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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!

Book Review :: Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul book cover image

Guest Post by MG Noles

Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Someone with whom you could confide anything? A soulmate who loved you no matter what you said or did? Celia Paul’s extraordinary new book, Letters to Gwen John, adopts Gwen as just such an “imaginary” friend/soulmate and listener as she writes all her thoughts and feelings to the long-dead post-impressionist painter who lived in the latter 18th and early 19th centuries. Using a series of letters, Paul reveals her inner thoughts about life, art, men, freedom, and beauty. The book is part memoir and part art history, and it makes a beautiful read. Filled with imagination and insight, Paul examines the meaning of art and life. She shares her vision and makes you believe that communication is possible across space and time. As she puts it, “time is a strange substance.” And somehow, as you read this amazing book, you see Gwen John seated in a cozy room somewhere, like the one she paints in Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, reading Celia Paul’s letters with a faint smile.

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul. New York Review Books, April 2022.

Reviewer bio: MG Noles is a sometime essayist, reviewer, history buff.

New Book :: Up North in Michigan

Up North in Michigan A Portrait of a Place in Four Seasons essays by Jerry Dennis book cover image

Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons
Essays by Jerry Dennis
University of Michigan Press, September 2021

Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain. Up North in Michigan has been selected as a 2022 finalist and is up for gold in the Non-Fiction – Nature Category of the Midwest Book Awards.

New Book :: The Man with Wolves for Hands

The Man with Wolves for Hands, a novella by Juan Eugenio Ramirez book cover image

The Man with Wolves for Hands
Novella by Juan Eugenio Ramirez
Southeast Missouri State University Press, September 2022

With panting, slobbering wolves where his hands should be, The Man with Wolves for Hands builds shelves, attends an HR meeting, gets drunk in a kiddie pool with his friend The Cowboy, and stumbles into a bacchanalian wake, held in a forest clearing, for a deceased soldier. In The Man with Wolves for Hands, Metaphor folds into allegory, folds into psychological exploration, folds into a meditation on trauma and struggle. These vignettes about a man and his lupine hands explore what it means to be compassionate in a world where perception is tenuous and morality fluid. Elements of myth and folklore anachronistically color the narrative creating a story that winds itself through both the present and some distant, primordial past. Winner of the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel.

New Book :: Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine

Big Gorgeous Time Machine by Nick Francis Potter book cover image

Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine
Graphics and Poetry by Nick Francis Potter
Driftwood Press, March 2022

This is a collection of experimental graphic works and comics poetry. It includes more traditionally-minded comics (with a lyrical bent) with abstract and conceptual works, including text-based comics and comics inspired by modernist abstractions. Taken together, the work finds kinship with contemporary avant-cartoonists like Warren Craghead, Aidan Koch, and Simon Moreton, while striking out toward something altogether new. Nick Francis Potter is a writer, cartoonist, and educator who holds an MFA from Brown University and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where he currently teaches writing and theory in the Digital Storytelling Program.

Book Review :: Spit by Daniel Lassell

Spit poetry by Daniel Lassell book cover image

Guest Post by Catherine Hayes

Daniel Lassell’s Spit harnesses the power of language to contemplate whether to embrace one’s own roots or to cast them off in favor of creating a new identity for a new life, and as such influences our sense of belonging. This conflict is one that Lassell grapples with for many years of his life, blending these two identities of past and future together to become “a city boy inside / the body of a country.” Part one recounts “sopping, hazy Kentucky” and when “a chicken costs 35 cents.” The natural world reigns supreme in this setting. The old barn on the land which “season by season… / have held their angle, onto the metal gate / leaned against a post pile for storage, / some form of pillar” soon gives way as “the field outside waits, / watching the barn’s leaning face / disappear” and nature has won against that which man has made. Yet the supremacy of nature does not last for long, nor does Lassell’s life in the country. The second and third parts make the progressive transition from “a hundred acres / into one” and by the final section, Lassell has completely immersed himself in the “concrete slabs” and “crumbling sidewalk squares” of the city. Yet his years on the farm never leave Lassell, for even in the city he recalls “hoisting bales up to a hay wagon” and “not waking during night / to car lights, sirens, hunger” and how, despite having “climbed from being / of dirt, rough fingernails,” his past will always be with him, no matter the distance or passage of time. Lassell’s poignant yet heart-warming story about what defines “home” presents a new meaning to the influence of upbringing and how sometimes home is not a physical place we return to but the memories we cherish that help guide us into the uncertainty of adulthood.

Spit by Daniel Lassell. Michigan State University Press, July 2021.

Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. She has previously published a nonfiction essay in an anthology with Wising Up Press. When she is not reading, writing, or reviewing she can be found exploring Boston, spending time with family and friends and looking for inspiration for her next story in the world around her. 

Magazine Review :: “The Memory of Clay” by Bruce Ballenger

The Sun May 2022 literary magazine cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The May 2022 issue of The Sun is loosely tied together by a focus on food or nourishment, so Bruce Ballenger’s essay, “The Memory of Clay,” initially looks like an outlier, as he focuses on his relationship with his father. He uses the metaphor of clay to guide his essay, as Ballenger’s daughter Julia explains why she works with clay, despite its unwillingness to easily follow the form she sets for it. Ballenger struggles to shape his memories of his father, an alcoholic journalist who was abusive toward their family, into something that helps him understand his father. Ballenger works to mold the story he tells about his father, ranging from the narrative of the wronged son to learning why his father never published the book he had a contract for. The essay ends largely unresolved, as Ballenger isn’t sure what to do with the complicated memories he has, but he returns to something else his daughter has taught him about clay. There are times when it resists taking any shape at all, and so there is nothing to do with it but start again. Ballenger leaves the reader and himself there, knowing that that is what we all have to do.

“The Memory of Clay” by Bruce Bellenger. The Sun, May 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Magazine Stand :: About Place – May 2022

About Place May 2022 online literary magazine cover image

In the Preface to the May 2022 issue of online About Place, Editor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke comments on the theme, “‘Navigations: A Place for Peace,’ the Spring 2022 edition of About Place Journal, and a special extended folio & related blogs encourages space for soulful solace and bold action. In navigating preservation, protection, reclamation and restoration of traditional knowledges for the sake of our planet in peril and all of its living counterparts, we were thrilled to receive works deeply attending to the remarkable nature of living within continual, revived and reclaimed pathways of knowing delivering such careful consideration and indomitable strength – endurance for the long-haul.” The issue features works from some one-hundred contributors in thematic groupings: Flourishing, Pathways, Gratitude, Reckonings, and Factual State / Future State.

New Book :: Walking Uphill at Noon

Walking Uphill at Noon poetry by Jon Kelly Yenser book cover image

Walking Uphill at Noon
Poetry by Jon Kelly Yenser
University of New Mexico Press, March 2022

Walking Uphill at Noon showcases Yenser’s mastery of prosody and love of play. Including free verse as well as established and newly invented forms, Yenser’s collection is organized into four parts that each explore the author’s life and interests: part 1 focuses on neighborhood observations; part 2 delves into travel at home and abroad; part 3 consists of a “walking log” that muses on current events; and part 4 explores magic, mysteries, and sleights of hand. Ultimately, Yenser urges readers to consider that everyday situations can be made extraordinary if they keep their love of play and wonder close to their hearts. Jon Kelly Yenser is also the author of two chapbooks, Walter’s Yard and The Disambiguation of Katydids, and the poetry collection The News as Usual: Poems (UNM Press).

Magazine Stand :: The Main Street Rag – Spring 2022

The Main Street Rag Spring 2022 literary magazine cover image

The newest issue of The Main Street Rag (v27 n 2) starts off with “Painting In, Painting Out: An Interview with Michel Tsouris” by Don Bertschman, and is followed up with fiction by Linda Buckmaster, Robert Garner McBrearty, Skyler Nielsen, Richard Risemberg, Terry Sanville, and Frank Scozzari; poetry by Michel Tsouris, Chris Abbate, Frederick W. Bassett, Stephen Benz, C.D. Bailey, Cindy Buchanan, Brian Builta, J.I.B., Jane-Rebecca Cannarella, John J. Ronan, Margaret Diehl, Irene Fick, Regina YC Garcia, Karen L. George, Alison Stone, Cordelia M. Hanemann, Marci Rae Johnson, Genevieve Fitzgerald, Donald Levering, James Lineberger, Christopher Louvet, Kim Malinowski, Richard Merelman, James Miller, Michael Minassian, Daniel Edward Moore, Benjamin Nash, Rikki Santer, David Sapp, Gordon Taylor, Matthew A. Toll, Tom Wayman, Jeffrey Thompson, Riand chard Widerkehr.

Magazine Stand :: World Literature Today – May 2022

World Literature Today literary magazine cover image

Muses — a special section showcasing writers, artists, and their inspirations, with cover art by Holly Wilson — headlines the May/June 2022 issue of World Literature Today, the 400th issue in the magazine’s 95-year history. Rembrandt, Picasso, Kandinsky, Andrew Wyeth, and David Hockney are among the legends whose visual art inspires the featured writers. Other highlights include poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and fiction from Canada, England, France, Israel, and Russia, as well as a previously unpublished letter by Boris Pasternak. The book review section also features a wealth of new titles from around the world, including new work by Victoria Chang, Louise Glück, and Alain Mabanckou.

Magazine Stand :: Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies 2021

Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies: A Feminist Review Summer Fall 2021 cover image

Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies: A Feminist Review (ISSN 2576-0750) reviews the latest print, video, and digital resources for research and teaching in gender and women’s studies. Recent book reviews have explored such topics as rape culture, the meaning of consent in higher education, African American women’s heritage and migration, trans care, the origins of dangerous ideologies about the Black female body, and the cultural and moral morphology of abortion. New, gender-focused special issues of journals are also highlighted, as are other resources and tools for feminist scholarship. To subscribe to the print edition of RGWS, visit their website for more information.

New Book :: Zero to Ten

Zero to Ten Nursing on the Floor stories by Patricia Taylor book cover image

Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor
Stories by Patricia Taylor
Livingston Press, July 2022

What’s your pain from zero to ten? How fast can you run on the floor, from zero to ten? How soon will you have burnout, from zero to ten? In this collection, Patricia “Tricia” Taylor takes over forty years of nursing experience in four southern states in the U.S. and weaves them into “mostly fictional” stories that move from joy to frustration to devastation. Taylor’s experiences included cancer nursing, hospice, med-surg, pediatrics, newborn nursery, and teaching psychiatric nursing in a nursing program for twenty years. Taylor then returned to med-surg, ER, quality control nursing, and finally psychiatric nursing, until her recent retirement. This collection highlights a career that was usually exhausting, sometimes tragic, frequently infuriating, occasionally funny, and consistently rewarding.

Book Review :: Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas

Bloodwarm poetry by Taylor Byas book cover image

Guest Post by Catherine Hayes 

Taylor Byas’s poetry collection Bloodwarm is an inspiring and modern commentary on what it means to be a Black woman living in a society where “I’m/seen as a threat” simply because of the color of her skin and sheds new light on the strong presence of racism within a variety of situations. The book opens with the inundation of Tweets surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, capturing “rubber bullets / pinging a reporter and her crew as they run for cover” and “a police car plowing into a peaceful crowd” all while “white friends” will promise to “do better” before they “bullet into our inboxes and ask us to hand them the answers” about what they should do or say. From there, Byas examines other aspects of racism and the lack of representation of the Black community in the media by putting into perspective the archetype of the damsel in distress of a superhero film. Byas describes how the women who “look like Kirsten Dunst or Emma Stone” are “dainty enough to be rescued by a white hero” and any type of confrontation between the speaker and a white woman would lead to “there is an African-American woman threatening me” and “call the police.” Byas does not shy away from reflecting the struggles that the Black community faces, and what it means to “have to stand / between / invisible” simply to avoid unjust persecution based on skin color. Yet peace in the racial conflict is difficult to achieve because “this is / the standard / this denial / the / rebellion against / negotiations”. Byas does not shirk from the ugly truth of the impact racism has had on the Black community, and her openness in discussing these topics allows for the possibility to have more honest and fruitful conversations about how to create lasting and truly impactful change in society.

Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas. Variant Literature, July 2021.

Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. She has previously published a nonfiction essay in an anthology with Wising Up Press. When she is not reading, writing, or reviewing she can be found exploring Boston, spending time with family and friends and looking for inspiration for her next story in the world around her.

New Book :: Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful

Lost Hurt or in Transit Beautiful poetry by Rohan Chhetri book cover image

Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful
Poetry by Rohan Chhetri
Platypus Press, June 2022

Selected as the winner of The Kundiman Poetry Prize, Rohan Chhetri’s collection of poetry Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a travelogue of belonging. In parts a separation, a crossing of borders and landscapes, in others the sorrow and depths of home. But ultimately, this is the journey of weary travelers making ghosts of the night. Rohan Chhetri, a writer and translator, is the recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, and his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Revue Europe, AGNI, and New England Review and have been translated into Kurdish, Greek and French.

New Book :: Adult Children Anthology

Adult Children Being One Having One and What Goes In Between anthology book cover image

Adult Children: Being One, Having One & What Goes In-Between
Nonfiction Edited by Heather Tosteson, Charles D. Brockett, Kerry Langan, and Michele Markarian
Wising Up Press, January 2022

What defines adulthood nowadays? Or ever? In particular, when do we see our own children as adults? When they are older than we were at the age we had them? When they have children of their own? Are fully self-supporting? What about the prematurely adult children some of us were or tried to be — where have they gone? And the lost and needy children in us? Are they still active? When our parents are failing, what is an adult-to-adult relationship then? When we have been completely dependent on someone — or fully responsible for them — is full parity ever possible? Desirable? In this Wising Up Anthology, fifty writers explore—with zest, angst, humor, humility, anger, and love—through stories, poems, memoirs, and creative non-fiction, our constantly changing and, hopefully, maturing relationships with those we raised and those who raised us.

Magazine Stand :: THE COMMON – Spring 2022

The Common literary magazine cover image

In 2016, THE COMMON began its relationship with the Arabic literary world when Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker and prominent Jordanian writer Hisham Bustani collaborated to publish a special issue devoted to contemporary Arabic fiction. THE COMMON now publishes annual Arabic portfolios of short fiction and visual art each spring. Palestine authors featured in this issue: Mahmoud Shukair, Samira Azzam, Suhail Matar, Abeer Khshiboon, Sheikha Hussein Helawy, Khaled Al-Jebour, Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud, Izzat Al-Ghazzawi, Ziad Khaddash, and Eyad Barghuthy. These stories are translated from Arabic to English by four celebrated translators: Ranya Abdel Rahman, Nashwa Gowanlock, Nariman Youssef, and Amika Fendi.

Continue reading “Magazine Stand :: THE COMMON – Spring 2022”

Magazine Stand :: Split Rock – Spring 2022

Split Rock Review online literary magazine Spring 2022 issue cover image

Issue 18 (Spring 2022) of Split Rock Review online literary magazine features Poetry (including audio recordings of authors reading works) by Ray Ball, Terry Belew, David M. Brunson, Christopher Buckley, Sarah Carey, Sarah Carleton, Karissa Carmona, Willa Carroll, Mark Caskie, Satya Dash, Scott Davidson, Angie Dribben, DJ Hills, Emily Kerlin, Charlene Langfur, Jed Myers, Sheree La Puma, George Perreault, Kimberly Ann Priest, Kiyoko Reidy, Dara-Lyn Shrager, Sarah Dickenson Snyder, Mistee St. Clair, James R. Swansbrough, Margo Taft Stever, Heather Truett, Connie Wieneke, Amanada Woodard; Nonfiction by Tim Bascom, Kathleen Melin, Art by Dagny Sellorin; Photography by Evan Fisher and Alexandre Nodopaka.

Magazine Stand – Poetry May 2022

Poetry Magazine May 2022 issue cover image

The May 2022 issue of Poetry Magazine begins with Guest Editor Srikanth Eddy’s final Editor’s Note, providing context for the theme “Make It Old,” with “old” being a “comparative measure.” The issue features “old” works in contemporary translations, and this is one time where the online version may rival the print publication. The print issue features English-only versions whereas online, readers can view the original text, the translation, and translators’ notes on their poems. Some works include “an avant-garde Brazilian poem from 1912, a Mayan creation myth, fragments of a pre-Socratic cosmology, the first circle of Dante’s Inferno stripped down to couplets, Medieval rune poems excavated after a fire in the harbor district of Bergen, Norway, a Nahuatl drinking song, a late Tang dynasty love letter, Osage talk, what might e the first Japanese tanka about baby diapers, and many more contributions.”

New Book :: Spooks

Spooks by Stella Wong book cover image

Spooks
Poetry by Stella Wong
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Saturnalia Books Editor Prize, Stella Wong’s debut book of poems playfully subverts and willfully challenges any notions we might have about Asian Americanness and its niceties. While her previous chapbook stunned her admirers and adherents into an almost fawning incredulity, this outing eviscerates. More like getting struck with Chinese stars right between the eyes. TKO with a mean left hook to boot. And if you manage to get back up on your feet again, if your dare dance around in the haunted ring that American poetry is, be certain that this most un-model minority bard will teach you not to ever read the same way again.

Book Review :: The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson

The Ache and the Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In the chapbook The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson, the poet wonders “just what I can seize” while a “homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name / fills up every night.” Welcome to the rodeo of life: a “father plays evangelical AM in the garden… to keep the deer away,” a friend pours gasoline on a “noisy cricket… outside her window” and “the baby arrives but he is dead already.” Humans and animals are “desperate / for life” in towns named “Why” where “none of my questions / were answered: Why / did our son (apple-cheeked, blue-eyed, / four days shy / of due) / have to die?” Wilkinson’s poems explore “hidden bonds” and how not to lose one’s mind when the world is burning. These are poems with “the end of the world” in them. With “much sad truth to say” about “bodies that break, that bear each other, / that hold one another in dark places.” [Readers can download this e-book for free from the publisher’s website link below.]

The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson. Sundress Publications, 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.

Book Review :: April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab

April at the Ruins poetry by Lawrence Raab book cover image

Guest Post by James Scruton

Depending on the reader, the title of Lawrence Raab’s tenth poetry collection, April at the Ruins, might evoke “the cruelest month” of Eliot’s The Waste Land or a postcard from a Henry James character on The Grand Tour. There are glimmers of each here — mixtures of memory and desire as well as travels both real and metaphorical. But more often we find Raab meditating on love and loss (and much besides) with his characteristic sense of gratitude, entire lives suggested by a precise detail or turn of phrase:

… and as they crossed
the street she took his hand,
just as if everything
they hadn’t told each other
had never happened.
(“One of the Ways We Talk to Each Other”)

In “Little Ritual,” stones collected and then forgotten beside a lake become metaphysical emblems, the “zigzags of blue” in a “shiver of quartz” reminding the speaker “that some day everything / I love must be set aside, / or given away, or lost.” Amid the ruin we’ve made or witnessed of this world, Raab nonetheless celebrates an April of the spirit. “Nothing is beyond repair,” he writes. “How can there be a beautiful ending / without many beautiful mistakes?”

April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab. Tupelo Press, 2022.

Reviewre bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Rules (Green Linden Press, 2019). He has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, among other honors.

Podcast :: Literary Citizen from Antioch University MFA Creative Writing Program

Literary Citizen Antioch University MFA Creative Writing Program podcast logo

Literary Citizen is Antioch University’s member-run MFA Creative Writing program podcast that explores the multi-faceted life of a writer in today’s literary community through insightful interviews with authors, editors, agents, and all of the people who help make writing happen. Antioch University’s MFA program is distinctive for its emphasis on literature, community service, and the pursuit of social justice. Featuring widely-published, award-winning faculty in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, young people, and literary translation, their program has distinguished itself through innovative features such as the MFA Field Study, the Art of Translation, and the Post-MFA Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing.

Magazine Stand :: Vita Poetica – Spring 2022

Vita Poetica online literary magazine Spring 2022 issue cover image

In their introduction to the Spring 2022 Vita Poetica Journal online literary magazine, Co-Editor Caroline Langston writes of the multitude of junctures and gaps of uncertainties in our daily lives and in the world around us. “Many of the writings in this edition of Vita Poetica seem calibrated to just this uncertain moment, and how to navigate the uncertainty seems to be the individual’s artistic task—which is then shared and multiplied with others.” Sharing with readers in this newest issue are works of Poetry by Samir Knego, Devon Balwit, Barbara Sabol, Peter Bankson, Libby Kurz, Ken Hines; Nonfiction by Ethan Ashkin Stanton, Heather Morton; Visual Art by Abigail Platter, Hang H. Lee; an Interview with Poet Libby Kurz in conversation with Emily Chambers Sharpe; and a Contemplative Practice – Zen Meditation, a YouTube video with Grace Phong which offers both instruction, insight, and guided practice. Cover Art: from Ophelia’s Baptism by Abigail Platter.

New Book :: The Southernization of America

The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker

The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance
Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker
NewSouth Books, February 2022

In 1974 John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie. Pulitzer Prize-winning University of Southern Alabama Journalist-in-Residence Cynthia Tucker and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator and University of Southern Alabama Writer in Residence Frye Gaillard carry Egerton’s thesis forward in The Southernization of America. They dive deeper, examining the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today, the racial backlash against President Obama, family separation on our southern border, the rise of the Christian right, the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capitol. They find hope in the South too, a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that might ultimately lead the nation on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and democracy under siege.

Magazine Stand :: Cumberland River Review – 11.2

Cumberland River Review online literary journal cover image

Publishing quarterly poetry, fiction, essays, and art online, the newest issue of Cumberland River Review features poetry by Michael Phillips, Anne Whitehouse, Eleanor Lerman, Adina Edelman, Angie Crea O’Neal, Lee Peterson, Michael Carrino, Steven Winn, Margaret Mackinnon, Cindy King, fiction by Allen Stein, and artwork by Michael Azgour. In her poem, “Cooks and Counterweights,” Eleanor Lerman asks, “So where are the adults who said they / would take over? Who were supposed / to face the future because sacrifices were made?” Visit the CRR website to find the answer.

New Book :: O

O by Niki Tulk book cover image

O
Poetry by Niki Tulk
Driftwood Press, July 2022

Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, writer and performance artist Niki Tulk’s O explores the aftermath of sexual assault, unearthing myths, folklore, and profound truths about our collective history of violence, womanhood, and justice. Niki Tulk is an ex-pat Australian and experimental theatre-maker, improviser, writer, poet and author of Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming (Routledge, 2022).

Contest :: June 15 Deadline to Enter 2022 New American Fiction Prize

2022 New American Fiction Prize

New American Press has announced the 2022 New American Fiction Prize with a deadline of June 15. Weike Wang, author of Joan is Okay, will act as final judge. All full-length fiction manuscripts are welcome. Winner receives publication contract including $1,500, 25 copies, and promotional support. View their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.

Where to Submit Round-up: May 6, 2022

Happy May! Hopefully spring is officially in progress where you live and the warmth is creeping back in. If you got too stuffed on tacos during Cinco de Mayo festivities, spend some time editing and submitting your work. Check out the where to submit opportunities featured on NewPages to help build up your submissions calendar.

Plus, get early access to calls and contests by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. As a bonus, you’ll also get our monthly eLitPak filled with all kinds of goodies.

Continue reading “Where to Submit Round-up: May 6, 2022”

New Book :: Plans for Sentences

Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman book cover image

Plans for Sentences
Poetry by Renee Gladman
Wave Books, May 2022

“These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.” So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, readers are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

Book Review :: On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard is a collection of poems “not elegiac” but of “another kind of seeing that involves letting go.” That requires “a dream we hold to,” where “orange and quick” fish are held as “dear / … as headstones,” and a guiding question is: “How to love in the midst of tumult?” These poems are too humble and intelligent to answer conclusively. But slant. From a squad car that runs over a squirrel to a child whacked for dropping ice cream, these poems acknowledge the range of “advent, accident, / celebration” in our lives together where either “we take up arms” — “The war / Is a war we all fight, and is near” — or we open our arms to “our / Life together / Quiet / Aimless / And full.” There is love in these poems. Love of life and others. And, love of language: a “ricocheting” “hallelujah” “Heaven” of sound and meaning unabashedly riots throughout — “What care for shame? In any of this?” Lovingly the poems share with the tender reader “the holy / Moment this moment.” Reading this book, “To be sitting / Here, the two of us”: “It felt good. And sad, of course. But mostly just good.”

On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard. Barrow Street Press, 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.

Books Received May 2022

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.”

Poetry
A Peculiar People, Steven Willis, Button Poetry
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, Lynn Xu, Wave Books
Anthropocene Lullaby, K. A. Hays, Carnegie Mellon University Press
Bassinet, Dan Rosenberg, Carnegie Mellon University Press
Bath, Jen Silverman, Driftwood Press
Behind the Tree Backs, Iman Mohammed, Ugly Duckling Presse
Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine, Nick Francis Potter, Driftwood Press
Copy, Dolores Dorantes, Wave Books
Green Regalia, Adam Tavel, Stephen F. Austen State University Press
Greyhound Americans, Moncho Ollin Alvarado
Harsh Realm: My 1990s, Daniel Nester, Indolent Books
Idle Fancies, Joseph Hart, Cyberwit.net
Indian Poems, Joseph Hart, Kelsay Books

Continue reading “Books Received May 2022”

New Book :: One Person Holds So Much Silence

One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan book cover image

One Person Holds So Much Silence
Poetry by David Greenspan
Driftwood Press, March 2022

Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, Greenspan’s work explores the intersection of physical and emotional traumas and was selected for its “surprising, jaw-dropping language from poem to poem.” Simultaneously lush and bizarre, the poems culminate in a striking deep dive into the pain and experiences of existing within a body. From self-harm to suicidal ideation, Greenspan tackles these topics through writing brimming with original language and wrought empathy. David Greenspan is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst.

Call :: Oyster River Pages Seeks De-Centered & Marginalized Writers

Oyster River Pages logo

This is the last month to submit work to online literary magazine Oyster River Pages for their annual issue. They seek work that stretches both creative and social boundaries and particularly seek to feature artists whose voices have been historically de-centered or marginalized. They also highlight new voices in their Emerging Voices in Poetry and Fiction. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.

Magazine Stand :: Volney Road Review – Spring 2022

Volney Road Review online literary magazine Spring 2022 issue cover image

In the online Volney Road Review Spring 2022, N.P. Stokes announces his stepping down from his role as Editor-in-Chief and passing the torch to Mallory Raider for the continuation of the biannual publication. Stokes writes, “Art comes from many places, inspiration, effort, and, not the least of these, love. In many ways, art is the expression of personal growth, it is tangible fragment insight the artist releases to the world. The communication of this flash of purpose that brings author, artist, and audience together in the shared experience of beauty.” Allowing us to share in this experience of beauty in this newest issue are works of Prose by Dianne Lee Blomberg, Dante DelBene, and Harvey James; Poetry by Amanda Hawk, W. Barrett Munn, Cassandra Lawton, and Michael T. Young; and Drama by Rose O’Keefe.

Magazine Stand :: Club Plum – 3.2

Club Plum Literary Journal cover image

In issue 3.2’s introductory essay, “Claim What is Ours,” Club Plum online literary journal founding editor Thea Swanson writes, “Freedom and democracy are fragile. They are precious, and they shouldn’t be precious. They should be mundane. // Writing and creating, for some of us, is mundane, and for that, we should take pause and treasure our ability to write and to create, to share our words and images, knowing how closely these acts are tied to our freedom, to our democracy.” Sharing in these very acts are the contributors to this issue: flash fiction by David Hartley, Amy Holman, Jen Schneider, and Nora Studholme; prose poetry by Kevin Carey, Larua Goldin, Sophia Holme, and Nicole Flaherty Kimball; and art by Nicola Brayan, Phyllis Green and Sabahat Ali Wani.

New Book :: The Bar at Twilight

The Bar at Twilight stories by Frederic Tuten book cover image

The Bar at Twilight
Stories by Frederic Tuten
Bellevue Literary Press, May 2022

In the fifteen stories contained in this collection, The Bar at Twilight, Frederic Tuten entertains questions of existential magnitude, pervasive yearning, and the creative impulse. A wealthy older woman reflects on her relationship with her drowned husband, a painter, as she awaits her own watery demise. An exhausted artist, feeling stuck, reads a book of criticism about allegory and symbolism before tossing her paintings out the window. Writing a book about the lives of artists he admires — Cezanne, Monet, Rousseau — a man imagines how each vignette could be a life lesson for his wife, the artist he perhaps admires the most. New York-based Frederic Tuten is the author of five novels, the memoir My Young Life, and two short story collections. Among other honors, Tuten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing.

Contest :: Juan Felipe Herrera to Judge 2022 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize

line art red wheelbarrow on white background

Juan Felipe Herrera, former US Poet Laureate and author of numerous poetry collections, is set to act as the judge for the 2022 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Besides receiving a $1,000 cash prize and publication in Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, the winner also receives a letterpress broadside printed by Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.

New Book :: Coining a Wishing Tower

Coining a Wishing Tower poetry by Ayesha Raees book cover image

Coining a Wishing Tower
Poetry by Ayesha Raees
Platypus Press, March 2022

Selected by Kaveh Akbar as winner of the 2020 Broken River Prize, Coining a Wishing Tower by Ayesha Raees is both story and song, a lyrical narrative that gathers and releases. There are moments of childlike wonder and of adult meditation — oftentimes one and the same. In fragments both real and unreal, this is a book of rituals, of history, of surrender. Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Asian American Writers’ Workshop The Margins and has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. From Pakistan, she currently lives between Lahore and New York City.

Magazine Stand :: Hole in the Head re:View – May 2022

Hole in the Head Review online literary magazine May 2022 cover image

Promoted by the editors as their “May Day Issue,” this newest online issue of Hole in the Head re:View features “Tulips, Saturday Night Fever, fat back, Jack Spicer, utopia, a corpse flower, murmurations of starlings, old New Yorkers, bronze and string, sad boomers, some jackass jacked up on coke, a cadaver, beetles, stray mutts, Hugo & Wright, St. Therese of Lisieux, a blizzard book, tickets to heaven, stardust, a declaration of war…and so much more.” Some of the writers include Charles Simic, Stephen Gibson, Gerald Yelle, Meg Pokrass & Jeff Friedman, Seth Leeper, Richard Matta, Ace Boggess, George Perreault, Anny Jones, Martine van Bijlert, Yvonne Zipter, Hannah Marshall, Christopher Paul Brown, and GTimothy Gordon. Hole in the Head re:View also published a special Ukraine issue with their friends at Nine Mile Magazine. Check that out here.

Magazine Stand :: The Greensboro Review – Spring 2022

The Greensboro Review literary magazine cover image

In his introduction to issue 111 of The Greensboro Review, Terry Kennedy writes of how he came to be the editor of this long-standing, esteemed publication under the apprenticeship of former editor Jim Clark. “I believe each great apprenticeship starts with someone believing in a person before that person believes in themselves. . . These days, what I want to do most is read. Discovering that one story, that one poem that really sings is what brings me the most joy, what gives me the most satisfaction. Put another way, I delight in believing in writers who may not yet believe in themselves.” Contributors to this issue in whom Kennedy believes include fiction by Clancy Tripp, Ellen Rhudy, Akshay Shrivastava, Molly Guinn Bradley, Robert Wood Lynn, Kevin McWilliams Coates, Kanza Javed, and poetry by Peter Kent, Nicole Adabunu, Natalia Conte, Emily Cinquemani, Melissa Studdard, Jeremy Halinen, Matt W. Miller, Jed Myers, Julia Edwards, K.R. Segriff, Emily Herring Wilson, L.A. Johnson, and Alyx Chandler.

New Book :: Greyhound Americans

Greyhound Americans by Moncho Ollin Alvarado book cover image

Greyhound Americans
Poetry by Moncho Ollin Alvarado
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, this collection is “dazzlingly queer, inclusive, celestial, with indigenous ancestral heart.” Through his verse, poet Moncho Alvarado confronts a family history of borderland politics by discovering a legacy of violence, grief, trauma, and survival through poems that have an unmistakable spirit, tenderness, intimacy, and humility. These poems’ persistent resilience creates a constellation of songs, food, flowers, family, community, and trans joy, that, by the end, wants you to feel loved, nourished, and wants you to remember to say, “I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.”

Magazine Stand :: Sky Island Journal – Spring 2022

Sky Island Journal Spring 2022 online literary magazine cover image

Sky Island Journal’s stunning 20th issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices from around the globe, including Andrew Cusick, Bracha K. Sharp, Christina H. Felix, David Axelrod, Elaine Fowler, Feiya Zhang, Grant Chemidlin, James Barnes, John Muro, Karen Poppy, Lana Lehpamer, Linda Michel-Cassidy, Lorrie Ness, Maryam Imogen Ghouth, Michelle McMillan-Holifield, Patrick Dawson, R.B. Smith, Robert Rinehart, Samantha Liu, Sarah Normandie, Sera Gamble, William R. Stoddart, and many more. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 100,000 readers in 145 countries already know; the finest new writing is here, at your fingertips.

New Book :: How We Disappear

How We Disappear by Tara Lynn Masih book cover image

How We Disappear
Novella & Stories by Tara Lynn Masih
Press 53, September 2022

In this collection, Masih offers readers transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone – runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium. Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes. Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of numerous other book awards. She is the author of My Real Name is Hanna and editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction.

Book Review :: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel, How High We Go in the Dark, doesn’t have a plot per se, as it reads more like an interconnected collection of short stories than it does a novel. A character’s wife from one chapter will show up in a later chapter as a friend to the girlfriend of another character, a minor characters in one chapter becomes the focus of a later chapter or vice versa. What the characters do have in common is a tenuous existence, as Earth has become less and less habitable. Throughout much of the book, a pandemic is ravaging the world, killing people by mutating their organ cells, causing hearts to behave like livers or brains to change into lungs. Even after that tragedy becomes more controllable, there is still environmental disaster, as wildfires rage constantly, the Arctic is quickly melting, and sea levels rise by feet, not by inches. What Nagamatsu is most interested in exploring, however, is how people avoid one another, even in the midst of suffering, and how they might still be able to connect to one another. Though technology — perhaps even space travel — could save people’s lives, only true connection has a chance of healing their souls.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. William Morrow, 2022,

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press).  He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter at @kevinbrownwrite or http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Magazine Stand :: South Dakota Review – 56.2

South Dakota Review literary magazine cover image

I’m a huge fan of the 9×9 format South Dakota Review and the luxury of poetry that doesn’t have to be font-shrunk to fit the page and the double-column prose. This lovely new installation includes poetry by Brandon Krieg, Hollie Dugas, Laura S. Marshall, Sunni Brown Wilkinson, Samantha Padgett, Lana I. Ghannam, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Annette C. Boehm, Charlie Clark, and Adam Scheffler, essays by Lee Ann Roripaugh, E. J. Meyers, Oakley Ayden, Lori Horvitz, Margaret Erhart, and short stories by Suzy Eynon, Cassandra Woodard, Jenny McBride, and Katie Schmid.

Magazine Stand :: Zone 3 – 36.2

Zone 3 literary magazine cover image

The Fall 2021 issue of Zone 3 just hit the stands, celebrating thirty-five years of continuous publication! Editor Amy Wright opens the volume with a retrospective look at events from the founding year, 1986, and extols, “For our 35th anniversary issue, we are united in our resolve to create a safe space to hear, heed, and uplift BIPOC issues, joys, struggles, and stories. We are invested in equity. As editors, we want the conversations generated by our pages to demonstrate a full range of human experiences and intend to follow this special issue with additional themed issues dedicated to underrepresented voices.” The opening essay, “This is My American Country” by Allen M. Price is intended to “upset assumptions about what America has meant and can mean, because when our concepts, illusions, and projections break down, we see ourselves as we truly are and are becoming.” and can be read on the Zone 3 website.

New Book :: Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual

Plan B a Poet's Survival Manual by Sandy McIntosh book cover image

Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual
Memoir by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press, June 2022

If you’re a poet, how are you going to survive if you can’t get a teaching job? McIntosh offers the answer: You need a Plan B if you want to put food on the table, wear shoes without holes in the soles, and stop living with roommates before you turn sixty. Taking readers through his own experiences in the world of commercial writing and publishing, McIntosh asserts that it is possible to have a successful career as a poet while holding down day jobs that make us better writers. Sandy McIntosh is publisher of Marsh Hawk Press. He has published fifteen collections of poetry and prose as well as three award-winning computer software programs.

Contest :: 2022 Autumn House Prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction

Autumn House Press logo

Deadline: May 31, 2022
The 2022 Autumn House Press Prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction are open! Winners of each prize receive publication of their full-length manuscripts. Each winner also receives a $1,000 honorarium and a $1,500 travel/publicity grant to promote the book. The submission period closes on May 31 (Eastern Time). Please submit online, through our online submission manager. The reading fee is $30 (we will waive the submission fee for those undergoing financial hardship or living with limited means). Submission should be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions permitted. The judges for the 2022 prizes are Carl Phillips (poetry), Venita Blackburn (fiction), and Lia Purpura (nonfiction).

New Book :: Tribar

Tribar by Andra Rotaru book cover image

Tribar
Poetry by Andra Rotaru
Translated by Anca Roncea
Saturnalia Books, March 2022

Winner of the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, translated from Romanian by Anca Roncea, Tribar starts from the geometrical concept of an impossible triangle whose three sides do not connect but still exist in the form of a triangle, creating a direction for movement. Andra Rotaru’s poetic work has developed from some of her encounters with modern dance choreography: her poems simultaneously mimic and track the body in motion. Her “connections” become joints or articulated bones that work together to carry the body along. This translation recreates this embodiment in English by focusing on the minute details of movement and sound in Andra’s language and on the “kinetic air” of Romanian.

Magazine Stand :: Presence – 2022

Presence literary magazine cover image

The Editor’s Statement in the newest issue of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry begins, “An explicit goal of Presence is to publish contemporary poetry that continues the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Church’s long history of recognizing the value of art as a way of leading us to God through its truth, beauty and goodness.” The featured poet in this annual issue is Julia Alvarez, along with featured translations of Juana Rosa Pita’s work translated by Erin Goodman. Over five dozen poets are included in this issue as well as interviews with poet, psychologist, and publisher John Cusack Handler and poet, teacher Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, two dozen poetry book reviews, and a section called “Life’s Work” with essays that focus on Jane Hirshfield (by Vivian I. Bikulege) and Sally Read (by Pat Destito). Cover art: Transmutation, acrylic on ceramic by Beth Shadur. The next submission period for Presence is August 1 – October 1, 2022.