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!
In A Short History of Presidential Election Crises (City Lights Publishing), Constitutional scholar Alan Hirsch addresses these issues with urgency and precision. He presents a concise history of presidential elections that resulted in crises and advocates clear, common-sense solutions, including abolishing the Electoral College and the creation of a permanent, non-partisan Presidential Election Review Board to prevent or remedy future crises.
Literary magazine The Massachusetts Review is kicking off the new decade with a special issue, the first of its kind for them. They seek new Native-authored fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for their first-ever issue with a Native focus.
Scheduled for publication in December 2020 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the Plymouth Landing, guest editors include Tacey Atsitty (Amenorrhea), Laura Furlan (Indigenous Cities: Urban Indian Fiction and the Histories of Relocation), and Toni Jensen (From the Hilltop). Send queries and submissions for this special issue to [email protected].
MR, celebrating 60 years of publication, is a journal committed to social justice and equality and regularly publishes poetry, fiction, artwork, and essays. Check out their current call for submissions as well as their website to learn more about them.
The Fall 2019 Issue of The Main Street Rag includes an interview with Cathryn Cofell. The interview touches upon career, inspiration, and the Cofell’s submission process.
Cofell was named the winner of the 2019 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award and readers can also find three of her poems in this issue: “Rush Hour,” “What I Learned from My Father,” and “Resignation Notice.”
Stick Figure with Skirt, the winning book, was released in November 2019 and is available at the Main Street Rag bookstore. Readers can also find additional sample poems from the book at the store.
Guest Post by Kimberly Ann Priest
“Are we only bone, skin, and urge?” asks the speaker in The Great Square That Has No Corners. I am beginning to wonder if the answer to that question is affirmative. Yes. As I write this, I am sitting in my living room on a Tuesday afternoon in October, mid-way through another semester teaching, and realizing that, this autumn, I have over-committed myself . . . again.
As projects begin to pile up and my network grows, while responsibilities increase and my own poetry demands that I give it more of my attention, I have to let some things go. After four years reading and writing about new works by various authors and publishers, this will be my last review for NewPages. It’s time, once again, to listen to my body and check my urges. And, how fitting that I should end my review history with a review of a collaborative manuscript by three clearly very talented women who have written an elegant collection of poems on assaulted womanhood—a topic that continually shows up in my own work. Drawing from mythology, Tina Carlson, Stella Reed, and Katherine Dibella Seluja have woven a modern (though not modernized) conversation between Helen, Leda, and Lilith, and they have done so with such precision, such tastefulness, such raw beauty. Continue reading “‘We Are Meant to Carry Water’ by Carlson, Reed, and Dibella Seluja”
Guest Post by Andrew Romriell
Ocean Vuong’s collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, is a masterpiece that illustrates the most vital and sincere hardships of humanity in astonishingly few words. Leaping from free-verse to prose poetry, from stringent format to broken syntax, Vuong fashions here a collection of inclusion.
We open on “Threshold,” a poem where Vuong introduces his themes of body, parenthood, sexuality, and history. He warns us from the very beginning that “the cost of entering a song—was to lose your way back.” Vuong asks us to enter into his words and lose ourselves there. And we do, poem after poem, until we close on Vuong’s book with the penultimate piece, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” In this poem, we read an assumed message from Vuong to Vuong where he tells himself “don’t be afraid,” and to “get up,” and that the most beautiful part of his body “is where it’s headed.” Before this, we’ve read pages of poetry full of pain, fear, and shattering, but here, Vuong embraces himself—and us alongside him.
“Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” like all the poems in Night Sky with Exit Wounds, rings with pain, wonder, regret, and history. Yet, there is also hope here, and I would say this is the theme of Vuong’s work: hope, inclusion, and change. Vuong takes us through a journey, shatters our expectations, holds our hearts, tells us to get up, and that, like him, we can survive the voyage.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. Copper Canyon Press, April 2016.
About the reviewer: Andrew Romriell is a creative writing student at Utah State University.
The featured fiction piece in the Fall 2019 issue of Colorado Review is the winner of this year’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction: Bryna Cofrin-Shaw’s “Loss and Damage.”
Joan Silber selected the winner, and says of her selection: “How many writers could turn a conference on climate change into a very smart tale of sexual intrigue? It has ideas (all too rare in fiction), irony so good it’s unexpected, and great characters.”
Pick up a copy of the latest issue of Colorado Review to take in this story and the rest of the quality work inside the issue, or check out the winning piece online.
We have exciting news for flash fiction writers. Beginning this year, quarterly Brilliant Flash Fiction is a paying market. Writers will now receive $20 via PayPal upon publication. Submissions are rolling, so go send your best flash their way now!
From NPR Music Deceptive Cadence. These important adoptions and adaptations of Beethoven’s Ninth inspired me to create a new project, “All Together: A Global Ode to Joy,” marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020.
The fact that this unique composition has inspired the imagination, hopes and aspirations of so many people from such diverse backgrounds led me to imagine a 21st-century rendering of the symphony – one that could bring to life the journey of the entire piece and capture the essence of the specific community where it is performed.
Lynda Barry’s Making Comics is a how-to graphic novel guide for people who gave up on drawing. Lynda Barry says that everybody has an innate ability to draw, which most people abandon in their youth; comics are gestures of the human hand, and the act of writing is likened to the art of drawing. Making Comics explores the process of expanding the life of drawings, and fusing symbols for character building. A term is introduced for reimagining the happenings of one’s life: autobifictiontionalography.
Great interview with Lynda Barry by Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm KCRW.
More here: Lynda Barry’s New Book Offers a Master Class in Making Comics
Guest Post by Adrian Thomson
Adam Vines’s Out of Speech, a poetry collection comprised of ekphrastic poetry based upon famous paintings as well as personal experience, draws on Vines’s travels from southernmost Argentina to the Louvre. Each poem begins by naming the art piece it takes as a subject, then moves toward unpacking their visual elements often through fascinating uses of enjambment.
More than just describing the artwork, Vines peels away surfaces to encounter shavings of shocking humanity lying beneath. In “My View From Here,” a poem responding to Yves Tanguy’s Les Vues, Vines sees an abstract red vista of segmented alien pillars the cancer polyps hidden in a barstool acquaintance he meets by chance outside the gallery. “Holes and Folds,” based on the group portrait The Swing by Jean Honoré Fragonard, finds a narrator focused on the most innocent of the lounging young men in order to question his objectives as a hand slides up a woman’s dress.
Vines’s visual inspection of minutiae leaves his reader questioning the subjects presented in the paintings. Will the awoken businessman in Hopper’s Excursion Into Philosophy leave before his lover stirs? What has made his countenance so dour? What of the open book forgotten on the bed? Is his shoe slipping into, or out of the light? The reader feels unsure even after turning away, and Vines leaves them contemplating in silence.
Out of Speech by Adam Vines. LSU Press, March 2018.
About the reviewer: Adrian Thomson is a creative writing student at Utah State University.
In the beginning was beer. Well, not quite at the beginning: there was no beer at the Big Bang. Curiously, though, as Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall point out in A Natural History of Beer, the main components of beer—ethanol and water—are found in the vast clouds swirling around the center of the Milky Way in sufficient quantity to produce 100 octillion liters of the stuff…
In America, where there was no such tradition, the movement was more heterogenous. It has found its public, though: by now there are 5,000 craft brewers in the United States producing 20,000 brands of beer. It is one of the bright spots in America’s otherwise dismal recent history.
december‘s Fall/Winter 2019 issue features the winners and honorable mentions of the 2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Fiction and Nonfiction.
This year’s Award in Fiction was judged by Rita Mae Brown, and the Award in Nonfiction was judged by Amy Chua. Contest Editor Lauren Lederman introduces the winners, and readers can find a full list of finalists inside the issue.
2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Fiction
First Place
“The Land Behind the Fog” by Andrea Eberly
Honorable Mention
“The Augmentation Dilemma” by TN Eyer
2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Nonfiction
First Place
“Gumdrop Electric” by Sarah Treschl
Honorable Mention
“The One Who Didn’t Stay” by Samantha Rogers
Valley Voices brings readers a special edition on ekphrastic poetry with the Fall 2019 issue. Fifty-seven poems by forty-two poets follow the theme, and John J. Han pens the essay: “A Verbal Response to Visual Art: The popularity, Types, and Composition of Ekphrastic Poetry.”
Opening the issue is a sort of call and response between husband and wife duo Leo Touchet and Elizabeth Burk in “Louisiana: A Duet of Photographs and Poems.” Touchet’s photographs serve as inspiration for Burk’s poetry. After the selection, the two speak with Editor John Zheng about their work, both as individuals and as a creative pair.
Zheng introduces the issue with, “[ . . . ] ekphrastic expressions are not simple interpretations; they are, instead, reinterpretations that experiment with imagination, language, and synesthesia in the creative process of writing poetry.” Check out the creative experimentations in the Fall 2019 issue and let it inspire you to experiment with your own ekphrastic work.
Kate Manne, associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, has won the 2019 Book Prize from the American Philosophical Association (APA) for her Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.
In Down Girl, Kate Manne calls attention to an underappreciated question in the literature: how should we understand misogyny? She advances a new account of it to make sense of some of the most fundamental issues in feminist thought and political philosophy.
Learn a little more about current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo in the latest issue of World Literature Today. In addition to a featured poem by Harjo, “Bless This Land,” there is also a mini, three-question interview with the poet.
Harjo answers the questions:
What recent book has captured your interest?
What outside the realm of literature has drawn your attention of late?
What current writing projects do you have underway or have planned in the near future?
The interview is brief but informative and gives readers jumping off points for what to pick up next.
Plume has hit quite a milestone this month. Their December 2019 issue is their 100th publication. As usual, they bring readers a fine selection of poems (some with audio recordings), a smattering of book reviews, and one essay. However, they stray from their usual format with their featured selection. While readers will normally find one poet interviewed with a selection of their poetry in this section, this month the staff has chosen to feature favorites selected from the past 100 issues.
These selections include: Rasha Abdulhadi (Issue 88), Angie Estes (Issue 46), Stephen Dobyns (Plume Anthology Number 7), Amy Beeder (Issue 67), Tom Sleigh (Issue 17), Justyna Bargielska translated from Polish by Benjamin Paloff (Issue 77), and Stephen Dunn (Issue 2).
If readers are feeling especially ambitious, they can find their own favorite poem among the full archive of all these past issues.
2020 PEN America literary awards longlists will confer over $330,000 to writers and translators whose exceptional literary works were published in 2019. Spanning fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, essay, science writing, translation, and more, these longlisted books are dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence.
Greta Thunberg, the soft-spoken Swedish teenager who became a global conscience for climate change and environmental activism, has been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019.
Sometimes our best is not good enough. We make mistakes. The most painful ones are those that harm a loved one. Stress and grief leave us in agony, and we play our choice repeatedly wondering if we made the right decision. We cannot let ourselves off the hook either merely because we are human.
In Joan Schweighardt’s Gifts for the Dead, Irishman Jack Hopper arrives home barely alive and without his brother. What could he have done differently? Guilt-ridden, he needs time to sort through the events in South America’s jungle. In the meantime, his mother and his brother’s sweetheart, Nora, nurse him back to health. They wait patiently to learn specifics of Bax, Jack’s brother. To make matters worse, Nora eased Jack’s pain and he liked it. He had always secretly cared for her more than he should have. As time passes and Jack heals, and the two grow closer until they take a trip to South America where Nora then learns the truth.
Schweighardt is masterful at historical fiction and Gifts for the Dead is an example of her skill. Not only does she entertain with accounts that examine the perplexities of being human with its heartening moments and struggles, but she also inspires thoughts about the human condition.
How does one justify bad choices simply because they are human? Why can we not be better than that, and what about the good that comes from bad choices as a result? Will Jack Hopper find that good thing?
Gifts for the Dead is a thoughtful and entertaining read, especially for those who enjoy historical adventure mixed with suspense and a little romance. A wild escapade that thoroughly entertains.
Review by Christina Francine
Christina Francine is an enthusiastic author of a variety of work for all ages. When not weaving tales, she teaches academic writing at the college level. She’s also a licensed elementary teacher. Picture books: Special Memory and Mr. Inker. Academic: Journal of Literacy Innovation.
Stepping back in time to 1960s-Manhattan, author and former supernumerary actor with the New York City Opera Company (NYCO), Edward Hower reminisces of sharing the stage with the magnificent, world-renowned coloratura soprano, Beverly Sills in “Echoes.”
Readers, performers, and devout season ticket holders alike are presented with backstage passes to one of the most opulent, velvet-covered theaters in the world. Hower’s recollections are so detailed that we can smell the sweat seeping through the make-up, pantaloons, and Roman breastplates.
Through a tender, adoring lens, Hower observes how Sills’s pianissimos float through the air forever, with descents so dazzling that guests are left liquified. Questions of purpose and place are contemplated in between the echoes of scales and vibratos: whom to love and how to love them, refusing to give up by giving in, and to what ends one must sacrifice for the sake of maintaining their integrity. As audience members we too may feel, as Hower expresses, “the tremor of applause rising through us” as we seek triumphant courage amid the tyranny of doubt on the stages of our own lives.
Review by Camille Sleight-Price
In the second edition of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 2019), authors Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin provide 18 entertaining and motivating prompts that range from the light-hearted to the serious and challenging. Drawing on both traditional forms and contemporary experiments, the authors encourage the use of found text, song titles, facts, and quotations. They propose scenarios and invite a poetic response. They even show how to “translate” the text of a poem written in a language you can’t read! Each prompt is followed by suggestions for getting started and sample poems written in response. What distinguishes Poems for the Writing from other poetry-prompt collections is that most of the sample poems are by undergraduates, community workshop participants, and some working poets. The responses are fresh, energetic, and unexpected.
This is an excellent book for poets and for teachers of poetry. The authors, both poets and teachers themselves, have selected prompts that work well in the classroom—for poets at any level and just about any age. They encourage emotional orientations, helping the students to plumb their personal experiences—and with just enough structure to help students struggling to organize and articulate emotional responses. But all of this comes with a touch of levity. Like Fox and Levin’s own approach to teaching, the book is friendly, open, and eclectic. The results are a testament to the extent to which prompts can trigger new and imaginative insights and jog one out of a routine approach to the blank page. Prompts are entry points—doors and doorknobs, as the authors put it—to new rooms, new emotional and intellectual spaces. The results are likely to be both surprising and satisfying.
Review by Antonia Clark
Antonia Clark has taught poetry and fiction writing and is co-administrator of an online poetry forum, The Waters. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Smoke and Mirrors, and a full-length poetry collection, Chameleon Moon (2014, 2019), and the forthcoming Dance Craze. Her poems and short stories have appeared in numerous print and electronic journals, including The Cortland Review, Eclectica, The Pedestal Magazine, and Rattle, and she has reviewed poetry collections for The Rumpus, Literary Bohemian, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and IthacaLit. Toni lives in Vermont, loves French picnics, and plays French café music on a sparkly purple accordion.
“B.K.” by Robert James Cross stands out in Issue 52 of Fiction International. Instead of straightforward text on the page, he utilizes other means: telegrams, “handwritten” and typed letters, an illustration, and official documentation.
The story unfolds in messages between Michael and Linda, siblings growing up without parents and left to rely on each other. Their letters take place from 1963 to 1967. In between the chatter about family, the two discuss their current historical events of John F. Kennedy’s death and the Vietnam War. Between this all, their love for each other brightly shines through.
The variety of means of communication makes the piece visually appealing and turns the idea of storytelling through letters on its head. Seeing these written or printed items given a physical form makes the piece feel more real and personal. Cross’s bio claims he is “under the influence of the unconventional,” and that definitely shows in this piece.
Cross isn’t the only one getting creative in this “Body” themed issue. Plenty of other writers push the limits of their craft, including Carol Guess & Aimee Parkinson in “Girl in Medical Trials1” Ivars Balkits in “Brain Talking to Brain,” and D.E. Steward in “CRISPR.” In Issue 52, Fiction International offers readers a group of talented writers unafraid to push boundaries.
Review by Katy Haas
“The Suit,” published in the Spring 2019 issue of American Literary Review, is an essay by Julie Marie Wade in which Wade questions, but never resolves, what it means for her to be born in a female body.
Much of the essay is set in scene and centered around a tight-fitting suit that Wade’s mother is committed to squeezing her husband—Wade’s father—into. When Wade’s image-obsessed mother is not home, her father splurges on James Bond films and hotdogs and explains to Wade that “every man wants to be James Bond,” even though he doesn’t believe he will ever be similar to the handsome agent.
Meanwhile, Wade’s mother encourages Wade to nominate her as “Most Inspirational Mother,” via a department store writing contest. Between scenes, Wade gives us drafts of her contest submission where she wrestles with representing her mother in “equal parts nice and true.” Wade tries to define her mother as a woman who “can see through who people appear to be and identify who they might be.” In these drafts, we understand that although Wade praises her mother, she also examines how her family relationships influence the way she approaches her own identity.
Through metaphor, shopping with her parents, and contest drafts, this coming-of-age essay is a story that explores gender identity in a home that explicitly encourages traditional roles.
Review by Alyssa Witbeck Alexander
In the Fall 2019 issue of Southern Humanities Review, William Walker concocts a suspenseful, haunting tale with “Saturn Devouring His Son.”
The short story brings readers out into the country where William and his mother live. The piece begins: “A car idled at the end of our driveway, and its lights were setting the living room curtains aflame. Somebody was out there walking around, but we could only make out the silhouettes stepping and out of the high beams near the pine trees.” The first pages continue with suspense as the two wonder if it’s William’s father outside watching them, the mother and son then learning how to shoot a gun in self-defense and surrounding themselves with familial support.
We’re momentarily lulled into putting our guards down as Tom Kaczynski comes into the picture, inserting himself as the new father figure to William and the new lover to his mom. William’s annoyance at his presence takes over the piece. Even as Tom takes measures to make the family safer, William’s dislike for Tom eclipses the worries of William’s dad.
However, the story reaches a brutal, explosive climax, shocking readers back into the state of tension from the beginning of the piece and we must watch as William tries to sort through his feelings in the days after tragedy strikes. Walker writes with clarity and detail, causing me to double check which genre I was reading several times. Was this fiction or nonfiction? At times I could believe either, a testament to Walker’s skill.
I recommend reading this story with several lights on, and only after you’ve double-checked the locks on your doors.
Review by Katy Haas
David Salner‘s The Stillness of Certain Valleys is impressively sustained. I could quote memorable lines from every poem. “Beer for Breakfast” is a pitch-perfect opening poem, and the subsequent sequence “A Dream of Quitting Time” is very strong. Then comes the agonizing “Goodbye to My Big Toe.” Salner writes with gritty authority about many kinds of work, including a stint as a cab driver in “Like Silver,” as well as in steel mills and coal mines. Now that world is in a state of collapse, hence “water drips from a tipple / to wild strawberries sprouting from rail beds” in the title poem. I admire the moving way he evokes the dignity of a working man in “Horse Trailer with Beans”: “nothing / but the dirt under his nails / and who he is.” This first section concludes with the understated “Steel Lunch Pail.”
The second section begins with a boy learning to be an artist, which could be the poet himself or Winslow Homer: “He creases uniforms, / inks the hollow of a gully. With purple shadows / he molds the blunt, half-buried stones.” Then come a series of poems about major American figures: Whitman during the Civil War, Melville brooding on human pain, Frederick Douglass working at the dry docks in Fells Point.
The third section features poems about his grandparents and growing up, before returning to the world of work, which Salner always depicts with convincing precision. Near the end in “The Lakefront Closes at 8 PM,” the poet notices as he walks to the parking lot how the weeds have “white flowers.” It’s that impressive eye for telling detail that make the whole collection a compelling and convincing read. Salner has been there, done that. As Whitman once said, “I am the man. I was there.”
Review by William Heath
William Heath has published three books of poetry, The Walking Man, Night Moves in Ohio, and Leaving Seville; three novels, The Children Bob Moses Led, Blacksnake’s Path, and Devil Dancer; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest; and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone.
Readers can find the 2019 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize winner and finalists in the Fall 2019 issue of Southern Humanities Review. The contest honors the late Jake Adam York [pictured], and the winner of the contest receives $1000 in addition to publication. This year’s contest was judged by Vievee Francis.
Winner
“Burning Churches” by Dante Di Stefano
Finalists
“Transubstantiation” by Jubi Arriola-Headley
“All-American Mexican” by Michael Torres
“A Different Alphabet” by Susan Cohen
“Near Miss” by Allison Adair
The Fall 2019 issue also features four pieces of fiction and two pieces of nonfiction, as well as work by five additional poets.
Issue 19.4 of DIAGRAM gives us “Call of Duty,” a riveting essay that explores the juxtaposition of needing and wanting. In this piece, Amy Long shares her experience with the unintended effects caused by opioid addicts for those who truly need the medicine and the lengths she went to in order to find relief from her own pain. Through beautiful and sharp phrases such as “I’ve betrayed the one person who really trusts me,” “I don’t want to turn into that patient,” and “I don’t lose everything. I don’t lose anything,” we get a sense of the narrator’s pain and the mask that she puts on and lives with in order to keep the trust of the people who matter most to her.
As most essays in DIAGRAM, Long’s relies on form and structure to move deeper the fear of judgement and misunderstanding. The essay comprises words, printed and cut up, that have been scanned onto paper in unique designs. Glassine envelopes are replicated in the story as well, providing more words, thoughts, and stories that are kept safely at first, but eventually spill freely onto the page. Stories such as these cannot be contained. We see, too, that through the use of font size, italics, wisely placed words, and bolding, Long remains apprehensive about the revelation of such truths; she still struggles with making any sense out of them. Only by letting the story spill out of the glassine packet does she even begin to make sense of what has happened to her body, her health, and her future.
Review by Tyler Hurst
Greg November opens the Fall 2019 issue of Boulevard with “The Business of Killing Tony.” After initially skimming the first sentences as I paged through the issue, I found it nearly physically impossible to stop reading: “Tony’s death—the first one, I’m talking—last a week. We had nothing to do with that one, Gwen and I, at least not directly.”
The story follows three siblings, the narrator Don, Gwen, and Tony, in the days and weeks following Tony’s death and subsequent resurrection and even more subsequent deaths. Prior to the death, their relationships are strained: Don is detached from the other two siblings as he separates from his wife and moves into a new condo; Tony, addicted to drugs and alcohol, orbits as the family black sheep; and Gwen halfheartedly takes on a motherly role as she attempts to organize an intervention for Tony (which is where he dies the first time) and get Don to participate. Tony comes back with a newfound clarity, death becoming the push he needed to finally sort himself out. But he has one problem: he wants to stay dead and can’t.
November’s characters are wry and detached, and the universe he’s created is lightened with dark humor. The siblings react to the news of Tony’s resurrection relatively level-headedly and are brought together by this new task of killing Tony again and again. There are moments November works in feeling, though he never careens into sappy sentimentality. The plot is inventive and interesting, readers not knowing quite what to expect out of a universe where a man can come back to life and make ties between the lands of the living and dead.
“The Business of Killing Tony” is a great opener for this issue of Boulevard and I look forward to checking out more work by November.
Review by Katy Haas
In “Bought and Sold,” Issue 30 of True Story, author Renata Golden locates herself in the complicated history of the American West after inheriting two half-acre ranchettes outside of Deming, New Mexico.
Purchased in 1969 by her father, a man ready to leave the ordeals of the Chicago Police Force behind him, the land promised a “welcoming warmth.” Fifteen years after his death, Golden steps on ground that had been handed down to her as the American narrative of land leading to wealth and a better life. Instead, the barren landscape and hard crusted earth force her to confront “how primitive land could be.”
Though her father believed the winds of the West “carried a hint of hope instead of despair,” as Golden mines the history of her inheritance, she discovers the injustice, violence, and death inflicted on the natives and land grant owners who first called the land home.
Despite framing each scene of the essay with excerpts from historical documents, Golden writes, “I know that some voices have been lost to the winds that carry a palpable sense of grief. I do not know the truths of the past. I know only the stories told around campfires and corrals, in letters and ledger books, that have survived. Stories repeated became history.”
Review by Emily James
The current issue of Nimrod International Journal is entirely made up of the winners, finalists, semi-finalists, and honorable mentions of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.
Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction:
First Prize
“Capybara” by Jonathan Wei
Second Prize
“This Might Hurt Some” by John Tait
Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry:
First Prize
”Negligee and Hatchet: A Sonnet Crown” by Robert Thomas
Second Prize
“The Adorned Fathomless Dark Creation,” “Getting Out,” “Boys Beyond June,” and “Legend” by Matt W. Miller
The Fall/Winter 2019 issue features over thirty writers, a diverse selection of fiction and poetry. A full list of contributors, including a handful of excerpts, can be found at the Nimrod International Journal website.
Brilliant Flash Fiction recently announced the winners of the FEED US Writing Contest, held between June and September this year. Judge Kathy Fish selected three prize winners.
First Prize
“TALKING” by Shikhandin [pictured]
Second Prize
“Two Ostomates” by Alexis Wolfe
Third Prize
“Mother’s Milk” by Anastasia Kirchoff
Find the three winning stories, the shortlisted stories, and the longlist at the Brilliant Flash Fiction website. There you can also grab a copy of their first anthology: Hunger: The Best of Brilliant Flash Fiction, 2014-2019.
Last week Concordia College’s Ascent shared a couple pieces of exciting news.
First: a special issue is on the way with twenty-five essays, twenty-one short stories, and a whopping eighty-one poems. This special issue is in celebration of their second piece of news: longtime editor W. Scott Olsen has announced his retirement from his position at the journal after twenty-three years at the helm.
Taking over in January 2020 will be Vincent Reusch, fiction writer and professor at Concordia College. We look forward to see what Reusch has in store for the literary magazine moving forward.
Learn more about the upcoming issue and the change in editors at Ascent’s website.
Although published in 1951, any person serious about literature would do well to read or reread Nabokov’s captivating autobiography, if not for the rapture of his complicated life, then for the beauty of his syntactical architecture. A master of form devoted to meaning, Nabokov relays the truths of a man twice removed from his home country of Russia, once by revolution and again with the rise of the iron curtain. He renders through complex but clear sentence structure the pains of diaspora and the call to home which he can never truly answer. Within this beautiful prose he also provides insight into his master works Lolita, Despair, and The Gift. He dangles before the reader a maze of sentences each providing a decadent feast for those who value—above all—the meaning-making capacity of provoking syntax.
Even his first sentence tells the reader more about his lost home and life than many lesser writers could conjure in a length of chapters, “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Although he plays at the duplicity of life and death, so does his opening sentence relay the pain of a man who can never truly return to the womb of his mother country nor escape its call through death. Nabokov rewards the keen reader. He displays the full power of a prose master and does so with all the beauty of a life richly lived.
For those readers who seek reward through art, no writer has ever provided as much in their autobiography as Vladimir Nabokov.
Review by Justyn Hardy
A haunting meditation on the legacy of racism, violence, and abuse, Relief by Execution: A Visit to Mauthausen by Gint Aras is a gut-kick of a memoir in which Aras contemplates the far-reaching tentacles of anger and hate from the normalized cruelty of a boy’s childhood to the genocide of World War II. After a prolonged bout of PTSD following a violent attack, Aras visits the Mauthausen concentration camp in Lithuania and reflects on its horrors, acknowledging that as a descendant of Lithuanians, there exists within himself “the energy of the victim and the perpetrator.”
While depictions of the Holocaust remind us of the enduring human capacity for dehumanization and extreme cruelty, Aras’s essay is at its strongest when recounting the socially accepted racism of his Lithuanian-American community in Chicago. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Presidential run provides a backdrop for Aras’s father’s racist diatribes; the community’s anti-Semitism is equally virulent and ingrained in their language. Aras writes: “The Lithuanian word for Jew is žydas. My family used this word to mean snot, and for a time I knew no other word. Mother would see me picking my nose and scold me, Netrauk žydų, or Stop pulling out Jews.” Aras draws the connections between the family’s denialism and scapegoating of Lithuanian Jews as Soviet collaborators with their refusal to see the physical and emotional abuse perpetrated against him by his tyrannical father. As an adult, Aras confronts his father in a harrowing scene, yet a cathartic reckoning remains elusive.
Aras reflects on whether he is imposing “the personal on the collective,” but most readers will recognize how hate, in its various manifestations, informs the cultural assumptions we carry. Aras’s willingness to confront this legacy is a useful reminder that we all bear the responsibility to do the same.
Review by Chuck Augello
Chuck Augello is the author of The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love (Duck Lake Books – April 2020). His work has appeared in One Story, Literary Hub, The Vestal Review, The Coachella Review, and other fine journals. He’s a contributor to Cease Cows and publishes The Daily Vonnegut, a website exploring the life and art of Kurt Vonnegut.
Sea Above, Sun Below by George Salis is a rich and masterful novel. It is a balanced reading experience, told from differing perspectives, chockablock with symbolism and allusion and wordplay.
The descriptions of people, the universe, and abstract concepts are always lyrical and moving. The characters, though isolated in their narrative spheres from other characters, all relate in symbolic ways, interacting like entangled particles.
This is a tale about skydiving, the brave divers through the sky, and the diverse revelations they encounter on land and in the arms of God, up in the air, floating like angels, hovering above the ball and chain of their earth, which to some is an Eden, and to others, an egg, flush with history, pregnant with myth.
It is also about childhood and escape, tragedy, and the infinite potential of the future, told in convincing voices with heart and love and joy. I was enchanted by the realistic characters, the effortless flow of the evocative language, the precise word choice, effective dialogue, and seamless storytelling. The novel works on multiple levels at once, guiding the reader through layers of meaning. It does not engage in handholding, nor is it like wandering a labyrinth. Reading it is like falling—which is a metaphor the novel makes ample use of—into a magical realm. The picture widens as you proceed, and the sky behind you is full of Halley’s comets, decaying gods, and past memories discarded like ballast.
There are many brilliant moments of interstitial congruency, like the following quote: “With the advancement of technology, he knew the future, however distant, would reveal the reality of alchemy.”
Sea Above, Sun Below is literary alchemy. A magnificent novel.
Review by L.S. Popovich
L.S. Popovich is the author of Undertones and Echoes From Dust. They have always been a cat person (a person who like cats, not a cat human hybrid).
In the Fall 2019 issue of Raleigh Review, readers can find the winners and finalists of the 2019 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, selected by Dorianne Laux & Joseph Millar. Readers can easily find these pieces in the current issue as they’re outlined in gradient blue (winner) and pink (finalists).
Winner
“Iguana Iguana” by Caylin Capra-Thomas
Finalists:
“At the Bar” by Cameron McGill
“The Land in Both Our Names” by Suzanne Grove
“After Watching The Quiet Man” by Hannah Dow
“Sertraline” by Emily Nason
Submissions to the 2020 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize will reopen in April and run through May.
The Tiger Moth Review publishes art and literature that “engages with nature, culture, the environment, and ecology” from Singapore and beyond.
In Issue 2, ko ko thett drew me in by writing about one of my favorite animals: elephants. “Funeral of an elephant” speculates on what is needed to mourn the death of the creature: the amount of men needed to carry the casket, how the casket should be made, what traditions to apply to this funeral, whether or not it weighs more dead than alive. thett prompts readers to hold this death in as great esteem as a human’s. I feel this is especially relevant after recent reports of eleven elephants dying as they attempted to save one another at a waterfall in Thailand. With their actions, as in thett’s poem, we see the humanity in the lives of these creatures.
thett also dedicates a poem to “The Chindwin,” a river in Burma. thett humanizes the river, comparing it to a “soon-to-be single mother,” a dominatrix, a woman puking, pissing, bleeding. There are no gentle verses here, just the ripping force of a river tearing away the landscape and the humans who have wronged her.
In both pieces, thett makes readers consider the humanness of nature, a nice selection to usher in the rest of this issue of The Tiger Moth Review.
Review by Katy Haas
It’s never easy to say good-bye, but readers should still take the time to say their farewells to the fiction monolith Glimmer Train. The Fall 2019 issue is here, marking the end of an era for the literary magazine.
The final issue features stories by Stanley Delgado, Rachael Uwada Clifford, Marian Palaia, Douglas Kiklowicz, Erika Krouse, Victoria Alejandra Garayalde, Arthur Russell, Robin Halevy, Peter Parsons, Christa Romanosky, Sindya Bhanoo, Alex Stein, Karen Malley, Ed Allen, Emily Lackey, Ashley Alliano, Aleyna Rentz, Kevin Canty, and Arthur Klepchukov. Also in the final issue: interviews with Matthew Lansburgh and Danielle Lazarin.
Stop by the Glimmer Train website to give them a proper send-off. Grab a copy of the last two issues, check out story excerpts, and pick up copies of available back issues.
Exploring the complexities and absurdities of grief, Book of Mutter is a lyrical text that will leave readers returning to its textured fragments of memory and meditation again and again. And each time, those moments will reassemble into something new and incisive.
Kate Zambreno, whose previous book O Fallen Angel won the Undoing the Novel—First Book Contest, reflects on and interrogates her relationship with her dying mother in this 2017 publication. Her mother proved such an invasive force in her life that Zambreno couldn’t help but turn to writing as the only hope she had to “expel [her] from my body.” With some photographs, spent lipstick tubes, hoarded kitsch, and a gardening journal, Zambreno sorts through these “ruins” in search of both a connection to and deliverance from the long shadow of a troubled relationship.
Far from conclusive or definitive, Book of Mutter offers something tragically beautiful and genuinely vulnerable to the perennial struggle of grief. While every page is not filled by text, they are all complete with curious and inviting moments of anger, confusion, peace, and yes, absence.
Review by Mark Smeltzer
Today we’re bringing you a tall stack of award-winning fiction and poetry books published this past month. Click Read More to find the full list.
Shanan Ballam’s newest book, Inside the Animal: The Collected Red Riding Hood Papers, published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in 2019, pushes the persona poem to its most shimmering and starved limit. Blending her voice with the perspectives of a depraved wolf, a blossoming girl, and a wilting grandmother, Ballam continually smashes wide the familiar fairy tale and trades reader comfort for animalistic truth. What empathy can be had for the predator? Is there a love story folded into the sheets of Grandmother’s bed? Would Red Riding Hood slip into the wolf again? Continuing the work begun in her 2010 chapbook The Red Riding Hood Papers and furthered in her 2013 book Pretty Marrow, Ballam writes deeply into new velveteen layers of the aged cautionary tale.
Divided into six parts, the childhood world is rewritten for an adult understanding of intimacy and separation, ecstatic connection and pain. Through her passionate mastery of syntax and imagery, Ballam pulls readers deeper into a psychological landscape as sharp and mesmerizing as a kaleidoscope. The new Poet Laureate of Logan, Utah, as well as current faculty of Utah State University, Ballam writes with the bone-deep need to reclaim the story of monsters and naughty little girls into a truth more complicated and warm. Wholly driven and new, Ballam’s tangled reimagining of the condemning Red Riding Hood fable will mark up the mind.
Reviewed by Brittney Allen
The Fall 2019 issue of Carve Magazine features the winners of the 2019 Raymond Carver Contest, guest-judged by Claire Fuller. These can be found online, as well as in the print issue. An interview with each writer can be found after their stories in the print edition.
First Place
“Private Lives” by April Sopkin
Second Place
“Gravity House” by Carolyn Bishop
Third Place
“The Enchanted Forest” by Brian Crawford
Editor’s Choice
“The Ghost Rider” by Erica Plouffe Lazure
The Raymond Carver Contest reopens for submissions in April. The Carve Magazine Prose & Poetry Contest is currently open until November 15.
Volume 12 Number 2 of Diode Poetry Journal shows the variety of sources poets draw inspiration from, whether it’s musical artists, medical documentation, or other poets.
Lip Manegio draws from one of my longtime favorite musical artists—Death Cab for Cutie—in “you tell me about your childhood memories of death cab for cutie, and i imagine every future and past we will ever get to live through.” Using Death Cab song titles as a way to jump into each stanza and light, beautiful language, they create a new song for themselves and the person the poem is addressed to.
Charlie Clark turns to “I am the beast I worship,” a line from the song “Beware” by Death Grips as he conjures his own beast, one that “speaks vulgar French,” “his whole demeanor muscle-thick and pissed.” The piece reads like a slow burn, a fiery anthem.
“[Infect this page]” by Hadara Bar-Nadav is an erasure poem made from the drug information for the antibiotic Ceftriaxone. Bar-Nadav creates art through the dissection of medical text and examines both sickness and art, urging the reader to action, to “Infect,” “Inject,” and “Kill / your need to / question / this / garbage art.”
Both of John Allen Taylor’s poems draw inspiration from other poets. “The boy thinks of after,” is written after Laurie Lamon, and “Dear Friend,” is written after and for Brionne Janae. Not only were his poems enjoyable to read, but they also open a door to introduce readers to other poets they may not be familiar with.
The latest issue of Diode shows the many ways writers draw inspiration from the media they consume and offers its own inspiration to readers.
Review by Katy Haas
From the introduction to the final sentence, Leslie Jill Patterson’s flash essay,“Study in Self-Defense: Lubbock, Texas,” published in the September 2019 issue of Brevity (Issue 62), kept me on the edge of my seat. A perfect read for this October, Patterson tells the story of the tense moments that follow her dog’s ferocious reaction to something, or someone, outside her house at one in the morning—an event that gives her “a lesson in self-defense.”
Patterson sets the scene by painting a sense of isolation: a woman living alone, lurking shadows, the man she is afraid might come after her. She then fully engages the reader’s fight or flight response through dark strokes of impending danger, her dog’s protective instincts engaged. From the moment of her dog’s jolt from a sound sleep to an adrenaline punched awakening, the reader finds themselves breathless as her “lesson” unfolds.
Patterson’s essay brings the scene to life with detailed imagery and an all too relatable reaction to terror. You can hear the furious barking of the dog as he “pinball[s]” from room to room, see the woman hiding as if to play “peek-a-boo,” and feel afraid even to look up from your own screen, your “covers,” and catch that terrifying glimpse. A thrill to read.
Review by Kelsie Peterson
A psychoanalytic spin on the “unthought known” stream of one woman’s stumble upon the narrative of self, reflective of intuitive synchronicity, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love bursts the bubbles of vintage notions of the perfect family, or at least the façade of what the perfect family should have been.
In this memoir, Shapiro takes readers on a rocky ride through her personal genealogic discoveries; specifically, finding out after five decades that the man she knew as her father was not her biological father. Shapiro elaborates on how he was the only father she ever knew, and they shared an unbreakable bond until his passing when she was in her twenties. She tenderly recalls how he taught her about his Jewish heritage, which makes up a major part of the fabric of her self-narrative surrounding her paternity. She encounters rough waters throughout her quest, yet love remains the “unknown thought” she never gave up on.
According to William J. Doan’s visual narrative “Dear Family and Friends,” in Issue 27 of Cleaver Magazine, “17 million adults had a major depressive episode last year.” Despite affecting so many people, it can be hard to articulate the experience, and even harder for the people around them to understand, especially when the sufferer is wearing a mask of “normality,” a mask of laughter and smiles. As Doan says, “Sharing what it’s like to live with anxiety and depression is a lot like undressing in front of strangers. It’s AWKWARD.” But after a while, masking began to feel like lying to Doan, and “Dear Family and Friends” is an attempt at breaking that silence and “coming out” to those around him.
By using visual means of communication, Doan offers a more concrete way of explaining and understanding the feelings of depression and anxiety. His images are grayscale, with smudges of cool colors creeping into some panels. Scribbles and dots of ink show how it feels to be filled with anxiety, to have your brain feel weighed down and blotted with dark ink.
“I’ve barely reached the heart of the matter in this brief letter,” he says of his eighteen panels, “But it’s a start.” Not only is this piece a start for Doan, but it’s a good way to start difficult conversations with our own friends and family as we remove our masks.
Review by Katy Haas
Unpregnant Offers a Radical Normalization of Abortion and Reproductive Health. Currently, we’re in a terrifying moment in history for reproductive health in America, which makes abortion no laughing matter—and that’s exactly why Unpregnant, the debut YA novel by Jenni Hendricks and Ted Caplan, is such a breath of fresh air. Unpregnant tells the tale of an overachieving 17-year-old named Veronica Clarke who discovers that she is pregnant a month before her high-school graduation. Seeing her college education (she’s been accepted to Brown University) and future slipping away, she enlists her former best friend—and current school outcast—Bailey Butler to drive her to an abortion clinic that doesn’t require a parental signature. The only catch? The clinic is more than 900 miles away… Read full review at BitchMedia here.
The works in the latest issue of Runestone Journal, which publishes writing by undergraduates, is splashed with color.
In nonfiction, Eli Rallo harnesses the power that a change in color brought to her as an eleven-year-old struggling with anxiety. A touching piece on family, “Color the Walls,” plays back moment from her past when her hardworking, serious father allowed his children to paint the walls red and green for Christmas, a gesture of pure silliness that gave her stillness during a difficult time.
In fiction, Whitley Carpenter captures colors in “Memories of Green,” with narrator Pell taking care of Ella, an older relative whose memories come in and out of focus as dementia starts to set in. From the blue veins beneath her skin to the green surrounding the farmhouse, Whitley’s details stand as a strong backbone to the characters’ struggles. In the same section, Renata Erickson creatively imagines a world where color is something that can be physically taken from its source in “The Color Crisis,” the narrator learning where they belong in this new type of environment and how they’ll contribute to it.
There is no shortage of color in the poetry section, however. Damaris Castillo’s “The Passing of Marigolds” brings us “a golden road to home.” Cole Chang’s “In the late Afternoon” brings a summer day in the wetlands to life in hues of brown and green, purple and gold. In “An Evening at Inch Strand Beach Just Outside Dingle, Ireland,” Emilee Kinney describes a sunset, the “Deep pink” and the “sunlit-stained shores.” Mariah Rose turns “flamingo-pink,” sunburnt in “NOLA,” then describes “Muddied water the color of chocolate milk” in “Sedona, AZ.”
Carve out some time to check out Volume 5 of Runestone Journal. It will be sure to give your day the pop of color it needs.
Review by Katy Haas
Do you ever find yourself feeling out of sorts, unable to tell if you’re still human? Jessy Randall has considered this feeling and helps readers handle it with an instructional manual of sorts in How to Tell If You Are Human: Diagram Poems, part of the Pleaides Press Visual Poetry Series.
Repurposing graphs and images to create visual poems, Randall’s works are minimal in style as they capture the complexity of human emotions. Although most of poems are just one sentence or phrase long, they manage to make connections with readers, leaving space to insert themselves as the speaker, to figure out whether or not they’re human.
Review by Katy Haas
Gabriela Garcia’s “Mrs. Sorry” can be found in the latest issue of ZYZZYVA. Focusing on class and gender, the short story is narrated by a young woman working at a cosmetics counter. At work, she helps rich women (and one in particular who comes to be known as the titular character) pick out skincare products. At home, she feels herself slipping away from herself and her boyfriend, who begins offering her the Roxicodone pills he’s been stealing from his work at a pharmacy.
As the story progresses, we see Mrs. Sorry’s husband, a man who gaslights her in front of and with debatably inadvertent help from the narrator. While Mrs. Sorry and the narrator are leading entirely different lives, they’re both women who are being manipulated by the men they trust most, the difference in their social and economic classes keeping her from speaking out on Mrs. Sorry’s behalf. “Nothing cracks in my presence,” the narrator thinks at one point as she considers her weaknesses and the futility with which she handles both her home and work life.
Eventually she finds the strength and the weight to make cracks, the ending a defiant fist in the air. Just long enough to create tension, Garcia masters her narrator’s voice in four short, satisfying pages.
Review by Katy Haas
