The Call: An Anthology of Women's Writing: Updated!

The following is an excerpt of a review of The Call: An Anthology of Women's Writing by Caroline Malone at the Monserrat Review. You can read the complete review here.

In the anthology’s title poem, “The Call,” by Calder Lowe, the mundane sound of a train whistle transports the speaker back three centuries to the landscape of her ancestors” – glass blowers in the Black Forest, kin carrying Lafayette “off the battlefield”, the Von Eberhardt’s glowing furnaces – where fragments of history lead her back to the recent past. Her ancestors’ craft sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, glass being a difficult medium with which to work. The speaker imagines “Some of the goblets flower, some crack.” The church bells that end stanza one are then heard at the end of the poem where the immediate past is recalled in which a single mother abandons her children, her son left at “an orphanage / tucked behind the spire of a Presbyterian Church,” her creations left behind. The speaker carries her history as part of her identity, and one sound, the whistle of the train, collapses the divisions of time allowing the speaker to connect with the past.

The writers represented in The Call are summoned to memory and respond with a wide palette of voices to bear witness to the lives of extraordinary ordinary women: daughters, granddaughters, mothers, lovers, caretakers, sisters, adolescents who celebrate life.

CONTRIBUTORS include:

Cynthia Benson, Grace Cavalieri, K.E. Copeland, Carolyn Dille, Sharon Doyle, Jean Emerson,
Blanca Espinosa, Anne Gelhaus, Cynthia W. Gentry, Lara Gularte, Parthenia M. Hicks, Kathie Isaac-Luke, Calder Lowe, Margaret Luongo, Patricia McKeown, B.L.P. Simmons, Mary Lou Taylor, and Roberta Young

Available today, exclusively from
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Full Moon on K Street: Poems about Washington DC

Plan B Press will release a new print anthology in January 2010, edited by Kim Roberts, the publisher of the acclaimed online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Full Moon On K Street: Poems About Washington, DC will include 101 poems, written by current and former residents of the city between 1950 and the present.




Featuring over one hundred contemporary poems, the book captures DC's unique sense of place, from monuments to parks, from lawyers to bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes. All poems were written between 1950 and the present, by past and current residents of the city. This anthology captures the city's many moods: celebratory, angry, and fiercely political.

Contributors include: two-time US Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore; DC's first Poet Laureate, Sterling A. Brown; senator and five-time presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy; Cervantes prize winner for lifetime achievement in Spanish-language literature, Jose Emilio Pacheco; renowned gay rights activist Essex Hemphill; and President Obama's official inauguration poet, Elizabeth Alexander.

Preorder from Plan B Press now and get 25% off!

Deadline Extended until Jan. 15 for Love Rise Up Anthology

EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JANUARY 15.

Phil Young and Steve Fellner have been asked to co-edit an anthology for Benu Press; its working title is Love Rise Up. Both have been invested in the literary world for some time. Steve wrote and published a book of poems entitled Blind Date with Cavafy (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007) and a memoir entitled All Screwed Up (Benu Press, 2009); Phil has published in literary magazines such as Antioch Review.

The focus of the anthology is on contemporary poets and poems that succeed on the following levels: 1.) The poem deals with social justice, not simply a social issue. In other words there has to be some action or suggestion of resistance or dealing with a social issue, not just having a social issue somewhere in the background. 2.) The poem offers an element of hope. This hope can be somewhat ambiguous, but at least some level of hope has to be detectable to the average reader. Think “Daybreak in Alabama ” by Langston Hughes. 3.) The poem is an “accessible narrative or lyric that contains elements of genuine drama or comedy.” 4.) If the poem were a movie, it would have to receive somewhere between a G and PG-13 rating.

Phil and Steve would really like to include a poem of yours in Love Rise Up.

If interested, please send us a poem(s) as a Word document to sfellner at brockport dot edu or pyoung at brockport dot edu We’d happily look at new work or previously published. The editors are responsible for paying all fees, so waivers are appreciated. Contributors will include D.A. Powell, Martin Espada (Spit This Rock Featured Poet 2008 and 2010), Denise Duhamel, Rigoberto Gonzalez, David Kirby, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Barbara Hamby, Cheryl Dumesnil, Fady Joudah (Split This Rock Featured Poet 2010), Rebecca Livingston (a past Sunday Kind of Love Feature), Alison Joseph, Laura Kasischke, Idra Novey, Eliot Khalil Wilson, Martha Collins Split This Rock Featured Poet 2010), David Baker, Jason Schneiderman, Minnie Bruce Pratt, among others.

When the anthology appears (in Fall 2010, tentatively), all contributors will receive one copy. Please call 585-637-4607 or e-mail the editors if you have any questions.

If you know that you will be offering something, please let the editors know by January 15. Please send this to anyone who you think may be interested.