Unusual Call For Submissions

Artistica, is accepting submissions! General guidelines - There is no particular theme. They're hoping to let the 'zine organically evolve on its own from the submissions they receive, and the tapestry is woven by you, the artists. Do not be afraid to be irreverent, satirical, experimental, politically incorrect or fearless. POETRY - 3 to 5 poems. No more than 1 pg (roughly 30 lines) but they do make exceptions. Previously published and simultaneous submissions are welcome. FICTION - 1 to 3 short pieces of flash fiction (1 to 2 pg preferred.) Long pieces are welcomed but will be broken into installments and published in serial format. All genres are welcomed. Email submissions to zgkluckman@msn.com

Cellpoems, a text-message based poetry journal, is looking for submissions of short poems and poem reviews. Past contributors include Sherman Alexie, Charles Simic, Kimiko Hahn, Matthea Harvey, and Matthew Rohrer. Poems and reviews must be less than 140 characters in length (including spaces). They accept simultaneous submissions, but do not consider previously published work. See their website for additional information, or submit here.

Mason's Road is an online literary journal sponsored by Fairfield University's MFA in Creative Writing. Run by the graduate students in the program, each issue focuses on a writing craft theme. Contributions are accepted in Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Art, and Audio. Mason's Road aims to focus each issue on a particular element of the writing craft. For their upcoming issue, they're looking for submissions that engage us in considering the opportunities and complexities of an "image." The reading period for Issue #4 is August 15 - November 15, 2011. Submit here.

Feeling ambitious? The Evening Street Press is asking for short novel submissions (90-150pgs) to win the Grassic Short Novel Prize: $500 and publication by the Evening Street Press! Their idea is to emphasize the power, skill and enduring value of the short novel form. The contest is open to writers who have already published books as well as those for whom this is a first book. The winning writer will receive 25 copies from a press run of 250. Submissions accepted May 1, 2011 to December 1, 2011. Here are the submission guidelines.

The Crab Orchard Review is seeking submissions for their Summer/Fall 2012 Special Issue: Due North, which focuses on writing that explores the people, places, history, and changes shaping the states in the U.S. (and the District of Columbia) that make up the Northern Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. See submission guidelines here. Writers whose work is selected will receive $25 (US) per magazine page ($50 minimum for poetry; $100 minimum for prose) and two copies of the issue.

"We Show What We Have Learned" in Best American Nonrequired Reading

Our wait is over! Behold The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, the new home for Clare Beams' story "We Show What We Have Learned," which first appeared in HFR #46. We're so happy for Clare, who found a copy of the book with her name inside in her local Barnes and Noble, celebrity-like. I like to picture her falling to her knees and weeping, but I can't confirm that actually happened. Something close happened to me when I first read her amazing story, though. Go out and get it. It'll blow you away.

Place in Poetry I

Herein lies the first of a short series of conversations on the notion of place and its affair with writing. I will be talking with a different poet about their relationship to place in each post. My name is Anthony Cinquepalmi, and I will be your host. This is post one—

with Beckian Fritz Goldberg

This summer I visited California after two months of days of watching Netflix and intentionally slothing around my house. I wrote a few sonnets in June. I watched full seasons of five TV shows. I'm not sure if that's disparity or if those activities make sense together. Either way, I had hoped a relatively thoughtless trip to some other place would fix the congestion I felt hiding inside from the desert. Well, in terms of writing, the trip made me feel useless. I had nothing to say about the shore, the smell of the shore's air, etc. Nor the trees, the sand, the people under the trees in the sand. Nothing.

I have wondered why travelling to a 'new' place did not inspire me. My first thought: "Surely, inspiration takes more time! You are spoiled and should have more patience!" That may be true, but I believe this account points to the strange idea of PLACE and its relationship to writing. Well, how does it figure into writing? Are we talking about place as something physical: the landscape, the front porch, the hallowed writing desk in front of the sunned window, the shade under the favorite big tree? Or, more importantly, the place in the mind a poet goes to each time they write, the images a poem lives in—that quiet fever of translation from within the mind to the outside, the page? Or there’s a poet's place in society and how that informs their writing Even further, what about a poet's place in something like POETRY?

I'm not going to be able to answer these questions—I do not want to. Though I do want to talk about their importance in being questions at all, and as Rainer Maria Rilke might have done, live in them.

I want to go about this by talking to poets who have been poets longer than I have, who have lived in & traveled to & written from various places. With that in mind, I began the first discussion.

§

I spoke to Beckian Fritz Goldberg the other day, and I'd say the conversation surprised us both—how sweeping and huge the idea of place is, and how little it's talked about in terms of poetry. Here are some locus-related facts: Beckian spent the first five years of her life in the Midwest before moving to the desert. Her first three books were "written from childhood," specifically those formative five years in Wisconsin. Maybe that is a testament to how spongy the infant mind is—or a testament to the impact of Midwestern landscape, its images, its snow…. Having grown up in Illinois, I felt a kinship in our discussion of that landscape. I realized that as of late I had also been writing from childhood, reproducing images of snow around the shed in my backyard. I don't usually think about why certain images enter the poem. They find their way in. It’s something that just happens. But I want to ask why am I returning to my childhood landscape when I've spent eight years in another place? The desert is a different animal.

"The desert is not a nurturing landscape. You have to earn it…You have to coax it out—it doesn't happen to you like New York happens to you."

Beckian has coaxed it out. She spoke to me about the two acres of desert her house sits on in Carefree, AZ, and about sitting in her backyard around dusk this summer. The heat creates a "vacuum" that quiets down as the sun sets, a sense of solitude in the landscape—Black Mountain, Sentinel Rock, stacks of boulders, coyotes, and jumping cholla cactus. It's quiet out there. Stars are visible. It's a landscape that informs more and more when treated with patience. And it's one Beckian has gravitated towards over time—her sense of place has changed, "It's fluid." In that regard, there's a sort of 'living' element involved in this. After a while a place might imprint upon a poet, and therein begins the sort of relationship Beckian has come to know with the desert: "I don't like it that much, that's just the way it is."

She has this great poem in the upcoming 49th issue of HFR, "Birds of Darkness Inhabit the Night, Stars on Their Foreheads," which plays into this place conversation and reminds me of how I spent most of the summer:—complete indolence—“I pissed the day away." The poem throws the reader a sense of scale with which one can size up their place on this earth while looking at images of the earth on a screen. It's fun. It’s a poem that was born from Beckian's perpetual courtship of the desert.

I can draw from our conversation that poets construct different relationships with place, not by choice, but by something outside of choice, a gravity. Some are nomadic: they can travel and write books rooted in one place before moving on to another. Still others are like Beckian. They like to nest, to wait and coax the landscape out, or relish awhile in its silence. And still, there are probably variants within this simple division. I'm wondering whether or not these orientations become fixed, ingrained within the writer to the extent that wherever a poet is physically, he or she writes from one place (the idea of a place in the mind). Or if one's relationship to place changes over a life, with some landscapes & images holding on stronger than others. Because they want to talk to us. Because we need them to.

"As a writer you have to be able to divorce yourself from where you are."

I think this is the most salient point in our conversation. A poet's task is one of communication, regardless of the particular variant of place-relationship to which a poet subscribes. We agreed that instead of trying to reach some conclusive point in this dialogue, it would be better to say I don't know and talk about dystopia films, Bobbie the bobcat (who makes a cameo in her poem), and physics:

A —Physics is so weird.

B —Yeah. If I had a brain I'd be a physicist. But I don't so I'm a poet.

A —(laughs) You know I'm going to have to quote that when I write this up.

B —(laughs) Yeah, that's okay, the poets will like that one.

Missouri Review's Editor Prize gives big bucks!

Our friends at the Missouri Review are currently hosting  the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize, which is open for submissions of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. They are offering $5,000 each, plus publication to winners in each of those categories. The deadline is coming up soon: October 1st. (This Saturday!)

The contest guidelines can be found here. And they are currently offering a free digital version of last year’s contest issue.

When Claire, at The Missouri Review, was telling us about this contest, she brought up an interesting point based on something Forrest Gander once mentioned to her. “He said that he is in favor of submitting to contests because when you consider writing as an art, in comparison with other arts, the costs are quite low. Painters spend hundreds of dollars on canvas, paints, brushes; musicians have expensive instruments and sound equipment to maintain; dancers have to buy special shoes; etc. But writers only really need a paper and pen. So he never feels bad about setting aside a little money every year towards journal subscriptions and contest submissions; these are just some of the tools of the trade.” At HFR, we appreciate that sentiment as much as Claire does.

Now get submitting! Think of all the literary journals that prize money could buy you!

Sky Harbor, by Miles Waggener.
Pinyon Publishing, 2011.
Poetry.
Review by Debrah Lechner
Debrah.Lechner@gmail.com

Sky Harbor is the poetic name of the massive international airport in Phoenix, Arizona. However, “Harbor” is not always the equivalent of “haven,” as Waggener suggests in one poem. This book of poetry is about hellos and goodbyes, departures and arrivals, but is not really about coming home. In this poetry, the restlessness of the culture we live in, our always changing and unstable social environment, meets the landscape of the undeniable, immanent desert in this flight of memory and vision of days to come.

The sky is never far away in the imagery in this volume of poetry―whether the sky is the location of the poet, viewing horses from an airplane; a medium for birds to move through; a partner to the sun, or the very meaning of the horizon. The entire collection leans toward the sky like a plant seeking light, and there is a craving for the release and quest of flight that, hominids that we are, is never quite answered by travel.

From “Bird in a Box:”

from the arc of its name, call it
a stray, a spool of thread through
thicket, of searing line,
to indigo fluting through tears, from
the glyph’s load that is too much,
to a hand that a larger hand
may―if it stops shaking―
close around, distance no more
than a crescent in the sky and the wish
to replace distance
with proximity, and then take it.

The poetry in this volume is eminently readable and re-readable. It inspires the reader’s own memory and insight, and my hope is that it will be experienced by a wide audience.

A word about the book and its cover before ending this review. I love it. I love the color, the jet stream of words, the galaxy--like opening in the night sky--, the city lights. I think the cover and the very shape of the book is witty, reminiscent of airplane magazines. Pack it to enjoy on your next flight.

Miles Waggener is also the author of Phoenix Suites, which won the Washington Prize. Sky Harbor can be acquired at Amazon.com and from most other booksellers.

News Around the Net

The MacArthur Grants for 2011 have been announced, the literary winners include two poets (one a former United States poet laureate) and a journalist.

George R.R. Martin crossed the one million Kindle ebooks sold mark, one of only ten who have done so thus far. He joins a list including Nora Roberts and James Patterson. Um, congrats!

Check out this gallery of Dickens characters. It was put together as part of a celebration of Dickens's 200th birthday, early next year.

When Kesey met Kerouac. Spoiler alert: they did not become best friends.

Borders closed forever and at least one of their employees was bitter enough to write this frustrated manifesto.

There's a new Silverstein book out. NPR has some of the poems in it.

This Week In Literary History: All Things Joyce

For this week’s foray into literary history we’ll return to September 1888, when at the tender age of six, young James Joyce was sent to Clongowes Wood College, forty miles from his home, in County Kildare. The school was in a castle, which had been built in the late middle ages, and converted to Clongowes after it was purchased by a Jesuit in 1814.  It is said that Joyce experienced homesickness, but what little kid wouldn't, living in a drafty old castle, far from home. But despite negatives of the situation, Joyce stated that his education with the Jesuits was a point of pride for him, and many of Joyces's experiences, good and bad, at Clongowes found their way into Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.  

So in honor of James Joyce, grab your favorite Joycean work, don your James Joyce hi top shoes, your James Joyce t-shirt and visit your favorite James Joyce pub. Whether you happen to be in Zurich Switzerland, Paris France, or Baltimore Maryland, to name just a few, you can get your Joyce on surrounded by memorabilia, good company, and of course your favorite beverage and Irish fare.

Next pick up your issue of HFR # 47, Fall/Winter 2010, and revisit Tamar Jacobs “Snow,” which got me thinking of North Richmond Street from “Araby,” the neighborhood that Joyce so beautifully portrayed in all of its gritty glory. When you've finished with that pick up the latest issue of Green Mountains Review, Vol.XXIV, No 1, start with Jene Erick Beardsley’s “Self-Portrait” then follow up with Allison Vrbova’s “Roughing it Smoothly,” the story of James, a homeless man living on the streets of Seattle. 

Book Review: The Girl's Club by Sally Bellerose

The Girls Club, by Sally Bellerose.
Bywater Books, 2011.
Novel.
Review by Debrah Lechner
Debrah.Lechner@gmail.com

The Girls Club observes and lovingly describes the passage from childhood to adulthood in a working-class, Catholic household rich with daughters (Cora Rose, Marie, and Renee, as well as hapless cousin Lorraine) in a society that is gradually, ever so gradually, changing―even if it is still changing too quickly for the LaBarre sisters at times.

As the sisters grow up they learn about the realities of life, of boys, of establishing lives and families, and formulate their individual definitions of sin while practicing their faith. The story is told from the point of view of Cora Rose, who has one ill-kept secret, “the dreaded bowl disease”― ulcerative colitis. Her sisters and family protect her from ridicule about her frequent bathroom visits and bouts of debilitating illness as well as they can, but Cora Rose can handle herself, as well as the sometimes unwanted help from her siblings, and she begins to learn early how to maintain her identity even when she finds herself afflicted with the shame and social insecurity that comes from being different.

She also has a secret that she initially hides from herself—that she is lesbian.

The Girls Club references her close relationship with her sisters, and also a lesbian bar that has, unknown to Cora Rose, been thriving a few blocks away from her home. There she meets an old friend from school, and many new women to inspire her, if only she can manage the reactions of her sisters, the husband she married when she became pregnant, and most importantly, avoid confusing her young son as she navigates both her coming-out process and her ostomy procedure, which changes her body at the same time that she is defining and revealing her sexuality. A passage from The Girls Club:

"A woman on the stool next to me says, “You okay?” She’s not a regular. Or at least, I’ve not seen her before. Maybe she’s been coming here for months. “Adjusting my ostomy bag.” It’s the wrong thing to say to a woman you’ve just met in a bar. It’s kind of fun to say the wrong thing and not really give a damn."

This is a book with both pathos and humor, very fun to read, that will reinforce the hope that friendships and family can flourish even through illness, differing lives and unfulfilled expectations.

Bellerose has published in numerous venues and was awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts for an excerpt of The Girls Club. It is available on Amazon.com both in a paperback and Kindle version. There’s an interview with Sally Bellerose on the web with the great title of Talking Shit and Getting Away With It. Check that out too.

News Around the Net

I'll match this guy's bitterness about the P&W MFA rankings with some bitterness of my own toward him for making fun of my program (San Marcos). I do agree that the rankings are sort of silly and that Columbia is better than it's ranked. But still, some serious sour grapes here.

On the other hand, here is a more rational response. Also not completely for the rankings system, but maybe they're not the dumbest thing in existence, either.

Neil Gaiman and a tweetathon for short stories!

Roald Dahl's writing shed needs to be saved. And one of you has to scrape together $790,000 to save it. Get on it!

The potential end for bookstores. Does anyone remember Blockbuster? Me neither.

Nostalgia and trying to save independent bookstores.

Website of the Week: War-of-the-words.org

Bazooka or spelunker, skank or poop, wraith or crux? Which word has the most phonetic punch, which the most versatility?

For the last three years, War-of-the-words.org has thrown words into a bracket-style battle, judging them by traits like “Frequency of usage” or “phonetic punch”, allowing registered users to submit their brackets online and weigh in throughout the tournament in ‘real time’ via Facebook. Commissioner and founder Rich Zeroth creates absurd (not to mention, funny) word profiles and statistics, overtly mirroring the tournament to NCAA basketball's March Madness. Yes, there’s even a live Final Four.

In the last year, the tournament has garnered enough interested to up the stakes with a $100 prize for the best predictor. The best part: sign up is entirely free. Besides, we all know ‘Mustachioed’ will be in the Final Four, and that Beth’s bracket is squeamish compared to mine. I dare anyone to disagree. Click to.

Unusual Call For Submissions

The Missouri Writers Project is currently accepting submissions for Holding Each Elephant's Tail: Voices from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars 2011 Prose & Poetry Contest. They're accepting poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. There's a $250 top prize in each genre. Word Limits: 5,000 words for Prose (Fiction and Creative Nonfiction); up to 3 poems (5 pages) for Poetry. The deadline for submissions is December 30, 2011. Winners will be announced by April 1, 2012. Submit electronically as a Word document. Please combine all poems into one document and use first poem as title. Put your name and contact information on the first page of your submission document and nowhere else within the manuscript. Please include a brief (75 word) bio with your submission. Send to: submissions(at)mowarriorwriters.com (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail).

Esquire and Aspen Writers' Foundation Present THE SHORT SHORT FICTION CONTEST. Win a trip to New York to study with Colum McCann, and a scholarship to the Aspen Summer Words Fiction Workshop. Entries must be 78 words in honor of the 78th anniversary. See if you can beat Colum McCann (in 78 words). Here are the rules.


The Birmingham Arts Journal is calling for storm-related poems, stories & art to be published in the April 2012 "Storm" issue. The editors will consider work inspired by ANY storm in ANY location (geographic, emotional or otherwise). Submit WORD documents as attachments or within the body of the email to: editor(at)birminghamartsjournal.com (replace (at) with @ in sending email). They're accepting FICTION & NON-FICTION (up to 1,000 words. Excerpts and quotes of fewer than 1,000 words from longer works are published, too), POETRY (all types up to 50 lines. Shorter works preferred), ARTWORK & PHOTOGRAPHY (300dpi or higher digital files (.jpg or .tif) of artwork to be submitted via email or on disk). Note: Please include a biography (3rd person) of 50 words or less with your submission.

The Drum Literary Magazine and WBUR's Radio Boston have joined forces to create Zip-Code stories, an effort to involve listeners in the creation of stories about our communities. Submit 500-word stories about one of the four zip codes they will be announcing each month through Broadcastr's audio social-media platform. Submissions will also be accepted through The Drum's website or through snail mail to WBUR. Hear some previously recorded radio stories here. For more info, contact Henriette Lazaridis Power at editor@drumlitmag.com.

And lastly, announcing the call for submissions for The Best of Mormonism 2011, to be published at the end of the year. They're looking for previously published short stories, poetry, creative non-fiction, comics, novel excerpts, exceptional blog pots, and hybrids. They are hoping to include work from a variety of genres: from literary, to sci-fi, to horror, to humor, to devotional. All entries should be published in 2009-2010. Send submissions to bestofmormonism(at)gmail.com (replace (at) with @ in sending email) by September 30, 2011. Include your name, title of work, publication information, and a link to proof of publication if possible. Attach your submission as a PDF. The author mus have retained nonexclusive reprint and electronic rights to the work.

Need a Jump Start? Upcoming Class:Four Poems in Four Weeks

"The border is a line that marks difference. On one side, the American narrative; on the other, the Mexican narrative. Identity, for me, functions like the borderlands: a site of hybridization, of interlingualism."

Eduardo Corral,

the FIRST Latino to EVER win the Yale Series of Younger Poet's Competition

Eduardo will be teaching an online poetry course this fall for all levels of inspiring poets. Offered through the Piper Writers Studio, the course will focus on four different types of poems: praise, narrative, imitation and elegy. Also, in this safe and supportive environment, you will learn how to craft your poems through diction, tone, syntax, imagery techniques, line and stanza formation.

Corral graduated from Arizona State University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. His poem's have appeared in several Literary Journals, such as the Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Meridian, and The Nation. He is the editor and interviewer at thr Boxcar Poetry Review and served as the Olive B. O'Conner Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Phillip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Corral won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poet's Competition for his poem Border With Violin from his first book of poems, Slow Lightning. You can find some of his work in Miquel Murphy's book of poetry, OCHO #22: Dear America, Don't Be My Valentine.

"Four Poems in Four Weeks"
Course Instructor: Eduardo C. Corral

The week of October 3rd through the Week of October 24th

Online through the Virgina G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University

For more information about registering for this course or other exciting Piper Writers Studio courses, visit the Piper Center website.

Notes from NJ — Hi Beth (# 3)

Chuck Tripi has lived a life of poetry and study since a medical catastrophe suddenly ended his flying career in 1998. After his poem "Crack-Up" was published in HFR's 47th issue, he struck up a correspondence with Managing Editor Beth Staples. His epistolary perspective on writing and the writing life has been so valuable to Beth, she wanted to share some of his notes here. He writes from Sussex County. See all of Chuck's letters here. 
*

Hi Beth,

The 727 was nimble although it could be tricky flying it for the first thousand hours or so. But once its quirks were learned it was the most dynamic and responsive airplane I ever flew, especially when the October wind, in the clarity and gusts of autumn—on the Expressway to thirty-one, say, or the River to thirteen at La Guardia.

Going up the Hudson River on an especially turbulent day, with a brand-new copilot flying the leg and getting a little bit behind the airplane, I had to take it for a few moments to let him regroup.

He was surprised and pleased when I gave it back to him, but it was his own limits he had bumped-up against, not mine. Everybody has to be new. We passed Manhattan’s caverns measureless to man in pretty good shape; he turned and crossed the stacks at seven hundred feet and greased it on without the need for further talk from me.

We hear, in our critique groups and open mics, poems that bump the limits of our own imaginations, poems more excellent than we might perceive, and poems scratched and scribbled while another poet is reading.

Not everyone can fly an airplane or write a poem, but everyone can want, and everyone can work within the realm of coming true, and everyone, when they cannot praise, can seek to encourage.

Best,

CKT

News Around the Net

This is like a yearly thing, but The Guardian is shocked by the Booker shortlist. Again.

In reaction to the Booker shortlist, Knopf has sped up the US release of Julian Barnes's novel, The Sense of an Ending.

Conan O'Brien's attempt to make old writers more accessible to young audiences. At least it's not a swimsuit competition.

This is a good essay, I'm excited about this little subcultural turn in literary fiction, but this has been happening for a while now, writers like Michael Chabon and Rick Moody have been doing combining lit fiction and genre for over a decade now.

Arthur C. Clarke predicting the future. He forgot one thing, we're going to the moon!

You're looking for a good place to eat? Well, why don't you let Cormac McCarthy help you with that.

This Week in Literary History: Another Round for Poe

We’ll begin our trip into history by revisiting the renowned Edgar Allan Poe. By September of 1835 Poe had become the assistant editor of the auspicious Southern Literary Messenger based out of Richmond, Virginia. But that position quickly changed, due to Poe’s drinking habits, when the owner T.H White fired him. But leave it to Poe, writer extraordinaire, to get sober, speak to T.H White about his job, get rehired, and by December 1835, get promoted to the position of Editor with the Messenger.

T.H. White wrote in a letter that: “Poe . . . I rejoice to tell you, still keeps from the Bottle.” And there was much rejoicing in literary circles as well. Poe stayed on as the editor of the Messenger for two years. When his tenure was over he was said to say that when he began at the messenger there were 700 subscribers, when he left there were 5,500 subscribers. Way to go Poe! And best of all while he was the Messenger he developed a reputation of being a “tomahawk” critic, which seems like a fitting moniker.

So in honor of Poe I would suggest picking up the latest HFR. Start with “Two Resting Blackbrirds” by Holly Simonsen, then work your way through the rest of the submissions. Prepare to be regaled by, sometimes dark, thought provoking stories and poetry. Also in fine Poe tradition pick up the latest issue of Colorado Review, Summer 2011, and partake of “Creatures of a Day” by Barry Pearce. The story got me thinking of Poe’s “Ligeria,” who made her way into the cannon of literature in September 1838. What a strange enchantress she is, the other woman who lingers in a man’s thoughts.

Many Thanks For LitStack's Review of HFR Issue 48 Spring/Summer

HFR is very proud to thank Jennifer M. Kaufman, of LitStack, for her kind review of the latest HFR issue. In looking at the beautiful, but desolate and alien, cover of the issue, Jennifer writes that: "the journal itself (published twice-yearly by The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University) is densely and vibrantly packed with fiction, poetry, and photographs from a remarkably international list of contributors."

When it came to the review of individual works Jennifer writes: "with so many excellent pieces it would be impossible to do justice to each and every one, and of course with such a range, they will each resonate differently for different readers. There were a few – particularly from the women contributors – that I found especially exciting."

Some of the women contributors showcased within the review were: S.E. Smith, Anne Valente, Naomi Benaron, Chidelia Edochie, Anna Piwkowska and Diya Chaudhuri.

The full review can be found here.

A Most Remarkable Video Project: We Need Your Help!

A new project is afoot at HFR, and we need your participation! We're determined to bring the latest issue to life in a new and exciting way. You've perhaps heard of music videos? You've heard—from us—about Motion Poems, and now we've got it into our heads to make our own kind of music-video-poetry, inspired by work in our current issue and with your help.

Here's the first poem chosen for the project, "Modern Medicine" by Michael Brooks Cryer:

Modern Medicine
-for JA

To be of help to its contemporaries, an artificial heart learned to sing during the last desperate moments before a transplant operation. The heart explained, before being placed into the human's chest, why fake hearts can sing and real hearts can only pump blood. "Real hearts have trouble singing because their muscles don't form good acoustics. Artificial hearts, like myself, made of plastic and exotic metals, nurture sound like a cathedral or the Albert Hall. I think all fake organs should sing, especially the shy ones." A beautifully crafted pseudo-kidney sat at the back of the operating room listening to this. It had heard earlier that day a chorus of hearts practicing "America the Beautiful" in a utility closet. The kidney turned to the organ at its left and said, "This is ridiculous. I can sing. Listen to this." The testicle was astounded the kidney could talk, let alone carry a tune, so it threw itself into a bedpan and took a nap. "Will somebody shut that heart up," an anonymous organ pleaded. "Good god!" a small intestine exclaimed as a large on clapped. "I heard the eyes are learning to juggle," whispered a pancreas. "America, America..." sang the hearts.

We'd like YOU to send photographs, sound bites, drawings, or music either inspired by this poem or that somehow speaks to the poem. Your favorite bedpan? Awesome. Your patriot rendition of "America, America"? Yes, please. Grab your camera, and get snapping! Think you know what a signing heart sounds like? Sing it!

Send these as mp3, jpg or tif files to HFR@asu.edu or through Twitter to @haydensferryrev. Sound bites should be under a minute, and images should be saved for the web (72 dpi). The deadline for your submissions is September 16, and we can't wait!

We'll choose our favorite images and sounds and create a lovingly curated mini-movie for you to view. We're certain many more hearts will be singing by the end of this.