Issue Number 3 of The Ne’er-Do-Well Literary Magazine focuses on Working-Class Stories, with new stories, essays, and comics from Willy Vlautin, Kevin Sampsell, Suzanne Burns, Gigi Little, Chris A. Bolton, Sheila Ashdown, Megan Zabel, Daniel Hall, Christina Mackin, Jill Holtz, and John Gifford.

From the editors: “If the phrase ‘working class’ conjures vintage images of lumberjacks and Rosie the Riveter [R.I.P.], it’s time to reboot your brain for the twenty-first century. This issue of working-class stories casts a fresh light on the absurdity, banality, and redemption of contemporary wage-slavery. Join us for a shift at the circus, the Outback Steakhouse, a Minnesota dairy farm, a Plaid Pantry convenience store, and more.”

Profits from the sale of this issue will be donated to the strike fund of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

University of Arizona’s Sonora Review 58 is a limited edition, hand-bound by Spork Press using their signature letterpressed two-color raw board cover and letterpress pages within.

New Letters Editor Robert Stewart comments on the role of “slow” literature in our fast-paced world:

“From the audience recently, where I sat at the downtown public library in Kansas City, a man asked the visiting speaker, Joyce Carol Oates, how she managed to write her many books all in longhand,as she just had revealed. ‘My mind thinks faster than my hand can write,’ said the man. ‘I need a computer keyboard to keep up with my thoughts.’ A general assent seemed to puff across the audience.

“The question highlighted a feature — call it a value — of literary art, not always or easily acknowledged: Literature slows us down. Here was an author, Ms. Oates, emblematic in our culture for productivity, who had just baffled the crowd by her adherence to a human-scale, physical scratching out of one sentence after another, although she happens to do so, as she pointed out, hour after hour, day after day. Of her slow method, she made a joke, citing Shakespeare, who worked in longhand, of course, and, yes, it might be said that his mind was pretty quick.

“Shakespeare, let’s admit, might have worked by computer or Tweets if he could have, but the point has been made by the work, itself. It holds up. It rewards patience.”

The full Fall 2010 issue editorial is available online.

“The View From Here” is a occasional feature in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry in which people from various fields comment on their experience of poetry. The January 2011 issue features the eighth installment of the series and includes comments from Daniel Handler, Madeleine Avirov, Helen Fisher, Jolie Holland, Stephen T. Ziliak, and Tracey Johnstone.

Volume 12 Issue 4 of Iron Horse Literary Review (published six times a year) is “The Facebook Issue” (which, by the way, you can “like” on their website). Editor Leslie Jill Patterson writes: “When we opened our call for submissions to the Iron Horse Facebook issue, most of the manuscripts we received focused upon the ironies of Facebook – a social networking Web site that so many writers both love and hate. One of the reasons I like FB is that it somehow encourages all of my friends, not just the writers I know, to tell stories and pay attention to language. I like the way we narrate on FB, the way our words surprise and entertain, as if we’re at a huge dinner party and each of us is vying to be the most interesting guest.”

Patterson goes on with comments such as “Do ‘friends’ honestly care…” and “But maybe we’re not supposed to stay in touch with our pasts.” and “But the truth is, no one is honest on FB. Not that we lie outright.” and discusses the contributions to this collection that explore each of these and more issues related to this form of hyper-social networking.

Contributors include (poetry) Robert Fanning, Laura McCullough, Juliana Gray, Steve Langan, Tamiko Beyer, Jennifer A. Luebbers, Randall BrowN; (fiction) Mike Land AND Shane Castle; (nonfiction) Mike Hampton, Katie Schneider, and Dinty W. Moore.

The Winter 2010 (#34) issue of Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century includes a tribute to mental health workers, “spotlighting the poetry of 26 mental health professionals. These psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, counselors, and case-workers dive inside the mind daily and come home soggy with the muck of dreams. Many of them write about their careers, but the scope is broad, and all of their poems are informed by years of training and unique insights on the human soul. The section is highlighted throughout by the stunning abstract portraiture of art therapist Mia Barkan Clarke. As psychoanalyst Forrest Hamer writes,’so much depends on what’s under.'”

The Rattle blog features the poem “Nursing Home” by Ed Galing, which begins:

this morning when i
got up
they had to change
the bed sheets again
because i had wet
myself during the
night
like a baby who can’t
control his bowels,
my helper, miss jones,
a nice young black
girl didn’t mind doing
it,
i just sat in a chair
when she changed the
dirty wet sheets with
new clean ones, and
i said, i am sorry,
and she said, with a smile,
it’s alright,
i used to do it for my
own father when he had
prostate cancer,
in this nursing home
everyone is good to me,
. . .

Poet Lore‘s Fall 2010 issue introduces the poems of native Alaskan dg nanouk okpik in their feature Poets Introducing Poets. Poet Lore Editors writer: “Nowhere are the effects of climate change more palpable than in the far North. Ms. okpik’s ritualistic narratives – steeped in Inuit folklore and sobered by the rudimentary predicaments of survival – conjure up a way of life as miraculous and endangered as the Arctic itself. In ‘Oil is a People,’ she writes: ‘I see the pipeline cracking, the Haul road / paved. I fall asleep as you are dancing / with the dead….’ Is this a vision? A warning? The eerie lines do what poetry does best: unsettle us with the truth – and maybe move us toward it.” Poet D. Nurkse introduces okpik’s poetry, of which 12 pieces featured.

The most recent issue of Cimarron Review is a tribute to the poet Ai (1947 – 2010). Nonfiction includes works by Lisa Lewis, Guest Editor whose work “Ai in Oklahoma” opens the issue, Dagoberto Gilb (“Poet Ai” available online), Clay Matthews, Chip Livingston, Rigoberto González, and Janet Varnum’s interview with Ai. Works of poetry include authors Yun WangMonique S. Ferrell, Labecca Jones, Jeff Simpson, Kimiko Hahn (“Theft” available online), Samantha Thornhill, Patricia Smith (“The Day Before What Could be the Day” available online),Cyrus Cassells, Ralph Burns, Oliver de la Paz, and Marilyn Chin (“Naked I Come, Naked I Go” available online). Cover image by Christopher Felver – “The Poet Ai at the Los Angeles Book Fair.”

The latest edition of Fiddlehead (Autumn 2010) includes “Remembering Bill Bauer (1932 – 2010)” an editorial by Brian Bartlett. Bill Bauer had been Co-Editor, Assistant Poetry Editor, and Poetry Editor for nearly ten years, then Fiction Co-Editor for two years, and published two full-length collections of poetry with Fiddlehead Poetry Books, along with several other collections of poetry and short stories. Bill Bauer was lost to his battle with cancer in June of 2010.

The editorial is followed by several of Bauer’s poems, including one previously unpublished work.

Field‘s Fall 2010 issue features a symposium on the work of Richard Wilbur, including his poem “The Beautiful Changes,” with essays by Bruce Weigl, Annie Finch, Steve Friebert and Stuart Friebert, DeSales Harrison, David Young, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Carole Simmons Oles, and Stephen Tapscott.

In the Editor’s Note for the Fall 2010 issue of The Healing Muse, Deirdre Neilen writes, “Our lives have their own unique roads to travel, but when the detour called Illness enters, we soon learn we have joined, willingly or unwillingly, a very large community with a language and a culture of its own that demands our attention and commitment…we become adept negotiators of hospital mores and insurance protocols, of treatment modalities and drug therapies; the mildest among us morph into warrior-advocates for our loved ones; we stand shoulder to shoulder with our nurses and physicians, our therapists, and our own research. And we write about the bartering, the begging, the rage; we’re not too proud to pray, to swear, to do whatever it takes to get a cure, an extension, a hope. We suffer – either as the person who is ill or as one who witnesses and cares for that one.

“Yet all this suffering somehow does not destroy us; we endure, and we incorporate it into the life we are trying to save, to maintain, to extend…”

And so begins this issue of The Healing Muse in recognition of its content, and the content of each and every issue. Hard core. Truthful. Honest. And recognizable, ‘relatable’ to so many of us.

In “Grounded: An Editor’s Note” (full text online) in the newest edition of New Letters (v76, n4), Robert Stewart says, “As America gets fatter, it seems to want its art to become weightless.”

Ouch. But true. Read on.

“Kindle-like products seem fine enough, but marketing has induced many people I know into feeling guilty for continuing to prefer regular books and journals. I believe that physical matter in literary art, as in the universe, cannot be destroyed. One must know how, and sometimes where, to look. My institution’s library just celebrated the installation of a book ‘robot’ — sealed up, like Poe’s Fortunato, in a cave-like room—where the library will seclude a promised 80 percent of its books and print journals, accessible for request but not for browsing. We can browse cataloguing-in data; but books and journals on shelves, in aisles, belong to the physical world, due for a change. The library has its reasons, as a friend points out, trying to fulfill contradictory missions: to provide access and also preserve the materials. Articles and chapters on library reserve for student reading now must be digitized; so none of my own students need get up and actually enter the library. This weightlessness, I admit, weighs on me…”

And there’s more. Read the rest here.

Creative Nonfiction Editor Lee Gutkind reminices about “the author as a personality” and how, in the ever changing word of publishing, he misses this.

The Fall 2010 issue of The Georgia Review
includes a special feature on Raymond Andrews: “Dreams, Ifs, and Alls.” This is the first of a multi-part feature on the Georgia-born author (1934 – 91), and is “the most extended focus on an individual writer in the Georgia Review’s Sixty-four-year history.” Included: previously unpublished prose and letters by Raymond Andrews, essay about his life and work, photographs from his family and professional life, and art by his brother Benny Andrews (1930 – 2006).

A capella Zoo: A Web & Pring Journal of Magic Realism & Slipstream gets my Stunning Cover notice for both the front and back covers of their Fall 2010 issue (#5). The front piece is “Acrobats” by Martha Brouwer, and the back is an untitled work by Feng Sun Chen. Both pieces can be viewed on A capella Zoo‘s website, along with much of print publication’s content online.

In honor of Nobel month The Georgia Review is placing on sale two unique Nobel laureate issues from Spring and Winter 1995. Until 31 October, these limited-supply back issues are available as follows: Spring 1995, $20; Winter 1995, $15; both, $30.

During the planning stages for the summer 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and the satellite Cultural Olympiad program, Georgia Review editor Stanley W. Lindberg proposed that the living laureates of literature—they numbered sixteen at the time—should be invited to appear together in Atlanta for an unprecedented multi-day program. His proposal was embraced, and on 23–25 April 1995 eight laureates convened at the Carter Center for readings, panel discussions, press conferences, and social activities. Never before or since have so many of these distinguished prizewinners been in the same room anywhere in the world.

The laureates in attendance were Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Kenzaburo Oe, Octavio Paz, Claude Simon, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott. The introducers and moderators for the event were former President Jimmy Carter, United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove, ABC’s Nightline host Ted Koppel, and Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games President and CEO Billy Payne.

The 350-page Spring 1995 issue of The Georgia Review is entirely given over to the Nobel laureates and comprises the following:

Full texts of the Nobel acceptance lectures given by all sixteen then-living laureates—the eight in attendance plus Saul Bellow, Camilo Jose Cela, Odysseas Elytis, Nadine Gordimer, Halldor Laxness, Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Commissioned original essays on all sixteen laureates, written by a range of notable critics—among them Henry Louis Gates Jr., Trudier Harris, Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard.

Bibliographies, photographs, and original drawings of all the laureates, the last by Darrell Rainey.

The Winter 1995 issue of The Georgia Review includes a sixty-page section of material transcribed from the Nobel laureates’ gathering:

Remarks by Jimmy Carter and Rita Dove.

A panel discussion featuring Joseph Brodsky, Toni Morrison, Kenzaburo Oe, and Wole Soyinka, with Ted Koppel moderating.

A panel discussion featuring Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, Claude Simon, and Derek Walcott, with Ted Koppel moderating.

Four pages of photographs taken during the events.

Spurred by a reader’s letter, Senior Fiction Editor Ronna Wineberg takes on this question in her forward to the Fall 2010 issue of Bellevue Literary Review:

Recently, a reader wrote us a letter and objected to a story we had published. She felt on of the characters in the story was unfairly dismissive of nurses. Her letter caused us to think about the BLR‘s goals. What can a reader expect from creative work about health, healing, and illness published in a literary journal?

Literary work about these themes differs from scholarly work, of course. Articles in medical journals must be fair, based on fact or rigorous research. A personal essay that appears in the BLR is grounded in fact as well, although the writer often expresses an opinion. But a short story and sometimes a poem create a fictional world. What does fiction promise us? How does the world of a story differ from a creative essay or scholarly article?

All readers bring their own experience to a work of literature. The reader who wrote to us understood the objective reality of the medical world and the importance of a strong partnership between doctors and nurses. But fiction does not always reflect reality. A character can think what he or she wants. A short story allows a reader to enter another person’s mind, to be privy to thoughts that might not otherwise be expressed.

Fiction doesn’t promise us a measured view of life or even a fair view, and it doesn’t always present a flattering portrait of people or a profession. A short story provides the reader with the vision of one author and the perceptions of the characters in that story. Readers, like our letter writer, may be offended by a story or feel that a character is insensitive. However, this is the beauty of fiction: it allows the reader to live another life, experience a new perspective, journey into unfamiliar worlds.

Washington Square‘s “Borderlands Issue” (Summer/Fall 2010) features writing that, rather than being interspersed throughout the issue, is given a devoted section of the magazine. According to Editor Martin Rock, though it may seem strange that the work is “cordoned” off, the “decision comes from our desire to give voice to writers in exile, be it self-imposed or otherwise, and to provide them with a space, both metaphorical and literal, to put up their feet and stay a while.” Those guests (with most works appearing in translation)include Meena Alexander, Jean-Luc Raharimanana, Drajica Rajcic, Avrom Sutzkever, Aung Way, Patrice Nganang, Soheil Najm, Huan Xiang, Idris Bazorkin, and an interview with Austin Woerner.

“Many writers and editors hope that literary magazines will carry writers through these difficult economic times by providing outlets. There is the usual hysteria about the ‘death of fiction’ but we have seen little of that here as young, middle-aged and older writers keep emerging, keep sharpening their pencils and trying to ouwit and outfence their readers. It’s not like the heyday of the late sixties when George Hitchcock published Kayak, when Gordon Lish shepherded and drove Raymond Carver to reach beyond himself and the bottle to produce a new order of writing that was distinctive, driven by aesthetic concerns rather than merely commercial ones.

“It certainly was an imperfect golden age, but short stories (very good ones) are still being produced and there are, as Salman Rushdie noted, lots of terrific magazines that continue to nourish the hears of readers and writers.”

Excerpt from Robert S. Fogarty’s Editorial “The Short Story Today” from The Antioch Review’s Annual All Fiction Issue

After a year of seeing so many long-standing publications shut down, it sure is good to recognize the 34th anniversary of Calyx, and especially considering the work that Calyx has done over the these year to “provide a forum for women’s creative work — including work by women of color, lesbian and bisexual women, young women, old women.” Happy Anniversary Calyx!

The New Quarterly #115 includes The Extra New Quarterly 40+ page supplement trade-format magazine “In Which Writers Writing on Everything But Writing.” Guest edited and introduced by Katia Grubisic, it includes watercolors by Jon Claytor and the following sections and authors:

CONFESSIONS
AMY JONES Confessions of a Roller Coaster Addict
ANNE FLEMING Confessions of a Ukulele Devotee
PATRICIA YOUNG Confessions from the End of the World
RICHARD CUMYN Confessions of a Sourdough Nerd
CARRIE SNYDER Confessions of an Unsettled Woman
HEATHER BIRRELL Confessions of a High School (Student) Survivor

COLLECTIONS
TERRY GRIGGS Rockface
JEANETTE LYNES Enlightening Fetish
SKY GILBERT Bank Ladies

OBSESSIONS
PASHA MALLA A Night at the Theatre
KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER Wide Open
MICHAEL REDHILL The Root of Consciousness
LEESA DEAN Cycle

REFLECTIONS
ALBERTO MANGUEL Stubborn Continuity
ANNE SIMPSON The Great Saskatoon Scavenger Hunt
ISABEL HUGGAN Reflecting on Mirrors
GORAN SIMIC Anatomy of Escape
RONNA BLOOM To Be With Strangers
ANDREW TIBBETTS The Taste of Pins

The latest issue of Chtenia Journalis themed “Dacha Life” – second home, rural living for city dwellers (something southern Michigan city dwellers refer to as “going up north” or “to the cabin” – usually near water). Editor Tamara Eidelman writes in her introduction, “Autonomy, Solitude and Peace”:

“Of supreme importance at the dacha is that life there be absolutely unlike life in the city. For a landowner in the second half of the nineteenth century, it meant there was no need to follow the conventions of high society. For a city person, it meant resting from the burdens of one’s labors, breathing fresh air free of the smoke and soot of a large city, and socializing with friends without any excessive formality . . . For over a century, Russian city dwellers have bee attracted to dacha life for the autonomy, solitude and peace it has to offer. So it is no accident that so many works of Russian literature take place in dachas – this is where people feel freer, where they open up more quickly.”

And this issue of Chtenia continues this tradition with contemporary authors prose and poetry in English (Alexei Bayer, Irina Borisova, Marina Arsenievna Tarkovskaya) as well as translations of past Russian writers: Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev, Alexander Blok, Aton Chekhov, Bavrila Romanovich Derzhavin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Maganpoets invited readers to Take the Proust Questionnaire for an upcoming special feature.

The editors at Verse Wisconsin take on the issue of “previously published” or not when a writer submits a poem that has been published on the writer’s personal blog or website. Some publications (most notably in my encounters – online journals) count personal blog/website postings as “previously published.” Others do not consider it “published” unless it has gone through an outside (of yourself) editorial process. Verse Wisconsin‘s position after much consideration and consultation: “We will accept poems that have appeared on the poet’s OWN blog or website (only), with an understanding that upon acceptance, the poet will remove the accepted poem from their own site for the duration of the VW issue, print or online, their poem appears in. After the issue is past, poets are free to publish the poem again on their blog, with a credit to VW listed and hopefully a link to the issue in our archives.” Solution? Well, it’s one approach.

The newest issue of Western Humanities Review (v64.2 – not yet posted on their website as of this blog post) features Hybrid/Collborative Work. Even the Editors’ Note, which addresses the topic “What is Hybrid Work?” is a “Collaborative on a Conversation about Hybridity.” In in, the editors discuss the history of hybrid work as a genre, set forth a working definition of hybrid as a literary form, and discuss the benefits of hybrid as an alternative to conventional forms. The editors’ also suggest moving away from rigid definitions of hybrid, which would allow us to “see hybrids everywhere, including critics’ discussion of ‘genre authenticity’ and “standards we have deemed ‘genre normative’.” An interesting and worthwhile editorial discussion for those interested in the issue of literary hybrids, and an volume of contributions to the discussion worth seeking out. If not for this, then definitely for the artwork by Kate MacDowell which graces the front and back covers as well as several pieces within.

Side by side in the mail: get born: The Uncensored Voice of Motherhood and Boston Review cover story: Mothers Who Care Too Much (“What feminists get wrong about family, work, and equality”). Moms, you’ve got some good reading this month.

The Summer 2010 front and back covers of The Georgia Review feature photography by Connie Imboden, whose work is also beautifully reproduced in a full-color, glossy, center portfolio – “Danse Macabre” – introduced by Susan Ludvigson. The Georgia Review website shares several images along with Ludvigson’s intro.

The newest issue of Granta (111) is themed “Going Back” and features an excerpt from Mark Twain’s never before published and forthcoming autobiography. Twain himself barred anyone from publishing the text until 100 years after his death. This fall, the University of California will release Volume 1 of Twain’s text. “The Farm” is available to read in the issue, and online at Granta, Benjamin Griffin writes on editing the autobiography (A Voice from the Vault) and Malcolm Jones offers his commentary, “Where do we put Mark Twain?” – on trying to place a literary great. Several other links to Twain-related sites and projects are also included, as well as images from Twain’s original text.

Evolution by Kathy Blackwell

The newest issue of Naropa University’s Bombay Gin offers a special focus on “Twenty Years of Eco-Lit” and more specifically on Jack Collom, who back in 1989, “taught his first Eco-Lit course at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.”

A portfolio section provides a tribute to Collom’s influence: “It opens with an interview of him by two Bombay Gin editors, Jennifer Aglio and Suzanne DuLany. Collom discusses how he introduces his students to a pantheon of writers that includes Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Stephen Jay Gould, and how his writing projects take radical shapes, investigating the ways old forms evolve into new. The haiku morphs into the lune, or the fourteen-line sonnet’s tight formalism restructures itself as the acrostic or mesostic. At the end of each year’s course, Collom’s group compiles a photocopy anthology of its writings. We’ve reproduced some of this twenty-odd-years of poems, polemics, word-forms, & collages. There are also new poems in the eco-lit vein by Jack Collom, and by Naropa University colleagues Joanne Kyger, Hoa Nguyen, Elizabeth Robinson, & Andrew Schelling. And finally, there is an archival talk on ecology & poetry, given by Eleni Sikelianos at a Naropa Summer Writing Program panel in June 2009.” [from the Editor’s Note]

In her Editor’s Note, Cave Wall Editor Rhett Trull dedicates the issue (#7) to Lucille Clifton with this remembrance: “This year, with the death of Lucille Clifton, we lost a great poet. I had the privilege of studying with her when she was a visiting professor at Duke University. When I think of that class, the main thing I remember is her joy. She brought it with her into any room. It was a difficult time in my life, and I clung to Lucille Clifton’s every word as if it were a kind of gospel, a message not just on how to write but on how to live. She made the world seem full of wonder, impossible not to love.

“This does not mean she wrote only of beauty. On the contrary, Lucille Clifton’s poetry is a catalogue of the spectrum of emotions from sorrow to hope, joy to despair, anger to celebration; to each of these, she brought her sense of compassion. Above my desk hangs one of her quotes: ‘You can’t play for safety and make art.” In my notebooks, I’ve saved more of her wisdom from that semester: ‘Art is not about answers. Don’t be afraid to leave a poem unresolved.’ ‘A poem should never leave you where it found you.'”

U.S. 1 Worksheets is the annual publication of U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative, a group of poets based in central New Jersey. In addition to producing the journal, members promote poetry by meeting weekly to share and critique their own work, producing an annual literary journal, give public readings followed by open mic, and hold occasional events, including U.S. 1 Presents at Princeton Public Library.

The journal, which began in tabloid format in 1973, has been published continuously since then. While publishing the work of their cooperative members, the current issue includes about 2/3 of its works from poets throughout the U.S., as well as from England and the Philippines. Manuscripts are accepted from May 1st through June 30th and read by rotating editors from the Cooperative.

The Spring 2010 issue of The Bitter Oleander offers readers a 20-page special feature: Pierre-Albert Jourdan’s “The Approach” – writings from his last notebooks translated from the French with an introduction and end-notes by John Taylor, and also including several b&w photos.

“When The Southern Review resident scholar Andrew Ervin came to me last summer with the idea of doing a special feature on baseball for our spring 2010 issue,” starts Jeanne Leiby’s Editor’s Note, “I was skeptical. My initial concern was that our slush pile would be overrun by Sunday-afternoon-playing-catch-with-Dad sentimentality and easy metaphors that didn’t challenge, compel, or embrace the literary standards that represent The Southern Review‘s history and present. In short, I didn’t think there was much to say about baseball that hadn’t been said a thousand times.” Instead, Leiby writes of her amazement at the complexity of works received, the translations representing baseball’s far-reaching appeal: “the depth and breadth was astounding.” And once again proved the value of literary magazines in our contemporary culture to bring out new work: “the work not yet seen and the voices not yet heard.” Until now.

World Literature Today‘s newest issue (May/June 2010) includes a special section devoted to speculative fiction. Editor Daniel Simon writes: “SF in WLT?” and answers with, “In the current issue, it matters less how we define the world and more how we see through it, or around it, and into the realm of other possibilities.” And so, SciFi it is – featuring Kij Johnson, China Mieville, Federik Pohl, George Zebrowski, James Gunn, Lavie Tidhar, Pamela Sargent, Paul Kincaid, David Fowler, Grady Hendrix, Tom Shippey, and Davor Slamnig.

Exclusive online content includes Rob Bollmar’s podcast interview with Cory Doctorow, the complete text of the short stories by Pamel Sargent and Lavie Tidhar (excerpted in the print edition), Paul Di Filippo’s extended reviews of the best speculative fiction of 2009, and much more SF-related content.

Last year, Poetry Northwest celebrated its 50th anniversary, “quietly” – as editor Kevin Craft notes. The publication has not survived these five decades unscathed, having suspended publication briefly at the turn of the new millennium. But Poetry Northwest came back “reestablished as a nonprofit enterprise on a foundation of community support.” Facing and embracing change once again, Poetry Northwest has relocated from the Attic Writers Workshop in Portland, and returned to its birthplace of the Puget Sound region. The magazine is now “housed and published by the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. But,” Craft adds, “it will depend, as it always has, on the support and interest of community of readers all over the country.”

This newest issue of Poetry Northwest (Spring & Summer 2010) features works by new and known writers: Bob Hicok, Linda Gregg, Paisley Rekdal, Sierra Nelson, Christopher Merrill, amy Greacen, Andrew Zawacki, Jason Whitmarsh, Joelle Biele, Jeff Hardin, David Sofield, Ted Gilley, Ronald Wallace, Spikanth Reddy, Kelli Russel Agodon, Rick Barot, Rod Jellema, Eamon Brennan, Lilah Hegnauer, Daniel Groves, Daniel Lamberton, Zach Savich, Jay B. Thompson, and Kevin Craft. Artwork by Claire Cowie and Jay Bryant.