Southern Humanities Review, a literary journal published quarterly since 1969, is seeking book reviews for publication in the website’s ongoing series. I am the co-editor of SHR. And, remembering the Warren Wilson MFA’s annotation-writing and craft lectures well, I imagine that fellow alumni would make great reviewers.
Here are the details: Southern Humanities Review welcomes book reviews of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
Please submit a 150 to 300 word pitch including the title of the work you would like to review, the book’s author, and a short summary. Also include your bio in a brief cover letter.
Complete reviews are to be 1300 – 2000 words. They should contain quoted material from the book throughout, as well as information on the book’s publisher, the publication year, the number of pages, and the price.
If you’re a graduate of the program, there’s no need to go through Submittable. Just email this address: [email protected] and mention that Friends of Writers’ blog helped you find us.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-09-22 19:01:082022-02-25 17:17:21A note from Rose McLarney (poetry ’10)
Our first concern might be did the artist consider the impossibility of defining nothing without speaking of absence without speaking
The white paint of the artist carefully selected and applied so as to seem an uncreased space unwrinkled unnippled a whatever indefinite nondescript discreet
But even without a mouth without figure or form or face the canvas if it were to speak as we the viewers imagine would it not speak of powdered sugar and cocaine, chalk, marshmallows, and salt and even that a betrayal of substance Would it not privately murmur something about the white simmer of stars Would it not speak of something not nothing would it not
On dull stretches during these anniversary trips, we’ve found it helps to point out places along the way, little things we pass together in the car: rest stops, Waffle Houses, personalized license plates. Graveyards, road kill, churches with services just letting out.
Once we saw a bride and groom emerge from the gloom of ceremony and into the sunlight holding hands, looking, for all the world, like they weren’t sure how they got there, or what they were doing, or whether their eyes would ever adjust. Remember how they squinted? Remember how we waved but they didn’t wave back, and we agreed that it was because they couldn’t see us, or that maybe they just didn’t want to let go of each other’s hands, they were holding so tight? I said, “Were we ever that young?” but maybe what I meant a little was “Were we ever that in love?” and you, you said, “No, not never,” but it wasn’t clear which question you weren’t answering.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-09-02 16:34:002022-02-25 17:17:16“The Love Poems of Virginia,” by Scott Challener (Poetry ’08)
Evy was standing in the corner of Ethan’s backyard in the middle of six girls shedding their bikinis, joining in the echoes of slurry shrieking ssssso funny and are we doing thisssok letsgoletsgo. The last cup of sweet red juice had made her head that certain heavy, shrouded her in a layer of protection she’d been aiming for all night, and she said heyyissmystraps, cansomeonedo my untie me? And then she felt the release of her own bikini, and the rise of a wild giggle, the grip of another girl’s hand, her elbow jerking forward, and then she was submerged in the pool, she was nightswimming cold and exposed, only skin and water where usually she felt the stretch of tight fabric.
Her eyes opened under water, trails of cloudy bubbles and the backyard spotlight surrounding the tangle of limbs and skin, then she surfaced and saw every guy (eyes, all wide eyes and fuck yeahs) at the edge of the pool, looking at the girls’ distorted bodies through the water before they all plunged in, flinging their own trunks away like flags of surrender, and her ears cleared out and let in the rise and fall of girlshrieks and chatter and the deep boyvoices crested and fell, and she felt another body next to her then space when it kicked away, and she pushed off and dove under again, while the bodies churned up choppy rising water.
NIN: I’m stunned by how close these speakers feel as I read your work. What would you say is the role of vulnerability in your poetry, and how did you come to define what vulnerability looks like in your work?
TB: In order for there to be vulnerability, there has to be some inherent sense of consequence. In other words, there must be knowledge that something valuable is at stake. This is the task I always charge my poems with: there must be something (a way of life for instance) the speakers within the poems are not afraid to lose in the name of feeling whole and human. It’s also why I am drawn to the lyric mode. Within the lyric mode, a problem or question becomes the engine behind the poem; the motor that keeps the machine of the poem chugging along. Ellen Bryant Voigt, in The Flexible Lyric, considers the lyric as being that mode in which much of the narrative happens beyond the poem. The lyric poem is simply an event along that narrative line—I am paraphrasing of course. Anyway, this is why I am drawn to desire and its penchant for an elliptical and obsessive logic. The act of desire is an act of grief. In desire, one feels something was lost when in fact they never possessed the object in the first place. Perhaps that closeness you hear, Noor, emanates from the open and shameless embrace of obsession that exists in the poems, but I want to say more.
One of the ways that I envision this book operating is as theater. In Detroit, one of my favorite theaters is the Slipstream Theater Initiative. The building is nothing fancy: a storefront that’s been refashioned into a black box theater. What gets me each time I see one of its productions is that they use the space differently each time. In a standard proscenium theater, one has a ticket that corresponds to a seat number located along the house’s floor. With Slipstream, I never know how I am to move through the space and what will be asked of me. In Fantasia, I mean the poems to make such demands on the reader by using myself, or the lyricized self in the book, as a conduit. Looking at the book’s approach to point of view, the membrane between “you” and “I” is very delicate. What I mean is the roles of subject and observer get fuzzy. The reader, I hope, experiences that sense of closeness to the speakers and the events happening. When the poems call out my name, it is also a placeholder for “your” name. With all of that said, I (as the poet) have as much at stake as the reader has invested in the poems. Although the book employs various personae and voices, it really is a kind of self-portrait that relies on the reader to complete. I think all of this too aids that sensation of vulnerability.
Count Giulio Vincenzo Zannini was conspicuously beautiful – when he entered a room, you could feel the air skip a beat. Almond-brown skin and features so fine they could have been carved by Michelangelo. He was born in Rome on July 13, 1900, but Mom always said he was better suited to the Renaissance.
I first met Uncle when I was four years old and he was already in his sixties. He and Mom’s older sister, Aunt Zosia, lived in a penthouse apartment near the catacombs of Sant’Agnese in Rome, one of those grand high-ceilinged affairs that make you feel like you are about three feet tall, as I probably was at the time. Even in the sizzling heat of summer, the marble floors were always cool and slick on your bare feet, and I stayed close to them, cowed by the enormity of the world around me.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-08-28 16:16:292022-02-25 17:17:14“Pendulum,” by Helen Fremont (Fiction ’91)
For days we may not speak more than a few words to anyone but each other. We leave the hotel in the cool morning and come back sweaty, drained of energy, to stand
before a huge cage of parakeets, watching them quickstep sideways along their long stick-perches. Courting? Fighting? When we wash our hands we turn the water brown as a flooded field.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-08-28 00:31:002022-02-25 17:17:14“Manuscript of a Long-Forgotten Poet,” by Chloe Martinez (Poetry ’09)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-08-27 00:26:002022-02-25 17:17:13“Apple,” by Robin Rosen Chang (Poetry ’18)
Jeff O told us that he and Brian H split after watching Chasing Amy and getting into a fight—by then I was pretty much over my crush on Jeff O and I was kind of off and on living with Steve K who I was sort of ready to break up with so I deliberately rented Chasing Amy for us to watch and then broke up with him (but it had nothing to do with the movie).
I remember I drove to the corner gas station and called Ricky (never Rick) my best friend to tell him and he said to meet him and Matt M (my other best friend) for a drink so we could recap (I had had a crush on Matt M I think before and after this).
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-08-25 12:20:002022-02-25 17:17:13“How It Was When We Were,” by Noah Stetzer (Poetry ’14)
