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Southern Humanities Review has respect for the questions of moral fabric that challenge a classical, essentialist universe, but it is not strictly a religious journal. Continue reading “Southern Humanities Review – Spring 2005”

If you don’t already know, Thema is a journal whose every issue is based on a different premise, upon which the poetry, fiction, and photography reflect. This issue’s theme is “Hey, Watch This!” Continue reading “THEMA – Summer 2005”

The poets of West Branch have something to say, and though the imagery may be beautiful and the lines carefully crafted, there is nothing excessive, artsy, or difficult for difficulty’s sake. This observation hit me as I read Yona Harvey’s wonderful “Turquoise,” in which the poet bluntly tells a young female student that “wearing turquoise jewelry & Frida Kahlo skirts / doesn’t make women artists.“ Continue reading “West Branch – Spring/Summer 2005”

This issue is dedicated to the theme, “Scars,” as evidenced from the dramatic black and white cover photograph of a man whose chest becomes a screen on which is projected several black birds in flight, their wings like the feathery reminders of what the body endures. While a theme dedicated to the visceral remnant of physical and emotional wounds could have solicited writing that was affected, tedious, or even cliché, this issue illustrates anything but. Instead, we read of the subtleties of pain, the nuances of grief, the faint reminders of loss or dejection, though many of these authors left me feeling hopeful — that glimmer of possibility that encircles our aches like a silvery light. Continue reading “Alligator Juniper – 2005”

A concentration of metaphors, word play, and unconventional thinking binds together the five line poems in American Tanka. From the world of subtle nuances and concrete images, I constantly had the sense of reliving a moment that had never before belonged to me. Yet through my communion with each poem, the shared joy, sadness, different perspective, that Aha feeling, I was assured that the moment was in part my own. Several authors are memorable, out of which only a few can be mentioned here. Cindy Tebo’s “old lime kiln,” the first line in her poem, is haunting. The sudden image of the kiln suggests travel, perhaps an old country road. Merely driving by, the traveler pauses in a chance meeting of past and present. The kiln “in the shadows / of a cold afternoon” emphasizes the passing, of the kiln? the traveler? Like Leonard D. Moore’s powerful seven stanza sequence “To Find My Way Home,” Tebo adds additional layers to her poem through careful word choice, placement of lines, absence of punctuation, and juxtaposition. Tim W. Younce’s repetition of the line “folds and unfolds” creates the feeling of nervousness from the perspective of a soldier “at the airport / camo clad,” holding his “boarding pass.” For a moment this soldier can stop time, fold it in his palms. We are all three connected, author, soldier, reader — through a shared awareness of both our power and powerlessness. These poems are for readers who do not want to be told what to think, for those who enjoy connecting the threads. We must compare images and/or ideas and draw conclusions using hints the author provides and our own resources. Because of the relationship we establish in the process, the poems have the potential to live on. [American Tanka, P.O. Box 120-024, Staten Island, NY 10312. Email: [email protected]. Single issue $12 www.americantanka.com] —Donna Everhart Continue reading “American Tanka – 2005”

The Gihon River Review’s spring 2005 issue offers a bountiful selection of stories and poems. Allan Peterson’s poem “Slight of Hands” I appreciate for his use of detail and personification, and fresh way in which Peterson reveals a sense of frustration: “The clock is holding its head in its hands,” he writes in the third stanza. Introducing the fourth, in which that sense of frustration seems to have ended when a “gnat burns itself crazy on the bulb.” Continue reading “Gihon River Review – Spring 2005”

Usually, I take a week to read a good literary magazine, parceling out the pieces over long evenings sitting on my porch or during my thrice-weekly ride on the stationary bike. It’s a sign of respect that I don’t read it all in one sitting. Now I have a new magazine to add to my weekly ritual: Gulf Coast. Continue reading “Gulf Coast – Winter/Spring 2005”

There is even a collaborative review of a collaborative book in this fascinating issue of work conceived and produced in collaboration (Mary Austin Speaker and Sara Jane Stoner review Phoebe 2002. Continue reading “Indiana Review – Summer 2005”

The preference in Main Street Rag is for transparency, work with plain, strong language and a clear point of view — Scott C. Holstad’s “I Want It All,” for example (“Fuck the sweats, / I want the world. / No rhyming for me, / no structured / bullshit, I want / to spread out, / feel the bullets / whistle past.”); or Nicole Lynskey’s “Talker at the Café” (“The extrovert-talker / could be a pit-bull on a cell-phone / for all that her dark-haired friend / is allowed to speak, / in her ‘this-funny-anecdote’, / ‘that-divorced-couple’ conversation…”); or Glen Chestnut’s “The Pickup” (“Sometime in the 1950’s / A construction site / somewhere in the jungles of Colombia. / Work had stopped for the day. / The mountains to the west / had swallowed up the last rays of sun.”) Continue reading “Main Street Rag – Summer 2005”

Though the editors of Make magazine cite Chicago literary patriarch Nelsen Algren as their inspiration, you don’t have to be a Chicagoan to be in Make’s debut issue. Continue reading “MAKE – 2005”

Montreal-based poet Robyn Sarah served as guest editor for what is called a “small anthology” of poems featured in this issue. Sarah also contributes an essay on poetics in which she defines a good poem: “it should transcend its own particulars; it should be built to bear weight; it should have lift.” The nearly four dozen poets she’s selected offer up work Sarah finds “attentive to language, memorable, ponderable, convincing.” Sarah clearly favors plain diction, narrative impulses, strong, authentic voices, and emotional integrity. Continue reading “The New Quarterly – Summer 2005”

There are literary magazines that you read and enjoy, but end up piled in your closet amongst back issues of other magazines. Then there are literary magazines that are so lovingly put together and carefully designed that they demand prominent placement on your bookshelf or coffee table. Ninth Letter is one of the latter. This University of Illinois based publication seeks to reinvent the literary magazine by infusing it with design and art. Continue reading “Ninth Letter – Spring/Summer 2005”

“What reader,” says Maureen D. Mack, “does not search for a happy ending at the end of a love story? How many of us yearn for a better ending to a human conflict or loss that we have suffered in our lives?” Continue reading “Open Minds Quarterly – Summer 2005”

Art “lives on long after wars have ended and townspeople have mended their ravaged homes and gone on with their lives…” says the editor of Other Voices. Each of the 16 stories in the spring/summer issue contains the suggestion of crossing a boundary, whether psychological, physical, social or national. Continue reading “Other Voices – Spring/Summer 2005”

I have never been disappointed by an issue of Pilgrimage. In a world that is exceedingly desperate, both on and off the page, this exquisite little journal never fails to soothe and stimulate in equal measure, with intelligence, grace, and authenticity. This issue’s theme is “borderlands.” Continue reading “Pilgrimage – 2005”

Do lawyers write poetry? Well, if a tribute to lawyers who write appears in the summer 2005 issue of Rattle, the answer is a resounding yes: lawyers do write poetry. Lawyer poems can often be just as sad, angry, or serious as non-lawyer poems. They can even be humorous, like these lines taken from ‘“What Is Your Idle Job?’” by Ace Bogess: “Then it’s back to the office for coffee / tasting like gasoline, maybe a doughnut on the sly” he writes. “If my boss pops over, checking my progress, / I greet him with a good-natured pat on the back / to wipe the sticky glaze from my fingertips.” Continue reading “Rattle – Summer 2005”

Penelope Shuttle admits that she is a bookworm while she talks (writes) about the importance of reading aloud, a common activity of the past, less common in the present. She attends author readings, the most memorable of which she describes. “It was Pablo Neruda who made the very deepest impression on me. Continue reading “The Reader – Summer 2005”

An impressive 30th anniversary issue featuring many prolific and well established writers, including Dorianne Laux, Lucia Perillo, Sharon Olds, William Gass, Molly Peacock, Louis Simpson, Richard Burgin, and Robert Finch, among others, as well as many accomplished, but lesser known talents, including Alison Pelegrin, Marcela Sulak, Allen C. Fischer, and Jacbo M. Appel. Continue reading “River Styx – 2005”

Eric Pankey and Jim Daniels, John Kinsella and Denise Duhamel — there’s no formula here, no template — the breadth of poems in Smartish Pace is one of its key attractions. Forty-two poets as different from each other as forty-two poets can be. There is a pleasing balance here, too, of stars (Bob Hicock and Lola Haskins, not to mention Rimbaud, Italian poet Giovanii Pascoli, and Polish poet Jerzy Kronhold, in addition to the aforementioned) and newcomers. I am sure I would have found Darren Jackson’s poem, “Pain Rents a Room Off Bourbon Street,” one of his first to be published, powerful had I read it last week or last year, but from here forward, of course, it becomes an entirely new experience: Continue reading “Smartish Pace – 2005”

Published by the University of South Dakota since 1963, this issue of South Dakota Review contains many fine stories including James Jay Egan’s “The Hand of God,” in which things go terribly wrong, Robert J. Nelson’s graceful memoir “The Music Teacher,” Katherine L. Holmes lyrical “Eggs in a Basket,” and Christine Sneed’s “Furious Weather.” Continue reading “South Dakota Review – Winter 2004”

The second issue of Swivel is a wry collection of fiction, essays, poetry, and yes, even the occasional comic strip, all written by women. “This time,” says editor Brangien Davis, “the zeitgeist is littered with beasts,” meaning that thematically, this issue seems inexplicably connected by animals — including giraffes. Continue reading “Swivel – 2005”

This is an attractive journal with the death images one would expect of the title on the slick cover. Nevertheless, Absinthe 4’s prose and poetry present fresh and unfamiliar prose rhythms from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, and Turkey. Continue reading “Absinthe – 2005”

There seems to be a resurgence of interest for comics in the literary world from acclaimed McSweeney’s comic issue and Chris Ware’s award winning Jimmy Corrigan to the recent works by Michael Chabon. Backwards City Review adds their voice with five comics here, including a delightful except from Kenneth Koch’s forthcoming book of comics. There is also a beautifully drawn and haunting anti-war comic by Nate Powell (a very underrated comic artist). Backwards City Review in general takes a humorous approach to their magazine (as evidenced by titles such as “Hockey Haiku” and “Constructive Criticism of Bathroom Wall Scribbling”). Continue reading “Backwards City Review – Spring 2005”

There are many magazines that claim to be eclectic, but The Canary is one of the few I’ve read that is truly deserving of the title. A five page free-form poem might be followed by a rhymed couplet, which might be followed by a narrative driven prose-poem. If it is going on in modern poetry, you can probably find it represented here. This all-poetry magazine has no art, non-fiction or even an editor’s introduction. Continue reading “The Canary – 2005”

This slim slick-paged journal contains, along with stories and poems, the interesting “On Writing, Stubbornness, and Food: An Interview with Leslie Pietrzyk.” Continue reading “Folio – Winter 2005”

In his editor’s note, David Lynn bemoans the Atlantic Monthly’s decision to discontinue publishing fiction and reaffirms his journal’s commitment to literary short fiction. Continue reading “The Kenyon Review – Summer 2005”

Excellent fiction. Those two words sum up everything that Night Train is about. There is no poetry and only two pieces of non-fiction here, an Amy Bloom interview and a segment on the city of Petaluma, California. Otherwise we have eighteen solid short stories that work with a range of styles and topics. Continue reading “Night Train – 2005”

Smack dab in the center of the issue is a portfolio of Marion Ettlinger’s extraordinary portraits of writers, sixteen powerful photographs that, like the work featured in this issue, suggest an intriguing variety of ways of interacting with the world—head on, sideways, with resignation, with appreciation. The issue is evenly divided between fiction and poetry (9 fiction writers, 9 poets) and concludes with the volume’s single piece of nonfiction writing, a beautifully composed family memoir by Amanda Bass Cagle, “On the Banks of the Bogue Chitto.” The 2004 Cooper Prize winning story, “Gone” by Glen Pourciau and stories by finalists Patricia Stiles and Karen Lorene are especially strong. While quite different from each other, they have in common an appealing emotional intensity. Wonderful poems by Reginald Gibbons, too, like Ettlinger’s photos and the prize-winning stories, inspire a range of emotions. Here are the final lines from his work “On Sad Suburban Afternoons”: Continue reading “Ontario Review – Spring/Summer 2005”

If you haven’t used all your vacation time yet this year, you might want to consider taking a few days off just to read this issue of Parnassus—it’s that good. Don’t plan to travel with it, at 470 pages it’s nearly too big to fit in a carry-on bag. But, if care about intelligent writing and about poetry, however you do it, make room in your life for this issue. Continue reading “Parnassus – 2005”

One of the standards, Prairie Schooner has published worthy prose and poetry for seventy-seven years, and this issue’s four stories, five reviews, and work by thirty-eight poets may be so described. The highlight for me is Ron Hansen’s “Wilde in Omaha,” in which the narrator, a local reporter, spends a few hours in Wilde’s witty, but taxing, company and experiences the truth (at least, for his lectures) of the Punch pronouncement: “The poet is Wilde. But his poetry’s tame.” There are poems and stories here of which Wilde would approve; not half bad—Rita Mae Reese’s “My Summer in Vulcan,” on catching the eye of an older sister’s boyfriend; Lon Otto’s “What Is Son?” – the question to ask if learning to dance on a rooftop in Havana; and a story of bitter betrayal, “Wooden Fish” by Matt Freidson. Continue reading “Prairie Schooner – Summer 2005”

A generous and attractive volume, this 40th anniversary issue of Puerto del Sol contains a 60-page excerpt “El Malpais (The Badlands),” from In the Shadows of the Sun by Alexander Parsons, a compelling novel set in the New Mexico countryside of the mid-1940’s when ranchers were allowed to return to confiscated—and possibly contaminated—land: “It was hard to believe how quickly it had been ruined: they had made it to last, painstakingly fitting each stone so that the cement mortar was superfluous to the binding force of gravity. But the impact from the atomic detonation, two miles east, had undone this.”  Continue reading “Puerto del Sol – Spring 2005”

The latest issue of 96 INC. is dedicated to the memory of founding editor Vera Cochran Gold and contains her intriguing “Vegetable Monologues: Broccoli, Okra, Fennel, The Pepper Farm, Eggplants.” The suite of short-shorts are experimental in form, affecting mediations on isolation and alienation.  Continue reading “96 INC – 2005”

If you dislike the homogeneity of Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, here’s the magazine for you. The equivalent to a locally owned coffee-shop, Arkansas Review is a fiercely regional tri-quarterly; based on that alone, it’s a laudable effort. The poems of Jeffrey Renard Allen are as bluesy as you’ll ever see (“Bol weevil in the cotton / worm in the corn / Devil in the white man / War going on”), and the centerpiece essay focuses on the racial implications of lodging alternatives in Clarksdale, Mississippi: “Race and Blues Tourism” is a perfect example of how focused investigation, even (especially?) in an area so removed from ‘cultural centers,’ can enlighten and entertain. Continue reading “Arkansas Review – April 2005”

This is a beautiful journal. It uses the same elegant design with each issue, alternating only the cover’s color and the content – and included are usually a novella, a long poem, and black-and-white artwork. Because the number of works is so small, the pressure on the editors to publish good pieces is much higher – little room for error here. Continue reading “At Length – 2005”

Editor Dan Veach is enthusiastic and proud: “Welcome to the most joyful and enjoyable celebration of poetry you’ve ever seen!” The celebration is nothing short of enormous — 330 pages of poetry divided into a series of “stages of human life” (Birth, Childhood & Youth, Love, etc., Home & Work, Aging & Death, Animals & Nature, Humor, Cities, Poetry, Music and Art, and War) interspersed with a series of “expeditions” (Ireland, Asia, Latin America, Spain, The Caribbean, Africa, Greece, Australia, Great Britain, and America), along with serene black and white drawings from a half dozen artists. Continue reading “Atlanta Review – Spring/Summer 2005”

The debut of Ballyhoo Stories, a biannual print magazine aiming “to reach the broadest audience possible,” is solid. It loses points for presentation – a less than elegant black-and-white cover, oddly shifting black-on-white with white-on-black text pages, and distracting borders and page number fonts – but the content is stronger. The eight stories loosely collected under this issue’s theme of “Portraits and Snapshots” are character-driven works that are at best quietly ambitious and at worst tend toward the sentimental, an understandable side-effect of fiction grown from personal photographs (and from a journal concerned with establishing a large readership). Several works stand out, including Michael Hartford’s “Call Me Pearl” and Amy Brill’s “The Pursuit of Joe Kahn.” Continue reading “Ballyhoo Stories – Spring 2005”

It’s fair to say that Barrelhouse is the most promising recent journal so proudly founded in drunkenness; in the introduction to their debut issue, the editors quickly establish its origin, writing, “Fine, we’ll admit it, we were drunk,” thus establishing a youngish masculinity that reverberates throughout. Continue reading “Barrelhouse – Winter 2005”

Published in Chicago, Bridge is a slick culture-oriented magazine that cranks the volume to eleven. The content is comprehensive – interviews with filmmakers and artists get as much space here as fiction and poetry – but sadly seems a bit loose: too many typos really do frustrate a reader’s experience, and some of the pieces seem to swing and miss. Continue reading “Bridge – Spring 2005”

Diner‘s editors endeavor to “support diverse voices that speak across boundaries of time and place.” Toward that end, this issue’s offers “features” of two poets who couldn’t be more different from each other: “Blue Plate Special #1” is Sandra Kohler, and “Blue Plate Special #2” is Michael Casey. The menu also includes 40 other dishes…I mean…poets. Continue reading “Diner – Spring/Summer 2005”

“If” is the theme here, and Kent Bruyneel’s poem “Struggles and gives. Breaks.” kicks things off well: “Then the strange and / proud echo of her turning around. Interrupted. By the voice / wondering aloud when she is coming back and if.” The collected pieces are nicely unified – no loose theme is this – and ambivalence of course weighs heavily, especially in Ken Howe’s amusing mock-epic poem “Jerry’s Barbershop, an Investigation,” in which the persona freaks out over a bad haircut: “I beheld / the same geek who’d take the chair some minutes earlier, OK but / with shorter hair.” Continue reading “Grain – Spring 2005”

The Malahat Review is characterized by a generous editorial vision. This issue is especially eclectic with poems by nine poets and nine fiction writers whose work ranges from experimental to solidly traditional. Continue reading “The Malahat Review – Spring 2005”

What makes this issue exceptionally interesting is the range of sensibilities found here. Continue reading “Michigan Quarterly Review – Summer 2005”

If you are like me, you often find the unknowns packing more punch than the big names in literary magazines. So you will probably be excited to see the Mid-American Review devoting an issue to unpublished authors. Continue reading “Mid-American Review – Spring 2005”

“This is what we seek: Clarity, fluidity, unselfconsciousness, poems that guide us without fanfare into what is genuinely human—an insight, experience, or mood which, though we’d not perceived it before, we recognize it instantly.” Some of the more accomplished poets whose work satisfies the editor’s vision include Linda Pastan, Diane Lockwood, Jim Daniels, and Jane Shore. Shore introduces seven poems by Nadell Fishman that “recast the roles of mother, wife, and daughter, retelling her personal story through fairy tales and popular culture…” Continue reading “Poet Lore – Spring/Summer 2005”

Although it’s not meant to be a special theme edition, it almost reads like one: “the men’s fiction issue”—approximately 75 percent of the magazine consists of short stories by male authors. These are conventional, but highly satisfying pieces for the most part, the sort of well plotted tales that take one, ever so briefly and deeply, inside another’s life. While these stories are quite different from each other in tone, in style and in the subject matter they treat, they have in common their uncommon psychological insight. Each one of these stories is narrated with close and astute attention to what moves and motivates people. 
Continue reading “The Portland Review – 2005”

Quarterly West consistently turns out sparkling pieces of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, and this issue is no different. Steve Fellner’s notable essay, “Are You There Judy? It’s Me, Steve,” is a bittersweet reflection on the impact of Judy Blume on the author’s adolescence. The fiction ranges from experimental to realism, and teenage thieves, dying in Israel, and raising exotic animals are among the wide-ranging subject matter.  Continue reading “Quarterly West – Winter 2005”

Salmagundi continues to offer up work that is challenging, not because it is unusual or inventive, but because it is thoughtful in the truest sense of the word. Thinking, is in fact, the subject of one of this issue’s many splendid essays: “The (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought,” by the ever thought-provoking George Steiner. Continue reading “Salmagundi – Spring/Summer 2005”

In its 63rd year, The Antioch Review is still a benchmark. Robert S.Fogarty’s editorial quote from Claude Levi-Straus identifies its theme as, “the search for unsuspected harmonies.” In the lead essay—of seven solid essays—Daniel Bell’s “Ethics and Evil: Frameworks for Twenty-First-Century Culture” asks: “How do we contain wars of faith, and the spread of potent ideologies while giving people an anchorage for their lives?” while Alan Cheuse’s ”Reflections on Dialogue: How d’yuh get t’Eighteent’ Avenoo and Sixty-Sevent’ Street?” addresses the question of the narrator in “And God said let there be light, and there was light [. . .]” while tracing the origins of speech and story. Iraj Isaac Rahmim’s autobiographical “Sacrifices” defines poverty: “[. . .] being poor as a student is not being poor at all; it is simply getting an education.” Work from eleven fine poets (among them: Neil Azevedo, Michael Demos, and Marilyn Nelson) is included and in “Poetry Today,” John Taylor concludes his review of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Selected Poems and Giorgio Caproni’s The Earth’s Wall: Selected Poems 1932-1986 with poetry of his own: “[. . . ] intimations of citadels looming there above us, even as we pass below the ramparts [. . .].” Continue reading “The Antioch Review – Spring 2005”

Perhaps the best editors are prescient, equipped with a literary sixth sense that allows them to provide readers with apt reflections at the right moment. So it was that I found myself clipping an article on the necessity of craft in memoir (as opposed to mere emotional regurgitation) by the current editor of AGNI, Sven Birkerts, out of a recent issue of Poets & Writers even as I was reading it, so exactly did it articulate thoughts I’d been having. A similar sensation attended my reading of an essay by AGNI’s founding editor, Askold Melnyczuk, in the current issue of the magazine. Seventy pages earlier, I’d been reading Ben Miller’s “Romancing the Dankerts” and reflecting on what it was about his prose that made it dense and stunningly lyric, lush in a way that made me want to taste it (and all this in piece ostensibly about trash and trashy neighbors who object to the trash!). And then there was Melnyczuk, ruminating on the same question: “I’m curious about why certain sentences read quickly, why others force us to slow down…” and quoting Susan Sontag: “Every style is a means of insisting on something.” I must insist that editors of this ilk are the reason AGNI consistently dazzles. Volume 61 is no different; I starred so many pieces as worth mentioning that I can’t mention them all. Birkerts may begin this issue by lamenting that with Sontag’s death, he lost his “ideal reader,” the person he felt he was editing for, even if she’d never seen a copy of the magazine, but I have a feeling that even without her guiding presence, AGNI will continue to deliver what readers are looking for–even if they don’t know it yet. Continue reading “AGNI – Number 61”