Home » NewPages Blog » Page 315

NewPages Blog

At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!

Natural Bridge – 2004

Natural Bridge always has substantial offerings, but this issue has some stunners: Alice Ayers’ short story, “Barney,” is a gorgeous second-person evocation to a man about to submerge a profound part of himself in marriage to a woman whose maidenly abode featured lace doilies and was “so pointedly virginal it obviously covered something. Continue reading “Natural Bridge – 2004”

PEN America – 2004

With a few small exceptions, PEN America, the annual journal published by PEN American Center, is peopled with the work of world-famous or much-published writers, both contemporary and posthumous. Here you’ll find such familiar names as Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Susan Sontag, Wallace Stevens, Rick Moody, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Continue reading “PEN America – 2004”

Plains Song Review – Spring 2004

It’s easier, of course, to define the physical boundaries of an enormous space like the Great Plains than to come to an understanding of its essence, the unwalkable borderland where place meets person, where the geography of a region becomes home to a human heart. Continue reading “Plains Song Review – Spring 2004”

Rattle – Summer 2004

This issue of Rattle contains a tribute to Vietnamese poets, enlightening conversations with poets Li-Young Lee and Naomi Shihab Nye (in which editor Alan Fox seems less interested in hearing his own opinions than in genuinely listening to theirs), Jessica Goeller’s funny and wise essay on writing with an infant daughter balanced on one arm (the miracle: it works better!), and “Fine,” Jack Grapes’ wonderfully tender-gruff piece on father-son love. Continue reading “Rattle – Summer 2004”

Louisiana Literature – 2003

One of the most attractive journals I’ve seen in a great while, Louisiana Literature gets straight to the point – delivering prize-winning poetry in a range of styles, a nice helping of short fiction, and a few critical essays and reviews – all in a lovely, understated layout. Continue reading “Louisiana Literature – 2003”

AGNI – Number 59

First, the time has come with this magazine to praise Sven Birkerts as an editor. He’s a ferociously intelligent author (most recently of My Sky Blue Trades), and he took the helm of Agni three issues ago, initiating his run with what was one of the single best printed journals of last year, Agni 57. Continue reading “AGNI – Number 59”

Vallum – 2004

First, thank god for Medbh McGuckian and her four beautiful poems within this small volume, and is everyone now clear, with each passion season and the crop of literary journals, that Canada is where it’s happening, literary magazine-wise? Should we list? Probably not (click, back on the main page on Literary Mags). Continue reading “Vallum – 2004”

580 Split – 2004

Reading the contributors’ prior publishing credits creates a kind of funky experimental poem of its own—Can We Have Our Ball Back? 10 Tongues, slapboxing with jesus, Pie in the Sky, baffling combustions, doomdarling.com, Good Foot, The Sour Thunder, Da Word, A Very Small Tiger, Skanky Possum—a reflection of the journal’s irreverent and innovative tendencies. Continue reading “580 Split – 2004”

The Bellingham Review – Volume 27

“Terrific” is how contest judge Robert Wrigley classifies the 49th Parallel Award-winning poem by Simone Muench, but this assessment could certainly apply to this whole special double issue. Sophisticated and polished, the work here (poems, stories, essays, interviews, Forrest Gander’s comments on work by Cole Swenson, and Lucia Perillo’s writing about photos by Scott Chambers) is never casual, yet it remains consistently accessible and, in the best sense, readable. Continue reading “The Bellingham Review – Volume 27”

Black Warrior Review – Vol 30 No 2

A common approach mysteriously unites the short fiction in this spring/summer issue of Black Warrior Review. Each of the six stories here possesses a similar obliqueness, a diagonal narrative attack that lends the characters and events an alluring inscrutability. Continue reading “Black Warrior Review – Vol 30 No 2”

Conjunctions – Spring 2004

This ambitious and strikingly effective theme issue in which writers respond to film leaves me with the feeling that I ought to know more about film than I do, though I’ve always felt that, in comparison to others, I know quite a lot. Several of the pieces here feel as if they were written for those already in the cinema ‘know,’ but each piece is, nonetheless, highly enjoyable. Continue reading “Conjunctions – Spring 2004”

Hanging Loose – 2004

This lovely issue of Hanging Loose features the amazing high-school-age poet Nathan Resnick-Day: “Listen to me as one listens to the rain. / It has been twenty years since the gas lamps flickered in Paris during a monsoon that took the beards off men. / […] / I was given a birdsong that loved me for what I was not” (“The Discourse of Hermeto”). Continue reading “Hanging Loose – 2004”

Scrivener Creative Review – 2004

This is my introduction to the Montreal-based Scrivener Creative Review, and I find it mostly delightful—from Matthew Aaron Guyer’s metaphysical fiction, “The Theory of Doorways,” to a beautiful collection of photographs, especially those of Geoffrey Brown. The poems are worth returning to again, as well, and I look forward to doing so. Continue reading “Scrivener Creative Review – 2004”

5 AM – Winter/Spring 2004

5 AM is in a newspaper format, but printed on the pages, instead of the latest (mostly disastrous) accounts of the day, are poem after poem – hip, edgy, funny – that are actually a pleasure to read. The tone in this Spring Church, Pennsylvania-based journal is often irreverent, political, or conversational; the names inside may be familiar with fans (like me) of Charles Harper Webb’s anthology, stand up poetry, like Denise Duhamel, Virgil Suarez, Lyn Lifshin, and Charles Harper Webb himself. I especially enjoyed several poems by Shao Wei, who was featured on the front page of 5 AM, and several poems by Reginald Harris, particularly “Dinah James.” Ron Koertge’s work was charming, especially “Lunch Hour in Macy’s.” Here are a few lines from that poem: “…Nearby, the pearly nurses of Dior / talk softly about flesh. Dark Stranger is / this month’s rage. Ten promos show a coarse / but sensitive roughly tender atheist…” This is one newspaper I would be happy to wake up to at 5 am. Let’s pour some coffee and read! [5 AM, Box 205, Spring Church, PA 15686. Single issue $5.] – JHG Continue reading “5 AM – Winter/Spring 2004”

The Antigonish Review – Winter 2004

This Canadian journal out of Nova Scotia features an eclectic mix of writing, a few translations, and the sprightly but thought-provoking poetry of Jan Zwicky. The mix of interviews, reviews, short fiction, and poetry is very balanced, and, as always when I read Canadian journals, I am surprised and impressed with the quality and diversity of the work of writers from Canada whom aren’t as well-represented in journals here in the States. One of the most interesting pieces in this issue was an interview with Heather Menzies, an expert on technology’s many impacts on social structures, particularly in the workplace. Much of the poetry featured here was well-crafted free verse, with many exemplary pieces, only one of which I have the space to quote here. A few lines from Myka Tucker-Abramson’s “Lot and Eurydice, Based on Akhmatova’s ‘Lot’s Wife’”: “If you turned around, I would lick the salt off your skin / before tumbling back like Eurydice into slush driven days. / You taste like fire and turn slowly away, while I speak / loudly as anguish…” Poems by Li Qingzhao, translated with skill by Allen C. West and Gundi Chan, are also exceptional. – JHG Continue reading “The Antigonish Review – Winter 2004”

Ploughshares – Spring 2004

This issue of the venerable Ploughshares was guest-edited by Campbell McGrath, a poet famous for his exuberant descriptions of all things American, from pop culture to politics. You’re not in for a lot of surprises here as almost all the writers included in this issue are well-known quantities (Denise Duhamel, Stuart Dybek, Michael Collier, Rick Moody, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, the ubiquitous Virgil Suárez…the table of contents reads like a directory of Poets and Writers magazine), but the quality is impeccable, and reading this cover to cover was enjoyable. And McGrath definitely makes an effort to include poets from a range of movements, from elliptical to expansive and everything in between. I particularly liked the tongue-in-cheek humor of Beth Ann Fennelly’s “I Need to Be More French. Or Japanese.” Other standouts include Cynthia Weiner’s ambiguously chipper story “Boyfriends,” the poem “Going Bananas” by Rita Maria Martinez and the poem “In the B Movie of Our Lives” by Dionisio D. Martínez. – JHG Continue reading “Ploughshares – Spring 2004”