February 2009 Front Page

this issue accepted poetry submissions ... page 2 accepted prose and article submissions ... page 3 a note from the editors For this edition we will be displaying submissions from both emerging and established poets in the same section of the review. We hope you enjoy the cross-section of talent being offered and look forward to more submissions for 2009. We welcome contemporary poetry, articles and reviews from all parts of the world. Please follow the guidelines at the bottom of this page and don't forget to include a short bio as well as a photo of the author. Regards, Bernard Alain Editor visit my blog Joy Leftow Production Editor visit my blog featured release Payday Loans by Jee Leong Koh UK With Koh's chapbook, Payday Loans, a sequence of 30 sonnets, the reader lives a critical month with the poet trying to reconcile vocation and job, love and desire, immigration and home. In his first full-length collection, Equal to the Earth, Koh writes in a variety of forms, speaks with a range of voices—ancestral, recent and contemporary—and travels a span of ground to investigate the imaginary claims of community and self. Here you visit Montreal and Montauk, Nebraska City and Fire Island, and a bar where Hart Crane, W. H. Auden and Cavafy hit on you. The question of love is at the center of this investigation and Koh's work. Understand what Richard Marx Weinraub meant when he wrote about Koh, "I felt I was encountering an important new poet." Publisher:Poets Wear Prada Language: English To obtain a copy of this release by Jee Leong Koh please use the following link: http://poetswearpradanj.home.att.net/ in the spotlight Patricia Smith Westchester County NY Patricia Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including "Blood Dazzler," finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and "Teahouse of the Almighty," a National Poetry Series selection. She is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. Born in Chicago and currently living in Westchester County, New York Patricia Smith is the smokin' hot goddess of American letters, winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the National Poetry Series award, the Patterson poetry award and the Pushcart prize. In 2006, she was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Patricia Smith's website can be found at the following link: http://www.wordwoman.ws/ selected poem Jumper Tappan Zee Bridge, August The Zee's threaded span, shrill and glory, scrapes its steel nail down the sky's middle back, believes most cities are strugglers. Our filthy river, so anxious to be beloved and unbloodied, hurts itself toward sparkle, shimmies frantically on a core of fuel. In the right lane, you soft brake the Corolla, the Civic, the Wrangler and clamor out onto the beautiful shelf. Your dutiful engine hums while the waves do their desperate rhumba and fit their mouths around the hot verb of your name. The Hudson, giggling at the game, pumps up the voltage and gleam. 287's blurred drone shivers your root, whips a whisper at your back and rocks your heels. You grab a rusting tendril, balancing for the one slow climb. Every last glimpse over your shoulder is shaped like you, climbing. by Patricia Smith this edition's featured emerging poet Jee Leong Koh Queens NY Jee Leong Koh is the author of Payday Loans (Poets Wear Prada, 2007). Of that chapbook, Marie Howe says, "Smart, irreverent, often unnerving, these sonnets smirk, smile, argue and bless." His poetry has appeard in Crab Orchard Review, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The Ledge Magazine, and Mimesis, among other journals, been included in the Best New Poets 2007 and Best Gay Poetry 2008 anthologies, and was nominated in 2008 for the Pushcart Prize. Born in Singapore, he now lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter (http://jeeleong.blogspot.com). A book of poems is forthcoming in March 2009, Christopher Hennessy previews "Equal to the Earth" at http://equaltotheearth.blogspot.com/ selected poem Florida This evening walk around Lettuce Lake begins on the planks of good intentions. Palm fronds droop, like fingers over railing, over land sliding below wetland, and weeds yielding along an indeterminable wave to duckweed, a false green carpet to the door of the lake. Bald cypresses, wearing beards of moss, sit surprised in water, their grayish knees breathing above the rootless bladderworts. Here, the wading bird is king, the Great Egret picking its way between land and lake, spearing the temporary frog to an unexpected hump of ground. Here, the roseate spoonbill swirls the mud. Even the osprey, which nests in feathertips of trees, must bury itself in the lake, wings held up like an archaic angel landing on a gravestone, before rising with silver in its beak. And here, reads the sign in stainless steel raised by park authorities, is Alzheimer’s Walk that travels two feet above the bog, two feet from the leafy stink, but does not sink. by Jee Leong Koh