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!
“Self-portrait” is the theme of Still Point Arts Quarterly Winter 2024, featuring art and photography, fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. Widely praised for its rich and valuable content and splendid presentation, Still Point Arts Quarterly from Shanti Arts is intended for artists, writers, nature lovers, seekers, and enthusiasts of all types. Current and past copies may be downloaded for free from the publication’s website and print copies are available for individual purchase as well as by subscription.
Contributors to the Winter 2024 issue include Marcia Yudkin, Dave Donelson, Diana Woodcock, Jeri Griffith, Elizabeth Rose, Mark Mathew Braunstein, Elise Chadwick, Ella Vilozny, Lorraine Jeffery, Karly Van Vliet, Karen Elias, Jiana Cipriano, Rosalyn Kliot, Wendy Lou Schmidt, and Judith Skillman.
Meet Me at the Library: A Place to Foster Social Connection and Promote Democracy by Shamichael Hallman Island Press, October 2024
Libraries have a unique opportunity to bridge socioeconomic divides and rebuild trust. But in order to do so, they must be truly welcoming to all. They and their communities must work collaboratively to bridge socioeconomic divides through innovative and productive partnerships.
Shamichael Hallman argues that the public library may be our best hope for bridging divides and creating strong, inclusive communities. While public libraries have long been thought of as a place for a select few, increasingly they are playing an essential role in building social cohesion, promoting civic renewal, and advancing the ideals of a healthy democracy. Many are reimagining themselves in new and innovative ways, actively reaching out to the communities they serve. Today, libraries are becoming essential institutions for repairing society.
Drawing from his experience at the Memphis Public Library and his extensive research and interviews across the country, Hallman presents a rich argument for seeing libraries as one of the nation’s greatest assets. As an institution that is increasingly under attack for creating a place where diverse audiences can see themselves, public libraries are under more scrutiny than ever. Meet Me at the Library offers a revealing look at one of our most important civic institutions and the social and civic impact they must play if we are to heal our divided nation.
This newest double issue of Cimarron Review (221 & 222) offers readers fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with a wide-ranging aesthetic, favoring the bold and ruminative, the sensitive and shocking, imaginative and truth-telling. Contributors include Eryn Green, H. Thao Nguyen, Ash Good, Michael Mark, Tara A. Elliott, Angela Ball, Lydia T. Liu, Nicole Melanson, Cecil Morris, Sergio Reyes, Jane E. Martin, Bergita Bugarija, Ashira Shirali, Ben Walter, Richard Sonnenmoser, Divya Mehrish, and many more. Cover art: “State Forest Campground” by Michelle Disler.
Edited by Emma Jeffrey, ti-TCR 20: On Collective Care is a special issue of The Capilano Review that examines the potential of art and writing to expand our capacity for empathy and care on a collective scale, and to activate tangible forms of community-building. Why write poetry during the apocalypse, if not for the hope of a kinder world?
The issue includes contributions by Kristin Bjornerud, Leah CL, Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal, Mark Foss, Christina Hajjar, Amanda Hiland, Penn Kemp, Alysha Mohamed, Dora Prieto, Belén Rios Sialer, Sneha Subramanian Kanta, and Jasper Wrinch.
This web folio is free to access, with the option to donate to Islamic Relief Canada’s Gaza Emergency Appeal, which provides urgent aid to displaced civilians in Gaza.
When Oliver Michaels was elected to represent the people of Maine in Congress, he pledged to fight hard for working-class and low-income people. But as progressive bill after progressive bill is defeated, his fury is mounting and he is seriously considering leaving the prestigious body. In addition, he and his wife have separated and he is depressed and lonely.
It is at this point that New York Times reporter Alex Broussard, Michaels’ college girlfriend, contacts him about an anonymous tip she’s received about collusion between two Senators, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and a corporate polluter. According to her source, the three individuals are embroiled in a pay-to-play scheme that has allowed industrial malfeasance to continue unchecked, with the dumping of tons of chemical waste into the waterway of a small, rural, Indiana town. Spiking cancer and respiratory illnesses in the area have concerned residents for decades, but it is not until Broussard and her colleagues begin investigating that the scope of the political scheme is uncovered. As the truth emerges, the culprits know they’re in trouble, but rather than come clean they concoct plans to retain their toehold on power.
It’s a tense and well-wrought setup that involves a slew of people – including mafia hitmen – and numerous federal agencies. While the latter work in tandem, suffice it to say that the novel has a happy ending, and anyone needing an infusion of progressive populism – as well as an example of a politician with humility, integrity, and grit – will get a hefty dose.
What’s more, The Senator is a good, old-fashioned story with characters you can root for. The satisfaction of seeing social justice prevail and a romance rekindled makes the novel an enjoyable, fun read. Highly recommended.
The Senator by Maya Golden Bethany. Rising Action Publishing Company, April 2025.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
In addition to a full line-up of general contributors to its Poetry 2024 issue, Atlanta Review Fall/Winter 2024 features contest finalists and winners. Selected and introduced by Atlanta Review Editor JD Reilly, Elina Kumra’s “God Is My Love” won the Dan Veach Prize for Young Poets, and selected and introduced by Poet Jeannine Hall Gailey, Carol O’Brien’s “The Woman in the Attic” won the Poetry International Grand Prize.
Orbit, Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning novel, has almost no plot, choosing a more meditative approach instead. Six astronauts and cosmonauts circle around the Earth sixteen times in the course of the day, living aboard the international space station. There is a different mission launching on that day, one that is going to the moon, implying the demise of the ISS, as humanity looks further out to space. The six reflect on that development, but most of the book is a meditation on Earth, not on space.
One of the two events that occurs in the course of the day is that one of the astronauts—Chie, from Japan—receives word that her mother has died. She has a few moments where she deals with that grief, but not much more. The other event is the build up of a typhoon on Earth, as the six take pictures of it, so meteorologists on Earth can see how it’s developing. It turns into a super-typhoon, wiping out parts of small islands, but Harvey shows little of that destruction.
Instead, there are chapters devoted to reflections on the beauty of the Earth, as well as its ordinariness. There are reflections on the absence of borders as seen from space, implying that national divisions are Earth-bound, human-created problems; however, the narrator also points out that all of the environmental changes they can observe from space are political problems, that the supposed constructs have real effects.
Harvey explores these types of tensions throughout the novel, not settling for traditional views of how humanity is nothing more than a speck in the cosmos. Instead, she writes, “We matter greatly and not at all.” The view from space reminds readers that the Earth is valuable and that we should do all we can to protect it, even though, in the broader view, it will ultimately get subsumed by some cosmic event. Orbital is a celebration of the beauty of life now, even while admitting what the future will bring.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Grove Press, December 2023. Winner of the Booker Prize 2024.
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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
Language Like Water explores the conflicts, challenges, and connections in a daughter’s relationship with her mother over the span of a lifetime. The poems resonate with longing and struggle as the daughter seeks to understand and restore her complicated mother, an enigmatic figure who struggles with depression. Ultimately the daughter recognizes her own strengths as she acknowledges and inscribes moments and memories of sharing and connection.
Bisbing Books has this to say: “Language Like Water is a moving, deeply personal glimpse into the mother-daughter relationship. The complexity of this bond is explored through sharp, evocative imagery that digs deep into the emotional terrain of love, guilt, memory, and loss. There’s a sense that words carry weight far beyond their surface meaning. Read these poems.”
43 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
The first full week of January 2025 has come to an end. If you are looking to meet your submission goals for this week, NewPages has your back with forty-three submission opportunities from literary magazines, presses, and more.
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. Our next eLitPak will be sent next Wednesday!
Celebrate forty years of publication with Fall 2024 The MacGuffin 40.1! Party in literary style with poetry from perennial MacGuffin fan-favorites Rebecca Foust, Poet Hunt 26 winner Patrick Wilcox, and Pushcart Prize awardee Jim Daniels; along with stories from Stephen A. Geller and Mary Lotz. Looking toward the future with authors new to MacGuffin’s pages: hit the mat in Tim Loperfido’s WWE-inspired epic, pay a three-poem visit to Susanna Rich’s Grandmother Mumchy, and take a relaxing, if somewhat hectic, family trip to the pool in Maureen D. Hall’s “The Pool.” Cap off the anniversary with the hometown art spread of woodcuts by Ernest Fackler.
The Fall 2024 issue of The Greensboro Review (#116) features the Amon Liner Poetry Prize winner, James Daniels’s “We Are All Starved for Touch,” an Editor’s Note by Terry L. Kennedy, and new poetry, stories, and flash from Sean Cho A., Jake Bauer, Nathaniel Bellows, Mark Brazaitis, Sébastien Luc Butler, Lucas Cardona, Adrienne Celt, K.S. Dyal, Jason Gray, Mickie Kennedy, Sally Rosen Kindred, Kip Knott, Alejandro Lucero, Jennie Malboeuf, Cori McKenzie, Eric Paul, Lizzy Ke Polishan, Bryan D. Price, Colleen Kearney Rich, Flannery Maeve Rollins, Anna Sheffer, Hannah Treasure, Alex Tretbar, Audrey Toth, Ross White, Christopher Stetson Wilson, and Haolun Xu.
Jayne Anne Phillips’ latest novel, Night Watch, is set in and around the Civil War, as sections take place in 1864 and 1874, with an epilogue in 1883. However, very little of the novel actually occurs in what most readers would think of as the Civil War. There’s only one battle scene, and there is little mention of slavery. Instead, Phillips is interested in the effects of the war, not just on those who fought in it, but on those whose lives are more peripheral to it.
The plot follows Eliza and her daughter ConaLee, as they try to survive while their husband and father, respectively—whose name the reader doesn’t learn until near the end of the novel—is away fighting. They live in rural West Virginia, so they have ConaLee’s grandmother (of sorts, it’s complicated), Dearbhla, living nearby to help, but they are largely isolated otherwise. A Confederate soldier appears in the 1864 section, but his real effect only shows up in the 1874 sections of the novel, as he has taken over the house and family, forcing them to refer to him as Papa. He ultimately has Eliza institutionalized in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, with ConaLee pretending to be her attendant.
The novel reminds the reader of the traumas that women endured, but also that they continue to endure, especially at the hands of men. Even in the best times of their life, Eliza and ConaLee are largely dependent on men and the decisions they make. Phillips shows the effect of that trauma—and the larger traumas of the war—through characters repeatedly having their names taken from them or having to change their names. At the asylum, for example, Eliza becomes Miss Janet, while ConaLee becomes Eliza Connolly; Eliza’s husband becomes John O’Shea for a time when he loses his memory of who he was. At one point in the novel, Phillips writes, “…the past is the present unrecognized.”
While Night Watch is clearly about the Civil War, it’s also about the lack of freedom and traumas women continue to endure, the present reality that so many are unable or unwilling to recognize.
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2023; Vintage, February 2025. Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
The January 2025 issue of The Lake is now online featuring Fizza Abbas, Edward Alport, C. J. Anderson-Wu, John Bartlett, Melissa A. Chappell, Daniel Dahlquist, Tim Deere-Jones, William Ogden Haynes, Maren O. Mitchell, J. R. Solonche, Rodney Wood.
The Lake also publishes reviews of new poetry collections, this month spotlighting Deborah Harvey’s Love the Albatross, Sanjeev Sethi’s Legato Without a Lisp, and Angela Topping’s Earwig Country. “One Poem Reviews” share a single poem from a poet’s recent book as a way to help them reach a wider audience. This month, readers can sample works from John Bartlett, Estil Pollock, and Myra Schneider.
The Bold, the Brave, and the Wrinkled: Retirement Just Got Rowdy!
Barry and Beth, high school sweethearts separated by time and circumstance, find themselves reunited at the Blue Loon Village senior living center in Minneapolis. Unwilling to settle into lives of boredom, the two become Silver Squad vigilantes and embark on an epic road trip across America. No one they meet will ever be the same!
“A smart, funny tale of a Good Samaritan crime spree.”—Kirkus Reviews (Recommended)
“[A] sparkling road-trip comedy of retiree crimefighters taking the U.S. by storm.”—BookLife by Publisher’s Weekly (Editor’s Pick)
“An original and fun read (think senior citizen versions of Thelma & Louise) from start to finish, The Silver Squad: Rebels With Wrinkles by author Marty Essen is a deftly crafted and extraordinary story that will have a very special appeal to readers with an interest in inherently fascinating novels that imaginatively blend later-in-life romances with elements of an action/adventure.”—Midwest Book Review
“A delightful mix of observational humor, introspection, and respectful affection for the older generation, The Silver Squad: Rebels With Wrinkles is a scenic road trip through the country with a gratifying destination.”—Indies Today (5 Stars)
The Shore Issue 24 faces the brutal cold of our literal and figurative winter with wide, unflinching eyes. It features breathtaking new poems by Sagar Nair, Sierra Hixon, Derek Chan, Mary C Sims, Stella Reed, Dylan Tran, Kyla Guimaraes, Jacob Sheetz-Willard, JP Dancing Bear, Sophia P Smith, Yev Gelman, Michael Okafor, Hana Widerman, Jenna Jaco, Amber Rose Crowtree, Melissa Strilecki, Annie Przypyszny, Dan Albergotti, Zack Carson, Ammara Younas, Brian Satrom, Bri Griffiths, Jan Hallaman, Aiman Tahir Khan, Christien Gholson, Maree Cianci, Joseph Radke, Jeff Whitney, Zebulon Huset, Mihaela Mihailova, Allison Cundiff, Jennifer R Edwards, Lila Cutter, Meagan Chandler, Chris Hutchinson, Lucas Cardona, Jodi Balas, Jo Ann Clark, Johanna Maqiin, Sascha Feinstein, Barbara Duffey, Derek Ellis, and Jennifer K Sweeney. It also features memorable art by Ari Koontz.
In her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls tries to understand and explain—though, most of all, feel—the intergenerational trauma she inherited from her grandmother, Sun Yi, and mother, Rose. She knows what she experienced as a child, as her grandmother suffered from a mental illness that left her obsessed with writing her story, unable to communicate otherwise, leading Rose not only to devote her energies to caring for Sun Yi, but also to overprotecting Tessa to prevent her from suffering the same fate.
Hulls spends much of the work using research to dig into Sun Yi’s life in China, showing how and why she had to flee during the Maoist revolution. Sun Yi was a journalist who became famous for writing a memoir about her time before she escaped China, fleeing to Hong Kong. However, the trauma of her repeated interrogations before she left the country leads to her mental illness, leaving her uncommunicative except for her constant writing, which becomes less and less intelligible as she ages.
Hulls also spends time talking to her mother, trying to understand how her mother coped with Sun Yi’s struggles, but also why Rose and Tessa were unable to communicate with each other. Hulls works to understand how Rose wanted emotional reactions from Tessa that she was unable to provide, leading Tessa to ultimately leave home as soon as she was able. In fact, she ends up living in Antarctica and Alaska, at various times, putting as much space between her and her mother as possible. A note to readers, as well: Tessa struggles with self-harm for a period of time, though she does not spend much time on that part of her life.
Hulls’ work on this book—ten years in the making—to face the ghosts that have haunted her family for three generations, is an attempt to work through the traumas rather than avoid them. The work is artistically and narratively dense, as Hulls has much to convey to help her and the reader understand the years of suffering, but that work is worth it for all involved. Readers will leave with a clearer understanding not just of Tessa and her family, but the effects that intergenerational trauma can have on those who have no first-hand knowledge of the suffering that began it all.
Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls. MCDxFSG Books, March 2024.
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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
Consequence Volume 16.2 is full of beautiful and thought-provoking prose, poetry, and visual art that addresses the consequences of war and geopolitical violence. This issue is focused on voices and perspectives from the BIPOC community through a special featured section.
Here’s what poet, artist, and Guest Editor, Marcus Jackson, had to say about the feature: “The editing team and I agreed this issue’s BIPOC Feature should be borderless and present writers and artists who self-identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color from across the globe, not just North America, as diasporas wonderfully outreach regional and continental parameters.
“In this installment of Consequence, the voices range valiantly from stark documentation to elaborate styles and structures, though they all share a sincere belief the written word and the visual image can transcend the horror and grief of geopolitical violence. The profound care and the unblinking courage of the writers and artists in this feature are the enduring reflections and testimonies of communities whose humanity and luminosity refuse to be dimmed by empires’ ruthlessness.“
Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine by Loretta Barrett Oden with Beth Dooley The University of Oklahoma Press, October 2023
Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine tells the story of Loretta’s journey and of the dishes she created along the way. Alongside recipes that combine the flavors of her Oklahoma upbringing and Indigenous heritage with the Southwest flair of her Santa Fe restaurant, Loretta offers entertaining and edifying observations about ingredients and cooking culture. What kind of quail might turn up in your vicinity, for instance; what to do with piñon nuts, sumac, or nopales (cactus paddles); when to add a bundle of pine needles or a small branch of cedar to a braise: these and many practical words of wisdom about using the fruits of the forest, stream, or plain, accompany Loretta’s insights on everything from the dubious provenance of fry bread to the Potawatomi legend behind the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash, the namesake ingredients of Three Sisters and Friends Salad, served at Corn Dance Café and now at Thirty Nine Restaurant at First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, where Oden is the Chef Consultant.
Turning the calendar to a new year is also a great time to be turning the pages on some new books! To help you achieve that goal, check out our monthly round-up of New Books. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages selects from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles and recent reviews.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
Apart from the writing, very little in Carys Davies’s novel is actually clear, as she sets her story in two historical upheavals. First, there is the Great Disruption in the Scottish Church, when roughly a third of the ministers rebelled against the system of patronage. Second, the Clearances led to landowners removing entire communities of the poor in rural areas from their homes, as they sought to profit from farming, raising cattle (then mainly sheep), a reshaping of the class and literal landscape that occurred from the mid-eighteenth century well into the nineteenth.
John Ferguson, the main character, finds himself caught in both of these significant changes, as he leaves the Scottish Church to become a member of the Free Church, which doesn’t yet have buildings or an infrastructure or means to pay ministers. Thus, he accepts a job that forces him to travel hundreds of miles to a remote island, one that Davies creates as existing somewhere between Shetland and Norway. He has to remove the one remaining inhabitant, Ivar, of that island for a landlord named Lowrie.
However, before he can present Ivar with a letter informing him of the removal, as John doesn’t speak his language, John falls and seriously injures himself, leading to Ivar’s nursing him back to health, unaware of John and his mission. They develop a deep friendship, as John works to learn Ivar’s language, and Ivar realizes how much he has missed community. While John is there, his wife Mary has begun a journey to bring him home, as she fears for his life, given what has happened to other messengers of such news.
Davies’s novel is brief, and the writing is spare and straightforward, beautiful because of that concision. While she sets her characters in an important historical time, her focus is on their relationships with one another, especially how language can bring people together, even when they can’t quite communicate. She reminds readers that true community is not one without conflict, but where one can develop their true selves, even when those don’t fit the expectations society has devised to keep people in line, especially during times of historic 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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite
Literary magazines are the finger on the pulse of our world, publishing emerging and veteran writers and artists whose works stand in cultural testament to world events. Check out the New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!
Each month, we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content blurbs for our featured publications. Browse the newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, graphic narratives, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
bioStories online features new essays every week contributed by writers from around the world offering readers “portraits of the people surrounding us in our daily lives, of the strangers we pass on the street unnoticed and of those who have been the most influential and most familiar to us but who remain strangers to others.”
Contributors in 2024 include Nicole Alexander, MerriLee Anderson, Beth Benedix, Phil Cummins, Mark Cyzyk, Sarah DeParis, Sky Karam de Sela, Hailey Duggirala, Michael Engelhard, Mary Fairchild, Erin Hesse Froslie, Paul Graseck, Lory Widmer Hess, Barbara Krasner, Angela Lam, Zoe Lambert, Sydney Lea, Mark Lewandowski, Alexandra Loeb, Mark Lucius, Bryan Mammel, J. Bryan McGeever, James McKean, Mario Moussa, David Newkirk, Sharman Ober-Reynolds, Leanne Phillips, David Riessen, Anup Saswade, and Clare Simons.
bioStories publishes semi-annual volumes of collected works, all available open-access online.
37 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy January! Welcome to our first submissions roundup of 2025. If you need some help to find journals, presses, and more to submit your work to in the new year, NewPages has your back. Enjoy 37 opportunities including calls for submissions from literary magazines and writing and book contests.
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.
Southern Humanities Review issue 57.4 features translations of Sri Lankan literature in Sinhala and Tamil thanks to a travel grant from the University of Chicago South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) Project. The magazine’s managing editor was able to attend the 2024 Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka to find emerging translators.
This issue features poetry by Liyanage Amarakeerthi translated by Alexander McKinley, Ruwan Bandujeewa translated by Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake, Christian J. Collier, Staci Halt, Arielle Hebert, Isurinie Anuradha Mallawaarachchi, Brandi Nicole Martin, Matthew Nisinson, M.A. Nuhman translated by Sumathy Sivamohan, Tina Schumann, Nathan Spoon, and Lloyd Wallace. Nonfiction contributors include Brooke Champagne and Austin Segrest. Fiction by Trevor Crown, Jihoon Park, Sunethra Rajakarunanayake translated by Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake, and Ashley Wurzbacher.
Some content can be read online, and individual copies, as well as subscriptions, are available on the Southern Humanities Reviewwebsite.
Cover Art: Blood Orange Moon, 2024, oil on linen, by Shyama Golden.
The Winter 2024 issue of Cool Beans Lit celebrates the philosophy of Yutori, a form of decluttering your personal space and mind. It’s a Japanese-originated practice of slowing down to give oneself more spaciousness or room to breathe in order to recharge and rejuvenate the senses. A clear mind can also inspire one to explore new genres of writing and art.
In Cool Beans Lit Volume 2 Issue 1, editors are proud to bring readers 31 unique contributors who range from brand new authors and artists to well-established creators with many published works. Authors hail from all corners of the globe, including one who is currently unhoused and sharing his reality in eye-opening detail. The issue features poetry by Arvilla Fee, Marc Meierkort, Alan Perry and Grant Shimmin; prose by Angela Townsend and Li Ruan; and visual art by Kelly DuMar, Nuala McEvoy and Robin Young.
To read and experience art is to walk in another person’s shoes and experience new thoughts and events that stay with you long after reading. It’s a way of channeling a deeper connection to others and gaining greater compassion. This new issue of Cool Beans Lit aims to do just that.
Good River Review comes to readers from the Spalding University Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. Editor in Chief Kathleen Driskell introduces the Fall 2024 issue noting, “There’s something beautiful in this issue for all readers to find—prose, lyric, dramatic work as well as Lynnell Edwards’s interview with Kevin Prufer focused on his debut fiction Sleepaway: A Novel.” Contributors also include Theodore Brady, Elizabeth Burton, Willie Carver, Andrew Chapman, Quintin Collins, Amanda G. Fillebrown, Anne Marie Fowler, Vincent Frontero, Stacey Goldstein, Michael V. Hayes, Sara Henning, Julie Hensley, G. Wesley Houp, Nicholas Hulstine, Hope Kidd, Jennine DOC Krueger, James Long, Lisa Low, Julia Lundy, Norman Minnick, Hibah Shabkhez, Phillip Sterling, William Waters, and Cecilia Woloch.
The title of Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, might give the impression that the protagonist Charles’s life is on fire, and he needs to escape it. That would give Charles too much agency and too much urgency. However, it’s true that his life is not going well and has not been going well for quite some time.
There are two events that have left him estranged from those he cares about, as well as from himself. First, his mother holds him responsible for his step-father’s death, and he doesn’t seem inclined to correct that assumption. The reader is never clear on what happened, given that the story is from Charles’s vantage point, but the guilt Charles feels is real, as is the distance from his mother. He reconnects with her, but only as she’s losing her memory and her grasp of reality.
Second, he has a house across the river from where his daughter, Elizabeth, grew up with Mary and Roger. Mary is her mother, and Elizabeth knows Roger as her father, as they never told Elizabeth about Charles, her biological father. When Mary found out she was pregnant, she left Charles, as she wanted to raise Elizabeth as a Penobscot on the reservation, so Elizabeth needed a certain level of Indigenous blood. Charles is white, even though he grew up on the reservation with his mother and step-father, who was Penobscot.
Given that much of the novel relates Charles’s feeling stuck in his life, there’s not much of a plot propelling the story forward. Charles checks on his mother, watches Elizabeth from a distance, and spends time with his friend Bobby (who spends most of his time drinking, even though Charles is in AA). Charles spends much of that time considering taking an action that could change the lives of many of the people he knows. Like in most people’s lives, not much happens in Charles’s life, but characters develop, and life moves slowly forward until it lurches ahead, leaving people wondering where it’s gone.
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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite
Dear Reader, the poems of Pine Soot Tendon Bone, Radha Marcum’s second full-length poetry collection and the winner of The Word Works’s Washington Prize, “sing harmonies / to complicate your discontent” with public health, gun violence, and ecological degradation—the evidence at the crime scene and the stratum of prolonged grief “forcing us all off / center” in our cacophonic contemporary lives.
“When the semi-automatic facts rushed in,” when we entered a “Plague Year,” when a valley is “plundered, then / plowed… [and] divided / into… clone homes,” we have need of a poet as attentive to “sorrow” as to “tenderness.” Radha Marcum is such a poet. She acknowledges “worry” at “the fate / of glacier lilies” and “recognize[s] / abundance when it is offered.”
By combining a lyric attention fine as “red silt” with an intellect as “sharp [as cholla cactus] spines,” Marcum is “alert in the juxtaposition.” Her poems “mother stillness / even as they shiver.”
Like a Japanese Sumi-e artist using black ink, made from “pine, soot, tendon, bone,” to make a painting on contrasting white paper, Marcum’s “ink-marks” are meditations on what “traverses merciless spaces” while “looking for … respite, too.”
When a “wildfire haze… / peppers the membranes of our eyes,” Marcum reminds us to hear the “air singing in the redwoods / whose seeds require / / a germinating fire.” By facing what is “irretrievable,” Radha Marcum’s poems also show us what “survived” “the dark / mulch of [our] days.” In Pine Soot Tendon Bone, it is “tenderness” that proves fire-resistant and transforming.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Chestnut Review: For Stubborn Artists is an online quarterly of poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, art, and photography from around the world. This newest issue features Therese Gleason, author of Hemicrania, in conversation with Maria S. Picone. Readers can also enjoy new poetry from Amelia Loeffler, Ann Weil, Callan Latham, Isaac Akanmu, Jacob Sheetz-Willard, K. Mobley, Kaitlyn Airy, Liz Robbins, Shiyang Su, Therese Gleason; prose by Andrew Zhou, Jennifer Robinson, Pamela Painter, T. Cutler, Theresa Sylvester; and art by Cynthia Yatchman, Moses Ojo, Nuala McEvoy, Ron Perovich, and Vasundhara Srinivas.
The complex legacies of violence are central to Nancy Kricorian’s spare and poetic new novel, The Burning Heart of the World. The 15-year-long civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990) and its impact on a small Armenian Christian community in and around Beirut forms the backdrop of this searing tale. Fighting is ever-present.
Nonetheless, the conflict remains enigmatic, perhaps because the book’s narrator, Vera, is a teenage girl more interested in spending time with her friends than she is in understanding the nuances of politics. Still, near-constant bombings, blackouts, and shootings take a toll on Vera and her family, and as the conflict rages the adults decide that it is time to leave Lebanon – a move that necessitates parting from a beloved family member who’d survived the Armenian genocide in the early years of the 20th century. The impact of this upheaval is masterfully woven into Vera’s coming-of-age story, and the resultant separation from friends and family – coupled with the residue of having lived in a war zone – complicate Vera’s adjustment to her new life in the United States.
But this unfolds slowly. In fact, for many years Vera is seemingly fine. Then, decades after leaving her birthplace, on a clear, sunny September day in 2001, the Twin Towers fell, triggering Vera’s long-repressed memories of wartime Beirut. Kricorian’s account of Vera’s unraveling is evocative and powerful, unsentimental but hard-hitting. There is emotional nuance here, and many brief but perceptive observations.
Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War, The Burning Heart of the World is a beautiful, sad, and timely look at the aftermath of war and its lasting impact on survivors. Highly recommended.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Seventy years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision was issued, public schools in most of the United States remain as racially and economically segregated as they were in 1954. In fact, as legal scholar Michelle Adams writes in The Containment, “since 1990, segregation has increased in every part of the country…Not only that, the school districts that serve nonwhite children receive far less financial support than those that serve mainly white children.” The difference, she writes, amounts to $2226 less per child. As a result, schools in low-income neighborhoods – the lion’s share of them filled with children of color – are more dilapidated and have fewer resources than those in higher-income areas.
These inequities could have been rectified had the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley been different.
The Containment provides an exhaustive deconstruction of Milliken and focuses on the inexorable link between housing segregation and segregated schools. Furthermore, Adams convincingly argues that the only way to end “separate and unequal” education is to ensure that students of all races, religions, addresses, and creeds study together. Numerous plans — including busing and creating large, integrated K-12 Educational Parks — were presented in multiple trial iterations.
But SCOTUS scuttled these approaches, finding the plans invalid.
At issue was whether school segregation policies were deliberately developed or were unorchestrated. Despite reams of evidence documenting redlining and restrictive housing covenants, SCOTUS found that the city of Detroit – and by extension other locales – had not intentionally kept Black and White students apart.
The upshot? “Educational apartheid” for both Black and White kids. As Adams concludes, “the highest court in the land told the nation that suburban school district lines can be used as fences to exclude Blacks.” And most have done just that.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Margarita Pintado Burgos’s Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, adroitly translated by Alejandra Quintana Arocho, is a meditation on vision, “Haunted by a slow want” to see the “glistening / from its own / beyond.”
Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat opens “on the brink of drought” with a figure who “put[s] forth the idea of rain before” “see[ing] it rain” and who wishes to “Allow oneself to rain.” Pintado Burgos’s use of the infinitive as a subject suggests the position of the figure who is seeing. It is not the seer, but the seeing and the seen that takes precedence. This is “The mystery of form” whose “forms resemble / other forms” Pintado Burgos pulls “hard into the pupils” to confront “opacity” and “seek brightness.”
Pintado Burgos’s seeker is a woman, “walking, as if there were a clear path,” through exiled and sublime spaces, “earnestly examining the makeup of days.” She asks, “What is an event?”: “Does the woman who crosses the street holding her skirt down, fearing the wind, constitute an event?” And, by extension, the poet also examines the line between being a vision and having a vision.
“No one sees her coming, but she arrives.” In her poems, Pintado Burgos stands before “a body of water” as if “in front of sadness.” This “woman / who had come from so far away,” “persisted, separating… / the vision from the retina / to look at [her]self without mirrors / broken but whole.”
In Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat Margarita Pintado Burgos “contort[s] all of [her]self” and empties herself out like “the sky empties itself out” to confront “Writing as an ailment of surfaces” and illuminate an “expansion” of vision. Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat rains, reins, and reigns!
Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat by Margarita Pintado Burgos, translated by Alejandra Quintana Arocho. Winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. The University of Arizona Press, February 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
For those fans of Oliver Burkeman’s previous work Four Thousand Weeks, his latest book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, may feel a bit redundant. Burkeman’s overall argument is the same: we only have a limited amount of time on this planet, so, despite what those who try to craft “life hacks” preach, there aren’t any tricks to change that cold reality. Thus, instead of spending time and energy trying to work in a few more minutes here and there in the misguided belief that people have the ability to do everything, Burkeman contends that we should focus on using our limited time doing what we love and what gives our life meaning.
However, he has updated some of the research from his previous book, and he formats this one in a package that’s easier to access for those who are coming to his work for the first time. In Meditations for Mortals, he divides the book into four sections—Being Finite; Taking Action; Letting Go; Showing Up—for the four weeks he suggests readers devote to the book. Each section, then, has seven brief (usually around five or six pages) readings moving through each of those ideas. Readers can follow that plan, as I tried to do for about a fourth of the book, or read the book straight through in a few sittings, which is how I ended up finishing it, and the book works just as well either way.
Burkeman positions his book as a type of anti-self-help, as he doesn’t want to try to convince readers that they can make a few changes and their lives will be perfect. He knows how unreasonable and unattainable that approach is. Instead, he wants readers to see their limits, then make changes to live more enjoyable, meaningful lives. His argument is compelling, and he brings in a number of resources to help readers take those steps. He knows they’re not easy, but they can make change feel much more doable. As his subtitle says, he wants readers to embrace their limitations and make time for what counts.
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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite
In Invisible Lives, Cristalle Smith writes “to offer / what [she] can” from the intergenerational trauma of her and her family’s lives which intersected with abuse of power and violence in the home, between intimate partners, and sexual abuse of children by adults. As the poet speaks from the “aching confusion” of her past, she breaks her family’s silence on these taboo subjects and those often cruelly adjacent such as poverty, homelessness, addiction, and suicide.
As Smith chronicles her life from a young girl to becoming a mother, she necessarily engages with gender — “When you’re a girl, you take things into you.” Memory, that “conduit / in between” experience and time, “lives in [her] body.” “It’s funny the things you remember.” And it is telling.
As she boldly shares what she remembers, Smith’s writing moves between the extension of the sentence and the brevity of the line, to get at the tensions between growing “up Always / on / the / run” and trying to “get the [life she] wished for.”
Moving from the prairies of Alberta to the Everglades of Florida with stints elsewhere in between, Smith’s restless writings chronicle lessons on how to drive and live along the way, transforming her traumatic past by singing the Blues of her survival.
Invisible Lives by Cristalle Smith. University of Calgary Press, July 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
The print edition of New England Review‘s cinematic winter issue (45.4) features gripping prose by Roy Kesey, Alysia Han, Kathleen Wheaton, and Dan Musgrave as well as contemplative poetry by Kazim Ali, Perry Levitch, Garous Abdolmalekian, and Rena J. Mosteirin. This special issue features Chunking Express at 30: Rewatching Wong Kar Wai curated by contributing editor J. M. Tyree, which presents readers with “the urban landscape of Hong Kong—rendered in Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 cinematic breakthrough—reenvisioned through the lenses of nostalgia, memory, and most of all disappointment at the shattered hopes of Hong Kong’s handover from the UK to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.” Readers will also enjoy translations from the Persian, Russian, and Korean, and much more. See a preview of contents here.
Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education by Jesse Hagopain Haymarket Books, January 2025
In just the last few years, scores of states have introduced or passed legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about structural racism and other forms of oppression. Books have been cut from curricula and pulled from school library shelves. Teachers have been fired and threatened with discipline.
Long-time organizer, writer, and high school teacher Jesse Hagopian argues in Teach Truth that our democracy is at stake, not to mention the annihilation of entire systems of knowledge that challenge the status quo. Hagopian explores the origins, philosophy, and manifestations of these attacks, and the Right’s effort to regulate knowledge as an attempt to maintain its power over the American capitalist system, now and into the future.
Yet the struggle for a liberatory education has a long history in the United States, from the days when it was illegal for Black people to be literate, to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, to Black Lives Matter at School today. Teachers, students, and their allies are already building a movement – in the classroom, on campus, and in the streets – to defend antiracist education.
Known for its massive print tomes, Gargoyle Online upholds the tradition by sharing some of the best works by unknown writers and artists in keeping with its mission to seek out the overlooked and the neglected. In this newest issue, readers can enjoy fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork from almost 90 contributors, including audio of Susan Hankla, George Kalamaras, and Kathleen Rooney interviewed by John King (Drunken Odyssey Podcast–Episode #570, April 1, 2023); and video by Belinda Subraman.
In issue #9, discover fiction by Jody Lannen Brady, Joel James Davis, Gary Fincke, Stefanie Freele, Amy Halloran, Thom Hawkins, Kateema Lee, Erin Mahoney, Terence Mulligan, John Picard, Charles Rammelkamp, Ben Roth, Steven Schutzman, Alice Stephens, Elizabeth Tracey, Michael Tyler; poetry by Brenton Booth, Chris Bullard, Sara Cosgrove, Deborah Elliott Deutschman , Marc A. Drexler, John Eustis, April Ford, Sid Gold, Paul Ilechko, Craig Kirchner, John Marvin, Alice Morris, Susan Notar, Ken Poyner, Stephen Roberts, Helen Ruggieri, Claire Scott, caren stuart, Kevin Sweeney, Renée Weitzner; a play by D. Harlan Wilson; nonfiction by Katelynn Adrian, Alissa Bader Clark, Karen Paul Holmes, Susan Isla Tepper; and art by Roberta Allen (including cover art), Franetta McMillian, Jody Mussoff among many more contributors.
In her third full-length poetry collection, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, Jennifer Tseng includes the reader in an epistolary exchange between her and her father. Reading the lyric poems, constructed in part from letters written by Tseng’s father, is as intimate as reading over the poet’s shoulder.
The epistles/poems bring to the fore the “inherent dilemma” within human communication. Despite the impossible and the obdurate, the poems also reveal a humble striving for connection and understanding between parent and child. This parent and child reach toward each other through the challenges of speaking different languages—English and Mandarin—across oceans. Every letter is a “riddle,” “contradiction,” or a “code [they] sent back & forth.”
Tseng is, and therefore her readers are, situated both “Outside [her father’s] letters” and “inside” them, providing a near real-time experience of the poet rereading her father’s letters and writing back to him. “The letters’ spell: / What’s missing.” The poems then are part reconstruction of memory and completion of correspondence while always reaching “farther” for “father.”
In a book “of mourning,” Jennifer Tseng “sit[s] in her father’s Shanghai apartment & eat[s] / His letters.” She “swallows the underworld” of “regret,” digests incoherence, and arrives at a “Plush unity. / A father never ends.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Deadline: February 3, 2025 Hindsight Creative Nonfiction publishes all forms of the “fourth genre”: memoir and lyric essays, but also portraiture, narrative journalism, creative scholarly writing, and humor—anything creative we can fact-check.
Get your true stories published in our Spring print edition! See our flyer to scan the QR code for more information.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Application Deadline: March 1, 2025 We’ll begin each morning in community. What is the heart of your story? Why are you the only one to tell it? Ultimately, we’ll practice writing as healing. This once-in-a-lifetime retreat is for women who long to write achingly beautiful prose in a transcendently beautiful place. Apply now for $900 off with code 25AK. See flyer for more information and link to apply.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
This four-session virtual workshop will provide poets and writers of all levels, genres, and backgrounds with the tools to write from their experiences with atrocity, the traumas produced by atrocity, and the healing (personally, communally, nationally) your words can make of it. Featured Speakers include Ellen Bass, Jacqueline Osherow, Joy Ladin, Geoffrey Philp, Jehanne Dubrow, Sam Fleischacker, and Mehnaz Afridi. View flyer for more information and link to registration information.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Application Deadline: February 16, 2025 Join us for our week-long, residential writing workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with acclaimed faculty in beautiful Gambier, Ohio. The Kenyon Review Writing Workshops are generative, focused on giving writers time and space to produce new work. Since 1995, these workshops have provided thousands of writers with a nurturing space to take creative risks and push their writing to the next level. The low student-teacher ratio and supportive, rigorous, and immersive writing community have proved so popular that many students return again and again. View flyer for more info and link to our website.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Deadline: January 14, 2025 $2,500 honorarium & book publication. Book-length poetry manuscripts accepted until January 14, 2025 (we observe a 5-day grace period). Final judge: Craig Morgan Teicher. $28 entry fee includes one-year subscription to Colorado Review. View our flyer for more information and a link to our complete guidelines. Questions? Please email us.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
Hot off the press, a splendid new Issue of Jewish Fiction! Issue 38 contains 12 stories originally written in Serbian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, or English. The one translated from German, “Alfred Menazbach, Subletter” (which is often humorous), is excerpted from one of the first novels in German by a Jewish author about the events surrounding the Holocaust. Along with this excerpt and all the stories in this issue, readers will find much to engage, fascinate, and delight!
43 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! With the holidays literally around the corner, NewPages has you covered with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities to save you time in pre-holiday chaos.
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. Our December 2024 eLitPak was just released this week.
Fans of literary criticism and poetry have likely heard the buzz surrounding poet-scholar Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, published by Seven Stories Press in November 2024. While I’m familiar with that feeling of disappointment when a hot new book just doesn’t live up to the hype, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book meeting, if not exceeding, the praise already being heaped upon it.
Ruby fills his epic poem about the history of poetry with plenty of footnotes—also presented as verse—explicating clever allusions to moments in the history of poetry and poetics through more detailed asides and famous quotes. With the exception of the prose prologue titled, “Razo” and the epilogue final section, “Tornada,” written in tercets, every other page contains footnotes on the right juxtaposed with one to twenty-nine lines of poetry on the preceding page, weaving text and subtext together in a feat that recalled to my mind Junot Diaz’s award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Readers uninterested in footnotes and looking up literary quotes in various languages including French, Mandarin, Latin, and Ancient Greek might find the book not to their tastes. However, while this poem may be a challenge to consume, Ruby’s witty, often cheeky allusions to linguistic history pay intellectual dividends for the effort. First thought, best thought: While the subject may be too specialized to interest all readers, Context Collapse is educational, entertaining, and edifying, particularly for poetry enthusiasts.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Fugue, On the Seawall, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among others.
Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison VOX Press, December 2024
Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison is a collection of writings from Mississippi inmates housed in the infamously brutal Unit 29 at Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm. The book is the culmination of three years of working with incarcerated students through VOX’s prison outreach program, Prison Writes Initiative. Comprised of writings from over thirty inmates, this collection delves into the after effects of the infamous December 2019 riots through April of 2020, and how the humans housed there deal with the conditions as they try to survive one of the country’s most notorious prison facilities. The collection is not a comfortable literary work but rather a cry for help from deep within a monstrous and insatiable beast known as Unit 29, Parchman.
Prime Number Magazine Issue 263 is our third and final issue of the year offering up our winners of the 2024 Press 53 Award for Poetry and Short Fiction, the winners of the monthly 53-Word Story Contest, the winners of the annual Prime 53 Poem Summer Challenge, poetry selected by guest poetry editor Michael Beadle and fiction selected by Clifford Garstang. Contributors include Anemone Beaulier, Lauren Crawford, David Capps, Candice Kelsey, Mark Brazaitis, Toby Donovan, and Tracy Winn.
The Fall 2024 issue of Arts & Letters will be its final issue, as Founding Editor Martin Lammon writes in his “With Gratitude” to readers, “After 25 years, this is the final issue of Arts & Letters, which I founded in the spring of 1999.” Having stepped down in 2014, Lammon notes, “I wrote a farewell essay in which I addressed the history of the journal’s first 15 years. [. . . ] On this occasion, then, I do not say farewell. Instead, again, I say thank you.”
Closing out the magazine’s 25 year history, the Fall 2024 issue features the 2024 Arts & Letters Annual Prize Winners, Siavash Saadlou, Liza Katz Duncan, and Faith Shearin, as well as new poetry by Bruce Bond, Ian Hall, Caroline King, Suphil Lee Park, Matt Schroeder, Brenda Taulbee, Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad, Michael Waters; fiction by Theron Montgomery; creative nonfiction by Joseph Bathanti, Emma Coomey, Tatiana Hollier, Angela Townsend; and flash by Maya Dobjensky, Joy Juliet Gallagher, Tyler McAndrew, and Sarah Seybold.
Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his most recent book, The Message, to a group of students enrolled in his writing class in 2022, calling them “comrades,” as he believes they all have an obligation to tell the truth through journalism. His first, brief essay—almost an introduction—provides his background and why he became interested in journalism, drawing on a Sports Illustrated story, as well as references to Shakespeare, Rakim, Audre Lorde, and Frederick Douglass. His father also helped point him in the direction of using research to understand important questions.
The rest of the book centers around three trips Coates took: to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. In Senegal, he visits places important in the sale of enslaved people, coming to understand that part of that story is myth—not the inhumanity, unfortunately, but the idea that there is a particular place that encapsulates all of that inhumanity, or that the inhumanity came only through colonization. He visits South Carolina to support a teacher who had allegedly violated a state law passed against teaching “critical race theory”; during a school board meeting he learns there are allies, as well as opponents.
The trip to Palestine is the longest section of the book, as Coates spends five days in Palestine for a literary festival and five days on the Israeli side. It is this section where Coates has his most dramatic epiphany, as he once compared the plight of the Israelis to formerly enslaved African Americans when he was making the argument for reparations. He sees, though, that Israel has now become an apartheid state, that those whom Germany once oppressed have now become the oppressor of others. Coates goes even further to show readers how Germany took the idea of race-based oppression from the United States and how Israel ultimately aligned themselves with South Africa.
Behind each of his trips, though, is the idea of what stories don’t get told. Whether that’s what he didn’t know about Senegal, what lawmakers in South Carolina were trying to keep students from learning, or how the media covers the oppression in Palestine—especially telling is that almost no major news outlet publishes work by people of Palestinian descent—Coates wants readers to dig deeper and find out what they’re not hearing.
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. One World, October 2024.
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. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrite
