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At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!

Visit the Red Room

No, I’m not talking about The Shining…

“The Red Room online community was founded in 2007 by CEO Ivory Madison. Madison previously founded the Red Room Writers Society, a brick-and-mortar writers’ community in a historic mansion in San Francisco. While only four writers signed up for Madison’s original “Red Room Writers Studio” back in 2002, by 2007 hundreds of authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners, had joined forces to launch the online home of the world’s greatest writers.”

The site offers a page for each of its author members with information about their books, events, video, and links. Visitors can search or browse authors, books, events, blogs, podcasts and more. Individuals can also sign up for membership to participate in the site.

Great feature for readers looking for new authors: authors are searchable by genre and areas of interest (such as LGBT or cultural studies).

Don’t delay – swing by the Red Room now!

Comics :: The Secret Life of Nancy

The Nancy Book
By Joe Brainard
Published by Siglio Press

The world has in Joe Brainard a semi-secret maverick hero who will win new friends indefinitely one by one.–Peter Schjeldahl

From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified by the incongruity of her presence. The Nancy Book collects more than fifty of these images for the first time and features collaborations with luminary poets Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett and James Schuyler, as well as original essays by Ron Padgett and Ann Lauterbach.

Also available are limited editions, which include a hand-pulled photo-lithograph housed in a foil-stamped portfolio and slipcased with the trade edition. The edition is 100, numbered and stamped by the Estate of Joe Brainard.

New Lit on the WebBlock :: Kartika Review

Kartika Review publishes literary fiction, poetry, and essays that endeavor to expand and enhance the mainstream perception of Asian American creative writing. The journal also publishes book reviews, author interviews, and artwork relevant to the Asian Diaspora or authored by individuals of Asian descent. Kartika plans to sponsor readings, panel discussions, writing contests, and other creative activities for the Asian American community in both New York City and the Bay Area.

Downloadable e-Book versions in PDF format are always free of charge and in addition, they will publish a print anthology of the best works every three issues. The print publication will be available for purchase online or through participating bookstores.

As a quarterly journal, they release issues in March, June, September, and December. Submissions by electronic mail year-round. Sim/subs accepted.

The Dzanc Prize :: More than Money

THE DZANC PRIZE

The Dzanc Prize provides monetary aid in the sum of $5,000, to a writer of literary fiction. All writers applying for the Dzanc Prize must have a work-in-progress they can submit for review, and present the judges with a Community Service Program they can facilitate. Such programs may include anything deemed “educational” in relation to writing. Examples would include: working with HIV patients to help them write their stories; doing a series of workshops at a drop-in youth homeless center; running writing programs in inner-city schools; or working with older citizens looking to write their memoirs. All community programs under the Dzanc Prize must run for a full year.

Last year, Dzanc Books awarded the inaugural Dzanc Prize to Laura van den Berg. Laura is currently in the middle of a series of workshops she’s running in the New England prison system. At the end of Laura’s year, an anthology of work by the prisoners she is teaching will be compiled and published by Dzanc. Laura’s story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All of the Water is Gone, will also be published by Dzanc Books in fall 2009.

Submissions accepted from now through November 1, 2008.

See Dzanc Books website for more information.

Conceptual Poetry Symposium and YouTube Challenge

Conceptual Poetry and its Others
Keynote Speaker Marjorie Perloff
May 29-31, 2008

The forthcoming publication of Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Anthology of Conceptual Poetry (based on the online Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing) is only one sign of the recent interest in the “tensions between materiality and concept” (Dworkin), in a “new new formalism,” based on constraints, both the Oulipo and Cagean variants, on citationality and found text, on sound play, and visual device. Is such “non-expressivist” poetry too extreme? Conceptual Poetry and Its Others brings together a variety of leading poets to debate the issue. Featured artistis: Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bok, Craig Dworkin, Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Susan Howe, Tracie Morris, Cole Swenson.

YouTube Challenge!
Videographer Jonathan VanBallenberghe built this YouTube video for the Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Symposium. We are struck by the endless possibilities of the form, and so have decided to create a challenge for you, the audience, to create your own video to answer the question, “What is conceptual poetry?” The only constraint is that somewhere in the video, this text should be included:

“Conceptual Poetry and Its Others. May 29-31, 2008. www.poetrycenter.arizona.edu.”

Upload a video to YouTube by May 21 and let us know about it. Top videos will be featured on the Conceptual Poetry webpage (and may be screened at the Symposium keynote address) and the winner will receive a cash prize, provided by someone, to be announced soon.

Georgia Review Hosts Pulitzer Week

The Georgia Review
presents
“The Pulitzer Legacy in Georgia”
27–30 October 2008
at the historic Jekyll Island Club
Jekyll Island, Georgia

Featuring Pulitzer Prize–winners Stephen Dunn (poetry), Natasha Trethewey (poetry), Edward J. Larson (history), and Hank Klibanoff (history), with additional writers to be announced.

Visit The Georgia Review website for more information and updates.

Alice Blue – Issue 8

Upon entering the first page of Alice Blue you encounter tiny square shaped images of odd looking stuffed animals that, when touched with clicking mouse, turns into a word denoting each distinctive section of their website. With issue number 8 of Alice Blue you are reminded of E.E. Cummings at his surrealist best with a healthy swath of absurdist tendencies incorporated into a mix of short prose pieces and poems ranging from experiments in form, language or both. Continue reading “Alice Blue – Issue 8”

Blood Lotus – March 2008

Rage and risk in writing is a powerful tool that can generate the most passionate work. In Blood Lotus, issue 8, the editors believe that if you write you should “Write like words are beautiful, powerful and dangerous…” In “katrina” by R.D. Coleman we are exposed to such risks and conviction head on: “my family up and / left me here, they knew / it called to me. / …could smell the gas out by / the road. / life was done, she said. / she surely meant to die.” Continue reading “Blood Lotus – March 2008”

diode poetry journal – Winter 2008

diode

Diode, partially supported by Virginia Commonwealth University at Qatar, is a journal of American experimental and electric poetry transported to a foreign land and concerned with the inescapability of our American identities today: “Even eight thousand miles from the United States, the constant hammering of the American media machine reaches us. Our connections—wireless, satellite, cable—crackle with a seemingly endless loop of fear and consumption.” Diode‘s theoretical purpose is to break through all of this noise and communicate with the poem. Along with these serious pretensions, Diode amazes with its array of ambitious rhythmic poems that play like a firecracker laden sound and light show of invention and tactical and formal daring that does not let up until the final poem.

Continue reading “diode poetry journal – Winter 2008”

The Dirty Goat – 2007

The Dirty Goat, published by Host Publications of Austin, Texas, is dedicated primarily to featuring literature from around the globe. This issue includes original works in Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese among other languages with English translations. There is also unique work by U.S. writers, none of whom I have heard of before. There is no editorial, but visual artists and translators provide commentary. Continue reading “The Dirty Goat – 2007”

Gargoyle – 2007

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I slid Gargoyle into my CD player. The colorful, beat-inspired cover assured me that “Poetry is the bomb, baby,” and I hoped that I would agree. Of course, I immediately thought about my past experiences with making “mixed tapes” and how difficult it can be when you’re only sticking with one genre, let alone many. However, after listening to the CD in its entirety, I knew that the editors of Gargoyle had done far more than compose a simple “mixed tape.” Continue reading “Gargoyle – 2007”

The Greensboro Review – Spring 2008

Inside The Greensboro Review’s simple cover is complex fiction and poetry. The first poem and story – “The Voice Before” by Melody S. Gee and “The Glass Mountain” by Aimee Pokwatka are Robert Watson Prize winners. Pokwatka’s story weaves a thematic fairytale told by an aunt into a story about a young woman, her sister, and her lover. The language is delightful: “It was a stupid question, but we forgave him because his eyes were the color of a sandstorm, and he sat still as an injured bird.” Continue reading “The Greensboro Review – Spring 2008”

Manoa – Winter 2007

This volume of Manoa, edited by Frank Stewart and Barry Lopez, is dedicated to the theme Maps of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination. This journal includes many types of work: oratory, essays, poetry, fiction, photographic essays, an interview, and even a play. It’s uncommon to see a journal include all of these genres, and the Table of Contents divides them by genre, so it’s easy to navigate. Continue reading “Manoa – Winter 2007”

Natural Bridge – 2007

Editor Steve Schreiner opens this issue of  Natural Bridge with a reference to Poe’s explanation of human temptation, that our “spirit of the Perverse” pushes us to “perpetuate actions to our peril simply because we feel that we should not.” The “Temptation Issue” offers many representations of this concept, from the swarming guppies in the late Dale Denny’s “Big Aquarium,” to the breast milk in James Vescovi’s “La Leche is Good for You,” to sticking one’s tongue to a cold porch railing in Amy M. Clark’s “Dumb.” Continue reading “Natural Bridge – 2007”

Paradigm – 2008

In the appropriately named Paradigm, it is as if all the disparate forms of literature have unified to create a beautiful spiders web of art that includes sounds for the ears too. If you try to read every piece in one sitting, you may be so enthralled as to stay up to the wee hours of the night. Continue reading “Paradigm – 2008”

SUB-LIT – Number 1

In SUB-LIT’s first issue, you get the not so subtle impression that you will be titillated or at the very least tantalized. And you will, but in a more intellectually risky manner than first expected when you come face to face with the sexy 60’s style rock’n’roll poster on their website. The poems and stories in this issue challenge your definition of the truth. Continue reading “SUB-LIT – Number 1”

Virginia Quarterly Review – Spring 2008

The fiction in this issue of the VQR offers “Superhero Stories.” But none of the protagonists of the short fiction that opens the magazine – a discharged sailor who suffered psychic and physical wounds in the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test; a masked vigilante who comes across as “a slurring crackpot taking a momentary break from a barbiturate triathlon” in his only public appearance; and a homebody in boxer shorts who commandeers the voices of televangelists – are paragons of virtue. Instead, Scott Snyder, Tom Bissell, and George Singleton give us blackly comic portraits of the flawed and fallen. These are men forged and broken in violence, antiheroes for our own times. Continue reading “Virginia Quarterly Review – Spring 2008”

New Lit on the Block :: Southern California Review


Southern California Review, formerly known as the Southern California Anthology, is the literary journal of the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. It has been publishing fiction and poetry since 1982 and now also accepts submissions of creative nonfiction, plays, and screenplays. Printed every October and April with original cover artwork, every issue contains new, emerging, and established authors.

Unsolicited manuscripts are read year-round; response time for submissions is three to six months. Sim/subs accepted. No queries required.

The inagural issue – Volume 1 Number 1, Spring 2008 – was released late April under Editor-in-Chief Annlee Ellingson, and features:

Cover art by Amber Arseneau
Fiction by Gary Fincke, Judith Freeman, and Michael Buckley
Poetry by Richard Foerster, Bonnie Louise Barrett, Susanna Rich, Jennifer Jean, Daniel Polikoff, Moira Mageson, and Paul Brancato
Nonfiction by Christopher Buckley
Stageplay by Lee Wochner
An Interview with Nathan Englander
And prize-winners in One-Act Play – Kristna Sisco Romero, and Poetry – Elisabeth Murawski, CB Follett, Leonard Kress.

SCR is also holding a fiction contest, deadline August 31, 2008, and a poetry contest, deadline December 31, 2008.

Jobs :: Various

East Los Angeles College English Department seeks applicants for a tenure-track position in English.

The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey seeks applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Literature for their Literature Program to start September 2008. Dr. Robert Gregg, Dean of Arts & Humanities.

American University Department of Literature in the College of Arts & Sciences
invites applications for a one-year, full-time temporary assistant professor in Creative Writing/Fiction for the 2008-09 academic year to teach upper-level & graduate courses in fiction writing as well as in General Education courses. Jonathan Loesberg, Chair, Department of Literature. May 15.

Saint Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic institution dedicated to student learning, research, healthcare, and service, seeks applications for a Assistant Professor of English specializing in Creative Writing. Professor Sara van den Berg.

Books :: Victorian Women’s Relationships

Between Women
Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
by Sharon Marcus

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other’s hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law.

Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality–not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

Sharon Marcus is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

*Thanks to Bronte Blog for noting this book.

Online Lit Mags :: Hello?!

Sponsored or not, I would appreciate knowing when you post new issues online. NewPages has a Magazine Stand on which we update our readers about new publications received, including Online Literary Mags. Since we can’t really “receive” new online mags through traditional mail, all you have to do is drop me a note when you post new issues: denisehill@newpages.com. Of course, sponsor mags get 50 or so words to describe their publication (sponsors please send me this!), but all others get at least a link. C’mon – don’t be shy! Let our readers know you want to be read!

Finalists Announced :: Tupelo Press

Best of luck to finalists and semifinalists of the Tupelo Press 2008 Snowbound Chapbook Award. They anticipate announcing the winner this May.

Finalists:
Lisa Beskin – Belchertown, MA, Shadow Globe
Remica Bingham – Norfolk, VA, The Body Speaks
Deb Casey – Eugene, OR, Spit & Purr, What Shines: A Several Sisters Chapbook
John de Stefano – New York, NY, From: Critical Opalescence and the Blueness of Sky
Mary Molinary – Memphis, TN, The Book of 8:38
Jamie O’Halloran – Los Angeles, CA, The Visible Woman
Howard Robertson – Eugene, OR, Three Odes to Gaia
Robin Beth Schaer – New York, NY, Almost Tiger
Suzume Shi – New London, CT, Ao
Jacob Shores-Arguello – Fayetteville, AR, John Barleycorn Must Die
John Surowiecki – Amston, CT, Mr. Niedzwiedzki’s Pink House
Janet Sylvester – Kittery, ME, The Unbinding
Stacey Waite – Pittsburgh, PA, the lake has no saint

Semifinalists:
Hadara Bar-Nadav – Kansas City, MO, Fable of Flesh
Colin Cheney – Brooklyn, NY, Here There Be Monsters
Mark Conway – Avon, MN, Dreaming Man, Face Down
John de Stefano – New York, NY, From: Three-Body Problems
Joanne Diaz – Chicago, IL, Violin
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs – Astoria, NY, Mongrel Angels
Matthew Hittinger – Astoria, NY, Spectacular Reflection
Christina Hutchins – Albany, CA, Dark Creek
M. Smith Janson – Florence, MA, Letter Written in this Life, Mailed from the Next
Jesse Lee Kercheval – Madison, WI, My Life as a Silent Movie
Sandra Kohler – Dorchester, MA, Final Summer
Gary Copeland Lilley – Swannanoa, NC, Wade In Da Wahtuh
Matthew Lippman – Claverack, NY, Moses
Mike Maniquiz – Clovis, CA, Cooking Frutti Di Mare on This Early Evening Before the Night Falls on Kentucky Hillsides
Mary Helen Molinary – Memphis, TN, This Book of Sun
Rusty Morrison – Richmond, CA, Insolence
Teresa Pfeifer – Chicopee, MA, Little Matryoshka
Joseph Radke – Milwaukee, WI, A Source of Reasons
Boyer Rickel – Tucson, AZ, reliquary
Reginald Shepherd – Pensacola, FL, Photos of the Fallen World: Poems
Page Hill Starzinger – New York, NY, Black Tongue
Barry Sternleib – Richmond, MA, Winter Crows
Jonathan Weinert – Concord, MA, Charged Particles

A First! :: First Book on eBay

From Kyle Zimmer, President, First Book:

First Book is joining forces with eBay Foundation, the charitable arm of eBay Inc., for Community Gives – an online fundraising campaign designed to engage the eBay Community in supporting First Book’s mission to provide new books to the children who need them most.

First Book is one of only three organizations eBay Foundation has chosen to support, based on input from the eBay Community. The campaign kicked off on Monday with a $1 million grant split evenly among First Book, Best Friends Animal Society and Oxfam. In addition, to encourage participation eBay Foundation will give an extra dollar to First Book for every person who donates.

Funds generated will support First Book’s to reach and provide brand new books and educational resources to tens of thousands more Recipient Groups nationwide.

New to U.S. :: The Drawbridge, London

Alice Waugh, Commissioning Editor of The Drawbridge, London, wrote recently to give us the heads up that their publication will be jumping the pond to make its way to the U.S. later this year. She writes:

“The Drawbridge is an independent quarterly magazine, established in 2006 with the aim of delivering wit, thought and reflection. It takes the form of a full-colour broadsheet newspaper. It has attracted written contributions from Isabel Allende, J.G. Ballard, John Berger, Hugo Chavez, Tishani Doshi, Terry Eagleton, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Ondaatje, DBC Pierre, David Rieff, Slavoj Zizek and many others, including a number of emerging writers, along with a wide array of top photography and drawing from renowned image-makers including Edward Burtynsky, Paul Fryer, Robert Polidori, David Shrigley and Joel Sternfeld. Each issue has a theme. Earlier topics include Failure, Freedom, Risk, and Memory. Our next issue, on Rage is published in May.”

We’ll look forward to seeing this one hit the stands!

Awards :: storySouth Million Writers Award

From Jason Sanford, editor, storySouth:

“The Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007 have now been released. The preliminary judges picked 164 notable stories, more than in any of the awards from the previous four years. This growth appears to have come in selections from the many new online magazines which have popped up in the last year, proving that online literature is still in an amazing growth period.

“The MWA award for best overall online publication goes to Blackbird for having seven of their stories selected as notable stories of the year. The MWA for best publisher of novella-length fiction goes to Jim Baen’s Universe, while the award for best new online magazine or journal goes to Farrago’s Wainscot (with runner ups being Wheelhouse Magazine and Coyote Wild).”

The top ten stories will be released in late May, at which time public vote for best overall story will begin.

Alimentum Menu Poems Succeed a Second Year!

Dinner, and a Side of Poetry
by Desiree Cooper
April 26, 2008

From Weekend America: “Alimentum, a literary journal all about food, chose to celebrate the month with food poetry. For the second year in a row, they distributed a menu of poems to New York City restaurants and cafes. We visited some of the eateries to see what people thought about getting their meal with a side of verse.”

The audio includes interviews with a number of menu poem readers, some relating their own stories of poetry in their lives, some responding to the idea of menu poems, and some reading the poems from the menus. Several poems are available on the WA website, as well as images of the menu broadside. Lucky New Yokers! Well done Alimentum!

Ontario Review Retires after 34 Years

Posted on Crossing the Border: Joyce Carol Oates News and Opinion
March 14, 2008 by Randy Souther

“With the passing of its editor, Raymond J. Smith, Ontario Review itself will cease publication with the forthcoming Spring 2008 issue. Smith began Ontario Review in 1974 in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife Joyce Carol Oates as associate editor; the Review later moved with its editors to Princeton, NJ…” Read the rest here.

I’m an Author, He’s an Author, She’s an Author…

Wouldn’t you like to be an Author too?

Rachel Donadio’s essay in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, You’re an Author? Me Too! explores this very phenomenon – or is it pestilence – of book “publishing.” Beginning with what we all know by now – U.S.ers are reading less, yet, “In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles.”

And at the same time our nation is reading less, there are more writers in the U.S. than at any other time in our history, and credentialed MFA programs kicking out an exponentially growing number of these. Additionally, Donadio notes that for as little as $3.50 a copy, “authors” can have their books printed and distributed through Amazon, and Borders is no in the fray, offering print packages starting at $300, with the “premium package,” which includes some actual editorial work, starting at $500.

While Donadio discusses the role of the writing programs as the “democratizer” of the talent pool, Gabriel Zaid, critic and author of “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in the Age of Abundance,” says: “Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.”

Good? Bad? Hard as writers, publishers – and readers – to be indifferent on this topic.

Read the full article here.

Arkansas

The characters in John Brandon’s crime noir novel Arkansas are men who, finding themselves unsuitable for the everyday world of work, leave the straight life behind for more illicit activities. When twenty-something Kyle Ribbis is laid off from his job in a bicycle shop, the narrator explains: Continue reading “Arkansas”

Sensational Spectacular

Nate Pritts lives in a sealed chamber. At least, I think he does, or wishes he did. Whether the voice in his poems is his own or an invented persona is unclear, but the question is soon overwhelmed by the noisy glass cubicle of his poetic consciousness – things don’t hesitate to boom, explode, and self-destruct. The place simply simmers with internal threat. After all, volcanoes are exploding here, dinosaurs are waiting, lighting strikes, the roller coaster won’t stop, the wind won’t stop, violent floods of emotion assail him, and the light is dangerously perfect. But you only know it because he tells you so. You can’t see it. You can’t break through those glass barriers – no one can. Not the woman Pritts longs after with potent intensity, and not the nameless friends he apparently lives amongst. Continue reading “Sensational Spectacular”

Oh Baby

Those familiar with the writing of Kim Chinquee will be pleased to read the seventy-four flash fictions and prose poems collected in her book, Oh Baby, not only for the satisfaction of revisiting a few select, memorable pieces, but also for the opportunity to see Chinquee work at length, crafting with a spare and precise language the most complicated, emotional stories possible per page. Continue reading “Oh Baby”

The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon

Charles Jensen’s The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon is an ambitious book, highly entertaining yet formally daring. It incorporates a variety of prose and poetic forms to tell a love story that spans most of the twentieth-century and at least two dimensions, all within the space of a mere twenty-one pages. Comprised of diary entries, academic papers, and shredded documents full of supposed “automatic writing,” this slim volume weaves a mysterious love story with far greater gravity than its size on paper would suggest possible. Continue reading “The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon”

Behind My Eyes

Li-Young Lee’s fourth collection of poetry is an elegiac march through a landscape of prayer, death, love, the eternal strife of family relations and the omnipresent political realities that come with the immigrant identity. More than any other theme, the status of the displaced illuminates these mysterious and evasively simplistic poems. Continue reading “Behind My Eyes”

You Must Be This Happy to Enter

In Elizabeth Crane’s You Must Be This Happy to Enter, her third collection of stories, she tempers a sometimes pessimistic worldview with an exuberant joy that suffuses her stories from start to finish. From the bouncing opening story “My Life is Awesome! And Great!” (which may contain more exclamation points than every other short story collection published this year combined) to the warm familial ending of “Promise,” Crane takes her quirky style and uses it to bring a variety of mostly female protagonists to life, including a woman who gets turned into a zombie at a JoAnn Fabrics store and ends up as a contestant on reality television, a girl obsessed with staying inside her boyfriend’s closet, and a teenager whose forehead is covered in ever-changing multi-colored words who meets a boy whose face displays polaroids. Continue reading “You Must Be This Happy to Enter”

City of Regret

The poems in Andrew Kozma’s City of Regret spring from a source of electric personality and emotion, striving to escape grief by staring at it unblinkingly until it becomes something else. Surrealistic images stretch and bend until they encounter recognizable truths. Metaphors, which may at first appear too close in the mirror, shift to give perspective: the poem becomes a unified field of beauty. For example, in “The Cleansing Power of Metaphor” we see: Continue reading “City of Regret”

I Was Told There’d Be Cake

Sloane Crosley’s debut collection of essays is the kind of book that causes deep bouts of guilty recognition almost as often as it induces laughing out loud. Crosley’s essays are self-deprecating and self-obsessed, written with a style reminiscent of David Sedaris but with a voice that’s all her own. Chronicling her disasters more often than her successes, Crosley relates everyday abilities like constantly losing her wallet and locking herself out of two different apartments on moving day, plus more specialized skills at ruining weddings and investigating unexpected “presents” left on her bathroom floor after dinner parties. The best of these is “Bring-Your-Machete-To-Work Day,” about the ancient computer game The Oregon Trail, and Crosley’s subversive playing style: Continue reading “I Was Told There’d Be Cake”

The Musical Illusionist

Alex Rose’s The Musical Illusionist is a work of ambitious fantasy, written not as a novel or a collection of stories but as a guide to the myth-like Library of Tangents, “an archive not of history but of possibility.” These fictions (which are not properly stories, with the possible exception of the excellent title piece) take the form of articles describing the Library’s many exhibitions, including fantastical cultures, books, paintings, numerous foreign lands, even psychological disorders and microorganisms. Each entry is written so credibly that disorientation and disbelief go hand in hand, as the convincing prose and accompanying diagrams, photos, and maps seek to stun the reader into believing in even the most outlandish of exhibits. Continue reading “The Musical Illusionist”

Jobs :: Various

The Scripps College Writing Program seeks two distinguished visiting writers to fill the Mary Routt Chair of Writing, one during the spring semester of 2009 and the other during the spring semester of 2010. Kimberly Drake, Director of the Writing Program, May 1.

John Carroll University Department of English announces a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing position, for one year with possible renewal for up to three years, depending upon need & funding. Rev. Dr. Francis X. Ryan, SJ, Chair, Department of English.

Seton Hall University English Department invites applications for a one-year, Visiting Professor position in Creative Writing specializing in Poetry to begin September 2008. May 12.

The Poetry Center of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will award a month-long poetry residency with housing. This residency is open to poets who have published no more than one book of poetry, not including self-published work. Submission deadline Friday, May 09, 2008.

Grrls Summer Camp = Art + Activism

Kore Press
Art Activists Summer Camp for Girls
Ages 13-18
June 9 – 20, 2008
Tucson, AZ

Opportunities to work with artists and writers: creative writing, video, public performance. Challenge your own and others’ imagination and critical thinking by putting your words and ideas out in public.

Part of the The Grrrls Literary Activism Project: enabling young women to exercise their voices in the public sphere. The project is inspired by activist foremothers such as the Guerrilla Girls, the New York City-based band of artists whose creative street activism inspired a shift in the way women artists appear in museums and the media.

For more information contact Lisa Bowden: lisa@korepress.org or 520.629-9752 ext. 227.

[Artwork by Piper Jack taken from Kore Press promotional poster.]