Congratulations to past contributor Cynthia Marie Hoffman who has a new poetry collection coming out on February 6th entitled Exploding Head.
This collection of prose poems chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems’ speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace.
This book has received significant praise:
“Hoffman’s fourth book compresses the relentlessness of fear and obsession into electrifying prose poems, boxes threatening to burst. Hoffman scrutinizes the child self and the mother self with absorbing candor, precision, music, and urgency in this harrowing world where ‘birds bomb through the air like the skulls of galloping horses.’ The impulses that sprint through the mind—‘a shuddering animal hunkered down inside your skull’—come so frightfully alive that I felt I’d been transported into another woman’s extraordinary brain.”—Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca
View more of Cynthia’s work on her website. Purchase Exploding Head here.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four poetry collections: Exploding Head (Feb, 2024), Sightseer, Paper Doll Fetus, and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume. Hoffman is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Director’s Guest fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy. Her work has appeared in Smartish Pace, Fence, diode, The Journal, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Collections have appeared as an intro feature in Pleiades, a featured chapbook in Mid-American Review, and in the annual Introductions Reading Loop online at Blackbird.
View Cynthia Marie Hoffmans’ poems “This Is All True,” “Protection Spell Jar,” and “If You Have Grown Unrecognizable to Yourself” in issue 30 of Superstition Review.
Winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction Available March 1
We at Superstition Review are pleased to congratulate previous contributor Terese Svoboda on her upcoming release of two novels!
In Roxy and Coco, the namesake sisters are two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time. Navigating urgent social work with abusive parents, personal attractions with complicated suspicions, curious homicides and surprise interventions, Roxy and Coco is a mythical reimagining with the soul of modern woes and foes, and the thrill of modern superheroes.
Winner of the Juniper Prize, The Long Swim is a collection of cynical, irreverent, and formally daring short stories. From a runaway circus lion that haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages, to a junket to Cuba and an ambassador’s dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. Inventive, dark, and absurd, these stories capture Svoboda’s clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Globe-trotting, barbed, nuanced, and deeply human, The Long Swim will speak to fans of Lauren Groff, Helen DeWitt, George Saunders, and Amy Hempel.
Both novels have already received enthusiastic reviews:
“There are many mythic reimaginings out there, but I can guarantee you that Roxy and Coco is unlike anything you’ve read—Terese Svoboda’s harpies are winged avengers, a celestial task force who save kids who have been abused by their terrestrial protectors.”
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Sleep Donation
“Existing at the sweet spot between Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, and James Purdy’s I Am Elijah Thrush, Roxy and Coco plucks a creature out of myth to bring it into our present—and does so in a way that keeps a steady eye on the flaws of our own weird moment. Rarely has fantastic fiction managed to say so much so deftly about the real while still offering a terrific, strange and highly original read.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Song for the Unraveling of the World
“Terese Svoboda is a master of the dire and the blackly comic and a virtuoso of economy and voice, and The Long Swim features the jaunty and the wounded who in extremis maintain their wit and lacerating self-awareness.”
—Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron and Like You’d Understand, Anyway
“One of those writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre.”
—Bloomsbury Review
Terese Svoboda is the author of over twenty books, including fiction, poetry, biography, translation, and memoir, including the recent novel, Dog on Fire (2023). Her many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, An NEH translation grant, The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation grant, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay.
You can read her story in Superstition Review Issue 7 here. You can read her interview for s[r] here. She has also published guest posts on our blog. Her work can be found in its entirety on her website.
Superstition Review is open to submissions for Issue 33. Our submission window closes January 31st, 2024 at 11:59 p.m.
Our magazine is looking for art, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry submissions. You can submit here.
Ensure you read all guidelines before submitting. Do not submit previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please alert Superstition Review to a piece’s potential publication elsewhere. Submissions are able to be withdrawn and part of a submission can be withdrawn if a note is added in submittable.
View Issue 32 of Superstition Review to understand the type of work our literary magazine publishes.
Congratulations to our friends at El Martillo Press for their launch this past June.
About El Martillo:
El Martillo Press publishes writers whose pens strike the page with clear intent; words with purpose to pry apart assumed norms and to hammer away at injustice. El Martillo Press proactively publishes writers looking to pound the pavement to promote their work and the work of their fellow pressmates. Founded in Los Angeles in 2023 by Matt Sedillo and David A. Romero, and launched with a diverse group of celebrated and hardworking writers who embody our working-class intellectual spirit, El Martillo Press maintains an editorial board that makes its selections for publishing.
The Founders
CEO, EL Martillo Press
Matt Sedillo has been described as the “best political poet in America” as well as “the poet laureate of the struggle.” He is a co-founder and CEO of El Martillo Press. His work has drawn comparisons in print to Bertolt Brecht, Roque Dalton, Amiri Baraka, Alan Ginsberg, Carl Sandburg and various other legends of the past.
David A. Romero is a Mexican-American spoken word artist from Diamond Bar, CA. Romero is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of El Martillo Press. Romero is the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press, 2020).
WE STILL BE: Poems and Performances by Paul S. Flores
The long-awaited full-length debut of poems by the nationally-celebrated, award-winning spoken word artist, playwright, and educator Paul S. Flores, WE STILL BE: Poems and Performances, is a collection that masterfully weaves together political and personal testimonies. WE STILL BE speaks to issues of gentrification, mixed Latino identity, masculinity, machismo, incarceration, systemic racism, racial unity, fatherhood, and more.
“Paul S. Flores unlocks the hot key, the people’s voice, and the Spanglish ritmoRhythm on how to write our story. He swags us into the soul and soulfulness of our life-chapters and our plight in the USA. It is a personal mambo, a face-to-face truth riffin’ us into a “Spanglish mandala of hope,” at last. We never again will ask ourselves “Who am I?” “Who are we?” Flores is not afraid to speak of his wounds of familia-yes, he is intimate, he is loving. He escorts us through the Bay Area, land of poets, artists, musicians, and muralists-he is part of that, he is all that-and we will be as we enter this world. Don’t forget: Huey Newton, Lolita Lebrón, and José Feliciano in this salsa history bowl that will light you up all the way to feverish happiness. Flores is a master weaver, with a blazing kaleidoscopic lamp that reveals and embodies our lives. No book like this one in the last 50 years.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus, winner of the Ruth Lily Prize, 2022, and Robert Frost Lifetime Achievement Medal, 2023
A Crown of Flames: Selected Poems & Aphorisms By Flaminia Cruciani
“Flaminia Cruciani’s language holds the vivid and evocative between its fingers like glue and lets us see the natural world and mysteries of the cosmos. A Crown of Flames is a celebration that delves into the mysteries of human civilization, illuminating the hidden depths of our shared human experience. Cruciani’s words evoke a sense of awe and reverence for the natural world. Each poem in this collection feels like a masterful exploration of the soul, inviting readers to see the world in new and profound ways.”
—Tshaka Campbell, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, author of Tunnel Vision (NaturalKink Enterprises, 2018)
“Flaminia Cruciani’s A Crown of Flames is a lush, often times terrifying, mythic, end/restart of civilization-a tour of the history of literature, philosophy, and western ideals-churning images that range between pastoral and apocalyptic. A book of revelations-quixotic, Odyssean, Catholic, and quintessentially Italian.”
—Linda Ravenswood, Winner of the Oxford Prize in Poetry and Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry
“The daughterland is a Plathian interrogation of Mexican motherhood during the regressive Covid-era by a mother who was a daughter during the arms race, Ronald Reagan, and socially-accepted toxic masculinity. Garcia’s poems are the secrets parents wish they didn’t have to keep to themselves.”
—Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Musician, professor, author of The Spitboy Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band
“Margaret Elysia Garcia may be my favorite living poet, a maestra of the form. In our era of sacrifice, young blood spilled, and hummingbirds that fly too close to the sun, Garcia tenders her exquisite language, late-stage lyricism, & fullnamed, full-throated mestiza cri de cuento.”
—Susie Bright, author of Susie Bright’s Sexual State of the Union and Big Sex Little: A Memoir
God of the Air Hose and Other Blue-Collar Poems By Ceasar K. Avelar
“Ceasar K. Avelar swings a Central American hammer in poems that sing the working life while also decrying the gaps and empties. He’s a powerful voice from the Central American migrant stream essential to the ‘essential workers’ risking life and family to keep economies going, even in pandemics.”
—Luis J. Rodriguez, former Los Angeles Poet Laureate, author of Borrowed Bones: New Poems from the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles
”Ceasar Avelar writes for the people in the trenches, for the marginalized, for those who sometimes feel as though they have no voice. The power of his words jump from the page. He is not writing to impress, he is writing to inspire.”
—Jeffery Martin, author of Ripples, Shadows & Huddled Scraps
“Through his palabras, Donato Martinez presents and pays homage to the many men and women who often are excluded from our history books. He acknowledges their being, their presence, and the many contributions they make to our everyday life. Donato’s poems make sure that we recognize their sudor, their hours of excessive work, and understand that they keep our cities in motion.”
—Angelina F. Veyna, Emeritus Professor of History, Santa Ana College
“Touch the Sky is a collection of silent prayers told over the beds of sleeping children, dreams of blacktop crossovers, Dorrito sandwiches, and the return of Aztec gods. At once modern and ancient, urban and sacred, Donato Martinez’s debut book Touch the Sky mines the everyday for the profound. Martinez turns his eye just outside the window and finds heaven in the streets and alleys. This is Chicano city writing. And it’s damn good.”
—Matt Sedillo, author of Mowing Leaves of Grass and City on the Second Floor
We are excited to celebrate Timothy Reilly’s recent publication of his fiction chapbook, Short Story Quartet.
“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” — C.S Lewis
As the title suggests, this fiction chapbook (published by Bottlecap Press) contains just four stories. The tone is set by a flash fiction titled “Tom Corbett and the Cadets of the Academy.” The flash is something of a “junior” quest story: via a 1950s TV space adventure show, and a box top from Kraft caramels. The stories in this miniature collection are certainly diverse, but they are all stories of longing —with skirmishes and hints of reconciliation between physics and metaphysics. The collection ends with a story blending youth and old age: with an unapologetic nod to The Wizard of Oz.
This book has been well received, hailed “A beautifully nostalgic collection” by Fictive Dream literary magazine.
You can purchase Short Story Quartet from Bottlecap Press here.
Timothy Reilly had been a professional tubist (including a stint with the Teatro Regio of Turin, Italy) until around 1980, when a condition called “Embouchure Dystonia” ended his music career. He gratefully retired from substitute teaching in 2014. Three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he has published in Zone 3, The Main Street Rag, Fictive Dream, Superstition Review, and many other journals. His chapbook, Short Story Quartet, is published by Bottlecap Press Features. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti: a poet and scholar.
Congratulations to past contributor Christopher Burawa who recently published Where I Came Here From.
Where I Came Here From is a collection of Zen Buddhist inspired poems that occasionally wander a path to the north-to Iceland, Christopher Burawa’s birthplace. The Iceland poems reflect, as Cynthia Hogue suggests, an “Icelandic Zen,” of the Self examining itself, unearthing what remains of his connections to the past and the trauma of separation, of being caught in the illusion of the fixated, isolated self. In these poems he follows the schematics of the skandhas and dependent origination, tracing the activity of mind and as the reborn self that arises from its dwelling.
The book has received significant praise:
Very few books of poetry move me the way Christopher Burawa’s Where I Came Here From has with its celebration of the imagination. The poems are like trapdoors, giving way to a world where you are both lost and found. Here, you find your way—through wit and earnestness, the playful and the profound—until “the cosmos breaks / open to let you through.”
–Blas Falconer
The perceptions inside Christopher Burawa’s collection invite you to track and take-in, live and breathe within some profound and defamiliarized spaces. These poems exist on a continuous and steep terrain, there to observe the rock’s jagged path, as well as the traveler’s clear-eyed navigation of an obscure map—and so these poems comfort you amidst all that’s unknowable; they ask you to gaze headlong while your hands pass uncut through a cold window, because, despite what you’ve understood before holding this book, “really, a river is a door, / until it opens.”
–Melissa Cundieff
“With deepest humility, a profound commitment to love, and reverence for truth, a book like Where I Came Here From appears. This does not happen frequently, this peeking into the ordinary with a view to what is there, not really there, but there in the sense of where we live. Burawa takes us beyond the illusion of thought and the firm conviction that some things hurt beyond what we think we can bear, and other things give us immeasurable joy, or hopefulness. We all should know what it takes to write a book of poems like this one. This is Zen.”
–Afaa Michael Weaver
Read more about Christopher’s book on the Finishing Line Press website.
Christopher Burawa is a poet, translator, high school language arts teacher, and ordained Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk. He received an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. He has received numerous awards for his work, including an NEA Translation Fellowship, Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, an American-Scandinavian Foundation Creative Writing Research Fellowship, Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency, among others. He lives with his wife and daughter in Red Wing, Minnesota.
View Christopher Burawa’s’ poems in issue 10 and issue 23 of Superstition Review
This semester, Superstition Review is highlighting the Editors producing Issue 32. On Dec. 1st, readers will be able to view content that these interns have worked to compile over the course of the semester.
Meet John-John O’Connor, issue 32 arteditor
SR: What are your plans for after graduation? JO: After graduation I am looking to apply to law school.
SR: What are you currently reading? JO: The Stand by Stephen King.
SR: What is one place you’d like to travel to? JO: Oaxaca, Mexico
Meet Jonathan Gillespie, issue 32 advertising coordinator
SR: What are your plans for after graduation? JG: To either enter education or business administration.
SR: What are you currently reading? JG: Blood Meridian.
SR: What is one place you’d like to travel to? JG: The Netherlands.
Meet Hope Kan, issue 32 social media manager
SR: What are your plans for after graduation? HK: I plan to go into publishing and editing and pursue a Masters program.
SR: What are you currently reading? HK:I am currently reading The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S Thompson
SR: Describe your perfect Saturday morning. HK: Go on a hike, have a yummy breakfast, and enjoy a productive couple hours before seeing friends!
This semester, Superstition Review is highlighting the Editors producing Issue 32. On Dec. 1st, readers will be able to view content that these interns have worked to compile over the course of the semester.
Meet Zoe Soderquist, issue 32 blog editor
SR: What are your plans for after graduation? ZS: I plan on getting my Master’s in Technical Communication at the Polytechnic campus and becoming a technical writer (hopefully at a software company!)
SR: What are some of your hobbies? ZS:I love gaming, embroidery, watching movies, working out, biking, and watching YouTube.
SR: What is your favorite midnight snack? ZS: Anything sweet! I have a massive sweet tooth. Probably a drumstick (the vanilla fudge kind with peanuts) or some popcorn (properly buttered and salted movie theater style).
Meet Carolyn Combs, issue 32 interview editor
SR: What are you currently reading? CC: I’m reading Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson which is part of a longer fantasy series. I’m also reading Therapon by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond!
SR: What is one place you’d like to travel to? CC: I really want to travel to Spain, specifically Castilla, I’ve always been fascinated with Don Quijote so I’d love to visit some of the sites from Cervantes’s tales.
SR: What are your plans for after graduation? AS: After graduation, I plan to pursue my passion for the English Literature field through editing, content writing and public relations. Eventually, I plan to return to university to complete my Master’s in English Literature in hopes of becoming an undergraduate professor.
SR: What is your hidden talent? AS: I have spent many years working in different fields with animals and it is a huge passion of mine. Being able to understand animals and their embodied communication is very important to me. I am very grateful for all of the experiences I have been able to accumulate with animals over the years.
SR: What are some of your hobbies? AS: I have so many ways I enjoy spending my time. My hobbies include listening to music, working out, sewing old clothes to give them a new life, going on walks with my dog, and binge watching many different TV shows.
SR: What are your plans for after graduation? RD: Master’s degree in Library Sciences at UA
SR: What are you currently reading? RD: Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter
SR: What is your hidden talent? RD: I cross stitch in 25pt, meaning 25 stitches per inch and 625 stitches per square inch. Miniscule and very detailed, a nightmare to do with stiletto nails, yet I get by and still enjoy it
The Launch Party for Issue 32 will be held over Zoom on December 1st, from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm MST. It is free and open to the public.
The party will include statements by the editors, and a roundtable discussion on collaborative writing with Issue 32 contributors Bruce Bond, Dan Beachy-Quick, Kim Magowen, and Michelle Ross.
