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Reminiscent of The Paris Review or, to a lesser extent, Western Humanities Review or The New Yorker, New England Review asserts itself as a dense academic journal that takes itself as seriously as academia tends to take itself. And that’s pretty serious. The journal’s subscription tear-out reads, assuredly, “Look to NER for the challenges your taste requires.” After a billboard like that, false advertising is pretty much out of the question. Continue reading “New England Review – Winter 2006”

One Story publishes 18 journals a year of one story each. Impeccably edited, professionally dressed, the slender, 5”x7”, pocketable books are a brilliant addition to the lit scene. “The Arrival” (Issue 67) by Robin Romm is not another cancer story. Continue reading “One Story – 2006”

Started in response to the Gulf War and the editors’ dissatisfaction with the self-absorption of much of contemporary poetry, Borderlands calls for work that “shows an awareness of connection—historical, social, political and spiritual.” Many of the poems in this issue do demonstrate this awareness, though never didactically. Continue reading “Borderlands – Fall/Winter 2005”

Crab Creek Review strikes me as a fun assemblage of the middlebrow to digest: just the right balance of poetry and fiction so that neither genre obscures the other; light in some places, darker in others, but never resorting to noise. Sometimes, you can’t find clear answers. Continue reading “Crab Creek Review – 2005”

North Dakota Quarterly is a sprawling academic journal—it has expanded by 50 pages since I reviewed it last year—but it knows how to put its enormity to good use. Thoughtful essays, reviews, and criticism are givens, but this issue gives opportunity to illuminate the fiction and poetry that tends to get overshadowed. The highlight is three short stories, three, by Robert Day. While two of them are fairly cosmopolitan, the other one, “The One-man Woodcutter Meets His Widowmaker,” decidedly belongs to the rugged West. Continue reading “North Dakota Quarterly – Fall 2005”

I don’t know if this magazine dropped out of the sky or sprung from the mud, but few have shown what Parthenon West Review has to offer: a fully-formed poetry magazine whose vision is frightening to behold. Coming in at under 200 pages, a weekend is too little time to get through this mammoth. If San Francisco is the city where West meets East, PWR takes advantage of the label, building on its Zen-influenced roots in modernism, imagism and the Beats, approaching the avant-garde without leaving contemporary conventions behind. This excerpt from Rusty Morrison is an exemplar: Continue reading “Parthenon West Review – Fall 2005”

Joshua Harmon’s lead-off essay is titled “Live Free (Or Die Trying).” Yes, it’s a skewed reference to New Hampshire, and to the political divide in the U.S. and the secessionist fantasies entertained by blue-staters. Yet Harmon, a self-described “Mass-hole” and shrewd observer of place (see AGNI No. 60), discovers that voting patterns are not so easily explained when he visits a region he knows well, Coos County, NH—an otherwise conservative area in the rural mountains that John Kerry won in 2004. Continue reading “Southwest Review – Fall 2005”

When I write a review, I try to organize it around the distinct pillars in the book that define the reading experience for me. With The Spoon River Poetry Review, that doesn’t work so well. There are as many writing styles as there are poets in this volume. Pillars here are like museum artifacts: free-standing, but still awesome to look at. Continue reading “Spoon River Poetry Review – Volume 30 Number 2”

Dark, dark, dark is much of the work in this issue, starting with the feature on artist Christin Couture, against whose eerie paintings the rest of the magazine’s contents seems to echo. Continue reading “The Massachusetts Review – Winter 2005/2006”

Brick, a Canadian journal of non-fiction and poetry, is a magazine in a class of its own. The contributors in the winter issue include prominent writers like Donna Tart, Oliver Sacks, David Sedaris, Geoff Dyer, and Fanny Howe. The issue begins with a quote from John Berger, the perfect writer to introduce this pioneering journal that relishes in investigating and pressing against the boundaries of literature. The nonfiction pieces are incredibly eclectic in style and subject, with essays on boxing, Dublin, highways, the novel True Grit, and Thom Gunn, in addition to a transcript of a speech made at the 2005 Griffin Poetry Awards ceremony—and interesting and often humorous meditation on the state of poetry—and letters from Norman Levine and William Faulkner. The previously unpublished letter from Faulkner to an aspiring writer is a standout; he prescribes Dostoevsky, Mann, and Hardy to the struggling artist and offers gems like “no writing that was worth doing was ever done in one day or one year, sometimes, oftentimes, not in one decade.” Continue reading “Brick – Winter 2005”

If ever you’ve gazed upon artworks born of the Surrealist movement with awe, you’ll readily absorb the concept that not to understand is, in itself, a way of understanding. Just as Surrealists aimed to circle like sharks the locus of aleatory explosion, the subconscious surfacing, spilling forth through the murky waters of convention, so, too, do the writers that comprise the Summer 2005 issue of Burnside Review. In theory, Surrealist art, like artwork of any era, concerns itself foremost with itself, then its audience. Artists aimed to tear at the piñata of despair to reveal the ripe and virile confetti within. This is where some of the work in this issue breaks down, and where some of it really takes off. Continue reading “Burnside Review – Summer 2005”

The spring issue of The Chattahoochee Review, a sleekly designed journal from Georgia Perimeter College, offers an excellent selection of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, book reviews, and art—in addition to a special feature on Brazilian poetry. The four outstanding short stories, two by notables William Gay (lauded by some circles as the next Faulkner) and George Singleton, center on down-on-their-luck characters and American domestic life gone awry. The poetry is equally impressive, in particular Chad Prevost’s stunning “Lyric of the Ever-Expanding Universe”: “You thought the dandelions stood / in one place, but come to find out they were / dancing across the wind like tumbleweeds / wheeling without the thought of gravity, / and what you thought was gravity / is only your body’s leaden weight / pinning down your dandelion soul.” Continue reading “The Chattahoochee Review – Spring 2005”

If you’re looking for one-stop shopping of the smartest poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and interviews there’s only one place to go: Gulf Coast. Let’s start with poetry. Work from Paul Muldoon, Barbara Ras, Denise Duhamel, James Shea, Robyn Art, Trent Busch, and Len Roberts, among others, that is playful, gorgeous, and challenging. Continue reading “Gulf Coast – Winter/Spring 2006”

Margie’s slogan is “strong medicine.” If you’re looking for a shot of poetry, this is the place. In this fat volume you’ll find over 400 pages of poetry by over 100 poets. Continue reading “MARGIE – 2005”

This issue of Natural Bridge, a beautiful journal produced by the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is guest edited by Ruth Ellen Kocher and explores the theme “fragment and sequence.” The roster of contributors includes both established writers like Denise Duhamel and Timothy Liu and lesser known authors. The locales are exotic and varied—Iraq, Bombay, Mexico, Romania—and much of the fiction involves domestic life. Continue reading “Natural Bridge – 2005”

New York Quarterly has emerged as not only a fine journal of poetry, but a publication that explores the state of contemporary poetry, the elements of craft, and the poet’s life. The latest edition begins with a craft interview, a regular feature in NYQ, with W.D. Snodgrass, followed by three of his poems. Continue reading “The New York Quarterly – 2005”

“Nothing original can ever be said about a trip to Paris; in some ways, that is its saving grace.” Kate Peterson may be right, in her installment-style story “Eighteen Conjugations of Cambridge,” which delights and ultimately stirs the dirty waters of nostalgia to a point that parallels “The lights in paintings […] afterglows: just-extinguished candles, early morning streetlamps, or dying stars.” Continue reading “Phoebe – Fall 2005”

Congratulations to Co-Editors and proud parents Tanner Higgin and Christopher Vieau on the birth of their child, The Means. The Means, a Michigan native, at once temperamental and charming, incubated for a full two years, paralleling the gestation period of an elephant. In concert with the already unraveling mammalian theme, Higgin writes, in his Editor’s Note, “This first issue contains a virtual Noah’s ark of writers […] absolutely necessary in our rebellion against the literary establishment.” Their complaint? Scarcity of literary journals willing to publish the risqué and the silly, which is exactly what they set out to do. The Means’s debut issue presents readers with seductive ideas in newfangled form. Rebecca Brown’s hyper-experimental essay “The Reading of Water: Subjective Surging Based on Graham Swift’s Waterland” simultaneously annoys and dazzles readers with its meandering style. But Brown ultimately comments steeply, I think, and not un-clearly, on time and its relevance—or irrelevance—to narrative. C.L. Bledsoe’s is-it-a-poem “What To Do In Case of a Locked Door” reads like a set of fold-out directions, making sense even without those tiny useless diagrams. As much sense as preparatory advice for a locked door situation can make. Both pieces are delightful endeavors, and they aren’t on their own. Admittedly, The Means is a new kid on the block, a strange new kid, both in approach and tenor, in a subdivision of more traditionally ‘serious’ journals. In a recent interview, Kim Addonizio commented on this strange new-ish approach to poetry: “earnestness […] to get at that from a different way, irony through humor, some kind of movement sideways.” The Means line dances its way to the dignity it already knows it deserves.
[The Means, P.O. Box 183246, Shelby Township, MI 48318. Single issue $8.]

In bookstores, the quirky and curious Carousel is filed under Literary or Visual Art. This international journal offers poems, cartoons, drawings, cartoon-like drawings, a few ads, mixed media, boobs, prose poems, a naked woman embracing a polar bear, charcoal watercolors, macabre big-faced drawings on graph paper, a list of phobias and more. Continue reading “Carousel – Fall/Winter 2005-6”

There is something sinister about children (a fact every Hollywood horror movie knows), with their made-up languages, their hidden play spots and their games of Hangman. The work in Conjunctions 45 makes good use of this, offering up a thick portion of eeriness in their “Secret Lives of Children” issue. Continue reading “Conjunctions – 2005”

Self-described as having a “shrewd eye for talent,” the editors at Epoch, Cornell University’s literary journal, have again published an exceptional issue. Largely filled with short stories, this issue includes characters that are ordinary and empathetic, complex and endearing—believable, if difficult to understand. Continue reading “Epoch – 2005 Series”

The auspicious debut issue of Lorraine and James compliments its diverse fiction with personal essays, some poetry, one interview and a contributor’s page that offers a brief explanation of the story’s inspiration and/or development. Continue reading “Lorraine and James – 2005”

Me Three delivers prose in all its bountiful forms: fiction, personal essays, criticism, and even “unclassifiables.” Continue reading “Me Three – Fall 2005”

Of the 49 contributors in this issue of Nimrod, 36 are finalists and semifinalists of its 27th annual award issue, which is based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Four are for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction; 32 for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Numbers may not be the best introduction for their venerated prize issue, yet it suggests the bloom of the varied, evocative and penetrating contents: this is a journal to be slowly ingested and savored. Continue reading “Nimrod International Journal – Fall/Winter 2005”

Opiummagazine.com has taken its “literary humor for the deliriously captivated” into the print world. No.1, with an Eggersly subtitle, “A Whopping Collection of Fanatical Literary Brilliance,” retains the clever wit and sly characterizations of its daddy on-line journal, including estimated reading times. Continue reading “Opium – 2005/2006”

In its 1953 inaugural issue, William Styron, best known for his novel Sophie’s Choice, wrote, “I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.” And they are good. This issue finds Liao Yiwu a seeming star, as both interviewer and subject, covering an alarming 35 pages, or about 18% of the issue’s 192 pages. Yiwu’s pieces range from encounters with a professional mourner, an independent public toilet manager, and a human trafficker, with China serving as each interviews’ backdrop. Continue reading “The Paris Review – Summer 2005”

“I can sometimes almost read the inscriptions on brick walls, in doorways, between/ the wing blades of pigeons.” So writes Yvonne C. Murphy, in her poem “Avenue of the Strongest.” Slipstream No. 25, a journal, as always, consisting solely of poetry, is rife with equal allusions to both the body and to the written word, both in crude and refined forms. At first this seems a strange set of motifs to underline a journal. But a second look finds body and text not altogether removed, and, in fact, a relatively popular contemporary discussion. Continue reading “Slipstream – 2005”

Don’t be deceived by the unassuming cover. Or should I say: be deceived, be very deceived, on account of the delicious merit of surprise. Such is the case with every issue of Barrow Street, and I have to say, I like it that way. Inside the summer issue are 72 poems, 6 poems-in-progress, and 3 reviews. Not bad for 127 pages, even better for $8 an issue. Barrow Street is perfect bound, the heft of a paperback novel, copious, a literary variety show. It seems more discerning than other journals, but by no means to a fault. While Barrow Street is known for publishing established writers bearing lists of publications, most of its contributors are past or present professors, making the journal no more or less academic for it. A cursory curiosity, though worth noting. Continue reading “Barrow Street – Summer 2005”

Many of the works in Buffalo Carp, “a hybrid, an amalgam” of two species native to the Quad City Mississippi River area, also celebrate the natural world. Dennis Saleh’s terse yet lyrical poem, “The Delta Songs of the Harper,” evokes Ra, the Sun God from Egyptian mythology. Continue reading “Buffalo Carp – 2004”

I am occasionally awed and inspired to be reminded of the number of excellent literary journals produced by this country’s community colleges. Controlled Burn comes to us out of Kirtland Community College of Roscommon Michigan, but in design, content, and skillful editorial vision, this publication is easily on a par with our nation’s more celebrated, ivy-league journals. Continue reading “Controlled Burn – Winter 2005”

Southern California is a nexus of geography and culture, a place where perspectives about the world get reflected through the iridescent sheen of difference. Continue reading “Crate – Spring 2005”

Charming and adventurous, this new annual journal displays impressive wit and eclecticism. Right away you know Fairy Tale Review will be a different sort of literary magazine from its multiple visual references to Andrew Lang’s Fairy Book Collection, (a series of books listed by color, the Red Fairy Book, the Olive Fairy Book, etc.) Continue reading “Fairy Tale Review – 2005”

The Fiddlehead may very well be the single best in-door for those with a mind to explore the finest of Canadian creative writing. This “Summer Fiction” issue is a wellspring particularly for anybody seeking the multifarious pleasures that original and adventurous short stories can provide. Published out of Fredericton, New Brunswick, The Fiddlehead, as the brief editor’s note asserts, celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, “which makes The Paris Review at fifty seem a veritable pup.” Continue reading “The Fiddlehead – Summer 2005”

Four-Hundred Words is a CD sized lit journal filled with 66 different 400-word autobiographies on the theme of…life. Though the editor, Katherine Sharpe, claims the first issue grew out of “that weird time right after college, the time of looking around and wondering how the world works and how people find, and understand, their place in it,” the array of contributors ranges in age from a 72-year-old physicist to a 15-year-old Taiwanese woman who expresses herself in exclamations, “She’s so URGH!!” Continue reading “Four-Hundred Words – 2005”

Beloit Poetry Journal threw me for a loop with this issue, by including not one, or two, but seven poems by Mary Molinary at the beginning of the journal—and in a slim journal such as this one (48 pages total) this makes quite an impact. The upside of having so many poems by a single artist is that you get a good solid idea of that artist’s work. Molinary’s seven poems are seven lyric, existential takes on the time 8:38—in a style more post-avant-garde/experimental than you might expect from this journal. Does this signal a shift in editorial preference? I await the next issue to find out. Continue reading “Beloit Poetry Journal – Fall 2005”

Among hundreds of saddle-stitched paper magazines, the Ithaca-based CARVE begs but one comment from this reviewer: I hope it continues its bold showcasing of unknown talent. Through the course of these three issues, CARVE has stuck to its formula, featuring as many as five poems or poem excerpts from each of five or six poets. The contributor demographics, though largely concentrated in New England, have diversified to include New Zealand and the U.K. And the poems are next to impossible to publish just about anywhere, but you’ll find them rewarding if you keep pace with them. Issue 5 includes a small biography of late British poet Ric Caddel, whose self-described style summarizes much of CARVE: “Part of the poetic process which is going on, is precisely that of jamming diverse elements together to see how they work, associating dissociated things.” In issue 6, we see how diverse such elements can be. Bill Marsh toys around with his wordplay meter on high in five excerpts from his magnetic Songs of Nanosense: Continue reading “Carve Magazine – 2005”

“Everything that once made him rage is now reason to smile,” says the narrator in Judith Oritz Cofer’s “Tio’s Nostalgia” of her uncle, though she could just as easily be describing the contents of the latest Chattahoochee Review. This issue couples celebration and darkness; Cofer’s piece is at once a story of homecoming and of the desire to leave. Continue reading “The Chattahoochee Review – Summer 2004”

This handsome perfect-bound journal out of Chicago with its heavy matte cover first drew me in with its impressive and diverse list of contributor’s names on the back: Nick Carbó, Karen Volkman, Wanda Coleman. From lyric narratives to post-avant experimental work, the poems have in common a certain hipness, an investment in emotion and image, and a conversational directness that draws the reader in. Continue reading “Columbia Poetry Review – Spring 2004”

Feminist Studies, a glossy, intellectual journal that balances its essays on research and theory with literary fiction, poetry, and art, manages again to spark interest in its intelligent, clearly written essays—this time, my favorite essays were on a post-post structuralist approach to feminism in Simone de Beauvoir’s writings by Sonia Kruks and a study of beauty pageants relations to college life by Karen W. Tice. Continue reading “Feminist Studies – 2005”

The summer edition of The Georgia Review is dedicated to “the art of the rant,” an idea that is, without exception, brilliantly explored in this outstanding issue. The topic is broadly interpreted, from frenetically paced poetry to a father’s tense conversation with his disturbed daughter to Robert Cohen’s essay that discusses the necessity of “going to the extreme limit.” Continue reading “The Georgia Review – Summer 2005”

Quick summary of the use of the term “experimentalism”: Some people impose the label on themselves as a license to do anything, while others get the label applied to them for lack of any better term. Good Foot poetry journal, where it is experimental, sits on the edge of the second camp. Continue reading “Good Foot – 2005”

Experimental poetry can be a challenge: of the pieces you enjoy, it’s difficult to say what moved you so. Of the pieces you don’t like, you want to ask why nobody’s telling the emperor to put some damn pants on. The poetry of 580 Split left me feeling a bit of both, but is sure to be enjoyed by those who appreciate avant-garde literature. Continue reading “580 Split – 2005”

“The Weight of Bones” I read first because the short story jumped out at me, or rather the skull did, the skull being the main character Ellen finds in her “charred garage.” All I will say is that Ellen took me by surprise from the first moment we met. Then came the nonfiction and equally engaging “My Wild Ride” that taught me how to welcome an unwelcome surprise. To summarize, the mother of two little girls under the age of five receives news that her life is about to change on more than one level. The eight poems are quietly seductive. As I was experiencing their power, I allowed the words time to soak in, take up a life, a meaning of their own. Continue reading “The Baltimore Review – Summer 2005”

The Carolina Quarterly has great short fiction going for it; I expect to remember at least four of the seven stories here long after I’ve put this issue on the shelf. I was most impressed by Jean Colgan Gould’s “The Queen of October,” in which a woman on the verge of 70 shoots hoops in her driveway. She’s recently had a showdown with neighbors who didn’t appreciate the basketball noise and suggested she ought to do everyone a favor and move out of her big, empty house, sparking her anger and a determination not to be forced to while away the rest of her days in “a nice condo.” Excellent! Continue reading “The Carolina Quarterly – January 2005”

As a beginning instructor, I invested a few days reading into College Literature, and I cannot say I regretted one second. Continue reading “College Literature – Spring 2005”

Published by the creative writing department of San Francisco State University, Fourteen Hills might just as aptly be titled “Fourteen Styles,” such a broad spectrum of approaches to narrative and poetics does it present, at least in this summer/fall issue. In the realm of fiction I found myself very taken with the short story “Three Girls” by Anne Clifford, which so deftly utilizes first, second, and third person perspectives, shifting from one to another and back with a spot-on rhythmic agility. Continue reading “Fourteen Hills – Summer/Fall 2005”