At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
The 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.
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.
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.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
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.
The Spring/Summer 2022 Alaska Quarterly Review was ‘slightly’ delayed due to what are now typical supply chain issues compounded with a cyber-attack – as in “you can’t make this stuff up,” but nothing, and I mean no thing will stop great literature from getting into the hands of the people! This issue is primed and ready for your beach bag or summer vacay getaway with Stories by Andrew Porter, Mark Jacobs, Molly McNett, Paulette K Fire, Jessi Lewis, Karen Nicoletti, Cary Holladay, William Weitzel; Essays by Heather Lende, Allison Field Bell, Joyce Dehli; Poetry by Patricia Hooper, Michael Waters, Kelli Russel Agodon, Jane Zwart, Laura Foley, Teresa Ott, Chloe Honum, Francesca Bell, W J Herbert, Eloise Klein Healy, Martha Silano, Kate Lebo, Jody Winer, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Anne Coray, Kathleen A Wakefield, Susan O’Dell Underwood, Vivian Faith Prescott, Francine Merasty, Allison Albino, Andrew Koch, Mike Seid, Huan He, Donald Platt, Maria Zoccola, Mercedes Lawry, Didi Jackson, AE Hines, and Jane Hirshfield,
This wonderful debut collection of poetry, Acreage, written by the visual artist Stephanie Garon, is a product of artistic accumulation where a self-conscious regard for the materiality of words is a characteristic of her poems. Many are finely sculpted pieces like, “Undercurrent,” mimicking the movement of oak leaves caught in an eddy. Repetition of the phrase, “how long can they stay under,” becomes a current pulling down both leaves and poet, and with panic, we realize all may stay “un/der.” Embodiment of a slow-motion disappearance is also a central theme in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” after WH Auden’s poem—where instead of Icarus, the central emptiness in Garon’s poem is represented by the “emptied / stamen” and the carcasses “of eight // stale petals curled.” This carnage, caused by a human hand (“Fingernail-pierced / stems / scattered”), also compromises the poet (“I / too / collapse”), and as we contemplate the artist’s imminent absence, we are left to wonder who will make the marks that cultivate meaning? There is no answer, but Garon gives us a sense in the final poem, “Feral,” that we are nearing the end of something (the Anthropocene) and may all become, like the poet, a “ravaged memory of acreage.”
Acreage by Stephanie Garon. akinoga press, December 2021.
Reviewer bio: Christine Scanlon is a Brooklyn-based poet with a collection of poems, A Hat on the Bed (Barrow Street Press), and work published in such journals as Adjacent Pineapple, Dream Pop Press, Flag + Void, and La Vague. She is a graduate of the New School MFA program.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
Yazoo Clay Stories by Schuyler Dickson Livingston Press, August 2022
Co-winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, Yazoo Clay is a collection of character-driven deep south stories from writer and regenerative farmer Schuyler Dickson. Experimental, humorous, and thought-provoking, this is a book “about the collapsing floor of living.” Dickson earned a BA in Southern Studies from Ole Miss and his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern. Readers can find an excerpt from the book here: “Happy Birthday.”
NewPages welcomes Chicago Young Writers Review to the scene, “a space uniquely created with the K-8 students in mind” says founder Daria Volkova. A native Chicagoan, Volkova wanted to preserve Chicago’s influence on her as a dynamic, diverse, multiethnic and multicultural city in their organization’s name. “We encourage young authors from all backgrounds to submit their work. In fact, we’ve had the most enthusiastic response from the communities of color and immigrant communities in and around Chicago. We also wanted the name to speak to our mission. There is an abundance of literary magazines for older writers, but there are less accessible spaces for the younger kids with whom we work. By including the ‘young writers’ within our name, we are stating exactly what we are and who we were made for. We are a playground (forgive the pun) for young creators to gain confidence in their work and blossom into stronger readers, thinkers, and writers.”
Boasting a twenty-year publication run, Salamander hails from the English Department at Suffolk University in Boston. This newest issue features poetry from over 50 authors, including Akhim Yuseff Cabey, Kelly Weber, Keith Leonard, John Sibley Williams, Robbie Gamble, J.P. White, Jane Zwart, Mag Gabbert, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Mel McCuin, Kassy Lee, Eliza Browning, Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Anthony Borruso, Luke Patterson, Alina Stefanescu, Rita Feinstein; Fiction by Bergita Bugarija, Megan Peck Shub, Anita Trimbur, Jade Song, Julialicia Case; and Creative Nonfiction by Rochelle Hurt and aureleo sans. Cover art by Wes Holloway (in addition to a full-color portfolio inside).
All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations Nonfiction by John T. Price University of Iowa Press, June 2022
All Is Leaf: Essays and Transformations by John T. Price draws inspiration and urgency from the storied Goethe Oak tree at Buchenwald concentration camp—and from the leaf as a symbol of all change, growth, and renewal—and explores a multitude of dramatic transformations, in his life and in the fragile world beyond: “the how of the organism—that keeps your humanity alive.” Price employs an array of forms and voices, whether penning a break-up letter to America or a literary rock-n-roll road song dedicated to prairie scientists, or giving pregame pep talks to his son’s losing football team. Here, too, are moving portrayals of his father’s last effort as a small-town lawyer to defend the rights of abused women, and his own efforts as a writing teacher to honor the personal stories of his students.
In Morgan (A Lyric), winner of the 2020 Gold Line Press Nonfiction Chapbook Competition, Boyer Rickel, a most open and ethical writer, writes out of “a sensation so precise” what it means to love—beyond shame or humiliation, in expansive and humble ways—not as “the hero,” but as “the hero’s sidekick.” Were this chapbook a musical composition, the minor scale “branching patterns of sound” referring to the relationship between men and their mothers, the luxury of who gets to age, the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, writing and reading poetry, and listening to music—the harmonic and cacophonic backdrop of lives at the center of a love song. A love story—between one who lives openly as a gay man and one who is more secretive in his choices, one in middle age and healthy, and one in his thirties, living with the complications of cystic fibrosis. The major scale “branching” the complexities of personality (“there might be many Morgans”), relationship (“separate states of extremity”), and eroticism (“denial begets desire”); the trappings of love and illness; the primary and secondary gains of caretaking—“a trade of need for need.” This is elegiac writing that “remove[s] us (readers) from time” as love and death do, but perhaps more than centering on death, this writing exalts lover and beloved—“To touch a boundary, to feel a limit”—leaving as much love on the page as possible.
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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The newest issue of The Malahat Review features their Open Season Award Winners, which includes both their works as well as an interview with each Kaitlin Debicki (poetry), Sara Mang (fiction), and Bahar Orang (nonfiction) – all winning works and interviews can be read online. The rest of the issue is chock full of great works, with Poetry by Ronna Bloom, Laura Cok, Francesca Schulz-Bianco, Carolyn Smart, Joan Rivard (online and includes an interview), T. Liem, Katherine Alexandra Harvey, Jamie Evan Kitts, Bill Howell, Aaron Tucker, Steve Noyes, Eric Wang, Domenica Martinello, Judith Taylor; Fiction by Suzannah Windsor, Jeff Noh, Jaime Burnet; and Creative Nonfiction by Kate Gies, Shauna Andrews, Ellise Ramos (online and includes an interview), and Ian Clay Sewall. Cover art by Emily Hermant.
Almost: My Life in Theater Memoir by Roselee Blooston Apprentice House Press, September 2022
Almost: My Life in the Theater tells the story of Roselee Blooston’s decades-long struggle to fulfill her early promise by becoming a professional actress, taking her to far-flung locales from Europe to Texas to New York City. Along the way, she encounters several Oscar winners and nominees—including Meryl Streep, Greer Garson, and Olympia Dukakis—who each had a profound effect on her self-image and trajectory, though no one had more influence than her mother, a visual artist, whose life served as both cautionary tale and beacon. Blooston can lay claim to trailblazer status as a solo performer, but she asks herself and the reader to deeply consider the true meaning of success and the value of a creative life. Her calling, commitment, and longing for recognition will resonate with anyone who has followed a passion, been thwarted in the attempt, and then successfully and happily reinvented themselves. Apprentice House is an entirely student-managed book publisher with students at Loyola University Maryland responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Learn more here.
Indebted to the docupoetics tradition, Raena Shirali’s summonings investigates the ongoing practice of witch (“daayan”) hunting in India. Winner of The Hudson Prize, these poems interrogate the political implications and shortcomings of writing Subaltern personae while acknowledging the author’s Westernized positionality. Continuing to explore multi-national and intersectional concerns around identity raised in her debut collection, Shirali asks how first- and second-generation immigrants reconcile the self with the lineages that shape it, wondering aloud about those lineages’ relationships to misogyny and violence. These poems explore how antiquated and existing norms surrounding female mysticism in India and America inform each culture’s treatment of women. As Jericho Brown wrote of Shirali’s poetics in GILT, her “comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry.” summonings offers a commentary on power and patriarchy, on authorial privilege and the shifting role of witness, and ultimately, on an ethical poetics, grounded in the inevitable failure to embody the Other.
The newest issue of Good River Review, the biannual online literary journal of the School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University, is available to read online. In between issues, Good River Review regularly features book reviews, interviews, essays on the practice of writing, along with literary news.
In addition to the poetry and prose selected for this issue, Editor in Chief Kathleen Driskell shares that the issue “closes with two essays on the writing life from our new anthology Creativity & Compassion: Spalding Writers Celebrate 20 Years. Faculty member in Writing for Children and Young Adults Beth Bauman offers her thoughts ‘On Crafting Surprise in Fiction,’ and Bruce Marshall Romans, faculty member in Writing for TV, Screen, and Stage, shares his essay ‘On Fear.'” Works are also included from authors Tommy Dean, Jessy Easton, Michael Henson, Crystal Wilkinson, Dmitry Blizniuk, Akhim Yuseff Cabey, Alexander Etheridge, Julia Gibson, January Gill O’Neil, Julia Koets, Andrew Najberg, Tatiana Retivov, F. Daniel Rzicznek, and Fernando Valverde (trans. by Carolyn Forché).
Terrain.org invites participants to attend an online conversation between acclaimed environmental writers and activists Sandra Steingraber and Taylor Brorby. In this event, noted environmental author and activist Sandra Steingraber is in conversation with Taylor Brorby about his debut memoir, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. This conversation is sponsored by Terrain.org, with Zoom hosting provided by the University of Arizona, Monday, June 27, 2022, 5 p.m. PT / 6 MT / 7 CT / 8 ET. Registration is free.
The newest issue of The Dillydoun Review has a genre for everyone, perfect for your summer beach or favorite park bench reading. Just stay in the shade as you enjoy Short Stories by Soidenet Gue, Michael McGuire, Max Talley; Flash Fiction by Atom Cheung, Alice Orr, Kylee Webb; Poetry by Tobi Alfier, Jeffrey Dreiblatt, Jess Levens, Lilian McCarthy, Laura Ann Reed, Patrick Wilcox; Prose Poetry by Glenn Armstrong, Emily Kingery, Preeti Talwai; Nonfiction by Shannon Barbour, Matthew William Jeng-Zhe Seaton; Flash Nonfiction by Amanda Barnett, Giuseppina Iacono Lobo, James Morena, Sarahmarie Specht-Bird, and Guinotte Wise. All free to read online – so head on over today!
Stubborn Writers Workshop—multigenre, come and get feedback on your prose or poetry and workshop with other CR readers and writers. 7/30/22, 11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UTC-0/8pm CET, 2 hours, $25
6 Weeks, 6 Poems—beginners and advanced poets alike will find the inspiration, community, and tools to write six new poems in six weeks. Each poet will also have a chance to workshop once during the class. 6 Sundays from 7/10-8/14, 11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UTC-0/8pm CET, 1.5 hour sessions, $200
Discounts are available for contributors, staff, or returning attendees. For more information see the Chestnut Review workshops page.
Wise to the West Poetry by Wendy Videlock Able Muse Press, November 2022
In Wise to the West, Wendy Videlock embraces her Western terrain and surroundings—family, neighbor, barbershop, morning shower, coyote, badger, wolf, blackbird, hawk, canyon, mesa, mountain—with songs, odes, witticisms, lamentations. Along the way, she tilts toward the grand view of the world around—relaying turns of uncertainty or affirmation, history or the latest news, myths and the mystic—and gifting readers musings and meditations in her unique style full of quirks, wit, wisdom, and surprising turns. Wendy Videlock lives on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies with her husband and their assorted critters. Her work appears in Hudson Review, Oprah Magazine, Poetry, Dark Horse, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, and other venues.
Published online biannually out of the Arkansas Writers’ MFA Program at the University of Central Arkansas, Arkana accepts works “from the whole universe at large” and seeks “inclusive art that asks questions, explores mystery, and works to make visible the marginalized, the overlooked, and those whose voices have been silenced.” Fulfilling this expectation, Arkana Issue 12 includes fiction by Zachary Johnson, Andrena Zawinski, and Erin Townsend; creative nonfiction by Melissent Zumwalt and Molly Wadzeck Kraus; poetry by Talya Jankovits, Aliah Jocelyn, Neha Rayamajhi, Lauren Scharhag, Leticia Priebe Rocha, Dante Di Stefano, and Saramanda Swigart; and interviews with Elizabeth Rush and Kai Coggin.
June will be over with next week. Had to believe our year is officially half over with. How is your writing and submitting going? Well, we hope. Speaking of submitting, don’t forget that our Big List of Writing Contests is arranged by deadline date to help you plan out some submissions there. With June ending, take a look at contests coming up in July and August and beyond.
As always, please enjoy this round-up of literary magazines, press, events, and programs open to general and contest submissions to help you with where to submit your work. And…don’t forget that NewPages 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.
If you need a beach read to get you through high summer, look no further than Razzmatazz, Christopher Moore’s follow-up to his hilarious page-turner Noir. (Make it a full vacation and read both novels.) This time out, our hero Sammy, his main squeeze Stilton (don’t call her “the Cheese”), and their unlikely roster of demi-monde pals must dodge both gangsters and cops to solve a double murder, locate a rich nob’s runaway daughter, and retrieve a mysterious relic before even more chaos ensues in late-1940’s San Francisco. In true noirish fashion, most of the action takes place in the wee small hours, when, as Sammy relates, the fog has “swallowed the city like a damp woolen crocodile.” Zany, with devious plotting and enough wise-cracking dialogue to fricassee a Maltese falcon, Razzmatazz is another healthy serving of Moore’s signature recipe: equal measures of screwball comedy, hard-boiled mystery, and X-Files-like otherworldliness. (Don’t skip the “Afterword and Author’s Note.”)
Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore. William Morrow, May 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.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists Poetry by Laynie Browne Wave Books, June 2022
Laynie Browne’s latest poetry collection, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life. These poems consider elegy, absence and bewilderment while allowing associative logic to make poetic leaps in imagination and mood that belie convention. This book explores the myriad ways one could attempt to categorize a lived experience with its dizzying infinitudes by marking it in finite language and ultimately shows how poetry is an experiment for that translation. Browne’s collection considers language, time, and poetics in a way that is as electrifying as it is elusive. In homage to poet C.D. Wright, her title is inspired by Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues.
Originally founded in 1779 as “GlassWorks in the Woods,” Glassworks is a publication of the MA in Writing program at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ, publishing both free-access online and print copy for purchase. Glassworks Issue 24 features artwork by Guilherme Bergamini, Rachel Coyne, Elinora Lord, and Leah Oates; fiction by Charlie Beckerman, Marco Etheridge, and Garth Robinson; nonfiction by Cole Brayfield and Cheryl Skory Suma; and poetry by Jared Beloff, Joel Best, Susana H. Case, Jessica de Koninck, Iris A. Law, Sharon Lopez Mooney, Toti O’Brien, Susan Chock Salgy, Kira Stevens, Denise Utt, Austin Veldman, and Cynthia Ventresca. Glassworks’ reading period is August 15 – December 15 for submissions in artwork, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, flash, and hybrid forms. There is no fee to submit through November 30 OR for the first 1,000 submissions, whatever comes first. After that, there is a $2 fee. Don’t delay!
