NewPages Blog :: Magazines

The Labletter “has its roots in the Oregon Lab, the name given to a group of artists and their annual gathering.” The magazine began as a way for these artists to stay in contact and share work, and in 2008 it went public—a move fortunate for audiences who care about sophistication, quality, and commitment to art.

In this issue, you’ll find generously-reproduced art, from the front cover inward; exquisite short stories; three beautifully-crafted essays, on collage, theater, and clogging; and fifteen strong poems by four inspired poets.

Continue reading “The Labletter – 2014”

This was the first issue of Poet Lore I have ever read, and it will not be the last! Well over 100 pages of outstanding poems, poetic history, interviews, and reviews made this more than just another issue to review; they turned it into an outright gripping read. While most of the works were brief (under one printed page), large-scale themes of loss and death are woven throughout. The editors did an outstanding job of finding beautiful poems that also highlighted positive moments in life through the pain. I am not lying when I tell you how a couple of pieces nearly brought tears to my eyes.

Continue reading “Poet Lore – Spring/Summer 2014”

Pretty Owl Poetry is a brand new online quarterly that publishes poetry and, in opposition to the title of the journal, flash fiction. The poetry is very accessible, not overly complicated or using fancy language.

Take, for example, Clare Welsh’s “Almost Exorcism,” a poem broken into three pieces about children’s reaction to a lump “on the ribs of a dog.” The first part have the children imagining it as a second heart…

Continue reading “Pretty Owl Poetry – Summer 2014”

The editors of River Teeth are candid about their selection process. About half of what they publish comes from unsolicited submissions. The rest may come from authors whose work they’ve heard at conferences, online or regional publications, commissioned work, or from friends, acquaintances, and the editors themselves. “We know all this sounds more than a little intuitive,” writes the editor, “even presumptuous, and quite a bit less than arm’s length. That’s the nature of love, we guess.”
In this issue, animals, parenting, and the nature of memory are the doors authors use into insights about life.

Continue reading “River Teeth – Spring 2014”

This issue of Southern Women’s Review has a “Bust” theme and is full and broad in exciting and enriching literature including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. As I was traveling at the time of reading this issue, I took special note of Kerry Madden-Lunsford’s piece in which the narrator is in China teaching English but is feeling isolated and very much an outsider. Although she wants to learn her own way into the culture, she can’t seem to and retreats back to English literature to find her own comfort.

Continue reading “Southern Women’s Review – 2014”

The stories in Under the Gum Tree feel very authentic; it is easy to identify with the characters and narrators. In Chelsea Schott’s “The Frederick Boy,” I was transported back to being a teenage girl, that feeling that your crush is the whole world, the terror of a disapproving parent, going over the day’s events again and again in your mind. It begins: “I try not to think of that day last summer on the back of John’s motorcycle—knowing if I think about it too much, if I let myself wander back into that day, I will dissolve into the desire I can’t resist—of retracing every step I took, walking over the same paths…”

Continue reading “Under the Gum Tree – July 2014”

The first and most obvious thing to notice about Conjunctions is that its biannual print anthology is enormous. This issue is more than 300 pages, featuring work by Brian Evenson, Laura van den Berg, Robin Hemley, Gabriel Blackwell, and others. The theme of the issue, “exile,” is addressed both literally and figuratively, with work often revolving around ideas of social exile and self-exile as well as physical displacement.

Continue reading “Conjunctions – Spring 2014”

Based at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cream City Review is a fun, slim publication that opens its pages wide to different aesthetics and styles. There are magical stories set side-by-side with realist flash fiction, and in the middle of the issue is a special feature on Native writing. It’s rare that I’m able to say I have no clue what to expect from one page to the next in a literary journal, but in Cream City Review, that’s absolutely the case. This is not a criticism, though: instead of seeming scattered or overloaded, the journal is a merry-go-round of brightly colored poems and stories.

Continue reading “Cream City Review – Spring/Summer 2014”

With a mix of flash prose, short prose, poetry, and book reviews, decomP delivers an online literary magazine monthly, with a fair tasting of good literature and samples of audio readings throughout. Adam and Eve’s marital and sex life comes to life in the first included piece, Adam Gnuse’s “Adam, at Night.” Although Eve is comforted by her child, Adam worries and is resentful about his eventual death, seeming to say that even in the beginning of life, the first man to live still questions life after death: “He wonders whether it will be like going back somewhere dark and warm, somewhere safe. Whether it will it be something like growing up. The thoughts don’t comfort him.”

Continue reading “decomP – August 2014”

This issue of Dogwood serves up a generous helping of surprising and original reading. The talent is evident; even when a poem or story can use more polish, I am interested and compelled to read on. A variety of styles is represented, some more experimental than others, but I never feel lost, either literally or emotionally, or feel that the writers draw too much attention to themselves at the expense of the writing.

Continue reading “Dogwood – 2014”

This issue of Five Points is an issue of reflection, from its opening tribute to Maxine Kumin, in which associate editor Beth Gylys remembers researching the literary friendship between Kumin and Anne Sexton for her college senior thesis, to the poems of Ellen Bass and Barbara Hamby, who reflect on meals of pork chops and fried chicken, respectively. We also have the reflective photographs of Vesna Pavlović through his project “Fabrics of Socialism” and Kirk West’s photos of blues venues, artists, and objects. The issue also includes interviews with Kumin, West, and Stephen Dunn.

Continue reading “Five Points – 2014”

Published at Lynchburg College in Virginia, this review has roots in the South as deep as James Dickey’s. But while its content aims “to maintain an artistic and intellectual connection” to Dickey and his work, the interpretation is generous enough to allow for a good mix of Dickey scholarship, original poetry, essays not about the author but maybe concerning things he would care about, and book reviews. One might say the spirit of Dickey is hovering over the journal, so that, for example, the wilder shores of the avant garde or identity politics do not appear in this issue. We are in recognizable Dickey territory the whole way.

Continue reading “James Dickey Review – Spring/Summer 2014”

This all-poetry issue of The Midwest Quarterly was a treat that did not disappoint. I grew up in a rural community, population south of 4000, and we were the county seat: these poems spoke straight to my childhood. As with all good poems, I’m sure there are pieces here that will speak to city folk as well, but the trip down memory lane was outstanding for me. The only gripe I have about the entire issue is that there was no table of contents for easy reference, so it took some effort to relocate my favorites for closer inspection.

Continue reading “The Midwest Quarterly – Winter 2014”

Last month I reviewed Frogpond and noted it as one of THE journals for haiku enthusiasts. Modern Haiku is another of THE journals haikuists should be reading. This journal has been in continuous print since 1969, with a masthead of esteemed haiku experts, each a haiku household name: Kay Titus Mormino, Robert Spiess, Lee Gurga, Charles Trumbull, and the current editor, Paul Miller.

Continue reading “Modern Haiku – Summer 2014”

Because the Poetry Foundation’s website is such a fixture of my online reading, buying an issue of Poetry always make me feel like I’m donating to public radio. Lifting an issue from the bookstore shelf and leafing through it, I can almost hear the faintly accusatory voice of a pledge drive broadcaster playing the guilt card, asking, “How often do you find yourself enjoying the vast resource that is the Poetry Foundation website, or sending the articles and poems you find there to friends? Isn’t that worth $3.75 a month to you?

Continue reading “Poetry – July/August 2014”

With this double-issue blowout, River Styx celebrates its thirty-ninth year (“because who wants to turn 40?”) as one of the country’s most “thoughtful yet accessible” literary ambassadors. Boasting a long list of notable and returning contributors and brimming with poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art of great depth that’s also deeply entertaining, this issue is River Styx turned up to eleven. Nowhere is this more evident than in the issue’s poetry. Featuring new poems from Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Jeffrey Bean, Stephen Dunn, Albert Goldbarth, Ted Kooser, Lawrence Raab, Robert Wrigley, and A.E. Stallings, among others, River Styx’s latest issue is Xanadu for those who enjoy provocative free verse and formal poetry of a largely narrative bent.

Continue reading “River Styx – 2014”

After a brief interview with Denise Frohman and a note from Women of the World Poetry Slam Host City Chair, Wicked Banshee Press (a brand new online journal) plunges right into the poetry, and it doesn’t fool around with any feet-wetting. The very first poem sends a strong emotional sting with Tara Betts’s “Throwing Away a Wedding Dress.” Describing it as “dented and dew-dotted, dried / fondant, crumbling and collapsed / in loose folds,” a metaphor for the entire marriage.

Continue reading “Wicked Banshee Press – Spring 2014”

Your Impossible Voice, a newer quarterly e-publication, has taken strides to give a great literary experience through the professional and engaging look of their website to the well-formatted work of their publication. As far as the work goes? Well, let’s explore. Karen An-hwei Lee’s “Letter from Orange County: Twelve Fragments” falls under the category of nonfiction in this issue, and is a beautifully written homage to a past place, or rather to a current place that is no longer what it was, but I could argue that it could also fall under the category of poetry with lines like these…

Continue reading “Your Impossible Voice – Summer 2014”

If I were a better thief, I’d steal this entire sentence from “Zodiacs,” by William Doreski, one of a handful of stellar poems in the most recent Burnside Review: “I’m afraid / to live in the suburbs, afraid / that no one loves anyone / without consulting the zodiacs / half occluded by pollution / from coal-fired power plants.” Maybe Doreski will let me have it if I say these lines are transcendent, which, pretty much, they are. Continue reading “Burnside Review – 2006”

In N.D. Wilson’s story “Conversations with Tod,” the narrator lives across from an evangelist with twin nymphet daughters who have vowed to remain virgins for life. “God doesn’t ask a lot,” says one of the Lolitas, “just everything.” The narrator leers and Wilson steers the narrative to unexpected places, in unexpected confines. A crow plays a negative part (but have crows ever been positive other than in the two movies named after them?) Continue reading “The Chattahoochee Review – Spring/Summer 2011”

We might think of ourselves as too sophisticated for fairy tales, that is, if the term conjures up Disney-ish recastings of classic tales; yet, fairy tales provide a body of common knowledge upon which to draw for literary allusions, and thus serve as currency even in our modern lives. Moreover, these tales recast archetypes and tap into our deepest fears: there are still beasts (literal and metaphoric) to conquer, the distressed who need a rescue, the hope of bliss—but at a cost. Continue reading “Fairy Tale Review – 2006”

A capricious God, a toad-killer with a nine iron, and a broke gambler whose only joy in the world is Howard Stern, walk into a bar called Five Points. The only question is, why aren’t you there already? This issue serves up poetry ranging from Charles Simic’s “Metaphysics Anonymous” (“The unreality of our being here, / an additional quandary we are cautioned / not to concern ourselves”) to Richard Howard’s challenging but compelling re-vision (“Look again, look closer.”) of Peter Paul Reuben’s painting, “The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus by Castor and Pollux.” Continue reading “Five Points – 2006”

This issue of GSU Review showcases the winners and finalists of their 2006 fiction and poetry contests, as well as the art of Len Kovsky on the covers and six full-color pages inside, rounding out this solid collection. Taking first place in fiction was Midge Raymond’s “Forgetting English,” about an American teacher trying to start again in Taiwan. But in a place where “[…] amid the belief that souls are lost and lonely, that they drift through an eternal purgatory, appeased with food, drink, entertainment, gifts […]” she is led inevitably to face her own haunted past and decide what to do with her future. Continue reading “Georgia State University Review – 2006”

A good looking, glossy magazine, Green Mountains Review puts a strong emphasis on poetry. In fact, the best story in this issue is written by Therese Svoboda, who – not surprisingly – splits her time between prose (four novels) and poetry (four collections). The work “355,” about spies in the American Revolution era, contains the type of subject matter that most writers would spend half the story setting up so that they could splash their research all over the page. Continue reading “Green Mountains Review – Fall/Winter 2006”

“If this were another country, somewhere / in Latin America, say, or Eastern Europe, I could write lines like, / My country, take care of your light!, as Neruda did, / I could write, I am begging you the way a child / begs its mother, as he did… Oh, to live among those writers / who make unabashed use of vodka / and exclamation marks!” This is how Eleanor Stanford’s “Political Poem” goes, and it begs to be anthologized for its treatment of motherhoods and motherlands. James Tate and Dara Weir, two poets in constant conversation, are also interviewed and their poems prominently placed. Continue reading “Hunger Mountain – Fall 2006”

The Literary Review’s editors chose to begin their fiftieth anniversary year with a translation issue. They also chose Robert Pinsky to write an introduction to translation. And what an introduction it is. I have been a fan of Pinsky since I first read his poem “Shirt” for a workshop. That the former poet laureate has also translated Dante’s Inferno and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Separate Notebooks enables him to speak like the sage that budding translators need. “Translation is also the highest, most intense form of reading,” says he, in “On Translation.” For Pinsky, it is “also the only art that is like writing. Continue reading “The Literary Review – Fall 2006”

In its sixteenth issue, Natural Bridge features a special section “in response to women’s writing.” The “general” pages feature poems such as Paul Hostovsky’s “People in Pediatric Oncology,” Rachel Hadas’s “The Middle Way,” and Andrew Sage’s “Paradise.” Each introduce their subject while illuminating it, tasks that seem just as vital in works explicitly responding to a text or writer. Natural Bridge’s most effective responses do this double duty. Continue reading “Natural Bridge – 2006”

I sensed what Anis Shivani’s argument would be in his essay, “Why is American Fiction in Its Current Dismal State?” before I flipped to it: lack of risk-taking fiction. Shivani’s tone in the essay is not sad, which saves the essay from becoming victim of its own subject. His attacks are scathing – “Fiction writing is the way it is because America has turned it into the last great Fordist model of production.” Elsewhere he argues that “the decline of American fiction is a sign of the decline of elite liberal consensus. The vacuum in political ideology is being filled today by an anti-politics, of personality and charisma…” Continue reading “Pleiades – 2007”

Prairie Schooner is one of the few journals with impeccable credentials, having disappointed few writers and readers. This issue is no exception. Continue reading “Prairie Schooner – Winter 2006”

It’s fitting that the journal whose health T.S. Eliot once lauded as an indicator of the world of periodicals should publish such an issue. The Sewanee Review’s issue comes subtitled “A Salute to British and American Poetry.” The opening pages are a list of books reviewed, including Wendell Berry’s Given, W.D. Snodgrass’s Not for the Specialists: New and Selected Poems, and the much lauded Adam Kirsch volume, The Wounded Surgeon. There’s a menagerie of material here. Continue reading “The Sewanee Review – Fall 2006”

In the introduction to the seventeenth installment of the “Writing in the South” series, Editor Bret Lott questions the past, present and future of Southern literature through the lens of Walter Sullivan’s essay in the original “Writing in the South” issue, thirty-nine years ago. Sullivan wrote, “[…] the new Southern writer must be something other than Southern: his faith and vision must be fixed somewhere beyond the Southern experience: he must find his own source. Continue reading “The Southern Review – Winter 2007”

You could try cocaine, or you could read subTerrain. This Vancouver-based magazine is rough around the edges but compensates with winning, dark intense fiction and warm, intelligent nonfiction and poems. The piece I can’t stop talking about in this issue is “The Shark Tumour Collection,” a short story by Jill Connell. An 18-year-old pet store employee with cancer decides sharks, an animal made entirely of cartilage, would be the perfect anti-cancer talismans. Continue reading “subTerrain – Number 44, 2006”

In the 64 pages of this issue, John Zheng gives us 27 poets and 49 lyric and narrative poems; not surprisingly, one page is often enough to include the entire poem. Brief bios of contributing poets appear at the end, along with a page to mention a handful of noteworthy books of poems published since 2007 in the U.S. Continue reading “Poetry South – 2010”

Again, there are no editorial musings, just a hipper than anything dive into the fray. One of the first is a great poem by Jared Stanley, called “Legitimate Dangers”:

A _____ stirs the thicket.
I am cherry alive, the little girl sang.

Fleas alight from this line.
Now it’s all our celebration, right?

I’ve got to interrupt you for a second;
this is my index finger talking.

Himilce Novas’s “Painting Life Over” is a sad story, filled with memories of a youth spent amongst parents who fought constantly, and the narrator who wishes to start life over: “Me? In my mind, I’m not in the picture at all. I’m just looking at it, a little shaky, praying that the fighting will stop and that Mr. and Mrs. Pepino, the elderly couple who live right next door, also in the fifth-floor walk-up, are really as deaf as they pretend to be.” Continue reading “Ghost Town – 2010”

2 Bridges Review is a young journal that consistently shows a lot of promise; it is apparent that the staff works hard to find the best work from both new and established poets. This issue puts forth poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, and photography where “the real and the imagination fuse.” Continue reading “2 Bridges Review – 2013”

The first sentences of the work in this issue of The Austin Review are some of the best I’ve read. Each one drew me in a little differently but with a similar level of intensity. And although the first lines of all nine pieces are of equal measure, here are a few examples: Continue reading “The Austin Review – January 2014”

The cover of the spring issue of Black Magnolias: A Literary Journal is striking, bold, and black & white, moving across the page displaying Alex Nodopaka’s Speed Wind Black Magnolias. It suggests an issue with writing that inspire movement and reaction; the issue does not disappoint on this account. Continue reading “Black Magnolias – Spring 2014”

Bop Dead City is a humble, independent, quarterly literary magazine. At first glance it may seem to lack the finesse of larger magazines, but upon closer inspection, the reader will be pleasantly surprised to see interesting cover art as well as poetry and fiction that can and will inspire us all to read more or to pick up a pen and begin to write. This issue focuses on work surrounding loss and attempts to grasp onto the ever-elusive intersection of what was, what now is. Continue reading “Bop Dead City – Spring 2014”

This journal is a lean sixty-seven pages of poetry. No editor’s remarks, no advertisements or indices, no author bios, no other genres. The state where each author lives is identified in the table of contents and that is all. The attention in The Cape Rock is all on the work. Continue reading “The Cape Rock – 2013”

Clare, a literary journal produced by students and faculty at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, has recently moved from a print publication to an online endeavor, and this is its second issue in that form. Continue reading “Clare Literary Journal – Spring 2014”

Communion is a brand new online literary journal, this being their first issue, just published this month. They look for and publish work that moves them either emotionally or intellectually but really aim for work that “reflects the concept of communion—with others, self, the world at large.” And from reading the first issue, I’d say they are hitting the ground running with this goal. Continue reading “Communion – June 2014”

Fairy Tale Review maintains its fanciful theme well, but its significance as a literary document exceeds whimsy: the authors transform modern literature, spackling any clichés or invention with language, philosophy, and critical energy. Continue reading “Fairy Tale Review – 2014”

Whether written in traditional free verse or veering off into experimental territory, the poems in the latest issue of theHiram Poetry Review are frank, high-spirited, and self-assured. Featuring twenty-one poems from nineteen different poets, this slim volume benefits from a clear editorial vision favoring “poems that exhibit excellence with flaws rather than general competence.” Continue reading “Hiram Poetry Review – Spring 2014”

This 15th Anniversary Issue of Iodine Poetry Journal is a collection of unassuming poems by talented writers. The poems are deceptively simple, written with an ease that belies their metaphoric skill. Each poem imagines a story, a picture, a memory, a season, a way of thinking or living, encapsulated in lines of distilled thought that somehow feel like one collective voice of humanity speaking for itself. Continue reading “Iodine Poetry Journal – Spring/Summer 2014”

The editors of Juked state on their website that they do not adhere to any particular themes or tastes, but in this year’s issue, one might perceive a predilection for experimentation. Michelle Latiolais opens the volume with “Out,” which cannot be characterized in a single clause, but links together a complicated narrative almost without any kind of literary seam showing. Reportage of a world caramelized with sex, friendship, and the idiosyncrasies of place and a specific time sets the work apart in a shifting carnival; one is suspended between effective ‘reportage’ and the sequined world of the author’s imagination. Continue reading “Juked – Spring 2014”

The cover image of Kestrel’s recent issue is a mixed media collage of photo transfer, ink, and colored pencil suggesting a window through which we’re invited to peer deeper into “a story” (the artwork’s title), the text which, along with “1934,” appears as part of the illustration. Artist Julie Anne Struck’s arresting compositions are featured inside the journal as well, collaging image, paint, pencil, text, and texture to results akin to a two-dimensional Joseph Cornell assemblage perfect for the paginated exhibit and super appealing as cover art. As illustrations that beg the viewer to imagine their narratives, what could be more appropriate for this issue’s strong collection of prose and poetry? Continue reading “Kestrel – Fall 2013”

The fourteenth issue of MAKE Literary Magazine focuses on visual culture, toying with the ideas of perception and image. The journal itself is stunning—a mix of colored, white, and black pages that proclaims on its front, “All colors, are, in fact, here.” It’s a line plucked from Cristina Rivera Garza’s poem “I. Despejar” or “I. To Clear.” And it fits perfectly, given that MAKE has a little bit of everything—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, book reviews, artists’ portfolios, an interview, translations, and comics are all represented and flow together flawlessly for fulfilling, well-rounded read. Continue reading “MAKE – Fall 2013”

According to its inviting website, Minetta Review is “a student-run publication at New York University [which also considers] writing and artwork from all over the country, and . . . [has] even published international submissions.” It’s the oldest literary publication at NYU; this is the publication’s fortieth anniversary. Continue reading “Minetta Review – Fall 2013”

This issue of online journal New Purlieu Review is themed “Family” and indeed asks important questions about family as well as reflects on the importance of one. Continue reading “New Purlieu Review – Summer/Fall 2013”