Incendiary Lit

The Briar Cliff Review from Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Iowa is always a surprising treat to get in the mail. The most artistic and high quality 8×10 format journal I’ve come across.Very top notch artwork (BCU has a quality art department) along with accessible, but not light poems and stories. In the 2007 issue there were an especially large amount of general reading goodness. Some particularly inspired moments came in Joshua Robbins’ wonderful poem “Dawn Above Spokane, Sacred Heart Hospital, 2001″ for instance, early on “precise sutures of crows across the wire” was really cool, as was “false dawn of hospital gowned light / thinning over commuters’ stop-and-go and the river’s / broken prosody.” Other lovely moments were in James Doyle’s “Necking in the Ford”- “It takes real romantics // to cauterize the ordinary.” Or in Emma Bolden’s “Assurance”- “I love your body the way I love the slur of grass against my feet.” Isn’t that nice? The slur of grass against my feet. Very cool phrasing. The art is varied quite widely from some beautiful river shots from Randall D Williams (though he’s only credited for one) to amazing macro plant photography to some beautifully simplistic, Rothkoesque paintings from Jacqueline Kluver and Bill Welu. Pretty solid content all the way through too. Some journals have a couple wonderful pieces, a lot of mediocre pieces, and some dreadful ones. BCR keeps the bar high, and while it may be shorter than other journals, it makes up for it in substance. Definitely a journal to check out, here, at the Briar Cliff Review homepage. They have a contest running, fiction, poetry and creative non fiction with $1000 prize in each category, $15 entry fee (which includes a copy of the spring 2008 journal the winner appears in.) More info on their page.

Posted: Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Category: Literary Magazines.