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!
possessions: poems in american poetry Poetry by Alan Botsford Cyberwit.net, May 2022
Author Alan Botsford has penned three other poetry collections—mamaist: learning a new language (Minato no Hito); A Book of Shadows (Katydid Press) with William I. Elliott; and mamaist: a different sort of light (dark woods press). He has also published the hybrid essay-dialogue-poetry collection Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Sage Hill Press). This newest collection consists of a large cast of poets, of multiple voices, over 150, including many contemporaries. As Botsford writes, “this book is a love letter to the art of American poetry, a tribute to American poetry’s pedigree. Its method is simple—I tried to synthesize what the poets wrote with my own music.”
Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing offers a variety of online workshop and “popup workshops” open to the public with some accepting donations and others with set fees. Snapdragon offers a membership that includes an annual subscription to their quarterly publication, discounts on classes and workshops, members-only content, and other freebies. Upcoming workshops include “Writing the Ancestors: A Generative Online Workshop with Jacinta V. White” (July 30 & 31), “Poetry and Ritual: A Path Towards Self Awareness & Awakening with Poet, Author, & Publisher Jacinta V. White” (August 14), and “Writing & Rage: Discussion & Workshop with Jacinta White & Aginetta Mulima” (August 25). Check their website for other events and the newest issue of Snapdragon journal.
The Blue Collar Review is a quarterly journal of poetry and prose published by Partisan Press with the mission “to expand and promote a progressive working class vision of culture that inspires us and that moves us forward as a class.”
The editors comment: “Poems in this collection focus on poverty, labor struggles, and on the devaluing of, and impact on, children in our corrupt corporate oligarchy. Children suffer inordinately from the criminal irresponsibility of political opportunism and arrogant class disregard. . . Violence driven by bigotry is a continuing foundational American reality. . . The scapegoating and targeting of people based on perceived differences is meant to divide us, diverting the focus of our frustration and rage from those who perpetrate vicious, unrelenting injustice upon us to our class brothers and sisters. Added to the targets of hate are Trans and gender non-binary people. As a class, our struggle demands transcending such prejudices and creating our own justice rooted in our common issues and interests.”
These poems, then, “exists to make us more aware of the commonality or our shared class experience and to strengthen the social solidarity we need to have a voice and to create authentic democracy.” Readers can find sample poems on the Blue Collar Review website along with submission and subscription information.
The Meadow and the Misread Fiction by Max Halper Threadsuns Press, June 2022
X Parke Penate, a college freshman, realizes she has no memories from before the age of 12 or 13. Determined to understand why, she boards a plane home over winter break to speak with her parents. But her plane crashes, and X Parke is stranded alone in the cold forest. What ensues is a journey—equal parts surreal and hyperreal, epic and interior, esoteric and harrowing, strange and familiar—to uncover the truth about her missing memory. Max Halper is the author of the novella, Lamella, and numerous short fictions. He lives in upstate New York.
Against the Wall Stories by Alberto Roblest Arte Público Press, March 2022
In the prologue to this inventive collection, the exhausted protagonist finally reaches the doors to paradise after an arduous journey, but the longed-for entrance doesn’t have a handle or keyhole and there’s no bell or intercom. He considers climbing over it, but the wall reaches to the sky. He thinks of magic words that might open it and even kicks it, to no avail. The long, difficult trip has brought him to nothing except a concrete wall surrounded by desert. The characters in these seventeen stories find themselves with their backs against the wall, whether literally or figuratively. They run the gamut from undocumented immigrants to faded rock and soap-opera stars and even the Washington Monument. The eyes of the world focus on the blackened obelisk, which is covered in millions of insects, as government forces attempt to deal with this national emergency! Several pieces deal with people who are lost or long to go back in time. In one, Ramírez wakes up disoriented to discover he—along with untold others—is trapped in a bus terminal, unable to leave the Lost & Found area that’s piled high with thousands of suitcases, trunks, backpacks and packages.
Congratulations to Alice James Books who, after nearly 30 years of programming with the University of Maine at Farmington has relocated to an independent office in New Glouster, Maine. [Video of new office space.] “This is a major breakthrough for the press!” say Carey Salerno, Executive Director & Editor, and Anne Marie Macari, President. “Our team is excited to concentrate our focus more fully on AJB’s core values and mission-driven work. The move comes at the moment we are about to celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2023, highlighting what’s always been important to us: publishing books that matter by poets who have something important to say.” Founded as a feminist press, Alice James Books is “committed to collaborating with literary artists of excellence who might otherwise go unheard by producing, promoting, and distributing their work which often engages the public on important social issues.” Visit their website for more information.
The mid-month deadline explosion has passed, but don’t forget about the deadlines coming at the end of this month! And since the weather has been getting unbearably hot and humid, it’s the perfect time to stay indoors with a cool drink to write and edit, isn’t it?
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 (view this month’s here!) along with the occasional promotional emails from advertisers.
In this linked essay collection, author Jeff Fearnside analyzes his four years as an educator on the Great Silk Road, primarily in Kazakhstan. Peeling back the layers of culture, environment, and history that define the country and its people, Fearnside creates a compelling narrative about this faraway land and soon realizes how the local, personal stories are, in fact, global stories. Fearnside sees firsthand the unnatural disaster of the Aral Sea—a man-made environmental crisis that has devastated the region and impacts the entire world. He examines the sometimes controversial ethics of Western missionaries and reflects on personal and social change once he returns to the States. Ships in the Desert explores universal issues of religious bigotry, cultural intolerance, environmental degradation, and how a battle over water rights led to a catastrophe that is now being repeated around the world.
The beautifully sounded, ecologically aware, and botanically influenced poems of Loss/Less, Rebecca A. Durham’s second collection, is, to my read, not so much interpretive of loss related to climate crisis, but intends to be reconciliatory: “This is how I enter the forest & this is how it enters me too.” Combining the geological and botanical with the plaintiff and ecstatic, the collection conjures Rumi and Thoreau. One way to read the book is as one long poem, an epistle to Thoreau, challenging his words “nothing could defile this pond.” The poet wonders if the transcendentalist knew that was a “lie.” Is Durham a new transcendentalist in her asking “what kind of extinction is this”; in her call for “a moratorium on cement or at least errant elements”; her command “uncut / all those holy trees”; her recognition that “we are illicitly complicit in disaster”? Like Thoreau, perhaps even if Durham knows it is already “too late,” her poems insist:
this is how we kneel at the hemlock
pulled back from the brink
pulled back from the helm of helplessness, hatred
(from “Arboreal Burial,” 77)
Call to action, educational primer, love song, the poet calls on the many gestures of poetry, creating if not an abundance, less loss. What remains? Loess, a windblown sediment, or as the poet writes: “I gather bitter fruits / map my fissures.” What else is there as “we are primed for decay’s reticent elegance.” A special and compelling book!
Loss/Less by Rebecca A Durham. Shanti Arts Publishing, January 2022.
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.
Reckoning is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice, with this newest issue, edited by Aïcha Martine Thiam and Gabriela Santiago, addressing the intersection between social upheaval and environmental change. The publication features poetry, essays, fiction, and art by Zuzanna Kwiecien, Francesca Gabrielle Hurtado, Russell Nichols, Tom Barlow, Nicasio Andres Reed, Nicholas Clute, Cislyn Smith, Nancy Lynée Woo, Tim Fab-Eme, E.G. Condé, Ken Poyner, Daria Kholyavka, Sofia Ezdina, Avra Margariti, Grace Wagner, Sigrid Marianne Gayangos, Kola Heyward-Rotimi, Scott T. Hutchison, Nicole Bade, Susan Tacent, Jessica McDermott, paulo da costa, Ellie Milne-Brown, Amanda Ilozumba Otitochukwu, Charlotte Kim, Rebecca Bratten Weiss, Amirah Al Wassif, Brianna Cunliffe, Jacob Budenz, Miriam Navarro Prieto, Wen-yi Lee, Mari Ness, Takayuki Ino, Rumi Kaneko, Preston Grassmann, Jesse Nee-Vogelman, Al Simmons, Laura Adrienne Brady, Prashanth Srivatsa, Taylor Jones and Luke Elliott.
Carolyn Kuebler’s introduction to the newest issue of New England Review (43.2) is a thoughtful reflection on the place of domesticity, travel, and tourism as it is reflected through the eyes of writers and interpreted by readers. The Editor’s Note along with several pieces from this issue are available to read online here. Kuebler also comments on the special feature, “Polyglot And Multinational: Lebanese Writers In Beirut And Beyond”: “The section in fact was born out of guest editor Marilyn Hacker’s desire to go someplace new, to know it more deeply, to feel the heat and rain and to hear voices in cafés. It began with her fascination and curiosity about the Lebanese writers whose works she’d read and translated and culminates here in something altogether uncategorizable.” In addition, this issue includes Poetry by Tomaž Šalamun, Gillian Osborne, Victoria Chang, Analicia Sotelo, Justin Jannise, Corey Van Landingham, Carmen Giménez, Steven Duong, and Tiana Clark; Fiction by Nandini Dhar, David Ryan, A. E. Kulze, Christine Sneed, Roy Kesey, and Kosiso Ugwueze; Nonfiction by Marianne Boruch, Maud Casey, Ben Miller, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, and Richard Harding Davis.
Warrior Spirit: The STory of Native American Patriotism and Heroism Military History by Herman J. Viola The University of Oklahoma Press, March 2022
For decades, American schoolchildren have learned only a smattering of facts about Native American peoples, especially when it comes to service in the U.S. military. They might know that Navajos served as Code Talkers during World War II, but more often they learn that Native Americans were enemies of the United States, not allies or patriots. In Warrior Spirit, author Herman J. Viola corrects the record by highlighting the military service—and major sacrifices—of Native American soldiers and veterans in the U.S. armed services. Warrior Spirit introduces readers to unsung heroes, from the first Native guides and soldiers during the Revolutionary War to those servicemen and -women who ventured to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Herman J. Viola is Director of Quincentenary Programs in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Other contributors include Ellen Baumler, Cheryl Huges, and Michelle Pearson, with a foreword by Debra Kay Mooney.
What happens when a high school student in love with writing since the third grade grows into a climate activist who believes in empowering her fellow youth? The answer is The Earth Chronicles, a student-led environmental newspaper that focuses on youth voices for climate action and awareness about our planet. Julianne Park and her brother, Aiden Park, both Dougherty Valley High School students, say they started The Earth Chronicles during the pandemic “when the wildfires raged across California and near our homes. We were scared and we saw fear on the faces of our friends and family. But we decided to turn this around. Our goal is to spread awareness and educate people about what is happening on our planet. Through writing, we want to empower students to fight climate change in their own unique ways and equip them with the tools they need for the future.”
Without Goodbyes: From Puritan Deerfield to Mohawk Kahnawake Poetry by Ginny Lowe Connors Turning Point, December 2021
Without Goodbyes by Ginny Lowe Connors is a collection of poems based on a historical event: the infamous 1704 raid on the village of Deerfield, Massachusetts. More than 100 Deerfield residents: men, women, and children, were captured. Then they began the 300-mile trek to New France, the French colony, in Quebec. The poems, which trace a narrative but are lyrical in nature, focus on Joanna Kellogg, an eleven-year-old girl, and two of her siblings. They were adopted into Mohawk families in the village of Kahnawake, a Mohawk community centered around a Jesuit mission. The physical journey Joanna and her siblings took to reach Kahnawake was grueling; of even greater interest is the journey she took to truly become a member of the Mohawk community. Read sample poems here.
The Louisville Review, Number 91, Spring 2022, after being supported for 45 years by higher educational institutions is now an independent publication. As Editor Sena Jeter Naslund shares in the Editor’s Note, her home has become the new “home” of The Louisville Review – a home “haunted” by the ghost of little-known poet Madison Cawein, who lived there over 100 years ago, and who published a poem that contained the phrase “waste land” – inspiring the more likely known T.S. Eliot’s work, “The Waste Land.” And so, Sena tells readers, “it pays off to read small literary mags, as well as to publish in them. . . And it pays off to SUBSCRIBE to them, for many reasons, but also so that you won’t miss out on some important trigger to your own imagination.” Here! Here!
The newest issue of The Louisville Review features ample imagination starters, with Poetry by Mary Ann Samyn, Adrian Blevins, Adam Tavel, Kyle D. Craig, Diamond Forde, Ann Pedone, Rachel Whalen, Kevin McLellan, Christopher Howell, Roy Bentley, Gabriel Welsch, Clay Cantrell, James Hejna, Rolly Kent, Alamgir Hashmi, Jack Ridl, Don Bogen, and Michael Mark. Fiction – which, get this, is “arranged to spotlight the progressive ages of the various protagonists” – ! – by Jane Ogburn Dorfman, Dennis Hurley, Patricia Dutt, Rebecca Bernard, Edward Jackson, John Sims Jeter, S. A. Griffin, and Marguerite Alley. And my all-time favorite section, “Cornerstone,” featuringing work by writers K-12: Saanvi Mundra, Kay Lee, Jiayi Shao, Haile Espin, Henry Phoel, Bravery Grace Boes, Alexander Miller, Matteo Tremaine Pavlenko, and Emma Catherine Hoff.
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” tag under “Popular Topics.” If you are a publication looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Alaska Quarterly Review, Spring/Summer 2022 The American Poetry Review, July/August 2022 Arkansas Review, 53.1 Bellingham Review, 84 Blue Collar Review, Spring 2022 Brick, 109 Brilliant Flash Fiction, June 2022 Carve, Summer 2022 The Cincinnati Review, 19.1 Cleaver, Summer 2022 Cream City Review, 46.1 Cutleaf, 2.14 The Dillydoun Review, June 2022 Driftwood Press, 9.2 Event, 51.1 Five Points, 21.2 Freefall, Spring 2022 Gay & Lesbian Review, July-August 2022 Good River Review, 3 Hamilton Arts & Letters, 15.1 The Hollins Critic, June 2022 Image 112 In These Times, July 2022 Inch, Summer 2022 Kenyon Review, July/August 2022 The Lake, July 2022 The Louisville Review, Spring 2022 The Malahat Review, 218 The Missouri Review, Spring 2022 New England Review, Summer 2022 Notre Dame Review, Winter/Spring 2022 Off the Coast, Summer 2022 One Story, 290 Otis Nebula, 17 Pembroke Magazine, 54 Poetry, July/August 2022 Prairie Schooner, Fall 2021 Reckoning, 6 Room, 45.2 Ruminate, Spring/Summer 2022 Salamander, Spring/Summer 2022 The Shore, 14 Sleet, Summer 2022 Superpresent, Summer 2022 Thema, Summer 2022 The Tiger Moth Review, 8 World Literature Today, July/August 2022 The Woven Tale Press, July 2022 Writing Disorder, Summer 2022 Yellow Medicine Review, Spring 2022
The premise of Susannah Q. Pratt’s collection of essays is in her subtitle: Essays from a Year of No Buying. After becoming overwhelmed by how much she and her family owned, she convinced her husband and three teenage boys—through her use of a PowerPoint—to go one year without buying anything other than what was necessary. Her project raises questions about what is necessary, what we actually need to live meaningful lives in the twenty-first century, and the importance we attach to what we buy, both in healthy and unhealthy ways. At her best, Pratt’s essays explore important questions of gender, class, and privilege, examining the ways aspects of our identities impact what we’re able to buy and own. While Pratt credits an essay by Ann Patchett in 2017 on a similar subject, I was surprised she didn’t mention Judith Levine’s 2007 book Not Buying It, in which Levine takes on the same project. Pratt’s essays are a solid update to Levine, given how the world has changed in fifteen years, especially as the rise of online shopping has made buying unnecessary items even easier, but interacting with one who came before would make her work even stronger.
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/.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
The newest issue of EVENT print publication of poetry and prose features their 2021 Non-Fiction Contest finalists with introductory commentary by Judge David A. Robertson, who writes, “in the end, that’s what writing stories is all about: connecting. You connect with your readers. They connect with something within themselves or to each other.” The winning entries: 1st Place “Penance” by Cayenne Bradley; 2nd Place “All My Love, Alex” by Vicki McLeod; 3rd Place“One Route, Over and Over” by Nicole Boyce. Also included in this issue is Poetry by Matsuki Masutani, Julian Gunn, Russell Thornton, Laurie D. Graham, Vincent McGillivray, Mark O. Goodwin, Zoe Landale, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Dan MacIsaac, J.G. Chayko, and Erin Kirsh; Fiction by Brian Moore, Joel Fishbane, and Adrian Markle; and numerous reviews of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The next deadline for EVENT‘s 2022 Non-Fiction Contest is October 15. More details on their website here.
In her chapbook Contain, poet Cynthia Hogue responds to artist Morgan O’Hara’s mandala-like series “Nineteen Forms of Containment.” O’Hara made her drawings on the back of The New York Times articles that she read during the height of the pandemic, and Hogue continues that recto-verso interactive throughout her chapbook. The poems on the recto side respond to O’Hara’s drawings and those on the verso side to The Times articles. The correspondences are non-interpretative, various, and layered. In some cases, news stories have been directly quoted to make cento-like poems, and given that the poems stay within the eight- to twelve-line range, the rondeau, triolet, and sonnet forms loom. The variety of poetic containers might be thought of as an analog for the various ways and by what means we each were contained during lockdown—by the coronavirus pandemic—and by social justice-related realities of the “circle wherein we live.” Hogue calls particular attention to first responders, long-haul truckers, food banks, racially motivated murders, and the climate crisis as “a way / of putting word to something / for which there are no words.” By “inward- / turning,” acknowledging the anxiety and isolation of our lives, these tender and humble poems explore the “global operation of containment”—what and who holds us. Which is captivity and which embrace. Beautiful! Hurrah new chapbook publisher, Tram Editions!
Contain by Cynthia Hogue. Tram Editions, June 2022.
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.
Slight Return Poetry by Rebecca Wolff Wave Books, October 2022
In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination. Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of the soul. Wolff is a poet that is unafraid to be a querent, not only of sages (“I only hang out with people / who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious / continuity”) but of language itself (“How else is one to know how to proceed / How is one to make a motion against— / electric word life”) In Slight Return, the journey is infinite and elusive—aspiring in the best way toward a point of diminishing returns and withholding any promise of a comfortable landing.
Driftwood Press will be switching to an annual anthology structure, so this is the final “biannual” issue for readers to enjoy. The latest short stories “Winged,” “Sore Vexed,” and “The Great Fall” show off the versatility of Driftwood Press like no other issue: readers are moved from a war-torn country to a Norweigian countryside, then to a global pandemic of missing memories. This issue also includes numerous poems investigating the paranormal, gun violence, familial strife, and more.
Driftwood Press also offers readers interviews with most of their contributors, with this issue featuring Chad Gusler, Caroline Bock, Kate Griffin, Daisuke Shen, Samantha Padgett, Emily DeMaio Newton, Danae Younge, Kindall Fredricks, Roben Gow, Danielle Shorr, Laura Goldin, Adriana Stimola, Kelly Gray, Amanda Hartzell, Austin Sanchez-Moran, Daniel Ferreira, and Amanda Ngo and Kendall Krantz, and additional works by Maxime Cousineau-Pérusse, Triin Paja, and Sofia Sears.
Summer Sleet 2022 is now online! It’s a beautiful, especially moving edition featuring student poets from Thunder Mountain and Yaakoosge Daakahidi high schools in Juneau, Alaska, in a “By Invitation Only” category. David Buck, Nakima Budke, Joseph Cavanaugh, Elizabeth Djajalie, and Savanna Tisher offer readers a view of the Alaskan landscape and what it means to “be from” this vast northern community. Summer Sleet 2022 also hosts Poetry by Samir Atassi, Nancy Botkin, Jack Chielli, E.J. Evans, Marsha Foss, Scott Gardner, Mom’s Dementia, Paul Ilechko, Kathryn Kysar, Debbie Laffin, John Palen, Joan Roger, Dan Sicoli, Suzanne Swanson, Matthew A. Toll, Cody Triplett, Jay Wittenberg; Creative Nonfiction by Mary Casey Diana, Mariana Navarrete, Anthony J. Mohr; Fiction by Vicki Addesso, Scott Gardner, Mike Herndon, Jerry Kivelä; and a fun section called “Irregulars” with unique contributions from Melanie Alberts, Kathryn Kysar, Mary Lewis, Colette Parris, Holly Pelesky, Edwina Shaw, Tee, and T. Wallace. Sleet is free to read online, and Sleet is currently open for submissions until August 31, 2022. All work, all topics welcome with a special theme for the winter edition: TATTOOS. Visit their website for more information.
Chibundu Onuzo’s novel Sankofa follows Anna Graham—a middle-aged British woman who goes to Bamana, a fictional African country, to find her father—as she tries to understand her mixed-race heritage. Raised by her single white mother, Anna always struggled with her identity, as she knew almost nothing of her Bamanian father. Anna lived a sheltered life with a husband (from whom she is now separated because of his recent affair) who took care of everything for her, so he and their daughter are surprised when she travels to Bamana alone. I have two minor complaints: first, the ending is a bit too neatly tied together in terms of Anna’s understanding of her identity; second, some plot developments similarly seemed too easy to predict, though Anna’s naivete prevents her from seeing what has happened. However, Anna’s grappling with her identity is a useful metaphor for a postcolonial Africa still coming to terms with the multiple strands of cultural history that make the countries what they have become. The novel serves as a healthy reminder to Americans and Europeans that African countries’ histories are more complex than they seem to those on the outside.
Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo. Catapult, October 2021.
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/.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
In this issue you’ll find nuggets of contentment as authors share stories of disability and the connections they experience with those who travel this journey with them. A pioneer in its field, Kaleidoscope magazine publishes literature and artwork that creatively explore the experience of disability. Submit your best work to us today! Visit our website or view our flyer for more information.
In her chapbook Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath, Laura Cesarco Eglin gives her poetic attention to a “tension of simultaneity,” tracking temporal interruptions, disruptions, and variations, and how those time-based movements affect breath within a particular life that withstands a cancer diagnosis and recovery, illnesses and deaths of beloved family members, and “knowing languages” by undertaking writing and translation. These are poems that want “to keep track of leaving”: the departures of words on breaths and “the hours that come and those that stay, those that leave.” Time unfolds “no matter what.” Yet, there is the recognition that “nothing is lost.” That acknowledgment makes room for inquiry: “What is left of me after I’ve left a place, after it has left me.” One response to that query might be: These poems! The impressions and residues left with this reader—“a scar / of what’s no longer.”
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 Displaced Fiction by Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre Arte Público Press, June 2022
Mikey and Lurch are worlds apart, even if they’re from the same Mexican neighborhood in West Los Angeles. Mikey just graduated from UCLA and is determined to get out. Lurch, the leader of the Culver City gang, loves the hood—its projects, beat-up apartments, and crackheads—more than his own life. They hook up with a doctor, who is from the same area. He put himself through medical school selling dope and now is back, running a clinic across from the Mar Vista Gardens housing project. All three notice changes. Suddenly there are outsiders everywhere: white people with beards, wearing V-neck sweaters and plaid shirts, running in jogging outfits or riding bikes with helmets, oblivious to the gangbangers. They’re artists, students, developers and entrepreneurs; a plague, pushing people out of their homes. Old people on fixed incomes start getting evicted or foreclosed on and the residents of the projects are being relocated, but some of the locals aren’t going to sit by without a fight. Soon they are fortifying the housing projects and stockpiling assault weapons! This absorbing novel follows a group of people who are determined to save their homes and neighborhood from gentrification, even if it means turning to violence.
Rolling submission deadline. Divot Poetry wants to read your poems for Issues 5 and 6. We value fresh imagery and startling ways to describe the human condition. See our submission guidelines for full information. We look forward to reading your poetry; you inspire us. View flyer or visit website to learn more.
New from Livingston Press! Aftershock by George H. Wolfe is a novel about GI’s returning from WWII to about-face and enter colleges under the GI Bill. Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor by Patricia Taylor is a story collection about nursing, its joys, frustrations, and heartbreak. See flyer for more details or visit website.
Otis Nebula Editor Andrea Perkins writes that the newest issue (#17) “features the work of thirteen writers ranging from the deeply established to one who is debuting in our ‘pages.’ We also invited our contributors to participate in the creation of an ‘otis,’ which is a linked poem form generated by a simple prompt.” Eleven contributors collaborated, “donating” seed words for each other, the editors chipping in, so that each writer had twelve words to incorporate. Otis Nebula provides full guidelines for this form on their site here. Otis Nebula is a digital magazine with all issues available for free online. Contributors to Issue 17 include Peter Cole Friedman, Nathaniel Kennon Perkins, J.D. Nelson, Cameron Morse, Andrew Haley, Maria Berardi, Jennifer Ruth Jackson, Ken Meisel, Martine van Bijlert, Rebecca Pyle, Mark DeCarteret, Julia Wendell, and Chey Chesser.
Deadline: August 31, 2022 The Off the Grid Poetry Prize recognizes the work of older poets, highlighting important contemporary voices in American poetry. Each year a winner is awarded $1,000 and publication. Contest runs through August 31, 2022. Garrett Hongo will judge. Find full guidelines here or view flyer for more information.
Mid-month is always an important deadline for calls for submissions and writing contests. Check below to see where to submit your work and who has deadlines today and for the rest of the month and beyond.
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 (view this month’s here!) along with the occasional promotional emails from advertisers.
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.
