Free State Review

29/03/2024

I'm hosting a poetry reading in three days at The Alley Downtown Taproom and I can't find my rabbit ears or my basket of straw or my eggs.

16/03/2024

New in the Bubby--

from his lawn chair in the Lakeside photo, right hand Hoisting the three-pounder Like the long weight of one of His past marriages. I think this Because he is nearly smiling Beneath his 12-inch bea…

13/02/2024

"The speaker has tracked a version of himself to a riverbank and observes him disposing of the bodies of yet other versions of himself" (Eli Burrell)

Eli Burrell is one of my favorite magazine contributors (Issue 2). We have almost nothing in common. He plays guitar, I smash them. He trims his face hair so neatly. I tend to look like a geranium …

08/02/2024

05/01/2024

A good mail day

01/01/2024

Some daze are always the Solstice of something. New in the Bubbler:

Nothing but taillights for miles, the red pain receding day by day but still a low throb of grief. My feet are not yet cold. The air blues and cools, a heavy velvet front of cloud descends. This is…

01/12/2023

Meghan Trainor’s jump blues ballad got a makeover last night in the Coachella Valley desert, with flashing disco club lights and enough air kisses and winks and rocking hips to raise the craven dead in all of us. Keisha D leaned into all the low ones to push into her diaphragm, and propped back to...

27/10/2023

Joanna Acevedo stirs up so many body details in this essay. She has a new chapbook from WTAW press.

By Joanna Acevedo Pouring sugar on a cut will make it heal faster, the sugar granules soaking up the moisture that the bacteria would have fed on. I learned from a young age that a man wants nothin…

15/09/2023

The dark and the light are neck and neck again. So they seem to be in every poem by Jan LaPerle. Maybe the Land Sings Back is not a book of platitudes and happy endings. In fact, this is the anti-platitude book.

. [with 3 poems by Jan LaPerle] . Cupboard . One day I decide I’ll do something good for people, but I forget, then I nap. My daughter wants to make lemon cake so we do that. I stand on the s…

11/08/2023

Murray most seriously considers the line between “what is forbidden” and “another person’s vulnerability.”
Here's a sharp review of Jessica Murray's Breakfast in Fur

In a world no longer quiet with belief, Breakfast in Fur, Jessica Murray’s debut collection of poetry, refuses to entertain naïve assumptions by imparting a sense that what peace there was, has bee…

08/07/2023

OUR OPEN SUBMISSION PERIOD FOR MANUSCRIPTS is all summer long from butterflies to cicadas or whatever six legged flying / jumping thing chirps until September. About half the writers who have sent us a book or a chappie included an artist statement--there's still time to upload one if you haven't al...

05/06/2023

New poems up from Galileo poet Matt Graham

Matthew Graham: "We sometimes talk about our fathers. / The misunderstandings and conflicts, / The small hurts and slights that grow comical with time."

29/05/2023

We have some rocker poetry and books out NOW.

With every vision there’s the opposite of vision. Ordinary, drab, skating out on Kierkegaard’s frozen lake of indecision. Where roads lead to no familiar. Theories of madness don’t interest you, nearer to the window seat of being. In the end maybe I’m only here for beauty. The soft curve of ...

06/02/2023

Can't wait to join Matt Hohner and Jennifer Keith tomorrow, February 6th for my monthly Poetry Open Mic at Manor Mill.

Matt Hohner has won or placed in numerous national and international poetry competitions, including wins in the Doolin International Poetry Prize in Ireland, the Oberon Magazine Poetry Prize, and the Maryland Writers' Association Prize. An editor with Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s first collection Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House) was published in 2018.

Jennifer Keith is a web content writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Her poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nebraska Review, Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendid, and elsewhere. In 2021 her poem “Cooper’s Hawk” was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace.

Let's get creative together! https://manor-mill.com/poetry

01/12/2022

"Can we, a bower of roses, hold the rain
on our lips..."
Evalyn Lee is in the Bubbler

It is your birthday, my birthday, your name,my name, you, my everloving, whatsyourname? Is it inevitable, will I say, as you do, as your motherdid, it is so terrible of me, can you believe it, I fo…

12/11/2022

Tobias Wolff is in the Telescope with a soldier story, "Wingfield," we published in 1983. We're happy to have legged him up on his writing career.

When we arrived at the camp they pulled us off the buses and made us do push-ups in the parking lot. The asphalt was hot and tar stuck to our noses. They made fun of our clothes and took them away from us. They shaved our heads until little white scars showed through, then filled […]

09/08/2022

Nice to read out again!

Back in April, the lovely Evelyn read us some poetry at The Alley Downtown Taproom.