Willows Wept Review

15/06/2024

Here in central Florida, the temperatures have climbed, predictably, into almost triple digits, but we're still waiting for the seasonal pattern of regular afternoon thunderstorms. The grass that lines the walking path in town has turned brown and brittle under the early summer sun, and there's an anticipation deep in the ground that longs for rain, for greening and growing. Our summer issue opens with the loss of this possibility in Keith Morris's poem "Miasmic," with "dead tendrils lost in their search / for what will not return," and there is a search to regain this buried potential that runs through the work in Issue Thirty-Three. Kristel Rietesel-Low's poem "Property Line" similarly describes "Clay, impenetrable, / covering where prairie once was," and the death of a butterfly in Madison Silva's poem "barely left a shadow of an imprint." There is, however, a mark left on the speaker of that poem, as she considers the effect we've had on the world--not in abstract, but in the very real impact we make on the beings we share this space with. Although this impact often feels like a destruction we can't hope to undo, there is, perhaps, enough that lies dormant to give us that hope. Kelly Terwilliger's poem "Animal Traces" explores a connection between a boy and the world begins to seem both magical and also entirely natural: "not deer, / not boy, / just sprung / into the forest." And at the issue's conclusion, the speaker of David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton's poem finds, at last, "a mustard / seed of (?) faith this iota of trust in no explanation in // unknowing."

Issue Thirty-Three includes poetry and prose by Becky Boling, D. E. Green, David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton, Gregory Meece, Jaime Lam, James B. Nicola, Jamey Gallagher, Jen Schneider, Jimmy T. Christon, John Saint Sylvain, Keith Morris, Kelly Terwilliger, Kristel Rietesel-Low, Madison Silva, Margaret B. Ingraham, Martin Agee, Nicole Gnezda, and Rachel R. Baum, as well as images by Amelia Shields and Kathy Bruce. The cover image is a detail from Kathy Bruce's Intricacies of Connectivity, which appears in this issue.

Here in central Florida, the temperatures have climbed, predictably, into almost triple digits, but we’re still waiting for the seasonal pattern of regular afternoon thunderstorms. The grass …

16/03/2024

In DC this week, the buds on cherry trees began to bloom, a transformation into color and fragrance that reminds us of both the beauty and the brevity of things. This recognition of the temporality of the processes that compose our world--arising, and passing away, and then arising anew--is a theme of our spring issue. This issue begins with music, with the creation of structures out of words: the speaker of Amber Cecile Brodie's poem "Mountain Songs" wants to make four sonnets out of words taken from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. The sentiment is a beautiful one, but it is coupled with loss: "I told you I felt like this / all the time, and maybe that's why / you left." The work in this issue explores these connections between song and word and world and loss, in an effort, perhaps, to take the "one last look" that concludes Becky Boling's poem "Lot's Wife." There is a desire to find beauty here, even if, as DJ Bennett's speaker admits, "I make it more beautiful than it is." The spring brings forth song, but it also reminds us of the tilting toward loss, looking both back in time to recall lost beauty and also forward, recognizing our own perilous fragility.

Issue Thirty-Two includes poetry and prose by Alexandra Risley Schroeder, Amber Cecile Brodie, Angela Townsend, Becky Boling, Bridget Ramsey, D. E. Green, David Capps, David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton, DJ Bennett, DS Maolalai, Elizabeth Birch, Joseph Hunter, Joseph Kenyon, Kathleen Calby, Lisa Ashley, Maggie Russell, Ray Corvi, Rebecca A. Spears, Stephanie Elizabeth Mohr, Steve McCown, and Yalda Al-Ani. The issue's cover art is by W Goodwin, and the issue includes more of Goodwin's work.

In DC this week, the buds on cherry trees began to bloom, a transformation into color and fragrance that reminds us of both the beauty and the brevity of things. This recognition of the temporality…

16/12/2023

Even here in Florida, the winter is a dying back, and the question of what is retained in that death--what truth or beauty remains, and how it will emerge as the world cycles toward spring--is central to our winter issue. In "& Friend," the opening poem by Aiyana Masla, the speaker searches for "a poem that will save your life" by cutting to the core of the present moment, a core that holds beauty in spite of the feeling of imminent loss the poem evokes. Many of the pieces in this issue grapple with loss, with the attempt to hold on to beauty and meaning in the final moments, with the question of what remains when this present folds into an uncertain future. As Marda Messick's "What's Inside Us" concludes, "What's inside us, this being / human, aches"--or Susan Eve Haar's "Seventy": "The body knows, but it's not talking." There is an uncertain transformation that holds the possibility for what Paul Ilechko's sonnet calls "something new and unheard of" in the future beyond the death of the present moment, a future envisioned sometimes as the flight of birds, or in the recognition found in Abigail Myers's "The Sower" that the individual is "the mother bird and the egg and the nest."

Issue Thirty-One includes poetry prose by Abigail Myers, Aiyana Masla, Alan S. Ambrisco, Alex Missall, Bart Edelman, Becky Boling, D. E. Green, Fred Chandler, Jeff Burt, Jen Schneider, John Repp, Jonathan Chibuike Ukah, Liza Libes, Marda Messick, Monica Fuglei, Nancy Nowak, Patricia Zylius, Paul Ilechko, Sandy Feinstein, Steve McCown, and Susan Eve Haar as well as images by GJ Gillespie and Angel T. Dionne. The issue's cover image is a collage by GJ Gillespie.

Even here in Florida, the winter is a dying back, and the question of what is retained in that death–what truth or beauty remains, and how it will emerge as the world cycles toward spring& #82…

02/12/2023

Please join me in congratulating this year's Pushcart nominees! This year, we're nominating work by William Welch, Lily Beaumont, Howie Good, Stephen Barile, VA Smith, and D. E. Green for The Pushcart Prize.

Over the last two months, I’ve spent time revisiting this year’s issues, and I continue to be amazed by and grateful for the work that our contributors generously share. The decision ab…

16/09/2023

In the poem that opens our fall issue, the speaker of William Welch’s “Earth Science” reflects on the beauty of imperfection and change in the rocks and fossils he studies, on the sense he has of the changes that have taken place in himself, and on the fear and also magic implicit in those changes: “I couldn’t explain. Maybe I didn’t want to / admit what was happening.” But the poem itself serves to explain and admit these changes, especially in the sense of ‘admit’ both as acknowledging and also as allowing in. The pieces in this issue explore this theme—many through images of birds and music—acknowledging and investigating the changes that come as the seasons of life move toward death and, perhaps, toward eventual regeneration. From the heron we see “shimmering” in Ahrend Torrey’s “Big Branch Marsh” to the one we find silently “floundering in the ditch” in D. E. Green’s “Blue Heron Blues” to the “seagull-shaped scar” on the face of Townes Van Zandt and the “old footprints” that fly away in David A. Goodrum’s “Lightheaded Near Yaquina Head,” we move through this fall toward winter, until Thao Votang’s “Nocturne” leaves us with only the memory of song: “we’re breathless and then three keys slow. Then two. Then one. Then none.”

Issue Thirty includes poetry and prose by Stephen Barile, Betty Benson, Barbara Daniels, Howie Good, David A. Goodrum, D. E. Green, Holly Guran, Alison Hicks, Susan Jaret McKinstry, Emily Kedar, Sharon Lopez Mooney, Wood Reede, VA Smith, Emily Tee, Ahrend Torrey, Thao Votang, William Welch, Nancy Yang, and James K. Zimmerman and photography by Robert Bulman. The issue's cover image is from the editor, Troy Urquhart.

There’s a longing for fall that has crept into recent conversations as we anticipate the end of a summer that’s brought record-high temperatures to many places. The few early mornings that have bro…

17/06/2023

Many of the pieces in our summer issue confront moments of loss, recognize their inevitability, and work to resist the hardening that can come from sorrow. Marcy Beller Paul's "Saw" seeks transformation in the "butcher[ing] of trees to make way for power lines, and Jeff Burt's "Everything Rural Will Be Razed" concludes in the despair that although brokenness can sometimes bring forth beauty, it is "now / only brokenness." Sometimes, these feelings of loss can be overwhelming—witness Becky Boling's "Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant" or Claire Massey's speaker recognizing that she has "no choice"—but Burt's "Richland Centre, Wisconsin" reminds us that any hardness "can be softened / by a swale of grass," an idea clear in Katie Kalisz's "Hush Now," where the speaker seeks a still and quiet space away from the brokenness and volume of our public discourse, offering us a lullaby in the simplicity of the outdoors. Katie Mora's "Flightline" similarly seeks respite, but with the recognition that loss leaves its mark, and that this "scar tissue" may eventually be a protection, that "it will hurt until it doesn't." It is this sense of moving with and through, not around or away from, that resonates through many of these pieces, as in the closing poem, where Annette Sisson's speaker moves forward, but only with a feeling of the future as familiar territory viewed through new, hard-won eyes.

Issue Twenty-Nine includes work by Amanda Hayden, Amanda Nicole Corbin, Annette Sisson, Becky Boling, Claire Massey, Claudia M. Reder, D. E. Green, Daniel Brennan, Jeff Burt, Julie A. Ryan, Katie Kalisz, Katie Mora, Laura Hope-Gill, Marcy Beller Paul, Roxanne Cardona, Stephen Barile, and Tina Plottel. The issue's cover art is by Hillary Calamaras.

I spent two afternoons recently on the shore of the Atlantic, just an hour or so each day before the late-afternoon storms moved in. It was quiet then on the beach, the stillness set against the mo…

18/03/2023

Our spring issue opens and closes with a warning and celebration of the poetic act. In the issue’s closing piece, the speaker of Andrew Cleary’s “Quiet Bird Death” asserts what ought to be obvious but is made less clear by metaphor: “A nest is a nest.” And in the issue’s opening poem, Lily Beaumont’s “How To Eulogize Oxygen Without Lungs,” the speaker acknowledges the ways that figurative language causes her to “feel gross(er) if you make me spell it out” but also reminds us to “remember it,” pointing back to the poem’s earlier, double-edged use of the phrase “Poetic justice.” This sense of recognizing the limits of things, of seeing their faults, while simultaneously celebrating (I almost wrote adoring) them is present in much of the work that appears in this season’s issue. In Carol Lee Saffioti-Hughes’s poem “The Field Rises, the Field Falls,” for instance, the speaker recalls buying land while acknowledging that the Menominee who have historically lived there “knew / land can never be bought or sold.” Even though this land has been made “barren of its humus / and topsoil” by a previous owner motivated by profit, the speaker and her companion still “scatter native seed” each winter, motivated instead by hope and by a trust that the land will somehow continue to support life, and to live.

Issue Twenty-Eight includes poetry and prose by Stephen Barile, Lily Beaumont, Becky Boling, Ed Brickell, Heather Candels, Andrew Cleary, Steve McCown, K.E. McCoy, Beth McDonough, Brandon Earl McLeod, Sarah Orman, David M. Perkins, Carol Lee Saffioti-Hughes, Rochelle Jewel Shapiro, Eugene Stevenson, Shi-Min Sun, Hannah Jane Weber, Alexander Lazarus Wolff, and Kenton K. Yee. This issue’s cover is an image by the writer, artist, and microbiologist Daphne Fauber.

I spent part of the last week on the west coast, where my morning runs would start along the shoreline at Rockaway Beach and then follow the trail by Calera Creek, with the hills that make up Mori …

17/12/2022

There is a dying back in our winter issue, as befits the season. Alison Davis’s poem “The Poet Revists Herself in Spring” opens the issue and reminds us that “The poet is always here, taking notes,” and “constellating her tender-tongued / self into every season.” But the loss we find in winter serves a cycle of renewal, one that crosses both generational lines and the lines within an evolving self that retains the past while recognizing loss, as the opening line of Daniel Bailey’s prose piece “Clara Barton and Me” asserts: “It turns out at 70 I’m still a first-grader.” There are things, we hear in one of Zoe Dickinson’s poems, that we must let “wilt on the compost heap / to make room for parsley.” The world, it seems, can be something very much like Patrick Ganey’s description of Khlong Toie Market: a “labyrinth of life death and sustenance.”

Issue Twenty-Seven includes poetry and prose from Daniel Bailey, Becky Boling, Beth Copeland, Alison Davis, Zoe Dickinson, Patrick Ganey, Gabby Gilliam, Jack Granath, D. E. Green, Paul Ilechko, Michael McCormick, Steve McCown, Karla Linn Merrifield, Andi Myles, James B. Nicola, Patrick T. Reardon, Julie A. Ryan, Louise Robertson, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, L. G. Rymond, Greg Sendi, Kevin Wi******er, and Marly Youmans. The issue also includes images by W Goodwin, whose “Bear Creek Cottonwood, Denver Suburbs” is this season’s cover image.

Watching tornadoes and snowstorms make their way across the continent this week has reminded me, again, of just how little we are able to control. And that the familiar theme that I suspect many of…

12/11/2022

Please join me in congratulating this year's Pushcart nominees! This year, we're nominating work by Pearl Button, Marion, Betty Stanton, Overcomer Ibiteye, Rich Follett, and Frederick Livingston for The Pushcart Prize.

I’ve just returned from the post office, where this year’s nominations for The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses begin their journey to the Pushcart Press out on the south fork …

17/09/2022

In Issue Twenty-Six, we see a too-familiar tension: on one side, a known and knowing loss, and on the other, a desire for pleasure, for consumption. Donna Glee Williams's "These Days" opens: "Loving the world / is like loving someone in hospice / immeasurably dear to you." But Daniel Edward Moore's "Glory and Back" reminds us that "the ground is loved / by fallen things," and in our conclusion, Jennifer Jordan's "Airport Song" celebrates "the exhilaration of / sleek jets dropping through twilight."

In this issue, you’ll find poetry and prose from Ed Ahern, Tom Barlow, V.A. Bettencourt, Becky Boling, John Brantingham, Ervin Brown, Melinda Coppola, Jess Gersony, D.E. Greene, Rob Hardy, Brooke Hoppstock-Mattson, M.J. Iuppa, Karen Luke Jackson, DB Jonas, Jennifer Jordan, Alex Kraft, Sister Lou Ella, D.S. Maolalai, Daniel Edward Moore, Marion, Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Richard Rubin, Alice Teeter, Jeffrey Thompson, and Donna Glee Williams. The issue’s cover art is a piece by the award-winning photographer Roger Camp.

As we release the fall issue, I wanted to describe the changing of leaves, the turning of seasons, the first hint of a crisp note in the air, but it’s impossible not to acknowledge the recent…

18/06/2022

There is water at the center of the summer issue: the “full body thirst” in Rachel Federman’s short prose, the drowning music of the Shenandoah in Rich Follett’s poem, the push and pull of life’s tides in Katharine Cristiani’s series, the “oceans of glass / creatures” that Noel Wingard’s speaker finds at the edge of the sea. And perhaps, this movement through water allows some purification, some cleansing, some move (however slight) toward hope after the loss expressed in many of the issue’s early pieces: the loss of betrayal, the loss of a child, the loss of naivete and innocence. As, for instance, we see as the narrator of Matthew Krajniak’s “Porch Light” responds to loss by discovering beauty and light in its depth.

In Issue Twenty-Five, you’ll find poetry and prose from Stephen Barile, Andrew Hudson Barter, Kathleen Calby, AG Compaine, Katharine Cristiani, Rachel Federman, Rich Follett, Goddfrey Hammit, Ute Kelly, Matthew Krajniak, George Looney, Rachel Mallalieu, Jessica Lee McMillan, Al Ortolani, Karl Plank, Betty Stanton, Stefan Sullivan, Noel Wingard, and Anastasia Vassos as well as an image by Patricia Merlino and two handmade collages by Howie Good.

I’ve spent the last several days on the west coast, and the cooler temperatures of the Bay Area have been a welcome respite from central Florida’s summer heat. The last couple of mornin…

20/03/2022

Our spring issue, available today online and in print, begins and ends with poems of creation and loss. In the opening poem, Madeleine Gallo's "Naming Fireflies" considers the power of speech, of naming as an act of creation. The speaker considers she "could have been this or that" except that her mother's "naming kiss" brought her into being: "here I am, still bodying words she once exhaled." In the concluding poem, the speaker of Jill Evans's "Afterlife" seems to share this sentiment, seen through a lens of loss and grief. The poem's closing questions the act of speech as it relates to life and the meaning that life has: "as if / all / that lasts / after life / leaves / is words?"

Issue Twenty-Four also includes poetry and prose by J. Adams Oaks, Becky Boling, Jeff Burt, Alice Campbell Romano, Heather Candels, Kenneth Chamlee, Gretchen Gales, D. E. Green, Elisabeth Harrahy, Cheng Him, Overcomer Ibiteye, Steven McCown, James B. Nicola, Mervyn Seivwright, Philip Venzke, and Christian Ward as well as a series of images by David A. Goodrum.

Just a year ago, I walked knee-deep through snow in central Arkansas. This year, here in central Florida, it’s been snow’s liquid sibling that we’ve seen much of. After a long tim…

27/02/2022

Now available from Finishing Line Press, longtime WWR contributor Rob Hardy's poignant new chapbook Shelter in Place includes two poems that first appeared in our seventeenth issue: "Coda" and "Shelter in Place."

When the future, especially under the influence of pandemic, “feels like unclaimed baggage,” Rob Hardy shows us “it’s hard to let go of absence.” In this lovely small collection of poems, dread is the catalyst for new life, and absence is metamorphosed into the new small miracles present a...

19/12/2020

Our nineteenth issue is available today, with poetry and prose by Becky Boling, Matthew Byrne, Holly Day, D. E. Green, John Grey, Meghan Healy, Tina Klimas, John Lambremont Sr., Mary Magagna, Karla Linn Merrifield, David Obuchowski, A. Rabaduex, Roberta “Bobby” Santlofer, Mário Santos, Marly Youmans, and Michael T. Young.

In the poem that opens this season’s issue, Marly Youmans’s “The Changes” describes December as a time “when the crows and ravens stalked around / And je**ed their blu…

31/10/2020

I'm pleased to share this year's nominations for the Pushcart Prize. This year's nominations include work by Maggie Evans McGuinness, John Paul Calavitta, Hope Coulter, Becky Boling, Steven McCown, and Raymond P. Hammond.

I’m just back from the post office over on Main Street, where I put this year’s nominations for The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses in the mail. Here’s a selection from …

19/09/2020

Our eighteenth issue is available today, featuring work from Ed Ahern, Matthew J. Andrews, Becky Boling, Jeff Burt, Megan Elizabeth Goetz, D. E. Green, Dane Hamann, Raymond P. Hammond, Sarah Henry, Andrea Lani, Karla Linn Merrifield, John L. Stanizzi, and Andrew Szilvasy. Digital versions of this issue are free, and perfect-bound print copies of this issue are available for eleven dollars.

07/08/2020

We're reading submissions for our upcoming fall and winter issues, and we'd love to hear from you. Please send us writing that explores, celebrates, interrogates, and/or problematizes the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Guidelines for submissions are available on our website.

23/06/2020

Many thanks to the Northfield News for sharing this news about our summer issue! We were grateful to include work by five talented poets from Northfield, Minnesota, in this issue: Becky Boling, Heather Candels, D. E. Green, Rob Hardy, and Steve McCown.

Five Northfield poets — Becky Boling, Heather Candels, D.E. Green, Rob Hardy and Steve McCown — have poems published in the Summer 2020 issue of “Willows Wept Review,” a small

20/06/2020

Today, we're pleased to share our seventeenth issue, which includes cover art by Pete Follansbee and features poetry and prose by Glenda Barrett, Nichole Brazelton, Becky Boling, Marianne Brems, Rebecca Burns, Heather Candels, Hope Coulter, D. E. Green, John Grey, Rob Hardy, Steve McCown, M. V. Montgomery, Joey Nicoletti, Darrell Petska, and Mindy Watson. Digital copies of the journal are free, and perfect-bound print-on-demand copies are available for twelve dollars.