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!
Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timeline by Dave Birkett Reedy Press, October 2024
In Detroit Lions, An Illustrated Timeline, award-winning reporter Dave Birkett vividly recounts the most important people, games and moments of the franchise’s first 90 seasons, from the early days of Earl “Dutch” Clark, the team’s first superstar, to the 10 Hall-of-Famers who played for the team in the ‘50s, to the spine-tingling performances of Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson and the team’s resurrection under beloved head coach Dan Campbell.
The story Professor and Journalist Carrie N. Baker tells in Abortion Pills: US History and Politics takes place at the intersection of public health and political posturing. Players include feminists, doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug Administration, Congress, state lawmakers, and anti-abortion actors who, for four decades, have grappled over protocols for pill distribution and use, a battle that largely sidesteps the fact that abortion medication has been used to safely end unwanted pregnancies in 96 countries.
But overly-cautious US lawmakers aside, Baker reports that the pills – called mifepristone and misoprostol – are typically taken within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and now account for 63 percent of abortions that are arranged via telemedicine or by visiting US health centers or contacting online clinics.
It’s a remarkable figure, and Baker writes that she expects it to grow.
Moreover, the rapid development of informal pill distribution networks, largely promoted on the internet, presently help an untold number of people acquire pills. According to Baker, these efforts began to skyrocket after the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center (which upended legal protections for abortion.) “The overturn of Roe removed abortion pills from the medical system in many states and spurred the development of informal networks of pill distribution and support for using them,” she reports. “Rather than moving patients to providers, advocates worked to move pills to people.” The upshot is that people have become increasingly aware that pills can be easily purchased and used at home.
That said, Baker acknowledges that abortion medication is not a panacea and recognizes that abortion surgery will sometimes be necessary; she also cautions readers that people have been arrested and convicted for acquiring pills unlawfully. Still, despite legal risks, Abortion Pills celebrates the determined feminists and public health activists who have put abortion medication directly into women’s hands.
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.
“The first step is admitting it,” opens Barbara Tran’s debut Precedented Parroting. The “it” is either something the speaker wishes to forget or is the speaker “admitting” to being a “willful forgetter.” The speaker has “taken this step many times.” To remember poses risks. Memories represent something “that plagues” and cause the speaker to “become stranded”; the memories at the fore, those specific and unique to a Vietnamese family, their immigration, and the anti-Asian sentiments and violence they survive/d. Throughout the collection, the reader witnesses the struggle between forgetting, “admitting,” and “sharing.” In the poem “Blue from a Distance,” the poet writes, “There is a phrase / in Vietnamese chia buồn / sharing sadness.”
From poem to poem, Tran turns the pages of a family photo album, “slicing / open” or “framing” a “moment” of her memory within her family’s life. The poet defines trauma as the nesting of a smaller figure inside a larger figure — “each loss / encompasses smaller / losses” like a bird’s “feather each barb / holds smaller / barbs.”
A cacophony of birds flock Tran’s poems. In the first poem alone, a raven, drongo, kingfisher, kite, cormorant, heron, egret, and sandpipers appear. As the title suggests, the parrot takes precedent. Parrots, readers are told in the title poem, respond to trauma in ways similar to humans: “They rock themselves to comfort / themselves They scream and suffer / from insomnia and nightmares.” But birds also have the ability to “let go their contact / with the earth and water.”
These “poem[s] are a road map / writ” “in measured layers, offering facts withholding / crucial details” by a speaker who “comes from a family / of unreliable narrators.” That is because it is “really difficult / to learn / how to live,” “to find / [one’s] own feather.” The poems in Precedented Parroting mark a beginning “telling,” and in this beginning, Barbara Tran sings as birds do.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
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Deadline: December 1, 2024 Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to the Fall Black Fox Prize with theme: Fragments of Time! Deadline: December 1, 2024! We are also accepting free submissions for our winter 2025 print issue. Free subs close on November 30, 2024! View our flyer for more info and a link to submit.
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Deadline: November 1-30, 2024 Third Street Review, a quarterly literary journal, welcomes submissions of Flash Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Art, and Photography. If you have something wild, wooly, and wonderful, we want to see it. We value the work of individual creators—show us who you are and what you can do. In addition to being a paying publication, we promote across social media platforms and nominate for awards. Jump in—we can’t wait to meet you! View our website to learn more.
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Deadline: November 1, 2024 Submit individual poems via Submittable ($10 for two poems, 40 lines or fewer). Winner and two runners-up will have broadsides designed and printed ($250 and 50 copies to winner; 25 copies for runners-up). No particular aesthetic; we just want great poems. Winning broadsides will be designed by poet/artist Lindsay Lusby. View flyer for more information and a link to submit.
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Deadline: January 14, 2025 $2,500 honorarium & book publication. Book-length poetry manuscripts accepted until January 14, 2025 (we observe a 5-day grace period). Final judge: Craig Morgan Teicher. $28 entry fee includes one-year subscription to Colorado Review. View our flyer for more information and a link to our complete guidelines. Questions? Please email us.
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Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Caesura Poetry Workshop aims to support, inspire, and energize poets and writers through a wide variety of affordable Zoom workshops hosted by award-winning poet, editor, teacher John Sibley Williams. Most workshops include poem analysis, active group discussion, and writing prompts. Some are even self-paced! Reference NewPages and get 50% off your first workshop. View flyer for more info and a link to our website. Register via email.
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Deadline: November 1, 2024 December Magazineseeks submissions for the 2025 Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize. Maggie Smith will Judge. Prizes: $1,500 & publication (winner); $500 & publication (honorable mention). All finalists will be published in the 2025 Spring/Summer Awards issue. Submit up to 3 poems per entry. $20 entry fee includes a copy of the awards issue. Submit September 1 to November 1, 2024. For more information and a link to our guidelines, please view our flyer.
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Submissions open for the Futurist Debut Book Award for debut books ($1,000 prize), the Front Range Book Prize for books by Colorado authors or about Colorado ($1,000 prize), the Luminaire Prose Award for short stories ($100 prize), and book-length nonfiction and poetry manuscripts! See what’s closing at the end of October! View our flyer for more information and links to submit.
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Application deadline: December 15 (priority); January 15 (final) UNC Greensboro’s MFA is a two-year residency program offering fully funded assistantships with stipends. Students work closely with faculty in one-on-one tutorials, developing their craft in a lifelong community of writers. UNCG offers courses in poetry, fiction, publishing, and creative nonfiction, plus teaching opportunities and editorial work for The Greensboro Review. Note our 12/15 priority consideration deadline! View our flyer for more information and a link to our website.
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43 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
October is half over with and submission opportunities are starting to roll in for the last few months of the year and into the next already! NewPages is here to help you out with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for the week of October 18, 2024, so you don’t miss out.
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 October 2024 eLitPak is now available!
The New York Times Book Review used to have a question in their weekly interview with authors where they would ask that author what book the President should read. The answers were often rather enlightening, but they became more political when Donald Trump was in the White House, which is when, I believe, the newspaper stopped asking the question. Matthew Desmond’s book would be a good answer, no matter who the President is, so I’m sorry that question isn’t there any longer.
Desmond lays out a solid argument that the poverty in America isn’t accidental, and it isn’t a result of laziness on the part of those who are poor. Instead, poverty is due to a concerted effort by politicians and corporations. The policies in the U.S. create poverty and keep people in that situation under the guise of a scarcity of resources. Similarly, corporations claim they cannot afford to pay workers more or they will have to charge consumers more for their products, all while recording record profits and bonuses for CEOs.
Desmond doesn’t let the average reader—white and at least middle class—off the hook, either. He points out that many government benefits actually make life better for people who are not poor—whether that be the ability to write off mortgage interest or zoning laws that drive up housing prices—not those who need the most help.
Thus, he calls on readers to vote and act in such a way to help alleviate poverty, especially by supporting companies that actually pay their employees a living wage (he doesn’t name particularly egregious businesses, such as Amazon, but they readily come to mind). However, real change has to come at the policy level, as poverty is, in fact, by design, so the solutions will need to be, as well.
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
In Stedfast, his third collection of poetry, Ali Blythe responds to John Keats’s last sonnet, which opens with the line: “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—” As if cutting a key from the past, Blythe disassembles Keats’s poem, by a full line, half line, or word at a time, then reassembles it across the titles of Stedfast’s poems. For instance, the first three poems in Stedfast are titled “Bright Star,” “Would I were stedfast,” and “As thou art.”
The poems of Stedfast are love poems in the romantic tradition, delivered in couplets and by “lyric address” from a speaker who whispers “disquieting thoughts” to a lover “asleep.” “And so on down the page” the “export is memory,” “the same old stories” by a “ghostwriter.” Via “astral projection” and “delicate revolutions,” Blythe reconceives and transforms Keats’s single sonnet into a book-length nocturne.
Taking place over “one night,” the collection meditates on the idea of steadfastness in romantic relationships, and by extension, in romantic poetry. As “one myth” dissolves “within / another, risking / our own nihility,” the poet grapples with the tension between “allusions” and illusions, illusions and reality, a romantic past and a fragile future.
In Stedfast, Ali Blythe’s poems constitute a “path / of devotion” to other and poetry, and they “seize what shines.”
Stedfast by Ali Blythe. icehouse poetry, September 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
About Place Journal October 2024 issue is titled, Shaping Destiny: Election Season, Before, During and After, with contents that respond to the realities of the most important election of our times. Democracy or dictatorship: these are the stakes. Through poetry, prose, and graphics, Shaping Destiny explores the current national and international situation, focusing on ways in which social and environmental justice are created or destroyed, and relating these—as is the focus of the Black Earth Institute—to matters of the spirit. Many rights have been lost or are threatened, as is the integrity of the election. It is our hope that Shaping Destiny will inspire you to do the work that is in front of all of us.
The Whole Catastrophe by Jami Macarty Vallum, September 2024
In her aptly titled fourth chapbook, The Whole Catastrophe, Jami Macarty takes readers on a road trip to the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico while reflecting on fragility of life, greed of corporations, and the disasters we must withstand, from plastics pollution to toxic feedlots to carbon monoxide poisoning. Mourning the death of a dear friend and threats of fragile ecologies are reasons for despair but not to disengage. In The Whole Catastrophe, resisting destruction means caring for the interdependent parts of wonder, annotating birds on their migratory course, waving hello to grief, and knowing catastrophe like a constellation above.
Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
The premise of Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, sounds like it could be the basis for a Hollywood comedy: people often confuse Naomi Klein, author of books that attack corporations and climate change, with Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, but now turned right-wing conspiracy theorist. There’s even a moment where Klein talks about earlier confusions with Naomi Campbell, a Black British model who does not, in fact, write books about corporate power or the climate crisis.
However, given that Naomi Klein wrote this book, it is not a comedy. Instead, Klein uses the confusion with Wolf to talk about the mirror world of the title, the one that Wolf now lives in, creating and perpetuating a reality that is similar to the real world, but different in dangerous ways. Klein talks about how she and Wolf have fairly similar concerns: the rise of technology and the companies that monitor and misuse their creations; global organizations that make decisions that overrule the concerns of people within independent nations; governments who use crises and catastrophes to change policies their citizens would never support otherwise. Wolf, though, takes those ideas and produces conspiracy theories with no basis in fact, sharing them online and on Steve Bannon’s productions.
Klein makes it clear that the primary difference between her work and Wolf’s work is the diligent research and fact-checking that goes into what Klein produces. That approach means that Klein is open to information that can change her mind, unlike Wolf and those like her. While Klein doesn’t spend as much time on former President Trump as she could, it’s clear that he and his supporters are who she’s trying to explain, through the lens of Wolf. Ultimately, Klein argues that all of the mirroring that goes on prevents people from seeing themselves and others clearly. Her book tries to cut through that to help readers understand a world they would never experience otherwise.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
38 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
With colder temperatures finally settling in the Midwest at least, now is a great time to dig out your favorite sweaters and cardigans, grab a cup of steaming hot cider, and write, edit, and submit. NewPages is back with our weekly submissions roundup to help you find a home for your work!
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 on Wednesday, October 16.
If you’re looking for writing that’s playful and unconventional (maybe even a little mysterious), truly new works that stay with you long after you’ve read the final line, and a publication that makes you excited for each next issue, then click on over to Jelly Squid. Publishing three online issues per year, Jelly Squid Magazine accepts all types of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and artwork, as well as all hybrid forms in between. “We really like to see – and would like to see more of – work that’s unique and experimental,” says Editor Mo Buckley Brown.
Even the name is reflective of this mission. “‘Jelly’ and ‘squid’ are both words that aren’t terribly uncommon,” Brown says, “but they have unique sounds individually, and together, they form a playful combination that felt a little unconventional. We thought this name captured our hopes for what the magazine would be – playful and unconventional, and maybe even a little mysterious.”
The October 2024 issue of The Lake, an online journal of poetry and poetics, is now available and features works by Carol Casey, Judy Brackett Crowe, J. H. Hill, Mary Makofske, Lauren K. Nixon, Kenneth Pobo, Lex Runciman, Fiona Sinclair, Susan Stiles, Tuyet Van Do. This issue also includes reviews of Eileen Carney Hulme’s Somewhere a Tree Waits for an Angel or a Butterfly, Dennis Hinrichsen’s, Dominion and Selected Poems, and Harry Man’s Popular Song. “One Poem Reviews” is a special treat for readers, offering a one-poem sample from a recently published collections. This month highlights poems from Judy Brackett Crowe, Clive Donovan, Helen Finney, Mahua Sen, and Ram Krishna Singh.
Hot off the press, a beautiful new Issue of Jewish Fiction! Issue 37 contains 18 stories, originally written in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English and, for the first time, Ukrainian. In honor of the upcoming holidays, there is a story set in between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. And since, in between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur this year, Jewish Fiction will commemorate the first anniversary of October 7th, Issue 37 includes 4 stories about that. We hope the stories in our new issue fascinate and delight you.
In Tangled in Vow & Beseech, Jill McCabe Johnson tangles with self as daughter, sister, mother, survivor, and poet; with an “unpredictable series / of geometries” in relationship with an intimate partner; with the “the weight / of weep and want and regret” of the most pressing socio-political issues of our contemporary time. The poet allows her speaker to get real about “another mass / moment” of gun violence, those “who fell in the path / of xenophobia,” “the silencing of women,” and the dangers of “indifference.”
While the poet “sit[s] with” the consequential and holds others to account, she assumes her ethical responsibilities as a citizen and an artist, insisting that the personal includes the public. Perhaps this collective of “all-too-human / foibles” accounts for McCabe Johnson’s poems being “leashed to form.”
In some cases, the poet determines form by the poem’s content. For instance, the poem “Boxed In” uses vertical lines to erect walls around horizontal textual lines, thereby boxing in the text: “| if I typed with an eye | toward balance | maybe each poem could carve a window | or box.” Received forms, such as the abecedarian, acrostic, apostrophe, elegy, epistle, and nocturne, claim space among poems that act as a “Travel Journal” and press release. The handful of contrapuntal poems, scattered throughout the book, offer readers multiple meaning combinations. The gesture of multiple possibilities of meaning makes sense because, throughout the collection, McCabe Johnson reaches beyond the unary and binary.
With her “eye | toward balance” and inclusion, Jill McCabe Johnson “breaks the bones of what we know. Resets them” to offer readers Tangled in Vow & Beseech, a book of both the “jurisdiction of the past” and an “edict of hope” for the future.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence by Nicole Bedera University of California Press, October 2024
The debate over campus sexual violence is more heated than ever, but hardly anyone knows what actually happens inside Title IX offices. On the Wrong Side by sociologist Nicole Bedera provides the first comprehensive account of the inner workings of the secretive Title IX system. Drawing on a yearlong study of survivors, perpetrators, and the administrators who oversaw their cases, Bedera exposes the structures that predictably punish survivors who come forward in the service of protecting—or even rewarding—their perpetrators. In doing so, she reveals that the system tasked with ending gender inequality on campus only intensifies it, upending survivors’ lives and threatening the degrees that brought them to college in the first place.
Dr. Nicole Bedera is a sociologist and cofounder of the antiviolence consulting practice Beyond Compliance. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and has spent more than a decade studying sexual violence and advocating for survivors in media outlets including the New York Times, NPR, and Harper’s BAZAAR.
Southern Humanities Review issue 57.3 features the 2024 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize winner, Erika Jing, and her poem “Follow.” Judge Victoria Chang also selected Andrew Hemmert, Wesley Rothman, and Felicia Zamora as runners-up. Honorable mentions include Gregory Emilio, Jenny Qi, Geneva Toland, and Shahryar Eskandari Zanjani.
The rest of the issue is filled with nonfiction by Christine Hale and Nell Smith; fiction by Olivia Clare Friedman, Samantha Kathryn O’Brien, Lisa Clay Shanahan, and Lauren D. Woods; with cover art by William Gropper.
On October 3, 2024, Southern Humanities Review celebrated the eleventh year of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize at an event presented by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art with the judge and winner in conversation.
A publication of Santi Arts, the Still Point Arts Quarterly Fall 2024 issue is themed “Walking,” as Editor Christine Brooks Cote writes, “I’ve walked to be in the moment, to let go of whatever difficulties and confusions occupied my mind, to feel the physicality of the experience, to absorb the natural world, to seek and find pure pleasure.”
Sharing in this joy of walking are writers and artists Kevin Browne, J. R. Solonche, Nancy Buonaccorsi, Kit Carlson, Daniel Thomas, Andrea Lani, Suzanne Doerge, Barbara Sapienza, Rebecca Ring, Katherine January, Paul Hilding, Brian T. Duncan, Jane Salisbury, Erin Jamieson, David Macauley, Amy Boyd, AD West, Molly Murfee, and Susan Currie.
Power Point is a groundbreaking collection of feminist poetry by Jane Muschenetz, including Best of the Net nominated, “100% Mom” (Whale Road Review), Pushcart nominated, “Failure to Thrive” (Meat for Tea), and several genre/discipline bending poems that intersect economics, science, popular art, and literature. Too often, women and change-makers are dismissed as “hysterical, emotion-driven, irrational.” Power Point turns this notion on its head, presenting meticulously researched “data poems” to make the case for a more compassionate world. Blending traditional and hybrid formats, Muschenetz exposes the status quo as a malleable and subjective reality that can and must be questioned and improved. Muschenetz, an MIT trained Business Strategy Consultant, used Microsoft PowerPoint™ software to create several of the ‘pointed’ poems about ‘power’ dynamics in this collection.
Since 2021, tiny wren lit has been publishing short-form poetry online and in a downloadable, single-page zine format. Nominating for both The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, tiny wren lit seeks poems that are fifteen lines or shorter (including stanza breaks) and will accept up to six poems per submission. The editors favor “poems with deep imagery + original, striking figurative language.” General submissions vary, with Issue 8 calling for “tiny golden shovels.” Recent contributors include Chris Bullard, Caleb Weinhardt, Natalie Nee, Paul Allatson, Vic Nogay, Lee Potts, Jennifer Browne, Ophelia Monet, Emma Gawlinski, Myriam Klatt, Devon Neal, Will Harris, Bart Edleman, L. Bellee Jones-Pierce, Melissa Wen, Paul Hostovsky, Maria Duran, and many more.
The tiny wren lit publishing arm features tiny chapbooks in zine format. Writers are invited to submit manuscripts of 6-15 tiny poems once per submission period. They also have a print anthology call currently open. Themed “Earth” with special guest editor Dana Graef, writers can submit up to six tiny poems for consideration.
The Summer 2024 Blue Collar Review opens with commentary regarding the upcoming election, the state of politics as they impact our daily lives, and the need for individuals to take an active role: “[. . . ] we must work to best effect the system we have in our own defense while building the next system beneath it.
“This requires breaking with official narratives, building militant working class consciousness, cooperative businesses and communities, understanding that, as with our symbiotic biosphere, every thing is connected. We are connected to and interdependent on each other and on all Earth’s myriad life forms. An understanding of this truth is vital in the shaping of a free and livable future. [. . . ] This journal serves not only to connect us but as needed outreach to our class brothers and sisters.”
Contributors to this issue include Mitch Valente, Cathy Porter, Emma Weiss, Roy N. Mason, Jen Dunford-Roskos, Tom Gengler, Marc Jannsen, Matthew J. Spireng, normal, Shirley Adelman, Cathal Whelan, Jonathan Andersen, Mary Franke, Katherine L. Gordon, Chris Butters, and many more. Sample works from the newest issue can be read on the publication’s website.
36 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
It’s officially October! Now is truly the month of spooky season! Spookiest thing of all…? I still have made no headway on my goals of submitting. I hope you are doing better on this end of things. Need help? As always NewPages has your back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
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.
Bellevue Literary Review – Issue 47 is themed Body Politic. Fiction Editor Suzanne McConnell writes in the foreword, “For this issue of BLR, we asked for writing addressing the interface of any body politic—societal, ideological, or national—with the personal. [. . . ] What about our collective body politic, then? We are fractious, split. But are we more than that? Our history tells us that we have been there before and something in our essence is bent on surviving.”
Answering the call for this issue, readers can enjoy fiction by Mehr-Afarin Kohan, Janice Furlong, Daniel Seifert, Alison Luk, Lori Huth, Eugene Stein, Randy DeVita, Jake Lancaster; nonfiction by Laura LeMoon, Claire A. Berman, Justine Payton, Anne Rudig, Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, Kristi Ferguson, Diane Oliver, Maureen Brady, Miciah Hussey; poetry by A. Jenson, Melanie H. Manuel, Hazel Kight Witham, Emily Kedar, Alene Terzian-Zeitounian, Kathleen Weed, Wes Matthews, Lisa Mullenneaux, by Katherine Lo, Fiona Miller, Vincent Basso, Vera Kroms, Winshen Liu, Sean Sam, Eunice Cho, Paul Howe, Jasper Kennedy; and cover art by Mary Lacy.
While fall is creeping in, the Summer 2024 Baltimore Review is still fresh for reading poems, short stories and creative non-fiction by Genevieve Abravanel, Caroline Barnes, Melissa Darcey Hall, Bari Lynn Hein, Sarah Sugiyama Issever, Nick Manning, Kaecey McCormick, Noreen Ocampo, Maurine Ogonnaya Ogbaa, Genevieve Payne, Nina Colette Peláez, Anne Rudig, Annie Trinh, and Ernie Wang.
Readers can also enjoy works by the winners of the Baltimore Review Summer Contest, judged by Kathy Flann: Amanda Auchter (prose poem), Taylor Ebersole (flash fiction), and Al Dixon (flash creative nonfiction).
Good Different is a stunning novel-in-verse narrated by Selah, a 13-year-old girl struggling to act normal amidst an onslaught of feelings (as all 13-year-olds are, but they do not know that).
The metaphor of the dragon carried throughout the book works on several levels: to embody Selah’s emotional state, as one struggles inside her; as a strike against social norms, as seen in her rule set (“Don’t talk about dragons too much”); and as a symbol of difference that’s powerful and cool.
A turning point in the story comes when Selah attends a Fantasy Convention where she encounters others embracing dragon art, dragon lure, and living life on the autism spectrum. Selah goes online and finds much to learn about herself and others, tools to assist with the impinging world, and a brave new word: accommodations. The scene with her school hallway lined with poetry brought me to tears.
Empathy can be taught, and in showing (not telling) how different can be awesome, this book is a welcome lesson. There should be a copy of this book in all middle/elementary school classrooms and libraries. As Selah says:
I am full of possibilities— I can do more than just hide
Good Different by Meg Eden Kuyatt. Scholastic Press, April 2023.
Reviewer bio: Elizabeth S. Wolf has published five books of poetry, most recently, I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a 2018 Rattle prizewinner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.
Jewish Fiction Editor-in-Chief Dr. Nora Gold has announced, “We launched a new website for our journal, renamed the journal Jewish Fiction (not Jewish Fiction .net), now housed www.jewishfiction.com – no longer .net [a redirect is in place], and we have a new logo. Our new website is now interactive and now allows readers to search our 600 stories by theme, author, and original language.”
Jewish Fiction continues to be “the only English-language journal, either print or online, devoted exclusively to publishing Jewish fiction,” sharing Jewish-themed fiction – stories and novel excerpts – from around the world.
It’s time to stock your fall reading list, and to help you with that task, check out the September 2024 New Books Received. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles.
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.
When an obsessive ‘starchitect’ moves into a remote glass house, her governing architectonic principles start to shatter. In the eye of a self-created cancellation storm, protagonist Jacky “The Beetle” McKenzie’s attempts to maintain a ‘streamlined’ existence become increasingly difficult. As she pinballs between ‘inflated confidence and immobilizing insecurity; the two logical poles of her world order,’ her partners struggle to magnetize her unyielding vision. Where Mark only supports Jacky as her obstinate, successful persona, Clarissa, her secondary partner, encourages her to inhabit the grey space between these poles.
The novel offers an intimate character study that effortlessly flows between the inner voices in this claustrophobic, triangulated relationship. While Mark and Clarissa are a well-drawn supporting cast, one can sense Bigg reveling in the humor of Jacky’s unpalatability. Yet, however unpleasant her protagonist appears while interacting with others, she is far more complex than an ‘unlikable female character.’
Jacky desperately falters towards growth but the reader is compelled to see the journey, particularly when, at one point, she sartorially becomes ‘the Beetle’ that the media nickname her. A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be is a fast-paced meditation on obsessive ‘genius,’ cancel culture, and the push-pull between intimacy and compromise.
Reviewer bio: Jennifer Brough is a slow writer and workshop facilitator. Her work has appeared in Ache Magazine, Eunoia Review, SICK Magazine, Artsy, Barren Magazine, among others. Jennifer is writing her first poetry pamphlet, Occult Pain and was shortlisted for the Disabled Poets Prize’s Best Single Poem 2023.
Looking for great new literary and alternative magazines to read the freshest in literary writing and current issues? Check out the New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!
Each month, we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content blurbs for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
Throughout Mengestu’s writing career, he has created characters who have trouble connecting with others, who have some sort of distance from others and themselves. Usually, that breakdown in relationships comes from their lack of recognition of the trauma they’ve suffered, frequently from their experience as refugees or immigrants.
Someone Like Us, his latest novel is no different, as he tells the story of Mamush, a journalist living in Paris with his wife Hannah, with whom he has a young son. However, Mamush spends almost the entire novel traveling to Washington, DC, where he grew up, reflecting on his life with his mother and Samuel, a father figure who might also be his father.
Mamush and Hannah’s marriage is on the verge of collapsing. Their son suffers from some ailment that has sapped his energy and seems to be taking his life from him. Whenever Mamush leaves home, Hannah wonders if he will come back. Similarly, Mamush’s career as a journalist has effectively ended. He became known for writing stories about immigrants from Africa, but those stories were always about tragedies that happened to them, not successes they had.
Samuel and Mamush’s mother have a complicated past that involves living in Europe, as well as Chicago, where they both were arrested, before moving to Washington, DC. However, neither of them will talk about it, and Mamush is unable to discover what happened. Like Mamush, Samuel seems incapable of building true relationships.
Near the end of the novel, Mengestu merges the past and present, questioning even the reliability of the story Mamush and Samuel have been telling. When one has been through trauma, stories become unreliable, but they also become the only thing one has to hold onto. Mengestu gives the reader one more such story, leaving it open to the reader to find hope in the midst of loss.
Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu. Alfred A. Knopf, July 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
In US Constitution 101: From the Bill of Rights to the Judicial Branch, Everything You Need to Know about the Constitution of the United States, authors Richey and Paccone, both teachers, provide readers with a concise, anecdotally rich account of how America’s most foundational document evolved to become “the world’s oldest, functioning written Constitution.” Influenced by Hammurabi’s Code in Mesopotamia, the Greek system of demokratia, and the European Magna Carta, US founders struggled to create unity among the original 13 colonies while simultaneously granting each locale some autonomy. This pattern persists today (seen, for example, in the diverse state abortion laws that followed the 2022 Dobbs decision and in policies that govern the voting rights of convicted felons.)
Eighteenth-century contention is writ large throughout the book – regarding immigration, slavery, women’s suffrage, taxation, and declarations of war — and showcases the compromises and concessions of James Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Moreover, tensions over ratification of the newly-drawn Constitution, which required approval by nine states, are palpably reported and readers become privy to arguments between those who favored federal cohesion and those who favored state’s rights. Accommodation, Richey and Paccone write, “to ensure that none of the branches of government can gain a decisive advantage over the others,” led to a bicameral legislature, with strict policies regarding Presidential veto power and the appointment of federal judges, cabinet members, and ambassadors.
In addition, coverage of church-state separation, freedom of speech and assembly, prior restraint of media, and gun rights give the book added heft and contemporary relevance. What’s more, a smattering of fun facts enliven the prose: Readers learn that gerrymandering, for one, is named for Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, whose administration created a salamander-shaped district that critics dubbed the gerrymander. Who knew?
US Constitution 101 is an entertaining and extremely-readable resource, a guide to US governance for middle school and older readers. It answers a host of questions and explains the rationale for the state-by-state patchwork that makes many policies both complex and varied.
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.
40 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! Welcome to the last roundup of submission opportunities for September 2024. It’s been a long, crazy week hasn’t it? Hopefully you are all staying safe and sound this week. If you have plans to stay indoors and write, edit, and submit, we are here to help! There are many opportunities with September 30 and October 1 deadlines.
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.
Just YA: Short Poems, Essays, & Fiction for Grades 7-12 Seela Books, September 2024
Just YA: Short Poems, Essays, & Fiction is a powerful collection of literature celebrating the diverse and dynamic experiences of contemporary youth. This open-access anthology features short texts that can be read in a single class period and are designed to spark deep conversations. Organized around themes of identity, love, place, justice, and the future, these works offer inclusive and affirming perspectives. With contributions from acclaimed young adult authors, flash fiction writers, and teacher-poets, Just YA provides educators with contemporary texts that resonate with and inspire today’s students. All content is freely available online, encouraging widespread access and use, including 50 pages of instructional materials for teachers.
Contributors include Kristin Bartley Lenz, Tamara Belko, Joe Bisicchia, Stefani Boutelier, Taylor Byas, Dana Claire, Mary E. Cronin, Chris Crowe, Kacie Day, Sarah J. Donovan, Carlos Greaves, Zetta Elliott, Federico Erebia, Kennedy Essmiller, Jen Ferguson, Glenda Funk, Hope Goodearl, Jennifer Guyor Jowett, Regina Harris Baiocchi, Christine Hartman Derr, Melissa Heaton, Rajpreet Heir, Jamie Jo Hoang, Julia Horton, Val Howlett, Valerie Hunter, Stacey Joy, Shih-Li Kow, Laura Kumicz, Sandra Marchetti, Lee Martin, S Maxfield, Jonathon Medeiros, Linda Mitchell, Alana Mondschein, Erin Murphy, Aimee Parkison, Alicia Partnoy, Sonia Patel, Darius Phelps, Brittany Saulnier, David Schaafsma, Laura Shovan, Kate Sjostrom, S., Samuel Stinson, Rachel Toalson, Padma Venkatraman, Karen J Weyant, Kayla Whaley, Emanuel Xavier, Aida Zilelian, and Laura Zucca-Scott.
India Lena González’s debut fox woman get out! is a poetry collection of “restless mourning,” seeking a “salve” to the “stopping up [of] spirit.”
What has stopped up the poet’s spirit has to do with America and the country’s sociocultural demands that she prove “where to place [her]self” and perform her identity as una parda, one of “the mixed bloods whose ancestries could almost never be accurately described.” The poet turns those demands on their head and acts out an exorcism of the “gold-toothed hag that is America” instead.
To “rez rrrrr e k t” herself, González uses drama-based and poetic intervention. First, the poet calls to be “heard out.” This reader willingly took my seat in the “audience.” Second, the poet calls in her matriarchal and patriarchal ancestors—her “planets”—to guide and help her “get [her] words right” for both her and her family. Third, she tears herself “wide open,” “showing [her] wounds.”
As the scenes of what González calls her “magnum opus” unfold, she seeks to “beat the / out-west-fragility” and the “being-a-woman business” “out of” herself, thereby “wash[ing] the beasts off” and “shaking [off] the trauma.” According to González’s healing wisdom, if there is to be “beginning again,” “first the old must go out.”
Yet, one of the remnants of “the old” may linger, revealing itself in the poet’s “assuming” that “reader(s)” would get “lost” in Fox Woman’s cosmos or be suspicious of her “big A” authenticity. This reader wondered if this “assuming” was evidence of anxiety about being accepted and therefore ongoing trauma. America may not change, but the poet does. This reader followed “sparks of divinity” as India Lena González gave “birth” to her words on the page, “building” and “shaping anew // world.”
India Lena González’s fox woman get out! is medicine poetry.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
Set in a provincial capital, in the penultimate throes of the Greek Civil War, New Moon: Day One is semi-autobiographical, a tale of two protagonists on the brink of manhood. They speak in bluntly human tones, but in precincts that echo of death the impulse to life is declared.
The elements of a screenplay are recast by Valtinos as a novel. Interposed with bursts of dialogue, and reading like stage directions, intimate scenes alternate with a wide-screen view. Fade-outs, as blank pages, punctuate the whole. Though the gaze is that of a camera—of pristine detachment—the energy is propulsive. The thread of a breathless suspense is drawn through a complex collage. It seems to precisely catch the rhythm of human becoming.
“Thanassis Valtinos is a masterful storyteller who has vividly captured in his novels and short stories some of the most turbulent and tragic periods in Greece‘s recent history. In “New Moon” he tells a coming-of-age tale of two boys who struggle to deal with their emerging sexual impulses as they try to survive the brutalities of a vicious civil war. A searing story by Greece’s premier living novelist at the top of his game.” —Nicholas Gage
The Shore Issue 23 welcomes in the coming shadows of autumn with an array of poems shifting and redefining darkness, forgetting and the unseen. Enjoy haunting new work by Abigail Cloud, Emma Bolden, Melissa Holm Shoemake, Kashawn Taylor, Dylan Harbison, Annabel Li, Cheryl Chen, Amy DeBellis, Matthew Wood, I Echo, Michael Boccardo, Brian Chan, Chris Brunk, Margaret Malochleb, Ash Bowen, Leia K Bradley, Taylor Hamann Los, Charles Hensler, Gus Peterson, Veronica Kornberg, Brooks Lampe, Marko Capoferri, Cam McGlynn, Guo Feifei, Sofia Bagdade, Jane Feinsod, Talia Pinzari, Mary McSharry, Christy Ku, Catherine Redford, Wren Donovan, Alix Perry, Stephanie Karas, Jeffrey Kingman, Vanessa Y Niu, Sara J Grossman, Yoda Olinyk, Robert L Penick and Cecelia Hagen with world-shifting art, including this issue’s cover image, by Emma Rockenbeck.
The Alternatives—Caoilinn Hughes’s third novel—begins with four chapters that follow four sisters going about their daily lives. Those lives are disrupted when Olwin, the eldest, leaves her family in the middle of the night and goes missing. The rest of the novel focuses on the three sisters finding Olwin and having conversations—or avoiding conversations—about who they are and what they value, often through accusations as much as confessions.
Their parents died when they were teenagers, a death that shaped them all in quite different ways, offering readers at least one meaning of Hughes’s title. Olwin raises them after their parents’ deaths, which is partly why her disappearance bothers the other sisters even more than one might expect. Rather than simply finding out that she is still alive and doing well, for example, they all converge on her to have a sort of intervention. It’s during those moments in the novel when the reader finds out more about their childhood and their parents’ deaths, as they each view that time in their life differently, yet another meaning of the title.
Hughes’s structure mirrors the dramatic stakes of the novel by literally shifting into dramatic form. When the sisters have found Olwin, Hughes twice shifts to writing the novel as if it were a play, as they discover more about each other as they are now and how they view their pasts. Such an approach doesn’t lose the characters’ interior thoughts, though, as Hughes allows those thoughts to appear in what one would typically see as stage directions. As with life, Hughes doesn’t leave her characters with closure; instead, they try to forge some semblance of a life out of the struggles they all face. As we all do, they will do the best they can.
The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes. Riverhead Books, April 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
Michigan State University professor Josh Cowen’s The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers is a potent indictment of the role school vouchers play in undermining public education. It’s a timely, insightful, and enraging book.
Cowen reports that the push for vouchers – which enable children to attend private schools with public dollars – began in 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education was decided. Fearful of court-ordered school desegregation, a slew of white parents sought ways to keep their children out of mixed classrooms. They were soon aided by racist legislators and theorists, including economist Milton Friedman, who helped them strategize. As fears about public school safety ramped up, their efforts picked up speed with eleven states currently providing universal school vouchers to any family that wants them.
That number, Cowen writes, is likely to rise.
This, despite the program’s consistent failure to prepare kids for academic progress – as measured by standardized test scores. But low grades don’t faze voucher proponents, a deeply connected network of donors (the Bradley, DeVos, Koch, Walton, and Olin funds) that dovetail with conservative political groups (The Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute), grassroots community activists, and professors from prestigious universities. All favor privatized education as well as book bans, censored curricula, and the enactment of anti-LGBTQIA policies.
Cowen’s analysis of how vouchers have fed into this broader conservative agenda makes it essential reading for supporters of public education. If being forewarned allows us to be forearmed, The Privateers elucidates the many challenges ahead and suggests ways to successfully resist the right’s game plan.
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.
Readers can get the newest copy of New England Review (45.3) to enjoy eclectic prose by Lindsay Hill, Jehanne Dubrow, Robert Stothart, and Mary Clark; provoking poetry by Temperance Aghamohammadi, Craig Morgan Teicher, Victoria Chang, and Michael Robins; a Celtic fairy tale about dreaming; translations from the Hindi and Spanish; cover art by Julia Soboleva, and much more. Visit the publication’s website for an online preview to access several works from the issue.
Real Americans, Rachel Khong’s second novel, follows three generations, beginning with the middle one. The first section tells of Lily’s life as a second-generation Chinese immigrant, as she tries to make a life in New York. She has an unpaid internship and a stereotypically small apartment until she meets Matthew, a tall, handsome, extremely wealthy, white man, an encounter that changes their lives. They get married, and Lily gives birth to Nico, the focus of the second section of the book.
He grows up on an island off the coast of Washington State with only his mother, going by the name of Nick. While he loves his mother, he also longs to escape the claustrophobic life of the island, ultimately leading him to attend college at Yale, even though he doesn’t feel he fits in there. He also struggles with his identity, as his mother is of Chinese heritage and he can speak Chinese, but he looks as white as his father, including his blue eyes. He reconnects with his father and begins to learn why his mother left, leading him to try to understand who he truly is, so he can craft his own life.
The final section’s focus is on May, Nick’s grandmother, providing the reader with more background on the family, helping to explain the actions and reactions that have led to Nick’s life. Underneath the family dynamics—the core of the novel—there is a larger ethical question that the contemporary world will have to deal with in the coming years, though I don’t want to give that aspect of the novel away.
Even without that issue, Khong clearly explores how parents try to do what is best for their children, how children misunderstand those actions, how parents sometimes make mistakes, and how children sometimes forgive them and sometimes don’t.
Real Americans by Rachel Khong. Alfred A. Knopf, April 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
This new book of poetry by David Chorlton continues his firm legacy as a great Southwestern poet whose current Arizona roots have established him in the deserts, the wildlife, and all its surprising vegetation revived after each year’s monsoon season. These poems bring a recognition of what’s been lost among all he loves and what he discovers each day as a kind of supplement to that loss.
Born in Austria in 1948, David Chorlton grew up in Manchester, close to rain and the northern English industrial zone. In his early 20s he went to live in Vienna and stayed for seven years before moving to Phoenix with his wife in 1978. In Arizona he has grown ever more fascinated by the desert and its wildlife. Much of his poetry has come to reflect his growing concern for the natural world. He now lives in Ahwatukee in Phoenix, within easy reach of South Mountain which dominates a 20,000 acre desert park within the city.
In her fourth collection, Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn brings necessary attention to the profound vulnerabilities and strengths of women and girls in a dangerous “American landscape.” With “keys between … fingers in a parking lot,” Frischkorn’s poems confront male violence against females, and they indict a “sex-trafficker pedophile,” “frat boys [who] pick off freshmen girls,” and physical, sexual, and emotional forms of family and intimate partner abuse. In this landscape, “it’s all dire.”
Frischkorn’s speaker tells us she is daughter of a father who “tried to drown [her] in his bottle of sorrows” and a mother who “had no stint of empathy / for any living thing.” Under these circumstances, a reader may wonder, as one poem does, “what did sorrow ever do?” These poems assert that sorrow can prompt honest expression, different choices, and foster change. The daughter’s “greatest // achievement was to shatter / the dysfunction [of her] parents.”
Bad things happen to girls and women in the forest, but not in these poems. “This is not a fairy tale.” Hurrah! Instead, the forest offers “detail of light and shade,” where our speaker takes solace among trees, and where “Like Thoreau alone // in the distant woods [she] come[s] to her[self].”
Out of that recovery comes a desire “to pay tribute to the promise / of the future” which requires allegiance to both the “ancestral forest” and the next generation. Here is a poet who fights for her freedom, protests “deforest, // to develop,” and strives to be the “kind / of mother— / to gift [her] child / endurance and steady pace.”
In Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn uses language to cut in two ways—beyond the imperiled and “beyond the veil.”
Whipsaw by Suzanne Frischkorn. Anhinga Press, April 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
