The Fall 2017 issue of Raleigh Review features the 2017 Laux/Miller Poetry Prize winner, finalists and honorable mentions:

Winner
Kristin Robertson - "Poem for My Unborn Daughter"

Honorable Mention
Jenna Bazzell - "All Is Wild, All Is Silent"

Finalists
Emily Paige Wilson - "Reasons to Return Home"
Emily Rose Cole - "How Not to Remember Your Mother"
Jenna Bazzell - "The Speaker's Prayer"
Mario Ariza - "Erratic transcription of notes taken at a refugee camp in Anse-A-Pitre, Haiti"

Several of the works as well as other content from this issue can be read online here.

“Field Tripping” by Katie Buchan is the eye-catching cover on the concīs Summer 2017. This online and e-pub journal devoted to brevity is available as PDF download.
"The Spaces Between" by Laura Berger is featured on the cover of the online issue of Fugue (52). Managed and edited by graduate students in the English and Creative Writing Programs at University of Idaho, Fugue  features poetry, plays, fiction, essays, visual-text hybrids, and interviews.
Do I pick EVERY Kenyon Review cover? Maybe, but when covers make me laugh or do a double take, that's worth sharing. The artist is Milan, Italy-based Emiliano Ponzi.

"The decision to consider the work in the current issue of Bennington Review through the lens of threat," writes Editor Michael Dumanis, "- be this threat political, global, localized, or existential - was made during an uncharacteriscially emotional editorial meeting on Thursday, November 10, 2016, two days after a certain historical event. We felt completely unprepared to imagine what might come next. Animated by collective anxiety - this sense of abrupt dislocation of expectaions, as well as new actual danger - we gravitated toward poems and stories and essays where paradigms were similarly disrupted, where characters suddenly found themselves destabalized by external forces, where institutions and individuals in which we'd placed our trust failed to hold up their end of the bargain."

See a full table of contents with several sample works from the issue here.

Cover image by Prague-based artist Jakub Geltner: "Cultural Landscape."

Dogwood Issue 16 features the winners of their 2017 Literary Prizes:

Grand Prize Winner
Judge Michele Glazer
Laura Read’s poem “Margaret Corrine, Dunseith, North Dakota, 1932”
$1000 and publication
[Laura pictured]

First Prize in Nonfiction
Judge Sarah Einstein
Natasha Sajé’s essay “Guilt: A Love Story”
$250 and publication

First Prize in Fiction
Judge Karen Osborn
J. Stillwell Powers’ story “Salvage”
$250 and publication

Read full judge's comments here.

In its Spring 2017 issue, Michigan Quarterly Review editor, Jonathan Freedman, offers a wonderful tribute to Managing Editor Vicki Lawrence who stepped down in May after twenty years with the magazine. As managing editor, Freedman writes, "she did just about everything: copyedited, proofread, supervised all the other manifold details of the publishing process, helped select the covers, talked the authors into her judicious recasting of the more infelicitous, erroneous, or just plain aberrational turns of phrase or thought. She schlepped copies of the journal to the Ann Arbor Book Festival and the AWP convention with equal vigor and tenacity."

NewPages enjoyed our professional relationship with Vicki, looking forward to our annual meetings with her at AWP. Along with many others who came to know her as the face of MQR, we will miss her greatly in our literary circle, but look forward to seeing her again soon to fulfill our promise of beers in Ann Arbor!

The Rust Belt extends from the Great Lakes to the Upper Midwest and refers to the deindustrialization the region experienced as needs and supplies changed over the decades. As a Michigander, Detroit and Flint are well-known names from our state representing the Rust Belt sector. But on the tails of any discussion of decline and decay are examples and stories of revitalization and renewal, and these are common literary themes. Rattle takes a uniquely complex approach in issue #57, looking instead to the impact "the shifting political attitude of this region" had on the 2016 election and checks in to "find a first-hand account of what’s going on through the poet’s eye."

Featured poets include: Joseph A. Chelius, Edward Derby, Heather Finnegan, Jim Hanlen, Zachary Hester, Donna Hilbert, Ananda Lima, Bob Lucky, Herbert Woodward Martin, Andrew Miller, Behzad Molavi, Al Ortolani, Li Qingzhao, Lee Rossi, Michael Sears, Matthew Buckley Smith, and Dennis Trudell, with a conversation with Detroit-based psychotherapist and poet Ken Meisel.

Dissent, the online magazine of independent minds and strong opinions, features a reivew of Raoul Peck's documentary I Am Not Your Negro, based on James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House. In "The Apocalyptic Baldwin," reviewer Dan Sinykin writes:
"I Am Not Your Negro  shows how the later Baldwin, as he negotiated the politics of the mid-to-late 1960s and lived through the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., became disillusioned about the possibility of any peaceful resolution to racism. Though the film hints at Baldwin’s emergent anti-capitalism, attention to the texts Peck draws from reveal the force with which Baldwin began to see American capitalism, nationalism, normative sexuality, and whiteness as inextricably bound. To address racism, then, he came to believe, would require a fundamental transformation of society. More likely, though, America would burn itself to the ground."

Read the full article here.

Virga is the name for the cloud streaks that stream hazily down from the sky, snow or rain precipitation that evaporates before having a chance to reach the ground. Virga can often fool radar into recording precipitation while the ground remains dry. Perhaps in this same way, poetic and hybrid forms can be as elusive as nature herself, and why Virga is an appropriate name for new online literary biannual dedicated to poetry and hybrid writing.

Teaching a course in The Novel, I took my students to the fiction section of the library and had them pull down books at random and simply read the first several pages, sometimes just the first sentence. I wanted them to sample as many “beginnings” as they could, then comment on the exercise. Some said they liked it as a way to consider a lot of books and see which one might grab their interest; overwhelmingly, they all wanted to go back and keep reading at least one or more of what they had sampled. Now, imagine this experience of sampling first chapters at your fingertips, on the computer, in one publication, and you will have imagined Embark.