Doubleback Review is Seeking Short-Form Previously Published Works

Doubleback Review is currently seeking submissions for issue 3:2! We are a part of Doubleback Press, a small press specializing in republishing creative works that were originally published by now-defunct journals and presses. Doubleback Review has also had a special edition for conscientiously withdrawn pieces—works that were withdrawn from journals because of harmful behavior from an editor. We are a home for your retired darlings, and we are also committed to uplifting the voices of marginalized creators.

We are open for submissions year-round and accept poetry, short stories, artwork, and more short-form work. Poets should send up to five poems and prose writers should send up to 4,000 words total—one story or essay, or up to three shorter flash pieces—in one document (Word preferred). Please begin each piece on a separate page. Include your name and email address at the top of each page. Below each piece, specify where it was previously published.

Artists may send one high-resolution image in .JPG, .JPEG, .PNG, or .PDF format, up to 25 MB in size. Please include an artist statement and specify where the piece was previously published in the cover letter field.

Our full submission guidelines can be found here.

Doubleback Books Announces the Release of Wendy Carlisle’s Discount Fireworks

Doubleback Books announces the release of Wendy Carlisle’s Discount Fireworks. Originally published in 2008 by Jacaranda Press, Discount Fireworks is grounded in the specific and personal, showing the universal truth of emotion that extends beyond the speaker and the situation of the poem.

Wendy Carlisle’s poems explore the minutiae of contemporary life, from a childhood in the 1950s to Hurricane Katrina and the thinning glaciers of the twenty-first century. Haunted by the Ozarks of her native Arkansas, the poet explores topics ranging from vampires to Adam and Eve to life in the Andromeda Galaxy. Carlisle’s poems range from sonnets to syllabics to free verse, taking us through an Arkansas landscape touched by wind and water, patois and the rocky Ozark soil. Discount Fireworks is a hymn to landscape and personal identity, a reminder of the interconnectedness of daily existence. Haunting and beautiful, Carlisle’s poems will transport you into an otherworldly plane grounded in everyday joys.

Download your copy of Discount Fireworks on the Doubleback Books website: https://doublebackbooks.wordpress.com/discount-fireworks-by-wendy-t-carlisle/

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books, Reading Berryman to the Dog, Discount Fireworks, The Mercy of Traffic, and On the Way to the Promised Land Zoo, and five chapbooks. See her work online and in print in Persimmon Tree, pacificREVIEW, 2RiverView, Mom Egg, San Pedro River Review, Atlanta Review, and others. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, has been anthologized, and has 12 times been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. For more information, her website is www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com.

Doubleback Books Announces the Release of Terese Svoboda’s Treason

Doubleback Books announces the release of Terese Svoboda’s Treason. A book centered on betrayals with a wry and feminist eye, these poems speak out against injustice and hold a mirror to our own flaws.

Treason is sometimes funny, sometimes strange, and always hard-hitting, covering motherhood, the toll of the 2002 civil war in Sudan, the Rodney King protests in L.A., and much more. Svoboda’s poems shine a torch on injustice and betrayal inside our public and intimate institutions. Treason’s topics are unfortunately timeless, the poems themselves worthy of mythology.

Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell and many other collections writes, “Cool, wry surface: depth charge of cry, of outrage, language at the edge of utterance, utterly original, black-bordered, indelible as we are not.” D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys adds, “These poems seethe with dangers so close to home they seem to teeter on that frightening edge between comic and tragic.”

Pre-order your copy of Treason HERE.

The author of 19 books of poetry, fiction, memoir, biography, and translation, Terese Svoboda will publish Theatrix: Play Poems (Anhinga Press), in 2021. A Guggenheim fellow, she has been awarded the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, and other prizes. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.’s Disney Hall.

Doubleback Books is an imprint of Sundress Publications. More information can be found HERE.

Doubleback Books Call for Submissions

Doubleback Books, a Sundress Publications imprint, is now open for submissions by authors of out-of-print books. At Doubleback Books, we believe that out of print should not mean out of mind. Although other publishers rescue works that have fallen into the public eye from obscurity, few reprint books from small, independent presses that have folded during the twenty-first century and (often through no fault of their own) left new, exciting books to go out of print before their time. 

If you are the author of a book that has recently gone out of print because of a press closure, we want to read it. We are hosting an open reading period from March to May 2020.  Authors of works that have gone out of print due to their original press folding may submit full-length or short books, including novels, novellas, chapbooks, short story collections, poetry collections, essay collections, and memoirs. Editors may also submit out-of-print manuscripts their presses published before closing. To be eligible, works must have been both published and out of print after the year 2000. 

Accepted manuscripts will be released as free downloadable e-books on the Sundress Publications website. Previous titles include Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s The Opposite of Work, Colleen S Harris’ These Terrible Sacraments, and Virginia Chase Sutton’s What Brings You to Del Amo. 

To submit, email the following to doubleback@sundresspublications.com:

  • Your manuscript(s) in .PDF or .DOC format 
  • A brief cover letter in the body of the email telling us a little bit about your work and yourself and noting the genre of the manuscript
  • The name of the manuscript’s original publisher
  • The name and contact information of the publisher’s former editor-in-chief, if available 

Please note: we do not republish translated work or previously self-published work. 

Doubleback Books is an imprint of Sundress Publications. More information can be found here.

Doubleback Announces Newest Release: “The Opposite of Work”

Doubleback Books, an imprint of Sundress Publications, is pleased to announce the upcoming release of The Opposite of Work by Hugh Behm-Steinberg. This poetry collection was selected in our 2019 open reading period for fall publication. The Opposite of Work was originally published by JackLeg Press and we’re excited to bring it back for new readers. 

The meditative poems in The Opposite of Work are paired with intriguing images on opposite-facing pages. The images, which operate as a flipbook, were created by Mary Behm-Steinberg. Doubleback will also release a companion video of the book.

On The Opposite of Work—

“Hugh Behm-Steinberg has built a dream-rattled space. It is a space of stretched ideas and ideals,” Tony Mancus, PANK.

“Delicately explores the effort to come to terms with one’s own soul and the Other,” Charles Kruger, The Rumpus.

“Extraordinary magic and possibility,” S. Marie Clay, Ghost Town.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is a poet and short fiction writer. His books of poetry include Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books, 2007), as well as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery (2007), Good Morning! (2011), and The Sound of Music (2015). A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, is forthcoming from Nomadic Press in January, 2020.

Behm-Steinberg is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA fellowship. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize for short fiction, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018. From 2007-2017 he served as Faculty Editor of Eleven Eleven, and he is currently the Chief Steward of the adjunct faculty union at California College of the Arts.

Look for The Opposite of Work, book download and video, coming soon at Doubleback Books.

Website: sundresspublications.com/doubleback             Facebook: DoublebackBooks
Email: doubleback@sundresspublications.com               Twitter: @DoublebackP

Sundress Announces the Launch of Doubleback Review

Doubleback_Header_ImageSundress Announces the Launch of Doubleback Review

Sundress Publications announces the launch of Doubleback Review, a publication that believes out-of-print should not mean out of mind. Adopting the singular mission of Doubleback Books, the Sundress imprint that reprinted Virginia Chase Sutton’s What Brings You to Del Amo and Sarah J. Sloat’s In the Voice of a Minor Saint, Doubleback Review will print pieces of any genre that were published by a journal that subsequently became defunct. In fact, Doubleback will only publish previously-published work from journals that no longer exist, a notably rare commission for a small indie publication.

“In a churn and burn culture, to revisit and reflect is a luxury. Doubleback Review wants to hit the pause button on art that may slip from the public’s eye (and therefore lose its potential for connection). It wants to resurrect your retired darlings, your dead art, your beautiful zombies — pieces that, like rare and precious artifacts, are worth dusting off, airing out, and putting out on display. Let Doubleback’s talented team of editors help you recirculate your valuable relics, and offer them one more triumphant day in the sun.” –Doubleback Review website

The inaugural masthead includes Krista Cox as Managing Editor, Anna Black as Poetry Editor, Samantha Edmonds as Fiction Editor, and Nilsa Rivera as Nonfiction Editor. The team also includes a suite of associate editors and a social media editor.

Doubleback Review will accept submissions on a rolling basis for two issues to be published in April and October. Submissions are free. Writers from traditionally marginalized communities are particularly encouraged to submit their work. For additional information, including submission guidelines and staff bios, visit http://doublebackreview.com/ You can also find Doubleback on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

 

Coming Soon from Doubleback Books: These Terrible Sacraments by Colleen S. Harris

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Doubleback Books Selects These Terrible Sacraments
by Colleen S. Harris for 2018 Open Reading Period

Doubleback Books is pleased to announce the upcoming release of These Terrible Sacraments by Colleen S. Harris. This poetry collection was selected in our 2018 open reading period for Spring 2019 publication. These Terrible Sacraments was originally published by Bellowing Ark Press out of Seattle, and we are excited to bring it back for new readers.

Colleen S. Harris serves as a librarian on the faculty at California State University Channel Islands, where she also teaches in the Freedom and Justice Studies minor. She is the author of God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010), and The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), as well as the chapbooks That Reckless Sound and Some Assembly Required out of Porkbelly Press (2014). She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry and short fiction, and the co-editor of Women and Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching and co-editor of Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Poets. Her work has also appeared in Main Street Rag, Wisconsin Review, The Louisville Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and is forthcoming from Mezzo Cammin.

Look for Doubleback Books’ next open reading period this summer; submissions begin in April.

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Doubleback Books is an imprint of Sundress Publications which is a 501(c)3 non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology. 
 


Doubleback Website                                    Doubleback Books on Facebook
doubleback@sundresspublications.com    Twitter

 

Virginia Chase Sutton’s New Book of Poems: What Brings You to Del Amo

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Doubleback Books presents Virginia Chase Sutton’s What Brings You to Del Amo

Doubleback Books, an imprint of Sundress Publications, is proud to announce the republication of Virginia Chase Sutton’s What Brings You to Del Amo. Bruce Weigl, author of The Abundance of Nothing, had this to say concerning Sutton’s work:

Virginia Book“Face it: as much as we love to glorify and extol the powers of imagination, there are some things you have to see up close and personal in order to be able to bring them into the rarified circumstance of a poem. These would include death, and even worse, all manner of human degradation and suffering possible. Still, bearing witness, no matter how intimate, is no guarantee of good art either. Virginia Chase Sutton manages, no, she illuminates a seamlessness between what is real, and what is barely imaginable in our lives with such precision that you are compelled to bear witness beside her. The poems of What Brings You to Del Amo are relentless in their pursuit of us, and relentless too in their pursuit of the highest level of craft and care.”

Virginia SuttonVirginia Chase Sutton is the author of the full-length collections Embellishments, What Brings You to Del Amo, and Of a Transient Nature, and the chapbook, Down River. Sutton’s poems have won the Louis Untermeyer Poetry Scholarship at Bread Loaf, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and the National Poet Hunt.  She has been a fellow at Writers at Work, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center.  Sutton has won the Paumanock Visiting Writer’s Award and Reading Series and has been a finalist for the Dana Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Western Humanities Review, and Poet Lore, and have received seven Pushcart nominations. Sutton lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Read What Brings You to Del Amo today for free!

Call for Submissions: Authors of Out-of-Print Books

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At Doubleback Books, we believe that out of print should not mean out of mind. Although other publishers rescue works that have fallen into the public domain from obscurity, few reprint books from small, independent presses that have folded during the twenty-first century and (often through no fault of their own) left new, exciting books to go out of print before their time.

If you are the author of a book that has recently gone out of print because the press closed, we want to read it. We are hosting an open reading period through August 2018.  Authors of works that have gone out of print due to the closure of the original press may submit full-length or short books, including novels, novellas, chapbooks, short story collections, poetry collections, essay collections, and memoirs. Editors may also submit out of print manuscripts their presses published before closing. To be eligible, works must have been both published and out of print after 2000.

Accepted manuscripts will be released as free downloadable e-books on the Sundress Publications website. Previous titles include Karyna McGlynn’s Alabama SteveJehanne Dubrow’s The Hardship Post, and Virginia Chase Sutton’s What Brings You to Del Amo (forthcoming).

To submit, email the following to doubleback@sundresspublications.com:

  • Your manuscript(s) in .PDF or .DOC format
  • A brief cover letter in the body of the email telling us a little bit about your work and yourself, and noting the genre of the manuscript
  • The name of the manuscript’s original publisher
  • The name and contact information of the publisher’s former editor-in-chief, if available.

Please note: we do not republish translated work or previously self-published work.  

Doubleback Books is an imprint of Sundress Publications. More information at http://www.sundresspublications.com/doubleback

Interview with Sarah Jane Sloat

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Sarah J. Sloat’s chapbook, In the Voice of a Minor Saint, showcases small moments that belie great significance and trumpet the author’s ear for the specific. This collection is rich with metaphor, and Sloat uses form in a way that emphasizes the lyric. Broad in scope, while still giving the reader intimate insight into the speaker’s psyche, these pieces are touched with the divine. In the Voice of a Minor Saint was re-released earlier this year from Doubleback Books, an imprint of Sundress Publications.

 

Sundress: Do you have any writing rituals or routines?

Sarah Jane Sloat: I don’t. I just try. If I’m stuck, which I often am, I read.

 

Sundress: Your poems often deal with smallness and small things: tongues, bees, grains of rice. “My heart is small, like a love/ of buttons or black pepper” and “Mine was a small world, small/ and flawed.” Tell us a little about how this theme developed.

Sarah Jane Sloat: I have a button collection. And the world’s smallest Indian pot. I like things you have to get close to to appreciate. I like “things” in general. After “In the Voice of a Minor Saint” I put together a chapbook focused on things found in the home – the whisk, the faucet and toothbrush.

In the case of this chapbook, smallness has to do with the minor saint, patron of the overlooked and unassuming, who fail to get much attention. S/he’s their champion, though they probably would never ask for that.

 

Sundress: Tell us about the process of writing a cento like “Naked, Come Shivering.” Did you build the poem around one line, or did you find lines to fit what you wanted to say?

Sarah Jane Sloat: A cento shouldn’t use more than one line from any single poem. That’s the only rule I’d pay attention to.

Every cento I’ve written so far, including “Naked, Come Shivering,” I’ve done by  pulling lines I loved from French poets, mostly the surrealists. I am always struck by their beauty, their oddness, how many lines seemed self-sufficient and self-contained. I put the lines together in a way that rings right, without any goal in mind.

In “Naked, Come Shivering,” the line I started with was either “not wanting anything to die of hunger” or “the whole town has come into my room.” Both evocative, bust-down-the-door kind of lines. The title came last.

 

Sundress: What is your favorite poem in this collection, and why?

Sarah Jane Sloat: This is very difficult. Probably it was “Ghazal of the Bright Body.” I’m a big fan of the ghazal. This was the first one I wrote, and for me it shrugs off all its could-be burdens. It avoids becoming overwrought, which my less successful ghazals (hopefully unpublished) do not.

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Sundress: Besides writing, what is your favorite way to participate in the literary community?

Sarah Jane Sloat: After writing, I participate, if you can put it this way, by reading. I really believe  reading is a way to interact with the world. In reading, I feel I’m participating in the past, present and future. And you can chose your company. And be introverted to your heart’s content.

I recently got the latest issues of The Journal (Ohio) and the annual RHINO. I’m not ass-kissing when I say they’re really wonderful publications, and in both of them I found work I loved by poets I’d never read before, who are now my imaginary friends.

There are also dozens of online journals I read and love – DMQ Review, Adroit, Plume, Birdfeast, etc etc.

I live in a foreign country so my participating in an English-focused literary community excludes physical presence! I’m not terribly outgoing or social, I must admit. But I keep up, like most everyone, on social media.

 

Sundress: What is the best writing advice you have ever been given?

Sarah Jane Sloat: There’s no right way.

 

Sundress: If you could tell the world one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Sarah Jane Sloat: It would be what most poets who want anyone to read their poems would say:

I want to everyone know that I have not died

that I have a golden manger in my lips,

that I am the little friend of the west wind,

that I am the immense shadow of my tears.

-Lorca

 

You can find In the Voice of a Minor Saint for free here.

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Sarah J. Sloat lives in Frankfurt, Germany, a stone’s throw from Schopenhauer’s grave. Her poems and prose have appeared in West Branch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Sarah’s chapbook of poems on typefaces and texts, Inksuite, is available from dancing girl press, which also published Heiress to a Small Ruin in 2015.