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!
Drowning in Light Poetry by Taylor Steele Platypus Press, March 2022
The poems in Taylor Steele’s Drowning in Light traverse the daily—the sickness, the loneliness, and the hope that yawns from within. There are continuous trails of light peeking through, hands grasping, fingers trailing—a notion of persistence, always. Taylor Steele is a queer, Black, NYC-born-and-based writer, performer, and photographer. Her poetry has been featured on Huffington Post, Brooklyn Poets, Button Poetry, and is a 2016 Pushcart Nominee. A triple-Taurus, she believes in the power of art to change, shape, and heal.
The Black Fire—This Time (BFTT) Virtual Summer Fellowship from Aquarius Press and Willow Books fosters the careers of poets and writers at all stages of development through independent study, readings, Q&A sessions with prominent authors and sponsored prizes. Fellows are provided exclusive access to the Black Fire — This Time Digital Collection, which contains cultural gems from the Black Arts Movement along with an extended set of hard-to-find and out-of-print works not found in the print edition.
From June to August, BFTT Summer Fellows will work remotely on the project of their choice. Projects are self-paced at any stage of development, from literature reviews to works-in-progress to full manuscripts. The fellowship is open to poets, writers, playwrights, teaching artists and healing arts practitioners addressing the myriad aspects of the Black Arts Movement (past, present and future).
Requirements: Fellows work independently but attend weekly check-ins (approx. 60 minutes), where they receive announcements, network, enjoy readings and Q&A sessions with guest speakers and schedule critique sessions. Fellows will submit a portfolio sample of work completed during the fellowship. Select projects will be eligible for sponsored prizes (TBA).
For more information visit the BFTT Submittable page. May 31, 2022 application deadline.
In the Editor’s Note to this double issue (VOL. 88 NOs. 1&2) of New Letters, Christie Hodgen explores a passage from Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” and concludes, “As writers, we are able to put words to what is hidden; as readers, we experience the often humbling privilege of gaining access to others’ hidden lives – a privilege we almost never experience in the real world.” In this issue, readers have the privilege to enjoy the New Letters Award Series of winning works by R.J. Lambert, Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry; Rachel Coonce, Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction; Richard Hermes, Robert Day Award for Fiction; Erin McReynolds, Editor’s Choice Award; and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Editor’s Choice Award. In addition, the issue features fiction by Nicole Hazan, Bradley Bazzle, Andrew Peters, Essay, Jillian Barnet, Chelsea B. DesAutels, P.L. Watts; poetry by Christopher Howell, Gaskin, Alicia Ostriker, Wyatt Townley, Maurya Simon, Jeremy Pulmano, John Blair, Vanesha Pravin; reviews and commentaries by Daniel A Rabuzzi, David Newkirk, Natalie Johansen, Robert Stewart; and a full-color portfolio of painting and collages by Harold Smith, whose work is featured on the cover.
Happy Friday the 13! Don’t press your luck and stay inside writing and editing. Check out these great opportunities of where to submit your work. Remember, our newsletter subscribers get early access to new opportunities before they are featured on our website. Plus, if you subscribe you’ll also get access to our monthly eLitPak newsletter first.
Speaking of the eLitPak, May’s eLitPak newsletter will be hitting inboxes Wednesday, May 18. Don’t miss out.
Real Rhyming Poems Poetry by J. M. Allen Kelsay Books, April 2022
Rhymers unite! Real Rhyming Poems by J. M. Allen is a chapbook of exclusively rhyming poems, which is quite uncommon, so the reader is in for a rare treat with this book. Twenty of the thirty poems in this collection had been accepted individually in thirteen different publications. The poem “Genes” won first place in a 2021 contest, and the poem “Ten Hours of Sleep” was picked up by Associated Press (immediately after it was published in a Minnesota newspaper). The author is a parent and included some poems regarding teenagers in this collection of humorous and serious poems. If you haven’t read good rhyming poems in a while, here is your chance! J. M. Allen is an electrical engineer and parent, who enjoys writing rhyming poems. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has been a longtime resident of Rochester, Minnesota.
BABE Poetry by Dorothy Chan Diode Editions, December 2021
BABE is about owning the room. It’s about physical touch. It’s about dancing (actually, grinding) on a heart-shaped bed and starring as the leading lady of the film (no matter how risqué it gets). At the core of this collection, the Chinese American speaker questions the conventions around her, dating back to her origin story as a Hong Kongnese child who would get up to stretch in the middle of Cantonese class. As an adult, she questions her fate since the family fortune teller screwed her over with a lazy fortune, yet got her brother’s completely spot-on. She triple sonnets her way through confrontations of queerphobia in her family, the trauma from a past relationship with a significantly older man, and the constant male gaze. She pays homage to the first girls who ever loved her in this analysis of sexuality, queerness, popular culture, and resilience. She’s baby forever. Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Editor Emeritus of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com
Iris Graville, author of the award-winning memoir Hiking Naked, lives on an island in the Salish Sea and writes as a citizen of the planet. Writer in a Life Vest as a collection of essays is a journey of discovery and an education about a delicate ecosystem which supports some of the world’s most iconic creatures. The first Writer in Residence on the Washington State Ferries, Iris spent a year riding the interisland ferry through the San Juan Islands of the Salish Sea. Readers cycle with her as the ferry glides and rocks through the home of the endangered resident orcas (killer whales) and meet scientific experts who are devoting their knowledge and energies to saving these rare creatures. As we learn about riding this ferry — including witnessing a moveable ukulele jam, where players board the ferry at various ports, play together for a while and move on — Graville teaches us about the current state of the sea’s health and our connection to it. The multiple essay forms Graville employs keep readers off-kilter, as if standing on the deck of a rocking ship, yet they invite us to hang on and to look deeper. Like Graville, I live on an island in the Salish Sea, though not in the San Juans, and I swim in the sea year-round. It is my concern for the fragile state of this body of water, of the resident orcas, and of our planet that has led me to write this review. Graville’s collection belongs in the genre of books alerting us to the precarious state of our planet, but it stands out by pointing our gaze toward hopefulness and action.
Reviewer Bio: Deborah Nedelman, PhD, MFA is co-author of two non-fiction books: A Guide for Beginning Psychotherapists (Cambridge Press) and Still Sexy After All These Years (Perigee/Penguin). Her novel, What We Take for Truth (Adelaide Press, 2019) won the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction. Deborah is a manuscript coach and leads writing and watercolor painting workshops.
Winner of the Driftwood Press 2021 Adrift Chapbook Contest, Silverman’s work was selected for its geographical and lyrical style, with poems that “communicate harrowing insights into the landscape of relationships.” Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. She is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Jen also writes for TV and film.
Brotherhood (2018) is a 25-minute documentary written and directed by Meryam Joobeur that documents the story of a Tunisian shepherd’s family whose son left home to join the Islamic State at war as a consequence of the Arab Spring Uprising (2010-2013) and is now returning home to Syria. The film “dispels the stereotypical notions of what it means to be Muslim as it deepens our understanding of the Arab world.” A feature-length version is currently in development.
The Spring/Summer 2022 issue of Concho Review Review features fiction by Marco Etheridge, David Harris, Paul Juhasz, Judy Stanigar, Gemini Wahhaj; poetry by Jonathan Bracker, Matthew Brennan, Nick Conrad, William Virgil Davis, Holly Day, David Denny, Lynn Domina, George Drew, Shawna Ervin, William Heath, Ann Howells, Ken Meisel, Gary Mesick, Elizabeth Rees, John Rutherford, Claire Scott, Matthew J. Spireng, Chuck Taylor, Larry D. Thomas, Barbara Tyler, Matthew Ulland, David Vancil, Maryfrances Wagner, Harold Whit Williams, Neal Zirn; and nonfiction by Janice Airhart, Michael Howarth, Kay Long, Gabriel Carlos Lopez. Cover photograph: UntamedPhotography by Tim L. Vasquez.
Now entering its tenth year, The Fictional Cafe is open for submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Rolling submissions deadline, there is no fee to submit. You do, however, have to become a member of their Coffee Club. It’s free to join.
Inspired by Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series centers on the aftermath of the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862 where Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.
Named after Court Green, the property in Devon, England, where Sylvia Plath lived and wrote the Ariel poems, Court Green, the magazine editors say, is like that property in England: “a space where all kinds of poems are welcome, especially those you can’t always find elsewhere: long poems, fun poems, pop poems, poems from archives and unpublished notebooks, playful poems, taboo poems, and artifacts we call ‘poems’ even when they defy all our efforts to label them.” Issue #20 is testament, featuring multiple works by each Jack Skelley, Harryette Mullen, Amy Gerstler, James Shea, Patrick Culliton, Sandra Simonds, Sean Cho A., Kelly R. Samuels, Christopher Citro, Yvonne Amey, Grant Quackenbush, Megan Kaminski, Nick Rossi, CM Burroughs, Ron Koertge, Kathleen Rooney, Brandon Menke, Dan Alter, rob mclennan, Catherine Pierce, August Green, Cameron Martin, John Muellner, Vicki Iorio, and Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade, as well as an interview with rob mclennan by Lisa Fishman, and an interview with Tim Dlugos by journalist Terry Gross for her radio program Fresh Air, produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, on March 29, 1985. All works are available to read online at the Court Green website.
Written against the harrowing backdrop of climate change, Green Regalia explores our precarious ecological moment and increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world. In this collection, Adam Tavel chronicles the objectification of landscapes and the species within them, the cultural denial of the body’s transient nature, and the aftermath of an estranged father’s death. These poems of rot and renewal seek a wisdom free of domination, where both wonder and surrender may remind us of our place in the greater tapestry of life. Adam Tavel is the author of five books of poetry, including this collection and Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2022).
That’s right! The deadline to enter Swan Scythe Press’ 2022 Poetry Chapbook Contest is only about a month away on June 15. This is a postmark deadline. The winner of the 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest was Rae Gouirand for her manuscript Little Hour. The winner of this year’s contest will receive $200, publication, and 25 perfect-bound copies. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds for full details.
Coastal Shelf online literary magazine has offered two Online Generative Poetry Workshop this spring/summer that offer participants “generative exercises and prompts” as well as taking “a deep-dive” into several literary magazines to better understand possible markets. The next workshop is 6 weekly 90-minute meetings: July 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, August 7. Participation is capped to “ensure good interaction and value,” and participants can also request one-on-one sessions. The money generated from these workshops goes towards paying Coastal Shelf authors. For more information, visit the Coastal Shelf website here.
Lunch Ticket Literary and Art Journal Winter/Spring 2022 is online for all to read published by the Antioch MFA in Creative Writing Program and features fiction by J. T. Townley, Poetry, Joanne Durham, Maya Lewis, Abhijit Sarmah, Ellen June Wright; Writing for Young People featuring Dana Blatte; flash prose by Brett Biebel, Jorge Torrente Cabrera, Minna Dubin, Eliot Li, Linda McMullen, Amber Wozniak; interviews with Robin Davidson, Crystal Hana Kim, Locascio Nighthawk, Paisley Rekdal, Sally Wen Mao; creative nonfiction by Julia F. Green, H’Abigail Mlo; the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction selections by Diane Forman, JoeAnn Hart, Kristin Marie, Dana Kroos; art by Guilherme Bergamini, Henry Hu, Dana Kroos; and the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts selections.
Heartwood Literary Magazine is an alumni-run semi-annual online literary publication in association with the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. The newest issue (#13) features poetry by Oisín Breen, Mary Lucille DeBerry, Pamela Hill Epps, Connie Jordan Green, Gabriel Green, David M. Harris, Peter Leight, Megan Wildhood, and Sara Dovre Wudali; creative nonfiction by Celesté Cosme, Molly Katt, Brina Patel, Amber Pierson, Laura Jackson Roberts, and Michelle Spencer; and fiction by Carl Boon, Melissa Feinman, Matt Gillick, Emily Krauser, and Martin Toman. Heartwood is free to read online here. Heartwood also hosts the annual Heartwood Poetry Prize Contest, open this year from May 15 – June 15, and judged by Bill King, the 2021 Heartwood Poetry Prize Winner.
Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Someone with whom you could confide anything? A soulmate who loved you no matter what you said or did? Celia Paul’s extraordinary new book, Letters to Gwen John, adopts Gwen as just such an “imaginary” friend/soulmate and listener as she writes all her thoughts and feelings to the long-dead post-impressionist painter who lived in the latter 18th and early 19th centuries. Using a series of letters, Paul reveals her inner thoughts about life, art, men, freedom, and beauty. The book is part memoir and part art history, and it makes a beautiful read. Filled with imagination and insight, Paul examines the meaning of art and life. She shares her vision and makes you believe that communication is possible across space and time. As she puts it, “time is a strange substance.” And somehow, as you read this amazing book, you see Gwen John seated in a cozy room somewhere, like the one she paints in Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, reading Celia Paul’s letters with a faint smile.
Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons Essays by Jerry Dennis University of Michigan Press, September 2021
Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain. Up North in Michigan has been selected as a 2022 finalist and is up for gold in the Non-Fiction – Nature Category of the Midwest Book Awards.
With panting, slobbering wolves where his hands should be, The Man with Wolves for Hands builds shelves, attends an HR meeting, gets drunk in a kiddie pool with his friend The Cowboy, and stumbles into a bacchanalian wake, held in a forest clearing, for a deceased soldier. In The Man with Wolves for Hands, Metaphor folds into allegory, folds into psychological exploration, folds into a meditation on trauma and struggle. These vignettes about a man and his lupine hands explore what it means to be compassionate in a world where perception is tenuous and morality fluid. Elements of myth and folklore anachronistically color the narrative creating a story that winds itself through both the present and some distant, primordial past. Winner of the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel.
Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine Graphics and Poetry by Nick Francis Potter Driftwood Press, March 2022
This is a collection of experimental graphic works and comics poetry. It includes more traditionally-minded comics (with a lyrical bent) with abstract and conceptual works, including text-based comics and comics inspired by modernist abstractions. Taken together, the work finds kinship with contemporary avant-cartoonists like Warren Craghead, Aidan Koch, and Simon Moreton, while striking out toward something altogether new. Nick Francis Potter is a writer, cartoonist, and educator who holds an MFA from Brown University and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where he currently teaches writing and theory in the Digital Storytelling Program.
Daniel Lassell’s Spit harnesses the power of language to contemplate whether to embrace one’s own roots or to cast them off in favor of creating a new identity for a new life, and as such influences our sense of belonging. This conflict is one that Lassell grapples with for many years of his life, blending these two identities of past and future together to become “a city boy inside / the body of a country.” Part one recounts “sopping, hazy Kentucky” and when “a chicken costs 35 cents.” The natural world reigns supreme in this setting. The old barn on the land which “season by season… / have held their angle, onto the metal gate / leaned against a post pile for storage, / some form of pillar” soon gives way as “the field outside waits, / watching the barn’s leaning face / disappear” and nature has won against that which man has made. Yet the supremacy of nature does not last for long, nor does Lassell’s life in the country. The second and third parts make the progressive transition from “a hundred acres / into one” and by the final section, Lassell has completely immersed himself in the “concrete slabs” and “crumbling sidewalk squares” of the city. Yet his years on the farm never leave Lassell, for even in the city he recalls “hoisting bales up to a hay wagon” and “not waking during night / to car lights, sirens, hunger” and how, despite having “climbed from being / of dirt, rough fingernails,” his past will always be with him, no matter the distance or passage of time. Lassell’s poignant yet heart-warming story about what defines “home” presents a new meaning to the influence of upbringing and how sometimes home is not a physical place we return to but the memories we cherish that help guide us into the uncertainty of adulthood.
Spit by Daniel Lassell. Michigan State University Press, July 2021.
Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. She has previously published a nonfiction essay in an anthology with Wising Up Press. When she is not reading, writing, or reviewing she can be found exploring Boston, spending time with family and friends and looking for inspiration for her next story in the world around her.
The May 2022 issue of The Sun is loosely tied together by a focus on food or nourishment, so Bruce Ballenger’s essay, “The Memory of Clay,” initially looks like an outlier, as he focuses on his relationship with his father. He uses the metaphor of clay to guide his essay, as Ballenger’s daughter Julia explains why she works with clay, despite its unwillingness to easily follow the form she sets for it. Ballenger struggles to shape his memories of his father, an alcoholic journalist who was abusive toward their family, into something that helps him understand his father. Ballenger works to mold the story he tells about his father, ranging from the narrative of the wronged son to learning why his father never published the book he had a contract for. The essay ends largely unresolved, as Ballenger isn’t sure what to do with the complicated memories he has, but he returns to something else his daughter has taught him about clay. There are times when it resists taking any shape at all, and so there is nothing to do with it but start again. Ballenger leaves the reader and himself there, knowing that that is what we all have to do.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
In the Preface to the May 2022 issue of online About Place, Editor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke comments on the theme, “‘Navigations: A Place for Peace,’ the Spring 2022 edition of About Place Journal, and a special extended folio & related blogs encourages space for soulful solace and bold action. In navigating preservation, protection, reclamation and restoration of traditional knowledges for the sake of our planet in peril and all of its living counterparts, we were thrilled to receive works deeply attending to the remarkable nature of living within continual, revived and reclaimed pathways of knowing delivering such careful consideration and indomitable strength – endurance for the long-haul.” The issue features works from some one-hundred contributors in thematic groupings: Flourishing, Pathways, Gratitude, Reckonings, and Factual State / Future State.
Walking Uphill at Noon showcases Yenser’s mastery of prosody and love of play. Including free verse as well as established and newly invented forms, Yenser’s collection is organized into four parts that each explore the author’s life and interests: part 1 focuses on neighborhood observations; part 2 delves into travel at home and abroad; part 3 consists of a “walking log” that muses on current events; and part 4 explores magic, mysteries, and sleights of hand. Ultimately, Yenser urges readers to consider that everyday situations can be made extraordinary if they keep their love of play and wonder close to their hearts. Jon Kelly Yenser is also the author of two chapbooks, Walter’s Yard and The Disambiguation of Katydids, and the poetry collection The News as Usual: Poems (UNM Press).
The newest issue of The Main Street Rag (v27 n 2) starts off with “Painting In, Painting Out: An Interview with Michel Tsouris” by Don Bertschman, and is followed up with fiction by Linda Buckmaster, Robert Garner McBrearty, Skyler Nielsen, Richard Risemberg, Terry Sanville, and Frank Scozzari; poetry by Michel Tsouris, Chris Abbate, Frederick W. Bassett, Stephen Benz, C.D. Bailey, Cindy Buchanan, Brian Builta, J.I.B., Jane-Rebecca Cannarella, John J. Ronan, Margaret Diehl, Irene Fick, Regina YC Garcia, Karen L. George, Alison Stone, Cordelia M. Hanemann, Marci Rae Johnson, Genevieve Fitzgerald, Donald Levering, James Lineberger, Christopher Louvet, Kim Malinowski, Richard Merelman, James Miller, Michael Minassian, Daniel Edward Moore, Benjamin Nash, Rikki Santer, David Sapp, Gordon Taylor, Matthew A. Toll, Tom Wayman, Jeffrey Thompson, Riand chard Widerkehr.
Muses — a special section showcasing writers, artists, and their inspirations, with cover art by Holly Wilson — headlines the May/June 2022 issue of World Literature Today, the 400th issue in the magazine’s 95-year history. Rembrandt, Picasso, Kandinsky, Andrew Wyeth, and David Hockney are among the legends whose visual art inspires the featured writers. Other highlights include poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and fiction from Canada, England, France, Israel, and Russia, as well as a previously unpublished letter by Boris Pasternak. The book review section also features a wealth of new titles from around the world, including new work by Victoria Chang, Louise Glück, and Alain Mabanckou.
Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies: A Feminist Review (ISSN 2576-0750) reviews the latest print, video, and digital resources for research and teaching in gender and women’s studies. Recent book reviews have explored such topics as rape culture, the meaning of consent in higher education, African American women’s heritage and migration, trans care, the origins of dangerous ideologies about the Black female body, and the cultural and moral morphology of abortion. New, gender-focused special issues of journals are also highlighted, as are other resources and tools for feminist scholarship. To subscribe to the print edition of RGWS, visit their website for more information.
Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor Stories by Patricia Taylor Livingston Press, July 2022
What’s your pain from zero to ten? How fast can you run on the floor, from zero to ten? How soon will you have burnout, from zero to ten? In this collection, Patricia “Tricia” Taylor takes over forty years of nursing experience in four southern states in the U.S. and weaves them into “mostly fictional” stories that move from joy to frustration to devastation. Taylor’s experiences included cancer nursing, hospice, med-surg, pediatrics, newborn nursery, and teaching psychiatric nursing in a nursing program for twenty years. Taylor then returned to med-surg, ER, quality control nursing, and finally psychiatric nursing, until her recent retirement. This collection highlights a career that was usually exhausting, sometimes tragic, frequently infuriating, occasionally funny, and consistently rewarding.
Taylor Byas’s poetry collection Bloodwarm is an inspiring and modern commentary on what it means to be a Black woman living in a society where “I’m/seen as a threat” simply because of the color of her skin and sheds new light on the strong presence of racism within a variety of situations. The book opens with the inundation of Tweets surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, capturing “rubber bullets / pinging a reporter and her crew as they run for cover” and “a police car plowing into a peaceful crowd” all while “white friends” will promise to “do better” before they “bullet into our inboxes and ask us to hand them the answers” about what they should do or say. From there, Byas examines other aspects of racism and the lack of representation of the Black community in the media by putting into perspective the archetype of the damsel in distress of a superhero film. Byas describes how the women who “look like Kirsten Dunst or Emma Stone” are “dainty enough to be rescued by a white hero” and any type of confrontation between the speaker and a white woman would lead to “there is an African-American woman threatening me” and “call the police.” Byas does not shy away from reflecting the struggles that the Black community faces, and what it means to “have to stand / between / invisible” simply to avoid unjust persecution based on skin color. Yet peace in the racial conflict is difficult to achieve because “this is / the standard / this denial / the / rebellion against / negotiations”. Byas does not shirk from the ugly truth of the impact racism has had on the Black community, and her openness in discussing these topics allows for the possibility to have more honest and fruitful conversations about how to create lasting and truly impactful change in society.
Bloodwarm by Taylor Byas. Variant Literature, July 2021.
Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes is a graduate student in English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and resides in the Boston area. She has previously published a nonfiction essay in an anthology with Wising Up Press. When she is not reading, writing, or reviewing she can be found exploring Boston, spending time with family and friends and looking for inspiration for her next story in the world around her.
Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful Poetry by Rohan Chhetri Platypus Press, June 2022
Selected as the winner of The Kundiman Poetry Prize, Rohan Chhetri’s collection of poetry Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a travelogue of belonging. In parts a separation, a crossing of borders and landscapes, in others the sorrow and depths of home. But ultimately, this is the journey of weary travelers making ghosts of the night. Rohan Chhetri, a writer and translator, is the recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, and his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Revue Europe, AGNI, and New England Review and have been translated into Kurdish, Greek and French.
Adult Children: Being One, Having One & What Goes In-Between Nonfiction Edited by Heather Tosteson, Charles D. Brockett, Kerry Langan, and Michele Markarian Wising Up Press, January 2022
What defines adulthood nowadays? Or ever? In particular, when do we see our own children as adults? When they are older than we were at the age we had them? When they have children of their own? Are fully self-supporting? What about the prematurely adult children some of us were or tried to be — where have they gone? And the lost and needy children in us? Are they still active? When our parents are failing, what is an adult-to-adult relationship then? When we have been completely dependent on someone — or fully responsible for them — is full parity ever possible? Desirable? In this Wising Up Anthology, fifty writers explore—with zest, angst, humor, humility, anger, and love—through stories, poems, memoirs, and creative non-fiction, our constantly changing and, hopefully, maturing relationships with those we raised and those who raised us.
In 2016, THE COMMON began its relationship with the Arabic literary world when Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker and prominent Jordanian writer Hisham Bustani collaborated to publish a special issue devoted to contemporary Arabic fiction. THE COMMON now publishes annual Arabic portfolios of short fiction and visual art each spring. Palestine authors featured in this issue: Mahmoud Shukair, Samira Azzam, Suhail Matar, Abeer Khshiboon, Sheikha Hussein Helawy, Khaled Al-Jebour, Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud, Izzat Al-Ghazzawi, Ziad Khaddash, and Eyad Barghuthy. These stories are translated from Arabic to English by four celebrated translators: Ranya Abdel Rahman, Nashwa Gowanlock, Nariman Youssef, and Amika Fendi.
Issue 18 (Spring 2022) of Split Rock Review online literary magazine features Poetry (including audio recordings of authors reading works) by Ray Ball, Terry Belew, David M. Brunson, Christopher Buckley, Sarah Carey, Sarah Carleton, Karissa Carmona, Willa Carroll, Mark Caskie, Satya Dash, Scott Davidson, Angie Dribben, DJ Hills, Emily Kerlin, Charlene Langfur, Jed Myers, Sheree La Puma, George Perreault, Kimberly Ann Priest, Kiyoko Reidy, Dara-Lyn Shrager, Sarah Dickenson Snyder, Mistee St. Clair, James R. Swansbrough, Margo Taft Stever, Heather Truett, Connie Wieneke, Amanada Woodard; Nonfiction by Tim Bascom, Kathleen Melin, Art by Dagny Sellorin; Photography by Evan Fisher and Alexandre Nodopaka.
The May 2022 issue of Poetry Magazine begins with Guest Editor Srikanth Eddy’s final Editor’s Note, providing context for the theme “Make It Old,” with “old” being a “comparative measure.” The issue features “old” works in contemporary translations, and this is one time where the online version may rival the print publication. The print issue features English-only versions whereas online, readers can view the original text, the translation, and translators’ notes on their poems. Some works include “an avant-garde Brazilian poem from 1912, a Mayan creation myth, fragments of a pre-Socratic cosmology, the first circle of Dante’s Inferno stripped down to couplets, Medieval rune poems excavated after a fire in the harbor district of Bergen, Norway, a Nahuatl drinking song, a late Tang dynasty love letter, Osage talk, what might e the first Japanese tanka about baby diapers, and many more contributions.”
Winner of the Saturnalia Books Editor Prize, Stella Wong’s debut book of poems playfully subverts and willfully challenges any notions we might have about Asian Americanness and its niceties. While her previous chapbook stunned her admirers and adherents into an almost fawning incredulity, this outing eviscerates. More like getting struck with Chinese stars right between the eyes. TKO with a mean left hook to boot. And if you manage to get back up on your feet again, if your dare dance around in the haunted ring that American poetry is, be certain that this most un-model minority bard will teach you not to ever read the same way again.
In the chapbook The Ache and The Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson, the poet wonders “just what I can seize” while a “homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name / fills up every night.” Welcome to the rodeo of life: a “father plays evangelical AM in the garden… to keep the deer away,” a friend pours gasoline on a “noisy cricket… outside her window” and “the baby arrives but he is dead already.” Humans and animals are “desperate / for life” in towns named “Why” where “none of my questions / were answered: Why / did our son (apple-cheeked, blue-eyed, / four days shy / of due) / have to die?” Wilkinson’s poems explore “hidden bonds” and how not to lose one’s mind when the world is burning. These are poems with “the end of the world” in them. With “much sad truth to say” about “bodies that break, that bear each other, / that hold one another in dark places.” [Readers can download this e-book for free from the publisher’s website link below.]
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.
Depending on the reader, the title of Lawrence Raab’s tenth poetry collection, April at the Ruins, might evoke “the cruelest month” of Eliot’s The Waste Land or a postcard from a Henry James character on The Grand Tour. There are glimmers of each here — mixtures of memory and desire as well as travels both real and metaphorical. But more often we find Raab meditating on love and loss (and much besides) with his characteristic sense of gratitude, entire lives suggested by a precise detail or turn of phrase:
… and as they crossed the street she took his hand, just as if everything they hadn’t told each other had never happened. (“One of the Ways We Talk to Each Other”)
In “Little Ritual,” stones collected and then forgotten beside a lake become metaphysical emblems, the “zigzags of blue” in a “shiver of quartz” reminding the speaker “that some day everything / I love must be set aside, / or given away, or lost.” Amid the ruin we’ve made or witnessed of this world, Raab nonetheless celebrates an April of the spirit. “Nothing is beyond repair,” he writes. “How can there be a beautiful ending / without many beautiful mistakes?”
Reviewre bio: James Scruton is the author of two full collections and five chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Rules (Green Linden Press, 2019). He has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, among other honors.
Literary Citizen is Antioch University’s member-run MFA Creative Writing program podcast that explores the multi-faceted life of a writer in today’s literary community through insightful interviews with authors, editors, agents, and all of the people who help make writing happen. Antioch University’s MFA program is distinctive for its emphasis on literature, community service, and the pursuit of social justice. Featuring widely-published, award-winning faculty in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, young people, and literary translation, their program has distinguished itself through innovative features such as the MFA Field Study, the Art of Translation, and the Post-MFA Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing.
In their introduction to the Spring 2022 Vita Poetica Journal online literary magazine, Co-Editor Caroline Langston writes of the multitude of junctures and gaps of uncertainties in our daily lives and in the world around us. “Many of the writings in this edition of Vita Poetica seem calibrated to just this uncertain moment, and how to navigate the uncertainty seems to be the individual’s artistic task—which is then shared and multiplied with others.” Sharing with readers in this newest issue are works of Poetry by Samir Knego, Devon Balwit, Barbara Sabol, Peter Bankson, Libby Kurz, Ken Hines; Nonfiction by Ethan Ashkin Stanton, Heather Morton; Visual Art by Abigail Platter, Hang H. Lee; an Interview with Poet Libby Kurz in conversation with Emily Chambers Sharpe; and a Contemplative Practice – Zen Meditation, a YouTube video with Grace Phong which offers both instruction, insight, and guided practice. Cover Art: from Ophelia’s Baptism by Abigail Platter.
The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance Essays by Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker NewSouth Books, February 2022
In 1974 John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie. Pulitzer Prize-winning University of Southern Alabama Journalist-in-Residence Cynthia Tucker and Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator and University of Southern Alabama Writer in Residence Frye Gaillard carry Egerton’s thesis forward in The Southernization of America. They dive deeper, examining the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today, the racial backlash against President Obama, family separation on our southern border, the rise of the Christian right, the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capitol. They find hope in the South too, a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that might ultimately lead the nation on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and democracy under siege.
Publishing quarterly poetry, fiction, essays, and art online, the newest issue of Cumberland River Review features poetry by Michael Phillips, Anne Whitehouse, Eleanor Lerman, Adina Edelman, Angie Crea O’Neal, Lee Peterson, Michael Carrino, Steven Winn, Margaret Mackinnon, Cindy King, fiction by Allen Stein, and artwork by Michael Azgour. In her poem, “Cooks and Counterweights,” Eleanor Lerman asks, “So where are the adults who said they / would take over? Who were supposed / to face the future because sacrifices were made?” Visit the CRR website to find the answer.
Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, writer and performance artist Niki Tulk’s O explores the aftermath of sexual assault, unearthing myths, folklore, and profound truths about our collective history of violence, womanhood, and justice. Niki Tulk is an ex-pat Australian and experimental theatre-maker, improviser, writer, poet and author of Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming (Routledge, 2022).
New American Press has announced the 2022 New American Fiction Prize with a deadline of June 15. Weike Wang, author of Joan is Okay, will act as final judge. All full-length fiction manuscripts are welcome. Winner receives publication contract including $1,500, 25 copies, and promotional support. View their ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
Happy May! Hopefully spring is officially in progress where you live and the warmth is creeping back in. If you got too stuffed on tacos during Cinco de Mayo festivities, spend some time editing and submitting your work. Check out the where to submit opportunities featured on NewPages to help build up your submissions calendar.
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Plans for Sentences Poetry by Renee Gladman Wave Books, May 2022
“These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.” So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, readers are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.
On the Verge of Something Bright and Good by Derek Pollard is a collection of poems “not elegiac” but of “another kind of seeing that involves letting go.” That requires “a dream we hold to,” where “orange and quick” fish are held as “dear / … as headstones,” and a guiding question is: “How to love in the midst of tumult?” These poems are too humble and intelligent to answer conclusively. But slant. From a squad car that runs over a squirrel to a child whacked for dropping ice cream, these poems acknowledge the range of “advent, accident, / celebration” in our lives together where either “we take up arms” — “The war / Is a war we all fight, and is near” — or we open our arms to “our / Life together / Quiet / Aimless / And full.” There is love in these poems. Love of life and others. And, love of language: a “ricocheting” “hallelujah” “Heaven” of sound and meaning unabashedly riots throughout — “What care for shame? In any of this?” Lovingly the poems share with the tender reader “the holy / Moment this moment.” Reading this book, “To be sitting / Here, the two of us”: “It felt good. And sad, of course. But mostly just good.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.
NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Books” tag under “Popular Topics.”
Poetry A Peculiar People, Steven Willis, Button Poetry And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, Lynn Xu, Wave Books Anthropocene Lullaby, K. A. Hays, Carnegie Mellon University Press Bassinet, Dan Rosenberg, Carnegie Mellon University Press Bath, Jen Silverman, Driftwood Press Behind the Tree Backs, Iman Mohammed, Ugly Duckling Presse Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine, Nick Francis Potter, Driftwood Press Copy, Dolores Dorantes, Wave Books Green Regalia, Adam Tavel, Stephen F. Austen State University Press Greyhound Americans, Moncho Ollin Alvarado Harsh Realm: My 1990s, Daniel Nester, Indolent Books Idle Fancies, Joseph Hart, Cyberwit.net Indian Poems, Joseph Hart, Kelsay Books
One Person Holds So Much Silence Poetry by David Greenspan Driftwood Press, March 2022
Chosen as one of three manuscripts for publication from their 2020 poetry collection reading, Greenspan’s work explores the intersection of physical and emotional traumas and was selected for its “surprising, jaw-dropping language from poem to poem.” Simultaneously lush and bizarre, the poems culminate in a striking deep dive into the pain and experiences of existing within a body. From self-harm to suicidal ideation, Greenspan tackles these topics through writing brimming with original language and wrought empathy. David Greenspan is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst.
