The Blog

Mark Bibbins's THEY DON'T KILL YOU BECAUSE THEY'RE HUNGRY, THEY KILL YOU BECAUSE THEY'RE FULL

Adam Day

One of the most engaging poems in Mark Bibbins’s smart and enjoyable third book of poetry, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, is “Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No.1,” the first of a series of six such poems, and which opens with these lines: “First I was fellating an African despot / for his diamonds, next I was paying / a hooker to give me back / my teeth.” When first encountering lines like these, you can’t necessarily be blamed for wondering who still cares about irony and “soft surrealism” (a phenomenon in which strange events occur that seem to invoke surrealism or the absurd, but with little to no substantive socio-political or ontological substance), particularly given the overabundance and the poor h

Free, full-text online archive!

TIR staff

We're delighted to announce the launch of our free digital archive, ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview, which contains the full text of virtually all the writing published in The Iowa Review from its founding in 1970 through 2011. The archive comprises 130 issues of the magazine and 5,752 individual poems, essays, and stories, searchable by volume, author name, and title. The site also includes links to the most frequently downloaded pieces, as well as a world map displaying real-time readership.

Issues from the most recent three years continue to remain accessible only to subscribers, bookstore patrons, and those who order copies through our website. Excerpts of work from the current and recent issues appear at iowareview.org/content/issues.

Etgar Keret's giving a talk at the UI 10/22! Here's his "Fatso" from our archives...

TIR staff

Etgar Keret—Israeli writer, former IWP visiting writer, and TIR contributor—will be giving a lecture and signing books at the University of Iowa this Thursday! More info here. 

We published his short story "Fatso" in our Fall 2002 issue. Here it is. (If this doesn't make you want to go his lecture, what will?!)

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FATSO

"Gazing at maps" and glimpsing poetry: TRIBUTARIES by Laura Da'

Alanna Hickey

Tributaries, the first book-length collection by Shawnee poet Laura Da’, begins with a scene of childbirth by Caesarean section. With an “abrasion that draws the past glistening into the present,” this commanding debut opens with a reflection on openings—the ruptures in our histories, geographies, and bodies that, following Da’s attentive gaze, demand we take a closer look. In poems that intertwine personal memoir, familial past, traditional Shawnee storytelling, and the history of Indian Removal, Da’ sifts through the painful records of Shawnee life under U.S. colonial power to remind us that archives, too, can come “glistening into the present.” 

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