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!
While February is letting us know that it is, indeed, still winter, this makes it a great time to curl up with some new issues of literary magazines, doesn’t it? Don’t know where to start? Check out our updated New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazines received during the month of February.
Each month we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content information for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
The newest issue of december features poetry by Jennifer Atkinson, Tyler Barton, Allisa Cherry, Dante Di Stefano, Jordan Escobar, Scott Frey, Albert Goldbarth, Tami Haaland, Hunter Hodkinson, Catherine Howl, Greg Jensen, Patrick Kindig, Christine Kwon, Winshen Liu, Shannan Mann, Kate Miano, Kylan Rice, Natalie Louise Tombasco, Donna Vorreyer, Laval Williams, John Sibley Williams, and James K. Zimmerman; fiction by Tamas Dobozy, JB Hwang, Erin MacNair, Ed McBride, Sean Theodore Stewart, Stephen Tuttle, and Christine Waresak; nonfiction by Gary Belsky, Chelsea Catherine, and Allen M. Price; and art by Jessica Diamond and Kyle Kogut with cover art by Mary Lou Zelazny, The Poet (2022).
Martyr!, Akbar’s debut novel tells the story of Cyrus Shams, the only son of his mother Roya—who was killed when the United States shot down an Iranian passagener plane in 1988—and his father Ali, who dies shortly after Cyrus leaves for college, as if he has completed his job of raising his son. Cyrus is an alcoholic and an addict; he’s considering killing himself; but he’s also looking for a sign from God, as he is considering being a martyr, whatever that might mean for somebody who doesn’t have faith in anyone or anything beyond him.
The narrative focuses on Cyrus, but Akbar intersperses shorter chapters that follow Roya and Ali when they are younger, helping the reader understand who they were outside of Cyrus’s limited view. There are even a couple of chapters that focus on Arash, Cyrus’s uncle, whose role in the Iran-Iraq war was to ride around at night on horseback, wearing a black robe, portraying the angel Gabriel to convince the dying soldiers that their sacrifice was worthwhile.
Cyrus has a few brief conversations with Orkideh, a performance artist in New York City who is dying of breast cancer, as she sits in the museum, talking with anybody who sits down with her. Cyrus has begun writing a collection of poems about martrys in an attempt to understand them and himself, and he believes Orkideh might be one.
While the story itself is compelling, Akbar draws on his skills as a poet to create images and sentences that will resonate long after readers have finished the novel. While watching Cyrus struggle to find who he is is painful, Akbar’s writing makes the journey well worth the effort.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Alfred A. Knopf, January 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
The February 2024 (7.1) issue of River Heron Review online poetry journal features works by Bethany Bowman, Cheryl Waitkevich, Hayden Saunier, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, K.Lipschutz, John A. Romagna, Shannon K. Winston, Julie Murphy, Kathy Nelson, Autumn Newman, Jen Stein, Tamara Kreutz, Martha Silano, Candice M. Kelsey, Emma Bolden, Darcy Smith, Tom Farr, Jane McKinley, and an interview with Rebecca Brock. Also included in this issue are works by 2023 River Heron Editors’ Prize Winner Amanda Hayden and Finalists Nico Sica, Patricia Wallace, and Emma Wynn.
Travis D. Roberson‘s watercolor and oil on paper Feline at Sunset adorns the cover of issue 38 of Radar Poetry 38, an online journal of poetry and artwork.
Themed “Witness,” this December 2023 issue of Fatal Flaw, an online literary and art magazine, features the work of Bristol UK-based illustrator, designer, and animator Alex Dimond.
Qu contemporary literary magazine from Queens University of Charlotte Winter 2024 features cover art by Thao Stovesand. Available in print with excerpts online, this issue includes “On Agenting” by Fred Leebron in The Writing Life section.
Kiley Reid has said that her second novel, Come & Get It, centers around money; that assertion is undoubtedly true—the novel even ends with a stop at Target. However, like all good novels, this one is about much more than the purported subject.
The reader follows three characters throughout the novel: Agatha, a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas who has also written a book about grief; Kennedy, a transfer student who has come to the university in the hopes of studying with Agatha; and Millie, the Resident Assistant for the dorm where Kennedy is staying.
Every relationship in the novel has the undercurrent of money’s influence, whether that’s Kennedy’s relationship with her suitemates Peyton and Tyler, both of whom believe Kennedy has way too much stuff for a dorm room; or Agatha’s romantic relationship with Robin, a dancer who earns little money; or Agatha’s paying Millie—who hopes to save enough money for a house—to help set up interviews with college students for her research. Class and race also complicate these relationships, not surprisingly when money is involved.
Reid interviewed thirty college students to help create her characters, and her research shows. She’s not condescending toward them, though, no matter how many poor decisions they might make. As in life, the adults are just as likely to make equally bad decisions. Though not a polemic, this novel seems designed to disprove the theory of the rational actor in any situation, economic or otherwise.
Come & Get It by Kiley Reid. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, January 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
49 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! I hope you are ending your week better than I am. We are back with 49 submission opportunities including calls from literary magazines, anthologies, and presses. You will also find writing contests, book prizes, and post-publication awards. Hopefully you can find a new home for your work.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
The February 2024 online open-access issue of Rogue Agent features poetry and artwork that investigates the question: “What is it like to live in the body?” Contributors to the newest issue (with an excerpt from each) include Shloka Shankar (“Lanterns / glow brightly on a summer night, looking / for something you could sing but you don’t.”), Denise Alden (“Imagine quaffing thirteen beers in an evening then popping / up like a daisy the next morning.”), Melanie McCabe (“The tongue abides, sibilant / as ever in its wise tree. I let it beguile.”), Trystan Popish (“on days like this, I do not contain / organs, bones, or veins, / but a body of water, coursing with currents / I can’t control”), Horus Balogh-Zanin (“The first scars on my skin the tiny homes of other living creatures.”), Justin Vicari (“Men sometimes lead two lives. I knew this from an early age.”), Melissa Fite Johnson (“Each year, I decide to forget. Each year, I can’t.”), Xiaoly Li (“It was your thirst / that could not be doused.”), Jeannine Hall Gailey (“Fifty is the year a woman changes from waif to wolf, / from virgin to witch.”), and Michele Sharpe (“My future snaps like a rusted latch / and hasp. I live happily severed after.”). Rogue Agent publishes new content monthly with submissions open year-round.
Absolution, Alice McDermott’s latest novel, is technically an epistolary novel, though it doesn’t read like one. It’s an exchange of only three, long letters between Tricia and Rainey, mainly focusing on Charlene, Rainey’s mother. Tricia and Charlene met in Vietnam as the war was beginning there, both married to men who worked for the American government, but who were not actually part of it or the military. Rainey was a young girl then, but she remembers Tricia and reaches out to her to inform her of the death of a common acquaintance.
Charlene is, as almost everybody describes her, a “dynamo,” always working to try to do good, whether that’s raising money for toys and candy for children in the hospital or visiting a leper colony to provide them with nice clothing. Tricia is much more passive, but Charlene is able to use her shyness as a way to get other women to invest in her ideas, passing them off as Tricia’s.
The novel portrays the women, even Charlene, as hemmed in by their gender, exploring their role in a place where they have no choice but to be, much like the soldiers, but for a very different reason. The main question of the novel, though, is who needs absolution and why: while the obvious answer is the U.S. government and those associated with the horrors of the war, there’s enough unspoken guilt in this world to go around.
Absolution by Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
Marriage 2001: A Bruised Odyssey by J. W Young is a book of poetry & writings which deals with the confines of marriage when defined and marred by subjugation, domestic abuse, and censorship in modern times. It is Young’s first published literary work. Though many of the writings were destroyed, this book contains survivors. The poetic expressions served as a means to cope and endure. Marriage 2001: A Bruised Odyssey is a journey of hope, pain, grief and the difficult pathway to reclaiming a sense of self.
Who doesn’t love getting a postcard in the mail? Especially one with contemporary art and poetry and no pithy guilt about not being somewhere else. Postcard is the brainchild of Editor-in-Chief and Designer David Wojciechowski who was initially interested in making broadsides but fell in love with the smaller, more economical postcard.
“I thought it was a funky idea for a literary magazine to be printed in that form,” Wojciechowski says. “Then I began thinking about the postcards, the poems, being sent through the mail. I loved the idea of people sending a poem to a friend—not just a link to a poem, but a physical object they can tape over their desk or wherever they need it. I also have this image in my head of a mail carrier stopping to read a poem; that image kind of motivated me to keep going with the idea.”
In a Body, Emily Hockaday’s second poetry collection considers a body that “feels / less and less like mine,” and what it might be like to be “outside / of time.” The movement from corporeal to incorporeal suggests trauma and an “interconnected web of pain.” The poems, offered to readers by a mother of a daughter located at the crossroads of a “diagnosis” and “the other side of us,” allude to substance abuse, mental health, chronic pain, breast cancer, and a father’s death.
Given that, it is no wonder that the narrator declares: “I want to be like the Earth, / but I want to be treated better.” Seen via the “micro and macro,” the body of these poems is “compartmentalized” and “becoming”; the body is seen in relation or comparison; the body is seen “after,” “in,” “as,” “at,” “of,” “above,” “before,” “from,” and “through” “momentum” and “metamorphosis.”Poem titles offer the body “Becoming the Owl,” the “Body in the Spring”; “Body Above Water” or “Body as Wood,” etc.
The poet returns to the “Body as Tree” idea several times. When the body is seen as a tree, the mycelia connecting it to other trees is analogous to the “power” that neural pain “wields,” and the network of shared grief over personal and communal loss. Both the narrator’s diagnoses and the death of her father tell us the “body / is ephemeral.”
These poems remind us that we live precariously with “how many batteries / lie below the surface” and our “humanity’s failures.” Survival and recovery depend on “the knowledge that / anything can happen.”
Hockaday’s In a Body “understand[s] what it means / to be” in a “future … never / imagined.”
In a Body by Emily Hockaday. Small Harbor Publishing, October 2023.
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 appear.
The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) offers free weekly online comics workshops on Fridays, each hosted by a professional cartoonist who leads participants through a structured drawing and/or storytelling exercise. The series was originally started by The Believer (‘We Believe in Comics’).
SAW is an online and in-person grassroots, non-profit comics school located in Gainesville, Florida, founded in 2011 by indie cartoonist Tom Hart. “At SAW we help budding cartoonists discover their own path in visual storytelling. Students learn core comics techniques like storytelling, character creation, panel design, storyboarding, inking and lettering.”
Numerous working groups meet via their online SAW Mighty Network Community, and the SAW Certificate Program enrolls every fall for a nine-month intensive instruction in drawing for comics, comic storytelling, comics history, and more. Many SAW graduates from the past ten years have gone on to publish full-length works.
Pénélope Bagieu’s newest memoir collection of comics, Layers, seems to follow the standard course of symbolism in deconstructing a past through layers of memories, some connected experiences, and some seemingly random recalls. However, by the close of the book, I felt more like I had been layered in warm comforting blankets of someone’s past, perhaps with a few snags and worn patches along the way.
Bagieu’s style is disarming in its simplicity. This black-and-white collection focuses each frame on a particular character or character object with very little if any scenery and minimal props. The focus is on narrative details, some of which follow a particular arc, such as the life of a family cat whose bad behaviors the family puts up with like saints, Bagieu’s recounting her involvement with physical activities that stem from a misunderstanding in her youth, and a lifelong battle with heat – as in the utility.
Other stories in the collection center on Bagieu’s experiences with sexual harassment, abuse, and just general crappy behavior, whether directed at her or others. The collection was built upon journal pages from Bagieu’s youth, now rendered in hindsight as an adult, but Bagieu retains the sense of being merely an observer and reporter here for the reader to make their own decisions in response to the image sequences.
Adding to the layering effect of the reading is the fact that each segment is followed by a blank page. Somewhat luxurious, but essential to the reading, as with the closing of each piece, that blank page allows the reader to rest a beat and let the story and its meaning settle in before just plowing ahead to the next. This is especially critical to pieces like the harrowing “Florence,” which are so fast-paced, that an extra page of rest is needed for the reader to allow the weight of the narrative to settle.
The closing stories are of strength and gumption, ending the collection with an adult Bagieu wrapping her youthful self in a blanket in one and meeting up with her grandmother in the afterlife in another. These provide closure to the stories collected here, and upend the trope of dismantling the layers of one’s life, as here, the reader feels more layered into the stories and the experiences they provided.
Wrapped in these memories, the reader’s own now entwined with the author’s, Layers feels as comforting as a life well lived.
Layers: A Memoir by Pénélope Bagieu. First Second :01, October 2023.
Reviewer bio: NewPages.com Editor Denise Hill reviews books based on personal interest.
The verse and prose poems of Tina Carlson’s third collection, A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, give tender attention to the lives of girls and women in history, our communities, in legend, myth, literature, and the poet’s life. Our narrator is a daughter who reckons with her life as a child caught between an agoraphobic father and an irresponsible mother who requires “mother me.” Around the family table, “she is they,” burdened by “the weight of words caught in her parents’ throats.”
The poems center on trauma related to intergenerational abuse along matrilineal lines and what follows “after generations of war” along patrilineal lines, but everyone within these poems has their personal, societal, and existential “battles.” Throughout this collection, the poet endeavors to give voice to the oppressed and that which is “made of scars,” to figure out “what to give up and what to throw away,” and how to “untether the tongue.”
Though tongue tie surgery is performed to improve breastfeeding, it has lasting implications for the children and adults who undergo the quick, effective surgery. Results such as these poems, speaking from their wish “to be unarmored.”
In these poems, there is an alternative to sorrow; there is perseverance.
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 appear.
Changing Skies Creative Nonfiction Journal is accepting submissions for online and print publication. We accept creative nonfiction writing on living through the climate crisis. We also accept forms of art including paint, drawing, photography, and more! Read our latest issues and submission details at our website.
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Deadline: March 10, 2024 About Place Journal‘s next issue invites you to consider and reimagine all things West. Send us your prose, poetry, and visual art that conceives of the West beyond its conventional and colonialized framework to help us decenter traditional subjects and propagandized histories of this region. Learn more and submit here.
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I’m going to let you in on a secret: I have so many ghosts and nowhere to put them.
Map Literary and the MFA program at William Paterson University are thrilled to celebrate the publication of Fiona Lu’s How to Become the God of Small Things. Come celebrate with us! View flyer to learn more.
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Fellowship Application Deadline: February 17, 2024 MVICW’s Virtual Writers Seminars offers four separate weekends this spring. Take a deep dive into your writing with award-winning faculty online. Seminars include fiction, poetry, CNF classes, evening readings, open mics. Weekends can be taken individually or as full series. Fellowships Available: 4 first prizes (winners receive the entire series), 4 second prizes. Fellowship Deadline: February 17th. Register at our website.
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Event Dates: September 10-16, 2024 Join Memoirist/Fiction writer Carolyn Flynn, Fiction writer/Writing Coach Karen Leslie, and #1 songwriter Clay Mills for a 6 day/night immersive writing retreat at Spannocchia, a 12th Century Tuscan tenuta. Generative workshops, time to write, individualized feedback, open mics, wine on the grass terrace, Tuscan food, and a writer’s excursion to Siena. Choose your track: Storyteller, Songwriter or Hybrid. View our flyer and visit our website to learn more. Zoom Q & A: 2/22/24. Register on website.
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Have you ever wished you could attend your own private writing workshop that would teach you exactly what you need to know, at the right pace for you, and provide feedback and guidance in extensive one-on-one sessions? That’s Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. It’s an intensive, personalized, one-on-one online workshop experience combining advanced lectures, expert feedback, and deep mentoring. View our flyer and visit our website to learn more.
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Registration Deadline: May 1, 2024 Event Dates: June 9-13, 2024 A generative and restorative writing immersion in County Kerry, Ireland with Carolyn Dawn Flynn, acclaimed novelist, memoirist and TEDx speaker, and writer and poet extraordinaire Jona Kottler. Let the soul-stirring mountains and wild sea of Ireland’s Ring of Kerry be your inspiration for this generative and restorative retreat for writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Whether you’re writing essays or a book-length memoir, short stories or a novel, poetry or screenplays—or hybrid!—this immersive retreat is designed to help you deepen and refine your work-in-progress, emerging with clarity and vision. Find out more at our website.
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Deadline: February 29, 2024 We want to see your work! Fiction, creative nonfiction up to 1000 words, three poems, and art and photography. Our mission is to explore the edges of things, to find the hidden cracks that let the light shine through. We publish quarterly and are a paying market. Have you got something for us? We can’t wait to see it! Submissions open until the end of the month. View our flyer for more information.
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49 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Another week, another roundup of submission opportunities to enjoy! Our unseasonably warm weather took a nosedive, and we had a mini snowstorm yesterday with some nice strong winds following behind it. So, if your neck of the woods is just as bad or worse, grab a cup of cocoa and hit the ground running with the opportunities below to help hit those submission goals.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. You can view our February 2024 eLitPak here.
Zine Lunch! presented by Sarabande Books is a free weekly online workshop “designed to be a fun and low-stakes way to make time for creativity.” Each one-hour session (12-1PM EST) is hosted by an author or friend of the press who guides participants in a uniquely designed practice. A full archive of over 60 recorded sessions is available on the publisher’s Vimeo page along with video directions on folding a one-page zine.
Each workshop is unique, the presenter offers a concentrated writing and/or imaging practice (such as collage). Not every session actually produces a ‘zine’ booklet. It seems the ‘zine’ concept can also mean a condensed practice in creativity, though some presenters come a bit ‘overprepared’ for the limited time, leaving participants to finish their projects afterward.
There is also an opportunity for attendees to share their work if they would like. It’s a friendly, welcoming workshop; I have attended a live session and have viewed about half of the recordings. The series is run by Natalie Wollenzien, Publishing & Communications Assistant, who is wonderful at introducing the presenter, participating, sharing, helping troubleshoot any tech issues, and continuing to curate a superb lineup for the community.
Steeped in the tannins of Heraclitus’s philosophy and the ecology of the Credit River in Ontario, Canada, Maya Clubine offers readers her chapbook Life Cycle of the Mayfly, a series of poems memorializing her relationship with her grandfather and father through the sport of fly fishing.
The “river bugs” in Clubine’s poems are the mayfly, the poet, and the men in her family from whom she learned how to tie flies and inherited flyfishing accouterments such as the waders both her grandfather and father wore. Via declarative and descriptive sentences, the movement of the poems is “catch” and “release”; their form is a memoir-epistolary hybrid.
As the poet writes her letter to her dying father, “mayflies lead the way like lanterns rising / into the air.” The precarious lifecycles of the people and insects point to Heraclitus’s philosophical declaration that there is nothing permanent except change.
Life Cycle of the Mayfly offers readers a family story; the poet’s and the mayfly’s families are “interwoven webs /.. rivers make.” The movement of the river’s waters, of the people fishing those waters, and of “mayfly wings” are the “fragile movements” of Clubine’s poems, movements that will “leave” their “traces” on your earthly heart, dear reader.
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 appear.
ONLY POEMS. You might think that says it all, but the name is only the beginning of this new online startup that curates a Poet of the Week every Sunday as well as a Poem of the Month for Substack.
ONLY POEMS was founded by Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor as a way to honor the literary community they are both an integral part of – “the true fire of which,” Mann states, “is stoked by lit mags. Both Karan and I are writers who submit a lot. We wanted to give back in some way, to create a unique platform for poetry, which is an ecosystem we are most familiar with.”
The unique platform of ONLY POEMS includes a Poet of the Week series which shines the spotlight on a poet’s oeuvre of work (“or a small beautiful sample of it”) by publishing 3-10 poems by the same poet. “ONLY POEMS also features a detailed interview with the poet,” Mann explains, “which includes conversations around their work, the poetry world at large, and anything else a life of letters might conjure for them.
By mid-2023, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 110 million people worldwide had been displaced by political turmoil, war, economic instability, or ethnic or gender-based discrimination. But the numbers tell just part of this harrowing story.
Journalist Selin Bucak’s first book, The Last Day Before Exile: Stories of Resistance, Displacement and Finding Home, zeroes in on the social trauma that typically ensues for asylum-seekers and refugees and makes clear that it is not only adults who suffer. As the World Health Organization confirms, migrant children often experience poverty, disturbed schooling, and racism in their new homelands, experiences that can lead to lifelong emotional difficulties.
“There are a lot of statistics about asylum seekers and refugees and it is depressingly easy to ignore the individuals behind the numbers,” Bucak writes. By introducing eight people who fled Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, she hopes to change that.
While their stories are not representative–all of her interviewees were granted asylum–they nonetheless provide a nuanced introduction to the dangers facing political activists, LGBTQIA+ people, feminists, and select ethnic groups by anti-democratic governments. Lastly, although the book sidesteps the issues facing migrants at the US-Mexico border, perhaps this will be fodder for a future volume.
The book is now available in the United States with free shipping through April 12 of this year.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
So many lit mags, so little time! Save time and energy by checking out the January 2024 New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!
Each month we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content information for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
A journal dedicated to the arts from Fairmont State University, this newest issue (#50) of Kestrel features In the Garden of Grace and Chaos, photography by Jj D’Onofrio, on the cover.
Published by the University of Findlay, the 2023 issue of Slippery Elm Literary Journal cover features lush and mesmerizing photography by Don Patty.
lazy dork working (from the series “Confinement”) a 2020 acrylic painting by Émilie Gleason is a humorous cover invitation for readers to enjoy the Spring 2024 issue of Epoch, edited by students and faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, in Cornell University’s Department of Literatures in English.
In Sarah Rosenthal’s chapbook, We Could Hang a Radical Panel of Light, the reader is offered the opportunity to view the manual labor behind making cut-up and collaged poems from a dream journal. Black text on a white background affixed to a gray page creates little rectangular light boxes, illuminating the poet’s tactile and associative compositional process.
The composition itself is lyric and elegiac. At its center is a “self / positioning,” figuring out “how to / squeeze into language.” This “implies trauma.” The reader is addressed directly by “Estelle meaning star,” though others or other aspects of Estelle— “I” and “she”— contribute to the conversation from “broken down / years.”
Foremost here seems to be a “child… / en route to woman,” experiencing “a pain that stretches the length of a body” or “one hundred fifty / … years.” The spare, pressured composition matches well with concerns about female identity and pain.
The composition emits a quality of the embodied and disembodied; though words have been affixed to pages and fixed in space, meaning and definitions are in transit. For Estelle, “who dots the sky,” we are her observers. We witness how “night’s / middle daughter / disperses” and is given “a new name.”
To read Rosenthal’s chapbook-length poem is to remind us that “the / dreams we have / [are] divining rods.”
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 appear.
We succeeded in making it through January! How are those New Year’s Resolutions holding out? Well, if reading more was one of them – great news!
With the end of the month comes our update of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
The title of Evans’ most recent novel seemingly relates to the house that Alice—the mother to the three daughters whose lives make up most of the novel—wants to build in Benin so she can live out her remaining days in her home country. Then there’s the pun on house, as in the word for a family line. Given the focus on Alice’s daughters, especially Carol and Melissa, that title would also make sense.
However, Evans wants readers to think of house even more broadly, as most of the characters are searching for a home of some sort, whether that’s in their marriage or within themselves or in their country, especially given the UK’s colonial past. That past comes to the forefront early in the novel, as Alice’s estranged husband Cornelius dies in a fire at his house on the same day of the Grenfell Tower fire.
The Pitt family’s mourning of their father and husband is complicated by the abusive relationship he had with all of them—emotional, physical, or sexual, depending on the wife or daughter. Similarly, the Grenfell Tower reveals how the UK has treated those who seek a better life there, whether the working class, the poor, or immigrants, serving as a metaphor for a country who says they care for such people, but then abuse and exploit them.
As with those who suffered from the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the members of the Pitt family have only each other to rely on to create a home.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
48 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
If you are out at AWP, we hope you are having a fun and informative time and getting lots of swag. If you weren’t able to attend, we have plenty of submission opportunities to keep you busy in our second weekly roundup for February 2024. Let’s all try to keep our submission goals going strong this year.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our next eLitPak will be hitting inboxes next Wednesday.
The February 2024 issue of The Lake is now online featuring Bharti Bansal, Mark Belair, Frances Boyle, Bob Bradshaw, Lynn Hoggard, Laura Celise Lippman, Niall Machin, Beth McDonough, Ruby Hansen Murray, Michael Salcman, Alison Stone, Stephen Wing. The Lake also includes reviews of poetry collections, this month taking a look at Pippa Little’s Time Begins to Hurt, Dorothy Wall’s Catalogue of Surprises, and Maurice Manning’s Snakedoctor. “One Poem Review” offers poets the opportunity to share a poem from a recently published book, with Melanie Hyo-In Han giving readers a sample with “My Dear Yeast.”
Salamander Issue #57 features the winners of the 2023 Fiction Contest, selected by Kirstin Valdez Quade: “Come Tomorrow” by Nina Sudhakar and “Americanos” by A.J. Rodriguez. Stories from Kasia Merrill, Ashlee Lhamon, Sue McMillan, and Steph Grossman are haunting and suspenseful; Creative Nonfiction from Andrea Gregory, Laura McPherson, and Julie Marie Wade explores disability, loss, and sexuality. Issue 57 features an art portfolio by Shane Allison and a wide range of poetry from Ginny Threefoot, Anna Laura Reeve, Beth Oast Williams, Javier Sandoval, Darren C. Demaree, Tola Sylvan, Joan Kwon Glass, Maryam Ghafoor, and Rita Mookerjee, among many others.
June and Athena both attended Yale and majored in writing; they even both began publishing short stories, then a novel for each of them. At that point, though, their careers took decidedly different paths. June’s novel ended up with a small press that folded, while Athena’s novel was the first step in a literary career that led to a deal with Netflix. Unfortunately, on the night when she and June are celebrating that deal, Athena dies.
The bulk of Yellowface proceeds from that point, as June steals a typed manuscript Athena has written and passes it off as her own, even going by her full first and middle name—Juniper Song—to make it less clear that she has no Asian heritage. Kuang’s novel raises questions about cancel culture, social media, the publishing world, and who gets to tell which stories (who controls narratives, in general).
While June is not a likable narrator, Kuang works hard not to stereotype her, especially when talking about June’s experiences in the publishing industry. June is not treated all that well when she’s a no-name novelist, and Kuang doesn’t hold back from criticizing the insularity of the industry.
However, what drives the novel is the sharp-edged satire of June’s belief that she’s entitled to publish this novel and deserves all the celebration that comes with it. Readers should see June’s obliviousness to her privilege; what matters, though, is if they can see their own in her.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. William Morrow, May 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
The winter 2023/24 issue of The Writing Disorder features all-new fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art. Is it possible to read 100 books in a year? Visit The Writing Disorder online and read CL Glanzing’s article and find out.
While you’re there, check out these new works of fiction by talented authors: “The Angels Are Leaving, The Angels Are Leaving” by Gaurav Bhalla; “Embarrassment upon Humiliation upon Mortification in My Intern Year” by Christine Benton Criswell; “Nothing Better to Do” by Tom Eubanks; “Dad Stuff” by Toni Kochensparger; “Self Portrait by the Thing Within” by Clayton McMIllan; “The Longer View” by Patrick Parks; “Puppy” by Ruth Rotkowkitz; and “Doomsday” by Anastasia White.
Poets featured in this issue include Duane Anderson, Lawrence Bridges, Annette Gagliardi, Elizabeth Morse, Frederick Pollack, Charlotte Suttee, and Michal Zielinski.
Nonfiction lovers, in addition to Glanzing’s article, can enjoy “Tangled by Blood: Book Review” by Lisa C. Peterson; “Some Peace” by Rita Plush; and “Proper Posture” by Angela Townsend. And finally, our featured artist is Kevin Nance, whose winter-themed photographs are breathtaking.
In this second novel by Mathis, the three main characters — Dutchess, Ava, and Toussaint — are each unsettled in some significant way. Dutchess spends her nights wandering through the woods of Bonaparte, Alabama, a fictional town created by African Americans after the end of slavery, where she often encounters the ghosts of those who have come before, another group of unsettled people.
Ava left that town and hasn’t returned, moving around the country before settling into an unhappy marriage in New Jersey that she leaves at the beginning of the novel, ending up in Philadelphia. She begins by having to move into a homeless shelter, then into 248 Ephraim Avenue, a house for the Ark, a place reminiscent of the homes the Black Panthers created in the 1960s. (One should also note that 248 is twice 124, the house in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Mathis explores trauma in her own way.) Ava’s son Toussaint has had to follow her, but, once they land in the shelter, he begins skipping school and roaming around Philadelphia.
While the bulk of the plot focuses on Ava and Toussaint’s attempts to find some sort of stability and meaning, with forays into Dutchess’s attempts to keep the town of Bonaparte from completely disappearing, what undergirds the novel are the systems that have oppressed and continue to oppress African Americans, especially relating to land and property. In the same way that the characters struggle to find a place that is truly their own, Mathis shows how systemic racism and white supremacy have denied African Americans a home in this country.
The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is a new venture focusing on – you guessed it – reviews of poetry chapbooks – but also quite a bit more. Readers of the site can expect to find short book reviews, long-form single-book reviews, long-form multi-book essays, craft essays on poetry and chapbooks, interview-driven author features, and weekly updates of poetry books.
Publishing six online issues each year, Editor Aiden Hunt prefers to “keep the publication lively and flexible,” so new content is released on a weekly, rolling schedule.
The Missouri Review Winter 2023 (46.4) is themed “Family Affairs.” Inside, readers will find work from the winners of the 2023 Perkoff Prize, new fiction from Elisa Faison, Robert Long Foreman, Stef Pixner, and Amanda Rea; new poetry from Virginia Konchan and Christine Marshall; and new nonfiction from Adam Boggon. Also: features on Robert Henri and Eva Tanguay; an omnibus review of four memoirs of parents from Cynthia Miller Coffel, and Michael Piafsky’s interview with Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, named one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker, Washington Post, Atlantic, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and Lithub.
In Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, Dimitris Xygalatas brings a wealth of research about rituals, both from the laboratory and the field, but also a depth of passion and interest in a subject that doesn’t get as much study as it does reflection. He is honestly looking for an answer to the question his subtitle implies, as he understands that rituals don’t provide any practical meaning to our lives, but we seem unable to live without them.
Xygalatas delves into how rituals provide order to people’s lives and how they help people bond. He explores how non-religious rituals help people connect with something beyond themselves and why people are willing to sacrifice their time, their money, and even their bodies for such acts. He illustrates how rituals help one’s mental and physical well-being, even when there’s intense suffering involved.
Near the end of the book, which he wrote during the beginning of the Covid pandemic, he shows how even minor rituals are important enough for people to try to recreate, such as drive-by birthday parties and graduations, and how rituals must be flexible to continue providing meaning as our world changes. He differentiates between ritual and habit, revealing how we all need a source of purpose in our lives, whether religious or secular, and how rituals that don’t make much sense to those outside of a tradition help us find that purpose that encourages us to keep living and growing.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
48 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday and happy February. The temperature yo-yo is back in full swing. There comes a time when you just want Mother Nature to make up her mind and stick with one…hopefully NOT the arctic cold, but she is a very fickle woman. Grab a cup of something warm like coffee, unless you are like me and have to forgo all acidic foods and beverages for the foreseeable future, and get ready to dive into our first weekly roundup of submission opportunities for February 2024…perhaps after a walk if your weather isn’t awful.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our next eLitPak will be hitting inboxes right after AWP.
The Main Street Rag Winter 2024features an interview with poet Anne M. Kaylor by Kim Blum-Hyclak, followed by “Stories & Such” by Mark Brazaitis, Jan English Leary, John Mauk, Randy F. Nelson, Jessi Waugh, and a hefty selection of poetry by Anne M. Kaylor, Johnny Cordova, Chris Dahl, Adam Day, Richard Band, Morrow Dowdle, Gary Fincke, Bonnie Stanard, Chapman Hood Frazier, Tony Gloeggler, Diane Gottlieb, Alessio Zanelli, Dennis Herrell, Michael P. Hill, Dana Kinsey, Tom Laichas, Linda Lerner, Donald Levering, George Longenecker, Daniel Edward Moore, John Nizalowski, Hayden Nielander, Beth Paulson, Alexandria Peary, Scott Owens, Jason Ryberg, Richard Rubin, T. Parker Sanborn, William Snyder, George Staley, Rob Vance, Jessi Waugh, Frederick Wilbur, Dede Wilson, and Erin Wilson.
The MacGuffin Fall 2023 (vol. 39.2) issue welcomes a familiar name to the masthead’s editor slot: Brett M. Griffiths. Readers will remember Brett as a Poetry Staffer, and this issue’s diverse poetry selections should give a sense of this, from Angie Macri’s elegiac “The rain suddenly silver over the diamond,” to Rebecca Foust’s trio of Orwellian poems to, MacGuffin fan-favorite Joey Lew’s contemplative closing poem, “Holding Pattern.” The opening and closing stories follow the magazine’s recent bend toward narrative experimentation, with J. Grace’s Brautigan-esque “My Father Was a Serious Man” and the deconstructed narrative of Chris Wiberg’s “Multilateration” serving as prime examples.
Blue Collar Review editor’s note opens the Fall 2023 publication: “This issue emerges in maddening times. As I write this, the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, triggered by a brutal uprising of oppressed desperation, continues in Gaza as well as in the occupied West Bank with avid support and weapons supplied by our country’s leaders. [. . . ]
“Some poems in this issue struggle with whether our protests and resistance even matter in the face of overwhelming odds and the stubbornly deaf power of the corrupt monstrosity of our seemingly insane ruling class. They affirm, based in our own working class history, as well as continuing labor victories, that it absolutely does matter; that we lose when we give in to hopelessness, cynicism or the cultivated division that isolates and disempowers us. Given the impending climate catastrophe, the danger of growing wars and of nuclear war that threatens our existence, we, like Palestinians, have no choice but to struggle for our own survival against the same entrenched, corporate militarized power. [. . . ]
“We remain grateful for your support, for the strong words and poetry sent and to be able to continue publishing in spite of rising prices and postal rates. As a poem by Cathy Porter notes, ‘Poetry can’t solve a damn thing / but readers can / And we must.'”
Sunday Forrester, the narrator of Lloyd-Barlow’s Booker-longlisted novel All the Little Bird-Hearts, is different than her family and friends. She prefers to eat white food only; she isn’t concerned about how she dresses; and her internal monologue makes it clear that she struggles in social situations. Though she never explicitly says she’s autistic, Lloyd-Barlow’s biography explains that she has “extensive personal, professional, and academic experience relating to autism,” and the publisher’s page pronounces the book to be “a remarkable debut by an author who is herself autistic.”
Despite her struggles, though, Sunday is quite happy with her life, both with her work at her ex-husband’s family’s greenhouse and her life with her daughter from that marriage, Dolly. Her life, in fact, seems to get better when Vita and Rollo move into the house beside hers, renting it for at least the summer, perhaps longer. Vita, especially, brings excitement and color to Sunday’s life, as Vita seems the opposite of Sunday in every aspect, yet she seems enamored by her new neighbor.
Vita and Rollo begin taking Sunday, then Dolly, into their life on a more regular basis. However, Vita and Rollo bring a wider world into Dolly’s small-town life, often taking her to London and showing her what a life away from her mother could look like. They use Sunday’s differences to create conflict, heightened by the difference in wealth and class, leading to a difficult ending for all involved.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 27th issue (Winter 2024) 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. 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 150,000 readers in 150 countries, and over 800 contributors in 50 countries, already know: the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
David Lipsky’s 2023 summer release, The Parrot and the Igloo, is a non-fiction work that focuses on climate change, but even more provocatively, the growing denial of its existence and the mammoth topic of potential human extinction.
Lipsky explains why climate change is so contentious using trendy narrative non-fiction techniques (think Capote or Mailer) to give insight into not only Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla’s scientific minds, but their personal idiosyncrasies as well. These insights allow casual readers to digest a convoluted and complicated topic: climate change and the subsequent denial of it.
Lipsky’s portrayal of a doom and gloom scenario reads like a comic entertainment of a who’s who in the field of science. Rife with current pop culture references from Disney’s Frozen to equating the severity of an ozone hole to a Christopher Nolan special effect, Lipsky makes reading about a potentially pending apocalypse fun. Wait… Is that possible? Unequivocally, yes.
Lipsky garnered much of his fame writing about the much more famous David Foster Wallace in his quasi memoir, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. But with the emergence of this Pynchonesque tragicomedy of world population proportions, Lipsky firmly stands on his own.
Reviewer Bio: Nicholas Agelis is an unpublished high school English teacher and basketball coach in North Jersey, and is currently an MFA student at William Paterson University.
Winner of the 2023 The Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award, Fiona Lu’s debut chapbook, How to Become the God of Small Things, is a layered introspection on survival and mourning.Lu offers a glimpse into the irreplaceable and delicate nature of life on a personal level, as discussed in “Elegy” and “Misstep.” On the other hand, she plays devil’s advocate by painting the insignificance of one’s life in the grander schemes of the world in poems such as “Loneliness” and “Poem Made Entirely of Gardens.”
In addition, Lu’s poetry collection displays a great deal of hand imagery to convey the God-like power and control that lie in one’s hands, “he / stuck his hand into a fishtank and squeezed,” as well as the kindness and humanity capable from the same hands, “the way he always claps his hands in apology / before he feasts,” as demonstrated in “Hunting.”
Lu’s quiet resilience commands each page or world of hers, unafraid of experimenting with different forms and rhythms. Evidently, she has given much thought to the artistic composition of her pieces, since many are worthy of the cork/bulletin board treatment.
Overall, How to Become the God of Small Things delivers startling reality checks on mortality, leaving readers to ponder its visceral imagery in moments of stillness.
How to Become the God of Small Things by Fiona Lu. October 2023
Reviewer Bio: Debbie Pierre is working towards an MFA in Creative & Professional Writing from William Paterson University. She is the recipient of Bloomfield College’s Joyce Carol Oates Award in Creative Writing in 2022. As an up-and-coming poet, her poems have appeared in BC Underground. She loves the macabre, the arts, and cheesy jokes.
