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!
“Did you check the box?” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asks while celebrating a new granddaughter in the preface to his latest book. The pleasure he derives from his son-in-law’s having checked the Black box on the newborn girl’s birth certificate feels bittersweet, though. As a “race man,” he wants the girl to take pride in the heritage of Black America; one in which he’s played a significant role in sharing. Still, he also knows she’s now in a more insidious box, despite her 87.5% European ancestry, containing the fraught baggage of Black American history.
Drawing from his Intro to African American Studies course at Harvard, Gates delivers a real education in The Black Box: Writing the Race. While it provides an excellent overview of Black American thought from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. De Bois to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, Gates goes deeper than how things have appeared to outsiders. He guides readers through different ways Black writers have approached escaping from the negative aspects of the box with strong, sometimes conflicting, convictions.
The Black Box shows that “Black thought” has never been unified or unchallenged, a fact that’s unlikely to change. By understanding the different ways Black writers and thinkers have conceived of their own identities, however, we can better understand how to overcome the racial challenges our society still faces, including in our literature. Maybe understanding and compassion can help smooth the sharp edges of the box.
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, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
58 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Welcome to our weekly roundup of submission opportunities for February 21! This edition is packed with a variety of chances for writers, creatives, and professionals to showcase their work and break into new markets. Whether you’re looking to share your latest article, artwork, or innovative ideas, you’ll find opportunities here that cater to a wide range of styles and themes.
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 February eLitPak was just sent to our subscribers last week. View it online here.
Longtime activist and community organizer Vanessa Priya Daniel, founder and former executive director of the Groundswell Fund, a foundation dedicated to supporting grassroots, women of color-led organizations, has written an extraordinary book that merges memoir with matter-of-fact advice for advancing social change.
She begins by situating herself as the biracial daughter of a Sri Lankan father and white mother and describes what happened after she told her paternal family about being sexually abused by a relative. The family’s refusal to believe Vanessa caused her mom to flee; she ultimately opted to raise her only child in the mostly-white Pacific Northwest. The move caused a deep rupture for Vanessa, separating her from a Sri Lankan community that she had previously loved. Moreover, this foundational disruption has continued to indirectly impact her work as a progressive change agent and parent.
But other factors have also affected her, and the book offers a deconstruction of the ways she – indeed, all people – internalize racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, “isms” that can support or stymie community organizing. Concrete examples highlight the ways groups can be destroyed from within by allegations that a leader of color is “acting white” if they demand punctuality, good grammar, and productivity. While this may be seen as a public airing of dirty laundry, by calling out the deleterious impact these assertions have on targeted people, Unrig the Game provides a courageous interrogation of organizational implosions. It also provides a direct pathway out of destructive behavior, showcasing the experiences of several women of color who, like Daniel, have had their authority challenged and character derided.
Unrig the Game is a celebration of collaboration over competition and a wise analysis of the ways personal and political power, mental illness, and “cancel culture” intersect. This makes the book essential reading for everyone who works for, or with, feminist, queer, antiracist, and pro-democracy organizations.
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 2025 issue of Baltimore Review invites readers to enjoy new poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction by Shelley Berg, Diane LeBlanc, Joanne Merriam, Kayla Rutledge Page, Tyler Patton, Fran Qi, Rook Rainsdowne, Emily Ransdell, Maggie Riggs, Elizabeth Rosen, Leanne Shirtliffe, Nancy Takacs, Sage Tyrtle, and Ben Van Voorhis, as well as winners of the Baltimore Review Winter Contest selected by final judge, Fracine Witte: “Furniture Bones,” prose poem by Dawn Dupler; “beta waves,” flash creative nonfiction by Marika Guthrie; “Crux,” flash fiction by Kayla Rutledge Page.
While its name exudes a playfully inviting quality, Fruitslice: A Queer Quarterly has established a solid foundation upon which to build “a living archive of contemporary Queer life,” the editors assert. “Fruitslice documents the stories, voices, and experiences that mainstream spaces often overlook. We believe in dismantling colonialist, capitalist, and exclusionary frameworks that have historically dominated the publishing world. Through each issue, we amplify Queer creativity with a focus on uplifting marginalized voices, especially those of BIPOC, disabled, and Trans creators. Our work is as much about preserving our present as it is about imagining and building liberatory futures.”
This inclusion extends to the publication’s encouraging submissions from all genres, with particular interest in prose, essays, and creative nonfiction, as well as printable mediums including visual and arts formats (no audio/video at this time). Issues are timed to release quarterly with each solstice and are always free and open-access online through ISSUU, with no paywall. Fruitslice is also available in collectible print issues for individual purchase.
Collective Credentials
While Fruitslice maintains a full staff of editors, their process is “deeply collaborative, rooted in techniques that prioritize community-driven creativity over rigid structures. Rather than adhering to a singular editing style,” the editors explain, “we focus on what resonates with and reflects the voices of our contributors and readers. We believe that storytelling and literature are tools to foster connection, understanding, and bring Queer people together in meaningful ways.
“Our editorial team brings a diverse range of expertise and creative backgrounds to Fruitslice. Together, we hold degrees in fields such as literature, creative writing, film production, screenwriting, performance, and visual arts, with academic affiliations including Columbia University, Portland State University, Cornish College of the Arts, and Drew University. Our editors have worked across various disciplines, from leading roles in literary journals, like The Portland Review, to contributions in magazines, such as Art Chowder and Eleven PDX.
“Our editors are writers, artists, and community builders who share a commitment to amplifying Queer voices. This ethos drives every issue we publish, a collective effort to document and celebrate Queer creativity while fostering meaningful connections through art.”
Editorial Process: Consistency and Care
For writers and artists contributing works, the editors approach every submission with this same philosophy of care and collaboration. “Our editorial process is designed to be both rigorous and personal,” the editors detail, “ensuring that every piece receives thoughtful attention while honoring the unique voice of each contributor.”
Submissions are received through Submittable and are first reviewed by a team of designated readers. “While many readers also take on additional roles, such as reviewers, editors, or proofreaders, their primary responsibility during this stage is to conduct the initial review of each piece. Each piece is evaluated based on an internal rubric, and team members submit detailed review forms to guide discussions. Pieces that move forward are then evaluated by our leadership team for a second review. Any final decisions on uncertain pieces are made by the Editor-in-Chief, ensuring every submission is handled with consistency and care.”
Collaboration continues through the editing phase as accepted pieces are assigned to a designated editor, who works closely with the contributor through multiple rounds of feedback, as needed. “This personalized process focuses on collaboration rather than prescriptive editing,” the editors assure, “allowing the author’s voice and vision to remain central to the work. At Fruitslice, we provide feedback as suggestions rather than mandates, aligning with our philosophy of amplifying rather than altering the contributor’s voice.”
The response time for this kind of thoughtful attention to submissions is 45-60 days.
Queer Language & Norm Challenging
Fruitslice offers contributors a working style guide that “outlines principles and practices that Queer language and challenge traditional norms. It serves as a tool for guidance, not restriction,” the editors assure, “and is available to the public on our website for anyone interested in exploring our approach. We encourage contributors to engage with the guide to align their work with our mission, but adherence is never a requirement for publication. Requiring strict adherence would contradict the guide’s purpose as a living document as a tool to resist the rigid systems that often silence marginalized voices. Our priority is honoring the authenticity of each piece while fostering a sense of connection and resonance within the larger community.”
Consuming Fruitslice
For readers, Fruitslice is equal parts a literary magazine and a lifestyle magazine. “We have short fiction and poetry, but we also have thoughtful essays on pop culture, technology, politics, and Queer culture. Each issue of Fruitslice features work from around 60 Queer artists, with the majority of our content curated from open call submissions. However, we’re not a traditional literary magazine. We also include staff-written pieces, which allow us to balance genres, explore diverse topics, and fully develop the story we aim to tell with each selected theme. This hybrid model ties the issue together, ensuring cohesion and depth. Staff-written pieces, decided through an internal pitch process, often include artist features, interviews, and other content that’s harder to source through open call submissions.”
Recent contributors include Ais Russel, Anya Jiménez, Amritha York, Ann McCann, Cam Reid, Em Buth, Hamish Bell, Jill Young, Kayla Thompson, Kelsey Smoot, Kenna DeValor, Lorinda Boyer, Meg Streich, Nyanjah Charles, Nico Wilkinson, René Zadoorian, Roman Campbell, Rhyker Dye, Starly Lou Riggs, and Taylor Michael Simmons.
Existing Boldy
With any new venture, there is always a learning curve. Fruitslice editors reflect on their fresh experience as newbies with the insight of an ancient. “The greatest lesson we’ve learned in starting this publication is the power of embracing imperfection. Waiting for the ‘perfect moment’ or feeling ‘perfectly qualified’ can be a form of self-sabotage, particularly for those who have been socialized to constantly question our place at the table.
“The studies showing that cis straight white men routinely pursue opportunities they’re only partially qualified for, benefiting from what we’ve come to see as a ‘productive delusion,’ an unshakeable confidence born of never having their presence questioned. We all deserve access to that kind of audacious belief in ourselves. We deserve to take up space, to make mistakes publicly, to learn as we go, and to value our unique perspectives even when — especially when — they challenge the mainstream.
“Like identity, creative work isn’t about achieving a fixed, perfect state, it’s about existing boldly in spaces of transition and transformation. Every cycle, we move forward with the publication before we feel ‘ready.’ We’ve learned that the most meaningful work often happens in these uncomfortable spaces where we dare to create despite our doubts. There will never be a perfect moment, and this publication will never be perfect, and that’s precisely what makes it vital, authentic, and true.”
“Queering” the Indie Publication Scene
Fruitslice holds an important place in our collective culture, not just for today, but also establishing a foothold for the future. “To ‘Queer’ something means to reimagine it beyond traditional systems,” the editors explain. “At Fruitslice, we’re doing more than just publishing Queer voices, we’re fundamentally rethinking how a publication can operate. Here’s how:
“First, we’re challenging what ‘professional’ publishing looks like. Our editorial process celebrates imperfection and values authentic expression over rigid grammar rules. We don’t just accept submissions, we build relationships with our contributors, working collaboratively to help their vision shine through while respecting their unique voice and style.
“Second, we’re reimagining growth. While other publications may chase rapid expansion and profit, we prioritize sustainable, community-centered development. This means sometimes moving slower to ensure no one burns out, valuing collective care over productivity, and making sure our growth serves our community rather than the other way around.
“Third, we’re Queering what leadership looks like. Our organizational structure embraces multiple ways of contributing and leading. We recognize that the best ideas often come from questioning traditional hierarchies and empowering everyone to shape our direction, regardless of their role or experience level.”
This matters, the editors impress, because “traditional publishing often excludes marginalized voices not just through who they publish, but through their entire approach to what makes writing ‘good’ or ‘professional.’ By Queering these systems, we’re creating space for voices, stories, and ways of working that have been historically silenced or deemed ‘unprofessional.’ We’re proving that a publication can be both high-quality and radically inclusive, both structured and fluid, both ambitious and sustainable.
“This isn’t just about making space within existing systems, it’s about building something new together, something that celebrates the messy, beautiful reality of Queer creativity in all its forms.”
Now hailing from its new home in Pennsylvania, The Main Street Rag Winter 2025 opens with an interview by M. Scott Douglass with Doralee Brooks: Poet Laureate, Educator, and Editor of The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain: A Pittsburgh Poetry Anthology. The publication also features “Stories & Such” by John Azrak, Joe DeLong, Sydney Lea, Rebecca L. Monroe, and Carolyn Wilson-Scott, as well as poetry by Doralee Brooks, Richard Band, Sam Barbee, Richard Thomas Murray, Clayre Benzadón, Carolyn Dahl, Eleanor Eichenbaum, Timons Esaias, Arvilla Fee, David A. Goodrum, Anthony Gloeggler, Andrew Schwartz, L M Harrod, David James, Karen Jones, Craig R. Kirchner, Jan Ball, Kristin Laurel, Abbie Bradfield Mulvihill, Richard Levine, Mark Madigan, Peter McNamara, Kurt Olsson, Kevin Ridgeway, Claire Scott, William Snyder, T.N. Turner, Mark Vogel, Tom Wayman, Kimberly White, Myles Weber, Sharon Whitehill, and Mike Wilson. Cover photos by M. Scott Douglass.
From the new 2025 Masthead, the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Black Warrior Reviewfeatures poetry by Edward Salem, Hayley Veilleux, Kailah Figueroa, Kristen Swane, Lian Sing, Lily Holloway, Mag Gabbert, Qianqian Yang, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, Rose Zinnia, Tasia Trevino, Yi Wei; prose by Amber Starks, Ala Fox, Alexandra Salata, Cameron McLeod Martin, Carl Lavigne, Ruofei Ivy Du, Emilio Carrero, Sammy Lê, Gabriel Mundo, Jasmyn Huff, Jaia Hamid Bashir, Leia K. Bradley, Lindsey Godfrey Eccles, Exquisite Armantè, Danielle Batalion Ola; comics and art by Kristin Emanuel and Mariah Gese. Evans Akanyijuka is the featured artist both on the cover and with a full-color portfolio inside.
Poetry Dust is more than a poetry collection—it’s an immersive experience which blends over 60 never-before-published poems with over 60 bold, vibrant art pieces, each carefully designed to complement the text. This book was created in the hopes of igniting inspiration, for art lovers, seekers, and those drawn to the unseen emotions that connect us all. It journeys through themes of life, change, time, truth, loss, resilience, and the extraordinary beauty found in the often difficult contrasts of life.
My early years were spent traveling with nomadic parents across Central and South America and beyond. This constant movement shaped my creative spirit and deepened my awareness of impermanence—the fleeting nature our lives, of time, and experience. I am forever drawn to the exchange and connection between the physical and the unseen, the tangible and the metaphysical.
This book marks my first published collection, and I invite readers to pause, reflect, and allow inspiration to grow. Whether you are a lifelong poetry reader or new to the genre, my hope is that it will stir the soul, and remind us that art is a living thing, passing from contact to contact, ever growing and reshaping itself in new creations.
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s most recent book, is a long essay, more of a meditation on the serviceberry than an argument. Honestly, though, it is not even about the serviceberry, as she uses that as a means to talk about, as her subtitle puts it, Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. However, her book is about much more than that, as she spends a substantial amount of time talking about gift economies and what that would look like in the twenty-first century world.
Kimmerer looks around the world as it currently is and finds a number of those types of gift economies already in existence. For example, in one section of the book, she uses quick examples of people taking somebody out to dinner or passing a stroller on to somebody else who needs it or another person who makes too much lasagna and shares it with a neighbor. In fact, Kimmerer often gets her serviceberries from a neighbor who grows and sells them, as that neighbor allows people to come and pick them for free.
She also uses larger examples, such as libraries and public roads or Scandinavian countries with a much higher tax base, but a much higher happiness index score, as well. Kimmerer pulls from her Indigenous roots and examines how various tribes have dealt with land management, including agreements to share lands between nations, recognizing that all benefit from the resources, so all should help care for them.
In a time where polarization seems not only to be the norm, but also to be widening in the United States (and a number of other countries around the world), a problem only reinforced by the widening wealth gap, Kimmerer reminds readers that there are other ways to be in the world. Not only that, she reminds us that those ways already exist, if only we take the time to notice them.
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Scribner, November 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
Gay Poems for Red States, Willie Carver’s debut collection of poems, draws heavily from his life growing up gay in rural Kentucky, as well as his years as a high school teacher (where he had great success, leading to his being named Kentucky Teacher of the Year in 2022). Not surprisingly, then, part of this collection focuses on the struggles he faced, especially within the education system as somebody who was openly gay in a red state.
However, Carver also talks about the love he received from his parents and others in his community, especially some of his teachers, ultimately leading to his relationship with and marriage to Josh, his current husband. In “Someday Child,” for example, when he was younger, he and his father were watching an episode of Jerry Springer, an episode that focused on a gay son coming out to an unaccepting father. His father comments, “You know, if I ever had a kid who felt comfortable telling me something like that, I hope they’d / know that it would be okay with me.” Carver’s not yet comfortable making that confession to his father, so he replies, “Well if you ever have a kid like that, I hope they do.”
This collection, though, is as much about class as it is about sexuality, as Carver also faced rejection because of where he came from. In “Hard to Take Seriously,” Carver tells of travelling to a state competition in speech and debate where he believes he performs amazingly. One judge, however, only provides the comment, “Hard to take seriously with your accent.”
Thus, Carver ends up struggling to find a place to fit in the world. Within the red state, people condemn his sexuality. In the wider world, they judge his socioeconomic status and cultural background.
However, in the final poem, “The Truth Will Stand When the World’s on Fire,” Carver shows how he has reconciled who he is with where he’s from and who he loves, largely based on the acceptance of those closest to him. It is a poem that draws from apocalyptic imagery, much like the book of Revelation; the revelation that he is true to himself and to all that has made him who he is, a reconciliation of both worlds.
Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. The University Press of Kentucky, June 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
Deadline: March 10, 2025 Collaboration is upon us for joy, productivity, and sometimes heartache. Please show us your art that involved collaboration and how that collaboration gave rise to your poetry, prose and images and hybrid forms. Here is a chance to tell us how you work and produce. Sponsored by Black Earth Institute valuing earth, spirit, and social justice. View flyer for more info and a link to our website.
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Deadline: February 21, 2025 The Subnivean Awards are open: winners receive publication and blurbs from final judges, as well as $150 each. Finalists and winners are featured at a popular virtual event. Subnivean’s received submissions from 63 countries and every U.S. state, publishing U.S. Poet Laureate Emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, Jane Wong, Molly Giles, Amit Majmudar and others. We await your poems and stories! View flyer for more info and a link to submit.
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The path of a writer is often paved with challenges. Distractions, rejection, self-doubt, writer’s block, imposter syndrome, resistance, and a lack of structure can make the journey feel impossible. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed and wondered if you’ll ever be able to finish projects or write consistently, you’re not alone. Come write with Writer’s Atelier! View flyer for more information and link to our website.
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Contest Deadline: March 30, 2025 Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to Black Fox Literary Magazine’s Winter Prize with theme Rise or Ruin! Deadline: March 30, 2025! We are also accepting free general submissions for our summer 2025 print issue. Free subs close on May 31, 2025! View flyer for links to submit.
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Deadline: Rolling We at Hindsight are looking to expand our online library! We accept artwork, photography, creative nonfiction prose, and poetry. All submissions are considered for both print and online publication. We accept internationally as well!
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Deadline: Rolling The flagship journal of ekphrasis offers a variety of inspiring Zooms on art history and the writer’s craft. Join a welcoming community and connect in conversation and creativity. View our flyer for a link to our website.
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Application Deadline: April 1, 2025 Have you ever wished you could attend your own private writing workshop that would teach you exactly what you need to know, at the right pace for you, and provide feedback and guidance in extensive one-on-one sessions? That’s Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. It’s an intensive, personalized, one-on-one online workshop experience combining advanced lectures, expert feedback, and deep mentoring. View flyer for more information and a link to our website.
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Deadline: April 15, 2025 Epiphany‘s 2025 Breakout! Writers prize will be judged by Victoria Chang in poetry and Hilary Leichter in prose. The contest is open to college and graduate students, and first prize winner in each genre will be awarded $1000 and publication. Submissions open March 1 and close April 15. View our flyer for more info and see more details on our website.
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Deadline: February 28, 2025 During the month of February, Third Street Review, a quarterly literary journal, welcomes submissions of Flash Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Art, and Photography. If you have something wild, wooly, and wonderful, we want to see it. We value the work of individual creators—show us who you are and what you can do. In addition to being a paying publication, we promote across social media platforms and nominate for awards. Jump in—we can’t wait to meet you! View our website to learn more.
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50 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
It is Friday and crazy weather has run rampant this week with bad rainstorms, ice storms, and snowstorms sweeping across the country. Now is a perfect time to stay indoors and write, write, write. . . and submit! NewPages is here to help you reach your submission goals with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities. As today is the fourteenth, there are a lot of calls and contests with February 15 deadlines. Don’t miss out!
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.
Deadline: Year-round 10 Reasons to Submit to & check out Fahmidan: 1. Our Journal pays $25 per acceptance 2. No Submission Fees 3. Affordable Manuscript & Editorial Feedback 4. Affordable Reader Feedback 5. Affordable Workshops 6. An Accessible retreat 7. An International Team 8. A Team with 100s of combined publications 9. A 25-day max Response Time. 10. True Diversity of Thought View our flyer for more information and a link to our website.
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HEART is a small literary journal from the low country of South Carolina published by Nostalgia Press. Its spirited and struggling editor-publisher has freely given voice to poets from all over the world since 1986. HEART uses modern prose poetry, poems that give life and motion to moods, messages from simple moments, and sparkling lines from meditative thought. An annual cash award is offered, and the 2024 HEART Poetry Award winner, “Piano” by Eric Machan Howd of Ithaca, New York is featured in HEART Issue 19. Readers can also enjoy works by Ben Onachila, Carol Despeaux Fawcett, Kimberly Lewis, David James, Ion Corcos, Jacob Friesenhahn, Kathie Collins, Laurice Gilbert, Victoria Melekian, Lesley Sherwood, Shutta Crum, Mike Wilson, and a contribution and commentary from Editor Connie Lakey Martin.
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought Winter 2025 is a special issue, “The Future. From a Woman’s Perspective,” guest edited by Judy B. Smetana, Interim Associate Dean for the Crossland College of Technology and Associate Professor and the HRD Graduate Program Coordinator in the School of Technology and Workforce Learning, Pittsburg State University. The articles in this issue include “Exploring the Intersectional Experiences of Black Women in Fortune 500 Companies” by Shana Yarberry, “Remote Work for Women in the Workplace: A Balancing Act to Doing It All” by Kayla Thomas, “Webs of Worry: Women and Financial Anxiety” by Goldie Prelogar-Hernandez, “Leading Through Change: An Adaptive Mindset” by Julie D. Dainty, “Business as an Agent of Individual Fulfillment” by Preeti D’mello, “A Word Please: The Effects of Using ‘Pussy’ as a Microaggression” by Erin Jordan, a selection of poetry, and the team-authored study, “Female Students’ Aspirations and Study in the U.S.: Voices of Gen Z from Uzbekistan.”
This Valentine’s Day, ditch the clichés and embrace the real. Join us on Zoom February 14 at 8 PM ET (5 PT) for the launch of Benjamin Talbot’s Periscope City: Where the Lonely Go to Live Alone. Following a brief reading by Benjamin, it’s your turn, so bring your best “love stinks” piece for our open mic. Sign up now. For more information, please view our flyer.
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The editors of Posit Issue 38 believe that “the art and literature in this issue offers wisdom and succor for our troubled psyches readers,” offering remarkable new poetry and prose by Gillian Conoley, Matthew Cooperman, Judy Halebsky, Brian Johnson, Tony Kitt, Peter Leight, Edward Mayes, Sheila Murphy, Jesse Nissim, Mikey Swanberg, and Martha Zweig; sculpture, photography, and paintings by Loren Eiferman, John Einarsen, and Gregory Rick; and text + image by Joanna Fuhrman.
Many would agree it’s an act of utter folly to start up a traditional print literary journal in this day and age, let alone a ‘high end, coffee table’ production, so the name, Folly Journal, certainly seems apt for this print-only literary publication featuring cultural commentary, creative writing, essays, poetry, and “carefully curated scandal.” Trying, as Founder and Editor in Chief Emily Makere Broadmore says, to be “lightish, ornamental, and intriguing. Each issue documents our cultural moment in all its messy, magnificent glory in an inviting and accessible magazine format.”
Published annually with a November release, the publication is generous at around one-hundred pages, “but it feels like something you can dip in and out of and take away on holiday to enjoy flicking through on the beach,” Broadmore assures. Currently available in print only, Folly Journal is stocked in selected independent bookstores, luxury hotels, and cultural institutions. It is also available for purchase online by single issue or subscription.
Two Line Press’ Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories brings together five previously untranslated peers of Osamu Dazai and Kōbō Abe in an exceptionally curated anthology of short fiction. While never explicitly stated, these are horror stories. Although their focus is never similar, enough themes and ideas are shared across all stories that it is hard to decide whether these are five isolated stories or equal parts of a homogenous universe.
Four of the five authors are women, the other queer, and gendered institutions form the bedrock through which strangeness grows. In one story, a wife’s simple hopes of going to the opera are complicated by her husband’s dimensions (he can fit in the box of a large sake bottle) and her mother-in-law’s connection to an ancient dwarf tribe. Elsewhere, a woman is so terrified by her husband’s annual departures that she obsessively buys new locks and mutilates herself — “radical cosmetic treatment” — in a way in which she hopes will keep him interested when he returns.
This is an amorphous collection, in which the only certainty is chaos. Age, size, gender and sexuality are in flux, and these characters — who seem to be contorting more than acting on their will — are archetypal protagonists of weird fiction.
Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories, authors: Nobuko Takagi, trans. Philip Price; Tomoko Yoshida, trans. Margaret Mitsutani; Jeffrey Angles, trans. Jeffrey Angles; Takako Takahashi, trans. Brian Bergstrom; Taeko Kono, trans. Lucy North. Two Lines Press, Center for the Art of Translation, March 2025.
Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a writer based in Norfolk, England.
The newest South Dakota Review is a double issue of of new poetry by Albert Abonado, Chelsea Dingman, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Keri Bentz, Michael Meyerhofer, Jill Khoury, CD Eskilson, Suzanne Frischkorn, Rebecca Macijeski, Adam Chiles, Morgan Eklund, Prosper Ìféányí, Alyse Knorr, Ilari Pass, Joan Larkin, Allison Field Bell, Gerry LaFemina, Sigman Byrd, Nano Taggart, Adam Deutsch, Rodney Gomez, Connie Post, Ellen June Wright, Maryam Ghafoor, and Sharon Chmielarz; new short stories by Janet Goldbert, Isabelle Stillman, Christopher Torockio, David Luoma, Michael Czyzniejewski, and Randy DeVita; and essays by Adam M. Sowards, Kathryn Ganfield, Meg Thompson, and Ha-Yun Jung. Cover art by Lee Ann Roripaugh.
The February 2025 issue of The Lake, an online journal of poetry and poetics, is now avaialbe for readers to enjoy, featuring new works by Peter Cashorali, Mike Dillon, Catherine Edmunds, Angela France, Martha Ellen Johnson, Tom Kelly, Kate Noakes, Marion Oxley, Jenny Robb, Kerry Ryan, Hannah Stone, A. R. Williams. Reviews of Roger McGough’s Collected Poems: 1959-2024, Bob Beagrie’s Romanceros, Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City, and Stephen Cramer’s Shakespeare Redacted. “One Poem Reviews” is a unique feature in which readers can sample a single poem from a recently published collection. This month Mridul Dasgupta, Sarah Dixon, and Alan Price have generously shared their works.
From earliest childhood, memoirist Marty Ross-Dolen, a now-retired child psychiatrist, knew that her mother’s life had been marked by something she could only glimpse, but which manifested as a sadness and sense of loss that nothing could fix. As she came of age, she learned the reason: her mother, Patricia [called Patsy] the second of five children, had been orphaned in 1960 when she was fourteen. A plane carrying her parents – the executives at Highlights for Children Magazine – had been flying to a meeting in New York City to discuss expanded newsstand placement when a collision between their commercial jet and another plane left no survivors. This abrupt end to life as she knew it catapulted Patsy and her siblings from their midwestern home into the home of relatives in Texas. Although they were well cared for and well-treated, from that moment on, a gaping absence hovered over every aspect of Patsy’s life.
Likewise for daughter Marty, who feared upsetting her mom by asking too many questions about the people whose photos stared at her from the living room mantlepiece. Still, she wanted to know more about her maternal lineage, so she started digging. The result, Always There, Always Gone, involved fourteen years of research, including the perusal of thousands of letters – miraculously saved by family and Highlights archivists – between Ross-Dolen’s grandmother, Mary Martin Myers, and her business associates and relatives before her death at age thirty-eight.
The result is a genre-bending memoir, offering readers fragments that Ross-Dolen calls “wisps,” a blend of conventional narrative, erasure poetry, imagined conversations between her and her grandmother, and family photographs. Moving, if somewhat enigmatic, the memoir is an emotionally rich interrogation of the legacy of grief on people who are both directly and indirectly impacted by tragedy. A wise and thoughtful addition to our understanding of the long-term effects of trauma and its transmission from parent to child.
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.
49 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy February! The groundhog miraculously saw his shadow on a day it did not seem like he would. But regardless of this old wives’ tradition that boasts a 30% accuracy rate…no matter what it is technically still 6 more weeks until Spring…right? It seems very appropriate that this weekend we have a winter storm locked in on us. So, if you will also be battling cold, windy, and snowy or icy weather, stay safe and, if you can, stay indoors and keep working on those submission goals.
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 newest issue of december (35.2) features winners and honorable mentions of the publication’s 2024 Curt Johnson Prose Awards for fiction and nonfiction as well as a generous selection of new poetry by Samaa Abdurraqib, Nicole Adabunu, Jodi Balas, Martins Deep, C.W. Emerson, Chad Foret, Dagne Forrest, Kelle Groom, Staci Halt, SG Huerta, Judy Kaber, Aekta Khubchandani, Tate Lewis-Carroll, Sheleen McElhinney, Becka Mara McKay, Katherine Mitchell, Doug Ramspeck, Vincent Antonio, Rendoni Lex, Kelly R. Samuels, Annelise Schoups, Kelly Terwilliger; fiction by Toby Donovan, Joshua Levy, Trent Lewin, Jill E Marshall, Julie Trimingham, Tryphena Yeboah; nonfiction Jacob Aiello, R. Renee Branca, Carrie Hall, Maggie Hart, Danica Li, Laura Price Steele; and art by Jen Everett and Chyrum Lambert. Cover art: Anonymous Women: Gone Postal (2024) by Patty Carroll.
Danusha Laméris displays her skill for sensual poetics in this latest collection, Blade by Blade from Copper Canyon Press. The book’s naturalist bent is apparent from poem titles like “Okra,” “Praying Mantis,” and “Let Rain Be Rain.” It’s in thoughts of this natural world that the poet has taken refuge from the grief of losing both a brother and a son. As the speaker of “Slither” says, Laméris wants to “go back into the green, green world” of her youth, when she was “small as the curve / of a spoon,” and she invites readers along with her to “start over / leaf by leaf, blade by beckoning blade.”
Laméris may miss this world, but she has no illusions about its sometimes brutal nature. As the speaker of “The Cows of Love Creek” proclaims, alluding to the circle of life, “We cannot love the earth / without getting blood on our hands.” There’s bittersweet longing in many of these poems, with the natural world linked with the emotional through techniques like the double entendre in the poem, “(R)egret,” which begins simply with, “I see the word egret, but read, instead, / regret.”
While Laméris delivers a fine collection of poems with long, lush lines, there’s a distracting tendency to stray into cliche, seen even in poem titles like, “They Say the Heart Wants.” Though not every poem hit its mark for me, the poet’s skillful lines employing deft alliteration and assonance make the collection a pleasant read overall. Readers looking for an accessible, but meaningful poetry will enjoy this.
Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris. Copper Canyon Press, October 2024.
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 literary magazine dedicated to poetry chapbooks. Aiden’s critical work has been published by The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, On the Seawall, and Fugue, among others venues.
Joyride by Ellen Meister invites readers to travel along as Joybird Martin embarks on her dream of becoming a life coach — from the driver’s seat of her humble blue Honda Accord. Despite a challenging upbringing and an array of insecurities, Joybird is a determined optimist, seeing the glass always brimming: “It’s a choice. I make that decision every day.”
There were times I wanted to reach into the story and shake that young woman by the shoulders for putting the needs of others ahead of her own and for some questionable choices, particularly regarding her love life. I was that invested. Also, I was occasionally annoyed at her brittle, sarcastic father. There’s some mystery around why the father’s career is in desperate straits, although I can surely guess.
Meister is skilled in advancing plot and developing characters through dialogue. With unexpected challenges or new clients, Joybird needed only a few centering breaths to find her way to empathy. Navigating plenty of intergenerational, romantic, and New York City caste conflict, Joybird journeys towards a future as bright “as the sun rising resplendently over a seedy New York City impound lot.” A fun read about the power of attitude and choices.
Reviewer bio: Elizabeth S. Wolf has published five books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a 2018 Rattle Prize winner. Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies and has received several Pushcart nominations.
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 30th issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices. Readers are provided with a powerful, focused literary experience that transports them: one that challenges them intellectually and moves them emotionally. Always free to access, and always free from advertising, discover what over 150,000 readers in 150 countries, and over 1,000 contributors from 54 countries, already know; the finest new writing can be found where the desert meets the mountains.
This Winter 2024 issue of The Missouri Review is themed “Sanctuary” and features the winners of the 2024 Perkoff Prize along with new fiction from Doug Crandell, Julia Ridley Smith, and Tate Gieselmann, new poetry from Kate Gaskin and Kara van de Graaf, and new essays from J. Malcom Garcia and prize-winning baker Graison Gill. Readers will also discover an art feature on Tsuguharu Foujita in Paris and a “Curio Cabinet” exploring the friendship of Mary Pickford and Frances Marion in early Hollywood, plus an omnibus book review on recent books considering the nature and place of stories in our contemporary moment.
Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is set in ancient Greece, fifth-century Syracuse, to be exact. The Syracusans have recently defeated the Athenians in battle, a surprise to both sides, and they are keeping their prisoners of war in a quarry until they die. Lampo and Gelon are unemployed Syracusan potters, so they use their free time to visit the quarry to see which, if any, Athenians know any of Euripides’ plays, given Gelon’s love of theatre. That interest ultimately leads to their putting on a production of both Medea and The Trojan Women in one afternoon.
Lampo and Gelon, as well as the narrator, don’t sound like they live in ancient Greece, though; they sound like they live in twenty-first Ireland, more or less. Lennon, though, doesn’t play that approach for laughs. He simply uses contemporary language and voice to delve into the life of Lampo — the center of attention — as he tries to understand who he is. Gelon is the one who loves theatre and comes up with the idea to visit the Athenians, while Lampo simply goes along with his friend. Along the way, though, he has to make choices that will define the rest of his life.
It would be easy to say that this novel is about the power of art — Gelon at one point says, “It’s poetry we’re doing. It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy.” — but the novel is about more than that, as any good art is. It’s about friendship and sacrifice and hatred and love and mistakes. In other words, it’s about humanity, whether in ancient Greece or contemporary Ireland. The struggles and successes are the same, no matter the time or place.
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. Henry Holt and Company, 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
If “read more” was on your New Year’s Resolution list, we’ve got you covered! 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. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
53 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
The Midwest got a small reprieve from winter weather only to have an awful wintry mix to come back today. If you are also experiencing some crazy seesawing weather, now is a good time to stay inside with a cup of chai and work on writing, editing, and submitting. Today is the final day of January 2025! This means there are submission opportunities ending today and tomorrow. Don’t miss out on these calls and contests from literary magazines, indie & university presses, and much 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.
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.
Though Susanne Dyckman’s and Elizabeth Robinson’s collaborative poetry collection Rendered Paradise “offers no route” to the poets’ compositional method, the experience of reading the collection prompts consideration of what constitutes collaboration. True artistic collaboration occurs when the combined result exceeds the sum of its parts, creating a third entity that, to borrow phrases from the poems, “assures its own fidelity” to a “truer / form of two,” one that is “sublimely unemphatic.” The emphasis and spirit of Rendered Paradise is on “Voices conjoined” in an “intimacy” of seeing.
Rendered Paradise “tells” the poets’ “story of looking” inspired by artists Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin, and Kiki Smith. The collection is divided into three sections, each devoted to looking at, responding to, and highlighting the artists’ subject matter and aesthetic. Poems inspired by Vivian Maier’s artworks emphasize portrait and gesture. Those responding to Agnes Martin explore color, shape, and pattern. Poems influenced by Kiki Smith’s artworks incorporate themes of animals, reptiles, and the cosmos. The poems “model” a language of active looking regardless of the subject-artist or the poet-speaker.
Collectively, they are “Who see it all.” The poems sometimes convey the perspective of one of the poets, and at other times reflect the viewpoints of the artists. The reader is left uncertain of who “I” or “you” refers to within the poems. This “gesture beyond its own climate” suggests the poets’ intention to transcend the “dispute” over the “proximity of the pronoun.” As one poem describes, “Where / voice stops explaining patterns, it begins to have a body.”
With both collaborative method and “Identity pushed aside,” Dyckman’s and Robinson’s ekphrastic poems are “assemblage bound” and stand “for the mixing,” writing toward a “release” of pride in the seer and attachment to the seen/scene. Rendered Paradise is an exaltation of pure seeing.
Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman & Elizabeth Robinson. Apogee Press, 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.
Pro AI? Anti AI? Undecided? No matter where you are on the AI fence, re•mediate is making its own contribution to the conversation, publishing creative writing, criticism, and interviews, as well as a limited amount of visual/interactive work, all of which centers on what is traditionally called human-computer collaboration.
“At re•mediate,” explains Founding Editor P.D. Edgar, “we call it computer-assisted creative writing, which is to acknowledge, in broad strokes, that the practice of being a writer is computer-mediated at many more stages than the compositional. In Issue•1, we published a poem that was human-written but addressed, using three different fonts, how writers are expected to maintain an online audience or presence as a part of their brand and the frustration with that expectation. On the other hand, we also seriously consider work that’s made with AI or written computationally, such as with functional code that prints text. We’re not the first to do this (Taper), and luckily, we’re in a little cohort of fresh new literary magazines who are interested in serious experiments with AI (Ensemble Park, AI Literary Review).”
Why We Eat Fried Peanuts: A Celebration of Family and Lunar New Year Traditions by Zed Zha, illustrated by Sian James becker&mayer! kids (Quarto), January 2025
Readers are invited to join Mèng, a Chinese American girl, as she prepares for the Lunar New Year with her family. Through Mèng’s conversation with her father, readers will learn about the rich significance of ancestral stories, the history of the Mandarin language, and the traditional foods that make the holiday so special. Mèng’s father shares the inspiring tale of Tài Nǎi Nai, Mèng’s great-grandmother, whose act of bravery a century ago left a lasting legacy and offers timeless lessons for today’s generation. As Mèng learns, food plays a vital role in the celebration, with fried peanuts serving as a special snack tied to the family’s traditions. The story concludes with a simple, fun recipe for fried peanuts, offering a hands-on way for readers to bring the spirit of the Lunar New Year into their own homes.
Sean is a young man in Belfast, Ireland, who spends most of his time drinking or doing drugs, seemingly not making any progress in life. He and one of his best friends, Ryan, live in an apartment that they’re about to be evicted from, as their landlord ran away, and it has black mold growing in it, as well. They both work as bartenders to try to make some money, but they’ve been barred from most of the places they try to go and drink due to their behavior. In fact, the novel opens with Sean about to go to court for punching somebody at a house party, causing serious harm to the young man’s face and mouth.
However, life wasn’t supposed to go this way for Sean, as he was different than his friends. He left Belfast and went to Liverpool, where he attended university and received a degree in English. He wanted to be a writer.
He has long odds to overcome, though, as his family has fallen apart. His mother left his father when Sean was young, and it’s clear that the lack of a father has wrecked Sean. He spends part of his free time looking his father online, as well as his half-sister from his father’s new marriage. Both of Sean’s brothers behave as recklessly as he does, prompting his mother to be surprised that it’s Sean who ends up going to court due to violence. They may have learned that violence from the IRA members they grew up around.
The one bit of light in Sean’s life is Mairéad, a young woman Sean grew up with. She was as violent and out of control as Sean and his friends, but she has changed her life. She spends much of the novel preparing to move to Berlin to try to break into the world of independent filmmaking. The problem is Sean makes the same mistakes again and again. Magee raises the question of how much environment shapes people and how one can love friends and family who might be preventing one from growing. There aren’t easy answers, but the reader continues to hope Sean can figure his life out.
Close to Home by Michael Magee. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
Kaleidoscopehas creatively explored the experience of disability through literature and the fine arts for 45 years, and issue 90 (Winter/Spring 2025) is now available. Contributors delve into the impact disability has on relationships, parenting, and aging, while other pieces provide insight into neurodiversity, chronic illness, ableism, and resilience.
In the featured essay, “My Legs,” Bonnie Ruane Wheeler takes a closer look at her lower limbs and contemplates the ways they have carried her for more than half a century. Beginning in the womb with a mere flutter, she eloquently recounts memories of legs that performed pirouettes, climbed, paced, and even buckled beneath her. These snapshots through time transport readers to the present day, and a diagnosis she might not be able to outrun.
Four local artists are featured in this issue along with a wonderful group of established and emerging writers: Mio Aoki-Sherwood, Brenda Beardsley, Diane Bell, Gail Brown, Virginia Isaacs Cover, Mimi Eagar, Meg Eden, Elliott Gorski, Linseigh Green, Mia Herman, Gabriel Hull, Elly Katz, Philip Andrew Lisi, M. S. Marquart, H. McCrystal, Anne Mikusinski, Tim Murphy, Dixie L. Partridge, Roselyn Perez, Zach Pietrafetta, Lily Sargent, Mary Harwell Sayler, Val Valdez, Bonnie Ruane Wheeler, Heather Wicks, Katharine Yusuf, Lisa Zimmerman, and Hearts For Music.
As the title gutter rainbows implies, “grit” and “glitter” coexist in Melissa Eleftherion’s third poetry collection. “Double consciousness” is also a characteristic of the poems’ speaker: “Before [she] understood the war of misogyny / [she] battled [her] own blood for understanding.” The poems also double in their artistic purpose, offering the poet “an attempt to / convene with the memory of the / interruption” while offering the reader “the story of [a girl’s] formation.”
The collection opens with Eleftherion’s portrayal of a “defiant,” self-possessed girl, navigating life between her own “kindling” and the challenging, often dangerous interactions with men. Eleftherion’s girl was “taught to hold space for the lion / sit quiet at his table” and to endure the “street mouths” as she walks “the avenue of eyeballs.” The poems highlight how these power dynamics and threats “damage” the girl’s sense of self-worth, leading to “internalized hatred” and “misogyny.”
As Eleftherion explores how the male gaze and patriarchal expectations “fracture” a girl’s life, she draws comparisons with how a geological depression interrupts a landform. Fracture variously appears in the poems as “gutter,” “gash,” “crack,” “ditch,” “pit,” “trench,” but in each case describes the shape of a landform that is lower in elevation than the surrounding area. This metaphor provides a visual and visceral vocabulary for experiences of trauma and the challenges faced by girls “fighting to be seen beneath” “a line of semen.”
Dear Sister Reader, “her story is my story is your story the axes we intersect.” Along with Eleftherion, we “hover as transformation / in the interstices / warrior, queen.”
So too, the transformation of trauma into poetry. Melissa Eleftherion’s gutter rainbows constructs a “lyric from the detritus.” While the poems explore themes of faults and fractures, they simultaneously reach “up up,” embodying true feminist resilience.
gutter rainbows by Melissa Eleftherion. Querencia Press, August 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 title of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces, might lead readers to think that he is the center of the book, especially with a focus on the various ways he feels pulled in two different directions. That latter part is true, but the true center of the book is Ba Má, his parents. He describes how they fled from North to South Vietnam, then to the United States. While Nguyen was alive during that time, he was too young to have many memories. He also talks about how hard his parents worked owning and running a grocery store, helping to provide for him and his brother.
However, Nguyen also talks about how he began to pull away from his parents, while also celebrating them in this book. Like many refugees and immigrants who come to America (or, as Nguyen describes it, AMERICATM), he loses much of his language and culture, partly because he wants to be more American, but partly because the culture that surrounds him shapes him differently than it does his parents, who spend much of their time at work.
That culture leads to a serious fracture in how Nguyen sees himself and the world, especially the various portrayals of Vietnam in the culture of his childhood. He talks about watching movies, such as Apocalypse Now and Rambo II: First Blood, seeing actors from other Asian countries play Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. However, he also digs deeper into the idea of colonizer and colonized, showing that people from North Vietnam, like his parents, took land from the Montagnards, an Indigenous group in the Central Highlands of the country.
One question he continually returns to is what has made him (and other refugees) who he is: is that because he is a refugee and Vietnamese or because of his family and his personal traumas. His book explores both of those poles without trying to reconcile them, as if there is any way they could be reconciled.
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
Published quarterly by Partisan Press, Blue Collar Review offers readers poetry, short stories, literary reviews, and illustrations voicing the perspective of the progressive working class. The Fall 2024 issue editorial comments on the value of this work:
“In times like these, our efforts as poets and as a journal are needed more than ever. We are proud to claim Trump’s epithet of being the ‘enemy within’ and are determined to continue together — no matter what — to say what needs to be said. Our entire effort is, first and foremost, perspective shaping. We understand the power of art, of poetry, to make complex issues understood and felt, to change attitudes and minds. We understand our class commonalties and who really threatens our health and well being. [. . . ] Let us remember that we are not alone, that we have the numbers and that we have to be here for each other in the hard times we face. Together, we make a difference, together we will persevere.”
Contributors to the Fall 2024 issue include Larry Crist, Ken Meisel, Facundo Rompehuevos, Vaughn Wright, Ken Poyner, Lyrion Ap Tower, Michael Theroux, Kathryn Showalter, Cave Roskos, Jonathan Andersen, Tad Tuleja, Chris Collins, Tom Gengler, Andrea Reynolds, and many more. Cover art by Molly Crabapple.
46 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
There is only one week remaining in January which means there are plenty of deadlines for January 31 and February 1 on the horizon! NewPages is here to help you out so you do not miss out on these opportunities and can keep your submission goals going in the right direction in 2025.
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.
Susan Muaddi Darraj’s latest work, Behind You is the Sea, is a series of interlocking stories that follow several Palestinian American families through their lives in Baltimore. While they all know each other well, their relationships both between families and within families are often strained, sometimes due to differences in class, but often because of a moral judgment one makes against another.
For example, the opening story centers on Reema Baladi, a young woman pregnant with her first child. She’s been seeing Torrey, but now that she’s pregnant, he is less interested in her. She compares herself to Amal, who is also pregnant, but who is planning to have an abortion, a decision that has made her an outcast in the community, including her family, as her parents have kicked her out of the house.
The collection ends with a story focused on Marcus Salameh, Amal’s brother. Their father has died, and Marcus has to take the body back to Palestine to bury him there. He discovers that their father had been supporting a woman named Rita, whom the Israelis had imprisoned and raped, leading to the community’s subtly ostracizing her—she’s invited to funerals, but not to weddings, for example. Marcus is confused as to how his father could reconcile supporting Rita, while banishing Amal, his own daughter.
The stories in between explore other relationships that are severed or strained, but also those that reconnect and grow. While some families break apart, other relationships develop and strengthen. There are stories that deal with domestic violence and eating disorders, but also those that reveal characters who discover the ability to love and forgive. As Marcus reflects in the final story, “The Arabs were a people that knew life could be horrifically unjust and unfair—and yet they cherished it.” Through all of their suffering, these are characters who cherish life, even when, like all of us, they do so inconsistently and imperfectly.
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
