NewPages Blog

This elegant, high-quality journal has a little bit of everything: fiction, poetry, essays, book reviews, and striking art in the form of black and white photographs of Uganda by Gloria Baker Feinstein. In one of these, school children look sternly into the camera, as if demanding to know the photographer’s reason for taking these pictures; in another, they seem to offer her a flower. The two essays, though very different in style and subject, are the most engaging pieces. “Recovering Robinson,” a biographical sketch of poet Edward Arlington Robinson, recounts high and low points in Robinson’s career and conveys the nature of his craft and aspirations in a conversational manner that made me want to pour the writer, Scott Donaldson, another glass of wine and ask him to keep talking. “Portrait of a Homeless Art History Student,” by Andrew T. McCarter, is riskier work, told in second person: Continue reading “New Letters – 2006/2007”

While this journal’s academic covers do little to counter the misperception that the Plains are plain, NDQ’s ninety-six-year publishing history does. This issue’s highlight is “Holy Socks.” After her father, an Ohio minister, endured a lobotomy that permanently confined him to a hospital, Constance Studer, a nursing student, breaks hospital regulation to gather information and portrays a family broken by “the cure” as well as the fine line dividing some peoples’ spirituality from psychosis. “White Meat of Chicken, Flowing Streams of Milk” excerpts a memoir about a Southern expatriate’s life in the Dakota oilfields with his beloved Boston Terrier. Continue reading “North Dakota Quarterly – Summer 2006”

Want to get a taste of modern and contemporary Japanese poetry but don’t speak Japanese? Then Poetry Kanto will give you a draught. It includes English translations of Japanese poems by members of the Kanto Poetry Center at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama. They have prefaced the works with helpful introductions to the poets’ lives and works. Many of the poems collected here have appeared previously on web sites or in books, and a number of these poems are slated to appear in Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology (M.E. Sharpe, 2007). I have the impression that many of the Japanese poems lost vitality in the translation, and this is the likely nature of translation because, of course, many aspects of poems (sounds, wordplay) cannot be rendered well in another language. What remains then are the images, and if the reader is not stirred by the images, the poem falls flat. Of the translated poems, “Eating the Wind” seemed to be the most successful, partly because the Indonesian terms are included so the sounds are not lost, and because of the difference in meaning of the title phrase in Indonesian and Japanese, as explained by the persona. Continue reading “Poetry Kanto – 2006”

Porcupine literary magazine is concerned with both the visual as well as the literary arts. Each issue contains poetry, fiction, and essays, as well as portfolios of artists and a full-color section dedicated to visual media. In this issue, Janet Yoder describes the basketry of Vi Hilbert, an Upper Skagit elder, who has been weaving her entire life, binding her community and her past as tightly as her cedar root baskets. We are given photos of two of her baskets and left wanting to see more of this amazing woman’s art. Continue reading “Porcupine – 2006”

This issue of Portland Review showcases “innovative fiction,” beginning with two pieces selected from the FC2 Writer’s Edge workshop for experimental writing that was held at Portland State University last year. There are hazards to publishing work selected from a pool as small as a workshop, which is not to say that these two stories aren’t interesting, but rather that other work that appears in the journal is better. Martha Clarkson’s “Water Filter,” for example, tells the story of a family that acquires gills (through surgery) and moves into the pool for a few months to get away from Dad. Continue reading “Portland Review – Fall/Winter 2006”

This Brooklyn-based review celebrates its fifth anniversary with this issue, and I must say, they are five quite underrated years. Alongside some new pieces, the editors have selected the best of their fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Brian Baise’s “Don’t Leon Sanders Me” is flat-out hilarious. Continue reading “The Saint Ann’s Review – Number 2”

It would take a particular effort of resistance to ignore this debut of The Saranac Review simply because Frank Owen’s vibrant painting In Season August adorns the cover. And while the black-and-white interior renditions of his paintings do not do justice to his work, the written works (fiction, non-fiction, verse, and “inter-genre”) match the cover’s brilliance. I enjoyed reading excerpts of the forthcoming novels Deadline Fiddle (HarperCollins, 2007) by Jay Parini and Push Comes to Shove by Wesley Brown. Parini’s novel, with its sympathetic characters and well-drawn settings (couldn’t tell much about plot in so few chapters), will likely take a prominent place among novels set during the American Civil War. Continue reading “Saranac Review – 2005”

Before I start, I have to admit to being confused by humor, which at least I do know is a very individual construct. I don’t watch stand-up comedians because I can’t enter into the proper frame of mind, David Letterman’s smug face makes me want to hurl (hard objects at the TV), and bitter sarcasm makes me anxious for the state of the world. Continue reading “Swivel – 2006”

For TriQuarterly, one of Chicago’s many estimable literary venues, their 125th issue is surprisingly erratic. It allows Moria Crone’s flat, turgid “The Ice Garden” to consume nearly 30 pages, and David Kirby’s initial travelogue/essay to proffer descriptions of how we consider sex: “The question is a loaded one, and the gun that fires it is double-barreled, for nothing is more wonderful than sex and nothing more tawdry, nothing more elevating yet nothing more degrading.” Continue reading “TriQuarterly – 2006”

Washington Square is edited by students in the New York University Graduate Creative Writing Program, which includes among its faculty members E. L. Doctorow and Philip Levine. This issue contains work by writers of sometimes dual national backgrounds, among them Kurdistan, Romania, Australia, India/Hong Kong, England, Bulgaria, Japan/Germany, Lebanon/France, Spain (Kirmen Uribe of the Basque region), Palestine/USA, Palestine, and USA—fitting for an issue proclaiming itself the Inaugural International Edition. Continue reading “Washington Square – 2006”

This end-of-year issue by the Canadian journal Vallum is a pleasant and serious counterpoint to the monthly whimsies of Poetry. Its theme is the desert, and I’m not talking about the American diet. Through poetry, Vallum explores deserts of ice and deserts of sand and deserts of the mind. Still hungry? Good. Continue reading “Vallum – 2006”

The title is utilitarian, the cover resembles vinyl, the pages are held together by a large snug red rubber band and the price is sexy ($3). And the poets run six deep and publish six poems each. If that isn’t good enough for you, then the top-right corner is cut diagonally. Plus, there’s the John Ashbery effect. This isn’t wrong though. For instance, opening act Christina Clark says in the first lines of her fourth poem, “Vous avez les shoes of august / fine-willed and waning.” And Sue Carnahan writes, “The midwife parks in the pond while the breech baby / is turned birthed slapped.” That it whirls the chorals and courses plodding along in the overhead is just part of my sympathies. But, listen to these lines from the sad-eyed recovery poems of Rick Snyder, collectively titled “The Memory of Whiteness.” Continue reading “6×6 – Spring 2006”

Very early on, the issue boasts the lines “Funny thing about the Autumn sun / how it warms the heart first / and later the skin” (Dexine Wallbank’s “Autumn Light”). And that is how this issue of The Antigonish Review sinks into a reader’s being. The issue continues with a Zoë Strachan (Betty Trask Award winner) piece, “Play Dead,” which adds another dimension to the fluidity of human sexuality, and makes sublime its otherwise trite last line: “I don’t suppose she’d ever felt so alone.” It’s a must read, if only to see how Strachan’s line makes the piece and vice versa. There’s a playful, narrative arc in every piece, even the reviews of Canadian poets. Ken Stange reviews Allan Brown’s Frames of Silence, a collection, beginning with: “This is not an unbiased review […],” for reviewer and writer are close friends. Stange does an evenhanded job, despite the admitted favoritism—treading finely the thin line between over- and under-whelming with his and Brown’s personal history; a fine place to start researching for an honest best-man speech. Continue reading “The Antigonish Review – Summer 2006”

An elegantly slim volume, the Fall 2006 Bellingham Review is an eclectic collection with the slight political edge of interviews with two poets: Gerald Stern: “So I don’t know where all my leftist influence comes from, maybe it was just in the air, but I identified with them. I was a socialist.”—in conversation with Kate Beles; and Robb St. Lawrence’s interview of Rita Dove: “I admire the Star Trek universe for the way it has always encapsulated our social structures and put them on spaceships, and I love the way they disregard race and other ‘differences.’” Continue reading “The Bellingham Review – Fall 2006”

That a self-portrait of Kenneth Rexroth looks out from the cover of this sixtieth anniversary issue is à propos as its first 180 pages celebrate the centenary of Rexroth’s birth. Continue reading “Chicago Review – Autumn 2006”

Doing justice to the 25th Anniversary issue of Conjunctions in a brief review is almost a crime in and of itself. Simply put: you won’t know where to start. I recommend Bradford Morrow’s introduction; this interposition of historical details and expressions of gratitude proves good preparation for the aggressive experimentation that ensues. The first offering, by Jonathan Lethem, features the antics of various characters marooned on an island after an airplane crash, who, as they document their disparate reflections of the enclosed landscape, collectively call into question the anthologizing process. Similarly, Rick Moody’s contribution reads like an acidic installment of “Sedaratives” from The Believer: a verbose advice columnist’s gleeful delivery of Mencken-esque dismissals is interrupted by the intrusion of a square-jawed, simple-minded, weightlifting, gun-toting allegorical figure called “American Literature,” who eventually shoots out the columnist’s entrails before fleeing to New Mexico. Continue reading “Conjunctions – 2006”

I wish I would have discovered Cream City Review twenty years ago. This issue on memoir, which celebrates the journal’s thirtieth anniversary, was the high point of my holiday reading because every piece offers something of interest. In his excellent introduction, an excerpt from his forthcoming book Then, Again: Aspects of Contemporary Memoir, Sven Birkerts draws distinctions between autobiography, memoir, and traumatic memoir. Wisely, the editors of Cream City Review also distinguish between “fictional memoir” and “nonfiction memoir.” Of these, I particularly enjoyed the fictional “The Fall of Iran” by Ed Meek—an adventure—and the nonfiction “Seven Dwarf Essays” by Michael Martone—an exploration of son Sam’s interest in dwarfs and the wider implications of dwarfism. Continue reading “Cream City Review – Fall 2006”

The Georgia Review is a champion of verbosity, and this installment does not disappoint. The fiction is dense and energetic—particularly Julia Elloitt’s “The Whipping”—but entirely believable. The reviews, though brief, are given the room to expand. They don’t pull punches; Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn is dismissed as “showy,” for example. True, Paglia is a barnyard-sized target for a publication slinging MLA phrases like “postpartum existential quandary.” Nonetheless, any publication whose foray into “criticism” isn’t an opaque attempt to make friends is one to be admired. Continue reading “The Georgia Review – Summer 2006”

Don’t judge Greensboro Review by its cover. Though the plain-brown-wrapper-style cover maintains the forty-year tradition of this magazine’s publishing history, the writing isn’t the least bit dated. Continue reading “The Greensboro Review – Fall 2006”

Harpur Palate is a sharp little journal featuring a center section of striking and surprisingly well reproduced visual art: otherworldly photography by Robert Kaussner, architecturally inspired drawings by David Hamill, gloriously colorful mixed media images by Michael Sullivan Hart, and an intriguing, surreal ink and paper study by Joseph Hart. Continue reading “Harpur Palate – 2006”

A long story has the possibility of incorporating a handful of moments, and spanning a story over a considerable length of time. The narrative space of three pages might not allow for an engaging tale spanning several years as much as twelve to twenty pages do. One common theme running through the stories in this issue is that of entrapment. Protagonists are incarcerated in three of the eight stories, while in another a girl is branded with the letter “J” on her forehead. Three gems in the collection are Shawn Hutchens’s “Midnight and the Fleeing Phoenix,” Peter Chilson’s “Toumani Ogun” and Bruce Douglas Reeves’s “You Only Live Once.” Chilson’s story is a chilling and funny take on Africa’s multiple problems, and the continuing hopelessness of Western aid organizations in their ability to understand the situation, let alone bring it under control. Reeves’s Prohibition-era first-person narrative of a luckless bootlegger is tastefully layered with the antithesis of ordinary situations: a flood that smashes the protagonist’s booze-laden truck and also his future, and the way he hunkers down in a movie theater afterwards, plagued with hunger and danger as equal threats. Hutchens manages to create a credible bull (the animal) with feelings—no mean feat, even in a non-fabulous long story. Continue reading “The Long Story – 2006”

Far more than a survey of literary Louisiana, this university journal collects fiction and poetry from West Virginia to the Ozarks. Perfect-bound in a firm, glossy cover as arresting as any book, though more scholarly-looking than most lit mags, each issue comes crowned with a striking color photograph. If the cover is the front door, the photo is the welcome mat, so come on in. Continue reading “Louisiana Literature – 2006”

One look at Murdaland’s cover and you know that you won’t be disappointed. It shows a potbellied assassin taking aim with a nearly-finished cigarello in his mouth, nothing but boxers on, and a look of precision in his one open eye. Continue reading “Murdaland – 2007”

I love it when I open a journal and serendipitously the first piece I read is a winner. This recently happened when I picked up Pebble Lake Review and turned to Ted Gilley’s poem “Password,” which begins “Young Dewey’s head / was shaped like a melon. / His password was I’m ripe. / His brother Matthew’s was / I blow up mailboxes. / Mine was just ignore me.” Although it includes several book reviews and works of fiction, including Dave Housley’s hit-the-nail-on-the-head, slice-of-life piece, “Where We’re Going,” this issue focuses on poetry. It includes poems by Denise Duhamel, Kelli Russell Agodon, Judith Skillman, C.J. Sage, Dan Rosenberg, Barry Ballard, Paula Bohince, and some two dozen other poets. For their wonderful imagery, I recommend “Measure Twice, Cut Once” and “House Diptych” by Bernadette Geyer. I also suggest that readers visit the journal’s website, where they can listen to selected audio files of the authors reading their own works—a great addition to the print journal. Continue reading “Pebble Lake Review – Summer 2006”

Pool is a great name for a poetry journal—all those denotations, connotations, symbols, and similes. Spanning a wide range of styles, this volume contains multiple poems by Gareth Lee, Bob Hicok, Elizabeth Horner, James Haug, Amanda Field, Paul Fattaruso, Tony Hoagland, Campbell McGrath, and Mary Ruefle, as well as single poems by three dozen others. Although many of the poems in this issue fell flat (belly flopped?), I enjoyed the playfulness of Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s language in “In Pursuit of the Original Trinket” and “Mosey Is as Mosey Does.” Corey Marks’s long poem “Lullaby” is this volume’s graceful dive from the high platform. In it he demonstrates skillful interweaving of avian imagery and symbolism with a fairytale motif and modern medical dilemma:

. . . your body
unstitched our trust in it, thread by thread, pocking
itself with blood that no longer knew to contain itself
capillaries split and spilt across your face and hands
into a map of a country you’d never thought to visit. Continue reading “Pool – 2006”

I picked Renovation Journal from a shelf of journals because of its theme: “The Letter Issue.” You see, I still feel the presence of my deceased father when I reread the letters he sent to me while I was away at college. I still cherish the love letters my boyfriend sent to me in France before he became my husband. So I expected a great deal from this slender volume. Cornelia Veenendaal’s, “I Must Tell You about a Trip to Zweeloo,” based on the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, well portrayed the pre-South of France painter, and editor Kate Hanson’s letter to Franz Wright caught the all-too-familiar timidity when in the presence of celebrity. Continue reading “Renovation Journal – Spring 2006”

This non-fiction issue of Salmagundi includes, along with much else, Richard Howard’s response to disdain for works older than one’s self—”A Lecture on a Certain Mistrust of the Past among Young Writers”—and “The Women of Whitechapel: Two Poems” by Nancy Schoenberger, whose second victim, remarkably perceptive under the circumstances, comments: “[. . .] a gentleman’s a man where darkness lurks until it’s sprung by some medicinal.” Linda Simon’s curious title, “What Lies Beneath,” is a review of Virginia Blum’s Flesh Wounds, the search for redemption via cosmetic surgery. From David Bosworth’s “Auguries of Decadence – American Television in the Age of Empire”: “If the rude yoking of the picayune to the profound is a feature of the post modern [. . .],” his brilliant 50-page rumination on TV’s spectacles of pain and folly—weeping Kurdish women, Extreme Makeover‘s cosmetic-surgery desperadoes—is postmodern, indeed; and also a hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration. “D. H. Lawrence, Comedian” by Jeffrey Meyers must concede the humor of Lawrence may be easily mistaken for misogyny, as in this example: “[. . .] I feel such a profound hatred of myself, of the human race, I almost know what it is to be a Jew.” Informative and entertaining as all this is, one expects no less from a journal claiming Russell Banks, Carolyn Forche, and Mario Vargas Llosa among its regular contributors. Continue reading “Salmagundi – Fall 2006”

If there’s been a push as of late to break the glass ceiling of female graphic artists, then little magazines stand in the vanguard: this summer Marjane Satrapi was interviewed in The Believer; a little later, A Public Space came out with an excerpt from Lauren Redniss’s Century Girl. Now comes Tin House’s graphic issue, which goes further than either publication, featuring articles with Satrapi and earthy icon Lynda Barry (whose curiously scatological and entirely dualistic rumination on the nature of mental imagery graces the cover), and, later, a vignette on the dearth of female graphic artists. An interview with Satrapi follows, wherein this “queen” of graphic novels discusses how she reworked the flurry of misconceptions surrounding her Iranian heritage into the intelligent, darkly humorous Persepolis, now the subject of a movie deal. Continue reading “Tin House – Fall 2006”

Listening to NPR recently, I heard an interview with the new PR guru for the state of Mississippi, who was touting the state’s heritage as the birthplace of famous writers and entertainers. Right away I thought of The Yalobusha Review. This volume, which is dedicated to novelist and essayist Larry Brown (Father and Son, Billy Ray’s Farm, Feast of Snakes), who died in late 2004, has much to recommend it: a moving if episodic eulogy “Larry Brown: Passion to Brilliance” by Barry Hannah; the heartfelt appreciation “Larry Brown: Mentor from Afar” by Joe Samuel Starnes; the fiction “Niche” by University of Mississippi writer-in-residence, Michael Knight, who as judge for the Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction chose Patrick Tucker’s story “The Course of History” for that honor because, he noted, it “doesn’t feel like it’s had the guts work-shopped out of it”; haunting poems by Nicole Foreman, Larry Bradley, and Joan Payne Kincaid; and Christopher Brady’s untitled print of an elderly woman (p. 33), which begs viewers to hear the story told in the wrinkles of her face and hand. Fans of Aimee Bender’s fiction (An Invisible Sign of My Own, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures) will certainly want to check out the interview, in which the author discusses magic as sleight of hand, realism as a bogus term, and holding something back from the reader. Finally, while some readers might say that the plot of Ron Pruitt’s story “Meth Lab” hinges on coincidence, I found it right on target with the unknowing ways things happen in the universe. Continue reading “Yalobusha Review – 2006”

Gracing the cover of this issue is a photograph of Spalding Gray, an actor-writer known for his humorous monologues and who long suffered from depression and committed suicide in 2004. Dave Korzon’s moving interview with Gray’s wife, director Kathie Russo, provides insights into Gray’s life and art, as well as Russo’s efforts to keep her husband’s legacy alive (Swimming to Cambodia; Monster in a Box; Morning, Noon and Night; It’s a Slippery Slope; Life Interrupted, among other books). Regular departments in this magazine include “No Do-Overs” (in this issue, Stephanie Johnson’s at turns hilarious and poignant essay “Girly”) and “Voices,” collecting the opinions of selected people on a certain topic. The magazine’s subtitle, “Your World, Your Story,” is apt, for, like the alternative magazine The Sun, The Rambler solicits works from readers, though instead of written thematic prompts, The Rambler offers readers photographs as inspiration for nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In this issue, Kerry Jones’s perfectly modulated short story, “So Glad We Had This Time Together,” is the sole fiction selection. It reads so well that were she not writing in the first-person voice of a male character, it could easily be mistaken for memoir. Continue reading “The Rambler Magazine – November/December 2006”

The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review does better than many literary magazines at integrating poetry and visual arts. In fact, marrying the two genres is the express intention of its “Crossover” section, which features the 8 x 10-inch digital mixed-media selections Wholeness and Eternity by Jing Zhou. Part of a series called “Ch’an Mind; Zen Mind,” these black-and-white pieces demand repeat “readings,” as does Sandra Kohler’s nine-part poem cycle “The Unveiling.” With its elliptical structure, recurrent imagery, and timeless theme, this poem amply rewards the reader who peels back the layers of craft and meaning. More direct but no less moving are Christine Leche’s “Three-Minute Egg” and “Eye of the Storm,” and upon reading Kelly Jean White’s “I Cannot Say How Deep the Snow,” I felt a chime of recognition. I would have positioned “The Drowning Man” by Nick Conrad as the issue’s finale poem, for its haunting quality will linger with readers long after they have set the journal aside. Continue reading “The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review – Number 15”

Quarter After Eight describes itself as publishing “some of the most innovative and significant experimental prose in contemporary letters.” This issue contains plenty of prose poetry and flash fiction, but the pieces that strike me as most unusual and interesting are the longer ones. Karrie Higgins’s essay, “State Lines,” about her epilepsy, is a standout. Continue reading “Quarter After Eight – 2004/2005”

Since this is an annual publication—despite title—the short story’s continuing evolution may be visible—although not yet deciphered—over even the one short year of this stellar 528-page collection. Continue reading “StoryQuarterly – 2005”