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!
Discover the latest issue of Amsterdam Review with poetry, translations, interviews, and visual arts by local and international artists. Featuring an exclusive interview of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and works by Rae Armantrout, Laynie Browne, Marin Sorescu, Jocelyn Ulevicus, Paul Cunningham, Ruth Lasters, and many more. View our flyer and visit our website for more information.
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Application Deadline: December 10, 2023 Our Winter Online Workshops offer participants a unique opportunity to learn from three faculty members in the same genre over six weeks. Workshops meet every Saturday 2:00–4:00 pm ET starting January 20, 2024 (no meeting on February 10). Workshops are generative, with a focus on creating new work. Visit our website and view our flyer for more information and to apply.
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Poets & Writers Magazine is happy to offer NewPages readers an exclusive offer. You’re invited to subscribe to Poets & Writers Magazine at our guaranteed lowest rate. For only $9.95 (a 79% discount off our cover price), you’ll gain access to the magazine that informs, connects, and inspires the literary community. Every issue is for the serious writer, and reader, like you. Subscribe now.
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Deadline: November 30, 2023 We want to see your work! Fiction, creative nonfiction up to 1000 words, three poems, and art and photography. Our mission is to explore the edges of things, to find the hidden cracks that let the light shine through. We publish quarterly and are a paying market. Have you got something for us? We can’t wait to see it! Submissions open November 1.
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Application deadline: December 15 (priority); January 15 (final) UNC Greensboro’s MFA is a two-year residency program offering fully funded assistantships with stipends. Students work closely with faculty in one-on-one tutorials, developing their craft in a lifelong community of writers. UNCG offers courses in poetry, fiction, publishing, and creative nonfiction, plus teaching opportunities and editorial work for The Greensboro Review. Note our 12/15 priority consideration deadline! Visit our website and view our flyer for more information.
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Deadline: December 1, 2023 Dorianne Laux will judge. Prizes: $1,500 & publication (winner); $500 & publication (honorable mention). All finalists will be published in the 2024 Spring/Summer Awards issue. Submit up to 3 poems per entry. $20 entry fee includes a copy of the awards issue. Submit October 1 to December 1, 2023. For complete guidelines please visit our website and view our flyer.
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“A tender, transformative novel for all who sometimes feel they don’t fit in, for anyone who’s ever been struck down by scamming or bullying, and for anyone who ever suffers profound pangs of loss—you will never forget this terrific story.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States 2019 – 2021
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Deadline: December 31 The Tartt First Fiction Award is in its nineteenth year. The award is open to any American writer who has not yet had a book of stories published. Publication and one thousand dollars awarded. View flyer or visit our website for more information.
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In Meltwater, Claire Wahmanholm buoys her poems between the loss of a child and glacial ice melt, between “wail / and wishing.” Her poems read like a glossary of “every passing catastrophe,” acknowledging that everything is “made of / vanishing.” And, the poet is “living,” “alive / to notice,” asking, What are the implications of artistic fertility and motherhood when we are killing Earth? Perhaps because the “clock is about to start,” poetic form and sequence are important aspects of Meltwater. In the abecedary poems “O,” “M,” “P,” and “XYZ,” there is an alliterative and assonating accumulation “between mist and milk.” In opposition, words melt “white letters of dread invisible against / their surface of snow” in the eight erasures entitled “Meltwater.” In another series that makes use of variations of the statement “Everything Will Try to Kill You,” Wahmanholm invokes Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me.” In her poem, Clifton asserts “something has tried to kill me / and has failed,” but Wahmanholm admits she has “no plan to keep the chemicals separate / from the lake, the acid separate from the rain, the bird from the glass.” A series of four other poems entitled “Glacier” recounts visiting “the bright blue undersides turning over and over in the bay,” which “sounds like a metaphor but isn’t.” Wahmanholm is “talking about water.” The glacial ice melt and sea level rise that will flood coastal areas. Unlike other writers who write about climate crises, I get the feeling Wahmanholm does not write to either avert or despite disaster. Wahmanholm writes “to be ready for whatever [is] left of the world” and what “we suffer the empty universe for.”
Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm. Milkweed Editions, March 2023.
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 appear.
42 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! NewPages is back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities just in time for some bad weather rolling in, so the perfect excuse to keep you indoors and accomplishing those submission goals. Plus, you’ll find even more opportunities and goodies in our November 2023 eLitPak Newsletter!
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
The prose poems in How To by Heather Cadsby are hilarious, and their titles are satisfying enough, let alone the bodies of the poems. Some examples: “How to catch flamboyant bohemians,” “How to tell if it’s different,” and “How to look at a broken fountain.” Each one offers its own non-advice and leads me to hunger for more.
I love how Cadsby plays with expectations. These poems offer surprises that are language-based without being frustrating to read. They are LOL poems, as in this line from “How to know if your venn diagram is pentimento”:
Golf is geometry as is burlesque.
These are funny and my mind creates illustrations or comic images to go with them as I read. I am challenged by this as a reader and also immensely entertained. Not a lot of poetry is funny. Many times, when poets try to be funny, they start rhyming or sound like Dean Young imitators (even though that is a good thing). Thank goodness to have read Cadsby’s inventions, I say to myself, wondering how I will manage to set this book down and get my mind back.
How To by Heather Cadsby. above/ground press, September 2023.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
The Louisville Review’s Summer 2023 issue Number 93 features Alfred Conteh’s painting Aaron on the cover image and an essay about the work contributed by Alice Gray Stites. Poems by Rosa Nevadovska (1890-1971) open this issue, both in the original Yiddish text—a first for TLR—and in English translation by Merle L. Bachman. This issue offers a wide range of voices and subjects engaged: from an exploration of the too-often-hidden contributions of Black distillers of Kentucky bourbon, in Kentucky Poet Laureate Frank X Walker’s poem, “Masta d’ Steala” to a speculative view of a not-so-distant future deeply impacted by climate catastrophe in J. D. Strunk’s short story “Tokyo, 2031,” to an assertion of reliance and vibrance in advanced age in Alice Bingham Gorman’s poem, “The House of Eighty”—plus much more!
High Lonesome: Poems by Allison Titus Saturnalia Books, October 2023
High Lonesome by Allison Titus is a radio left on in a candlelit room, playing softly into the shadows as the hours fall through the evening. Interruptions of static, a slow confetti of grief drifting into the corners, mysterious white noise dispatches. Here is a meditation on estrangement—from an other, from the world, from the self—and its long aftermath spent learning how to cultivate tenderness and devotion in a world “where nobody / is tender enough,” a practice that alternates between sorrow and transcendence. These poems are little ceremonies of attention to a variety of lonelinesses, both human and non-human.
White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link’s collection of short stories, draws from Grimm’s fairy tales and uses them as inspiration for new stories. Some of those new stories are quite contemporary, while some read very much like the fairy tales that inspire her—most are a mix of that feeling. For example, the final story, “Skinder’s Veil” is based on “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” but it tells the story of Andy, a graduate student who hasn’t been working on his dissertation. A friend from graduate school offers him a three-week housesitting job at a rural home in Vermont. There are rules, though, in that he must welcome anybody who comes to the back door, but not the front door, including Skinder himself (who seems to be Death, but that isn’t clear). As in fairy tales, Link purposefully omits important information, leaving it to the reader to decide who some characters are or what particular events or places mean. In “The White Road” (based on “The Musicians of Bremen”), for example, the white road seems to be some portal to another place, but it could also simply be the evil that exists within each of us. Though Link has modernized some of the settings and plots from Grimm’s collection of tales, humanity never seems to change.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
South Dakota Review is delighted to wrap up Volume 57 with a marvelous roster of authors! Volume 57, Number 4 includes poetry by Craig Blais, Maggie Bowyer, Lawdenmarc Decamora, Deidra Suwanee Dees, Aidan Dolbashian, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Joanna Doxey, Kristin Entler, Kennedy Amenya Gisege, Korey Hurni, Evan J. Massey, King Tina, Sara Moore Wagner, Terin Weinberg, Kenton K. Yee, and Hafsa Zulfiqar; fiction by Ryan Burruss and Noah Pohl; creative nonfiction by Alyse Bensel, Anna Oberg, Emily Stedge, Caroline Sutton, and Natasha Williams; and a scholarly essay by Joanna Acevedo. Issues can be ordered here.
The Common‘s annual postcard auction opens for bidding on Monday, November 13. If you aren’t familiar, it’s an annual fundraiser where you can bid to receive a postcard from your favorite author. This year’s list of 40+ authors includes folks like Anthony Doerr, Gina Chung, Sandra Cisneros, David Sedaris, Rick Russo, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Anne Tyle, Alison Bechdel, Julia Alvarez, and Rabih Alameddine just to name a few. Authors always put a lot of their creative energy into writing (and drawing!) these, and they’re always completed by the holidays if you want to buy one as a gift for someone. Bidding closes at noon EST on December 4, 2023.
The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones Rose Metal Press, October 2023
In The Hurricane Book, Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones pieces together the story of her family and Puerto Rico using a captivating combination of historical facts, poems, maps, overheard conversations, and flash essays. Organized around six hurricanes that passed through the island with varying degrees of intensity between 1928 and 2017, The Hurricane Book documents the myriad ways in which colonialism—particularly the relationship between the United States and the island—has seeped into the lives of Puerto Ricans, affecting how they and their land recover from catastrophe, as well as how families and citizens are bound to one another. Through accounts of relatives, folklore, and necessary escape, Acevedo-Quiñones illuminates both the tenderness and heartbreak of bonds with family and homeland.
Set in 1898, Chris McGinley’s rural noir saga Once These Hills introduces the reader to life in eastern Kentucky on Black Boar Mountain, a world relatively untouched by modernization. Gaining momentum quickly, this story follows protagonist Lydia King, then aged 10, as she navigates life in a world that favors only the few. By championing strong female characters throughout the book, McGinley emphasizes the hardships of life in the early part of the twentieth century in rural Appalachia and how survival truly was reserved for the fittest.
As life starts to change on Black Boar Mountain, McGinley explores the relationship between big business and politics where the arrival of the Railway Company and its single-minded pursuit of advancement serves as a brilliant metaphor for our North American history of colonialism and capitalism. Through its insightful and nuanced dialogue and well-paced storyline, McGinley highlights the relationships between power, influence, and affluence, and how modernization often leaves some behind. In Once These Hills, McGinley has created a full-circle story with well-developed, three-dimensional characters, wrapping them up in a saga that successfully reminds us of the inevitability of the future; it is coming, and McGinley wants us to be prepared.
Reviewer Bio: Ashley Holloway gets bored easily, so she lives her life according to an ‘&.’ She teaches healthcare leadership in Calgary, AB, and is a nurse with a Master of Public Health, a graduate diploma in Global Leadership, with further studies in intercultural communication and international development. She writes in a variety of genres with work appearing across Canada and the US and has co-authored three books. Ashley is an editor for Unleash Press and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She also really loves punctuation.
Uncollected Later Poems (1968-1979) by Ernst Meister Translated by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick Wave Books, November 2023
In these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity. Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence (2015), In Time’s Rift (2012), and Wallless Space (2014) —provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities.
Cutting the Stems by Virginie Lalucq Saturnalia Books, October 2023
Translated from the French, Cutting the Stems by Virginie Lalucq is a playful, long poem in sections that contains a pastiche of various unlikely influences: manuals on gardening and plant propagation, etymological dictionaries, gemstone and mineral guides, a how-to for florists, and other “un-poetic” texts. Lalucq’s poem incorporates word play, linguistic borrowings, and etymological references, and McQuerry and Bourhis’s translation captures, and, at times, reinvents, that word play for an English audience. Translated by Claire McQuerry and Céline Bourhis.
For nearly two decades, Broadsided Press has released monthly collaborations of poetry and artwork for readers to enjoy and share by posting far and wide. This Fall 2023 marks the launch of their biannual folio, bringing together multiple collaborations, lesson plans for teachers to use in their classrooms, and book reviews. Each collaborative work is published alongside a conversation between the artist and the writer – perfect for teachers and students of the craft. The Fall 2023 issue features eight collaborations: Poet Darren Demaree/Artist David Bernardy; Poet Alica Mteuzi/Artist Donna R. Charging; Poet Michelle Whitstone/Artist Regin Igloria; Poet Rose Strode/Artist JoAnne McFarland; Poet Nicelle Davis/Artist Michele L’Heureux; Poet Rajiv Mohibir/Artist Janice Redman; Poet Geffrey Davis/Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata; and Poet Tomas Nieto/Artist Kevin Morrow. Visit Broadsided today, and download these gorgeous broadsides to enjoy and post around your community.
43 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Does your state practice Daylight Savings Time? It can definitely throw off your routines and schedules, can’t it? Speaking of schedules, NewPages is back again this Friday with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities to help you out.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
I love seeing the various styles/forms of poems in Hood Vacations by Michal “MJ” Jones and the way they’re never the same from one to the next. This variety shows hard work and willingness to bend. I especially admire how one moment we could be skirting Nate Mackey’s style in Double Trio, and then the next poem is like a small concentration in the mode of Tom Clark. Filled with backslashes, “Turnstiles” is a one-stanza poem about the author’s young son. It is interesting to see how the use of this punctuation flips readers through Jones’ narrative in the poem:
Societal and racial violence, family issues, birth, identity, and travel to hot springs are topics Jones makes fascinating through restrained telling that turns wild, full of expletives and eroticism. I appreciate that there are longer poems here. “Channelings” is seven pages long, in seven sections, so it is a pleasure to read in such a sensible layout and such a relief to see and read a poem this way. Hood Vacations is a break with something to show for, something to keep us there. Exquisite!
Hood Vacations by Michal ‘MJ’ Jones. Black Lawrence Press, January 2023.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
Rita Bouvier invokes Linda Hogan’s belief from The Radiant Lives of Animals (Beacon Press, 2020): “The cure of susto, soul sickness, is not found in books.” And yet this Métis writer gives readers a beautiful rebellion, a book “carrying ancestral memories of the land,” and “adding to the story / like old times around the fire / giving thanks always giving thanks.” The ethos here: “as long as we have more to enjoy / than another we have responsibility / to lift each other again / and again.” In odes, elegies, “call it prayer if you want” or “an invocation for the sick and the dying,” Bouvier’s are poems that both “ponder the murky waters of truth and reconciliation” and “the massive weight of colonial history” as well as celebrate the “new greening of spring” and praise her “relative’s warm hands,” “crying out / marrsî my relatives!” As Bouvier strives “to wash away the pain and sorrow / as right renewal,” “her questions are very simple / who counts? what counts?” Bouvier suggests that to find answers, we must “look beyond ourselves to others / human and non-human / with whom we share this marbled blue and green planet.” With “wild rose” and “the scent of sage enveloping” in a beautiful rebellion, Rita Bouvier offers readers “a gift of renewal / / understanding that language is the sinew / connecting us to a life force” and “when we tire… / … / a bed of mustard-yellow dandelions.”
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 appear.
The November 2023 issue of The Lake online journal of poetry and poetics is now online featuring Fizza Abbas, Ken Anderson, Maria Berardi, Jennifer Blackledge, Clive Donovan, Matt Gilbert, Elizabeth Goodall, Maren O. Mitchell, Ronald Moran, Jason Ryberg, and Fiona Sinclair. Reviewers offer their take on Rachael Carney’s Octopus Mind, Frances Sackett’s, House with the Mansard Roof, and Charles Rammelkamp’s Transcendence. “One Poem Reviews” offers readers one poem from a newly minted collection, with works this month from Lorrain Caputo, Diane Elayne Dees, Kris Falcon, and Sarah Leavesley.
The title of Carlos Soto-Román’s 11 evokes the “other” September 11: Chile’s September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile. The poetry in this book adopts the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the language emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto-Román’s work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory. How does censorship translate into another language when translation already involves so many degrees of selective removal? This collaborative version in English, taken on by eight translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma, and politics.
Consequences. AGNI 98 fronts the world as we find it, parsing enigmas and celebrating the drive to engage necessary truths. This newest issue includes essays by Mara Naselli and Peter Balakian that take on misogyny and cultural suppression while poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Rochelle Hurt, jason b. crawford, and Sharon Olds probe the surprising energies of duress. Stories by Lucy Sweeney Byrne and Mylene Fernández Pintado (in Dick Cluster’s translation) test commitments to decisions made. Cover artist Eva Lundsager sets the tone, finding motion in landscapes at the edge.
I am the dead, who, you take care of me by Anthony McCann Wave Books, November 2023
The poems in Anthony McCann’s I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead. Following the poet’s recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is “a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat.” By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. “I want life—but for the living” he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these works ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.
The Main Street Rag Fall 2023 issue, in keeping with the long-standing tradition of hosting interviews to open the magazine, invites readers to enjoy Editor M. Scott Douglass (& friends) in conversation with Minion TRUNION – who is also featured on the cover and whose origin story is provided in the “Welcome Readers” intro. After that good laugh (or maybe cry), readers can go on to enjoy “Stories & Such” bySydney Lea, Kevin Brown, Maria Hardin, Burt Rashbaum, Michael Pikna, Michael Sadoff, Bill Spencer, Richard Widerkehr, Kevin Winchester, Marie Gray Wise, and Poetry by M. J. Arcangelini, Joe Barca, Jane Blanchard, Ace Boggess, Alan Catlin, Deborah H. Doolittle, Mirana Comstock, Paula Brancato, Casey Killingsworth, Carol Levin, Kevin McDaniel, Richard Merelman, Yvonne Morris, Richard Thomas Murray, R. Nikolas Macioci, Charles Rammelkamp, Kevin Ridgeway, Russell Rowland, Maeve Stemp, Jane M. Wiseman, Richard Weaver, Liza Wolff-Francis, and many more.
Heating the Outdoors, an intimate lyric written by Marie-Andrée Gill and tenderly translated from the French by Kristen Renee Miller, is a “love story like all others.” As a result, the poems balance precariously between “simple happiness” and “storm damage.” More pointedly, Gill writes: “love is a virgin forest / then a clear cut.” The reader enters at the “clear cut,” then follows Gill through three phases of her love story as she experiences break-up, objectivity, and rebound. Throughout the collection, there is the feeling that Gill is “writing to survive” after “turbulent intimacy.” Despite the colonization of her heart, there is “something” in her that “keeps a lamp on”; something beseeches “where do I even begin to switch off my hopes”? It may be hope that prevents acceptance and leads to the repetition of “old dramas” and “sex bombs reigniting” once again. The poems do not provide an easy answer, but they do reflect how the constant battle for a woman’s sanity and autonomy inside a love relationship is analogous to skating on thin ice. In Heating the Outdoors, Gill determines that the woman not “end up in an asylum,” but instead “seeking [her] place somewhere out on the trail” in the boreal forest. “Outside is the only answer I found inside,” she writes. Turning toward a new intimate, nature’s “aspen,” “elk,” “bright paths of snowflakes,” Gill, an Ilnu and Québécoise woman, begins to “feel worthy of its / voice” and her own.
Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill translated by Kristen Renee Miller. Book*hug Press, March 2023.
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 appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/
DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach Elixir Press, January 2023
DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach won the 2022 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. As contest judge Candice Reffe describes the book, these dazzling prose poems are a portal into “a realm where some great secret is to be divulged, the gate to what’s been sought but never found briefly ajar.” Enter. Details of ordinary life—the scraping of a spoon, the “fat blue mailbox bolted to a sidewalk”—shimmer like auras the poet reads in the world around us. Part observation, part divination, the poems send messages in invisible ink that appear when you tip them to the sun, the dispatch you’ve been waiting for.
Two-time Lambda Literary fellow and co-editor of The Common‘s Issue 26 Miguel M. Morales offers these words to consider as we head into a season of feasting and celebration: “our farmworking hands helped harvest the feast.” The Common is a Whiting Award-winning literary magazine based out of Amherst College, and their latest issue features a portfolio of work from Latinx farmworkers, exploring issues of labor, immigration, identity, and “the farming culture that once coursed through the valley where Amherst is now located,” as David Applefield fellow Sam Spratford writes in the magazine’s opening essay. Issue 26 also features a new translated story from O. Henry Prize-winner Amar Mitra, a haunting essay about coming of age in 1990s Yugoslavia, and a poem from Whiting Award-winner Rickey Laurentiis, “Tall Lyric for Palestine (Or, The Harder Thinking).”
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
deLuge online literary arts journal is devoted to the creativity that arises from dreams and the deeply felt/experienced life. The Summer 2023 issue cover art is by Eric Lunde (Old Early Script), whose work is also featured inside along with other asemic and vispo contributors.
Fall 2023 The Elevation Review, “Black as the Ocean,” celebrates poets of color, exploring contemporary verse “that resonates like waves, powerful and unrelenting.”
The Twin Bill quarterly online literary journal dedicated to baseball features the work of Sam Williams on the cover of their newest issue, (lucky) Issue 13.
There must be an angst category in poetry called urban angst poetry when you realize you live in a city but have been feeling and acting like you are in the countryside. Maybe that’s not the case, here, exactly. More like pandemic angst, which the entire planet can relate to. rob mclennan’s Alta Vista Improvements is a place where such a realization occurs and is one of above/ground press’ unique pamphlets churned out in Canada. Here are a few lines in the titular poem in Section 5, which I loved reading:
[. . . ] this through-line of patchwork housing, outcrop. A craft
of optimism, ignorance. The internet equally bears each alphabet.
This is delicious writing! mclennan highlights the loss of the family goldfish through multiple fish, multiple losses; something is wrong in the picture of domesticity. What is it? We don’t exactly find out, yet travel the off-road territory with mclennan and enjoy every moment. In “Summer, pandemic,” as he waits for us in the car, his loyalty goes above and beyond to the complicated:
[. . . ] I perch in precooked car awaiting our cat, in his follow up appointment to recent dental extraction [. . . ]
Will life get itself all sorted out? In The Alta Vista Improvements, we sit and ponder (and hope) in all the wreckage.
Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).
The Engineers: Poems by Katy Lederer Saturnalia Books, October 2023
In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers, Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is “the self”? What is “the other”? And how to reproduce “one’s self”? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body—or poem—malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body—or poem—attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral “we,” the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world.
Ascent of the Mothers by Noelle Kocot Wave Books, November 2023
Ascent of the Mothers, Noelle Kocot’s ninth collection, is a sagacious testament to the ways in which poetry can shape personhood. “I am nothing” they write, “Or else I have made myself / Too big for words.” The scope of this book is marked by Kocot’s psychic journey punctuated by a near-fatal car crash, which elicited a new understanding of their spirituality and gender nonconforming identity. Generous, self-aware, and resilient, Ascent of the Mothers is a treasure to behold and be shared.
2024… Your Year of More is your go-to book to set goals and mindfully invest your efforts. It appeals to adults of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds who wish to improve their lives. Its pages are packed with something special for everyone.
The pages contain practical ideas from A to Z, thought-provoking questions, and self-reflective exercises that inspire you to live your best life.
The book is an ideal companion during your moments of solitude. You can read it in the early morning before the rest of the world wakes up or during the evenings after a long day. You may also find it enjoyable while writing in your journal or taking a lunch break.
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45 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
It’s officially November which means, for my grandfather at least, that deer season will be upon us shortly. If you have a hunter in the family and will finally get some unadulterated time off from your responsibilities to write, NewPages has you covered with a host of new submission opportunities.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice—the latest book from award-winning Pittsburgh author Lori Jakiela—is much more than a cancer memoir. It’s a pause between polarities. Cancer is almost an afterthought. Inspired by Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, it celebrates the tiny moments that make up a time capsule of a life.
A weirdly funny book about mortality, Rice is also about family, genetics, nature vs. nurture, the Rust Belt, EPA clean-up zones, emotional support peacocks, box turtles, Emily Dickinson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Andy Warhol(a), and so much more. A fresh voice aligned with the work of classic stream-of-consciousness writers like Richard Brautigan and Virginia Woolf, Jakiela explores the way a mind works—complete with leaps and spirals—while reflecting on a life thoroughly lived against a dire breast cancer diagnosis.
Half new and selected essays, half spiraling memoir, Rice is experimental in both voice and form, and offers a fresh approach to age-old questions about life, love, mortality, and the fine art of living, even so.
A Sky of Paper Stars by Susie Yi is both satisfyingly predictable and enticingly surprising. The story centers on middle-schooler Yuna and her attempt to detach from her Korean identity and fit in among her American schoolmates. Not finding the acceptance she craves, Yuna wishes to return to Korea, a place she left when she was just a baby and visited infrequently.
Memories of her halmoni (grandmother) and the stories her mother tells her about growing up there make Yuna believe she would be better off living in Korea. She makes the dreaded wish to return as she folds her 1000th tiny origami star and blames herself when news comes of her halmoni’s death. Burdened with the guilt that she has brought this untimely end, Yuna’s hand seems to turn to paper. Yuna travels to the funeral in Korea where she meets family she cannot even remember and who share memories of their halmoni that Yuna has no part in, causing her to feel even more isolated. As the shame over her wish grows, the transformation of her body to paper begins to creep up her arm. The only remedy, Yuna decides, is to complete an unfinished jar of paper stars her grandmother began folding. Once she reaches 1000, Yuna believes her wish will be reversed, and her halmoni will be restored.
Flashbacks in the novel shift from full-color images to blue or sepia tones, while the remaining present-day images throughout use deep, rich hues and dark brown rather than black linework to create a warmer overall tonality to the story. There are beautifully rendered full bleed pages to represent dream/surreal/imagination (I could envision a whole wordless book of these works by Yi). It’s these more fantastical elements of the story that help connect three generations of women and set the final emotional tone of the novel. The ending is heartwarming and surprising, enticing the reader to close the book and start all over again.
In Wellness, Nathan Hill has written a novel that is of its time, while still being timeless. In exploring the particularly American obsession with wellness and improvement, what he is really excavating is the power and peril of stories. His second novel follows Jack and Elizabeth, a couple who fell in love at first sight in 1993, and who are negotiating their marriage after just over two decades of being together. They tell themselves stories about their marriage, as well as their childhoods, hoping to make sense of their lives. Hill weaves minor characters’ stories in, as well: Jack’s father becomes obsessed with conspiracy theories; Elizabeth’s friend Brandie hosts a group that believes one can manifest happiness by speaking it into the universe; and Kate and Kyle, a couple who find meaning through polyamory and a critique of monogamy. While Hill satirizes each of these characters—and more, especially the postmodern cultural conversation in academia in the 1990s, one of the most humorous sections of the novel—he also understands why they (and we) need stories at all. When Elizabeth seems ready to turn to nihilism, wondering if anything is real, her mentor tells her, “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty.” That’s good advice for our divided country and world, now and anytime anyone might pick up this novel.
Wellness by Nathan Hill. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2023.
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. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
The Keeping Room is an online magazine from Minerva Rising Press that publishes short stories, essays, free writing, and photo essays that touch on topics related to Women’s Wisdom, Lessons Learned, Self-care, Bodies, Relationships, and Community. Writers selected for publication will be paid $25 via PayPal. Recent works include “The Unfurling Frond” a review by Colleen Lutz Clemen, “Her Longing & His Loneliness” creative nonfiction by L Grace G, “A TALL GLASS OF LEMONADE ON A HOT DAY” fiction by Cindy Knoebel.
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought Fall 2023 issue features a wide range of essays to pique reader’s interests: “Outbreak Communication: Exploring the Relationships between Health Information Seeking Behaviors, Vested Interests, and COVID-19 Knowledge in U.S. Midwest Populations,” “Emblematics Related to Émilie du Châtelet: Voltaire’s Mistress, Muse, and More,” “A Contemporary Overview of Dyslexia,” “‘Façades for Emptiness’: Jim Thompson’s The Nothing Man,” “The Therapeutic Role of Animals in Health Care: From Before Florence Nightingale to Current Practice,” and “Homo Athletica to Homo Digitalis: Esports as Sport.” This along with poems by Allison Blevins, Paul Dickey, Rob Hardy, Marianne Kunkel, David Lee, and Chad Weeden fill the pages to challenge and entertain. Cover photo by Saketh Garuda.
This anthology collects the ten winners of the 2022 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. First place winner: Jason Fagone, “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.,” about one man’s attempt to still communicate with his dead fiancée (San Francisco Chronicle). Second place: Jenna Russell, Penelope Overton, and David Abel, “The Lobster Trap” (The Boston Globe and Portland Press Herald). Third place: Jada Yuan, “Discovering Dr. Wu” (The Washington Post). Runners-up include works by Lane DeGregory, Christopher Goffard, Evan Allen, Mark Johnson, Annie Gowen, Peter Jamison, and Douglas Perry.
The JAB Anthology edited by Johanna Drucker & Brad Freeman University of Iowa Press, October 2023
The Journal of Artists’ Books: Selections from the Journal of Artists’ Books, 1994–2020 contains some of the best critical writing on artists’ books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists’ books from multiple perspectives. The JAB Anthology contains contributions by many renowned figures in the field including Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Janet Zweig, Monica Carroll, Adam Dickerson, Alisa Scudamore, Mary Jo Pauly, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Gerrit Jan de Rook, Océane Delleaux, Brandon Graham, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Ward Tietz, Paulo Silveira, Philip Cabau, Leszek Brogowski, Lyn Ashby, Tim Mosely, Debra Parr, Pedro Moura, Levi Sherman, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Isabel Baraona, and the editors.
In A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, Erin Noteboom positions readers on the fine line between the “sting and sweetness” of “lives in depth and distance.” This is a poet interested in demarcations and definitions, where memory meets metaphor, perspective meets specifics, and recombination implies structure. The poet repeatedly flips a coin, showing readers one side, then the other, revealing the enigma where one concept begins and another ends. Within the poems, the mysteriously undefinable is proximal to the scientifically discoverable. Wilhelm Röntgen, who developed X-rays, and Marie Curie, who discovered radium and polonium, are among the scientists Noteboom’s poems present to readers. The poems, like these scientists, are focused on the interplay between light, shadow, and darkness that permits new, profound, and various forms of seeing, as “the eye is lighthouse.” Such a quest for “the sensation of light” and the “struggle for another label” inevitably has a cost. “For such a cost, there must be benefit / that is the equation of science,” writes Noteboom, who determines as a writer, “I want to use my life up / like a pencil. I want to eat stone and leave behind / the shell of a word I live inside, / something open.” Noteboom’s poetry examines “the cost / of the beauty. The beauty of the cost.” The poems mark readers with their exploration of science’s brilliance, life’s radiance, and what it is “to write at the end of the world.”
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 appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 26th issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 125,000 readers in 145 countries and over 800 contributors already know; the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
World Literature Today November 2023 is bursting at the seams with lively culture essays, book reviews, poetry, creative nonfiction, interviews, and fiction. This issue features a cover story devoted to four artists of Iraqi descent who are achieving global recognition. Other highlights include Karlos K. Hill interviewing Cornel West about his embrace of prophetic witness; Adnan Mahmutović recalling an unforgettable Hajj; and Veronica Esposito pondering the characters of the schlemiel and schlimazel in her latest “Untranslatable” column. With 80 pages of vibrant content, WLT’s latest issue remains your indispensable guide to the best in international literature and culture.
“Little magazines, which still operate in the interstices of a mostly commercialized, capitalized, and urban-centered literary marketplace, invite readers to unthink what they know and to broaden their ideas of what an international Republic of Letters might look like.” ~ Daniel Simon, WLT Assistant Director & Editor in Chief
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
Cycles and Cyclones (2017) mixed media (burlap, dye, wire) by Nnenna Okore is the colorful cover of Prairie Schooner‘s Winter 2022 issue.
There’s so much to appreciate about Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Journal from Britain, the Autumn 2023 cover artist Maxwell Doig’s, “Southwold Rooftops II,” acrylic on canvas on panel, is the perfect invitation.
Of course, at least one Halloween-themed cover would be nice, and that honor goes to The Deadlands, a monthly online zine about death. Cover image by inkshark.
Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg Translated by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023
Mirta Rosenberg (1951-2019) is a key poet of the ’80s generation in Argentina. In Interior Landscape, Rosenberg explores questions of life and death, of changes experienced in one’s body through time and the resulting changes in perspective. These poems contemplate the dislocation of the self, posing questions about the relationship between subjectivity, perception, the body, and memory. Rosenberg’s voice is at once autobiographical and critical, displaying the interior landscapes of its experience as well as the complex ways that language forms a fundamental part of that experience. Originally published in Spanish in Argentina in 2012, Interior Landscape is the first book-length translation of Rosenberg’s poetry to be published in English.
