Find the latest news from literary and alternative magazines including new issues, editorial openings, and much more.
This month’s Plume Featured Selection: “Caliche Sand and Clay: Five Albuquerque Poets” with work by and interviews with Jenn Givhan, Felecia Caton Garcia, Michelle Otero, Rebecca Aronson, and Hilda Raz. In Essays & Comment: “It’s Called the Renaissance, You Know, or The Soul Sibling Report” by David Kirby. Fred Marchant reviews Ledger by Jane Hirschfield.
This issue is dedicated to Dr. Terry Dalrymple, the founding editor of CRR. It includes fiction by Peter Barlow, Michael Fitzgerald, and others; nonfiction by Michael Cohen, Lucie Barron Eggleston, and more; and poetry by Barbara Astor, Roy Bentley, Jonathan Bracker, Matthew Brennan, Holly Day, Alexis Ivy, Ken Meisel, Alita Pirkopf, Maureen Sherbondy, Travis Stephens, Marc Swan, Loretta Diane Walker, Francine Witte, and more. Read more at the Concho River Review website.
This issue of Cleaver Magazine features art by Madeline Rile Smith, a visual narrative by Emily Steinberg, and an essay on the art of Jan Powell by Melanie Carden. Also in this issue: short stories by Reilly Joret, Elaine Crauder, Melissa Brook, and Marion Peters Denard; flash by Susan Tacent, Brenna Womer, Michelle Ephraim, Leonard Kress, and others; and poetry by Roy Bentley, Stella Hayes, and more.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
I love when a poem has visual components, so I was happy to see a couple pieces by Ryan Mihaly in the Summer 2020 issue of The Massachusetts Review with visual accompaniment.
“[B]” and “[A♯/B♭]” are paired with clarinet fingering charts. In “[B],” the speaker looks back at “a catalogue of embarrassments,” which are broken down and pointed out on the chart as “Wrong name,” “Loss of language,” and “Failed elegance.” “[A♯/B♭]” explores language and communication, finishing, “Music is not a language because it cannot be translated into anything. It can only be described. A♯, then, is the word ‘handiwork’ mispronounced ‘hand-eye-work.’” The chart above shows a corresponding “Hand,” “Eye,” and “Work.”
While both poems would work just fine without the visual aspect, their presence is still welcome and enhances each piece, the text almost working as a footnote to guide the reader through the charts.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
I may be an atheist, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying Liz Bruno’s poem in the latest issue of The Cape Rock. “Jesus, The Original Disney Princess” compares the religious figure to the familiar cartoon girls of our youth. I found the comparison to be lighthearted and sweet, the connections between Jesus and the girls clear. They’re all “Westernized beauty queen[s],” with “endless magic.” They teach “girls and boys to dream big and look pretty” and are friends with animals, are critics of the bourgeois, and rise above their humble beginnings.
A new and different take on the familiar religious figure, Bruno creates an endearing poem with an eye-catching title.
In this issue, find featured fiction by Alexandra Kulik & Julian Senn-Raemont and Nia Imara; essays by Allison Grimaldi Donahue and Miljenko Jergović; and poetry by Diamond Forde, Chelsea B. Desautels, Ryan Mihaly, and Thomas Tranströmer. Read more at The Massachusetts Review website.
The July issue is now online featuring Ken Autry, William Bonfiglio, David Callin, Kitty Coles, Eileen Walsh Duncan, Maren O. Mitchell, Ronald Moran, and more. Reviews of Claire Walker’s Collision and Oisín Breen’s Flowers All Sorts in Blossom, Figs, Berries and Fruits Forgotten. Also features a tribute to Eavan Boland. .
The July/Aug issue of the Kenyon Review offers fiction chosen by guest editor Angie Cruz. Featured authors include Samia Ahmed, Yalitza Ferreras, Katherinna Mar, Cleyvis Natera, and Namrata Poddar. In her introduction, Cruz writes “When I reread the stories featured in this issue, I find solace in them. They serve as evidence or reminders that as a collective, as members of the global community, everything we are feeling and experiencing now is both temporary and ongoing.” The new issue also includes work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Stephanie Burt, Floyd Collins, Nicola Dixon, Rodney Jones, Stanley Plumly, Grace Schulman, and Arthur Sze.
The spring issue includes our 2019 Editors’ Awards winners Kirk Wilson, Aurielle Marie, and Eleanor Bluestein. With additional work by Billy Collins, Angelo R. Lacuesta and Roy Allen Martinez, Jennifer Popa, Yasmeen Alkishawi, Gabriel Thibodeau, and others.
The summer New England Review issue extends deep into the past, with translations from ancient Greek, historical fiction featuring Alfred Nobel, and an essay/collage about Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. It imagines the future with speculative fiction and crosses the Atlantic to bring together fifteen contemporary poets from the UK. Fiction by Hugh Coyle, Rachel Hall, Laura Schmitt, and more; poetry by Emma Bolden, Jehanne Dubrow, David Keplinger, Esther Lin, Joannie Stangeland, and others; and nonfiction by Indran Amirthanayagam, Zoë Dutka, and more.
Featured in our latest issue is the 2020 In-House Contest winning story “Trash Man” by Jessica Holbert alongside another story, “The Taxidermist,” by Seth Tucker. The poetry in this issue explores the emotional and physical connections to different geographies and technologies, from abandoned lighthouses and frost-covered pastures to half-truth news coverage and Harry Potter. Wrapping up the issue are visual arts and comics by Coz Frimpong, Geoffrey Detrani, Yi-hui Huang, Aimee Cozza, and Jason Hart. Read more at the Driftwood Press website.
The nonfiction in this issue asks difficult questions regarding the nature of power, self-concept, and family story; the stories explore the construction of self against one’s own misperceptions; and the poems callus toward our own inferiorities refracted by multi-layered experiences of loss and death. Read more at the Dogwood website.
The latest issue of The Cape Rock features new poetry by Caroline Mann, Mark Christhilt, Rachel Tramonte, Carol Levin, Diana Becket, Olivia Vittitow, Nathan Graziano, Elian JRF Wiseblatt, Mukund Gnanadesikan, Daisy Bassen, Christine Donat, Barry Peters, Michael Estabrook, Holly Day, Dick Bentley, Liz Bruno, Sandra Sylvia Nelson, Phillip Sterling, Tobi Alfier, Martina Reisz Newberry, Donna Emerson, James K. Zimmerman, Chase Dimock, David M. Taylor, Seward Ward, Judith Cody, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle, Arlene Naganawa, and Simon Perchik.
New on their website: flash by Darcy Casey, Laura Bailey, Anthony Keers, Rimma Kranet, Kate Lunn-Pigula, Yongsoo Park, David Bassano, Dona McCormack, Christian McCulloch, and Cyan James. Find out more at the Brilliant Flash Fiction website.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
In the Summer 2020 issue of The Georgia Review, Bishakh Som finds a creative way to process feelings of longing and isolation in “Shelter in Place.” This graphic poem spans days in May, the images taking readers into a futuristic, sci-fi setting. Calendar dates guide the piece along, moving us from one day to the next as the speaker writes of what and who she misses in this strange state of life. At the end of the piece, we’re met with that now familiar feeling of time becoming unreal and immeasurable as the calendar page reads “May 32.”
While we all process our feelings about sheltering in place, living in a time of a global pandemic, and missing the physical connection with people we were once allotted, I appreciated this different and creative take. The change in setting and the beautiful language make “Shelter in Place” a stand-out among other pieces of writing that are responding to current life in COVID-19.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
The latest issue of the Missouri Review features the winners of the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. The nonfiction winner, “The Trailer” by Jennifer Anderson is a powerful piece on self-reflection.
In “The Trailer,” a trailer appears on land Anderson owns. For awhile, it stays empty, and then one day a man and woman appear inside. Anderson then works on getting the inhabitants removed, and the trailer towed from the property.
In doing this, though, she ends up looking inside herself and examining her response to the two people that have begun squatting on her property. As a teen, she drank, did drugs, and engaged in risky behavior and she realizes she easily could have ended up just like the woman she evicts from her property. Later, when one of the women she delivers food to on her Meals on Wheels route must move out from her care facility and is essentially homeless, Anderson is filled with compassion and the desire to help, a response that is much different than her response to the woman in the trailer. After the woman leaves the trailer and the trailer is hauled away, Anderson continues to see her around town, each time having to face her past actions and feeling shame.
The piece is introspective and honest, a good reminder to examine our own actions. Anderson’s writing is compelling and hard to look away from, well-deserving of its placement as the nonfiction Editors’ Prize winner.
Sleet Magazine‘s slim Summer Edition has arrived! We promise you will not be disappointed; the pieces have heart and guts. Proud to showcase work by poets B. Baumgart, L. Castle, M. Dillon, J. Palen, O. Umukoro; Fiction by E. Ferrell, P. Sterling, SF Wright, K. Skiles Law; and CNF by A. Schur and W. Thornton.
The “Elemental Force” issue of Missouri Review is out. Inside: The 2019 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize winners, and Stephanie Carpenter on Little Women and Louisa May Alcott. Featuring John Balaban, Nathan Greenberg, Daniel Hornsby, Melissa Studdard, Diana Xin, Javier Zamora, and many more.
The latest issue of The Iowa Review is out. In this issue: birthday cake, auctioneering school, the 2018 Hawaii false missile alert, a male masseuse in Kanagawa Prefecture, a love performance, the winner of the 2019 David Hamilton Prize for Iowa Review Alumni, and tributes to Connie Brothers.
The Georgia Review‘s latest issue features new writing from Garrett Hongo, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Laura van den Berg, A. E. Stallings, and many other exciting voices! Original translations of poetic works by Hisham Bustani and Shuzo Takiguchi. Illustrated features on the theme “Shelter in Place,” by Lindsey Bailey, Kaytea Petro, and Bishakh Som. Cover art and portfolio by Doron Langberg. This issue is not to be missed—read selected online features today!
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
In Cave Wall Number 16, Maggie Smith writes a poem to America. “Tender Age” focuses on the reality of the country, which is decidedly “not what I learned / in grade school.” Instead, this America “caged / even the babies.”
She questions who our laws serve, questions where the country’s conscience lives, or where it’s been removed from. Reminiscing on the past, Smith writes of the street she grew up on and the church she attended, as well as the handbells played there. These memories are unburied again as she wonders whether there will be “neighborhoods / named for this undeclared war” like we’ve named ones “Lexington, / Bunker Hill, Valley Forge.” Finally, the piece ends on the images of the handbells again ins sobering stanza:
America, when we want to silence
the bells, we extinguish
their open mouths
on our chests.
This poem is unfortunately continuously timely and relevant with the continued practice of caging migrant children and following the recent news that another 1,500 have been “lost.” Smith’s poem encourages readers to join in as she speaks to America and against the horrific, harmful systems we’ve created.
For the Summer 2020 issue of THEMA, writers and artists explore the theme “The Clumsy Gardener.” See how Sarah Gramelspacher, Charlotte Stacey, John Delaney, Madonna Dries Christensen, Virginia McGee Butler, Donna Aycock Meares, and others interpret the theme.
The summer issue of The Shore features dazzling poetry by: Catherine Pierce, Kim Harvey, Beth Gylys, Joshua Garcia, Sara Moore Wagner, Kristi Maxwell, Dillon Thomas Jones, Matthew Bruce, Lorrie Ness, C.C.Russell, Travis Truax, Stanley Princewill McDaniels, Njoku Nonso, Erin Rodoni, Phillip Sterling, William Doreski, and more.
The Rathalla Review Spring 2020 issue features work by Timothy Dodd, Liam Strong, Thad DeVassie, Nathan Spoon, Isaac W Sauer, Henry Stimpson, Jeffery H. MacLachlan, Phillip Sterling, Adam Luebke, and Bina Ruchi Perino.
The 2020 issue of Presence features poets Sean Thomas Dougherty and Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Also in this issue: translated work by María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, Laura Chalar, Julio Herrera y Reissig, Federico García Lorca, Lucía Estrada, Fina García Marruz, and more; poetry by Ann Applegarth, Collin Becker, Aaron Brown, Ann Cefola, Paola Corso, Susan Cowger, Janet McCann, Stephen Paling, Skip Renker, and others; and interviews with Christian Wiman and Paul Mariani. There is a lot more to discover in this issue, including an “in memoriam” section, book reviews, and a “life’s work” section.
The 2020 issue of The Briar Cliff Review explores themes of violence, disconnectedness, and the legacy of slavery. Find poetry by Jed Myers, Claude Wilkinson, AE Hines, Lindy Obach, Doug Rampseck, Laura Stott, Melanie Krieps Mergen, Mary Fitzpatrick, Dar Hurni, and more; fiction by Deac Etherington, Carrie Callaghan, and others; and nonfiction by Karen Holmberg, Ryan McCarl, and more. Plus, two book reviews and pages of art.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
In the latest issue of Pembroke Magazine, Jessica Hertz writes of the “Fictional Women I Have Known.” This five-part piece focuses on Alice from Alice in Wonderland, the mermaid from Hans Christian Andersen’s or Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Persephone, the sister from “The Six Swans” fairy tale, and Eve.
Each section explores the complexities of their feelings, their desires, and their realities. They’re not flat women on a page but are thought-out and developed even in the small space provided. I enjoyed Hertz’s take on each of them, and my favorites were the mermaid and Eve. The mermaid is faced with having to choose between a voice or the ability to dance, a choice she wishes she did not have to make. Eve is faced with a choice—eat the offered fruit or don’t—and Hertz asserts she knew exactly what she was doing when she accepted, a take I appreciated.
Peer into the inner thoughts and feelings of these five fictional women with Hertz as your guide.
New poetry by Karen An-Hwei Lee, Jan Freeman, Ashanti Anderson, Ken Babstock, Drew Swinger, W. Todd Kaneko, Susan Parr, Noah Baldino, Faylita Hicks, Erika Martínez, Ian Pople, Bradley Trumpfheller, Alla Gorbunova, Marion McCready, Eleanor Hooker, Tim Seibles, Carol Ann Davis, Karisma Price, Rita Dove, Fran Lock, Emily Fragos, Rajiv Mohabir, Cynthia Guardado, Sandra McPherson, Elizabeth Metzger, Miller Oberman, Catherine Cleary, and more. In “The View from Here” section: Nicolas Bos, Zach Pino, Leah Ward Sears, Mairead Case, and John Green. Plus two essays by Torrin A. Greathouse and Christian Wiman. Check out other poetry contributors at the Poetry website.
This issue’s theme is “Making a Mark,” and the current art exhibition explores this theme. Featured artists include David Sapp, Mary Macey Butler, Cary Loving, and others. Featured writers include Karla Van Vliet, Wally Swist, Paula Penna, Dave Gregory, Bethany Bruno, Gergory Stephens, Mary Lane Potter, Roudri Bandyopadhyay, Sarah Brown Weitzman, Mark Tulin, Joe Kowalski, and more. Find more info at the Still Point Arts Quarterly website.
In the Spring 2020 issue: fiction by Jarrett Kaufman, Emily Alice Katz, J.T. Ledbetter, John Mancini, David Pratt, and Timothy Reilly; poetry by Jeffrey Alfier, Tobi Alfier, John Azrak, Tara Ballard, Chris Bullard, Dorritt Carroll, Ricks Carson, George Bishop, Sudasi J. Clement, Joan Colby, and more; and six book reviews. Be sure to check out our featured interview with Tim Bascom by Beth Browne.
In the Spring 2020 issue of Hiram Poetry Review, find poetry by Jo Brachman, R. Steve Benson, Dan Cardoza, Daniel Daly, J. David, Lynn Domina, Ben Goluboff, Stuart Gunter, Alec Hershman, Joanne Holdridge, Henry Hughes, Richard Jones, Peycho Kanev, Kara Marell, Jose Oseguera, Jonathan Andrew Pérez, William Snyder, and more.
Our latest issue features poetry by Kenda Allen, Jamaica Baldwin, Ronda Pizza Broatch, Satya Dash, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Rebecca Foust, Valentina Gnup, Tate Lewis, Abby E. Murray, Phong Nguyen, Eric Pankey, Kimani Rose, Joel Showalter, Ellora Sutton, Raisa Tolchinsky, and more; and fiction by Stacy Austin Egan, Lucy Ferriss, Tyler McAndrew, Casey McConahay, Susan Mersereau, and Griffin Victoria Reed. Read more info at the december website.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
If you’re using pride month as a time to become more familiar with LGBTQIA+ writers, I recommend grabbing a copy of the Spring 2020 issue of Hiram Poetry Review. Inside is the four-page poem “I Didn’t Know You Were Transgender” by Mercury Marvin Sunderland. This poem is a response to the observation cisgender people have made: “I didn’t know you were transgender / they tell me / I thought you were a cis man.”
Sunderland spends the poem speaking to these people, asserting his place in the gender spectrum. At one point he declares:
if you knew
even a scrap
of trans culture
you’d know i
already do look
like a trans man
because we are a diverse multitude all over the earth.
With this poem, he challenges the idea of what someone is “supposed” to or expected to look like, challenges the argument that using “they” as singular “destroy[s] the english language,” challenges the idea that “stick[ing] medicine in me” means “i want to be cisgender.”
Throughout the four pages, Sunderland provides a better understanding of what it means to be a trans man, and what it means to be Sunderland himself.
In the May 2020 issue of Poetry, find work by A.E. Stallings, Perry Janes, Raymond Antrobus, Mary Ruefle, D. M. Spratley, Desirée Alvarez, Kelle Groom, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Safia Elhillo, Janice N. Harrington, Zakia El-Marmouke, Eileen Myles, Lupe Mendez, TC Tolbert, Karen Skofield, Daniel Poppick, Jennifer Barber, Inua Ellams, Stuart Barnes, Travis Nichols & Jason Novak, Kyle Carrero Lopez, Ricki Cummings, Dean Browne, Jennifer L. Knox, Jayme Ringleb, Gerard Malanga, Helen Mort, and Srikanth Reddy. Plus, Vidyan Ravinthrian in the Comment section.
This month’s Plume featured selection: Reginald Dwayne Betts: On Art, Poetry, the Particular Fucked Up Parts of Incarceration, and the Multitudes of I. Work by the poet is introduced with an interview by Amanda Newell. In the Essays & Comment section, find “Rescuing Ourselves” by Celia Bland. Chelsea Wagenaar reviews Sara Wainscott’s Insecurity System.
This week, check out what new work was published on the Fiction Southeast website during the month of May: work by Marianne Rogoff, Robin Littell, L. Vocem, Charles Grosel, and more. Read more at the Fiction Southeast website.
In this issue: fiction by Auguste Budhram, Ace Boggess, Martha Keller, and others; nonfiction by Paul Bryant, Catherine Vance, and more; and poetry by James Whyshynski, Sallie Hess, and Donna Isaac. Art by Alice Stone-Collins.
See what was published in May at Terrain.org. Poetry by Charlotte Pence, Michael Daley, Maryann Corbett, Lois P. Jones, Elizabeth Jacobson, Traci Brimhall, Sharon Dolin, Beth Paulson, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Dennis Held; nonfiction by Andrew Furman and Gretchen VanWormer; and fiction by Amy Barker.
The latest issue of Pembroke Magazine contains poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by emerging and established authors from the US and abroad. A young mother struggling to nurse trades notes with a gorilla; a Midwesterner finds a bathing suit in a sock drawer that whisks his mind back to a Grecian beach; a woman desperately seeks to return to her home at the edge of the world; a man takes a manic road trip with his schizophrenic uncle; a couple in a gated community is saddled with the job of maintaining an exalted lawn; a woman flees a California wildfire for a holy site near Albuquerque; and much more. Cover art by Margie Labadie.
The Lake‘s June issue features Sheila Bender, Phillip Henry Christopher, Robert Eccleston, Edilson Ferreira, Mercedes Lawry, Bruce Morton, David Olson, Carolyn Oulton, J. R. Solonche, Hana Yun-Stevens, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan, Tanner. Reviews of Matthew Caley’s Trawlerman’s Turquoise and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry.
Guest Post by Emily Lowe
Alice Friman’s “Insomnia in Moonlight” in The Gettysburg Review Fall 2019 is a moving poem that grapples with a popular theme within this issue: death. Friman handles the topic delicately, with humor, and with heft. The poem is broken into four irregular stanzas beginning with the dead waking in the night, making noise. This stanza read with immediate intrigue through the life Friman breathed into death about a speaker who cannot sleep because the dead are alive in their thoughts. It suggests playfulness, too, written with a lighter tone than often associated with death and mourning.
Friman then equates the dead to the sun, something bright and fixed, and the speaker to the changeable moon, “she wears my child face—round, / sunburnt, and pensive.” The final lines in the poem are the most striking, offering up the speaker’s recount of a total eclipse where the moon tried to “blot out the sun.” It felt like a reflection of their desire to hold death in their hands and make sense of it, but the speaker admits that the moon fails in its attempt to resist permanence, to resist, as Friman puts so eloquently in her final two lines: “geometric progression, the unerasable / dead, and everything else I don’t understand.”
Reviewer bio: Emily Lowe is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where she is also a fiction editor for Ecotone literary magazine.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
The cover of the latest issue of The Malahat Review is a calming scene: a full moon framed by powerlines over a pastel sky. It invites readers to pick it up and open it to discover what’s inside. I had found two new favorites in the pages: “Nice Girl” by Hollie Adams and “A High Frequency Words List” by Matthew Gwathmey.
In “Nice Girl,” Adams’s speaker likens herself to a mall who would “never automatically / open the doors even though / there’d be a sign saying / Automatic Doors.” She admits she’d keep them locked because she’s “evil / even though in real life / I’m always doing nice things.” This poem is a fun exploration of one’s inner self and the intentions behind actions. There’s a sense of humor in this piece even as it leads to introspection, an enjoyable aspect.
Gwathmey’s poem is in four sections, each one a list of words picked from the Fry and the Dolch sight word lists, used in children’s vocabulary development. This piece is just four paragraphs listing off words, a cool form of recycling.
There is plenty more poetry and prose to find inside this issue of The Malahat Review. Grab a copy to find your own favorites.
Our spring issue showcases the 2020 Open Season Award winners: Joshua Whitehead (cnf), Patrick Grace (poetry), and Ajith Thangavelautham (fiction). Also featured: Manahil Bandukwala, Ayaz Pirani, Christine Wu, Rob Taylor, Edward Carson, Matthew Gwathmey, Tania De Rozario, Hollie Adams, Emi Kodama, Bradley Peters, Kevin Shaw, Emma Wunsch, Glen Downie, and more.
The Autumn issue of The Gettysburg Review is out. The issue features paintings by Jared Small, fiction by Jennifer Anne Moses, Jared Hanson, Darrell Kinsey, and Sean Bernard; essays by Andrew Cohen, K. Robert Schaeffer, and Christopher Wall; poetry by Jill McDonough, Max Seifert, K. A. Hays, Albert Goldbarth, Mary B. Moore, R. T. Smith, Jill Bialosky, Katharine Whitcomb, Corey Marks, Kimberly Johnson, Margaret Ray, Danusha Laméris, Linda Pastan, Christopher Bakken, Christopher Howell, and Margaret Gibson.
The latest issue includes poetry by Lisa Zimmerman, Sally Rosen Kindred, Jennifer Bullis, Carolyn Oliver, Andrea Potos, Michael McFee, Patricia Clark, Cathy Smith Bowers, and more. Art by Andis Applewhite. Read more at the Cave Wall website.
This issue includes short stories by and interviews with Ashley Hand, Chris Vanjonack, Reece McCormack, and David J. Wingrave; poetry by Kimberly Thornton, Andrew Szilvasy, Bruce Lowry, Ryan Meyer, and Jose Hernandez Diaz; and nofiction by Gregg Williard and Greg Oldfield. Read more at the Carve website.
The Spring issue of The Baltimore Review features poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction by: John Blair, Shevaun Brannigan, Naomi Cohn, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Katherine Gekker, Matthew Henry, R. Dean Johnson, Yume Kitasei, Andrew Kozma, Avra Margariti, Rita Mookerjee, Glen Pourciau, Ellen Skirvin, David Urbina, and M. Drew Williams.
The May 2020 issue is here with poetry by Jenny George, Arthur Sze, Jessica Abughattas, Melissa Crowe, Jamaica Baldwin, C.X. Hua, Kara van de Graaf, Hala Alyan, Mark Wunderlich, Raymond Antrobus, Stephanie Chang, and more; prose by Scott Broker, Alyssa Proujansky, Maura Pellettieri, and Mina Hamedi, with a prose feature by Dima Alzayat. See what else the issue has in store for you at The Adroit Journal website.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
Everything is green and warm outside my window right now, but James Braun takes readers back to winter in his story “The Salt Man” from the Spring 2020 issue of Zone 3.
The story centers on two young sisters mid-winter. They are sent outside to wait for the salt man to come salt their roads before they’re allowed to play outside their yard. This is a dark piece. Poverty hangs heavy over the story. What once was green and beautiful has been covered by rocks. They have no heat in the house. Their neighbor loses fingers to frostbite. A woman cries on a couch while they go door to door asking if they can shovel driveways for cash to pay for a doctor bill. And the person they’re told will bring them a level of safety—the salt man—ends up being a source of danger in himself.
I enjoyed Braun’s writing style. There’s a level of flippancy with all the characters who view their lifestyle as ordinary. The story is short but holds a lot inside it. We’re able to discern as much meaning in what isn’t said as in what is clearly stated. And even though it is warm enough that I have my window open, a warm breeze blowing into my living room as I write this, Braun’s writing still makes a reader feel that inescapable cold of winter.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
Opening the Spring 2020 issue of Boulevard is the winner of the journal’s 2019 Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers: “My Mom Claims I Had a Drink with My Rapist. I Investigate.” by Emi Nietfeld.
In this piece, Nietfeld looks back to June 28, 2010 when she was raped while in Budapest and to the conversations she had with her mother immediately after and eight years later about the incident. This investigation focuses on the drink that Nietfeld did or didn’t have and the influence the drink had on her mother’s reaction to the rape.
Nietfeld breaks the piece up into sections, investigating in-person conversations, emails that were sent in 2010, and her old computer documents. After she presents the “evidence,” she breaks it down and discusses it. I found this approach to be interesting and impactful as she turns a critical eye on past conversations, her memory, and her relationship with her mother.
Not only is this piece a strong start to the issue, but it demonstrates why Nietfeld deserves to have won the Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers.