NewPages Blog :: Magazine Reviews

In this issue, The American Scholar continues to prove it’s one of the best publishers of essays in the country (the poetry–by Rita Dove, etc. Continue reading “The American Scholar – 2004”

“Terrific” is how contest judge Robert Wrigley classifies the 49th Parallel Award-winning poem by Simone Muench, but this assessment could certainly apply to this whole special double issue. Sophisticated and polished, the work here (poems, stories, essays, interviews, Forrest Gander’s comments on work by Cole Swenson, and Lucia Perillo’s writing about photos by Scott Chambers) is never casual, yet it remains consistently accessible and, in the best sense, readable. Continue reading “The Bellingham Review – Volume 27”

A common approach mysteriously unites the short fiction in this spring/summer issue of Black Warrior Review. Each of the six stories here possesses a similar obliqueness, a diagonal narrative attack that lends the characters and events an alluring inscrutability. Continue reading “Black Warrior Review – Vol 30 No 2”

This ambitious and strikingly effective theme issue in which writers respond to film leaves me with the feeling that I ought to know more about film than I do, though I’ve always felt that, in comparison to others, I know quite a lot. Several of the pieces here feel as if they were written for those already in the cinema ‘know,’ but each piece is, nonetheless, highly enjoyable. Continue reading “Conjunctions – Spring 2004”

“High quality” and “serious intent” is what CutBank seeks, say the journal’s guidelines. Continue reading “CutBank – Spring 2004”

This issue of Ellipsis, a long-time student-edited publication of Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, contains prose, photos and an astonishing number of poems (forty-five!) for a journal of its type. Continue reading “Ellipsis – Volume 40”

The work in Five Points boasts a consistently down-home earnestness. Continue reading “Five Points – 2004”

Amidst all the sophisticated fiction and poetry, Green Mountains Review provides a nice regional touch: photos of the modest farmhouse owned by an old Vermonter until his death and the subsequent destruction of his “uninhabitable” dwelling. Continue reading “Green Mountains Review – Nov 2004”

My first impression of Gulf Coast is not a particularly lofty one, but I’ll say it anyway: I can’t believe this thing is only eight bucks. Continue reading “Gulf Coast – Volume 16 Number 2”

This lovely issue of Hanging Loose features the amazing high-school-age poet Nathan Resnick-Day: “Listen to me as one listens to the rain. / It has been twenty years since the gas lamps flickered in Paris during a monsoon that took the beards off men. / […] / I was given a birdsong that loved me for what I was not” (“The Discourse of Hermeto”). Continue reading “Hanging Loose – 2004”

It would be difficult to find another journal this spring that demonstrates the immense possibilities of poetry more clearly, blatantly, and provocatively than The Hiram Poetry Review. Continue reading “Hiram Poetry Review – Issue 65”

The Literary Review has an emphasis on international writing. Continue reading “The Literary Review – Spring 2004”

Many Mountains Moving has traditionally been one of my favorite magazines, partly for the idiosyncracy of its new-agey platform, if you will, and partly because the quality of the writing is consistently strong and operates on a personal level. Continue reading “Many Mountains Moving – 2004”

“Every story in this issue is redemptive,” promises Robert Stewart’s editorial note at the front of New Letters Volume 70, Number 2. Continue reading “New Letters – Number 70.2, 2004”

With this issue, Other Voices celebrates twenty years of publishing some of the finest fiction around. Continue reading “Other Voices – Spring/Summer 2004”

This issue of Phoebe delivers a fresh, diverse selection of fiction and poems. Continue reading “Phoebe – Spring 2004”

More poems than plays, the drama here consists of three short, one-act pieces. Continue reading “Poems & Plays – Spring/Summer 2004”

“Turn each page and imagine yourself out for a nice bicycle ride like the women on our cover,” advise the editors. Continue reading “Poet Lore – Spring/Summer 2004”

This is my introduction to the Montreal-based Scrivener Creative Review, and I find it mostly delightful—from Matthew Aaron Guyer’s metaphysical fiction, “The Theory of Doorways,” to a beautiful collection of photographs, especially those of Geoffrey Brown. The poems are worth returning to again, as well, and I look forward to doing so. Continue reading “Scrivener Creative Review – 2004”

Southern Humanities Review seems to have a little something for everybody. Continue reading “Southern Humanities Review – Winter 2004”

I don’t know spank about Italian, but I know a giant when I see one. Continue reading “Storie – April 2004”

I wish more magazines were like this one. This always-a-theme-issue journal features a spectacular theme this time, “off on a tangent,” and the pieces featured here are just what I like—tangential, surprising, rarely staying in one place for too long. Continue reading “THEMA – Spring 2004”

“Humans love to lie,” notes editor Win McCormack of Tin House Magazine. Continue reading “Tin House – 2004”

It’s one of those great, relatively rare feelings: finding a journal with not a single author (or very very few) you recognize, a journal you may have heard of but have never actually read through, and within a few pages you’re hooked. Continue reading “Descant – 2003”

Tameme is a bilingual journal of new writing from North America. Continue reading “Tameme – 2003”

This is the premiere issue of an annual published with support from the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Program for Writing and Rhetoric. Continue reading “Divide – Fall 2003”

Bone by bone the skeletons of nature and science are picked, rattled, and pieced together to flesh human in isotope. Continue reading “Isotope – Fall/Winter 2003”

Porcupine is a fine mix of what you’d expect from a literary magazine, and what you’d never see coming. Continue reading “Porcupine – 2003”

This is an unassuming bi-annual, modestly staple-bound and graphic-less. Continue reading “Two Rivers Review – Fall 2003”

When you pick up this stylish journal, with its austere yellow cover, you notice its shape–-with longer pages that accommodate lots of white space and long lines. You might expect the poetry inside to be eclectic, experimental, and artistic–-and you wouldn’t be disappointed. Continue reading “The Canary – 2004”

5 AM is in a newspaper format, but printed on the pages, instead of the latest (mostly disastrous) accounts of the day, are poem after poem – hip, edgy, funny – that are actually a pleasure to read. The tone in this Spring Church, Pennsylvania-based journal is often irreverent, political, or conversational; the names inside may be familiar with fans (like me) of Charles Harper Webb’s anthology, stand up poetry, like Denise Duhamel, Virgil Suarez, Lyn Lifshin, and Charles Harper Webb himself. I especially enjoyed several poems by Shao Wei, who was featured on the front page of 5 AM, and several poems by Reginald Harris, particularly “Dinah James.” Ron Koertge’s work was charming, especially “Lunch Hour in Macy’s.” Here are a few lines from that poem: “…Nearby, the pearly nurses of Dior / talk softly about flesh. Dark Stranger is / this month’s rage. Ten promos show a coarse / but sensitive roughly tender atheist…” This is one newspaper I would be happy to wake up to at 5 am. Let’s pour some coffee and read! [5 AM, Box 205, Spring Church, PA 15686. Single issue $5.] – JHG Continue reading “5 AM – Winter/Spring 2004”

This Canadian journal out of Nova Scotia features an eclectic mix of writing, a few translations, and the sprightly but thought-provoking poetry of Jan Zwicky. The mix of interviews, reviews, short fiction, and poetry is very balanced, and, as always when I read Canadian journals, I am surprised and impressed with the quality and diversity of the work of writers from Canada whom aren’t as well-represented in journals here in the States. One of the most interesting pieces in this issue was an interview with Heather Menzies, an expert on technology’s many impacts on social structures, particularly in the workplace. Much of the poetry featured here was well-crafted free verse, with many exemplary pieces, only one of which I have the space to quote here. A few lines from Myka Tucker-Abramson’s “Lot and Eurydice, Based on Akhmatova’s ‘Lot’s Wife’”: “If you turned around, I would lick the salt off your skin / before tumbling back like Eurydice into slush driven days. / You taste like fire and turn slowly away, while I speak / loudly as anguish…” Poems by Li Qingzhao, translated with skill by Allen C. West and Gundi Chan, are also exceptional. – JHG Continue reading “The Antigonish Review – Winter 2004”

This double issue of Interim, out of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas English Department, features some names you will be familiar with (Cole Swenson, Donald Revell) and some you may not. Continue reading “Interim – 2004”

The Normal, Illinois-based Spoon River Poetry Review features some of the best writing from the Midwest and beyond. Continue reading “Spoon River Poetry Review – Winter/Spring 2004”

This issue of the venerable Ploughshares was guest-edited by Campbell McGrath, a poet famous for his exuberant descriptions of all things American, from pop culture to politics. You’re not in for a lot of surprises here as almost all the writers included in this issue are well-known quantities (Denise Duhamel, Stuart Dybek, Michael Collier, Rick Moody, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, the ubiquitous Virgil Suárez…the table of contents reads like a directory of Poets and Writers magazine), but the quality is impeccable, and reading this cover to cover was enjoyable. And McGrath definitely makes an effort to include poets from a range of movements, from elliptical to expansive and everything in between. I particularly liked the tongue-in-cheek humor of Beth Ann Fennelly’s “I Need to Be More French. Or Japanese.” Other standouts include Cynthia Weiner’s ambiguously chipper story “Boyfriends,” the poem “Going Bananas” by Rita Maria Martinez and the poem “In the B Movie of Our Lives” by Dionisio D. Martínez. – JHG Continue reading “Ploughshares – Spring 2004”

Slim and lightweight with a plain purple cover, Iodine Poetry Journal isn’t much to look at. But it’s the perfect length, and depth, to tote along to Starbucks for a quick poetry fix. Continue reading “Iodine Poetry Journal – Spring/Summer 2004”

I don’t read literary journals for the reviews they publish, and I’m a little surprised to find myself mentioning them here—in a review. But I have to say that the three reviews in Tar River Poetry are themselves as compelling as the poetry in this small volume. Richard Simpson, Susan Elizabeth Howe and Thomas Reiter present careful, academic discussions of three new poetry volumes, discussions that presume a well-educated but not necessarily scholarly audience. Informative and never pompous, they are a pleasure to read.
Continue reading “Tar River Poetry – Spring 2004”

With so many outstanding stories in this journal, it’s hard to know where to begin. Does one talk about the honest, dead-on dialogue of Ron Rindo’s “Crop Dusting”? The dreamy and lyrical narrative of Anne Spollen’s “Fishdreams”? The landscape of losers in Andi Diehn’s “Burning Season”? It’s impossible to do justice to this fine fiction journal in two hundred words. Continue reading “Orchid – 2004”

I find it impossible not to love – or at least admire – Northwest Review for allocating an entire white page to this epigraph by Leonard Bernstein: “Our response to violence will be to make music more intensely, more beautifully and more devotedly than before.” Continue reading “Northwest Review – May 2004”

The edgy fiction in Zoetrope chronicles our hard-won (if dangerously tentative) status of humanity. Primal bullies lurk throughout the stories in this issue: a family simultaneously imprisons and abandons its defenseless, unmarried kin; a man exploits a toothless orphan reduced to turning tricks by the freeway, an anonymous driver works up a deadly malice. Continue reading “Zoetrope: All-Story – Spring 2004”

I’m hooked. I was a sporadic reader of Arts & Letters, but no longer. I’ve just finished this issue and I can’t wait for the next one. I read from cover to cover, not tempted to skip or skim or even come back to something later — every piece, from the A&L Prize for Drama winner, “Left” by Sourbah Chatterjee, to reviews of work by Judson Mitcham, Annie Finch, and Vivian Shipley drew me in and satisfied me. With so few opportunities to read new play scripts, I was thrilled to read Chatterjee’s clever one-act play about a family of siblings, abandoned by their father as children and their adult solution to father-less-ness. I’d call Chatterjee’s piece a highlight of the issue, if it weren’t for the fact that it is followed by fiction, nonfiction, and poems that could all easily qualify as highlights. There is a delightful interview with Janisse Ray, author of The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilting: Taking a Chance on Home; pleasing, read-me-more-than-once fiction by Janice Eidus, Barbara Haines Howett, Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer, among others; and read-again-and-again poems from Jesse Lee Kercheval, Roy Jacobstein and others, including newcomer, Israeli poet Rosebud Ben-oni. – SR Continue reading “Arts & Letters – Spring 2004”

VQR gets the award for the most evocative juxtaposition this spring — illustrator Eric Wight’s blond, broad-shouldered “Escapist,” from Michael Chabon’s comic book story (“The Origin of the Escapist”) practically leaps off the cover, heavy chains broken and loose in his hands, locks flying, white teeth gleaming, and then the first entry in the magazine, Carleton J. Phillip’s “Capturing Saddam.”  Continue reading “The Virginia Quarterly Review – Spring 2004”

This refreshingly energetic and well-produced journal from San Francisco State University may have a confusing table of contents, but once you find yourself between the covers, you won’t want to leave. The content is just as colorful – and at times as jumbled – as the image on this issue’s cover, “Cityscape” by Chris Johanson; this is a lighthearted romp rather than a doleful stroll through the works of the writers. Continue reading “Fourteen Hills – Winter/Spring 2004”

I read this San-Francisco-based journal, an eclectic grab-bag of West Coast writing, on a regular basis, because I have a vested interest in West Coast writing, but also because I am always interested in what will show up next. The editors always have surprising delights hidden among the pages, often in their “First Time in Print” section, where debuting authors are showcased. Continue reading “ZYZZYVA – Spring 2004”

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. Continue reading “Bellevue Literary Review – Spring 2004”

This issue of the Minnesota-based Ascent is focused on the contemplative, the intellectual, and the spiritual – most of the pieces are focused in some way on individuals contemplating their world and their place in it. In one story, the balance of the universe rests on the subversive tendencies of a man at a newspaper who inserts people’s names into the text of classified ads; a poem compares the speaker’s actions as a new father with the actions of Caligula. Entertaining and somewhat erudite, I enjoyed Jean-Mark Sens poem “Doubling,” which begins: “Your mouth articulates / outside words: / and bit by bit you’ve grown / a guardian angel.” and the poem “Watching” by Jesse Lee Kercheval, about watching movies –  “…Now when the movie comes I’m already restless, thinking one step ahead. / I’m questioning everything even before the academy leader counts down. // Now when I’m watching a movie, it may happen that another movie / fills my head & keeps me from watching the movie I am watching.” I enjoy reading the new voices and new ideas found here. [Ascent, Concordia College, 901 8^th Street S, Moorhead, Minnesota 56562. E-mail: ascent@cord.edu. Single issue $5. http://www.cord.edu/dept/english/ascent/] – JHG Continue reading “Ascent – Winter 2004”

This issue of Kenyon Review might help a newcomer to the literary world learn who’s who; there are so many well-established poets and writers here: Alice Hoffman, Stanley Plumly, Marvin Bell, Carl Phillips, David Lehman…and the list goes on. Continue reading “The Kenyon Review – Spring 2004”

While it’s tempting for me to enjoy Conduit because we are of the same city, or because I think Conduit does many things tremendously well—among them risk annihilation, use words instead of page numbers, gather incredible poetry—the clearest reason in this latest issue to enjoy it is because of the poem, “My One Paneled Wall,” by Crystal Curry, though ‘enjoy’ is far and away far too weak a verb for this startlingly sharp and perfect poem, and she should, like many other poets within (C.G. Waldrep, Olena Kalytiak Davis, etc.), have whatever choice of beverage she prefers purchased for her. Continue reading “Conduit – Spring 2004”

I know it’s not polite to talk about politics, and there’s hardly a gray zone in the polarized debate regarding politics in this country right now, but the Long Story is specifically political, so it bears discussion. Continue reading “The Long Story – 2004”