Literary MagNet
“When it comes to journals, it’s really all
about the editors,” Cohen says. “I can’t
overstate the importance of finding
editors who believe in your work and help,
over the years, to bring readers to it.”
Cohen found such an editor in Rebecca
Morgan Frank of the online biannual
Memorious (memorious.org). Frank
published Cohen’s work in Issues 1, 8, 15,
and 26. “Literary editing has always been an investment in literary
community: We need one another,” says Frank, who started the
journal with Robert Arnold and Brian Green fifteen years ago,
when she was an up-and-coming poet herself, and has since
worked to publish poetry and fiction that bridges generations.
In the latest issue, for example, Frank published emerging poets
Jos Charles and Molly McCully Brown alongside established
poets such as Amy Gerstler. Looking ahead Frank hopes to find
an institutional home, preferably a low-residency MFA program,
for Memorious. Submissions in all genres will open in January- ◆◆ Cohen describes the online literary and technical journal
Terrain.org as an “ambitious mix of literary
genres and photography.” Established in
1997, Terrain.org is focused on place and
publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and
art along with essays by doctoral students
in the sciences, case studies, articles,
and editorials. Editor in chief Simmons
Buntin says the variety of pieces “provide
mutually beneficial perspectives and insight on a common goal,
which is creating more livable communities in the context of a
resilient and biodiverse world.” Cohen singles out one of the
journal’s initiatives, the Letter to America series, which features
more than 160 letters containing prose and poetry from writers,
scientists, politicians, and thinkers, written to the nation after the
2016 presidential election. In March, Trinity University Press will
publish an anthology of the letters, including a poem by Cohen.
Journal submissions in all genres will open on September 3. ◆◆
Cohen, who directs the Writers House at Merrimack College and
the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
says that Jenny Barber, the founding editor of Salamander
(salamandermag.org) has been, “in her modest manner, central
to the Boston poetry world.” Barber, who started the print biannual
in 1992, has worked to publish both
established writers and writers “who’ve
reached artistic maturity and deserve
a wider audience.” She recently passed
the torch to poet José Angel Araguz, who
started as editor in chief in July. Edited at
Suffolk University, Salamander publishes
poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translation,
book reviews, and art. Barber says the
editors want to share work that, like
Cohen’s, has a transformative effect on
the reader. “Andrea’s poems bend and refract reality in surprising
ways,” says Barber. “I often want to laugh and cry at the same time:
Her verbal wit is matched by her ability to render personal loss—
that of family members, love relationships—and recent history with
depth and precision.” Submissions in all genres open October 1.
◆◆ “I love everything about the Threepenny Review: the poems,
the photography, the fiction, the
eloquent range and depth of the
nonfiction, and the newspaper-
like format,” says Cohen, who
credits the review’s quality to
its editor, Wendy Lesser. In 1980 Lesser started the Threepenny
Review (threepennyreview.com), now a highly respected journal of
literary and cultural criticism, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with
a circulation of more than six thousand, in Berkeley, California.
The Summer 2019 issue includes poems by Charles Simic and
Dean Young, fiction by Medardo Fraile, and criticism by Javier
Marías. Submissions open in January 2020. ◆◆ Cohen published
four poems from Nightshade in the online poetr y
journal Diode (diodepoetr y.com), edited by poet
Patty Paine. “I am partial to the understated
design of the online journal, the beauty of the
Diode Editions books, and the stellar poems that
Patty and her colleagues publish,” Cohen says.
Paine, in turn, is a fan of Cohen’s work and has
published the poet multiple times in the journal,
including when she ran poems Bob Hicok and Cohen had written
for each other in Issue 7.1. (“Andrea Cohen, you’re a good egg,”
wrote Hicok; Cohen replied: “...Bob likes his autumn / shaken and
stirred, he likes it / with a side of blizzard....”) Submissions to
Diode are open year-round. –DANA ISOKAWAThe spare, lyric poems in Andrea Cohen’s sixth collection, Nightshade, published by Four
Way Books in September, play with dualities such as bitter and sweet, absence and presence, and silence
and speaking. The title poem goes: “It trades in / poison and // in balms. We / call it bitter- // sweet—what
/ living isn’t?” Aphoristic and witty, Cohen’s poems—some as short as four words—address loss and
intimacy. “The disarming playfulness of her linguistic surface leads to the seriousness of her truths,” says
Salamander editor Jenny Barber. Cohen has published poems in Salamander and more than twenty other
periodicals, including the New Yorker, Poetry, the Atlantic, the Kenyon Review, and the journals listed below.19 POETS & WRITERSad
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