birds, not birdcages
Check out Michael Dumanis in conversation with The Review Review, where he discusses the journal’s past, its current iteration and focus, and its plans for the future: https://bit.ly/2DoRl4Q
“A searing story of a crumbling marriage.” - Pravesh Bhardwaj
“It’s the kind of journal that may no longer make sense in 2018, because the goal, for me, is to have a print journal flourish at a time when fewer and fewer people are reading print periodicals. Or maybe that’s precisely why it makes sense.”
Readers
Natalie Eilbert, Anna Maria Hong, Christine Hume, Hilary Plum, Sandra Simonds, Analicia Sotelo, Catherine Taylor, Rebecca Wolff
Saturday, March 10 at 7:00PM
Four Green Fields at Curtis Hixon Park
702 Ashley Drive,
North Tampa 33602
(a seven-minute walk from Tampa Convention Center)
Poetry Foundation
"Issue Four of the Bennington Review is out, and while most of it must be read while holding the actual journal, a few online features dot the table of contents, including a re-presentation of a 1980 interview between John Ashbery and David Remnick. "This historical document captures Ashbery's thoughts and insights just a few years after his trifecta win of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," write the editors."
—Harriet Staff
Originally Published: January 31st, 2018
"As a reader, I hope I never lose the sense of wonder that comes from watching worlds unfold from just a few scant lines and breaks swallowed by negative space. There’s a special, charged energy when I read a poem. My expectations (as much as I try to downplay them) are calibrated around an amorphous space of abstraction and observation, of craft and purpose.
Maybe this is why long poems are so very special to me as a reader and a writer. The ability to stay within that space, to push the edges of where a poem wants to go and what it wants to say, for pages and pages is a wonder to me..."
—Nix Thérèse
ISSUE 3
William Brewer
"Today I Took You to Our Oxyana High School Reunion"
Mary Ruefle
"Chain of Flowers"
Natalie Shapero
"Pennsylvania"
ISSUE 4
Julia Anna Morrison
"Treatment"
ISSUE 3
Su-Yee Lin
"A Flock, A Siege, A Murmuration"
Marco Wilkinson
"Hidden Light, Wooden Ladder,
Bucket of Clay, Pillar of Water"
ISSUE 4
Jakub Geltner, “Cultural Landscape”
“Cultural Landscape,” the cover image by Jakub Geltner that kicks off Issue Three: Threat, is a special kind of eye-catcher. A slice of pizza hangs precariously over a table’s edge, its cheese replaced by grass, its toppings swapped for uprooted trees and tumbling cars caught up in some unfamiliar landslide, slipping toward an undefined kind of doom.
The mood set, Editor Michael Dumanis explains that the issue’s theme threat was chosen on November 10, 2016, two days after “a certain historical event.” He writes that, as a result of this sudden sense of dislocation and anxiety, the editors “gravitated toward poems and stories and essays where paradigms where [sic] similarly disrupted, where characters suddenly found themselves destabilized by external forces, where institutions and individuals in which we’d placed our trust failed to hold up their end of the bargain.”
“With an extraordinarily light touch, Lauren Haldeman glides us through the peregrinations of grief and delight with a revivifying play and formal resourcefulness. Instead of Dying shows us that whimsy, that the imagination sustains life.”
—Dean Young
“Each of the seven sections of Instead of Dying delivers singular shocks and unanswerable questions. Guided by great figures in the history of science, these poems court the mystery lying beyond the precision of language and symbols in ‘the spell of the world pouring down.’ Lauren Haldeman’s writing opens us toward the work of mourning. Did I say work? Rather call it song.”
—Susan Howe
“In this searing book, Lauren Haldeman designs a series of intricate afterlives for her lost brother, braiding these memorials with poignant lyrics that chart the personal outlines of grief. Haldeman offers these poems as acts of generosity, but be warned: her ‘crystalline path’ is a sharp one, to be walked not by the dead, but by those left behind to make sense of loss. Instead of Dying is part elegy, part star map, part book of cures. Here, the body may be healed by syringes filled with sunlight, by secret walks in the woods, and above all, by language itself, which emerges, powerfully, to move us toward the light of forgiveness even in our darkest hour.”
—Kiki Petrosino
Keya Mitra
“My Child of Stone,” Issue 2
David Stuart Maclean
"Golden Friendship Club," Issue 1
Tanya McQueen
"After Water Comes the Fire," Issue 2
“Misbegotten Youth," Issue 2
Ed. by Michael Dumanis
Benjamin Anastas is the author of the novels An Underachiever’s Diary (Dial Press) and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance (FSG). His memoir Too Good to Be True (Little A) was a national bestseller. His essays, reviews, short fiction, and other work have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Bookforum, and The Best American Essays anthology. He teaches literature at Bennington College and is on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program.
ISSUE 1
David Stuart MacLean
"Golden Friendship Club"
(Honorable Mention)
ISSUE 2
Erika Dawson
"Condition"
CLMP named Bennington Review the Best Debut Magazine as part of their 2017 Firecracker Awards Ceremony on June 6 at Poets House in New York City. Learn more about the Firecracker Awards here.
Issue 2 contributor Deb Olin Unferth was featured in Poets & Writers, as part of the magazine's Literary MagNet series. Click here to read the full article.
Friday, February 10th, 2017
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Free admission. Copies of Bennington Review and Oversound, food, and drinks will be available for purchase.
Readers
Sara Deniz Akant, Ari Banias, Julie Carr, Dan Chelotti, Erica Dawson, Robert Fernandez, James Allen Hall, Paul Killebrew, Evan Lavender-Smith, Adrienne Raphel, Lindsay Turner, Candace Williams, Ronaldo Wilson, Jane Wong, Ryo Yamaguchi, and Magdalena Zurawski.
New interviews with some of our Issue 2 contributors, including Samuel Amadon, Nicolas Delbanco, Alex Dimitrov, Shane Jones, Evan Lavender-Smith, LaTanya McQueen, Keya Mitra, Paisley Rekdal, Ahuva Rogers, Mathias Svalina, Gale Marie Thompson, and Deb Olin Unferth are now available on our site!
Poetry Daily featured Jessica Fisher's poem, "Prague, Late December, 1989," from Issue 2 of Bennington Review.