Issue 1:1 Now Available!

New Verse Review 1.1: Summer 2024

The inaugural issue of New Verse Review poetry journal is now available. It is free to read, so check it out at www.newversereview.com. I put some thought into the order of the poems, so if you have the time you might get something out of reading through the issue from beginning to end. (For instance, the trio of poems that brings the issue to a close—Jared Carter’s “Ötzi,” Michael Angel Martín’s “The Incorruptible,” and Marly Youmans’s “Saint Thief”—resonate with each other in particularly interesting ways.)

Below, I offer a sampler of seven sonnets from the first issue. Before turning to the sonnets, though, I’d like to thank some people who helped make this issue a reality. First, I want to thank all the submitters for sharing their work with a fledgling endeavor. Second, I want to thank my wise and incredibly helpful advisory editors: Boris Dralyuk, Claudia Gary, A.M. Juster, Amit Majmudar, Sally Thomas, and Marly Youmans. Matthew King provided the cover image for the first issue. The following kind souls offered advice, helped spread the word, or otherwise encouraged the project: Annie Knepper, Katie Ann Knepper, James Matthew Wilson, Mary Finnegan, Mary Ann Miller, Matthew Buckley Smith, Rob McDonald, Mattie Quesenberry Smith, Matthew Wickman, Ethan McGuire, Joseph Bottum, Micah Mattix, Carter Johnson, Felicity Teague, Rusty Barnes, Alex Rettie, and Zara Raab.

NVR will always be free to read. In a few days, though, I will turn on donations and optional paid subscriptions. Many, many thanks to all of you have already pledged support. All money raised will be used for NVR—first to cover startup costs, next to upgrade to a submission management system, and then to expand in some exciting ways.

And now, on to the sonnets!

“The Pitcher’s Arm” by Benjamin Myers

To find the saplings lanky in the field,
awkwardly stretched toward flat, indifferent sun,
growing through anthills, sparse grass, and earth peeled
bare by high wind; to find the seedlings run
down by the mower blade and tossed aside,
the piles of brush, cut sycamore and oak,
heaped up against the summer’s waxing tide
of yellowed grass in air as furred as smoke;
is finding something out about almost,
not quite, and could have been: the pitcher’s arm
grown heavy in the minor leagues, the ghost
of young glory sent back to haunt the farm.
The world is crammed with what’s not there, not quite,
as saplings rise to die in gold-flecked light.

“Bacchus Departs the Camp of Mark Antony” by Benjamin Myers

A clash of cups and bowls splashes the night.
The naked captain rolls beneath the fleece
and knows that all is done, tomorrow’s fight
the last, the rest a silence they’ll call peace.
He listens to the timbrels and the calls
that trail between the tents and out of camp.
The sounds of revelry fade, and silence falls.
The breath from night’s slack lungs is cold and damp.
He marvels at so little left among
us mortals when the god’s abundance flees.
He strains to hear a distant drinking song
that’s really just the wind through broken trees.
At dawn he’ll rise, take up his shield, his sword,
his doom. The man must die; the god is bored.

Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 poet laureate of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry and three books of nonfiction. His work has appeared in Image, The Yale Review, Measure, and many other places. He has written essays for many prominent journals and magazines and is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic. He teaches at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he also directs the Great Books Honors Program. Myers' most recent book is The Family Book of Martyrs.

“Alumni Magazine: Class Obituaries” by Maryann Corbett

a bouts-rimés on Shakespeare’s sonnet 5

On separate pages, each in its black frame:
faces of classmates dead. Stop there. Now dwell
on age and loss. You are, and aren’t, the same
as that green graduate, furious to excel,
who Was. But here’s bright memory, flickering on:
Views from a third-floor dorm room shimmer there
in the mind’s eye, although the dorm is gone.
Crape myrtle and magnolia everywhere
scent those recalled all-nighters, fragrance left
muted, like perfume stored in stoppered glass.
Breathe now. Even bereaved, you’re not bereft
of what you knew. Remember how it was,
since memory alone is where you meet
those days, those nights when even pain was sweet.

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books of poems, most recently The O in the Air from Colosseum Books / Franciscan University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Image, Raritan, and many other journals, and in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and Best American Poetry 2018. She is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.

“Fennec Foxes” by David W. Landrum

Huge ears (you notice them at once) atop
a head too small, it seems, to bear their weight;
a rodent: thin, diminutive; backdrop
of desert sand and dunes. When they would slake
their thirst but can’t find water, they burrow
into the earth, deep, where the sand is cool;
their body heat, much warmer than the furrow’s
base temperature, condenses (by the rule
of chemical formation) elements
of oxygen and hydrogen; and, soon,
water to drink is formed. The moments spent
beneath the sand becomes the creature’s boon,
granted by God, instinct, or by nature—
amazing, whatever the nomenclature.

David W. Landrum has published poetry in numerous journals, including New Oxford Review, Measure, Autumn Sky, Pulsebeat, and The Orchards. Two volumes of his poetry—The Impossibility Of Epithalamia and Tawney Grammar are available for purchase.

“Sunflowers” by Erica Mapp

(Dried Sunflower Stalks, a painting by Vincent Van Gogh)

Seedy sunflowers, modest as they are, 
Symbolize friendship, love and gratitude. 
Savor this gift. It’s not much, but perhaps 
Sincerity is all we ever need. 
Since friendship is so poor and what we get 
Sometimes is not enough to meet our needs, 
Small joys should not be scorned as if they’re weeds. 
Severed from roots, no earthly flowers live, 
Still, cut sunflowers, like the love of man, 
Strike a high yellow note. Honest and rough, 
Sunflowers smile with such beatitude, 
Simply all heart; their hearts portray them best. 
So if love fades, its buried seeds will live; 
Sure as the Spring, these seeds have more to give. 

Artist and poet Erica Mapp, originally from Trinidad, lives in New York City. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and periodicals in the U.S. and abroad. She is working on a poetry manuscript and a book of essays based on the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. She is a Cave Canem Fellow. In 2017 she received a Walker Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

“Turmoil” by Claudia Gary

It brought you here. Where is your gratitude,
slamming the door like that? Thanks for the ride! 
you should have said. Instead, stubborn and rude,
you stomp along the sidewalk lost in pride,
thinking of ways to even out the score.
You rage, fixate, obsess and agonize.
What’s worse, you’re plodding just when you should soar
and raise your head, serene, with open eyes.

It tries to leave without you but you call it
back from its expedition around town                      
and it obeys. You grab your coat and wallet,
hop in again. The engine’s wearing down     
and burning oil. Blue smoke from the exhaust
signals, Get out, get out, before you’re lost.

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and several chapbooks, most recently Genetic Revisionism, she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal art songs and chamber music. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is available online. Her chapbooks are available via the email address at pw.org/content/claudia_gary.

“On Sometimes Smelling Smoke” by Matthew King

You smell it sometimes when you’ve been away.
There once had been a fire, the neighbours say;
it’s one of many things they’d have you know
you only know because they said so—they
were here; they saw the flashing engines go
around your bend. They heard the sirens slow.
They point out where your window frames are grey.
You wouldn’t find the signs; they hardly show,
except the one the damp brings after rain:
that smell like spirits smokers left behind.
To visitors who notice you explain
you’re used to it, you really can’t complain.
You wonder, though, what else has slipped your mind
that’s seeped so deep and silent in your brain.

Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada; he now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville", where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. His photos and links to his poems can be found at birdsandbeesandblooms.com.