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!
A collection of essays has never been so utterly tragic and full of truth. James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well is overflowing with vulnerability, and it is the vulnerability that makes the reading experience worth it. Hall’s essays demonstrate his ability to marry poetry and prose in a relationship that I hope will only continue to blossom.
Continue reading “I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well”
In recent headline news: 14,000 inhabitants of British Colombia were evacuated as wild fires approached; 8,000 Southern Californians dashed for safety; 62 victims died in a forest fire in Northern Portugal; London’s Grenfell Tower fire took the lives of “around 80 people.” The threat of infernal combustion is the leitmotif that ties Dave Housley’s latest collection of short stories Massive Cleansing Fire together. Although it is unknown whether the fires that bridge the stories are started by folly or malice or divine lightning rod, what remains clear is the horror, destruction and often mundane reactions to our inevitable demise. As the flames approach, an insurance salesman commits double suicide, a clown and a monkey die together, a writer hiding in the Museum of Modern Art attempts to save some Rothkos, a bible thumper prays away, and a lab worker at a New Mexican cryonics lab follows final instructions. Suspenseful, dense, and unpredictable, Housley keeps the pages turning.
Martha Cooley’s first book-length collection of essays, Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss, is premised on the fact that eight of Cooley’s friends died within 10 years. I’m not sure that’s unusual for anyone who’s eased past a 50th birthday. Nevertheless, Cooley and her husband Antonio Romani spend 14 months in Italy’s Castiglione del Terziere where she reflects on life, friends, and her mother. She surveys the effects of losing loved ones and her means of adapting to those losses in this blend of travelogue and memoir.
Are you a smoker? When did you start smoking? How many cigarettes have you smoked in your lifetime, and what were the brands? Did they have filters? Have these questions ever crossed your mind before? Maybe you’re not a smoker, so these questions are useless to you, but maybe you used to be a smoker and now you’re trying to recall some of these answers. Or, maybe, you are a smoker, and some of these questions are on your mind every single day. That is exactly the case for Gregor Hens.
The writing of a travel memoir is, from my perspective, very much akin to the unfolding of the journey described. In spite of copious amounts of preparation, forethought, and heartfelt intent, it is all too easy to stumble along the path, or even find oneself completely lost somewhere along the way. After all, how does one successfully navigate the terrain of readers’ expectations? Are they looking for landscapes captured through lush, photographic language or a dredging of the traveler’s inner landscape? How much anthropology, history, reflection or poetic license is enough? Perhaps too much? All the while remaining true to one’s own experience.
As I read Ariel Goldberg’s The Estrangement Principle, a book-length meditation, examination, and critique of the term “queer art,” I was reminded of an essay I often teach: G. Douglas Atkins’s “The Return of/to the Essay,” in which he argues for a type of academic criticism which “reestablish[es] contact with the Anglo-American tradition of the personal or familiar essay without sacrificing intellectual rigor or forgoing the insights and accomplishments of recent theory.”
At one point while I was reading The History of the Future, someone asked how it was, and I looked up and exclaimed, “The essays are almost too perfect.”
If you happened to glance at the number of pages in this manuscript (listed above) you’ll have noticed that it is much longer than your typical book of poems. In fact, The Others is not really a book of poems; it is a thick 4 x 7 paperback that looks very much like a typical novel. Amazon calls it a “gripping, eerie, and hilarious novel-in-verse,” and that description seems about right.
Erdağ Göknar has a conversational way of writing poetry, yet his phrasing is not at all ordinary. He allows us to eavesdrop on his life in Turkey and America in his first book of poems Nomadologies. Göknar teaches Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, and is an award-winning translator, but it has been a circuitous journey to arrive at his current status.
Glimmer Train Bulletins are produced monthly with essays written by writers (published in GT) and creative writing teachers on topics related to craft and the industry.
In the most recent issue, #157 August 2017, Rowena Macdonald offers 10 tips for writing dialogue, offering this advice: “. . . remember, when it comes to writing dialogue in prose you need to convey the impression of reality rather than verbatim speech.” Silas Dent Zobal [pictured] offers a meaningful exploration of finding the heart of the story and the difficulty of writing about what can’t be written: “That’s what I want to tell you. Here, right here, is where you can find the heart of the heart of your story. Not in a place but in no place. Not in clarity but in ambiguity.” And Joshua Henkin provides commentary on developing character background: when Mia comes from Montreal instead of Maryland, it changes how her family got there and the impact of their choices on her character in story – and the writer’s responsibility to the “seeds of a narrative.”
Three excellent essays that would be great semester kick-off reading for any creative writing class, and some great basic craft conversation for all writers to consider. Signing up for the bulletins is free.
Second Look is a section in One online poetry journal in which various writers are asked “to take a second look at poems they admire and discuss informally what they admire about the work.” Some of the poems include “Woman Falling” by Franz Wright, “homage to my hips” by Lucille Clifton, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” by Dylan Thomas, “Looking for Songs of Papusza” by Bronisława Wajs, “Celebrating Childhood” by Adonis, “Looking for my Killer” by Thylias Moss, and “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova.
The Mom Egg Review print literary journal about motherhood also has an online quarterly component called the Mer Vox, featuring writing, artwork, craft essays, hybrid works, and interviews. Recent craft essays include: “Women Writers, Mothers And Friendships: How We Sustain Each Other,” an Interview by J.P. Howard, MER VOX Editor-at-Large, of Mireya Perez-Bustillo and Patsie Alicia Ifill; several essays on “Poetry as a Reflection of Self on the Page” curated by J.P. Howard – “Release the Dam: A Poem is a River” by Keisha-Gaye Anderson, “Writing the Narrative Poem” by Heather Archibald, “Poetry as a Reflection of Self on the Page!” by J.P. Howard, and “Poets and Performance” by Jacqueline Johnson; and a number of writing prompts from the editors as well as other writers (Janet Hamill, Cynthia Kraman, Tsaurah Litzky).
NewPages Guide to Alternative Magazines features publications not typically found in local chain bookstores on topics including the arts, nature and ecology, health, human rights, LGBT, and more. Among these publications is American Forests, which invites writers to submit works on the topics of outdoor recreation, environmental issues and tree-related science, adventures, forest policy, community forest programs, benefits to trees, unique ecosystems, and “Earthkeepers” – “a person or group of people, current or historic, that has worked to protect or responsibly manage a forest.” See complete writers guidelines here.
Ever stuck your foot or hand into ice cold water and held it there, feeling the numbness of the aftershock? How about the whacky idea of a polar plunge – your whole body into an icy lake – can you imagine what that must feel like? Believe it or not, that’s the exact sensation the editors of Cold Creek Review were going for when they named their online publication. “We wanted to focus on literature and art that makes you feel paralyzed,” Editor-in-Chief for Poetry and Nonfiction Amber D. Tran tells me. “We imagine reading and reviewing our featured pieces leaves you with a sense of frozen time, like you were being submerged in a body of ice-cold water.” Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Cold Creek Review”
From The Florida Review interview with Denise Duhamel, focusing on her newest collection Blowout:
TFR:
Given the times we suddenly find ourselves living in, is there even more pressure to write in the moment?
Duhamel:
Yes, absolutely. I was thinking so much about how my next book, which is not out yet, is going to be called Scald. [The book came out in February 2017, after this interview.] It’s about feminism and it’s dedicated to three different great feminists. I was so in the zeitgeist of a Hillary Clinton presidency and women, and now I feel so unmoored. But I’m so glad I wrote it when I wrote it because, while I wasn’t thinking of Hillary necessarily when I was writing it, I felt this movement towards women and the feminization of power and saving the planet. Now, we really have to stay in the moment and not stick our heads in the sand. I mean you may have to stick your head in the sand for a week to survive, but then we have to come out strong.
TFR:
I felt like I often heard people say, “We are having more conversations about race during Barak Obama’s presidency and we will talk more about gender with a female president.” Do you feel like we will talk more or less about gender given the president we ended up with?
Duhamel:
He’ll talk a lot less about gender and even his wife will say less. I was reading something just this morning about how she wants to be more like Jackie O. It’s so retro and cultural regression to the max, right? She really wants to go back to the 1960s pillbox hat and not even say anything. We are in big trouble, but I also think because this election is so egregious and Clinton didn’t lose to a man who was moderate or even a Mitt Romney or John McCain, she lost to a misogynist who calls women the worst possible names, I think women are not going to give him a pass. We are going to come back strong, especially since we had a taste of what could have been. I can’t imagine women going, Oh well, we’ll let it go.
TFR:
No.
Duhamel:
I think we’ve been letting it go for decades and centuries and I don’t think we can let it go anymore.
TFR:
I think that’s also what I admired about your book. You didn’t let it go. You talked about it.
Read the full interview on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.
The July/August 2017 issue of Poetry Magazine “is the product of a new partnership between the magazine and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and it launches as part of the Smithsonian Asian American Literature Festival, held July 27–29, 2017, in Washington, DC.” In his section of the introduction, Timothy Yu writes, “‘Asian American poetry’ is itself a political category. Like the term ‘Asian American,’ it is a category constantly redefined by new contexts; yet it is also one that demands attention to the intersections of poetics and race, and that claims value for the act of placing poems within an unfolding Asian American literary tradition.”
Authors whose works are featured in this special issue include: Ocean Vuong, Chen Chen, Rajiv Mohabir, Hoa Nguyen, Kazim Ali, Khaty Xiong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zubair Ahmed, Cathy Linh Che, Kimiko Hahn, John Yau, Sarah Gambito, Li-Young Lee, among others. Read the full contents here.
It may be halfway through summer, but it’s not too late to enjoy the Spring 2017 issue of Canadian literary journal The Fiddlehead. This issue holds timeless treasures, including the winners and honorable mentions of the Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poems and the Short Fiction Prize.
Living in Michigan, it’s hard not to be near water. Surrounded by the Great Lakes and oodles of smaller inland lakes and rivers, residents are never farther than a few miles from fresh water. Whether one enjoys swimming, fishing, kayaking, or tanning on the sidelines, they never need to travel far. The Lake, the online, UK-based, poetry magazine, fulfills a similar function: editor John Murphy provides readers with poetry and book reviews that refresh and entertain. With a new issue arriving every month, readers are never very far away from new poems.
Blood Orange Review has existed for eleven years and has continued to stick to their founding mission: “to create a home for the emerging and established writers.” The May 2017 issue gives a home to twelve writers and one interview with Rita Wong.
This issue of Dogwood features winners and finalists of their annual prizes for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Opening the publication is nonfiction winner “Sweet Dreams are Made of This” by Anna Leahy, which sets the tone for this issue. Neither the contest nor the issue were themed, but nostalgia would be the single emergent concept from Leahy’s essay that by pure coincidence runs through the rest of the publication. I can honestly say, of all reviewers, this focus fell on the wrong person. The last thing in the world I want to spend my mind space on is waxing stupidly over the past. Fortunately, Leahy’s essay does more than set a tone, it sets a whole new attitude about nostalgia.
There is something mesmerizing about a lightning storm; each flash lasts for only a moment, but holds tremendous power that electrifies the air and the imagination. Good flash fiction has the same effect on the senses of the reader, and the online magazine Vestal Review delivers the same power with each story. Ever since its debut in March 2000, Vestal Review has published exclusively flash fiction and is “firmly established as an exciting venue for exceptional flash by both emerging and well-known authors.”
Weber: The Contemporary West, published by Weber State University, highlights literary and artistic talents from its home state of Utah and along the Wasatch mountain range. Among outstanding work included in this season’s issue is David Lee’s lengthy poem, “Postmortem: After the Obsequies,” which blew me away.
The Hollins Critic is a unique literary magazine focusing on a serious survey of a contemporary writer’s work, while also sharing book reviews and poetry. Each cover features a unique portrait image of the writer made especially for the publication by Susan Avishai.
“Roaring Reading,” the July/August 2017 cover illustration by José Luis Merino, is a perfect compliment to the slim format of The Kenyon Review.
Another slim design, “Serenity Overflowing” by Chris Ogden is the cover photo for issue 12 of One, an online journal of poetry.
The cover of Ragazine.CC, a global online magazine of arts, information & entertainment, is a photo of the German duo Shari Vari, whose music is featured in this issue’s special section, “The Summer Seven: Listen to the Best Bands from Europe.”
Thanks to Hiram Poetry Review Editor Willard Greenwood for this rather nonchalent mention in the Spring 2017 Editor’s Note: “. . . with the release of Paterson, a fine film by Ohio native Jim Jarmusch, poetry is as cool as ever.” Released at the end of 2016, I hadn’t heard boo about this film, so set out to find it.
The film is about a former Marine – named Paterson (played by Adam Driver) – who lives a quiet, static life, driving a bus in Paterson, NJ, and writing poetry in his “secret notebook.” Lines of poetry Paterson thinks and then writes appear in his handwriting across the screen intermittently throughout the movie; the poems themselves were written by poet Ron Padgett. There are references to one of Paterson’s favorite poets, William Carlos Williams, with Driver delivering a delightful on-screen reading of “This is Just To Say.”
Well received by critics, The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody wrote: “Paterson is the man of all endurance. He does his dull job without complaining and finds charm and enlightenment in the conversations of passengers and pleasure in repeated viewing of the cityscape of his route. His poetry is imbued with the modest substance of his life.”
Some have described the movie as showing the creative process of poetry writing, but I’d say it more accurately reveals the kind of life poets live, with the process of writing poetry often inseparable from the day-to-day, moment-to-moment. And that is the beauty of what Jarmusch has created. He has absolutely nailed it in Paterson.
This past week, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s book of poetry, Paterson Light and Shadow, arrived in the mail. With photographs by Mark Hillinghouse, this beautifully packaged hardcover explores Paterson, NJ, “this once great industrial city, envisioned by Alexander Hamilton as the birthplace of manufacturing in a new nation, a city now home to countless immigrants who still struggle to build lives and survive.” Fans of the film, fans of Williams and his own epic poem Paterson will appreciate the creative contributions of Gillan and HIllinghouse to this mystical yet wholly down to earth place.
Are we still talking about our addiction to Facebook despite its evils? Apparently, yes, we still are, with New England Review Editor Carolyn Kuebler contributing a new perspective to the conversation – especially for writers. In her editorial for Issue 38.2, she addresses some of the known issues with the social media platform, and comments that “Facebook seems to present a special kind of hell for writers” in that it “offers the possibility of an audience beyond one’s circle of friends (the real kind)—and even better, an audience that responds immediately, positively, and in great numbers.”
But, alas, what about when there is NO response? What about the silence of a Facebook post? “Writers have always known that theirs is a lonely art,” Kuebler comments, “but after spending time on Facebook it’s as if we have to learn this all over again. We have to remember that the audience for literature is largely silent; it takes its time.”
Read the full editorial here, and Kuebler’s closing comment of appreciation for writers, even if it is only ever offered in silence.
The Summer 2017 issue of Ruminate features 2017 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize winners with commentary from Judge Josh MacIvor-Andersen:
First Place
“Like This We Begin: An Essay in Two Photographs”
Sonja Livingston [pictured]
Second Place
“The Seven Stages of Not Eating”
Anne Boyle
Third Place
“Oh, Hi”
M. Sophia Newman
Loyal readers of NewPages book reviews may recognize a familiar name on the cover of Plato Poetica, the new poetry collection published by Kelsay Books in May 2017.
Author Daniel Klawitter has shared his thoughtful opinions on poetry books for NewPages for the past couple years, and now his own poetry collection Plato Poetica is out in in the world for readers. According to Carl Sharpe, founder and editor of VerseWrights, reading the collection causes Plato to become relevant, and also invites the philosopher to become “a friend, a confidante, an advisor, whispering in our ear in the 21st century language [ . . . ]. We are brought to realize that ancient philosophy and religion are only dry subjects if we allow them to be.”
Pick up copies from Kelsay Books to invite Plato into your circle of friends and add this poetry collection to your bookshelf.
Visit the new Broadsided Press website to catch up on the most recent art and poetry collaborations available for free, full-color download to post and share. May: “Backyard” – words by Melissa Fite Johnson, art by Amy Meissner; June: “My Father’s Hearing Aid” – words by Adam Chiles, art by Cheryl Gross; July: “Pink” – words by Terese Svoboda, art by Lisa Sette. Each artist and poet give a brief commentary on their work, which provides a great teaching tool for classroom use. Broadsided is looking to build a section of lesson plans for using broadsides in K-12, college, community centers, etc., so if you have some best practices to share, visit their website and click on TEACH.
In May, the Center for Literary Publishing released Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays edited by Stephanie G’Schwind. I find the eye-catching cover reason alone to pick up the nonfiction collection, but readers who require a little more persuading will be won over by the writing found inside. Selected from the country’s leading journals and publications, the eighteen essays build “a multi-gender, multi-ethnic body out of essays, each concerning a different part of the body.”
Contributors include Dinty W. Moore with “The Aquatic Ape,” exploring the curious design of sinuses; Peggy Shinner with “Elective,” examining the author’s “Jewish Nose”; and Matt Roberts with “Vasectomy Instruction 7,” considering the various reasons for and implications of the titular surgery. The fifteen additional contributors are Wendy Call, Steven Church, Sarah Rose Etter, Matthew Ferrence, Hester Kaplan, Sarah K. Lenz, Lupe Linares, Jody Mace, Samantha Simpson, Floyd Skloot, Danielle R. Spencer, Katherine E. Standefer, Kaitlyn Teer, Sarah Viren, and Vicki Weiqi Yang.
The Poetry Marathon is an annual event that challenges participants to write 24 poems in 24 hour, posting the writing online via a shared WordPress site. This year’s marathon begins at 9 AM EDT on Saturday, August 5, 2017 and ends at 9 AM on Sunday, August 6, 2017 There is also a half marathon from 9 AM until 9 PM Saturday or 9 PM until 9 AM Sunday. Registration is open from July 20 – 27.
The Poetry Marathon is run (no pun intended) by Caitlin Jans (Thomson) and Jacob Jans, two writers and web publishers living in the Pacific Northwest. There is no charge to participate in the marathon, and in 2016, over 500 writers started the marathon, but many did not finish. Clearly, this is not an activity for the faint of heart.
Last year, I participated in the half marathon and found it to be demanding, frustrating (sometimes forgetting to write my poem!), but in the end immensely rewarding. I have run marathons and half marathons, and the feeling from finishing the Poetry Marathon was very similar. I felt a huge sense of accomplishment, and at the same time, a bit of sadness that it was over. I had posted poems, offered feedback to others, received comments on mine – just like cheering each other on in a foot race. It was sad to be a part of such an intense, similarly driven community of writers, and then, just be done with them. It’s what makes a person want to come back and do it again!
The Poetry Marathon website has an FAQ that answers the burning questions, like: How do I prepare for the Marathon? What if I can’t be at a computer all day? What happens to the poems once I post them? and more. The site also features blog posts from previous participants who offer commentary on their marathon experience. If you’re not sure about the commitment, just try it for a day on your own. See what it takes to get to the computer once an hour and write a poem (or at least write a poem per hour, because you are allowed to “catch up” at the computer if you can’t get to one every hour).
This year, like last year, the organizers plan to publish a Poetry Marathon Anthology of poems written during the marathon. Some writers included in the first anthology: Sheila Sondik, Teri Harroun, Marie Moser, Raven Kingsley, Joan Leotta, J.I. Klienberg, Liam Strong, Will Jackson, Anne McMaster, Ebony Larijani, and Seema Ka.
I simply can’t resist this chicken on Issue 9 of True Story, Creative Nonfiction‘s monthly, pocket-size publication of longform nonfiction narrative.This month’s story is “Resurrection” by Rebeca Dunn-Krahn. I have no idea yet what a chicken has to do with it, but I plan to find out!
This Thema cover photo by Eleanor Leonne Bennett made me smile, but then as I read the theme for this issue, it made me laugh out loud: “Second Thoughts.” Yup. That’s the look.
Danny Ochoa’s artwork is featured on the summer 2017 cover of Writing Disorder, an online literary journal. More of his illustrations and comics are included in this issue as well.
The eleventh annual August Poetry Postcard Festival is open for 2017 registration – closing July 18.
For you newbies, the August PoPo Fest goes like this: You sign up. You get a list of 31 names/addresses of other people who signed up. Starting late July, you write a poem a day on a postcard and mail it off to the next person on the list, so by the end of the month, you will have (hopefully) written and sent 31 poems and (hopefully) received 31 poems.
The poems are not supposed to be pre-written or something you’ve been working on for months. This is an exercise is the spontaneous, the demanding, the gut-driven, the postcard inspired – whatever it is that gets you to write once a day, each day, and send it off into the world.
Last year, poems from contributors were selected for publication in the 1st Poetry Postcard Fest Anthology, 56 Days of August, Poetry Postcards, to be published October 2017.
I’ve done this event since it began! I don’t always keep to a poem a day; sometimes I get ahead one day, or catch up another, with several poems in one day. But I try my best. The event gets me thinking of poetry in my every day, when I rarely have time for it, and writing it down – something I have time for even more rarely.
I’ve received poems from across the state, the country and around the globe. I’ve gotten postcards made from cereal boxes, some with gorgeous original artwork, and lots of the lovely tacky tourist cards from travel destinations. I have cards from “famous” poets, and some who have since become more famous, and some never signed, so I’ll never know, and it hardly matters. I’ve gotten poetry. Sent to me directly. From strangers. Lovely, strange, absurd, and funny. Poetry.
It’s an amazing event, and I hope you will take the challenge and join in this year. There is a nominal fee for the event ($10). I can only imagine the amount of work it is to run this (with 300+ people participating), and keeping up virtual space to promote it. I’m not dissuaded by the fee, knowing the extraordinary event that it is, and knowing I’ve spent 100 times that on conferences from which I’ve gotten a great deal less inspiration…anyone else?
So, please writers, wanna-bes and needs-a-kick-in-the-arsers, poetry lovers, postcard lovers – this event is for you. Join us! Registration ends July 18!
Issue 43 of New Orleans Review is themed “The African Literary Hustle” and opens with the editorial by Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Laura T. Murphy, “This Hustle is Not Your Grandpa’s African Lit.” The two issue editors examine the historical ‘presentation’ of African literature published in Western culture as “all too often realist, in English, and in the spirit of Chinua Achebe. But romance, science fiction, fantasy, epic, experimental poetry, satire, and political allegory all find expression in Africa, though not necessarily publication.” The editors confront this disparity, “Those who are called to write often have to hustle to get recognition by writing a coming-of-age colonial encounter tale or hustle even harder to have their unique voices heard. So the post-Achebe generation writer faces all sorts of firewalls.”
Thus, the call went out for this issue, and writers responded with the editors hoping “to provoke some interesting and unpredictable writing and thinking that would reflect and respond to the spirit of the hustle.” Oddly enough, the editors note, “eighty percent of the submissions were from white non-African-identifying writers who thought they could hustle their way into a volume of African literature and had no qualms about it.” Seriously.
The editors close on the comment, “But what is African literature? Is there, can there be, was there ever and African literature? In asking you have answered your question. African literature is a question. It is an open question that invites, and has to keep on inviting, different geographies, languages and forms.”
Thus, this issue of New Orleans Review: The African Literary Hustle.
The Summer/Fall 2017 issue of The Southampton Review includes winners of the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize:
“Delivering” by Suzy Vitello [pictured]
Vitello’s piece can be read on TSR’s website here.
“Sounds Kept in the Valley of the Tongue” by Sarah Cadorette
The opening poems of Alan Felsenthal’s Lowly suggest a collection that will fall squarely within a familiar subgenre of contemporary poetry: newly crafted myths, fables, and parables. Taking up classic modes of speech and story-telling, many poems of this subgenre operate according to a fairly defined mechanic, developing tight, logical sequences that utilize inversion, tautology, and other structural maneuvers to arrive at illuminating surprises—often with a bit of jesting. This mechanic perfectly describes the first poem of Lowly, “Two Martyrs.”
On April 30, 1942: “my father and his family lost their freedom upon entry to Tanforan Racetrack, a designated Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, for the wartime removal of Japanese. Arriving by bus, [ . . . ] they were housed in a series of empty horse stalls named Barrack 14. This was just the first stop; from Tanforan they would be transported by train into the Utah desert to live in a concentration camp named Topaz.”
Aaron Gilbreath’s book of essays, Everything We Don’t Know, posed a dilemma as I was trying to determine the audience for it. Taking the title at face value, I expected to find fresh ideas about people, places, and, of course, things. His first few essays appear as a memoirish charting of his drug addiction. Not really on my list of wanting-to-know-abouts. But before long, Gilbreath turns his focus to other subjects and fulfills my expectations.
The nine stories in Sam Allingham’s The Great American Songbook include: an experimental modular tale describing the differences between the composers Rogers and Hart; the retelling of a quirky and complicated relationship between two baristas seeking love and finding confusion; a second-person epistle emoting on a relationship’s ending; a tragedy in which a newly widowed mother turns to hunting; an exploratory list of the characters we encounter in life; a hard-boiled parable (a lá George Saunders) about four assassins set against each other; a straight-forward first-person recounting of a childhood neighborhood friend who devoted his life to building the town in miniature; a bar joke that goes virtual and a talking duck becomes protagonist; and concludes with the lost letters of Artie Shaw to various friends before going off the deep end in a remote cabin. The Great American Songbook is a tour de force of style, theme, image, and wit.
Selected by Richard Blanco as the 2015 winner of The Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, Rochelle Hurt’s In Which I Play the Runaway is a tightly-structured map of the human heart. Spanning the ventricles of mythical America, each section is named after a town: Last Chance, California; Hurt, Virginia; Needmore, Indiana; Accident, Maryland; and Honesty, Ohio—the author names the inner-workings of daughter, mother, wife, and poet. Almost all the sections conclude with a prose poem and contain self-portraits and dioramas. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz provides a dramatic-persona through-line, much in the vein of Berryman’s alter-ego Huffy Henry, creating a close to perfectly-structured second collection.
I have never seen anything like Caits Meissner’s first solo collection: Let it Die Hungry. Brave. Eclectic. Essential. Especially in this day and age when the rats in power are filling the swamp with evil droppings. Let It Die Hungry is a manifesto, a manual, a survivor’s message-in-a-bottle and a battle-cry.
“Teach me to climb / Down from ambition. // Beyond my fingertips / rolls the moon.” –from the title poem, “The Ladder”
The most recent issue (17.1) of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley features winners of two of the publication’s annual contests:
2016 Mighty River Short Story Contest
$1000 Award and Publication
“In the Jungle” by Jeremy Griffin [pictured]
2016 Wilda Hearne Flash Fiction Contest
$500 Award and Publication
“Frayed Cords and Pink Underwear” by Shannon Sweetnam
From the Smithsonian article “Horse-Riding Librarians Were the Great Depression’s Bookmobiles” by Eliza McGraw:
During the Great Depression, a New Deal program brought books to Kentuckians living in remote areas.
In 1936, packhorse librarians served 50,000 families, and, by 1937, 155 public schools. Children loved the program; many mountain schools didn’t have libraries, and since they were so far from public libraries, most students had never checked out a book. “‘Bring me a book to read,’ is the cry of every child as he runs to meet the librarian with whom he has become acquainted,” wrote one Pack Horse Library supervisor. “Not a certain book, but any kind of book. The child has read none of them.”
Read the full article and see more photos here.
The Summer 2017 issue of The Cincinnati Review features the winning entries of their annual Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in poetry in prose:
Prose Winner
“Stylites Anonymous” by Maureen McGranaghan
Poetry Winner
“Very Many Hands” by Aaron Coleman [pictured]
Each winner receives $1000 in addition to publication.
American Life in Poetry: Column 639
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
One of my favorite poems is Louise Bogan’s “The Crossed Apple” which mentions two species, Meadow Milk and Sweet Burning, and since reading it many years ago I have made notes of the names of apples, a poet’s delight. In this touching poem by Cathryn Essinger, who lives in Ohio, I’ve come upon yet another for my collection. Her most recent book is What I Know About Innocence from Main Street Rag press.
Summer Apples
I planted an apple tree in memory
of my mother, who is not gone,
but whose memory has become
so transparent that she remembers
slicing apples with her grandmother
(yellow apples; blue bowl) better than
the fruit that I hand her today. Still,
she polishes the surface with her thumb,
holds it to the light and says with no
hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .
they’re so fragile, you can almost see
to the core. She no longer remembers how
to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but
her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants.
And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core—
to that little cathedral to memory—where
the seeds remember everything they need
to know to become yellow and transparent.
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2016 by Cathryn Essinger, “Summer Apples,” from Alaska Quarterly Review, (Vol 33, No. 1 & 2, 2016). Poem reprinted by permission of Cathryn Essinger and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2017 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
The Southampton Review Editor Lou Ann Walker recounts the day, ten years ago, when Robert Reeves, who would be rebuilding the MFA Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, opined that a “distinguished MFA program” should likewise have a “distinguished literary journal as its intellectual and creative center.” Then he asked Lou Ann: “Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested in founding and editing a literary review?” She writes that it had been her “secret dream” to do just that. Ten years later, Walker has created exactly the publication worthy of the university’s writing program – and vice versa! Publishing two issues per year, readers can also find selections available to read on the TSR website.
Hanging Loose, published by Hanging Loose Press since 1966, includes the section “Writers of High School Age” in each issue. Featured in issue 108 are two young poets who contribute several works each.
Elizabeth Girdharry writes of math and sciences with “Filling Empty Spaces,” including the lines “Mathematical formulas, / on how to stay tangent to the line, / somehow slipped my mind,” and “There Was Geometry” begins: “There is geometry in my junk drawer.” And comes back around to, “More importantly, / there is geometry in my junk drawer. / Angles and tangents twist out of circles / the same way you smooth back flyaway wisps of baby hair / when you’re pondering a hard science theory.”
Elise Wing crafts strong imagery to draw her readers in. “The Microscope” begins “Dead diatom / Crisp as a leaf skeleton,” and “The Living That Terrifies” begins with the amusing but poignant, “Your ears are the trees for egrets to nest in,” and “Tomorrow, the Seagulls” starts, “The future is as frightening as a three-headed hyena.”
NewPages includes Hanging Loose in our Young Writers Guide where we list publications written by and for young writers and readers as well as a vetted, ad-free list of contests for young writers.
In celebration of TLR’s 40 years of publication and “looking toward the future,” Sena Jeter Naslund writes in the Editor’s Note, four guest editors all under the age of forty were invited to select works for this first issue year 41. “Each of them is a graduate, in various areas of concentration, of the Spalding University low-residency MFA in Writing Program,” notes Naslund. Making the selections: Eva Sage Gordon, nonfiction editor; Ellyn Lichvar, poetry and Children’s Corner editor; Amina S. McIntyre, drama editor; Flora K. Schildknecht, fiction editor.
The Summer 2017 issue of The Gettysburg Review features paintings by Tina Newberry. In addition to this untitled cover piece, there are eight works in a full-color portfolio inside. It’s also worth a visit to her website to view her Barbies series.
You have to take a close look at this detail from “Iron Horse” by Kent Monkman on the cover of Brick #99 to get the full effect of the kind of cultural/historical mishmash that makes up this image and a great many of his works.
“Myth” by Eiko Ojala is a papercut illustration for the cover of the May 2017 issue of Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, an online bi-monthly publishing poetry and prose.