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Crossing Through the Present: German Poetry in Translation is a special section in the current issue of Middlebury College's New England Review (v37 n3). "The selection of writing from Germany assembled here," writes Carolyn Kuebler, "came about as the result of both intention and accident—NER ’s ongoing intention to offer an inspiring, provocative range of literary voices, and the happy accident of our own Ellen Hinsey’s living for a time in Berlin. While there, Ellen read a particularly intriguing essay about poetry, notebook-keeping, and Hannah Arendt, and she suggested it would be worth translating for NER. . . She also met the essay’s author, the writer Marie Luise Knott, who offered to share her familiarity with the scene to help us choose a selection of new German poetry. Add to that a call for submissions, a series of meetings in Berlin cafés, and several time-zone-jumping phone calls, and the result is that this issue contains not only a multitude of voices from the English-speaking world, as always, but also a multitude of voices from the German-speaking world. They meet here in our pages."

Two works, "Zakid’s Delicatessen, Bremen" by Peter Waterhouse (trans. Iain Galbraith) and "on classification in language, a feeble reader" by Uljana Wolf (trans. Sophie Seita), are available to read on the NER website along with Kuebler's Editor's Note for this issue.

“I wanted to remember the absences that online life had replaced with constant content, constant connection.  I’ve remembered what it is to be free in the world, free from the obliterating demands of five hundred ‘contacts.’” 

Author Michael Harris shares this journal entry near the end of an “Analog August” (a self-enforced month without a smartphone and other internet devices) in his 2014 book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection (The Penguin Group).  Mr. Harris examines the loss of absence from the perspective of the digital immigrant generation—those of an age to recall life both before and after the ubiquitous online world.  Do you remember what it was like to cast an empty gaze out the window of the car on a long family trip?  To vaguely wonder what the couple down the street was discussing as you waited for your bus?  Do you remember being alone with your thoughts and just . . . being?  Mr. Harris takes a digital immigrant journey of exploration through our technology-infused society and technology-induced angst, culminating in his own attempt to recapture absence.

CutBank Literary Journal #85 features the winners of the 2016 genre contests:

Montana Prize in Fiction
Selected by Claire Vaye Watkins
"Crick" by Terrance Manning, Jr.

Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction
Selected by Amanda Fortini
"Meme" by Tracy Fuad

Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry
Selected by Oliver De La Paz
Three Poems by J.R. Toriseva

I think Black Warrior Review covers make the pick every issue, with Luanne Redeye's (Self)Image on the Fall/Winter 2016 cover just another example of why. More from her "Genre Paintings 2011 - " series can be found inside the publication, as well as here on her website.
The cover of The Massachusetts Review (v57 n3) features Nina Chanel Abney's What, 2015 (unique ultrachrome pigmented print, acrylic, spray paint on canvas). More of her work is also featured in the publication and can be viewed in her online portfolio here.
The cover of the seventh issue of Subprimal Poetry Art features Three Shadows by Kate Viola, who says the painting was "inspired by the haunting arias often found in operas." Subprimal Poetry Art is a open access online publication of words with music, words alone, and artwork.

Father Fragments
by Erica Goss

Once a week I wipe the dust from the lid,
tilt the little jar of ashes

and watch them settle. Where
is his giant bark of a laugh,

his hand smacking the table
so hard my plate jumped?

Night after night he voiced
all the parts in Huckleberry Finn. . .

[read the rest and more on gravel]

"Nobody wants to feel everything, just as nobody wants to read work by a writer who is emotionally incontinent. In real life, I may be strung out on anxiety, or aching from bad news, or jubilant, or missing someone I love. However, I know that my job is not to directly transmit those emotions to the reader. My job is to live my life, feel my feelings, and then learn to translate what I’m feeling without making it about me."

From "Emotion is Not Plot: Using Detachment to Create Powerful Fiction" a craft essay by Claire Rudy Foster in the online journal Cleaver Magazine.

Published online quarterly the last day of January, March, June, and September, Brilliant Flash Fiction holds several writing contests per year, often with a prompt, none with a fee, and each with a cash prize. The most recent was "Special Delivery" judged Paul Beckman [pictured]. Of the 287 international writers who entered, the top three prize winners and shortlist can all be read online here.

Winners
First: "It Came in the Mail" by Damhnait Monaghan
Second: "Princess Party" by Jennifer Stuart
Third: "The Secret of the Snoring Time" by Elizabeth Fisher

Issue 53 Fall 2016 of Brevity is a special issue on Race, Racism, and Racialization and includes such essays and authors as "Black in Middle America" by Roxanne Gay, "A Pop Quiz for White Women Who Think Black Women Should Be Nicer to Them in Conversations about Race" by Deesha Philyaw, "How to Discuss Race as a White Person" by Samuel Stokley, "Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps" by Sejal Shah, "How to Erase an Arab" by Julie Hakim Azzam, and "Mexican Americans and American Mexicans: An Etymology" by Sarah A. Chavez.

The online journal also includes guest editors for this issue Joy Castro and Ira Sukrungruang in conversation with one another about "what they hoped for and what they learned" in putting this issue together, as well as the accompanying craft essay "Three Commandments for Writing About Race" by Xu Xi [pictured].

3Elements Review is an online quarterly literary journal publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography. Unique to this publication, submissions for each issue must include the three elements the publishers post in advance. Past issue elements include: labyrinth, trace, reflex; measure, cleaver, silver; mania, tower, exposure.

The most recent issue (Fall 2016 #12) features the elements passageway, relic, kiss. "When we first chose the elements for this issue . . ." write the editors, "we worried that this specific trio of words would be a bit too leading. Would we get dozens of submissions about alluring, illicit affairs, kisses stolen along the shadowy hallways of castles and cathedrals? As it turned out – the answer was no. This issue is filled with writers and artists who surprised us, who made us see and consider the elements in ways we never had before, and we are honored to be able to share their work with you all."

The elements for Issue 13 are THREAD, GLAZE, MURMUR with a submission deadline of October 31.

"Drone Confessional" a collaborative broadside with a poem by Kim Garcia and art by Helen Beckman Kaplan is the Broadsided poster for October 2016. Broadsided Press provides the opportunity for writers and artists to come together to create a work to share with Vectors - people who then download the free PDF and post it around their neighborhood, workplace, or travel destination. Each month's writer and artist also provide commentary on their pieces and the collaborative process.

If you'd like to be a Vector, all you need to do is print and post the broadside. Broadsided Press would also like to encourage colleges and universities to start their own broadside collaborations! Visit their website here for more information.

Hotel Amerika promotes itself as a publication for "writing in all its forms. . . traditional work alongside the experimental. We strive to house in our pages the most unique and provocative poetry, fiction and nonfiction available. Work with a quirky, unconventional edge—either in form or content—is often favored by our editors. Hotel Amerika is an eclectic journal that attracts an equally eclectic audience." To that end, last year they held a Transgenre Writing Contest, the winners featured in their Spring 2016 issue.

1st Place
Sarah Minor, “Nest”

2nd Place
Dana Curtis​,​ ” Two Films”

Honorable Mention
​adrian nichols​,​ “lexicon of anarchy, no. xxii”​
Sophie Monatte​,​ “Fragments”

Other writers who works are included in the Transgenre section: Jessica Hollander, Julia Brennan, Katherine Riegel, Elizabeth Bryer, Lisa Samuels, Amy Newman, and Sara Biggs Chaney.

Since 2013, Noemi Press and Letras Latinas (the literary imitative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame) have been co-publishing under the Akrilica Series to showcase innovative Latino writing.

You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior by Carolina Ebeid joins the ranks of the Akrilica Series, published in September 2016. Ebeid’s first book, You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior has been called “a book of listening and responding and listening again” (Shane McCrae) that uses “[t]he voice of a mother, of lover, of friend” (Julie Carr).

More information about the book and the series can be found at the Noemi Press website.

The Fall 2016 issue of Ruminate features winners and select honorable mentions and finalists from their 2016 contests:

2016 Janet B McCabe Poetry Prize
Judge Alice Fulton
FIRST PLACE: “Yellow” by Melissa Reeser Poulin
SECOND PLACE: “Small Implosions” by Barbara Ellen Sorensen
HONORABLE MENTION: “The Lord, Walking in the Evening” by Michael Schmidtke and “Deer Apples” by Sally Thomas

With October here, it’s time to announce a couple of the award-winning books slated for publication this month.

Winner of the 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, Of This New World by Allegra Hyde, hit the shelves earlier this month. The collection starts at the Garden of Eden and ends on a Mars colony, each story wrestling with “conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink,” and asking the fundamental human question: “Is paradise really so impossible?” Of This New World is Hyde’s first collection, and it’s now available at the University of Iowa Press website (now currently on sale for the frugal reader!).

Love Give Us One Death: Bonnie and Clyde in the Last Days by Jeff P. Jones is the winner of the 2015 George Garrett Fiction Prize. Final Judge Tracy Daugherty says the book of the two famous outlaws shows “larger dimensions: the spiritual shadows and compulsive needs from which our nation springs and through which it has found its many forms of speech.” This is Jones’s first book, and copies are available from the Texas A&M University Press website.

Continuing an annual tradition started three years ago, Creative Nonfiction presented a list of topics to its newsletter subscribers and social media followers and had them vote for the ones they liked best. "Mistakes" was the first issue (#53), followed the next year by "Waiting" (#56), and now, for 2016, "Childhood" (#60), with the subtitle: "It's not all fun and games." Each Readers' Choice issue also includes a Best Essay contest. Readers can access on the CNF website the winning essay, “The Walk Home" by Judith Barrington, and an interview with Barrington; "Before We're Writers, We're Readers" by Randon Billings Noble - 15 nonfiction authors on the true (or mostly true) stories they read as kids; Lee Gutkind's introduction; and two additional pieces: "I Survived the Blizzard of '79" by Beth Ann Fennelly and "Writing Motherhood" by Marcelle Soviero.

Able Muse has announced that Nicole Caruso Garcia has joined their staff as Assistant Poetry Editor, replacing the departing Richard Meyer. Nicole Caruso Garcia was born grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, earned her B.A. in English from Fairfield University, and an M.S. in Education from University of Bridgeport. She was a 2006 Summer Institute Fellow of the Connecticut Writing Project and currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Trumbull High School in Connecticut. Her poetry has appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Willow Review, The Raintown Review, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Soundings East, The Ledge, Poetry Midwest, and Small Pond Magazine of Literature, and she received the Spring 2010 Willow Review Award. But, to show her ability to flex poetic styles, while she tends toward formalist poetry, "her rapping alter ego, Capital G, often visits to bust a rhyme for her students." We at NewPages can dig it.

The Fall/Winter 2016 issue of Nimrod Magazine includes the winners, runners-up, and numerous finalists from thier annual literary awards.

Nimrod Literary Awards: The Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry
FIRST PRIZE: Markham Johnson, OK, “Greenwood Burning, 1921”
SECOND PRIZE: Bryce Emley, NC, “Thesis/Antithesis” and other poems

Nimrod Literary Awards: The Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction
FIRST PRIZE: Chad B. Anderson, D.C., “Maidencane”
SECOND PRIZE: Ruth Knafo Setton, PA, “Swamp Girl”
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Susan Finch, TN, “My Friends, My Sisters, My Doppelgangers”
Daniel Hamilton, KY, “Dragonslayers”

Photographer John Chavers' kaleidoscope image is featured on the October 2016 online issue of Crab Fat Magazine, a journal "founded on the principles of inclusive & diverse writing/publishing." And they mean it.
The Georgia Review has been turning heads for 70 years and will be celebrating through the year with a variety of special events that they will update on their website. The Fall 2016 cover art ("#1637") is by Masao Yamamoto, whose work is also featured with an introduction and full-color, twelve-page portfolio within.

Copper Nickel, the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver, features several Translation Folios in each issue, spotlighting the works of several writers in translation. The Fall 2016 (#23) issue includes five poems by Jerzy Ficowski introduced and translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, three prose poems by Shoba introduced and translated by Paula Gordon, and four poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski introduced and translated by Piotr Gwiazda.

Southern Humanities Review 49.4 includes a special poetry section of the winners, runners-up, and finalists of their 2015 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize honoring Jake Adam York. In addition to publication, the winner, Mark Wagenaar [pictured] received $1,000 and travel to Auburn, Alabama in October 2015 to read his award-winning poems at the Julie Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art alongside Richard Tillinghast, the final judge of the 2015 prize. This event kicked off the 2015 Auburn Writers Conference. The contest is held annually in honor of Jake Adam York, poet, fifth-generation Alabamian, and an undergraduate alum of Auburn University, whose works "examined race relations in the South, celebrating the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement and questioning, as a native son of the South, his own complicity in its tragedies."

Winner
Mark Wagenaar

First Runner-up
Susan O'Dell Underwood

Second Runner-up
Doug Rutledge

Finalists
Mehul Bhagat
Ryan Black
Cortney Lamar Charleston
Meghan Dunn
Jennifer Givhan
Pamela Hart
Susanna Lang
Ansley Moon
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

The Antioch Review, "one of the oldest, continuously publishing literary magazines in America," celebrates 75 year of publishing fiction, essays, and poetry from both emerging as well as established authors. The celebration begins with the Summer 2016 issue, Part I, with a selection of "firsts" and a few "favorites" from the 40s - 60s. Editor Robert S. Fogarty includes the first poem and first story published in the journal, as well as the "most downloaded" essay which was first published in 1943.

Also shared within this historical collection is the "Preamble and Statement of Principles" collectively written by The Association of Literary Magazines of America when those 19 magazine organizers first met in 1961. It begins: "Resolved, that we form an association, the purpose of which is to increase the usefulness and the prestige of the literary magazines in the United States and Canada," and later makes the following statement that still rings true today: "A nation's body of literature does not depend wholly on a the great, and since the magazines have served as a seedbed for each generation of creative writers they have also helped to preserve the very impulse to literary creation. The literary magazines of the present generation are continuing this indispensable tradition."

The American Poetry Review provides readers a glimpse inside their bi-monthly publication by providing featured works of poetry on their website. From the September/October 2016 issue, readers can enjoy works by Marie Howe, Afaa Michael Weaver, Nicole Steinberg, Jane Wong, Carlos Pintado, and Beth Ann Fennelly. Available in the print edition is the full content, which includes Michael Dowdy's commentary "Reading Latina/o Poetry in the Summer of Trump" and Edward Hirsch's "What is the Task?" - a version of an essay which appears as the introduction to The Best American Poetry 2016.

The Raleigh Review Fall 2016 issue features "Red Madonna" by Geri Digiorno on its cover, an appropriate welcome to its contents, which Editor Rob Greene comments: "Many of us enter the arts as a way to heal . . [the arts] is about real people trying to make a better world. We hope the work in this volume guides you a better understanding of humankind."
"Jenna's First" by William Paul Thomas adorns the cover of The Carolina Quarterly Fall 2016, with a full-color portfolio of his work within. "I paint representations of disembodied heads of people in my social circle and sometimes scrawl text directly over their likenesses," Thomas writes in his Artist's Statement. "As it relates to my portraits, whatever the viewer derives from looking is the correct interpretation. I embrace symbolic ambiguity while clinging to observational specificity."
"My work explores narratives that recognize the urgency and conflict in our continuing attempts to connect to the world around us," writes Hanna Dansie in her Artist's Statement. Her work is featured both on the cover of the Spring/Summer 2016 Hayden's Ferry Review and with several internal pages as well.

American Life in Poetry: Column 601
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Barbara Crooker, who lives in Pennsylvania, has become one of this column's favorite poets. We try to publish work that a broad audience of readers can understand and, we hope, may be moved by, and this particular writer is very good at that. Here's an example from her collection, Gold, from Cascade Books.

Grief

is a river you wade in until you get to the other side.
But I am here, stuck in the middle, water parting
around my ankles, moving downstream
over the flat rocks. I'm not able to lift a foot,
move on. Instead, I'm going to stay here
in the shallows with my sorrow, nurture it
like a cranky baby, rock it in my arms.
I don't want it to grow up, go to school, get married.
It's mine. Yes, the October sunlight wraps me
in its yellow shawl, and the air is sweet
as a golden Tokay. On the other side,
there are apples, grapes, walnuts,
and the rocks are warm from the sun.
But I'm going to stand here,
growing colder, until every inch
of my skin is numb. I can't cross over.
Then you really will be gone.

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by Barbara Crooker, “Grief” from Gold, (Cascade Books, 2013). Poem reprinted by permission of Barbara Crooker and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

"On Writing" is a series of guest posts written by writers for the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter, curated by Rob McLennan. On Writing #107 features former NewPager and poet Gina Myers. Entitled "Is there room in the room that you room in?," borrowed from the opening sonnet in Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, Myers explores the concepts of community and inclusivity as place in poetry. Read the full post here.