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!
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Recently I found a poem that gave me rare permission to admit how much love I feel, even in the face of cynical, worldly evidence I should just close up my heart until I die. Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Love”, first published in The American Poetry Review and then reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2021 guest edited by Tracy K. Smith, spills and sprawls with nine double-spaced pages of sentences, each one beginning with “I love.” It’s a list poem, predictable in structure—“I love looking at someone without need or panic.”—yet sensual: “I love statues in a downpour.” With these declaratives, I adored how I entered effortlessly into the rhythms and curvatures of the poem.
But more than the syntactical ease, it required no intellectual or political bracing. How often do we encounter text that cools, that refreshes? Dimitrov skips comfortably through the narrator’s life, covering various topics—literature, relationship, time: “I love that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year.” and “I love the blue hours between three and five when Plath wrote Ariel.” This poem possesses a wide lens trained on the interior of the heart, the exterior. With a clear emotional bravery, “Love” unabashedly just admits, through a repeated subject and verb, the truth.
“LOVE” by Alex Dimitrov. Love and Other Poems, Copper Canyon Press, February 2021.
Reviewer bio: Maureen O’Brien is the author of the spiritual memoir What Was Lost: Seeking Refuge in the Psalms (Franciscan Media, 2021). Her next book, Gather the Fragments: Finding Everyday Miracles and Abundance is forthcoming from Franciscan Media (January 2023). She is a contributor to St. Anthony Messenger and the online site Pause+Pray. She has also published a novel, B-mother (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and The Other Cradling, a chapbook of poems (Finishing Line Press). Find her on Instagram: maureen_obrien_writer
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Midstream Fiction by Lynn Sloan Fomite Press, August 2022
In Midstream, Lynn Sloan’s second novel, it’s 1974, and America is restless, with the Vietnam War winding to a close, and feminists marching in the streets. Polly Wainwright respects the protesters’ demands for equal pay, but now nearing middle age, won’t risk her security. Her job, being a picture editor at a prestigious publisher, is enviable and too good to lose. Polly is comfortable with her life—her homey Chicago apartment, her war-correspondent boyfriend with the dangerous job that everyone admires, the steady paycheck. Still, she’d once dreamed of making documentary films. When suddenly her life is thrown off-course, Polly slowly begins to view things differently and with growing dissatisfaction. But she can’t shift gears to imagine a different future—until a mysterious letter arrives, changing how she views the one moment in her past when she might have achieved her dreams.
The Missouri Review Spring 2022 issue (45.1) features the 2021 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Winners: Alix Christie (fiction), Matthew Wamser (essay), Jennifer Perrine (poetry), as well as a special feature with Michale Millner on the Jack Kerouac Archive and a portfolio of artwork by Kristine Somerville in full color, “Boxed In: The Art of Assemblage.” The issue also includes Poetry from Kelli Russell Agodon and David Moolten, Fiction from Joy Baglio, John Fulton, and Peter Mountford, Essays by Susan Neville and William Roebuck, plus: “America’s Left Bank: Jessie Tarbox Beal’s Greenwich Village Photographs.”
“They resemble Eskimo Pies,” says George Bilgere of his air-conditioned neighbors in the title poem of his latest collection, Central Air, “or boxes of frozen peas.” Characteristically, he goes on to concede, “Not a bad life, I guess,” though admitting he’d miss the crickets “simmering / through summer, and the love / song of cicadas, burning / all night for each other, insect / ecstasies beyond our dreams.” This even-handedness typifies Bilgere’s approach, the poet awed by his good fortune on a pleasant summer evening (“Ripeness”) but also acknowledging the countless daily injustices suffered by others (“Summer Pass,” “For the Slip ‘N Slide”) as well as horrors on a global scale (“Chernobyl,” “Reichstag”). Bilgere delights in detail (“the stalled machinery” of a dead bee) as much as in the acoustics of language and the subtleties of line. Note the fatigue conveyed by the d’s in his description of a waitress’s voice (“tired, / frayed around the edges”) and the sudden, brightening weightlessness of the two-line stanza that follows:
But what she said hung sparkling in the air, so masterful…
The collection produces the same heartening effect, Bilgere’s work a balance of light and dark, the amusing and the profound.
Central Air by George Bilgere. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022.
Reviewer bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry as well as dozens of reviews, essays, and articles on poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
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Pacific Light Poetry by David Mason Red Hen Press, August 2022
David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”
The July 2022 issue of The Lake online poetry magazine is now available and features Frank De Canio, Agnieszka Filipek, Jeff Gallagher, Kasha Martin Gauthier, Sarah James, Yvonne Higgins Leach, Beth Mcdonogh, Mark Parsons, Tim Taylor, and Rodney Wood. There are also reviews of George Bilgere’s Central Air and Peter Roberts’ Night Owling, and “One Poem Reviews,” which is one poem from a collection to help writers get the word out about their publications. This month features works by Joanne Durham, Estill Pollock, Susan Taylor, and Melody Wang.
American Narratives Poetry by T.P. Bird Turning Point, November 2021
In this newest collection of poems, American Narratives, T.P. Bird offers the reader narratives of America that portray the grit of the street, the noise of the crowd, and the softness of the heart in a manner as large and capacious as a myth and a country. Bird is a retired industrial drafter/designer and minister now living in Lexington, Kentucky with his spouse. He has published widely in literary journals and is the author of two previous chapbooks, Mystery and Imperfections and Scenes and Speculations. Read sample poems here.
Every month, Ethical ELA hosts a five-day “Open Write” and invites English Language Arts teachers to join in! ELA is broadly defined to include active and retired K-12 and college/university teachers as well as teachers of English and language arts in a variety of settings. The Open Write is five days of poetry writing developed by different educators with 30 to 100 of teachers participating at various times and thousands observing and borrowing resources. Founded by Sarah Donovan in 2005, this remains a free and ad-free event. I personally participate in this event and look forward to it every month! Some months I miss, sometimes I miss a poem or two, and I know some who visit each month for the prompts but never post them to the site, and that’s okay – however you choose to approach it.
Sarah offers these simple guidelines for first-timers:
Not a Soul but Us: A Story in 84 Sonnets Poetry by Richard Smith Bauhan Publishing, April 2022
Not a Soul but Us: A Story in 84 Sonnets by Richard Smith is the winning collection of the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. In it, Smith tells the story of mid-fourteenth century Yorkshire, when the plague pandemic wipes out half the inhabitants of a remote village. Left behind is a twelve-year-old shepherd boy, who, with the help of his dog, survives near-starvation and a brutal winter and keeps his flock alive. In the months and years that follow, he struggles to reconnect with the life around him. Judge Meg Kearney said this of her selection, “A mastery of craft. Music. An undulating urgency of tone that leaves no doubt about the emotional impulse that drives the work. A voice that you trust, even when the syntax or the material is difficult. And that material needs to feel relevant, of substance, necessary. Not a Soul But Us is an achievement on every front.”
The July 2022 issue of The Woven Tale Press Literary and Fine Art Magazine promises “haunting portraiture, the surreal, architectural mixed media, poetry, fiction, and more!” The Woven Tale Press “strives to grow the online presence of noteworthy writers and visual artists” and encourages readers to visit contributors’ websites. Featured this month are works by Simon Berson, Ann-Marie Brown, billy cancel, Brut Carniollus, Lawrence F. Farrar, Chuck Fischer, David Mason, Robert Garner McBrearty, David Provan, Carolyn Schlam, and Elizabeth Searle. Readers can subscribe for free email delivery and view the publication online. Cover image by Carolyn Schlam.
This year’s Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop will be taking place October 20 through 22. You get to enjoy celebrated comedians and authors, including “Cathy” cartoonist Cathy Guisewite, SNL legend Laraine Newman, and more. Deadline to register is October 1 or until the event is sold out. Learn more by stopping by the NewPages Classifieds.
The Tiger Moth Review Editor Esther Vincent Xueming’s introduction to Issue 8 begins: “This issue celebrates life. // This issue celebrates love. // This issue celebrates joy. // This issue celebrates and sings of the light that continues to shine on endlessly, even after death. This issue celebrates the infinity of time, of love as bending time. This issue chooses to celebrate death as a transition from the physical into the spiritual, as a carrying on rather than an ending of.” Fully online, The Tiger Moth Review features art and literature “that engages with nature, culture, the environment, and ecology.” To carry out this celebration and engagement are works by a global cast of contributors:
The ranting, mischievous, socially engaged verse of Lucebert, the great Dutch poet, painter, and anti-apartheid activist, dazzles (and dizzies) the reader with surrealistic images, quick tone shifts, puns, and jazzy philosophical musings. Published by Green Integer in a pocket-sized, bilingual edition, Volume 3 shows Lucebert, a well-known affiliate of experimental writing movements De Vijftigers and CoBrA, on top of his game. See this tercet from the brief, wry “communiqué”: “through logic people get ahead / shoot for kicks at rats wolves riffraff / god is a pet[.]” Or consider how “…always music makes music / rocking ejector-seat directed / at perilous fluffy down / sweet skirt that frowns / like an enjoying forehead”; images morph into more images, mimicking the consciousness that commits them to paper. Diane Butterman’s translations from the Dutch into English preserve (and transform) the poems’ spirits. In “…and tomorrow the whole world,” a poem full of sharp adjectives, the poet pokes fun at class privilege: “…from our snooty benefits we will if need be / weave a temporary bandage for the world[.]” Lucebert eschews proper punctuation, creating language-rivers, reminding us to be wary of the “…little butcher [who] planned to slaughter the whole nation.”
Bio: Jason Gordy Walker (he/him/his) has received scholarships for his poetry from The New York State Summer Writers Institute and Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. His book reviews and interviews have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, NewPages, Subtropics, and the Dos Madres Press blog, among others.
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The Girl I Never Knew: Who Killed Melissa Witt? True Crime by LaDonna Humphrey Genius Book Publishing, April 2022
For over two decades, the identity of Melissa Witt’s killer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. Determined to find answers, LaDonna Humphrey has spent the past seven years hunting for Melissa’s killer. Her investigation, both thrilling and unpredictable, has led her on a journey like no other, at times her own safety at risk from those who want this mystery to remain unsolved. LaDonna Humphrey is a writer, documentarian, investigative journalist, private investigator, and advocate for victims of crime. “I’m hopeful that the book will put some pressure on some of those people who know they are being looked at [as suspects] but have not been named publicly.” Visit the publisher’s website for links to radio and news media interviews with the author.
Blood Snow Poetry by dg nanouk okpik Wave Books, October 2022
American Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures. Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
The July/August issue of Poetry Magazine is guest-edited by Esther Belin, a Diné (Navajo) multimedia artist and writer, and is dedicated to the topic of Land Acknowledgments. In the “Dear Reader” introduction, she writes:
“One of the biggest take backs is the re-territorializing of language. In this issue, quite a number of Indigenous writers are expanding poetics, resuscitating tribal languages, refashioning the English language with tribal meter, rhythm, and sound. I hope more than a few readers will understand the significance of this feat. Little more than fifty years ago, many of these writers would have been overlooked, misunderstood, or questioned about the legitimacy of their poetics. This volume acknowledges the history of racism and privilege in how access to publishing has been extended and the selection process of those eventually published. This volume acknowledges that the represented writers merely hint at the momentum of literary sovereignty occurring in Indian country, in addition to Indigenous writers throughout the globe.”
Writers included in this seminal issue are Allison Akootchook Warden, Manny Loley, Beth Piatote, Dean Rader, Abigail Chabitnoy, Valerie Wallace, Elise Paschen, Gabriel Dunsmith, Anthony Cody, Max Early, Franklin K.R. Cline, Michael Thompson, Megha Rao, Jayant Kashyap, Hao Guang Tse, Micaela Merryman, Halee Kirkwood, Ariana Benson, Arthur Sze, Michelle Whitstone, Tina Deschenie, Majda Gama, Ibe Liebenberg, Carol Moldaw, Toni Giselle Stuart, Jake Skeets, Laura Da’, Jay Wieners, Yvonne, Jennifer Militello, Krysten Hill, Jessica Kim, Khải Đơn, Yaccaira Salvatierra, Bai Juyi, Tim Tim Cheng, and Adedayo Agarau. There is also an interview with Arthur Sze. Poetry Magazine and its many wonderful resources are free online.
These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad Essays by Arianne Zwartjes University of Iowa Press, June 2022
In These Dark Skies, Arianne Zwartjes interweaves the experience of living in the southern Netherlands—with her wife, who is Russian—and the unfolding of both the refugee crisis across Europe and the uptick in terrorist acts in France, Greece, Austria, Germany, and the Balkans. She probes her own subjectivity, as a white American, as a queer woman in a transcultural marriage, as a writer, and as a witness. The essays investigate and meditate on a broad array of related topics, including drone strikes, tear gas, and military intervention; the sugar trade, the Dutch blackface celebration of Zwarte Piet, and constructions of whiteness in Europe and the U.S.; and visual arts of Russian avant-garde painters, an Iraqi choreographer living in Belgium, and German choreographer Pina Bausch.
The latest book from Steve Timm, Rule of Composition, more than resembles jazz. Giant-of-the-art Cecil Taylor’s album with the Feel Trio, 2 Ts for a lovely T, forms the basis for Timm’s book’s division into “listens,” when the author wrote as an improvisational accompaniment to the 10-CD set. While Timm is 21st Century Wisconsin’s answer to Russian zaum poetry and Dadaist soundscapes, he also diffuses a hyper-inflationary poetics into the nonce words others might dash throughout lyric pieces or isolate in austere minimal poems, spinning out syntactic, phonetic and morphemic swerves — each of which he entrusts to readers’ decipherment. Lines blatz across pages from “Marry pensile attribles / join the scuchus suqologue” to “that’s myander enjourn?” so that “a lipe shangs in the bilence / zeroes aglitter.” Once clought in Timm’s whipnotic enburgonment, the mive glences bursht ignoblistervly. To call his work word-salad by no means disparages it; rather, it suggests a need to elevate the art of the farrago in the culinary imagination. For anyone tired of literature that tells you what or how to think, the book can be purchased online and in-person through Woodland Pattern Book Center and A Room of One’s Own.
Rule of Composition by Steve Timm. Bananaquit Press, 2022.
Reviewer bio: Nicholas Michael Ravnikar makes understanding look like overthinking. He’s currently disabled with mental illnesses. Married with two kids, he enjoys cooking, exercise and meditation. Stay in touch via social media and download free books at bio.fm/nicholasmichaelravnikar.
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Superpresent magazine of the arts Summer 2022 issue is themed “Signs and Symbols,” and the editors comment that “works selected seem both grounded and abstract. Some of the works are mysterious and some surprisingly direct.” Most assuredly, there is a lot to choose from to enjoy, with works from over fifty contributors – prose, poetry, art – and the ever-cool film section with links/QR codes to a unique selection of short art films. Superpresent is available to download as a PDF or by subscription, mailed four times per year.
The June 2022 issue of Brilliant Flash Fiction online literary magazine offers readers a variety of subjects to choose from. Just check out this lineup of stories that adhere to the ‘not more than 1000-word” limit: “Gorilla vs Dogs” by David M. Rubin; “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” by Lauren Voeltz; “Good Neighbors” by Tim Frank; “Far Enough” by Sai Shriram; “Act One, Scene Five” by Rajiv Moté; “My Whole Life” by Elizabeth Kerlikowske; “Love” by Ernesto B. Reyes; “Whiskey” by Sam Selvaggio; “Hockey Night, 1963” by Debra Bennett; and “Wherein the Labyrinth the Fridge Lie” by Nic Arico. It just seems there has to be a story in here for every reader. Check it out today, and if you’ve got your own story to share, BFF is open year-round and is a paying market.
Editor-in-Chief of Bellingham Review since 2015, Susanne Paola Antonetta has announced she will be stepping down from her role to focus more on her own writing and perhaps even start her own small press. She writes, “I’m thrilled to be passing along the editorship to Jane Wong,” poet and nonfiction writer whose most recent book is How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Press, 2021). Closing out her final issue, Susanne writes, “Literature may not fix our problems, but it fixes us to one another. It allows us to see that the view from another’s space in this world is both akin to ours and radically different [. . . ] each word is an invitation to a longed-for dialogue, on both ends.”
Offering ways to connect in this newest issue of Bellingham Review are the 2021 Contest Winners: Keya Mitra for fiction, Lisa Nikolidakis for nonfiction, and Andrea Hollander for poetry. Also featured is Fiction by Farha Mukri and Marc Vincenz, Nonfiction by Gordon W. Mennenga, L.I. Henley, and “Critical Conversation” by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade, Poetry by Darius Atefat-Peckham, G.C. Waldrep, Robert Cording, Stacy Boe Miller, Mira Rosenthal, and Martha Silano, Hybrid works by Lissa Batista and Suzanne Manizza Roszak. Cover photo by Susan Bennerstrom.
Chronicles of a Luchador YA Fiction by Ray Villareal Arte Público Press, June 2022
Jesse Baron, the son of the American Championship Wrestling star known as the Angel of Death, is about to graduate from high school. His parents expect him to attend the University of Texas and study mechanical engineering, something he’s not interested in. The young man knows he would be a natural at professional wrestling, and with his father’s help, he might even reach the same level of fame and success. But the Angel of Death, retired from the ACW and running a wrestling promotion and school, refuses to train his son for fear he will choose sports entertainment over a college degree. Jesse decides that once he gets settled at UT, he’s going to look for another place to wrestle. To keep his father from finding out, he’ll promote himself as a masked luchador from Oaxaca, Mexico, named Máscara de la Muerte. When no one will hire him, Jesse reluctantly considers joining a lucha libre organization, even though he doesn’t speak Spanish. Will the fans and his fellow wrestlers see him as a luchador—or just a gringo with a mask?
The Silk the Moths Ignore, Bronwen Tate’s debut and winner of Inlandia Institute’s 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, is to be “read as choreography,” marking “what led to this.” In her poems, Tate makes legible what is illegible about rejection as it concerns motherhood and miscarriage—rejection by a newborn of a mother’s breast and by a woman’s body of a fetus. What are the roles of nature and will? These poems “rage at who names a body,” acknowledge that a man and a woman “carry risk unevenly,” and ultimately recognize “the present carries multiples.” Memory and recovery, balance and counterbalance are important to these poems whose forms toggle between lullaby-like short lyrics and Proustian prose poems. Brevity and extension, lines and sentences, meditative and narrative counterbalancing elements “speak a language no known mother tongued.” Tate is a poet willing to sit with the complexity of human connection: “we seek comfort and reject it.” Her poems “swim against / the waves, held by / what resists,” and, it seems in so doing the grief-currents they swim transform into a “less insistent presence.” Isn’t that what loss eventually becomes? The Silk the Moths Ignore is a collection of lyric ache that brims with “artifacts of hope.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.
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Ready to get back into the submission game now that the holiday is over? NewPages has you covered with our Where to Submit Round-up. Take your time and peruse the submission opportunities below to find a home for your work.
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Published initially in Argentina in 2013, The Murders of Moisés Ville has only now been made available in English with a wonderful translation by Robert Croll.
In 2009, Javier Sinay, an Argentinian author and journalist, received an interesting email from his father. It referred him to an article published in the late 1940s by his great grandfather, Mijl Hacohen Sinay, detailing the murders of Jews committed in one of the first Jewish colonies in Argentina, Moisés Ville. The history of this colony, long forgotten not just by Sinay’s immediate family but by the Jewish community as a whole, prompts him to investigate the crimes that occurred over a century ago, against the backdrop of hardship and violence that afflicted the settlers.
The Ultimate Havana: A Willie Cuesta Mystery Fiction by John Lantigua Arte Público Press, March 2022
Willie Cuesta, former Miami Police detective turned private investigator, is struggling to pay the bills when he receives a call from an old family friend. Cesar Mendoza is the blind, elderly owner of Tabacos El Ciego, a cigar store in Little Havana. Cesar is worried about Victoria Espada, a friend from the old days in Cuba. As a young woman, she was so beautiful that cigar makers competed to put her image on their boxes. She came from a long line of tobacco growers and married a man from an old, respected clan of cigar makers. The couple, who represented one of the great cigar dynasties of all time, fled the island after the revolution, but things didn’t go well. Ernesto Espada ultimately committed suicide, leaving his widow with two young children to raise. Now, her son, a less-than-successful cigar salesman, has gone missing, and the detective is tasked with finding him.
Every year literary magazine The Daphne Review hosts an online mentorship program for rising seniors. This year they will be hosting three sessions. The first session will take place from July 25 – August 15. In these sessions 5-7 students work with professional writers on a one-on-one basis. See their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more. Mentors and students need to apply for Session I by July 11.
The 2022 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize closes to entries on July 31! This year’s judge is Juan Felipe Herrera. The winner will receive $1,000, their poem printed on a letterpress broadside, and publication in Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine. Learn more about this year’s contest by stopping by their ad in the NewPages Classifieds.
The newest issue of Cleaver, the online “cutting-edge art and literary” journal with work from a mix of established and emerging voices features Short Stories by Rebecca Ackermann, Nathan Willis, Mariana Sabino, Lara Markstein, Maggie Mumford, Gemini Wahhaj; Poetry by Mitchell Untch, Sadie Shorr-Parks, Mateo Perez Lara, Mimi Yang, Alex Wells Shapiro, Matt Thomas; Flash Fiction and Nonfiction by Meg Pokrass, Timothy Boudreau, Rosemary Jones, Tess Kelly, Jamie Nielsen, Will Musgrove, Russell Barajas, Francine Witte, Damian Dressick; Creative Nonfiction by Deb Fenwick, Luisa Luo, Peter DeMarco; and “War and Peace 2.0: A Visual Memoir” by Emily Steinberg, Visual Narrative Editor at Cleaver, and “To What Survived” sculpture portfolio by Mario Loprete. This issue’s cover design is by Karen Rile. Cleaver also has daily features an advice column, essays on craft, interviews, comix, and book reviews. The Cleaver Summer Lightning Flash contest is also still open for submissions until August 1.
Hands of Years poetry collection by Riley Bounds chronicles a journey of faith undertaken with open eyes. While stylistically spare (“tall and slim as votive candles”), these poems reach deep, plumbing the seminal moments in the author’s spiritual life and illuminating the healing power of such moments. Death is described as a space where “life simply leaves, vagabond through zodiacal clouds and dust”; to his father, the poet writes, “Your heart was always a war drum, so stay and tithe your noise”; a child’s prayer is “proffered to Who he doesn’t know from the textless hymnal of his solar plexus, the liturgy of bone and marrow.” In the collection’s final piece, Bounds prays that he might one day “hold the hands of years and become the voice I sing, echoing up the wall of our netted souls, refracting each other’s given light.” The power of these poems lies in their meticulous imagery, their brutal honesty, and their bold confrontation with difficult truths. They alternately rattle and soothe, offering a glimpse of light after each forage into the darkness.
Hands of Years by Riley Bounds. Kelsay Press, October 2021.
Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Genovise is an MFA graduate from McNeese State University and the author of four short story collections, the most recent being Palindrome from the Texas Review Press (forthcoming September 2022). www.elizabethgenovisefiction.org/
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After practicing medicine for more than thirty years in the sweltering suburbs of Phoenix, Dr. Norah Waters is weighing her options, and early retirement is looking better and better. At age fifty-eight, she questions whether she still needs to deal with midnight calls, cranky patients, and the financial headaches that come with running a small clinic. Fighting burnout and workplace melodrama, Norah gives herself one final year to find the fulfillment and satisfaction she remembers from the early years of her once-cherished career. Supported by her steadfast dog, a misfit veterinarian, and a thoughtful radiologist, Norah wrestles through a surprising assortment of obstacles, sometimes amusing and sometimes dreadful, on her way to making a final decision about her future.
NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Books” tag under “Popular Topics.” If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry
American Narratives, T.P. Bird, Turning Point Book of the Cold, Antonio Gamoneda, World Poetry Books Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 Buy a Ticket, Judith R. Robinson, Word Poetry Cold Fire, Veronica Zondek, World Poetry Books Coming To, J.R. Solonche, David Robert Books Flutter Kick, Anna V.Q. Ross, Red Hen Press Gold Hill Family Audio, Corrie Lynn White, Southeast Missouri State University Hechizo, Mark Statman, Lavendar Ink Hers, Maria Laina, World Poetry Books I Dreamed I was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend, Ron Koertge, Red Hen Press Living in a Red State Blues, M. Scott Douglass, Paycock Press The Lowly Negro, James Smith, Revolutionary Books Love Poems in the Apocalypse, Dani Gabriel, Main Street Rag Publishing Love’s Universe, Nin Carey Tassi, Cherry Grove Collections Lynchings: Postcards from America, Lester Graves Lennon, WordTech Editions The Ones with Difficult Names, David Brendan Hopes, Kelsay Books Oxblood, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Able Muse Press Salem Revisited, Charles K. Carter, WordTech Editions Sheltered in Place, CJ Giroux, Finishing Line Press A Woman Somehow Dead, Amy Locklin, David Robert Books
Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life Poetry by Peter Neil Carroll Turning Point, January 2022
In this newest collection, Talking to Strangers: Poetry of Everyday Life, Peter Neil Carroll employs a multiplicity of voices to ensure that no one is, truly, a stranger. Carroll is the author of several previous collections, including Fracking Dakota, Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem and A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places, which won the Prize Americana in 2012. Other books include the memoir Keeping Time. His poems have appeared in many journals. He has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco, taught history and American Studies at Stanford and Berkeley, and hosted “Booktalk” on Pacifica Radio. Read sample poems here.
Having read Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Random House, 2018), I reread Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (Random House, 1970), which I’d devoured after the Kent State shootings sparked riots nationwide. “Events were transpiring too rapidly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche.” Hold on! That’s from the Introduction to the Romantic Period in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962), reflecting the despair felt as England’s agricultural way of life was ripped asunder by the Industrial Revolution. Compare Toffler: “The normal institutions of industrial society can no longer” [endure the] “rising rate of change in the world,” which “disturbs our inner equilibrium, altering the very way in which we experience life.” Toffler quotes Daniel P. Moynihan (1927-2003), then chief White House advisor on urban affairs, who says the United States “exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown.”
Toffler (1928-2016) witnessed the Vietnam War, Watergate, the 14.5 percent inflation of the ’80s, AIDS, the Gulf War, dot.com bubble, 9/11, the internet, Afghan War, social media, etc. In passing, Future Shock mentions “alterations in climate.” But Toffler missed Donald Trump, COVID, and January 6th. Where would he begin, if still alive, to update a new edition of Future Shock?
Reviewer bio: Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, Claude Clayton Smith is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four. For details visit: claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com.
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The Summer 2022 issue of Carve “Honest Fiction” has a lot to offer readers to fill out the lazy days of summer reading: Fiction from Jason Ferris, Seher Fatema Vora, Patrick J. Zhou, and Susannah Rickards.; Poetry from Dan Wiencek, Sarah Dickenson Snyder, Stacey Forbes, and David Greenspan; “Deline/Accept” with Josh Rolnick; “One to Watch” with Matthew Vollmer by Kira Homsher; Interviews by the editors and reading committee; and Illustrations from Carve‘s resident artist, Justin Burks.
THEMA is a theme-related journal with three goals: to provide a stimulating forum for established and emerging literary and visual artists; to serve as source material and inspiration for teachers of creative writing; and to provide readers with a unique and entertaining collection of stories, poems, art and photography. The theme for this newest issue is “Watch the birdie!” and it inspired works from Brenda Robert, Anne Dalziel Patton, Patrick Cabello Hansel, Laine M. Harrington, DS Maolalai, Lynda Fox, Peter Venable, Julieanna Blackwell, Robert Ronnow, Margaret Pearce, Kenneth Chamlee, Martins Deep, R. David Bowlus, Pamela Hobart Carter, HB Salzer, Christine Duncan, Larry Lefkowitz, E. P. Fisher, Michele Ivy Davis, Lynda Fox, William L. Ramsey, Brenda Robert, Jeanie Greensfelder, George Michael Brown, and Juliane McAdam. Forthcoming themes include “So, THAT’S why” (deadline November 1, 2022) and “Help from a stranger” (deadline March 1, 2023).
The just-released summer issue of The Shore online poetry magazine of cutting, strange, and daring work from new and established poets alike is glistening with powerful work! In it is hot new poetry by Flourish Joshua, Aron Wander, James Kelly Quigley, KJ Li, Meghan Sterling, Alyx Chandler, Derek N Otsuji, Robert Fanning, Siobhan Jean-Charles, Ariel Machell, V. Batyko, Marcy Rae Henry, Hannah Riffell, Anne Taylor, Lily Beaumont, Jennifer Martelli, Lisa Trudeau, Kimberly Kralowec, Laura Vitcova, John MacNeill Miller, Aaron Magloire, Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, Molly Tenenbaum, Joseph Housley, Kayla Rutledge, Samuel Burt, Chris Kingsley, James Owens, Alexandre Ferrere, Urvashi Bahuguna, Amanda Roth, Jory Michelson, Miceala Morano, Seth Leeper, Michael Lauchlan, Summer Smith, Mary Lou Buschi, Jack B Bedell, Adam Gianforaco and Robert Beveridge. It also features amazing art by Roger McChargue.
Happy July! Take a break from writing and editing to get a cool drink and enjoy family, friends, and fireworks. When you’re ready to get back into the swing of things, check out our handy guide of where to submit your work for the week of July 1, 2022.
Want to get alerts for new opportunities? The NewPages weekly newsletter subscribers get early access to new calls for submissions and writing contests before they go live on our site, so subscribe today! You’ll also get our monthly eLitPak along with the occasional promotional emails from advertisers.
Brilliant Flash Fiction is offering Brilliant Endings for Flash Fiction Writing Workshop with Todd Mitchell on Saturday, July 30, 2022, from 12:00noon – 1:00pm (Mountain Time/Denver, CO, USA). The workshop aims to help writers “learn about creating dazzling endings for your flash fiction stories.” Mitchell is an award-winning author and director of the Beginning Creative Writing Teaching Program at Colorado State University. The suggested donation to attend is $10.
Writing Disorder online literary quarterly is on a mission to showcase new and emerging writers – particularly those in writing programs – as well as established writers. For readers, that means this newest issue offers a great blend of curated Fiction by Jennifer Benningfield, Don Donato, Jane Frances Gilles, Cecilia Kennedy, Steve Levandoski, Ed Peaco, Isabelle Stillman; Poetry by Ali Asadollahi, Christine Horner, Susan Jennifer Polese, RE DRUM cadre, M.A. Schaffner, Glen Vecchione; Nonfiction by Thomas Backer, Paul Garson, Graeme Hunter, Sara Watkins; and Art by Derek Art. Swing by and check it out, free and accessible online.
Winning Writers announces they are open to entries for their 20th Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest! Two prizes of $3,000 will be awarded: one to a poem in any style and the other for a poem that rhymes or has a traditional style. Both published and unpublished work accepted. Deadline to enter is September 30. S. Mei Sheng Frazier will judge this year’s contest. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Interim is open to submission for its 2022 print issue through September 1. They are interested in work devoted to music that isn’t so much “about” music, but rather “enacts or composes” it. See their ad in the NewPages Classifieds for more information.
In Clamor, Hocine Tandjaoui’s debut English-language poetic memoir presented in the text’s original French and English translations, the Algerian author tries to make sense of surviving the aggregation: “Life war songs death.” Death and war came early in Tandjaoui’s life: His mother was killed during childbirth by “raging septicemia,” and he was “not even five years old when the war broke,” “not yet seven years old when [he felt] the blast of the bomb.” Tandjaoui was born in 1949 in French-occupied (1830 – 1962) Algeria “that transformed some of the humans that occupied it into half-gods, whereas the others were reduced to subjects without rights.” Outside Tandjaoui’s window, “a musical bath” of warfare’s bullets and bombs “playing simultaneously” to the tortured, pained conversations of colonial society and jazz, blues, and classical music—the “loud speakers were in fierce competition, pushing to the max, projecting a sonorous magma into the surroundings.” Clamor offers Anglophone readers “this setting in which a person comes first to life, then to consciousness”—adult reflections and reminiscences of the sounds of Tandjaoui’s childhood, complete with a discography (Piaf, Simone, Joplin, Holiday, etc.) that was a “resonance chamber” for his grief. Hocine Tandjaoui’s Clamor: “between celebration and weeping, an ululation made of love, despair, and tenderness.”
Clamor by Hocine Tandjaoui; translated by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Litmus Press, April 2021.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
The biannual online journal of poetry and art, Off the Coast means to provide a space for diverse and marginalized voices. This issue takes its name, “To the Forest Between Trees” from a line in Laura King’s poem “Not the World I Was Born Into,” combined with art by Dylan LaVallee to create the cover. Other works included in this issue come from Diana Donovan, Mary Ann Larkin, Hannah Grady, Elder Gideon, Becky Kennedy, Laura Schulkind, Mike Cohen, Joel Ferdon, Joel Fry, Kathleen Gunton, Simon Perchik, James Miller, Laura Schulkind, Russell Rowland, Margaret B. Ingraham, James Dewey, David McCann, Judith Fox, M. Nasorri Pavone, and a translation from Ivan de Monbrison.
I curate the NewPages Publications for Young Writers Guide, and as much as I do this to provide a resource for young readers, writers, teachers, and parents, we could all benefit from spending some time reading the voices of young people. I was distracted from my work (a regular occurrence here, as you can imagine) when I came across “My Parents Are Anti-Vaxxers” by an anonymous contributor to YouthComm Magazine. In it, the author recounts how shocked they were when their parents went down the Facebook “Covid hoax” rabbit hole, declined vaccinations even in the face of losing a job/income, and then what they put their children through when one parent contracted the virus and declined medical care. The plaintive yet matter-of-fact style in which the author presents their perspective is frustrating to read, even heartbreaking, “It has made me question the people that I idolized growing up. The people that I believed, in my childhood innocence, could do no wrong.” Yet there is some consolation, “This experience has taught me a lot about the complexities of humans. It’s hard to accept that we can be good people and still go down the wrong paths. That things aren’t always simply black and white, though it’d be easier if they were.” And the final resolution, “But I’ve learned other people can provide guidance when your parents can’t.” It’s a sad commentary on the kind of division this experience created, and that we see continue among family, friends, and communities. It’s tough to imagine these youth experiencing the need to break away from their parents’ ideologies, but at the same time, encouraging that they (and we all) may be better off as adults as a result.
Youth Communication offers short, nonfiction stories and related lessons to help students improve their reading and writing skills, and improve the social and emotional skills that support school success. They provide workshops and publications, including Represent Magazine: Stories by Teens in Foster Care.
The newest issue of Cutleaf online literary journal from EastOver Press is now live In this issue, Robert Fanning attempts to translate distance into love in three poems beginning with “Snow and Roses.” Patricia Foster considers what it means to start a conversation with strangers in “The Boys.” And, in Casey Pycior’s expertly crafted story “O’er the Ramparts,” readers are introduced to a man, Kent, who struggles with everything: job, marriage, parenting. And compounding this struggle are a new neighbor, a video game, and the launching of fireworks. This issue features turn-of-the-century hypnotism posters from The Donaldson Lithographing Co. based in Newport, Kentucky.
Hechizo Poetry by Mark Statman Lavender Ink, January 2022
An hechizo is a spell, an incantation that attempts to effect change in the world via language. Mark Statman’s Hechizo is woven through a world of personal demons, past and present, a world facing a pandemic and social, political, and environmental dissolution. These incantations take aim at the world from the smallest lizard that crawls into view to overarching political structures. It’s a register not seen in his work before—of foreboding, the forbidden, concluding in tentative, possible joy.
In The Sustain Pedal, Carol Jennings continues the poetic journey she began in The Dead Spirits at the Piano. Her poems create a connection with the composers she listens to and plays on the piano-Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Mendelssohn-as well as with the natural world she loves and mourns for what is being lost. Retreating glaciers, volcanoes, coral reefs, viruses, the outer edge of the solar system-her poetic craft evokes both what we cannot control and what we must learn to control to survive. Read sample poems here.
Hamilton Arts & Letters 15.1 is “The Candian Chapbook Issue” guest-edited by Jim Johnston and Shane Neilson, and it is not enough to just name names here, but check out some of these titles to get a much better idea of the content:
“Chapbooks as Living Art: An Interview with Cameron Anstee, Ashley Obscura and Adèle Barclay”; Interviewed by David Ly
“MANIFESTO: Visual Poetry for Women” and “Coda for Women Making Visual Poetries” by Dani Spinosa
“A Perspective on Poetry Chapbooks, 1999-2021” by Jason Dewinetz
“The Alfred Gustav Press: WHEN I MAKE A CHAPBOOK” by David Zieroth
“In Praise of the Mayfly: A Survey of Canadian Micropresses Part 2” by Jim Johnstone
And a section of several videos from the Ontario D/deaf/HoH, Disabled, Mad and Neuroatypical Poetics Festival held in April 2022.
Other contributors to this issue include Jim Johnstone, Shane Neilson, Adam Lawrence, David Zieroth, Dewinetz, Monica Plant, Gillian Dunks, Astra Papachristodoulou, sophie anne edwards, Robert Colman, Tanya Adèle Koehnke, Violet Arenburg, Sarah Cavar, Diane Wiener, Sarah de Leeuw, and George Elliot Clarke.
HA&L is free to read online as well as in print by subscription.
