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“Ooh, mail art!” Such was my glee in flipping through Fourteen Hills, which is chock full of collages by collaborators Mike Dickau & Jon Held Jr., not to mention the inimitable Winston Smith. This issue of the journal is something of a collage itself, boasting a variety of talented writers from San Francisco and from around the world. Binyavanga Wainaina’s “Hell is in Bed with Mrs. Peprah” takes the reader to a beauty shop in Kenya in the late 70s, where a young girl sits among the hot combs and gossip and listens to the educated, eccentric, and undeniably strong “Auntie” Peprah defend herself against naysayers. Continue reading “Fourteen Hills – Winter/Spring 2005”

The ten stories of this issue are eclectic in style and, alas, quality: most are engaging, many are well-written, and some could use a bit more work. Descant opens with Paul H. Williams’ “Seeds in the Cellar” about a young man who is somewhat embarrassed by his Cherokee heritage but embraces it in a private moment of mourning for his dead grandfather. Continue reading “Decant – 2004”

“The memory is merely a summary/of the last time I remembered it,” writes Michael Penny in his wonderful poem, “In Memory.” Memory is the theme of the issue, which, among a collection of poems worth remembering, includes interviews with poets Aislinn Hunter, Laurie Block, and Doug Nepinak. I was unfamiliar with many of the poets here, most of whom have published primarily in Canadian journals, and I was happy to be introduced to their strong, original work. Continue reading “CV2 Contemporary Verse – Winter 2006”

From the moment you pick up Quick Fiction, something tells you it isn’t a standard literary journal. There’s the diminutive size, the quirky cover art, and, most notably, the refreshing and innovative selections of flash fiction. Each piece clocks in at five hundred words or less, the subject matter ranging from a surreal sexual encounter to sea turtles to an overdue library book to an interview with the CIA, featuring styles both lyrical and gritty, with some entries blurring the line between prose and poetry. Continue reading “Quick Fiction – Fall 2005”

Poetry dominates the spring edition of Bitter Oleander, a handsome, glossy journal produced by Bitter Oleander Press. This issue features work by twenty-six poets, with six excellent translations among them. Standouts include David Johnson’s stark and affecting three-part poem “Morning” and Christine Boyka Kluge’s “Swallowing Darkness”: “This is the time of night / when blackest dreams unfold / like bats from secret eaves.” Continue reading “The Bitter Oleander – Spring 2005”

Lake Effect, an annual journal published by Pennsylvania State Erie, features an eclectic selection of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This issue includes the winners of the Sonnenberg Poetry Award, the Rebman Fiction Award, and the Farrell Nonfiction award, plus brief paragraphs stating the judge’s reasons for selecting the winning manuscripts. Both winners in the prose categories are short pieces, two to three pages, and lush and surreal in tone. R.M. Evans’s “Seahorse,” the nonfiction winner, is a particularly innovative look at the author’s recurring dreams and filled with unique imagery, “I feel my alveoli distend like spinose balloon fish.” Continue reading “Lake Effect – Spring 2005”

isotope, a journal of literary nature and science writing, published by Utah State University, boasts an impressive selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, in addition to a striking, full color portfolio of artwork by Richard Gate. This issue includes the winners of the first annual Editors’ Prizes: “Consumption,” a remarkable essay by Sunshine O’Donnell, and a suite of poems by Thomas Joswick that examine the life and art of John James Audubon. My favorite of Joswick’s poems is “Audubon Anticipates Dawn and Blood”: “Before sunrise, from scratching grounds, / where males assemble to strut and boom, / you may hear their rumpled notes, / followed, at times, by rapid / and petulant cackling, / like laughter.” Continue reading “Isotope – Spring/Summer 2005”

Too beautiful by half, Bardsong, The Journal for Celebrating the Celtic Spirit, is an unabashed 8.5 x 11-inch publication devoted—in both senses—to the Celtic theme which is expressed by Assistant Editor Kathleen Cunningham Guler as: “[. . .] hiraeth. Untranslatable into English, my own understanding of it has come to mean several ideals: a melancholy longing for an unfulfilled dream of the way things should have been; a need to return to the ancientness of our culture and people; and that beneath the surface of what we consciously see in the present world lies another place, one that is sacred and holds the secrets that are the heart of our heritage.” Continue reading “Bardsong – Summer 2005”

32 Poems could have taken a more minimalist approach to poetry, as its design and layout would suggest, but instead it touches on every fundamental poetic theme—life, sex, change, death—with the varied imagination of the finest journals around. With a book binder’s precision, each poem is designated to one page, never longer. Continue reading “32 Poems – Spring/Summer 2005”

This issue of AQR devotes 80 pages of photo-essay to: “Chechnya: A Decade of War,” by Heidi Bradner. “A Chechen woman holds photographs of her missing sons [. . .].” For those not au courant, Stalin deported the Chechen nation to this desolate area during World War II. Deborah A. Lott’s “Fifteen,” a moving account of her father’s legacy of insanity provides this remarkable insight: “That I made the mistake of aligning myself with the parent who was crazy because I confused his intensity with love.” Continue reading “Alaska Quarterly Review – Fall/Winter 2005”

From its attractive table-of-contents pages to ads for the Missouri Review, Notre Dame Review, and Shenandoah, New Letters is a class act, including the inside-cover ads for books by and about Peter Viereck as well as for New Letters itself. Robert Stewart’s “Allow Yourself to Say, Yes, An Editor’s Note,” includes this quotation: “‘This playfulness,’ says scholar Richard Rorty, ‘is the product . . . of the power of language to make new and different things possible and important [. . .].'” Continue reading “New Letters – 2005”

Editor Jaime Robles chooses a quotation from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to help define “uncanny love,” this issues’ theme: “first the soul grows tender, then it sickens…but then it feels the true warmth of divine love and cries out and moans and becomes as stone flung in the forge to melt into lime, and it crackles, licked by the flame…” But there isn’t much moaning here, as it turns out. The work in issue 22 is, for the most part, controlled, tightly wound, sure of itself, and intense. Continue reading “Five Fingers – 2006”

Always been a fan of E.E. Cummings? Then Spring is the journal for you – nothing for 234 pages but essays about Cummings, poetry influenced by Cummings, and critical examinations of his life and work, with titles like “Hermetism in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings: An Analysis of Three Obscure Poems” and “Squaring the Self: Versions of Transcendentalism in The Enormous Room.” You may see how these kinds of pieces may appeal mainly to scholars of the late poet’s work, but even amateur fans of Cummings can appreciate the playful poems, like this one by Tony Quagliano called “ON BLY ON POETRY”:
Continue reading “Spring – October 2002”

This slim but vivacious lit mag out of the University of South Dakota is bristling with content: eight short stories, twenty-eight poems, and two essays. Continue reading “South Dakota Review – Winter 2003”

Everything expected of a journal co-founded by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks is here in an issue commemorating Warren’s 10oth birthday with his own fine prose (three letters to friends) and six memoirs—including the delightful “Places: A Memoir” by his daughter, poet Rosanna Warren. In a season in which rereading All the King’s Men for dominant themes seems ever more relevant, the brilliant short stories in this issue touch upon war in “Hot Coffee, Summer” by Christine Grillo, in John Lee’s perfect, first-published story “Fires”—”[. . .] a thin blaze over the northern horizon, and we heard that Seoul was about to fall when the pyobom, the leopard, began to appear in the valley,” and in Asako Serizawa’s memorable study of Alzheimer’s Disease “Flight,” astonishingly also a first publication. Continue reading “The Southern Review – Spring 2005”

Sometimes clichés are true: this issue of Prism International illustrates the concept that good things do come in small packages. The journal contains poetry which ranges from Bernadette Higgins’ traditional poem, “Short Wave,” describing language, music, and thoughts which tease and cross on the air late at night, to a strong contemporary poem by Matt Robinson, “why we wrap our wrists the same each time,” exploring a hockey player’s quest to “do anything” to beat his “jinx.” Ouyang Yu translates four Chinese poems from the 8th and 9th century, which are beautiful in their simplicity and complexity. Continue reading “PRISM International – Fall 2003”

This issue of Santa Monica Review is an extraordinary collection of memorable short stories and novel excerpts. Editor Andrew Tonkovich has selected outstanding first-person narrations with the theme of morality, as well as religion, appearing in most and uniting them in surprising ways. From the amusing dangers of “Daily Evangelism,” by James D. Houston to Paul Eggers’s moving “A Thinly Veiled Autobiography Regarding My Reasons for Giving Up Chess,” moral concerns rank high. In Roberto Ontiveros’s “The Fight for Space,” the narrator—meshing his mundane job and intellectual super-hero obsessions with Batman’s fictional universe—comes down hard on the comic-book icon: “Batman’s trophy room pisses me off the most; it’s like our hero does not want to find peace.” Continue reading “Santa Monica Review – Spring 2005”

The Seattle Review’s lovely cover photograph belies the region’s mountainous nature by offering not a hint of near—or distant—mountains while providing the merest glimpse of Lake Washington; and from a locale often thought stubbornly regional, this issue’s surprising highlight is Kathleen Wiegner’s interview of M. Scott Momaday: “Some of my students sometimes say to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you wrote in Kiowa?’ My answer is, well, in the first place, you can’t. There’s no written language.

Continue reading “The Seattle Review – 2005”

Just over one third of the fall issue of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics is dedicated to a symposium on Russell Edson, a strikingly original poet, playwright, novelist and illustrator who died in 2014. Born in 1935, Edson studied art as a teen, then began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His corpus of work, in addition to numerous books of poetry, includes a book of plays, two novels, and the much-cited 1975 essay, “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems.” In fact, The Poetry Foundation has referred to Edson as the “godfather of the prose poem in America.” In tribute, several contemporary writers each comment on a different Edson poem. Continue reading “FIELD – Fall 2015”

The vicissitudes of pain, a stranger who won’t leave, a talking hole in a shoe. These are just a few of the poetry plot lines in the Winter 2015 issue of Able Muse which individualizes itself by publishing work “with a focus on metrical and formal poetry.” Continue reading “Able Muse – Winter 2015”