NewPages Blog :: Magazines

No is more than a literary magazine; it is a journal of the arts. That lofty subtitle is not just a marketing ploy. No really does bring the literary magazine to the level of art form. It is so well put together it succeeds as a discreet collection of poems and as a unified whole. Beautifully bound, this creative cornucopia is overflowing with the smartest, edgiest, and most provocative poetry. This issue heavily features Marjorie Welsh’s poetry and painting, including the book-length “From Dedicated To,” which acts as a kind of book-within-a-journal in this case. Continue reading “No: a journal of the arts – 2005”

“For genius, at least where poetry is concerned, consists precisely in being faithful to freedom,” Dean Young quotes from surrealist poet Yves Bonnefoy in the latest issue of POOL. Although this quote comes from Amy Newlove Schroeder’s interview with Young in the back pages of POOL, it might as well be the magazine’s credo. From the Natasha Sajé’s prose poem “B” to Jeff Chang’s “Things to Forget”—“Under the skin is another layer. / We call this baby skin. // Under a baby’s skin, / snowflakes.”

Continue reading “Pool – 2005”

Spring is The Greensboro Review’s contest issue and the prize winning story, “The Cornfield” by Ann Stewart Hendry, and prize winning poem, “Poem from Which Wolves Were Banished,” by Jeanne Marie Beaumont, are indeed exemplary. Hendry’s story of the ruin of a farm as a result of foot-and-mouth disease on a neighbor’s property is beautifully written, old-fashioned in some senses (a pleasingly traditional story), much like the family farm itself.

Continue reading “The Greensboro Review – Spring 2003”

This last issue to be edited by David Milofsky (“…it’s important to know when to write the conclusion…”) is a study in contrasts. For the most part, the fiction is plainspoken, colloquial, and of the moment. The poetry, on the other hand, tends toward the abstract, fragmented, and difficult, with marvelous syntactical configurations in poems both long and short.

Continue reading “Colorado Review – Summer 2003”

This Canadian review is separated into sections titled “Up the Down Staircase,” “Stone Games,” “Mask in Flight,” “In Fall/Forest Garden, Book, and Prison,” Stories From the Water Glass,” and “Strange Honeymoons.” The section titles are as lyric (and sometimes as obscure) as the poetry, fiction, essays and art contained within. The weirdly haunting short fiction “Bloodline” by Janette Platana is a standout piece, as is the poem “Babies in the Eyes” written by Wang Shunjian and translated by Ouyang Yu. Continue reading “Descant – Winter 2003”

Judith Hall, the influential poetry editor of this esteemed literary journal, should be congratulated for producing one of the best issues of “The Antioch Review” that I’ve read in a long time. This special all-poetry issue, subtitled “What to Read, What to Praise,” contains, contrary to what you might believe from the cover, more than just poetry.

Continue reading “The Antioch Review – Winter 2004”

Editor Robert Stewart’s interview with Renée Stout — reproductions of her mixed media assemblages, paintings, and sculptures appear on the cover and on sixteen pages within — is reason enough to look at this issue, but, not the only reason. Poems by Sherman Alexie, Simon Perchik, Diana O’Hehir, short fiction by Lance Olsen, and essays by Janet Burroway, and Jodi Varon make spending time with the most recent New Letters especially worthwhile.

Continue reading “New Letters – 2003”

The Gettysburg Review is a consistently beautiful literary magazine. Distinctive art work grace its cover and internal gallery, and it has a sensual “feel good” quality. The Review continually selects works of fiction, essay, and poetry which make you sigh. This issue does not disappoint, although the art work—desolate industrial Manhattan landscapes by Andrew Lenaghan—can best be appreciated after reading the insightful commentary by Molly Hutton.

Continue reading “The Gettysburg Review – Autumn 2003”

In the “Route 66” issue, River Styx succeeds in its “homage to that lingering spirit of the road” with poems (by Gaylord Brewer, Walt McDonald, Nancy Krygowski, Rafael Campo, among others), short fiction, essays, illustrations and photography. These lively pieces concentrate on the vast subject matter encountered during automobile travel around the United States. 

Continue reading “River Styx – 2003”

The quiet, simple beauty of Paula Eubanks’ black and white photographs featured in this issue tells you all you need to know about the fiction you’ll find here. These are high-quality stories, told in clear, confident, but unadorned prose. This issue opens with “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” by Alice Hoffman, with strongly depicted characters and a keen sense of place: “I could place a single blade of eelgrass between my fingers and whistle so loudly the oysters buried in the mud would spit at us.” In “An Only Child,” Julia Lamb Stemple gives us a heartbreaking look at a boy’s ambivalence towards growing up: “He wanted to hold himself close to [his babysitter] again but thought that she didn’t want him to, and something seemed to come loose inside him. He looked over at the triangle of shadow between the ficus and the entertainment center where he had been hiding and saw that she must have known he was there all the time.”

Continue reading “Five Points – 2003”

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.

Continue reading “The Bitter Oleander – Summer 2003”

This new-ish journal (only on its third issue) has already generated lots of positive talk among poetry insiders and continues to showcase a wide variety of writers: experimental, traditional, narrative, lyric – name a style, and you’ll probably find it in here. A feeling of whimsy and humor pervades this issue; in the editor’s notes, Ian Randall Wilson confides that they used a “Dada” method to organize the submissions. But the felicitous juxtapositions created work in the reader’s favor.

Continue reading “88 – October 2003”

Phantom Drift is an annual journal of slipstream writing: fiction, nonfiction and poetry which experiment with fantastical and realist elements. The work published in Issue 5, Navigating the Slipstream, is unapologetic and unseats us from our perceptions of reality. Continue reading “Phantom Drift – Fall 2015”

For Polychrome Ink, the goal is simple: prove that “diversity is not a niche market.” The contributors and their content exhibit diverse sexuality, gender, religion, race, ability, and more. The authors featured dig into the intersection of power and vulnerability to tell stories where people are diverse, but most importantly: where people are people. Continue reading “Polychrome Ink – October 2015”

The Gay and Lesbian Review (G&LR) analyzes and affirms queer culture in the arts. The March-April 2016 issue, The Art of Memoir, compiles essays, book and theatre reviews, and a smattering of poetry to comment on and question how far the queer movement has come (or hasn’t). Continue reading “The Gay & Lesbian Review – March/April 2016”

Since 1973, Saskatchewan’s Grain: the journal of eclectic writing has been publishing new and emerging writers. The Fall 2015 issue entitled “Who’s Knocking?” complied by guest editor Alice Kuiper, begins with a quote from Thomas Edison:  “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls, and looks like work.”

Continue reading “Grain – Fall 2015”

With sixty poems, eight fiction pieces, three nonfiction essays, four reviews, five new translations and a featured artist, the 223-page 2016 winter issue of The Cincinnati Review has more than a little something for everyone. It’s biblical in scope, thick in thought and entertaining as hell. Continue reading “The Cincinnati Review – Winter 2016”

“(Re)Collecting the Vietnam War” is the theme of unrestrained poetry, prose, drama, and art in this special issue of The Asian American Literary Review. This hefty volume can be regarded as a history, much like survivor accounts of other wars. Its five sections are each prefaced by a curator, some offering more explanation than others to illuminate what follows. Contributors to this volume straightforwardly talk about the past, present and future, while not glossing over the conflicts in Southeast Asia four decades ago.

Continue reading “The Asian American Literary Review – Fall/Winter 2015”

Melissa Gwyn’s oil painting on the cover of Catamaran Literary Reader hints at the 40 spectacular works inside by various artists. Gwyn’s creations are hard for me to describe, so I’ll let her do it: “Drawing upon the opulence and detail of Netherlandish painting and the sensual materiality of Abstract Expressionism, my work explores an ‘embarrassment of riches’ that is both visual and thematic.” Her description still leaves me hanging, but it doesn’t distract from the beauty and complexity of her paintings that appear to be flowers or buds and other times appear otherworldly. Continue reading “Catamaran Literary Reader – Winter 2015”

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. Continue reading “Blink Ink – Number 23”

I Wanted to Write a Poem, William Carlos Williams explained why he reduced a five line stanza so that it would match a four line stanza: “See how much better it conforms to the page, how much better it looks?” Unsurprisingly, this same attention to form–form for form’s sake, as an aesthetic consideration, perhaps even more than a literary one–characterizes much of the work of the fifteen writers Seneca Review features in their Spring 2005 edition “New Lyric Essayists.” Continue reading “Seneca Review – Spring 2005”

This issue’s guest editors, Crystal Wilkinson, a professor of creative writing at the University of Indiana, and award-winning poet, Debra Kang Dean, have selected four stories, five essays, and fifty pages of poetry by established and emerging writers. I was struck by the volume’s unifying tone, which might be best described as poignant — quiet, traditional work, deeply felt, writing that is both psychologically astute and moving. Edmund August gets my vote for the most poignant title in the issue, perhaps for one of the most poignant titles of all-time: “How Will We Know Which One of Us Died First?” Continue reading “The Louisville Review – Fall 2005”

“Ooh, mail art!” Such was my glee in flipping through Fourteen Hills, which is chock full of collages by collaborators Mike Dickau & Jon Held Jr., not to mention the inimitable Winston Smith. This issue of the journal is something of a collage itself, boasting a variety of talented writers from San Francisco and from around the world. Binyavanga Wainaina’s “Hell is in Bed with Mrs. Peprah” takes the reader to a beauty shop in Kenya in the late 70s, where a young girl sits among the hot combs and gossip and listens to the educated, eccentric, and undeniably strong “Auntie” Peprah defend herself against naysayers. Continue reading “Fourteen Hills – Winter/Spring 2005”

The ten stories of this issue are eclectic in style and, alas, quality: most are engaging, many are well-written, and some could use a bit more work. Descant opens with Paul H. Williams’ “Seeds in the Cellar” about a young man who is somewhat embarrassed by his Cherokee heritage but embraces it in a private moment of mourning for his dead grandfather. Continue reading “Decant – 2004”

“The memory is merely a summary/of the last time I remembered it,” writes Michael Penny in his wonderful poem, “In Memory.” Memory is the theme of the issue, which, among a collection of poems worth remembering, includes interviews with poets Aislinn Hunter, Laurie Block, and Doug Nepinak. I was unfamiliar with many of the poets here, most of whom have published primarily in Canadian journals, and I was happy to be introduced to their strong, original work. Continue reading “CV2 Contemporary Verse – Winter 2006”

From the moment you pick up Quick Fiction, something tells you it isn’t a standard literary journal. There’s the diminutive size, the quirky cover art, and, most notably, the refreshing and innovative selections of flash fiction. Each piece clocks in at five hundred words or less, the subject matter ranging from a surreal sexual encounter to sea turtles to an overdue library book to an interview with the CIA, featuring styles both lyrical and gritty, with some entries blurring the line between prose and poetry. Continue reading “Quick Fiction – Fall 2005”

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.” Continue reading “The Bitter Oleander – Spring 2005”

Lake Effect, an annual journal published by Pennsylvania State Erie, features an eclectic selection of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This issue includes the winners of the Sonnenberg Poetry Award, the Rebman Fiction Award, and the Farrell Nonfiction award, plus brief paragraphs stating the judge’s reasons for selecting the winning manuscripts. Both winners in the prose categories are short pieces, two to three pages, and lush and surreal in tone. R.M. Evans’s “Seahorse,” the nonfiction winner, is a particularly innovative look at the author’s recurring dreams and filled with unique imagery, “I feel my alveoli distend like spinose balloon fish.” Continue reading “Lake Effect – Spring 2005”

isotope, a journal of literary nature and science writing, published by Utah State University, boasts an impressive selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, in addition to a striking, full color portfolio of artwork by Richard Gate. This issue includes the winners of the first annual Editors’ Prizes: “Consumption,” a remarkable essay by Sunshine O’Donnell, and a suite of poems by Thomas Joswick that examine the life and art of John James Audubon. My favorite of Joswick’s poems is “Audubon Anticipates Dawn and Blood”: “Before sunrise, from scratching grounds, / where males assemble to strut and boom, / you may hear their rumpled notes, / followed, at times, by rapid / and petulant cackling, / like laughter.” Continue reading “Isotope – Spring/Summer 2005”

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.” Continue reading “Bardsong – Summer 2005”

32 Poems could have taken a more minimalist approach to poetry, as its design and layout would suggest, but instead it touches on every fundamental poetic theme—life, sex, change, death—with the varied imagination of the finest journals around. With a book binder’s precision, each poem is designated to one page, never longer. Continue reading “32 Poems – Spring/Summer 2005”

This issue of AQR devotes 80 pages of photo-essay to: “Chechnya: A Decade of War,” by Heidi Bradner. “A Chechen woman holds photographs of her missing sons [. . .].” For those not au courant, Stalin deported the Chechen nation to this desolate area during World War II. Deborah A. Lott’s “Fifteen,” a moving account of her father’s legacy of insanity provides this remarkable insight: “That I made the mistake of aligning myself with the parent who was crazy because I confused his intensity with love.” Continue reading “Alaska Quarterly Review – Fall/Winter 2005”

From its attractive table-of-contents pages to ads for the Missouri Review, Notre Dame Review, and Shenandoah, New Letters is a class act, including the inside-cover ads for books by and about Peter Viereck as well as for New Letters itself. Robert Stewart’s “Allow Yourself to Say, Yes, An Editor’s Note,” includes this quotation: “‘This playfulness,’ says scholar Richard Rorty, ‘is the product . . . of the power of language to make new and different things possible and important [. . .].'” Continue reading “New Letters – 2005”

Editor Jaime Robles chooses a quotation from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to help define “uncanny love,” this issues’ theme: “first the soul grows tender, then it sickens…but then it feels the true warmth of divine love and cries out and moans and becomes as stone flung in the forge to melt into lime, and it crackles, licked by the flame…” But there isn’t much moaning here, as it turns out. The work in issue 22 is, for the most part, controlled, tightly wound, sure of itself, and intense. Continue reading “Five Fingers – 2006”

Always been a fan of E.E. Cummings? Then Spring is the journal for you – nothing for 234 pages but essays about Cummings, poetry influenced by Cummings, and critical examinations of his life and work, with titles like “Hermetism in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings: An Analysis of Three Obscure Poems” and “Squaring the Self: Versions of Transcendentalism in The Enormous Room.” You may see how these kinds of pieces may appeal mainly to scholars of the late poet’s work, but even amateur fans of Cummings can appreciate the playful poems, like this one by Tony Quagliano called “ON BLY ON POETRY”:
Continue reading “Spring – October 2002”

This slim but vivacious lit mag out of the University of South Dakota is bristling with content: eight short stories, twenty-eight poems, and two essays. Continue reading “South Dakota Review – Winter 2003”

Everything expected of a journal co-founded by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks is here in an issue commemorating Warren’s 10oth birthday with his own fine prose (three letters to friends) and six memoirs—including the delightful “Places: A Memoir” by his daughter, poet Rosanna Warren. In a season in which rereading All the King’s Men for dominant themes seems ever more relevant, the brilliant short stories in this issue touch upon war in “Hot Coffee, Summer” by Christine Grillo, in John Lee’s perfect, first-published story “Fires”—”[. . .] a thin blaze over the northern horizon, and we heard that Seoul was about to fall when the pyobom, the leopard, began to appear in the valley,” and in Asako Serizawa’s memorable study of Alzheimer’s Disease “Flight,” astonishingly also a first publication. Continue reading “The Southern Review – Spring 2005”

Sometimes clichés are true: this issue of Prism International illustrates the concept that good things do come in small packages. The journal contains poetry which ranges from Bernadette Higgins’ traditional poem, “Short Wave,” describing language, music, and thoughts which tease and cross on the air late at night, to a strong contemporary poem by Matt Robinson, “why we wrap our wrists the same each time,” exploring a hockey player’s quest to “do anything” to beat his “jinx.” Ouyang Yu translates four Chinese poems from the 8th and 9th century, which are beautiful in their simplicity and complexity. Continue reading “PRISM International – Fall 2003”

This issue of Santa Monica Review is an extraordinary collection of memorable short stories and novel excerpts. Editor Andrew Tonkovich has selected outstanding first-person narrations with the theme of morality, as well as religion, appearing in most and uniting them in surprising ways. From the amusing dangers of “Daily Evangelism,” by James D. Houston to Paul Eggers’s moving “A Thinly Veiled Autobiography Regarding My Reasons for Giving Up Chess,” moral concerns rank high. In Roberto Ontiveros’s “The Fight for Space,” the narrator—meshing his mundane job and intellectual super-hero obsessions with Batman’s fictional universe—comes down hard on the comic-book icon: “Batman’s trophy room pisses me off the most; it’s like our hero does not want to find peace.” Continue reading “Santa Monica Review – Spring 2005”

The Seattle Review’s lovely cover photograph belies the region’s mountainous nature by offering not a hint of near—or distant—mountains while providing the merest glimpse of Lake Washington; and from a locale often thought stubbornly regional, this issue’s surprising highlight is Kathleen Wiegner’s interview of M. Scott Momaday: “Some of my students sometimes say to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you wrote in Kiowa?’ My answer is, well, in the first place, you can’t. There’s no written language.

Continue reading “The Seattle Review – 2005”

Just over one third of the fall issue of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics is dedicated to a symposium on Russell Edson, a strikingly original poet, playwright, novelist and illustrator who died in 2014. Born in 1935, Edson studied art as a teen, then began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His corpus of work, in addition to numerous books of poetry, includes a book of plays, two novels, and the much-cited 1975 essay, “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems.” In fact, The Poetry Foundation has referred to Edson as the “godfather of the prose poem in America.” In tribute, several contemporary writers each comment on a different Edson poem. Continue reading “FIELD – Fall 2015”

The vicissitudes of pain, a stranger who won’t leave, a talking hole in a shoe. These are just a few of the poetry plot lines in the Winter 2015 issue of Able Muse which individualizes itself by publishing work “with a focus on metrical and formal poetry.” Continue reading “Able Muse – Winter 2015”

Flight, as a magazine theme, can suggest numerous interpretations including a state of transition, a secret passage, or confronting the unknown, according to TLR: The Literary Review Editor Kate Munning. She, along with her crew, chose several pieces to reflect this broad theme. Continue reading “The Literary Review – Fall 2015”

Cumberland River Review’s self-defined goal is “to feature work of moral consequence—work that transports us.” And not just sometimes, but “always.” I tried to sort that out from the added fact that the publication is produced by the department of English at Trevecca Nazarene University, which could further weight whole concept of “moral consequence”— as if we English folk don’t do it enough on our own, let’s just add the mission of a Christian university to that. Relax—we’re not talking preachy, biblical moralities here. Rather, CRR editors have a clear sense of selecting writing that seeks to question, even challenge, what moral means, and in doing so, cause readers to seriously consider the consequences in their own lives. Continue reading “Cumberland River Review – Issue 5”

For ten years, Words Without Borders has been publishing an annual graphic novel issue each February. According to Editorial Director Susan Harris in “Graphic Novels at WWB: The First Ten Years,” this issue brings the amount of graphic works on the site to a whopping 174. A link to the entire graphic archive is provided, and after reading this issue, readers won’t be able to resist diving in. Continue reading “Words Without Borders – February 2016”

Produced by the students of creative writing and web design at Arizona State University, the online Superstition Review showcases a great selection of writing and art, all easily accessible from a cell phone. Continue reading “Superstition Review – Fall 2015”

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. Continue reading “Brilliant Flash Fiction – January 2016”

I was immediately impressed by the overall presentation of this issues of Pleiades, beginning with the cover artwork by Julie Speed and following with the overall heft of the issue itself. The contents are pretty evenly divided between one hundred pages of creative writing and one hundred pages of book reviews. Continue reading “Pleiades – 2005”