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The slim, saddle-stitched new poetry journal out of Portland, Oregon looks like care and attention has been lavished on its design; it resembles a well-done chapbook, with its heavy cardstock paper and clean, clear typeset. And the poetry you’ll find won’t disappoint either. Many of the poems have a lyrical bent and pack an emotional punch. I particularly liked Virginia Mix’s piece, called “Boundaries,” which culminates in these eerie lines: “And I can also fast-forward five years, and / squat down in her tiny kitchen, 29 years / old and pregnant, whispering into the / goat’s silky coat after he spent the day / munching on toxic rhododendron. / I cover my ears as he moans and screams / while the poison rushes through his blood, / and hold him in my lap at four in the / morning, and the moonlight shivers off / the linoleum.” I am looking forward to more of Burnside Review after this promising debut.  Continue reading “Burnside Review – Summer 2004”

This special issue is dedicated to, as the cover states, Food Matters. Continue reading “The Massachusetts Review – 2004”

Formatted like a slick cosmopolitan magazine, this quirky, subversive offering out of Canada includes comics, poems, art work, fiction, and essays, all of which were weird, humorous, or some combination of the two. They also feature sci-fi and horror genre work. One of their stated goals is to include writers from all over, and it seems they succeeded, as I count five countries represented on two pages at one point. As a lover of literary comics, I have to say my favorite comic from this issue was that depicting a tyrannosaurus rex’s search for God, which was attributed to a web site www.qwantz.com and a Canadian author named Ryan North. Of the poems, I particularly liked the prose poem “She Tried to Teach Me Poetry” by Karina Sumner-Smith, which begins: Continue reading “NFG – Writing with Attitude – 2004”

This journal, originating from Portland State University, includes poetry, fiction, photography and art from a variety of voices, not just those of the Northwest. Standout pieces for me included Dustin Nightingale’s poem, “Shoot Out the Lights,” and James McCachren’s story, “Driving,” which begins with the irresistible lines: “We had two reasons for going there: 1) because it was called “the supermarket of the stars,” and 2) because we had no chapstick. I saw we had no chapstick, though I think my wife may have hidden it. Continue reading “The Portland Review – 2004”

This new saddle-stitched journal of poetry and art out of Tennessee gives a forum for newer voices, with a lyric bent. I liked the ekphrastic poem “Shark Infested Waters” by Gayle Elen Harvey (about a show by Damien Hirst), as well as P.J. Taylor’s “The Mice and The Lemon Tree.” An excerpt of Taylor’s poem: Continue reading “Tar Wolf Review – Fall 2004”

Ever wondered what would happen if a mermaid were inverted with scales on the upper half? Continue reading “Boulevard – Fall 2004”

Grain has an inventive way of honoring its annual Short Grain contest winners without shortchanging the other contributors – a double issue with two front covers and no perfunctory rear. In the “regular” issue, Christine Lindsay’s “Last Words” is a potent dialog with a character from a poem by Jane Kenyon. Continue reading “Grain – Autumn 2004”

After a string of elaborately presented thematic issues, McSweeney’s returns with a back-to-basics issue. Continue reading “McSweeney’s – Fall 2004”

The cover of this New Letters issue features a mural detail in which a face in a mirror mimics its own act of reflection, soliciting your gaze and shooting it right back to you. Inside the issue, broader sections of Luis Quintanilla’s frank, witty frescoes with a Don Quixote theme (fear no macho kitsch here) are enhanced by commentary from both the exiled Spanish artist and his son. Continue reading “New Letters – Number 70.1, 2004”

This captivating journal presents essays, poems and stories in their original language side by side with their English translations and notes from the translators. Continue reading “Two Lines – 2004”

Been longing to, as the song says, drive south? Just pick up a copy of the Arkansas Review and step into one of Daniel Coston’s you-are-there paintings of quintessential southern settings somehow rendered exotic by his fresh view of their familiarity. The white churches, the flat green lands of the Mississippi Delta, an “old store south of Pine Bluff, Arkansas on highway 65” will seem so real you’ll want to have your picture taken there. Then head out to the inexplicably named Club Disco 9000, actually “a juke joint, a prefab steel barn on Otha Turner’s place, out in the country” with white, middled-aged British blues fan Garry Craig Powell. In “Talkin’ Blues at the Living Blues Symposium,” he’ll give you his entertaining/worried take on the current health of (and his not so promising prognosis for) the blues and the fact that white people’s love for the blues (or their co-opting of it, depending on how you look at it) helps keep it alive, yet also tends to alter its essence. Who you play for can change your song, as R. T. Smith will warn you in his tour de force for one (fictional) voice “Dear Six Belles,” a wonderfully cranky and obsessive paean to real Cajun music: “Authentic whang-doodle, chers, the true thing.” Hear it? “You gotta cherish the blue swell in the emotional motion, give your self whole heart to the Loosiana razzy dazz.” If you start now, you can be back by suppertime. [Arkansas Review, Department of English and Philosophy, P.O. Box 1890, Arkansas State Unversity, State University, AR 72467. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $7.50. http://www.clt.astate.edu/arkreview] – AS Continue reading “Arkansas Review – August 2004”

Probably one of the most unassumingly designed literary journals, The Baltimore Review stands up to the best of them with fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews that all have that special glint of treasures presented with a knowing wink of editorial conviction. This issue features six short stories, all impressively artful and absorbing. Joe Schall’s “Opossum”, winner of TBR’s 2003 Short Fiction Competition, treads with not a single unsure step the bizarre territory of agoraphobia, etymology, toxicology, and marsupials, blending it all together with a thematic grace that left me moved by the feeling that I’d just read one of the year’s best stories. Continue reading “The Baltimore Review – Summer/Fall 2004”

Defying the trade paperback design standard to most literary journals, The Briar Cliff Review is a magazine-size book with thick, glossy paper and an evocative array of crystal-clear full-color artwork scattered throughout. To peruse this journal is an enjoyable sensory experience, and I found myself savoring the pure pleasure induced by the design as much as I savored the contents, which are substantial: 28 poems, 6 stories, 3 nonfiction pieces grouped under the unique heading “Reflective”, 4 articles or exhibits dealing with the “Siouxland” surrounding Briar Cliff’s Sioux City origins, and 3 book reviews. The short stories here are highly literary, somewhat ponderously paced, and ultimately very winning in their shared reluctance to undercut the human mysteries they present. Continue reading “The Briar Cliff Review – Volume 16”

Cairn: from the Scottish, a pile of stones meant as a monument or landmark. Also an exceptional literary magazine out of St. Andrews Presbyterian College. Kevin Frazier’s haunting story “The Magic Forest,” the tale of a lonely child who, on the spur of the moment, absconds with an infant “being aired” in the yard, considers the law of unintended consequences in a (disturbingly undermined) fairy tale setting. Continue reading “Cairn – May 2004”

This venerable journal (it has been around for more than 50 years) can be relied upon for excellent short fiction, and this issue is no exception. Lydia Peelle’s “Mule Killers” and M. Allen Cunningham’s “Crustacean” are both evocative and nostalgic – “Mule Killers” evokes the farming past of the speaker’s family, and “Crustacean” about a man trying to keep his crumbling family from falling apart. The few poems sprinkled throughout the issue provide tonal counterpoints for the stories, which means the editor put some thought into how to position these pieces together. For instance, the poem “Revival” by Jody Winer-Cook describes a museum exhibit of stone snake-tongue-carved knives and how the speaker responds to it: Continue reading “Epoch – 2004”

Produced by the Creative Writing Department of Florida International University, Gulf Stream presents about as straight-up a dosage of contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry as you could hope for. Continue reading “Gulf Stream – Volume 21”

Lilies & Cannonballs Review “seeks to create a space for the synthesis of contrary elements: aesthetically driven and socially conscious literature and art; traditional and experimental forms; crazy-man conservative and bleeding liberal views.” Continue reading “Lilies and Cannonballs Review – Spring/Summer 2004”

A Christian publication, Mars Hill Review is distinguished by its willingness to leave behind the preaching-to-the-choir safety of explicitly Christian texts and venture forth into the realm of pop culture in search of what MHR calls “reminders of God.” This issue offers a spiritually in-depth interview with poet Carolyn Forche, Cindy Crosby’s piece on the restoration of her faith as she helps restore a prairie, stories, poetry, and a generous selection of assumption-challenging book, film, and music reviews—these last on topics as diverse as the Christian-Celtic connection and garage rock revisited. You’ll find here articles supported by Bible verses alongside cogent cultural commentary that would be at home in any (secular) literary magazine. Of the latter, particularly insightful is Craig Detweiler’s review of Sofia Coppola’s fine film Lost in Translation. Informed by memories of his own isolating sojourn in Japan, Detweiler’s assessment, like the film itself, calls attention to what is missing, to that something beyond ordinary life that we all seek in imperfect ways… Continue reading “Mars Hill Review – 2004”

This perfectly-bound academic quarterly out of Pittsburgh State University (that’s Pittsburgh, Kansas, not Pennsylvania) presents poetry, articles, and reviews. Continue reading “The Midwest Quarterly – Summer 2004”

Mindprints, from the Learning Assistance Program of Allan Hancock College, is an annual literary journal “for writers and artists with disabilities or those with an interest in disabilities.” In this issue, Marcia Mascolini’s hilarious/wise “Hocus Pocus” considers real-world faith in one very wriggly kid’s encounter with an unmelting Communion wafer: “You have touched the Body of Christ, they yelled. I didn’t really think so. If I had touched the Body of Christ, I think it would have felt more like chicken.” Continue reading “Mindprints – 2004”

Bristling with the work of thirty-four different poets, this issue of Notre Dame Review is mostly blank verse, all of it enjoyable, and much of it breathtaking. I was most amazed by Beth Ann Fennelly’s long, sober, meditative piece, “The Presentation,” a title deriving from the hospital procedure of showing a stillborn infant to its mother. “Within hours, within you, / the cell, smaller than a decimal point, / began its long division. / But you know how unforgiving / math can be. Just one small mistake / and it won’t add up.” Continue reading “Notre Dame Review – Summer 2004”

This free, bi-monthly newsprint publication offers West Coast readers insights into the lives of poets and publishers, plus a handy calendar for poetry-related events up and down the West Coast. The front-page articles include a discussion of The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth by Jack Foley and an interview with Kazuko Shiraishi and her translators Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumara by Ikuko Tomita. Inside are more essays on Rexroth, a few poems, including one by Shiraishi, as well as reviews and news about various poetry figures, including a discussion of Louise Glück. The reason this newsprint publication is invaluable to me, besides the fact that it is wonderfully inexpensive, is that it contains a detailed lists of conferences, readings, festivals, classes and even public radio programs devoted to poetry, mostly focused on California, but including events from Seattle to Colorado. When planning trips, I always glance through their schedule to see if I can make any readings or festivals while I’m there. [Poetry Flash, 1450 Fourth Street, #4, Berkeley, CA 94710. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue: Free on newsstands; Mail subscriptions 12 issues/$30 (U.S.). www.poetryflash.org] – JHG Continue reading “Poetry Flash – Winter/Spring 2004”

Prose Ax’s zine-like appearance (saddle-stitching, black-and-white photocopied art works on the cover and throughout the issue, untrimmed pages) and authors with attitude who write pieces with titles like “Brain Spiders” are going to appeal to a zine audience more than your typical academic audience. And this little collection of poetry and short prose pieces has edge in spades, although occasional clichés creep in to zap a piece’s potential. Continue reading “Prose Ax – Spring 2004”

If you love to read more than, well, more than just about anything (except possibly that), you’ll love the University of Liverpool’s The Reader, a compendium of, appropriately enough, all things readerly: essays, interviews, reviews, recommendations, even quizzes and crosswords. A “reading lives” section includes Elizabeth Spooner’s “Let’s Hear it For Librarians” (“Sixty-five years ago, at the age of ten, my life began. Continue reading “The Reader – Summer 2004”

The standout feature of this issue of the hefty annual Red Wheelbarrow, which publishes poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and artwork including comics, is a long (eighteen-page) transcript of De Anza college students interviewing Adrienne Rich, a lively back-and-forth conversation that included discussions of politics, Rich’s poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World,”  feminism, classicism, the problems of globalization, and more. This is a must-read for Rich’s fans, though they probably won’t be that surprised by Rich’s answers. The other thing that immediately stands out about this lit mag is the size and spacing – at least 14 point font, and everything, even the poetry, is double-spaced. Easy on the eyes, perhaps, but a bit disconcerting at first. “Bee-Stealing Season” by Margarita Engle and “Mother as Rope” by Jennifer Perrine were two poems among the many deserving attention in this issue, which also include “Tell Me” by Adrienne Rich and work by Virgil Suarez and Lyn Lifshin. Here are a few lines from “Mother as Rope”: Continue reading “Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine – Number 5”

This issue of the populist journal Rosebud features stories by the winner and several close finalists for The Le Guin Award for short “imaginative fiction,” as well as a Roundtable called “Truth in Poetry?” My favorite short fiction piece was Alicia Conroy’s “The Nameless Season,” a runner-up for the Le Guin Award. Continue reading “Rosebud – April 2004”

An enjoyable new offering that hails from Seattle, Swivel showcases “women writers of wit.” As editor Brangien Davis writes, “In Swivel, you’ll find both funny ha-ha and funny strange, but mostly you’ll find that we take funny women seriously.” Continue reading “Swivel – 2004”

32 Poems once again impressed me, in its inimitable way, with the contrast between its modest appearance and superb content. The 32 poems (yes, hence the name of the magazine) in this issue lean heavily towards the lyric, and most have a playful sense of language that extends, at times, to their subjects. God, language, and poetry itself are interwoven in much of the work, including Heather McHugh’s clever “Ill-Made Almighty” and Lisa Gluskin’s wonderful “De Profundis.” There are so many exceptional poems I cannot quote from all of them. Do check out Daniel Nester’s “Prodigies” on the 32 Poems web site. Here are a few lines from Jill Osier’s melancholy “Kansas”: “The fields sweat into the air, a mild stew. / The ballplayer rolls over. His sheets are wet. Continue reading “32 Poems – Spring 2004”

Jim Meirose and Andi Diehn both are writers of at least one (presumably more, hopefully more) great story. G.C. Waldrep: thank you, again and for more—he is, dear reader, one of the poets whose work we may all, gladly, turn to, hopeful that people are still making language do strange tricks we can’t imagine. Also: Nancy Eimers—bravo, and I look forward to hunting down your two books. American Literary Review is another of those great reminders that literary journals can act as: there’s literally no limit to the number of these things, and the phrase “All boats rise together” has no stronger ledge on which to stand and preside over than the ledge above we scribblers the world over without contracts or even degrees. As ever, having heard of only one poet within, I come away, post-read, with a handful of new practitioners to mentally asterisk. Continue reading “American Literary Review – Spring 2004”

This issue of the newsprint bimonthly American Poetry Review features an essay on Hayden Carruth (“In Measured Resistance: On Hayden Carruth’s “Contra Mortem”), along with a special supplement of Carruth’s poems, and seven outstanding poems by Adrienne Rich, which in itself is enough to satisfy most poetry addicts. But it also includes multiple poems by other well-known poets such as David Wagoner and Donald Revell. APR is justifiably famous for its essays, and usually also features a large spread of international poetry in translation – in this issue, six poems from Viktor Sosnora translated by Dinara Georgeoliani and Mark Halperin. Even the ads make for fascinating reading – one touting the newest poetry releases from Wesleyan, another for a new MFA program seeking students, and Contests! Contests! Contests! – those holy grails for upstart poets such as myself. Continue reading “The American Poetry Review – July/August 2004”

Kary Wayson: you have uncountable volumes of love in store from all who read your poetry. Continue reading “Cranky – May 2004”

Imagine being able to put into words the feeling of a home run on a summer night and you’ll have the All-Star issue of Elysian Fields Quarterly, a unique and unabashedly ardent literary magazine devoted solely to America’s once (and future—well, we can dream, can’t we?) favorite sport, baseball. What are the Elysian Fields? Continue reading “Elysian Fields Quarterly – Summer 2004”

This appealing journal out of the University of Maryland publishes feminist research, analysis, theory, reviews, art, as well as poetry and fiction; the overall flavor of this issue was resolutely academic. Particularly interesting in this issue was Stephanie Hartman’s essay “Reading the Scar in Breast Cancer Poetry,” which examined how poets like Hilda Raz, Audre Lorde, and Marilyn Hacker wrote about the physical and metaphorical scars of breast cancer. Also a startling discovery – the amazing art work of Betye and Alison Saar, whose work has both powerful symbolism and haunting directness. Continue reading “Feminist Studies – 2004”

Fence opens with a reprint of Vladimir Nabokov’s marvelous “Canto One,” a tough act for any poet to follow. Eighth-grader Kyle Kenner does a good job with his two prose poems, including “Drafted,” a powerful, understated piece which ends: “A couple of days after the war was no more, his mom received a letter. A letter from the U.S.A. The letter said the soldier fought well, the letter said the soldier was no more.” Continue reading “Fence – Spring/Summer 2004”

Are you lonely for the music that used to inhabit the house of poetry? Do you miss the rhyme, though you visit it sometimes in the lyrics of your favorite songs? Does a stray phrase from “Prufrock” or “Innisfree” or “Stopping By Woods” pop into your head every now and again, wondering where you’ve gone? Continue reading “The Formalist – Spring/Summer 2004”

HGMFQ is not only a fiction journal, but a wealth of scholarly articles on gay literature and academic history. Continue reading “Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly – 2004”

The second issue of The Land-Grant College Review is an interesting thing to behold: it features some charming old-timey illustrations by Joy Kolitsky, but its ten stories are anything but old-fashioned. Continue reading “Land-Grant College Review – 2004”

To be lynx-eyed is to possess very keen sight, an attribute this magazine’s contributors bring to their considerations of (a sometimes remarkably disguised) human nature. Continue reading “Lynx Eye – Spring 2004”

A little thicker than Bridge’s double issue, PBQ is, for those of us not in the know (which includes me until recently), now entirely an online presence and then, once a year, published as a print anthology. I’ll fully admit to the prejudice: I love print journals, and am always somewhat nervous or anxious about online stuff. Continue reading “Painted Bride Quarterly – 2004”

The venerable grand-dame of literary journals has been through some major changes lately, with the recent sad passing of enthusiastic founder, George Plimpton. However, the quality of the journal has remained very high, as might be expected. This issue features interviews on the art of poetry with poet Paul Muldoon and Paris Review’s own Poetry Editor Richard Howard. Continue reading “The Paris Review – Spring 2004”

I urge you to check out, before even finishing this review, the website of Bridge Magazine, though I know the wish is sort of hopeless: there’s almost no way to conceive of the sort of madness and playful fun the magazine contains, promotes, inculcates, various other verbs. It’s sort of like McSweeneys, I suppose, though somehow more fun, grounded in a real world (perhaps this is the only magazine I can think of that’s made strangely more whole, more itself, because of advertisements [almost all of which are by/for Chicago-area businesses]). Continue reading “Bridge – Summer/Fall 2003”

This special issue of NDQ, more than three hundred pages long, covers Hemingway’s involvement with the theater, his 1935 trip to China, his relationships with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky and “spiritual kid brother” Arnold Samuelson, and much more. (Don’t miss Heidi Brotton Hudson’s linoleum-block print of a reflective Hemingway looking down, which seems somehow more essential than all the handsome hale fellow photographs we’ve seen.) There’s even a scholarly examination of why the film In Love and War (starring Sandra Bullock and Chris O’Donnell) failed so miserably (it jettisoned the “literary underpinnings” that might have given it weight and substance). Continue reading “North Dakota Quarterly – Fall 2003”

The American Scholar deserves applause for providing a loving home for the personal essay, a wonderfully egalitarian and pliant form that adjusts itself to any voice or subject matter, however refined or rough-hewn, fact-enamored or fanciful. Continue reading “The American Scholar – Volume 73 Number 3”

This summer the Olympics go home to Greece, and so does Atlanta Review in a “special commemorative issue for the Athens Summer Games, 2004” with a remarkable Greece Feature Section edited by formalist poet and Greek translator Alicia Stallings (Archaic Smile). Continue reading “Atlanta Review – Volume 10 Number 2”

Guest edited by writer Paul Maliszewski, this issue of Denver Quarterly is comprised entirely of brazen prose (the contents page does not distinguish fiction from non) that is often whimsically digressive, sometimes obtuse, but always daring. Continue reading “Denver Quarterly – 2004”

Occasionally I am provoked to mourn the insular, sometimes elite world of our nation’s literary magazines. Continue reading “Inkwell – Spring 2004”

isotope, Utah State’s journal of literary nature and science writing, is not content with the usual dichotomy between wonder and funeral song that characterizes our discourse on the environment, but strikes out fearlessly across new (and ancient) terrain with a backpack full of ceaseless questions and a full canteen of inspiration. Continue reading “Isotope – Spring/Summer 2004”

Dedicated to “exploring the experience of disability through literature and the fine arts,” Kaleidoscope subverts the usual categories of “normal” and “disabled” by bringing the reader inside the phenomenon of disability as it affects the life of one (normal) person at a time. Continue reading “Kaleidoscope – Winter/Spring 2004”

Knock-knock. Continue reading “Modern Haiku – Summer 2004”