Forthcoming, part deux

For Halloween this year, I got a second (and quite unexpected) acceptance letter. I had already resigned myself to being rejected again from this literary magazine, but the emails came in yesterday: my poems "Red Market" and "Women and Children First" have been selected for publication in the next issue of Moon Milk Review!

I was first drawn to Moon Milk Review last fall when I stumbled upon them in a lit mag search. When I learned that their namesake is taken from the writing of Italo Calvino (specifically, his short story "The Distance of the Moon" from Cosmicomics), I was in love. I first discovered Calvino during my junior year of college with The Castle of Crossed Destinies; and I was so enamored that he became one of three authors I studied and wrote about for my senior thesis. Even now, whenever I go to a bookstore, I scan the C section for his name. A magazine run by editors with reading tastes as snobby as mine, now that sounds like a place I want to be. So I submitted a couple poems then, but they weren't quite up to snuff. And I went on with my daily life, writing more poetry when I could find the time in between everything else.

So, then came time to start submitting again this fall and I thought I'd give it another go at MMR. I'd written some new poems over the past year that I thought were more along the lines of what the magazine was looking for: magical realism, surrealism, slipstream with a Calvino flavor. Don't misunderstand, I didn't write these poems to match a certain editor's preferences. But after another year of writing, I took a look back at the poems that came out of it and found that a few I had written might be a good match this time around.




I am more than honored that two of my poems have been chosen for this magazine. In the meantime, I will have a good read-through of their latest issue, also released yesterday. Happy poetry season!