The Blog

Carlo Matos's BIG BAD ASTERISK*

Kristina Marie Darling

In Carlo Matos's stunning third book of poetry, Big Bad Asterisk, readers will find "science projects," Jeopardy matches, and "the blood of princes." It is Matos's ability to seamlessly weave together vastly different points of view that makes his work so compelling. Presented as an ongoing series of annotated prose pieces, much of the work in this formally inventive collection reads as a conversation between different characters, as well as a dialogue between different facets of consciousness. For Matos, all writing, thinking, and living is a collaborative act, an idea that is gracefully enacted in the form of the poems themselves.

L. Annette Binder's RISE

Anika Gupta

In this engaging debut collection of short stories, L. Annette Binder probes the psyches not of heroes, but of monsters, turning the lens of the fairy tale on itself. When I first read the list of story titles, heavy with allusions—Galatea, Nod—I was afraid of finding myself in the well-trod territory of the reinvented Grimm tale. But Binder’s collection is unusual in the way it straddles the divide between fairy tale and normal life. There is no magic, and there are no talking beasts. Instead, Binder's monsters are ordinary people marked by physical and mental deformities: freakish height, the ability to speak dead languages. For them, the realm of the fairy tale is a lonely, isolated one, an internal landscape of beauty set against a reality that is often twisted and bleak.

Winners of the 2013 Iowa Review Awards

TIR Staff

We're thrilled to announce the following winners and runners-up of the 2013 Iowa Review Awards. These stories, essays, poems, and photos will appear in our December 2013 issue. Thanks to all who entered, and thanks to our judges, Susan Orlean (nonfiction), Mary Jo Bang (poetry), ZZ Packer (fiction), and Alec Soth and Kathleen Edwards (photography).

Nonfiction

Winner: Laura Lynn Brown (left; Little Rock, AR), "Fifty Things about My Mother"
Runner-up: Meghan Flaherty, "Womb"

New issue of Anomalous + call for submissions

TIR staff

Our pals at Anomalous Press have just released their newest issue! It's available online, via, Kindle, as a PDF, and as an audiobook (!!).

They write:

We present to you Anomalous 9, and we hope that when you're finished, you might come back, or at least give us away. We want to be repossessed. We want to be the enigmatic jewels that thieves leave behind, like the re-painted myths and revolving language of retold histories. This issue is full of them. There are always more layers to peel, but you can start by looking under the sheets to find:

Patricia Vigderman's POSSIBILITY: ESSAYS AGAINST DESPAIR

Jacqueline Kolosov

Possibility: Essays Against Despair, Patricia Vigderman's second book, shares affinities with her first, The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Associative in nature, the essays assembled here cross genres, encompassing biography, memoir, art history, natural history, and film studies, to name just a few of the subjects that Vigderman brings into dialogue. In the introduction “Seeing Double,” Vigderman describes the evolution of the collection as follows: