NewPages Blog :: Magazine Reviews

Prose Ax’s zine-like appearance (saddle-stitching, black-and-white photocopied art works on the cover and throughout the issue, untrimmed pages) and authors with attitude who write pieces with titles like “Brain Spiders” are going to appeal to a zine audience more than your typical academic audience. And this little collection of poetry and short prose pieces has edge in spades, although occasional clichés creep in to zap a piece’s potential. Continue reading “Prose Ax – Spring 2004”

This free, bi-monthly newsprint publication offers West Coast readers insights into the lives of poets and publishers, plus a handy calendar for poetry-related events up and down the West Coast. The front-page articles include a discussion of The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth by Jack Foley and an interview with Kazuko Shiraishi and her translators Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumara by Ikuko Tomita. Inside are more essays on Rexroth, a few poems, including one by Shiraishi, as well as reviews and news about various poetry figures, including a discussion of Louise Glück. The reason this newsprint publication is invaluable to me, besides the fact that it is wonderfully inexpensive, is that it contains a detailed lists of conferences, readings, festivals, classes and even public radio programs devoted to poetry, mostly focused on California, but including events from Seattle to Colorado. When planning trips, I always glance through their schedule to see if I can make any readings or festivals while I’m there. [Poetry Flash, 1450 Fourth Street, #4, Berkeley, CA 94710. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue: Free on newsstands; Mail subscriptions 12 issues/$30 (U.S.). www.poetryflash.org] – JHG Continue reading “Poetry Flash – Winter/Spring 2004”

Bristling with the work of thirty-four different poets, this issue of Notre Dame Review is mostly blank verse, all of it enjoyable, and much of it breathtaking. I was most amazed by Beth Ann Fennelly’s long, sober, meditative piece, “The Presentation,” a title deriving from the hospital procedure of showing a stillborn infant to its mother. “Within hours, within you, / the cell, smaller than a decimal point, / began its long division. / But you know how unforgiving / math can be. Just one small mistake / and it won’t add up.” Continue reading “Notre Dame Review – Summer 2004”

Mindprints, from the Learning Assistance Program of Allan Hancock College, is an annual literary journal “for writers and artists with disabilities or those with an interest in disabilities.” In this issue, Marcia Mascolini’s hilarious/wise “Hocus Pocus” considers real-world faith in one very wriggly kid’s encounter with an unmelting Communion wafer: “You have touched the Body of Christ, they yelled. I didn’t really think so. If I had touched the Body of Christ, I think it would have felt more like chicken.” Continue reading “Mindprints – 2004”

This perfectly-bound academic quarterly out of Pittsburgh State University (that’s Pittsburgh, Kansas, not Pennsylvania) presents poetry, articles, and reviews. Continue reading “The Midwest Quarterly – Summer 2004”

A Christian publication, Mars Hill Review is distinguished by its willingness to leave behind the preaching-to-the-choir safety of explicitly Christian texts and venture forth into the realm of pop culture in search of what MHR calls “reminders of God.” This issue offers a spiritually in-depth interview with poet Carolyn Forche, Cindy Crosby’s piece on the restoration of her faith as she helps restore a prairie, stories, poetry, and a generous selection of assumption-challenging book, film, and music reviews—these last on topics as diverse as the Christian-Celtic connection and garage rock revisited. You’ll find here articles supported by Bible verses alongside cogent cultural commentary that would be at home in any (secular) literary magazine. Of the latter, particularly insightful is Craig Detweiler’s review of Sofia Coppola’s fine film Lost in Translation. Informed by memories of his own isolating sojourn in Japan, Detweiler’s assessment, like the film itself, calls attention to what is missing, to that something beyond ordinary life that we all seek in imperfect ways… Continue reading “Mars Hill Review – 2004”

Lilies & Cannonballs Review “seeks to create a space for the synthesis of contrary elements: aesthetically driven and socially conscious literature and art; traditional and experimental forms; crazy-man conservative and bleeding liberal views.” Continue reading “Lilies and Cannonballs Review – Spring/Summer 2004”

Produced by the Creative Writing Department of Florida International University, Gulf Stream presents about as straight-up a dosage of contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry as you could hope for. Continue reading “Gulf Stream – Volume 21”

This venerable journal (it has been around for more than 50 years) can be relied upon for excellent short fiction, and this issue is no exception. Lydia Peelle’s “Mule Killers” and M. Allen Cunningham’s “Crustacean” are both evocative and nostalgic – “Mule Killers” evokes the farming past of the speaker’s family, and “Crustacean” about a man trying to keep his crumbling family from falling apart. The few poems sprinkled throughout the issue provide tonal counterpoints for the stories, which means the editor put some thought into how to position these pieces together. For instance, the poem “Revival” by Jody Winer-Cook describes a museum exhibit of stone snake-tongue-carved knives and how the speaker responds to it: Continue reading “Epoch – 2004”

Cairn: from the Scottish, a pile of stones meant as a monument or landmark. Also an exceptional literary magazine out of St. Andrews Presbyterian College. Kevin Frazier’s haunting story “The Magic Forest,” the tale of a lonely child who, on the spur of the moment, absconds with an infant “being aired” in the yard, considers the law of unintended consequences in a (disturbingly undermined) fairy tale setting. Continue reading “Cairn – May 2004”

Defying the trade paperback design standard to most literary journals, The Briar Cliff Review is a magazine-size book with thick, glossy paper and an evocative array of crystal-clear full-color artwork scattered throughout. To peruse this journal is an enjoyable sensory experience, and I found myself savoring the pure pleasure induced by the design as much as I savored the contents, which are substantial: 28 poems, 6 stories, 3 nonfiction pieces grouped under the unique heading “Reflective”, 4 articles or exhibits dealing with the “Siouxland” surrounding Briar Cliff’s Sioux City origins, and 3 book reviews. The short stories here are highly literary, somewhat ponderously paced, and ultimately very winning in their shared reluctance to undercut the human mysteries they present. Continue reading “The Briar Cliff Review – Volume 16”

Probably one of the most unassumingly designed literary journals, The Baltimore Review stands up to the best of them with fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews that all have that special glint of treasures presented with a knowing wink of editorial conviction. This issue features six short stories, all impressively artful and absorbing. Joe Schall’s “Opossum”, winner of TBR’s 2003 Short Fiction Competition, treads with not a single unsure step the bizarre territory of agoraphobia, etymology, toxicology, and marsupials, blending it all together with a thematic grace that left me moved by the feeling that I’d just read one of the year’s best stories. Continue reading “The Baltimore Review – Summer/Fall 2004”

Been longing to, as the song says, drive south? Just pick up a copy of the Arkansas Review and step into one of Daniel Coston’s you-are-there paintings of quintessential southern settings somehow rendered exotic by his fresh view of their familiarity. The white churches, the flat green lands of the Mississippi Delta, an “old store south of Pine Bluff, Arkansas on highway 65” will seem so real you’ll want to have your picture taken there. Then head out to the inexplicably named Club Disco 9000, actually “a juke joint, a prefab steel barn on Otha Turner’s place, out in the country” with white, middled-aged British blues fan Garry Craig Powell. In “Talkin’ Blues at the Living Blues Symposium,” he’ll give you his entertaining/worried take on the current health of (and his not so promising prognosis for) the blues and the fact that white people’s love for the blues (or their co-opting of it, depending on how you look at it) helps keep it alive, yet also tends to alter its essence. Who you play for can change your song, as R. T. Smith will warn you in his tour de force for one (fictional) voice “Dear Six Belles,” a wonderfully cranky and obsessive paean to real Cajun music: “Authentic whang-doodle, chers, the true thing.” Hear it? “You gotta cherish the blue swell in the emotional motion, give your self whole heart to the Loosiana razzy dazz.” If you start now, you can be back by suppertime. [Arkansas Review, Department of English and Philosophy, P.O. Box 1890, Arkansas State Unversity, State University, AR 72467. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $7.50. http://www.clt.astate.edu/arkreview] – AS Continue reading “Arkansas Review – August 2004”

The venerable grand-dame of literary journals has been through some major changes lately, with the recent sad passing of enthusiastic founder, George Plimpton. However, the quality of the journal has remained very high, as might be expected. This issue features interviews on the art of poetry with poet Paul Muldoon and Paris Review’s own Poetry Editor Richard Howard. Continue reading “The Paris Review – Spring 2004”

A little thicker than Bridge’s double issue, PBQ is, for those of us not in the know (which includes me until recently), now entirely an online presence and then, once a year, published as a print anthology. I’ll fully admit to the prejudice: I love print journals, and am always somewhat nervous or anxious about online stuff. Continue reading “Painted Bride Quarterly – 2004”

To be lynx-eyed is to possess very keen sight, an attribute this magazine’s contributors bring to their considerations of (a sometimes remarkably disguised) human nature. Continue reading “Lynx Eye – Spring 2004”

The second issue of The Land-Grant College Review is an interesting thing to behold: it features some charming old-timey illustrations by Joy Kolitsky, but its ten stories are anything but old-fashioned. Continue reading “Land-Grant College Review – 2004”

HGMFQ is not only a fiction journal, but a wealth of scholarly articles on gay literature and academic history. Continue reading “Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly – 2004”

Are you lonely for the music that used to inhabit the house of poetry? Do you miss the rhyme, though you visit it sometimes in the lyrics of your favorite songs? Does a stray phrase from “Prufrock” or “Innisfree” or “Stopping By Woods” pop into your head every now and again, wondering where you’ve gone? Continue reading “The Formalist – Spring/Summer 2004”

Fence opens with a reprint of Vladimir Nabokov’s marvelous “Canto One,” a tough act for any poet to follow. Eighth-grader Kyle Kenner does a good job with his two prose poems, including “Drafted,” a powerful, understated piece which ends: “A couple of days after the war was no more, his mom received a letter. A letter from the U.S.A. The letter said the soldier fought well, the letter said the soldier was no more.” Continue reading “Fence – Spring/Summer 2004”

This appealing journal out of the University of Maryland publishes feminist research, analysis, theory, reviews, art, as well as poetry and fiction; the overall flavor of this issue was resolutely academic. Particularly interesting in this issue was Stephanie Hartman’s essay “Reading the Scar in Breast Cancer Poetry,” which examined how poets like Hilda Raz, Audre Lorde, and Marilyn Hacker wrote about the physical and metaphorical scars of breast cancer. Also a startling discovery – the amazing art work of Betye and Alison Saar, whose work has both powerful symbolism and haunting directness. Continue reading “Feminist Studies – 2004”

Imagine being able to put into words the feeling of a home run on a summer night and you’ll have the All-Star issue of Elysian Fields Quarterly, a unique and unabashedly ardent literary magazine devoted solely to America’s once (and future—well, we can dream, can’t we?) favorite sport, baseball. What are the Elysian Fields? Continue reading “Elysian Fields Quarterly – Summer 2004”

Kary Wayson: you have uncountable volumes of love in store from all who read your poetry. Continue reading “Cranky – May 2004”

This issue of the newsprint bimonthly American Poetry Review features an essay on Hayden Carruth (“In Measured Resistance: On Hayden Carruth’s “Contra Mortem”), along with a special supplement of Carruth’s poems, and seven outstanding poems by Adrienne Rich, which in itself is enough to satisfy most poetry addicts. But it also includes multiple poems by other well-known poets such as David Wagoner and Donald Revell. APR is justifiably famous for its essays, and usually also features a large spread of international poetry in translation – in this issue, six poems from Viktor Sosnora translated by Dinara Georgeoliani and Mark Halperin. Even the ads make for fascinating reading – one touting the newest poetry releases from Wesleyan, another for a new MFA program seeking students, and Contests! Contests! Contests! – those holy grails for upstart poets such as myself. Continue reading “The American Poetry Review – July/August 2004”

Jim Meirose and Andi Diehn both are writers of at least one (presumably more, hopefully more) great story. G.C. Waldrep: thank you, again and for more—he is, dear reader, one of the poets whose work we may all, gladly, turn to, hopeful that people are still making language do strange tricks we can’t imagine. Also: Nancy Eimers—bravo, and I look forward to hunting down your two books. American Literary Review is another of those great reminders that literary journals can act as: there’s literally no limit to the number of these things, and the phrase “All boats rise together” has no stronger ledge on which to stand and preside over than the ledge above we scribblers the world over without contracts or even degrees. As ever, having heard of only one poet within, I come away, post-read, with a handful of new practitioners to mentally asterisk. Continue reading “American Literary Review – Spring 2004”

32 Poems once again impressed me, in its inimitable way, with the contrast between its modest appearance and superb content. The 32 poems (yes, hence the name of the magazine) in this issue lean heavily towards the lyric, and most have a playful sense of language that extends, at times, to their subjects. God, language, and poetry itself are interwoven in much of the work, including Heather McHugh’s clever “Ill-Made Almighty” and Lisa Gluskin’s wonderful “De Profundis.” There are so many exceptional poems I cannot quote from all of them. Do check out Daniel Nester’s “Prodigies” on the 32 Poems web site. Here are a few lines from Jill Osier’s melancholy “Kansas”: “The fields sweat into the air, a mild stew. / The ballplayer rolls over. His sheets are wet. Continue reading “32 Poems – Spring 2004”

This special issue of NDQ, more than three hundred pages long, covers Hemingway’s involvement with the theater, his 1935 trip to China, his relationships with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky and “spiritual kid brother” Arnold Samuelson, and much more. (Don’t miss Heidi Brotton Hudson’s linoleum-block print of a reflective Hemingway looking down, which seems somehow more essential than all the handsome hale fellow photographs we’ve seen.) There’s even a scholarly examination of why the film In Love and War (starring Sandra Bullock and Chris O’Donnell) failed so miserably (it jettisoned the “literary underpinnings” that might have given it weight and substance). Continue reading “North Dakota Quarterly – Fall 2003”

I urge you to check out, before even finishing this review, the website of Bridge Magazine, though I know the wish is sort of hopeless: there’s almost no way to conceive of the sort of madness and playful fun the magazine contains, promotes, inculcates, various other verbs. It’s sort of like McSweeneys, I suppose, though somehow more fun, grounded in a real world (perhaps this is the only magazine I can think of that’s made strangely more whole, more itself, because of advertisements [almost all of which are by/for Chicago-area businesses]). Continue reading “Bridge – Summer/Fall 2003”

This issue of Rattle contains a tribute to Vietnamese poets, enlightening conversations with poets Li-Young Lee and Naomi Shihab Nye (in which editor Alan Fox seems less interested in hearing his own opinions than in genuinely listening to theirs), Jessica Goeller’s funny and wise essay on writing with an infant daughter balanced on one arm (the miracle: it works better!), and “Fine,” Jack Grapes’ wonderfully tender-gruff piece on father-son love. Continue reading “Rattle – Summer 2004”

It’s easier, of course, to define the physical boundaries of an enormous space like the Great Plains than to come to an understanding of its essence, the unwalkable borderland where place meets person, where the geography of a region becomes home to a human heart. Continue reading “Plains Song Review – Spring 2004”

With a few small exceptions, PEN America, the annual journal published by PEN American Center, is peopled with the work of world-famous or much-published writers, both contemporary and posthumous. Here you’ll find such familiar names as Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Susan Sontag, Wallace Stevens, Rick Moody, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Continue reading “PEN America – 2004”

To review this publication for the first time is to tell as much about the concept as the content.

Continue reading “One Story – 2004”

Natural Bridge always has substantial offerings, but this issue has some stunners: Alice Ayers’ short story, “Barney,” is a gorgeous second-person evocation to a man about to submerge a profound part of himself in marriage to a woman whose maidenly abode featured lace doilies and was “so pointedly virginal it obviously covered something. Continue reading “Natural Bridge – 2004”

Knock-knock. Continue reading “Modern Haiku – Summer 2004”

Dedicated to “exploring the experience of disability through literature and the fine arts,” Kaleidoscope subverts the usual categories of “normal” and “disabled” by bringing the reader inside the phenomenon of disability as it affects the life of one (normal) person at a time. Continue reading “Kaleidoscope – Winter/Spring 2004”

isotope, Utah State’s journal of literary nature and science writing, is not content with the usual dichotomy between wonder and funeral song that characterizes our discourse on the environment, but strikes out fearlessly across new (and ancient) terrain with a backpack full of ceaseless questions and a full canteen of inspiration. Continue reading “Isotope – Spring/Summer 2004”

Occasionally I am provoked to mourn the insular, sometimes elite world of our nation’s literary magazines. Continue reading “Inkwell – Spring 2004”

Guest edited by writer Paul Maliszewski, this issue of Denver Quarterly is comprised entirely of brazen prose (the contents page does not distinguish fiction from non) that is often whimsically digressive, sometimes obtuse, but always daring. Continue reading “Denver Quarterly – 2004”

This summer the Olympics go home to Greece, and so does Atlanta Review in a “special commemorative issue for the Athens Summer Games, 2004” with a remarkable Greece Feature Section edited by formalist poet and Greek translator Alicia Stallings (Archaic Smile). Continue reading “Atlanta Review – Volume 10 Number 2”

The American Scholar deserves applause for providing a loving home for the personal essay, a wonderfully egalitarian and pliant form that adjusts itself to any voice or subject matter, however refined or rough-hewn, fact-enamored or fanciful. Continue reading “The American Scholar – Volume 73 Number 3”

Because nothing ruins art like an admirable cause, I was initially wary of Mizna, “a forum promoting Arab American culture that values diversity in the Arab community. Continue reading “Mizna – 2003”

One of the most attractive journals I’ve seen in a great while, Louisiana Literature gets straight to the point – delivering prize-winning poetry in a range of styles, a nice helping of short fiction, and a few critical essays and reviews – all in a lovely, understated layout. Continue reading “Louisiana Literature – 2003”

This issue of the eclectic and elegant Review features a refreshingly low key interview with poet X. Continue reading “The Evansville Review – 2003”

“Humans love to lie,” notes editor Win McCormack of Tin House Magazine. Continue reading “Tin House – 2004”

I wish more magazines were like this one. This always-a-theme-issue journal features a spectacular theme this time, “off on a tangent,” and the pieces featured here are just what I like—tangential, surprising, rarely staying in one place for too long. Continue reading “THEMA – Spring 2004”

I don’t know spank about Italian, but I know a giant when I see one. Continue reading “Storie – April 2004”

Southern Humanities Review seems to have a little something for everybody. Continue reading “Southern Humanities Review – Winter 2004”

This is my introduction to the Montreal-based Scrivener Creative Review, and I find it mostly delightful—from Matthew Aaron Guyer’s metaphysical fiction, “The Theory of Doorways,” to a beautiful collection of photographs, especially those of Geoffrey Brown. The poems are worth returning to again, as well, and I look forward to doing so. Continue reading “Scrivener Creative Review – 2004”

“Turn each page and imagine yourself out for a nice bicycle ride like the women on our cover,” advise the editors. Continue reading “Poet Lore – Spring/Summer 2004”