NewPages Blog

Now this is cool: Brick 95 has a special feature “On Childhood Books” in which 17 writers reread and comment on books of their youth. Featured authors include Marina Endicott, Pico Iyer, Colum McCann, Kilby Smith-McGregor, Melora Wolff, Eugene McCabe, George Murray, William Kowalski, Frank Macdonald, Aga Maksimowska, Sarah Faber, John Goldbach, Eliza Robertson, Yasuko Thanh, Madeleine Thien, Lisa Moore, and Johanna Skibsrud. Some books you may recognize: Black Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Crime and Punishment, Stuart Little, The Hardy Boys, Peter Pan, and many more. Great concept. Great read. Brick includes some samples on their website here.

Pilgrimage magazine (v38 n3) features black and white photography from the organization Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (NILMDTS). From the organization’s website: “NILMDTS trains, educates, and mobilizes professional quality photographers to provide beautiful heirloom portraits to families facing the untimely death of an infant. We believe these images serve as an important step in the family’s healing process by honoring the child’s legacy.”

Pilgramage editors write, “The organization has a valuable mission and takes powerful photos that are haunting and tender. The photography intersects with the issue’s words by encouraging us to look closer and take no detail for granted. It risks sentimentality and makes us look closer at an intimate moment for families. At the core of it, NILMDTS offers a uniquely valuable service to parents in need and navigates the tough terrain of grieving and celebrating life simultaneously. We encourage you to learn more and support NILMDTS at https://www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org.”

Yellow Medicine Review Spring 2015 features “Entering Language from Two Directions” a roundtable conversation with poets who work directly with/in threatened languages. Participants include LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Jacqueline Osherow, James Thomas Stevens, and Karenne Wood. Megan Snyder-Camp moderates the conversation and begins: “This is a conversation between poets who enter language form two directions: in addition to engaging language on the page in a variety of innovative ways, these poets also work as linguists, translators, and/or language activists…Grounded in our craft, our conversation covered both what these poets bring to the page and also what happens on the page, while also exploring historical and contemporary context.”

The Sewanee Review Spring 2015 issue takes a close look at the print world with its theme “The Alchemy of Print.” Essays include Sven Birkerts [pictured] on “The Little Magazine in the World of Big Data”; A. Banerjee on T. S. Eliot’s editing career, “T.S. Eliot and the Criterion“; Robert Buffington on Allen Tate’s time at the Sewanee Review; Stephen Miller on the life of the Partisan Review, “Memoirs of a New York Intellectual Manque”; David Heddendorf on “Reading that Isn’t Reading”; John Maxwell Hamilton’s “The Gospel on Book Theft”; “Price Control and the Publisher” by James L. W. West III; “Everything an Anchor” by Fred Chappell; “The Man Booker Prize for 2014” by Merritt Moseley; “Remembering Winston Churchill: The making of a Book” by Mel Livatino; and “The Cheever Misadventure Revisted” by Scott Donaldson.

Online literary magazine Subprimal Poetry Art is having a contest to select the theme for their next issue. They are looking for submissions of a theme title and description of approximately 100 words. There is no entry fee to submit to this contest and you can enter up to three times. The winner will receive $50 USD.

The deadline to enter is July 28th. Subprimal Poetry Art suggests taking a look at past issues and themes before submitting. You can find full guidelines and details here: subprimal.com/contests.

While Litro Magazine Editor Eric Akoto claims he won’t attempt to give a full understanding of the history of Detroit that led it to becoming “the symbol of the American urban crisis,” his introduction to Litro #143: Detroit does a pretty darn good job. More importantly, this issue’s content focuses on the “hope for this once great city to rise again and rebuild itself.”

Content includes fiction by Dorene O’Brien, “Way Past Taggin’,” which takes readers inside the sub-culture of Detroit’s graffiti artists, and Patricia Abbott’s dark and gruesome story “On Belle Isle” about a photographer obsessed with photographing images of dead corpses. Amy Kaherl, one of the founding members of Detroit Soup, writes about her Detroit and its community in “A Community through Dialogue.” A Q&A with Detroit photographer Amy Sacka explores her project “Lost and Found in Detroit,” a photo series that began as a 365-day photo essay, where she literally took a photo a day, and has now extended to “The next 500 days.” The issues closes with Bram Stoker Award and Locus Award winner Kathe Koja, who considers Detroit’s new status in “The Limbo District.”

Litro is fully available online as well as on Issuu.

The newest issue of Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century (#48) features a Tribute to New Yorkers. In addition to a conversation with Jan Heller Levi, recorded live in her Manhattan apartment, the publication features works by “real New Yorkers”: Ryan Black, Susana H. Case, Bill Christophersen, Coco de Casscza, Kim Dower, Tony Gloeggler, Linda S. Gottlieb, Michele Lent Hirsch, Jan Heller Levi, Arden Levine, Martin H. Levinson, Peter Marcus, Joan Murray, Harry Newman, Myra Shapiro, Katherine Barrett Swett, and Marilynn Talal.

“Nearly 9 million people call the five boroughs home,” Rattle editors write, “squeezing into a land area of just 305 square miles. How does life in such a unique locale enter into the poetry, and what do New Yorker poets have in common? We explore, in the smallest regional theme we’ve ever done.”

The photography and writing of TED Fellow Eman Mohammed is featured in the spring/summer 2015 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. Eman Mohammed is a Palestinian refugee born in Saudi Arabia and educated in Gaza City. She is the first female photojournalist in Gaza, having started at the age of 19. The mother of two daughters, Eman “continues to shed light on hidden stories by documenting not only the war, but its aftermath and its effect on the people of the region.”

Eman Mohammed introduces her portfolio with several sections of writing: I. The Path / “You have to be a man”; II. The Blast Zone / Locked Doors; III. Mothers and daughters / “Many women died in the kitchen”; IV. Defining Moment / Broken Things; V. The Hole Inside My Heart.

The Spring/Summer 2015 of Atlanta Review International Section, edited by Alex Cigale [pictured], features 52 Russian poets in translation. In his opening remarks, Editor and Publisher Dan Veach writes about the great Russian poets: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Yevtushenko, and Brodsky – who was exiled as a ‘social parasite.’

Veach comments, “On their worst days, poets sometimes wonder if what they do is useless . . . what these poets do is far from useless, and it was out of fear, not scorn, that Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union. As Oslip Mandelstam, who died in Stalin’s prison camps, once said: ‘Only in Russia is poetry respected; it gets people killed. Is there another place where poetry is so common a motive for murder?’ Independent thinking, a broad and human perspective, imagination, fearless criticism, creativity itself – these are the things that repressive regimes fear most, and for which we turn to poetry and poets.”

Having made the shift from publishing quarterly to publishing bimonthly in print, Kenyon Review Editor David H. Lynn writes, “One of the advantages of our new format – fewer pages and more frequent publication – is a greater flexibility and the opportunity to be more adventurous. In this issue of the Kenyon Review we flex those muscles for the first time, offering a special section devoted to poems that share ecological themes and concerns.” Curated and introduced by Poetry Editor David Baker, “Nature’s Nature: A Gathering of Poetry” features works by over 20 poets.

Lynn writes that this feature is not a “one-off,” but will continue. “The Kenyon Review‘s engagement with the ecological world and with science more generally will increase in coming years. Writing about science—by scientists on their own work and by other writers on scientific topics—is a challenging area we intend to explore more fully. Indeed, I’m interested in expanding the categories of literary writing beyond the often constrained arenas of much fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry we see today, to include ecology and science more broadly, as well as travel, history, and so on.”

The Experience of Gender is the theme of Brevity #49. This online issue of “concise literary nonfiction” features work from Kate Bornstein, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Ira Sukrungruang, Brian Doyle, Eunice Tiptree, Judy Bolton-Fasman, Sandra Gail Lambert, Cade Leebron, Deesha Philyaw, Jessica Hindman, Jody Keisner, Madison Hoffman, Mark Stricker, Samuel Autman, and Torrey Peters.

Guest Editors Sarah Einstein and Silas Hansen write, “These brief essays shine a light on the intersections of gender and race, sexuality, disability, faith, and social class, interrogate our strongly-held beliefs about what gender is and what it means, and show us how to embrace and celebrate gender fluidity.”

The Brevity craft section includes “Writing Trans Characters” by Pamela Alex DiFrancesco and memoirist Judy Hall’s “Balancing Act,” writing about her own transgender daughter tells readers, “But when it comes to writing about my children, there is another type of fear: I don’t want to screw it up.”