we would always / fit that way.” These poems, too, fit that way, a comforting reassurance.
To find 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!
If you seek “musings, hallucinations, fantasies, determinations and peregrinations that depart formal structures and do not recognize parameters,” then you need look no further than NĪNSHAR Arts, an open access online publication of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, paintings, drawings, etchings, photography, digital art, and sculpture images publishing on a rolling basis.
Reading TimeLock by Howard Berk and Peter Burk is a great way to celebrate National Science Fiction Day (January 2). In the crime-ridden near future where a bold new technology transforms the justice system and challenges America’s moral compass, the President authorizes a hugely controversial program: TimeLock, a cellular acceleration process whereby select prisoners are instantly aged the total number of years of their sentence. In other words – three strikes and you’re old . . . very old. Only one problem—what happens if someone is innocent? When everyman Morgan Eberly is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, he’s subjected to this experimental new technology. Now 43 and on the run, Morgan teams up with Janine Price, the FBI agent who arrested him, as they embark on a dangerous quest to find out the terrifying truth behind the TimeLock program.
Special thanks to Peter Berk for this title which he co-wrote with his late father, Howard. “My dad – Howard Berk – wrote numerous shows, films and novels, with credits including Columbo, The Rockford Files and Mission: Impossible. A few years before his passing, we wrote a screenplay which I later novelized along with several sequels also based on related scripts. TimeLock is the first of five planned novels in the series.”
“Disability Justice” is the newest issue of The Massachusetts Review. Guest edited and introduced by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and Khairani Barokka, the volume presents “writing by disabled authors that pushes back against dominant depictions of disabled people as helpless, minor, or merely as patients and nothing more. . . The work in this issue reclaims the narrative of illness and disability from medical experts and scientists. It centers the wisdom and expertise of those living painful lives, sick lives, disabled lives, neurodivergent lives. It insists that such lives are worth living, are beautiful, are deserving of documentation. It brings our universes into being and our bodies into focus.”
Contributors include Zuo You, Zefyr Lisowski, Claude Olson, Brian Teare, Vivian Li, Lynn Buckle, Djenebou Bathily, Levent Beskardes, Bhavna Mehta, Ally Zlatar, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Saleem Hue Penny, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Michelle Renee Hoppe, Ife Olatona, Panteha Abareshi, Andy Jackson and Gaele Sobott, Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick, Christine Barkley, Abu āl-`Alā´ al-Ma`arrī, Camisha Jones, Jodie Noel Vinson, Maureen Seaton, Ellen Samuels, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Olivia Muenz, Clare Richards, John Newton Webb, , Travis Chi Wing Lau, Daniel Sluman, Pinka PopsicKle, Ekiwah Adler-Belendez, Kieran Mundy, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, Wakaya Wells, Yi Zhe, Stephanie Papa, and Salma Harland. Some content is available to read free online.
Stories No One Hopes Are About Them Short Fiction by A. J. Bermudez University of Iowa Press, November 2022
At once playfully dark and slyly hopeful, Stories No One Hopes Are About Them explores convergences of power, privilege, and place. Characters who are ni de aquí, ni de allá—neither from here nor there—straddle competing worlds, disrupt paradigms, and transition from objects of other people’s stories to active subjects and protagonists of their own. Narratives of humanity and environment entwine with nuanced themes of colonization, queerness, and evolution at the forefront. Big things happen in this collection. But it’s also a collection of small intimacies: misremembered names, chipped teeth, and private rituals; unexpected alliances and barely touched knees beneath uniform skirts; minutiae of the natural world; incidents that quietly, achingly, and delightfully transgress the familiar. Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Julie Otsuka uses shifting points of view to make her books both universal and specific. In her novel, The Swimmers, she begins with the first person plural point of view to give voice to the titular swimmers, exploring the diversity of their reactions when the pool develops a crack, a metaphor for the loss to come in the second half of the novel. Otsuka sets up the idea of memory, collective and individual, she will explore through Alice, one of the swimmers. The reader learns little about Alice in the second half, though Otsuka shifts to the second person point of view to put the reader in the position of Alice’s daughter (who sounds quite similar to Otsuka, from the few hints the reader receives, including her mother’s interment in camps during World War II, one of the memories her mother holds onto throughout much of her deterioration). The reader sees Alice from a distance as one of the swimmers and up close as a mother who is becoming a different person than the daughter remembers. The reader empathizes with the mother and daughter, but knows, as the doctors make clear, there is nothing to do, but to endure the inevitable loss and rebuild a life after that loss.
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka. Knopf, February 2022.
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/.
Semantics of the World: Selected Poems by Rómulo Bustos Aguirre Edited and translated by Nohora Arrieta Fernández and Mark A. Sanders University of New Mexico Press, December 2022
A poet of both the body and spirit, the work of Rómulo Bustos Aguirre often explores the nature of existence at the turn of the twenty-first century–humankind’s relationship to itself and the universe, the meaning or purpose, if any, of human existence, and the daunting task of discerning that meaning. Critics have described his poetry as highly refined lyricism, metaphysical, existential, and at times erotic. Semantics of the World introduces the English-speaking world to the exciting work of Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, one of Colombia’s most celebrated living writers.
To find 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. Click here to sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The Winter 2022 Rain Taxi Review of Books is available at bookstands or by membership subscription and includes interviews with poet Dara Barrois/Dixon and multi-genre writer Carl Watson, features on novelist Pauline Melville and poet Susan Lewis, and reviews that will take readers from the classic literature of Stendhal to the contemporary cartooning of Kate Beaton and cover art by Roger Williamson. Check out the complete table of contents of issue 108 here.
The Portrait of New England Volume 2 is the first issue back from the publication’s hiatus, which NewPages.com covered in this interview with its new editor, Matthew Johnson, and founding editors Brett Murphy Hunt and Jon Bishop. Portrait of New England is a regional-based online literary magazine that published poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction from writers with ties to New England – which can include being a current or former resident or attending schooling in the region. NewPages.com is happy to welcome the publication back with contributions from Andrew Yim, Donna Mitchell, Eric D. Lehman, Emily Fabbricotti, Emily Ehrhart, Benjamin Thomas, Ann Taylor, Alexander B. Joy, Ed Ahern, Charlotte Friedman, Cortney Davis, Kathryn Sadakierski, Joanne Corey, Melissa D. Burrage, John Grey, Patricia Peterson, Katherine Gotthardt, Katherine Gotthardt, Gayle Lauradunn, Frank William Finney, Angela Acosta, and Natalie Schriefer. Submissions for the next issue are open from March 1-May 31, 2023.
In her latest novel, Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver updates Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (thus the name of the titular character), moving the story to turn-of-the-millenium Appalachia. This approach tempts those readers who are familiar with Dickens’s novel to play a matching game with characters and events, but Kingsolver’s novel goes much further than a literary exercise that tests readers’ nineteenth-century novel knowledge. Her interest in updating Dickens’ novel is to explore the poverty rampant in Appalachia (as it was in Dickens’s London), a problem made significantly worse because of the opiod crisis. While Dickens’s David struggles through his own forms of exploitation, Kingsolver’s Demon, his friends, and his family are all victims in various ways to the addiction that pharmaceutical companies created in places and people who lacked the means to fight back. As with cases from real life, Demon comes by his addictions innocently, but then struggles with them for hundreds of pages, despite those around him who are trying to help. While Kingsolver shows a community decimated by drugs, she creates characters—as does Dickens—the reader cares about. She puts a face to the headlines many of us have the luxury of skimming over and reminds readers there are too many people whose lives seem destined for destruction, through no fault of their own.
Demon Copperhead by Barabara Kingsolver. Harper Collins Publishers, October 2022.
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/.
The Shore issue 16 marks the online quarterly publication’s fourth full year of production, and the newest issues keeps to their standard of selecting poems from new and established poets that are “cutting, strange, and daring.” Featured in this issue are works by Ellery Beck, Nasser Alsinan, Ryan Varadi, Michael Goodfellow, John Glowney, Heather Qin, Helen Nancy Meneilly, Mary Simmons, Justin Carter, Michel Agunbiade, Maggie Boyd Hare, Maya C Thompson, Ronda Piszk Broatch, Chris McCann, Margaret M Kelly, Daniel Dias Callahan, Katie Tian, Martha Silano, Marina Brown, Mike WIlson, Anthony Gabriel, Christopher Citro & Dustin Nightingale, Shannon Hardwick, Kevin Roy, Jay Brecker, Lauren Badillo Milici, Grant Schutzman, Monica Cure, Brandon Hansen, Erin Wilson, Lucas Dean Clark, M Cynthia Cheung, Leland Seese, Joey Wańczyk, Kimberly Ann Priest, Joe Dahut, and Vanessa Couto Johnson with haunting art by taylor d waring.
The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin Translated by Mark S. Burrows Green Linden Press, April 2023
Hilde Domin is one of the most highly regarded German poets of the 20th century. A poet of the Jewish faith, she fled political developments in Germany in 1932 and spent more than twenty years in exile, first in Italy then the Dominican Republic, which became her self-chosen namesake. Her work was deeply influenced by her time in exile and the loss of homeland. After returning to Germany, she was known as the “poet of return” and received numerous honors for her literary work, including the Carl Zuckmayer Medal, the Nelly Sachs Prize, and the Grand Federal Cross of Merit. Presented bilingually, many of these poems appear here for the first time in English. Read a sample from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 13.
It’s the final Where to Submit Round-up for December 2022! We’ll see you all in the New Year. How will your submission goals change in 2023?
Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every Monday afternoon instead of waiting for our Friday Where to Submit Round-ups? For just $5 a month, you can get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! Free subscribers get access to the latest submission opportunities on the following Monday.
In What You Wish For, Ruth Bardon uses a feminist lens to take a fresh look at wishes, witches, magic spells, princesses, sleeping beauties, and 21st century queen bees. Her poems are sympathetic both to hopeful, yearning heroines and to equally hopeful, yearning villains and minor characters. At the same time, they are darkly pessimistic about the possibility of happy endings. With subtlety and humor, these quiet poems radically deconstruct familiar stories. Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in journals, and her first chapbook, Demon Barber, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020.
Headlining the Jan/Feb 2023 issue of World Literature Today is Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop, laureate of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Also inside, Emily Doyle interviews R.O. Kwon (“On Sex, Soul Loneliness, and Walking toward Terror”), while Shoshana Bellen, Cleyvis Natera, Ana Ojeda, and Danae Sioziou provide additional conversational exchanges. Further highlights include A.E. Copenhaver’s “Eco-Lit to Read Now” booklist, a new poem by Ted Kooser, and an excerpt i9from Deena Mohamed’s forthcoming graphic novel Shubeik Lubeik (Pantheon, 2023). With more than two dozen book reviews, recommended reading lists, and other great content in the latest issue, be sure to take WLT—your passport to great reading—with you into 2023 and beyond.
In Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Rivka Galchen uses the story of Johannes Kepler’s mother, whom her neighbors accused of being a witch, to explore how easily people will bow to societal pressures. Katharina is a woman like many in the early 1600s: unable to read or write, but knowledgeable of the natural world. She is also a widow in possession of property. That combination makes her an ideal target for her accusers. Galchen also creates a seemingly innocent bystander—Katharina’s neighbor Simon, who serves as her guardian in the absence of her children—to take down her testimony. The reader watches the world through Simon’s eyes, as well as Katharina’s account of her experiences, and the reader also watches Simon react to the pressures the townspeople put on him. Through Simon, Galchen raises the question of who is willing to stand beside the accused even to their own detriment, as well as exploring what it feels like to be the accused. In her recreation of a time that seems so different from our own, Galchen reminds readers we will all have such moments—both of bearing witness and of standing up for ourselves—turning a time-bound tale into one that is terribly relevant.
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/.
Black Fire This Time, Volume 1, edited by Kim McMillon and Kofi Antwi Aquarius Press/Willow Books, September 2022
Black Fire This Time, Volume 1 is an anthology celebrating the roots and legacy of the Black Arts Movement begins with a foreword by Ishmael Reed and introduction by Margot Crawford and features the works of over 100 poets and writers, including (in no particular order) Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Amina Baraka, Eugene B. Redmond, Lucille Clifton, Haki R. Madhubuti, Wanda Coleman, E. Ethelbert Miller, Jerry Ward, Tom Dent, Michael Simanga, Quincy Troupe, Margaret Porter Troupe, Dudley Randall, Askia Toure, QR Hand, Jr., Denise Nicholas, Sonia Sanchez and many more. Michigan writer Denise Nicholas’s chapter is based on her true story as a voting rights volunteer from Michigan in 1964, inspired Michigan’s Office of the Governor to issue a Proclamation for an annual Freedom Summer Remembrance Day. Aquarius Press owner Heather Buchanan is a graduate of Wayne State University and UM-Dearborn, respectively. She was a director of the Idlewild Writers Conference and Midwest Poets & Writers Conference. Her press publishes many of the nation’s top poets and writers of color and national laureates, Including Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy (Louisiana), devorah major and Tongo Eisen-Martin (San Francisco) and Lupe Mendez (Texas). If not for yourself, consider purchasing a copy for your local public or school library.
For Issue 10 of Waxing & Waning, the editors went with their standard call: “We want what’s on the fringe. Whatever is deep and true. The moon represents this idea: what is dark, what is brooding, what is wild, what is crescent and changing. We want to feed the beast in you, the one buried beneath layers of manners and anxiety and internet induced abyss, repetition, and relative sameness. Work submitted to Waxing & Waning should be honest and well-executed. It should scream coherently; it should bring experiences and knowledge out of us that we have not seen before. It should rip out our black hearts and put them in front of our eyes. Bring us the work everyone else is afraid of. Bring us the work you’re afraid of. Bring us the work that gets at the trueness frightening you out of the routine. In a world blanketed in monotony—we seek to search outside of ourselves so we can better love, give love, and sacrifice for whatever art could bring. We hope to wax in truth and wane into poetics—to shelter ourselves from reality. To bathe in the light of the moon.”
Stepping up to meet this call for Issue 10 are contributions of poetry by A.N. DeJesus, Esme DeVault, Benjamin Green, Marian Shapiro, Taunja Thomson, and Andrew Walker; fiction by Robert Cramblitt, Max Firehammer, Joseph Morice, Chris Motto, Elizabeth Quirk, Eugene Radice, Douglas Steward, and Rebecca Wood; creative non-fiction by Mackenzie Broderick, Christie Green, Joan Halperin, Melanie Reitzel, and Anne-Christine Strugnell; art by Katie Allcorn, Karyna Aslanova, Gianna Sozzi, and Alice Teeple; a play by Paul Antokolsky; and Editor’s Note by Lance Ümmenhofer.
Waxing & Waning is published under the April Gloaming Publishing imprint, which includes a special focus on Southern literature as well as novels, memoirs, poetry collections, and anthologies. Print copies of Waxing & Waning and the Waxing & Waning Presents Series can be purchased here: www.aprilgloaming.com/shop
NewPages receives many wonderful literary magazine and alternative magazine titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Mag Issues” under NewPages Blog or Mags. Find out more about many of these titles with our Guide to Literary Magazines and our Big List of Alternative Magazines. If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
About Place, December 2022 Aji Magazine, 17 Atlanta Review, Fall/Winter 2022 The Baltimore Review, Fall 2022 Blink Ink, 50 Bomb, Winter 2023 Boulevard, 110 & 111 Brick, 110 Cave Wall, Number 17 Communities, Winter 2022 Cutleaf, 2.24 december, Fall/Winter 2022
instead, it is dark by Cynthia Hogue Red Hen Press, April 2023
Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.
Jody Keisner’s Under My Bed and Other Essays explores the ritualistic aspect of fear, the summoning of anxiety’s ghosts, and what it means to be a woman living under the promise of male violence. Although Keisner speaks truth to power on what it is like to live with anxiety, it is the exploration of fear and her grandmother that ties the themes of womanhood, illness, and survival. Keisner’s three-section arrangement (Origins, Under the Skin, and Risings) plays an intricate role in how the work is both read and experienced. The reader could interpret the three sections as a balanced academic and creative essay of the Genesis of anxiety, the kinesthetic journey of a disabled body, and the resurrection of Self, which are all ideas Keisner studies deeply about herself.
In “Origins,” the opening essay, Keisner explores her fear as her partner asks, “Why does your mind go down such dark corridors?” This is the premise of the collection of essays in which Keisner, while realizing her own body has an autoimmune disorder, is also realizing that the world is constantly telling women that there is always a threat. Learning how to coexist with this notion, Keisner offers an exploration of female-bodied anxiety through beautifully curated pieces with profound research that both enriches and empowers the reader. Always paying respect to queer and disabled bodies, Keisner unites her voice as part of a symphony of those trying to survive in an increasingly antagonistic world.
To offer a counter point to the deeply embedded fear, Keisner devotes beautiful moments and lyrical prose to speak of her beautifully messy and human grandmother, Grace. Always studying the power behind language, Keisner speaks of her paternal grandmother with admiration and fondness, “My grandmother protected my joy-filled childhood, but to do so, she had to keep a part of herself from me: her pain and suffering.” It is through Grace, ironically, that the readers find a form of respite and the goal that, regardless of how much this world tells us we’re not welcomed, there are ways to not be afraid.
Reviewer bio: Olga Montenegro is a grad student at Bridgewater State University. She splits her time between Mexico City and Massachusetts. You can find her @ActuallyOlga on Twitter.
Chaos, Crossing by Olivia Elias Translated by Kareem-James Abu-Zeid World Poetry Books, November 2022
In her English-language debut, with a foreword by Najwan Darwish, acclaimed French-language poet of the Palestinian diaspora Olivia Elias probes deeply into the upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chaos, Crossing—translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid—is a powerful chronicle of uprootedness, of times marked by inequality, injustice, and disconnection. These poems—presented here in a bilingual edition—seek the calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos. Poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until she was 16 years old in Lebanon where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal-Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse, laconic language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees and human suffering in general. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, has been published in numerous journals and in anthologies.
From the Department of English at Auburn University, this Southern Humanities Review is a double issue and their 2022 Witness Poetry Prize Issue, featuring the winner, “Tulsa Triptych” by Daniel Donaghy as well as poems from finalists as judged by poet Rick Barot. The rest of the issue is filled with nonfiction by Kate Lister Campbell, Gage Saylor, Caroline Sutton, and Justin Jannise; fiction by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Rachael Fowler, Max Hipp, John Kim, Greg Tebbano, Neal Hammons, and Stephanie Macias; poetry by Nicole Stockburger, Ashley Kunsa, Tennessee Hill, Desiree Santana, Jubi Arriola-Headley, M. Cynthia Cheung, Jacob Griffin Hall, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, emet ezell, Marissa Davis, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Jai Hamid Bashir, Benjamin S. Grossberg, Jamie L. Smith, Helena Mesa, Zoë Fay-Stindt, Julia C. Alter, Aneeqa Wattoo, Adam J. Gellings, B. Tyler Lee, Ajay Sawant, Piedad Bonnett, and Karen McPherson; with cover art by Doris Alexander Thompson.
Night by Ennio Moltedo Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz World Poetry Books, November 2022
Written during the Pinochet dictatorship but not published until democracy’s return, Ennio Moltedo’s Night is a masterpiece of controlled rage, mourning, resistance, and astonishing humor, and the first of his books to appear in English translation. Moltedo, whom Raúl Zurita called “one of the finest, greatest, most curious and honorable poets of Chile,” is at once lyrical and political, a dramatist, a historian, and a critic. Ennio Moltedo (1931-2012) spent his life in the small Chilean coastal cities of Valparaíso and Viñ a del Mar. Born to Genoese immigrants, he is a poet of the New World Mediterranean: inspired, chastened, and challenged by the ancients, and in conversation with his contemporaries, including Huidobro, Girondo, Neruda, and de Rokha. A revered “poet’s poet,” he published eight individual collections of poetry, as well as an anthology of Romanian poetry co-translated with Neruda, and a chronicle of Neruda’s life (Neruda: poeta del cerro Florida). Longtime director of the University of Valparaíso Press, Moltedo also wrote criticism, journalism, and text for books of visual art and cartoons.
As fearless as she is creative, Chelsea Stickle reaches deep into her bag of tricks to “wow” her readers with every story in her debut chapbook, Breaking Points. Many of these stories captivate the reader in such a way that it feels criminal that they’re only flash fiction pieces, but it’s beautiful enough to accept them as the art forms they are. The courage to experiment with various styles of writing, including a multiple-choice quiz and a flow chart, reveal Stickle’s hidden genius by telling deep stories in unorthodox ways, one that might even spark the beginning of a writing revolution! A standout piece, “How Mature Are You: A Quiz,” exemplifies the glories of pushing conventional boundaries within flash fiction formatting through its whimsical and ironically hard-nosed approach to storytelling with a choose-your-own-adventure type of beat. These kinds of structures, while puzzling at first glance, expand a reader’s view of how effectively a writer can tell a story without falling into familiar patterns. It would not be surprising to see a wide range of unique, personalized styles born from Stickle’s innovation. Ultimately, this collection is more than just an ensemble of witty tales but a mosaic of brilliant artistry.
Breaking Points by Chelsea Stickle. Black Lawrence Press, April 2021.
Reviewer bio: Matthew Rodriguez is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University pursuing his English MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) and currently works as a freshman English teacher at B.M.C. Durfee High School.
The Lonely Stories: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone is a collection of distinguished and diverse writers gathered in a volume of unifying isolation narratives, a wonderful contradiction illustrating the affliction or privilege of solitude. Editor Natalie Eve Garrett aimed “to summon cathartic personal essays illuminating the experience of being alone” to challenge the shame and the taboo aspect of discussing one’s loneliness. Collected and crafted before and during the worst of pandemic lockdowns, the stories act upon the hard-learned lessons of the times, showing our isolation was not some passing phase.
Writing can be a punishingly lonely craft, so it’s the writers themselves that tie this collection together best. Each entry is a mosaic showing the complex solidarity of feeling alone. It’s in the “utter brownness” of Claire Dederer’s West Texas landscape and in the silenced pain of Yiyun Li, who “disowned [her] native tongue.” We feel the despair of it in Imani Perry’s hospital room, described as “a funhouse of refracted and repeated loneliness,” and the “different texture” of loneliness in the pre-internet era of Lev Grossman’s “Maine Man.”
Each contribution is a flare sent out of the darkness. In their glare, we see the individual reflections of loneliness. In their glow, we bask in the rebuttal.
Reviewer bio: Sam Tarr is a graduate student at Bridgewater State University and writer living in Weymouth, MA. His work has appeared in 86 Logic and The Bridge.
The weather outside is truly frightful across the country as winter storms sweep the nation. We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season. Hopefully you can stay inside safe and sound and work on ending 2022 by hitting the submission goals you set for yourself in January. NewPages is here to help with our Where to Submit Round-up for the week of December 23, 2022.
Want to get alerts for new opportunities sent directly to your inbox every Monday afternoon instead of waiting for our Friday Where to Submit Round-ups? For just $5 a month, you can get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! Free subscribers get access to the latest submission opportunities on the following Monday.
