I always look forward to seeing the cover art of jubilat’s new issues, often featuring bright colors or eye-catching images. However, their latest issue caught my eye because it doesn’t fit their usual look. Instead, the editors chose a plain black background behind their title text for this special issue that presents 108 poems by 105 writers who share what’s been on their minds since November 8, 2016. With this issue, jubilat creates something beautiful out of rubble, giving readers something to hold onto when we may feel hopeless, wordless, or disconnected.

Continue reading “jubilat – 2016”

Jubilat 21 is an eclectic issue packed with both surrealism and honesty, insight and fun. I’ve always loved jubilat for the bold, inventive work it features, and this issue is no exception. Continue reading “Jubilat – 2012”

Uljana Wolf’s work, translated by Susan Bernofsky, excerpts from DICTHionary. A German-English Dictionary of False Friends, True Cognates, and Other Cousins, is like the best of the work jubilat always gives us, inventive, unusual, confusing, smart, and full of itself—always in the best sense. Here, dictionary letters and their representative words are followed by prose poems that play out the letters in clever streams of connected and disconnected images and opinions. Continue reading “Jubilat – 2010”

“At last, terror has arrived.” Thus begins the big bang of this little journal in Arda Collins’s “The News.” Quality poems follow, as is guaranteed by titles like “Heaven,” the silly goodness of Robyn Schiff’s “Dear Ralph Lauren,” and “1450-1950” by Bob Brown, a picture-poem, for want of a better word. It has eyes surrounding the verses “Eyes / Eyes / My God / What eyes!” Continue reading “Jubilat – 2007”

Your ears are pricked. You’ve just read a good novel. You want more. You’re ready for a poem. And so is the newest issue of Jubilat. Though it has its luminaries, such as Ashbery and Salamun, they deliver – if only enough. The problem with Jubilat is not too little poetry, it’s the tidiness of the poetry. There’s meaningless metaphors like Allison Titus’, “O how we mine for artifacts the endless dusk.” Or there are the ones that deserve reflection like Rae Gouirand’s: Continue reading “Jubilat – 2006”