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A young journal — this is just the third issue — Tiferet has the solidity and self-assuredness of a more seasoned publication and its approach to “spiritual literature” is expansive. Take, for example, this poem by Helen Marie Casey, “Loaves and Pears”: Continue reading “Tiferet – 2005”

The new issue of the Bat City Review starts off strong with Michael Czyniejewski’s “Pleurisy,” a strangely moving story where the small lies of a marriage get reflected in the inconsistency of the family dictionary’s definitions and eventually other written materials in their home. Clocking in at only four pages, its slippery definitions haunt well beyond the story’s size on paper. Elsewhere, Maryl Jo Fox’s “Marker” brings us a post-apocalyptic tale regarding an artist’s capture and near-escapes from the vain dictator who rules her world. As the warlord stages twisted beauty pageants and forces refugee artists to paint her image, the narrator can do nothing but flee uselessly towards the borders of her failed society. Cruel and evocative, “Marker” shouldn’t be missed by anyone interested in the quickly emerging slipstream genre. In poetry, Stephen Dunn’s “How to Write a Dream Poem” brings a light tone to the difficulty of conveying a powerful dream to someone else, its advice wisely steering the dream-writer away from truth and toward the more profound potentials of story, feeling, and those ever present dream symbols.  Continue reading “Bat City Review – 2006”

I’m sure I finally understand the meaning of the term “fine etched” now, which I confess I wasn’t always certain I did, because I can think of no better phrase to characterize the luminous poems in this issue of BPJ. These poems are like this venerable journal itself, slender, deliberate, careful, and nearly perfect. Many are delicately wrought (poems by Sonja James, Marsha Pomerantz, Lynette Ng), others are urgent or exuberant, but never in a casual way (poems by Garth Greenwell and Anne Marie Macari), and a few are more direct, more immediate, and equally well crafted (poems by Kristina Martino and Malcolm Alexander). Poems by Aimee Sands, Robert Buchko, and B. Z. Niditch are a testament to the ordinary word’s exquisite potential, in the hands of a gifted writer, to reveal whole centuries, continents, and galaxies of thought in a few spare lines. Here is Niditch’s poem, “Holocaust and Art (Gorky, Celan, and Levi),” the last in the issue — a measure of how thoughtfully BPJ is edited, for what poem could follow? Continue reading “Beloit Poetry Journal – Summer 2006”

What I’ve come to expect of the Bitter Oleander is work that is unusual. Not odd or inaccessible or experimental, but unusual — poetry with unusual diction or an unusual tone and stories with unusual perspectives. This issue is no exception. I liked, in particular, poems by Shawn Fawson, George Kalamaras, and Kenneth Frost, and an amazing piece of short fiction by Michael Roberts, “Found in the Wreckage,” in which a man contemplates his own death in prose that is both chilling and lyrical. All of the fiction, in fact, is sharp, disturbing, and unforgettable. This issue’s special feature is a long interview with poet Martín Camps, conducted via email in English, and a terrific selection of his poems, translated from the Spanish by Anthony Seidman. (Camps was born and raised in Mexico; he studied in California where he now resides.) Continue reading “The Bitter Oleander – 2006”

Barbeque, bottletrees, National Steal Guitars – if you’re looking for clichés, this isn’t the mag for you. Focusing on the seven-state Mississippi River Delta, Arkansas Review draws the humanities and social sciences in its interdisciplinary net to evoke the Delta experience. And although each issue contains fiction and poetry – 3 stories and 7 poems here—AR includes “studies” in its title for a reason. First, there’s the scholarly articles – about Arkansas State College’s early alliance with the Army and a transcribed lecture on Delta race relations—then the book reviews—17 pages of them, outnumbering any other single piece.  Continue reading “Arkansas Review – April 2006”

Being introduced to the literature of a foreign country is like finding a new wing on your favorite library. Every reader should take some time to wander through Chattahoochee Review’s Hungarian Fiction Issue. Work in translation often makes me feel as though I’m reading Ivan Drago’s lines from Rocky IV—clipped, simple phrasing—but the work here is uniformly gorgeous. Continue reading “The Chattahoochee Review – Fall 2005”

The “Hot Stove Issue” contains two fiction pieces, Michelle Von Euw’s “The Show,” and Billy O’Callaghan’s “The Game of Life.” O’Callaghan unfolds the relationship between a boy and his grandfather with the same steady pace with which the boy perfects his curveball. Continue reading “Elysian Fields Quarterly – Spring 2006”

With numerous journals and anthologies representing the South’s literary tradition, it’s about time the desert got a turn. For those not schooled ecologically, the “high desert” is that gray-green steppe between the Rockies and Cascades. Dry enough for rattlers, high enough for snow, it may not be flourishing farmland, but the sagebrush proves fertile soil for literary abundance. Continue reading “High Desert Journal – Spring 2006”

If Hobart’s Issue 4 was the magazine’s coming out issue (with stories by Aimee Bender, Ryan Boudinot, Rick Moody, and Stephen Elliot bringing a lot of attention to the young publication), then Issue 6 is the one where it fully reveals its own voice with its sixteen stories full of wit and wonder. Continue reading “Hobart – Summer 2006”

Main Street Rag publishes simple, solid, conversational writing without gimmicks. The layout has rather cramped pages and fuzzy artwork, but this can be overlooked. Continue reading “Main Street Rag – Summer 2006”

Whoever made the sign adorning the building in Greg Otto’s pastel cover, which reads “The New United Church of Love and Deliverance Miracle Center” must have the same aesthetics as Passages North—there’s space available, why not use it? This massive 250-page paperback is filled with 100 pages of fiction, 30 pages of nonfiction, and 100 pages of poetry. I was a bit put off at first by the number of non-adult narrators in the fiction (half of the stories are told by children or teenagers), but each stands on its own. Continue reading “Passages North – Winter/Spring 2006”

Associate Editor Todd Moffett writes that the journal does not present themes so much as follows a hidden code, one that creates associations between the stories, poems, and essays in the issue “to delight not only us but our reading audience.” If part of my job as a reader is to discover the secret code in this issue, I’d say it was “mystery” starting with Michael Clure’s three “Mysterioso” poems (here is an excerpt from “Mysterioso Eight”)— Continue reading “Red Rock Review – Winter 2006”

For those of us tired of most literary journals’ slim nonfiction pickin’s, River Teeth offers not only quantity, but variety. Taking its name from David James Duncan’s genre-bending book, this all-nonfiction journal prints narrative reportage, essays, memoirs and critical essays to, as they put it, “illuminate this emerging genre.” In his 40-page memoir “Starting at the Bottom Again,” Dustin Beall Smith, a 57-year-old, cosmically disoriented key grip, follows a Lakota camera assistant from his world of New York City studio suck-ups down the rabbit hole of adopted spirituality and cultural collaging. Continue reading “River Teeth – Spring 2006”

There’s a lot of variety in these average-sized, unspiralled pages—from the elegance of Paul Yoon’s “So That They Do Not Hear Us” to the humor of Ladette Randolph’s wonderful “The Girls” to the stark descriptions of Natasha Radojcic’s “You Don’t Have To Live Here.” No single characteristic defines the stories other than quality. Continue reading “Small Spiral Notebook – 2006”

Versal is an attractive, large-format magazine, denser than its one-hundred pages would initially suggest and ornamented with full color art both inside and out. Most of the prose in the issue is very short, each story generally only a couple of pages long. Chad Simpson’s “Hunger,” for example, is one of the strongest stories in the issue despite taking less than a single page to convey a terrifying tale of a woman obsessed with eating after a move to a new house. Strong undercurrents of menace lurk between sentences, and the final line packs a surprisingly large punch, considering the story’s lean three-hundred-word body. Continue reading “Versal – 2006”

The Yale Review contains fiction, poetry, reviews and essays. The design, by Chip Kidd and Jayme Yen, is simple and unadorned, but eye-catching. Kidd’s imprimatur is noticeable, though it is also noticeably restrained; his transatlantic flights of fancy are shortened to mere layovers. Continue reading “The Yale Review – July 2006”

Call AGNI brain food. This issue is full of literature that is not meant for mere entertainment; it’s meant to be digested. “215. Philosophy is to the intellect what art is to the imagination; philosophy is—and ought to be a kind of art.” Parallels can be drawn to Issue 63; in addition to the art of story, this journal uses words to exalt all art. Vietnam and other wars are referenced in several pieces, and traditional themes like parents’ deaths are juxtaposed with a Slovenian parable, reservation blues and renderings of bats and witchcraft. The artistic references, especially in A.P. Miller’s “Blessing the New Moon” can be daunting more than esoteric—the contributors imbue so much passion for art that it never waxes on artistic pretension. Not art for art’s sake—art for sustenance and at over 250 pages it’s quite a helping. Paul Eggers’s “Monsieur le Genius” is, for instance, about a chess player who initially fools Burundi officials into believing him to be a master chess player. The insistence of the official to maintain the comic masquerade is undercut by the Hutu-Tutsi war that is spilling over the border from Rwanda. Continue reading “AGNI – Number 64”

It’s back. After an eight-year hiatus, American Short Fiction returns with a new publisher, a new design, an essay and a photo narrative, and an admission “to a certain amount of uncertainty.” The tight, 122-page journal includes five pieces of fiction that should assure readers that they “are concerned as always, and above all else, with fiction.” The writing is quality, the story-telling unconventional, the authorship distinctive though not necessarily American. Susan Steinberg’s narrator lurks in the parking lot, observing and obsessing over the “Court” of a basketball game, revisiting her past, reimagining the present. Steinberg’s style, witty and self-conscious, sparse but biting structure, elevates the undercurrent of sex and longing, brilliant and self-conscious, sparse prose-poem like narrative: Continue reading “American Short Fiction – Winter 2006”

A very special Swayze section, where contributors praise the mulleted icon from Dirty Dancing all the way to Donnie Darko. An action figure portrait gallery featuring Spiderman in repose, the Lone Ranger and Silver facing down the camera. A punk rock interview with iconoclast Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and five-dollar Fugazi. “We have a thing for pop culture.” Issue Two of Barrelhouse is fun. Though it tends to the silly side of kitsch, the comic eccentricities of some of the prose belies the quality and craft of the storytelling. With nearly all of the prose coming from male contributors, you can expect some father-son stories. In “Hey Now, All You Sinners” by Brian Ames, a father searching for his bipolar son drifts further back in time to the love of his life before he had a family. Putting his wife in a non-coma pales to the confession he must make about his past. Another son suffers his football coach father by shuffling his dead mother’s belongings from one corner of the basement to another in “Rivals and Hyenas Alike” by Sean Beaudoin. “Luck is for losers,” he reminds a girl, in a laconic, sparse style apt for the despondent narrator. Continue reading “Barrelhouse – 2005”

I love unassuming journals: those thinner, saddle-stitched endeavors with so few people working behind the scenes, I can count them on one hand. Some border on zine rather than lit mag, and it can be a hard call. With this publication, there is no question that this publication is right up there with much larger-staffed literary endeavors. With full-color throughout – photos, artwork, page design – this “little” publication is a huge feast for the eyes. As plagues fine art reproductions, however, there are some issues with resolution that I wish could be resolved, rather than holding the image at an arm’s length to limit the blur. The written works, poetry and fiction, are not to be held at arm’s length, but brought into close range. Not one piece in here I didn’t like for at least a line or stanza or image or feeling it dragged into me and out of me. Continue reading “THE CLIFFS “soundings” – Spring 2006”

A slim annual, more chapbookish in its perfect-bound style, the content of The Eleventh Muse is anything but slim. The back cover gently boasts: “55 poems; 44 poets; 23 states; 4 countries.” What matters most to me is 1. Give me one great poem, and that makes my reading worthwhile, and this publication was more than worth my while. Continue reading “The Eleventh Muse – 2006”

Who could resist the cover art of this publication? Themed “Youth,” I had to keep reminding myself of that as I read the works in this issue, so varied were the contents and perspectives on this theme. Favs in poetry include “Why I Gave Up Mysticism” in thirteen parts by Sean Lause which combines concrete narrative with its own mystical rhetoric: “and ate Eskimo Pies / that wept down our shirts / as we listened to intricate crickets / design the dark.” And Ruth Kessler’s “Valediction” which presents the adult child’s departure from the parental point of view: “into your eager hands we would like to press everything we / have paid for so dearly at life’s roadside bazaar.” Michael Leong’s personification in “Blackboard” left me smiling, grade school memories replenished, while Jeremy Byars “The Last Time I Saw Her,” a boy’s recollection of most innocently being the last witness, left me haunted with so many childhood warnings about strangers. Continue reading “Gihon River Review – Spring 2006”

The Heartlands is bookended by poetic tributes to Sherwood Anderson, one a reprint, the other an original, both crying for ‘more, more.’ You hear Sherwood, you think Ohio, which is also home to the Firelands Writing Center, the producers of The Heartlands. The audience extends from the southern tip of Lake Erie, out to “Northwest Ohio, Ohio at large, the Midwest and the Nation…around our theme of Midwest Life and Art.” The community-minded publication includes photo essays from community college students to an essay by editor and teacher Larry Smith, who writes that the most important gift of writing is our intention, “If we can get out of the way (of our ego) our presence and our intent will come across quiet and clear. To do this we must be able to slow down and listen.” This idea, this community of sharing, from the classroom to the forest, courses through the black and white magazine-styled journal. Continue reading “Heartlands – Fall 2005”

Reading the 44th installation of this Chicago journal is an exercise in patience. Its stories start slow, build carefully, and almost always finish on a terrific note. The subject matter ranges all over the spectrum; the tone remains entrenched in realism. When this quotidian stylistic blend sinks too deep into structure the result can be a little workshoppy; oftentimes an OV story commits to a single metaphorical strand of development that, while turned smartly at the end, loses the reader before getting there. Even the principal exception to this rule – Tao Lin’s Daniel Handleresque “Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money than There Exists” – seems to be gazing playfully out at the rows of “normal” fictive prose lines which will follow it. What’s interesting is that Lin’s story, while wildly entertaining line-by-line, is also one of the few that fails to deliver a forceful ending punch. Continue reading “Other Voices – Spring/Summer 2006”

Ex Machina Press adds a new journal to the all-fiction genre with the debut of Silent Voices. The oxymoronic title is best defined by an excerpt borrowed from Isak Dinesen: “Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there in the end, silence will speak.” The loyalties range from the traditional to the experimental, stories of ghosts and toilet scrubbers, mad professors (“perhaps the jump from professor to career patient was not such a big one after all.”) and madder neighbors. Michelle Melon’s “Nameless,” winner of their first contest, refers to the book of names that a dying woman finds in the shack that used to be a church for slaves. Desperate to carve their names into tombstones, she hears their song and knows she is not alone. “ . . . she craves and fears the companionship they offer following the lonely, uncertain journey that lies ahead.” Raffi Kevorkian mingles with the afterlife in his parable, “Misfit.” The townspeople summon first the police, then the Der Hayr (an Armenian married priest), and finally a doctor who cannot help the man who carries his heart in his hand, a hole in his chest. Continue reading “Silent Voices – 2005”

Don’t read Alimentum when you’re hungry! On the second thought, read it when you’re very hungry—it will satisfy your appetite for good writing, as well as for good food (not to mention spirits). I was reading Sophie Helen Menin’s personal essay, “First Growth—An Essay on Love and Wine” on the bus and nearly leaped off, several blocks before my stop, when we passed a wine shop. Her essay about the wines her husband collects, and which they both savor, had me nearly desperate for a bottle of Barolo. Who knew it was possible to write such mouth watering fiction, or scrumptious poetry, or savory essays as the many appetizing works here by Michele Battiste, Patsy Anne Bickerstaff, and Jehanne Dubrow. Alimentum is more than luscious descriptions of great meals and the emotions they inspire, more than a whiff of fine coffee.  Continue reading “Alimentum – 2006”

The newest issue of Crazyhorse contains four stories, twelve poets, and an interview with Robert and Penelope Creeley conducted a month before Mr. Creeley’s death in 2005. The highlight of the issue is the four new poems by Dean Young, whose work the last two years (appearing regularly in places such as The Believer and Poetry) is potentially the best of his career. In “Home,” Young continues this newest surge, writing “Home is where you’re always wrong / but only in familiar ways,” kicking off his trademark rollercoaster of imagery and fast, vibrant sentences, circling the idea of homecoming and approaching it from a variety of angles that each feel equally true. In fiction, John Tait’s “Reasons for Concern Regarding My Girlfriend of Five Days, Monica Garza,” a story told in lists of insecurities, worries, and remembrances. Continue reading “Crazyhorse – 2006”

Diner, “a journal of poetry,” is impeccable in every sense; this is the single greatest issue of a literary review that I’ve ever read. Even the peripherals are outstanding: the cover design, the typeface choices, the layout; it looks as good as it reads. As for the poetry itself, Diner offers a surprisingly mixed bag of styles—editorial predilections don’t seem to divert quality work that exists outside certain rigid parameters, as so often happens. Continue reading “Diner – Fall/Winter 2005”

Fugue is one of the journals I turn to when I’m in the mood for something reliable and satisfying. I know I’ll want to read the whole issue, that I won’t be confused about the editors’ choices, that I’ll find writers whose work I’ve enjoyed before and a few I’m happy to encounter for the first time. The work is always solid, readable, and pleasurable. This issue is no exception. Continue reading “Fugue – Winter 2005”

The stories and poems in this issue are unpredictable and surprising. They move in unexpected and original ways and come to unimagined conclusions. Continue reading “Green Mountains Review – 2005”

Orchid “celebrates stories and the art of storytelling” and it is, indeed, cause for celebration. Here are a dozen rich, pleasing, readable pieces of short fiction; stories to sink your teeth into; stories to lose yourself in. They are wildly different from each other, which makes the volume all the more exciting. Continue reading “Orchid – 2005”

The “Low Carb Issue” of Pavement Saw is a tasty buffet of (primarily) narrative and list poems. The writing is concrete, unpretentious, idiomatic, unadorned and occasionally surprising, a welcome remedy for all the lofty, self-important abstractions found in The Paris Review and other journals. The writers follow Levine, Wakoski, Tom Clark. There are traces of Bukowski and Ginsberg. Continue reading “Pavement Saw – 2006”

Phoebe is a biannual journal of fiction, poetry, art and special features (interviews, art/text collages, etc.). It’s quite a prestigious review and, like others in this niche, features a certain kind of poetry. It’s Greg Grummer Poetry Award winner, Lynn Xu, epitomizes this. In “[Language exists because],” she writes: “Language exists because nothing exists between those / who express themselves. All language is therefore / a language of prayer.” Continue reading “Phoebe – Fall 2006”

N. Santilli’s essay introducing a feature on the prose poem in Great Britain calls the form one that “appears in print but is not formally accepted by its author or its audience, both simply accepting it for what it is.” More than anything, it seems the purpose of Sentence is to correct this assumption by building a formal set of both intellectual and artistic frameworks for the consideration of this form, as well as to highlight the work already being done in the genre. Continue reading “Sentence – 2005”

Before they have the craft mastered, most undergraduate students high on talent have to settle for publishing their work in a magazine that never makes it off campus, if even outside the dorm hall. The Allegheny Review remains the lasting outlet committed to giving them the better opportunity for wide circulation. However much its selections may be arbitrary, however abundant the sloppy typos are, the magazine still packs potential. The students write about what they know: meditation on the seasons; failure to communicate in relationships; a moment of doubt while in church. “Attempting Vipassana” by Kristel Bastian is a standout, using the slightly-less-familiar theme of experimenting with Eastern meditation, but still impressive:

Continue reading “The Allegheny Review – 2005”

If, as Christine Delphy writes, “We can only analyse what does exist by imagining what does not exist,” American Letters & Commentary #17 proves the verity of her words. While this sort of existential imagining does not occur without staring current states in the eye, there are innumerable ways to stare. And stare they do, each writer confronting their own serrated
truth(s) from a lens fitting their particular frame. Often, these truths relate in some way to current U.S. politics, as the issue’s special section, “Wedding the World and the Word,” asserts. Continue reading “American Letters & Commentary – 2005”

What I like best about Arts & Letters is that there is no best — everything is worth reading. This is sophisticated, polished work by experienced and accomplished writers. I’m not even tempted to skip around, but to read straight through from the Table of Contents to the Contributors’ Notes. This issue gets off to a quirky start: an interview with Bob Hicok whose answers to Jessica Edwards’s questions are similar in tone to that of his verse (“I’m not telling you what to do / anymore than I’m telling you what to feel, / I’m not telling you what to feel / because I’m not sure I feel anything, / I’m not sure there’s anything to feel / because I’m not sure language is real.”) Of course, the prize-winning short play by Phillip William Brock, three fascinating essays, the elegant translations by Alexis Levitin of poems from Portuguese by Eugenio de Andrade, the exceptional poems, solid short fiction, and book reviews that follow demonstrate not only that language is real, but really impressive in the hands of the right creators. If you’re a reader who skips around, don’t overlook Sarah Kennedy’s three entries for her “Witch’s Dictionary,” poems whose epigraphs link “current events” with eighteenth century “witchcraft” or Rebecca McClanahan’s moving personal essay about “My Affair with Jesus,” or Viet Dinh’s story “Faults.” You’ll appreciate just how real language can make an imaginary world seem with prose like Dinh’s: “The first thing I ever stole was a heart.” [Arts & Letters. Journal of Contemporary Culture, Georgia College & State University, Campus Box 89, Milledgeville, GA 31061-0490. Single issue $8. http://al.gcsu.edu/] —Sima Rabinowitz Continue reading “Arts & Letters – Spring 2006”

The continuing premise of the Bellevue Literary Review is to express, through words, all the emotion that is held within the manner of sickness. This is not an easy thing to do. Illness, as fiction editor Ronna Wineberg observes, “extends its tentacles past any single episode of disease. There is the crisis, and for those fortunate enough to withstand it, the aftermath.” The Spring 2006 issue promises to explore these two, crisis and aftermath. Among its pages, through fiction and poetry, both are found. Notable fiction entries are Judy Rowley’s “The Color of Sound,” and Joan Melarba-Foran’s “The Little Things.” Rowley writes of an implant that can bring sound to her deaf ears. Easy decision, right? Of literature, she explains, “I locked into the connection between the authenticity of a sound in the fullness of its color and the authentic voice, which exhibits the unique and colorful characteristics of its writer.” Continue reading “Bellevue Literary Review – Spring 2006”

Black Clock is hands down the best looking literary magazine I’ve ever picked up. To begin with, it’s a huge 8″ x 11″ volume with full color graphics not only on the cover but throughout the magazine. The inside layout is both graphically intense and minimalist at the same time, visually engaging without distracting from the writing itself. Luckily, Black Clock‘s looks aren’t the only thing it has going for it—it’s got personality too. Continue reading “Black Clock – Fall/Winter 2005-06”