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!
Do you love great stories? If so, you’ll be delighted by the 15 terrific ones in the new issue of Jewish Fiction! Issue 39 contains 15 fabulous stories originally written in Italian, Polish, Hebrew, and English. Contributors Shulim Vogelmann, Sagit Emet, Yuval Yavneh, Mikołaj Łoziński, Anna Rosner, Richard E. Marshall, Jaime Levy Pessin, Warren Hoffman, Maya Ben Yair, Adolf Rudnicki, Aaron Goodman, Karen Zlotnick, Shelly Sanders, Hannah Glickstein, Jill Siebers invite readers to feast on their works and enjoy!
South Dakota Review continues their commitment to cultural and aesthetic diversity, publishing exciting and compelling work that reflects the full spectrum of the contemporary literary arts. This newest issue (59.1) features poetry, short stories, and essays by Stella Wong, Mackenzie Carignan, Anthony D’Aries, Michael Leal Garcia, Michael Meyerhofer, Vivek Sharma, Andy Bodinger, Camille Carter, DS Levy, Sappho Stanley, Tiffany Graham Charkosky, Bernadette Geyer, Susan L. Leary, Brooke Sahni, Emily Seibert, Josiah Nelson, Teresa Milbrodt, Joel Fishbane, and a review of Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies by Joanna Acevedo.
Opening issue 46.1 of New England Review, Editor Carolyn Kuebler writes about ecosystems and survival, commenting on the proliferation of literary publications, “. . . if you see magazine publications as an artistic practice that contributes to the literary ecosystem, and if you see them as part of a community rather than as random and unrelated, they look more like a sign of vitality than of diffusion.”
Contributing to the vibrancy of our literary landscape, the newest New England Review invites readers to enjoy engrossing prose by Nilou Panahpour, Tom DeBeauchamp, and Julie Marie Wade; poetry by Cathy Linh Che, Derrick Austin, and Amy Dougher-Solórzano; translations from the Portugese and Spanish; and much more, wrapped in captivating cover art by Brian Flinn.
59 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
March is over and done and here we are in April. A month which should be bursting with warming weather, rain, and the start of seeing flowers starting to blossom. What we are getting is a blustery start to the month complete with an entire year’s worth of seasons in a single day. If you are also living through this depressing whiplash of wacky weather, what a great excuse to throw on your favorite comfy sweater and stay home writing and submitting. NewPages is here, as always, to help you meet submission goals with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
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.
In Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries, Journalist Abigail Leonard, a mother of three, blends the personal and political in her astute look at how motherhood is supported (or not) in four countries: Finland, Kenya, Japan, and the United States. Her up-close-and-personal portrayals of four cisgender women track the physical toll of childbirth, post-delivery adjustment, and relationship strain. The result is powerful. “Many of the big decisions, like how much time to spend with the children and how to divide the emotional and physical labor with their partner, are heavily determined by the social structure of the place women give birth,” she writes.
Finland comes closest to an ideal, not only providing cost-free prenatal care that includes therapy to break intergenerational trauma in expectant moms but also utilizing midwives for most deliveries. During the birth itself, medication is promoted to reduce labor pain. Then, after the no-cost-to-them birth, moms like Anna get nearly a year of paid leave from their jobs; paid paternity leave is also encouraged. This has made Finland the only country in the industrialized world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers. Still, it’s not utopia, and Leonard chronicles the custody drama between Anna and Masa, her newborn’s dad.
That said, Anna has access to robust social supports, including professional daycare, which makes navigating single parenthood possible, if difficult. Nonetheless, compared to Chelsea in Kenya, Sarah in the US, and Tsukasa in Japan – mothers who have to juggle post-partum anxiety and depression with a relatively quick return to work – Finland seems like the gold standard. For the other three, the stress of unaffordable childcare, lack of breastfeeding support, and frustration with partners who either vanish or are clueless, makes this immersive portrayal heartbreaking, albeit compelling.
Sadly, Leonard notes that the visionary feminist goal of egalitarian parenting, a once prominent demand, remains unrealized. But we know what’s needed. While Four Mothers does not make policy recommendations, its case studies serve as a potent directive.
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.
The Winter/Spring 2025 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review is now available in print for readers to enjoy stories, essays, poetry, and a novella. Online, readers can access over forty years of Alaska Quarterly Review in their archive with the content of the most recent twenty years available with no paywall.
Alaska Quarterly Review has launched a YouTube Channel, with recent videos featuring craft conversations with Jane Hirshfield and Dorianne Laux, and readings with Jason Brown, Jessi Lewis, Joan Murray, Maura Stanton, Doug Ramspeck, and more.
The Dissident Club, a graphic memoir by award-winning Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui, opens with his attempted kidnapping by military officers in 2018, presumably under orders from government officials who were displeased with his near-constant reporting about government corruption. As someone on the country’s “Kill List,” Siddiqui had long attracted official enmity. But this beautifully illustrated and evocative book is more than an account of Siddiqui’s political resistance: It is also a deeply felt reflection on his childhood and a potent critique of fundamentalist religious viewpoints and restrictions.
As the oldest son of deeply conservative religious parents, Siddiqui began life in Saudi Arabia, then returned to Pakistan where his parents attempted to keep him and his siblings from Western media and culture. The book chronicles Siddiqui’s attempts to come of age — drinking, smoking weed, and hiding a Shiite girlfriend from his Sunni parents — and asserting his independence by refusing to work in his father’s business. Not surprisingly, this took a toll, as his family never accepted his vocational choice or lifestyle.
It’s a sad, if not uncommon, denouement, but one that comes with a relatively happy ending.
Shortly after the kidnapping attempt, Siddiqui, his wife, and son emigrated to France where he set up The Dissident Club, a thriving Paris-based gathering place and bar for refugees and their supporters. The Dissident Club tells the site’s story, along the way zeroing in on religious hypocrisy, the War on Terror, the uses and misuses of propaganda, and the ways many government officials promote repressive policies for personal, financial, and professional gain. It’s a powerful indictment and an ode to free expression.
The Dissident Club by Taha Siddiqui; co-author illus. Hubert Maury; trans. David Homel. Arsenal Pulp Press, 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.
Lemonade, the captivating chapbook by Catalina Vargas Tovar, attentively translated by Juliana Borrero, invites readers on an ecological inquiry that “is not a book of poetry” but an engaging “Paranormal Investigation.” At its core, this work explores the enigmatic presence of a mountain from Bogotá’s eastern range. Tovar describes the mountain as a sentinel that “keeps watch… observes / attunes.” Then notes its geological, hydrological, and transformative powers; the mountain “separates this plateau / from the world” and “absorbs water / in excess / turns it into language.” In contrast to the mountain’s enduring existence and transformative powers, we — “a great ensemble of / disoriented / out of tune / apocalyptic / crows” — illustrate the fleeting and “incoherent” nature of humanity.
Tovar’s exploration focuses on relationships between humans and the land, presenting the mountain through a feminine lens: “she… / receives / compensates / transforms.” The collective human presence is conveyed through a first-person plural perspective, presumably including the speaker: “we will be mummies / piled on mummies,” the “ghosts / that drink lemonade on the shore of a Black Sea.” The complexity of our existence and the mountain’s supernatural essence can only be “understood through investigation.”
Parts paranormal, philosophical, and poetic, Lemonade is a vibrant site for experimental conversation “under the sun of climate change” where “we [have] turned to shadows.” The chapbook endeavors two things: To “undo the spell / move in reverse”; To cast a new spell that encourages readers to listen to the land with fresh ears, to “see without tongue.”
Lemonade reflects Catalina Vargas Tovar’s inquiry into the interplay of ecology and culture while also challenging readers to consider how these elements shape our own ways of listening to the “promise” of the land where we live.
Lemonade by Catalina Vargas Tovar; translated by Juliana Borrero. Ugly Duckling Presse, November 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.
Housed in and published from Suffolk’s English Department, Salamander is biannual print magazine of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and works in translation. Founded in 1992, Salamander aims to publish work by writers deserving of a wider audience at any stage in their careers as well as to focus intentionally on inclusivity and outreach to marginalized writers.
This newest issue features an Art Portfolio (including the cover image) by sculptor Dale Rogers; Creative Nonfiction Andrew Bertaina; Fiction by R. S. Powers, Caroline Fleischauer, Michael Welch, Danny Lang-Perez, Gillon Crichton, Taylor Melia Elyse Mahone; Poetry by Marcy Rae Henry, Sharon Lin, Despy Boutris, Cynthia Atkins, James Davis, Cecelia Hagen, John A. Nieves, Jane Newkirk, Justin Groppuso-Clark, Benjamin Paloff, Alexandra Malouf, Lindsay Clark, Kate Hubbard, Susannah Sheffer, Donna Vorreyer, Moriah Cohen, Alice White, Sara Watson, Lisa Summe, John Gallaher, Jason Fraley, Amy Roa, Leah Umansky, Lindsay Younce Tsohantaridis, Julie Danho, Anthony DiPietro, Gabrielle Grace Hogan, Mary Rose Manspeaker, Katrina Madarang, and A. Molotkov.
64 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
March is almost at its end already! This means that there are a host of submission opportunities ending soon with March 31 and April 1 deadlines. As always, NewPages is here to help you keep chugging away at your submission goals so you don’t miss out on the opportunities with our weekly roundup. Check out calls for submissions from literary magazines, anthologies, and even a poetry calendar! And if you enjoy writing contests, we have a wide range to choose from, including opportunities from literary magazines, indie and university 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.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Emma Knight’s debut novel, is a powerful and compelling observation of womanhood in the early 21st century. Knight explores, a time when the cultural definition of the term womanhood and women’s roles in society largely came into question after the rejection of archaic boundaries and restrictions in the face of second wave feminism in the latter half of the 20th century.
The story follows Penelope “Pen” Winters, a first year international student at the University of Edinburgh who serves as the central protagonist of the novel; Christina Lennox, a family matriarch; and Alice, Pen’s friend and fellow classmate at university. Through each character, Knight explores the silent pressures, demands, and expectations that society places on women through her examination of the institution of marriage and romantic relationships alongside the power dynamics between men and women in these scenarios. Each of the three women undergoes an individual journey of self-discovery and empowerment as they begin to recognize the restrictions and prejudices that have been placed on them simply because of their gender. Yet Knight skillfully brings these three storylines into conversation with one another as each woman plays an active role in the others’ journeys, making for a moving portrayal of female friendship and support.
A truly memorable debut novel that is intelligent and character-driven, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is an important story that sheds light on the suffocating nature of society’s archaic gender prejudices. In the end, Knight emphasizes how each woman has the power and capability to define herself and her life outside the boundaries of these definitions.
Reviewer bio: Catherine Hayes graduated from Bridgewater State University with her master’s in English and currently lives in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Blood & Thunder: Musings of the Art of Medicine, MER Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, NewPages. She can be contacted on Twitter at @Catheri91642131.
The Shore Issue 25 stares down the springtime of our discontent with poetry that refuses to flinch. It features sharp new work by Dana Wall, Doug Ramspeck, Sarah Carson, Jaiden Geolingo, Rachel Nelson, Mary Paterson, Beth Oast Williams, Sally Rosen Kindred, Anthony Frame, Michele Santamaria, Susan L Leary, ND Allison, Stuart Greenhouse, Nicole Callihan, Helen Gu, Rucha Virmani, Ellis Purdie, Caron Wolfe, Caroline Cahill, Christopher Locke, Disha Trivedi, V Joshua Adams, Radian Hong, Le Wang, Nadine Hitchiner, Lara Chamoun, Bex Hainsworth, Elizabeth Wing, Ann Haven McDonnell, Lee Potts, Alastair Morrison, Tom Blake, John Bradley, Minnie Wu, Shannon Hardwick, M Cynthia Cheung, Binoy Zuzarte, Jeremiah Moriarty, Michael Lauchlan, Kate Kobosko, and Sharon Denmark. It also features art that bursts off the screen by Jennifer A Howard.
The Boyhood of Cain, Michael Amherst’s debut novel, tells the story of Daniel, a middle-school-aged boy who is trying to understand his place in school, his family, and the world. Like his biblical namesake, Daniel feels like he is in a lion’s den, but it’s one he doesn’t understand, as he is not popular at school, and he has no respect for either of his parents. His father is the former head of the school he attended, but he mismanaged the finances and so left the school in disgrace. Daniel’s mother struggles with depression, eventually leading to a period of hospitalization.
Like the biblical Cain Amherst alludes to in the title, Daniel is an outcast at school, as his metaphorical offerings don’t live up to the quality of the other students, especially Philip, his friend and rival. Mr. Miller, an art teacher, initially takes Daniel into individual lessons, possibly because he sees potential in his art, but then he includes Philip, as well. Daniel goes from feeling like one of the chosen to being on the periphery again, where he has spent most of his school days. It’s clear to the reader that Mr. Miller is not a good person, but Daniel seeks his approval, as he doesn’t have any other part of life to provide him with that support.
The distance between Daniel and the reader is the strength of the book. Daniel’s narration is simple, given his age, but the reader often sees the reality of Daniel’s life in ways that he cannot. When Daniel talks about wanting to be special — even comparing himself to Jesus, at one point — the reader sees him as a typical child, solipsistic and narrow-minded. However, the reader also feels sympathy for Daniel, as most of us have had similar experiences as children, times when we didn’t understand ourselves or the world, but thought we knew more than anybody around us. Thus, while the narration is child-like, the emotions are as human as any most readers have experienced.
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 Spring 2025 issue of Tint Journal, the magazine for English as a Second Language (ESL) writers, includes 24 new poems, short stories and nonfiction essays by writers identifying with just as many different nationalities and speaking 17 different first languages. The texts represent a travel across time and space: imaginary dreamlands, alien scapes, and hopeful wishes go side by side with anecdotes of festivities, radio shows, and seaside travels. All texts are available to read free online.
Contributors include Selene Lacayo, Stefan Sofiski, Wera Lou Gmeiner, Christian Lesmes, Bianca-Olivia Nita, Tanya Ng Cheong, March Abuyuan-Llanes, Madina Tuhbatullina, Ibrahim Oladeji Tijani, Marlena Maduro Baraf, Nazia Kamali, Olga Zilberbourg, Vincent Ternida, Nawel Abdallah, Diana Kussainova, Lars Love Philipson, Mariana Serapicos, Caroline Siebbeles, Ludivine Massin, Anke Laufer, Jesimiel Williams, Elodie A. Roy, Lara Della Gaspera, and Shrutidhora P Mohor.
In the title of Charleen McClure’s debut poetry collection, d–sorientation, the absence of the letter “i” enacts a loss of orientation to self in relationship to other, time, and place. The disorientation explored in McClure’s poems primarily stems from the poet’s mother’s illness, which not only threatens her mother’s life but also disrupts the daughter’s/poet’s sense of grounding: she is “the woman / in the snow of [her] mother’s / / cancer—” As a result, there is a reversal of roles between mother and daughter which leads to a reorientation within caregiving that highlights a legacy of devotion among generations of helping women, “the casava women / we come from.”
To capture the essence of the threats to orientation, McClure crafts a lyric, elegiac, fragmented, and unstopped poetry that utilizes subtext, negation, and erasure. The choice of erasure is particularly striking and resonant. As cancer imposes its own form of erasure on her mother—something the daughter cannot prevent — the poet asserts her artistic power through a blackout of William Fox’s 1792 pamphlet, “An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West Indian Sugar and Rum.” This poetic approach creates a compelling parallelism between personal experience and societal issues concerning the treatment of women and people of color. The approach also adroitly subverts a narrative of dominant culture while pulling its critique by non-dominant culture into relief, challenging the very notion of “negation.”
That is what McClure’s “words do”! They follow Ezra Pound’s imperative to “make it new.” The poet makes something new out of the givens — historical, physical, relational, and gendered elements — and in that gesture, acknowledges artistic and female fertility.
The reader of d–sorientation, having followed “the threads” of Charleen McClure’s “forlorn music,” arrives at “the edge of sweetness” and is nourished by the possibility of what “might mend.”
d–sorientation by Charleen McClure. BOA Editions, September 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.
Erratum 3/26/25: The author’s name, Charleen, had been misspelled as ‘Charlene’ and may still appear this way in areas where it cannot be redacted.
Charles Baxter has subtitled, Blood Test, his latest novel, “A Comedy,” and it lives up to that name, both in the sense that it is a humorous book, and the reader is never really concerned about an unhappy ending. The title refers to a test that Brock Hobson — the main character whose name everybody mispronounces — takes while at the doctor. It comes from a shadowy organization that promises to predict one’s future behavior, a joke in and of itself, as Hobson is an insurance salesman who takes no risks and lives a predictable life.
His two children suggest that he could begin breaking the law at will, even murdering somebody, given that the test results say that he will, at some point, break a law. Thus, they tell him he could argue that he had no choice in the matter. The shadowy organization even has him buy an insurance policy that retains legal counsel for when he does break the law.
The person Hobson wants to kill is Burt, the man who is now in a relationship with Cheryl, Hobson’s ex-wife. Burt seemingly has nothing redeeming about him, save for being handsome and in great shape, and he’s taken to calling Hobson and Cheryl’s son slurs because of his sexual orientation. Hobson ultimately does confront Burt about that and other issues, leading to a physical altercation and, ultimately, a type of duel.
On one hand, Baxter is raising questions about freedom and whether it can lead us to perform actions we wouldn’t otherwise undertake, and he might even be criticizing America’s reliance on guns, among other issues. However, the novel doesn’t seem to take itself seriously enough for that. Instead, Baxter invites the reader to follow along with Brock Hobson as he tries to figure out how to navigate his life as it has become more interesting after the blood test, and nobody knows where he’s going, even if a test tells him.
Blood Test by Charles Baxter. Pantheon Books, 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: @kevinbrownwrites
60 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
The whiplash is real. Along with dealing with the ever-fickle weather and the seasonal crud, it makes this time of year very difficult. You want to be able to celebrate spring, longer days returning, and more, but instead you feel rundown and are finding time changes definitely difficult for your body to deal with the more time marches on. Don’t let your writing and submission goals stumble along with the weather. NewPages is here to help with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
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.
Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins by Amy Shea Rutgers University Press, September 2025
Death is the great equalizer, but not all deaths are created equal. In recent years, there has been an increased interest and advocacy concerning end-of-life and after-death care. An increasing number of individuals and organizations from health care to the funeral and death care industries are working to promote and encourage people to consider their end-of-life wishes. Yet, there are limits to who these efforts reach and who can access such resources. These conversations come from a place of good intentions, but also from a place of privilege.
Amy Shea’s Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins is a collection of closely connected essays, taking the reader on a journey into what happens to those who die while experiencing homelessness or who end up indigent or unclaimed at the end of life. Too Poor to Die bears witness to the disparities in death and dying faced by some of society’s most vulnerable and marginalized and asks the reader to consider their own end-of-life and disposition plans within the larger context of how privilege and access plays a role in what we want versus what we get in death.
Pre-order is available with shipment upon publication and exam/desk/review copies are available upon request.
Holding firm to publishing in print since 2009, Blink-Ink is a tenacious quarterly of the best fiction of (approximately) 50 words or less. The theme of Issue #59 is “Bad Science,” with writing that challenges our beliefs. “People believe humans can’t move a big rock without a big machine or supernatural powers” the editors explain. “People believe ‘to evolve’ always means, ‘to get better.’ And those are just some harmless ones. Science works to correct itself; technology has overrun us, and most people believe the same pernicious nonsense people believed two hundred years ago.”
Contributors to Blink-Ink #59 sharing what they know about Bad Science include Carolyn R. Russell, Norbert Kovacs, Z.J. Lee, Katie Keridan, Clodagh O’Connor, Dart Humeston, Catfish McDaris, Sally Reno, Daryl Scroggins, Joe Hillard, Collen Addison, and many more.
In her introduction to this Spring 2025 issue of Colorado Review, Editor-in-Chief Stephanie G’Schwind writes, “Control may be an illusion, but we can always find ways—even small ones—to help, protect, and heal. And when ‘the world is too much with us,’ we can also retreat for a bit, construct a place for sanctuary, whatever that may look like for each of us: real, imagined, or remembered. May the work in this issue offer you a bit of respite.”
Offering respite for the world weary, readers will recharge with fiction by Rebecca Turkewitz, Ji Hyun Joo, Becky Hagenston, Leanne Ma; nonfiction by Jamie Cattanach, Calla Jacobson, Sarah Carvill; poetry by Sarah Kathryn Moore, Amit Majmudar, Triin Paja, Ira Sadoff , Susan M. SchultzTor Strand, John Allen Taylor, Xiaoqiu Qiu, Edwin Torres, Eric Pankey, Mackenzie Kozak, Maxine Chernoff, Kristin George Bagdanov, Brittany Cavallaro, Jonathan Aprea, Adam Ray Wagner, Miriam Akervall.
Evie Wyld’s latest novel takes place in three different time periods, which she refers to as Before, After, and Then. The Before and After section focus on Hannah and Max, a couple living in England, with the Before and After referring to Max’s death. The Before sections come from Hannah’s point of view, while Max—as a ghost—is the centerpiece of the After chapters. The Then sections go back to Hannah’s childhood in Australia, showing what led her to England and to who she currently is.
Those Then sections relate Hannah’s childhood in The Echoes, a place that exists on the graveyard of what used to be a “school” for Indigenous children where the white family running the institution abused, beat, and sometimes killed them. That past echoes through the experiences of the white family that now live there, as well, especially in Hannah and her sister Rachel’s Uncle Tone (short for Anthony).
Some Australian writers and thinkers have criticized Wyld’s handling of this section of the novel, critiquing her knowledge of Australian culture, but also in her supposed equating of the two types of trauma. I read the novel, especially the title, as an attempt to show how the whites are often oblivious to or indifferent to the suffering that has come before them, focused only on their own suffering, not as people for the reader to emulate. However, I’ll also admit my shortcomings in both perspective and knowledge.
In the Before and After sections, Hannah and Max’s relationship struggles to develop as fully as it could, largely because of the trauma Hannah endured before coming to England. While it’s clear they love each other, Hannah hasn’t revealed much about her past, even hiding a decision to have an abortion recently in their relationship. Characters’ decisions echo throughout time, as the novel also meditates on grief and loss, as Max’s ghost hovers in their flat for years after Hannah leaves, seeing her only one more time, understanding all they have lost.
The Echoes by Evie Wyld. Alfred A. Knopf, February 2025.
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
Roisín O’Donnell’s debut novel tells the story of Ciara, a woman who seems to have the perfect life: an attractive husband who has a steady job, enabling her and their two children to live a comfortable life. However, the reader discovers quite quickly that Ryan is not what he seems, as he emotionally and sexually abuses her. Readers see little of that abuse firsthand, especially the assaults, but they clearly see the effect of that abuse on Ciara.
She is finally able to leave Ryan, but her life for much of the next year is precarious, as there is little housing in Dublin for her and her children. She ends up in a hotel, with little money, trying to find a better place to live and a job to support her children. While her family offers to help her, she—like many survivors of abuse—is reluctant to take it. However, the people she meets in the hotel (and one brave civil servant who meets her outside of the office to tell her the truth about the reality of finding housing) help keep her from completely falling through the gaping holes of the social safety nets.
Throughout the novel, Ciara questions if she is making the right decision by leaving, especially when she gives birth to their third child and returns with him to the hotel. Ryan’s years of abuse have made Ciara afraid of him and unsure of herself, so she has moments where she allows him back into their lives, partly because of the legal system, but partly because of what he has done to her psyche.
O’Donnell reveals the realities of abuse that is more emotional in nature and how it causes a person to change, as well as the problems with the systems that should help women in such situations. However, there are still moments of joy where Ciara remembers who she once was and who she still can be.
Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell. Algonquin Books, February 2025.
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
HINDSIGHT Creative Nonfiction accepts submissions year-round. We are reading primarily for our themed journal, CHANGING SKIES: WRITING THROUGH THE CLIMATE CRISIS. We want to hear your stories from living through our ever-evolving climate crisis. The publication aims to educate and inspire our readers on this existential reality through creative nonfiction and artwork. We accept prose, poetry, and visual art from any corner of the world and encourage unique perspectives. Note that all submissions can also be considered for online publication or featured in the next issue of HINDSIGHT. In other news, we’re going to AWP at the end of March. View flyer for more information and links to submit.
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Deadline: May 1, 2025 Ashland Poetry Press is currently reading manuscripts for the 2025 Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize. $1000 and publication to the winner. Multiple submissions accepted. Any style or subject okay; we only want to be wowed by the poems. 2025 judge: Kim Addonizio. Submit by May 1. View flyer for a link to our website with full guidelines and link to submit.
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Registration Deadline: May 15, 2025 Immerse yourself in pristine mountains and write under starry skies. For prose storytellers and songwriters. With novelist/memoirist/essayist Carolyn Flynn, novelist and songwriter Karen Leslie and the award-winning songwriter Clay Mills of Songtown. View our flyer for more information and link to our website.
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Enjoy 350+ pages of work in CUTTHROAT’s 20th anniversary edition: Taking Liberties, a joint project with The Black Earth Institute. See flyer for more information about this issue and a link to our website.
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The Colorado Authors League (CAL) supports and promotes its community of published writers while connecting with and adding value to the reading world. Formed in 1931, authors become members to: keep up with changes in the craft of writing, publishing, and marketing, gain greater visibility for their writing, join a group of like-minded people who love writing. View our flyer to see new releases by members and a 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.
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.
63 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Mother Nature continues her fickleness and unwillingness to decide which season it is. If you are getting to enjoy warmer weather without the storms, take your laptop and head outside to enjoy fresh air and sunshine while you work on your writing, editing, and submission goals. If you are unfortunately dealing with the whiplash of storms and dropping temperatures, stay indoors and let NewPages help you as well with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities. There are many opportunities with March 15 deadlines, don’t miss out on these!
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 poems in this John Murphy’s newest poetry collection, Notes, focus on artists and producers in the popular music industry, covering all major genres: rock, jazz, and blues, as well as influential record producers.
Artists featured in the poems include Joni Mitchell, John Mayall, Cleo Laine, Chuck Berry, Brian Wilson, Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Paul McCartney, Tubby Hayes, Phil Spector, Blossom Dearie, Graham Nash, Bob Harris, and more.
“Notes takes us on a journey of appreciation of some of the key figures who made significant contributions to popular music in the 20th century… he writes not only as a poet but also as a seasoned musician of many years standing.” —David Mark Williams, author of The Odd Sock Exchange and Papaya Fantasia
“Notes interweaves two of John Murphy’s loves drawn from a lifetime as a poet and musician… Choosing exemplars from Doris Day to Dylan his writing honours its massive contribution to contemporary culture.” —Pippa Little, author of Time Begins to Hurt
“Murphy’s ear is true…he re-animates the great singers and songwriters, in his own affectionate tributes.” —Hannah Stone, editor of Dream Catcher.
The Tiger Moth Review is an online art and literature journal publishing poetry, prose, art, and photography engaging with nature, culture, the environment and ecology. In her Editor’s Preface, Esther Vincent Xueming comments on the meaning of sounds and silences, a thread that runs through Issue 13, including man-made disasters, food choices, flowering and decaying in nature, consciousnesses in body and memory, and playful mark making in forests.
The Tiger Moth Review champions minority, marginalize, and underrepresented voices, and publishes works in translation, with this newest issue feature works by Su Thar Nyein, Madeline Newell-Wilson, George M Jacobs, Andrea Ferrari Kristeller, Özge Lena, Tonia Leon, AnnaLeah Lacoss, Jerome Masamaka, Raka Banerjee, Shalome Lateef, Kimberly White, Shilong Tao, Michelle Pietrzak-Wegner, Kathy Pon, Jiang Pu, Nazia Kamali, William Summay, Eóin Flannery, Sadie Rittman, Matt Carrano, Tom Laughlin, and December Ellis.
Under the Gum Tree is a gorgeous print quarterly literary arts micro-magazine that “strives for authentic connections through vulnerability” by publishing creative nonfiction and visual art. The Winter 2025 issue features works by Jenny Bartoy, Meg Ritter, Gillian Dockins, Shawna Ervin, Zoë Christopher, Rita Malenczyk, and Cori Matusow, with a photo essay by Anna Omni and artwork by Mihone Forsyth.
Uché Blackstock’s memoir begins by talking about her mother, who was also a doctor and who served as the inspiration for Blackstock and her sister’s both pursuing degrees in medicine from Harvard. Her mother died in her early forties, but Blackstock continues looking back for what she can learn from how her mother lived.
The middle part of the memoir focuses on Blackstock’s medical education, where she not only encounters overt racism, but the much more subtle racism laced throughout the healthcare industry, including some beliefs about African Americans that remain from the 1800s. She eventually finds what should be her dream job at NYU only for her to continue to struggle against the racism built into such institutions.
She transitions into work that we would now call DEI, but she receives no meaningful support. In fact, she learns that people want the cover of such offices, but don’t want any meaningful change. COVID-19 impacts her work life rather dramatically, as she spends much more time working in hospitals at that point, and she quickly notices how many of the patients look more like her than she is used to seeing.
Ultimately, she leaves academic medicine, shifting her focus to health equity to try to counter the racism within healthcare systems. She questions both the legacy of racism/slavery in such systems, as well as her legacy from her mother, wondering about the choices her mother made in a system that was even more overtly racist than the one Blackstock finds herself in. She ends the book with direct suggestions to a wide variety of audiences of how they can begin the work of making healthcare more equitable, leaving the reader with a sense that there are solutions, as opposed to leaving them with feelings of despair.
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
Established in 2016 in Joshua Tree, CA by r soos, Cholla Needles celebrates its 100th Issue Anniversary this March 2025. Cholla Needles selects ten to twelve writers for each monthly issue to give the reader a full taste of each writer. In addition to these monthly issues, Cholla Needles publishes two youth (K-12) issues per year. Contributors come from around the globe and regularly include works in translations.
Opening this celebratory issue, Editor r soos comments, “I am often asked how I keep the pace up. The people you read in this issue supply several answers. First, of course, is because I love poets and poetry. But that alone does not answer the question. So, the very same writers you are reading in this issue supply the answer. I cannot, all by my lonesome, keep up the pace. The ten writers in this issue have all edited issues of Cholla Needles on a voluntary basis, and some of them two and three times. They offer me the break I need to take a breath and find time away from the desk. I thank them all for the opportunity AND I thank them all for their professionalism in keeping our literary standards high.”
The editors/writers featured in this issue include Cynthia Anderson, David Chorlton, Tobi Alfier, Juan Delgado, Miriam Sagan, Michael Dwayne Smith, Romaine Washington, John Brantingham, Cati Porter, and Bonnie Bostrom.
Story Monsters Ink is a monthly literary resource for teachers, librarians, parents, and young readers featuring interviews, book reviews, and articles of interest about the YA literary. The February 2025 issue includes interviews with Amanda Gorman, David Shannon, Megan McDonald, Martellus Bennett, Andrea Beatriz Arango, Kaitlyn Sage Patterson, Nikki Shannon Smith, Terry Pierce and Nadja Sarell. Enjoy regular columns, like Conrad’s Classroom: Falling Rocks from Outer Space, Live on Life: Toxic Beauty Standards, Judy Newman talking about the power of stuffies, and Nick Spake’s movie review of Paddington in Peru.
Education professor Soyoung Park’s latest book, (Re)Imagining Inclusions for Children of Color with Disabilities, is grounded in her direct observations of public, elementary-level “special education” programs in California, New York, and Texas. Throughout, she lambasts the general segregation and isolation of children into separate and unequal classrooms and offers a critique of the pervasive biases that label some children — especially those who are neither white nor English-dominant — as uneducable and inferior.
But the book’s strength is not in its unraveling of the link between ableism and racism. Rather, it rests with its focus on teachers who do the seemingly impossible: quiet aggressive, disinterested, and overwrought children. Park showcases how these master educators make room for unexpected actions and revelations; allow students to develop their unique intellectual curiosities; and center the development of relationships between teacher and student and between the students themselves.
Reading these anecdotal examples is revelatory — and inspiring — particularly because the book is being released as federal cutbacks to public education are looming. Nonetheless, thanks to the concrete examples that are presented, the text offers well-grounded insights into best practices for teaching kids diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and autism. It’s an excellent model of what should happen in every special ed classroom.
At the same time, because the book never addresses the distinct needs of children who are deaf, blind, or severely intellectually impaired, it is not a one-size-fits-all reference. Still, teachers will learn a lot from the book and other readers will gain a profound appreciation of an often-denigrated profession.
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.
There’s still time to catch the Winter 2025 issue of The 2River View, published by 2River, which also publishes individual authors in the 2River Chapbook Series. All their publications are available to read free online as well as download in printable formats. The Winter 2025 issue features new poems by Kristin Lueke, Lindsey Brown, Jenny Burkholder, Andrew Cox, Leila Farjami, Rae Flores, Sarah Jefferis, January Pearson, Daye Phillippo, Adam Tavel, Diana Woodcock, and artwork by Rae Flores.
61 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy March! This month is as temperamental as ever with Mother Nature still at war with herself on if spring should at last be here or if winter still needs to enjoy its last hurrah. If the weather whiplash is giving you the blues, why not spend some time indoors writing, editing, and submitting? NewPages, as always, is here to help with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities.
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 first two words of Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poetry, Heliotropia, are “I love.” The poet turns toward topics she deems “worth loving” — plant life, love life, and love poetry — like a sunflower moves in response to the sun. The collection’s strength and its risk are its “leaning into love.”
In a current poetic landscape that leans toward first-person narratives of traumatic pasts and uncertain futures, Bandukwala’s lyric poems risk expressing an opposite to loss and fear. They turn away from what is life-depleting and toward what is life-giving. In doing so Bandukwala offers a poetry that reaches for a beloved, for connection, for light, trusting that “love is always within reach.”
“I try not to be at war with memories I teach myself that I can be my own divine agent I practice surrender in the name of something I believe in”
Bandukwala’s poetry proactively cultivates intimate fellowship and appreciative practice. The poet knows her “path / is tenuous at best,” but makes a practice of “being alive” and determines “each day can hold one thing to love.”
In exploring “the subject / of love,” the poet acknowledges its dynamic, everchanging, and multifaceted nature. To illustrate that love is “constantly changing” and encompasses multiple definitions, the poet references poetry, painting, music, cinema, Star Trek, and The Marigold Tarot Deck. Her response to the perspectives of notable artists, such as Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Canadian poet Phyllis Webb, American poet Ellen Bass, and Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, contributes a unique framework for understanding types of love such as eros, philia, philautia, and agape.
Bandukwala writes from love and to love, believing that “even at its most difficult / love is worth loving.” Heliotropia celebrates her personal love of galaxies, stars, flowers, kisses, and language. For Manahil Bandukwala, “There are more love poems to write.”
Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala. Brick Books, September 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.
We all grapple for moments of respite in our current world, whether a road trip to a warm place to escape the cold, or just a quiet moment with a warm cuppa or a secret bowl of midnight ice cream. While MoonLit Getaway might sound like a metaphysical location — a realm of refuge, apart from the worries of everyday life, an imaginary vacation place for the world-weary — it is actually just a click away. Sharing new artwork, fiction, and poetry every two weeks open access online, with a print anthology released every September (aptly named Harvest Moon), Moonlit Getaway has created a haven for both creators and consumers of what’s new in literary arts and more.
NewPages curates Publications for Young Writers and Writing Contests for Young Writers, two guides where young readers and writers can find print and online literary magazines to read, places to publish their own works, and legitimate contests. These are ad-free resources regularly updated with carefully vetted content, wonderful resources for teachers to use in the classroom as well as for anyone mentoring young readers or writers in their lives.
Pictured is Fleeting Daze Magazine, a youth-run literary online quarterly magazine publishing all forms of literary arts and writing from contributors ages 13-24. Their most recent issue is themed “Aurora.”
If you know publications or contests for young readers and writers not listed, please contact us.
The title of Lindsay Turner’s second collection of poetry, The Upstate, locates the poems and the reader in the northwesternmost area of South Carolina. For those unfamiliar with this region, the term “upstate” may evoke other meanings such as standing, lifted, constructed, ready. These adjectives suggest the complicated realities of geographic capitalism and resource exploitation prevalent in American landscapes. From references to “clearcut” forests to a “paper mill,” the haunting essence of the “land unanswerable beneath the haze—”
Despite hazy disorientation, Turner invites us to examine what is in our “peripherals.” As “a person who believes in the value of intelligence,” she dons a headlamp and attempts to “find the verb for how you lost” and articulates the destruction of a place and people that she witnesses. But Turner does not write “at a remove”; she is our accomplice. And we are hers, because the crisis is ours. “We all did it.”
“The question is who does your money come from The question is whose loss The question is whose loves are torn like wet paper for your money Whose lines are crossed by it Who can’t live the thing she wants which is good and reasonable Because of your money”
As Turner seeks orientation and perspective to “get at the truth of it,” she climbs “up a mountain” — another interpretation of “upstate”— and what she sees is devastating: “The only being on the rocky outcrop, some things present in their outlines while the others sink into the sea. The other things dissolve in toxic fog. The other things are sold in pieces so small you couldn’t recognize.” These days “heavy days,” struggling with what it means to live in a “bleak” state.
In The Upstate, Lindsay Turner “has a different song about being out of place.” A downstate. She sings to us, “Whose lives are rubbled,” acknowledging how “distanced” we are from “the garden.”
The Upstate by Lindsay Turner. The University of Chicago Press, October 2023.
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 March 2025 issue of The Lake, an online journal of poetry and poetics, is now available for readers to enjoy new work from Pratibha Castle, Christian Emecheta, Diana MacKinnon Henning, Jacqueline Jules, John K. Kruschke, Beth McDonough, Yvonne Morris, Charlie Pettigrew, Kenneth Pobo, Marilyn Ricci, Richard Stimac, and Kate Young.
The Lake also book reviews of Ruth Padel’s Girl, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s Winter of Worship, and Mark Vernon Thomas’s Tales of Fenris Wolf. “One Poem Reviews” is a unique feature that invites poets to share a sample poem from a recently published collection. This month’s poets are Emily Bilman, Eugene Datta, Laura Theis, Louise Warren, and A.R. Williams.
Chad Sanders lays out his premise in the opening line of the opening chapter of his book: “This is my last time writing about race,” a line that echoes Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Sanders takes a different approach to come to some similar and relevant conclusions, as he talks about the trades he has to make in order for (mostly) white executives to listen to him and greenlight his projects.
Sanders works in the entertainment industry, as well as in writing, and he spends a significant part of the book talking about the unpaid or underpaid work he has done in order to try to make the connections he needs in order to succeed. Much of that work involves talking about race, almost always including racial trauma. The parts of the book where he focuses on that part of his career mirror Danzy Senna’s recent novel Colored Television, with its portrayal of a Black woman trying to break into television writing.
Sanders also draws on his experience in Silicon Valley, which is strikingly similar to Hollywood, as well as conflict within the African American community, such as the debate over the Jack and Jill organization. By the end of the work, he reiterates that this will be his last time writing about race. However, he admits, “Unless I need the money again,” as he recognizes the realities of the world, even while critiquing them.
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
65 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
It’s the last day of February which means there are submission opportunities ending today and more ending tomorrow, March 1. NewPages has your back with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities so you don’t miss out on these deadlines. Plus, find opportunities with March 2025 deadlines and beyond. This is a perfect weekend activity when the weather has decided to move back towards winter after a brief taste of spring.
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.
With Bernadette Mayer’s record-keeping poetry and Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto by her side, Amy De’Ath offers Not a Force of Nature. Each of these feminist writers resists “acting in the spirit of the contract” and seeks a “release from form” imposed by systems of power.
De’Ath writes at the intersection of feminism and capitalism, poetry and critique. Conscious of class, gender, sexuality, and other capitalist categories and oppressive systems, De’Ath writes against a “culture of financial bullshit” and attempts to make room for “Different shades of grey.” She “state[s] categorically that [she does] not endorse / whatever it is / people don’t like about these others—”
Readers will recognize categories of form such as a sonnet and an email, but what if “work emails” are made sonnets? That may seem like a simple question, but the implications are complex, suggesting not only a subversion of written forms, but a change in categorical concept. De’Ath proposes this “alternative trajectory” of tradition and conformity to the reader without coercion. As she considers “changeable forms of praxis,” De’Ath shifts readers away from being passive consumers of her art to being active thinkers within it. That’s art! And an act of love! “Since LOve tackles DEbt, [De’Ath] will follow it to / the marrow.”
At the core, Amy De’Ath is a revolutionary, writing against narrow cultural and institutional parameters. She refuses to conform to economic systems of artistic reproduction. Instead, she writes poetry to “make a concept out of it,” enabling socio-political thinking and heart-poetic communication. She writes for “People who like [her]… don’t want to reproduce / Themselves that way or this way.” Amy De’Ath’s way vies for people “roaming free” and a poetry “made by human hands.”
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 word gliff has a variety of definitions, one of which — now long since out of use — is “to make a slip in reading.” In that line, Ali Smith’s most recent novel seems a simple story, a dystopian tale about two children, Briar and Rose, who are unverifiables, people who are living off the grid, after their mother and (maybe) step-father go missing.
Along the way, they meet Colon (that seems to really be his name) who has a horse that Rose tries to buy, a horse she names Gliff. They also live with other unverifiables for a brief period of time. Smith never explains what has happened in the broader society to lead to whatever dystopian world now exists, but the monitoring certainly feels like something that could happen in any society today (there are also references throughout to Brave New World, though Smith isn’t concerned with the same questions Huxley was, as she’s writing about a different world than he could imagine).
It’s also never clear what Briar and Rose’s mother did that would lead to her being removed from the society or fleeing the society to avoid that removal, but Briar clearly doesn’t fit into the gender binary of this world. Smith doesn’t mention how they present their gender for much of the novel, but they ultimately encounter the world outside of their community of unverifiables, a situation that pushes Briar to choose one side of the binary.
The reader gets to see a bit of that world, as Briar has a good job a few years after having to make that choice. Ultimately, though, they encounter somebody else, somebody with news about Rose that reminds Briar who they once were and who they might still be. Though this novel seems to cover “a short space of time; a moment,” possibly only offering “a passing view; a glance, glimpse” of this world (other definitions for gliff), Smith clearly conveys the oppressive views of those who seek to impose their ideas — especially about gender and heteronormativity — on others, but she also reminds readers that there are ways to resist.
Gliff by Ali Smith. Pantheon Books, February 2025.
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
Susan Hahn’s Corner Office features the dramatis personae: Earth, Man, and Woman. Each character “pines” for what has been lost. For Earth, that’s “pastures” and “seasons.” For Man, it’s his corner office and the status it conferred. For Woman, who once had a corner office that was later “sliced in half, it’s more complicated.
It may be troubling to a feminist, but for a while in the unfolding drama, Woman “pines” for Man, “pray[ing] each night that he’ll change— / spin only around [her].” Eventually, Woman decides “not / to call him, or anyone, but to exist / not inside the clutter of others’ thoughts, / or corner offices and those who mourn them.” Phew!
Hahn presses her Man and Woman against the thin wall between gender stereotypes and archetypes, highlighting tensions between capitalism’s professional hierarchy and the patriarchy’s gender roles. His office furniture “bubble-wrapped,” Man soothes himself with the idea of having “seven different pairs / of breasts in one week—new moons / circling [his] face.” Man views women primarily as sexual objects, a “substitute” mother, or a therapist. That artistic choice carries ethical risks; stereotypical portrayals of men and women in society and art can perpetuate misogyny.
Hahn takes another artistic and ethical risk in having Earth speak in first person: “I cannot seem to stop / the injuries inflicted upon my surface.” While this utterance is moving, anthropomorphizing Earth risks reducing the planet to a vessel filled with human rationality. Early in the book, Earth asks, “How did it come to this?” A reader could argue that the human perception of Earth as a metonymic and metaphoric figure underlies climate crises. Hahn’s Man and Earth lose power. But Hahn’s Woman emerges as the most nuanced, sympathetic character, ultimately finding freedom in the metaphorical “open field / of a poem.” The corner office is hers!
Corner Office by Susan Hahn. Word Poetry, April 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.
In The Infernal Machine, Steven Johnson tells a story of explosive political violence, boosted in the late 19th century by Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite (later dubbed “infernal machines” by the press), and culminating in the U.S. Red Scare arrests and deportations of 1919-20. While some of the actors are well-known to history, such as anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, along with their eventual persecutor, J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson also follows lesser-known creators and early adopters of modern policing techniques, like fingerprint analysis and bomb disposal, to combat the threat.
Following the destruction trail of dynamite, Johnson shows how Nobel’s invention was soon adapted by radicals opposed to oppression and the capitalist order. It featured increasingly in political violence from the high-profile assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, to the U.S. organized labor campaigns around the century’s turn, the intimidating blasts of the extortionist Black Hand in the aughts, and the prominent Italian anarchist bombing wave that swept the U.S. in 1919. Johnson weaves accounts of anarchist events from the writings of Goldman and Berkman with the creation of modern police surveillance techniques to provide an even-handed and satisfying account from both sides.
While some readers may bristle at the foundation of a surveillance state that continues to flourish, Johnson tactfully acknowledges these perils while providing the compelling reasons for its creation. Beginning his story in the Russian “old country,” Johnson returns there after Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and 247 other leading “alien anarchists” are deported in December 1919 to revolutionary Russia and its nascent civil war. However, the U.S. revolutions in both political violence and state control would continue to shape our future.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. He is the editor and creator of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, an online journal of poetry and poetics, focusing on chapbooks. Aiden’s critical work has been published, or is forthcoming, in The Adroit Journal, Jacket2, The Rumpus and Fugue, among others venues.
The newest issue of The Malahat Review (229) features the 2024 Constance Rooke CNF Prize Winner, “Lanterns” by Marcel Goh, as well as an interview with the author. The issue also includes new poetry by Olive Andrews, Jocko Benoit, Ronna Bloom, Shauna Deathe, Susan Gillis, Jennifer Gossoo, Eve Joseph, Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Steve McOrmond, John O’Neill, Shannon Quinn, Natalie Rice, Sue Sinclair, Owen Torrey, and Paula Turcotte; fiction by Atefeh Asadi (trans. from Persian by Rebecca Ruth Gould), Manahil Bandukwala, Jake Kennedy (incl. an interview), Yasmin Rodrigues (incl. an interview), and Stuart Trenholm; and creative nonfiction by Kate Burnham and Shane Neilson. Cover art by Laura St. Pierre.
