The debut of a new literary journal always causes me a small pang in the breast. It can be such a vicious world for these little literary nestlings. A trim, handsome journal out of Greensboro, North Carolina makes its debut with this Fall 2004 issue, and if Volume 1 Number 1 is any indication, the folks behind Backwards City Review should be assured that, whatever perils await them on the road of financing, distribution, sales, etc., they’re well ahead of the game in the editorial department. This inaugural issue is happily modest, but by no means meager, in its offerings: 4 short stories, 1 nonfiction piece, 26 poems, 3 fascinating comics, and as a delightful bonus: a facsimile of a hilariously pungent dispatch from the famous Kurt Vonnegut, answering the query: “Where do you get your ideas from?” Michael Parker’s story “Results for Novice Males” pictures in restrained (but never constrained) prose, the sticky relationship between two fledgling triathlon competitors, each struggling through dysfunction from opposite poles of class, and takes its thematic cue from the compelling idea of “junk miles”—“the mileage one accumulates without actually getting better, stronger, faster.” Alix Ohlin’s “Local News,” concerns a TV reporter who dreams of a better, happier, more successful life, and finds herself dramatically subject to the maxim of her journalism teacher: “When you…break all the rules I’ve taught you, then you’ll know you’re working in news.” And Adam Berlin’s unique story “Speeding Away” portrays the mean-spirited machinations of two bachelor protagonists as they wriggle their way out of a promise to drive an annoying friend of a friend home to New York from an Indiana wedding. 

A lot of litmags call themselves contemporary, but Backwards City Review is one of the few that truly feels like a product of the 21st century. It's not just the alt comics and offbeat fiction, but the awareness that literature and art can, indeed, be fun. Dorothy Gambrell's Cat and Girl comic, for instance, presents a waitress (girl) and an indecisive customer (cat) trying to decide on an order. (What's “the anthropomorphic platter?” “Beef tongue on a roll.”)

Part comic book, part ironic guidebook for today’s troubled yet repeatedly humorous world, the winter edition of Backwards City Review reveals the more playful side of the more reflective, more meditative literary journal; and yes, this is possible. While its contents won’t dazzle your minister—unless, of course, he’s not put off by a hearty double helping of sarcasm—this issue offers roughly 100 pages of quirky, if, at times, campy, quality writing, complete with a giant, purple, city-crushing, donut-eating robot on its cover. All the world an oddity. Let’s just say you know what you’re in for when you see the cover and your interest continues its meandering inside. 

With a selection of two poets and two pieces of fiction, this issue of The Bacon Review offers a spotlight on four writers, giving all of the writers the focus they deserve.

Strong first lines. That’s the highly enviable trait shared by several of the pieces in Bacopa, the Writers Alliance of Gainesville-produced journal named after a family of aquatic plants with medicinal strength.

The Bad Version is a new literary magazine, and this is only its second issue. While showing many signs of promise, the magazine is clearly still suffering some growing pains. The mission statement on their website says that the name of the journal “comes from the collaborative art of screenwriting, where the first attempt at a scene, that wild idea that gets the process going, is called a ‘bad version.’ Likewise, this magazine is dedicated to beginnings: to pieces that are taking risks, trying to broach new ideas, experimenting with new forms, starting new conversations.”

The second issue of Ballyhoo (meaning extravagant publicity—from the American, of course) brings together writers at all levels of their careers on the theme of “Songs and Cacophony.” The 8.5 x 11 black and white journal frames each story with a prominent black or white border. On the third anniversary of his mother’s death, Andrew Bomback’s narrator prank calls his ex to misquote the Beatles’ “I Will.”

I barely knew how to start with the 2017 edition of The Baltimore Review. It is huge. There are 325 pages of poetry and prose, a culmination of four online issues from Summer 2016 to Spring 2017. A little history in the Editor’s Note gave me a better sense of what I was delving into. The Baltimore Review has been around since 1996 and became an independent nonprofit organization in 2004. Though based in the Baltimore area, the journal accepts work from anywhere, and publishes online to a vast audience. There is such a wide variety of voices in the fiction pieces. There are stories about ballet dancers, dogs, gardeners, a young girl in Hawaii caring for her grandfather, an imagining of the future of online avatar use. The journal also feels current. The cover is a gorgeous painting by Sughra Hussainy featuring a self-portrait obscured by the zipped lip emoji, a statement about how women are often told to remain silent, even now. The Baltimore Review is not a place for silence. It’s a raucous collection of talented voices, passionate about a wide range of topics. It’s 325 pages of fresh new work.

This issue sizzles, ignites, burns, and lights a literary fire with the special theme of “Heat.” The contest winner, Ann Cwiklinski, contributes a third-person narrative about a woman who takes her children for a day at the beach, but she cannot relax as she is constantly on the lookout to keep her children safe. Yet, as the sun blazes down on her, she is drawn to the water. She wants to take a swim by herself and perhaps disappear. Titled “Selkie,” this story came from Cwiklinski’s research about Irish folklore: “These weren’t romantic fairytales, but matter-of-fact stories about some local woman who jumped into the sea one day, her mild eccentricities finally making sense to her neighbors: ‘Shoulda known that she was part seal!’”

I read a selection of stories from three different online publications and was bored with the same old same old (I find it hard to believe that editors think anyone is going to read this banal stuff), and then I stumbled on to The Barcelona Review. Thanks goodness! The editors really live in Barcelona and say, “We like good, powerful, potent stuff that immediately commands attention, shows stylistic and imaginative distinction, and is literarily sound.” Well, who doesn’t? But these people really publish it.

Too beautiful by half, Bardsong, The Journal for Celebrating the Celtic Spirit, is an unabashed 8.5 x 11-inch publication devoted—in both senses—to the Celtic theme which is expressed by Assistant Editor Kathleen Cunningham Guler as: "[. . .] hiraeth. Untranslatable into English, my own understanding of it has come to mean several ideals: a melancholy longing for an unfulfilled dream of the way things should have been; a need to return to the ancientness of our culture and people; and that beneath the surface of what we consciously see in the present world lies another place, one that is sacred and holds the secrets that are the heart of our heritage."

You know that cousin you have who is really weird but whom you would defend to the death if anyone badmouthed him? He may be a little different, but you mean that in the best sense. He’s eclectic and creative and bound to do something amazing with his nontraditional life. That’s kind of how I feel about Barn Owl Review (BOR). There were times I was reading and shaking my head in wonder at the same time. BOR is definitely not bor-ing.

A very special Swayze section, where contributors praise the mulleted icon from Dirty Dancing all the way to Donnie Darko. An action figure portrait gallery featuring Spiderman in repose, the Lone Ranger and Silver facing down the camera. A punk rock interview with iconoclast Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and five-dollar Fugazi. “We have a thing for pop culture.” Issue Two of Barrelhouse is fun. Though it tends to the silly side of kitsch, the comic eccentricities of some of the prose belies the quality and craft of the storytelling. With nearly all of the prose coming from male contributors, you can expect some father-son stories. In “Hey Now, All You Sinners” by Brian Ames, a father searching for his bipolar son drifts further back in time to the love of his life before he had a family. Putting his wife in a non-coma pales to the confession he must make about his past. Another son suffers his football coach father by shuffling his dead mother’s belongings from one corner of the basement to another in “Rivals and Hyenas Alike” by Sean Beaudoin. “Luck is for losers,” he reminds a girl, in a laconic, sparse style apt for the despondent narrator.

The editors of Barrelhouse can always be counted upon to present works that occupy the necessary space on the spectrum between “literary” and “pop culture.” Barrelhouse is the perfect journal to present to friends and family (or even strangers) who have far too long deprived themselves of the magic and potential of poetry, prose and even graphic art.

Don’t be deceived by the unassuming cover. Or should I say: be deceived, be very deceived, on account of the delicious merit of surprise. Such is the case with every issue of Barrow Street, and I have to say, I like it that way. Inside the summer issue are 72 poems, 6 poems-in-progress, and 3 reviews. Not bad for 127 pages, even better for $8 an issue. Barrow Street is perfect bound, the heft of a paperback novel, copious, a literary variety show. It seems more discerning than other journals, but by no means to a fault. While Barrow Street is known for publishing established writers bearing lists of publications, most of its contributors are past or present professors, making the journal no more or less academic for it. A cursory curiosity, though worth noting.

If focus is the key to success, Barrow Street is throwing straight bullseyes. Forget author interviews, genre-jumping, and flashy art, and delve into the text, straight into the words on the page. The Winter 2014/15 issue has a simple no-nonsense design. Authors are listed alphabetically. Bios are found at the back in fine print jammed together to save precious real estate. No editor’s letter. No ads. Just a tight masthead and a New York address and 96 outstanding poems, running the gamut from short and sweet to epic and tragic. Sixty-two poets are published, ranging from first-timers to big names from big institutions with supporting bibliography. Whatever process the Barrow Street editors and readers are using to sift through their slush, which I imagine to be a mountainous snow bank, doesn’t change a thing: because it is working. Since 2000, they have had 18 poems selected to be anthologized in Best American Poetry.

Under the seemingly plain cover of the Winter 2017/18 issue of Barrow Street, featuring a black and white photograph of one of the New York streets, I have found complex colors of poetry seeping through the pages. Barrow Street publishes both “new and established poets writing in a wide variety of styles” offering something captivating for any picky reader.

First volume, first issue, what should one expect? A group of locals got together to celebrate their neighborhood, what should one expect? A group of writers put together their own journal so being published became easier, what to expect?

This literary journal presents eight stories a month to the reading public and then has viewers vote on their favorite. That story becomes the featured story of the month, to be included in a downloadable biannual collection produced in July and January. Two new stories are featured each week, encouraging frequent visitations to the website by interested readers. This is strictly a fiction website, and there is a range from microfiction up to 4000 words.

This issue of Basalt, an Eastern Oregon University issued poetry and short prose journal, contains the work of seventeen writers and one visual artist: Timothy C. Ely, whose book The Observatory demands close scrutiny and makes the viewer look at the heavens differently. Many of the poems should also be studied, especially the ones mentioned herein.

“Dark-colored, fine-grained,” reads the subtitle to basalt, the Oregonian journal named after the volcanic rock with those same dark, fine properties. Basalt is formed from surface lava cooling, and the poetry and art within the 2017 issue mimics its namesake, rising up as a strong finished product built from an eruption of words.

The new issue of the Bat City Review starts off strong with Michael Czyniejewski’s “Pleurisy,” a strangely moving story where the small lies of a marriage get reflected in the inconsistency of the family dictionary's definitions and eventually other written materials in their home. Clocking in at only four pages, its slippery definitions haunt well beyond the story’s size on paper. Elsewhere, Maryl Jo Fox's “Marker” brings us a post-apocalyptic tale regarding an artist’s capture and near-escapes from the vain dictator who rules her world. As the warlord stages twisted beauty pageants and forces refugee artists to paint her image, the narrator can do nothing but flee uselessly towards the borders of her failed society. Cruel and evocative, “Marker” shouldn’t be missed by anyone interested in the quickly emerging slipstream genre. In poetry, Stephen Dunn’s “How to Write a Dream Poem” brings a light tone to the difficulty of conveying a powerful dream to someone else, its advice wisely steering the dream-writer away from truth and toward the more profound potentials of story, feeling, and those ever present dream symbols. 

When you first hold the poetry journal Bateau in your hands, it reminds you of a well-crafted chapbook with some abstract art of a flat bottomed boat (the journal’s namesake), or if you are not in the know, like some strange design project from a school of design student with a wash of blue coming out in the form of the boat’s canopy. The poems here tell a human narrative that is instantly recognizable no matter the form or the foreign or alien way in which a topic is often tackled.

Tomatoes, children, cats, drinks, and boats. Reading a poetry journal in one sitting can be problematic. You notice odd, inconsequential connections between poems, like those listed above. An excellent categorization of this issue of Bateau is that which the editors put forth: transformation and morphology. Themes aside, the charm of Bateau is in its understatement and uniqueness. Including the work of thirty well-accredited poets, this issue is a mish-mash of inventive, quirky poems that play with form and content, impressively pinpointing elusive emotions and giving artistic value to the most banal moments.

Despite an impending hiatus, Editor Christopher Harter is optimistic that Issue 20 will not be the last batch of Bathtub Gin. The challenges of producing a lit journal be damned: Harter expects Gin to reach legal drinking age. The stapled, zine-sized journal features new and familiar artists contributing pieces on war, work and marginalization. Carmen Germain's broken verse gets better with each read, specifically in the fight between a homeowner and a nest-building wasp in "Work Like This": “Work like this makes / work. I aim the garden // hose, sorry that killing / comes to what's / mine, what's yours."

According to the Editor’s Note, this is the first issue of Bayou Magazine from the University of New Orleans to be produced after Hurricane Katrina. The cover features a photograph of Bayou St. John, which flooded during the hurricane. In this context, it’s hard not to see this magazine as a small miracle, a reflection of “both the promise of new beginnings and the determination to persevere,” as editor Joanna Leake writes.

Despite having to evacuate the city during the fall term, Bayou’s editorial staff nevertheless had time to compile an impressive selection of work. Especially notable are the nonfiction pieces and George Pate’s “Indifferent Blue,” winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival One-Act Play Competition.

This issue of Beeswax Magazine, with its red and gray letterpressed cover and “hand-turned metal binding pegs,” is so beautiful I had a hard time opening it. When I finally did, I discovered the inside is just as distinctive as the outside.

I admire Bellevue Literary Review for its consistency and the polish, confidence, and competence of its contents. Produced at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, with a focus on “illness, health, and healing,” it is easy to conceive of a journal that might compromise on or sacrifice literary quality in its quest to adequately represent these themes, yet Bellevue pays as much attention to composition as to subject matter. Featuring fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews, the journal presents the work of accomplished writers with impressive credentials from the world of medicine, literature, the social sciences, education, and the MFA poetry scene.

Last week my creative nonfiction writing class workshopped a piece about one student’s experience with ADD in elementary school. He described zigzag thoughts, hypersensitive ears, rising frustration, and a positively entertaining rage, in a perfectly modulated eight-year-old voice; he then took us through the process of diagnosis, disastrous prescription of inappropriate meds, and ultimately courageous development of a customized program that enabled him to manage the disorder satisfactorily. His understated irony, his consistent voice, and the beautifully appropriate imagery made the piece one of the most successful our class has seen this semester.

The Fall 2015 Bellevue Literary Review from NYU’s Langone Medical Center operates under the subtitle “Embattled: Ramifications of War.” Self-described as a “journal of humanity and human experience” this issue focuses specifically on narratives surrounding not only war, but war’s varying and often heartbreaking effects on the human experience. The short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction explore delicate topics such as PTSD, death on the frontlines, and post-deployment readjustments with an unflinching matter-of-factness paired with beautiful language.

The Bellevue Literary Review explores the connective tissue between the practice of medicine and literature in a way that is sensitive, surprising, and compassionate. I routinely read and love the work of this journal, in part because the subject matter is so intensely personal, the vulnerabilities of illness and injury, the uncertainties of working with the ill and injured. This issue is sprinkled with the work of well-known authors like Alicia Ostriker and Hal Sorowitz and focuses on the impact of relationships with others in a medical setting.

This twice-yearly perfect-bound journal, which focuses on the practices and experiences of medicine, illness, and related topics, always contains touching fiction, non-fiction, and poetry of high quality. The knockout story for me in this issue was a delicate story of class, race, and responses to miscarriage, titled “Baby,” by Lois Taylor, and the poem “Being Nursed by Walt Whitman,” by Jennifer Santos Madriaga, about the experience of teaching poetry to dying students: “My father asks me what it’s like to teach / writing to dying people. ‘Are you afraid?’/ ‘Dad, we’re all going to die,’ I say. / ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘You’re right.’ / There’s a brief silence as static crackles / on the long distance telephone line./ ‘You’re right, absolutely right.’”

The continuing premise of the Bellevue Literary Review is to express, through words, all the emotion that is held within the manner of sickness. This is not an easy thing to do. Illness, as fiction editor Ronna Wineberg observes, "extends its tentacles past any single episode of disease. There is the crisis, and for those fortunate enough to withstand it, the aftermath." The Spring 2006 issue promises to explore these two, crisis and aftermath. Among its pages, through fiction and poetry, both are found. Notable fiction entries are Judy Rowley's "The Color of Sound," and Joan Melarba-Foran's "The Little Things." Rowley writes of an implant that can bring sound to her deaf ears. Easy decision, right? Of literature, she explains, "I locked into the connection between the authenticity of a sound in the fullness of its color and the authentic voice, which exhibits the unique and colorful characteristics of its writer."

This issue’s charming cover photo, taken during WWI in Vichy, France, shows a nurse from Bellevue’s medical staff helping a dog apply a stethoscope to the temple of a man in uniform—eavesdropping on the man’s thoughts, perhaps? This image says much about the journal’s literary aesthetic; the stories, poems, and essays inside are about death and loss (of health, loved ones, ways of being in the world—the many things there are to lose as we encounter the human body’s various limits), but these are not depressing tales melodramatically told. Instead, they are creative and sometimes humorous engagements with realities we usually prefer to avoid.

Published by the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, Bellevue Literary Review explores literature that addresses aspects of the human condition that relate to health, healing, and disease. In this volume, selections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction recover images from hospital rooms and doctors’ offices, caregivers’ homes and nurses’ stations. They find language deeply rooted in the human body, with all its strength and resilience, limitation and vulnerability. These selections speak a common language with which most of us can identify and relate.

The Bellingham Review, produced by Western Washington University, offers an outstanding selection of poetry in its fall issue. A number of the poems are inspired by visual art, such as Diane LeBlanc’s “Bardo,” Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s “Brujula,” and Matt Donovan’s “Guernica, First Draft”: “May 1, 1937, four days after the fact, / Pencil lead on blue notepaper, / contours, skeletal whorls.” Melissa Kwasny’s bold and sprawling poem, “The Waterfall,” is also a standout. The prose is strong as well, with a preference for straightforward, earnest narratives in fiction—

An elegantly slim volume, the Fall 2006 Bellingham Review is an eclectic collection with the slight political edge of interviews with two poets: Gerald Stern: "So I don't know where all my leftist influence comes from, maybe it was just in the air, but I identified with them. I was a socialist."—in conversation with Kate Beles; and Robb St. Lawrence's interview of Rita Dove: "I admire the Star Trek universe for the way it has always encapsulated our social structures and put them on spaceships, and I love the way they disregard race and other ‘differences.’”

An incredibly strong awards issue with work that is funny, moving, surprising, and memorable, and, though I mean this in the most positive way imaginable…strange. If you're tired of coming-of-age poems or skeptical about poems that work to be humorous, Christopher Bursk's "E Pluribus Unum" (chosen by Lucia Perillo for the 49th Parallel Poetry Award) will forever alter your view of poems about adolescence and the use of humor in poetry. Creative Nonfiction Judge Paul Lisicky says Bonnie J. Rough's winning essay, "Slaughter: A Meditation Wherein the Narrator Explores Death and the Afterlife as Her Spiritual Beliefs Evolve," "shines with its fusion of gravity and wackiness."

Aimee Nezhukumatahil, 49th Parallel Poetry Award judge, is not exaggerating when she calls the prize-winning poem “gorgeous” and “breathtaking.” Kaveh Bassiri’s “Invention of God” is divine. From Bassiri’s clever, lyrical tercets to Mardi Link’s experience of Tractor Supply as “a spiritual moment” in the essay “Chicken Trilogy,” this issue of Bellingham Review is about pure pleasure: that particular and spectacular pleasure of purely good reading.

Brenda Miller, author of five Pushcart-Prize-winning works and co-author of a best-selling creative nonfiction text, is the editor-in-chief of Bellingham Review. The names of Rita Dove, Tess Gallagher, Tobias Wolff, and other better-than-well-known poets and writers light up the editorial board. And with such a masthead, and a mission statement that includes a cry of “hunger for […] writing that nudges the limits of form, or executes traditional forms exquisitely,” how could we not expect excellence from this fine journal out of Western Washington University? This hefty issue contains nearly 250 pages of striking fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and photography. And from the contest winners that open the issue to the interviews that conclude it, not a single entry misfires.

With its introspective and lyrical qualities, the writing in Bellingham Review invokes the brief northern daylight and drizzly afternoons of the little bayside town, just south of the British Columbian border, which is its namesake. But don’t misunderstand: this unassumingly slender journal (which must be one of the country’s most beautifully designed) is neither slack nor unadventurous; its pages contain all the great weight and mass of true literature. While the 22 poems tend to induce a mellow and reflective state of mind, they are never staid, never complacent, and are nearly always—whether on a grand or quotidian scale—breathtaking.

This newsprint journal out of Shoreline, Washington declares on its web site that its editors embrace the romantic tradition, are biased towards narrative, and pointedly are not interested in academic exercise, minimalism, or surrealism. I believe those declarations to be true, especially when I found that the cover art was photographed by someone named “Moondoggie” and that this issue features parts II and III of a story called “The Elf King.” It is indeed an eclectic mix of poems, art, and prose. Many of the poems contain the words “God,” “Heart,” “Sadness,” and there is a lot of weather present in the poems as well – rain, moonlight, snow, Springtime, etc. So be prepared for open-hearted (if sometimes simple) writing, and you won’t be disappointed with what you find. Mary Carol Moran has two poems in here that I liked, “The Dance” and “X’s and O’s.” Here is the first stanza from “X’s and O’s:”

In Keith R. Denny’s short, remarkable dream-sequence of a story, “Ulrika,” the reader is swiftly trammeled up in the twisty mind of a would-be fiction writer for whom “the possibility of narrative is machine-gunned down in the street like a mad dog.” Lucky for us, the narrator’s self-effacing assertion does not hold true for “Ulrika” nor any of the other stories in the wonderfully narrative-packed Beloit Fiction Journal. The issue starts off strong with David Crouse’s “The Observable Universe” in which an estranged brother and sister who share a tragic childhood reunite amidst the surreal hubbub of a science-fiction convention.

Beloit’s annual journal of fiction contains engaging stories with clear prose. Every literary magazine usually has at least one story in which I feel the author’s style detracts from the characters or narrative – one of my biggest pet peeves – but I couldn’t find that fault in any of these stories.

If I hear writers talking about literary magazines, I often hear them getting excited about some new magazine on the scene. They talk about the experimental aesthetic or the unique formatting or the promise of aggressive marketing. They talk about what they’ve submitted and what it might mean to get something accepted. They talk as though the magazine might just be the next Paris Review—or the next Beloit Fiction Journal, for that matter.

Beloit Poetry Journal threw me for a loop with this issue, by including not one, or two, but seven poems by Mary Molinary at the beginning of the journal—and in a slim journal such as this one (48 pages total) this makes quite an impact. The upside of having so many poems by a single artist is that you get a good solid idea of that artist’s work. Molinary’s seven poems are seven lyric, existential takes on the time 8:38—in a style more post-avant-garde/experimental than you might expect from this journal. Does this signal a shift in editorial preference? I await the next issue to find out.

What knocks me out about the Beloit Poetry Journal’s fall 2007 issue is the cover. On the front, there is a black-and-white portrait of a woman. Her dress is leopard print but modest. She holds her left arm across her chest, revealing henna calligraphy that runs from her forearm up and across her fingers. She is not beautiful in the way of Gwyneth Paltrow, but she is beautiful – a woman Picasso might have painted. Her eyes are wide and dark, her lips thick, her hair short and curly. Her necklace is a swirling flame. Most striking is a great dignity, the shoulders straight, the chin raised high. I was spellbound by these details, yet it took me several viewings to see that in between tiles that form the background – stars of David – are other tiles shaped like crosses. On the back is the same woman, same pose, same background. Here she wears a veil that covers everything but her face and left arm with its calligraphy. I suppose these photos may represent the meeting or juxtaposition of the three Holy Land faiths, but there’s no need for simple conclusions. The woman is breathtaking. She is how you would want a poem to be.

What I liked best about this issue of BPJ is the dissonance – the clash of tones, styles, voices, and intentions. “During the processing of new acquisitions / evidence of cogitation must be monitored” writes Paul Lisson in a tightly composed prose poem, “Cartesian Melody,” excerpted from “the Perfect aRchive.” “A little celebration: / it is six a.m. and I am not sick.” writes Muriel Nelson in “For the Night People.” “My day as a tragedy / brand manager: the red- / on-void block letter logo / for Backwater Black Widow” begins “If It Bleeds, It Leads,” by Steven D. Schroeder. In some ways, it almost seems as if the poems in this issue belong in 17 different journals (that’s the number of poets who appear here), but together they work to create a marvelous compendium of mismatched styles and tones that somehow coalesce into a unified whole. These poems are some of the most original I’ve read lately. I never had the impression I was reading a poem I’d seen a version of dozens of times before. I was always a little surprised, taken aback, stunned into paying better attention. What more can we hope for from poetry?

Notwithstanding Lee Sharkey’s essay/review on the poets Kazim Ali and Brian Teare, this entire volume of BPJ features just one poet, Michael Broek—more precisely, his series of thirty poems titled The Logic of Yoo. Reading the collection is a transforming experience. The series tackles the problem of violence in modern history. The problem is approached without preaching or thundering. A protagonist—a doctoral student—researches the topic, not because he is passionate about it or wants to rid the world of violence, but because he is paid for his work. Masterful irony reverberates in the laconism of the student’s research notes, in his quoting factual documents, and in evoking authentic objects, places, and persons.

Beloit Poetry Journal excels at showcasing fresh voices with original and sometimes difficult things to say. They never exhibit the mediocre or merely pleasant, and I think that is a particularly trustworthy (and brave) stance for a journal’s editors. The dark side of sexuality and language is explored in this issue of the predictably good Beloit Poetry Journal, in poems like the exceedingly creepy “Molester” by Jeff Crandall and the delicate but heart-wrenching “Helen Keller Dying in Her Sleep” by Julianna Baggott.

BPJ publishes some serious poetry, and by that I mean finely-tuned, well-crafted poems that may require two or three or twenty readings to reveal themselves to you. There's nothing “fun” or “hip” here, and I say this not as a value judgment on “fun” or “hip” or even “serious,” but so that readers new to this venerated journal know what to expect.

I’m sure I finally understand the meaning of the term “fine etched” now, which I confess I wasn’t always certain I did, because I can think of no better phrase to characterize the luminous poems in this issue of BPJ. These poems are like this venerable journal itself, slender, deliberate, careful, and nearly perfect. Many are delicately wrought (poems by Sonja James, Marsha Pomerantz, Lynette Ng), others are urgent or exuberant, but never in a casual way (poems by Garth Greenwell and Anne Marie Macari), and a few are more direct, more immediate, and equally well crafted (poems by Kristina Martino and Malcolm Alexander). Poems by Aimee Sands, Robert Buchko, and B. Z. Niditch are a testament to the ordinary word’s exquisite potential, in the hands of a gifted writer, to reveal whole centuries, continents, and galaxies of thought in a few spare lines. Here is Niditch’s poem, “Holocaust and Art (Gorky, Celan, and Levi),” the last in the issue — a measure of how thoughtfully BPJ is edited, for what poem could follow?

Toby Wiliguru Pambardu’s poem “First Truck,” “splutters,” and spins, and gushes, and presses forward, with the wild, persistent, percussive energy of the strange and magical beast of a “first truck” on the plain. Written in Yindjibarndi, the indigenous language of the people by the same name of the Pibara region of Australia, the poem creates a rumbling across the page that “clatters,” “rattles,” and “whirls” like the vehicle itself. The poem is translated by Shon Arieh-Lerer whose translation is not, in fact, the first of this poem. This one “attempts to capture Pambardu’s daring innovation, excitement, and poetic style.” Even without the ability to read the original, I can see that Arieh-Lerer has succeeded, and the poem (which takes up four pages in an issue of a mere 35) – and the translation – are thrilling, a highlight of the issue.

The latest issue offers a high quality mix of poems exploring international themes and the idea of language. It announces the 18^th annual Chad Walsh Poetry Prize winner, Charles Wyatt, for his poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens,” and includes an extensive review of the anthology Best American Poetry 2010.

“Cultural Landscape,” the cover image by Jakub Geltner that kicks off Issue Three: Threat, is a special kind of eye-catcher. A slice of pizza hangs precariously over a table’s edge, its cheese replaced by grass, its toppings swapped for uprooted trees and tumbling cars caught up in some unfamiliar landslide, slipping toward an undefined kind of doom.

Muse-Pie Press’s new magazine (they also publish Shot Glass Poetry and the fib review) puts out video and sound files of spoken word poetry. While this often includes slam poetry, it isn’t exclusively so: “Bent Ear Review is about giving a voice to poets, enabling them to express their work with their own emotions and passion in the form of the spoken word.”

What a find Big Fiction is! The magazine publishes only three to five “shorts” or novellas of 7,000 words or more, bound in a beautiful hand-designed letterpress volume of just the right size: perfect for a weekend away, an afternoon of rich leisure, an evening curled up by the fire. This issue is a delight to hold, to view, to read carefully. The editors’ intention of visual and tactile beauty aligned with literary delectability is fully realized. The green, tastefully mismatched typography of the title takes up a small top left corner of the white cover, which is filled with a red etched fiddlehead fern. “No. 2” takes up minimal space in the bottom right corner, and in the title corner the image of a young fiddler playing unobstrusively.

Big Lucks, much like its name, has a quirky but earnest mission statement. “We at Big Lucks feel as if the most exciting and noteworthy writing lurks in the unlit depths of the ocean, amid the lifeforms and creatures humanity was never meant to see. It’s our goal to be the vessel—the nuclear submarine—that helps these new life forms breach the repetitive ebb-and-tide of this metaphorical ocean’s surface.”

I immediately noticed that this small journal devotes a surprising amount of space to fiction and essays: 9 pieces total followed by 17 pages of reviews.

The Mississippi River holds a special place in American literature. Mark Twain wrote extensively about it in his memoir, “Life on the Mississippi”: “The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.” Big Muddy, a literary journal published by the Southeast Missouri State University Press, is as remarkable as the mighty river it is named after. This journal delivers stories, poems, and essays related to the Mississippi River Basin and its bordering ten-state area, but you don’t have to live in this area of the United States to enjoy the writings collected in this issue.

Published out of Southeast Missouri State University Press, Big Muddy showcases works and authors “related to the Mississippi River basin and its bordering ten-state area.” While that might at first seem limited, there is no sense of that limitation in reading this publication. On the contrary, the genre styles, subject matter, and author backgrounds are so broad, “big” is even an understatement. More like its river’s namesake, this Big Muddy meanders, rages, roils, and gently laps through the gamut of literary creative expression.

It's overwhelming to think of the number of people we see daily and try to imagine their individual lives, their hidden stories. John Koenig calls the sudden realization of everyone having their own story "sonder,” and bioStories lends a hand in coping with sonder by giving readers nonfiction glimpses into the lives and stories of those around us. New work is added to the website weekly, with two PDF anthologies of this work released per year.

Enclosing 76 pages of innovative wordplay by contributors, Bird Dog constitutes a thin journal. But the density of material it contains ranks Bird Dog’s seventh issue among my favorites, one of the reasons for which is the cover—an electric orange with many dogs howling at a birdlike black gnash. My first dive into the material brought to face a labyrinth of giddy texts, where sentences sprang in every direction with ease. Most works deserve praise for their innovation.

A wild little journal of "innovative writing and art: collaborations, interviews, collage, poetry, poetics, long poems, reviews, graphs, charts, non-fiction, cross genre…" not to mention the marvelous pasted-on-the-page-as-separate-slips-of-paper reproductions of photos and artwork. Does somebody do this by hand? Now, that's innovative! Innovative is one of those tricky words that confuses me, even though I confess I often use it to describe work that is risky or unusual or odd or curious and there's all of that and more in Birddog. There are excerpts from Mark Tardi's divided-columns poem "Chopin's Feet," where every other page is divided graphically with a straight vertical line and the verses are like Chopin's complicated music moving from dense rhythms to lighter ones and back again. There's Heidi Peppermint's poem, "The Gulf Streams," whose diction wavers between the utterly familiar and ordinary ("Boy, those days we've talked about are here! / pamper yourself with daily maid service"), to a playfulness that veers toward the arcane ("Boy, those sways wave tangent about arrant! / Boy, those swerves as stranger about arsy-varsy!"). There are excerpts from Bob Harrison's poem "Counter Daemons—4D," incorporating concepts from computer programming, as well as from the "counting coups" of the Plains Indians. There are Brigitte Byrd's prose poems whose fate, we hope, will not be the same as this title: "Comparative Obscurity": "If there is estrangement what is the difference between speaking to the dead and speaking to the living." If you're open to Birddog's innovation, you'll know the answer to that question.

Created last Thanksgiving, Birdfeast aims to quarterly provide a feast of poetry; publishing all forms and styles. “Think of how you might see a dessert pudding sitting comfortably by a roast turkey on your Thanksgiving table,” the editors say.

The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Birmingham Poetry Review presents readers with a special feature: six poems and an interview with Pulitzer Prize winning, former Virginia Poet Laureate, Claudia Emerson. The six poems demonstrate her range and proficiency as an acclaimed American poet; from her historical poem “Virginia Christian,” a narrative of the “first female electrocuted in the state of Virginia in 1912,” to the “Lightning” sonnet that brings us to the electric moment when the poem’s persona “hears the strike that splits the pecan tree,” readers are treated to language that at once is immediate and powerful.

In addition to offering readers a hefty volume of contemporary poetry from accomplished writers, the Spring 2015 issue of the Birmingham Poetry Review also includes an interview with featured poet Allison Joseph, a couple of useful poetry-focused essays, and a lengthy review section.

The spring issue of Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR) is an assemblage of numerous pieces to inspire and stimulate. Form and function bestow imagery and metaphor in new and distinctive ways. The issue contains sixty-eight poems plus seven from featured poet, Gerald Stern, in addition to essays, reviews, and an interview, so there is much to savor and revisit at every reading.

BPR is one of those slim, no-nonsense poetry journals that publishes a strong selection of the best work that comes their way, followed by several book reviews. No filler, no academia, no kidding. In that spirit, I'll just get down to a couple of the poems I admired most, starting with James Doyle's playful "Magritte," in which "an admirer / has slid the skeleton of a pheasant" through the surrealist painter's mail slot.

This well-regarded journal focuses on poetry and fiction that uses “the deep image,” so the work here, as you might expect, focuses less on the narrative thread and more on lyric imagery. The poetry here seems more successful than the short fiction. Take, for instance, the following lines with their trilling sound effects from Silvia Scheibli’s “Monsoon Season:”

This journal is always unpredictable and sometimes even startling. Editor Paul B. Roth promises to free us from "enslavement to the usual and expected" and the unexpected is certainly one of The Bitter Oleander's trademarks. "The fish arrived in my dresser drawer, / swathed in socks, its eyes calm as a desert."—a poem by Katherine Sanchez Espano opens the issue. This fish has something to say, of course: "I open its mouth and see pictures / of a lost Ticuman woman / who looks like me.” "The Fish" is representative of the issue as a whole: powerful work that means to change the way we think about the world around us or, at the very least, to change the way we read. The centerpiece of the issue is a series of poems by six Mexican poets, along with their "ars poetica."

What I’ve come to expect of the Bitter Oleander is work that is unusual. Not odd or inaccessible or experimental, but unusual — poetry with unusual diction or an unusual tone and stories with unusual perspectives. This issue is no exception. I liked, in particular, poems by Shawn Fawson, George Kalamaras, and Kenneth Frost, and an amazing piece of short fiction by Michael Roberts, “Found in the Wreckage,” in which a man contemplates his own death in prose that is both chilling and lyrical. All of the fiction, in fact, is sharp, disturbing, and unforgettable. This issue’s special feature is a long interview with poet Martín Camps, conducted via email in English, and a terrific selection of his poems, translated from the Spanish by Anthony Seidman. (Camps was born and raised in Mexico; he studied in California where he now resides.)

This issue features a marvelous interview with and series of poems by Ana Minga, a young journalist and poet from Ecuador, whose work is translated here by Alexis Levitin. Having grown up in a religious community where her father worked, Minga says her childhood ended at age six; she suffered dreadful insomnia by age 11; and by her teens she was writing and publishing award-winning poetry. Her best friends, she claims, are her dogs; investigative journalism provides the adrenalin “rush” she needs to thrive. Her work reflects these realities:

The Bitter Oleander’s autumn issue is a motherlode of bold interpretations softened with poems like the delightfully introspective, “I Don’t Want to Write” by Simon Anton Nino Diego Raena. “Leave me alone, please. / All I want is to enjoy the solitude of being / a nonentity in this lightless balcony.”

Poetry dominates the spring edition of Bitter Oleander, a handsome, glossy journal produced by Bitter Oleander Press. This issue features work by twenty-six poets, with six excellent translations among them. Standouts include David Johnson’s stark and affecting three-part poem “Morning” and Christine Boyka Kluge’s “Swallowing Darkness”: “This is the time of night / when blackest dreams unfold / like bats from secret eaves.”

Theophrastus wrote that the root of Oleander when mixed with wine makes the temper gentle and more cheerful. While Theophrastus never got the chance to read The Bitter Oleander, he surely would have had similar sentiments about what reading it could do for a person. The Bitter Oleander strives to provide readers with deep, image-driven work that will “open eyes to a world our habits and blindness ignore everyday.” This issue is a testament to that goal.

The Spring 2014 issue of The Bitter Oleander is like a smorgasbord laden with curious-looking food that you’re not sure you would like, and which even seem a little intimidating. But egged on by your adventurous spirit and that childhood admonition at the dinner table—you don’t have to like everything, but you ought to try everything—you pick it up and discover that the rewards can be great indeed. The magic lies in the deft mix of the accessible and the unfamiliar, in the selections as a whole as well as in the individual pieces.

This issue of The Bitter Oleander is heavy on translations and features an interview with writer and editor Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz as well as a selection of his poetry, which, overall, provides an international flavor to the collection. The translations in this issue are accompanied by the pieces printed in their original languages, from German to Spanish to Swedish, which I think adds nuances to the reading that otherwise might not be caught.

Black Clock is hands down the best looking literary magazine I've ever picked up. To begin with, it's a huge 8" x 11" volume with full color graphics not only on the cover but throughout the magazine. The inside layout is both graphically intense and minimalist at the same time, visually engaging without distracting from the writing itself. Luckily, Black Clock's looks aren't the only thing it has going for it—it's got personality too.

The cover of the spring issue of Black Magnolias: A Literary Journal is striking, bold, and black & white, moving across the page displaying Alex Nodopaka’s Speed Wind Black Magnolias. It suggests an issue with writing that inspire movement and reaction; the issue does not disappoint on this account.

The thirtieth anniversary edition of BWR starts out strong with “Mother of Pearl Clouds,” a poem by Larissa Szporluk that ends with a line articulating what is possibly the impetus of all art: “let’s not let them / think that we’re just passing.” And it just gets better from there, offering fiction, nonfiction, interviews and a chapbook, all of which are smart and enjoyable.

The selections in this issue reflect the goal of the editors who claimed they sought to “embody different methods of collection and obsession.” The magazine is rich in literary diversity from Jesse Jacob’s comic, “Oh, What a Cruel God we’ve Got” to K.A. Hays’s chapbook, Some Monolith.

After thumbing through, then devouring, the 2011 Fall/Winter issue of Black Warrior Review, I’m convinced that this publication is one I need to keep my eye on. Reading work from nearly thirty different writers and poets has simply impressed me with not only the quantity but also the quality, the originality, and the freshness of the prose and poetry in this magazine.

Black Warrior Review does everything right. They consistently publish great fiction and poetry while doing things differently and standing out from the crowd. The most obvious example of this is their chapbook series: each issue includes a full-sized chapbook in its pages. The current issue is excellent from start to finish, and it seems impossible to decide what stands out the most: Julie West’s eight gorgeous full-color paintings? The minimal, haunting line-work of Richard Hahn’s comic? Adam Prince’s hilarious short story “The Triceratops”? One thing I feel compelled to comment on is G.C. Waldrep’s chapbook, “Precision Castanets.” His prose-poems here are written in dream-like prose with a strong inclination towards humor and absurdism. Maybe a cross between Ben Marcus and Dean Young could give you an idea. An excerpt from “Fight or Flight”: “The latest fashion was antlers.

This very cerebral and provocative issue of Black Warrior Review begins with an unexpected critique of U.S. culture and international perceptions of the U.S. in Beth Ann Fennelly’s poem, “Cow Tipping.” The idiotic “tradition” of cow-tipping is juxtaposed with the speaker’s confusion about negative views of U.S. society/culture in other countries; in the end, she begins to understand that these international criticisms view bragging about cow-tipping “at a party for a laugh” as representative of a self-centered approach to the world. This issue is full of great poetry, notably Stephanie Bolster’s “The Life of the Mind.” Bolster’s poems interpret paintings, Sylvia Plath’s last residence, and captions from books and newspapers. Her words animate material objects.

Before I began reading this issue of Black Warrior Review I skimmed its pages to see what they had in store for me. As it turned out, the pages held more than I could have ever expected, such as a chapbook by Nicole Walker, the graphic prose of Jeffery Chapman, a small section of featured work which includes everything from fiction and nonfiction to a graphic short story and artwork by Melissa Zexler. Needless to say that before I even started this issue, my mind was buzzing with excitement to read every single page.

The Black Warrior Review (BWR), published out of the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, mixes the bizarre with the familiar in issue 42.2. Best summed up by Megan Milks in their chapbook “The Feels”— a legitimization of queer pairing in fanfiction communities—this issue expands “what is possible in both the actual world and the world of the text.”

Lisa Krannichfeld’s “Undomesticated Interior No. 7” dominates the cover of the spring and summer issue of Black Warrior Review. Its subject, a young black woman wearing a flashy blue suit, mint green button down, and screaming red boots, sits defiantly at the edge of a chair, ready for movement. An image of a snarling wolf hangs on the wall just behind her. In her artist’s statement, Krannichfeld says: “Images are vehicles for the teaching of history and it is the historical imagery of the female gender I aim to counterbalance.” Looking over the eight other images Krannichfeld has contributed to the issue, all of women in ornamentally-patterned suits, sitting in wallpapered rooms with framed images of bared fangs surrounding them like a warning, an aura, it’s clear that these are not the “doll-like women,” the “decorations” of the past; instead, Krannichfeld’s subjects throw the male gaze back at their viewers, watching with confidence, hands running together as they contemplate their opponent’s next move. And that move had better be good.

Micro-mag Blink Ink has seen some exciting changes thus far in 2016, including a new and improved website, a special glossy-covered issue at the beginning of the year, and in the latest, #23, a postcard insert of Kristin Fouquet’s black and white, gender-bending photograph “Edgar Allen Poe-Boy.” But there’s more to Blink Ink than a new site and a fun postcard: there are also great little poems packed into every issue, issues small enough to comfortably fit in the back pocket of one’s jeans.

Rage and risk in writing is a powerful tool that can generate the most passionate work. In Blood Lotus, issue 8, the editors believe that if you write you should “Write like words are beautiful, powerful and dangerous…” In “katrina” by R.D. Coleman we are exposed to such risks and conviction head on: “my family up and / left me here, they knew / it called to me. / ...could smell the gas out by / the road. / life was done, she said. / she surely meant to die.”

Blood Orange Review has existed for eleven years and has continued to stick to their founding mission: “to create a home for the emerging and established writers.” The May 2017 issue gives a home to twelve writers and one interview with Rita Wong.

This second edition of Bloodroot, “dedicated to publishing diverse voices through the adventure of poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction,” features the work of 27 poets, five fiction writers, and one essayist. Poems tend to fall into one of three categories, personal narratives, nature scenes, or personal encounters with nature, with a few exceptions (including a few more metaphysically oriented pieces). David Strait’s “Christmas Day” is characteristic of the personal narrative. The poem begins:

What a find! This is as diverse a collection of writing as I have read in some time (with 42 entries on 60 pages – this is packed!). Anyone who has worked labor or second shift or a thankless-number-not-a-name job will find themselves within these pages. But don’t mistake the content (which is heavy on the poetry) as being all about work/ing. Oh, no -  there’s sensuality, as in Jillian Meyer’s “First Job” where she describes the post-shower relaxation that comes after work, the outdoor air blowing “gently into the warmer darkness behind my knees, / a drying breeze over a landscape not meant for fast travel / in the quiet of a night at home in my skin.” Natural imagery as metaphor roars in Cunningham’s “a hollow thunder” and walks us gently into the wood in Napolin’s “On Sunday.” 

Blue Collar Review: Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature is a small, targeted magazine filled with voices insisting on being heard. The editorial introduction to this issue states, “Poems in this collection speak of both the pride and the misery of work. They flesh out the real insecurity and resentment of underpaid and tenuous jobs and the seeming hopelessness of unemployment.”

What Blue Collar Review succeeds in doing, I think, is putting a human face on nearly every problem you’ve seen on the nightly news in recent years. War, layoffs, violence, crap jobs, bad schools: these are the subjects of the poetry published here. I have to be honest: not every piece is very well crafted, but what some poems lack in skill they make up for in conviction. As I write this, the U.S. is attempting damage control on the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, and Mike Maggio’s “Collateral Damage” is an impressive litany of mind-numbing public apology snippets that certainly fits this situation as well. An excerpt: “(we swear on our mothers) / (we swear on the flag) / (we swear on the bible) / (we swear on the corporation) / (we’re sorry).” Amy E. Oliver’s “Professional Chef,” about what really goes on in restaurant kitchens, took me back to my waitress years (“the sick onion grease stench” indeed!), and I admired the quiet dignity of Jeff Vande Zande’s “Losing Work,” about a laid-off man fearing loss of respect by his family yet finding support from his wife. If you like poetry by and for the people, you’ll want to pick up a copy of this magazine. [Blue Collar Review, Partisan Press, P.O. Box 11417, Norfolk, VA 23517. E-mail: . Single issue $5. http://www.Partisanpress.org] - JQG

With no more of an introduction than “It’s not all sunny skies and lake breezes. Deal with it. And read the new issue of Blue Lake,” this issue dives in with mixture of poetry, fiction, and essays.

I expected something devoted a bit more to Southwestern literature, since Blue Mesa Review is published at the University of New Mexico, but this appeared to be a standard literary magazine without regional focus. This issue is jam packed with great essays, stories, and poems, including “Weathering the Freeze” by Bonnie Jo Campbell, a visceral description of sub-zero weather on a farm in Michigan; “Black Box,” by Katherin Nolte, a short story about a woman having an affair with a man whose wife becomes a zombie, quite possibly because the philandering woman’s husband knows voo-doo and has discovered his wife’s affair; and a long section featuring Gene Frumkin’s poetry, whose work “succeeds above ground and deep in the mine shaft.” Because I love non-fiction rooted in a sense of place, my favorite piece in this issue is an essay by Jennifer Brice, entitled “Wild Music: Reflections on Big Oil and Innocence.” In it, Brice explores the Alaskan past and present, explaining that yes, the “pipeline” and “oil” changed Alaska in myriad ways, but the core part of Alaska that “seems unwilling to compete with or improve upon nature” has remained the same. [Blue Mesa Review, University of New Mexico, Dept. of English/Hum 217, Albuquerque, NM 87131. E-mail: . Single issue $12. http://bluemesareview.org] - JP

The closest this University of New Mexico journal comes to evoking the Southwest is in an "Elegy" for James Turrell, by Mark McKain, in which the author witnesses a sunset through one of the visual artist's holed cathedral ceilings and comes to grips with his mortality. (Turrell is, of course, still very much alive.) Yet the format and style of the Blue Mesa Review is not out of place: it's in the line of the coastal émigrés who have come to define the former frontier and brought their experiences with them.

The Blue Route is a national online journal for undergraduate students. This issue offers writers from Carnegie Mellon University, Notre Dame of Maryland University, Stephen F. Austin State University, Susquehanna University, University of Colorado Denver, University of Houston, and University of South Florida. The writing is of high quality and is enjoyable to read.

With this issue, I started backwards, working my way from the bottom of the table of contents on up. After I read the creative nonfiction and the fiction, I couldn’t wait to move on to the poetry. This issue is filled with solid writing that breaks the boundaries of traditional writing and that surprises by heading toward cliché and then rocketing away from it.

Fall in the Midwest is a time for snuggles, blankets, reading, and a new issue of The Boiler. While the fiction and nonfiction were enjoyable, it was the poetry that warmed me up inside. In “Things I Know,” Megan Collins reminisces about part of her family she never knew—her grandfather.

The art in the latest issue of The Boiler features paintings by Gloria Ceren and photography by Klara Feenstra. Ceren’s work evokes feelings of chaos and smoldering heat with warm colors and layered textures. Feenstra’s photography gives the sense of looking in from the outside, the overlaid image appearing like a reflection on glass as if the photographer took photos from the other side of a window. The writing in this issue of The Boiler echoes this: although we’re taking in the poetry and prose in this issue from the outside, the colors and chaos draw us in to examine it closer.

BOMB puts artists in conversation with each other. In the Summer 2017 issue, art is broadly defined and equally celebrated: poets and directors and architects, all are welcome at the table to open up the discussion on art, its legacy, history, and future. Particularly through reviews and interviews, BOMB lays bare artists’ inspiration, where creators and their creations speak to each other across time.

Bombay Gin, the product of The Naropa Press and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, continues its legacy of eclecticism and experimental genre-bending in the Fall 2011 publication. Before a word of text is displayed, there is a black and white photo of a woman, handsome in a neck tie delightfully draping dreadlocks. Friends and former colleagues at Naropa and the world of poetry lost Akilah Oliver in 2011. Eleni Sikelianos reflects on the memory of her friend, “She never settled on an identity handed to her, be it her name, her gender, her genre, her theories, her performances, her race—she made herself, from scratch.”

The aims of Bone Bouquet’s editors have been abundantly achieved in this issue. The writers represented are women experimenting with imagery and poetic forms while at the same time exploring social agendas, dilemmas, and personal experience. Most of the selected poems subvert language and present readers with vocabulary and symbolism that confounds all expectations, expressing voices that are not often found in literary magazines.

Bone Bouquet is a biannual print journal that features poetry by women writers. The Spring 2015 issue includes a varied range of voices and styles, and a satisfying selection of creative forms. The speakers throughout are strong, self-aware, and are unafraid to expose their flaws. This slim volume covers topics of grief, loss, and self-consciousness, while also displaying the beauty of language through several complex descriptions of the surrounding world.

While Bone Bouquet is subtitled “a journal of poetry by women,” the poems in this issue go beyond the idea of women writers only writing about women’s issues. Instead, it holds a wide spectrum of styles and subjects with only the commonality of being written by women.

Booth never fails to present a beautiful product, and Issue 9 is no exception. In fact, it’s such a beautifully produced issue, I wrote notes about it in a separate journal, unable to bring myself to scribble in the margins and ruin a good thing. A green color scheme starts on the cover with art by Jillian Nickell—a house on a hill that’s actually a sleeping creature’s back—and carries through the entire issue. Even the inside cover flaps are donned with colorful art. Luckily, the editors put in just as much care in their writing selections, so readers guilty of judging books by covers will not be disappointed when they read the work this issue of Booth holds.

Booth 11, the Women Writers issue, began, arguably, with male tears. In his introductory letter, Editor Robert Stapleton details an email he received after the 2015 Booth Poetry Prize shortlist was announced, in which a particularly entitled male noted: “Eight of your ten finalists are women. Is this gender bias or chance?” Stapleton kept his cool, explained the process dispassionately, and used the experience for growth. Prior to that email, he notes, two-thirds of the editorial staff at Booth had been men. Since then, the numbers have balanced as more than half of the journal’s editorial positions have been filled by women. Stapleton realized there was more he could do. “American history is dominated by the patience of women,” he writes, “and the world of American publishing, a garden of so much culture and progressive thought, should have been leading this charge long ago.”

Playing parts both online and in print, Booth chose this year to put out a special short fiction issue, packed with many of the best pieces from the online edition as well as the winners of the 2013 Booth Story Prize. All the stories included in this issue are imaginative and well worth the read.

The 15th issue of Bop Dead City was released last month with the theme “Dreams,” a dreamlike state carrying over to much of the work in this issue.

Bop Dead City is a humble, independent, quarterly literary magazine. At first glance it may seem to lack the finesse of larger magazines, but upon closer inspection, the reader will be pleasantly surprised to see interesting cover art as well as poetry and fiction that can and will inspire us all to read more or to pick up a pen and begin to write. This issue focuses on work surrounding loss and attempts to grasp onto the ever-elusive intersection of what was, what now is.

Smaller journals are vulnerable to becoming just another magazine in the ever-expanding literary world. It is up to the individual journals themselves to find a way to separate their art from the countless others in circulation. Border Crossing, now four issues old (founded in 2011), appears to embrace this challenge and continues to deliver high-quality work while experimenting with unique features such as their “Michigan and Ontario” section.

Published by Lake Superior State University, Border Crossing shows just how vibrant a small journal can be. Many of the poems stand out, but it’s the first two lines of George Bishop’s “Watching Dolphins In the Harbor With the Homeless” that really stand out in my mind: “I found myself / carving silence into a shelter.”

For those still Stone Age enough to think of Texas poetry as an oxymoron, welcome to Austin. Alex Grant’s “Vespers” offers home and peace and space and the beautiful old word quieten. Kelle Groom’s poems find the soul of things and help us hear the faint but heartfelt dialogue between the living and the dead: “I wonder / If they are always talking behind the glass, / Full of joy for us, if they are in the trees, swinging, / Smiling, saying live, live, live, & on this side / We hear birds, / Songs from far away.” Brenda Ladd’s photo series gives us lost-(or perhaps found) in-performance soul glimpses of the likes of B.B. King, Abbey Lincoln, and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. (A white light shot of a joyful Ray Charles graces the issue’s cover.) Weston Cutter’s wondrous strange, down on all fours and calling “Same Animal” reminds us that evolution of the human kind can be a tricky proposition. To delight you even as it makes you weep that we’ve all but lost to computers the handwritten record of our writers’ painstaking choices is the manuscript page of Walt Whitman’s lovely “unpublished, undated, and perhaps unfinished fragment” “In Western Texas”:

Started in response to the Gulf War and the editors’ dissatisfaction with the self-absorption of much of contemporary poetry, Borderlands calls for work that “shows an awareness of connection—historical, social, political and spiritual.” Many of the poems in this issue do demonstrate this awareness, though never didactically.

There's nothing particularly distinctive about Borderlands, but it does contain some fine poems, and there's nothing wrong with that. Many of the poets here take small moments for their subject matter, suggesting larger introspection, as in a poem by Eric James Cruz. Here, an early morning run in a beautiful, pastoral place puts the poet in a meditative state of mind: “It is good to come here, / this happens to be your life, / this cradle of dark things, / this place in need of naming.”

This journal out of Texas presents poetry, art work, photography, and reviews in a slim, perfectly bound package with good production values. The appealing poetry within captures a cross-section of American writing that balances heart and art; these works are beautiful in and of themselves but also strive to mean something. For instance, the poem “On Forgetting” by Megan Snyder-Camp plays on well-known proverbs to display a deeper truth about motherhood, as in the following:

Boston Review essays tend to follow a somewhat predictable pattern, and I couldn’t be happier about it. A serious, well-informed, literate, critical mind challenges the conventional wisdom about a controversial and highly politicized subject or issue of undeniable significance and urgency. Here are the two opposing views we commonly hear and debate, the writer begins, but there is something wrong with each of them, and I want to offer an alternative, he concludes. Subjects covered in the current issue of the Review include the “post-racial” in the Obama era (Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart III); free market regulation (Dean Baker, Robert Pollin); tax cuts (Jeff Madrick); Guantanamo (David Cole); Afghanistan (Barnett R. Rubin); Iran (Abbas Milani); and new (old?) philosophical approaches to God (Alex Byrne).

Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, which publishes six issues per year, recentlycelebrated its fortieth anniversary, and that level of time and experience is evidenced by the high quality of the writing and the magazine’s simple yet elegant design. Aesthetically, I enjoyed how the poems were contained within thinly outlined boxes, the dimensions of which changed to best suit the need of each individual piece.

This hefty journal is art-in-the-palm; it is a singular delight, a challenge, and a joy, all at once. Readers are presented with a collage of literature, poetry, memoir, music, and photography. This journal explores realms of authorship with notably startling computer images of Japanese mathematical scores by the renowned visual artist, Ryoji Ikeda.

Ever wondered what would happen if a mermaid were inverted with scales on the upper half?

Occasionally the predominant voice of a journal can be found within a single statement embedded indirectly in a piece within. For this issue of Boulevard, one turns to Robert Zaller’s essay on Robinson Jeffers. Zaller writes that Jeffers defines “the task of culture as the pursuit of truth.” The essay is about the poet not the publication, but it speaks in microcosm what the journal does throughout. Boulevard does not seek to categorize the journal as something as amorphous as “the pursuit of truth,” but I think it presents at least twenty clips of veracity from aperture to aperture, until we barely recognize the camera against the disciplines of truth themselves.

boundary 2 is a serious journal—with cover art by Theodore A. Harris titled "On the Throne of Fire after Somebody Blew Up America (for Amiri Baraka)."

As the title of the journal suggests, Breakwater Review is the in-between. “We are both the literal space between ocean and shore and the virtual space between reader and writer. And as it turns out, we want to read about other places like us—those liminal spaces in life.” Their tenth and current issue demonstrates this through a number of poems and a couple of prose pieces.

Brevity Poetry Review publishes—what should be obvious from the title—short poems, all coming in at under 30 lines. Each issue puts forth just 10 of these short poems, giving more weight to each one. And this issue contains no mediocre poems; they are all worth reading.

Celebrating their 20^th anniversary, Brevity is a staple in both concise writing, and skillful nonfiction. An assignment in my first creative nonfiction class years ago was to browse the online journal’s website and pick out pieces we admired, and since then, Brevity is a magazine I revisit often, knowing I will never be disappointed by what I find there. As one might expect out of an anniversary issue, the September 2017 edition contains masterful nonfiction, exemplary of the quality work readers have come to expect.

Brevity, the staple for flash nonfiction writing, puts forth another fascinating issue, with authors I couldn’t wait to read.

With a splendid cornucopia of colors and textures on the large, glossy front cover, and many gorgeous full pages of voluptuous art and photography within, The Briar Cliff Review could be a splendid coffee-table book. However, with the quality literature inside, it proves it is something more. The art is spectacular – twenty-two works from oil or acrylic to graphite, sculpture, even archival inkjet. Thirteen photographs are equally spectacular and eclectic – the issue is a feast for the eyes.

The worst part about The Briar Cliff Review is that it only comes out once a year. The journal, published by Briar Cliff University (Sioux City, IA), is packed with uniformly excellent work. Editor Tricia Currans-Sheehan managed to find poetry, prose, and artwork that are technically sound and satisfying to a wide range of readers.

Great art has a distinctive voice, one that draws the reader into story, into a narrative or a lyric, into a situation or moment. For the duration, the reader lives under the influence of that voice and consequently feels a sadness at the finish, upon leaving. If the voice is strong, well-crafted, fine-tuned, easy to sink into, without artifice, aware only of its purpose and the story, the reader will be left satisfied.

The Briar Cliff Review, a publication of Briar Cliff University in Sioux City Iowa, has published its 29^th issue, and for 29 years it has held to its mission “to discover and support new and mid-career writers and artists, to keep literature and art alive for future generations.” This it has done in a beautiful issue of art, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that serves readers finely-crafted portions of each genre. The annual publication is worth the wait.

Brick is an excellent literary journal printed out of Toronto specializing mostly in nonfiction, though it publishes poems, stories and interviews.

I have always loved Brick, a handsome, polished, semi-annual from Toronto. The journal typically features some of the finest, and most influential, writers and from across the Americas and around the world (this issue’s stars include Michael Ondaatje, Eduardo Galeano, Edmund White, Dionne Brand, Francisco Goldman, Jim Harrison, Jack Spicer, and Juan Cruz for example); what I’d call “pure and original finds” (a brief essay on Harold Pinter by acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema, along with a marvelous photo of her and Pinter; and the posthumously published “Three Wishes” by Pannonica de Koenigswarter, fascinating black and white photos of and fragments from bebop and jazz musicians); and terrific graphics (some great photos in this issue).

Brick is one of those journals that makes you feel a little inadequate, but in a good way. You realize, after reading, the vast amount of interesting and impressive writers who have somehow stayed hidden from you. It’s not only a matter of discovering new, contemporary voices you hadn’t yet had the pleasure of hearing (though that’s certainly part of it), but one of being exposed to established authors as well, those who have been around for years and—apparently—already have a good deal of clout to their names (even though you have no idea who they are). This latest issue of the Canadian-born magazine does a wonderful job of making you want to learn more about these men and women, to run to the library and check out every one of their books.

Brick, a Canadian journal of non-fiction and poetry, is a magazine in a class of its own. The contributors in the winter issue include prominent writers like Donna Tart, Oliver Sacks, David Sedaris, Geoff Dyer, and Fanny Howe. The issue begins with a quote from John Berger, the perfect writer to introduce this pioneering journal that relishes in investigating and pressing against the boundaries of literature. The nonfiction pieces are incredibly eclectic in style and subject, with essays on boxing, Dublin, highways, the novel True Grit, and Thom Gunn, in addition to a transcript of a speech made at the 2005 Griffin Poetry Awards ceremony—and interesting and often humorous meditation on the state of poetry—and letters from Norman Levine and William Faulkner. The previously unpublished letter from Faulkner to an aspiring writer is a standout; he prescribes Dostoevsky, Mann, and Hardy to the struggling artist and offers gems like “no writing that was worth doing was ever done in one day or one year, sometimes, oftentimes, not in one decade.”

Halldor Gudmundsson’s essay, “Halldor Laxness Across the Universe” opens the Winter 2010 issue of Brick, a Toronto-based literary journal. Using Nobel-Prize-winning-novelist Halldor Laxness as an example, Gudmundsson explores how literature travels and meaning evolves based on culture, language, and ideology. Building upon this premise, Bernardo Atxaga explores the publishing history of Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl” in Franco-era Spain. Yet, Jose Teodoro’s conversation with British writer Geoff Dyer and a subsequent excerpt from his novel, Out of Sheer Rage, serve as the thematic anchor for the rest of the journal.

Brick’s 100th issue celebrates forty years of nonfiction. An international journal published out of Toronto, Brick “prizes the personal voice and celebrates life, art, and the written word.” In issue 100, the authors look out into the world, to literature, to poetry and to nature for inspiration, while grounding their insights in the personal. Brick is a love letter to our artistic influences.

Brilliant Corners, “A Journal of Jazz and Literature” celebrates its tenth anniversary with this Summer 2007 issue, featuring numerous tributes to the late Whitney Balliet as well as poems, interviews and children’s poetry about jazz. For those like me wholly unfamiliar with The New Yorker jazz critic Balliet, you may be disappointed with the narrow scope of the journal.

Brilliant Flash Fiction promises to be even more brilliant than usual as they present the winners and shortlist of the “Wow Us” Writing Contest. Out of the 350 writers that entered, Eileen Malone, Suzanne Freeman, and Laton Carter stand out as the three placing winners.

Brilliant Flash Fiction, the online literary magazine, is all about the flash. Individual issues are made up of one continuously scrolling page, eliminating the distraction of returning to a table of contents or turning digital pages, and there’s no PDF download required. The stories fall down the page in quick succession, accented by the flashes of color the accompanying photographs provide. Readers are carried from one story to the next with just enough time to get acclimated to whichever setting or character’s mind we’re suddenly thrust into.

Published out of Virginia Commonwealth University, Broad Street: A Magazine of True Stories, bridges personal and researched knowledge in creative nonfiction. The journal furthers what it means to tell true stories. This issue, themed Maps & Legends, goes where no map can lead to find truth: exploring what it means to be a foreigner.

Broad Street has created a viable option for literary end table collections. In this issue, several mediums of storytelling are combined, allowing readers both a visual and multifaceted verbal display. Hunt/Gather was the proposed theme, and I do feel it is somewhat of a challenge to the reader. Loose definitions of the terms seem to have been used by the editors in compiling the pieces presented. By getting a little too hung up on wanting traditional definitions, I feel like I missed some of the simple beauty available in the pages that I can easier see in reflection.

Broken Bridge Review sports a three-piece painting as cover art: three gorgeous blue-green panels titled “World View Trip-Tik” by Jessica Hathaway Scriver, painted on top of world maps. The editors chose to make this painting the inspiration for this issue, and included a substantial amount of material that is in some way connected to the political sphere.

The range of experience represented in this annual publication is of particular interest — poets and fiction writers as sophisticated or widely published as Denise Duhamel, Peter Johnson, William Greenway, Antler, and Mark Brazaitis (among others) alongside newcomers Thomas Graves and Audrey Doire. With more than two dozen poems and a half dozen stories, there is much to contemplate and appreciate here.

Many of the works in Buffalo Carp, “a hybrid, an amalgam” of two species native to the Quad City Mississippi River area, also celebrate the natural world. Dennis Saleh’s terse yet lyrical poem, “The Delta Songs of the Harper,” evokes Ra, the Sun God from Egyptian mythology.

BULL {Men’s Fiction} is best described as “handsome,” both for its subject matter and its appearance. The journal boasts a clean, striking design and attractive line illustrations by James-Alexander Mathers and Patrick Haley. I expected BULL editor Jarrett Haley to explain his journal’s subtitle in its debut print issue. Perhaps Haley’s silence is an indication that he wishes the reader to forge his or her own concept of what “men’s fiction” means.

BULL Number 5 is covered in colorful, urban-styled art, created by the late Patrick Haley, whose work is profiled at length in this issue. Inside, his black and white drawings of surreal settings, strange creatures, and highly-detailed settings take influences from a variety of interesting visual sources such as Salvador Dali, R. Crumb, Heavy Metal magazine, and street graffiti. Each of the thirteen pages of drawings and sketches plucked from the artist’s notebooks tells a story, even the most basic “practice” sketches, with a couple in particular that could make one feel as though they could fall right into the page.